Mexicali Mamas

 by Jenean McBrearty

­

There's a cool, dark cantina, one of hundreds in Mexicali, where the women's room has tiny toilets, and cockroaches swagger across the bar. The decor isn't as eclectic as Natty’s in Brawley where a roll of toilet paper graces the altar of a large picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the left of the beer box, but it's as visually stimulating. The red ceiling lamp is surrounded by a mirror shade that reveals the owner's strategic attempt to hide a hole in it with a Band-Aid, and there are plenty of hand-painted signs. One lists the price of a beer as 7000 pesos, 10,000 pesos for a beer and female company.

          "The women work in the bar and keep the men company while they drink, splitting the fee with the owner,” my friend, Lupe, explained as the bartender brought us another round. "But they're not prostitutes."

          "More like geisha girls," I said. He bobbed his head in assent. "How much is beer if a woman has a man keep her company while she drinks?"

          He translated the question to the bartender who froze in confusion. Was my friend Lupe gay? Was I suggesting that a man would sell his time to listen to a woman, or that it was proper for a woman to buy it?  In Macho-cali the only answer he could manage was a laugh at the gringa’s joke, as Lupe pointed to me to reassure the man he was not pendejo. 

          "Think I could get a job here?" I asked Lupe.

          "No."

          "Too old?"

          "You don't speak Spanish."

          "That's okay, the men won't notice."

          "Oh no?"

          "Men talk. Women listen, and do their “look” thing.”

          “What look thing?"

          I sighed. "If a man cries, a woman looks sympathetic," I explained, lowering my eyes, shaking my head, and putting my hand over my heart. "If he gets angry, a woman looks awed." I opened my eyes wide and stared at him admiringly, my hand moving down to cup my breast and lift it in homage. "It's all the language any woman has to know."  The bartender casually wiped a bug off the bar with the same towel he’d used to wipe off water spots on the glasses.

          "We need music," Lupe declared and lumbered across the old Parquet dance floor.  I followed ten steps behind. I felt my pocket to make sure he’d given me the car keys. "Get them from Lupe before he gets drunk or you may never make it home," Lupe’s wife, Sandra, had told me.  She didn’t mind him taking the 40-something editor of the Brawley Tribune to Mexicali thirty-five miles to the South to learn about Mexican heritage. Experiential research is my forte.  It was my first trip past the tunnel that connected Mexicali with Calexico—whether these hybrid names were the founders' idea of creativity or just happenstance I never learned—where the pharmacias sold cheap medicines to the gringos.  

          It was easy to see where the profits of the cantina went—a jukebox with state-of-the-art, compact discs offering single songs or whole albums complete with miniature album covers pictured on the side of the lists for the drunk or the illiterate.  We both found something we liked. For me it was banda music, a blend of nortena and Tex-Mex, a polka beat with a wider range of lyrics.  More bounce, less migrant misery.  "You like it because it's just like German music only without the yodeling," my friend, Trina, told me on one of my gott'a-get-out-of-the-heat visits.  She still couldn’t believe I’d left San Diego for the Imperial Valley where it often topped 115 degrees in the summer, or that I spent money on Mexican CD’s. I reminded her music was a quick and dirty research tool, but she didn't buy my sociology even when I tried to explain:  

     The cover photographer of Banda Machos, my favorite banda group, faces quite a challenge. There are 12 members of the group, some rather portly, whose faces are lost in the black haired crowd, and all wearing cowboy hats, matching boots, and matching suits with fringed seams. Fans and family members know which one of them plays brass, including a sousaphone, and which ones sing.  I don't. But I had it on good authority—Danny from Lou Lang's Music Bar—that they were one of the most popular norteno groupos around. I didn't know that when I bought Los Machos Tambien Lloran —The Strong Men Also Weep—at Wal-Mart.  I just saw the picture of these guys standing around in suits that reminded me of the mod suits the Beatles wore in the early 1960s, which reminds me of uniforms, which... it's complicated.

          I got Danny to translate the titles for me. Tu Abandando - You're leaving me; La Calles Di Mi Pueblo - The Streets of My Town; and, my favorite, Cumbio Torero - The Dance with the Bull.  It's a racy tune, not unlike a fast tango with castanets and rousing oles! that conjures up images of lithe Andalusian beauties in ruffled dresses being dominated by men in black leather boots and tight pants—thrilling to me ever since I saw Jose Greco stomp and click his heels in Around the World in Eighty Days.

          But the flamenco heritage of the song sounded different in the ambience of poverty, dirty red wallpaper, and cracked vinyl bar stools. I gazed at our reflections in the mirrored wall; Lupe and I looked out of place.  A man approached us, furtively reconnoitered, and showed Lupe pictures he had in a faded manila folder.  "No!"  Lupe said.  The bartenders spat out a few words and motioned the man to leave.

          "What was he selling?" I said.

          "Pornography."

          "Anything I haven't seen?"

          "Probably. It was pure filth.”

          “That's an oxymoron, you know” I said.

          "You can buy anything in Mexicali, didn't you know that? An oxymoron, a necklace - remember the guy with the necklace? Stolen. He's fencing it to buy drugs." Lupe’s voice was brittle.

          “You don't know he was going to buy drugs," I said

          “Yes I do."

          I knew better than to argue with a man swilling his sixth brew.  The awkward moment was saved by the throaty, on-the-verge-of-a-sob voice of Anna Gabriel.  We listened, staring at our bottles of Bud Lite.  "It's too bad you don't understand Spanish,” Lupe said.  “Listen to the words she saying—that only her man can touch her this way, kiss her this way, nobody else makes her feel this way."

          “She can really belt out a tune,” I agreed. I decided to make her La Cascavel—The Rattlesnake—my theme song.  Like Lupe's beer-soaked voice, it had an intense, throbbing insistence to it.

          He was clenching his beer bottle like a life raft.  "This is our therapy. Cervesa. Less expensive, less time-consuming than a psychiatrist.  We come here to be with our people and get away from the stress of America. To be Mexican again."

          He was as poignant as Gabriel who had a lot in common with Axl Rose and Bonnie Tyler—like Total Eclipse of the Heart.  Gabriel forces the sound from her throat as if straining every vocal cord to say words instead of screaming help. Passionate, but suppressed.  I could picture her tied to a granite pillar in an Aztec temple while half-clad warriors in feathered headdresses menaced her with maracas and whips. 

