She’s a smart girl; out of all of them, she’s the one who uses the computer to call me out in California, and she does it often enough that I feel like I know her. Leidy brags during our phone call each week about how well Angelica and Dante are doing in school. She knows me enough to give me that kind of update, to keep me from worrying about them too much. Leidy says she’s not worried either, even though Dante and Angelica (and their other two boys, once they master potty training and fine motor skills) will eventually go to Hialeah Lakes, which is supposedly better now (Leidy’s word) than it was when we went there. She and David moved to Hialeah—right back to within a few blocks of the old house, a handful of streets away from Omar and his wife (a girl we both knew from middle school whom he re-met at some evangelical church)—after they got married. A six-year-old Dante was the ring bearer at his mother’s wedding, Angelica their barely walking (and therefore largely ineffective) flower girl, who I ended up holding for most of the ceremony.
I would’ve been Leidy’s maid of honor had she asked me, but she didn’t. She claimed I was too busy with grad school—your extra college—for the role. She only asked that I read some poem during the ceremony, and then I went back to my seat in the crowd, to one of the hundred or so metal folding chairs lined up in rows on the banquet hall’s dance floor—chairs that, once the dancing started, would disappear.
The maid of honor was my mom. My dad didn’t come—I’m not sure if Leidy even invited him, and I knew better than to ask her or Mami—but he sent, through me, the ludicrous set of copper pots they’d listed on their registry (the registry itself a sign that Leidy was more American than she wanted to admit—at least as American as I was). Those copper pots were the most expensive item on that list: I know this because I’d also wanted to prove something to my sister, but my dad beat me to it and bought the pots for her himself.
The wedding took place the summer before my third year at Berkeley; I’d inadvertently followed Ethan to grad school, but he was gone by the time I made it there. When I found out I’d been admitted, I wrote to him with that news, hoping only that he’d remember me and not think I was crazy for looking up his Berkeley-issued e-mail address. But that e-mail bounced back, and once I moved out there and looked him up, I learned he’d left before finishing to take a position as a regional union organizer in the Midwest. The hint of a receding hairline blinked at me from his photo on the union’s Web page; he was still young, and so I thought it seemed unfair—that backward-creeping edge—and it shocked me almost as much as the fact that I was one of only a handful of minority students in my department’s entering class.
That Ethan was no longer at Berkeley—not hiding on campus somewhere finishing his dissertation, maybe in a carrel near what would be my lab—really was for the best: the person I’d started (and still am) seeing, another Rawlings senior who swore along with me that whatever happened between us couldn’t turn serious, decided on UCLA for law school partly so we could be within driving distance of each other. We ended up living even closer once I quit my program; I might’ve beaten the odds at Rawlings, but I figured out quickly that I’d never be the imaginary profesora I met on that airport shuttle years ago. I have a better idea now as to how much she might’ve been suffering the day she corrected my grammar on our way home. And while I hope she survived her postdoc, I’m glad I learned early on that I was only happy in the field or at a lab bench, far away from anything having to do with The Department, from the advisor who told me my dissertation proposal (about the effects of toxins from coal-to-gas plants—found almost always in poor communities of color—on aquifers) would never find more general interest, that sticking with such a project could limit my options when it came to funding sources. Lizet, there’s not a lot of money in … those kinds of … questions, he said when I pressed him for what he meant. Sorry, that came out wrong, he said, but … you know what I mean—I’m interested in developing you as a scientist, not as an activist.