by Alisa Valdes
Selwyn is reading tonight, poems of love. For me.
Without my makeup and with this scarf on my head I don’t think anyone can recognize me. I waited in the truck on the darkened street a few blocks from the bar after she got out, for about fifteen minutes, then I slipped in after she had started reading, walked down the darkened, narrow flight of stairs into the basement bar and took an anonymous seat in the back of the room. I keep my sunglasses on, even though it’s late at night and the bar is dimly lit. I don’t want to be bothered. Not here. Not while Selwyn Womyngold is reading. I don’t need to be spotted here, either, not on a Wednesday night. Womyn’s Night. But I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
It is the first week of a new year. Perhaps it is time to become a new woman. I don’t know. I don’t know if I have that kind of courage.
Rising from the sea, your body, wet-salt, sun, air / Mermaid womyn, seashell skin, rolling in the sand of my heaving, leaving your handprints as you go …
She reads on, and I get goose bumps. This strong, stout woman from Oregon is like a poem herself. Her soul is as green as the pine trees she writes about. You can see it there, her soul, every time she pauses in her recitation and looks out at us, her audience, drinking in every perfect, delicious word. Tonight, her cropped, spiky hair is purple. It changes with her mood. Last week it was platinum white as she gave us a poem about growing old; she is only twenty-four years old, so this was a great exercise in empathy. This week it is the color of love, for she is reading love poems.
I shouldn’t say reading, I know that’s not the right word. I came to this country when I was seventeen years old, for college, and though I studied English in Colombia and am fluent, sometimes I still have trouble finding the right words to say what I mean. I mean, I have trouble finding them in English and in Spanish. After ten years of bilingual life, I don’t know where all my words have gone. I reach for them, feel them floating just there, in the periphery of my consciousness, and then they fall away, recede into the ether again. That’s why I love poetry. If the right word is missing, you can create the same intention with another, follow the tentacle through to the other some way. Wormholes of the spirit.
I have not told any of my old college friends that I want to write poetry. That I write poetry. Amber might understand the need for poetry in the world. Maybe Lauren, too. The others would appreciate the creativity, I suppose. What they wouldn’t understand is the part that keeps me from telling any of the sucias about my poems. I don’t think they’d understand the feelings they’d find there. I know they wouldn’t. When we get together, when I see Lauren and the passion in her eyes, I want to tell them. I want to take a knife and open my chest and remove my heart and hold it out to them on the palm of my hand so they can finally see how differently it beats. How oddly. How, what do you say? How queer. Queerly. But it took me until I was twenty-five, just three years ago, to even see it myself, or to even acknowledge it. And it was mine. I can’t imagine any of the sucias would appreciate the lopsided beat of the thing, the offness of it, the strangely patterned, entirely foreign seashell skin of it. Selwyn understands that part of me, because she shares it herself. And here it comes, rumbling from her mouth in words she captured from the cosmos just for me.
I used to see you, shadow girl, hunched girl, talking to your demons in the corner/I used to sing you in my sleep, breathe you in my slow alone deathness/ and then I stepped into your wave, felt below the water, found you there, found you there/ Darkgirl, longgirl, found you there, waiting for me, Spanish words dripping from your mouth like honey, dripping down and down, good and good.
She wouldn’t make a good impression on them. I’m sure of that. She is bulky, and she wears plaid flannel shirts and loose-fitting men’s work pants. Her hair is short, and that might please Rebecca, but she only puts earrings in one ear, and then there are at least five of them, hard silver hoops. That would not please any of them. That would send them running for the nearest door. They’re like that. They wouldn’t be able to see past their own misplaced instincts in order to appreciate Selwyn’s eyes. Dark brown, on-fire eyes. Lit up with humor. Lit up with life. She wouldn’t make a good impression. Not on them. But she did on me. She did on me. She did. On me. On me, she was almost Lauren.
