In English my name means hope. In
Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is
like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays
on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.
It was my great-grandmother's name and
now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of
the horse--which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female-but I think
this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their
women strong.
My great-grandmother. I would've liked
to have known her, a wild, horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until
my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like
that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it.
And the story goes she never forgave
him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their
sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she
sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I
have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.
At school they say my name funny as if
the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in
Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as
thick as sister's name Magdalena--which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at
least- -can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. I would like
to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one
nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something
like Zeze the X will do.
