"All the Answers I Don't Have" by Sandra Sanchez
Photo by Kai Dorner, licensed under Public Domain and obtained from Unsplash.
All the Answers I Don’t Have
My nieces enjoy taking the world apart with questions. They’ll ask why a tree is a tree and in trying to answer them, I’ll realize I don’t really know why. Someone just told me that the giant thing growing out of the ground with arms shaped differently from mine, but arms still, was named a tree and I accepted it as fact. They’ll ask why the raspado man no longer walks the block and I can only think to tell them he moved to a different neighborhood. Ice to small humans ages six to nine is still just frozen water. Sometimes it’s crushed. Other times it comes in cubes. But it’s not the same ICE I know it to be.
I often wonder if the philosophers I’m told are great, like Aristotle and Confucius, ever thought about the nature of relationships. If they too had nieces armed with questions. If, like me, they also answered in omission of what the world is like to give them answers interested in reimagining how the world should be. If they thought about all the forms relationships take. Our relationship with the earth, or lack of it. With our community. With those who hurt us and those we hurt.
Doubt it. They hardly thought of women.
I remember staying late after school once, because Papi was caught in traffic. I wandered to the balcony to look at the sunset when the vice principal appeared behind me. A short man with greying hair. Doesn’t the sky look pretty, Mr? The sky was the color of a day-old bruise. The sun dragging behind it a trail of red and pink that mixed in well with the purple. He agreed and asked, Did you also know it looks so nice because of pollution? I didn’t. I learned then.
I also learned that not all beautiful things are created from something inherently good. Some beauty is born out of pollution. Like sunsets. Like orange skies that are less sky and more extinguished forest-fires. Like summers in Los Angeles. Similar to beauty born out of displacement. Like the University of Southern California and its new courtyard with the giant fountain made useless during times of drought. Or the cute little cafes littering downtown with their free wifi and air conditioned stores. Like my nieces, born out of marriages held together by almost-love.
Ever witness a university swallow a neighborhood? It’s funny in a way that really isn’t funny, but that I have to tell myself is in fear of spiraling into despair. People who lived on Exposition Blvd and faced eviction back in 2018 because of USC’s expansion plan know this more intimately. As someone who sat through too many after school creative writing clubs, exposition is normally explained as the thing one must do to ground a story. I need to explain with lots of background information where exactly a story begins. Perhaps if someone on the committee that greenlit the expansion plan also suffered reading through charts plotting exposition before leading to some climax, they would have hesitated before evicting these tenants.
How does a community exist in a world that does not want it to?
They would have known how absurd it is to end a story before it even begins. How not funny it is to displace people from their background and their origins and their homes. How violent it is for an institution to buy out land to grow their community at the expense of the one already living there. Maybe it’s precisely because they did suffer through such ordeal that they grew indifferent to the term. It’s just another boulevard. Another sidewalk heavy with foot traffic as people return home after work and school, but a sidewalk still. Why else would they think it free to claim?
When Amy Fusselman wrote, “I want to do what I want in a world that does not seem to want me to do what I want,” I thought oof. Fucking oof. I wrote yesyes in the margins of the borrowed library book and left it there for the next patron to encounter. Because yes. I’m thinking now of my nieces and their many questions. I want to answer them all.
A short index of Maggie’s & Liliana’s & Allison’s questions:
Nona, why do you wear glasses?
Can I have some coffee too? Mommy said no, but it smells good.
Why is your school so far away? Will you be back for Christmas?
How do you say (insert english word) in Spanish?
The internet’s not working, can you fix it?
Can I sleep over?
Nona, where’s your dad? Do you miss him?
I don’t want them to stop asking questions. I want them to ask what they want, whatever it is, in a world that does not want their questions. Because yes. Because maybe if someone would have wanted the same for me, imposter syndrome wouldn’t be a thing. Because perhaps if more people would have let kids ask questions then someone would have been in that room in USC and would have raised their hand to ask why.
I have long since abandoned asking such questions myself. I’m not interested in why things happen so much as I’m intrigued by the how of their becoming.
How does a community exist in a world that does not want it to?
This is how:
With hope. Hope that the next world is better than mine. Hope that my family will stop arguing over money long enough to remind the small ones of how much they’re loved. Hope that higher educational institutions will stop excusing buying out residents for the greater good. I hope so much that the word stops looking like a word. When this hope is met with black iron gates planted alongside long stretches of cracked sidewalks where gates never lived before, with new private property signs in bulky font, it doesn’t die. Not really. It migrates.
It doesn’t have to go that far either. Movement begins and ends with the body after all and sometimes that means I end up sitting at the head of my dining room table reading. My only company: a cup of coffee. Until Maggie walks in from the kitchen and asks for a sip.
Nona, can I have some coffee too?
I look at her then. Bare feet made dirty by the tile floor, which I forgot to mop that morning. She’s wearing the navy blue Lycoming shirt my twin got her for Christmas. Her hair is similar to mine, if only in style, both sporting buns to deal with the afternoon heat. A pale face made round by all the cheek it carries.
What did your mom say?
Mommy said no, but it smells good.
How a kid is introduced to coffee is important. I don’t actually remember my first sip. Can’t recall if it was black or if it had cream and sugar or if it was store bought or if Mami made it for Papi and he gave me some to try or if it found its way to my tongue via spoon. But I remember every first sip after. My first sip from one of Papi’s large cups of Colombian coffee. My first small cup. My first large one. Mine.
I grab the spoon left in the mug from when I first made the coffee, tell Maggie to come closer, and spoon-feed her some. Her dimple greets me in response.
