by Myriam Gurba
Siluetas
I really feel Ana Mendieta’s artwork, especially her siluetas.
I’ll repeat myself and say that Mendieta traveled this planet’s dirt, nestling herself into it and photographing traces of her presence. In some photographs, her trace appears as an unadorned impression. In other photographs, flowers fill the emptiness.
Every year, on the anniversary of Sophia’s death, I take her flowers. I rest them on the dirt near home plate. They’re my attempt at a tribute, an acknowledgement, but when I look at Mendieta’s siluetas, I wonder if she was psychic. I wonder if she made these for Sophia.
When you have PTSD, things repeat themselves over and over and over.
Guilt is a ghost.
Guilt is a ghost.
Guilt is a ghost.
Have I told you about Ana Mendieta?
It seems a long, long time ago that this story
first took place; of two young ambitious lovers
who wished to see an amazing grace. It’s often
said you can’t resist a calling within the heart;
with [me] and [you] this is how we start.
A gentleman, a lonely man, a gangster as well;
upon first sight of [you], [I] knew [I]
fell. [I] passed her by, [I] caught her eye, her
heart had skipped a beat; yes, [I] would be the
lucky man to knock her off her feet. The
aspect of this love unique is hard to
comprehend. Impossible, most baffling, when
analyzed from end to end; love between a boy
and girl, two hearts that beat as one; they hunger
for each other’s touch with passion on the run.
They love to live and live to love together as
friends; yes, this is the truth and story of
[you] and [me] from beginning to end.
That poem belongs to a legal document. It appears in his death-penalty appeal. Guess who he wrote it for.
His girlfriend.
This poem proves he’s a romantic.
Wordsworth.
I Wandered Lonely as a Dissociated Cloud
So I was walking, minding my own business, when hands circled my ribcage and slid down to my waist. They gripped me.
“It’s Elizabitch!” I thought. “She’s come to surprise me!”
My thoughts happen in lasagnas, in layers of meats, noodles, and cheeses, and the thought under the Elizabitch one was very different. It contradicted the one that believed a girl was touching me. This layer of awareness knew that the person touching me was not girl.
It was man.
But underneath was another layer. It breathed, “Men don’t do things like that. They don’t do things like that to you.”
I chose to believe in Elizabitch.
I said her actual name aloud.
There was no Elizabethan response.
My thoughts shifted, on the verge of doing something psychologically seismic. The arms holding me felt very strong. The hands gripping my abdomen were large. A palm pressed into my navel.
Whispering her name, I turned around.
The man standing behind me looked so average it horrified me.
His grin horrified me the most.
He was enjoying our closeness, relishing it, pressing himself to my backside, holding me captive. We were close enough to kiss. I saw the stubble in his pores. His smile overwhelmed me and the rest of his face vanished. Only his mouth remained. A smile held me captive.
I broke up with my body.
Birds watched my assault.
I joined them.
I observed.
I saw myself in the clutches of a stranger waiting to do something to me.
I was a bird, though I was also myself. The smile looked into my eyes. I couldn’t make sense of it. An animal part of me understood its intentions, but the intellectual part of me, the part that likes books and fantasizes about visiting the Louvre, didn’t. It ignored the animal. My rational mind wanted to believe that a smile is a smile is a smile is a smile.
The man shifted his hold. His arm tightened around my waist the way safety bars hold riders in place on roller coasters. The smile descended. It lowered until it was crouched behind me, kneeling. Was he going to pray? Was he ready to receive Communion? Was he going to be knighted?
He was wearing mesh shorts, a T-shirt, and athletic shoes. He seemed about my age.
His face pressed against my ass.
He lifted my skirt. Fingers were in me, his breath and his mouth were on me, and the rest of the details belong to me.
The only other detail I’ll give is one that seared me with humiliation.
“Oh my god,” I thought, horrified. “I’m wearing my period underwear.”
Girls know what I’m talking about.
There was a point at which I heard my voice.
“What are you doing?” it screamed.
He continued doing what he was doing.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” my voice roared.
He let me go and sprinted toward the corner. He looked over his shoulder and smiled.
Like a mouse chasing a lion, I ran after him.
He turned a corner, then another, and sprinted down an alley. I paused at the alley’s mouth.
I quit there. My instincts told me to stop. They told me that he wasn’t done and that if I followed him, he might finish.
I went back to the corner where he’d crept behind me.
Where had he gone?
Tears welled. I was determined not to let them fall.
I didn’t want him to see me cry. I didn’t want to give him another chance to relish my fear.
I could feel him. Watching.
My heels clicked. The only sound in the galaxy. My skin prickled. It felt like he was in everything.
He wasn’t finished.
Things like that are never finished.
Men like that are never finished.
I used to love the houses in that neighborhood. Covered in jasmine and ivy. They were so beautiful. The Secret Garden. My secret garden. After he touched me, it seemed like every fragrant bush might be holding him. He might be hiding inside that bougainvillea. He might be disguised as a butterfly or a hummingbird. Why hadn’t I noticed him before?
Because he was everywhere.
I walked past the gray house where I was babysat in elementary school.
