Grey Matter
Raquel Penzo
_
Jimi Hendrix reminds me everyday--manic depression is a frustrating mess. He stares at me from a poster on the wall across the room. His eyes bore into me, his lips slightly parted in that sexy, “hey baby” kind of way. His hair tousled and processed. He is situated between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Janis Joplin on my wall, above John Belushi and diagonal to Freddie Prinze.
I wonder if he suffered the affliction or just sang about it. If a doctor stuck the label on him or if that particular group of words fit in the song better than ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘bipolar disorder.’
Tía calls this tiny collection my “Pared de Sinverguenzas”-a wall full of men with no shame. I remind her that Janis is a woman. I tell her that when I’m gone, I’d like my picture added to the bunch. She shoos me away. “No hables así. Papa Díos will punish you.”
“You mean it can get worse than this?”
“No lo tienes tan mal aqui. You have food, clothes, your own room. I never had my own room. And I let you have these crazy people on your wall. You don’t have it so bad.”
“She likes to invent problems,” my uncle chimes in. “Fake hardships.”
I’m not fond of him. Haven’t been since I caught him touching himself in the shower. During the first weeks of my medicated haze, I stumbled in and out of rooms like a zombie. I found myself in the bathroom, but had not noticed the water running and music playing from the shower radio. Through the clear plastic I saw Tía’s fat, brutish new husband gripping and stroking himself to the beat of, what after the fact I remember as some classic salsa, the kind Mami used to play when she cleaned the house. His eyes were closed and he was singing along. Tìa married him after only a six-month engagement and a two-week courtship, and I remember wondering if she knew about his shower habits before she said ‘I do.’ After that I began to spend time in my room to try and avoid him; remembering his hands in the shower made me stop eating meat from his butcher shop around the corner. In fact, meat altogether.
“Go get a job and then tell me about your problems,” he continued. I imagine what his cream colored Lazy Boy would look like with his blood and grey matter splattered on it. Tía crying at his feet. NYPD coming for me, banging down the door. His tigere brother coming to get revenge. It’s a frequent daydream that clouds my head for days before I can force it out.
~ ~ ~
My skin turns duller everyday and what used to be a nice mocha is looking jaundiced. Dark circles surround my eyes, and my face sags, aging me. My hair, once a thick lustrous mane down my back, is stringy and sparse. I’m not sure if it’s lack of care or a side effect of my illness and medication. Whatever the cause, I stopped caring until Tía and I were mistaken for sisters at the Keyfood near her house. She blushed and thanked the deli man like a dumb schoolgirl. I gave him the finger and stomped away. That night I ditched my pills and painted my room red.
“M’ija, why red?”
“I want to swim in blood,” I tell her. “I want it to cover me like the sabana from Nana’s bed.”
“Ay, niña! Don’t talk like that—quick! Make the sign of the cross. Ask Santa Barbara to protect you.”
I stood, stoic, and Tía lit three candles in front of my room that night. I didn’t tell her that the red made my head hurt for days after. It was a bad idea I lived with out of stubbornness.
------------------
In April, I stop going to school. It becomes tiresome to debate moot points with underpaid academics that think the answer to everything is in the teacher’s edition of the text. I outgrow school. Instead, I get up, drink a glass of juice, and sit on the sofa all day watching television. Tía throws fits and threatens me. I remind her that I’m old enough to drop out. Her pig of a husband demands that I get a job. I remind him to fuck off. I hear them at night fight about me, and he curses my mother many times. I keep count on the wall by my bed. By May, he’s cursed her two hundred and seventeen times. Not even my mother would have let you touch her, I think while he yells in Spanish and English. A few times, I hear him hit Tía with his disgusting, masturbating hands, and her sobs add more cloudy days to my calendar.
My mom died two springs ago. I won’t lie to myself and say angels came and took her to heaven. She hated angels and heaven and anything religious. She’s feeding the earth now, recycled, biodegradable. She never wanted a coffin and Tía was kind enough to respect that. When I watched her canvas-covered corpse lowered into the ground, I wondered how much of the heroin would still be in my mother’s body in a hundred years. What good would her poisoned remains be to the Earth? I always think perhaps Mami didn’t think it all the way through; her theory was flawed. The entire first year after her death the need to speak with her overcame me. I wanted to ask Mamí so many questions, and it seemed that I couldn’t reach her from where I was, and I had to go to her.
Last spring I took all of Tía’s Valium, the ones she takes to help her “relax.” There were only five in the bottle, what I thought would be enough to speak to my mother, but it was only enough for an extended hospital visit. Different doctors in various stages of their medical careers were in to see me everyday; I hardly took the time to remember any of their names except for Dr. Wallace – his name is on my medicine bottles. They sent me back to live with Tía before long with a pretty label I had tattooed on my arm in large, blue Gothic letters, at a hole in the wall I knew wouldn’t ask too many questions: Manic Depressive. The tattoo artist asked me three times if I was sure it’s what I wanted, but he never asked me if I was old enough to get one. He was one of those blanquitos you can spot from a mile away, who probably left school early because he was a misunderstood artist, an outsider, the type who put together a whole rebel persona- tattoos, piercings, weird, blue faux-hawk- in order to be on the fringe of cool, but still had daddy’s money to fall back on.
