Vanessa Bernice De La Cruz is an emerging artist and writer from Los Angeles, CA. You can find her hanging out with her cat, taking naps, whining on social media @vbdelacruz, or you can visit her not fully constructed website vbdelacruz.com.
I want you to picture this. There’s a girl, right. And she’s at a diner sitting opposite of her dad. And he’s dressed up and the booths are red and the decor is sleek and ’50s style or at least the modern perception of what the ’50s should be and she’s wondering if she should be wearing a pencil skirt or poodle skirt, maybe a neckerchief, but she’s not. She’s in clothes that’ll be easy to change out of for work later and she did the best she could to look cute, considering, but her style doesn’t really match the decor. Neither does her dad’s though he’s dressed up in his best guayabera.
The Waitress comes over and she’s nice. About her age but prettier. Thinner. And our main character is thinking maybe she should be a waitress but she doesn’t have the social skills. She and her dad have been silent after he asks how she’s doing and she says good and she asks how he’s doing and he says good but now they order. And she’s wondering what her dad will order.
She watches him while he looks at the pictures on the menu and he chooses pancakes and sausages and huevos estrellados. And she’s not sure why this surprises her but it does. She can’t remember if this is what he ordered when she was a kid or not.
And she orders the huevos estrellados, bacon, and hashbrowns and she looks at him in case he realizes that she’s ordering this because he has made this breakfast for her a million times and he would even peel the potatoes when he made homemade fries for her even though it was more work.
She associates hashbrowns and any sort of fried potato with him and she hopes this is communicated in her order. She hopes the significance weighs in the air as heavily as the scent of syrup coming from the table next to them.
But he’s sipping his coffee. Maybe he didn’t notice. She looks down at her orange juice. Wonders if she needs more vitamin supplements. Smiles instead of sighs.
There’s more silence.
How is this person and how is that? Oh that’s good. That’s nice.
When was the last time he made her breakfast? Once when she visited him for two weeks and didn’t have anywhere to go till the end of those two weeks. It was different then.
And before that? Not at the red house.
And before that? In the trailer they didn’t have full access to the kitchen. Instead they ate out. Kept a mini-fridge in their room. Tacos de tripa and cheesecake. Her fourth grade belly was so round. A little plastic ball on an otherwise tiny body.
It was flatter now but would always be a little round, always be a plastic or rubber little dome on her frame.
There wasn’t much to say maybe. Or maybe too much. But none of it made sense to be said in a diner so maybe it’d never be said at all.
. . .
With the hashbrowns came a miracle. Of the tiny sort. Or maybe not the tiny sort. See. She took a bite. And her dad took a bite at the same time. And the clock ticked 11:11 and she caught it as she took a sip of her orange juice refill. Blinked for a fraction of a second and thought, I wish. I wish things could be like before. And just kept eating because maybe she doesn’t think wishes come true.
But she’s eating and she’s savoring every bite and everything is salty even though it’s not but that’s okay because she also has a cup of water next to her orange juice to wash everything down. Everything seems a bit farther. The table seems higher up than it did a bit ago.
And the light is soft and yellow outside. The grass is still wet from the morning sprinklers and her dad’s car is outside and her bus stop is outside and she knows he’ll drive her to work because that’s the polite thing to do and her family has always believed in these little politenesses even if the family is in the state it’s in now.
But she’s staring outside and then he says, “M’ija.” And she looks at him and he’s crying. Full blown tears down his cheeks. Thick as maple syrup and the other tables are staring at her and the Waitress comes over and says, “Is everything okay?” And our main character says yeah, but her voice is both softer and sharper. Higher even.
And she tilts her head down and back to look at herself because now Everything seems bigger and she feels smaller and Everyone is staring and maybe there’s something wrong with her body. Maybe she spilled something on her jeans. Maybe her face broke out like it did when she was younger when her face was red and bumpy for a couple of years and everyone saw the redness on her face before they saw her.
But she’s smaller. And her legs are short. And her hair is longer than she’s had it since about age thirteen. And she’s wearing capris and shoes from Payless back when Payless was cheap. And her shirt is Bobby Jack. But wait, that isn’t right. Bobby Jack is what she wanted to wear but never found the right size or price maybe and yet here she is. She’s somewhere between the age of five and eight. Her hair is in a half ponytail because her mom doesn’t like it loose but other hairstyles are for special occasions.
But she’s wearing the hat! The pink hat they bought her when they took her to the zoo for the first time after she cried and cried because they didn’t let her go on the field trip. (Field trips are not safe. It is not safe for kids to go off with strangers somewhere their parents haven’t been.)
And she looks down again and now her shirt is blue. That’s better. It’s the blue shirt they got her for the zoo. There’s a picture of her somewhere with a giraffe. Same shirt and hat. Picture’s all faded by now.
But. The Waitress asks if she wants a coloring book now that she has turned into a Child. And she says yes because she likes restaurants who do That.
And her dad is crying and it’s like he’s forgotten the rebellious teenager he’d bump heads with constantly. He’s forgotten she didn’t talk to him for months after the divorce. He’s forgotten they don’t talk anymore because age eleven to now has been more than a decade and people change in just a decade, now imagine more.
But he’s telling her stories again. Like he used to over the fire when it was late and the men got drunk but they’d let her sit outside with them for a while, maybe because her dad always wanted her to be a boy but maybe because she could be quiet enough that they forgot she was there sometimes, I’m not sure. Stories about ants devouring his body while he was hungover and transporting him to whole new places. Stories of being possessed by a malignant spirit as a baby until the whole pueblo prayed and the evil spirits left. When he heard La Llorona out in the woods one day. Explaining what sierra and campo and other terrain in the mother tongue meant in case she forgot.
And as he starts talking and her eyes widen at each story, they start floating. A little at first. Just a little. But then they’re up near the ceiling hovering while they continue to eat breakfast and the diner has stopped staring at this point because it’s Sunday and sometimes on Sunday miracles happen.
And they finish and pay and she folds her colored up page and puts it in what was once her purse but is now a cute little side bag she forgot she ever owned and there’s a park nearby and they float over there. And there. There is the canal where they’d spent every Saturday riding bikes and playing on the playground.
There are stables where they once kept a horse but not for long because it was in the months before The Divorce and things got messy after that.
And he tells her about the horses he rode as a kid before he Crossed and how he’d ride them without a saddle and so many stories. So many stories. But then her alarm rings and she remembers she has work. She’d forgotten about that.
It isn’t very far but he floats over with her (there is no need for him to drive her there because, I mean. They ARE floating across the sky).
And at the parking lot he pats her head and hugs her and she knows it might be a year or two before they see each other again so she wants to fling herself on the ground the way she did when she was a kid and in trouble screaming, “Mi papaaaaa, quiero my papaaaa” because she knew her dad would take it easy on her. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t fling herself. She doesn’t cry. She waves and floats over to the fast food place she works at. Lands on the ground.
Her coworkers are surprised by the five- to eight-year-old in the kitchen but don’t say anything because they’re short-staffed. Instruct her to tie her apron so it doesn’t drag on the ground. She takes her place in the line. She can’t see over the counter.
But her tiny child arms cook anyway.
