by Myriam Gurba
This set the tone for the rest of my life.
Mom got pregnant again before I started kindergarten. Dad broke it to me at the kitchen table. He sipped black coffee. I commented, “That smells good, Daddy.”
“Take a sip,” he said. He held out the cup.
I took it and sipped. I tasted masculinity.
“Mommy is going to have a baby,” said Dad. “What do you want, a brother or a sister?”
“Yes,” I prophesied.
Doctors had to cut out the twins, a boy and a girl, three months early because of complications. A pilot helicoptered Mom to a hospital in Palo Alto, and Dad threw my things in a suitcase while his forehead and bald spot dewed. Mine remained dry. I was fine. Mom being gone and Dad having to go with her didn’t bother me. I got that it was important for Dad to go be with Mom, and I kind of got that something very bad might be happening, something that might prevent my mom from ever coming back, but I wasn’t upset by it. I was excited. The abandonment felt like an adventure. My parents were leaving me. This would be new and fun. Kind of like being an orphan.
Anyone who isn’t an orphan has orphan fantasies.
Dad walked me up the driveway with the RV.
He handed my suitcase and me over to the white mom.
She smiled. She said, “You’ll stay with Emily.”
I thought about what this meant.
This meant I was going to get to sleep in Emily’s room.
Emily lived in a room meant for an object. Lace edged her bedspread and curtains. Mahogany furniture carved with rosebuds gleamed. Pink accents lurked everywhere. Her carpet was a crotchy color. The room’s femininity was inescapable. From a Victorian cradle by the bed, a porcelain doll’s eyes stared at the popcorn ceiling. The things in her room were teaching Emily how to be a woman.
I crawled into Emily’s bed and felt deficient. I was wearing a scratchy, nosebleed-stained nightshirt. Emily was luxuriating in a gown as white as her race. It was like what Nellie Oleson wore in that episode of Little House on the Prairie where she pretends to be a paraplegic and sits in that beautiful wheelchair. Staring at Emily’s curtains, I didn’t contemplate my mother’s impending death. I thought about how I could get my hands on Emily’s stuff.
I was very curious about how the whites handled food. At home, we typically ate fusion. Mom cooked hamburgers, meat loaf, and pork chops, but she defiled these foods in ethnically specific ways. She sprinkled radishes and stuck avocado slices where they didn’t belong.
I was loafing in the kitchen when the white mom told me, “Since you’re gonna be staying with us til . . .” she paused to choose her words, “your parents get back, you’re gonna help us out. Today, you’re gonna help make dinner.”
“What’re we having?”
The white mom smiled. She said, “Since you’re visiting, Mexican.”
I imagined the Mexican foods Mom sometimes made. Enchiladas melting in glass dishes. Chuletas with onions floating in red sauce. Chicken tacos fried in corn oil. Pozole. Machaca. Mom never made mole. In English, that’s an animal. It can’t see.
“What are we having?” I repeated.
“Mexican casserole.”
Casserole was a new word for me. It intrigued me. It sounded musical.
The white mom putzed around the kitchen dicing, blanching, and massaging things into a glass dish that she carried to the oven and slid onto a rack. I shut the door on it and watched the casserole warm through a greasy porthole.
The white mom grabbed five goblets from a cupboard and set them on the counter. I helped her layer cream and red Jell-O, which Mom pronounced yellow, into them. We made seductive parfaits the likes of which I’d never seen in our kitchen. Our kitchen was a chocolate pudding place.
I couldn’t wait to explore these cool desserts with a cold spoon.
Dinnertime came and we sat around the table in the dining room, which was basically an extension of the kitchen but a step up. The house had a split-level floor plan. The white mom stabbed the casserole with her spatula. Her vigor made her swan wings flap. She scooped a square onto each of our plates and ladled the night’s vegetable, soggy brussels sprouts, out of another glass dish. Four green balls rolled beside my casserole hunk.
