Yolanda

I find myself cursing my grandmother for the body that she gave me, the one that I didn’t even know I had. When she was pregnant with my mother in 1959, a brown recluse spider bit her, and my grandfather paid for her to go to the hospital in San Joaquin. He didn’t have enough money to treat his own spider bite. Instead, he waited for her in stark lights, the dusk mood too much for him, now and always. There is still Yolanda.

In 1958, my mother had an older sister named Yolanda, who was delivered stillborn. My grandmother had to wait a week for the doctor to return to town to make the delivery. I wonder what Yolanda’s body would have been built like. Her death threw off the birth order of my grandmother’s daughters. Yolanda is the firstborn daughter, not my mother, and she is a reminder of all the ailments that our bodies have, us three women, who were left alive to break away. I am afraid of Yolanda’s body. I see her body in mine. Child-like. Dying. I see our bones chipped into bird figures, displayed on machines, but then I remember that those machines didn’t exist for her. There are still us. Lungs murmured and bruised, my body rages outside of hospital gowns. Yolanda’s dress is a sack with a string that pulls closed at the bottom. Yolanda is brown and large eyed, curly hair close to her head, blue-faced brown, like me, Yolanda.

My grandmother hosted her mother-in-law’s 90th birthday party in 1990. She stayed up for weeks preparing the house, cleaning the closets and linen for overnight guests coming in from LA, dusting the hinges of her cowboy style accordion doors. The day of the party was a scattering of our family across the lawn, my distant cousins spitting beer at trees and rocks, mothers fishing their almost drowned children out of wading pools. My grandmother had a stroke that evening. I always wonder if she thought of her daughter, Yolanda, just before she began to repeat words over and over again in her kitchen. My grandmother had a little wrought iron gate in her back yard that creaked every time someone passed through it. I felt pain once when my mother walked through that gate in the afternoon sunlight, wearing a red dress with silver buttons. My dress hit my knees, and hers fell to hers. I could see our reflections joining together in the deliberations of glass. These were our bodies, turning over ourselves, cherry flat cola in my mouth, my mother growing her body inside me.

When my grandmother died, I watched my oldest girl cousin hold her hands and push her hair from her face. I couldn’t touch my sick grandmother, so I stayed in the waiting room, falling in and out of sleep on chairs, hearing my boy cousins rummage a tiny refrigerator filled up with gelatin cups and water bottles. My grandmother pale and gray hued. My mother tapping her sandaled feet in the hallway.

My grandmother had a brick house with stained glass windows and a saloon with Toulouse-Lautrec wallpaper. On New Year’s Eve, 1987, I played on the bar stools with my cousins when I was four years old and fell back and broke my arm. I spent the holiday at Valley Children’s Hospital, making patterns on the imaginary pins I felt inside me. I sewed a dress that night, and I have been wearing it ever since then.

My mother started teaching kindergarten when she was twenty-two years old, a year before I was born. She always had health insurance, and she’d give up any part of her body that ailed her. When her periods started coming every 20 days, she said, here’s my uterus, take it. My mother has always liked the taste of hospital food.

My mother lost a baby in the spring of 1992, and she arranged for her friend to babysit me, a white woman who ran a daycare from her house. The woman’s teenage daughter took me to the back yard, where there was a tiny tin dollhouse with a low roof. She made me a tea party, and we drank punch from cheap plastic cups, a lace apron at her hips.

My own hips were so small boys made fun of me at school. They are thick now, but they still feel cursed by those boys. My mother and my grandmother had their hysterectomies when they were my age now. Losing blood made us swoon and dance. I had never lost a baby like my mother and grandmother because I never got pregnant after my first child, and I had a tubal ligation when I was twenty-nine. My mother cried the day I had it done, and I could not pretend to understand why. I was out in an hour, and my mother took me to eat lunch at a cantina afterward. I felt whole inside and watched the lights gleam off a chandelier made of tequila bottles and thought of Yolanda dancing and swooning inside them.

On Saturdays, my son and I watch recorded episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful while eating lunch in the living room. I know his body will never be the thing that mine has become. There is a cold pomade in his hair, and I resent him for not having the things that I have, and I love my son for not having this body. When he has petered away, I lay on my couch as flat as I can, nerve pain at my wrists like bracelets, counting all the children I will never have, but there is always Yolanda.

Some people say I look like the women in my dad’s family, and I see it too. I look like my father’s mother. The outside of me is not the indicator of my ailments. In my pain, I belong to my mother, and I am Yolanda’s. My father knows this, and he tells me to get cream from a botánica in downtown Fresno. I buy dollar teas in shiny clear packets hanging on the wall like jewels. I buy a rainbow-colored Santa Muerte Statue small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, and my son buys hex candles that he promises he won’t use on anyone. He just likes the colors. I want my own son to hex my own body and make the bones into pearls, new nerve stems growing back to me.

I look like my father’s grandmother, too. She lived to be one hundred and four.

At the doctor’s office, everyone is dressed up for Halloween morning. A brown boy nurse in a Batman costume happily takes my vitals. I tell the doctor that I have been eating ice cubes, and I pay an extra $9 to have my blood taken, so she can check my iron levels. While I wait, I kick my feet against the crisp white paper wrapped around the examination table. Batman returns nervously and says that he’s going to retake it, and if it is much too low, I will have to go to the emergency room, and I laugh and ask him if he’s serious.

My mother wants me to go to the same doctor who cut her open and took her uterus out. She tells me that she was a nerdy white girl with bleached blonde hair. She looks up the woman and shows me what she looks like now. I have to wait until winter to cut out that inside of me. The winter in my town is a dry, cold, and foggy one. I count the children I have never had and wait for winter to come.

I am always in my body’s pain. There are X-rays with lung clouds and cotton ball alcohol drops. I rise every morning at five o’clock and hear the shower run. My nerves turned out. I lash out at the ones I love the most. The neighbors can listen to me at night. In the afternoon, my head aches by the time I walk to the corner, passing my favorite armadillo house, making my way to whiskey around the corner.

Every time I hear Yolanda’s name, I think of the color yellow, pale like a new bruise, yellow like a scared cowboy in a movie. I can feel her mouth open and close when I spit in my bathroom sink. There is dust in her matchbox lungs and her fingers flailing like the Pentecostal paper from my Sunday school days. Yolanda is buried over in San Joaquin, away from her mother, away from me, away from her sister. My grandmother is buried in Belmont Avenue’s cemetery in Fresno, her headstone five feet tall, nearly the same height as my mother. My mother’s name is already etched on the stone to save money. All the plots have been claimed there, so I will need to find my own.