by Jaquira Díaz
During boot camp, we’d been trained to abandon ship by climbing a fifteen-foot tower and jumping feet first into the deep end of an Olympic-sized pool. In Battle Stations, the tower was twice as high and there were Navy SEALs in the water, pretending to be sharks. If one of them caught you, you were dead.
I was standing at the top of the thirty-five foot tower, after my whole squad had jumped. They were all in the water, swimming among the sharks toward the rescue boat. And I was frozen.
I was supposed to jump. If I didn’t, I’d get recycled and my team could get fucked. They might not pass Battle Stations.
I moved closer to the edge, measured the distance between the tower and the rescue boat. I looked straight ahead at the clock on the wall across the pool, but I couldn’t make out the time. It was the middle of the night. By tomorrow afternoon, Battle Stations would be over, and most of our two divisions would be handed their official navy covers. Those who didn’t pass would have to keep wearing their recruit ballcaps and wouldn’t be able to graduate. Everyone would know.
I had to jump. I had to go over the edge, land feet-first in the water and swim. But I couldn’t get off that tower.
In the pool, one of the Navy SEALs surfaced, started treading water, pulled his snorkel out of his mouth. When he saw me, he called up to me, “Get off that tower, recruit!”
Behind me, another Navy SEAL was climbing the ladder, coming after me.
Everyone in the water was looking up at the tower, at me. In the rescue boat, Brooks and G-mo were already sitting back, watching, Jones and Williams climbing onto the boat.
“You better get off this tower, recruit!” the Navy SEAL behind me said.
There I was, in front of my whole squad, Brooks and Jones and Williams and G-mo, and all the other squads that had already finished the event, drying off by the side of the pool. Everyone watching.
“You better get off this tower before I throw you off!” the Navy SEAL said, and I flinched.
All those times I’d considered jumping off the balcony in Southgate Towers, the eighth floor, the fifteenth floor. That time I jumped off the roof of a two-story building. I’d been so high. But now, on this tower, I was sober, painfully sober, and everyone was looking toward me expecting some kind of bravery. But didn’t they know? I wasn’t brave. I was a girl who was scared of the dark. A girl so scared of being hurt she would always leave first. I’d never been brave.
And then I heard G-mo’s voice. “Come on, Jaqui,” he yelled. “Come on!” In front of our entire division, in front all the RDCs, everybody looking from G-mo, to me, realizing that he’d called me by a nickname, not my last name, not even my first name. Nobody in the navy knew me as Jaqui. Only G-mo. He didn’t know it yet, and maybe I didn’t either, but before the month was up, I would fuck him over. We’d both be out of boot camp, in Tech Core, and he’d be the same G-mo, this earnest, smart, hard-working, funny guy from California who liked lowriders and played spades and wanted kids some day. Exactly who he’d always said he was. He’d come visit me in my barracks and I’d be a completely different person, and he’d look me in the eyes and not recognize me, say, What happened to you, Jaqui? This isn’t you. He wouldn’t know it, but by then I’d already be gone.
I looked down again, then straight ahead. I folded my arms across my chest, feet together, deep breath. I closed my eyes and stepped off the tower, felt the hollow in the pit of my stomach. I had dreamed of this moment so many times, my body falling falling falling through the air, the concrete below, the ocean below, nothing below. Is this what the French woman felt? What if gravity is a lie we’ve been told? What if I never land? What if I fall forever?
I heard myself scream all the way down. And then I hit water.
I kept a journal during all of boot camp, all those weeks, months. I didn’t want to forget that there had been a time when I thought I’d end up exactly like my mother, that maybe the navy had saved my life. I didn’t want to forget my shipmates after we all graduated, friends that had been like family, after we shipped off to school or our first deployments, after months at sea. Or how on Battle Stations night, all of us sleep-deprived and hungry and nervous, we were jerked from our dreamless sleep by the sound of whooping fire alarms, the recruit division commanders hollering on the 1MC. How we strapped on our battle gear, Kevlar helmets, gas masks, canteens, ran across the base to the USS Marlinspike, a guided-missile destroyer, and for an entire night we put out fires, emptied flooding compartments of their heavy artillery, dragged ourselves across gravel and underneath barbed wire in the dark, carrying our wounded shipmate on a combat stretcher, playing at war. How on that final run, weighed down by all our gear, carrying each other, crying, the pride I felt when I crossed that finish line. How until that moment, I didn’t know I could be that strong, didn’t really believe I could be saved.
