NONFICTION

FICTION 
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When It Rains
by Linda Zamora Lucero


​The school day began, as most mornings did, with Mama’s voice breaking into my dreams, yelling “Time to get up!” She stood at the foot of my bed, drawing out my name like a whip and snapping it, “Looourrr-des! I said, Get up!” I ignored her, knowing she would come by at least twice again, first taking the blankets, then ripping the sheets from my shivering body. Mama’s footsteps faded as she hurried down the hallway to the kitchen. “You kids are so damn lazy!”
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In the tiny kitchen, my younger brother Ricky leaned back his chair at the table, opening his mouth so wide I could see his tonsils, and growled: “Tony the Tiger! . . . He’s grrrrreat! Hey, Lourdes! What's nine times nine, Miss Smartie Pants?” He snorted and attacked his bowl of corn flakes, his Davey Crockett coonskin cap hanging on his chair.

“I hope you fall,” I said, elbowing his shoulder. Yawning, I made my way to the pantry.

“Ma! Ma! Lourdes hit me!” His dark eyes were shining, set for our morning battle.

In her lilac robe, Mama stood at the counter, black hair still in curlers, wrapping bologna and American cheese sandwiches in waxed paper and packing them into lunch boxes with an apple and a thermos of milk. Daddy had left for the shipyard long before dawn. I dropped a slice of bread into the toaster, slid the black handle down and watched the metal coils inside gradually glow red as rubies. The radio was tuned to KYA—Your Top Hits by the Bay. I knew all the lyrics by heart. “La Bamba,” “Stagger Lee,” Love Potion #9.” That year—1959—the hits just kept on coming. “Mack the Knife,” my favorite song, came on. Wearing a brown dress Mama had found at La Segunda and hemmed to fit me, I remember dancing and mimicking the menace in Bobby Darin’s lilting voice “. . . Someone's sneakin' 'round the corner . . . could that someone be . . .”

"Lourdes, stop playing around or you'll be late," Mama interrupted without looking up. Mama was always reprimanding me for one thing or another, unjustly in my opinion. She knew I had no intention of being late for school. Marshall Elementary was where I learned to grow radishes from seeds, play chess, and draw horses from my schoolmate Leslie Yee. I adored Mrs. Wiley, my third-grade teacher, and Miss Shands the Librarian, who had introduced me to Grimm’s Fairy Tales and The Arabian Nights. That year, my best friend Alice May and I had decided to read every book in the library starting with A. We had a ways to go, but we were nothing if not determined.

 At lunchtime, Alice May and I ate our sandwiches sitting on a wooden bench on the shady side of the schoolyard, huddled with other students. It was way too hot to do anything. Only a few boys were playing kick ball. Miss Pritchard, that day’s lunchtime monitor, strolled the yard like a queen in a sleeveless lime-green dress and white heels, two fourth-grade girls clinging to her arms despite the heat. 
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“When I’m in Sewing Club, I’m making a green dress just like Miss Pritchard’s, except with a gold belt,” I announced, brushing sticky bangs away from my face.

“I don’t know,” Alice May said, wrinkling her nose. “We’re not like those girls.” Her butterfly barrettes were yellow against her dark pigtails, beads of sweat glistened at her hairline.

“But when I’m in fourth grade . . .” I protested, indignant. Everyone knew I couldn’t wait to join Miss Pritchard’s Friday Afterschool Sewing Club. As I understood it, one more year to go and I’d qualify. I was already drawing my own designs in anticipation, all featuring gold trim.

“Well, Miss Pritchard looks like a movie star, but she don’t sing.”

I gave Alice May a sidelong look. She was always saying things that sounded wise but made no sense. Once, when we were sharing stories about our families, I revealed we were Catholic. “But not that Catholic, I guess,” I elaborated. “We don’t go to church on Sundays, even though it’s a mortal sin.”

