The Immutability of Shame, Emily Piccard

The Immutability of Shame

“Let me take your picture, abuelita.” Her grandson, whose name is Alfonso, lifts the camera. A black boxy setup, like something from a magazine. Alfonso, with his straight teeth and white smile, cranks a dial. There is a ticking sound. “No, Alfonso.” A hand goes up. There is no sun today but the air is wooly around her shoulders, too cloying, too warm. “No picture.” “Just one, por favor.” Please. “No, Alfonso.” “Please?” “No, Alfonso.” She is ashamed. Her shoes are cheap and thin-soled and her hands are wrought with age and dark veins, and her hair is frizzy like that of a surly schoolgirl’s, and she is ashamed. “Put it away.” “Fine,” he says. “Grandma.” He knows that she hates that: Grandma, hard vowels drawn out long and ugly. Too American. No fluid, the word catches in your throat like trying to swallow down stale bread. The plastic looped around her left arm is a noose; bag heavy with tortillas, canned tomatoes. Herbs in a bottle, all mixed together. Putrid. She wants vegetables that taste like sun and earth. “Do you want me to carry that?” Alfonso, who lets the camera dangle from a polyester neck strap, asks. An old courtesy. Habit that will die hard, but by the time he is twenty he will watch old women cross parking lots burdened with big pendulous bags and he will be too occupied with his friends and dance clubs full of neon persuasion and the girl in tight jeans pushing a cart through the sliding glass doors of the supermarket. “No.” He lifts the camera again. “Not even one picture? For my school assignment?” “No, Alfonso.” Her shoulders ache under the jacket. She does not want a photograph of herself wearing this; good quilted fabric, deliciously warm, wide collar. It would keep the cold out, if it got cold this far south. She

30 Pillars of Salt

imagines that it might have hung in a rich woman’s closet, beside, maybe, dark musty furs and technocolor silk. The woman would wear it with strings of pearls, drive a Mercedes. The rich woman, whose closet the jacket had hung in. Forty dollars; for Evelyn, free. “Not even one, for your favorite grandson?” Out the door, walking fast, three years ago in the Culver City sunlight. The shriek of an alarm, distant, no match for quick Evelyn in white sneakers and dyed hair. As she walked she had asked herself why, why, she could have paid in full at the counter. Could have used her husband’s credit card, the satisfaction of celluloid affluence between her fingers. Staring down the cashier: yes, I can afford this. So absurd, theft. But so delicious the escape, the thrill of alarms fading, of no one coming for her. Possibly no one suspecting—sturdy white shoes and a plastic bag, going past the dollar store full of Old World stoicism, innocence. The jacket was not especially fetching—ridiculous, unflattering shoulder pads, like the ones she’d worn as a teenager, or those boys with their Zoot Suits and cruel fast cars. No highfashion garment, but she’d walked quickly, made it back to the apartment and leaned against the door and stared at the bag in her hand. Asked herself why, again and again until her eyes burned. She is full of vast and expandable and immutable shame, and she lifts the extra bag and lets it drift over her head, and the lie is deliciously warm, the familiarity of dishonor, the wind hisses against the plastic and with every breath it clings to her nose. “You are my only grandson.” He breathes something like a curse, or maybe deliberate exasperation. Looks away from her. Taking this shiny plastic world for granted. Evelyn inhales against the bag, feels it press up against her nose, realizes that she could die like this, realizes how ridiculous that is, this is, and she lets the shame sweep her up, carry her away.

Emily Piccard ’14

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