by Laura Resau
This is all I found out: He was an only child. His parents were alive in a remote village in the mountains. We couldn’t visit them; it was too far away, too much money, too much time. When I asked if he missed them, he said, after a long pause, “Mira, Clara, I knew I couldn’t go forward in life if I was always looking back. I had to learn English and work hard and save money. And now, look where I am. I can give a good life to my children. I look to my future, not to my past.” He said this as though he’d rehearsed the words in his head so many times they sounded hollow. After that, I stopped asking him questions. Part of me was relieved. It made it easier to forget that Dad had come here illegally.
I put the letter on my lap and glanced up. “It’s from my grandparents.”
Dad’s face looked serious—but not in the stony way it got when he was angry. It looked as though a protective outside layer had been pulled back, like when you peel off a Band-Aid and find tender pink skin underneath.
Mom’s face glowed, lit up, curious. She practically had to sit on her hands to keep from grabbing the letter and reading it herself. “What does it say, Clara?”
My neck pulse was beating hard and fast now. “They want me to come for the summer.”
Mom’s mouth dropped open with a little squeal. “That’s wonderful!” She was still in her superenthusiastic teacher mode. “It’s about time you met them, Clara!” Then she gave Dad a sideways look and raised her eyebrows. Her smile had a little bit of “I-told-you-so” in it. She’d probably been trying for a while to convince Dad to have me meet my grandparents. Whenever I asked her about Dad’s family, she sighed and said, “Ask your father.” I figured either she didn’t know or she’d promised not to talk about it.
“But there’s no one to go with me, Mom. You teach summer school and Dad’ll be too busy with landscaping.”
“You could go alone,” Mom said. “After all, you’re the one they invited.”
“But they don’t even give a date!” My cheeks were growing hot and flushed. I looked down at the letter again, hiding my face behind my hair. “They just say they’ll meet me on the full moon in June at the airport in Oaxaca—”
“Wa-HA-ca,” Dad interrupted in a hoarse voice. “It’s pronounced Wa-HA-ca.”
I pushed my bangs out of my face and looked up at him. The first time in my life I’d seen him crying had been the night before. Now his tears came again.
Seeing him cry made me feel like someone had reached inside me and rearranged my internal organs. I avoided his eyes, set the letter on the table, and left the room, stuffing my hands in my pockets to stop their shaking.
At dinner, I could tell from my parents’ expressions that they’d already made a decision, but I tried to argue anyway. I’d been wanting a change from Walnut Hill, but what I’d had in mind was a beach vacation to a tropical island complete with howler monkeys and wild parrots.
“I can’t go,” I said. “What about hanging out with my friends?” I loved summers, long humid days drenched in sunshine. Riding bikes on the paths in the woods, water fights by the stream, the cool relief of tree shadows. But then, I could tell this summer would be different, since all Samantha wanted to do lately was wander around the mall for hours or sit in front of her computer instant-messaging boys. Last summer, Samantha and I had been completely wrapped up in our collection of dried pressed leaves from the woods, but once school had started she’d made me promise not to tell anyone about it. She’d even thrown out her half of the leaves. I thought about doing the same, but since Dad was so excited about them I stuck them carefully in a drawer instead.
“Two months away from your friends won’t kill you,” Mom said.
“I’ll miss out on all the summertime parties.” Samantha had gotten invitations to three boy-girl pool parties already, and I was still hoping I’d get at least one.
“Parties?” Mom asked, curious.
I shrugged.
Hector sat calmly during all this, eating his noodles and chicken and green beans systematically. He sat there like a prince on his stack of phone books, with his T-shirt tucked in neatly, and socks that matched the light blue stripes on his belt.
“Clara,” Mom said carefully. “We think you should go.”
“But I don’t even know them!”
“You’ll get to know them, Clara. It’ll be an adventure,” Mom insisted.
Easy for her to say. She wouldn’t be the one stuck with two old strangers in the middle of nowhere. “What do they do there anyway?”
