Every Step You Take (3 page)

Living in my own world far away in New York City for so many years, I sometimes forget the imposing scale of our “clan.” But whenever I am back home, it hits me—we are a big family. My mother was the second eldest of nine children born to my Navajo grandparents, Rachel Begay Towne and Joseph Towne, and the second of seven daughters—Alice; my mother, Josephine; Buddieta; Rosita; Valerie; Pauline; and Yvonne. Next came the long-awaited boy, Orlando, and finally another girl, Rochelle. Over the years, my mother—always the rebel, always the traveler—established herself as the most colorful and also the most controversial among this brood. For starters, the majority of her siblings have remained on or near the reservation, where they were all born, in keeping with Navajo tradition. But at a young age Mom began to roam to faraway places, and over the years she established a pattern of moving on and off the reservation that upset her more traditional relatives. When she was only eighteen Mom fell in love with my father, a full-blooded Puerto Rican named José Soto, and not much later she made a big break with Navajo tradition by marrying outside the tribe—a huge taboo and another source of ongoing friction with her relatives. Now, to complicate matters, my mother requested that she be cremated and buried on land Luis and I had recently bought in Eagle Nest, New Mexico—thereby resoundingly rejecting the Navajo tradition of burial in which the intact body is returned to its Native soil in a three-day-long, highly ritualized ceremony that involves the entire clan.

Mom was a beloved member of a big clan, but as I look around the little chapel we have chosen for her memorial service I note that the pews are nearly empty. My brother, Kiko, and his wife, Deb, are on one side of me, and my partner, Luis, and my father are on the other. Luis is holding my hand, squeezing it, as I look around at a few friends of Kiko's and my father's who dot the pews. Not one of Mom's siblings has come to this service. Throughout the previous week, as it became clearer and clearer that her death was imminent, I had been calling all of them to tell them that it was time to come see her and say their good-byes. In our phone conversations my Navajo relatives made it clear that all of Mom's untraditional decisions about her burial were causing considerable upset back on the reservation where her family members and elders had been planning a traditional Navajo burial and ceremony. In the end only three of Mom's eight siblings—her sisters Rosie, Buddy, and Ali—managed the trip to Colorado Springs to say good-bye to her. When they were in Kiko's house it had seemed to me that these sisters scuttled about with dark, disapproving looks, and when they visited my mother in her hospice room they stood in a circle and held hands and chanted and prayed. After being there for two days, they took off furtively in the middle of the night, saying only a brief good-bye.

I had been upset by all of this, and I became even more upset when I heard from family members that the elders on the reservation had started planning a memorial service for Mom before she had even died. I stomped around and cursed my Navajo relatives. You would think a family could pull together in times of such sadness and trauma. All of this was hard enough; did they have to make it harder? Outwardly I criticized my relatives for their selfish behavior, but on some level I was also nervous about the situation. As a resident of New York City for thirty years I have become well versed in metropolitan culture and all the sophistications of modern life. But the power of Navajo beliefs and superstitions and the consequences of going against them have been impressed upon me all my life. For years I have carried a private (and for the most part unacknowledged) guilt at having left the reservation where my clan lived. As I sit at my mother's memorial service in a chapel that is far away from our clan's sacred homelands, I have to acknowledge that somewhere deep inside I know that the ancient Navajo laws are nothing to mess with. Thinking about this, I instinctively make the sign of the cross, the way I always used to before stepping onstage.

Looking around at the empty pews sends a painful reminder of another family situation that contributed to the pressure cooker atmosphere in Kiko's house during the last two weeks of my mother's life. Because of recent disagreements between Kiko and his ex-wife, their two sons, Trevor and Bryce (my mother's only grandchildren), have not been speaking to Kiko—or to any of us. Trevor and Bryce have not come to their grandmother's funeral. I called earlier in the week and left a voice message at their house, asking if my mother could please see her grandsons before she died. Kiko's ex-wife left a short and bitter response on Kiko's voice mail: “Everyone dies.”

Everyone dies, yes. But not everyone dies with the dignity and courage and grace of my Navajo princess of a mother. Several times in the past few days I have found myself back in the moment when I entered my mother's room at Pikes Peak Hospice for the last time. The curtains are drawn. The room looks impeccable—cleaner than when I left it to go grab a little lunch a while ago. The oxygen tank that has been her constant companion is no longer there. Mom is lying with her arms crossed underneath her favorite faux-fur blanket, which I bought her one Christmas from Pottery Barn. She looks beautiful, still and peaceful as a Sleeping Beauty. The strained and erratic breathing that I watched for five hours that same morning—counting the seconds between each gasp as I talked to her, touched her cheeks, held her hand—has stopped.

She looks so lovely and peaceful lying there, that on an impulse I kneel down beside her bed and gently kiss her, allowing myself the wild hope that maybe, just maybe, she will magically awaken and give me her amazing smile. But she does not.

It is 4:30 on the afternoon of March 25, 2008, and Josephine Towne Soto, my beloved mother, has departed. There is nothing bendable or flexible or fixable about this sad fact. Nothing to do but say good-bye and leave. Looking around the room, I spot my mother's favorite red bathrobe on a chair. I gather the bathrobe in a tight ball against my chest to take back to New York with me, and then I pick up her laptop computer, which has been waiting like a faithful pet at the foot of her bed. As I cast one last look at my mother's peaceful silhouette, it occurs to me that my mother has managed her own death with the same aplomb with which she managed everything in our family all my life. I understand that she didn't want us to have to watch her lose the breath of life and depart. She has chosen to slip away quietly and quickly, while she was alone.

