hugs, dimples, laughs
to aimee joy, with love
By Teresa Purugganan
part one:
we met in our infancy
when our arms were too clumsy
to pick themselves up
and wrap around each other
but we enveloped the other
as if we were capable
because we
were probably one at a point
God held our souls in His palms
(mine in His left, yours in His right)
and watched us find our way
through the mazes of His crevices
He put His hands together
and devoted us as one
then
He smiled so radiantly
the brightness rippled
into a majestic laughter
we met in our infancy
she waited on a six month delay
outside my mothers womb
and when I came
we didn’t know what life was
or that we were living it
it didn’t matter
we were there
two entities with the breath of Gods magnificence
engulfed into human essence
we had to be one at a point
He watched us share His glory
watched
as my dimples molded to match her giggles
how they jumped and dropped
into my cheeks
my face went numb with His splendor
with her joy
and some unknown brilliance
it doesn’t matter what life is
we are just here
part two:
soul mates aren’t lovers
but two who last before the birth of spirits
who last between the continuous ticks of life
reaching for God through our laughter
she fell in love
twice with the same boy
and I don’t know if that was the place in time
when she became a woman
because time is so confusing
and I don’t know
at which point we became teenagers
and then young adults
sharing eyeliner
kissing boys
moving to college
but we will always be children
waking up at eight to watch bananas in pajamas
to find breakfast waiting for us on kitchen counters
when grandma woke us up to spread her love
like butter on golden-edged pancakes
we wore shirts through sprinklers and peed in pools
peed in our pants because of too many jokes
no one but us would ever find funny
we rode our bikes until the thunders began to roll
getting lost on sidewalks of a suburban maze
(remember? grandma was so worried
You told me I needed windshield wipers for my glasses)
we rode our bikes until our legs ached
and grandma couldn’t worry anymore
and our only friends were a blue dog and a raggedy mouse
both breaking at the seems with childish love
we wanted them to speak to us more than anything
so we gave them our voices
but I swear
they really do talk after we shut the door behind us
because they know we will never forget about them
she fell in love
and I didn’t believe her at first
until I saw it wandering in her eyes
as she watches me still looking for what she already had
within boy after boy
but boys can never fill my eyes
with the browns she filled
eventually, though
and eventually well realize
soul mates aren’t lovers
but two who last before the birth of spirits
who last between the continuous ticks of life
reaching for God through our laughter
and I don’t know
when we stopped believing in sprinklers
maybe it was the day we woke up
and grandma was gone
when we didn’t know what to do
when her mouse began to lost her stitching
when her neck began to dwindle
without grandmas sewing needles supporting her
maybe it was when grandma didn’t have to worry about us
because we wore our seatbelts when we drove
hung rosaries from our rearview mirrors
with the same old world superstitions
pointed across our bodies
but eventually
well believe
soul mates aren’t lovers
but two who last before the birth of spirits
because it doesn’t matter what life is
we are just here
part three:
and if you watch
dark chocolate and coffee beans glisten
in every strand of hair she flung into ponytails
or she let fall into waves too graceful for the sea
or when she just let the browns sink
and hang like summer
summer
when her skin is the warmest
and the sun melts her _mocha touch
into peaceful shades
melting
into memories of black beauty
and shell make me a memory so bold
even the erasers of old age couldn’t get to it
a memory
so effervescent
the heavens will sing
and raise our souls
into their palaces of immaculate wonder
where grandpa waits for us to sit on his lap
one on each knee
(I on his left, you on his right)
waiting
to tell us stories of his Filipino youth
and together
well smile so luminously
the angels will dance for us
(like we’ve danced for them)
and God will ripple His majestic laughter
into the depth of our risen spirits
because soul mates aren’t lovers
but two who have loved beyond death
reaching for God
through our laughter
because it doesn’t matter what life was
we were there
At Lola’s
By Teresa M. Purugganan
In an apartment kitchen in Canterbury Complex, Lola Maberit cooks. With woks as deep as wishing wells, as wide as a whale’s belly. She stirs noodles, glass noodles with carrots and celery, chicken and beef. Fish paste, too, sour and tangy. She stirs with a long wooden spoon and fingers ripe with arthritis and too many steamy summer mornings, afternoons and evenings spent stirring and stirring.
