Ghost Factory

I can’t just wait for this story to write itself. So here is my song: I have been scared of them since before I knew who I was. Because I thought knowing who they were was enough. Their grease smells thick and old. They are the excess of the stereotypes that have surfaced around them. Braised meat, corn dough, hot sauces, fried sausage, and kernels of food stuck to the bottom of a lip or under a fingernail. They are everything scary to a girl who’s allergic to the world. Though she cannot be allergic to herself. Or to living. So she tells me in her monosyllabic Spanish, te necesito por favor que me ayudas no se como decirlo me hoyes. She looks like every pretty little Mexican girl I can think of, except she is ugly. Her story, I mean. That is, the translation.

* * *

I was in a bar. And at eight-years-old, it was obvious to me that a little girl’s birthday party shouldn’t be housed here. My mother’s friend Leticia was small and curvy. Her hair was long and outlined the clothes she painted on herself. My mother was not like this at all. She was, to me, absolutely somebody’s mother. Her pants were tapered, her hair was short and wavy, her hands were neat but unpainted. My mother was the most plainly beautiful woman I would ever know.

She and her friend Leticia were talking about “grown up things” and kept shooing me away to dance with her daughter. But Leticia’s daughter didn’t like me. She wanted to dance with boys only. She wanted to paint clothes on her body and balance her weight on high-heels until she fell into some dangerous thing’s arms or learned how to run. She didn’t like how I was always reading. She didn’t like the way my shirt sagged over my flat chest. She didn’t want to baby sit me at her tenth birthday party.

So I walked off, slid through doors that had been shut to contain the party, and found a whole backroom to play in. I crawled under a swinging door that normally let cocktail waitresses in and out. I slid beneath the bar in the empty backroom and started playing with the seltzer gun. The man came out of nowhere—I do not remember his shark circle or his sudden leap onto the scene. I cannot recall much more other than how much he resembled the man in the doughnut commercials. Was this endearing? Did I want to talk to him when he pulled open the swinging door, leaned on it to hold it open, and called me over with two curling fingers?

He was so covered in shadows that I barely saw his wrinkles. He didn’t say a word, just kept curling his fingers at me, pulling me closer like a ball of yarn. Maybe he was someone’s grandpa, I thought. But he was too lonely for that. He must have been lonely, I knew, if he was interested in me, alone. I had become a little dizzy from the sips I’d been taking from mysterious bottles. Maybe this is what made me soft and malleable.

I put down the seltzer gun from the corner I had been playing in so I could get on all fours and squint into the dimness. I tried to find hints of warning in his smile as he hissed at me. He made a cattle-call noise through his teeth that I have hated ever since. This was warning enough for me. My mother made a sour face in the fruteria whenever men called this way at their wives, or grandfathers to their grandchildren. But there was no other exit beyond the tiny door he was leaning his ragged, reeking body on.

It was a gradual crawl to the midpoint of the bar, but not an eternal one. My goal of escape was very apparent to me. I continued to crawl past the sink. Somewhere along the way, I decided I may as well crawl all the over to him, instead of rising up just a couple inches from his chest. I thought maybe I could sprint from the floor, while if I stood he might be able to grab me around the waist. When I was close enough to him, he lunged at me, laughing with a scratchiness that I hadn’t noticed before. I pulled away and squatted, watching his movements carefully. “I won’t hurt you,” he said as he laughed. “I just want to say hello.” My body must’ve been beet-red because I could feel heat rushing through my every limb as if I’d already escaped and was running until I dropped.

I tried to decide how I could get out of this. If he tried to enter the bar, I could just rush past him through the door. But if he stood at the door he would have me no matter what. I waited him out as he continued to coo at me through big, shiny teeth. Finally, I tried to make a run for it but his leg stopped my body from crawling out. His rough fingers squeezed the undersides of my jawbone and pulled my face up into his. My face charged into his like it was pressured by suction. He kissed me so hard and wet it felt like a tongue vacuuming the skin of my lips until they were chapped. When he let me drop, the corners of my mouth turned down into my throat. I felt like my face was dripping with shame.

His face was roughly shaved and dry from neglect. His clothes hung awkwardly over the sloppy curves of his body. There was no care in him.