“Oh, we go to church every Sunday—we’re Baptist to the bone,” Alice May said. I hooted as if this were the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I hated when kids teased her, calling her “Alice May-onnaise,” but she immediately shot back, “Your mama’s mayonnaise!” She even sassed Mrs. Wiley and handed her homework in late or not at all. Her grades showed it, but Alice May said grades didn’t matter. I secretly admired her, a girl who questioned everything, the wild child I wasn’t. We bonded over our mutual love of reading: fairytales, Archie comics, milk cartons—everything that we laid eyes on was treasure. Especially movie star magazines. On Saturdays, after painting our fingernails with Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, we scoured the pages of Mama’s latest Silver Screen, drinking in movie gossip and instinctively searching for actresses with ebony skin and kinky hair like Alice May’s or my own earth-brown skin and stick-straight black hair. The closest star we found was the scandalous Elizabeth Taylor with her violet eyes. Despite her dark hair, Liz-the-Husband-Thief didn’t quite fit our vision of ourselves, and it didn’t yet occur to us to imagine another reality.

As Miss Pritchard and the fourth-graders neared our bench, I caught her eye and beamed at her. I was a shy child, but I was also confident at school. The best reader in class. The helpful student called upon to feed the tetras. Miss Pritchard saw me, raising her perfect eyebrows, and smiled a half-smile in return as she glided by us.

“Did you see that?!” I whispered. I thought my face would break from happiness.

“I see how her hair is made from pennies!” Alice May said.

Sure enough, Miss Pritchard wore a halo of copper, radiant in the sunlight.

In the hallway rush to class after lunch, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Looking up, there was Miss Pritchard smiling down at me. 
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"Please come see me after school, young lady. In Room 12."

“Yes, Ma’am,” I said. Miss Pritchard’s voice was kind but it sent my heart banging inside my rib cage. Why did she want to see me? When I asked Alice May, she said, “Beats me,” and kept on mouthing it every time I looked at her that afternoon. I could not concentrate. Mrs. Wiley had us read from Children of Many Lands, and gave us homework for the next day. On the wall clock the secondhand swept past the Roman numerals, yet it seemed that the hour and minute hands were frozen. Maybe Miss Pritchard liked that I smiled at her. Maybe Mrs. Wiley had encouraged Miss Pritchard to invite me to Sewing Club since I was constantly talking about it. In retrospect, none of these possibilities made any sense, but in my third-grade mind they did. My apprehensions vanished and I daydreamed of pinning tissue to fabric and basting seams. I’d learn to use the sewing machine and make a red velvet dress with puffy sleeves and gold trim for myself and for Mama a purple satin apron with gold sashes. I would ask Miss Pritchard if Alice May could join Sewing Club too, and . . 

With two blasts of the buzzer, school was out.

When I opened the door to Room 12, Miss Pritchard looked startled, as if she had forgotten me. She was standing at a worktable in the empty classroom, cutting a length of red plaid into squares with a pair of scissors.
                                                                                                  
"Oh, yes, there you are,” she said, dropping her work. “Please come in.”       
                                                
On the table were rolls of fabrics, stacks of Simplicity patterns, jars of buttons that looked like penny candy. Next to the table was a glossy black sewing machine with SINGER lettered in gold on the arm. She nodded toward a chair.
                                                              
“Close the door and take a seat. What is your name, dear?"     
​                                                          
I took a deep breath. "Lourdes.” Hoping the thumping in my chest wouldn’t betray my excitement, I scooted past the sewing machine and desks into the chair, newspaper crinkling under my shoes. The classroom smelled like gardenias, unlike Mrs. Wiley’s classroom that was thick with the odor of white paste. A mobile—the sun a big red balloon, surrounded by smaller planets—floated motionless from the ceiling.

“And Lourdes, what grade are you in?" Standing above me, Miss Pritchard’s blue eyes examined my shoulder-length hair with the bangs that I was always brushing from my face, my brown polka-dotted dress, white socks, leather Mary Jane’s in a red Daddy called ox-blood.

"I’m in third grade." The hollow ponk-ponk of a dodge ball rose through the open windows. "In room seven with Mrs. Wiley.” I hoped Alice May would wait for me down in the schoolyard. Behind Miss Pritchard was a poster of an orange kitten, tangled up in skeins of wool, one blue, one pink. Next to that was a chart where rows of gold stars glittered by the names of fourth-graders: Alicia Hernandez, Dennis Barnes, Gloria Herrera, George Tsosie, Geraldine O’Brian, Nora Creed, Shirley Alday. Nora and Geraldine had the most stars.
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​I realized that Miss Pritchard was still studying me and the skin on my arms began to prickle. "We’re on multiplication tables," I added, to fill the looming silence inside the classroom. Meeting her gaze I became uneasy, though I couldn’t have explained why at the time. Despite the heat, the room now felt like a refrigerator.

