come to the right place. He was warm. I could feel the heat of his chest, his hips, and his mouth through my tank top and jeans. Later, when his hands slid under my top and up, I could feel the soft trail of hair leading from his navel down. José’s hands reached along my ribs and stopped when they encountered not material but flesh.
I pulled back slightly. “I don’t believe in bras,” I said.
“Me neither,” he said as my top came off.
Later in his bed I confessed, “Sex is my favourite sport.”
“Then you’re my favourite jock,” José replied.
I laughed, José put his hands on either side of my head. “What’s the Spanish for jock?” I asked even as he touched his tongue to my eyelids and turned my head in his hands. He didn’t answer.
José, Josecito, Pepe, Pepito, Pepillo, who knows, why not mi amor, amor mío someday. What better language for the making of love than his?
He slid his thumbs to my throat, stroked the lump centred there, whispered, “Manzana for apple,” glided to his knees, murmured, “And now for the forbidden fruit.”
I rolled onto my side, my head at José’s feet. Traced a line along his calf, parting gentle hairs with my nail. In slow motion I traced and watched, reflexes drugged by sex. Thought to myself, he has to go to work. “So tell me, what’s so forbidden?”
José raised himself on one elbow, cast a glance at his travel clock, reached across, stroked a breast, my Venus mound, my ass. I noticed, detached, as my nipples grew hard again. “Not these, or this, or this. All of it. All of you. Gringa’s the forbidden fruit.”
“Gringa.” Funny how the words to describe me multiplied. Baby, girl, sister, daughter, woman, lover. Kid, student, painter. Anglo, Canadian, and now this. Gringa. “I am half-Mexican, remember. Besides, Gringa’s for Americans.”
“Wrong again. We’re the Americans, all of us Latinos to the south. Gringos are North American, that means you too.”
“Not true. Canadians never came in uniform to invade Mexico. Those are the greens the Mexicans wanted to see go.”
“Okay, okay, you win. How about I give you your prize?”
But there was something I still wanted to know. “So why are we, why am I forbidden?”
“Santos, you ask a lot of questions.” He twirled around to point in my direction, dropped his legs over the side of the bed. “Here, I’ll show you.” He rummaged next to him on the top of the desk, the only other piece of furniture in his room. “Look at this.”
He’d grabbed a magazine, flipped it open to an ad, full page. A picture of a milk carton stamped Made in U.S.A. Underneath was the caption “No sean malinchistas. Digan no al TLC.” Don’t be Malinchistas. Say no to the TLC.
“TLC. That’s the free trade agreement Mexico’s negotiating with Canada and the U.S., right?” José nodded. Back home, I’d had a union button handed to me on the same agreement. It said, Free Canada — Trade Mulroney. “Who’s Malinche?”
“Ever heard of Doña Marina? Cortés’s interpreter.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s her. The one who sold out. Defected to the other side. La Malinche was the name the natives gave her. Any of us who go to the other side, to the gringos, we call them Malinchistas. Looks like I’m going to be a Malinchista for a while.”
For a while. I said the only thing that came to mind. “In English, TLC stands for tender loving care.”
I walked him to the metro, broken crates, banana peels, and cigarette butts littering the gutters at our feet. I remembered the street sweeper, told José.
“Happens all the time. In the middle of the night. The pockets of smog get so bad the birds can’t breathe. They fall from the trees, and we wake up to them the next day. A new spot every time. Here today, a month from now thirty blocks further down. The air moves in mysterious ways.”
He didn’t notice my slight shudder.
III
After saying goodbye at the metro — both of us too awkward out in the open, too tentative, to kiss — I wanted to relive the morning with José, but the sparrows kept intruding. I walked slowly, not wanting to imagine birds toppling from branches, wings folded, never to unfurl for one last flight. I realized I couldn’t be any part of the poisoned air.
There was only one solution. I would tell Faith the car was out. There was no way I’d add to the exhaust in the air that kept birds raining from the sky. I wasn’t as sure what Faith’s reaction would be. Well, actually, I was. Faith always told me that I think in headlines, that I’m the melodrama queen. I still remembered her reaction the day I decided to quit eating mammals. I was living with her and Marc then. After Mom left for Mexico.
Mammals, not meat. Because of a terrible dream I had. In my dream, we made a huge bonfire — Faith, Mom, and I — at first throwing on wooden crates, branches of trees, and book after book after book, some of them bearing Papi’s name, until they were all gone. Then we threw a donkey, a pig, a calf, and a goat — mammals all — into the flame-ringed pit. Not one gave a cry, a squeal, or a scream. Their cries, squeals, or screams were sucked away by the ring of flames like molecules of oxygen. Worst of all, the fire created a vacuum in me. I watched and felt nothing, there was nothing left to feel. The vacuum frightened me more than the sacrificial act.
No other nightmare had ever made me feel that much fear before, not as a kid in my bed alone, not even during the long nights after Papi left. I had to listen to what the dream was telling me.
Faith’s reaction? “Mammals, you’ve given up mammals! So, like, you’re a non-mammalian now? Can’t you just be a vegetarian like everyone else?”
I expected more or less of the same when I told her about the birds and the car. Faith accusing, like there was something wrong with not being like everyone else. Like she had something better to offer. And that wasn’t all. If she did agree to give up the car, she would probably figure this got her out of the promise she made last night to come with me the weekend after next. Mom had been back to Canada seven times in the past seven years, but neither Faith nor I had ever been down to see where she lived in Cuernavaca. I’d told Mom before Faith arrived that I would go down one weekend to visit her. She suggested a date to coincide with one of her vacation breaks, one that would give me enough time to settle in to the big city first. She mentioned us going together to her friends’ beach house, on the ocean, once she’d shown me the place she now called home. “You could tack some days onto the end of your stay in Mexico to make up for the few days you spend with me.” Now Faith was part of that plan.
Faith thought of the hitch right away. “Where does that put Cuernavaca? How do you think we’re going to drive down?”
“I didn’t have a car when I told
