Leaves by Elizabeth Jordyn Blakely

 

The doorbell woke me up from a nightmare. Still asleep and confused, I almost stumbled while I was walking toward the door. The only thing I could see through the peephole was the enlarged version of one of my roommates, Vanessa. I remember it was only five days before Thanksgiving and it was really cold outside. But her face and her Home Depot uniform were totally covered in sweat. I opened the door, and I noticed she had at least six grocery bags in each hand– “Help me, Luisillo, this is heavy.”  While I was helping her, I got suspicious about the plan behind that brutal grocery shopping:  maybe Vanesa wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving  ”The American Way”.

My friend Mauro, his two sisters, and I had arrived at that same apartment only a few months before Vanessa. I had arrived from Argentina, after leaving from Buenos Aires a week after former president De la Rua resigned from presidency, in the middle of a civil war. We joined Cocho, a foreign student from Mexico, his mother’s second cousin and her five children. This last one, his aunt, who was not in exile like most of us, had been married to a Chilean nightclub owner who left her for a “table dancer”. When we arrived, there were eleven in that apartment. With Vanessa joining us a few weeks later, there was one more. We were twelve, living in a three bedroom apartment in Doraville, ten minutes away from downtown Atlanta.

“We are twelve, and I love that number,” Vanessa shouted in a cheerful accent from Bogota, Colombia. “We only need Jesus and we can have dinner.”

She knew that I hated the idea. Around those days, during my first few months in America, I got addicted to a book of short stories and essays by Julio Cortazar, an Argentinian writer. In one of his stories, “Casa Tomada” or “Taken House,” the author wrote about a group of intruders who were taking over, little by little, his house in Argentina. The whole story was a metaphor of what he was experiencing while being in exile in Paris. The military government that forced him to leave was “taking” his country. His house.

The afternoon that Vanessa showed up with all the groceries, I was having nightmares about people breaking into my apartment: An Immigration Officer entered through the back door. I would scream and run around the house, but I could not find any doors. He chased me until Vanessa and the doorbell woke me up.

I was not really aware who Sigmund Freud was at that time, but I could interpret the semantics of my dream up to a certain point. My nightmare had to do with the fact of feeling far away from home. l was also living  and working illegally in the country because my  tourist visa had expired by that time and, since the socio-economical situation was really unstable in Argentina, I had  decided to stay.  But overall, I was in a country whose culture I didn’t fully understand, trying to speak a language that sounded foreign to me and somehow funny to my bosses and co- workers. 

In the sitcom Seinfeld, when Festivus, the celebration for the “rest of us” was happening, everybody reunited with the  practice the “Airing of Grievances”. Each person at the table would tell everyone else all the ways they have disappointed him or her over the past year. I did have some particular feelings for my bosses, and I wanted to address them in some way. But the bottom line is that I thought that I had nothing to celebrate.

Vanessa and I did not have a lot in common. She had arrived in this country a long time before me  and, although I guess  maybe she had once been in similar circumstances of the negativity that I was now lost in,  she somehow had found her way out. What surprised me at that point about her, was that although she missed Colombia the same way that I did Argentina, she always managed to try to incorporate herself into the American culture. Her spirit was always full of joy and optimism. That, instead of being contagious, was disturbing for me.

 With all that shopping, Vanessa got everybody in the apartment, totally thrilled with the idea of having a first “Thanksgiving”. Each room mate — except me– started  making plans for the big dinner even though that event was still five days away. Everyone was so excited that they didn’t notice that the phone started to ring…

I picked up. It was Vanessa’s ex-room mate calling with some urgent information. When she took the phone I instantly understood a change in the expression of her face. She gasped. She cried. She was speechless. Then she laughed. When she hung up, she started jumping around and hugging everybody.

“I got my work permit !!!!”

I looked at her with the last drop of my Argentinian arrogance and said, “Soooooo you belong to the Man, now. You are not a wetback anymore. Yeaaaaahhhh, we should all celebrate, now.”

Vanessa looked at me like a peaceful grandmother–she was two years younger than me–and said. “No, Luisillo. What makes me really happy is that I am better person now, but not because I have the stupid permit.  It’s not about the goals that you have in life. It’s about how you deal with suffering and adversity.” 

In that moment, I understood that at least at that moment I had one thing to celebrate around those days: the fact of that I at least had very wise friends. 

 A day later, I enrolled in “English without Barriers” a private language school, a few hours away from home. Luckily, I had an English teacher, Mr Veelout, who patiently explained the origins of the Thanksgiving holiday. “Do you know the story?” Mr Veelout asked.  “It is all about people that are new to America, fighting, surviving and finally showing progress in the New World, thanks to the helping hand of the natives.”  I answered affirmatively, with no other words and a lot of thinking.

That Thanksgiving I invited more people and the capacity of the apartment ended up being greatly surpassed. We ate on the floor, with soap opera magazines spread out as our tablecloths. We started calling that the “Night of the Orphans”. A bunch of immigrants and some native residents, eating some cheap frozen trash food, and some homemade traditional delicacies, telling  stories, dancing and laughing.

Five years later, the old apartment in Doraville is on its way to being pulled down by one of those developing companies that think about “your” family, not mine, first. My  first Thanksgiving “family” spread around the country: Vanessa started her own Hardware Retail Company, Cocho’s aunt re-married the Chilean Night Club owner, and I started a ”College Writing” class, with the purpose of making my English less and less foreign. However, every last Thursday of November, all of us fly, walk or commute to bet together somewhere and to celebrate heartbreaks, disappointments, and disillusions, bad credit, lack of transportation and distance, as a genuine part of life.

As Vanessa says, “God will never put you in a situation that you can not handle. But you better deal with it with a smile.”