A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  Aside from Mexico and the U.S., I had never been to any other countries and I was excited to finally have the chance to see something new, to be exposed to other cultures and ways of life. But at the last minute, due to complications with her passport, Delia couldn’t come with me. Francisco eagerly offered to take her place. Since I didn’t want to go alone, and no one else could go, I accepted. He bought his ticket and there was no turning back.

  I left Saudade under Norma’s care, and Francisco and I flew to Madrid, the first of the many cities we were planning to visit. I was taken aback when, for a moment, I thought we had landed in Mexico. With its beautiful Spanish architecture, narrow cobblestoned streets, and stunning Catholic cathedral, Madrid reminded me of Taxco, the silver mining town an hour away from Iguala. As usual, I didn’t really have a plan about where to go and what to see, and neither did Francisco. The one thing he and I had in common was an adventurous spirit, so we walked along the streets of Madrid to see what we would find. And we saw a great deal—art, architecture, Spanish dances—but what I would always remember about the trip was what Francisco did.

  Two days after we arrived, as we were getting ready to split the check for our dinner, he patted his pockets and said, “Oh, shit, I think my wallet got stolen.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” I said, really wanting to believe him, but there was a voice in the back of my mind wondering, What if he’s lying? I thought of the fiasco at my birthday dinner, and wondered if once again I would be the idiot who had to pay the bill.

  “I’ll pay you back when we return to L.A.,” he promised. Even though he called the credit card company from a pay phone to make a report, suspicion still gnawed at me.

  After that, the trip took a sour turn. I paid for every meal, hotel room, train ticket, entertainment. In Seville, we watched a flamenco show, but instead of appreciating the Spanish dance influence on folklórico—all I could think about was the cost of the show, and the bottles of wine and Spanish tapas Francisco ordered. We slept on the train all night to save on hotels, and arrived in Barcelona completely exhausted. Maybe it was my grogginess, but Gaudí’s church La Sagrada Familia seemed like an ice cream cake left to melt in the sun. In Venice, we found the cheapest places to eat and we stayed in a crumbling, moldy inn. Instead of appreciating the magic of the city with its canals, water taxis, and gondolas, I thought of my dwindling bank account. We took a train to Rome, walked inside the Colosseum, and I wished the gladiator shows still existed so I could throw this man to the lions. We headed to Pisa to see the leaning tower, but by then I didn’t give a damn about why it was leaning. Our last stop was Paris, where I wasn’t feeling particularly in love with mon amour and the Eiffel Tower was just a big hunk of metal. To top it all off, my camera and most of my rolls of film got stolen at the train station. In a way, I was grateful, because part of me didn’t want to remember the trip at all. By that point my bank account was completely depleted, and I was paying for everything with my credit card.

  When we returned from our trip, I walked away from that relationship. And if it hadn’t been for my cat, it might have stayed that way.

  Reyna in a water taxi, Venice, 2001

  A few weeks after I broke up with Francisco, my cat went missing. The window in my bedroom was slightly ajar, but it wasn’t a big enough opening for Saudade to have squeezed through. And yet, after a long search around my apartment, I resigned myself to the fact that the cat wasn’t there. I searched the streets for the next two days and didn’t find him. Saudade had no claws, and I worried he wouldn’t last a week out in the streets with the feral cats that lived around my apartment. I walked through the neighborhood in the evenings calling out Saudade’s name but had no luck.

  On the third night, as I was about to go on my search, Francisco called me to ask how I was doing, and when I told him about my missing cat, he offered to come help me find him. By then I was too desperate to say no. We ventured out farther than I had before. On the second night of walking with Francisco all over Boyle Heights, I was surprised—and suspicious—when we spotted Saudade running around in the alley behind Francisco’s apartment building, which was a mile away from mine.

  “It can’t be my cat,” I said. Yet somehow, I knew it was. “How the hell did he get all the way over here?” I asked Francisco as we chased Saudade down the alley, and trapped him behind some trash bins. Francisco grabbed the cat and held him tight, and as Saudade meowed loudly, he handed him to me. Saudade was filthy and looked nearly starved. As I took him in my arms, I couldn’t believe this was really my cat. But it was. The missing claws proved it. As I held him tight, I could feel his rib bones poking through.

  “You silly cat,” I said. “How did you end up here?” I looked at Francisco, my suspicion growing. I had never asked him for my spare key when I broke up with him.

  “Cats can travel far,” he said.

  “What a coincidence it ended up here, behind your apartment. Don’t you think?”

  “You don’t think I stole your cat, do you?” he asked, seeing the accusation in my eyes. He shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you would blame me for this. Cats are good at escaping. It’s in their nature. You can’t keep him trapped all day, you know?”

  Whether he was guilty or not, I will never know.

  I slept with Francisco the night of my cat’s rescue, either from guilt for wrongfully accusing him of catnapping or gratitude for him helping me find Saudade or because I was dumb. After I slept with him a second time, and then a third, it was clear to me that I was an idiot.

  But rather than blame my own stupidity, it was easier to blame my cat.

