Crux Read online

  After visiting relatives in Tijuana one day, while in line at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, my parents’ return trip was interrupted when German shepherds attacked my mother’s Pontiac and U.S. customs officials sent the couple to a secondary inspection. They searched her vehicle, but found no drugs. They threatened to cut open her seats. You will not touch my car, she said, trembling with indignation. I am a doctor and a U.S. citizen. If you’re going to search anyone, search him. She glared at Marco with such contempt that the officials seemed embarrassed. They let them pass. But my mother made a decision: she would never again cross the border. Mexico had always made her nervous, with its citizens’ disregard for traffic lights and lanes, for laws in general, the corruption of police who accepted Marco’s bribes, the brazen machismo of Marco’s cousins. She now associated Mexico with everything that she believed was wrong with Papi—the unpredictability, the danger, the air of being just about to unravel.

  * * *

  •

  One afternoon, when Papi was in a good mood, he invited me and Michelle to use his Macintosh Plus. He opened the word processor and typed Hi girls on the white canvas. He guided our fingers over the keys, having us poke letters to spell our names. Papi said we could deposit our secrets into the screen. They would be safe in the magic box, he said, not like on a piece of paper or notebook that anyone could find—the Macintosh functioned like a brain; you could “Save” a private document and “X” out of it and it would vanish. Retrieving it entailed searching for a secret blue “folder” strategically buried in other folders. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Papi conjured pictures of me and my sister on the screen. He dropped images of us into the pollen of flowers. He placed us on clouds. The contraption was like a television you could inhabit—a hybrid of moving pictures and an empty book, waiting for the input of a human imagination. We were amazed. Most of the time, Papi kept his door locked. His Macintosh Plus acquired a strange significance. I believed the contraption had stolen my father. I wanted to destroy it. I wanted to play with it. I wanted to climb inside it and find Papi’s innermost self.

  * * *

  •

  I began to exhibit worrisome signs of sympathetic dependency with Mami—crying when I looked at her tired eyes, calling the hospital or paging her when she was with patients, clinging to her legs when she returned. My anxiety added to hers. We had a strict bedtime of 8:00 p.m. because our mother had to get up early for work and was often on call through the night. She was regularly sleep-deprived. I internalized her nocturnal distress. One night, while Abuela Carolina was visiting, I noticed it was past our bedtime. I demanded that my grandmother depart at once. When my mother told me to calm down, I burst into tears. I declared that I needed to sleep, that I would die if I didn’t sleep. Mami snapped; couldn’t I see? I was constantly adding to her problems. It hit me then: I had to learn to keep my sympathy zipped inside my stomach. After sleeping with my mother for about three years, waking up each time her beeper tore her from dreams with a summons to the emergency room, I requested my own bed. I distracted myself from my unease by watching and re-watching my favorite film, The Neverending Story.

  In The Neverending Story, based on a German fantasy novel, a little boy finds a mystical-looking book titled The Neverending Story. The book has a bronze ouroboros on the cover—rather than the classic symbol of a single snake devouring its tail, it has two snakes devouring each other’s tails, entwined in the symbol for infinity. Within the pages of the book, a young warrior named Atreyu embarks on a quest to save his world, Fantasia, from a stormy mass of clouds called The Nothing. To protect himself, he wears the ouroboros talisman from the cover of the book. I coveted his necklace as I watched the film, and touched the golden crucifix I wore on a chain around my neck—a gift from my mother—pretending it was the ouroboros as I galloped through Fantasia with Atreyu. Slowly, Bastian—the boy in the movie who is reading the book about me and Atreyu—becomes aware that Fantasia is a real place. It’s vanishing into The Nothing because humans outside its boundaries are losing faith in their hopes and dreams. Bastian uses his imagination to revive the dying world. The movie reassured me that what Papi had taught me was in fact a law of the universe: that book worlds, movie worlds, dream worlds and computer worlds were all vividly tucked inside the tangible world, and that all of them belonged to me. I could rescue my parents from their sadness by perusing the photo album of their “honeymoon,” where they lived happily ever after in a forest of waterfalls.

