The plane’s constant exhalation clogs my ears as if to lull me into security, but its breath is more like that of a monster cursed with overlong lungs and misshapen lips. My seat (with no cushion between my sitting bones and its curved metal base) has been vibrating beneath me for the last twenty minutes. I’ve lost all sense of feeling in my pancake flat ass. The seats don’t recline, and its angle forces me to sit tilted forward as if to catch sight of something sinister around a corner. Maritxell sits on my right wearing a GoSleep travel pillow. Her eye mask has an elastic strap which wraps around both the headrest of the seat and her forehead to keep her from slumping forward in her dreams.
“I’m living some straight guy’s fantasy right now. BDSM kink meets Mile High Club.”
“Someone’s going to hear you,” I say. Though we have our own two-person aisle, the plane is miniature, built for people who never went through growth spurts. Even I walked down the aisle stooping. People surround us on all sides. Our flight from San Diego to Reno will be short.
“Is that hot flight attendant around?” she asks. “I hope she hears me.”
“You can’t talk like that once we’re with your parents,” I say.
“Sure I can. They don’t speak enough English to pick up on most of these things.”
A child’s feet press into the small of my back through the seat, miniature footprints on my spine. I tighten the muscles in my legs, push myself against the seat for five, full seconds and release a bit of tension.
“Besides, they know we bone even without knowing about the apartment,” she says.
When we met at our campus’s Latino cultural center, Maritxell’s self-assuredness drew me to her. Until I saw her nametag, I thought she was someone’s tag-along white friend, but she wrote in thick, block letters with that characteristic X announcing itself as somehow more authentic or indigenous than me. I envy that X in her name. Cassandra is bland—common in many countries across the world and indistinct enough with its soft S’s and its commitment to A’s, an untroublesome vowel, to be both inoffensive and unremarkable. During introductions, Maritxell’s voice came from her sinus cavities on either side of her nose. Her fun fact was that her house, built on the border of Nevada and California, had a backyard in a different state.
People were impressed.
After that event, when I invited her to fro-yo, she told me her backyard encapsulates her dual identity as a Mexican-American. I never told her I feel divided by every border, that I am a car speeding down the Kumeyaay Highway between San Diego and Tucson. Along that highway, Calexico, California hugs close to Mexicali, Mexico in a strange portmanteau friendship. There is a stretch of road where, for a few minutes across the course of a lengthy trip, the car is within one mile of the border and a wall can be seen off in the distance. That is how my identity becomes embodied.
“The hottie is back,” I say. “And she’s taken off her silk scarf.”
Maritxell yanks off her GoSleep and it catches her earring, pulling her head to the side. The flight attendant is nowhere in sight. When I laugh, she says, “Yuk it up all you want now. We’ll see what happens once I shove you at my parents and say, ‘We’ve been living in sin for a year now.’” She straps herself back into her seat. She is blinking her eyes beneath the mask.
“I am not a sin,” I say.
“Of course, you’re not. Neither is eating all the cream filling out of the center of the Oreos and throwing the cookie halves out, but that makes my mom mad, too.”
Maritxell graduated last year. Once she picked up a full-time job as a campus admissions officer, we moved into a tiny one-bedroom in Linda Vista so I could finish out my senior year. We live close enough to Mission Bay that I can smell the spray of salt in the air. She told her parents she was living with a sorority sister.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to set them off,” she says. “My parents didn’t care when I started dating girls, but they flipped a shit when I dyed my hair blue.”
“Right, so we should be as careful as possible this weekend.”
“It’s like… I know they love me unconditionally, but I still have to speak to them using usted, ya know?”
I didn’t know, actually. In my family, only my grandmother and her brother and sisters speak to each other in Spanish, and they sure as hell aren’t using usted. Since I haven’t spoken to her parents, I feel absolved of having ever lied to them. My parents helped us move our furniture in, telling Maritxell, in English, that I am less ruminative in her presence.
“It’s time for them to get over their ancient ideas,” she says. “This weekend feels right.”
I turn to her hidden face and lift at the corner of the mask. It’s so hard to tell when she’s being serious. “Hold on. You said what?”
