American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [76]
“Wyoming?” Abuelita asked as we kissed her good-bye that evening. She was trussed in a wine-dark suit, her shoes so tight that the skin of her feet plumped over the leather like dough on the rise. “Adónde se van?” rasped my grandfather from the top of the stair, blinking as if he’d just strayed into the light. Where are they going? “Parece que se van a Wyoming, Victor,” my grandmother called up to him—Woy-yo-meen—and she might as well have said “the Yakutskaya tundra,” for all that the name summoned to her mind.
To Abuelita, my mother’s family was a blank no one had bothered to fill. She had not been told—even though my parents had made a trip there a few years before—exactly where my mother’s family lived. Mother and Papi had taken Vicki and George on a long tour through Miami, Chicago, Denver, Wyoming, California, Washington … and the family was somewhere up there. The few facts Abuelita knew had been printed on wedding announcements disseminated eleven years before: Mr. and Mrs. James B. Campbell of Seattle announce the marriage …
“Woy-yo-meen,” my father repeated for his father. “Nos vamos a Wyoming, Papa. I’m leaving the address here on your radio console. We’ll be back by July.”
By sunset of the next day we were over a pearly ocean and I was hoping fervently that we’d see the likes of Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Pocahontas, George Washington, and Betsy Ross along the way. But the truth of exactly who it was we were going to see would be refined further as we touched down in Miami, boarded a train to Denver, and sped north in a Greyhound bus. Somewhere in that rush of American countryside, I asked Vicki, “Will we see Davy Crockett?”
“No, silly girl. He died at the Alamo.”
“And so where do the Campbells live?” I asked then.
“Not Campbell,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. “Their last name is Clapp. And you’d better not make that mistake in front of them.” She nodded toward our parents across the aisle.
“Oye,” I said, turning to George. “Tell me about Wyoming.”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember much. There’s just Grandpa Doc. He’s huge.”
“A cowboy, no?” I asked, prodding him. “With a gun?”
George squinted at me, his lip in a vigorous tic. He said something back to me, but I was no longer listening. I sat and stared into the whir of green. I’d never seen so many trees before: at least not like this, with wide trunks and round, verdant pompadours. Backs of houses flew by; laundry flapped in gardens. Streets gleamed with shops. There were no ramshackle stands, no hawkers, no one pushing a cart, touting wares. There were front doors, which, like the Birdseyes’, you could walk right up to and knock. There were dogs lazing by. There were stretches of farmland, heaps of rusted-out cars.
Where were the rivers sparkling with gold dust? Where were the gem-lined streets? Where was the money growing on trees? Where were Moby Dick, Sitting Bull, Honest Abe? I was looking at a place unrecognizable from my mother’s historias. The only Americans, as far as I could see, were hurtling by behind glass, over black rubber, down a long asphalt snake.
Our train was a Union Pacific Pullman, a long gray bullet on a string of long gray bullets just like it. It was tidy and comfortable, with ample seats and chummy passengers.
“Where you from, honey?” a towering woman asked me, shoving her head in my face when she heard me chatter in Spanish. I didn’t understand a word of what she said.
Mother reached across the aisle to fend for me. “She was born in South America. This is her first trip to the States.”
“Well, I’ll be,” the woman said, taking me in, head to toe. “She’s a little foreigner.”
“No, ma’am,” Mother said with a tight little smile. “She’s one hundred percent American