Soledad

I had first heard of the storm in the office break room. It was a gray slab which housed coffee and old yogurts. I was adding another ring stain to the counter when I heard a discussion of Puerto-Rican debt. Cable news was always on. I watched the shellacked mouth of a blonde anchor discuss the upcoming hurricane, and for a moment I wondered about my aunt. When I returned to my desk, I had forgotten all about it.

My mother called a dozen times that day, I assumed because of the storm. When I returned her call, I found she wasn’t concerned. She asked me to cover a bill, this time the gas.

–           I loaned $200 to your sinvergüenza brother and I can’t ask for it right now, because the baby and all.

–           Ma. Have you heard from Tití about the hurricane?

–           It’s fine. It’s September. These storms always come, she said.

I told her I’d pay the bill directly and to call our tití before she lost power. She attempted to negotiate my giving her cash.

That September was warm late into the month. My walk home felt like summer, with thick air and the smell of sweet rotting garbage. I lived in a neighborhood that was once mostly black families and then mostly college students. My apartment was small and greasy, with an absentee landlord who did not make repairs but also did not raise the rent. I lived alone. My routine involved work, easy meals, and old sitcoms. That night, as I was getting out of the shower, I noticed I had bitten my nails into jagged edges, bleeding.

The next morning, a small crowd at work had formed in front of the television, watching the news in silence.

–         We should do something, an adult woman named Jenny said.

It seemed that her saying these words was itself a generous act. The group agreed and many looked at me.

–           Yes, I said, leaving the room.

My work was to write reports for a company that sold spring water in heavy glass bottles. I was handed piles of meeting notes and unfinished memos, ideas for presentations that the CEO typed into his phone in a moment of inspiration. It was my job to turn them into professional treatises on water and health and beauty.  I didn’t mind the work. I found it easy to distill the ideas and arguments of others.

That day, coworkers with whom I had rarely interacted stopped by my desk. Some were red-eyed and holding crumpled tissues. They pronounced it Pordo-Rico. I kept my face still, not moving even an eyebrow.

–           Don’t worry, I told them.

A couple of days later, my mother told me that Tití was okay, though without power. She did, however, lose all of her chickens in the storm along with access to potable water. A distant cousin I had never met died in the hospital in a blackout. Another cousin had his entire farm destroyed and was moving to Miami to find work. I started reading the news more than ever, scrolling through images of downed power lines and washed out roads. Pastel pink houses were muddied, gas stations full of people waiting entire days. Rumors circulated about people being robbed at gunpoint for gas cans, generators, and water filters. I studied images of older women, standing in wreckage with their hands pressed to their mouths.

Around that time, my body started to change. I would go to the Dominicans for a weekly blow out, where they turned frizz into something sleek and long. But that week when the hairdresser pulled the round brush through, a large clump of hair fell. It didn’t hurt.

–           Se te cae el pelo, she said in my ear.

Her breath was hot and smelled like stale cigarettes. I looked in the mirror as she said this and noticed my tired eyes. A small rash had sprung up on my cheek, and it was red and flaky. When it was time to pay, I avoided eye contact.

I began to feel different. I felt, at times, a cold hand in my chest. I had trouble catching my breath. I was nauseated easily. I was both sluggish and jittery, beads of sweat collecting around my hair and armpits. I smelled sour and metallic.

I became convinced I was pregnant, from a brief fling that had long ago ended. A thought came into my mind and would not leave – a tiny being, two beings, many beings, hidden in my uterus, making me sick. It was my first thought upon waking. In the afternoons at work, I idly read stories of desperate women looking for signs of miraculous conception. At night, I dreamt of freakish babies, jaundiced and reaching for my breast. The pharmacy offered dozens of lavender and baby blue boxes, most housing two tests. I chose three different brands, and mumbled a smile at the cashier. I woke up with the dawn and after a two minute timer, I received results of one pink line, meaning Not Pregnant. I threw the test in the trash quickly, and performed another immediately after. I did this five more times each day that week, and was given the same result. When my period arrived, it was brown and thin.

–           It might be the change of life, my mother said. It’s because you never had children.

–           I don’t think it works like that. Also I’m just 33.

–           Don’t call me for advice if you don’t want it. If I waited for you to become a grandmother, I’d be in an urn. Anyway, when are you coming by?

At work, things returned to normal. That is, I was ignored. Surely they noticed my changing appearance, but said nothing. By then, people’s concerns had turned toward a school shooting. In the corporate bathroom, bright with fluorescent light, the rash on my face grew blotchy. My eyes sank. As the sun turned toward winter, I turned yellow. No one asked if I was alright. I was not alright.