          “That bitch makes me come," Lupe whispered, and sucked out the last drops of beer in the bottle.

          “I guess you do like her," I said, wondering if Gabriel would be sympathetic or awed by his graphic endorsement.  I wondered if Gabriel ever smoked too. My sister sounds a lot like her, and she's a chain smoker.

          “She begs for it," he continued, massaging his groin. He didn't have to explain what “it” meant.  Some unexpected cascavel awaited Sandra tonight.

          Three women came in and sat down off to my right.

          "They're starting to work now,” Lupe said as he sat up straight, trying to pull himself together.  "They’ll be here till six in the morning. I have a lot of respect for them. They help support their families."  I wondered if the women understood English because they were close enough to hear him.

          They all appeared to be at least 35, all of them heavyset and wearing tight black skirts, neon satin blouses, and bright red lipstick. Their nails were long and polished, and they all wore dangling bronze filigree earrings. They sat close together, and talked quietly while the music played.  I could see them looking at us, trying not to stare, but curious.

          Lupe and I were dressed alike too, in faded jeans, turtleneck T-shirts, and tailored jackets with rolled up sleeves.  Our gold digital wristwatches both read ten o'clock. I thought about Lupe’s new Silver Thunderbird parked outside, and watched the women wait for a man who would pay her to listen to him.  Who listens to the women?  Los machos tambien lloran.  Strong men also cry. Was it suffering that made them weep, or the guilt from not suffering enough?

          I thought about Tom Flores, at six feet one of the tallest Mexicans in Brawley, who worked for the city’s Public Works.  He was raising his stepdaughter because his wife abandoned them when the fourteen-year-old got pregnant.  The granddaughter was born with a large red floret on her upper lip, a birth defect that the doctors said they would not remove until the child was four years old.  It was rumored Tom's wife left to return to the husband she'd left behind in Mexico out of guilt, believing the birth defect was God's revenge for her coming to America.  Other people gossiped that the baby was really Tom's child, and that his wife left out of guilt, believing the birth defect was God’s revenge for her coming to America.  Most gossip in the Valley ended with guilt and God's revenge.          

          “No one liked Tom's wife," Sandra confided to me. “She was too dark. Too wild. She went to church too much. ” The contradiction went unnoticed when tongues wagged about one of Brawley's sexiest employed unattached men. Tom had universally acknowledged suffering creds, but he never cried. At least not to me.  

          I remember the long conversations I had with him on Sunday mornings when I’d bring coffee and we’d read the newspaper in his office near the water treatment plant.  He was a wealth of information about the city, its plumbing problems, and the hated city manager.  One of my favorite stories concerned old Jesus Cardoza, who had worked for the city for over forty years. When the city decided to hire a certified college graduate to run the streets and roads division, it “retired’ Jesus sans pension.  Maybe there had been rumors that the La Raza god was pissed off that Jesus had come to America, but Jesus didn’t exhibit any guilt over it, or return to his pueblo like Tom's wife.

He bided his time till the plagues came: the crickets that descended on the city like volcanic ash, the gas leak at the chlorine plant that sent hundreds to the make-shift hospital in the school gym, the arrival of Wal-Mart, and the flash flood. When the storm drains were unable to handle the runoff, the water pressure dropped, and it was clear a main water pipe had broken—somewhere.  A review of the cities storm drain system map proved useless.  Jesus was the only one who knew how the pipes were actually laid out and where the break could have occurred.  Jesus may not have been familiar with the term “poetic justice” but he certainly got a super-sized portion.  His response to the city’s request for his help was an unprintable series of expletives that summed up to a definite no.

          Had Jesus ridden with Zapata or Pancho Villa?  Was he, perhaps, inspiration for one of Villa's horsemen depicted in the mural on the weight-bearing wall of the Mexican-American Club?  Tom was too young to remember anything about Jesus’ origins when I asked him about the leathery old man, but he remembered stories and told me city secrets – it was the kind of information that made being a reporter interesting, interesting enough to keep me hanging out with dark men desperately trying to hang on to their culture though they worked for the city, had pensions, and married women named Sandra. 

          The cantina was filling up with dark men who had no jobs, whose wives worked at other cantinas while they idled in this one.  The women stopped talking to one another, and exchanged words with the men who came to the bar to order.  By ten thirty, none of the men had hired any of the women—not drunk enough, not sad enough yet, I supposed.  But Lupe’s tears were visible now, flowing freely as Gabriel began another tortured song. “White men don’t know what it’s like,” he groaned.  He was wrong, but I lowered my eyes, shook my head yes, and put my hand over my heart.  I could still see the women in the mirror, watching me.  I caught their eyes, and they smiled approvingly.

A graduate of San Diego State University, Jenean McBrearty was raised in Southern California where she taught sociology and political science for military education programs and wrote for newspapers in the Imperial Valley. She was a social science/history book reviewer for Choice Magazine; a columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader; and has been published in Teaching for Success, Static Movement, Wherever It Pleases, and the

Main Street

Rag 2011 Anthology, Altered States. She won Eastern Kentucky University's English Department Award for Graduate Non-fiction in 2011, and is an MFA Creative Writing candidate.

Blood Sisters

by Clementine Till

Amelia had an earthy, impish face and a mysterious smattering of warts on both of her knees. Her scraggly brown hair was so long it occasionally tucked into the back of her pants. She was born in Ireland but moved to the States by the time she was two. When she was four her dad died in a car crash and at six her mom married Greg, my kindergarten teacher.

It took us a single conversation (one that meandered over warts, guinea pigs, and her mother’s impending marriage) to discover that we were soul mates. When Greg and her mom left for their honeymoon, Amelia stayed at my house where we consummated our bond, alone in my basement, with a blood-sister ritual. Smearing blood between our palms we gasped at the realization that our hands were exactly the same size.

The school that Amelia and I attended, and where her step-dad taught, was a small Montessori elementary school. For the most part Amelia and I were symbiotic. She was the leader, I was the follower, and we didn’t need anyone else. However, this didn’t stop Amelia from commanding a significant audience when she felt the inclination.

