Us by Meg Malachi
In between spoonfuls of his wife’s
homemade rice and pork, Humberto talks about a distant cousin,
a young woman whose father was my grandfather’s third
cousin—a lanky, white man with green
eyes who hailed from Vega Alta, Puerto Rico.
He pulls up a photo of the woman on his phone
and figures he ought to explain:
Her father’s some black man. Don’t know his name.
His ancestral, low cheekbones reach
for his eyes, completing a sad
epigone of a smile,
and with an obvious lump
in his gut, he continues
She’s black, like you.
Humberto’s wife raises her glance
from her greasy plate.
She stabs her plastic fork into a maduro,
and halfway between the plate
and her mouth, she says
Meghan’s not black, though!
Right, Meghan?
You’re not black,
right?
She chuckles lightly before popping the fat plantain
into her mouth, stunned
by her husband’s directness.
My first thought was that she had finally gone mad.
I once overheard my cousin Lorena telling the story
of when Humberto’s wife was a teenager,
how a woman dropped a frying pan on her head
from ten stories up.
Lorena thinks she’s always been a little off since.
I am wearing the charm bracelet that
Humberto bought me for my birthday.
He even bought me some charms to start it off.
It doesn’t match
my gold studded earrings, but my mother says
you should always wear the gifts people buy you
when you know you’re going to see them.
It lets them know you liked it, even if you don’t.
As Humberto’s wife
stays firm in her invitation,
watching me with a leer of promise,
I regret wearing a gift
given either out of guilt for who they were
or pity
for who I was.
And despite the weight
of that heavy hunk of metal
on my wrist,
I cannot align my
self with her apocryphal truth.
I remind her that my father is black,
therefore so am I.
After taking a sip of OJ,
she points her lips at the salad bowl
and hands me a spoon
I did not ask for—
cheap upholstery
for her stupid, galling words.
Answering with truth
a question that had no
regard for facts, only choice,
is hardly didactic,
only regrettable.
Humberto is silent, as are his white children—
my white cousins, whom I should hate the most in that moment,
but for whom I endure ruth instead, considering
the shackles of inheritance.
Inertia outstrips their
anatomies, and I am certain that I
am alone.
In the dissatisfied silence that follows,
amid lukewarm fare and pulped juice,
I suffocate my mouth with sour lettuce
and glare at the window, a harbinger
for this flecked, moonless night.
I consider the woman in the photo,
whom I know I’ll never know,
wondering if she’d ever been shown
a photo of me,
wondering if she, too, nourished herself
in outstanding love.