Monstress

by Lysley Tenorio

  “You’re staring at my tits, hon.”

  The ice slips from my hand, slides across the cement onto the dirt.

  She manages a smile, shrugs. “People look all the time.” She glances at them herself. “Four years ago, when I came to the States”—she gestures at her breasts, like she’s trying to display them—“there’s nothing here. Just flat. All empty. So now, if people want to look, I let them. They’re mine, right?” She puts out her cigarette, lights another. “It’s the same thing with Erica. Hers turned out really nice, really—”

  “More ice?” I reach for another blue bag. “There’s ice.”

  She reaches out, puts her hand on my shoulder. “I’ve embarrassed you. Sorry. That wasn’t Coke in my cup.” Raquel pulls a silver flask from her purse, unscrews the top, and holds it upside down. “All gone,” she sighs. “I should be gone too.” She gets up, but she’s off balance. “Walk me to the door?” She puts her hands on my wrist, holds it tight. I don’t know that I have a choice.

  We step inside, work our way through the crowds in the kitchen, the living room. People look but they don’t stare, and I think we can slip out quietly. But then I see the Mendoza brothers on the couch, eyeing Raquel, smirking at one another. My guess is that they’ve gone from childhood bullies to the kind of men who would follow a girl to her car with whistles and catcalls.

  I help Raquel with her coat. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “I’m at the end of the street.” We step outside, walk down the driveway. Raquel takes my arm again, her hold tighter this time.

  “Maybe you should’ve had Coke after all,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “I need to be this way tonight.”

  We get to her car, a beat-up Honda dented all over, with a missing back window replaced with plastic and duct tape. “Time for you to go back home,” she says, leaning against the door. She searches her purse for her keys, not realizing she’s holding them in her left hand.

  Then she says, “Oh, shit.”

  I see it: on the corner, seven women, tall and big as Raquel, empty out of a minivan and head toward Ma’s house, their heels clicking loudly against the sidewalk.

  “I told them they shouldn’t come,” Raquel says. She takes a step toward them but I don’t let her go. “It’s not our problem,” I say, then take the keys from between her fingers, walk her to the passenger’s door. I unlock it for her, then get into the driver’s seat.

  “What about your guests?” Raquel asks.

  “I don’t have any.” I start the car, watch the women enter Ma’s house one by one. “Where to?”

  “San Francisco.”

  I drive down Telegraph Avenue, head for the bridge.

  “You’re a nice man, Kuya Edmond.” Raquel reclines her seat, turns toward the window, like she’s watching the moon. “Can I call you that? Kuya?”

  “Why not.” No one else will, and Eric never did.

  It’s less than ten minutes from Ma’s house to the bridge, and yet I never cross it. Yesterday, when I drove to ID the body, was the first time in years that I’d been to San Francisco.

  The time before that was when Ma kicked Eric out. He was seventeen. She found him in his bedroom, made up as a girl, in bed with a guy. She told them to leave, and told Eric not to come back. “For good this time,” Eric said on the phone. “But there’s nowhere for me to go.” He was breathing fast and heavy, fighting not to cry.

  Delia and I were living in Richmond, a good half hour away. But who else was going to help my brother? “Find a place,” I said, “and I’ll drive you there.”

  When I got to the house, Eric was sitting on the curb, a suitcase and an orange sleeping bag at his feet. He looked up at me, and what I thought were bruises was just makeup smeared together. “She tried wiping it off with a dishrag,” he explained. “I look awful, don’t I?”

  “Get in the car,” I said, then went inside to check on Ma. She was sitting at the top of the stairs, still in her Denny’s uniform, Dad’s terrycloth robe draped over her lap. She had just gotten home from a late shift when she found Eric. “I brought home a sandwich for him,” she said. “He doesn’t want to take it. If you’re hungry—”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  She nodded, went to her room. I heard her lock the door.

  I went back outside, got in the car. Eric was in the passenger’s seat, putting on lipstick. I grabbed his wrist, squeezed so hard he dropped it. “Didn’t I tell you,” I was shouting now, “you don’t do this here. You want to play dress-up, that’s fine. But not in Ma’s house. You keep it to yourself.”

  “I’m not playing dress-up,” Eric said.

  I started driving. “Just tell me where to go.”