  I found out I was pregnant soon after, and when the realization sank in, I knew what I had done to my child was unforgivable. The truth was that I had my little “accident” on purpose. When I broke up with Francisco, I had stopped taking my birth control pills. The nights I slept with him, I was aware of the risk. I knew exactly what I was doing.

  I had once thought I needed a baby. But when I held the test results in my hand, I asked myself how I could bring a child into this world for the wrong reasons. To put so many expectations on a baby—for it to come and rescue its mother from herself, to help her find her way in the world, to give her roots, to give her life meaning because she wasn’t strong or mature enough to do it herself.

  This is what I had done to my baby.

  Worse, I had given it a father who only liked making babies but not raising them, who would not be there to guide it, love it, and teach it how to be a good human being. I had cheated my baby out of a kind, loving, responsible father because I had been too selfish, thinking only of my own needs.

  I told myself my baby would want for nothing as long as it had me. But didn’t I know firsthand what having an absent father could do to someone? The way a parent’s absence could haunt you every day of your life. How it could mess you up in the head and affect the relationships you had with other people because everything you did or thought or felt stemmed from that dark, empty ache your absent parent had left in your life. How could I do that to my child?

  “You can have an abortion,” Mago said when I gave her the news. “You made a mistake, yes, but you still have a choice, Nena. Why would you want to have that man’s baby anyway? And why would you give your child a father like him?”

  I lay in my room thinking about what she had said. I had a choice, yes, but the guilt weighed on me. It was my fault. Besides, what excuse did I have not to have this baby? I had a job. I could support it. I was twenty-five. Betty had become a mother at seventeen; Norma at sixteen; Mago at twenty-one; my stepsister, Cindy, had given birth to twins at nineteen. I was surrounded by young mothers. What excuse did I have except that I had done this to myself, and now I was afraid of having a child for the wrong reasons?

  When I was at PCC, I had taken a biology class and discovered a room in the Science Building where they had fetuses in jars. It was the most horrific thing I had seen in my life, yet the most amaz
ing. I had never imagined that such a thing was possible—to put babies in jars and display them on shelves, where they would spend the rest of eternity existing and yet not existing. I returned, again and again, spending hours in that room, going from jar to jar containing a fetus at each stage of development. Seeing how a baby looked at two, or three, or five months after conception fascinated me. I imagined that was how I had looked inside my mother’s womb, and somehow it made me feel connected to her in a way I never had before. It was in her womb that I had come to exist and had been at my most vulnerable.

  But the one that fascinated me the most was the six-month-old fetus. It had eyebrows and eyelashes and seemed as if it were merely asleep. I felt that if I stood there long enough, it would open its eyes. But then I remembered it was dead. That they were all dead. From the poster on the wall, I learned that these babies had come from natural miscarriages, and my heart ached for them, for the lives they would never get to live. For all that was lost. For the dreams they would never dream.

  Thinking of those babies in jars now made me grieve for my child. I was two months pregnant. I knew what the baby looked like in my womb. I decided that unlike those babies in jars, my child would get to have a life and dreams to reach for. I would keep my baby and start my own family, just the two of us.

  When I gave Francisco the news, I broke up with him once and for all.

  24

  Reyna and her teacher’s assistant

  MY ADMINISTRATORS HAD shown me a little mercy by giving me sixth-grade ESL for the new school year. I quickly realized how much I preferred these bright-eyed little sixth graders to the eighth graders I had been struggling to connect with. For starters, the sixth graders were small, so for once being short didn’t bother me as much. They also hadn’t yet lost their eagerness and enthusiasm for learning, and they didn’t dare call me anything but Ms. Grande. The sixth-grade girls, unlike the older girls, looked up to me and respected me. They hadn’t yet developed the cynicism toward adult authority that some of the older kids had.

  What made me feel connected to these kids was that most of them were recent immigrants from Mexico or Central America. I knew that many were undocumented, though I never asked. They didn’t speak English, but in their eyes I could see the desire to find a place to belong, a place where they could feel safe. Their stories were so similar to my own. Broken homes, broken families—that was the price we all had paid for a shot at the American Dream.

  My sixth graders reminded me of myself at that age, especially the girls. I had been a year younger than they were when I arrived in the U.S., not knowing the way of life, the language, or the culture. My job was to teach them English, but I also knew they needed a patient, loving teacher who would understand that their needs went beyond learning a language. They needed to heal from their trauma first. They didn’t leave it at the door. It came into the classroom with them like a ghost haunting them day and night. As I stood before my students to welcome them into my class, I wondered how many of them were living with parents who were complete strangers to them. I told them what I wished my own elementary teacher had told me.

  “The first skill for learning English is patience,” I said to my students on their first day. “Being in a new country, learning a new language, a new culture, takes time. You will learn. It doesn’t feel that way now, but one day you will be just as comfortable speaking English as you are speaking Spanish. But no matter what, don’t ever forget where you came from, and don’t ever be ashamed of who you are.”

  “Yes, Ms. Grande,” they said, sitting quietly and looking at me as if I knew everything. Finally, I felt confident as a teacher. With this group of sixth graders, the stickers and pencils, pizza parties and popcorn and movies worked! I even let them play their favorite music when we had parties, and I danced to “Mambo #5” with them.