“Farm,” Dad said.
“What will I do there?”
“Well, you’ll find out, won’t you?” Mom’s cheerfulness sounded a little strained.
“How did they even know our address?”
In a raspy voice, Dad said, “Sometimes I—” He cleared his throat. “Sometimes I send them letters.”
“You do?” Mom and I said at the same time.
“A few times a year,” he said. He had more secrets than I’d ever imagined.
“Well, Dad, do they speak English?”
“Of course not.”
“But my Spanish isn’t good enough—”
Dad interrupted sharply. “Hablas muy bien español, Clara.” Your Spanish is very good.
I decided to try one last angle. “What if they’re not there to meet me? What if—”
“If my mother”—and here he paused. Maybe the words sounded strange for him after so many years. “If my mother says she will be there, she will be there.” He looked out the kitchen window for a few moments, squinting at something far away. For the first time I noticed a few lonely silver hairs in his mustache. “You think it was a coincidence this letter came right after you did this thing last night?” His voice shook. “My mother knows things. She knows things.”
I wondered what that meant. Mom raised her eyebrows, gave him a questioning look.
I’d never seen him like this before, and suddenly I had the unsettling feeling that I didn’t know my own dad. Sure, I knew that his favorite food was marshmallow brownies and that he always woke up before the sun, and that he was scared of little dogs. But there was a giant chunk of his life that I didn’t know about. We sat in silence and I watched the dark circles under his eyes.
“Time for ice cream!” Hector announced. He sucked the last rice noodle off his fork, and flashed his toothless six-year-old grin. He was too young to notice Dad’s strange expression.
“Okay, c’mon,” Mom said, and led Hector into the kitchen. They clattered around with bowls and spoons as Dad and I stared at each other awkwardly.
I could refuse if I wanted to. They couldn’t force me. I imagined myself kicking and screaming the whole way to the airport and handcuffing myself to the waiting-area seat. But deep down, I wanted to know more about my grandparents, about their world far away from Walnut Hill, even if it was in a tiny village in the mountains.
“¿Qué decidiste, hija?” Dad asked me softly. What did you decide, daughter?
I closed my eyes. I was balanced on the edge of a cliff, peering over.
“Fine,” I said at last. “I’ll go.”
In my room later that night, I sat on the carpet by my open window, with the vent under my legs blowing cool air up and out into the muggy night. Balanced on my knees was my sketchbook. Instead of drawing maps of imaginary tropical islands like I usually did, I started a list of what I would take on the trip:
CDs? DVDs?
Seashell swimsuit?
Shiny black shoes with ribbons and purple skirt
Fuzzy green sweater with holes?
Two tubes of toothpaste?
Art shirt
There were question marks after nearly everything, because really, I had no idea what the weather would be like. Or if they’d have a DVD player. Or a swimming pool nearby. Did they even sell toothpaste there? My shiny black shoes I would definitely bring, even though they gave me blisters. When I wore them with the purple skirt with tiny mirrors along the hem I felt like a gypsy princess.
And I knew I couldn’t go anywhere without my paint-splattered art shirt, an old sweatshirt that Dad had given me that I used as a smock in art class.
Through the air vent I heard my parents’ voices—low whispers that grew louder and louder until they realized how loud they were getting, and began whispering until their voices grew loud again. Their voices were muffled, but I caught a few words, including my name.
I tiptoed to the landing of the stairs, and sat on a step, resting my gaze on a piece of light blue fuzz on the carpet. Now Dad’s voice sounded clearer.
“…I panicked…when we couldn’t find her last night…going from room to room, searching all over the house…do you know what kept going through my head?…that she’d left us, forever….”
Now I heard Mom’s voice, soft and soothing as hand cream, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. It was getting harder to hear them over the dishes clanking against each other in the dishwasher.
Then Dad’s voice: “…and I kept saying to myself, this is how my own parents felt when I left…this is what I made them suffer….”
