Table of Contents “SORRY” by Richard Compean……………………………………………………………….……….3-7 “Cloistered” by May Le…………………………………………………………………………………….7-8 “The Seamstress” by Holly Day……………………………………………………………………….….8 “Priority Mail Stickers that Kill” by Brett Stout………………………………………………8-9 “Bag of Blood” by Mark Belair……………………………………………………………………..10-11 “Cotard delusion” by Selina Mahmood…………………………………………………………11-12 “Lover of Mine” by Hali Cardenas…………………………………………………………….….13-18 Cover photo by Katie Traeger To be considered for upcoming issues of Pour Vida lit zine, please send submissions of writing, artwork, and photography to pourvidazine@gmail.com
2
“SORRY” by Richard Compean “Grandma, who’s the Pope?” Sammy asked as his grandmother Agnes served him tomato soup and half of a grilled cheese sandwich, the crusts of the bread sliced off, just as her own mother had done. Her cardigan came close to matching the color of the soup, just as Sammy’s shirt, his favorite, almost matched that of the cheese. “That’s quite a question for a boy of five to be asking,” Agnes replied as she sat with him in the small kitchen she had shared with Tom, until he had passed away three years ago. They had raised two daughters, but Tom had never gotten the son he wanted and had only had two years with his grandson, Sammy. “Who do you think the Pope is?” Agnes asked Sammy. “I don’t know, or I wouldn’t be asking you.” “Well, then, please tell me this, young man: Why are you asking?” “I heard Mommy and Aunt Julie talking about the Pope. She kept saying, “Even the Pope, even the Pope.” Sammy’s mother, Judith, was the elder daughter to whom Agnes had not spoken for nearly two weeks. Sammy’s Aunt Julie was the younger daughter by three years. Quite surprised by Sammy’s question, Agnes asked if his mother had said anything else about the Pope. “No, that’s the only part I heard about the Pope. But I did hear her talking to Aunt Julie about somebody else taking care of me after kindergarten. Aren’t you going to keep taking care of me anymore?” Stunned by that second question, Agnes said, “What a lot of questions, Sammy. Let me get my tea and then I will sit with you to answer them.” Agnes took her time to pour her tea and to get settled. After a few sips, she said, “Okay, honey, let’s start with the Pope. Do you remember how at church, when you join us in the pews after Sunday School, there’s a man in special clothes up at the altar, leading all the prayers?” “You mean the priest?” “Yes, the priest,” Agnes replied. “Well, this priest is a holy man. And he has an even holier leader who’s in charge of priests all over the world.” “You mean like the President of the United States.” “Yes, like the President, but he’s the President of all the churches and priests. He’s very smart and he knows what God wants for all of us. This man is called the Pope.” “Wow,” said Sammy. “But why would Mommy talk about him when she hardly ever goes to church?” “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.” That satisfied Sammy enough that he forgot about his second question. To hide her own anguish about it, Agnes suggested that he get out the board and playing pieces and cards to set up his favorite game, SORRY!. This was the game Sammy loved to play with her most afternoons, but not because she used to let him win. That was no longer true, for in the last month, she had become a fierce competitor. Nor was it because of the game’s description
3
on its box—“A Game of Sweet Revenge.” Sammy was more interested in winning than revenge. He always chose the yellow playing pieces and she always chose the red. Whenever he picked the SORRY! card that sent one of Grandma’s red pieces home, the “sorry” in his voice combined both regret and glee—sorrow that he was harming her chances, yet delight at have gained advantage. Under the same circumstances, her “sorry” let him know that this was the way life was, what he would have to learn to accept, just as she had. Sammy won all three games that afternoon because his grandmother could not concentrate. The very thought of someone else caring for him weekday afternoons pained her so that in the late afternoon she let him watch Shrek while she sat down to compose—what? Herself? A letter? A handwritten note? A message? She did not know what to even call it, but she had to find a way to reconnect with Sammy’s mother, Judith. It was now thirteen days since their rift. It had begun on a Saturday afternoon, over tea and sandwiches at Tal-Y-Tara, one of Agnes’s favorite places— a combination “Tea and Polo Shoppe” with comfortable, old-fashioned couches and chairs, tablecloths and linens, proper china and servingware. It served not only tea and scones, but also wonderful sandwich plates, using homemade Motorloaf bread. Before