At 18, the author flees brutal domestic violence, is taken in by her dying, once sex worker grandmother who reveals family secrets. "Someday mija, (her grandmother tells her) you'll learn the difference between a whore and working woman." The author gets an education, raises a family, becomes an activist. Over time she learns what happened to her grandmother. As she heals the author learns to fight back and helps others learn to fight back too.

Prologue

Dishes and Dolls

On the first morning of her death, she lay with her arms wide and her palms facing heaven. Flat on her back under the bay window, it looked like she had fallen from the bed that was too big for the tiny Victorian dining room where she slept. That first morning was the beginning of my search. A search that would lead me to secrets inside secrets to a truth that broke out on its own. It came out bit by bit, at times too heavy to handle, but eventually I became strong enough to hold this much of it. That first morning of her death, her life ended, but her story began.

Each morning her feet touched down on the warm wood, and in just six barefoot paces, she could get to the four-burner stove in the skinny kitchen for a light and then back to the edge of her bed by the window. Between long drags of her Salem menthol, she’d sit and look out from ten floors up over a sliver of San Francisco that would become Japan Town. When the six paces to the stove got too hard, (She refused to have matches or lighters by her bed because they were a hazard.) she’d call out to me, Ivanna, her name for me, Yvonne, her granddaughter. She’d call me from wherever I was to light her cigarettes at all hours of the day and night. When I found her that morning, her head was on the wood inlay, where the natural gold and yellow wood met slat to slat, plank edge to plank edge in fixed angles, gold against brown. Grandma Mary had managed to pull down a sheet as she fell. It gathered cross-crooked over her short torso under the light of the bay window. Even in the light, she didn’t look like herself. There were no rings on her fingers, no “real red” lipstick, no black pencil eyebrows drawn over her eyes with the shiny Maybelline shaved-tip pencil she’d wet her lips with before drawing the arches over her eyelids. Instead, her yellow, cigarette-burnt fingers curved into a half curl and lay parallel to her hips. The chipped red paint on her toes pointed east and west. Her eyes were half-closed, her gaze was gone. She told no one she was dying. But they all knew, the absent man, the missing cat and her no-show son. One by one, as she’d gotten sicker and sicker, they’d all taken off.

Grandma was living by herself by the time I got there. I’d been planning a run from my Mother’s house ever since the Salt Lake City police installed me there in kindergarten back in Utah. By the second grade my step-father had moved us all to Los Angeles, far, far away from my Mother’s family and everything Utah. Each time I ran, I’d gotten farther away. I didn’t begin to make real breaks for it until I was fifteen. This time I’d made it as far as San Francisco, all the way to Grandma Mary’s.

The free clinic movement drew her west from Salt Lake to San Francisco when she got sick.

As I knelt over her, I never fathomed that she was actually dead. I left her on the floor undisturbed, gathered my robe around me and went into the four by four foyer that separated our two rooms. Where Mexican grandmothers put candles and saints in their alcoves, Grandma Mary stationed a heavy, black telephone on top of the White and Yellow Pages. There was no blinking Jesus; no plug-in off and on sacred hearts; no benevolent, blue-shrouded Virgin Mary, only heavy black metal.

I lifted the phone receiver only to feel it drop in my wrist like a free weight. The coil rolled itself tightly around the base of the phone. I put my finger in the black metal cut-out dial marked “0” and pulled it all the way around. The dial rolled over the numbers on the phone’s face and took its tick-tick time getting back to zero. I spoke into the receiver close and low, in the alcove like I was in a confessional booth.

“Something’s wrong with my grandmother,” I said.

“We’ll send someone,” a voice said back. “She’s on the floor and won’t move,” I said. “We’ll send someone,” the voice said. It felt like a screen slat closed shut at the end of a confession when the call ended. There was only silence, not even the comfort of a string of penance in the wake of the shut sound. Nothing in my hands, nothing to hold on to.

The morning light started to shift away from the wood pattern around Grandma’s head, and still no one came. I called the voice in the alcove and called again; walked back and forth to the window; finally pushed it open towards the street; and propped open the front door to look down the narrow hallway to see if anybody had arrived to rescue her in the way that you believe that magic will happen just by calling the doctor.

Everybody, it seemed, knew that she was dead but me. I pulled my robe tighter around me and took the accordion door elevator down to the street to see if the ambulance was coming. In the pink, faux fur-lined slippers that she’d given me, I tiptoed across the lobby and out the front of the building. I pulled the pink belt of my matching robe around my waist, the line of pink faux fur crisscrossing over my breasts. Arms around myself, I stood at the top of the granite steps and took one long look up Post Street and down the other. Back inside, the heavy, wood-sculpted door pushed me back into the lobby. My pink fur heels click-clicked across the black and white octagon tiles to the elevator. I took one last look through the beveled glass and saw cat paws and hiking boots. My uncle was coming up the steps from around the corner with Grandma’s missing cat. I pushed the door open, wide enough for him, the cat and his bedroll backpack. My other arm closed my robe over me. “Uncle,” I said. “Hey kid,” he said. “Where’ve you been?” I said. He pulled the red bandanna off his head and snapped it into the air.