My fork stabbed my casserole and brought it to my mouth. I dropped it on my tongue. There was nothing Mexican about it. Its spices told unfamiliar stories, but I used my milk as a chaser and managed to choke it down without vomiting. The brussels sprouts were a different story. I scooped one into my mouth and realized its flavor: eternal damnation. I parted my lips and dropped my jaw. The vegetable rolled off my tongue. It fell back onto the plate. It glistened with my spit.
“I can’t eat these,” I told the white mom.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I just can’t eat them.”
“If you don’t eat them, you can’t have dessert.”
I could not believe her nerve. She was blackmailing me and I had done her a gigantic favor by eating her casserole, whose nationality was a lie.
“I can’t do it,” I reiterated.
The white mom rose and strutted across the dining room to the kitchen.
She pulled open the fridge door, took out the tray of parfaits, and carried them over. She placed one in front of her husband, one in front of Emily, and one in front of Josh. She segregated the one that would be mine on the counter. She set a long-handled spoon beside it. Its metal clinking against tile practically neiner neinered.
“Once you finish your brussels sprouts,” she said, “you can have dessert.”
“But I helped make dinner! I helped make those!”
“You have to eat your vegetables.”
I watched the others wolf their parfaits down and lick their spoons. I watched the white mom clear the dishes. I watched the back of her yellow head as she washed and dried. I looked down at her brussels sprouts. They looked cold and evil. They looked like American presidents. I trusted my instincts. I refused them entry into my face. They remained on my plate, unloved.
The white mom looked at the clock hanging on the wall by the sliding glass door. The big hand rested on eleven. The little hand rested on twelve.
“Go put on your pajamas,” she finally conceded.
My win made me feel glad, but what had my victory cost me?
Mom saying yellow, a goblet of Jell-O.
Judas and Icarus
My first touch came from a white man’s spanking.
My first crush was my white neighbor Josh.
My first friend, my best friend, was white, too.
We met in kindergarten, and I loved her when I was five, I loved her when I was six, I loved her when I was seven, I loved her when I was eight, I loved her when I was nine, I loved her when I was ten, I loved her when I was eleven, I loved her when I was twelve, and I loved her when I was thirteen. I have loved her up till now, and I have loved her in the future.
She once smoked crack on accident. She thought it was heroin.
Sometimes, I imagine Krakow filled with quaint Polish crack houses.
The white girl who smoked crack on accident is named Ida.
We met in kindergarten at Montessori school. I didn’t like her immediately. She was too much like me. A cunt. A free thinker. A roamer.
Montessori school is great if you’re a liberated person. It’s a great place to be if you’re obstinate and don’t appreciate being told what to say, think, feel, or do. Montessori school is private and everything in it is child size. I hung out in this miniature world for two years, and every school day I got to choose what I wanted to do with myself. If I wanted to sit in a beanbag paging through a thesaurus for hours, I could. If I wanted to show picture books to our school pet, a bored corn snake named Ivan, I could. I could hunch over long division problems, breaking down numbers till it was time for recess or lunch. At lunch, I lolled beneath our playground ginkgo tree, collecting leaves and unsurreptitiously smelling my fingers.
Montessor
i school ruined me for normal school and life in general. It made me only want to do things I care about or am curious about. Which is really hard if you have to live in reality.
Ida and I migrated to public school for second grade. Our parents didn’t like how our Montessori school got increasingly traditional as the grades got higher, so they figured they’d just stick us in normal school anyway.
We were assigned to the same class, and it was there that our love really began to flourish. We recognized our own selves in the other. We recognized ourselves as refugees. We were both new to the land of raising your hand to go to the bathroom.
This was a trickier culture.
But still cool.
Second grade mirrored Montessori. We couldn’t roam the school, but we could roam the room. I could talk and ramble as a much as I had to. Nobody told me to shut up or wrote my name on the board for being bad. My teacher, peers, and classroom pets tolerated my garrulousness. I sat beside Ida.
We read books together.
Third grade came and changed everything.