It was relatively common at recess for Amelia to give spontaneous performances of Shel Silverstein’s poetry. She had committed an astounding number of his works to memory and she was particularly known for her interpretation of the classic epics: Peanut Butter Sandwich, The Crocodile’s Toothache and Sick. She employed suspenseful pauses, whispered for dramatic effect, and held nothing back in terms of sound effects. At the end of her chosen arrangement she accepted requests. Rarely did anyone shout out a poem she couldn’t execute on the spot.

At home I poured through my Shel Silverstein collection, rehearsing for hours before delivering a mediocre rendition of There’s a Polar Bear in my Frigidaire in front of my mom and brother. But my recitals were only hazy replicas, certainly nothing to flaunt on the playground. 

I don’t recall often feeling jealous of Amelia. When I sat with my schoolmates to witness her stunning presentations, my dominate feeling was pride. Amelia was my best friend and everyone knew it. We were a couple.

On occasion, Amelia struggled with teachers or staff who didn’t understand her. They dismissed her sensitivity and raw emotion as mere dramatic flair but I, her best friend, knew that drama had nothing to do with it. Amelia was authentic. Her sadness, her compassion, her sense of humor, the entire gamut was spawned from true life and I wanted nothing more than to feel things as fully as she did. She was born with a high range antenna, a satellite dish tuned to emotion. I was a black and white TV with bunny ears made of tin foil.

One Friday afternoon in September I heard her sobs before even opening the door to her room. I stepped in to find her sitting cross legged on the bed fashioning a cross with two twigs and a rubber band.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Another goldfish died!” 

Just the preceding Saturday Amelia and I each acquired about a dozen goldfish at the fair our school organized as a fund raiser. The most popular event was the goldfish toss where rows of fish bowls containing red, blue, or green water were arranged on a large table. Inside each bowl a single fish swam resolute circles occasionally disrupted by the splish of a ping-pong-ball. It cost a dollar for five tosses.

Behind the booth there were large boxes bubbling over with plastic bags, like depraved water balloons, each containing a despondent fish. Upon Amelia’s insistence she and I spent about three solid hours and every dollar of our parent-allotted money at the goldfish toss.

Teachers and parents who witnessed our fervor spoke gently to us with furrowed brows. They warned us that the goldfish would probably die within the week. Doubtlessly a premonition involving Amelia and all this sobbing was unfolding for them like a tragic movie. But what could be done? We were already hooked. 

When the grown-ups told Amelia about the goldfish and their fragile constitutions, her toss of the ping-pong ball became even more purposeful. It was her valiant objective to rescue every single fish from the noxious waters of their meager existence.

Here it was, only Friday, and her mission had all but failed. “This is my Eighth... Dead… Fish,” she intoned.  Even in grief her timing was gripping.  She motioned with her head toward the back yard, “soon I’ll have an entire graveyard out there!” and she fell into a revived wave of anguish.

I didn’t know what to do besides put my arm around her. Most of my goldfish had died too. I hadn’t fashioned any crosses or dug any graves. I’d flushed them unceremoniously down the toilet.

I perceived our varied responses to life’s tragedies as a blatant indication that she was far wiser than I. Adults faced tragedies head on, while children remained innocent and unaware. Amelia had a relationship with grief, ecstasy, and humor that I wasn’t sure I’d ever develop. She was living and I was fumbling dumbly like a mannequin. The truth of her maturity was further magnified one Saturday afternoon just after she turned nine.

Both of our households participated in the “if it’s yellow let it mellow” philosophy so it was common knowledge that Amelia’s mother’s pee consistently maintained a bright golden hue. Amelia was certain that this was a symbol of adulthood and I believed her because… Amelia just knew these things.  We both waited for the day that our own pee would attain the saffron tinge of maturity.

I vividly remember the afternoon she shouted ecstatically for me to join her in the bathroom. My heart sank. I knew without even looking that her pee would be yellow. I peered into the toilet with a counterfeit smile and a nod of faux nonchalance as she assured me that I, too, would have yellow pee… eventually.

Truth be told, I was terrified of adulthood, but I was even more terrified of being left behind, so I began to study Amelia. I watched every movie she loved, repeatedly, and I read every book on her shelf… including her diary. That’s how I learned that she wanted to kiss Frank Walker: a bit of information that shook the foundation of my nine-year-old reality. What? Kids kissed?

Later that year it was decided on the playground that Amelia and Frank actually were going to kiss. It was common for decisions of this nature to be made in playground forums. In most cases the “should’s” or “should-not’s” were hashed out in the absence of the designated kissers. Usually their feelings and opinions were communicated by representatives who spoke with an elevated sense of authority and who dismissed themselves, frequently and importantly, to consult with the “kissers.”

I did not participate in these forums. I was embarrassed by them. Besides, there was an understood contract that anyone involved could, potentially, become the next targeted kisser.

Once the decision was made and the time announced, word spread like wildfire. I was notified only four minutes in advance by a completely unassociated minion of the rumor mill. I had no idea how to react.

I was hurt that my opinion hadn’t been included or even vaguely solicited. I’d been aware for some time of Amelia’s evolving sexuality, but I was dumfounded by a sudden recognition that our best-friend status was ambiguous…at best. On top of that, I had four minutes to determine my next move.  My desire to boycott the event was conflicting utterly with my reluctance to further ostracize myself from the momentous occasion of Amelia’s first kiss.

 In the end I plodded over to the woods (a six-foot-wide strip of trees on the edge of the playground) where the event was scheduled to take place. I stood at the back of the crowd where I refused to stretch on my tip-toes or otherwise display any sign of curiosity for the proceedings. Therefore, I saw nothing.

Fortunately, there was an announcer. I’m pretty sure it was Emily Weinstein. She was in possession of a stop watch and she counted the seconds loudly and with mounting fervor. By the fifth second the rest of the crowd had joined the count. This is probably what drew the attention of the playground monitors… if they hadn’t already noticed the sudden pilgrimage of half the school to the far-back corner of the woods. I think Emily Weinstein had reached twelve seconds by the time the monitors broke us up.

