The Distance Between Us

Now in America, Reyna and her siblings have to adjust to a new life and prepare for school. Their father warns them not to tell anyone that they are illegal; furthermore, he tells them that if they slip up at school, he will send them back to live with Grandmother Evila in Mexico.

Reyna notes the culture shock; they live in a small apartment in northeast Los Angeles. Although Reyna’s father and Mila own the complex, the family uses a one-bedroom apartment. Recalling the experience, Grande writes: “I was not used to living in a noisy place […] here, it seemed as if people never slept” (167). Compared to the relative quiet of her hometown, she now hears police sirens, helicopters, and gunshots in the middle of the night.

As Reyna has arrived in mid-summer, she does not attend school. The best moment of that summer is seeing the ocean for the first time with her family. Her father holds her hand as they go into the water. She tightens her grip and “couldn’t believe that he was real, that he was no longer just a photograph hanging on the wall” (169).

When she begins school, she has to sit in a corner with other kids who don’t speak English. Furthermore, she has to shorten her name for paperwork purposes and drop her mother’s last name, Rodriguez. She is shocked to see that, while the other kids have dark hair and Spanish-language names, they are all speaking English. She becomes nostalgic, thinking that she might have been better off staying in Mexico: “I stood there […] feeling as if I were tearing in half. Where do I belong? I wondered. Do I belong here? Do I belong there? Do I belong anywhere?” (175).

With Halloween approaching, Mila buys a costume for Reyna and explains trick-or-treating. Again, she is shocked by the cultural differences, writing that: “In Mexico, we would have been preparing for the Day of the Dead celebrations […] But here, there was nothing like that to be done” (177). Halloween morning, their father discovers that Carlos has again wet the bed and throws him, fully dressed, into a bath filled with cold water. For Reyna and her siblings, their father’s spankings and beatings are worse than Evila’s because their father is also supposed to be their hero. That evening, he doesn’t apologize; in fact, he never apologizes for his behavior.

Mila encourages the kids to go trick-or-treating, making additional costumes for Carlos and Mago. Grande then reflects on what she would learn later about Mila—that she had three children of her own, living with her mother. Mila and her mother end up in a custody battle; Mila earns only visitation rights. When the kids return from trick-or-treating, Carlos shares his candy with his father, who acts as if nothing is wrong.

Suffering from toothaches, Reyna visits a dentist but has to pretend to be nine-year-old Cindy—Mila’s legal daughter—to use her dental insurance. Reyna wishes that her father could take her, but he can’t risk taking time off, nor can he speak English. At the dentist’s office, Reyna is confused and conflicted—the only word she understands from the dentist is Cindy: “I sat there wondering how Mila felt about the dentist calling me by her daughter’s name. The few times Cindy had come to the house, I had noticed how uncomfortable she seemed around Mila” (184). Reyna fantasizes about being Cindy and on the ride home calls Mila “Mama Mila.” Mila tells Reyna to simply call her Mila, as she is not her mother.

Mila has made spaghetti, but Reyna can’t bear to eat it, as the noodles remind her of roundworms. However, she can’t explain the trauma of having had roundworms repeatedly as a child. Chinta would give them home remedies, causing them great pains “as if our intestines were twisting and twisting like wet clothes being wrung out before going up on a clothes line” (189). They would then rush to the outhouse to empty their bowels in agony. Grande also remembers a boy who was reduced to a skeleton with a huge belly; his case of roundworms was so terrible that he needed surgery, leaving him with “a hideous scar. Raised and swollen, the stitches like the legs of a crawling centipede” (189).

Reyna’s father, coming to the kitchen for a beer, notices that Reyna has not eaten her spaghetti. He yells at her to eat; in tears, she attempts to lift the fork but can’t bring herself to put it near her mouth. He takes the plate of spaghetti and dumps it on her head. Reyna, devastated, wishes she could return to Chinta and begins to understand that The Man Behind the Glass was a fantasy—her father is nothing like what she longed for.