Although the oldest, she was still the only girl, and though Apá reluctantly allowed her to participate after days of pleading, he grew furious when he saw her atop the truck and pulled her down. He yanked her arm all the way home, with the long train of her dress dragging behind; the music from the band continued playing, the party went on without her, without its queen.
The next day her pastor pointed to her in front of the congregation and proclaimed that she was a sinner. She was banished from leading the choir and had to beg forgiveness from God and the church for parading herself on top of a truck, a very worldly offense. She raised her hands and fainted every Sunday and rose back up as if she were a bored Lazarus who was tired of resurrection.
Apá sat her at the kitchen table and read off Bible passages to her even though he hadn’t gone to church in years. The town took the dress back and said they would use it again for next year’s queen.
4.
I drove an hour into the city and asked Rubi to record a short video of me saying something—anything. I wanted to document my voice so that I could look back later to try to remember that moment.
“How do you feel?” asked Rubi, holding her phone up as we walked away from our car toward the federal building in downtown Sacramento.
“I’m fine,” I said, wringing my fingers together. Whatever happened after my interview, I would look back to that video to search for any signs, to see if something was trying to tell me that things would be okay. Maybe I would see that something in the background was trying to warn me to turn around, even if it meant giving up the prospect of ever getting a green card. If the interview didn’t go well, I knew I could be sent into removal proceedings.
We entered the large federal building with our lawyer. It seemed like no one was inside, as if we had just entered a building dedicated entirely to myself, to granite and paper. This was a place built for the questioning of people and their stacks and stacks of papers, a simulacra of human lives. I wondered who cleaned the building at night because I could almost see my reflection walking below on the granite floor.
The first floor was dedicated to ICE removal operations, and the second floor was Homeland Security business. Most people think they’re the same thing, but they’re not. People—for the most part—were removed from the country on the first floor, and others were considered for entrance on the second floor. We were going to the second floor. My father’s paperwork, gathered over the years, was probably somewhere in a box on the first.
My lawyer looked preoccupied with something else, relaxed, even bored. It must have been so routine to him, like dropping off mail, or waiting at the drive-through for a burger. The wood paneling made the whole second floor seem more judicial than the first, like a courtroom where we were either confessing or swearing allegiance already, even though there wasn’t a country at the other end to receive me. If we succeeded, there was a paper, not a country; I still belonged to Mexico.
*
After quietly waiting in a lobby on hard wooden benches, instructed not to speak, our names were called and we were led into a comfortable office that looked like a guidance counselor’s office with a large framed poster of Barack Obama smiling down on us, with all of his hair still dark. The picture was certainly taken on the day of his swearing-in to office—before the drones, before the quarter million deported on his watch, when things still seemed possible. Everything still seemed possible then.
Small indoor plants lined the window, and soccer pictures of someone’s kids adorned the walls. My lawyer edged closer to whisper in my ear, “We’re lucky, we got the good one,” and I wondered if he said that because of the soccer pictures and the ficus plants or if he actually knew the officer. And by “good,” did he mean understanding, compassionate, or jaded so as to not really care about the impacts of her decisions anymore? He knew more than me. He had surely been in that very office before. He sat back in his chair as if his job was done, as if we had passed the test already.
I wanted it to be like TV. I wanted there to be variations of a laugh track to the mundane answers of my uneventful life. I wanted my uneventful life to sound eventful, thought-provoking even—“You mix eggs with what!?” But the room was quiet. Unlike the interviews on TV, I didn’t have a mug to drink from on the table. I didn’t wear my sunglasses indoors, and there was no musical accompaniment to punctuate our comebacks.
In effect, what I was yet again doing was crossing the border, inside that small office, with Obama staring down at me.
I wore the bluer shirt because it reminded me of the water at Bridgeport, a swimming hole up in the Sierra Nevada in Northern California. It was the only place where I felt absolute stillness, where I could comfortably dive until my head felt like it was going to collapse from the pressure. I had been that deep before in the ocean, but only at Bridgeport did the pressure feel both safe and not. Unlike the ocean, where it seemed like you could go in any direction forever and the pressure would only mount, there at the river, it was shallow yet deep enough to provide the feeling of being pushed toward your center, so I was never afraid of descending, never afraid I would go too deep without being able to rise. I could see the finite dimensions of the river—I knew what was at the bottom, I knew what was at the top. I knew how long it would take to get there. I wore the darker shirt because I imagined that like those bioluminescent creatures, even I could be capable of light—the kind of light only visible from the bottom, looking up.
*
We knew how we were supposed to answer, and they knew how to expect us to answer. It was a show. There was nothing new about any of it. I asked Rubi the questions as we climbed into bed at night. I found them online one night and printed them out. On some nights, however, we didn’t interrogate each other with our interview in mind.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“No, I mean, do you actually love me?”
