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But every once in a while, I pull them out of my dresser drawer and touch them to my cheek, worn velvet and faded silk, mi tesoro, mi juventud- which my husband has passed on to the young women who hold for him the promise of who I was. These are the chastened girl-selves I gave up to become the woman who could be married to you. This is my wild-haired girlhood dazzled with stories of love, the romantic heroine with the pale, operatic face who throws herself on the train tracks of men's arms. These are the trophies of my maidenhood, the satin dress with buttons down the back, the scented box with the scalloped photographs. But no, I tell him, you do not understand, I want my hairbands even if I don't need them. He says I do not need them, I've cut my hair, so it no longer falls in my eyes when I read, or when we are making love and I bend over him. Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.My husband has given away my hairbands in my dream to the young women he works with, my black velvet, my mauve, my patent leather one, the olive band with the magenta rose whose paper petals crumple in the drawer, the flowered crepe, the felt with a rickrack of vines, the twined mock-tortoise shells.
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From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below. All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. "Why, Yolanda dear, that's snow!" She laughed. But then Sister Zoe's shocked look faded.
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I shrieked, "Bomb! Bomb!" Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as she hurried to my side. One morning as I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the ones Sister Zoe had drawn random at first, then lots and lots. It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school.
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The months grew cold, November, December. She drew a picture of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a flurry of chalk marks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. At home, Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world peace. At school, we had air raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we'd file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home, explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City. Sister Zoe explained to a wide eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba. Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air. Slowly, she enunciated the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, cornflakes, subway, snow. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them.
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I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class how to pronounce it. I liked them a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister Zoe. Our first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning.