A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  Marta had once said I was twice the girl I used to be. And she was right. Being split in half had forced me to create two versions of myself. I went home thinking about the duality of being an immigrant, our split identities, the cleaving of our hearts and bodies—half of our heart remained in our homeland, the other was here with us. One foot remained rooted in our native soil while with our other foot we dug into American soil to anchor ourselves and weather the storm.

  As with the moon, there is the face that we immigrants show to the world, but our second face is the one we keep hidden in darkness so that no one can see us weeping.

  I figured out how to move forward with my story.

  When the summer ended, I printed the manuscript for the last time. For nine months, I had done nothing but write late into the night, trying to make up for the three years I hadn’t touched the book. Holding the finished manuscript in my hand, I felt I had done everything I could with it. I contacted Jenoyne and said, “I’m ready to send you my novel. It’s called Across a Hundred Mountains. Do you still want to take a look?”

  I couldn’t sleep that night or the day after. Then her response came. “I’ve been waiting.”

  I mailed her my manuscript, and the next thing I knew, I had an agent.

  32

  Jenoyne Adams

  IN ADDITION TO writing over the summer, I had also been finishing my last requirement to get my teaching credential. The first thing I did upon completing my last class was to apply for a job at Fremont-Washington Adult School, which was five minutes from my house. I was interviewed and hired a few days later as a Beginning ESL teacher. I was elated and relieved. My sacrifice had paid off. Going back to school had helped me to dig my way out of the hole where I had been slowly suffocating.

  Diana had been right. The difference between middle school and adult school was like night and day. I soon found myself in a classroom with students who wanted to be there, were not being forced to be there, who, despite working all day, would come into school ready to learn, full of dreams for the future, eager to meet their challenges head-on. Many of the students in my Beginning ESL class were older than I was, in their late thirties and forties, some in their fifties and sixties; a few were younger—all were immigrants.

  They came mostly from Mexico, some from El Salvador or Guatemala, a few from Honduras or Nicaragua. The majority of them hadn’t finished elementary school in their own countries and had been working most of their lives. In them I saw my parents.

  When I had tried to get my mother to learn English, she had shaken her head at me, completely terrified, and said, “El inglés no se me pega.” English doesn’t stick to me, she said, as if she were talking about a piece of gum. Eventually, she did end up at adult school while preparing for her citizenship test. It if hadn’t been for that class, she wouldn’t be a U.S. citizen now. When I was in junior high, my father had decided to attend adult school to learn English once and for all. I remember how proud it made me when I would see him go to school after work, textbook and notebook in hand, ready to become proficient in the language of our adopted country and improve his life.

  As I scanned the faces of my students, I saw fear and excitement in their eyes. I imagined that this was what it must have been like for my father. I pictured him sitting in the corner of my classroom watching me attentively.

  It amazed me that I could give my students an assignment and they would do it without complaint. They only talked when I asked them to practice speaking; otherwise they did their work in silence. I would assign activities that required them to get up from their seats and interact with one another, and to my surprise, there was no chaos. No one was running around the room or pushing. No one saying, “Ms. Chiquita, Juanito spit on me.” I never once had to raise my voice. Soon, I realized that I actually enjoyed teaching. At the middle school, I had done too little teaching and too much disciplining.

  “Gracias, maestra,” they said to me every night as they filed out the door, shaking my hand as they left my classroom.

  I had wanted to make a difference in my students’ lives. Maybe I hadn’t accomplished that in the middle school, but now I could. At Fremont, I discovered that if as a society we want to help children, we need to help their parents as well. When we give parents the opportunity to learn English, to improve their work skills, to get better jobs, to be exposed to new experiences and nurture their minds, they are in a better position to provide for their families. They are able to help their children with homework, or at least able to understand the demands of being a student. Also, their children respect their parents even more, seeing them fight for an education.

  This job, although part-time, paid me well enough that I could support Nathan and myself if I was careful with my budget. Now with fewer hours of work, little prep time, and zero grading, I had more time to spend with my son. With my credentialing classes behind me, I also had more time to devote to my writing. Those were the two things I cared most about: my child and my art. Thanks to the decision I had made to sacrifice a year of our lives to return to school, a shorter work schedule allowed Nathan and me to be closer than ever.

  While I was learning the ropes of my new job, Jenoyne and I worked together to improve Across a Hundred Mountains. Thanks to her insightful feedback, I revised my novel once more and turned it into something I was truly proud of. I decided to play with the identity of my character and write two story lines that merged at the end. I printed the entire manuscript and laid my chapters on the floor to get a clear visual about the order, paying close attention to the transitions and the pacing. Nathan snuck in and started tossing the pages up in the air, laughing. Soon my living room was covered in papers.

