Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (8 page)

Maybe it was because Dante seemed to make himself fit everywhere he went. And me, I always felt that I didn’t belong anywhere. I didn’t even belong in my own body—
especially
in my own body. I was changing into someone I didn’t know. The change hurt but I didn’t know why it hurt. And nothing about my own emotions made any sense.

When I was younger, I’d had this idea that I wanted to keep a journal. I sort of wrote things down in this little leather book I bought, filled with blank pages. But I was never disciplined about the whole thing. The journal turned into a random thing with random thoughts and nothing more.

When I was in the sixth grade, my parents gave me a baseball glove and a typewriter for my birthday. I was on a team so the glove made sense. But a typewriter? What was it about me that made them think of getting me a typewriter? I pretended to like it. But I wasn’t a good pretender.

Just because I didn’t talk about things didn’t make me a good actor.

The funny thing was, I learned how to type. At last, a skill. The
baseball thing didn’t work out. I was good enough to make the team. But I hated it. I did it for my father.

I didn’t know why I was thinking about all these things—except that’s what I always did. I guess I had my own personal television in my brain. I could control whatever I wanted to watch. I could switch the channels anytime I wanted.

I thought about calling Dante. And then I thought that maybe I wouldn’t call him. I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone. I just felt like talking to myself.

I got to thinking about my older sisters and how they were so close to each other but so far away from me. I knew it was the age thing. That seemed to matter. To them. And to me. I was born “a little late.” That’s the expression my sisters used. One day, they were talking to each other at the kitchen table and they were talking about me and that’s the expression they used. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone say that about me. So I decided to confront my sisters because I just didn’t like being thought of that way. I don’t know, I just sort of lost it. I looked at my sister, Cecilia, and said: “You were born a little too early.” I smiled at her and shook my head. “Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that just too fucking sad?”

My other sister, Sylvia, lectured me. “I hate that word. Don’t talk that way. That’s so disrespectful.”

Like they respected me. Yeah, sure they did.

They told my mom I was using language. My mother hated “language.” She looked at me with the look. “The ‘f’ word shows an extreme lack of respect and an extreme lack of imagination. And don’t roll your eyes.”

But I got in worse trouble for refusing to apologize.

The good thing was that my sisters never used the expression “born too late” ever again. Not in front of me, anyway.

I think I was mad because I couldn’t talk to my brother. And I was mad because I couldn’t really talk to my sisters either. It’s not that my sisters didn’t care about me. It’s just that they mostly treated me more like a son than a brother. I didn’t need three mothers. So really, I was alone. And being alone made me want to talk to someone my own age. Someone who understood that using the “f” word wasn’t a measure of my lack of imagination. Sometimes using that word just made me feel free.

Talking to myself in my journal qualified as talking to someone my own age.

Sometimes I would write down all the bad words I could think of. It made me feel better. My mother had her rules. For my father: no smoking in the house. And for everyone: no cussing. She didn’t go for that. Even when my father let out a string of interesting words, she looked at him and said, “Take it outside, Jaime. Maybe you can find a dog who’ll appreciate that kind of language.”

My mom was soft. But she also very strict. I think that’s how she survived. I wasn’t going to get into the whole cussing thing with my mom. So I did most of my cussing in my head.

And then there was this whole thing with my name. Angel Aristotle Mendoza. I hated the name Angel and I’d never let anybody call me that. Every guy I knew who was named Angel was a real asshole. I didn’t care for Aristotle either. And even though I knew I was named after my grandfather, I also knew I had inherited
the name of the world’s most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn’t give.

So I renamed myself Ari.

If I switched the letter, my name was Air.

I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.

I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.

MY MOM INTERRUPTED MY THOUGHTS—IF THAT’S
what they were. “Dante’s on the phone.”

I walked past the kitchen and noticed my mom was cleaning out all her cabinets. Whatever summer meant, for Mom it meant work.

I threw myself on the couch in the living room and grabbed the phone.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m still not feeling great. My mom’s taking me to the doctor this afternoon.”

“I was hoping we could go swimming.”

“Shit,” I said, “I can’t. I just, you know—”

“Yeah, I know. So you’re just hanging out?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you reading something, Ari?”

“No. I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“Stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“You know, Dante, things.”

“Like what, Ari?”

“You know, like how my two sisters and my brother are so much older than me and how that makes me feel.”

“How old are they, your sisters and brother?”

“My sisters are twins. They’re not identical, but they look alike. They’re twenty-seven. My mom had them when she was eighteen.”

“Wow,” he said. “Twenty-seven.”

“Yeah, wow.”

“I’m fifteen and I have three nieces and four nephews.”

“I think that’s really cool, Ari.”

“Trust me, Dante, it’s not that cool. They don’t even call me Uncle Ari.”

“So how old is your brother?”

“He’s twenty-five.”

“I always wanted a brother.”

“Yeah, well, I might as well not have one.”

“Why?”

“We don’t talk about him. It’s like he’s dead.”

“Why?”

“He’s in prison, Dante.” I’d never told anyone about my brother. I’d never said a word about him to another human being. I felt bad for talking about him.

Dante didn’t say anything.

“Can we not talk about him?” I said.

“Why?”

“It makes me feel bad.”

“Ari, you didn’t do anything.”

“I don’t want to talk about him, okay, Dante?”

“Okay. But you know, Ari, you have this really interesting life.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Yes, really,” he said. “At least you have siblings. Me, I only have a mother and a father.”

“What about cousins?”

