by Myriam Gurba
Also from Emily Books
The Gift by Barbara Browning
I’ll Tell You in Person by Chloe Caldwell
Problems by Jade Sharma
Copyright © 2017 by Myriam Gurba
Cover design by Christina Vang
Cover image © Joel Quizon/EyeEm/Getty Images
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Author photograph © Dave Naz
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distribu tor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Gurba, Myriam, author.
Title: Mean / Myriam Gurba.
Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017012422 | ISBN 9781566895019 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gurba, Myriam. | Mexican American women authors—21st century—Biography. | Mexican American lesbians—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3607.U5485 Z46 2017 | DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012422
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the philosophers, poets, artists, and weirdos who influenced and popu late this book. Hugs to Ruth and Emily for paying attention to my words. Kisses to Bob and Beatriz for giving me language and a family. Hugs and kisses to my guaya bas on this planet and beyond. Thanks to Terri and Kalani for letting me edit at their henpecked dining room table. Thanks to Tiombe for helping me sort out my “issues.” Thanks to RADAR Productions for supporting queer writing, art, performance, and me. Thanks to the cowboy for his Slavic generosity. Thanks to Lee for putting up with my shit. Thanks to the drama teacher for the love and drama. Thanks to Wendy for being a good Taurus sister. Thanks to David and Yasmin. Thanks to the ghosts.
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For the restless.
But not the young.
“Lo mejor que te puedo desear es que te vaya mal.”
—JENNI RIVERA
Contents
Wisdom
English Is Spanish
The Whites
Judas and Icarus
The Problem of Evil
Googolplex
Señorita
Cuban Interlude
Acorn
Mamase Mamasa Mamakusa
Mormonse Mormonsa Mamakusa
Hammer
Bonnie
Via Dolorosa
Something I Often Reflect on as an Adult Woman
The Unbearable Whiteness of Certain Girls
Crack
Summer in Sumer
Cyndi Lauper
OMG
Dorm
Fall Semester 1995
ID
Magdaleno
c c cummings
Nicole
Aesthetic Boners
Spring Semester 1996
Hart Crane
Babylon
A Wrinkle in Time After Time
Hella Ukiyo-e
Omnipresence
Strawberry Picker
Exquisite Corpse
Siluetas
I Wandered Lonely as a Dissociated Cloud
Jeans
Fall Semester 1996
Transcript of a 9-1-1 Call: November 15, 1996
Battered Body Found at School: Mysterious Phone Call Alerted the Authorities
Burrito
The Albatross
Page: 17
Spring Semester 1997
The Other Women
Summer Session 1997
Fall Semester 1997
Spring Semester 1998
Fall Semester 1998
Spring Semester 1999
Fall Semester 1999
The Return of Elizabitch
The Collector
The Post-traumatic Bitch and the Sea
Jobs
Doing Donuts
Capital Murder
Flower Girl
Radio
Wisdom
Let’s become a spot upon which fateful moonlight shines.
Let’s become that night.
Let’s become that park.
Let’s absorb and drip. We’re damp grains of earth. We’re grass purged of color. We’re baseball bleachers. We’re November’s darkness. We’re the baseball diamond’s sediment. We host Little League games by daylight. By dark, we become an Aztec altar.
We open our eyes. We allow them to adjust to the place and things described.
Seasonal quiet prevails.
Nothing squeaks or whimpers.
Nothing hums.
In a tunnel beneath the bleachers, a gopher daydreams. Roots sigh. Earthworms blindly go about their business.
A dark-haired girl walks alone.
Her foot falls onto the grass. We see up her skirt. She’s not wearing underwear, so we can see that special part of her. It’s the hole Persephone fell into. Some swine fell down it too.
Her clothes are long. Her dark-blue jacket sweeps her knees.
She slouches. She walks as if in mourning.
She steps into the outfield.
She pauses.
“Who’s there?” she calls out in Spanish.
Silence responds.
She clutches her white purse. Her fingers worry its strap.
She nears the pitcher’s mound, walks across it, heads toward home, and walks across it too. She crouches and climbs through a gash torn into the chain-link backstop.
She reaches into her purse. Mexican hair falls across her face.
It won’t look like that much longer.
A man wearing white clothes creeps around the corner of the snack bar. He creeps up behind the girl and swings a pipe. It hits her in the head and her knees buckle. The man raises his weapon, takes another swing, and whacks her again.
He reaches down his sweatpants. He fondles his penis.
At sunset, a vendor in a straw cowboy hat had pushed his cart along the sidewalk yards away. Making his way down Western Avenue, the vendor had shouted, “¡Elote! ¡Elote! ¡Elote con mantequilla! ¡Elote con mayonesa!”
The man had heard these calls for corn.
He bought none.
Lovingly, he strokes his corn. It quivers. He lets go of it and resumes his chase.
She scrambles up the bleachers, panting. She bleeds onto benches. Blood on concrete. She hears him coming. She lurches, her purse tips, and two receipts sail. A nail file spills. Her toothbrush hits the ground bristles first. She scrambles further along the bench. She slips and falls. Her weight smashes against her elbow.
