2 Stories by Claire Salinda
“Baja California, 1995”
I’m nine years old. My mother is sitting at a round table under a fiberglass umbrella angled against the setting Mexican sun. We’re in Baja California to volunteer at a rural medical clinic along with my aunts, who are nurses, and their other medical-professional friends. My mother is not a nurse but her secretarial skills are useful at the clinic too, where she oversees the administrative work while I kick around a soccer ball with local kids and occasionally apply a few brushstrokes of fresh paint to an outhouse. But the heavy round tables with their hard, built-in umbrellas are not at the clinic. They’re at the ranch where we all stay for these trips and where the adults are currently drinking warm beers after a long day.
The sun draws closer to the horizon as I run around with a pseudo cousin of mine—our parents are old lovers and even older friends. We’re playing some sort of military hideout game among the ranch’s dusty outbuildings and brush-filled landscape. Our antics grow more focused, more serious, as the darkness begins to envelop us. There is no electricity on the ranch, just a generator for certain necessities and it turns off at 10 PM each night, so we all carry around old-fashioned oil lamps to see in the dark. However, my fake cousin and I cannot play our game with lamps in our hands, so we dash around in the dark, absorbed in the realism created by the blackened sky and our untamed surroundings.
My mom calls out to us and we’re startled. We had forgotten all about the grown-ups in our imaginary warfare. We approach the table she’s sitting at, cautious of our feral state as well as that of our parents—they’re drunk on those Mexican beers by now. My mom smiles at us as she runs her fingertips along the inside glass of one of the oil lamps on the table. “Here,” she says to us, transferring the soot from her fingers to our cheeks with a confident and firm wipe. “Now you really look like soldiers.” Something has shifted in this gesture. This drunk woman no longer resembles my mother as I know her and so she becomes something like a stranger to me. Emboldened by this new distance between us, I look into this woman’s—my mother’s—unfocused eyes and reach for her Pacifico Clara, waiting for her to stop me. She doesn’t, she just chuckles, and that is how I drink my first beer. “Go ahead! Why not? It’s Mexico!” she calls out while we abscond with the bottle.
My pseudo-cousin and I take turns sipping the beer, not enjoying the taste but finding something interesting in the way we suddenly feel a little warmer, a little tingly all over. Things are funnier now, less dire in our war game, as we resume our prowling in the chaparral. Eventually, we grow tired and still, and decide to just stalk the adults from our hideout. I see my mom get up from the table and smack her head hard against the edge of the umbrella. She winces and then she giggles, and so does everyone else. When she comes back from wherever she was, she hits her head again as she sits back down. I watch as my mom does this a few more times—stands, smacks, sits, smacks—while the rest of the adults slap their knees and double over with laughter. I don’t know how to feel about this scene. It must hurt her head each time she bangs it on the fiberglass rim and I worry about my mom. But I’m also embarrassed that she is incapable of controlling herself, both with regard to how her body moves so recklessly through space now and with how she got to that state in the first place. It’s easiest for me to just not recognize this woman as my mom and to feel unrecognizable as her daughter, too, unseen with my sooty face behind the bushes.
Eventually, someone takes her to a cabin and puts her to bed. Another good friend of hers, a woman I know well enough to follow, takes me to sleep not in my mom’s cabin but in her own bed, assuring me that everything will be normal again in the morning. No one washes the black soot from my face and for the first night in my life, with half the Pacifico in my belly and my mom unreachable, I understand what it means to be someone other than a mother and a daughter.
I Find Myself Riding The Subway
Dearest A.:
Yesterday afternoon, Jesse and I took the subway to the natural history museum to cheer ourselves up; or, to forget and to escape; or, to, at the very least, feel differently. There was a man sitting across from us who wiped his face with an intention that felt danced—it was so full of grace. While we later talked about the future and how one day we'll look back on that afternoon with humor and appreciation and pity for our cold, sad, January selves, it was that man's gestures that held the most promise for me. The world is big. The future is fucking terrifying. Everything has yet to be known. I don't like how I'm writing about this. But that man on the train wipes his face like that so I have to concede that life is also beautiful, right?
I find myself on the subway resting against the middle pole, across from four women who all share one bench. Behind me, on an identical bench directly opposite this line of women, just two men take up the seats. I believe the women would make room for me to sit with them if they could.
A dog rests its head on my elbow on the train not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions. I take pictures of their snouts nuzzled against my arm, and I take pictures of young couples who fall asleep in each other's laps, of strangers who let other strangers fall asleep on their shoulders. I take a picture of a man’s feet because he has the word siiiiiiiiiick tattooed across the front of his right ankle in a pleasing arc.
