A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  When I got to Iguala late at night, my aunt and my grandmother were surprised to see me, even though I had called to let them know of my arrival. It was the way I looked; even the darkness couldn’t hide my bloodshot eyes. I didn’t want to tell anyone that I had just had my heart broken. But they could all see that I was suffering. When my cousin Lupe cleaned the house, I volunteered to help. She put on the songs of Marco Antonio “El Buki” Solís, and I would burst into tears as I was mopping the floor.

  Te extraño más que nunca y no sé qué hacer.

  Despierto y te recuerdo al amanecer.

  “There’s nothing harder than living without you!” I would sing. “Suffering from the anxiety to see you come back.”

  In the evening, I sat at the dining table with Abuelita Chinta, complaining about my love life. My grandmother told me a story I had never heard before.

  “I understand your pain, m’ija,” she said to me as she patted my head.

  “Thanks, Abuelita. I know you suffered a lot when my grandfather died,” I said as I took a sip of the cinnamon tea she had prepared for me. My grandfather, Abuelito Gertrudis, passed away a week before I was born. My pregnant mother didn’t go to his funeral because the locals believed it was bad luck for an unborn baby to be exposed to all the dead bodies and wandering souls in the cemetery. Of all my siblings, I was the only one born left-handed, just like my grandfather. I had always believed this was his special gift to me, upon his death.

  “I wasn’t talking about your grandfather,” she said.

  My grandmother told me that when she was a señorita, she had fallen in love with a young man, but her father and brothers hadn’t approved of their relationship. “Eliseo was poor, nothing more than a simple peasant,” she said, “and my family wouldn’t allow me to be with him. So I ran away from home and went to live with him, desperate to fight for our love. We loved the way young people tend to do—con ganas y entrega total.” She laughed at that before continuing. “But my father and brothers came looking for me, and they grabbed me by the hair and dragged me out of his house. They threatened to kill Eliseo if he came near me again, and that was the end of our relationship.”

  “You really think they would have killed him, Abuelita?” I asked, holding her hand.

  “Yes. They could have easily done away with him, m’ija. You know what this place is like. Here, you can easily disappear and no one would ever know why or how it happened.”

  As punishment, she was sent to work at her brother’s cantina. She spent her days serving beer and tequila to borrachos, drunks. “The bar was no place for a young innocent woman, but my family no longer saw me as pure. So I had no choice but to work there along with the women of ill repute, who always mocked my innocence and naïveté, telling me to stop pretending I was a blanca palomita, a white dove. That was where I met your grandfather. He was twenty years older and had grown obsessed with me. He wouldn’t let any of the other women serve him his drinks. He wanted only me to pour his tequila and mezcal. One day, after work, he waited for me to come out of the bar and he pushed me against the brick wall and put a knife to my throat, threatening to kill me if I didn’t become his woman. My father and brothers did not defend me. They did not stop him from pursuing me.”

  “And that was how you ended up with my abuelo?” I said in disbelief.

  “Yes. But I never forgot my first love.”

  I sat there with my grandmother, dumbfounded by the story she had just told me. How was it possible? How could that story be true? I thought about the tales I had heard of the old days, when a man would kidnap a woman by throwing her on his horse, like a sack of corn, and running off with her, taking her away from her family and everything she had known. Many Mexican marriages had begun that way. I knew my grandmother’s story was plausible, and yet I couldn’t believe it.

  I never met my grandfather since he died of alcoholism eight days before my birth, but the years that I lived with my grandmother she had been a devoted wife to him, even in death. She had gone to the cemetery every week to bring him flowers and clean his grave. She placed a framed photograph of him on her altar, where he sat surrounded by saints and La Virgen de Guadalupe. She prayed at that altar every night and looked at his photograph. How could she tell me now that he had forced her at knifepoint to be with him? How could she forgive him and not only give him flowers but be so loyal to him in death that she never remarried?

  When I asked her, she simply nodded. “Era mi esposo,” she said. “For better or for worse, he was my husband. He gave me five children.”

  And I suddenly hated her father and her brothers. I hated my grandfather for what he did. I hated my culture for breeding these men who would treat women as if they were merely objects to be used and abused. As Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz had once written, men like that were the cause of all that they blame on women.

  My grandmother was so used to being victimized that even after he died she was still a faithful wife. And what about that young man she had loved? I asked her. Did the pain of their forbidden romance eventually wear off?

  “He fell in love with someone else,” she said.

  This was the only time my grandmother ever told me anything about her past, which ended up making my failed romance with Eddie worth the pain. I never learned why Eddie decided to end our relationship without giving it a chance. But thanks to my abuelita, it no longer mattered. My heartbreak had been the catalyst for her revelation—a grandmother’s gift of love.

  “I’m sorry, Abuelita.”

  “Me too, m’ija,” she said.

  My grandmother and I hugged each other and cried for the love we could not have. For what would never be.

  Abuelita Chinta as a young woman

  20

  Carlos, Norma, and Natalia

  I RETURNED TO Los Angeles and decided to go on with my life and get over my failed romance with Eddie. I wanted to embrace this next stage with optimism. I was a new college graduate with my whole future before me. It was an exciting time for me, and I was ready to work hard for my dreams.

