Sorry For Partying @sfpnovel-blog - Tumblr Blog

Moving Announcement

It's not you, Tumblr, it's me. I thought it would bring cache to my project to host it on Tumblr, but we're wrong for each other. You're great for images and crowdsourcing but I'm too much text for you. I've moved Sorry for Partying to Wordpress. But this was fun, while it lasted. I hope we can still be friends.

Please join me at Sorry for Partying's new home on wordpress: sfpnovel.wordpress.com

-Tessa

After their meeting with Principal Walczek and the other fourth grade teacher, Ali went back to her reconfigured classroom and Wallo assumed his station with Mrs. Doubtfire, as they called her. Since she was preparing to send Edgardo, Maya, Ritish and Chaco next door to the new concentrated-disability alignment (as Walczek had termed it), Ali was surprised to see that her students seemed to have been told of the new arrangement before their teachers. Before her, in an elementary school classroom in the forgotten parts of Chicago, twenty-six students without serious cognitive or behavioral problems sat staring up at their teacher, wondering what happened to their classmates.

“Donde’sta Maya?” asked Tina, a tiny Mexican girl who sat in a cluster of desks near the back of the room. Chirpy, dyslexic Maya was her best friend, Ali knew.

Ali stood behind her desk and placed her fingertips on the cushiony day planner that topped it. “A number of our students have been transferred next door, to the other fourth grade classroom,” she announced. Most of her students watched her, listening intently. A few stared at their desks. Davide stood up and walked to the back of the classroom, sat on the rug. “Additionally,” she went on, “because we are a smaller number now, Mr. Guero will no longer be here to help us out.”

A collective moan, a tiny whimper, shot around the classroom.

Lourdes raised her hand. At her desk cluster, Edgardo’s chair sat empty.

“Yes, Lourdes.”

“But you said Mr. Guero was a lifesaver.”

“I did say that.”

“So who will save your life now?”

Ali sat down in her chair. She had a powerful urge to place her forehead on the desk, to twist her neck and flatten her cheek into the cool papery calendar whose small neat boxes made each day look so short and manageable. Time, she knew, was not so brief and contained.

“You will have to save my life,” Ali said. Lourdes sat straight in her tiny chair, her chin raised as though she were hearing orders she desperately wanted to follow. “All of you,” Ali went on. “You all have to save my life. Can you do it?”

“Yes!” came twenty-five cries of assent.

In the back of the room, Davide stood up from his perch on the reading rug and raised his hand.

“Yes?” asked Ali. She tried not to engage students who left their seats but without Carmen here to manage what that actually meant, the encroaching disorder seemed already too much to handle. And Davide could be volatile, his slim figure twisting quickly into anguish and rage. Already Ali could see the tight corners of his mouth quivering.

“Were we bad citizens?” he asked. His classmates swiveled in their small seats to see him ask, then followed the lobbied question back to Ali, still sitting at the front of the room. Outside the wall of sticky window panes, rain and wind pushed struggling tree branches against the glass. The leaves would stick, flat as pressed flowers, then pull away.

Back in mid-August, when the semester had first begun and Ali was wondering how two twenty-somethings would handle a classroom of thirty ten-year-olds, three of whom had special needs, one with a behavioral disorder, and at least two or three whom Ali suspected were brilliant, she had brought the question home to Carmen and together they’d brainstormed this model of classroom citizenship.

On the second day of school, Ali had asked, “What does it mean to be a good citizen?” and patiently she’d written the kids’ answers on the board: Pay taxes from Lourdes, Don’t Litter from Malik, Recycle from Martell. But when she returned to face the class, twenty-seven more students stared up blankly. Ritish bored a hole in his desktop with a pen.

“Rewinding a little,” said Ali, “what do we think is a citizen? Any of the ladies? What’s a citizen?”

“A person,” said Irsa, a fat Turkish girl in the front row. “A person who lives in society.”

“Great!” said Ali. “Really wonderful. So how to be a good citizen?”

“You help the society,” Irsa went on, her hands in little fists on her desk. “You help the society to be good.”

“Great!” Ali said again. “So we’ve heard Pay Taxes, Don’t Litter, and Recycle as ways we could help the society. How else? How else do we help a society to be good? Eric?”

