by Reyna Grande
Through the large glass windows, we could see families sitting at the dining table sharing a meal, perhaps talking about their day or planning family vacations. Or they would be sitting together in the living room watching TV. Parents would be tucking their children in to sleep, reading them a book.
We wondered what it would be like to be part of those families and fantasized about walking into one of those big houses and being adopted by the family living there, being welcomed with open arms. We both wanted to have a beautiful place to come home to.
For now, we had our little apartment and each other, and at least for me, that was enough.
Then another letter arrived, and then another, and Betty confessed that she was ditching with Omar to go to his house while no one was home, and they were having unprotected sex. I was devastated. I remembered my aunt’s words in Mexico. She had said she didn’t want Betty to end up pregnant on her watch, and neither did I. What the hell would I do with a baby?
“Mándamela,” my mother said again when I called her. “At least you’ve tried.”
And failed, I wanted to say. I was so ashamed to realize that when I brought Betty to Santa Cruz, I had been both extremely arrogant and ignorant. I had wanted to prove to my mother that I could do a better job than her. In a way, I was beginning to understand why my mother had sent Betty away. If you can’t keep someone from being self-destructive, maybe it’s easier to send them where they can destroy themselves without you having to watch it happen.
I had thought I could save myself and my sister and give us both a home. Now I felt as if the two of us were drowning in a deep, vast ocean, and the truth was I no longer had the strength to save us both. So I had to let her go.
When Betty came home from school, I gave her the news. “I’m sending you back to her,” I said, unable to look her in the eye. “I can’t do this anymore.”
I sank into the couch and didn’t hear anything she said to me. She cried. She begged. But my mind was made up. I knew it was hard to let go of bad habits, but there had to come a point when enough was enough. For the first time, I understood that what I wanted for her—to do well in school, to go to college one day—wasn’t what she wanted for herself. I could not give my dreams to her. She would have to find her own. She would have to find the ganas, the fierce desire that my father often said would drive us to become the people we knew we could be.
She didn’t need to go to school the next day since I was putting her on the Greyhound bus to L.A. the day after, but she begged me to let her say goodbye to Omar.
“And come straight home,” I said. “You need to pack.”
I went to my own classes, only half listening to anything my teachers said, wallowing in the bitter realization that I had failed to save my sister from herself.
I came home to help her get her things ready, but Betty wasn’t back yet. The hours went by and there was no sign of her. I called Mago to get her advice.
“You have to focus on what you need to do for yourself, Nena. Don’t let her screw it up for you. When she shows up, just tell her to leave. Don’t even let her into the apartment. Let her figure it out. She obviously wants to do what she wants to do. Let her see what it’s like to be on her own.”
Mago was always so drastic in her decisions. I hung up feeling more confused than ever. I sat in the living room and heard a helicopter above, then an ambulance rushed by. I went outside and saw people gathering on Westcliff Drive, near the rocks that plunged into the water. I ran over to see what was happening.
“Someone jumped,” I heard people say. “They think it’s suicide.”
What if it was Betty? What if I had pushed her to kill herself? I stood there with the crowd, watching as the rescue team dove into the bay with their gear, trying to find the person. The helicopter circled above us; the lights of the siren atop the ambulance made everything red. As the sun set, I stood there watching the whole scene feeling as if I had stepped into a horror movie. I held on to the railing and felt my knees go weak.
I bent over the railing, my eyes scanning the water. The waves crashed against the rocks, and my eyes blurred with tears. I wanted to jump in and search for her, tell her I would keep her. Tell her that no matter what, I would never let her go and give up. I made a mistake. Come back, to me! Please don’t be dead.
When it was too dark to see anything, the crowd dispersed and I pried my hands from the railing. They were calling off the search and would resume the next day. I walked back to my apartment, forcing my feet to take one step and then another. I returned to an empty apartment and sat in the living room, imagining my sister in the depths of the ocean, dead because of me. I cried myself to sleep, and when the door finally opened and Betty stood there, I was relieved. She’s alive! And then, I was furious.
“Where the hell have you been?” I yelled, though what I wanted to say was that I was glad she was okay. But the fact that she was okay and had deliberately made me suffer like this angered me more than anything. It was well past 10:00 p.m.
“Hanging out with Omar and my friends,” she said.
“While I’ve been sitting here all day, worrying about you? You’re so damn ungrateful!” I said. An argument broke out, and she yelled at me and I yelled at her. “I am not getting on that stupid bus, and you can’t make me,” Betty said. “I’m not going back to L.A.!”
The next thing I knew I was doing the very thing Mago had suggested. “Well, you can’t stay here. No way. I’ve had enough of this. Go back to Omar and your friends if that’s what matters more to you.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’m outta here.”
And just like that, Betty walked out the apartment door and disappeared down the hallway. As I stood there in the empty hallway, I felt more alone than ever. Like Betty, all my life I had been on the receiving end of punishment, and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done to be the executioner, but in my rage, that was what I had become. I was no better than my parents.
