In Their Ruin by Joyce Goldenstern

Author:Joyce Goldenstern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Heron Press
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Marisol

Caleb handed Marisol a colorful crayon drawing. Without having to ask, Marisol knew that the little boy in the drawing was Caleb and the tall man at his side, dressed in harlequin, was his father Samuel. Marisol thought about Samuel more than she really wanted to. She did not pine for him or hate him or regret her decision to leave her life in Chicago, but she, of course, lived with his child and saw on the child’s face Samuel’s resemblance and read into the child’s gestures and preferences echoes of Samuel’s gestures and preferences or notable departures from them.

Celia, Marisol’s aunt, no longer pretended that she was Caleb’s mother. Still, Celia continued to be helpful and reliable—cooking, babysitting, attending school events—while her niece took college courses, worked late at the newspaper, or volunteered for one cause or another. Marisol had established herself in the community as eccentric, but a fighter for justice and a champion for Latina causes, including domestic violence, so the need to offer explanations about a child without a father or to pretend to be “respectable” in a conventional sense seemed less important. Marisol had done favors for many neighbors and counted on their goodwill.

Aunt Celia shared some of her worries about Caleb with Marisol—his preferences of clothes colors, orange, pink, red, turquoise—were these colors a boy should like?—the reports from teachers that Caleb had problems reading, that he spent too much time alone practicing dance steps or manically fixing the forever broken pencil sharpener, that he once was found trying on a little girl’s bracelet and had adamantly insisted that it was his own.

Marisol dismissed these concerns as trivial compared with the injustices in the world, though sometimes she worried her son did not have the self-esteem and grit he might need to be a spy for Aztlan, her long ago wish when she named him after a Biblical spy. She still hoped he would follow in her footsteps and fall in love with great causes as she had done when she read Rodolpho Acuña’s Occupied America when she was in high school and had been able to suddenly contextualize her shame—lonely afternoons at the race track, the only child there watching her father walk and groom the horses and she being asked, Do you speak English? Where is your mother? Why aren’t you in school? And then later lonely afternoons in the apartment after school on the steps reading, overhearing neighborhood children, “She’s pretty, but she’s a Mexican.” “I heard her mother died swimming across a river.” “I heard her father cheats at cards.”

Acuña’s book had banished shame and boosted confidence. She assumed her proper role as an indignant native whose homeland had been invaded, no longer an outsider but an insider with justifiable grievances. In grammar school, a stance of haughty silence protected her against the ignorance that surrounded her in Cicero. But armed with Acuña’s book, she emerged a poised and verbose crusader. She still had her original copy of the book, underlined and dog eared.

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