A Dream Called Home Read online

  Hombres necios que acusáis

  a la mujer sin razón,

  sin ver que sois la ocasión

  de lo mismo que culpáis.

  Stupid men, quick to condemn

  women wrongly for their flaws,

  Never seeing you’re the cause

  of all that you blame on them.

  I memorized her poem and repeated it to myself as a mantra.

  Another time, Marta gave us an excerpt of Borderlands/La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldúa. At the time Anzaldúa lived in Santa Cruz, and although I never had the opportunity to meet her, her words resonated with me.

  “The U.S.-Mexico border es una herida abierta where the third world grates against the first and bleeds, and before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture,” wrote Anzaldúa.

  Because I was an immigrant, the border was something that had always been part of my life. That fateful day in 1977 when my father decided to emigrate was the day the border changed my life. I was two years old.

  A third country. Not Mexico, not the U.S., but the hyphen between Mexican and American. Not my father, not my mother, but the sum of their genes that was greater than their parts. Not English, not Spanish, but the language formed of their commingled blood—Spanglish. The third country was inside me. I was a product of the merging of those two worlds, two people, two languages. My heart was the open wound, la herida abierta.

  Anzaldúa wrote: “I am a turtle. Wherever I go, I carry my home on my back.”

  It was then that I understood what I needed to do. If I could become a turtle and build a home that I could carry on my back, I would never feel homeless again.

  13

  Reyna on the paint crew, 1997

  WHEN SUMMER ARRIVED, my maintenance job at Kresge College began. Since my apartment was far from the nearest bus stop, I bought a used bicycle for transportation. UCSC is located on a hill. A very steep hill. As I made my way at 7:00 a.m. to my first day of work, I didn’t even last a quarter of the way. I was soon panting and gasping for air. I had to get off my bike and walk up Bay Street, praying for the bus to come so I could throw my bike on the rack and hitch a ride to campus.

  My boss, Robin McDuff, knew everything there was to know about working with your hands. I had never seen a woman use drills and hammers and saws, but Robin handled tools with the same expertise as a man, and I was in awe of her. I wanted to learn everything she had to teach me, and I threw myself into my job completely. The first thing Robin had the paint crew do was to enter each dorm and take out everything the students had left behind. Carolyn hadn’t been kidding when she said that college students were destructive—the holes in the walls were proof of that. She forgot to mention that they’re also dirty. There was trash everywhere. We hauled away all the abandoned furniture (most of it broken and useless), unwanted or damaged clothes, tattered books, and other discarded belongings. We took the leftover nonperishable food to our rec room to eat during our breaks. After the cleaning was done, we set out to repair the many holes and to prepare the rooms for painting, things my father had done at his own job.

  The irony was that in Santa Cruz I had hoped to forget my father, and yet my work on the paint crew brought me closer to him. My father had been a maintenance worker for many years. When we came to live with him, he was working at Kingsley Manor, a retirement home in L.A., making $300 a week. He wore a blue uniform with his last name, GRANDE, embroidered over the left pocket of his shirt. Every day he would come home from work with streaks of white paint in his hair and white splotches on his hands and arms. The paint Kingsley Manor used was the same color we used on student housing at UCSC.

  As I painted walls for the first time in my life, I thought of my father. Standing there in the dorms, inhaling the dizzying fumes, dipping my paintbrush into the white paint to carefully coat the walls or cut their edges, running the roller up and down, side to side, I began to get a glimpse into my father’s daily life. This is what it had been like for him. The endless rolling and cutting, dipping and stroking. I got white paint on my hands, my arms, my hair. If I had had a blue-collared shirt with the word GRANDE embroidered over my pocket, I would have looked just like him.

  At PCC, when I was nineteen, I’d been infatuated with one of the maintenance workers because he wore a blue uniform that looked exactly like my father’s. Just like my father’s uniform shirt, Alberto’s last name was embroidered over the left pocket. He had skin darkened from too much work in the sun and his hands had bulging veins, like my father’s. Whenever I walked to my classes and caught a flash of blue, my heart would skip a beat, imagining I was seeing my father, that he had come to see me at school, but it was Alberto. I would go over and talk to him. Sometimes he would be wading in the mirror pools removing debris. Other times he would be using the leaf blower. Or he might be painting. Always, it was the blue uniform that drew me to him. He was in his late twenties, the age my father had been when he’d headed north. I thought I was in love with him, and yet, whenever I saw him after work without his blue uniform, his presence diminished before my eyes.

  “You’re so tiny, I could fit you in my pocket,” Alberto would say to me, and I’d look at his blue uniform, his name embroidered over his left pocket, and I would want to be in there, safe and protected.

  After I finished painting a room, I would sit quietly during my break smelling the fresh paint, getting drunk on the smell of my father, and for a second the hole in my heart would fill with his presence. I would take deep gulps of air, getting dizzy with the paint fumes, imagining conversations I would have with him the next time I saw him. I could talk about brush and roller techniques, how to repair holes, texture walls. Now we had something in common.

