The Go-Between

by Veronica Chambers

  I had been at Polestar for two months but knew that, despite the fact that tuition was four times the national average salary in Mexico, I was, in fact, surrounded by more drug dealers than I had ever been before in my life.

  “Define ‘drug dealer,’ ” I said innocently.

  “You know what I mean,” Tiggy said.

  Willow looked annoyed. “C’mon, Antigone,” she said, using Tiggy’s full name. “You’re being so insensitive. Who knows what she had to do in Mexico to survive.”

  Sweet.

  “What do you mean by ‘drug dealer’?” I asked, looking around the room. “Do you mean like Ethan who deals E? Or the weed guy, Scott? Or someone like Wyatt, who can be counted on for the harder stuff?”

  This was not only true but also a bit of a dig. Tiggy had a crazy crush on Scott Merchant, and I knew it.

  Tiggy glared at me. “If you don’t want to talk about your past, then just say so. I just mean, Willow and I have embraced you with open arms. We let you into our country. You got a scholarship to our school. The least you could do is exchange in a little honest dialogue.”

  Was she really saying that my ability to attend Polestar, live in America, and not be a social pariah at school was all because of the kindness of her little fashion-obsessed heart? She had to be kidding. Even though I knew I was escalating the drama, I said, “How about today, instead of delving into my immigrant past, we talk about you and your dirty little secrets? What were you into before I got to town? Was it anorexia, bulimia? Cutting? Shoplifting? What did you do because you’re a bored little rich girl? What are you ashamed of?”

  Both girls stared at me as if I’d just slapped Tiggy, which is sort of what I’d done. I had thought I was done with Patrizia, but every once in a while, she popped out—my inner mean girl. Or maybe I couldn’t blame Patrizia at all. Maybe that’s just how we’re all wired, with that little sliver of ice in our hearts.

  “Wow,” Willow said, standing with her tray. “I think we should all take a step back and cool down. After all, we’re friends.”

  Tiggy stood up too. Then she turned to me and said, “How about tomorrow you try not to pour so much bitch juice into your morning tequila?”

  I actually laughed. “Oh, is that a Mexican joke? Hilarious.” But it wasn’t funny. Not at all.

  I wasn’t going to be able to keep it up much longer. But I wasn’t sure what “it” was—my friendship with Willow and Tiggy, or the lies upon which our friendship was based.

  I had thought it would be easier in America. When I lived in Mexico, it seemed like ours was almost a cartoon life. It was all a little unreal—the industry my parents were in, our gargantuan house, the staff and the security. It was as if I was always waiting for my regular life to start, the moment when I went away to school the way Sergio had, and nobody cared that my mother was famous and that our family was successful. I looked forward to being just Camilla, a girl whose BFF didn’t sell her family secrets to the tabloids and who might just learn how to blend into the crowd. But maybe the truth was that I’d done a better job of blending in with the stereotypes than blending into any crowd.

  The LA Camilla was closer to the girl I’d always felt I was on the inside. Our house in Beverly Hills was nice, but it wasn’t a crazy blinged-out compound like our place back home. Albita still lived with us—I don’t think my mother could manage without her—but none of the other staff members did. My mother went to the gym instead of having a trainer come to the house. The drivers and the cleaning people and the organic chef came in and out, but they didn’t live with us the way they had in Mexico. I was taking the bus to school—the bus!

  Sergio encouraged me to go out for some school activities. “You’re going to have to meet some other kids when this Camilla from the Barrio act comes crashing down.” I knew he was right. Not to mention that my college counselor said my grades were good for an “international” student but every university wants their students to be well rounded. I thought I might try out for the tennis team in the spring. I wasn’t that good, but I loved to play. It might have been all the Law & Order episodes I’d been binge-watching since we’d moved to the US, but I was also thinking about going out for mock trial in the fall.

  Then of course, there was the little one-woman show I’d been putting on for Willow and Tiggy. You’d think it would be some sort of sign that the gift of acting had been passed down to me. But I don’t think you can call it acting when the lines practically write themselves.

