Sara Marchant – Writers Resist

Contingency Plans

By Sara Marchant

My husband recently retired. His anxiety had increased over the last four years (whose hasn’t, right?) and a few months ago he was having a bad day at work, when he abruptly stood up, announced, “I retire,” and walked out the door.

It’s been an adjustment.

At first, he didn’t know what to do with his day. As I was unemployed by the pandemic, not even teaching from home, I was available for him to ask for direction or inspiration. I was available all day, every day. He questioned me like a kindergartener on a long road trip; the situation soon was fraught. This changed when I received a phone call from friends down South making contingency plans for the post-election end times. They were worried; they were scared; they didn’t know where to plan on going if they should have to flee. They know my husband has survivalist tendencies.

We live in a southern red zone of the blue state of California, but we own our acreage, have an artesian well and electrified fencing, and are prone to paranoia. We keep our house well provisioned in case of emergency. It’s known that we like to plan ahead. My friends had called to ask our advice.

Now my husband no longer asks me for direction in the morning. Instead, he gets up every day and prepares to take in refugees from red states. I won’t go into too much detail here. We are all safer that way.

My fingers are crossed for a peaceful, smooth, safe transition of power—power once more in sane heads and hands—and my husband claims he wants and prays (he’s the believer in the family) for that too, but just in case. … Then he goes back to fortifying the property. He wants to be a good host, you see.

• • •

When I was a little girl and we’d go to look at open houses for weekend fun, my mother always told us, “Find the hiding space!” She didn’t say this in front of the realtor or the homeowner; she taught us it was a private game. The hiding space would only safe if we were the only one’s who knew it existed. “Every house should have a space to hide when they come for you,” my mother said. When, not if.

Other games we learned were equally different from our friends’ family pastimes. Our mother taught us to seek out all exits when you enter a building, keep your back to the wall when eating in public, always carry something sharp in your pocket and “aim for the cojones.” Other children played lava floor and we did too, but we also played count your steps with your eyes closed, in case we ever had to escape in the dark.

My siblings and I are surprisingly well-adjusted, considering.

• • •

Shortly after November 9, 2016, my mother made me drive her to the post office to renew our passports. My husband refused. He’s Native American. He belongs to the land, he said. He’ll never leave.

“That’s nice, but short-sighted,” Mom told him. “We’re Jews. We’ve been through this shit before. Always have an exit strategy.”

When the pandemic caused all borders to close to United States citizens, my mother wept. She was born in 1940, but in Denver’s Little Italy; my mother is not a Holocaust survivor. However, her parents didn’t believe in censorship, so her siblings took her to the movies and no one thought to cover her five-year-old eyes when the newsreels showed the camps being liberated.

Now, when reading about the camps at our southern border, the concentration camps committing crimes against humanity in our name, my mother doesn’t weep. She’s too angry. It’s gone on too long, been allowed to perpetuate, descended into genocide. Now my mother curses the perpetrators. Each morning as she pricks her finger to check her blood sugar levels, my mother damns every member of this administration, every enabler, every supporter—even those of us standing by watching helplessly in horror. “We’ve damned ourselves,” she tells me.

“We’ve no longer the right to weep tears of anything other than shame.”

• • •

Four years ago, I didn’t believe it could happen—and that’s shame on me. I was a history major; I’m married to a Native. This country was founded on violence, conquest, cultural genocide, germ warfare; we’ve been ripping children from their mother’s arms from the time the first boats arrived—and kept arriving full of stolen men, women and children. Why wouldn’t I believe it could happen again—only this time live-streaming? How dare we become complacent?

None of us knows what will happen the first week of November 2020, but I don’t believe any of us are still complacent—that’s been burned away. This household’s ballots have been mailed and counted, the pantry is stocked, the fence is fortified, space has been made for our friends.

My fingers are crossed, my husband is praying, and my mom is practicing blood curses with her back to the wall. My most fervent desire is that soon we’ll all be dancing in the space we’ve created for ourselves, but if not … I’ve got a plan. I hope you do, too.

Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. She is the author of The Driveway Has Two Sides, published by Fairlight Books. Her memoir, Proof of Loss, was published by Otis Books. She is a founding editor of Writers Resist. Her website is TheSaraMarchant.com.

Photo credit: Mitchell Haindfield via a Creative Commons license.

The Rainbow Sign

By Sara Marchant

We went, my mother and I, to get haircuts. The previous appointment was still there, standing in front of the mirror, talking. This woman’s hair made her look like a pretty Afghan dog; her large green eyes did little to compensate for wearing clothes too dowdy for a woman in her forties. The stylist fluttered around nervously, her curly black hair disheveled, her small dog, barking with anxiety, twining around everyone’s feet. Later, the stylist would tell us that the green-eyed woman had been talking for two hours.

Mom sat in the chair, received the apron, and we all listened to the previous appointment, a white evangelical woman, talk about Jesus saving her from a rattlesnake the week before. She stepped out her kitchen door, right on its middle, and it wrapped around her ankle, striking. She said, “I don’t want to alarm you ladies,” but she was the one she was reassuring.

James Baldwin said, “White is a metaphor for power.” White evangelicals seem to take this as encouragement lately. That is, they would if they knew who James Baldwin was or what he wrote or what his work signified with its mere existence.

