My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  It was my father who called me to deliver the news, which was strange. We hardly ever spoke on the phone, as my mom typically did the work of relating anything interesting I said to him, and vice versa. It had always been this way, even in college, and even before that; she was his interpreter, reminding us that he loved us even if he couldn’t show it in ways we understood or needed, teaching us to read his moods for signs of volatility. Every story I know about my father’s traumatic upbringing I only know because my mother told it to me, usually as an excuse for whatever distant and hurtful treatment he was enacting against us. She deployed these stories to defend him, and to teach us to be thankful that he wasn’t worse.

  My father then explained that the passing out was just the beginning of the story; within hours of being admitted to the emergency room, doctors told him he had advanced leukemia. They told him that without treatment he had about six weeks to live. He was fifty-eight.

  I flew home a day later, arriving a couple of hours before the start of his first chemotherapy treatment. He’d decided to undergo it—of course he did. He told anyone who asked that he felt fine, that he was actually totally healthy aside from the cancer thing. He bragged that he had never taken a sick day from work in his life. One doctor coaxed my mother and sister and me out of his room in order to warn us that my father would be receiving “the strongest chemotherapy on the planet.” He and the nurses gave us a rundown of what treatment would look like, how crucial it would be for my father to keep physical contact with us and visitors to a minimum because the risk of infection once treatment was underway would be the biggest threat. My sister laughed that this wouldn’t be hard, blurting out, “We never touch him, he hates being touched.” Whatever, I thought, these doctors don’t know Rey like we know him. He is tough, even mean. Chemotherapy should be afraid of him.

  We were told that, best-case scenario, he’d be in the hospital for four weeks. “I’ll be out by Christmas,” my dad said.

  Despite the doctor trying to warn us of what could and would come, we were so optimistic that our main worry was how we were going to keep my father entertained over the duration of his hospital stay. This was my father’s biggest worry as well. “I have no excuse now, do I?” he said to me just as this all started, weeks before he would end up on a ventilator and on dialysis, machines doing the work his lungs and kidneys couldn’t do. “I gotta read your books now, don’t I?” He didn’t mean because I might die. He meant: because the time and work excuses no longer held. In his mind, he was about to have more time than he could handle.

  I was surprised my books were even on his mind in that moment, but the double whammy of him having cancer and him admitting he would have to read my work made me think, Finally! We will finally learn to talk to each other and he will no longer be this cold mystery to me. This is actually going to be great once we come out on the other side. This will change everything. I decided this was the kind of positive thinking the doctors were encouraging us to have. The doctors also encouraged us to make the room feel like home, since it would be weeks before he’d be allowed to leave it. As he dictated from the bed, we made a list of the things he wanted us to bring from home. My books were on it, in my mother’s handwriting. While unpacking, my dad placed both books on the nightstand by his hospital bed. He said he would wait until he got “really bored” to start them.

  Very soon after that, things got much worse, and so he never read them. That makes it sound like he died, but that’s not what happened (though he almost died several times). In fact, as of this writing, he is in remission. He never read my work because, ultimately, he just couldn’t, for reasons he won’t ever explain to me, for reasons he himself will not face.

  Reasons that will probably haunt every book I ever write.

  * * *

  When I was a little girl, my mother and grandmother often sat me on the kitchen counter and made me drink Malta soda with condensed milk stirred into it, high-calorie stuff meant to fatten me up. Engórdate, they commanded. It didn’t work. I drank and drank, developed a love for the stuff—the way the sugar coated my teeth, how the carbonation, weighed down by all that sweet milk, turned the soda silky—but once inside, it never took. I couldn’t make my body do what they wanted.

  As a girl on that date years later, the guy who’d brought me to the Cheesecake Factory—the nice one in Coconut Grove with the jacked-up prices—let me order that fucking strawberry lemonade and whatever I wanted for dinner. As the waitress turned away with our dessert orders, the guy leaned over the table and gave me those words—I let you order that fucking strawberry lemonade and whatever you wanted for dinner—and then he laughed. I remember my freshly shaved armpits suddenly stinging at the sound. In the midst of whatever he found funny, he said, “Don’t worry, it’ll cost you later.”

  I did and didn’t know what he meant. I was sixteen. Maybe he was kidding. He was nineteen. I excused myself and went to the bathroom, my head down to watch my steps—I was wearing heels.

  I pushed with my whole body against the door, and once it swung closed behind me, sealing me off from the clatter of the dining room, I leaned over the sink to look in the mirror—too much eyeliner, too much blush—and asked myself, Do you want this? My body knew its answer immediately. A forceful no: I threw up in the sink, my inaugural stress vomit.