And I stick Q-tips deep into my ears. Sitting Indian style on the rug in Lola Maberit’s apartment living room, watching Wheel of Fortune. My big sister is on the couch next to Tita Lorna. As the wheel spins, I twirl the Q-tips around, around. And Lola is stirring, stirring.
She isn’t really our “lola,” our grandma. We have our own, but she is busy playing bingo. So we have a substitute grandma, one we call “lola” because it’s impolite to call her by her first name, and not familiar enough to call her “Mrs. Maberit.” That’s what we call our classmates’ mothers, our teachers.
Tita Lorna is waiting on the couch for her noodles. Tita Lorna knows my mother from the nursing school days, I think, I don’t know, but she makes me call her “tita” like the way we call Mrs. Maberit our “lola.”
“Honey, baby,” Tita says, shaking her head at me, “You’re going to get an ear infection. Or worse!”
“What’s worse than an ear infection, Tita?” Sister asks.
“The cotton will get stuck in your ears, and they’ll bleed and you’ll go deaf!”
She means it.
Inside I am laughing. Outside I grin. I believe her, but Contestant Number Two might go bankrupt. I keep twirling.
There isn’t any air conditioning, just a fan stuck in the window behind Tita Lorna’s big hair, and I sweat. Sister asked Mama when she dropped us off before work why it’s always so hot at Lola Maberit’s, why there isn’t ever any air conditioning like at home. Mama says you have to pay for those kinds of things, and Lola Maberit can’t pay.
Lola Maberit is making the noodles sizzle, putting on a pot of rice for our lunch. This is the only way she ever knew how to live, cooking for the neighbor woman who married too early. Or for the father who doesn’t know where to begin. And she cooks for big parties. Pans filled with glass noodles, or fat fat spring rolls stuffed with vegetables. The skinny ones, too. Fried just right.
After she makes the noodles sizzle, she will have them wait for her on the stove and she’ll chop and bang bones of chicken to throw them in a stew with cabbage or spinach. And then that tangy stuff. The steam smells like a fish’s ghost baking in dusty summer air. That is how I smell when I leave Lola’s, like fish are swimming in my hair.
Contestant Number Three gets the last puzzle right. He wins a car, a convertible with red paint. Pat shakes his hand, meets his mother.
My Q-tip filters the applause of the audience and the bangs of old hands wrapped around a cleaver.
Mama is working the midnight shift, saving grandpas from heart attacks and children from broken limbs.
And Dad shows “The Plan” every Monday and Wednesday night, and today is Monday. He draws ovals and lines on white boards. He tells people they could “Go Diamond!” like Tom Hanson did. Tom Hanson with his convertible and his house with a pool.
“This could all be yours someday,” Dad says, pointing to pictures of houses with pillars and balconies. He practices on us sometimes, drawing his ovals and lines.
And Canterbury Complex is where single moms with too many little ones and not enough rooms live, where missed-matched, missing-the-old-world families squeeze into living rooms to watch Pat Sajak shake hands with Andy from Houston, Texas.
It is where old Filipino women with too thick, puffy fingers and tangy fragrances spend their days stirring and stirring.
After lunch, Sister and I will go see her friend next door. Then we’ll go see our cousins who live around the way. Lola has finished Tita Lorna’s noodles.
Tita Lorna didn’t notice it, but when Contestant Number Two went bankrupt, I pulled out the Q-tips from my ears. They were bloody.
Teresa Purugganan is looking forward to graduating from Columbia College this spring with a Bachelors degree in Fiction Writing. She is currently the client coordinator for Screen Magazine and lives in Chicago.
