Where Are All the People that Mattered?

Week 91

There’s a world out there, Europe, heritages, distillations of thought, art genius. I’m not in it.
I woke up remembering my dolls, my coleccion de munecas. I left them in Ventura with a little girl, one of the little girls I mentored in my secret belief I knew how to treat young people, my conviction and commitment that as a 13 year old I was preparing to remember what it was like to be young when I became an adult.
I knew, in the same way I assumed I would control my future, be in charge of my future remembering of the knowing of being young, that I would come back to Ventura for my dolls very soon.
But this morning I woke up 45 years later wondering what became of my dolls. Did the little girl Orietta keep them in the comejen dissolved legal shelf I painted with leftover fat blue wall paint? There were two of those glass fronted shelves and in them I jammed in the dolls my father brought back from his preaching travels. I left the collection intact because I knew I’d be back for them soon.
I failed myself.
I can barely stand to imagine how the little girl dismantled the integrity of the collection and then dismembered the dolls limb by limb.
It’s Monday.
I can barely get up.
I want to vomit but I don’t. I don’t vomit Monday morning anymore. Only drag myself out of bed vaguely nauseated.
Facing a sea of Mondays. Hating my work. How did it come to pass I wasted my whole life and none of my dreams came true and I fulfilled not one of them, and now I see even my dreams were not dreams at all, but the hopes of a child for a life of static well being, for an endless maternal tit, for safety.
Even my dreams were not dreams.
The revolution didn’t happen.
Where are all the people who mattered? I’d give anything to have them all together in one room, like the dolls.
(Josefita)
Sherry
Anita
Iyllis Elizabeth
Tommy Harper
Patsy Isaacs
Marlene Santa Cruz
Polly
Cristinita
Gracielita
Zoilita
Orlandito Fundora and his blonde sister whose name I can never remember (Gladys Maria, maybe her nickname was Chuchi)
Mari Laura
Mary Alice Juch
Angelita Labrador
Bebito
Eugenio Villacian
Roberto (I heard he died)
Nelson (I know he died)
Here is how the sad stories go
Sherry, I don’t know why I kicked up our garden
Anita, you scared me, I knew about class from you, that you were better than I, your father a general or some such and my father hiding urban guerrillas in our living room
Iyllis I liked. Americanita. Nice to me. Plump
Tommy Harper every girl had a crush on and I liked to pretend I didn’t but I did His mother taught third grade and was Cuban but spoke perfect English, almost unaccented, and smelled of American cigarettes. She smoked Camels I think. When I couldn’t take it any more and complained about Patsy Isaacs' bullying of me and pony tail pulling on line Mrs. Harper put a stop to it.
Marlene had powerful legs and blonde hair. She was an agua de violetas girl. Class powered and confident and a thrower of spitballs in geography class, a tormenter of the disempowered declassed man, maybe depressed or alcoholic or cuckolded who couldn’t get control of the primero de bachillerato class.
Polly was one of the few people who ever came to visit me in my house in Nuevo Santa Fe who negotiated the travel somehow. Years later I did see her one more time when I went to Ventura with Machi as an infant for the anniversary of the Victoria and she found me. She was a reporter and I was too. She for the revolution’s newspaper and I for the Party’s newspaper.
Cristinita was a reiteration on the block of my cousin, always planning randezvous with her novio who was Bebito’s older brother. While I served as lookout she and Chucho necked on the concrete paved square of yard just by the door of the kitchen. I stood by the kitchen sink window ready to tell her if Chucho’s mother arrived, watching them kissing the way they kissed in Hollywood movies
Gracielita was another little girl I championed and treated well, a tomboy short and plump, who played the Broderick Crawford role in patrulla de caminos games. She rescued my dog lasi from a hunger strike the time my brother and I went to mi campamento while my mother got to go with my father on a preaching trip for a change. Lasi refused to eat a thing. Her grief was overwhelming until Gracielita came by and got her at last to eat. Were it not for Gracielita I would have come home to a dead dog.
Later when we gave lasi away to the bodeguero in sta fe because we were going al exilio lasi came home, broke the rope and ran away and found our house
So zoila kept her after all I wonder if she committed suicide successfully after we vanished after she chased our car past the traditional first farol and we failed to keep our part of the bargain, do our role in the game,
We never came home again.
