Tell Me Something Real

For my sister, Robyn

Neighbors call us brats, unruly yelling monsters who pick fights with their children, litter their lawns, and scream at night when we should be asleep. We hear “Where is your mother?” daily, a question as boring as bedtime prayers. Adrienne, my older sister with the filthy mouth, always yells back, “She's dying, so why don't you shut the hell up?”

Adrienne is beautiful; her strawberry-blond hair and yellow sundress disguise her poisonous tongue. A cream puff with tacks inside. As we walk to the car, a tidy row of deceptively innocent-looking girls, I trail behind like an afterthought. I want to be a mixture of my sisters, gathering fragments and putting them together to create a mismatched whole. Unapologetic like Adrienne. Gentle like Marie.

Adrienne takes after our mother, inheriting her cornflower-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips. She rides shotgun. Marie and I cram in the back, where I watch Mom's hair whip around her face in the rearview mirror. She commits
her gaze to the road. I want her to glance up and blow me one of her rare and elusive air kisses. I rest my head against the window and evaluate the sky. Dark clouds cluster together as if they are scared to be alone.

San Diego is a strange mix of border town and resort. As we drive through the neighborhoods, I can identify the rich from the poor with ease. The run-down houses with cracked stucco blur into larger, freshly painted versions of themselves. Some streets are tree lined; others are dusty and filled with potholes. American flags wave at the major intersections, a constant reminder of the bicentennial and recent end of the Vietnam War. Fire hydrants have lost their bright yellow color in exchange for a more festive red, white, and blue. It's 1976—the most significant year of the twentieth century. Fireworks trump the moon walk.

I love the car, the simple act of being in motion. Marie climbs over the emergency brake and turns on the radio. Sparing us from her beloved disco, Adrienne takes requests for stations, and we sing along to Neil Diamond and the Carpenters. I pretend that we're taking a road trip. A vacation to the Grand Canyon or Lake Michigan or Mount Rushmore. I sing loudly.

“I love your voice, Vanessa,” Mom says.

Adrienne agrees. “You have a goddamn angel voice.”

The highway curves against the ocean, the shore so close that the salt water stings our eyes. Mom tells us that if we look hard enough, we might see dolphins beyond the
breaks. Marie and I stare for what feels like hours, dying to see the arched gray backs emerge for a brief moment before disappearing into the surf. Adrienne says that she's more interested in the debris floating in the waves: logs, seaweed, a broken surfboard. She wants to see sharks and teeth.

We pull up to wait in line for the border crossing. Adrienne blasts the radio until guards glare at us. She stares right back, smiling as she runs her tongue over her teeth. She is seventeen and defiant, confident now that she's going to be a senior. Mom looks at the guards and then at Adrienne before turning down the music. Being blond makes the crossing effortless. A guard waves us right through. We're halfway there.

Mom says Tijuana looks like a city that's been bombed. In the streets filled with pedestrians, our pace slows. We pass refrigerator boxes that house families. Children younger than me, younger than Marie, who is nine, run after the car, begging.

“Be grateful,” Mom says.

Marie leans against the window, needy, the youngest. “When are we going to eat?” she asks. She wants a bottle of Coke and a burrito.

Mom answers, “When we're out of Tijuana, honey.”

My father told me that Mom's symptoms began when she was nineteen. They were students at UCLA. She studied nursing, and he studied architecture. My mother had a tumor. A small, ugly bump on the back of her neck. Dad said
it was the only ugly thing about her. She explained that it was cancer and had it removed. Except for the faded scar, they almost forgot about it, until five months ago, when she told Dad about the leukemia. Now cancer possesses us; we are its hostages. We occupy a world of illness. Rooms filled with closed curtains, a kitchen sink overflowing with dirty dishes. We are ungrateful. We don't appreciate the present or the past. We want more, and each unmet need germinates into a nagging resentment, multiplying like infected cells.

Laetrile is cyanide. Its origins seem harmless: apricot pits. It should be nutritional, like a vitamin or dietary supplement. A few years ago, a bigwig doctor declared it the miracle cure. Others call it poison. Thousands of people diagnosed with cancer—mostly blood cancers—go to Mexico for Laetrile treatment, staying in the clinics for days or weeks or months. It is illegal in the United States.

At first, we visited the Mexican clinic weekly, staying a night at a time. We learned a handful of phrases:
“por favor”
and
“gracias”
and
“donde esta el baño?”
Bilingual in medical terminology, Mom manages communication, freeing us from doctors and details. We like the children at the clinic because they are as loud as us. They don't appear full of fear. They don't pity us for having a sick mother. Their parents don't banish us from their houses because Adrienne utters phrases like “shit-faced rat fucker.” Later I realize how easy it is to simplify people when you don't share a common language. When you can't ask questions and understand answers.

At the clinic, Mom has found a community among the patients. She improves her already excellent Spanish. There, nurses take care of her while we lounge in the courtyard looking out at the ocean as though on holiday.

I don't want to believe Mom is as sick as the others. When we first came to the clinic, she looked so much better than the other patients. She had color in her cheeks and enough energy to shop in Ensenada. Now she doesn't feel well enough to ride her bike; she stopped visiting with friends; she threw out her makeup. Mom is sick, but her illness is abstract. My parents are strained with each other, always tired and preoccupied with something larger than our family—the grief of living each day as though it could be the last.

Once we pass Tijuana's crowded streets and finally arrive at the clinic, Mom disappears upstairs. We sling our backpacks over our shoulders and cut through the kitchen into the courtyard, pausing so Adrienne can sneak cold bottles of Coke from the fridge.

“We won't be here long,” she says. “It's just a blood-work day. An hour, tops.” She stretches her long legs on one of the chaise lounges and pulls out her arsenal of fashion magazines, pining for peasant blouses, wrap dresses, and jumpsuits. Like her idol, Stevie Nicks, she wraps her hair back with a scarf.

As I read one of my Agatha Christie mysteries, the riparian tree casts shadows across my body, a temporary tattoo
of leaves. I try to concentrate on the book, on the perils of the Orient Express, but the breeze flutters the pages, disturbing my already poor concentration. I never understand what happens to Mom upstairs, where they insert needle after needle into her arm, taking out blood and pumping in medicine. A war rages inside her, white blood cells against furious red, crowds cheering for life or death. A spectator sport too complicated to follow.

Marie can't sit still, too busy with her virgin saints, torched maidens engulfed by flames, that have obsessed her since Mom's diagnosis. We aren't Catholic, not even churchgoers. Until the diagnosis, we only spoke of God in profane terms.

Copying Saint Lucy, a waif of a girl who carried her gouged-out eyes on a plate, Marie walks with her eyes closed, stumbling over calla lilies and gardenia bushes.

“Park it, Marie. I'm sick of this,” Adrienne says.

“Sick of what?” Marie pops open her eyes and blinks in the sun.

“All of your bumping around. Come here.” Adrienne pats the vacant chair next to hers. “I have something for you.” She spills out the remaining contents of her backpack.

“What do you have?”

Adrienne hands her a plastic box. “It's a Make-Your-Own-Rosary kit.” She taps the box with her finger. “See the beads?” She kisses Marie's cheek. “Now sit down.”

Marie organizes the beads by color, rattling off their
meaning: violet for penance, green for hope, red for love, and white for purity. She leaves the black beads in the box.

I point to the sky. “Here's the storm.”

“You should do the weather on TV.” Adrienne smirks. “It's like you're psychic.”

I shoot her an I-told-you-so look when rain splatters her magazine. We can't pack up fast enough. I hold my hand out to Marie. “Come on, you can play with that inside.”