  “I suppose the story doesn’t have to be in order,” I told him as I tried to put my chapters back together again. It was all for the best. After many editorial lunches and home visits, and brainstorming sessions on the phone, Jenoyne and I decided that one of the story lines should be out of chronological order, and somehow it all made sense in the end. I carried my manuscript everywhere I went, even to work. There was something reassuring about the weight of three hundred pages hanging from my shoulder. I patted my tote bag the way I had patted my swollen belly when I was pregnant—with excitement, fear, and great expectations.

  One evening, during a long teacher meeting in one of the classrooms at Fremont, I took out the manuscript and put it on the student desk where I was sitting. There was a scene that was giving me trouble, and I wanted to finish my edits by the end of the week because Jenoyne was ready to send it out. It was now October, and she said that November would not be the best time because of the Thanksgiving holiday. “We need to time it right,” she had said. She had made a list of editors for the first round of submissions, and a second. I hoped we wouldn’t need the second round. Every little chance I got, I was busy editing and polishing my manuscript, even if it meant half listening during a meeting.

  “What do you have there?” a deep voice asked from the desk behind me. I turned around and was instantly embarrassed. We were at work, and I was focusing on my writing instead of on my job. What was really mortifying, though, was that it was Mr. Rayala. I hadn’t had a chance to meet him, but I had heard from my administrators that he was one of their best and most dedicated teachers, and the handsomest, in my opinion. The first time I saw him was in my job interview. He was in a group photo hanging in the assistant principal’s office. I thought he was cute, but on my first day at work, when I saw him walking down the hallway in the flesh, I realized the word “cute” didn’t do him justice. The man was incredibly handsome. He was my age, twenty-eight, and six feet tall, with beautiful blue eyes and dirty blond hair. Every time I caught sight of him in the hallway or at teacher meetings I had to keep myself from staring at him.

  I had wanted to talk to him before but had felt intimidated not only by his good looks and whiteness, but also by his confidence. The guy walked around as if he owned the world. He seemed so sophisticated and self-
assured in his dress shirt and tie, whereas I still felt, in many ways, like a child playing dress up. Four years later I still wasn’t used to wearing heels, blazers, and silk blouses.

  “Is it a screenplay?” Mr. Rayala whispered, pointing over my shoulder to my manuscript. Even sitting down, he was tall enough to see over me.

  “It’s my novel,” I whispered. “I’m revising it.”

  “Can I see it?”

  The few people I had shown my work to were my teachers. Micah from UCSC had seen the first draft and María Amparo had seen the second. The EV fellows had read a few excerpts. Of course, Jenoyne had read the whole thing. Now here was the handsome Mr. Rayala asking me if he could look at it, and I felt scared and nervous.

  In that moment I realized that if Jenoyne was successful, there would soon be many strangers reading my novel. I might as well get used to it. But what if he thought my writing was mediocre? What opinion would he form of me, as a woman and—let’s be honest here—a potential date?

  With my heart pounding and my hands trembling, I handed my manuscript to him.

  I could no longer concentrate at all on the meeting, thinking instead about how frightening it would be to let my book out into the world without me to protect it. In whose hands would it land? What would people say about it? Would anyone understand what I was trying to say about immigration?

  I glanced at Mr. Rayala as he skimmed through the first chapter. This was the closest I had ever been to him, and I could see that his eyelashes were long and blond, some of them golden, so that when he blinked, there was a flash of gold. It took my breath away.

  I whirled back around to return my focus to the meeting, though I didn’t hear anything the principal said. My mind was preoccupied with thoughts of the man sitting behind me. I no longer cared what readers might think about my book. All I cared about was what Mr. Rayala thought, and how my work would make him feel. I no longer cared whether or not my book would help people to better understand the immigrant experience. What I cared about was whether or not my book would give this man an insight into who I was. Would he understand my struggles and heartbreak? Would he understand who I was by reading the words I had painstakingly carved out of my own sorrow?

  Finally, the meeting was over and we were dismissed. I turned to look back at him, and he smiled and handed me back the manuscript. “It looks interesting,” he said. “I’d love to read it.” I thought he was being polite, but seeing the honesty in his clear blue eyes instead of the false praise I had expected, I knew he truly meant it. I could lose myself in those eyes. Blue like Monterey Bay and the Santa Cruz sky.

  “Do you think I could take your novel home and read it?” he asked as we walked out into the hallway.

  “You serious?”

  He smiled and nodded. He wasn’t just trying to be polite. He really did seem interested. Maybe not in me, but at least in my writing!

  Letting him read my novel made me feel more exposed and vulnerable than if I had stood naked before him, painfully aware of the flaws of my body, especially the stretch marks and saggy skin on my belly from my pregnancy. I didn’t know why, but I felt I could trust him. So I handed the manuscript to him. “You better not run off with my book,” I said. “I know where you work.”

  Throughout the week, before our class or during the break, we would talk in the hallway outside our classrooms and discuss my novel. He said he was impressed with the story.

