Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  The ghost looked at the clock again. 7:35. She looked back at the group. The gray-haired woman bent her arm, put her elbow against her knee, and rested her ineffective chin on her palm. The ghost thought, This is the most awkward thing I’ve ever been through in my entire death.

  She stepped into the gray-haired woman’s head. She tasted orange juice from concentrate and the thought, Come hell or high water, I will get this girl to admit she was molested. I will get her to crack. I know she’s been molested. I can feel it in my arthritis. We’re gonna pull this anorexic shit out by the root.

  The ghost glanced back at the clock. 7:36. She jumped into the girl’s head.

  The girl was sitting at a table in a pink kitchen, lusting after movie popcorn, the last thing she’d enjoyed eating. She was thinking, This is ridiculous. How can I participate in a group about getting in touch with your inner child if I still have an outer child? This is dumb.

  The ghost thought, She has a point. She rooted around in the girl’s memories to see if she could find proof of anything the gray-haired woman suspected. She dug through wet layer after wet layer but there were no memories, no bad touch there. Just a lot of chemically-induced fears and sorrows. The ghost stumbled into a memory bubble, popped it, and she was sitting with the girl in her floral-papered bedroom. The girl knelt on her carpet, leaning into her long closet. She sniffed at a shoebox on the floor. The ghost leaned closer to see if she was sniffing shoes. She wasn’t. A chocolate glazed donut was in the box. The girl sniffed and sniffed and sniffed, only allowing herself to taste the donut through her nostrils. She stuck her nose into the donut hole and devoted every cell in her being to her smell ritual. The girl grabbed the lid and slammed it over the box, shoving the donut back behind more boxes. She crawled into her closet, and crouched under the hem of a white dress. She tucked her short legs against her chest. She slid a pocketknife from her pocket. She flicked free a small blade and held it to her inner thigh. With an automaton’s expression, the girl dug the knife into her skin, tracing a stretch mark, turning it red.

  The ghost leapt out of the girl’s brain. She was tired of experiencing people hurting themselves or torturing themselves or hurting others or torturing others. Maybe she should’ve stayed in the forest. Maybe her quest for wisdom and knowledge wasn’t worthwhile. Maybe it was best to share communal silence in a circle or to carry your silence alone.

  The ghost looked out the sliding glass door window. Her friend, the moon, was in the sky again.

  “I’m coming,” said the ghost.

  The moon beckoned the ghost through the yard surrounding the psychiatric unit, along blossoming dogwood trees, down residential streets. The ghost followed the moon’s silent chirps, and if one could’ve seen her, one would’ve seen a ghost in a trance, a girl in a white nightgown with matching skin and ratted black hair that scraggled to the middle of her backbone. Her face said nothing about her place of origin. Some people might’ve looked at her and said, “Probably Mexican.” Others might have looked at her and said, “We can’t tell. She could be lots of things.” Still others might have thought she was an escapee from the hospital. She looked hungry, but not for food. Her hunger ran intellectually deeper than that. She wore her appetite on her skin. It completely lacked color. It lacked anything. That absence tainted her, invisible.

  The moon quit whispering to her in front of a two-story California Craftsman. All its lights were on and house music shook the window frames. The ghost saw reflections of herself, barely teenaged girls, sharing a cigarette under a front yard bottlebrush tree. She walked up the front walk and let herself inside. She wandered around the house, across Persian carpets and kids barfing into potted ficus trees. Couples made out on leather couches.

  She headed up the wooden staircase into the first bedroom on the second floor, where ten kids were sitting cross-legged in a circle. In the middle of the circle, a glass jar. One mushroom remained. The kids were panting, their fungal breath heating up the room. It felt mushroom muggy.

  The ghost stood by a frail white desk. Some of the boys and girls in the circle were glancing at each another. Some were staring straight forward, waiting for the drugs to take effect. Two blonde girls acted totally normal, gossiping about girls they considered sluts.

  The ghost got the feeling that someone was staring at her. She turned to see if it was a fellow ghost. One of the seated boys was staring directly at her. The boy happened to be black, and wore a red, white, and blue striped polo shirt, jeans, and topsiders. His diamond stud earrings sparkled. His hair was coiffed in careful curls and he sat beside a redhead in a pink on purple cheerleading uniform.

