Sometimes it was just the two of us; sometimes we rolled around in a giant SUV, picking up members of my father’s crew before taking off to some magnificent place to eat.
My father liked the hidden places best—the places that didn’t have a sign out front or any indication that beyond those doors lay some of the most delicious food you ever tasted. I can close my eyes and be back there, in the garden of Los Chicos Chapultepec. To get to the Chicos, you have to walk through an antiques store that looks like your grandmother’s attic that hadn’t been cleaned out in decades. But in the back, there was Jago, manning the grill, serving up the most delicious tortas on his mother’s homemade bread—grilled octopus, short ribs with red chile sauce, chicken marinated with red onions. I mean, heaven.
Then there was Salvatore’s, my father’s favorite barbershop. You had to climb three flights of stairs in an old nineteenth-century building, but when you got to the top floor, you reached this beautiful loft, with midcentury modern furniture, everything slick and smooth like something out of Architectural Digest.
In one corner, there were two vintage barber chairs. On the far side of the room, there was a long banquette where Crista, Salvatore’s girlfriend, served up tapas and tonics. This was my father’s world, a whole city of places where he was known and loved and treated like a king. It was good that he had his Iron Man movie to voice over. It was nice that Rogelio Claro, his buddy, had come to town and the studio had rented Rogelio an apartment in the Wilshire district, just a fifteen-minute drive away. But Mexico City was a booming metropolis that my father knew como la palma de su mano, like the palm of his hand. Los Angeles was still, for him, a city of closed doors, and I knew that he sometimes felt like he would never see more than the back of Hollywood’s hand.
My mother’s show had received an order for what they call the front thirteen. Telenovelas are actually something between an American TV series and a series of movies. They tend to run, from beginning to end, every week for a year, and then the whole story line is complete. That show goes away, the characters go away, and a new telenovela starts. In the US, a show can go on for years and years, but each year you get, on average, about twenty-two episodes. When a show is new and they don’t know yet if it will be a hit, they order only thirteen episodes, aka “the front thirteen.” The idea was that the thirteen episodes offered some sort of resolution, so even if the show was canceled, all the people who actually did watch it could be satisfied that the characters they’d invested in had a little bit of a happy ending.
By the time we’d been in the US for a few months, it was like we were at that same, “Okay, so are they going to make it or not?” point. My mother seemed to be totally not stressed about work. As far as our family was concerned, she had it the easiest. She was like a college student studying abroad. The scenery was different, but her job—stay slim and sexy, learn her lines, and perform on camera—was much the same.
Even though my dad had a job, I could tell that he missed his life in Mexico City. That was his town, and he loved rolling up to restaurants and barbershops, cigar bars, and clubs like El Colmillo, with a posse of friends in tow and old friends waiting inside. Having Rogelio around helped, but it wasn’t the same. More and more, my dad complained about what he called “low hum racism”—nothing so big that it caused irreparable harm, nothing so epic that you wanted to file a case with La Raza, but incidents that messed with the general quality of your life, like interference on the radio when you’re jamming out to your favorite song, or the weird warp you get sometimes when you record a show in HD and the cable is being funky. For example, one night my father and Rogelio went out to a fancy tequila tasting. This asshole pulled up in a Jag and thought my father was the valet.
“Be careful not to scratch it,” the guy said, tossing my father the keys. “And no joy rides.”
My father said the guy was gone before he could even explain that he didn’t work there.
The actual valets, though, were peeping the whole thing and said, “Welcome to being brown in LA, hermano,” slapping my father on the back.
It wasn’t the end of the world, but still, my father said that it had been like a gnat flying around inside his head all night. No matter how many sips of five-hundred-dollar tequila he drank, the gnat wouldn’t go away.