“Help people,” said Eric from the back row. A couple of the other boys snickered.

“That’s wonderful, Eric,” Ali said pointedly. “Help people how?”

“Like…grocery shopping!” Eric exclaimed. “My neighbor Mrs. Ng. can’t go to the store so my mom buys her groceries and she pays us back on Sunday!”

“That’s great,” said Ali. Help feed people went up on the board.” She put down the chalk and took off in a stroll around the perimeter of the room. “So let’s change directions a little bit,” she said. She passed Carmen at his perch in the back. “Let’s imagine this classroom, right here, is a society. And in our society, like every society, we have all different types of people who need and give different kinds of help. What can we do, as classroom citizens, to improve our society for everyone?”

“Be nice,” said Eric.

“Wonderful. Be courteous, right? Respectful?” Eric nodded. Ali walked back to the board, wrote, Be Nice.

“Don’t eat smelly food in class,” said Martell.

No Smelly Food went up on the board.

In the back of the room, Carmen raised his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Guero?”

“I think a good classroom citizen would want everyone to be learning.” Before him, Ritish was furiously prying away the top of the desk. Carmen placed his hand on the twitchy shoulder.

“How do we know if everyone is learning?” Ali remembered asking. “How are we supposed to know?”

“We have to ask them,” Carmen had said, like a sage.

“But how do we ask?”

And Carmen walked around to the front of the room and stood next to Ali, beaming in the limelight of the children’s gaze. “As citizens,” he said, “we have to be responsible for ourselves and for each other. Don’t you agree?” The kids nodded along. “So why doesn’t everyone turn to the person next to them and ask if they are learning. And if not, see if the two of you together can try to imagine a solution. What will help you learn?”

“Are you learning?” Ali whispered to Carmen. In three rows before them, fifteen pairs of students chattered and laughed.

“Every day,” Carmen said.

Now, after almost six weeks of school and daily calls of “Citizen check!” in which the students, comparing needs with their neighbors, had clearly discerned who among them were learning the quickest and who not at all, and so had suggested themselves in the third week of school that they reorganize their desks into little groups of four each with one person good at math and one person good at reading in each group, so they could better help each other learn, after which of crowdsourced bit of urban planning Ali had magically seen seven islands of desks work together to make sure that the answer to the question “Are you learning?” was if not always “Yes!” at least “Kind of” or “Sometimes” or “Partly,” it was as obvious to Ali from the front of the room as it was to the students before her that those students who were missing were the weakest among them who apparently they had not been able to save. And now, these kind remaining youngsters had no known recourse (and why wouldn’t they?) but to blame themselves.

“You are not bad citizens,” Ali said. She felt, with twenty six ten-year-olds clustered before her like inquisitive grapes, that there was nothing to tell them but the truth. She stood up and walked around to the front of her desk, to feel closer to them all. “The fact is,” she went on, “sometimes even when we are the best citizens we know how to be, the folks in charge don’t reward us for our good behavior. Because there are other things they are thinking about. Other priorities.”

“You mean the government,” Martell said. He nodded knowingly, channeling some older brother or father Ali didn’t know.

“Sometimes the government, yes. In this case, the school board.”

Sixty-two eyes stared up at her, unblinking.

“You see, we had thirty students and two teachers. But the school couldn’t afford to pay my salary and Mr. Guero’s. So some of our students moved to another class that already has two teachers, and now our class is a little smaller so we don’t need Mr. Guero’s help anymore.”

“But we love Mr. Guero,” said Tina.

“He loves you too, you guys,” Ali said. “He misses you already. This is not a lesson we wanted you to learn.”

#school #lesson planning #layoffs #transparency #fourth grade

7. (The Occupation)

It felt weird not to have a job. Since he was eight or nine or even earlier Carmen had always worked: raking the leaves in front of a neighbor’s trailer, watching a local kid for fifty cents an hour, delivering papers. He flipped burgers for a year at McDonald’s, once he turned old enough. Fourteen. That was in Phoenix. Studied for his GED in a ranger’s office north of Santa Fe. Read more books at the front desk of Carson National Forest than some of his co-teachers at Cermak Elementary had cracked in a lifetime. Wasn’t much for a ranger but he could answer the phone all right, speak Spanish to the naturalized abuelitos still scared to travel in their own land.

