Children of the Land
Page 11
*
In the warmth of our small apartment near campus in December 2014, surrounded by partying undergrads, I began packing for a flight to Ciudad Juárez to see Apá. After he’d waited ten years in deportation, his own immigration interview at the U.S. Embassy had finally arrived. Now that I had a green card, it was agreed that it was my responsibility to handle “matters of the family.” It felt good to be needed like that; it made it seem like I was putting my green card to good use, like I deserved it. It made me not feel as guilty as when I first received it.
I took everything out of my luggage and spread it on the floor, a travel habit I acquired to make sure I knew exactly every single item that went into my bags. This would be the first time I used my green card to leave the country, and I didn’t want anything to go wrong. I could hear drunken frat brothers screaming outside. They were always so loud, always so angry. I held my green card in my hand and felt the raised lettering on its surface—16 FEB 1988 M. I looked heavy in the picture. I had gained a lot of weight since moving to the Midwest. My long mustache looked like my father’s, as did my hair parted to the side. The crooked smile was mine alone. The grooves on my fingerprint on the bottom right side swirled clockwise.
*
The winter air was a cold that I still was not familiar with, one that I didn’t think I would ever completely understand. Just before evening, when I didn’t know if the sun was still there or not—so far behind the clouds that it was only the idea of a sun—it looked like everything was crouching down a little—the cars, the houses, the trash cans lined on the road. Just then, and only then, when everything felt closer to the earth, like it was being slowly pulled by a thin rope toward the warmth at the center, a blue descended on the backs of everything—a kind of blue I had never seen back in California, a cerulean blue that seemed older than the things it touched, as if it was not from here but had taken a long time to arrive. And when it did, it felt eternal, though it only lasted about an hour before the boredom of the dark took over again.
And when the blue was gone, I felt like I could breathe again, like I could go back outside into the night and walk upright again. When it left, it was as if someone had unplugged a TV hissing its white noise in the background of a sad party where everyone suddenly blinks and looks around, aware for the first time that they’re even at a party. You never knew it was there until it wasn’t. When it left, it almost felt like it would never come back—it was hard to believe that anything like that could be done twice. And yet it did, it came back every afternoon in winter, weighing things down, making it difficult to move.
I found it hard to speak when the sky looked like that. It took more effort to open the hinges of my jaw. I had felt that way in the hot California summers too, only different. There was no blue, but a particular brightness. At the hottest time of the day, the air would stop. It was difficult to speak, people crouched a little lower too, a little farther from the sun. The stray dogs outside would walk in maddening circles, their heavy tongues hanging to the side like broken arms. But in the northern Midwest, there were different reasons to wander back and forth like aimless dogs. None of which involved the sun.
*
I finished packing my bags and put my green card on the table. The dark outside didn’t interest me as much as the blue, which had long since left, transformed into the very things it weighed down. The dark didn’t come from anywhere else, it was always there, it was as much a part of this world as anything you could buy at Walmart. It was cheap, it fit neat and orderly in every corner of the street. When I saw my father the next day, I would tell him about the blue. I would ask him if he had ever seen anything like it. I would ask if he felt the same ropes that I did, tugging him toward the ground.
2.
I liked to take walks late at night to get out of my head. “I’m going for a walk,” I said to Rubi, who was wrapped in a blanket on the small sofa we bought at the Salvation Army. We were never planning on living in the Midwest for long, so there was no point in buying anything new. It felt like nothing in the house belonged to me, like I was just borrowing it from someone whom I would never meet. It felt natural to me to move and not be tied to any of my furniture. Never in my life had I bought a brand-new couch, not necessarily because I couldn’t afford it, because there were times when I could, but because I had the feeling that our residence was always temporary. I hated to admit that it was easier to throw away a couch and buy another used one at a thrift store than to try to ship or move it.
I put on my heavy jacket, my hat, gloves, and snow boots. I liked having to put all of it on. It made even going outside for a moment feel like an event, like something special I needed to prepare myself for. It took a long time to put everything on, to lace my boots all the way up, and I appreciated that I needed to slow down just to be able to stand outside. It was never like that back home. The outside felt like the inside, especially after the ICE raid; there was not much to keep the two apart. One just turned into the other. It didn’t feel special to go outside; you changed nothing about you, so once you were there, you hardly noticed. I stood there at the door fully clothed but didn’t leave. It felt hot underneath all the feather down and fleece. “Did you forget something?” Rubi asked. “No,” I said quietly after a moment, and opened the door to step outside.
I never knew what snow sounded like before moving to the Midwest. I didn’t know it even had a sound. With my earmuffs, my steps reverberated inside my head. I could feel each crunch like rubber that turned into gravel or sand, like a medical glove grinding between my teeth. I felt the vibrations running through my bones, and I liked it for the same reason I liked putting on all those layers of clothes. It reminded me of each step. I could feel my body moving from one leg to the other, my knees bending, my weight arrowing down to my heel and pushing the snow aside. Any other time I just felt numb and withdrawn—apathetic.
