by Myriam Gurba
Frida put her arm around me. I felt her big breast press my bicep.
“They start pretty young these days,” Frida said. The hippie smirked, but his smirk didn’t matter. His smirk couldn’t touch us. Only we could touch each other.
Via Dolorosa
Thanks to Mr. Osmond, our neighborhood was no longer tranquil. It was, however, still gorgeous.
My sister, Ofelia, was trying to be gorgeous.
As a premenstrual girl, she’d been soft, round, and sensitive. Like, hearing Dad call Mom a bitch could make her cry. The dying tweets of a bird trapped in Dad’s car engine made her weep. Having her arms pinned behind her back by an asshole while neighborhood boys jumped our brother made her hysterical. (Kids shoved, kicked, and punched Herman because he wore glasses, did his homework, and founded the chess club. He was brown, gangly, and not mean enough to be cool. He wasn’t a sissy, but everyone could still tell.)
My parents’ intent in making Ofelia and Herman was to give me a playmate. They didn’t. They created a set of creatures that existed for each other.
That’s how twins work; they’re an island unto themselves. Anyone with twins as siblings knows this. Herman and Ofelia spoke to each other with silence. Sitting beside them, I could feel them having telepathic exchanges. Through our living room windows, I watched them silently hunt for specimens for Herman’s bug collection.
They got to go to junior high together, and I envied that. It’s good to have someone, especially someone you can communicate with preternaturally, present during the weirdest time of your life. Seventh grade can be that time.
Herman went to tang soo do classes after school. At the dojo, he learned to chop. Ofelia went to ballet. At the dance studio, she learned that she ought to unleash her bones. Her mealtime behavior turned strange. I stared at her in the dining room. Its terrible wallpaper featured watercolor oranges dangling from long, turd-like branches. Oranges play a sacred role in the history of female starvation. Legend has it that every Friday, Saint Veronica, female starvation’s patron saint, ate five orange seeds to commemorate Christ’s five wounds. Vitamin C.
At dinner, Ofelia hunched beneath our hexagonal wall clock. Her hazel eyes stared at proteins, carbs, and fats. She poked them with forks, spoons, knives, and fingers. She stirred sour cream and beans in figure eights. She minced scrambled eggs to dust. She spread her mashed potatoes and smashed green beans into them, making and remaking mounds. Her thin lips remained clamped. It was a hearty meal if she ate an entire scoop of canned corn.
Our parents stared at her and fidgeted. They furrowed their brows and sighed. They pursed their lips with frustration. I silently prayed to a god I didn’t believe in, asking him to intervene and fix the situation. I tried to set a big-sisterly example by eating all my food, even the food I hated.
I swallowed all my lima beans.
“Eat your food,” Dad told her. “Don’t play with it. One time my sister wouldn’t eat her eggs, and my father smashed her face right into them. She stopped fooling around after that.”
I’d seen enough after-school specials and read enough young-adult fiction to understand what was happening. In Mom and Dad’s room, I told Mom, “Ofelia has anorexia.”
The corners of her lips turned down. The long creases made her look equal parts worried and sad. She shook her head. In Spanish, she said, “I don’t think so. She just needs to eat more.”
When I made the same announcement to Dad, he shook his head even more vigorously. He said, “I don’t think so. She just needs to stop playing with her food.”
Once Ofelia’s leotards fit her loosely, Mom made an appointment with our pediatrician. I came along. Dr. Hamilton’s office smelled like glass, steel, and immunity, how I imagined it smelled inside a syringe. He’d inherited the practice from his father, a white Nevisian who’d had a stroke. I preferred the older Dr. Hamilton. He always smiled and complimented the girth of my earlobes. “Great for jewelry,” he’d say. Young Dr. Hamilton said nothing about my earlobes. He parted his hair down the middle. He wore corduroy. He exuded confidence and inexperience, a combination that gave me pause.
“Stand on the scale,” he told Ofelia.
She stepped onto it. He fingered the scale’s black square. He peered at the number it framed.
“Eighty pounds,” he muttered. He recorded her weight on her chart.
