Migrations and Other Stories by Lisa Hernandez

Author:Lisa Hernandez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Red Curtain

There’s a huge nuclear power plant in San Diego. You can see it as you drive south on Interstate 5. Two white domes, very round. Somehow, I thought, quite feminine. I told my brother Andy, who was driving, about how feminine the domes were. Andy is a twenty-nine-year-old seismologist in San Francisco, quite handsome and charming in an understated way. And I’m not just saying that because he’s my brother.

Andy agreed that the roundness of the plants had a certain voluptuousness, a certain curvaceousness that suggested femininity. He said this with a smile.

We both went to Cal, but I dropped out when I was a junior and returned to Los Angeles to pursue my art. Mostly I worked on installations because they showed how fragmented my life had been, pieces from here and there that didn’t quite fit together. I’d had a few art shows, but none of them successful (it’s hard to sell a twenty-foot installation), so I was working as a bus driver during the day. I drove the small buses, those buses for “special needs” kids. That’s where I met Richard.

My husband Richard, who insisted on coming along, said that only I could come up with such an insane idea as a power plant being feminine. I reminded him that the word “plant” in Spanish is planta and that in Spanish it is feminine.

My husband annoyed me. He’d annoyed me for some time now, probably years, but the bickering had recently gotten meaner, more aggressive. As long as I was in the car with Andy, though, I was determined to control myself. I didn’t want my brother to feel uncomfortable. Things were difficult enough for us having to take this trip and scatter our mother’s ashes into the Pacific Ocean.

It was with quiet acceptance that we saw our mother pass three weeks ago. She had been battling cancer for seven years. Seven horrible years of seeing her suffer. But it did give her enough time to resolve things, to tie up loose ends with us. If she was scared, she didn’t show it.

She whispered to me, in careful details, her past. In her elliptical way, she spoke of her true love, of the real reason she left Mexico over thirty years ago. When it was time, she told me, I should share these stories with Andy.

Andy stopped at a rest area in Oceanside and sprawled a huge map of Baja on top of our car. We would pick a cliff in Mexico nearest the border, he said, pointing to several spots that might be suitable.

Our mother had requested that her ashes be scattered at the border, somewhere between San Diego and Ensenada. Because her heart belonged in both countries and ultimately in neither, the ashes should go into the ocean. So Andy and I were intent on finding the “right” place for her ashes.

With a pencil, Andy carefully calculated the distance from the border of the most suitable spot. “There are some cliffs thirty miles south of the border,” he said.

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