“I’m just going to tell them the truth.”
I wait a beat for her to follow up. When she doesn’t, I pull the mask off her head.
“That isn’t what we discussed.”
Our plan had been to wait until the next time we visited to tell them we would be moving in together at the end of the summer, but I also had my own discreet plan.
“Trust me, it’ll be better if we don’t have to be worried about tripping up on our words. We can’t let anything slip if they know the truth.”
“Didn’t you say your dad once spanked you for lying about letting your hamster run around outside his ball?”
“Hey,” she says. “I told you that in confidence. You can’t use that story against me.”
“What do you think your father is going to do when you tell him you’ve been lying for a year?”
Maritxell shrugs.
For another family, that might mean two or three lies total, but Maritxell is on the phone with her mother two or three times a week. That is a lot of lies.
Our plane is either new or refurbished. The interior is a clean white with blue lighting. All edges are rounded in a look that is simultaneously futuristic and retro, like 1960s imaginings of the late 21st century. A much friendlier blue “Wi-Fi” alert replaces the “No Smoking” sign. Maritxell pulls out her charger and plugs in her phone.
“Show me a picture of your dad.”
“Trying to figure out if you can take him in a fight?” she asks.
I press my head onto her shoulder as she navigates through her text messages with him to find a photo. Much of the conversation is written in Mexican text speech. I understand the “k” as “que” but other abbreviations baffle me. As in real life, I am more comfortable having academic conversations in Spanish than bantering with adults.
“What is puercoespín?” I ask.
“My brother got a new haircut which he’s been spiking with a ridiculous amount of gel. My dad says not to be alarmed when we see him.”
I’ve never once had a conversation in my entire life in Spanish in which porcupines were mentioned. I hate the “jaja” Maritxell messages to her father with a ferocity I don’t recognize. It is a tell-tale sign of her ease, and she always types “haha” to me.
Maritxell navigates back to conversations from Christmas break to find a photo. We both see a few messages with my name in them and she scrolls quicker so I can’t read them. When we parted ways before the holidays, she gave me a cold kiss on the cheek. I had declined her invitation to visit with her family then.
Finally, she locates a photo: Maritxell beside her father at Pyramid Lake. I study her father’s face for a hint of what type of man he is. He is squat, lightly built with a beard which grazes his collarbone, erasing all evidence of him having a neck at all. Most of the men in my family can’t grow full facial hair, and his ability to do so makes me feel even more removed from him. A mole hides on the edge of his beard.
I plan to ask his blessing to marry Maritxell on this trip. I imagine his beard dancing up and down with a steady nod yes. An engagement could mitigate some of the premarital move-in concerns, could make it easier for them to forgive the faults I’m sure they’ll find in me. I didn’t think I wanted to legally marry until the day came when it had finally been legalized for us. That evening, Maritxell and I went to The Back Door to celebrate with our friends. Dancing with her between queens and party poppers, drinking Taste the Rainbows and singing ABBA, I knew I wanted our own fruity version of forever. It wouldn’t be exactly what her family had imagined for her, but there would be recognizable parts: a commitment to each other, a ridiculously large family celebration, a proposal, asking her parents for her hand in marriage.
In her seat, Maritxell is sucking on her bottom lip which she does when she’s sleepy. She is my person and I am hers. There is no way I can ask him if she tells them we’ve been lying. They would never say yes. Her parents would think of me as some upstart hussy, dragging their daughter into sin instead of the traditionalist I am intending to be.
“You can’t tell them,” I say.
“Excuse me?” She raises an eyebrow.
“I said you can’t tell them.”
“You can’t tell me what I can or cannot tell my family, Cassandra.”
“I am your girlfriend, and this is our secret to tell or not tell. We’ve already committed to this plan.”
“Yes, because of you. I didn’t want to lie to them in the first place,” she says. “You can’t keep avoiding my family.”
A man from business class two rows up turns around and gives us a pointed look. We are being brown people loud.
“It’s not my fault they’re third-world conservative,” I say.
“Fuck you. Liking my family is a non-negotiable, Cassandra. If you want this to keep happening long term, then you need to figure a way out through this. We are a package deal,” she says. “Me, my fucking fantastic sense of humor, my parents, and these water-balloon boobs.” She straps herself back into her GoSleep and puts in headphones.