. . .
After Battle Stations, late one night, Eliza and I were assigned to do the laundry for our entire division during watch. It was the first time we had a real conversation, after weeks of just watching each other, and sitting across from each other, and almost smiling at each other when we passed each other in the USS Carr, or in the classroom, or the galley.
That night, we loaded the washers, added the soap, and then sat on the laundry room floor, listening to Dru Hill on her Discman, sharing her headphones, the two of us singing “We’re Not Making Love No More.” After Battle Stations, everything was less tense, and the RDCs barely came up to check on us while everybody was sleeping. So we could just hang out. We folded laundry, told each other stories. She told me about her daughter, who was at home with her ex-husband.
“Do you miss her?” I asked.
“It’s hard,” she said. “But I’m doing all this for her. She understands.”
I was surprised she had a daughter, an ex-husband, an entire life that included a family. She was butch, muscular, with a husky voice, and she was comfortable in her own body. She was older than me, and it seemed she knew exactly who she was. How freely she just took my hand and sang to me and asked whatever she wanted to know. How easily she could break my heart. Even in her navy T-shirt and ridiculous gym shorts she was sexy. I couldn’t picture her with a man. As hard as I tried, I could only picture her with me.
I didn’t tell her about Cheito.
We sat there for a while, listening to music and singing, and when she kissed me, I kissed her back. I wanted to put my hands all over her, but didn’t know how. I licked the soft tendons of her neck, her shoulder blades, the small of her back, all sweat and salt. There was no art to what we did—when she fucked me, it was fast, the two of us watching the laundry room doors, exasperated, like we were grasping at something, the clock on the wall ticking like it was set to detonate.
As soon as it was over, I was already thinking in the past tense. As much as I’d dreamed of this moment, and even though for the first time in my life I finally felt like myself, like the woman I was supposed to be, and even though I knew I could’ve loved her, the truth is I never intended to love her in the real world. That’s who I was. A girl who ran.
Months after boot camp, after I’d moved on to electronics school, walking down the corridors in the Tech Core school building, I heard a couple sailors whispering and laughing and calling out, Hey, don’t ask, don’t tell!
I kept walking, not really paying attention, until I heard it again, Don’t ask, don’t tell!
I turned around, and saw the two of them laughing, covering their mouths, and realized that I was the only other person in the hallway. They were talking to me, laughing at me.
Every day after that, walking past the groups of mostly guys huddled in the hallways, I had to hear and not hear and keep walking as they said it again and again and again, Don’t ask, don’t tell. Hey, don’t ask, don’t tell. Until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” became my nickname.
A few days later, as we lined up in formation outside the barracks, one of my boot camp shipmates came up to me. Jones. He stood rig
ht next to me, smiling.
“What’s up?” I said.
He didn’t reply, just smiled. Like he knew something I didn’t know.
Behind him, another sailor lined up. “Hey, Díaz, I heard you like to eat pussy,” he said, loud enough so that our whole group heard. Everybody laughed.
Jones was still smiling, and I realized, in on the joke.
I didn’t say anything. I turned and faced forward, kept my military bearing, face expressionless, heart pounding in my chest.
He kept talking. “Everybody knows. Everybody’s talking about it. Somebody, I can’t say who, even made up a song about you.”