I know nothing of my hairstylist’s belief system. I know about her children, her grandchildren, her boyfriends, the kind of clothing she shops for and that she likes those excursions where people drink wine and paint. She knows that I am an atheist Mexican-Jew who teaches critical thinking and hasn’t much patience. And she knows my mom will talk to anyone about anything and comes from the generation that will never tell strangers that her family is Jewish. My mom finds it convenient (and by that she means safer) to be Catholic outside the home because of things like World Wars I and II and the Shoah.

The white evangelical woman was sure that it was Jesus who saved her from the rattlesnake, but it sounded like Jesus was her name for her Adidas and thick denim jeans.

She really didn’t appreciate me pointing that out. Standing, one hand on the doorknob, she talked and talked and talked the entire duration of my mother’s haircut.

Then it was my turn. The hairstylist and I helped my mother from the chair and walked her across the room. The white evangelical woman didn’t break verbal stride, but her talk abruptly devolved from her personal relationship with Jesus into an indictment of Catholicism. The stylist paused, her hands shaking, a probable sign that her belief system includes Catholic teachings or did at one time. The hairstylist studied my mom intently, worried for her I believe. She underestimated my mother’s intense distrust of institutionalized power and her particular dislike of priests. (Ask my mom how many times priests sexually harassed or assaulted her in her youth. Or better yet—don’t.) Mom knew how to deal with the white evangelical woman’s bigotry. She placated her, she played along.

My haircut commenced.

While the hairstylist and I discussed the fact that my hair was growing according to our plans– Meryl Streep’s hair from The Devil Wears Prada— I could hear the White Evangelical woman getting bolder. Her statements (because her entire belief system, to her, are absolute statements) oozed closer to objectionable. My mother stopped placating her; her responses now tended toward, “Well, dear, if that brings you comfort …”

“She’s handling her so well,” the hairstylist whispered as she tried to clip up one side of my hair in order to cut the back. “I’m so relieved.”

Just then the rhetoric got louder, more paranoid. The liberal elites were coming for this woman’s religion, they were coming for her faith; they were the reason this country was in such a mess, such a lack of values; the liberal atheists were the ones letting riff-raff into the country, dangerous foreign elements.

My body turned to solidified rage. My blood was lava oozing through fury.

The hairstylist gave up with the hair clips when the third one flew from her shaking hand. She grabbed both my hands and guided them to the weight of my hair.

“Hold this up, okay?” She grabbed her clippers. “I can’t—”

She was applying the clippers to my neck when White Evangelical woman said, “And of course, you can’t trust the world to be safe for honest Christians anymore. Anywhere you go, anywhere, could be filled with atheist liberals who want to take down my cross. They could be anywhere.”

“That’s right,” I said, pulling the hair straight up from my head with both hands. “We are everywhere.”

“Oops.” The hairstylist had run the clippers up the complete length of the back of my head.

“She’s joking, right?” the woman asked my mom.

“Oh no, dear,” Mom said. “She’s not joking at all.”

“We are everywhere. We are sitting in this very chair, in this very room, listening to your nonsense.” It felt like the stylist might have taken my hair down to regimental length. “And thus far, I’ve listened to your nonsense very politely. But no more.”

My mother giggled nervously in the corner; the small dog ran out of the room.

“I didn’t mean to offend your daughter,” the woman said. She let go of the doorknob to wring her hands.

“Well, you did,” I said as the rest of the back of my head was shaved.

“She’s joking, right?” The woman just couldn’t get it that we weren’t like her. “She’s just joking.”

“No, no,” Mom said. “No, dear. She’s dead serious.”

“Well, I’m sure she’s not one of the atheist liberals who are taking down my cross.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. Still holding my hair, yanking it really. “Every day, I wake up and I say to myself, ‘What cross can I destroy today? What cross is just asking for it?’”

“Now she is joking,” my mom said. “That’s called sarcasm. She’s got much better things to do. She’s a very busy woman”

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone.” The woman’s voice was thickening with tears.

“You didn’t, dear,” my mother said. “Don’t cry, you have such pretty green eyes.”

“I am offended,” I said. “You offend me.”

The hairstylist removed my hands from my hair, tried to comb it down over the shaved parts. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “It looks great. I can fix it.”

“I am offended that you would assume that everyone shares your stunted beliefs. I am offended by everything you said. I am.” I turned to the hairstylist. “Did you just shave the back of my head?”

“It looks great!” She patted me on the shoulder.

The White Evangelical woman was trying to stifle tears, still insisting she’d meant no offense, that she didn’t understand what had just happened. Why was I being so mean to her?

That week, in my critical thinking class, we’d gone over DARVO. Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. I promised myself, this would make for a great object lesson for my students. Eventually, I could explain it calmly and rationally. Right then, though, I wished for a nearby cross to destroy. I was capable of ripping it apart with my bare hands. I wanted to pick my teeth with its splinters after biting this woman’s head off.

My mother was helping the White Evangelical woman to the door, still telling her not to cry. Mom opened the door, gently pushed the woman through it and shut it in her face. The little dog ran back into the room.

“I thought I’d better show her out,” my mother said, “before you started quoting Tom Waits.”

