*
It was around this time, in kindergarten, when I first became aware of another language, a language I didn’t know. There was something twisting in someone’s mouth, not the kinds of words I was familiar with. A distance started to grow between me and the world, and I gladly walked toward the torpid shores of its strangeness. As we sat crisscross apple sauce, the music teacher at my first American school sat on a chair in front of us, rattling a steady rhythm with two spoons between his fingers. I understood the music because I clapped, we were all clapping along to his beat, some of us singing, others not.
The spoons vibrated like a rattlesnake’s tail in front of me. I knew what music was and I liked it, bobbing the small frame of my body from side to side. But the strangest and most arresting sound of all was coming out of his mouth, which was nothing that I had ever heard before. I knew the sounds, I knew the rhythms, and even the gestures on his face that accompanied them as he nodded his head up and down. I could tell all of those things together were meant to produce some kind of happiness. I could make those sounds, but not in that order. I thought he sounded funny, so I let out a small giggle in the middle of his song, which prompted a stern look from the teacher keeping watch over us on the side. She must have thought I was mocking the song or the teacher, but I loved them both because despite not understanding them, I understood them differently. I liked the way that rattler kept shaking right above me, saying what most rattlers say with their thrashing tails, “Don’t come near me, I am dangerous, I will bite you.”
Maybe one day English would be dangerous for me, but not in that moment, tapping my small palms on my lap, looking at the song behind the children’s song, the flurry of sounds looming above the spoons saying something that must have been happy, given the expressions on the teacher’s face, a kind of joy that felt like home to me, a kind of joy that made sense, that reminded me of home.
I ran home elated, carrying that small pocket of joy like a wild mongoose whose belly was full of snake, whose teeth were smeared with blood.
“Amá, I want to be a musician when I grow up,” I said.
“That’s wonderful, mijo, now go take off your shirt so I can cut your hair,” she said. I wondered if she had heard me. She cut our hair often because she said her children would not go around looking ragged.
“Amá, I said I want to be a musician when I grow up.” I said again, that time louder. Still, she didn’t seem to pay much attention. Maybe I shouldn’t have stressed the music but what carried the music—I should have said I wanted to build violins.
*
I stood on a chair near the window, watching the neighborhood kids playing outside without me as Amá moved the clipper up and down my head. I started rambling to them through the open window in what I thought was my newly acquired English. I wanted to repeat what I had just heard in music class, but I wanted to do it without the music—without the spoons. It wasn’t really anything coherent, but Amá says it had the effect of being discursive, as if I was standing at a podium addressing a throng of people below me. I waved my hands in the air, gesticulating, giving them instructions in this new language that I was certain they could understand but that they most certainly couldn’t.
They laughed and I laughed with them because we were children and because that was what children did. We took refuge in our misunderstanding. I rambled on, trying to make any kind of sound that wasn’t a word that I recognized because anything that wasn’t Spanish automatically meant that it was English. English was the “other.” Amá finished cutting my hair, not without protest that I was moving too much for her to steady her hand, and I finished my long speech, even though my friends had long since stopped paying attention. I felt like I had done something good.
I bowed politely in my chair and went out to the yard again.
In my head, I knew what I was saying, there was meaning behind my squawk. It was in that very short window of time, when I could speak in that primal language between languages, that I could understand things better—clearer. Perhaps I never really left and was always moving back and forth between languages, reaching for something I would never fully attain.
The afternoon was warm, and the sun wouldn’t start making its eventual retreat over the mountains for another few hours. Amá went to the kitchen to put another pot of beans on to boil. Beans were still beans, there was nothing new about that, there was nothing that needed translation, I could move back and forth with relative ease.
*
With time, that innocent wonder at my nonlanguage would slowly start to fade and be replaced by English, which would soon mostly replace Spanish. In no time I would find myself sitting crisscross apple sauce just like the other children, bored at yet another music lesson, sedated, singing along to words that were reduced to one thing and one thing only. Music would again just be music and words just words. I would never again reach that wandering calamity of sound, that cacophonous revelry. I’m sure that wasn’t the first time I ever heard English being spoken, but it was the first time I remember being aware of it in any meaningful way.
I loved being bilingual, but there was something special in that moment of utter confusion. The short journey from Spanish to English was a revelry, a reverie that deflated like balloons shortly after the party has ended. It was a path on which I moved, another migration. My body had already reached the U.S., but my tongue was a bit slower getting there, taking its time, hopping from rock to rock like a small mountain cat. I stuck out my skinny tongue and hissed at everyone around me.
*
The path to learning English wasn’t like a pig being taken to slaughter. Pigs know what’s at the other end of that long walk to the slaughterhouse, and they fight tooth and nail to escape. Their long and deep howls seem to come from somewhere beyond their body, from the very earth itself—almost demonic. I didn’t fight; I didn’t know what was at the other end, but I ran toward it with open arms nonetheless.
