C: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Back then she was called Female, as in tamale. She was born in the
United States, across a shallow river from her hometown that would
later play a very big part in her life.

Her mother lay exhausted in a hospital bed (but not too exhausted to
ignore the cleanest, whitest sheets she'd ever seen in her life) while
her father paced their small apartment on the edge of a highway,
wondering where his wife had got to. "Crazy woman!" he cried to the
sagging couch, where his wife had spent most of the past three months
praying to a glow-in-the-dark crucifix attached to the wall across from
her. Neither he or his sons had had a decent meal the entire time, a
fact which disturbed him almost as much as his wife's confusing
condition. Why could she not act like a wife, even with her stomach so
round, like his own mother and sisters and aunts? She would rub the
glow right off of Jesus with her constant rosaries.

After driving to three different hospitals, each with a burly security
guard eyeing him suspiciously as he pushed open their doors, he found
his three sons - all a year apart in age, and disturbingly similar in
appearance - sprawled across the waiting room chairs. A nurse told him
cheerlessly that, yes, Mrs. Yanez was down the hall, take a right, then
another right, her door is to your left. He didn't understand a word
she was saying. Finally the nurse rolled her eyes, jerked her neck like
she'd been slapped so he'd follow her, and took him to Signora Yanez's
room.

She was alone, an empty bed with the same clean, white sheets just six
feet from her own. He sat on the empty bed and watched his wife sleep,
the dark hair on her brow a nest of tangles and ringlets. And her flat
stomach. So flat! He let out a small yelp, and stood up. By then his
wife was watching him through half-closed eyes, though she was thinking
more of her couch at home, and how the glowing Jesus might miss her now
that she'd never be left alone.

"Boy or girl?" he asked, his voice too loud for the quiet room. She
noticed he was still wearing his straw cowboy hat. The inside was so
dirty from pomade and dirt that she could never get it clean.

Before she answered, a nurse pushing the room door open with a cart,
its wheels squeaking on the shiny, waxed floor. Signor Yanez turned and
looked at the pink glow coming from the cart and, to his wife's
surprise, took off his hat and held it in front of him like a
shield.

"A girl!" he whispered. The nurse, who spoke more Spanish than her
co-workers knew, smiled and nodded. Signor Yanez stepped up to the
cart, looking down on his new daughter with the patchy black hair and
wrinkled face. "An old woman!" he said, and laughed.

Signor Yanez was not so excited by the idea of having a daughter as he
was about what the daughter might mean in comparison to the three
little outlaws he claimed as sons, all of whom were currently laying
about in the waiting room and giving passerby the evil eye. A daughter
would be cleaner, happy to see her papa; she would know when to quit
squawking for the few coins left in her father's pocket, coins she
would never use to buy tasteless candy and syrupy orange sodas. She
might serve him his meals, even make them when the Signora was perched
on the couch, lonely and miserable and thinking of all she'd left
behind.

"All she'd left behind! Ha!" Signor Yanez thought to himself. Right
here, in this pink blanket and strange little cart, was something he'd
never leave behind. And she was the first of his family to be born in
the United States, a stroke of good luck that even his wife could not
deny. He reached for the tiny head, just to feel the soft black hair,
but the nurse knocked his hand away. Reaching into her apron, she
brought out what Signor Yanez took to be a prophylactic and dangled it
in front of his face. He begin to protest when she pulled the rubbery
fingers of the thing apart, and - in his own language, no less - told
him he should put the rubber glove on before touching the baby.

He did, then patted the baby's head as the nurse wheeled the cart
closer to Signora Yanez's bed. He kept up his patting until the baby
was safely in his wife's arms, then put himself between the nurse and
the bed. "Baby, baby, baby," he said, then whistled a tune that caused
Signora Yanez to close her eyes and hold her breath. He'd whistled the
same tune at the birth of each of their sons, and she hated it. She
didn't open her eyes again until he'd finished.

Signora Yanez fingered the seamless, plastic bracelet on her daughter's
wrist. Both she and her husband could read, although not in English,
even if the letters were so similar. "Female," Signora Yanez said, and
looked up at her husband.

"Female," he said, as in tamale, and nodded. A pretty name, for what
would surely be a pretty girl. "Si, Female."

The nurse, preoccupied with checking her hair in the bathroom mirror,
did not hear this exchange between Signor and Signora Yanez. Had she
heard it, she might have quickly put an end to what would become a
terrible burden for the little girl. But she did not, and Female was so
named by her parents in a strange hospital room with clean white sheets
and a view of the parking lot.