  Eric gave directions, and before I realized it I was on the Bay Bridge, bound for the city. He had a friend with a spare couch who lived in the Mission neighborhood. I headed down South Van Ness, turned onto a dark street that got darker the farther down we went. “Stop at the next house,” Eric said. I pulled up in front of an old peeling Victorian. “Here,” I said, and I put four twenty-dollar bills in his hand. He gave one of them back, reminded me that Mother’s Day was coming up, and asked if I could get flowers for Ma.

  He got out of the car, but before he closed the door he leaned in. “It was the first perfect night I ever had,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

  I didn’t. “Call me in a few days,” I said.

  Eric walked toward the front door, dragging his things behind him. At the top of the driveway, he turned around. We looked at each other, as though neither of us knew who should be the first to go.

  What I wished then I’m wishing now: that I’d reached over and opened the passenger door. Maybe then we could have made our way back to Ma’s, or to a place neither of us had been to before. An all-night diner off the freeway. A road that dead-ended with a view of the city. If we’d had more time, I could have taken him home. Maybe then, things could have stayed the same.

  It took me hours to find my way back to the bridge.

  Ma finally spoke to Eric a year later, just in time for his high school graduation. But she never invited him to live in the house again, and he never asked to come back. Eric’s room is storage space now, but mine she left as is: my childhood bed against the window, my blue desk beside it, Dad’s wicker rocking chair still in the corner. It’s like she knew Eric was never coming back, and I always would.

  I tap Raquel on her shoulder. “We’re here,” I say. “Tell me where to go.”

  For now, Raquel is homeless; a pipe burst in her apartment building three weeks before, flooding every unit. She’d been staying with Eric ever since. Had she said this before I got in her car, I’m not sure I would have driven her home.

  It takes forty minutes to find parking, and when we do, it’s blocks away from Eric’s building. Walking, we pass drunken college boys negotiating with prostitutes, homeless kids sharing a bottle, cops who seem oblivious to everything around them. “I get scared at night,” Raquel says. I let her keep hold of my arm.

  Eric’s building is on Polk Street. Two teenage girls sit on the front steps, smoking cigarettes. “New boyfriend, Miss Raquel?” one says.

  “Ask me again in the morning and I’ll tell you.” Raquel laughs, high-fives both girls.

  We take the stairs to the third floor, head down a narrow hallway lit by fading fluorescent lights. Eric’s apartment number is 310. The door is white, like all the rest. “I’d meant to visit,” I say. Raquel says nothing.

  She takes the keys, lets me in. “After you, Kuya.” I don’t know how I’m getting home.

  Those times I spoke to Eric, I imagined him sitting on his windowsill, and what his apartment might look like: wigs and dresses piled on a red leather couch, Christmas lights framing every window, drooping down from the ceiling. It was the kind of place where I would stand in the middle with my arms folded against my chest, careful not to touch anything; I’d keep an eye on the door, ready to escape at any moment. But wh
en I step inside, everything is muted—there’s a metal desk, a cream-colored futon, a cinderblock bookshelf with a stack of newspapers and magazines. On the windowsill are two framed pictures: one is of Ma and Dad in Long Beach, when they first came to the States, and the other is of me, from a time I don’t remember. I’m just a kid, four or five, looking unbelievably happy. I don’t know why or how. It seems impossible to me that anyone could be that pleased with life.

  Raquel offers a tissue. I tell her I’m fine.

  She goes into the tiny refrigerator beneath the desk, takes out a Mountain Dew and a small bottle of vodka. She mixes them in a paper cup, stirs it with her finger.

  Then she takes out a bottle of pills from her purse.

  “Headache?” I ask.

  “Nothing’s wrong with my head.” She pops a pill in her mouth, sips her drink, makes a face when she swallows, like it hurts. “Hormones,” she says, “no pain no gain.” She takes another sip.

  “There’s pain.”

  “Figure of speech, Kuya. It goes down easy.”

  “There must be pain. There has to be.” I think of Eric on a table, surgeons cutting into his body, needles vanishing into his skin. I think of that studio audience giving him the thumbs-down, like a jury deciding his fate. I think of Ma telling Eric he was dead. “The things you do. To prove yourself. We loved him as is. That should have been enough.”

