The Best American Essays 2013

by Robert Atwan

  2.

  Francisco, a beautiful boy, sits at the front of the classroom—center stage. When the girls arrive, they circle around him and slip into desks nearest to him, glancing his way and trying not to giggle every time he makes a comment. He leans forward with folded hands, his feet planted solidly on the floor like some goody-goody schoolboy. When he asks a question—usually something ridiculous—the girls turn completely around in their seats to stare at him. I say, “The midterm exam will be next Tuesday at ten—don’t be late!” And he raises his hand and asks stupidly, “Uh . . . Miss? Is there a midterm for this class?” Then one of the serious, not-so-beautiful boys murmurs, “Pendejo! Open up your ears,” and beautiful Francisco will wink at me and yawn. His eyes, translucent and emerald green, make me uneasy. He resembles Johnny Depp but speaks with a slow rising cadence that reminds me of my grandfather—my grandfather who ended up with seven kids and a gambling habit. Francisco tries to flirt with me by calling me profesora in that lazy melodic lilt, though around here—at age thirty-two—I am old enough to be his mother. I wonder which girl will get to him first and then whether he’ll pay child support or if he’ll want to get married ever, being so beautiful and all.

  3.

  Our neighbors across the street whom we call the “Meth Joads” remind us of Steinbeck’s Joads because they drive around in a patched-together pickup truck that teeters under the weight of a perpetual mass of junk: wooden pallets, broken bicycles, miscellaneous car parts. Unlike Steinbeck’s Joads, however, they are most definitely meth addicts, with the telltale tense jaw, the broken shorn-down teeth, the deep bronchial laugh that inevitably turns into a coughing fit. The Meth Joads have a teenage daughter who sits on the front porch and talks on the cordless phone. One day she’s out there talking and I notice that Misty Joad’s belly has grown big as a watermelon and is now straining against the seams of her tank top. A few days later, Mr. Meth Joad hauls in a yard-sale crib from his pickup truck. It’s all good, he says, straining under the weight of the crib, a cigarette between his teeth. The girl, Misty Joad—no more than sixteen and heavily pregnant—paces the sidewalk and talks languidly on that phone like she’s waiting for somebody to pick her up and take her somewhere. Every few days a red-faced teenage boy shows up and the two of them drive away in his Mustang. Then the boy stops coming. Eventually Misty Joad walks the sidewalk with her newborn baby. But imagine her power. Even with dirty bare feet and no plans, her body has declared a coup: If you won’t love me, here’s a person who will.

  4.

  We live down the street from the continuation high school. When we first moved to the neighborhood, Patrick and I referred to it as the “bad-boy school” because that is what my grandpa used to call the school on his street in Boyle Heights. At that bad-boy school in Boyle Heights, enormous pigs lived belly-deep in black muck—muck that emitted an odor so foul that we tied bandannas over our noses and gagged anyway as we rode our bikes past the pigs’ enclosures. I’d spy on those bad boys in their rubber boots as they shoveled muck and slops, and I was glad that, being a girl, I would never have to shovel shit or get my ass bit the way that rogue hog had once bitten Grandma’s ass (after it had chased her around the neighborhood for a good forty-five minutes). That pig had gone hog wild.

  The bad-boy school in this town, though, turns out to be a bad-girl school, with a special program for pregnant teens. Sometimes I see those girls exercising on the track—twenty or thirty of them—a whole herd of teenage girls walking around in circles, hands supporting their lower backs, bellies sticking out a mile. Merced gets hotter than hell, so usually the girls pant dramatically and fan themselves, periodically squinting and shielding their eyes from the merciless sky. After their babies are born, most of these girls will come back to school for a few months, and then the majority of them will drop out of school altogether.

  I push my own baby in her stroller and observe the girls through the chain-link fence as they complete their one-mile forced march. One starts brushing her hair. The teacher cajoles her and momentarily she quickens her pace, but as soon as the teacher turns around, she slows down again. Looking at them, I try to imagine the moment of love or rage or revenge that brought them here. Most of their babies’ fathers will not marry them. Most will continue living in poverty as single mothers. The majority of their children will have learning and behavioral problems. Some of those babies will end up right here back on this very same track.