Following our sixth grade graduation Amelia and I attended different middle schools, though distance was not our ultimate dissolving factor. Amelia started having sex and experimenting with drugs. I was too naïve and timid for such antics, but far from ill-judging her choices, I was held rapt by her self-reliance, her charisma, and her seductive allure. I desperately hoped she would eventually grieve our separation the way I did and that she’d solicit my company on just one of her brazen debaucheries. It never happened 

Suddenly I understood about suffering. After a lifetime of rehearsing Amelia’s emotions as though they were Shel Silverstein poems, she was, at long last, gifting me with the real deal and it sucked. For years the very sound of her name made my insides crumble, so I kept a calculated distance from anyone else who knew her. It wasn’t easy. Amelia could stir things up in a way that even defied school district boundaries.

Once I inadvertently sat across a cafeteria table from a girl named Carrie. Over her bagel slathered in pink cream cheese and my salad drenched in government issued ranch, we correlated that Amelia’s new favorite confidant, Stacia, was Carrie’s estranged, childhood best friend. I had zero interest in bonding with Carrie over our mutual “rejected best friend” status so I kept her at a distance. 

Nearly a year later she called me at 11:50p.m., on a Tuesday night.

“What’s going on?” I asked, wondering if she was drunk.

“I just heard something…weird.  I thought I should tell you.” Carrie sounded nervous.

“What is it?” I braced myself, knowing it had to be about Amelia.

“Stacia called me today. We haven’t talked for a long time.”

“Yeah?” I hoped I sounded detached.

Carrie spoke quickly, “Stacia said that Amelia woke up in the middle of the night and that Greg was sitting on the edge of her bed with his hand down her shirt.”

“What?” Greg? My preschool teacher? The most significant man in my life besides my dad?

“And she said it’s happened more than once…” Carrie was going on. I was having a hard time listening.

“Well, Stacia is lying” I interjected. “She doesn’t even know Greg. She’s spreading stupid rumors!”

“I think this is the first time Amelia’s ever talked about it…” Carrie went on, ignoring my accusations. 

It was too much. I told Carrie I had to get off the phone. It was midnight and I was ten years old again, learning from a stranger that Amelia was going to kiss Frank Walker in four minutes. I knew that I was probably supposed to do something… tell my mom? Call the police? Call Amelia?

In the end I did nothing.

Over the next decade, Amelia and I both moved frequently. Once she sent me a very concise, and rather vague, poetic letter. It was accompanied by a striking black and white headshot of her looking wise and gorgeous… Athena-like, the way I always imagined her. I saved the picture in a shoebox and lifted the lid a few times a year when I wanted to feel romantically dejected. Her mother and Greg drove 1,500 miles to attend my wedding. 

We eventually settled in adjacent towns where we both studied herbal medicine and avoided each other until Amelia’s school scheduled a field trip to the farm where I interned. After the tour Amelia stayed behind. We made egg-rolls and edamame in the outdoor kitchen and then wandered the gardens where we talked about everything except our past.

A few weeks later we met at a café. As I stirred way-too-many packets of artificial, dehydrated creamer into my coffee, I told her about the phone call. 

“I need to know if she was telling the truth.” In that brief statement my cadence switched gracelessly, like the vacillating tones of a pubescent boy, from a demand, to a plea, to an apology.

Her response was an understated, “Yup.”

I wanted to respect the fact that this was her story… to tell or to keep to herself. But after agonizing for a solid decade, I felt that some piece of the story must belong to me too. 

 I wanted to say, “How long was he doing that? Was he doing it when we were seven? Did he do anything… worse?” But I settled with, “Did you tell your mom?”

“I’ve talked to Greg about it.” She said. “He apologized.”

“Do you hate him?” I asked. But what I really meant was, “Should I hate him?”

She shrugged. “He takes care of my mom.”

Somewhere along the line Amelia’s mom was diagnosed with M.S. and it was true, Greg cared for her pristinely.

I nodded. Then Amelia made one of her trademark eye gestures insinuating that the conversation was over and barreled full force into an elaborate account of a 2:00 a.m. Echinacea poaching caper.

So much for the speech I’d been rehearsing for weeks in front of the mirror. The one entitled: I sort-of-get-it-now but it was really hard when you randomly chucked me out of your life for no apparent reason.

Now she lives on one coast, I live on another, and we talk about three times a year. I ask about her boyfriend and nursing school. She asks about my kids. The space between our words is raw and swollen with the disparity of two people who know each other too well and simultaneously not at all.

I often remember the simplicity of our first conversation: warts, guinea pigs, and a life on the verge of change. There weren’t any subtexts that day. I pray that there is still a place for that youthful candor somewhere amidst the haggard mistrust of our adulthood. The persistence of our tentative phone calls reassures me that we’re both striving to reclaim that sincerity.

 We both have a memory of two little girls standing in a cold cement basement, palms pressed together in a promise of sisterhood. I hope that someday, in honor of those children, we’ll again share our lives with the frankness of six-year-olds.

Clementine Till spends the majority of her life at very particular table in a very particular café where they begin brewing Earl Grey the second she walks in the door. She counteracts this substantial caffeine intake by consuming equal amounts of water and, consequently, borrows the bathroom key so often that they’ve begun nodding her admittance to the “employees only” area where she retrieves the key herself.

Slide

by Kathleen Patton

            The view to the west was always my favorite; a softly dimpled blanket of green during the summer that faded into the purple and blue haze of Rip Van Winkle country. Sitting on that side of Slide Mountain, it’s easy to imagine falling asleep for years, wrapped in the warmth of the sun and the cool touch of the mountain breeze. There is a nook that is carved from a boulder placed right before the mountain heaves up cliff-like and finishes its journey at the peak of the range. I liked to stop there and sit in the perfectly shaped indention and look out across the emerald colored foliage below. Everything breathed easier there.

            Growing up, I could see Slide Mountain from my gable bedroom during the months when the maple and apple trees just outside stood leafless and dead. It rose up starkly from the softly sloping and rolling mountains and held its notched peak thousands of feet above the others. When I was old enough for the long hikes to its crest, my dad would bring me to the massive base and we would make our way to the top, choosing the trail that had the marker I fancied that particular day—some days the more modern wooden ones, other days the old, worn down stone ones that were so weathered we could barely read them. It was on one of these excursions that I discovered the boulder that has found me coiled in its arms many times over the years.

