Fiction | Short Story

The Moon’s Navel

“You’re Mexican!” he said a little too enthusiastically, like I was just what he’d been looking for. I worried that he was going to put me in his museum or something.

I followed Dan through a series of fluorescent-lit hallways into the room where the artifacts were kept. I immediately distrusted the room. It looked too much like what I imagined a secret room in a museum might look like, home to a silver-haired woman in a white lab coat and face mask, blue latex gloves on her hands. She was picking over a relic—a red tunic that looked a thousand years old, its ropy edges frayed with the centuries.

“A bit busy back here,” she mused.

“Sue,” Dan said. “This is Raúl.”

I never cared for the way Dan said my name, always digging into the bowl of the u like there was a compliment on his Spanish buried in there. I didn’t even speak Spanish myself.

“Hello, Raúl,” the woman said, blinking at me like I had come specifically to distract her. She placed emphasis on my name precisely where Dan had, as if I had once had a stern conversation with Dan along the lines of, “Pronounce it this way, you stupid gringo,” and she wanted to respect that.

“Hi,” I said. Her obligations to me being met, Sue dived right back into the red tunic that was splayed out on the table like a surgery patient.

“Incan,” she offered kindly from its depths while Dan beamed over us, as if this was going exactly how he’d hoped.

I was annoyed, but I couldn’t say why. Dan didn’t usually grate on me. He was a soft-spoken redhead from Minnesota; polite, tolerant, eager to correct life’s little inconveniences. But whenever it came to his work, he would swell with a smug authority that irked me.

“Wow,” was all I could think to say. I felt it my duty to be awed by every object Dan showed me. In all earnestness, the tunic was a rare sight. It was a mystery, Sue explained without looking at me, because the pattern on the tunic shouldn’t have appeared for another few centuries.

“It’s like writing,” she went on. “Every line means something. We can see here, from this pattern, that the person who wore it was important. Here, we can tell what city she was from.”

It was my first time visiting Dan at work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was something he had teased from the jump, when we first met at the diversity conference months ago, and then again during our first date at a dive bar on the Lower East Side.

“I’d love to show you the Met sometime.”

It was my first year living in New York City and I was keen to take him up on it. I remembered visiting the Met with my mother as a kid, flying out from Texas to New York, and being dwarfed by everything. We went to the Met and perused the halls. My mother pulled that face she made whenever she took in finer things, like a discriminating bird of prey, separating good from bad with her beak.

“Fabulous,” she’d occasionally say, standing before a painting.

I was nine then, and twenty-five when I climbed out of the subway station on a sweltering afternoon to meet Dan at a side entrance of the museum, a lanyard with his smiling face on it around his neck. I was interested in pulling back the curtain on things that once mystified me. I hoped to make the Met, labyrinthine and imposing, miniature with knowledge.

We left Sue to her work of surgically placing the Incan tunic in time. Dan guided me through the stacks. He opened long, slim drawers to reveal obsidian daggers, jade beads, clay shards of pottery, and other important knickknacks.

“Wow,” I’d say. “Oh, wow.”

My abuela had just died when I met Dan at the diversity conference. It was winter then. I had also just moved to New York from DC after a larger company bought the blogging startup where I worked. I was given the option to move to keep my job. Soon after I moved, the entire team was fired, leaving me to freelance until I found something more permanent.

One of my part-time employers offered to send me to the conference where CEOs, businesspeople, and managing editors were gathered to talk about how hiring gay people was important, or something. The staff writer who was assigned to go got sick and my schedule was embarrassingly open.

At the conference, Dan approached me while I was seeking refuge by the refreshments table. He put a warm hand in mine and shook it. “I think I’ve read your stuff before,” he said. “I like it.” He was tall, freckled, sharply dressed, but not so sharp that he took events like these too seriously; a gingham shirt tucked into a pair of chinos, pointy dress shoes.