I shouldn’t have said that. I want to tuck Maritxell’s rogue blue hairs underneath the elastic, behind her ear. To show her I’m here, on purpose, with her. I want her to pinch my earlobe and roll the ball of scar tissue formed under my piercing between her fingertips, but none of that happens.
The hot flight attendant clips my shoulder with her drink cart as she walks down the aisle. She says, “I’m sorry, hun,” and keeps walking.
The monotony of planes, where everyone simply waits—with a greasy chicken sandwich, with a crying toddler on their lap, with their head slumped forward as they nap—to be somewhere else usually calms me. No one expects more of passengers than to sit down or stand up. In these moments, I’m just another person, waiting too. Now, the waiting is agonizing. What will Maritxell’s parents think of me, dressed as I am, in velvet pants and a plain shirt? When we meet, should I have my arm around Maritxell’s shoulders to show we are united? Or will the gesture seem too territorial? Too self-confident when, in truth, I’d not touch her for the whole week to get on their good side.
I commit myself to verb conjugation for the duration of the flight. I start with the basics which should be ingrained in my memory, but which trip my tongue when I’m performing my sub-par Mexicanness.
I am. Yo soy. You are. Tú eres. He/she is. Él/ella es. We are. Nosotros somos. They are. Ellos son.
I like. Me gusta. You like. Te gusta. He/she likes. Él/ ella le gusta. We like. Nos gusta.
They like. Les gusta. They like me. ¿Ellos me les gusta? No. A ellos les gusto.
Or does that mean they have a romantic interest in me?
Doesn’t matter. I’ll be sure to avoid that form.
I sleep. Duermo. You sleep. Duermes.
He/she sleeps. Él/ella duerme.
We sleep.
Dormimos.
I wake to the flight attendant saying, “Trash! Trash! Trash!” The pressure localizes behind my ears, charting a sharp path between my ear drums, back and forth and back again. We are high, high in that space between the clouds and the iris of the sky. The light bouncing off the cloud tops is assaulting me. I lower the window shade.
I rub my outer ear and upper jaw in forceful circles which relieves the pressure for a single moment in each revolution, but I have a pimple near my right earlobe that makes the massaging painful as well. The plane smells like reheated enchilada tv dinner so I switch to breathing through my mouth. The shift in breath triggers a strong desire to yawn. I am afraid of that pressure forming a small bubble in my ears which will pop when I take in air. Instead, I open and close my jaw wide, cutting off deep breaths before they pool in my lungs.
The dip in my stomach and the feeling of being pushed deeper into my seat means we’ve begun our descent. Maritxell sleeps in earnest now. Her mouth hangs open beneath her mask and I know she’ll wake with the same overdried tongue that I’m smacking back to life in my own mouth. Her phone blinks a notification in the pouch before her.
On the overhead speakers, the captain says, “We’re about fifteen minutes from touchdown in Reno, Biggest Little City in the World, ladies and gentlemen.”
Very shortly, I will be meeting Maritxell’s parents. We’re only that much closer to the floundering moment when I attempt to explain to Maritxell’s father that I love his daughter and mean to live by her side until we are old, gray, and still gay. And it all starts with hello.
I immediately have an urge to pass gas.
Hello.
On a summer abroad in Spain, I learned my greetings were too rote to be natural: How are you? I’m fine, thank you. How are you? Very good, but also hungry. Let’s eat! What form would this exchange between Maritxell’s mother and myself take? Hola. Alo. Buenas tardes. ¿Qué tal? ¿Cómo estás? ¿Qué haces? Or, those should probably be in the usted form. What if her parents throw in a wild card? What if her father asks me about the security of the pilot’s cockpit? Or questions what I might have done on this Thursday had I not travelled to Reno? What then?
