Credible fear? I say.
You can’t say the wrong thing, Maura says. You tell the truth but it can still be the wrong thing. You can’t be nervous.
I look up at the sky and think what use are words.
Texas heat is sometimes dry, like flying just above a burning house. Breathing a heat that rises, that burns the lungs. In Texas, my body is sucked dry.
Sometimes we can see oil stacks burning in the distance from this yard. When the sun sets, the Texas fields are burning in the horizon. Nobody comes to this part of Texas, nobody but oil workers and us. We must be families made of bird. If we are families that nobody wants, we will want one another. We are families made of birds and we will save one another because no one else is coming. I hug Alegra and cry again. I cry into her shoulder.
* * *
Dinner is a square of bologna, slick, a little slimy; a square of white bread, half thawed; a square of corn kernels. Water that sometimes tastes of bleach. Milk is for the children. Unlike lunch, dinner is with the children. But I am the only one who does not have a child with me, so after I finish, I offer to hold babies for some of the mothers so they can eat. I hold the babies who are too little for baby food. The babies who are still suckling on their mothers or hungrily drinking from bottles. The electric outlets are covered when not in use and none of the tables have sharp edges. There are high chairs. This is a jail baby-proofed for babies who should not be in jail. But they will not remember, I tell myself. They will not remember, unlike Ana who is not a baby anymore or even a toddler and she will remember.
I go back to the social worker but he takes me to a blue-eyed man, a guard or a worker or the government, I don’t know anymore.
You should sign this, says the blue-eyed man with a blue badge and a blue polo shirt. We are sitting on plastic chairs in a room that looks out on another room where a few people meet with family-member visitors but mostly they meet with lawyers and volunteers who visit. Sometimes they move us around, center to center. We all think they are trying to keep us as far away as possible from anyone we know. I am from Florida and I am in Texas. I knew I was going to Texas only when the officer escorted me to the American Airlines gate that said SAN ANTONIO. We are not in San Antonio. We are in some part of Texas where nobody hears us if we scream.
What is it? I say.
If you want to get out as quickly as possible, you should sign it, the blue-eyed man in the blue polo repeats. I look out the window.
In the visiting room there is a woman with a long braid down her back. She is speaking to a teenager across from her who shares her face. I imagine the woman speaking in Spanish and the teenager answering in English. I don’t know if this is true. It’s probably not true. They hold hands. I think of a photo I saw in a magazine on the table at a house I cleaned. Time. I was drawn by the photo on the cover. It was a woman, milk-coffee skin like mine, bars obstructing her face and the chalky yellow desert behind her. Tears ran down her face. She hugged a young girl through the bars. She hugged her daughter on the other side of the fence, on the US side. I wonder what does it feel like to hug someone through bars and do you look at your skin after and see the imprint, stripes down your belly, stripes on your chest? Your body, a fence.
What is it? I ask again. Do you have the form in Spanish?
No. You sign where the line is and you will leave detention faster.
Voluntary Departure, the form reads, and though I know some English, I do not know these words. There are a lot of numbers, a lot of codes. Sections 240A, 245, 248. ICE Form I-210. IJ, BIA, DHS.
What happens if I don’t sign it? I ask.
Oh, the man says. They’ll deport you anyways. You could stay here for who knows how long.
And what about my daughter?
These are questions for a lawyer.
I don’t have one. How do I get one?
The man touches his beard and gives me a soft smile that makes me want to sink into his arms. Help me, I want to say but I don’t.
The government is only required to provide a lawyer for criminal cases, says the man who does not take me in his arms. Unlawful presence of an alien in the United States is a civil issue. You can get a lawyer but you must find this lawyer on your own and pay on your own.
But all the lawyers who come here. I haven’t yet had a chance to—
Look. I like you, Ms. Gloria Ramos, is it. I like you, Ms. Ramos. So I’m going to give you some advice. Sign this form. Do it for your daughter. Get yourselves out of here quickly and on with your lives.
But where do I go if I sign this? Do I go back to El Salvador?
