I.

Yesterday, my ex-husband told me I had to talk to this attorney-type person about some unresolved legal thing. So I called this guy -- not an attorney, but something of the type -- and we had a nice chat, and he said there was just this and that we had to resolve.

I said, yes, we should definitely clear this up; I certainly wouldn't want anything to get in the way of my ex closing on his new house with his lovely new girlfriend. And I giggled. The attorney-type person said I was being very pleasant about the whole thing, and that he wouldn't want to ever get on my bad side, because he wouldn't know when I was really angry. I said, actually, you would. You'd know.

Also yesterday, I decided I wasn't going to think about my ex-husband "that way" anymore. The romantic way. The loving way. The complicated way. I mean: just because we were one of "those" couples for whom everyone wanted the greatest happiness; and just because we were a family with three joyful kids; and just because he "won" one of those kids in a legal crapshoot, thereby breaking apart the family; and just because I sometimes believe I'm too damaged to ever feel "that way" with anyone else again ... well, that's no excuse not to go on, is it.

I felt pretty final about that, yesterday.

I feel pretty final about it once or twice a week.

Today, I was sitting out on my deck in the sun with different ex of mine. One from 15 years ago. Well, we started as lovers 15 years ago, and she's been an ex-lover/best friend for about 10 years.

I asked her whether she knew the ex-husband and his lovely new girlfriend had found a house. She said he didn't exactly tell her: she had to ask. I said yeah, I found out when he told me to call this attorney-type person.

We both lit cigarettes and sat quietly, musing over this.

Finally, I said, "I don't like it."

She nodded.

I said, "I mean: it just seems weird that he should be doing this with some other woman and my kid, you know?"

She nodded.

We smoked.

I think I maybe spoke in a small voice, next. I said, "Do you think he loves her like he loved me?"

She answered fast and strong: No.

I nodded.

We began hashing over this ongoing debate we have about love and passion: she says she just wants to be comfortable and sane and not "go wild" over love ever again, especially after the way she felt with me; I argue that "comfortable" means "boring" and that I couldn't live without passion.

"Besides," I said, "it's not like you can control it. Somebody could walk up to you tomorrow and it could just be sudden and impossible and irresistible all at once, and you wouldn't say no."

"Got that right," she laughed. "I'd be all over that. It'd be one of them shoot-first-think-later kinda situations." She smiled again, and sighed.

Then my ex-husband came out onto the deck. He'd brought my youngest
daughter over.

I said, "We were just talking about you."

He raised an eyebrow and tried to look confident.

My girlfriend added, "Well, we were talking about love and passion and stuff."

He said, "Ah."

She asked him whether he agreed that it's better to have a "comfortable" relationship than a wild, crazy, passionate one.

He said, "I think sometimes people make the mistake of confusing chaos with passion, of trying to give so much to the other person and thinking that's love."

He looked at me.

"That's just you," I said. "You're a martyr. You confused measuring your capacity for love with measuring your capacity for pain. I thought all that suffering was boring."

He said, "Well, it's more like it comes down to whether it's going to be you or the other person: who's going to survive."

I rolled my eyes. "This is his T.S. Eliot Must Institutionalize Viv in Order to Survive gig," I told my girlfriend. "A variation of his earlier captivation with Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and his errant willingness to wheel my 'depleted' brown body out onto a wide, green lawn with a small white blanket folded ever-so-kindly over my shriveling legs. All in the name of 'helping' me. Or, more to the point, of feeling like the Great White Hope, himself. Fending off passion and moaning about 'lunacy.' Who's going to survive, indeed."

I blinked faux-seductively at him. "Or you can just strike a balance," I argued. "You can temper the craziness with calm. I mean: it's not that binary, is it? Can't you have both the passion and the comfort?"

He laughed. "Not with you," he smiled. "Your life is a living testament to the fact that you  can't have both. You just burn through people."

My girlfriend laughed, too. "It's true, hon," she said. "You do kinda take people to the edge."

I said I was still waiting to find someone who wants to be there with me. Not someone who gets there and feels dragged. Or who constantly yammers about taking the next step by leaping over the precipice.

"And you," I told the ex-husband, "are going to be a very unhappy man, in the end, being bored and stale with this new girlfriend. And the funny thing is, you'll be proud of that unhappiness, because you'll confuse it with having been honorable. You'll end up just like your father, and you'll think that's great."

He pursed his lips for a moment and said, "You're probably right."

My ex-girlfriend told me then to stop lecturing my ex-husband.

I protested that I wasn't lecturing him. "He had me on the phone for two hours a few months ago, going on and on about how I should have stayed with my last boyfriend and learned to be more 'stable,'" I added.

He said he just thought I should have given that boyfriend a little credit.

I rolled my eyes again. "Credit for what?"

He sighed.

I said things were fine with the boyfriend until we moved in together. Then I found out that he'd been cheating and lying. The cheating astonished me, because no one had ever pulled that on me before, but the lying was worse. I hate lies. Even his promises to be a "better man" felt like lies. And I want more.

My girlfriend said, "But what if you don't find it? Are you willing to just keep having one relationship after another for the next 30 years, just sticking around for six months at a time?"

