Crux Page 14
WICCA
Mommy took me and my sister to the torn-up condominium in 2000. I was eleven. Electric wires spilled from the walls. The sticky, mutilated floor smooched our shoes. The wine-colored carpet of my early childhood was still in place on the stairs, marred by hard black cigarette burns. I touched it. A sense of well-being flowered in me, a tactile echo of the past. I removed my shoes and socks and walked upstairs, trying to summon dead days with my feet. A layer of ash covered everything. Cigarette stubs floated on the dark yellow water of the toilet. My mother called me from the kitchen—she didn’t want us wandering here alone. She advised me to put my shoes back on.
Papi was missing, possibly dead. I had no clue why Papi had damaged the condominium like this. I had learned not to ask questions about him. He was a forbidden subject. The kitchen was filthy with grease and stacks of dirty plates. My sister and I helped our mother wash silverware, scrub counters, flush toilets, fill trash bags. We placed our father’s things in boxes: notebooks, silverware, electronic gadgets, clothing. Papi’s brothers picked them up. My mother hired a company to re-install the carpet and repair the walls. Abuelita Carolina paid for a new electrical system. When the work was done, my mother sold the condominium.
That year, I marred my straight-A record with a B in history. I was in sixth grade.
I had finally accepted that stories in books were distinct from reality. But reality was dreadful, so I decided to manipulate the fabric of the universe itself. Magic. I looked up spells online and purchased books like True Magick: A Beginner’s Guide. I aimed to master the witchcraft of my childhood fairy tales. I knew better than to believe in goblins and mermaids and fairies, but my research had taught me that witches did in fact exist—Wicca was a religion, just like Catholicism.
My first act of magic was innocent: a strength spell. When I couldn’t open a jar of pickles, I simply invoked the power of the earth, the wind, et cetera, and voilà, opening the jar would require a mere flick of my wrist. I was eager to show off this power, and whenever somebody had trouble taking the lid off anything—a gallon of Gatorade, a jar of Jif—I would rush to the rescue and say, casually: It’s a magic spell I know.
Then I used witchcraft to improve my grades. I repeated a magic rhyme at the start of each test: Earth, wind, fire and sea / As I say so mote it be / On this test I take today / I shall receive no less than A.
It worked. My ambitions grew. I had learned no boy would ever like frizzy-haired, pimply me of his own volition. I decided to bewitch a brunette named Matt, one of the few boys who did not make gagging sounds when chancing upon my face. Once, he told me I was “not repulsive,” which nearly made me faint with glee. He had full, heart-shaped lips, a retroussé nose and small, tan hands I longed to touch.
I lacked a silver goblet as required by the spell, but I figured one of my mother’s wineglasses would do. I filled it with water and set it on my bedroom floor. I lit three red votive candles. I closed my eyes, visualized Matt’s beautiful face and read a chant from one of my magic books thrice. Then I blew out the candles and took my “goblet” outside, to be charged overnight by the waxing moon. The next morning, I drank the magic water.
Matt kept his usual distance in class. But in the evening, he called to ask about homework. I answered his questions, then clutched the cordless and closed my eyes, bracing for the inevitable buh-bye. Instead, he said: “So…what’s up?”
A dam came crashing down; my history poured out of my mouth. I told him I feared my father was dead. I had recurring nightmares of his corpse in a Mexican alleyway. I recalled a time when my father lived with us and everything was great. Matt told me he understood; whenever his parents were sick, he got sad. If one of them were missing, he would be devastated. He told me to call him any time I needed to vent. I can’t, I explained. My father is a big secret in my family.
Matt remained distant toward me in class, but started calling me regularly. One weekend, he asked me to accompany him and his friends to the movies under a questionable pretense: Eric’s mom says we can only go to the movies if we bring a girl.
I was ecstatic. My spell had worked. I was gaining control over the world.