  Raquel walks over, stands in front of me eye-to-eye. “You think that’s why we do this? To prove a point to you? Listen, Kuya Edmond. All of this”—she unfolds her arms, takes my hand by the wrist and puts it on the center of her chest—“I did for me.” She keeps it there, presses it into herself like I’m supposed to check for a heartbeat, but she lets me go before I can feel anything.

  “I should get back,” I say. She nods, walks me to the door. I make a tentative plan to stop by next week, to pick up some of Eric’s things, though I’m not sure what I can rightfully claim. She says yes, of course, anytime, like she doesn’t believe that I’ll ever return here.

  Just as I walk out the door, she hands me forty dollars for the cab ride back to Oakland, and refuses to take it back. “You brought me home,” she says. “If you didn’t, I could be dead too.” She starts crying, then puts her hand on my face. I don’t come closer, but I don’t pull away either. “She loves you,” she whispers, “okay?” Then she holds me, her body pressing against mine. I wonder if this is how Eric felt after he changed, if the new flesh made him feel closer to the person he held. I won’t ever know, but I wish I could stay this way a little longer, listen to Raquel whisper about my brother the way she just did, in the present tense, like he’s still going on.

  The next morning, Ma is sitting at the bottom of the stairs, a vinyl garment bag over her lap. Eric’s body is being prepared for tonight’s viewing. We need to deliver his clothes.

  She says nothing about the girls from the HoozHoo, doesn’t ask me where I went. But on the way to the funeral home, I can feel her staring at me, like she’s waiting for me to confess to something I didn’t do.

  Loomis is waiting in the lobby. “We’ve set up a room, Mrs. Dominguez,” he says. We follow him through the lobby, but pass his office and continue down the hallway. “There’s a phone inside, if you need anything.” We stop in front of a metal door. He looks serious, like he’s worried for us. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  Ma shakes her head.

  Loomis takes a breath, nods. “All right then.” He turns to me. “It’s good that you’re here,” he says, then leaves us.

  Ma opens the door. I close it behind us. Eric lies on a metal table with wheels, a gray sheet covering him from the neck down. A strand of his hair hangs just over the edge, the darkest thing in this white room. I can see the incision on his neck, the thread keeping his lips shut.

  Ma takes the garment bag from my hands. She goes to Eric. I stay by the door. “They have staff who can do this,” I tell her.

  She hangs the bag on a hook on the wall, unzips it. It’s a suit. One of Dad’s. “We have to change him.” Ma puts her hand on Eric’s right arm, rubs it up and down, the sheet still between them. She bends over, whispers “Ang bunso ko” between kisses to his cheek, his forehead, his cheek again, weeping. For a moment I mistake this for tenderness, her gesture of amends, a last chance to dress him the way she did when he was a boy.

  Then she stands up straight, wipes her eyes, breathes in deep, and pulls several rolls of ACE bandages from her purse. Now I understand.

  She lifts the sheet, folds it neatly down to his abdomen. For the first time, we see them, his breasts. They look cold and hard and dead as the rest of him, like they have always belonged to his body. If this was how he wanted to live, then this was how he wanted to die.

  “Lift his arms,” Ma says.

  I don’t move.

  “This will work. I saw it on TV. Women who try to look like men. This is what they do.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Everyone will see him tonight,” Ma says, unrolling a bandage.

  I tell her to forget tradition and custom, to keep the casket closed. “You picked out a nice casket for him. Beautiful flowers.” I keep my voice calm and move toward her slowly, like a person trying to save someone from jumping off the ledge of a skyscraper. “They won’t see,” I say, “they won’t know.”

  “I will,” she says.

  I reach for her arm but she pulls back. She steps around, stands behind Eric’s head, slips her hands beneath his shoulders, manages to raise Eric a few inches from the table, but he slips from her. Ma tries again, her arms shaking from the weight of him, but she’s just not strong enough. “Please,” she says, looking at me. One way or another, she means to do this, and she’ll only hurt herself in the end.

  I walk over to the body. The light in here is different than it was in the morgue. Yesterday, the room seemed lit by a gray haze, and it took me only a second to recognize my brother. Today, the light makes shadows on his face, and I notice the sharpness of his cheekbones, the thin arch of his eyebrows. His lips are fuller than I remember, his neck more narrow. “It’s still him,” I say, but Ma doesn’t believe me.

