Revised Memories and CollidingIdentities: Absence and Presence inMorrison's "Recitatif and Viramontes's"Tears on My Pillow"

Helane Adams AndroneMiami University

Recently several literary critics have argued that ethnic litera-tures are comparable in their complex rhetorical remembering ofancestral, linguistic, and gendered realities to negotiate contempo-rary political, social, and spiritual issues,' A close comparativeexamination of African American and Chicana women's fictiondemonstrates that many authors in these fields create literaturesthat contain similar struggles for personal and collective power.Both include non-traditional spiritual and ancestral connections,and both engender metaphors that recognize the hybridity of ethnicAmerican experience. More specifically, Toni Morrison andHelena Maria Viramontes's stories show that mothers inform theconnection to memory and the understanding of present realities;the relationships between the female protagonists and their mothersdirectly correlates to the relationship between the protagonists andtheir cultural and ethnic identities. Morrison and Viramontes usearchetypal symbols that expose both the absence and presence ofmothering in the texts and establish the deeply embedded intersec-tions of identity and mythology.

In Toni Morrison's "Recitatif (1991) and Helena Maria Vi-ramontes's "Tears on My Pillow" (1994), the protagonists partici-pate in traumatic mothering situations that reveal an ab-sence/presence paradigm. Characters heal from trauma only when

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they interrogate and confront the meaning of archetypal figuresfrom their memories. In "Tears on My Pillow" the main character,Ofelia, struggles to revise the legend of La Llorona, the archetypalwailing woman of Latina/Latino legend who drowned her ownchildren; through this revision she hopes to understand the disap-pearances and reappearances of mothers in her own life. In Morri-son's "Recitatif," the archetypal mother figure is embodiedthrough a domestic servant named Maggie; the female protago-nists' continually revised memories of an incident in whichMaggie is attacked attempt to negotiate a traumatic motheringsituation that is both absent and present. Alhough these two textsare different in many ways, Morrison's and Viramontes's uses ofmemory point to what these stories—and many African Americanand Chicana works—actually share: stories are told to revisememory and as a way to cope with an absence/presence motheringparadigm. Analyzing the absent/present paradigm shows howmothers' identities actually collide and intersect with archetypalidentities, and how women use culture and memory to cope withtrauma.

Karla Holloway uses the concept of absence/presence as part ofan Afrocentric interpretive model that "acknowledges both aspiritual and a physical mother at its center" (22). This peculiarparadigm of "psychic fracture" requires participation in whatHolloway refers to as a "cleansing of psychic despair" or healing(Holloway 4, 59). I use Holloway's paradigm as a comparativestrategy because, as she argues, it denotes both a metaphorical andmetaphysical presence alongside literal presence and absence to"gather together figures of language, myth, and literary imagery"in "cultural and gendered intimacy" (22). Holloway describesancestral women who are mythologized and become "communaland culturally determined archetypes" (86). In "Recitatif," lan-guage, myth, and imagery are united in the archetypal figures ofMaggie, a servant at the girl's home where the two protagonists(Twyla and Roberta) meet. In "Tears on My Pillow," La Lloronahaunts Ofelia's nights while the transgressive presence of herclassmate Veronica haunts her during the day. In Morrison's text,Twyla and Roberta revise their memories of Maggie in order totransfer their anxieties and anger toward their mothers onto her.

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For Ofelia, in Viramontes's text, the absence/presence of fe-males—including her mother, Arlene; her grandmother. MamaMaria; her classmate, Veronica; and Veronica's mother, Lil MaryG.—is mediated by the frightening story of La Llorona. An exami-nation of Maggie and La Llorona as archetypes reveals a poignantcommentary on the pervasive trauma of absence/presence mother-ing, and on its on-going haunting effects on women's conscious-ness.

Domestic Silence: "What the hell happened to Maggie?"

