We learned about Columbus on a Friday. It was October 1999, the year the world expected computers to collapse. The year papi’s mind began to gray and mami consumed herself with God and the twins laughed at everything they heard, prayers and pop songs and curse words. The Arizona heat had finally subsided. For months, summer had slogged like drip from a honeycomb, stretching into days of endless sun and nights thick with mosquitos. I was ready for a shift in mood and weather, and soon after wishing it so, autumn swept through the desert, bringing leafy winds and mildly orange sunsets that dropped each night behind a sprawl of indigo mountains. Sweaters came out of storage, as did our neighbors’ shifty-eyed skeletons. Stores began to fill with candlelit pumpkins and bags of foil-wrapped candy and our fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Hensley, strung the walls with construction paper cuffs, black entwined with orange. Mami said the devil invented Halloween out of boredom, and I wanted to ask how she knew it was boredom, not genius, that drove him to such creation. But I was eleven and didn’t have the words, let alone the backbone, so I let her go on about the evils of paganism and forced myself not to think about the witch dress hanging in my closet.
That Friday morning, like every other weekday, mami rapped on my door with three swift taps. “Priscila, hija, ya es hora.”
Tugging the blanket high above my head, I caracoled deep into the fleece, where I discovered the musk of my unwashed hair, a scent that might charge any other person to rise out of bed, into the shower. But I felt no such pull.
Ever since papi got the sadness, mami stopped tiptoeing around. She made no effort to muffle the motorized blow of the hair dryer. Every morning, she let hinges squeak and the microwave beep and the twins kick and scream as though they were trying to startle the dead. None of it mattered. We all knew there was no noise, no atomic-size boom that could stir papi out of his stupor.
Once, during a sermon, sleep struck him so hard his neck bent at a terrifying angle, and he began choking on his saliva. The pastor made a joke about upping his material before gesturing at an elder to check on papi, and please bring him some water. The congregation laughed, all heads swiveling as an elder approached us with a cone-shaped paper cup. I remember mami’s face, sweat-slick and red, as if the sun had burned through the ceiling, lighting her raw. She said nothing at the time, except yes and thank you and I’m so sorry, and not too long after, we stopped attending church altogether.
This was fine with me, except I think maybe God minded, because after that the sadness only got worse.
Papi’d come home from working the swing shift and wouldn’t wake until an hour before beginning the next one. We hardly saw him aside from his brief exits, which were always prompted by mami’s panic at his bedside—“Arriba, Tomás. Despierta, por favor.” Along with his energy, his appetite went, too. He lost so much weight, we feared his body would eat itself to nothing, his face so gaunt it became ghoulish, and we hardly recognized him, even from up close.
Sadness and sleep, the lack of control over these states, became the tension rod between my parents. Both latched onto different ideas of what it meant to be present, to live within God’s purpose, neither realizing that in trying to figure it out, they were already failing.
The door burst open. In one fell swoop, mami yanked off the covers and ushered me out of bed, into the subway-tiled bathroom, hot water already running. “Diez minutos. No más.”
After my shower, I combed the wet from my hair and mapped out an outfit, something baby blue and stripey. My best friend Monica had said we were closer to teenagers than to toddlers and needed to start dressing the part. I skimmed through my options and caught sight of the witch dress hanging in the back of the closet, long and skinny like a shadow. The dress had been a yard sale find on a Saturday morning stroll through our neighborhood. Mami had been too enraptured by a bin full of baby clothes to notice me stuff the dress beneath the twins’ stroller after paying with the change in my pocket. We’re too old for trick-or-treating, I imagined Monica saying when she saw it, but then she’d try on the dress on the pretense of boredom, and we’d find ourselves playing games only children closer to toddlers would play. I stroked the smooth polyester, the little pills of friction. All that was missing was a slouched and pointy hat, which I knew I could find if only I could get out of the house.
At school, before the bell signaled first hour, Monica found me hanging around the monkey bars, and the moment I heard my name I plowed through the playground, not caring how I looked or that I’d collected sand in the bed of my sneakers.
