by Adi Alsaid
She hands Memo a paper sack with his favorite snacks: a bag of mango chile paletas, several Reese’s, Baby Ruths, Takis, and two ice-cold cans of Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng.
You really do love me, Memo teases.
He hands Marlene a mango paleta, pops one in his mouth, turns the radio up, and jokes Let’s go, before they know I’m missing.
Neither of them bother looking back at what they’re leaving behind as they race towards the 10.1
THE PART WHERE YOU LEARN ABOUT HOW
TÍO REYNALDO AND MARLENE ARE REALLY
EXTENSIONS OF THE SAME LONGING.
Decades before, upon first arriving in the United States, Tío Reynaldo had taken that same 10 all the way to Florida. He made stops in Phoenix and El Paso. Then San Antonio and New Orleans. He was a young man. His parents were still alive, and he still believed in the American Dream. He didn’t fear deportation as much as he does now. But then again he was young and doing all the things young straight men were supposed to do. Working long hours for women and fun times. He had picked up English easily and quickly learned to use it to his advantage, especially with White women who found him “exotic.” Women who asked him to talk to them in Spanish in bed. He figured it was quid pro quo, because they were both fulfilling a need. Though his need was more natural than their racist fantasy.
Reynaldo (this was before anyone called him tío) drank and slept and smoked and danced his way through the American Southwest that summer in 1985. He and his primo, Chico. Chico, who missed the rancho too much to stay in el norte but left him a little black-and-white TV and most of his cologne collection. This was Reynaldo’s favorite summer. No parents. Single. No major responsibilities. Just a 1964 cherry-red Plymouth Valiant taking him and Chico from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
* * *
Perhaps this is where Marlene gets her incessant desire to roam. To be a pata de perro. She has always been this way. And he has always been this way—itching to wander, and aching when forced to stay put.
When she was little, and when Tío Reynaldo would come down to visit, he would take her on long drives through back roads throughout Southern California. She got to know the Inland Empire, her home, this way. Tío Reynaldo would take her on the winding roads through Reche Canyon to look for wild donkeys.
He had brought up the wild donkeys in conversation and Marlene didn’t believe him.
There are no wild donkeys in Southern California, tío, she said to him.
Why would I lie about that? Tío Reynaldo rolled his eyes.
I don’t know why. You just lie sometimes. It runs in our family.
Ay Marlene. Come on. I’ll prove it.
So they jumped in his old red-and-white Ford truck and went in search of wild donkeys.
The sun was setting and the hills on both sides of the road that twisted itself from Colton to Moreno Valley began the shift from dry desert landscape to being awash in the gold disappearing from the rays of sun that made the dangerously dry shrubs and brush seem magical before darkness completely overtook everything.
Marlene almost missed the little donkey standing by a fence post. Tío Reynaldo pointed it out with a whistle.
Ay, mira. There’s one.
Sure enough, Marlene looked up and sees the little brown donkey. When she looked a little to the right, she spotted about ten more donkeys, just chilling. That evening she and Tío Reynaldo spent a few hours driving through Reche Canyon and San Timoteo Canyon Road. This was a favorite pastime of theirs; wandering to just wander. No aim, no specific X.
They were quite the pair. Tío Reynaldo in his fifties, brown hair thinning, thick-rimmed glasses, stylish clothes that didn’t reveal that he spent most of his days changing oil or cooking kale and sweet potato mash or whatever the ever-changing and ever-hungrier American palate asked for. Then there was Marlene in her teens. T-shirt and jeans, flannel and jeans, blouse and jeans. It would be a sweet story to say that they enjoyed each other’s company from the first time they met, but that would be a lie. While she didn’t dislike Reynaldo, Marlene was indifferent during his visits.
She found him mostly tolerable and a little annoying because he was one of those adults who always made cheesy jokes and tried to be pals with the kids. It wasn’t until Marlene saw Tío Reynaldo playing the accordion and singing Ramon Ayala that he became more than an annoying uncle.