I wondered, as I often wondered upon meeting a man, if he was going to be my husband. I thought if we got married, I could take refuge in his accent, his gentle eyes, and his body, which, he would often brag, ran hot “like a furnace.” I thought we could cuddle and watch TV together until I died.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

He told me he was the junior curator of the Mesoamerican section at the Met. He collected pre-Columbian artifacts and coordinated how they were displayed for maximum clarity and impact. “A museum is a story,” he said in a way that told me he’d said it many times before and liked the way it sounded. He was at the diversity conference to help him be sensitive to the various communities that passed through his museum: young, non-white, non-English speakers, the poor. “I find it helpful.”

I imagined Dan, artifacts strewn before him on a stretch of blue tarp, arranging the jigsaw into a cohesive unit, using clues like the soil the objects had been found in, the types of noses the masks had. I’d never considered there was more than one way to present items in a museum. I thought you just sort of put everything out there.

“Cool,” I said. “I’m gay and brown and I was forced to be here.”

Dan laughed. “Not having fun?”

“I hate it,” I said. Dan was satisfyingly startled. I considered marrying him again, just to sporadically unsettle him throughout our lives.

“Oh!” he said. “Why is that?”

I had no good reason to hate the conference. I could have told him I thought it was inauthentic, that it was rich people congratulating themselves.

“I’m not feeling well,” I said instead. “I had to wake up so early.”

It was easy to talk to Dan. He was eager to accommodate everything that came out of my mouth: “I moved to New York and I got fired, like, two weeks later. Yeah, it’s OK. My sleep schedule is screwed. I keep waking up at noon. I’m trash; it’s fine. I’m the only Mexican in my neighborhood. Everybody is Puerto Rican.”

“You’re Mexican!” he said a little too enthusiastically, like I was just what he’d been looking for. I worried that he was going to put me in his museum or something. But he recovered nicely, and we exchanged phone numbers. I agreed; I would love to see the Met.

*

Abuela fell and died. She’d been at an age where “she fell” told the whole story. Gravity had taken her like a crocodile takes a gazelle at the water’s edge with a swift kerplunk. The way my mother said it over the phone, you’d think being dead were some kind of childish fit Abuela was throwing. I made the necessary arrangements.

Abuela fell and died. She’d been at an age where “she fell” told the whole story.

I hadn’t been back to Wichita Falls in years, not since I’d moved up to DC. I looked at it with new eyes through the windows of my mother’s car after she picked me up from the airport. All the buildings were shorter than I remembered; everything was spaced farther apart and worse.

We passed the Michoacana Meat Market where Abuela would leave my cousins and me in the van while she picked up chicken feet and livers. In the summer, she’d leave the sliding door open. We passed the panadería where she would fish around for coins in the cup holder and let us get whatever we could get in little plastic bags, crumbly conchas and guava empanadas.

How is anyone from here? I wondered.

Mom had this way of driving; she always clutched the wheel like the car was careening out of control, her eyes dead ahead. She was wearing sunglasses, Dior knockoffs, but good ones. She had recently chopped off her long black hair to rest just below her ears, silver roots. She wore a lavender cashmere sweater over her shoulders, the limp arms crossed neatly over her chest. It was too hot out for it, but there it was.

“She sure did collect a bunch of junk,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

She had looked me over once after meeting me at the airport. I was wearing my Brooklyn attire: black shirt, black boots, black studs in my ears that she eyed like they were to blame for absolutely everything.

“Will you sell the piano?” I asked, a frivolous question to take up space.

“God, no,” she said. “It sounds haunted. Try it.”

I’d forgotten how to talk to Mom at some point. I hadn’t gone back to Texas for her wedding with Paul. I couldn’t afford the flight, I’d said. He had come up with her once to visit me in New York. He was an older white guy, with a beer gut and bright blue eyes, who spoke to me with a rugged, masculine solidarity that I hated.

“Women,” he groaned, nodding at Mom’s two overstuffed suitcases in their hotel room.

