The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

by Josephine Mitchell

We invited the state to our wedding, the defunct state of California, and it gave an awful toast. We never should’ve invited it, but we were in love and we didn’t care who knew it. We got married at the top of the apartment building stairs because love was flying when the world below was drowning, plus it was cheaper to have the wedding at home. We got married because we’d been together for a while and what else do you do? We got married for the wedding presents: a book of citrus postcards—in color!

We used watches instead of rings because time seemed like the most precious thing to us. We didn’t know how long we’d been together (maybe it was thirty-seven years?) or would be together (maybe that was thirty-seven years?) so the watches were meant to connect us; clock us to something bigger.

One of our watches broke on our honeymoon, but it wasn’t a sign. It wasn’t. One of us sweated out the mechanics while we were having sex. Our love could stop time—that was the sign. But, now it’s easy to see, signs are a honeymoon thing. And our love didn’t stop anything. It couldn’t stop our spines from cracking like old plastic bottles, couldn’t stop our eggs from crusting over.

We must’ve gotten married because we were young, resourceful, uncharted, beautiful. Like the west when it was capitalized. Or like California now, when you look past the sludge, the disease. History can be circular like that.

The first time we met, one of us had just given up on religion and their old marriage, the other was really into horoscopes, destiny and using people. We were equally ignored and bruised, but in different shades. And then, one night we ended up together, one of us was on a bender going south, the other headed east unsure about themselves. We picked the lock to a house with bone white sheets, copper pots, a water filtration system and a cabinet of mescal. In the kitchen, we ate popcorn and spent hours slamming the cabinets that caught themselves on these special hinges that closed the doors with a soft pfff, despite our savagery. We yelled, “That’s what money can do!” again and again, but with different emphases. “That’s what money can do!” “That’s what money can do!” “That’s what money can do!” That was a lovely home. But the owners came back and we slipped out along the tennis courts. There weren’t any stars out. We never got caught.

The next week, we found the complex in Little Italy and didn’t mind the curvature of its structure. It seemed Roman to us, but everything seemed a little Roman to us at the time, like Rome when it was falling. We tried all the doors in the building and the best place was by far the ninth floor because it was empty, high up and no one would try and break in, exhausted by too many stairs to commit battery or robbery. We moved in together.

The apartment was big. Two large rooms and a wall made of mirror with only hairline cracks so you could still see your entire self without being too divided. We would slow dance in front of it. We would get really drunk, sloppy-kiss and say to each other’s reflection, “This is what the 1960s were like.” But we didn’t know that for sure, maybe it was the 1860s we meant.

Remember how we found, by the apartment’s defunct guardhouse, a stash of eggs, chicken eggs, a neighbor must’ve been trying to hide? More than six dozen. We hadn’t seen eggs in years. We didn’t want to be found out, so we ate them over the course of five days, all of them. Didn’t leave the apartment, we shared them, thirty-six eggs a piece: scrambled, in tacos, fried, migas, sunny side up, poached, rancheros, hard-boiled, burritoed, raw, over-easy, deviled. The yolks were viscous suns rising in our kitchen, setting in our gullets. We were full and smelly and for nights we’d awaken each other with cooing farts like we were reaching out in our sleep for the other’s hand to hold. “Come here, baby,” said our guts.

Once, we had a party and some couple asked us what we thought love was and we said getting home and turning the lock and hearing the other in the house, or already being in the house, hearing the lock turn and knowing the other had just arrived home. Either way, that was love: the sound of a lock unlocking.

The other couple said that was bullshit.

And we didn’t know what to make of that because we were being sincere, we were being earnest. And we were sharing our bucket wine and made them chili and so I think we changed our answer to something about fucking so no one would be satisfied.

When we had sex in the beginning, we imagined we were animals eating on each other. Not domesticated animals, tricked into love with treats and handshakes, but wild animals following an instinct not to bite through vein. Maybe that’s what love is—you feast, but not enough to break the major arteries, just the minor ones, enough to get your face bloody.

