Mean

by Myriam Gurba

  When was the last time you were mean for fun? When was the last time you were mean in the name of politics? Have you ever been mean for Jesus? When was the last time you tried to kill someone rather than let him into your club? When was the last time you wanted to kill someone but chose to be a bitch instead of a murderer?

  Have you been called a bitch?

  Dad has gotten so pissed at Mom, my sister, and me that he has called us bitches.

  When he calls us this word, I want to say, “Dad, we’re just making your life more interesting. Remember?”

  Googolplex

  Although Ida was white, she sort of wasn’t.

  She looked like Kurt Cobain. She attended bilingual classes with me and spoke and understood Spanish. She kicked it with Mexicans on the playground and learned how to play handball. When she came over to my house, she slurped Mom’s pozole instead of asking “What is this?” in that supremely bitchy California-girl accent some white girls reserved for interrogating my mother’s hospitality.

  The fifth-grade race war proved Ida’s racial solidarity.

  An Asian American child fired the first shots.

  She stood near me in the playground sand by the handball courts. She looked me up and down and said, “Your mother . . . is a wetback.”

  I lost control of my limbs. My hands attacked her and they shoved her chest, making her lose her balance and fall to the sand. My toes flew into her stomach. My Velcro shoes landed blow after blow, her round face winced, and the bell rang. Recess was over. I quit kicking. She ran away crying.

  She didn’t tell any grown-ups what had happened, but the fifth-grade girls balkanized soon after. White girls from the English-only classes refused to socialize with girls from the bilingual classes. Looking at the jungle gym and tetherball courts, our segregation was clear as melanin. Clusters of girls named Lupe played together. Clusters of girls named Michelle played together. Lupes and Michelles didn’t mix. The playground felt dicey and tribal.

  From the jungle-gym bars, a dangling white girl, Amy, called, “Go back to Baja!”

  Her taunt seemed aimed at both Ida and me.

  We paused beside the merry-go-round. I turned to Ida. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” I asked her.

  Ida shook her head. “No,” she answered. “But I’d go with you.”

  “You would love it,” I told her. “The food is really good there. My uncle got his head cut off by a bus. The cockroaches fly.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded.

  Amy screamed, “Ida loves wetbacks!”

  Ida screamed back, “Fuck your mother in the tit!”

  I felt like hugging Ida. I’m not sure where she learned that comeback. Her mother did work for a gynecologist. Her father lived in Colorado and worked for the defense industry. Ida was so smart. Her favorite number was googolplex.

  The balkanization and screaming drew our teachers outside. They decided they needed to fix things. They informed us that we were going to have to sit down and “talk about it.”

  After lunch, a male teacher marched the boys to the blacktop to play dodgeball. Girls got herded into the English-only classroom. I stared at the boys through tinted windows. My skin felt jealous. I didn’t want to be inside.

  “So,” prodded the English-only teacher. “What’s going on?”

  She stood by the board. She folded her arms.

  She was dressed entirely in purple.

  The white girls sat on the opposite side of the classroom, in desks facing ours. They blinked at us. We blinked back.

  I raised my hand. The English-only teacher said, “Go ahead.”

  I pointed at the lot of them and said, “They call us wetbacks and tell us to go back to Mexico. Those girls are racists. And she’s not even Mexican.” I pointed at Ida.

  Ida nodded.

  White lower lips quivered. White eyes grew glassy. One by one, white girls burst into tears. Ida and all the Mexican girls looked at each other, like, seriously?

  “Apologize for making them cry,” said the English-only teacher.

  “Sorry,” I said without any sincerity.

  Señorita

  Soon after the fifth-grade race war ended, we unloaded boxes from a moving truck and hauled them into our new address.

  Some of our boxes held Mexican knickknacks and some of our boxes held Polish knickknacks and our family became the first thusly interracial family to pioneer this upper-middle-class neighborhood in the name of those like ourselves, Mexican Polacks. We became the first in our neighborhood to blanket long, hot kielbasas in tortillas. In the kitchen, accidentally cutting her finger while dicing an onion, Mom tainted the bulb with her blood. Dad stood at the stove and stirred a cauldron of pork broth. He dropped a garlic clove into the simmering and interrupted the lecture he was giving me on semiotics.

