A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  That Sunday night, I called Diana and Micah Perks to ask if they would write letters of recommendation.

  “But I only have five days to turn everything in!” I exclaimed.

  “No worries,” they said.

  I spent the next few days working on my application. It consisted of several questions I needed to answer about my writing. Why are you applying to Emerging Voices? What are your goals as a writer? List any commitments (classes, employment, personal obligations) that could interfere with your participation in the fellowship. How are you locked out of the literary establishment? I also had to put together my curriculum vitae and prepare a twenty-page writing sample.

  On Thursday, just as I was putting the finishing touches on my application, Micah’s letter arrived. On Friday, the day the application had to be postmarked, I drove to Pasadena and met Diana at the post office near PCC. She ran up the steps, letter in hand and, after a big hug, I handed her Nathan and she held him while I put her letter in the packet. I sealed it, stamped it, and watched it go into the post office cart with the other packets.

  “This is going to change your life,” Diana said as we walked away from the post office.

  “I don’t want to get my hopes up,” I said. “I don’t want this to break my heart.”

  Diana had always had an unwavering belief in me and in my future. With no doubt in her voice, she said, “You’re going to get it, Reynita. Just watch and see.”

  28

  Abuelita Chinta and Cousin Diana

  EVERY TIME THE phone rang, I hoped it was the Emerging Voices program, but it never was. Instead, the one who called was my mother, delivering the worst news. “Se está muriendo tu abuela,” she said to me. “Your grandmother is dying.” Her voice sounded weak and distant through the phone receiver, vulnerable in a way that was unfamiliar to me.

  “What happened?” I asked, clutching the phone.

  A scorpion had bitten my grandmother on her hand. Abuelita Chinta didn’t tell anyone. Instead, she did what they do in my hometown—rub alcohol and onion on the sting and eat a raw egg to counteract the poison. Obviously, those home remedies hadn’t worked. Two days later, my grandmother fell ill and ended up in the hospital suffering from chest pain, fever, and blood clots.

  “We have to go to Mexico. Can you help me with the airfare? I need to go see my mother.”

  “No te preocupes, Ma. I’ll buy the tickets.”

  Buying plane tickets at the last minute cost more than I had imagined it would. I put them on my credit card and cringed. I asked for time off from work and school, and Mago, my mom, Leo, Nathan, and I left for Mexico the next day.

  My mother was on the verge of tears the entire time. I could see her eyes swollen and red, and for the first time I reached out to hug and comfort her. This was new to me, this intimacy. She wasn’t the kind of mother who said loving things, and I wasn’t the kind of daughter who knew how to comfort. If anything, whenever I saw my mother, I would never fail to remind her of her failures, her mistakes, the many ways in which she had disappointed me through the years. That October morning as I held her at the airport, it was awkward for both of us, yet our mutual grief helped us overcome it.

  As we waited to board, we talked about my grandmother. Mago and I shared our favorite memories of her, of how kind and loving she had been when we lived with her. “I should have gone to Mexico more often to see her,” I said to Mago as I held Nathan in my arms. He was sleeping soundly, sucking his thumb. “Every time I had vacation from work, I could have gone to see her.”

  “Me, too,” Mago said.

  “And I should have sent her money,” I continued. That was eating at me the most. My salary as a teacher had been more than enough to send money to my grandmother every month. If my own mother, who was making minimum wage, could do it, why hadn’t I?

  Instead, I was spending my wages on frivolous things, like a pair of Carlos Santana shoes for $100, highlights on my hair for $120, bags of river rock for $150 to landscape my front yard. I spent money on stupid rocks instead of sending it to the woman who had given me so much love as a child. It hurt so much to realize that I had forgotten that pledge I made four years earlier, that as soon as I finished college and had a good job I would start sending her money.

  “How was it that my struggles with adulthood had consumed me so much that I had forgotten about my promise?” I asked Mago.

  Mago said nothing. She had her own guilt to deal with. We had turned out to be ungrateful granddaughters, allowing the materialism of the U.S. to infect us and make us forget about our family in Mexico, who had hardly enough to eat.

