by Myriam Gurba
Around noon, I’d strap on sandals and go for walks along our neighborhood’s sidewalkless streets. I sidestepped llama loogies while cradling biographies of famous women. I fell into their pages down by the abandoned barn. Feminism, the smell of hay, barbed wire. Sunshine that I didn’t have to share with anyone. Weeds.
Having so much leisure time and freedom embarrassed me. I loved sitting in the countryside reading, but it wasn’t constructive. It didn’t seem fair. I decided to be a volunteer. I would donate my time to the library or some other quiet place.
I rode into town with Dad, and after leaving his building, I wandered across the train tracks toward a line of people waiting to be served free food at the Salvation Army. I left them behind and continued walking alongside the oaks shading the courthouse lawn. I left them behind too. Magnolia trees flirted with me near the public library’s promenade.
I gazed at the bronze statue outside city hall. When I was five, Dad pointed to it and told me, “That statue is called Mother and Child Miss the Bus.” While the statue might not actually be called that, it definitely conjures the mood.
I skirted the Methodist church, Chinese restaurant, and drugstore/ice cream parlor.
A tiny art museum had opened next to the drugstore. Wisteria snaked up its tinted windows. I meandered into its pentagonal interior.
The art hanging on its tiny walls made me feel like my entrance was destiny.
Woodblocks depicting waves, mountains, cherry blossoms, sumo wrestlers, and pretty ladies abounded. They represented a microcosm of eighteenth-century Japan. I was reading about this kind of art. I was meant to volunteer here. With and for the art of the floating world.
Ukiyo-e.
I walked up to the liver-spotted, white-haired lady minding the front desk.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m on summer break from college, and I’d like to volunteer here.”
“All right,” she creaked. “We’re looking for docents.” She smiled. I couldn’t tell if her teeth were real. “You’ll be the youngest.”
“Good,” I said. “I prefer the elderly.”
The liver-spotted lady, Patricia, was right about my youth. My covolunteers were five mature women, one for every weekday, and their companionship made me an interloper in a real-life version of The Golden Girls.
Staring at the empty gallery one afternoon, I sat beside a jellybean-shaped old lady, Muffins. Muffins checked me out and then fished a card out of her pocket and handed it to me. In a voice as alive as it was chubby, she said, “I’m a Poseidon Society representative.” I wondered if this meant she oversaw gatherings for enthusiasts of maritime gods. I pictured green complexions, shells covering areolae, bubbles spitting from gills.
“Have you considered what you’re going to have done with your remains?” asked Muffins. “It’s never too early to start thinking about that.” Looking at my neck, she asked, “How old are you, dear?”
“Nineteen.”
Her second and third chins jiggled as she replied, “That’s not too young.”
I read Muffins’s card. A trident pointed at her phone number in the corner.
“What is the Poseidon Society?” I asked.
“We’re an organization that advocates cremation. It’s the forward-thinking way of dealing with your remains. We also contract burials at sea.” Muffins looked around the empty gallery in case of eavesdroppers. She lowered her voice. “There are certain places where we’re not supposed to dispose. I can make those disposals happen.”
Interesting. Muffins was an ash pirate. I shoved her card into my smock pocket.
“I’ll definitely start thinking about this,” I said.
Muffins tugged at the tummy of her shirt. She looked pleased.
While sharing docent duties with the most flirtatious of the ladies, I discovered she lived in my neighborhood, in a house that looked like a Swiss chalet.
“Charming,” she said to me, extending her hand. “As in, ‘It’s charming to meet you.’ That’s my name.”
I wondered if Charming had suffered through a lot of Charmin jokes and figured she must have, so I didn’t bring it up. It was the same thing with my old math teacher, Lipshitz. No one even bothered to mock him.
Aside from her name, Charming didn’t really intrigue. But Patricia, the oldest old woman and the one I’d first asked about volunteering, did. I preferred hanging out with her. I got historically turned on as I listened to her share the lore of her life. She had that thing some elders develop where they compulsively narrate their youth while offering real talk a young person would censor. I thanked the goddess of old age for the days that this woman was my companion.
