Que dira la gente? What will people say? I believe my late mother, Marie, went to bed each night with that question in mind, ready to use on any or all us five Trujillo children, some six decades ago.
But to try to penetrate Mom’s thought processes necessitates a bit of background, Pay-It-Forward style. Remember the recent movie in which good deeds were paid before they became due? People were encouraged to engage in some act of kindness in the hopes it would soon bear fruit and benefit others.
Mom’s thinking — bless her heart — was a slight variation of that. But in fairness to her, let me explain, emphatically, that hers was probably like that of any other mother trying to raise an army of kids, without scandal. I hope we Trujillo children didn’t disappoint. Not much to report in that area, but we lived as if we were in the spotlight, or at least the Railroad Avenue spotlight.
Mom’s rendition of Pay It Forward depended much on the “but you could have or would have or might have” principle. Most of our breaches of etiquette, things that worried our parents, and thus might create the Scandal of the Century, had to do with potential. And that potential sometimes caused our derrieres to become acquainted with the business end of a belt.
You see, if I’d arrived home from school and announced that the reason for my being five minutes late was caused by my having offered to carry some of Mrs. Baca’s groceries, that bit of chivalry wouldn’t have exactly made me Sir Lancelot. Or even Sir Lancelittle.
At the time, I believed that act alone should have earned me some bonus points, or as my homeroom teacher at Immaculate Conception School, Sister Mary Semper Enojada might say, “a higher place in Heaven.”
Did my grocery-toting gesture elevate me? No. “You should have carried all the groceries, and not left her to struggle with all those heavy bags.” Mom would utter a couple of heroic sighs as if lightening Mrs. Baca’s load by that gesture alone.
“But Mom, she bought the groceries, and they’re just as heavy for me at age 10 as they are for her, at age 35.” So, the potential by which my mom lived her child-raising years factored in big.
I tried other tacks, real and conjured:
“Well, Mom, I’m late because there was the most exciting fight at school, and I think both girls are going to be suspended.” I might have said that, but I’d be countered with “First, why did you stay and watch? Que dira la gente? Second, why didn’t you stop them?” At any age, did anybody ever survive an attempt to break up a couple of hair-pulling, bobby-pin-piercing, arms-flailing female pugilists? Years later, while picking up one of my sons from middle school, I actually succeeded in separating two combatants, but that’s a topic for a future column.
We had only one clock in our house, the kind that would buzz on the hour, causing the lights in the house to go dim. Mom never seemed to look at it, but she always knew the exact time, without benefit of the mammoth timepiece atop our Victrola.
We often had after-school meetings, diversions, interruptions that made us late from school. If I’d taken an extra five minutes to walk Isabel, Lydia or Georgia home, Mom would know that. Somewhere in that Black Book that she kept in her head, there was a record of demerits: Memo to self — Arthur was five minutes late coming from school today; Arthur spent 12 hours playing pinball yesterday.
In retrospect, I guess I could have sent Mom an email from school, or even texted her: “BhomeL8er.CHrCH.” It’s a pity these gadgets didn’t come around for another 50 years.
In trying to resurrect some of the childhood things I did that merited punishment, I come up with blanks. I suspect the parish priest, upon hearing my first confession, dozed off. “This new kid confesses to taking an extra slice of bread at supper and to failing to have his knee completely touch the floor when he genuflected in church, and he’s telling me about it?”
Where I was cut some slack was almost exclusively in the ecclesiastical realm. But that wasn’t guaranteed. In most cases, if my lateness from school resulted from a meeting in which our teacher prepped us on the High Mass, I got a pass. But if the lateness came from a routine class meeting, or even a few passes on the playground swing, that became another que dira la gente situation.
Sometimes I succeeded in blowing away Mom with some fantastical tale I’d heard in class or on the playground, or that I merely imagined. “Gee, Mom, did you know that if people chew gum during Mass, there’s a big chance the earth will open up and swallow them?” and “Sister told us today that for every grain of salt that we spill during our lives, we’ll have to sweep it up — with our eyelashes — before we can get out of Purgatory.” or “Hey, Mom, did you hear that they cleaned out two tons of pigeon manure from the old I.C. Church belfry when they tore it down?”
Those diversions worked once, Mom having gotten so wrapped up in the what-if-ness of an earth belch, or with a turned-over Morton’s Salt truck or a congregation of birds that she forgot to chide me.
And what usually worked was being late after a bona-fide church event. Obviously, I needed to have actually been churching before telling Mom about it, but yet, the thrill of legitimately arriving home late spurred me on.
Church matters alone didn’t always appease my mother. I learned in time that if I gave the utterance an extra syllable — chur-urch instead of just church — Mom toned down the might-have, could-have, should have logic.
That pleased me, especially when my drawn out chur-urch syllable worked.