We turned to each other and danced. It was High Baroque, it was neoclassical. We wore long gowns, and the men held their hands behind their backs. We bowed to each other and spun in circles. It was a game in which the children played adults and the adults played children. The border agents were the grooms. The border agents were the smoke outside, because everything was burning. It was burning? Yes. I put on my father’s boots and his hat. I took out a small toy pistol and told him to put his arms up. “Stick ’em up, partner.” We spoke English already. “Bang.” We were accustomed to the new way of life even before we arrived. We tidied up the place. We baked every fucking pie we saw in the movies.
Yes. It was snakes. But they didn’t bite us. They were looking for their own music, they were trying to make it stop. My baby brother in the womb had his own problems, so we left him alone. We didn’t ask any questions; we held our heads down and gestured with our hands to each other. We hid in the dark beneath a tractor, and I was told to shut . . . the . . . fuck . . . up. I hummed and hummed a song and kept my eyes closed, and pressed my hands over my ears.
23.
The Midwest was still cold and gray, but I was relieved to be away from El Paso and Juárez. We landed in the afternoon, and I wondered if that cerulean blue of the evening had already arrived and left. The day carried on, but there was no sign of it. It had rained while we were away, and the snow had melted. Maybe the blue came and went with the snow.
There was a reading at the bookstore in town by a poet I admired that same afternoon we landed. I should have rested, but I didn’t want to stop moving, to stop doing something and have to think about what the Juárez decision meant now.
“I’m going out, I’ll be right back, okay?” I told Rubi as I got dressed and headed out the door. I hadn’t called Apá to see if he had made it home safe. I figured he would.
The reading was in a cramped room that felt smaller with everyone’s large winter coats still hanging on them. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, so I decided not to sit and instead stood near the door in the back, where I could feel the cool breeze as people came and went from the bookstore.
I guess I was supposed to smile too. I was supposed to pretend like nothing had happened. Or perhaps I was supposed to pretend that this was normal, that it happened to everyone. I saw a friend walk in, and we stood quietly next to each other. We hugged and let our thick coats deflate into themselves, pushing the down feathers tight. I didn’t need to tell my friend not to let go for them to not let go.
*
I told a few close friends what had happened but immediately regretted it. At first it felt good to release it from my breath, but at the same time, I wished I could keep it all inside me and never let it out, because once it was out, it was no longer mine. I felt like I could somehow still change the outcome if I was the only one who knew about it.
Later that semester, on the first warm day of the year, my friends and I went out to a green meadow for a picnic. We took blankets, gin, wine, some snacks, and books. It was a perfect day to lounge in the sun. I drank gin like it was water. Our other two friends laughed at the sheer joy of each other’s company, and for once, I seemed to have forgotten what had happened in winter. There was a group of shirtless boys playing a game of football. They were all frat brothers. Their bodies glistened with sweat in the afternoon sun.
Already drunk, I looked over at Derrick and said, “I want to go play with them . . . look at them, they’re beautiful.”
“No, honey, you’re drunk,” Derrick said.
I wanted them to tackle me, so I too could glisten in the sun. But I would glisten like they never could. My dark, golden skin would catch the light and release it as something new and angled. I was beautiful and sad and drunk.
The last time I played football was in the eighth grade, when a boy jumped on top of me and broke my leg at the shin. It split in half. I was small, so it didn’t take much weight to break it.
I wanted to go over there with the frat brothers and tell them what had happened. I wanted to tell them about the border officers who were talking about football as if it was just football. Wasn’t it just football? Wasn’t it just a piece of paper? Wasn’t it just ten years? Ten, ten, ten, ten.
Instead I ran up and over a hill. I was barefoot, and the grass felt cool to the touch. It was no longer wet, but it was damp where the shade was heaviest. I was sweaty and I glistened either way. I yelled at Derrick and everyone else lying on the blanket to look at me, but they didn’t hear.
“Look at me, goddammit,” I yelled.
I ran down the hill as fast as I could and tripped, but I was drunk already so I didn’t really feel it. I just felt a warmth creep into my foot.
*
Ten years. My mother, too, had been waiting those ten years for my father’s return. I knew what his rejection meant. It meant Amá would finally have to decide whether to leave him for good, abandon the charade of waiting, or finally join him in Mexico and never come back.
I called her but she didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail. I said I was tired, and I said she was right, it was the same kind of tired.
Fourth Movement: Glass
1.
The fact that I was still in the Midwest, Apá was forced to stay in Mexico, and the rest of the family was in California made us long for each other’s company in ways we hadn’t known. Something changed. My father’s rejection in Juárez made us ask “What now?” All we had known to do with him up until then was wait, but we had reached the end of the road, and ahead of us was a fork. There was no longer a solid something to look forward to, something tangible that we could see in our heads. Instead it was now right in front of us, all too real, a living thing that we did not know how to care for and which was growing beyond control. It was as if something that we were trying to avoid for over a decade finally grabbed our face in its palms, opened our eyes, and said, “Look at me!”