            I was always at peace there. I would sit, cradled above the world, listening to the orchestra of birds, and breathe. The air was filled with a glacier-like chill, but carried the smells and sounds of summer—dew-soaked ferns, leaves from past autumns deteriorating under more recent layers, water gurgling up from underground, squirrels rampaging through the treetops. During the colder months, the smell of wood smoke mixed with the scents and, sometimes, a single spiral of gray, heated air rose through the woods around it.

The last time I trudged to my rock was almost four years ago. It was May, just after graduation. The leaves at the base of the mountain were still young—adolescent-looking, just as I was. I took the stone-marked trail that day.

Curtis

&

Olmsbee

Trail to

Slide

→

1800

Someone named A. Ford had scratched in an illegible message underneath the neatly engraved directions. I smiled at the familiar graffiti and placed a pebble on top of the marker, letting it teeter on top of the pile of similar stones before whistling to my dog and heading to the winding “trail” up the mountain.

“C’mon, Black Jack. Quit chasing the squirrels.”

Something that sounded like a herd of bison resonated as my two-year-old, gangly-legged lab mix tumbled up the trail, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. He knew where we were going. I had started taking him on hikes after he turned a year old, and this one was our favorite. He darted up the trail ahead of me, knowing the turns and twists of the mountain. I brought a map and a compass, but buried them at the bottom of my pack, knowing I wouldn’t need either.

            I was going up to celebrate—my own private party that consisted of Black Jack and the mountain I had watched through my window. When I reached it, I sat quietly in my niche and looked out over the trees. I smiled triumphantly.

The pack I had brought for my day trip was light, containing only a light lunch, three bottles of water to replenish the canteen on my belt, a flashlight, a collapsible water bowl for Black Jack, matches, and, under the map, an official looking letter that I had held on to for two years. I pulled it out, along with the matches.

My parents started homeschooling me in third grade due to my health. When I was well enough to go back to school, I decided not to. I felt that I was learning faster at home. When I was sixteen, I wrote the superintendent of the local high school a letter, requesting her to go over the transcripts that we had been required to send to her over the years, and grant me a letter of equivalency to take the place of a high school diploma. Several weeks later, I received a short, curt letter back from her. She refused, stating that it was impossible for a sixteen-year-old, homeschooled student to have the same level of education as one of her seniors.

Sitting at in my alcove, I unfolded the letter and lit a match. A week before, I had graduated with an Associate’s Degree and high honors from S.U.N.Y. Sullivan, as well as received my G.E.D. through earning more than twenty-four credit hours. I was eighteen.

I smiled smugly as I watched the paper burn.

The University of North Carolina at Wilmington had accepted my application, and I was leaving in two months. There were, in my mind, big things ahead in the glamorous city of Wilmington, North Carolina.

At the time, I could not see beyond the years that I would spend earning my Bachelor’s Degree and privately thumbing my nose at the people who said I couldn’t. Graduation found me quickly, and life after college enveloped me in the discovery—and rediscovery—of real life, with its darker bits, but especially its bright ones. I still remember that day on my favorite mountain, but not as the day I stuck it to the system. I remember it as the day I shifted into the next phase of my life, and watched the last one drift away with the paper ashes.

Kathleen Patton grew up in rural New York nestled in the heart of the Catskill Mountains. She earned her BFA in Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, and currently lives in Florida. Kathleen draws her inspirations from the mountains she grew up in and her experiences as a military dependent and sister during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Unnecessary Lessons

by Kirsti Sandy

In a scene from one of my favorite movies, The Jerk, the nouveau-riche Steve Martin urges his wife, Bernadette Peters, to “take unnecessary lessons.” Her choice: knife throwing, and she’s not all that great at it. When my parents moved from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Andover, when I was twelve, I finally got the joke.  Although it was a fifteen-minute drive from our old house, everything had changed, including how we spent our weekends. People in Andover did not sit in front of the TV on Saturday afternoons, watching candlepin bowling, boxing matches, and Solid Gold while referring to the dancers as “sock crotch” or “tomato bum.” They did not linger near neighbors’ houses in a bathing suit on hot days in the hopes that they might, by chance, be invited for a dip in the pool. They did not stretch out on the kitchen floor and moan about having nothing to do while their mothers stepped over them to dry the dishes. At least, this is what my mother told my father, my brother, and me. And then she signed us up for lessons.

I wanted to learn the cello but compromised and went with violin. My brother wanted karate but settled for Cub Scouts. What my parents chose surprised both of us: disco dancing. Now, I could see myself as a violinist, in a white shirt and velvet skirt, looking regal and serious as I concentrated on moving the bow across the strings. I could easily picture my brother in the blue scout uniform, gold scarf on his collar, ready to earn his badges. Yet the idea of my parents as disco dancers was all wrong. While they both loved disco music, family lore had it that my father was so averse to dancing that he danced only the first song at their wedding. Plus, disco hardly seemed like the kind of pastime our lawyer neighbors next door, the ones with the purebred Irish setter and the twin maroon BMWs, had in mind when they had suggested community education at the local high school.

It was only a matter of time before one of us quit our lessons, but I was the first.  I could not understand how the sound that emerged from my violin squeaked and whined so, when I was pulling the bow across the strings just like everyone else.  That and I had become distracted by the act of rosining the bow; the sticky rosin felt had the appearance and texture of butterscotch candy and it was soothing to move the bow across it, back and forth,  as though spreading it with crystallized pine pitch.  My parents did not put up much of a fight, especially after listening to me practice, so the violin went back in the velvet case for good.

Next to quit was my brother, but even this did not deter my parents. Their disco lessons had a new purpose:  to prepare them to take the floor with their actor friend Tom at Studio 54. They prepared in secrecy, as though not to jinx their chances. Although we saw them walk to the car and return from their dance lesson, we never actually saw them dance, not once, even though they practiced at home a few times a week. They made sure that we were out of the house before they danced in the living room, and I suspect they drew the shades, turned on the “Disco Hits of 1980” compilation I was always taking out of the sleeve to play in my room, and got down to business.

Studio 54 was for them, as I’m sure it was for many, a disappointment. My mother, bless her justice-loving heart, returned with this complaint: “We waited in line and they just kept letting other people in!” If you ask her now, she will tell you that of course she knew they weren’t getting in, but I remember that she was upset about it. My father seemed more relieved than angry, describing the men in high-heeled sneakers carrying balloons who stepped right from limo to door, the people they met in line “from all over—you wouldn’t believe it! China, Mexico, even California!”—the doorman who looked exactly like the actor on Taxi, the food they ate before and after and in between: “real New York bagels, Kirsti! You should have tried them—like hot pretzels!”

