TORCH: Over the Borderline

In the desert of Nogales, Arizona, two girls jump on a trampoline under the swell of limitless sky. The younger one is Mexican-American and the older one is white. The smaller girl’s feet push hard to be as high up as possible, while the other bounces fast and low, and then slowly their jumps begin to match each other’s, up and down, up and down, until all the other movement of the world is suspended and it’s just them, leaping together.

This is what happens in the fictional story I am writing about two girls growing up along the US/Mexico border. In real life, my Mexican-American cousin pointed to the sky. Turkey vultures circled above us, with the mean hope that we were not alive. We laughed at them from the trampoline, loud and clear and glorious, so that they knew we were.

In the fictional story, the girls meet in the wash, where the river used to bubble and flow, and they scour the ground for the glint of gold. The sun made them dizzy, but there was a silence in the desert that enthralled them or maybe it was what came with the silence: the mountains rubbed as smooth as the slick of wet clay or skin, the silhouette of the horizon at the closing of the day churning the sky the colors of a bruise, the warmth disappearing into the expanse of the night. In real life, when we played in the wash on the ranchland which our grandfather owned and where my cousin lived, close to the border, the sand fell through our fingers, the dust stuck to our arms and shirts and lashes, and we never found any gold but everything glistened under that dissolving sun.

We were the youngest ones in our family. We were cousins first and then we were best friends. She was chubby; I was skinny. She was nine; I was eleven. We were both going to be movie stars. We took turns wearing my pink feather boa while excavating items from my costume trunk or slid along the floor to music or hid in closets and then made each other scream when we jumped out. When my cousin’s mother spoke in Spanish, we both answered in monosyllabic English without looking up from the TV. We poured gravel onto the car seat of the first man my mother dated after my father left and I think that was our first act of feminist solidarity. We slept in the living room, under a cascade of blankets and pillows on the floor, our heads next to each other. In the fictional story, I write, The girl slept with her mouth open a little, as if she still had things to say and her friend put her ear next to her on the pillow as if she could still listen, but it’s not fiction. I asked her what her husband would be like, who she wanted to kiss. Will Smith, she always said.

I’m writing about the border through the eyes of children because the border is a problem of the imagination. In the movie Life Is Beautiful, the protagonist helps his son survive concentration camps by playing pretend. In my fictional story, the white girl hears coyotes and wonders about the migrants who cross outside her windows, somewhere in the swathe of dark desert hills. Later, the girls find scraps of clothing left by the migrants and call them treasure. “We’re like pirates,” they say. In real life, I saw empty water bottles, the remains of shoes, and shredded jackets strewn in the desert and it took me years before I fully understood that I could have found bones.

In the fictional story, the girls go to what they call the in-between place, the place between the fences. In real life, when I went with my sister and mother, I hopped over the sagging barbed wire fence and ran around yelling, “I’m in Mexico!” What is the border wall if not an act of fiction, an act of the imagination plopped onto land? I didn’t know the word arbitrary while I was growing up, but like any child who puts her foot down on a rock and announces it as her territory, I knew that countries were made-up things.

The girl laughed in a way that reminded her of canyons, their long walls echoing and thundering majestically; she wanted to fall in. Some people have those kinds of laughs: it’s a way of showing how wide and open they are on the inside.

In the fictional story, the girls get into an old pickup truck and play pretend. They swerve through the desert with its jojoba bushes and javalina hiding in the shadows of the mesquite trees, and then they arrive at the beach, and they drive faster, their hair like flames in the wind, right into the sea, the water soft velvet around their small bodies. In real life, my cousin’s mother drove us around in her SUV and we sang along to Mariah Carey and fantasized about going to LA not for the beach but for the boys. In real life, I once gave my cousin my collection of Polly Pockets, those little pink worlds that closed into a shell. But before two months had gone by, I asked for them back. I was ten years old and not yet ready to stop playing pretend.

In the fictional story, the girls go to Mexico where chickens peck the ground outside kitchens, where women slap their knees and laugh about men and wars while pans of oil sizzle, as if in expectation. Someone teaches the white girl how to make tortillas out of a ball of masa. Roll it, mi hija. In real life, we went to small, dusty Mexican towns together with our families. We got hyper from drinking too much coke from glass bottles. We didn’t talk about how much her father drank or about how my parents’ lengthy divorce played out like a video we watched in slow motion. We didn’t talk about how we wanted to pause that video and rewind it back to the beginning so that we could watch the good parts again and again. We wanted to be old or we wanted to be young, but we were neither. We sat on benches and took photographs of each other to see if we were beautiful.

A writing teacher reads a draft of my story. She comments that the adolescent girls are at the border between childhood and adulthood. “The border is a metaphor,” she says. The border is not a metaphor, I want to respond. The border is one thousand nine hundred and thirty-three miles long.

