B0061QB04W EBOK

by Reyna Grande

  The next day, Papi decided to go to adult school and improve his English once and for all. He was still going through the process of legalizing his status through President Reagan’s amnesty program, IRCA. He hoped that soon that green card he so desired would help him become more than just a maintenance worker. But, first, he had to learn the language. “Once I’m a legal resident, and I speak better English, things are going to change,” he said. “I’m going to move us out of this neighborhood.” So far, he had depended on Mila for everything. She had to write out the checks to pay the bills. She had to take me, Mago, and Carlos to our doctors’ appointments because Papi didn’t feel comfortable doing it. Mila went grocery shopping. Mila went to our parent-teacher conferences because Papi made her go in his stead. Mila dealt with their Asian tenants who couldn’t speak Spanish. Papi would stay in his room and wouldn’t come out, except to go to work or to the liquor store.

  Papi bought himself a notebook and borrowed a pencil and a sharpener from me. I even gave him my eraser that smelled of strawberries, for good luck. We watched as he left the house and headed to Franklin High School, where they had night classes for adults. It filled me with pride to see my father go to school. All his talk about education, about the importance of school, seemed to mean so much more when I saw him full of determination to learn. My father’s desire for a better life was palpable. It was contagious. It was one of the things I most respected about him. And I hoped with all my heart that he would be granted amnesty and be allowed to step out of the shadows.

  Yet a few weeks after he’d started going to school, Papi found out something terrible. Tía Emperatriz had stolen his dream house. My aunt had finally gotten married, but at that point she had been so desperate to do so that she found herself a man who was much older, who had already been married once, but who could not take care of her. The bitterness of her disappointing marriage changed her. Somehow, she managed to get Abuela Evila to sign over to her the deed to her property, which included the land on which Papi’s house had been built. My father had been allowing her to stay in the house in his absence, since he wasn’t there anyway and he needed someone to take care of it. But he never imagined his sister would outright steal the house from him.

  “How could she do that?” Mila asked. “Your own sister. And your mother, why would she hand over your house to Emperatriz, just like that? You’ve been a good son. Look at all the money you’ve been sending her all these years. Without you, she would have starved already.”

  “What are you going to do?” Mago asked Papi. We knew what that house meant to him. We knew it was his backup plan in case things didn’t work out for him here in the U.S. It was an investment that had cost us our relationship with our parents, that cost Mami her marriage with my father. The price for that house had been too high to pay, as Mami once said. And now, it had been stolen from him.

  “I’m going to go over there and get my house back!” Papi said, slamming his fist on the kitchen table.

  “You can’t go, Natalio. If you get caught on your way back, your green card application will be denied. Do you really want to jeopardize your chance at becoming legal?” Mila said.

  But Papi wasn’t listening. “I’m not going to lose that house. I can’t lose that house. It’s all I have.”

  “But we don’t have money to pay for your plane ticket. We don’t have money to pay for a smuggler to bring you back,” Mila insisted. “We’re barely making it as it is.”

  But Papi wouldn’t listen, and by the next day, he was gone.

  While he was in Mexico, it took a lot of effort for me to stay focused in school. I wondered what Papi was doing. I wondered if by now my aunt and my grandmother had realized their mistake and given the house back to its rightful owner. It hurt me to know that Tía Emperatriz had acted in such a dishonest way. She’d been so kind to us, and I had always remembered her fondly. Now, she had not only betrayed Papi but us as well.

  I wondered if Papi was already on his way back to us. I prayed that he would cross the border safely. I prayed that he wouldn’t get killed or hurt or caught by la migra. My stomach hurt knowing that if he did get caught, he would lose his chance at becoming a legal resident, at finally having that security he desperately desired. And what would become of his dreams, which by then were also becoming my dreams?

  Two weeks later, we came home from school to find Papi sitting at the kitchen table, his head hanging low. His face was pale, despite the sunburn he’d gotten while crossing the border. His eyes were red and puffy from lack of sleep. He looked thinner than when he’d left. We rushed to him, happy that he had made it across the border safely. He turned to us and said, “I’m never going back there again.”

  I thought about all those times Mago, Carlos, and I had helped to carry bricks and buckets of mortar to the bricklayers. I thought about those nights when we couldn’t sleep because we had been so sore. I thought about the years that Papi was gone, that Mami was gone, so that they could build that dream house.

  “What happened, Papi?” Mago asked.

  He told us that Abuela Evila was ill and frail, and somehow my aunt had managed to coerce my grandmother into deeding her the property. While he was there, my aunt had said that what was done was done. She said Papi didn’t need a house when he had so much already. Didn’t he live there in that beautiful country? What more could he want? He said that neither his father nor his mother stood up for him, that neither parent fought by his side. He said, “I’ve never felt so alone in my life.”

  I wished I could go to my father and wrap my arms around him, tell him that I understood his loss, tell him that it hurt me as much as it hurt him, that he wasn’t alone—he had us, his children. But I didn’t know how to hold him. I didn’t know how to say what I felt, so I said nothing at all.

