Volar
Judith Ortiz Cofer
At twelve I was an avid consumer of comic books- Supergirl being my favorite. I spent my allowance of a quarter a day on twelve-cent comic books or a double issue for twenty-five. I had a stack of Legion of Super Heroes and Supergirl comic books in my bedroom closet that was as tall as I. I had a recurring dream in those days: that I had blond hair and could fly. In my dream I climbed the stairs to the top of our apartment building as myself, but as I went up each flight, changes would be taking place. Step by step I would fill out: my legs would grow long, my arms harden into steel, and my hair would magically go straight and turn a golden color. At last I would be aerodynamic, sleek and hard as a supersonic missile. Once on the roof, my parents safely asleep in their beds, I would get on tip-toe, arms outstretched in the position for flight and jump out my fifty-story-high window into the black lake of the sky. From up there, over the rooftops, I could see everything, even beyond the few blocks of our barrio; with my X-ray vision could look inside the homes of people who interested me. Once I saw our landlord, whom I knew my parents feared, sitting in a treasure room dressed in an ermine coat and a large gold crown. He sat on the floor counting his dollar bills. I played a trick on him. Going up to his building’s chimney, I blew a little puff of my super- breath into his fireplace, scattering his stacks of money so that he had to start counting all over again, I could more or less program my Supergirl dreams in those days by focusing on the object of my current obsession. This way I “saw” into the private lives of my neighbors, my teachers, and in the last days of my childish fantasy and the beginning of adolescence, into the living rooms of the boys I liked. In the mornings I’d wake up in my tiny bedroom with the incongruous-at least in our tiny apartment-white “princess” furniture my mother had chosen for me, and find myself back...