Opening Gestures
After the daughter’s fourth miscarriage, her mother flies across the country to introduce her to the ancestors, the ones whose bones rest somewhere in the hills of deep Mexico. She thinks she is ready, but she is not. Nothing has prepared her for this.
Her mother lands on a Tuesday morning and by noon wants the daughter to stand on the opposite side of the room, close her eyes, and imagine that all the first-born daughters from the maternal side of the family are now approaching her in the dining room. The daughter only agrees to participate after night falls, after her mother has spent the entire day wearing her down.
Raise your hand if your mother has ever worn you down.
When the ancestor work starts, the daughter cannot keep her eyes closed. It is not real, she knows this. But she senses an unfamiliar kind of encroachment. Something or someone wants acknowledgment, or to bear witness. The myriad encroachments are dizzying. She says, I think I want to sit down.
Her mother insists they continue. The obedient child does as she says.
Repeat after me, the mother commands, and she does.
I honor you, she commands her to say. The daughter says it.
I love you, the daughter tells the ancestors, which is the truth.
Please help, she commands her to say. The daughter says it.
The mother has a gesture with her hand that she uses to ask the universe for permission to do things, so she uses the gesture now to ask if they can open this exercise up to include the women on the father’s side of the family, his female ancestors. This is the daughter’s limit. I don’t think I’m ready for that, she says, and sits down to show she will not be continuing. The stories about the women on her father’s side terrify the daughter.
The mother doesn’t move to sit with her and instead asks the universe if she can do that one exercise where she represents herself as her daughter’s mother, and the daughter represents herself as her daughter, and they talk to each other in those roles. Talking with her mother, plainly and clearly, is something the daughter has wanted since she was a child, and if this rigamarole is what it takes to get it, the daughter better get back up. It occurs to the daughter that perhaps her mother needs to heal too.
The universe is fine with them speaking to each other as themselves, so they stand on opposite ends of the room. They begin.
I don’t know how to explain what happens next, so I’m going to skip this part and instead tell you about how, in high school, the daughter would have a hard time opening her gym locker during P.E. Some days, regardless of how many times she turned the dial on the padlock to the correct combination, the daughter would be late to join the class on the field, the basketball court, the pool. At times, the daughter wouldn’t make it at all. You could find her at the frazzled end of fifty minutes spent hiding angry tears, still clutching her padlock, and the girls would stream back into the locker room, ignoring the daughter as they often did. She didn’t understand how some things were so easy for others.
One day, the daughter must have been especially quiet in her struggle to caress the lock to yield because a group of girls skipped class to huddle in the corner closest to the showers to gossip, and they spoke freely in that way girls can only do when convinced no one is witness. The subject was sex and the boys who had made propositions to them. Their voices echoed off the tile.
I don’t even talk to him, said one of the girls. So hell no. Another girl mentioned how she needed to get birth control because she didn’t want to be one of those girls.
You know. A Mexican.
She got the laugh. They all laughed about the pregnant Mexicans. One of the girls felt compelled to add, It’s not even saying anything bad. It’s just a fact. My mom heard it on NPR. There were murmurs of agreement. She wasn’t saying anything we didn’t already know.
Raise your hand if, in your youth, you used all the magnificent energies from your miraculous body to prove everyone and yourself wrong.
The ending to that locker room story should be cautionary, but it’s not, and it’s familiar. The girl who got the laugh in that locker room got pregnant at seventeen, completed her GED at the adult continuation school, gave birth in front of two young grandmothers who soon proved eager to babysit for free, and so she ended up with a nice car, a nursing degree, and professional photos of her child in good, clean clothes at every stage of her life. Nobody could ever threaten to take her baby away.
Raise your hand if this story makes you break out in a sweat.
The daughter is sweating. The way her mother is looking at her right now is making her face hot. In fact, this whole room is starting to look like a brown cardboard box being crushed inward by external hands. The facets are diminishing in a way she can’t quite reconcile, but the exercise demands the daughter look straight into her mother’s eyes, so she holds her gaze, feeling like a little girl about to get a reckoning.
Again, I don’t know how to convey what happened next, so I’ll instead ask if you have a story about a time you looked at your father or some other man the way she is looking at her mother right now. It isn’t fair, of course, that mothers are rarely fully seen and known in this way, but here the daughter is, giving a look to her mother now that transcends, carrying weight, a gesture of recognition.
