CORONA
Corona, I’m talking about a little village perched under the number 7 train in Queens between Junction Boulevard and 111th Street. I’m talking about the Lemon Ice King, Spaghetti Park, and P.S. 19. The Corona F. Scott Fitzgerald called the valley of ashes as the Great Gatsby drove past it on his night of carousal, but what me and my own know as home. And we didn’t know about any valley of ashes because by then it had been topped off by our houses. You know, the kind made from brick this tan color no self-respecting brick would be at all. That’s Corona.
And you know the song by Paul Simon? The one where he says, “Goodbye to Rosie, the queen of Corona. Seein’ me and Julio down by the schoolyard…”
Well, at first, I couldn’t believe it was Corona he was singing about, because why would Paul Simon be singing about Corona? I didn’t see many white people there unless they were policemen or firemen, and I didn’t think Paul Simon had ever been one of those. Then I saw these pictures of him standing in front of one of those tan brick homes. What I thought was a lie was true.
* * *
I once knew a Julio too. We didn’t hang out down by the schoolyard like Paul Simon must have with his Julio. We didn’t hang out anywhere at all, but I loved him the way you only could when you were a child. Julio had beauty marks all over, as if it wasn’t obvious to everyone how he looked. He carried his body like fire, matchstick, rope.
All the girls in school showed off for Julio, cursing and fighting. In Corona, girls learned early to flash skin, flirt, chew gum, and play games to bring the boys down to their knees, even though it usually ended up the other way around.
But I was not one of them. My mother didn’t let me wear skirts, especially the short kind the other girls wore with their hairless legs and fearless way of flicking their hips. I watched them flirt with Julio, my back against the brick wall.
Julio was my next-door neighbor, and we were in the same fifth-grade class in school. We walked the same way home. Not together, of course. He walked ahead of me with his friends, who’d be whooping and laughing, pulling roses out whenever they went past this house that had so many roses they grew up and over, through the fence like they were some kind of convicts trying to scale the walls.
The Korean grandmother who lived there always stood in the yard as soon as the school bell rang and waved her stick and screamed at us, so we wouldn’t pull out every last one. But Julio always managed to steal a rose. He was quick and thin. All the other boys rallied around him. He’d leap to the top of the fence, grab a rose, then fall back on the pack of boys, pushing them nearly into the street, partly from the impact and partly for the joy of it. Then he’d shake the hair out of his eyes and laugh.
* * *
One day, the Korean grandmother wasn’t waiting inside the fence, yelling like she usually was. She was hiding behind a car across the street, and when Julio and his friends came around, she was right behind them. She grabbed Julio by one of his skinny arms and pulled him into the garden. “Bad boy!” She shook him. “Tell me where you live!”
Julio’s friends stopped. Their hands were still pushed through the gaps in the fence. This was new. They didn’t know whether to run away or run in. They stood like statues, waiting for someone to do or say something to make things normal.
Julio was the one who did. He pulled back with all his thin weight and said to her face, “I don’t need to tell you where I live, you—”
The grandmother stopped. Her mouth opened, but what she wanted to say, she couldn’t. Julio’s and my eyes met, and I felt the thread of our shame pulse through me, a burning flame.
Just then, one of Julio’s friends picked up a beer can from the street and threw it at her. He missed, but the next thing I knew, there was a howl and a rush. All the boys started picking up litter and glass bottles and throwing them.
The grandmother’s fingers lost their grip, and when she ran into the house, the boys ran into the garden and started pulling roses off the branches. All of them: the tea lemon, the hot pink, the deep red, the little ones with flecks of gold in their skin. The thorns tore through their fingers, but they didn’t let it stop them. It was their first time in the garden, and now it was theirs.
By this time, all the kids who walked home that way, and even some who didn’t, had stopped to see what was happening. Unable to pull away, I stood with my face pressed against the chain links.
Then I saw Julio. His arms were full of tattered roses. He looked like a crown prince as he walked out of the garden, and started throwing flowers at the children who were too scared to run in. When he saw me, he stopped. For a second, I could see he didn’t trust me not to tell.
Then he smiled, the first time he had ever really smiled at me. He picked out a rose. It was hot pink, stiff, just beginning to open.
“Here,” he said, and threw the rose at my feet.
SKIN
It had poured rain and thundered all day like a hot summer storm should, and when I opened the door to my friends Saima and Lucy’s house, the metal corners tugged on the grapevines, and cooled-down rain, which had pooled on the leaves, showered down on me, and wet my salwar kameez.
Lucy lived below Saima, and Saima lived above Lucy, and they both lived next to Shahnaaz, the neighborhood bully. I lived down the street, but in the summers, I spent all my time at Saima’s and Lucy’s. The grapevines lived everywhere, acting like they were trees. They grew when our mothers called us in to eat. They grew when we played in the back lot acting like junglees. They grew at night when we were asleep, and in the mornings, Lucy and Saima had to push against the doorjambs, pull and twist the doorknobs to get anywhere they needed to be.
The biggest argument Saima and Shahnaaz always had was whose grapevines they really were. They were rooted in Shahnaaz’s yard, but the vines with their baby hair twists swung over the fence and knelt down and touched the ground on Saima’s side of the fence.
I always sat with Saima on the red vinyl sofa her mother had put under the grapevines. All over Corona there were sofas like this, growing like mushrooms: yellow, red, orange, brown. Who could get rid of a sofa after paying so much?