During a cold autumn night that smelled of birria and leña, years ago when she was a child, at a birthday party for a cousin visiting from Mexico, Tío Reynaldo transformed from tolerable and annoying, to someone fascinating and worth knowing. Marlene had already been sent to bed but someone’s aunt’s sister had brought out a guitar and was belting out Chavela Vargas with such sentimiento that Marlene knew, having never even been in love yet, what heartache felt like. What that particular sadness was. By the end of the song women were openly crying, and men were drying their eyes. Marlene sat in awe of what music could do to a person.
But when Tío Reynaldo picked up the accordion and started playing what could almost be called “the other” Mexican national anthem, “Tragos de amargo licor,” that was it. She learned that there was something more sincere in that man than she had believed.
Marlene thought of that moment whenever she hung around Tío Reynaldo and any time she’d go see him perform in bars or lounges she probably shouldn’t have been at. She thought about that moment now as the familiar tune poured from the radio and she turned the volume up without thinking. The song was midway through and Ramon was singing about how much like a coward he felt for drinking his feelings away. Tío Reynaldo and Marlene joined voices as San Timoteo Canyon got darker and the high beams were turned on.
But they stopped singing as they came up to some of the citrus groves that still dot Redlands. What the high beams highlighted was almost unbelievable to Marlene—a herd of donkeys amongst orange or lemon trees, though it was hard to tell which was which in the dark. There they were, cute and dumb looking, caught infragante and mid-chomp, oranges in their mouths, their eyes full of surprise as the high beams shined on them.
This is why Marlene loves Tío Reynaldo: because he’s always shining a light on dark places, always teaching her that the unknown isn’t always frightening. That the unknown is simply that, unknown, and that if we are not cowed by not knowing, or by money, that if the fear doesn’t keep us safe and sound at home but instead drives us to know, leads us directly into temptation, well then, we are constantly changed and can create change. We are never done growing and, therefore, he adds, we never stop being young.
That’s how I keep my youthful glow, Tío Reynaldo joked.
No pos wow, Marlene responded. I just thought it was the not having kids and being single.
That too, he added. But mostly it’s the curiosity.
Haven’t you ever been curious about that?
About what?
Being married and having kids?
Ay, Marlene, let’s not talk about sad things, he said and quickly went back to the wild donkeys.
THE PART WHERE YOU LEARN ABOUT MEMO’S
AND MARLENE’S FAMILIES.
There are people who are born to sit. To stay in one place. Whose eyes do not wander, much less their minds. Who live in fear of the unknown and who haven’t been curious since the first time they fell off a tree and never attempted to climb again. People who when there are no real, physical, fences or barriers, will quickly erect imaginary ones so as to reassure themselves that they are safe. However, that assurance is also imaginary because there is no such thing as real safety. That is an illusion.
Memo and Marlene have parents who are both from this country and from another country. They do not come from families of sitters or stay-putters. They come from a family of fence hoppers and explorers. Some, like Reynaldo and Marlene, are patas de perro and were born to wander. Others left out of necessity. In either case, thei
r families are a mix of people who can come and go as they please to the country of their birth and ancestors, and of people who are trapped by an inefficiently run and racist system. A system that has enacted laws and physical structures that get people killed for simply trying to leave poverty and reunite with family. Marlene had an uncle die in the desert and Memo had a cousin drown in a river, crossing to El Gabacho. Marlene’s father was born on a rancho in the middle of Sinaloa and her grandmother finally left her husband, Marlene’s grandfather, for good when Doroteo was four years old. His brothers, much older than him, were already in Gilroy with Reynaldo, working in restaurants and a tire shop. Trying to find their place in their new country. Marlene had visited the left-behind grandfather a few times in her childhood. The once big man lived small in a haunted apartment in Celaya, Guanajuato. He was old and lonely, and rarely left his couch, where he watched courtroom dramas and telenovelas with his cat, Petra.
