by Vanessa Hua
He told me other stories. What he used to do with his brother Eduardo, the one I was named after. How they played fútbol in the zócalo. How they snuck into the zoo. The animals! A rhinoceros. A bear. Zebras. From the excitement in his face, I could see a little of the boy he once was. But I couldn’t imagine my tío—who had grown fat and deliberate—running as fast as Papá claimed.
One night we had seven calls—three car lockouts, two key changes, and two apartment break-ins—which meant a big payoff, and at home he offered me a beer. I tried not to cough after I took a sip of the Negra Modelo.
“I can finish it.” Papá drained the beer and his smile disappeared. “Lalo, what I’m teaching you. Don’t ever use it to steal. If I catch you—”
I nodded. I’d heard this lecture before. He was clean, unlike some old friends who thought they could make easy money selling drugs or boosting cars. They were dead or in jail. But didn’t he break the law every time he picked a lock? He had a fake license, sold to him by Francisco who ran a neighborhood locksmith shop. Francisco, who landed amnestia before the door closed, paid my father less but charged the customers the same. He kept the difference, which was fine with Papá because he made more than he could busing tables or as a day jobs painting or in construction.
Papá checked each morning to make sure I wore nothing to set off the gangs in the neighborhood, no red or blue clothing, though I didn’t need him to tell me which intersections and what kind of people to avoid. I had learned on my own. He forgot what he left behind; the gangs in Morelia were far worse than the cholos who stood on the corners here. My brothers were still there, and who would warn them?
~~~
Two months after my mother started her job at La Gloria, Papá told me to leave the dishes on the table. I had been getting sloppy, swiping them once with the sponge, and he yelled at me when he found bits of dried food on the plates and smudges on the glasses. I retreated into my room. Why did I ever want my parents all to myself? If my brothers were here, we could sneak out, run around, and get away from their unhappiness. How could Mamá leave me again, when it had taken so much for us to be together?
Papá was waiting for her when she found the mess. I pictured the bits of tortilla and rice scattered on the kitchen table, and the greasy knives and forks crooked on crumpled napkins. I huddled in bed, listening through thin walls. Before, I’d heard the sounds of their fucking—the bed banging and squeaking, my mother moaning—with the same disgust and fascination. But it had been months now.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I work.”
“I work, too.”
“I didn’t bring you here so I could live like a bachelor.”
I bolted out of bed and cracked open the door. Should I wash the dishes? I stood there, unable to go another step. They were both standing, Papá with his hands braced against the table, as though he were holding it down. Mamá faced him, her eyes narrow and mouth hard. Unyielding. I shut the door. I could not fix them, no matter how many dishes I washed.
They argued every night for a week, until Mamá announced that we would visit the center together. We gulped down dinner, and set off for La Gloria, a building covered in a mural of Aztec warriors, Teotihuacan, and farm-workers picking grapes. The lobby had an orange plaid couch that looked itchy as a haystack, piles of newspapers, and a bulletin board with job postings, and the two classrooms were in the rear, each with a large window in the door. I peeked in. In one room, people pecked out essays on computers. In the other, a man with wavy black hair and sleepy eyes, handsome as a telenovela star, was teaching English. In his class, mothers and fathers were taking notes, the people Mamá had been. I recognized where they were. Tricky verbs, where the past had no connection to the present. Go-Went. Eat-Ate. Take-Took.
I walked to the lobby, where Mamá’s picture was on the wall, along with ten other staff members. She wore a green dress with gold buttons and stared straight into the camera. Serious, with a hint of a smile, important but also approachable and reassuring, like she would do whatever she could to help you. A guapa I recognized from school sat down on the couch. Martita. She was slender and taller than me, with sly dark eyes. She slipped on her headphones and waited for her father or mother—or her boyfriend?—to finish class. I wanted to show her the picture on the wall and say, This is my mother.
From across the room, I watched Mamá wave at the volunteer teaching English. He motioned for her to come in, but she shook her head no. Who were these people who relied on her, and what did she owe them? She introduced us to Paul, the director, a gabacho wearing a light blue guayabera. In college, he had spent summers in Guatemala working as a church missionary, he told us in Spanish. Your mother is an inspiration and an example.
“We’d love her to work full time,” he said. “Please help us convince her.”
“She doesn’t need another job,” Papá said. “She’s already working full time.”
“I see. I hope you’ll check the schedule of night classes.”
“Someone has to look after our boy.” He set his hand on my shoulder. I resisted the urge to shrug him off, and we left the center soon after.
“He thinks he has to save the Mexicans,” Papá said. “We can save ourselves.”
Mamá stopped. “We are saving ourselves. That’s why I work here.” She walked ahead. My father stared at her back, then hurried beside her, slipped his arm around her waist, and she rested her head on his shoulder. I was relieved. Papá was trying. From behind, they looked happy. Solid. Strong. United. But you can never see all angles at once.
~~~
Late in the summer, Papá got a call for an apartment on Liberty Street. Mamá had quit her hotel job and worked full time at the center, after convincing my father that her wages would dip only temporarily. If a state grant came through, the director promised her a promotion and a raise.
