My eyes open, real eyes, and see the real waking room. Darker than the one of dream. Messier. Pants strewn on the floor, discarded comic books, sentinels of empty Diet Dr Pepper cans. My arms can move, and I gather the covers to me, giving myself another layer of fabric to protect against the universe. The loudest thing is my breathing, and I settle it down. Force it to slow, allow one heavy sigh before normalcy. The next sound is not from me. It’s from the side of my bed. I still hear the sobbing.
I will scream. I’ve decided. If she’s in this house again, I will make a sound like no man has ever been proud to utter. It will be loud. It will be the entirety of my defense against the world. It will be all of me converted into vibration.
She’s in the corner, the hair is over her face. It’s dark, full, hangs all the way past her neck. But it is curly, too. It ripples and bounces as she cries. It’s my daughter.
“Tal? What’s wrong?” I ask, but specifics don’t yet matter so I swing my legs over and go to her, kneel and wrap her in both arms. Tal’s in the chair, my knees are on the floor. She’s been acting like everything is fine in the time since she got back from Irv’s, since his news, and yet here she is, in the dark, undone. I hug her like she’s broken and I can squeeze her tight enough to mend.
“I can’t breathe, Pops,” is the only thing that gets me to loosen.
I try again, the whole list: what’s wrong, whatever it is we can talk about it, nothing can be that bad. Tal says nothing more. I’m still holding her. I try a little rocking motion, but she resists. After two minutes, it gets awkward.
“Everyone I ever love will leave,” Tal says finally.
“But new people come. Sometimes. Sometimes, when we make room for them.” I think this sounds deep. I was just thinking of her, in my life, but it sounds like something someone would put in nice font over a pretty stock photo, so I’m proud of it. Tal is less impressed, though.
“Irv’s going to die. I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there, and I realized everyone I love disappears. They either die, or they leave. It’s that’s simple. I’m stupid, I only just figured it out.”
“That’s not stupid. That’s the single hardest thing to accept in the world. That everything changes. Sometimes it changes for the better, though.” I try again, and again I’m thinking about her, the fact that she came into my life, and now it is better. No question. And after this moment in time, she’ll also go.
“That’s the best advice you’ve ever given me,” Tal says with so little enthusiasm that it tells me competition was nominal.
“That wasn’t advice.”
“Whatever.” Tal pulls out of my arms. Standing, she snorts all the liquid she can with her nose, wipes the rest off with her forearm. “Disgusting,” she says to no one, then walks out of my room.
I stay sitting on the floor long after she leaves. I will not go back to sleep. In the gloom, I can see the bed. I can see the foot of it. There’s an indentation in the fabric of the fitted sheet I want to believe I’m just imagining is in the shape of a boney ass.
—
“Mouths shut, pencils sharp, let’s get ready to scribble,” I say, because that’s what I’ve been saying to start for a while now and, perhaps because of its slogan-like nature, they tend to obey. Then I walk around and offer guidance and criticism one on one, which helps them to learn and me to avoid panicking that I don’t actually know how to be a teacher. This works, on average, for about thirty minutes. I stroll through the room, check on the status of their projects. After the first few days resulted only in pictures of superheroes punching each other, Spider made sure they had visual references for their tri-racial isolate projects.
“But when are we going to do our presentations?” the little fat one says today. It is not right to call “the little fat one” “the little fat one,” so out loud I call him Marcus, which works since it’s his name.
“Well, Marcus,” I say, largely to display my knowledge of his identity. This is important, because it compensates for the fact that for a few seconds I have no idea what he’s talking about. When I see his poster board and the memory kicks in, it doesn’t help me much, because it was Spider’s assignment, and Spider isn’t here. Today is a Non-Spider-Appearance Moment, which usually occurs about once a week without prior warning or later comment. “You get an extra point for diligence. I was going to wait until the end of class, but we can start now. Would you like to go first, then?” I ask, because I really have nothing planned for the class today anyway, and time is for killing.
Marcus doesn’t bother to answer. He gathers his things and comes to the front of the room. His only request is for a plug, to connect his smart phone. And then, pushing PLAY, he stands before us, papers in hand, head down.
The beat comes on. It’s bossa nova.
“Brasil,” Marcus says, lifting his head up. Holding up his poster board, which says the same. Then he drops his head again. Behind him, a recorded woman’s voice sings in Portuguese, and Marcus is respectfully silent until her verse is done, then he lifts his notes, takes a deep breath, and begins.
“O Brasil é uma sociedade mestiça. Foi invadido pelos europeus em 1500, e originalmente…”
It’s clearly not fluent, there’s a hint of phrase-book mimicry in his voice, but he seems to know what he’s saying; there’s rhythm in his sentences. I recognize enough cognates from Spanish to nod along.
I’m not surprised the class politely listens. They’re good kids, for the most part. What catches me off guard is when Marcus ends with “Não acredito que os professores” and they all laugh, comprehending, at his last line.
—
“They take Portuguese, two hours a day, plus lab. Most of the kids. Brazil’s the largest mixed-race population in the Americas. Dude, how did you not know this?” Spider tells me, when he finally shows up, after class has been dismissed. This time, he offers the excuse that a tattoo went long, which could either refer to the time it took to do or the literal length of the image.
“My daughter takes French.”
“No, your daughter takes French Creole, Louisiana style.”
“Papa! Tu ne comprends pas?” says Tal, whose hair is in cornrows today. I refuse to acknowledge this change in appearance, and we’re playing a game to see how long I can keep that up. Tal’s sitting on my desk, bored already, in just the seconds she’s been in the trailer. I don’t know the specifics of what she’s said but I get enough of the gist to tell her to stop being a smart-ass and go meet me at the car.
“Why Portuguese? Nobody in America speaks Portuguese. Spanish is everywhere.”
“Come on, you know how mixies are. Every one of us has some place they heard about, where people look like us, where we could totally fit in. Morocco. Cape Verde. Trinidad. Man, I pretended to be Puerto Rican all through high school. It’s that dream: home. To finally go fit in somewhere. Isn’t that what everyone here wants? To feel what it’s like to be in the majority? To be home?”
—
I think of that word, home, when I stick my own key in the door of my father’s decrepit mansion. It opens, but I don’t belong here. We walk in and Tal immediately drops her bag right on the floor. I tell her to pick it up and lock the door behind us, but I don’t want us to be locked in here forever. The word home, it sticks with me through lunch, as I watch Tal separate the peas and chicken and carrot squares from her fried rice until it almost looks like a healthy, balanced meal instead of bulletproof takeout. She doesn’t even eat the peas; she gives them to the hamster. I know this because he doesn’t like them, and doesn’t eat them either.