The Boys Down the Street
The Boys Down the Street
By Chia-Pei “CP” Chang
The boys down the street tell me that they want to rape me. They catcall and whistle and hoot at me when I walk past them at night, and they say things in Spanish that I’m ashamed to admit I don’t understand. Words that end in “ita” and have “ch”s in them, but my high school didn’t have language classes. But I do understand this: “Hey baby! I want to rape you!” And I understand that loud, throaty laughter that follows.
They’re only teen-agers, and I bet I could take any one of them on. I wear hard boots and my rings have sharp points on them-not diamonds unfortunately-but if I were to backhand you across the cheek with my left hand, I’d cut you bad. And I will not hesitate for a millisecond to kick you in the balls or scratch your eyes out or do whatever it takes to get away from you. What do I care if you wind up blind and bloody? But they usually hang out in groups of three or four. And if one of them grabs me from behind and gets his forearm around my neck, then I don’t know, I’d have to kick and flail and…and…I don’t know. It makes me breathing shallow and tense just to think about it.
My friend Chele from the coffeehouse always carries a condom with her in her purse, not in case she hooks up, but in case a man tries to rape her. She believes she can convince him to wear it, but I think it’s defeatist. You’d have to kill me first. Death or rape, what a damn choice.
They’re just stupid kids, I tell myself, as I hear them clomping on the sidewalk behind me, pretending that they’re running after me. What’s wrong with them? It’s too cold to loiter outside, and yet here they are, four boys in puffy white jackets, smoking cigarettes and smacking their lips at me.
Pulling my leather jacket down to my hips, I keep my headphones on and stare straight ahead, but I pay attention to whether there’s anyone else on the street, driving or walking, and whenever I come up on a dark alleyway between two buildings, I walk a little faster, almost skipping, until I can get in front of a gate or a walk-up that comes right up to the sidewalk. But with my luck, no one in this damn city would even pay attention to my cries for help. They’d be too busy listening to their iPods.
Even my boyfriend, Frank, didn’t bat an eye when I told him.
“They were at it again,” I said as soon as I got home and warmed up.
He piloted his remote control car around the living room and replied, “Did you do what I said?”
I changed into a sweatshirt and gray sweatpants and curled up on the couch. I told Frank, “You can’t confront these guys. That’s what they want. They want me to acknowledge them.” I bit my fingernails as I talked.
Frank thumbed the controls, sending the miniature four-by-four circling around the old couch and chasing after my panicked cat, Missy. There was only the couch and the TV in my bare living room, and Missy knew she wasn’t allowed on the couch, leaving her few places to hide from Frank’s toy car. “Oh, they’re harmless,” he said.
I grated, “One of them chased after me.”
“Did he catch you?” he asked. Missy jumped up the curtains, hanging on by her claws.
Did he catch me? Frank could be such a prick. “Would you stop chasing Missy around?” I told him.
“Are you kidding? It’s the only exercise that fat cat gets around here.” He squatted on his haunches between the living room and the kitchen. “She’s a tubby tabby; that’s what she is.”
I glared at him from the couch, and finally I dared him. “Do you think I’m fat?”
“Oh. My. God.” He didn’t even look at me, his blue eyes steadily staring into the distance. “Celine, if you were fat, do you think those boys down the street would be hitting on you?”
I thought the veins in my neck would burst when I shrieked at him, “They were not hitting on me!” The toy car whirred at my feet, its chubby wheels suddenly spinning on a greasy spot on the hard wood. “Are you so dense that you can’t understand that?”
The tiny wheels spun backwards as Frank fussed with his controls. I stood up and shouted, “Do you think this is okay?!? Do you think this is a game?!?”
Frank stood up from his squat and pointed the controls sideways at his plaything, biting his lip in concentration.
And so I kicked the car. I kicked it across the room, and it clanked against the wall opposite the couch, lying on its back like a turtle stranded on its shell.
“Hey!” Frank rushed to his toy. He knelt down next to it, his long hair draping his face. One wheel spun erratically while the other three remained silent. “You broke it!”
I rubbed my foot and examined the nail of my big toe. “It’s just a damn toy, Frank!”