She crawls. Wet palm prints lengthen behind her. Blood smears her clothes. It makes dark Rorschachs on various surfaces.
Hard-packed dirt rubs her knees.
The man in white stands beside her. Blood dapples his T-shirt.
He kicks her. She flips onto her back. He slides a knife out of his pocket, takes a step, and stands so that he straddles her waist. He lowers himself onto her chest, squats, and leans toward her face. He presses his blade to her skin and slides it along her cheekbone. Black oozes from the slit. Wrecking her makes him feel like she belongs to him. We may feel that because we are privy to the wreckage she belongs to us too, but she does not.
He pushes her legs apart. He pulls out his corn and kneels. Blood pours
from her cheek, nose, and head as he feeds himself into her. He thrusts to the rhythm of her death rattle. Her agony sustains his erection, holding it.
He freezes. He moans and shivers. His slack corn slides out of her. Cum oozes from between her legs. It gleams like unspeakable poetry.
A newscaster described the murder as “the bludgeoning death of a transient in Oakley Park.”
This description is cruel. It reduces her to transience, as if she personified it, and it ignores her name. Her name matters. It’s a word that philosophers fall in love with.
It appears many times in the Bible: Sophia. In Greek, sophia means wisdom.
I turn her name over and over in my head. My brain rubs it smooth from S to a.
Sophia.
In my grim reverie, I think, “She’s the capital of Bulgaria. I love Bulgarian yogurt. So rich, so tart, so mean. So grown up.”
My mind keeps rubbing her name. An hourglass fills my imagination: Sophia Loren.
I light a votive candle, watch the flame bounce, and whisper her name aloud.
It sounds like breath. Transient sibilance runs through it.
Sophia is always with me. She haunts me.
Guilt is a ghost.
Sometimes, in my car, I realize I’ve been listening to Mexican music I’m not really into. A ranchera will be blaring, a man with a nasal voice will be moaning lyrics about heartache, and an accordion will join him.
I think, “Why am I listening to this? I don’t even like this.” Then I’ll remember: Sophia . . .
Some ghosts listen to the radio through the bodies of the living. They use us to conduct pain, pleasure, music, and meaning. They burden us with feelings that are both ours and theirs.
English Is Spanish
I began as an only child with an only language. This language was English and Spanish.
My English and Spanish came from a pact my parents made. My father, a green-eyed American, agreed to speak to me in English. My mother, a Mexican by birth, a feminist by choice, promised to speak to me in her native Romance language peppered with Nahuatl.
Their pact gave me lots of words. Folger’s crystals. Asshole. Aguacate. Tiliche. Cadillac. Smart. Girl. Sanguich. That’s Mexican for sandwich.
I spoke my first words at a place more American than Appomattox, the McDonald’s across from the Greyhound bus station. This makes me a patriot, though the words themselves were Francophile.
“French fry,” I moaned, reaching for one.
French fry: those are a lot of consonant clusters for a small mouth.
French fry. Papa francesa. Pomme frite. Joan of Arc.
While Mom drew blood at the hospital and Dad worked teaching fourth graders, I amused myself at nursery school. From its playground, I saw tombstones, monuments, and an American flag waving at the cemetery. I got down on all fours and knelt in the dirt by the swings. I stared at a gopher hole, wanting to slide my fist down it. The hole proved very tempting for one boy. He sexually assaulted it and they took him away in an ambulance.
I enjoyed the cuisine at nursery school; it tasted metallic since it all came from cans, even the juice. I hated naptime.
Naptime was torture.
I wanted to move and talk during naptime, but I couldn’t. I forced myself to stay still and shut my eyes. I listened to other kids breathe. I peeked at the ceiling and at light making its way through thin cracks between curtains. I wondered about the cemetery. The mats were soft and smelled like children who drank juice.
Dad forgot to pick me up once. I didn’t mind. Dusk was coming and a nursery school teacher and I sat together at a short table. We stared at a wall clock.
I smiled and told her, “I wonder what happens here at night.” I imagined toys, books, blankets, chairs, and cans becoming enchanted, performing for me after dark. I asked, “Do you think things come to life and move?”
The nursery school teacher laughed.
She said, “They might.”
The door opened. Dad stood there. “I’m sorry!” he said. As he explained the reason for his tardiness, I zoned out, fantasizing about enchanted objects, disappointed that I would be sleeping in my own bed and not a nursery school cupboard.
Dad laughed at the way my nursery school teachers treated me.
My language paradox escaped them.
They didn’t get that my first language was double theirs.
Dad discovered their misunderstanding as we set the dinner table one night. I pointed. In a didactic tone, I narrated, “This is a plate. This is a cup. This is a spoon. This is a fork.” I gestured and continued, “This is a chair. This is a table. This is the kitchen.”