As a child, when I got angry, my face would turn red almost instantly. I would ball my fists as tight as I could to keep from crying, hold the heat, and puff my grief into my stomach until it became a solid, rolling thing. Then I gave it free reign to roll inside me—wherever it liked—as long as it didn’t break.

I can’t remember if I was punching his chest as he kissed me. Or maybe I was squeezing my fists into balls so heavy they couldn’t budge. When boys at school made me angry, I kicked towards their privates until they left me alone. But this was no boy, and I was afraid he would like it. Or worse, he would be so angry he’d hurt me. I knew that he could do more to me, but what scared me most was that I couldn’t imagine how much more.

Finally, the curse broke and I scuttled under the door, clumsy and scared because I had to move closer to him before I could escape. I watched him through wet eyes as I jumped up and ran backwards. He chuckled deep and gruff as he put his uncurled fingers up to his mouth and hissed sssshhhh. I pushed through the same saloon doors I had snuck through earlier and barreled back into the front room so fast I wasn’t sure what route to take as I navigated the small tables where couples were leaning and drinking over one another. I found Leticia in the mix of draped men and women and screamed, “Hey, where’s my mom?” to which she sneered “over there” as if one annoying birthday daughter was enough without my frantic demand. She pointed at the open bar where mostly single, drunk partygoers were crowded. I pushed through what seemed like a million busting waist spandex pants before I found my mother’s body that had always smelled and felt like a bed to me.

She noticed me and laughed, “Where have you been, loca?” I must have looked crazy. Of course I did. But hearing it only made the secret bombs explode in me—I squeezed against her belly and cried, choking on the tears before they even began to fall. She crouched down to my height and pulled me close by the shoulders. She knew, but I told her anyway. Her face became the smooth red sternness of the bull she sometimes became, mostly on nights when Papi came home late. She stood and pulled me up by the hand. She made sure I was steady and said, “Show me.” Her voice was so stern that I cried more, scared that she was mad at me for running off in the first place.

“No,” I sniffed out.

“Mamita, I need to find him.” My mother’s voice remained the same, but her eyes glistened familiarly and I led her into the backroom where I’d found the empty bar. No one was there, just like I had found it before. I stopped crying because I wanted to show her everything. We found him swaying out the bathroom doors and I said, “Him! That troll one. Mami, see? Him!” He smiled dark and lonely as we walked toward him.

“Are you the one who touched my little girl?” His face recoiled into hanging folds of cowardly skin. He shook his face no and the cheeks wagged. My mother slapped him so hard the wet warmth of his face left him.

When she’d asked him, my mother used the pronoun usted. Sometimes this denotes a reverence. It also denotes unfamiliarity. But the things she yelled at him after he lied to her; the names she called him made me think she must have known his man before. People came up to her and told her to calm down, vouching for the man’s apology, not knowing the full extent of what had occurred. But she said nothing to these people. She simply freed herself of their hands and words by the taut skin of her cheekbones and chin, yelling, “This is not a man!” We left, walking so closely together that I thought we’d trip and lose our balance, but we never did. In the car, my crying splutters attempted words like “I’m sorry” and “he scared me.” But she stopped me at the light—turning to me and putting her fingers over my lips.

“I shouldn’t have left you,” she said. And her skin was the cool dryness of ice you feel the instant before it touches the heat of your tongue. “You’re my baby girl,” she said as she put the car in P and pulled me as close to her lap as she could. “This is just between you and me, okay?” she asked. I saw wetness in her eyes, washing out her makeup at the corners.

I shook my head yes and stuffed it into the softness around her ribs, squeezing my eyes tight as peas. She was asking me to forgive her and I was telling her I never blamed her for a thing.

* * *

I talk to the dead when I feel like the living are causing too much trouble in my life. My grandma once said, “It’s not the dead you should be afraid of, it’s the living. The dead can’t touch you in the way the living can.”

* * *

These are things I would like to know. These are things I know about people I love. One, your favorite candy bar; two, a song that you always sing or dance with; three, a word that changes your mood; four, a vice that helps you forget; five, a place you don’t ever want to live again; six, a thing you can only do alone. Also, could you help me stop hating Mexican men? It has become a problem that hides in my pockets. Every so often it comes out to scare me. Sometimes it jumps into my mouth and I say something that I regret later. Sometimes it jumps into my ears and I hear things that aren’t really said. Sometimes it rubs onto my skin and I begin to hate the part of me that loves Mexican men.

