During the divorce proceedings my mother fought for the house—the house I’d been repeatedly raped in. I told her I wanted to move. “Don’t
you
want to move?” I asked. I pleaded. Blind fury, she fought tooth and nail for her society-marriage-expensive-house-wronged-wife martyrdom.
“I absolutely refused to let him have the house, for Francisca’s sake,” she later liked to say. “I wasn’t going to let him rob our baby of her home.”
Years and years of bullshit and lies, but still, when my father died, some part of me wanted nothing more than to sit on my mother’s living room couch and rub elbows with her—of course, even that fantasy wasn’t untainted by reality. Even if she had let me inside her house to sit down, I hated the couch in her living room. When I was fifteen, two of her rich patients had delivered that particular hand-me-down from their garage.
Why? Because we had no furniture.
Two years post-divorce, Prince Charm had come to the house with a court order permitting him to select and claim possession of items he’d left behind in his frenzied departure when insufficient blood was reaching his brain. He strolled through the house with his young-nurse-fake-tits-trophy-wife and pointed to things for moving guys to carry out to trucks parked in the carport. Total asshole, Chip didn’t even need any of the stuff he took. He’d been gone for two years, he already had a new house with all new things. That day was pure power trip.
A man who wouldn’t know how to prepare a meal to save his life, Chip took the ice-cube-dispensing refrigerator from the kitchen, the Cuisinart, the Krups coffee grinder, and most of our pots and pans. He pointed to our cool kidneyshaped couch and it disappeared from the house along with a few matching modernist chairs. He took throw pillows and several lamps. And when he ordered the movers to pack the living room’s custom-length curtains, sun glared in and revealed dented spots on the carpet where furniture should have been, scuffs where framed photographs had decorated walls, cobwebs exposed in what had been, just minutes before, dark hidden corners. He took all the master bedroom furniture. He even pushed past me to retrieve the headboard, nightstand, vanity, stereo, and television from
my
bedroom.
As I watched Chip move through my room and pile up my things for the movers to carry away, scenes from old
Waltons
episodes played in my brain. Back then, I watched reruns of that show religiously, and my favorite episode was the one where the young redheaded freckle-faced Walton girl turns thirteen and gets all these spooky witchy powers and shutters slam when she’s mad and chairs skitter across the floor when she doesn’t get her way. It was like,
whoa
, a girl starts to bleed and watch out, she’s dangerous and devil-possessed. I think it was a Halloween special. Scared the shit out of me. I loved it.
My stupid ex-stepfather was in my bedroom, stealing all my things. I figured it was worth a shot to try to conjure spirits and demons and whatever else might come to the aid of a pissed-off fifteen-year-old kid. I hated Chip so fucking much. I focused hard and willed any supernatural power I might possess to strike him down. Gilded golden boy, he drove away that day without a scratch.
And then, about a week after Chip emptied out our house, two of my mother’s fancy patients, a husband and wife, brought their old furniture, including a crap-brown couch, to our house. My mother had learned the faux-poverty grovel bullshit family game from her mother perfectly. She thanked her patients profusely and nudged me to do the same, to play like we were humble inferiors dependent on the kindness of strangers. It was fucking humiliating. I recognized the looks on their faces from early in my childhood.
Once when I was young my grandmother took me on her weekly trip to get government food at the barrio community service building, the Friendly Center. As we stood in line, my grandmother’s neighbors, usually so chatty, didn’t talk to us or even look at us. But the do-gooders who volunteered at the Friendly Center and distributed the cardboard boxes of cheese and giant tubs of peanut butter, they looked at us— like they were examining us for defects. I remember watching the wheels in their heads turn as they tried to figure out why I, seemingly a little white girl, was there with an old Mexican woman.
I could almost hear them processing:
Oh, she must be the girl’s nanny.
And then:
So help me God, if our nanny took my baby with her to get handouts, I’d have the woman deported.
When my grandmother told me to help her carry some heavy cans of white-labeled government applesauce, the volunteers watched with what could only be described as disgusted disapproval. But it was their initial expressions of pity and superiority that came back to haunt me on my mother’s patients’ faces.
They looked at us like we were pathetic. And my mother thanked them in return.
My mother confounded me.
Apparently, the sentiment was mutual.