I started coming here with the intention of one day reading one of my own poems. But to do that I would have to emerge from these shadows, swim to the surface, stand bare and dripping in front of all of Boston, rip my heart out for millions of strangers to see and bite. No. People know who I am here. They know me. They think they know me. They eat eggs and drink coffee and stare at their televisions and see my face behind all that makeup. They send their children to the bus stop and rustle their newspapers while I read them the news of the day with my perky smile. They send me Christmas cards and thousands of letters with all sorts of unsolicited advice. They tell me to grow my hair, to cut my hair, to gain weight, to lose weight, to speak more clearly, to be proud of my accent, to change my name, to revel in my Spanish surname. They tell me to go back to Africa, they call me a hundred ugly names. They ask me to marry them and offer to bring their mothers to the studio to meet me. They send postcards with neatly drawn people dangling from neatly drawn nooses. They ask me who I think will win the Super Bowl. They ask me to give shout outs to their baby daddies. They all think they know me.
None of them do. No one does. Not even Selwyn. She tries. She reads about Colombia, studies the history of Colombia, she buys vallenato CDs and tries to learn to dance. She started subscribing to trade magazines like the American Journalism Review so we might have more to talk about on Sunday afternoons. But there’s this thing about me, the rhythm of my childhood, the garden of flavors I like to eat, and the bright, brave colors I wish they painted houses in this town, the warm, floral ways I think a city street should smell in the summer, things about me she will always find exotic and unknowable. I am from the warm and humid coastal town of Barranquilla, and though the place was cruel to a single mother who was a doctor in spite of her color and sex—and cruel as well to her tall, skinny daughter—that is how I think the world should be. Moist. Green. Alive with music and flavor. I am never more at home than when I am in Colombia, for even with all of her violence and infections I do desperately love her.
Selwyn grew up short and thick and American, with liberal parents who loved her no matter what, and knew from kindergarten that she would love women. I grew up tall and narrow with a mother who did not talk about these types of things, and though I knew I felt something particular and pink for girls and not for boys, I did not know loving women was an option until I got to college and learned the word for it. Lesbian. Such a clumsy, ugly word, buzzy and not at all like the way it feels to be one.
In Colombia, we don’t have a word for it at all. We have a word for men who love men, and it is “woman.” Men are not thought of as gay unless they are “on the bottom” where I come from, and almost every man has had sex with another man at least once. Women are not thought to be sexual in Colombia. Sexual women are bad in Colombia. In the popular lore, I mean. And even when they are called whores, everyone knows they are getting paid and do not enjoy it. Women are mothers in Colombia, and cooks. They are virgins or whores and there is nothing else, nothing in between, nothing. That’s why my mother never wanted me to go back. She stayed there, but she always told me she wanted me to live free, in a nation where my sex and skin would not cause outpourings of hatred. In America, my mother taught me, women are at the very least human beings. And now, here in Boston, I am a woman and a celebrity. My mother is very proud. She asks me to send her videotapes of every newscast. We talk on the phone every Sunday, and I fly to see her whenever I can. She knows nothing of my feelings for women, and I want to keep it this way. This is why I hide in the back of the room, listening to Selwyn’s words. This, and the fact that I don’t know how the producers of the national network evening news show who have been courting me for months would react if they knew. And I want t
hat job. So much. A national news anchor. Me. This is why I cannot emerge from the penumbras and sombras and stand up and cry my description: lesbian! It would kill my mother, maybe kill my career, and I might lose the sucias, my anchor in this city for a decade.
In particular, I would lose my best friend, Sara, that quirky, loudmouthed woman from Miami who makes me laugh harder than anyone I have ever met. I don’t find Sara attractive. I never have, and I never will, not in that way anyway. But I can’t tell her what I am. She does not seem to like gay people, and she has told all of us this fact once or twice—a hundred hundred times that I can remember she has told jokes at the expense of people like me. How, you wonder, can I have Sara for a friend, even with her dislike of people like me? And I will tell you this: Sara and I have a history, a long friendship of shared coffee and tea and dreams, her humor is my humor, her family like my own, her children like my sons. I do not think it wise to fight prejudice with prejudice, so I cannot hate my best friend for being ignorant. I prefer to hide from her hatred and bask in her laughter. I cannot come out. I would lose Sara. I might even lose my job.