“Sure,” I said. That was the last time we talked.

Along the drive, the shops gave way to dilapidated houses, rotting porches with busy gardens, chain-link fences, concrete Guadalupe figures keeping vigil over the flowers. Here and there, small children cleared out of the street ahead of our approach and watched us with mute curiosity.

“We won’t be long,” Mom assured me, as if I had complained, but I hadn’t. She parked on the curb in front of Abuela’s old house and told me to be careful opening the door. “Don’t scratch it.”

Mom used to walk with some embarrassment through the barrio. I could never tell from which direction it came, whether she was ashamed of being from there or guilty for leaving it. But Abuela’s death, or maybe Paul, changed that. She walked with purpose up to the old house. It had nothing to do with her anymore.

The inside of Abuela’s house was how I remembered, but smaller. Not smaller in size, but in potency—here was the pink plastic step stool she’d set me down on whenever I acted up. She’d grab me by the hips and plant me on it, snot running down my nose, my eyes red and puffy.

“You quit that,” she’d say gruffly about my crying.

The stool now sat in the corner, utterly diminished. I thought it was avoiding me.

“Let me know if you want anything,” Mom joked.

There was nothing to want. What jewelry Abuela had, we would pawn and put toward Mom’s new houseguest, Abuelo. Mom had insisted he move in with her and Paul in their leafy neighborhood across town. She was certain gravity was still lurking around the house, waiting to take him too.

Mom’s block heels made vehement clacks on the linoleum as she stalked the house, searching for anything worth anything. I wandered around, put my hand to the brick. I checked Abuela’s sewing room, creepy dolls and yards of fabric, and then the living room, a wood burning stove and a folding card table.

This was where Abuela would pray her rosary every morning, an exercise I could never wrap my head around. I couldn’t imagine praying in my free time outside of Catholic school. I couldn’t imagine doing anything Abuela had done: saving every little scrap of food for mulch for her plants, scratching lotto tickets, speaking Spanish. Who was this alien person that had raised me?

My dad was a history professor who’d absented himself from our lives and moved back to Houston when I was eight. “Some white guy,” I called him to my friends, which Mom always hated.

She was a front desk secretary at the smoked meat factory in town. She was well-liked there. I used to fake being sick at school sometimes and she’d come pick me up and sit me down behind the desk to wait for her to finish her shift. She would access a different personality there with her coworkers. She’d gently bully them, say things like, “Don’t go working yourself to death” to the men taking their lunch breaks. They’d smile and make like they were going to smack her, and she’d throw her head back and laugh.

When I was little, Mom would drop me off at Abuela’s house every morning before work. Sometimes, I’d spend the night. Abuela would make me tortillas and sweet tea and give me longhorn cheese to nibble on, then she’d yell at me in Spanish, call me names, and tell me I was spoiled.

“Cara de nopal,” she’d spit at me. I didn’t know until years later what it meant: “cactus face,” an insult that amounted to, “you look like a Mexican.”

How stupid, I thought. It was her face too.

I recalled a particularly bad afternoon when I was six, walking into Abuela’s Pepto-pink bathroom with its pink bathtub and pink tiles.

That afternoon, I got into a fight with one of Abuela’s many cats, Squirrel. She’d named her cats after random English words she liked: Squirrel, Kettle, Fuchsia, Pineapple, and Debris. I was holding Squirrel and rocking him like a baby in Abuela’s front yard when he slashed my face with his claw, leaving what would become a small but permanent scar. I threw him away from me. Abuela only saw that part, the throwing.

How stupid, I thought. It was her face too.

Abuela loved her cats. She made a point to love them loudly and in front of us, like she did with everything that wasn’t her family. She loved the weatherman. She loved the woman who worked at the cafeteria, Abigail. “She’s so pur-ty, mija,” she’d tell my mother, who always rolled her eyes. “Really! Honest. She is.” She loved the high school friends I would bring home. “What’s-his-name,” she’d say, pretending to forget. “Michael? Oh, mijo. Michael is so shar-ming.” Charming. She loved a specific goose she liked to look at when she sat in the park by the pond. “I saw Lady Godiva,” she’d tell us proudly, her name for the goose.

