I always think about my childhood friend Berta.  She and I grew up together in the same neighborhood. Berta was three years younger than I.  She was small for her age. I always felt as if I loomed over her because I was tall for my age and overweight. 

I always picture her as that scrawny girl with wiry arms and mosquito bitten skinny legs.  Her hair is parted on the side and a barette is on the opposite side controlling her long crooked bangs.  She is wearing either a faded dress that is too big on her or a Catholic school uniform.  Her shoes always look old but her socks are white because she made they were.  Berta is smiling so big that her eyes are squinted.  Her hands are together as if she is holding something very small or she has a huge jawbreaker candy in her right hand and a coin purse in the other.

When I first became friends with Berta she had eight sibilings, later her mother would have two more children. Her mom was mean and her dad was always drinking a quart of Coors beer.  Berta’s mom was the type of person who would insult some of her children in front of anyone.  She would beat Berta’s brother who was a year older than her in front of the neighbors.  The four older children were either in high school or had graduated, so they were too old for her to deal. Unfortunately for Berta, she was a frequent target of her mother’s insults, but was never physically punished.  Her mom had a mouth on her.  My father was always cussing in Spanish, but Berta’s mom took the prize for her expertise in the use of vulgar language since she could swear in both English and Spanish or both at the same time.

Even though Berta’s mom was a hell raiser, she sent the majority of her children to Catholic school.  I found that amazing how someone as evil as the devil could send her kids to a religous school.  It is even more daunting to think that one of these children ended up being a nun.  Although Berta attended another school, we still were friends. I liked her a lot because she was very funny.  She was also very kind.  I guess what I admired about her is how she could keep respecting and loving her mom as much as she did.  She was a very strong person.  Berta was always doing the best she could with any situation in which she had to confront.  Whether it be kids teasing her and her little brothers, or her mom always being dissatisfied with the way Berta washed clothes, cleaned the house, or raked the yard, she would just put up with this without reacting.  It was as if she shut out all of the hurtful and mean-spirited remarks that frequently rained on her. I will never forget the time that we were walking  home from the store and there was a boy who was her age.  He lived two houses down from me and I was the same homeroom at school as his sister.  When we walking by his house, he began to taunt her for some reason or another.  She ignored him.  After failing to get her attention, he decided to call her a dirty Mexican.  I felt my face flush red with anger, and just as I bent over to pick up a rock so I could throw it at him, Berta yells at him, at the top of her voice,”Shut up, huevos secos!”[dried up balls]  I couldn’t believe what she had called him and we both started laughing hysterically.  This made him very mad that he couldn’t understand what she had said.  This made us laugh even more.  He asked me what that meant and because I was laughing so hard, I could barely tell him. If we saw him at the store, or as we were walking by his house, Berta would make eye contact with him and mouth ”huevos secos.”  He never bothered her again. Berta became my hero.  I would never have called some boy that because I was afraid that he would tell my parents. Berta probably felt that she had nothing to lose because kids in the neighborhood were afraid of her mother and there was no way this kid would go and tell on her.

 We liked to go to mass together because we would walk to and from church and it gave us a chance to talk.  Also, there was no way our parents would say no to us going to mass.   On the way home, we would stop at a store owned by an Asian man who was .my Dad’s close friend. We liked his store because he always had ice cold sodas.   On hot days, we enjoy a soft drink at his store, buy a bunch of candy, and then go to my house to eat lunch.  After lunch, we would eat some of the candy. If Berta ate too much candy her molars would hurt.  I liked her teeth because they were straight, even, wide and very white. I thought that they looked like a small pretty version of  Chiclets gum.

Berta always had money. One day, I asked her how she got money and she told me that when her dad would pass out on the couch from drinking too much, she would take the coins that fell out of his pockets.   She claimed that he would never confront anyone because he would not want to have to admit that he lost some money while he had been drinking.  She would use  the money for our candy shopping expeditions, and for the collection basket at our church.  She convinced herself and me that it was OK to take it if she gave some to the church, and bought some candy for her younger brothers Sam and Tony.

We stopped being close when I went to junior high school.  The last time that I spent some time with Berta was when I went with her to cheerleading practice. She was in sixth grade and I was in eighth. She was walking by my house and had invited me to go with her.  She was so proud of being picked for the squad.  Berta was a great cheerleader.  All of those somersaults, and jumping around that she was always doing as a little girl must have helped. 

When we were both in high school, we would greet each other in the halls and that was about it.  I was in band and she had her own group of friends.  We never had a fall out, we just went our separate ways.  When I was in college, I was dating a guy whose friend had gotten Berta pregnant.  The baby’s father would not admit that Berta’s child was his.  Apparently, Berta’s mom tried to take him to court so that he would admit the child was his and pay child support, but she was unsuccessful.  I knew the truth and for the longest time, I felt so useless because there was nothing I could do to help Berta.  One day,  I went to visit her and one of her brothers told me that she and her baby had gone to live with one of her older sisters in California.

I think about Berta all of the time and I hope that life has gotten better for her.