Juliet Takes a Breath

by Gabby Rivera

That’s a feminist, right? But my mom still irons my dad’s socks. So what do you call that woman? You know, besides Mom.

Who irons socks? I mean if she likes spending times this way, that’s her choice.

It felt like my body was both overexposed and an unsolved mystery.

Funny, I felt really good when I left the house this morning. I thought I looked cute. My shame seeped into a frothing rage. The type of rage that can’t be let out because then you’d be that crazy chick that killed three dudes in the bodega and no one would even light a damn candle for you.

Very familiar feeling, at least when I was younger. Now I’m the only one that gets in my head about this.

Ani was crazy white girl shit. Her music evoked images of Irish bagpipes and stray cats howling in heat. Her garbled singing voice made my eyes water, and I couldn’t ever be sure of what she was singing about. But with enough practice and encouragement from Lainie, I broke down Ani’s gay girl code and understood that I too was just a little girl in a training bra trying to figure shit out.

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people was written in chalk on her front steps.

Harlowe’s front steps

All women come from faeries, goddesses, warriors, and witches, Juliet. But we don’t know anything about the women who birthed those women. We don’t know who our ancestral mothers are. I want you to help me find them. We have to tell their stories before they disappear forever amid all the violent and whitewashed history of men.

I didn’t understand them. What kind of white people were they?

Oughtied hippies—new wave hippies. Every generation, and all that.

I sipped my coffee and wondered when she’d gotten so militant. Watch out for those white girls, okay? Like, what was that? Were we in a scary movie or something? White girls could be annoying, but mostly they were just harmless. Sometimes it was easier to be around white girls anyway; all the things that made me weird in my neighborhood seemed cool to them.

Ava’s words of advice to Juliet

I wanted my mother to come here to know what a quiet neighborhood could sound like, what peace sounded like. Mom and I might even be able to hear each other speak and really listen. We could set our words on these sun-drenched branches and let the breeze guide us to resolution. For a split second, I wondered if there was a price to pay for this type of peace.

Foreshadowing, of course

The only thing we can really do, Juliet, is develop our own sustainable theodicies. You know? We need to create our own understanding of divine presence in a world full of chaos. My God is Black. It’s queer. It’s a symphony of masculine and feminine. It’s Audre Lorde and Sleater-Kinney. My God and my understanding of God are centered on who I am as a person and what I need to continue my connection to the divine,” Maxine explained. She took a long breath. “It’s everyone’s job to come up with a theodicy. One that has room for every inch of who they are and the person they evolve into.”

She explained that God was at best an elevated spiritual feeling and at worst one of the most brutal myths people have ever created.

Like the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Just sitting there watching everyone made me view my people through a whole different lens, like we could be hippies too and that wouldn’t make us any less Black or brown. I could dig that.

“After years of workshops and endless conversations about race, you still manage to center whiteness,” Maxine said finally, eyes on the road.

“Wait, this is like a thing people know? You knew this?! This is messed up, Lainie. Like, some store is profiting off a name that comes from fucking over people in Latin America. Isn’t this the kind of thing we should be protesting? Or boycotting? Or one of those things you’re probably doing at Democratic lesbian camp?”

None of the people shopping in there look like me. The few times I’ve been in there by myself, I’ve been followed around the store by employees. Everyone is white, skinny, and rich, and oblivious to the fact that I’m a person. I thought all those feelings were in my head, figments of my imagination, but maybe they’re not.

Mom and Dad have asked only three things from me: get good grades, do as they say, and have faith in the Lord.

As their first-born daughter, I never had much say in the matter. Get good grades or else! Worship God or go to hell. Do as we say or suffer the consequences. What the consequence would be, I was too scared to ever find out.

Our identity as Puerto Ricans was tied into a movie where both lead actors were white. My parents didn’t tell me that either. I had to find out on AMC that Natalie Wood was white, and I cried like a bitch that day. I felt robbed of something, as if a lie had been woven into the narrative of my Nuyorican identity. Why was a musical more important to have on a loop in our home but not an act of bravery in the name of a free Puerto Rico?

