A Dream Called Home Page 5

  “Sí, Abuelita. But I was careful.” I sat at the small table with her and watched her finish cutting her vegetables. “What are you making, Abuelita?”

  “A taco. Would you like one?” She got up to heat the tortillas on her stove, and I looked around to see where the meat was. There was no pot on the stove, and I could see no food except for the vegetables she had cut up. There were no beans or rice either.

  The shack looked exactly as it had when I lived here with my grandmother and my siblings. It was one big room, with no interior walls. My grandmother’s bed, the stove, and her altar were near the front door; in the middle was the dining table and in the back a hammock where my uncle slept. The bed that had belonged to my parents was still there, tucked into a corner. Hanging from the rafter on the ceiling was a cage with two sleeping white doves in it. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the bamboo outer walls. The heat of the sun radiating from the corrugated tin metal roof made me sleepy, and I yawned.

  My grandmother put the hot tortillas on two plates and filled them up with the tomato, onion, and jalapeño slices. She handed me a plate and apologized for the modest meal.

  “Your uncle hasn’t been working much lately,” she said. “And the little money your mother sent me is gone now.”

  I took the plate from my grandmother and looked at the taco. In Santa Cruz, I had met my first vegetarians and vegans, and I had been shocked that such things even existed. What would my grandmother say if I told her that in the U.S., people chose to eat the way she was eating now, especially the rich kids who thought being vegan was cool and who shopped at the thrift store, like I did, because they wanted to and not because they had to? Over there, I wanted to tell her, eating a tomato taco was a personal preference and not an act of survival forced on you by poverty and a system of corruption and oppression.

  As if reading my thoughts, she said, “Let us be grateful for what God has provided, m’ija.”

  God wasn’t providing all that much, I wanted to say. Or maybe He was a vegan and was trying to get my grandmother to be one, too. Yes, I was being cynical, and I knew full well what my grandmother was saying to me—sometimes even vegetables are hard to come by and you should be grateful when you have them. When I lived here with my grandmother, there were times when we would have nothing to eat except tortillas sprinkled with salt. As a university student, I was struggling to get by, and I wasn’t in a position yet to help support my grandmother. But I made a promise to myself that one day, when I was making the kind of dollars that would come from my college degree, I would take care of her, just like she had once taken care of me.

  She took a bite of her taco, and I did the same, the tomato juice spilling down my hand, and I licked it because there were no napkins.

  “How’s it going in El Otro Lado?” my grandmother asked, licking her own fingers. “Your mom tells me you are at a university now.”

  I nodded and excitedly told my grandmother about Santa Cruz, about the redwood trees, the deer, the bay, the boardwalk, the way the air smelled—a mixture of leaves, soil, salty ocean breeze, and esperanza. What I wouldn’t give to be able to take her there! I pictured myself walking around that gorgeous place with my tiny grandmother, pointing out a banana slug crawling on the cinnamon-colored bark of a redwood, plucking a needle from a branch so that she could smell its scent. I reached out to hold her hands, as if by magic I could transport her there with me. I wished I had thought to buy a UCSC Grandma T-shirt for her.

  “There are trees near the library that bloom with flowers so white they look as if they are covered in snow,” I said, and then, remembering that she had never seen snow, I added, “Or as if a thousand white palomas have landed on them.” Doves, she knew well.

  Abuelita Chinta smiled and had a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were trying hard to imagine this magical city. When you live in a place like Iguala, it’s hard to believe that the world can look any different. My guilt brought me back to reality, and I could feel the calluses in her wrinkled hands, see the layer of dust on her feet, feel the heat radiating from her tin metal roof. Why did I get to enjoy such a beautiful place, but not my grandmother who from a young age had had to work to feed her family? My grandmother never went to school, lived only three hours from Acapulco and yet had never seen the ocean with her own eyes.

  “I’m glad you’re living in a beautiful place, m’ija,” she said, smiling her gap-toothed smile. “After everything you kids went through, you deserve it.”

