Oscar Casares
In the Year 1974
Leaving home for the first time is never easy. Finding your way back can be even harder.
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“If that’s really what you want, maybe we can try it.” She sounded distracted. “Don’t hang up,” she said. “Somebody wants to talk to you.”
“Are you having fun?” my father asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you been behaving?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s a good boy.” I could hear his stubble brushing against the receiver. “You need to be careful tomorrow, okay?”
“I will.”
“We miss you, mi’jo.” He said it softly but clearly.
I hesitated for a second. “Okay, see you tomorrow.”
The next morning my sister made me sit behind the bus driver. She said I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone or get off the bus when it made stops. I told her not to worry, that I had my golf club in case anything happened. The bus pulled out, and my sister and the baby waved good-bye.
Over the next 350 miles the land changed from hill country to brushland to river valley. I started getting hungry around Corpus Christi and wished that I hadn’t eaten my ham and cheese sandwich before the bus left Austin. I wondered if my father would say yes to eating pizza. For a long time I imagined I was in a car on the other side of the highway, headed north instead of south. After a while I fell asleep and then woke up just in time to see my hometown: the swaying palm trees; the fat water tower on its skinny legs, a lonely seagull hovering high above the catwalk; the bell tower at Guadalupe Church; the tamale place next to the freeway; the used-car lots, the used-car lots, the used-car lots.
I saw my parents standing outside the terminal. My mother was wearing her royal-blue smock from the grocery store where she worked. My father had on the straw cowboy hat that he wore for work every day. He hadn’t noticed that one of his pant legs was stuck inside his boot. As soon as the door opened, my mother came up and hugged me. “How was your trip?” she asked. Then my father shook my hand and put his arm around my shoulder. When we got to the car, he placed my suitcase in the trunk and told me to sit up front with him. “I hear you want pizza?” he said. I nodded. “You sure?” I nodded again.
Most of the lunch crowd had left by the time we got to the Pizza Hut. I slid into a wooden booth, and my parents slid into the other side. My father held on to his hat until the waitress showed him the coat hook on the edge of the booth.
“Would you like to see a menu or do you want the buffet?” the waitress asked.
She looked at my parents, who looked at each other for a second and then looked at me for the answer. But the truth is, I didn’t exactly know what she was asking us. The word “buffet” was as foreign to me as the word “pizza” had once been.
“No, we just want to order pizza,” I told the waitress.
My father nodded in approval.
“I’m real hungry,” I said, “so I want a large pepperoni pizza. My father will eat a medium pepperoni pizza. And bring my mother a small pepperoni pizza.”
The waitress looked up from her notepad. “You sure you don’t want the buffet?” There was that word again.
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “We just want pizza.”
After she left, we sipped our iced teas and waited for the food. I could tell my father was proud of me for taking charge and ordering our food, the same way he would have.
After a while, the waitress came back and set the table. The manager helped her slide another table up against our booth. My father seemed impressed with all the work. The waitress returned a few minutes later and placed a small pepperoni pizza and then a medium one in front of my parents, leaving very little room for their plates and iced teas. My father looked at my mother when he realized how much food we had in front of us. Then the manager set a large pepperoni pizza on the extra table. “Can I get you folks anything else?” he asked.
I kept my head down and tried not to make eye contact with my father, which was easy, because he was busy eating more food than I’d ever seen him eat. My mother whispered to him in Spanish about this being a special lunch. To which my father answered, in English, that this would have been more special if we’d gone to a regular restaurant. Then he took a deep breath, exhaled, and continued eating. In the end, the waitress still had to bring out two boxes for the leftovers, and my mother had to dig into her purse to help my father pay for lunch.
After this we went back to eating the same foods. As far as I know, my parents have never entered another Italian restaurant. But me, I eat pizza wherever I go—Brooklyn, Chicago, Paris, Mexico City. If some fancy hotel has it on the menu, I know what I’m ordering. If I’m leaving a bar at two in the morning, it’s nearly impossible for me to walk past an all-night pizza place. Who knows how many times I’ve eaten a cold slice while standing next to the refrigerator. Once, I even ordered a pizza in South America. I’d finally saved up enough money to take what I considered my first real vacation. I spent most of my time in Chile, but on New Year’s Eve I caught a flight to Ushuaia, Argentina, the city at the southern tip of the continent and the world. To get there we flew over Patagonia, and the massive ice formations looked close enough to touch. Then I spotted the elusive strait that Magellan had discovered more than four hundred years earlier. And the land became only more distant and remote the farther we traveled into Tierra del Fuego. As we approached the airport, the pilot circled over the Beagle Channel, along the way passing tiny islands of penguin and sea lion colonies. The plane shook desperately against the Antarctic wind, and I thought to myself then that this was where wind was invented and here was the origin of the warm breeze we felt so far away in Brownsville. I was traveling alone and that night went out to an Italian restaurant, where I ordered a small mushroom pizza. After dinner I walked to the channel, trying to stay warm while the wind whipped around me and whistled lightly, as if someone were calling me to come closer. I stepped toward the edge of the water and pulled out a bottle of champagne I’d stashed in my jacket. An ocean liner was docked off to the side, and at midnight the crew sounded the ship’s horn to mark the new year, 1994. People were laughing and clapping in the distance. I uncorked the champagne and took my first drink. The Andes were at my back; Antarctica was straight ahead. And the wind never stopped whistling. I stared into the darkness and wondered what else was out there.
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