The only Mexican man I’ve ever loved is my grandfather. He’s always been dead—a heart attack ten years before my conception. Maybe it’s the harmlessness of someone else’s mortality that allows me to love him. In any case, his full mouth and austere cheekbones made me think no man could be as beautiful or as dapper. A sophisticate who, with a different history, could’ve been the curved spine on the corner selling tamales and chewing the husks quietly under his brimmed hat.

The distance I feel inside myself is the dissonance of my black and white photographed grandpa interviewing international celebrities and the old, squatting Indio who eats more than he sells. When I go up to him and pay for my lunch, we will communicate in Spanish, his mouth a loose drawl and mine a tight pucker. I will count the hairs in his ears and he will imagine the whiteness of my feet. This dissonance is in my nose, the bridge desperately tugging the skin to stretch as the nostrils flare widely beyond my will.

My imbalance exists in a confused love affair between my halves. I am too Hispanic-looking to avert the “where are you from”s, but my loose hair and plain face call the purple-lipped snarls, thick-lidded stares of stoned shorties who have lived next door since we were both chiquitas. The disconnect exists between the polite smallness of my breasts and the brash pillow of my ass. It exists between my love for Abuelo and the disgust I feel when I remember Hector and all the other machista assholes who look at me and every other woman like we’re up for sale.

Hector was the first one I ever hated. He wasn’t a man yet. I wasn’t a woman. But there is a point at which we are sneakingly convinced out of our youthful robes and instead of inhabiting the garments of adulthood we roam the free world naked and disgusted with each other. That is the way, at least it was for the young female me. I saw how closely Hector’s wet black eyes were following the new, awkward curves of my body. I hated their shameless clinginess. He was dark as tamarindo with hair that was so black it seemed to always be wet. He had two styles for it—up and down—both with the unbearable spikiness of incredibly straight and thick hair, always so shameless. The boy I loved then was a blond-haired, blue-eyed tadpole, skinny and bland compared to Hector’s dark, muscular body, but good enough for my undeveloped palate.

* * *

Hector doesn’t like me anymore. He’s taken to coming up behind me so close that I can nearly feel him but if I were to say “get off me,” he could safely claim innocence. He whispers things behind my ear, where the skin is thin and the bone is smooth. “Slut.” My neck flares like feathers. “Bitch.” I turn to him slowly, but he is already walking away, smiling into my plain face, like he’s just relieved himself all over it.

“Hector’s always really nice to me.”

I smirk, humph, glare distrustfully at my friend.

“Maybe he just doesn’t like you, Cristina,” she said.

“Uh, no. I think the problem is that he likes me a little too much. This is how he thinks he should talk to me. Because of how I look, he thinks we are the same.”

She laughs. “You guys definitely don’t look alike.” My body slumps into the softness of itself.

* * *

In the gym, when Hector and I locked eyes for the first time, I reminded of a book I had been reading—White Fang. He had frightful razor eyes, but there was a dullness to all the rest of him. I could only be disgusted knowing that he wanted something from me. I must have been something new. The whole gym must have been. It certainly was not something I had ever seen before. Pale, athletic, well- dressed people who were consumed with aesthetics of self and appearance in ways that seemed too distracting for reality.

He and I were the same because we understood our place. It was to serve them. In one way or another. But always to do, not to be.

He befriended the girls who sat near me. Messy heads and crooked glasses, we sat slouched and gossiped like we supposed real women did. He listened to everything, reaching for me through the thickness of words. He thought himself magnetic as most men do at some point in their lives. But to me he was only the loud and disrupting hue of embarrassment. It was like having my mom at a social, with all the manicured, sparkling-eyed mothers who went to college—if only to meet a husband. My mother worked three jobs until she gave birth. And then she started a whole new line of work. What did the rest of them know? What mattered was the look of them. They did not work to be magnetic. They simply were. The didn’t have to do, they only had to be.

It is Valentine’s Day in the sixth grade and there are heart shaped streamers stuck to the walls like spitballs. We are nervous as chattering teeth, but all for different reasons. The thing about hormones is though they may be happening simultaneously among people, their sources are never the same. Everyone’s fears are different and reasonable. I was scared because the color red made me feel strong but love made me feel weak.

“Why do we have to do this? I don’t think anyone is going to enjoy this.” I asked my new friend who was taller and more awkward than I. She wiped her nose with her wrist and pulled down sleeves that were always too short. She snorted softly.

