by Myriam Gurba
The bell rolled its long, high-pitched rr. Mr. Hand made a point of surveying our faces, acknowledging the disappointment. He said, “We were going to watch more Simpsons, but we can’t.” The groan of children who’ve been let down, and have, thus, lost a certain innocence, motivated Mr. Hand to behave childishly. He looked at me. His blue-eyed stare ratted me out.
“Somebody’s parents called to complain,” he said.
I felt like an asshole, but I didn’t feel like my parents were assholes. I knew they were right—you don’t go to school to watch cartoons, even if these cartoons keep you from getting molested. Mr. Hand maintained eye contact with me long enough to damn me.
As punishment, Mr. Hand was going to make us learn.
He assigned us a history report and told us, “It’s worth a thousand points.” He walked us to the school library and dropped us off with the librarian.
Her arthritic finger pointed at the card catalogue. She said, “That’s the card catalogue. It’s got what you need.”
This lesson on how to use the card catalogue—that it was there, along with the suggestion that we open it and take what we wanted from it—was similar to my first lesson on sex. One afternoon, Mom walked me to my room, pointed at a purple book on my bed, and said, in Spanish, “Read it.”
The book was in English and I did not care for its picture of a penis.
Since the librarian was done with us, it was time to do nothing unless you were a nerd. Girls with friends went to go chew gum and talk shit. Boys with friends went to go see if they could use glasses, sunlight, and library books to start fires. Starting a fire with glasses was something I would’ve liked to do with friends but I didn’t have any. I skulked to a table near the door and plopped into a chair that hurt every part of me.
Why does public school furniture have to hurt?
Why can it never feel good?
I opened my primary source and sighed. I looked down at it and then looked at the door. I rued having taken Mom’s suggestion. When I’d asked her, “Who should I do my history report on?” she’d answered, in Spanish, “Ana Frank. Read the diary of Ana Frank.”
I followed her suggestion, believing that reading a teenage girl’s diary would be juicy and seductive, but it was a little slow. Anne Frank slept in an attic. She was thankful to eat dinner, though it wasn’t very good. Going to the bathroom was awkward. How was this any different from going to my grandmother’s house? There was even a Nazi there. Dad’s mom’s second husband was German. Grandma liked to play in the snow.
Boring details shoved my eyes off the page and back onto the table where an ant was marching toward a family who’d never see him again. My fingertip squished him, and I lifted him to my face. I visualized his soul leaving his many-legged body.
Someone said, “Anne Frank was a dyke.”
I looked away from the bug and at the source of this interesting accusation. Gavin, a rosaceaed Little Leaguer, stood near me, grinning.
I didn’t understand.
Gavin stared at me, processing. Then, he said, “You retarded Mexifart. Anne Frank was a lez.”
Lez I understood. I responded to the best of my ability. I said, “Oh.”
Gavin said, “Yeah, she gets it on with her friend. Anne Frank was a big-time lesbo.” He physically punctuated his assertion with a hip thrust inches from my face.
“We’ll see,” I said.
“Lesbo . . .” Gavin whispered. To get rid of him, I pretended to read. Boys hate that shit.
In Spanish, intimate apparel is called ropa interior. This directly translates to interior clothes and reminds me of the Wallace Stevens poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”
Wearing only ropa interior, I was reading El Diario de Ana Frank by lamplight. The sound of my sister snoring in the room in front of me and the sound of my brother grinding his teeth in the room to my left reminded me to think before I masturbated.
Anne Frank was talking kind of dirty. She was sharing what her body was like, but her narrative got interrupted by a photo insert featuring Jews, train stations, and Miep Gies. I pinched these pages, flipped, and got back to the meat. I dove back into Anne describing her period and confiding the texture of it, the marinaraishness of it, the minestroneishness of it. She nicknamed it her sweet secret.
Sweet secret my ass.
Anne wrote about being in bed at night and wanting to explore her body. Her hands wanted to feel up her own titties and tweak her nipples. I finally felt connected to this dead Jewish girl. I did the same thing. I played my titties. I did air guitar on them. Anne wanted to do this, but circumstances forced her to play hers acoustically.
