Meliza Bañales
Empujame
Today, the art of pushing is a lost one. Finding her on the floor was the relief. It was getting the door open that hurt the most. The door to the other bedroom of my house, the room my grandparents lived in for more than fifty years, doesn’t have a lock. But it wouldn’t open. And she, my current girlfriend, was nowhere to be found. I felt a clear and sudden panic. I pushed. I pushed again. I resorted to banging. Then yelling and banging. Then more pushing with my entire body. The door gave a little. And she was this surmountable weight against the door. I made it in. She didn’t move. I pushed her over. Her teeth were clenched. And there was a needle under her that rolled a little as I called 911 and told them she was having a seizure. In LA County, everyone knows you never say drug overdose, because the DEA headquarters for the West Coast is housed in LA County, and when you say drug overdose to 911 they send the police so that they can arrest you for drug possession after they bring you back to life. I started pushing against her chest with my hands. I was a machine, a pushing machine. I was gonna work this out.
When I was seven, I went with my older sister to the mental institution. There were a lot of adults who had decided my sister was different. I was seven and my sister was twenty-two. There was a series of glass doors you had to go through and I ran toward each of them with my hands in front of me so I had enough power to push the large glass doors open for my sister and my parents. I needed a running start. This was well before I was diagnosed with lupus and became disabled. And damn could I run. And push. Running and pushing together, I had the strength of titans. And every glass door led us deeper into the belly of a very white place that was quiet and cold and smelled of lemons. There was a window where we could watch the tests they were giving my sister. There was a picture test where they would show her pictures of everyday people doing everyday things and they would ask her what was happening in the picture. They would show her a picture of a woman cooking and my sister would tell them, “It’s the end of the world.” And I suppose my sister would know, since she pushed many pots of rice and beans across the stove on a regular basis. But then these people, these adults I didn’t know, would write something down on a clipboard then come out of the room and explain to my parents that they could pick her up in a few days. This happened many times until I finally memorized all of the pictures. Before they pushed my sister into another room and into the picture test, I told her, “When you get to the one of the lady cooking, tell them it’s a lady cooking. That’s the right answer. Tell them this, and you can come home.” Then, I’d begin my running start back to each large glass door and push. Push.
When the ambulance arrived at my house, they took me away from my girlfriend and placed me in the living room while they went to work. I couldn’t see what they were doing. I know they thought they were arriving to a seizure. There was a line of paramedics and firemen staring toward me but not at me. They didn’t know how to tell me she was dead. But I already knew that. I asked them to try again anyway, whatever it was, to save her. I asked them because I figured trying one more time couldn’t hurt. And they did. And then, like the moment a flower unfolds right in front of you, she got up. She got up the way people wake up from a nap. They simply rise.
It was snowing outside and my sister had not left her room for three days. I was thirteen and she lived with her three children in a cabin on a mountain. It was the week after Christmas, well after Las Posadas and all the tamale-making and Catholic church my Chicano family could handle. She hadn’t left the room. In fact, she hadn’t left the bed or changed her clothes and never blinked her eyes. They were open and fixed on the ceiling. I would routinely go in to spray air freshener and put towels under her to soak up her urine since she didn’t go to the bathroom. She was so still, a delicate statue. My niece and two nephews and I would comb her hair and push her on her side because I had read somewhere that people who stay in bed like that and don’t move can get these sores all over them. There was no way of knowing when she would go into one of her trances. That’s what we called them. We saw a show on TV where a magician hypnotized people and they did things they would never do, completely out of nowhere and for no reason. They called it a trance, and we decided that’s what it was. I always wondered if it was more like a vacation. I imagined that she was dreaming even though her eyes were open, and in her dreams, my sister was deep in a clear-blue ocean and the sun was shining and all you could hear was the water and the sky. Then, on the fourth day, us kids would hear the shower running through the closed door. And just like the people on TV, abracadabra, there would be my sister, dressed, with her hair done and makeup on, smiling at us and baking five pies in the kitchen. Ta-da.
I don’t remember what was said after the ride home from the ER with my girlfriend. There was no arrest, no charges. Since my girlfriend had no record for drugs and the call was for a seizure, the police never arrived anyway. It was as if the whole thing disappeared, or really never happened. I remember it was dark, and even though the hospital was only ten minutes away, the road seemed like it went on and on. I remember we took a bath together, and I looked at her veins under her paper skin. They looked like a series of small, dried-up rivers. Heroin does that. The veins become so flat, you’d swear you were looking at a map or an old atlas. They are a shade of blue like the highways, and where they’re supposed to connect, they break off into tiny roads to nowhere.
I spend many years helping her clean up only to find her living out of her spoon all over again.
I spend many years watching my sister hold a bottle of Jack Daniel’s close to her the way I hold memory or love or myself.
I find my body stretched against a woman who finally passes out and, for now, the room doesn’t smell like death anymore, and her breath on my skin is the only sign I have that she is still alive.
I find my sister’s body stretched against me. I am six years old and she smells like whiskey and she holds me so tight as her voice in my ear sings “De Colores” under the full moon through our broken apartment window in LA, and the more the colors fall from her mouth, the more urgent we feel.
I watch a woman I love go in and out of highs and lows and mood swings and desperation. I lose myself in the promises I make to try, just try.
I love a woman who carries a museum of scars and emptiness and will and confusion and I am taking notes, I am getting ready for the next time, for the next fall, for the next days in bed.
I am standing on the edge of so many beds and hospitals and blank white rooms and doctors and guesses and drugs and lies and mistakes and I am mad I am mad I am so fucking mad.
They have many names for this: bipolar disorder, affective disorder, manic depression, catatonia, personality disorder, borderline psychosis.
I have many memories for this: an arrow in the heart, sand slipping through fingers, my girlfriend’s hands around my throat because I won’t give her dope, my sister drunk always drunk, my father lighting candles at the church praying only for my sister’s happiness because, he says, unhappiness is its own disease that can eat you whole like a cancer. My sister taking me to my first drive-in movie at 10 o’clock at night in the heart of LA in her husband’s 1962 Supersport. Her buying us anything we want, pushing us all on the swings in the night air. Her smiling so big, laughing and laughing, and I remember that she is a person and not an illness. And how I now return to the tiny house in LA to make my stay and I rarely think about the room my lover died in but only the rooms she lived in.
There is a kind of curse in remembering everything. There is a kind of blessing in seeing all parts of the story.
My ex-girlfriend says, “Sometimes this illness makes me feel so dark inside my mind. And you are so full of light, Meliza. Maybe that’s why I keep finding my way back to you. I know it’s not fair. You probably say that to yourself everyday, Missy. This is what I’m sorry for the most.”
“Los Angeles is the most beautifully complicated city, flaca,” my sister says to me. “You know how it can be afternoon and all you can hear is the birds and wind, viento a todo. It pushes you through the day, kinda gentle, and you almost forget yourself and everything that seems wrong isn’t really that way. I know it sounds crazy, but hey, I never said I wasn’t crazy.”
She (insert the she) stares off into a distance (insert the nothing) and you learn to be thankful (insert the prayer) because at least she is peaceful. There is a push, a magic in having absolutely nothing. And you have been raised to believe in magic.