I, uncherished, no Michael, no Lady Godiva, threw Squirrel, who was cherished, right in front of her. I’d never seen her so angry. She flung open the screen door with such force that it bounced back with wiry, clanging thunder. She picked up her long skirt to get to me faster, rabies in her eyes. I screamed and ran away, went around her and made it back into her house, where I booked it to the pink bathroom and locked the door behind me.

But, like so much else in her house, the lock didn’t work. The door opened violently, Abuela standing there, holding a space heater by the cord like a medieval flail. I shrank into a corner of the bathroom and buried my head in my knees while Abuela unleashed a torrent of contempt on me. I waited for the space heater to crash down on my head. But it didn’t.

When I finally dared to look up through my arms, my eyes landed on the gold necklace hanging around Abuela’s neck. It was her favorite necklace, the one she wore every day. It was Mother Cabrini, a missionary from Italy. Mother Cabrini locked her eyes with mine as she jangled about on Abuela’s neck, staring at me with the austere gaze of Catholic saints.

“Mother Cabrini is always watching out for me,” Abuela would often brag, holding her up. She claimed the necklace had been bestowed upon her at the top of a mountain that she had climbed in Mexico. There was a church up there and a woman in a veil had put the necklace in Abuela’s open hand, then closed it for her—or so Abuela had said. Abuela said a lot of things.

I didn’t really believe any of that. But some part of me did believe that Mother Cabrini saved me from a space heater to the head.

“Are you OK in there?” Mom called from outside the bathroom. “I’m sweating my ass off.”

*

Dan and I cut through the tourists as we made our way to the main exhibit, an aura of privilege separating my experience from theirs. These were people who would never see the hallways I had just seen. Dan whisked me past relics, plaques with explanations in different languages. We stopped to admire a wooden figure of a man splintered in half.

“It probably represented an enemy tribe,” Dan explained. “They were ritualistically broken before battle.”

“Like a pep rally,” I said. “Sounds fun.”

Dan showed me smoking pipes, pots sculpted in the likeness of various gods, tools of all kinds. I thought about how these objects once lay around as everyday items in the past. They must have been dull as a coffee maker in a modern kitchen back then.

But here they were, suspended and holy, separated from the world from which they had been plucked by thick panels of glass. They must have known everything researchers like Sue were dying to know. But they didn’t speak. They slept instead, out of contempt for their captors.

“Do you know what ‘Mexico’ means?” Dan asked in front of a ragged rock sculpture of a deity.

“Yes,” I said. “The Mexica were a tribe. They were the Aztecs.”

He grinned that knowing grin that meant he was about to annoy me with something. “True,” he said. “But not the whole truth.”

“Oh?” I said, prompting him.

“It’s a fun mystery,” he said. “No one is completely sure, but Miguel León Portilla—he’s a famous anthropologist—he says it means ‘the moon’s belly button.’” He was serious when he said it, respect in his voice for the poetry of it all.

“That’s not real,” I said. “Stop making things up.”

“‘The moon’s navel,’” he went on without me. “Isn’t it crazy how a word can be right in front of you, but can mean something you never knew?”

The moon’s navel.

I imagined a huge, ropy umbilical cord climbing into space. I imagined it being severed by a scalpel, by a doctor’s hand wearing one of the blue latex gloves Sue had been wearing, primordial juices scattering into space in little liquid orbs.

I felt supremely stupid, calling myself Mexican all this time without even knowing what the word meant. I wondered if Dan had privately corrected me back at the diversity conference when I’d told him that was what I was. I tried to remember if he had smirked back then. And why did Dan, from Minnesota of all places, get to know this? Why not me? Why hadn’t I?

“That’s pretty,” I said.

