Part of that refusal, for each of us, is telling everything wholly, completely, leaving in the parts that contradict or make no sense. Talk without censoring, talk that matters; talk that works like truth, even when it hurts like lies.

V. can play this better than anyone I know: she can say anything, tell even the ripped or jagged pieces. Still her voice will be strong and deep and, listening to her, she can somehow make you end up hurting as bad or worse than she does.

When we got word that Essex Hemphill had passed, for instance. I called V. as I was lighting a candle for Essex, and I was telling her how much it hurt, these endless losses.

"We die, querida," she intoned, flatly. "We get AIDS and we die; we get cancer and we die; people pick us off in the streets and we die."

I didn't know what to say to that: Essex had AIDS, not V.; I'm the cancer survivor, not V.; and yes our people have been gunned down in the streets, but no one is shooting at me or her. I didn't understand her attitude at all, couldn't feel where it was going.

I tried to change the subject, several times; every move, she cut me off, brought me down. I just couldn't find the rhythm of the conversation. Up to that point, I've only known two modes of dealing with V.: go slow and work through all the details, giving her as much space as possible; or hurry the fuck up and give her a solid solution, because you don't have much time before she walks out and right into trouble. This was different. This was weird. It was slow, but jagged, and nothing I knew how to say seemed to bring her back.

Finally, I just tried to end the call. I said the girls were needing to go to bed and that I wanted to be with them, that Flori was getting old enough that I almost wished I had another baby, just to hold that smallness for a while longer.

In a heartbeat, V.'s right up in my face, wanting to know why the hell I might think I could want another baby, if I don't even take care of the ones I've got. She says I'm all up in my room all the damned time anyway, and these babies never even get to see me -- that when they come to me, I shoo them away, and call Thomas or Marlani to wipe their noses or their asses. She says she cannot even imagine depending on one person to parent with you for the rest of your life. People are just not that reliable, according to V., and eventually I'm'a get left flat out with a bunch of babies and no one to help me. And the only reason I can stand have so many children anyway, she's convinced, is because I'm a white girl; and nobody's ever gonna take care of her the way she thinks they do me, 'cause she's black.

I finally stop her. "I'm a white girl? And you're black?" I ask her about three times, 'cause she's just going. We're talking over each other, tense on either end of the phone, but it's so surreal for me, I can't even imagine where this started. "I'm white and you're black," I repeat. "Girl, that is entirely too tired, and you know it. Yeah, I got my little light-skinned privilege, but I ain't white, and you ain't black. You're browner than me, in the summer, but honey you out there livin' under them San Francisco clouds all the damn time and you ain't nothing but yellow, alright? I'm light-skinned, and you're yellow. I guess that makes you light-skinned, too."

It doesn't end until she comes up for another pull off her cigarette. "Yeah, you a white girl," she prods. "Ain't never been nothing but a white girl. All your talk about color and ethnicity and you are white white white. Nobody anywhere evah would mistake you for no damned Latina. And when you open your mouth, they just think you some ghetto chil'. You couldn't have no goddamned mutherfucking children at all, unless you had yourself a Filipina slavegirl and acted some white man's exotic."

I catch my breath here; I know she's going in for the kill. I do not even hold the phone near my mouth, I am so silent.

"Maybe it's just me, alriiiiiiight?," she adds slyly. "I'm just thinking about myself. I just know I would never want to be one of your damned babies. I could never stand the way you mothered. Always telling those kids to get out of your face and calling Marlani to come get them. I just feel sorry for any child who has you for a mother."

She did it. She's in. It feels like something broad and strong has suddenly gone tiny and brittle, and I know that the worst thing in the world that I could do right now is go off on her.

Out of frustration, I start to cry, which makes me even more angry. "Don't you ever, ever, play me like this again, Verónica," I warn her. "I could go there with you, but you know I wouldn't do that. I would never play you like this. You know better. Don't ever. Ever. Just don't."

She hangs up on me.

Sometimes you have to know that the people you love have hidden parts of themselves, or disguised their experiences to end pain. Verónica does this; so do I. Marlani does it. And Jake. We all do. Dusk and marrow.

When V. talks shit to me like that, all I know how to do is listen. Not absorb, not hold on; just listen. I know when she's talking to the imprints, what bruises. Here, she's talking about how she lost her son, because she didn't think she could be a good mother, I tell myself. Here she's still holding on to the slap of light-skinned privilege, because her sister is la preferida, like her grandmother, and she got punished for being darker. And I know when she starts referring to Marlani as a "Filipina slave-girl," after all these years of pushing the 'Rican back into her, V. is slamming at her recent girlfriend, who's from the Philippines. Jesus, it hurts, but I hold on, rehearsing what I know silently, letting her go, listening to her talk, because that's what she does for me, no matter what.

