Echolocation for Mixed Race Runaways
by Danny Thiemann Venegas
—-Rope 1—-
“We’re not lost,” mom said. She took a deep breath and yelled, “Desgraciado! Imprudente! Chingón!” Each insult was like the click from a bat. She located where she was by putting insults into the air and listening to the dark city echo and holler back. Eulogio was by the taxis. He had a wandering eye and freckles. His facial features reminded me of a flock of birds slowly losing interest in staying together. Lula, recently blonder, was in her Cadillac with cream interior and white wheels. Hearing her laugh felt good, like spending other people’s money. Triste Recuerdo, the barber, had a laugh that sounded genuinely happy. Mom listened to the responses and triangulated our position easily. Call it echolocation, she used this method to find her way through the darkest streets. She called out to the city and listened to it call back.
“Dad’s going to hear you,” I said.
“Let him find me,” she said. “You try,” mom said. “Insult someone.”
“I’m no good at put-downs. I can’t do anything right,” I said.
“I had you, so maybe neither can I,” she said and grabbed my ear.
Mom had a leftovers kind of smile—it was still good cold. Her smile, like the pink seam across her broom, stretched across every strand of her being to keep herself from falling apart. It was selfish to think this way, but I liked her sadness. She had a sadness that could see me, not just a sadness that I could see in her. Mom stopped me by the edge of the Hudson River. She took off her wedding ring. We stood beneath a lone, flickering lamp by the water’s edge. “Ready?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Hey,” she said before she handed me the ring. “What happened between me and dad, it’s not your fault.”
“I know,” I said. She gave me the ring. I bent my arm and threw it as hard as I could. My arms were weak and the ring didn’t go far. We watched it glint as it hit the water. It began to spin beneath the waves. The light flashed and dimmed as the ring spun. The glimmer beneath mom’s eyes also reflected the light of some hard and valuable thing slipping out of reach.
“Let’s go,” mom said.
“Where to?” I asked.
“The garden.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Gardens help us reimagine what is useful,” she said. “And we need something for dinner.” We didn’t live far from the Nuyorican Poet’s Café on 3rd street between Avenues B and C. There was a small community garden down by the East River that mom signed up for the moment she moved to New York.
Worms, compost, dirt, and empty lots—all of them were different when she was gardening. There must have been a time when anything could be reimagined in her hands, including me. She wasn’t afraid of the future, or the dark, or what was happening to our family. She was comfortable with uncertainty. She was OK with the momentary blindness that occurs when removing the masks that love wears. Mom tended to a cherry tree that she planted in the community garden when she was pregnant with her second child. She thought the tree would be ready to produce by the time her child was old enough to enjoy it. She lost the child. She kept the tree.
We left the garden and walked along a river. It was so dark I could barely see her in front of me. Mom talked in a low, sweet voice. Over mom’s lifetime, the whales out beyond the Lower Bay had changed their songs. Their songs had gotten progressively lower in frequency. Noise from ships made it harder to hear the higher frequencies in their songs. So they stopped using higher frequencies. The lower frequencies travelled further in the water. This language beneath the waves was like the language of revolution. It would be less audible in the noise of the future, but deeper, more necessary, and longer lasting.
“Oiga, Putas,” she said. “Super-culeros.” She threw out her first insults to help us get home.
No one answered her.
“You are worse than dollar store salsa and the woman who killed Selena.”
Usually she got a laugh or two from that one. Nothing. No echolocation or any other kind of insult-based radar got a response.
“Where’s Eulogio?” mom asked the clerk at 7-11.
“Arrested.”
“And Lula?”
“La deportaron.”
“And Triste Recuerdo?”
“He’s still there,” the clerk said. Mom didn’t ask about dad.
“Let’s go,” mom said. We started walking a few blocks towards what we thought was the right direction.
“Why did you stay with dad for so long?” I asked. “You didn’t even want to be with him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Why didn’t you break up with him a long time ago when you said you would?”