My feet crossed the street. Loaves hung in place of my arms. These limbs felt less mine than the rest of me, which also felt less mine. I was losing myself in degrees.
These sidewalks were so familiar. It amplified my horror that I’d spent much of my childhood walking them.
I walked to the spot where a cyclist once nearly ran Ida and me off the path. Ida shook her fist at him and yelled, “Asshole!” and he dipped into the street, U-turned, and pedaled back. “He won’t,” I thought, but he aimed his bike right at us. I leapt out of his way. Ida pressed her feet to the sidewalk, a righteous blonde. Tires sped toward her and cut right across her sneakers. The pressure caused her toes to bulge.
As the bike’s rear wheel released Ida’s foot, she flew backwards onto the lawn. She howled. I tried to hold it in but I laughed. Ida was crazy.
That was the meanest thing I’d known to happen on these sidewalks till today.
Since I wasn’t me, I don’t know who was walking.
I don’t know who was walking along those pretty houses, down the streets lined with pepper trees.
Mom had been a chemist in Mexico, like Marie Curie, but she was no such thing here. Here, she was a phlebotomist and then a third-grade teacher. She taught third grade at the elementary school I had gone to with Ida.
I walked past a lawn dotted with ornamental plum trees, past the school’s library, along a cement walkway to Mom’s classroom door. I opened it, stepped inside, and couldn’t hold it in anymore.
I bellowed new words in a new language.
From their desks, Mom’s third graders
stared. Their mouths fell open. Mom’s mouth fell open. The color left her face. Just like when I told her I was gay.
“Que pasó?” she insisted.
I might’ve said, “Somebody hurt me. A man.”
Mom left the blackboard and ran to me. She reached for the phone bolted to the wall near my elbow. Grabbing its receiver, she dialed zero. In her strong Mexican accent, she said, “Send the preenceepal now. NOW.”
Seconds later, we saw the principal coming down the walkway.
Mom took me by the arm and tugged me outside. She and the principal exchanged words, and I followed the principal back up the walkway, past the library and the plum trees, and into the main office.
The school secretaries turned as we entered. They looked at me. They had the same looks on their faces the principal had upon first seeing me. It was one I’d never seen before but recognized immediately. It was the oh-god-she’s-been-raped look. It was rotten to receive that look. I didn’t ever want to be looked at that way again.
The principal led me into the nurse’s office. I sat near the sink. On the counter there were glass jars filled with cotton balls, cotton swabs, and tongue depressors. By the window stood a bed, and beside it, a scale. I’d been weighed on that scale once. I’d been checked for scoliosis in this office and had curled in that bed, wracked with nausea that made me retch and whine.
An eye chart hung behind the nurse. She roosted in a wooden chair beside the bed. She was a blond woman with huge tits and no waist. Her hair was platinum and fine. Her name alliterated.
“What happened?” she asked. She squinted at me through her glasses. She folded her arms and crossed her legs. She was closing herself off. The principal was gone.
Her question triggered a fresh round of hysterics. I wailed through my tears. “Iwaswalkinghereandamangrabbedmeandhewouldn’tletmego andhebentmeoverand—”
“STOP CRYING!” yelled the nurse.
Her command shocked me silent.
“You’re going to have to get over this,” she said. “These kinds of things happen. You’re going to have to get over this. Do you hear me?” Her forehead tensed. Her skin grew stern.
I became perfectly quiet. The nurse observed me. Her expression remained firm. Sensation left me. Numbness replaced the volcano I’d been seconds before.
Somebody knocked at the door.
The nurse opened it.
A Latino man stood waiting. He wore a gray suit. Last time I’d seen such a man, he’d pulled down my underwear and done things to me.
“Yes . . .?” she said to him.
“Hello,” he said to me. “I’m detective Steve Lopez.” He gave the nurse a good-bye glance. She waddled out.
He pulled the door behind him but left it slightly ajar. He leaned against the counter and slid a notepad and pen out of his breast pocket. He flipped the pages till he arrived at a fresh one. Pen poised, he asked me my name. I told him. He said, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to need you to tell me what happened so I can help you. Can you tell me what happened?”
I nodded and began to recite. I left out the part about calling him Elizabitch.
As I spoke, the detective wrote down what I said but never looked at me.
His skin, however, betrayed his humanity. It twitched at details of my peculiar, particular humiliation. Feeling breath on my pubic hair. The word panty liner.
In a distant part of me still capable of feeling, I catalogued and appreciated his winces.
“We’re going to go back to the area where this happened to see if we can spot him, OK?”
I nodded and followed him out of the nurse’s office. Reentering the main office, I saw Dad standing beside a spider plant in a macramé sling. Who had called Dad? What had they said?
The three of us headed out into the parking lot, to Detective Lopez’s sedan, and I got into the backseat. Detective Lopez drove us to where I had been ambushed. I pointed to the corner where it happened. He parked and I walked him to the spot. I stood in it. I said, “It happened here.” I walked to the alley and pointed. “That’s where he went.”
Detective Lopez said, “He’s not here. We’ll keep looking.”