“Your hair, dear,” Miss Pritchard said, frowning. Before I could grasp what was happening, she took my chin in her hand. A flood of fear and confusion swept over me. I started as a comb scraped across my scalp. "Hold still," she said.

Miss Pritchard reached for the scissors on her desk and leaned closer, and when she did, those scissors became a bird, a horrid black bird with flapping wings, pointy silver beak poking, snipping just above my eyes.

My heart felt like it was going to burst from my chest.

"I can't imagine how you can see a thing," Miss Pritchard said. Jangling bangles on her pale wrist made a dreadful noise in my ears. In my terror, it took a while for her words to sink into my mind, to form meaning.

"I can see," I managed to say, the words sticking to the inside of my mouth like peanut butter. What was inside me that allowed me to answer, much less to correct a teacher?

I could not move from the chair—it was as if I’d been put under a magic spell. I avoided Miss Pritchard’s gaze as she toiled. Instead I focused on her smooth cap of copper hair, cut just like the Dutch Boy’s on the paint cans, that kid who sat on top of a scaffold in coveralls and painter’s cap, waving his paintbrush. The Dutch Boy was part of my world, along with the annoying Mr. Magoo with his thick spectacles, and the fascinating blonde girl with the umbrella on the Morton’s salt shaker who danced in the rain, crystals of salt streaming onto the ground from the miniature shaker under her arm. “When it rains, it pours,” the container declared. No matter how many times I read them, I never fathomed those mysterious words, but they enthralled me just the same. “When it rains, it pours.” What did that mean? What was the girl’s name? And all that salt spilling onto the ground? When I asked Alice May, she said, “When it rains, it pours. You know.”

"Dxty brmbfuk est motginbg?" Miss Pritchard said.

I strained to hear her over a cacophony of clanking blades, jangling bracelets, and my own thundering heart. Black hair drifted onto my lap like falling feathers.

Miss Pritchard said louder, "Did you have breakfast this morning?"

What was Miss Pritchard asking? Didn’t everybody eat breakfast? "Yes," I said, barely able to hear myself. I stole a glance at Miss Pritchard’s eyes and saw faded glass so I shifted to the window where the afternoon sky was brighter, bluer, clearer.

"And what did you have for breakfast, dear?"
4
I recalled the traveler in the fairytale who was offered three wishes by a genie, in a scarlet turban and a single golden earring, who billowed out of a magic lamp. What was it the fortunate traveler asked for? A roast chicken, a bottle of wine . . .

"Corn flakes," I said.

"Corn flakes?" Snip. Snip. Snip. The blackbird flapped its wings again and again.

"And oatmeal," I said, flushing.

"Oatmeal?"

It didn’t feel like enough. “Oatmeal with milk and sugar and cinnamon. And bananas.” I crossed my fingers in my lap. “And pancakes with maple syrup and French toast."

"Your mother made you all that for breakfast just this morning?" Miss Pritchard’s voice leaked doubt, as she clipped away. My legs trembled.

"With fried potatoes and chocolate milk and cream of wheat." I could not stop myself. What made me feel a need to defend my family from some imagined lack? To this day, I do not know. The hands in my lap had become fists.

"And eggs and bacon and sausage and orange juice and fruit cocktail . . ." I named every breakfast food I had ever eaten in my eight years, except for the menudo that Daddy made on Sundays, and offered it all up to Miss Pritchard, knowing it wouldn’t be nearly enough to appease the teacher who had turned into a troll.

"All that for breakfast, Lourdes?”

In my third-grade heart, I knew I had gone too far, and I knew Miss Pritchard knew I had gone too far. I didn’t care.

