The House on Mango Street Read Free

a famous writer who went to the Iowa Workshop several years before she got there. His latest book has just been sold to Hollywood. He speaks and carries himself as if he’s the Emperor of Everything.
    At the end of the evening, she finds herself searching for a ride home. She came on the bus, and the Emperor offers to give her a lift home. But she’s not going home, she’s got her heart set on a movie that’s showing only tonight. She’s afraid of going to the movies alone, and that’s why she’s decided to go. Because she’s afraid.
    The famous writer drives a sports car. The seats smell of leather, and the dashboard is lit like an airplane cockpit. Her own car doesn’t always start and has a hole in the floor near the accelerator that lets in rain and snow, so she has to wear boots when she drives. The famous writer talks and talks, but she can’t hear what he is saying, because her own thoughts are drowning him out like a wind. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. She is just young and pretty enough to feed the famous writer’s ego by nodding enthusiastically at everything he says until he drops her off in front of the cinema. She hopes the famous writer notices she is going to see
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
alone. Totell the truth, she feels miserable walking up to the box office by herself, but she forces herself to buy the ticket and go in because she loves this movie.
    The theater is packed. It feels to the young woman as if everybody is there with somebody, except her. Finally, the scene where Marilyn sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The colors are cartoon-wonderful, the set deliciously campy, the lyrics clever, the whole number is pure old-style glamour. Marilyn is sensational. After her song is over, the audience breaks into applause as if this were a live performance, though sad Marilyn has been dead years and years.
    The woman who is me goes home proud of having gone to the movies alone.
See? It wasn’t that difficult
. But as she bolts the door of her apartment, she bursts into tears. “I don’t have diamonds,” she sobs, not knowing what she means, except she knows even then it’s not about diamonds. Every few weeks, she has a messy crying jag like this that leaves her feeling shipwrecked and awful. It’s such a regular occurrence she thinks these storms of depression are as normal as rain.
    What is the woman in the photograph afraid of? She’s afraid of walking from her parked car to her apartment in the dark. She’s afraid of the scuffling sounds in the walls. She’s afraid she’ll fall in love and get stuck living in Chicago. She’s afraid of ghosts, deep water, rodents, night, things that move too fast—cars, airplanes, her life. She’s afraid she’ll have to move back home again if she isn’t brave enough to live alone.
    Throughout all this, I am writing stories to go with that title,
The House on Mango Street
. Sometimes I write about people I remember, sometimes I write about peopleI’ve just met, often I mix the two together. My students from Pilsen who sat before me when I was teaching, with girls who sat beside me in another classroom a decade before. I pick up parts of Bucktown, like the monkey garden next door, and plop it down in the Humboldt Park block where I lived during my middle and high school years—1525 N. Campbell Street.
    Often all I have is a title with no story—“The Family of Little Feet,”—and I have to make the title kick me in the behind to get me going. Or, sometimes all I’ve got is a first sentence—“You can never have too much sky.” One of my Pilsen students said I had said this, and she never forgot it. Good thing she remembered and quoted it back to me. “They came with the wind that blows in August …” This line came to me in a dream. Sometimes the best ideas come in dreams. Sometimes the worst ideas come from there, too!
    Whether the idea came from a sentence I heard buzzing around somewhere and saved in a