13
Reyna and Papi, 1988
BY THE END of the summer before eighth grade began, I had two things to celebrate: I had become a señorita, and unlike my sister’s, my body bled in silence. I had also successfully completed the ESL program and had gotten rid of my status as an ESL student.
When the new school year started, I was enrolled in regular eighth-grade English. Over the last year, I had become addicted to reading, in part because I was not good at making friends. I shied away from kids because there was always something for which they would make fun of me: my ridiculous name, my height, my Payless tennis shoes, my thick accent, the unfashionable clothes I would wear courtesy of the old ladies at Kingsley Manor.
Every Friday before heading home, I would stop at the Arroyo Seco Library for books. The maximum I was allowed to borrow was ten, and I would read them all during the week. At first, I mostly read the fairy-tale collections the library owned, from the Brothers Grimm to The 1001 Arabian Nights. Fairy tales reminded me of Iguala, of story time on the radio. When I was done with those books, the librarian then led me to the young adult section and handed me books she recommended. They had titles like Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club. As my reading skills got better, I started to read thicker books. My favorites were by an author named V. C. Andrews.
I enjoyed the Sweet Valley Junior High and Sweet Valley High series, but those books had nothing to do with my own life. The characters were twin sisters who had sun-kissed blond hair, a golden tan, dazzling blue-green eyes, perfect size-six figures—characters whose world was so different from my own. And yet I kept reading those books because I was seduced by the twins’ lives. Those books gave me a glimpse into a world I wished to belong to, where there were no alcoholic fathers, no mothers who left you over and over again, no fear of deportation. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. That world was the perfect place I had imagined the U.S. to be.
But with V. C. Andrews’s books, I found a connection. Even though she wasn’t writing about my Mexican culture, I could relate to her characters and their experiences. I was blown away when I read Flowers in the Attic, which was a story about four kids who, when their father died, were taken by their mother to live with their grandparents. The kids were locked up in the attic, and soon the mother started to visit them less and less and began dating other men, leaving them at the mercy of their evil grandmother.
When I read Heaven, I immediately related to the poverty the children lived in, although the setting was rural West Virginia, not Guerrero, Mexico. In My Sweet Audrina, I knew firsthand the longing Audrina felt for her father, that desperate desire to be loved by him.
Another thing I liked about V. C. Andrews’s books was that they made me feel better in a way. True, my life was very difficult, but in no way as bad as her characters’ lives. Abuela Evila didn’t feed us much, but at least, as far as I know, she never tried to poison us!
I read so much that sometimes I would hide under the covers with a flashlight and not go to sleep until I was finished with my book. When I got my first pair of eyeglasses later that year, Mago said, “Now you look like a librarian,” as if to insult me. But it only made me love books even more.
Halfway into the school year, I found out that Burbank was having a short-story competition. My English teacher encouraged all her students to enter. I thought about the story I wrote at Aldama Elementary. I was afraid of my writing once again being rejected. Yet part of me had something to prove. I am in regular English classes now, aren’t I? With the exception of my pronunciation skills, my English is almost as good as the native speakers’, isn’t it? I might have a chance this time, right?
And what if by some miracle I did win? Wouldn’t Papi finally be proud of me? I didn’t allow myself to think that he might not be. So far, making my father proud had turned out to be impossible. He’d never once come to my band concerts. And I wasn’t the only one trying to get his attention. Carlos had joined a soccer team, but Papi wouldn’t go to his games. Mago had taken an interest in modern dance, performing at basketball games during halftime and at other events, but Papi wouldn’t go see for himself how good a dancer she was.
So what chance did I have of making my father finally take notice? Probably none, but I wanted to try.
Because of the influence of Sweet Valley High, I wrote a short story about identical twins—Beverly and Kimberly. But in my short story, when the twins were very little, they were separated when their parents divorced. The mother kept Beverly, and the father took Kimberly. One day when they were teenagers, the twins were reunited by chance, and they had to struggle to recoup all that lost time and find a way to overcome the separation. Looking back on it now, I realize that first short story of mine would set the tone for all my other stories—stories of broken families, absent parents, and siblings that were separated—for that was the world I lived in, the world I knew.
I turned in my short story, and, for the following two weeks, I was anxious about the results. By then I was beginning to fall in love with writing. In my writing, you couldn’t hear my accent, which is why playing the sax, writing, and drawing were my favorite ways of expressing myself.
When the time came to find out the results, they were given through the PA system during homeroom. “Congratulations to all the students who entered the short-story contest,” the principal said over the speaker. I held my breath and put my head between my hands. “Remember, that even if you didn’t place, you’re still a winner.”
She started off with the honorable mentions, but my name wasn’t one of them. Then she announced the third-place winner. It wasn’t me. Then the second-place winner. It wasn’t me, and by now tears were starting to form. “And the first-place winner is—Reyna Grande.”
I looked at the speaker. Had I just heard my name? My homeroom teacher clapped and said, “Congratulations, Reyna. I’m so proud of you.” All the students looked at me, and for the first time, they weren’t looking at me to criticize me, but to congratulate me.
When I went to my English class, my teacher had the competition prize for me. In front of the whole class, she handed me a blue ribbon that read “First Place” and my prize, which was two tickets stapled to a brochure. A picture of a beautiful cruise ship was on the cover of the brochure.
Had I just won two tickets to go on a cruise? My heart started to race. Won’t Papi finally be proud of me when he finds out that I’m taking him on a cruise!
“These are tickets to go to the Queen Mary, ” my teacher said.
“The Queen Mary?” I asked. I glanced at the picture of the cruise ship. What a beautiful name for a ship. But I’d never heard of it before.
“Where is it?” I asked my teacher.
“In Long Beach.”
I didn’t know where Long Beach was either, but I was so excited just thinking about the adventure I was going to have on that cruise and how much fun it would be to share it with Papi. Maybe we could have a father-daughter moment when we could finally bond, when we could finally overcome the gap our separation had created. I thought of us standing on the deck as the ship pulled away from the harbor. I pictured us holding hands, and not letting go as we became surrounded in azure.
“Um, you do know what the Queen Mary is, right?” my teacher asked, interrupting my reverie. When I shook my head, she told me a brief history about the Queen Mary, except that I stopped listening when she got to the part that the Queen Mary didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t ask why in the world the school would give me tickets for a cruise ship that didn’t go on cruises. I went back to my seat, and for the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about the adventure I thought I was going to share with my father.
Despite the disappointment about the cruise, I went home that day feeling proud, and I couldn’t wait for Papi to come home to give him the news.
As soon as he opened the door, I ran to him and told him about getting first place in a competition. I showed him the prize and my short story. Papi glanced at the tickets. “What the hell is the Queen Mary?”
I told him it was a cruise ship, but I hated admitting that it didn’t go anywhere.
“So what’s the point of going to see it?”
“Because I won!”
“I don’t even know where it is.”
“It’s in Long Beach.”
“Long Beach is a big place,” he said. “I don’t want to get lost.”
“Couldn’t we ask for directions?” I asked. But I already knew what his final answer would be. Papi didn’t go anywhere unless he knew where he was going.
Without another glance, Papi handed me back the tickets and short story. I put them and the ribbon inside a little box where I stored my keepsakes. I told myself that the prize wasn’t important. It was the fact that my writing hadn’t been rejected that mattered. I took out my notebook from my backpack, found a clean page, and I started to write another story.