Grandfather comes to talk
to ease my fears
and to remind me he's not yet dead 

They all come
Uncle Lalo, Abuelita Méndez, Rudy,
George, and mi papá Rafael,
descending the magic staircase
they open the door into my dreams
and come to remind me
of my heritage
to tell me
I am not yet dead.

"Siéntate"
sit down Abuelita commands
I sit at the cracked wooden table
pulling splints from the edges
scents of masa and anís
rise into the air
and I'm reminded of Christmases past

.I comb Abuelita's long black hair
as she talks in tongues of mixed languages
Spanish, English, and Mayan
rolled into one like spicy tamales

She says one day she will
tell me the story of every deep
dark wrinkle that lines her face.

"Don't forget us
let not the children grow old
without knowing of who they are
tell them."

"Dígales de Rafael
sold his wife's car without asking
for a load of potatoes from Mexico.
Dígales de Tía Lulu with her glass eye
porque her loco husband shot her in the face.
Dígales de great grandfather who was a drunk
and beat his wife 'til the day Rafael told him to leave.
Dígales de la familia."  

Sand and grit
gather in my mouth
as my stomach fills up
with its daily ration of butterflies
and depression

So this is growing up

When I was young
I had visions:
mother and daughter
becoming friends
sharing secrets and emotions
together
Numbness isn't a quality
I cared to inherit

Look Mother
what all you gave to me
isn't it sweet
isn't it bitter
does it make you sick too?

Blood that's passed on
and passed on
and passed on...

Embedded
you gave me these chemicals
Unbalanced
You sold me
your strength
or lack thereof

And love
what is the importance
of love
if you never gave it
why then should I? 

If there is one thing
that you taught me
Mother
our blood
is terribly thick
and you drink it
like water

A Sea Full

My momma used to talk about it,
all the time,
she'd say if wishes were like fishes,
and we all live
in a sea full of these.
I never really understood then,
not the way my motherdid,
and certainly,
never wanted to know it,
not the way she meant it.

She'd say,
it's all just chance,
sometimes
you'll cast the line
and get what you want,
then you can eat good
for a while,
but at other times
it'll just be a nibble,
and occasionally,
your line will be broke,
then you'll have to be re-strung. 

Wishes are like fishes
to me now,
and he was definitely,
the biggest damned red fish
I had ever seen,
blue eyes and all,
but I ran out of line
before I could reel him in,
or maybe
I just used the wrong kind of bait.

The Dreamer

What do trees dream about
at 2 a.m.?
They sleep standing up,
their roots fingering
the mattress of the earth. 

They don't snore;
they don't twitch.
They awaken at daybreak
and breathe
while the rest of us make coffee.

Air Force Boyfriend

I am a freak. I have an Air Force boyfriend in San Antonio and I don't even have big hair. I don't have long fingernails and I don't wear tight jeans. If I wore tight jeans, they would only accentuate my average, middle-aged, female bodyI would resemble a pigeon in leotards. So I do the world a big favor and I stay away from Texas fashion.

You might be surprised to learn, as I was, that there are many obsessive-compulsive Texan military men. I learned this at my job. I work at a doctor's office near the Air Force base. I submit paperwork that details diagnoses. I noticed that next to alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disorder is a popular disease among Air Force personnel.

I met Billy at the coffee shop next door to the doctor's office. I wasn't looking for a boyfriend. I was onlyrecently divorced. I didn't know his diagnosis when I met him; I didn't even know if he had one. I only knew that he was tall and polite. He smiled at me as if he thought I might be really funny even though, when I spoke to him, I only said, "Hello One day, he admired a shirt I was wearing. It was a bright pink shirt with flowers embroidered on it. My sister gave it to me. Self-conscious, I wore it anyway; I was meeting my sister later for a beer. Otherwise, I would never wear something that gaudy. I asked him to join me for coffee. He did. Halfway through our conversation, he said I had nice eyes.

He seemed to like lots of women in a genuine rather than a flirtatious way. He seemed to appreciate Mrs. Collins, for instance. She works with me and I've never liked her muchshe is not all that bright and she repeats herself.

I've heard one particular story about twelve times. It's about swimming in a cow trough in the summer in Texas when she was a kid. It's not an appetizing image. But through Billy's eyes, I could see that though she is older and fatter than I am, she does have beautiful skin; she has a nice laugh.

