I left the table to call Amá.
Amá sounded eager to talk on the phone. What mother wouldn’t want this for her son?
“Everything went well, Amá. They said I passed.”
“Thank God, mijo. Thank God. What else did they say?
“Nothing really, they just asked Rubi a lot of questions, but it went well.”
Toward the end, her voice was cracking as if I had disturbed her prayer, as if she had never stopped praying, even though she must have known it was over by then, and was only waiting for my signal to cut her tie with God.
*
I had an international calling card in my wallet to call my dad back in Mexico because I knew he would want to know too. I always carried one just in case. Two dollars gave me fifteen minutes. I dialed the ten numbers on the card, then the ten numbers from the PIN that I scratched off like a lotto ticket, then the international code for Mexico (0–11–52), and finally the actual ten-digit number I needed to reach. It was a small miracle when the call finally went through, and even more of a miracle if the line didn’t cut off while it rang, and more so if Apá actually answered.
“Hi Apá, I had my interview today, did you remember?”
“Yes, of course I remembered, how did it go?”
“Everything went well, I think.”
“That’s great, mijo. I’m happy for you.”
We didn’t talk for long. After a few awkward silences and asking how things were over there, and him asking how things were over here, and both of us saying the same thing to each other, I hung up. Leaving was always easy; hanging up took less than a second, and just like that, I was back in the restaurant, dipping more chips into the little pig, which they replaced with another one with green salsa.
Maybe if it took just as long to hang up, having to repeat the same process of dialing but in reverse, perhaps I would stay and talk for longer, maybe then I would be a different son.
“What did your dad say?” asked Rubi.
“Not much, just that he was happy.”
I didn’t want to sound excited over the phone because I didn’t want to come across as if I was rubbing salt on an already infected wound. So instead I decided to keep it short and cold, which was not a difficult thing to do with my father, but it hurt to do so with Amá.
*
I wasn’t sure if Amá and Apá would have passed if they took the same test. I didn’t know if Amá ever really loved Apá, even in the beginning. Maybe they had a secret language of affection between the two of them that was hidden from everyone else. Perhaps leaving was his best way of caring for us and showing his love for us. I had never seen them be affectionate toward each other—never seen them kiss, no sly side-winks, no cute nicknames, nor had I even seen them hug each other for long. The closest I could remember seeing them was when they would get together for a picture, and even then Apá would always look mad, gripping Amá’s shoulder tightly and letting go as soon as the picture was taken.
I, on the other hand, was always tragically, hopelessly in love with too many people growing up. I wasn’t sure if I only liked girls, I didn’t know what to call what I felt. I knew what love was, but I didn’t know how to direct it. Maybe Amá and Apá didn’t yet know they loved each other, even after so many years, just like I thought I knew what love was but didn’t know how to love yet. When I was a child, when Apá was still present, I wanted some kind of confirmation that love was possible outside of the movies I watched and the Harlequin books I was too young to be reading. I watched Amá and Apá love each other in their mysterious ways, but I wanted to see proof of more. Maybe love had nothing to do with it.
*
After finishing our meal and all the salsa we could eat, we took the back roads home. Every few seconds, I looked down to check how fast I was going. It was a habit I picked up after years of driving without a license and which was heightened after the county jail, Yuba County, began cooperating with ICE by handing over inmates they suspected to be undocumented. A third of the inmate population in the county jail were ICE detainees awaiting trial. A simple traffic stop had suddenly turned into potential grounds for a deportation. The cautious habit never went away.
Sometimes I would spend more time obsessing over how fast I was going than paying attention to the road ahead. On a few occasions I almost crashed while going exactly somewhere between sixty-five and sixty-nine miles per hour on the freeway. That was a good range. I liked that range because it didn’t look suspicious. That range told a story: it sent the message that I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry but that I had nothing to hide. It didn’t draw any suspicion toward me. Anything less would have been too slow and made it seem like I especially didn’t want to be pulled over. Going exactly sixty-five was too obvious, it was obsessive. Anything above seventy was too fast and started to get dangerous. Any cop on a bad day could technically call that speeding.
So I drove home trying to go in that sweet range. It made it difficult to concentrate on anything else, especially to follow conversations. Rubi scolded me for not paying attention to her, but I screamed and pointed at the speedometer and exclaimed that I was trying to concentrate. I apologized, and we stayed mostly quiet all the way home.
*
How many of these antics would soon loosen their grip on me as I became more comfortable, as I gradually eased into my position as a person with papers? A ticket could now be just a ticket, I didn’t have to think of it as a deportation, but somehow it wasn’t as easy as that. I knew the voice would still be in my head, telling me ICE could return for me at any minute, and the cameras would always be on, giving me the feeling that I was always being watched. The feeling of surveillance, I feared, would never go away.
What behaviors would be lost, and which ones would I keep? Would the fear nestled in every joint of my body finally be massaged away, so I could let go of the tension that I had been holding for so many years?
