In the summer before I entered ninth grade, I had a chance to travel to Puerto Rico with my Spanish class. While I waited to board the flight, my mother pulled me aside and said to me, “Whatever you do, never let a boy stick his tongue in your mouth.”

I could not get on that plane fast enough. I’d already been reduced to tears that morning by my father, because he thought my dress was too short. The only reason I was going on the trip at all was that my teacher had pulled some strings and gotten me a scholarship to pay for my plane ticket, and my father never could pass up a bargain.

Once my class reached the island, we were introduced to twenty Puerto Rican students with whom we’d be sharing a dormitory. In the mornings we attended language-immersion classes at the university, and in the afternoons we went to the beach, or a historic fort, or a lush rain forest. At night, under the watchful eye of our formidable chaperone Señora Toro, we danced the twist to Latin-flavored rock music. 

One night the band played a merengue, and a boy named Juan asked me to dance. He was fifteen and tall, with brown eyes and toffee-colored skin. He taught me the merengue with an air of expertise, clasping my hand, placing his other hand on my hip, and moving his pelvis to the left and right. “Sígueme,” he instructed, coaxing me to follow him. Our hips, just inches apart, began moving in unison. My heart pounded.

When the dance ended, Juan led me to a blooming frangipani bush at the edge of the patio. He put his hands on my waist and drew me close. His smooth face exuded a sweet aroma of cologne, and his lips touched mine. I had just received my first kiss — and then my second, and my third. Shockingly, his tongue insinuated its way into my mouth.

“No!” I cried and pushed him back. “Basta!” — enough!

“Qué?” he asked.

“La lengua!” I said — the tongue! “La lengua es prohibida!”

He was baffled. What could I tell him: My mother said no?

Then I remembered where I was — hundreds of miles from my parents. I smiled at the confused boy, wrapped my arms around his warm neck, and invited him to kiss me again.

Sue Z. Smith
Los Angeles, California

I was eight years old and living in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. In the 1950s the street was our playground. Three older boys — two big Irish brothers and an Italian kid — seemed always to be waiting to taunt me when I came out to play. They called me “camel jockey” and took turns rapping their knuckles on top of my head. More often than not, I would cry and go back into the house.

One Saturday my dad, who wasn’t known for his patience, told me just to stay away from them. 

“They’re always there,” I said, crying. “I just want them to leave me alone.”

“If you want them to leave you alone,” he said, “I’ll tell you what to do.” The next time they came near me, he said, I was to keep my head down and my eyes on their crotches. Once I got an open look, I should kick one of them in the balls and run as fast as I could. “Believe me,” my dad said, “if you do that, they’ll leave you alone.”

The next time I went outside, I did exactly as he’d said. I don’t even know which boy I kicked, but I can still feel his tender parts give beneath the force of my foot and hear his cries of pain as I ran down the street. It was thrilling.

A couple of weeks later I did the same thing to another big kid who was trying to horn in on a game of touch football. A great, pent-up anger had been released in me by then, and I became somewhat of a bully myself. My bullying came to an abrupt halt, though, after I knocked a boy unconscious by pounding his head into the sidewalk.

I’d learned not only to fear other boys, but also to fear myself.

Thomas Mallouk
Doylestown, Pennsylvania

At the age of ten I became my mom’s sous-chef. She would tell me what vegetables to cut up and always criticize me for doing it wrong. Then, after she heated her wok till the oil was smoking and flames shot up toward the ceiling, she would start to shout: “Garlic! . . . Now the onions! . . . Bring me the carrots and bamboo! . . . Where’s the cabbage? . . . Hurry with the broccoli! Now!”

Ma taught me that if food is seasoned properly before you serve it, there is no need to add soy sauce at the table. As I entered my teens, though, I started to question her excessive use of oil, salt, sugar, and something she called “ajinomoto” — all of which she kept by her stove in open bowls.

“Ma, what is that? It looks like sugar and tastes so weird.”

“That’s ajinomoto. It’s good for vegetables.”

“Why do you add so much?”

“Finish chopping the vegetables!”

After dinner I tried to read the label on the ajinomoto container, but it was in Japanese. It would be a couple of years before I found out what it was: monosodium glutamate, or msg.

When I learned about the health problems associated with msg, I tried to talk to my mother about it.

“Ma, I’ve read that it’s really bad for you.”

“You’re crazy. I’ve eaten it all my life.”

“It’s this inert chemical that just sits in your stomach.”

“You think you know so much ’cause you read!”

“But it makes it so nothing tastes good without it.”

“If it’s so bad, how come everybody in Taiwan eat it? Everyone in Japan eat it. Now add water, or the vegetables will burn!”

As much as I complained about the seasoning, Ma’s cooking always tasted good. Too good. 

When I left home and got my own apartment, I vowed to stay away from salt, sugar, and msg when I cooked vegetables, and I used only a tablespoon or so of oil. My dishes were beautiful and healthy, but they just didn’t taste as good as my mom’s food. 

Ma battled cancer successfully once, but then it came back, and she was bedridden. I stayed at her house for three or four days at a time to help out. She was too sick to cook for herself, so I made her rice porridge and brought it to her on a tray with a flower and a cup of green tea. Even with her energy depleted she managed to criticize the porridge for being not hot enough, or too hot, or too soupy.

We went on like this for a year and a half as she shrank to eighty pounds. On our last day together she asked me to make her a dessert of boiled peanuts. I used Spanish peanuts she had in the cupboard, and we sat in her bed and peeled the skins off one by one and watched an old All in the Family episode on tv. It was funny, till one of the characters went to sleep and didn’t wake up. 

Ma turned to me. “Did she just die?”

“Yes. I think so.”

We were quiet for a time, and I finally gave up on skinning the peanuts. I ended up throwing them away. But she was happy because we were trying to cook together. The next night she died.

Dmae Roberts
Portland, Oregon

“Go left,” says my guide. 

I do.

“No, left!”

“This is left,” I say with calm assurance.

Pause. “Oh, my left.”

I move accordingly.

“There’s a . . . thing in front of you, and you have to go through it.”

My guide lets go of my arm, apparently manages this mystery before us, and then says, “OK, come on.”

“What sort of thing?” I ask, extending my cane.

“It’s a . . . turntable.”

I move closer and hear the clicking of a turnstile.

“There are six stairs,” the guide says after we’ve passed the turnstile. “I counted.”

I am suspicious. Usually guides count the risers but not the floor, which is actually a final step down. I am fairly sure there will be seven steps. But who knows? There may be eight or only five.

“I’ll just stay a step behind you and hold your arm,” I say. “I can feel you moving down the steps.”

Finally we get on the bus.

“Where are we going to sit?” I ask.

“Over there,” my guide says.

“Over where?” I ask, wondering how long it will be before I can stop giving sighted people instructions on how to give instructions.

Nancy Scott
Easton, Pennsylvania

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