Archive for category: 2019 Contest Winners

Son of Chuquín

I often wonder who would I be without this stubborn, perennial image—my mother in bed in the dark, lying like a corpse, only her eyes and her mouth moving, talking to me as if reminiscing and at the same time prescribing a course for my life, anticipating perhaps losing me sooner rather than later, suspecting, although not necessarily wishing, that our voices playing in the dark would be all I’d be left with to explain my most secret sense of loss.

“Think big, now, Quique. What would you like to study?”

“I don’t know, Mom. I already told you so many times.”

“Well, something has to come to your mind, right?”

“At school, they gave us a test last week. It said I’m supposed to be an architect or a coach, a tennis coach, I guess.”

“I don’t see the relationship between those two options to tell you the truth, dear.”

“It said that I should look for a profession that combines science and art.”

“Well, I just don’t see where the science or the art is in being a tennis coach.”

“It actually came out as choreographer, but since the teacher and I didn’t know anything about choreography, he said it could be interpreted as some sort of coach. And since he knew I like to play tennis …”

“So the teacher modified the results of the test just because he didn’t know what a choreographer is?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s kind of nuts. The real problem, though, is that he didn’t give you any options.”

“Architect is an option, isn’t it?”

“Maybe in theory. In practice, the architects I know don’t make any money because they’re just drawing stuff for engineers; they’re the ones who have the resources to actually build.”

“Maybe I should be an engineer, then.”

“That’s a wise choice, dear. A very wise choice, don’t you think? ’Cause I don’t think you want to become another Chuquín, do you?”

“I guess not.”

Chuquín was my tennis coach. Actually, he was more than that. As a joke, although more like an insult, my friends called me Son of Chuquín. I was supposed to feel ashamed of him (and my connection with him) because he was dark, short, skinny, and rather peculiar. “A cocky, puny little thing of an Indian,” my mother used to say. Chuquín, by the way, was used to being mocked. And to make sure everybody knew he didn’t care, he walked with the most upright, super-erect posture in town, his chest leading the way like a puffed up pigeon marching in front of an imaginary military parade.

Having been Chuquín’s tennis student since I was six (he liked to call me his disciple), I was more than aware of his peculiar side. Somehow, though, I never gave in to the pressure to ridicule him. He had a way of teaching, not only tennis, but his own defiant version of how to respond to “the cruel laughter of the world” that, as a clandestinely rebellious kid, I found admirable. Even my mother, despite her unwavering prejudice toward dark-skinned people, had to respect him for that.

You could blame my father, I suppose, for bringing Chuquín to our lives. They weren’t exactly friends, but they were born in the same small town in the highlands of central Peru and considered helping each other “in exile” a moral duty, which given Chuquín’s starving tennis-coach lifestyle and my father’s solidly established businessman credentials meant that my father could play his favorite public role with Chuquín: the generous sports benefactor who is always donating trophies, uniforms, and footwear to all sorts of teams, tournaments, and coaches.

Where did my father’s fondness for sports come from? I still wonder. He was the most unathletic person I’d ever known. Walking the three blocks from our house to his import-export store was nothing short of “a cruel and vile form of punishment,” as he liked to say. The only plausible explanation I could come up with was that he’d somehow figured out this was a most cost-effective way of promoting his business in town.

In stark contrast, my mother cared nothing for sports or sponsoring them. What attracted her to tennis was its potential as a vehicle for social advancement. She had a college degree but no money. My father had money but very little in the way of formal education. Tennis was supposed to help with this imperfect union. Sending me to the only American school in town was also part of her upwardly mobile master plan.

“I just want you to grow up to be a successful professional, dear,” she would say to me, trying to justify why I had to learn tennis. “It’s the perfect sport for a promising young man.” And if she felt the need to buttress her argument with an actual reason, a reason that couldn’t be contested, she’d add: “You have to be proud of your English roots, okay? Tennis is part of that.”

To push things even further along this God-save-the-Queen direction, Chuquín happened to be as obsessed as my mother with everything English, although he couldn’t claim a real or imaginary genetic connection. For him, it was enough that England had invented tennis, “the most civilized of all sports.” Ergo, England had to be “the most civilized of all nations.” Which made him, according to his unique logic, a lot more than a tennis coach. He saw himself as a crusader. He was helping to bring civilization to Peru.

Despite my mother’s and Chuquín’s odd Anglo-Saxon convergence, though, there was one critical difference between them. My mother’s belief in England as the bastion of civilization was tempered (Chuquín would’ve probably said corrupted) by her preference for the U.S. As she liked to say to her faithful cadre of girlfriends over Darjeeling tea and homemade butter cookies, “I think we can agree that the English Empire has been successfully replaced by the American, which lacks class, no doubt, but it’s decisively more future-oriented, don’t you agree?”

By training with Chuquín, anyway, I wasn’t only being prepared to be the next Peruvian tennis champ, I was being groomed to be “a perfect English gentleman,” an ontological category I couldn’t have cared less about. What was important to me, and probably the only reason their Anglo-Saxon conspiracy worked so well, was that nothing in the realm of physical activity, aside from masturbation and cumbia dancing, gave me as much pleasure. Call it a precocious, perverted proclivity toward banal hedonism, but getting up at six every morning to run after a ball had to be one of my most consistent sources of joy as a child and teenager. And although I often pretended to be annoyed by having to be up and ready to walk out the door by Chuquín’s second ringing of the bell (daylight not yet the victor over darkness outside my bedroom window), I looked forward to playing tennis every morning with undiminished enthusiasm.

Before the actual tennis lesson, though, the two of us had to parade. Dressed in white and wearing shorts, let’s say we stood out from the other early risers “like a pair of fags in a whorehouse,” as my friends liked to say. Yet we kept on walking as proud as could be. Which was the only way Chuquín knew how to walk anyway—pretending we were strolling down the streets of Wimbledon or Oxford and that playing tennis first thing in the morning was as established a local tradition as flying kites after school in the spring, escaping to the beach in the summer, crashing parties on weekends, flirting during Sunday communion, and going back home feeling totally purified, eager to start sinning from scratch once again.

One more crucial detail, Chuquín walked joined at the hip to this gigantic two-speed bicycle packed like a burro with old rackets and dark, hairless tennis balls coming out of ripped plastic bags. And as he walked, he had to lecture me (and anybody who could hear him), about his favorite subject: the art of winning.

“’Cause to tell you the truth, Henry, I’d rather lose with style than win without it.”

I was always Henry to Chuquín. Never Quique or Enrique. Sometimes Henry V or VIII, depending on his mood.

“I mean anybody can win. But to do it with style, well, that’s the most difficult thing to master in life, Henry. The most, most difficult.”

“Your grandfather Enrique was the best tennis player ever in Tacna and Arica, you know that, right?”

“I know, Mom. You’ve told me that a million times.”

“Well, I just want to make sure you’re a good keeper of the torch, okay? Your brother is so useless, my God.”

“You also told me he was an incredible singer and guitar player. How come you never want me to play the guitar?”

“I’ve told you, honey. Your grandma suffered too much because of it. He’d disappear for days on end. He’d go from one party to the next, non-stop. Everybody wanted him playing and singing waltzes at their parties. He didn’t know how to say no. I just don’t want you imitating his bad side. Do you understand, dear?”

I didn’t.

Actually, I didn’t want to.

Maybe I should say, I simply couldn’t. By the end of high school, I was the lead singer and bass player for Los Conchesumadres (The Motherfuckers), the most foul-mouthed, underground, garage-cumbia band in the history of Tacna. I wasn’t any good at it, but it didn’t matter. We played anti-establishment cumbia. It was meant to provoke and torment. We were ahead of our time, even ahead of the Brits and the Americans who hadn’t yet come up with punk rock. Anyway, I suspected she knew about my fertile underground punk-cumbia life. I also trusted she’d never mention it.

We had an understanding. It was written on the invisible pages of our mother-son contract. There were subjects tacitly deemed unsuitable for our late-night conversations. My grandmother’s blackness, item number one on the list. My aunt Rosamelia’s sexual preference for women, also number one. And another number one, the unspoken prohibition to mention my grandfather’s controversial-heroic-anti-heroic death. In general, though, anything my mother considered distasteful was barred from our nightly chats. As she liked to say to me in a slightly affected confessional tone, “Please, darling, just tell me beautiful, happy stories. There’s already enough ugliness and tragedy in this world.”

Dutifully, responsibly, obligingly, I stuck to the permissible and avoided the taboo. You could say I made an art form of it.

The Unthinkable Future, the Indiscernible Present, the Past’s Insufferable Weight

“So what do you think about going to study abroad, darling?”

I always admired the way my mother could talk lying in bed perfectly still, like a mummy, a mummy who’d wait for me no matter how late I came back home, which shouldn’t be understood as a some sort of selfless, motherly act. She simply could never sleep. At least that’s what she claimed, and not without pride, believing herself morally superior to the rest of us because of it.

My father, on the other hand, slept “like a narcoleptic,” according to my mother. And she acted as if there was something terribly wrong with him for being able to set aside his daily worries and tribulations and fall asleep until the next morning at seven-thirty. Always at seven thirty, when he’d tiptoe to the bathroom, farting and whistling tangos for our morning entertainment. He slept in a tiny bed, too. Impossible not to notice since my mother’s bed was three times as big. Maybe that was his punishment for his inconsiderate narcolepsy. Or maybe for being “a goddamned man,” as my aunt Rosamelia, who lived with us, would say so we never forget that in our household women were in charge.

“Abroad like?”

“Like the U.S., darling.”

“Really?”

“Your father and I have been talking about it because, as you know, it’s becoming more and more dangerous to be a young man in Peru. These war games with Chile aren’t going to end well. And I’d probably not care if we lived in Lima, but we live right at the border, dear. The whole town’s already become a giant military base. Now you and your classmates are going to have to spend Saturdays in military training. And that’s just the beginning.”

“All I can say is I’m sick and tired of all these young officers taking over the town, and how they just have to show off their latest sport cars, their expensive sunglasses, imported blue jeans and holier-than-thou attitude. I mean all the good-looking girls only have eyes for them now.”

“Well, once the war starts, I don’t think they’ll have time to run after good-looking girls, if that’s any consolation. They’ll always be better off than us civilians, though. My God, where does this thirst for revenge come from? Don’t they realize that the Chileans are going to beat us to shame just like they did a hundred years ago? We’re so useless, my God. All posing and bravado.”

“Maybe we’ll beat them this time, Mom.”

“Look at you, talking about war as if there were winners and losers, as if you could trust anything this communist government says. What does it matter if we win anyway? We’re doomed to become another Cuba, which is no fun, let me tell you. That’s why your father and I have been talking about you going to California, dear. We’re too old to start all over. But you’re at the perfect age. Remember my dear friend Martha? Remember she has a brother who went to Australia? Well, he lives in San Francisco now. He can help you get settled. Eventually you could even bring your brother with you.”

I can’t say that my mother’s proposition wasn’t provocatively tempting. Its temptation, however, had very little to do with escaping a war with Chile or the fear of becoming a subject of a more totalitarian regime. What seemed irresistible to my seventeen-year-old self was the romantic (and clichéd, of course) promise of unlimited adventures in a foreign land with no adult supervision. And if in order to accomplish that I had to make an effort to empathize with and validate my mother’s worst fears I was more than willing to do it. I didn’t need her or anybody explaining to me how hard it had been for her to earn her upper-middle-class status, or to tell me how traumatic it must have been for her to live as child through a military occupation, although her memories of it were shockingly positive. I understood my mother, or better yet, I understood what made her think and feel the way she did, which included playing the mummy in bed every night as if to outwit her omnivorous anxiety, pretending to be numb and immune to history’s contingencies, which, in turn, might also explain why she failed to foresee the military coup (yes, yet another coup) that would steer Peru away from war and communism. The best resolution she could’ve hoped for. Too bad it came too late for comfort.

I mean, by then, I wasn’t only gone to a foreign land but was eagerly adopting San Francisco as my new home. Or to put it in even more irrevocable terms, I had already discovered the strange and almost perverse pleasure of reinventing myself as an American. And she had only herself to blame for it.