Mom stood across from him next to the examination table. A straw purse covered in hot-pink roses dangled from her forearm. Square glasses shielded half her face. She sputtered, “Ofelia doesn’t eat. It’s very hard for us to get her to eat.” Her voice cracked, a sign that she was going to cry. I watched a tear fall and cut through her blush. “Could she have anorexia?” asked Mom.
I was proud of Mom for saying the word. I was relieved she was crying. I believed her tears would get her taken seriously.
Dr. Hamilton chuckled. He said, “She isn’t anorexic. She can’t be.”
“Why?” asked Mom.
“You’re Mexican,” he answered.
He filled out a prescription and tore it off his pad. He handed it to Mom.
I peeked at it. His handwriting was appropriately terrible.
Mom stared at the paper. Through sniffles, she asked, “What does this say?”
Dr. Hamilton answered, “Make her eat double.”
He smiled. It wasn’t every day that such a pretty and confused Mexican lady cried in his office.
I left his office feeling he’d sentenced Ofelia to die.
UMILIANA DE’ CERCHI MARGHERITA DA CORTONA CATERINA DA SIENA ANGELA DA FOLIGNO COLOMBA DA RIETI VERONICA DE’ JULIANIS MARIE D’OIGNIES BEATRIJS VAN NAZARETH and JULIAN OF NORWICH spoke a lean and ancient language. OFELIA OF SANTA MARIA spoke it, too. Female fasting has its own grammar and syntax. Men, especially fathers, often misinterpret it. By fasting, a girl ascends a throne made of bone. She stares into the face of the divine and beyond. She finds that infinity has no caloric value. This is fine. Emptiness comes to nourish her. It replaces her marrow. All of her hope calcifies, cracks, and disappears. She laughs at gravity.
Ofelia got as wispy and quiet as a ghost.
Everything became baggy on her, and my parents finally relented. Mom drove her to see a Harvard-educated psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. I came along.
While Ofelia and Mom did whatever they did behind the shrink’s office door, I sat, legs crossed, on the waiting room’s Scandinavian furniture. Nothing hung from the smooth ecru walls. Even the light bulbs seemed expensive. The posh minimalism gave me hope. Somebody with this much taste had to be able to cure my sister. Mozart played softly. There was a stack of New Yorkers splayed on the end table.
I reached for a magazine, opened it, and admired its fonts. I held it up to my face so that my nose touched a poem. I sniffed.
“So this is what mental health smells like . . .” I thought. It wasn’t cheap. It certainly wasn’t Mexican.
The lower the glucose, the closer to . . .
I knew the stories of Ofelia’s spiritual antecedents.
I read about them in books I kept in my bedroom. Their stories are fed to Catholic girls as exemplars of good girlhood. Good girlishness resists gluttony. Good girlishness resists pleasure. Good girls prove their virtue by getting rid of themselves. Saint Catherine did this by eating only herbs and Eucharist. Mystic pizza. When she was force-fed, like I watched my parents try to do to Ofelia, she shoved twigs down her throat to barf up the unwanted items. Saint Angela survived on a diet of air, scabs, and lice. For drink, she sucked leaky wounds. Mary of Oignies thanked Jesus whenever her throat swelled shut at the sight of food. Emaciation saved Blessed Columba. Would-be rapists peeked under her dress, and her bones so turned them off that they spared her. She went on to starve her way past Saint Peter. Death by anorexia is a fail-safe sexual-assault prevention technique.
I was pretty sure Ofelia hadn’t eaten anything in three days when Dad dropped us off at the movies. I bought our tickets, a bag of popcorn, and a Sprite.
We sat in the second row. The Nightmare Before Christmas played. An extra-large T-shirt hid Ofelia, but I was certain that underneath it she looked like Jack, the skeleton who was the animated movie’s hero. Good guys tend to be thin, white, and melodious.
Movie light illuminated Ofelia’s face. It traced her hollowness and turned her beatific.
Her curly mane was pulled into a tight ponytail that sprouted from the back of her skull. Escaped frizz caught in the movie light gave her a halo. She looked the part. She looked pious, medieval, and ready for martyrdom. Saint Veronica would have been proud. I watched her hand dip into the popcorn bag. Each time it exited, it carried a solitary piece of popcorn. She placed these on her tongue.
