The Best American Essays 2013 (29 page)

Pulling it out, we drew blood too, since everything in the desert is sharp, thorned, serrated, spined, resistant to meddling. We left a little of our analog selves in the space left after we got it out. After a year, the palm died in his yard. We’re still not sure why. He will presumably pull it up and replace it with something native and gorgeous and complicated, since that’s his wont. The memory of those new roots, those old roots, will be gradually erased.

It’s bittersweet, I suppose, to close this open door of mystery, but more sweet than sour, as I am the agent of the solution, lucky in my stumble. The world offers so few of these rewards for our attention that we best take them when they’re offered, before they disappear back into the trash, the sidewalks filled with other rotting oranges, the thrift store, the lumber pile that might get pulped to paper in Wisconsin, on which we might write or rewrite history, the whiteness of blizzard or memory. I’m going to take the answer.

ANGELA MORALES

FROM
Southwest Review

1
.

Here in the middle of California—in this sun-bleached, hardtack landscape—we have no choice but to search for beauty. The soil, dun-colored and rock-hard, erodes into a soft layer of silt that covers the town every time the wind blows. All across California’s farm belt—this land between the Sierras and the Pacific—rows and rows of cotton bolls, apricot and walnut trees, grapevines and tomato plants, roll out for hundreds of miles. But then the rain ceases. Two years pass. Three years. Early morning dew brings the smell of manure that lingers in our neighborhoods, a smell that grows stronger with every passing month. Winter brings no rain but only a thick layer of tule fog that traps us further in a damp white haze. Bitter particles of pesticides hang in the air. We drive on Highway 99 in search of something to look at and find
FOR LEASE
signs, abandoned western-themed restaurants, and peeling billboards advertising brand-new housing developments that never panned out—a picture of a two-story tract home adorned with a Spanish tile fountain, a father holding a plump toddler, a chemical-green lawn, a happy yellow dog. Between aqueducts and waterways, mazes of irrigation canals and ditches, we try to improve our minds. We enroll in classes at the community college and vow, once and for all, to see it through.

But our library—a big, sad building—houses old, second-rate books, and the librarians seem tired as they thumb through ladies’ magazines and gaze wearily over the tops of their reading glasses. This library, unlike some libraries with summer reading programs and cheery children’s wings containing beanbags and puzzles, is not a happy place. Here the hours are limited. Erratic. Now think of the brutally hot sun. You worry about dogs not having any shade. That dog chained to some little leafless tree in the back of somebody’s junkyard. That dog whose water bowl is covered in green slime and sits about six inches from the end of his leash. You worry about dogs and children. (Cats can generally take care of themselves.)

2
.

Francisco, a beautiful boy, sits at the front of the classroom—center stage. When the girls arrive, they circle around him and slip into desks nearest to him, glancing his way and trying not to giggle every time he makes a comment. He leans forward with folded hands, his feet planted solidly on the floor like some goody-goody schoolboy. When he asks a question—usually something ridiculous—the girls turn completely around in their seats to stare at him. I say, “The midterm exam will be next Tuesday at ten—don’t be late!” And he raises his hand and asks stupidly, “Uh . . . Miss? Is there a midterm for this class?” Then one of the serious, not-so-beautiful boys murmurs, “
Pendejo!
Open up your ears,” and beautiful Francisco will wink at me and yawn. His eyes, translucent and emerald green, make me uneasy. He resembles Johnny Depp but speaks with a slow rising cadence that reminds me of my grandfather—my grandfather who ended up with seven kids and a gambling habit. Francisco tries to flirt with me by calling me
profesora
in that lazy melodic lilt, though around here—at age thirty-two—I am old enough to be his mother. I wonder which girl will get to him first and then whether he’ll pay child support or if he’ll want to get married
ever
, being so beautiful and all.

3
.

