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LOVING IN THE

WAR YEARS

Cheme L. Moraga

Lo QUE NUNCA PASO POR Sus LABIOS

Expanded Edition South End Press Classics Series

SOUTH END PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts

SALVATION, JESUS, AND SUFFER

Last night at work, a woman younger than me with rosary beads and a scapular wrapped 'round her neck came floating into the restaurant, act­

ing like she was gonna have a fit or something crazy-her eyelids blink­ ing a hundred miles an hour, her eyeballs rolling up into her head, only

the whites showing.

It was sunday-rush and she stood there in the middle of the floor, telling everybody they should all leave immediately because Jesus was coming. And what was funny is that everybody stopped eating, their forks hanging in the air in front of their open mouths, and listened. Just for a second, but

for that second, she had their complete attention.

As a nut, people noticed her. She'd be nobody if she weren't a crazy

woman.

I bate religion, I said to Jeanne the hostess who kept trying to get the crazy woman to sit down, shut up and eat some soup. I hate that she has all those words about salvation and jesus and suffer to pull off this scene with. Confusing the point.

The woman left and came back at least seven times before she finally left

for good. Nobody wanted to throw her out-to where? But every time she came in again, my stomach would get all tied up in knots and I kept get­ ting these hits of myself at about eleven years old, shaking my body up

and down trying to rattle the "impure thoughts" outta it.

She and I, we're the same woman. but nobody notices me like that.

LOVING IN TIlE WAR. YEARS/59

ANATOMY LESSON

A black woman and a small beige one talk about their bodies. About putting a piece of their anatomy in their pockets

upon entering any given room.

When entering a room full of soldiers who fear hearts,

you put your heart in your back pocket, the black woman explains. It is important, not to intimidate. The soldiers wear guns, not in their back pockets.

You let the heart fester there. You let the heart seethe. You let the impatience of the heart build and build until the power of the heart hidden begins to be felt in the room. Until the absence of the heart begins to take on the shape

of a presence. Until the soldiers look at you and begin to beg you to open up your heart to them, so anxious are they to see

what it is they fear they fear.

Do not be seduced.

Do not forget for a minute that the soldiers wear guns.

Hang onto your heart. Ask them first what they'll give up to see it. Tell them that they can begin with their arms.

Only then will you begin to negotiate.

6O/rnERRfE L MORAGA

IT GOT HER OVER

You're lucky you look the way you do, you could get any man. Anyone strys any­

thing to you, tell them you r jather~ white.

-Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise

1 To touch her skin fdt thick like hide, not like flesh and blood when an arm is raised the blue veins shine rivers running under­ ground with shadow depth, and tone.

No, her skin

had turned on her in the light of things. In the light of Black women and children beaten/hanged/raped strangled murdered in Boston Atlanta

in California where redneck hunters coming home with empty white hands go off to fill 'em with Black Man.

WVlNG IN THE WAR YEARS/61

Her skin had turned in the light of these things. Stuck to her now like a flat inunovable paste

spread grey over a life.

Still, it got her over

in laundromats when machines ate her change swallowed whole her doilar bill when cops stopped to check what the problem was

Rerllember I could be your daughter she used looking up from the place on the sand where two women were spread out, defiant

where he read, the white one must be protected that time

saving them both.

It got her over when the biLI was late when she only wanted to browse not buy

when hunger forced them off the highway and into grills called "Red's" and "Friendly's"

coffee shops packed suburban white on white. eyes shifting to them and away to them and away and back again then shifted into safety lock inside their heads.

62/CHERRfE L. MORAGA

2 She had never been ashamed of her face.

Her lust. yes

Her bad grammar. yes Even her unforgiving ways but never, her face

recently taken to blushing as jf the blood wanted to swallow

the flesh.

Bleed through

gUilt by association

complicity to the crime. Bleed through

Born to lead. Born to low.

Born to liw. Bleed through

and flood the joint with a hatred so severe

people went white with shock

and dying.