I glanced at her to see if she chewed. She didn’t. She seemed to let each kernel melt. She swallowed imperceptibly.
In those moments that Ofelia was able to break her fast long enough to enjoy the decadence of movie popcorn, she transfixed me. I believed that she loved me. She loved me enough to break her taboo with me. I felt honored.
It honored me that she chose to eat with me.
Her illness made me understand the meaning of female sovereignty. Ofelia deserved to be bathed in light.
When Ofelia went to live at the hospital, she became even more of a ghost.
You could see her in Dad’s scowl and in Mom’s pallor. You could feel her around Herman, as if her skeletal spirit stood behind him, peeking at you from behind his martial arts uniform.
Her absence was haunting the house, and I didn’t want to be there. I ran away from her ghost.
I started weekending at Frida’s.
Frida lived in a one-story house by the fairgrounds. Her mom, Ester, worked as a hairdresser and spoke with an accent like Mom’s. That comforted me. Ester didn’t bug us about what we did Friday and Saturday nights and that endeared her to me, too.
Frida’s bedroom walls were gray, and the words joker, smoker, and midnight toker were painted in black above her bed. Those three things described Frida. So did official. She served as our school’s Students Against Drunk Driving vice president. Ashley was president.
Ashley and Frida loved to drink. Who doesn’t?
I love drinking. Till I don’t.
Ashley, Frida, Conchita, and I drank at the beach, in cars, and out of cans. We drank with boys, girls, and neither. I loved drinking with people I knew or wanted to know, and I even liked drinking with people I couldn’t stand. I liked the way my mouth tasted when I drank. I liked the way other people’s mouths tasted when they drank.
Ashley insisted she drove better while drunk, and she was drunk when she drove us to the park to meet some boys. We parked on the street and walked to the bleachers. We sat on them, guzzled beer and malt liquor, and threw our cans and bottles at the outfield. I was feeling buzzed when a squad car pulled toward us. Its tires crushed the lawn. Headlights cut through the dark, tracing blades of grass, bleachers, then us.
The car stopped. The cop got out. He paced toward us. I stared at his baton.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Waiting for friends,” answered Ashley. She flipped her blond hair over her shoulder. It would save us. Its color purged us of sin, conferred innocence on our group.
“The park is closed,” said the cop. “Leave.”
“OK,” said Ashley. We staggered after her, to the Scirocco.
The cop’s uniformed silhouette watched us pull away. We drove cackling into the night.
You never know what spaces might turn into graves. It felt bad—OK, sickening—when I realized I’d partied on her grave, but you just never know if you’re standing on a spot where someone has been or will be beaten to death. It’s cheesy, but sometimes my concerns about the history of violence taint everything, even Shakespeare. That quote “All the world’s a stage” becomes “All the world’s a grave.”
I tossed empty bottles on her grave before it became her grave. I was allowed to escape. I was allowed to walk away from that spot.
Sophia was not. Guilt is a ghost. Guilt interrupts narratives. It does so impolitely. Ghosts have no etiquette. What do they need it for? There is no Emily Post for ghosts.
Buzzed, Ashley drove us from the park to Lyon’s.
This diner stood across the street from the Santa Maria Inn, a hotel where Valentino once stayed. We crowded into a corner banquette. We peered at our waitress through the secondhand smoke.
Lindsay, this Mormon girl who sometimes hung out with us, declared, “Hi, Elizabeth!” through the haze.
Our waitress smiled through her annoyance. “Hi,” she said. “Are you guys actually gonna order something?”
I kind of knew Elizabeth from the parties we went to. She’d be at them looking skinny, pretty, and Mexican. She was a bobblehead Mexican, the kind that are so skinny you worry their heads will fall off if they get excited. I didn’t know much about Elizabeth other than that boys were really into her and wanted to have sex with her. I didn’t get it. She seemed so frail and brittle that I imagined rubbing up against her for a long time might be like rubbing against kindling: a fire hazard. She naturally had the kind of body Ofelia had almost killed herself to achieve. (Ofelia was home again. Her weight had been brought up through nasogastric tube feeding.)
