Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  To our left, near a staircase and a short palm tree, a copper man worked at a folding table. A red velvet cloth covered it and on that perched a wire cage housing a yellow bird. The bird had a job. When the man opened the cage door, the bird hopped out and onto a long box crammed with folded papers. The bird bounced along the papers till he paused. He folded his claws around one’s edges. The man pinched the bird’s chosen paper, bribed the animal onto his finger with birdseed, and lifted him back to his cage.

  I fished money out of my jeans pocket, walked up to the table, and flashed three coins in my palm at the man.

  “Can your bird tell my fortune?” I asked.

  The man eyed my coins. He looked at me and said, “I’m not begging for alms.”

  Ofelia, her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter laughed at me. I grinned to hide my embarrassment. The man turned to unfold the fortune of the woman who had been waiting with her four kids.

  From under the brim of my straw hat, a straw hat whose band I sometimes tucked fortunes mined from fortune cookies, I glanced around the courtyard. I looked for Death. Maybe she was hiding behind the column supporting an office balcony. Maybe she was hiding in the ivy eating the monument bearing the city’s coat of arms, a tree gripped by twin lions. Maybe she was the little yellow bird, grabbing people’s fortunes from a wooden box.

  On the way back to Abuelita’s, I listened through my migraine as Ofelia shared with us her first memory:

  She heard weeping. The sound was coming from a place without God.

  Ofelia pressed her eye to the keyhole in her parents’ bedroom door. She spied her mother pacing, howling, and clutching a wooden box.

  The coffin carried a baby, a little boy. Abuelita hugged the box to her chest and Abuelito reached for it to take it away. Abuelita snarled and bit at him. He let her pace for days till eventually, she crumpled. Slept on the floor next to the bed where she’d given birth to death and afterbirth. When she woke up, her arms held nothing.

  The Chaperones

  Mrs. March was the second grown-up I came out to, and as I was psyching myself up to do so, I dangled my legs over the side of her hotel bed. She was sitting on a chair across from me. A brass table lamp lit her long head from behind. Nothing sexual was going on; Mrs. March was chaperoning twelve nerds, including me, on an overnight field trip for argumentative teens. We belonged to Junior Statesmen of America.

  I’d had a feeling about my teacher that made me stand in my socks at her door and knock. I believed, in fact my heart glowed with the possibility, that I could trust her enough to tell her I’d been making out with a tomboy in eucalyptus groves behind the airport. What Mrs. March looked like had made me plant my trust in her. She had Virginia Woolf’s face, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s hair, and Walt Whitman’s wardrobe. What little queer wouldn’t want her identity validated by a chimera like that?

  After my confession, Mrs. March told me in a soothing but staunch voice, “I’m fine with you being a lesbian but I feel sad that you might never have children.” Her turkey waddle jiggled as she pitied my womb, “In order to completely be, to completely be a woman, you must experience motherhood.”

  Since a baby hasn’t grown inside me, I cannot completely be, completely be Mrs. March’s kind of woman. Like a partial birth abortion, I’m partially alive. This slides me into the category of the living dead. My maternal shortcomings render me a llorona.

  La llorona, Mexico’s most famous ghost, is missing the same thing I am. However, at one point in her life, she would’ve made Mrs. March’s cut for womanhood. This fabled Mexican she-creature had kids and then she fully realized herself by unhaving them. Through the unhaving, she unhad herself. In her legend which is constantly being retold, innovated, and massaged, la llorona murders her kids and then commits suicide. But isn’t this just a symbolic way of expressing that obliterating motherhood obliterates womankind, that is, killing your kids is killing yourself? And yet it isn’t. It isn’t at all. A mother is a mother is a mother even when she isn’t. Even when she never was.

  La llorona is louder dead than when her lungs breathed. She’s not completely gone but she’s not completely here either. At night, she wanders neighborhoods, seeking replacements. She sniffs out and follows fresh baby smells to nurseries. She slips in through windows hung with alphabet curtains and lingers beside wicker bassinets. Gazing into a cradle, she thinks, It’s so beautiful. It’s mine!