To make things even more distant between us, although I’m not sure it was a conscious decision, I decided I was the wrong person to provide her with any kind of solace. As a refugee from a communist regime that didn’t take hold and a war that never happened, I was in too much of a rush to let go of a past that felt awkwardly alien to me, a past that had less to do with me than with my mother’s designs for me.

The War Against all Wars

Then there was the war, a real one. Actually, there were two wars. And the passion with which I embraced the war against the war could only be understood, I suppose, if one considers that a part of me felt in desperate need of genuine immigrant pathos. I wanted to make up for what history had deprived me of. A war (or an anti-war in this case) was just the perfect setting to finally launch my own epic and be, by my own design, the hero of my own movie.

None of this was lived at a rational level, of course. I was simply responding to what surrounded me, including the curated Vietnam War images that a few newspapers and TV stations broadcasted for our sentimental and political education. What was I suppose to do, anyway, with the horrific self-immolations executed with unfathomable self-possession by Buddhist monks in protest against America? Or the scalding orange rivers running wild across the jungle, like lava, turning everything in its path into fluorescent ash? Or the tormented, frightened-beyond-fear faces of “our enemies” looking at the camera just before their heads exploded and their brains splattered on the ground?

Besides, most of my new friends (none of them from the Engineering Department) were actively involved in all sorts of anti-war marches and protests. I really didn’t have to do much to become one of them—a true pain-in-the-ass provocateur, witness and occasional victim to an organized, thuggish form of violence that came dressed in blue and never let go of us. It would’ve helped, of course, to have a better command of English to truly bear witness to my times, but what I lacked in eloquence I made up for in fervor, verve, and dedication to babbling on about charging horses, barking German shepherds, tear gas, malicious blows landing on young, idealistic, defenseless bodies, refusing to retreat or to stop expressing their righteous discontent.

Meanwhile, the more I delved into the muddy, early-seventies American cauldron, the more my provincial, Peruvian memories (how could I not notice?) faded in the distance, acquiring a quasi-pre-historical quality. To my surprise, though, no matter how foreign and distinctly irrelevant to my American life my past seemed, it continued to play an active, commanding role in my new life if only because Mother and Aunt Rosamelia, resolutely and unabashed, found a way to impress their opinions and desires on me just as they always had. In fact, now they had even more influence. Now that they had managed to trick time and space, they could live within me and come and go at will, and bring my pre-American persona and pre-historical universe back to life even when I didn’t want to deal with it, or maybe I should say, especially when I wanted to forget all about it.

The Pre-historical Heart of the Matter

So, yes, or maybe I should say no. This isn’t an immigrant saga. My life in the U.S., although essential, isn’t this tale’s central concern. This is all about, I’m afraid, the actors and forces that came before my American reinvention. In other words, maybe all I’m trying to do here is answer (with a modicum of wickedness) one single question, actually two. But let’s start with the question posed to me most promiscuously since the moment I arrived in San Francisco: What brought you here, man?

That is, I came here to go to college was (is) more of a shield than a portal through which I could reveal how Mother, Chuquín, Father, and Aunt Rosamelia, the essential components of my pre-history, worked together to create the first version of myself.

The second question, the one nobody asks and that I find most fascinating, would be how is it that the same old voices from your past keep on defining not only who you are but how you write your own narrative? Or to be more to the point, how is it that my mother keeps on prescribing my future (even if I eventually went and still go against her wishes), while my aunt informs how I talk about my past, which might be why in my memory (and imagination) the two of them have to be endlessly dueling.

Before delving into their eternal war, though, I’d like to go back to my mother. For she is the one and only adult in my pre-American world who not only drilled me and guided me but, like Moses, once she felt I was prepared to step onto the Promise Land, let go of me, something for which I never thanked her, but then nobody thanked Moses for anything either, he just did what he had to do and that was it.

“So are you ready, Quique? I know you’re tired. But one more rehearsal isn’t going to kill you, right? I’m not supposed to be nice to you, remember? I’m mean and rude. Like a grumpy cop. Let’s see, young man, I see you have a tourist visa. What’s your reason for traveling to the United States of America? May I know?”

“I’m going to visit Disneyland, sir. It’s been my dream ever since I was a little boy. I want to visit San Francisco and Los Angeles. I want to see the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, Universal Studios.”

“And why are you carrying those rackets with you? It doesn’t seem like you’d have much time to play tennis.”

“Well …”

“Come on, dear, you know you can’t pause like that. He’s going to think you’re lying. You’re supposed to say you’re a tennis champ. Americans love champs. They’re totally into winners. They can’t stand losers. As a matter of fact, they send them back to their countries or they put them in jail. So for Christ’s sake, try to sound more convincing, okay? Let’s start all over again.”

War hysteria and rigid drilling methodology aside, my mother’s dedication to making sure I was optimally prepared to clear U.S. Customs & Immigration and be on my own (no matter where I went) was genuinely honest. Her meticulous dedication, however, wasn’t unique to her or my family. Being constantly pressured to be prepared to leave town as soon as you were done with high school, especially if you had the means, was an essential part of growing up in Tacna in those days. If you stayed, you could study to be a nurse or a teacher. Those were your college degree options. That’s why, now I understand, almost every adult man in Tacna in those days was a merchant, a contrabandist, or both. Well, not only because of that.

According to our unique border-town mentality, smuggling merchandise to and from Chile was considered a patriotic duty, a unique way of keeping Tacna and Arica united despite the fact that they no longer belonged to the same country, a humble tribute to our ancestors who’d heroically fought against the Chileans and later endured their occupation. We’re talking about contraband as a sublime form of heroism. Which might sound funny, but the subject matter isn’t necessarily a shallow one. In fact, it runs deep and often undetected inside all of us Tacnenians. One could argue we have been successfully preconditioned to think of sneaking something (anything) across a real or imaginary border as a legitimate business, which in my case meant that the plan, conceived and orchestrated by my mother in consultation with my father and aunt, was based on the premise that sneaking myself into the U.S. as a tourist wasn’t just the most practical but the most honorable solution.

My point, though, isn’t to take credit away from my family’s border-sneaking talent, but simply to point out that as active masters of the art of patriotic contraband, their solution was rather predictable. That’s one side of the story, of course. The other side (related to the second question) is more intimate and obscure, and as complex as what lies behind two sisters’ infinite tug-of-war.

My Grandfather the Unforgiving Role Model

Fully aware of history as a transaction (and most often an immoral one), Aunt Rosamelia believed (or pretended to believe) there was nothing heroic about having resisted “those tight-assed, faux Nazis,” as she called the Chileans. “Wrapping yourself in the Peruvian flag and jumping off a cliff onto the ocean, that’s what I call a hero,” she’d say as if to make sure we (her nieces and nephews) understood what her minimum epic requirements were. Then, relapsing into a more conversational tone, she would add, “I mean what were we supposed to do? This was our town. There’s no heroism in staying put. There were, of course, a few so-called freedom fighters, Grandpa Enrique chief among them, but I don’t think what he did was heroic anyway. It was plain crazy and stupid if you want to know the truth.”

Aunt Rosamelia was the oldest of the three sisters and considered herself the official family historian, Aunt Chepa, three years younger, was “too dumb to care,” and my mother, by virtue of being the baby, “too young to remember.” My mother nonetheless claimed she remembered “everything.” And since her oldest sister persisted in dismissing her recollections, she preferred to leave the room whenever Aunt Rosamelia broached the subject of “life during the occupation.”

Their sisterly rivalry, though, as I’ve mentioned, went beyond a mere conflict of interpretation of their past. It was a prima donna contest. “There can be no more than one sun up in the sky,” was the way my aunt liked to put it. The past, nonetheless, and more specifically, the figure and legacy of their father, the family’s Anglo-Saxon bastion, was the fulcrum of their insoluble dilemma, which provided me with my first practical lessons on how to understand my own history. For as crucial as my nightly visits to my mother’s bedroom are in the creation of my pre-historical identity, my aunt’s flamboyant disregard of any romanticized version of the past, her penchant for coarse language (something my mother totally disapproved of), and especially her readiness to laugh at her ancestors were equally influential—all the more because she swore (to my mother’s chagrin) that I was the living image of my grandfather. Hearing her tell stories about Grandpa, then, was more like hearing stories about me; better yet, stories about a version of myself most appealing to my punk side, which as a teenager was all I cared about.

Hearing my aunt’s stories was also the exact opposite experience of hearing my mother’s. Instead of the intimate, secretive, bedroom-in-the-dark setting my mother and I shared, my aunt’s domain was the early-afternoon-big-family lunch—the warm sunshine percolating through the vines, all of us bathed in a gentle, golden light while the dishes were constantly brought and cleared from the table, everybody talking loudly, preferably while laughing. And if there happened to be a few half-asleep adults in their chairs, arms crossed over their snoring chests, distended bellies proudly revealing an overtaxed digestive system, heads bouncing back and forth, in and out of siesta oblivion, we knew that the moment Aunt Rosamelia took charge they would instantly wake up and become a devoted audience. Nobody could really resist her.

“I mean, let’s not forget that for almost twenty years I had to put up with being a goddamned second-class citizen, oh yeah. Let’s not forget either that my dear sister Ameriquita was barely seven when we went back to being part of Peru. So what can she really remember? And when Father died, she was only six months old. So I don’t think you have much of a choice here. To talk about Father you have to have known him. You have to have witnessed what a stubborn son of a bitch he was. I mean everything had to be done his way. Nobody could tell him what to do. Not the Chileans or the Peruvians. For him, authority was the enemy. They can kiss my ass and lick my balls was his favorite political slogan, as you all know.”

“That’s right. Kiss my ass and lick my balls. The family mantra, isn’t it?”

That was cousin Omar, who liked to play Aunt Rosamelia’s choir’s principal tenor. Cousins Laly, Priscila, Darío, Martha, and Hugo were part of the choir too, but Omar was the first to speak, the loudest and fastest. Aunt Rosamelia loved the call-and-response dialectics. The bigger the choir, he more supported she felt. She could then relax the tempo and drink her favorite wine (Chilean, by the way) and theatrically get back to her story.

“My poor mom suffered terribly because of him. I mean how could she avoid it? How could anybody who loved my father avoid it, really? At times, she’d even wonder if he’d married her just as an act of rebellion and not because he truly loved her, you know. Being a blond man in a brown country, and knowing how uncontrollably contrarian he was, she could never really get rid of the suspicions that he’d married her, a black woman, just to be rebellious.

“She was beautiful, of course, but she didn’t have the white kind of beauty that’s socially acceptable. Anyway, in those days, blacks and Indians intermarried and it was no big deal. But blond and black? Privileged upper-middle class boy marrying second generation, freed-slave girl? No wonder when we walked the streets as a family people would point at us as though we were a freak show or something.

“My father, needless to say, was totally thrilled by it. He liked to say he’d come into this world to defy all rules and labels. And he’d punch you in the face if you called him an anarchist. ‘I’m not an anarchist, a communist, an atheist, or whatever you want to call me. I am who I am and I don’t need you or anybody to tell me who I am.’ Can you imagine what it must have been like to live with a man like him? No wonder the Chilean authorities kept a close eye on him and on his two cousins who were as contentiously crazy as he was.”

“And what were the names of the two cousins, Auntie? Just for the record, you know.”

“Manuel and Alvaro, the only two male sons of Uncle Ambrosio, the best center forward in those days, a small man but mighty strong, and fast as a lizard.”

“That’s right. They called him ‘White Magic,’ didn’t they, Auntie? He could score from everywhere in the soccer field. Isn’t that right, Aunt Rosamelia?”

“That’s damned right, Omar. I’m so glad you remember his name and his amazing soccer feats, although we can’t forget he was also a terrible husband. A total Casanova. Poor Aunt Fortunata. Well, at least he was good in soccer, although it didn’t do him any good. ’Cause whenever they organized soccer matches between Chileans and Peruvians, the Peruvians always won. He was unbeatable. So the Chileans hated his guts and were always putting him in jail for one reason or another. Well, also because he was blond, like your grandpa, both whiter than the Chileans who, racists pigs that they were, saw themselves as the superior race. At least superior to us because we were darker.

