Like Son (3 page)
“Anyhow, if you ever get pregnant,” he said, almost cheerily, “there are options.”
He uncapped his Sharpie and felt for the paper napkins he’d spread on the table between us. At the center of the napkins, he drew a circle that was supposed to represent me. The marker’s ink bled out in a spindly spiderweb mess as he drew another line. He meant the line to start at the circle’s perimeter and extend outward. Instead, the line intersected the circle, and I thought of that old magic trick where the magician saws his assistant in half. I’d always hated that trick. I knew it was all smoke and mirrors, but there was something inherently creepy about the illusion. What if something went wrong and the assistant really got sawed in two? What then?
“You could selectively abort,” my father said, and wrote a jumble of overlapping letters I presumed would have read
abort
if he could have seen his own writing. “I know it sounds awful, but it’s an option,” he said.
A searing hot pain surged in my stomach. My pastrami on rye threatened to travel upward and out. I pressed on my wrists to stay grounded and try not to puke. My discomfort was not caused by the thought of an abortion, per se, but by having a conversation with my father—who’d just breezily revealed he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer—about being pregnant and selectively aborting a baby boy who might be blind because of something I had apparently inherited.
The situation sucked.
“Dad …”
“By the time you’d want a baby,” he marched on, “doctors might be able to manipulate an embryo’s chromosomes. It’d be expensive, but be sure at least to ask.”
He found the left edge of the napkins, dragged his index finger halfway across, and drew another line from where he imagined his circle daughter to be. He wrote a long tangled mess of totally illegible letters that he probably intended to read
artificial insemination
or
test tube baby
, but could have just as accurately read:
I’m a freak show and you’re a freak show and any kid you have will be a freak show too.
“Really, Paquita, it’s amazing what science can control,” he said.
There we were, living proof to the contrary. My chromosomes defined me as a daughter. And cancer was irreversibly sabotaging my father on the most essential of cellular levels. Our bodies were failing us in ways science could never entirely repair.
“Dad, are you scared?”
Such a stupid question. But I asked it.
He sighed. The skin on his face hung loose and pallid. He was going to die. Soon. Sooner than either of us realized. He sipped from his heavy ceramic mug of coffee. Black. Two sugars. Plastic brown stirring stick still in the mug.
“Dad?”
He reached his hand across the table and I met him halfway with mine. With a squeeze as warm as his sick flesh could afford, he said: “I don’t want to die alone.”
And then he cried. Openly. Loudly. Uncontrollably.
I silently vowed to be the perfect son.
I
emptied the feces-filled plastic bag secured to my father’s abdomen.
“I can’t do this. I can’t,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said, and tried not to let him hear as I gagged.
“You shouldn’t have to do this either.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
Of course, nothing about the situation was okay. My father would be in the hospital for another week. His surgery had been only a partial success. After minimal recovery time and a round of chemo, he’d be scheduled for more surgery. As it was, once the surgeons had finished removing much of his intestine, they’d sealed the lower end of his colon. Then they’d removed a small circle of skin at the original incision site, led the top half of his colon through the hole to the surface of his skin, and sewed the colon into place. That thick fleshy pink little nub fit into the opening of a plastic bag, which was adhesive-secured to his shaved-clean lower abdomen. Hence the colostomy bag which I cleaned for him. An enterostomal nurse stood by and watched to make sure I drained the bag into the bedpan properly.
“Mr. Cruz,” she said to my father as she supervised, “when you’re able to get out of bed, you will empty the bag directly into the toilet …”
I imagined my father straddling the toilet as the nurse said many patients prefer to do, his shirt pulled up, pants unbuckled but not pulled down, boxers lowered slightly.
“It’ll become second nature,” she said. “You won’t need help.”
Thank God.
I loved my father. Dearly. And I wanted to help. In any way possible. I’d take as many days off work as I could without getting fired. I’d fucking get fired if I had to. I’d really do anything.
But thank God.
I checked the clip sealing his plastic bag twice for good measure. If that clip slipped, the nurse warned, contents would leak. Weeks later, the first time the clip came undone unexpectedly, we tried to laugh away the humiliation of his shit-soiled shirt. This was our failed attempt at controlling a situation that allowed us virtually no control at all. Dying. There was nothing we could do about it. My father’s body was less his every day.
As months of chemo and subsequent surgeries passed, my father slept more and more. He was so still at times that I checked to find signs of his rib cage rising and falling. It terrified me to realize his slowing body was practicing for final sleep. And then there were his funeral marches to the bathroom to heave vanilla Ensure. He vomited a disgusting sweet stench of white fluid. Even applesauce wouldn’t stay down. His face was gaunt. His eyes, already virtually useless, seemed to shrink outright in sockets that were themselves hallowing at a frightening rate. One day he woke up the color of stale flan. Jaundiced. His liver joining colon. It was all going to pot. Strangely, the physical misery of this protracted death was contagious. Depletion burned deep in my core. My vision blurred. My bones ached.
7 May 1995, my twenty-third birthday: My father woke me by singing “Happy Birthday.” I’d slept over at his house the night before, and I was still wrapped in blankets on his couch, yawning, when he handed me a padded manila envelope. The envelope was outsized, eleven by fifteen inches at least. I couldn’t discern what was inside, but whatever it was didn’t weigh all that much. My father had written
Paquita, Birthday Girl
across the front in fat marker. Reading those words was like accidentally chewing on a piece of tinfoil, but I said nothing to him about it. We’d spent time together nearly every day for months, and I’d come close to broaching the topic with him countless times, but it always felt forced. I mean, he was dying, for God’s sake. And we were in each other’s lives again. Insisting we have some sort of big talk about my gender seemed to miss the point completely. So on my birthday, I tried to focus on his intention, on what was, girl reference or not, a birthday gift my father had carefully chosen for me.