Once we woke up holding hands. Remember that trash-packed mattress? How unbearable and hard and good for our backs it was, even though it left inflamed circles on our hips when we spooned. That’s got to be how we got bursitis. We scavenged red sheets which seemed passionate, but the blanket was yellow and it looked like a ketchup and mustard bed more than a bed of passion. We loved that bed more than we should have. We ate in bed a lot, didn’t we? We didn’t have a table.

One of us got scurvy. One of us had dysentery. One of us had Hep A. One of us had malaria, but which one had which disease? One of us had a chance to eat steak, one of us artichoke, but which one of us was it? Things were easy that way—inseparable.

And then, in the last few years, we asked each other not to touch us, skin felt clammy and unnatural. Sex was off the table, the table we never owned. We didn’t have sex unless one of us was about to explode and sometimes we didn’t even then. Instead we threw burritos at the walls, their innards exploding onto that big mirror. It was the frijoles, not us, that cracked it too far apart, made it useless. We listened to angry jazz on the cassettes we pilfered from the dump. We once banged our heads against the doorjambs until bruises developed below our hairlines. We disappeared, separately, over a Christmas weekend and came back like nothing was out of the ordinary, as if nothing had happened besides the horrendous hangover like stitches replacing our eyebrows. In the stairwell, we said, “If you insist, we can talk about it,” so we didn’t talk about
it.

One last good memory: for one of our birthdays we made wine and paper flowers and the sunset that day was so pink through the pollution we called it a grapefruit evening and we said we should call all our lazy Sunday afternoons grapefruit evenings.

We had that book of citrus postcards for reference.

It was a good thing there were six color postcards. Easy to split. One of us took the kumquat, orange, and lemon. The other the blood orange, lime, and grapefruit. It turned into a fight though, a fight over depictions of citrus. In the end, we ripped up all the postcards.

It’s been months without communicating and our separate languages are crystalizing, right angling into themselves, impenetrable. When are we going to figure all this out civilly? Without throwing burritos? Maybe this separation is temporary? We’re both thinking it. This is what we need to do to have something stronger later. Maybe we can still be good friends, good neighbors, good roommates even? Maybe we’ll never move on to other lovers, our loyalty stuck in neutral, our hearts plateauing. Maybe we’re not meant to be together, but beside each other.

Maybe that’s more beautiful.

Maybe that’s deluded. Or is it diluted?

We can’t understand each other anymore. We live in the same apartment still (it’s a big space. Who can afford to move? Who’s in good enough health for that?) so we sledgehammered another entrance and divided the place with a wall of cardboard. We each get a bedroom and half the mirror we broke. We can’t hear each other through the wall, surprisingly. We draw on the cardboard because we like the sound of crayons on the corrugated ribbing, so at least there’s some type of noise emanating from our division. We think we might draw the same thing, but we don’t know for sure.

Let’s admit it, we were good together. We were ourselves, bolstered, something better than the singles of us. But when we ripped up the postcards, did we see how the grapefruit was sectioned perfectly into its self-contained pieces, like this was a natural thing?

Today one of us got mugged by a neighbor on the third floor of the stairwell—the new neighbors say they couldn’t understand us, didn’t recognize us and won’t allow us to enter the complex anymore, even though we’re all squatters. There was a meeting about it. In the stairwell where we got married. Only one of us could attend the meeting, because the other was walled out, on the street, in the water-logged gutters.

The meeting was short. Democracy quick when it’s only afforded to a few.

They all said it was you. They didn’t understand you, they didn’t recognize you, they won’t let you in anymore.

I voted, too.

The apartment will feel big without you there. Can’t you see it from my side? I’ll pace circles through it. Try and make it more lived in, more mine. I have to move on somehow.

Josephine Mitchell is the 2021-2023 scholar-in-residence at The University of Houston's Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Flyway Journal, Boneshaker, and The Contemporary Art Museum-Vancouver. She is a teacher of creative writing in Houston, Texas. She’s originally from San Diego and she is at work on a novel-in-stories set there entitled Fuck You, El Niño.