That Takes Ovaries! (9 page)

Sonya was lukewarm and always longing. She swore all would be right with the world if she could just have a man at night. Not some nights, every night. I saw many come and go, because whereas Sonya may have equated happiness with a man, she never kept one for long. “Meet Uncle Conrad,” “Meet Uncle Larry,” she’d say, and I’d think to myself,
You only have one brother, where the rest come from?
I was overwhelmed with lost uncles who found their way home by way of her bed.

The years went by, I grew older, and my mother’s past became a guide to my future. When I was seventeen, she was newly married. Her last words to me cut to the bone: “I finally have a life,” she said, “and now you need to find your own.” I wasn’t to return because she was finished raising me. It was that simple. I slept at the Greyhound station that night, a discarded product of discord. It didn’t take long before I realized sex was an ever-present trade for a warm bed and a hot plate.

I am ashamed of the company I’ve kept. Other women’s husbands, boyfriends, fathers, sons. I offer no excuses, just the truth about the depths I traveled for the sake of selfpreservation. Young and ignorant, I fell unnoticed into the shadows of our society. While others my age were celebrating their graduation from the university of
this
and getting their degree in
that,
I gave up my ass in a dirty hotel in Hollywood.

Lying on my back, I’d look right through whoever was on me. Breath stinking of gin or beer, their sweaty bodies pushed and shoved inside me. Every day, lists of phone numbers of Johns and Mikes who’d pay a buck or two to see a friend and me “Do what dykes do.” Me on top, her on the bottom.
It doesn’t matter,
I told myself,
’cause it’ll all be over when the money hits the bed and he closes the door.

I tried to suppress my cowardly inclinations. Suicide could never be a successful escape, yet it whispered to me once or twice—I have the ugly scars from our past dances together. I’d fantasize about being found dead, beautifully draped across my bed. At my funeral, I’d hover above, watching the monsoon of tears.
How lovely,
I’d think,
the world really did care.

One night I stood at the mirror, patching my face together after a trick nearly split my head apart with a baseball bat. I craved rebirth. Evolution. I was growing sick of the husbands, sick of the boyfriends. Sick of spreading my legs.

Finally, barely twenty-one, I abandoned my old life in hopes of living a new one.

In the beginning, I stood on the back of our prized public assistance programs to help me gain my sea legs. It was not easy returning to society when for so long I’d looked up at it from the gutter. Help was fleeting, empathy was rare. People were dismissive and disapproving. They rarely looked me in the eyes, as if they’d catch my misfortune. Even my social worker wasn’t supportive. She glared at me over her Coke-bottle glasses with the warmth of a cobra.
How can she help me,
I wondered,
when she doesn’t believe in me?

I began my venture into the mainstream timidly. First I bought an old car. Then I drove twenty miles to a temp office, wearing a $10 suit, scuffed-up sneakers, and a glow of anticipation. Intimidated but hopeful, I listened to my job description. I bit the inside of my jaw raw wondering if they knew what I was.

I soon sat on an assembly line. Eight hours a day, plus overtime, for $4.25 an hour. It was a hundred degrees in that warehouse where I shoved “talk boxes” up stuffed-bunny butts. I
sweated and stuffed for months, and with my earnings moved into a clean, furnished single. For the first time I worked without the weight of shame and came home to a quiet place that was mine. It was dreadfully lonely, but I took comfort in the fact that the bed I slept in was used for just that and nothing more. Even so, I rarely felt the calm cover of sleep. In my dreams I’d see them: men’s haggard and twisted faces hissing my name. They bound me, pushing me to my knees. I remembered, though I wished I wouldn’t.

Even now, in the stillness of my room, I often wake a few hours before dawn. I greet the morning perched on the back stairs, inhaling the sweetness of my Newports. I watch the crossover of daybreak. Down the way I sometimes see a couple of “boulevard girls” seeking refuge from the rising sun.
God, they look younger than I was. Poor lost little girls.

No, all is not yet right in the world.

But at the same time, I think about this new world of mine. I am amazed at the changes time can bring. I now have a new job, paying a good wage.
What else awaits me?
It’s a joy to ponder my opportunities.

One recent morning, gazing into the sun, I realized for the first time my divine perfection. The creator of all things thought I was special enough to be blessed with the gift of life. I cried. And right then and there I let go of the deprived and painful way I was raised and how that helped shape me into who I came to be. I let go of the hatred. I decided to live. Whore. Virgin. Nigga bitch. Beloved. I am all. For all these things have made a complete me, in sorrow and now in peace.

It was almost midnight, and the Pacific Ocean’s warm breeze waltzed through the enormous panoramic windows of the villa. I could hear the waves and smell the salty mist. They were perfect complements to the exquisite European and South American delicacies Alain, our host, had set out. He wanted to please me, the consultant responsible for the final destiny of the project. I was catered to like Cinderella at the ball.

“¡Fantástico!”

“¡Qué bueno!”

Guests talked in superlatives about the project, and they appreciated my role in shaping it. It was a wonderful full-moon night and I felt it like a reward. After years of hard work, despite the criticism from colleagues that “two women could not succeed in this market,” my business partner and I had created the first women-owned engineering consulting firm in Venezuela. Without compromising our integrity, we had won important contracts in our country and were establishing a solid presence in others.

Even competitors who had initially laughed at us were finally convinced we were there to stay. They stopped offering me enticing executive positions; now they wanted to buy our firm. With market recognition came more money, resources, and contracts. I had climbed the ladder and made it to the top. My presence in Alain’s country and my stewardship of the project was proof.

