First Lesson

Liz Ramirez

Race was not something inside your home. Of your parents’ children, you were probably the darkest; that was true. But you were also the loudest, the bossiest, the most competitive of your sisters, far more relevant attributes in the microeconomy of pretending and competing and screaming and running and racing and lying and giggling that was your childhood with them. Later, you will wonder if this was the only time you ever existed without it.

         Race is not something on your skin.

         Race is something waiting outside, something that seizes you the moment you step into the world of other people. Race is the first girl who looks at you when you are twelve after theater practice and asks, like it’s some delicate subject she shouldn’t broach but still will, anyways, with all the graceless tact of kids-pretending-adults, “If you don’t mind me asking, where are you guys from?”

         The question seems odd to you then (who would mind that?). You are still learning. Cheerfully, eager to be interesting, you recite for her the earlier details of your life. Five years in Japan, five in North Carolina, five in Virginia. Sometimes, people get excited when they hear that you were born in Okinawa, Japan, and they start firing off questions about what you remember (not much, a convenience store your mom called the monkey store), if you spoke Japanese (you didn’t), why you were there (the Marine Corps). You have some more interesting details at the ready to make up for your lack of interesting memories: did you know that legally I can’t be President? (In college government class when you are nineteen, you’ll find out this was actually not true.) About the Battle of Okinawa in World War II? That I have a Consular Report of Birth Abroad instead of a birth certificate? You can’t help but be a little smugly satisfied with yourself. This is grown-up conversation, like your mom and her mom would have; this is learning to be a person.

         But Okinawa seems beside the point to her.

         She looks at you again (and for always after this, you will become very conscious of this particular gaze: the second look. The curiosity in it, unsatisfied. The implication of evaluation, ton-of-bricks-heavy; the second call to account for yourself, a bit more insistent this time.)

         “But where is your family from ethnically?”

         She says the last word with a strange, pedagogical delicacy. And though it will take years for you to realize it fully, this is the first glimmer of understanding into the question she is really asking, if you strip it of its first and prettiest skin—the question you always implicitly have to answer.

         Why do you look like that?

         Your lesson is not over yet.

         Exactly what you say in response is hazy and unclear. Something about your grandma, Mexico, other things you think but leave unsaid (the border crossing at fourteen, the years of migrant fruit-picking and traveling for harvest time, scraping by with church donations), while your mind seethes hot and prickly as you try to figure out exactly what she has done to you so you can repay in kind. You know how to play the game of insults, and a dozen of them bubble to the surface, at the ready. But she didn’t insult you, did she? No, she did something else…something with her eyes.

         So you stare at her like you have Superman eyes too, stare without blinking, stare till the jabbing of tear-needles forces you to blink as you try to make your eyes do the same thing, to pull from behind them that the pastor-in-the-pulpit, judge-on-the-bench readiness to call out not-belonging, to find it somewhere inscribed on her and force it to account for itself, like she has done to you. And it is a rush and a revelation and a condemnation when you look and look and look at her and finally, you see it—or rather, you don’t see it, because this is what it is: a lack of somewhere-elseness on her skin, and a saturation of the same on yours.

Liz Ramirez recently completed an M.A. in English at Texas A&M University, where she now works full-time in the Graduate and Professional School. Her poem “et tu,” published last year in Volume IV of OyeDrum Magazine, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her on Twitter and Instgram @trapezoidette.