Like Son (7 page)

Maybe accomplished liars can pick up the scent of deceitfulness on each other, because I’m pretty sure that even before the Watergate fiasco, my mother’s mother had looked at Nixon, and she had known that together they had plenty in common. Both of their families started out working class and scratched upward. Both told pretty lies all the way. Just like Nixon, my mother’s family was the Great American Dream come true via the untrue.

By the time I graduated from high school and moved out of my mother’s house, I’d long been unwilling to play along quietly in my maternal family’s collective psychosis. But then, five long years later, there I was at my mother’s doorstep. Of course, finding those letters at the bank had been the immediate and obvious push for me to go to her house, but my standing in front of my mom that day was something bigger than just that. It was as if my father’s death had abruptly reconfigured my existence within a larger genetic framework. The disintegration of my chromosomal matrix had triggered a need for reunion. Finding myself at my mother’s house only a handful of days after my father died, with the dead man’s ashes actually tucked under my arm no less, was primal chemistry asserting itself involuntarily.

It was like those freak instances when you stretch your back years and years after you did a particularly strong tab of acid, only to suddenly have the traces of illegal chemical stored dormant in your spinal fluid burst active into fullblown glory all over again. Like one of those glowsticks they sell at carnivals,
snap
, all you meant to do was adjust your alignment, but too bad because now you’ve got hallucinogens rushing your brain and you better just chill and enjoy the ride because you’re tripping and seriously spun.

My dad was dead and I missed my mom. I also missed the house I grew up in. I knew the actual fibers of that place by heart. I could walk from cluttered room to room closeeyed without crashing into a single object. Forget unrealistic regressed expectations of some saccharine Hallmark moment, that day I just wanted to be with my mother in her house.

But she was insane. My mother. Truly, she was insane.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Fucking bizarre question. But it got me thinking. Really, who was I? Where to begin? Let’s see, for starters …

Well, I’d been the human my mother gave birth to in a doomed love affair when she should have been focusing on her med school texts and clinics. And I’d been the toddler she said used to huddle under the kitchen table with an upset stomach in a graduate housing apartment when insults and pots and pans flew through the air. I’d also been the three-year-old whom she, one day when my father was at work, snuck onto a plane and took back with her to Southern California.

And three years later—when she, by then the star member of the acclaimed UCLA surgery residency program, fell in love with a young hotshot anesthesiologist she met on rounds while extracting the compressed shit out of an old man—I’d been the six-year-old she brought along into marriage. My mother’s husband was the only child of a wealthy political family—his revered mother, a lawyer like her husband, had been a member of President Carter’s cabinet. Add to it all, my stepfather was towheaded and as Waspy as could be. My mother’s mother finally approved. We existed in her world again. Our future seemed golden.

I remember thinking I was some sort of royalty when my Prince Charm new stepfather told me I could call him “Chip” as he drove us, his perfect little insta-family, in his cherry-red 1978 Porsche 911 SC Targa to his fancy Laguna Hills home. I’d gone from living in my grandmother’s barrio home to living in a multimillion-dollar estate with my own swimming pool and Jacuzzi and private hilltop view.

My father, who had relocated back to Southern California to be close to me and to fight for custody, was a burdensome reminder to my mother of her old life. For a year, each time I returned to the fancy house from my father’s court-mandated every-other-weekend and Wednesday night visitation privileges, I was required to strip down to my underwear in the foyer. My mother took my clothes and sleepover bag and placed them in a sealed trash bag in the garage for a day before “disinfecting” them twice in the washing machine with bleach at the hottest setting. She said she did this to kill cockroach eggs on my clothes. I had made the mistake of telling my mother once that I’d seen a giant cockroach outside my father’s apartment. So, yes, technically, there were probably cockroaches at his place, but still, she might as well have hosed me down naked in the carport every other weekend and Wednesday night. I was thus filled with deep shame. Not to mention self-loathing.

When I was eight, Chip’s parents helped my mother file papers to terminate legally my father’s visitation rights. They had no true legal right to do what they did. But they had the pull. They were that powerful. My dad still had to pay child support, but he couldn’t see me anymore.