* * *
I’d known Saima since she and I were born, and even before, because our fathers had been best friends in Pakistan. They’d met at Peshawar University and had come to America together with their tight-fitting British suits, curly dark hair, and sunglasses. In Pakistan, they’d been scientists and worn white lab coats, but in Corona, they worked in stores. Now Saima’s father wore tight pants and shiny shirts while he sold radios, VCRs, and illegal copies of Bollywood movies. My father wore his lab coat as a butcher at his Gosht Dukan: Corona Halal Meats. Whenever I visited him, his coat would be covered with blood.
Lucy’s father was from the Dominican Republic. He worked so many jobs, Lucy couldn’t keep track. He had a belly that hung out of his shirt and black curly hair all over his chest. When he was home, he sat under the grapevines, drinking. He’d learned how to make wine from the Italian neighbors, and on his days off, he drank homemade wine and yelled at us when we popped the sour green grapes into our mouths.
“Hey! You! Get away from my grapes!”
After it rained was the best because Lucy’s father stayed inside watching TV. Then we pulled on the vines like hair and felt the rain run down our cheeks, soak our clothes, our salwar kameez. It always felt cold, sweet, and green, the air around us thick liquid, about to burst like a sneeze.
* * *
One afternoon, Shahnaaz was poking around in the old abandoned garage that had come with her house. Her family didn’t have a car, so the garage was left to pile up with junk. It was the kind of place stray cats had babies. The kind of place rats lived. The kind of place you wouldn’t go into by yourself, unless you thought you were a badass the way Shahnaaz did.
Our main way of getting money for candy was to look under the sofa cushions. There the loose change that leaked out of our fathers’ and uncles’ pockets slipped down and collected into secret pools of pennies, nickels, and dimes. Shahnaaz’s brother, Amir, had just moved an old sofa into the garage, and she thought she’d find undiscovered treasure, but when she lifted the cushion, it wasn’t George Washington’s head or even Abraham Lincoln’s she saw. It was a woman in a glossy magazine, her nipples pink and round as quarters, her mouth wide open, her head thrown back, nothing on her body but a thin sheet draped over her legs.
Shahnaaz didn’t say this, but I’m sure her eyes popped. None of us had breasts, but Shahnaaz always acted like she did, pushing her chest out whenever we walked around the block. She thought she was the prettiest, and the only reason we agreed was because her brother was older and said he’d beat us up if we said she wasn’t.
When Shahnaaz came up to the fence, Saima and I were sitting under the grapevines, pooling our cushion change. Lucy had gone to Top Tomato with her mother, and it would be a while till she got back. Every so often, Saima and I reached up and pulled down a handful of grapes. When we saw Shahnaaz, we weren’t happy.
“Whatcha doing?”
“None of your business.” Saima had less patience for Shahnaaz than I did.
“Oh yeah? Well, maybe it is my business because you’re eating my grapes.”
We rolled our eyes and ignored her, but she kept talking. “Well, what I found in the garage is none of your business either.”
I tried to be tough. “So what then?”
It was useless. A few minutes later, I was sneezing from the dust in the garage, and Saima was trying to find a place to sit that wasn’t covered with rat pee. Shahnaaz pulled out the magazines, and Saima’s and my mouths dropped open. There were naked men and women in all sorts of positions. Some of them were doing everyday things like eating breakfast, just naked. One woman was spread out on a car.
“This is gross,” Saima said with disgust, but she kept looking. I did too. I couldn’t stop myself from flipping through the pages. I kept the tips of my fingers on the edges though, so I didn’t have to touch the skin. Whenever I accidentally did, I could feel my fingers burning.
There was one lady I couldn’t stop looking at. She was the only one who wasn’t blonde. She was small with dark brown hair and brownish skin. Her body was thin, and she was sprawled out asleep on a bed, completely naked. Her eyebrows were wrinkled, and her hair was messy. There was brown hair, curly and thick, between her legs, brown hair thick underneath her arms, places where my skin was still as smooth as a baby’s. The picture must have been taken by someone standing over her. She looked like she was sleeping and having a very bad dream.
“Are they your brother’s?” Saima was the first to ask.
“No! My brother would never look at something like this. It’s—”
“Guna,” I said. It’s what we learned from our mothers, who taught us the long lists of what was Guna and what wasn’t. It was Guna to listen to music. Guna to talk to boys. Guna to cut our hair. Guna to miss any of our prayers: Fajr, Zohar, Asr, Maghrib, Isha. It was most definitely Guna to take off our clothes, lie on top of a car, and let people take pictures.
When my mother saw people in our neighborhood walking around wearing almost nothing, she always said, “They don’t know any better. But you do. You think it’s hot now? When you go to Hell, demons will take torches and set fire to all the places you left your skin naked. And as much as you scream and cry, or say please, please, Allah forgive me, Allah will say, ‘You didn’t listen to me when you were alive, why should I listen to you when you’re dead?’ But Allah is merciful, and when the demons have burned you enough, He’ll forgive you, give you new skin, and bring you up to Heaven.”
“But how long until I could go to Heaven?” I’d say, trying to push the images of demons out of my mind.
“In Hell, every day is an eternity,” my mother would say, then leave me to go clean.
“We have to burn them.” Shahnaaz’s voice echoed the voice in my head. “Saima, does your mother have matches?”
Saima looked up at the windows of her house. We could all hear her mother screaming at her younger brother, Ziyad. “I don’t want to go home. My mother won’t let me come back out.”
Shahnaaz turned to me. “Razia, go ask the man at the store.”
Copyright © 2022 by Bushra Rehman
