MY MOM INTERRUPTED MY THOUGHTS—IF THAT’S what they
were. “Dante’s on the phone.”
I walked past the kitchen and noticed my mom was cleaning out all her cabinets. Whatever summer meant, for Mom it meant work.
I threw myself on the couch in the living room and grabbed the phone. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I’m still not feeling great. My mom’s taking me to the doctor this afternoon.”
“I was hoping we could go swimming.”
“Shit,” I said, “I can’t. I just, you know—” “Yeah, I know. So you’re just hanging out?” “Yeah.”
“Are you reading something, Ari?” “No. I’m thinking.”
“About what?” “Stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“You know, Dante, things.” “Like what, Ari?”
“You know, like how my two sisters and my brother are so much older than me and how that makes me feel.”
“How old are they, your sisters and brother?”
“My sisters are twins. They’re not identical, but they look alike. They’re twenty-seven. My mom had them when she was eighteen.”
“Wow,” he said. “Twenty-seven.” “Yeah, wow.”
“I’m fifteen and I have three nieces and four nephews.” “I think that’s really cool, Ari.”
“Trust me, Dante, it’s not that cool. They don’t even call me Uncle Ari.” “So how old is your brother?”
“He’s twenty-five.”
“I always wanted a brother.”
“Yeah, well, I might as well not have one.” “Why?”
“We don’t talk about him. It’s like he’s dead.” “Why?”
“He’s in prison, Dante.” I’d never told anyone about my brother. I’d never said a word about him to another human being. I felt bad for talking about him.
Dante didn’t say anything.
“Can we not talk about him?” I said. “Why?”
“It makes me feel bad.”
“Ari, you didn’t do anything.”
“I don’t want to talk about him, okay, Dante?”
“Okay. But you know, Ari, you have this really interesting life.” “Not really,” I said.
“Yes, really,” he said. “At least you have siblings. Me, I only have a mother and a father.”
“What about cousins?”
“They don’t like me. They think I’m—well, they think I’m a little different. They’re really Mexican, you know. And I’m sort of, well, what did you call me?”
“A pocho.”
“That’s exactly what I am. My Spanish isn’t great.” “You can learn it,” I said.
“Learning it at school is different than learning it at home or on the street. And it’s really hard because most of my cousins are on my mom’s side— and they’re really poor. My mom’s the youngest and she really fought her family so she could go to school. Her father didn’t think a girl should go to college. So my mom said, ‘Screw it, I’m going anyway.’”
“I can’t picture your mom saying, ‘screw it.’”
“Well, she probably didn’t say that—but she found a way. She was really smart and she worked her way through college and then she got some kind of fellowship to go to graduate school at Berkeley. And that’s where she met my dad. I was born somewhere in there. They had their studies. My mom was turning herself into a psychologist. My dad was turning himself into an English professor. I mean, my dad’s parents were born in Mexico. They live in a small little house in East LA and they speak no English and
own a little restaurant. It’s like my mom and dad created a whole new world for themselves. I live in their new world. But they understand the old world, the world they came from—and I don’t. I don’t belong anywhere. That’s the problem.”
“You do,” I said. “You belong everywhere you go. That’s just how you are.”
“You’ve never seen me around my cousins. I feel like a freak.”
I knew what it was like to feel like that. “I know,” I said. “I feel like a freak too.”
“Well, at least you’re a real Mexican.” “What do I know about Mexico, Dante?”
The quiet over the phone was strange. “Do you think it will always be this way?”
“What?”
“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”
I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don’t know,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