Bagels aside, I could not fathom waiting in line for two hours while someone else got to sail through the door with no delay at all. It went against everything I had been taught—even the seventh graders at my school had a code of “no cuts, no buts” that was strictly followed by even the most popular kids. It seemed to me that this gave the people in charge tremendous power, power that intrigued and appealed to me, so I set about creating my own version of Studio 54, but not with dancing—I was in remedial gym, after all—with something I was good at, even without lessons: roller skating.

My parents were great sports about it; they let me string up the Christmas lights in the basement and play records on the wood-paneled stereo. I would be the DJ and the bouncer, and also the hostess. Kids in the neighborhood would wait in line to come to my skating rink. Never mind that there was a big skating rink in nearby Lawrence, called “Roll on America” which, despite the fact that it sounded like a deodorant, was very popular. Mine would be free, with no strict rules about skating backward or doing tricks and none of those “skate bouncers” in mesh shirts who thought they were so big and liked to blow the “get off the rink” whistle at the younger kids. It struck me that I could also reject anyone who was a better skater than I was, or who was thinner, or who had better hair.

On opening night, I set out some warm Polar Ginger Ale (I had wanted name brand soda, which my mother nixed immediately) and a plate of E.L. Fudge cookies. After attempting to bribe my little brother to plug and unplug the lights while we skated to produce a strobe effect, I ran upstairs to answer the door: Leslie and Kelly, skates in hand, talking faster than they could listen, then the boys from down the street, then my cousins. One of the neighbor boys had removed the knob from the front of his skates, the one that served as a brake “to make them more aerodynamic.” We watched as he demonstrated, whipping forward and using a support pole to keep from crashing into the wall. Kelly wore the ribbon barrettes from the movie Xanadu, so I put on that record first, the opening chords of “You Have to Believe in Magic” filling the room as we spun and twirled across the floor.

It wasn’t until the evening was almost over when I realized that I had not turned a single person away.  At some point during the night, they had all stopped skating and started joking around, climbing the furniture, and turning cartwheels. I had lost them. As Leslie and Kelly left, Kelly (likely coached by her mother) thanked my mother “for the roller skating party.” That should have been my first hint that my friends would never view my basement as a real roller rink—it was a basement, and we were all pretending, especially me. If my friends were going to get a ride somewhere on a Saturday night, it was going to be to a real skating rink, which had boys from different schools and where they could play Ms. Pac Man and eat French fries.  I could not compete.

The roller rink turned into a makeshift haunted house the next October and finally served as a temporary apartment for my dad’s down-on-his-luck friend from California. Like the real Studio 54, my roller rink had been overtaken by a coked-out weirdo, but I had already moved on to classier pursuits:  English riding lessons. Elocution. Baton twirling.

“Toss the baton in the air the way Mary Tyler Moore throws her hat,” the baton teacher shouted, making the motion with his hand. He was fed up with our lackluster tosses, our deflated twirls. Not a beauty queen in the bunch—acne-marked, greasy-haired, brace-faced, four-eyes we were, all of us, yet we held on to thin hope that lessons might transform us, because wasn’t that, after all, what lessons were for?

“Throw that hat!” he demonstrated, with a vigorous toss and a satisfied smile. “The world is yours! You are Mary Tyler Moore!” And in the instant the baton made a perfect spiral in the air before crashing back down on my head, I almost believed it.

Kirsti Sandy is an English professor at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, a town that once held the world record for having the most lit jack-o-lanterns in one place. She has published essays in the online journal of Freerange Nonfiction, Freshly Hatched, and in several academic journals and books. She recently purchased a pair of "Roller Derby" brand skates for her two-year-old daughter.

Perimenopause and Scanned Documents

by KJ Hannah Greenberg

I’ve reached that time of life when my new experiences are beginning to insist on entwining with my more familiar ones. Two important examples of this phenomenon are: the changes caused by the monthly sloughing off of my uterine lining and the changes caused by my weekly attempts to update my understanding of computer accessories.

Per the former, I’m now, in a good eye, part of the “over fifty” crowd. That certain differences would occur, in my physical function, was expected. Early adolescence, young adulthood, pregnancy, the post partum years, lactation spans, as well as the middle of midlife all brought with them anticipated variations in my reproductive tendencies. Some things got bigger, others smaller. Some energies intensified, others diminished. Women’s bodies, mine included, are anything but static.

Per the latter, whereas I remain an unwilling participant in the media revolution, I allowed myself, for the reasons of earnings and sanity, first to be dragged through the conveyances of mass media and then to be pulled along the shoots and ladders of convergent media. The liminal stages of those explorations, all the same, were disagreeable despite the fact that they wrought necessary transformations.

In the first instance, somehow, although I had previously experienced many corporeal alterations, perimenopause surprised me. Wellness, at its best, is a free fall that creates no G’s worth of health challenges. Yet, as honest older gals will testify, the mid decades’ fluxes frustrate order, hindering even those economies of time, space, money or energy that have been in place for just a brief measure. More specifically, simultaneous with my accepting that nooky would never again generate progeny, I found myself facing multiple false alarms.

In the second instance, my word count, font issues, and efforts to avoid hincty language, aside, nothing equaled the equilibrium problems I stumbled upon when interacting with machines that buzz, click, or burp. All of a sudden, editors were insisting on electronic connections. If I wouldn’t or couldn’t Skype or to IM, I stood to lose contracts.

My husband and I exhaled a lot, counted to twenty-five, and otherwise made do with my erratic hormones. My inner chemicals pinged and ponged more than they had during my premenarch years, my fecund years, and the occasions when I lapsed in my exercise routine. Like New Englanders who accept the inevitability of northerly winds, we braced ourselves during my shifting patterns.

I, personally, also attempted to get along with the more popular new conduits for broadcasting ideas. While remembering to format my works according to submission sheet instructions and making sure to trim my pages’ size according to individual outlet’s strictures stymied my creative process, decades of experimenting with not abiding by publication fads proved, in balance, that any urgings I manifested to resist the winds of the media might as well, alongside my writing aspirations, be flushed. Without a means to cultivate an audience, an author has few reasons to generate manuscripts.