Our neighbors across the street whom we call the “Meth Joads” remind us of Steinbeck’s Joads because they drive around in a patched-together pickup truck that teeters under the weight of a perpetual mass of junk: wooden pallets, broken bicycles, miscellaneous car parts. Unlike Steinbeck’s Joads, however, they are most definitely meth addicts, with the telltale tense jaw, the broken shorn-down teeth, the deep bronchial laugh that inevitably turns into a coughing fit. The Meth Joads have a teenage daughter who sits on the front porch and talks on the cordless phone. One day she’s out there talking and I notice that Misty Joad’s belly has grown big as a watermelon and is now straining against the seams of her tank top. A few days later, Mr. Meth Joad hauls in a yard-sale crib from his pickup truck.
It’s all good
, he says, straining under the weight of the crib, a cigarette between his teeth. The girl, Misty Joad—no more than sixteen and heavily pregnant—paces the sidewalk and talks languidly on that phone like she’s waiting for somebody to pick her up and take her somewhere. Every few days a red-faced teenage boy shows up and the two of them drive away in his Mustang. Then the boy stops coming. Eventually Misty Joad walks the sidewalk with her newborn baby. But imagine her power. Even with dirty bare feet and no plans, her body has declared a coup:
If you won’t love me, here’s a person who will
.

4
.

We live down the street from the continuation high school. When we first moved to the neighborhood, Patrick and I referred to it as the “bad-boy school” because that is what my grandpa used to call the school on his street in Boyle Heights. At that bad-boy school in Boyle Heights, enormous pigs lived belly-deep in black muck—muck that emitted an odor so foul that we tied bandannas over our noses and gagged anyway as we rode our bikes past the pigs’ enclosures. I’d spy on those bad boys in their rubber boots as they shoveled muck and slops, and I was glad that, being a girl, I would never have to shovel shit or get my ass bit the way that rogue hog had once bitten Grandma’s ass (after it had chased her around the neighborhood for a good forty-five minutes). That pig had gone
hog wild
.

The bad-boy school in this town, though, turns out to be a bad-
girl
school, with a special program for pregnant teens. Sometimes I see those girls exercising on the track—twenty or thirty of them—a whole herd of teenage girls walking around in circles, hands supporting their lower backs, bellies sticking out a mile. Merced gets hotter than hell, so usually the girls pant dramatically and fan themselves, periodically squinting and shielding their eyes from the merciless sky. After their babies are born, most of these girls will come back to school for a few months, and then the majority of them will drop out of school altogether.

I push my own baby in her stroller and observe the girls through the chain-link fence as they complete their one-mile forced march. One starts brushing her hair. The teacher cajoles her and momentarily she quickens her pace, but as soon as the teacher turns around, she slows down again. Looking at them, I try to imagine the moment of love or rage or revenge that brought them here. Most of their babies’ fathers will not marry them. Most will continue living in poverty as single mothers. The majority of their children will have learning and behavioral problems. Some of those babies will end up right here back on this very same track.

In the Teen Parent Program, girls are taught life skills, like how to eat healthy foods such as carrot sticks and cottage cheese rather than a
machaca
burrito (two out of three girls are Latinas) and the three-pack of Hostess Ho-Hos. (And who knew that a bacon guacamole Whopper had 1,020 milligrams of sodium and 43 grams of fat?) They watch filmstrips in which fetuses unfurl their tiny limbs; black guppy eyes grow human eyelids; a prehistoric fin separates into ten toes. Later the girls learn about scary conditions like preeclampsia and gestational diabetes and suddenly they understand why so-and-so’s cousin gave birth to that extraordinary thirteen-pound infant, the one with doughy, waterlogged skin and a protruding tongue.

They learn how to change a diaper and how to hold a baby’s head so it won’t bob off to one side. They learn about the soft, downy triangle called the fontanel and how their babies’ brains, soft as cream cheese, can be felt by gently placing a finger on that eerie soft spot. They learn about shaken baby syndrome and sudden infant death syndrome and then they are given stickers with emergency contact numbers—school counselors, social workers, paramedics. They are told that they will not be alone and that caring for a child requires both strength and humility.
We are your support system
, the girls are told.
We are here for you
.

