Reaching Out (12 page)

I was so depressed and discouraged by Sunday that I did not feel like going to the first meeting for new Sodality candidates that afternoon. At Smokey's insistence, I dragged myself to it and took an aisle seat in the back of the room and tried to pay attention to Father Shanks. After he welcomed us, we joined him in a prayer for the new year. He then wrote on the blackboard:

What is the meaning and purpose of my life?

The question held my attention because I often wondered why my family and I suffered so much. My father would say we were cursed.

"I want you to answer this question to yourselves," Father Shanks said, pacing up and down the room, "It's not easy, but it's one we must all seek to answer. "

He moved to the back of the room, stood next to me, and continued. "Where can we find clues? In our faith and life experiences. Each one of us must reflect on our faith and life experiences and try to draw strength and meaning from
them." He paused, placed his right hand on my shoulder, and explained that sometimes we would be baffled by our experiences because they did not come neatly packaged and labeled. He encouraged us not to give up and told us that the struggle was as important as finding the answer. He leaned over and whispered to me, "Can you please come see me in my office after this meeting?"

He walked back to the front of the room, picked up the chalk, underlined the question on the board several times, and said, "As Sodalists I want you to wrestle with this question. Your education and the deepening of your faith here at Santa Clara will guide you in your quest."

At the end of the meeting, several students went up to talk to him. I left and waited for him in the lobby outside his office in Walsh Hall. Through the glass doors to the main entrance of the building, I saw him plodding up the front stairs carrying a bundle of file folders in his left arm. I opened the door for him. "Thanks," he said, catching his breath. He unlocked the door to his office and invited me in.

"Take a seat," he said. He dropped the folders on top of a heap of papers on his desk, sat down next to me, and lit a cigarette. "What's this I hear about your leaving Santa Clara?"

I was surprised he knew. Father O'Neill must have told him. He must have read my mind because he said, "Yes, Father O'Neill talked to me."

"The reason—"

"I know your reason," he said, interrupting me. "Father O'Neill explained it to me. And I agree with him. I think you're making a big mistake. I know that in your culture children are expected to live for and honor their families. I admire that, but you must also think about yourself."

"But you said that we have the responsibility to act as 'my brother's keeper,'"

"Yes, it's true. But in this case, think of the long-term consequences, Don't you think that you would be in a better position to help your family once you finish college and become a teacher? It's a sacrifice you're making now to fashion a better future for your family, yourself, and others like you. Don't you agree?"

"It makes sense." I paused. "I'd like to think more about it." I felt pain in the back of my neck and shoulders.

"I agree. You should take more time to reflect on it. I'm confident you'll make the right decision."

After I left his office, I went to the Mission Church. It was empty and silent. I knelt down before the painting of Saint Francis at the Cross and prayed. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned anything to Father O'Neill about it. But out of respect, I had had to tell him. He was my friend and I trusted him. O/i,
it would be so much easier if someone would just make the decision for
me! I got up and sat down in the front pew and looked at the painting of Saint Anthony adoring the Christ Child that was to the right of the altar. The Christ Child figure seemed so pure and peaceful. I went up
to the side of the altar, lit a candle, and said a Hail Mary.

I returned to my room and wrote down more memories of my childhood, keeping in mind what Father Shanks had said about finding purpose and meaning to our lives. I wrote about Torito, who almost died from an illness he contracted during the time we lived in Tent City. He was a few months old when he began suffering convulsions and diarrhea. My parents gave him mint tea, prayed, and consulted a
curandera,
a healer, who Tubbed raw eggs on his stomach. When he got worse, my parents finally took him to the county hospital even though they had no money to pay for medical care. The doctor told my parents that Torito was going to die. My parents refused to believe the doctor. They brought Torito home and our whole family prayed every day to El Santo Nino de Atocha, the little baby Jesus, until my brother got well.

I put my notes aside and went over the assignment for my philosophy class. We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives, I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how
the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others to break free.

After finishing the paper, I thought about Father Shanks's question and the advice he and Father O'Neill had given me. They were right. I had to sacrifice and finish college.

I began the second half of my sophomore year feeling less worried about my family and more confident about school. My Tía Chana, who was taking care of my father in Mexico, wrote to my mother, telling her that our father continued to be ill physically and mentally but that, with the help of a
curandera,
he was slowly recovering. She told my mother that he prayed for us every day, Roberto and his wife provided support and comfort to my family by visiting often and helping them out financially. My mother began working in a vegetable processing freezer during the week. Trampita kept on working as a custodian for the Santa Maria Window Cleaners, and my other siblings helped my mother work in the fields on weekends. I continued sending money home whenever I could.

Besides taking seventeen and a half units of course work that second semester and enjoying all of my classes, I found a soul mate who made me feel more at home in college.

I met Laura Facchini in the Survey of Latin American Literature 11, taught by Dr. Hardman de Bautista. Laura
stood out in the small class because everyone else in it had taken the first part of that course the previous semester and because she was the only freshman and the only one who was not a native Spanish speaker. The other students were from Central and South America and the Caribbean. She caught my attention immediately when I saw her for the first time. She had big brown eyes, a light olive complexion, a high forehead, a narrow, slightly rounded chin, and short brown hair turned under. She reminded me of a girl with whom I was secretly infatuated when I was in junior high school. I always sat next to Laura because I seldom saw her outside of class, and when I did, she always seemed to be in a hurry, scurrying across campus, clutching her books and binders.

