And you are suddenly, inexplicably, unafraid.
“I’m not fearing any man.”
And you make a promise to yourself that you will meet every panicked impure thought with three words—I am good. Even if you don’t believe it, even if you have to fake it all the way up those altar steps to the bishop’s slap and you will go on faking it for years to come until you will finally, perhaps, come to know its truth.
* * *
I was not yet thirteen when I, at last, clawed my way out of the hole of that perverse exile, nails dug into the earth of my own crumbling self-abnegation. All the while, clinging to the rope of a deeper knowing: that I was not truly condemned to the tyranny of that hell my brain and church and traitor body had concocted.
And just as my head clears to catch a glimpse of a huge and open sky and Martin’s “promised land” beneath it, I spy my sister. She, the Jill who comes tumbling after me. And I catch her, you see, before she drops into that abyss. I say, out of love for us both, “Don’t believe it, JoAnn. Don’t believe those ugly thoughts. They’re just thoughts,” I say, full of doubt. “You’re good, my sister.”
And I know nothing about psychology, nor the “pedagogy of the oppressed.” I know nothing about the origins of guilt ’cept Adam and Eve, and my feminism is a good ten years down the road, and my Buddhism another twenty, and unlocking the sad shame of Elvira will take another forty; but I do know that my sister and I were just plain guilty for being female, perhaps simply being females with hope; for feeling that we had a right to hope.
* * *
Two years later, I hear the Preacher’s speech:
“I’ve been to the mountaintop.” His voice trembled with the knowledge.
And I think—Yes, that’s how it feels.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man of doubt who believed in freedom. And the faith of a man of doubt is stronger because it has been tested. Is tested over and over again.
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.” The Preacher-Prophet knows what’s coming.
And that’s all courage really is. To move forward in the face of doubt, in the face of death. I would be free.
* * *
High school would be like that: my quiet refusal to suffer uselessly while daily I witnessed my mother trapped in a memory maze of her own troubles. She having lost huge chunks of her life filling in the holes of an absent father, a dead brother, a widowed mother’s forgotten mothering. Elvira, with a husband so distant, so detached. Her constant nagging, the useless lid on a cauldron of brewing resentment.
Maybe I was just done with the tears, with my mother’s inability to change, to give up the stories that caused her so much grief. Her refusal to stand up for herself and require a different life of her husband, of her never-satisfied mother, and, one day, of her son. I walked out of that kitchen with the righteousness of the young, when we still believe change is possible in the ones we love.
“You’re just like the rest of them.” Elvira throws the blade at my back. “You don’t know how to love.”
I keep walking.
MISSION GIRLS
My sister was not a lesbian, but she loved the nuns and our female teachers much more than I did. Still, I frame my high school years as a study in desire, around and about the nuns, my attraction to and contempt for them. There was the exceptional Sister Miriam Rose with the courage to leave the Dominican order. She was only one who ever said to me, “You can write. You are a good writer,” even as my reading faltered.
JoAnn was the reader, a madrigal singer, and a diligent student. She needed school more than I did. She needed the company of those women. Our home was a place where homework wasn’t especially honored, where good grades meant less than good housekeeping. While I excelled only in the latter, my sister, on Saturday mornings, lingered by our small bedroom bookshelf. Passing the dustrag over the painted plywood with one hand, she would turn the pages of a library book with the other.
* * *
A memory shelved somewhere returns me to a time.
I am a junior in high school. I sit tall on the office counter stool, fingering the attendance-record cards in a long file box. I make my marks. It is my after-school job to pay for my tuition. I so much prefer it to my freshman and sophomore Saturday-morning jobs, following the quite elderly Sister Anita around, cleaning the home economics room and dusting library bookshelves. I knew it was a problem—how well I could clean. “I’ve never had a girl as good as you,” Sister Anita would regularly remind me. I feared that my mother’s home training had me doomed to the dungeons of such uninspired and isolating labor. But, by junior year, Winona, the odd girl with whom I had a yearlong no-touch lesbian relationship, graduated and had passed on to me the much more prestigious position of maintaining the school’s attendance records.
Winona was a poet and an artist and she would secretly send me carefully scripted melancholic love poems in equally careful pen-and-ink calligraphy. I remember once when, after much begging, my mother allowed me to spend the night at Winona’s house. (A very un-Mexican thing to do, since, as my mother always reminded us, Tienes una cama en tu propia casa, so why do you got to go sleep in somebody else’s house?)
That evening, Winona and I lie down in our respective twin beds. It has been a good day of sharing clandestine writings and Winona’s preoccupations with this or that nun. Once in bed, however, there is a long uneasy silence. I stare at the colorless ceiling when Winona says to me, “I wish I could just touch you.”
And I feel a sudden and inexplicable revulsion. Was it homophobia?
I was attracted to Winona’s lesbianism, but not to her. I often wondered what would have happened had her best friend, Tina, been the one to say those same words to me. Would I have climbed over that carpeted divide and into her twin bed?
Months before, on the last day of the school year, Tina and I had said goodbye for the summer. We held a hug, her white uniformed breast pressed against mine, and I walked the two blocks home replaying in my mind its soft weight, its fullness against my chest.