Once, we were talking about libraries and how I’d almost volunteered at one instead. Patricia said, “I read so much as a child.”
“Me too!” I interrupted.
She continued, “I read every book they had at our library, and then I found books the librarian kept on a special shelf for books that I wasn’t supposed to read, and you know what? I read those, too. That’s how I learned about rape. A man would get a woman alone, trick her into a corner, and then . . . the chapter would end.”
I told her, “I learned about it from my grandma! In Mexico, when we’d visit, she’d paint portraits of me, because she’s a painter, and to get me to sit still, she’d tell me stories. She called rape violación. Like, in this one story she told me, some revolutionaries raped some nuns, and then they killed them, and while they were tearing the joint apart to look for gold, they found dead baby skeletons in the convent walls! Sluts!” I joked.
Instead of exclaiming, “Oh, dear! Your grandmother told you rape fairy tales?” Patricia said, “That’s the word some of the books from the special shelf used, too. Violate. I’ve worked with women who’ve been abused and raped. I volunteer at a women’s shelter, too, and some of the ladies,” she folded her claws together and placed them in her lap, “I think they like it.”
I mentally disagreed with her but said nothing. I respect my elders. Plus, I wanted to hear what bullshit she’d say next. (I sensed she had yet to be exposed to third-wave feminism.)
She went on, “We had one lady who came in and her husband had stuck his rifle inside of her and threatened her. She stayed with him. How could you stay after someone did that to you if you didn’t like it?”
I thought I understood how a lady could loathe a situation like that but stay in it, but I felt ill equipped to explain this paradox. I was a C student.
Nothing says you have a career in art, especially an unpaid one, like swaddling yourself in a shapeless black shroud. An art history teacher was coming to lecture us on the Japanese art exhibit he’d helped install, so that morning I’d slipped on a black blouse, black skirt, and black shoes. My hair color did not require alteration. Neither did the color of my soul.
I meant to bring the Ishiguro book to the art talk but forgot it on the kitchen counter with my purse. I walked empty handed across the train tracks, past the Salvation Army, the courthouse, the library, the church, the Chinese restaurant, and the drugstore. I entered the art museum and sat among my fellow crones. We listened and nodded as the goateed art history teacher introduced himself and lectured us about the unbearable lightness of cherry blossoms. He droned on about Buddhist scripture, mulberry bark, urban pleasure districts, kabuki heartthrobs, and geishas, geishas, geishas.
I savored my smugness. I pursed my lips. I’d learned a lot of what he was telling us from my book.
The goateed art history teacher explained, “This genre of art is ukiyo-e. In English, that’s—”
“Floating world,” I interrupted.
The art history teacher’s goatee gave a start. Have you ever noticed that sometimes it’s not people’s skin that reacts to the world, it’s their facial hair? His goatee-mustache combo asked, “How did you know that?”
“I’m reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World,” I answered. “I also went to Japanese school.” I smiled.
> My smugness kicked up a Fuji-sized notch. I remembered the smell of the black ink our sensei made us dip our calligraphy brushes in. It had the faint stink of overripe mangos. I’d reveled in the fact that I could spell my first, middle, and last name in elegant letters that other kids couldn’t read.
The art history teacher handed sheets of colored paper to us. I picked up an orange one, and he showed us how to fold our paper this way and that until we each had a paper crane. Again, something I’d done before. We pushed our flock to the sidelines, and the art history teacher gave us more paper and bossed us around, leading us in the creation of a basket.
Carrying a plastic bag of red-and-white peppermints, he walked from basket to basket. He held the bag over our receptacles and tipped it. Candies spilled inside. I felt like I was back in class with Yuka. I thought of titties.