Betty said she would never again return to our mother, and she kept her word. She moved in with Omar, and a few months later, at sixteen, she was pregnant. Though we lived in the same city, I hardly saw her. Her belly grew, and the guilt ate at me thinking that it was all my fault. I worried that she would drop out of school again. I felt lonely in Santa Cruz, just like I had when I first moved here, and I couldn’t even take refuge in the campus as I once had. The redwoods had lost their power to heal me. They no longer smelled of hope, but failure. I began to doubt myself, wondering if there was a point anymore to what I was doing. Not only was Betty pregnant, but so was Mago and so was Carlos’s second wife. There was a pregnancy epidemic happening in my family! I saw all those babies as obstacles to higher education because if my older siblings had dropped out of college—even when they were single and childless—pursuing higher education while supporting a family would prove a challenge too difficult to overcome.
Santa Cruz was small, and for that reason, I felt the distance between Betty and me even more strongly. Unlike L.A., where it’s so easy to disappear, here in Santa Cruz we were only a mile apart, but as the months went by without seeing each other, I felt our separation becoming insurmountable, and that realization tore me up inside.
What am I doing here? I wondered. I would go to my classes, half listen to what was said, and ask myself that question again and again.
12
ONE DAY WHILE walking to the market, I passed by a little shop that offered palm readings for ten dollars. It was a bit pricey, and I needed to shop for groceries, but my spirit was hungrier than my stomach so I went in and handed those precious ten dollars to the woman sitting behind a small round table, her eyes like Cleopatra’s, smoky and mysterious.
“What would you like to know?” she said, as I sat on the chair across from her and gave her my hand. The room was decorated with cheap products from foreign lands to make it look exotic, the smell of the incense was overwhelming, and the purple cloth wrapped around her head made her look ridiculous,
but I was desperate to believe.
“Is it worth it?” I asked.
She ran her fingers along my palm, her Cleopatra eyes studying its surface. My palm lines reminded me of the uprooted cypress trees lying on the ground along Westcliff Drive. I once read that 80 percent of what happens with a tree takes place beneath the soil. What if that were true for humans? What if by looking at the lines of our palms we could see what we keep hidden, even from ourselves? I shook my head. This woman couldn’t predict the future any better than I could, and yet her words were all I had to cling to that day.
“What do you see? Is there a point to all this?”
She closed my fingers to form a fist, and I could no longer see my palm. She looked at me and said, “You will break the cycle. So yes, it is worth it.”
She’s a charlatan. Everything that came out of her mouth was pure speculation, I told myself, but when I stepped through the beaded curtain and back out into the light, I felt the gloom begin to lift.
I returned to my studies with determination, and under Marta’s supervision, I finished the short-story collection I had been working on.
“Reyna, why don’t you publish your collection?” Marta said as she handed me her edits for the last of my stories.
“How?” I had never heard that you could publish your own work.
“There are student grants you can apply for that are specifically for special projects,” she said. “Check to see if the Literature Department, or Kresge College, can help.”
I did as she suggested and applied for a grant to self-publish my collection of short stories, and was awarded $1,000 to pay for printing costs. For the cover of my book, I used a painting on parchment paper I had bought in Mexico from an indigenous artist selling his work on the street. I titled my collection, Under the Guamúchil Tree.
Guamúchil trees were common in my hometown. They lined the dirt road that led to my grandmother’s house. When I was little, my siblings and I would grab a fifteen-foot bamboo stick, tie a metal hook to it, and walk around the neighborhood cutting down the reddish green pods of the guamúchil tree. We would fill a bucket or two with the fruit if we got there early and beat the competition, and would keep some to eat, but the rest Mago would take to the train station to sell.
I picked up the box of books from the printer, and the next day Marta threw a publication party for me. She promoted the event with the Latino Studies and Languages Departments, and encouraged all her students to come. Thanks to her, my very first book signing was a success.
“You should look into making a stage production of your work,” Marta said to me another time after I finished reading a play she had given me—Los Vendidos by Luis Valdez of the Teatro Campesino. “I think your stories would be great onstage.”
“Is that possible?”
“Books get adapted for the stage or film all the time,” Marta said. “Though rarely the works of Latino authors, which is a shame. Pero tú puedes, Reyna.”
So, I applied for another grant from Kresge to turn my short stories into skits, and I recruited the few friends I had, some of my peers, and even some of the students I tutored, like Alfredo, to perform my work onstage. The provost allowed me to use the Kresge Town Hall for the performance, and I had a good, supportive audience who bought copies of my self-published book. Once again, Marta was there, encouraging me as best she could.
The three grants I had received made me feel confident and excited about the creative work I was doing and my progress as an artist. Once again, I had turned to my creativity to help me deal with my pain and sorrow, and it carried me through the difficult months during my trials with Betty, but especially after we had our falling out.
