Mean

by Myriam Gurba

  I painted a floating vase holding a single pink flower blooming at the end of a spaghetti stem. Below the vase, I painted the phrase, “A room is a room is a room . . .” The ellipsis indicated that rooms are always and forever being themselves. Roominating. I seemed to be operating under the influence of Gertrude Stein even though I hated her too. I’d read her long-ass poetryish thing titled ROOMS. In ROOMS, she rhymes the words mister and sister. She should’ve included fist her.

  My window looked out onto roofs that shone after rain. I could see the smoky, foggy bay and Bay Bridge. I’d never lived up high. Having a bird’s eye view tempted me to throw things out the window to see how fast they would fall.

  I grabbed a bag of pork rinds sitting near Ruth’s bong. I crept to the window, opened it, and stuck my head out. I reached into the bag, plucked an almost weightless piece of fried pigskin from it, and held it out. I watched as it sailed toward earth like an angel.

  When pigs fly.

  I tossed another and another and another.

  I was watching one touch down on the sidewalk when a feminine hand appeared below. What the hell. I released another pork rind. It floated into the palm of the hand. Cradling the pork rind, the hand slipped back into the building. I felt satisfied that I’d fed somebody.

  We stood in the scary, tense semicircle students formed to criticize one another’s art.

  We were sharing our final projects, which were going to go in a student show. Since the grad student had put an embargo on my use of photographs, my medium of choice had become caloric and perishable. The grad student’s eyes were fixed on it. She regarded it with approval. It stank on a stand that doubled as a painter’s palette, welts of color giving it texture. The palette itself was modern art, a mini-Pollack, and my sandwich was plopped on top.

  I made a sandwich.

  Before class, I’d gone to a bakery and browsed loaves. I’d compared colors and shapes and settled on the most melodramatic. Wedging the challah into my armpit, I headed to the flower stand beside the donut shop. I purchased a bouquet of roses mixed with baby’s breath. I stopped at the art supply store, picked up a tube of scarlet paint, and went to class. In my pocket, I carried a sliver of paper cut fortune-cookie style. The little slip bore my piece’s title: “Dostoyevsky’s Flowers, or Despair, Hope, and Redemption.” The making of the sandwich was part of the piece. I’d watched people perform making sandwiches as art before. My high school friend Lindsay had worked at Subway and her nametag said, “Sandwich Artist.” I’d watched her make roast beef and turkey clubs. I knew what I was doing.

  I set the challah on a small paint-splattered table and knelt beside it. I tore it into halves and grabbed the bouquet. I unwrapped the flowers and shoved them between the pieces of bread so blooms stuck out at one end and stems at the other. I grabbed the paint bottle, shook it, uncapped it, and squirted red into the sandwich, across the flowers, and onto the palette. It was blood, fake blood, ketchup, a joke, whatever.

  I pulled the title from my pocket, set it in front of the sandwich, and looked up at everybody.

  “I like this,” said the grad student. “I’m really into it. Food. Work that rots in multiple ways. Talk about it.”

  “I’ve been reading Notes from Underground,” I said. “I can relate to the narrator’s nervousness.” Somebody snickered. Their snicker felt like a stab. I added, “I was also influenced by the installation pieces you showed us of those big hunks of cake suspended from the ceiling, gathering flies in that museum.”

  She nodded, pleased that I’d taken a cue from what she liked. She was really into those rotting cake sculptures.

  “What about the rest of you?” the grad student asked. She looked at the bitch I was pretty sure was the snickerer.

  A white girl with raw acne scars said, “It’s beautiful and cathartic. I really like it.”

  The snickerer twisted her mouth smugly. The grad student asked her, “Jericho, what are your thoughts?”

  Jericho drew out the word: “Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell. It doesn’t really do much for me.” She smiled. Silence.

  I made eye contact with Tim. We shared the faintest smile. I imagined him force-feeding Jericho my sandwich and her shitting out the thorns.

  I got a C in English and a B in Introduction to Visual Thinking.

  Like Raskolnikov, I suffered.