  * * *

  •

  We were raised by a steady flow of Mexican and Central American teenagers who worked as live-in muchachas—my mother fired roughly thirty for various alleged crimes: stealing, not cleaning, not cooking. She found herself doing much of the housework. At the San Ysidro Health Center, she observed a pattern: her less experienced colleagues were receiving bonuses, raises, promotions—even those who weren’t bilingual and couldn’t provide adequate care to the Hispanic community. Most of them were men. She worked later and later hours, determined to be recognized. In the evenings, she brought us toys or pets to compensate for her absence. We heard her pull into the driveway and ran outside squealing, greedy for more Barbies, hamsters, Beanie Babies and betta fish to forget our sorrow. If Mami failed to stop by Toys“R”Us or Petco, we wept. When she brought groceries, no one helped her carry them inside. She no longer referred to our father as Papi or Marco but as Vago and Inútil. She repeated a lamentation: I never have a break. I come home from work to more work, like a slave. But when my sister and I tried to help, she laughed and chastised us. I squirted dishwashing soap onto the kitchen sponge, and my mother bumped me away from the sink with her hip. No quiero que sean esclavas como yo, she would say. She wanted us to focus on learning so that we would become so successful we wouldn’t need to cook or clean for any husband. She was supplanting her dreams for herself with dreams for me and Michelle.

  * * *

  •

  Papi called my mother at the hospital to advise her to get checked for gonorrhea. The confirmation of his betrayal felt like cancer in her body. But she could not crawl into a corner to try to mend her wounds. She had to take care of me and my sister. She awoke every morning, ignoring her grief, working and working. Papi admitted he was using prostitutes. He found it hard to resist now that the relationship was so stressed. He wasn’t doing anything really wrong, he reasoned, so long as he returned home. The problem, from his perspective, was that Jeannette was too stuck-up all of a sudden, always making him feel inferior. Papi again tried to distract himself with hard labor. Soil clinging to his sweat, Papi installed a perfect green lawn in front of our house. He placed his camcorder on the tripod and recorded himself toiling on his knees. In the backyard, he built wire mesh cages and a wooden shed for compost. He purchased hens, roosters and cockatiels to crowd his constructions. He fed branches into a wood-chipping machine and used a rotary tiller on the soil. He stacked wooden logs to create enclosures for strawberries, potatoes, frijoles. Using wire mesh, he made a towering trellis for tomatoes. He lined pots of cacti and other desert plants at the base of our sea fig hill. The backyard became a labyrinth of crops and cultivating machines. Back bent over the earth, sawing and sowing and shoveling, Papi was building my mother her very own Garden of Eden.

  DÍAS DE LOS MUERTOS

  Once Papi’s jardín was ready, he retreated under his comforter. He did not let me or my sister join him for naps or cuddles. Something was dying inside of him, or perhaps had died upon his departure from the Butcher Block. Nature echoed him as if in sympathy. Flies reproduced in his compost pile and populated our house. With a swatter, I flattened their bodies, plucked off their wings and made piles of them. His garden began to deteriorate. His fruit shriveled into wrinkled black sacs. Flowers drooped on their stalks. Even the cacti turned a sickly brown. The worms came out to feast.

  The rare times Papi emerged from his bedroom, he sat on our living room leather couch, burping, staring
at the turned-off television. My sister and I picked the lint out of his belly button and the cheese out of his toenails. He smelled of cigarette smoke and sweaty armpits. I examined his hands’ pinkie nails, an inch longer than the rest. Why are your pinkie nails so long? I asked. He thought for a few seconds. To more easily pick the boogers out of my nose, he said, Big Bad Wolf–style, then unleashed his cartoon chuckle: Heh, heh, heh. We cackled; it was contagious. It was years before I discovered that addicts use long pinkie nails as organic cocaine scoops.