“Yes, I do, why do you have to keep asking?”
“What’s my grandmother’s name?”
“Which one, Sarah or Julia?”
My lawyer held a large legal folder against his chest that detailed everything about me, and yet nothing. It had dates, addresses, pictures, and names, but it didn’t have the things I was afraid of, nor what I longed for. It recorded the past but not what it meant for the future. I was interested in what would change about me after that interview. I wanted to record every moment to see if there was something I missed there in that office too.
Suddenly a woman opened the door, sat down at the desk before us and began the interview.
5.
It’s a call-and-response. One announced the space into being, and the other filled it. “What is your name?” said the first voice. “Marcelo,” said the second.
“Why are you here?”
“Because we want to remain together.”
“And who is she?”
“I’ve known her almost all my life, she is my wife, and I love her.”
Between us was a synonym for a barrier through which only certain things could pass. My name could pass, Rubi’s name, how we met, how long we had been married. All of this could pass—information, which was free to move like air or animals over the border. However, there were still things that could not—how much we wanted it to be over, all the bad things we had to do over the years to survive as immigrants, and what I really wanted to say to the woman and to every guard I smiled to on the way up to her office. I still had to be polite.
I was speaking beyond the officer and to the entire country itself. Between us, a desk, but it might as well have been a long stretch of road. Long for its distance, but also for how narrow. She gave me something, and I turned it around and gave it back to her. Our language moved back and forth. It was like dancing reluctantly to a song that I hated—to a song that reminded me of someone I would rather forget. We were throwing stones into a deep pond and trying to figure out how deep it was by its sound. I would say something and see the ripples of its re
verberation in the air. I would see it sink deep inside my interviewer as she nodded and pondered each of my answers to her questions, trying to decide if they were real. I imagined the entire building was vibrating with the small ripples of those afterthoughts when it was too late to take anything back—“I shouldn’t have said that, . . . I should have said this instead.” There were countless small rooms just like the one I was in where people nodded their head and said yes, or no, and watched a government worker scribble something on their notepad.
“Do you understand that marrying someone under any fraudulent circumstances in order to be granted any kinds of immigration benefits is a federal crime?”
“Yes, we do.”
*
Her tone was casual. It almost sounded like she wanted to be our friend, as if she was inviting us to her spin class at the gym. Perhaps we had stood in the same lines at the DMV, and taken our dogs to the same dog park, and waited in line at the same bank with the same blank face everyone has on when they wait at the bank. Yes, there was nothing different about her. She clocked in and out just like I did at work. She went home and probably had the same problems at home as I did—bills, and dog shit to clean, and more bills. But behind her easy demeanor was something my mother taught me to fear—the warmth and tenderness of someone who could hurt you. She didn’t look like La Migra. She didn’t talk how I imagined La Migra would talk. But did I ever imagine La Migra as having a body, as having a mouth? Did I ever think it could be reduced to one person sitting behind a desk in front of me?
“Where did you two meet? I’m asking her now, not you, sir.”
“That’s a tricky question,” Rubi said. “There wasn’t one particular place, we were always just there.”
I wondered if the officer followed the lives of the people she denied, or if each meeting was just another day at the office. I couldn’t imagine her keeping track of that many people, years after their encounter. But no doubt there were a few cases that remained in the back of her mind. People’s faces she couldn’t seem to forget, their stories that haunted her in the shower.
“Where do each of you work?”
“We’re kind of in between jobs right now.”
“I see.” She said and scribbled something on her note pad.
*
When someone asked me what I did for a living, I never said I was a poet. Instead I would cut the conversation short and just say I was a teacher, and after a smile and nod, no one would usually ask any follow-up questions. I preferred the terseness of such interactions. It was a boring response—it was safe. There was no more room for the imagination in that response. I didn’t want to tell people I was a poet because I didn’t want to explain (mostly to white people) what led me to writing, which would be followed by something like “I bet it was a great outlet of expression for such a hard life you lived.” I usually had to spend a considerable amount of time trying to convince them (and perhaps myself) that I, indeed, was a poet. If someone asked my immigration interviewer what she did for a living, I wondered if she said she worked as an immigration agent, deciding who stays and who goes from the country, separating families as par for the course, or if she simply said she works in government, or perhaps she kept it blander and simply said “the public sector,” yes, “I work for the state.”
“How long did you know each other before you started dating?” she asked
“I’m not sure,” I said.
*
I looked over at Rubi and remembered everything we had been through, like the time she left me in the summer of 2007, which led me to get a large tattoo on my back. When I saw her for the first time in the months after our breakup, I didn’t know what to say, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was that I got a tattoo, which wasn’t true. She asked to see it, but I said no, because there was obviously nothing there. Hours later that same afternoon, I went to the first tattoo shop I could find, pointed at whichever artist didn’t seem to be busy, as if I was getting a haircut, and sat for four painful hours over the course of two days as they needled the largest cliché I could point to in their portfolio of pictures of red chapped skin with fresh ink from the needle. I stood up and held a mirror against another mirror to see, still a little bloody, and headed straight to Rubi with large wings on my back.
