The Rug

For about six weeks it was the three of us and that was the best time I have ever had.

I am aware of the competition. I am aware that is not saying much. It stands anyway.

Marigold had been there since November and had the house running the way somebody runs a house when nobody has ever let them run anything. There were rules about doors. There were candles. There was an actual argument, an entire real argument, about whether the radio was too loud, and I sat through it in a state of quiet astonishment because nobody was going to be hurt at the end of it.

It was the thing I could not get used to. Not the blood. Not the not-breathing. The fact that a disagreement could simply end.

Then Bisbee brought us a boy.

He was eighteen. He came out of the same machine we did, by a different road, and Bisbee had found him somewhere he should not have been and had made a judgement, and Bisbee’s judgement is good, and this is the one time in thirty years it was not.

I read him in the doorway.

This is the thing I have gone over most often out of everything in my life.

I did not miss it.

I felt it in the doorway, before it had a word or a shape: the thing you feel off a man who has already decided what a room is for, and I have felt that exact thing across a concrete floor with a drain in it, and I felt it again on a Tuesday evening in a house in Cochise County with the radio on.

And I did nothing, because what was I going to say.

That is the whole of my defence and I do not think much of it either.

He had the third bedroom. He put a rug down in it the first night, in the middle of the floor, facing east, so that anybody walking in had to go round it.

Nobody walked into his room. That was not the point. The point was that it was there, and it had a correct orientation, and the orientation had opinions about the rest of us.

The theology started small.

He prayed. Nobody minded. The Abuela lets people process however they process and has watched thirty-eight years of it and does not comment. He prayed and then he explained the praying and then he began explaining our praying, and there is a distance between those three things that you cannot see while you are crossing it.

Then it was the clothes. Then it was how we hunted, and what that said about us. Then it was late visits to talk about where each of us was falling short spiritually, which is a thing you cannot object to without sounding like the person in the wrong.

It is the design. It is always the design. Every single step is individually too small to complain about, and you can only see the staircase from the bottom of it.

I had never seen it done with God before. I had seen it done with money, and with a brother, and with a door that locked from outside. The vocabulary was new. The machinery was not.

Then he started on our names.

He called us sisters, in his sense of it, which was a word from inside his own house with a whole structure behind it about what a sister is and what she is for and who she answers to.

He gave us new ones.

I am not going to write down what he called me.

The reason, and then I am leaving it, because I have never been able to talk about this part without my voice doing something I didn’t authorise.

I took my name out of the dirt.

I was on the ground in a country I didn’t know, dead, four days out of a truck, and I had nothing at all, and I reached into the last warm thing I had and I took a word out of it and I put it on myself. Nobody gave me that. Nobody was there. It is the only thing in my entire existence that is mine from the beginning, with no man’s hand anywhere on it.

Marigold’s is the same. Hers is a flower you put on a grave. She chose it for a reason she has never told anybody and I have never asked, and I know exactly the shape of the hole it is covering because I can feel it, and I would sooner walk into the sun than mention it to her.

He looked at the two of us and decided we had been named wrong.

Eight weeks earlier I had three letters put on my wrist by a man who was pleased about a straight line. I know what it is to be assigned. I know exactly what it feels like and I know what it is for.

And I said nothing about that either.

I could read him better than anybody in that house. Better than the Abuela, who is older than the language he prayed in. Better than Marigold, who had come up the same road as me and had her own reasons for looking away.

I knew what he was on the first night.

What I didn’t have was a way to say it that would have sounded like anything other than a girl who had been through what I had been through, seeing it again where it was not.

So I went and got a chair, and I sat down, and I talked to him.