"Yes," I said, in a voice of quiet defiance. My cheeks and ears were on fire. I longed to be in the schoolyard with Alice May or at home—anywhere but in Room 12 with Miss Pritchard, her lizard-green dress, her clanking bracelets, her never-ending questions. Miss Pritchard leaned back, narrowed her gaze at me. With a final snip, she dropped the scissors on the table where they clattered, echoing in my ears.

The spell was broken.

"There. Stand up and brush yourself off.”

Released, I stood up. Snippets of hair rained onto the newspaper under my shoes. Dead hair. I bit my lips, willed myself not to cry.

Miss Pritchard moved the chair. “Lourdes, please tell your mother to keep your hair out of your eyes.” She wadded the newspaper into a ball and shoved it into a trashcan, then turned to me, saying, “Does she speak English?"
​
I looked past Miss Pritchard and stared at the world outside the windows. My chest ached.
5
I felt Miss Pritchard’s sharp eyes on me as she waited for a response. In the distance a church bell rang out, cars honked, a baby squealed.

I sealed my lips.

A classroom door slammed outside in the corridor.

"Well, you can go," she finally said in that gentle teacher voice. "And close the door behind you, dear. I have work to do."
​
In the hallway, there were no tears. I refused to cry.
 

​
Mama noticed my hair right away. My bangs had been cut so short, the hair stuck out from my forehead like a wire brush. When Daddy came home from the shipyard, exhausted and grimy, Mama met him at the front door. I heard them murmuring from my bedroom where I lay curled up on the bed, feeling miserable. They spoke in Spanish, the language of adults.

In the middle of dinner, as I glumly contemplated the mashed potatoes on my plate, Daddy asked, "What happened today, Hijita?"

Ricky pretended to choke on his food.

"Miss Pritchard said my hair was in my eyes,” I said.

“Who’s Miss Pritchard?” Mama said. “I thought Mrs. Wiley was your teacher.”

“Don’t you know anything? Miss Pritchard teaches fourth-grade!” I cried out.

“There’s no need to yell,” Daddy said. “No one’s deaf here.” He chewed his meatloaf slowly. Twice, he started to say something, then hesitated.

Ricky smirked. “Miss Smartie Pants got clipped.”

“If I wanted your opinion, I would have asked for it,” Daddy said.

“No one here knows anything about school!” My voice cracked.

“Enough to know the teacher's job is to teach. A teacher isn't a barber, otherwise I just might need a haircut myself," Daddy said. He meant to be funny, but there was bitterness in his voice. No one laughed. "I'll go to the school in the morning."

“No!” I protested, but Daddy’s look stopped me cold.

“You can’t afford to miss a day of work,” Mama said. “The hair will grow back,” she said to me.

Daddy took my hand and squeezed it. “Mija, if anybody says you’re not American, you tell them our family was waiting right here on the shore to welcome them when the Mayflower sailed in.” He shook his head, saying with disgust, “A mere child.” 
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​After dinner, I washed dishes without arguing, and went to my room. My bedroom window faced east towards Potrero Hill where every night a giant neon glass on Hamm’s Brewery lit up like fireworks in the sky. I sat in my pajamas on the bed and watched the glass fill with beer, contemplating Daddy’s words. I realized my father intended to tell me something important, but exactly what he meant was beyond me. I would ask Alice May in the morning.

The glass overflowed and the sky went dark. Before the sequence started again, I pulled the shade and got into bed, my homework untouched. Just before I fell to dreaming, Mama’s words came to me, “The hair will grow back.” Instead of consoling me, the words stuck in my heart like thorns.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Linda Zamora Lucero is writing a series of short stories set in San Francisco’s Mission District. Published stories include “When It Rains” (Yellow Medicine Review, 2020, editor Zibiquah); “Mexican Hat,” Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century (Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, 2020, editors Luis Alberto Urrea, et al); “Balmy Alley Forever” (Santa Clara Review 2016, and Yellow Medicine Review, 2016, editor Trevino Brings Plenty); “Take the Money and Run—1968” (Bilingual Review, ASU, 2015, editor G.F. Keller), and Vistas and Byways (SFSU, 2018). A graduate of San Francisco State University, Lucero is the Executive/Artistic Director of Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, an admission-free outdoor performing arts series in San Francisco. She is sheltering in place. 
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
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Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to theVistas & Byways  volunteer staff.