The Distance Between Us PDF

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CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com Contents Book One: Mi Mamá Me Ama Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Book Two: The Man Behind The Glass Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Epilogue Acknowledgments Photography Credits About Reyna Grande Copyright To my father, Natalio Grande 1947–2011 And to all DREAMers “Nothing happens unless first we dream.” —CARL SANDBURG Book One MI MAMÁ ME AMA Prologue Reyna, at age two M Y FATHER’S MOTHER, Abuela Evila, liked to scare us with stories of La Llorona, the weeping woman who roams the canal and steals children away. She would say that if we didn’t behave, La Llorona would take us far away where we would never see our parents again. My other grandmother, Abuelita Chinta, would tell us not to be afraid of La Llorona; that if we prayed, God, La Virgen, and the saints would protect us from her. Neither of my grandmothers told us that there is something more powerful than La Llorona—a power that takes away parents, not children. It is called The United States. In 1980, when I was four years old, I didn’t know yet where the United States was or why everyone in my hometown of Iguala, Guerrero, referred to it as El Otro Lado, the Other Side. What I knew back then was that El Otro Lado had already taken my father away. What I knew was that prayers didn’t work, because if they did, El Otro Lado wouldn’t be taking my mother away, too. 1 Carlos, Reyna, and Mago with Mami I T WAS JANUARY 1980. e following month, my mother would be turning thirty. But she wouldn’t be celebrating her birthday with us. I clutched at my mother’s dress and asked, “How long will you be gone?” “Not too long,” was her response. She closed the latch on the small suitcase she had bought secondhand for her trip to El Otro Lado, and I knew the hour had come for her to leave. Sometimes, if I promised to be good, my mother would take me along with her as she went out into the neighborhood to sell Avon products. Other times she would leave me at Abuelita Chinta’s house. “I won’t be gone for long,” she would promise as she pried my ngers from hers. But this time, when my mother said she wouldn’t be gone long, I knew it would be different. Yet I never imagined that “not too long” would turn out to be never, because, if truth be told, I never really got my mother back. “It’s time to go,” Mami said as she picked up her suitcase. My sister Mago, my brother Carlos, and I grabbed the plastic bags lled with our clothes. We stood at the threshold of the little house we had been renting from a man named Don Rubén and looked around us one last time. Mami’s brothers were packing our belongings to be stored at Abuelita Chinta’s house: a refrigerator that didn’t work but that Mami hoped to x one day, the bed Mago and I had shared with Mami ever since Papi le , the wardrobe we’d decorated with El Chavo del Ocho stickers to hide the places where the paint had peeled o. e house was almost empty now. Later that day, Mami would be handing the key back to Don Rubén, and this would no longer be our home, but someone else’s. As we were about to step into the sunlight, I caught a glimpse of Papi. Tío Gary was putting a photo of him into a box. I ran to take the photo from my uncle. “Why are you taking that?” Mami said as we headed down the dirt road to Papi’s mother’s house, where we would be living from then on. “He’s my papi,” I said, and I clutched the frame tight against my chest. “I know that,” Mami said. “Your grandmother has pictures of your father at her house. You don’t need to take it with you.” “But this is my papi,” I told her again. She didn’t understand that this paper face behind a wall of glass was the only father I’d ever known. I was two years old when my father le. e year before, the peso was devalued 45 percent to the US dollar. It was the beginning of the worst recession Mexico had seen in y years. My father le to pursue a dream—to build us a house. Although he was a bricklayer and had built many houses, with Mexico’s unstable economy he would never earn the money he needed to make his dream a reality. Like most immigrants, my father had left his native country with high expectations of what life in El Otro Lado would be like. Once reality set in, and he realized that dollars weren’t as easy to make as the stories people told made it seem, he had been faced with two choices: return to Mexico empty-handed and with his head held low, or send for my mother. He decided on the latter, hoping that between the two of them, they could earn the money needed to build the house he dreamed of. en he would nally be able to return to the country of his birth with his head held high, proud of what he had accomplished. In the meantime, he was leaving us without a mother. Mago, whose real name is Magloria, though no one called her that, took my bag of clothes from me so that I could hold Papi’s photo with both hands. It was hard to keep my balance on a dirt road littered with rocks just waiting to trip me and make me fall, but that January morning I was extra careful because I carried my papi in my arms, and he could break easily, like the bottle of Coca-Cola Mago was carrying the day she tripped. e bottle broke into pieces, the sweet brown liquid washing away the blood oozing from the cut on her wrist. She had to have three stitches. But that wasn’t her first scar, and it wouldn’t be her last. “¿Juana, ya te vas?” Doña María said. She was one of Mami’s Avon clients. She ran down the dirt road with an empty shopping bag on her way to el mercado. Her lips were painted hot pink with the Avon lipstick she had bought on credit from Mami. “Ya me voy, amiga,” Mami said. “My husband needs me at his side.” I’d lost track of how many times Mami had said that since my father’s telephone call three weeks before. It hadn’t taken long for the whole colonia of La Guadalupe to learn that Mami was going to El Otro Lado. It made me angry to hear her say those words: My husband needs me. As if my father were not a grown man. As if her children didn’t need her as well. “My mother will be collecting the money you owe me,” Mami told Doña María. “I hope you don’t mind.” Doña María didn’t look at her. She nodded and wished my mother a safe trip. “I’ll pray for a successful crossing for you, Juana,” she said. “Don’t worry, Doña María, I won’t be running across the border. My husband has paid someone to drive me across with borrowed papers. It was expensive, but he didn’t want to put me in any danger.” “Of course, how could he do otherwise?” Doña María murmured as she walked away. Back then, I was too young to realize that unlike me, Mami didn’t walk with her eyes to the ground because she was afraid of the rocks tripping her. I was too young to know about the men who leave for El Otro Lado and never return. Some of them nd new wives, start a new family. Others disappear completely, reinventing themselves as soon as they arrive, forgetting about those they’ve left behind. It was a worry that kept my mother up at night, although I didn’t know it back then. But in the weeks since my father’s phone call, she walked di erently. She didn’t look down at the ground anymore. My husband has sent for me. He needs me, she said to everyone, and the women, like Doña María, whose husband left long ago, would lower their eyes. We didn’t live far from my grandmother’s adobe house, and as soon as we rounded the corner, it came into view. Abuela Evila’s house sat at the bottom of the hill. It was shaped like a box, and it had once been painted white, but by the time we came to live there the adobe peeked through where the plaster had cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled e. It had a terra-cotta tile roof, and bougainvillea climbed up one side. e bougainvillea was in full bloom, and the vine, thick with red owers, looked like a spreading bloodstain over the white wall of the house. My grandmother’s property was the length of four houses and was surrounded by a corral. To the east of the house was an unpaved street that led to the church, the school, and the tortilla mill. To the west was a dirt road that led past Don Rubén’s house and curved east to the dairy farm, the canal, the highway, the cemetery, the train station, and el centro. Her house sat on the north side of the lot, my aunt’s brick house sat on the south side, and the rest of the property was a big yard with several fruit trees. Aside from being one of the poorest states in Mexico, Guerrero is also one of the most mountainous. My hometown of Iguala de la Independencia is located in a valley. My grandmother lived on the edge of the city, and that morning, as we walked to her house, I kept my eyes on the closest mountain. It was big and smooth, and it looked as if it were covered with a green velvety cloth. Because during the rainy season it had a ring of clouds on its peak and looked as if it had tied a white handkerchief around its head, the locals named it the Mountain at Has a Headache. Back then, I didn’t know what was on the other side of the mountain, and when I had asked Mami she said she didn’t know either. “Another town, I suppose,” she said. She pointed in one direction and said Acapulco was somewhere over there, about three hours away by bus. She pointed in the opposite direction and said Mexico City was over there—again, a three-hour bus ride. But when you’re poor, no matter how close things are, everything is far away. And so, until that day, my twenty-nine-year-old mother had never been on the other side of the mountains. “Listen to your grandmother,” Mami said, startling me. I hadn’t noticed how quiet we’d all been during our walk. I took my eyes o the Mountain at Has a Headache and looked at Mami as she stood before us. “Behave yourselves. Don’t give her any reason to get angry.” “She was born angry,” Mago said under her breath. Carlos and I gi led. Mami gi led, too, but she caught herself. “Hush, Mago. Don’t talk like that. Your abuela is doing your father and me a favor by taking you in. Listen to her and always do as she says.” “But why do we have to stay with her?” Carlos asked. He was about to turn seven years old. Mago, at eight and a half, was four years older than me. Both of them had to miss school that day, but of course they didn’t mind. How could they think of numbers and letters when our mother was leaving us and going to a place most parents never return from? “Why can’t we stay with Abuelita Chinta?” Mago asked. I thought about Mami’s mother. I loved my grandmother’s gaptoothed smile and the way she smelled of almond oil. Her voice was so like the cooing of the doves she had in cages around her shack. But even as much as I loved Abuelita Chinta, I didn’t want to stay with her or with anyone else. I wanted my mother. Mami sighed. “Your father wants you to stay with your abuela Evila. He thinks you will be better off there—” “But why do you have to leave, Mami?” I asked again. “I already told you why, mija. I’m doing this for you. For all of you.” “But why can’t I go with you?” I insisted, tears burning my eyes. “I’ll be good, I promise.” “I can’t take you with me, Reyna. Not this time.” “But—” “Basta. Your father has made a decision, and we must do as he says.” Mago, Carlos, and I slowed down our pace, and soon Mami was walking by herself while we trailed behind her. I looked at the photo in my arms and took in Papi’s black wavy hair, full lips, wide nose, and slanted eyes shi ed slightly to the le. I wished, as I always did back then—as I still do now—that he were looking at me, and not past me. But his eyes were frozen in that position, and there was nothing I could do about it. “Why are you taking her away?” I