Woman's Story

Francine Rodriguez

Description

"The stories of these Latina women's lives depict conflict in gender bias, experiences of exploitation, violence, and powerlessness, sometimes resulting in pain and despair in their turbulent world. But these stories also tell of these women's celebration of life itself that empowers them and gives them the will to sustain. These stories resonate on a deeply emotional level"--

Sujets

• Hispanic and Latino Americans
• Hispanic
• Latina
• Skid Row
• Latino
• Fiction
• Los Angeles

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 19 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692618
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Woman’s Story
 
Also by Francine Rodriguez:
The Fortunate Accident A Woman Like Me
A Woman’s Story
Francine Rodriguez

L AKE D ALLAS , T EXAS
Copyright © 2021 by Francine Rodriguez All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
A Woman’s Story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions Madville Publishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to these publications where stories were first published: “I Still Like Pink” first appeared in Taboos & Transgressions (Madville 2021); “Smiley and Laughing Girl” first appeard in Fleas on the Dog , Vol. 7, 2020.
Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis Cover Art: Created by DaisyArtDecor for International Women’s Day. Licensed through Shutterstock. Author Photo p.237: Joo bin Lim
ISBN: 978-1-948692-60-1 paperback, 978-1-948692-61-8 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941275
T ABLE OF C ONTENTS
Ten Days in May
All the Lonely People
Smiley and Laughing Girl
Mrs. Fonseca
Crossing
Looking for the Reason
I Still Like Pink
He Shuffles When He Walks
He Didn’t Call Back
Undeliverable
About the Author
Ten Days in May
I tried to ignore the terrified look in the old man’s eyes as I threaded the plastic tube down his trachea, while he lay in the narrow white bed with his head positioned so he stared straight up at the ceiling, and his eyes running with tears moved frantically from side to side. I hoped I was on course, because I couldn’t tell if the laryngoscope was working, and I couldn’t see the upper portion of the trachea the way I’d seen it done before. I could hear myself mumbling as I pulled it partially up and tried to hold his tongue aside while I inserted the tube again. Before this week, I wouldn’t have been doing anything like this, a procedure for someone experienced and trained in sticking tubes down people’s throats.
I’d only done it once by myself with Dr. Shirvani watching, but there was nobody to supervise or guide me now. If something went wrong, this man would be breathing in the contents of his stomach. If I went too fast, I’d mess up and have to start again, but if I was too slow, he’d get even less air in his lungs and they wouldn’t be able to use the mechanical ventilator. “Damn,” I muttered to myself, and patted the skinny arm with its translucent white skin under the worn hospital gown, and hoped it was some comfort. I wasn’t sure how old the man was, because like many of the patients here, there was no mention of family in his chart, and even if there was, they wouldn’t be allowed in to visit. Nobody had been allowed since the quarantine was imposed by the government.
Intubation was not something we normally did at this facility. We were really just a storage facility, where patients came to finish healing or to finally die, and we only had a couple of ventilators, and I wasn’t sure if they even worked. It was a horrible process and the only reason we went through it is because we couldn’t move the patients anywhere else. There was no more room in the city’s Intensive Care Units. I hooked up the patient’s catheter and put a wet towel under him to bring down his fever. If he lasted through this round lying on his back, we would turn him over to ventilate the rest of his airway. I loaded up his IV with enough meds to knock him out. It was such a miserable and uncomfortable process that this was the only way the patients tolerated it. I checked his catheter again and wondered how many people he’d exposed before he got here.
“Okay, there you go. They’ll be in to hook up your ventilator real soon, you’ll be okay,” I told him.
He didn’t give any sign he’d heard, just lay there, tears streaming, eyes moving. He must be in a lot of pain, I thought, wishing that he was like the other one I’d handled who had been unconscious by the time it came to this.
I started out the door as Tyson, the orderly, on loan to us from County, wheeled in another bed with a young man lying on his side, his legs in casts, his breath raspy and choking.
“Help me move this over,” Tyson pointed to the bed.
I pushed the old man’s bed further into the corner so they could squeeze the young man’s bed into the remaining space. The room was not really set up for patients. It used to be for storage, but now with no space left on the floor, the custodian had cleaned it out, and we kept the COVID patients there. If they crammed the beds together, it would hold two patients. I didn’t see how all the equipment would fit, but it wasn’t up to me.
