“The whole time she was speaking, Mama was weaving my hair into a flat plait which required pulling apart the two sections of hair with little jerks that made my eyes water; but knowing how grandmother detested whining and boba ( sissy tears), as she called them, I just sat up straight and stiff.”
The phrase ‘sissy tears’ connotes Mama’s patriarchal ideology. Even though Mama is female she loathes feminine affinities such as shading tears overwhelmingly. Mama champions the ideology of Stoicism; whereby, she expects Cofer and other women to put up with discomfort without weeping ( which ,for Mama, denotes feebleness.)
“In Mama’s eyes, a man set free without a legal contract was a man lost. She believed that marriage was not something men desired, but simply the price they had to pay for the privilege of children, and of course, for what no decent (synonymous with “smart”) woman would give away for free.”
Mama’s analysis infers that men get hitched for the sake of bearing offspring. Men have a repugnance for commitment as it hampers them from roving around. Mama considers that a shrewd woman should warrant that a man is ‘legally committed’ to her;if not, she will lose the man.
“Maria la Loca interested me, as did all the eccentrics and ‘crazies’ of our pueblo. Their weirdness was a measuring stick I used in my serious quest for a definition of ‘normal’. As a Navy brat, shuttling between New Jersey and the pueblo, I was constantly made to feel like an oddball by my peers, who made fun of my two-way accent: a Spanish accent when I spoke English; and , when I spoke Spanish, I was told that I sounded like a “Gringa.”
Cofer draws parallels between her state of affairs and Maria la Loca’s. Even though Maria la Loca is fictional, the prejudice that she sustains ,because her body is deemed nonstandard, is comparable to the intolerance that Cofer encounters in her life due to her communication skills. The pueblonians are ethnocentric because they regard Cofer as an “oddball” due to her pronunciation skills. The childhood story becomes noteworthy in Ciofer’s life as it aids her to apprehend her predicament and the eccentrics that further it.
“Sara and I discussed everything we heard the women say, trying to fit all together like a puzzle that once assembled would reveal life’s mysteries to us.”
As children, Sarah and Cofer would not grasp the insinuations of the stories that women recounted. Accordingly, they tasked themselves, being almost the same age, with the burden of filling in the puzzles in the stories. The course of filling the puzzles is akin to taking on womanhood bit by bit.
“ I fell in love, or hormones awakened from their long slumber in my body, and suddenly the goal of my days was focused on one thing: to catch a glimpse of my secret love.”
Cofer’s defining age, in relation to love, is fourteen when she is enamored for the first time. The arousal of her love hormones portends that she is no longer a baby. The hormones stimulate her to sense that she is mellow for love.
“I saw other Roman ladies emerging from their parents' cars looking authentic in sheets of material that folded over their bodies like the garments on a statue by Michelangelo. How did they do it? How was it that I always got it just slightly wrong, and worse, I believed that other people were just too polite to mention it. "The poor little Puerto Rican girl," I could hear them thinking. But in reality, I must have been my worst critic, self-conscious as I was.”
Cofer matches her look to that of the Roman students. She feels mediocre because her garments are not as engaging as theirs. As an adult, Cofer makes out that her self-consciousness was inhibitory to her self-esteem ,and the self-absorption , during the extravaganza, was gratuitous. Instead of being at ease with herself, she disparaged herself unreasonably.
“I learned a lesson about the battle of the sexes then that I have never forgotten: the object is not always to win, but most times simply to keep your opponent (synonymous at times with "the loved one") guessing.”
Cofer’s first heartbreak edifies her on the prime approach in “the battle of sexes”. Her encounter in “First Love” is analogous to a battle where she suffers defeat due to her gullibility. Comparatively, her crush outmaneuvers her by keeping her in guess-mode all thorough without explicitly affirming whether he adulates her or not.