I didn’t know if Amá would decide it was time for her to leave. She had done as much as she could have ever done for herself, and for her children, now all adults. Was she happy with what we had done with our lives—with hers? If she did decide to leave, it wouldn’t feel like defeat but pride, because it meant that she had made the right decision by not leaving when Apá was deported in 2003, when his incessant pull was strongest. If she did leave, it would be a way of announcing to everyone else that she had had a plan all along, and that that plan had come to fruition.
Every time I spoke to her on the phone while walking through campus, or in my small apartment, back from one of my evening walks, I always braced myself, hoping it wasn’t the moment she would finally tell me what was on all of our minds. Sometimes I avoided calling her, stalling myself as well. But I was only lying to myself because I could feel it coming.
At the same time, with each lament of her possible departure, deep inside me was an innocuous and hardly visible trace of elation that she would finally get rest, finally return home and give up the toil she’d led to give us a better life. I wanted her to retire and live a peaceful life, growing a garden in Mexico, but I couldn’t tell anyone this, not even myself. I couldn’t bring myself to ever say it out loud.
I knew what labor had done to her body after so many years. She hardly had any fingerprints left, each ridge softened away by years of heat and steam from the plum factory, the way a river rubs off the parts of a boulder that can cut you. Her fingers were so sensitive that she needed to wear layers of gloves when she worked. The heat dug closer and closer to her nerves until it hardly needed to touch her hands before she could feel it. Two gloves turned to three—rubber, then cloth, then rubber again.
After Juárez, I was trying to convince myself that Apá had changed. I would close my eyes to try and remember the times I was with him in Tepechitlán and then later in Juárez—how he gripped things, how he talked to other people, how he swatted at flies. I hoped that it was only the residue of violence and not actually violence that lingered in his hands, like the sweet
sugar on my palms after cutting open an orange. If Amá went back to Mexico, essentially self-deporting herself, she would be alone with Apá, without ever being able to return, and with no one to help her.
I thought love could have come out of his anger—bitter plants that make the sweetest honey. I confused each of his flowers with a small act of tenderness. There is a tender way we can confuse violence with love, trying to convince ourselves that it wasn’t so bad. When a vaquero shoots an injured horse not out of cruelty but because he loves him, there is still blood, there is still a bullet hole, and maybe another hole where the bullet escaped depending on the caliber of the vaquero’s mercy, which is to say, it’s still violent nonetheless. How vigilant my life had become to temper his anger, to look for it and say “hush,” as I would to a beast who only knows two tones of voices. And it was the repetition of his anger that made it so normal—the same song I thought I knew the words to, but I didn’t. He’s changed, it’s not so bad over there.
This new thing, this new nothing that was building after the Juárez rejection, that was getting bigger and bigger, made Amá look at her life, made her stop and see what it was that she had built in all her years in the United States. After a total of thirty-five years on and off in the country, she didn’t have any money to her name, she didn’t own any property, she didn’t know the language, but she had all of her grown children, who had finished at least high school and had decent jobs, as testament, as fruits of her labor.
*
She called me one day and was silent for a moment. She could have hung up because I already knew what she was going to say, and she knew I knew, but it’s normal and polite to continue with the parts that hurt the most in conversation, even though they can be avoided altogether.
“Mijo . . . mijo . . . mijo . . .”
“My son . . . my son . . . my son.
I’m leaving, my son, I’ve done everything that I can. You have your wife, you have your school, and soon you will have your own children, and when you do, you will understand. I’m proud of you, mijo. I’m tired. I’m so very tired.”
My son. My son. My son.
I hung up and sat there, staring at a wall, for a long time. I called my friend Lauren. We didn’t say anything over the phone. It was usually like that with Lauren, who knew that I didn’t have to explain why I was calling, crying. So we just listened to each other breathing until my sobs started to wind down and my heartbeats settled, and at last, when it was more or less silent, I said hi. But it was a kind of hi that didn’t feel like it broke the silence between us, rather, it felt like it was part of that silence.
We, the children, had always been the ones in the middle. Amá always chose us over Apá, and now she was choosing him. But in choosing him, she still wasn’t choosing herself, like always.
*
Amá came to the U.S. for us, her children, and she stayed behind in 2003 even when Apá demanded she return. She lived by her sister’s words—“What were you thinking, getting pregnant, you can hardly feed the kids you have.”
Amá said the one time she felt strongest and most invincible in her life was precisely in 2003 when Apá was deported. Refusing his orders gave her chills and a crushing resolve that she would pull ahead. She said she felt like a lion, even though as soon as he was gone they laid her off at her job.
Apá wanted to start a new life in Mexico after his deportation, but how many fresh starts can you have in life? How many times can you actually start over? It seems that’s all my father was ever good at: dropping everything and starting new somewhere else. It was a way to say, “let’s try again,” but each time we tried again, we ended in the same spot: in debt, in hiding, sometimes hungry.