And he never asked me if it was okay to feel me up, either. But I got the tattoo and he got to second base.
~ ~ ~
In June, I agree to start working with Tía at her restaurant, where she cooks for and makes me serve men just like her husband. Men oozing machismo who talk badly about their women and grab my ass whenever I walk by.
“Así son los hombres,” she says, brushing me off. “Take it as a compliment. You’re a pretty girl. Smile and you’ll get more tips and less pinches.”
Her advice makes my skin crawl. I know that with my sepia skin tone and mess of hair I am no longer attractive, but apparently a pulse is all that her customers require for a good time. My mother had been a woman like this: subservient, desperate, pleasing. Stupid. Mamí believed any man that spent the night was marriage material. On second thought maybe she would have married a guy like Tía’s husband. But the men never even stuck around for breakfast. Not even my father.
Only her one boyfriend, Ignacio stayed a bit, long enough to turn Mami into a junkie and steal our only television set. My mother shrugged it off and said TV was not a necessity and did not buy one to replace it. I still think she believed Ignacio would bring it back, as if he just borrowed it. In the meantime, after putting in so many countless Saturday nights into the show, I never got to see the last season of The Facts of Life. I often wonder if the girls manage to stay best friends. Ignacio stole that from me, too.
In October, soon after I add River Phoenix to my wall on the other side of Belushi, Tía’s son, Miguel returns from Somalia. He looks different, older, sadder. When I was little Miguel seemed to be a ten-foot tall. Now we meet eye to eye, as if the war had shrunk him into a sallow version of someone I used to know somehow.
Tia immediately puts him to work at the restaurant, and even gives his friend, Elijah, who lost his leg during the “military intervention,” a job, too. The three of us share tales of woe during cigarette breaks by the dumpster in the back of the restaurant.
“Sometimes, man, I wanna find that bitch-ass dude who tricked me into the army and beat his fucking skull with my fake leg. Show him how great his fucking Army is.”
Elijah’s stories are usually woe-ier than Miguel’s, or mine, but we still tried our hand at the prize for saddest life. Even sadder was the fact that the coloring on Elijah’s plastic leg was darker than his own café-con-leche complexion; the military hadn’t sprung for an exact match. That seemed to bother him more than anything. He would run his hand through his beard, brown eyes on fire whenever he was reminded of the dark-skinned leg, as if in some way, it made him less Dominican.
“I’ll trade you a good leg for a good night’s sleep, anytime nigga, for real. This nightmare shit is for the birds.” Miguel had bags under his eyes that a stack of cucumber slices could not get rid of; they were there to stay.
Tía has called on all the santeros she knows to cure her baby of his night tremors to no avail. Every night, at least twice a night, Miguel can be heard from his room in the back of the house screaming bloody murder.
“I’ll trade you both a good leg and a good night’s sleep to just once want to live to see the next day.”
My cousin and Elijah are quiet at the ridiculousness of my statement, but I hold steady to my feelings. It’s the truth, and in my opinion, much worse than amputation and bad dreams.
“Shiiiit, come back when you got real problems, little girl, okay? Ain’t nobody in this world wanna get up everyday. You be making that shit more than it is.”
Elijah never looked at me when he said these words to me. The only time our gaze would lock is when he added:
“If it’s that bad then kill yourself already.”
Miguel gives Elijah a “what-the-fuck” look, and Elijah defends himself.
“What, man? Listen, I know she’s your cuz and she’s sick or whatever, but she’s a fucking downer! She’s the reason I had to get shot and get this fake-ass Haitian leg? Defending her stupid ass in the white man’s army? She don’t even want to live!”
All of our conversations go like this, every time we three work the same shift. Part of me wonders if Elijah picks on me to keep Miguel in the dark about our relationship, even though I know he only fucks me because no one else will fuck him.
In the pitch-blackness of his rented room in Doña Maria’s Bushwick Avenue rooming house, I sneak in after the Doña has fallen asleep in front of her novelas. He is always awake in the dark, the bright red tip of his cigarette the only guide to his bed. Most nights he waits for me naked, already hard, and no words are exchanged between us. The only sounds in the darkness are our quickened breaths and the springs in the old cot.
On a rare night he’ll ask me to rub what’s left of his left leg, kiss it even. Sometimes he’ll ask me to rub myself on it, and the deviousness of it gets me off. Sometimes he takes these pills he gets from a guy he and Miguel knew overseas, and on those nights his hands explore my entire body. On those nights I take one of Elijah’s little pills and his exploration of my body sends me soaring.
Just as quietly as I sneak in, I sneak out. Elijah never asks me to leave, in fact, he hardly says ten words to me the entire time, but after he comes and has smoked at least three cigarettes, I can feel my usefulness dwindle. So I make myself scarce.
In December Tía’s husband accuses Elijah of stealing from the restaurant. He persuades Tía to get rid of him, and even convinces Doña Maria to evict him.
“That mutha-fuckin piece of shit,” he complains to me and Miguel. “What is his fucking problem with me?”