  In the Teen Parent Program, girls are taught life skills, like how to eat healthy foods such as carrot sticks and cottage cheese rather than a machaca burrito (two out of three girls are Latinas) and the three-pack of Hostess Ho-Hos. (And who knew that a bacon guacamole Whopper had 1,020 milligrams of sodium and 43 grams of fat?) They watch filmstrips in which fetuses unfurl their tiny limbs; black guppy eyes grow human eyelids; a prehistoric fin separates into ten toes. Later the girls learn about scary conditions like preeclampsia and gestational diabetes and suddenly they understand why so-and-so’s cousin gave birth to that extraordinary thirteen-pound infant, the one with doughy, waterlogged skin and a protruding tongue.

  They learn how to change a diaper and how to hold a baby’s head so it won’t bob off to one side. They learn about the soft, downy triangle called the fontanel and how their babies’ brains, soft as cream cheese, can be felt by gently placing a finger on that eerie soft spot. They learn about shaken baby syndrome and sudden infant death syndrome and then they are given stickers with emergency contact numbers—school counselors, social workers, paramedics. They are told that they will not be alone and that caring for a child requires both strength and humility. We are your support system, the girls are told. We are here for you.

  Across the street from the bad girls’ school on the corner of 20th and G Streets, Rollins’ Donuts emits the thick, cloying scent of golden doughnuts as they bob around in the fryer. After school the girls disregard what they’ve learned in health class and line up out the door, shifting their pregnant selves from foot to foot while absent-mindedly massaging the undersides of their bellies, bellies now covered by maternity jeans with spandex tummy panels. Some girls, the rebels, forgo the secondhand maternity clothes altogether (too old-ladyish!) and let their bellies hang over the elastic bands of their sweatpants.

  Just downwind from Rollins, at the government-approved WIC grocery stores, girls can cash their WIC vouchers for Similac, double-wide boxes of Cheerios, and big hunks of cheese.

  In the hospital after my daughter was born, the nurse had brought me yet another stack of forms to fill out. “Here,” she’d said, handing me a pen. “You’ll definitely want to fill these out.” I hoisted the baby onto one shoulder, and just as I had begun to write my name in the first box, I saw that I was about to fill out a Women, Infants, and Children Assistance application.

  “Oh, I don’t need this,” I said. I tried to give back the pen, but she wouldn’t take it. “Oh, but you have to,” she said. “You get free food like bread and milk and formula. Formula’s expensive! You’ll see! You can get WIC vouchers until the baby is five years old! Imagine five whole years of free food!”

  “No, that’s okay, really . . .” I said again. She pressed on.

  “Why the heck not?” she said, leaning close, giving me a conspiratorial look. “Almost everyone gets approved. Well, just think about it.”

  After she left, I crumpled the forms and shoved them into the trash can. Certainly, I thought, WIC is for very poor women—single mothers, teenagers, and migrant farm workers. Being of sound mind and body (or so I tell myself) and having a job, I knew I would not need such assistance, and now I admit to being slightly offended that the nurse had automatically assumed that I needed WIC at all. Based on what? Based on my dark hair and my last name? But in her defense, the odds that a Latina with a newborn baby would need government assistance are, in this town, indeed, very high. Here, population 60,000, one in four women and children is enrolled in WIC. That’s a lot of formula. A lot of cheese.


  Every day on my street little girls push strollers with real babies in them. The girls walk with their friends—other young girls with their babies—sometimes three or four of them at a time. They walk shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the street like they belong to a fertility parade. Sometimes we have to drive around them, swerving gently to the opposite side of the road. “Careful,” I’ll tell Patrick as he turns the corner. “It’s a stroller brigade.” It’s an evangelist’s nightmare (or would that be a dream come true?).