One night, I find myself on the subway headed to Grand Central, where most of the people will get on another train out of the city. Four men in khakis and Easter egg-colored polos rehearse excuses to their wives as to why they’re arriving home from the city so late. I bet they played lacrosse in high school but weren’t good enough for college, and I’d like to think that as their wives drag their manicured nails across their husbands’ stubbly, dimpled cheeks that night, taking in their whiskey exhales as they tell them the game ran late, the server forgot their check, the train was delayed—that these beautiful women in their matching pajama sets, their own dimpled cheeks shiny and smooth with La Mer and gentle fillers, wives who haven’t taken the subway since they moved into big houses in the suburbs—that they don’t believe a word of it.
I take short videos, too, on the subway. I find myself filming a young girl mindlessly stroking another young girl’s arm with a single finger. In another clip, I am trying to capture the view of Brooklyn that emerges around a certain bend when the train surfaces from underground for two stops, but all I can focus on is a man and a small boy tucked into the right-hand corner of the screen and the son’s miniature fingers slowly squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing, his father’s arm.
More than I’d like to admit, I find myself kicking the side of the train after the doors have closed without me. I soothe myself by composing fake class-action lawsuits in my head against the MTA for their enraging ineptitude. And one evening, on my way home from work on the next train that wasn’t too full to fit me, I find myself seated next to a very fat baby, so fat that his eyes look crossed and I want to bite into his cheeks. He can see his reflection in the metal door of the train car and he is delighted. He keeps smiling so big, and his eyes keep looking more crossed, and so I almost touch a stranger’s baby’s cheeks. He is munching on cereal handed to him piece by piece by his caretaker and when she puts the cereal away, he goes from pure glee to total agony in the span of a few seconds, the joy of his reflection completely forgotten. The woman says a few words into his pink, seashell ears and then points to the metal door, and then again, he is beaming at himself with those fat, fat cheeks and little crossed eyes. It is a beautiful thing and when I get off the subway I am afraid it will disappear, that I will be angered or disappointed or exhausted by something or someone immediately, not unlike the baby losing his own face when the cereal goes away. But then a stranger takes a step back down a stair and offers to help the woman and the baby in his stroller up to the street, and that, too, is a beautiful thing.
I’m nine years old. My mother is sitting at a round table under a fiberglass umbrella angled against the setting Mexican sun. We’re in Baja California to volunteer at a rural medical clinic along with my aunts, who are nurses, and their other medical-professional friends. My mother is not a nurse but her secretarial skills are useful at the clinic too, where she oversees the administrative work while I kick around a soccer ball with local kids and occasionally apply a few brushstrokes of fresh paint to an outhouse. But the heavy round tables with their hard, built-in umbrellas are not at the clinic. They’re at the ranch where we all stay for these trips and where the adults are currently drinking warm beers after a long day.
The sun draws closer to the horizon as I run around with a pseudo cousin of mine—our parents are old lovers and even older friends. We’re playing some sort of military hideout game among the ranch’s dusty outbuildings and brush-filled landscape. Our antics grow more focused, more serious, as the darkness begins to envelop us. There is no electricity on the ranch, just a generator for certain necessities and it turns off at 10 PM each night, so we all carry around old-fashioned oil lamps to see in the dark. However, my fake cousin and I cannot play our game with lamps in our hands, so we dash around in the dark, absorbed in the realism created by the blackened sky and our untamed surroundings.
My mom calls out to us and we’re startled. We had forgotten all about the grown-ups in our imaginary warfare. We approach the table she’s sitting at, cautious of our feral state as well as that of our parents—they’re drunk on those Mexican beers by now. My mom smiles at us as she runs her fingertips along the inside glass of one of the oil lamps on the table. “Here,” she says to us, transferring the soot from her fingers to our cheeks with a confident and firm wipe. “Now you really look like soldiers.” Something has shifted in this gesture. This drunk woman no longer resembles my mother as I know her and so she becomes something like a stranger to me. Emboldened by this new distance between us, I look into this woman’s—my mother’s—unfocused eyes and reach for her Pacifico Clara, waiting for her to stop me. She doesn’t, she just chuckles, and that is how I drink my first beer. “Go ahead! Why not? It’s Mexico!” she calls out while we abscond with the bottle.
