by Myriam Gurba
Regardless, she’d become a corn husk.
Aztecorexia.
I cut out pictures of Ofelia’s gaunt face. My X-ACTO knife decapitated Degas’s dancers’ heads. I pasted Ofelia’s where theirs had been.
When I presented this project, the graduate student shook her head. She said, “You can’t use photographs for your next assignment. Try something else.”
I hate being told I can’t do things.
The graduate student wandered away from me. She strolled from table to table, handing out a sheet with a list of local art exhibits we could check out and critique. I skimmed it.
I paused on the first female name, Hannah Wilke. Her exhibit Intra-Venus was showing at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I didn’t know who Wilke was or anything about her work except that it might have to do with being a woman. For that reason, I circled her name.
Her first name was a perfect palindrome: Hannah. hannaH.
Mine is an imperfect one: Myriam. mairyM.
Her last name ended in K E.
My middle name ends in K A.
I wanted this nonsense to mean something.
I wanted to cry eureka. Eureke.
I could talk about the train ride to San Francisco and how grown up it made me feel to go to the city alone to see art.
I could talk about the time in junior high when Dad took us to San Francisco for vacation and I stared at everyone, even the pigeons, wondering, “Are you gay?”
I could talk about how the sunlight moves in San Francisco. San Francisco sunshine is a bisexual woman moving through the fog.
I could talk about ghosts in San Francisco.
Allen Ginsberg’s ghost runs through North Beach. It streaks. Its ghostly penis flops. AIDS ghosts weep beside trashcans. Only certain people can see them.
None of these things matter, though. Not ghosts, Allen Ginsberg, or queer pigeons.
What matters is a woman making art out of everything she was born with.
I was standing in front of evidence of a woman doing exactly this.
Hannah Wilke was dead—the brochure in my hands told me so—but I was still watching her make art out of everything she was born with. The brochure explained that Wilke and her husband collaborated to make these photographs while lymphoma ruined her body. The brochure showed younger pictures of her with gum stuck to her face, chest, and back.
I put my face near her dying face. She looked pretty with lymphoma. I didn’t feel bad thinking that. Her face reminded me of Mom’s. It had good bone structure and a nose that was a natural work of art.
Maybe Wilke called this series Intra-Venus because she found Eros in dying. Eros is present in every image. In many, she seduces. She covers her face with her hands and swings her thinning hair. She does the things girls do that make boys think we like them. Wet hair hangs over her eyes and cheeks. She looks at the camera’s lens through the thinning strands. This reminds you who’s in charge. A palindrome.
There is Hannah (I feel I can call her by her first name because of what she’s shown me) and she wears a puffy white cap. A bag is taped above her breast. Her black robe flops open. Underneath, tubes.
Hannah in house slippers.
Hannah in bed.
Hannah in a bathtub.
Hannah with a little bit of hair.
Hannah without any hair.
Hannah on the toilet.
Hannah wraps herself in a blue blanket and of course becomes the Virgin Mary, which is so much fun. Almost as fun as building a fort out of boxes and blankets. If you’re a girl and a Catholic, you’ve done it. You’ve hoisted a blanket over your head and realized this blanket makes me divine. Put me in a manger. Hand me my Messiah. Let’s make one out of whatever is available. Women are resourceful. I will pretend that this bean burrito is the newly born Jesus. I will pretend that my fourteen-year-old cat is my donkey. I will pretend that this pillow stained by nosebleeds is my baby’s daddy.
Becoming the Virgin Mary is a good game to play when you’re dying. It reminds you that you can cheat death and that you also can’t.
Sunshine came into the gallery.
I ignored it.
Hannah Wilke was modeling how to be me for me. She was an artist, but she also had what it took to be a saint, at least in pictures. She taught me that most of being a saint is looking the part. Saints visually convince us of their power. They use props the right way. They especially use their eyes the right way. Blankets make them magic. Hair makes them magic. Less hair makes them even more magical. No hair makes them eternal. Their mortality looks timeless.
Saints are artists.
