Planting Dandelions

by Kyran Pittman

  My Canadian passport and visitor information form lay on the desk between us. He picked them up and reviewed the facts that had flagged me in the preclearance line as undesirable and unwelcome. One, I was traveling on a one-way ticket, purchased that morning by an American friend. Two, I had no idea how long I intended to stay with said friend. Three, I had no cash with me, and I had been unemployed for several months, as had my friend. Four, I was clearly a nervous wreck. The only thing separating me from the usual suspects was that I hadn’t made any attempt at all to conceal or minimize the damning evidence against me. But it hadn’t occurred to me that I should. I was twenty-five years old, and the only time I had traveled outside Canada as an adult was for my Jamaican honeymoon, two years before. I had no idea that my circumstances would flag me as a would-be illegal immigrant. When my hands and voice shook as I handed over my passport for inspection, it wasn’t because I was scared of getting caught, but because I was in the middle of coming completely unglued. I was going to America just long enough to figure out my next move. I didn’t want to live there. Why would anyone? The news made it sound like a stupid, scary place to be.

  That’s a Canadian passport, pal, I felt like saying to the officious clerk, who was looking smug, as if he’d foiled my schemes. I’m not some refugee.

  Except I was a refugee, fleeing a comfortable life that had recently become intolerable, thanks to the catastrophe of falling in love with an American. Patrick would be waiting for my plane to arrive in Little Rock, watching the last passenger come through the gate, telling himself I was coming on the next flight. Champagne and a vase of flowers in a hotel room. The long night.

  The interviewing officer turned to his computer keyboard, poised to enter my name in a database of the huddled masses. There wasn’t going to be another flight for me. Not headed in that direction. Maybe it was the clear sign I’d been seeking all these anguished months. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so defeated if I just surrendered.

  “I left my husband this morning,” I said, quietly. “But I think I made a mistake.”

  He stared at me a long moment across his desk. Then, without saying a word, he slowly handed me back my passport, took me by the arm, and walked me back to the Canadian side of the airport. I made two phone calls from a bank of pay phones, then flew back to a life I desperately wanted to belong to, but didn’t anymore. Homeless, and tempest-tost.

  That miserable November day turned out to be the backward step it sometimes takes to make a giant leap. Three months later, legally separated, I joined Patrick in Mexico, and the following spring, accompanied him back to the United States, though I still had no intention of staying longer than was absolutely necessary. It was still a stupid, scary country as far as I was concerned. But bumming around with the other ex-pats in San Miguel de Allende wasn’t paying the rent. If we saved carefully, we figured, Patrick could quickly earn enough USD to buy us a year or more of la vida mexicana. We promised all our friends we’d see them soon, gassed up the car, and drove north.

  “Welcome to Texas,” a road sign announced. It might as well have read “Here Be Dragons.” Driving through the streets of Laredo, I felt like I’d left civilization behind. Hand-painted gas station signs advertised “GUNS BEER AMMO” as if it were the lunch special, beverage included. We pulled into a fast-food joint for supper, and I marveled at the grotesque portions, my first exposure to supersizing. I could barely grasp the soda cup with one hand, tucking it inside the crook of my elbow instead, like I was playing a bagpipe, not drinking a cola. We found a cheap motel and checked in. When Patrick said he was going out to buy cigarettes, I freaked out.

  “It looks like a dangerous neighborhood,” I said, fretfully.

  “I’m just going around the corner,” he reassured me.

  But I meant the neighborhood that extended from the Mexican border all the way to Canada. As far as I knew from watching television, the entire citizenry of the United States was armed to the teeth, running around shooting each other over imported vehicles or a bad day at the post office. International media coverage of America tends to draw from extremes. I’d grown up with nightly news portrayals of a dystopian anarchy so violent it made Mad Max look like an Outward Bound adventure. I was frantic the entire fifteen minutes Patrick was gone, convinced he would be shot.

  He came back unharmed, and the next day we set out across Texas, arriving in Little Rock two days later, without being shot at once. After several consecutive weeks passed without either of us getting mowed down in a hail of bullets, I began to relax and take in my new surroundings. In Mexico, I’d acquired an idle expatriate’s taste for people-watching, and the dives we frequented in Little Rock offered a steady parade. It was a pageant of misfits and miscreants: drunks and drug addicts, rednecks and hippies, young strippers and old groupies, musicians who were on their way up and those who were all the way down, trust-fund kids who were slumming, and ghetto kids on the hustle. Everyone was a character. Fear gave away to detached bemusement, then exhilaration. I loved the freedom of being a stranger, an observer of the show. And what a show.