At two o’clock, I carried the crane and basket I’d made to my cubbyhole. I set them inside and headed for the door. I growled “Domo arigato!” at the art history teacher.
Floating into the afternoon sun, I started my walk to Mom’s work.
I walked along the edge of the library parking lot, kicking magnolia pods out of my way. My black heels clicked. I turned the corner. Chemicals from the pool where I’d learned to swim freshened the air. I looked to my right. I sneered. The DMV. I’d successfully failed my driving test there three times. Historical fact: Cleopatra, the Virgin Mary, and Helen Keller never learned to drive, and they changed the world.
I crossed the street and sniffed at honeysuckle climbing the fence around the plant nursery. I headed past some weird brown building I assumed offered social services to women—I don’t know why, but the building just gave off an abortion vibe. I crossed the railroad tracks cutting down the middle of the street. An old-timey Coca-Cola bottling plant loomed noirishly behind me.
The sky hung super clean, as if it had been Windexed. I thought maybe I had seen Elizabeth, the Lyon’s waitress, back by the pool. I thought I’d spied her skinny body hurrying through the parking lot. Since she’d seemed in a hurry, I hadn’t said hi. I’d chosen to ignore Elizabitch.
She was not a bad person. She was ditzy. People referred to her as Elizabitch because it was fun to say.
Elizabitch.
Elizabitch.
I stepped onto the curb in front of the rambling Spanish-style mansion that was my favorite house in the neighborhood. I meandered along the stucco fence rising beside the mansion’s lawn. Here comes a classic moment.
A possessive part of me wants to hoard this story. I want to chipmunk or squirrel away the memory of this event, place it in a tree trunk with the memories of all the other rapes, attempted rapes, and gropes, memories that will never be released or consumed. When a man asks, “What did he do to you?” he’s asking to eat one of these traumatic acorns. Girls never ask for these seeds. They know what it’s like to be degraded and fucked by this world, to be made a big-time bottom by life. They don’t need the details of my particular shame to construct empathy.
Girls have always left my nuts, my tragic acorns, alone. Uneaten.
I know I can be mean, but I also want to be likeable. I just don’t want to be so likeable that anyone wants to rape me.
Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition. Like the man who gave my gay cousin HIV, or like my grandfather, who gave my grandmother the clap.
You can “get” schizophrenia or bipolar in the genetic sense. You might inherit genes that predispose you toward hearing voices or intense fluctuation of mood. In that sense, these conditions are “given” to you. But they aren’t given to you in the same way watching your father cut off your mother’s head on Christmas gives you PTSD.
I want to be a likeable female narrator.
But I also enjoy being mean.
I always get crushes on people who are mean to me.
I’m mean, but I’m not so mean that I’ve ever raped anybody. I’ve never grabbed a strange woman, pulled down her underpants, shoved my face into her pussy, and inhaled. That’s a special kind of mean.
Omnipresence
My catechism teacher, a white nun with sky-blue eyes, taught me that god is omnipresent. He is a he and he is everywhere. He is in the sky. He is in the birds. He is in the grass. He is in you. Whether you like it or not, he is in you.
God is like rape.
Rape is everywhere too.
Rape is in the air.
Rape is in the sky.
Rape is in the Bible.
Rape happens at the neighbor’s.
Rape happens at home.
Rape happens in the dugout.
Rape happens in the infield.
Rape happens in history.
Rape happens at bakeries.
I’ve watched children rape donuts with their fingers.
Rape gave birth to Western civilization and maybe your mom.
Stranger rape makes me think of Camus.
A stranger chose me to rape.
There was no nepotism involved.
Basically, I got raped for real. (I’m being cheeky here.)
Stranger rape is like the Mona Lisa.
It’s exquisite, timeless, and archetypal.
It’s classic. I can’t help but think of it as the Coca-Cola of sex crimes.
