6. New Rule

The class had been working for days on their new rule. Those words had been hard earned and burned themselves into their memories. They owned them. Through them they were mastering reading. Once again, Claraberta spoke a version of the rule they were crafting. She had wrested leadership from Ginny by being open and direct where Ginny was full of secrets and intrigue and that was just what Claraberta's rule said. “Say what you believe. Ask for what you want.” She knew the class routine. She wrote the rule on the board in big block letters. And the women read the words together several times.
Marina sat on the edge of her work table close to the windows and let Claraberta run the discussion from where she stood, the spot where Marina often stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the six round tables. Ginny stood at her place beside Lula at the table closest to the booklined wall. “Isn’t that just what I did?” She was yelling, talking fast. “Why are you all ganging up on me?”
Lula shook her head and spoke from where she sat. “You know what Clara means.” She spoke softly and by now everyone knew to try to listen. “She means not behind Marina’s back. She means tell people to their face what you think.” Claraberta turned, looked at all the women. “Maybe some of the rest of you who aren’t saying very much have to speak. Or would you rather write your rule like Marina said. Write your rule. Write your petition. What is it that you want?”
Only now did Marina notice Jimmy standing at the door. How long had he been there? Uninvited. He had turned up a few weeks ago, the new hire at the day care center upstairs from her class. Up til now they'd both pretended not to notice the other. In the more than five years since they broke up she'd never once even seen him on the street. She wasn’t sure this was the best time for a man to come into the room, although once Danny came to tell the women about child support laws, and she’d forced Hal to do a poetry workshop. One of the women had brought her teenage son who’d sat in on the class. The Women in Action was meant to be a safe space for women. She met him at the door and stepped into the hall with him.
“That looked intense.” He leaned down. His cornrows brushed her head. She could smell on his breath cigarettes and last night’s beer and she stepped back fast, avoiding his kiss, resisting the impulse to punch him or at least push him away. They'd broken up years ago and she still wanted to punch him for drinking. What had she been thinking when she got involved with him? He'd been a clear bad choice: drank too much, told tall tales. After him had come Ori who was off pattern. Then Danny and now Hal. Danny was a lawyer and Hal was a poet.
Jim was a permanently underemployed genius forever driving while black. He and Marina met when they'd worked together at Chef Victor's restaurant. Right around the time she left him Victor laid him off. He found a job after she got together with Ori as an assistant at a family day care. She suddenly saw the way Jimmy, Danny and Hal were the same: dream people, male muses, demon lovers. Only Ori had been real.
“Still rabble rousing.” She was never sure whether or not Jimmy was laughing at her. “You can’t just teach them to read?” She shrugged and shook her head. He could read her, how badly she wanted him to go away. “Just wanted to tell you I’m working here now. Got a job assisting in the day care down the hall.” So he was taking care of the women’s children. He did great with them. Children found him as much a joy to be with as she had. Did he disappear on them the way he had on her? There was a loud shout from the room. Ginny. “I’ll let you get back in there to your revolution. We’ll have lunch later. What time do you get your break?” He looked happy their breaks coincided, shoved a cigarette between his lips and ran outside to light it.
Ginny went quiet when Marina stepped back inside the room.
“We’ve agreed on the new rule.” Claraberta handed her the paper. Marina read: “Say what you believe to people’s face. Ask for what you want to people’s face.”
“Just not on what the rule means.” Ginny still looked pissed, still not part of the group. Claraberta spoke in Spanish: “El que hizo la regla hizo la trampa.” Marina laughed. “Why don’t you tell the class what that means?” Julita who had the most English among the Latinas and liked to interpret more than she liked to speak called out. “Whoever makes the rule makes the…how do you say that? Makes the way to cheat the rule.”
Even Ginny laughed. Marina stood in the center of the room beside Claraberta who took this as the cue to take her seat.
“Ask for what you want. Why is that not as simple as it seems?”
“Because how do you know what that is?” Lula said. She waited until the room got quiet. “And if you want something others don’t want you’re in trouble. Like what happened here.”
Claraberta cut in, “Ginny wanted one thing.”
Marina interrupted. “To get rid of me. What I want right now is to get our talk as straight as possible here. One question is what do you do when you want change, when you want something others might not want or that could hurt some one, or something that you need to persuade others to do. What do you do when you want something that could be unpopular, put you into conflict?
“Is it always so easy to speak to people’s face? Did Ginny feel that was the only thing she could do?”
Julita raised her hand. She didn’t burst into the discussion without permission.
“Maybe Ginny could have started by asking first. Asking what it was the story we wrote meant. It wasn’t just her story. It was our story. Maybe sometimes there’s no war there, when you find out what is actually going on.”
Claraberta jumped in. “Julita’s right. You can ask. You can make sure there’s a bochinche before you repeat it and start to sembrar cizaña.”
Lula spoke again. Ginny had pulled her chair away from hers and turned. “What you said. Ask yourself what is it you really want? Do you want to make the situation better or do you want to make it blow up. I see that in my church all the time..”
Marina had quietly walked to the board and begun to scribe.
Ask yourself what you really want.
Do you want to make things better, or make them blow up?
Right then her stomach turned. She needed to race to the bathroom and just made it to a stall in time to throw up. She felt her forehead blazing. She really didn’t want to have lunch with Jimmy. Or she’d caught whatever Machi had.