Two rows ahead of him, an Asian teenager yipped frenetically into his cell phone in Thai or Cantonese. In nine or ten hours, he’d be in New York. Another new city, more America to judge and let judge. Outside the window, the flat bottom of Michigan rolled by, fields and small buildings and occasionally a cluster of strip malls. Across the aisle, a fat black woman sang incomprehensible church songs along with her headphones. He was still a little stone. In New York there would be hipsters. At Oklahoma State “indie” had meant “indigenous” and Carmen’s friends were all Indians and he was the white man. Sometimes on the weekend he’d take a bus like this one up to Wichita where away from his friends’ posturing he could drink and dance and fuck strangers in their odd Nebraska apartments before sneaking out into the cold morning knowing the bus was waiting to take him away from the fake phone number he’d left on the napkin stuck to the faded kitchenette. From there it was a small dream to Chicago. In all this time he had never been fired, not fired, Pilar hadn’t thrown herself across a dusty border for her mestizo son to get fired, sent packing onto this goddamn bus in search of another dream in another city in another part of America.

In the duffel between his legs was two t-shirts, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of wool socis, and a set of long underwear from the Army Navy surplus store. Carmen wore an extra-large long-sleeved yellow waffle henley under a ratty hoodie plus jeans and a third pair of socks. He would need a coat. He’d bought boots for the expedition. A dop kit held a razor, a half-used bar of soap in a Ziploc baggie, travel shampoo, a large SpeedStick, and a small battery-powered vibrator that looked like a rehydrated prune painted gold. Beside it all, under the seat, went Ali’s sleeping bag, a grandly generous parting gift only befitting to a Grand Dame such as Alaia Monterey.

He would try to sleep. He would try not to think about the bureaucratic mouth garbage he’d been given: “the school board has elected to consolidate the non-central faculty.” He would not wallow in Wallo’s presence as the only other non-central faculty at Cermak who would now be dividing his time between the computer lab and the other fourth grade classroom to which Carmen and Ali’s learning-disabled children would now be transferred and placed under Wallo’s careless care. He would not reconsider where he was going, or why. He would press his fat forehead to the cool dingy glass of this swaying Megabus and for a few hours relinquish responsibility for the physical forward movement that seemed after everything his mother had sacrificed the only choice to which Carmen’s body retained the exclusive and inalienable right.

#bus travel #work #oklahoma #indigenous studies #arizona #unemployment

In the morning when Ali left her post along Wallo’s back and headed to the bathroom, Carmen was already (or was it still?) sitting on the couch in the small living room in his leopard-print briefs with this charmeuse dressing gown fallen open around his wide belly. It was unclear whether he’d slept. The scene was identical to the one Ali had arrived home to yesterday after school, her cheeks flushed from a bike ride home down forgotten city streets on a warm September day, when she’d entered the apartment with her bicycle hoisted over her shoulder and Carmen announced, “Lover, I’ve been fired.”

She put the bike down and followed the smells of a strawberry blunt to Carmen’s side, took a deep toke before taking off her helmet and hearing what had happened.

But this morning she stayed standing by her bedroom door, afraid of a contact high from what appeared to be the second half of yesterday’s blunt, its fumes milling around Carmen’s breathing air as though he were the plastic fixture in a campy snow-globe or a lava lamp. The thought of facing her twenty-nine students without him made her stomach lurch.

A packed bag sat on the floor beside the couch, and with it the sleeping back Ali told him he could use. She wanted to sit down beside him and hold his great skull in her arms and comfort him like she did yesterday when the small action of a large beauracracy fell upon them like a guillotine. Like a house. She wanted to skip school and let the weed settle into her mind-body like she was a muddy pond and thoughts were only wispy weeds swirled around by the watery muck.

But that had been yesterday’s luxury, and today was now today, a school day. Ali was standing on the shore with pond scum clinging to her calves, water running into the back of her shoes, trying to grieve Carmen’s departure as quickly and quietly as possible, when Wallo burst from the bedroom door in corduroys and socks, his thin chest still bare, and came to rest beside her. “A little early, muchacho?” he asked, noticing the smoke, then the bag. “Where ya going?”

Carmen deigned to cast a glance through the smoke at the two he would presently leave behind, then re-crossed his eyes and centered his attention on the peace pipe hanging turgidly between his wide lips.“I am going to occupy Wall Street,” he said.