“Nigga I wish I knew. Hell, give it three more months and he’ll get my moms to kick me out, too.”
“Where the fuck am I s’posed to go, man? Who’s gonna hire me?”
His last night at Doña Maria’s, I go to him. As quiet as I try to sneak in, boxes of Elijah’s stuff block my once clear path to his cot.
“Go home, Evie. I don’t wanna see you tonight.”
His words are cold and cut me, but I oblige and creep back out into the busy Bushwick night.
Parked nearby, I see Tía’s Bonneville. But it isn’t Tía behind the wheel. It is her pig-faced husband, and our eyes lock into a blinking contest. He steps out of the car and motions for me to get in. “Ahora, niña. I’m not asking again.”
When I get in, he lights a Camel cigarette, the kind that comes with the quirky Joe Cool matchbooks. “I’m not really sure what your damage is, little girl. Maybe your junkie madre fed you some bad shit one day or dropped you on your head, no se.” He takes a long drag of his cigarette and blows the smoke towards me. “And whatever you do in that room con ese cojo is none of my business, pero te digo que- it ends tonight.” He takes another drag, but this time he blows the smoke out the window. “Tu Tía, she worries about you. And I don’t like to see her like that. Just so you know I love that woman. She’s good people.” He pauses to smoke some more and stare at me for a minute. “But you, dios mio, you’re damaged. And I don’t want you damaging her. Entiendes?”
I only sit and stare as his fat fingers bring the cigarette to his lips, his poisoned words penetrating my ears, burying themselves in my head.
He points towards Doña Maria’s rooming house. “That boy is leaving, so that fixes part of this, but now you need fixing, too.”
And I close my eyes and brace myself for his touch. I brace myself for his breath on my neck, his hands forcing their way into me. I brace myself for what I knew all along he was capable of.
But he doesn’t do any of it- the touch, the breath, the force. Nothing. Instead he flicks his cigarette out the window and starts to drive. “I won’t tell your Tía where I found you, or what I know. But you need to go back to that hospital and get some help. You need to stop giving my wife so much grief.”
“Are you going to stop giving her black eyes and fat lips?” I hear the words escape my lips a tenth of a second before the back of his right hand clashes with my front teeth.
“Vas a’prender a respetarme! Do you hear me?” A little trickle of blood falls onto my bottom lip and continues down my chin. This was how he got Tía’s respect. “You hear me?”
“I hear you,” I say. There isn’t anything else left to say between us. He wants me back in the institution and will in turn keep my secret and expect my respect. What can I do but acquiesce? I have no place else to go. We drive all the way home in silence.
In the spring, when I’m allowed back home from the hospital, a picture of Kurt Cobain in my suitcase ready to take its place on my wall, Miguel moves in with Noelia, a girl he knew from high school who already had three children from two different men. In a couple of months, her fourth baby would be his. I learn from Noelia that Elijah moved to Pennsylvania with his cousin and was working at a bike repair shop somewhere near Philly. I act like I don’t care but inside, a small silenced version of myself wants to run off and find him.
I take up smoking to pass the time, and experiment with skipping my pills every three or four days. These new ones make me feel unreal, and I use the breaks to compose myself. On the nights I don’t take my medication, my body misses Elijah.
In the second week of May I tire of my medication and flush the pills down the toilet. I quit my job, telling Tía that I got something new at the mall through an old friend, when what I really did was loiter about the food court. Sometimes I would call my cousin Sahdi, the only extended family member whom I could stand, and she would throw me some money and some weed, just because she could. With her parents gone, full access to her inheritance and a detachment from the family very similar to my own, I feel a closeness to her, even though I’ve seen her only five times in my whole life.
“You seeing anyone?” she asks during one of our encounters.
“Just the voices in my head.”
“Nice. What do they say to you?”
“How fucked up I am.” I look to see if there’s any reaction or judgement from Sahdi, but she’s already on another plane.
“Here, take another hit…”
Sahdi is definitely my favorite.
By the end of May I’m in the middle of an affair with the manager of the movie theater at the mall, a young Columbia University student who finds me fun and exotic, completely fascinated by the dark skin and light eyes I’ve been forced to wear. Who would soon be going back to his Cambridge girlfriend and helps me lie to Tía about my employment. I meet him at closing time and together we take the long train ride to his Inwood apartment, a pre-War studio by Riverside Park.
He is not my type and that makes him perfect. His hair is too blond and his eyes too green. He has a spray of freckles across his nose that annoys me every time I see them. His skin is too milky and his lips are too thin to kiss me deeply. He is everything Elijah is not and that, too, makes him perfect. The small silenced version of myself weeps whenever I’m with him.
He lights candles and serves me whiskey in his Columbia coffee mug. He plays music he thinks will get me in the mood, and when he plays Nirvana I say, “Isn’t this a little morbid?” but he lets it play on repeat. I undress in front of him with candles flickering all around us. He buries his face between my thighs and tiny gasps and moans escape my lips despite myself. When he’s sated, he undresses and lays on his back, much like Elijah on those clandestine nights. I mount him and am transported back to Elijah’s Bushwick Avenue room. In the candlelight, he looks me in the eye and I in turn am afraid to close mine.