Manuel calls a few days later, giggling and sighing like the phone diva he is; I just sit back and listen.

"Feliz end of the semester, girl," he starts. "How you been? You and your family doing alright? Verónica más o menos me ha platicado lo que te ha estado sucediendo. All I can say is hang in there, I know how it is, and you deserve better anyhow. Who needs all that abuse de a gratis, ¿no? I've been just barely hanging, myself. But me and Ariel are doing real well. We've grown so much as a couple y estamos echándole muchas ganas porque nos queremos mucho, cada día más."

I congratulate him, in this moment of clouded effervescence, then he's sighing again.

"He's had to stop school 'cause'a lack of funds -- what else is new? -- since the conservatory couldn't come up with any money for him -- what else is new?! But he's determined to stay focused with his music. Me, I'm just teaching -- it's a good school, but it's still a pain in the butt, and I'm just doing it to pay the bills and 'cause I know how to do it, I guess, but I'm getting tired of it, as you can imagine -- you know how stupid the public school system is. Anyway, pues Ariel and I are basically planning to move to Mexico City in two to three years. He really loved it there when we went this summer, and this country just doesn't cut it for me at all. After I came back, I was barely able to get over the culture shock, and I realized there isn't much here that I want to stay for. Queer culture is also really starting to happen in Mexico, not to mention art in general. Well, you know just how different it is. Those things, lots of love, and a family of activists and dreamers are really all I want from life at this point."

He laughs absent-mindedly, then takes a studied breath, and goes on. "V.'s doing alright -- much, much better, ¿tú sabes? Well, you know how much I love that woman. Sometimes I feel like I leech off of her insights, but she's taught me a lot about love and survival and about finding the ways to improve as a human being. But, yeah, she's doing alright. Ay, muchacha, pues qué más te cuento. She sends her love, of course."

V. always sends her love, in the end. Of course.

I've never been more glad for that than at the end of this summer, when the whole reservation gig blew up in my face, and I needed V.'s talking in the worst way.

I finally dragged my ass out of bed one day and called her, because I knew nothing else could help. I told her in scattered pieces about how the school I'd chosen was floundering; how it looked good on the surface but was controlled by maniacs; how the principal was married to the executive director of the school board, who was also the commissioner of the entire damned county; how they'd brought me in with promises that I could develop my own curriculum, then had taken all my courses away from me a week before classes started; how my materials had been censored in the classroom -- the principal taking a black marking pen and inking out words in the works of Dorothy Allison and Asha Bandele, even in Sandra Cisneros; how I'd been fired at the end of the first week, for bringing "objectionable materials" to the students; how the coach had been arrested, over the weekend, for kidnapping and raping a woman in town; and at the end of the next week, how they'd had an ice cream social for the entire damned school: no problems here.

Jason, who's in his first year of high school this year, brought home fresh reports every day of new student protests, administrative shut-downs, and horrifying gossip.

"Ain't shit to do with white folks," I told V., "It's just like being back in Denver, trying to teach Rocky Mountain Chicanos: our own eating our own. Damn. I can't deal. There is no place, V.: everything's fucking corrupt. I just wanna lay down and die. Ain't no amount of joy ever gonna equal the pain I feel right now."

V. went stone serious. "You listen to me," she started. "The time for heroes is over, mami. Ain't about no fucking revolutions no more. You always think you're gonna walk into a room with your intellect on fire and taunt people like a little kid sing-songing on a playground: 'I've got a bo-omb.' When you gonna learn? Heroes don't make changes; they just end up bleached- out faces on t-shirts. You know who gets things done, mija? It's the dull, ugly people with the bad teeth and bad breath who sit in the back rooms of office buildings quietly their whole damned lives, just digging a little at a time, not making a fucking bit of noise."

V. stopped, because I was crying. Her voice softened then. "People will always shame you when you do the most honorable thing, mi amor. Don't internalize their shame. Do not take the stick from their hands and beat yourself with it. You go. Just go. Get yourself and your family to safe ground. Then, from some sneaky little place far away, maybe just in your own heart, you just take their damned stick. Don't even beat them with it. Just take it and see how they act without it."

She paused, and I could hear her pulling on a cigarette. The smoke exhaled with her last words. "As noble, as intact and as whole as you have ever been, you walk out of there, you hear me? You drive yourself. Don't let Thomas drive. Don't you leave feeling like anybody drove you out of there. You get to safe ground, and you call them on it. As noble, you hear me?"

Just so.