When Apá saw that nothing was working to convince her, his pleas for her to join him turned to orders, then to shouting, and after a few years, by the time I’d graduated from high school, it simmered to quiet supplications. As much as he shouted, and screamed, and cursed her, at the end of the day he was only a fizzle of a voice at the other end of the phone that she set down on her lap when the ranting would start. Maybe that’s when he began taking baths in a large tub in the sun, when he started caring for his garden, because he realized that his shouting was useless, that he had lost his power over Amá, and so he needed something else to depend on him. Unlike Amá, the plants would die without him.
Amá knew there was no such thing as a fresh start; she knew nothing really changed when you moved from one place to another, you were still the same person, and it was still the same luck and the same life that would lead you to that same dead end.
We got used to his badgering, and it became something like white noise in the background of our lives. It seemed like each year, at any significant event like Christmas, Apá would call and say “It’s time,” but Amá would say the youngest still needed her. By which she meant the oldest too, and the middle, as well as the grandkids.
“Let me just be there for him until he finishes college,” she would say again, and Apá would go back to his shouting, insulting, and ultimately hanging up. Sometimes, however, having run out of choices, she would hand us the phone in desperation.
“Hijo, try to convince your mother to come back. I’m dying here. I don’t eat, I can’t do this alone. I’m getting old. Do you want me living like this?” I was young, what could I say to that? Each time he pleaded with me, I would try to find the right words, though they never felt right in Spanish. Had I retreated that far away from my first tongue that even saying no felt impossible, even though it was the same word in both languages? He was planting a small seed two thousand miles away through the phone wires. “Hijo, your mother is doing this to me.”
How could I explain to him that I didn’t believe him?
I dreaded those phone calls. Amá, always next to me, coaching me on what to say, so that I wouldn’t say the wrong thing and make a promise on her behalf by accident. I could see her lips moving silently, mouthing the words “No,” or “I’m sleeping,” or “Ya, hang up” when she didn’t want to talk to him. I cradled the phone to my ear and tried to listen to both of them talking to me at the same time.
She stalled as long as she could.
*
The clock began ticking to my mother’s departure, and for the first time, I gave myself permission to write about my life in a way that wasn’t cryptic, that didn’t hide behind the surreal nature of lyric images.
I wrote a poem about the parts of him that I could briefly touch—his hands, how “they were large and capable of great things.” How they flung a belt I named Daisy through the air—“my ass purple with welts, my ass purple with love. And I said hello, Daisy, and she said hello,” as he wiped his face with his kerchief.
I said my father “would love a man at the first sign of weakness. I was weak, therefore, I gathered that he loved me. That was how we both became men—him for the beating, and me for taking the beating.” The poem ended.
To the animals he slaughtered—“His hands were two doves courting a lamb, which was also a dove in its thrashing.” To the mouths he fed—“He always had peaches to put in their mouths.” To the objects named—“I love you, Daisy.”
[Fourth Movement as Language]
I got used to the roaches, I got used to the milk crates we used as chairs as we ate a pot of boiled beans and washed them down with black coffee for dinner. I was five, and we had just moved into our first apartment in the U.S., and though it was small, it still felt larger than our house back in Mexico. It certainly felt larger than the room we all crammed into at our uncle’s house when we first arrived, careful not to be too much of a burden, though it was hard not to be when a family of seven suddenly moves in. Amá’s belly was large, and she was due to give birth any day. Although our new apartment wasn’t much to look at, we could scream, we could jump, and no one could say anything to us because it was ours.
We had one spoon. Or maybe it was one spoon for each person, so it still felt like one spoon. Amá rubbed her
large belly and spread her legs as she crouched down to eat off an old bedside table. Everyone argued over what the new baby would be named. “It’s my baby, I’m going to name him whatever I want,” said Amá. Apá had named every child up until then, but Amá knew this would be her last, and she was determined to name him herself. When she gave birth, she kept the onesie the hospital put on the baby even though she was supposed to give it back because she didn’t have a lot of clothes for him yet. She had a joke that the baby was made in Mexico but shipped, assembled, and delivered in the U.S. She came home with her baby in her arms and told us his name was Gilberto.
*
Every night was the same. I didn’t like the taste of coffee, but Amá held the cup to my mouth and said to drink, that it would help. Help with what? We each cleaned our respective bowl, cup, and spoon. I took the drying cloth and made small circles with my hand until my bowl was dry and shiny. We were poor, but we were clean. The dishes were placed upside down over a towel so “nothing” would touch them at night.
“Beans again?” I said to Amá as we gathered around our bedside table, sitting on our milk crates in the middle of our small living room.
“Yes, now, don’t complain,” she said. She wasn’t speaking in English, and although I didn’t know English at the time, my memories of those days are peppered in English now. My mother handed me a taza, not a cup; she poured café, not “coffee.” Amá’s loud call to come in from playing outside was Ya vente, not “Come in now.” But in my head, I see a “cup,” I see her handing me a “cup,” and the “cup” is now in English even though no one is speaking.
I have to work to put the Spanish words inside my memories—I have to think hard about each syllable inside them. To this day my mother still does not know English, though she is trying to learn it. Apá understands a little but can’t speak it.
Children of the Land Page 18