Like Son Page 5

  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 teen
ager 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.

  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.