In her youth, the daughter had imagined a house full of children and had wondered how they would look at her. She would often think about one of her father’s great-aunts. In her strict manner, the great-aunt would line up all her children in a row, all eight of them, and, in great detail, express all the ways they had each disappointed her. Because of this, they scattered across Mexico when they could. Now nobody knows where they are. To leave a family like this is unheard of. But then it happened to her father’s mother. And then one of the aunts too. Their husbands and children left them to sit in the dark, all alone with their thoughts for the rest of their lives. But the fathers had committed their own sins: adultery that resulted in second families, arbitrary corporal punishment for those too young to defend themselves, and complete absence in the formative years—yet the fathers were still allowed into the homes. The mothers were not. The daughter, in her youth, saw that mothers couldn’t win.
When the daughter finally entered a loving and committed relationship, she imagined her children as paper cutouts of herself and her boyfriend, strung around the house, the Christmas tree, the backyard, the soccer field. Once the daughter stopped seeing her future children as garlands of her making, she knew she was ready to have them. Part of that shift involved no longer worrying about being held to a different standard than the father. It was more important to know that her long-term boyfriend, whom she’d met at a dentist’s office, would do his best, the way he had for the last ten years of loving her through career changes, moving houses, and her brother’s illness. Their children would look at him with great love. And the daughter knew that she would throw herself into the job of mothering as she did with all tasks: headfirst, sleeplessly, and without complaint. Their children could perceive her however they would.
She opened her arms wide to receive her children. She let her body speak to other bodies on the cellular level, on the fractal level, on the god level. Then the future began to split infinitely, perpetually, or rather it kept collapsing away from the places where the daughter could get to know her children. Multiple ob-gyn visits and tests confirmed nothing. These things just happen, they told her. Tuesdays, Sundays, Thursdays, never days, all the days were days the daughter was full of wonder, but the bad kind. It is possible to be amazed at how terribly things have turned out, and to wonder whether this is, still in fact, the best of all possible worlds.
Indeed, there are certain things she only thinks and never says aloud, because her English and Spanish aren’t good enough to convey what she is asking. She thinks of her great-aunt and wonders if her great-aunt had even wanted to be a mother. Then of her grandmother, who had wanted children at first but had regrets, and the daughter grieves for her too. The daughter goes for jogs, she rolls out balls of dough, she curls her hair, she drinks entire bottles of wine, and each time she shakes her mind’s fist violently. But at whom? To whom is she screaming? She comes to understand that the ordinary is magnificent while the uncommon is as natural as the happy ending. Women who have lost children they loved deeply never get a happy ending. Did her great-aunt love the children who left, or was it just expected of her to have them and find out how motherhood would feel? The truth harasses them either way, their personal Llorona, for the rest of their lives.
The daughter still feels she is the girl in the locker room all the time.
Her mother is floating. Her long skirt is hovering above the floor, and the daughter cannot see her feet. This is what I was having a hard time saying before, that the daughter can’t believe her eyes, and she is awash in reverence. She is struck by splendor. The daughter finally understands her mother on the cellular level, on the fractal level, on the god level. The daughter sees, for the first time, that it all begins and ends with the mother. The daughter looks up and down at her mother, though she is not supposed to break her gaze. She wants to sink to her knees. She wants to weep and tithe at her mother’s feet. But she can only stare at the weird way her mother is hovering, and she shrinks her thoughts into fragments until, finally, she considers this is a daydream or she is dehydrated, or she is dead.
She sits back down, and then it is over.
Because it is over, her mother is waiting for her to speak.
Rocio Anica is a Chicana from Southern California who received her M.F.A. in Fiction at Cornell University. Her writing distinctions include Juxtaprose’s 2016 Short Fiction Contest and Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions in 2017, and her teaching distinctions include the 2019 Martin Sampson Teaching Award. Rocio has collaborated on several theatrical works, including a one-act debut at Casa 0101 in Boyle Heights and, later, Teatrotaller in Ithaca. These days, she devotes herself full-time to writing, teaching, and traveling with her husband and dogs. Find her at rocioanica.com.