  Times have changed since my grandmother and great-grandmother (with sixteen children between them) dodged the shame of being dark and young and pregnant. Without reliable birth control, access to good schools (only the inferior “Indian schools”), and decent jobs with decent wages, what choices did my grandmothers have? Even if girls did not have babies of their own, they often became mothers by default—by tending to younger siblings, nieces, and nephews. Babies were a fact of life. The wealthy had nannies and nursemaids at their disposal. My grandmothers were these nannies.

  Fast-forward a hundred years and observe the very same girls—now unfettered by husbands and tradition—now walking side by side in the middle of the street, chattering away as they adjust their babies’ juice bottles, talk on their cell phones, and halfheartedly dangle little rattles above the strollers. Unlike my grandmothers, the girls in this town have access to birth control pills, integrated schools with specialized programs, and guidance counselors who are supposed to tout the merits of college—even to the brown and black kids. The girls in my town have more choices, though some people might argue that when you’re young and poor and your own mother lives on welfare, those choices are hard to find. Love, on the other hand, is easier to find. Love (or the promise of it) is free. Love makes you feel good, especially if you’ve never had a father, even if only for a few minutes. Love is beautiful: think of walking hand in hand with the green-eyed Francisco at sunset along some fictional beach. And if you end up getting pregnant, we are here to support you. And here’s a fact about babies: babies now come with many cute accessories—headband bows for little bald heads; Lilliputian T-shirts imprinted with hip slogans like Ladies’ Man or Change My Diaper, Biaatch!; knit caps with built-in Mohawks and bunny ears; pacifiers with vampire fangs painted onto the mouthpiece.

  5.

  The obstetrics nurse at Mercy Hospital dims the lights and draws the threadbare curtain across the center of the room, a flimsy illusion of privacy between me and my fourteen-year-old roommate. Both our babies had been born around midnight, and now, with babies swaddled and sleeping inside plastic, wheeled bassinets, sleep seems like a superb idea.

  Everyone has gone home, and I’m alone for the first time with my newborn daughter. I can’t stop staring at her. She’d been the loudest, angriest baby in the nursery, apparently furious at having been exiled from the womb. With our bodies now separate entities, the world, to me, seems upside-down. Sharp-edged. Somewhere a car smashes into a tree. Airborne bacteria and spiky pollens float past. And who is this little human, anyway? What about her life comes predestined? I try to see the tiny, scrolled-up map inside her skull—the grid within her brain, the catalogue of her choices and, ultimately, her destiny and desires: an aversion to crowds, a deep compassion for animals, a love of money, a penchant for mathematics, a blind left eye.

  Meanwhile, my roommate and her boyfriend are lying side by side in bed and watching back-to-back episodes of Cops. Crack addicts make excuses, a homeless woman sobs over a lost dog, a teenage girl’s baby-daddy just put a steak knife to her throat. My roommate’s baby-daddy adds his own running commentary: Damn, look at that dude! He’s so fucked-up. Hey! Remember when the cops beat the shit out of my uncle? My roommate murmurs something in reply. And what’s going through her head? I try to remember being fourteen. I try to imagine being a mother at age fourteen.

  Then my roommate’s baby starts crying. The crying gets louder. Pretty soon the baby wails like a peacock. Ay-ya! Ay-ya! Suddenly the sound of a crying baby makes me feel crazed, like an animal with its paw caught in a trap about to gnaw off its own foot. My head throbs. My spine aches. I wonder if these fourteen-year-old children know what do with an infant. Do I know what to do with an infant? How will we keep these babies alive? How will these children survive the years ahead? Jesus, where the hell are the nurses? I think. I consider saying something, but I’m too exhausted. I’ve got seventeen years on her, and compared to her, I’m already an old lady.

  6.

  The Lamaze teacher said, “Visualize that your uterus is a beautiful spring bud, slowly unfurling its leaves, blossoming right before your eyes.” This teacher talked so gently about the body and the birth process—how childbirth happens every single day—how women’s bodies are designed for birth. Her voice, like a drug, hypnotized me as I sat cross-legged with the other pregnant women—some with husbands, some with boyfriends, some with their moms. We breathed deeply and traced slow circles across our bellies—a technique that supposedly calms the body, calms the mind.