the presidential election, Agnes and Judith had accepted that they would offset each other’s votes. That had seemed fine, but now that the results had not turned out the way Judith and many others had expected, she felt the need to ask her mom how she could have cast a vote that helped prevent the election of the first U.S. female president. Agnes calmly replied that she had considered that argument, but because of her own Roman Catholic beliefs, she could not vote for someone who supported abortion. The conversation then became quite heated until Judith, now almost thirty, let slip that she had had an abortion when was twenty-two. A roaring silence erupted. And it lasted until Agnes gathered her purse, dropped cash on the table, and turned and walked out. Judith was left to close out their service. At home, she told her sister Julie that after she paid for their tea and sandwiches, she went to the parking lot and found no sign whatsoever of their mother’s car, as if she had never come at all. She and Julie decided it would be a good idea not to contact mother until at least tomorrow, after Sunday mass at St. Anne’s. Judith called, around three o’clock in the afternoon. Her mother’s phone rang and rang, so she decided to try again later. At six o’clock, she called again and this time left a message, because tomorrow Sammy would have to be picked up after kindergarten, if not by her mother Agnes, then by someone else, because Judith had important end-of-the-month meetings all afternoon. Agnes had only recently learned to text. So Judith was surprised to receive from her, around eight thirty, a message verifying that Agnes would pick Sammy up as usual tomorrow afternoon. Judith’s message back simply said, “Thank you.”
4
When Judith arrived at her mother’s Monday afternoon and rang the doorbell, Sammy stepped out, closed the door, and joined his mother. This happened again on Tuesday, and for the rest of the week. And Judith heard nothing from her mother on the weekend. When it continued happening the next week, she spoke with her sister, Julie—who had recommended giving their mother more time—about finding someone else to care for Sammy in the afternoons. Because the freeze had to thaw, Judith decided to call or visit in person with her mother this weekend. When she came to her mother’s door on Friday, expecting another hasty Sammy departure, sure enough, there stood Sammy. But next to him, holding his hand, stood her mother, Agnes, as well. “Grandma asked me to give this to you,” Sammy said, handing his mother a small pink envelope. Agnes asked her to please read the card, and Judith said she was not the one who had stopped talking, as she dropped it into her purse and then departed with Sammy. Saturday was one of her rare lazy mornings, so Judith slept until nine o’clock, then joined Sammy and Julie for breakfast. She did not want to open the note in front of them. After she had showered and dressed, she sat before her vanity and read it: Dear Daughter, Sammy told me he overheard you talking about finding someone else to care for him afternoons after kindergarten. Please DO NOT do so! I love him dearly, and you will not find anyone able to love him more. Love, Mother Judith found herself in complete agreement; she had already decided not to get anyone else. But she and her mother had to end their détente, so that afternoon, she began to develop a peace plan. After back-and-forth texts all week, they agreed to meet the following Saturday when Sammy would be away with his father. They would meet for dinner at Gaspare’s Italian Pizza and Pasta, a place they had been to as a whole family with Sammy. Whoever arrived first would get a booth and wait for the other. When both were seated, Judith broke the silence and convinced her mother to share a small house salad, a pizza, and a small carafe of wine. She then took out of her purse a SORRY! card and two dice. “You know this is Sammy’s favorite game,” she began, “so I would like to play a version of it with you, with some slightly different rules.” She went on to propose that they begin as usual by each rolling a die to see who would go first, and then take turns not playing but speaking. At each turn, the speaker would talk for the number of minutes indicated by the die. The other person would listen, without interrupting, then also roll a die and speak while the first person did just the same—listen. Both had to commit to not walk out until dinner was over. Just before the salad came, mother and daughter rolled the dice; Agnes came up with a two and Judith a three. Judith reached across and served salad
5