“‘Come down off your cross, we could use the wood.’” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

The hairstylist scooped up her dog and dropped into the shampooing chair, cuddling him on her lap. We all three sat and looked at each other for a while. I couldn’t stop touching the back of my shaved head. It felt naked, exposed. It should have made me nervous; it should have made me empathetic to those who feel they require some sort of magical protection from the dangers of our world. It didn’t. It made me feel belligerent, powerful, capable of pulling crosses from the raped earth and chopping them to firewood with my anger. Maybe I should have thanked that sad, bigoted woman. She knew not what she’d done.

Another work of James Baldwin’s contains an epigraph having to do with the biblical story of Noah and his ark, God’s promise that the water would recede. I’ve no pity for that woman’s tears. What weight do her tears have compared with the tears of the “foreign element” she described? The tears of the children in cages, the tears of the mother’s writing their names and birthdates in Sharpie ink on the flesh of their babies in hopes of having a chance at reunification when the children are wrenched from their arms, the tears of the sick ones dying in the hielera? I save my sympathy for the more deserving, but I do wish I could go back and confront that woman again, using language that maybe she’d understand.

God gave Noah the rainbow sign: No more water, the fire next time.

Then again, maybe she wouldn’t.

Sara Marchant, a prose editor at Writers Resist, received her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. Her work has been published by The Manifest Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Review, ROAR, and Desert Magazine. Her work has been anthologized in All the Women in My Family Sing, and by Running Wild Press. Her novella, The Driveway Has Two Sides, was published by Fairlight Books. Her memoir, Proof of Loss, was published by Otis Books.

Photo credit: Forsaken Fotos via a Creative Commons license.

Wednesday’s Child

By Sara Marchant

On Wednesday, during peer review, a student waves me over to say something in a voice so low and hoarse I strain to catch the words.

“ICE went into Cardenas Market and took people away.”

“What?” I say. I must have misunderstood.

The students are reviewing papers with topics like Foucault’s panopticism, patriarchy’s rape culture, Snowden’s leaks, and The Hunger Game’s inversion of the love triangle. I have to rearrange my thoughts.

“ICE went into the grocery store and took people away. They were buying food and got taken.” He’s still whispering.

Abruptly, I’m sitting at the desk next to him. He raises his voice.

“People are afraid to buy food. Food.”

All the students go quiet. His words reach them, my selfie generation sweethearts. He looks around, uncomfortable with his new audience, then back to me.

“What are we supposed to do?”

What am I supposed to tell him? To say to all of them? Am I to tell him that I am as sad, scared, and confused as he? I stand up from the desk and address the entire class.

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Vote?” Crystal says.

I’d offered extra credit to anyone who registers.

“Do the shopping for people who can’t,” Reyna offers.

“Shop at the white people grocery,” Rigoberto throws in.

Everyone laughs, including our one white student, Penny. The rest of us in the class are people of color in our varying shades of not-white. We are anxious people, but united in our sentiment, our goal: What do we do when our people are targeted while engaged in activities of daily living? There are no answers, we decide, not yet. We promise each other to keep asking and trying.

• • •

On Friday, in another class, a student asks to speak to me privately. “You can walk with me to the copy center,” I say. Because we live in the world we do: As adjunct faculty, I don’t have an office. I’m not paid for office hours. I try never to be alone with male students.

We walk across campus and my student tells me he has to be absent the next week, for his work.

“Fine,” I say. “Keep up with the assignments. Nothing is due next week anyway.”

“Everyone thinks I’m a cop,” he says. “I’m not. I’m asking you to keep this between us because everyone in class hates ICE so much.”

I trip over nothing and, worried that he’ll try to assist me, take a sideways step so he can’t touch me.

“See?” he says, as if I’d said something or done something overt. “I need you to keep my job between us.”

Never mind that he doesn’t need to share this with me at all. I’ve forgiven his absence. Did he want me to forgive his profession as well? Perhaps because I am silent, he keeps talking.

“I’m not ashamed of my job,” he says. “I’m not a traitor to my people. I was born here. The illegals are not my people.”

“No human—” I begin from habit. I am not allowed to finish.

“I know, I know,” he says. “No human being is illegal.”

You’d be surprised how often my male students feel entitled to interrupt me. Unless you are a woman, then you’re not surprised at all but merely as tired of it as I am.

“If you’re not ashamed,” I ask, “why must it be a secret? When we are discussing the subject in class, why don’t you join in? Present another side for discussion? Another view?”

“Because everyone will hate me. My peer review group might kick me out. Or they’ll get that look on their faces.”

Like the one on mine.

“Don’t believe everything you see on the news,” he says. “Most of what they say isn’t true.”

“Did you just say that to me, your critical thinking professor?” Enraged, I draw strength from the anger. “Do you think I share anything in the classroom that hasn’t been vetted and verified? Have you not heard anything I’ve said about checking sources?”

“I apologize!” he says. “I apologize. I forgot who I’m speaking to and you’re right about one thing …”

One thing. I’m right about one thing.

“Every ICE office, every station, every television is on the FOX News channel. We’re not allowed to change it. You’re right about the feedback loop.”