“They don’t like me. They think I’m—well, they think I’m a little different. They’re really Mexican, you know. And I’m sort of, well, what did you call me?”

“A
pocho
.”

“That’s exactly what I am. My Spanish isn’t great.”

“You can learn it,” I said.

“Learning it at school is different than learning it at home or on the street. And it’s really hard because most of my cousins are on my mom’s side—and they’re really poor. My mom’s the youngest and she really fought her family so she could go to school. Her father didn’t think a girl should go to college. So my mom said, ‘Screw it, I’m going anyway.’”

“I can’t picture your mom saying, ‘screw it.’”

“Well, she probably didn’t say that—but she found a way. She was really smart and she worked her way through college and then she got some kind of fellowship to go to graduate school at Berkeley. And that’s where she met my dad. I was born somewhere in there. They had their studies. My mom was turning herself into a psychologist. My dad was turning himself into an English professor. I mean, my dad’s parents were born in Mexico. They live in a small
little house in East LA and they speak no English and own a little restaurant. It’s like my mom and dad created a whole new world for themselves. I live in their new world. But they understand the old world, the world they came from—and I don’t. I don’t belong anywhere. That’s the problem.”

“You do,” I said. “You belong everywhere you go. That’s just how you are.”

“You’ve never seen me around my cousins. I feel like a freak.”

I knew what it was like to feel like that. “I know,” I said. “I feel like a freak too.”

“Well, at least you’re a real Mexican.”

“What do I know about Mexico, Dante?”

The quiet over the phone was strange. “Do you think it will always be this way?”

“What?”

“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”

I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don’t know,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

I WENT INTO THE KITCHEN AND WATCHED MY MOM AS
she cleaned out her cabinets.

“What were you and Dante talking about?”

“Stuff.”

I wanted to ask her about my brother. But I knew I wasn’t going to ask. “He was telling me about his mom and dad, about how they met at graduate school at Berkeley. How he was born there. He said he remembered his parents reading books and studying all the time.”

My mom smiled. “Just like me and you,” she said.

“I don’t remember.”

“I was finishing my bachelor’s degree when your father was at war. It helped me take my mind off things. I worried all the time. My mom and my aunts helped me take care of your sisters and your brother while I went to school and studied. And when your father came back, we had you.” She smiled at me and did that combing-my-hair-with-her-fingers thing.

“Your father got on with the post office and I kept going to school. I had you and I had school. And your father was safe.”

“Was it hard?”

“I was happy. And you were such a good baby. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. We bought this house. It needed work, but it was ours. And I was doing what I had always wanted to do.”

“You always wanted to be a teacher?”

“Always. When I was growing up, we didn’t have anything, but my mom understood how much school meant to me. She cried when I told her I was going to marry your father.”

“She didn’t like him?”

“No, it wasn’t that. She just wanted me to keep going to school. I promised her that I would. It took me a while but I kept my promise.”

That was the first time that I really saw my mother as a person. A person who was so much more than just my mother. It was strange to think of her that way. I wanted to ask her about my father, but I didn’t know how. “Was he different? When he came back from the war?”

“Yes.”

“How was he different?”

“There’s a wound somewhere inside of him, Ari.”

“But what is it? The hurt? What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know, Mom?”

“Because it’s his. It’s just his, Ari.”

I understood that she had just accepted my father’s private wound. “Will it ever heal?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mom? Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything.”

“Is it hard to love him?”

“No.” She didn’t even hesitate.

“Do you understand him?”

“Not always. But Ari, I don’t always have to understand the people I love.”

“Well, maybe I do.”

“It’s hard for you, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know him, Mom.”

“I know you’re going to get mad at me when I say this, Ari, but I’m going to say it anyway. I think someday you
will
understand.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Someday.”

Someday, I would understand my father. Someday he would tell me who he was. Someday. I hated that word.

I LIKED WHEN MY MOM TOLD ME ABOUT HOW SHE FELT
about things. She seemed to be able to do that. Not that we talked that much, but sometimes we did and it was good and I felt like I knew her. And I didn’t feel like I knew a lot of people. When she talked to me, she was different than when she was being my mother. When she was being my mother, she had a lot of ideas about who I should be. And I hated that, fought her on that, didn’t want her input.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.
Maybe if you weren’t so quiet, Ari
. . .
Maybe if you could just be more disciplined . . .
Yeah, everyone had suggestions as to what was wrong with me and what I should become. Especially my older sisters.

Because I was the youngest.

Because I was the surprise.

Because I was born too late.

Because my older brother was in prison and maybe my mother and father blamed themselves. If only they’d said something, done something. They weren’t going to make that mistake again. So I
was stuck with my family’s guilt—a guilt that not even my mother would talk about. She sometimes mentioned my brother in passing. But she never said his name.

So now I was the only son. And I felt the weight of a son in a Mexican family. Even though I didn’t want it. But that was the way it was.

It made me mad that I’d felt like I’d betrayed my family by mentioning my brother to Dante. It didn’t feel good. There were so many ghosts in our house—the ghost of my brother, the ghosts of my father’s war, the ghosts of my sister’s voices. And I thought that maybe there were ghosts inside of me that I hadn’t even met yet. They were there. Lying in wait.

I picked up my old journal and thumbed through the pages. I found an entry that I’d written a week after I turned fifteen:

I don’t like being fifteen.

I didn’t like being fourteen.

I didn’t like being thirteen.

I didn’t like being twelve.

I didn’t like being eleven.

Ten was good. I liked being ten. I don’t know why but
I had a very good year when I was in the fifth grade.