The Skirt
In an old photo, my aunt Rosalva sits on the grass. Her full, circle skirt spreads like a confection around her, a rosette on a birthday cake for a thousand guests.
She’s posed like a Mexican calendar girl – one of the chicas provocativas of the 40s and 50s. On her calendar, the pages of the months would be torn off to September, the month she was born, the end of summer and the onset of autumn. She’s a Virgo, mutable, willing to let go of the past and receive the future.
In the photo, she’s awash in sunlight and the overexposed images on her white skirt are faint as ghosts. The photo is black and white and yet colors suggest themselves: blue ribboning the hem, red roses falling head first toward the earth, fronds of green like outstretched hands chasing after them. In the middle of the skirt is a revolucionario, bandoliers crisscrossing his chest like the arms of a lover.
When Rosalva stands, the skirt cascades and the images fold in on themselves. She grabs a handful of skirt in each hand and fans out the fabric. The images unfurl. She spins and the skirt blooms. The blue-bordered hem swings inches above her taut calves. Her feet are in high-heeled sandals; her slender ankles carry the weight of the stories on her skirt and all the stories yet to come.
When she is ninety, her legs are birdlike, her walk a shuffle. She dresses up for her appointments – pantsuits of high-color polyester, a mail-order brooch or pendant in lucky animal shapes – a jade frog, a gold cricket, a rhinestone-studded ladybug. Her dangling earrings distend her earlobes to a disquieting length. The way the wrinkles have settled gives her face a perpetual smile.
Or maybe, despite everything, she really is smiling. Like the Mexican calendar girl.
She listens to the doctor describe the option of no longer having her kidneys cleansed by machinery. She cocks her head, thrusts her drawn-on eyebrows together in assessment, glances at her arm where the needle has collapsed her veins and puckered the skin. When the doctor finishes, she nods. “That sounds pretty good to me,” she declares as if she is contemplating plans for a party. Having outlived two husbands and two sons, she is a party of one now. And she will wear her party skirt.
She’s posed like a Mexican calendar girl – one of the chicas provocativas of the 40s and 50s. On her calendar, the pages of the months would be torn off to September, the month she was born, the end of summer and the onset of autumn. She’s a Virgo, mutable, willing to let go of the past and receive the future.
In the photo, she’s awash in sunlight and the overexposed images on her white skirt are faint as ghosts. The photo is black and white and yet colors suggest themselves: blue ribboning the hem, red roses falling head first toward the earth, fronds of green like outstretched hands chasing after them. In the middle of the skirt is a revolucionario, bandoliers crisscrossing his chest like the arms of a lover.
When Rosalva stands, the skirt cascades and the images fold in on themselves. She grabs a handful of skirt in each hand and fans out the fabric. The images unfurl. She spins and the skirt blooms. The blue-bordered hem swings inches above her taut calves. Her feet are in high-heeled sandals; her slender ankles carry the weight of the stories on her skirt and all the stories yet to come.
When she is ninety, her legs are birdlike, her walk a shuffle. She dresses up for her appointments – pantsuits of high-color polyester, a mail-order brooch or pendant in lucky animal shapes – a jade frog, a gold cricket, a rhinestone-studded ladybug. Her dangling earrings distend her earlobes to a disquieting length. The way the wrinkles have settled gives her face a perpetual smile.
Or maybe, despite everything, she really is smiling. Like the Mexican calendar girl.
She listens to the doctor describe the option of no longer having her kidneys cleansed by machinery. She cocks her head, thrusts her drawn-on eyebrows together in assessment, glances at her arm where the needle has collapsed her veins and puckered the skin. When the doctor finishes, she nods. “That sounds pretty good to me,” she declares as if she is contemplating plans for a party. Having outlived two husbands and two sons, she is a party of one now. And she will wear her party skirt.
Mini Interview
1. Since you published with Crab Creek Review, how has your work grown or changed? What excites you now that maybe didn't back then?
That flash piece published in Crab Creek Review a few years ago was inspired by a photo of one of my aunts when she was a young woman. She was seated on the grass, her skirt fanned out around her. She was young, vivacious, and sexy. She lived to be 91 and had been receiving dialysis treatment for a while when she decided to call it quits – the treatment, that is, which meant her life.
I have been off and on inspired to write flash pieces and several summers ago I took a class taught by the brilliant Suzanne Paola on flash non-fiction. The following summer I took a similar class from the also brilliant Rebecca Brown. I would love to take other such classes as well as some on essay-writing. With three books of fiction published and one in development, I’ve been hankering to learn more about and to practice the various essay forms. I want to explore the themes I’ve focused on in my fiction – family, place, and identity – in the essay, which I think forces me to address a topic with a more naked kind of perspective and truth. That is both exciting and scary.
2. Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
In my notes from a workshop with Tom Jenks I took about 15 years ago, there’s a quote attributed to Cynthis Ozick that goes, “Play what feeble notes you can and keep practicing.” I used to have this on my screensaver. I still think about it often. It reminds me that whenever I feel disappointed or frustrated with what I’ve put on the page, which is often, I need to keep working at it and even then I’m bound to fall short. We can come close to translating a mood or sensation into words but’s it’s nearly always an approximation. So we try again with the next sentence. And the next.
The advice applies in a way to writers submitting their work. When you send work out into the world, know that rejection is part of the process. But if you’ve been practicing and practicing those notes, feeble and otherwise, there’s bound to be a place for it. In the next place you submit to. Or the next.
3. What are you reading?
I’m reading Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19, the anthology that Seattle writer Jennifer Haupt created to bring writers together during a time of isolation. It’s exciting for me to have a short essay in this book along with writers from around the country as well as many favorite Seattle writers. Reading each piece is a bit like recognizing yourself even if that writer’s experience is completely different from your own. What you recognize and connect with are what’s described in the subtitle: love, grief, comfort. This book is not just about creating community, it’s about assisting a community. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which provides assistance to bookstores in need.
4. What are you working on?
My writing time has been limited lately, but I should be back on a more regular schedule in a few months. Waiting for me is a draft of a novel about two women who last appeared in my story collection Hola and Goodbye as twin high school wrestlers. I’ve taken them into adulthood to face a world unkind to women who don’t fit norms of beauty and behavior. I’ve also started on that series of essays on family, place, and identity I mentioned earlier. And an idea for another novel is percolating. So what I’ll be working on will be using one project as a reason to procrastinate on another.
That flash piece published in Crab Creek Review a few years ago was inspired by a photo of one of my aunts when she was a young woman. She was seated on the grass, her skirt fanned out around her. She was young, vivacious, and sexy. She lived to be 91 and had been receiving dialysis treatment for a while when she decided to call it quits – the treatment, that is, which meant her life.
I have been off and on inspired to write flash pieces and several summers ago I took a class taught by the brilliant Suzanne Paola on flash non-fiction. The following summer I took a similar class from the also brilliant Rebecca Brown. I would love to take other such classes as well as some on essay-writing. With three books of fiction published and one in development, I’ve been hankering to learn more about and to practice the various essay forms. I want to explore the themes I’ve focused on in my fiction – family, place, and identity – in the essay, which I think forces me to address a topic with a more naked kind of perspective and truth. That is both exciting and scary.
2. Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
In my notes from a workshop with Tom Jenks I took about 15 years ago, there’s a quote attributed to Cynthis Ozick that goes, “Play what feeble notes you can and keep practicing.” I used to have this on my screensaver. I still think about it often. It reminds me that whenever I feel disappointed or frustrated with what I’ve put on the page, which is often, I need to keep working at it and even then I’m bound to fall short. We can come close to translating a mood or sensation into words but’s it’s nearly always an approximation. So we try again with the next sentence. And the next.
The advice applies in a way to writers submitting their work. When you send work out into the world, know that rejection is part of the process. But if you’ve been practicing and practicing those notes, feeble and otherwise, there’s bound to be a place for it. In the next place you submit to. Or the next.
3. What are you reading?
I’m reading Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19, the anthology that Seattle writer Jennifer Haupt created to bring writers together during a time of isolation. It’s exciting for me to have a short essay in this book along with writers from around the country as well as many favorite Seattle writers. Reading each piece is a bit like recognizing yourself even if that writer’s experience is completely different from your own. What you recognize and connect with are what’s described in the subtitle: love, grief, comfort. This book is not just about creating community, it’s about assisting a community. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which provides assistance to bookstores in need.
4. What are you working on?
My writing time has been limited lately, but I should be back on a more regular schedule in a few months. Waiting for me is a draft of a novel about two women who last appeared in my story collection Hola and Goodbye as twin high school wrestlers. I’ve taken them into adulthood to face a world unkind to women who don’t fit norms of beauty and behavior. I’ve also started on that series of essays on family, place, and identity I mentioned earlier. And an idea for another novel is percolating. So what I’ll be working on will be using one project as a reason to procrastinate on another.
Donna Miscolta is the author of three books of fiction: When the de la Cruz Family Danced, Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories, and Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories.
Donna’s newest book of fiction is Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories, published in 2020 by Jaded Ibis Press, a feminist press which makes a perfect match for Angie Rubio’s burgeoning awareness of her personhood in these stories. Each story represents an event or experience in a particular grade in school, a life lesson about winning and losing, belonging and not belonging, or about overcoming the divisions in life that can be caused by race, gender, or just a different way of walking through life. Whether the issue at hand relates to skin color, body image, sexual awakening, or some other aspect of peer and social pressure or the mere act of growing up, the stories cohere to tell a story of Angie’s struggle to find out who she is and her place in the world.
Donna was born in San Diego and grew up in National City, California. She received a bachelor’s degree in zoology from San Diego State and later received master’s degrees in education and public administration from the University of Washington. During the thirty years that she worked as a project manager in local government, she took classes and workshops in fiction writing. She lives in Seattle.