There is something seductive and promising about Billy's love for women.

At the coffee shop, I learned that he is not my type. He's a Republican, he likes Country-Western music, and he has a crew cut. Those things made him all the more intriguing because it was time to stop seeing men who were my type. My type usually ends up feeling like I'm closing him in or I end up feeling like he closes me in. Billy, not being my type, became my new boyfriend.

At first I worried that he would suddenly discover that I'm not that attractive. But, if anything, Billy uncovers the hidden appeal in people.

 As I get to know him after weeks and months, I see that something plagues him. I discover that he counts things over and over; he washes too much. He takes out a big can of soap and washes his hands with it, again and again. He runs water between his fingers. He spends many hours in a steamed up, foggy bathroom.

He counts his cigarettes often to make sure none are missing. He's trying to count on something, and maybe he knows he can't count on menot reallyI am the person who turns his life upside-down.

In San Antonio, people think more visits to the Southern Baptist church, more white-bread sex, more work on the ranch, or more Lone Star beer can solve most problems. Billy agreeshe believes in barbecued beef, Camel cigarettes, white socks on sale at Kmart, and Lava soap to wash motor oil off callused hands. And maybe he believes that he doesn't really have a problem; he has a temporary issue that will wash away with soap and water. As I see it, soap and water are the problem.

I suggest to him that he have his mind evaluated by Dr. Cantu, a local psychiatrist. I manage to get him to the doctor by promising that I will get a big hairdo. His 12-year-old son called me to the side one day and said, "Miss Barton, ma'am, if you want to keep my dad, you'd better get big hair."

I tell Billy that I will change my hair if he will try something new for his temporary issue.

OK," Billy says. "If you do that, I'll go to the damn doctorbut those guys are nuts."

Billy gets medicationlittle green and white pillspills that occasionally fall on the kitchen floor and roll into corners. They seem small and inconsequential, but in a few weeks the pills begin to work. He counts and washes less and less. With more time on his hands (no pun intended), he sits in his big easy chair for hours, looking at my face up close.

"You know," he says, "You're a good-looking woman. You're a damn pretty girl."

It's not the statement about being pretty that gets to me; it's just that I'm 42 and I'm happy to be considered a girl.

After the pills reign in his thoughts, he spends less time worrying. Instead, he calls me more often. He takes me dancing three times a week instead of just once. I start to feel like I'm his new soap; he sinks his hands into me, washes, and feels clean. Rather than feeling admired, I feel pressured by his focused attention. I start to feel nervous around him. I start to feel nervous all the time.

I cannot remember whether I've done certain things. I try to remember whether I really turned off the iron in the bedroom. I think I've left my car lights on. I wonder whatever happened to those pictures that I took last Christmas.

I try to sit quietly with Billy. I take his newly steady hands into my own. I'm afraid he's really starting to see me. I have nothing to be afraid of. He sees who I am and he likes who I am. I've been looking at myself for 40-some years and I am starting to think I cannot see myself as clearly as Billy sees me.

He doesn't suggest that I need psychiatry, a support group, or a session with a young social worker. He doesn't even suggest more church, work, sex, or barbecued beef. Instead, he buys me a gift. I take it out of the gift box so happy to be receiving something from someone who took time to choose something for me. It's a denim shirt with cowboy boots embroidered across the chest, a sentimental reminder of our first real meeting.

"Wow," I say, holding the shirt across my chest.

I wonder if the bottom drawer of my dresser is full yet. That's where I put the clothes I never wear.

Billy insists that I wear this shirt tonight. He also reminds me of my promise to get big hair.

In the late afternoon, I go to his mother's beauty salon where she stands behind me with a cigarette dangling from her sparkly pink lips, attacking my head with vile hair spray. My hair stands on end, as if I've just emerged from a horror film. If I lived anywhere other than Texas, people would mistake me for the Bride of Frankensteinnow there's a woman who can carry off big hair. I put on a pair of tight jeansjust this once. I wear cowboy boots.

We go Country-Western dancing. I walk into the dance hall with cowboy boots stamped across my breasts. I try to look normal, though everything about me is stiff and unreal. But people seem to like me this way. I don't tell Billy that every time he leaves my side, another cowhand saddles up to me and asks me to dance.