I moved away before we got to the age when we would have gotten our licenses, shared sips of liquor concealed in soda bottles, been reckless and troubled and beautiful all at the same time. She was thirteen, I was fifteen and then suddenly, so soon, we were older. Her father died; she didn’t eat. Across the country, I didn’t know what to say—I couldn’t hide in a closet to surprise her and make her scream. She wasn’t chubby anymore when I saw her at Christmas and was always trying to get drunk. I didn’t want to watch what she put or didn’t put on her plate but I did. She taught me the term “suicide shot.” The memories I play in my mind are silent except for the sound of her laugh flooding the room, I soaked in it for as long as I could.

In the fictional story I am writing, the girl’s mother is interrogated and searched by the border patrol when crossing the checkpoint in Nogales. The man’s hands crept over the girl’s mom like she had seen the clouds do to a clear sky until there wasn’t an untouched part of her. When the man left the room, her mother turned around to look at the girls. Instead of the disturbed face they expected, her eyes held a surprising glint and she quickly stuck her tongue out at them, making them smile. In real life, we didn’t need passports back then to cross the line and it would have been my mother, not hers, who would have done something like sticking out her tongue while being detained. The feeling isn’t fiction though. I’ve always believed that if you are laughing, no one can have power over you.

In real life, my cousin acquired the kind of staggering beauty that gets in the way of daily life. She was seventeen, I was nineteen. We leaned against the sofa and smoked a joint, read poems we had written, sang Ani DiFranco songs, laughed about men like they were something on the stove we accidentally kept burning. Then she was nineteen, I was twenty-one. By the time she visited me in New York, she knew how to highlight the contours of her eyes with makeup and could cross the street in stilettos; I had read Marx and wasn’t afraid to untie trash bags to reveal heaps of day-old bagels. I took her to a party where I watched the hungry hands of men follow her throughout the room and I knew they did not love her for the reasons I did. We danced to Madonna, singing, “You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.” A man tapped her shoulder while she bought a drink, another man stood as close as her shadow while we danced, another plopped a weighty hand on her waist and finally I put my body in between hers and theirs and said, “She’s mine.”

In the fictional story, after the mother is detained on the border, the girls have a conversation.

“Are you okay?” asks the one based on me.

“I’m used to it,” says the one based on my cousin.

“I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“That’s because you’re white.”

In real life, my cousin and I never spoke about race. I don’t know when we learned that we were different. We had too much in common or maybe too much at stake.

Once, a friend of mine who was doing humanitarian aid on the border, dropping water and food in the desert, met a young man who had decided, after so much debilitating exhaust while crossing, to give himself over to the Border Patrol. He gave my friend a small rock that he had been carrying for good luck during his long journey: a worn thing, burnished with so much unfulfilled hope. Fiction relies upon symbolism like this. In real life, that rock was useless.

Four years ago, after only seeing each other at family holiday gatherings, my cousin and I met for dinner at a restaurant in Tucson and looked at each other under the glow of Christmas lights which softened the edges of our faces and made love seem a little easier. She told me about her new boyfriend who worked for the Border Patrol, how she had lied to him and told him that she was Brazilian, not Mexican. I don’t remember if I tried to argue with her about the injustices committed by the Border Patrol or if I told her that she should be proud to be Mexican—but who was I, her white cousin, to tell her that? Maybe she went to the bar and gulped a shot or two while we waited for our food to arrive, or maybe the cocktail she drank was enough, but she stopped making sense, her speech slurred, her tone aggressive. When the waiter noticed how drunk she was, we were asked to leave. She dangled on my arm as we left the restaurant, like an accessory I didn’t feel poised enough to wear, a loose thing that could get lost. Once at my house, I took off her shoes so she could pass out on the sofa and then I searched her purse for signs of some other drug usage but found nothing, though I knew that if she lied to her boyfriend, she could lie to me, too. She left before I woke up, leaving her shoes behind and driving home barefoot. She had an ignition interlock device in her car from a DUI she had received but somehow she passed the test. For days, I looked at her abandoned sandals and knew that their presence on my floor meant that she had to return to pick them up, which meant that we would discuss what happened, which meant that maybe she would open up to me. But when she finally stood in my doorway, she averted her eyes and told me she had to go. I didn’t know if I she was lying to me or not; maybe I didn’t want to know.

In the fictional story, the girls tell each other everything. They talk to each other just by exchanging looks or by holding each other’s fingers. In real life, at night in the desert, the velvet mesquite leaves fold into themselves, as if protecting secrets, and they remind me of her.

The night that Trump is elected, I watch the red smear through the country’s states like the blood from a wound. But it isn’t until I check my cousin’s Facebook page and see that she voted for Trump that I feel as if I’ve been slashed.