No, she had never been ashamed of her face not like this

grabbing her own two cheeks her fingers pressed together as if to hold between them the thin depth of color.

LOVING IN THE WAR. YEARS/63

See this fau? Wearing it like an accident

of birth. It was

a scar sealing up a woman, now darkened by desire.

See this face?

Where do you take this hate

to IUllch?

How to get over this one.

64/CHfR.R1E L MORAGA

WINTER OF OPPRESSION, 1982

The cold in my chest Comes from having to decide

while the ice builds up on this side of my new-york-apt.-bldg.-living window, whose death has been marked upon the collective forehead of this continent. this shattering globe the most indelibly.

Illdelible. A catholic word I learned when I learned

that there were catholics and there were not.

But somehow we did not count the Jews among the have-nots, only protestants with their cold & bloodless god with no candles/no incense/no bloody sacrifice or spirits lurking.

Protestantism. The white people's religion.

First time I remember seeing pictures of the Holocaust

LOVING IN THE WAR TIARS/65

was in the tenth grade and the moving pictures

were already there in my mind

somehow bifore they showed me

what I already understood

that these people were killed

for the spirit-blood

that runs through them.

They were like us in this.

Ethnic people with long last names

with vowels at the end or the wrong

type of consonants combined a colored kind of white people.

But let me tell you

first time I saw an actual

picture glossy photo of a lynching

I was already grown & active

& living & loving Jewish.

Black. White. Puerto

Rican.

And the image blasted

my conscIousness

split it wide I had never thought seen

heard of such a thing

never even imagined the look

of the man the weight

dead hanging swinging heavy

the fact of the white people

cold bloodless

looking on It

had never occurred to me

I tell you I the nUlls failed to mention

66/CHER.R1E L. MORAGA

this could happen, too

how could such a thing happen?

because somehow dark real dark

was not quite real

people killed

but some

thing not

taken to heart

in the same way it feds

to see white shaved/starved

burned/buried

the boned bodies stacked & bulldozed

into huge craters made by men

and machines

and at fifteen I counted 22

bodies only in the far left-hand

corner of the movie screen

& I kept running

through my mind

atld I'm Ollly aile

coullt one

it could be me

it (ould be me

I'm nothillg

to tbis cruelty.

Somehow tonight,

is it the particular coldness

where my lover sleeps with a scarf

to keep it out

that causes me to toss

and turn the events of the last weeks

tqe last years of my life

around in my sleep?

LOVING IN mE WAR YE.AR.S/67

Is it the same white coldness

that forces my back up

against the wall-choose.

choose.

I cannot

choose nor forget

how simple

to fall back

upon rehearsed racial memory.

I work to remember

what I never dreamed possible

what my consciousness could never

contrive.

Whoever I am

I must believe

I am not

and will never be

the only

one

who suffers.

68/OIERRtE L. MORAGA

THE ROAD TO RECOVERY

I

I

I

i

________ . ____ . ________ J

MINDS & HEARTS

the road to recovering

what was lost

in the war

that never pronounced itself

left no visible signs

no ration cards

sailor boys

ticker tape

parades, the road

to recovering what was lost

in a war that never pronounced

correctly

the road to recovering

what was lost in a war

that was never pronounced

dead

missing In

action, prisoner

of our minds

& hearts

7o/CHERRfE L. MORAGA

NO BORN-AGAIN CHILDREN

"Somebody in my family just died!

Now are you gonna stay dead or pull a lazarus?"

Woman, if I could simply rise up

from this bed of doubt, miraculous and beaming,

I would.

if I could,

I would.

You told me that when your brother saw the train coming

he didn't move. He was transfixed somehow

intensely curious a boy of twelve with a body of pure

speed and a death wish

he's ready to dump into the nearest river

or body that can swallow

it.

He opened you up, pink and hungry, too

bu t for the tenderness in his fingers talking

you into, coaxing you into

turning [old and quiet into you.