Twyla and Roberta are prevented from having a comfortable,consistent sense of home and motherhood. Both girls are"dumped" by their mothers at St. Bonaventure, a state-run homefor girls; unlike their peers, they are not orphans, but rather theproducts of absent mothers. The physical absence of their mothershas landed Twyla and Roberta in the home; the institutionalpresence of their mothers is a consequence of the home's organ-ized and designated visitations. Mrs. Itkin, known by the girls asthe "Big Bozo," controls St. Bonaventure. Twyla initially ex-presses the view that her mother would not want her sharing theroom with Roberta due to their racial difference—one girl is whiteand the other is African American, although the text never makesclear what each girl's race is. At this point Mrs. Itkin remindsTwyla of the ambiguous nature of their stay there: "'Good,' saidBozo. 'Maybe then she'll come and take you home'" (445). Twylaadmits that the bond between her and Roberta is built upon thedifference between them and other girls at the home: "We didn'tlike each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted toplay with us because we weren't real orphans with beautiflil deadparents in the sky. We were dumped" (446). This initial placementtogether forecasts Twyla and Roberta's future interactions, whichwill always be framed by their racial and class differences; thisplacement also identifies the connection between them (both havemothers who have abandoned them, rather than mothers who aredeceased). St. Bonaventure for them is always and already nothome; both the homes they know with their mothers and the homesthey know without their mothers are precarious and inconsistent.

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Twyla and Roberta are in a home, which is not a home to them;they interact with mothers, who are not in a position to motherthem; and they connect to each other, but share only the experienceof alienation and rejection.

Initially, Twyla and Roberta share that private ambivalenceabout their mothers that, for them, requires little explanation: "Twolittle girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—hownot to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed.There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Isyour mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh—and anunderstanding nod" (455). In the beginning, the "politeness"allows them to imagine they are doing each other a service, that the"reluctance and generosity" they employ to avoid such questions isnecessary for survival. As girls, they find some solace in thismutual maternal alienation and disconnection; during their child-hood this bond also conceals complications of race and class.

Like the girls themselves, the mothers are not specified racially,but rather by their behavior; Mary "danced all night" and wore"tight slacks" while Roberta's mother is "sick" and wears a "crosslike two telephone poles" (445-46). Mary's dancing and thephysical or psychological illness of Roberta's mother are named asreasons for Twyla and Roberta's stay in the home. Ironically,Twyla's and Roberta's cognizance of their mothers' states of mindbecomes the discursive signifier for the absence/presence paradigmthrough which they negotiate future issues in their friendship, andthis negotiation is always underscored by their revisions of theirmemories of Maggie.

When Twyla and Roberta meet at different moments in theirlives, they attempt to (re)member a particular violent and traumaticincident at St. Bonaventure involving Maggie, described here byTwyla:

Maggie fell down there once [in the orchard]. The kitchen womanwith legs like parentheses. And the big girls laughed at her. Weshould have helped her up, I know, but we were scared of those girlswith lipstick and eyebrow pencil. Maggie couldn't talk. The kids saidshe had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just bom that way:mute. She was old and sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. Idon't know if she was nice or not. I just remember her legs like

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parentheses and how she rocked when she walked. . . . She wore thisreally stupid little hat—a kid's hat with ear flaps—and she wasn'tmuch taller than we were. A really awful little hat. Even for a mute, itwas dumb—dressing like a kid and never saying anything at all. (447)

As we will see, their memories of their mothers frame memories ofthis experience of Maggie in the orchard. This is because Maggieembodies Twyla's and Roberta's intersecting pasts. Rather thandealing directly with their maternal realities of absence and pres-ence, memories of Maggie become the center of strife betweenthem. The racial difference between Roberta and Twyla is insuffi-cient to counter the "dumped" aspect of their identities. The classdifference between them is insufficient to separate them from thememory of their shared experience of physical, psychological, andeconomic abandonment. Maggie represents the intersection of theiridentities and their desire to revise their pasts to explain theirpresent selves.

In Twyla's description Maggie is "old and sandy-colored," a"kitchen woman" in a position of domestic servitude, silenced bywhat the other children assume is an act of violence against her.Twyla, on the other hand, dismisses her as being "bom that way:mute," which suggests her unwillingness to envision Maggie'ssilence as the result of a violent act. Twyla distances herself fromthe reality that Maggie represents: a racially ambiguous, gendered,violated presence in the home. Her lack of voice silences herpresence and her "legs like parentheses" set her physical bodybetween absence and presence, between and within other contexts.Maggie functions within those parentheses for Twyla's andRoberta's memories as a re-occurring comment on their lives.

