TINY ADAMANTINE ME

by Rose Smith

Juan opened the heavy glass door and the bells that hung on the rope clanged and rattled. It was dim inside and a little smoky. I followed him in, the musky smell of the incense familiar. For a moment, we were alone. He turned a corner, disappearing behind a statue of the Buddha, and when he turned back to make sure I was right behind, his dark eyes peered out from around Buddha’s fatty neck folds. Juan had very long eyelashes. 

Even though he had been walking me home from school every day for a few years, it was different now that we were in fifth grade. I remember it as a confusing time; I felt like a series of nesting dolls, a tiny adamantine me inside layers of increasingly flimsy ones. The outer-most me, bones and skin and then clothes, felt like a live wire. Sometimes we liked to stop in this little store on the corner of South Main. I ducked my head under the lamp shaped like a giant god’s eye and plunged deeper into the haze. My eyes adjusted. The shelves were lined with tiny ceramic cups. I ran my hands along the undulating surface, carefully, gently. I didn’t want to upset the fine symmetry of their line. Juan was at the end of the aisle. He stood still and intent. This was what we came in for: an elephant, carved in stone and about the size of his hand. It had lovely white tusks that curved like a dancer’s arm. He held it between his palms and I thought how it must feel to hold that cold perfect elephant against his skin, pressing the most longing spot in the small hollow at the base of his thumb. 

And then too in the same instant I thought how it must feel to be the one enclosed in his hands, pressed together so firmly and carefully, flat palm on either side. Standing next to him, his smell was new to me, different from before. A smell like being under a heavy blanket in winter.

After a moment he set the elephant down, but he hid it behind a boxed tea set so that no one would buy it while we were gone, so that it would be there when we came back. I didn’t look at him and we just stood there side by side facing the shelves. He moved his hand slowly until his pinky rested against my wrist and I held my breath. 

“You break you buy.”

We jumped as the old woman came around the corner. Juan moved away and she followed him closely. I was left alone. There was space around me and it was completely quiet. Suddenly my hands knew what to do. They reached in and lifted the elephant off the shelf and dropped it right into the pocket of my skirt. My mom sewed this skirt out of an old dress. It was wide and gathered with a big patch pocket on the front that had seemed pointless to me up until now. I walked directly to the door and Juan followed me out, leaving the old woman standing alone in the smoke. 

The autumn day was sunny and garish when we emerged onto the street.  Every time we left that little store I felt the pain of the bright light and street noise, the smack of the fresh air. Juan was laughing again, now that we were out and walking toward home. 

“That old lady  - she was on me in there. Chinese people – they always think us Mexicans are going to steal from them. She is so old! She must be a hundred. She’s older than my Tio Chancho.”

I didn’t tell him that she was Vietnamese, not Chinese. We crossed over onto the wide median that separated the lanes of traffic on South Main. On the other side was the gas station. We liked to cut through there to the side street that led to my house. 

There was an old pick-up truck parked at the pump, and a ragged man leaned against the hood. His army jacket was too big for him. It hung loose over his narrow shoulders. I didn’t know then, like I do now, to be wary of a man that makes himself small and mean inside his clothes. He sipped from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. 

“Look at that crooked little chick,” he said loudly, to no one in particular. “Oh my god is she skinny.” 

My face burned hot. I turned away from him. I hoped, absurdly, that Juan didn’t hear. 

“Fuck you, viejo cabron,” Juan yelled, shaking his fist at him like a cartoon. 

The man laughed and it turned into a harsh coughing fit so that he sounded like a dog. He started walking toward us. 

Juan turned to run but I was fixed to that spot, watching the man’s boots stomp toward me. I could hear him muttering under his breath as he got closer: bitch bitch bitchbitchbitch.

“Let’s go,” Juan said, and reached back for my arm. I was doing that thing that I sometimes do, even now. Listening without listening. Moving through the world without really being in it. There have been times when I find myself in my car in the driveway, with no recollection of how I got there, no images or memories from the drive home, like I travelled deep into my own mind and left my body to carry on without me. 

“Come on!” Juan yelled, which yanked me back into the moment. I started to run after him and tripped hard over a curb. I landed in the grass near the sidewalk. Juan bent down to pick me up and when I turned to face him his eyes were fierce and beautiful. He took off running and I broke into a sprint to keep up with him. There was a time when I was as fast as him, but now he had to slow his pace to match my loping gait. When I looked behind me the ragged man was back at his truck, fiddling with the passenger door. At the end of my street we stopped. We needed to catch our breath and calm down before I went home. 

We stood under the cherry tree in front of the Jackson’s house. Juan took in my red face and the water in my eyes and said, “Don’t listen to that asshole.”

I took a deep breath. “You don’t think I’m ugly?”

His face turned red and he slowly shook his head. Then he took a step toward me. I stepped back. He took another step forward and soon my back was against the trunk of the cherry tree. The bark pushed painfully into my bones. He put his lips on mine. They were softer, and wetter, than I had imagined. I made my lips soft too. We stayed like that, lips together, until he pulled back and smiled. 