Reyna at her first book signing, 1997
Marta was also a Spanish teacher, and I enrolled in her Spanish for Spanish Speakers class, where I learned to speak my native tongue in a way I hadn’t before; that is, “properly.” I had known that the language I had inherited from my parents wasn’t perfect—their grammar and vocabulary reflected their poverty and lack of education—but I hadn’t truly known until then how riddled with “mistakes” our Spanish was. We spoke words that were mispronounced, words that didn’t exist, verbs that were conjugated completely wrong. It was in Marta’s class that I finally learned about accent marks and their correct placement, the right conjugations of regular and irregular verbs. I also discovered that I spoke a third language that described who I was—a mixture of two cultures, two languages, born from the collision of two identities—Spanglish. Not only did I speak incorrect Spanish because of my family’s poverty, but growing up in America had added yet another layer to my native tongue.
Though Marta repeatedly said that there was nothing to be ashamed of—there was no right or wrong way to speak Spanish—I did feel ashamed not speaking it with fluency and mastery. How could I claim it as my mother tongue if the words came out twisted and distorted as if my mouth were a hand-cranked clothes wringer?
“When it comes to Spanish, we all have different ways of expressing ourselves,” Marta said. “There are colloquialisms unique to our upbringing and the places where we’ve lived. To be ashamed of how you speak is to be ashamed of where you’re from, Reyna, and that is not how I want my students to feel.”
I told Marta about Don Oscar and his family. When we lived in Mexico, my mother had a job at a record shop. Her bosses, Don Oscar and his wife, were wealthy Mexicans who looked at us with pity whenever they saw us. They had three children who were always clean and well dressed, who attended private schools, and who were treated with the utmost respect by my mother and other adults. Never mind that they were just kids, the same age as my siblings and me, they were rich and therefore were treated like royalty. I remembered my shock the first time I heard my mother address Oscar Jr.—who was twelve—as “usted” instead of the informal “tú.” I had never heard a child being addressed as usted until that day.
When I was in Mexico over Christmas, I had been invited to Don Oscar’s for lunch with the family. Sitting there in the living room of their two-story brick house, located in Iguala’s only gated community, with its own security guard, I struggled to feel comfortable around Don Oscar and his wife, but even more so with their children. I kept telling myself that things were different for me now. I was no longer the little girl walking around with lice and tapeworm, barefoot and dressed in rags. I was now a university student, just like the couple’s oldest son, Oscar Jr., who was attending UNAM, Mexico’s largest public university.
But it was my Spanish that remained a barrier. When they spoke, I could hear their wealthy upbringing in the fancy words they used. The words rolled out of their mouths perfectly formed and polished, like shiny marbles. When I spoke, I could see them glance at each other. Ever since I was little, I had sensed that my Spanish was different from theirs, but now I was more aware of it than ever before. Who cared if I was a university student like their son if I continued to talk like the Mexican actress and comedian María Elana Velasco, who rose to fame by playing La India María, a caricature of an indigenous woman who spoke the most awful Spanish?
Things turned around for me later that day when Oscar Jr. and his sisters put on their favorite English music and asked me to translate the lyrics for them. Drinking a Bailey’s on the rocks for the first time, I listened to the familiar lyrics of George Michael’s “Careless Whispers,” and the music and the alcohol made me feel confident once again. Oscar Jr.’s and his sisters’ Spanish was perfect, unlike mine, but now I could speak a language they struggled with but were desperate to speak, which suddenly put me at their level.
When I translated the lyrics for them, my painful struggle to learn English suddenly seemed worth it just so that I could have this moment—seeing the profound admiration in the eyes of these rich young people who, up until then, had seen me as the poor little girl who deserved their pity and required their charity.
In Marta’s Spanish class that memory of Don Oscar’s children made me work extra
hard to learn my mother tongue. “So that next time I see them,” I told Marta as I walked her to her office after class, “I can speak with confidence.”
She listened attentively as I told her about the feelings of inadequacy that came over me when I visited my native country. “Over there, everyone treats me differently, as if I’m not Mexican enough.”
Marta stopped walking and turned to look at me. “Reyna, let me tell you something. It isn’t that you aren’t enough. In fact, the opposite is true.”
I waited for her to explain. What did she mean that I was the opposite of not enough?
“If they treat you differently in Mexico it is because you are different,” Marta said in that soft, tender voice of hers I had grown to love. “You are now bilingual, bicultural, and binational. You are not less. You are more.”
After our talk, as I sat on the bus heading back to my apartment, I thought of what she had said. From the moment I stepped foot in this country, I had felt cut in half. But now I wondered if Marta was right.
Could it be true that without me knowing I had transformed into twice the girl I used to be?
In Marta’s Chicano literature and Spanish classes, I made a lot of Latino friends—not just the students in her class, but also the authors Marta assigned us to read. Diana had introduced me to the works of Helena María Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, and Isabel Allende. In Marta’s class, I was exposed to even more Latina writers, and I fell in love with hard-core feminist writers who inspired me to keep fighting for my stories: Ana Castillo, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Cherríe Moraga, and many more. Through their words, I would hear them tell me, Yes, your stories matter!
Marta introduced me to the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a feminist nun who lived in seventeenth-century Mexico—or New Spain, as it used to be called—who wrote some of the most powerful poetry and prose I had read. I felt connected to Sor Juana’s struggle to write and thrive as an artist in a patriarchal society that subjugated and censored her and, on many occasions, had tried to silence her.