  Like the babies she stalks, la llorona is constantly being born. Every time a woman undoes her motherhood, a llorona is born. Some lloronas are born by arson. Conservative lloronas are born by water. Lloronas who are lazy cooks become so by microwave (yes, there are women who have microwaved their infants). My mother almost became a llorona by wooden spoon. The spoon whapped my pompis but the profound tension in my butt cheeks cracked it. Splinters rained and wood chunks stained brown by thousands of beans clattered to our kitchen linoleum. Mom and I stared at her jagged handle, now a stump she could use to dig my heart out.

  Some lloronas sacrifice their eggs by loving other women. Lesbianism is the most melodramatic contraceptive.

  Before I knew the word lesbian, my parents used la llorona to make me behave.

  “She’s looking for children,” Dad would warn me, “because she drowned her own. Now she wants other people’s. If she catches you wandering around the house after your bedtime, sneaking more little late-night snacks out of the fridge, she’ll take you. You’ll become hers. No more cartoons. You’ll never see your hamster again.”

  The prospect of bumping into a dead lady in my dark living room made me want to toss off my sheets and grab my slippers. It made me pray to white Jesus that I would sleepwalk. Staring up at dark popcorn ceiling, I wondered, If la llorona is powerful enough to hunt me down while I wander my house at night, what’s to stop her from crawling into my bed and reaching her arms around me? My cheek pressed to nosebleed-stained pillow. My toes waited for her tickle. I worked myself into a hallucinatory state where I believed the air space around my body was alive, electric with her haunting.

  Since la llorona is a spirit, she leaves her passport on her nightstand when she travels. She wafts north into the United States to midwife her rebirth as an American. A Yanqui.

  Shaquan Duley — a South Carolina woman who looks in her mugshot how I imagine Precious, the shero of Sapphire’s masterpiece, Push, might look — recreated herself as a llorona. She placed her hands over her toddlers’ mouths till their breaths dried up. Afterwards, she strapped their bodies into car seats and waited on the riverbank. She watched her Chrysler roll into the Edisto. It sank into the black water as she walked away.

  Shaquan sat for an interview with Oprah. The piece was titled THE MOM WHO KILLED HER SONS. In the interview, prison bars glow behind Shaquan and Oprah. Oprah repeats, “How were you able to do that?” Repeated, the question turns into a chant. The chant implies accusation. Shaquan weeps instead of answering. Oprah changes her question to “Whom did you suffocate first?”

  As Shaquan replies, Oprah condemns her with her eyes. Shaquan describes killing her kids as an out-of-body experience. She doesn’t say this but, maybe, since she can leave her body, maybe sometimes Shaquan’s soul floats through the bars, past the prison watchtowers. It (souls don’t have a gender) touches down at the river. It moans, “Where are my children? Where are my babies…?”

  When Shaquan killed her kids, a lot of people drew comparisons to another llorona, a white one, Susan Smith. I was seventeen when Susan, also of South Carolina, was cheating on her husband. Susan’s lover told her that her least sexy characteristic was motherhood. To become sexier, Susan strapped her kids into their car seats and watched her Mazda roll into John D. Long Lake.

  Susan exercised less mercy than Shaquan. She rolled her sons to their deaths while they breathed. Their small nostrils inhaled lake. Their lungs became water balloons. Tadpoles swam into their ear canals.

  While my family ate, we listened to the TV. We listened to Susan twang,
“It hurts to know that, um, that I would be accused, or thought that I would ever do anything to harm my children.” This ineloquent sound bite repeated as Susan’s false story of a black man driving off with her kids during a carjacking looped on the news. The day after All Souls Day, Susan confessed. Divers swam to her car and found her children floating upside down.

  I was sitting in my Catholic high school’s gym, yawning through the annual Mothers’ Mass when, from the altar erected below a basketball hoop, Father Stephen urged, “…remember to pray for all mothers, including Susan Smith.” As he continued his sermon, I glanced around. My gaze bumped into mothers glancing around, too. They were making rotten cheese faces, like, Did that faggot just say what I think he said?

  My blood felt warm and fuzzy. Hotly carbonated. I formed fists and smiled. I was pleased the priest had upset so many women of leisure by bringing up a llorona, especially one with the same color as them.

