by Joe Jiménez
“Just let him go,” you say. “Just go,” you tell him. “You can’t even stay for Thanksgiving?! Man, she doesn’t ask you for shit.”
“Abram!”
“No, Ma. Let him. Let him,” he scoffs. “He wants to man up and talk down, let him. He wants to step up like a man. You drop one little boy in a bunk-ass boxing ring, and you think you’re a badass now?”
Your uncle is talking to you now. He’s up in your face, and his breath is hot like an iron, wrong blooded, indignant. And you know this feeling, having another man in your face, provoking you, trying to push you down. It is familiar and different at the very same time, and your uncle is present, and the world is very old, so perhaps this is a battle that has compressed men and made them for eons. Chiseled them and placed fire inside of their mouths.
You don’t know what to say or what to do that is good. You want, you want to knock the shit out of him. But Becky places her hand firmly on your leg, and she squeezes you, pushing every ounce of restraint she can muster into your muscles and bones.
“Abram.” She says it firmly. Becky’s voice bolsters and strikes at the inside part of you that is ready to strike out. “Abram,” she repeats more firmly.
But you push back from the table, and your chair, the one beneath you, reaches for another part of the floor, one that can hold it and you and maybe fix the slenderness that has whittled itself between you and the control you wield over the overcrowded fuss happening in your veins, a fuss that riles the little animal in the long cage of your ribs.
“I’m not afraid. Not afraid of you. You’re gonna leave anyway.”
“Abram,” your grandmother urges. “Leave. You go to the room. Abram! Abram!” But your fist has a fury inside it.
But the little animal inside you bares its teeth and is ready to attack.
You smirk, and your chest expands. The vein in your neck grows thick, and it thuds. It is a line full of blood that says its name loudly against the hull of your skin.
So your uncle’s chest holds right up to yours. You can feel his breath on your face like a lantern, because his teeth can do little more than hold back his air. He pushes forward with his chest and tries to topple you.
You meet his challenge: “Big man! Why don’t you get in your car and go somewhere. Go and drive off and don’t look back.”
“Abram!! ¡Basta!” your grandmother screams, squeezing her frail body between the two of you while Becky tries to hold her back.
“The two of you, stop!!” Becky yells.
His eyes cannot bore holes into you, though they try.
“Man, enough of this shit! ¡Basta!” your uncle yells.
Your grandmother pushes you back. The line in your neck, full of blood, quakes beneath her hands. Your spine feels the wall. “Go, Abram! Go to your room!”
“Damn!!!” he yells.
But your heart is snagged, its whole husk hardening and full of blood. By then, you’re halfway to the hall and stop only to turn back and listen to the front door slam shut. The car roar is a false triumph, the wheels squealing as they imprint black scars on the cold asphalt.
16
major drama. shit., you text Ophelia, but she doesn’t reply.
You figure she’s busy. So you do so many push-ups your arms crumble, the bones bleed out of their rhythms and marrow. What’s left is a pile of ache in the middle of the bedroom floor.
By the time Ophelia responds, Becky has let herself into your room and given you a speech you will never dislodge from the fibers that make up your heart and your bones and every dream you felt growing inside you about how to live your life as a man, not any plain or unmotivated man, but a good man. And that’s how she starts. And you listen because the words she gives you are very much like the little light of stars.
“I am proud of you. Funny, no? To hear me say that after all that. But I am, Abraham. I am proud of you. Before I came in here, I thought about what to tell you. I didn’t ask your grandmother for permission. Because you and I both know how she thinks. But I sat at the table and thought for myself. Like if I should tell you anything at all or if I should demand that you go back and finish eating, like if nothing had happened, just pretend everything was all right. But we both know that’s not right. Pretending shit isn’t happening, it’s the worst thing we can do. Too much of that happens around here. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“So how does it have to be? The truth is, there are enough bad men in the world, Abraham. Bad women, too. People who thieve and lie and hurt others. They only care about themselves, about what they can get regardless of how it turns out for others. You have to be a good man. I’m telling you. There is enough bad in the world. You can see it on the news every day. Or every night. I can tell you stories. People getting hurt all over the place, killed and raped and shot and stolen from. I’m telling you today, from this moment on, you must be one of the good guys, Abraham. You must. You must. You must. You’re a smart guy, a strong guy, and you have to do good with what you have. Anything else is a waste. Anything else means all the sacrifices your grandmother has made, every sacrifice I have made in helping her help you, then it was for nothing, because we believe in you and that’s only worth a damn if you believe in yourself, m’ijo.”
You sit for a long while and listen. It’s the words that she’s giving you, how they disperse themselves in the room, over the bed that once belonged to your father, across the floorboards and the blue pillowcases, through the gray plastic blades of the old fan, only to coalesce again inside of you, where they’re meant to land all along. And so that’s what you do, as you listen, you breathe—and you open yourself to permit her voice to enter you, to merge and emerge and reconfigure the parts of you that have felt lost and haven’t made sense until now.
