ONE FRIDAY NIGHT THE winter I was twelve, tĂo Erwin showed up at my grandmotherâs apartment in Jamaica Plain with his new wife. She was fifteen. Theyâd met during his recent trip to Guatemala. She looked like any one of my cousins, only she didnât weigh as much. Her smile stretched, revealing teeth so white they looked like they would glow in the dark. She was short like tĂo and had fluffy, frizzy hair, and her skin was the same color as the outside of a loaf of bread.
âThis is Yolanda,â tĂo Erwin said. Underneath the buzzing fluorescent light in my grandmotherâs kitchen, he draped his arm over his brideâs shoulder. They practically purred.
When I kissed Yolandaâs cheek I inhaled her scentâa combination of incense and floral perfume. She tickled my chubby middle and giggled when I stood back, startled. My mom tore the lid off a box of Dunkinâ Donuts and set it on the table where my aunts sat, their elbows resting on the green-and-white checkered tablecloth. âÂĄNiños!â she said, âÂĄvĂĄyanse para la sala!â We were banned from the kitchen so the women could get to know Yolanda.
The living room was crowded with mustached uncles, including tĂo Erwin, and my dad, who said, âMija,â and pushed his lips toward the kitchen. âMy daughter, you should go play with your cousins.â
Kids were forbidden from playing in the bedrooms too, so we were left with the linoleum strip of hallway. We cousins ranged in age from six-year-old David, a fan of Ninja Turtles, to sixteen-year-old Erika, with her feathered bangs and Guns Nâ Roses T-shirts. Unlike most of my cousins, I adored Barbies and Pogo balls and puffy-painted tops. My sisters, parents, and I lived in a neighborhood where the only nighttime sound was a recycle bin rattling down a driveway.
My parents agreed that education was important. It was the reason they had left their homeland of Guatemala and, later, Boston. They believed the suburbs meant securityâgood schools, organized sports, a library down the street. My mother pushed the idea of college on us before we could write in cursive. We took elective classes in French and read chapter books for fun. Many of my cousins, on the other hand, lived in Section 8 housing and changed schools often. But when we were all together, in the pocket of Friday night, we were the same. We played checkers and compared our favorite scenes in The Goonies. We played Go Fish with a sticky deck of cards. Eventually, we would teach Yolanda how to play too.
From where I sat that first night, cross-legged in the hallway next to the kitchen, I could see Yolandaâs round face, mischievous grin, and nostrils wide as dimes. My grandmother sat closest to Yolanda, who was eating a Boston cream doughnut. Yolanda wore a long cotton skirt and a Celtics jacket. From my auntsâ head nods and thick fingers raised in the air, it seemed someone was making a speech. I leaned closer and snatched what I could: âUno nunca sabe . . . tiene que cuidarse.â
One never knows what? You must take care of yourself. They hadnât said, âBe careful.â That was something we constantly heard. Be careful riding the scooter and donât go past the yellow house where the Chinese family lives. Be careful swimming or you might drown like Monica almost did one summer. âYou must take care of yourselfâ implied a further concern. If you donât take care of yourself, then . Whatever filled that blank space, I wouldnât know for years. CuĂdate, âtake care.â
That spring we celebrated my birthday with a barbecue at Larz Anderson Park. Surrounded by shades of green, my cousins and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted without downstairs neighbors calling the cops to complain about âthem spics.â I was thirteen, so I was too old to play tag. Instead, I sat at the wooden picnic table and licked the salt off Cape Cod potato chips. I placed one on my tongue and let it dissolve like the wafer at Mass. TĂo Erwin showed up again, this time without his teenage bride.
âIs Yolanda here?â he asked out of breath.
My mother ripped apart a head of iceberg lettuce and arranged the leaves onto a ceramic plate. âNo.â
TĂo massaged his temples with his palms.
âShe was gone when I woke up.â
Later, we found out that Yolanda had been sleepwalking. I imagined her black jelly shoe sandals swishing past the triple-decker apartments, down the concrete hill, reaching Hyde Square, and headed to the supermarket or church. These were the only places sheâd find someone to speak Spanish to, someone to tell about the baby kicking against her expanding belly. After that, tĂo Erwin put newspapers on the rug next to her side of the bed so heâd hear if she got up in the middle of the night. Who knows where she would have wandered. My mother seemed especially concerned for Yolanda. Maybe it was because they had grown up in neighboring colonias in Guatemala. Or maybe she knew more than she would admit.