Wallo’s mouth opened and his tongue flapped inside like a fish. He wagged it at Ali, then back at Carmen. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No joke, cracker,” said Carmen. He puffed longly on the last inches of the blunt.

“You are totally outrageous,” said Wallo.

“Yes,” Carmen said, nodding. He smiled at Ali.

“Yes,” she agreed, nodding along. Here was Carmen Guerra on the couch in his sateen dressing gown, but tomorrow he would be Comrade Carmen, leader of a new age, Gaga in khakis and a tan beret, living love as liberation, a dangerous feat possible only for dangerous lovers like Carmen, with his trans burlesque shows, his shadowy arts.

“You have my blessing,” Ali said, because it seemed the right thing to say. She went to Carmen and hugged him.

Later, while she and Wallo stood waiting for the bus stop under the sharp blue sky, takeout coffees and muffins in hand, Ali thought of her bicycle, still leaning against the living room wall where she’d left it.

#Occupy Wall Street #marijuana #teacher layoffs #public transport #public school teacher

“What was that all about?” Wallo asked. Ali handed him one of the two glasses of Fernet she’d poured in the kitchen to accompany their retreat to her bedroom. She sipped slowly, the thick liquory jet fue coating her throat. She felt stronger already.

“Carmen was laid off today,” she said. She turned and looked at him, Wallo, Mars prone on the bed, his right eyebrow raised.

“No shit,” he said. “Thus tomorrow’s Emergency Meeting.” He bobbled his head with mock seriousness.

Ali sat down beside him, on the edge of her bed. She slid her hand under his shirt and let her fingers burrow into the soft hair on Wallo’s belly, matted like the forest floor, like a dog’s dense fur.

How amazing it was to find, each time she blinked and opened her eyes again, this same fine white man still laying on her Laura Ashley duvet. Incredible that the bedding set her mother bought her in a Bethesda mall could coexist in the same visual field with this handsome teacher discovered in the computer lab, leaning lithely over one of the printers when Ali arrived with her fourth graders on the first day of school, this tall scrawny Prince Eric type who’d asked, “You my next class?” and Ali had replied, “I sure hope so,” before she’d even had time to think, so that three hours later when they found themselves leaving the building together somehow they ended up in a Russian dive bar down the street where a waitress was offered vodka shots and sent plates of pickled tomatoes their way and Alaia found herself spinning the gold ring around the middle finger of her right hand so insistently that Wallo announced, “You have beautiful nails. I used to bite mine,” and presented his hand, ten small neat impressions of nail-plates atop ten narrow, columnal digits laid upon Ali’s knee.

“Your hair is funny,” Ali had replied, ever uncool.

“I know,” said Wallo. “I have no control over it.”

“But the rest of it,” Ali said, feeling the vodka swish around her inhibitions. “You got control over the rest?”

“Sometimes,” said Wallo, eyes twinkling. “Not always.”

So now here they were again in Ali’s bedroom, not for the first time, Wallo’s fingers, the selfsame ten working themselves around the lilting parabola of Ali’s waistband, testing the stretch to the denim. Carmen sang in the kitchen even louder than before, SCRUBS, I DON’T WANT NO SCRUB, A SCRUB IS A GUY WHO CAN’T GET NO LOVE FROM ME, pouting and stomping like a furious bird of paradise, crooning his jealous call so that it filled the apartment along with the lingering smells of fajita night, slipped under the crack beneath Ali’s door to surround the bodies of the two lovers whose shirts had since been unbuttoned and zipper flies unzipped and underwear tugged down into a mechanically-mediated Twister game Ali believed the ancients could not have imagined when they dictated to their scribes the multiple spiderous facets of the actions of love.

#Twister #lovers #layoffs #Russian food #TLC

Ali marched into the kitchen, where Carmen was chopping tomatoes beside the stove. He’d picked up a whole basket at the Lincoln Park farmer’s market, object of his weekly pilgrimage to north of downtown, where rich white families lived and shopped. “I swear to God, those trixies wouldn’t know what to do with a fresh tomato if a pico de gallo slapped them in the face.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Ali sat down at the small breakfast table by the window. Outside she could hear women talking in Spanish about the late September warmth, as Chicagoan as anyone, dissecting the weather like it was theirs to understand.

