Like Son (6 page)
… take out a piece of paper, write everything down. Then you can read it back to me and maybe you can hurt me, you can read it back to me, maybe you could know something—about me. About me …
In search of the woman I’d met in the safe deposit letters, hoping she still existed somehow, I drove. To my mother’s.
W
ho are you?”
These were my mother’s very words as I stood at her doorstep holding the box of my father’s ashes.
I hadn’t called to see if she’d be home. In fact, my mother and I hadn’t talked in nearly five years. But—from the bank, through miles of flatland tract housing, up curving Laguna Hills roads, past increasingly wealthier homes—I’d driven to her house with absolute certainty it was the right thing to do. When I’d reached her property, I’d worried my car would have trouble making it up her absurdly steep, long, private driveway. So I’d parked my car on the street, brought the box of ashes with me, and walked up. Relieved to see her vehicle parked in the carport, I’d rung the doorbell. A long wait later, my mother finally came to the door.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Classic. This was vintage insane behavior for her. Five years apart or not, of course she knew damn well who I was. I had wanted to tell her about the letters I’d read at the bank, to tell her they’d been so special to my father that he’d kept them all these years, to ask if maybe she wanted to keep the ones she’d written, but then she said what she said, and I decided she didn’t deserve such generosity. Fuck her. She probably wouldn’t want the letters anyway. Instead of sentimental niceties, I stuck to the obvious.
“My dad died.” I sort of tapped the box of ashes.
She just stared at me through the still-closed screen door, mounting frustration only slightly visible under the unnaturally smooth façade of her face. Seduced by even the less prestigious perks of being an Ivy League–educated doctor, my mother wore, as she did whenever she was home, one of the endless oversized and tacky T-shirts pharmaceutical companies sent her as promotional gifts. That day’s poly/ cotton knee-grazing T-shirt housedress was emblazoned with a prescription anti-inflammatory pill’s logo. Knowing my mother as I did, she most likely wore a threadbare pair of old cotton granny-style panties under the T-shirt, and, although I couldn’t see them through the screen door, I was certain she had on one of her pairs of tan vinyl Velcro-flapped acupressure sandals, plastic insole peeling up from rubber heel.
A word of caution:
Anything and everything I say about my mother will most likely seem unbelievable. You might think I’m exaggerating or lying outright. I’m used to this. I’ve spent an entire life not being believed when I talk about my mother. But I swear to you, each and every word I say is true.
My mother. Even in her freebie T-shirt, she imagined herself a glorious phoenix risen to elite hills out of barrio chaos. As stoically elegant an image as it was, she’d never considered that being a firebird inevitably meant you’d singe both your nest and baby chick along the way. Still, as much as she’d done me wrong over the years, and damn how she’d done me wrong, I knew that from a public view—not as I saw her—she did seem quite the Wonder Woman. Presumed bluecollar girl from the ’hood, my mother was the first Mexican-American woman ever to graduate from Yale Medical School. Class of ’75. And she didn’t just graduate, she graduated with honors and acceptance to one of the most prestigious surgery residencies in the country. My mother was an academic and medical genius. She even had impeccable bedside manner. Eventually, she found her true calling and became a sought-after plastic surgeon. And through it all, she was beautiful with big dark brown eyes, a thick mane of shining black hair, and a quick smile. She was the perfect poster girl for a model minority against-all-odds success story.
Granted, it was truly remarkable that she made it to Yale in an era when civil rights and feminism were considered new-fangled nuisances by much of the country. And yes, it was equally impressive that patients traveled from places as far as Portugal to receive her care. But thing was, the poor-little-brown-girl-made-adoring-career-mother role she played in public was a complicated mess of half-truths and dysfunction.
There’s no good way to begin explaining. So let’s just start with this:
Even though I hadn’t stepped foot in her house for five years, I could assure you with absolute certainty that the kitchen cabinets and drawers of her multimillion-dollar home burst forth with a combination of the finest china, crystal, and silver … alongside precariously tall stacks of Taco Bell giveaway plastic cups, rubber-banded bundles of broken ballpoint pens, piles of junk-mail envelopes saved to be used as note paper, at least five American Society of Plastic Surgeons coffee mugs, a Botox Cosmetic wine opener, and a seemingly endless supply of Pfizer Post-it notes.
