Don Quixote’s Spear

My mother’s love of the Spanish language began with “Don Quixote.” Mine began with a flashcard. Thick beige card stock, 3 by 5 inches, printed on the front with a line drawing of a human ear. On the back, the words la oreja. How bizarre to be confronted by one disembodied ear. How exhilarating to be able to say la oreja to my mother sitting across the breakfast table, knowing that we shared a secret language. La oreja. The ear.

When I was 7, my mother began work on her associate’s degree. The moment my younger sister entered nursery school, she enrolled in art history and literature courses at the community college. My father humored this--possibly to compensate for the black eyes he dealt her on occasion--and built her an office in the attic. I’d find her sitting among scraps of insulation and shards of drywall, head bowed over Kafka or Camus, their theories of existence illuminated in the light of a bare bulb.

Before academia, my mother enrolled me in the parks and recreation classes she also took. We began with cake decorating, learning to festoon frosting rosettes and sugary curlicues across the smooth white expanse of a sheet cake. Later, we moved on to Spanish lessons.

My mother had discovered “Don Quixote” in a world literature course. The relentless idealism of Cervantes’ tragic hero captured her imagination. Quixote is the classic underdog, battling a tedious reality touted by his peers. Perhaps my mother found inspiration in his fight, gained new courage to spurn the conservative middle-class

society that advised her to remain in a loveless relationship for the sake of her children. Ironically, my father’s birthday present to her the year she began college was a small iron statue--Picasso’s angular depiction of Don Quixote astride his steed, Rocinante. In one hand, the knight held a shield, in the other a solid 8-inch spear.

“We’re going to become fluent in Spanish.” My mother cradled me to her, hand pressed warm against my ear, as she called to register for the course. My world was our insular upper-middle-class neighborhood, with its neat stone paths winding through tract homes to the gated pool. I knew no one but the other Anglo children who played hide-and-seek on the cul-de-sac while our mothers hosted Tupperware parties in sunken living rooms. On weekends, whatever bruises and curses commenced when the fathers were home from their engineering and advertising jobs remained concealed behind closed doors.

But my mother had glimpsed another reality. She yearned for La Mancha, for Cervantes’ windmills and decrepit inns and raucous bars. Spanish--the language thick and golden as honey--appeared to be her passport into this world.

There were other flashcards in the deck given to us by our Spanish teacher, of course. La nariz--the nose--pictured as an austere proboscis with large, unsettling nostrils. La boca--a full-lipped mouth brandishing an even row of teeth. El pelo--a lock of dark hair vastly different from my mother’s blond beehive and my own brown pigtails. In those weekly Spanish classes at the library, my brain registered an abundance of information. El gato--the cat. La hermana--the sister. La madre--the mother.

At home, my mother practiced Spanish inquisitions as she washed dishes or fried liver and onions for my father, home at 7 from his hourlong commute. “¿A donde vas?” she’d ask herself. Where are you going? “¿Que adora usted?” What do you love? “¿Usted es feliz?” Are you happy?

My younger sister and I sat squashed together in the orange easy chair and watched “Sesame Street” as my mother concocted appetizers in the kitchen. Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, Maria and Luis and Mr. Hooper populated my dreams. I absorbed the brassy resilience of Carmen’s famous aria as a Claymation orange warbled Bizet while rolling about on a countertop. “¡Peligro!” hooted a shrewd owl as a train rumbled by on one of the show’s educational cartoon segments. “¡Peligro!” it cautioned as a piano fell out of an open window.

My Spanish flashcards elucidated only nouns. Imperatives arrived in the Level II class. Still, I avoided railroad tracks, stepped over sidewalk cracks and watched my mother from my chair.

She set a steaming plate on a TV tray beside my sister and me. “Tortilla Flats,” she called the open-faced quesadillas speckled with olives and named to honor John Steinbeck, the other author who captivated her imagination that year. She’d nibble one cheesy triangle and gaze out the kitchen window at our spurious Southern California suburb.

From my chair, I spoke of what I had learned.

“Peligro, Mommy.” Danger.

Sancho Panza served as Don Quixote’s spoilsport sidekick. In vain, he attempted to convince the don of the truth of his prosaic surroundings, but Quixote remained impervious to warnings. Like every idealist, he possessed an unshakable faith in his own vision.

The city of Oxnard, 20 miles from my parents’ suburb, also envisioned itself as something other than what it was. Inspired by the grandeur of Los Angeles to the south, the sleepy farm town struggled against banality. Expensive new houses materialized on the harbor. Fisherman’s Wharf, once a scattering of tacky shell boutiques and dank lobster markets, transformed itself into an alluring destination.

It was here, near the wharf, that my mother relocated us the summer she left my father and moved in with a woman. My mother’s first female lover was bold and mesmerizing, with a shrewd gaze and earthy poise. She reminded me of Dulcinea, the peasant woman whom Quixote believes to be a princess, who never actually appears in the flesh in Cervantes’ novel, and was played by Sophia Loren in the musical adaptation I watched as a child.

Within a week in Oxnard, my mother had shed her demure print dresses for flannel shirts and blue jeans. On balconies lit with candles set in jam jars, she drank beer and smoked Camel Lights, reveling in her newfound freedom. Across the harbor was Oxnard’s upscale restaurant, the Whale’s Tail, the lights from docked yachts illuminating its manicured landscape. But Silver Strand Beach was a community of minorities who had no place in the gleaming new palaces across the water.