  You do, too, Abuelita, I wanted to say.

  Just then, Tía Güera came home, trailed by my little cousins, Diana and Ángel. “You’re here,” she said. “Good.”

  “Where’s Betty?” I asked, standing up to give her a hug. “Is she with Lupe?” I had arrived in the afternoon, and had been surprised no one was home except for my grandmother. My cousin Lupe was fourteen, a year younger than Betty. In Mexico, the schools had two shifts—morning and afternoon. Usually, especially in junior and high school, the poor kids got stuck in the afternoon shift and would have to travel through the dark city at night to get home. It was a dangerous journey, especially for the girls.

  “Lupe is in school,” my aunt said. “But not your sister. She didn’t want to enroll, and I didn’t want to force her.”

  “So where is she now?”

  “I don’t know,” Tía Güera said. “She goes to see her friends, sometimes without telling me.” She took a seat on the opposite side of the table and said, “Look, Reyna, I love your sister, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to her, but the whole neighborhood is gossiping about her improper relationships with the boys here. I don’t want the responsibility anymore. If she ends up pregnant, or worse, I don’t want it to be on my watch. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

  I sighed. I didn’t tell my aunt that I might not be able to help much. If the adults around her couldn’t get through to my sister, what made them think I could? Betty and I had a good relationship, but not the kind I had once had with Mago.

  Finally, my cousin Lupe came, but there was still no sign of Betty. “She’s probably over there, by the train station. That’s where Chon lives.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s the guy Betty has been hanging out with,” Lupe said. “But he’s already married.”

  I gave Lupe money and sent her to the nearest food stand to buy us quesadillas. While we sat there and continued waiting, I wondered why both Betty and I had an unhealthy need to be loved and wanted by men. Since our parents rarely showed any tenderness toward us, we had to look outside of home to find it. No matter what anyone said about Betty, I wasn’t going to judge her.

  When Lupe returned, she wasn’t alone.

  “Look who I found,” Lupe said.

  Betty came over to hug me, and everything anyone had said about my little sister faded away as I held her in my arms. This was my Betty. When I first heard that my mother was going to have a baby in the U.S., I hated that baby. I was jealous of the little girl who had come to take my place as the youngest in the family. But when I met her, I thought she was the cutest little girl I had ever seen, with thick, curly black hair and the longest eyelashes. When my mother ran away with a wrestler, leaving us behind—including her American baby—I realized that Betty was like me, nothing special to our mother and just as easy to abandon. I had tried to protect her like Mago had protected me.

  But once Mago, Carlos, and I had taken off to the U.S. with our father, and we were forced to leave Betty behind, we drifted apart once again. Through the years, even when Betty ended up in L.A. with our mother, we hardly saw her. We tried to bring her to our father’s house on some weekends, but the visits were brief and infrequent. Mago and I had a wonderful bond that did not include Betty. The distance had kept her on the periphery of our sisterhood.

  It wasn’t until Mago left me to start her own life and make a home for herself that I understood what it was like to have no one, just the way Betty had felt for many years.

  This wa
s why I had come to Mexico. It wasn’t because I thought I could help her, but because I knew what it was like to be alone.

  “I’m here,” I said holding her even tighter. “I’m here.”

  Later that night, Betty and I shared the bed that had once belonged to our parents. My uncle, Tío Crece, slept on a hammock hanging from the rafters and my grandmother slept on her bed near the front door. Between the snoring of my uncle and grandmother, the barking of the dogs outside, and the chirping of crickets, it was hard to fall asleep. Not that I was trying very hard. Betty and I had too much to share.

  “I didn’t want to be in L.A. anyway,” Betty said to me after I told her how sorry I was that my mother had sent her away. “Here, at least, I can get away from her. From them.”