asked the Man Behind the Glass. As always, there was no answer. “¡Señora, ya llegamos!” Mami shouted from the gate. From across the street, the neighbor’s dog barked at us. I knew Abuela Evila was home because my eyes burned from the pungent scent of roasting guajillo chiles drifting from the kitchen. “¡Señora, ya llegamos!” Mami called again. She put a hand on the latch of the gate but didn’t pull it open. From the start, my grandmother hadn’t liked my mother, and ten years—and three grandchildren —later, she still disapproved of my father’s choice for a wife, a woman who came from a family poorer than his own. So Mami didn’t feel comfortable walking into my grandmother’s house without permission. Instead, we waited at the gate under the scorching heat of the noon sun. “¡Señora, soy yo, Juana!” Mami yelled, much louder this time. My grandmother was born in 1911, during the Mexican Revolution. When we came to her house, she was about to turn sixty-nine. Her long hair was silver, and she o en wore it in a tight bun. She had a small hump on her back that made her body bend to the ground. As a child, she had su ered from a severe case of measles, and what remained of her illness was a le arm that hung at an angle and a limp that made her walk as if she were drunk. Finally, she came out of the house through the kitchen door. As she headed to the gate, she dried her hands on her apron, which was streaked with fresh red sauce. “Ya llegamos,” Mami said. “Ya veo,” my grandmother replied. She didn’t open the gate, and she didn’t ask us to come inside to cool ourselves under the shade of the lemon tree in the patio. e bright sun burned my scalp. I got closer to Mami and hid in the shadow of her dress. “ ank you for letting me leave my children here under your care, señora,” Mami said. “Every week my husband and I will be sending you money for their upkeep.” My grandmother looked at the three of us. I couldn’t tell if she was angry. Her face was in a constant frown, no matter what kind of mood she was in. “And how long will they be staying?” she asked. I waited for Mami’s answer, hoping to hear something more definite than “not too long.” “I don’t know, señora,” Mami said. I pressed Papi’s photo against my chest because that answer was worse. “For as long as necessary,” Mami continued. “God only knows how long it’s going to take Natalio and me to earn the money for the house he wants.” “He wants?” Abuela Evila asked, leaning against the gate. “Don’t you want it, too?” Mami put her arms around us. We leaned against her. Fresh tears came out of my eyes, and I felt as if I’d swallowed one of Carlos’s marbles. I clutched at the thin material of Mami’s owery dress and wished I could stay there forever, tucked into its folds, wrapped in the safety of my mother’s shadow. “Of course, señora. What woman wouldn’t want a nice brick house? But the price will be great,” Mami said. “American dollars go a long way here,” Abuela Evila said, pointing at the brick house built on the opposite side of her property. “Look at my daughter María Félix. She’s built herself a very nice house with the money she’s made in El Otro Lado.” My aunt’s house was one of the bi est on the block. But she didn’t live in it. She hadn’t returned from El Otro Lado even though she went there long before Papi did. She had le her six-year-old daughter behind, my cousin Élida, who—when we came to Abuela Evila’s house—was already going on fourteen and had been living with our grandmother ever since El Otro Lado had taken her mother away. “I wasn’t referring to the money,” Mami said. She got choked up and wiped the moisture from her eyes. Abuela Evila looked away, as if embarrassed by Mami’s tears. Perhaps because she lived through the Revolution, when over a million people died and the ones who lived had to toughen up to survive, my grandmother was not prone to being emotional. Mami turned to us and bent down to be at eye level with us. She said, “I’ll work as hard as I can. Every dollar that we earn will go to you and the house. Your father and I will both be back before you know it.” “Why did he only send for you and not me?” Mago asked Mami, as she’d done several times already. “I want to see Papi, too.” As the oldest, Mago was the one who remembered my father most clearly. When Mami gave us the news that she was leaving to join him in El Otro Lado, Mago had cried because Papi hadn’t sent for her as well. “Your father couldn’t a ord to send for us all. I’m only going there to help him earn money for the house,” Mami said again. “We don’t need a house. We need Papi,” Mago said. “We need you,” Carlos said. Mami ran her ngers through Mago’s hair. “Your father says a man must have his own house, his own land to pass down to his children,” she said. “I’ll be gone a year. I promise that by the end of the year, I will bring your father back with me whether we have enough money for a house or not. Do you promise to take care of your hermanos for me, be their little mother?” Mago looked at Carlos, then at me. I don’t know what my sister saw in my eyes that made her face so en. Had she realized then how much I would need her? Had she known that without her strength and unwavering love, I would not have survived what was to come? Her face was full of determination when she looked at Mami and said, “Sí, Mami. I promise. But you’ll keep your promise, right? You will come back.” “Of course,” Mami said. She opened her arms to us, and we fell into them. “Don’t go, Mami. Stay with us. Stay with me,” I said as I held on to her. She kissed the top of my head and pushed me toward the closed gate. “You need to get out of the sun before it gives you a headache,” she said. Abuela Evila nally opened the gate, and we were allowed inside, but we didn’t move. We stood there holding our bags, and I suddenly wanted to throw Papi’s photo against the ground so that it shattered into pieces because I hated him for taking my mother from me just because he wanted a house and a piece of land to call his own. “Don’t leave me, Mami. Please!” I begged. Mami gave us each a hug and kissed us goodbye. When she kissed me, I pressed my cheek against her lips painted red with Avon lipstick. Mago held me tightly while we watched Mami walk away, pebbles dancing in and out of her sandals, her hair burning black under the sun. When I saw her blurry gure disappear where the road curved, I escaped Mago’s grip on my hand and took off running, yelling for my mother. rough my tears, I watched a taxicab take her away, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Mago standing behind me. “Come on, Nena,” she said. ere were no tears in her eyes, and as we walked back to my grandmother’s house, I wondered if, when Mami asked Mago to be our little mother, it had also meant she was not allowed to cry. Carlos was still standing by the gate, waiting for us so that we could go in together. I looked at the empty dirt road once more, realizing that there was nothing le of my mother. As we walked into my grandmother’s house, I touched my cheek and told myself there was something I still had le. e feel of her red lips. 2 Abuelo Augurio M AGO, CARLOS, AND I were given a corner of my grandfather’s bedroom. Abuelo Augurio and Abuela Evila didn’t sleep in the same room because when my cousin Élida came to live at their house my grandmother kicked him out of her bed to make space for her favorite grandchild. My grandfather’s room smelled of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke. His bed was in the farthest corner, next to some boxes, an old wardrobe, and his gardening tools. e light that streamed through the only window was too weak to make the room less somber. Close to the door was a twin-size box spring raised on bricks and covered with a straw mat. e “bed” was pushed up against the wall, underneath the tiny window that looked out onto an alley. is is where Mago, Carlos, and I slept. I was in the middle, so I wouldn’t fall o. Mago slept against the wall because if a scorpion crawled down and stung her, she would be okay. Scorpions couldn’t do anything to my hot-blooded Scorpio sister. Carlos slept on the edge because a week a er Mami le he began to wet the bed. We hoped that sleeping on the edge would make it easier for him to get up in the middle of the night to use the bucket by the door. My grandfather’s room was next to the alley. Since the window above our heads didn’t have any glass to mu e the outside noises, we could hear everything that went on in that alley. Sometimes, we heard grunting noises coming from there. Mago and Carlos got up to look, and they gi led about what they saw, but they never picked me up so that I could see for myself. Other times we heard drunken men coming from the cantina down the road. ey yelled obscenities that echoed against the brick walls of the nearby houses. Sometimes we could hear them urinating on the rock fence that surrounded Abuela Evila’s property while singing borracho songs. ¡No vale nada la vida, la vida no vale nadaaaa! I hated that song those drunks liked to sing. Life isn’t worth anything? One night, the noises we heard were a horse’s hooves hitting the rocks on the ground. My skin prickled with goose bumps. I wondered who could be in the alley so late. “What is that?” Carlos asked. “I don’t know,” Mago said. “Get up and look.” Just then, dogs started to bark. “Nah,” Carlos said. “You’re such a sissy,” Mago said. She got up from the bed and stood over us as she looked out the window. With all the noise we were making, you would think Abuelo Augurio would wake up, but he didn’t. I wished he would wake up. I wished he would be the one to look out the window and reassure us that everything was all right. I looked at the opposite side of the room and knew he was asleep. When he was awake, he would lie in bed for hours smoking cigarettes in the darkness, the red tip of the cigarette winking at me like an evil eye. His silence always made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like my grandmother constantly yelling at us, but my grandfather acted as if we weren’t even there. Somehow, I felt that was worse. He made me feel invisible. Mago gasped and quickly fell on top of us, crossing herself over and over again. “What did you see?” I asked her. “Who was that in the alley?” “It was a man, a man on a horse,” Mago whispered. e clopclopping of the hooves grew fainter and fainter. “So?” Carlos said. “But he was dragging something behind him in a sack!” “You’re lying,” Carlos said. “I’m not, I swear I’m not,” Mago insisted. “I swear I saw him drag a person away.” “We don’t believe you,” Carlos said again. “Right, Reyna?” I nodded, but none of us could fall back to sleep. “ at’s the devil making his rounds,” Abuela Evila said the next morning when we told her what Mago had seen. “He’s looking for all the naughty children to take back to Hell with him. So you three better behave, or the devil is going to take you away.” Mago told us not to believe anything Abuela Evila said. But at night, we huddled together even closer when we heard a horse pass by our window, the sound of its hooves sending chills up our spines. Who would protect us if the devil came to steal us and take us far away where we would never see our parents again? I wondered. Every night, I would bury my face in my pillow and hold on tight to my sister. My mother had asked Mago to be our little mother, and she and my father would have been proud to see how bravely their older daughter had taken on that role. Sometimes she took it a little too far for my taste, but Mago was there when my father and my mother were not. One day, about a month a er Mami le , Mago and I were passing by the baker’s house on our way to the tortilla mill when he came out wearing a big basket that looked