A year and a half ago, I had my last full conversation in Spanish. It was a few months after returning from Spain and I tried to explain my argument to Profesora Kiesel that, though literary critics disregarded Emilia Pardo Bazán’s poetic portrayal of accidental incest in La madre naturaleza during her time, it played an important role in a larger exploration of sexual deviance. It wasn’t the topic that messed me up. I had trouble conjugating basic verb forms. At the end, my profe asked, in English, “Do you have any family back in Mexico? Anyone with whom you could spend a little time?”
I told her of some family living west of Acapulco but that it wasn’t feasible for me to stay with them. I didn’t mention my cousins were working on ways to extract some of their parents from the daily dangers they faced.
“Why didn’t you consider the Mexico City exchange program for your study abroad then?” she asked. In Galicia, whenever a Spaniard asked, I said I was from the United States and they forgave my cluelessness. Mexico would have been different.
“Europe seemed more exciting,” I said.
“I don’t want to be rude, but your Spanish has markedly declined since our trip.”
That afternoon signified a personal shift that was a bit like running fingers through my hair and watching dandruff settle. I haven’t yet been willing to articulate it to Maritxell, but I’ve realized I probably won’t ever be fluent in Spanish. That thought sparks a panic in me.
After speaking with my professor, I tried to enact a Spanish Every Other Day rule between Maritxell and I, but it didn’t stick. I saved my stories where the conjugations moved from simple pretérito to pluscamperfecto or condicional for English-Allowed days. On Spanish-Only days, we discussed the weather and my homework and narrated what was happening in the movies we watched. I talked less. But Maritxell failed me, too. She gave up on correcting my mistakes, got impatient when I stumbled on tongue-twisting, multisyllabic words (esta, estacon, estacionamiento), and switched back to English for our conversations.
Despite my many attempts, there will always be something she shares with her family which will, at its base level, exclude me. All I can offer her family is my physicality—my presence, tight hugs, and carefully wrapped gifts which are inadequate in the face of a lifetime.
“Miss, may you please put your seatbelt back on?” Our flight attendant crush startles me. Her lipstick has rubbed off the fullest part of her bottom lip, making her both authoritarian and petulant child. I sit up and buckle back in, adding the clip of my belt to the chorus of clacks rolling down the aisle. The pressure releases in my left ear and sound flows into my inner canal. Now that my ears have broken the pop barrier, I’m eager to return to equilibrium. I open my mouth again to fake a yawn and my right ear follows.
The seatbelt twists and the band presses into my stomach, somehow making its way under my shirt. I adjust back and forth, pulling my pants higher up my hips and pulling the shirt down. Because of the plane’s size, we had to check our carry-on bags. Somewhere below me, folded into the cargo hold, are five “dressy casual” outfits meant to convey different aspects of my personality to Maritxell’s parents that our conversations won’t tell them—I am more than a plain noodle, I have a sense of decorum, a definitive style and a touch of grace, I bring fun into their daughter’s life. Velvet pants are fun.
I write a script for the conversation, anticipating answers to questions I haven’t been asked yet. They are a chatty family, and I should be prepared.
Me: Señor, yo quiero pasar todo mi tiempo con Maritxell.
Or does that sound like we are going to hang out instead of marry?
Me: Yo quiero casarse con Maritxell.
And he asks about how I am going to provide for her. But I don’t know the word “to provide.”
Me: ¿Mande?
Maritxell’s Father: El dinero. ¿De dónde va a llegar el dinero?
Me: Uh… tengo que buscar un trabajo.
Oh god. Find a job? That doesn’t sound great. Earn a job maybe?
Maritxell’s Mother: Ay, que bueno. ¿Y cómo harías el… el—
Propose, propose. I search for the word for propose. Or even a way around the word propose and I don’t have one. How can I ask them to marry their daughter if I can’t even say to propose? I squeeze Maritxell’s shoulder and upper arm, massaging her awake. Once she unmasks, I say, “We can’t tell them about living together.”
She opens and closes her mouths a few times before, “You fucking shook me awake for that?”
“Listen to me, Maritxell. I don’t even think it’s a good idea to tell them we’re planning on moving in together yet.”
“It’s going to be fine.”
“No, it isn’t. They’re going to hate me.”
“Cassandra, you can’t know that, because you don’t know a fucking thing about them.”