And, presumably because I had become, for all intents and purposes, as Chip said, “his girl,” Chip hired a design team to glitz-up my bedroom. Looking back at it, the miniature pied-à-terre that resulted should have been a red flag that he thought of me in ways other than purely parental—which it turned out he definitely did—but no one seemed to think anything strange of it then. All I knew was that I was totally stoked when an interior decorator came over to consult with me, still only eight years old, on possible themes for the renovation. With my approval, we settled on new rattan furniture à la
Three’s Company
, what I thought were awesome Hawaiian-print linens, a custom paint job that included an OP-surfer-style sunset on one wall, and adhesive glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling in a perfect recreation of the Milky Way. Construction workers installed a bar sink and dorm-sized refrigerator (blended into my bedroom with tiki bar rattan accents and forever stocked with those cool squat eight-ounce cans of Coke and vacuum-sealed glass jars of macadamia nuts). One corner of my room held an entertainment system that consisted of not only a turntable and speakers but also a remote control color television with stereo sound. I even got my own phone line and answering machine. I felt so damned grown-up. A third-grader missing two front teeth, I was crowned an American princess.

On most weekends, Chip, my mother, and I drove up to a super snooty section of hilly suburban Los Angeles to visit Chip’s parents. They held dinners and introduced us to congressmen, senators, and a hodgepodge of renowned musicians, artists, and other famed people. Two quirky examples I loved to brag about when I was a kid: my stepgrandma knew astronauts, and she’d met Andy Warhol once (she’d been bombed on wine—as she often was—the night they met, according to an entry in Warhol’s later published diaries). Sir Edmund Hillary, drunk and sans the Sherpa who really reached the summit first, posed for a Polaroid with me by my stepgrandparents’ fireplace for my Famous World Figure social sciences report in fourth grade. Official NASA satellite photographs illustrated my planet report in sixth grade.

I glowed in limelight. I traveled. I sat front row at rock concerts. I wore cashmere sweaters and drank from a crystal glass filled with Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Cider at the fancy yuppie wine-tasting parties we hosted in our home. Chip liked to play Frisbee golf on the weekends. He also had a thing for secretly snorting pharmaceutical coke lifted from hospital holdings. Hippocratic Oath and all human ethics out the window, by the time I was nine, Chip had taken to drugging and fucking his prepubescent stepdaughter in the middle of the night.

And my mother dared ask who I was?

Well, I’d been the little girl who woke inexplicably groggy and aching and sad in the mornings, who still managed to always keep her braids combed tidy, to tuck her shirt in, to say thank you and generally sit politely when told to. I’d been the one who worked like a dog in school to get high marks so my mother would be proud of me. I’d been the strange kid who cried at her desk before elementary school exams from the anxiety of trying to be perfect.

I’d also been the child Chip came home to once after a shift in the ER and told about a little boy he’d worked on the night before.

“It was like he melted, Francisca,” he said.

Chip told me that the little boy’s father had taken his only son to a motel room, poured gasoline on him, thrown a lit match, and left him to burn to death. Firefighters found the boy and put out the flames before he died, but not before his entire body was covered in third-degree burns. He would live. The father would go to prison for sure.

“Monster,” Chip said, presumably in reference to the boy’s father.

And then he sat across from me at the kitchen table and cried. I continued eating my Tony the Tiger cereal afternoon snack. And I know this is sick, but I wished I had thirddegree burns from head to toe like the little boy. I fantasized about being in the hospital, about being covered in gauze and icepacks, about IV tubes sticking out of me and machines keeping me alive. I wanted nurses and doctors frantically flitting about treating me. I fantasized about suffering unearthly brutal but easily diagnosed pain. I daydreamed about Chip being arrested and spending the rest of his life in prison.

So, who was I?

I’d been the person who knew best how full of shit my mother’s airs of impeccability were. She, entirely invested in surface—sculpting, plump-injecting, and laser-beam smoothing other people’s aging bodies, perfecting the false flawless mask she herself put on each day—probably would have stayed married to Chip forever if it had been an option. Given the opportunity, she would have stuck by his side and taken endless holiday card portraits smiling with him in matching sweaters next to the Christmas tree. But, in a glaringly public addition to his early midlife crisis, he’d had an affair with a nurse coworker and then served my mother with divorce papers. It was so pathetically
Seven Year Itch.