“Anyway, you can imagine how they tried to brainwash us in school, to make us believe in our inferiority. They had the broomstick handy too if we didn’t accept their version of history. The worst part, though, was that I couldn’t tell any of it to my father. He would’ve set the school on fire or done something even crazier. The only person in my family I could tell these things to was my mother. Bless her heart!

“She was my moral rock during those years. And it wasn’t as if she had it easy. She was one of the few black women in town, and the Chileans weren’t subtle about showing her where she belonged. But just like me, she couldn’t tell my father how bad it was for her. Not that he didn’t know, but still. You didn’t want to provoke him. Oh my God, the silence we carried inside us. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to put into words the unbearable burden it was to keep it all to ourselves.

“On top of everything, Grandpa Enrique was just not the consoling type, you know. Any type of sentimentality was revolting to him, which is funny because he was an amazing guitar player and singer. I guess he reserved his soft side for his playing and singing. Away from his guitar, he was all macho bravado. And his two cousins were just like him.”

The Battle for History

Endowed with Herculean shoulders, enormous breasts, and arms to match, Aunt Rosamelia was fond of wearing at least three layers of white plaster on her face “to not look too black,” which had the curious effect of making her look “like Frankenstein’s sister,” according to my mother.

Aunt Rosamelia, however, didn’t mind the horror-movie effect. Quite the contrary, you could tell she derived an enormous amount pleasure from it. She’d figured out a way of keeping men at bay. Although I’m not sure it helped her find girlfriends. In any case, it was her invulnerable rhetorical armor that I admired, her blunt, iconoclastic dominance of the family’s narrative, which also made her the only person in my family I could talk to about my cumbia-punk projects. Having said that, I never had the nerve to share with her any of our band’s songs, usually composed by me. I mean You wanna fuck me, I wanna fuck you, you wanna fuck me, I wanna fuck you was probably our most family-friendly chorus. So I had the strong suspicion that even she wouldn’t approve of our poetic vein.

As for my mother, despite her hyper-sensitive, uptight propriety, she was as effective and inspiring a storyteller as my aunt. She just operated in a different emotional register. She wasn’t there to provoke you or make you laugh or cry. What she was good at was leaving you not knowing what to feel. And when it was just the two of us, she always had to make sure I understood that Aunt Rosamelia couldn’t be trusted.

“The thing is I just don’t think the occupation was as bad as Rosamelia claims.” My mother’s voice sounded soft, tender, as if she’d just woken up from a sleeping-beauty siesta, which was physically impossible for her because of her insomnia. “We were kind of prisoners of war, sure, but it wasn’t like we were living in a concentration camp. In many ways, I’d say we were better off than now. ’Cause they wanted us to become Chileans, you know. So they had the city well taken care of. The markets and stores were beautifully stocked. They’d remodeled all the schools and built new ones. And if you weren’t adamantly anti-Chilean, you were treated well.

“I mean, nowadays, even though we’re no longer occupied, if you go out and protest against the government, you get beat up and thrown in jail. It just wasn’t that different back then, with the advantage that things were more orderly. There was no crime. The streets were super clean. If they caught you littering, you paid a fine or went to jail. And what was even better, they didn’t allow the Indians to settle wherever they pleased. In fact, they allowed them in only for the day, so they could sell their products, but they would disinfect them and make them shower first. There were no shantytowns. There was opera twice a year and the best ballet company in Santiago visited all the time. I had wonderful Chilean friends and teachers. The best.”

I wonder (have been wondering ever since) if my mother’s rather pleasant memories of her childhood have to do with her being the blonde in the family. I also wonder if the Chilean authority’s unabashed racism toward Indian-looking and dark-skinned people in general might have something to do with how precociously she opted for identifying as white, something her mother and sisters absolutely couldn’t do by virtue of their looks.

Racial issues aside, I don’t think my mother or my aunt expected to have similar childhood memories. They just didn’t know how to live with their differences in public. So when my mother left the room to let Aunt Rosamelia talk freely about her “occupation memories,” it was with the implicit understanding that she was doing her sister and her audience (us) a favor. She wasn’t conceding. She was simply choosing to be civil.

The jarring part for me was feeling like a traitor to my mother for not only listening to my aunt but actually enjoying her tales so much. The fact that I was, as far as I knew, the only one in the family who had those whispering, late-night chats with Mother in bed was, I suspected, the crucial, isolating ingredient, which only made my traitor role feel more damning. In any case, my incapacity to reconcile my mother and aunt within me has a lot do with how avidly I began to fantasize about having a life as far away as possible from home so I could free myself from having to choose between them.

Now, I don’t mean to imply, though, that my mother’s and my aunt’s kingdom have equal weight in my psyche or history. Formidable as they both were, the level of intimacy my mother and I shared wasn’t possible with Aunt Rosamelia (or with any other member of my family for that matter). Aunt Rosamelia, to begin with, wasn’t the touchy-feely type. She actually pushed you away if you got too close to her. She needed her own secrets and the necessary space to protect them. Her theatrical, public persona was, in a way, how she protected her inner self. She only had, as far as we knew, a public persona. Talking to her alone or surrounded by the entire extended family made no difference. There was nothing she would reveal in the intimacy of a one-on-one conversation that she wouldn’t say in public and vice versa.

“She’s always performing, anyway,” I remember my mother sort of warning me.

I, of course, didn’t know what she meant. Or I did, but at the same time I had the suspicion that in life we all rely on performing for survival in one way or another. So it’s not like my mother was more honest than my aunt because she could talk to me in a more intimate tone. It was a mere difference of style. My mother’s central concern, anyway, was never the past, but the future. And when we were alone, my future. Her performance was all about it.

“Oh, to be your age again, Quique, to be seventeen and carefree. Although I don’t think I was ever as carefree as I should’ve been. There was always something or someone in the back of my mind telling me I had a million chores to do. Maybe because from a very young age I knew I wanted to be doctor. And since my mother couldn’t afford to send me to college, I had to plan things very carefully. Yes, I had to work after school from junior high on to save money. I also had on my shoulders this enormous pressure to get good grades. And since I also knew my mother wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of me leaving home to go to school, I did it all very quietly and somehow found a way not to be discouraged by what everybody told me, including my mother: Why would you bother studying something you’ll never be able to practice? Wouldn’t it be better to stay here and become a teacher like your sisters? ’Cause you know that no matter what you study, you’ll end up as a housewife, don’t you? And for that you don’t need any degree. Nobody does. Or don’t you want to have a family?

“Yes, I wanted to have a family. Of course. But how could I have explained to my mother that I also wanted to be a doctor and I didn’t see a conflict between the two? And I was full of doubts and I couldn’t tell her anything about it. Doubts about how I was going to survive all by myself in the big city. Doubts about what I was going to do once I ran out of the money I’d saved working after school. Doubts about not being smart or dedicated enough to study medicine, a career that in those days took a minimum of twelve years. To her, I could only show determination.

“Then, in my last year of high school, during winter break, my friend Martha, yes, Auntie Martha as you call her, well, she and her family moved to Lima. And her mom, who’d always treated me like a daughter, knowing that I was dying to go to college, offered me room and board in exchange for light housekeeping. That was all I needed to believe I was going to be who I wanted to be. And I know it’s not in good taste to compare yourself with others, but I can’t help but be a little envious at how fortunate you are, dear. You have our total support and nobody laughs at you because you’re going to San Francisco to be an engineer. And traveling, oh my God, is so much easier and safer nowadays.

“Imagine. Depending on the weather conditions and the type of ship you boarded, the trip to Lima could take up to two weeks. There were no airplanes. The roads were impassable. On top of everything, there was a war. No, not against the Chileans. Europe was at war. The German submarines were roaming the coast of Peru. They had already sunk a few passenger ships. My mom and my sister Chepa kept repeating to me, Death at sea means no grave. How are we going to leave you flowers?

“And I have to say that, for all my unshakeable determination, when the day to leave for Lima finally came, and we took a taxi to the port of Arica, as I stepped off it, my legs wouldn’t hold me up. Thank God your Rosamelia was there to practically carry me out of the car. And then, when we got to the pier, and I saw the actual ship I was supposed to board, not only my legs but my entire body went limp. It was such a ridiculously puny little thing. It was full of badly patched holes too. The paint was peeling from it like when you get sunburnt and your skin starts to come off. Anyway, the only painted part, sort of, was the captain’s cabin, where you could read its name: El Rey.

“‘That’s the saddest king I’ve seen in my life. What kind of a king is that?’ I remember telling Rosamelia, and then I burst into tears.

“I was in shock. Totally. Instead of the giant, floating city made of polished wood and shiny steel I had dreamt of, it was this pathetic fishing boat that had been, I don’t know how, turned into a sort of passenger-carrying device. To my astonishment, though, there were tons of people boarding. Nobody seemed to mind the boat’s funkiness. Thankfully, too, Rosamelia wouldn’t leave my side. So I eventually calmed down, although when it was my turn to walk up the ramp, my body just wouldn’t move.

“I had also cried so much, I couldn’t see anything. So Rosamelia, once again, helped me gather myself. She cleaned my face and retouched my makeup while she kept whispering, ‘This is no time to wobble, Ameriquita. You hear me? You’re going to be fine. You don’t need a giant boat to make it to Lima. Actually, it’s a lot safer than going in one of those fancy ships. Or do you think the Germans are going to waste a torpedo on that shitty cardboard raft?’

“You could always count on your aunt, I suppose, to make you laugh at the worst moments … Anyway, I did settle down, and eventually walked up the ramp. And only when I found a place on the deck where I had a clear view of the pier did I notice the joyous party around me. I’d been too overwhelmed to pay attention to it. A military band was playing cuecas, marineras, waltzes. Peruvians and Chileans were singing and dancing and embracing each other by the pier. It was, I remember telling myself, the perfect atmosphere to say goodbye to my childhood and teenage years.

“I could see my two sisters and my mother from the deck, standing there, so elegant in their long, flowery dresses, so glamorous under their wide-brimmed hats. Well, my two sisters. My mother had made herself up, but she wore only black. ‘I’m a professional widow,’ she liked to say. And I kept staring at them as they stood together, holding hands, waving their tear-soaked handkerchiefs. And I remember realizing, just before the boat began to glide off the pier, that I didn’t feel sad. Actually, I felt euphorically happy. I was crying happy tears.”

It Doesn’t Really End

I don’t remember ever asking my mother why she didn’t become a doctor. I don’t remember her volunteering an explanation about what kept her from realizing her dream either. It may seem odd now, but never did back then. One more layer of selective silence between us was far from discomfiting. One more tale in which she kept the central point unmentioned was part of her signature style. Like Homer leaving the Trojan War out of the Odyssey.

It was a mutual restraint anyway. I never told her anything about my sentimental or sexual adventures, even when she knew the actors involved. Like my long, languid, and predictable romance with Carla, her closest friend’s daughter, who would ride with me in my father’s car with the absolute conviction that we were destined to be married and live merrily ever after once I returned from San Francisco as a civil engineer. With the same unassuming confidence, too, she would never let me touch her body when we kissed. That was only supposed to happen when we marry.

In the same vein, it never crossed my mind either to tell my mother about my numerous escapades with my fellow Conchesumadres to the biggest whorehouse in town as a sort of never-ending farewell ritual during our last year of high school. Silence was, as I’ve said, an essential part of our deal, a deal that often made me think I had been raised (I had been cursed, really) to be a duplicitous, untrustworthy man, which, in turn, was also part of my secret reasons for wanting to leave home. Maybe away from her, without the fear of trampling on my own lies, I could speak openly about my life, I could enjoy a sort of freedom only imaginable once I could be on my own and that, not coincidentally, I began to savor the very same winter night I boarded a Boeing 747 bound to San Francisco.

