* * *
Saturday. In the kitchen, my mother grated cheese for a stuffed pastry called, depending on the dialect your kind of Armenian speaks, boreg or borek. My mom pronounced it with a hard g—so I did, too, and it was one of the twenty or thirty words in the language I spoke with any confidence. I used the word now as a replacement for hello.
“Good morning,” my mom said, taking a break to kiss me and then returning to her work. “I called in sick again so we could be together.”
“You weren’t supposed to make anything for tonight,” I said, stealing a pinch of shredded cheese from a growing mountain of the stuff. “It’s Teresa’s dinner party.”
“Just something small,” she said. She moved to the oven to check the bulb labeled PREHEATED. “Most of this is for us, but we’ll take a few over. Those Mexicans love anything with a lot of cheese, I think.”
“Mom,” I said, reflexively offended. But she hadn’t said anything foul, really, except for the unnecessary inclusion of the word “those,” so I left it at that.
“You’re already dressed,” she noticed. “You have plans?”
The answer was yes. I’d decided to go to the rally on the Boulevard as soon as my dad mentioned it. I couldn’t imagine what a political rally would look like in a place where everybody’s politics aligned. I had to see for myself.
“You have to stay and be my taste tester,” my mom said.
“I’m sure they’ll be as delicious as they always are,” I said, which was true. “But my boss at the newspaper emailed me.” A lie. “He said I should go to that rally on the Boulevard and take notes for a feature. I’m heading out now, actually.”
“You’re going by yourself?” The way she spoke — accusatory and bewildered all at once — made going to the rally alone seem like the most ridiculous thing in the world. And so, for the second time in as many responses, I lied.
“An old friend is one of the organizers.”
“A girl or a boy?”
“A girl,” I said, knowing she’d prefer it that way.
“Why doesn’t she just come here after the event? I can make tea, and you two can sit by the pool. I won’t bother you.”
“Well, we’re doing something,” I said. “We’re not just sitting around, talking.”
“Talking is doing,” she said. Then—“Ugh”—she nicked the top of her thumb against the grater, sucked the shallow wound, and, leaving her fist against her mouth, grumbled, “What is this rally, anyway?”
I went to the drawer where we kept the Band-Aids and peeled one from its packaging. “Immigration reform,” I guessed, taking her cut hand in mine.
“Not too tight,” she said. I kept my attention on her thumb, but I could feel her looking at my face. All my life she’d paid a comical amount of attention to me, but this trip was the first time I felt as though she were studying me, analyzing my every move, for … for what? I couldn’t say. I finished applying the Band-Aid without looking her in the face.
“What immigration?” she said.
I went to the trash can under the sink to throw away the wrapper. But the trash can had moved since the last time I was home. Now it stood near the sliding glass doors that opened out onto the backyard. “Oh, you know,” I said, strangely disoriented. “The rights of immigrants, I’m assuming. The stuff you hear about in the news every other year.”
“Maybe I should come,” she said. “You did promise you’d spend the whole weekend with me. Plus, I know a thing or two about immigration.”
“I don’t think it’s a forum,” I said.
“A what?”
“Like, I don’t think we’re going to talk. I think we’re marching.”
“That’s the first mistake. Nobody talks anymore.”
“I thought you were upset that nobody gets out of the car anymore. At least we’re doing that. And anyway, the march is supposed to spark a conversation. I think the conversation that follows the march is the point.”
“So I can’t come?”
Now she was cutting filo dough into little triangles, hands white with flour. I wanted to say that her kind of immigration — from Soviet Armenia through New York and Los Angeles, thirty years ago — was different from this kind, across the border with Mexico. This kind was more deeply entwined in contexts of racism, for one thing. Plus, I wanted to say, we had a two-party political system that, encountered with a phrase like “the largest growing demographic,” preferred to accomplish nothing, knowing that actual solutions would only hamper xenophobia and large anonymous political donations. In fact, I wanted to say to my mother, talk was the problem. All anyone did was talk.
Then I remembered I’d entirely made up immigration reform as the cause for the rally. As far as I knew, people were marching for creationism in the classroom.
I asked if the Band-Aid felt okay.
“You think your mother is weak,” she said. “But I’ve survived more than a cut.”
“I’m sure you have,” I sighed. I grabbed her keys from the nearby rack and jingled them to let her know I was borrowing the car. “I’ll be back before you’re done with the boreg,” I said on the way out. “So this isn’t me breaking my promise.”
* * *
Now, at least, the traffic was no mystery. Thousands lined the sidewalks and spilled out onto the Boulevard, a recently renovated stretch of small businesses and venues in the heart of town. Mostly those rallying were white men and women, and many wore camouflage in one form or another, which quickly snuffed out any hope I had that the event would save the environment. Some people carried seated children around their necks like airplane pillows. Invariably the children waved miniature American flags, and most of their parents carried homemade signs declaring their right to free assembly, signs I found eerie in their redundancy. I pulled off on a side street and had to drive a few blocks before finding a parking space. Then I trekked back to the Boulevard and joined the flow of the crowd.
Although I’d lied about my boss at the Tribune sending me to the rally, I did bring a notepad, and more or less pretended to be a reporter. I asked some of the protesters why, exactly, they were out today. Every response was a variation on some vague patriot-babble: “Because I’m an American, and that’s what we Americans do,” or, “I just want to be out here to show support.” When I followed up by asking what it was, specifically, they were supporting, my interviewees responded with some version of, “I’m supporting freedom and democracy,” and the question returned to why that support was necessary today, and I found myself in an endless feedback loop of nationalistic vapidity. I kept checking the homemade signs, hoping to find a clear cause, but the signs were just as nebulous as the people who’d made them.
My last attempt to understand the event came when I approached a middle-aged white man pointing a handheld, battery-operated fan at his face. I said, “What do you think is at stake today for your town?”
“I hate to break it to you,” he said, “but this ain’t a town.” He threw his arms out, enveloping the Antelope Valley as thoroughly as the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains, and in so doing dropped his fan. Bending to pick it up, he said, “Look around. This is a city now.”