Other artworks hung in the gallery. I felt like maybe they were jealous of how reverentially I was treating Intra-Venus, so I walked over to them. They were pictures of beach houses. I couldn’t give them what I was giving to Hannah. They didn’t deserve it. I looked out the window and felt ill. I didn’t have to love these other pictures. Maybe they were art, but they weren’t a woman showing me how to become myself.
I held my graded critique of Intra-Venus. Ten out of ten was written in green ink at the top. In the margin beside my second paragraph were the words, “Yes, I agree. She was BRAVE.”
I watched the grad student’s sweater sleeves jiggle while she passed back the other critiques. I said, “Excuse me?”
“Yes?” she answered.
“What do you find brave about Hannah Wilke’s work?” I asked.
In a tone you use to explain the obvious, she answered, “Well, it’s that . . . she was so beautiful.”
I looked at the grad student like I needed more.
She added, “She was so beautiful, and she let us see that beauty destroyed.”
I thought this was an unsatisfactory answer. Maybe the grad student’s mom wasn’t a beautiful woman whom she got to watch age. Every pretty woman who lives a long life gets to perform an art project called “watch my beauty disintegrate.” It’s not revolutionary. It just happens.
c c cummings
I shared my room with two girls of color. One of these girls was a rare thing for Berkeley: a Chicana. Her name was Ruth and she came from the outskirts of Fresno. She kept a framed photo of her dad shaking hands with Bobby Kennedy by the grim reaper bong on her desk. She had beauty like Hannah Wilke and Mom. She was so beautiful that she had a boyfriend. I knew when it was him on the phone because after answering, Ruth would say, “Yes, I accept,” to the operator who’d asked her if she’d take a collect call from jail.
Ruth slept on the bottom bunk. She tacked a Metallica poster and a Metallica calendar up on her chunk of wall. She drew rosaries around her boyfriend’s court dates. Inside the rosaries, she drew angels that looked more like bats.
Helen got the top bunk. Helen was Chinese. She taught me to say “shut up” in Chinese. She never studied for school. She sat at her desk studying hair manuals. One of her aunts sucked at English and was getting her cosmetology license. Helen was going to take the written part of the exam for her. I admired Helen for this.
I didn’t, however, care for the way our dorm smelled. It smelled of dry humping and shrimp ramen.
I stayed in bed one morning with cramps. They were so bad they were giving me visions.
“Get up!” said Ruth. “Go to class.”
“I can’t,” I groaned. “I’m birthing blood clots.” My cramps martyred me. I deserved canonization.
I missed my English lecture. I was taking a class on modernism. I didn’t know what modernism was; I just wanted to take an English class. So far, I’d sort of read The Sound and the Fury and To the Lighthouse. We were going to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness.
While lecturing on To the Lighthouse, Dr. Brown drew an H on the blackboard. She explained, “This is how Virginia Woolf did it. Despite being stream of consciousness, there’s a distinct structure to To the Lighthouse. Part one, ‘The Window.’” Her fingers tapped the H’s left vertical bar. “Part two, ‘Time Passes.’” Her
fingers tapped the H’s connecting dash. “Part three, ‘The Lighthouse.’” Her fingers tapped the H’s concluding column.
My classmates nodded. I drew an H in my notebook. I labeled its parts as Dr. Brown had done. I didn’t care about form, content, structure, or Mrs. Dalloway. I wanted to hear about Virginia Woolf’s suicide. I wanted to know how wet her clothes had gotten in the River Ouse. I wanted to know how many rocks it had taken to weigh her down. The best feminists are dead and wet.
The best feminists are martyrs.
Dr. Brown lectured to a mostly empty room. I always sat next to a black boy whose eyes invited me into his life. There was nothing malicious or misogynistic in them. They were filled with houndstooth scarves and homosexuality. He told me his name softly, “Nathan . . .”
Nathan liked David Lynch movies. He delivered gelato in the city. I could tell he’d had braces. His teeth were way too straight. He agreed with me that the class was stupid and that our professor kind of sucked.
