Dry Your Smile by Robin; Morgan

Yetta’s face.
    â€œGet out!” she yelled. “You’re coarse and vulgar and ignorant! You’ll never in a million years know who I am! I don’t need any of you! Get out! ”
    To her amazement, Yetta obeyed. She watched her older sister, livid with insult, gather up her belongings and huff to the door.
    â€œMomma was right to curse you, Hokhmah! You’re a crazy woman, a—a snake , an ungrateful—”
    â€œAnd stay out! Forever!”
    She went. She actually went.
    Alone in the room, Hokhmah felt an exhilaration of freedom thrill through her. Then the fear struck, harder than Yetta’s hand against her face. And with it came the next sweep of pain, drawing her down into herself, into a dark world lit only by flares rupturing along every nerve, a world where now only her own consciousness, her own voice, could keep her from going mad.
    Oh … It’s fading again, thank God.
    Oh no … oh somebody help , I peed all over myself in that last one, didn’t even know it, couldn’t even feel it.
    God this is so humiliating!
    Where in hell is that—
    â€œNurse!”
    Why me? Perché me rimunari cosi? Why did this have to happen to me? Just because I wanted something different from them? Things they never even knew about me … In Mexico, that time … for Momma and all of them I left him. Strange beautiful man. Wanted to make love to me. Sent me flowers. They never even knew what I could have done, didn’t, for their sake. And for Your sake, damn You, God. Te amo , he kept whispering to me, sitting there in that sidewalk café with those little mosaic tables and the candlewax dripping down the bottle. I didn’t know what to say back to him. I could feel myself getting wet and I thought how funny I must’ve got my period early or something so I got up and went to the ladies’ room but there wasn’t anything except me being wet. What in hell did I know? I was seventeen. I wanted him to love me and I didn’t want to lose him or make him mad at me. So romantic he was. It was like fire, like a brand, where he touched my elbow, steering me through the crowds. His handprint on my elbow, under my short sleeve … But I didn’t. I remembered how I’d hurt her about the singing and so I didn’t. He never even got mad at me, just such a pitiful smile when I told him I couldn’t. I cried. He kissed my hand, gently. His lips were like moths. That’s when he gave it to me, the turquoise bracelet. He took it out of his pocket, wrapped in bright red tissue paper. Wrists like a Mayan princess, that’s what he said. These wrists, swollen like my ankles have been for months. These wrists.
    How funny, there’s tiny crescents, half moons in a row where the fortune tellers say the life line is. What are those, in my palms?
    Oh, I know.
    Just where I’ve been digging my nails in, making fists without knowing it, I guess, when the pain peaks.
    That’s why you’ve got to grip the bedrails …
    There was a young crescent moon that other night. He was the right one, I thought. Not some half-Indian with a smile like … slow lava. But when he touched me with his surgeon’s fingers and reached for me in the night like I was life itself, he could make my breath catch and hold and explode like—
    Oh Momma, here comes the pain again!
    Momma, Momma …
    Linda , the other one said linda it means beautiful but I never did it no I was the best daughter …
    Momma make it stop!
    Ah … it’s dying down.
    Finally, ah …
    My hands , so cramped, never dared let go of the bedrails …
    â€œ Nurse , goddammit, come give me something!”
    Nobody hears, nobody comes. Maybe nobody remembers I’m in here. Maybe—
    But the door—
    â€œWho are you? ”
    Stands in the doorway, staring. A schwarze in a bathrobe, just like that, out of nowhere.
    â€œWho in hell are