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My brother Carlos is the ideal ambassador’s son. He knows how to bow, he can
and he’ll be Secretary General of the United Nations before he turns twenty-five. That is, assuming his little sister can learn how to keep her mouth shut.
I don’t mean to suggest that I disliked the Prime Minister of Denmark, or any of his
been told “Abuela is taking you to see the elephants,” “It isn’t polite to talk about Tía Maria’s mustache,” and “Don’t flush until you wipe.” You really couldn’t take me anywhere.
could always find a welcome at the Georgetown Public Library. Every Saturday morning, Clint walked me through the cavernous reading room to the much cozier children’s corner, which we weren’t allowed to leave until I had at least three books under my arm. One of them turned out to be The Bracelet by Yoshiko Uchida. That was a mistake. A big mistake. In it I met a little girl named Emi, who lived on the West Coast in 1942. For some reason, all of the kids who were partly Japanese and partly American had to leave their homes and go into prison camps with barbed wire and guns, and that meant that Emi had to say good-bye to her best friend Laurie. So Laurie gave her a friendship bracelet to make sure they’d remember each other until Emi could come home again. I got as far as the part where Emi lost the bracelet at camp and was afraid it meant that Laurie was going to forget about her before I burst into tears and had to be calmed down by Mamita’s maid and three of Papa’s most devoted chargés d’affaires. Who makes up a story like that for a child?? It was only at dinnertime that Consistently Correct Carlos admitted that the Japanese American internment was, in fact, one of the less fortunate chapters in our history, and that there really might have been an Emi after all. I was furious. And that was before anybody had told me about the Freedom Riders.
meanwhile they were raising a ten-year-old activist who could find a social issue in a box of Kleenex. After I’d told the Korean ambassador that I had little use for either half of military Korea but at least the south knew how to say “May I?” before they shot you, I was persona non grata all along Embassy Row. And since I’d obviously become a disappointment to every one of my relatives, I compensated the only way I knew how: Straight A’s, Honors English, Honors Math, and first prize in two national creative writing competitions. I decided that if I had to join the diplomatic corps sooner or later, at least I’d have the academic credentials for it—and all I’d need to learn in the meantime was how to stop talking. But two things happened back to back that turned my plans inside out.
movie that might take my mind off the fact that I was never going to eat again. What resulted was a copy of Damn Yankees, which was either a lucky choice or a deliberate move by Clint to start a Civil War in my own family. Until I recovered enough to return to class, I was glued to the television screen watching Gwen Verdon dance a tango and a mambo again and again until I could match her step for step. And except for the vomiting, I’d completely forgotten that I was supposed to be sick.
called Fosse—where, for two and a half hours, the most beautiful men and women imaginable used their bodies to create sheer magic. By the time the curtain had come down, my eyes were wet and I was absolutely certain I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I also knew that I’d need to be re-born to different parents first. (Proof: Papa thought the show was “mildly diverting,” Mamita wished that the boys had worn more clothing, and Utterly Unassailable Carlos—eighteen at the time— missed the whole thing when he ran into the only Argentine vice consul on West Forty- fourth Street and spent both acts in the lobby, chatting him up about tin and copper deposits outside of Buenos Aires.) So faced with the prospect of bringing shame to my very visible family, I was convinced that I could keep myself from even thinking of becoming a dancer just as long as Papa never retired as ambassador to Mexico— something that certainly wasn’t going to happen in my lifetime.
the houses in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., emancipated all of the serfs, and moved into one of the loveliest homes in Brookline, Massachusetts. The rest of that summer was taken up with visiting the museums, walking the Freedom Trail, learning how to ride the T, and trying to figure out what these people saw in the Boston Red Sox. (I discovered no rational clue. Perhaps it’s viral.)
filled with thirty-five chattering kids I’d never seen before in my life, but who all seemed to have known each other from the womb. And just kids. No nannies, no bodyguards, no heads of state, no dinners with Chelsea Clinton or Tobey Maguire, and no one who wouldn’t think you were a stuck-up pain in the ass if you mentioned either one of them. I was terrified. There was one boy in particular who always wore blue and white sneakers, easy fit jeans and gray T-shirts (half of them unraveling so badly he could have played The Mummy). He spoke with such an unseemly Boston accent that you were lucky to catch every fourth word, he tried to be cool by pretending he didn’t know how cool he was, and his bangs looked like brown flax woven on a loom. His name was Anthony and I detested him. I even told him so—and assumed he believed me.
was nobody in the wings to replace her.
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