At sixteen, I was too young to drive, and Uber was my lifeline in Los Angeles. I depended on it to take me to Willow’s house for tutoring sessions and to the Grove, the outdoor shopping center where Willow and Tiggy liked to hang. I did not tell them that I Ubered it everywhere. I lied and said I took the bus—everyone knew that the LA bus system was outdated, draconian, and borderline dangerous. All I had to say was “I’ll take the bus” to feel the warm blanket of sympathy thrown over me.
“Poor you,” Willow would coo. “I mean, the struggle is real.”
“You are a braver woman than me,” Tiggy would intone, her voice filled with admiration. As a now bona fide, semi-full-time liar, I kept my stories about the bus vague, making broad allusions to the Wilshire line, or changing on well-known streets like La Brea and Fairfax. Sure, sometimes I thought, “It is ridiculous that I walk three blocks away, hide behind a shrub, and call a town car to come get me.” But there was something vaguely spylike in the measures I took to protect my story, and what can I say, I was a kid who loved Nancy Drew.
The girls never asked me where I lived, exactly, or to come over to my house. Sometimes I found myself being a little offended, and I thought, “Why don’t you ever come over to my house?” Then I remembered that even if I’d wanted to, I could not invite them, because they did not expect me to live in a 1927 Spanish colonial with a pool and a guesthouse in the 90210. Hanging at my house would mean game over.
And yet, the more I lied to them, the more I discovered things about them that really touched me. One afternoon we were having an after-school chowdown at Blue Ribbon Sushi at the Grove.
I tried to eat only an appetizer, figuring that even a fourteen-dollar appetizer would be a lot for a girl like the one I was pretending to be. Willow noticed right away and ordered twice as much food as she could possibly eat. She kept pushing plates toward me and saying, “Hey, Cam, try this.” Or “OMG, this kanpachi with yuzu pepper is amazing. You’ve got to have some.”
Then when the bill came, Tiggy grabbed it and said, “It’s on me.” Willow tried to take it from her and said, “Nope, my treat.” And it was a little bit of a scene, the two of them fighting over the check until finally they agreed to split it.
I said, “Let me at least leave the tip. I insist. I’ve got money from my weekend babysitting job.”
Did I mention that I’d made up an imaginary babysitting job with an imaginary kid named Benicio? Really, I was the worst.
Willow finally agreed to let me tip, and I reached into my purse to pull out a crinkled twenty. (I spent a lot of time distressing the bills my dad gave me. For whatever reason, I thought if I was poor, my money wouldn’t be crispy and new.)
Then it happened. My AmEx black card fell out of my wallet. I grabbed it quickly, but Willow noticed it right away.
“Is that a black card?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“This?” I said. “Are you kidding?”
Tiggy motioned for me to hand it over, but I refused.
“I’m actually embarrassed,” I said, putting it back into my wallet. “I’ve been listening to a lot of motivational podcasts, and on one, this guy suggested that in order to be wealthy someday, you have to do creative visualizations. So I ordered this fake credit card online. I just wanted to imagine myself having all the money I could possibly need.”
Willow started to tear up. “I think that’s really wonderful, Camilla. What a positive way to approach your situation.”
I was the worst. Lo peor.
Tiggy, however, was unimpressed. “I’m really sorry to tell you, but I don’t think that positive-thinking stuff works. But you’re at Polestar. You’ll go to a good college. You’ll be solidly u
pper middle class one day. That’s something.”
Willow glared at her. “Wow, Tiggy. Way to be condescending and classist in five sentences or less.”
“I’m just speaking truth to power,” Tiggy said.
“It’s okay,” I told Willow. “I have faith in my dreams.”
—
That afternoon, as I waited at the bus stop for them to be far enough out of range so I could call an Uber, I told myself it wasn’t bad that they treated me all the time. It’s not like they couldn’t afford it. “They buy me food because I’m offering a service,” I thought. “I’ve constructed this identity, Camilla the Poor, and each day, I improvise the script like I’m starring in my own high school telenovela.” When I made Tiggy laugh or I saw Willow puff up with pride at how much her Spanish was improving, I thought, “This is working.” My show was working. My mother was not the only one with an order for the front thirteen.