The upshot of going along with, instead of fighting against, my physical changes is that my husband and I smiled and still smile more. Loving, in the sixth decade, seems to be an agreeable matter.

The most singular result of my retrofitting my instruments for offering up my work has been my ongoing enjoyment of having my name in print. Other benefits have included my intermittent pleasure in learning to place dark backgrounds behind pictures meant to be scanned, my periodic delight in developing a website, and my seasonal joy in learning to differentiate among data storage devices (albeit, I’ve still not tried parking my information caches on multiple viral servers, i.e. on cloud storage devices).

I never would have believed, had someone bothered to predict for me, that my perimenopausal years would be juicy, invigorating and downright fun. There continues to be a great discrepancy between my lived days and nights, and the concepts floated out by our information sources about the physicality of middle-aged women.

Similarly, if anyone would have suggested, twenty or thirty years ago, that I would be tolerant of, if not somewhat comfortable with electronic publications, audio publications, print-on-demand vetting, or other extremely contemporary aspects of getting writing to readers and to listeners, I would have laughed. I am an old school, palpable card catalog, Big Six publisher, footnotes ‘til ya drop, sort of person. Clicks and whirs never figured on my professional horizon.

Nonetheless, change can bring unexpected goodness. In determining that I will have to remain obsequious to my body’s rhyme and rhythm, similar to determining that the nature of publishing’s progression is beyond my control, I find myself freed. Explicitly, instead of fretting over my long past youth, I celebrate my matronly methods. Equally, instead of getting unsettled about the shrinking numbers of readers that bother with paper-delivered notions, I glean my satisfaction from wider, more diverse, and often younger groups of respondees than my traditionally transmitted writing ever scraped together.

At the same time that having to empty the dishwasher, having to take out the trash, and having to feed any and all visiting, though invisible, dragons remain constants, my ways of having to transport my exuberance to others, whether in intimate climes or for the public eye, have fluctuated a large amount. In all, I’d espouse that my sudden weaving together of comfortable manners of acting with new forms of being present is serving me well.

KJ Hannah Greenberg has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice, helps out as an Associate Editor at Bound Off and at Bewildering Stories, and has two new books launching, a full-length poetry collection, A Bank Robber's Bad Luck with His Ex-Girlfriend (Unbound CONTENT), and an assemblage of short fictions, Don't Pet the Sweaty Things (Bards & Sages Publishing).

Traveling Salesman

by Loukia Borrell

            I’ve had sex with nine guys. There were others, with nudity and some kind of sexual act, but no intercourse. If I include everyone, sex and almost sex, I might be closer to twenty men.

            I began my sexual resume at age nineteen, with a mild-mannered college guy from Richmond. I moved on to newspaper people and cops, and retired at age thirty-two with my second husband, an ambitious, edgy, green-eyed Philadelphian whose hands are always warm and comforting.

            The one person I didn’t really know was the second guy. Our paths crossed when he was in town on business and after spending a grand total of two hours with him, he left town. I felt the itch and motivated myself to follow him across the country for sex.

            It was 1985, and we met when I was working as a waitress during my summer break from college. He came in for dinner and caught my attention right away. I thought he was very handsome. He reminded me of Kurt Russell, the way he looked in “Escape From New York,” except without the eye patch. He took notice of me and carried on about how               I looked like Anne Bancroft. He loved the dark hair and bedroom eyes. He told me he was in computer sales and in Virginia for a convention. He asked me to guess his age and it turned out he was ten years older than I. Cool. 

            During his two-hour stay at the restaurant, he was like a wave. He flirted outrageously, as did I. Before he left, he gave me his business card.  On the back side, he wrote his home address and phone number. He asked me to meet him at his hotel the next day, so we could get to know each other.

            The next morning, I arrived wearing crisp, white shorts and my matching sorority shirt. I walked into the lobby like I was a movie starlet on set. We sat on a sofa and talked. I giggled constantly. I went back the next day, carrying flowers, and hoping my hair looked the way Madonna’s did that year–messy, sexy, and unlike a virgin. He kissed me on the bed in his hotel room. I felt his body through his clothes. We made plans to meet at his house in San Diego before I went back to college for the fall.

            He flew home and within days, wrote to me. His letters were filled with adventure stories: Biking trips, watching a mesmerizing city skyline, eating lobster and drinking beer in Mexico, driving along endless miles of beach on

Pacific Coast Highway

. The frequency and detail of his letters depended on how sure I was about making the trip. The more anxious I sounded on the phone, the more letters came.  He told me to make a stand for myself, not to miss a chance for closeness and fun. He thanked me for making him feel things he hadn’t felt in a long time.

            I spent my summer working and shopping for nice clothes. Everyone at the restaurant knew what was going on. They all thought I was crazy, especially Big John, the owner. One afternoon before my shift started, he asked me into his office.

            “I hear you are planning something crazy for a guy you don’t know,” he said.

            “Yes?” I said.

            “Do you really need to go all the way across the country to get a boyfriend? There are guys working here,” he said.

             “The busboys?” I shifted my weight and leaned up against a filing cabinet. “I can get those at college,” I said. “This guy is different, older. He’s got a life.”

            He stopped counting money and looked at me.  The office was quiet.  

            “You’re crazy. After you have sex with him, he’s going to drop you. If he likes you so damn much, he’d walk back here from California. Tell him to come here to get to know you and your family,” he said.

            I knew that would never happen. I adjusted my cummerbund.

            “Well, I know what I’m doing,” I said, “It’ll be fine.”

            All of this was happening as I tried to forge my own way and make decisions for myself. My older brother didn’t say anything. My father took an observer’s position, but my mother was outspoken and furious.  She fumed whenever I got a letter or call. She complained that I was tying up the phone too much. She threatened to disinherit me. At least once, she called him at 3 a.m. Pacific Time, so he implemented the “Mother Project,” urging me to find ways to manage her until my departure. She finally stopped talking.

            It was the summer of 1985. I was just realizing that AIDS was something that could threaten me. Before that year, I thought it was a disease for gays, hemophiliacs and people who spent their time shooting heroin. Then, I woke up when Life magazine did a cover story on AIDS and the headline said something like, “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.”  About a week before I went, I called him.