And taking the orange into your five-year-old fist

the boy coming at you again, you flung it out the window.

He stopped dead cold in his tracks.

I don't know why your brother died. I don't know why .

• Was it the face of the orange, alive and bright, spinning

before his eyes? The vision of a girl

LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS/71

pushing life through the hole of doom that bore you both? It was a suicide, woman. A suicide we both refuse daily with all our good brains and tenderness. Still, you can see me in him, can't you? Riveted onto that track putting my cheek up against the size of a locomotive just to see what it's like just to taste how dose it'll get h",,.,,,.",_

stone still & trembling I split off that rail.

But I am not your brother. I will not die on you no matter how you dare me to reenact that tragedy

like your momma dragging you down to the railroad tracks still hot from his suicide

anotber £bild dead.

No, I will not die on you and yet. death keeps us watching. We look to each other for miracles to wipe out a memory full of dead men and dying women, but we can't save each other from what we learned to fear.

We can't.

There are no miracles. No Lazarus. No born-again children.

Only an orange flung out of a window like a life line that bears repeating again and again until we're both convinced.

72/CHERRIE L MORAGA

NOVEMBER AGAIN

she called it, the black pearl of my conviction the security oj knowing

at least our fear is unchangeable.

at the beach in november, there is a woman with a thin silk robe draped around her bare shoulders the rest of bare. too. and a child coming after her.

naked on the beach and flaunting it, waving the silk robe up around her head, leaping over its skirt, dancing. the child hununing to himself, like accompaniment.

three times, I imagine myself coming up to her. taking her by the wrist, explaining to her how she should cover up, not expose herself so, not joyfully like this.

passing the woman, I find a thin stone on the shore. I lick the sand and salt clean from it, then rub it dry and dull on the thigh of my pants.

leaving the beach, I place it in my pocket.

LOVING IN ruE WAR YEARS/73

YOU CALL IT, "AMPUTATION"

Macali5ter~ boy took one of the fish and CHt a square out of its side to bait his hook

with. The mutilated bo4>' 0t was alive stilD was thrown back into the sea.

-Virginia Woolf; To the Lighthouse

You call it ((am pu tation}}

but even after the cut they say the toes still itch the body remembers the knee,

gracefully bending

she reaches down to find her leg gone the shape under the blanket dropping off suddenly, irregularly

it is a shock, Woolf says that lry putting into words we make it whole

still, I feel the mutilated body swimming in side stroke

pumping twice as hard for the lack of body, pushing through your words which hold no water for me.

74/CHER.R1E L. MORAGA

FOR AMBER

when her friend Yve died of a stroke

I want to catch it while it's still fresh and living in you, this talking like you don't know what's gonna come outta your mouth next. I watch the bodies pour right out between those red lips of yours and without thinking, they're changing me without trying, they're transforming before mv eves.

I I

I told you once that you were like my grandmother the white one, the gypsy all dolled up in a white cadillac convertible with Big Fins-she red deep behind the wheel, her bleached blonde flying. At stop lights she'd be there just waiting for some sucker to pull up, thinking she was a gal of twenty. She'd turn and flash him a seventy-year-old smile, and press pedal.

Oh honey, this is you in all your freeway glory, the glanlOur of your ways.

And without stopping last night you talked about the places

in you thinking of your body

LOVING IN TIlE WAR YEARS/75

that are lost to you, how we locate

that damage in our different parts

like a dead foot, you said, how we run

inventory--checking on which show

promise of revival

and which don't.

What I didn't tell you

was how my grandmother stopped

all of a sudden

turned baby, all of a sudden

speechless

my momma giving her baths

in the tub, while I played nearby

her bare white skin slipping

down off those cold shoulders

piling up around her hips and knees,

slowing her down.

My grandma turned baby

and by the toilet I'd sit with her

she picking out designs in the linoleum

saying this one looks like a man

in a tub, scrubbing his back

with a brush,

and it did.