Our teacher, Mrs. De Leon, expected us to stay in our desks. We had to raise our hands for permission to stroll to the pencil sharpener, a fine place to fart. An amateurish painting of the night sky hung by our classroom door. I often stared at it and thought, “I’ve seen better.” I later saw that painting of the night sky in a collection of works by van Gogh.
Thanks to Montessori, and genetics, I didn’t know how to be quiet. I felt compelled in a way that itched and burned to turn everything in my head into spoken word. I had to give my words to somebody, and I did, I gave them to everyone, and Mrs. De Leon did not approve. I talked without raising my hand, and she wrote my name on the board. She put check marks next to it as I talked more. She moved me from desk to desk to desk. She sat me beside introverts and recent arrivals from Sinaloa. Her changes of venue did nothing to quiet me. The shy became my audience. I got through to the Mexicans. I told them tall tales and discussed American current events with them . . . in Spanish.
Ida and I spent recesses in the baseball dugout. This was in the southeast corner of the grassy field we jogged or walked laps around for PE. Bees buzzed in it. Frogs died in it. A chain-link fence ringed the field and the backyards of tract homes pressed against one edge while a manmade pine forest grew along another. Pine needles formed a carpet that made crispy noises as our Velcro shoes crept.
Ida and I sat on the dugout’s wooden bench, imagining. Three other girls, Emiko, Madi, and Espie, joined us in our mental adventures. We spent so much time in that dugout making a sport of imagining that our minds melded. We formed a community. One day, I said, “This is a club.”
It felt good to be in a club. During club, we told stories, harvested clover, killed bees, invented fantasylands inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, and developed rituals. We sacrificed snails and stuck their meat on Ritz crackers. Ida dared me, “Eat it.”
I popped escargot in my mouth. I chewed and swallowed.
The five of us were having so much fun partying in the dugout that it attracted the stupider sex. Some wandered into our meeting spot.
A boy interrupted me. It asked, “Can we be in your club?”
“No,” I answered. “It’s girls only.”
“That’s not fair,” Steve, the boy, protested. He was Mexican and had what are commonly called piercing blue eyes. It happens.
“He’s right,” agreed Emiko. “It’s not fair.”
“OK,” I said. I looked from Emiko to Steve. I stared into his blue eyes with fortitude. “You and your friends can join our club if you climb to the top of this.” I pointed to the chain-link backstop that reached several stories high. “And jump.”
The rational boys in Steve’s group sighed. Those with high levels of T sprinted for the backstop. Their fingers curled around its metal and their tennis shoes slipped in and out of its holes. They moved farther and farther up, and the blowing of whistles made us look across the field, at the playground. The yard-duty ladies gestured with their arms. The hugetitted one jogged toward us. Her breasts dog-paddled in her muumuu. She slowed near second base.
“Stop!” she screamed at the climbers. “Get DOWN!”
One climber, Reymundo, in English, KING OF THE WORLD, what hubris in a name, froze. He dangled. He swiveled his head and looked over his right shoulder, at me. He looked at the yard-duty lady. He blinked. One foot moved after the other as he felt his way back to earth.
Steve clung halfway up the backstop. He stared down at us. He looked at the yard-duty lady. He looked back at the sky. He scrambled up.
I hoped Steve would injure himself and die so that I wouldn’t have to let him into my club. That had been my strategy. To give his sex an insurmountable initiation. Like the literacy tests given to black folks in the American South before the Voting Rights Act passed.
I was an early-onset feminist.
Steve reached the backstop’s sharply angled crown. He paused.
“Don’t you dare!” threatened the yard-duty lady. To a third-grade boy, those words equal please.
Steve’s fingers uncoiled. His white T-shirt flew up. It flapped as he fell. I spied his belly button. Unlike most people’s, his pushed forward into a repugnant outie.
Steve’s feet touched down near home plate. Dirt hardly puffed into the air around his jeans. I’d expected him to shatter or liquefy, but he was feline. He landed fine.
