by Achy Obejas
“We don’t have to know everything, do we?” she asks. “You see, I barely remember what happened anymore. You’d have to put me under hypnosis to get the details out of me, and even then I don’t know if I could make them make sense.”
The third problem is that the twenty-two-year-old is on the other line, asking me if we can have dinner next Monday (which, as she well knows, conflicts with my Monday counseling appointments—a deliberate power play on her part, I assume). She says it’s our one-year anniversary. She wants to go to this incredibly expensive Italian restaurant that she, on her puny little art student work-study check, can’t afford. I am not dazed by what she expects me to spend—after all, I’m the one with the job and the notoriety—but somehow this thing between us has gotten away from me. How the hell did a year go by already?
“Or maybe,” she says. “We should just break up. I mean, relationships never last. I don’t know any that do. We’re going to break up sooner or later, and the longer we stay in it, the harder it’s going to be, the more hurt we’re going to be. Maybe we should just call it quits and celebrate the rational side of ourselves. We could toast to a new beginning as friends.”
I tell her I have to see her right away.
The train is out of control, swinging drastically on the elevated tracks. I’m trying to hold onto the bar above my head, but I’m convinced that every time the car takes a curve, I’m going to throw up. Even though it’s the middle of the day, we’re squeezed together in this furnace on wheels. There are strangers’ faces within inches of my face, strangers’ thighs vibrating next to my thighs. I close my eyes, trying to still the rumble in my stomach, until I’m sure I can feel someone’s breathing on my breast. But when I open my eyes, there’s no one there, just the same sweaty faces all around me. I need some air.
“Excuse me,” I say, trying to make my way to the space between the cars. I reach out and grab things, but I don’t always know what. I’m drenched, rivulets running down from my armpits. I feel the bodies shifting around me, hesitantly making a way. I can feel their hands passing me around as if I were a dirty postcard at a pervert’s party. For a moment it feels reassuring—I know I’m not going to fall with all this soft support—but in an instant I’m embarrassed and disgusted and hope no one’s recognized me.
“Jesus fucking Christ, let me out,” I say to someone—a conductor maybe, or perhaps a teenager carrying a pale blue beach bag. I don’t know. They all look at me blankly. All that happens is that the train takes another manic turn and tosses me against a window, my face smeared against the glass. I hold my jaw because it hurts, but no one, not even the little Eastern European widow standing next to me, says anything.
I manage anyway to get my hands on the door handle, to wiggle it a little so that for one glorious instant I can hear the rush of air and the crazy clattering of metal between the cars. Then the door slams shut again, and I have to pull hard, using my legs against the door frame to pry it open. When I get outside, holding precariously to the link chain running from car to car, it feels like a shrieking wind tunnel. My hair is swept back hard, and I feel sand and dirt hitting my face like tiny needles. All I can think is that I want to hold my heart—that whimpering beast in my chest—but I don’t dare let go of the little link chain.
When the train stops, I breathe in and out like a cardiac patient. I can’t see because my hair has fallen in front of my face in clumps. But I don’t move. My hands are forged around the chain that runs from car to car, and no matter what I tell myself, I can’t peel my fingers from it. I can’t seem to generate commands from my brain to my limbs.
“Miss, miss,” a voice says, and without opening my eyes I know it’s the Asian man standing in front of me between the cars. He is holding another piece of paper out to me.
“What the fuck do you want from me?” I whisper, furious. My hands—which are suddenly barely recognizable as my own—leave the link chain and open, each finger aimed at him like some terrible claw. He’s surprised, but he catches my wrists, and we begin to struggle, bouncing each other off the link chain.
“Miss,” he says in a panic, but his voice gets lost in the noise. The train starts to pull out of the station, and we’re trapped between cars. I see him opening his mouth to say something, but I can’t hear him. The train bangs one car against the other, the rails hiss beneath us, and all around the wind is howling.