76/CHERRfE L. MORAGA

HEADING EAST

We are driving this car on determination, alone.

The miles seem to repair us

convince us that we are getting somewhere

that we won't have another breakdown

we end up leaking into somebody's movie

trapped in a ghost town shaniko, oregon pounng ram

we dive under the car

expose its underside, our fingers

feeling into the machine for its sore spot

''I've got it;' I scream

"I know where the hole is," our eyes fire each other's

thinking we have conquered the unknown

we patch up the lacerated hose with black tape.

In this town of livery stable, turned museum

we roll out our bags onto the floor

of an abandoned caboose.

we are in somebody's movie

Two women stranded in a ghost town.

They are headed east.

Th~y think they'll make it.

LOVING IN TIfE WAR Yf.AR5/77

MODERN-DAY HERO

I would not have stopped, but there was the love that I wasn't getting from

you which I had to put somewhere. Setting down the two six-packs of

beer onto the sidewalk, lifting up the head of the woman lying next to

them. A modern-day hero. If it takes heroism to win you back, then I guess

that's what it takes. Kay and I lift the woman into my car. "There, honey,

you'll be fine;' I hear Kay say for all of us, to each other. "There, honey,

we got YOll ...• Yes, hold onto your purse."

That was how I found her, clutching her purse into her belly. Every

other part of her limp, but her hands tight around her purse. And there

was a man with her--clrunk like her-trying to get something out of her.

Move her. Leave her. Take her purse. I don't know. All I know is that he's

standing and she's race down with a mouth full of cement.

The police cars arrive. Some white man comes charging out of his

house. "I called the police," he shouts, glad for himself I could have throt­

tled the guy, waving his hands over his head like a crazy person. More men

to contend with.

The three of lis-the woman, Kay and I-are getting quickly out­

numbered. Two cars have pulled up with four cops inside. They pile out.

There's only one brown one in the lot, but he's the one that says, looking

at me, "Can you ladies get her home all right?" "Yes;' J answer. And we

do. As the cop cars pull away and we pull the woman into my car, I can't

get you clearly out of my mind. All along wondering how you could see

me here, managing these men to save a woman. Lifting this woman up

that long flight of stairs, home.

78/CHERRiE L. MORAGA

THE WARBRIDE

The minute we got back from Monterey Beach, sat down to table with two taquitos apiece laid out in front of us, I knew our relationship was on the road to recovery. The waitress, built like Tia Vicky-stocky, stick­ legs, make-up & busy efficiency-convinced me.

Who can survive the Pacific Ocean? When not bordered by 24th Street Mission District storefronts. When not L.A. Venice Beach pre-redevelop­ ment. When not simple like two sisters who knew the sun's setting into the water as the course of a day-no big deal, no romance, floating in a big black tube beyond the waves. Still counting on the fact that a mother would surely live forever-like a life forever wakening in the kitchen, cooking.

Who can survive the pacific ocean? Not in caljfornia. I know the beaches too well to fool you into thinking they are anything but fatal. It's not the water, exactly; it's what drives people to its edge. ROMANCE. SEX. MOMENTS OF QUIET CONTEMPLATION. STEAK & LOB­ STER & cliffside mansions owned by hollywood producers clinging to the canyon walls, praying this winter's mud will go around them.

"That rock is old:' a friend said, "brittle and bitter. It was never meant to hold ... ;' slipping away. But the beaches are about serious living, as if there were actually some huge neon splitting the orange atmosphere over­ head as you barrel down bighway one, warning: Danger. Pacific Ocean Ahead. Check Your Life Jor Meaning.