Dad’s brow furrowed. He watched and listened. I grabbed his hand, walked him around the house, and introduced him to more domestic nouns: “This is a lamp. This is a television. This is dust. This is a sofa.”
Eventually, he laughed.
Mom was in the kitchen. He shouted, “Guess what!” at her.
“Qué?”
“The nursery school ladies think Myriam can’t speak English so they’re trying to teach her! They’ve turned her into a parrot!”
Dad spoke the truth. This was exactly what had happened.
On my first day, yo hablé con mis nursery school maestras usando palabras como éstas because I assumed we all had the same words. I didn’t know I was spewing ciphers fed to me by a foreigner. I didn’t know Mexicans were Mexicans, a category some mistake for subhuman, a category my grandfather mistakes for divine. I thought of myself as a person, and I understood people. People were people, and people talked, and talking was for everyone. Today, I understand that words are for everyjuan, but that not everyjuan is for every word, so please, dear reader, si no te molesta demasiado, pass me the metaphorical french fries as you whisper what you wish had been the first un-American words to pass through your uncorrupted lips.
The Whites
It took me years to figure out that white people are white people and that that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Having white neighbors began the process. Their lifestyle differed from ours.
They looked different from us. Mom, Dad, and I were brunettes. The whites had yellow hair. They used fewer words than we did.
Mom sometimes went over to the whites’ to practice her English.
She sat across from the white mom at her coffee table. In contrast to one another, each became Other. A mother from another Other.
While they visited, Mom sipped black coffee. She kissed burgundy lipstick stains onto her mug. Her hair, which she parted down the middle, reached her breast pockets. Liquid liner that tapered into tails highlighted her brown eyes. Mom’s bone structure put the white mom’s to shame. Her cheekbones were so there and lushly sculpted that they made the white mom’s face look like mashed potatoes from a box. Not that the white mom was ugly. Her face just didn’t exude foreign-lady sexiness the way Mom’s did. The white mom’s face exuded Puritanism. Margarine. Thrift. The absence of fun.
Mom met Dad in Mexico back when he had long hair and wore bell-bottoms. She first laid eyes on him as he walked past a Guadalajara cemetery, and she knew. She turned to her big sister and said, “See that hippie walking across the street? I’m going to marry him.”
Her sister reminded her, “You have a boyfriend.”
Mom said, “So?”
Mom broke up with her boyfriend and courted Dad with marigolds. She proposed to him and they married in a Catholic temple designed by one of Mom’s uncles. Dad was working at the American School, teaching English and music to the kids of politicians and moguls, and his students filled the pews at his wedding. As a gift, one boy offered my newlywed parents a Great Dane. Dad declined, explaining that he could not feed it on a teacher’s salary.
Dad applied to graduate schools in the U.S. and got accepted to one in Tucson. He quit the American School, Mom quit her job as a chemist, and they traveled to Arizona, where they made me in the dry heat.
I guess Gila monsters and saguaros a
re aphrodisiacs.
Dad earned a master’s in linguistics, and then he and Mom left the southwest. They moved to Santa Maria, California, a super-quiet place that grew strawberries and needed teachers.
Strawberries and broccoli grew across the street from our house. A donkey lived at the end of the road.
The white people lived to our left.
Their skin nearly matched their hair.
They parked a long RV in their driveway. They ate lots of Jell-O. The white mom teased her hair into yellow swan wings. It looked great. The white dad looked like my uncle who smoked a lot of mota. Their white son was super chill and fun to hang out with. I followed him around his yard, staring up at his metallic hair, longing for him to show me affection. A smile. Meanwhile, his little sister acted cunty.
One time, when I was playing with her in our driveway, Dad told her, “That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing.”
She looked at him with nonchalance. “I know,” she said.
Her answer mortified Dad. At the dinner table that night, he kept saying, “She was supposed to say thank you. She was supposed to say thank you.”
I eventually convinced the white boy, Josh, to play with me. I wanted him to myself, so when his sister, Emily, asked, “Can I play, too?” I told her, “No.”
Her lower lip quivered. Tears spilled down her cheeks. They landed on her homemade dress.
“Eat your lip gloss,” I told her.
I reached into her pocket and pulled out her lip gloss tin. I slid open its lid and eased my finger into the purple sludge. I helped myself to a serving, rubbed it across my thick lips, and sucked the excess off my finger.
I was three, maybe four.
Makeup meant for children is always a snack.
“Live from New York . . .”
This must have been an omen: Mom went into labor with me while Dad was watching Saturday Night Live. He was laughing so hard at John Belushi dressed like a bee that he didn’t hear the screams. Mom’s Yorkie bit his ankle and barked. He frowned, got up, and followed her to the bedroom. From the doorway, Dad stared at Mom. The bed glowed red from her blood. Dad wrapped her in wet sheets and threw her into the Pinto. He sped to the hospital, where a doctor wearing a leisure suit sunk his scalpel into Mom’s abdomen. He cut a slit, reached between the lips, pulled me out, and held my blue body. He spanked me. I halfheartedly breathed.