I was seeing a therapist who told me about concepts that I jotted down in a small notebook and promised myself to look up later but never did. I made so many promises to myself that I never kept. The days had been passing without me, they blurred into weeks and months. I was moving myself only out of habit, and the small joy of hearing the snow with each footstep made me jump inside a little, it made me look both ways before crossing the street.
*
I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go but liked wandering through the town. Everyone on that side of town was a young undergrad at the college. They took up so much space walking down the street and didn’t care who overheard them, as if they wanted everyone to know about their bright futures—their unpaid internships, because they could afford to not be paid for three months, their summers abroad. Rarely did I hear anyone speaking Spanish on the street, but when I did, I wanted to run up to them and ask what brought them to that small town, to say anything to them and just listen to our voices muffled by the snow. I wanted to ask them where they were from, if they prayed to the Virgen de Guadalupe, and where was a good place to get some decent food. I had never before lived in a town whose restaurants called a torta a “spicy chicken sandwich” as they brought it to your table.
Sometimes I would take a bus to the next town over just to walk through the aisles of the only Mexican grocery store in the area. I liked to peruse the imported household wares, natural sponges wrapped with coarse horsehair bristles, a bar of Zote soap, which I was told by people who remembered, smelled, just like all of Mexico wrapped together, and all of the colors of the candies that were spicy and sweet—things that I could find nowhere else. I liked the butchers best, with their white aprons stained pink with blood, and how every time I entered they always greeted me the same, “Qu’húbole primo.” And I would reply back with something familiar in my mouth, “Qu’húbole pela’o.” I wasn’t their primo, their cousin, but it meant so much more to say it there, thousands of miles away from my family, in a town where football was religion, where I had to take two buses to hear someone call me primo.
&n
bsp; It didn’t feel forward to be that cordial with a stranger; we both silently agreed we needed that intimacy, being so far away from whatever it was we called home. Maybe, if either of us stayed long enough, the next generation would call that town home. Each time we spoke, we were also saying “We made it here, we have both left people behind, but we are here.” We were announcing the history of our pain. We didn’t need to say much in the way of introductions—we knew enough about ourselves that we could guess what life was like for the other in that small town. The only things I didn’t know, and what I dared not ask, had to do with returning. So when are you going back, primo, I thought—is your family here, is your mother here, or over there, or has she already left us? Some of those questions not even brothers asked of each other. “When are you going back?”
I always left that store feeling like I had just eaten something warm and savory. It was the only place I could find calling cards to call my father, and it was wrapped with the smell of meat drying on hooks above the cute young butcher sharpening his knives, the blades scissoring through the air like a deck of cards. I would often come home with things I didn’t need, just to have them around.
3.
I spoke with my mother at least twice a day. Sometimes it was just for a second between classes. I wanted to hear her voice. She always asked how I was doing, and I never liked to admit that I was tired, even though my bones ached, my headaches were intolerable, and I felt fatigued for seemingly no reason at all, just generally lethargic. It was difficult to tell her I was tired when all I had been doing was reading all day and working on a few lines of a poem: “Yes, we drowned, then changed our minds, / then drowned again, / because we could, / because no one would know the difference. / Let’s continue this drowning to remember what we look like.” That was my new job, to read and write, and I didn’t think I deserved that kind of comfort.
I wrote those lines in my journal. I tried to hold the words of my poems inside me like the sounds of snow, but they were nothing like snow, they disappeared as soon as I wrote them. Snow at least stayed until March, maybe even April. It didn’t feel like I was doing anything important, or of substance. According to my director, I should have been writing something that caused great pain or emotion, or came from great pain or emotion, and I was its only vessel—“If you don’t write it, no one will,” I kept hearing at program meetings and bars. I scoffed. I didn’t believe it. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, seemed to know more than me.
None of my own work seemed to matter much to me because all it was, was words. I didn’t know if the poems would ever be a book, I didn’t know why I was there exactly, when I could have been home, helping Amá with her bills, maybe working hard enough to let her stay home if she wanted—real things, tangible things. I could have been useful doing something else. “Yes, we drowned, then changed our minds . . . because we could . . . because no one would know the difference . . . Let’s continue this drowning . . . to remember.” I was a lot more forward about who I was than when I first arrived, but I still felt like I was withholding so much of myself from people. I still felt like a fraud, and my poems reflected that, “you called it cutting apart, I called it song.”
I changed the words in my poems around; I said them softly, and I could see the shape they made in the small cloud of fog beneath my breath as I walked farther and farther from home. That was my work, that was my labor, what they were paying me to do. Somehow it felt like I was stealing. They didn’t take up much space, they hardly even existed at all. “Yes, we changed our minds to remember. Yes, we remembered, yes, we drowned, and changed our minds.” I was losing my memory and I didn’t know why, but Rubi was helping me restore it. “You called it cutting apart, I called it song.” People kept opening and closing their mouths in front of me, and some days I was too depressed to nod along. My therapist said it would happen like this, but I didn’t believe her. I wondered what kind of poems my mother would write if she was in my place, if someone would have given her the chance.