The noise of the dishwasher filling with water drowned out their voices, but I didn’t want to listen anymore anyway. It was giving me a funny feeling in my stomach, the feeling that watching Dad cry gave me. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and looked in the mirror, wondering if one of my grandparents was to blame for my chubby cheeks.
As much as I complained to Mom, and stayed clear of Dad over the next two weeks (I really didn’t want to see him cry again), secretly, my curiosity about his village grew. It was impossible to have a blank bubble in my mind about the future. I had to picture something. What I came up with was a little adobe house with red flowers in the window boxes and a neat fenced-in garden. I think the image came from a New Mexico postcard that used to hang on our refrigerator. I figured my grandparents probably couldn’t afford a regular two-story house with a big yard, so everything would be smaller and older: a small, old car and a small, old TV and a small, old refrigerator. Their house would have Latino flair, like Mexican restaurants—the chairs painted bright blue with yellow sunflowers, the floor covered with earthy pink tiles. Clay moons and suns would smile from the walls. For dinner, we would eat nacho chips and spicy salsa and cheese-smothered enchiladas, with shredded iceberg lettuce and diced tomatoes and sour cream on the side, and then fried cinnamon ice cream for dessert.
I opened my new sketchbook and breathed in the fresh smell of paper and drew the house I saw in my head. All the while, a voice inside me was saying that really all I knew was this: The plastic me-doll in the stream was going somewhere, floating around the bend. And two weeks later on the plane, sipping my ginger ale nervously, watching clouds from above, I was between two worlds, drifting down the stream, letting the currents carry me, blindly trusting that I would end up in a good place.
Clara
Trees were what my grandparents made me think when I saw them at the airport. Brown tree trunks, worn by the wind and sun and rain, solid and tough, scarred and callused. Their skin looked rough as bark, and their feet, in sandals, as leathery as Dad’s old boots.
The look in their eyes, though, was gentle. My grandmother’s—Abuelita’s—eyes were black, like shiny beans. And my grandfather’s—Abuelo’s—were like bits of wet sea glass, one brown and one green, I noticed, amazed. The way his face lit up when he spotted me reminded me of Hector, bouncing up and down on his phone books, excited for dessert.
“Mucho gusto en conocerla, Clara,” Abuelo said, beaming. Good to meet you. They must have known it was me, since I was the only fourteen-year-old girl looking lost and alone.
Abuelita took a step toward me and touched my hand softly—not a handshake, but something more gentle, like stroking a puppy. Her touch calmed the wild jumping in my stomach.
On the way to the airport in Baltimore, I’d made a deal with Mom and Dad that if my grandparents were weird or mean I could go home after two days instead of two months. But I could tell already they weren’t weird or mean. Abuelita’s smile was full of light, like the ocean early in the morning.
We waited for my bags to appear on the conveyor belt, and Abuelo whispered to Abuelita in Spanish, “How she looks like you, m’hija!” And a moment later, “Clara! How you look like your grandmother, m’hija!” I’m not sure why he called us both “my daughter,” but it seemed nice, like how Mom called me and Dad sweet pea or sugar pie. I pushed my bangs behind my ears.
Then he burst out, “Your eyes! It’s your eyes, mi amor!”
I hoped he wouldn’t bring up our cheeks, because my guess had been right; my squirrel cheeks came from her. On my grandmother, the rosy round cheeks looked cheerful, but mine made people think I was still in elementary school.
Abuelita looked at me with the hint of a smile, as though we shared some secret. Meanwhile, Abuelo talked and talked—about how good my Spanish was, how sorry he was he spoke no English, about how it was rainy season and he hoped I’d brought plenty of warm clothes (I hadn’t), about how sorry he was that the only phone in their village had been out of service for three months. “So you had better call your parents now, Clara,” he said.
Why hadn’t Dad warned me about the phone situation? Or about the rainy season? Maybe he thought I would have used them as excuses not to come. I would have.