When I looked over at him, I was shocked to see tears on his face. His voice was low. “Everything has to be about you, doesn’t it? Your problems, your cat, your apartment, you, you, you. You think you’re so unusual? You think that everything you say is new, Celine, but it’s not. It’s the same thing all over the world, Celine. What makes you so special?”
I huffed at him as I sat back on the couch. “I never said I was special,” I snapped. I expected a retort from Frank, but instead he picked up his car and went to the closet and grabbed his coat. “Where are you going?” I asked.
His voice was dull and tired. “I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?” My heart started to beat faster.
“Just leaving, Celine. I don’t give a crap anymore.” And he walked out the door.
I was too stunned for the first minute to even move. Then I ran after him, not even locking the door behind me. I was in my flip-flops and it was freezing outside, but I yelled, “Frank!” at the top of my lungs. He was already on his motorcycle, and he just gunned the engine louder, the roar of it drowning me out. I yelled his name again, but he started to pull away from the curb, and I ran after him down the street. I chased him down the block, my feet hurting against the pavement and the wind stinging my cheeks and ears, but he kept getting further and further away. He dropped out of sight for a second as the road dipped under the overhead train tracks, and then he turned the corner and he was gone. Just like that, he was gone.
I didn’t understand.
I turned towards home, and then those boys, those boys, started again. “Hey baby, I want to rape you!”
I swiveled and screamed, “Fuck you!” I fell on my knees on the street, in the gutter, and I grabbed anything I could. I hurled cans at them, Schlitz cans and Pabst bottles and broken sticks and concrete pebbles and potato chip bags and twigs and crumpled-up flyers and all the trash I could lay my hands on and I screamed at them fuck you fuck you you motherfuckers what do you know what do you know you fuckers and I couldn’t even see anymore and my face stung and my lungs burned but I threw shit at them with all my might, empty boxes and abandoned toys and soggy leaves and clumps of dirt and I dug into the ground and my fingers hurt and my shoulder ached and I hate them I hate them I hate them.
I sat on the curb sobbing and sobbing and hating them and my lungs felt so heavy that they should have dropped out of my body. And then a young voice behind me said, “Hey, lady, we didn’t mean nothing.”
I turned to the voice and saw a thin brown face. He looked younger than a boy talking about rape should look, maybe only thirteen years old, with pointed eyebrows as delicate as any girl’s and brown eyes wide and disbelieving at what he had just seen. His three friends hung back a few steps behind him, stony-faced, and one sneered at me with a raised lip, as if to say he was only dragged to this spot by his soft-hearted friend.
The boy directly in front of me reached out his hand towards me, but before he could touch me, I waved him off fiercely. “Lady-” he started to say, but I cut him off and stood on my own two feet.
I glared at him, at all four of them. “Fuck you,” I said.
CP Chang received his M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia College of Chicago in 2007. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Hair Trigger, artisan, Upstairs at Duroc, Atlanta Review, on Nerve.com, on wordriot.org, and in the anthology My Angels and Demons at War. He also writes a column for the suburban newspaper The Evanston Sentinel. A section of his novel-in-progress (tentatively titled Causes) won the Patricia Painton Scholarship at the Paris Writers Workshop and an Honorable Mention with the Helen Fong Dare Scholarship at Columbia College.
He can be heard performing his work as a contributor to the reading series RUI: Reading Under the Influence, at the Kate the Great’s bookstore, and as part of the 2nd Story performance group. His photography can be seen in No Touching and on Schmap Chicago. CP laments that there are not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the summer, and not enough summers in Chicago.
Untitled
By Desiree Mulkey
I remember the day I fought with my dad, truly fought. It was a terrible day, and I was in a terrible mood. My ex had been grating on my last nerve for weeks and that alone was enough to make me ready to lash out. Then the guys showed up at our house to deliver the mattress my mom and dad had bought a couple of days prior. It didn’t look like what my mother had described to me, but I wasn’t there, so how should I know?
I walked down the stairs of our two-flat through my grandma’s apartment and to the basement door.
My dad had been having a lousy day himself, attempting to fix something or other and getting nowhere. He was always his angriest when working on something he couldn’t get right. The only words I remember getting out of my mouth before his temper flared was something about the mattress possibly being the wrong one.