I had modified my behavior for so much of my life that I knew I would have to work hard to undo some of those habits, like staring down at how fast I was going, like staying quiet even when I should be screaming. Some of those behaviors could take years to undo, and others might have been irreversible. Being undocumented said nothing about me or my identity, but it did inform a lot of my behavior. There were things about me that became automatic, that over the years I came to do without thinking. I would have to pull myself back and adjust. I had to recalibrate—to enter the world as someone who was there, someone who was present. I finally had the liberty to do things as minor as saying my name out loud, and still at times I kept silent.
Maybe I wasn’t as present as I thought; maybe my interviewer was right when she said “Welcome to America.”
Laugh now. Laugh hard. Spit out your food.
10.
For years, to rid myself of anxiety, I got into the habit of asking myself questions in the second person in my journal. And I always answered as if having an actual conversation with myself. It was good to articulate and vocalize what was bothering me because it would fester if it just spun in circles in my head. I had been doing this long before my immigration interview. It was also a way to trick myself into saying something I might otherwise have not.
“Marcelo, are you tired?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you tired?”
“I don’t know, I just am, okay.”
“Okay. Is there something bothering you, Marcelo?”
“Kind of . . .”
“Can you tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so, shoot.”
“The other day, you were there, remember, I said something out loud in class that I regret saying.”
I wrote to myself day after day. I interviewed myself as if I was someone famous.
“So, tell me, who are you excited about these days?”
“Oh, you know, the usual suspects.”
“I don’t!”
“Well . . .”
“You don’t say!”
&nb
sp; It was a form of confession, and although I am not a Catholic, I believed in confession, in repeating the same prayer to dislodge whatever it was that was trapped inside me. I never went to church, but I wanted to confess to my friends all of the terrible things I had done to see if anyone would still love me.
But I was a coward. Instead, I interviewed myself and made fake Twitter accounts to anonymously declare what I was too afraid to tell anyone. It was a form of talking to myself, like a confession box. No one was listening, but that wasn’t the point. My Twitter handle got followed by bots and shirt companies. They didn’t care what I did. They just wanted to sell me things made in countries I had never been to by people in sweatshops who looked like me. As much as I tried, I couldn’t find anyone I could tell everything about me.
Once, I tweeted to my actual account “I’m a terrible person,” but people thought it was a joke. They replied with emoji faces that kissed or winked. I deleted the tweet and posted the same thing to my fake accounts and got ads for coupons, which I ended up using.
I never told anyone about these conversations, but one day, when I was teaching undergrads, out of some wild obsession to confess in front of people, to prove some point I can no longer remember, I told my students about my self-interviews, and they didn’t believe me until I took out my laptop, connected it to the projector, and showed them. “Oh,” one of them said, and the rest stayed quiet for the remainder of the class. We never mentioned it again.
I was just tired of keeping things inside for so long that I wasn’t sure if I could keep them in me any longer. But still, there was no one I could trust enough to give all of myself completely. There were still things I couldn’t say even to Rubi. Would there ever be, in my lifetime, a point in which I could say absolutely everything about myself with complete abandon, without fear of judgment or repercussions? I was always afraid I would say too much, but part of me drank with other people because I knew that was the only way to say anything significant about me.
*
I kept asking myself more questions in my journals day after day as I waited for my green card to arrive in the mail. “You look nervous, why are you nervous”? I waited by the mailbox every day for weeks, just in case it might arrive early. I didn’t have much time because summer would be over soon, and I would have to fly back to Michigan for the start of the semester. On the day it was scheduled to arrive, there was construction on the road near my mother’s mailbox, so the mail carrier decided not to deliver mail that day. It was as simple as that—there were a few cones on a Friday from a utility truck, and the mail carrier decided not to bother with maneuvering around them. The card was sent back to a main office in Texas and destroyed. It was their policy; maybe they didn’t want any good cards floating around out there and risk being forged. They would have to make a new one, and I would have to fill out more forms explaining why.
After screaming at a post office employee who quickly told me I had to leave, or they would call the police, I sat in my car for what seemed like hours. I would have never screamed at a federal employee before. That was something new. I started the engine and drove away, going faster and faster down the road. I didn’t care about going sixty-seven. I wanted to run a red light, to blow a stop sign, to swerve through the lanes as if something was chasing me. Maybe something was chasing me, but I didn’t care if it found me anymore. Maybe the card should have gone to someone else indeed. Someone with kids to feed, someone whose parents were dying back home, and with it they could finally go see them. Her toothbrush is red, I love her now.
I revved the engine faster.
Waiting for my second green card to arrive, I had more of an urge to expose all of my secrets even if no one was asking, even if no one was around to listen: “I still wet the bed occasionally when it is cold, I don’t always brush my teeth, I am jealous of so many people who have their first book published before me.” It was a long summer. It almost made sense to be that sad. If I were my father, I would have sold my sadness for two dollars. I thought about my new friends back in grad school and wanted to paint their portraits from my memory of the day I told them I was undocumented. I wished that I had been raised Catholic so that I at least could go to church and do the real thing; confession. What I wanted most was to tell somebody, anybody, anything.
