RUBBER MASK OF HER OWN FACE
Grove Press UKJuly 2021Selected by Barbara Epler
Francisco Goldman wields the past and the present like a pair of scissors, cutting new, hypnotic, crimsonbright patterns out of the very fabric of his large heart. There is the past with family, adolescence, first love, teenage desire, loss, racism (vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Latino bullying), which all wells up like blood, irrepressible, flooding the present. Our hero – and the author’s alter ego – Francisco Goldberg is an American writer and journalist investigating the horrors of the massacres in Guatemala, his mother’s homeland. He grew up in a working-class, deeply racist suburb of Boston, confused by his split identities – Jewish-Catholic, white-brown – and in fear of his violent, unpredictable father. After years of living in Mexico City, Goldberg has moved back to New York City and to a new love, but Boston and the past, in the form of his beloved mother and Arlene, his first girlfriend, beckon him back for visits, which revive those waves of love, pain, and humiliation. Goldman’s ability to plumb life’s intensity is outstanding and the prose of Monkey Boy grabs you and doesn’t let you go. — Barbara Epler
Making out with Arlene meant I was going to have a girlfriend, I was sure of it. She was going away to camp soon, and I was headed into the underachiever program. We only had to make it through summer and by fall we’d be discovering love and sex together in the woods after school, over at each other’s houses when no one else was home. We’d stand making out on street corners oblivious to passing traffic like the teenage couples you saw all over our town, talking and laughing with their foreheads touching. Maybe by Thanksgiving we’d even lose our virginity together, like only a few of our classmates, not including Ian Brown, supposedly already had. When I got to school that Monday morning, just before the homeroom bell rang, it seemed like everybody was waiting for me, though that really couldn’t be true, there couldn’t have been that many seventh and ninth graders waiting for me. What I do remember is stepping through the doors into the wide lobby of the cafeteria and hearing howls and shrieks of excitement, laughter and shouts about a monkey and a banana. I saw Arlene standing between Ian Brown and his best friend, Jake Rosen, our middle school’s football star even as an eighth grader and Ian was holding her by the bicep. Arlene’s face was weirdly distorted, like a rubber mask of her own face hanging in a tree, her usually sweetly shy smile replaced by a grimace-grin, as if she were about to explosively sneeze. Her hands flew up as if to pull that mask off, and she turned and fled, Ian spinning to watch, her friend Betty Nicholson chasing after her.
Supposedly, Arlene had said that when she was making out with me, she’d felt like a banana being chomped on by a monkey. That joke electrified the school. But I’ve never believed it was Arlene’s joke. It just didn’t make any sense to me that she would have said that. I think it was Ian who made it up and that he and Jake told everyone it was Arlene. In all the classes I went to that morning, I elicited snickers, sharp grins of malice, looks that mixed pity and hilarity, a few just pitying. Kids made banana-eating gestures when they saw me coming in the corridors or made screechy monkey sounds, some jouncing their hands under their armpits. In one class after the next, I sat stiffly in my seat as if trapped behind the steering wheel in an invisible car crash, that dazed sensation of wondering: Is this really happening? I felt as if I’d walked out of myself, leaving behind an eviscerated container. That horrible sensation of a vacated hollowness that follows one of those enormous disappointments that can seem to take over and penetrate everything. Whenever I have a day like that, I remember my first kiss. ◉