Becoming Maria by Sonia Manzano

Author:Sonia Manzano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

It’s Saturday, the morning of my fourteenth birthday.

“Happy birthday,” says Ma, handing me a box.

Inside is a green dress so ugly it makes me mad. Not only because I’d never wear such a thing, but because it reminds me I have no place to wear it to.

“Thanks, Ma …”

“AveMaríaPurísima …”

My stomach feels okay by now, but I’m still embarrassed in front of the boy, whose name I don’t even want to think because I feel like such a jerk, so I sneak past the candy store hoping he won’t see me. It’s rainy and muggy as I slip on over to Bathgate Avenue to buy stockings, at the same store where I had bought the handkerchiefs for Marion Uble’s birthday so long ago. And that old disappointment throbs anew and gets mixed up with this fresh disappointment of being fourteen years old today.

Still, I buy a pair of stockings for fifty cents to last me the week. By the time I get home my hair is frizzy, making me look as ugly as I feel inside. I have nothing to do but look at the Fenway marquee blinking on and off, and flip through an old magazine when—bang! There it is! Everything I’ve been looking for. Everything that will give me joy and happiness everlasting—a short, blonde haircut like the one on a girl in a Maytag washing machine ad.

She is thin and wearing a turquoise-blue jumper over a long-sleeved white blouse, with a big bow around her neck. Her hair is all wispy bangs around her eyes, the rest of it cut bluntly at her chin. It is pale yellow and silky.

What gets me is the look of joy on her face. She’s in a series of pictures with the washer/dryer. In the first picture she is happily loading in the clothes, in another she is cheerfully pouring in the detergent, in the third she is impishly waiting for the washer to be done, in the fourth she athletically tosses the clothes into the dryer, in the fifth she pirouettes while waiting, and in the sixth she’s done and stands triumphantly next to a pile of freshly laundered, exquisitely folded clothes! What a life. I want to be her so I can grin and flip my troubles away with my hair while I do the laundry if we ever get a washing machine. I hound Ma, who is in the kitchen singing “You really got a hold on me …” while making spaghetti. (Another good thing about not having my father around is that we can eat more American food.)

“I want to cut my hair.”

“What?”

“Like that!” I point to the girl in the magazine. “Like that. So it looks like that.”

“Your hair don’t go like that!” says Ma.

“It would if I could cut it!”

She laughs. “Go put your nice dress on,” she says. Then she continues singing: “Oh yeah, you really got a hold on me!”

“No. Why get dressed when there’s no place to go. I want to cut

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