  “Hey!” he shouted at Mom. “Hey!” he repeated. He looked at her bloody onion. “Don’t get AIDS in my dinner!”

  He was joking, of course. Mom didn’t have AIDS. My gay cousin did.

  Can you smell yourself? I can usually smell myself, but sometimes I can’t. I have heard some people say that different races have different smells. If you’re interracial, do you have a blended fragrance? My crotch has a blended fragrance. I love the way it smells, especially when it hasn’t been washed in a few days. It smells like life, the ocean, baked goods, and shawarma.

  This white lesbian from Kalamazoo once told me that when she was taking an ethnic studies class in high school, the teacher told the kids of color that they could say anything they wanted about white people for one class period and not get in trouble. The white lesbian told me that a COC, a classmate of color, demanded, “Why do white people smell like wet dogs?”

  I don’t think white people smell like wet dog. But white people’s houses do have a smell. The smell is sour and not very alive. Like a phonebook.

  I walked home with white kids from our new neighborhood’s bus stop. They failed to pick up on my smell (kielbasa and corn tortillas), and one of these kids, a white girl, turned shameless in her curiosity. I’m going to call this white girl Shaquanda. White people love to appropriate things. By naming the white girl Shaquanda I’m beating them at their own game.

  Shaquanda stared hard at my profile. She scrutinized my nose, cheeks, lips, and eyelashes. In her deeply bitchy California-girl accent, she terrorized me.

  She asked, “What are you?”

  To keep it simple, I answered, “Mexican.”

  Shaquanda scowled. This made her look smarter than she was. It also made her look like her mother, a big-boned pro-life activist brave enough to picket Planned Parenthood while wearing cow print.

  “Are you sure you’re not Filipina?” asked Shaquanda. “We had a Filipina who cleaned our house and she looked like you.”

  I said, “It’s safe to say I’m not Filipina,” and wondered about my safety.

  Shaquanda listened to me breathe. She was checking to see if I breathed in English or some other language. Breaths do happen in different languages. They are onomatopoetry. Even animal onomatopoetics happen in different languages. American dogs say “woof.” Mexican dogs say “guau.” Spanglish dogs say “go Raiders.”

  Shaquanda and I went to junior high together. Almost everyone there was a stranger. Almost everyone there was white. The elementary school where I’d come from had been about fifty-fifty, about half Mexican, half white, and a few of everybody else.

  Ida wasn’t among these new whites. She went to the mostly Mexican junior high by the freeway. She was going to have the joy of entering puberty among cholas.

  The pallor of my junior high’s student body worked as my weight-loss pill. Digesting the sight of so many white kids made my hands tremble. I sweated. My heart raced. At night, in bed, I stared at the black hole of my ceiling, knowing that in the daylight, I’d see nothing as infinite, familiar, and dark as it.

  In the morning, back on campus, I locked myself in bathroom stalls and diarrheaed my baby fa
t away. I flushed but did not emerge reborn as a swan. I was thinner but still tan. I wanted to kill that color. Undoing it would take dedication. It would take turning goth to undo. It would take sitting in the shade while reading vampire erotica to undo. It would take wearing veiled hats and tubes of skin lightening creams bought from Mexican pharmacies. It would take me years to be able to declare victory over my complexion.

  My classmates took my brownness as a warning. It told them that I was a thief. At lunchtime, they hugged their brown bags to their chests when I walked past.

  A skater standing near the cafeteria doors grinned at me. His freckles tricked me into thinking he was sweet.

  “Nigger lips,” he hissed at my face.

  Isn’t it something how an “oversized” body part, even if it’s not black, “darkens” you? I inherited my Niger lips from my half-Polish father. My eyes came from him, too—green. He gave me chlorophyll. Our eyes photosynthesize. They catch energy. They release it.

  The school counselor enrolled me in PE, pre-algebra, life science, English, art, and history, and in history, I recognized the boy suffering near the globe. With prowess adding bounce to my step, I walked to him. I prayed we might knit an alliance. This boy was already intimate with my lips. He knew they were soft and mean.

