Infinite Country(33)
It was a joke, but not really. I figured Talia would eventually learn there is no place that can turn a person suicidal with the quickness of a North American suburb. Every now and then someone at school has a go. Usually a white girl, but sometimes a white boy. A few years back a teenager leaped off the Fort Lee cliffs. The town made a big production of its devastation. A lot of the girls said he was a show-off and started thinking of ways to compete with more dramatic final exits, like diving off a Manhattan skyscraper or something retro like lying across train tracks.
Every time there’s a suicide attempt, the school administrators hold meetings for parents to learn how to help their miserable children, and it’s expected everyone attends or your parents will be seen as uncaring assholes. Our mother went once, but when she got home she said she didn’t understand how these kids who had everything they could possibly want in life—nice homes, parents who didn’t abandon them, food, clothing, cars, debt-free college educations waiting to be claimed—somehow had no desire to live. She’s convinced depression is a gringo problem and since Nando and I have Andean blood, we are spared.
She doesn’t know that when I was a freshman who managed to get the second highest grade point average in class, I had a total fucking freak-out in the girls’ bathroom, couldn’t breathe, a crushing in my chest, pierced by an awareness that I was about to die, and ended up in the school shrink’s office.
“You’re having an anxiety attack,” the lady explained. She wanted to tell my mom so she could arrange support, find me a therapist or some crap.
I said there was no money for that. She called home, but Mami was working, so she left a message saying she was concerned about my ability to cope with stress and suspected I was experiencing depressive feelings.
“?Qué dice?” Mami asked.
“It’s my English teacher. She wanted to let you know I’m the best student in her class.”
She was satisfied with this, and the next time I saw the school shrink, I told her my mother said not to bother her at home anymore with stuff I can deal with myself.
There are things I wanted to tell my sister before her arrival. Like that you can love the United States of Diasporica and still be afraid of it. The day after the last election, some kids came skipping into homeroom like a war was won. Hearing cocaine jokes and mechanical hallway insults of Go back to your country was nothing new for me and Nando, but there was new brazenness, like a gloved hand reaching for our throats, reminding us we were not welcome.
I’m our mother’s interpreter when she comes to talk to our teachers or when her bosses can’t make themselves understood with their college Castellano. I can toss around phrases, carry conversations, sing along with reggaetón, but my Spanish grammar is shit and Nando and I probably have kindergarten vocabulary. We didn’t speak English till we started school. They put us in the ESL program for a few years. I did all I could to get out and kill my accent, but Nando slid into the remedial trap, which is where they put the undesirables, poor kids and minorities who aren’t math or science whizzes. Another word I hate: minority. A way to imply we’re outnumbered (we’re not), and suggest we are less than.
It’s kind of amazing how rapidly language is diluted if not altogether lost, quicker than memories, which I still have of Colombia. A house of dark wooden walls, permeated with gentle voices and the tang of soap. A sky vast as an ocean. My father holding me atop a crater, silver water below. You want to say I was only a baby when I left. How could I possibly remember anything? But the pictures and scents come from a place deeper than recall. I wish I could see it again, but that’s the thing about being paperless. This country locks you in until it locks you out.
I also remember the day Talia was born. We lived then in a yolk-yellow room that reeked of pizza, and this must be why I can’t stand the taste of it. Our parents were gone a long time. The lady watching us couldn’t pry me and Nando from the window above the alley, topped with snow. Then our parents arrived, something bundled and round in our mother’s arms.
“This is your sister,” she said, and Nando started crying.
Mami lowered herself to us, and I remember reaching for the baby’s face. “Suave, suave,” she said, as I felt the baby’s fuzz of hair and warm cheeks.
At night we slept in a family tangle, my head on my father’s chest, hard and flat under my small body. One day he was gone. The mattress huge and empty without him.
I’ve wondered if he remembers these things as often and as intensely as I do. In the years since he was taken, I’ve guessed at why he didn’t call more. If he didn’t miss us as much as we missed him. Or if it was his plan all along to deliver us to this country and leave us here alone. When we did speak on the phone, I worried he was just dealing with Nando and me like you deal with an old bill you forgot to pay or some stinky chunk of meat you’ve left on the kitchen counter too long.
If I were completely honest, I’d tell Talia I’ve always been jealous of her. She might think me nuts since, from where she stands, it might look like Nando and I got the better life deal while she was stuck with our drunk dad and dying abuela. But I sensed our mother saw Talia as her lost treasure, something she lived her whole life in hope of reclaiming, that even with two children holding on to her as we slept after our father was gone, the child our mother most loved was the one she couldn’t touch because she’d sent her away.