A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  Nathan was so fascinated by the dead birds, my aunt handed him a pigeon, and he ran to show it to us, smiling with glee.

  “Papa, Papa!” he said as he shoved the pigeon at Cory. “Birdie.”

  The look on Cory’s face as he looked at Nathan was priceless, and I didn’t know if he was more shocked at being called “Papa” by Nathan or by the dead pigeon in Nathan’s hand.

  “You eat these?” he asked incredulously as he held Nathan on his lap and looked at the pigeon with the same fascination as Nathan. I couldn’t tell how he felt that my son had called him Papa, but the loving way he was holding Nathan on his lap told me he didn’t mind.

  “They’re delicious,” I said. “I can’t wait.”

  Later, when he had eaten two of the pigeons, he agreed.

  The next day, I took him to Tío Gary’s house to deliver the things I had brought him, mostly clothes for him, his wife, and his five children. The three youngest were playing marbles out in the dirt road, their bare feet and hands covered in dust. The youngest boy was completely naked. His little penis waggled from side to side as he ran to tell our uncle we had arrived. Tío Gary lived in a tiny shack near the train station. As he entered the shack, Cory had to duck because the door frame was too low for him. My uncle was skinny and short, a mere couple of inches taller than me but many pounds lighter. As he shook Cory’s hand, he seemed smaller and older, the years of hardship marked all over his wrinkled, sunbaked face.

  “Mucho gusto,” Cory said.

  “Te ves más gorda.” You look fatter, my uncle said to me with his usual bluntness, making me feel even fatter than I already felt in his presence. I was 120 pounds and I knew I wasn’t fat, but here, where everyone was undernourished, I felt like a glutton. My uncle offered us a soda and Cory sipped on it, being careful not to stare at the bottle caps embedded in the dirt floor, the walls made of sticks, the two small beds where my uncle’s whole family slept in this one-room shack. My uncle asked about my life in the U.S., and as usual, I kept the details to a minimum.

  “And where did you meet this guy?” he asked, as if Cory weren’t there. “Does he treat you well? Aren’t there any good Mexican men over there in the U.S.?”

  “There are plenty of them, but they’ve never treated me as well as he does,” I said, and left it at that, feeling uncomfortable talking about Cory. By the look Cory gave me, I knew he had understood every word. Just because he couldn’t speak Spanish didn’t mean he didn’t know we were talking about him. “And how’s your job, Tío?” I said, to change the subject.

  Tío Gary worked at a building supply store where he carried, on his back, cement bags and other heavy building materials onto delivery trucks. “It’s getting harder,” he said. “I’m not young anymore.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. He had no skills, had learned no trade. He had grown up depending on his body and physical strength, and now his aging body could no longer be depended on for a livelihood.

  “What if you learn to drive, Tío? You can become a cabdriver. They make decent money and the work isn’t too demanding. I can pay for driving lessons for you.”

  My uncle blushed and shook his head. “Me da miedo,” he said. “I’m too scared and too old to learn to drive.”

  “Let me know how I can help you,” I said as I stood to leave.

  I left him some money, and I later learned he had used it to buy himself a used tricycle cart and gone around the neighborhood from house to house picking up the daily trash for tips. When we left and were walking back to my aunt’s, Cory reached to hold my hand. I wondered if he had had enough of Iguala. I knew I had.

  “It hurts to see them living like this,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know. How could it not? You’re carrying so much on your shoulders, trying to help your family. You’ve had to work so hard to get to where you are now. You should be proud of yourself, love. I mean, look at you. You started here, and now you’re about to be a published author.”

  I squeezed his hand and held it tight as we walked, grateful that he was here to share my hometown with me. Iguala was me, with all the imperfections and broken beauty. Cory saw me for who I was, just like I had hoped he would. But he also saw me for who I would become. I was glad I had brought him to my hometown. Now I knew that for as long as we were together, whenever I shared with him my sadness, my frustrations, my pain, my worries, my fears, my traumas, he would know the source and understand.

  When we returned to Los Angeles, Cory decided to give up his apartment in Long Beach and move in with me and Nathan. I had been afraid we would lose him if I took him to Iguala. Instead, my hometown had brought us closer.

  Nathan, Reyna, and Cory

  39

  WHENEVER I WENT to Mexico, I would return feeling guilty about buying into the materialism of the U.S. Did I really need all those clothes crammed into my closet? Did Nathan need all of those toys scattered around his room? I decided to have a yard sale and de-clutter my house. My mother came to help me with the sale. She hardly ever came to visit, and I was grateful for the extra pair of hands. She showed up with her little dog and instantly struck up a friendship with the fruit vendor. She even took him a plate of food when she made us lunch.

  I felt ashamed that in the time I had lived here, I hadn’t talked much to the man aside from saying “buenos días” and “buenas noches.” Before Cory moved in, I had been living alone with a toddler in South Central L.A. I kept to myself and tried to keep my baby safe. I had bought fruit from the vendor, though he always gave me an extra bag or box of fruit and refused to take my money. He would say, “I’m really grateful that you let me stay.”