“Wallo is coming over.”

“Ai!” Carmen exclaimed. He whipped his sleeve back from the stove where peppers and onions sizzled in a frying pan. Ali studied her roommate’s nighttime uniform of turban and chiffon dressing gown held closed by a vintage apron. The frying pan fizzled and spat. “It’s my last night,” Carmen growled.

“He called me.”

“Bullshit, muchacha. When?”

“A little while ago.”

“So why you don’t come hang out with me?”

“My guts hurt.” Ali leaned an elbow on the table and a sharp crumb from the tablecloth ground its way into her arm.

“Yes, a gringo penis inside you will help your womanly pains, absolutamente.” Carmen was back at the tomatoes, dicing them finely, not turning around to look at Ali.

“I’m sorry,” Ali huffed.

“Me, too.” Carmen came to the table with a plate piled high with tortillas, grilled vegetables, salsa and shredded cheese. “Hungry?”

Ali moaned, a long, histrionic, self-indulgent, drawn-out growl of a moan, a world-historical sigh, an Ur-groan, the battered cry of the African-American experience. “Uuuuuooooogggghhhaaaaahhhhh,” she said. “How am I fucking going to survive without you here? Carmen? Don’t gooooooo.”

“I have to. Sorry, baby.”

They ate in silence until the doorbell rang. Ali crossed the tiled kitchen floor and buzzed him in, and then here he was, his thick black hair piled atop his head, female almost in its luxuriance, skittering into the apartment like it was a television set, slim hips leading as though Ali and Carmen had tugged Wallo by his corduroy waistband into their lives, Converse hi-tops skidding across the floor, a trail of urbam muceous on their wake, his cardigan flown open, mouth wide in a shit-eating grin.

“Hola, fuckers!” said Wallo.

Carmen stood up and carried the empty dishes back to the sink. Wallo promptly took his seat.

“Hi,” said Ali. “How are you?”

“Great,” said Wallo. “Super fuckin swell. Whatcha lovebirds up to?”

“We were just eating—“ Ali began.

“And didn’t save any for me?” Wallo craned his long neck around to look back at Carmen, loading dishes into the sink. “Carmen, mi hijo, what’s the diggity? You no me gusta?”

“Do you even like teaching?” Carmen asked, still facing the dishes. “Or do you just suffer the little children for the summers off?”

“Enchanted, darling,” Wallo said. He held his hand out for an imaginary plebe to kiss.

“Whatever, you two,” said Carmen. “Don’t crowd the kitchen for my sake.”

#Mexican food #cooking #love triangle #friendship #three's a crowd #Cornel West

No sooner had they begun but they were arguing, Alaia Jackson Monterey and Carmen Ruiz Herrerra Guero, this unlikely interracial international Platonic couple cooped up in a walk-up in Pilsen at 19th street and Loomis. Traffic rattled past Carmen’s window, sending water droplets fluttering down the iron tiers of a fire escape. Fall’s chill had deepend this past week and Ali slithered under the covers, poked her head out the foot of the bed then sat up with the blanket around her shoulders. Howard Zinn’s contraband photograph stared at them from its perch on a repurposed chair, Zinn’s arched teamster eyebrows eyeing their hoodlum history project with encouraging disdain. Carmen wrinkled his nose.

“Well?” he asked.

“I know what you want me to say.”

“What, then?”

“That if not for the Constitution, I’d be a maid and you’d still be in Mexico.”

“Not even!” Carmen cried. He disappeared his wide fingers into his short brown curls. “Lord, it is so much bigger than that. Fuck, my mama wouldn’t have even come here if—.” He took a long drought of cheap Pinot Noir, then tried again. “If it wasn’t for Andrew Fucking Jackson, Mexico might have been an all right place to live!”

“Weren’t,” said Ali. “If it weren’t.”

Carmen ignored her. “You think I’m exaggerating?” he pleaded. “Why don’t you ask some of our students—ask Lourdes or Edgardo why Mami and Papi had to move to the US of A in the first place.”

“Touché.”

“You’re just saying that so I’ll stop.”