We are almost to the copy center. It’s a beautiful Southern California day. The jacaranda trees are in purple bloom; the lawn is being mowed. There are hummingbirds strafing the rose bushes. Everything smells fresh and clean and safe. This interview is almost over. I can see the end in sight.

“If you know that much, can recognize that …” I don’t know where I’m going with this thought. Haven’t I told my class, his class, over and over, that you can’t argue against irrationality? There’s nothing to grab onto. When people aren’t capable of critical thought, arguing against their emotions is not only futile, but dangerous.

Now I’m thankful this student, this ICE agent, isn’t in my other class. I hope no one in this class, his class, has inadvertently let slip their undocumented status. I let my last attempt at a sentence go and start over.

“I’ll only keep your secret,” I say, “if you promise never to report on any student at this school.”

He looks genuinely hurt. I shrug at his pain. It’s good he should feel something. Even if it’s only for himself.

“I’d never,” he says. “And I’m about to graduate.”

This is cold comfort. We reach the copy center. In silence I make copies, in silence we begin the return walk. Why hasn’t he left me to walk back alone? More confessions are coming, oh lovely.

“My family asks me how I can live with myself. A Mexican man with an accent, no less.”

“Good question,” I say. I always praise good questions in my classroom, questions are the basis of critical thought, after all. And I’ll grant him no absolution.

“If 80 percent of the people I’m arresting are criminals and the rest are innocent mothers and fathers, I can live with that.”

Whatever he sees on my face stops him. There’s a woman’s restroom up ahead and I point to it.

“I’m going in there,” I say, “and you should go back to class.”

He turns with a martial pivot and walks away.

The restroom is empty and after I vomit I stand for a moment with the cold water running over my wrists. The second half of the class must be taught, my copies spilled on the bathroom floor need to be picked up. I have two hours until the privacy of my car and a good cry. Thinking about my mother’s Jewish family—were they innocent mothers and fathers or criminals?—doesn’t help me. Thinking about my Mexican father’s family—would my student consider them murderers and rapists?—only makes me angrier. What does he see when he looks in the mirror? I wonder as I look at myself.

Then I shut off the water, pick up the papers, and I return to my classroom. I keep his secret, he keeps his side of the bargain—as far as I know. I never look him in the eye again.

• • •

Wednesdays and Fridays pass by, two months of them. The school year ends; my students say goodbye. Every time I shop for groceries, I think of my Wednesday child. When Jeff Sessions orders the separation of children from their parents and ICE puts them all in different camps, cages and tent cities, I email my Friday child:

What happens when the innocent mothers and fathers and the breastfeeding infants become the criminals? What then?

He never replies.

Sara Marchant received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert. Her work has been published by Full Grown People, Brilliant FlashFiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Review, ROAR, and Desert Magazine. Her essay, “Proof of Blood,” was anthologized in All the Women in My Family Sing. Her novella, Let Me Go, was anthologized by Running Wild Press, and her novella, The Driveway Has Two Sides, will be published by Fairlight Books in July 2018. Sara’s work has been performed in The New Short Fiction Series in Los Angeles, California, and her memoir, Proof of Blood, will be published by Otis Books in their 2018/2019 season. She is a founding editor of Writers Resist.

Art credit: ¿Donde Esta? by Laura Orem, a Writers Resist poetry editor.

Civil Discourse in the Trumpocalypse

By Sara Marchant

My brother Marvin is calling me, and, as usual, I debate whether to answer the phone.

My mother claims she never had an affair with Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David, but my brother is so similar to the self-centered, self-absorbed, neurotic nervous maniac David, that I’m not sure I believe her. I don’t watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and I don’t talk to my brother when I’m driving or cooking dinner because vehicular manslaughter and third degree burns are not funny.

Finally, though, as I’m reading on the sofa, I reason it’s safe to be angered by whatever Marvin has to say.

“Marvin.”

“I’m calling for advice.” Marvin prides himself on not going in for a lot of ‘chit-chat,’ and he doesn’t engage in social niceties like hello, how are you, is this a good time?

“Really?” I say. “I doubt that.”

“I’m calling to ask your advice and pay you a compliment.”

I choke on my cinnamon gum as I laugh in disbelief.

“Listen up, I’m talking to you.” Now that sounds more like my brother.

“Two different people have stopped being my friend because they think I’m a Trump supporter.”

“Good for them,” I say and spit out my gum to prevent further choking incidents. I toss it into the trash.

“But I’m not a Trump supporter,” Marvin says incredulously. “I mean, he’s obviously insane.”

“But?”

“But what?” Marvin sounds eager, which makes me wary.

“Have you made comments that led them to believe you’re a Trump supporter?” Of course he has, he’s a giant insensitive punk who thinks only of himself. What’s best for Marvin is all that matters.

“Well, I mean, I am a conservative.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly, what?” He really is excited by the coming fight. I wish I had more gum.

“Nowadays conservative equals Trump supporter, which equals asshole. I’d kick you to the curb, too, if I were your friend.” I chew the skin off my thumb’s cuticle in lieu of gum.

“You can’t say I’m an asshole just because I am a conservative.”

“I’m not. I don’t think you’re an asshole because you’re a conservative; I think you became a conservative because you’re an asshole.” I say this slowly so he’s sure to follow. “You’re selfish, shallow, and incapable of empathy.”

