Cual es peor?

Estar siempre sola,

o estar con alguien para siempre.

(Which is worse? To be always alone, or to be with someone forever?)

Ever since Cisneros was a kid, she's competed with men--her father even counted her as one of them; now, she'll never surrender herself to one. "Nobody's mother and nobody's wife," she is quick assure us in her books' notes on the author. According to Cisneros, she's found success-by doing something that she loves, writing in her own words about her own experiences-by avoiding the emotional bonds of marriage and children. She's grateful that she didn't marry "her first boyfriend, that pest who never gave me time alone, something crucial to any writer…and who couldn't understand why I didn't want what he wanted: marriage, kids, and a house in the suburbs." (Notes, 51)

The narrator of the poem "Old Maids" shares this attitude, declaring:

"My cousins and I,

we're all old

maids at thirty…

The aunts,

they've given up on us.

No longer nudge--You're next.

Instead-- What happened in your childhood?

But we've studied

marriages too long-

Aunt Ariadne,

Tía Vashti,

Comadre Penelope,

querida Malintzín,

Señora Pumpkin Shell-

lessons that served us well.

(Loose, 9-10)

Cisneros has learned not only from the characters of myth and legend, but the characters of her own stories. Almost every female character searches for the ideal man–almost always someone who fits their romantic ideal of a Mexican man–but once she find him, he abuses her, abandons her, or both. There is Esperanza's great-grandmother in The House on Mango Street, who refused to marry until Esperanza's great-grandfather "threw a sack over her head and carried her off," to a life of sadness and waiting (House, 11). Esperanza's friend Sally is an eighth-grader who tries to escape an abusive, repressive father by marrying a similarly abusive, repressive man. Cleófilas from the title story in Woman Hollering Creek--trapped, a victim of another abusive marriage. Cleófilas tries to find the "pearly moon" of soap-opera-esque love and romance with the Mexican she marries, but only gets on the road to finding it when a woman with her own truck rescues her from her husband.

Some of Cisneros' characters don't trust in marriages--because they're the ones that break them. Clemencia of "Never Marry A Mexican" indulges in many affairs with married men, admitting "I'm vindictive and cruel, and I'm capable of anything" (Creek, 69). She derives "crazy joy" from "killing wives," by sleeping with their husbands while they give birth (Creek, 77). No wonder she doesn't want to have a husband other women can "borrow," like she's borrowed so many others.

In Cisneros' stories, however, a relationship with a man doesn't need a wedding ring to be dangerous. When her single characters take the risk of giving themselves and their love to a man, he invariably takes it and then abandons her. For example, a mysterious man claiming to hail from a line of Indian kings seduces the teenage narrator of "One Holy Night." Boy Baby (or as he styles himself, Chaq Uxmal Paloquín) enthralls her with his stories of temples and his boy-child who will bring back the glory of his nations; he tells her that he loves her "like a revolution, like a religion," but takes her virginity and runs off without a word of farewell. The saddest part of the whole story, however, is when the narrator discovers that "Boy Baby is thirty-seven. His name is Chato which means fat-face. There is no Mayan blood." We realize that she has ultimately been fooled when the revelation about her seducer drags her dream of their love through the mud.

Another of Cisneros' characters, the artist Lupe Arredondo, falls madly in love with a poet (moonlighting as a roach-killer) named Flavio. He’s something that Lupe has tried to find all her life–a real Mexican, a soul as artistic and esoteric as her own self, someone who teaches her to tango and makes love to her in Spanish. But this Flavio leaves her to attend to his (hitherto unmentioned) two wives and seven children back in Mexico, with no note nor address nor phone number. He leaves nothing at all to connect him with Lupe, except a painting in which he modeled for her.

The narrator in "One Holy Night" is guileless enough to admit to the reader that she still loves Boy Baby, that greasy lying old pedophile--even though the newspaper shows him to be a child-molesting serial killer, all she can do is "stare at the little black-and white dots that make up the face I am in love with" (Creek, 34). Lupe, older and wiser, didn't lose her virginity or get pregnant, but she has too much pride to admit that she still has feelings for Flavio: she tries to diminish his hold over her. Lupe changes the painting which he modeled for--the painting which brought them together in the first place--so that "Prince Popo and Princess Ixta change places. Prince Popocatepetl lies on his back instead of the Princess...I think I'm going to call it El Pipi del Popo. I kind of like it." (Bien Pretty, 163) Cisneros' character asserts her freedom from the love of a male, deliberately subverting something that glorified him--to put herself above him. She further presents her ex-lover as a sex object--a tasty man with "skin sweet as burnt-milk candy, smooth as river water" (152) perhaps to marginalize him, to show that he had no real grip over her. Yet Lupe wouldn't be so obsessed with cutting Flavio down, expending so much energy to expunge him from her mind, unless he still had a death grip on her heart.

The narrator of Cisneros' poems in Loose Woman have learned the lesson that eludes her The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek characters. With titles like "Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs," we see that the speaker--and most likely Cisneros herself--don’t want men for marriage, or any lasting commitment–but sex, and only maybe "love, that old shoe" (Loose, 62). The arrangement that pleases her most is when "we do not belong one to the other/except now and again intermittently/Of that infinity, freely you give yourself to me to take/andI take freely." (Loose, 87)