Actually, I first noticed the change in myself a bit before boarding, while I waited with the other passengers at the gate and couldn’t stop looking at (as if I were looking at the encrypted version of my life to come) the giant tattoo covering the entire aircraft, the work (I later found out) of Alexander Calder, my favorite American artist because of it. And it was at that moment, the free-floating shapes painted by Calder providing a playful lightness to the moment, when I thought of Aunt Rosamelia (not my mother) as the only person in the world capable of telling the tale I was about to begin. And all of a sudden there she was. Or maybe I should say, there we were—out in the patio, the unbearable, summer sun sneaking in through the vines, the dirty dishes gone so as not to attract yet another invincible army of flies.

“Think about it. Just think about it for a minute. Grandpa Enrique with his two cousins, Manuel and Alvaro, had come up with this crazy tradition. Every weekend, they would go out late at night and terrorize lonely Chileans, preferably cops and soldiers. They’d cover their faces and attack them like vandals. Like a swarm of wasps, was how he used to describe what he did, which we had to keep secret, of course.

“I suppose Manuel and Alvaro did it out of patriotism. My father’s motivations, though, as I’ve said before, were less political. He was just a born contrarian son of a gun whose worst fear, by the way, was to be turned into a hero. Oh yeah, a hero is a political fabrication for suckers, I remember him saying. Hero or not, anyway, he knew he was playing with fire. You can’t go around beating people up with total impunity. You eventually gotta pay.”

“That’s right, Auntie. Everybody’s gotta pay. If not on the way in, on the way out.”

“I’m gland we’re in agreement here, Omar. Well, one Saturday night, a few days before Peruvian Independence Day, a night that apparently began just like any other violent night for your grandpa and his cousins, he finally had to face his fate.

“Now, you have to remember that, by then, word had spread around. So very few Chileans now dared to walk late at night by themselves. After going around and around fruitlessly looking for a victim, then, they decided to call it a night. Before disbanding, though, they went for drinks at La Bodega de Nicolás, which was about two blocks away from the Chilean Prefect’s Palace. And it was there, over fried pork skin and homemade wine, that Grandpa came up with the idea of bringing down the Chilean flag flying at the entrance to the Palace.

“According to my cousin Marilina, uncle’s Alvaro daughter, the main purpose of bringing down the flag was to pee on it. Knowing my father, though, I’d say he probably also wanted to shit on it. Anyway, that was the brilliant plan. My dear father only had brilliant plans. My God, why do men have to think with their dicks? When will they grow up? That’s why I will keep on saying till the day I die, if you want to make of him a hero, feel free to do so. But I don’t think peeing or shitting on a flag counts as heroism. He certainly didn’t either.

“Anyway, in order to shit on the flag, first they had to deal with the four soldiers guarding the palace day and night. So they decided that Manuel and Alvaro would walk up to them, pretend they were drunker than they were, and begin to insult them, which, needless to say, was something that came very naturally to them. Anyhow, the guards, as expected, bit the bait and ran after them, at which point my father, who’d been hiding somewhere, ran to the pole and brought the flag down.

“He was apparently peeing happily on the flag (he’d drunk enough wine to pee a river, for sure) when a whole platoon of Chilean soldiers came out of the Palace and shot him dead. Right there. He didn’t even have time to pull his dick back. Now, tell me if that’s not a ridiculous way to go. And what for? To send the Chileans a message? I’m telling you, sometimes I wonder if all the problems in the world would be solved if men were goddamned castrated at birth …”

And with her big, confident voice echoing inside me and Grandpa Enrique as the only possible role model for me to follow, I walked out of the gate onto the tarmac, the humid, sticky air of Lima making me feel already in a foreign land, although not too foreign. Not yet. For standing at the most prominent corner of the Lima Airport terrace, my fellow Conchesumadres were waving their arms, jumping and yelling at me: “Give them hell, Henry … Show them what we’re made of in this godforsaken country … lucky bastard … going to the land of James Brown, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin … write us about all those drugs you’ll be taking … LSD, motherfucker … mescaline, son of bitch … acid tripping, asshole … get yourself a beautiful all-American girl as sweet as apple pie and as wild as Tina Turner …”

As I comfortably sat back in seat 27A, I could see from my window they were still at it, even though they knew I could no longer hear them. Actually, all I could hear at that moment was my mother’s last late-night admonition, “Whatever you choose to do, darling, just don’t do anything that would bring you shame or remorse, okay? That’s all I ask.”

It was, I realized then, as it had always been and will always be—the two sisters of perpetual discord arguing and, by doing so, making sure I had path to follow or elude, a model to emulate or reject, an impossible-possible future and an intractable yet somehow always entertaining past.

The plane was up in the air now. It was that time of the night when Mother and I met with unintentional punctuality. Time for the late-night flavors, sounds, and shadows that surrounded us too: the casual, drunk footsteps of someone crossing the street, the occasional squealing of tires around the corner, followed by the irrepressible laughter of teenagers at the wheel, the discordant, foreign-accented voices of Mexican-dubbed American sitcoms coming from our neighbor’s window, the distant smell of an ocean we couldn’t see yet always dreamt about, especially in winter.

As the flight attendant made the customary announcements after takeoff, I felt the dry, quick caress of my mother’s warm lips on my right cheek, the unequivocal sign that it was time for me to get up from her bed and walk to my room in the dark, absolutely clueless about the life I would create for myself away from her, a life that would include (to my endless sense of secret pride and my mother’s unbearable shame) falling in love with the perfect girl with the wrong skin color, and quitting engineering and then school altogether to become, of all things, a tennis coach.

The four of us kids crowd into the green Chevy Impala that looks and moves like an alligator. At three years old, I am small enough to fit on Ma’s lap in the front. My sister Xuan gets a window seat in the back because she’s the eldest. My brother Trung gets the other window seat because he’s the boy. Phuong is the diplomatic middle child and sits between the two, where all the seatbelts have collected into a tangled heap that rattle and bump against her backside.

I rest my chin on Ma’s shoulder to get a better view of the three of them: Xuan, Trung, and Phuong, bundled close together in age, at ten, nine, and seven, with names that rhyme and sing like a Chop suey musical. When they are in high school, Phuong’s classmate will learn there is a fourth youngest sibling, dissonantly named “Katie.” She’ll recite all three of their Vietnamese names in shrill succession, then say the final American name in an anticlimactic barren monotone. Xuan! Trung! Phuong! Katie.

This will become the family joke we share with friends and acquaintances. Also a quick and efficient family history lesson too: three Vietnamese names for three kids born in Vietnam. Then an American name for the accidental last one, born eleven months after the family arrived to the U.S.

When I get too big to sit on Ma’s lap without fearing the cops will pull us over, my parents send me to the backseat with the rest of my siblings. I don’t mind squeezing in the middle—with half my body balanced on top of Phuong’s bony thigh while gripping  Ma’s head rest with curled fingertips—because I’m closer to their trio. They talk and I only understand snippets, about friends Sonia and Fat Abe, or a class they attend with three alphabet letters, E, S, and L. Phuong says she loves so and so teacher of E, S, and L. Xuan wrinkles her nose and says the teacher’s breath smells like coffee. Trung nods in silent agreement to Phuong, Xuan, or both. I can’t be sure.

In order to make more room in the backseat, Phuong and I stuff the seatbelt buckles into the crack between the synthetic leather cushions. Our parents don’t mind; they view seatbelts as yet another American frill, much like dishwashers or deodorant. Ba likes to remind us the family vehicle back in Vietnam was a Honda moped, with all three of my siblings sandwiched between him in the front and Ma in back, weaving through the crowded streets of Saigon.

“Goddamn!” He laughs whenever he tells this story and we can see the gold fillings in the deep recesses of his mouth. “Phuong was just a baby then, held by your mother. No seatbelt, no helmet, nothing. That’s what it’s like over there. Tin không? Can you believe that?”

We can believe that because Ba drives like he’s never driven a car before. He grips the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock, on the dot. His posture frozen upright. He refuses to relax because getting too comfortable will surely lead to collision. Instead of driving the speed limit, he takes that number and subtracts ten to fifteen miles. We skulk along the high way. Everyone hates us on the I-19. Truck drivers honk. Hunchbacked grannies flip us off. We beg him to please drive like a normal person but he ignores us.

Ba’s greatest fear is the police. Years later, I’ll learn how he lived through the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. He witnessed what people in overnight positions of power were capable of: random late-night searches of neighbors’ homes, and the arrest and “re-education” of people he knew, like my great uncle who was sent to a labor camp and separated from his wife and two young children for thirteen years. Instead of threatening me with the “Boogeyman,” my parents warn, “Càhn Sát, the police, will get you if you’re naughty.” Each time I see a cop car, my insides turn to gelatin.

Seated on Ma’s lap, I watch Ba slow the Alligator for a distant stop sign. With another half block to go, he taps his foot on the gas pedal to get us closer to the stop sign, only to stop altogether seconds later.

Ba’s driving is an exaggerated show of respecting the law, but he is a road hazard. One a weekend morning when I’m big enough to be seated in back, we get pulled over. We’re on our way to the Asian grocery stores on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. The sirens blare behind us just like they do on the TV shows.

“Dụ mẹ. Motherfucker. Kill me now,” he says as he pulls the car to the side of the road. Then he swivels around to face us. “No one speaks English! Got it? The less we understand the better.” He directs this at the four of us because we always communicate to each other in English, only resorting to Vietnamese when the conversation involves our parents, relatives, or their friends. He knows we are well versed in switching languages on the fly, or in this case, holding our tongues.

“You kids buckle up or else Càhn Sát are going to throw you in jail,” Ma adds.

Xuan and Trung are frantic digging the seatbelts out from under the cushion, all while accusing Phuong and me of burying them too deep. Trung finds three and because I’m the youngest, I’m left to fend for myself—most likely alone in a barren prison cell.

The cop saunters over and peers into the window at the four of us, silent in the backseat. He’s Viking blonde and enormous. He could be the size of all of us kids combined. I fold my hands in my lap in prayer, in a last-minute declaration of my innocence. It also hides my nonexistent seatbelt buckle. Ba does his lost-in-translation routine that involves a lot of hearty smiles and deferential nods. The police officer lets us off the hook “this time,” but warns, “Driving too slow isn’t safe either, you know.” Ba laughs and his gold filling twinkles in the afternoon sun. He says “Thank you” again before accelerating until Càhn Sát is out of sight, then returns to creeping below the speed limit as cars whiz past us on the road.

***

Seeing my siblings in the backseat now, I realize I’m the only one in the family wearing something new. It’s starchy. A pale pink confection with fluffy marshmallow sleeves and an exaggerated pilgrim collar that curls up and scratches my chin.

I wore this dress once before, at a birthday party. There were balloons that shined like enormous lollipops, a frosted cake with flowers made of thick sugared petals, and huge bottles of Pepsi that I swallowed in greedy gulps with both hands. In my sugared ecstasy, I spilled and stained the front of the dress. Ma managed to get most of it out, but I can still see a faint brown outline floating on my chest.

My hair is done up too. In the living room earlier that morning, Ma beckoned me holding the artillery in her hands: a broad hairbrush, which, from a distance, resembled a spanking paddle, and two rubber hair tie nunchucks with red, plastic balls attached to both ends.

“Sit still,” she commanded, yanking huge fistfuls of my hair.

The brush had wire bristles that seared my scalp with each aggressive stroke. I closed my eyes to stifle the pain and felt my hair crackling tight at my temples. The plastic balls made quick snaps as she wound a tidy bundle on both sides of my head. Two sacrificial pigtails. “There. Cute,” she said. Neither of us smiled.

Ma made sure my sisters and brother were dressed in the best secondhand clothes she could find today, but still they look itchy and poor. Phuong’s wearing a turquoise polyester dress with a skinny lace collar and matching lace sleeves. Two white, decorative buttons dangle down the center. Both sides of her hair are pulled back in matching white barrettes, giving her the appearance of a cocker spaniel statuette.

At ten years old, Xuan has mastered a business casual appearance. No accessories decorate her shoulder-length wispy hair or hand cut bangs. She wears khaki-colored jeans and a red, white, and blue striped collared shirt. Ma probably convinced her to wear this because she believes in dressing in patriotic colors, likely in an effort to placate our foreign-ness in our small Minnesotan town.