Anne described a friend of hers. She said she got curious about this girl’s body; she wanted to touch on her boobs but her friend told her no. Anne admitted to entering ecstasy when she saw figures of naked ladies, and I thought of topless Victory flying over the battlefield, a triumphant goddess nobody could squeeze.
Anne made some gay lament like, “If only I had a girlfriend! Yours, Anne.”
I lowered my hand to my thingy. My finger took its temperature.
It felt like it had just come out of an oven.
Macaulay’s eyes were as bad as his hands. They were rubbing all over my paper, stealing what I wrote. His pencil was scratching my answers onto his paper.
Around us, a concert of pencils scratched. Pages turned to no particular rhythm.
Macaulay set his pencil down. I knew where his cheating hand was headed. I felt it land. I blushed as his fingers snuck into my crotch.
I clenched my developing jaw.
I looked at Mr. Hand.
His eyes left the page he was grading. He saw. From where he was sitting, his desk parallel to the chalkboard, his face facing us, he had a view.
Mr. Hand’s eyes were watching the performance between my legs. It was symphonic. Macaulay played for no audience, but he had an audience of one.
I looked into Mr. Hand’s unprepared eyes. He looked me in mine. Mr. Hand’s face, neck, and scalp went from light pinkish to cherry tomato.
I’m not sure what my expression told Mr. Hand, but I think it communicated something like, “I know that seeing a boy do this to me is embarrassing for both of us, but I’m pretty sure you can make it stop.”
Unable to look into a girl’s eyes or soul while she was being molested, something all teachers should be prepared to confront, Mr. Hand snapped his eyes back at the worksheet he’d been grading. He hunched closer to it. He buried his blushing face in it. He used the worksheet as a veil. He became as modest as some harem girls are expected to be. As speechless, too.
Cuban Interlude
That’s the story of my avant-garde molestation. I call it that because the standard American molestation narrative implicates a grown-up and not a peer, especially not a peer molesting you in broad daylight while your history teacher looks on and pretends he doesn’t see. I later discovered that Macaulay did what he did to me to every girl he sat beside in junior high. Sometimes he used his foot, sometimes he used his hand, and once, he used his pencil. He was resourceful.
The way Macaulay’s touch left invisible imprints on my thighs is reminiscent of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta’s work. She wandered Iowa, Oaxaca, and other states, nestling her naked body into meadows, beaches, and hillsides. She created depressions then sprinkled them with things like rocks, berries, and flames. Photographs of these silhouettes remain as evidence of her interaction with the earth. You can’t see her in them, but you can. You can’t see Macaulay on me, but you can read him. He treated me like an artist working with dirt.
If Duchamp could place a urinal in an art gallery and thus elevate it, I can do the same thing with myself. By redefining my little molester as a sculptor, I redeem my molestation. I secrete English, Spanish, and tears, but, like a urinal, I also function as a vessel. I hold sadness, language, memories, and glee.
The other day, as I was cleaning my bedroom, I decided, for fun, to act out Mendieta’s
murder. Her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, pushed her out of their window. She fell, and, presumably, her body left an imprint on the roof of the delicatessen where she landed. I took off my clothes, set up my camera, and struggled against an imaginary husband. A single lamp lit my room and cast silhouettes against the wall. I held out my arms. I leaned back.
My shadow froze mid-plummet.
My camera clicked.
Art is one way to work out touch gone wrong.
Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death. Somewhere on this planet, a man is about to touch a woman to death. Men touched Mendieta and Sophia to death. In my cold bedroom, their ghosts fused. Their shadow climbed my closet door. It touched the ceiling. I felt accompanied.
There are times when I sit in my car by myself. I gaze at the passenger seat and its emptiness.
Moon glows above me. My skin prickles. Goose bumps remind me. In this emptiness, I am never alone.
Shadows fall.
Shadows fall again.
No one can touch them.