  My brother, Carlos, was generous enough to open his home to me. I moved in with him and his common-law wife, Norma, and their one-year-old daughter, Natalia. They lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, and all they had to offer me was a couch in the living room, but I was grateful for the couch. I told them it would be for only a month or so. Soon, I told them—told myself—I would be a published author, sharing my writing with the world and making a difference.

  Their apartment was in East Los Angeles, an area I wasn’t familiar with. Though I had grown up in L.A., I only knew Highland Park and nearby communities, like Pasadena. I was a little familiar with downtown because that was where my mother had lived for thirteen years. Other than that, L.A. was a big unknown city that seemed to go on forever.

  As the days passed and I found myself lying on my brother’s couch night after night, I came to the frightening realization that I didn’t know a thing about how to get published—I mean published for real, not the self-publishing I had done in Santa Cruz with a school grant. In my writing classes we had never talked about how to approach publishers or how to find an agent, and I was completely clueless about where to begin. In Santa Cruz, I had learned the craft of writing. I learned to take risks and venture out of my comfort zone. What I didn’t learn at UCSC, however, was what to do with myself once I was back in the real world.

  I looked in the classified section of the newspaper to see if any publishers were looking for writers to publish or if any agents were looking for writers to represent. Maybe I could find someone to hire me to write a novel or pay me to finish the one I was working on. I found a few ads for local newspapers hiring journalists, which wasn’t what I had in mind. But as the weeks turned into a month, then two, I ended up responding to those ads because a job writing news articles was better than no job at all. I was told that creative writing was not the same as journalism and that to them my degree was useless, thank you very much. I ha
d written for the school paper at PCC, but that didn’t seem to count.

  Some of my friends, who had also majored in what I began to think of as useless fields, were heading to the office of the Los Angeles Unified School District to get jobs as teachers, even if teaching hadn’t been their original career choice.

  “You should check it out,” one of my friends said to me after finding a job as a math teacher. It was August of 1999 and the LAUSD was in the middle of a severe teacher shortage. They were giving away emergency credentials to anyone who had a bachelor’s degree.

  “I don’t want to be a teacher,” I said to my friend. “I want to be a writer.” I continued my search, but then another month passed, and the couch at Carlos’s house was getting worn and so was my welcome. I turned twenty-four that September, and my worst nightmare was becoming a reality: I was jobless, broke, and had over $20,000 in student loans to repay. I wasn’t contributing anything to household expenses and was becoming a burden, but my brother never complained. He was being as supportive as he could and was grateful that I was keeping Norma company while he worked two jobs. Being a housewife and taking care of a toddler wasn’t easy, and at least I was good at washing dishes and entertaining Norma with interesting stories.

  I couldn’t turn to Diana for help. I told myself she had done enough for me already. I couldn’t expect her to keep rescuing me. I needed to take care of myself as I had done during my three years in Santa Cruz.

  I missed the city terribly, the smallness of it, the sense of community, the ocean, the redwoods, having my own room and an income, regardless of how meager it had been. I could ride my bike wherever I wanted and feel safe, and wherever I went I was sure to run into a familiar face—a classmate, a teacher, a friend. L.A. was a city of concrete and strangers. It was gray and dull, not the lush, vibrant green and blue of Santa Cruz. It made me feel small and insignificant, lost and alone.

  I missed my job in the Kresge Maintenance Department, a job I had truly loved. I was beginning to feel useless. My student loan grace period would be over in January. I had two months left to find a job. Little by little, the realization that my education at UCSC hadn’t prepared me for the real world began to frighten me. The plain and simple truth was that I was a storyteller, but I didn’t know how to make a living telling stories. I had never realized that there were two sides to writing: the art and the business. Sleeping on my brother’s living room couch, I started to feel like an ignorant fool with nothing to show for my college education.

  Since I had double-majored in film and video, I went to Hollywood to look for jobs, hoping to have better luck in film than I had had in publishing. I found listings for internships at TV stations and film studios, but all of them were unpaid positions—every single one.

  “You want me to work for free?” I would ask, astounded. “I have over $20,000 in debt I need to pay!”

  “But just think about how valuable this experience would be,” they would say.

  In early November, I went to the Pasadena Mall with Norma to window-shop. We saw a “Now Hiring” sign at a clothing store. The holidays would be upon us soon, and they were hiring seasonal workers. All I could think of was that when the holidays were over I would need to start paying my student loan for a college degree that day by day seemed to be losing its value.

  “You should apply,” Norma said to me. “A job is a job.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just not what I thought I would be doing by now, you know?”

  Norma was seven years younger than me. Like Betty, she was a teenage mother with a maturity that amazed me.