Outside in the sunshine, we stopped at a bright blue phone booth. I dialed a whole string of calling card numbers, and then cradled the receiver and counted the rings. My grandparents watched me, Abuelita’s face calm and curious, and Abuelo’s straining with anticipation, like a little kid in line for a roller coaster ride. After six rings the voice mail came on and I heard my voice, sounding young and far away. I mumbled a quick message in English. “Well, I’m here. I’m fine. They seem nice.” A lump began to form in my throat. “It might be a while before I can find a phone again,” I added, forcing my voice to stay steady. Then, even though I was a little mad they hadn’t been waiting by the phone for my call, I added, “Love you.”
When I hung up, my grandparents looked crushed. “He didn’t ask to talk to us?” Abuelo asked solemnly. So I explained voice mail, which they’d never heard of. Even after I cleared that up, they seemed disappointed. They’d wanted to hear Dad’s voice as much as I had, I realized. It had been over twenty years since they’d heard his voice.
We carried my bags across the parking lot, toward the bus stop by a palm tree. As we waited in the shade, the sparkle came back into Abuelo’s eyes. “And your hands, m’hija! How they look like your grandmother’s!” I couldn’t see anything our hands had in common. Hers were thick and huge, like a landscaper’s, like Dad’s. Mine were piano player’s hands, Mom always said, even though I gave up the piano after four months of lessons. Long, slim fingers with the nails filed into proud ovals and painted blueberry.
I caught a whiff of a nice smell—soil, campfires, leather. It came from Abuelo. Then I noticed the smell that clung to Abuelita. She didn’t smell like perfume counters in department stores the way other grandmothers did. She smelled like chiles roasting, chocolate melting, almonds toasting. And like herbs—the teas that Dad gave me when I was sick.
I must have been smiling just thinking about it, because Abuelo said, “And the same smiles!” He dropped my bags, and stood dramatically still, watching a grin spread over my face. Even though I tried to keep my mouth closed to hide my squirrel cheeks, I couldn’t help laughing at how hyper my little grandfather was.
I snuck a closer look at Abuelita’s dazzling smile. Did mine really look like that?
The first bus ride was a short one, from the airport on the outskirts of Oaxaca City to the bus station downtown. On the way, we passed shacks and fields and trees with big orange flowers that I’d never seen in Maryland, or anywhere else for that matter. The streets of the city were lined with pastel cement buildings, with store signs painted right on the walls. Tiny Volkswagens filled the streets, speeding and beeping and weaving crazily around each other, skidd
ing between buses, through puffs of black exhaust.
At the bus station we boarded a bus headed outside the city, toward a smaller town. The view out the window made me thirsty—dry brownish hills spotted with tall cacti and shrubs with sharp leaves bursting out in all directions like fireworks. Villages speckled the landscape, each with its own giant cathedral and cluster of small houses. They weren’t the cute houses I’d imagined. Most looked haphazardly thrown together from unpainted concrete blocks and sheets of scrap metal. Heaps of sandbags and construction materials littered the dirt yards, and laundry flapped on barbed wire fences. The nervous ball in my stomach was growing bigger. I told myself not to worry, that my grandparents’ house would match my picture.
After two hours on the second bus, we switched to a third bus. Another bus? I nearly groaned. I felt like stomping my foot and whining, Why aren’t we there yet? When Abuelo saw the look on my face, he said, “Don’t worry, m’hija, only one more bus after this! And what a beautiful ride! You will see!”
Even though it was early evening, the heat felt heavy. This third bus wasn’t air-conditioned. I unstuck my thighs from the ripped vinyl seats and crossed my legs the other way. My body felt stiff as old spaghetti from so much sitting. My grandparents were dozing now. In front of us sat a woman with three chickens in her lap, their legs tied together with frayed twine. Every time the bus hit a bump, the chickens bounced up, flapping their wings and squawking. The bus held a strange mix of smells—animals, sweat, ripe fruit, raw meat. I pushed open the window and a fresh breeze blew in, rattling the panes and rippling through the torn curtains.