* * *
•
I cast no spells to find my father. Abuela Carolina hadn’t heard from him in months, and was considering filing a missing-person report. But Mommy had told me to forget about Papi. With an ache in my chest, I avoided numerous magic rhymes for locating “lost objects.” On a subconscious level, I probably feared that if I used them, I would discover that my spells were a fiction like the Animorphs or fairy tales.
* * *
•
I started reading a Ruth White book, Belle Prater’s Boy, about a girl named Gypsy whose aunt vanishes without a trace. Desperate to unravel the mystery, Gypsy interviews her cross-eyed cousin, Woodrow. Woodrow tells her about a Jalal al-Din Rumi poem his mother read and reread: The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep. A crevasse opened in my chest. It didn’t hurt. It radiated a warm, buoying light. I thought: Papi crossed the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
* * *
•
Mommy convinced her parents to leave Puerto Rico and move in with us. Abuelo Coco had diabetes, and Dr. Del Valle wanted to supervise his health care. She razed the pomegranate trees in our backyard for a second master bedroom. The roof of the addition rose higher than our living room sun window, decreasing the amount of light that could enter our house. Please behave yourselves, our mother begged me and Michelle. But this was impossible. The Cocos had concluded my sister and I were intolerable when we were cute little girls. Now we were ugly, hormonal, metamorphosing pubescents. If we drank milk in the afternoons, the Cocos called us viciosas (full of vices). If we watched any television show besides Caso Cerrado, a Spanish-language version of Jerry Springer that they loved, we were malditas (wicked). If we giggled, we were mal-educadas (poorly educated). If I spoke to Matt on the phone, I was a guarra (loose woman).
One day, I came home from school to discover that my spell books were gone. Of course I thought Abuela Coco was to blame. But my mother informed me it was she who had stolen them. Why would you do this to me? I sobbed. Because you’re inviting Satan into the house, she said. Witchcraft is against God.
I was horrified. I thought that because Wicca allowed for both a god and a goddess, it was a mere expansion of our Catholic faith. My mother corrected me: if I kept dabbling in witchcraft, Lucifer himself would come. I renounced Wicca just to be safe. But I believed that if anyone had brought Satan into the house, it was the Cocos. In the span of a few weeks, they were sapping my mother of her essential sweetness. It drained from her eyes, from her smile.
A vast cultural chasm precluded pleasant cohabitation with the Cocos. Michelle and I never made our beds, never washed the dishes, rarely even put our plates in the sink. My mother had never asked us to do anything besides succeed in school. I was a top student. I spent my free time reading and writing. I considered myself the ideal daughter. The Cocos’ accusations made me feel I was the victim of a grave injustice. Perhaps it made sense for them to attack Michelle—she had B’s and some C’s on her report cards. But why me? In the face of their complaints, I talked back to the Cocos with self-righteous rage and conviction. The deteriorated state of my Spanish made it impossible to express the purity of my intentions with the eloquence I perceived in my preadolescent imagination. The more I defended myself, the more the Cocos attacked, which made me still more indignant, to the point where I was slobbering as I screamed. That’s her father’s blood in her, the Cocos told my mother. Not yours, Jeannette. Not yours.
* * *
•
I awoke in the middle of the night, gasping. I had per
ceived the secret of life in my sleep: it was the reason why humans exist, the reason why suffering occurs, the reason why death should not be feared. I stumbled to my desk, grasping for a pen and paper. I could feel the dream evaporating from my memory. I had to write it down. I had to write it down before losing it completely. I shoved aside books in quest of a writing utensil. I couldn’t see in the dark. By the time my pen touched paper, all I could remember was: Something About Mirrors. I scribbled those words and underlined them. I turned on the light and looked in the mirror. I told myself never to forget.
* * *
•
Michelle and I received a letter in the mail. On blue-lined notebook paper, a person purporting to be our father told us he was okay, not to worry about him. It was full of misspellings and incorrect conjugations and awful grammar. It was nearly illegible. I informed my sister there was no way the author could be our father. Papi spoke excellent English. He was a reader of literature. His handwriting was always very neat. I told her my hypothesis: the person who had written the letter was our father’s murderer. He was trying to make sure we didn’t hire a search party. The letter served as confirmation of our father’s death. Papi would never return.