for both of them, then rolled her own die, which came up a one. With her minute, she said she knew that her mother loved not just Sammy and Julie, but also her. She also thanked her mother for being there. Agnes rolled a two and apologized for walking out of Tal-Y-Tara; she added that Judith’s revelation had completely overwhelmed her—body and soul. After the pizza and wine arrived, Judith rolled a four. She took her time and suggested—if it did not seem too outrageous to her mother—that she think of the pizza as a large communion offering to go with the wine. Then Judith told her mother how sorry she was about terminating her pregnancy seven years ago. At the time she had no choice because of some regrettable behaviors. She had been engaged to Liam for just a few months when he had to go to Hong Kong on business. She went partying with two girlfriends, had a few drinks, and was slipped a date-rape drug. She woke up naked in a strange man’s bed and only remembered finding her clothes and getting out as fast as she could. Agnes reached out to her daughter, unable to hold back her tears. After composing herself, she then rolled a two and told her daughter of the trauma she had felt upon hearing what she had done. She explained that she had left Tal-YTara because she could no longer stand to be in the same room with her. Judith too paused before rolling her die, her eyes embracing her mother. She rolled a three. “Mother, I have to tell you that my experience at the clinic was horrible. Julie came with me and helped me navigate past the protesters in front, with their horrid pictures of dead fetuses. Believe it or not, the welcoming nurse inside told me I did not have to go through with this. Afterward, Julie drove me home. I bled a little for a few days, then began to feel better, to feel relieved, but still ashamed. I feel ashamed, even to this day.” Agnes got up to embrace and hold her daughter. When she sat down she rolled a two and expressed her deep sorrow. But she also let Judith know that she was pained at the thought that Sammy might have had an older brother or sister. When Judith rolled a five, she paused. Then, calmly and without accusation, she explained to her mother that if Liam had found out about her pregnancy, there would have been no marriage or even a Sammy. Now she would love to give him a younger brother or sister, but the divorce from Liam was final, and currently she knew no prospective husbands or fathers. She also said she wanted to explain why Sammy had mentioned the Pope. A recent newspaper article had reported that Pope Francis had initiated a policy allowing not just bishops or special confessors to grant forgiveness for abortions, but all priests. When Judith saw it, she had repeated, “Even the Pope, even the Pope!” Before her marriage to Liam, she had gone to confession at St. Anne’s and received, as far as she knew, complete absolution. At lunch a few days later, she had found herself seated next to a table where three priests explained that the Pope’s pronouncement applied mostly to other countries because such absolution had not been a problem in the U.S.
6
Instead of taking her turn, Agnes said she no longer needed to play and handed her die to Judith. “Honey, we don’t need to keep playing; we can just keep talking and listening. I myself don’t have much more to say, except that I now understand, and I will try—believe me—to forgive and forget. What about you?” “Mom, I have just a little more to say. I want you to know that I would never do it again and that I’m sorry that telling you hurt you so much. But I have to add that it still goes on. Women still find themselves unintentionally pregnant and need this option, however terrible it may be. And I accept that you do not agree.” Agnes replied, “That’s a good place to end our game. Let’s have some of this pizza—which, by the way, is not the body of Christ, nor is this wine his blood.” They could not finish the pizza, so they asked to take the remaining slices home for Sammy. On the next Monday afternoon, after the pizza, just as Agnes started to play SORRY! with him, Sammy said to his grandmother that he had heard she and his mommy had played SORRY! over the weekend. He wanted to know who had won. *** “Cloistered” by May Le
I come home with nobody, to nobody but the walls that cloistered me the yellowed books on shelve—half opened—eyed me down I kneel to their lessons adore what people called the old decay of yesterday For me it is Love: The fulfilling of the Law. Ever since Mother’s womb I’ve reveled in solitary I don’t drink flavored lust and call it Love nor unzip my heart in the loudest club and dance to false melodies. Every night as I waste my blood alongside the moon When the drunken and the lost are staggering home Muttering in judgement my girlish reticence The woman in me awaken
7
Observe with a gentle smirk.