  “Oh my God!” cried the boy.

  “What?” asked the redhead.

  “It’s Anne Frank!”

  “What?!”

  “It’s Anne Frank!” he cried again. He pointed to where the ghost was standing. The ghost sweated and felt panicky. She’d wanted to talk to a living teenager and now here was this boy, naming her, but she knew, she just knew, she knew, knew, knew the same way that you know your gender and whether or not you’re alive that she was not Anne Frank.

  “I’m not Anne Frank!” she screamed at the boy. “I don’t know my name! Who’s Anne Frank? Was she Mexican? How did she die?”

  The boy told the empty space, “Well, you’re Jewish and I think you died in a concentration camp or something like that. I’m not sure. I learned about you last year in World History. This year, I’m taking U.S.

  “I’m not Anne Frank,” the ghost said firmly.

  “Then why do you look like her?” the boy asked accusatorily.

  “I don’t know. Why do you look like yourself?”

  “Because I am myself.”

  “Okay. Apply that same thinking to me.”

  The ’shroomer grew quiet. Kids who’d heard that one of guys tripping upstairs was talking to Anne Frank came charging into the room. They gawked at the space where the boy was addressing his dialogue. The ghost hated having all these fingers pointing at her, people muttering, “I don’t see shit… Me either… He’s just making it up for attention…” It made her feel like she existed even less so she climbed into the window and jumped.

  The hedgerow lining the porch cushioned her fall. She sprang out of it and ran across the street and kept running and running and running. She sweated, her nightgown bunched around her hips, and she ran till she saw a park. In it stood a manmade forest.

  While she caught her breath, the ghost thought, I’ll go build a nest there. I’ll go build a tree house and stay with the crows and hawks till I’ve decided whether or not to continue this stupid journey.

  The street separating her from the park was empty save for a dark lump in the middle of it. Walking towards it, the ghost thought, Roadkill.

  Drawing closer to the lump, she tried to categorize the roadkill. She wanted to know what kind of dead animal she was dealing with. She stared down at a brown paw and still wasn’t sure. Whatever had destroyed the thing hadn’t run it over or splattered it — it seemed pretty intact — and yet it seemed to be missing a head. The ghost knelt down beside the creature.

  She put her face to the dead thing’s stomach. Smelling the recently deceased, the ghost realized, This is special roadkill; this is roadkill that has never been alive. It was so never alive that it had no face, no brain, no memory, no lungs, and no guts. It was just dead meat, dead meat, dead meat, and more dead meat covered in a mink coat that had always been and will always be unalive. This lump reappears in this same street although crows will fly down from the eucalyptus trees to tear and gobble it down to its ribs. Garbage truck wheels roll over it, squishing it into the asphalt till the thing and the road are one. The dead meat is then reborn as a fresh fluffy lump in the gutter, a fresh fluffy lump by the stop sign, a small body on a speed bump. The first five cars that run it over smell as though they’ve rubbed down their vehicles with durian fruit.

  The ghost placed her hands atop the special roadkill’s fur. Feeli
ng it the way a medium touches a missing girl’s possessions in order to deduce if her parents should be hopeful or not, the ghost whispered, “Okay, I get it. I’m like you. We’re part of the same family. Neither of us has ever been alive. We’re beyond that. Our faces are unrecognizable to everyone. Nobody can take our picture because we’re beyond human. I was born a ghost. Just like you were born dead. We have no lived experiences. Only dead ones.”

  She thought her last thoughts in pictures, instead of words. That is the genius of ghosts and animals.

  Tzintzuntzan

  Like a great religion, my parents conceived me in the desert. Water, however, did serve as one of their earliest aphrodisiacs. Two years before my making, they drove to Michoacán, to honeymoon on the banks of Lake Pátzcuaro. On its shores, cattails rustled, and my parents slid together into a tight canoe that set sail for the island of Janitzio. Fat yellowthroats chirped at Mom and Dad. They could smell that they’d been doing it a lot. Fisherpeople were casting butterfly nets into the water. Dad peeped through his camera lens and snapped a picture of Mom smiling and wearing so much eyeliner it would’ve made Cleopatra jealous.