Monica was my only real friend at school, though things didn’t start off so peachy. My loud mouth had uprooted me from the middle row where the other Ls sat to the front alongside the As, so I could be “more closely monitored.” At first Monica acted as though the mere proximity to me would damage whatever potential she had for being popular. Not that her efforts made any difference. We were Latinas after all, and everyone knew the popularity crowns belonged to the white girls.
When first bell rang, our fifth-grade class formed a line, and when the bell rang again, we hobbled inside Room C4, our bodies sweaty from running and jumping and shouting ourselves breathless.
We rammed into our rows, uncapping gel pens and flipping through the dog-eared pages of our spiral-edged notebooks. Monica whispered in my ear that Tyler Van Houten had locked eyes with her twice near the picnic tables, and my God, had I ever seen anyone more beautiful—besides, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio—and I laughed because I didn’t know where to place my embarrassment. Boys didn’t exactly notice me, and I’d convinced myself into believing I was okay with this. Monica asked what I thought it all meant, her and the most popular kid in school locking eyes more than once.
I shrugged, not wanting to raise her hopes, somehow already attuned to the flippancy of eleven-year-old boys. “I think it means you both looked the opposite way and your eyes got caught in the middle.”
She slumped in her seat. “I doubt that’s what it means.”
“Okay.” I ripped a sheet from my notebook. “You really wanna know?” In the style of Monica’s fat, bubbly handwriting, I wrote Do you like me? Check yes or no.
Monica gaped in horror.
I folded the sheet into quarters and passed it to the person sitting behind me—a horse-obsessed rich girl named Bethany. “It’s for Tyler.”
Bethany’s face contorted into a bucktooth sneer. “Whatever this is, I don’t approve.”
I snatched the note back with a “Good thing we don’t care” and slapped it onto the desk of the kid sitting next to her, a Mormon boy nicknamed Squeak. “It’s for Tyler.”
Squeak grabbed the note. “For who?”
“For Tyler.”
He smiled. “Who?”
Monica squeezed my arm, “Please, stop,” but I was determined to communicate my message, which was not meant to embarrass my friend but to get her to see she was worth more than a white boy’s unsubtle gaze.
I reached for the note, but Squeak dangled it just out of reach, then tossed it a few seats down, to a boy named Jonny Lan. Smiling, he pointed at himself and mouthed, Me?
I shook my head. “For Tyler.”
“Oh.”
He passed the note to Jacob Strohmeyer, Tyler’s idiot best friend, who passed it to Tyler.
Monica slid deeper in her seat. I watched Tyler open the note, but when he looked up and our eyes met, I realized I hadn’t clarified who it was from—me or Monica.
Ms. Hensley tugged on a retractable map of the United States and began pointing to all the places Columbus’s ships had landed, which was basically half the globe.
Without Columbus, she said, we’d have no place to call home.
I craned my neck to grab Tyler’s attention, tried to signal that the note’s message did not come from me, but he was busy writing.
“Priscila, please face the front,” Ms. Hensley said. As soon as I did, I felt a tap on my shoulder and Squeak’s voice muttering, “for you.”
I unfolded the note. The question Do you like me? had been crossed out and replaced with graphite letters imprinted so deeply, their echo reverberated across the folds.
Ms. Hensley snatched the note from my hands, and to my relief didn’t read it before crumpling it and tossing it into the waste basket. It would stay there overnight until my papi emptied the trash.
Papi wasn’t born sad; he’d earned the right to feel melancholy. Images from Guatemala’s Civil War had seared into his cellular memory, so that wherever he walked, death walked with him.
In 1991 he and mami arrived in Downey, California with three visas, a suitcase, and a hand-me-down stroller. For six months, the three of us crashed in the basement of papi’s childhood best friend, a tamarind-skinned man named Raúl. Raúl had four daughters with his American-born wife, who he met while taking ESL classes at the local career center. Raúl used his newfound bilingualism to secure his mother’s long-awaited visa, which led to him sponsoring many remaining family members and friends, including my parents, who were rejected by the American Embassy in Guatemala three different times before finally receiving a yes.
I have few memories of this strange but wonderful time. I remember I liked playing with Raúl’s daughters. They’d each take turns brushing my hair and dressing me in their outgrown clothes and feeding me rounds of peppermint candies. I remember other things, too. Like the warmth of sharing a mattress with my parents, papi’s snores and mami’s breathing lulling me to a sleep so deep, I was sure this is what people meant when they talked about the American Dream.
