Tiffany Scandal - Jigsaw Youth

I got my first black eye at a show. I was in the pit, moshing, not giving a shit. Didn’t even see the elbow coming.

I don’t know if I ran into it, or if it ran into me. Regardless, it knocked me to the ground and hurt like hell.

My friend Mensa helps me up and pulls me out.

She looks at me like my face was disfigured.

I squint at her with the one eye not spiking with pain, and call her a jerk.

“Let’s get out of here and figure out what you’re going to say happened. It’s not like this band is all that good, anyway.”

We hold hands walking out of the venue. Some guys standing outside smoking cigarettes are checking us out. One of them grabs his junk and grins, baring gold teeth. Another one says something, but I don’t pay much attention. My eye is still throbbing. I hear Mensa shout back. “We’re only sixteen, asshole!”

“Even better!” All of the guys seem to be laughing.

Mensa and I keep walking.

We get to her house and catch her brother making out with his girlfriend on the couch. Mensa smacks the back of his head and calls him a cochino . He blindly throws a pillow at us and gets back to swapping spit.

She puts ice cubes in a sandwich bag and hands it to me.

“How does it feel?”

I shrug. The ice feels good.

“How does what feel? Did you lesbos finally do it?” Her sister walks in, a toddler at her hip. She’s pregnant with her third child. She’s twenty-three.

“Ella got a black eye.”

Her sister moves my hand and ice pack to look. Laughs. “Oh, shit. Mensa, what’d you do? Teach her a lesson?”

“What?”

Her sister makes the punching motion. “Gotta keep your hoes in line.” She grabs the bag of chips from the kitchen table and retreats to their room.

“Are you guys really lesbos?” Mensa’s brother’s girlfriend asks from the couch.

“They say they aren’t. They totally are.” Her brother responds without even looking.

“Gross.”

They resume kissing.

“Actually,” Mensa pointing at her brother on the couch. “ That’s so gross.”

She pretends to stick her finger in her mouth and makes retching sounds.

Mensa smacks her brother on the back of the head we we pass.

“Ow! Fucking dyke.”

“ Cerote .”

She shares a room with her sister and her sister’s kids, who’re sleeping on the bed with her. The sister looks up at us and puts her finger to her mouth, so we know to keep quiet. It’s midnight. She’s eating chips, crinkling the wrapper. We sit on Mensa’s bed and whisper, trying to figure out lies we can tell my family. They knew I’d be staying over at her house, but they didn’t know we were going to a show. My family tolerated the music I listened to, but they didn’t like it. Somehow, to them, punk’s worse music than constant gunshots and sirens. If they’d known I got hurt at a show, it’d be proof they had to ban me from going out. We need a good lie.

“You walked into a cabinet?”

“I slipped in the shower and a bottle of shampoo hit my face?”

“You rolled off my bed in your sleep and hit your head on the nightstand?”

Mensa’s sister chimes in. “Our menso brother, Chino, was playing baseball in the yard, and the ball hit you in the face.”

“That’s good,” I say.

Mensa nods. “If her family calls to ask, will you tell them that happened?”

“Sure. Now shut the fuck up and go to sleep before you wake up my kids.”

The next day, Chino is playing baseball in the yard and the ball really does hit me in the eye, the good one.

For what seems like an endless week, kids at school point and laugh almost every time they pass me in the hallway.

Didn’t learn your lesson the first time?

What do you say to a girl with two black eyes? Nothing you haven’t already told her twice.

I wear my sunglasses whenever I can. It gets old hearing the same jokes from different people.

When I get home, I immediately notice the blinking light on the answering machine. The first message is one of my great aunts asking is someone is home, like, seriously fifty times. The second message is a debt collector looking for one of my uncles, butchering the pronunciation of his name. The third message is from my school. It’s the assistant principle saying they’re concerned about how I came to school today, and wanted to ask a few questions. I delete the messages and go to my room.

Later, a knock on the door wakes me up.

My grandmother turns on the light and enters with a mug of chamomile tea. She sits down on the bed.

“Let me see you.”

Reluctant, I turn to face her. Dreading the conversation that will ensue.

“Chino was playing baseball. .”

“ Mija , don’t lie to me.”

“But it’s true.”

“A baseball hit you two times?”

I look down. I’m terrible at lying, especially to my grandmother.

“No.”

“Who hit you?”

“No one. But one time it really was a baseball.” I felt my face growing hot with shame. “The other time was an accident at a show.”

“They hit you after a show?”

“No. During. I was dancing. It was an accident.”

My grandmother laughs and gives me a hug. I don’t get the te dije speech, nor am I banned from going to another show. Instead, she says she thinks she’ll always struggle to understand younger generations. How things get stranger each decade. How things are so different from when she was a young girl in Mexico.

She threatened to ship me off to Mexico again. She says there I would learn to be a proper woman.

Whatever the fuck that means.

Proper is subjective, but she says it means to cook and clean every day, cater to every beckon call of your man. Your main goal should be to find a man. Your second goal should be to always make him happy, even if it means sacrificing your own well-being, When you find a man, you must marry him and give him lots of babies. His happiness is what you live for. You don’t want to die alone, she says. The stories people will come up with when you’re alone, she says. She made it sound like they would be terrible.

Any dreams that don’t involve a man, family, and a well kept home are stupid and selfish, and a proper woman should be neither.

Always say yes with a smile and never ask questions. There’s too much to do to even think about making waves, so don’t even bother. Man, family, and home should always come first.

Wake up before him. Make him food. Make him coffee. Wash his clothes and ignore it when he farts, no matter how bad they smell. Stay awake and wait to go to bed until he his ready. Never go to bed angry with him or you will lose him. You don’t want to die alone, she says again.

If you think that he’s fucking another woman, ignore it. Be grateful that he is still your husband and that he is coming home to you. Questioning it or being angry will only push him away. You never want to push him away.

Never deny him. If you’re dry, not feeling well, or just lost your leg, always give him what he wants.

Always give him what he wants.

She tells me stories about how her mother always greeted her with a chancla and how her father preferred the belt. She says everything she knows is because of a firm hand. But she’s never been that way toward me.

Mexico is a threat that she likes to hold on to. Something that scares her, something that should scare me.

I look at her, my grandmother, and picture the stories picking at her head. Stories she won’t ever tell me because she thinks I’m too young to be so disappointed in this world. I wonder how her life would’ve been different if she had been taught about feminism in a positive light. How different these messages would be if she saw herself as an equal to the man that she married.