To have families in two countries is to have part of yourself missing. Perhaps this is not the case with people who, if they have the money, can jump on a plane and cross borders without fear. But for much of Memo’s family, and some of Marlene’s, leaving is never easy. Marlene thinks about how her tía in Sinaloa will never see the house her brother built or come over for Sunday carne asada. How she has cousins she will never be close to, because their parents decided to have sex in a different country and this country is a closed border for most Brown and Black people—and Brown and Black people is exactly what their families are made of.
So maybe this journey to find her brother is not just about her father lying and confronting that lie. Maybe this journey is also about keeping all the family you can together, desperately gathering them like sticks to start a fire. Because, often, that’s what it feels like we are: the kindling that keeps everything warm in a country made of water.
* * *
1For those non-native Californians: whereas in most parts of the US folks say, “Interstate 10” or “I-10” when talking about an interstate, in California we usually say, “the 10” or “the 91” or “the 405” aka “the freeway from hell.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isabel Quintero is an award-winning writer and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She lives and writes in the Inland Empire of Southern California. Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (Cinco Puntos Press), her first YA novel, was the recipient of multiple awards, including the California Book Award Gold Medal and the Morris Award for Debut YA Novel. She is the author of the chapter books, Ugly Cat and Pablo (Scholastic, Inc.) and Ugly Cat and Pablo and the Missing Brother (Scholastic, Inc.). In 2016 Isabel was commissioned by The J. Paul Getty Museum to write a nonfiction YA graphic biography, Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide (Getty Publications), which went on to be awarded the Boston Globe Horn Book Award. Most recently, My Papi Has a Motorcycle (Kokila), her latest book, earned the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award.
HARD TO SAY
Sharon Morse
There’s so much I don’t remember about where I was born. Venezuela is just a few hazy scenes in my mind, so loosely tied together that they feel like dreams instead of memories. I don’t remember my school, except for the sweet, smiling face of one of my preschool teachers. I don’t remember our home, except for the balcony off the living room where I could feel the tropical breeze brush across my cheeks and whip my hair into a halo around my head. I don’t even remember the language—my first language. It, too, got lost to the haze of dreamlike memories.
My sister remembers it all. She was ten when we moved—old enough for her memories to stay intact. I had my sixth birthday just after we got to the States.
I try not to get jealous as I walk into the kitchen to the sweet smell of cinnamon pancakes and the sound of Clarísa speaking Spanish on the phone with our grandmother. My sister laughs and asks how she and our grandfather are doing. I know enough Spanish to figure at least that out.
“Morning,” my mom says as I pull out a stool next to my sister.
“Morning,” I answer.
Clarí stands from her stool and walks to the other side of the kitchen, like the two words that Mom and I uttered are disrupting her enthralling conversation.
Mom slides a plate of cinnamon pancakes in front of me, swimming in butter. It’s a tradition my mom has insisted on since my last day of kindergarten, when she accidentally knocked the cinnamon over and it went flying into the batter. We deemed it meant-to-be and carried on the tradition ever since. “You know,” I say. “I’m almost seventeen. You don’t need to make me special last-day-of-school pancakes anymore.”
“I’ll be making you last-day-of-school pancakes all the way through grad school, kid. Deal with it.”
I pop the top off the syrup bottle and pour it all over the pancakes. “So, you’re going to travel to wherever I’m attending college and make pancakes on a hot plate in my dorm room?”
Mom raises an eyebrow. “FedEx,” she says, dropping the pan into the sink. “Or you can always go to school close enough to come home for pancakes, like your sister.”
I laugh as I cut into my pancakes, letting the syrup run down through the layers. “Moms be crazy.”
“You laugh at me now,” she says, wiping down the countertop with a kitchen rag, “but you’re going to miss this when you’re all grown up and I’m too old to trust around an open flame anymore.”