That afternoon, he and I walked to the western edge of the Mission, where the streets climbed into the hills flanking Noe Valley. Flyers stapled to the telephone poles warned residents about daytime break-ins in the neighborhood. “Keep your eyes out!!!” The customer introduced himself as Carlos. He and my father appeared to be about the same age, but he was dressed in khakis and a green V-neck sweater, while Papá wore jeans and a faded button-up from the Salvation Army. Carlos looked familiar but I could not imagine why. Papá broke through the front door and we climbed the stairs to the third floor of the building, and he got us in again.
“You want a soda, or a beer? Grab anything you want from the fridge,” Carlos called from the other room, where he was getting his checkbook.
My father said no. It was better that way, he always told me, to keep things professional, but I still wanted those cookies or Cokes that were forever being offered to us. Some women flirted with him and I wondered sometimes what he would have done, if I weren’t there. What he did those years before my mother arrived.
While Papá studied the big television and flashy stereo, I looked around. Carlos had so many video games! My hands itched to play. The black leather couch looked comfortable, softer than the bed I had at home. Then I saw the picture on the bookshelf. A single framed photograph of a woman who looked like Mamá, but softer somehow, the rough edges smoothed out, glowing. She was glancing over her shoulder, smiling, caught by the photographer.
I looked closer and saw her two moles. Mamá.
Carlos. I recognized him as the volunteer from the center, the man she had waved at from across the room. In the picture, it looked like she was at a party, with a piñata and streamers thick as kelp hanging above her. Why did he have her picture? She had no friends here, none that I knew of. It was always her, Papá, and me. Papá came from behind and studied the photo of Mamá. His eyes widened. He squeezed the trigger of the lock-gun. Click, click, click.
All those special events at the center, nights and weekends. I never thought about who else was there. Carlos wrote a check, and signed a statement that this was his apartment and th
at he had given us permission to break in. After my father handed him the receipt, I pulled out the black vinyl logbook and noted the address. My hands shaking, I crossed out the entry twice before I spelled the street correctly. At the door, Papa stopped. “Where do you get a girl like that?”
“Who?” Carlos said.
“The girl on the shelf.”
Carlos smiled. “I tutored her. A very good student. I teach her English, and she teaches me Spanish.”
“And now she’s your girlfriend.”
“Well…not quite,” Carlos said. “Not yet.”
Something flashed across his face—happiness or pain or regret or maybe all of that. I knew only that my mother mattered to him. My mouth went dry as paper, and my stomach twisted. I was unable to take a step, another breath, and would have fallen if I had moved.
“Where are you from?” Carlos said.
“Michoacan.”
“My grandparents are from Jalisco.” Carlos might have thought we were buddies, brothers, with a shared ancestry. “I’ve never been back though.”
We had nothing in common, no matter what this pocho said and thought.
“Muchas gracias,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Papá said in English. “Anytime.”
My father walked down the block before picking up an empty beer bottle and smashing it against a wall. The crashing sounded like how I felt inside. After staring at the window of Carlos’s apartment for a minute, he tossed the jagged shards into a garbage can. Blood trickled down his fingers from a cut on his palm. Did he understand what was happening more than I did? Or was he as lost as me? I offered to carry the tool-bag, but he refused.
When we came home, Papá and I sunk onto the couch in front of the television, and for once, Mamá didn’t nag me to finish my homework after returning from the center, maybe because she could tell she should leave us alone. That night, Papá picked a fight with her over the messy bathroom. The next day, he complained about her overcooked beans; the next fight happened when she woke him when she was getting ready for work; the next was over her cherry-red lipstick.
Desgraciada, he said.
Mamá kept the lipstick on and left for an event at La Gloria, an awards ceremony, she said. Papá waited ten minutes, and then told me to eat dinner without him. He said he had a job, but I knew he was checking on her. In the living room, I traced my thumb over the buttons of the remote. The television flashed unwatched. My homework assignments remained crumpled at the bottom of my backpack, because all I could think of was the picture. Why couldn’t we give her that kind of smile? Open, unguarded, carefree. A flash of who she was, not who she had to be.
I had to see for myself. I ran to find the doors of the center locked and the windows dark. Mamá had lied. Papá had already taken off. I bent over, winded, hands on my knees, feeling stupid for helping Mamá with her homework, when all it did was bring her closer to Carlos. Closer to his world: spacious, tidy, and privileged. Away from ours: poor and cluttered with struggle. Those afternoons and evenings she went to the center, she wasn’t taking the classes for my brothers or for me. It was for her alone. Puta. The nasty word rang in my head. She wanted another life, without my father and my brothers. Without me.
I had survived by thinking our family had had no choice but to split up. That I had to accept the loss of all who I loved, but Mamá was messing with that. None of what had happened was unavoidable or inescapable. She had an alternate existence, happier than what she was born to, bound to. The perfect life that she hid from us, the one where she did not cry for her lost sons or get on her knees to clean toilets or argue with her husband. The life she deserved. I walked home and shut myself in my room, heard my father come in a few minutes later, and after about an hour, my mother. I listened, waiting for the fight that never came, and imagined them curling away from each other in bed, pretending to sleep. What held Papá back?
