So that’s the way it was. When I was eight, I didn’t know anything about war. I didn’t even know what a conscience was. All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn’t like sad.
So I was the son of a man who had Vietnam living inside him. Yeah, I had all kinds of tragic reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn’t help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.
Boys. I watched them. Studied them.
In the end, I didn’t find most of the guys that surrounded me very interesting. In fact, I was pretty disgusted.
Maybe I was a little superior. But I don’t think I was superior. I just didn’t understand how to talk to them, how to be myself around them. Being around other guys didn’t make me feel smarter. Being around guys made me feel stupid and inadequate. It was like they were all a part of this club and I wasn’t a member.
It made me smile, the way they got along, the easy and affectionate way they talked to each other as if love between a father and a son was simple and uncomplicated. My mom and I, sometimes the thing we had between us was easy and uncomplicated. Sometimes. But me and my dad, we didn’t have that. I wondered what that would be like, to walk into a room and kiss my father.
“My dad says it’s all right if people make fun of you. You know what he said to me? He said, ‘Dante, you’re an intellectual. That’s who you are. Don’t be ashamed of that.’”
I noticed his smile was a little sad. Maybe everyone was a little sad. Maybe so.
“Ari, I’m trying not to be ashamed.”
I knew what it was like to be ashamed. Only, Dante knew why. And I didn’t.
“We’re not really Mexicans. Do we live in Mexico?”
“But that’s where our grandparents came from.”
“Okay, okay. But do we actually know anything about Mexico?”
“We speak Spanish.”
“Not that good.”
“Speak for yourself, Dante. You’re such a pocho.”
“What’s a pocho?”
“A half-assed Mexican.”
I kept staring down at the floor. And then I heard my father’s voice in the room again. “I have bad dreams too, Ari.”
I wanted to ask him if his dreams were about the war or about my brother. I wanted to ask him if he woke up as scared as me.
All I did was smile at him. He’d told me something about himself. I was happy.
“I mean, my dad’s parents were born in Mexico. They live in a small little house in East LA and they speak no English and own a little restaurant. It’s like my mom and dad created a whole new world for themselves. I live in their new world. But they understand the old world, the world they came from—and I don’t. I don’t belong anywhere. That’s the problem.”
Because my older brother was in prison and maybe my mother and father blamed themselves. If only they’d said something, done something. They weren’t going to make that mistake again. So I was stuck with my family’s guilt—a guilt that not even my mother would talk about. She sometimes mentioned my brother in passing. But she never said his name.
And my feet keep getting bigger and bigger. What’s with the big feet? When I was ten, I was kinda small and I wasn’t worried about hair. The only thing I was worried about was trying to speak perfect English. I made up my mind that year—when I was ten—that I wasn’t going to sound like another Mexican. I was going to be an American. And when I talked I was going to sound like one.
“When I went to the university, I never had one Mexican-American professor. Not one.” There was a look on her face, almost anger.
I knew so little about her. About what she’d been through—about what it felt like to be her. I’d never cared, not really. I was starting to care, starting to wonder. Starting to wonder about everything.
This is what I understood: a woman like Mrs. Quintana didn’t use the word “love” very often. When she said that word, she meant it. And one more thing I understood: Dante’s mother loved him more than he would ever know. I didn’t know what to do with that piece of information. So I just kept it inside. That’s what I did with everything. Kept it inside.
I guess it was enough just to hear the sound of Dante’s voice. It was like listening to a song. I kept thinking about the bird with the broken wing. Nobody told me what happened to the bird. And I couldn’t even ask because I would be breaking my own rule about not talking about the accident.
When he was done, I opened my eyes. Tears were falling down his face. I should have expected that. I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to tell him that it was me who should be crying.
Dante had this look on his face. He looked like an angel. And all I wanted to do was put my fist through his jaw. I couldn’t stand my own cruelty.
Maybe my dad just didn’t need words to get by in the world. I wasn’t like that. Well, I was like that on the outside, pretending not to need words. But I wasn’t like that on the inside.
I’d figured something out about myself: on the inside, I wasn’t like my dad at all. On the inside I was more like Dante. That really scared me.
The thing is I love my dad. My mom too. And I keep wondering what they’re going to say when I tell them that someday I want to marry a boy. I wonder how that’s going to go over? I’m the only son. What’s going to happen with the grandchildren thing? I hate that I’m going to disappoint them, Ari. I know I’ve disappointed you too.
“You’re in high school, Ari. You’re not looking for a profession. You’re just looking for a way to earn some money. You’re in transition.”
“In transition? What kind of a Mexican mother are you?”
“I’m an educated woman. That doesn’t un-Mexicanize me, Ari.”
She sounded a little angry. I loved her anger and wished I had more of it. Her anger was different than mine or my father’s. Her anger didn’t paralyze her.
Sometimes parents loved their sons so much that they made a romance out of their lives. They thought our youth could help us overcome everything. Maybe moms and dads forget about this one small fact: being on the verge of seventeen could be harsh and painful and confusing. Being on the verge of seventeen could really suck.
“We’ll play that game,” I said. “That game you made up to beat the hell out of your tennis shoes.”
“It was fun, wasn’t it?”
The way he said that. Like he knew we would never play that game again. We were too old now. We’d lost something and we both knew it.
“I’m sorry about last night,” I said. “It’s just that sometimes I have things running around inside me, these feelings. I don’t always know what to do with them. That probably doesn’t make any sense.”
“It sounds normal, Ari.”
“I don’t think I’m so normal.”
“Feeling things is normal.”
“Except I’m angry. And I don’t really know where all that anger comes from.”
“Maybe if we talked more.”
“Well, which one of us is good with words, Dad?”
I left him alone for a while. But then, I decided I wanted to be with him. I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.
He looked tired but at that moment, as we sat at the kitchen table, there was something young about him. And I thought that maybe he was changing into someone else.
Everyone was always becoming someone else.
Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can a guy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?
“He was so happy that you were going to have another baby. And not just because he was going to be a big brother. And he said, ‘He has to be a boy and he has to like girls.’ That’s what he said. So that you could have grandchildren. So that you could be happy.”
“I don’t care about grandchildren. I care about Dante.”
Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you’re feeling too much. And you can’t always control the things you do when you’re feeling too much. Maybe the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn’t control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could. That afternoon, I was just a boy. Not even close to being a man.
I was a boy. A boy who went crazy. Crazy, crazy.
And loved my father too, for the careful way he spoke. I came to understand that my father was a careful man. To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.
“What am I going to do?”
My father’s voice was soft. “Dante didn’t run. I keep picturing him taking all those blows. But he didn’t run.”
“Okay,” I said. For once in my life, I understood my father perfectly.
And he understood me.