One Sunday afternoon, I traveled uptown to my mother’s apartment. It was the same neighborhood I grew up in, but in my adulthood she was constantly moving as the rent was raised, or her romantic relationships soured. I hadn’t yet been to this newest one, but upon opening the door, it was familiar. The smell of her cooking, her statue of Jesus, the floral couch covered in plastic. She was making rice with green olives, and asked me what was missing. I suggested cumin and was dismissed. My baby niece sat in a high chair in front of the television, dressed in pink ruffles with a white lace headband. She babbled back to the telenovela actors. I took her plump hands in mine.

–           Your brother dropped her off last night and hasn’t come back. I don’t know where he ran off to, my mother said, setting down a plate of food in my lap.

–           I can make a few guesses.

–           Maybe he found work, she said. Working nights.

–           That’s generous, I replied.

The conversation turned toward gossip. A neighbor’s sister hadn’t been heard of since the hurricane. The elderly neighbor was cracking up, hanging around the corner bodega, talking to everyone who passed by, sometimes to herself. My mother kept a mental list of every ailment her neighbors faced, and this one in particular she relished telling. She described the woman’s wild hair, her wearing chanclas in the cold, the nonsensical conversations they held.

–           She kept asking me about goats. I had to tell her I don’t keep goats in the building, she recounted laughing.

–           There but for the grace of god, Ma, I said gently.

By Christmas, the hurricane was long out of the news. On Noche Buena I sat with a throng of extended family in a smoky apartment. Everyone was eating and gossiping, sharing photos of this baby or that baby, complaining of some loss or impending appointment. All conversations eventually turned toward the storm, each storyteller upping the ante with an injustice they had heard. A cousin shoved a toppling plate toward me and my stomach turned. Arroz dulce, my favorite, appeared to me a writhing mass on a paper plate; the raisins insects. Tití was in town for the holiday and she sat down next to me, patting my knee with a dark, wrinkled hand.

–           Flaca. How much you eat is how much you love me, she said, gesturing to the kitchen with her chin.

–           That is how I became an obese child, I said.

–           You were a good girl, always helpful around the house. Your brother, he still needs you.

–           Ay, Tití, he needs to grow up, he has a baby now.

–           Men are different. They can’t endure the way women can, she leaned her head in close to mine. Her kinky gray hair was shorn close to the scalp. She smelled like vanilla incense.

In the New Year, I felt sickly, like I was being poisoned. I felt itchy patches under my hair. My teeth seemed softer. I wondered about my mother’s neighbor, what it was like in her head. The attention of men also changed. Previously, I existed in public like most women, forced to ignore yells from corners, or the occasional man touching my arm in the street. As I began to shift, the commentary did as well. They’d go from leering to staring. A man passing with a group of round-bellied friends told me to fix my face. Another, shuffling and drunk in a bodega, told me I had to watch my health.

My doctor was a middle aged white man who spoke at length about his weekend hiking. He didn’t make eye contact as he typed with two fingers into my chart. When I listed my symptoms, he appeared incurious and unconvinced. After the labs had come in, he said my appearance was due to stress. My mother, dubious about what stress I could be under, said I was hexed and should ask for a despojo.

–           Don’t light any black candles, she said. Just some palo santo, some agua florida, a cleansing bath.

–           And then what?

–           And then you believe.

Near my office was a botanica that had survived the changing neighborhood. I had walked past a dozen times. Inside, the walls were painted red, and it smelled sweet and dark with herbs and smoke. There were multiple altars with ceramic saints, flowers, and long lit candles in glass. Signs in English warned not to touch. I expected an old man, a santero, to look at me and know instantly what I needed. Instead, behind the counter was a college-aged girl. She looked at my face with mild distaste and boredom. I left empty-handed.

I had a colleague who was high in the marketing department and frequently made jokes about capitalism. He wore cotton t-shirts that cost hundreds of dollars. We had previously never spoken, but he approached my desk and informed me there was still little electricity on the island, and that people were sick from polluted water, and that the death toll was much higher than originally reported. I knew all this.

–           I don’t really know anyone there, most of my family is here.

–           Yeah, well, it’s super sad what’s happening, he said.

I agreed and turned back to my computer. When I looked up again, he was gone. I tasted copper in my mouth.