Well, I don’t know. That I don’t know.
Do I see a judge and, you know, plead my case?
The man sighs. His face changes.
Listen, he says. If you want to make this harder for yourself then fine. But this is your last chance. You can sign this form and get out of here in no time or not. Up to you.
The blue-eyed man places the blue pen in front of me. I take it in my hand. Gloria Ramos, I sign. The man smiles again.
* * *
There are televisions in the common room, four of them, one in each corner. Two of them are set to children’s channels and two are set to adult channels. Of the adult channels, one is always a Spanish channel. That’s the one I watch every night.
When the news comes on, the guards change the channel, though sometimes we catch snippets. I think the guards don’t like the Spanish news because they are always talking about immigration. They show sad graphs like border crossings down, deportations way up. They show President Obama, who likes to smile a lot. President Obama, who answers questions and some of the people asking the questions smile back and some of them don’t. President Obama, who sometimes looks like he doesn’t like the questions. They interview a lot of experts in fancy offices. It’s bad for morale. That’s what they must think.
We like the telenovelas anyways. We get the news anyways. I get it from the women who get letters from the outside where the Spanish news is not blocked. The telenovela stars are all blond and thin and rich and most of us look like the maids and witch doctors and farm peasants on the shows, but this is as close as we get to the outside, as close as we get to the life we imagined outside these walls. What would it be like? we think. What would it be like if our problem were a fight over a man or an inheritance? If the only violence we knew was killing a nemesis to steal away with her lover? Laughing, laughing. How funny to imagine this alternate universe.
In this alternate universe, maybe I wouldn’t be a mother. If I am being honest, I don’t always want to be a mother. Sometimes I want to be a dancer, at Salsa Rueda on Fridays at my favorite spot, the one by the Miami airport. I was learning. Sometimes I want to be a swimmer, in Key Biscayne, where the wealthy Salvadorans live, where the beach is uglier than Miami Beach but where fewer people venture so I can sink beneath the green-gray water and watch the clouds blur and no one asks anything of me. Sometimes I want to be a fighter, as when I consider attacking the men who stand guard over me. What about not caring about the consequences? Throw me in prison, beat me with your batons. Give me up to the television, another headline. Some moments I want my daughter returned to me, but God forgive me, others I want a different life for her, away from me. It is ugly to admit. But don’t believe the mothers who tell you motherhood is vocation or sacrifice or beauty or anything on a greeting card. Motherhood: question mark, a constant calculation of what-if. What if we just gave up?
There’s no bedtime, technically, but we can’t roam after ten o’clock. It’s not jail. That’s what the guards say constantly: It’s not jail, be glad it’s not jail. Most of us go to sleep early because the children have school the next day plus we have nothing better to do. My room has five bunk beds lining the walls with identical blue plastic mattresses. Below the bunks are plastic bins in which to store our things. Most of us don’t have things. There is one plastic table painted over with a checkerboard and backgammon. We don’t play. Ther
e are no pieces to play with, plus none of us know the rules. There is a door that does not lock and Plexiglas windows with chicken wire. Sometimes a child cries at night but is not allowed to sleep with the mother; the guards will come in the middle of the night and break it up. There are too many people here. That’s another thing the guards tell us. They complain that there are too many people and not enough guards and they’re building another place like this not far from here but it is taking too long. The guards complain about it together but we hear it and we tell one another: There are too many people here. We tell each other: This must mean they’ll let us out sooner. Because it seems logical that they’ll let us out sooner if there are too many people. Some of us even beg, Just deport me already.