* * *
•
One of my first real friends, Elizabeth, introduced me to a new fantasy book series: Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth, about a young man, the Seeker of Truth, who must save the world by asking the right questions. A boundary that separates a country of humans, Westland, from a country of magic creatures, the Midlands, is breaking. Magic creatures are spilling into the human country. They’re fleeing an evil warlock, Darken Rahl, who’s massacring them all in his quest to rule the world. The last surviving Confessor, a long-haired woman who extracts truth from people with a mere touch, escapes the Midlands. A handsome woods guide rescues her from three assassins. It turns out the man is the Seeker of Truth, spoken of in prophecies. Together they decide to fight Darken Rahl.
Elizabeth made me feel better about my long, ugly hair, telling me it meant I was like a Confessor. In the Midlands, only Confessors have long hair—a sign of rank. In school, I was bullied relentlessly for my hair, a waist-long, rat-colored cloak, which my mother forbade me from cutting or coloring because she did not want me to “sexualize” myself. I spent all my free time inside the Sword of Truth fantasy series. It made more sense to me than life. I mined the pages for wisdom I felt starved of at home and in school. Each of the books explored the wizard’s rules of life. The Wizard’s First Rule is: “People are stupid. They believe things mainly because they either want them to be true or fear them to be true.” I thought this held the key to the Cocos. I never fathomed it could apply to me.
* * *
•
A decade later, seeking to fill in my memory blanks, I wrote Elizabeth, asking if she remembered what—if anything—I had told her about my father when we were kids. We hadn’t spoken in years, but Elizabeth responded with surprising detail:
I remember always assuming that [your father] had either passed away or that your mom had divorced him; either way, I detected that he was not someone you talked about in your family and that there was some sort of negativity surrounding him. The only mention of your dad I remember was once we were in some part of your house and I saw a picture of you and your sister in something like little flower pots (or were you dressed up like flowers?). I asked about it, and you said your dad took the picture. I still remember that because I was really surprised at you mentioning your dad, since I knew absolutely nothing about him. You said somewhat wistfully that he was really good at photography when he was around “back then.” It seemed like you missed him, but I somehow felt like I shouldn’t ask more about him.
One of my favorite wizard’s rules from The Sword of Truth is: “To ignore the truth is to betray thyself.”
* * *
•
My sister was spiraling into a deep depression. She dressed like a goth (thick black eyeliner, black-and-gray plaid skirts and chains), attended screamo concerts, read Satanism books. The bullying she endured was relentless. Her grades provided no solace. She fantasized about going to public high school, where the more diverse student body might accept her. She ceased studying, sabotaging her chances of getting into the Bishop’s School, the private high school in La Jolla my mother wanted us to attend. “As a child, I always felt abandoned,” she wrote in an essay I found decades later in my mother’s garage. “I sat in my backyard until the sun went down, I sat there until my eyes felt like they were bleeding, I just drew and drew and drew….Raising myself was tough.” She gave up drawing, convinced she was no good. She surrounded herself with older punk rockers, dropouts and drug addicts who felt a similar emptiness. She started smoking cigarettes.
My mother clung to me, with my top grades, my obsessive adherence to the rules. You have to be valedictorian, she whispered. When I brought back A-minuses, she nearly cried in disappointment. My breathing became shallow from the tension in my diaphragm, which made it hard to expand my lungs. I needed all A-pluses and A’s to make up for that B in sixth grade—I couldn’t afford to let Mommy down. If I failed to secure the valedictorian title, I feared she would conclude that giving birth to me and my sister had ruined her life. Each time my teachers handed back tests, I became pallid, my hands quivered, my coronary movements felt like angry animals. My physical reaction was so apparent and so predictable that my classmates began to mock me: Jean is going to cry, isn’t she? Jean is going to have a heart attack; look at how she’s shaking. They knew I was going to be the valedictorian or salutatorian—it was between me and my crush, Matt, who, as the effect of my love spell faded, had fallen in love with a pretty classmate. One day, as I compared our report cards at the end of class, Matt told me to hurry—my hands were trembling and I was having a hard time calculating and contrasting our number of A-pluses versus regular A’s versus A-minuses—and finally, he tore his report card from my hands and vanished. I burst into tears. A beautiful Mexican girl who rarely spoke to me stayed behind. Don’t cry! she said, and hugged me. I sobbed in her arms, grateful for her unexpected kindness. I hadn’t been touched comfortingly in what felt like centuries. I said: But Matt’s going to beat me at valedictorian and my mom is going to yell at me. She patted my head. Ay, it doesn’t matter; you’ll still get billions of awards, she promised. I cried harder.
