What Happens in February Marcia Ratliff
My name is Beatriz Guadalupe Villagomez. I go to school at West Oak Valley Elementary, about four blocks from where I live with Mama, her husband Roger, Abuela, and my little brother Martin, who is nine months old and half-white because he is half Roger’s. Mama’s name is Maria Manuela Villagomez Iglesias. You may not recognize the name, but you would know her face because she is a model for J.C. Penney underwear. She also works as an interpreter at the hospital because Roger does not work at all in the wintertime. He fixes roofs all summer, so that he looks almost Latino by September. I was eight years old when Mama married Roger, and we moved to this smallish yellow house because Roger said it was a fixer-upper. It is funny that he fixes roofs and houses, but our own house is half wrapped in paper and half covered in mossy, rotting yellow siding. Abuela tells me Mama’s story in pieces, by accident. Mama left work at the restaurant late, after the bar was clean and the tables wiped and the doors locked. There were men in the dark, laughing loud around the bushes behind the restaurant. Her manager was one of them, and he stumbled out of the bushes with alcohol on his breath. “Maria.” “Who’s there?” “It’s me, Pedro.” “Don Pedro, you could have gone home hours ago. Why are you still here?” “I was waiting for you, Maria. Ever since you have started working here I have wanted you.” “Why didn’t you ask my papa?” “I was afraid. Your papa is powerful in the business. You are a beautiful girl!” Too many men there, all drunk, Abuela says, and they did not care that Mama was a virgin. She tried to run away but Pedro, his eyes red and glittering, hit her with a bottle and raped her. I wonder how Abuela knows what color the eyes were, or the part about the bottle because thankfully, blessed Mary, Mama does not remember that part. The next morning Mama was pregnant with me. She was fifteen.
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