“Should I open it now?” I asked.
“Of course.” He reached forward, found the couch edge with his hands, and sat down next to me.
I carefully loosened the envelope’s taped-shut flap, reached in, and pulled out a solid rectangle of dimensions not much longer or wider than my hand. My father had wrapped the object. And not only had he wrapped it, but he’d wrapped it beautifully. The small something was tucked inside starched gold linen fabric and tied with a white silk ribbon. I peeled off the wrapping paper only to find two more wrapped objects stacked one on top of the other.
The top gift turned out to be an old clothbound book with a blank cover. I opened it to the title page.
A dix ans sur mon pupitre. Nahui Olin. 1924.
I flipped through the pages and found that although the title was in French, the book was written in Spanish. From what I could tell, it seemed to be a selfpublished collection of prose poetry, almost like an antique ’zine, really. I wasn’t sure why my father thought I’d want a collection of poems, but the book was appealing in a vintageobject sort of way.
“Cool book. Thanks, Dad.”
“Open the rest.”
I did and found a small rectangle of cardboard with something pasted on one side. Upon inspecting the pasted something, I instantly felt like I had one time as a kid. I’d been spinning all around my mom’s house, dancing like a total spaz to the Sparks’
Angst in My Pants
, when I ran over to the couch, planted my hands on an armrest, did a somersault, and, klutzextraordinaire,
slam
, hit my back against the wall. I got the wind knocked out of me something good for my dorky dance move. That was the first time I’d ever lost my breath. It was terrifying. And thrilling. It was so intense that I thought I had died; all my other emotions up to that point, even if combined together into one single emotional whammy, came nowhere close to equaling the way I suddenly felt.
So, what could make me feel that way again? It probably won’t immediately impress you as something very extraordinary. But just hang with me for a minute.
Pasted to one side of the cardboard was a peeling and crumbling black-and-white photograph of a woman. A portrait. Very elegant. Posed. Artsy. And melancholy as all fuck. Strangely, I was pretty sure the photo had been mounted on the cardboard as a makeshift retablo to be used on someone’s home altar. I was confused by this because I thought retablos were supposed to depict saints—and the woman in the portrait was, from all appearances, most certainly not a saint. Still, the small cardboard object did seem to be a retablo. But, honestly, those pragmatic logistics were neither here nor there. What really mattered was that the woman in the portrait was hot. Beyond hot. In fact, the subject of the portrait just might have been the human incarnation of sex itself.
I greedily ate up every detail.
Written in a small careful cursive on the cardboard under the photo was:
Nahui Olin. Fotografía de Edward Weston. 1924.
Of course I knew who Weston was, but I didn’t recognize the woman’s name or the handwriting.
The portrait:
It had been shot with such a tight frame that the outer edges of the woman’s bare shoulders were cropped. Only a narrow halo of empty space surrounded her head. She was so nearby and right in front of me that I could see the pores of her skin on her cheeks and the tip of her nose. Every uneven strand of her jagged bangs and blunt bob was visible. I could count each deep crease on the dehydrated cupid-bow lips that formed an expression more snarl than smile. The woman’s conventionally beautiful features—lovely clavicle, outsized and thick-lash-adorned almond eyes—were almost an aside. It was her stare that punctured me so hard.
Even though I’d never seen her before, and I had no clue who she was, her wicked lovely stare made me want to worship the ground she walked on. I would be her most devoted servant. Of course someone had made an altar for her, who wouldn’t once they’d looked into her eyes? Those eyes, pure crystalline fire, could burn all barriers—the barriers between here and there, between what she had and what she wanted, between the past and present. Even though the photo was dated 1924, she was so goddamned rough and melt-down beautiful all at once that if someone had said to me, “Dude, check her out, her band’s playing tonight at Spaceland,” I would have so believed them and, I can guarantee, her thrasher riot girl band would have been my new favorite. She was timeless
jolie laide
perfection.
But, to my deep horror, she was disintegrating. Like a mirror unsilvering, specks of black—photographic paper and developing chemicals turning cannibalistic to devour their own image—showed through the left side of her face and on her shoulders. I resisted the intense urge to lick each and every one of those ashen freckles. Honestly, I wanted to taste past her skin. I wanted to find a way into her soul. I wanted to consume and claim forever as mine any part of her that might be slipping away.
I swear you would understand if you saw the portrait.
“Dad, where’d you get this?”
“The retablo?”
I was such an asshole. Of course he couldn’t see which of the two gifts I was holding.
“Yeah, the retablo.”
“Do you like it?”
“A lot.”
“It was my mother’s. I found it after she died.”
I wish I’d known how to respectfully tell my father that I appreciated the layered importance of his gift, that I understood that he gave me the retablo both because he knew I’d love it, and also because soon he, like his mother, would be dead. I wanted him to know I was grateful that he recognized mourning was in my near future. If nothing else, he was making sure I’d have a retablo of a surrogate saint to turn to in my sadness. I comprehended all of this immediately, but I was at a loss when it came to the subtleties of communication in emotionally steeped situations.
I blurted out: “Is the photo really a Weston?”
I hoped the question sounded sophisticated. It was hard to tell if my dad was impressed. But I think he might have been.
“Yes, but that’s only a reproduction.”
“Why’d Grandma make the retablo?”
The word “Grandma” felt dumb leaving my mouth. Even though I’d never met her, she had been, indeed, my grandmother. Still, no disrespect, it was weird to call her “grandma.” My father seemed to pick up on this.