We wrestle like this until we reach the next stop—the last before the train dives underground to Clark and Division. As soon as we come to a halt at the station, the man, terrified, jumps over the link chain, losing a shoe as he catches the edge of the platform. “You bitch,” he shouts, disappearing into the train station. His face is twisted and pained. “I thought you knew!” he screams at me, tears running down his cheeks. I’m trying to figure out how he got away from me so quickly and what the hell’s going on when I feel the train door behind me pop open.
“Hey, are you okay?” asks a voice. I turn around and see a tall, pink-cheeked public transit policeman. “What happened?” he asks, leading me gently inside the car. “Are you okay? What happened?” he asks over and over.
I sit down and without explanation immediately start crying. The transit cop sits next to me, his meaty arm around my shoulders. When I go to wipe my nose with my hand, I realize I’m still holding the Asian man’s mysterious white paper.
In an aquamarine CTA office, fresh off the train, I sit and drink water from a Styrofoam cup. When I try to explain the situation to the transit police officer and the official Chicago cop sent to take my report, I fully expect them to be assholes, to dismiss me as some self-important dyke radical with a wacko sense of the world. As I look at the three officials in front of me—the transit cop, the real cop, and a woman I think is some kind of sex assault counselor—I’m ready to tell them to go fuck themselves. All I can think of, though, is the twenty-two-year-old, waiting for me outside my apartment. I can’t even call her.
“You say you’d seen him around,” says the woman. “Does that mean you knew him?”
“Who?” I ask, still thinking about my girlfriend, surely pacing outside my building, wondering what happened, worried and maybe scared. I just want to comfort her, that’s all.
“The man who assaulted you,” the woman says.
“Him?” I say, remembering the note in my hand. “No, I don’t know him. But I see him all the time. He keeps giving me notes.” I hand the white paper, still folded, to her. The official Chicago police officer takes it from her and unfolds it very carefully, as if he were defusing a bomb. The beefy transit cop looks over his shoulder, awed. Then the three of them read the note together, their eyes darting from left to right.
“You’re Maria de los Angeles?” asks the transit cop, his face all aglow. “From OutNews?”
I nod, but I’m holding my breath, ready to cut this motherfucker down to size if I have to.
He grins, the grin pushing his fat cheeks up so that they almost make his eyes close. “God, I’m so glad to meet you,” he says, offering me his hand. “I read your column all the time.”
“Apparently, so does your friend,” says the woman, handing the note back to me.
I take it cautiously, amazed that they really seem to know who I am. Then I glance quickly at the white paper, the writing small and carefully crafted, and hold it up to read it.
“Dear Maria, I read your column every week because I know you know what’s it like to be gay and a minority. Very few people understand that when we, who are gay and a minority, enter the gay community we are really exchanging one series of expectations for another, one set of stereotypes for another. The worst part is that the gay community doesn’t really accept us if we’re a minority, but because we want so much to prove to everybody that we made the right decision, we don’t always tell the truth. I’m glad you’re not like that. Thanks for representing us so well. Your faithful reader, Rajeesh.”
I am suddenly overwhelmed by a hollow feeling in my stomach, a
s if I’m going to throw up or stop breathing.
“Camila, I need to ask you a favor,” I say. I’m standing on the L platform, waiting for a Howard train and talking on a public phone to my ex-girlfriend. I have an unspoiled view of the back porches of a half dozen townhouses, all spilling over with piles of newspapers for recycling, Weber grills, and potted plants. Everything looks cozy, settled. There’s not another soul at this train station.
“Listen, Maria, I want to talk to you, but I have rehearsals in twenty minutes,” Camila says. “Can we continue this later? I mean, before Monday, because I wasn’t kidding, I really want to stop couple counseling.”
I tell her everything in an instant: that I couldn’t care less about couple counseling at this point, that Sally’s waiting for me in front of my building, our whole relationship up in the air, that I’m running really late because I was nearly assaulted on the train, and that I can’t find Sally anywhere.