“Why couldn’t I have been happy with a bad man?” mom asked. “Why does a relationship have to be like a drug? Something valued by how pure it is?” When mom spoke about her relationships, she spoke in two languages. One was made of all the words she said. The second was made of all the words she held back. More often than not, people spoke about love in this second language.
I didn’t have any answers to her questions. The more complicated my family became, the more similar the words “trauma” and “love” became. Love was a kind of trauma, just one I didn’t want to recover from. “Anyways, the hardest part of breaking up a relationship is when the dust settles,” mom said. “I’m not ready for that yet,” she said.
“I still don’t get why you’re with him,” I said to mom.
“He wants to share custody,” mom said. “I need some help around the house and I need help taking care of you. It might not be a bad thing if we work things out.”
We reached home. Dad was waiting there. He had an owl pellet for a mouth. He opened it to reveal what was dead inside. Dad and mom used to speak exclusively in Spanish, but they furloughed an entire language. They stopped putting it to work. They found it easier to be crass in English and less forgiving. They yelled “Fuck You” or “Fuck You Two” so often that I expected someone to yell “Fucking Trés.” After so many arguments, mom’s patience thinned into a reed that her heart played to sing herself to sleep.
“Get out,” mom said to dad. When I heard her say those words, I stopped whatever I was doing. Mom hadn’t tried to throw dad out since he came back to her.
“You too,” mom said to me. “Get out. I’m not choosing between the two of you.” When mom said that she wasn’t going to choose between me and dad, it felt right. Alone, she could be herself in a way that she couldn’t be with either of us around.
I rode my bike up through East River Park, past the crickets singing to thunderstorms. I watched fireflies become the visual echoes of lightning strikes out in the Atlantic. I pedaled until my lungs hurt. One of the things I loved about riding a bike was that it could take my breath away when the beauty that was supposed to be in other people could not. The moon rose above the skyline like an usher’s flashlight showing me to my place in the dark. I liked being alone. Loneliness asked questions that intimacy could never pose, much less answer. I rode until Orion and the North Star reappeared through dissipating thunderclouds. I wanted to keep riding but got hungry and circled back to the garden to get some food.
Dad was already at the garden when I got there.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Looking for your mom,” he said. “She threw me out. When I tried to go back an hour later, she wasn’t home. What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Spending time with my brother,” I said.
“What brother?”
“This one,” I said and handed him a cherry from the tree mom had planted years ago.
“Why do you need to keep bringing this up?” he asked. “It wasn’t my fault. You don’t know everything.” It was true. I didn’t know everything. I’d just been told bits of a story. When mom was pregnant with my brother, dad’s white friends let something awful happen to a Chinese girl in front of mom and it traumatized her so much that she miscarried.
“You’re a fuck-up,” he said to me. “You’re a big reason why your mom and I aren’t together right now.” He refused to connect the dots between the way he spoke and what led to mom’s miscarriage. I got uncomfortable being in a fenced-in space with him. I wanted to leave. “I used to smile so easily,” I said. “I used to smile without even wanting happiness. And then you came back into my life.” I’d found my best insult. I’d found my way home.
—–Rope 2—–
Back at home, mom’s happiness was in a child-proof jar. She struggled too long into adulthood to open it. She drank in the shower to make herself feel happy. She dropped her beer. She bent to reach it and slipped. She grabbed at the shower curtain and tore it off the rungs. She hit her mouth on the tub and broke off her front tooth. I opened the bathroom door to see what happened when I heard the noise. The bleeding didn’t stop her from lecturing me. “When we lose our last tooth,” she said, “our bodies know the jawbone is no longer needed. The jaw dissolves. The body reabsorbs the entire bone. But a few remaining teeth can stop that from happening. The smallest pieces can keep a larger structure together. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Y, ¿sabes que?” she asked.
“What?”
“There was a time when I looked to you to keep me together.”
Mom’s life was not a story. It was a fortune, a warning. I could end up like her. I wiggled my last baby tooth while holding her broken tooth in my hand. On citizenship tests, every question essentially asks, “Are you good enough?” She’d been asked that question so many times, I thought she’d easily pass her citizenship test. She was showering up because she got the results from her first exam. She didn’t pass and was on her way to retake the test.