***
“The Seamstress” by Holly Day she makes her quilts out of institutional clothes, squares cut from blue paper pants and orange jumpsuits. she snips carefully to center bloodstains that won’t wash out buttonhole stitches the outlines of cigarette burns appliqués name tags of the released against those of the more fortunate dead. *** “Priority Mail Stickers that Kill” by Brett Stout There’s a purified murder that I don’t want to solve, this isn’t the Summer of Sam nor apparently the summer of me, either enough distilled failure 16.9 Fl. Oz 500 mL’s worth in fact the light is burning under shadow and slowly rotting wax but no one’s home a bloody handprint on a keyboard hardwired into the American ghettos,
8
trimming the cancer off my skin right after I clip my sand filled toenails I haven’t talked to my doctor about Viagra but I did talk to my TV about degradation and to my neighbor’s dog about failure soon after I sold his kidney on the Russian black market for an ipad II, there’s a purified murder that I don’t want to solve, this isn’t the Summer of Sam nor apparently the summer of me. ***
9
“Bag of Blood” by Mark Belair I am brimming with blood. My skin taut with it. My resting hands pulsing with it. I’m a bone-borne bag of blood. Like an IV, I could be hung and sourced. I’m alive with it, made alive by it. Circulating it my animal duty— my species of spirituality. Blood secures me, yet lets me run wild—my pounding legs streaming with it. My blood-rich heart what, of me, loves me most; what, of myself, I love most. It is core to all I am. And beats quietly at night, repeating your name. Telling me, my love, that if you’ll
10
take such a thing it’s yours. *** “Cotard delusion” by Selina Mahmood 1. you thought to immortalize beauty, but all you did was create a moment of pretense…or beauty, Santiago? the Jesus-and-cross-painted-truck-bound black cloth threw flapping tremors of black smoke into the light sky warding off the evil eye, mine: dying is the easy part, what’s hard is living. they say two can’t be one, but the eyes take two and make one, love. two in one. 2. can that moment, that first moment, carry us through love? and what can i say other than i have lived a million lives and died a million deaths. you don’t want to die in longing, death rising up from herself, leaving her carcass as a spirit into the night hubz, reaching her hand out to clasp nothingness, hypnagogic, are you alive or dead? you won’t really know until the moment you die, or now. 3. life had been those sun kissed fantasies you once bathed in. sometimes you forget if you’re alive or dead, the now did i make from life or death, one (false) step i saw there, did it happen? but no, i took another, but i saw that too, i saw it all, so many split realities, so many split deaths.
11
he tripped and died, just tripped and died. this could have been any of us, this could be any of us, this could, in fact, be death, this…
4. it was written single but you said it double, because that’s just what the heart stands for. one in two. you now live in fear of steps and spikes wondering if you haven’t already stepped off, if not in this, then another – a horrific Nietzschean eternal return. and i will return. ***
12
“Lover of Mine” by Hali Cardenas I was sitting in the room he and I shared, thinking. I was sitting at the foot of our newly purchased bed, thinking about boxes. I was mentally dividing things in my mind – the bowing bookcases, the records collecting dust in their crates, the prints we never hung on the wall, the furniture we picked out and bought together. I even started dividing time, neither mine nor his, but our son’s. Who gets him on Christmas? Thanksgiving? The weekends? There I was, at the end, thinking about where to go from there. I guess I should start at the beginning, whenever that was. We still can’t agree on when we started, when we became a unit, and I’m sure we won’t ever agree on the exact moment we decided we were done. I think it starts, weirdly, in a time before him, before R. It starts with my own childhood, with my mother and my father. It starts somewhere in the tiny two-bedroom house of my early youth, the one nestled in the barrio. When I reflect on these memories, I always come to in the middle. I don’t know what they’re fighting about, I don’t know when or why it started, but I always know what comes next: Sometimes, it is the shrill sound of a dinner plate crashing into the kitchen floor. Shattering into a dozen sharp jagged pieces, the corners cutting my mother’s soft fingers as she picks up the pieces, crying. Always crying. Sometimes, the shattering is replaced by striking. As in, my father striking her cheek with an open palm. As in, my father making a closed fist and striking it against her face, wherever