The next day, when a classmate shoved past me in the hallway, I pushed back. His friends piled on and we sprawled on the ground. I was a terrible fighter. I thrashed around and each time I swung my fist, I thought of Carlos, smacking his face bloody. If my brothers were here, we could have attacked him, bashed in his teeth, and stomped on his neck. Instead I was flat on my back, kicking at nothing. The teachers broke us apart and called our parents.
Papá cuffed me on the head after I returned home. I rubbed my throbbing right ear, and blinked away the white points of light floating across my eyes. What he could not do to Carlos or to Mamá, he did to me.
“Don’t hit him.” Mamá looked away, out the living room window, through her reflection, at the rooftops, at the hills beyond, transported somewhere far away from us. That destroyed me, her distance. Not the usual hug to let me know that I was forgiven. All along, she was holding part of herself back. “You can’t let them find out about you. About us,” she said to me.
Left unsaid was how the truth could have ended with us sent back to Morelia. I wondered if that would be for the best.
~~~
The next day, I rang the doorbell of Carlos’ apartment. No answer. And so, I broke in for the very first time. I had to know why my mother came here. Standing in the living room, I could see her everywhere: sinking into the couch, sipping from a glass, and smiling as Carlos pulled her into the bedroom. I flipped over drawers and emptied the closets, trampling the clothes and spilling cologne bottles. I found a string of condoms in his bedside drawer and flushed them in the toilet. I threw the ladder of the fire escape down, scattering false clues. I took a laptop, CDs, and video games and left them on the sidewalk on 16th Street, where they would disappear in minutes, stolen by junkies.
I kept the only thing that mattered.
~~~
I gave the picture of her to Papá, which he accepted with no questions. Mamá would slip away, with no explanation, if we did not stop her, and Papá left me no choice but to reclaim the photo. After Mamá found it on top of the television, she swept into the kitchen. I sat frozen on the couch, gripping a scratchy cushion, unable to turn away.
“Where did you get this?” She thrust the picture into his face.
“You know damn well.” Papá shoved back his chair and stood. “Who is this pendejo? What kind of guy would sleep with another man’s wife? With a mother?”
“It’s nothing. Just a friend from the center.”
“The center! There was no awards ceremony the other night. You were with him. I saw you leaving his place.”
She opened her mouth but no words came out. She bowed her head but only for a moment before she drew herself up. “He understands what I want. You, you can’t stand to see me better than you.”
They argued about their failed plans, and he kept saying she belonged to him.
“That’s why you had to steal this. You steal what you can’t have.” Mamá did not know that I deserved the credit or the blame. She wasn’t around to see what I was capable of and what I had become.
Papá slammed his hand down onto the table, scattering the tools on the floor. He kicked over his chair, the rungs splintering like spilled matches. “How could you do this to me? To your sons?” His voice cracked and his expression bared an obscene fear and longing that no son should witness in his father. “You are mine. You belong to me. To the kids. Please. We belong to you.”
Mamá sagged, the fight gone out of her, and he staggered over and threw his arms around her. The key to my mother’s heart: where she came from was worth more than what she could be. The picture slid from her hand, landing with an explosion of glass. I fled, but at the front door, turned to look at my parents. Over Papá’s shoulder, she stared at me with huge, wet eyes. I understood later that she wanted me to save her, to forgive her and make the family whole. To defeat her desire to be admired and respected at the center.
But it was my turn to leave my parents behind.
I walked up and down Mission Street, past the storefronts locked tight and the crowded taquerias, past the prostitutes with aqu
a eye-shadow, flamboyant as parrots, and the skinny addicts with balloons of heroin tucked into their chipmunk cheeks, before hiking to the top of Dolores Park.
A squealing Muni train emerged and glided down the hill with the stately grace of an elephant. I sat on a bench, sweatshirt pulled over my knees, my arms tucked inside. I could wait all night. In the shadowed playground below I could make out a family of three, parents and son, bundled against the cold. Mexicans too, it sounded like, by their accent. Hooting with laughter on the swing, the boy was about six years old, the same age I’d been when Mamá left. Did he have a brother or a sister in Mexico? Had he been born here?
“More,” the boy said. “More!”
“Five more minutes and then we’ll go,” his mother said. The father pushed him higher. I willed them to look at me and wave, giving me their blessing. But they never did.
The Bay Bridge pulsed with cars, shining white coming in, red heading out. The lights of the apartments and skyscrapers glittered gold, beautiful and removed. Messy, painful, and ugly up close. That was what you lived with. I knew then I would always remember my parents this way, locked in the embrace of one who cannot let go and another who cannot get away. Their struggling would change shape, disappear and I would see only mutual devotion in the story of their long marriage. This was their choice. Their sacrifice.
~~~
I never told my brothers or my American-born sister Rosalie—the one with all the privileges, the most loved and most loving in our family— about what happened before they arrived. What happened before we got our papers, before I got the desk job my parents wanted for me. It is my gift to them. My burden.