The film on her shower curtain was made of dirt and skin. The film came from all the people who showered at her house and then left. First dad left her. Then I started running away for months at a time. Only my little brother was left. Mom lay in the bottom of the tub. She wrapped the shower curtain around herself to keep herself warm. The stickiness of the film made it cling to her in a way that her children no longer did. Mom didn’t cry often. She knew that not all movement in a labyrinth is toward an exit, and not all tears move toward healing pain.
“Dad won’t be happy if he hears you didn’t walk me over to retake my citizenship test,” she said.
“I don’t feel safe with him around,” I said to mom.
“Too bad,” she said. Mom’s bathroom was wide enough to comfortably accommodate herself and no one else. Her sympathy had the same dimension.
I jumped rope in Double Dutch competitions. In Double Dutch, two girls turned the ropes while I jumped in the middle. The girls turning the ropes sang in a way to make sure I didn’t lose my rhythm. They sang because they wanted me to succeed. This was different from my life at home. Mom and Dad didn’t talk to me that way. Mom would hit me with her belt, lock me out of the house, and call me evil. When she did those things, she said she had not stopped loving me. Instead, as she once told me, “Sometimes I love you from afar because there are times when you don’t need love. You need the distance it makes you run.”
“Help me up,” she said to me from inside the tub. She was heavy. I grabbed all the excesses of her—her love handles, the fat under her arms, her tub-wide thighs. I held the parts of herself that she struggled to hold up. Thunder rattled the bathroom window. The seconds between lightning and thunder revealed how many miles away the storm was. Each second corresponded to a mile, more or less. Mom flashed a smile at herself in the mirror. The seconds her smile lasted on her lips corresponded to a distance that could have existed between her and her unhappiness.
I helped mom pick out her clothes and she drew her eyebrows in.
“Ready to go to your test?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, and we walked out the door. I heard the usual girls jumping Double Dutch outside their home on the corner. The rope glimmered underneath the streetlights. The blurry shimmer of rope made them look suspended inside a soap bubble or a wrinkle in time. The girls turned the rope faster. Good jumpers can jump with their eyes closed, listening for the tempo by the hum of the ropes and the beat of the voices singing songs. The ropes cut and whipped the air and then slapped the concrete. The girls sang songs with calls and responses that echoed in the city’s canyons. The Double Dutch ropes turned in opposite directions like a clock where the hour and minute hand could not agree on which direction time flowed. When the girls lost the rhythm, the ropes hit their calves and shins. Mom started jumping with them, and then I joined in. My baby tooth shook in my mouth in a way that made me aware of just how loose my hold on my body could be. I breathed hard from jumping as fast as I could. It felt like I could live forever while jumping, but obviously I couldn’t. I loved the trees around me because they were turning other people’s last breaths into the air I would need to one day take as my own.
“You’re going to be late,” dad said. He’d found us and wasn’t happy. He pushed my shoulders and I fell on my ass. “Mom should have already been looking for someone to administer her test.” He was Dad as Seen On TV! He was a bad actor playing himself. The older he got, the quicker he got angry. Anger could be its own form of kindness because it gave me the freedom to want to leave my relationship with him.
He reached to grab me. I took a step back and jumped into the middle of a Double Dutch set. While I jumped rope, it was harder for him to grab me. The rope slapped his hand away. The girls turned the ropes faster. He reached for me again and the ropes cut his skin. I saw why the ropes here had an extra shimmer. They laced the ropes with bits of glass glued to them. This wasn’t the first time the girls had used jump ropes as a form of defense.
We grabbed the ropes and we ran away. We couldn’t see much, but I shouted out insults the way a bat clicks in the air. “Pendejo! Huevon!” I listened for the usual deadbeat dads to swear at me to get a sense of which street corner we were at and where we were headed. I led us to hide under the awnings of some bars and strip clubs. Their neon lights covered up our bruises and other deteriorations in our skin. Neon was one of the most common gases in the universe but was rare on earth. Kindness felt distributed the same way. People looked for life on distant worlds by looking for the signatures of color that life leaves in an atmosphere. I looked at my bruises. They were purple and black in the middle. They were rimmed with green and flecks of blue around the edges. Bruises created a sky inside my skin to look at. It was a sky that suggested there was life inside, even if that life felt far away.