“Who are you?” she had the nerve to ask.
I was the child she probably wished she’d never had. I was a person who wanted out of the life I was born into. But there was one thing I most definitely wasn’t …
I was
not
my mother’s daughter.
Time had come that even she, queen of false reality, couldn’t help but see the man—granted, awkward and still somewhat gawky—I’d become. All through my adolescence she had tried to convince herself that my ever-more-confident boyness was only some sort of
unfortunate phase
. For years, she picked apart my layers of oversized boy clothes, my short haircuts, my ever-failing attempts to deepen my voice, the way I hunched my shoulders to hide any visible curve of my small breasts—she scrutinized all of this as if she were making a diagnosis. She showered me with mean criticisms veiled as motherly advice about my supposed lack of grace and untapped beauty. I rarely managed to articulate any sort of response in my own defense. All I knew was that I was a boy and that being a boy felt safe and true and right.
As a teenager, I desperately wanted to leave my mother. I dreamed about running away or filing for emancipation, but she would have never allowed it. She’d have sent me away to juvie on trumped-up charges before she would let me embarrass her by showing the world I wanted to get away. I knew I’d have to wait until I was eighteen to leave. My friends told me I should apply for early admission to universities on the East Coast and have her foot the bill for my freedom. They so didn’t get it. I mean, sure I wanted to go to college, I’d busted my ass getting perfect marks all through school, but I knew my mother would continue somehow to control me for as long as I was doing things her way. And going to college like a good kid was most definitely doing things her way. Stupid and self-defeating as it may have ultimately been, I wrote off college. I wish I’d known a way to take her money, go to university, and flip her off all the same time, but I didn’t. So, starting in my junior year, I worked after school and on weekends and all summer long. I saved money. Neurotic overachiever, I still earned all A’s and even graduated high school “Most Likely to Succeed.” But the second I graduated, I used my savings to move to L.A., where I got a new job and worked more and saved less money, but finally slept well at night.
Being away from my mother for five years was one of the best gifts anyone could have ever given me. But then my dad died and I had his ashes and I was exhausted and I’d read those letters at the bank, and damnit, there I was at my mother’s house. Part of me had hoped she might show at least a little kindness. I needed that from her. I really did.
Instead, I got: “What do you want? Money?”
“No, Mom …”
“Wait,” she said and disappeared into the house, the screen door still locked.
She returned, cracked the screen door open, and pushed her manicured hand through, a thick roll of cash in her fingers. The top bill was a hundred. It was safe to assume the rest were too. Strange knowledge I’d gained from my mother’s family, I could eyeball a wad of cash and accurately estimate how much was there without even needing to hold it, let alone count it out. My mother was pushing approximately five thousand dollars at me. Same as her family, she was desperate for control and more than willing to buy it.
“Here,” she said.
“I don’t want it, Mom.”
“Take it.”
Fuck, what would you do? Honestly. If someone was shoving thousands of dollars at you and you could just waltz away that much richer with nothing required of you, no debt incurred (of course, the situation would never be so simple as that)—what would you do?
“Thank you,” I said. Perfunctorily. And took the money.
And then she said: “Do you realize what people say about you?” Her eyes scanned me up and down.
Forget apron strings attached, the money I’d already tucked in my jeans pocket—like any other support my mother had ever given me—came with a noose. Payment for abuse, past and present. Hush money. Blood money. Retribution funds.
I had my money. And I should have done the walking-away part. I should have held my head high and left. But I didn’t. Instead, I dug in my heels and refused to budge. I was hungry for kind words, one warm hug of reassurance, a single atom of unconditional maternal approval and kindness. Clearly the woman was incapable of giving me these things, but I argued my case one last time. I spoke quietly and calmly at first, then, mounting frustration, my hand trying to open the screen that blocked my entry into her home, into her heart, I begged please to be let in. My voice loud and strained, I cried and pleaded with my mother to please, please, please let me in.
My screen-door-pixilated mother edged away and paused to signal that the end, the absolute not-another-word finale was about to hit. And then, almost whispering, the ultimate of insults from her, she said: “You have your father’s blood in you.”