“The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists,” Trump said in a statement released July 6, 2015. In the fiction produced about the border, the wall isn’t built or it’s partially built but not built enough. In real life, I once met a woman in southern Mexico who said, I went all the way to Kansas but there were no tortillas there. Most people don’t want to leave their families or crumbling adobe homes with crooked crosses and wrinkled photos of their parents on the walls, but they come because of financial need or because they’re gay or because of threats of gang violence. In real life, during the same years when my cousin and I played in the wash, the Border Patrol began a strategy which funneled people into the most dangerous stretches of the desert, over those same purple mountains we watched glaze with the setting sun. While we looked but couldn’t find gold, over six thousand human remains were found in southern Arizona; journalists use the term human remains instead of terms like cousins, sons, mothers. In real life, the Sonoran desert has no borders: Indigenous families and ripples of butterflies and herds of local antelope known as pronghorn have crossed through this region long before fiction existed with a name, but now all of them, except for the butterflies, have a wall in the middle of their home which they cannot cross.

Why do people write or tell fictional stories? People hold onto fiction when they don’t know how to tell the true story or when they don’t want to believe the true story or when the true story is far more complicated than a lie. “Truth or dare?” I asked my cousin on those nights when we were too full of exhilaration to sleep. “Truth,” she always said, as if it were easy.

My cousin and I are not the first family to be divided by a wall. Many families are split by the US/Mexico border, their loved ones scattered on both sides like the seeds of wildflowers. In real life, during one of the last times I went to the border, I walked past the adobe houses with boarded up windows and blooming bougainvillea, the ones across from the wall that have been there since the land was Mexico. A little dog followed me as I walked along the fence; he could have fit through the beams to the other side if he wanted to, but he chose to stay with me. For him, it’s a choice. Above me, the sky squeezed out the last of the light and then stars sifted through the sieve of the dark. When the moon appeared, cut out of the blackness of the sky, I wondered, What is the opposite of a wall?

Maybe I will end my fictional story with a deportation. In real life, my cousin marries the Border Patrol agent. He speaks some Spanish, makes her laugh, doesn’t look me in the eyes. He wants to get a job working on the Canadian border, wants to take my cousin to a small town in Michigan where there will be no steaming tamales made by her mother, no javalina hiding behind the jojoba, no sunsets to rip apart the sky. No one in my family has been deported but the feeling doesn’t feel like fiction.

In the fictional story I don’t know how to finish, the girls don’t talk to each for a long time. Then one day they do. Maybe one of the girls is married now. But she thinks of the other girl and calls her on the phone. Do you remember the time I threw whipped cream on your face? Do you remember when we walked through the desert and felt like real cowgirls, the wind teasing our hair, dirt caked on our jeans? Do you remember those hot days on the trampoline with the turkey vultures above us and how free we felt under that boundless sky, jumping and jumping all day?

My cousin’s wedding is held in Nogales and so I stare at the snaking gash of the border wall as my mother, sister, and I drive to the church. Marriage is a kind of fiction, too: happily ever after is never the whole truth, but during a wedding ceremony, we collectively agree to suspend our disbelief out of a place of love. We applaud during the kiss, as if, like in a fairy tale, it is a source of magic that prevents all future uncertainty.

I have been dreading this moment but when my beautiful cousin finally walks across the aisle, it is as if something has skittered across the sky and left the branches rattling, the leaves falling, the air shaking. So easily, I am crying.

The reception is held at my grandfather’s ranch house, where we played hide and seek as children, where we drank tang the color of a toxic chemical and ate green-corn tamales at Christmas and everyone around us spoke Spanish while we spoke our own language: the private language of shy girls who whisper behind sofas. Mariachis play love songs in Spanish, their chests and cheeks puffed as proudly as singing birds. When the DJ plays Will Smith, I tap my cousin on her polished shoulder. She is standing there with her wedding dress encircling her like a line drawn in the sand as a form of protection. “This is our song,” I say, and she laughs as if there is still an our, still an us, still a place in the world with our private jokes and songs that we could visit instead of us living only in a kind of diaspora, where the memory of that old place has to be enough. In the living room, a slideshow blinks with childhood photographs of my cousin and her now-husband, and when I see that face of the chubby girl who had been my best friend, I understand that love is not a secret truth that you share with only one person but is instead a kind of dare, the thing you say yes to without knowing what it is that will be demanded of you.

Earlier that day, after the ceremony, my cousin and her husband stood outside the church, her white dress gleaming under the waves of desert light like the gold we never found. I congratulated the Border Patrol agent, not because I wanted to, but because I know that some lies are necessary, and then I hugged my cousin. “I love you,” I told her, and it was the truth.

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TORCH is a monthly series edited by Arielle Bernstein devoted to showcasing personal essays and interviews about immigrant and refugee experiences. You can visit the archives here. For more information on submitting head here.

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