Dad didn’t chase us, but mom found me. Part of me wished that she hadn’t found me. I spent time as a runaway so often that I felt homesick for it. Small bruises and even smaller questions defined my life. I needed to believe that those small, bruised circles could be the frames for a lens that would bring a different future into focus.
“I can still call out better insults than you,” mom winked at me. “And I can jump better than you,” she said. “I’m la Reina of Rhyme. The Double Dutch Dama. No one can jump like me. I can even make a snail jump.”
“How many gene edits payments have you missed?” I asked while she jumped.
“Only a few,” she said. The further someone was from being “American,” like dad who was German-Irish, the more gene edits they needed to pass their citizenship test.
“Look at our skin,” I said.
“The change in color just means your gene edits deteriorated. We’ll update it.”
“With what money?”
“Dad said he’d help.”
“We can’t afford to buy you enough edits to pass your citizenship test.”
“I’ll pass,” she said.
“How many times will it take for you to leave him?” I asked her, and started counting the turns of the rope around her. “1…2…3…4…”
“Dejelo.” “Drop it.”
“5…6…7…”
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she sang in the tune of a jump rope song. “Disrespect me and get slapped with a chancla that flies like a boomerang.” Chancla-threats were real. Sandals were her preferred weapon. She could slap my Wet-N-Wild lipstick off my lips with her Dry-N-Fast sandals.
“You couldn’t leave him even if you tried,” I said.
“I could leave him anytime I want,” she said. A sundial turns shadows into information about the hours. I needed something to understand why she couldn’t love him or leave him on her own terms.
“I don’t feel safe with him,” I repeated.
The girls saw police coming. They ran away again.
“Let me see those smiles,” an officer said. He lifted his scanner to the girls’ faces who didn’t run away fast enough. He scanned their teeth to start their citizenship test. The storm knocked down the first power lines. The trees bent over in the gusts. Leaves built staircases in the air for the wind to climb and lose its breath. The blue light of electricity from downed power lines created the color of another sky. When cables went down, they charged anything they touched: a street sign, a telephone pole, an awning, or a metal trash can. Downed power lines made ordinary objects untouchable. Breakups had the same effect. A photograph, or a text message thread, or a feeling like happiness: The most ordinary things could become beyond reach. Every time I looked at old photographs of mom I was struck by the contrast. She looked happier in her old photographs. The clearer light of the present day obscured what the fainter light of the past could render in more truthful detail.
Mom called dad to let him know where we were and that her test was starting. I knew mom might pass the scan for citizenship if she had my tooth in the gap in her smile. I was mixed so my genes were closer to white. When dad got there, I tried to get him upset so that he’d slap my mouth. He might knock my tooth out. I could then give it to mom so she could pass her test.
“Remember when you said that you hate me?” I asked him. “Remember when you said I was out of this family, that I was ruining your life, and that you were going to make my life hell. You called me a mongro, a mongrel. You said if I ever had kids, that they would look like monsters.”
“No,” he said. “Mom said those things, not me.”
“Mom learned English by watching soap operas. She became fluent for you. She should’ve fit right into your family. But mom became mute around your family. Whiteness can do that. It can leave a person speechless in two languages.” Dad didn’t budge.
The officer opened his scanner. I knocked my own tooth out and offered it to mom so she could put it in the gap in her own smile. The officer put his scanner up to her lips. She refused my offer. She smiled at the officer. She wanted her happiness to be what gave her away.
Danny Thiemann Venegas an associate attorney at Earthjustice. Prior to coming to Earthjustice, he was an attorney in the Migrant Farmworker program at Oregon Law Center where he was part of a team that fought for, and won, key protections for workers that put food on everyone’s tables. “Writing is still a weapon. I’ve seen it happen in my work, and in amazing magazines like Bellingham Review.”