  In the evenings at five thirty, I would look at Papi’s bedroom door and wonder if that day he would finally come out with his notebook under his arm, ready to go back to school. But the door remained closed. After two weeks of looking at his closed door, I realized that the dream house wasn’t the only thing he had lost.

  13

  Reyna and Papi, 1988

  BY THE END of the summer before eighth grade began, I had two things to celebrate: I had become a señorita, and unlike my sister’s, my body bled in silence. I had also successfully completed the ESL program and had gotten rid of my status as an ESL student.

  When the new school year started, I was enrolled in regular eighth-grade English. Over the last year, I had become addicted to reading, in part because I was not good at making friends. I shied away from kids because there was always something for which they would make fun of me: my ridiculous name, my height, my Payless tennis shoes, my thick accent, the unfashionable clothes I would wear courtesy of the old ladies at Kingsley Manor.

  Every Friday before heading home, I would stop at the Arroyo Seco Library for books. The maximum I was allowed to borrow was ten, and I would read them all during the week. At first, I mostly read the fairy-tale collections the library owned, from the Brothers Grimm to The 1001 Arabian Nights. Fairy tales reminded me of Iguala, of story time on the radio. When I was done with those books, the librarian then led me to the young adult section and handed me books she recommended. They had titles like Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club. As my reading skills got better, I started to read thicker books. My favorites were by an author named V. C. Andrews.

  I enjoyed the Sweet Valley Junior High and Sweet Valley High series, but those books had nothing to do with my own life. The characters were twin sisters who had sun-kissed blond hair, a golden tan, dazzling blue-green eyes, perfect size-six figures—characters whose world was so different from my own. And yet I kept reading those books because I was seduced by the twins’ lives. Those books gave me a glimpse into a world I wished to belong to, where there were no alcoholic fathers, no mothers who left you over and over again, no fear of deportation. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. Th
at world was the perfect place I had imagined the U.S. to be.

  But with V. C. Andrews’s books, I found a connection. Even though she wasn’t writing about my Mexican culture, I could relate to her characters and their experiences. I was blown away when I read Flowers in the Attic, which was a story about four kids who, when their father died, were taken by their mother to live with their grandparents. The kids were locked up in the attic, and soon the mother started to visit them less and less and began dating other men, leaving them at the mercy of their evil grandmother.

  When I read Heaven, I immediately related to the poverty the children lived in, although the setting was rural West Virginia, not Guerrero, Mexico. In My Sweet Audrina, I knew firsthand the longing Audrina felt for her father, that desperate desire to be loved by him.

  Another thing I liked about V. C. Andrews’s books was that they made me feel better in a way. True, my life was very difficult, but in no way as bad as her characters’ lives. Abuela Evila didn’t feed us much, but at least, as far as I know, she never tried to poison us!

  I read so much that sometimes I would hide under the covers with a flashlight and not go to sleep until I was finished with my book. When I got my first pair of eyeglasses later that year, Mago said, “Now you look like a librarian,” as if to insult me. But it only made me love books even more.

  Halfway into the school year, I found out that Burbank was having a short-story competition. My English teacher encouraged all her students to enter. I thought about the story I wrote at Aldama Elementary. I was afraid of my writing once again being rejected. Yet part of me had something to prove. I am in regular English classes now, aren’t I? With the exception of my pronunciation skills, my English is almost as good as the native speakers’, isn’t it? I might have a chance this time, right?

  And what if by some miracle I did win? Wouldn’t Papi finally be proud of me? I didn’t allow myself to think that he might not be. So far, making my father proud had turned out to be impossible. He’d never once come to my band concerts. And I wasn’t the only one trying to get his attention. Carlos had joined a soccer team, but Papi wouldn’t go to his games. Mago had taken an interest in modern dance, performing at basketball games during halftime and at other events, but Papi wouldn’t go see for himself how good a dancer she was.

  So what chance did I have of making my father finally take notice? Probably none, but I wanted to try.

  Because of the influence of Sweet Valley High, I wrote a short story about identical twins—Beverly and Kimberly. But in my short story, when the twins were very little, they were separated when their parents divorced. The mother kept Beverly, and the father took Kimberly. One day when they were teenagers, the twins were reunited by chance, and they had to struggle to recoup all that lost time and find a way to overcome the separation. Looking back on it now, I realize that first short story of mine would set the tone for all my other stories—stories of broken families, absent parents, and siblings that were separated—for that was the world I lived in, the world I knew.

  I turned in my short story, and, for the following two weeks, I was anxious about the results. By then I was beginning to fall in love with writing. In my writing, you couldn’t hear my accent, which is why playing the sax, writing, and drawing were my favorite ways of expressing myself.

  When the time came to find out the results, they were given through the PA system during homeroom. “Congratulations to all the students who entered the short-story contest,” the principal said over the speaker. I held my breath and put my head between my hands. “Remember, that even if you didn’t place, you’re still a winner.”