I scowled. "What? I'm supposed to stay with some fool who can't keep his pants zipped, just to have a relationship? Just to be a couple? Jesus! And, technically, my average is 4-6 years, not 6  months, but yes. Definitely. Yes. I'm willing to keep looking. Forever. Until I find it."

My exes exchanged glances.

The ex-husband left.

My ex-girlfriend and I swam and played in the pool for a while with my daughters.

Then she left and took my youngest daughter with her.

My oldest daughter went upstairs to hang out in her room.

I tried to decide what I should do about love and passion.

I took a nap, instead.

A friend called and asked me to come visit him in New York. He wants to be in love. I think I'd wreck his life. He's only 25, the darling.

I watched TV.

I read email.

I thought about a friend's brother, who's been in trouble. I felt bad.

I thought about my brother. I felt bad.

I thought: in my imagination, there's this kind of sweet, romantic person I could go head over heels for. But I'd probably just wreck another life.

Then I thought about my obverse fantasy, where I meet someone who could counter all my attempts at wreckage with bitterness and corrosion. Which made me laugh, because I'm actually a little scared of that.

Then I looked at the black and white, high-contrast calendar photo on my office wall: a scantily clad woman with a long jacket shrugged off her shoulders, and high black leather boots slithering up towards her knees. She's looking down at herself, pulling up the sides of her bikini bottoms. And I thought: Now that I could handle.

At least until the next time.

It's hot today, and I don't see half of the things that bite me in the night.

II.

A long time ago, when my 19-year-old son was still a young boy, somebody hurt him badly. Disastrously badly.

I knew it was going to happen. I saw it coming. I told him it was going to happen.

We fought.

I had to get out of his way.

So it happened, just the way I'd imagined.

Then he told me, and I said, I'm gonna buy a gun and board a plane.

My son shut down. So I shut up.

I took care of it other ways.

But it stayed in between us for years and years.

And during all those years, he kept chanting: Nothing happened; everything's fine; why do you keep bringing it up.

So I let it go.

Last week, though, I was going out for a swim, when my son called.

He said, "I had a psychotic break yesterday."

I thought he was kidding around. My son's a kidder.

I said, "From the heat?"

He started quoting lines from a silly movie we both like. "There's a lot of ins and outs here, man," he said. "Lotta new stuff coming to light."

I laughed and asked, "Was there a beverage involved?"

He said, "Actually, there was."

Then he told me that he got really drunk last night.

He paused.

I waited.

He asked if I were angry that he'd gotten drunk.

I said, "No, why? You're responsible. If you want to get drunk in your own house, that's not my business, is it? I mean, mijo: what's going on?"

He said maybe I should go for a swim, and we could talk about it later.

I said the pool was always going to be there, so we could talk now.

He said, "Well, as it turns out, I've been wanting to get drunk a lot lately. Then I figured some shit out. It all has to do with that stuff I don't talk about. But I spilled my guts last night to my girlfriend, and now I don't want to get drunk anymore."

My stomach hurt. I whispered, I'm really sorry.

He said that he just talked and talked the night before, and he didn't cry at all.

I said again, I'm so sorry.

Suddenly, though, he was sobbing on the phone, and I could hardly make out his words.

I kept saying soothing things.

He kept talking.

At one point, I said, "This really hurts me."

My son apologized.

I said, "No, no, not you. You haven't hurt me. It's the situation. I'm just trying to think it through."

He said again that I should go for a swim.

I said yeah, maybe I would. I told him I'd pick him up for dinner. He thanked me.

Of course, I don't deserve to be thanked.

I was the mother in this situation. I saw it coming, and I didn't stop it, just like my mother before me.

None of which is anything my son needs to hear.

So I swam.

I played water volleyball for a while.

I let my face burn.

III.

Nobody else is home today. I lower the blinds against the afternoon sun and lie on the hand-made quilt over my bed. Eyes shut.

The phone rings. I almost don't answer, but pick it up, finally. It's Ángela. Miss Angie, who disappears for months on end, then turns up when you least expect it. And who says today that she got a "vibe" from me and thought she should call. Seriously.

She tells me she's been talking to her angels this morning (this is how Ángela -- appropriately named -- thinks and talks), and has asked for heavenly guidance in understanding her work as a filmmaker. She says she feels that she can only produce works about what she knows well, but all she really seems to know is about being used and treated like an object. The angels tell her that she has more to learn, to infuse her work with meaning, because she doesn't need to be making films about women being used in imbalances of power with men.

"I've been playing the Mexican maid and the Mexican whore too long," she finishes. And who can argue with that.

"Me, too," I say. I tell her the whole thing about the ex-boyfriend, and she listens to me saying that I just thought he wasn't being respectful, et al. Then she asks me what I'm not telling her, what the dirt is.

So I go into the stuff about the lying, and the bullshit about how he can't live without cheating, the fears he has about his fragile ego making public appearances unshielded by the visage of media-toned, socially-acceptable, locker-room scrotum stamp of approval "attractiveness." His, of course, not mine, but what difference does  that make.