I wrote a poem that night: “I probably can’t even win / Every B is like a horrid sin / I can’t take a breath / Sometimes I’d prefer death.”
* * *
•
Every day after school, I typed for two to three hours in my online journal, recording every innocuous detail of the day. I wrote almost nothing about my father, obeying my mother’s commands. I vented about the Cocos. After dinner, I locked myself up with my Sword of Truth books. Mommy began insulting my writing and reading, saying I was doing so obsessively, like a “sick person.” When Michelle returned from partying at dawn, Mommy directed her anger toward me. Why aren’t you guiding her, the way a big sister should? She had no control over Michelle. So she turned against me. I twisted my knees and my elbows and fingers, trying to distract myself from her voice with pain. I dug my nails into my wrists until they were covered in red, bumpy scratches. I longed for my mother to notice the harm I was causing myself. But she persisted. She thought I was, like her, unbreakable.
* * *
•
Papi rematerialized. The news that he was still alive came from Abuela Carolina. I felt a ticking in my head, a static in my chest. I had grown accustomed to the idea of my father as dead. If he was dead, he wasn’t willfully ignoring us. This belief had become a sinister source of comfort. Now I was scared again. What did his resurrection mean? Was he the same scary man we had traveled with to Mexico? Or the magical father from long ago, who had taught me about the horizon and the sea?
Our mother took us to see him. He was staying at Abuel
a Carolina’s house, in one of her guest bedrooms, after traveling through Mexico and Europe. Michelle and I knocked tentatively at his bedroom door. Our hearts thumped. Sweat gathered on my sternum. The door opened, revealing a disheveled figure in the dark. What? he asked. A pungent wave of cigarettes and armpit odor emerged with him. It provoked in me a familiar mix of longing and despair. Michelle stepped forward to hug him. I stood paralyzed, unsure of myself. He patted Michelle on the head, his back straight and stiff. He retreated before I could touch him.
My mother told us he was Schizophrenic. I capitalize the word because of the disproportionate significance it took on for me. The word solved everything. Suddenly, I had an explanation for why my father was always absent. It wasn’t because he didn’t love me. It was the involuntary consequence of a chemical imbalance in his brain.
I became obsessed with Schizophrenia. But it was also terrifying. The disease, Google said, was genetic. Did this mean I was destined to become Schizophrenic as a grown-up? The word “schizophrenia” derives from the Latin schizo: to split, to divide, to cleave. The Abuelos Cocos constantly said I was “behaving badly” because of my Mexican blood. Meanwhile, my classmates called me gringa. My Americanness came from my mother, who spoke English with a Puerto Rican accent and criticized my gringa habits. I felt cleaved to pieces. I did not know what I was.
* * *
•
In the summer of 2001, at around 3:00 a.m., I awoke to spinning red lights. I looked through my window and saw an ambulance in the driveway. I walked downstairs, trembling. Abuelo Coco had a drop in blood sugar, my mother said. Go pray. He had suffered a stroke. He didn’t recognize us when we visited him in the hospital the next day. He threw up and choked on his vomit. Abuela Coco pried his mouth open with her fingers. Abuelo Coco got better, but then he got worse. In August, his toe turned black. Surgeons cut it off, but then the blackness infected his foot. They cut off his foot. The blackness invaded his legs.