At her U.S citizenship ceremony, Ma dazzled in a white knee-length dress with thin, navy, windowpane stripes. Her outfit accented with red heels, a skinny red belt, and matching red lipstick. She convinced the elderly judge who presided over the ceremony to take a photo with her, with Xuan wearing a blue dress and Phuong wearing a dark pink dress (the closest thing to red she owned) standing on each side. It was my mother’s proud American debut. Photo evidence, too, of how she passed the test on her first try, while my father had to re-take the test a second time, begrudgingly, a few years after her, before he finally passed.

Compared to the bright colors adorning us girls, Trung appears camouflaged. His large brown eyes and tanned summer skin blend seamlessly into the mahogany crisscrosses of his short sleeved, button-down shirt and tawny corduroy pants.

When we ask our parents why they aren’t dressed up today, they shudder and make their usual huffs when they don’t want to elaborate. “No. No. We don’t need that,” Ma says.

We kids develop a rash against the synthetic fibers we’re forced to wear, while our parents flaunt their comfortable weekend attire: loose, elastic band pants for Ma and saggy faded Levi’s on Dad. American jeans are too long for his legs, so he has them rolled up several times at the cuff, like denim donuts floating around his ankles.

The Alligator plods through the quiet residential streets until we reach down-town Northfield. Ba parks in front of Harmon’s Photography Studio and orders us out. Ma has me in her arms but I wiggle free. I want to stand on the street like the rest of them.

A bell rings when we open the door, signaling our arrival. The man behind the counter looks as old as Ba. He has the same bushy moustache that looks as itchy as my collar. He glances at our family of six without saying a word. This kind of sullen reaction is familiar to us by now. Ba and Ma both smile. Ma pushes Xuan to the front and tells her, “Hoi Ong di. Go ahead. Ask him.”

Xuan places her hands on the chest–high counter to show she means business. Or perhaps to steady herself. Her voice is poised, well-practiced. “We’d like to get some photos taken today, please.”

“Ask him how much,” Ba says.

“Tell him we want photos of you kids, none of us,” Ma chimes.

“Normally we do photos by appointment only,” Bushy Moustache says. He looks over Xuan’s head at Ma and Ba, as if to chastise them.

“Oh. We didn’t know,” Xuan makes the same forlorn face I’ve seen her do many times. It’s a look of exaggerated hurt and confusion that would be distasteful on most, but elicits sympathy from strangers because she is a ten-year-old translator working full-time for our parents.

“What are you saying? Did he tell you how much?” Ba repeats in Vietnamese.

Bushy Moustache sighs. He points to a sheet of prices and photo packages, which Xuan and my parents bend over and scrutinize. Once they decide on the cheapest, two photo set, he leads our family to the back of the store, cordoned off by a dark and heavy curtain. A raised platform stands in the center of the room, with a lone and regal wicker chair on it. He switches on a bright light that’s attached to a skinny umbrella, rolls down a projector-like screen behind the platform, and repeatedly returns to his camera to see if the view has changed since the last time he checked.

In the meantime, Ma pats down my hair and smooths the layers of my skirt. She adjusts the gold necklace dangling through the petaled labyrinth of my collar, making sure the pendant is perfectly centered below my chin.

It’s the first I’ve seen of this necklace. Ma must have stowed it somewhere safe to preserve it from grubby kid fingers, then clasped it on me when I wasn’t paying attention. I’m reminded of my parents’ friends Cô Dao and Cô Cup, chirping Vietnamese women in our neighborhood who wear a cloying amount of perfume and thin gold bangles with glittery etchings that sparkle up and down their wrists. I’m flattered, feeling exquisitely grown up in my gold adornment. I look down to admire the necklace and see it dangling right above the brown Pepsi stain.

Bushy Moustache turns to Ma and says, “Yup, we’re a go.”

Everyone’s eyes are on me, watching as Ma lifts me up and plants me into the wicker chair that feels dangerously high. She returns to the rest of the family, who stand next to the camera, several feet from me. I feel like a zoo exhibit. Their voices topple over each other’s.

“Smile, ok?”

“Look at the Moustache man.”

“Look happy!”

“Don’t close your eyes! They’re small enough as it is,” Ba says.

“Sit still, Con My, my American child,” Ma coos.

Con My, American Child, is a nickname that’s meant to be funny. It’s what Ma calls me when I get too loud or whiny for her Vietnamese standards, look chubby, hairy, or exhibit unusual behavior that defies her cultural understanding and must be attributed to my American birth. Ma calls me Con My as a joke, but in this moment, I feel jolted.

I’ve been shunned to a solitary chair in the center of the room, opposite a united pack, observing me from a comfortable distance. Why is no one else joining me for a photo? Why am I alone?

“Smile!” they hoot. I scan their faces across the room—Ma, Ba, sisters, and brother—each one feverish with excitement. I hear clapping, whistles, clucks, clicks, snaps, and cheers. Phuong is doubled over in laughter. Dad’s hands are waving in the air as though he were the Master of Ceremonies of his own parade. I might be imagining it, but I think Xuan has a tambourine in her hand, shaking and jostling it to and fro to her own dance party. Even Trung is smiling. Amid the ruckus, Ma calls out Con My again to get my attention.

It’s my greatest fear realized: my family is complete without me. I arrived after Vietnam, the escape by boat, and the refugee camp in Thailand. All my life, I will feel the family I know is a watered down, partial truth. A cleaned-up version that doesn’t quite capture the full picture that is my family.

Up high on the wicker throne, it doesn’t occur to me that my family’s putting on a show for my benefit, in the hopes of getting a good photo. My only desire is to join their festivities. My hands clench both sides of the wicker chair and I cry. In response, their cheers get louder. The skinny umbrella beams hot light on my face. Tears stream down my cheeks and form small puddles in the crevices of my skirt. Despite their cries for me to smile, my lips quiver in dissent, refusing to turn upwards.

Finally, Bushy Moustache says, “Yup, that’ll do it. I tried the best I could, but geesh. She doesn’t like getting her picture taken, huh?”

“What’s the matter with her?” Ma says. The celebration suddenly ends. Everyone looks exhausted, exasperated.

“Cry baby,” Ba declares.

It should have been a happy photo. I should have been smiling—exploding with unbridled joy—for the camera. I didn’t have the worries or troubled memories of escaping Vietnam like my siblings. I was the American everyone could call their own—I have an American daughter. An American sister. It was supposed to be a photo my parents could show off to relatives and friends, a record of their new beginning in this new country. I should have been smiling to prove it.

Instead, it’s only afterwards, when Xuan, Trung, and Phuong come onto the stage to join me, that I am able to smile. Bushy Moustache brings extra chairs and arranges the three of them into a halo around me: Trung seated to my right, Xuan to my left, and Phuong standing behind me. My tears halt. In my relief, I feel lightheaded and giddy. This time, when Ma and Ba tell us to smile from across the room, my legs are bouncing up and down in anticipation. My hands are rolled up in delighted fists in my lap. I squint with laughter.

When we get the photos a week later, the disparity between the first and second shot becomes a family joke. In the first photo, tears well in my eyes, my hands are squeezing the chair tight, and my lips are clenched in a look of constipated despair. In the second photo—the one of all four kids— I look like I’m squealing on a rollercoaster ride, while everyone else has a composed and sensible smile. Together, I am still mismatched from the rest.

My mother will buy matching silver frames and keep the photos on her bedroom dresser for years, until they sell the house and pack everything up. In the mayhem of their cross-country move to California, temporary relocations and reconfigurations of where and how our parents would live as her dementia worsened, as her memory went from blurry to blank, I’d somehow inherit the first photo of me alone and crying.

There are days I live named not good
for anybody. A single misstep
shakes awake the whole
sleeping house. I stand in front of a mirror
that’s upside-down, do my hair around the crack
in the well of my worst nightmare. I, myself,
only dream
when I am awake. Shaving
in the shower I dream
about cutting my own breasts
from my chest,
carving great
globs of flesh from my own
desirability, breaking
the mirror and razoring
across my face, my lips and legs this
is what you’ve done to me.

Outside the house, roving eyes
follow me everywhere,
I am whistled at, cat-called, bat-mouthed,
barked at: I long for a greeting in Swahili that means
don’t fucking look at me like that.

I can’t pass the shadow spot on the road, where the light
does not reach, can’t pass between
the houses because my feet are filled
with terror, my entrails
with hunger for a calm
I can’t eat. If there was a bottle of tequila
or a knife fight,
or a bar brawl, I’d crawl
right in there and take it over.

I hate the word survivor,
because it means tethered to the thing
you survived. If you tie a pencil
to a piece of string, pin-prick
a center, and pull it out tight,
push it round to the left, right, left
you get a perfect circle, an invisible
point of origin.

Do you know why I
am always in motion,
on the road? For the same reason
the pencil faces outward: when we reach
the edge of our rope the line
gets taut, we swing or are swung
in triumphant arches
round its outer
boundary, feel only the wind
on our face, a slight tug
under our belly button.

In other words:
we are no longer aware
we exist.

This fate, for me and the pencil:
born dizzy,
die dizzy,
call it freedom.

The cave remembers. More than remembers, the cave sees far past the surface under which she sleeps. Her tributaries of tunnels, like hollow fingers, spread underground for hundreds of miles. They touch acre after acre, town after town, and county after county. As if she is a single, enormous mass of substance, top indistinguishable from bottom, her fingers are also her eyes. Each vein of tunnel that yawns open to the world above is an eye, and her thousands of eyes keep watch on the families who grow and the dynasties that die off above her.

The cave remembers the moments we have experienced before and sees the moments we will inevitably return to again in a hundred or maybe five hundred years. People change on the surface but always come back around. As the surface changes, the cave does not. She remains solid, her caverns hollow but permanent, ancient. She keeps watch for the people who need her and remembers for the people who don’t. They will always need her, she believes. She spreads her arms, her tunnels, to those who seek refuge in the dark.

She is there even when they leave her for those dirtier, manmade caves whose essence clogs the lungs of the people she has worked so hard to protect.

Fear clenches her. How could they leave? She holds her breath, her veins winding and unwinding beneath the earth as she waits, determined to be here when they realize their mistake. Her caverns will be open for them, always welcoming. When her people inevitably return, her ever-expanding tunnels will reach out and encircle them as they once again find their roots in the darkness. These arms will envelop them whole, the world will resume spinning, and the cave will finally let loose that breath and sigh.

***

Dixie propped her hip against the rotting wood bannister of their porch’s railing and watched Boone disappear through the front door only to emerge again with yet another bag.

“Good Lord, you’re not going to war,” she said when he bounded across the porch again, the screen door clattering shut behind him. The late August air was still hanging on to summer’s mugginess, and Dixie could feel a bead of sweat collecting in her cupid’s bow.

Boone shot her a smile as he dropped a large brown paper sack—full of cornbread for the road, courtesy of Nan—into the growing pile of stuff on the gravel drive. His waves of black hair stuck to his forehead in the heat. “I won’t see you until Thanksgiving, girl,” he called up to her. “And who knows what kind of food they’ve got around those camps. Probably tastes like piss—”

“Watch your mouth,” Nan spat, appearing in the doorway, an apron over her overalls.

Dixie eyed her mother, who was always referred to as “Nan,” even though her name was not any variation of the kind. Boone had cursed profusely in front of Dixie since they were newly teenagers, and Dixie didn’t pay it any mind. What Dixie didn’t like was the way Boone called those towns “camps.” Camps sounded … involuntary. They were more mining towns. There would be general stores, and Boone would be living with his friend Rhett, who had graduated with him this past spring. He would be a few hours’ drive away, but he would be living just fine.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Boone said, taking the porch steps two at a time. At eighteen, Boone was only a little more than a year older than Dixie. He leaned over and gave their mother a kiss on the cheek. Well, Dixie’s mother. His own mother had been gone since childbirth, and when his father died in Vietnam in sixty-five, Boone had only been thirteen. Glasgow, Kentucky was a tiny town where people shared food, gossip, and prayers. In a town that small, they also shared children. There was no question that the poor, orphaned boy would be taken in by a neighboring family. The only question was who. Her own husband taken by the war, Nan had the dinner table set for three before she had even asked Boone if he wanted to stay.