  The next day, after Tiggy and I had mumbled our apologies, we managed to spend almost the entire lunch hour without talk delving into Mexican Culture: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy. Then Willow had to go there.

  “So your mother’s a maid, right?” she began.

  “That’s what the uniform says,” I answered.

  Tiny lie.

  “And what does your dad do?” she asked.

  I tried to stay as close to the truth as possible. “He’s been looking for work,” I said. “But these days, he’s been spending most of his time in the garden.”

  This was not a lie. While my mother was off to the studio every day and had a full schedule of meetings with producers, sessions with her new American acting coach, and of course lots of Pilates and lots of shopping, my father was not as busy. He had an agent, but there wasn’t as much voice-over work for a Spanish-speaking actor in Los Angeles as there was in Mexico City. Most of that work in the US was based in Miami. So my father had turned all Edward Scissorhands in our garden. It was beautiful and a little haunting.

  Willow looked sympathetic. “I see those guys on the side of the road all the time, hoping to get picked up for day work.”

  I nodded. I’d seen them too. Was I going straight to hell for my lies?

  That evening, after our Spanish tutoring session, Willow handed me seventy-five dollars for three hours of tutoring. She then added a crisp hundred-dollar bill to the small stack.

  “What’s this?” I asked, handing it back to her.

  “It’s a bonus,” she said, pushing the money back toward me. “I got a B-plus on my Spanish vocab quiz, and Señorita Gomez said that my accent has vastly improved.”

  I tried to give her the hundred back. “That’s because you’ve been studying your ass off. That’s you. Not me.”

  “Keep it,” Willow said. “And if you ever need money, a loan, anything, you just ask.”

  I was touched. I couldn’t remember ever making an offer like that to a friend. But then again, in Mexico, I didn’t have any friends whose families weren’t affluent. And I’d never given it a second thought. I tucked the extra money into my wallet because I knew she wanted me to have it.

  Just when I thought Willow could not have been any kinder, she hugged me. “We girls of color have got to stick together,” she said.

  It was so unexpected. I always thought of them as a twosome—Willow and Tiggy. Tiggy and Willow. But I could count on my hands the number of brown girls in our grade at Polestar. Willow was so wealthy and so fabulous, it had never occurred to me that she might feel like an outsider. I guess I knew now what my classmates had thought about me back home.

  As I did every time I left Willow’s house, I walked down to the bus stop on Wilshire. Then I called an Uber. The school bus was cool, but I wasn’t looking to ride a city bus from Hancock Park to Beverly Hills. As I slid into the back of the town car, all I could think was that I really hoped Willow would still be my friend when I told her the truth, which would be soon-ish.

  When I got home, my father was in the backyard weeding—weeding or planting. I honestly knew so little about gardening that I couldn’t tell the difference. So I asked him.

  He was dressed in a pair of denim overalls and a khaki button-down shirt. If my friends from Polestar could’ve seen him, they would have mistaken him for a day worker looking for landscaping work, or even a migrant worker. How did that saying go? Clothes maketh the man?

  My father told me that he was planting for spring. �
�We’re going to have a beautiful garden come May,” he said. “These are actually for you.”

  He held up a packet of seeds. Camellia roses. So sweet.

  I kissed him on the forehead. “Thank you, Papá.”

  “You’re welcome, niña,” he said. “Your mother is out at an event tonight. It’s just you and me for dinner. I was thinking we should go out.”

  It crossed my mind that I might cook for my dad, but I had no idea if we had the ingredients. I quickly agreed. “For burgers and fries?” I asked hopefully.

  “Lots and lots of fries,” he said. “Just let me shower and change.”

  Driving down the LA side streets with my father, I loved how empty they were. It was a little after eight. The evening traffic had died down and the city was quiet, at least on our side of town. It was all palm trees and streetlights and that bright blue haze of a sky above us.

  “So where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” my father said with a smile.

  A few minutes later, we pulled in front of a place called Father’s Office. I burst out laughing.