  “It’s a temporary job,” she said. “It’ll provide you with some money while you figure out your next step. You have a green card, a college degree. Doors will soon open for you. Just be patient and don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  Norma had come to the U.S. from El Salvador four years earlier, smuggled in the back of one of those infamous trailer trucks where immigrants sometimes die of extreme heat and no ventilation. Once she and my brother were married, he helped legalize her status, but at the time, she was still undocumented, and because of her baby and because she was a minor in an illicit relationship, she had stopped going to school. In addition to the challenges of being a young mom and wife, on a daily basis she had to deal with her fear of being deported and separated from her child, or that her baby’s father might end up in prison. I knew that I had nothing to complain about. In the scheme of things, I didn’t have it so bad.

  “You’re right,” I told her.

  A week later, I had a job steam-ironing and putting price tags on clothes. I also stood at the door greeting customers. “Hi. How’s your day going?” I said over and over to customers who pretended not to see me or hear me as they walked into the store. The Christmas songs played for hours on end, burrowing so deeply into my mind I would hear them in my sleep. My coworkers were mostly high school students. At twenty-four, I was the oldest employee in the store, and my manager was a kid who wasn’t even planning on going to college.

  When I asked her why, she eyed me up and down said, “What for? It didn’t do you any good.”

  At home, things had deteriorated. Though at first they had been supportive, now Carlos and Mago had started making fun of me. “You with your college degree, and now look at you, working for minimum wage at a clothing store as a seasonal worker,” they said.

  To be fair, I deserved it. Whenever I had spoken to them while in Santa Cruz, I had done nothing but encourage them to return to college for their degrees. “You’ll have great jobs—amazing careers. Earn lots of money!” I would tell them, often criticizing Mago for working at a collection agency and Carlos for being an office clerk at a hospital and having to work two jobs just to make ends meet.

  I had been a snob, and I became an even bigger snob when I graduated and framed my diploma, hung it up for all to see on a wall that wasn’t even mine to begin with.

  As I always did, I turned to my writing and my Mexican community for inspiration. East L.A. had Mexicans—lots of them! It was wonderful to be part of the majority again. On my days off, I would walk around the neighborhood with Norma and my baby niece. We would hear the ranchera music drifting from open windows, smell beans boiling on the stove, see taco trucks on almost every corner.

  It was in East L.A. where I discovered an appreciation for the shopping cart. They were everywhere: a woman pushing a shopping cart loaded with dirty laundry on her way to the Laundromat on Olympic Boulevard, a man pushing a shopping cart carrying a large aluminum pot filled with corn on the cob or tamales. “Tamaaaales. Eloootes!” he would say and people would run out of their homes with money in hand. An older couple pushed a shopping cart filled with cans and bottles. I would watch them go down the length of Soto Street, rummaging through trash cans as they made their way to the recycling center nearby. A woman pushed a shopping cart filled with the groceries she had bought at the local market, her three children clinging to each side of the cart, begging her to go faster, faster. A homeless person pushed a shopping cart down César Chávez Avenue carrying everything he owned in the world, turning the shopping cart into a home that he could carry.

  Who were these people? What were their stories?

  Even though I would come home exhausted, my feet throbbing from standing all day, after everyone had gone to bed I would sit at the kitchen table and write late into the night. I began a second collection of short stories called The Shopping Cart Chronicles and continued to work on my novel.

  21

  Reyna and her couch

  IN DECEMBER, PANIC set in. With the arrival of the new year, my seasonal job would end and my first student loan bill would arrive. Though I had promised Norma I would be patient and optimistic about my future, my debt kept me up at night. I wasn’t going to default on my loans, no matter what. I had promised to repay this money, and I would keep my promise.

  “LAUSD is still hiring,” my teacher friends said.

  The morning
of my day off, I dragged myself off the couch and headed downtown to the school district’s office, and turned in an application. In two hours, I had a full-time job as a middle school teacher, earning more than I had ever expected.

  Even though I had liked my tutoring job on campus, being a teacher wasn’t a career I had seriously considered. Now I was the new remedial English and ESL teacher at a middle school in South Central Los Angeles. Due to overcrowded schools, the district had a year-round system, with tracks A, B, C, and D. I was placed on B track, which meant I would work through the summer. My track started in July, and it didn’t dawn on me that by starting in January, I would be coming into the school year late. It turned out I was taking over a class that had already had five different substitutes. I knew nothing about being a teacher, not even how to fill out a roster. All I thought about was the salary. With that kind of money, I could rent my own place, buy a new car, pay my bills, and put an end to Mago’s and Carlos’s mocking. I would finally have something to show for this college education I had worked so hard to get.

  I was finally going to be what my father had once dreamed for us to be—a working professional.

  To help me get ready for my new job, Mago took me shopping. If there was one thing my sister could do well, it was picking out stylish clothes. I wanted to look older and sophisticated so that I would be taken seriously. I looked younger than twenty-four, and at five feet tall, I was the size of a child. I didn’t have much money, so we went to Ross.

  We walked down the aisles, and Mago picked out dresses and skirts, professional-looking jackets and blouses for me to try on. I watched her with admiration because she seemed so sure of herself here, touching fabric, admiring the cut of a blazer, the buttons on a blouse, the waist of a dress. “Oh, look at this one,” she said as she held out a red dress with spaghetti straps.