(Az years part 5)

Eventually GiGi and I added a couple more girls to our small group. Mary Blanca Paloalto was a Mexican girl who lived in a Mexican neighborhood in our school district. All the Mexican girls were Catholic and they were almost all named Mary. Blanca was also a popular name, though I didn't understand the reasoning for it, like I did the name "Mary." If you were brown, why name your kid white? Some white girls were named Blanca too, I thought that was just as odd, but, it was a pretty name, I guess. Mary Blanca was tall, had black eyes, good features and a womanly figure. She had thick jet black straight hair all the way past her butt. We were all envious of Mary's hair, but, Mary was so uptight about her religion, she believed girls shouldn't wear thier hair down and loose. Jesus wouldn't like it. She thought it made them look "fast." But, only Mexican or Catholic girls, she assured us. I used to be fascinated by the way she did her hair. She'd bend over at the waist, letting it fall in a shiny pool on the floor and brush it furiously up into a tight pony on the very top of her head. That pony tail would be so friggin' tight her eyes looked Chinese for an hour. Then she whip it under, roll it and pin it in place with dozens of bobby pins and spray it with a cloud of Aquanet. The result looked like a big black metal oblong space ship on the back of her head. She never had a hair out of place. Ever. Once Mary had a bad hair day and stayed home from school. Seriously. She dressed conservativly, but, nice. Her mother bought her cute knock off of designer stuff, which at that age, we could spot a mile away. But, they were good knock offs, at the time my goal in life was to own good knock off's. Mary dressed the same way every day. Knit sleeveless fake Villager blouse, fake Villager skirt, pastel button down cardigan, and fake Capezio flats. She must have had a dozen of that outfit in various pastel colors. She also wore panty hose every single day of her life even though she had the greatest coffee colored legs. She even wore panty hose with her shorts on weekends. She wore the same pair of little gold ball pierced earrings and her little gold cross on a chain at all times. She was a lady. She wasn't a cut up like me and GiGi and didn't care for some of our outrageous (by her standards) shenanigans and giggle fits, but, there was one thing about Mary we loved. She may not have been described as the life of the party, but, she was loyal. Even if she disaproved of something we did, she would never tell on us. You could always talk to Mary when you had a problem, she was sensible and you could count on her. She could figure things out or ask her mother. She was like the stabalizer of our little group. The one who keeps the rest out of trouble. I think she liked us because we were so different than her and dared her to step out of her box sometimes.
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Mary's house was just like mine, an adobe square with two small bedrooms...her's was surrounded by a bunch of other little adobe squares just like it occupied by other Mexican families. There was the gravel yard and chain link, but, thiers all had the virgin Mary statue in the front. They all had it. Mary's house was also different than mine because she had a real family and they loved her. She had a shit ton of loud brothers, both older and younger, but, Mary was the only girl. She was precious to all of them. Her mom was a fat Mexican woman who wore wild prints and too much jewelry, but, she was a great cook. Her dad was a fat balding Mexican man who lived for baseball and Ed Sullivan. He never looked at us "funny," not once. We were always welcome at their house. They'd open the door and yell "Hola!! Come eat!" They always had real Mexican food, which took some getting used to, but, I liked it. For breakfast her mom always served the same thing..refried beans on warm home made tortillas and Mountain Dew. We'd line up and Mary's mom would hand us a hot tortilla out of the oven and slap a big spoonful of steaming beans on it and then we'd pour ourselves a paper cup of lukewarm "dew" from the newfangled big plastic bottle on the counter and we'd head out to the backyard where they had picnic tables enough to hold us all. To this day I enjoy refried beans on folded tortillas for breakfast sometimes and I think of Mary and her family. Her backyard was gravel and chain link too with a junk car or two the boys were working on, a couple of well fed curr dogs and statues Mary's mom favored for decorating. These included Mexican guy in a sombrero having a siesta and Mexican donkey pulling a cart full of Petunias, which I had always thought were white trash-art, but, the Paloalto's considered them Mexican trash-art. She had window boxes out there painted a bright turquoise filled with masses of leggy pink Petunias. And oddly, not a cactus in sight. I guess they didn't feel like picking Pricky Pear needles out of all those brown butts. The yard was just big enough to play a rowdy game of badmitton. Everything was rowdy at the Paloalto house. Mary had her own small room and the boys had the other room. It was just wall to wall bunk beds in the boy's room. I doubt they ever used it for anything but, sleeping when they were worn plum out. Her parents slept on a fold out sofa in the tiny living room. Her house was always jam packed and there didn't seem to be enough room to breathe sometimes, and yet, they welcomed us. GiGi and I both loved staying at Mary's once in awhile, it gave us a window into a family life. Something neither one of us knew anything about. We also felt very safe there.
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The other girl we added was named Racine. She was transplanted from Ohio by a divorce and her mom "starting over." It seemes like only a few people were actually from Tucson, most seemed to be transplants from all over who came there for the sun. Racine was a beautiful slightly plump blonde who I thought looked like Cybil Shepard. Cybil Shepard was a young popular model then and I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Racine didn't like looking like her, she said, but, I told her it was better than looking like Twiggy. Which I got compared to. Racine was "fast" by Mary's standard. Okay, by ours too, but, she was really funny and said the most outrageous things to make you laugh. She was voluptuous and wore tight cheap clothes, shared by her mother. Her mom was pretty, but, wore too much makeup and an enourmous teased bee hive hair do and she worked in a bar and was never home. They lived in a crappy apartment not too far from me and her mothers many boyfriends hung out there. I didn't like going there and neither did GiGi. It was a dank place that smelled like stale beer. It always felt "dangerous." And it probably was, and if anyone could spot danger, it was me. Racine had an older boyfriend named George, he was sort of dumb and greasy, and had tattoos. She claimed to have had a hundred boy friends back in Ohio and I don't know, maybe she did. She was sexually active, preached about the new sexual revolutuion for women and shocked us constantly with tales of what "it" was like. It was no big deal, she said, everybody was doing it.
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I'm pretty sure Racine was sexually abused at a young age. I know GiGi and I both were. Not from any details GiGi shared. We wouldn't talk about that awful stuff, but, just from things she said. Like, she told me that they had a gardener before the one they had now and he got fired. I asked if he was a bad gardener and she looked real sad and said, no, he just liked little girls. I knew exactly what she meant. Unlike my abusers, I'll bet that gardener didn't just get fired, I'll bet they never found his body. I hoped so. Men should never do that to little girls. They don't have any right to hurt you and terrorize you like that. It's systematic torture, mental and physical. And it fucks up your head. In my case and GiGi's case it made us scared shitless of men and sex. It gave us a warped view of it. In Racine's case, I think she felt like she'd already been used up, so what did it matter? She used her young sexuality to get older boys to do whatever she wanted and to buy her things. I admired her and was embarassed for her and I felt sorry for her all at the same time.