Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,11
how much fear you hide in your cells: blue cells, green cells, red cells, sickle cells, sleeper cells, jail cells—people are shot through with it. But I don’t hold my fear there. Everybody needs a place where they’re fearless or they’d never survive, at least I wouldn’t. Sometimes I hate this world. Especially when it’s more beautiful than I can imagine.
The freeway lights stuttered and the valley sank. We ran with the rest of the traffic into a furrow lined with restaurant chains and competing gas prices. Jimmy’s skin was light brown above her jeans and cream colored below like I thought it would be. And maybe I saw a garden beyond a gate. And maybe it wasn’t a garden but a reflection of a garden. It was so clear to me now. I just somehow hadn’t seen it. Everything had already erupted. There was nothing to save.
I had been kissing the hems of ghosts.
5 Jimmy
The morning light on Jimmy’s face showed all the tiny scars she had from being alive. Above her eye was a small white scar that pulled when she squinted and next to that, another scar, thin as a wrinkle, from a car wreck. Under her chin was a ragged patch of raised tissue from wiping out on a skateboard. She wouldn’t get it stitched because she didn’t want to pay the ER bills.
I tried to move but her hair was tangled in my ring. I twisted it but couldn’t get the ring off because my fingers were swollen from sleep. She was laughing the whole time, which made it harder. Finally, we had to cut the hair out with the scissors of her Swiss army knife, which was lying on the makeshift nightstand.
“Not like it matters,” she said and threw the bleached orange lock behind her where it landed coiled and soundless.
The sheets were tangled. The white fan with the cherry branch lay open by the mattress. Jimmy reached over my body and picked up a photo that was lying face down on the floor.
“This is where I’m going,” she said and handed the picture to me.
A colony of shacks sat unevenly on a clay hillside. Behind them, boxwood carpeted the mountain slopes, receding up into a distant cloud forest.
“The village is Indian.”
Because the search for authenticity is a well without a bottom.
“Very beautiful,” I said and handed the picture back.
Pale light filtered through the gauze window curtain, whitening the sheets and turning Jimmy’s shoulder and hip the color of ivory.
“If you’re going to tell Credence,” she said, “I want to be warned.”
“He’ll just think it’s funny.”
“Funny because I’m a girl or funny because it’s me?”
“Funny because it’s you.”
But Credence did not think it was funny. He called my having sex with Jimmy unscrupulous dabbling. Apparently, his time with her made him some kind of gender cowboy while mine just made me irresponsible. We got into an argument over which stance was more unenlightened, getting into bisexual relationships with lesbians (viewpoint Credence) or treating lesbians like incapable children who will automatically fall in love with you just because you are woman (viewpoint Della). I admit sleeping with Jimmy was lazy, though. Kind of like dating your cousin because you already know all the same people.
Annette didn’t care. She just wanted to be the one to tell my parents. We all agreed the joy of my potential gayness would kill them. First, black grandchildren and now the fantasy of two women on the couch at family gatherings (entwined and laughing as if it were all going to be okay). Yes, they would finally be dead from politically informed glee. And, most importantly, the Bobbsey Twins of Labor Unrest though unable to rescue the PUBLIC from the slander of BIG GOVERNMENT would be placed in an historical context where the primacy of class had naturally yielded to its more ornamental, if secondary features: race and gender.
Annette said the only thing better would be if one of us went to prison.
“But you know, the next time you date a boy Grace is going to accuse you of exercising heterosexual privilege.”
“Jimmy will be in Honduras before I see them.”
“The anniversary is next week.”
The green fans of the katydids fluttered.
“She could come to that.”
I looked at Credence. “I’m not going.”
Annette turned and walked into the kitchen.
Every year I say I’m not going.
When I first got hired at the restaurant Mirror asked about my parents.
“So, Della,” she said, swallowing a chunk of raw tofu the size of a golf ball, “Jimmy