“Will you tell your parents?” he asked. 

“No,” I said. 

“I’ll probably tell my brother.”

Juan’s whole family spoke in Spanish all the time. His big brother was a dancer; we’d gone to see him perform in the folklorico. He had older brothers too, and uncles and cousins. And he had sisters. Cha-Cha was the youngest, but the rest were beautiful teenagers with long hair and tight pants. I recall them all dancing once, on a street corner in a big circle of kids. There was a boom box, and each took a turn in the center, the boys spinning on their backs, flipping and jumping to show off. The girls were more subtle. They told little stories with their gestures: whole sagas of falling in love, fighting, surviving, getting revenge. Hips, hand, arms, the tilt of the head as it snaps back like a slap. 

His family had already begun plans to move away next summer, they wanted a bigger home, a safer town, more work for the men. Juan smiled at me, and raised an eyebrow. I told him I’d see him in the morning, but when he turned to go I felt like crying. 

When I opened the screen door the smell of sugar and fried dough hit me right away. I wanted to slip in unnoticed, but my mom stood at the center of a vortex: bowls of powdered sugar on the table, strips of dough frying on the stove, Rolling Stones on the record player.  She turned and looked at me. Her eyes snapped and I glanced down to see the grass stains on my skirt. The pocket, cut from a different fabric, a bright paisley pattern, was a little torn at the corner. The weight of the elephant had pulled the stitches loose. 

“Did something happen again at school?” Lately she’d been watching me so closely. I couldn’t account for it. 

“No.”

I tried to break away but she called me back. “I can clean this up later,” she said. “You better practice before dinner. You’ve got ballet tonight.”

She moved a chair out into the middle of the dining room for me to use as a barre. I kicked off my shoes and bent at the waist, pressing my forehead against my knees. She handed me my ballet slippers. I pointed my toes; the bones in my feet popped as they settled into a different shape. We couldn’t afford these lessons, and I felt the burden of perfecting myself.  All these years later, I’m still perfecting myself. To force my body into such particular shapes, well, back then it held the promise of beauty. When I let my hand rest on the back of the chair, my head seemed to float above my curving spine. 

My mother’s spine, always so straight and rigid, collapsed with relief when the doctor recommended ballet class for me. She hated the metal brace that held my head in its cradle. I might’ve hated it too, had she not spilled her humiliation out onto everything. 

My arm lifted at my side, making the shape of each position. At first my mom watched me from the other side of the room, calling out corrections as I moved, reminding me to turn out my leg, to make sure my knees were over my toes, to lift my chin. Finally, she went back to the kitchen and left me to my practice. I felt the elephant in my pocket bounce lightly against my thigh as I moved through each exercise. 

My brothers wandered through the dining room. They jumped and spun in a clownish impersonation of me, then slammed the screen door on their way to the back yard. 

By the time dad walked in the back door the cookie mess had been cleaned up, Tino had left for his girlfriend’s house and the boys were back in the kitchen, begging mom for a snack. 

“Dinner’s almost ready,” she told them. “No snacking.”

I took the opportunity to stop practicing and go to my closet. The lamp was soft and yellow and the sound of brothers and cooking and record player on the other side of the wall were dull and far away. Inside here I felt alone, and good. For my tenth birthday we cleared out the coat closet and made it my own room. There was not enough space for a bed, so mine was still in the room with my brothers, but in here I had a lamp and a cushion and my favorite books and a shelf of miniature glass animals. My grandmother gave me some of them: birthdays, Christmas. I won a tiny doe at the state fair by landing a dime in an ashtray. The clear glass was so thin and fragile, and it changed color as it reached the tips of her ears, and of her hooves, soft brown. I stood looking at it and then I felt for the carved elephant in my skirt pocket. It was cool and smooth in my hand. I was relieved then, that I didn’t give it to Juan like I’d intended. Next time he walked to the back of the store and reached for it behind the tea set it would be gone. 

I set it on the shelf with my glass things. It looked out of place. Gross and rough and opaque next to my delicate shining collection. Its tusks jutted out and intimidated. The translucence and beauty of the miniatures suddenly made me angry. I picked up a shoebox that I’d saved for a doll bed and swiped them all into it. The sound of their fragile glass bodies rang as they collided. I imagined then that the doe’s tiny hoof had broken off in the wreckage, but I didn’t look. I just closed the lid and tucked it under the shelf. The solid elephant stood alone. Its long tusks looked mean and elegant. The curve of its back was strong. 

Rose Smith’s fiction and nonfiction can be found in The Missouri Review, CRAFT and Five Points. She was the winner of The Missouri Review's 27th Annual Editors’ Prize and was named a finalist for Narrative Magazine's 2018 Story Contest. As a film producer, her work has aired on PBS and Sundance Channel among others, and has screened at various festivals, including Sundance, SXSW and MoMA Documentary Fortnight. She received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Rose lives in Austin, Texas and is currently at work on a novel.