Tourmaline

If she slept in the heat long enough, maybe she could melt away the baby. If there was a baby.

By Susan Straight

Aug 9, 2001 | Elvia sat on the makeshift bed she'd set up under the cottonwoods, braiding her hair tightly to keep it off her neck, to piss off her father and his girlfriend. She would sleep out here in the yard, against the chainlink fence and cottonwood trunks which butted up against the desert. If she slept long enough, sweat pouring from her skin, August heat coursing through her veins, maybe she could melt away the baby.

If there was a baby. She was dizzy, her head ached, she tasted oil at the back of her throat. But she felt nothing in her belly. She wouldn't look down. She wouldn't even touch her skin, by the navel, because what if there was a baby, and it felt her fingertips? Thought she loved it?

She didn't. Because there wasn't anything to love. She was dizzy because it was 110 today in Tourmaline, and she'd been washing clothes in the bathtub. Her father's girlfriend Callie said, "We can't walk to the laundrymat in this heat and anyhow we ain't got the money." As Elvia hung them outside, the t-shirts were already drying, stiff as flat people.

She had seen a pregnancy test in the medicine cabinet. Callie must have used the other one. Elvia wasn't going to pee on a stick. There was no baby. She wasn't going to have a baby and then leave it someday, like her own mother had left her, in the light of a windshield with only the sound of mothwings against the glass.

She remembered strange fragments from when she must have been about three: bowls of red pomegranate seeds, flickering candles, the crescent grin of white at her mother's brown heels.

Useless things. She couldn't even imagine a mother. She wasn't going to be a mother when she couldn't even make one up for herself.

Her father had always refused to tell her anything.

"Why talk about somebody when she's gone? Huh, Ellie?"

Her father never called her Elvia. Never.

"You said she wasn't regular Mexican. She didn't even speak Spanish. She talked some kind of Indian words."

Her father had gotten mad. "And you're not a regular kid. She's a gone Indian, okay? That kind. I'm a right-here dad. Most kids don't get that. You're lucky."

She leaned against the chainlink fence, guessing that she was lucky compared to most kids in the desert. Her father brought home food, he had never hit or even touched her, and he hadn't disappeared.

My mother disappeared. She left me at a church. Like some old Bible story about a baby wrapped in a blanket and stuck in a basket and headed down a river. Except I was in a Nova with no license plates in a parking lot. I remember one of the foster ladies telling somebody on the phone.

She tied her braids with leather shoelaces. Bracelets of gold light from the cottonwood leaves fell on her arms. Her father hated the braids.

"You're not Mexican," he said, over and over. "You're not Indian. You're American. Wear your hair like everybody else at school."

"Shave it off?" Elvia had offered. "All the guys shave theirs. Whatever they are."

Callie hated the braids, too. "I could curl all that hair for you, make you look gorgeous," she said. "But you want to pretend you're a cross between a squaw and a boy."

Elvia always shrugged. She liked looking strange, like someone no one would want and no one would want to mess with. Every time her father got into trouble with someone, at a bar or at a job or at a store, and they moved to a new place in the desert -- Indio, Cabazon, Palm Springs, and now Tourmaline -- she had to start a new high school.

A girl would say, "You look Hawaiian." Elvia would shrug. Another girl would sneer, "I hate when girls get green contacts that don't even go with their skin."

Elvia would fold her arms and glare. "Try pullin these out then."

Her father's eyes. Her mother's skin. She felt dizzy again. She wondered if she had her mother's heart. A heart that would let her leave a baby.

She wasn't huge. A quiltlike layer of soft fat surrounded her ribs and hips, that was all. She wore baggy jeans and big t-shirts, like always. She and her father had always gone to the Army surplus for clothes. She stared out into the desert trembling white with afternoon heat. Michael had braided her hair. He was a Cahuilla Indian. She had met him at the high school in Cabazon, but she'd spent hours with him in an arroyo outside Tourmaline. He'd built a plywood shelter with a car windshield for a window. Months ago, when darkness had turned the shattered glass into sparkling silver webs, when they'd drunk vodka and juice, she had fallen asleep with his chest pressed like a bony shield against hers.

Then he disappeared from school, from the shelter, from the desert. People said he had a job building windmills in the pass, he had stolen a car, he had gotten casino money, he had vaporized himself.

Next Page: "It's just a blob. So when you get rid of it, it's no big deal"

• View blog reactions