I half expected her to cross her nonpracticing Protestant self for protection before she closed the front door with a purposeful push. She didn’t slam the door. Uptight repressed tragedy, even then, even as she essentially orphaned her child, her only child, even then my mother didn’t let her emotions rage. Strangely, her lack of emotional display was itself just for show. She didn’t want any neighbors who might be looking down from their own hilly views to catch sight of her slamming the door on the miserable horned creature standing on her
Welcome
mat.
Horns. Yes, I’m certain I had horns emerging from my temples. My father did too. God-fearing woman that she was raised to be, my mother had always insisted she hated my devil father from the day they met.
“Actually,” she once said, “at first I pitied him.”
What a romance love story: First comes pity, then comes marriage, then comes little me all pink blanket and bouncing baby carriage. Perfect. Take a snapshot and put it in each and every tacky gold picture frame sold in dime stores across the country. Buy the frame and get the dream.
She said, “You have your father’s blood in you,” and I saw in her eyes all the times my father had grabbed her tiny wrists and forced her to listen, the times he had screamed and thrown things against walls. I was not violent, but, unforgivable as it was, I did understand why my father had snapped with anger at her. The way she refused to speak when she disagreed and didn’t think you worth her time—it drove me mad, the holier-than-thou air she doused herself with in the way some people wear perfume. Not just a spritz behind the ears or the backs of the knees, or a polite little cloud walked into. No, my mother poured herself big tubs of righteousness and soaked ritualistically. She was rigid and bloated from such long baths of stoic false humility.
And still, I had wanted her to let me in.
A thick wad of money in my pocket, my father’s ashes tucked under my arm, I walked back down my mother’s tortuous driveway to my car. There was nothing to stay around for.
F
rom my mother’s house, I got on the I-5 north and drove directly to the lawyer’s office.
“Something’s come up,” I told him. “Can you sell my dad’s house and whatever?”
“That’s why he retained me, Ms. Cruz.”
I stood at his desk, holding the compact box the funeral home had given me.
“My dad wanted his ashes in the Pacific,” I said, knowing full well my dad had never said any such thing.
“Would you like me to arrange those details also?”
“Yes. Please.”
One final tap of my fingers on the box of ashes (how does one show affection to a box of ashes?), I handed over my father’s remains.
By the time I got back in my car it was nearly five, but still the sun was relentless. Bright light blasted through the windshield and forced me to squint the entire way to my father’s house. Irony was that by the time I arrived, my pupils were so constricted that I felt particularly worthy of the first item I retrieved:
A red-tipped white walking stick. From the hallway coatrack. I tucked the folded-up cane in my hand and continued to my father’s bedroom. Blind man dark glasses from his bureau, golden little worry stone from the nightstand—I placed these on the rented hospital bed and sat to rest for a second.
My suits would fit you nicely
, I swear I heard my father say.
His presence shivered me.
“I don’t wear suits,” I said aloud. As if he could hear me. I think he could.
Take them. Think about it later.
Considering I was filled with guilt over leaving his ashes at the lawyer’s, I felt inclined to obey. I had no idea when I’d ever wear his fancy clothes, but I went to his closet, gathered his suits, a few dress shirts, and lay them next to the small pile of his things on the bed.
A gentleman needs proper accoutrements.
Gentleman? Me? Hardly. More like skater rat, but still, I wondered, had he understood more than I’d given him credit for? If he had, then why the birthday gift with
Paquita, Birthday Girl …
The fedoras and pocket squares. Take them too. And my briefcase.
Again, I did as told.
My father’s suits draped over the hook of my left arm, and his cane, glasses, and the worry stone safely packed in the serious-looking Secret Agent Man black leather briefcase in my right hand, I walked downstairs. At the second to final step, the atmospheric pressure was suddenly wrong. Bright blue sparkles filled my eyes. Pins and needles flowed through my veins. I started to hyperventilate. Try as I did, I couldn’t get a proper breath in. The suits and briefcase fell from my grip to the floor. I stumbled to the couch and sat. No, that wasn’t good enough. I lay on the couch, my feet stuck on the carpeted floor, my torso and legs forming a twisted right angle. I closed my eyes. Fuck, I was going to black out and choke on my own tongue and froth at the mouth and die and nobody would find me until the lawyer sent people to clear out my dad’s house. I was so going to die. That was it. I was dead. I was totally dead.