like a giant straw hat lled with sweet bread. My mouth watered at the thought of sinking my teeth into a sweet, u y concha de chocolate. The baker’s wife looked at us and said to her husband, “Mirálas, pobrecitas huerfanitas.” “We aren’t orphans!” I yelled at her, forgetting all about the sweet bread. I grabbed a rock to throw at her, but I knew Mami would be disappointed in me if I threw it. So I let it fall to the ground. Still, the baker’s wife had seen the look in my eyes. She knew what I was about to do. “Shame on you, girl!” she scolded. “Oh, don’t be too harsh on her,” the baker said. “It’s a sad thing not to have any parents.” He got on his bicycle to deliver his bread. I watched him until he turned the corner, amazed at how he weaved his bike through the rocks scattered throughout the dirt road without losing his balance and spilling all the bread he carried on that giant hat basket. “If your mother ever comes back, I will be sure to tell her of your behavior,” the baker’s wife said, pointing a finger at me. Then she went into her house and slammed the door shut. “I can’t believe you,” Mago said angrily. She hit me hard with the straw tortilla basket. “But we aren’t orphans!” I said to Mago. She was too angry to speak to me, so she held me tightly by the wrist and hurried me along to the mill to buy tortillas for the midday meal. I stumbled on a rock, and I would have fallen if Mago hadn’t been holding me. She slowed her pace and loosened her hold on my wrist. “I don’t want people feeling sorry for me,” I told her. She stopped walking then. She touched her cheek and ran her nger over the scar she had there. When she was three, she had almost lost her eye while playing hide-and-seek. She’d hidden underneath an old bed that had metal springs sticking from it like spiky ngers. One of them dug into Mago’s eyelid, another into her cheek, another on the bridge of her nose. e scars the stitches le on her eyelid looked like miniature train tracks. Ever since then, whenever anyone noticed her scars, they would look at her with pity. A er a brief silence she said, “I’m sorry I hit you, Nena.” en she took my hand, and we continued our walk. When we got back from the tortilla mill, Élida was waiting by the gate asking why we took so long with the tortillas, and couldn’t we see she was hungry? Élida had a round chubby face and big pu y eyes that Mago teased her about, calling them frog eyes. At rst, we had tried to be friends with Élida. We thought that since we were in the same situation—having been le behind by our parents—we would be friends. Élida wasn’t interested in being our friend, and, like the neighbors, called us the little orphans. Technically, she was a little orphan, too. But the fashionable clothes Abuela Evila made for her on her sewing machine and the many gi s her mother sent her from El Otro Lado helped Élida transform herself from the little orphan to a privileged granddaughter. She was everything we were not. Seeing her, I was angry again at being called an orphan, at being hit by Mago, at my mother leaving, at my father for taking her away. I wanted to yank Élida’s braid, but at the sight of Abuela Evila hovering nearby, I knew it wise not to. Instead I said, “Your hair looks like a horse’s tail.” “¡Pinche huérfana!” she said, and yanked my pigtail. Abuelita Evila took the tortillas from Mago but didn’t say anything to Élida for pulling my hair. Mago, before the scars My grandfather and my aunt, Tía Emperatriz, were sitting at the table in the kitchen. My grandfather worked in the elds nearby and was only there for lunch. My aunt worked at a photo studio. She was twenty- ve years old and was still single. e youngest of my grandmother’s ve living children, she had yet to nd someone who my grandmother felt was good enough to marry her prettiest daughter. Any man that came knocking would be scared off by my grandmother. Carlos, Mago, and I sat on the two concrete steps leading from the kitchen to my grandmother’s room since the table was only big enough for four people, and those seats were already taken. Abuela Evila gave a pork chop to Abuelo Augurio, another to Élida, the third went to Tía Emperatriz, and the last pork chop she took for herself. By the time the frying pan came our way, there was nothing le. Abuela Evila scooped up spoonfuls of oil in which she had fried the meat and mixed it in with our beans. “For flavor,” she said. If Papi were here, if Mami were here, we wouldn’t be eating oil, I thought. “Isn’t there any meat left?” Tía Emperatriz asked. Abuela Evila shook her head. “The money you left me this morning didn’t go very far at el mercado,” she said. “And the money their parents sent is gone.” Tía Emperatriz looked at our oily beans and then got up and grabbed her purse. She gave Mago a coin and sent her to buy a soda for us. Mago came back with a Fanta. We thanked our aunt for the soda and took turns sipping from the bottle, but the sweet, orangey taste didn’t wash away the oil in our mouths. “What’s the point of our parents being in El Otro Lado, if we’re going to be eating like be ars?” Mago said a er our meal, once we were out of earshot. I had no answer to give my sister, so I said nothing. Tía Emperatriz and Abuelo Augurio went back to work. Élida went to watch TV. Carlos took the trash can out to the backyard to burn the pile of garbage, and I helped Mago take all the dirty dishes out to the stone lavadero. Then we cleaned the table and swept the dirt floor. “¡Regina!” Abuela Evila called out from her bedroom, where she was mending her dresses. “¡Regina, ven acá!” It took me a moment to realize she was calling me, since Regina isn’t my name. My grandmother thought it should have been because I was born on September 7, the day of Santa Regina. When my mother went to city hall to obtain my birth certi cate, she had been angry at my grandmother for constantly criticizing her cooking or the way she cleaned, so in an act of small defiance, my mother registered me as Reyna. My grandmother never called me by my given name. “¡Regina!” Abuela Evila called again. “¿Sí, Abuelita?” I said as I stood at the threshold of her room. “Go buy me a needle,” she said, handing me the money she took out of the coin bag she kept in her brassiere. “And hurry back,” she said. I glanced at the living room where Élida was watching El Chavo del Ocho while eating a bag of chicharrones sprinkled with red sauce. Don Bartolo’s two daughters were playing hopscotch outside his store. When they saw me walking past them, they pointed at me and said, “Look, there goes the little orphan.” is time, I didn’t think twice about it. is time, I didn’t care if the whole colonia thought I was wild and a disgrace to my family. I threw the coin as hard as I could. It hit one of the girls above her right eye. She screamed and called to her father. I ran home, forgetting to pick up the coin on the ground. When Abuela Evila asked me for her needle, I had no choice but to tell her the truth. She called Mago over and said, “Take your sister to apologize to Don Bartolo, and don’t come back without my needle.” Mago grabbed my hand and pulled me along. “Now you’ve done it,” she said. “She shouldn’t have called me an orphan!” I yanked my hand from Mago’s and stopped walking. Mago looked at me for a long time. I thought she was going to hit me. Instead she took my hand again but pulled me in the opposite direction of Don Bartolo’s store. “Where are we going?” I asked. She didn’t tell me where she was taking me, but as soon as we turned the corner, our little house came into view. We stopped in front of it. e window was open, and I could smell beans cooking. I heard a woman singing along to the radio. Mago said she didn’t know who Don Rubén’s new tenants were, but that this house would always be where we had lived with our parents. “No one can take that away,” she said. “I know you don’t remember Papi at all, but whatever you remember about Mami and this house is yours to keep forever.” I followed her down to the canal on the opposite side of the hill from Abuela Evila’s house. Mami would come to do the washing here when we lived in Don Rubén’s house. Mago said, “ is is where Mami saved your life, Nena. Remember?” When I was three, I had almost drowned in that canal. e rainy season had turned it into a gushing river, and the current was swi and strong. Mami told me to sit on the washing stones and stay by her side, but she let Mago and Carlos get in the water and play with the other kids. I wanted to get in, and when Mami was busy rinsing our clothes and looking the other way, I jumped in. e current pulled me down the canal. My feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and I got pulled under. Mami got to me just in time. We went back to Abuela Evila’s house, not knowing what we were going to tell her. But before we went into the house itself, Mago took me into the shack made of bamboo sticks and cardboard near the patio. Inside were large clay pots, a griddle, and other things my grandmother didn’t have space for in her kitchen. This is where Mami and Papi had first lived when they were married. Mago and I sat on the dirt oor, and she told me about the day I was born exactly the way Mami used to tell it. She pointed to the circle of rocks and a pile of ash and told me that during my birth, a re had been on while Mami had squatted on the ground, over a straw mat, grabbing the rope hanging from the ceiling. When I was born, the midwife put me into my mother’s arms. She turned to face the re so that the heat would keep me warm. As I listened to Mago, I closed my eyes and felt the heat of the flames, and I heard Mami’s heart beating against my ear. Mago pointed to a spot on the dirt oor and reminded me that my umbilical cord was buried there. That way, Mami told the midwife, no matter where life takes her, she won’t ever forget where she came from. But then Mago touched my belly button and added something to the story my mother had never told me. She said that my umbilical cord was like a ribbon that connected me to Mami. She said, “It doesn’t matter that there’s a distance between us now. at cord is there forever.” I touched my belly button and thought about what my sister had said. I had Papi’s photo to keep me connected to him. I had no photo of my mother, but now my sister had given me something to remember her by. “We still have a mother and a father,” Mago said. “We aren’t orphans, Nena. Just because they aren’t with us doesn’t mean we don’t have parents anymore. Now come on, let’s go tell our grandmother we have no needle for her.” I took Mago’s hand and together we le the shack. “She’s going to beat me,” I told her as we headed to the house. “And she’s going to beat you, too, even though you didn’t do anything.” “I know,” she said. “Wait,” I said. I ran out of the gate before I lost my nerve. I ran down the street as fast as I could. Outside the store, Don Bartolo’s daughters were playing again. ey glared at me the moment they saw me. Suddenly, my feet didn’t want to keep walking. I put a nger on my belly button, and I thought about Mami, and about everything my sister had just said. It gave me courage. “I’m sorry I hit you with the coin,” I told the older girl. She turned to look at her father, who had just come out of the store to stand by the door. She said, “My papi says that we’re lucky he has the store because if he didn’t, he would have to leave for El Otro Lado. I wouldn’t want him to go.” “I didn’t want Mami to go, either,” I said. “But I know she’ll be back soon. And so will my papi.” Don Bartolo took my grandmother’s coin from his pocket and handed it to me. “Don’t ever think that your parents don’t love you,” he said. “It is because they love you very much that they have left.” As I walked home with the needle for my grandmother, I told myself that maybe Don Bartolo was right. I had to keep on believing my parents le me because they loved me too much and not because they didn’t love me enough. 