5 Jimmy
The morning light on Jimmy’s face showed all the tiny scars she had from being alive. Above her eye was a small white scar that pulled when she squinted and next to that, another scar, thin as a wrinkle, from a car wreck. Under her chin was a ragged patch of raised tissue from wiping out on a skateboard. She wouldn’t get it stitched because she didn’t want to pay the ER bills.
I tried to move but her hair was tangled in my ring. I twisted it but couldn’t get the ring off because my fingers were swollen from sleep. She was laughing the whole time, which made it harder. Finally, we had to cut the hair out with the scissors of her Swiss army knife, which was lying on the makeshift nightstand.
“Not like it matters,” she said and threw the bleached orange lock behind her where it landed coiled and soundless.
The sheets were tangled. The white fan with the cherry branch lay open by the mattress. Jimmy reached over my body and picked up a photo that was lying face down on the floor.
“This is where I’m going,” she said and handed the picture to me.
A colony of shacks sat unevenly on a clay hillside. Behind them, boxwood carpeted the mountain slopes, receding up into a distant cloud forest.
“The village is Indian.”
Because the search for authenticity is a well without a bottom.
“Very beautiful,” I said and handed the picture back.
Pale light filtered through the gauze window curtain, whitening the sheets and turning Jimmy’s shoulder and hip the color of ivory.
“If you’re going to tell Credence,” she said, “I want to be warned.”
“He’ll just think it’s funny.”
“Funny because I’m a girl or funny because it’s me?”
“Funny because it’s you.”
But Credence did not think it was funny. He called my having sex with Jimmy unscrupulous dabbling. Apparently, his time with her made him some kind of gender cowboy while mine just made me irresponsible. We got into an argument over which stance was more unenlightened, getting into bisexual relationships with lesbians (viewpoint Credence) or treating lesbians like incapable children who will automatically fall in love with you just because you are woman (viewpoint Della). I admit sleeping with Jimmy was lazy, though. Kind of like dating your cousin because you already know all the same people.
Annette didn’t care. She just wanted to be the one to tell my parents. We all agreed the joy of my potential gayness would kill them. First, black grandchildren and now the fantasy of two women on the couch at family gatherings (entwined and laughing as if it were all going to be okay). Yes, they would finally be dead from politically informed glee. And, most importantly, the Bobbsey Twins of Labor Unrest though unable to rescue the PUBLIC from the slander of BIG GOVERNMENT would be placed in an historical context where the primacy of class had naturally yielded to its more ornamental, if secondary features: race and gender.
Annette said the only thing better would be if one of us went to prison.
“But you know, the next time you date a boy Grace is going to accuse you of exercising heterosexual privilege.”
“Jimmy will be in Honduras before I see them.”
“The anniversary is next week.”
The green fans of the katydids fluttered.
“She could come to that.”
I looked at Credence. “I’m not going.”
Annette turned and walked into the kitchen.
Every year I say I’m not going.
When I first got hired at the restaurant Mirror asked about my parents.
“So, Della,” she said, swallowing a chunk of raw tofu the size of a golf ball, “Jimmy says your parents are pretty fringe. Were they like total hippies? ”
“No. My parents blew up hippies.”
“For f*cking real?” she threw the rest of the tofu into the trash. “Did they really blow up hippies?”
“No. But they would have if they thought it was necessary for the revolution.”
She thought about it for a second.
“Wow. That’s intense. What are they like now?”
“Pretty much the same.”
“That’s cool,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron, “I’d blow up a hippy if I had to too.”
Grace and Miro. The serrated edge of an ongoing revolution cutting its way through a thicket of injustice. Going out to their place once a year for the anniversary was the one thing asked of us. None of us ever said no, I’m not going. Which is what I told Credence that morning, which is why, without asking me, he called Jimmy and invited her to come. Being a good organizer is about manipulation after all. By the time Jimmy called me, Credence already had her committed to bring the vegan pineapple-lemon cake.
“Oh, Grace will love it,” he told her.
Grace hates veganism. She calls it an elitist enclave for white people to lie to themselves about their role in the cycle of consumption. But that didn’t matter. At the end of the day, Jimmy had taken the time off work, bought a book for Grace and Miro on permaculture, and wrapped it in re-plantable wildflower paper.
When I found out what Credence did, I slammed the door even though no one else was home. Way to drive turnout, Credence, you get a prize. What should it be? A papier-mâché head of John the Baptist? A tour map to the Rat Graveyard?
My cell phone buzzed and I didn’t answer.
I stared at the white flags pinned on my wall where I’d been tracking a wave of immolations along the coast of France. I adjusted a pin. The flags bothered Credence, but not like talk of the box-mall-church. A few months ago I got lost in an industrial field behind there. I was trying to map the social events and boundaries that had turned our architectural vocabulary into drive-thru Christianity and free checking. More than that, I was trying to prove there is an end to it, but there isn’t. It’s endless. I had hoped to make an Aerial Map of the Carnage but it was beyond me. That night a bomb woke me up. Credence said it wasn’t possible. That it was across the ocean and wasn’t even ours. But everything’s ours. The outside world is nothing anymore, just a franchise of nations.
I promised Credence I would never go to the box-mall-church again.