“I just tried her house,” I say. “I was hoping she was still hanging around—although I can’t imagine it because it’s been forty minutes—and I’m kind of freaked out, and I was wondering—I mean, Camila, you’re only a block from my apartment—if you could—please!—just go down there and see if she’s still there and tell her I’m on my way, really, and explain what happened.”
Camila, to whom I’ve been confiding all of my ambivalence about Sally, sighs. “I thought you weren’t that interested in her anymore,” she says. “It sounds like if she’s mad and wants to break it off, you’re getting what you’ve wanted all along.”
“Look, that’s not what I want,” I say, suddenly adamant. In the distance I see the blinking lights of a train headed toward the station. The rest of its body is blurry, a mirage in this terrible heat.
My ex-girlfriend laughs. “María, that’s exactly what you’ve been saying you want!”
“Camila, please!”
She’s enjoying this more than she should, but I’m at her mercy, so I let it all go. I tell her the train’s nearing, and soon I’ll be headed home where, with her help, I’ll hopefully find Sally, all arms and legs like a tangle of Pick-up Sticks, sitting on my step pouting and angry but, yes, forgiving—forgiving of me.
“Sally passed the porch test?” Camila asks, teasing.
I stop and try to form the picture—Sally and me rocking on a rustic old porch in some fantasy future—but all I can see is an image of Sally on the train, wearing an engineer’s cap and waving at me through a mist. I’m waving back, but I’m choked up and scared. Is the train going to stop? Is she going to jump off? Am I supposed to hop on? And what if I miss?
“Sally passed the test, didn’t she?” Camila asks again, but she’s not laughing now. There’s something almost tender about her tone, something that tells me she’s going to find Sally no matter where she is, and tell her where I’ve been and why, and all that she knows to be true about how I feel.
“Listen, Camila, I love you,” I tell her as the train pulls up. It’s one of the newer ones, with less of a rattle and more of a hiss, but I can’t hear anything at all. I hang up the phone and climb into an empty car, where it’s cool with air conditioning, and the metal on the bars offer my reflection back to me, long and carnival-like.
I throw myself in a seat, lean my head back, and close my eyes. I try and I try, but I can’t picture Sally much older than twenty-two, not even at thirty-four, and I think, there is no right person, we will all love the wrong people, over and over and over. Then, as the train yanks itself around a corner, I suddenly see us—me all gray, her with her red hair white-streaked, her arms sinewy under rice paper skin, straddling my rocker with her long legs, telling me I’m not going anywhere.
We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?
for Nena
I’m wearing a green sweater. It’s made of some synthetic material, and it’s mine. I’ve been wearing it for two days straight and have no plans to take it off right now.
I’m ten years old. I just got off the boat—or rather, the ship. The actual boat didn’t make it: We got picked up halfway from Havana to Miami by a gigantic oil freighter to which they then tied our boat. That’s how our boat got smashed to smithereens, its wooden planks breaking off like toothpicks against the ship’s big metal hull. Everybody talks about American ingenuity, so I’m not sure why somebody didn’t anticipate that would happen. But they didn’t. So the boat that brought me and my parents most of the way from Cuba is now just part of the debris that’ll wash up on tourist beaches all over the Caribbean.
As I speak, my parents are being interrogated by an official from the office of Immigration and Naturalization Services. It’s all a formality because this is 1963, and no Cuban claiming political asylum actually gets turned away. We’re evidence that the revolution has failed the middle class and that communism is bad. My parents—my father’s an accountant and my mother’s a social worker—are living, breathing examples of the suffering Cubans have endured under the tyranny of Fidel Castro.
The immigration officer, a fat Hungarian lady with sparkly hazel eyes and a perpetual smile, asks my parents why they came over, and my father, whose face is bright red from spending two days floating in a little boat on the Atlantic Ocean while secretly terrified, points to me—I’m sitting on a couch across the room, more bored than exhausted—and says, We came for her, so she could have a future.
