We Are Not Invited By Marilyn Duarte

Mike Fritcher CC



We Are Not Invited


We chalk the sidewalk in front of our rented flat and play hopscotch by ourselves because we have moved mid-school year again and haven’t made new friends. The neighbors stare at us and we stare back, but our mothers tell us we’re being rude, so we focus on the colourful obstacle course instead. Single hop, single hop, double jump. 

On our first day of elementary school, we wear crocheted knee-high socks and shoulder-padded dresses. We have bowl haircuts. Our mothers insist on buying 8 x 10 school photos all the way through junior high, even though we’re careful to hide the order forms deep inside our knapsacks because the cool kids tell us it’s stupid to have pictures of ourselves. You’re so conceited they say, over and over while flying high on their swings. 

We walk behind our grandmothers, who are dressed in their traditional mourning clothes: black kerchiefs, black tights, and black ankle-length skirts. We pretend we’re grown up enough to walk semi-alone the six blocks from the playground to our home. As people stare, waves of embarrassment cover our faces, turning our pudgy cheeks pink. We wonder if Wayne from the corner house will make fun of our grandmothers who greet people with boa tarde instead of hello.

We take home the Weekly Bulletin, the school’s newsletter, and translate it for our mothers when they get home from their full-time jobs sewing in the congested garment factory during the day and from their part-time jobs cleaning hollow office buildings during the night. Our mothers’ responses to the updates on the various field trips and science fairs are that we need to wear deodorant. Otherwise, they warn, the school will complain that people like us are not only stupid, but dirty. We believe them and stock up on meadow-fresh roll-ons and lavender sticks.

When probed by our teachers, we admit that we do not see our fathers much, and our mothers still can’t speak English. When they congratulate themselves for having been right about us all along, we tentatively smile, unsure what else to say or do.

We enunciate our surnames for our friends’ parents, as they look up quizzically from their newspapers to ask where we are from. We bite into our homemade prosciutto and queijo sandwiches when we desperately crave a slice of pepperoni pizza, but those cost a loonie. 

We get pulled out of school to translate for our extended family, their friends, and their acquaintances. As children, we speak to adults at the government agency that invited them to this country, but can’t help them find better places to work or study or be. We answer the phones at home. We write cheques for our mothers and point to the line where their signature must go. When one of our grandparents needs help with their oxygen mask, we stop working on our fractions and run to adjust the tubes, making sure they can breathe. On Fridays, we dust. On Saturdays, we help carry groceries home from Knob Hill Farms. We don’t always have time to finish our homework. During the week, we don’t bother our teachers with questions.

When our hair grows out, we tease our bangs and hairspray them into place. We beg our mothers to let us wear English Rose lipstick like Mindy and Jenny and Rainbow, who have eyes as light a blue as the watercolour we once painted and knew was good but threw into the garbage because nobody else praised it. We hide our report cards from our families. We do not say the word discrimination the first time, nor the second time, nor the third time we do not get the job that our friend gets, even though we attend the same school, lack the same amount of experience, and are available for the same hours. We do not bother applying for the fancy internship because we need a j-o-b and while paying for our bus fare and serving us gourmet sandwiches sounds nice—nice, we already know, doesn’t pay the bills.

When our boyfriends congratulate themselves for broadening their horizons and dating someone so completely different, we feign flattery and imagine ourselves like a relic inside a museum that is protected behind a glass cabinet. We do not realize that we’re the ones paying the cost of their admission, and that the price is too high.

We inhabit two histories, we practice two customs, we live two lives.

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Marilyn holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa. Her writing has appeared in various print and online journals including Longleaf Review, Emerge Literary Journal, and Barren Magazine. Her work has also been nominated for The Best of the Net. Visit her at www.marilynduartewriter.com.

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