  At the onset of my labor, then, I successfully envisioned a Georgia O’Keeffe orchid, a soft swirl of violet petals and leaves. As labor progressed and the pain intensified—surprise, surprise—my orchid melted away and in its place appeared an engulfing blackness. Eventually, as the pain intensified into lightning bolts, a creature took shape—half man, half goat, with horns, red eyes, and lobster claws, the whole bit; he could have leapt right out of a Francisco de Goya painting. By the eighth hour, the beast had burst right through the floor and had me around the waist and was trying to pull me into the hole that had opened up in the middle of the floor.

  Lying in my hospital bed in the small-town Catholic hospital, I decided to surrender myself to the image; in other words, I would not swim against the current and try to turn the demon back into an orchid. Instead, I would face my nightmare head-on: I would grab that son of a bitch by the horns and peer directly into his flaming eyes. Ha! Two can play at this game, I thought. Here’s what the Lamaze teachers don’t tell you about childbirth—particularly childbirth without drugs: the goal is not really to stay calm and focused; the goal is to stay alive! Once, when I was eighteen, a fortuneteller peered at my palm and said, “Mmm . . . lucky you live in these times. One hundred years ago you would have died giving birth.” In this small-town hospital, though, one hundred years does not seem like that long ago.

  So with the fortuneteller’s words echoing in my head, I told myself to fight like a warrior. Screaming felt good. I screamed until my throat became sandpaper. Suddenly a nurse grabbed me by the wrist and said sternly, “Dear. You are wasting an awful lot of energy on all that screaming. Why don’t you get a hold of yourself? Just calm down.” I jerked my arm away and glared at her. How dare she tell me how to have a baby? How dare she intrude into my hallucination? Anyway, I thought, she had no idea what she was talking about—all those Lamaze lies, all that childbirth propaganda designed to shut us up—to keep the masses sedated so that nurses and doctors don’t get headaches.

  So I decided that with each contraction I would scream every bad word I knew. Bitch, motherfucker! I didn’t care what anyone said, not Patrick, not my mother, not even the nuns. It felt good to fight, then, to unleash my rebellious tongue.

  Later I wondered about my fourteen-year-old roommate, who had been giving birth at the same time. Why had I not heard her voice? Did she not feel such intense pain? Had she been given an epidural? Was I too melodramatic—me with my death-defying warrior fantasy? Now I wish I’d talked to her during those two days that we shared a room. We talked a little bit, but she averted her eyes. Painfully shy. Not much of a talker. I wish I’d asked her how she got through it and whether she dreamed up some flower or some other beautiful thing. What thoughts and images travel through the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl as she becomes a mother?

  7.

  Carl Jung believed that his schizophrenic patients’ hallucinations should be treated with the same respect that one mig
ht treat any “real” scenario that one can see with one’s own eyes. Jung believed that if a person truly believes that he is being chased by wild tigers in a jungle, you should not remind him that he is actually sitting in a comfortable velour armchair and not running for his life through a jungle. Nor should you tell him that the tigers are simply phantoms or figments of his imagination. Instead, you should help him to survive. Instead, ask him, “Have you a spear? Have you a rifle?” Urge him to jump into the river or to grab a big stick. In acknowledging the phantom tigers, Jung believed that he could reaffirm and validate the contents of a mind, those contents being significant in their symbolism and necessary to the survival of their host.

  8.

  Here is a true story that has become part of our local mythology:

  Late one night, fifteen-year-old Benita Ramos pounds on the door of a random house. Crying and begging for help, she says that a man has just kidnapped her son—snatched the stroller right out of her hands. When police arrive, Benita explains that she was visiting the baby’s father (age seventeen) at his parents’ house, and as she was walking home and pushing the baby’s stroller down the dark path, a tall, skinny white guy tackled her from behind and then ran off with the stroller, her baby boy still strapped inside.