And then the novelty of the US began to fade, leaving room for the sadness to settle in. Memories became nightmares that forced papi to shake and sweat and sometimes scream in the middle of the night. The nightmares stayed long after we’d left Raúl’s for a place of our own, a studio apartment on the second floor of a renovated Motel 6.
Here, mami and I learned English from watching PBS and borrowing books from the Downey City Library, while papi separated good pears from bad ones at the Westlake Produce Company. This was backbreaking work, his spine curving to the shape of him bent over a conveyor belt, and before I started first grade, we’d packed our bags and moved to Arizona so papi could work for the Mesa Unified School District, where third shift janitors made a whopping six bucks an hour.
This is how he came into contact with my note, through the ghostly veil of a plastic bag, though I doubt he ever rifled through the trash and found it. All that way—two buses and a taxi from his hometown in Villa Nueva to the airport in Guatemala City, a delayed flight to LAX, carpools and bus rides and lonely walks home, an old Buick bought at an auction and then, when that failed, a yellow Chevy Caprice, then a U-Haul to Arizona because Downey schools were riddled with gangs and he and mami wanted better for me, for us, because otherwise what was the point? Just so he could hold my rejection in the trash bag in his hand, in case, after all that movement, he’d somehow think we’d arrived.
After school, I told Monica our only shot at revenge was egging Tyler’s two-story Spanish Revival, the kind of upper-middle-class house with red clay shingles and half-moon windows and an Escalade gleaming in the driveway. She sat on the edge of the sidewalk and stared at her electric blue pedicure. The sun had shifted from its high point in the sky and was now dipping further and further west, gilding rooftops and carports as it sank behind the mountains. Across the street, a group of boys in jerseys and FUBUs were walking in the same direction home, laughing and spitting and yelling vulgarities. We watched them pass by, backpacks slung high, frosted tips kissing back the light. And though neither of us said anything, I knew we were both picturing ourselves among them, all measured laughs and practiced hair tucks, beautiful and beloved, like troves in a museum.
Monica rested her chin in her palm. “But what did the note say?”
“Nothing important.” I plopped down next to her. “So, you in?”
She shook her head. “Monday’s Columbus Day and my dad wants us to visit up north.”
“Not this weekend. I mean on Halloween. Everybody will be out, which means no one will see us.”
“Everyone will see us.”
I pulled her up and we dusted our hands on the seat of our pants. I knew Monica was still upset. She hadn’t met my eyes all day after I’d refused to reveal what Tyler had said, and I could feel our friendship edging closer and closer to another cyclical fallout. It’d been a few weeks since our last one—a brief separation period prompted by my saying she was too boy crazy—and I was determined not to let it happen again.
The relief of late afternoon had prompted families out of their homes, into their front yards. We watched one mother juggle the phone while hosing a mandarin tree and yelling at her children to come help, their father was on his way and the groceries needed to be brought inside. We watched those same children leap at the sight of their father’s approaching Chevy Silverado, and when the driver’s door flew open, we watched how this man greeted his wife, with a kiss and a twirl, as if it’d been years since he’d last journeyed home.
Our neighborhood was vivid with people who looked like us and those who loved us, and I felt comforted at seeing our future unfold as naturally as a table linen, everyone feasting on the abundance America had promised. This abundance was not the abundance of white neighborhoods with manicured lawns and three-car garages. This abundance was string lights hanging from the fence and boleros blaring from the radio. Tíos sharing long-winded stories. Abuelitas lecturing on the correct way to fold a chuchito. Primos and primas chasing each other up and down the stairs. Tías in the kitchen gossiping about husbands and children and petty church rivals. Abundance was the safe gathering of brown people without the fear of gang violence arriving at their doorstep. Abundance was a table so full of food not even the dog went hungry.
