by Nan Cuba
For my last class, tennis, I had to change into a gym suit. The girl I shared a locker room cubicle with belonged to an orthodox religion that outlawed makeup, boys, and knowledge about bodies. She stared, shocked by my total nakedness.
“Once in a while,” I said, “girls have to let their breasts and vagina breathe.” Her gullibility was irresistible. “If you don’t, the natural bacteria will mutate into an infection that looks like mold. And it can spread. See?” I showed her a mole on my chest. “When I saw this, I knew it was time.”
Frowning, she turned, unsnapped two buttons, and inspected herself. I hung my skirt and blouse on a hook, thinking maybe I would/maybe I wouldn’t tell her the truth when we changed clothes again at the end of the hour.
I wasn’t part of the 2006 archeological team that discovered the twelve-ton, pinkish andesite monolith of Tlāltecuhtli near the ruins of the sacred pyramid known as Templo Mayor. Broken into four pieces, it squats to give birth while drinking its own blood, devouring its own creation, a symbol of death perpetuating life. But I was part of the team, led by Leonardo López Luján two summers later, that found a deep pit beside the monolith. When Leo and his assistant pulled off a stucco block in the plaza floor, we stepped back, startled. Twenty-one flint knives painted red—teeth and gums in the open mouth of Tlāltecuhtli, the earth god—positioned to receive the dead. Underneath, in a shaft eight feet deep, we uncovered a stone box. Leo allowed me to open it, but when I took off the lid, my gloved hands shook like an amateur’s. I retrieved, avoiding all but the slightest pressure, the skeletons of two golden eagles, twenty-four knives wrapped in fur, and the remains of a dog or wolf wearing a collar of jade beads, turquoise ear plugs, and gold bells on its ankles. The objects had been arranged according to a certain logic, re-creating the Mexihcayōtl cosmos.
After dinner, I searched my father’s shelves for Sam’s Aztec book. The cover image, a marketplace, reminded me of Otis and his stories about Houston’s years with the Cherokees in Arkansas. I’d told Sam that East Texas Comanche had once kidnapped a girl, Cynthia Ann Parker, and that when she was returned to white, germ-free order in Navasota twenty-four years later, she’d died of heartbreak. He gave me the book the next day, but I didn’t understand how he’d gotten from Comanche to Aztecs, so I’d stuck it with my father’s orthopedic journals, dog-eared copy of Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, and the Bhagavad-Gita.
I turned to a chapter titled “The Eagles and Jaguars.” Men, it said, earned knighthood by capturing four prisoners for ritualistic sacrifice. The knights kept concubines and drank octli, an alcoholic drink. They worshipped the warrior sun god with cannibalistic feasts.
Archaeologists had discovered a life-sized pottery statue of a jaguar knight at the entrance of the order’s private hall inside the Great Temple. A photograph covered two pages, its background black, the terra-cotta figure with detailed features. Crouched, the warrior bent his sinewy arms upward; his fingers curled, ready for battle. He wore the animal’s speckled skin, complete with sticklike tail, his human feet magically attached at the ankles.
Reaching for a lamp switch, I glimpsed my father’s desk topped with bills, pens and pencils in a jar, a copy of The Journal of the American Medical Association. My silhouette reflected from the glass-fronted bookshelves, superimposed over rows of colored bindings. I pulled off my socks and Weejuns, twisted the lamp knob.
The knight wore the jaguar’s head like a helmet, the small ears pointed, the eyes black-rimmed, the whiskers jutting. Here was the marvel: Fanged jaws were unhinged, spread impossibly wide, the man’s face protruding as though he were being swallowed. His lips parted; he frowned, his eyes wide, focused on some distant sound. Was he man or animal? Was the jaguar animal or man?
If I could, I’d slide my palm around his killing arm. Together we’d catch fish with our hands, tear white flesh, eat it raw, each slick morsel a gift from Tlāloc, the rain god. We’d drink octli and rub oil into each other’s hair.
I carried the book to my room, took down the mask, set it next to the picture: same rosettes, same leather tongue. Pulling the jaguar face to my face, I looked in the mirror. The pin-sized eye holes worked like binoculars. I moved closer, crouched, raising my arms, curling my fingers. “Night hunter, maguey dust,” I said.
