Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jennifer Gillan Page A

orange juice, and to a father sitting before his morning coffee while the mother buttered his toast. They hurried through the day making friends and gobs of money, returning home to a warmly lit living room, and then dinner.
Leave It to Beaver
was the program I replayed in my mind:
    “May I have the mashed potatoes?” asks Beaver with a smile.
    “Sure, Beav,” replies Wally as he taps the corners of his mouth with a starched napkin.
    The father looks on in his suit. The mother, decked out in earrings and a pearl necklace, cuts into her steak and blushes. Their conversation is politely clipped.
    “Swell,” says Beaver, his cheeks puffed with food.
    Our own talk at dinner was loud with belly laughs and marked by our pointing forks at one another. The subjects were commonplace.
    “Gary, let’s go to the ditch tomorrow,” my brother suggests. He explains that he has made a life preserver out of four empty detergent bottles strung together with twine and that he will make me one if I can find more bottles. “No way are we going to drown.”
    “Yeah, then we could have a dirt clod fight,” I reply, so happy to be alive.
    Whereas the Beaver’s family enjoyed dessert in dishes at the table, our mom sent us outside, and more often than not I went into the alley to peek over the neighbor’s fences and spy out fruit, apricot or peaches.
    I had asked my mom and again she laughed that I was a crazy
chavalo
as she stood in front of the sink, her arms risingand falling with suds, face glistening from the heat. She sent me outside where my brother and sister were sitting in the shade that the fence threw out like a blanket. They were talking about me when I plopped down next to them. They looked at one another and then Debbie, my eight-year-old sister, started in.
    “What’s this crap about getting dressed up?”
    She had entered her profanity stage. A year later she would give up such words and slip into her Catholic uniform, and into squealing on my brother and me when we “cussed this” and “cussed that.”
    I tried to convince them that if we improved the way we looked we might get along better in life. White people would like us more. They might invite us to places, like their homes or front yards. They might not hate us so much.
    My sister called me a “craphead,” and got up to leave with a stalk of grass dangling from her mouth. “They’ll never like us.”
    My brother’s mood lightened as he talked about the ditch—the white water, the broken pieces of glass, and the rusted car fenders that awaited our knees. There would be toads, and rocks to smash them.
    David King, the only person we knew who resembled the middle class, called from over the fence. David was Catholic, of Armenian and French descent, and his closet was filled with toys. A bear-shaped cookie jar, like the ones on television, sat on the kitchen counter. His mother was remarkably kind while she put up with the racket we made on the street. Evenings, she often watered the front yard and it must have upset her to see us—my brother and I and others—jump from trees laughing, the unkillable kids of the very poor, who got up unshaken, brushed off, and climbed into another one to try again.
    David called again. Rick got up and slapped grass from hispants. When I asked if I could come along he said no. David said no. They were two years older so their affairs were different from mine. They greeted one another with foul names and took off down the alley to look for trouble.
    I went inside the house, turned on the television, and was about to sit down with a glass of Kool-Aid when Mom shooed me outside.
    “It’s still light,” she said. “Later you’ll bug me to let you stay out longer. So go on.”
    I downed my Kool-Aid and went outside to the front yard. No one was around. The day had cooled and a breeze rustled the trees. Mr. Jackson, the plumber, was watering his lawn and when he saw me he turned away to wash off his front steps. There was