Except it doesn’t work that way in real life. In real life, silence often is just lying, hiding, and dying.
In the end, even though language can mess us up, Rich ends up choosing “these words, these whispers, these conversations / from which time to time, the truth breaks moist and green.” I love that image of the truth, like some small, fragile thing that you have to take care of, but maybe it will grow into something strong and beautiful. It comes as a result of all the words, even the bad ones. It makes everything worth it.
42
“SANA, COME ON!”
I look up from the patch of beach that I’ve been examining to see Jamie waving her arms and hollering. She runs a few steps toward me and beckons me over to where she and the others are making their way through the narrow corridor that separates the ragged cliffside from a huge rock arch the size of an office building. At low tide, the corridor is a damp strip of sand. At high tide, it becomes a channel of frigid seawater so cold it makes your teeth hurt. Through this channel and beyond the cliff is the rest of the beach, where we’ve left our stuff.
“The tide’s coming in! If you wait too long, you’ll have to swim back to the other side!”
This morning, we had salt-pickled kombu seaweed and tiny sardines cooked in soy sauce for breakfast, and I imagined that I was in the undersea palace of the Dragon King, having a royal feast. Mom went crazy for our New Year’s breakfast. She spent a week preparing all the traditional good-luck foods: the sardines for abundance, the kombu for joy, black azuki beans for health, salty yellow fish eggs for many descendants, and prawns cooked in their shells for long life. Plus about a hundred other things. She doesn’t always go to such lengths. When we lived in Wisconsin, if she wanted to do a full-on New Year’s breakfast, she had to drive all the way to a special store in Illinois to get all the ingredients.
But this year, Yūko was invited to have New Year’s breakfast with us. Sorry—that’s Yūko-san. Mom insists that I speak of her with respect. I was setting the table when the doorbell rang. Mom answered it and called me over to introduce me. Yūko-san bowed deeply to me, apologized for all the suffering she’d caused, thanked me for understanding, and said she hoped we could become friends in the new year. Then she went into the kitchen to help Mom with her gazillion New Year’s dishes. Awk-ward.
I mean, Yūko-san is beautiful and nice and—as Mom has repeatedly pointed out to me—honorable. But to be honest, I’m still working to wrap my head around the idea of her and Dad being in love, of her and Dad being something permanent. I still don’t know how she’s supposed to fit into my life. Or how I’m supposed to fit into hers. And I still want Mom to find a life and a love of her own.
Yūko-san and Dad looked so happy together, though, and Mom seemed totally fine with the whole thing, laughing with Yūko-san about Dad’s bad habits and idiosyncrasies, and reminiscing about old times. Maybe it’s easier if you have history together. Yūko-san was wearing the pearl earrings that Dad gave her, and I thought about what he’d said so long ago about everyone having something powerful and precious inside them—especially Mom. Now I think I understand what he meant.
Jamie, JJ, Christina, and Arturo came to pick me up after breakfast, and off we went to the beach. I’ve invited the others to meet us here later: Reggie and Thom, Elaine and Jimmy, Janet, Hanh, Caleb, and a couple of others. Hopefully they’ll show up.
During winter break, the week after my epic performance in Mrs. Byrd’s classroom, Jamie and I met Christina, JJ, and Arturo at Psycho Donuts downtown. They were already sitting at a table when I arrived, holding hands with Jamie.
“So, props for standing up to The Bird.”
“Thanks.”
“And I liked that poem. ‘Elliptical.’ About how whites and Asians see Mexicans and Blacks—like we’re always ‘they.’ Like, people think they know about us, but they’re really just guessing and making stuff up and judging . . . so . . . yeah . . . that was pretty cool.”
“Oh,” I said, “yeah. I’m glad you liked the poem. I hoped you would. And I’m sorry about all the things I said.”
So that was good. The thing is, I’d thought the poem was actually about uncertainty, about how we can all look back at our lives and wonder what we could have done, thought, and said differently. But the instant I heard Christina’s interpretation, I saw that she was right. It made much more sense her way—white (and some Asian) people saying about Blacks and Latinos, “They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . We all wish they were more . . .” Thinking we’re trying to understand, but actually just sitting in judgment.
Duh. How could I have missed it? And here I was, thinking that I was smarter than her, even though Jamie told me she was smart. That I was nice and she was mean. Which, okay, yeah, Christina was no sweetheart. But I saw her through a veil of mistrust and—I’ll just say it—racism, and it colored the way I saw everything she did.
Maybe people get tired of trying to be nice to folks who keep saying, “They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . We all wish they were more . . .” Maybe it feels useless to keep explaining when no one listens. Maybe Christina is like the woman in Sandra Cisneros’s poem. The one who makes me uncomfortable but whom I admire. She just is who she is, and she shouldn’t have to apologize for it or explain it to anyone. Christina and I are still not a hundred percent comfortable with each other. We still tread on each other’s toes every once in a while. But it’s getting easier. We’re learning to trust and listen to each other enough to dig for the truth together.
The strange thing about this beach is that there is no sea glass. Smooth gray stones and pebbles, yes. Bits of creamy white seashell, sanded and polished until only the ghosts of their ridges and spines remain—yes. But no emerald green, no amber, no startling sapphire blue. Nothing that was tossed, sharp-edged and broken, into a world where it didn’t belong, and survived to become a rare and unexpected gift on an endless stretch of sand.