“Here,” he said.

Snap.

“And there,” he said.

Snap. Snap.

“She’s been on the floor for hours and won’t move,” I said. Uncle slid the accordion elevator door shut in front of us and tied the bandanna around his wrist. He pulled it tight with his teeth. I folded my arms over the pink fur of my robe. “I called the ambulance hours ago,” I said. I took the key that I found gripped in my hand and opened the door to the flat. My uncle dropped his backpack just inside the tiny foyer under the phone alcove, leaving the pack ready for remount. He pulled one of his fingerless gloves off his hand with his teeth and took one step toward Grandma’s bedroom in the dining room. In just three steps, he bowed his head under the Victorian circle block corner doorway, his black hair in tight black curls around his face. He stood over her with his tip-less gloves hanging out of his back pocket. He rubbed the sweat of his palms on to the thighs of his hiking shorts. “Let’s take a look,” he said.

He squatted on the window side of her, pressed his hands deeper into his thighs, his boots over the even light and dark patterned wood, he bent over her. “Maria,” he said in a short breath to himself. Not calling to her, he simply named her. He pushed in on the flesh of her cheek with his hitchhiking thumb. “Maria,” he said.

Her brown face went grey against the red bandanna on his wrist. Her head just hung in his hand as it had fallen and fell to the side when he released it.

“Maria,” he said. Uncle stood up, took a step back, rubbed his hands deeper into his thighs, then reached over her. With one swift yank, he pulled her sheet up from her feet up over her torso. The sheet landed over her face and exposed her from the waist down. “Take a good look,” he said. Her short legs opened to graying pubic hair. “That’s all she was,” he said.

His face twisted into one word. Cunt. He wiped his forehead with the red bandanna around his wrist. “That’s all she ever was to me,” he said. He moved away from her in the same three steps he took crab-like to get to her. “That’s all,” he said. Near naked under the robe she had given me, I could only hold my arms tighter over my breasts.

He filled his arms with all her favorite candles, the big ones and the small ones, the half-melted ones, wide purple ones, the scented ones, and the untouched ones; the white ones wrapped in tissue in the drawer, her blue dishes, all her dolls and her red geraniums. “It’s time to get rid of all this shit,” he said. Back and forth down the skinny hallway he went. He left a trail of dirt, broken candles and red petals on his way to the garbage chute. He stuffed and stuffed until the chute’s metal door couldn’t close. When there was no more room, he piled up dishes, dolls, clothes, and anything else he could along the wall under the half-open, metal chute. Broken pieces of Grandma’s things fell Picasso-like into a shrine and refracted light from broken pictures gathered under the heap. Nothing could interrupt my uncle’s tight lips and the ridges of wrinkled skin on his forehead, a hate that got shinier with sweat with every load he carried. When there was no more room in and around the chute to shove things into, or lay under the garbage chute door, he pressed his back against the kitchen wall and slid to the floor across from the stove, just steps from where Grandma lay. He loosened his hiking boots, rested his elbow on his bent knee and looked over at her. All the dishes were gone, her pots, her collections of mismatched saltshakers, her clothes, everything. Everything went down that chute, even her pillow and the blankets on her bed. There was nothing left to shove down the chute but her. She lay near naked, alone and dead from uterine cancer at fifty-two, exposed in death in a way that she’d spent her whole life trying to avoid. I pulled the sheet back down from her face and over her legs.

When the coroner came that evening, Uncle was gone. The ambulance gurney’s legs flipped down under its metal frame beside Grandma where she lay under the bay window. The coroner had her body lifted hand to hand into a long black bag, way too big for her tiny frame. He joined the heavy metal zipper near her feet. With one long yank, he pulled the silver teeth over her short legs, her flattened breasts and over her face. Hand to hand, he had her lifted one more time onto the gurney and with it made his way through the hallway rolling her over her red petals and dirt, broken candles and blue dishes, doll arms and legs to the elevator and down to the street. At nearly nineteen, my body already knew what there was to know about my grandmother. Knew it in ways I didn’t yet have words for. Knew it in the binary neutron charges that informed my posture, my language and my bearing in the world and told of it in ways that I didn’t know that I knew. The only thing that mattered to me in the days that led up that morning was that she had taken me in and now she was gone.

Now, nearly forty years later, I have been able to put together the years of veiled references, coded phrases, hidden asides and the reason for my family’s open contempt for my grandmother. When I finally did hear the words, heard my aunt speak them out loud, they were the last layer of confirmation, the last piece of evidence. They were hearsay as good as any primary source. And even then, I had to store them away until I could find a safe place to examine them, to bring them out. Words that began in the phrases and images etched in me since I was a little girl in Salt Lake City where I lived with my grandma Mary’s mother, my great grandmother Mercedes Murillo Corona and her second husband my grandfather, Vidal Corona, whose real name wasn’t Corona, it was Arguelles. He wasn’t who he said he was. His name and my mother’s parentage were only a few the many secrets that my family protected. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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