Later, lying in my nightgown, breasts pressed against the mattress, fan cooling my legs, I read: Eager to join the gods, some captives sprinted up the temple steps, then bent backward over the sacrificial stone so a priest could scoop out their still-beating hearts with an obsidian knife.
Then Hugh walked in, his bare feet slapping the carpet. “Where is it?” he asked, glancing at the top of my dresser, my desk.
I couldn’t believe he was almost a teenager.
“Sam told me,” he said, his brows lifting, clownish, a kid again.
The mask lay next to me, and when I held it up, he ran over. “Oh, man.” He tapped the nose and tongue then put it on. When I reached for it, he shoved my arm.
“Hey, be careful,” I said as he strode around the room, the mask an obvious attachment, unable to transform someone so young. “Sometimes an Aztec wore a dead man’s skin.” I leaned on an elbow, wiggled my feet.
“Yeah, right.” Hugh took off the mask and studied it, rubbing the eyes, peeking inside the ears.
“Really. Every spring they had a holiday, like Easter. They cut out prisoners’ hearts, and then jaguar warriors wore the skins.”
“Gross,” he said, frowning. He sat on the bed. “How come?”
“It’s their religion,” I said, sitting, marking the page with my finger. I longed to show Hugh that he, like Sam and I, should be unafraid to look. “The first guy died for this god, Xīpe Totec, and the second one wore the dead guy’s skin to honor him.”
Hugh positioned the mask over his face as he stepped to the mirror. “Can I have this? Please?” he said, hunching, pretending pain.
“Let’s say it’s ours together.”
“Yeah!”
“But it stays in here.”
That night, I dreamed a muscled boy lay across a bloody stone. The dream started with him whole, brawny one minute, then limp, mutilated the next, his eyes glazed, his mouth open. As a priest held up the heart, his cowl slipped back. Cuts surrounded his eyes; his mouth puckered, a mashup of teeth and skin. I saw myself—next to the body, across from the priest—dip fingers in a bowl, smear blood on my lips. Hands appeared then, rubbing, oiling me: slithery. As I grunted, pulling on the skin, I thought, Why don’t men have to wear these? When I woke, I remembered the stench, the itching, the faint pressure of a daisy garland on my head.
o
Most of the weekend, I sat at my desk studying the book. Its cover was a picture of Diego Rivera’s “Great City of Tenochtitlan”: a marketplace of bodies draped in colored tunics, cloaks, some people tattooed, others wearing animal skulls or tusks hooked into their noses. One man in headdress held a silvery white arm hacked at the shoulder, the damaged joint, muscles and ligaments, marbled, purple. In back of the commotion, an archaeological detail of the ancient city spread to the mountains, its pyramids grand as castles, the layout an aerial view of a metropolis.
Monday night, I paced in circles next to the windows, my shoulders casting shadows across the pages:
Can it be true that one lives on earth?
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Be it jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
My glance drifted to the ceiling. The people I knew thought of death as a clinical diagnosis, its fatal aspect signaling that the doctor’s work was done. I pictured an Aztec funeral, the man’s face painted white, his mantle covered in macaw feathers, his body surrounded by a gourd-and-stick rattle, a turkey, six frogs, a bowl of ant eggs. The image of him lying on a stone altar like the cadaver and half bust of a man in my father’s anatomy
lab. I remembered looking through the skylight, and, earlier, Sam saying that I should face everything, no matter how ugly. Maybe, if I focused on whatever made me uncomfortable, Sam would notice. Self-righteousness, naiveté, those were now sins. Sin, in fact, would become my specialty. Not the petty, dishonest kind, but the kind my parents seemed to fear most: impropriety.
My English teacher sent the class the next afternoon to the library to research the existentialist interpretation of Hamlet. Instead, I found a book on Aztecs. I’d been looking for references to their women, and although I’d found descriptions of birth rituals and the moon goddess, who’d been overpowered by her sun god brother, such typical females were not what I was looking for. I was looking for, and found, Tlahzolteōtl.
Wearing a flayed skin, its hands hanging at her wrists, precious raw cotton on her headpiece, black painted on her nose and mouth, a man’s head emerging from between her spread legs, Tlahzolteōtl was outrageous, beautiful. “The Goddess of Filth,” a caption read, “both absolved sin and inspired it.”