he can reach her. As in, my father’s strength a striking match, my mother’s body, waiting to be burnt. Sometimes, there is a sickening dull thud. The thud of her petite body careening to the floor, or the thud of her being shoved into a wall. Years later, my son would fall off of the bed, his head making that same sickening sound as it collided with the wooden floor of my bedroom. The dull sound of the impact triggered memories of my mother’s crumpled body, still and silent. When he cried, I thanked a god I didn’t believe in, for the simple fact that he cried afterwards. That he wasn’t a silent and shapeless heap. Sometimes, we left. She would pack a weeks’ worth of clothing in a suitcase, hurriedly putting coats and shoes on our small bodies as her nose bled out. She would rush us out of that tiny house, walking towards the car, the keys rattling between her quivering hands. That was when she was rational. When he hadn’t rattled her brain, when she could still think straight. I think the worst was when she was all flight. When she was so scared she couldn’t bother to pack clothes, or look for her keys. When her only instinct was to get the hell out of that house before he got worse. She would gather us and just walk, she didn’t know where or why, but she just took off. My brother, a toddler, on her hip, me at her side, clinging to her hand in the dark. Sometimes, my mother held my father. Cradling his heavy head in her lap, as he cried, as he promised he wouldn’t do it again. She would soothe him,
13
motherly in this, although her body was in ruins. This was when he apologized, when he blamed his absent father or the stepfather full of rage, martyring himself, although she was the one torn to pieces. Sometimes, my memories come in flashing images: the veins popping out of my father’s forehead, spit coming out of his mouth as he degraded her, I see my mother cowering in a corner offering refused apologies, I see her perfect cupid’s bow split. No matter the order they come in, my reaction remains the same. I find myself wondering why she stayed, when we would just end up leaving again. I promised myself that I wouldn’t be like her, I wouldn’t, couldn’t stay. And I would never marry someone like my father.
I can’t remember how old I was when my nana told me about la llorona, the weeping woman. We were telling ghost stories and it quickly turned into urban legends, that much I know. She told us that many years ago, a young girl fell in love with someone who was not of her class, how she had children from a previous marriage, and he told her he couldn’t be with her because of that. So, she drowned them. When she told her lover what she had done, he was horrified and left her. Without her babies, and without love, she drowned herself. When she got to the gates of heaven, the angels asked her where her children were. They told her that she couldn’t get in without them. She didn’t know that they were already on the other side of those golden gates, and that this was her punishment. Her spirit was sent back to our realm, doomed to wander the riverbanks searching for the children who weren’t there. “That’s why she’s called la llorona,” my nana stated, very matter-of-factly, “she is always crying for her babies, but I think she cries over the man she lost, también.” La llorona was who we were threatened with when we were misbehaving, when we wouldn’t stop bickering, when neither of us went to sleep early. She became the new cucuy: “If you guys don’t go to sleep, la llorona is going to get you.” “If you don’t come inside before the sun sets, she is going to snatch you up.” “If you see a woman wearing white, crying, and its nighttime, don’t let her see you!” I became obsessed with this crying apparition. I wanted to know more about her. I settled for asking everyone what they thought about her, and gathered a few different renditions of her woeful tale. In some, she was in an abusive relationship and drowned her children and herself as an escape. In others, she drowned her children out of spite, because her amor loved them more than he loved her. The only thing anyone could agree on was that she served as a warning of sorts. I think an underlying theme of my obsession was a search for the truth. I felt like the crying woman was real; I told my nana as much. She shushed me,
14
telling me it was only a folktale, and even if she were real, she doesn’t live in our hood. What I couldn’t tell her was that I saw the weeping woman at home, the woman who loved her violent man unequivocally and passionately; how her love for him overshadowed her love for her children. I could never tell her that when I heard of la llorona, I pictured my mother, dressed in white and pacing the riverbanks, searching and searching and searching.
