When I imagine it, I first picture the twisted fence, her body warping wire, lava nails pushing her face so deep into metal a cheek pressed through a pentagon. And I assume she was wearing one of her two outfits. But before I get into how the third didn’t come till five years later in a town 1000 miles away I want to focus on the fence. And its crescent bend as six fists beat my mother into her place in the Española Prep School circle of life, their hoops gleaming like lowriders. Though on that day something miraculous after a seismic bounce against the chain links, my mom Margie Marquez ducked and rolled, stood and clouded 3 cholas in roadrunner dust. She ran faster than the time Roque haloed a lasso toward her throat, faster than the rocks Pedro pegged with the end of a piñon root. She had enough fists in her life to know when you’re chased down Pueblo Street by 3 chubby cholas, when you got 3 angry motherfuckers clawing at the wisps of your hair yapping “Next time you kiss Tony Martinez,” you take the back route and deal with the horse manure. You climb the dirty hill, tumble down desert weeds and flatten yourself against the family feed store. You just run till you hit something more dangerous. When my mom learned Flamenco she never told us, just arrived one day in spotlight on a stage and we watched, we, who have never been chased by cholas, never seen a screaming Puerto Rican run her boyfriend over with a pickup at a party, never learned how to honk a horn inside a car to rouse rescue from a knife. No, I’ve never even had to mop up my own blood. Flamenco looks like something you’d do on a playground and get in trouble, her heels hot with embroidered flames. The “Duende” of a dance is when routine is abandoned when she met my father for the first time, my mom Margie Marquez saw him in a pressed sweater from The Gap, ducked and rolled into Mary Larson’s room across the hall, wiggled out of a cattle-stained collar and pulled on a flower frock, with pearls, lifting her arms in the light, she secured them behind her neck, fingers curved above her hair.
