Permanent Resident

From your office parking lot the GPS lady tells you to exit south even though today you are headed north, to the INS building in Lawrence, Massachusetts. You are going there to renew your United States Permanent Residency, or green card, because this is something you must do every ten years to stay in America. 

            Each decade is just long enough to forget that you are Alien Registration Number 0000-000-0000. 

            Now, on this rainy highway, you are also Application Number LIN2212703694, and the GPS lady tells you to stay on the current road. 

            This makes no sense, but you obey because this is something you have learned in America: Sometimes, you must head south to get north. 

            The wipers squeak. You turn the radio dial for a radio traffic report. The rain turns heavier. It’s 10:05 a.m. You have allotted twice the required time for this journey, but now, you fear that you might be late. 

            The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service doesn’t like or tolerate late. You know this from the letter that sits in your briefcase—letter I-797C—where it says in block capital letters: “If you fail to appear as scheduled, your application will be considered abandoned and denied.” 

            Even worse than being late would be a fender bender that sends your passport and your Letter I-797C skittering across three lanes of highway. You would become illegal, though your arms, your legs, your speeding frantic thoughts, your sometimes broken heart—none of these feels illegal and they never can or will. 

            At work, the Finance Department would have to create a new budget line item: “Immigration Fines.” At home, your husband would have to pay the mortgage while Harry the cat would mewl around the house for his deported Mommy. 

            You force yourself to shush those fears. You study your fellow highway drivers—their faces and their phone calls and their frowns. Honestly, there are days when it seems that America is just a very large country set in motion, a 24/7 drive time on looping auto-replay. 

            You crank the wipers and peer past the next car to check for an exit, a short cut that will take you west instead of south, even though west is not where you’re headed either. 

            It’s 10:30 a.m. You sneak along the shoulder while the GPS lady screams about a U-turn as you pass the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Richdales and the traffic light up ahead turns red. 

            The GPS woman says she’s recalculating as you sit there calculating how long before the light changes. The light turns green and you rush on because it’s better to be going someplace than going no place at all. 

            That day, the day you left, you wanted to tell your weeping mother this: It’s better to be going someplace than no place at all. 

            In Lawrence Massachusetts you check the streetside parking signs because you don’t want your car to get towed to some expensive place where they’ll rip you off and they will not care. You check your brief case and your wallet and bring an umbrella. On the way to the INS office you pass a brown building, “Immigrant City Archives.” Then, even though it could make you late, you stop on the rainy footpath to pay your respects to this building, to this city where once, the mill girls from Québec and Poland and Ireland worked the riverfront textile mills, and some of those girls had a life expectancy just longer than today’s college graduates. 

            At the Lawrence INS building the security men scan your bag and your coat and your pockets. It’s all been done before and each time reminds you of all the other times. 

            There was the woman in Albany, New York who lunged across her desk to demand how many children you were planning on smuggling in. 

            There was that border-town woman in Vermont who made you take another unpaid day off work to drive through a frozen countryside because she swore your Irish Gaelic name was a typo or a ruse. 

            There was that last time in Rhode Island, where a young man’s creaking office chair beat a rhythm with his pissed-off sighs. 

            But that last one was ten years ago now, and so much can happen in ten years. There have been flights and funerals. There have been tears and parties, arrivals and departures. 

            You’re at the immigration desk. This is the correct room and correct desk because you have double-checked the signs. You pull yourself up tall because this is another thing you have learned in America: Fake it ’til you make it. 

            You hand the woman your paperwork. In Spanish-accented English, she hands you a clipboard with more paperwork. She flashes a smile and you want to hug her because here’s one of them who doesn’t treat you like a beggar or a crook. You think that maybe, and magically, she has been with you in that car, on that highway, counting time and miles. 

            At the new biometric machine, she starts with your thumb. Roll slowly from left to right. You are reminded of an infant in its crib, and even though this woman works for the federal government, you wonder how many times someone has called her a spic. 

            “Pressing too hard?” She asks, and you want to pat her hand, to assure her that it’s not just girls like her. That you’ve been called a mick, only in your case, it was said in jest—oh, yes, so much back-slapping jest. That at cocktail parties or holiday dinners they have ranted on about immigrants while they passed you the cranberry relish. You cited U.S. labor statistics, and they said, “Oh, gosh, we didn’t mean you. I’m mean, you’re …” 

            You think you could tell this woman an old, old story, and that she would not rush you through or twirl her hand to fast forward you to the story’s bottom-line point. Instead, you think that she would nod along and wait and listen. 

            Once upon a time, you would begin. Once upon a time, when I first moved to this country, I washed dishes in a restaurant where the chefs screamed and cursed and the waitresses clanked dirty platters into plastic buckets. This was a long time ago, in a sub-zero winter that froze the snot in my nostrils, in a place where there were so many choices of prime rib and pastrami and ravioli that, just when I got caught up, the dishes started piling up again. 

            “Next finger,” the INS woman says. You wonder if that smile says: Debo corregir las suposiciones de esta chica blanca. 

            Oh, mi amiga, your story is so yesterday. Sure, we washed dishes and picked artichokes because, back then, nobody wanted plastic buckets of filthy restaurant dishes, just like nobody wanted dirty hotel rooms or entire shops without fresh, California produce. So the INS men looked the other way. 

            But listen, have you really learned so little about America? We immigrants are not a tribal force. These days, when the ICE men cometh, it’s likely for my people, mi amiga, not yours.

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