Twyla and Roberta's inability to agree on exactly what hap-pened to Maggie in the orchard punctuates conflicts between them.Twyla and Roberta first see each other again as adults at a HowardJohnson's where Twyla works as a waitress; Roberta and somefriends are going to a Jimi Hendrix concert. Twyla does not knowwho Hendrix is, so Roberta dismisses her. Twyla's revelatoryresponse may be a sort of "pay back" for this rude dismissal:

I was dismissed without anyone saying goodbye, so I thought Iwould do it for her.

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"How's your mother?" I asked. Her grin cracked her whole face.She swallowed. "Fine," she said. "How's yours?"

"Pretty as a picture," I said and tumed away. (453)

Saying "goodbye" to Roberta by invoking her absent and possiblydisreputable mother breaks the politeness that they had alwaysexhibited in the past on the subject of each others' mothers. Twylabegins the process of confronting the differences between her andRoberta by stabbing at a common, vulnerable psychological place,forcing Roberta to admit the pain in a "grin [that] cracked herwhole face."

The next time they meet, Twyla and Roberta are both married,but again their differences are evident. Twyla is grocery shoppingfor her small town fireman husband and son, while Roberta is thewife of a computer executive and has a limousine driver and twoservants. Though Twyla expects an apology for their last interac-tion, Roberta behaves as though it never happened. The avoidancethat marked their childhood "politeness" begins to break down,however, through a confrontation with the traumatic memory ofMaggie that Twyla brings to the forefront:

"I don't remember a hell of a lot from those days, but Lord, St.Bonny's is as clear as daylight. Remember Maggie? The day she felldown and those gar girls laughed at her?"

Roberta looked up from her salad and stared at me. "Maggie didn'tfall," she said.

"Yes, she did. You remember.""No, Twyla. They knocked her down. Those girls pushed her down

and tore her clothes. In the orchard.""I don't—that's not what happened.""Sure it is. In the orchard. Remember how scared we were?""Wait a minute. I don't remember any of that." (456)

If Maggie fell, it was involuntary and no one was to blame. But ifMaggie was pushed, that revises the memory into an act of vio-lence against a silent, domestic female in the institutionalizedhome. This complicates the role Twyla and Roberta played in thefall and is a precursor for how they will handle moments of recallabout their own mothers. Roberta suggests that Twyla has"blocked it," but the idea bothers Twyla because this revision

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articulates Maggie's powerlessness, a reflection ofthe helplessnessthey felt back then but did not openly articulate.

Maggie and Roberta next reencounter each other on opposingsides of a busing issue. Twyla is surprised to see Roberta amongthose picketing: "And who do you suppose was in line, big as life,holding a sign in front of her bigger than her mother's cross?MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO! it said" (458). While Twylaseemed initially apathetic, the confrontation reveals that theirdifferences hinge on notions of mothering. Roberta says: "It's notabout us, Twyla. Me and you. It's about our kids." Twyla retumswith: "What's more us than that?" (459). Already Twyla clarifiesthe psychological connection she feels inherent between mothersand children. Their conversation tums to their childhood whenTwyla likens the picketing women to "Bozos" like Mrs. Itkin,"Swarming all over the place like they own it" (459). But whenRoberta responds to this with, "No, they're not. They're justmothers," their childhood experience of absent/present motheringintersects with the racial and class-charged issue of busing andbecomes an affront again; Roberta's failure to privilege their bondover politics asserts an unfamiliar paradigm of motherhood.

During this meeting Roberta's memory of Maggie is revisedonce again: "Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you're not.You're the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black ladywhen she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady andyou have the nerve to call me a bigot" (460). Roberta introduces aracial identity for Maggie that Twyla had not considered. In this,Roberta enacts their current conflict onto Maggie's body, elevatingher to archetype. Twyla resists ascribing race to Maggie:

What was she saying? Black? Maggie wasn't black."She wasn't black," I said."Like hell she wasn't, and you kicked her. We both did. You

kicked a black lady who couldn't even scream.""Liar!" (460)

The vision of Maggie as black automatically puts Twyla andRoberta at odds with each other and frames their disagreement onthe busing issue. Twyla struggles with Roberta's recollections:"Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business

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about Maggie" (458). Maggie in fact becomes a signifier fordifferences that would threaten their already tenuous bond.

