Crux Page 4
Carolina stirred tomato sauce in a pan, saying: “When it’s boiling you put the tortillas in there, chopped onions, cheese, cilantro, and that’s it!” My mother glanced at the camera and giggled. “Now I’ll make it for you,” she said. The filmmaker didn’t respond. “I’m going to make it for you,” she repeated with a wink. “Sunday. You’ll see.” My father turned the camera toward his reflection in the window against the nighttime landscape of San Diego. His body merged with the light particles and the darkness extending to the sea.
VHS VORTEX
I was born on March 31, 1988. They named me Jean Carolyn, combining Jeannette and Carolina. No one could explain my blue eyes, which later turned green. Papi laid me on a bed between two of my brown cousins. I looked conspicuously white. My uncles elbowed my father with snorting laughter: ¿Estás seguro que es tuya? The paternity jokes made my mother tense with indignation, but Papi just rolled his eyes. He knew I was his. My left ear had a strange elfin protrusion at the tip, like his. I was a cream-colored creature, but I was his daughter. He knew it from the moment I was born, bloody and muculent from the womb, not making a sound. My eyes were wide open, and I was staring straight at him. More than two decades later, Papi marvels at how lucid I seemed. “Like an old soul,” he says, chopping nopales for a fruit shake. “Like, man, you were already like, wow. From the moment you were born, you were alert.”
My mother believed my unblinking expression was a sign of shock, a by-product of the epidural anesthetic she had been given without her consent, causing her to lose sensation in her legs. My heart rate sped up, and she lost control over the birth. She suffered postpartum depression for weeks. Papi took the reins while she recuperated.
Fatherhood gushed purpose through his veins like a drug. He fed me, bathed me and entertained me with a silly, high-pitched voice. He made it his mission to catch every milestone on film: my first bath, my first word, my first watermelon. He zoomed in on my strange, elfin ear. He used his tripod to film himself dunking me repeatedly in his mother’s hot tub, delighted by my lack of fear. He filmed himself tossing me several feet over his head on the beach. He snapped pictures of me perched perilously on the ledge of a second-floor balcony. Manipulating my little body came easily to him. He was completely confident in himself. And so was I. I was certain, like he was certain, that he would never let me fall.
He filmed everything. He filmed me watching films of myself. He was enamored with the creature he helped create and wanted to immortalize even the most banal moments of my life. I suppose it’s no surprise that I would do the same for him.
* * *
•
Words are tethers that bound Papi and me. He brought me into the world with language, coaxing me out of the darkness with description, as my mother did with the blood of her body, the milk of her breast, the sweat of her brow. Papi named things in nature: piedra, hoja, cielo. He corrected my pronunciation, annoyed by lazy consonants, blended vowels. By my first birthday, my vocabulary was trisyllabic: camino, ramita, Papito. He spoke to me in Spanish so it would be my first language. He explained the facts of the world and I asked questions, simple ones like ¿Por qué?, and he answered if he knew, or said, No sé, investigaremos. I remember the excitement in his whispering voice, in the gasps that preceded his sentences, as if the sky and the trees were relaying secrets he was astonished to discover and share. The world was a maze of shapeless mysteries, and Papi gave each puzzle a name. He pointed at the horizon, summoning it into my awareness: El sol se va al otro lado de la tierra. He dug holes in the earth with his fingers, placing my palms in the dirt, and said it was the path to China. Papi took me to Sunset Cliffs and spoke to me of el Océano Pacífico. He placed things in my hands: curling conchas de mar, tickly cobitos, slimy alga de mar. He thought I was precocious, except for one conspicuous flaw that he designed in me: I could not distinguish fact from fiction. I thought all the characters in Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics, Timeless Tales from Hallmark, Disney movies and other films I watched were real. Papi constantly tortured me by claiming he had seen my favorite characters. It’s the Little Red Riding Hood! he cried in a crowd. ¿Dónde? I screamed. He claimed I had just missed her. My inability to separate stories and reality, fueled by my father, would persist until puberty.