The truth is, I guess Billy saw my potential. I wonder, "Is that what he's seen all these weeks through his big glasses? I'm bigger than life? I'm more than I should be? I can take care of anyone's problems? I can figure things out?"

Even I suddenly see the power of big hair and big heels. I can see why people drive big cars and somehow I know that when I drive home tomorrow in my economy car with my hair deflated and my ass spread out to normal proportions, I will no longer have big powers. I will be ordinary and small.

But tonight, high on attention, I grab Billy around his thin waist and I follow the tips of his boots as he moves me around the dance floor. I listen to the words of country songs, realizing that simple music about big emotions makes sense here in a world where people dress the way they want to feel, not the way they do feel. Or maybe, unlike me, they really do feel this big.

Billy pats my big hair and pulls me close: He is happier than I've ever seen him.

Vanishing Lily

"Couldn't you be happy if you just tried a little harder," her mother had asked. "This too shall pass Lily you just have the blues but they will pass."

Barton, her husband chanted "more sleep and less stress." He brought a jar of expensive multi-vitamins with extra iron "created especially for the delicate balances of a woman's body," he said. Lily loved him for that, but she had nothing to say, no way to voice the sense of dread that had begun to haunt her every mood. She busied herself even more to escape her anxieties. She was always considered the "Supermom" and now she spent more and more time striving to be the perfect Mom. Perfect meals followed to the detail out of Martha Stewart Living, perfect wife and lover. Perfectly happy Lily.

She picked out books, six of them one weekend at a 50% off going out of business sale. Her favorite bookstore was closing, driven under by the new chain bookstore across the street with expresso machines, talking books and famous authors peddling their wares every week. Her little bookstore which had been there at least fifteen years as she had even frequented it during her college days, finally beaten down by the siren songs of the competition.

Lily took the books home and poured them on the breakfast table in the white and lemon tiled breakfast room separate from the kitchen.

Barton had taken the boys to the strip on the beach to roller blade. Lily occasionally rubbed the book covers with her right hand feeling the smoothness of each book, but she never opened them and finally fell asleep, her head bending her glasses on top of, "Why You're Unhappy but Not Forever," the book she had seen on the Today show.

Barton returned with Sam and Spencer and she rose from the table teary-eyed helping them out of their gear and steering the two boys toward the bathtub. They were 8 and 6 now and insisted on bathing without Lily. Letting her lead them to the bathroom and once inside, hearing her footsteps down the hall would toss the dirty clothes in the basket outside the door for her to launder. Of course they were too old to need Lily to bathe them, she knew that. What she really missed was being privy to their boy conversations. Watching them seep and swoop the washrag, soap and anything else not anchored to the tub playing war or wrestling or other little boy adventures.

Always Sam as the oldest was in charge and Spencer to follow but when they were younger, more fragile and clingy they would have Lily be a tree or a scout and once she was the Queen of Moms being held hostage by the wicked King of Darkness and the boys bravely saved her. Giggling and laughing in the tub, the bath water warm enough to steam the room so Lily's tears could not be seen as her heart sometimes burst when so tenderly held by them in their adventurous play.

Lily carried the basket of sweaty clothes smelling of the beach and the rollerblades turning much faster with Barton at their side than if she were with them. Lifting Spencer's shirt out of the basket for a moment, holding it to her cheek so she could smell his whole body without him actually in it.

Lily, after the boys and Barton went to bed would find herself watching CNN on the hour, every hour, sitting not moving, taking small sips out of her third Diet Coke mesmerized by the moving screen of constant catastrophe and tragedy. Sometimes, depending on the CNN anchor, she didn't like the woman with the frosted hair and perky nose, she would mute the sound and just watch the pictures. Silent tragedies unfolding live but filled with death, broadcast from all four corners of the world. It seemed the silence made it more real for Lily.

People sleeping, a family of four in Seattle, sleeping peacefully while their house and then their very own lives were washed away by a mudslide. Lily wondered what it would feel like to be covered by mud, swallowed by mud. Maybe you would dream you were simply being covered by sand like in a game at the beach on a warm sunny day. Or maybe you dreamed you were choking on dirt and couldn't reach glass of water like those Got Milk commercials where with the giant chocolate chip cookie but no milk to wash it down with.