I don’t say this. At least we are safer here. I fled the person who killed my brother. Simmering violence. A government whose response was to militarize the streets. Of course with US help. Of course they don’t talk about this on the news. I’m afraid of the conditions that create violence. I’m afraid of the police. I’m afraid of the army. I’m afraid of how I survive in a country where the official currency is the US dollar and farmers can barely afford the abono for the milpas but the rich hire private security firms. I’m afraid every moment of every day, thinking about my life here, thinking about my life if it’s not here, thinking about Ana, thinking about my people, my beautiful people, so many young people dying in the streets. Parents sending their children off into the unknown, thinking maybe they won’t make it to the United States but maybe they will. Maybe they will and if they stay here maybe they won’t. I know all this because the women who get letters or make calls ask about my town for me, women who have sisters or uncles or cousins from all over Sonsonate. Most of the women crossed not long ago. Border Patrol holding cells where they crank the AC, from the hielera to here. If they force me back, we will have to find a new place that is safer, Ana and I. But where, with what, how? I turn on the sticky, sweaty mattress to face the wall and think, What kind of fear is credible? There are so many kinds of fear. I don’t like that the rooms won’t lock.
* * *
Some mornings, I wake up really early. I wake up at six and head to the common room before anyone else gets there. I like to put in the National Geographic DVD another woman gave me. I’ve watched it so many times. It is in English but I can make out some of what the deep-voiced narrator says. I can enjoy the bursts of feather and branch and leaf and sky. I watch it all the way through until my favorite part. The camera zooms in and I see them: the hoatzin chicks.
Hoatzin chicks differ from their parents. When young, hoatzins have two claws on each wing. The claws go away once the chicks mature into adults, but as children they can climb trees with their wing claws, jump into water and claw themselves out, fight predators if they need to. They are beautiful birds, the hoatzin, my favorite of all the birds. They have bloodred irises crowned by sea-blue plumage. They have red crests that rise up like crowns. This is how I picture my daughter, flying through these gates to me, shedding handcuffs and perplexing Immigration officers as she expands her wings and flaps them viciously, as she rises past the walls, past the chicken wire, past the guard booth. This is how I see her coming to me, arms spread, sun in her belly, royalty made of delicate bone and feather and laughter. My daughter, knowing she is royalty and ready to spread her killer claws.
4
HARDER GIRL
Jeanette
Miami, 2002
Johnson’s lips were rubber clams. His breath was stale and hot, though the sand pricked cold against Jeanette’s back. She turned her head when he tried to kiss her again, as if by looking away, nothing was happening, nothing but the ocean at her side. It’s never really dark in Miami Beach, even on a moonless night. Ocean Drive dripped its neon across a dying street, across a concrete wall, over sand dunes, all the way to shore. Eerie exit-sign green, Barbie-doll pink: they were awash in the palate of a night all wrong.
Jeanette spotted the hand first. Bloated, palm up, on the wet sand. Skin purple-red like a heart carved out of the body. She cheered it on, even. Yes, my little heart, run to sea and leave this moment. Then she followed the lines and angles, and a fuller graph appeared: an arm as the water receded, bobbing breasts as the water rushed back.
“Holy fuck,” she whispered. Shock gave her strength she couldn’t muster a moment before. Jeanette dug her heels into the sand and pushed Johnson off.
He tumbled onto his side, onto his elbow. “What the fuck?” He followed her gaze: water receding, body. “Fuck!”
They scrambled to their feet. Jeanette’s tank top was bunched under her armpits. Her nipples poked through a mesh purple bra. She pulled her top down and her denim shorts up from her ankles. They stepped closer to the water’s edge but stopped before the body like an invisible perimeter held them back.
Johnson said the obvious. Something like, “Holy shit. It’s a dead body.” The body was of a woman, perhaps in her forties, perhaps in her sixties. It was impossible to tell.
“What do we do?” she managed.
The dead woman’s eyes were open, the pupils fixed on some faraway horizon. They were milky, looked like they’d be pebble hard to the touch, and the mouth was slightly parted like death had come as she said something innocuous. How’s the weather over there? mouth barely closing over ere.
“Fuck, I don’t know. Fuck! I’m so high. Okay, give me a moment. I need to think. Give me a moment.” Johnson ran a hand through the wisps of hair left on his almost-bald head.
