Like Son (2 page)

And so, there he sat on the concrete hospital bench, his manicured hands primly folded on his knees, back straight, clean-shaven face tilting side to side slightly as he listened to the sounds around him. As I approached, his body turned static. I stood directly in front of him. And still he didn’t stand. He only adjusted his glasses—as if there was a chance in hell this might help him recognize me any better.

His glasses:

Opaque dark brown lenses framed by bulky rectangular solid side panels, an expensive version of the throwaway pairs ophthalmologists give patients after dilation, a more serious version of those many an old man put over the top of regular glasses to filter out all the sun’s light—my father was wearing what as a kid I’d so bluntly referred to as his blindman glasses.

“Dad?”

“Francisca, baby girl.”

I cringed. But didn’t say anything.

He rose to greet me, facing slightly right of where I stood.

“Ready to go?” he asked, like
he
had come to pick
me
up.

I put my hand on his left elbow and, after a briefly awkward moment, led him to the car.

“Where should we eat?” he asked, as if this was a casual little lunch date we had every week.

“Wherever.”

“Canter’s?”

“Sure.”

I drove east on Sunset and then onto Santa Monica Boulevard. We’d made it all the way to Fairfax and were heading south before I got up the nerve to ask what was going on.

“Let’s talk while we eat,” he said.

Fine. A supposedly dying man should be granted such requests, right?

We arrived at Canter’s. I parked in the side lot, took a ticket from the attendant, and led my father into the restaurant. A comforting stink of sugar cookies, pastrami, and pickle juice greeted us, so did one of Canter’s many venomspitting charm-haggard waitresses. My father and I sat at a table for two in the main dining room, under the stained glass false ceiling that looked like a canopy of giant autumnal trees. Why the New England forest motif in a Los Angeles Jewish deli? Don’t know, but the resulting effect was simultaneously unsettling and perfect.

The second we sat down I did what I always did when I got to Canter’s. I picked up the telephone. Like every other booth, ours came outfitted with an old-fashioned black telephone mounted on the mottled glass that divided the booth into its own little cubicle. You could make local calls for free from your table. I wasn’t actually going to call anyone, but the gimmick was too good not to be acknowledged each visit. So I picked up the phone. But there was no dial tone. I clicked the receiver hook. Nothing. The line was dead. My dad must have heard me futzing.

He said: “Your mother didn’t say much when I called to get your number. How is she?”

“Don’t know, really.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t see behind his glasses, but I was pretty certain two heavy-lidded eyes precisely the same shape as mine went sad in response. My father took off his fedora and placed it on the table next to the napkin dispenser. With hands as big and bony and slightly freckled as mine, he smoothed his hair into place and sighed.

It was such an uncanny thing to sit across from a person I resembled so exactly, but with whom I’d spent so little of my life. That said, I knew it hadn’t been my father’s fault we were near strangers. The custody battle that ensued after my mother left him had been extremely messy, to say the least. By the time I was eight, my mother had done all she could—and she did a lot—to end my relationship with my dad. Still, there was no doubt about it, I was his kid.

“Son,” our waitress interrupted our silence, “you ready to order?”

Not that my father could see it, but his little girl had become a young man. Starting in junior high, I’d wound Ace bandages tight around my chest to flatten my thankfully negligible breasts. Hoping for the healing benefits of a cold compress, I’d initially stored the bandages in the freezer overnight. Over time, I’d acquired less chilling and more sophisticated means for smoothing things out. And by the time I sat across from my dad at Canter’s, I’d mastered counterbalancing most physical evidence of ever having been born a girl.

The careful staging our waitress unknowingly tested with her impatient stare: a baggy long-sleeved black T-shirt over a tight Hanes undershirt over a wife-beater over an extrasmall binder; boxer shorts peeking out from under low-slung oversized black Dickies cinched with an Army surplus canvas belt; a bulky dark gray hoody sweatshirt, hood down. I pulled the visor of my baseball cap further over my face, shuffled my skater-sneaker clumsy feet, and cleared my throat to deepen my voice for a response.