* * *
•
If I try to recall the past through vision, I fail. Voices are easier to follow through the years. Perfumes and flavors, too. But the most reliable conveyor is touch. The past awakens under my palms. I pull the threads of dead days, their textures and temperatures, rewinding and rewinding until I can go no farther back.
I am clutching Papi’s shirt. Nube, he says. He rolls down the airplane window and strokes a cloud as we pass it. As I write this memory, I know it’s impossible. But I see it perfectly, anchored by my fists: my father’s tan fingers are tilting in the cloud. Inspired, I plunge my own hand into it. My fingers curl in confusion. The cloud is insubstantial. I expected cream, marshmallows, cotton balls. It feels like nothing: a ghost. The intangible tendrils of cloud confound me so much that every brain cell pummeled by the experience is linked forever: my first long-term memory.
For years, I thought airplane windows during the 1980s could be opened. Now I know the cloud-touching experience must have been an illusion, a product of suggestion. Papi stroked the window, prompting my mind to dissolve the plexiglass with my eyes and my hands. How an illusion yielded an insight about a celestial object’s texture I can’t be sure. What I do know is this: in my first memory, Papi is making me hallucinate.
* * *
•
Six months after my birth, my mother purchased a two-bedroom condominium with carpet the color of dark wine. My parents bought a stereo sound system and listened, above all, to Fleetwood Mac: “If I live to see the seven wonders…I’ll never live to match the beauty again.”
My mother became a popular physician. She was affectionate and familiar with her patients, calling the old men papi and the old women mami. Mostly Mexicans, they were charmed by her Puerto Rican accent. My father managed the Butcher Block as customers flooded the shop. Meat orders arrived from as far away as Arizona. In front of the meat-packaging counter, he established a small grocery store with sodas, tortillas, Mexican chips and other snacks. It seemed to Jeannette that Marco Antonio had been healed by the fact of my existence. They felt a mutual sense of accomplishment.
With his camcorder, Papi blended images of my face with flowers, and of my mother’s face with the sea. He captured his mother at the new carnicería, sitting proudly in her office chair. My father’s filming was unusually expressive, featuring sunsets, cloud formations, bird flights. I study his attentive eye for the poetry of light and contours, his descriptive curiosity at its crux. What happened to this person? I dip my hands into the dark sea of the past, and all I grasp are questions.
¿Qué miras? he asked me one day when I was only a small child. He was dangling me over the edge of a coastal cliff, ignoring my mother’s protests. The wind lashed my face with the taste of salt and the smell of mariscos. Agua, I answered. He praised me for my astuteness, and told me that inside that water—which stretched across the planet and was deeper than I could imagine—lived calamares (squid), barcos hundidos (sunken ships), ballenas (whales) y más. Slowly, the ocean—its vastness, its unfathomable depth and aliveness—came into my consciousness.
* * *
•
My sister was born on September 29, 1989. Papi brought me to the hospital, filming our acquaintance. I saw the bundled infant and poked her head. Michelle Ruby was different from me: dark-eyed, dark-haired, eyes shut tight against the light. Observing my parents’ affection for her, I became jealous and repeated “buh-bye” louder and louder, a futile incantation. “She thinks you’re a doll,” he told my little sister as I stared suspiciously. “But you’re not. You’re a living doll.” Papi spent hours jumping on the bed to make us bounce and giggle. Since the Guerre
ro enterprise was operating at full steam, our father took days off to dote on us.
* * *
•
I search my father’s VHS tapes for his point of no return. I find only foreshadowing and forecasts. Futile prophecies. The day after Michelle was born, my father connected his camcorder to the TV. He placed the camcorder on his tripod and pointed it at my mother, who was breast-feeding the newborn on the couch. He sat beside her. My mother smiled at him with adoration he didn’t seem to notice. She kissed the corner of his lips. He watched the live stream. “Okay, I’m going to bed now,” he said in Spanish. Papi disappeared as if by magic, experimenting with the Pause button on his camcorder’s remote control. He re-materialized beside her. “Oops, I forgot something.” He grinned mischievously, without clarifying what he forgot. “Okay, now I’m really leaving.” He snapped his fingers and disappeared again, leaving my smiling mother alone on the couch with the baby.
