Angelica by Luz Vazquez
FICTION
Angelica was solid, a small tank with a thick Spanish accent, and my daytime replacement mother. Daily, she reminded us of her plummet in status since becoming our babysitter. Inundating us with her tsunami of recollections about the beautiful, rich, white, children she used to care for. How well-mannered and good-natured those children were. How much she missed their lovely suburban home. I envisioned them as little golden gods with halos surrounding their heads, like the picture of the Virgin Mary in church.
We were such a disappointment; in our ghetto apartment with its flaking paint, with our bad behavior, and our brown skin deepening in color as summer progressed. She reprimanded us frequently. We were “malcriados.”
I found innovative ways to annoy her. Simple things, like dumping pills from our medicine cabinet into her orange juice, then innocently offering her a cold drink. The goal was to poison her. The idea was born from the Sleeping Beauty movie I watched for my eighth birthday. I offered her the glass with that concoction of capsules floating on top and said, “Drink this, Angelica, it won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“I’ll drink it later,” she replied “I’m not thirsty right now,” followed by a quick dump of the contents of the glass into the sink. She knew I had tainted the well.
Everywhere we went she lamented her fate; as she cooked our breakfast, on our walks in the park, while she bathed us. We endured her tirades about how much she missed those fair- skinned children. We questioned her.
“Why don’t you go back to them if you miss them so much? Why do you stay with us?”
“They’re all grown up now. They don’t need a babysitter anymore.” She replied, followed by a deep sigh that would let us know how disappointed she was.
She arrived at seven am, the first face to greet me each morning. She fried sweet corn fritters for breakfast. The reward for a clean plate, my favorite sweet: a ripe, juicy, plum. She walked me to school as I devoured it. I loved that sensation of crunch followed by the slow drip of juice sliding down my chin. In the schoolyard, she would pull a wet washcloth out of her handbag and scrub my face. Only then would she release me.
At the end of the school day, she waited for me outside the schoolyard fence, and we walked home together. My tales of third grade often interrupted by: “Ay mi Nina she was so smart” or “Nina she could jump rope better than all the girls.” I paled in comparison to her precious Nina, that suburban wonderchild.
Angelica, my rock for three years. Reliable and steadfast, she was the substitute for my real mother who worked to pay our bills and keep us fed. My Angelica, who I knew would leave me in a microsecond if those rich kids would stop being adults.
She left one day without warning. She quit to care for her new grandchild, but that part of the story was not yet revealed. We were informed of her departure at the end of what appeared to be a normal day. As Angelica left, my mother announced:
“Come say goodbye to Angelica, she won’t be back, she is leaving us to take care of another
family.”
Those words thrust a knife into my stomach. Finally, a better family had been located.
She was abandoning us. If only I had been good. If only I weren’t so ugly. If only I had not plotted to kill her, she would stay. I ran to my room and refused to come out and say goodbye to her.
The door slammed as she left. l wandered into the living room where my mother was reading the newspaper.
“You were very rude to Angelica. You should have said goodbye to her. Despite that, she left you a present. Go look on the table.”
I ran into the kitchen and on the table sat a bowl of beautiful ripe purple plums. I wept.
Luz Vasquez is a retired physician who resides in North Branford, CT. She loves salsa, social justice, and diversity. Her work has been published in Cuentos, Stories by Latinas, Kitchen Table Women of Color, Press 1983. She writes for those who are seldom seen.