The channel CNN became her co-conspirator in sadness, her closeted companion that she couldn't expose to anyone. The less she needed sleep the more it was replaced by a craving for CNN. Her dreams when she had them were dreams enveloped, immersed in all the things she watched on CNN. She didn't need the mute button in her dreams because they were always quiet tragic images. Buildings blown up, babies smothered, mothers murdered, Somalians starving, Rwandans holding bloodied machetes, famous and non-famous fathers weeping over innocent beautiful sons murdered in the prime of life. Lily understood slowly but surely the world was filled with imperfection and she made it her mission to keep her home perfect, her kids perfectly protected and safe, her body in perfect shape.

Late at night they would show the drunk driving commercials where she watched a happy gurgling baby and hear the Mom's voice saying, "Come on Carly, smile Carly" at a birthday party. And the next moment a horrible wrenching crash sound and the death notice across the screen. Lily replayed the commercials repeatedly in her head and it was that summer she decided she didn't want Barton to take any more videos of the boys. Late one night she jammed a screwdriver into the belly of the open video camera and moved it forcefully hearing it clink and click as little pieces of its interior were forever broken. Lily believed if they didn't videotape the boys they would be safe from drunk drivers. The ad agency would have no video to show of a happy Barton and the boys before being smashed to death by a drunk driver. Maybe she thought, if there is no tangible proof of our being, it can't be taken from us.

By the middle of summer Lily had lost eighteen pounds and her clothes were beginning to envelop her body. During the day she ate nothing and stuck to her three Diet Cokes. At dinner she would eat salad and nothing else. She felt as though for the first time in her life she was in complete control of something. Her body. And it filled her with a sense of peace that she could not find in spirit. Her friends commented on her tiny "lithe" waist.

The boys left for two weeks in July at Boy Scout camp and Barton took off the second week from his law firm to join them as one of the Scout masters. The boys noticed nothing different about Lily other than it seemed she was shrinking and there was less of her to pull away from as she hugged them and they obligingly hugged back.

Lily was left in charge of Spencer's goldfish and the second night of the empty house she cleaned out his bowl and accidentally dropped Goldie on the white and lemon tile kitchen floor.

She reached to save the madly flopping fish, but their Siamese cat Sebastian pounced on him and left the kitchen with a goldfish bloodied and barely moving, hanging out of his mouth. The only remainder of the fish was one eye, popped out from the force of the pouncing and it lay staring up at Lily as she laid down beside it and cried. "I'm so sorry," she said over and over to the eye until exhausted she fell asleep beside it on the floor.

She dreamed fitfully of hundreds of goldfish flipping on the white and lemon tiles and awoke only when the phone rang and it was Barton's voice on the other end. "The fish, the fish, he's dead." She started sobbing and listened to Barton telling her to breathe and calm down, it would be ok, where to go buy another goldfish. He even made Lily laugh by saying they could do the old bait and switch routine and Spence would never know the difference. "But I will know, " said Lily and Barton told her he loved her and missed her and it was hard to get any sleep at night with the constant pillow fighting and peeing contests going on. "Lily you are a perfect Mom and the boys and I are lucky to have you," he said as a good-bye. This made Lily's heart swell and she felt happy for the moment even while picking up Goldie's eye with a wet paper towel.

Lily spent two more days scrubbing the kitchen floor trying to erase any hint of the goldfish's demise. She kept all the TV's on in the house and had all the buttons muted, just the pictures. When she felt hungry she would make tea and sit on the floor sipping it slowly watching the images of blood and gore whirl around her. Lily felt hopeless and very tired but each time she started to sleep her mind flashed all the images she now needed to escape from her own imperfections. She couldn't turn off the images just as she couldn't turn off the tv's anymore. They had become her secret lover, silent and shadowy, painful, deliberately betraying her. Lily picked up the mop and with one quick motion she pushed the handle through the screen, it buzzed and raged and then it died.

Lily lay on the spotless floor, falling asleep. In her dream she drove to the beach, walked into the water and began to swim out toward the bright warm sun which was barely rising. And as she slipped under the warm water taking her last breath she waited for the boys and Barton to save her, the Queen of Moms, from the King of Darkness.

And when she woke her boys and Barton were holding her and telling her they loved her, she would be alright. She looked at the gaping hole in the television and she felt finally freed.