* * *
•
Papi filmed me in an empty fish tank. I placed my hands on the glass, diverse emotions flickering on my face: amusement, confusion, boredom, annoyance, fear, adoration. He zoomed in on my expressions. A few weeks later, he captured a snake and placed it in the tank. He purchased a mouse at a pet store and dropped it in. “It’s eating it now,” he said, filming. The snake masticated the mouse, slowly, until only its tail protruded. The snake flicked out its tongue, savoring its meal. Like many of my father’s videos, this one was recorded over a previously taped educational wildlife program. At the end of the snake footage, scenes of the Sturt’s Desert Pea from a nature show take over. “Their flowering will be brief,” says a male narrator. “And in their urgent need to attract pollinators, they provide copious nectar.”
* * *
•
My father took my mother to see a house for sale in a neighborhood of Southeast San Diego called Paradise Hills. It was a three-bedroom single-story house with white paint that peeled off in exclamation marks. One side of the backyard sank into the backyard of the neighbors, the elderly Lockhart couple. A hill of purple-flowering sea figs rose on the east toward a fence where old man Mr. Bob lived. Straight back, behind a chain-link fence: a view of protuberant hills. We moved in January 1990.
* * *
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My most vivid memories are tactile: the feel of sea figs breaking between my fingers, and their sleek, damp centers; the sandpapery red bricks on the front wall of the house; my father’s bony, slightly hairy knees through the holes of his torn jeans; my mother’s soft, gurgling stomach against my cheek; the rough, wrinkled bark that I pulled off trees in strips. I follow my fingers through recollections and encounter the slimy flesh of tadpoles. My father purchased them; I dipped my hands into the water of their tank. He bought two iguanas, Iggy and Izzy, for me and Michelle. I ran my cheeks against their ribbed backs. I sprinkled salt on hard-boiled eggs and kissed their still-warm surfaces. Leaves fell from the oak trees in our backyard. I crumpled them in my hands. I stared straight at the sun, swallowing its light with my pupils, experiencing the pulse of its heat. I wanted to make out the orb’s contours, see if it had craters like the moon. My sister and I spent much of our time outside. Rolly pollies inhabited the landscape. I thought they were ugly, and the feel of their fourteen legs on my skin was too intense for me to stand. Michelle poked them until they contracted into spheres. She picked them up and they unfurled, crawling up her wrists.
* * *
•
One afternoon, as my father helped his brothers chop meat at the Butcher Block, his half sister Aimee strode in through the front door. Aimee was an eye-catching woman, with dramatic curves, luxurious wavy hair and her father’s strong jawline. Her presence in the carnicería was unusual. As the second-youngest sibling, a full child of Jesus and Carolina as well as a teenager when the Butcher Block bounty matured, Aimee had enjoyed luxuries Marco had not. She completed her education in the United States, funded by her parents. She spent her free time taking her fiancé to San Diego’s best restaurants. She had no need to dirty her shoes on the blood-spattered floors of the carnicería.
Aimee summoned her parents from their office and declared, in front of them and the customers, that my father had made a mistake. The Butcher Block phone number was registered as a private household number. Aimee argued that this evidenced tremendous incompetence on her brother’s part. He was ruining the family business. She had just attained a business degree from a community college.
Her attack was ruthless and confident; everyone, even the clients, seemed transfixed. As she spoke, Marco felt himself shriveling against his will. His vision blurred; he tried to summon indignation, anger, some other fighting emotion—anything to match her self-righteousness. None came. He fished for a casual response instead, laughter perhaps. But the normally instinctual act of breathing suddenly required all of his attention. An old chasm widened inside him. Don Jesus was watching his daughter as if she were preaching a revelation: his business would be better run by his own blood. Nobody defended Marco; he could not defend himself. And so he walked out.