  When the painting was done, I moved on to other things: cleaning rugs; stripping, staining, and refinishing the oak dining tables and end tables; snaking drains and removing hair balls the size of mice; cleaning moldy refrigerators.

  When the days were long and grueling, and summer seemed eternal, I yearned for school to start, so I could finally go back to my classes, my books—and it hit me that this was only a temporary job, a job that was going to help pay for my college degree. For my father, being a maintenance worker was all he had. It was the job that had helped him support his kids. He made $15,000 a year; I was paying almost $15,000 a year to be at UCSC. Some students were in college thanks to their parents’ occupations. I was there in spite of mine.

  I had never had a full-time job, and it took half the summer to get used to it. Even though it was grueling to make the ride up the hill to campus every morning, and I would curse the founders of the university for building the place on a damn hill, in the evening I was grateful for the downhill ride all the way to my apartment. I would get on my bike and fly across campus, down Bay Street, my hair flapping wildly around me, my blood pumping from my heart with sheer joy. I would make a right turn to my apartment, where I could see that sliver of Monterey Bay from the balcony.

  As I took a shower and scrubbed the white paint and dirt off with lavender soap that dissipated the memory of paint fumes, I began to get an insight into my father in a way I never had.

  Now I knew why he had been such a tyrant about school—he didn’t want any of us to be a blue-collar worker like he was. He wanted us to succeed in a way he had never been able to. I had never understood why, when my father would come home, he just wanted to sit in front of the TV and watch the basketball game or the news. He didn’t want to go anywhere once he was home, so he rarely took us out. On the weekends, instead of resting and doing something fun, he would get up early and work around the house—cut the grass, repair a leaky faucet, paint over graffiti on the fence. He worked endlessly. Whenever we complained that school was too hard and demanding, he would scoff and say, “You don’t know what it’s like to work hard.”

  After my shower, I sat in front of the TV and rested my tired, aching body, massaged my feet, saying to my
self, “You were right, Papá. I didn’t know.”

  As I rode my bike to work, finally making it all the way up the hill to Kresge without stopping, the pain I had felt when my father banned me from his life gave way to something else—understanding.

  I met Gabe during the last three weeks of my summer job. Now that the painting was mostly done, I was sent to clean the moldy refrigerators in the apartments and get them ready for move-in day. A professional builder, Gabe was in his mid-thirties and was part of an outside crew the university had hired to remodel some of the buildings. The first time I saw him, he was operating a drill. The shrill sound reminded me of my father, and I stopped outside the door just to listen to it. He saw me watching him work in the living room and turned off the drill.

  “I’m here to clean the refrigerator,” I said.

  He was dressed in a sweaty T-shirt and jeans that were stained and torn. He had yellow knee guards and steel-toed boots, like the kind my father wore to work. His face was sunburned and wrinkled from spending too much time working outdoors. He was covered in a film of white powder, and he was too old for me, and yet I was immediately attracted to him.

  He seemed uncomfortable with me there. “I’m not done putting up this drywall,” he said, taking off his safety glasses. “It’s going to be noisy in here.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  He had brown hair and light brown eyes, and his last name meant “cherry” in Italian, he said. After we introduced ourselves and shook hands, he turned the drill back on and resumed his work. The sound distracted me from the task at hand. The refrigerator was covered with so much mold it looked as if it were being eaten by a shapeless green monster.

  “I don’t envy your job,” Gabe said a few minutes later as he stood behind me.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t want to trade?” I said, handing him the bucket of soapy water and my latex gloves the color of a banana slug.

  “You’ll hurt yourself with this,” he said, holding his drill close to him, as if protecting it from me, not the other way around.

  “Maybe,” I said. “It all depends on how you hold it, right? And the trick is to not be afraid of it.” I remembered my father telling my brother that once. I knew I had no business flirting with a man in his thirties, but I couldn’t help it. “I can tell you’re an expert with the drill.”

  “I sure do know how to use it,” he said, and grinned.

  He returned to his task, and I did the same. When he was ready for a break, he came over to watch me work on the refrigerator. I felt embarrassed to have him watch me do that nasty job. I would rather he had seen me paint.

  “Damn if that fridge don’t look brand-new,” he said. I tried not to let him see how his words pleased me, but I couldn’t hide my smile.

  He asked me what I was studying, where I had come from, how old I was. “And how do you like Santa Cruz?”

  “I love it,” I said. “These trees are amazing.”

  He said he lived in Boulder Creek, which was a few towns over, and if I liked the trees so much, then I would surely love his house. “It’s in the middle of a forest. I built it myself.”

  “Really?” I was genuinely surprised. I had never met anyone who had built his own house. In Mexico, my father had been a bricklayer, and he had dreamed of being able to build his dream house himself but he couldn’t afford the building materials, so the only way to build the house was by coming to the U.S. to work and hiring someone else to do it. With Mexico’s weak economy, he would never have earned the money he needed, but if he had been able to stay and build his house brick by brick, he would have been like Gabe. He would have been a man who lived in a house built with his own hands, sweat, and labor.

