Thelma Reyna was born in a small town in Texas and spent most of her childhood there. She presently lives in Pasadena, California. She is a school administrator and the author of short stories and poetry that have appeared in journals, including Voices and El Grito del Sol. In “Una Edad Muy Tierna, M’ija,” a horribly unsettling divorce traps a fifteen-year-old between her feelings for her parents and her own growing sense of self. The author says of the relation of her writings to her life: “Almost everything I have published is an account of something straight out of my childhood. My family life was turbulent, even though I generally consider my childhood to have been a happy one. One of my favorite brothers was killed in Vietnam at the age of eighteen, a loss that my mother never really overcame. Both of my maternal grandparents, who were very dear to me, died during my adolescence or early adulthood. Therefore, loss was a reality that colored many of my perceptions about growing up, and it was an inevitable companion to love. Oftentimes, I weep when I compose a story or poem, because, as I write it, I relive it, complete with all the pain and sorrow that attended it. It seems, unfortunately, that the events most filling my ‘writing mind’ are painful ones.”
IS THERE A GOOD PLACE TO HIDE, I WONDERED AS I WALKED THE dusty road of my neighborhood. The caliche of our unpaved street powdered my ankles gray. I didn’t care. Ordinarily, I would mumble my displeasure as I’d stumble among the larger chunks of gravel, but on that particular day the street could have been a swami’s spiked bed for all I cared.
The spikes were in my heart. My father had told me I was at a very tender age—una edad muy tierna, m’ija, not long after a particularly violent argument between him and my mother. I’d been caught in the middle, used as an alibi by them both, questioned by both, their jealous distrust of each other building to a crescendo until I’d run outside in tears.
My parents’ marriage was crumbling—ugly, vermin-eaten framework crumbling, rotting. For years, pieces had been chipping off in personality clashes, in marathon arguments that outdistanced midnight and heralded daylight without shame. And always, we children—nine of us in varying degrees of involvement, with varying degrees of comprehension—had pleaded heroically with them to stop, or had wept helplessly, or hid, or innocently sought refuge with TV or games in sympathetic neighbors’ homes. We older ones (I was second oldest, eldest daughter) had struggled with passionate involvement in their conflicts, or with sanity-maintaining apathy; shame that our calmer neighbors knew all too well the loud discord within our home, or defensive bitterness toward the busybody bastards with their horribly-disjointed noses; and the most heart-rending ambivalence of all: see-saw love and hate for our thirtyish, handsome, turbulent parents.
Es edad muy tierna, m’ija. Fifteen. And I’m so sorry that you’re going through all this. He’d been unable to hide his own tears that day, and I knew he knew better than I the resentment boiling just under my skin. We were all living in hell.
Through my wet eyes now, I glanced to left and right and wondered how many of the neighbors were watching me as I plodded skinnily down the street. I walked quickly, my pigeon feet unfocused as I watched them almost tripping. I glanced from house to passing house, wondering, wondering. Do they know? wishing, wishing that a rut in the corduroy street would suddenly yawn and take me into it, out of this hell, maybe into Hell itself. Houses with neighbors I’d never met and even those kindly ones I’d known metamorphosed suddenly into cells of malice. I heard the neighbors’ whisperings in the dusty silence: “Look. There she goes, the poor child. Yes, yes. Have you heard? Bebe and Raul have divorced.”
Divorce. Like a faceless statistic, the word should have simply died in the air. But in a conservative Texas town, in a Chicano neighborhood, the word was anathema. For lower-class, churchgoing Chicanos in 1963, divorce meant scandal; and my parents’ divorce—ironically a surprise to us children, furtively planned and consummated—had just gone through.
The whispered scandals skipped from mouth to mouth in each alien house I passed: “Did you hear Bebe and Raul fighting last night? Did you know he left?” My neighbors were omniscient bastards! “It was the worst one yet. He had to go. She divorced him, and he didn’t even know. Can you believe that?” My tears streamed silently. “He had to go. The police were there.” Then, in a conspiratorial hush my heart heard: “Were you the one who called them?”
I watched the thin clouds of caliche dust rise about my ankles. I’d left school early that day, for who can concentrate on books when life intrudes? All morning a gray plug had blocked my throat. Child of scandal, child of hate. Why hadn’t I sprung forth from man and woman bound so tightly in love, that they became manwoman instead? What was it in a union that chafed and wore the bonds until love whimpered away to nothingness?
I gasped. I’d seen fire and spring, ugliness and filth and radiance in my father, in my mother. How many times had my whimpers of disappointment and fear—yes, hate, too—filled my room? I’d whimpered, but my love for them had never whimpered itself into nonexistence.
Child of hate, child of love.
I stopped suddenly in the street and faced the small, nondescript houses ranged opposite me. I looked from one to the other and nodded slowly.
“Yes, yes. Child of love, do you hear me?” I waited for an answer. A fifteen-year-old scandal waited in the dust. No faces showed in windows. No figures sat on front porches. No busy neighbors walked the street or watered anemic flowers.
“Yes, yes. Do you hear me?” I waited in the hot silence and allowed the tears to flow. I was a child again, a more-child child. Memories flowed.
“I’m a child of love, do you hear?” I shouted. “He used to love her, damn it! He told me once she was like a lily to him on their wedding night. She was the first woman he ever knew, and he knew her for twenty years!”
Twenty years.
The tears flowed. My defiance was still mute, but I knew the world could hear. I knew as I stood under the sultry sky that day that the world watched. In a supreme, salving effort, my subconscious choked out scene after scene which had been pushed to the back rows of my memory. There had been loving times! These had been almost obliterated, and the thought that misery could wipe away joy so easily shamed me more deeply than my parents’ present scandal.
The film my mind played back flashed on a giant screen, there in the loneliness of midday:
The film whirred:
Scene after scene flashed:
The film whirred smoothly, endlessly. “Yes, yes. Child of love.” (He lay in their narrow bed and rubbed her inner thighs.) They loved each other. (As he rubbed, he sang to her a song he made up about the white silkiness of her skin.) He loved my mother! (She smiled at him, then he told us children to go outside and play.)
I no longer shouted. I didn’t need to hide. My terribly misguided parents had been manwoman once. For twenty years, their union had been love/hate. The ultimate scandal last night, incredibly, had been love, too—gasping, distorted, on its knees, love not flawless as it once was, but love in its nadir.
It could not have been anything less.