I enter the house, grateful that it is empty. I do not want to forget the feeling, even as I carry it heavily down the hallway. I drag myself into my unmade bed, twist the sheet tight into a rope and pull it up between my legs. And I just cry and cry and cry because my desire is so fucking, and undeniably, physical.
Tragedy befell Winona (or at least that was how I thought of it) when after graduation she entered the nunnery. It is the late 1960s and just as nuns all over the country are leaving the convent in droves, Winona decides to enlist. It was to be a lesbian, I knew, and I hated the thought of it. Repression as religion. These were my fierce convictions as a teenager, full of contradiction and tainted by fear.
When I visited Winona at the convent (and I did so only once), I knew this was the real masquerade; the whole thing, a performance. Sitting in a hard-backed chair, she held her hands quietly in her lap, her tidy little novice headpiece holding back her once-long hippie hair. She spoke in soft tones in a kindly manner. What happened to my tortured artist beatnik friend?
* * *
It is four twenty on the office clock. I am doing what I am supposed to be doing: working. JoAnn is doing what she is not supposed to be doing: not working. The attendance job is a breeze and I love the company. JoAnn should be home by now, cleaning house, awaiting our mother’s return from the electronics plant. But she is caught up in the moment, in teenage-girl banter with the principal, Sister Mara, and a few other after-hours girls.
Mara is not so much a principal at the moment, but a woman—a grown and brown woman, who treats us with interest. For a moment, we are free and intelligent women with our futures beckoning just outside the threshold of that small Mission High School girls’-wing office. And we got nothing better to do. We got all the time in the world to just hang out and laugh and gossip about some silliness, some smart-aleck remark, some (dare I say even emergent-feminist) critique about the Church. We, women, so superior in v
antage point, so presciently awaiting that second coming where God is indeed and justifiably a woman. Even when we have no words to say so.
And then without warning, the doorway darkens and our eyes land upon the sudden presence of … Elvira. JoAnn is closest to the doorway. She spots our mother first. I put my head down, am dutiful at my post with the attendance records. Mara stands sentinel to the scenario. Suddenly everyone else disappears.
I spy the leather belt held in our mother’s crooked grip. JoAnn must see it, too. It hangs pulsing by her leg. What is she thinking? Is she going to beat JoAnn like a wayward burra all the way back to the village?
No, this was wrong—a private moment gone public. The equilibrium of our girlhood life had suddenly gone awry. Elvira and “the belt” were meant to remain on the other side of the kitchen doorjamb. That scenario we understood:
“Ven pa’ca,” she would command us.
“No, Mom, you’re gonna hit me.”
“I won’t hit you”—the lie of the belt, snakelike and writhing with intent along her thigh. And each time, no matter how many times she lied, we would cross that threshold to our own demise.
JoAnn does not bother to wait for our mother to lift the belt; she rushes by her and heads directly for home. She does not run off in a different direction, as perhaps other, less dutiful daughters might; for there is nowhere else to go but to that home.
* * *
There had once been a grandmother, the American one, who thought JoAnn special, who allowed her always the foreground spot in the family photos, JoAnn’s hair in thick ringlets falling upon her Easter outfit shoulders. Grandma Hallie had always defended her; for, like Hallie herself, who aspired all the way to the Geary Theater stage, JoAnn was a dreamer.
* * *
“But I don’t got nothing to wear.” JoAnn stares at our bedroom closet, where dresses from holidays past hang bored and styleless.
Dressing for Sunday Mass, Elvira can hear her eldest daughter through the bathroom vent complaining como si fuera una reina, like money grows on trees.
“Cállate, ya,” she snaps back. “Put on anything, I don’t got time for this.”
Elvira wishes she could just shut the girl’s face up, once and for all, that mouth of too-many-teeth always whining. She’s like him, a husband who only knows to think of himself, who asks for a cup of coffee with his eyes like worthless hands.
“But I look stupid in everything.” JoAnn says the wrong thing.
Esto es el colmo, the last straw. It is the moment our menopausal mother has been waiting for—a reason, any reason, really, to explode from that bathroom and let la ingrata have it.
“Ya te dije que no me friegues.”
Elvira spills into the bedroom, wearing only a skirt, her breasts bare. She brandishes a hairbrush as a weapon. Against what?
Against Seventeen magazine and Hollywood dreams?
Against dreams?
Elvira never got to dream, cabrona.
She rushes at JoAnn, begins to beat her with the wooden back of the brush. I stand rigid, taking in the scene. JoAnn’s arms flail in self-defense, falling onto the bed to block the blows. Elvira tosses the brush, spins around, and lunges backwards onto her daughter’s head. Her small hips and bony nalgas pound JoAnn’s face into the bed. Tailbone against jawbone, she pounds, over and over again.
“Stop, Mom,” I cry. “You’re gonna kill her.”
But she doesn’t stop, so I do what I have never done before. I stop her myself. I am as tall as my mother by then and strong enough.
I grab Elvira by the shoulders and pull her off JoAnn’s crumpled face.