  His first name was Cory, and his last name was a common Finnish surname originally spelled Rajala, with the stress on the first “a,” but his great-grandfather, upon arriving in the U.S. from Finland, had changed the “j” to a “y” to make it easier for Americans to pronounce. Immigrants changing their identity to fit in—it was a story I knew well, and it made me feel connected to Cory to know that this was also part of his history.

  I was surprised when he told me he had a BA and an MFA in theater. He was from Wisconsin and had come to California to attend UC, Irvine. I thought he was a “real” teacher; that is, someone who had always known that being an educator was his calling. He seemed so passionate about his job, I had assumed he had wanted to be a teacher since he could walk. But his first love had been acting. I was pleasantly surprised that he knew how to talk about plot and structure, scene, dialogue, character arc, pacing. I had never met a man I could talk to about those things, and I found it exhilarating that he spoke my writer’s language.

  “Where did the story come from? Is any of it autobiographical?” he asked.

  I didn’t know him well enough to tell him it had come from my childhood fear of never seeing my father again, but I did share with him a little bit of my history, of where I had come from. Just enough for him to know I had some kind of authority to write this book. “The story is set in my hometown, even though I don’t name it. Poverty, family separation, children having to fend for themselves because the adults around them fail them, those are things I know firsthand,” I said while we stood in the hallway during our fifteen-minute break. “Though it’s fiction, it isn’t all made up. The heartbreak is real. The pain that Juana feels at watching her family fall apart, I didn’t make that up.”

  “I believe it. It comes across in the writing,” he said. “I loved the ending. How did you come up with it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was struggling with how to end the book and a friend suggested that I just write any ending. He said I could always change it later.” I had spent three weeks with horrible writer’s block, unable to push through the last chapters. I had called Ibarionex, one of the EV fellows I kept in touch with, and he had listened patiently to me and offered his advice. “I did what he suggested and wrote whatever ending came to me, thinking I’d change it later when I came up with a better one. It turned out that was it.”

  Cory pointed out a few complications with the plot and suggested some solutions. He showed me where the dialogue was a bit forced, or when a character had acted “out of character.” I loved that he would talk about my characters as if they were just as real to him as they were to me. The guy spoke my fourth language, the language of my writer-self that I so rarely got to share with others. And even though he was white, he seemed to grasp the nuances and complexities of my culture, the themes in my novel, my Mexican characters. I imagined that working as an ESL teacher at a school where nearly all the students were Latino had taught him a thing or two. If anything, it had made him empathetic to our struggle. This man, whose great-grandfathers had immigrated from Finland and Scotland, and who was physically the whitest person I had ever met, seemed to understand what my writing was all about.

  But though immigration was part of his history, Cory had been born into a different America than I had experienced. Coming from the “right” ancestry gave him privileges immigrants like me didn’t have. He was a white man from a middle-class family that had what my family did not—higher education. His mother had a master’s degree. His father and stepfather had PhDs. His sister was in a private college getting her BA. His aunts and uncles had BAs, MAs, PhDs. Even his grandmother and grandfather had gone to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For me, it had always been “if you go to college.” For him, it had always been “when you go to college.” He had grown up with that certainty, always knowing what he should expect in life, fully aware that there was a place for him in American society, whereas I had always wondered what life had in store for me and if I would ever reach my goal of a higher education, if I would ever find a place I belonged. He had grown up going to French camp in the summers and having private piano lessons every week, taking trips to Europe or going on cruises in the Caribbean. His stepfather, a Shakespeare professor, had owned a used bookstore, so Cory had grown up surrounded by books—literally shelves and shelves of them at his disposal—whereas I had never owned a book until I turned nineteen and Diana gave me The Moths and Other Stories for my birthday. When Cory went off to college, his parents paid for him to go to a private liberal arts college in Minnesota. I
had paid my own way through my public college and university, not getting a single dollar of support from either of my parents.

  Our lives had been completely different. We had nothing in common. And yet, when I was with him, I felt understood in a way I never had been by any man.

  33

  MY ADMINISTRATORS WERE having a Christmas party for the faculty and staff, and two of my colleagues and I decided we should go together. We asked Cory if he wanted to go with us, and he agreed. Two days before the party, the other teachers said they couldn’t make it anymore, so I asked Cory if he still wanted to go. “But it will be just the two of us,” I said. I certainly didn’t mind the change of plans. Truth be told, I was excited about turning this party into a date.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.”

  “Great!” I said.

  We were about to part ways in the hallway to go to our classrooms, but then Cory said, “Listen, Reyna, thank you for inviting me to come with you, but I think you should know that I have a girlfriend.”

  “Oh,” I said. I thought of Eddie and that moment on the bus so long ago. He said he wasn’t ready for a relationship. Cory was telling me he was already in a relationship. Either way, it meant the same thing: It wasn’t going to happen. My fantasies blew away like dried bougainvillea petals in the wind.