Dr. Brown couldn’t help sucking. Her voice cracked when she lectured, and her syllabus said that it was her first year being a professor. The first year doing anything new usually sucks, but Dr. Brown had the clothes part down—she dressed like an English professor. She wore earth tones and shirts that seemed like vests or vests that seemed like shirts.
She slurped black coffee while she lectured, and her hands shook so badly that the liquid sloshed over her paper cups’ edges and spilled. Her silver watch caught the classroom light. When she waved her hands to make points, her armpits dazzled me. Matted tails spilled out of them. I’d never seen a woman with armpit hair like Dad’s before. Mom always trimmed hers once it became stubble, and she’d bought me an electric razor and taught me to trim mine, too.
I modernized my armpits. I quit dragging a razor across them.
Our English reader held a few Xeroxed Harlem Renaissance poems, Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” some Salman Rushdie stuff, and a bunch of bullshit by Gertrude Stein that got on my nerves. I tried to read it, but it infuriated me. Alpha-Bits cereal. Its marshmallow letters float in milk and make no meaning. That was Gertrude Stein.
During her Stein lecture, Dr. Brown read an excerpt from A Book Concluding With As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story. “Nearly all of it to be as a wife has a cow, a love story . . .” she began, and as she got deeper and deeper into the piece, she read it with more and more Eros. It was gross. She made her voice cummier and cummier. Finally, once she was done, Dr. Brown said, “Stein was a lesbian. Her lover was Alice B. Toklas.” She grinned. Her hand trembled. Her coffee cup quaked. Coffee spilled. She said, “This piece is about bringing a woman to orgasm.”
Nathan and I cringed. Dr. Brown hadn’t committed completely to her cummy reading about the cows. To read a piece about lesbian e e cummings, you have to fully commit, but you could tell Dr. Brown was scared. The fright tarred her performance. It made it pathetic.
I looked at Nathan. We gave each other embarrassed smiles. Here was a straight lady (she talked about Mr. Brown sometimes) trying really hard to read a gay poem passionately. Nathan and I knew that we would have been better suited for reading this poem about gay cumming. Our eyes silently agreed on this. Our eyes shook hands on it.
Nearby, a thirty-something white lady student looked on, unaffected by Dr. Brown’s reading. She crossed her legs and brushed her blond hair behind her ear.
A pale student with dreads spent our entire time in English section diagramming how Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey applies to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Overlapping circles covered the whiteboard.
It was so annoying.
I really didn’t care.
The only thing I cared about in that book was racial dynamics.
Our TA was handing back our papers. She was a thick white girl with blond hair, a Norse name, and intense calves.
She set my essay facedown on my desk. I flipped it over. A scarlet C marked it.
The letter made me feel cold and wet.
I was not an artist, a revolutionary, a saint, or a genius.
I was a C student.
The TA set a paper on a desk by a tall window. Fir arms stretched past it. A black girl who often came to class in a leotard and sweats was seated at the desk. Her hair was pulled up in a Degas bun.
The TA pulled her leather satchel off her chair. She lifted it over her shoulder. She waddled out of the room with the dreadlocked student, whom everyone suspected she was fucking.
The ballerina flipped her paper over. Skinny tears spilled and wended down her cheeks.
“A C?” she moaned. “I’ve never gotten a C.”
“I got a C, too,” I said, hoping to console her.
Her tears continued. Her legs rubbed together. I felt sad for her. I tried sending good vibes to her bun.
I turned to Nathan. His scarf sailed over his shoulder. Tassels fell against his tweed jacket.
“What did you get?” I asked him.
“A C.”
“Look!” I said to the ballerina. “Three of us got Cs!”
The ballerina said nothing. She was pretty when she cried. Bitch.
I shoved my C in my bag and walked into the hallway with Nathan. It smelled like wood and anxiety. I felt wooden and anxious. Like a termite.
I was wearing my purple sweat suit and lying in bed. Ruth and Helen were away. I stared at the ceiling and pondered my C.
I C, therefore, I am.
Nicole
Of course an elderly white dude taught anthropology. Who better to explain all the cultures and peoples of the world than he who is in charge of them?