The last week before he leaves for Cambridge, he utters, “I love you, Evie.”
“No you don’t,” I say as I get dressed. “You love what I let you do to me. You love my skin color and my social status and my last name. But you don’t love me.” I don’t give him a chance to argue and leave the comfy pre-War by the park- the oversized reading chair, the deep claw-footed tub, the beautiful detail of the moldings on the wall, its smell of scented candle, sex and beer- for the last time, half expecting Tía’s husband to be waiting for me on the curb.
And all of a sudden I am energized, all of a sudden awake, antsy, and jittery. And hot. My neck feels like fire, the collar of my blouse igniting my skin. It overtakes me and I have little choice but to remove the blouse. I sit on the curb, blouse in hand, pink bra exposed to all of Dyckman Street. But the streets are rather empty at four in the morning, and the only witness to my striptease is the baker opening his shop across the street. “You okay, miss?” he yells across to me.
“I will be in a minute,” I yell back. He tips his hat and it occurs to me that men don’t wear hats anymore. As if men in hats would cure the hot flash that was taking over my body. It finally passes and I put my blouse back on and make the long journey from Inwood to Brooklyn, taking a nap all the way to West 4th Street. From there on I study the faces of my fellow passengers: nurses, restaurant workers, construction men, club kids—these were the four a.m. faces of the subway. Them and me.
At home, Tía’s husband is still up and sitting in his chair. I can tell my presence takes him by surprise; soft core porn on the T.V. and his hard member in his hands, mid-stroke, empty beer bottles at his feet and me sneaking in at dawn. We are both surprised.
“Coño, pero look at you coming home at this hour!” He speaks as if he’s not still in mid-stroke, as if the cheerleader on the screen isn’t going down on the other cheerleader. “Where the hell have you been?” He covers himself with his robe, gets out of his chair and before I can bolt or duck, catches me across the mouth. Again. And the bitter taste of my own blood adds fuel to my internal fire. “Maldita puta! Who are you with now? You never learn, do you? Wait till I tell your Tía- this time I won’t cover for you.”
“Tell her,” I say, turning my back to him to head to my painfully red room.
“Oh don’t worry, I will. Right after I tell her how you flushed your pills.”
His words stop me for a minute. I can’t think how he knows about my pills, and all I hear from his mouth are evil threats and I’m instantly transported to cloudy days in the hospital. Force fed psycho-babble, more, stronger pills, a condescending nurse, and surrounded by really crazy people, the kind who can kill you in your sleep.
“You’re going back to the manicomio, sucia!”
I force my legs to keep moving and lock myself in my room. My neck is hot again, and now in the safety of my room I can take off all my clothes and jump into a cool shower. I wash off the blood and sweat, and the cologne of the pre-war apartment in Inwood, and try to cool down the heat on my neck. After half an hour, nothing changes. I’m on fire and the stench of sex and self-loathing are trapped in my pores. I only have one option at this point. I won’t go back to the hospital. It’s him or me; and Tía will choose him, I know it.
How did Kurt do it? How did he find the courage? How did he pull the trigger? Was he scared?
I know where Tía keeps Miguel’s gun; Noelia didn’t want it in her house but he would not get rid of it. I watched him and Tía debate on where to keep it. Away from ‘the girl’. I watched from behind the door to my room as they finally decided on the cabinet where Tía keeps her good china, tucked inside a soup tureen. I don’t bother to get dressed; it doesn’t matter how I’m dressed anymore.
I creep by Tía’s husband, still enthralled by the lesbian cheerleaders, still drinking and naked under his robe. I see the sun making its appearance finally; Tía would be getting up soon to get ready to open the restaurant. But she won’t be opening the restaurant today. I make it to the cabinet and to the gun without making a sound. I’m not only naked, I am invisible. I’m invisible and on fire. This must be what heroin is like, what my mother felt before she died. I am starting to understand.
Tía has been good to me. Better than my mother or anyone else in the family who wanted to ship me away a long time ago. She gave me a home and food and a job. But she is too trusting. And she loves the wrong man too much.
He really is a disgusting-looking man. His body has too much hair and the hair is messy and matted and graying in most areas. He has breasts, enough to fill an A cup, and his stomach folds over his lap like a trash bag full of pudding. He’s old and sagging and truly unattractive. I look at him real hard, trying to find any redeeming value, but I can’t find it as he just sits there in his chair disrespecting Tía. In the midst of that foggy living room his sloppy, hairy, overweight body in that chair is all I can make out.
~ ~ ~
I straddle him, my cousin’s pistol cocked in my left hand. He whispers in my ear with beer soaked breath, and my stomach flips over. –Is this what you want, niña? I keep my eyes open, to take it all in. I know it will be beautiful. I know it will be freeing and gratifying, and prove that his life is nothing and mine is everything. No one will mourn him. And I will be a hero.
He enjoys it. I know he sees the gun but chooses to close his eyes and lean back in his chair, a lazy smile on his lips that let free tiny moans into the night, keeping rhythm with my body. And I know it’s going to be just wonderful.