3 Carlos, Reyna, Mago É LIDA’S HAIR WAS so long, it tumbled down her back like a sparkling black waterfall. Every few days, Abuela Evila washed Élida’s hair with lemon water because, according to her, lemon juice cleans the impurities of the hair and makes it shiny and healthy. In the a ernoons, she would ll up a bucket from the water tank, pick a few lemons from the tree, and squeeze the juice into the water. Mago, Carlos, and I would hide behind a pink oleander bush and watch their ritual through the narrow leaves. Abuela Evila washed Élida’s hair as if she were washing an expensive silk rebozo. Afterwards, Élida would sit under the sun to dry her hair. My grandmother would come out to brush it in small strokes, beginning with the tips and working her way up. She spent half an hour running the comb through Élida’s long hair while we watched. Our hair was louse-ridden, our abdomens swelled with roundworms, but my grandmother didn’t care. “I can be sure that my daughters’ children are really my grandchildren,” Abuela Evila o en said to us. “But one can’t trust a daughter-in-law. Who knows what your mother did when no one was looking.” It was my mother’s bad luck to have been the only daughter-in-law. My father had a brother who died at seven years old. His name was Carlos, and my brother inherited his name. My grandfather would take Tío Carlos to the elds to work, and since they le very early in the morning, Tío Carlos would be too sleepy to stay awake during the ride to the elds. My grandfather would tie him to the horse to keep him from falling. One day, the horse lost its footing and fell, crushing my uncle beneath it. But my uncle’s death didn’t save my father from the elds. When he was in third grade, he le school to harvest crops alongside my grandfather. If only Tío Carlos had lived and married, my mother would have had an ally, and we would have had cousins to share the burden of my grandmother’s mistrust. “Your mother is not coming back for you,” Élida said to us one a ernoon while lying in the sun to let her hair dry a er Abuela Evila’s lemon treatment. Mago and I were scrubbing our dirty clothes on the washing stone. “Now that she’s got a job and is making dollars, she won’t want to come back, believe me.” ree weeks before, Mami told us she got a job at a garment factory where she worked all day trimming loose threads o clothes. She said she was nally going to help Papi save money for the house and promised to send us money for Abuela Evila to buy us shoes and clothes. We couldn’t tell Mami not to bother, that the money they sent disappeared by the time my grandmother made it home from the bank. My grandmother hovered above us while we talked on the phone, and if we said anything bad about her, she would spank us afterward. “She’ll be back. I know she will,” Mago told Élida. In the two and a half months we’d been there, my parents had called us every other weekend, but Mami had yet to send us the letters she promised she would write. But every time she called, Mago would be sure to remind her of her promise—that she would return within the year. “Don’t lie to yourself,” Élida said. “ ey’re going to forget all about you, you’ll see. You and your brother and sister are always going to be Los Huerfanitos.” “Speak for yourself. It’s your mother who’s not coming back,” Mago said. “Doesn’t she have another child, over there in El Otro Lado?” At being reminded of her American brother, Élida looked away. Abuela Evila came out of the house carrying a large plastic comb. She sat behind Élida and combed into shiny black silk her long hair that smelled of lemonade. Élida was quiet, and she didn’t answer Abuela Evila when she asked her what was wrong. An hour later, Élida was back in the patio. She lay down on the hammock and watched us do our chores. Mago swept the ground, and I watered Abuela Evila’s pots of vinca and geranium on the edges of the water tank. Carlos was in the backyard clearing the brush, a chore my grandfather had given him. As always, Élida didn’t have to do any work. She rocked herself on the hammock eating a mango on a stick she had bought at Don Bartolo’s store. It was a beautiful mango cut to look like a ower. Its yellow esh was sprinkled with red chili powder. My mouth watered at seeing her take a big bite. Élida was always eating goodies she would buy with the money our grandmother gave her, and she never shared them with us. But when our other grandmother, Abuelita Chinta, would visit, bringing us oranges, cajeta, or lollipops, we had to share them with Élida or Abuela Evila would take them away. “My mother loves me,” Élida said. “ at’s why she sends me everything I ask her for. at’s why she writes to me.” “¡Ya cállate, marrana!” Mago said. She turned the broom to face Élida and started to sweep toward her. “¡Pinche huérfana!” Élida yelled, scrambling to get away from the cloud of dust Mago had just sent her way. “¡Pinche piojosa!” “So what if I have lice?” Mago said. “And if you aren’t careful, I’ll give them to you, and we’ll see what happens to all that hair of yours.” Mago pulled me to her and started parting my hair. “¡Mira, mira, un piojo!” she said, holding an imaginary louse toward Élida. “¡Abuelita! ¡Abuelita!” Élida yelled, her eyes opened wide with fear. She ran into the house clutching her thick long braid. Mago and I looked at each other. “Look what you’ve done. We’re really going to get it now,” I said to Mago. I thought we were going to get a beating with my grandmother’s wooden spoon, or a branch or a sandal, the usual choices. I would have preferred a beating to what we got. In the evening, when Tía Emperatriz came home from work, Abuela Evila told her to take care of our lice problem. “Can’t it wait for the weekend?” Tía Emperatriz asked. “It’s been a long day for me.” “ ey’re going to pass their lice on to me, Abuelita,” Élida said, still clutching her braid. “Please, Abuelita.” “Do as I say,” Abuela Evila said to my aunt. Tía Emperatriz glanced at Élida, who was smirking behind Abuela Evila’s hunched gure, and I caught a glimpse of anger, a hint of jealousy in my aunt’s eyes. She gave Mago some pesos and sent her down to Don Bartolo’s store to buy lice shampoo and a fine-tooth comb. “That’s not going to work,” Abuela Evila said. “Get kerosene.” “But Amá, that’s dangerous,” Tía Emperatriz said. “Nonsense,” Abuela Evila said. “In my day, there was no better remedy than kerosene.” e last rays of the sun were gone, and the world became wrapped in darkness. My grandmother turned on the light in the patio, but it didn’t work. ere was no electricity that night, so she brought out her candles and set them on the water tank. When Mago came back with the kerosene, my aunt had us sit down one by one. “What if that doesn’t work?” Élida asked. “If the kerosene doesn’t work, I’m shaving off their hair!” Abuela Evila said. At hearing my grandmother’s words, I stopped squirming. I sat so still I could hear the mosquitoes buzzing around. ey bit my legs and arms, but the thought of getting my head shaved kept me from moving. My aunt gently tilted my head all the way back and in the dim candlelight combed my hair with the ne-tooth comb for ve minutes. e comb kept getting caught in my curls, and I felt as if needles were di ing into my scalp. Tía Emperatriz soaked a towel in kerosene and then wrapped it around my head, making sure every strand of hair was tucked in before tying a plastic bag over my head to keep the towel in place. e smell was overpowering, and I had to stru le not to scratch my scalp, which was throbbing from the sting of the kerosene. “Now o to bed,” Tía Emperatriz said when she was done, “and stay away from the lit candles in the house.” at night was long and restless. I wanted to scratch, scratch, scratch. But could not. e overwhelming smell of the kerosene made it almost impossible to breathe. I reached for my towel and pulled on it, not able to bear the pain and the dizziness any longer. “Leave it alone,” Mago said. “It hurts so much,” I said. “I need to scratch. I really need to.” “My scalp feels as if it’s on fire!” Carlos said. “I can’t take it anymore.” “Don’t do it,” Mago said. “We’ll get our hair chopped off if you ruin it now.” “I don’t care!” With one swoop of his hand, Carlos pulled off the towel. Shortly thereafter, when I reached my limit, I did the same. Abuela Evila was true to her word. e next a ernoon, when my grandfather came home from work, she had him take out his razor blade and scissors. Carlos didn’t put up much of a fuss because he was always trying to please my grandfather. His hair was completely shaved o. We ran our hands over his bald head, feeling the stubble tickle our palms. When she saw him, Élida said, “You look like a skeleton.” She was always making fun of him because Carlos was really skinny, except for his bloated abdomen, and now with his head completely bald, he did look like a skeleton. Élida started to sing a song, “La calaca, tilica y aca. La calaca, tilica y aca.” I laughed because it was a funny song, and I could picture a skeleton dancing along to it. “Regina, it’s your turn,” Abuela Evila said. “Please, Abuelita, no!” I yelled as my grandmother dra ed me to the chair. My grandfather hit me on the head with his hand and ordered me to sit still. “Allá tú si te quieres mover,” he said when I wouldn’t stop. I jerked around, crying and yelling for Mami to come. I hated myself for being so weak the night before when I tore the towel o. My scalp still burned and my head hurt, but it had all been for nothing. I cried for my hair. It was the only beautiful thing I had. Curls so thick, women in the street would stop and touch it and tell Mami, “Qué bonito pelo tiene su hija. She looks like a doll.” Mami would smile with pride. “Don’t move, Nena, he’s doing a really bad job!” Mago said. But I didn’t listen, and the scissors hissed near my ear. I squirmed even more at watching my curls land on the ground and on my lap, falling one by one like the petals of a ower. en my grandmother’s chickens came clucking to see what was happening, and they picked up my curls and shook them around, and when they realized they weren’t food, they stepped all over them and dragged them with their feet across the dirt. In the end, when Abuelo Augurio was done, I ran to my aunt’s dresser mirror and gasped. My hair was as short as a boy’s, and it was so uneven it looked as if one of the cows from the dairy farm down the road had nibbled on it. I looked at Papi’s photo hanging on the wall, right below the small window. I’d seen myself in the mirror enough times to know that his slanted eyes were just like mine. We both had small foreheads, wide cheeks, and a wide nose. And now, we both had short black hair. “When are you coming back?” I asked the Man Behind the Glass. I wished we had a picture of Mami. I wanted to tell her that I missed being with her. I missed watching her getting the dirty clothes ready, putting them inside a blanket and tying the corners to make a sack, then throwing the sack on her head. “Vámonos,” she would say, and I walked alongside her to the canal. There I would sit on the washing stone while she scrubbed the clothes and told me stories. If the water was low, she would let me get in. I would chase a er the soap bubbles as she dunked the clothes into the water to rinse. I missed watching her go through her pretty Avon merchandise—smelling the perfumes, trying on the lotions that smelled of springtime—and seeing her face glow with pride after each sale. I missed going with her to visit Abuelita Chinta, and