Acorn
The neighborhood we pioneered as Molacks, Mexican Polacks, remained tranquil and gorgeous. Birds purred at dawn. Eucalyptus leaves, whole carpets of them, murmured mentholated nothings. Grinning dog owners walked border collies toward sunsets made for lovers.
To the east, in fading pastels, little mountains swelled. To the west, a valley cradled our small town—named after one of Columbus’s ships—a smear of beach, and the Pacific Ocean.
I’d kneel on my carpet at my tall bedroom window. I didn’t look east or west. I looked ahead. I watched the grass it was my job to tend. It ended where the real plants lived, along our front yard hillside.
Across the street, to the left side of our hill, an ophthalmologist and his family lived in a fake villa. A one-eyed widow lived to the right side of our hill. She wore an eye patch and imperiled her remaining eye by hopping around her backyard tennis court with a racket. The payout from her husband’s life insurance policy had bought her the court. I think her eye paid for it, too.
Vineyards grew behind these two backyards. Rows of vegetables followed the grapes. After the veggies, soft mountains—melting ice cream or mashed potatoes with butter. They created our valley.
Being surrounded by so much leisure, tranquility, and nature amplified my quiet anger. Every cell that was me was mad and jealous. The cells that were me envied the mellow that was my view, this California. I hated that the grapes glistened and dangled without anyone yanking their tendrils. The gently smiling mourning doves that sailed over our lawn pissed me off, and the sugar bushes along our driveway made me want to be them. Nobody was shoving their fingers into them. Occasionally quail families darted into them, but they came and went with such speed and lightness that the bushes only felt the suggestion of quail.
The front yard entity I had most in common with was the acorn. It kept its mouth shut. It was small. It was two toned. It held a bitterness that, in certain cases, such as ingestion by horses, poisoned, and I’d found a way to advertise my bitterness. I rolled my skirts up to the cusp of where it counted so people who were into that kind of thing could see my vertically scowling cunt. Underwear covered the cunt, but it scowled so deeply you could see it through its cotton mask.
My skirt-wearing style attracted admirers, and since Democrats were raising me, I was nice to them. (Niceness is social justice.) I led my admirers to the dirt behind the science classrooms and kissed them. One make-out partner was a man who ended up mired in the quicksand of eighth grade. He smoked cigarettes, had a rattail, rode a BMX, and wouldn’t be following me to high school.
I tongue wrestled a neo-Nazi. I suspected this skinhead wanted to taste what he hated so no one could accuse him of not at least trying it. Unlocking his lips—which were surprisingly full for a racist—from mine, he leaned around my neck, toward my ear.
“You taste like chicken,” he whispered.
“That’s because I’m scared,” I whispered back.
By eighth grade, being called a ho was water off my wet back. I was a paradoxical ho, though, a bookworm ho with a fading Mexican complexion. Young people of color are supposed to enjoy looting and eating trans fats, not sustained silent reading, but I found a way to reconcile my assigned stereotype with my passions. I microwaved nachos and ate them while reading Jackie Collins paperbacks I stole from my mother—trans fats, looting, and literature.
I chose to read Sophie’s Choice as part of my English class’s read-athon. The number of pages I read filled the classroom wall read-a-thon chart way before I was ready to admit that no nerd could catch up with me. I stole a piece of graph paper from math class and used a ruler to draw an extension for my row. I cut it out and stapled it to the bulletin board without asking my teacher’s permission. I filled my annex with more book titles and more page numbers. I annexed that annex with another annex. I annexed that annex’s annex with another annex and filled it. I wrote Anne Frank’s name in there even though it was cheating. I read her in seventh grade. A whole year before.
Despite my intense bookwormery, my ho status eclipsed the rest of me. I gave in to the magnetic pull of other hos.
One of these hos, Janet (we’ll say her last name was Jackson) was gifted with an ass that didn’t match her ethnicity—a Swedish face with an Oakland booty. Her hobbies included abstract expressionism, oil painting, and the fight against cystic acne. I wanted to suggest to Janet that she combine these hobbies but kept this idea to myself. We hung out with a freckled undercover Mexican named Luna Smith. Luna’s real last name had been Sanchez, but her dad legally changed it so the company he owned, Smith’s Etc., wouldn’t be associated with anything as foul as a Romance language.