Before Columbus, the indigenous Taíno lived in abundance. Before American settlers ravaged the west, the tribes of the Sioux and the Crow and the Southern Cheyenne roamed freely. There must have been a time when joy, not sadness, was the dominant emotion in papi’s life. I wished there was a way to project him back to this time. A time before Ronald Reagan financed a war against the Guatemalan Maya. Before papi’s parents—the abuelitos I never met—were disappeared by the Kaibiles. There was so much in this world I’d have done differently.
When we arrived at my house, mami was screaming at papi in the driveway. As soon as she saw us, mami motioned us inside—“Los gemelos, por favor”—then continued cursing my father until he locked himself inside our Astro minivan.
Mami was tired of being the only one to cook meals, to wash clothes, to frequent the grocery. He was there, yes, but at the same time he wasn’t, and what was the point of being married if in this relationship only one person existed?
Monica and I watched from the living room as papi sped recklessly away, no please drive safely, no kiss on the lips goodbye. Mami crumpled to her knees on the scalding asphalt while I looked shamefully away.
In the kitchen, Monica and I unlatched the twins from their high chairs and played at being teenage moms left by their boyfriends. Monica had caught hers cheating with her sister, while I’d gotten pregnant by the world’s second immaculate conception. In our arms, the twins burbled and squirmed, and I hated the way they always smelled like the curdled remains of Enfamil formula.
Eventually, mami stumbled inside, lightheaded from crying. Hands still shaking, she pointed at a pot of beans simmering on the stove and waved at us to turn it off. We watched her scurry to her room, heard the door click as it closed followed by the scrape of drawn curtains. When we heard the opening theme of Primer Impacto, we knew she was in for the night.
I could feel Monica looking at me, but I was too embarrassed to meet her eyes.
“It’s okay,” she said, still bouncing the fatter of the twins on her hip. “My family—they’re all broken, too.”
What did it mean to be present, I wanted to know, as opposed to being alive? If I was to one day die, I first wanted to live, and so with the twins asleep and mami still in her room, I convinced Monica to sit on the handlebars while I steered my bike to the Goodwill on the corner of Dobson and Guadalupe Road.
Together we scoured the racks in the juniors’ section. Monica held a tube top to her chest, and I gave her a thumbs up. A pair of low-rise bell-bottom jeans. Thumbs up. A bucket hat with the word Babe embroidered on the front. I wrinkled my nose. “But are you really a babe if you need to advertise it?” She sighed and returned the piece, combed through the next row and the next.
Our pile grew bulkier, our cart whiny with each push. Counting Crows crooned from the ceiling, so loud we could barely hear ourselves think. But we didn’t mind. We were just relieved to be out. If mami were here, she’d demand we stay by her side. She’d frown at the indecency of teenage clothing, at the devil music playing from the speakers. But here, behind the safety of a Buy One, Get One Fifty-percent Off sign, no one dared tell us what to do. We could scream “fuck” if we wanted. We could talk about sex if we wanted. That three-way scene from Wild Things was still staked in our minds like a flag post, enough to make us curious. Enough to make us question why we couldn’t just be like the other kids—unfazed by the salaciousness of everyday life. We were nothing if not the sheltered, first-born daughters of working-class immigrants, both born-again Christians in lifelong servitude to the one and only Protestant God. My problem wasn’t with God or His mandates. My problem was with being asked to love one thing or the other, Him or the world. When mami talked about her faith, she did so with a reverence I struggled to understand. On the occasion papi surfaced from his sadness, it was only to remind us how deep his own rock bottom lay. Even Monica—already abloom and not even twelve yet—had fastened herself to girlhood and let it define her.
I had nothing anchoring me in place. I felt ricocheted between the wants and whims of other people. The only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to be like the white kids and wear a costume for Halloween. I wanted to dress as a witch: the ugliest, scariest, most Pagan witch that ever walked the streets. I was hungry for more skin, more edge, more proximity to darkness. I didn’t want to impress Tyler—I wanted to terrify him. I knew if mami ever saw me in full costume, she’d question every decision she’d made as a mother, but I didn’t care. I chased the image of the witch hat through the store, pushing my cart deeper down the aisles, scouring every corner, every bin, every dusty shelf, and when finally I found it, perfect and pointy and black, I felt the world open up a little bit wider.
To read the remainder of “In Search of Elsewhere,” you can purchase the issue here.
