Crossing Invisible Lines

Does your spouse use a regular or electric toothbrush?

“Regular.”

What is your spouse’s favorite food?

“CHEESE.”

What color are your bedroom curtains?

“A-ha! We don’t have any curtains, but blinds. Our blinds are white.”

How did you and your spouse meet?

My husband stops, rests his head on the back of the couch, and laughs. “Well officer, she was drunk, and…” He smiles and does a double eyebrow rise, flirting.

How long after you first met did you speak again?

“Uh… the next morning?” My husband laughs again and I shake my head and punch him on the shoulder.

It started the morning I awoke with a ring on my finger and a man in my bed. Come to think of it, I guess it started a little earlier. Maybe it began when I was born, or where I was born, where he was born, and the fact that they were not the same place. The paperwork goes back to birth certificates filed in two towns some miles apart, an imaginary line drawn between them.

By the time this is published, I will have had my green card interview. I will have walked in and out of that old, brown office building in north San Antonio within the hour. I will have cruised home on I-35, my husband and I smiling with relief.

Today, we practice.

“This one, in New York…”

“That’s a good one… do you have any from San Francisco?”

“A couple from the wedding. Oh, that one’s pretty. Get some with your parents.”

I am sitting on a swivel chair at CVS, looking through thousands of pictures in my phone’s camera roll. There are big moments here, like the night we met: my arm around him, rum and coke in my free hand, his face close to mine. Our first trip to Monterrey together, the mountains reflected in my sunglasses. The engagement over Christmas, our wedding in the spring, the honeymoon in New Orleans. And hundreds of small moments, captured: sitting in our backyard, the leaves changing colors behind us; laughing at the bowling alley with his family; a shot of us holding hands, walking around east Austin on a Sunday afternoon.

The goal is to choose pictures that make us look like a “real” couple — real, in the eyes of someone who does not know us.

People go through this every day. I know several of them myself, beautiful people who fall in love with someone from a different culture, decide to marry, and receive interrogatory congratulations. Hugs and handshakes abound with analysis: there must be something there. There are situations more difficult than mine: people who can’t afford the application fees or who don’t have a full grasp on the language. People with no home to return to. There are cases that take longer than mine: folders left on cluttered desks for months, paperwork filtered with mistakes. Cases handled by lawyers who were not real lawyers.

My life has been a privilege. I grew up with books and education, living in a great house surrounded by mountains, with wonderful friends who make my stomach hurt from laughter. I moved here wanting even more. People from my hometown who moved to the U.S. as well, for college or work, some have told me we never really stop being questioned. About why we’re here and how long we’re planning to stay; they greet us, ready to slip the welcome mat from underneath. I don’t think I could ever really tell you what it feels like.

A group of guys loudly requesting a different table at a restaurant, not wanting to sit next to a girl speaking Spanish.

A man I barely know warning me about visiting home because it’s awful there, he says, he saw it on the news.

Colleagues commenting on my lack of accent or the lightness of my skin, always with the tone of surprise.

Time after time, being asked, “Is it offensive to call you Mexican?”

My friend getting kicked out of a public bus after punching a boy who called him a wetback.

Hours of questioning at the border, wondering why I’m driving back with an American who claims to be my boyfriend.

A former coworker joking, “Time to get pregnant and trap that white boy into marrying you.”

These moments happened, making me feel disheartened and unwelcome. I grew desperate to show people who never gave others a second chance, a second glance — people who never traveled or wandered — that they could experience something different. I wanted to explain that is why I’m here, for something different. For something beautiful.

These moments happened, but they were scattered through years of learning in school, of making new friends from around the world; years of enjoying live music on Red River and being published in magazines and driving through Texas for weekend adventures… of meeting a man who made me believe every single decision in my life led up to this. Here. This place.

A few months after my green card was approved, I read Roxane Gay’s Untamed State. The book tells the story of Mireille Duval Jameson, American-born daughter of a rich Haitian construction magnate who is kidnapped outside her family home in Port-au-Prince. Before Mireille is kidnapped, Gay writes: “Soon everyone was offering their own desperate piece of information about my country, my people, about the violence and the poverty and the hopelessness, conjuring a place that does not exist anywhere but the American imagination…There are three Haitis — the country Americans know and the country Haitians know and the country I thought I knew.”