Will Machi ever come home again
Ori will never come home again
Zoilita was my close Presbyterian friend she and I lay in bed late at night during a sleepover talking about our sexual policies. She intended to encourage her novio to go to prostitutes so that he would be less likely to pressure her into sex before marriage neither of us would kiss or neck before we got married I know she’s dead out of the blue her brother called me only a few months ago to tell me he now is also an exile, of a fresher vintage than myself and zoilita too escaped salio de ventura only to die of a stroke in mexico
Orlandito Fundora and his blonde sister whose name I can never remember were the first people I personally knew whose father had gone into el exilio their mother pounded on our door early in the morning looking for help she knew my mother worked at the military camp for the americanos installing microondas for comunicaciones I don’t know if my mother was able to help the sister was blonde and not my closest little girl friend she like to play with the whitehaired marie antoinettish doll with the ticking clock for a heart. Orlandito left me a love letter in the back fender of our car. When I asked him what it said it was garabatos he said I don’t know I can write but I can’t read
Gildita was the other of the quartet of girls with Gracielita, Lourdes maybe fundora, and the long faced girl who lived on the avenue Her father was a glamorous piloto her mother liked to eat avocado sandwiches gildita was energetic and vivacious and reminded me most of me at her age She was Bebito’s cousin and came to get me the last day I ever saw him He’d already moved back to the center of the city his mother couldn’t stand it in the reparto and he was in the milicias and he showed me his gun. We walked in the empty lot between my house and the avenue and the gun was enormous He no longer planned to go to medical school because the revolution needed engineers. I explained I was leaving because my father had gotten a job in Switzerland I don’t know exactly what I said but I me le declare and he rejected me He told me he intended to only have one novia the idea was he had to wait until he was much older and closer to actually getting married before he would even bother Still he looked me up when he came back to the reparto I was his novia of sorts
Beatrizita was my parents servant she came to the capital every year to try again for the nursing school exam although she had no pull and had taken no special test prep courses and had no chance at all she told me what perder la honra meant and after that I was terrified whenever I talked to a boy that I would spy through his pants his penis getting hard The tell tale sign he liked me
Mary Alice Juch took me to her run down mansion. We drove by a band on the street and she started to call out in the car, Hurray for the band, and her father or grandfather who was driving said, Mary Carol, it’s a funeral.
Mary Alice like Felicita I think must have been a jew exiled from Europe and the camps. Felicita was tall and didn’t know how to play and made me jealous of her lunches by making me believe the black paste in her sandwiches was chocolate. Later I figured out it was mashed black beans
Angelita Labrador I was passionate about in boarding school she was smart and a revolutionary and had zealous fierce convictions she explained to me that certain novios and novias were together for lujo not love.(What did she mean? Did she mean pretence or lujuria? She had fascinating thoughts I had to think about.) I locked myself in the laundry room to scream curled on the floor pounding into the laundry sacks despairing rages about her rejection of me I imagine she is a big leader of the revolution
Bebito was my love I hacia posta on my bicycle sometimes with beatrizita sitting on the handle bar Mostly he ignored me But it turned out my postas were a kind of noviazgo because he came to say goodbye to me when he heard I was going into el exilio
Eugenio Villacian se me declaro and I said yes not meaning to because nobody else had declarado their love
Roberto (I heard he died) He se me declaro too and I said yes to him too because I didn’t quite know what to do he was blonde and skinny and had a big pompadour and somehow I knew I could tell he was even more poor than we were Later I heard he died of cancer
Nelson (I know he died) We stared at each other in the bible group. I adored him. He was thin and dark and had long eyelashes and he was a preacher’s kid. He never said a thing to me. The nurse gave me reports when I went to her at the infirmary. He was always not going to class because he was sick. Years later in the City after we were both exiles , not so many years later actually, maybe one, but centuries later in the river of space time, he told me, soy un tipo enfermizo I thought he was bsing. He complained that when he kissed me I was too passive, just letting my mouth be a lax receptacle. I was supposed to be doing things with my tongue. I was disappointed. It was too late for him to pay attention to me now that my whole real life was beginning as I went off to college. When I needed him in boarding school he ignored me and part of me wanted to get revenge. I intended to get myself another novio as soon as I got to college in a week or two from our kissing walks to randall’s island. He went with me to buy the blanket my long hairs later stuck to with static electricity grossing out my American roommate who plagiarized my paper got an a minus when I got a b plus. She was put to room with me to the horror of her mother I figured out later, because I was Latina and she, although she had the hugest breasts in creation and was blonde, was jewish. Two nonwasps in a presbyterian college.
I want them all in one room
My dolls in their flat blue comejen shelf
I want to know what happened to them