Across the street from the bad girls’ school on the corner of 20th and G Streets, Rollins’ Donuts emits the thick, cloying scent of golden doughnuts as they bob around in the fryer. After school the girls disregard what they’ve learned in health class and line up out the door, shifting their pregnant selves from foot to foot while absent-mindedly massaging the undersides of their bellies, bellies now covered by maternity jeans with spandex tummy panels. Some girls, the rebels, forgo the secondhand maternity clothes altogether (too
old-ladyish!
) and let their bellies hang over the elastic bands of their sweatpants.

Just downwind from Rollins, at the government-approved WIC grocery stores, girls can cash their WIC vouchers for Similac, double-wide boxes of Cheerios, and big hunks of cheese.

In the hospital after my daughter was born, the nurse had brought me yet another stack of forms to fill out. “Here,” she’d said, handing me a pen. “You’ll definitely want to fill these out.” I hoisted the baby onto one shoulder, and just as I had begun to write my name in the first box, I saw that I was about to fill out a Women, Infants, and Children Assistance application.

“Oh, I don’t need this,” I said. I tried to give back the pen, but she wouldn’t take it. “Oh, but you
have
to,” she said. “You get free food like bread and milk and formula. Formula’s expensive! You’ll see! You can get WIC vouchers until the baby is five years old! Imagine five whole years of free food!”

“No, that’s okay, really . . .” I said again. She pressed on.

“Why the heck
not?
” she said, leaning close, giving me a conspiratorial look. “Almost everyone gets approved. Well, just think about it.”

After she left, I crumpled the forms and shoved them into the trash can. Certainly, I thought, WIC is for
very
poor women—single mothers, teenagers, and migrant farm workers. Being of sound mind and body (or so I tell myself) and having a job, I knew I would not need such assistance, and now I admit to being slightly offended that the nurse had automatically assumed that I needed WIC at all. Based on what? Based on my dark hair and my last name? But in her defense, the odds that a Latina with a newborn baby would need government assistance are, in this town, indeed, very high. Here, population 60,000, one in four women and children is enrolled in WIC. That’s a lot of formula. A lot of cheese.

Every day on my street little girls push strollers with real babies in them. The girls walk with their friends—other young girls with
their
babies—sometimes three or four of them at a time. They walk shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the street like they belong to a fertility parade. Sometimes we have to drive around them, swerving gently to the opposite side of the road. “Careful,” I’ll tell Patrick as he turns the corner. “It’s a stroller brigade.” It’s an evangelist’s nightmare (or would that be a dream come true?).

Times have changed since my grandmother and great-grandmother (with sixteen children between them) dodged the shame of being dark and young and pregnant. Without reliable birth control, access to good schools (only the inferior “Indian schools”), and decent jobs with decent wages, what choices did my grandmothers have? Even if girls did not have babies of their own, they often became mothers by default—by tending to younger siblings, nieces, and nephews. Babies were a fact of life. The wealthy had nannies and nursemaids at their disposal. My grandmothers
were
these nannies.

Fast-forward a hundred years and observe the very same girls—now unfettered by husbands and tradition—now walking side by side in the middle of the street, chattering away as they adjust their babies’ juice bottles, talk on their cell phones, and halfheartedly dangle little rattles above the strollers. Unlike my grandmothers, the girls in this town have access to birth control pills, integrated schools with specialized programs, and guidance counselors who are supposed to tout the merits of college—even to the brown and black kids. The girls in my town have more choices, though some people might argue that when you’re young and poor and your own mother lives on welfare, those choices are hard to find. Love, on the other hand, is easier to find. Love (or the promise of it) is free. Love makes you feel good, especially if you’ve never had a father, even if only for a few minutes. Love is beautiful: think of walking hand in hand with the green-eyed Francisco at sunset along some fictional beach. And if you end up getting pregnant,
we are here to support you
. And here’s a fact about babies: babies now come with many cute accessories—headband bows for little bald heads; Lilliputian T-shirts imprinted with hip slogans like
Ladies’ Man
or
Change My Diaper, Biaatch!;
knit caps with built-in Mohawks and bunny ears; pacifiers with vampire fangs painted onto the mouthpiece.

5
.