“So what?” said Ali. She didn’t care, really, now that Carmen was leaving. All of this would collapse. This project, her classroom, her home. They were a team, now a broken team. He’d been fired and was leaving and all their students would be the losers. “You win. I surrender.”

“Well, this is America, so I’m still going to arrest you and rape your wife.”

“Jesus, Carmen.”

“Jesús, Jesús, Jesús,” Carmen muttered. He fell to his knees in front of the shrine, bent his head before Zinn, Ganesh, and the Virgin. “And if it weren’t for that pendejo coyote I wouldn’t exist and mi madre would still be alive.” Carmen crossed himself, looked up at the sky, brought his fingers to his lips. “Te amo, mamá,” he said. “Y papá también.”

“Why do you say that?” Ali asked, unmoving. “If he raped your mother.”

Carmen stared at the ground. “Conveniently, that makes him my father.” He kneeled upright, his wide waist held high over his knees. “Y la historia no escrito sobre el agradable sino el verdadero.”

“Oh, good grief...”

“Exactamente, Alaia Monterey,” Carmen said, rising onto his feet. “Now let’s make some dinner. I’m starved.”

#Pilsen #history #Mexican migrants #friendship

Uh, HELLO, it's don't PLAY in her garden, don't smell her flower(s). But i don't know how many flowers are in there. I think I just have one?

will do. thanks, friend.

“Good grief,” Ali said, aloud. She was surprised at the sound of her own voice, at its insistence, as though she had spoken in tongues, uttered an incantation whose meaning she didn’t know.

“Shall we work?” Carmen asked. As though on cue, he pulled up a worn desk chair to the edge of the bed, then gathered a pile of papers and a notebook from their corner on the floor. Carmen sat at attention, a secretary ready to dictate.

When Ali sat up, she gasped. The brightly printed curtains, the Himalayan prayer flags that had draped the ceiling, the outdated posters of Ricky Martin and Shakira, all were gone. While she lay moaning, Carmen had scrubbed his life away. For a year this bedroom had been as loud and guarded and confusing as he was. Now all that was left was the red patterened coverlet, damp from Ali’s tears, and the shrine in the corner to Howard Zinn whose photo, secretly cut from the dust jacket of a library book, both characters now reverently faced.

Yes, it was he, Howard Zinn, that wizened old Jew whose leftist historical wisdom three decades of questioning readers had sought out from Pilsen’s middling public library branch, his face smudged with thumbprints, his photo framed in a tiny twisted spiral of tinfoil, hung by dental floss from the back of the chair that served as altar. Beside him were figurines of Ganesh, the Hindu god of the threshhold, and the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, the crying patron mother of all Mexico.

“Where are we?” Ali asked vaguely. She was feeling too depressed to work.

“The Constitutional Convention,” Carmen replied.

Yes, was it—they had written their way to 1787, past the forgotten African and Scandinavian explorers who had chosen not to colonize the land; past the arrival of Columbus and his peers Cortez and de Soto, leaders of the great waves of Iberian murderers, rapists, enslavers and infecters whose cruelty baptized the land; past the pathetic whines of the early English settlers, who appeared to massacre Indians for sheer ego rehabilitation; through (as recently as the last few weeks) the Revolutionary War, a clusterbang of populism and race-baiting; to get them to here, today, September not in Chicago in 2011 but in Philadelphia in 1787, to a covention for which founding document Alaia Monterey Jackson, daughter of the law and would-have-been law student (to the great chagrin of Teach for America, still sending annual questionairres wondering why she was still a teacher), still had trouble approaching critically.

And that was the point, here, wasn’t it? In writing a revisionist children’s American history textbook out of an almost millenarian belief that dealing honestly with the wounds of the past could maybe heal us for a healthier future, if Alaia Jackson couldn’t get it up to approach central texts critically, how could this project possibly succeed?

Carmen had lit the half-melted votive candles that lined the altar’s seat and resumed his position next to her. “O, Howard Zinn, he intoned, “stolen from the second floor of the Pilsen Public Library, grant us your wisdom, your historical zeal, your hawkish, skeptical glory. We beseech you—“

“And Ganesha, and Mother Mary,” Ali added, nudging Carmen in his fleshy shoulder.

“Yes, all three of you! Unholy triad of resistance, show us the way to the Constitutional Convention.”