And:
Although my mother’s closets were filled with a couture wardrobe, designer jewelry and shoes, it’d been years since she could fully open the door to the master bedroom without knocking over the leaning piles of trash that literally filled the room wall-to-wall. Her queen-sized bed was covered ceilinghigh with unopened mail, old medical journals, and drab complimentary magazines sent for her office’s waiting room. She slept on a La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room. And she bathed with a washcloth in the front hall bathroom. Why? Because raw sewage seeped up through all the showers in my mother’s house.
“It’s the septic system. I can’t do anything about it,” she’d said on countless occasions.
I rather doubted that the other richies in the neighborhood put up with shit flooding their homes. To be fair, I also doubted they’d grown up in as damaged a family as had my mother. But trust me, that knowledge didn’t make it any easier to be her kid. Considering how much my mother’s screwed-up-ness had interfered with my life, it was really tough to empathize. So, while I wished I could have just loved my mother pure and simple, at least I understood that, even though she shone angelically in public, deep down and in the safety of her home, she was a sad mess in exactly all the ways she was raised to be.
See, my mom came from a long line of sick twisted wealth and seriously perverse notions of love. She grew up in a tight extended family that lived very simply but provided total financial support for life to those who deferred their personal sanity and needs to unfair family rules and expectations. With multiple bank accounts in various names and a net worth reaching into seven digits, the family had more money than they would ever use. Where did all that immigrant barrio dough come from? Mexican Mafia? Drugs? Black market jumping beans?
Official story held that my mother’s family had pinched hard-scraped pennies until the copper screamed. But please. You don’t get that much money from collecting pennies. Besides, my maternal great-grandparents were Mexicans who had come to the States during the Depression. There weren’t any pennies to pinch back then even if you’d wanted to, especially if you were Mexican, doubly if your marriage was the equivalent of that between an American black boy and a Southern white girl, which my great-grandparents’ was. My great-grandfather, often mistaken for Japanese in the States, was full-blooded Chichimecca Mexican Indian, and my greatgrandmother was green-eyed Michoacán Spanish-ancestry pale. Forget how they had money to burn, it was a wonder they didn’t get lynched—either in Mexico or in the States. Years of piecing clues together, eventually I learned that the true source of all the family money came from a blue-collar twist on white-collar crime.
It seems my great-grandfather was an Uncle Tomás. Perfecting what must have been a humiliating role as compliant darkie, he had worked as a scab for Sunkist during their most devastating Depression-era union strikes. As all the company’s other immigrant laborers—Mexican, German, and Irish—picketed in the fields and factories, lost the small savings they had, went without food and housing and were forced to return to their home countries, my great-grandfather had worked for the Man. And for his loyalty, the bosses paid him pretty under the table and later gave him breaks on buying up orange groves, company housing, and undeveloped lots when the company was ready to unload them. By the time my mother was born, her family owned acres of orange groves, entire city blocks of houses in their barrio, and clusters of homes all the way north to Sacramento.
In 1955, the family opened a little neighborhood grocery and sundries store. Remember, this was back in the era when signs reading
No Dogs, Niggers, or Wetbacks
were still a common sight in many Southern California store windows. Mexicans had few places to buy necessary goods. My mother’s family saw a market need, and so they met it. Plus, confirmed rumor around town was that if you needed a fake green card or papers, that store was the place to go. Located in the heart of the city’s barrio, it was a cash business. Hand over fist and into various shoebox stashes and accounts, my mother’s family played creative with their taxes and made bags of dough they then invested for even more profit.