One day she came to class a few minutes late, looking hassled. She sat down next to me and opened her Latin American literature anthology to the section on Rubén Dario, a Nicaraguan writer whose poetry we were to have read and studied for homework. I glanced over and saw that she had written in pencil numerous notes in the margins and the English translation of practically every Spanish word in the text. She caught my eye, smiled, and pulled her book closer to her and closed it halfway. I felt embarrassed and looked away. Professor Hardman de Bautista made a few remarks about Dario and assigned each one of us a different poem to read aloud and analyze. I felt nervous and intimidated as I listened to students read
with drama and confidence. However, I was surprised that Professor Hardman de Bautista had to guide them so closely through the analyses. This was not the case with Laura. Even though she had a slight accent when she spoke, her reading was smooth and her interpretation impressed everyone, especially the teacher. At the end of the class period, I followed her out of the classroom.

"Where did you learn Spanish so well?" I asked, trying to keep up with her fast pace. A light breeze pressed her floral cotton dress against her slightly bowed legs.

"Oh, I don't know Spanish that well." She glanced at me from the corner of her eye and smiled.

"But you do." I liked her modesty.

"I like Spanish and work hard at it. That's why I decided to major in it. I enjoy learning languages. I guess I take after my grandfather, who studies French and Spanish on his own."

When I told her I was impressed with her interpretation of Rubén Dario's
Canción de otoño en primavera,
she explained that her high school English teacher had taught her how to analyze literature.

"I am still struggling with English."

"I wish I knew Spanish as well as you know English."

"Maybe we can study together." We were approaching Nobili Hall. "I'll help you with Spanish and you can help me with English."

She frowned and said, "Well, here we are. Luckily I
don't have to climb too many stairs. I live on the second floor. Thanks for walking with me."

"You're welcome. See you in class." I opened the entry door and she dashed up the stairs. Maybe she thought I was being too forward.

For the next few days, I did not walk with her after class even though I wanted to. Then, to my surprise, I saw her come into the language lab in Varsi Library one evening. I was working there, setting up audiotape players, signing out audiotape cassettes, and closing the lab in the evenings.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Dr. Vari hired me to help out in the lab. I guess we'll be working together,"

This was music to my ears. It gave me a chance to see her more often. And as days went by, after we closed the lab, we spent time together sitting on the front steps of the library, sharing stories about our childhood. Once, I told her about my efforts to pick cotton when I was six years old. My parents used to park our old jalopy at the end of the cotton fields and leave me alone in the car to take care of Trampita. I hated being left by myself with him while they and Roberto went off to work. Thinking that if I learned to pick cotton my parents would take me with them, one afternoon, while Trampita slept in the back seat of the car, I walked over to the nearest row and tried to pick cotton. It was harder than I thought. I picked the bolls one at a time and piled them on the ground. The shells' sharp prongs scratched my hands like
a cat's claw and sometimes dug into the corner of my fingernails and made them bleed. At the end of the day, I was tired and disappointed because I had picked very little. To make things worse, I forgot about Trampita, and when my parents returned, they were upset with me because I had neglected my little brother, who had fallen off the seat, cried, and soiled himself.

"Poor Trampita ... and you too," she said. She buttoned her white wool knit sweater, looked up at the stars, sighed, and told me about how she helped her parents at their grocery store when she was six years old. The name of her family's store, Hilltop Market, had a sign with the motto "Not the Biggest but the Finest." The customers were people who had moved from the rural South and Oklahoma and lived in modest houses tucked in the hills above the store in Brisbane, California. They would order a chicken every week for their Sunday dinner and Laura and her mother would clean and package it for them. On Saturdays, customers would come into the store to pick up their order or Laura's father would deliver the chickens along with the families' grocery orders to their homes.

She said that her father bought the chickens from a poultry house in San Francisco, and that she would often go with him to see how the chickens were processed. The chickens were held in square cages, about two feet high each, stacked up four or five cages tall. Laura's father would pick out the chickens he wanted, and then the chickens would be delivered to a big, noisy room where they were killed and their feathers removed. All of this work was done by women who wore black rubber aprons, boots, and gloves. Once the feathers were removed, the heads and feet were wrapped in butcher paper and the chickens were put in crates, and Laura and her father would bring them to the store. Laura would help her mother prepare the chickens according to the orders. They would cover the kitchen table with layers and layers of newspapers. Her mother would open the chicken and she and Laura would carefully remove the intestines, heart, and liver. "I used to play with the feet. By pulling on a tendon, I would make them move as if they were walking," she added, chuckling.

"Roberto, my older brother, used to do that too. He would take the chicken feet and tell us it was a rooster's foot. He'd pull the tendon as fast as he could and chase my brothers and me around, hollering that it was the devil's foot. We thought it was so funny."

"Why would he say it was the devil's foot?"

"Because it's a superstition that the devil has rooster's feet when he transforms himself into a man."

"Really! You don't believe that, do you?"

"No, but some people do."

Suddenly I realized I had interrupted her story. "I am sorry," I said. "Finish telling me how you and your mom prepared the chickens..."

"There isn't much more to tell. I think my mom was really
proud that she could fill all the orders in time so people could have a nice Sunday dinner." She smiled, glanced at her watch, and said, "It's getting late. We'd better do our homework."

I walked her back to Nobili and watched her rush up the stairs. She and I continued sharing stories every day after we closed the lab. The more time we spent together, the more I appreciated our friendship. I learned to trust her and developed a deep affection for her.