And stay he did. From twelve years old, Dixie had grown up with Boone, the boy constantly hovering between a kind of brother to her or simply an extended guest. They looked nothing alike, which was, of course, the first thing new and nosey neighbors liked to point out before they heard the full story of how Boone came to live with her and Nan. Dixie had Nan’s fair hair and floury skin, while Boone’s dark hair and eyes swam against warm skin.

Regardless of how Boone fit into Dixie’s family, he fit all the same. This made it hard to let him leave now.

Dixie crossed her arms as Boone and Nan watched the single-lane road at the bottom of the hill where their farm’s property ended. Rhett would be here any minute. Boone’s own ride sat in the grass on the side of the drive, newly washed but only an afterthought. He had purchased the used ’66 Chevrolet Chevelle the summer he was sixteen, after having saved up cash from working at the auto shop in downtown Glasgow. The boys had decided to take Rhett’s beat-up pickup; coal-infused air couldn’t hurt the junky thing, and since they’d be living in a town that was in the stack shadow of the mines, it would do them no good to bring something with them that was any kind of nice.

“You got enough food?” Nan asked, her words clipped. If she was at all affected by Boone’s leaving, she would throw her emotions into work around the farm or cooking. The kitchen became a warzone when Nan was determined to put her mind off something. She had not supported Boone’s decision to work in the mines from the beginning.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Boon repeated.

Nan nodded, patted his cheek, and went back into the house. Dixie could hear the rich clanging of a cast iron skillet through the mesh of the screen door.

Boone edged up closer to Dixie, his movements tentative, as if trying to feel her out. “You still mad?” he asked.

Dixie pursed her lips. “You could’ve stayed here. Worked in Glasgow.”

“The mines pay better.”

“’Cause people die in those caves.”

“Nan can’t hold onto the farm much longer, you know this. Now c’mon, you’re too intelligent to sulk.”

Her lips quirked at this. He was always a flatterer. It had to be because his dark hair made him look like Elvis. That gave him all the confidence in the world. “You’re going to miss my birthday next week,” she said, a last effort to sway him.

Boone saw right through her. “When I get back, I want to read your college essays. You hear? I want to see progress.”

“As if you can spell for shit.” They both cracked up at this, just as Rhett’s pickup pulled into the drive. Dixie could hear the King playing on the radio all the way from the porch. As Rhett pulled up, Boone dug in his jeans pocket and pulled out the keys to his Chevy.

“Here,” he said, tucking them into Dixie’s own front pocket while her arms remained crossed. “Take care of my car, yeah? No joy rides.” Before she could protest, he leaned in, his eyes glancing toward the kitchen window. “Sell it if you need to.”

Overcome with the sudden responsibility, Dixie could only nod, her tongue numb.

“Now don’t miss me too much,” he said, grinning.

“I’m not going to miss you,” she finally managed. “Don’t let the caves swallow you up.”

This only made his smile grow. “I swear you sprout a freckle every time you lie, Dixie Cup.” His smile disappeared then and he leaned forward. His lips found her cheek and stayed there a long second that made her stomach flip. When he pulled back, something had changed in his expression but she didn’t get the chance to hunt it out before he bounded down the front steps, leaving her alone on the porch.

***

The cave’s oldest children were the indigenous peoples. They found her thousands of years ago, and even back then, she was already ancient. But this was the first time she saw light.

They carried their cane plant torches and filled her meandering tunnels with heat and life. Their bare feet padded against the rough stone of her insides, gripping the jagged paths with calloused soles. They only touched the first layer of her skin, only explored dozens of miles even though she had hundreds more to show them. Nevertheless, this was the moment she ceased to be alone under the earth. Finally, other heartbeats thrummed against the backdrop of her own.

They came for her minerals. Perhaps for medicine, the cave didn’t really care. She was just happy to provide something after millennia of silence. They took her gypsum, her mirabilite, and her epsomite. She had plenty, and wanted to share with these people her history and all she had seen and all she had remembered. Finally, here were ears her winds and underground rivers could whisper to.

She was their protector, and kept them neither cold nor hot with her temperate air. The copper flames of their torchlights illuminated her walls better than the harsh, white lights that would come later in those other, manmade caves of soot and death. It was as if these Native peoples understood her and had struck a deal: in turn for her protection against the harsh weather above, they would be kind to her and listen to her stories. She kept the artifacts they left behind, preserved these objects just as these peoples had taken care to preserve her.

She felt herself grow proud with purpose when they used her cool temperatures for burial preparation. These ceremonies of mortality left her feeling determined to preserve these bodies as she had preserved their objects. So she opened her long tunnels of arms, the veins of her being, and enveloped these peoples. When they hopped between the surface and the underground, still she kept her arms open. And when these people returned to her for the last time, their bodies stiff and cold and ready for the earth, she welcomed them as she always had, and took them into her embrace and sighed.

***

Boone returned the night before Thanksgiving. He snuck in like a ghost. Dixie was already in bed, but she awoke from her drowsiness the moment she heard his voice as he greeted Nan, who apparently knew he was coming and had waited up for him.

Any bitterness she felt at having not been told he was coming back so soon disappeared under a healthy flow of excitement. Boone was back! Things would be normal, if only for the few days he had off for the holiday. She hoped he would have Christmas off, too. When they were younger and she was still holding onto the idea of Santa Claus, Boone would sneak out onto the front porch at midnight on Christmas Eve. Softly, just enough for Dixie to hear if her bedroom door was cracked, he would whistle Jingle Bells. It only took her one more Christmas to realize what he was doing, but she didn’t tell him when she figured it out. Even when he knew that she knew, he didn’t stop. It had become one of their rituals.

The moment she heard his voice, she realized how much she had missed the ritual of him, the presence his movements took up in the house. They each had their own small bedroom, attached to each other by a two-sink bathroom. When she finally heard Boone’s tall body drop onto his mattress, she crept into their shared bathroom and knocked softly on his bedroom door.

This was another one of their rituals. When he was still home, she would knock on his door shortly after they had both gone to bed. He would leave the door unlocked and she would slip into his room to find him waiting for her. She would hop onto his single bed and curl against his ribs. Then he would tell her a ghost story before she crawled back into her own bed. Boone’s stories were filled with the spooks he claimed wandered the forests and farms around them, or those that haunted the passages of Mammoth Cave only a few miles to the West.

But this time, the door was locked. Heat crept into her cheeks. She had never felt awkward slipping into his room before, but it was as if a sheet had been pulled from her body in a cold room. Something was different. She went to bed without knocking again.

The next morning, Dixie dropped her stack of college essays on the small round kitchen table before Boone. As he read, she read him.

He was thinner. Nan would have none of that, and already had a big bird in the oven. His deep eyes and black hair were darker, like he had absorbed the coal he worked to mine. It looked as if shadows had attached themselves to his skin, but Dixie could see it was just coal dust that had stuck to the angles and swells of his face. She’d heard him washing in the bathroom that morning, but he’d barely managed to scrape a single layer of soot from his surface.

His appearance didn’t bother her as much, though. Something else had shifted. In the two months since she had seem him, something in him seemed to have given way, and he stared at her college essays as if he wasn’t seeing anything at all.

“Don’t just stare at him like that, Augusta May,” Nan called across the room. “Come help me make this bread.”

Dixie flinched at her Christian name. In the way that Nan was called Nan, Dixie was called Dixie. There was no particular sense to it, it was simply the way things were and the way things would always be. She joined her mother at the counter where a fresh bowl of sticky cornbread batter sat waiting. Nan opened the cabinet by her feet and hauled out the cast iron skillet, a beast of a thing and black as coal, passed down to her from her mother and her mother before that.

Nan motioned for Dixie to come closer. “First, we’ll coat the skillet with oil and get it hot in the oven,” she explained as she tilted the pan this way and that so the oil ran up onto the raised sides. With her accent, oil came out as all. “After it’s set in there a minute, we’ll take it back out and pour the batter in. That way the hot oil makes the surface of the bread good and crispy.”

At Nan’s instruction, Dixie hoisted the skillet off the counter as Nan opened the oven door. The joints in Dixie’s wrists shrieked at the weight. How in the world did Nan haul the thing in and out of the cabinets all day long? Then she noticed the rough texture of the inside of the skillet and she stopped, bracing the weight against her chest.

“Nan, this is dirty. There’s bits of stuff still stuck to it.”

“Of course, girl,” Nan said, surprise on her face. “You don’t really clean it. Not with soap. Just run some water on it when you’re through.”

“You mean you don’t scrape all this shi—all this stuff off?”

“Good Lord, no. The leftover flavors go into the next meal, and the next. It’s the texture of the grit that gives the bread a good crust.”

Dixie looked to Boone for support, but he was engrossed in her essays—or still far off, she couldn’t tell—so she lugged the oiled skillet into the oven. Sometimes Nan made no sense to her. That skillet would just get dirtier and dirtier until it couldn’t hold any residue any longer and it crumbled under its own weight.

That night, Dixie lay awake in her bed. Nan had gone to bed hours ago, and Boone had eventually settled in as well. She didn’t dare try the door to his room tonight. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she had a feeling that if she found the door locked to her a second time, she might crumble right onto the nipple pink tile floor of the bathroom.

Not long after midnight, she heard the bathroom sink running. Boone would be leaving tomorrow and then she would not see him again until Christmas. She made up her mind quick and hopped out of bed. She found him hunched over one of the sinks, scrubbing his veiny hands raw. They looked fine to her, but he was so focused on his task, he didn’t notice she was there until she came up to him and took the bar of soap from his hands.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, girl,” he said softly. She could see now he had missed some crud in the cracks around his thumbnails. “I just … sometimes I think I see the dirt when it’s not there. It’s like it doesn’t come off in my head. I can smell them. The tunnels. It’s like I can’t stop breathing it, like it follows me. I taste it in everything, too.”

“Then don’t go back, idiot,” Dixie whispered.

Boone shook his head and that was that. “I’m sorry I locked the door last night,” he added. “I just wanted to be alone for a stretch. I didn’t have a good story for you, anyhow.” He tried to grin as he said the last part, but it didn’t fill his face the way his smiles usually did.

Dixie didn’t need any type of explanation, and replaced the bar of soap in her hand with a nail file she pulled from a drawer. She grabbed his hand and began carving the dirt out from underneath his nails. He watched her work, inching closer to her every time she gave a tug on one of his fingers.

“Well, tell me a different story,” she eventually said. Her accent came out just like Nan’s when she was nervous or felt small. Well sounded like wool. “Tell me what it’s like down there.”

Boone inhaled a steadying breath and began to tell her about the Eastern Kentucky Coalfields, about his mine, which they called the Hurricane Creek Mine. As he talked, Dixie cleaned his nails and listened, thinking all the while she much preferred the older ghost stories.

***

In the middle of the 19th century, the cave became sick. She was not prepared for these people and the contagion they promised. But who was she to cast someone out? So she welcomed them, her caverns tall and her tunnels numerous, and shared in their disease.

She remembered when the doctor brought his patients beneath the earth. They thought her air would save them all. Not just save them—cure them. She watched as the doctors and builders scrambled to construct a makeshift stone hospital within her to house their sick. As they built, and as the patients trickled in on unsteady legs or stretchers, the cave could feel the desperation cling to her air the way humidity never had.

The patients could never walk and explore the tunnels she offered them or had the energy to appreciate the rock formations she herself had been building for thousands of years. The patients’ sweat and coughed-up blood and phlegm coated her floors, and for the first time, the cave felt truly helpless. There was nothing she could do except remain consistent. Her constancy was why the patients were here in the first place.

But she failed them. Her air did not work. She could feel each moment a patient slipped away and would not come back. Within months, most were dead and those who were not fled to die on the surface in the sunlight. Perhaps she was not the safe haven she had promised to be, but surely she was better than those other caves that injected their peoples with disease the moment they stepped into the darkness. At least she offered her patients quiet while those others only grabbed onto their humans’ lungs and refused to let go.

Alone again, the cave realized she could not save everyone. But she hoped the people would come back to her, that they had not been scared away by the empty promises of her massive caverns. She would wait, and in the meantime, she stifled a lonely sob with a powerful, wind-filled sigh.