  I went home for winter break to get my first pap smear. I got it done at Ida’s mom’s office. She was between my legs, poking around inside me, and after taking her swab, she let my vagina shut its mouth. Tossing her speculum aside, she asked, “How’s college goin’, darlin’?”

  I shut my legs and wept. I moaned something about Dostoyevsky and wanting to be a good person and not doing very well in my English class.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “You know what college is?”

  Through snot and spit, I gurgled, “What?”

  Her blue eyes looked me in mine. She twanged, “It’s the best of times, and it’s the worst of times.”

  I recognized the quote. A Tale of Two Cities. I hated that book. All I remembered about it was decapitation and knitting.

  Ida’s mom got out her prescription pad and pen. She wrote something down, tore off a page, and handed it to me.

  I didn’t question why my neurosis had been recognized at the gynecologist, but I was glad someone had noticed that things were hard for me. Mom took me to the pharmacy, a pharmacist gave me a bottle of Zoloft, and I assumed a daily regimen of twenty-five milligrams washed down by six cups of coffee.

  Spring Semester 1996

  COM LIT 60AC

  HISTORY 7B

  LINGUIS 55

  SOC 1

  I didn’t know the new roommate had undiagnosed narcolepsy.

  I just thought she was a bitch.

  Helen had left and a white Mormon had taken her place.

  She came from Phoenix, and she fell asleep while I talked to her. She fell asleep while reading Joyce Carol Oates (lots of us do). She fell asleep while peeing. She fell asleep in bed. She fell asleep on her cafeteria tray. Sleeping was like breathing for her.

  “Hi, I’m Sydney,” she said the day she and her magic underwear moved in.

  Sydney, Ruth, and I took history 7B in Wheeler Hall. We sat together in the second row. One day Sydney split open a plain bagel. Her knife was spreading cream cheese across its pores as REM sleep struck. Her head fell back, landing on the padded seat. She continued to grasp her plastic knife in one hand and her bagel in the other. Eyeballs twitched under her pretty eyelids. Gooey snores escaped her mouth.

  The professor, a white man with dinosaur teeth, gave her a scowl that was somehow tinged with awe. He was a good lecturer. He was a man, he was white, and he was an excellent orator. His expression said, “The audacity!”

  A violent snore ripped out of Sydney. It knocked her out of her nap and her green-flecked eyes darted. Unsure what was going on, and seeming to remember that it was time for breakfast, she resumed spreading cream cheese across her bagel.

  The professor carried on with his lecture on W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.

  I glanced at Sydney. I glanced at the button on her lapel. The button said, “Verklempt.”

  Hart Crane

  The history class taught by the old man with the dinosaur teeth became my favorite. Nobody molested me in that history class, and we read Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Betty Friedan, and Richard Rodriguez, though I wished we’d read Richard Ramirez. We read Richard Wright in comp lit, too, and there was a pompous, coked-out philosophy major in that class who was always inviting me to eat dinner at his dorm. I told him no. He sweat too much and his eyebrows were too sculpted.

  One day he was standing outside our classroom door, shooting the shit with a curly-haired guy wearing gray sweats. The dude in sweats had an accent—he sounded Italian or something like that—and the coked-out kid introduced us. Soon after, the dude in sweats excused himself, announcing, “I’ve got Heidegger.” He hurried away.


  “Do you know who that is?” my classmate asked as we watched the gray sweats shrink.

  “No,” I said.

  “That guy,” he bragged, “is a prince.”

  The prince had been wearing velveteen house slippers. He seemed normal.

  He wasn’t my first. Two princes went to Berkeley. Sweatpants and a Norwegian. I shrugged. My classmate followed me into comp lit. He sat in front of me. I whipped out my notebook and got ready to take notes on a suicidal American poet who shouted, “Good-bye, everybody!” before he threw himself overboard, into the Gulf of Mexico, gaily losing himself at sea.

  Babylon

  Dad and Herman came and got me.

  They took me home for the summer. Which was also the name of a white girl who lived down the hall. She had a piece of paper with her name written on it hanging from her door. I often fantasized about crossing out an m and making the sign Babylonian.