It's about taking stock. Makes sense now, in retrospect, how I would find my eyes so fixated on those stockpiles of weapons the army used to store in big cement tombs on their beachfront property just outside Monterey. \Vhen I was a warbride, my boyfriend's job was to keep guard there, smoking joints. I wishing there was some real Vietnam he could object to, conscientiously. But I'd spread my legs for him anyway in seaside Motel 6's to relieve his misery that he was not out shooting shots & the shit with

LOVING IN TIlE WAR YEARS/79

his dog and his buddies. And what else would I be doing anyway, if not

spreading my thighs?

With you, it's supposed to be different and I guess it is when the beat of your hand against my bone/isn't worked against the beat of the water flooding memory/against the walls of my heart beating fast! against the flash of boys beating off. inside me.

BO/OIERR!E 1. MORAGA

Lo QUE NUNCA PASO POR SUS lABIOS

A LONG LINE OF VENDIDAS

para Gloria Anzaldua, in gratitude

SUENO: IS DE JULIO 1982

During the long dijJicult night that sent my lover and I to separate beds, I dreamed 0/ church and chocha. I put it this way because that is how it came to me. The s!iffering and

the thick musty mysticism of the catholic church fused with the sensation of entering the

vagina-like that of a colored woman's-dark, rica,full-bodied. The heavy sensation of complexity. A journey I must unravel, work out for myself.

I long to mter you like a temple.

My BROTHER'S SEX WAS WHITE.

MINE, BROWN

If somebody would have asked me when I was a teenager what it means

to be Chicana, I would probably have listed the grievances done me. When

my sister and I were fifteen and fourteen, respectively, and my brother a

few years older, we were still waiting on him ..... I write "were" as if now,

nearly two decades later, it were over. But that would be a lie. To this day

in my mother's home, my brother and father are waited on by the women,

including me. I do this now out of respect for my mother and her wish­

es. In those early years, however, it was mainly in relation to my brother

that I resented providing such service. For unlike my father, who some­

times worked as much as seventy hours a week to feed my face every day,

the only thing that earned by brother my servitude was his maleness.

It was Saturday afternoon. My brother, then seventeen years old, came

into the house with a pile of friends. I remember Fernie, the two Steves

and Roberto. They were hot, sweaty and exhausted from an afternoons

82/CH.ER.RfE L. MORAGA

basketball and plopped themselves down in the front room, my brother

demanding, "Girls, bring us something to drink."

"Get it yourself, pig," I thought, but held those words ftom ever form­

ing inside my mouth. My brother had the disgusting habit on these occa­

sions of collapsing my sister JoAnn's and my name when referring to us

as a unit: his sisters. "Cher' ann;' he would say, H we're really thirsty:' I'm

sure it took everything in his power not to snap his fingers. But my moth­

er was out in the yard working and to refuse him would have brought her

into the house with a scene before these boys' eyes that would have made

it impossible for us to show our faces at school the following Monday. We

had been through that before.

When my mother had been our age, more than forty years earlier, she

had waited on her brothers and their friends. And it was no mere lemon­

ade. They'd come in from work or a day's drinking. And las mujeres, often

just in from the fields themselves, would already be in the kitchen making

tortillas, warming frijoles or pigs' feet, alb6ndigas soup, what-have-you.

And the men would get a clean white tablecloth and a spread of food laid

out before their eyes and not a word of resentment from the women.

The men watched the women-my aunts and mother moving with the

grace and speed of girls who were cooking before they could barely see

over the top of the stove. Elvira, my mother, knew she was being watched

by the men and loved it. Her slim hips moved patiently beneath the apron.

Her deep thick-lidded eyes never caught theirs as she was swept back into

the kitchen by my abuelita's call of "Elvirita:' her brown hands deepening

in color as they dropped back into the pan of flour.

I suppose my mother imagined that Joe's friends watched us like that,

too. But we knew different. We were not blonde or particularly long­

legged or "available" because we were "Joe's sisters:' This meant no boy

could "make" us, which meant no boy would bother asking us out.

Roberto, the GU;ltemalan, was the only one among my brother's friends

who seemed at all sensitive to how awkward JoAnn and I felt in our role.