Twyla counters Roberta's insinutations about mothering with aquestion about their own cultural memory of mothering andRoberta's own mother: "How would you know?" and "Is yourmother well?" (461). With this, Roberta disappears from theprotest. Because Roberta uses Maggie to question Twyla's respon-sibility in Maggie's plight, Twyla questions Roberta's interpreta-tion of that cultural memory by forcing Roberta to deconstmct it.HoUoway's theory applies in that, "The recursive stmctures withinblack women's literature simultaneously constmct (historic)contexts (for discourse, meaning, and reading) and revise thosesame contexts in art intentional effort to destabilize them''' (Hollo-way 73). Revising the memory of Maggie's domestic, childlike,racially vague body to address a new context, which is framed byrace and class, further destabilizes the already volatile contexts ofbusing and mothering.

Both Twyla and Roberta attempt to clarify the present throughtheir memories of Maggie and the past. Maggie's inability orunwillingness to speak, her mistreatment by the children, herchildlike appearance, and her position as servant in the institution-alized home speak prophetically to the silent but present tensionsof gender, race, and class which Twyla and Roberta indirectlyconfront. But why are confrontations around the subject of Maggieso painful? Twyla realizes the relevance these revised memorieshave to their mothers later in the story:

I tried to reassure myself about the race thing for a long time until itdawned on me that the truth was already there, and Roberta knew it. Ididn't kick her; I didn't join in with the gar girls and kick that lady,but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her andnever called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, Ithought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you ifyou cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything importantthat you could use. Rocking, dancing, swaying as she walked. . . . Iknew she wouldn't scream, couldn't—just like me—and I was gladabout that. (462, emphasis added)

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Twyla and Roberta realize that Maggie's identity as powerless andstigmatized intersects with their mothers' identities and their ownidentities as outcasts. Remembering the past is affected by theiroutcast identity and by the lack that comes from their mothers'absence/presence. When Twyla's mother Mary is physicallypresent, there is "nobody inside," signifying absence and a lack ofwisdom, wisdom that Twyla "could use." To imagine her motherassaulted by female children at St. Bonaventure for that transgres-sion provides Twyla a measure of justice, an opportunity to be"glad about that."

Roberta also recognizes this connection when she meets Twylaagain:

And because she couldn't talk—well, you know, I thought she wascrazy. She'd been brought up in an institution like my mother wasand like I thought I would be too. It was the gar girls. Only them.But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her. I said we didit, too. You and me, but that's not true. And I don't want you tocany that around. It was just that I wanted to do it so bad that day—wanting to is doing it. (464, emphasis added)

Roberta connects Maggie's identity with her mother's and hermother's identity with her own. Roberta equates Maggie's institu-tional upbringing with her mother's institutional connections(religious zealotry); that extremity is "sick" and the idea of herown institutionalization terrifies her. Because of this fear she wantsto assault and destroy Maggie—and the young "gar girls" whoreject her and Twyla enact the anger Roberta felt onto Maggie'sperson.

Recalling their mothers through the (re)membered person ofMaggie revises their childhood bond. At the story's end, theirconversation tums again to their mothers and Maggie:

"Did I tell you? My mother, she never did stop dancing.""Yes. You told me. And mine, she never got well." Roberta lifted

her hands from the tabletop and covered her face with her palms.When she took them away she really was crying.

"Oh shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened toMaggie?" (464)

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Twyla admits that her mother, "never did stop dancing" andRoberta states that her mother "never got well"; through thesestatements the women begin to face their past and their present.What "happened" to Maggie is what happened to their mothers.The question compels them to locate their mothers—and them-selves—as psychologically separate from the silent, childlike,powerlessness they feared through Maggie, the archetype of theirfears. As archetype, Maggie transfers Twyla and Roberta's feelingsof helplessness—their inability to "scream"—onto their mothers.Twyla and Roberta know that their interpretations of themselvesare linked to memories of Maggie.