  She started off with the honorable mentions, but my name wasn’t one of them. Then she announced the third-place winner. It wasn’t me. Then the second-place winner. It wasn’t me, and by now tears were starting to form. “And the first-place winner is—Reyna Grande.”

  I looked at the speaker. Had I just heard my name? My homeroom teacher clapped and said, “Congratulations, Reyna. I’m so proud of you.” All the students looked at me, and for the first time, they weren’t looking at me to criticize me, but to congratulate me.

  When I went to my English class, my teacher had the competition prize for me. In front of the whole class, she handed me a blue ribbon that read “First Place” and my prize, which was two tickets stapled to a brochure. A picture of a beautiful cruise ship was on the cover of the brochure.

  Had I just won two tickets to go on a cruise? My heart started to race. Won’t Papi finally be proud of me when he finds out that I’m taking him on a cruise!

  “These are tickets to go to the Queen Mary,” my teacher said.

  “The Queen Mary?” I asked. I glanced at the picture of the cruise ship. What a beautiful name for a ship. But I’d never heard of it before.

  “Where is it?” I asked my teacher.

  “In Long Beach.”

  I didn’t know where Long Beach was either, but I was so excited just thinking about the adventure I was going to have on that cruise and how much fun it would be to share it with Papi. Maybe we could have a father-daughter moment when we could finally bond, when we could finally overcome the gap our separation had created. I thought of us standing on the deck as the ship pulled away from the harbor. I pictured us holding hands, and not letting go as we became surrounded in azure.

  “Um, you do know what the Queen Mary is, right?” my teacher asked, interrupting my reverie. When I shook my head, she told me a brief history about the Queen Mary, except that I stopped listening when she got to the part that the Queen Mary didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t ask why in the world the school would give me tickets for a cruise ship that didn’t go on cruises. I went back to my seat, and for the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about the adventure I thought I was going to share with my father.

  Despite the disappointment about the cruise, I went home that day feeling proud, and I couldn’t wait for Papi to come home to give him the news.

  As soon as he opened the door, I ran to him and told him about getting first place in a competition. I showed him the prize and my short story. Papi glanced at the tickets. “What the hell is the Queen Mary?”

  I told him it was a cruise ship, but I hated admitting that it didn’t go anywhere.

  “So what’s the point of going to see it?”

  “Because I won!”

  “I don’t even know where it is.”

  “It’s in Long Beach.”

  “Long Beach is a big place,” he said. “I don’t want to get lost.”

  “Couldn’t we ask for directions?” I asked. But I already knew what his final answer would be. Papi didn’t go anywhere unless he knew where he was going.

  Without another glance, Papi handed me back the tickets and short story. I put them and the ribbon inside a little box where I stored my keepsakes. I told myself that the prize wasn’t important. It was the fact that my writing hadn’t been rejected that mattered. I took out my notebook from my backpack, found a clean page, and I started to write another story.

  14

  Reyna and “RoboCop”

  MY FIRST LOVE was a forbidden love.

  My first love had velvety eyes the color of the mountains in Iguala. They reminded me of home.

  My first love was a boy on a bicycle. From the corner of my eye I saw him riding lazily down Avenue 50 on the opposite side of the street. He didn’t pedal but let gravity pull him down the street. In this way, he kept pace with me as I made my way to the liquor store to buy Papi a bottle of charcoal lighter. As I went into the store, I turned to look at him. He waited there at the corner on his bike. I knew he would still be there when I came out.

  The boy I loved was named Luis Gómez, and he was from El Salvador. Two weeks before, my friend Phuong, whom I had met in ESL class, had pointed him out to me during lunch. She’d said, “Do you see that boy there, the one with the green eyes?” When I spotted him among the other boys he was with, I nodded at Phuong. She said, “I love him.
Go talk to him for me.” She pushed me toward him, but I didn’t move. How could I go up to a complete stranger to talk to him about my friend? She said that Luis had just started ESL class and didn’t speak much English. Phuong didn’t speak a lot either, and that was why she hadn’t passed to regular English as I had.

  Mago had passed, too. Now at Franklin High School, she didn’t hang out with any ESL students. She moved in “better circles” now that she’d gotten a good grasp of the English language. Carlos was in regular English, too, but he liked the ESL kids, and those were the friends he had at Franklin. I was following his lead. I was not ashamed, as Mago was, of people knowing where I came from.

  Phuong wanted me to act as her messenger, and she would tell me what to tell Luis in Spanish for her. She said, “Reyna, you and me are sisters, you need help me.” Phuong said we were like sisters because I looked Asian, just like her. Sometimes teachers and students would think I was Chinese, or Filipino, or Japanese, or Thai. I’d never even heard of those nationalities until I came to this country, and I hated the fact that I was being stripped of my Mexicanness. I would tell people, “I’m Mexican, from Mexico,” but sometimes they wouldn’t believe me. I would later find out that Mexico’s history includes many immigrants from different places in the world, such as Asia. And this was the source of my features.