is papers. “I’ll take a personal interest in her and keep in constant touch with you.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” my aunt told him, speaking in English again. “I’m not asking for any special favors, and I don’t intend to treat a girl this age like some sort of baby. I won’t nursemaid her. She’ll sink or swim on her own, and she knows it.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, still shuffling papers to keep from looking at those furious eyes.
He walked out of the office with her and spoke to her for a while in the hallway. When he returned, he looked brow-beaten and happy she was gone.
“I’ll take you to your classroom and your teacher now,” he said.
I rose with trepidation. The school was bigger than any I had seen, and there were so many students in the hallways and classrooms. Surely, I thought, I will get lost here.
“Your aunt is quite a woman,” Señor Diaz told me as we walked out of his office. I saw from the way his eyes twinkled that he wasn’t giving her a compliment. “We’d better not disappoint her, eh, Delia?”
I nodded. I was afraid to utter a word in Spanish or in English.
He brought me to a classroom to be with ten other boys and girls who had recently come from Mexico. The teacher, Señorita Holt, reminded me a little of Señora Cuevas. She was far prettier, with shoulder-length auburn hair, and she was much younger than Señora Cuevas. However, I saw immediately that she was just as serious and had little patience for inattentiveness or disruption.
As part of the day’s lesson, I was introduced in English to each student. Señorita Holt had provided each student with a sheet of questions in English we were to ask to learn about one another. While we were in this classroom, Señorita Holt insisted we speak only English. If we didn’t know a word, we were to ask and then use it. I found out quickly that the other students ranged from ages twelve to seventeen, the oldest being a boy named Ignacio Davila, whose father now owned his own gardening business.
I learned Ignacio’s father had come to America to work and eventually developed his own company. Afterward, he sent for his wife and four children. Ignacio was the oldest. I was placed next to him in the classroom. I thought Ignacio was a sullen, unhappy boy, not very interested in learning how to speak English well. Except for attending the ESL class, he had little to do with the school, because he had to work in his father’s business most of he time.
All but one of the other students’ parents worked as gardeners or maids. The one whose didn’t was the daughter of a man who sang and played guitar with a group of mariachis in a big Mexican restaurant. She was twelve, and her name was Amata, but the others simply called her Mata. She had black hair down to her wing bones and had a face like a small doll’s face, with diminutive features and ebony button eyes, lighting her smile with innocence and happiness. Her tiny voice and little hands made you feel like hugging her.
Señorita Holt broke us into three work groups to practice what we were learning in the textbook and on the tapes she had us play, all of us listening on earphones. Before the class ended, we watched a television program in which important English words were spelled and sounded out. With the words I had known before coming to the United States and the words I did pick up from my lessons with Señor Baker, I managed to do well enough to get a compliment from my teacher my first day.
After she had enrolled me in the public school, my aunt had given me money to take a bus, which would drop me off almost a mile and a half from the estate. She provided me with the address, but she didn’t take the time to explain any directions. Anyone would think she was hoping I would not find my way back.
Ignacio, who had said little to me in the classroom, rode the same bus. He would ride it much farther. At the bus stop where we boarded, he asked me why I had come to live with my aunt. He had heard of my village in Mexico and knew it was populated by farmers and small tradesmen with almost no tourism, but he had never been there. When he learned what had happened to my parents, he became less indifferent.
“I know who your aunt is,” he said. “We don’t have her property to service, but we have one nearby. She’s very rich. Why doesn’t she have someone take you to school and pick you up? If you miss the bus, you sometimes have to wait an hour for the next one. And when you get off at the closest station, you’ll have a good long walk.”
“I like to walk,” I told him.
“Wait until it’s very hot. You won’t be happy. Your aunt knows that.”
How was I to explain my aunt?
“It’s the way she wants it,” I said. “It’s not so bad. I have never been on such a long bus with such comfortable seats and air conditioning.”
The truth was, I had never been on a bus at all.
He shrugged. “My father promised me that next year, I could get a car. I have to save at least half the cost from working myself. I had my grandfather’s truck in Mexico,” he told me. “I drove it when I was only ten.”
“I never drove,” I told him. “We had only a truck, and my father rarely used it for anything other than going to work and back. You will be very fortunate to have your own car.”
“It’s not for sure. It’s hard to save money here,” he said.
I was happy he was talking to me. He had very beautiful black eyes, a shade of ebony I had not seen. Sometimes they had a green glint. His hair was as short as a soldier’s. He saw I noticed and explained that his father insisted his employees look clean and respectable. He would never permit drinking alcoholic beverages on the job, not even a bottle of beer. A man he knew who worked for someone else was drunk on the job and nearly cut off his foot. Now he had a very bad limp and hardly worked.
“He sends very little back to his family in Mexico. He’s illegal, undocumented, you know. He doesn’t have any insurance and is afraid to complain about anything, or he’ll get sent back, and he won’t even be able to get them the little he does.”
“That’s very sad.”
“Yes. Sometimes he has nothing and begs on the streets. My father says he’s an embarrassment to our people. You know men don’t beg like that in Mexico. They’ll try to sell anything first, trinkets, souvenirs, anything,” he said, sounding bitter, as if this man embarrassed all of the Mexican men living here.
“Sí,” I said, afraid even to suggest I disagreed.
“My father has five other men working for him,” he said proudly. “And they all have a legal right to work here. He won’t hire any undocumented Mexicans, and he pays all his taxes, including payroll taxes. I wish he didn’t sometimes. I’d make more and get my car for sure.”