  My mind, too, said no. While rinsing my mouth, I tried to figure out a way to get home that wouldn’t embarrass anyone. This was before teenagers carried cell phones. And this was in Miami, where public transportation left (and still leaves) much to be desired. My mind worked and worked to figure out a way to keep my body safe. My mother had warned me the night before that good Cuban girls always go out with chaperones, but fine, okay, she would tell my dad I was going out with friends because this guy did seem so nice and he was so handsome and he came into our house and looked my mother in the eye and she knew then he’d never hurt me. Besides, God would protect me. Besides, she knew this guy’s mother. My mind was trying to make sense of the guy she’d met with the guy I was about to meet.

  As I ran water in the sink and used paper towels to pick up chunks too large for the drain, my body somehow already knew it would need to go to extremes to keep me safe. And that it would fail. The mind let the body down and made it do something it didn’t want to do.

  I ignored what the body told me for a long time after that. It did cost me later, and it kept costing me, until I couldn’t afford it anymore.

  * * *

  I can say with confidence that literature has never brought my father comfort (it was, after all, my mom who took me to the library, my mom who taught me how to read in the first place). I’ve yet to see him read a book that wasn’t filled with the latest electrical codes or glossy pictures of cars, so perhaps it was misguided of me to hope that he’d read the books I’d written and take some sort of comfort from them. Because the only thing I’ve ever seen bring my father comfort is work. When his kidneys were failing post-chemo and the high nitrogen and carbon dioxide levels in his blood began to impact his brain function, he kept hallucinating that he was pressing buttons on an iPad, trying to submit inspection reports. While in that state, he repeatedly and feverishly warned us about a failed fire inspection, saying that there were problems with the ceiling tiles, that the building was unsafe. One of the last things he said to me before becoming unresponsive was that he needed me to “hit the REFRESH button,” swearing as he thrashed in his bed, “It’s not up to code!”

  “He’s going to a place where he feels confident,” the psychologist assigned to our family told us the day before my father had to be placed on a ventilator. “It’s the brain’s way of trying to take back control.” I couldn’t believe it. Even in his delirium, even as he slipped closer to the possible end of his life, instead of reaching for us, my father was going to work.

  Our psychologist had his work cut out for him. My father was in complete denial that he needed a psychologist’s help, despite his first-day-of-chemo prono
uncement that “Half this shit is attitude.” He told us not to talk to the psychologist lest we be labeled crazy. He warned that they kept a record of everything you said. When the doctor would ask my dad about his feelings, he’d answer with aggressively short sentences: “I’m fine,” or “I’m good.” Of the four of us, I’m the only one who’d been to a therapist (years earlier, while in graduate school, and again when my marriage was ending), which means I was the first to break rank when my father’s condition dramatically deteriorated seven days into treatment. I followed the psychologist out of the room after another brief, awkward check-in and told him everything: how my father had told us not to talk to him; how my mother refused to leave his side to the point of making herself ill; how she often seemed hysterical and no longer trusted the nurses to do their jobs; how my father yelled in his sleep, saying things like “Get ahold of yourself, asshole!” and “I should’ve died already” and “I’m not really here.” I showed the doctor the notebook I was keeping where I was documenting everything as it happened, told him I was a writer. He then said he’d recognized our last name, had seen it on a book his wife was reading and would be teaching the next semester—she was, like me, a professor. His recognition in that context felt surreal, a reminder of some life I’d lived that was over, and now my life was the oncology wing of this hospital and nothing else, then or ever. He handed me his business card (the psychologist ended every interaction by handing me his business card; this happened enough times that I suspected he was earning rewards points for every card he gave out) and told me he’d check in with us again in the evening.

  I went back in the room after having been gone for long enough that it was obvious I’d said a lot to the psychologist. No one was talking. I could guess what my parents were thinking, so I said, “His job is to help us get through this. He can’t do that if we don’t talk to him.”

  Only my father responded. He said, “All your intelligence flies out the window when you come into this room.”

  I wrote that sentence down, too.

  * * *

  The first time I told my mom I was seeing a therapist, while still in graduate school, she said exactly what I thought she’d say, because it was a refrain that had kept me from seeking out help for more than a year: “But you’re not crazy.” She said, “You just need more sun, more exercise, you don’t eat right.” She said, “Therapy is for Americans.” By which she meant—because we are, in fact, Americans—for white people. The narrator of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Oscar Hijuelos, has this to say about Cubans and mental health: “Cubans then (and Cubans now) didn’t know about psychological problems. Cubans who felt bad went to their friends, ate and drank and went out dancing. Most of the time they wouldn’t think about their problems. A psychological problem was part of someone’s character.”

  Cubans then and Cubans now. The first time I read this passage, I felt sick with recognition. A whole group of new Americans—all having suffered the trauma of exile, many of them as children—minimizing what had happened to them as problems they could eat and drink and dance away. A psychological problem as part of someone’s character: So my father was not practicing avoidance; he was just a workaholic. And so was I. And my character was just too sensitive, my father’s just too angry and distant. It’s just who we are—so says Hijuelos’s narrator, so says my mother—and not a thing to work through.

  The second time I started seeing a therapist, when I sensed the impending end of my marriage, I kept it to myself. I told my parents about my divorce a week after filing for it.

