The First Woman

She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great sense that she should fall in love with him. He was Adán. Before the Fall and afterward, her invert twin. And she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust, like Liv Ullmann. I loved her honey hair, her full lips; her green eyes a nameless sin. (Not that I worried all that much— the church was Presbyterian.) In Sunday school, her way to teach us kids to pray was to comment on all the beauty we could touch or see in our environment. My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment. Since other kids considered prayer a chore, the floor was usually mine. My list of joys left out her hair but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows while others bowed their heads. Her heart I schemed to win with purple prose on meringue clouds. —For who was Adán, anyway, I thought, but nada spelled backward? While hers, reversed, called out, Ave! Ave! The lyric of a bird born and airborne on the same day. But it was night when I saw her outside the church for the last time: yellow light, mosquitoes, summer. I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair of wings with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones to my parents. The next day I would find myself up north, in a strange house, without my tongue and almost blind, there was so much to see. This caused Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed in time, but Eva stayed, a loss. Ave, I learned, meant also this:Farewell! I haven’t seen her since.