For weeks afterward, on the street, in the barracks’ corridors, as I mopped the floors on the quarterdeck while on duty, guys would rap as they walked behind me, would break into spontaneous rhyming the second I stepped into a room. Later, after I’d gotten kicked out of Tech Core, after a long period of unauthorized absences, after I’d gone AWOL and become a military deserter, after turning myself in, standing in my old barracks in front of a petty officer who would look at me with disgust and call me “coward” and “traitor,” words that would stick to me, that would define how I saw myself for years, after everyone had heard I was back, after another petty officer cornered me in the hallway, ordered me to stand at attention, screamed in my face, tiny splatters of his spit landing on my cheek, and after a seaman recruit, two ranks below me, came up to me in the chow line, asked, What are you doing breathing my air, Díaz? What the hell are you doing in my navy? it would still be Jones I thought of. I’d see the five of us, our squad carrying him in the combat stretcher, our squad carrying each other during that last run, after twelve hours, that final mile, Brooks pulling Williams’ wet seabag off her shoulders, strapping it on himself. G-mo behind me, not letting me slow down. Jones next to me, when I knew he could run faster, much faster, saying, You better keep pounding that pavement, Díaz, you better keep pushing.
I had loved boot camp, the navy. It was in the navy where I’d been able to imagine living past eighteen, where I’d finally felt like I mattered. But I would eventually run.
Secrets
and I am going to keep telling this if it kills me
—Audre Lorde, “For the Record”
It’s more than a year after you get out of the navy, after you’ve returned to Miami Beach. You’re walking south on Biscayne Boulevard, where it’s mostly drug dealers, sex workers strolling the streets at dawn, grimy motels. The Stardust, the Vagabond, the Shalimar. Iconic Miami. The sun is almost up and you’ve been walking for what seems like hours. Just walking, hoping no one will notice your bare feet. You have one sandal. You hold it with both hands, press it tight against your body, cradle it like a baby. You bought the pair while shopping on Lincoln Road with your best friend. They were expensive, but you were getting ready for her twenty-first birthday party, and you figured you’d get to wear them for your own twenty-first birthday party, in a few months. You only wore them once. And now you only have one.
You walk faster, and every time a car passes, you turn your face, flip your curls to cover it. You hope no one you know will recognize you if they drive by on their way to work or school. When a man on a bike passes, you pull up the torn strap of your dress, try to readjust it, put it back in place as if it could somehow reattach itself. As if you could make yourself presentable. Your feet are bloody, and every step is a spike, piercing, and just when you think you can’t walk anymore, you see a payphone. You cross the street to get to it. Pick it up. But you have no money. All you have is the sandal. You dial 0, call your little sister collect. Please pick up. There’s a pause. You’re holding your breath.
Then a voice. Hello? Your sister. And you can breathe again.
In fourth grade, Ida M. Fisher Elementary, our whole class sitting in the bleachers during PE, my friend Beba came up to me. “You have to hear this,” she said, her voice shaky, breathless.
Yvonne, who we weren’t really close to, was with her. Yvonne, with red hair that fell down her back and shoulders, a mass of freckles on her cheeks and nose.
“Come on,” Beba said to us, and we moved over to one corner of the bleachers, where no one would hear our conversation. The rest of our class, playing “Around the World,” waited for their turn at the basketball. Beba and I listened as Yvonne described how her stepfather came into her room at night, how he took off her clothes and felt her naked body under the covers. How sometimes he took off his own clothes, made her touch him.
“Why don’t you tell someone?” I asked. It was my first instinct. To tell.
“I told my mom,” Yvonne said. “But she didn’t believe me.”
“What do you mean she didn’t believe you?” Beba asked. She was angry, furious. It didn’t make any sense. “Let’s tell Ms. Carey. She’ll know what to do.”
But Yvonne didn’t want us to tell. She shook her head. She searched our faces for something, I didn’t know what. She begged us, with tears in her eyes, to keep her secret. “Please,” she said.
And we did.
Years later, at twenty-two, long after I’d forgotten about Yvonne, on a beach road trip from Miami to Maine with some friends, we’d stop at a diner in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for breakfast. We’d talk about our trip, where we were heading next, the Outer Banks, Virginia Beach, the Wildwoods. We’d ask the waiter about the coastal towns in the area, where to get the best ice cream, the best pizza. Where to go dancing. We were from Miami Beach, we said.