Jimi Hendrix reminds me everyday--manic depression is a frustrating mess. He stares at me from a poster on the wall across the room. His eyes bore into me, his lips slightly parted in that sexy, “hey baby” kind of way. His hair tousled and processed. He is situated between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Janis Joplin on my wall, above John Belushi and diagonal to Freddie Prinze.
I wonder if he suffered the affliction or just sang about it. If a doctor stuck the label on him or if that particular group of words fit in the song better than ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘bipolar disorder.’
Tía calls this tiny collection my “Pared de Sinverguenzas”-a wall full of men with no shame. I remind her that Janis is a woman. I tell her that when I’m gone, I’d like my picture added to the bunch. She shoos me away. “No hables así. Papa Díos will punish you.”
“You mean it can get worse than this?”
“No lo tienes tan mal aqui. You have food, clothes, your own room. I never had my own room. And I let you have these crazy people on your wall. You don’t have it so bad.”
“She likes to invent problems,” my uncle chimes in. “Fake hardships.”
I’m not fond of him. Haven’t been since I caught him touching himself in the shower. During the first weeks of my medicated haze, I stumbled in and out of rooms like a zombie. I found myself in the bathroom, but had not noticed the water running and music playing from the shower radio. Through the clear plastic I saw Tía’s fat, brutish new husband gripping and stroking himself to the beat of, what after the fact I remember as some classic salsa, the kind Mami used to play when she cleaned the house. His eyes were closed and he was singing along. Tìa married him after only a six-month engagement and a two-week courtship, and I remember wondering if she knew about his shower habits before she said ‘I do.’ After that I began to spend time in my room to try and avoid him; remembering his hands in the shower made me stop eating meat from his butcher shop around the corner. In fact, meat altogether.
“Go get a job and then tell me about your problems,” he continued. I imagine what his cream colored Lazy Boy would look like with his blood and grey matter splattered on it. Tía crying at his feet. NYPD coming for me, banging down the door. His tigere brother coming to get revenge. It’s a frequent daydream that clouds my head for days before I can force it out.
~ ~ ~
My skin turns duller everyday and what used to be a nice mocha is looking jaundiced. Dark circles surround my eyes, and my face sags, aging me. My hair, once a thick lustrous mane down my back, is stringy and sparse. I’m not sure if it’s lack of care or a side effect of my illness and medication. Whatever the cause, I stopped caring until Tía and I were mistaken for sisters at the Keyfood near her house. She blushed and thanked the deli man like a dumb schoolgirl. I gave him the finger and stomped away. That night I ditched my pills and painted my room red.
“M’ija, why red?”
“I want to swim in blood,” I tell her. “I want it to cover me like the sabana from Nana’s bed.”
“Ay, niña! Don’t talk like that—quick! Make the sign of the cross. Ask Santa Barbara to protect you.”
I stood, stoic, and Tía lit three candles in front of my room that night. I didn’t tell her that the red made my head hurt for days after. It was a bad idea I lived with out of stubbornness.
------------------
In April, I stop going to school. It becomes tiresome to debate moot points with underpaid academics that think the answer to everything is in the teacher’s edition of the text. I outgrow school. Instead, I get up, drink a glass of juice, and sit on the sofa all day watching television. Tía throws fits and threatens me. I remind her that I’m old enough to drop out. Her pig of a husband demands that I get a job. I remind him to fuck off. I hear them at night fight about me, and he curses my mother many times. I keep count on the wall by my bed. By May, he’s cursed her two hundred and seventeen times. Not even my mother would have let you touch her, I think while he yells in Spanish and English. A few times, I hear him hit Tía with his disgusting, masturbating hands, and her sobs add more cloudy days to my calendar.
My mom died two springs ago. I won’t lie to myself and say angels came and took her to heaven. She hated angels and heaven and anything religious. She’s feeding the earth now, recycled, biodegradable. She never wanted a coffin and Tía was kind enough to respect that. When I watched her canvas-covered corpse lowered into the ground, I wondered how much of the heroin would still be in my mother’s body in a hundred years. What good would her poisoned remains be to the Earth? I always think perhaps Mami didn’t think it all the way through; her theory was flawed. The entire first year after her death the need to speak with her overcame me. I wanted to ask Mamí so many questions, and it seemed that I couldn’t reach her from where I was, and I had to go to her.
Last spring I took all of Tía’s Valium, the ones she takes to help her “relax.” There were only five in the bottle, what I thought would be enough to speak to my mother, but it was only enough for an extended hospital visit. Different doctors in various stages of their medical careers were in to see me everyday; I hardly took the time to remember any of their names except for Dr. Wallace – his name is on my medicine bottles. They sent me back to live with Tía before long with a pretty label I had tattooed on my arm in large, blue Gothic letters, at a hole in the wall I knew wouldn’t ask too many questions: Manic Depressive. The tattoo artist asked me three times if I was sure it’s what I wanted, but he never asked me if I was old enough to get one. He was one of those blanquitos you can spot from a mile away, who probably left school early because he was a misunderstood artist, an outsider, the type who put together a whole rebel persona- tattoos, piercings, weird, blue faux-hawk- in order to be on the fringe of cool, but still had daddy’s money to fall back on.