  A Wrinkle in Time After Time

  Consider this a prescient wrinkle in time.

  Some of us use death to tell time.

  Some of us use time to tell death.

  The summer my abuelita died isn’t really the summer she died.

  The morning she died isn’t really the morning she died.

  The second she died isn’t really the second she died.

  The seconds she died aren’t really the seconds she died.

  She died all the time.

  She died when she started forgetting things.

  She died when her second child died during childbirth.

  She died when my grandfather gave her gonorrhea.

  She died when her third child was stillborn.

  She died when her father left her on the steps of the stone orphanage.

  Some of us use death to tell time.

  Some of us use life to tell time.

  Some of us use Jesus to tell time.

  Anno Domini.

  Ab aeterno.

  Abhinc.

  In media res.

  Some of us use metronomes to tell time.

  Some of us use baseball bats as metronomes.

  Some of us use rape to tell time.

  When my abuelita was alive, she taught Mom to swaddle me.

  When my abuelita was alive, she taught me to sit reasonably still.

  She used horror, horsehair, and turpentine to do this.

  I sat in a wooden chair in her moldering front hallway. She sat in a moldering chair near me, an easel propped near her knees. Knee-high stockings puddled around her ankles. One orthopedic shoe remained untied. “Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t move.”

  She told me legends to keep me still while she dabbed a canvas with oil paints. She painted my portrait and told me stories. In one, revolutionaries rode up to a convent. They dismounted from their horses and lined up the nuns in the garden. Roses cowered as the men chose the prettiest women for violación. (Abuelita didn’t explain violación, but its aftermath made my eyes bulge.) When they finished, the revolutionaries shot the nuns. The men didn’t believe they were worthy of living to tell the tale of their violaciónes. The surviving nuns fled while the revolutionaries ransacked the convent. They discovered gold hidden in not-very-good hiding places.

  Some of us use oil portraits to tell time.

  Some of us use bullet holes to tell time.

  Some of us use grandparents to tell time.

  Some of us use the memory of our abuelita’s casket, suspended by ropes and lowered into Guadalajara soil, to tell time.

  Cyndi Lauper’s saddest song is about time.

  “Time After Time” masquerades as a love song. It suggests that you may get lost, but also that you will be found. You may fall, but you will be caught. Cliché is the drumbeat of “Time After Time.” Romanticism is its heart. Cliché and romanticism form the backbone of modern memory.

  Looking, wondering, circling, and falling.

  “Time After Time” expresses the grief I felt staring down at my abuelita’s stiffening corpse.

  When we die, we fall.

  Who catches us?

  Cyndi Lauper?

  Time after time is how a certain four-legged animal lurks. This beast has glassy eyes. Its fur is made of memories. It creeps up and pounces on you from behind. Humps your leg. Molests the clock inside you. Your second hand unwinds.

  Hella Ukiyo-e

  Going to college in the Bay Area made hella part of my vernacular, and since I’d done hella reading for school, I wanted to spend summer doing hella reading for pleasure.

  And just because it was summer didn’t mean I was giving up coffee.

  It was now time to enjoy coffee’s full potential.

  I was ready to hand my life over to caffeinated pleasures.

  Since I’m susceptible to attractive book covers, I prowled thrift shop shelves and grabbed books with aesthetic appeal. Sexy sloppy seconds with smooth jackets and pages that had been fingered so hard they’d softened and swollen. I paid in coin for Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World so I could double my pleasure: I could learn about Japanese art history while consuming a novel.

  An Artist of the Floating World taught me more about ukiyo-e, an art form I’d developed some marginal childhood familiarity with. When I was eight, Dad had enrolled me in Japanese school. I was the only Molack there. I shared a high-ceilinged, chilly classroom with one classmate, Yuka.

  Yuka was Japanese American and not second generation. She was hella American, like third or fourth generation. Her inner elbow was crusted with eczema, and she would scratch it bloody then suck her fingers. She wore her hair in electric pigtails.