I wrote more interviews in my journals and covered certain words up with Barbie stickers that I bought at a Dollar General. It occurred to me, sitting in my car in the parking lot of that same Dollar General, in search of cheap balloons for a party which I did not care about, that I was allowed to be sad, the bad kind of sad, not the hot kind, or the glamorous kind, but the kind that makes people want to call for help or turn away. I picked out the brightest balloons, paid, and mouthed the words “happy birthday to you” in a dark room lit by everyone’s phone cameras.
I entered all of my emails from five years into a cloud engine and the most used word was “okay.” I spent many nights obsessing over the placement of the furniture. If I could, I would have given away my boredom, I would have given away my obligations, my desires. I would have given away the night I danced, and danced, and danced at a child’s birthday party, drunk and by myself, pretending I was happy.
*
My time in California was up. I had to return to the Midwest, back to school for the fall, and the card would take months to resend. Still, my mother waited by the mailbox just as I did, just as if the card was for her. Every day she shuffled hurriedly with her slippers scraping the cement to see what had come. When it finally came, she asked if she could open it. “Yes, Amá, of course,” I said over the phone. They shipped it to me, and I tracked it carefully on my bright computer screen, anxiously waiting for the next update—L.A., Phoenix, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit.
They wrapped it inside the pages of George Orwell’s 1984—it was one of the only books left in my room back home, the only one I didn’t bother bringing with me to grad school. I held the package tightly beneath my arm as I walked down the street. No one knew why I was smiling, but they did what good strangers would do, they smiled back. Maybe there were no cameras. I wasted so much of my life for nothing.
Third Movement: Sentence Served
Suppose a father dresses his two-year-old child in cowboy attire and places him on a black mare with the intention of taking a picture. The mother watches from the window because there is nothing she can say to stop him. Suppose the father takes a picture and the camera shutter scares the horse away with the child on top. The mother walks back to the house out of shock, she doesn’t want to see what she thinks will inevitably happen—her boy coming apart in small pieces behind a horse that runs faster from the weight dangling behind her, a body that might eventually look like a snake at some point—no hands, no feet, just a skinny thing of red.
But the child doesn’t fall, he holds on to the mane of that mare with his small fists like pom-poms bunched together in the coarse hair, which makes the horse run even faster. Suppose a man down the road manages to stop the horse and grabs the child, but only the father, running up, catching his breath, can pry his small fingers loose. The horse looks shaken, her large eyes nearly jumping out of their sockets as if to keep running on their own.
Perhaps that man who stopped the mare knew something my father didn’t, knew how to calm her with a child dangling on her mane. The horse didn’t stop for my father because she wasn’t supposed to. I wonder what that man said to make her slow down. Maybe it wasn’t “Stop.” Maybe it was something more like “Please.” I imagine my father leaning into the mare, saying “I’m sorry,” distracting her while he gently pried my small hands open.
Suppose the mother does not leave the house that day, rubbing aloe vera on the blistered palms of her boy. “Why didn’t you just let go?” she asks, but he doesn’t respond because he doesn’t talk yet and it will take him a while before he does. The father sits outside on a plastic chair, mending the horse’s saddle. He rubs it down with oil until it’s soft and shiny. He wa
lks over to the horse tied to a tree, still a little shaken, and says, “I’m sorry” while he caresses her muzzle and brushes her sweaty and muscular back.
1.
It took leaving California for Michigan to realize that there was a greater kind of loneliness to fall into, that there were even more ways an immigrant could bury his past. I took for granted how much growing up in California quietly consoled me just by being in the presence of people like me. But in the frigid Michigan snow, in its humid summers, in small corn-fed towns that I’m sure meant well when their people asked me “So what are you?” I had to recalibrate who I was to those around me.
Rubi and I had only been in the Midwest for two years, and already we hungered to reclaim and resurface the identities of our culture that we’d hidden for so many years. We were suddenly loud when speaking Spanish in public, and slowly the letter I started making its way into my poems. I was finally able to find enough courage to say even a little about myself, where I had come from, and where I was at in life. It took distance from all that was familiar to me, to be placed in a completely new environment for the first time, to see with some objectivity some of the madness I put myself through, and which in turn I was subjected to.
Rubi dropped out of school in Sacramento when we made the move. We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into, because I was the first undocumented student in the program’s history, and I wasn’t exactly sure how things would play out with funding and graduation requirements, if I ever made it to graduation at all. But I was given the opportunity, and I took it. I was grateful. Be grateful. On our first day in Ann Arbor, we sat in a bus looking at the Gothic architecture of the university buildings and I said to Rubi, “This is it, all of our troubles are finally over.” I was so naive. But in the two years after we moved, things got considerably better. I got DACA, which was what allowed me to go see Apá, and shortly after I got my green card, which meant I had an ID, which meant I could finally go to the bar with my cohorts after the workshop instead of asking Rubi to buy liquor for me and drinking alone at home. I liked going to different bars just to slowly pull out my newly minted ID from my wallet like the punch line of a joke. Eventually they stopped asking me after I showed my face enough and became a “regular,” but I insisted on pulling it out and making them look at it each time, slapping it hard on the marble slab bar. Being away from our family and friends was hard on both of us, and we both turned inward, away from each other.
Children of the Land Page 10