My anthro professor stood onstage in Wheeler Hall. His pastiness stood out against the blackness behind him. He wore his hair in a bowl cut. He wore cargo shorts, hiking boots, and a khaki vest bloated with pockets. He looked ready to dig or raid a tomb.
He lectured about a Kalahari Desert tribe.
Putting his withered mouth near his microphone, his tongue made a series of wet, sharp clicks. He clicked precisely and said, “Kung. An exclamation point in front of K-U-N-G is used to denote the click. The !Kung language contains many sounds not found in English.”
The auditorium doors creaked open, but nobody paid much attention. Late students were probably trickling in.
“Yo!” someone shouted.
The professor stopped and the rest of us turned around. A lithe olive-skinned boy who lived on my floor stood in the doorway. His face appeared both frantic and elated. Excitement stiffened him. He seemed on fire to share.
He screamed, “THE JUICE IS LOOSE! THE JUICE IS LOOSE!”
Half the room gasped.
Some people laughed.
Some people applauded.
Some people groaned.
Some people booed.
I thought of white Broncos but not O. J. Not Nicole.
It was October 3, 1995.
Aesthetic Boners
You could do almost anything in and to our dorm. It didn’t matter. Since they were going to remodel it, nobody gave a fuck. Kids punched holes in the walls, tore up the carpet, and peed in corners. Kids wheeled their office chairs into the hallways and raced. Nerd couples fucked in the showers. Blood smeared the toilet seats. Diarrhea splashed everywhere. Puke coated the sinks. Even though every gender used the coed bathrooms, no one got raped in them. They would have been a bad place for rape—too busy to get a decent sexual assault in.
Our room was crumbling. Ceiling tiles detached and fell on my body. They woke me up when I tried to nap. I breathed their asbestos. They flaked their cancer onto me.
Besides the ceiling tiles, I was kept up by coffee.
Coffee became my closest friend that semester. Coffee gave me everything I needed. Coffee made my heart beat faster and turned me into a speed reader. Coffee turned me into a sweaty introvert. One cup a day became six cups a day, either from the cafeteria or a café called Wall Berlin. Coffee stained Wall’s floors. Students hung out at its wooden ta
bles and benches, reading and talking theory. Artists hung out there not brushing their hair. I huddled in the corner studying anthro flashcards. Homo habilis. Homo sapiens. Homo erectus. Australopithecus. I prayed that I would become a saint who survived on kindness, crackers, and coffees. Saltines and americanos. Yin and yang. Gluten and adrenaline. I loved the way Berkeley coffee shops smelled. And the jazz they played. Listening to jazz made me feel smart for a Mexican, and the only thing that competes with the smell of raunchy, intellectual-bullshit coffee is the smell of stinky weed. Both smell bold. Both announce power. When you smell good weed or good coffee, you know you are smelling drugs. You know that you are smelling something that will do fun things to your brain chemistry.
Sometimes, just to change things up, I’d drink Mountain Dew. I was sipping the dregs from a can of it and staring at paint bottles left over from my pomegranate project. They sat on my desk near my word processor, which resembled a typewriter a computer had given birth to. Carrying it was a struggle. A tugboat could’ve used it as an anchor.
On the wall next to my bed I’d taped and pinned pictures of men and women I found beautiful: Sophia Loren, Isabella Rossellini, Damon Albarn. Italian women and English boys gave me boners. Not physical boners, really, but aesthetic ones.
I reached for the bottles of paint, uncapped them, and squirted a little bit of each color onto a dirty paper plate. I pulled a paintbrush from my desk drawer, crawled onto my bedspread, and fantasized that I was an artist. I dipped the paintbrush into maroon and dragged its tail along the wall. I dragged paint around the beautiful people’s faces to frame them. I framed everybody, including Ida, with whom I’d posed in a photo booth for a strip of goofy pictures. That picture of us watched over my bed and so did one of Mom and me, her bathing me as a baby.
Underneath the pictures, I painted daisies in jars, premature green ones and feminine ones in reds and pinks. A crude flower garden proliferated and threatened to become a mural. I paused to assess and could see that Matisse had influenced it. I didn’t even like Matisse, but you can hate your influences.