My pseudo-cousin and I take turns sipping the beer, not enjoying the taste but finding something interesting in the way we suddenly feel a little warmer, a little tingly all over. Things are funnier now, less dire in our war game, as we resume our prowling in the chaparral. Eventually, we grow tired and still, and decide to just stalk the adults from our hideout. I see my mom get up from the table and smack her head hard against the edge of the umbrella. She winces and then she giggles, and so does everyone else. When she comes back from wherever she was, she hits her head again as she sits back down. I watch as my mom does this a few more times—stands, smacks, sits, smacks—while the rest of the adults slap their knees and double over with laughter. I don’t know how to feel about this scene. It must hurt her head each time she bangs it on the fiberglass rim and I worry about my mom. But I’m also embarrassed that she is incapable of controlling herself, both with regard to how her body moves so recklessly through space now and with how she got to that state in the first place. It’s easiest for me to just not recognize this woman as my mom and to feel unrecognizable as her daughter, too, unseen with my sooty face behind the bushes.
Eventually, someone takes her to a cabin and puts her to bed. Another good friend of hers, a woman I know well enough to follow, takes me to sleep not in my mom’s cabin but in her own bed, assuring me that everything will be normal again in the morning. No one washes the black soot from my face and for the first night in my life, with half the Pacifico in my belly and my mom unreachable, I understand what it means to be someone other than a mother and a daughter.
I Find Myself Riding The Subway
Dearest A.:
Yesterday afternoon, Jesse and I took the subway to the natural history museum to cheer ourselves up; or, to forget and to escape; or, to, at the very least, feel differently. There was a man sitting across from us who wiped his face with an intention that felt danced—it was so full of grace. While we later talked about the future and how one day we'll look back on that afternoon with humor and appreciation and pity for our cold, sad, January selves, it was that man's gestures that held the most promise for me. The world is big. The future is fucking terrifying. Everything has yet to be known. I don't like how I'm writing about this. But that man on the train wipes his face like that so I have to concede that life is also beautiful, right?
I find myself on the subway resting against the middle pole, across from four women who all share one bench. Behind me, on an identical bench directly opposite this line of women, just two men take up the seats. I believe the women would make room for me to sit with them if they could.
A dog rests its head on my elbow on the train not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions. I take pictures of their snouts nuzzled against my arm, and I take pictures of young couples who fall asleep in each other's laps, of strangers who let other strangers fall asleep on their shoulders. I take a picture of a man’s feet because he has the word siiiiiiiiiick tattooed across the front of his right ankle in a pleasing arc.
One night, I find myself on the subway headed to Grand Central, where most of the people will get on another train out of the city. Four men in khakis and Easter egg-colored polos rehearse excuses to their wives as to why they’re arriving home from the city so late. I bet they played lacrosse in high school but weren’t good enough for college, and I’d like to think that as their wives drag their manicured nails across their husbands’ stubbly, dimpled cheeks that night, taking in their whiskey exhales as they tell them the game ran late, the server forgot their check, the train was delayed—that these beautiful women in their matching pajama sets, their own dimpled cheeks shiny and smooth with La Mer and gentle fillers, wives who haven’t taken the subway since they moved into big houses in the suburbs—that they don’t believe a word of it.
I take short videos, too, on the subway. I find myself filming a young girl mindlessly stroking another young girl’s arm with a single finger. In another clip, I am trying to capture the view of Brooklyn that emerges around a certain bend when the train surfaces from underground for two stops, but all I can focus on is a man and a small boy tucked into the right-hand corner of the screen and the son’s miniature fingers slowly squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing, his father’s arm.
More than I’d like to admit, I find myself kicking the side of the train after the doors have closed without me. I soothe myself by composing fake class-action lawsuits in my head against the MTA for their enraging ineptitude. And one evening, on my way home from work on the next train that wasn’t too full to fit me, I find myself seated next to a very fat baby, so fat that his eyes look crossed and I want to bite into his cheeks. He can see his reflection in the metal door of the train car and he is delighted. He keeps smiling so big, and his eyes keep looking more crossed, and so I almost touch a stranger’s baby’s cheeks. He is munching on cereal handed to him piece by piece by his caretaker and when she puts the cereal away, he goes from pure glee to total agony in the span of a few seconds, the joy of his reflection completely forgotten. The woman says a few words into his pink, seashell ears and then points to the metal door, and then again, he is beaming at himself with those fat, fat cheeks and little crossed eyes. It is a beautiful thing and when I get off the subway I am afraid it will disappear, that I will be angered or disappointed or exhausted by something or someone immediately, not unlike the baby losing his own face when the cereal goes away. But then a stranger takes a step back down a stair and offers to help the woman and the baby in his stroller up to the street, and that, too, is a beautiful thing.
Claire Salinda is a writer and tarot reader from Los Angeles and New York. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Assay, Thrillist, and Pen and Ink, among others, and has been supported by the Prospect Street Writers House. As an MFA candidate in literature and nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars, Claire is at work on an essay collection that engages with identity, nostalgia, and place, through the lens of a mixed-race Asian woman in America. Sometimes she writes about surfing, too. www.clairesalinda.com