Amá stirred the pot of beans one more time and announced that they were ready. We grabbed our spoon, and our bowl, and our coffee. How unbearably boring the world would soon be. In that moment, though, I was an oracle, I was enchanted, I was enchanting. The bean broth was hot as it slowly went down my throat, as it touched that part of me that had no name yet.
2.
Rubi and I were glad to be back in California for good and out of the Midwest after we graduated. All of California was burning, parched, and expensive, but it was home. The air had the dry smell of rice husks left behind in cracked marshes that stretched for miles around my town. I was used to seeing the Sierra on the east and the coast ranges on the west. I was in the valley, where the sun sat low and blistered everything dry. Rubi and I moved in with Amá, in the same home in Yuba City where I grew up, a home she’d rented for seventeen years, where I held her by the arm the day of the ICE raid.
I often heard people ask me why Amá didn’t “just get papers if she had over thirty years combined in the U.S.,” as if time alone was the remedy. It was like telling someone, “Just stop being depressed.” It was remarkable how little they understood how it worked. Amá had an application pending in immigration, which we froze, because if we allowed it to continue, she would almost certainly receive the ten-year ban as well and never be allowed to return. Her application was in the system for decades, petitioned by a relative, but it was going nowhere because we knew where it would end up. We were waiting for a law to change, hoping for Congress to pass something, anything. Our lawyer tried every single legal maneuver possible, and each was nil.
She was stuck in a catch-22. Her only possible option was for Apá to petition for her, but he needed to be a citizen, and the only possible option for him was for her to petition for him, but she needed to be a citizen, or at least a resident, to do that. They were stuck.
I spent hours on my laptop combing through legal blogs, articles, and official government websites, hoping to find something that our lawyer might have missed. Even though she had alre
ady made up her mind to leave, I was hoping I would find a way that would allow her to come back, so that it wouldn’t feel so permanent. I scrolled through a directory of the area’s lawyers and called to ask who offered free consultations.
We had spent years looking closely at Amá’s case with a magnifying glass, trying to inspect every detail for a loophole, and perhaps that was precisely the problem. Perhaps what we needed was to step back and look at it from a distance. I scheduled meeting after meeting with lawyers who all had the same-looking diplomas hanging on their beige walls, and tchotchkes from trips to Cancún or Costa Rica. Some were fresh out of law school, not yet jaded, and took their time to get to know my mother and what had brought us to that moment in time. Others just stared at the clock. I had to repeat my mother’s story so often that it started to sound absurd. Hearing it out loud so many times made it sound foreign, like it was happening to another family and I was simply a messenger.
One of the lawyers I saw said she had “committed a felony, that never goes away.” The words themselves already seemed permanent, irreversible. I had never heard anyone refer to my mother like that. I thanked him for his time and walked out. His secretary asked if I would like to schedule a follow-up. “That won’t be necessary, thank you,” I said, and headed to the parking lot to sit in my car for a long time, tuning the radio back and forth.
3.
Back in her house, I brushed my mother’s hair, which was soft, and thinning. She’d started dyeing it for the first time. Maybe that’s why it felt so light through my fingers. She always loved her gray hairs, said it made her look refined, dignified, but not anymore.
We sat on her couch late at night watching a Spanish-dubbed Steven Seagal movie on Telemundo. Her arms were small, and I could feel her sharp bones angled at the softest parts of her.
I rubbed oil in her hair and kept brushing as we both laughed at Seagal, those quick-action camera angles and the infamous ponytail whipping back and forth. The explosions in the background, twenty years after the movie had been released, seemed faded and uneventful, as if by now, in our dim room’s Telemundo version, they were only pointing at fire, and couldn’t actually burn, as if they were only saying bang but were muted, and Seagal knew this. He was indifferent, with his emotionless face, perhaps already aware during filming of the dim and fuzzy filter he would be seen through twenty years later in a dark room where a boy who was hardly a boy anymore was brushing his mother’s hair. It was as if he knew that his voice would be replaced by the voice of a man speaking in heavy Castilian Spanish who had difficulty expressing surprise when a bomb exploded in his ohs and ahs, and which sounded more like soft moans. He didn’t bother opening his mouth much to speak.
She never had many knots in her hair, but I continued to brush. It wasn’t defeat that was growing in the air with each week, it was exhaustion. It was easier to brush her hair than to tell her I would miss her.
I knew she would never return. Could we be blamed for giving up?
There was an abscess growing on her arm from a car accident. It looked like a golf ball on her wrist, and it forced her to become left-handed. I remembered her being mad at me as a teenager and saying “Don’t make me hit you with my good hand”—her left hand. It didn’t hurt when she hit me, but I had to pretend that it did. What hurt most was the fact that she hit me, the fact that she couldn’t hit me with her right, the fact that she had to adjust her body sideways to hit me with her left, and that I stood there, unfazed, angry that I couldn’t go out with friends, the fact that it didn’t hurt but I cried nonetheless. She was hit by a drunk driver. Apá was driving, and they were T-boned on the passenger’s side, Amá’s side. Apá walked away from the crash unharmed. The hood of the car sliced open Amá’s neck. The right side of her body was shattered. Apá said he saw the car coming, and just before impact, he swerved left without thinking. I wonder how much time he had to choose which way to turn—his side or Amá’s side. It’s funny how those things happen, how one person can walk away without a scratch while the other is nearly sliced to pieces.