“I’m going to tell Mom,” my forty-eight-year-old brother says.

“Mom thinks you’re an asshole, too.”

“She does not!”

“She says your unpleasant personality is mitigated only by your handsomeness.”

“I am extremely handsome,” Marvin concedes.

“You look exactly like Mom.” He does, and our mom looked like Lucy Lawless (Xena: Warrior Princess) when she was young. “I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait, wait.” My brother is almost gleeful. I dread when he gets like this. He enjoys inciting me. If I lose control, let him know he’s getting a rise out of me, he wins. “But you’re friends with that conservative lady, the survivalist prepper-lady. That’s the compliment I was going to pay you—you’re not kicking her to the curb.”

“She’s not an asshole,” I respond. My temper is no longer fraying. I’ve temporarily clawed back from the edge, but I’ve also started chewing the skin of my other thumb. “She was raised by conservative Christians—narrow-minded white people from a homogenous state—to fear the other and think of herself as superior because of her blond hair and white skin. But now she’s found Jesus—again!—and she’s trying to do better, to be better. She’s just really annoying with the conservatism. It’s not like you. You were raised better. Your assholery is a character flaw.”

My brother gives the high-pitched giggle that means he’s both nervous and happy that he’s irritated someone to the point that they have to defend born-again Christian survivalists prepping for the coming invasion of ISIS. The cuticle around my middle finger is now bleeding.

“Anyway, you can keep your compliment,” I say. “She isn’t my friend anymore.”

“Since when?” Marvin is way too excited about this. “Because you’re too liberal? Because everyone at your party was gay? When did she break up with you? The party was, like, a week ago.”

I pause. I want to measure time so he understands that his questions are absurd, rude, and invasive. But he won’t ever understand, I know. Probably, he doesn’t even understand why he is so emotionally invested.

“Well?” Marvin asks. “Are you there?”

“She knew everyone was gay beforehand. I told her flat out that if she had a problem with that not to attend. Frankly, I think she came just to prove she isn’t a bigot.”

“You hurt her feelings,” Marvin says. “You offended her.”

“People with Infowars bumper stickers don’t get to be offended when others call them out on their ignorance, bigotry, and hate.” I’ve started chewing the skin from my littlest finger, but remove it from my mouth so that Marvin is sure to understand. “Advertising your hate means you want to be called out.”

“Infowars!” Marvin is rendered mute for two seconds. “Now that shit is awful.”

“Yep.”

“But she still came to the party; she seemed happy to be there. She was nice to me when you wouldn’t come down and open the gate. When did she stop being your friend?” He’s like a tiny fruit fly that you can’t see well enough to swat.

Marvin liking someone because she sympathized with him when I wouldn’t leave the thirty-plus guests in my house, while trying to keep the buffet going and everyone’s glass full, in order to walk half a mile in 112 degree heat to open my front gate so that my brother wouldn’t have to leave the comfort of his air conditioned car for two minutes is so typical I don’t even bother to address it.

“At the party, when Eduardo introduced himself, she told him her name and that she worked with me at the school. Eduardo said, ‘Oh my god! I’ve read about you!’ She hadn’t known about the essay or that I’d used her real name. And I guess that pissed her off. She stopped calling or returning emails—she’s sticking a fork in our friendship.”

Marvin is quiet. Then he starts to laugh. A big belly laugh, not his anxious giggle. He delights in catching me wrong-footed. He is loving evidence of my assholery. Then he quiets again.å

“Maybe you should stop writing essays about people,” he says.

We are both thinking of our sister. We are remembering an essay I wrote that made our sister so angry she stopped speaking to me. She sold her house, moved to Idaho, and we haven’t seen her since. It’s been years. Marvin is giggling again, sniggering really.

My brother was a conservative before the Trumpocalypse, and even though he says Trump is insane and he can’t support him, Marvin is gloating that his team is in power. He doesn’t see how this diminishes me. As a white non-Hispanic, my half brother doesn’t see how this diminishes me as a person of Mexican heritage, as a woman who’d like control of her own body, as a sister who realizes she’ll never be able to make her brother view her as anything other than an addendum to his own life and identity.

“Maybe I’ll write an essay about you, bozo,” I say.

“If you do, I won’t get angry,” he promises. “I’ll send it to all my friends.”

“All your ex-friends,” I interrupt.

“I’ll say, ‘Read this mean essay my mean liberal sister wrote about me.”

“You’re such a pendejo.”

“I’ll brag about the mean essay.”

“I’ll do it, punk.”

“I’ll say, ‘My sister calls me the asshole for being conservative, but she’s the one starting shit with mean liberal essays.’”

“I am hanging up now, jerk face.”

“Tell me you love me before you go write a mean essay about me.”

“I love you, and I am going to write the meanest essay I possibly can so all your friends break up with you.”

Marvin is laughing his loud belly laugh of irritating glee as I end the call. All my cuticles are bleeding. I realize he never asked me for advice, the supposed purpose of his call. I never asked him what advice he wanted or why he wanted to ask it of me. This is so typical of us that I giggle, sigh, and bandage my fingers. The phone rings again and I see it’s my mother. I answer.

“Did you tell your brother that I think he’s an asshole?”