  I would wave my hand, dismissing his gratitude, and reply, “The street doesn’t belong to me.” I should have told him instead that I understood. I, too, was an immigrant. When I bought the house, I hadn’t had the heart to ask him to leave, even though it affected the curb appeal of my house. I admired his work ethic. In an area full of homeless people, I preferred to see him out there selling fruit than asking for alms in the street. To hell with curb appeal, I told myself, and so I had let him stay.

  Now here was my mother chatting with the fruit vendor and feeding him her pork adobo and corn tortillas. Later that day, she told me that his name was Clemente, and that he was undocumented. He had a wife and four children in Mexico whom he was putting through high school and college by selling fruit. He rented a little room up the street. Every day he woke up at 4:00 a.m. to go to the wholesale market downtown to buy his fruit. He hadn’t seen his children or wife in twelve years.

  In a few hours, she had learned his story. I thought of his children in Mexico and understood the pain they must feel at being separated from their father. But I also understood his pain as well. My job as an adult school teacher had shown me there were two sides to the story—the experiences of the children who stay behind and the experiences of the parents who leave. Both sides of the immigrant story were equally heartbreaking. I had watched him sitting on a crate in front of my house, surrounded by his fruit, with no one to talk to, but I hadn’t known about the children who were growing up without a father. I wished his children could see what I saw day after day from my window: a solitary man who sold bags of oranges and bananas to put them through college and give them a chance. I hoped his children appreciated his sacrifice.

  By the end of the day, I had made about $250 from my yard sale. Considering that I really didn’t have anything valuable to sell, I thought it was pretty good money.

  “You know, yesterday we only sold about $50 at the swap meet,” my mom said to me as we were cleaning up the yard. Her husband, Rey, was just pulling up at the curb. He had come to pick her up after spending all day at the Starlite Swap Meet in Rosemead, where they had been vendors for years, selling Avon, Jafra, and Mary Kay products, hair oil, and plastic sandals.

  My siblings and I had tried to convince my mother to get a job that would give her a steady income and a retirement plan, but she refused. She lo
ved to sell and wanted to be her own boss. She had done it in Mexico to survive—selling not only Avon, but also popcorn, frozen popsicles, tamarind pulp, and cigarettes. She sold door-to-door or at the fancy club by the house, and that was what she wanted to keep on doing in this country. But her booth at the swap meet kept her living below the poverty line. What frustrated me was that she had options. She wasn’t like my adult students, who despite their lack of legal status, were hungry to learn English, to gain work skills, to improve themselves. Thanks to the amnesty of 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), my mother, like my father, had gotten a green card and later became a naturalized citizen. What wouldn’t my students give for the opportunity that my mother had been given? What wouldn’t they do with a green card, with U.S. citizenship?

  That was what I wanted my mother to understand and to appreciate, but her refusal to do so infuriated me. “You and Rey should get a real job. You are U.S. citizens, I don’t understand why you insist on selling at the swap meet when you know it isn’t worth it,” I said.

  “Do you mind if I have a yard sale of my own next week?” she asked.

  I was surprised she wanted to do this. For years my mother had been a pack rat. She had a habit of picking up things people threw away. On trash days, she would roam around her neighborhood picking up discarded items meant for the landfill. She would take some to Mexico, and the rest she just kept in her apartment until there was hardly any space to move.

  I was willing to help her clean out her house, so I agreed.

  The following week, she showed up at my house to have her yard sale. She and Rey unloaded boxes and boxes full of used clothes and kitchen supplies, shoes, tools, toys, car seats and strollers, coffee tables and dressers she had picked up off the street. Once he was done helping her set up, Rey took off to go to the swap meet by himself.

  My mother happily chatted with the fruit vendor, Clemente, or with her customers, her fanny pack tied around her waist, her dog running in circles around her. When she made a sale, she would make the sign of the cross before putting the money in her fanny pack. I had never seen her so happy, so relaxed. Watching her, I realized how much she really did love to sell.

  In the evening, Rey came back to pick up my mother. He said that after the $30 booth rental, he had only made a measly $15 at the swap meet. My mother had spent no money on the use of my yard and made $150.

  I should have seen it coming, but the next thing I knew, my front yard was turned into a swap meet. I had Clemente under the tree at his usual spot on the sidewalk, selling his fruit, and my mother with all her stuff spread out across my front yard. She started to come three times a week to take advantage of the parents who were on their way to and from the local elementary school. I closed the curtains of my front windows. I had never had a great view, and now it was worse. I only hoped she would sell all her stuff quickly and be done with the yard sales.

  “Rey and I are thinking about not going to the swap meet at all,” my mother said to me a few days later. “Sales just aren’t like they used to be. We could have a yard sale here every day.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea” was all I managed to say. I couldn’t say no. I knew my mother was struggling with money, and I wanted to help her. For my grandmother’s memory, I wanted to be as generous with her as she had been with my abuelita. The days she didn’t come to my house to sell, people knocked on my door and asked me when she would be back. She smiled when I told her this. “I have many customers now,” she said. She took over my kitchen and cooked a quick meal for everyone, even the fruit vendor. If he was lucky, she even fed him dinner. I parted my curtains to peek outside. I saw her talking to her customers, laughing with the fruit vendor, trying to figure out the best way to display her wares.

