Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

The street was empty, illuminated by the glow of art deco hotel fronts like the whole place was as real as a lit-up plastic Christmas tree. They ran two blocks inland, a few trickles of bleary-eyed clubbers meeting their path, unimpressed by their half-dressed, panicky race toward nowhere. They ran past closed tourist shops full of mannequins, balloon-breasted women in bikinis, blank-faced men in silly T-shirts that said things like FBI: FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR. Rows of shot glasses, crystal dolphins, bleached sand dollars. Johnson with a hand holding his pants up, Johnson running with the wobble of a toddler taking its first clumsy steps.

It had happened like this: Johnson thrusting her into the sand and pinning her by the shoulders. Like this: a tiny crab scurrying inches from Jeanette’s sideways-turned head, minute legs like fingers running over a piano. She didn’t yell or protest. She didn’t say no. She felt the futility of language, that it couldn’t capture the knowledge that what was happening was exactly what she’d expected could happen, that she was disappointed that once again the unexpected hadn’t won out. That strange men in cars were exactly what everyone had warned they were. That sex was just sex and not something that would clean her from the inside out, deliver her new to the world.

As Johnson undid her shorts, as he tugged at her tank top, she wanted to yell that he should stop—not because she wanted him to but because why would he want to be exactly what everyone expected? Didn’t he know how exhausting it was? She couldn’t find her voice, but it didn’t matter. Jeanette knew it then: harder girls weren’t happy. Probably, nobody was.

Jeanette followed until she didn’t. She followed until Johnson no longer looked back. Then she stopped along an empty street and curled onto a bench. She wondered if Johnson would come back looking for her. She wondered what a sunrise would look like on this particular street, what a body would look like coming into the light.

5FIND YOUR WAY HOME

Gloria

Mexico, 2016

When you first got there, to the detention center, I was afraid you would forget: the feel of bathwater (that feeling of calming suspension, like in a womb!), the way Miami smells of salt, what it feels like to run for miles and never hit a wall or fence. I was afraid captivity would shape you into something new and unrecognizable. I was afraid I would bear witness to a turning point, look back and think, That was the moment that shaped your life into disaster, or worse, I was the one who caused disaster.

But you were resilient, and I guess it’s no surprise. I’ve watched mewling kittens fight for life, the mother flattened into bone and fur by a careless car, and why should a human child be any different? I like to think you need me but I know now—that the feeling is more about my own survival than yours.

When you first got there, I wasn’t moved to another room. Our room had already swelled with more people than beds even though they said that wasn’t allowed. So you slept on the plastic cot with the scratchy blanket with me, and we both tried to will ourselves smaller to make space for the other. You asked me only once where we were and why. I told you it was only temporary, but by then, weeks had passed. You seemed to sense my struggle to answer so you stopped asking. But I could see you swallow the question and it pained me.

You didn’t like your new “school.” You complained that you were in the second grade but had to take a class with first graders and kindergarteners. You called them babies and I wanted you to stop growing, to remain in this moment. You said some of the kids couldn’t speak English but that when you tried to speak to them in Spanish, the teacher said you weren’t allowed. You complained that you already knew everything they tried to teach you. I was miserable and proud at the same time.

You didn’t like the food either but this was easier to get used to. It was hard, watching you no longer savor, lose that pleasure. I watched how eating became mundane. But there were bigger losses to mourn. I couldn’t think about food.

It’s funny, how a place can look so different when you crop the edges. I’d watch you play with the other kids in the industrial-looking playground, all that laughter, all that running and jumping. Except for the wall and chicken wire looming beyond, this could be any multicultural playground in any multicultural city full of happy, thriving kids. It reminded me of when I was young, long before you, in Sonsonate. A group of Christian missionaries came to our town and they built a school and a church. We watched them from behind our porches and favorite trees, how they delighted in everything we eschewed, favored the grubbiest clothes and the simplest food despite the rolls of bills in their lanyard wallets.

One day, as I played with two school friends, one of the Christian missionaries approached and spoke in Spanish to me. “Despite having so little,” she said, “you are so happy. You could teach the children in my country so much about what’s really important in life.”

I hadn’t known until that moment that I had so little. Even as an adult, when I had experienced enough to place my own life in comparison, I marveled at the woman’s comment. I wondered what she had expected: sad poor people being sad and poor at every sad, poor moment of their lives? She mistook happiness for what it was—how we survive and build lives out of the strings we hold. But she must have known, deep down, that she was lying to herself. She had said I knew the secret, what was really important in life, what made a person happy. If that was true,