            “Do you have any diseases?”

            “No, no way.” I didn’t ask him to prove it.

            “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry. I just have to stop listening to everyone and thinking so much.”

            “Good girl.”

            His place was up on a hill. It was a small, bungalow-style house with two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom and kitchen. I felt like I was in Beverly Hills or something.  The floors were hardwood, the furniture well-placed and neat. There were a lot of windows that you could sit in front of and see the city’s lights at night. We slept with T-shirts on and were naked from the waist down. I used a spermicidal diaphragm I hoped would kill any viruses he might have. I didn’t have any orgasms but I felt close to him, anyway. I daydreamed about transferring from my North Carolina college to a university near him.  We could live together, get married and have kids.

            He worked during the days and I rode a bike to the waterfront or walked around his neighborhood. I cooked meals, dusted furniture, and shopped at a corner market. Everything seemed brighter, bigger. The plants seemed huge, the flowers tremendous. The trees seemed taller. The sky was always blue and the nights were cool. Some days he took off work and we went places together. We drank wine by the ocean, took a ferry to Catalina Island for the weekend, and drove to hole-in-the-wall restaurants for great Mexican dinners. I called my mother and told her she was wrong.

            About a week into the trip, I met some members of his family.  We planned a cookout for them. When they arrived, I could tell his parents were money. They wore nice clothes and jewelry, spoke of their travels and easy lifestyle. They were nice people, but I felt awkward around them. They knew he picked me up in a restaurant and that I came out without knowing him. I felt embarrassed, thinking they might know something I didn’t.  While I was in the bathroom, I overheard his mother talking about how I was still in college. She kept telling him I was too young. After I told his father how much of a struggle it was for me to get there, and that people had tried to stop me, he looked at me point blank and said: “If you were my daughter, I would have chained you to the bedpost.”

            The next day, we fought. He wanted me to leave a week earlier than I planned.

            “Change it. Call American and tell them you had a death in the family and have to be back sooner,” he said.

            He was impatient and distant.

            “OK,” I said.

            He left for work. I sat in his living room, by the computer, and spent most of the morning on the phone trying to convince a supervisor for American Airlines that someone in my family was dead. He made the change and I apologized for the trouble. When I hung up, I sat and stared at the furniture. I began to look through cabinets, drawers and closets, for papers, bills, proof.  I found a lot of pictures of girls in the back of the guest room closet. Most of them were dark-haired, like me. A lot of Latina and Hawaiian girls. There were letters in his desk. One of them was from a girl who was coming over from Vegas to see him for his birthday. I studied the postmark on another letter, and then opened the envelope. It was from someone he met during the same trip he met me.

            I confronted him. He said I had no business going through his things. He was angry. I relented. The trip was ending and I didn’t want to leave on a bad note. The morning I left, he dropped me off at the airport curb. He gave me some cash to cover the ticket I had purchased to visit him. He told me it was a thank you gift for helping him prove to his friends he could get me out there.

            My brother picked me up. My parents didn’t want to talk to me or know anything about the trip. About a week after I got back, he sent me picture prints, but no negatives. He said he needed to keep them in case I got mad at him someday. There were no nude shots, but I did let him take pictures of me in my underwear. I was too sad to argue with him. I planned to buy a photo album, but ended up putting my pictures in a brown envelope with his letters.

            The next week, I went back to college. I felt safe there, away from the summer’s disappointment and my mother’s silence. I called him a few times during those months, and there were some letters exchanged between us. Our contact was infrequent, impersonal and brief. His letters were thin, double-spaced and written on small pieces of paper. I graduated in December and got an internship that put me in a new city.

            About a year after I went to California, I started getting sick. I was renting a room from an elderly couple, working at a newspaper near Washington, D.C., and feeling tired all the time. I got different things: Urinary tract infections, respiratory illnesses, fatigue, weight loss. I was working a lot of hours and put down my poor health to stress. I also wondered if it might be AIDS, which by now, with Rock Hudson dead, was the biggest story out there. I told the doctor about my trip and asked for an AIDS test. During those months, I would stand in front of the mirror every morning, naked, and look for unexplained rashes and lesions. I looked at my reflection and imagined thorns all over me. What a dumb broad.

            After the second negative test, I stopped taking them and tried harder to put that summer behind me. That trip hurt me and ruptured my relationship with my mother. She took it personally and was ashamed at the lengths I went to for a man. Eventually, I moved on, but I wasn’t the same girl. I was different. I had less faith in people and viewed them skeptically.

            The last time I called him was in 1989. I don’t know why I did. I think I was just making sure he was alive and that his life wasn’t too different from when I visited him. He talked to me and said he was serious with a girl. He said something about getting married. I told him I was a journalist. He said he was sorry for acting the way he did toward me. I told him he was fine.

            I never spoke to him again. Years went by and bigger things happened. My brother died of cancer. My mother got dementia and quit life. I married my second husband and we had three children. My husband tells me the same things every week: I am beautiful, entertaining, and interesting. He is obsessed with his wife, he says. He says the first time he ever saw me, he felt a cord unravel itself from deep inside him and attach itself to me.

            He does silly things. He’ll go grocery shopping with me and wander into different aisles, waiting for me to come around. He likes to pretend he has never seen me before and imagines what he could do to introduce himself. He writes letters to me, on his way somewhere, 30,000 feet above the United States, telling me about his incredible life. He says he could live in meager surroundings, in any city in the world, as long as I live there, too. Things get bumpy from time to time, but we have great passion, mutual understanding and a good life together.

            Now and then, I think about my trip to California. It comes to me the same way you think about being in a car accident. You were there and it happened, but as time goes on, it fades, and you don’t want to bring it into focus anymore. But I can. I can bring it back, razor sharp, anytime. I can find the pictures and the letters. They are valuable to me because I have daughters and a son, and you know, life moves around in circles.

Loukia Borrell has been writing for more than two decades. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot, St. Petersburg Times, New York Times Regional Newspapers, and in various other magazines and newspapers. She has authored a book, Raping Aphrodite, a fictional work based, in part, on the 1974 invasion and division of Cyprus. A native of Ohio, Borrell was raised in Virginia, where she lives with her husband and their three children.