by Myriam Gurba
“How do you know about it? How do you know it’s safe?”
“I looked up how to induce a miscarriage online and there are all these sites with information on herbal abortions. Tansy’s the strongest of all the herbs I read about. That’s why I picked it. I need something that’s not gonna let me down.”
“How does it work? Will you just like, have your period and then, everything comes out?”
She shook her head. “You have to help me.”
I gulped. “How?”
“Well, first we have to loosen my cervix. Get it to relax and open up. So we need to have sex. Or, I at least need to have an orgasm.”
“Alright.”
“And, we need to make my body freak out and want to get rid of it. The tansy should do most of the work but one of the websites I was on said that causing trauma will definitely help things. You’re gonna have to kick me.”
“Kick you!”
“Yeah.”
“Sokhun, I can’t kick you. This is crazy. Why don’t you just go to a doctor and get a normal abortion? I’ll take you. I’ll help pay for it.”
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because my parents will kill me if they find out!”
“How’re they going to find out?”
“I don’t know! Like, parental consent or some shit like that! They’ll find out! They’ll throw me out. They think abortion’s murder!”
“Buddhists think abortion’s murder?”
She nodded. “Cassidy, I don’t wanna talk about this anymore. I’m not feeling good. Can we please just go to my house and get this over with?”
I nodded.
We got up and walked around to the front of Delightful Donut to wait for the bus. It came quick and we boarded the 32 and transferred to the 41. We got off at Alacran and Cage and walked in silence to Sokhun’s yellow house. Because Sokhun’s parents are always working at her uncle’s store, we get the place to ourselves a lot. That’s where we do it; we have sex on her creaky twin bed with the purple Ikea comforter. When we first started doing it, we used condoms Sokhun stole from the pharmacy section of her uncle’s shop. That pack ran out quick. She never got more.
Sokhun unlocked the front door. We entered the empty house and turned down the hall and walked into her room. She’s the only kid still living there. One of her sisters is in college and the other one’s a lesbian who lives with a girlfriend she passes off as her roommate. Sokhun sat on her bed. The stuffed animals on her shelf stared at me. The white desk with books arranged on it looked like it belonged to a smart girl. A poster of The Strokes hung on the wall next to a postcard from Angkor Wat. A serious, regal Buddha observed from the corner.
“We have to have sex,” Sokhun said.
“What if I get you pregnant again?”
“Then just finger me.”
Sokhun unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down. She lay down on her bed and I crawled beside her and curled into her body. I felt her flat stomach and stroked the hair between her legs and felt her sigh. I pushed a finger in and felt her clit. It was hard and warm. I stroked it and tapped it and pinched it and played with it and felt Sokhun getting tense under me. It was working. I rubbed harder and faster and she moaned and then I stuck another finger in her pussy and felt her spasm as she came.
My hand felt sticky. I opened my eyes and held my hand in front of my face. Blood coated my middle finger. Sokhun saw.
“It’s working,” she said.
She pulled her pants the rest of the way off so she was only half dressed and slid off the bed. She went to the corner and picked up a golf club.
“Cassidy,” she said. “You’re going to have to hit me as hard as you can across my pelvis with this.”
I stared at the club. I thought about golf vocabulary. 6 iron. 7 iron. Driving iron. Mommy dated a caddy once.
“Whose is that?” I asked.
“My Dad’s. Cassidy, did you hear me?”
“I can’t hit you!” I screamed. “I love you! Please, can’t we just do this the normal way?”
“No! And if you don’t help me right here right now, I’ll just shove something up myself and cut it out of me! Okay!”
I felt tears in my eyes and nodded.
Sokhun handed me the club and got back on the bed. I looked down at her skinny body and thought about the baby in her tummy. I held the club limply in my hands.
“Do it,” she said.
I lifted it in the air and angled it towards the middle of her body. I shut my eyes and breathed. I thought of Mount Fuji, of drifting down the sides of it, of seeing the calm waters of Lake Kawaguchi. I raised the club and brought it down with all my might, more than I thought I had and when I opened my eyes, the only color I saw was bright, bright red.