  “This country is a train wreck,” I wrote gleefully in a letter to my father during my first year in the United States. Maybe so, but I met it in a head-on collision. I became a connoisseur of trash culture, venturing out from the neighborhood bars in search of something even grittier. I found it in highway joints where you had to be ready to duck under the table when a brawl erupted, where everybody and their gun was always half cocked and fully loaded, and the possibility of getting shot was no paranoid delusion. I was playing a part. I drank bourbon, smoked Marlboros, got fake nails, and knotted my shirts below my breasts. I thought I was on TV. I thought I was Daisy Duke. I thought I was badass. Dumbass, more like. One night, after all the bars and even the strip clubs were closed, we wound up in somebody’s house down a country road, where I picked up an antique pistol off a table and swung around brandishing it in a two-handed grip, posing like a Charlie’s Angel. Everyone in the room ducked and shouted at me, and I was shocked by the response. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the gun might be loaded, or that anyone on the business end of the barrel would think it was loaded. I had never held a pistol that wasn’t a toy. As far as I was concerned, it was just a prop. Like so much about America, it seemed too far out to be real.

  In those early days, it was a thrill just to sit in a diner booth at four in the morning, ordering a breakfast of biscuits and gravy from a gum-cracking waitress who called me “hon.” The Waffle House was no less exotic to me than a sidewalk café on the Left Bank or a tearoom in Japan. The giant American flags that flew over car dealerships and truck stops were as colloquial and curious to me as dharma banners fluttering on a mountainside in Nepal—expressions of a local faith, not mine.

  Gradually, the novelty wore off. Our lifestyle changed. We never did make it back to San Miguel. Patrick got a desk job, we got an apartment, got married, bought a house, and had a bunch of children. No regrets. It was good to settle down. But every year I spend in this land of the free has cost me more of my freedom. I’m not an onlooker anymore. I don’t relish it when things go off the rails. I have children on the train now, and many other people I care about. My heart heaves and shakes with every rumble of the track. I’m tied to it.

  I might as well just get on board, but I’ve held off making that last leap. My passport is still Canadian. Most people assume I’m a U.S. citizen. But to a careful observer, there are a few signs that should give me away. The Pledge of Allegiance is one. At the request to “please stand,” I rise to my feet along with everyone else, out of respect. I put my hand over my heart like everyone else does, out of affection. And then I just stand there, mutely smiling and trying not to appear seditious while the rest of the assembly pledges fealty to the flag and the republic for which it stands. No one has ever once turned to me afterward and called me a traitor, or asked me what I’m protesting, but the self-consciousness and anxiety I endure for those two minutes is acute. I’m Canadia
n, I telegraph silently through my smile. Don’t shoot.

  “I’m Canadian,” I explain, in an apologetic aside to whoever happens to be standing next to me, as soon as they get through “justice for all.” They are always amazed, as if just learning that there is such a place. “Oh! Canada!” they exclaim, whenever I out myself. Nine out of ten people will then say something nice about Vancouver, a city four thousand miles away from my East Coast hometown. I’ve never been anywhere near there, but when I go, I will have a lot of kind words to pass on, and numerous distant relatives of Americans to look up.

  “I had no idea you were Canadian,” they say next, if we’ve been coming to Scouts together for a while, or passing each other coming and going in the school hallways. Living and breeding in your very midst, I think, as they scan me for any visible marker of foreignness that hitherto escaped them.

  In Mexico, the other ex-pats used to joke that the only way to tell a Canadian apart from an American is to mistake them for each other. The one who’s offended is Canadian. There’s more than apocryphal truth to this. People think hockey is Canada’s national pastime, but what really brings the Great White North together is disapproval of the country next door. If the community of nations were middle school, Canada would be on safety patrol, courteous, eager, prissy. America would be the rich girl with big breasts and loose ways.

  I flung off my orange safety vest one day, and went running after her.

  I don’t know exactly when my feelings deepened past infatuation, but I’ll never forget noticing that they had. I was home for my father’s funeral at the end of the summer of 2001. Patrick had returned stateside, ahead of me and the children, to get back to work. He called me one morning from his office. It was Tuesday.

  “Are you watching TV?” he said. I wondered what juicy political or celebrity news had broken.

  “The boys are watching something on CBC,” I told him.

  “Turn on an American channel. Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center.”

  It was like the confounding of tongues in Babylon. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I grabbed onto the words that were the most familiar. Plane crash, I thought. An accident. But as I set the phone down and lunged for the living room, my mind was parsing the rest of the sentence. Two planes. Two. Two is not an accident.

  I picked up the remote control and pressed an arrow. Not an accident. An attack. On my friends, on my neighbors, on my husband and my children. This is what it means to be hated. The TV screen a mirror held up to my heart, blown out and crumbling. I gathered my sons in my arms, realizing for the first time that they have mortal enemies because they are Americans.

  I was due to return to Little Rock through Boston, our usual route. Now I was stranded, like everyone else; detained once more on the other side of the border from Patrick. While running errands one morning a few days after the attacks, I caught the live radio broadcast of ceremonies on Parliament Hill honoring those who had died. The Canadian anthem was played first. Then a Mountie sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I laid my forehead on the wheel of my mother’s car and wept with a heart that was truly broken. In that moment, it was no longer “their” anthem. It was mine, too.