“This is just how it is. We do this shit every year. And some people do like it.” Her wavy nose pointed out some people with its tip. Some people were those people. They were the ones in the spotlight, leaving our shapes to be filled in with negative space.

Our eyes were set on who we wanted, but it only happened for one or two couples. Mainly the boys punched each other and looked around the gym for loose basketballs. The girls gathered in small groups at different corners talking about each other and hoping the scent of their shampoo would make them especially attractive.

Hector looked at me a few times, but I scowled like I’d seen my mother do so often while holding the mop or broom. He looked away, down. I knew he wouldn’t look again—that I had succeeded. I felt sorry for him.

My friend and I sat cross-legged on the cold tile floor and talked about how funny it was that we lived so close to one another. She was the only white girl I knew who didn’t live in the affluent neighborhood we all felt so special to be schooled in.

“It’s funny how all of us used to be friends when we were little.”

“How long have you gone to school here?”

She smirked and said, “Forever.”

“So you know all of them?” My eyes grew and— from of their corner’s—pointed out some of those people. She nodded with raised eyebrows as she leaned her lank back onto her elbows. I rested perpendicular to her, against the painted brick wall.

“Why are they so... weird? I mean, different. I don’t get it.” She shrugged and we went on to discuss last night’s capitulation of our favorite teen vampire drama. And those people were probably doing the same thing, but with the language and mannerisms they learned from their those people parents.

* * *

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know who I am. People ask me what I do or where I’m from and I think about filling out applications and all those little unchecked boxes. It’s not about semantics. It’s about the way those little empty boxes make me feel. Figuring out who I am should not parallel the same format as a survey that a cable company gives out in between the pages of its channel guide. When my parents chose my name, I’m sure it was less cerebral a process than their scratching of all of the appropriate characters in the insurance forms, attempting to ignore the silliness of what they were being made to do.

I do know some things, though. I know what love feels like when it is good and when it is tricky. I know that wind is the freest element I can experience. And when I look at myself, in a mirror or pictures, now or then, I see an entire lineage. I see a clay dish full of thick, warm blood that has dripped from variously shaded skins. Eyes stare back at me in several different colors and shapes. Hairs wave to me from wind strewn heads of various heights and roundnesses. My ancestry comes down to my simple belief in myself. It is simple, because I am complex. And so are they, those beautiful mothers and fathers of mine.

I am safely tucked into this complexity when I get into a fight with a purple-lipped girl at the fruteria because she thinks I am trying to steal her gallon of milk. I am safe when the man on the miniature bike calls me Chinita and I lunge to push him off balance instead of crying. But also safe when my bike is bumping into my hips because we are walking so tight in this group of brown faces yelling about immigration reform.

My mothers and fathers beam at me as I read aloud the story of my grandma’s death and it makes me cry for my papi but never for her. Who I am is in the stories I try to tell without disclosing every personal detail of my upbringing or heritage. Who I am is not determined by who you think I am.

How many radical Latinas have had fights with their papis or thought they must be dykes because there’s no way to love the kind of men they know?

I think of all the burdens people must carry on their delicate spines as I walk down Erie Street. My neighborhood houses y(oung) u(rban) p(rivileged) p(ricks) ies who walk their dogs profusely, dogs who look at me as if they’d have more fun at my house as I pet their soft ears, elderly women carrying grocery bags and laundry baskets, children who scream into each other’s faces, people my age who dress similarly and go about their business perpetually swaggering, and teenagers who are always touching each other or themselves and appear to be the children of music video dancers.

* * *

She (who?) doesn’t know what to call herself. She says mutt and smiles nervously, thinking, dogs would never judge me like this. She tries to smile at people who look like her out of a desire for connection, the recognition of synchronicity, some kind of affinity.

He (who?) moves toward her like a cane-cutter, his broadness too fine for the shortness of his body, his nose flat as a pig’s. His rattail is worn proudly. His shorts are the wide, round likenesses of tortas and glazed buns, foods that are starchy and fattening.

How many times will her throat expel “FUCK YOU”s to those loud, swaggering, broccoli-haired corner-dwellers? She passes them and thinks, I am going to school and they are not. I must be noble, and they must not be. Her face inflates with the blood that runs between them as she attempts to digest her anger.