The Choice

agreed.
We tried to make the upheaval into a fun adventure, a vacation.
We drove scenic highways, we stopped at motels with swimming pools,
and got off the road early enough in the day to have a refreshing swim
before dinner. Despite my anxieties over the move, the cost of gas and
motels and restaurant meals, the miles stretching once again between
Magda and me, I found myself smiling more oen. Not the mask of a
smile worn to reassure my family. e real kind, deep in my cheeks
and my eyes. I felt a new camaraderie with Béla, who taught Marianne
corny jokes and bounced Audrey in the water when we swam.
In El Paso, the ĕrst thing I noticed was the sky. Open, uncluttered,
vast. e mountains that girded the city to the north drew my gaze
too. I was always looking up. At certain times of day, the angle of the
sun would Ęatten the range into a faint cardboard cutout, a movie set,
the peaks a uniform dull brown. And then the light would shi, the
mountains rainbow into pink, orange, purple, red, gold, deep blue, the
range popping into relief like an accordion stretched to expose all its
folds.
e culture, too, had dimension. I had expected the dusty, out-of-
touch frontier village of a Western movie, a place with stoic, lonely
men and lonelier women. But El Paso felt more European, more
cosmopolitan, than Baltimore. It was bilingual. Multicultural without
the stark segregation. And there was the border itself, the union of
worlds. El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Chihuahua, weren’t separate cities
so much as two halves of the same whole. e Rio Grande cut through
the middle, dividing the city between two countries, but the border
was as arbitrary as it was distinct. I thought of my hometown: from
Košice, to Kassa, to Košice again, the border changing everything, the
border changing nothing. My English was still basic and I didn’t speak
Spanish at all, but I felt less marginalized and ostracized here than I
had in Baltimore, where we lived in a Jewish immigrant