  We had accumulated numerous pets: the chapped-lipped iguanas, stuck-in-time tadpoles, a frog or two, maternal hens, violent roosters, a stray cat, fish, ducks, red-eyed rabbits, fat guinea pigs, hamsters and nearly a hundred cockatiels. Our creatures began to die in synchrony with Papi’s slumber. Our cockatiels, which had emerged from a single incestuous pair, died of deformities or homicide. Carcasses littered their cage. Our hamsters crawled off tall surfaces. A chubby classmate of mine came over for a homework assignment, asked if she could hold our pet frog and squeezed it with such nervous excitement it exploded in her hands. Our chickens toppled into our neighbor’s backyard, where their Rottweiler ate them. Mami rescued one at the last minute. She heard the horrified squawks, jumped into the Lockharts’ backyard and pried the hen from the dog’s jaws. In the bathtub, she washed it and sewed it back together. We ate its eggs.

  Whenever a pet died, we put it in a Payless shoebox with flowers and snacks for its journey to Heaven. We made a cross of toothpicks for its grave. Our backyard became bloated with bodies. I asked Mami if I, too, was going to die. Never, she said. She smiled, but her eyes were sad. The incongruity of her expression stayed with me. I repeated my question often. She sighed: We all die, mi amor. But when you die, well, you’re going to go to Heaven. You’re going to become an angel. Her expression stayed suspicious: downcast eyes and stretched-out lips that didn’t quite curve upward. Even our firsthand experience contradicted her words: our dead animals went down into the gross dirt, not up into the sky. I couldn’t imagine this place called Heaven. Paintings at church depicted an amorphous landscape of clouds and light. Heaven seemed nowhere near as real or as solid as our backyard, which swallowed up our animals and made them nil.

  A dark dread flowered inside my chest. It had sharp petals, like a spiky succulent. During the first years of my life, I spent more time with Papi than with Mami, who was busy seeing patients. My father took me outside, imparting his amazement with the natural world. Now both parents were inaccessible. And everything was dying. The movies we were set in front of began to seem terrifying, their songs maniacally chipper, the animated characters demonic in their jerky movements. My sister and I started having nightmares and night terrors, detracting from our mother’s already scarce sleep. Whenever I stood still, the succulent-thing grew, creating what felt like bottomless holes that displaced my body’s center of gravity. I developed hypochondriacal tendencies, constantly asking my mother to take my temperature and blood pressure. Once, I became so feverish I hallucinated voices—I repeatedly screamed Shut up! to a silent room—but my mother refused to take me to the hospital, certain I would recuperate on my own.

  I delved deeper into make-believe with my sister. I was no longer interested in playing with muñecas or watching TV. I needed to use my whole body to enact fictions. I had to move to prevent the pain of the spiky dread, which flourished on boredom and stillness. We marched like soldiers in the living room. We crawled along the hardwood floors, pretending we were scaling vertical surfaces to rescue our parents from the edge of an imagined precipice. I threw on my mother’s lab coat and moved her stethoscope all over Michelle’s chest, curing her with frantic rhymes and extravagant gestures. I plunged my hands into our tank of tadpoles, cupping them and kissing them, attempting to turn them into princes, or at least frogs; they had been tadpoles for what seemed like years, it was making me really anxious.

  I found solace in vanity. I begged our muchacha, a Central American woman named Maria, to take me and my sister on walks. When we went out, strangers stopped us and said things like, Oh my gosh! That is the prettiest little girl I’ve ever seen! My mother’s patients and coworkers made similar comments: She’s the loveliest thing, she looks like an angel! Then they turned to my sister and said things like, This one is adorable, too, or So cute. For the first time since my father’s deterioration, I felt a level of control over my environment. I was discovering that my blonde hair and light-colored irises granted me a seemingly immutable privilege: strangers were pleased by the sight of me, and wanted to please me in turn, with compliments and candy. I looked like the princesses and other lovable girl protagonists in popular culture: Cinderella, Rapunzel, Goldilocks, Sleeping Beauty, Barbie. My skin turned golden in the sun, like my father’s, but it did not quite brown like my sister’s; she was Prieta and I was Güera, and for some reason that gave me a social advantage. I spun in front of the mirror, staring at my wavy golden locks and green eyes, thanking God for the luck. Since multiple people had used superlatives to describe my beauty on separate occasions, I concluded it had to be true—I was the most beautiful girl in the world. The belief was a symptom of my inability to distinguish fact from fiction, both a sickness and a coping mechanism.

