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“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.

OGUN SIZE:

So she tells Oya she pregnant with Shango’s baby. Just walked up to Oya with them hips you know and was like my name Shun, I got his baby so you ain’t shit to him. And see Oya can’t have no kids. Everybody know that. Now she scared she gone lose Shango. Which would be good if she left the nigga… But she can’t see that, nah she got to show him how much she willing to do for Shango. How far she willing to go for Shango. So she can’t give him no child, she cut off her ear.

OSHOOSI SIZE:

What!

OGUN SIZE:

Put it in a bowl and walked it to him while he was watching TV at her house. She ain’ scream or nothing… Cut off her ear and gave it to him. Say, I don’t want nobody but you. Say this mark me as yours…

Two marriages:

            Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.

            Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.

“He has something of mine,” the man said.

With that, she turned to look at him. “Who are you?” she finally demanded. “Sergio called me to come pick him up, not you.”

“You don’t know me?” His voice pitched higher, edging toward frustration, maybe anger. “You don’t know who I am?”

“No,” she finally said. “I don’t.”

“He’s got my heart,” the man said, melodramatically holding his hands across his chest, but he sneered a bit when he said it. “He’s got a lot of things I want back.”

Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.

The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess.

Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.