  When I returned to Lincoln (exactly two days after my father was discharged from the hospital, on the eve of classes beginning again), I started seeing a therapist to help me dismantle the system of avoidance disguised as productivity that had, for so long, kept both of us working. The process would mean accepting what had happened to me years earlier—events that began with that dinner, events I still cannot name for what they were even now as I write this sentence. But I’d just witnessed the places avoidance led and its limits, and there would be more lessons to come.

  * * *

  At the end of May 2016, my family spent a week together at the beach, an impromptu celebration with the stated aim of helping us all relax after everything we’d been through. We booked it before we’d even gotten the results from my father’s biopsy. Cancer-free or not, my dad planned to go back to work at the beginning of June, so if we were going to schedule some family time, he said it had to be before his return date.

  During the trip, my mother, sister, and I couldn’t help talking about our weeks in the hospital, recounting what we’d experienced, filling in gaps and questioning each other’s memory of the endless hours we spent sitting by him. Many of those days, my father doesn’t remember because he was heavily sedated, and I could sense the terror in him when we’d bring these days up. “Stop talking about that,” he said more than once over his shoulder, his face determinedly pointed at the ocean. “I don’t want to hear about that. Forget it happened.”

  One night during this trip, sitting around the dining table over pizza, I got brave enough to ask him what he planned on changing about his life now that he was healthy. Back in the hospital, on his third day of chemo, I’d asked him a similar question after he’d said out of nowhere, “Once I’m outta here, it’s a whole new attitude.” I’d asked, “How would you change?” and he was quiet for a long moment before saying, “Treat you guys a little better.” I wanted to know if he remembered that, if he had other things on his list now that it seemed the worst was behind him. It was a question I’d started asking myself: What would I let my body teach me?

  “I’m not healthy,” he corrected. “I have to get tested again in three months.”

  Because one of the things I wanted to change about my life was my fear of his anger and the way he used it to keep his distance from us, I pressed on. “Okay, fine, let’s go with that. Let’s say in three months when you get tested, the cancer is back. What are you gonna do with the next three months, before you go into the hospital for more treatment?”

  He looked away from us and said, all his patience gone, “Worry about having cancer again, Jennine.”

  I didn’t know what to say back to him. I felt disappointment flood me—a profound, body-filling sadness, an exhausted sadness that I now recognize as the hallmark of my relationship with my father, a defining characteristic I’m still working to accept rather than fix—because what he was telling me with this answer was that nothing would change.

  Because my father (and my mother, by example) trained us well in the art of deflecting and covering for the discomfort he induces with his callousness, I quickly posed the question to my sister: “What about you, you have three months to really live—what would you do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Watch TV? I’d probably just watch TV.”

  “Are you serious?” I pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose. She was twelve weeks pregnant with her first child.

  My mom spoke up then. “I would go to Spain. I have always wanted to go there.”

  “Spain is really cool, I love Spain,” my sister said. Of the four of us, she’s the only one who’s been there, and she tends to remind us of this fact whenever that country comes up in conversation.

  “Wait, you guys should go to Spain!” I said. “You should go, like, tomorrow.”

  My father leaned forward and rubbed his hands over his whole face and head, his palms scrubbing the hair that was already growing back—a more exaggerated, exasperated version of the gesture I’d just made.

  My mom asked me, “What about you?”

  Three months felt like nothing, and without warning and before I could articulate an answer, I started to cry—I thought of the books I would never write, the literature I would never create.

  “What?” my mom said, laughing sweetly at my sudden tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just thought about
how there’s no way I could finish writing a novel in three months, and even if I could, there’s no way I’d get to see it out in the world.”

  Literature might never have been a comfort for my father, but it had meant so much to me that I’d devoted my life to making it myself. I don’t see the act of writing as a form of therapy, but I do think that what you write will reveal things you didn’t consciously recognize as feelings you held, expose beliefs you didn’t know you had. Like how halfway through writing the previous sentence, I felt the need to switch to the direct address instead of using I: a switch that illustrates my own struggle to accept that my writing can reveal my darkest feelings about people I love, that the difficult family at the center of my novel came from a place I couldn’t yet consciously visit. Writing fiction is my work, my form of artful avoidance that always inevitably leads me right back to the heart of the thing I am avoiding.

  My mom leaned away from the table and said, “You’re crying like that about work? You wouldn’t spend those three months with your family?” I didn’t think about the implications of her response, of who she might really be talking to. I didn’t think about how in my novel, the father character remains a mystery to his wife and children because of his own childhood experiences (the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of an alcoholic father and an agoraphobic, unloving mother, each of them also survivors of unspeakable traumas), how those experiences prevent the father from engaging with the daughters he watched his wife raise. I thought only, I am my father’s daughter.

  I sputtered back, defensive as usual, “Uh, none of us said family, you didn’t say family, did you?” My dad stood up from the table and took his pizza slice to the couch to watch TV, letting out a big burp followed by, “Whatever.”