***

The crumbs on the cast iron peeled off layer by sticky layer under the running faucet as Dixie dragged the flat edge of a spatula across the skillet. She huffed, careful to not scrape off the deeper layers Nan had instructed her to leave. It didn’t quite fit in the kitchen sink on account of its size, so Dixie had to rotate the entire thing every few seconds.

The Christmas dinner she and Nan had prepared waited on the table for them, but the mines had made Boone work today, so Dixie did not see why she had to wrestle the cast iron when the person who enjoyed cornbread the most wouldn’t even be here.

She gave up and shut off the noisy faucet. That’s when she heard it: a soft song hovering on the dense December air. The whistling was coming from the front porch, and it almost sounded like … Jingle Bells. She raced out onto the front porch only to find it empty. Is this what Boone meant in his stories when he claimed Mammoth Cave used its winds to whisper to people and lure them in?

Then hands grabbed her from behind, and she squealed like a newborn piglet as Boone’s fingers mercilessly tickled the soft flesh under her ribs. He only let up when she was out of breath and sprawled across the wood beams of the porch. He grinned down at her, his smile still not as powerful as it used to be before he left for the mines.

“Miss me, Dixie Cup?” he crooned.

“Ass,” she breathed, holding her ribs.

“Language, Augusta May,” Nan said from the doorway. She had come running at the noise. Giving Boone a one-armed hug, her other arm cradling jars of apple butter, Nan ushered them inside. “We were just about to sit down to dinner, so go clean up. And leave your boots on the porch. Don’t be tracking anything into my house.” She said all of this with a chuckle, unable to hide her excitement that Boone had made it home in time. She turned to Dixie. “Get off the ground. It’s Christmas. Act Decent.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Dixie and Boone chorused, exchanging a wry look as Nan disappeared into the house. Just as Boone reached down to pull Dixie to her feet, a rough cough tore through him. He doubled over and stepped away to cough into the soot-covered sleeve of his jacket. Dixie just watched him, unsure what to do. This was not a cough a glass of water or a shot of Jim Beam would fix.

When Boone turned back to her, the hollowness she had seen on his face over Thanksgiving had returned. “Don’t tell Nan,” was all he said.

Hours later, after the cornbread and ham and jam cake were gone, Dixie and Boone sat on the carpet around their small Christmas tree. Wrapping paper debris lay scattered around their legs. They watched the tiny fireplace as they sat, sipping on bourbon. Boone had poured her a miniscule inch from Nan’s liquor cabinet after Nan had retired for a nap. Every so often, Dixie knocked her outstretched foot against Boone’s, and he would knock back.

“When do you have to go back?” she asked quietly.

“Day after tomorrow. Rhett’ll pick me up.”

Two days, Dixie thought. Two nights. Two ghost stories if she was lucky. That was barely any time at all. She didn’t respond, hiding her disappointment in the pressure of her fingers against her glass.

Boone sat up with a sudden jerk. “I’ve got one last present for you,” he said, digging under the torn wrapping paper. He handed her a small paper package, but as she reached for it he pulled it back. “Wait,” he said. “You been good? Did you get all your applications in?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course I did.”

He gave her the gift. She tore through the paper, trying to ignore the black fingerprints that smudged its surface. Popping the lid off the small box inside, she huffed. It was a literal, sooty, jagged piece of coal.

Boone laughed, an honest to God light in his eyes. Maybe the coal was worth it, Dixie thought, if it made him laugh like that. “For your naughty heart,” he chuckled.

Again, she rolled her eyes.

“Look under it,” he said then. The humor in his look vanished. Dixie set the coal to the side and dug through its tissue paper nest. She pulled out a simple silver chain, and dangling from that chain was a round, bright green stone the size of a peppercorn.

“Peridot,” she whispered. Her birthstone.

“I wanted to get it for you for your birthday, but I was gonna miss it anyway and I didn’t have the cash saved up yet. So Merry Christmas,” Boone said, his breath short, almost like he was nervous but maybe it was just his cough.

Dixie felt her cheeks warm as she twisted on her butt so Boone could drape the necklace around her throat. This gift was not the same as the kind of gifts they had given each other before. The hot blush at her temples only confirmed her body could feel the difference, too. When she turned back around, she found he looked equally caught off guard.

“Where did you get the money for this, Boone?” she asked.

He shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

Dixie scrambled for anything to say. “I made the cornbread this year,” she blurted out. “All by myself.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve bragged on you all through dinner.”

She shrugged. “I guess in case it tasted like shit.”

The laughter that erupted from Boone had him gasping for air seconds later, his coughs echoing around the silent house.

Later that night, as midnight crept closer, Dixie found herself in the bathroom at Boone’s door. She had listened to him cough for twenty minutes through the walls. She knocked before she tried the knob. The door was unlocked and swung open. Boone sat against the headboard of his bed outside his blankets, clad only in old pajama pants that were now too short on his growing frame. When he noticed her, he scooted over to make space. She padded across the dark room and joined him.

This time, she didn’t curl up against him like she had before. When he was home for Thanksgiving, they had talked in the bathroom before retreating to separate rooms. She had not been next to him on his bed since he left for the mines and now she felt distinctly out of place. But before she knew it, Boone had moved closer to her so his left side was pressed against the entire length of her right.

He began to tell her another ghost story. She fingered her new necklace as she tried to listen, but she could only focus on the heat of his body, the way his hand eventually found hers in the dark and held on. Finally he stopped in the middle of the story and looked right at her.

“I’ve been making more money than I let on,” he said in a low murmur like he was confessing something. “I haven’t been sending everything back to you and Nan. I’ve been saving some of it.”

“For what?”

She could hear his breathing strain in the silence. “For us. I’ll work in the mines while you finish your senior year, and then as soon as you graduate, we’ll take my car and go wherever you end up for school. Then I’ll sell it in the nearest city and we’ll have plenty to live on for a while. I’ll find a job and you can study and … and we’ll just get out of this place before we suffocate down here.”

This was not what she had expected at all. She didn’t even know this rash boy was capable of planning like this. “Where could we go?” she asked.

“Anywhere,” he said, urged on by the eagerness in her eyes. “Louisville, maybe. I’ll take you to that hotel that was in The Great Gatsby.”

“What about Nan?”

“You know Nan wouldn’t leave here.”

Dixie did know. But despite that, her chest tightened with excitement at the thought of starting new someplace. With Boone. “Why?” she asked after a hum of silence.

His confidence faded and his fingers worried her own where their hands were clasped. “Because I want to know where I’m headed,” he said, his voice hoarse. “The lights they give us down there, they don’t show us more than three feet in front of us. I never know what’s around the next corner.”

Even in the haze of the dim room, she knew he was staring right at her, knew what he was about to do, what with the way he was looking at her like he had finally found a diamond after crawling through endless tunnel after tunnel. She beat him to it, and pressed her lips to his.

Four days later, Boone was gone. He had been away at the mines for a couple days already. Tomorrow was the last day of the year. Dixie remembered the date, only because it was on the radio. She was in the kitchen, bent at the waist to haul the cast iron from its slumber. Nan still cooked furiously like she always did in the days after Boone left, but she had relegated the cast iron to Dixie lately. Dixie reckoned that’s why it eventually got passed down; only the young women of the family had the strength to carry its weight after a while.

The war was on the television, the sound turned way low. She had stopped listening anyway when they started up about the draft. President Nixon flashed onto the screen occasionally. Dixie preferred the radio, which was the only way she found out about local happenings.

She did not register the information at first when the alarmed voice came over the radio. She only started to pay attention when she heard the words Hurricane Creek Mine. An incessant humming filled her ears as she stood up and strained to catch the news report.

Hyden, Kentucky. Connected mines Fifteen and Sixteen, together known as Hurricane Creek Mine. Thirty-nine men caught in a coal dust explosion underground. Thirty-eight dead, one man taken to the hospital. The lone survivor was near the portal in the belt entry …

The cast iron slipped from her sweaty palms and hit the floor, shattering the fragile wooden floorboard at her feet.

***

The wars came next. It was like nothing the cave had ever seen.

The twenties had her on top of the world; there was nowhere to hide anymore. Explorers and entrepreneurs competed to explore her, to catalogue her, to guide dozens of people through her tunnels as they put her on full display during these so-called cave wars. Suddenly, they wanted to know everything, all of her secrets. How far did she go, what was her largest cavern, how old was she? Competing explorers tried to find others like her, but the men who owned her only laughed. There would never be another network like her hiding beneath the earth, just as there never had been in the history of time. She did not know why the people began to crave the darkness and the unknown during this time.

The forties toppled her from her place in the sky. She made her official debut as a landmark only a few months before the Japanese let loose their bombs and her country was pulled into war. No one needed her anymore, even though they had only mapped forty miles of her so far. There were other, more important caves to focus on, manmade ones to the East and West of her. Those caves were suddenly on top of the world, their coal thrusting them into the forefront. Oh, how she wanted to scream. Those weren’t caves, those were tombs! They could offer decades, maybe a century of support before they became unsustainable. She could offer millennia. She had been watching and protecting since the world began. This wartime boom didn’t promise a future, but no one seemed to want to listen to her, even as boys continued to succumb to the thick, black air that slowly built up on their lungs like a silent wound.

There was nothing the cave could do this time except wait. Wait, and sigh at the naïve and hungry world around her.

***

The fire boss for Hurricane Creek Mine had examined and green-lit mines Fifteen and Sixteen just that morning. Later, investigators discovered that the preshift examination for mine Fifteen was instead for mine Sixteen and had been recorded incorrectly. The man who actually examined mine Fifteen claimed to have recorded the details, but the record could not be located.

These facts would come later. Dixie knew none of this now as she and Nan waited on the front porch on New Year’s Day. A man from the mines was supposed to pay them a visit. For what, she didn’t know. To hand them Boone’s body? To bring them his belongings? Nobody had told them anything more than what had been on the radio the last couple days. She tried to keep her mind blank of all these questions. If she thought too hard about anything right now, she would crumble. If she crumbled, Nan would too. And if Nan went down, Dixie would just disintegrate all over again.

A black Ford pulled into their long drive. Its slick exterior instantly fell prey to a healthy coat of gravel dust. The car stopped at the porch steps. Dixie felt Nan shivering next to her, despite their thick barn coats. The passenger door opened and a man stepped out. Nan sunk to the bottom step, her head in her hands, and began to shake.

Boone shut the door behind him. His right arm was in a sling, a thick wad of gauze had been taped over his right ear, and cuts and scrapes littered his face. Relief struck Dixie, damn if it made her selfish. Her knees went weak but Boone was there, his good arm around her in a fierce hug, keeping her from totally sinking into the earth.

Over the next couple days, as more information about what had caused the explosion trickled in, they only left the house once. Boone had insisted he pay his respects at Rhett’s funeral. He had to step out of the service twice when coughing hit him. Dixie did not cry once despite the tears on Boone’s face; she clung to her selfishness like a small light in the darkness.

Boone was resting, asleep on the couch when the first letter was delivered to their house. Nan saw the front of the letter and immediately dissolve into sobs so strong, Boone startled awake. She abandoned the greens on the stove and fled to her bedroom.

“Open it for me, girl?” Boone asked Dixie, on account of his bad arm. She read it aloud to him. He was to report to the Louisville recruiting office in the next forty-eight hours.

He left for Louisville the next day, catching a ride with another boy who had also been called for immediate physicals. Nan would not come out of her room, so Dixie made eggs and saw him off. She helped him put on his best suit—she didn’t understand why he dressed up—and he even took off his sling for the trip. Standing on the porch, he promised her he would be back that night or in the morning. She draped her peridot necklace around his stiff collar.

“For style. Don’t lose it.”

As he pulled away with the other boy, still Dixie did not break under the weight of it all.

Hours later, maybe around midnight, she heard a car door slam. She was in bed but was miles from the depth of sleep. Her ears followed his movements through the house. Boone closed his bedroom door, struggled out of his suit, then took a quick shower. The Velcro of his sling was loud in the silence and then all was quiet. Dixie thought he had gone to bed.