taking a nap on Abuelita’s bed while they talked. I would fall asleep listening to Mami’s voice and the cooing of Abuelita Chinta’s doves. And at night, I missed snu ling with her on the bed she had slept in with Papi before he le. Mago and I had tried to keep Mami warm so she wouldn’t miss him so much. Mago came in to tell me it was dinnertime, and I looked at her and hated her because she didn’t get her hair chopped o. She dealt with the stupid itching all night long. Even though her scalp was irritated and blistered, the lice were all dead. She washed her hair twenty times with Tía Emperatriz’s shampoo that smelled of roses, but it still reeked of kerosene. But at least she didn’t look like a boy. “Leave me alone,” I said. “Come on, Nena, come and eat.” My stomach didn’t care that my hair got butchered. It groaned with hunger, and I had no choice but to go out into the kitchen where everyone could see me. Tía Emperatriz, who was at work when the hair cutting took place, gasped at seeing me and said, “Ay, Amá, what did you do to this poor girl?” Élida said, “What girl? Isn’t that Carlos?” When I glared at her, she laughed and said, “Oops, I thought you were your brother.” at night, I had a dream about Mami. In my dream she was washing my hair with lemon water and scrubbing it so gently my body shuddered with pleasure. I awoke with such longing that I felt like weeping. And then I realized that Carlos had wet the bed. 4 La Guadalupe BY JUNE OF 1980, we had been at Abuela Evila’s house for six months. During the time Carlos, Mago, and I lived there with her, we were never taken anywhere, like to el zócalo downtown, the plaza with a monument to the Mexican ag and stone tablets explaining the role Iguala played in Mexico’s War of Independence; the beautiful San Francisco church built in the nineteenth century and surrounded by thirty-two tamarind trees; the bus station, el mercado, or the city’s popular train station that connected Iguala to Cuernavaca and Mexico City to the north, and the state capital, Chilpancingo, to the south. e city of Iguala de la Independencia is actually the third-largest city in the state of Guerrero, the two others being Chilpancingo and Acapulco. My grandmother’s house was in a neighborhood known as La Guadalupe, on the outskirts of the city, although no one would call it the outskirts anymore. Whenever I can’t resist the pull of my birthplace, I visit Iguala, and I have seen it grow to more than 110,000 inhabitants. e neighborhood where I grew up is no longer the undeveloped part of the city. It’s the new neighborhoods encroaching upon the foothills where the poorest people now live. Most of the streets of La Guadalupe have been paved and electricity is fairly stable, although running water is still not readily available. Back then, Carlos, Mago, and I had mostly stayed on my grandmother’s property. We only ventured outside when my grandmother and Élida le for el centro on Saturday mornings. We would rush to the huge vacant lot near her house. ere was an abandoned car there and we liked to play in it, but rst we had to check for snakes. e car was rusty and the seats were full of holes. It had no tires, but the steering wheel worked just ne. I didn’t know how long that rusty car had been there, but I liked to believe Papi had played in it as a child. But since he stared working when he was nine, I don’t think he really had much of a childhood. “Where are we o to today?” Carlos asked, taking his turn at the wheel. He made noises like the revving of an engine and turned the wheel to the left and to the right. “To El Otro Lado,” I said. “Here we go,” Carlos said. e noises got louder. e car went faster. Carlos said, “Hold on tight for the jump!” He was a big fan of e Dukes of Hazzard, and his favorite character was the blond guy named Bo. In the evenings, Carlos would sneak out of the house and run to the baker’s to watch TV with his kids. He would get a piece of sweet bread because he didn’t mind being called a little orphan as long as he got a treat. While he was gone, Mago and I had to keep Abuela Evila from nding out where he was, although usually we didn’t need to say anything. Abuela Evila, Élida, and Tía Emperatriz would be sitting in the living room watching a telenovela and wouldn’t pay much attention to our whereabouts. “Yeee-haa!” Carlos said. As he drove, I looked at the Mountain at Has a Headache and was sure El Otro Lado was over there. Mago said El Otro Lado was really far away, and back then nothing seemed farther away than an unknown town on the other side of the mountain. “Head that way,” I told him. “That’s where Mami and Papi are.” Carlos at four Carlos started the noises again. The engine revved and soon we were off. “Yeee-haa!” Because I’d decided that my parents must be on the other side of the Mountain at Has a Headache, I got in the habit of looking at it each night and wishing my parents a buenas noches. In the morning, I wished them a buenos días. Carlos and Mago would do it as well, even though Élida would laugh and tell us we were a bunch of pendejos to believe our parents were that close. “We aren’t idiots,” I would say to Élida. “My mami and papi are as close as I want them to be.” At rst, I hadn’t really known where to nd Papi. All I had was his photo and the rich brown color of Mago’s skin, which was the color of rain-soaked earth, like his. But one day, as we were walking to the store, Mago stopped outside a house to listen to “Escuché las Golondrinas,” which was playing on the radio, and said, “Papi loved that song.” at is how I learned I could nd him in the voice of Vicente Fernández. Another time, as we were walking to the tortilla mill, a man passed by us on his bicycle and we caught a whi of something spicy, like cinnamon, and Mago said, “ at’s how Papi smelled!” So I would nd him in the empty bottle of Old Spice we were lucky enough to discover in a trash heap. It was easier to nd Mami. She was in the smell of the apple-scented shampoo we asked Tía Emperatriz to buy for us. I found her in the scent of her favorite Avon perfumes I smelled on her old clients when Mago and I stood in line with them at the tortilla mill. I found the color of her lips in the owers of the bougainvillea climbing up Abuela Evila’s house. I heard her in the lyrics of her favorite songs from Los Dandys: “Eres la gema que Dios convirtiera en mujer para bien de mi vida …” And when Abuelita Chinta came to visit us every other week, I saw Mami in her eyes. Whenever I would go into the little shack where I was born, I’d trace a circle around the spot where my umbilical cord was buried and think about the special cord that connected me to Mami. Every two weeks, when they called, I would nd my parents in my grandmother’s phone. But always, those precious two minutes Abuela Evila allowed us on the phone went by too quickly. Two minutes to tell them everything we felt. So many things to say to them, but one night in August we said nothing at all. It was Mami who talked, who gave Mago the worst news of all. She was going to have a baby. “ ey’re replacing us,” Mago said a er handing the phone back to Abuela Evila. Élida smirked at hearing the news. We went to our room, and since only a thin curtain separated the room from the rest of the house, I could hear my grandmother telling my parents how tough things were and could they please send more money. “Your children need shoes and clothes …” Abuelita Evila said. “ ey’ll leave us here and forget all about us,” Mago said as she lay on the bed. We had been at my grandmother’s for eight long months. What had sustained us through that time was the belief that our mother would be back within the year. Now, with this new baby on the way, Mami’s plans had changed. Why would she come back to Mexico to have her baby, when she could stay on that side of the border and give birth to an American citizen? “She promised,” Mago said. Carlos and I tried to make her feel better, yet no matter what we said, Mago was inconsolable. Almost every night, I heard her crying, and all I could do was wrap my arms around my sister and cry with her. I felt so angry at my parents. I couldn’t understand why they asked God for another child as if we three weren’t enough. I put a nger on my belly button and reminded myself about the cord that tied me to Mami. I told myself that as long as that cord existed, she wouldn’t forget me, no matter how many other children she had. But Papi, what connected me to him? What would keep him from forgetting me? In his sleep Carlos couldn’t hide his sadness, and some times in the middle of the night I’d feel something warm seeping into my dress. e day a er the telephone call, Mago refused to go to school, and Carlos had to walk there by himself. Mago spent all day in the room we shared with my grandfather. She grabbed one of Élida’s old history books and ipped through the pages until she found a map. She kept tracing a line between two dots, and because I couldn’t read yet, I couldn’t make out what the letters said. When I asked her what she was doing, she showed me the map. “ is is Iguala. And this is Los Angeles, and this,” she said as she made her finger go from one dot to the other, “this is the distance between us and our parents.” I touched my belly button and said, “But we’re connected.” She shrugged and said there was no such bond. “I just made that up to make you feel better.” “You’re lying!” I said. I kicked her on the calf and ran out of the room with a nger on my belly button. I hid in the shack where I was born and traced a circle around the spot on the dirt oor where my umbilical cord was buried. Someone shouted my grandmother’s name from the gate, and I went out and saw Doña Paula had arrived. We didn’t have running water, so Doña Paula would come every three days to deliver water to Abuela Evila from the community well. Her donkey carried two large containers on either side. Her two little boys would ride on the donkey while she walked alongside it, pulling on the reins. e older was my age and the younger was three. “Buenas tardes,” she said to Abuela Evila as she led the donkey through the gate. As always, she pecked each of her sons on the mouth as she helped them get o the donkey one by one. I tried not to look, but my eyes were glued to Doña Paula, to the way her lips pressed against the so esh of her sons’ cheeks, the mark they le. I thought of my mother, of the kiss she had given me the day she le , of the fact that her lipstick had rubbed o all too quickly. I tried to recall what my mother’s kiss had felt like, but I could not. “Look at those little jotos,” Mago said from behind me. “Being kissed by their mami.” She went back into the house, murmuring something about them being a bunch of sissies and mama’s boys. I stood there watching Doña Paula’s sons, thinking that there had once been a time when my own mother had kissed me, but now she would soon be leaving the imprint of her lips on another child. “Jotos,” I whispered under my breath. And making sure that their mother wasn’t looking, I stuck my tongue out at them. “Regina, tell your sister to go buy Doña Paula a Fanta,” Abuela Evila told me as I stood there by the patio. I nodded and did as she said. “Why doesn’t she go get her the soda?” Mago said. “It’s not like we get any of that water.” e water Doña Paula brought was dumped into the tank and used for washing dishes and for Élida, my grandmother, my aunt, and my grandfather to bathe with. If we wanted to bathe, we had to go to the community well to get our own water and bring it back in buckets. One time Mago slipped and almost fell into the well, but while she held desperately onto the rope and dangled in the air, Carlos and I grabbed her feet to get her back to the edge. We only