On Border Guards and Nowhere New York — B.G.

July 28th, 2022:

I played Magic, The Gathering in this house, back when I was a girl and the boys let me join in. We wrestled in the backyard. Games of soccer, volleyball, keep away. I accidentally hit Catherine in the face and she never forgave me.

Another year, another summer, “smear the queer,” before I knew what queer meant, but I still knew it was wrong to call it that, her cousin’s elbow came back to catch the ball. It met my face. Two decades later and I still have a gray tooth to show for it.

Childhood is violent.

But it’s also sweet, sweet as the berries you’ll find growing all over this land, sweet and sticky, the juice clinging to your lips, your fingers and your clothes. Raspberries grow red in long thorny rows, there are blackberries too…but my favorite are the blueberries, sweet sweet sweet like nothing you’ll find in a store.

The store is downtown, in a tiny little one-block main square where they sell only the worst of produce and the cheapest of white bread. A town of Trump stickers and front-yard banners that read, “Biden Sucks.” Oversized t-shirts and jeans, bodies carrying unhappy looking faces, skin pockmarked and stained, eyes sunken, the children stare as we go by.

A black and white American flag with a blue line through it.

A pick up truck that reads, “No Lives Matter.”

We’re in Nowhere New York, and it is beautiful.

We arrived yesterday, Marisol, Andrés and I. At the border they asked what we were here for. “I’m bringing them to my family reunion,” I said, and giggled nervously, as though this were somehow too strange to be real, as though we were committing a crime. I always feel like a criminal at the border.

“Any drugs in your car?” he asked roughly. “Any weapons? Anything illegal?”

“No, no, no,” we murmured, trying to project the right amount of trustworthy politeness. Who in their right mind would ever answer yes?!

“What’s going on with her?” the border agent asked, pointing toward Marisol. “Why does she look like that? Is she on drugs?”

He was mortified when we explained.

“I’d like to apologize for how I spoke about her earlier,” he said after handing us our passports and advising us to go inside for a stamp. He spoke directly to Andrés and me, as though Marisol didn’t have any ears or was a baby who couldn’t understand anything.

“People traffic people across the border, you know,” his middle America accent almost too comical to be real. “We’re supposed to look for anyone who might seem…like, you know, she seemed like she might have been on drugs or something and I wouldn’t ever want someone being drugged over the border on my watch, you know?”

I appreciated his earnestness. I don’t want anyone drugged over the border on his watch either. Marisol was quietly furious, though, with reason. Worse than being mistaken for a drugged human trafficking victim was the fact that he didn’t actually apologize to her. He just apologized ABOUT her like she wasn’t there.

To add insult to injury, inside getting her passport stamped the other border agent didn’t speak to her directly either.

“She can put her four fingers flat there, then the thumb. Now she can do the other hand. I’ll take her passport…”

Marisol is not a confrontational person but after the fifteenth time of being referred to in the third person she said, “You can speak straight to me. I’m listening.”

The agent did her best, only slipping up and forgetting a couple of times that Marisol’s ears are fully functional — it’s just her eyes that are the problem. I squeezed her shoulder in a quiet gesture of, it sucks, I’m sorry, they’re idiots, I love you.

Marisol takes life by the horns and rarely complains about her blindness. That, despite the fact that she has to rely on other people for far more than would ordinarily be reasonable. She has infinite patience and enough of a sense of humor to laugh at the things that other people would find humiliating — a stained white shirt. A stubbed toe with bruises up her leg from bumping into the wall. The inability to ever read a printout menu.

When we lived together during graduate school I found her in the kitchen one day struggling with the compost liner. It was one of those annoying plastic bags that is so stuck together you can’t even begin to separate it. She had no visual cues to even tell her which way the opening was, so she had to sit there working at it from all four sides.

But she didn’t ask for help unless she really needed it.

She kicked ass at the exams. I know it’s not a competition but she’s better than me, which makes me crazy but I suppose is the humble-kick in the nuts that I deserve.

But never mind her master’s degree and the fact that she speaks three languages fluently; because her eyes don’t focus on you when you talk, people treat her like she’s something different, something dumb, a person who can’t be spoken to directly…of all the frustrations in life, that is the one that gets to her.

We left Montreal at 7:30am and arrived here about 7 hours later. My family reunion is up the road, but we are here at Emma and Eric’s cabin that they built with their own hands almost forty years ago.

I was friends with their children growing up. Kyle, Catherine and Lily. Their family came to welcome us to town the summer I was 8. My parents had bundled all of us into our beige suburban and headed West away from traffic, pollution and smog. I fell in love with that slab of mud where grass refused to grow, with the ramshackle house that was unliveable so we slept in tents and a trailer the first couple years we stayed there. It was an adventure and I was thrilled.

Nowhere New York became our second home. We spent our summers here, returning for the grape festival in the fall, carving out ski-time in the wintertime. The year I was 16, my father took a sabbatical and we spent the year here.

I fell in love for the first time. Started community college. Stayed an extra year after my family all went home.

I’m more attached to this patch of earth than I am to the home I grew up in.

Emma had left us pages of notes. The house has no air conditioning; the temperature is controlled by opening the windows and closing the curtains at the right time of day, she wrote. There were other sections too: Hot tub. Compost. Burnables. Fire pit. Garden. Plants. Cat. Berry bushes.

Their home sits on acres of land, trails zigzagging through woods.

In the quiet of nothing, 100 acres of land home to nothing but flowers, berries and birds, I was able to get my first good night’s sleep since last Friday.

Love,

B.G.