  Dad knew her mom from work, so after regular school, on Japanese school days, Yuka’s grandma cruised into our frantic school parking lot in her Cadillac. We rode across town to Yuka’s, where we hung out in her bedroom. We stood next to a window framed with yellow ruffles. She played her Casio keyboard and we sang “You Are My Sunshine” to ourselves. We took breaks in her kitchen, where we stuffed ourselves with chocolate-covered Pocky and Hapi snacks, which are pretty much Japanese trail mix. Wasabi and seaweed flavored some of it. Yogurt never did, thank god. I hate it when yogurt sneaks into snacks. It’s so unfair.

  Once, in her bedroom, Yuka turned to me and told me to follow her. We went out, down her hall, and into the bathroom. Since she was creeping, I tiptoed. Yuka whispered, “Shut the door.”

  I obeyed as she knelt. Without making a sound, she pulled open the yellow cabinet door below the sink. Her scabby arms disappeared. She looked like a little plumber.

  She emerged clutching a stack of glossy magazines. She set them down on the fuzzy yellow mat hugging the base of the toilet. Without any explanation, she opened one. I stared as she flipped through pages of ads that gave way to women who did not look like my mother.

  My mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. That’s not an exaggeration. My mother looked like Susan Lucci, the bitch from All My Children, but Mexican. Mom, however, didn’t hop around doing the stuff the women in this magazine were doing. She didn’t walk around wearing nothing but a robe and see-through heels while her breasts flopped out. Looking at these ladies was giving me warm-milk-before-bedtime feelings.

  “Whose are these?” I whispered.

  “Jerry’s,” Yuka answered. She called her dad Jerry for fun.

  I grabbed a magazine and realized boobs were the best things ever. There were boobs and pussy on almost every page, and the boobs made me feel drunk or like I was on a cloud. They were so round. Gazing at that much pink stuff made me feel pink and grabby. I knew that somehow I wanted to connect my body to these bodies, and the faces mattered, especially the lips and the eyes. The expressions—lips parted, eyelids heavy—promised my desire was being returned. The faces communicated an invitation, and even though it was a performance, I was ready to ask these women to marry me.

  I was eight, but I knew what I wanted.

  I had access to cheap rings at the supermarket.

  I wasn
’t sure what looking at the Playboys, Penthouses, and Hustlers did for Yuka. We didn’t talk about what we were doing; we just stared together. The magazines might have given her that thrill you get when you look at something you’re not supposed to look at. She might have been appreciating the beauty of the female form the way one does in a figure-drawing class. Or she might have been taking a bath in her own feelings like me. She stared at the brunette centerfold and scratched her eczema.

  In Japanese class, we studied with our sensei, a painter/ceramist with a crispy black bob. Our sensei was born in Japan. She was married to an air force veteran, and she drilled us in both katakana and hiragana. She listened to us as we read aloud from Japanese primers. When we successfully completed a reading, she rewarded us by pushing a piece of stale cinnamon candy at us. Crinkling overtook the quiet as we unwrapped the cellophane. Our voices echoed as we said konnichiwa. O genki desu ka.

  We were the only students at Japanese school. We counted ichi, ni (Yuka, me), san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, ju. We chanted ka ki ku ke ko. Sa shi su se so. N. Koi fish swam through our primers. They were aka to shiro. Blancos y rojos. Menstrual like Japan’s flag.

  Mom liked my sensei’s art and bought a watercolor geisha from her. The artwork hung above my bed, a harbinger of my future ho-dom. Attending Japanese school taught me about femininity, nudity, and parting your lips a certain way: making sure people can see them forming vowels.

  A, i, u, e.

  O.

  Our neighborhood had mostly remained the same.

  The obstetrician who’d cut me out of Mom still lived down the street. The family with the Mormon child who’d first exposed me to the sect’s large underwear still lived there too, and so did the couple with the llamas that spat at you the way some men spit at whores. The Osmonds had relocated. Mr. Osmond was at Folsom, doing his best to avoid bending over. His wife and kids had moved into a condo that was less boy friendly. Shaquanda’s mom was still hosting pro-life fundraisers at her house.