Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories: My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn Summary & Analysis

The story opens with a description of Lucy Anguiano, a girl whom the narrator of "My Friend Lucy..." describes as smelling “like corn, like Frito Bandito chips, like tortillas, something like that warm smell of nixtamel or bread.” The narrator says that this smell is strongest when she leans close to Lucy, perhaps while making a doll out of paper or when playing with marbles on the porch. Lucy asks the narrator if she’s ever eaten dog food, an idea that disgusts the girls’ other friend, Janey Ortiz. Nonetheless, the narrator admires Lucy for eating dog food and likes that they both wear the same flip-flops, which they purchased together at K-mart for 79 cents. 

The narrator of "My Friend Lucy..." declares she’s going to sit in the sun even though it’s incredibly hot outside. She wants her skin to “get so dark it’s blue where it bends like Lucy’s.” Apparently, Lucy’s and her eight sisters all have “eyes like knife slits.” The narrator describes how Lucy’s mother is often in the kitchen “feeding clothes into the wringer washer,” and the narrator herself frequently helps pin laundry onto the clothesline, carefully stringing up a “pink sock of the baby” and a “flowered T-shirt” along with blue jeans and a blouse. She explains that Lucy and her sisters all wear each other’s clothes; “There ain’t no boys here,” she says. “Only girls and one father who is never home hardly and one mother who says Ay! I’m real tired and so many sisters there’s no time to count them.”

The narrator of "My Friend Lucy..." imagines having sisters of her own, wishing she could sleep with them instead of by herself on a fold-out chair in the living room. She envisions coming home that night and dealing with her grandmother, who will inevitably be angry with her because she’s wearing the same dress she’s supposed to wear tomorrow. Nonetheless, she resolves to “jump off an old pissy mattress in the Anguiano yard” and scratch her mosquito bites and trade shoes with Lucy and wear them on her hands. Continuing this list of things she wants to do with Lucy, she says they’re going to walk over to Janey Ortiz’s house and say, “We’re never going to be your friend again forever!” Then, in the late afternoon she and Lucy will eat popsicles; “And when we look at each other, our arms gummy from an orange Popsicle we split, we could be sisters, right?”