A note from Sara: If you enjoy knowing that Writers Resist exists, please consider a small contribution, so we can continue to give our writers and artists a little something. Contributions are gratefully accept here. Thanks for reading!

Sara Marchant, a founding editor of Writers Resist, received her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. Her work has been published by The Manifest Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Coachella Review, Writers Resist, East Jasmine Review, and ROAR. Sara’s nonfiction can be found in the women of color anthology All the Women in My Family Sing, and her novella Let Me Go has been anthologized by Running Wild Press.

Long ago and far away, she worked at The San Diego Natural History Museum in their BiNational Education Department utilizing her BA in Latin American History. In her spare time she teaches Critical Thinking and Writing at Mt. San Jacinto College to the new generation that she hopes will someday save our society from its nihilistic impulses. She lives in the high desert of Southern California with her husband, two dogs, a goat, and five chickens.

Photo courtesy of the author.

Women in Parking Lots

By Sara Marchant

My hands were full in the post office parking lot. I held out-going bills, my car and postal box keys, my purse, and a heavy manila envelope containing a manuscript destined for greatness (one can always hope, right?). When I heard a loud car horn and a male voice yelling “Votes for Trump!” it was awkward to turn and look over my shoulder.

But we live in times when a male voice yelling and a horn honking in a government building’s parking lot signify danger. This might be Southern California, blue state, home of Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown, but my town is rural, poor, and red with baseball caps and Trump bumper stickers—and my mother always preached situational awareness to her daughters and sons. So, being a Jewish woman of color, I stopped walking and turned to locate the danger.

What I saw was an old, fat, cotton-headed white man hanging out of his truck’s window and gesticulating with one hand as he worked the horn with the other. He was parked illegally, across three spaces, and he continued to lean on the horn as he yelled out the window. “Votes for Trump! Votes for Trump!” Honk, honk, HONK. He seemed pleased that everyone stopped, turned, and stared. He yelled louder.

One woman did not stop. A small woman, not as old as the yelling fat man, but at least twenty years my senior, she was still moving across the hot asphalt. She wore a turquoise blue, Mexican-embroidered shift and sandals. I’d have admired her dress but I was already admiring her stamina. For she kept walking, even as the man continued his harassment, and it was obvious that she was his primary target. The rest of us in the parking lot were standing and staring, but she kept her back to him. She just kept walking.

She was halfway to where I had stopped on the sidewalk when her hand rose over her head. The honking paused for a moment as her fist unclenched. When her fingers folded down and the middle finger shot up, up, and up, the yelling renewed and intensified. Laughing, I headed down the sidewalk to join her, and walked with her to the post office door. I held the door open for her. She nodded thank you regally, turned and entered the building, her hand descending to her side.

“What was that?” I asked.

“My friend’s husband likes to tease me,” she said. “At least, he calls it teasing. I call it something else.”

An older woman was sorting her mail at the counter. Her long gray hair was unkempt, she wore a shabby t-shirt over hot pink spandex pants. The stack of mail at her elbow threatened to slide to the floor. My new heroine in the turquoise dress addressed this bedraggled lady.

“Your husband is harassing me again. This nice lady stopped because she was worried about me,” Turquoise Dress Lady said.

Pink Spandex Lady turned wearily from her task, and peered around her friend’s shoulder to speak directly to me.

“I’d like to put a bag over his head and beat him to death.”

She wasn’t joking. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t making light of her friend’s harassment at the hands—and horn—of her husband. She was obviously tired, hot and too fed up to prevaricate.

We were all women in the post office lobby that afternoon. We were alone with no one to censor us, and she paid us the compliment of speaking her honest truth. She wanted to put a bag over her husband’s head and beat him to death. I paid her the return compliment of accepting what she desired in silence. I bowed my head, nodded, and walked away as the two friends huddled in conversation. Before I left the building, however, Turquoise Dress Lady shook my hand in thanks, and we wished each other luck.

That night, when my husband and I recounted our day as married couples do, I told him about the man in the parking lot harassing Turquoise Dress Lady. I told him about her silent middle finger response. I told him about joining the lady in her walk for safety and solidarity. I told him about the wife who wanted to put a bag over her husband’s head and beat him to death, and then I started to cry.

I had to explain why I was crying over a stranger I’d met in a post office and a type of situational awareness that I couldn’t even imagine. I couldn’t imagine sleeping every night next to a man I wanted to beat to death. I couldn’t imagine being that woman.

I couldn’t have imagined any of what took place in that parking lot, that post office lobby. But it happened. It happened because these are the times we live in.

Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside / Palm Desert. Her work has been published by The Manifest Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Reviewand ROAR. Her nonfiction work is forthcoming in the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing. Her fiction is forthcoming in the anthology Running Wild. She is the prose editor for the literary magazine Writers Resist. She lives in the high desert of Southern California with her husband, two dogs, a goat and five chickens.

This essay was originally published by Roar: Literature and Revolution by Feminist People.

Blue Plate Special

By Sara Marchant

The little girl in the booth behind me is bouncing on her vinyl seat in excitement, and I stop chewing my crunchy salad in order to better eavesdrop. My back is to her, and her back is towards me, so I can hear her breathy voice over the bouncing creak of the aged diner bench, but I cannot see her.