I checked the young man’s chart quickly. He was here at Culver Convalescent to recover from two broken legs. He was a county patient, from the city. No mention of an accident. Standing next to him I could see the tattoos on his chest and upper arms: FIRM 22 in large black lettering with something that looked like a badly drawn swastika on his forehead. He was a member of one of the local white neo-Nazi type hate groups. I used to think of them as skinheads, but now I guess they call themselves something else. They were really right wing, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, anti-you-name-it. Anybody who wasn’t white was their enemy.
I moved closer and studied his face. Bad teeth and grayish skin. Probably from speed. He must have been transferred here because they ran out of room at the last place he was hospitalized. His chart said he tested positive for COVID. He probably didn’t come into the system with COVID, but he must have picked it up along the way. His breathing was raspy, and he held onto the sides of the bed as he forced his breaths. His eyes met mine for a moment and I saw him glaring as he watched me. He was young, too, I thought. His first name was Ryan, so I figured he must have a nice white family somewhere wondering about him. But maybe they gave up on him like my mother gave up on my younger brother Fernando. Fernando had gang tattoos too, but his tattoos said “ M13 ,” a violent Latino gang that was gaining new members every day. You probably heard on the news about how they lured a rival’s girlfriend to the woods and took turns stabbing her to death.
I haven’t seen Fernando since he got sent up. At first my mom visited him every week, making the three-hour trip by bus, but now she only goes once in a while. She says Fernando has more jailhouse tattoos and complains if she doesn’t put enough money on his books. I looked back at Ryan giving him my best “mad dog stare,” to show him I was nobody’s bitch, as I rang for Dr. Shirvani to authorize the LVN to set up the ventilator if he thought it was necessary. Personally, I wouldn’t waste one on him if I had a choice. To me, he was just trash. The same trash that called my brother and me names and threw rocks at us when my mother sent us to a white school in a neighborhood where we were out of place. She had this idea that if we were with white kids, we’d be taught something and not just passed through. I got through school because I started fighting back. Those white girls were no match for me. I pulled hair, scratched, and punched, whatever was necessary. I spent a lot of time in the principal’s office, but they started leaving me alone.
Fernando wasn’t like me. Tender-hearted from an early age, he cried a lot, and I ended up fighting some of the kids for him, just so they’d get off his back. I guess that just made it worse for him, because they called him a sissy through elementary school. Fernando had trouble reading and stopped school in the ninth grade. He was an exceptional artist, though, and liked to sit at the kitchen table drawing for hours while I got into fights in the street. I still have a couple of his drawings at home. There’s one he did of my kids in charcoal before they sent him up. It looks like something you would see in a museum. I don’t think he draws anymore where he is now.
Culver Convalescent isn’t a perfect place for a nurse to work. Located on the island of Bridgeview, it’s a ferry ride away from the city, but the ferry only runs at eight o’clock in the morning and five o’clock at night. If you miss the ferry leaving the island, the only place to stay is the ratty Motel 8 off the main highway, unless you want to drive the badly lit and crater-ridden main road to the decaying bridge that connects to the city. The bridge is mostly pockets of crumbling concrete linked together to form a deck without guardrails that connects the island to the city by a thin finger of land. Since the tax base moved from the island long ago, there’s no money to repair the bridge and most people bypass the road. Too many cars have veered off and ended up in the deep water filthy with chemicals from spills or dumping at the tire factory. I make the journey slowly every night across that bridge on my way to work, worrying that one dark night it will collapse and throw me into the dark putrid water that sits so still I don’t think I’ve ever seen even a ripple—like it’s waiting for me.
Nobody with anything going for them lives on the island. The white population started leaving in the early eighties and thirty years later the residents are more than ninety percent Black and Hispanic. The ones who have jobs mostly do assembly work at the factory that manufactures truck tires at the far end of the island. The smell of burning rubber rides on the breeze during the day and you could swear you taste rubber in your food every time you swallow.
The residents here who don’t work at the plant work at the local market or the several liquor stores, take-out places, government offices, the two schools, or the bank. The remainder work as CNAs, LVNs, cooks, or janitors who double as orderlies at Culver.