"Nothing Worser Could Happen": Transgressing the Myth ofLa Llorona

Morrison thus uses the traumatic event of Maggie's beating inthe orchard to center Twyla's and Roberta's memories of anabsent/present paradigm of mothering, and also to create a con-frontation with that absence/presence that might allow for move-ment beyond this trauma in the present. Viramontes's "Tears onMy Pillow" also centers on a traumatic event of absent/presentmothering that begins to confront the traumas of the past. The storybegins with the protagonist Ofelia recounting a personalizedversion of the myth of La Llorona, the weeping woman whomurders her children and haunts the night in sorrow:

[Mama Maria] told me La llorona's this mama, see, who killed herkids. Something like that. How does it goes? Something like there'sthis girl and some soldiers take her husband away and she goes to thejail to look for him, asses why these soldiers took him. And she gots Idon't member how many kids all crying cause their daddy's gone,you know. And the soldier being mean and stupid and the devil insidehim (but that's okay cause God knows everything says Mama Maria),he points a gun to her head and says "I gonna kill you." But she looksat him and says "Do me the favor." That's like something Arlenewould say, you know. But the girl she don't know when to stop. "Youkill everything so go ahead and kill me," she tells the soldier, "butfirst kill my kids cause I don't want 'em hungry and sick and lone

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without no ama or apa or TV." So the devil says "okay," and shootsall the kids, bang, bang bang. But you know what? He don't kill her.Cold shot, huh? She goes coocoo and escapes from the nut house likemy Grandpa Ham used to do before he got dug in at Evergreen. Andto this day, the girl all dressed up in black like Mama Maria cause shekilled her kids and she walks up and down City Terrace with no feet,crying and crying and looking for her kids. For realties, late in thedark night only. (110)

Like Twyla atid Roberta, the memory of an archetypal figure is theframework through which Ofelia attempts to cope with her fears ofabsence/presence. However, La Llorona (unlike Maggie) is anestablished ethnic icon. So the memory of La Llorona acts as a lensthrough which Ofelia considers contradictions between her ethniccultural memory and the events of her daily life.

It is significant that Mama Maria, Ofelia's grandmother, and notArlene, Ofelia's mother, is the one who imprints this archetypeonto Ofelia's memory. According to Tey Diana Reboliedo, Chi-cana mothers are not the primary source for their daughters'negotiation of the world around them. Reboliedo argues that partof the reason for the cultural distance between Chicana mothersand daughters is the tendency for mothers to have to play a role ofdisciplinarian. The result is that the mother is often a source of"conflict, misunderstanding and alienation" while the grandmothermay function in a different way:

The searching for female to female relationships to discover values,resources and coping mechanisms uncovers the various bonds grand-daughters have with their grandmothers. These interfamilial dynamicssymbolize the handing down of cultural traditions through the femaleline, estabhshing and affinning values. The bond functions to destroythe feeling of isolation. (Reboliedo 149)

Ofelia's bond with Mama Maria includes her as the source ofcultural wisdom and makes her death particularly traumatic. Thetrauma becomes acute when Ofelia attempts to use La Llorona'sstory to process Mama Maria's absence and her classmate Veron-ica's presence. Rebolledo's point is exemplifted in Mama Maria'shanding down of ethnic cultural memory to Ofelia in the story of

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La Llorona: "La Llorona is the one who doing all the crying I'vebeen hearing all this time with no one to tell me who it was tilMama Maria" (110). As Rebolledo suggests, Mama Maria isOfelia's source of understanding; without Mama Maria she muststruggle against isolation and confusion.

