Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  On our way to the clinic, in the backseat of Miguel’s VW bug that he chauffeured Abuelito around in so that he could give lectures about his dear co-seminarian Juan Rulfo, I scratched. My eye drooled pus that mingled with the grime under my fingernails. Together, these ingredients formed a fertile slime I could’ve sowed papaya seeds in. I could’ve sprouted vines from my fingertips. Squash blossoms. Pumpkin patches. Gophers could’ve burrowed there. Hobbits, too. My middle finger, a Middle Earth.

  Mom turned to look at me. “I told you to quit scratching your eye.”

  “But it itches.”

  “Think about something else.”

  I thought about the time a distant uncle had asked me if American farts smelled differently than Mexican farts. Somebody had cut the cheese in his living room, and he was sniffing the air, trying to deduce the cheese’s nationality. Cheddar or panela? Maybe I had farted. I couldn’t remember. I had felt embarrassed. Later on, in private, I’d tested my farts to see if there was an invisible difference, a distinctly Yankee odor. I’d detected none.

  I scratched my eye again. Pus slobbered onto my fingernails.

  A doctor wearing a white coat over a blue guayabera so pale it was almost snow asked, “What happened?”

  My good eye stared at him.

  “I think something bit me in the eye,” I explained.

  As his hands grabbed hold of my face while his fingers gripped my eye socket, pulling open the taut slit that wanted to stay shut, he asked, “Where are you from?”

  “California… What does it look like?”

  “It looks like something bit you in the eye.”

  I imagined the offense. I had probably fallen asleep sniffing my fingers (that was my habit) and with them curled against my nose, a mosquito attracted by my smell —as attracted to me as I was attracted to the papaya because of her smell; maybe to the bug I smelled like the United States of America, like hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, female vice presidential running mates, and long lines at Disneyland — made my eyebrow her landing strip. Her visionary diet forced her to ignore my cheeks, shoulders, ankles, and groin. This mosquito wanted to taste what I saw.

  Kneeling on my eyelid, fantasizing about blood banks, she plunged her proboscis beside an eyelash follicle and slurped. I figured this mosquito might have also sucked from the woman down the street who sold awesome pozole out of her living room. She might have also gotten drunk off the blood of witches with AIDS. Maybe she was descended from mosquitoes that had sucked from historically important Mexicans, like the guy who started the Mexican war for Independence or the eighty-three Mexicans who got squashed fighting the French in the Battle of Puebla. These are the Mexicans to whom American beer companies owe it all. Happy Cinco de Mayo, assholes! Maybe this mosquito had tasted my dreams. I often suffered a nightmare that I had to watch my mother, father, brother, and sister be executed. I decided that my blood tasted like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts still on.

  “How do you like your president?” the doctor asked.

  “They’re all the same,” I answered.

  The doctor let my eye slurp back shut. He turned and began giving Mom directions for how to administer my eye medicine. I reached up to scratch.

  “Don’t touch your eye!” he and Mom chorused.

  When they turned to resume their conversation, I lifted my nails to my eye and scratched till I drew tomato juice.

  Mom was on top of me. There was nothing sexual going on. It was the opposite. I was screaming.

  Her knees held me still, and her right hand pried my eye open. She held the bottle over it and squeezed. I could see the blur of the bottle, and the descending drop and, reflexively, my eyelid tried snapping shut.

  “No!” screamed Mom.

  The medicine hit my eyeball. Sizzle. I felt the howl come out of me and fill the room with unnecessary desperation. The dose was two drops.

  “I’m sorry!” screamed Mom as she pried my eye open again.

  Two days and twelve drops later, Miguel drove us to the airport where several years later, a Catholic bishop would be gunned down… accidentally. We were there to pick up my dad and brother. We stood, herded behind wooden and metal barriers, till we saw the rest of our family. Then we screamed.

  “Hi!” I yelled.

  Dad kissed and hugged Mom. He turned from her, looked down at my sister and me, and recoiled.

  “What happened to you?” he asked me.

  “A mosquito bit me in the eye,” I said.