The bell rang, chairs scraped against linoleum, somebody whistled, another shouted, a few squealed, an elbow jabbed my shoulder. But I leaned closer to the photo, examining each feather, embroidery thread, the easy way the goddess squatted, the expression on that man in profile (broad nose, large, round eye) as he slid out, like some full-grown baby in headdress, from…? Was he coming out or going in? I touched the picture, wondering whether the extra hands had fingernails, then glanced up, seeing Harold Drumm standing at a shelf but staring at me. I noticed that my skirt was hiked when a breeze traveled up my legs. Moistness prickled, but I didn’t move.
That image of Tlahzolteōtl is found on page thirteen in the Codex Borbonicus. She presides over the fourteenth day (Ōcēlotl, jaguar) thirteenth trecena (Olin, movement) of the sacred 260-day year and most likely originated as a Huastec goddess from the Gulf Coast. Some doubt that, from the Mesoamerican point of view, she inspired transgressive behavior. Still, noted scholars think she represents a male-dominated society’s Freudian fear of femininity, becoming both life-giving and cruel, an instigator of depravity, even insanity, yet an administer of forgiveness. Before his death, Diego Rivera pleaded for her intervention. Patroness of adulterers and physicians, her most noticeable feature is the black on her mouth and chin, left from chewing bitumen, a byproduct of decomposed organic materials. Tlahzolteōtl is the Eater of Filth, the Eater of Sins.
o
After school the next day, I made a beeline for The Hair Boutique. I was tired of looking like a Pelton. As I stepped onto the shop’s pine floor, a bell tinkled. Shampoos and rinses, permanents, electric curlers, brushes, and hair dye covered carpenter’s racks. My mother had told me I was too young to frost my hair. I grabbed a bottle of peroxide, headed for the cash register.
Once home, I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom, punched holes with a screwdriver into a rubber bathing cap, put it on, coaxed hair clumps through the slits. I followed the bottle’s directions, and when I took off the cap, my head was a rat with polka dots. What will I do? I thought as I looked in the mirror, about to cry. When I held up a strand, I remembered feathers like corn stalks in Tlahzolteōtl’s headdress. “Wait a minute,” I said. The goddess wore cotton in her hair. “Nurses never bleach it white.” The second time, I soaked my head, no bathing cap.
After a shower, I towel-dried, then leaned toward the mirror again: beady eyes, angular face, chalky hair. I fluffed the top. This new person was wild, possibly unbalanced—a pre-seventies punk, absent cachet.
“Is something wrong, sweetie?” my mother said, knocking. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, smoothing frizzle.
“Hurry up, then. Supper’s ready.”
I knew what Sam would do. “Hey, Good lookin’,” he’d say and walk me to the kitchen.
Downstairs, I sat at my usual place next to Hugh. My father didn’t notice, but when my mother turned to ask me to serve the plates, she froze, her face slack. “What is that?” The spoon in her fist shook. Who knew kids would soon body pierce, neon hair a given?
“What?” I said nervously. “Are you talking to me?” My fingers slid underneath my thighs.
Hugh leaned back, blinked.
“It’s not permanent, you can wash it out?” my mother said, lurching, shifting the spoon to her other hand. She pinched a strand. “It’s some kind of game your friends cooked up?” Her face blanched; perspiration flecked her lip.
“Mama, I’m trying—”
“Peroxide. Owen, this child has ruined her hair.” Her breaths jerked; she stumbled to the sink, fingers pressing her brow. She tossed the spoon, which bounced and clanged against the porcelain.
“You dyed it?” Hugh said, eyebrows raised.
Still facing the sink, my mother shook her head, shoved her palm at the air.
“I bleached it,” I said. “It’s no big deal, really.”
“Your hair?” my father said. He lifted his hand, covered his mouth.
“I just wanted something different,” I said. Maybe I was about to learn how Sam felt.
My mother turned, pointing. “A haircut, a new dress, that’s different.”
“Do you know what you look like?” my father asked in monotone.
My mother sat at the end of the table, next to me. “I could have helped you. There are ways to go about this, and bleaching your hair is not one of them. What you’ve done is just plain stupid.”