He would smile at us nervously, taking the lemonade, feeling embarrassed

being waited on by people he considered peers. He knew the anglo girls

they visited would never have succumbed to such a task. Roberto was the

only recompense.

LOVING IN mE WAR. YEARS/83

As I stopped to satisfy their yearning throats. "jock itch" was all that

came to my mind. Their cocks became animated in my head. for that was

all that seemed to arbitrarily set us apart from each other and put me in

the position of the servant and they, the served. I wanted to machine-gun

them all down, but swallowed that f.1ntasy as I swallowed making the boy's

bed every day, cleaning his room each week, shining his shoes and ironing

his shirts before dates with girls, some of whom I had crushes on. I would

"lend" him the money I had earned house-cleaning for twelve hours so he

could blow it on one night with a girl because he seldom had enough

money because he seldom had a job because there was always some kind

of ball practice to go to. And as 1 pressed the bills into his hand, the car

honking outside in the driveway. his double-date waiting. I knew I would

never see that money again.

Years later, after I began to make political the fact of my being

Chicana, I remember my brother saying to me, "I've never felt' culturally

deprived';' which I guess is the term "white" people use to describe peo­

ple of color being denied access to their culture. At the time, I wasn't exact­

ly sure what he meant, but I remember in re-telling the story to my sister,

she responded, "Of cOUrse, he didn't. H.e grew up male in our house. He

got the best of both worlds." And yes, I can see that truth now. Male in a

man's world. Light-skinned in a white world. Why change?

'fhe pull to identifY with the oppressor was never as great in me as it

was in my brother. For unlike him, I could never have become the white

man, only the white man's woman.

The first time I began to recognize clearly my alliances on the basis of

race and sex was when my mother was in the hospital, extremely ill. I was

eight years old. During my mother's stay in the hospital. my tia Eva took

my sister and me into her care; my brother stayed with my abuela; and my

father stayed by himself in our home. During this time. my father came

to visit me and my sister only once. (I don't know if he ever visited my

brother.) The strange thing was. I didn't really miss his visits, although I

sometimes fantasized some imaginary father, dark and benevolent, who

might come and remind us that we still were a family.

I have always had a talent for seeing things I don't particularly want to

see and the one day my father did come to visit us with his wife/our

84/CHE.RR1E 1. MORAGA

mother physically dying in a hospital some ten miles away, I saw that he

couldn't love us~not in the way we so desperately needed. 1 saw that he

didn't know how and he came into my ria's house like a large lumbering

child~awkward and embarrassed out of his league-trying to playa par­

ent when he needed our mother back as much as we did just to keep him

eating and protected. I hated and pitied him that day. I knew how he was

letting us all down. visiting my mother daily, like a dead man, unable to

say, "The children, honey, I held them. They love you. They think of you:'

giving my mother sOlllething.

Years later. my mother spoke of his visits to the hospital. How from

behind the bars of her bed and through the tubes in her nose, she watched

this timid man come and go daily, going through the motions of being a

husband. "I knew I had to live." she told us. "I knew he could never take

care of you children:'

In contrast to the seeming lack of feeling I held for my father. my

longings for my mother and fear of her dying were the most passionate

feelings that had ever lived inside my young heart.

H-e are riding the elevator. l\{Y sister and I pressed up against one wall, holding hands,

After months 0/ separatioll, we are goillg to visit ml mama in the hospital. My tfa tells me,

"Whatever you do, 110 110m, Cherr!e. It's too hard on your mother when you cry." I nod,

taking long deep breaths, trying to control Illy quivering lip.

As we travel up floor by floor, alii can think about is not cryi1lg, breathing, holding

nry breath. "(Me prometes?" she asks. I nod again) '!fraid to speak fearing my voice will

crack into tears. My sister's nervous 'land around mille, sweating t,10. m are going to see

Illy malt/i, mama, '!fter so IOllg. She didn't die '!fter all. She didn't die.

