“Well,” I started, but decided not to press the point. How do you explain what makes a city? Not the number of people or the sluggishness of traffic, but what? What I’d had in mind was something like my daily commute to the office at Lake Merritt, where I would stand in the aisle of the crowded 88 bus and listen to secrets traded and affirmed in the boundless languages of the world, where I’d hold on to the chrome bars so tightly that when my stop finally came, my hands smelled strikingly and perfectly of blood. A city got its smell on you, the smell of life itself, and no matter how inflated its population had grown, the Antelope Valley was no city.
I thanked the man and went on my way. The day was hot and dry as usual, but a thin cloud cover kept everyone marching in relative comfort. Along the grass meridian bisecting the Boulevard, beach umbrellas and foldout tables had been set up, and opportunistic capitalists were selling bottled water and snacks. Although I was enjoying the reporter character I’d invented for myself, I suddenly began to feel sick. I’d always imagined that I was born in the wrong place, that I was a metropolitan kid playacting the small-town boy. But now the truth set in: I was a small-town kid pretending to be a big-city reporter, and the inversion of my mask, along with the heat, had me dizzy. I went to buy a bottle of water.
At one of the umbrella-covered kiosks, I found a stack of flyers for the day’s event, held down against the wind by a rock. DON’T BELIEVE PHONY POLL NUMBERS, said the headline, beneath which came a few hundred words debunking the media’s declaration of the war’s growing unpopularity. The protest was a general assembly of the new, so-called American Popularity Party. Just as I was beginning to understand the day’s event, I spotted Roxanne Karinger. Although she looked not unlike a hundred other girls at the rally — blond, self-tanned, and pretty — I knew it was Roxanne. She stood the same way Karinger did, perfect posture except for the toes pointed inward. If she’d been alone, I might’ve gone to her and started the long work of mending my friendship with her brother. But she was with her mother, a woman who had been, until the fight, something of a second mom to me, not that I needed one, and suddenly I felt so absolutely silly for carrying a notepad and a pen that I dropped them where I stood and walked back to the car, ignoring the voice yelling after me, “Sir! Hey! You’re littering! You can’t just litter!”
* * *
Again we were in the car, but this time I was behind the wheel. Half past seven and the sun was still up. Dinner started thirty minutes ago, but the traffic and the daylight made it impossible for me to feel rushed. My mom didn’t seem to share the sentiment. She bounced in the passenger seat, rattling the lid of the porcelain dish in her lap, telling me to cut the line.
“There’s nowhere to go,” I said.
“Well, if you hadn’t gone to that rally, we would’ve left on time.”
That I’d returned from the Boulevard hours earlier, that I’d spent the entire afternoon listening to her assessment of my sister’s chances of finding a husband in law school, didn’t seem to matter. I had left her, briefly, and now our whole weekend was thrown.
“What time is your flight tomorrow to San Francisco?”
She always treated Berkeley and Oakland as neighborhoods in San Francisco, and I’d stopped correcting her a long time ago.
“Not until noon,” I said. “But I should get there by ten, so, leave here at nine?”
“Why did you make it so early? Couldn’t you have spent the day here, one more day?”
“I just bought the cheapest flight,” I said.
“Twenty dollars cheaper,” she scoffed, almost to herself. “It’s not the money, and you know it. Don’t lie to me. You just don’t want to be here with us. You’d rather be in San Francisco.”
This wasn’t untrue. But she was implying I didn’t love her enough, or something more insidious. Maybe she could sense I wasn’t my real self around her, whatever that is, and that I could fake it for only so long without bursting at the seams. I decided to say nothing.
“When I visited home a few years after I’d moved here,” she said, “everybody told me I changed. I was talking different, they said, walking different, taking my coffee different. I didn’t think so, but that’s what everybody back home told me.”
I said, “The traffic’s starting to move, so that’s good.”
“I’ve been watching the way you are,” she continued. “Now I understand what they meant. They meant I had become an American. And now I can say you’ve changed, too. You have become a different kind of boy.”
“And what kind of boy is that?” I asked, feigning boredom. I spent most of the important moments in my life feigning boredom.
“I guess you can’t help becoming the places you go,” she said. “I think of you now as a San Francisco boy.”
* * *
Teresa and my mother hugged like long-lost sisters, one apologizing into the other’s hair for being so late.
“This traffic is unbelievable!”
“I thought I told you not to make anything,” Teresa said, taking the boreg and placing it on a little side table, a safe distance from the dining area, where I could smell the homemade tamales waiting for us.
We followed our noses to the table, where Watts’s father, Seth, had already taken a seat. “Welcome,” he said in his jowly, graveled voice. He didn’t stand. He was an enormous man with thick brown sideburns, which he stroked and tugged at in an anxious display of impatience. Clearly he was ready for everyone to sit down and eat; when he twisted open a two-liter bottle of Coke, he released its hiss like a starting gun.
“Lena,” Teresa said to my mom once we’d all taken a seat, “I’m sorry again your husband couldn’t join us.”
“Me, too, Teresa,” said my mom. Because of their accents, they pronounced each other’s names better than Americans could, and therefore did so as often as possible. Lay-na, not Lee-na. Teh-reh-sa, not Tuh-reesa. “I’m disappointed, too, Teresa, and so is he.”
“I’m not,” said Seth, scooping beans onto his plate. “More for us, right?”
Teresa asked everybody to hold hands while she said grace. As a nonbeliever, I always dreaded these exhibitions of group prayer — I feared my disbelief was palpable. Seth, who had to put down the tortillas he’d just peeled from the basket, was the only other person who didn’t seem eager to join hands. But we did: I was sitting between my mother and Watts, and held on to them while Teresa spoke. We bowed our heads and closed our eyes.
“Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” came the chorus. Even from me.
I reached for a tortilla, but Teresa said, “Daniel, would you like to—?”
Then Watts repeated the prayer in Spanish — I knew this only when he got to the cognate for “Christ.” I caught Seth rolling his eyes. We chorused again, and this time I paid special attention to the big man, the only one of us not to say “Amen.” He started to eat.
I, too, reached for the food, but my mother asked if it wouldn’t be too much if she said a prayer in her native tongue, as well. Teresa said, “That would be great,” and we chained our hands together a third time. This time I let out a little laugh-groan, and Seth gave me a wink.
When we finally released hands, Teresa said, “I hate to say it, but Seth has some work to deal with tonight, too, so he’ll be leaving us early. It’ll just be the mothers and sons.”
“I’ve got employees coming in and out,” Seth explained, grabbing two tamales at once with his bare hand. “We got a lot of paperwork to do with them. When you’re in the landscaping business, you’ve got to deal with a lot of forged documents. Some of these guys, it’s my fourth or fifth time checking their information, because the government’s been cracking down, and you can’t be too careful. See, back in the day, when people like my grandparents were coming in from Wales, when Teresa’s parents brought her up here as a kid, when Lena here was coming in from — where was it, again? Romania? — people got in line and waited their turn. Not anymore. People think it’s a racial thing, but it’s really not. It’s generational.”