As Rebolledo notes, "The ever-evolving aspects of La Lloronamake her one more in a series of Chicana archetypes that havebecome contemporary and remain relevant in their retelling" (81).Ofelia's La Llorona clearly represents the connection and desire ofa mother for her children. In the original archetypal story of LaLlorona the mother drowns her child(ren)—the killing is either anact of revenge or (more mercifully) an attempt to save them from alife of poverty. Yet Viramontes makes the killing more unambigu-ously protective: "Kill my kids cause I don't want 'em hungry andsick and lone without no ama or apa or TV." Still, Ofelia knows LaLlorona is to be feared, either because of her murderous tenden-cies, or because of the insanity resulting from loss. According toOfelia's version. La Llorona is at fault not because she pulls thetrigger, but because "she don't know when to stop." Thus, she iscondemned to haunt "the dark night only." Similar to the way inwhich Maggie's body becomes a site of violence for Twyla andRoberta's desire for retribution on their mothers' failures, Ofeliaunderstands La Llorona's night stalking as a frightening penancefor her failure as a mother. That failure, coupled with the persistentdesire for her children, is an archetype of motherhood that conjuresfear, danger, and images of impending psychopathology. This isanalogous to the way memories of Maggie reiterate Twyla's andRoberta's fears about their mothers' failures and instability.

While Twyla envisions Maggie as her "dancing" mother, Ofeliaconnects her mother to La Llorona through her language andeconomic status. La Llorona has an edgy sarcasm; her retort in adangerous situation is "like something Arlene would say." Similarto Maggie's domesticity as a configuration of class. La Lloronatypically takes on the economic identity of the powerless. Like thesocio-economic status of La Llorona, Ofelia's mother Arleneworks in an oppressive and underpaid sweatshop environment. Theconnection between Arlene and La Llorona is prophetic of Ofelia'sfear of absent/present mothering. Not only is La Llorona identified

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with Arlene through her language; she is also "dressed up in blacklike Mama Maria," making La Llorona an archetype that can beidentified with both of Ofelia's "mothers." Like Twyla andRoberta, Ofelia's mothers are acknowledged by their behaviorsand beliefs, and by their roles in Ofelia's life. Ofelia's version ofLa Llorona's story includes the protective provision of mother-hood: the provision of sustenance, the promotion of mental health(psychological and spiritual protection), and the pursuit of thestability of a nuclear family. Yet as in Twyla and Roberta's case,absent/present mothering threatens Ofelia's sense of mentalstability. The disillusionment resulting from an inconsistent senseof home and mothering for Ofelia is based on absences resultingfrom death, rather than those resulting from the feeling of being"dumped."

Ofelia also works through the revision of her ethnic culturalmemory of an absent/present mother through her knowledge of anactual person, a classmate named Veronica. This classmate dis-rupts the dichotomy of failed mother/dead children that La Lloronasuggests. Veronica's mother Lil Mary G. is killed, presumably bydomestic violence, but Veronica lives through this incident. Ofeliais faced with a conflicting reality that frightens her as much as LaLlorona's stalking: the dead children of La Llorona may in fact bealive, suffering the trauma of her death. Veronica's presencetherefore acts as a gruesome suggestion to Ofelia of her ownvulnerability. Veronica strains what Ofelia believes about therelationship between mothers and children, and challenges herperceptions of psychological and physical safety. Twyla andRoberta asked of their shared cultural memory, "What the hellhappened to Maggie?" Because of Veronica, Ofelia is forced toask: what happens to children when a mother is gone? Her ethniccultural memory explains that a father's being absent is perhapsunavoidable since soldiers (the system) can "take [a] husbandaway" (110) but who will protect her if the mothers (Mama Mariaand Arlene) are absent?

Ofelia expresses this confiasion when she reflects on her grand-mother's death:

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Just they never say hello and they never say goodbye. Mama Marianever said goodbye, she just left and that's that and nobody to tell mewhy tio Benny don't live with tia Olivia any more or when isGregorio gonna come home or if Arlene is fixed up to go dancing atthe Paladium tonight. No one to say nuthin'. (115)

Ofelia is left to interpret the meaning of such absence/presencewith "no one to say nuthin.'" "They never say hello," describes aliteral and figurative suddenness of absence/presence that trauma-tizes Ofelia. She is troubled that even her grandmother "just left,"leaving her without an important source of motherhood andaffirmation, causing her to fear the possibility of Arlene's suddendisappearance.