  When I could no longer hide my baby bump, the girls screamed their excitement about my baby and asked me a million questions. Had I picked a name? Was it a boy or a girl? Could they have a baby shower for me when the time came? Would I give them pictures of the baby? Would I come show them the baby when it was born, even though I would be on maternity leave?

  I felt uncomfortable when I admitted that I wasn’t married and that my child would have no father. That wasn’t the kind of role model I wanted to be for them, and sometimes I felt ashamed. They never judged me. I told myself that I was quite capable of being a parent, that not having a man wasn’t the end of the world. I had made my decision and was going to do everything I could to be the best mother I could be. That was the lesson I wanted my students to take away: honor your responsibilities and do the right thing.

  I shared my first ultrasound pictures with my students, and when I learned I was having a boy, they helped me pick out some names. Sebastian, Fernando, Adrián.

  When my girls complained to me about the bullying going on in the playground during recess and lunch, I opened my classroom to them and they would come hang out with me during break, away from the eighth graders who frightened them. Soon, even the boys started coming. They played games, listened to music, told me about their lives and families, did homework, cleaned and organized my room, helped me grade papers while I put my swollen feet up to rest. Many of them joined my folklórico group, so I got to see them after school, too. I grew so attached to these kids that when it was time to go on maternity leave, I was truly sad to say goodbye, and I looked forward to returning to them.

  There were many moments when the uncertainty and the fear I experienced at becoming a single mother made me feel more scared than I had ever been in my life. But I pushed past those fears, and managed to do something right: I bought myself and my son a house. If I could have, I would have built it with my own hands. Instead, I did the next best thing—I jumped on the opportunity of a lifetime!

  A few months before I went on maternity leave, I heard from one of the teachers at the middle school about a program offered by HUD called “The Teacher Next Door.” The properties the program offered were foreclosed homes sold by lottery at half the market price. The only requirement was to live there for three years, at which point you were then allowed to sell the house at its full value.

  Through the weeks, I diligently checked the list of houses and spent hours after school and on the weekends driving around looking at them and putting my name in the lottery for the ones I liked. Though I was disappointed at the end of each week when my name wasn’t on the list of winners, I persisted. Several weeks later, right before Thanksgiving, my tenacity and endurance paid off when my name finally appeared on the list. I was the lucky winner of a two-bedroom house. I hadn’t gone to see the house because I hadn’t had time and had entered my name in the lottery on a whim. Now I knew it had been intuition.

  The only downside was that the houses being offered were all in undesirable neighborhoods. The whole purpose of “The Teacher Next Door” and “The Officer Next Door” program was to bring teachers and police officers to troubled areas that needed to be revitalized. I was worried about moving to South Central, where my new house was located, ten minutes from work. It was an area notorious for its crime and violence from gangs such as the infamous Crips and Bloods; its troubled history, such as the Watts Riots of 1965, and most recently, the 1992 riots sparked by the beating of Rodney King by white police officers who were not held accountable for what they did. In high school, I had stood outside with my classmates watching the distant smoke rising over the city when the riots broke out.

  Now here I was, moving into the epicenter of one of the most violent areas in Los Angeles. I told myself it would only be for three years. After that, with the money I would make from selling the house at its full value, my son and I could go anywhere—even back to Santa Cruz. What I wanted, most of all, was to feel part of a community again. I wanted trees and blue skies and clean air. I wanted to surround myself with people who loved nature and were conscious of our impact on the environment. But the biggest reason for wanting to leave
was that I felt small living in this big city, just one of millions trying to survive.

  When I got the keys three weeks before my due date, I had to call the police to evict the squatters who had moved into the house while it was vacant. The water had been turned off the entire time the house was on the market and the toilet was a disgusting mess. The house reeked of marijuana, urine, and feces. The kitchen cabinets had been ripped off the walls and there was nothing left but huge holes. In the master bedroom, a large burn spread on the corner of the wood floor, as if someone had pretended they were at the beach and lit a bonfire. The outside was no better. The front yard was nothing but dirt covered in holes from the dozens of gophers living underground. A vendor sold fruit on the corner, right outside the chain-link fence, and the view from the bay window in the living room was his blue-striped umbrella, black plastic crates, and the fruit vendor himself rearranging his fruit to make it look presentable.

  The house was directly in the flight path to LAX, and every few minutes an airplane flew overhead. And to make matters worse, the house sat on a busy street. There was a bus stop and a stop sign right by the front yard. Airplanes, gunshots, cars, helicopters, police sirens, ambulance sirens . . . these would be the cacophony of sounds I would be hearing every night from the first day I moved in.

  I thought it was hilarious—one of life’s jokes—to send me the opposite of the dream house I had fantasized about. But with immense pride I stood in the backyard, my hand gliding over my humongous belly, unable to believe that I was twenty-six and now a homeowner! I didn’t know that fifteen years later, I would sell this house for five times what I paid for it, and that that money would allow me to buy a real dream house. I didn’t know it, but I felt it. I knew in my heart that this house was the equivalent of the first draft of a novel. And as every good writer knows, the first draft is always shitty.