  “She’s one of the sweetest and kindest women I’ve ever known,” I said. “The best grandmother anyone could ever ask for. When she recovers from this, I’m going to look into bringing her to the States.”

  I knew she didn’t really want to come. My mother had asked several times through the years and my grandmother had refused. She didn’t want to leave her home and die in a strange country, far from the place of her birth. But maybe this time she would realize it was better to come to live with us. We could take better care of her—besides, I would tell her, there are no scorpions where we live!

  My mother had been quiet as Mago and I talked, but then she leaned forward and said, “Your abuela wasn’t like that with me, you know?”

  “¿Qué quieres decir?” I asked.

  I could tell she was hesitant to say more, but then, maybe because we still had an hour before boarding, she leaned closer to us and said, “Your abuelita was very cruel when I was growing up. I never knew why. She was just angry and bitter, resentful, but I don’t know what caused it. Maybe the poverty we lived in. Maybe it was the life my father gave her. He drank his wages away, and there were many times when we had nothing to eat. She would hit me all the time. Out of her five children, she was hardest on me.”

  I shook my head, and I wanted to tell her to stop, that I didn’t believe her. But there was something in her voice that told me to be quiet and listen. I understood that this was a rare gift my mother was giving us, telling us about her past, letting us see the young girl she had once been.

  “When we had nothing to eat, I would go to Doña Caro and beg for a loan,” my mother continued. Doña Caro was the only woman on our block who had a refrigerator and a real house made of brick and concrete. Her husband was a welder and made decent money. I remembered Mago, at some point or other, had also asked for loans from Doña Caro. “Your abuelita would get angry at me for going to the neighbor. She would say to me, ‘Don’t you have any pride?’ And I would say, ‘Amá, we can’t eat pride.’ So she would take the pesos from my hand and go to the mill to buy corn dough for tortillas.

  “One day, she tried to teach me to make the tortillas, but she wasn’t a patient teacher.”

  As she told us the story, I pictured my eight-year-old mother sitting near the hot griddle, clap-clap-clapping as hard as she could with her little hands, the dough forming into a shape like an amoeba instead of a perfect circle. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t get the dough to form the desired shape. My grandmother yelled at her. “You’re ruining the tortillas, pendeja!” Once, my grandmother got so frustrated she took my mother’s hands and slammed them down on the hot griddle to punish her.

  “My hands were covered in blisters,” my mom said, looking at her hands, wincing as if still in pain. “It hurt so much to do my chores all week.”

  When my mother turned into a young woman, and boys began to take notice, my grandmother became very vigilant. Once she caught my mother walking back from the store with a neighborhood boy, and she picked up rocks from the road and threw them at the boy, chasing him away. “I never want to see you near my daughter again!” she yelled.

  Another time, she took off her chancla and chased off another boy, hitting him on his butt with her sandal.

  “She never let me have a boyfriend and chased all the boys away,” my mother said.

  “Y mi papá?” I said.
Obviously, there was one man my grandmother hadn’t chased away. I wondered if my father had been so handsome and charming that he had won over my grandmother. I was imagining a love story straight out of a Harlequin romance novel, when my mother said, “It’s her fault I ended up with him.”

  She said she had met my father at the tortilla mill where she used to work, across from the train station. My father was working on a construction project and would come to the mill every day to buy tortillas for his lunch.

  They started seeing each other in secret. Then one day, he invited her to a dance in a town an hour away. She lied to my grandmother, saying she was going to work, and met him at the bus station. They took a bus in the morning, but in the evening, they missed their bus back and had no choice but to spend the night in a motel.

  “He didn’t touch me,” my mother said. “He was very respectful. He didn’t take advantage of me that night.”

  But still, when she returned home the next day, my grandmother was waiting for her. She had already learned my mother had not gone to work, because my aunt had gone looking for her at the tortilla mill. Not accepting her explanation, or her pleas, my grandmother gave my mother the biggest beating she had ever received.