  Time magazine put Susan on a cover. They chose a picture of her where she looks like a saint with downcast eyes, a Marian apparition. The words “How Could She Do It?” scrolled down the right side of her face. I never told my friends, my mom, Mrs. March, or the tomboy I was making out with, but Time’s question baffled me. A mother killing her kids seemed like the most natural thing in the world to me. I came to this conclusion through make-believe, through a childhood game called Push. A game where one person flails on a mattress, faking labor, while another person stands between their legs yelling, “PUSH!”

  The person pushing always has more fun. It’s the most fun if you push so hard you die, and your playmate has to drag you by your feet to the yard to bury you. Even as a kid playing Push, I understood that the things you love most are the things that wind up killing you, so why not beat them to it?

  Andrea Yates is another white llorona. Looking at her mugshot doesn’t evoke any literary protagonists. However, her stare. It’s clear that insanity anchors her stare. Andrea and her husband practiced hardcore Christianity in a hardcore place, Texas. He kept her belly swollen despite warning signs that birth control might have prevented her from becoming what she was bound to become. Having babies made her hands tremble. By the time she had her fourth, Andrea was whispering, “Help.” Demonic voices spoke inside her head. Listen. Can you hear them, too? Can you hear pretend babies being born?

  Andrea came to believe Satan had wormed inside her. He lived in her blood and marrow. She believed she’d messed up her kids to the point that they couldn’t be fixed. She decided to use her bathtub to purify them. In order of age, she held them underwater. After dunking each one, she placed them on her bed and pulled a sheet over them.

  Her oldest, Noah, screamed, “I know what you’re doing!” and ran away from her.

  She chased him around the house, caught up to him, grabbed him, dragged him back to the bathroom, and made broth with him.

  Andrea was sentenced to a mental hospital instead of prison. Now, she sits at a table. She sews aprons that customers buy and wear to keep their clothes clean while they’re tossing carrots into crockpots.

  Lloronas are still being made in Mexico. Last year, in Guanajuato, a state famous for its accidental mummies, a woman whom Mexican newscasters described as “desnaturalizada,” unnatural, decided to unhave her children. She was working at a shoe factory. Instead of smashing her kids with chanclas, a Mexican’s preferred weapon against cockroaches, she drowned them. To get rid of what was left, she drove their bodies to the countryside. After piling them on the dirt, she struck a match and let it fall. Pumpkin flames consumed the bodies till their meat was charred. Grilled bones and buttons remained.

  When reporters asked why she did what she did, the shoemaker replied, “Somebody had to die. And it was them.”

  Reporters asked her, “Why didn’t you kill yourself?”

  “I tried,” she answered. “But I failed.”

  An uploaded video about her crimes is titled SHE DROWNS AND BURNS HER CHILDREN.

  SHE drowns SHE burns HER children

  Men lifted the skeletons, loaded them onto gurneys, and carried them to vans.

  Am I related to the shoemaker? Maybe. Abuelita gave birth to Mom in a house in Jalisco. Jalisco bordered the shoemaker’s pyre.

  In March, Ebony Wilkerson drove her Honda into the Daytona Beach surf. Onlookers and a lifeguard made tracks across the sand, chasing the minivan into waves. One caught up with Ebony, who was behind the wheel as if possessed. From the backseat, a child screamed, “Please help us! Our mom is trying to kill us!” The men rescued the children and Ebony was sent to a hospital.

  Two months after trying to wash her kids to death, Ebony welcomed her fourth child.

  During the birth, the Cihuateteo whispered, “Push,” into Ebony’s ear.

  The Cihuateteo are the ageless ghosts of women who’ve died during childbirth. It’s been thousands of years and they still haven’t forgiven the babies that tore them to death. Those brats stole from them the ability to be. They are just like this sentence (incomplete)

  According to the Aztec ritual calendar, the Cihauateteo share our dirty planet. Like Mrs. March, they chaperone the sun to hell every night but make sure it returns to the sky each morn. When the Cihauateteo aren’t hanging out with our solar system’s light source, they roam kitchens, porches, lakeshores, beaches, driveways, and shoe factories. They hold hands with children. No one living can be sure of what the Cihuateteo do with the kids that they take for long walks. Statues of the Cihuateteo show them bearing clawed feet, flashing dry, broken nipples. They rustle, wearing skirts made of husks.

  Her face is an open-mouthed skull. Her teeth are ready. Her teeth say everything completely and incompletely.