You never predict that rapists are lurking in the sun, sky, and trees. In other words, humans are as they seem. Seeming is real. After a stranger ambushes you and assails your private parts, everything becomes new. Everything is reborn. Everything takes on a new hue, the color of rape. You look at the world through rape-tinted glasses. You understand that you live in a world where getting classically raped is possible and that classical rapists lurk everywhere, even in impossible places. Like, is that a moth or is that a rapist? Is there a rapist hiding in that fresh-cut bouquet of sunflowers? Is that a rapist in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? It’s a nerve-racking proposition. It’s like being at the edge of your seat at a horror movie, but the horror movie is your life, and you’re the girl who knows just how evil the ordinary guy is. This girl gets to live, but she under stands that her job is to tell the story. Film theorists call this person “the final girl.” Laurie Strode, the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, is a good example. Sophia is not. For every final girl, there is a cast of actors who must be sacrificed. It’s all very Aztec.
Strawberry Picker
I’m unqualified to tell the story of Sophia Torres, but since she’s dead, so is she.
A BOOK WITHIN A BOOK: THE SHORT, MEAN LIFE OF SOPHIA TORRES PROLOGUE
The man who’s about to sexually assault me murdered Sophia Torres. That’s how I sort of know her.
I don’t know her at all, really. I’ve never seen her, never touched her, but the man who touched me touched her too. Sometimes I feel like I know her better than I know most living people. We share this thing. A man, a Mexican. All three of us, the trinity of us, are Mexican. She and I share a fear of him. We share what it’s like to have him touching us and watching us. Breathing on our faces. We both understood that he wanted us dead. She wound up dead. I mostly didn’t.
Besides having survived, there are other ways I differ from Sophia. Although I’m Mexican, I grew up in a nice house with books, cable TV, and a white cleaning woman. I grew up with middle-class pleasure and privilege. Sophia didn’t. She came to the United States from Mexico, picked strawberries for white people, and had a boyfriend who got murdered. She got raped, beaten to death, and left in a park. I can almost hear the Statue of Liberty whispering, “I’m sorry . . .”
It’s not fair that I’ve had so much privilege. And by privilege I mean life.
The privilege of surviving doesn’t feel good. It makes me feel guilty. It makes me not want to enjoy strawberries.
Parts of Sophia must’ve looked like strawberry compote once he was done with her. Sauce in the moonlight.
THE ONLY
CHAPTER: MOST OF IT HAS ALREADY BEEN GIVEN AWAY BY THE PROLOGUE
There’s hardly anything to say about Sophia. I learned about her by watching TV. A local news anchor referred to her as a transient who’d been bludgeoned to death in Oakley Park. The rest of what I know I’ve gathered from newspapers and court documents. Articles with headlines like “Battered Body Found at School” gave me bits and pieces. These headlines shared space with others that read “Heavy Rains Leave State Pretty Soggy” and “Two-Snouted Pig: Remains of Ditto Will Help Science.” Her murderer’s appeals are the documents that hold the most information about her life. The words “Appellant’s Opening Brief” are centered in the middle of one page. The bottom of this page is stamped crookedly: “Death Penalty.” The brief has a section devoted to Sophia’s life. It says that Sophia was born in Mexico in 1961 and came to Arizona. She had a boyfriend, but somebody shot him or stabbed him or something. This made her depressed. She wandered from Arizona to California. She wandered around town. She spent her time quietly eating lunch at the Santa Maria Salvation Army. She kept to herself. She picked strawberries. People accused her of being withdrawn. One night, under the full moon, a guy, a very normal-looking guy, struck her with something over and over till he destroyed her face. He put himself in her vagina, too, and got cum on her dress. The police found her stuff strewn around the park. This trail of personal belongings means that he terrorized her, chasing her and chasing her before he turned her into nothing.
Exquisite Corpse
I hate found poems. Found poems are so tacky. That said, I used court documents to make a found poem for Sophia. I think it’s a suitable tribute. Police found her in a park. They collected bits and pieces. All I know about her are bits and pieces. Rape cuts everything into bits and pieces.