I decided to track my appearance. I undressed in front of a long hallway mirror. For the most part, I rarely saw my naked body, as I undressed in the bathroom and turned away from mirrors when grooming.  This time, I stood nude with a notebook and pen. I looked at my body and noted the shape and color of the rash, which by then had grown onto my shoulders and chest. I then measured the width of my part, to see how rapidly my hair was thinning. I was slow and meditative and the room faded. I thought I could hear crickets singing in the background. I noted regular features. Places I could pinch or lift. The cellulite across my thighs and stomach, puckered and longing.  My thighs in particular were wide and meaty, rubbing together in childhood. Parts of myself I had never liked. They were unchanged.

People at work had begun asking if it was okay to take vacations in Puerto-Rico. The well-meaning asked if there were places to go that would be helpful. Alternative spring break. I ran into an old friend from college on the train. With bouncy hair and white teeth, she asked me about going to Vieques in the winter, and if it were possible to support some small farms on her vacation. I explained that I had heard there was still sewage in the water and Vieques in particular hasn’t been a healthy  environment for decades. She shrugged and I could see her on the tourist beach, a bright bikini on pale sand. And in the background the fishermen with cancer and no work, sitting with the people they had lost.

After I left her on the train, I found a vigil to the island outside of a bodega. Black and white flags against peeling, laminated photos. Burned out candles with ashen glass. Small white votives in a pile on the sidewalk. Que dios la cuide, written in blue ballpoint ink with carefully plotted letters.

I started to feel an itch under my skin, like a small bug burrowing. I woke up in the night scratching and warm, and searched my bed for bugs with a flashlight. I dreamt that my pillow had rats inside, shifting the fabric. I was frozen and the bedroom was gray-blue, and I could tell there were things in the room that didn’t belong, hiding just out of sight. When I woke, I saw that I had scratched myself all over, drawing blood.

On my Sunday visit, my mother embraced me while commenting on my unkempt clothing. The baby was with my brother and the apartment was quiet. My mother also was unusually still, instead of fussing around with flip flops slapping the floor. We sat in the kitchen against a dark round table, topped with glass over a woven doily.

–           Have you called your Tití, she asked. It’s her 91st birthday.

–           Right, I should. I keep forgetting.

–           She’s complains all the time how abandoned she feels by you kids. You have to call her, she’s not gonna read a text. Your cousins are always sending her texts, she doesn’t know what they are.

–           I know I know, I said, sighing.

–           You don’t seem like yourself. She tilted her head. You’re not hassling me like always.

I looked into my mother’s eyes. They were warm and mirthful, lined but not tired. She didn’t seem worried at all. But when I was leaving, she held my face in her hand, and tilted my chin toward her.

–           Cuídate. You won’t be young forever.

During my day off, I decided to walk. It was still cold out, and my apartment was oppressive and heavy with the radiator rattling. My skin was jumping. I measured my hair part. I examined my thighs. I paced from the bedroom to the kitchen and felt my thoughts rolling around. I slowly walked to a large desolate park which still had hints of snow in the field. The sun was setting, the sky ash. I muttered to myself about futures and time. I came upon an older woman dressed in many dark layers, with long skirts and her hair covered by a scarf. She gestured for quiet and pointed out a hawk in a tree above. We stood together in silence for a while, watching. As the bird took off, its long wingspan revealing red-brown feathers, she turned to me.

–           You don’t belong here, she said.

I agreed, and returned home.

As spring came, my ability to communicate was more and more odd. Ideas I thought hidden were revealed without my consent. My opinions were in the air, pushing against everyone. My mother called often and it felt as though we were having an old conversation. As if every word spoken had been spoken before, in the same order, with the same inflection, and the same result. One evening we were arguing in a circle and I couldn’t remember where it started. I didn’t remember even picking up the phone. Her voice came through a fog:

–           You’ll never let me forget that time, you’re always holding it over my head, she said.

–           What are you talking about?

–           You’re always rejecting me, she cried, before hanging up.

Hands in the soil of my mind, unearthed a memory. I was 11. I was told that my mother was too ill to take care of us; that my brother and I would be living with some extended family. That I was a little woman now, and I needed to care for him. Tití came to stay. We visited my mother in the hospital. It was clean and bright. She looked at us, foggy. Awake, but also sleeping. Tití pushed us toward our mother. She was small and tried to hug us and we were frightened.  No, before that. My mother said there was an evil infecting the house. She said there were ways to protect us and she had been instructed by the saints. She blacked out the windows with blankets. She didn’t sleep. We ate food directly from the can, in the dark. Eventually, my absences caused the school concern, and they sent a caseworker. She had a warrant and the police forced the door open. We were interviewed after, sitting on cold metal chairs denying in small voices to the questions, Did she hurt you? Did she touch you?