We were leaving, and one of my friends headed to the register to pay the bill, the rest of us headed outside, when I saw her. She was wearing a waitress uniform. Black pants, white shirt, black apron. She was placing drinks on a table. As soon as I saw her, the memory came back to me: the three of us sitting on those bleachers at Fisher, that gym where we played basketball and square-danced awkwardly with greasy-faced boys. Yvonne, Beba, and I. Just girls.
My friends left the diner, but I stood there watching her, looking for a name tag, something to tell me that it was really her. That somehow she’d turned out fine. There was no name tag, nothing to confirm that she’d made it. But I knew it was her.
I don’t think she saw me. Or if she did, I like to think that she didn’t recognize me. I wanted to go up to her, say something. I thought about the three of us in the fourth grade that day, her face as she told us about her stepfather, as she asked us to keep her secret. Do this for me, she’d said. Do this one thing.
I’d kept her secret. All those years, I kept it. You could argue that I was a child, that I didn’t know any better, that it was what she wanted. But I didn’t do it for her. The truth is I did it for me. I kept it because I didn’t want to get involved, because the thought of putting the words together to recreate what Yvonne said had seemed like too much to bear. It had been easier not to tell.
I didn’t say hello that morning in the restaurant. I didn’t say anything. I left, without a word.
Her name, as you probably already guessed, was not Yvonne.
Your sister drives you to Mount Sinai Hospital. You don’t remember the drive there, but when you look up, you are there. She parks the car in the ambulance lane and the two of you get out. You walk into the emergency room, where a nurse hands you a clipboard. You don’t write your name on it. Instead, you look around the sitting area at all the people, waiting. Some of the faces look back at you. You look at your bare feet, bloody, then back at the nurse. You have to wait. Like everybody else.
You leave the clipboard on the counter, walk out of the emergency room, ignoring your sister’s pleas as you head back to the car. In the backseat, you wait for her to start the engine.
You have to let me help you, she says. She’s only sixteen, but she’s so grown up. She looks like you, but different, so much more like herself. She has dyed blue streaks into her long curls. She dresses to match her mood, faded punk-rock band T-shirts, handmade leather bracelets, Chuck Taylors in every color. You are twenty, but feel like a child, and you�
�d never wear Chucks. Instead, you splurge on expensive midi dresses and uncomfortable strappy heels that cut into your toes, or basketball jerseys with Jordans that run you almost a week’s paycheck.
I don’t know how, you want to tell her. There is so much you want to say, so much you don’t.
I met Beba when I was nine, in fourth grade. I’d just been transferred into her class, and my new teacher, Ms. Carey, yelled across the room for me to sit next to Beba. I did as she said, put down my backpack, looking around for familiar faces. It was three weeks into the school year and I’d just been yanked from my small ESOL class, my fourth-grade friends, and dropped off in this enormous classroom with at least thirty strangers who all spoke perfect English and this screaming lady who was supposed to be my teacher.
“We’re going to art in five minutes,” Beba said. She was drawing on a manila folder, and she didn’t take her eyes off of it, not even when she spoke to me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Beba,” she said. Her pencil raced across the folder’s surface. Horses, so many horses, then a rabbit, a squirrel, a few birds, some grass, a tree. With a single stroke of her pencil, faster than I could take a breath, she signed her name on the bottom, then dated it.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Jaquira,” I said.
She looked up, puzzled. “How do you spell that?”
I spelled it for her, and she wrote it on the folder’s upper right corner, handed it to me.
. . .
You don’t remember the drive to your apartment either. But you don’t take the elevator. You run up the stairs until you get to the sixth floor, stop in front of your door when you realize you don’t have your keys. You wait for your sister to open the door for you. When she opens it, you realize you are still holding the sandal. You walk into your studio apartment, open the closet. You want to put the sandal on the floor, imagine that the other one will be there, what it would mean if that were true.