The three of us piled back into his sedan and cruised the perimeters of the rail yard, the pool, the library, and the DMV. The smile didn’t stare back at me from any of those places. The smile had retreated into the small town ether, taking stolen sights, smells, and tastes with it.
On our way home, Dad and I shared a big jar of tense silence. I broke it.
“The detective is Mexican,” I said.
“I remember him from when he was little,” said Dad.
Remember, Dad had first come to Santa Maria to teach elementary school. He taught hundreds of kids before becoming an administrator. We couldn’t go anywhere in town without him being recognized by a former student.
“Was he your student?” I asked.
Dad nodded. “Fifth grade.”
“Do you think he remembered you?”
“I know he did.”
“How?”
“He said, ‘Hello, Mr. Gurba.’ You didn’t hear him?”
I stared at Dad. It horrified and comforted me that one of his former fifth graders knew what a stranger had forced upon my crotch. I looked away, toward the broccoli fields. I can’t remember anything about this day after that moment.
Jeans
A few days before I headed back to Berkeley, Detective Lopez called.
I felt like I was on an episode of Law and Order when he said, “I’d like you to come down to the station to look at some pictures.”
Dad went with me. We walked together through the station’s tall castle doors, and Dad told the receptionist, “My daughter is here to see Detective Lopez.”
The receptionist paged him, and he led us to a high-tech room with monitors. He escorted me to one.
“This is a database. It contains photographs of known offenders. Please look at them carefully and take your time. Let me know if you see him.”
Standing at a screen mounted at breast level, I scrolled through mug shots. They floated against a pixelated blue background. Most of the faces seemed Latino. A few wore lipstick, eyeliner, and blush. One wore a wig cap. I thought about how some of these “offenders” probably should have been recategorized as female, but I didn’t feel like getting into a conversation about gender theory with the detective.
I paused at a mug shot of a tall guy who used to hang out with us at high school parties. He bought my friends and me beer. I clicked and scrolled till Mr. Osmond appeared.
“Not his type,” I thought.
Perpetrator after perpetrator stared at me, unblinking, but none of them had smelled or touched me.
“He’s not here,” I said to the detective. I felt disappointed but also relieved I hadn’t had to see his face again.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be in touch. If you need anything, call me. You have my card.”
The words felt so scripted. Stiff and preordained.
Dad screamed, “Go change, now! Those jeans are ripped! Do you know what that makes you look like?”
He was implying that torn denim sent an invitation: this girl has holes . . . explore them.
I defended my fashion choice by shouting a slogan I’d heard a hysterical feminist shout on a TV talk show: “WHAT A WOMAN WEARS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHETHER OR NOT SHE GETS RAPED!”
My throat did strange things to the word raped.
I silently doubted my defense. Had I not been wearing a skirt, it wouldn’t have been so easy for that smile to go where it didn’t belong.
Skirting the issue: I sometimes fantasize about meeting the inventor of the skirt. I fantasize about talking to him (because you know it was a him) and asking, “Why?”
My theory is that skirts exist to create a funnel to a tunnel. Good girls use their knees as tollbooths.
I wasn’t an art volunteer anymore.
Nobody wanted me walking around town by myself, so I spent my days
with Mom: helping in her classroom, running errands with her on the way home. Since I loathed food shopping, I usually read magazines in the hair care aisle when we went to the market. One afternoon I felt too jumpy to be alone, so I walked down the bread aisle with Mom.
She pushed our cart. Michael Bolton flowed out of speakers. Somehow, I became queasy while simultaneously leaving my body.
He was approaching me.
Beside the whole grain loaves, he paused.
His hand reached for hot dog buns. It squeezed.
I came back to my body almost as immediately as I’d left it when I realized the shopper was not him. His was not the smile I still felt between my legs, like the worst kind of dingle berry. This shopper was some random homey, but for a sesame seed of a second, my mind transposed that face over this homeboy’s face. It blended them into one composite. The post-traumatic mind has an advanced set of art skills.
The shopper stared back at me, reflecting my staring problem. I realized that he could be here shopping, maybe even with his mom.
Oh my god. He had a mom. Maybe they were here together, checking the expiration dates on egg cartons. Arguing about whether to buy corn or flour tortillas. Maybe she told him, “Bring me a bottle of Vicks VapoRub.” Mexicans use VapoRub to treat everything. Smallpox. Emphysema. Miscegenation.
In terror, I moved closer to Mom.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Just keep shopping,” I insisted.
Each aisle brought the possibility of seeing him. I imagined him lurking, stocking up on Tang or Otter Pops. I saw flashes of him in nearly every man. The curve of a shaved head was him. A sharp grin was him. A bright white T-shirt was him. Tightly laced Nikes were him. Five o’clock shadow was him. Post-traumatic omnipresence. I wanted to burrow between Mom’s legs and hide where I’d come from.
We made it to the checkout line. Fresh tabloids tempted me from their racks. Impulse buys in glossy wrappers gleamed. Bags of M&Ms. Disposable cameras. Nail clippers to attach to your keychain so you could groom yourself in the driver’s seat.