“Of all the presidents running for president, I like the girl president the best and I am going to vote for her because when I grow up I want to be president, too. When I am president I’m going to tell everyone what to do, except you, Mommy, because you are my mommy. And I’ll let my husband drive the car. Sometimes.”

My husband asks me to taste a suspicious side dish on his plate, and I lose track of my six-year-old neighbor’s future plan for world dominion. Why hasn’t her mother given her the bad news about the election, I wonder? Why is she letting the child go on rooting for the girl president? Can the mother just not bear the thought of the other? Is Mommy in denial?

“That’s creamed corn,” I tell my husband and I am proud of how I keep my irritation at the interruption out of my voice.

“That’s really sweet corn,” he says and takes another bite.

“It’s in a whipped-cream sauce,” I say. “Gross.”

“I like it.” He goes back to his silent eating.

The waitress passes our table, eyes it, and pauses at the little girl’s table when the child hails her.

“My daddy moved to Bakersfield.” The little girl has stopped bouncing. “He has a big dog there.”

“Oh really?” the waitress replies politely.

“Yes, he has a big dog and a new mommy. The new mommy has a baby in her belly and that baby is my half-sister. Daddy used to love my mommy, but now he loves the new mommy. It’s okay, though. He still loves me.”

Now I understand why the mommy is too distracted for election conversation or hasn’t the heart to deliver more sad news.

“Oh my,” the waitress says. “Oh, my. How are you holding up?”

This must be addressed to the old mommy because she answers.

“We’ve only been separated six months,” she says. “It’s an adjustment.”

My husband has finished his fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and overly sweet corn. I pray that he doesn’t wave the waitress over to order dessert and break the conversational magic taking place in the next booth.

“You’ll be okay,” the waitress is saying. “I’ve been there. You’re young enough you can start over if you want or maybe—”

A busboy clears the dishes from under my husband’s elbows and the clatter obscures whatever came after “maybe.” By the time our table is bare the waitress has finished her pep talk.

“Are you ready for an ice cream sundae?” she says.

“Oh, we didn’t order that,” says the old mother.

“It’s my treat,” the waitress says. “Actually, the whole dinner is on me.”

“That isn’t necess—”

“The big dog’s name is Layla,” the little girl interrupts. “I just remembered.”

“Do you like hot fudge sauce?” the waitress asks.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Thick chocolate sauce.”

“Oh yes, I like that.” The bouncing starts again.

The waitress drops our ticket on the table as she passes on her way to fix the child’s ice cream. We get up to leave, and I risk one quick glance at the tired-looking woman and the now-quiet child. She has stopped bouncing and sits staring at her mother.

“Why are you crying, Mommy?”

Turning quickly, I follow my husband out the door. During the long drive home we don’t exchange a single word, and I use the time to think. I think about the bouncing six year old, our new president, and her tired mommy adjusting to single motherhood. I think about the new mommy with the half-sister baby in her belly, and the big dog named Layla. I think about them relying on a man who left his first fledging family to form a new one. I wonder if the new mommy realizes yet what she has gotten herself into.

As we drive, I count the leftover yard signs on the matchbook-sized lawns of Temecula’s McMansions. I count the signs that were “with her” specifically. Are they still up in protest? Or are we all in denial? Bless your heart, Hillary, I think. I’m with you, too. As we drive out of town, into rural Southern California, the “with her” signs grow sparse. We are leaving the blue safety zone, lines bleed purple, and finally, we are home in our tiny, red town. There are no lawns here, no signs, but there are old, rusted pick-ups with bumper stickers, and the old men driving the trucks wear red baseball caps. We pass these trucks, driven by our neighbors, and I turn my face away. I wonder if any of us ever realize what we have gotten ourselves into until it is far, far too late.

Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside, Palm Desert and her Bachelors of Arts in History from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been published by The Manifest-Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. Her work is forthcoming in the anthology Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God: All the Women in my Family Sing. She lives with her husband in the high desert of Southern California, where she enjoys teaching ESL at a Christian university despite being the only Mexican-American Jew on campus. She is a founding editor of Writers Resist.

Was it foolish to think so?

By Sara Marchant

My husband’s birthday is November eighth. He takes the day off. We drive to Idyllwild for lunch. It is a windy day so we have the patio to ourselves until an elderly white lady with an elderly dog joins us. She greets the waiter by name and he greets the cranky old dog by name. The dog only growls.

“Did you vote yet?” the elderly lady asks.

“Yes,” the waiter looks toward our table before answering.

“Let’s whisper who we voted for,” the lady suggests. They both look our way this time. They put their heads together and whisper in each other’s ears.

They squeal in tandem as they pull away and slap hands. I am smiling when they glance our way again. The waiter walks to our table and peers into my coffee cup.

“I told you it was too strong,” he says. “I’ll bring you fresh and drink that cup myself.”

“I’ll take the fresh,” I laugh, ‘but you’d better not drink after me. I have a head cold.”

“Okay, okay,” he takes the cup and walks away laughing.

The bell on the restaurant door rings out.

“Who do you think they voted for?” my husband asks.

“Hillary, of course.” I am astounded he even needs to ask. “She’s a college-educated woman who lives in Idyllwild, and he’s a gay Mexican man. They’re with her.”