If the lights were on in the room, and if I were looking at Amá for the first time, I would notice the remnants of that accident, the scars running down her neck and the ones on her shoulder where small pieces of glass were still tucked just beneath the skin and yet lodged too deep to extract, too large to dissolve into the rest of her. The largest scar ran down the length of her forearm, where they opened her and replaced all the bones with metal. The metal would stay there, but the glass would not, at least not all of it. The doctors said the shards would come out by themselves, unexpectedly and years later, with “minimal pain,” like a slow bullet traveling out of her, like a bullet in a film with an already outdated actor looking directly into the camera as he recites one-offers—“I’m a bad motherfucker.”
I imagined the glass making its uneventful entrance into the world two decades later, as if it were alive, squirming the way snakes do when they come out of the shell. Maybe it would be a lonely affair, no one there to see it, except Amá, who would surely be confused at first, seeing something leave her body. Or maybe I would be there to witness this thing that’s been part of my mother’s body for so long that it could be mistaken for bone. I wouldn’t know how to hold it if it fell in my hands. I would put it to my ear and listen, I would hold it to the light before giving it back to Amá so she could know what it was that hurt her every time she lifted her arm to hit me.
[Fourth Movement as an Abandoned Car]
We outgrew our first apartment when the baby came. It was a one-bedroom and there were seven of us, plus another cousin who crossed with us, promising to one day return. We moved into a two-bedroom nearby that had a large empty field in the back with dozens of old abandoned cars fixed into the earth as if they had been planted but bore no fruit. They looked ancient, some without windows, others without doors, some with their motors splayed out beside them. I imagined them to be a congregation of old men, sitting on stones, grumbling quietly to each other about all they had lost.
I spent hours playing in that field, going through the spare car parts scattered beneath the tall grass, wondering what their purpose was, playing swords with a windshield wiper or using a hubcap as a shield. I used to keep a small family of rabbits in one of the cars, and would bring them fresh alfalfa every day that we grew in our garden. A few cats ate them one day, and I avoided that car for a while.
*
I liked to sit alone in one of the cars that wasn’t so tattered but still had weeds growing inside. Generations of opossums made their den in the trunk. I still didn’t know English well, but I was starting to know my body.
One day, sitting inside that car, I reached into my pants and pulled.
I felt the muscles of me hurt because they had never been used like that before. I felt my skin tear at the new weight of that unseen desire.
My dog left me, and I cried for days. My rabbits were eaten, which was a kind of leaving. We left Mexico, we left the first small room we rented, we left the first small house we rented. We were always leaving, so whatever it was that wanted to leave my body didn’t seem out of the ordinary.
*
I didn’t know what to call my erection. I didn’t know what it was that my body was doing or how I knew that it would feel good if I pulled on myself. Who taught me that lesson of the body? Or did it come to me by mistake, or accident? Did I hold myself too long and suddenly feel that first pang of pleasure? And before long I was back in that hot car with no seats, sitting on the metal floor, rubbing the ends of myself as if I knew what I was doing, as if the instructions were written in me already.
Although it hurt, I tugged harder just as the door swung open.
If I was present in my body, I would be able to say something to Amá standing at the door. I felt like my life was one long sustained breath.
*
A checklist of things I saw that day:
The first ice cream truck slowly driving by, blasting its twang
y music through the blow horn.
The neighbors fixing their cars with their shirts off, a loud racket coming from their engines.
The sun not going anywhere.
The sun doing exactly what it was always doing.
Apá working alone on a piece of leather to make a whip, even though no one had horses anymore.
The sun in a different place than last time I saw it.
Tires tossed on the side of the road.
The second youngest, still two, seemingly forever two, aggressively two, playing in the dirt as always.
The neighbors yelling.
The neighbors kissing and drinking beer on their porch and then yelling again.
The neighbors saying, Baby I’m sorry, and walking away.
How the afternoon air felt like a blessing.
“Child, what are you doing?”
*
I took out my hand and zipped up my pants. How did I know that that was something I shouldn’t have been doing? How did I know I was supposed to hide, to not tell anyone? How did I know the feeling of shame even before the door swung open?
*
Feelings of Shame:
Cold wet clay at the bottom of a jar.
Blue bubble gum.
I ran and ran home from school, as if something was chasing me.
Stick ’em up partner.
Morning light.
Rabbits chewed as if for fun.1
“Child, what are you doing in there?”
*
Years later I will find myself sitting at a desk, wiping myself clean after watching a man enter a woman, a woman enter a man, a man enter another man. Shortly after which I’ll write a line in my notebook. That line will read, “I could have been anyone’s idea of pity, to name each part of me after the names of my mother’s lovers or just hold the shame in my hand.”
Children of the Land Page 19