And he never asked me if it was okay to feel me up, either. But I got the tattoo and he got to second base.
~ ~ ~
In June, I agree to start working with Tía at her restaurant, where she cooks for and makes me serve men just like her husband. Men oozing machismo who talk badly about their women and grab my ass whenever I walk by.
“Así son los hombres,” she says, brushing me off. “Take it as a compliment. You’re a pretty girl. Smile and you’ll get more tips and less pinches.”
Her advice makes my skin crawl. I know that with my sepia skin tone and mess of hair I am no longer attractive, but apparently a pulse is all that her customers require for a good time. My mother had been a woman like this: subservient, desperate, pleasing. Stupid. Mamí believed any man that spent the night was marriage material. On second thought maybe she would have married a guy like Tía’s husband. But the men never even stuck around for breakfast. Not even my father.
Only her one boyfriend, Ignacio stayed a bit, long enough to turn Mami into a junkie and steal our only television set. My mother shrugged it off and said TV was not a necessity and did not buy one to replace it. I still think she believed Ignacio would bring it back, as if he just borrowed it. In the meantime, after putting in so many countless Saturday nights into the show, I never got to see the last season of The Facts of Life. I often wonder if the girls manage to stay best friends. Ignacio stole that from me, too.
In October, soon after I add River Phoenix to my wall on the other side of Belushi, Tía’s son, Miguel returns from Somalia. He looks different, older, sadder. When I was little Miguel seemed to be a ten-foot tall. Now we meet eye to eye, as if the war had shrunk him into a sallow version of someone I used to know somehow.
Tia immediately puts him to work at the restaurant, and even gives his friend, Elijah, who lost his leg during the “military intervention,” a job, too. The three of us share tales of woe during cigarette breaks by the dumpster in the back of the restaurant.
“Sometimes, man, I wanna find that bitch-ass dude who tricked me into the army and beat his fucking skull with my fake leg. Show him how great his fucking Army is.”
Elijah’s stories are usually woe-ier than Miguel’s, or mine, but we still tried our hand at the prize for saddest life. Even sadder was the fact that the coloring on Elijah’s plastic leg was darker than his own café-con-leche complexion; the military hadn’t sprung for an exact match. That seemed to bother him more than anything. He would run his hand through his beard, brown eyes on fire whenever he was reminded of the dark-skinned leg, as if in some way, it made him less Dominican.
“I’ll trade you a good leg for a good night’s sleep, anytime nigga, for real. This nightmare shit is for the birds.” Miguel had bags under his eyes that a stack of cucumber slices could not get rid of; they were there to stay.
Tía has called on all the santeros she knows to cure her baby of his night tremors to no avail. Every night, at least twice a night, Miguel can be heard from his room in the back of the house screaming bloody murder.
“I’ll trade you both a good leg and a good night’s sleep to just once want to live to see the next day.”
My cousin and Elijah are quiet at the ridiculousness of my statement, but I hold steady to my feelings. It’s the truth, and in my opinion, much worse than amputation and bad dreams.
“Shiiiit, come back when you got real problems, little girl, okay? Ain’t nobody in this world wanna get up everyday. You be making that shit more than it is.”
Elijah never looked at me when he said these words to me. The only time our gaze would lock is when he added:
“If it’s that bad then kill yourself already.”
Miguel gives Elijah a “what-the-fuck” look, and Elijah defends himself.
“What, man? Listen, I know she’s your cuz and she’s sick or whatever, but she’s a fucking downer! She’s the reason I had to get shot and get this fake-ass Haitian leg? Defending her stupid ass in the white man’s army? She don’t even want to live!”
All of our conversations go like this, every time we three work the same shift. Part of me wonders if Elijah picks on me to keep Miguel in the dark about our relationship, even though I know he only fucks me because no one else will fuck him.
In the pitch-blackness of his rented room in Doña Maria’s Bushwick Avenue rooming house, I sneak in after the Doña has fallen asleep in front of her novelas. He is always awake in the dark, the bright red tip of his cigarette the only guide to his bed. Most nights he waits for me naked, already hard, and no words are exchanged between us. The only sounds in the darkness are our quickened breaths and the springs in the old cot.
On a rare night he’ll ask me to rub what’s left of his left leg, kiss it even. Sometimes he’ll ask me to rub myself on it, and the deviousness of it gets me off. Sometimes he takes these pills he gets from a guy he and Miguel knew overseas, and on those nights his hands explore my entire body. On those nights I take one of Elijah’s little pills and his exploration of my body sends me soaring.
Just as quietly as I sneak in, I sneak out. Elijah never asks me to leave, in fact, he hardly says ten words to me the entire time, but after he comes and has smoked at least three cigarettes, I can feel my usefulness dwindle. So I make myself scarce.
In December Tía’s husband accuses Elijah of stealing from the restaurant. He persuades Tía to get rid of him, and even convinces Doña Maria to evict him.
“That mutha-fuckin piece of shit,” he complains to me and Miguel. “What is his fucking problem with me?”