A moment ago Jeanette had thought she’d reached the precipice of who she wanted to be, thought she’d finally walk the halls of Gables High like a harder girl, like the ones with boyfriends who didn’t have to lie about sexual experience. They’d always both intrigued and frightened her. She knew they knew of things she only read about in romance paperbacks with worn spines or watched on HBO late at night with the volume muted so her parents wouldn’t hear. She believed the harder girls, the cooler girls, were contagious and she, dripping with want, could siphon their cool. She’d tried to move in their orbit, hoped they’d see her as one of their own. But until this night, she had lived with fear they’d find her out for the girl she really was.
Now she was standing in front of a dead body and knew of things none of the cool girls would ever know.
* * *
It started like this: Two girls in denim coochie-cutters hanging outside a gas station. Sasha’s car was parked in an IHOP lot. They’d just finished eating a stack of pancakes for dinner. They were bored. Sasha’s mom was at her boyfriend’s place in West Palm Beach, where she spent most weekends. Jeanette’s mother was home recovering from a tummy tuck. Her father was home drunk.
They’d split a joint and hot-boxed Sasha’s car at the car wash. They did that often: selected a deluxe super-plus wash, which meant the car went in and they didn’t have to pull out for like fifteen minutes. So nice, to be pulled along, car moving on its own, no decisions. In a haze of smoke, Jeanette had watched automatic rollers paint Sasha’s windshield with giant, clumsy, felt-robot hands. The robot and Jeanette had blown hot air at each other. Then, giggling, they’d rolled into the sunshine, opening the windows to air the car as a bored young worker took Sasha’s money and shook his head in disbelief and, probably, a bit of jealousy. Then IHOP. Then they’d wanted cigarettes. That’s why they went to the gas station.
Jeanette and Sasha had a routine. They stood off to the side, by the quarter air pumps, out of the sight line of whoever manned the cash register inside the shop. They watched for the right kind of guy getting out of his car. The best bets were guys over thirty, without girlfriends or wives or kids in the car. Jeanette was better at asking than Sasha. She’d never said it to Sasha’s face, of course, but Jeanette knew it was because she was prettier. Sasha, with her small chest and habit of wearing headbands, looked younger. The only guys who eyed Sasha at the gas station were the really old ones and they had agreed to draw the line at sixty. Old, old guys were
creepy.
That Saturday, Jeanette had tried one guy before Johnson. The guy had been in his thirties maybe, with a crew cut and a tattoo of Florida that said GOD BLESS THE GUN-SHINE STATE in Old English letters below. She was sure he’d buy them a pack. But he’d brushed Jeanette aside with laughter while scanning her body and lifting the gas pump from its holster.
“Sweetie, I’m on parole, and you aren’t worth it,” he’d said.
She was mortified. So she tried extra-hard with the next guy, with Johnson: adjusted her bra so extra cleavage spilled over her orange top, sucked her stomach in, reapplied strawberry Lip Smackers and a light-brown lip liner. She’d dabbed some CK One between her boobs.
Johnson pulled up in a beat-up bloodred Toyota. He looked like a dad, or like one of Sasha’s mother’s boyfriends, in camouflage shorts and a white T-shirt that read TONY’S TACKLE AND BAIT SHOP in faded blue. He had green eyes and acne scars, muscular arms that strained his shirtsleeves. The Toyota had dark-tinted windows.
Jeanette chewed her gum as she walked up to him. She smiled her most pleasant smile, the kind her dad liked. Smile, it’s your best feature, he’d say to her as she left the house for school each morning.
Johnson looked up with his wallet in his hand. Sweat beaded on his forehead. She said hello, and he sized her up, didn’t return her smile.
“I was wondering…” Jeanette chewed her bottom lip and looked toward the shop door. A laminate tacked to the glass read EMPLOYEES DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO SAFE.
“Me and my friend”—she motioned toward Sasha with her chin—“we want to buy cigarettes but we forgot our IDs. If I give you the money, would you buy us a pack of Marlboro menthols? The green pack?” She held out a crumpled twenty, gave her best smile again.
Johnson squinted. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
Of Women and Salt Page 6