“What are you insinuating?” Frida snapped.
“That you guys never order anything.”
“Well,” said Frida, “we’re gonna have onion rings and two bowls of ranch. And . . . another ashtray.”
Elizabeth made a face like we were worthless bitches and turned to walk away. Her apron flipped up as she did.
I put my head down on the table and breathed in secondhand smoke. It encased me amniotically.
Something I Often Reflect on as an Adult Woman
I still have unserved detentions.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Certain Girls
I listened to Billie Holiday on certain school nights. With my underwear soaked in period blood, I crawled across my bedroom carpet. I got intimate with it. I knelt at the stereo. A cassette spun on the tape deck. Blues filled the corner. I fell to my side and curled my body around an invisible ball of feelings that was tethered to me as if by an umbilical cord.
A pretty heroin addict from long ago was singing to me.
She was voicing how it felt to be in love.
She was voicing how it felt for me to be in love with a white girl.
“You’re my thrill. You do something to me. You send chills right through me. When I look at you. ’Cause you’re my thrill . . .”
“You’re My Thrill” expressed every emotion I felt for this white girl, and it didn’t matter that a whole bunch of time and space existed between me and Billie Holiday. Her delivery proved to me that she understood how crazy in love I was with this girl I’m not even going to bother describing. All the white girls I fall for are the same. They’re all Michelle Pfeiffer. Or James Dean. None of them have been Nina Simone. None of them have been Richard Pryor. None of them have been Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Only Billie Holiday could voice my yearning. She was dead. That seemed fitting.
This white girl who I french-kissed went to Catholic school with me. She kept her things in a locker by the chapel. The pimple on her chin turned me on. Every part of her turned me on. We touched titties and tongues in her bedroom. We bit each other. Her hands bruised my arms and flanks and we tasted one another’s blood. We crawled through moonlight into dark, wet tunnels and felt each other’s necks. She listened to Zeppelin. She had her flaws.
I enjoy saying that my father forcing me to mow the lawn and use the leaf blower turned me gay. I also blame MTV’s The Real World. Do you even know what The Real World was? It was reality. It was a TV show where a bunch of fairly good-looking people with conflicting identity politics were put together in a house, plied with free alcohol, and filmed giving one another lectures and HPV.
The San Francisco season premiered at the same time I invited the white girl of my dreams over for enchiladas. Pedro s
tarred as the gay cast member. That was a thing in the nineties—the gay cast member.
Like me, Pedro wasn’t white. He was light skinned but not white; there’s a difference. Pedro dated a black guy. He had a handsome face and spoke with a Cuban accent. When had a Cuban on TV last been so popular? It had to have been Ricky Ricardo. Pedro was dying of AIDS. He was doing it better than Magic Johnson.
Pedro had beef with one of his roommates, Puck. Puck was a white guy of the worst type: a white guy with a bicycle. He delivered things on his bike. He was a bike messenger. He reveled in being disgusting in a very “boys will be boys” kind of way, and the show’s editors dedicated a segment to his grossness. They juxtaposed this grossness against Pedro’s AIDS-y gentility.
A scene opens with Pedro being interviewed. In an accent similar to Mom’s, he says, “I really have a big problem with Puck. I’m fixing myself a bagel with peanut butter and I’m getting really into it.” Cut to Pedro in the kitchen. Sensual R & B plays as he slices a bagel. The musical choice suggests that gay Latinos sexually interact with everything. Sticking a knife into a bagel is erotic for us.
We don’t see the fingering happen, but we see Puck walking out of the kitchen, seemingly chewing, and over his shoulder Pedro calls, “Did you stick your finger in the peanut butter?” Cut back to the interview, where Pedro confirms that yes, Puck stuck his finger up his nose and then fingered the peanut butter jar, licked his digit, and went on with his straight life.
Puck denies his crime. The tapes are replayed. They vindicate Pedro. Puck totally did it.
Watching this drama made me hungry for a bagel. It also made me wonder if Pedro ever got so frustrated he wished he could give Puck AIDS.