“Please, Mari, please don’t tell them yet,” I say. It feels like the air is leaking out of the plane, but no oxygen masks fall.
“My parents aren’t monsters.”
“I never said they were.” Maritxell needs to know this isn’t about her family. “It’s that I don’t even know how to say simple words, words like cockpit or proposal.”
“Just don’t talk to my parents about the pilot or business plans.”
“I also don’t know how to say flight attendant or lifelong or velvet or cumulus clouds or or apartment complex.” All the words I don’t know are building up, compounding onto themselves inside of me, inside this bag of skin, and they are multiplying exponentially, moving up my shins, slipping through feet of intestines, swirling around in the wet cavity of my chest and stacking up inside my throat, stopping me from saying anything at all. And once they’re there, they begin to swell and fill with unknown forms of conjugations and their ballooning makes it impossible for my lungs to expand, for me to get the air I need. I am hyperventilating.
“Cassandra, breathe in with me.” Maritxell grabs my hand and puts it between her thighs, then squeezes her muscles together—our gesture that grounds me. “Inhala, two three. Exhala, two three. Inhala, two three four. Exhala, two three four.”
Count by count, my body returns to an alert rest.
“Bunny, speaking Spanish really shouldn’t get you this worked up.”
She doesn’t know. She can’t know how much it hurts to fumble through a language that is supposed to be a part of me, how each mistake is a betrayal of ancestors I don’t know, how every conversation in Spanish reminds me of how painfully American I am, and of how little I deserve her and her beautiful Mexican family. My mouth is insistent on offending through its ridiculousness and maintaining monolingualism in the face of a multi-cultural world. She rubs my thigh—Maritxell who grew up bilingual, Maritxell who proudly proclaims that she’s ESL when she verbally slips, Maritxell who is unaccented in both languages, Maritxell who has been fluent in English since elementary school, who picked up French and Italian for fun in college.
She has what I want, and she doesn’t know it. I turn away from her too late.
“Why in the hell are you so upset?” she asks. “Talk to me.”
Just talk to me.
I raise the window shade. The clouds tops are pillowy, brilliant with nothing between them and the sun. “You can’t understand how disappointed I am,” I say, finally. “In myself. I’m not going to be what they want for you.”
“How can you already be disappointed in a thing that hasn’t happened yet?”
Because I know how this is going to go. It will go the same way it always has. Because of my brown skin, her mother greets me in Spanish, and I respond by bobbing my head. Around the dinner table, her father talks about his day cleaning the carpets at the casino, how dirty the Americans are. I stand on the periphery of a conversation and mutter que barbaridad on cue. Her mother asks me a question in Spanish. After starting the sentence four times, I make it to the end, but the conversation loses its color. I laugh pleasantly when her mom asks Maritxell, “Does she know what I said?”
They will be disappointed in me as I am disappointed in myself.
Looking at the tops of the clouds feels intimate, like watching your girlfriend take off her clothes for the first time and shyly glancing at the parts few others see. The plane lists restlessly from side to side, first dipping its wings into the pillow tops and back up into the ultra-blue of sky. As we turn, I close my eyes and let the sun fill my eyelids with a warmth of reds and speckled golds until its heat passes.
“Cassandra, it’s ok. We don’t have to tell them,” Maritxell says. She puts her hand on the back of my neck. “Either way, they’re going to love you.”
“I’m not ready.”
Maritxell and I descend into the clouds, passing first through their wisps, then cutting tops off them. The plane shimmies and shakes against pockets of air. My stomach clenches as we come up against a large cloud. We enter it and engulf in a shapeless gray. The plane lurches down and Maritxell gasps. Her hand closes around my wrist and her fingerprints are gritty. For a few moments, we are caught in a space devoid of ground, horizon, sky.
Suspended.
But then we break through the cloud cover and Reno lays out before us. Steep mountains form a U behind the city. Dappled shadows impose themselves on the gridded cityscape below. Houses become visible, distinguishing themselves in roofing, driveway layout, and toys collected in the yard. Two panels on the wings bend down and we descend lower, in earnest now, moving closer to brown and browner squares of the Nevadan mountains which plot themselves on the ground below me, in a pattern I can’t discern.