The idea of Arlene's possible absence and Ofelia's fear of lone-liness manifests in a moment of panic after Arlene has taken a bathand Ofelia fears she has disappeared:

"What the fuck's wrong?" Arlene yells, running into the bathroom,her hair wrapped in a towel like a vanilla Foster Freeze ice cream. . . .

"Oh," I says, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, feelingstupid. "It's nuthin' ama. I just thought you . . . "

"Cheezes, mi'ja. Don't do me that again, sabes?"I dunno what to say. One minute I seen her in the tub, next minute Irun into the bathroom and stand there and the tub is empty and I onlyseen the water circling and circling into the drain and I screamed for Idunno why. Ain't nothing worser could happen than for a mama todie, you know. They ain't supposed to. Not even with such a purtyname like Lil Mary G. (115)

Ofelia realizes she has no real reason to be afraid of her mother"circling into the drain," yet she still screams. Her immediatethought is to equate her own mother's sudden absence with theabsence of her classmate Veronica's mother, Lil Mary G. Herethnic cultural memory intersects with her reality here; the ab-sences of mothers are traumatic and undermine the myth of LaLlorona, which suggests that a mother must continue to be presentthough her children are absent. Veronica represents such a trans-gressive absence.

While she is tormented by images of La Llorona at night,Ofelia's daytime fears are magnified by Veronica's presence. The

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juxtaposition of La Llorona and Veronica in Ofelia's memory iscrucial: "La Llorona only comes at night. When it's day, Veronicawill always stay" (111). Ofelia transfers her fears onto Veronicabecause according to her ethnic cultural memory, Veronica (thechild) is supposed to be gone; Lil Mary G. (the mother. LaLlorona) is supposed to be alive, though perhaps wailing, edgy,sarcastic, and "coocoo." Though she is frightening. La Llorona atleast represents protective mothering and is confined to the night.The suddenly unprotected Veronica is even more horrific becauseher presence suggests that Ofelia could also lose Arlene. "Andevery time I seen [Veronica], I member of its possible for mymama to die too" (111). Memory is conflated; Ofelia connects LaLlorona, Veronica, and her own mother. In light of Lil Mary G.'sabsence, Veronica's presence suggests that the myth of La Lloronacannot be trusted to explain Ofelia's reality. Veronica's presence inthe face ofher mother's absence is in every way an aberration:

I don't like Veronica. Not cause her skin was all scaly and yellow andpusy 'round the elbows and neck and behind her knees. Not evencause she's been hold back a few grades and just gets taller, or theway spit always dried at the comers of her mouth and tumed white.I'm ascared ofher cause her mama died a few months back. (Ill)

Ofelia could dislike Veronica due to her ambiguous physicalailments (her "scaly and yellow and pusy" joints) or size (she "justgets taller" in relation to the other younger children). But in factOfelia dislikes—and is "ascared" of Veronica—because of hermother's death. Ofelia is not sympathetic toward Veronica for herloss; rather Ofelia is undone by the disruption of the myth. Ofelia'sfears later reveal that she does not ever want to be Veronica, whostands in sharp contrast to her ethnic cultural memory.

But Veronica remains as an unavoidable sore presence: "thenseen her scratching, scratching makes me want to tear out toanywheres . . . she just gets taller and rashier and her scratchingsounds louder, like someone always rubbing sandpaper together"(111, 113). Veronica's "scratching, scratching" is a horrific signal,like the weeping of La Llorona. Ofelia explains that "Veronica, shelives close to me too," not only revealing physical proximity, butalso psychological proximity and diminishing distance—one

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forever closing in, like the nightly weeping of La Llorona (111).To Ofelia, the clear connection between the daily scratching andthe nightly weeping is overwhelming.

After Lil Mary G's death, Ofelia interprets Veronica's isolationin school not as a consequence of physical deformities, but as adesire to be forgotten, to "disappear" like her mother, to be absent:"Veronica don't talk to no one, and purty soon no one talk to her.She just wants to be left alone til everybody forgets she's around. Ithink that's what it is. Then she can disappear like Lil Mary G.without no one paying no attention. You don't need bras or nuthin'when you just air" (113). Like Maggie for Roberta and Twyla,Veronica becomes the embodiment of fears centering around theabsence/presence of the archetypal mother. The child is silent,unwilling to "talk to no one," and invisible. While Veronica beingalone might be scary to Ofelia, her desire to "disappear" makessense. If "no one talk to her," Veronica attains the distance andinvisibility of the myth's murdered children. She returns to hermore appropriate position as a ghost, rather than a child scarred byabsent/present mothering and paternal violence (Veronica hasbums on her, presumably from an abusive father whom her mothercould not protect her from).