“Fuck,” I thought to myself. “He’s in.”
The yard-duty lady herded us across the baseball diamond, grass, clover, playground sand, blacktop, and cement. We filed into our classroom and sat at our desks. I felt warm in my sweat pants. Our teacher paced the bald carpet. Her gaze zeroed in on Steve. She demanded, “Why did you do that?”
Steve pointed his finger at me. “She told me to,” he said. “So that I could join her club.”
Mrs. De Leon’s gaze fixed upon me. “Is that true?” she asked.
I nodded.
She returned her stern expression to Steve. She asked, “If she told you to jump from a cliff, would you do it?”
“No,” he said.
“Good. You’re suspended.”
I grinned. Mrs. De Leon looked at me, shook her head, and said, “No more club.”
I felt slightly crushed but satisfied. I’d rather have my club destroyed by a strict third-grade teacher than let fucking boys into it.
The Problem of Evil
It’s OK to be mean.
Dad taught me so, as he stood at the kitchen counter, playing with his watch. I poured a glass of milk, gargled, and gulped. I’d emerged from my bedroom after paging through A Child’s Book of Saints. Reading about morality had made me thirsty. I swished milk between my cheeks, warming it, and thought about the book’s martyrs and mystics. I admired them, especially the girls, but a pattern troubled me. Bad things happened to the saintliest ones. Villagers lit them on fire. Pirates and aristocrats raped them. Barbarians carved their breasts and noses off. It seemed that the nicer you were, especially during the Middle Ages, the meaner the world was.
“Dad?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Why does evil exist?”
“Just a second,” he answered.
He multitasked, pondering my inquiry while fiddling with his watch.
The lack of a quick response made me uneasy.
Through my milk moustache, I blurted, “Why does god let so many bad things happen?”
I breathed through my mouth. Waited.
Dad looked at me with the same face he made when I questioned the Easter Bunny’s existence. In a matter-of-fact voice, he said, “Myriam, think of how boring life would be if nothing bad ever happened.”
His words felt epiphanic. I smiled and my heart felt very, very warm. It was bathing in permission.
What an excellent point. Why hadn’t I arrived at that conclusion?
Dad’s words rehabilitated bad things. His logic made them beautiful. Necessary, in fact.
It
isn’t just greed that’s good. Mean is good too. Being mean makes us feel alive. It’s fun and exciting. Sometimes, it keeps us alive.
W. H. Auden wrote that evil is unspectacular. I totally disagree. Evil is dazzling. If it’s done right, mean can be dazzling too.
We act mean to defend ourselves from boredom and from those who would chop off our breasts. We act mean to defend our clubs and institutions. We act mean because we like to laugh. Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being rude to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being a bitch is more exhilarating. Being a bitch is spectacular.
Being mean isn’t for everybody.
It’s best practiced by those who understand it as an art form.
These virtuosos live closer to the divine. They’re queers.
To observe the queer art of being mean, watch Paris Is Burning.
Venus Xtravaganza, a trans woman who’s murdered partway through the documentary, inspires me to be a better mean. In a scene where she’s so beautifully lit she looks like a painting, Venus cries, “You wanna talk about reading? Let’s talk about reading!” She embodies her femininity with cruel genius and shakes her peroxided mane. She rubs her fingers down her creamy arms. Her skin’s beauty reminds me of good, soft things—peaches, magic hour sunlight, babies that never cry. She yells, “Touch this skin, darling, touch this skin, honey! Touch all of this skin! OK? You just can’t take it! You’re just an overgrown orangutan.” She pronounces orangutan so that each syllable awakens and develops a soul.
Drag queen Dorian Corey also demonstrates the high art of meanness during her interviews. New York learned the extent of it after AIDS killed her. Friends were cleaning out her home and found a mummified hustler among her sequins and feathers. Somebody had wrapped his corpse in imitation leather and stuffed it in a trunk. Shrouding him in pleather was perhaps the cruelest part of the violence.