Already ready to snap, he went off like it was my fault. He told me I should have known better than to let the guys bring the wrong mattress in, since I was the one left upstairs to sign for it.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know? I wasn’t there when you guys bought it!” I fired back, my temper just as quick and hot as his.
A barrage of argument continued, the meaning and words lost in the anger, until he reached out to slap me. I was 18 years old at that time, and I was done with anybody putting me in my place. So, in rage, I blocked and I countered.
* * * * *
I stood in my girlfriend’s bedroom, that same rage multiplied by ten. My body shook with anger and hurt. I stood across the room, facing away from her. Lava pumped through my veins, and everything inside me pushed, pounded and drove me insane, begging for action.
My fist had a mind of its own and smashed into the half painted orange and white plaster on the wall across from me. The wall began to dent. Before I could stop or think, it flew again and again. I couldn’t feel my hand. I couldn’t feel my wrist. The wall was crumbling, pieces of dry wall and fine dust floated to the ground.
* * * * *
I remember being young and watching my dad hang dry wall. I remember watching him patch holes when it was time for old fans to come out of the ceiling. I remember the way the putty scraped across the seams, and the way it looked when it was dry and sanded and painted. It looked whole again, smooth and perfect.
I remember having to use my second hand knowledge to patch the holes my ex had put in the apartment walls when I lived with her. I remember hating her for her temper. I hated her bravado, the way she tried to pretend she was a bad ass, when later she would cry like a child. Somehow her tears repulsed me more than her fabricated anger; everything was fabricated with her, and it used to make my skin crawl.
Even with that, I would sit on my knees in our closet sized all white bathroom, filling and patching the holes she left. I took comfort in the fact that I had learned the skill from my father, who I idolized, even when we fought and screamed. I took comfort in the fact that some holes in life could be fixed that easily.
* * * * *
I looked at the empty space that hung in the wall, but the demons inside of me were still fighting and gnawing their way out. I picked an old green chair to fling into the same wall as hard as I could. A smaller whole appeared below the original one. I was still shaking and I couldn’t feel any of my limbs. I looked away from my girlfriend because I didn’t want her involved in it. I didn’t want her stepping into a situation I was already controlling the best I could.
The last surge of hurt and fury bolted through my body, and I could feel my heart running on battery acid in my ears. I plunged my foot through the wall, forever connecting and widening the holes.
I picked up the hammer. It’s begged to leave my hand, but I tried to stop it. I knew that hammers had to bounce at least as well as wrenches.
* * * * *
During the same fight where I took a swing at my dad, he ended up twisting my arm behind my back until I screamed for mercy. In that moment I hated him. I hated him for making me ask him to stop. I hated feeling weak and powerless.
My grandmother was in the apartment the whole time, yelling at us. Telling us that we were crazy. We scared the shit out of her, and I felt bad for it. But I also felt crazy for a minute.
I picked up the wrench my dad had been working with and stormed into the large kitchen after him. I held the wrench high in my hand and gave him a look that he later, half-jokingly, referred to as the look of death. My grandma was still yelling at us, but I didn’t care.
I bounced the wrench off of the hard tile floor a few feet in front of him. It bounced wildly into the wooden cabinets that were the foundation of the island in the middle of the kitchen. Then I stormed out of the house.
* * * * *
I let the hammer fly into the living room, where there were expanses of empty space and no one would get hurt. Finally the shaking stopped and thoughts returned to my brain. Unfortunately, none of them were pleasant. The feeling returned to my hand and I looked down to see cuts across my knuckle and wrist from where they entered the wall. My heart ached too with the pain of discovery, but I was not about to put my backbone down.
“So you cheated on me back then?” I yelled at her.
She sat as small as she could on the bed, not wanting to even make eye contact.
“Tell me the fucking truth! I deserve at least that much,” I yelled at her.
“No, I didn’t,” she stumbled.
“Don’t fucking lie to me, I’m tired of your bullshit, and I’m tired of your games. Now tell me the truth,” I half shouted, trying to control my voice.