The elevator doors opm. 1# walk down the corridor, my heart pounding. My eyes are

dartill,g in and out 0/ each room as we pass them;fearing/anticipating my ma11li's face.

Then as we tum around the corner into a kind 0/ lobby, I hear my tla say to all older

woman, just skin and bones~an Indian, I think-straight black-and-grey hair pulled

back, I hear my tfa say, "Elvira."

I don't recognize her: This is not the woman I knew, so roulld and made-up with her

hair always a wavy jet black' I stay back until she opms her arms to me-this strange

and familiar woman~her lIoice hoarse, 'jAy tni'jita!" Instinctively, I run into her arms,

still holding back my insides. "Don't cry. Don't cry," I remember: "Whatever YOH do, 110

LOVING IN mE WAR YEARS/8S

l/ores," But my tia had not warned me about the smell) the unmistakable smell of the

womall, 1I1i mama, el olor de aceite y jaban and conifort and home, ((Mi mama." And when

] catch the smell] am lost ill tears, deep IOllg tears that lOme when you have held your

breath for unturies,

There was something I knew at that eight-year-old moment that I

vowed never to forget-the smell of a woman who is life and home to me

at once. The woman in whose arms I am uplifted, sustained. Since then,

it is as if I have sprnt the rest of my Fars driven by this scent toward la

mu)er.

when her india makes love

it is with the greatest reverma

to color, texture, smell

by now she knew the scent if earth

could call it up even between the cracks

in sidewalks

steamil!g dry

from lIIidday summer

rain

With this knowledge so deeply emblazed upon my heart, how then was

I supposed to turn away from La Madre, La Chicana? If I were to build

my womanhood on this self-evident truth, it is the love of the Chicana,

the love of myself as a Chicana I had to embrace, no white man. Maybe

this ultimately was the cutting difference between my brother and me. To

be a woman fully necessitated my claiming the race of my mother. My

brother's sex was white. Mine, brown.

86/CHERRlE L. MORAGA

LIKE A WHITE SHEEP I FOLLOWED

SUENO: 3 DE JULIO

] am haVing my face made up, especially my eyes, by a very beautiful Chicana. The make~

up artist changes me entirely for only five dollars. ] think this is a very low price for how

deep and dark she makes tile look.

When I was growing LIp, I looked forward to the days when my skin

would toast to match my cousins', their skin turning pure black in the

creases. I never could quite catch up, but my skin did turn smooth like

theirs, oily brown-like my mama's, holding depth, density, the possibil­

ity of infinite provision. Mi abuela raised the darkest cousins herself; she

never loving us the way she molded and managed them.

To write as a Chicana feminist lesbian, I am afraid of being mistaken, of

being made an outsider again, having to fight the kids at school to get them

to believe Teresita and I were cousins. "You don't look like cousins!" I feel at

times I am trying to bulldoze my way back into a people who forced me to

leave them in the first place, who taught me to take my whiteness and run

with it. Run with it. Who want nothing to do with me, the likes of me, the

white of me-in them.

When was] forced to {hoost? When Vivian Molina after two years of the

deepest, richest friendship, two years of me helping her through "new

math;' helping her not flunk once more--once was enough-and her so

big already, fat and dark-skinned. When Vivian left me flat, I didn't know

what happened, except I knew she was beginning to smell like a woman

and once, Just before our split-up. the neighbor-kid talked of Vivian

growing hair "down there:' I didn't get it, except I knew that none of these

changes were settling right in Vivian. And I was small and thin, still, and

light-skinned and I loved Vivian which didn't seem to matter in the way

teachers were wondering if Vivian was going to make it through the year.

So, one day that year Vivian came to school and never spoke to me again.

Nothing happened between us. I swear nothing happened.

I would call her and plead, "Vivian, what did I do?" "Vivian. ~por

que?" I would have asked in Spanish had I been taught. ",Que paso? No

LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS/87