  She meant our stepfather, of course. Even though we had lived apart, in a way our lives hadn’t been much different. Living with my father, Mago, Carlos, and I had suffered from my stepmother’s indifference. Mila had kept us at arm’s length and didn’t want much to do with us. She never yelled at us or hit us, but that didn’t mean we didn’t suffer because of her. Whatever complaints she had, she would give them to our father, who would barge out of the bedroom with belt in hand to give us a whipping. Most of the time we didn’t even know what we were being punished for, since Mila never told us directly how we had displeased her.

  Rey, our stepfather, was the opposite of Mila. He was quick to beat Betty and yell at her, and he didn’t have to go through my mother to show or act on his disapproval. Though we had both grown up in households where beatings and verbal insults were the norm, I had received them only from our father, whereas Betty got them from both our mother and stepfather.

  “I’m sorry, Betty,” I said. And I meant I was sorry about everything, how immigration and separation had taken a toll on all of us, how even though our parents had emigrated from this very city to go to the U.S. to build us a house, they ended up destroying our home.

  As if reading my thoughts, Betty turned to me and said, “Do you think things would have been different if they had never left? Do you think we would all be together as a family?”

  The silver moonlight streamed through the gaps in the wall made of bamboo sticks tied together with rope and wire. Her moonlit eyes looked at me with so much hope and innocence, I knew she wanted me to paint a different picture—a different reality—than the one we were living. But there was no point in what-ifs. There was no point in wishing our family’s past away.

  “There’s nothing we can do to change it, Betty. But you know what I want? I want to one day look back and say that it was worth it. All the pain, all the heartache.”

  “That’s why you’re going to college?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ve already paid a high price for the opportunity. We might as well take advantage of it. We have it in our power to make our future better than our past, Betty, even though at times it doesn’t feel like we can ever escape it.”

  Betty didn’t say anything. She turned her back to me and faced the wall. “I don’t want to go back there,” she said before she fell asleep. “I hope you aren’t here to take me back to her.”

  8

  Reyna and Betty washing clothes

  IN MEXICO, the Christmas season had been my favorite time of the year because of the celebrations leading up to Christmas Day known as Las Posadas. All the kids received a goodie bag each night at the posada, one filled with candy, a tangerine, a jicama, sugarcane, and freshly roasted peanuts. It was one of those rare times in my childhood when I went to bed with a full belly for nine days straight. This year, I had arrived in Mexico in the middle of Las Posadas, so every night I went to the posada hosted by the church in my neighborhood. With candles in hand, my cousins and Betty would follow the procession making its way from house to house, reenacting the journey that Mary and Joseph had taken as they sought shelter. I walked through the streets of my old colonia and remembered myself as a child, burning my hands with the candle wax or singeing the hair of the person in front of me.

  I felt like a child again as we ran back to the house that night, emptied our goodie bags on the table, and swapped candy and fruit. Then Las Posadas were over, Christmas was over, and it was almost time for me to return to Santa Cruz. I still didn’t know what to do about Betty. All I knew was that she didn’t want to go back to my mother’s, and I wasn’t going to force her. She would only return to more physical and emotional abuse. But she couldn’t stay in Iguala either. This place had nothing to offer her.

  I wished I could do more for her beyond our daily chats and our walks around the neighborhood and our trips to the pool at La Quinta Castrejón, the fancy local country club. To Betty and me, going to the pool was a triumph of sorts—as little girls we had only been able to dream of swimming there since our family would never have been able to afford it. Now I could afford to go with my sister every day, or twice a day if we so desired. The admission price per person was two U.S. dollars. But in a city where people made less than five dollars a day, that was a fortune. The bitter irony was that absolutely no one from the neighborhood could afford a day of fun at the local swimming pool.

  I wanted to help my sister as much as I wanted to help the people who lived here, but I didn’t know how. I was ready to return to Santa Cruz, the place I longed for more and more. The poverty in Iguala was a burden I was tired of carrying. The guilt, the helplessness, the anger that bubbled up at seeing my family living in these circumstances became too much, and I was desperate to leave—to go back to my little paradise and not have to think about this misery anymore. I wanted to go back to UCSC and bury my head in my literature books and read about exotic lands that had nothing to do with my family’s reality. I wanted to read about someone else’s struggles and misery. Not my own. Not my people’s. But how could I forget? By forgetting Iguala, I would be abandoning those I left behind.

