Prose Passage #2: Yolanda

“What are you trying to say?” she kept asking. He spoke kindly, but in a language she had never heard before.
She pretended she understood. She took a big smell of the flowers. “Thank you, love.” A thte word love, her hands itched so fiercely that she was afraid she would drop the flowers.
He said something happily, again in sounds she could not ascribe meanings to.
“Come on, love,” she asked his eyes; she spoke precisely as if she were talking to a foreigner or a willful child. “John, can you understand me?” She nodded her head to let him know that he should answer her by nodding his head if words failed him.
He shook his head, No.
She held him steady with both hands as if she were trying to nail him down into her world. “John!” she pleaded. “Please, love!”
He pointed to his ears and nodded. Volume wasn’t the problem. He could hear her. “Babble babble.” His lips were slow motion on each syllable.
He is saying I love you, she thought! “Babble,” she mimicked him. “Babble babble babble babble.” Maybe that meant, I love you too, in whatever tongue he was speaking.
He pointed to her, to himself. “Babble?”
She nodded wildly. Her valentine hairline, the heart in her ribs and all the ones on her sleeves twinkled like the pinchers of the crab in the sky. Maybe now they could start over, in silence.
When she left her husband, Yo wrote a note, I’m going to my folks till my head-slash-heart clear. She revised the note: I’m needing some space, some time, until my head-slash-heart-slash-soul—No, no, no, she didn’t want to divide herself anymore, three persons in one Yo.
John, she began, then she jotted a little triangle before John. Dear, she wrote on a slant. She had read in a handwriting analysis book that his was the style of the self-assured. Dear John, listen, we both know it’s not working.
“It’s?” he would ask. “It’s, meaning what?”
Yo crossed the vague pronoun out.
We are not working. You know it, I know it, we both know it, oh John, John, John. Her hand kept writing, automatically, until the page was filled with the dark ink of his name. She tore the note up and confettied it over her head, a rainfall of John’s. She wrote him a short memo, Gone—then added—to my folks. She thought of signing it, Yolanda, but her real name no longer sounded like her own, so instead she scribbled his name for her, Joe (Alvarez 77-79).