A minute later, she heard a knock at her door and Boone stole into her room. He slipped under the blankets next to her, leaving his bandaged arm outside of the covers, and rested his head next to hers on the same pillow. With his body so close to hers, she could feel the beating of his heart slow as he calmed down. His cold bare feet wound around hers under the blankets.

Eventually, he whispered into the stillness. “I didn’t pass the physical.”

Again, that selfish relief warmed her veins. Although she was confused. Boone would turn nineteen at the beginning of summer; he was still a young man.

“Why?” she asked.

He took a deep, rough breath. “Asthma.” Soon, he drifted off next to her.

It was two in the morning—or three, she wasn’t sure—when Dixie snuck out of bed, Boone oblivious to her absence. All she knew was that it was still pitch black outside. She crept to the kitchen and hauled that cast iron skillet from its cabinet and slunk outside into the night, carrying the heavy thing with her. She didn’t bother to put on shoes, even with the grass crisp from frost.

She stumbled in the darkness for an hour, maybe longer, all the while dragging the weight of the skillet. How in the world did someone think it a good idea to make a daily item so damn heavy? Did they not think that perhaps it was only durable and would live through generations because it was too difficult to use? Even as splinters worked their way into the soft flesh of her arches, Dixie kept at it. She knew the woods around their farm, and the woods around those woods, like she knew the curls of Boone’s hair. This blackness did not scare her.

With only moonlight to guide her, she finally found what she was looking for: the mouth of an unremarkable cave that lay a mile or so off the main road through Glasgow. It was the forgotten entrance to a branch of Mammoth Cave’s extensive underground network, and it was exactly where Boone’s stories said it would be.

Dixie entered without hesitation. The grass under her feet quickly melted into rough, slippery rock. She didn’t make any turns, heeding the warnings in Boone’s stories, yet pushed onward into the cave until she was surrounded by impenetrable nothingness. The temperature rose and settled around sixty degrees, and when she could at last make out the whistling of a large, gaping cavity, she paused. Her nearly numb toes felt the path before her and touched on the edge of a precipice. She thought of Boone and his meager few feet of light in those dust-choked mines, which were nothing like this cave with its cool, moist walls around her now.

Asthma. If only she could pretend it was that benign.

With the fading strength in her muscles, Dixie heaved the cast iron over the edge. It screamed as it dropped, clanging against rock after rock as it fell into the abyss of a cavern below. Each resounding toll echoed ten-fold around the cave, and those echoes reverberated deep into the earth, loud enough to wake generations of the dead.

***

Just as the cave liked to give without asking, she accepted this gift without question.

Visitors so rarely graced her outer fingertips and there was still so much she had to show these people, so much left unexplored. Sure, there were those who were working to catalogue her veins, but what would be the point if those other, greedy caves and their explosive tunnels worked their way through the land toward her until they nipped at her heels?

She would not think too hard about that yet, though. Now, she would help the girl find her way safely out of the darkness. The cave could tell this was a girl who belonged on the surface of things, not because she couldn’t handle the depths, but rather because the depths might not be able to handle her. This was a girl of the cave’s own kin, one who could see and, more importantly, one who could remember the lessons that would allow her to see better as she neared the end of the tunnel. The cave would never steal this girl earlier than was necessary. That’s what she hoped set her apart from the others. She did not posses the unique greediness that belonged to those people and their caves who solely thought of the here and now.

When it came time for the girl to come home, to take her place next to the cave beneath the ground, the cave would be waiting with open arms to help the girl pass through into the next life—not with a tragic scream of grief or wail of loss, but with a final, peaceful sigh.

Dedicated to the curiosity and wonder of my daughters.

This story was born out of a question from my seven-year-old, Zara. She asked, “Why does the Ratoncito come to our house and not the Tooth Fairy?”

It begins with magic and love, with hope and wonder …

Hundreds of years ago, when girls and boys would lose their first tooth a magical mouse would appear. He would leave a present in place of the tooth.

Unknown good spirits gave El Ratoncito the power to be like no other mouse.

No one knows how old El Ratoncito is or where he came from, what we do know is that he has been around for at least two hundred years and his first language was Español.

Some say his name is Don Jorge.

He is celebrated for his sense of humor, kindness, and sometimes his quirkiness. This is a story about the night that El Ratoncito visited a little girl named Vida.

On a night just like almost every night, with the sway of the wind bringing in the scent of dreams and the stars glittering like buds of fluorescent light, a sense of calm and normalcy was palpable. Yet it was not quite like other nights when nothing seemed to happen but for a cricket mistaking his house for under the bed. This night had indeed a different feel to it, one that Vida could not yet put her finger on, but it felt playful like fairy dust and squirming puppies.

She placed her tongue in the gap in between her front teeth and felt the space fresh and awkward. An adult tooth would soon come out to fill in the space but for now what occupied her mind was that a fantastical thing would finally occur tonight.

She ran around the house desperately with her baby tooth in one hand, tripping over toys and other stuff she had forgotten to pick up from the floor. Vida was being clumsy as she felt that time was pressing and soon the little mouse would be expecting a nice snack along with her tooth.

“Abuelita, I can’t find any cheese for the Ratoncito and my tooth just fell out! Do you think he’ll like some cheddar or asadero cheese?” asked Vida.

“I think he will like either cheese mija,” answered her Grandma.

“The kids at school talk about the tooth fairy, but I do not know why the Ratoncito comes to our house,” Vida said with a confused face.

“Well, we come from a long line of people from Mexico who are friends with animals and believe in magia. We have been fine tuned to the natural and to the ‘unseen’ world since we can remember,” explained her Abuelita.

“Well, I’ll be ready for tonight!” said Vida.

As she got ready for bed, she left a piece of brie cheese on her night stand, hoping for a a coin or two. But, what she wanted most was for El Ratoncito to like her choice of cheese. “After all we are not in Mexico and maybe he had acquired a taste for different kind of cheese,” she thought.

As the pink and orange hues in the sky turned into purple and then into a deep sea blue and the stars came out to dance like a Neruda poem. And so did la luna, as she stood like a queen overlooking her desert.

Her Abuelita whispered into her ear, “Dulces sueños mi cielo.” And then gave her a kiss on her forehead.

As Don Jorge scrambled out of his hole in the wall he knew his chance to dress as a fairy for a night had finally come. He rubbed his belly while he said to himself, “I hope that I get manchego cheese or pastel de tres leches even—why not? My pancita is growling (grrrr…),” he mumbled.

He had always had a special fondness for Vida. Her thoughtfulness, her kindness, and her humor had motivated him to dress as a fairy that night.

Although the rule was not to be seen, because he loved Vida so much he thought he might bend the rules a bit and say hi to her.

Vida drifted into the mystical realm of the dream world, as if she was hearing a lullaby … “Duermase mi niña, duermaseme ya …”

Don Jorge was just on time, maybe too timely. He peeked out once, he sniffed twice and got a good glance of Vida’s peaceful expression as he squinted his eyes in the dark.

Don Jorge had been visiting the family for generations without being seen, until tonight …

This idea of being seen was a little more adventurous than he was used to so he was a little nervous. He took a step and a twirl in his never-ever worn tutu, and flapped his wings. “¡Ay nanita! Being a fairy is so much fun!” he thought.

Vida heard little footsteps like a crackling fire in the distance. She opened up an eye ever so slightly. The mouse dashed across the rug to eat the brie in one single bite. Then she opened the other eye as she jumped up in bed.

“¿Eres tu Ratoncito?” Vida asked, excited.

As the light of the moon shined through the window he realized he had run out of fairy dust which had made him invisible for a while. The decision of being seen was made for him.

“Gracias por el queso,” he said to Vida timidly.

Vida felt so lucky! He slowly approached her with five pesos and five quarters. She extended her arm and opened her hand to receive them. And so they stayed up for a while exchanging cuentos of their families. Stories about adventures where they had both felt a little afraid but they had managed to be valientes.

“Ratoncito, tell me about how you go from house to house,” asked Vida.

“I travel from casita to casita not by taking a train or sailing a boat or riding my bicycle nor flying on my favorite bird. My secret is that I hop into a tunnel where space and time don’t really follow rules. As I enter it, I think of the person I am visiting and let my heart be filled with love. Once the emotion takes over my body like a beating Tarahumara drum I close my eyes and in what feels like a second I am at the hole in the wall of the child’s bedroom,” the little mouse carefully explained.

“Hmm … so, you travel powered by love or magic,” said Vida.

“Tell me one more story before you go,” Vida asked. She was not going to let him go so quickly. A luciernaga flew by lighting up the room and a current of fresh air came into the room filling it with a scent of magnolias.

Don Jorge took a deep breath and smiled as he begun. “Long ago, children had little time to remind them of how loved they were. Their parents and grandparents would work so much and playtime was shorter than it is today because kids would help with family work. And so, some children would go to sleep and not hear ‘Te Amo’ before bedtime or lose a tooth and not remember to celebrate this special rite of passage.”

“Out of this need came a solution,” said the Ratoncito as he winked. “A very ordinary field mouse, myself, grew tired of the sad faces of these wonderful kids. My desire became so strong that I decided to bring more joy into these big-hearted little ones. That’s when, for the first time, I left coins to a boy named Cipriano when he lost a tooth.”

Vida was so intrigued and could not get enough of this fantastical creature. “And when did you come to our house for the first time?” she asked with wide eyes of expectation and not a hint of sleepiness in her voice.

He reluctantly accepted as he knew there a few more homes to visit. “Esta bien, I will tell you one last cuento. When your abuelita was just around your age I accidentally stepped out before all the lights were turned off. As I turned the corner into la cocina your great grandmother, Esmeralda, happened to be picking up the kitchen. Pegó el grito when she saw me she almost smashed me with the chancla.”

“And then what happened next?” she asked.

“Your abuelita Concha stepped in to protect me without knowing who I was and hid me in her rebozo. We ran to the patio and she let me go safely amongst the cempasúchil flowers. Casi me machucan but thanks to your grandma’s kind heart and bravery I am still the Ratoncito on duty today.”

He was quietly smiling as he remembered other adventures from long ago. “It’s late and it is now time for you to go back inside and for me to go. Remember to place your tooth under the almohada the next time you loose one. And please leave a piece of cheese or an enchilada for me.” He giggled.

“¡Buenas noches linda niña!” said Don Jorge as he scurried out the window and into the night. The stars had a twinkle that shined stronger than before, maybe because of the full moon or maybe because they had been chiming into the magic all along.

All was well that night for the beautiful Vida and for the hard working Ratoncito. She slept peacefully and felt grateful for the unexpected meeting and drifted into sleep with a smile on her face.

The Mexican mouse would have more tales to tell and more adventures to share but that would have to wait, for the nights are as important for the body as magic is for the soul. Buenas noches.

El Fin.

Vocabulary

Español—Spanish

El Ratoncito—The little mouse

Don—Mr.

Vida—life

Abuelita—grandma

Asadero, ranchero, and manchego are mexican cheese

Mija—affectionate expression to refer to a little girl or daughter

Neruda—Pablo Neruda is a chilean poet

Magia—magic

Dulces sueños mi cielo—sweet dreams my love or my sky

Pastel de tres leches—a type of Mexican cake

Pancita—tummy

La luna—moon

Duermase mi niña, duermaseme ya …—Sleep my little girl, sleep now

¡Ay nanita!—oh my!

¿Eres tu Ratoncito?—is that you little mouse?

Gracias por el queso—thank you for the cheese

valientes—valiant or brave

Pesos—Mexican coins

Casita—little house

Tarahumara—an indigenous group located in northern Mexico, who reside predominantly in the area of the Copper Canyon

Luciernaga—firefly

Magnolias—magnolia flowers

Esta bien—That’s fine

Cuento—story

Te Amo—I love you

Pegó el grito—screamed

Chancla—sandals or flip flops

Rebozo—shawl

Cempasúchil flowers—marigolds

Casi me machucan—I was almost smashed

Enchilada—tortilla with a filling of cheese, vegetables, or meat

¡Buenas noches linda niña!—Good night sweet girl

Almohada—pillow

El Fin—The End