  On shore, Mom and Dad ate whitefish with heads still attached. As their shadows grew thin and long, Mom and Dad’s bellbottoms swished towards the sun. Their flowing black and brown tresses blew as they hiked up Tzintzuntzan’s pyramids shaped like Bundt cakes.

  Tzintzuntzan. Can you say it? Tzintzuntzan. It’s not as hard to say as Parangaricutirimícuaro. Parangaricutirimícuaro is near the ruins of Tzintzuntzan, but its ruins are crispier. Some of them are still under the volcano that Pompeii’d all over it.

  Verbal archeologists suspect that Tzintzuntzan is onomatopoeic. Guess what it’s the sound of. Picture a hummingbird twerking. The sounds accompanying those sharp movements would be tzin, tzun, and tzan.

  My lover and I lived in our own Tzintzuntzan, a roundish five-floor apartment building where the elevator would discriminate against us for being lesbians, refusing to open for us, and we’d have to hike the stone stairs to our lair. Hummingbirds never visited our Astroturf-lined balcony. Instead, pigeons flocked to it. Pigeon couples and threesomes canoodled on top of the air conditioner. Their claws scratched nasty bird sex rhythms into the rust. One psycho pigeon dove into the heating system through the roof and got stuck in a tube. She made dying pigeon sounds until she quieted.

  We left that sexual drama downtown when we moved into our blue house. Starlings nest in its red tile roof. Raw peach babies screech for worms while moms sail overhead, on their way to forage in urban playgrounds and Cambodian refugees’ vegetable gardens. Brown feathers flutter and fall on our limestone porch. Chunklets of nest fall, too. Bits of down drizzle the century plant that blossoms into a bigger and bigger green star by our front steps.

  Hummingbirds drop in for breakfast. I was watching one hovering inches above the dirt. His beak dipped into a Mexican sage’s purple inflorescence. My stomach growled. I was in the mood for Mexican food, too. Chorizo. I wanted chorizo but not a man’s.

  I bent over and reached for our newspaper. I subscribe purely for the crossword puzzle. The hummingbird turned his head and made tiny eye contact. He darted towards our tallest tree, our guayaba, and sailed over its green heights, speeding down the street, over tagged apartments and double-parked cars flashing hazard lights. Pit bulls nobody is interested in spaying or neutering lounged in yards and driveways, waiting to be fed a baby of any race.

  I smiled. I knew I’d hear tzintzuntzan again. The buffet I planted attracts both bitchy and easygoing hummingbirds. They enjoy my sage, fremontodendron, and lavender but they will shank you, just like some of the passionate locals, if you stand in the way of the guayaba’s ultra-seductive nectar.

  Next door to us grows Don Patricio’s house. People call me short but I’m tall enough to look down on the part in Don Patricio’s hair. My skin color is beige-ish whereas Don Patricio is bronze. His eyelids blink open and shut over double Lake Pátzcuaros. Some assholes think Mexicans with blue eyes don’t exist but we are very real. Our eyes can be any color. Even pink. Albinism doesn’t care if you’re brown.

  You can tell from Don Patricio’s iron pompadour that he was probably into gyrating like Elvis back in the day. He’s hunchbacked and wears one extremely thick-soled shoe so that he won’t be a leaning Tower of Pisa. He was putting his thicker sole forward, limping up our driveway the evening my lover and I started unloading moving boxes from our truck. Joining me under guayaba leaves, we shook hands. Pink sunset behind evoked Johnny Appleseed. Don Patricio was being neighborly, warning me about our culde-sac’s dangers.

  “Look!” he said in Spanish. He lifted his cane and pointed its rubber tip at a Trans-Am peeling rubber. The tires blew a gust that lifted and swirled hot pink bougainvillea petals out of the gutter. Lipstick kisses on a window. “Kids live here!” Don Patricio exclaimed. “ ‘Kids live here,’ I’ve told them but they don’t listen! Look! They keep driving forty, fifty, sixty miles per hour up our little street!