bathed once or twice a week because it was a hassle getting the water, and since no one told us to bathe, we only did it when we felt like it. at meant we were nearly always covered in dirt and our clothes looked as if we had mopped the oor with them. You wouldn’t have known by looking at us that we had two parents working in El Otro Lado. If our grandmother hadn’t kept the money my parents sent for us, perhaps we would have been like Élida, who was always aunting all the pretty clothes and shoes she bought with the money her mother sent from El Otro Lado, and no one would have dared to call us orphans. We ran to the store with an empty bottle to exchange for a new soda. When we got back, Mago handed Doña Paula the Fanta, then we watched her drink it. She had the strangest way of drinking soda I’ve ever seen. She would raise the bottle two inches from her lips and would tilt it just enough for the liquid to cascade down into her mouth. She never touched her lips to the brim of the bottle, saying that since the bottles were used again and again by the soda company, other mouths had touched the glass. She would drink half of it and then hand the bottle to her boys, who’d nish it o while she unloaded the containers and dumped the water into the tank. A er drinking the soda, Doña Paula told her sons to go play with us while she visited with my grandmother. We loved playing in the backyard, but Mago didn’t want to play with Doña Paula’s sons that day, and I didn’t either. So they went o on their own to the backyard, and we went to the north side of the house where the alley was, and there, right by the rock corral encircling Abuela Evila’s property, was a big pile of caca. We could tell whoever had pooped there had recently eaten black beans because we could see little pieces of bean skin peeking out from the caca. Mago yanked my arm and said, “Nena, go get me two tortillas.” “What for?” “Just do it, and heat them up.” I sneaked into the kitchen, being careful not to get caught. I didn’t know what Mago was up to. I ran back to Mago and gave her the hot tortillas. She jumped over the corral and scooped up some caca with a stick and buttered the tortillas with it. en she rolled them up and went to nd Doña Paula’s boys. Realizing what she was about to do, I pulled on her arm and be ed her not to. She pushed me away so hard, I fell to the ground. She looked at me, and for a second, my little mother was there, worried that she had hurt me. But then the anger came back into her eyes, and she walked away and left me there on the ground. I got up and ran a er her. It was one thing to call them names, but a completely different thing to feed them poop. “You boys hungry?” she asked. The boys said they weren’t, but Mago forced them to take the tacos. “We don’t want any,” they said, eyeing the tacos with distrust, as if they knew Mago was up to no good. She held her hand up and curled it into a st. “If you don’t eat them, I’m going to beat you up,” she said. “I mean it.” “Mago, cut it out,” I said, but Mago pushed me away again. I watched in horror as she bullied those boys into taking a bite out of the tacos. Their eyes widened with disgust as they chewed. “What’s in them?” “They’re just bean tacos,” Mago said. “We don’t want them,” they said, tossing the tacos before running back to their mother. We watched Doña Paula do her usual routine— rst she picked up the older boy, kissed him on the mouth, and put him on the donkey, then she bent down and picked up the other one. But this time when she kissed him, she made a face. She sni ed and sni ed and then wiped something o the corner of his mouth. “You smell like caca, mijo,” she said. She sni ed the nger she used to wipe his mouth and then said, “It is caca. Why do you have it on your mouth?” e little boy pointed at us and told her we had given them bean tacos. “You stupid brats, why did you feed caca to my sons?” We didn’t wait to hear what Abuela Evila said to her. We raced to the backyard and climbed up the guamúchil tree and didn’t come down when our grandmother called us. She stood below us waving a branch. “Malditas chamacas, you better get down right now!” But we didn’t come down. She nally tired of yelling and went back into the house. “You’ll come down soon enough when you’re hungry,” she said. We were there for so long Élida and Carlos came home from school. Carlos couldn’t get us to come down either. So instead, he climbed up the tree and sat with us. “Élida was right all along,” Mago said. “Mami won’t be coming back. Neither is Papi. ey’re going to have new children over there and leave us here for good.” “No, they won’t, Mago,” I said. “They’ll come back,” Carlos said. “Why would they want us now, when they’re going to have American children?” Even though I was little then, I knew what she’d meant. Every time someone mentioned El Otro Lado, there was a reverence in their voice, as if they were talking about something holy, like God. Anything that came from over there was coveted, whether it was a toy, or a pair of shoes, or a Walkman, like the one Élida had gotten the month before from her mother. She was the envy of the whole colonia. Wouldn’t it be the same for my mother then, if she had a baby who was made in that special place? Carlos tried to make Mago laugh by telling us his favorite jokes about a boy named Pepito. He said, “One day, Pepito’s brother, Jesús, took Pepito’s leather sandals. When Pepito woke up, he didn’t have any shoes to wear to school. Pepito went from street to street trying to nd his brother Jesús and get his huaraches back. As he was passing by a church, he heard the priest chant, ‘Jesús is ascending to Heaven.’ Then Pepito burst into the church, screaming, ‘Stop him! Stop him! He’s stealing my sandals!’” Carlos and I laughed. Mago cracked a hint of a smile, but when Carlos started on his next joke, Mago told him to shut up. e sun went down and soon the re ies were out and about. Mosquitoes buzzed around and bit us, but it was too hard to see them and scare them o. Our bottoms were numb from sitting on the hard branch of the guamúchil tree. From up there, we saw Tía Emperatriz come home. We called out her name. “Ay, Dios mio, niños. What are you doing up there in that tree at this hour?” We told her what we did, and even though she tried to stop Abuela Evila from giving us a beating, she didn’t succeed. Abuela Evila made us each cut a branch from the guamúchil tree. She hit us one by one, beginning with Mago because she was the instigator. Mago bit her lips and didn’t cry when the branch whistled through the air and hit her on the legs, back, and arms. Carlos did cry— rst, because he didn’t do anything and, second, out of humiliation because Abuela Evila made him pull down his pants, saying that if she hit him with pants on, he wouldn’t learn his lesson. As the branch whipped my legs and butt, I wailed like La Llorona herself and called out for my missing mother. 5 Mago cutting her and Reyna’s birthday cake A MONTH LATER on September 7, just as the rainy season was coming to an end, I turned ve, but my birthday came and went without notice. Since Mago’s birthday is in late October, Abuela Evila said our birthdays would be celebrated together. at meant I had to wait a month and two weeks. at whole time I was angry at Mago because it was easier to take it out on her than to rebel against my grandmother’s decision. Why did Mago have to be a hot-blooded Scorpio and not an easygoing Virgo, like me? Why couldn’t it be she who celebrated her birthday early, instead of me celebrating mine late? Finally, one Saturday morning, my grandmother reluctantly handed Tía Emperatriz the money my parents had sent to buy us a cake. My aunt did more than that. She came home with a roasted chicken, two cans of peas and carrots, which she used for a salad, and small presents for me and Mago: shiny ties and barrettes for our hair. is was the third birthday I celebrated without Papi being there. e rst without Mami. e cake was beautiful. It was white and had pink sugar owers all around. My grandmother’s oldest daughter brought her children to the house, not because she cared about our birthdays, but who could resist getting a free meal and a slice of cake? Even Élida put her pride aside and asked for seconds. Not once did she try to ruin our special moment with one of her usual remarks about us being orphans. That’s what a fancy store-bought cake does to people. Tía Emperatriz took pictures of us cutting the cake to send to my parents. We rarely had our photographs taken, and the thought of these pictures making their way to El Otro Lado—to Papi and Mami—was exciting. I thought those pictures would remind them of us, and that way they wouldn’t forget they still had three children waiting for them back home. I smiled the bi est smile I could manage because I wanted them to know I appreciated the money they’d sent for the cake. Carlos smiled halfway. He was very self-conscious about his teeth. Back then, not only were his teeth crooked, but there was also a tiny little tooth wedged between his two front teeth. Since he didn’t want anyone to see them, he would purse his lips and smile without showing any teeth. He looked as if he were constipated. Mago didn’t smile. She said that if she looked sad, then maybe our parents would see how much she truly missed them, and they would come back. From that point on, she continued to look sad in almost every picture we took. Her tactic didn’t work. e pictures were sent, the months went by, and still our parents did not return. The one who did come back, however, was Élida’s mother. We had been at Abuela Evila’s house for over a year when Élida turned een. She o cially became a señorita, and Tía María Félix came to Iguala to throw a big quinceañera for Élida. She arrived loaded with so many suitcases she hired two taxis to take her from the bus station to Abuela Evila’s house. While everyone greeted her and made a big fuss about her arrival, we eyed the suitcases, wondering if our parents had sent us something. Élida’s little brother, Javier, was six years old. He held on to Tía María Félix and when Élida tried to hug my aunt, Javier pushed Élida away and said, “No, she’s my mommy.” Tía María Félix laughed and said it was cute. Abuela Evila scolded him and said that Élida was his sister, and Tía María Félix was Élida’s mother, too. But he wouldn’t let go of his mom. Mago would have taken advantage of this opportunity to say something mean to Élida. But the news Tía María Félix gave us sent us to our room, where we spent the night crying. “Your mother just had a little girl,” she said. “Elizabeth, I think, is what your mom named her.” We lay on our bed, huddled so close together our limbs were entangled. At night, barking dogs serenaded la colonia as they wandered through the dark streets. We listened to them, watching their shadows streaming in through the small window. What’s her name? I wondered. Elisabé? I’d never heard this name before. “A baby girl,” Mago said, breaking the silence. And it suddenly hit me: I was no longer the youngest. Some other girl I did not know had replaced me. e next day all my cousins showed up to see what Tía María Félix had brought for them from El Otro Lado. We didn’t see our cousins o en, but now they were all there, having come as soon as they heard Tía María Félix had arrived. We watched as she gave our cousins presents—a shirt, a pair of shoes, a toy. We waited our turn, and when the suitcases were empty, Tía María Félix turned to us with a sad look on her face and said, “Your parents sent you something, but unfortunately I lost that suitcase at the airport.” “That’s a lie,” Mago said softly. “What did you say?” Tía María Félix asked. “ ose toys that you gave away were for us!” Mago