My mother refused to sign the divorce papers. Shut down and totally depressed, she diagnosed herself with Epstein Barr Virus. Desperate for company, I guess, she told me that I too was seriously ill with the virus. After months of her insistent, persistent diagnosis, I gave in.

January 1986:

Bedridden and covered in severe hives that I’d somehow manifested as medical proof of what an obedient kid I was, I watched hours and hours of live news coverage leading up to the Challenger shuttle launch. I was completely fascinated with NASA stuff, with knowing every little detail about the preparations and equipment and crew. I liked the science teacher guest astronaut who gave thumbs-up and big smiles at press conferences. She looked like she’d be a cool teacher, unlike the ones who threatened to fail me for the countless days of eighth grade curriculum I’d missed that year. I woke so damned excited the day of the launch. I sat right in front of my bedroom television, volume all the way up, glued to the set, counting down with Ground Control. And then … well, you know what happened.

I watched the explosion and all the instant replays. And I sobbed. Uncontrollably. Hives in my throat swelled from the stress. I couldn’t breathe. My mom wasn’t home. She was meeting with her lawyer that day. I was alone. My windpipe constricting, I gasped for air. Several seconds passed. Blue specks and white streamers filled my line of vision. My ears felt heavy. I heard buzzing. The sound in my left ear went out entirely. I was unable to inhale a full breath. I gasped. I was going to pass out. Panicked, I reached for the EpiPen my mother had left in my room in anticipation of such an event. She had explained how to use the clunky penlike contraption when she first diagnosed me with hives.

“The EpiPen is filled with 0.3 milligrams of epinephrine, a dose sufficient to halt a grown man’s anaphylaxic reaction. The syringe is spring-loaded and automatic. Just press the tip of the pen to your outer thigh until you hear it click. Count to thirty. It’ll inject on its own,” she’d lectured with a slight glimmer in her eye.

The hives were visibly worsening. Dizzy, my hands tingling and losing sensation, I yanked up my pajama boxer shorts and jabbed the pen against my thigh. The pain was immediate. Stinging medicine flowed hot up my leg toward my heart. I massaged the spot of injection to sooth what I was sure would become a bruise.

Within seconds, my hives subsided. I could breathe again.

But I couldn’t stay awake. I fell asleep. I slept and slept. And slept some more. Lurid images of explosions filled my dreamless brain. Everything was too much. Everything. I simply didn’t want to be awake anymore.

“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” my mother asked when she got home.

“I used the pen. I’m sleepy,” I said.

After a few more days of my endless sleep, my mother— my sole physician and guardian—reached into her bag of tricks, diagnosed me with mononucleosis, told me to stay in bed, wrote a letter withdrawing me from school indefinitely for medical reasons, disconnected my phone line, told my friends who stopped by that I couldn’t come to the door, and said I’d enroll at a private middle school once I was better.

And I was the sick one?

I was thirteen and I was angry, and being angry made me brave. Memories came back to me from the deep haze they’d hidden in. Simultaneously numb and scared, I told my mother what Chip had done to me. She listened, looked at me with blank eyes, and forbade me to tell anyone else.

“Don’t complicate the situation, Francisca,” she said. “We risk losing too much, especially now.”

Central to my required “proactive cooperation,” as she called it, was maintaining all appearances of loyalty to Chip as my father.

“The court needs to know you miss him, that you think of him as your father. Your
only
father,” she said.

I was forbidden from reinitiating contact with Francisco.

“When you turn eighteen, you can make your own decisions on this matter. But honestly, I don’t know why you would want to associate with such trash,” she said.

And so, just like that, I became the kid she wished she’d never taught to speak. She said this often, as an aside, as if I was a mouthy brat, which I wasn’t. She said it with a smile and slight laugh—to her colleagues, to her patients, to the gas attendant dude, to whomever would listen to her supposedly innocent maternal teasing. They’d laugh with her, charmed by her as they always were.