“Nigga I wish I knew. Hell, give it three more months and he’ll get my moms to kick me out, too.”
“Where the fuck am I s’posed to go, man? Who’s gonna hire me?”
His last night at Doña Maria’s, I go to him. As quiet as I try to sneak in, boxes of Elijah’s stuff block my once clear path to his cot.
“Go home, Evie. I don’t wanna see you tonight.”
His words are cold and cut me, but I oblige and creep back out into the busy Bushwick night.
Parked nearby, I see Tía’s Bonneville. But it isn’t Tía behind the wheel. It is her pig-faced husband, and our eyes lock into a blinking contest. He steps out of the car and motions for me to get in. “Ahora, niña. I’m not asking again.”
When I get in, he lights a Camel cigarette, the kind that comes with the quirky Joe Cool matchbooks. “I’m not really sure what your damage is, little girl. Maybe your junkie madre fed you some bad shit one day or dropped you on your head, no se.” He takes a long drag of his cigarette and blows the smoke towards me. “And whatever you do in that room con ese cojo is none of my business, pero te digo que- it ends tonight.” He takes another drag, but this time he blows the smoke out the window. “Tu Tía, she worries about you. And I don’t like to see her like that. Just so you know I love that woman. She’s good people.” He pauses to smoke some more and stare at me for a minute. “But you, dios mio, you’re damaged. And I don’t want you damaging her. Entiendes?”
I only sit and stare as his fat fingers bring the cigarette to his lips, his poisoned words penetrating my ears, burying themselves in my head.
He points towards Doña Maria’s rooming house. “That boy is leaving, so that fixes part of this, but now you need fixing, too.”
And I close my eyes and brace myself for his touch. I brace myself for his breath on my neck, his hands forcing their way into me. I brace myself for what I knew all along he was capable of.
But he doesn’t do any of it- the touch, the breath, the force. Nothing. Instead he flicks his cigarette out the window and starts to drive. “I won’t tell your Tía where I found you, or what I know. But you need to go back to that hospital and get some help. You need to stop giving my wife so much grief.”
“Are you going to stop giving her black eyes and fat lips?” I hear the words escape my lips a tenth of a second before the back of his right hand clashes with my front teeth.
“Vas a’prender a respetarme! Do you hear me?” A little trickle of blood falls onto my bottom lip and continues down my chin. This was how he got Tía’s respect. “You hear me?”
“I hear you,” I say. There isn’t anything else left to say between us. He wants me back in the institution and will in turn keep my secret and expect my respect. What can I do but acquiesce? I have no place else to go. We drive all the way home in silence.
In the spring, when I’m allowed back home from the hospital, a picture of Kurt Cobain in my suitcase ready to take its place on my wall, Miguel moves in with Noelia, a girl he knew from high school who already had three children from two different men. In a couple of months, her fourth baby would be his. I learn from Noelia that Elijah moved to Pennsylvania with his cousin and was working at a bike repair shop somewhere near Philly. I act like I don’t care but inside, a small silenced version of myself wants to run off and find him.
I take up smoking to pass the time, and experiment with skipping my pills every three or four days. These new ones make me feel unreal, and I use the breaks to compose myself. On the nights I don’t take my medication, my body misses Elijah.
In the second week of May I tire of my medication and flush the pills down the toilet. I quit my job, telling Tía that I got something new at the mall through an old friend, when what I really did was loiter about the food court. Sometimes I would call my cousin Sahdi, the only extended family member whom I could stand, and she would throw me some money and some weed, just because she could. With her parents gone, full access to her inheritance and a detachment from the family very similar to my own, I feel a closeness to her, even though I’ve seen her only five times in my whole life.
“You seeing anyone?” she asks during one of our encounters.
“Just the voices in my head.”
“Nice. What do they say to you?”
“How fucked up I am.” I look to see if there’s any reaction or judgement from Sahdi, but she’s already on another plane.
“Here, take another hit…”
Sahdi is definitely my favorite.
By the end of May I’m in the middle of an affair with the manager of the movie theater at the mall, a young Columbia University student who finds me fun and exotic, completely fascinated by the dark skin and light eyes I’ve been forced to wear. Who would soon be going back to his Cambridge girlfriend and helps me lie to Tía about my employment. I meet him at closing time and together we take the long train ride to his Inwood apartment, a pre-War studio by Riverside Park.
He is not my type and that makes him perfect. His hair is too blond and his eyes too green. He has a spray of freckles across his nose that annoys me every time I see them. His skin is too milky and his lips are too thin to kiss me deeply. He is everything Elijah is not and that, too, makes him perfect. The small silenced version of myself weeps whenever I’m with him.
He lights candles and serves me whiskey in his Columbia coffee mug. He plays music he thinks will get me in the mood, and when he plays Nirvana I say, “Isn’t this a little morbid?” but he lets it play on repeat. I undress in front of him with candles flickering all around us. He buries his face between my thighs and tiny gasps and moans escape my lips despite myself. When he’s sated, he undresses and lays on his back, much like Elijah on those clandestine nights. I mount him and am transported back to Elijah’s Bushwick Avenue room. In the candlelight, he looks me in the eye and I in turn am afraid to close mine.