  Though I have sometimes, fleetingly, questioned the wisdom of it, I brought my children home to their country after September 11, 2001. I gave birth to another U.S. citizen. My sons are smart, healthy, and beloved. They are also white, middle-class, American males, which is to say they are princes—extraordinarily privileged, even in the shifting world order. The responsibility I feel for their upbringing is beyond personal for me. It’s global. In them, I like to think I am helping to raise a new nation, one with fewer enemies, at home and abroad. Be kind, I tell them. Share. Take turns. Stand up for your brother. Include the girls. Use your words. Look after the little ones. Pick up after yourselves. Cooperate. And when you promise allegiance to the flag, remember what it stands for: liberty and justice for all people. I believe in those words. But my kids have never heard me pledge them.

  My cold feet were easier to rationalize when becoming a U.S. citizen meant renouncing my Canadian citizenship. Nobody has ever blamed me for not wanting to sever ties with a country that offers universal health care and vacations in Cuba. But that excuse no longer holds water. The rules have changed, and it is possible for me to hold dual citizenship now. By virtue of their birth, my kids are already dual citizens.

  “You’re Canadians, too,” I remind them occasionally. But they don’t really know what that means, and I can’t tell them, because I don’t know, myself, except as a stance apart. I am Canadian mainly when I am exasperated with the United States and want to distance myself from its messes and its problems. I’m Canadian if I don’t like the election results or I disagree with a war. I wear my Canadian identity like a T-shirt that says “Not with Stupid.” I’m not sure I know what patriotism is, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t it.

  The childish truth is, I haven’t wanted to commit. Becoming a U.S. citizen would mean having to dismount from my Royal Canadian high horse. It would mean having to say, “I’m an American,” not just on a day when a black man is elected president, and I could burst with pride, but on days when U.S. missiles strike down children in another land, on days when the Stars and Stripes decorate a mob’s hatred, on days when greed and piracy are sold as freedom. It would mean having to sing my country, ’tis of thee, in praise and in lament.

  It would mean I belong.

  I’ve gotten used to the idea of not belonging anywhere. It’s romantic to play the exile, the desperado. But that’s a thin veneer of bravado pasted over a lifetime of yearning. I used to think I could act, look, work, even marry my way into belonging, right up to the moment I’d realize that I hadn’t, in the shattering way a bird comes face-to-face with its truth in a patio door. Epiphany of bone and glass.

  I didn’t realize that belonging isn’t something you can make happen. It’s something you let happen.

  In Newfoundland, the old people say you are “in the fairy” when you are lost in a dream. All these years, there’s been a part of me that believed I had wandered into the fairy, into this American dream, and that I would eventually wander back out. That my enchantment with this country was just that: an enchantment. In the back of my mind, there was a voice that kept saying, Someday, I’ll wake up and go home.

  The last time I crossed the border was through the Toronto airport, on my way back from a reading in Canada. I followed the moving sidewalks and escalators to the same U.S. Customs area as I did on that November day all those years ago, only now I got to stand in the line for U.S. citizens and alien residents. My hands and smile were steady as I passed my green card over the counter. The customs inspector smiled back, then frowned. In a post-traumatic flashback, an American bald eagle glared and flexed its talons.

  “Do you know this is about to expire?”

  Ignorance is no defense, I know, and I’m sure it sounded lame to say I’d forgotten that I wasn’t a U.S. citizen, but it was the truth. I need to be reminded that I’m not a U.S. citizen, because the rest of the time, I feel American. I assured the customs inspector that I would update my immigrant status as soon as I got home, and boarded the plane.

  For the last leg of my itinerary, I was on a tiny regional flight, bound from Chicago for Little Rock. There was no mistaking my fellow passengers for anything but Americans: across the aisle, a death row prison guard was flying home to an execution that night. Behind me, a born-again Christian was preaching to his seatmate. Ahead of me sat a large black woman, her hair sculpted and lacquered into a rigid, gleaming mass that never touched the headrest. They were all very different from me, but they felt very familiar. Not characters. People. My people.

  The next day, I climbed to the attic to retrieve a box, then pulled out the file that held my old immigration records. I had already looked over the forms online and spoken with the consultant who had helped me with my green card application. Naturalization would be a len
gthy and expensive process. It would be so easy to apply for a renewal instead. To buy myself another ten years of limbo, of wait-and-see.

  A faded piece of facsimile paper was tucked among the visas and medical records. It was a poem from my father, faxed to me in Mexico, his way of blessing my departure from his country. Although at the time, I had assured him I’d come back to the island someday, it was clear that he had seen my path unfolding differently. Going toward yourself is the longest journey of all, he wrote. I could hear his priestly intonation in my mind, and was reminded of a line of Deuteronomy.

  These words shall be on your heart. You shall teach them to your sons and talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.

  These are the words I should teach my sons. Going toward yourself is the longest journey of all. Belong.

  The thermal ink of my father’s signature had faded with time. Had it really been fourteen years since I came across the border? All around me were the dusty boxes full of files and memorabilia to prove it. A long time wandering in the fairy, I thought. Time to wake up. I climbed downstairs, went to my computer, and opened a file. N-400: Application to Become a U.S. Citizen. Under “Your Name” I began typing. Pittman, Kyran.

  Time to come home.

  17.

  The Crush