“How do you know he’s gay?” my husband argues. “You can’t know that.”

“I know,” I say. He stares; he won’t speak until I explain. “When he joked about drinking my coffee, did you feel uncomfortable? Territorial? Jealous?”

“No,” my husband says. “It’s like you were talking to your brother … oh.”

“Yep.”

The waiter brings the fresh coffee, and I drink it. We pay and prepare to leave. The elderly lady waves. I point to her “I voted” sticker and give her a thumbs up. Her dog growls in farewell.

We’ve declared the day social media free. We don’t go online and we watch the 1960s television series Stoney Burke instead of election coverage. We have that last day free, and when I think of it later, that last free day, I remember the elderly lady and our waiter’s gleeful high five.

* * *

Wednesday my mother calls me, early. She is crying. She needs me to go online and see if her neighbors are lying. They aren’t lying. Unless the whole world is lying.

“Are you sure? Are you sure?” my mother keeps asking. She can’t accept it.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “How could this happen? Are people really this stupid? I don’t … I can’t …” She ends the call because she is crying again.

When I was a little girl, my mother told me of a nightmare she first had when she was four years old. In the nightmare there is an awful man, an angry red-headed man wearing a trench coat and clenching knives in both hands. Surrounding my mother are the bodies of women, stabbed, hacked and bleeding. The awful red-head, Mr. Agony, is on a bridge above my mother’s head; he holds a woman by the arm. He throws the woman off the bridge and when she hits the ground her head comes off. My mother runs over and grabs the head, holding it with the neck uppermost so the blood doesn’t run out. She thinks that if the blood is preserved the head can be sewn back on. She is four years old. In trying to save the woman’s head, my mother realizes, she has lost track of Mr. Agony. He is no longer up on the bridge, she sees. He will be coming for her next. My mother had this dream for many years.

She thinks maybe her parents shouldn’t have allowed her to see the newsreels of the camps being liberated.

Wednesday I don’t go to work. My English as a Second Language students, mostly Chinese, have asked to cancel class. I remember going to the post office. I remember that four of five women I saw there couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. I remember crying with my mother. I remember crying with my friend Senta. I remember screaming at my husband when he asked why I was crying. I don’t remember much else.

* * *

Friday is my birthday, but I have to work. We celebrate on Saturday by going to brunch. The plan is to catch a movie after, but the thought of sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers, strangers who might possibly have voted for bigotry, misogyny, racism, and environmental destruction, makes my skin crawl. Instead I decide to go food shopping. I want full cupboards and I want to be in the light.

We go to my husband’s favorite Chinese grocery store in Temecula. He once bought a cake mix called “Puto” there; this delights him. And the cake was quite tasty. In the rice aisle we spend 20 minutes talking with an older woman from Okinawa. She tells us about the cleanliness of Japanese rice compared to Californian—“California rice is just filthy”—why brown is better than white, and how CostCo is the best value for bread because the price of bread is just ridiculous.

“You don’t look like a bread eater,” she tells my husband.

“I’m not,” he says, pleased. “I’m Native. American Indian,” he clarifies.

“Your people walked across the Bering Straight,” she says. “I went to citizenship school.”

Later on, my husband says to me, “That lady sure needed to talk about rice.”

“It wasn’t about the rice,” I say. “It was never about the rice.”

* * *

That night, eating dinner, my husband asks about impeachment. My mother, who is eating with us, looks up, hopeful.

“Impeach the puppet so the master is in charge?” I ask. “That guy advocates conversion therapy. Using electric shock.”

My mother vomits. She literally vomits in revulsion, anger and fear.

When my mother was ten, her older sister was kidnapped, raped, and tortured before being dumped on the side of the road. My aunt spent the next two years in a mental hospital. In the 1950s no one talked about rape. We don’t even know if the doctors in the hospital were told what had happened. The only therapy my aunt received was shock therapy.

“I’ll never let anyone take you away,” my husband tells my mother. “Anyone coming for you or my wife will have to go through me.”

My mother shakes her head. My husband still doesn’t get it.

“You’re too young to remember,” my mother says once she’s cleaned up and comfortable, sitting on the sofa with a cup of hot tea. “Once the hate is institutionalized, everyone loses.”

When we are alone my husband will question me. “I get that you are Jews, I get that you are Mexican, I get that you are worried for your gay family, but your mom actually threw up.”

“My mom is an elderly, disabled Jew, with Mexican children, black grandchildren, Chinese grandchildren, gay grandchildren, but this was never about an election,” I will tell him. “This was never about Republicans or Democrats or red or blue. This was about thinking we lived in a country where we knew our neighbors. Some of them are assholes, sure, but we thought we lived in a country that would protect us from the assholes. We thought they would keep us safe. And we woke up Wednesday and discovered we weren’t safe at all.”

Were we foolish to ever think so?

…………………………………………………………….

Sara Marchant, a prose editor for Writers Resist, received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside, Palm Desert, and her Bachelors of Arts in History from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been published by The Manifest-Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. Her work is forthcoming in the anthology Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God: All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives with her husband in the high desert of Southern California, where she enjoys teaching ESL at a Christian university, despite being the only Mexican-American Jew on campus.

Reading recommendation: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.