I knew this, I hadn’t forgotten this. It was always there.

And then I was in my kitchen. My whole body was itching, it was on fire. My eyes were a gritty desert and I kept closing them and opening them to get relief. I reached up to put my face in my hands and came away with a palmful of hair and flecks of dry skin. I lurched around the apartment. I brushed up against door-jambs, catlike. I began to grab different objects to scratch myself: a wooden spoon, a plastic comb, a butter knife. I took a larger knife, a thick handled cleaver with a sharp edge. I began scratching my arms, rubbing the edge in methodical lines against my skin. When I drew blood, an accident, I felt an instant shift. Not pain, but release. And so I kept cutting, at first small, bringing up a prick of blood. And with each one, a bubble formed inside my head, a cascade of bubbles, effervescent. Electricity flowed from fingertips to spine. I laughed, tickled.

When I was a teenager, I was accepted into a magnet high school. It was in a brightly lit building and unlike my middle school, there were no metal detectors, but did have a lounge where students could buy canned soda. I was around non-latinos for the first time. Some white girls would show their arms and thighs with thin scars. They talked about their eating habits and their oppressive parents. I felt embarrassed at how they shared their problems, how easily their families were betrayed. It seemed they were free with information and their bodies. They wore shorts in the sun and put lemon into their light hair and displayed their troubles like badges. Sometimes, these girls would talk to me. They put their arms around my shoulders and we walked down beige carpeted halls, through the rush of changing classes. In these rare moments of attention, I would blush and stutter, and imagine myself to look like them – taller, smoother, and shiny. My peers saw this too, and asked, confused, if I were friends with Emily or Caitlin or Ashley. And as randomly as it started, the girls forgot these brief confidences and moved on to other, more similar students.

But I wasn’t a needy young girl. At first, I didn’t think much of it. The next day, I went to work, I went grocery shopping, I went to the post office, I cleaned my apartment. And then I felt it – the thought shrapnel in my head. My body was buzzing, electric. I cut myself again to see what it would bring. I chose my outer thigh, a place I had always despised. Tan and fleshy; I never wore shorts. When I sliced into it, shallow at first, I was flooded with the scent of jasmine and earth. It didn’t hurt or bleed. It smoothed over in a way that looked familiar. Like youth. Dimples and marks of years gone. I cut the other to match. It was good to be bad.

At work I felt myself in a torpor. My supervisor spoke to me as if underwater, and the skin on my face began to sag. I sat at my desk and picked at my nails. Out of the corner of my eye, a letter opener winked. I hid it in my sleeve, and in the bathroom stall I made three parallel cuts to my forearm. In the mirror, I saw my body slender and eyelashes full. I bounced back to my desk and flew through a report. The walls couldn’t hold my energy and I shimmied out the door, humming. The moon was high, visible by daylight.

I walked all over the city. Asphalt glittered beneath me. This island, 13 miles long, and 2 miles wide, pewter and glass buildings tall like spines on a dragon’s back. I walked around square blocks and skipped over gutters. Sounds receded. Alarms, sirens, yelling, quiet. I walked as night fell, through strange neighborhoods and small side streets. Block after block was dark and empty, corners illuminated by orange street lamps. My heels clacked an echo, the only presence. For a moment, I felt the sensation of being followed, but I was alone with the moon. Eventually I reached the ocean. The ferris wheel and rollercoaster were still. Resting fossils of summer. I looked out and saw black, unable to differentiate between sky, shore, and sea. I slipped off my shoes and walked across cold sand. A roaring Atlantic. I removed my clothes and my skin was warm against the air. I felt strong, strong enough to dive and swim and escape this island city. I waded in among the frothing break and came across a long piece of plastic, floating and rippled like seaweed. I took the train home wet and smelling of salt and algae.

I started taking tools with me. I placed a pair of gold-handled scissors in my purse, and a set of sharp tweezers in my jacket pocket. At home, I set up a wooden box with a set of razors and an abalone mirror the size of my palm. I cut myself each morning, enough to start my day. By noon, if my energy flagged, I could reach for my pocket. I walked all over the city. I felt myself becoming long and lean, my thighs hardening with muscle and my back a column of vertebrae growing taller and straighter. People asked about my exercise routine, and if I had injected something into my face to bring about a youthful glow. I responded with quiet smiles.