Dan picked up on my displeasure, though I didn’t know where it might have shown itself. He pivoted.

He showed me a blue pot to honor Tlaloc, the rain god. Dan pronounced these Aztec words, with their x’s and tl’s, so confidently that I had to assume he was correct. He showed me clay houses that depicted everyday pre-Columbian life.

They didn’t speak. They slept instead, out of contempt for their captors.

“The bottom floor is for ancestors,” he said. “They buried them under the house like they still lived there.” The figures on the bottom floor, ghostly white, were standing up.

“Gross,” I said.

I’d always been uncomfortable with the project of ancestry. I didn’t like the notion of being beholden to any people’s traditions or way of seeing themselves. Maybe I’d gotten that from Abuela, who’d come from Aguascalientes in Mexico and then made it her life’s work to sieve out anything in her kids that reminded her of where she’d come from—Spanish, recipes, poverty, these were things that had followed her across the border. She saw them buried.

There’d been no formal strategy for this. She never chastised me, for example, for the times I tried to practice Spanish with her. She didn’t actively seek out and extinguish any traditions. She simply did not nourish them, and so they died.

Dan showed me a panel, a Catholic triptych with two saints painted on the flanks. They were bearded and stiff in that stained glass way, bags under bulging eyes, long robes with thin, brittle halos around their heads. This was a rare find, Dan said, because the technique used to make it was lost shortly after the Spanish arrived in Mexico. Only the elite Aztec artisans of the day knew how to do it.

“What’s that?” I asked.

The Aztecs had plucked feathers, hundreds and thousands of tiny feathers from hummingbirds and parrots and fashioned a mosaic out of them. The Spanish then painted over the feathers, giving the piece an iridescent sheen.

“These are feathers?” I asked, stupid in the mouth.

“Yep!” Dan affirmed.

I imagined hummingbirds being picked from the sky like jittering, twig-beaked berries. I imagined Aztecs, forced at gunpoint to pluck the unwilling little bodies naked. Thick strokes of black paint buried the colors; two saints, one on each side, oversaw the burying, which seemed to me to be an ongoing process. The piece was centuries old.

*

Dan and I broke up for boring reasons. Over drinks, he told me he would be in Oaxaca for the next few months on an assignment and I immediately knew our relationship wouldn’t survive that. He was, as always, patient and understanding. He even sent me pictures from Mexico; little faces and animals fashioned out of gold.

“Do you remember that necklace Abuela had?” I asked Mom over the phone one afternoon. “Mother Cabrini?”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “La Mother Cabrini.” She said the name dolefully, like Mother Cabrini had been a past tormentor. I wondered if she too had been threatened with a space heater. “What about her?”

We’d salvaged next to nothing from Abuela’s house. Paul had people come in to junk most of it. Abuela left me her tortilla set, which was just a big hunk of wood. I didn’t want to check it on my bag back to New York after the funeral. I had no room and I thought it would break. But, as time went on, I realized I did want something, some heirloom from Abuela. The problem was, she didn’t really have anything for me.

“Could you, uh, find it for me?” I asked sheepishly, as if I were asking for Abuela’s bones in a box. “Unless you pawned it.”

“I’ll look,” Mom said noncommittally.

I found myself anticipating an update. I did wonder why I wanted something from Abuela so badly in the first place. My memories of her weren’t necessarily warm. I never even spoke with her after I moved away. But I had been overcome with the strange urge to declare, through an enduring object that had outlived Abuela and would outlive myself, “I am, I was, and I will be.”

Mom texted me, “Found it!”

A week later, a small cardboard box was waiting for me in the entryway of my apartment building. I ferried it up to my room and waited a few hours before opening it, as if something final might happen once I held the necklace in my hands. I ought to take in the world as it was while I still could, just in case.

I took my keys and slashed the packing tape. I opened one end of the box and slid the necklace out. It landed with a light, disappointing weight in my hand. Plastic.