White Girl
She took me in her arms and came at me with a knife. She was my first white girl. Pale skin, green eyes, and stringy black hair. She cut her name into my leg. She bit and licked and sucked at the wound. The gash in my leg made me vulnerable and open, a surrogate hole, a place for a tongue or a finger to trace.
It all started with her sister, Mickey. Mickey was my best friend and Gabriella was her older sister. Mickey was short like me with kinky curly hair, gaps between her teeth, freckles, and a body like a sack of bones. She was knobby-kneed, knobby-elbowed, with a long skinny neck like a chicken. She was a tomboy with a crush on Axl Rose.
I became her best friend. We both went to St. Bern’s Catholic School and our lockers were right beside each other. I’d stay the night at Mickey’s house all the time and she lived way out, far from the edges of town in the middle of a quiet valley. I loved going to her house. In the middle of the night, we’d sneak out and go walk down the desolate country roads, feeling our way in the dark, listening to the hooting of owls and shrieking of bats. We were country girls, lost and lonely, and we’d found each other. We’d be miles from her house and there was a tiny graveyard on the side of a hill and we’d sit there in the dark beneath the oaks and hold each other. Sometimes a warm California breeze would come and rustle the air and our hair would stand on end and we’d giggle, snuggling even closer, like two small sisters. We’d walk home holding hands, through her grandmother’s pumpkin patch, and sneak in through the side door of the house.
We both turned goth at the same time. We both went and bought combat boots but I also got pointy-toed witch boots with buckles and we also shared Wet‘n’Wild black lipstick. We bought records and put black lace up over the windows and played “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” over and over until it drove our parents crazy. We painted our nails black and gave each other fucked-up haircuts. We were twins in everything for an entire summer. It was hot and dry and it was like our honeymoon. Somehow, Gabriella managed to change that. She was weirder than both of us and had a boyfriend. She wore this really severe black hat to school and slave bracelet me and Mickey were jealous of. Everybody was scared of her boyfriend Willy and they said he was creepy and liked to kill animals and look at the insides, but I liked Gabriella anyways. She found a rusty old Chevy pickup, like a '39, and fixed it up herself. She didn’t customize it or anything, just reached in under the hood and found a way to stroke it, make it come to life, grease it up and make it hum again. It would rattle down the road, angry, burning oil, filling the air with a dirty smell.
Gabriella and Mickey taught themselves to skate and they’d throw their beat-up boards in the bed of the truck and ride into town to find smooth places to practice tricks. They’d pick me up and I’d go with them. I’d usually just sit on the curb and watch as they’d ollie over things, sliding down handrails and jumping trashcans. I’d just sit and watch and wait until it was time to go home again and we’d all pile back into the truck, cramped in the narrow front seat like sardines in a tin, and rattle home. Gabriella would come to my house and pick me up on Friday nights and take me to see Mickey. After Gabriella broke up with Willy, she started to hang out with me and Mickey more. Gabriella would pull up m
y parents’ driveway in her big loud Chevy and I’d run out of the house, kissing my mom goodbye, leaving a big red lipstick stain on her gaunt cheek, and she’d call after me in Spanish, yelling at me to be careful, a strange look on her face, trying to figure out these strange white girls that had become my friends, pale as ghosts, Anglo phantoms.
I was kind of intimidated by Gabriella at first, but slowly, we became friends. She would sit and drive and smoke and eventually offer me a cigarette, a Camel or one of her cloves. Her eyes were so green and you never could quite make out the shape of her body because it always swam in oversized black t-shirts and baggy men’s trousers. Every once in a while, she’d bend to shift or make a sharp turn and her clothes would mold themselves to her body and just for a second you could see the girl that was underneath all that, swaddled in black, wrapped in a masculine package, and I’d wonder what was line and what was curves. We’d have dreamy conversations all the way back to the farmhouse and then her and me and Mickey would listen to records and light candles in Mickey’s room and watch The Hunger for the twenty-fifth time and Mickey’s mother would walk in during the part where the two women are in bed, licking blood from each other’s wounds and she’d drop Mickey’s laundry on the floor and give us a weird questioning look and turn and leave. “My mom doesn’t like us watching this movie,” Mickey told me. “We only watch it when you’re here.”