  Two weeks later, after spending more time with Gabe on campus and going out to lunch with him a few times, after telling him about my complicated relationship with my father, I agreed to go to Boulder Creek with him. So, on a Saturday, he picked me up at my apartment, and off I went to see the house that Gabe built. I had expected a crude cabin, a cute rustic cottage at best, but it was a real house and just as beautiful as he had claimed. Not only was it surrounded by a forest of redwood trees, but the house itself seemed to be made of the same wood. The house had what he called an open floor plan, so there were no walls to divide the kitchen, dining room, and living room. It was the most spacious, brightest house I had ever been in. He had put floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room, so even though we were indoors, it felt as if we weren’t. You never forgot you were in a forest. Even the ceiling had windows, and I could see the deep, blue sky through them.

  “I’ve never been in a house with windows on the ceiling,” I told him, shocked at the sight. By now, I thought the man was a genius.

  “They’re called skylights.”

  “Skylights,” I repeated. The word sounded like poetry.

  The house had a bedroom where his daughters slept when they stayed with him. He and his ex-wife had joint custody, he said, and the girls came every week.

  “I sleep upstairs in the loft. Come, I’ll show you.”

  I hadn’t planned to sleep with Gabe, and before I came here I’d told myself I wouldn’t let things go that far. We hadn’t even kissed, because deep down I knew this relationship was all wrong for me. But now I found myself not wanting to leave. I wanted to spend at least one night—not with Gabe, but with his beautiful house. So when he drew me into his arms and lowered me onto his bed, I let it happen. And that night, while we had sex in the loft, I could see the moon and the stars peeking through the skylights.

  Afterward, he said to me, “What are you going to do when your summer job is over?”

  “Look for another one,” I said. The money I made this summer was going toward paying off my debt at Sears for my computer. I had no money left over, and finding a job was my top priority.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve been looking for help with my daughters. I could pay you to babysit them when they come over and I’m still at work. You can live here in the house. I’ll build you a bedroom, not charge you rent. Then you can just focus on school and not worry about money.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “No strings attached,” he said. “I’m serious.”

  But I wondered if that was true. I was suddenly filled with dread. His was a dangerous proposal. To live in his dream house, to become part of the fabric of his life, to take care of his daughters, to be his lover—because surely, now that we had done it once, how could it not happen again? This wasn’t like the time I had gone to live with Diana. She had never asked me for anything in return, only that I honor my dreams.

  Gabe knew what he was asking of me, and I was tempted. Here was a man who had done what my father hadn’t been able to do. To build his dream house with his own hands—and actually live in it. And have his children live in it, too, though part-time.

  In the morning, as we got ready to go back to Santa Cruz, I took a long look at his house. Bathed in the golden light streaming through the skylights, I knew I would never go back there again. So as we drove away, I said goodbye to Gabe’s house. This isn’t my dream house, I told myself as it got swallowed up by the trees. It’s someone else’s.

  I didn’t know if I would ever have the money to buy or build my own house, but even if I never did, I would build my home out of the only things I had—words and dreams.

  14

  I MOVED INTO A new place because, without Betty, the apartment by the bay didn’t feel the same anymore. I couldn’t afford to move back to campus, so when the lease ended, I rented a small room in an apartment I shared with three roommates. It was $100 less per month than my old place and was located directly across from Santa Cruz High School, close to the bus stop and five minutes from La Esperanza Market. The place was small and dark, and I had nothing in common with my roommates, two white men who were not students and drank too much and a Chinese guy who was a student and studied too much. I hated spending time there with no one to talk to. I w
ould usually go to the coffee shop downtown to do my work. I would walk by the high school, my heart racing, wondering if I would run into Betty. Weeks later, on my way to the coffee shop, I finally did. Betty came out through the front doors of the school with a group of friends. She looked like a regular teenager, young and carefree.

  My eyes went straight to her big belly, and I realized that her life wouldn’t be carefree for long. I didn’t want to judge, yet all I could think of was that my sister had turned seventeen two months before and would be a mother in ten weeks. I stopped walking and stood there, wondering what to do. She came down the steps and saw me watching her. For a second I thought she was going to pretend I wasn’t there, that she would look away and keep walking with her friends. Instead, we found ourselves face-to-face on the sidewalk, and her friends continued on their way, leaving us alone.

  “How are you?” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but I didn’t know how to start the conversation.

  “Fine.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s the pregnancy going?”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, take care,” I started to walk away, disappointed about not saying what I had wanted to say—that I was so damn happy to see her! I wished she would at least meet me halfway. Didn’t she miss me at all?

  “I’m having a boy,” she said. I turned around and retraced my steps, the tightness in my chest loosening.

  “Cool,” I said. “Have you picked a name?”

  “We aren’t sure yet,” she said. “We’re still thinking about it.”

  She told me about the program for pregnant teens that SCHS had and how grateful she was for the support she was getting from her teachers. She loved Omar’s mother, she said. The woman treated her like a daughter. “I finally found the mom I always wanted to have.” I could tell in her voice that she really meant it. That was the first time it ever occurred to me that something positive had come from this situation. “I’m learning from her what it means to be a real mother. The kind of mother I want to be.”