At the memorial the priest is still talking, and my eyes wander to a poster-size picture of Mom—an enlarged version of a photograph that my father has carried in his wallet for more than two decades—on display in the chapel. In the picture Mom has short hair, much like one of the wigs she wore in the last few years because of chemotherapy. This gets me thinking about Mom's hair—she had the most beautiful long dark hair, thick and lustrous. I remember how when I was younger she would pile it up into a beehive. A moment later I am a child again, riding in my father's '65 convertible Cadillac. In the front seat Mom is snuggling up close to my father as he drives. Kiko and I are in the backseat, eating candy and carefully stashing the wrappers in Mom's beehive. We giggle. We know she won't find them until sometime after she gets to work.

Thinking about how much I used to love to touch my mother's beautiful hair when I was young, I am suddenly reliving another day, when I am ten and I have asked Mom if she would feather my hair. When she finishes, I am thrilled. I think I look incredible. A male Farrah Fawcett. I put on my roller skates and go outside, feeling like some sort of beauty queen. Me, my feathered hair, my skates. I glide through the streets of our little desert community. Just like a scene from the movie
Xanadu
. Clearly I am a homosexual already…

Everyone is standing up. Mom's service is finally over now, and as we are leaving the funeral facilities I notice a lone figure sitting at the back of a bigger, separate chapel that is near ours. The person looks familiar to me, and a moment later I realize it is Kiko's older son, Bryce. As soon as he sees that he has been spotted, Bryce takes off in a dead run. A second later Kiko takes off after him, calling his name and begging him to stop, to come back. As I watch them disappear down the road I wonder if everyone's family is as complicated as mine. Our mother has died. Can't we all just get along, for her sake?

My mother and father always shared a chronic restlessness—there were periods of their lives together when they moved to a new place every two or three months—and the day after Mom's memorial my father demonstrates that he may have lost a wife but he has not lost his urge to ramble. His RV has been parked in Kiko's driveway during these last weeks while Mom's been in the hospital, but now he is anxious to take off. He wants to get behind the wheel and hit the road, go somewhere. Luis and I decide to accompany Pop in the motor home on the three-hour trek to go see the house we are building in Eagle Nest, New Mexico. It is the house that I have promised to build for my mother since the age of six. It is the house we were finally building together. Except now it has become the house my mother will never see. It has become the house being built on the ground in which my mother wants her ashes to be buried.

While Pop is driving, Luis and I take a nice long nap, bouncing around on Mom and Pop's bed in the back bedroom of the RV. We lie there under the blankets, staring out at the Colorado Mountains, and then at the winding Rio Grande and into the New Mexican landscape beyond. I am lying on my mother's side of the bed. I bury my head into her pillow to see if I can smell her.

When we get to Eagle Nest we walk through the house with the builder, Eldon, and discuss everything that has been done and everything that must still be done. We talk toilets, countertops, flooring, doorknobs. It is hard to concentrate, or even to care. At one point as we are standing outside, Eldon looks up and points to a huge herd of elk gathered on the mountainside above us. I wish my mother could be here to see how beautiful they are—so big and strong. As I look at the elk it strikes me that the communal beauty and strength of the herd resemble that of Mom's big family—our clan. I can see my mother's face in the faces of her mother and father and in each of her siblings and even in the faces of her siblings' children—my grandparents and the sprawling army of aunts and uncles and cousins who, in the Navajo culture, are also called my mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. I see my mother's face in all of these relatives, many of whom I barely know, and I see her face every time I look in a mirror. The strength and rich color of the elk, the way the members of the herd resemble one another and stay together and graze together, remind me of what Mom always said about our family—that we were bound to one another by forces beyond ourselves, and that we would be together always. I am beginning to understand her now, and I believe her. We are many and we are far-flung, but we will always be a family.

When I leave the house site I head back to my father's motor home and get ready to do some hard-core cooking in the tiny RV kitchen. This is what I always do when my family and I are together. It is what I always did with my surrogate family members when I was a teenager pursuing a dream in New York. It is what Luis and I do now, when we want to relax together. We cook. As I start to bustle around the little cooking space I remember how much I love cooking in the RV. It feels so contained and no-nonsense, so self-sufficient and cozy. I roll up my sleeves and get to work. I am going to start with some Tequila Courage Margaritas and some Killer Guacamole. And then I am going to make my mom's famous pork chops smothered in onions and tomatoes with yellow rice and black beans. This is a recipe my father's mother taught Mom. I know it will make us all feel better. We will still stay here in the RV beside the half-built house for Mama Jo and we will eat together.

For Mom's sake, and for our own, we will prove that we can still be a family.

I
N MY EARLY
years with my family I spent much of my time not just moving from home to home but actually living in a home that moved. Recreational vehicles (RVs), campers, motor homes, trailers—we roamed all through the Southwest, and at the end of each day, to cap our wandering with something that made us feel cozy and homey, we would prepare and eat a wonderful meal.

I think one of the reasons RV meals are always so fun to prepare and taste so good is because they demand a special resourcefulness on the part of the cook. Limited space, limited burners, a makeshift supply of utensils and pots and pans—the inventive chef welcomes all of the challenges that come with on-the-road cooking. One of my favorite meals whenever we traveled was a recipe for pork chops my mother had learned from my father's mother. I still find it such a comforting meal, so simple and inexpensive—and I have discovered it is just as satisfying when cooked in a stationary home.

In my version of Mom's pork chops, I have added poblano peppers, because I love them, and a dash of cumin or curry. The pork chops are also good without these extras. Sometimes if Luis is working late and I want to take the edge off my solitude, I put on my pajamas, make myself a big ol' margarita, and cook two of these chops. I serve myself in a large bowl, wrap up in a blanket, and—with the dogs at my feet sniffing the goodness—dive in. Try it and don't feel guilty. We all deserve it!

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SERVES 4

2 large Spanish onions, diced

3 poblano peppers, seeded and diced