This passage stunned me, making me feel like I was reading my own journal during the weeks leading up to our wedding,

the months of filling out forms,

the year of answering questions.

It was a year of trying to please people. Trying to please them with half responses, with uncertain plans and decisions made in haste. There were moments that stuck — moments that made me angry. A family member of my husband, asks jokingly but with clear concern: What if they have kids and she takes them to Mexico? My father, forever questioning my future: Why would you accept being treated like a third-world citizen when you grew up first class? Questions I wanted so badly to brush off, Mexican jokes that grew tiresome. People from the States saying, OF COURSE you don’t want to go back there! Mistaking the love I have for my husband and love for the life I built here with seeking escape from a place they have never known. A place they have been taught to fear.

It is only midnight, but we have been drinking for hours, at lunch and at dinner and for long in between. I have forgotten the point when I switched from beer to gin, and I’m not sure who handed me a glass of red at dinner. We leave the restaurant, and even though we ate some pizza, our bodies stumble out wanting more. Esquite, my mother craves. Tacos! the rest of us beg. So we walk in a strange town, a couple blocks this way and that, our noses and our stomachs guiding us through unfamiliar streets. We finally reach it — “Aqui!” my friend Alma yells, nodding toward a dark corner. We all follow in a huddle. There we encounter a beautiful line of taco stands and eloteros, ready to feed us. The night was warm and wonderful, and we yell out orders and mumble “gracias” and laugh and talk until there is silence, grateful, satisfied silence.

One of my best friends is getting married tomorrow. I am in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, the first trip I have taken without my husband in years. I feel odd without him, like I’m missing an arm or a leg. But I bite into that freshly made corn tortilla and look around at my mother and my friends and friends’ boyfriends and friends’ mothers and more strangers in desperate need of late-night tacos, and I am home. I say something then, something small and ordinary, like requesting a napkin or more salsa, and I hear Spanish come out of my mouth. Fluid and uninterrupted. Nobody looks at me or questions me or shakes their head. We stand together, stuffing our mouths with the purest joy of our culture.

These are the tough moments. When I am so happy I question my place in the world and my place in my country. When I am torn between Us and Them, Here and There, and I wish my husband was here to reassure me with an easy smile.

I share these hesitations with my mother, and she is kind and firm and strong, like she always is. “Todo pasó muy rápido, pero tu vida es hermosa. Disfrútala.” I try to believe her, but I miss her. I miss the smell of her at night and her morning kisses on my forehead. And this is another tough moment. Dealing with family relationships that depend solely on phone calls and Skype dates and private Facebook messages; learning about their lives via Instagram photos or tweets. Feeling like I am always missing something, missing someone, and trying to merge two lives, two worlds, into one. Into mine.

The woman who interviews us is short and informal, carrying her Bill Millers BBQ cup around when she walks us from the waiting room up to her office. We sit down, my husband and I holding hands, anxious, and I stare at the stacks and stacks of paperwork on her desk and messy filing cabinets. She looks through our pictures quickly, the ones we chose so carefully, and asks about our trip to Taxco and comments on my short wedding dress. She nods when she looks at our proof of joint accounts and insurance, confirms a few dates and names, and then it is done.

I ask, “Is that it?” And she looks at me intently and asks back, “Should there be more?” I shake my head and tell her I’ve heard nightmares about these interviews. She smiles and says we’re clearly a real couple; we provided plenty of proof. We’re real, she says, we are real.

“She didn’t ask about the toothbrush,” my husband says.

That night we meet some friends for drinks, and we are happy but we’re tired and we want to go home. So we drive down Guadalupe Street to Cesar Chavez, now crossing the bridge. Car windows down, music loud, Town Lake serene beneath us. I look over at him and remember those first nights. When we had just met, and we spent our dates driving for hours, talking about who we were and who we hoped to become. Laughing over blaring music and kissing, good God, so much kissing. And I think about the things we have learned about each other since then, and even though everything happened so quickly he is somehow my oldest friend.

We pull up and park, lingering in the car. He reaches over and kisses me, making me laugh until I start to cry. “It’s okay,” Jonathan says, “we’re home.”

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