  Papi was immune to the spell of the rest of the world. During the few times we interacted now, he insulted me. You should be more like Ruby, he said. He liked the fact that when my sister was hungry, she did not demand food, but rather snacked on dirt from our backyard; this gusto made her badass in his eyes. Once, as I went number two in the bathroom toilet, I noticed three daddy longlegs spiders in a corner by my feet. My screeches stirred Papi from his slumber. He stomped into the bathroom, scooped up the spiders and placed them on his head. I sobbed: one of the spiders crawled onto his lips. He looked horrifying: the whites of his eyes red, his irises black with pupils. He flicked his tongue out and ate the spider. See? No big deal, he said.

  Once, as I ran from a green June beetle, Papi snatched it out of the air and planted it on my head. He held it there as I screamed. The insect became entangled in my hair. When Papi removed his hand, it roared like a chainsaw drilling through my skull. I sobbed hysterically. My father disappeared in quest of scissors. When he returned, he liberated the creature by chopping off a chunk of my tresses.

  It became clear that Papi, who previously adored me, now felt only contempt for me: I was a girly girl, a crybaby, a bimbo.

  Sometimes, the rare inspiration struck him, and he cooked elaborate mariscos: caldo de pescado or ceviche de pulpo. Once, he carved slingshots for us. Most of the time, Papi stayed behind his wooden door. His room became off-limits. If my sister or I bothered him, he threatened to whip us with his leather cinturón. We developed a terror of the hallway that led to his room. Beyond the threshold was a black hole.

  * * *

  •

  My sister became dangerously ill. The housekeepers weren’t feeding us properly. This posed no problem for me—I raided the kitchen cabinets whenever I pleased, and often ordered the women to make me quesadillas. But Michelle was not yet two. Attempting to acquire the minerals she was starved of, her body experienced intense cravings for dirt. She repeated one word again and again: tierra. Dirt. Nobody noticed she was sick, because Papi was locked inside his bedroom and Mami was busy with work all day.

  In one of the last VHS tapes my father filmed, in 1991, Michelle implores the camera for dirt, brown curls sticking to her sweaty forehead. I prance around, smiling at my reflection in our jeep, running my hands through my hair. “Tierra,” Michelle begs. My father tells her she can’t have any. “Tierra!” she sobs. The film cuts to Michelle contentedly devouring dirt from her palm. “Look at this little savage we found on the mountain,” my father says affectionately.

  My parents disagree about who first noticed the thick vein throbbing irregularly on my little sister’s neck. Either way, when the vein’s unusual size and rhythm were detected, my m
other tried to take Michelle to the hospital; my father plucked her out of her arms. Papi said pill-pushers would pump my sister full of medicines more harmful than whatever she had. He believed her body would benefit from fighting it off––probably just a parasite. But Michelle got worse. When my mother finally took her to the children’s hospital, the doctors told her Michelle was severely anemic. Her heart had swelled to nearly twice its normal size. Compensating for the lack of oxygen in her body, it had been pumping furiously for months. She required an immediate blood transfusion.

  A social worker materialized, threatening to take away my mother’s custody of my sister. Dr. Del Valle’s explanations—about trusting the wrong nannies, about our father’s unreliability, about working like a slave—sufficed to move the social worker, who let my mother take Michelle home. My mother fired the babysitter. She took three months of unpaid leave. She nursed Michelle back to health.

  Papi seemed racked by guilt. He cried, paced back and forth, shut his door very quietly. He dove farther away from us, deeper into his abyss, to a place where real-life villains resided.