When she’s done, when her syllables have reassembled themselves in the new parts of the you they’ve made, then you hold that last word in your heart, and you fall into her body, quivering, slobbering a handful of hard, brave sobs, spittle spewing from your limp mouth as you huff and break apart from the inside in order to be made whole again.
That night, you sit with Becky on the cold wood of your floor, and she grips you tightly, her arms bolder than any stone God has ever made, firmer and more loving than anything you might ever have projected coming from your father, who is no longer among the living, and your mother, who left. Over you, the light in the room is dim, and the bed winces each time Becky’s back shifts against the side of the old mattress and box spring. Above the roof, the sky is black, and there are stars offering the world the certainty of their light, and the pecan tree, wanting to make itself known, wanting to give voice to its wants, scrapes against roof each time there is a breeze.
At the table again, after your grandmother joined the two of you on the floor, after her hot tears and her shaky voice apologized to you for pushing you away, the three of you sit and listen to the old country music Becky loves, a Christmas album. Together, you cut the Bill Miller pecan pie, the kind Becky loves, and your grandmother makes coffee, and like this, pouring sugar and eating pie, listening to Reba McEntire and watching the steam from the turquoise mugs form marvelous white swans, you remember why this all started.
“I don’t think he should come back,” you say, chewing pie and crust. “I don’t think you should let him back.”
Without pause, your grandmother reaches for your hand and holds it like a button that gathers a loose shirt. She gently pulls your fork from your grip and places it on your plate, and she looks you in the eyes and nods. “I know. I know.”
This is how you tell Ophelia the story.
It’s a briefer version you impart, though, because the two of you, the next night, sit underneath the stars, floating along in a river barge that drifts beneath a million lit cypress trees that line the River Walk’s banks. The air is cold, and Ophelia nuzzles beside you, her sweater the color of turnips and her red hair as red as a heart. You hold her hands in your coat, which you’ve wrapped around her
, and each time she speaks, her breath dances its soft movements in tough puffs of white feathers, the puffy fur of some fantastic bird. The sky is dark and alive with brightness: blues and bold tangerines, greens and enduring reds, chili-pepper yellows, pebbles of light or buds of small fires, constellations too near the heat of your bodies to have any name other than joyousness, than calm, than wonder. The more you stare at the lights clinging to the cypress trees, hanging over the river, you see a galaxy of ideas: ten years from that day, a watermelon cracking open at a children’s birthday party, and kayaking down a fast-skinned river with Ophelia, and the whole white moon over your trees over a bonfire where you sit and hold Ophelia as she plays a guitar, all of it, alabaster white, and your house, your house filled with laughter and swans and barbecue, a baby sitting in the middle of the yard while you tell stories about when you and Ophelia were young, a watermelon, a tree, a baby, the moon and a river . . .
“I love the fact that you wait,” Ophelia whispers into your neck. “Sometimes I worry that you won’t like me because of it. That someone might steal you away,” she tells you with a fissure in the full flesh of her voice. “But if that was the case, then, like my mother said, a man who can’t wait for you isn’t meant to be yours. And it’s true.”
You smile. You don’t need any words. You hold her hand and squeeze it a bit, and those are your words. That is enough.
“I want us to be good people,” she says. And the stars fall then, because you hold Ophelia to your chest, and she holds you back, and you laugh, the two of you swaddled in river light.
17
Fathom.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
The little handwritten card on the counselor’s desk asks this and tells you Mary Oliver wrote it, the bold black letters direct and singular, nodding to you and your thoughts, which whorl, much as they do any day. And you read it—your one wild and precious life—study its sounds, its shadow, saying every word to yourself, under the heaviness of your tongue, with patience and vigor and lust for someplace you have never heard of before but know in your bones is there, possibly, somewhere in the near vicinity of your not-far-off future. What will you do with it? you ask yourself. Your life. Waiting. The clock ticking. You know you want Ophelia to be part of it, somehow. The clock on the wall shaking its little hand like a long, slow-moving queue of ants. The counselor with her back turned to you, the phone cocked between her ear and shoulder, jotting notes hurriedly in a small black notebook, her voice pleasant and matter-of-fact and solid.
When she comes to you, she asks simply, “How are you, Abraham?”
“Well.”
“‘Well’? I like that. Not everyone knows to use ‘well’ when asked how he’s doing.”
You wait.
“It’s a compliment. I’m giving you a compliment,” she says.
Her hair is pulled back behind her ears, and its ends hang from her shoulders like the soft yellow grasses of a field you once saw in a book.
The phone rings.
It rings again, a few more times, and the counselor glances at the number, as if deciding to answer it or not, then checks her watch, punches one button on the phone and proceeds.
“I’ll just cut to the chase. I’m changing your schedule. You can’t be in the same classroom as a student with whom you’ve fought. So we are changing your schedule.”
“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”
She hands you the white sheet, the class list neat and ordered and perfectly black.
Again you stare at the card on the counselor’s desk about preciousness and wildness and life.
“You have one more year, Abraham,” she says.
One more year, you think, walking slowly back into the hallway.