Similar to the fear and anger faced through Morrison's Maggie,the presence of Veronica for Ofelia forces a negotiation withemotions carefully hidden within memory. Ofelia is at a pointwhere recognition of the archetypes of ethnic cultural memorymight be healing. In the end, Ofelia laments: "They just disappear,leaving you alone all ascared with your bums and La Lloronahungry for you" (115). This is the articulation ofher fears; shetakes on Veronica's voice and "bums" to suggest that it is theintegration of identities—becoming Veronica—that terrifies her.Just as Twyla and Roberta had to confront blended identitiesencapsulated in their memories of Maggie, for Ofelia to lose MamaMaria is to get ever closer to becoming Veronica, to being leftunprotected. Through ethnic cultural memory the story clarifiesOfelia's conception of motherhood and the lines that should not becrossed.

Both of these stories use archetypal women so cleverly that onecan miss the significant difference that allows these stories to

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parallel and intersect, yet retain distinct commentaries. Morrisonand Viramontes show that mythology and identity intersect even asthey posit memory as a site of confrontation and negotitation. Yetfmally Twyla and Roberta share experiences that are more cultur-ally, rather than ethnically or racially, specific, especially giventhat one woman is white and one is African American, and thatMaggie's racial status remains ambiguous. Alongside the sharedsocial situations and arrangements of the institutional culture of St.Bonaventure, Twyla and Roberta communicate an understandingof how they read the world through a framework that attachesvalue to differences of whiteness and blackness, but also of classstatus. Twyla's and Roberta's differing identities but sharedexperiences of the constructions of race and class allows for theinterpretation of their memories as cultural, although not specifi-cally ethnic.'̂

In "Tears on My Pillow," Ofelia revises a specifically ethniccultural memory, drawing on the legend of La Llorona. In mostcases the archetype has been revised to inspire fear, although insome recent Chicana works it has been used to empower women.^Through Maggie's vague ethnicity and domesticity Morrisoninfuses specific commentary on complex racial and class con-structs. Viramontes, on the other hand, articulates specific ethnicand gender commentary unique to Latinas through La Llorona,signifying on how the icon changes from siren to harlot to witch,depending on the purpose of the story. And yet both Maggie andLa Llorona are archetypes through which we can understand thefear embodied in absent/present mothering.

Notes

1. For example, see the works of David Palumbo-Liu and Amritjit Singh andPeter Sehmidt listed in the bibliography.2. Here I follow Satya P. Mohanty's formulation that cultural identity requiresre-conceptualization of experience and that "Identities are theoretical construc-tions that enable us [to] read the world in specific ways" (216).3. See, for example, Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" (in thecollection of stories with this title) for at least one work that positively revisesthe archetype of La Llorona.

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Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. "Woman Hollering Creek." Woman Hollering Creek andOther Stories. New York: Random House, 1991. 43-56.

Holloway, Karla F. C, Moorings & Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Genderin Black Women's Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992,

Mohanty, Satya P, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism,Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997,

Morrison, Toni. "Recitatif." The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthol-ogy: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990. Ed. IshmaelReed, Kathryn Tmeblood, and Shawn Wong. New York: Norton, 1992, 445-64,

Palumbo-Liu, David, ed. The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, andInterventions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.

Reboliedo, Tey Diana. "Abuelitas: Mythology and Integration in ChicanaLiterature." Revista Chicano Riquena 11.3-4 (1983):148-58.

Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt, eds. Postcolonial Theory and the UnitedStates: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jaekson: UP of Mississippi, 2000.

Viramontes, Helena Maria. "Tears on My Pillow." Currents from the DancingRiver: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonjiction, and Poetry. Ed. Ray Gon-zalez. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. 145-49.