yelled. “I know it. I just know it.” I wanted to believe that Mago was right. e thought that our parents had neglected to send us gi s really hurt. What if they had been too busy tending to their new baby to think about us? Papi and Elizabeth in El Otro Lado “You insolent child,” Abuela Evila said. “I’m going to teach you to respect your elders.” She looked around for something to hit Mago with, and when she couldn’t nd anything, she took o her sandal. By the time she unbuckled the strap, the three of us were already bolting out the door and heading to the backyard to climb up the trees. “She could have given us something from the stu she brought. It’s not our fault she lost the suitcase,” Carlos said. “No seas pendejo,” Mago said, punching him on the arm. She jumped o the branch, climbed over the corral, and disappeared down the dirt road that led to Don Rubén’s house. e preparations for Élida’s quinceañera were completed quickly because Tía María Félix had to return to her job in El Otro Lado. Tía Emperatriz spent hours making decorations for the hall, and Mago and I had to help. e times we refused, Tía María Félix spanked us under Élida’s mocking gaze. We made garlands using paper owers and straws. Abuela Evila spent all day making dresses on her sewing machine. Élida’s dress was made in the U.S. because Tía María Félix said she had to have the best for her daughter. But when Élida tried it on, the dress wouldn’t zip up. She was put on a crash diet, and Tía María Félix bought her a girdle. Even then the dress wouldn’t fit, so it had to be altered. By the end of the week everyone had a new dress except for Mago and me. It wasn’t until the day before the party that Abuela Evila was nally done with everyone else and was able to start on our dresses. She bought a few yards of a silver material, shiny like a brand-new peso. She made Mago’s dress rst. In the evening, she made my dress. By then she was so tired she made a mistake. e shiny part was on the inside. The dull part was on the outside. “But, Abuelita, I can’t wear the dress like that, it looks like I’m wearing it inside out! Please fix it.” “I’m too tired,” she said as she stood up and stretched her back. “You’re going to have to wear your dress just as it is.” e next day we watched while everyone fussed over Élida. A hairstylist came and did her hair up in tiny braids held together by pink and white bows. en her mother, our grandmother, and Tía Emperatriz helped her put on the crinoline, the girdle, and the beautiful pink dress made with layers of satin and tulle. I hated seeing Tía Emperatriz fussing over Élida so much. Usually she didn’t pay much attention to her, but she was always nice to us. While everyone was at church for the ceremony, we spent the whole morning plucking chickens. Tía María Félix hired a woman to help with the cooking, and she showed up with huacales of live chickens clucking and shedding feathers that floated in the air like white flower petals. She killed the chickens by grabbing them by the head and spinning them around like a matraca until the necks broke. She told Carlos to help her, but he was too gentle on the chicken, and when he put it down, the poor chicken had a broken neck but still ran around and around, its head hanging to one side. e cook told him he was no good at killing chickens and made him help Mago and me pluck feathers. Our job was to hold the dead chickens by their feet and dunk them into boiling water to so en the skin. en we put a chicken on our lap and pulled out the feathers. We complained about having to do it. “Why should we be helping out for Élida’s party?” we wanted to know. I’d never plucked a chicken and couldn’t pull hard enough for the big feathers to come out. e small downy feathers would stick to my ngers, and I couldn’t scratch my legs when mosquitoes bit me. Carlos kept complaining that this was a girl’s job, and why should he be plucking chickens? “Because you aren’t man enough to kill them,” the cook said. Mago loved plucking chickens. She threw herself into it with a frenzy, and she plucked, plucked away, plucking so hard sometimes the chicken skin would come o along with the feathers, and I wondered what the poor chickens had done to her to deserve such fury. By the time we were nished, the whole patio was covered in feathers. Flies buzzed around, settling on the chicken guts spilled on the ground as the cook chopped the meat to pieces on the washing stone before boiling it. A erward, even though we took a bath and scrubbed ourselves hard with the apple-scented shampoo we liked, we still smelled like wet chicken feathers, and once in a while throughout the evening we pulled out feathers buried in our hair. I pretended I was turning into a dove. I imagined flying in search of my parents. e quinceañera was held at a beautiful hall near la colonia called Las Acacias. Élida looked like a princess wearing her pu y pink dress and matching slippers. Mago spent the whole time sitting in a corner of the hall, feeling sorry for herself, her jealousy consuming her to the point where she couldn’t even talk without saying a bad word in every sentence. “ at stupid frog-eyes doesn’t deserve this stupid party.” Carlos, who didn’t get any new clothes, took advantage of the fact that everyone was too busy to see him sneaking into the kitchen to grab some sodas and a plate piled high with chicken mole and rice. I spent the whole time hiding from people, ashamed about wearing a dress that had the shiny part on the inside and the dull part on the outside. It’s a new dress, I told myself again and again, I should be happy because it’s a new dress. But I crawled under a table and cried about the dress, and about the fact that my parents had replaced me. I only came out to see the waltz, which is the highlight of any quinceañera party. Élida danced with her chambelán, and when that waltz was over, she danced with her godparents. e last waltz was meant to be danced with her father, as is tradition, but since she had no father, she danced that waltz with my aunt’s cousin, Tío Wenceslao, who was a butcher. He raised and killed pigs and had a restaurant in La Guadalupe where he sold pozole, chorizo, chicharrón, and everything else that comes from pigs. “Look at her, dancing with the pig man,” Mago said. “How appropriate.” My eyes got watery as I watched Élida dance with the butcher whom we called uncle even though he wasn’t an uncle but a distant cousin. But since the only male she could have danced with—our grandfather—was passed out on a chair from too much drinking, and the other male—my father—was away, what choice did Élida have but to dance with this man, this distant cousin of ours? I prayed and hoped for Papi to come back soon. When I turned een, I didn’t want to dance El Vals de las Mariposas with anyone but him. Carlos had been following Élida’s American brother around to ask him to say things in English. When little Javier did, Carlos would burst out laughing so hard, he didn’t care that everyone could see his crooked teeth. He thought Javier sounded so funny speaking English. “Do you really think it’s English he’s speaking, or is he just making up words?” Carlos asked us. Mago said, “He could be speaking Chinese for all we know.” Back then, I could never have imagined that one day, I would speak English better than I spoke my native tongue. As Tía María Félix was packing her suitcases and getting ready to leave, Carlos went up to ask her what El Otro Lado looked like. He said he wanted to know more about the place where our parents lived. My aunt looked at him and didn’t say anything, and we thought that maybe she wouldn’t answer, but then she smiled and said: “El Otro Lado is a beautiful place. Every street is paved with concrete. You don’t see any dirt roads there. No mosquitoes sucking the blood out of you,” she said, as she slapped a mosquito dead on her leg. “ ere’s no trash in the streets like here in Mexico. Trucks there pick up the trash every week. And you know what the best thing is? e trees there are special—they grow money. ey have dollar bills for leaves.” “Really?” Carlos asked. “Really.” She took some green bills out of her purse and showed them to us. “ ese are dollars,” she said. We had never seen dollars, but they were as green as the leaves on the trees we liked to climb. “Now, picture a tree covered in dollar bills!” She le in the a ernoon with little Javier. She promised Élida that one day soon she would send for her, and although she did eventually keep her promise, Élida had to stay behind for now and watch a taxicab take her mother away. Abuela Evila put her arm around Élida and held her while she cried. Élida buried her face in Abuela Evila’s arms. It was so strange to see her crying. e ever-present mocking gaze was gone. e Élida that made fun of us, that laughed at us, that called us Los Huerfanitos, had been replaced by a weeping, lonely, heartbroken girl. Mago grabbed our hands and took us to the backyard to give Élida privacy. “Los quiero mucho,” she said, pulling us close to her. en I realized how lucky Mago, Carlos, and I were. We at least had each other. Élida was on her own. We climbed up the ciruelo and talked about those special dollar trees in El Otro Lado. Even though we knew that what Tía María Félix had said couldn’t be true, we fantasized about them anyway. “If we had trees like that here, Papi wouldn’t have had to leave,” Mago said. “He could have bought the brick and cement and built us a house with his own hands.” “And Mami would still be with us,” I said. “And the new baby would have been born here, like us,” Carlos said. We talked about the day our parents would return. Carlos’s fantasy was that Papi and Mami would y to us in their own private helicopter. “I can just picture it,” he said. “It would land here, in the middle of the yard.” We gi led at the image of Papi emerging from the helicopter, his hair blowing in the wind, his face framed by aviator sunglasses as handsome as Pedro Infante, then Mami coming to stand next to him, looking just as glamorous. We pictured the whole colonia rushing over to see them come home. And we would be so proud. 