My sister and I, once schooled in the arts of English riding and gymnastics, skipped barefoot through narrow streets flanked by stray dogs and neighborhood children of every color. We explored the tawny skeletons of half-built oceanfront houses and pilfered spilled nails when the contractors had gone home for the night.

Oxnard captivated me with its heady fragrance of oregano, chili and bay laurel. Roosters crowed from the yard next door, and mariachi canciones competed for air time across our back patio, trumpeted on all sides by neighbors in a community that didn’t yet brandish a noise ordinance.

The inland neighborhoods hadn’t fared as well as our beachside community. Left to their own devices, the post-World War II homes that bordered broccoli and strawberry fields began to fade and splinter. Rusting cars splayed across dandelion lawns. Young people emerged from these houses on weekends and flocked toward the jagged ribbon of Saviers Road that bound together the lettered downtown streets. Then the boulevard became a brighter, flashier version of the classic Spanish promenade. Men in lowered Chevys pumped out bass-heavy Tejano music as they cruised Saviers in tinted sunglasses. They jerked their chins at girls in Camaros who moussed their bangs 6 inches high and applied layer after layer of mascara to kohl-rimmed eyes.

When it grew too dark to play on the beach, my sister and I begged on Friday nights for a part in the ritual. “Mommy, please can we cruise Saviers?”

Then my mother and her girlfriend would load us into their VW bus and crank up our eight-track of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “No Easy Walk to Freedom.” They held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes at red lights. I peered out the flowered curtains at teenagers engaged in their strange mating dance and wondered when I might find a true love of my own.

Mario lived next door to us, in the duplex with the roosters. He baby-sat when my mother had to work late at the newspaper office where she had successfully lobbied, with a few community college courses in journalism, for the position of editor. Mario was a gentle 17-year-old who danced elegantly between two languages. His parents hadn’t gone to college, but he planned to--a goal that alienated him from his father, who spent his days hunched over in the fields. He baby-sat us as much to escape his house as to earn the $4 an hour my mother could pay him. He taught my sister and me to make Frito boats--cans of chili con carne heated and poured over snack bags of corn chips. He played Monopoly with us for hours, wondering what life might be like on Park Place far away from Silver Strand Beach.

“We’ve got to get out of this dump,” he told me.

I shook my head. “I like it here.”

“Then you’d better become fluent in Spanish,” he said. “You need it if you’re going to stay in Oxnard.”

I pictured my deck of flashcards, left behind in a cupboard at my father’s house. My mother had left him no forwarding address, and my father already might have thrown them away.

I longed for the easy assurance of line drawings and nouns. The abstracts of my new world confused me. Who was this woman my mother adored? Who was I in her new world?

At night before falling asleep, I practiced Mario’s earnest accent. “Yo vivo aqui.” I live here. “Oxnard es mi hogar.” Oxnard is my home.

What must my father have thought the autumn day he appeared on our doorstep to find his girls tumbling about in the sandy yard with wild hair and scabbed knees while my mother and her lover read Cervantes in the shade?

He had no problem persuading his attorney or the court to consider his six-figure income and his new girlfriend, who would devote her days to being heir to both his children and his abuse. The judge denounced my mother’s world without deliberation. In an instant, her children vanished. Dismayed by my mother’s months-long despair, her girlfriend decided to run off with another woman.

What is the meaning of a life in which windmills are merely windmills? Don Quixote on his deathbed tries to surrender his visions as folly, while Sancho Panza, heartbroken, begs him to reconsider. “Crea,” he might have implored. Believe. But my mother had no Sancho Panza, no faithful friend who would renounce a dogged skepticism and champion her illusions.

Alone, she worked and contemplated her mortality, sitting in the dark among the scraps and shards of her impossible dream. She spoke only a little Spanish--pleasantries that couldn’t convey her despair to the people around her. The neighbors in houses swelling with multiple generations hadn’t read Cervantes. They didn’t invite her to their parties. But shy hands knocked on her door, leaving offerings of foil-wrapped tortillas and beans, homemade tacos and enchiladas.

Noting her sudden dearth of children, the neighbors began to leave my mother stray animals as well. My sister and I arrived every other Friday night for our twice-monthly weekend visits to find cardboard boxes on her doorstep, replete with the peeping of baby ducks and chicks, with the mewing of kittens. A scrawled sentence decorated the top of each box. Para la madre.

That year, my mother’s love of the Latino culture deepened as she began to grasp the predicament of minorities, discovering what happens when a dream is indeed deferred. Then one night, she unwittingly impaled herself upon Don Quixote’s spear.

She related the incident to me later, over the telephone as I evaded danger behind my locked bedroom door in my father’s house. The Picasso statue was one of the few items she’d brought with her from his world. It sat on her milk-crate bookshelf in the living room. In the dark, she’d tripped and fallen backward, and the 8-inch spear impaled her upper arm. The barb on the tip inhibited removal, so she drove herself to the emergency room with the ridiculous weapon protruding from under her shirt sleeve. The attending doctor cut the weapon out and stitched the gash closed.

“Not many people can say they were stabbed by Don Quixote,” she quipped. I silently pressed the receiver against my ear like a warm hand. Beneath my mother’s attempts to cheer me, I absorbed the new tones and cadences, the sorrowful inflections of the language we now shared.