At this, Ali laughed, and the roommates set down for one last night of work on their hopeless pedagogy project, Good Grief.

#history #Howard Zinn #Teach for America #Pilsen #Chicago #American history #textbooks

Jean’s question, “Why not just go on the pill?” had an answer. For one, Ali thought, fuck Big Pharma. For two, it had killed her libido in college—and depressed her, or maybe it was just depressing, the act of popping a tablet each morning and abandoning herself to its chemical infanticide. For three, she figured, as Carmen scurried around her, cleaning his life away, she was getting older, older to the point that the requisite one-year wait period between quitting the pill and safely getting pregnant shifted from creepy factoid to important logistical concern. In contrast to a synthetic hormone under whose influence her uterus would forget how to self-regulate, an IUD seemed to Ali a simple appliance she’d slide out when ready, like a used tampon.

As Ali lay on Carmen’s bed half-watching his legs move around the room, she remembered reading that Big Pharma could have designed the pill with natural instead of synthetic lady hormones but they didn’t because you can’t patent natural, non-tinkered with organic substances. Now that, Ali thought, is some Monsanto shit, all up in my flower garden. Don’t play in her garden, and don’t smell her flower.

And further, what was wrong with preferring a good ol’ barrier method to some chemical gut-fuck? Okay, maybe not barrier, maybe interceptionist—Hi, this is the interceptionist speaking, how can I redirect your sperm?—definitely physical as opposed to chemical, a direct gentle irritation to her uterine wall that keeps fertilized eggs from implanting there. Which begged the question, were eggs getting fertilized and then dying because they had nowhere to grow? Is that abortion? Was this actually not preventative care?

But the biggest issue, Ali knew—and here she imagined her mother Jean leaning over the bed with disapproval written all over her face even as her daughter lay curled in the fetal position before her—the bigger issue was that Ali’s new plastic-copper hormone-free IUD had some social connotations with which her mother was unequivocally uncomfortable.

“Don’t they use those a lot in Europe?” Jean had asked on the phone, the implication being that European women were vaguely promiscuous, an IUD therefore a socialist slut protector. Also: “Can’t you feel it in there?” And indeed, right now, as the rain fell outside their third-story window and Carmen wiped off his dresser top humming Scrub, I don’t want no scrub, a scrub is a guy who can’t get no love from me, preparing to leave her forever, she could feel it, this new technology, asserting itself against the inside of her spasming uterine wall, reminding her of the fact that life was fundamentally tragic, a fact known to too many of her fourth grade students, a reality which only made this fact all the more true.

Sure, there was once a comfort to be found in the idea, however unscientific, that a pill was a decision one made every day to not get pregnant today, as though if Ali had skipped that day’s pill whatever spunk was floating up her pelvis from Wallo’s softening dick could sprout and grow like a swallowed watermelon seed. But something about her new IUD—this tiny plastic T shoved up inside her by an old Planned Parenthood feminist with an out-of-practice grimace seemed, well, involuntary. Passive. Like Ali hadn’t chosen to put it up there (though she had), like it had a mind of its own, a mind which was not her mind, a mind which was oppressive, which hated her black body and the black babies it was born to bear. That is what Jean had been thinking.

“It just doesn’t seem right,” she had said, “given our history, and all.” Or had it been: given history. The difference seemed collossal, given Ali and Jean’s history, that is, how few serious words were exchanged between them, the gravity of each one, these through the phone conjuring the image of a white doctor in the south in the twenties, gloves on, glasses on, putting this thing in without permission, achieving one more instance in a silent tidal wave, another broken procedure borne away by the undertow of history into that great accumulated trash heap floating down toward the breakwater, Mistakes America Made and Will Never Admit, and beyond it Jean’s unspoken but understood question: In 2011, what was a black woman, her daughter, doing with an IUD? My darling, Jean seemed to say, the symbol retains its meaning regardless of your choice.

#novel #literature #African-American history #birth control #cramps #mothers

Epigraph

When I ask her how Smoky manages to attract his hordes, she tells me, 'By the force of his prick.' 'Explain,' I say, and she tells me, 'You know how when a real cunt walks into a room, a man knows it? Well, the same thing happens the other way round. With certain people, no matter what the disguise, you understand what they're there to do.'

- Philip Roth, The Human Stain

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