It was all super complicated but, like, to me, also really simple: if Maxine didn’t want it, Harlowe shouldn’t do it.

“The thing is, Juliet, I’ve never appreciated someone else’s unrequested guidance on my identity. I don’t want their interpretation of who I am or where they think my politics should lie.

“I didn’t mean to upset you, prima. You know I love you,” Ava said. “I’m still figuring out my shit too, and the circles I run in are mad with it. Like, no time for white supremacy or second-wave white feminism. But it’s not fair for me to judge you, you know?”

“I’m still figuring stuff out,” she said. “Like, I’m not gay, but I’m totally in love with a girl named Luz Ángel. And most of the time, I’m basically attracted to everyone and lots of times no one at all. So what does that make me? Queer? I’m trying that out for now.”

Ava didn’t like the term preferred gender pronouns. “Whatever pronouns a person chooses, if they choose any at all, are their right. Not a fucking preference,” she said.

said. Before this summer, I’d never considered there was anything beyond he or she. Or that folks could experience a multitude of genders within their person, like what?! That sounded amazing. Beautiful. Wild like the universe.

“Why not just ask someone straight up if they’re trans?” I asked. “Girl, how rude do you plan to be in this life?” she questioned, stretching out on her big-ass bed. “Your one job is to just accept what a person feels comfortable sharing about themselves. No one owes you info on their gender, body parts, or sexuality.”

“Love all the vaginas you want, prima, just remember they’re attached to people. Okay? And it’s the people that matter most.”

Maybe I wasn’t such a freak, feminist, alien dyke after all. I was part of this deep-ass legacy and history of people fighting to be free.

still had to ask: What was so bad about Raging Flower? Ava said Harlowe didn’t make queer and/or trans women of color a priority in her work; that Harlowe assumed that we could all connect through sisterhood, as if sisterhood looked the same for everyone. Ava spoke while she brushed her teeth, applied dark eye makeup, and checked out her body in the floor-length

“Our moms and grandmas have this woman thing going on and it has a lot to do with bodies, and babies, and periods.” “Don’t I know it,” Ava said, plucking brows in the mirror. “So then why does it feel like you’re trying to separate them?” I asked, lathering up my legs.

Her consistent linking of genitals to gender as an absolute is violent as hell. It’s a closed fist instead of open arms, you know? And besides,” she added, staring at herself unflinching in the mirror, “womanhood is radical enough for anyone who dares to claim it.”

“Juliet, I’m asking because I love you, and I want to keep challenging you, babe. What are you basing your ideas of womanhood on? You gotta question everything, especially who you give your love and respect to. This is about perspective, you know? Like, where do you stand?” I didn’t have an answer for her. Or for myself.

It’s not like I was going to cut my hair, anyway. Never. I’d promised myself that I’d never be one of those manly lesbians.

But after being surrounded by a community of people who were committed to one another, to every political cry and hazy love daydream, I couldn’t spill my guts to someone who wasn’t asking for them.

How had I been so naive? How could anything as huge as feminism be universal?

But I wanted to believe that we were all love renegades and that we didn’t have to discard one another. People break hearts and love disappears. The vegan waffle truck stood before me in all its glory.

forget? You said reading would make me brilliant, but writing would make me infinite.”

But there were ways in which womanhood pinched. It was too tight white stockings on chubby thighs before church and questions about boyfriends I never wanted. It was Dominic Pusco’s hands down my pants without consent and the disbelief and eye rolls and me thinking I did something to make it happen. It was Titi Penny falling in love with Magdalena and not hating herself for it. Complex, chaotic, beyond even biology. Like Ava said: womanhood was radical enough for anyone who dared claim it.

I think calling out racism in other white folks has made me feel like I’m above it and that . . . that’s just a big old mess. I’ve messed up with you, Max, Zaira. I have my work cut out for me. I hope one day you’ll forgive me.”