  “You know, several years ago, a little girl was playing right over there and TZAN! a car hit her. She went running up the street without her eye. It was on the headlight. That little girl still lives around her. You’ll see her. She’s the one without the eye.”

  I nodded.

  “The woman you’re with,” said Don Patricio, “is she your mother?”

  “No,” I answered. “She’s my partner. We’re a couple.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. He grinned. Crooked headstones knocked together in his mouth.

  Hours later, stacking boxes in our garage, I found a scrapbook leaning against some empty paint cans. I set it down on two of them and opened it. Inside were snapshots of a black lady and a white lady wearing matching rainbow boas and riding matching Harleys among a herd of dykes on bikes. Paging deeper into the scrapbook, I found Melissa Etheridge concert ticket stubs and sobriety chips. I flipped through a bunch of empty pages and arrived at a glossy but wrinkled picture of black boy with a birthday hat strapped on. He was leaning over a table, blowing out seven candles jammed into a chocolate-frosted cake. The black and white dykes were standing on either side of him, wearing party hats and clapping. I recognized our dining room.

  I shut the scrapbook. Melancholic but thankful, I set it back in the corner. Pioneers had already accustomed Don Patricio to the lifestyle.

  My lover was sitting at our dining room table, crunching on potato chips. She was telling me what had been going on in our tree when she’d pulled into our driveway that noon.

  “I saw his feet first,” she said.

  “The crooked shoes?” I asked.

  “Yes! I don’t even know how he got into the tree with his legs that way,” I said. “Maybe he has wings. He does have that hump.” I paused to imagine Don Patricio’s wings.

  My lover continued, “He was just sitting in the branches like it was normal. Eating. And when I got out of the car, he goes, ‘Hello neighbor.’” She did her best to imitate his Mexican accent. “ ‘Just enjoying the weather. And the fruit.’” She mimicked him holding out a guayaba.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Maybe that’s his thing. Climbing lesbians’ trees and eating their fruit.”

  “What should I do if he does it again?”

  “Let him, I guess. It must be his lifestyle.”

  Neighbors don’t give a shit about the gorgeous succulents and cacti I’ve planted along our driveway. All they care about is the guayaba tree that came with our house.

  On their way to the bus stop, neighbors stop at our white gate and stare at it. Their lips move so that you can tell their mouths are watering. In Spanish, they tell me, “Your tree, it’s giving a lot of fruit this year.”

  “Yes,” I agree, glad that I’m carrying my machete. I will protect my succulents and cacti. They will not be trampled by raza lusting after my fruit.

  Handle digs into my forearm, and I reach into my jungle, harvesting.
I don’t even have to pull the guayabas. All I have to do is graze them. Touching them loosens them and tzun! they fall into my orange bucket.

  It gets too heavy to handle. The weight is strangling the circulation in my hand so I reach under the bucket, hold it with both hands, and step down from the wooden chair I had dragged out here, back into the dirt. I don’t care that the bucket is just half full. These are some heavy-ass fruits.

  I scurry down our driveway, turn left, and hoof along the nopales doing jazz hands under Don Patricio’s windows. When their paddles have been macheted off and bloody green stumps bleed, I know someone over there is eating her fiber.

  I head up Don Patricio’s driveway, stepping on bricks that match for a little while and then some new bricks that match for a little while, and then some different bricks that match for another little while. An armless plaster cherub grins in front of a sliding glass door. A Pekingese runs out. Goo crusts the corners of his eyes, and his nails clack against the clashing bricks. The animal yaps at my ankles, and my flip-flops make obscene slurping noises as he follows me up the front steps. I set the bucket down between my ankles. I call, “Hello!” My knuckles rap the screen door’s metal frame.

  The screen shoves open. A man looks down his goatee at me. He smiles, screams, “Chela!” paces to a corner couch, and plops down.

  The TV shouts, “Gol!”

  Like a nosy bird, I peak into Don Patricio’s. The tile floor shines. Greens coat the walls. Traditional Mexican furniture — equipales and reed stuff — mix with particleboard hutches and shelves. Extra walls suggest compartments. Don Patricio’s home is a hive. A honeycomb. How many generations of bees live here?

  A brown-haired woman wearing glasses, her hands dripping water, hurries across the tile to greet me.