The immigration officer speaks a halting Spanish, and with it she tells my parents about fleeing the Communists in Hungary. She says they took everything from her family, including a large country estate, with forty-four acres and two lakes, that’s now being used as a vocational training center. Can you imagine that, she says. There’s an official presidential portrait of John F. Kennedy behind her, which will need to be replaced in a week or so.
I fold my arms in front of my chest and across the green sweater. Tonight the U.S. government will put us up in a noisy transient hotel. We’ll be allowed to stay there at taxpayer expense for a couple of days until my godfather—who lives with his mistress somewhere in Miami—comes to get us.
Leaning against the wall at the processing center, I notice a volunteer for Catholic Charities who approaches me with gifts: oatmeal cookies, a plastic doll with blond hair and a blue dress, and a rosary made of white plastic beads. She smiles and talks to me in incomprehensible English, speaking unnaturally loud.
My mother, who’s watching while sitting nervously next to my father as we’re being processed, will later tell me she remembers this moment as something poignant and good.
All I hold onto is the feel of the doll—cool and hard—and the fact that the Catholic volunteer is trying to get me to exchange my green sweater for a little gray flannel gym jacket with a hood and an American flag logo. I wrap myself up tighter in the sweater, which at this point still smells of salt and Cuban dirt and my grandmother’s house, and the Catholic volunteer just squeezes my shoulder and leaves, thinking, I’m sure, that I’ve been traumatized by the trip across the choppy waters. My mother smiles weakly at me from across the room.
I’m still clutching the doll, a thing I’ll never play with but which I’ll carry with me all my life, from apartment to apartment, one move after the other. Eventually, her little blond nylon hairs will fall off and, thirty years later, after I’m diagnosed with cancer, she’ll sit atop my dresser, scarred and bald like a chemo patient.
Is life destiny or determination?
For all the blond boyfriends I will have, there will be only two yellow-haired lovers. One doesn’t really count—a boy in a military academy who subscribes to Republican politics like my parents, and who will try, relatively unsuccessfully, to penetrate me on a south Florida beach. I will squirm away from underneath him, not because his penis hurts me but because the stubble on his face burns my cheek.
The other will be Martha, perceived by the whole lesbian community as a gold digger, but who will love me in spite of my poverty. She’ll come to my one-room studio on Saturda
y mornings when her rich lover is still asleep and rip tee-shirts off my shoulders, brutally and honestly.
One Saturday we’ll forget to set the alarm to get her back home in time, and Martha will have to dress in a hurry, the smoky smell of my sex all over her face and her own underwear tangled up in her pants leg. When she gets home, her rich lover will notice the weird bulge at her calf and throw her out, forcing Martha to acknowledge that without a primary relationship for contrast, we can’t go on.
It’s too dangerous, she’ll say, tossing her blond hair away from her face.
Years later, I’ll visit Martha, now living seaside in Provincetown with her new lover, a Kennedy cousin still in the closet who has a love of dogs, and freckles sprinkled all over her cheeks.
At the processing center, the Catholic volunteer has found a young Colombian woman to talk to me. I don’t know her name, but she’s pretty and brown, and she speaks Spanish. She tells me she’s not Catholic but that she’d like to offer me Christian comfort anyway. She smells of violet water.
She pulls a Bible from her big purse and asks me, Do you know this, and I say, I’m Catholic, and she says that, well, she was once Catholic, too, but then she was saved and became something else. She says everything will change for me in the United States, as it did for her.
Then she tells me about coming here with her father and how he got sick and died, and she was forced to do all sorts of work, including what she calls sinful work, and how the sinful work taught her so much about life, and then how she got saved. She says there’s still a problem, an impulse, which she has to suppress by reading the Bible. She looks at me as if I know what she’s talking about.
Across the room, my parents are still talking to the fat Hungarian lady, my father’s head bent over the table as he fills out form after form.