  Macaulay grinned and panted. His breath warmed sub-Saharan Africa.

  Macaulay and I knew each other from a simpler time and place, second grade. We’d scissored and glued together in class, and during recesses we’d competed against one another in timed tournaments of sexual assault. Our playground sport was called Kissy Boys versus Kissy Girls. Its object was to chase down an “oppositely sexed” team member and connect lips with any part of them. A kiss benched the receiving player till only the toughest kiss rapist was left standing. Due to my well-developed calves, ambition, and machismo, my ass rarely warmed the bench.

  One afternoon, after a sweaty session of Kissy Boys versus Kissy Girls, we lined up outside our classroom. Spent, we panted, a chorus of perverts. How moist we must have been. Our class pets, a nuclear guinea pig family, were going to replace their salt licks with our faces.

  I heard my name and turned. Macaulay’s face careened at mine. His mouth banged into my lips, and my teeth dug into my own wet flesh. This was an unsanctioned kiss, we were off the kissy clock, and this was the only time Macaulay kissed me in this way. He disappeared from my life after second grade and reappeared in history. He became a part of history, mine and Mr. Hand’s.

  Mr. Hand, our seventh-grade history teacher, stood in front of the blackboard. Before him, rows of empty tables stretched to the back wall. We stood against this wall on the first day. We waited.

  “You’ve got about thirty seconds to choose a seat!” he cried. “Hustle!”

  I figured Mr. Hand was exaggerating, but I grabbed Macaulay’s elbow and tugged him up an aisle to the left front corner. I slid onto a hard yellow chair. Macaulay slid onto the chair to my left. To our left, sunlight streamed through a wall that was almost all window. Our profiles warmed.

  Since he was blue-eyed, and likely had a penis, everyone had taken Mr. Hand seriously. Everyone had claimed a seat and was waiting in silence. Give-us-more-instructions was our vibe. Tell us what to do. Mr. Hand lumbered, knock-kneed, along the front row. He tossed syllabi. I scooped them off my tabletop, kept two, and passed the rest to the girl behind me.

  I turned back to face the front but peeked at my neighbor.

  Macaulay’s auburn hair, ermine eyes, and almost olive skin were the same, but something, perhaps a trauma, had turned him into a mouth breather. With each breath, his lips got drier and grosser. Braces gave him a snout that would’ve looked cute on a marsupial. On him, it looked both awkward and slightly sinister.

  Macaulay’s sweater drew my gaze. Its sheepskin collar fluffed around his neck so that his head seemed spit out of a mushroom cloud crafted from innocence. The sheepskin was so thick, full, and fluffy that I felt lewd impulses toward it. I wanted to touch the fleece. I wanted to squeeze it the way I sometimes longed to squeeze big boobs. Have you ever wanted to milk a well-endowed lady? Seriously milk her?

  I sat on my hands and swung my feet. They failed to reach the carpet.

  Under the table, a sensation intruded.

  It was happening near my bicycle shorts’ hem. Every girl and her mother was wearing bicycle shorts then so everyone could, therefore, appraise the cloven heft of generation upon generation of camel toe. Camel toes were pleased that a fad had brought them into the light. Camel toes basked in the ultraviolet rays of 1989.

  I looked at Macaulay with caution. This trepidation was new but it felt natural. Instinctual. I knew that what was happening under the table shouldn’t have been happening, but my impulses did not command me to fight. I froze. Many animals do this. Deer. Possum. My mother.

  With nonchalance, Macaulay stared ahead, at the bulletin board.

  Against its yellow butcher paper, the word welcome hung in chunky black. Pins jammed into each cutout letter, suspending the collection. Mr. Hand must’ve tracked, hunted, and captured his w, the two e’s, and l, c, o, and m. Or maybe he caught two w’s and flipped one upside down.

  My brother, Herman, owned a similar collection. He hunted flies, moths, and dragonflies with nets. He scavenged dead insects off windowsills. He skewered his bug collection with needles. Another way of looking at the pins jamming into welcome was that Mr. Hand believed in acupuncture for language.

