I can’t even wait all the way through a YouTube ad without hitting Skip.
Ita walks into the kitchen holding an old box. “Come,” she says to me. “Sit.”
“Me?” I point a finger to my chest. I look from Ita to Mom. The timing of all this—and the encouraging smile on Mom’s face—makes me wonder if Clarí said something to Mom about my little meltdown yesterday.
“Sí.” She sits down at the table and opens the box. It’s full of old pieces of paper. I sit beside her as she sifts through them all, not really searching for anything. Just looking. The box is full of beautiful images—magazine clippings of beautiful people or clothes or buildings, those National Geographic-type photos of animals or places. They’re all really old, the paper crinkled and starting to yellow. She reaches a stack of photographs, and I recognize me and Clarí when we were little. Ita passes it to me with a smile.
“Que linda,” she says. How cute. She waits for me to look at the photo, then grabs hold of my cheek and gives it a pinch.
“Ita,” I laugh, brushing her hand away.
A photo of a beach catches my eye as she sifts through the stack. I reach for it as Ita puts it down next to her and I know I remember this place. The way the palm trees lean in, surrounding a half-moon bay. And the color of the sand. Red. Almost like Texas dirt.
“That’s Playa Colorada,” Mom says over my shoulder. I didn’t even know she was standing there.
“It’s in Venezuela?” I ask.
Ita nods. “Sí.”
“I’ve been here before?” I ask, sure that I must have.
“Te acuerdas?” Do you remember?
“Sí. Me acuerdo,” I say, impressed at my on-the-fly conjugation. But I know we learned that one in junior high Spanish. “Or, I think I do.”
Ita tells me the story, or starts to tell it to me, then switches to telling Mom. Her way of asking her to translate.
Mom tells me that we went there a few months before we moved to the States. That I had so much fun that day, I didn’t want to leave. As she talks, some of the details start to fill in.
“I think I do remember. Clarí buried me in the sand...”
I look at Ita and she nods, smiling. Her smile makes me remember more than the beach. I remember the whole day. Playing with the other little kids, sitting with Ita in the hammock Dad strung up between the palm trees, Dad hacking away at a coconut, trying to get to the sweet water inside. Mom digging that giant hole in the sand so that Clarí could bury me up to my neck.
Ita digs through the rest of the photos, and there it is. A photo of just my head, sticking out of the red sand and Clarí holding the shovel with an evil grin.
Ita grabs the first photo from the tabletop. The one with the pretty palm trees. She says something to Mom, nodding to me.
“She wants you to paint this.”
“Me? I thought she was the one painting,” I say to Mom.
“I show you,” Ita says to me.
And she does. We start with the sky, blending blue and white into thin, wispy clouds on a sunny tropical day. The oil paints blend together so easily, and you can keep blending the colors even after you’ve spread them on the canvas. It takes some getting used to, but I love the feel of it.
After a while, I don’t even notice how long, Mom leaves us on our own. The second I realize she’s gone, my chest gets tight with worry. What if I have a question, or Ita asks me something and I don’t understand? But after blending the reds and browns and yellows to mimic the bright color of the sand, I realize we don’t actually need words right now. I pay attention to the way she changes the angle of her brush, and I watch as she shows me how to get the texture of the sand to translate onto the canvas.
The brushstrokes are their own language.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Morse was born in Caracas, Venezuela, to an Argentine father and an American mother. When she was six, her family moved to her mother’s hometown of Houston, Texas, where Sharon refused to speak a word of English until her first bite of a Shipley’s donut. Sharon still lives in Houston with her husband and four kids, three of whom have disabilities. When she’s not busy advocating for her kids or writing, you can catch her in the kitchen where she runs a small cake business. Find her online at sharonmorsebooks.com and on Twitter @sharonmorse. This story is her first publication.
CONFESSIONS OF AN ECUADORKIAN
Zoraida Córdova
Dear Yoda,
I know that my last entry was dated three years ago on the first day of 7th grade after Horacia Móntes kicked me out of our Spice Girls cover band, but it’s me, Paola, and I’m back. Hi. Hello. Hola. It would take me a hundred years to tell you everything that’s happened, and my mom says I can’t buy another diary until I finish this one. So, in the words of Inigo Montoya, “Let me sum up.”
The rest of junior high school sucked. Not the cool kind of suck like being a vampire (I’d make a very good vampire by the way). It sucked in a way scientists haven’t even begun to find a solution for.
7th grade: I lost all of my friends because Horacia said I had no talent and was not as pretty as she is. That’s fine. I mean, it’s not actually fine. She called me a Really Bad Thing* that I had no idea was an insult. Now that a few years have passed, I’m glad she broke up our friendship. My cousin Gabriela who is one year older than me and way cooler than Horacia said that I shouldn’t surround myself with heifers who will put me down. Did you know that a heifer is a cow? I definitely didn’t until today. (That’s not what Horacia called me.) Anyway.
We also moved into a two-family house. My mom, grandma, tía Felicia, and ñaño Toto pooled all their money and bought our very first house. Mom, grandma, Lily, and me live on the first floor. Tía Felicia, her husband, and my cousin Ronaldo are on the second floor. My mom’s youngest brother, ñaño Toto, lives in the basement but he’s barely ever home because he works in Manhattan and his commute back to Queens Village is over an hour and a half. Anyway, that’s the only good thing about that year, even though I have to share a room with my little sister.
8th grade: I graduated junior high and became a citizen of these United States! I wish that my mom had told me to, I don’t know, brush my hair for the photo? I already hate my nose and that my hair is too in-between curly and straight. Now I have a certificate that says I’m an American and a photo that says I was hatched in a Dagobah swamp.
Getting your citizenship kind of feels like getting your graduation diploma. It’s the same shape and cardstock with gold cursive letters and some official-looking seals. Except, when you graduate school, you know what you’re getting right away: more school. But when you pass your citizenship test, what do you do? Do you keep studying and memorizing dates and the names of presidents? Horacia was born here and she doesn’t even know that Pocahontas was a real person or that Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States. She didn’t have to take a test because she was born in Brooklyn a decade after her parents immigrated from El Salvador. Lately, I’m not exactly sure what it means that I’m an American citizen.