Four years ago, I was sitting on my ivory-ikat couch when there was a sudden knock at the door. I was home alone, and while I usually didn’t answer the door, something – my intuition, maybe – told me to open it. Standing on my porch, in the dark, was my friend Blanca. I could see that she had been crying, there were thick black streaks of mascara trailing down her swollen face. Her hair was up in a top knot, but large chunks of it were pulled out. Her white sweater was ripped in several places; it was a miracle that it still clung to her body. Here she was, the crying woman in white, at my door, asking to come in. I ushered her in from the cold. I didn’t ask what happened because deep down, I already knew. I could see that there were runs in her black opaque tights, and bleeding scrapes on her knees. Fingerprints were starting to form at her neck and at her wrists. I hugged her until she stopped shaking, until she could breathe again. I poured us some wine and handed her a glass. I waited for her to speak, not wanting to disturb her more than he already had. She took a drink of her wine, lifting the stemless wine goblet to her cracked lips, and then she spoke. “I always told myself I would never be her, you know? My mom. I wouldn’t be like her. And I’m feeling like I became her tonight and it fucking sucks,” she said. I nodded, unsure of whether or not I should speak or comfort her. I hoped my nod was sufficient in saying, “go on, I’m here” or “it’s okay if you need to stop.” “I always said I would leave if it happened,” she said, so softly, as if whispering to herself. And with that statement she took a large gulp of her wine. I didn’t expect for Blanca to define what “it” was. Marco had written it all over her body. “Marco hit me and he didn’t stop and I don’t know what to do, you know?” Blanca continued, “because I have no family in town, and your house is the only place I have to myself and all of my things are at our house and I can’t afford to leave, you know?” I said that I knew, that I understood, that I got it. I offered our spare bedroom to her. I told her she could stay with us as long as she needed to, we have an extra key. I don’t remember us talking much afterwards, I remember listening to the album Teen Dream by Beach House, finishing a few bottles of cheap sweet red together. My cat, Jaime, lounged in her lap, nudging her with his blonde pointy snout when she would begin to tremble again. He was purring loud enough for me
15
to hear it from across the room. I had read once that cats used their purring mechanism for healing and I wondered if that’s what he was doing for Blanca. If he was trying to heal her hurt. She cried from time to time, until she abruptly got up in the middle of the album Teen Dream, rinsed her stemless wine goblet and announced that Marco texted her and she was going to meet him because he was sorry but she would be right back. “I promise, I’ll be right back,” she reiterated. She didn’t come back that night, and I wasn’t surprised. Later, she blamed it on the abuse Marco suffered when he was a child. She said he was a victim of traumatizing sexual and physical abuse at the ends of a deranged tío, that it wasn’t his fault he snaps sometimes, that she loves him more than anything, and he promised he would never do it again. Despite whatever reassuring thing I said in response, I was overcome with a sense of disappointment. Disappointment because I didn’t understand how she could go back after the horrors of that night. When I drink cheap wine, I still picture her, dressed in white, wide eyed and weeping, on my front porch. Soon after the Blanca incident, my nana and I went on one of our weekly lunch dates. We were stuck in traffic behind a car that had a curling, faded bumper sticker that read, “Honk If You’ve Seen La Llorona!” There was a picture of a woman in excruciating pain, dressed in white, tears streaming down her suffering face. I took a photo of it, as my nana said something like, “I don’t know why they have that sticker. Nobody sees la llorona and lives to talk about it.” I laughed and then I asked her if she ever noticed how much women were made to suffer in our culture. She said she had, followed by something I won’t soon forget: “From la Malinche to la Virgin, it is our lot in life, mijita.”