My mother and I at this time were not speaking. I began spending money on new things: black clothes with metallic thread, crystal bottles of rose-scented water, spreads of rich cheese and meats. I was cutting and walking day and night. I came across bars and danced by myself. A weeknight and a woman alone. I lifted my arms to the beat, smiling and sweating. A young man, pale and square-jawed, had blue eyes that followed me around the bar, magnetized. He looked like no man that had ever found me attractive. The air of someone who had never wanted. He approached me, finally, near the bathroom. I was against a wall that was pulsating with bass and my body vibrating in harmony. He leaned in toward me, our bodies almost touching.

–          You’re so beautiful, what are you, are you Spanish?

–           Spaniards are from Spain, I laughed.

I was invincible.

The days were becoming longer, humidity returning to the air. The cities were full of Boricuas, from Boston to Miami. The island was emptying itself of young people, and all that remained were the elderly or those too poor to fly. The local news discussed this momentarily, amplifying the mayor’s concern that the shelters were too taxed, our social welfare net already stretched thin. I heard stories, however, of still-polluted creeks and dark hospitals. I stopped going to work.

Walking felt unbearably slow and I took off running. I felt, with enough effort, that I could push off of the ground and fly. I came close. I danced on edges of subway platforms. Just warm enough for a rooftop party. Fat yellow light bulbs strung against brick. With a winking skyline, I stepped onto the ledge. A white dress hem flapping against my legs. I held my arms out, tilted my head back and drew a deep breath. I was pulled into someone’s arms.

–           Are you crazy? He panted.

I felt his weakness as he held me. Sweat dripped from his nose. Trembling hands. I was getting stronger and I was drifting away, leaving behind an old husk no one had wanted.

Unsatisfied by rooftop parties, I wanted to be higher. I walked across the bridge in the middle of the night. Tugboats passed silently. The black river parted. I wanted to climb to the top and pull my body across the braided metal cables. To swing like jungle vines, from one end of the river to the other. I climbed up a thin ladder of metal rungs  and sat on top of a steel beam. Wind pushed against me and the cables creaked.  I sang to the sliver moon with a voice clear and high. I looked out at the city and the sun began to rise. Light bouncing against glass towers in gold and ochre and red.

I came home with the sun. I received a text from my brother: Call Mom back, you asshole. He sent a link – 4,645 dead and a searchable database. The website was a somber brown. There were categories to peruse – people who had died the day of the storm or immediately after, or people who died due to lack of utilities – power loss, unclean water. I could sort by age, location, and type of death. A brick wall of names materialized, alphabetized by second surname. And I found her: Soledad _____. Ponce. 91 years old. An asterisk next to cause of death: heart failure; lack of adequate medical services. My Tití, my namesake.

I back up from the computer, its electronic hum poisoning the air. I walk into the bathroom. Brush fingers along cool white tiles. A space of cleanliness. I undress slowly, leaving my clothes in a neat pile. I get into the bathtub and draw my knees to my chest. I hug myself. I see on my right knee a crescent scar from childhood – I fell off of a bicycle and never rode again. What a waste, to be afraid.

Seconds, minutes, hours, tick by. My heart is pounding with them. The first cut is like the others, smooth and drawn against my body. Time is yawning into the future. The second, third, fourth, are more jagged, rough, insistent. I can hear the phone ringing. I know it’s my mother. I look at my wrists. They are thin, like a dancer’s. Grace. My body is a mountain in rose bathwater. My mother is calling. She is calling and calling, but she is light-years away.

Imagine an island. Water air and blood are the same temperature. I go to a place I’ve never really known and bring back life. Turn a clock back and forward, the past and future one. Deep green leaves tremble and blossom and bud. Downed palms become earth. Water falls up, into the jungle. A spray of salt and glass into sand. Seafoam, soft meets grit. The sound is a rush. A delicate white flower becomes a red berry becomes coffee. A stalk of sugar, fermented. The moon sings and pulls the tide. The water is clear and phosphorescent, glowing a pelagic sparkle. An ocean of seven colors, each a different drop of blue green. The dusty hillside of blooming cacti home to glossy long-beaked birds. A hillside of family homes colored papaya and teal and blush. They sweat in the heat and fry foods in oil. They cry and push and give light. They comb their hair carefully, clothes stiff from the sun. They bury their dead and paint the graves fresh white. Imagine an island.

_________

Vida James is a social worker in Brooklyn, NY. She works with mostly immigrant and homeless youth which is sometimes difficult but always fun. She is a 2018 VONA/Voices Alumna. She sometimes tweets @vidacelina. This is her first publication.