B0061QB04W EBOK (29 page)

Throughout the summer, I had been looking forward to the day when I would start school. I couldn’t wait to meet my teacher, make friends, get my own books. Mila said that teachers here don’t hit their students like they do in Mexico. And best of all, she said that my teacher would not yell at me for being left-handed. “That stuff your grandmother told you about the devil is pure nonsense.” When she said that, I started liking my stepmother, and I stopped being so afraid of going to school. I hoped that one day I would be like her, fluently bilingual and a U.S. citizen.

But early the next day, when Mago, Carlos, and I stopped at the corner to say goodbye, my apprehension returned. Aldama Elementary was up the street. Mago and Carlos had to take a bus to get to Luther Burbank Junior High School.

“Walk me there,” I pleaded. “I don’t want to go alone.”

“It’s only four blocks away, Nena,” Mago said. “And Carlos and I are late enough as it is. We’ll miss our bus.”

“Don’t be scared,” Carlos said.

“Everything will be fine. We’ll see you when we get home,” Mago said, waving goodbye.

I watched Mago and Carlos rush down Avenue 50 to catch the bus on Monte Vista Street. I wished I weren’t ten. I wished I were old enough to go to junior high with them.

I made my way to Aldama Elementary. Since Papi was here illegally, he’d said he couldn’t risk losing his job by taking days off or arriving late to work just to walk me to my school. I stood outside for a long time and watched children walk in. Some of them came in with their parents. All of them were strangers to me, and I thought about Iguala. Back there I had known, by sight if not by name, almost every parent and kid that came to my little school.

Aldama was three times as big as my school in Iguala. I had no idea where to go. I was so used to being with my sister, having her show me what to do, that now I was completely lost. I couldn’t go through this by myself. I couldn’t walk into that big school all alone.

What if I went home? Would Papi know I hadn’t gone to school? Would he spank me?

I didn’t know what it was about Papi that sometimes he could be nice, and other times, like when he was drinking, he would become a different person, one who yelled and hit. That father scared me. That father reminded me of Abuela Evila, although she didn’t need alcohol to bring about that crazed look in her eyes.

A bell rang, and soon everyone was inside. I peeked inside the main doors, and I was overwhelmed by all the doors, the hallway that seemed to never end. I felt as if I were looking at a repeating image in a distorted mirror. My school in Mexico didn’t have hallways. It didn’t have so many doors. Tears started to well up, and I was angry at myself for being such a useless coward. A mother walked by and asked, “¿Estás perdida?” At hearing the familiar Spanish words, I immediately confessed that I didn’t know where to go.

She took me to the main office and there, the receptionist asked my name and called my classroom. A few minutes later, a boy my age
came in. The receptionist said something to him and motioned for me to follow him.

The boy didn’t say anything to me as we made our way down a long hallway. We entered our classroom and the teacher, a tall, pudgy woman with short blond hair, looked me up and down and asked me something in English. I wanted to kick myself for coming late. Now, I had to stand in front of the whole class and have everyone watch me while the teacher spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand. I looked at my feet. My toes wiggled in the new tennis shoes Papi bought me from a place called Payless. I didn’t like wearing tennis shoes. After ten years of walking around barefoot or in plastic sandals, my feet felt trapped inside the thick material.

“¿Sólo español?” she said. I looked into her eyes the color of the sea. I thought about our trip to Santa Monica, of Papi holding my hand.
Please, don’t let go of me, Papi.

“¿Español?” she asked again. At first I didn’t realize that she had spoken to me in Spanish.

“Sí,” I said, feeling relieved she spoke Spanish. The knot in my stomach began to loosen. “Me llamo Reyna Grande Rodríguez. Discúlpeme, maestra, por llegar tarde.”

She shrugged and smiled. “No entender mucho,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, disappointed that she didn’t speak that much Spanish. She pointed to a table in the corner and gently pushed me forward. There were four students there and a man with black hair which was spiked with so much hairspray it looked as if he were wearing a push broom on his head. He had a very skinny neck and a big Adam’s apple that went up and down like a yo-yo when he swallowed.

“I’m Mr. López,” he said in Spanish. “I’m Mrs. Anderson’s assistant.”

He had us introduce ourselves and asked me to go first. “Me llamo Reyna Grande Rodríguez,” I said.

He glanced at his roster and then looked at me. “Here in this country, we only use one last name. See here,” he said, showing me the roster. “You’re enrolled as Reyna Grande.”

“But I’m Rodríguez, too,” I said. “It’s my mami’s last name.”

He asked me to keep my voice down so that I wouldn’t interrupt
Mrs. Anderson, who was speaking to a class of about twenty students. I wanted to tell him that I had already lost my mother by coming to this country. It wasn’t easy having to also erase her from my name.
Who am I now, then?

“I’m sorry,” Mr. López said. “That is the way things are done in this country. From now on you are Reyna Grande.”

The students at my table laughed. One of them said in Spanish, “But she’s so little, how can she be a queen, and a big one at that?”

Mr. López told them not to tease. He asked them to introduce themselves next. There was Gil, María, Cecilia, and Blanca. They were from Mexico, like me, except for Gil who was from someplace called El Salvador. I didn’t know where that was, but he spoke Spanish, too.

For the rest of the day, I stayed at the table in the corner. Mr. López taught us the English alphabet. It was difficult to pay attention to him when Mrs. Anderson was speaking loudly to her students. Most of those kids looked just like me. They had brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. They had last names like González and García, Hernández and Martínez, and yet they could speak a language I could not. Mrs. Anderson didn’t tell them to keep their voice down. Sometimes it was hard to hear what Mr. López was telling us. Then he couldn’t hear what we told him because we had to whisper.