That afternoon, you put your face to the pillow. Inside, the pillow of your heart inflates and exhales, exhales and inflates. On some nights, when the street is as silent as a shoe, the heart is a pillowcase, just a pillowcase, filling slowly with air. You could live this way: slowly filling, emptiness overcome with weight. You think of Ophelia sitting at her desk, her face pressed into a book. Or at her computer screen, waiting to hear her mother’s song. Or on her bed, with her hands in her letters or thinking about you. Each thought simple and necessary and comforting.
But tonight, tonight, the world is small, and the moon is heavy, hovering with loneliness or something like that, the loneliness of a satellite or the lone unpicked fruit left on the vine. For an hour, you lay there, your eyes paying attention to the light. The moon with her suffering, her oddly, less fully formed skull splotched with scars and eyeless. The tree scratching the roof.
sup., you text Ophelia.
Someone told you once there was a rabbit on the moon. And a little boy. What, a life? What do they do?
Your grandmother once told you the moon falls apart from all the bad things that have happened to her but is so strong that she puts herself together again and again and again. Every night, each month. For eternity.
Sometimes you believe your father is like this, capable of being put together somehow, stitched or glued or composed as one would piece together a broken plate, a small statue whose arms have dislodged from the torso.
homework :/
tell me a poem i should read
will look for one
big moon outside
i heart the moon
me, too
, too = smart :)
new English class
yay
sweet dreams
dont forget freewrite homework
ok
In the morning, you wake with your two hands in fists. From the crouch in which you’ve slept, your back aches, but light fills the room, and your eyes open themselves. Your uncle is not home and hasn’t come back since Thanksgiving. Your grandmother is already off to work. The house is yours.
You sit at the table with the tacos your grandmother left and empty pages in the new journal from the new class.
These moments alone with yourself: both the best of times and the worst. No words can expound upon the joy of solitude, how picking what to watch on TV, how not being told to make your bed or to take out the trash, how the silence, that silence, is essential and listless and genuine. No syllables can defy the loneliness, though. How it creeps, how it sneaks, how it waits. In the part of your heart where you think of your father, where your mother sits on a couch and paints her toenails or drinks a cold beer or laughs rambunctiously, all giggles and lipstick and long conversations with a homegirl, there, in that part, you feel it. For a few hours, the world belongs to you—it is silent, and you are fine with this. Silence and tacos and a little bit of thinking. Makes for a good journal. Makes a good start to a screwed-up day.
18
The night your uncle returns, the Spurs are on TV, and your grandmother sits with joyousness on her body like a shawl. It is a quiet joy. Like a small blackbird’s, one that has found some simple morsel it enjoys and, for that briefest of moments, to live for.
When you are dead, you will remember her. Like this. Joyous. Wrapped in her happiness. Enthralled by the smallness that ignites us, each of us, having that one or two or maybe, if we’re lucky, three or five things that bring us there. Your grandmother and her beloved Spurs. The clenching of her eyelids in those perfect moments when tension escapes the court and a free throw matters more than a kiss, her jaw that also tightens in those delicate, teetering exchanges. The prayers, tenderness whispered for a single basket or one measly point, but points that she yearns for, hankers after, fundamental scoring—silly, really, she’ll confess later through her small laughter, an exhaling that animates her chest and signals relief once the game has been clinched.
Tonight the Spurs are winning. Easily. Duncan and Ginóbili and Parker light up the screen. Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard. And this brightens your grandmother.
“You think this year they’ll go all the way, Grandma?” you ask her. This excites her. The promise of
it.
“Con el favor de Dios.” If God wills it, she says.
“Something to drink?” she offers from the kitchen as the game goes to commercial.
Before you can respond, before you can begin to ask yourself about thirst, the door begins to budge, and it is your uncle, flat-footed, the darkness behind him. The door wobbles before it lets him in, and it slaps the wall, and your uncle stands there, staring at you, holding a red-nosed pup.
Blankness swamps his eyes. His mouth askew, he holds a dark red thing in his arms, a creature too busy squirming, its paws vying for freedom, to whimper or whine.
“I bought her for you, Abraham. I thought you might like a dog. A boy should have a dog,” he says and shuts the door with his foot.
From the kitchen, your grandmother gasps. She holds her hands in a knot in front of her legs. And her face quakes.
When your uncle releases the red thing in his arms, the pup darts about the floor rambunctiously and wags her tail and nearly knocks over a lamp, bites at your toes through your socks and scampers away, playfully smashing her snout full against the wall.
When she darts for the Christmas tree, you reach for her, and her belly is fat, as if a grapefruit resides beneath the soft pink flesh.
“She’s part pit bull. Her name is Destiny,” your uncle tells you as he rummages through the refrigerator. The fridge light on his face reveals torpor, a weariness you haven’t witnessed in him before.
From the counter, your grandmother watches. Motionless, she holds her hands in a bind in front of her lap.
“But you can change it.” He stuffs a handful of chicken into his mouth and chews. “Her name, if you don’t like it.”