  “You’re a disgrace to your family,” my grandmother said. “Get out of here. We don’t want you here anymore. Go live with that man who has already ruined you.”

  “But he didn’t touch me!” my mother said.

  “You’re a liar. You think I was born yesterday? ¡Vete de aquí!”

  So, my mother cleaned herself up as best she could, took her belongings, and walked all the way to La Guadalupe, where my father lived with his parents. She had shown up with a bruised body and her heart in pieces.

  “Against your abuela Evila’s wishes, he still took me in,” she said. “And that was how I ended up with your father.”

  Mago and I looked at each other. I didn’t want to believe our mother, and yet I knew she wasn’t lying. My siblings and I hadn’t been products of love, but of our grandmother’s abuse, mistrust, and betrayal.

  I thought about the story my grandmother had told me three years earlier when Eddie broke my heart, about the young man she had loved and how her family hadn’t allowed her to be with him. They condemned her to a life with a man she didn’t love. Had that made her bitter? Was that why she had kicked out my mother, condemning her to the same fate?

  “But she was so gentle with us,” I said. “She never hit us, never yelled at us. Not even once.”

  My mother nodded. “You were her first grandchildren. When you kids were born, things got better between us. She repented for how she had treated me and forcing me to move in with your father, especially once she saw the kind of life he was giving me. He used to beat me because his mother—your abuela Evila—was always telling him that I wasn’t good enough for him. That I was a bad cook. A bad homemaker. A bad mother. Sometimes my mother would come visit me and she would gasp at seeing my face, when I had a black eye or a bloodied lip. Then she would cry and ask me to forgive her. And I did.”

  I knew my mother had forgiven my grandmother. Through all the years she had been in the U.S., my mother had always sent my grandmother money, and my aunt as well. Even though my mother was living below the poverty line in a one-room apartment infested with roaches, she would send half of her wages to Mexico. A year before, she had even built my grandmother a one-room cinder-block house to replace the shack of sticks and cardboard she had lived in for most of her life.

  My mother hadn’t been a good mother to us, but no one could say she wasn’t a good daughter or sister. I always assumed it was because my grandmother had been a kind and loving mother. Now that I knew otherwise, I was astonished that, despite her mother’s cruelty, my mother held no bitterness or resentment toward her. I looked at my mother and wondered if the legacy of the women in my family was to be abused and then become the abuser. My mother had repeated with me and my siblings some of the same behaviors my grandmother had exhibited with her. Would I be expected to forgive her and take care of her when she was an old woman, pretend she had never hurt me? I didn’t know if I could be that kind of daughter.

  I watched Nathan, sleeping soundly in his carrier. Would I continue the legacy of the women in my family and go from victim to victimizer? As we waited to board our plane, I told myself that since I had already broken one cycle, perhaps it would be possible to break another.

  29

  TWELVE HOURS LATER, as we arrived at my aunt’s house, an ambulance was leaving, its red light slicing through the darkness. Upon hearing our taxi—my aunt, her husband, my cousins, and my uncle Gary came running out of the gate. My mother broke into tears seeing her sister and brother. “We’re here,” she said, “¿Cómo está mi amá? Is she here? We saw the ambulance.”

  Tía Güera started crying and couldn’t speak. My uncle looked at Mago, at me, then finally at my mother. He shook his head and said, “She’s gone, Juana. Our mother went into cardiac arrest three hours ago. The ambulance came to drop off the body.”

  As I watch my mother and her siblings embrace, I thought about the fact that three hours earlier we had been at the station in Mexico City waiting to board our bus. Three hours earlier, we had been talking about everything we were going to do for her—how she would want for nothing. Now here I stood, learning that I would never have a chance to make things right with my grandmother. I would never see her again, and my son would never meet the woman whom I had been blessed to have as a grandmother.

  “Llegamos muy tarde,” my mother said, echoing my thoughts. We were too late, and there was nothing to do now but to go inside to plan a funeral, weighed down by the knowledge of what we had lost.