How does a community continue in a world that does not want it to?
Like this:
The Los Angeles Public Library has an online photo database archiving all of the important landmarks in the city. I found the oldest photo of the LA River, and it actually had water. A proper river. In black and white but still visible. Magnificent, strong, and dangerous: or it must have been for the city to decide to turn it into this massive slab of concrete.
Allison asked me about it once. Why was it called a river if it didn’t have any water, and I told her that not all rivers need water. She was unsatisfied with my answer, but we were on our way to school, so she didn’t have enough time to probe me about it.
I was thankful for the break. Because what I really wanted to tell her was this: Patito, the world sucks. It does but if you grow up like us, you’ll learn how to make it better.
There are days when I am tired of my nieces’ questions, but I am tired of men and institutions who fail us, so I fight for them. I fight for the girls and their questions.
We’ve learned how to be like this river. How to run without water. How to keep going.
When there’s a checkpoint anywhere, I know ten different people will snap and tweet and insta story it, because we understand. Who else will care for our communities? The police? Nope. Higher educational institutions? Hardly.
When we run out of groceries, we shop at El Superior or El Super, depending on who has cheaper deals that week. Even when a Whole Foods pops up on Grand Ave. It’s far enough that we can ignore it.
When we want good coffee, we go to the panaderia. Spend the few dollars we have on pan dulce from the old man who we grew up seeing but whose name we never really learned. Starbucks is where we go when we’re somewhere new.
We picked up Allison from school later that afternoon, and I showed her the black and white photo. I told her about the city placing concrete to regulate the water and she asked me why.
I don’t really know, Patito.
Although now it’s apparent to me the world did not seem to want the river to do what rivers so naturally do.
There is nothing gentle about this.
Just now, here in the library, there’s a moth, or an insect that looks like a moth, trapped within the space that exists between the window pane nearest to me and the one facing outside. It looks desperate. Repeatedly hurtling its mostly grey body against the window. I wonder how it ended up there. Briefly. Because I don’t care all that much. It doesn’t seem important. But I’m staring at it and I get it. Almost want to be a moth slamming itself into windows for someone to witness. If my nieces were here, they’d probably ask me about it.
I’m thinking of LA now, and how its best quality is how it convincingly tricks people into thinking everything is okay. Yes, it is the city of smog. Yes, most of its trees only really exist in protected national parks. Yes, you can truly find a taco truck anywhere you visit. And yet. Smack in the middle of Exposition Boulevard, surrounded by several museums dedicated to art and history and science and sometimes all three, is the rose garden. Full of flowers so vibrant and colorful that people visit, take their photo for instagram, and pretend like nature hasn’t been stripped from the neighborhood in exchange for cell phone towers and parking spaces for all the new tenants moving in.
There is nothing funny about this either. Not really. Nothing caring or coffee-like.
There are days when I am tired of my niece’s questions. Even when I fight their dads when they try to shut them up. When Liliana’s dad tells her to stop being annoying, I call him annoying and take extra time with my answers. We were in his car driving back to my house when Liliana entered a question frenzy. The windows of his boxed car were down, and Lily could see all of Vermont Ave. She asked about the yogurt place when we passed Slauson and the gated park as we passed Gage and the elotero man who was crossing the intersection and about the men standing outside of the 7/11 when we turned onto Florence Ave and and and. Edgar was listening to some pop song from the radio and had to keep turning the volume down to listen to her questions. She was excited with the upper half of her body leaning way out of her car seat. Pointing at all the things we drove by. I clocked how Edgar looked like someone was pinching his entire face when I looked in the review mirror. I tried to direct her questions to me, but she wanted her dad to answer them.
Before my nieces were born, and when Vane and I were small, my fists were the only way I knew how to answer my own questions. When a fifth grade boy shoved Vane hard, I wanted to ask why he would push a first-grader, but I threw myself at him instead. I wanted to ask him to stop when he punched me in the face and my loose tooth fell, but the words didn’t make their way out and I focused on kicking him. The adults around us were too tired from adulthood to remind me that not every question ended in a closed fist. Too tired to tell I could ask questions in the first place. Too tired to answer them.
Lily, if you ask another fucking question imma stop the car.
Stop the car then. I’ll walk back home with her.
Edgar continued driving. I held Lily’s hand and we worked through why we can’t always see the moon the backseat.
There are days when I am tired of my nieces’ questions, but I am tired of men and institutions who fail us, so I fight for them. I fight for the girls and their questions.
Then there are days when I just want to go to Santa Monica and map out the city grid on the sand. How Papi used to. Watch the ocean come and wash it away only to do it again. A loop of lines erased and remade. Like USC and its fascination with fountains. Like my nieces and their never-ending curiosity for the world and how they keep going. Like me, with these words, these questions, this obsession with coffee, this city, and this inability to explain why a tree is a tree.
Somewhere behind a blue house, exists a backyard with trees of various ages planted four years apart from one another. The story goes: Papi planted one after every child born. I think of this when my nieces ask me about trees. I think of this when someone suggests I share the etymology of the words with them, or when someone pulls up the dictionary and reminds me that a tree is just a piece of wood. I think of trees planted in celebration of someone’s life and I want to tell them how naming a thing keeps it alive. Instead, because I know they’re not asking about word origins or definitions or some giant philosophical meaning, I give them an acronym. Say tree can be: turtles rule everyone everywhere. But this too falls short.
Because really, why do we call them trees?
Sandra Sanchez is a recent first-generation college graduate, completing her B.A in Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College. A Salvi-American, she was born and raised in LA, where she currently resides. Her work was recently published in Tropics of Meta.