6 Reyna, Carlos, and Mago I T WAS 8:00 AM sharp, and Carlos, Mago, and I lined up with the rest of the students around the school’s courtyard to salute the flag. “Who are they?” I asked Mago. I tu ed on her dress and asked again, as I pointed to a group of six students wearing white uniforms and not the navy blue ones everyone else was wearing. “That’s la escolta,” Mago said. “And what do they do?” I asked. “Just wait and see, and stop bu ing me with all your questions. You’ll soon learn your way around here.” I couldn’t help being excited to be there. It was my rst day of rst grade. I’d been waiting for this day for a long time. Abuela Evila didn’t send me to kindergarten because she said it was too expensive to have all four grandkids in school, as if my parents hadn’t been sending money to pay for uniforms, school supplies, and the monthly school tuition. Even though we went to public school, there was nothing free about it. She held me back a year, but nally I was there, and I would get my own books, like the ones Mago and Carlos brought home. Books full of beautiful poetry and fun stories with colorful pictures of clouds, stars, people, and animals like foxes and birds. I liked it when Mago read to me from her books, but I wanted to learn to read them myself. Tía Emperatriz spent the weekend at my grandmother’s sewing machine making our school uniforms. On Mondays, when we honored the ag, we had to wear a uniform in navy blue with a white sailor shirt. e uniform for the rest of the week was made of a checkered print in white and green. We also got new patent leather shoes and a few pairs of knee-high socks with the extra money our parents sent. e color guard began its march around the courtyard. e student in the middle carried the ag on a pole, another shouted out directions: “¡A la izquierdaaa, ya! ¡A la derechaaa, ya!” e green, white, and red colors of the flag blurred in my mind like salsa. “I’m going to be a ag bearer when I’m in sixth grade,” Mago said as she stared longingly at the escolta members, looking great in their crisp, white uniforms. I believed Mago would be a ag bearer one day. She was really smart and always brought home good grades, mostly tens and nines, not like Carlos who, with fives and sixes, almost flunked first grade. How shameful. “I’m going to be a ag bearer, too,” I told Mago. She laughed and said that it was my rst day of first grade, and sixth grade was ages away. And I said it didn’t hurt to plan for the future. As the ag passed by me, I stood straighter and maintained my hand rmly pressed again my chest in salutation as I sang the Mexican anthem as loud as I could. Mexicanos, al grito de guerra el acero aprestad y el bridón. ¡Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra, al sonoro rugir del cañón! Mago told me that we should be proud to have been born in Iguala because it was in our city that the treaty which ended the Mexican War of Independence was dra ed. It was in Iguala that the rst Mexican ag was made by a man named José Magdaleno Ocampo on February 24, 1821. is is why Iguala is called “Cuna de la Bandera Nacional,” Birthplace of the National Flag. e rst time the national anthem was sung, it was sung in Iguala. I looked at the ag with new eyes, a newfound admiration, and as I sang el himno nacional on my rst day of school, I pu ed up my chest, feeling especially proud about being born in Iguala de la Independencia! My school was small. It was laid out in a square, with all the classrooms facing the courtyard. It had two bathrooms, one for boys and one for girls, but no running water. We had to ll up a bucket from the water tank inside and dump it in the toilet. But still, at least there was a toilet, although it was hard for me to get used to it after having to squat on the ground my whole life. When the morning activities were over, we lined up, and our teachers led us into our classrooms. We took our seats and a er a brief introduction, el maestro started the lesson by teaching us the alphabet. He said we should have learned it in kindergarten, but half the students in the class hadn’t gone to kindergarten. We repeated a er him, and I felt proud that I knew my letters already because Mago had taught them to me. When he told us to write our names down, I didn’t have to look at the board to spell my name: R-E-Y-N—I felt a stinging on my hand, and it took me a second to realize that el maestro had hit me with his ruler. “What are you doing?” el maestro asked. He held his ruler in his right hand and tapped it over and over on the palm of his left hand. “I’m writing my name,” I told him. “See?” I raised my brand-new notebook to show him. “You are not to write with that hand,” he said to me. He took the pencil from my le hand and made me grab it with my right. “If I see you using your le hand, I will have to hit you again, ¿entiendes?” My eyes welled up with tears because everyone was looking at me. I took a deep breath and nodded. He walked away, and I looked down at my notebook. I wrote and erased, wrote and erased, and no matter how hard I tried, the letters didn’t come out right. It was like trying to write with my feet. Abuela Evila and Élida always teased me for being le -handed. My mother’s father, Abuelito Gertrudis, had also been le -handed. Because he died a week before I was born, Mami said he had given this gi to me. And that is how I had always seen it, as a gi , until we came to Abuela Evila’s house. She didn’t agree. She said that the le hand was the hand of the devil and I was evil for using it. Sometimes during meals, she would hit my hand with a wooden spoon and tell me to eat with my right hand. “Don’t you know that the right side is the side of God?” she asked. “ e le side is the side of evil. You don’t want to be evil, do you?” Since I didn’t want anything to do with the devil, I would pick up my spoon with my right hand and try to eat with it. But I could only manage a few bites before my spoon found its way back to my left hand. Measles crippled my grandmother’s le arm when the open sores got so infected they were crawling with ma ots, but she would tell me that if I kept using my le hand it would shrivel up, just like hers. Even though it was a disease that crippled her, I lived with the constant fear of waking up one day with a shriveled le hand. It was ironic that it was Abuela Evila who ended up shriveling when osteoporosis set in several years later. And it would be Tía Emperatriz who had to change her diapers, who continued to tend to her because nobody else would. “Don’t listen to her, Nena,” Mago would sometimes tell me. “ ere’s nothing wrong with being le - handed.” But just as Mago couldn’t ignore Élida’s taunts about her scars, I couldn’t ignore Abuela Evila’s or my teacher’s. He didn’t understand that my pencil obeyed my le hand, but not the right one. I tried once again to write my name, but the letters came out all twisted and ugly. When Mago taught me to write my name, she wrote it with beautiful letters and made the tail of the Y long and curly. It looked so pretty it made me nally start liking my name. I used to hate my name because sometimes when Mami and I were on our way to el mercado, men would whistle at Mami from across the street and yell “¡Mi reina!”—my queen—and the way they said “mi reina” made me want to throw a rock at them and make them bleed. en I would ask Mami why she gave me a name that sounds so foul in a man’s mouth. I asked why she couldn’t have just named me Regina, as Abuela Evila had wanted. I wished she had chosen another time to rebel against my grandmother’s bossy ways. “Reyna is a very nice name,” Mami would say. “ ose men are just not saying it the right way. And it wasn’t your grandmother’s place to name you. You aren’t her daughter!” I looked at my name on the notebook. I had never hated it as much as I did at that moment. And I didn’t stop hating my name until many years later, when I realized that it wasn’t a name to be ashamed of, but one to live up to. I met Mago and Carlos during recess by the jacaranda tree in the courtyard. By the entrance of the school, women were selling food. ey had brought baskets lled with enchiladas, taquitos, and potato picaditas. e smell of the chile guajillo sauce, fresh cheese, and onion wa ed toward us, and I asked my brother and sister why we weren’t getting in line to buy food. Mago laughed. “Our grandmother never gives us money,” Carlos said. “You better get used to it.” We watched the women put the food on paper plates and hand it to the students who did bring lunch money. We weren’t the only ones drooling over the enchiladas. At least half of the children in the school were leaning against classroom walls, grabbing their empty bellies while looking at the food stands. For the second time that day, I felt my eyes stinging with tears. “I hate school,” I said. “Why, because you’re hungry?” Carlos asked. “I like it. At least it gets us out of our grandmother’s house. Imagine if we had to be there all day long?” “I’ve been there all day long all this time,” I said. “Until today.” “ en you should be happy to be here,” Mago said, but she didn’t look at me. She was looking at a boy in my class who was heading toward us eating a mango on a stick. “ e teacher hit me because I was writing with my le hand,” I said. “I think I’d rather stay home and clean Abuela Evila’s house from top to bottom than to go to school.” “So you would rather stay home with our grandmother?” Mago asked. “I don’t believe it.” I looked at the glass containers of agua fresca at the food stands: agua de melón, sandía, piña. From here, I could see the large cubes of ice swimming inside the glass containers. My throat was so dry I imagined that this was how the earth felt a er months and months of waiting for rain. Mami used to say that the clouds go down under the mountains to drink water from the rivers, and once they’re full they come up to the sky, ready to bathe the earth. Sometimes the clouds take too long to drink water and that’s when the grass withers, the owers die, the water in the canal narrows to a trickle and almost disappears. But sometimes the clouds drink too much water, and that’s when the oods happen. Days and days of never-ending rains that turn the gentle river waters into aguas broncas, tearing down trees and dragging everything in their path, then spilling over the banks and bursting into people’s homes. Mago gasped, and I turned to see what she was looking at. e boy in my class had dropped his mango on the ground. He began to reach for it, but then stood up and walked away from it looking really sad. I looked at Mago and knew what she was thinking. Every time we went out to run errands, she was always looking around to see if she could nd a half-eaten fruit or a lollipop some unlucky kid had dropped. Sometimes she got lucky. Sometimes she didn’t. Mago looked at the mango, and I knew she couldn’t resist picking it up. “Go get it,” she told Carlos as she pointed to the mango. “You go,” Carlos said. “Some of my classmates are over there. They’ll see me. Ándale, you get it, Nena.” “No,” I said. Mago looked at me, and I knew that sooner or later she would make me do it. “Mago, you shouldn’t eat things from the ground. They’re bad. They’ve been kissed by the devil,” I said. Mago waved my words away. “ ose are just tales Abuela Evila likes to scare us with,” she said. Abuela Evila used to say that when food falls to the ground, the devil, who lives right below us, kisses it and taints it with evil. “Look, I don’t know if the devil exists or not, and I don’t care. I’m hungry. So go get it!” Mago pushed me toward the mango, but I shook my head. Tales or no tales, I wasn’t going to risk it. But my mouth watered at the thought of sinking my teeth into the mango’s crunchy flesh. e bell rang, and the kids rushed back to their classrooms. Mago and Carlos waved and disappeared from sight. I stood there under the jacaranda tree, and my feet didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to go back to the classroom. I didn’t want to go back and stru le to hold my pencil with my useless right hand. I didn’t want to see el maestro looking at me and making me feel ashamed, making me feel as if I were evil. I didn’t want him to hit me again and have my classmates jeer and laugh. But if I didn’t go back, I knew I wouldn’t learn to read and write. How could I ever write a letter to my parents and ask them to please, please, come back? As I made my way to the classroom, I noticed the mango again. It lay on its side, its flesh yellow like the feathers of a canary. It was covered with red chili powder and dirt. And what if Mago is right? I asked myself. What if the devil doesn’t exist? If he doesn’t exist, that means the le side isn’t the side of the devil. And that would mean I am not evil for being left-handed. I looked around, and the courtyard was now empty. I bent down and picked up the mango, icked the dirt o , and sank my teeth into it. e chili powder burned my tongue. e burning sensation made me feel warm all over. I stood there waiting for something to happen. I waited to see if the devil was going to burst out of the earth on his horse and drag me to hell with him. e jacaranda waved in the breeze, looking beautiful with its bright purple owers. From above the brick fence, I could see the colorfu

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