“Son?” she repeated.

“I’ll just have a coffee,” my father answered before I could, oblivious to the way I looked, flattered by what he’d taken to be a waitress’s flirtation directed at him. He was totally clueless. But still, I’d passed in front of my father. I ordered a celery soda to mark the occasion. What other options were there? Sweet fizz celebration was the best I could do.

“So, Dad, can we talk now?”

I watched as my father responded by retrieving a black Sharpie from his jacket pocket. He took several napkins from our table’s dispenser, unfolded the white squares, and spread them out on the table in front of him. As we waited for our food, he mapped out a diagram of what he was leaving me in death:

His blindness.

I would inherit my father’s ticking time-bomb vision.

I’d always known my father had been dealt a particularly bad set of eyes, but now he told me the specifics of his deteriorating eyesight. By the time he was seven he’d needed Cokebottle glasses. As a teenager, he’d required a magnifying glass to read the Bible as his mother insisted he do each Sunday morning …

These details didn’t make sense. I’d just picked him up from the V.A. hospital. He’d fought in Vietnam.

“Wasn’t there an eye exam when you got drafted?”

“Once Uncle Sam found me, nothing mattered except trying to get me killed.”

And then he started in on a rant about how Vietnam had never been his war to fight, about how he’d grown up in Mexico with no clue he’d been born in the States, so why should he have had to go to war for this country? And, unbelievable as it may have seemed, it was true—he really hadn’t known he was a U.S. citizen until he was drafted. He also hadn’t known until he was eighteen that when his mother was pregnant with him, his family had gone north as
braceros
to build railroads. 1943. Chicago. And—yet another detail you’d figure most people would know about their own lives—he hadn’t learned until he was a grown man that he’d once had a sister. Rosario Maria Guadalupe Cruz. My father’s sister Rosario had been four years old when the family went north. And when the family came home less than a year later, she was no longer with them.

Rosario met tragedy while she and her newborn brother were living with their parents—along with thousands of other government-indentured Bracero Program laborers—in a Chicago railroad company’s shantytown. Their makeshift home was constructed out of barely modified old train cars located on a dusty stretch of land adjacent to a strip of railroad. The living and working conditions were barely one step from slavery. My father’s mother was a proud woman; she didn’t like leaving her home country to be so shamed. Hard work didn’t upset her, but a lack of dignity did. She had wanted to be treated with respect. And she longed to spend more time with her newborn son, she wished she didn’t have to leave him every day with the old woman who came to the shantytown each morning before dawn and watched the workers’ children for a hefty cut of their pay. My dad said that his mother once admitted that in Chicago, after a particularly trying day of breaking stone into gravel to be laid out under the tracks, she had cursed God for giving her such a trying life. She told my father she’d forever regret that moment of weakness because, a few days later, in what she interpreted as retribution for her ingratitude, the railroad—that angry and almighty steel-and-oil God of industry—threw thunderbolts at her.

Quick rumble flash, a supply train derailed. Heavy weight skipped thick tracks. Screech metal snapped. Rattle impact, the train crashed into the perimeter of the shantytown. In the bright-sunshine middle of the day. It was a pretty day. A very pretty day. The camp was near-empty. Most everyone was working far from there. Few were injured. Only one died.

Rosario had been playing by the side of the railroad.

My father’s mother, devastated by her little girl’s death, refused to speak a word of their time in Chicago. She forbade her husband or anyone else ever to mention it. As it turned out, the gods weren’t done with the family yet.

One afternoon five years later, the trio settled back into their life in Mexico, my father, now a young boy, was helping his father tend to the family’s small farm. His mother was inside their shack home, presumably preparing supper. My father felt shivers on his arm as a sudden thunderstorm filled the sky with electric air and heavy raindrops. When a thunderclap rattled the field, his mother must have thought of the shantytown in Chicago. She would have thought of her little girl. A lightening bolt outside, too close outside, too near the house, much too close, shook my father’s mother to the core. And outside, in the field, my father watched as celestial brilliance reached down and anointed his father. Singed black to his toes, the man died instantly. One could conclude, and many did, that traces of the flash seared my father’s vision, swam through the veins of his eyes, and, although it took many years, slowly turned him blind.