My mother was horrified at what my room turned into during those years. It was more of a coffin than a room, and everything was dead and covered in layers of dust, dead dried roses filling cheap dime-store vases, Mexican shawls from the my mother’s girlhood draped over every piece of furniture in my room, Victorian antiques brought here from Guadalajara, some of the only furniture willed to my bastard grandmothers becoming co-opted into the dark circus that was my little bedroom. I think that the worst for her were the Catholic icons, the Virgin, all the images and icons of the Virgin with a mournful look on her face that I gilded with black lace and barbed wire, my rosaries that we had blessed at la cathedral in Mexico, and the votive candles that burned alongside tattered copies of Dracula and The Labyrinth of Solitude.
Sometimes Mickey and Gabriella came over to my house but most of the time we were at theirs. I lived closer to town but we could get away with more stuff at their house because their parents weren’t as strict. Sometimes they got pissed and made us stay home but most of the time it was like they just didn’t care. They let their daughters run wild. The sisters didn’t really like to come to my house. They didn’t like my mom’s food and Mickey always made fun of her ’cause she had an accent. They didn’t get that part of me at all. Their parents were Catholic, too, but it was different. They thought my mom’s things were stupid: lots of icons, big heavy ones; statues; colorful paintings with weird subjects; Indian things from Mexico. I suspect that deep down inside, because of her accent, they believed she was stupid and could be easily deceived. But she wasn’t stupid and she saw right past everything, through them, through the dark clothes, the messy eyeliner, the dog collars, and their cold angry stares. She saw right into Gabriella’s chest and into her heart and knew what made her heart beat and saw the girlish desire that lay there and they had underestimated her terribly.
The three of us shopped at the Catholic Charities Thrift Store, the one by the railroad tracks and this rowdy Mexican bar called El Gato Negro. We poured through the smelly racks, finding treasures to take home and repair. I was wearing June Cleaver dresses dyed black paired with my buckle boots and fingerless gloves. I wore very proper hats with mesh covering my hazel eyes and I ate very little, as little as I could. I wanted a small waist. I liked Gabriella a lot and she always went to the men’s section to scour the shelves for old suits, three-piece ones, and she looked so awkward and beautiful at the same time. The three of us loved thrift stores, the smell of mothballs, used dead things, and each other. We were a trio with an unspoken romance and nobody every talked about how close we felt, like the three of us were connected by something tangible but somehow invisible, being fed by the same clear umbilical cord that made us all sisters.
That changed the day of the poems. I wanted to show Gabriella just how much I really liked her, what a cool girl I thought she was, that she didn’t give a shit that all the nuns and the priests hated her, and that she was the number one rebel who’d stolen my heart. I sat in my room one night, listening to my Billie Holiday records and wrote all the words to “You’re My Thrill” and then cut my arm and squeezed blood onto the tip of a needle. I wrote out the words of the song in my blood and I felt warm and safe and scared all at once. I had asked Gabriella to meet me in front of the school chapel the next morning ’cause I had something to give her.
She was sitting there, waiting for me at 7:30 and I slipped her the rolled-up piece of paper and my hands trembled. “Here,” I told her. “I made this for you but don’t open it until you get home.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t.” I blushed and smiled and walked away.
I sat in every class, looking at the clock, wondering if she’d really wait, sprinting to Tony Montecinos’ car when the bell rang. He was this mod boy who gave me a ride home from school everyday in his Volkswagen and he took me home and I waited. My stomach tied in knots and the phone never rang. I wondered what she’d think when she read it. I wondered if she’d hate me and I wondered if she’d be disgusted. I wondered if she just wouldn’t care, and I think that was the scariest of all my thoughts. The next morning, I walked to Gabriella’s locker and she stood there with a crooked smile on her face.
“Here,” she said to me in the softest voice I’d ever heard her speak in. She handed me a small piece of paper folded into many pieces. “You can open it whenever you want.”
I blushed and sat and opened it and she sat next to me. I could smell her. She smelled like shampoo and mildew. She had a small pimple by her lower lip. She wore a green shirt. I loved every single thing about her. I opened the paper and found a letter telling me how she felt about how I felt. She understood. Her heart was the same as mine and in the same place. We had found each other and inside we were holding hands.