I winced. “I didn’t like it the other way, that’s all.” I stretched my arm toward her.
“Who talked you into it? Owen, I don’t know if I can fix this.” Her chin wrinkled, a rubbery patch.
“Won’t anybody listen? I’m trying to tell you I had a reason.” I clutched the table edge, closed my eyes. I remembered sitting together at our Rockport summerhouse. “This family’s impossible,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. It was something Sam might’ve said.
I didn’t hear the lecturing. My father’s face contorted as he picked up his glass then set it down. My mother paced, throwing out her fist, shoving it at her waist, while Hugh scooted low in his chair, his eyes peering over the table like periscopes.
o
The next day at school, at a junior class assembly, I spotted Mary Jo LaFoille and Diane Kressbach sitting in the corner on the last row. Mary Jo slumped; Diane chewed a curl of her hair. We’d sometimes bumped shoulders in the hall and spent a friendly semester together in American History. I slid down the row, sat next to Mary Jo.
“Seat’s taken,” she said, digging in her purse, looking me over. “Nice do, but that ain’t getting you into this club.” Diane peered in my direction, her pageboy blanketing all but a snout-like nose and freckled mouth, as though she’d bent over and brushed her hair forward.
Mary Jo lived by herself, for all anyone knew. She was always with Diane, whose father owned a downtown gas station. Diane was a member of the honor society, but she never went to meetings. They played in the band—Mary Jo the drums, Diane the clarinet—because everybody had to take that or speech. They never appeared in organdy formals at the dances or at Service Club car washes, only at the Friday night football games, dressed in their blue-and-white uniforms with gold braid, talking, glancing distractedly at the field. Rumor had it they put their bodies first.
I kicked off my Weejuns, balanced my heels on the seatback, rubbed my thighs.
Mary Jo shifted her mannequin legs. Her figure rivaled Ann-Margret’s, but her face didn’t match, the nose puffed, veiny as a boxer’s. That plainness canceled itself out, leaving the effect of that body, its implications.
“Ain’t she cute,” Mary Jo said to Diane, who leaned, poking her cheek with an index finger. “Miss Josephine College, over here with her white hair, slumming.”
Like Sam, who’d befriended Jaime and Mariana at least in part to needle my mother, I wanted someone like Mary Jo. She had good cause to be suspicious. “Look, if I make you nervous, fine.” I hoped curiosity would convince her
to overlook my good-girl image. “But if you’re game, my car’s outside.”
Mary Jo scratched her arm, worked her tongue at the side of her mouth. She turned to Diane, the gawky sidekick. “What do you say, Graceful? What we got to lose?”
“Mary Jo, I can’t miss anymore class. My dad’ll kill me.”
Mary Jo stood, facing me. “Okay, genius, lead the way.”
Diane’s knees bumped the seatback as she brought her feet down with a thud. She grabbed Mary Jo’s purse, followed.
While I coasted past the old Avalon Theater, now the First National Bank, Mary Jo stopped two soldiers from Fort Payne, the nearby Army base. “Y’all are cute,” she teased, leaning out the window. Diane dipped her head; I smoothed my cotton hair.
“What about a ride?” one asked, his khakis like pressed copper.
“Sure,” Mary Jo said. “Hop in.” They slid into the back with Diane, who hugged the door, her mouth an open pocket.
The USO was only a few blocks away. Inside, men ate sandwiches and played cards. As Roy Orbison crooned “Blue Bayou” from a jukebox, a couple danced, their foreheads touching, their pressed bodies barely swaying.
Walter, from Nebraska, hated the heat. “Pardon my French, but it’s like fucking Arabia down here,” he said, wiping his shaved head.
I covered my surprise by looking out the storefront window, seeing street, an occasional car.
“How do you stand it?” he said.
Pulling over an extra chair, we squeezed around a small table. The shy one, Tyrone, brought sandwiches on a tray from the buffet next to a wall. He had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen, and when he smiled at Diane, she fidgeted, crossing her arms. She grabbed a pimento cheese on white, bit, chewed, swallowed.
Is he flirting? I wondered. Our high school was still segregated, so I’d never sat with a black boy before, but maybe Diane had. A guy at the other table turned, glared. Tyrone stared at his hands in his lap. He frowned at Walter, who smiled.
