AROKA ONLY- 2 ASSIGNMENTS BY SATURDAY AT 3 PM EST

TBone6102

dirt_article.docx

Home >Applied Sciences homework help >AROKA ONLY- 2 ASSIGNMENTS BY SATURDAY AT 3 PM EST

Title:

Dirt. By: Cisneros, Sandra, Grand Street, 07345496, , Vol. 15, Issue 1

Database:

Literary Reference Center

DIRT

Listen

On Sunday mornings other families go to church. We go to Maxwell Street. Vamos al Mas-guel, Father announces, and starts to sing. He sings while he is shaving; he sings so loud we can't stand it. He flicks the light on in the rooms where we are sleeping. Wake up. Vamos al Mas-guel.

Father wears his Sunday clothes even though Maxwell Street is filthy. Flies on crates of rotten cantaloupe. Rusty coffee cans filled with rusty nails. A plastic Timex box filled with gold molars. Boxed lemon meringue pies with the meringue a little squashed. Beyond the trash are real and not so real treasures. Strings of plastic pearls the color of Easter eggs. A china shepherdess statue with a crack like a strand of blond hair--From Paris, gimme ten dollars. The finest homemade tamales in the world from that Michoacan widow the police keep bothering because she doesn't have a food permit.

Father hates used things. When we bring home toys from Goodwill and the Salvation Army we have to lie when he asks where we got them--This?--you bought it for us, remember? But Maxwell Street is different. It reminds Father of the open-air markets in Mexico.

Father is shopping for his British wing tips, the Cadillac of zapatos with pinhole designs along the toe and ankle and lace-ups, shoes so heavy if you dropped them on someone's head, you'd kill him. But these are the shoes Father prefers, classic wing tips of oiled and waxed calfskin, a rich tobacco color.

It's over to Harold's we're headed, corner of Halsted and Maxwell, across from the Vienna hot-dog stand. Harold has been there since . . . Since before you were born, girlie. Up a narrow, dark flight of wooden stairs. On each sagging step, a strip of aluminum so that your footsteps coming up or down announce you. Tap, tap, tap. The stairs creak. The walls are stained. The banister, dark from the oil of hands, is sagging. Everything is sagging like a pile of shoe boxes--building, shelves, steps, Harold.

Two hundred and forty pounds of Harold is standing with a shoe box in his hand, tissue paper gaping over, one shoe in the other hand. Those costs you double in the Loop, Harold is saying to a black mother who is buying a pair of red hightops for a lanky, baby-faced boy.

Harold's best shoes come in strange sizes, display shoes from the windows, tiny as Cinderella. Good lucky for Father he has small feet.

It smells sweet in Harold's, dusty and sweet as leather. The box window fan revolves slowly. All of Harold's salesmen are young boys in ties, the place too hot for ties. Everyone sweating. Harold, tie-less, standing among a pile of messy boxes, talking too loud. How does he find anything here? He does. It's not a fancy shop. The grime, the dirt, the sweet leather smell. Harold wiping his face with a handkerchief. He knows shoes like Father knows sofas.

There are only a few chairs, the ones with seats that lift up like in the movies. Harold demands you step on the cardboard shoe-box lid when you try a shoe on. It's a bit dim and dark, and there is a genuine disorder that nobody minds, that makes finding a pair more exciting. At any moment the place could collapse in a sea of flames; at any second another Chicago fire could start, a spontaneous combustion of shoe polish and paper and shoehorns and dirty shelves. A speckled light enters from the windows that have been painted over in green paint, the windows yawning open, noise of street hucksters and hawkers, the sticky scent of pork-chop sandwiches.

But at Harold's, Father forgets British wing tips mean excellence. Dirt, dirt, he says in Spanish, when examining the slippery leather soles, the fine stitching, the sweet scent of real Italian calfskin. Trash, he keeps muttering in Spanish--Mugre. Porqueria. iFuchi! Father feels it is his duty to insult the merchandise. He is furious when we pay the first price quoted. Fools!--storeowners expect you to haggle.

--How much, my friend? Father asks.

--Them costs you fifty, Harold says, already talking to another customer.

--How much? . . . as if he hadn't heard.

Harold, sweating, looks at him disgusted. --Amigo, I already told you, fifty bucks. Cincuenta. Cinco and oh.

Father: Fifty?!!! Then that look he is famous for, that eye of the rooster, head tilted a little as if he has razors tied to his talons and is about to attack in a gleam of green-black feathers and bloody foam.

--Fifty dollars?!!! For this dirt . . .

Harold brings his 240-pound body of businessman over and plucks the shoe box from Father's hands. --For you, not for sale.

--Get outta . . .

--You get out of here, Reyes. Don't bother me, I'm busy selling shoes.

--Twenty-five. I give you twenty-five.

--I already told you, forget it. They're the best, those shoes.

--Sheet on you. Get outta . . . Son of a mother . . . muttering as we all step down the rickety, aluminum-tipped steps that tap-tap with our defeat.

Father is a man possessed. We talk to him and his eyes are spirals. We pluck his sleeve and point at items we would like to buy, but it's useless. After we have walked around the block and touched bunches of socks, three pairs for one dollar, after we have had a cold bottle of strawberry cream soda floating in an ice cooler with chunks of ice floating like icebergs--your hands numb when you finally fish it out--after we have heard the preacher man shouting for us to receive the Lord, He is coming, but he's not here today on Maxwell Street, after we have walked past the doorways with big women in halter tops and purple satin hot pants, after we have eyed sacks of ruby red grapefruit, a plaster Venus de Milo, a bougainvillea plant growing in a coffee can, we do go back, we will go back, we must go back. Must we? We must! It is humiliating to have to climb the aluminum-tipped, crooked stairs the second time.

--How much?

--Forty-five.

--Thirty?

--Forty. That's what I paid for them.

--Thirty-five?

--I said forty and get outta here, you heard me.

Father pays his money muttering, dirt, dirt, for this dirt, all the while Harold is stuffing the bills in his pocket and waving him off, waving his arms as if saying--You're nuts, get lost, forget it. Each terribly angry, ruined even, all day.

Enraged. Disgusted. Triumphant.

~~~~~~~~

By SANDRA CISNEROS

Copyright of this work is the property of Grand Street Press and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. Accession Number: 9606273613