That weekend we had something like a date. On Saturday afternoon, she drove up in her truck and picked me up. I dressed up for the occasion: a long, torn dress from the 1930s, so thin you could see right through it, with a black slip from Kmart beneath. Black stockings and Victorian boots with sharp little heels. Gloves and a black bolero jacket, embroidered. I had cut my hair in a sharp Louise Brooks A-line to go with the dress. I grabbed a black handbag and was ready for her. She stood at the door, waiting. She had dyed her hair black again and it looked brittle and dry. She stared at me with green eyes, two large almonds that peered out from behind sharp cheekbones, part gentleman, part lady. She wore a three-piece suit with a pocket watch and black shoes.
“The suit was my grandpa’s,” she told me. “So was the watch.”
We walked to the car together and rattled down the country road as the California sun dimmed and dipped into the foothills. “This was given to my dad by my grandpa and then he gave it to me. My grandpa was only 23 when he died.” She paused for a few moments. “I think I’ll die young, too.”
I nodded my head in agreement and smiled bashfully. We drove north in silence. My heart was buzzing inside my chest.
We stopped in a small town with the world’s tackiest hotel–a huge gaudy pink thing that looked like it was made of ice cream–and went to a café with big metal flower sculptures jutting from the ground in its courtyard. Gabriella bought me a cappuccino and I sipped it really fast, trying to avoid the bitter taste. She bought me a second one and my pulse went racing and I felt drunk from the caffeine and from her smell. We walked through alleyways to the edge of downtown, enjoying the shadows, past a mission, and took the path that went under a bridge. We walked down to the water and stood on the rocks, listening to the sound of the water humming over the pebbles. There was no one around. She pushed me against the d
amp, mossy wall and stroked my short hair.
“You’re pretty,” Gabriella said softly. I thought she was going to kiss me on the mouth and I closed my eyes but instead of lips on mine I felt a warmth on my neck and her teeth were digging into me, biting, painful but sweet, and my thighs went warm. She bit at my neck for a while and my body went limp. I stared at the moon. She didn’t touch me anywhere, just stayed like that, in that position, like a cat with a mouse, pinned to the wall, nowhere to run but enjoying every second of it, a soft little plaything. When Gabriella was finished, she stared at me, eyes twinkling, and I wondered what part of me she’d attack next.
We left after that, rode home in silence, and she dropped me off at my house. I tried to turn up the collar on my jacket to cover the bruises she had left but I’m sure my mother saw. She had left purple and red scratches, little echoes of her kisses on my neck, and I was proud of her mark. I went to my bedroom and took off my hat and gloves and dress. I stood there in my slip and plastic pearls, staring at myself in the mirror, running my fingers over the marks on my neck. I still felt warm and I loved my souvenirs. I took off my stockings and turned on my record player and turned off the lights. I crawled into bed and curled myself into the tiniest warmest ball and thought about her, the way she smelled, her skin, her black clothes, how her breasts shifted under her old vests and worn out t-shirts, what it feels to be close to a white girl, close enough to smell her clean scent.
Gabriella was exotic. She came from another world. Pale skin, green eyes, and casseroles for dinner. She spoke nothing but English. She was raised to fear the macabre and there was nothing dark about her except for what she invented and that made her powerful. It wasn’t forced on her. I liked her for that and loved her for so much more.
My mom knew exactly what was going on. It was almost tangible, complete with an odor that came from my pores and filled my bedroom with girlish heat, puppy love and lust. I had met someone who made my insides feel like cookie dough and it was a girl. A girl who hated my mother’s cooking because it wasn’t bland enough and made fun of the way she killed English. Gabriella would be at the dinner table with me and my family and she’d slowly nudge her foot towards mine, stroking my little naked ankle with the toe of her big heavy boot. I’d feel warm and keep eating and she’d push food around her plate. My mom stared at us, able to see right past it all, two teenage girls playing footsie under the table, a foreplay she didn’t understand and was scared of. I looked like I was on my way to a funeral, with my choppy black hair and my funny dresses. But I glowed. My mom hated the juxtaposition, the happy lightheartedness mixed with some sort of inappropriate, heavy passion and I had fallen so in love or at least I thought I had and I knew that I really wanted Gabriella to touch me anywhere.