“Nah.” I pop a bite into my mouth, savoring the butter and cinnamon and maple syrup on my tongue. “I’ll put you in an old folks home way before that.”
“Valentina. Have a little respect for your mother.” Mom swats at me with the kitchen towel. “At least make it a nice one—a retirement community for active seniors. With a pool for water aerobics.”
I laugh. “Deal.”
Mom does that mom thing where she watches me like I’m going to grow up and leave the house if she dares to look away.
“I still have senior year, Mom. There will be more pancakes ahead of us.”
“I know.” She purses her lips and nods.
“Oh, God, are those tears?”
“No!” She hisses and turns away to start washing the dishes.
I cram another bite in my mouth and chew around my smile while Clarísa paces the length of the kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear. Her mouth moves a mile a minute in perfect Spanish.
Even though Spanish was my first language, now I have trouble piecing together even the most basic conversations. I can understand bits and pieces when someone speaks slow enough. But I can barely find a response with two hands and a flashlight unless it’s sí, no, or gracias. It happened without even realizing it. One day it was just...gone. I can’t even tell you when.
Dad shuffles into the kitchen and puts an arm around me, giving me a good squeeze along with a loud kiss to the top of my head. “You ready for junior year to be over?”
I nod and swallow, my mouth full of pancakes. “So ready.”
“History final today?” He sits on the stool next to me.
“And I have to turn in my final art project,” I say, nodding to the canvas on the kitchen table, a landscape of Texas bluebonnets and an old hill country barn to showcase perspective. I brought it home last night to work on the last few details.
“You’ll nail that one, no problem. And I call dibs once it’s graded. I want to hang it in my office.”
“Deal,” I say, smiling into my pancakes.
“Dad, Ita wants to talk to you.” My sister holds the phone out to him. Ita and Ito became my grandparents’ names when Clarí was little and couldn’t say Abuelita or Abuelito. Everyone thought it was adorable, so of course it stuck.
Dad’s smile falters as he grabs the phone. “Hola, Mamá,” he says, but he walks toward his office before we can hear anything else.
“Is everything okay?” I push my plate toward my sister, and she takes my fork.
Clarí shoves a huge bite into her mouth. “So good,” she mumbles to herself. “I don’t know,” she finally says when she’s done chewing. “I tried to ask how things were going, but she wouldn’t tell me much other than the weather.”
I try to ignore the tightness in my chest. Clarísa’s managed to stay close with our grandparents, but when you don’t speak the same language anymore, staying close isn’t so easy.
Clarísa sighs and runs a hand through her thick hair. She takes after Dad, with darker skin and hair. I try not to be jealous of that, too. My mom is beautiful, but Dad definitely has the good hair.
Dad’s words float down the hallway, and we lean back on our stools, trying to hear more. He talks way too fast for me to pick up any of the words, but I can tell by his tone that something’s up.
We both turn our heads to Mom, who starts tinkering around the kitchen, cleaning surfaces that are already clean.
“Mom, what’s going on?” Clarísa asks.
Mom just shakes her head. “Let your father tell you, okay?”
My sister and I look at each other as all sorts of scenarios run through my head. I search her eyes, wondering if I’ll find the answers there, but it’s clear that, whatever this is, Mom and Dad are shielding it from Clarí, too.
We both know the situation in Venezuela has been getting worse. We’ve all held our breath, waiting for tiny crumbs of updates from American news outlets. Over the past year I’ve followed some of the protests on Twitter—what I can make sense of with Google Translate, anyway. The worse the situation has gotten, the more the mainstream news has reported about it. Every time another update comes about the violence, the lack of food and medicine, the millions of people leaving the country daily, the strain it’s putting on Colombia and Brazil, I can feel the tension in the house rising. It’s in the set of my dad’s shoulders, the tight smile on my mother’s face, the hushed, late-night conversations in Spanish.