Ángela rises large and righteous, then. "I'm not even going to be angry with you about what you've put up with," she begins, "because you already know. I  will say that I hope never to meet him, because I just don't want anybody near me whose personal spirit is that low. Face it, babe," she finishes, "he got fucked, and you got screwed."

I laugh, without humor, mostly because it makes me nervous that she's right. I mean: I taught  her all of this. Gack.

We are quiet for a long while.

"Hey," she says, finally, "what do you need?"

I am so taken aback by this simple query, I don't know what to say. She has put no emphasis on any single word or syllable. She just asks. And it occurs to me that nobody has cared to ask me that in a very long time. Another ex, I'm thinking. The one used to say that great thing, when I was upset: What makes it better?

But now? I honestly don't know. So I say, "Hum..." and ponder for long moments, telling myself that the first thing that comes to my mind will be the true thing.

"Reassurance." That's what I say. Quietly.

"What?" She didn't hear me.

"Reassurance?" I repeat, this time unsure of myself.

We talk about how the divorce and custody stuff left me feeling vulnerable and fragile, and how I don't know things anymore. I say I haven't felt this lost and far away from "home" since I was a 14-year-old runaway on the streets in San Diego. It's not as bad now, I say: I do have a place to live. But I don't know where I  belong. And I don't know how to love.

"I am so glad you're rid of him," she says. "I am  so glad you're rid of him. And, if you ever let him treat you like that again, I will go over there -- and I know you don't allow people to slap you -- but I will raise  some kind of ruckus! Listen, mija," she adds, switching to her  curandera guidance-from-above tone, "to the extent that he does not recognize or honor you in your being, to that extent you do not recognize and honor yourself. This is a great opportunity for you to choose again. This whole thing about sex and sexuality ... well, god knows  I don't have the answers ... but I'm really looking forward to celebrating what you learn about ecstasy."

I smile and cradle the phone softly, wanting her to feel my pleasure at her words.

"I'm not trying to go into one of my proselytizing, good-girl Chicanita things here, or persuade you to do anything..." she begins.

I laugh and cut her off, "You always think just because you begin a sentence or a paragraph like that, I won't notice that you're still fucking doing it!"

"Okay, okay," she admits, "so maybe I am. But here's the thing: do you remember how you used to always say 'Caminante, no hay caminos, se hace caminos al andar'?"

"No," I correct her, "I was quoting Gloria Anzaldúa, and it's  puentes, not  caminos. She says, 'Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.'"

"Doesn't matter," Ángela decides, still set on schooling me, "I'm saying it's  caminos. No hay caminos; se hace caminos al caminar. And you have to get ready to go down this path. It's a path you're going to have to make yourself. But you already know that, don't you," she allows.

"Yeah."

"Then there's nothing left but for you to just do it, right? I mean: hear me, mija, you are brilliant. You really are so brilliant..."

"...but I have no common sense, right?"

"That's not what I was going to say. I was going to say that you're brilliant, and nothing should ever be allowed to stand in the way of how you shine. Nothing and nobody. Be rid of him. Move on. Choose again, and this time choose  better. Because  you're better."

I think: Well. Right. Maybe. But I don't say that to her. Instead, I say, "Thank you."

We hang up, and I go out to the pool. Swim the length over and over. Thinking.

I used to live with a man who chose random encounters with unknown people as a way of preening his ego. Young women, single mothers, whatever. Vulnerable people. A man who once picked up a hitch-hiker for the sole purpose of having sex. He swears it wasn't "forced"; clings to the notion that it was "consensual." And that makes it okay, right, because it's all "adults." Age is a big thing. I asked how old she was, this hitch-hiker. He said he thought she was in her early 20s. And why did they have sex in the car on a public street? He says: Because she lived with her parents.

I will say here, once and for all, out-loud and without uncertainty, that I have been that hitch-hiker, that I know that girl, that I have lived that moment, and I  did not know how to give consent.

Because I didn't know how  not to. I didn't know I had a choice.

If they came at me with violence, I knew to fight. But, if all they did was ask, I felt compelled to accede. I gave myself, because I didn't know how  not to.

That was then. I'm decades past it. I don't know the women or men he's picked up. I don't know anything but the rage and disgust inside me.

Was he abusing them? I don't know. The point is: he doesn't know, either.

And that wounds me. Wounds me deeply.

I'm going to get past this, the same way I've gotten past all his tawdry little tales of cheating and lying. I'm going to get past it, because it's not my world, not my life, not my business, not my problem.

I know it didn't happen today. Three or four years ago, he says. Maybe that's true. Whatever.

Today is when it hurts. Today is when I'm 15 all over again. Today is when betrayal feels like an atmosphere in which I simply cannot breathe.

I turn on my back in the water. A cusp of moon hangs over me. I let myself float.

I need things. I want things. I deserve things. Comfort. Safety. Honor.

This is  not it.

Tonight, I want every girl with a thumb to know that, somewhere between sticking it in her mouth and pushing it out on the road, there is the sanctity of self, the wholeness of being one, alone.

Giving that to herself, and to her children. Comfort. Safety. Honor.

I am that girl.

.