  “I thought she would only have a few yard sales before she got rid of all her stuff, but every week she comes back loaded with more,” I told Cory one night as we were lying in bed. He had said he didn’t mind the yard sales, and of course, since this was my house, I knew that even if he did, he wouldn’t say anything.

  “I think she’s collecting more stuff,” he said. “It looks like she’s starting a business.”

  “I know I need to decide what to do about it before it gets out of hand,” I said. “I have to put a stop to this madness. But it makes me sad to know that once I do, she’ll no longer come over. Things will go back to how they were before. Ever since I let her set up her yard sale, I’ve seen her more than I have in years.”

  I felt as if I were on a roller coaster ride. I was happy to see her and spend time with her, and it felt good to help her make some money, but at the same time I was angry and disappointed that the yard sale—not me, not Nathan—was the reason she came over. Also, I knew my house was not much to look at, but I had done my best to fix it up and make it cute and cozy. I felt that my mother’s yard sales tarnished my home. In truth, she was becoming a trespasser. All her stuff strewn across my yard, her constant comings and goings disrupting the precious peace and tranquility I had managed to create despite living in this area, had made me resentful. I felt as if little by little I was losing control of my own home, and I wanted her to care enough to notice how uncomfortable she was making me. But she didn’t.

  My mother’s dog was white so she had named him Güero. Since she lived in a cluttered one-bedroom apartment with her in-laws, there was no room for Güero. He spent his days trapped inside her van. Only at my house did he have a yard to play in, and a playmate—Nathan.

  Ever since he was a puppy, my mother and Rey had disciplined him by hitting him. They even told Nathan to hit Güero if he got too excited. “You will not hit that dog,” I told my son. “You must never hit animals.”

  Mother’s yard sale, with the fruit vendor

  “Abuela hits Güero,” Nathan said.

  “Don’t do what your grandma does,” I told him. “Ever.”

  One day, Nathan was petting Güero, and he turned around and tried to bite him. “Güero!” my mother yelled from across the yard. “Pégale,” she told my son. “Hit him.” My mother looked at me and said, “When he was little, that dog wasn’t like that. He was a sweet little puppy. Now that he’s grown, he’s turned vicious. Now, when anyone tries to touch him, he bites.”

  That’s because he’s had enough of your ill treatment, I wanted to say. One can only take so much, even a dog.

  There were times when I was like Güero, when I wanted to bite and snarl at my mother. I wanted to understand, to forgive her the way she had forgiven my grandmother, but one day I’d finally had enough and my rage got the better of me. I turned on her.

  That day, Cory and I had gone to work and left my mother to her yard sale. I closed my eyes and tried not to look at what had become of my front yard. I had recently started composting, so I had a small cooler in the kitchen where I put all my kitchen scraps meant for my compost bin. When I got home from work, I found my cooler all washed and cleaned on the kitchen counter. All the kitchen scraps I had saved for three days were gone. I went outside to the front yard and asked my mother what had happened to my kitchen scraps.

  “I threw them out,” she said. “I thought it was trash, so I dumped them in the trash bin outside.”

  I was furious at her for taking over my yard, my kitchen, my house. Furious at myself for letting it get this far. “Well, it isn’t trash. I was saving them for my compost bin. Now you go and put them back in my cooler!” I slammed the door and went into my bedroom, seething.

  When I came out, I could see my mother bending over the bin out back, digging through the trash and gathering the kitchen scraps. Just tell her to leave it, I said to myself. Tomorrow you’ll have more scraps. Stop humiliating her like this. But the frustration I had been bottling up about the yard sale got the better of me, and I stood there and watched my mother digging into the trash with her bare hands, putting banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, and vegetable pieces back into my cooler.

  She handed me
the cooler without looking at me and went back out to her yard sale. I stood there by the window and saw her chatting with the fruit vendor while my son laughed and played with Güero.

  Later that night when I spoke with Betty, the first thing she told me was that my mother had called her and told her I made her dig through the trash. “She was crying,” Betty said.

  “I feel awful about it. It was a shitty thing to do to her,” I said. “There are times when I can’t help myself. There are times when I want to hurt her the way she hurt me—us.”

  “I know,” she said. “I understand.”

  But the thought of me making my mother cry filled me with guilt. Why couldn’t I be like her? Why couldn’t I forgive the abuse and the lack of love?

  The next morning, when she came back to put out her yard sale, I wanted to apologize to her, but I found myself unable to do it. I’m sorry were difficult words for me to say. Instead, I made her a meal, and later, I helped her pack up her wares and fold the tarp. How could I tell her that I was just like Güero now? That I could only take so much.

  Rey came to get her, and as he loaded up the van, Güero ran into the street and my mother ran after him so that he wouldn’t get hit by a car.

  “You could’ve gotten killed, you stupid dog!” She smacked him on the head before squeezing him tight and kissing his head. I realized then how complicated my mother’s love was. How she could hurt and love at the same time. As I watched her drive away, I wondered if that was how things between us would always be.