  As we took our seats, my father said, “So although you should not skip school, if you do, then meet me—this is our spot. You can say, ‘I’ve got an emergency and I’ve got to go to my father’s office.’ ”

  I smiled. “Really? I can cut school and meet you here?”

  “Sí,” my father said. Then he shook his head. “No.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “Maybe every once in a while.”

  Once we’d devoured our burgers, I asked him the difficult, delicate question for out-of-work actors. “So how’s the auditioning going?”

  He smiled. “Good news, actually. I booked a part.”

  “Really? Way to go!” I said, clinking my soda bottle with his pint of beer. “What is it?”

  “Robot Number Three in an action flick,” he said. “It’s only two lines. But it’s in English, so it’s a start. You know what they say: del suelo no paso.” You can’t fall down from the floor. In other words, there’s nowhere to go but up. I was happy for my father. He was starting a new chapter too. What I hoped, more than anything I wished for myself, was that my dad would get his own shine here in the US, that he wouldn’t just be Mr. Carolina del Valle.

  At every awards show my mother was ever honored at, she thanked my father for being el viento bajo mis alas, the wind beneath her wings. But take it from me, if you ever get the choice between being the wind or being the one with wings, choose wings. Being the wind sucks.

  A couple of weeks later, my dad got a bigger gig—a Spanish voice-over for the new Iron Man movie. He was going to be playing Iron Man, which meant weeks and weeks of work. They even flew in his favorite producer, Rogelio Claro, from Mexico to work on the project.

  His first night in town Rogelio came over for dinner.

  “Ay, chica, you’re even taller than the last time I saw you!” he said, giving me a hug when I opened the front door.

  “That was just three months ago, Tío,” I said. We call all of our parents’ close friends “aunt” or “uncle.”

  He shrugged. “You’re taller. It’s the American way. Supersize me, am I right?”

  My father came in and gave Rogelio the Mexican man half hug, half handshake. “Hombre, qué pasa?”

  Then my mother came in, and Rogelio lifted her off the ground and spun her around. “Corazón! It’s the American movie star,” he said.

  My mother blushed. “TV,” she said. “And not star. Not films. Not yet.”

  It was the first time we were entertaining a guest from home, and we were all positively giddy. By the end of the evening, Rogelio was dancing with Albita and my father was twirling my mother around the patio. I thought about Amadeo and the whole crazy way that I’d met him. Our love story was almost like a telenovela. But was it real? Would it last? I was more unsure than I’d ever been. I watched my parents for a moment from the staircase, remembering all the parties they’d thrown in Mexico. Then I tiptoed up to bed.

  —

  That Friday, after school, I went to visit my father at the studio in Culver City where he and Rogelio were working. The recording studios for voice-overs were light-years away from the television studios. There was no big security booth, just a guy in a uniform at a desk who would have preferred that I show him a form of ID. But when I told him that I didn’t have one, he said, “Okay, fine, just sign your name here.” Then, as if this was a deterrent, he added, “Your real name.”

  I took the elevator to the fifth floor of what looked like a regular office building, found the suite I was looking for, and walked in. It was just my father, Rogelio, and a sound engineer inside.

  The movie was playing on a screen on the far wall of the studio, and my father sat on a high chair in the soundproof booth, wearing a pair of headphones and holding a script. He waved at me when I came in.

  I quietly took a seat behind the sound engineer, pulled out my chemistry homework, and watched my dad do his thing.

  “I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

  “You know, it’s times like this, I realize what a huge superhero I am.”

  I did my best not to burst out laughing. But he was so funny, so charming. I thought, one day, people will know how amazing my father is. One day, it will all come out. One year for Christmas, Sergio got my dad a T-shirt that said GET THE MONEY, F*** THE FAME. My bro had explained to me that although my father wasn’t as well known as our mother, he was—in his own right—very successful. “None of this would go away if Mami stopped working,” Sergio said. “Dad could cover it all—the house, our school tuition, maybe a little less staff, but we’d be fine. It’s important that he knows that we’re proud of him, that we see all that he does for us, because while it seems like this is the Carolina del Valle show at home, it’s not.”