  Dad stared at me for a bit, smiled to himself, and then hunched his shoulders. He let half of his face palsy. He pointed his performance in the direction of baggage claim. Taking my hand, he limped and said, “Let’s go find my bags, Quasimodo…”

  Lambada

  Were you as confused by AIDS as I was? In Spanish, AIDS is SIDA, which sounds fertile: “Don’t move: I’m going to plant some SIDA in you.” In English, the syndrome sounds helpful. When I’d hear people talking about it on TV or see headlines about AIDS in newspapers and magazines, I’d wonder, “A plague of help?”

  The threat of AIDS made me want to avoid assistance. Help could kill me.

  My cousin Andrew did not die of AIDS, but a Samoan did help him die. This Samoan rocked Andrew’s world. He grabbed Andrew’s handsome head, thumped it melonishly against Southern California concrete, and scrambled his egg.

  Hours later, doctors drilled holes into Andrew’s head to relieve swelling.

  A little while after that, Andrew turned acoustic. His mom, my Aunt Teresa, Dad’s oldest sister, let doctors unplug her youngest son.

  Dad made us get into the minivan, and he drove us to the east of LA suburb where Aunt Teresa was having Andrew’s funeral. I was secretly stoked. I was going to get to miss school and see an actual dead person. Up until that point, I’d only buried a dead hamster. This hamster’s ghost had visited me. It floated through my bedroom, by the bunk beds. I whispered the hamster’s name, and that was its cue to vanish. It came to me that once and ceased visiting. Hers was not a serial haunting.

  Standing at the altar, I looked down. I’d imagined Andrew would look smashed. He didn’t. All the pieces of his face were where they belonged but he looked as if he was sleeping incorrectly. When you sleep, your eyeballs are supposed to vibrate against your eyelids. Andrew’s stayed still. Your chest is supposed to rise and fall. Andrew’s stayed stuck. I got as close as I could to Andrew’s coffin without climbing inside. I stared at his eyelids. Something underneath them turned their texture lumpy, mashed potatoey.

  My cousin Nancy bumped her shoulder against mine.

  “After Teresa turned off his life support,” she whispered, “she had somebody scoop out his eyes and donate them.” I imagined a nurse standing by with a melon-baller. “Somebody out there has Andrew’s eyes.”

  I looked out the church doors. Sun beamed down on a silvery hearse waiting at the curb. I wondered, if I bump into the stranger who’s got Andrew’s eyes, will this person still be a stranger? Will they be part Mexican now? I tried to do the math. Andrew was a quarter Mexican, since his mom was half, and depending on what the stranger was, Andrew’s eyes could be the missing piece that completed the stranger’s Mexican-ness or the thing that sullied the stranger’s whiteness.

  I sensed that the recipient of Andrew’s eyeballs was probably white. Andrew had green eyes, like Teresa, Grandma, and me. Unripe, mossy, 7-Up bottle verdant.

  I checked out my cousin. He was wearing a light gray suit. His complexion was like the wax fruit my piano teacher kept on her coffee table. His coffin gleamed long and smooth as a forty. Cotton balls were jammed into his ears. These leaked embalming fluid that oozed down the corner of his jaw line and trailed down his neck onto his pillow.

  The back of Andrew’s head felt like a taboo. The idea of what it looked like titillated me. Was it smashed? Were there holes? Could I put my fingers in them and bowl?

  Teresa loomed at the foot of the coffin. Her height converted nonbelievers
: Chicanas tall enough to play in the NBA do exist. She had the same amount of body fat as a Virginia Slim. Lunchbag-colored skin wrapped her high cheekbones. She was wearing a pencil skirt and a blouse with a depressed bow tied at her chin.

  A guy dressed like Miami Vice-goes-Goth sashayed up the pews, past a grotto hosting a big-ass statue of Saint Christopher. The guy turned at the doors and came to us. He threw his head against Teresa’s chest.

  “Grrrl,” he growled. He clutched at Teresa’s bones. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Who is that?” I whispered to Nancy.

  “You don’t remember him?” she whispered back.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s Rudolph. Tío Carlos’s son. He’s our cousin. He’s a faggot.”

  The faggot part explained why he was wearing clear braces and foundation. From his breast pocket, Rudolph pulled a coral handkerchief. He blew a gust of boogers into it. The boogers sounded wet but cheerful.

  Something tapped my shoulder. I turned to see what it was. Mom stood behind me.