Elvira stands speechless before her teen daughters. Suddenly, realizing her nakedness, she picks up my bathrobe from the bed and drapes it over the front of her, one small breast exposed like a defeated Amazon. But I can’t get the sight of those flaming purple nipples out of my mind; can’t forget the hardened look of them—that bark of oak, the deep wooden grain of her anger.
“Get dressed,” she says. “I’m going back into the bathroom and I’m gonna put on my face and when I come out, you both better be ready for church.”
But I did not want my mother to put her face back on. My mother eyes me, as she moves to the door. I don’t hate her. Somehow she knows this. My face has a grown gaze, but it does not wholly indict. She will come to count on this.
I don’t remember what my sister’s face looked like.
* * *
As JoAnn pushes through the giant mission oak front doors, she flashes back on the sight of her younger sister jumping down from the office stool to block the path of their mother. It was the shield that allowed JoAnn exit. She didn’t stick around to hear Elvira go into her litany of contempt. JoAnn’s heart had already memorized the lines: She might act like she’s someone special at the school, but she’s not so special, you don’ know what she’s really like …
“Mom, please…” She hears her sister’s receding voice entreating. The belt gradually slips back under Elvira’s apron, as JoAnn’s hurried feet beat the hot pavement home.
In JoAnn’s defense, Sister Mara is all compassion with our mother. She has handled this before. She does not judge. She sends Elvira home, humbled but not shamed. Mara was a Mexican daughter, too.
MIND-FIELD
The college’s good Catholic name had conveniently disguised to my family its subversive intent; perhaps until my graduation ceremony belied it, as barefoot girls with flowery crowns in their hair and a guy in a gorilla suit came onstage to accept their diplomas. (The gorilla got a banana.) Consisting of no more than some five hundred students, Immaculate Heart College stood white and deceptively mission-tiled on a hilltop overlooking a Hollywood Boulevard with its heyday in decay.
Those four years at IHC unwittingly laid stepping-stones to my eventual departure from Southern California. Although JoAnn also attended IHC, she and I had grown more distant. The half-hour commute from our home in San Gabriel to the radical IHC campus in the Hollywood Hills crossed a “mind-field” of class and cultural fronteras that stunned each of us into a kind of emotional paralysis.
A nagging uncertainty plagued me—about my womanhood, my sexuality, my mixed-blood ethnicity, all of which I had yet to fully acknowledge. It seemed I would not, could not be loved. Not only because I suspected I was a lesbian, but also because, against my family’s wishes, I wanted to be free. But if free looked like my gringo classmates in their tattered and patched hippie costumes of downward mobility, if free required weekly acid trips and mota on most days, if free meant a complete and utter disregard for the labor of your elders while you dug your hand in their pockets for loose bills, if free was that cavalier male sense of entitlement and “cool” meant you had to sleep with it, then my freedom road was desperately uncharted and unpeopled. I instinctually avoided entering into any intimate relationships with other students. Only in the neutrality of the classroom did I find voice for questions that were generating viscerally from my body.
For the first time in my life, I read in earnest: the existentialism of Sartre and Camus (The Stranger); William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi and George Orwell’s prophetic 1984; the early feminist inquiries of Sexton, Plath, and Adrienne Rich; Beckett and Ionesco’s Theatre of the Absurd; Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious”; and Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex.” All this as a way to chart out a worldview by which I might one day build a life. All white writers and mostly men.
Although small in enrollment, the newly nonsectarian and coed college opened my mind to a grand landscape far beyond the confines of my mission school education. The Immaculate Heart nuns were the first religious order in the country to cast off their religious habits and don secular clothing to better serve a spiritually motivated social activism. It was a terrible beauty, the education unfolding before me, even as it frightened me. For, unlike most Roman Catholic colleges of its days, Immaculate Heart was founded in the spirit of wome
n’s right to know and to act on that knowledge.
* * *
The spring semester of my sophomore year at IHC had been the hardest. My transcript from that period, as I remember it, was riddled with Cs and failing course withdrawals. One early April afternoon, returning from our daily commute, JoAnn and I pull up in front of our family home. It is a sunny day and the lavender petals of la jacaranda fall lightly onto the windshield. But I know no such lightness within me. I turn off the engine and JoAnn starts to get out. I grab her knee.
“Wait. I wanna tell you something.” I feel her eyes on me.
“Okay,” she says. And shuts the door.
I have both hands on the steering wheel, clenching it. I can’t look at her. I begin, a feebly thrown lifeline.
“I think I am a homosexual.”
I had never uttered those words aloud.
It was a short conversation, as I remember it. Her response was almost perfunctory; a weak wall against a swelling wave of trepidation inside her. What will this mean about the rest of our lives? Wisely, she suggested a therapist, Liz Broome, who had been her psychology teacher at IHC. But, personally, she admitted she needed to keep her distance. We were too close, she said, and reminded me of my preteen years when my wordless fear stirred sleeplessly in the bed next to her. The gallows rope of those pubescent predawn wanderings, locking and relocking doors, had threatened to hang her, too.
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