Whatever Mrs. Anderson was teaching the other students, it wasn’t the alphabet. She wrote words on the board. Although I could recognize each letter in those words, I couldn’t understand what they spelled. I watched her mouth open and close, open and close as she talked. I wished I could understand what she was saying. I wished I didn’t have to sit here in a corner and feel like an outsider in my own classroom. I wished I weren’t being taught something kids learn in kindergarten.

“Reyna, pay attention,” Mr. López said. “Now, repeat after me,
ABCDEFG
…”

By the end of the day, I still hadn’t fully memorized the alphabet and the numbers in English. I walked back home feeling scared. I thought about the trip to the beach, of Papi holding my hand. I wished things
would always be like that for me. But they wouldn’t be like that if I didn’t do well in school. Papi had said so.

I wanted to make my father proud. It still bothered me—as it would for many years—that my father had not wanted to bring me at first, and because of that I had a desperate desire for him to one day say, “Chata, you’ve made me a proud father. I’m so glad I didn’t leave you in Mexico and instead brought you here.”

I felt as if I owed him something, as if there was a debt that needed to be repaid. The way I could pay it back was to make him proud of my accomplishments, because they would be
his
accomplishments, too. Even now, there are times when I think back on that moment when I begged my father to bring me to this country, and the knowledge that he
could
have said no still haunts me. What would my life have been like then? I know the answer all too well.

Since I got out of school before Carlos and Mago, Papi told me to go to the neighbor’s house and stay there until Mago arrived to pick me up. I told him I had stayed alone before. He said in this country he could get in trouble if the police found out I was all by myself. Mrs. Giuliano lived right across the street from us. She was an old lady with hair like cotton and eyes the color of my birthstone, sapphire. Her sweet smile reminded me of Abuelita Chinta, although she had a row of perfect teeth, unlike my grandmother’s gap-toothed smile. She didn’t speak much Spanish, but she spoke Italian and English. She was the first Italian I’d ever met.

When she opened the door she said, “Buon giorno, bambina!” She smiled and pulled me into her house. It smelled of bread and garlic. “Hai fame?” Mrs. Giuliano asked. She pointed to the stove where she was making minestrone.

“Si, tengo hambre,” I said.

I sat on the stool and she gave me a bowl of the soup. She asked me a question in both Italian and English, but I only understood the words scuola and school.

“No good,” I said, shaking my head. “No pude aprender inglés.”

“No capisci?” she asked. “Dare il tempo, bambina.”

Tiempo? She was right, time is what I needed, but back then I’d thought that I would never be able to stop feeling as if I didn’t belong in that classroom.

I wished I could tell Mrs. Giuliano that school wasn’t the only place that was difficult to get used to. Although there were many good things we now had, there were also things we had in Mexico that we no longer had here. Mago, Carlos, and I missed our freedom. We missed being able to go outside to walk around the neighborhood and feel safe because everyone knew us. The only person we knew in Highland Park was Mrs. Giuliano. We didn’t know anyone else, and because of the gang members in the area, Papi wouldn’t allow us to go too far. Unlike in Iguala, kids here wouldn’t go outside to play in the afternoons. Women wouldn’t come out to embroider cloth napkins and talk to their comadres. Men wouldn’t come out to have a beer with their friends and play a game of poker or dominoes. The streets here were empty except for the endless procession of cars on Avenue 50. There was no one to play with except one another.

But I didn’t have the words to tell this to Mrs. Giuliano, and I was afraid their meaning would get lost in the translation, no matter how similar Italian and Spanish were. But she seemed to understand my unspoken words because she squeezed my hand.

After my meal, Mrs. Giuliano took me to her backyard where she kept chickens in a coop. As I helped her clean it, the smell of chicken poop and feathers reminded me of Abuelita Chinta’s doves. The smell made me even more nostalgic for Iguala. I touched my belly button, and I remembered the bond that tied me to my mother and to my country.

Would it be so terrible to be sent back?
Even though I liked this beautiful place, I still missed my home. It still called to me in different ways. A pigeon resting on the roof of the house, its coos traveling down the vent of the heater in the living room. I’d stop and listen, letting my mind travel back to Abuelita Chinta’s shack, and I’d remember waking up to the cooing of her doves.

Mexico was also in a cup of hot chocolate, the steam curling up into the air. I would inhale Mexico through my nostrils. While at the supermarket with Mila, picking out vegetables and herbs, crushing cilantro leaves with my fingers, bringing a bunch of epazote up to my nose, I’d think of meals in Mexico, of a pot of beans boiling, of my grandmother adding epazote leaves for flavor.

Mexico was in the whistle of the midnight train traveling on the tracks that run parallel to Figueroa Street. I’d awaken to the sound of the train’s whistle, and my body would fill with longing. When Mago and I cleaned the beans before putting them on to boil, we’d pick out the clumps of dirt and moisten them with our tongues to smell the scent of wet earth. I thought about the dirt floor of Abuelita Chinta’s shack, of how we would sprinkle water on it before sweeping it, so as not to unsettle the dirt. If I returned to Mexico, then I could see my little sister, my mother, and my sweet grandmother again. I would also get to keep my two last names. I would be in a classroom where I understood what my teacher said.

But what about my dream of one day making Papi proud?

I stood there in Mrs. Giuliano’s backyard feeling as if I were tearing in half.
Where do I belong?
I wondered.
Do I belong here? Do I belong there? Do I belong anywhere?

I didn’t know the answers to my questions, but I sat on the bench in Mrs. Giuliano’s backyard and I took out my notebook. I traced the letters of the alphabet as I began to say them aloud, my determined tongue stumbling over the right pronunciation.

2