The Distance Between Us

by Reyna Grande

In Mexico, the biggest dream Mago had was to be a lawyer’s secretary. Now, Mago didn’t want to be a secretary—she wanted to be the lawyer who had a secretary.

I thought about the Man Behind the Glass, of how I wished I hadn’t left him behind in Mexico. In his eternal silence, he had been a much better father than the one we lived with now.

Instead, she talked about looking for a full-time job so she could buy herself a car and pretty clothes. She talked about her desire to go out with her coworkers, who spent their weekends dancing at clubs.

Even to this day, people still misinterpret my shyness for arrogance.

I didn’t know then just how much my relationship with my father would affect my relationship with other men. I didn’t know that my need to be loved by him—and his inability to show affection—would make me desperate to find it elsewhere. The more he denied me his love, the more I would seek it in the boys I would meet.

Mago had accrued too much debt from all the pretty clothes and shoes she was buying.

But between the credit card debt and the car loan, Mago had dropped out of college to work full time.

I turned to look at the train station, feeling my eyes burn with tears.

I knew that I had been in the U.S. for too long when the sight of my grandmother’s shack, with its bamboo sticks, corrugated metal roof, and tar-soaked cardboard, shocked me. Had I really lived in this place?

Seeing those kids’ dusty bare feet, dirty hair, and torn clothing, I knew how my father had seen us those many years ago when he’d returned. I wondered if he had also felt his heart break.

Her scent was all I needed to feel that I was home.

I felt awkward having to look down at my tiny grandmother, who was three inches shorter than me. How tiny and fragile she seemed to me now.

Mago began to complain. “Look at my shoes,” she said. “They’re covered in dust. Ugh.”

“I’d rather be poor, but together,” was my uncle’s reply.

As Papi often said, my siblings and I had been given the opportunity of a lifetime. How could we let it go to waste? As I looked at my cousins walking down the dirt road, I thought of my father, of what he wanted our future to be like, and I understood.

When you come from the U.S., people look at you differently. They treat you differently.

I was afraid to admit that perhaps I might not be the same little girl who used to make mud tortillas and whose only dream of the future was to one day have her parents back.

I was no longer considered Mexican enough. To the people there, who had seen me grow up, I was no longer one of them.

I’m so sick of this place.

“Just because I used to live here, it doesn’t mean that I still need to be friends with these people,”

Now I realized that we owed it to them, our cousins, our friends, to do something with our lives. If not for us, then for them, because they would never be able to.

Unlike me, she had no accent when she spoke English. Now I knew why that was. Even in her speech, she was trying to erase Mexico completely. I didn’t know if I ever could. Or would want to.

I became an ESL teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District,

In 2003, I taught adult school for the LAUSD,

In 2002, I became a citizen of the United States.

The United States is my home; it is the place that allowed me to dream, and later, to make those dreams into realities.

In 2006, my first novel, Across a Hundred Mountains, was published. The following year it received an American Book Award.

In 2008, I received my MFA in creative writing,

My children call her “Grandma Mila” and like visiting her.