  El Hospital Cristina, where my grandmother had died, was charging the equivalent of $1,000 dollars in pesos. I knew my mother and aunt had no money. Carlos was back in Los Angeles and sent enough for flowers and candles but not for the hospital bill. Mago didn’t have much to pitch in. The only way my aunt had been able to retrieve my grandmother’s body was by turning over the deed to her house as temporary payment. Early the next morning, I walked to the bank to make a withdrawal, and with that money, and the little that Mago could contribute, I settled the hospital bill. The deed of the house was returned to my aunt. She had been worried that on top of losing her mother, she would lose her house as well. I tortured myself thinking about the many ways $1,000 would have made my grandmother happy while she was living and could have enjoyed the money.

  At home, we bathed Abuelita Chinta and dressed her for her funeral. She was stiff and incredibly heavy, her skin cold and rubbery, her lips purple, her eyes shut, but her curly gray hair was as soft as cashmere, smelling of almond oil, just the way I remembered it. Thanks to her, my sisters and I had wavy hair that was thick and full.

  Mago and I forced our grandmother’s hands together and secured them tightly with a rope, then wove a white rosary between them. She would now pray in her coffin, just like she had done her whole life. “I have her hands,” Mago said, and she held them out for me to see. I had never noticed before that her tiny hands were the exact shape as my grandmother’s.

  What else had we inherited from this woman? Her tenacity for life? Her ability to survive in a harsh environment? Her capacity to reinvent herself and go from being bitter and cruel to loving and gentle?

  She lay there in her coffin, surrounded by dripping candles, marigolds, and the lamentations of all of us she had left behind. We hired a rezandera, a professional prayer who attended my grandmother’s rosary to lead us in prayers. The rezandera’s voice was deep and hauntingly sorrowful as she prayed an Our Father and a Hail Mary. I stood in a corner clinging to Nathan, silently repeating her words as I looked at my grandmother lying peacefully in her casket.

  “Santa María, madre de dios, ruega por nosotros los pecadores ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amén.”

  My grandmother had gone to the cemetery every week to tend the grave of my grandfather and my
cousin Catalina. Now she was making her last trip to the cemetery. The procession walked a mile to the holy ground, over the dirt road, past La Quinta Castrejón, the fancy country club where my mother had taken us to sell cigarettes and gum to the partygoers for a few pesos that had kept us from starving. We passed the train station where at twelve years old, Mago had worked at a food stand to help the family. In the 1990s, the government privatized the railroad system, and train service in Iguala was permanently suspended. Now as we walked by the train station, it pained me to see it so empty and lifeless. When I was a child, it had thrived and buzzed with activity—full of vendors selling clay pots and other wares. Food stands had lined the station, and the scent of chicken quesadillas and gorditas wafted through the air; travelers from all the surrounding towns would come here to catch a train to Mexico City, Cuernavaca, or Chilpancingo. As a child, I longed to ride the train to one of those cities, but we were too poor to leave Iguala, and all we could do was stand by the train tracks and wave goodbye to the passengers who were on their way to somewhere else—far away from this broken place.

  My grandmother never got a chance to go anywhere beyond the nearby towns we visited on our annual church pilgrimage. Now, as the procession left the abandoned train station behind and veered left toward the cemetery, I suddenly wished we were not burying my grandmother in Iguala. I wished I could take her with me somewhere else—like Acapulco—so that at least in death she would get to visit a beautiful place. Instead, we put her in the same dirt grave where my grandfather was buried. I wondered if this was what she would have wanted, to spend the rest of eternity sharing a grave with her borracho, abusive husband. I never learned if he had ever asked her to forgive him. If he hadn’t, I hoped he would do so now, in the afterlife. I no longer believed in Heaven and Hell, but for my abuelita, I wanted to believe that she had gone on to a beautiful, peaceful place, far away from Iguala and its cruel way of life. Perhaps she would find her way to Santa Cruz and find peace in its redwood forest.