The first woman I ever loved was Shelly Meyers, in the fifth grade. I lived to watch her walk. I never told her. Didn’t know I could, didn’t know how. Didn’t know. I have always favored the same type of woman. The second woman I ever loved was Lauren Fernández. Shelly and Lauren are both fair, with dark, crazy hair spilling everywhere and those big, angry eyes. They are both powerful in the hips and legs, with a confident bounce to their strides. Selwyn is like that too. Sometimes, I imagine she is Lauren. She does not know this, and she must never know this. It would send her over the edge. Selwyn is like that, fragile. She may look tough, but she’s not. She’s emotionally fragile the way only true artists can be. I call her paperglass, ready to break with a strong wind. She calls me seaweed. These are the names we whisper to each other in the dark, where no one can hear. Paper-glass and seaweed.
Seaweed flows over me, under me, into me / I taste seaweed on my tongue when I least expect it, I taste seaweed in my moments of bright bursting light / Paperglass light in a thousand shades of yes.
She continues, and then she stops. The audience claps and whistles and a few groupies rush the stage and try to touch her hand. I am not jealous. They are students of hers. I know Selwyn, and she’s not the type to cheat. She is the first one who told me that joke: What does a lesbian bring to a second date? A U-Haul. We have been together for almost a year, sneaking around like teenagers, me taking curly routes to her home in Needham, her waiting and listening to me on her cell phone until I can tell her my neighbors across the street have closed their shades so then she can run around the corner and slide into my neat white Beacon Hill townhouse door. It is Selwyn I thought of when I bought the comforter with the plaid flannel duvet, Selwyn I think of when I stop in the deli section of the market and buy potato salad, something I never used to eat, Selwyn I think of when I water the plants she insisted I put everywhere in my home for balance and serenity and oxygen. It is Selwyn, always Selwyn, standing in the center of every decision I make these days with her muscular legs and narrow hands.
We would live together by now, but I can’t admit it, what I am. She is patient, Selwyn. She does not pressure me. She says it takes a long time for a green tree to grow tough bark. She is gentle and generous and does not call me at work unless I page her first. She is careful and does not look at me the wrong way in public. These are the inside-out ways Selwyn must show her love for me now. These are the hoops I make her jump through. These are the injuries I carve into her character each and every day, yet she comes back and back, always back, asking for more. This is the way of it for Elizabeth Cruz and Selwyn Womyngold. This is what love looks like from my perch on the razor’s edge.
The jazz trio takes over. Selwyn signs a few autographs, smiles for a few photos, and then glances my way. She gives the signal—a scratch to her left eyebrow—that means it’s time to meet back at the truck. I watch her go first, walking as she does in the body of a panther, wait a slow hard minute, then slither my way along the back wall to the stairs that lead out into the cold night. I walk down Massachusetts Avenue and around the corner, and feel like all the oddball nighttime Central Square eyes are on me. But they aren’t, of course. In my scarf and dark glasses and big long trench coat, I am just another eccentric in one of the world’s most densely populated eccentric places. I have parked a few blocks down, on a side street near the Women’s Center, the place I first heard Selwyn read. I walk, and am vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps behind me. There are many people here, so it’s nothing new.
When I get to the truck, the street is empty. Selwyn leans on a light post next to the truck, and watches me come. She smiles, paperglass pantherwoman. Beautiful like that. I smile back. I want to rush her, grab her in my hands and knead her like bread dough, devour her. I want to kiss her. So much. I look around, and see no one. Her poetry got me tonight, made me feel alive. Invincible. I decide to let go, for just a moment, to leap from the ledge and see what happens. I run toward her, grab her quickly, and plant a kiss on her lips. She is surprised. Shocked. Not uncomfortable at all, because she has never been the one with a problem. If she had her way, we would stroll through malls together holding hands, ignoring the horrified mothers and fathers who rush their children to the side and away, away from us. We would make out at the movies like normal people.