  I had been putting off visiting my father’s mother, Abuela Evila, but two days before my departure, I knew the time had come for me to go. Abuelita Chinta asked me about Abuela Evila, and I knew she disapproved that I didn’t want to go see my own grandmother.

  “You might never see her again,” she said. “I heard her health is not very good.”

  Abuelita Chinta was so kind and loving, I couldn’t tell her how for all these years I had held on to my resentment toward my paternal grandmother with fierce stubbornness, often revisiting my memories of living at her house and feeling anew the pain and sorrow of my miserable childhood. To Abuelita Chinta—to my Mexican culture—it was unacceptable to question your elders, to criticize them for their faults. We had to honor and respect them no matter their shortcomings, abuses, or failures.

  But now that I was here, I told myself, I might as well try to get answers from her, or at the very least, an apology.

  I took a combi—a public minibus—to Abuela Evila’s neighborhood, La Guadalupe, which was close to the mountains. When I got to her house, I looked over the rock wall encircling the property and scanned the backyard, my eyes taking in the plum, guava, and guamúchil trees my siblings and I had once loved to climb. Here in my grandmother’s backyard, Mago, Carlos, and I had learned how to survive. My grandmother had fed us as little as she could, enough to keep us alive but never enough for us to feel satisfied. After a meager lunch, our stomachs would still be rumbling from hunger, and we would come to the backyard to scavenge for food. Beans and tortillas don’t fill you up if that’s what you eat day after day after day. Soon, we discovered that the leaves of the plum tree were tasty if we sprinkled them with salt. They were really sour though and made our eyes squint while we chewed. Another day we discovered that the plum saplings had thick bulbous roots that were crunchy and starchy, like jicama. So we dug up the saplings clinging to the soil and ate them.

  When fruits were in season, it was easier to find treasures. We climbed up the guava tree and then munched on the pink flesh of its guayabas, or we plucked ripe red plums and ate them while licking the juice tha
t ran down our hands. When there was nothing else to be had, there were always the lemons, which we could sprinkle with salt and chili powder, or we would eat the mint leaves growing wild around the water tank. We would then have minty breath as well as a full belly.

  Abuela Evila didn’t know we had learned to feed ourselves from her yard. Whenever we got in trouble, she would send us off to the back for punishment and tell us to stay out of her way or so help her God, she was going to beat the hell out of us. And we would run to the backyard, laughing all the way.

  One day, as we were finishing our chores, we heard someone calling our names from the front gate. It was our uncle, Tío Mario, my mother’s youngest brother.

  “What are you doing here, Tío?” we said as we rushed to the gate. He said he had come to spend a few days with Abuelita Chinta and decided to come see us.

  Abuela Evila came out of the kitchen and told him to leave. “I don’t want Juana’s no-good family at my house,” she said. It hurt me to hear her insult my mother’s family.

  “Can I at least give them the ice cream I brought for them?” he asked, but my grandmother refused to let him near us and threatened to send for my grandfather and his friends if he didn’t go. We were sad to see Tío Mario walk away and sadder still to see him take away the ice cream he’d brought us. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any.

  “Get out of my sight before I grab a belt and spank all of you for inviting him over,” Abuela Evila said.

  We didn’t waste our breath telling her we had done no such thing. We rushed to the backyard to pretend we were explorers and dig up roots, climb trees, trying to forget my uncle and his present. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t be explorers. We were simply three hungry kids, and all we could think of was that bucket of ice cream that had come within our reach.

  “Pssst. Mago. Carlos. Pssst. Over here.” Tío Mario was standing on the other side of the corral. We jumped off the branches and rushed to where he was hiding.