It didn’t seem real to me whenever I spoke to Amá on the phone. It was as if I had been dropped into a different world. Unlike Apá, she was only a button away, her voice was clear, and yet she was geographically farther than Apá. There were things I could no longer explain, experiences she could only nod along to, though I knew I wasn’t making sense. I didn’t realize that because of my leaving, she too would be left out from a large part of who I would increasingly become. “That’s great, mijo, that’s great” is all she would say. I could feel our conversations steadily becoming more and more like Apá’s—distant.
Nonetheless, we still shared the familiar set of words for being tired. I called her, stopped walking, talked for a minute, hung up, and continued walking. “It’s a different kind of tired that you’re feeling,” she said, “but it’s just as exhausting as anything else.” I wanted to believe her, but I knew she said it to make me feel better, to make me forget about the longer hours she worked to make up for my absence back home. I nodded in agreement, even though she couldn’t see me, and mumbled yes over the phone, because that was what any son would tell a mother who was tired.
*
I went on my walk so that I could tire myself enough to fall asleep, since I hadn’t been sleeping well lately. I hated to admit that the only times I was physically tired anymore were when I went on such walks. I was used to feeling the aches of my body after clocking out from a long day’s shift. I was used to lugging my body in heavy steel-toed boots caked with mud through the construction site. But here I ate soft cheeses at department parties where I laughed at terrible jokes I felt an obligation to laugh at. Eventually I came up with some terrible jokes of my own.
I taught poetry to dull-eyed business undergrads early in the morning who wrote about football, their fraternities and sororities, their family trips to Paris. I felt deflated when they demanded to know why, despite having always received A’s in high school English classes, they weren’t passing my class. No matter how long I stayed up, how many hours I spent crouched over my desk, it didn’t feel like real work. No matter how much I wrote, it never felt like I got enough done, or anything done at all. The only way I’ve ever understood work was when my body was tired, when I ached, so I walked to make up for it.
When I was building houses back in California, I could see what we produced at the end of the day. There was no denying that I had gotten something done because the proof was right in front of me—a new wall, a new roof, a window. I could see my progress. But in that small college town, I felt like I was running out of time every day, and I would have nothing to show for it. I thought I would get left behind and couldn’t allow myself even an hour of idleness. What was a poem compared to a house? I worked myself to death writing as many poems as I could to stave off the anxiety and guilt I felt for being comfortable while knowing that Amá and the rest of my family toiled just to make ends meet. What I wouldn’t give to see my poems like I saw the houses I built—large things with many windows. But one thing was true: those poems were mine, and no one else’s. Those houses never were.
Sometimes I wrote my name behind walls that would be covered up forever. Sometimes I wrote small phrases, “yes, we remembered, yes, we changed our minds,” and carried these phrases with me to grad school, where they eventually made their way into poems. I fantasized someone remodeling the house years later, maybe a different owner, uncovering a board and coming across my small incoherent phrases. “Yes, we drowned.”
*
I didn’t only walk late in the evenings, I was always outside. I never felt comfortable being indoors or being in the same spot for too long. I called it my daily shuffle. I would start in one café on Main Street, and by noon, I was already sitting down in my third or fourth. It was very expensive buying a cup at each place in order to earn my right to sit down.
I especially couldn’t be home in the midafternoon. The anxiety got worse around two p.m. The sun would hit my windows in just the right way to m
ake everything feel dirty. Or maybe it was just the silence and unnerving calm of that hour of the day, as I sat alone with my thoughts, that made me leave. When I sat on my couch, a plume of dust particles swept up into the beams of light, and the dread would begin as soon as the dust settled back onto the couch. It was especially bad in winter, everything seemed dull and quiet, muffled by the snow, and perhaps even the clouds. Everything sounded like a variation on a bass note, a heavy thud. That silence reminded me that I was wasting time, that I hadn’t gotten anything done and the day was almost over. My apartment might as well have been a hotel room, since I was only able to bear being there at night. I was the classic hardworking immigrant, but not by choice. I couldn’t escape the traps I put out for myself.
I wanted to tell my mother I felt like I was dying, or that I actually wanted to die, to walk in front of a bus or out in the middle of a frozen lake with thin ice. I considered whether it was a mistake to come. I couldn’t reconcile the two worlds that we were living in. When she asked if I was tired, I simply said, “No, Ma, I’m not tired, everything is fine, my head just hurts a little.” She didn’t know how much I was drinking, that I had gained a lot of weight from the Prozac, and that I came to graduate school only to lose my love for language. Back home, poems felt real, but after I’d been in the Midwest for two years, they felt like nothing more than bright store-bought balloons.