  “I see you, Papi,” I wanted to say through the soundproof glass that separated me from my father. “And there’s no place I’d rather be than right here with you.” No cast of thousands. No wind machines. No hair, no makeup, no sequins. Just my dad’s voice, Rogelio’s sotto voce comments, and a movie that hadn’t even opened in the theaters yet, playing on silent, on the screen in front of me. Heaven.

  In some ways my mother’s life, at least schedule-wise, was the same. She got up early for her morning ritual of running on the treadmill, followed by a big glass of juice. While my father and I were just stumbling into the kitchen for our morning cafecito, she was dressed and headed out the door. She kissed each of us and yelled, “Es un buen día pa tener un buen día.” It’s a good day to have a good day. Each morning, the studio sent a car to pick her up, and she had fallen into an easy rapport with Ilías, her new driver. It took thirty or forty minutes to get to the studio, time my mother spent learning her lines and playing with her new favorite app, Duolingo. “I thought my English was pretty good,” she said in her throaty, movie-star voice. “But it’s like my abuela always said, ‘See me’ and ‘Come live with me’ are two entirely different things. As a tourist, my English is perfect. As a resident, not so much.”

  I was also settling into the fact that this was more than an extended vacation. Los Angeles was our home now. “Do you miss home?” my father sometimes asked me. Yes, I missed the place—hearing everyone speak Spanish the way that I spoke it. In the US, everyone’s Spanish is different. Mexican Spanish is different from Mexican American Spanish; the way Nicaraguans speak is different from how a Cuban or a Colombian might speak. Of course, I heard different Latin accents at home, but I hadn’t recognized how much you grow accustomed to the hum of your own language, how much it makes you feel at home to walk into any room, or turn on the radio or the TV, and understand exactly what is being said. My English was good, maybe stronger than my parents’ even, but a dozen times a day or more, I had to ask someone to repeat him or herself. “Hmm, what did you say?” In class, if I daydreamed for even five minutes, I w
ould lose the thread and have to pay super-close attention just to pick up the subject. I liked the challenge of it. Maybe because I had watched my brother master English while at boarding school and then had seen him pick up German at the university, but I had begun to think of being bilingual as one of my superpowers. I wasn’t super-pretty or rocket-scientist smart, but there were now two of me—the girl I was in Spanish and the girl I was becoming in English, and I liked the fact that each of my selves had her own language, her own way of hearing and being heard in the world.

  My father, I think, missed Mexico most of all. My mother had been the star there, but her celebrity had limited her. There were so many places she couldn’t go and things she couldn’t do. She was like this rare beautiful bird and our home had been her cage. As a voice-over actor, my father had suffered no such restriction. He loved Mexico City and he loved showing it off. Even when my mother’s success meant that we might be targets for kidnapping, my father would pile me into the car with security, and we’d go driving around the colonias. He would pull up pictures on his iPad and show me how Mexico City’s main boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma, was so much like Paris’s famous Champs-Élysées. He’d show me pictures of Gaudí architecture in Barcelona and the slickly designed art mecca of Bilbao as we drove through the streets of Colonia Cuauhtémoc. It was my father who took me on annual pilgrimages to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s Casa Azul every July 6, on Frida’s birthday. And then there was the food.

  My mother was always watching her weight, so even if she could have hit up every dive bar and café in La Roma, she wouldn’t. But my father loved to eat, and drink, and there wasn’t a restaurant we visited where the owners didn’t know him by name. From the high-end molecular gastronomy restaurants where the olives dissolved into briny liquid the minute you bit into them, to the most humble torta stands and loncherías, my father knew them all.

  Sometimes we were joined by my father’s friends from the world of voice-overs: Rogelio, his favorite producer; Sammy, the sound guy; and other actors like Bobby and Hector. Bobby was a big guy with a belly like Santa Claus’s and a booming laugh. Hector was the opposite, tall and skinny, with hair that was always a little too long and with what my dad liked to call a “villain’s mustache.”