It was lunchtime, and the three of us, plus Janet’s skater lover, Bobby, were hanging out beneath untouchable monkey bars. We were too mature to dangle from them. We had body hair that required grooming.
Janet stood between two poles. Her pose reminded me of a cage dancer’s in a music video. Bobby stood behind her, kneading her camel curves. Since her eyelashes were blond, it was sometimes hard to tell if they were there or what they were up to, but the way the sun was hitting them that afternoon, I could tell they were definitely fluttering. Low key, she was having an orgasm.
I squatted in the sand, watching popular girls walk the track. This was how they burned off the calories from the almond they split for lunch. Across the blacktop, by the fence separating us from the elementary school, bullies chased a dork into the pines. On his way past a retarded girl in a pantsuit, one bully screamed, “Nice tit!” Half the girl’s chest swelled with a supremely developed breast. The other half of the girl’s chest looked like mine.
I envied this girl’s full boob but pitied her asymmetry. I prayed a Good Samaritan would teach her to stuff. That Good Samaritan would not be me.
Mamase Mamasa Mamakusa
A strand of Jheri curl uncoiled from under his fedora’s brim and bounced above his surgical mask. His loafers made dainty sounds against the floor. He approached Pretzealot, our mall’s pretzelry, each step exposing his white ankle socks.
In front of Pretzealot, a teen dressed as a pretzel held a tray of chopped-up pretzels. When he saw the celebrity, he forgot how ashamed of his costume he was. His tongs pinched a sample. He held it out.
The pretzel asked, “Pretzel?”
The singer shook his head. He clacked away from the baked good. He pedaled past the window display of a store selling Peruvian arts and crafts and owl figurines, Inca Hoots. He headed toward the dinging, glittering, and neon. A cave full of unsupervised children: the arcade. He was determined to taste what was there.
Dad and four clerks colored at a round table in a government building. They used markers to vivify posters destined to help migrant kids, kids whose parents picked berries, beans, and other fruits, legumes, and vegetables. Dad’s job was complicated and subsidized by Washington, but this part is easy to explain. He crafted teaching materials that wen
t to classrooms where kids whose parents spoke Mixtec and/or Spanish could get their feet wet in English.
Apple.
Banana.
Cunt.
Durian.
Egg.
Father.
Girl.
Hoe.
Inchilada (very short enchilada)
Jheri curl.
Ku Klux Klan.
Leather daddy.
Mamase mamasa mamakusa.
Neverland.
One of the clerks, Noemi, was wearing an off-white sweater. She had a special-needs son, Felipe, who was named after his father. The elder Felipe worked as a gardener at Neverland Valley Ranch. The King of Pop employed lots of townsfolk since the ranch was so close, and we got pumped whenever he came into town to shop. Santa Maria had nothing special except for a ton of strawberries and a mall where a pop star sometimes came to cruise the toy store.
Noemi worked on a picture of a little boy, moving a yellow marker back and forth across his bangs. (When it sprouts from follicles, yellow turns blond. Blond can be sexy. Blond can be innocent. Blonds get to have more fun. Blonds get to embody duality. Brunettes don’t get this privilege. Brunettes are doomed to ho and hoe.)
Noemi’s Spanish accent slid a beast of burden into the name: Yakson. She explained that he’d invited the younger Felipe to the ranch for a sleepover.
Dad asked, “Are you going to let him go?”
Noemi smirked. She pushed up her sleeves and cocked her head to the side. Her accent turned her retort Semitic: “Mr. Gurba, are jew crazy?”
Dad and the clerks chortled.
They colored more.
Mormonse Mormonsa Mamakusa
I never entered the Osmonds’ house, but from outside, it looked like it belonged on the East Coast. It looked stuffy yet cheerful. It was Ivy League and frat party at the same time. This was because of who lived and hung out there.