. I couldn’t understand why these women stayed until it happened to me. I had known of R for years, but never really knew who he was as a person. We connected through shared roots – we were both in McAllen, Texas at the same time, visiting our respective families. R was older, he was aloof, he was not from my hometown and he went to law school in California. He knew everything before everyone else did and he was smart as hell. I fell almost immediately. It started with small things that only seem big in retrospect. He did not let me play music in the car. He never let me pick what we got to watch – your shit is too emotional, he said. He started to tell me that I did not like things that I had always liked – that I was just being trendy. That I was so much cooler before I became an uptight bitch. That all my friends were pretentious hipsters and wouldn’t I like to hang out with his friends instead? The first time R punched a wall in front of me, I saw my father. The way his hands swelled, his knuckles bruised and bleeding, and how he glared at me like it was my fault. I was stunned. I silently wept as he threw obscenities at me. I cleaned the mess of the drywall on the floor. I saw my mother then; the dry wall became the ruins of the shattered dinner plate, nicking her delicate fingers. I
16
tried to make sense of the powdery fragments in my hands. The fragments may not have been sharp, but I felt the cuts all the same. It escalated from him taking his aggression out on our things, to pushing me down outside of the bar, to grabbing me by my wrists and violently shaking me, my face flecked with his spit, to ripping the glasses from my face and throwing them across a night-black alley. As I was looking for my glasses by the light of my cell phone, I thought to myself that this was not the woman I was supposed to be – crawling and crying and chasing after a man who neither loves nor respects me. Despite all of this, I still tried to justify it to myself, as if to stave off the selfhatred: “Well, he was drunk and so was I.” “Well, he hasn’t quite hit me.” We were on the verge of breaking up when I discovered I was pregnant. My mother urged me to leave, I didn’t. Things had changed, I told her. He stopped being physically aggressive, but the emotional manipulation grew. I struggled to breathe through postpartum depression, and he found a way to twist that into something hideous. If I cried too much, he threatened to take our son away. If I was in the throes of an anxiety attack, I was unfit and unsuitable and selfish – think about what your instability is doing to my son, he screamed. I justified the constant gas-lighting with: “Well, he does have a point, I can be ‘too much’ sometimes.” “Well, he works hard all day, he shouldn’t have to deal with me too.” The first time I tried to leave, he told me my family was not good enough for our son, and his family could care for him better and didn’t I know that all I could ever be was a barrio bitch? Like your mother, he said. Everything always finds its way back to my mother. In machismo culture, women can only fit in neatly defined little boxes: the defiant woman becomes la Malinche, the depressed woman becomes la Llorona, and the perfect woman is always la Virgen. We teach them that women are merely warnings in a story for boys: don’t trust her because she will betray your people; don’t fall in love with her because she will drown your children; find la virgen but the minute she is your nagging wife, ella es la puta. Why do men abuse women? Is it because, like Marco, they were cruelly abused by a tío? Is it because, like R, their parents were cold and cruel to one another? Is it because, like my father, their fathers were absent? Is it because our society teaches men that women are not to be respected unless they are la Virgen? Is it that having an immense pride in being a man can make women seem like they are inferior, somehow? The bigger question and the one I keep trying to answer is: why do women stay? Maybe it is because we are scared to go, maybe like Blanca, we are isolated from our families and can’t afford to leave. Maybe it is because our mothers stayed, and our grandmothers stayed even longer. Maybe it is because we don’t want to be the statistic of “young single unmarried Mexican-American mother”, so we unwittingly become another statistic instead. Maybe it is because when you
17
are laying in the dark, with him, and his body is still and sleeping next to yours, you think to yourself - he will change this time - as you Google “am I in an abusive relationship?” or “how much can babies actually remember?” The answer is that I don’t know why we stay when we know it will end in either the disintegration of the relationship, or worse, the disintegration of our minds and of our bodies. When I was a child and my nana told me the tale of La Llorona, I always took it as it was – she is crying over her children (mis hijos, mis hijos). I hear her now, and wonder if she is crying over the woman she has become (mi vida, mi vida). ***
18
19