Before we moved to California, I thought I was fluent in English. But in reality, I’d based this belief almost entirely on my ability to watch American movies and TV shows without subtitles and still keep up. Going to school in English—a competitive college prep school (progressive was more a “theory” than a reality)—was another thing entirely. Subjects that used to be easy for me, like history and literature, were all of a sudden hella hard.
I signed up for a class called Experimental Fiction, thinking it would be the magical realism authors that I loved, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Isabel Allende. None of those authors were on the syllabus for Experimental Fiction. That course focused on one book. It was a book about war, and I just didn’t get it. Every afternoon after school, I tried to be disciplined. I plopped myself at the kitchen table with my Spanish-English dictionary. (Sergio insisted that Google Translate was an unhelpful crutch when it came to academic work.) I vowed to devote an hour a day to the book. Most days I made it twenty minutes. Occasionally I made it forty minutes, but only when I ate a ton of candy, drank soda, and let myself be hopped up on sugar. Regardless, not once did I ever make it the whole hour. Every study session ended the same, with me banging my head on the table, murmuring, “No se puedo. No se puedo.” I just can’t.
If Polestar had been any other school, I would’ve failed the class. Instead, because of the progressive nature of the school, my teacher marked me as IM—Improvement Made, or about a B-minus. I joked with Sergio that IM actually stood for “Insane Mexican” because that was what I felt like the whole time I tried to read that book.
Like so many immigrants, I discovered that while I had a way with words in my own country, getting those words down on paper was a challenge in my new home. Math and science quickly became the domains where I could shine, which was why I was psyched when my counselor announced that I was being moved from regular chemistry to honors chemistry.
This turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag. I was happy to get called off the bench for honors chemistry. Then I saw her in the class, the Mexican-looking girl with the tattoos, and I think I actually shuddered.
The upside was that the honors chemistry teacher was a fantastical man named Mr. Agrabal. Unlike most of the other teachers at Polestar, he did not want us to address him by his first name. We called him Mr. Agrabal and he, in turn, called us by our surnames. He referred to me as Ms. del Valle, which made me feel grown-up. I liked it.
Mr. Agrabal dressed in a stunning array of perfectly pressed suits. My favorite was a purple suit with a peacock-blue shirt and bright blue paisley tie. But his suits ranged in color from robin’s-egg blue to sunset coral and everything in between. He seemed intent on teaching anything but chemistry. But I loved his class because he reminded me of my mother. You could tell that he loved life and he saw everything in that “bright lights, big city” way.
One afternoon, Mr. Agrabal said, “Pop quiz. How many people in this room are lactose intolerant?”
Three people raised their hands. He went over to each and squeezed their hands in his own. “My brothers and sisters in the struggle. I feel your pain. We live in California, a cheese lover’s paradise. But for those of us who suffer from this dreaded disease, temptation is only dwarfed by the gargantuan reality of the suffering that will follow.”
Meghan, a pretty girl with a long face that looked like it should be in a Modigliani painting, raised her hand. She said, “I eat cheese. I just take a pill.”
Mr. Agrabal shook his head and clucked softly under his breath as if he were consoling a crying child. “Perhaps because you are young and American born, these pills work for you. But for me, there is no cure. I must stay away from the cheese.”
Liam Baker, a tall, skinny kid with shoulder-length curly hair, raised his hand and asked, “I’m sorry, but what does any of this have to do with organic chemistry?”
Mr. Agrabal spun around and shot him the most withering glare. I half expected a wand to magically appear in Mr. Agrabal’s hand and for the walls to shake, as if he was a character from Harry Potter. He was that wizardly.
“Cheese is organic chemistry, Mr. Baker,” Mr. Agrabal growled. “Or are you not using your brain? More important, science is useless without the element of human compassion. Or are you not familiar with a little invention called the atom bomb?”
Liam rolled his eyes. “Sure. But we pay a lot of money to come to this school. I want to learn something useful.”