  SPOILER ALERT: If You Haven’t Read Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel But Plan To, Skip Ahead

  Dad looked up from a glossy tabloid he was faggily reading. He said, “Michelle Obama is no Jackie O. Jackie O was pretty. Michelle Obama looks like Mohammad Ali.”

  Lifting the magazine, Dad turned it to show me Mrs. Obama. If all Dad was going by was that particular picture, a candid photo that vastly overemphasized the First Lady’s jawline, he was right. However, I responded by saying, “You’re a racist.”

  Of all the names you can call an American, “racist” is the worst. The accusation flusters. You get to watch them say interesting things in selfdefense. Dad was ignoring me.

  “You’re racist,” I repeated. He kept reading about the Obamas. I ordered, “Name a pretty black woman.”

  Dad answered calmly and succinctly, as if he’d been anticipating this prompt, “The ghost from that movie Beloved.”

  “Thandie Newton?”

  “Yes. The ghost from Beloved is pretty. Very pretty. Beautiful. She looks like your mommy.”

  “Anybody else? What about Oprah?”

  Dad repeated, “I like the ghost from Beloved.”

  “Mo-om!” I yelled. Mom was standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing a head, a head of iceberg lettuce, lechuga. “Dad thinks the ghost from Beloved is pretty!” I tattled.

  Mom looked at us across the tiled counter, shrugged her shoulders, blew a playful cobweb of white hair off her cheek, and declared, “Yo soy mas bonita!”

  MY MOTHER THINKS SHE’S PRETTIER THAN THE GHOST OF A FICTIONAL SLAVE BABY CRUSHED TO DEATH BY HER OWN MOTHER IN A MANNER REMINISCENT OF THE LEGENDARY LLORONA.

  Is that saying much? Yes.

  Thandiwe Nashita Newton, the British actress who played a dead slave child returning to haunt her surviving family as an insatiable ghost in Oprah’s film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved is, physically, a goddess. While I have been known to envy my mother’s beauty, more than that I envy her ability to assert such irreverent self-esteem.

  Chaparral

  Dirt slopes sandwiched the mesa our long white house sprawled along. If you picture the property like a moon pie in three layers, then the cream is one story’s worth of three-car garage, half bathroom, pantry, laundry room, dining room, break
fast nook, living room, family room, fireplace, foyer, hallways, master bedroom, master bathroom, kids’ rooms, and kids’ bathroom surrounded by lawn and patio and veranda and arbors and a shed and plants. Our four-bedroom house looked traditional. Not Paul Revere traditional, California traditional. A red brick porch that smelled good after rain, and red bricking around the living room and dining room windows.

  I chose green for our shutters, and cleaned and painted them. Ixchel’s room looked onto dreary rabbit hutches by some crab apple trees that the house’s previous owners had abandoned. Dad’s axe hacked these to shipwrecks, and he and I wore matching gloves while we stuffed their remains into trashcans. Those cans sometimes held living things. Driving country roads, we might see a big rope sunning itself on the asphalt. Antonio would squeal, “Daddy, a king snake!” and Dad would pull our minivan to the shoulder, get out, creep along the pavement, grab a snake by her tail, and drop her into an empty firewood box that happened to be in the corner.

  Antonio, Ixchel, and I rode staring at the snake box. Dad’s sweatshirt covered it. We pulled into our neighborhood which had no sidewalks in order to make it feel extra country. We drove up our driveway that we weren’t allowed to ride our bikes down anymore. One time, I talked Ixchel into riding hers down it. She zoomed, struck a pebble, caught air, and became E.T. silhouetted against the moon. A eucalyptus tree stopped her and turned her nose into a latke for a couple of months.

  Parking on the driveway’s level slab beside the loquat tree, Dad prepared. He hurried to the green trashcan and heaved garbage out of it, setting its sacks near our gas meter. He scampered back to the van, picked up the firewood box, and walked it to the can. He shook off the sweatshirt, and gently emptied the snake into the trashcan. I tiptoed to the can and leaned over it. Snake coiled at the bottom where stink and grime, mugre in Spanish (what a delicious word), lived in the creases and ruts. The snake didn’t like it down there. You could tell she was going to make herself anorexic or something. Not eat. We could release Hamlin’s rats in there and she’d let them crawl all over her, use her as a futon. She would shrink pipe cleaner thin.