The last week before he leaves for Cambridge, he utters, “I love you, Evie.”
“No you don’t,” I say as I get dressed. “You love what I let you do to me. You love my skin color and my social status and my last name. But you don’t love me.” I don’t give him a chance to argue and leave the comfy pre-War by the park- the oversized reading chair, the deep claw-footed tub, the beautiful detail of the moldings on the wall, its smell of scented candle, sex and beer- for the last time, half expecting Tía’s husband to be waiting for me on the curb.
And all of a sudden I am energized, all of a sudden awake, antsy, and jittery. And hot. My neck feels like fire, the collar of my blouse igniting my skin. It overtakes me and I have little choice but to remove the blouse. I sit on the curb, blouse in hand, pink bra exposed to all of Dyckman Street. But the streets are rather empty at four in the morning, and the only witness to my striptease is the baker opening his shop across the street. “You okay, miss?” he yells across to me.
“I will be in a minute,” I yell back. He tips his hat and it occurs to me that men don’t wear hats anymore. As if men in hats would cure the hot flash that was taking over my body. It finally passes and I put my blouse back on and make the long journey from Inwood to Brooklyn, taking a nap all the way to West 4th Street. From there on I study the faces of my fellow passengers: nurses, restaurant workers, construction men, club kids—these were the four a.m. faces of the subway. Them and me.
At home, Tía’s husband is still up and sitting in his chair. I can tell my presence takes him by surprise; soft core porn on the T.V. and his hard member in his hands, mid-stroke, empty beer bottles at his feet and me sneaking in at dawn. We are both surprised.
“Coño, pero look at you coming home at this hour!” He speaks as if he’s not still in mid-stroke, as if the cheerleader on the screen isn’t going down on the other cheerleader. “Where the hell have you been?” He covers himself with his robe, gets out of his chair and before I can bolt or duck, catches me across the mouth. Again. And the bitter taste of my own blood adds fuel to my internal fire. “Maldita puta! Who are you with now? You never learn, do you? Wait till I tell your Tía- this time I won’t cover for you.”
“Tell her,” I say, turning my back to him to head to my painfully red room.
“Oh don’t worry, I will. Right after I tell her how you flushed your pills.”
His words stop me for a minute. I can’t think how he knows about my pills, and all I hear from his mouth are evil threats and I’m instantly transported to cloudy days in the hospital. Force fed psycho-babble, more, stronger pills, a condescending nurse, and surrounded by really crazy people, the kind who can kill you in your sleep.
“You’re going back to the manicomio, sucia!”
I force my legs to keep moving and lock myself in my room. My neck is hot again, and now in the safety of my room I can take off all my clothes and jump into a cool shower. I wash off the blood and sweat, and the cologne of the pre-war apartment in Inwood, and try to cool down the heat on my neck. After half an hour, nothing changes. I’m on fire and the stench of sex and self-loathing are trapped in my pores. I only have one option at this point. I won’t go back to the hospital. It’s him or me; and Tía will choose him, I know it.
How did Kurt do it? How did he find the courage? How did he pull the trigger? Was he scared?
I know where Tía keeps Miguel’s gun; Noelia didn’t want it in her house but he would not get rid of it. I watched him and Tía debate on where to keep it. Away from ‘the girl’. I watched from behind the door to my room as they finally decided on the cabinet where Tía keeps her good china, tucked inside a soup tureen. I don’t bother to get dressed; it doesn’t matter how I’m dressed anymore.
I creep by Tía’s husband, still enthralled by the lesbian cheerleaders, still drinking and naked under his robe. I see the sun making its appearance finally; Tía would be getting up soon to get ready to open the restaurant. But she won’t be opening the restaurant today. I make it to the cabinet and to the gun without making a sound. I’m not only naked, I am invisible. I’m invisible and on fire. This must be what heroin is like, what my mother felt before she died. I am starting to understand.
Tía has been good to me. Better than my mother or anyone else in the family who wanted to ship me away a long time ago. She gave me a home and food and a job. But she is too trusting. And she loves the wrong man too much.
He really is a disgusting-looking man. His body has too much hair and the hair is messy and matted and graying in most areas. He has breasts, enough to fill an A cup, and his stomach folds over his lap like a trash bag full of pudding. He’s old and sagging and truly unattractive. I look at him real hard, trying to find any redeeming value, but I can’t find it as he just sits there in his chair disrespecting Tía. In the midst of that foggy living room his sloppy, hairy, overweight body in that chair is all I can make out.
~ ~ ~
I straddle him, my cousin’s pistol cocked in my left hand. He whispers in my ear with beer soaked breath, and my stomach flips over. –Is this what you want, niña? I keep my eyes open, to take it all in. I know it will be beautiful. I know it will be freeing and gratifying, and prove that his life is nothing and mine is everything. No one will mourn him. And I will be a hero.
He enjoys it. I know he sees the gun but chooses to close his eyes and lean back in his chair, a lazy smile on his lips that let free tiny moans into the night, keeping rhythm with my body. And I know it’s going to be just wonderful.