  “Tell your cousin goodbye,” she said.

  I returned my eyes to Andrew’s face. “Goodbye,” I told it.

  I glanced left. I glanced right. Everybody was absorbed by the unique grief that comes with losing somebody at sixteen. I knew it was my chance to make a memory.

  I reached into Andrew’s coffin. My fingers touched his. I appraised them. They felt chilly, stiff, and anti-climactic, like omens of my future attempts at compulsory heterosexuality.

  Nancy and I sat side by side in a pew to the left of the altar. A priest was talking. Everybody was listening or weeping. I stared at the fag in black.

  Our cousin Penny, Andrew’s big sister, was reaching for her cane. She stood and hobbled up the altar steps. She stationed herself behind the pulpit. She started to read from a paper somebody had set on the stand for her in advance.

  “Do you know why she walks with a cane?” Nancy whispered to me.

  “Because of scoliosis surgery,” I whispered back.

  Nancy shook her curls. She whispered, “Because her boyfriend fucks her in the ass.”

  I stared at Penny’s boyfriend. He was the white guy with a mild pompadour sitting in the front pew. He was wearing a red V-neck sweater with white monogramming. I tried to imagine him ruining Penny’s spine via her rectum. My mental conjurings made it so that I turned deaf to Penny’s eulogy.

  People found it moving though. They were weeping and their voices were cracking, as if they were entering a puberty brought on by grief. Penny hobbled back to her seat. I watched Dad. The experience of tragedy tensed his body. Made it seem less Mexican. More Polish.

  Pallbearers wheeled Andrew’s coffin towards the doors. Everybody rose to watch. I wondered if, when I died, would I also be handled like groceries? That’s how they loaded his coffin into the hearse. Loading him expressed how he was a thing, a thing that you loaded and unloaded. Mourners milled in the parking lot, figuring out who would caravan with whom. Mom turned to tell me, “Come on.”

  I said, “I’m going with Nancy.”

  Mom glanced at Nancy. Instead of looking her in the eye, she looked her in her hairpin chola eyebrows.

  “Okay,” said Mom. “See you at the cemetery.”

  “Can we ride with you?” Nancy and I begged our faggot cousin.

  Grinning, he answered, “You can ride my Mercedes, girls,” and I got excited because I caught his reference. It was to Pebbles’ song, “Do You Wanna Ride My Mercedes, Boy?” We followed him to his shiny, black turd. Nancy climbed into the front seat. I climbed into the back and scooted to the middle seat. My baroque perm minimized visibility but I didn’t care.

  Rudolph pushed his sun visor down and flipped open its mirror. He squinted at his reflection. With his index finger, he poked at lesions caked in peachy concealer, trying to rub the makeup smooth again. I grinned at him. His jaundiced eyes locked with mine. I folded my hands in my lap. I was ready.

  “Buckle up, bitches,” he said. “We’ve already got one dead body on our hands. I don’t need two more.”

  Nancy strapped herself in. I buckled my lap belt and pulled it tight. I was riding an endorphin high and feeling sexy. My hair was big. I was wearing nice black clothes. No man had ever called me a bitch with such pizzazz. It felt good.

  Rudolph turned his key in the ignition, and the German engine did its thing. The radio screeched Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” and Nancy and I sang, “They say I’m nasty, but I don’t give a damn. Gettin’ girls is how I—”

  “Nancy!” snapped Rudolph. “Change the station. I don’t wanna hear that whiny-ass nigga talk shit.”

  Punching buttons, Nancy got rid of Whitney Houston’s future beard. She station surfed. We tailed cars with yellow FUNERAL stickers on their windshields. Our caravan merged onto the freeway but we turned into a gas station. Parking at a pump, Rudolph ordered, “M’ija, hand me my glove.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered in a girl-on-her-period tone. “It’s under my seat.”

  I bent down, groped, and felt fabric. I pulled free a white glove. I handed it to him.

  “Thanks, bitch.”

  Wearing the single white glove, Rudolph walked to the cashier’s bunker. He pushed cash through a thick window’s mouse hole, turned, and minced back.

  He paused near the door to my left and unscrewed the gas cap. He turned, yanked a handle, and shoved in the nozzle. While fuel spat into the tank, he checked himself out in the tinted window, smoothing down flyaways that were escaping his hairdo.