She started to cry and sob and tell me that she loved me. She snapped my temper in half like nothing more than a toothpick. She told me that she never did and never would. She told me more things than my brain could keep track of. But she was crying, so I was holding. My own anger and feelings cast aside immediately.
Miss Kitty’s New Haircut
By Jessica Young
I think I started waxing my twat when I realized I couldn’t have kids. I made an appointment at a day spa, dropped my jeans and put on the most comical pair of paper panties you ever saw, and spread my legs for a big Polish aesthetician named Ilana. She had icy blue eyes and a mod blunt cut with thick bangs that was dyed a deep red. She spread warm wax on my thighs and then ripped my hair out, all the while prattling on about taking care of the skin, and how important it is that you moisturize and exfoliate. Exfoliate your bush: who knew? She even recommended a drink before I came in the next time. “You have a leetle drink, just a leetle one, you feel a lot less.”
My vagina needed something nice, something, after such heavy news. The poor thing had been so dutiful and dependable for so long, doing what I paid it to do, going when I needed to go, providing pleasure for both me and my husband, without a peep. It never asked for anything-not a shiny green dildo, no request for a thong, not even for a skirt so mini that when I climbed out of the car it might pretend it was Britney’s twat and wink hello to the world. It was content to keep quiet.
I never wanted to have kids. I met my husband, Justin, when I was 29, that prime baby-having age, the age when the magazines agree, “Ladies, if you haven’t popped one out yet, better get crackin’!” One night, after it had become clear we were getting serious, I sat across from him, gazing nervously into my after-dinner coffee, and confessed that I was the opposite of every good girl, that I didn’t want kids. He said he was fine with it, but I didn’t believe him. We continued dating for the next two years, and I restated it, asserted it, practically shouted at him, “I don’t wanna have kids!”
Each time Justin would smile at me and shrug his shoulders. “It’s fine, babe; we’ll make a great life together, just the two of us.”
I’m as surprised as you are that he married me; I didn’t think they made men like that.
Not wanting to have kids is not the same thing as not being able to have kids.
Five years into our marriage I was surprised to find my mind changing, my clock ticking, and we started trying to make a baby. After six months of trying with plenty of fun but without much success, I went to the doctor. He squeezed and groped, he peeked at this and poked at those, and then he frowned and wrote something down on my chart. We went into his office, where he sat down across from me behind a gleaming mahogany desk. He looked at me, all white jacket and somber, serious face, and told me that because of my age and the state of conditions in my body, that carrying a baby to term would be impossible. Apparently, a sizeable cluster of fibroid tumors had already moved into my uterus. It was too early to start talking surgery, but conception was out of the question. There would be no baby-having for my twat; no baby-having for me. That was it: our options were over, and the window was closed.
I didn’t know what to do.
I told my husband. I cried about it. A lot. He cried about it too. We cried together.
And then I waxed my twat.
Not completely, now. There are neither chunky, see-through stripper heels, nor any trips to Brazil in my future, and as my favorite aesthetician says, “Some of us like to look our age.” But I thought since little Miss Kitty wasn’t going to lose her figure any time soon, I might as well treat her right. Spruce her up. Take the girl in for a haircut.
It’s a surprising amount of fun. It hurts: don’t let anybody tell you differently, it hurts like hell. But it’s fun. After Ilana and I got better acquainted, after an earful of instructions and a promise that when I returned in three to six weeks, I’d have taken the edge off first with a glass of Pinot, I went home and took off my pants and stared at myself in the mirror.
“Tracy?” called Justin from another room.
“In here,” I said. He stuck his head through the open bathroom door, and, because I was naked from the waist down, he stayed. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Looking at my vagina,” I answered.
We stood there, both ogling my crotch. I curled a lock of brown hair around my ear, and looked at his reflection in the mirror. Then I spoke. “I mean, I know it’ll never get to be a gateway for a baby. But still, it looks pretty good, right?”
“I’ve always thought so,” he said, grinning at me.