“What was that for?” she asks, rubbing my shoulder.
“For being you. For being mine.”
I feel like a girl again, giggly and silly and ready to dance in the street. But it’s too cold here in Cambridge, in Boston, isn’t it? Too very cold in your very bones. Selwyn pulls me close to her, and kisses me again, warm, soft, mine, woman. But before we are through, I hear the voice. Not mine. Not Selwyn’s. But familiar.
“Liz Cruz?”
I stop, release Selwyn, and spin toward the direction of the voice. It’s Eileen O’Donnell, gossip columnist for the Boston Herald, and a frequent guest on the morning show where I am a co-anchor.
“I thought that was you,” she says with a smile too big for her small, pointy head. “Listen, I was just at the reading, got a tip about Selwyn Womyngold—that is your name, isn’t it? Womyn with a ‘y’? It was really good, Selwyn, the performance. Really … touching.” Her words come in ugly white puffs of steam from her mouth; she has been running and the cold air makes her cough.
“Eileen,” I say. I beg. I plead at her with my eyes.
“It’s good to see you, Liz. How have you been?”
I don’t answer.
“Where might I find one of your books, Selwyn?” she asks. Selwyn wolfgirl stares at her with all the love of a trained fighter.
“I have to be honest with you kids,” Eileen continues. “I was here last week, too. And I followed you to Needham. You have a nice house out there, Sel. You make a pretty good living for a poet. A twenty-four-year-old poet fresh out of Wellesley. I saw on the Internet you teach over at Simmons College. That an all-girl school or something?”
“Fuck off,” Selwyn seethes.
“Now that doesn’t sound like a poem to me. What is it, haiku?”
Selwyn takes the truck keys from my hand and opens the passenger side door. She pushes me into the truck. “Let’s go.” I am numb, cold, hard, terrified of what Eileen is going to do. Selwyn lets herself into the driver’s seat, and guns the truck out of there. We drive most of the way to her house in silence. “Don’t worry about it,” she says, finally, making a sad attempt to appear cheerful. I look at her, and see tears in her eyes. “Please, Elizabeth,” she says. I can see the little girl she used to be. “You have to let it go.”
I nod. She leads me into the house, makes me a cup of hot chocolate, brings me my long nightgown with the Snoopy decal, and my fuzzy slippers. She gives me a massage and sings to me, American lullabies with words so sad I can’t imagine why anyone would want to sing them to a child, and she strokes my hair. Then
she puts me in bed, tucks me in like a mother, with a gentle kiss to the forehead.
“You get some sleep, mío amore,” she says, her Spanish mangled as always. “I have some writing to do yet.”
I nod, and close my eyes. But I can’t sleep because I know Selwyn isn’t the only one with some writing to do yet tonight.
Somewhere in her oniony devil den, Eileen O’Donnell is writing too.
… Only four shopping days ‘til Christmas, and I’m pleased to report I finally got most of my shopping done last night. But there’s one friend I can’t find anything for. We all know someone like that, don’t we? It’s almost a cliché—the woman who has everything, including the perfect man. But in my pal Sara’s case, it’s 100 percent true. I’m thinking a Chia Pet or one of those massive “massage toys” from the Sharper Image, but she’s probably got plenty of both already.
—from “My Life,” by Lauren Fernández
sara
COÑO. I COULD hardly sleep last night, chica. And it’s not because of the sex, which I’m sure Roberto thought was great. I was so sick. He had no clue. I did the usual thing I do, the moaning and the faces, the ridiculous lingerie, all the while willing the vomit down. I pulled a full Meg Ryan in the end, and Roberto, as always, loved it—until he was done. Then he decided I’d acted like a puta and gave me “the speech,” which goes something like this: You’re a Cuban woman, a decent woman. You aren’t an American whore. It’s fine that you enjoy yourself, but why do you have to act like that? You’re the mother of my sons. Where’s your pride?