With each new question our interviewer was getting to know us better—testing the waters. Her job was one predicated on doubt. It was her job not to believe us. It was her job to unravel the story of us until it was replaced with one absent of love—an absence she could prove on paper, distill to its basest form, and perhaps even measure. And wasn’t that what I did in my poems? Distill love into something that could never come close to love?
“What are his parents like? And same to you, what are hers like? Where do they live, and do you see them often?”
She trafficked in the images of legitimacy, trained in spotting the subtleties of body language in order to detect a sham green card wedding and tell it from the real thing. How close do they sit to each other? Do they smile, do they look at each other when they talk? It was our job to show her what we had shown the world, and to do it without thinking about doing it.
“What year did each of you enter the U.S.?”
“It’s funny, we arrived just about the same time—1992 and 1993.”
“Can you tell me all of the schools the other has gone to?”
But what if love had nothing to do with either her decision to legitimize our marriage or our decision to continue as such? If not love, then what? On what basis could they recognize us as a complete unit? Commitment? Were they looking for some kind of promise between two people? “I promise to pay half of the bills with you, I promise to not use up all of the hot water in the shower, I promise that if we ever have children, I will work tireless hours to give them a better life.” Or were the characteristics for validity more physical—did I have a tan line beneath my wedding ring, which indicated how often I wore it? Did I have calluses in my palm from wearing it?
Some people could spend their entire lives together without love. I went to a therapist once who told me that after a certain time, love had little to do with staying together, that we build our lives around comfort.
“Do you plan on having children?”
“Not at the moment, ma’am, we want to finish school first.”
If I told her, “Yes, I am married to this woman, but I am not in love with her. I will commit my entire life to her, but not my heart,” would she automatically deny my application?
If I said, “I’ve been married to this woman and am barely learning to love her, but I know I am possible of loving her more in the future,” would that be cause enough for rejection? What if I did not love her at that moment, but I was willing to let myself try? Would they take a gamble on me? Some people fall in love, and then they fall more in love with time. I thought about Amá and Apá. Maybe for them, the possibility of learning to love each other was disrupted when they were separated by immigration. Rubi and I had started to become distant since moving to the Midwest for school, even though we had been through so much. Perhaps I occupied the first scenario: “I am possible of loving her more in the future.”
“How did you propose, sir?”
“She actually was the one who proposed to me.”
What if I told her I loved this woman in particular, but I also spent many nights dreaming of a man? A no-name man who didn’t do much in my dreams except sit by himself at a diner, eating a big piece of American apple pie? What would she do with our desires? I imagine a line in her notebook, and a box, and a checkmark, and a long pause followed by some notes in the margins. And it was true, Rubi and I had begun to distance ourselves from each other ever since I came to terms with my sexuality. I told her I was bi that same summer, and she didn’t take it as well as I thought she would. I told her nothing would change between us because of this revelation, but perhaps that’s what bothered her most, that nothing would change.
What if
my answer was the opposite of growth? What if I said: “I love her to death now, but I know I will no longer love her in the years to come, not out of choice but out of gradual neglect,” what would happen then? I couldn’t possibly expect them to believe that love was a constant, that once you had it you had all of it forever, that it was like an object you could hold and call yours.
“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
“We never went on one, we couldn’t afford it.”
They wanted definite answers to the indefinite, beyond simply is your marriage real. They wanted the specific outline of love. Undoubtedly, between ours and the thousands of other interviews, happening in rooms just like that one, across the country with countless other dark-haired Obamas soon to be peppered with worry and compromise looking down, they must have believed that their data pointed to a collective consensus. Love equals [blank].
*
Of course our marriage was real, but she wanted to know if I married Rubi for the right reasons. And did I? In that moment, it was, if ever so briefly, that woman’s job to determine what love was and compare her definition to what she saw sitting before her.
Did I look like I was in love? Did I carry my body like that of someone who dreamed of another? Was there something in the way I said “yes,” or “no,” or even “please?” I could always tell when someone was in love; I could see it in their eyes.
She asked us questions about our bodies and things that came in contact with our bodies.
“Are there any distinctive moles or birthmarks on your wife?”
“What color is her toothbrush?”
“What side of the bed does she sleep on?”
“Is your husband left- or right-handed?”
She wanted to know if we had moved beyond being simply intimate and into the world of the mundane. Had we moved passed the moments of mere sexual excitement and into the more repetitive spaces of domestic life? But there was not enough time to explain the intimacy of silence, of our own secret language, so many years in the making. I doubted she would even understand.
Children of the Land Page 8