The Same Sky(56)

But America! It was easy (too easy?) to distract yourself from weighty matters here. Everything was so bright—it was as if stores had more light bulbs than the ones at home. The streets were very wide and there was no trash on the ground. There seemed to be endless space—supersized restaurants; huge cars; fat white, black, and brown people eating triple-decker hamburgers.

My mother told me that when she first came to Texas, the only food she knew how to order in English was a hamburger. “I ate so many I could not eat another,” she said. But then McDonald’s started numbering the meals—it was the best thing to happen in her life! “I could order a Number Six!” she exclaimed, “I could have anything—fish, chicken, the McRib sandwich!” My mother was chubby, and I looked forward to becoming as plump as an American myself.

My first week in America, we walked to McDonald’s, and when we got there she told me to order whatever I wanted. I chose a meal with two meat patties and cheese and sauces and pickles. We waited for a Guatemalan man to wipe our table with a rag and then we sat down and I bit into my Big Mac. It was so delicious I could hardly believe it was real, but I still found room to eat every single french fry in my bright red french fry holder. Even Coca-Cola tasted fatter in America.

My mother brought me with her to work at the Texas Chicken. It was not as I had envisioned. My mother did not wear a banana-colored uniform. She wore elastic pants and a shirt that grew dirty as she stood over hot vats of oil transforming frozen things into hot, delicious things. Pieces of hair fell out of her net and she brushed them back with the top of her hand, but she could not stop working long enough to readjust the net or find a bobby pin. The sight of her cheeks growing red and the way her hair kept falling back in her eyes made me not only sad but actually sick, and I went into the bathroom and vomited. Then another Honduran woman came and cleaned the toilet with a rag and a bottle of sanitizer.

My mother was paid $7.25 per hour. She was allowed to pee twice during her eight-hour shift. My head spun when I thought about how long it must have taken her to earn the two thousand dollars I had given to the Snake. (Carlos told me later that she had sold her car to get the money, a car she had saved for years to buy.)

After my mother’s day at Texas Chicken, we rode the bus back to Room Sixteen. My brother and his friends and the other families were sprawled around the room like laundry. “Ma, you gotta pack me a better lunch than PB&J,” said Carlos, his voice loud and obnoxious. “I already told you I don’t like peanut butter!”

My mother nodded and smiled in an indulgent way, and I hated Carlos right then. I hated him even more when he made a mistake in his video game and said, “Fuck!” and threw the controller at the TV, making my mother wince.

I could not stay inside Room Sixteen, and I could not go outside Room Sixteen because the Ace Motel had some bad elements, my mother said. Her boyfriend, Mario, worked behind the meat counter at the HEB grocery store, and we did have plenty of meat that was still perfectly delicious even though the date on the package said it had expired.

My new sister, Marisol, was dreamy and sweet, an American citizen and someone who had never known anything sad or difficult besides how loud it was in Room Sixteen. She only had a few words and none of them were Spanish. She grabbed one of my three stuffed animals (the elephant), and when I asked for it back, Mario said, “Don’t pick on your little sister, Carla! For Christ’s sake, get over it, you’re twelve!”

Before work one day, my mother took me to a giant American high school. Carefully, she filled out the paperwork that would enroll me in sixth grade. I was too old to go to the elementary school with Carlos. When I told Carlos I was scared to attend the middle school and did not speak any English, so I did not know how I would ever know what the teachers were talking about, Carlos said, “You will learn, and I will tell my friends to keep you safe.”

I did not ask, What friends?, and I also did not ask, Safe from what?


One evening, we went to a green park. Mario brought charcoal and ingredients for a picnic. Carlos played futbol with older boys and then joined me under a live oak tree. “Can I ask you about my brother?” he said to me under the tree.

“He is my brother, too,” I said. I put on the sunglasses I had found on one of the tables at the Texas Chicken.

“I know,” said Carlos.

“He was sniffing the Resistol,” I said.

Carlos’s eyes bored into me. “How could you leave him behind?” he said. “I just don’t understand.”

I ripped a dandelion out of the ground. “He made it to Ixtapec,” I said. “I was caught and he ran away. I found him in a shelter there. A man offered a ride in a combi, and Junior was not there when the ride was leaving.”

“So you abandoned my brother,” said Carlos. He stared at me, waiting. When I did not respond, could not find words to respond, he stood up and ran to join the games with the other children who looked like me but who were nothing like me at all.

“He is my brother, too,” I told the live oak tree.





44




Alice


I BOOKED A FLIGHT home the next day. Jane was doing fine with her big and small boys around her, and I missed Jake and the restaurant and my friends and the swampy smell of Austin and its buttery, sumptuous light. When I called Jake to give him my arrival info, he answered his phone with a whisper, “Hey, can’t talk, I’m at Dillard’s.”