After the baby was born, Yolandaâs mother, doña Consuelos, arrived from Guatemala to help take care of her new grandson, Jonathan. Weeks and months stretched between family get-togethersâat least for me. Most weekends I earned money babysitting, spending nights in wealthy peopleâs living rooms. While their children slept, I tried to figure out the complicated remote controls to watch movies and eat endless snacksâChipwiches in the freezer, Halloween candy in the cupboard all year round, pizza. I preferred the cushy tan couches, where I would talk to friends on the phone, to the crammed apartments in Boston, where my parents and younger sister still spent weekend nights with family.
The minute I turned sixteen I started working at the Gap. I learned to fold jeans diagonally at the knee. I could explain the difference between a classic and a relaxed fit. The store manager called me Maria. âOh, sorry,â sheâd say, looking over my head when I corrected her. With my employee discount I could finally afford the preppy styles displayed in the storefront windows. I could fit in with the rich Jewish kids at my high school. My cousins started to call me white girl.
We branched out in different directions. Some of the guys took up weed and basketball or started having sex, and my girl cousins found love in the form of serious novios. Or they gained weight. My sister fulfilled my motherâs lifelong dream and became the first in our extended family to go to college. I followed soon after, attending a small liberal arts school two hours away. College was like another country. They served food Iâd never heard of (hummus), students wore clothes I didnât have (Patagonia), and professors encouraged us to call them by their first names. At least I could speak the languageâthe middle- to upper-class, white, privileged vernacularâor at least I could fake it by throwing in the word vicariously now and then. A friend âcouldnât believeâ Iâd never heard the song âStairway to Heaven.â I couldnât believe he had only two cousins. I had thirty-eight.
Once, in World Politics, a student in the front row with a blond ponytail and high-pitched voice declared that it was unjust for ATMs in America to offer Spanish as a language option. âWhy donât people just learn to speak English?â The hardwood floors and ceiling-high windows closed in, and I could feel eighty eyes on me. What did I have to say? Me, the Spanish-speaking representative in our classroom. I raised a shaking hand and said, âSometimes itâs easy to forget that the word Florida means âfloweredâ in Spanish and that Colorado means âredâ or âcolored.â These are words in Spanish because the Spanish were actually here before the English. Iâm just saying.â
When it became too much, when I simply grew tired of having to explain where Iâm from, or when Mexican night in the college dining hall failed to soften my homesickness, I called my mother. Cell phones had not yet infiltrated campuses, but she had a special long-distance plan that allowed unlimited minutes on the weekend. Usually she spoke in Spanish, and I used a mix of Spanish and English. When I didnât want my roommate to understand, I stuck to Spanish. My mother would ask about my classes and my friends, and she would listen with enthusiasm. Sheâd catch me up on the family, almost always sharing news of a pregnancy, a separation, a scandal at church. One day she called to tell me about Yolanda. I was sitting on my twin bed propped up by cinder blocks. My feet dangled off the edge, and through the window I could see that autumn had set the tops of trees ablaze in reds, oranges, and yellows.
âListen. Yolanda called the cops on your tĂo the other night. She was screaming, acting crazy. Tore at her own clothes, clawed her face with her nails. SĂ . . . And she told the police that your tĂo did it. They were going to arrest him but one of the police checked Yolandaâs hands and found blood under her nails.â
âOh my God!â
My roommate walked in wearing a bathrobe and holding a dorm shower caddy. âWhoâs pregnant now?â
âIâll call you back,â I told my mom.
That winter tĂo Erwin, devastated, moved from Boston to Framingham with Jonathan, who was now in elementary school. No one saw Yolanda for a long time. If the adults still talked to her, I didnât know. Eventually, we lowered our heads at the mention of her name. She became hazy in my memory, nothing like the girl who tickled my middle in my grandmotherâs kitchen seven years before.
If I were to draw a timeline of my parentsâ lives, I could see that after they came to the United States in the seventies, their lives dramatically improved. They worked hard, saved money, and in the early eighties bought their first house. My mother learned to drive. We spent nearly every weekend visiting family in Boston, but we always returned to our house in Framingham on Sunday evenings in time for my sisters and me to finish our homework. But moving to America wasnât enough to guarantee a better life for Yolanda. It just wasnât that simple. She hadnât immigrated as we had. She had disappeared.
College came to an end. Classmates left for law school, medical school, fellowships, travel abroad, or jobs in New York City. I moved across the country to work as a teacher. I could have found a position in Framingham where my sixth-grade teacher still worked and still wore a beehive. Instead, I chose California. Deep down, I wanted to experience the feeling o...