But despite this success, something was deeply wrong.

At the magnificent villa, I appeared at ease sitting among the elite representatives of the government agency that would borrow and administer the money, the prestigious officials of the Euro-American consortium that would build the project, and a local politician who teared up as he joyfully declared, “This electrical and agro-industrial facility will
forever
change our region.”

The next morning I would fly to Washington to report to the international development agency that had hired me. It had been my job to ensure that the project followed environmental standards and that the indigenous people affected by the development would be adequately considered. After much hard work, I was proud of what I had achieved. Yet beneath the polite conversation I wondered,
Why, instead of the pleasure of accomplishment, do I feel immense sadness?

I searched for clarity in the faces around me. First, our host, a handsome South American millionaire who believed he was doing his nation a favor by administering the project. His obvious pleasure—even arrogance—felt familiar. I was looking into a distorted mirror at my own naïveté. But the mirror showed more: the similarity in our faces. Like mine, his revealed a native genealogy. I could see it in our shared cheekbones, our hair. Suddenly, at that moment, I was hit by the clarity I sought.

The ladder I had climbed was the wrong one.

Distraught, I looked past Alain to his servants standing in silence behind him, two at each side, like four columns of ancestral patience, waiting for the minimal order from their boss. They did not simply have Indian
traits;
they were fully Native American. Their presence, like the gaze of Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs I had met during my travels for the project, evoked profound sadness in me. In the countries I visited, I found Native people living in crushing poverty, sometimes dressed in garish costumes to attract tourists, often crowding city streets, selling Tinkertoy crafts seemingly manufactured in Taiwan. These were the people the project was supposed to help.

I should know better,
I thought. The corruption and disorder in Latin America made it difficult for any real change to be imposed from the outside, from the top down—like from my project. Developing factories and services similar to those of the so-called First World had produced nothing but debt and pain in the Third World. The adequacy of this model of development was negated by the facts, both in the reports of social scientists and in the situation on the ground.

That night I was forced to confront the non-sense of my work. That night the Native people at Alain’s home, absurdly dressed as English maids, chased my conscience, like spirits of the past asking for revenge from centuries of betrayal. Native people—my people—had been victims of colonials, neocolonials, and even international development specialists with good intentions. The project, like thousands of others aimed at helping the poor, would likely benefit only bankers, Euro-American companies, and corrupt politicians of Latin America.

Until that night, this was the dance I was dancing.

The evening’s strange elixir of ocean, tropical sensuality, and unbearable sadness helped me to realize I was not at an elegant party but rather a masquerade ball. Like Cinderella, my childhood heroine, I had made it to the palace. Like her, I now needed to run away. Upon leaving Alain’s villa just after midnight, I knew the dance was over for me.

With the same tenacity with which I had walked the Cinderella path, I now escaped it. At the height of my career I left prestige, money, and security. I looked for better ways to serve my people, a different approach to meeting the needs of my community. Using the experience I had gained building my firm, I began a new company. Our approach is based not on profit, but on love and respect. Our core philosophy is not to expand and exploit, but to promote humane change—this time starting from the grassroots level.

The Native woman in me, the one I had hidden from myself as I climbed to the top, was now free. My sadness vanished.

“Askia, would you like to come over to play after school?”

“I don’t know if I can; I’ll have to ask my mom.”

I hear my son’s voice over the bustle of other children and parents gathering coats and lunchboxes. Warmth spreads through me at hearing myself named so easily, so naturally, as one of his “moms.” I have been Askia’s parent for almost four years now, and yet I am still amazed at how quickly and intuitively I fell in love with this child and accepted a role for myself I never thought I would have—or even want.

When Bashir and I first started seeing each other, she was living in Los Angeles and I was still in New York. With all those flight hours between us, the fact that she had a seven-year-old son didn’t seem that big a deal to me. I certainly didn’t see myself as one of Askia’s parents. But after a year, when we moved in together, I suddenly realized that mother and son were a package deal. And, to put it bluntly, I was terrified.
Me, give up my vagabond lifestyle, be responsible to a child day in and day out?
I mean, I knew I was in love, but was I really
that
in love?

I was never one of those people who thought of having kids as a “when” or even an “if” in my future. I hated it when older relatives such as my stepmother asked when I was going to settle down and have a family. “I’m not sure that’s going to happen,” I’d reply, before changing the subject. I knew from an early age that I had a nomadic heart, a need for the drama of moving from place to place. Since I turned eighteen, I had moved several times, leaving San Francisco for my first solo apartment in New Haven, my godmother’s living room in Manhattan, a mud room with no electricity in Kenya, a studio with no air-conditioning in sweltering Los Angeles … I loved being constantly in motion, just as my own family was during my childhood. Then, suddenly, all that came to an end.

In the early days of living with Bashir and Askia, I worried that
all my fears would come true: that I was giving up a fundamental part of myself, sacrificing my free spirit to the demands of motherhood like so many women before me. But after a while I could see it wasn’t like that. Instead of a huge, mysterious gulf that swallowed me up, I found being a parent was made up of very small and ordinary things: Askia needed someone to drive him to school, to make his lunch, to listen to him talk about how it feels when someone teases him, to read him a story at night. And in living this everyday, drama-free existence, I discovered the bedrock inside myself, the strong self who had learned to find her own stability to survive a life of motion and change.