* * *
•
Marco Antonio came home in an alarming state, pacing, hyperventilating. He stared at Jeannette with wide, unseeing eyes. She touched his arm, anchoring him in the room, voicing questions in the reassuring tone she used with patients. ¿Qué ha pasado? ¿Estás bien? His eyes settled on hers and he explained, in a broken way, what had happened. He insisted, through tears, that he was not angry at his family, that it was his decision to leave the business. My mother was furious on his behalf. She encouraged Papi to start a business of his own to outshine the Butcher Block. He could be a professional photographer, he could be anything. He was competent, brilliant, strong. She drove him to a community college to enroll in photography classes.
He got straight A’s. He was already a self-taught master when it came to the basics: shutter speed, aperture, framing. His pictures were bold and creative. After catching a garter snake, he asked me and my sister to hold it on the porch. He captured us with the snake. He dressed up our iguanas, Iggy and Izzy, in our Barbie dresses, and posed them in our toy furniture with Marlboro Reds between their lips. Our mother framed his work, placing it prominently on our walls.
But it was too late. The incident at the Butcher Block had changed him. He lost interest in playing with me and Michelle. When Jeannette bought a Macintosh Plus so he could edit digital photographs, he locked himself up in the guest bedroom with the computer. He became obsessed with his assignments. Michelle and I pressed our ears against the door, listening to mysterious clinking and clattering. When we knocked, he ignored us or yelled ¿Qué? My sister and I tried to occupy ourselves without him. We played with Ken and Barbie in our toy house. Ken became sick and grumpy, Barbie brought him medicines in bed, and Ken was cured and happy again.
Our mother purchased a giant poster showcasing the alphabet and educational books identifying objects with English-language words so we could start transitioning into real Americans, unlike the half-feral outsiders we felt like in public spaces, despite our citizenship and birthright. Gringos were so poised, with their pursed language, each sentence curled up and closed like tied shoelaces, unlike the openmouthed español que hablamamos en casa. But I loved learning the language. It gave me an excuse to dwell inside an alphabet. Like textures and other tactile properties, text itself made a special impression on me. Decoding those twisting black contours satiated a thirst in my skull. I opened my father’s dusty dictionary, determined to pronounce its secrets. I sounded out simple words like “bad” and “big.” The worlds in books seemed more magical than the worlds in movies—hidden, invoked, specially mine. I fingered the cryptic curvature in my mother’s medical tomes, my father’s old novels, imagining I could feel the loops of letters like braille. I didn’t understand most of the English-language words yet. But I was fascinated. Mami enrolled me in a Montessori school at age three, telling
me the most important thing in life was school because if I took it seriously, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I wondered who Papi would become.
* * *
•
Eventually, Papi realized that even if he succeeded as a photographer, his income would never match my mother’s. This obliterated his desire to pursue an artistic path. He switched to real estate. The subject bored him. Then a new idea rekindled his passion.
Let’s move to Tijuana. We’ll buy a farm. I’ll work the land, while you take care of the girls. You could spend time with them, he said, adding: Like a mother should.
My mother laughed. If you wanted a farm with a housewife, you should have married a Mexican campesina.
They each tried to forget about their differences by becoming more deeply absorbed in the things they’d never share. My father had always used drugs recreationally, and he began to do so more often. He planted marijuana in the backyard. My mother took on extra patients. Papi started sleeping in the computer room. He disappeared all night and returned in the mornings, when my mother was getting ready to go to work. He criticized everything about our mother—the “cheap” ink-black Pontiac she had shipped over from Brooklyn, her bright-colored shoes, her brand-name dresses. He called her a “pill-pusher” and modern medicine “a joke.” She lambasted his use of illegal substances and called him “schizophrenic.”