  Bell chimed. Rudolph put the nozzle back in its crack and poured back behind the wheel. After unpeeling his glove, he handed it back to me. I replaced it.

  Nancy got back to work DJing and Rudolph said, “Leave it, leave it: This is my jam!” He rapped along to Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stands” and when it faded to commercial, he proclaimed, “Grrrrl! Neneh Cherry has some mean titties on her. Shit, I’d even fuck her!” He winked at me through the rearview mirror. “Wanna know who else I’d fuck just to say I fucked her?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Diana Ross.” He shivered. “And all those fish in that Madonna video.”

  He was outing himself. The merpeople in Madonna’s “Cherish” video were mermen.

  I blurted, “Are you gay?”

  Rudolph convulsed. His hysterics made the Mercedes swerve.

  “Bitch,” he said and paused, “I played with Barbies.”

  Nancy laughed. I giggled, too. It felt safe since Rudolph made it seem fun and natural to have been a child with homosexual tendencies. I wondered if Rudolph was gay enough for AIDS. Help.

  Rudolph hit a dip and started talking shit about the city of L.A., how its potholes had done a lot of damage to the chassis of his car, he was going to sue but he got over his rage quickly, equating potholes to blowholes, and he returned to the mermen from Madonna’s “Cherish” video, how he would find a way to do them, he would find a hole, a gill, something, and as we pulled into the cemetery, I glanced at the mausoleum, where skeletons were turning to dust in drawers.

  Rudolph parked at the tail of our caravan, in the part of the graveyard where the ground swallowed the recently deceased. We got out. So much sun greeted us, Death couldn’t keep it down. I stepped onto lawn.

  Rudolph whispered, “Oh my god, lookit my fucking sister.”

  “Hey!” she screamed. She jogged across graves. Her mustard hair bounced and her mustard shirt was knotted at the waist. A black mini-skirt swaddled her biscuits and her doughy legs poured into mustard stilettos. Her knees were scowling. Her heels stabbed loose dirt and sank.

  “Ah!” She waved her arms. “Help! They’re pulling me down! They’re pulling me down!”

  I pictured the deceased reaching for her heels, able to see the hairless piglet between her legs.

  “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl!” Rudolph lyrically proclaimed. “You look like a mothafuckin’ bumble bee.”

  His s
ister stuck out her arms. She fluttered her hands and said, “Bzzzz.”

  I think she was on drugs.

  Dad was standing near Andrew’s grave. A Saint Francis of Assisi statue was watching over the burial, holding a serene expression. Dad motioned come here with his hand. I jogged over dead people while saying I’m sorry to them in my head.

  “Get in the van,” said Dad. “I don’t want to see them put your cousin’s coffin in the ground.”

  “But I wanna say goodbye to Nancy and Rudolph!”

  “We don’t have time. Get in the van.”

  Dead children horrify Dad. He won’t watch movies where children get strangled, dismembered, or tossed off of cliffs. He’s sensitive, but I know that at funerals with mariachis, he has been known to whoop, scream, and lambada till the cows — and my mother — come home.

  Some Orphans Have Parents

  Death was killing time down the street from the orphanage. Her gender was inescapable, especially for her victims: infinitely, infinitely, infinitely female.

  Occasionally, she came out when the sun was out but that was mostly to admire her work from the night before. She had been wandering the dirt boulevard and was crouched beside a man who’d kissed her under black sky. His face, contorted by a mystic stare, now looked up at baby blue. Death smiled. She pulled her rainbow-stripes-against-black rebozo around her shoulders. She breathed onto the contorted facial expression she’d created.

  “Ahhhhhhhhh…”

  The corpse could almost smell her breath. Brittle roses and pork bones. Ladybug urine and monarch butterfly cocoons. Cacti candies and coffee-stained dentures. Bloody underwear. Cinnamon. Accidental mummies. Slaughterhouse sinks.

  Her colorless face tilted up. Her pupils dilated, replacing her irises. The toes of her Victorian boots poked out from under her ankle-length ruffle skirt. Embroidered stags pranced around her blouse’s neck. Her black braids wound into donuts on either side of her head and woven into the strands were tiny white flowers plucked in hell, stillborn baby’s breath.