  I noticed movement.

  The hand Macaulay wasn’t molesting me with rose to his snout.

  Four of its fingers curled into a circle with the index finger pointing at the ceiling. This pointer pressed flat against his mouth. From this dry hole issued the most brazen yet muted “Shh.”

  The hand that was molesting me slid to my inner thigh and squeezed the fat. Sensing that if I yelped, I’d look like the bad guy, I obeyed the shh. I swallowed my chance at rescue.

  The reason I know that Mr. Hand taught history was “History” was the name of his class.

  I didn’t learn much history from him. My time with him mostly taught me how to be quietly molested. The word molester makes me think of animals. Molesters are bad moles that touch other moles. A molester creeps up the tunnel behind unsuspecting mammals and lets his whiskers slip where they don’t belong.

  When his prey asks, “What are you doing?” the molester answers, “Oh, I didn’t see you there.”

  Which is true.

  Because of his snout, Macaulay looked like a mole, and he’d scoot his chair so his was touching mine. Our tabletop masked his incursions, and I’d bite down on nothing, pressing my molars together till I felt the hand that he’d plopped on my knee slide toward and into my pudding.

  Once Macaulay began stirring, my tapioca warmed and bubbled. I didn’t want it to be warm. I didn’t want it to be cooking in public, and class is public, very public, and I had a feeling that if one of my classmates noticed what was happening to me under the table, they’d call me a ho.

  I was having my usual diarrhea and reading accusations carved into the bathroom stall paint.

  Many accusations involved the word hoe and sometimes a girl was a hoe and at other times she was a ho. Spellings varied. According to the stall door, some teachers were even hoes and hos. And according to an accusation carved into the small metal coffin that received our blood-drenched sanitary napkins, our woodshop teacher fingerbanged himself.

  Dad and I gardened together on the weekends.

  Recently, I’d helped him plant five sugar bushes along our front yard hillside. Bush wasn’t the only thing Dad and I handled together. Dad also taught me how to handle leaves, dirt, and grass. He Three-Stoogeishly taught me to mow. Maternally, he taught me to hoe. Mexicanly, he taught me to blow—leaf blow. Maybe mowing, hoeing, and blowing were why I was feeling certain mole feelings lately. Like a molester, I wanted to bump into girls so that I could press myself against their soft parts. The chipmunks napping between their thigh
s. I knew girls had chipmunks between their legs because I was a girl and I had a chipmunk there, too. These creatures seek out nuts. They hoard fetuses for the winter.

  Macaulay licked his snout. He leaned into my earlobe.

  “Have you got a big, hairy bush?” he asked.

  “What?”

  In a blue-balls tone, he insisted, “A big, hairy bush! Do you have a big, sweet bush?”

  “We have five,” I whispered.

  Macaulay’s breath picked up like he’d hit a jackpot. His hand groped for the bushes I’d been hiding from him.

  Mr. Hand wheeled the TV/VCR cart in front of the board. Its presence announced FUCK TEACHING!

  Mr. Hand’s knuckles pushed down the VCR’s lid and pressed buttons. A taped episode of The Simpsons came on.

  This was a form of Christmas, watching cartoons instead of having class, and for my pussy, there was an extra dose of merriment. The gift Mr. Hand was giving us was so great that Macaulay felt no need to fondle mine.

  I consider every pussy a gift.

  I glanced at Macaulay’s hands.

  They were out in public instead of down in pubic. They rested on our tabletop.

  Thank you, Homer, Bart, Lisa, and Marge.

  News about somewhere oily barked in the background. Kuwait.

  Dad was scooping a food I associated with euthanasia onto his plate.

  He looked up from his lima beans. He asked me, “How was school?”

  Before I could weigh the implications of my blurt, I Touretted, “We watched The Simpsons, and tomorrow, we’re watching more!”

  Dad’s beard bristled. It asked, “You watched cartoons at school? Which class?”

  No TV/VCR cart. Just Mr. Hand with skin glowing like grilled salmon. The glow plus the way he was grasping his chalk, with a lot of ill will, worried me.