At this point, I physically gasped. Back home in Mexico, no one would ever talk to a teacher that way. Not even loudmouthed Patrizia. At my school in Mexico, the men wore suits and the women wore crisp, starched cotton shirtdresses in shades of white, navy, or charcoal gray. I did not know their first names, where they lived, what they liked to eat. What they taught us seemed so prescribed, so mandated from up on high, that I never questioned where the lessons came from or how we might deviate from them.
I didn’t even notice that anyone had noticed my reaction, but Mr. Agrabal came running over to me. “You,” he said, pointing at me as if he were wielding a sorting hat. “Compassion. I heard it. Stand up. Rise up!”
I stood nervously. “To the board, Ms. del Valle. You will help me document the bounty of cheeses available in the western region of these United States.”
He then pointed to Liam. “And you will write me a twenty-page double-spaced paper about the invention of the atom bomb and the push and pull between the compassionately minded members of the scientific community and how they struggled against the political ambitions of the governments they served.”
Liam looked stunned. “Are you kidding me? Due when?”
Mr. Agrabal said, “Due Monday.”
Liam pushed his desk away, steamed. “No way. My family’s going to our house in Jackson Hole this weekend. I can’t do it.”
For me, it was like watching a telenovela come to life. Who talked to a teacher that way?
Mr. Agrabal took the chalk and wrote on the board “#firstworldproblems.”
Liam groaned, “You’re insane.”
My mouth just hung open. How could he talk that way to the authority figure in the room?
Mr. Agrabal just smiled. “Let compassion be your polestar, Mr. Baker, or I will have you write another twenty-page paper on the power dynamics between humanitarians and their scientific allies and the political powers that agitated the rise of the nuclear bomb.”
Liam put his head on the desk and began to bang it slowly.
“Very dramatic, Mr. Baker. Are you planning to major in theater?” Mr. Agrabal asked, grinning. “Someone let me know if he draws blood, and we’ll call the school physician.
“Ms. del Valle!”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“To the board!” he said, handing me the chalk. “Let’s talk cheese.” He looked practically ecstatic, like my mother when her stylist came in with a Louis Vuitton trunk full of just-off-the-runway, not-yet-in-stores clothing.
“What is your favorite kind of cheese, dear?” he asked.
I thought about it, the
n answered, “Cotija.”
He said the word again, as if he could taste it just by pronouncing it. “Cotija. Amazing. Tell me more about this cheese.”
“It’s a Mexican cheese…,” I began nervously. The whole class was staring at us, and I wasn’t used to being onstage. “It’s named after the town where it was first made, Cotija, which is in a part of Mexico called Michoacán.”
“Fascinating!” Mr. Agrabal said. “And what are its properties?”
“It’s a crumbly, white cheese. Salty, like feta.”
“It sounds scrumptious,” Mr. Agrabal said, feasting on my words.
“When it ages, it gets hard and takes on a quality like Parmesan.”
“And how do you serve it?”
In an instant, I was transported back to our kitchen in Mexico. Albita was standing at the counter, grating Cotija over our dinner salad.
“You can grate it over a salad. Or you can sprinkle it on a taco. It’s also good in soup.”
“Splendid!” Mr. Agrabal cheered. “Write it on the board.”
And that is what I did for the next forty-five minutes. I wrote the names of cheeses and their properties on the board. Cotija. Gruyère. Manchego. Cheddar. Vermont cheddar. White Cheddar. Colby. Colby Jack. Brie. It was crazy, but it was fun. Liam was wrong. It was an education. An education in life.
I left the class almost giddy. I couldn’t wait to get home and give Sergio my daily report. I’d just come out of that crazy chemistry class when the cutest boy in the world came up to me. He said, “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m white Max.”
What I thought was: “I must be having one of those moments.” Sometimes when I was tired, my brain got lazy and didn’t translate properly.
What I said was: “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”
The Go-Between Page 9