Through it all, the family played like they were still as poor as their neighbors. They wore thrift store clothes, drove old rusted cars, and stood in line for government food. They could have eaten out at nice restaurants every meal, but they stocked their pantries with government grub instead. Completely strange and twisted, right? Even more bizarre and contradictory, as they did all these things to blend into their neighborhood, my grandmother insisted my mother lose her inherited accent, attend services at the local United Church of Christ, win 4-H blue-ribbon prizes, and assimilate as best she could. Given this mess of circumstances, no one was too shocked that my grandmother didn’t approve when my twenty-year-old mother met my father.
“Don’t marry a Mexican,” she told my mother.
I don’t care if that Francisco boy is fair-skinned and tall. And it makes no difference that he was born in Chicago—he grew up in Mexico, on a farm no less, he has no formal education, and he’s poor. Don’t you dare love him
, she’d meant to say.
“I won’t marry Francisco. I promise, Mother,” my mother said to hers.
Technically, she kept her word. She and my father never did marry. But they did fall in love. She, an undergrad honors student working long hours in the university research lab, was earning gold stars for med school applications. And he, the lab’s minimum-wage assistant (really a glorified guinea pig cage cleaner and toxic chemical janitor), was courting my mother by retrieving coffees for her late at night from the coin-operated vending machine located on the other side of campus. Their flirtation started out so innocently. But the lovey-dovey stars in their eyes brightened and brightened until there was no recourse save for universal expansion.
And so, when my mother received early acceptance to med school across the country, my father asked if she would allow him to come with her. She radiated an excited yes. Boxes were packed, my father got a job in the lab at her new school. Within a year, they were living together. And then they had me.
When I was born, my mother sent my grandmother a photograph. My grandmother—mind you, she took after her father in her dark brown, stocky Mexican Indian appearance— said: “At least she looks white.”
It was true; the only trace of Mexican Indian visible in my features was the flatness of my cheekbones. In every other way I’d taken after my father, a man who was living evidence of old Mexico’s European colonialization. Like him, I was fair-skinned, hazel-eyed, big-footed, taller-than-short, longlimbed, strong-nosed, and vaguely French-looking. Ironically, it was exactly because I didn’t look “Mexican”—because I so entirely resembled my father, the man my grandmother had forbidden my mother to love—that my grandmother resented me.
For the first two years of my life, whenever my grandmother’s friends asked if her daughter was enjoying living in Connecticut and how her little granddaughter was doing, she replied that she didn’t know, that she didn’t have any family living in New England. For real. She said that.
My mother’s mother was a grand liar.
Somehow, I don’t remember how exactly, my grandmother mentioned to me once that she’d voted for Nixon. Both in 1968 and in 1972. I couldn’t understand how she—a woman who read the entire newspaper from front to back each day, a registered Democrat, a Mexican-American living in a working-class neighborhood—could have supported such a conservative prick. It just made no sense to me. So, precocious teenager that I’d been, I tried to discuss the topic with her. Much to her annoyance.
At first I thought maybe she had voted for Nixon because he was a local boy. He’d grown up just a few towns away. Nixon’s Yorba Linda birthplace and my grandma’s City of Orange were both old citrus towns. They were sister cities. But I was pretty sure that alone didn’t explain her allegiance.
I asked. She didn’t answer.
Then I proposed that maybe she had voted for Nixon because of the whole visit to China thing in early 1972. I said I could sort of get that being the reason she liked him because publicly reinitiating relations with a Communist country back then was a seemingly radical thing for a Republican to have done. But, I prodded, even though that may have contributed to her decision to vote for his second term, it still didn’t explain why she’d voted for him in 1968.
No reply from my resistant debate partner.
When I learned Nixon was supported through each campaign by evangelical church leaders, things began to make a little more sense, especially considering all the speaking-intongues and no-dancing rules of my grandma’s strange whitey church. Still, something about the intensity of her loyalty just didn’t add up.
It wasn’t until 1994 when Nixon died and I saw old press footage on the evening news that it all clicked in my brain. There was a familiar essence to Nixon’s face—the flat gleam of his eyes, the drooping jowls, stiff smiles, and that unquantifiable something I recognized from the faces of my mother’s family … and then I knew. My grandma had Nixon’s back because they played the same game—the lying game.