  His body is hard from the embalming fluid, and he is heavier than I expected. To hold him up, I have to slip my arms beneath his, fold them across his chest. I can feel him, and I don’t care how we look: we are together and we should stay this way, for all the moments we can. We have been apart for so long; soon he’ll be gone for good. “Leave him alone,” I say, but she doesn’t listen, and then her hands separate me from my brother as she works the bandage round and round his breasts. I kiss the back of his neck, just once, in love and in apology.

  Ma keeps going, another bandage and then one more, so tight the breasts vanish back into him, like they never existed. If my brother were alive, he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  I say nothing to Ma on the way back to her house, and I let her off at the bottom of the driveway. Then I make my way to Telegraph Avenue, heading for the bridge.

  I find my way to the Tenderloin, and as if it was meant to be, find a parking spot right in front of Eric’s building. I hurry inside, pass the same two girls on the doorstep from last night, run up the three flights of stairs, down the hall to the end. I knock on the door.

  “Who is it?” Raquel says.

  “Edmond,” I say. “The brother.”

  And she opens to me.

  Felix Starro

  We were here to perform the Holy Blessed Extraction of Negativities on unwell Filipino Americans. Mrs. Delgado was our 153rd patient, but we treated her like the first and let her tell the story of her pain as if we had never heard it before. “It begins here”—she tapped her heart, then three spots on her stomach—“then here and here, sometimes here. Bastard American doctors tell me nothing is wrong, like I’m so old, so crazy-in-the-head.”

  “Then it’s good you came to see us, ma’am,” I said. I helped her onto the massage table, laid her flat on her back. Then I
lit a pair of candles, hung plastic rosary beads over the covered mirrors. A wreath of dried sampaguita flowers made the cigarette air of our dingy hotel room smell like Philippine countryside.

  I unbuttoned her blouse halfway up, rubbed coconut oil on her stomach, forehead, and chin. Then Papa Felix, my grandfather, stepped forward. He rolled up his sleeves, pulled his thinning hair into a ponytail. He put his palms on Mrs. Delgado’s belly and began to massage it, gently at first with his fingertips, then hard and deep with his fists. I closed my eyes, chanting Hail Marys over and over, faster and faster, and when I looked again Papa Felix’s hands were half gone, knuckle-deep in Mrs. Delgado’s body. Blood seeped out from between Papa Felix’s fingers, and one by one he extracted coin-size fleshy blobs and dumped them into the trash can by his feet.

  “Negativities,” he said.

  Mrs. Delgado lifted her head to look. “Thanks be to God,” she said with a sigh I’d heard a thousand times before—that breath of relief that there is someone in the world, finally, who understands what hurts you.

  There was a time when I might have apologized, if only in my head. “Two hundred dollars,” I said. “Cash only.”

  I wiped the blood from her stomach, helped her to her feet. She reached for her purse, gave me the money. But then she did something no other patient had ever done before: she took out a camera. “When I told my sisters that Felix Starro was coming to San Francisco, they didn’t believe me.” She pressed a button, adjusting the zoom lens. “May I?”

  Papa Felix shook his head: the camera flash could disrupt his spiritual vibrations, he said, which could thwart the healing of patients to come. “But for you,” he said, “okay.” He undid his ponytail, smoothed back his hair, and smiled. I moved to the right, to stand outside the picture.

  In my family, the only recipe passed down was the one for blood, but Papa Felix said I could never get it right. “Too thin,” he said. “Like ketchup and water mix-mix.” He dipped a finger into the plastic jug of blood and held it up to the fluorescent bathroom light. “What idiot would believe it’s his own?”

  Too much water, not enough corn syrup. Always my mistake. “At least it’s red,” I said, but he just grumbled about my carelessness and lazy attitude and insisted that something in America was making me different; he guessed it was the greasy food, the low-quality air of our hotel room, my terrible luck of turning nineteen in midair, en route from Manila to San Francisco. “I’m the same,” I said, but he took my shoulders and stood me in front of him, flicked my temples twice and rubbed them in slow circles, as though what I was feeling could be diagnosed. “You’re not right, Felix.”