Unfortunately, my father was not yet blind the day his pueblo’s grocer, who was also the post general, found him at Sunday service and told him of the letter waiting. “It looks important, Francisco. It’s from up north.”

With nothing more than a piece of paper translated by the grocer into Spanish, the U.S. government took the farm tools from my father’s hands, forced him to report to San Diego for processing, taught him how to shoot a rifle, and shipped him to a jungle in Vietnam.

Thirteen months of hell later, my father returned to Mexico speaking English and with ever-worsening eyesight. Soon thereafter, he decided to move to the States—a country he had never seen with clear eyes—to embark on his newfound birthright: the American Dream.

“Mami, come with me,” he said to his mother. “We’ll get you papers.”

“I won’t go,” she said.

“It’ll be good.”

“No.”

His mother knew that the roads up north were not paved in gold. But even after two years of an American war, my father was still naïve enough to hope for the best. As he boarded a bus north, his mother took his hand and in his open palm she placed a small honey-colored pebble, a memento she’d picked up once long ago as she walked along a rural dirt road leading to church. “Remember your home.”

My father kissed the pebble and tucked it in his pocket for safekeeping. He hugged his mother and told her he loved her. He promised to write often, to send money and visit as soon as he could. He followed through on most of his promises, but he never saw his mother alive again.

Slowly, my father built a life for himself. He found employment. Worked long hours. Tried to save money. Fell in love. But no matter what he did, his world still blurred and darkened with each passing year. When I was a child, he often held me close, not exactly out of intense affection, but more specifically—knowing one day he might wake without the ability to see anything at all—to memorize the features of my person. More years went by. More work. Less love. Less money saved. On and on.

All throughout my childhood, my mother had tried to make me hate my father. Her efforts were useless—I’d always respected my father, if for no other reason than his ability to strike out on his own, to leave home far behind and just go. Countless were the times I’d wanted to follow his example. But I’d always been too chickenshit. Sure, I’d moved to the big city thrill of Los Angeles the instant I graduated from high school, but please, my disaster of a childhood home and mother were barely forty-five minutes south, and—although we’d stayed out of touch and our paths never crossed amidst the sprawl of L.A.—my father and I did both live in the same county. Ultimately, my move toward independence was like that of a kid who said he was going to run away and then went and pitched a tent in the backyard instead.

So there I was, wishing I could be far, far away from everything I’d ever known, and yet I sat in a booth at Canter’s with my father. Me: a twenty-two-year-old with the selfabsorbed myopic vision of youth. And my father: a middleaged blind man.

“It’s called
retinitis pigmentosa
,” he said. The condition, he explained, caused degenerative eyesight and eventual blindness. And it skipped generations.

“So I
don’t
have it?” I asked, ashamed to be so hopeful.

“No, you do.”

Our order arrived. I bit into my sandwich for distraction.

The blindness actively affected only males, my father said. But female offspring of the blind generation carried the gene and could pass the blindness to their male children.

“
You
,” my father emphasized, “are a
carrier
.”

I choked a little on a dry bit of rye bread—more at my father’s loud insistence that I was female than at learning my hypothetical son might be blind. Throat cleared with a swig of soda, I asked: “And
retinitis pigmentosa
is a terminal illness?”

“What?”

“You said when you called … the doctors told you …”

“Oh, no, that’s unrelated.” He waved his hand as if to shoo away an irrelevant and bothersome topic. “The pain in my gut got so bad last week that I called my doctor. They ran tests at the hospital. The pathologist says he found cancer. They’ll operate, but they think it might keep spreading.”

The pain in his gut? What the fuck was he talking about? He mentioned it like it was some long-standing topic we’d discussed endless times before. The elephant my father tried to ignore sat himself directly on my chest. I was stunned. Confused. And speechless.