Travel, you’d say, whenever I made it.
Travel, nice shot.
That would have been great if you hadn’t walked ten feet first.
Did you forget in this game you have to dribble?
Once when I was guarding you I noticed scrapes on your hands and knees.
It’s nothing, you said, slapping the ball from my hand.
Sometimes I’d ask if you wanted to transfer to another school, how often kids picked on you, if you’d told Mom and Dad, or anyone.
I’m fine where I am, you’d say, all your angers and sorrows locked up, along with all the other things I didn’t know about.
* * *
WHEN WE WERE YOUNGER I’d ask you: What’s your earliest memory? Nine times out of ten you’d play back the Christmas afternoon when I let you drive in three circles around the Safeway parking lot. Our mother had been so busy with the presents that she’d forgotten to buy anything for dinner, and when you and I went out in search of groceries, we found the parking lot empty. It had been my idea to switch seats.
You can go a little faster, I’d said. You don’t need your blinker here.
Let’s not tell Mom about this, you’d said, as if it made the moment that much happier.
That was Christmas 2001, I would say, which put you at ten.
But what is your earliest memory, I’d say. You’d shrug. Perhaps you were offering the first ten years as a gift, out of laziness, out of love, a permission to write all the memories inside them.
* * *
THERE’S A FAMOUS STORY in our family, a founding story of sorts, one our mother would often reference with our aunt. Our great-grandfather on our mother’s father’s side, Peter Marino, was a dyer and his wife, our great-grandma Josephine, was a seamstress. They lived in Brooklyn and money was tight; they had recently emigrated from Naples and had our grandfather and his three siblings to feed. Peter dominated the household with his bad temper. He cranked at the children and he cranked at his wife, passing his particular brand of unhappiness down to his oldest son. Nothing was spent without going through him first, and even approved purchases were met with disdain. Then one evening, without explanation, Peter came home with a mandolin. And the story goes that Josephine took one look at it, picked it up, and crashed it over his head, and from that moment the crown passed, and Grandma Josephine ruled the house.
Our mother says there was a moment like this in our home, a story you’ve probably heard but would be too young to remember. It happened in 1995 while I was at school and our father at work, and the morning was off to this kind of start: you were kicking and screaming and thrashing so loudly on the floor that even after our mother decided to take you to Happy Day Preschool across town, it still took her thirty minutes to get your writhing body in the car.
The parking lot was empty when you pulled in, and our mother realized that Happy Day was, on this unhappy day, closed. And you began to cry again in your car seat, and our mother began to cry in the front seat, and the two of you wept together in the empty parking lot, the whole sunny day ahead of you.
Our mother took you back home, and you threw yourself back on the kitchen floor, crying and screaming and thrashing again, picking up almost exactly where you’d left off. Our mother took a seat next to you on the floor. And watching you she said finally, I can’t do this anymore, Danny; she spoke your name in a voice she’d never used with you. Stop for a moment to look at her here, on the floor. I can see her so clearly on the old linoleum that used to drive her crazy, revealing all the dirt tracked in from the side door. She looks so young to me sitting there, short hair, long earrings, no shoes. She had already raised one child but the rules had changed from first to second—a guilt often pressed in when she scolded you, reprimanded you, and now she could see that it was her guilt that kicked your legs up in the air, made you beat the ground with your fists. It clicked. And, as has always been the case, she was first to understand you.
No more, she said to the guilt.
No more, Danny, she said to you.
You looked back at her curiously, as if considering the weight of that crown, a power that had burdened your small, shaky frame. The tears died down. And you followed her around the rest of the day, questioning, questioning, and until the sun went down every answer she gave you was no. That was the last of the tantrums there on the kitchen floor, where the crown passed. After everything, you seemed to retire it with relief.
* * *
MAYBE A FAMILY stripped down to its roots is just a shared story, all translations traced back to an original source. This might explain how it felt when that story went missing, with an estrangement, with a death, pieces of history that dissolved when no longer passed back and forth. How disorienting it was.
What would become of the story, years from now, if neither of us picked up the phone to remember?
* * *
WHEN WE WERE GROWING UP our mother would kiss us and say, My life didn’t begin until I had you. It made me angry and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why. I think I wanted her to claim what had been before us; I wanted her to claim a life beyond being our mother.
If I had a daughter, I would try to explain all the beginnings there could be. Or maybe I would look in her face and understand what our mother was probably trying to say. That, in seeing her there, the other beginnings ceased to matter.
BY JUNIOR HIGH, teachers were calling you angry, and our parents sent you to therapy. You were getting into fistfights and still attending speech-and-language sessions a few hours a week. The school had put you in a Friendship Group.
What’s a Friendship Group? I asked.
It’s a new thing, our mother said.
It’s stupid, you said. Can’t they at least call it something less stupid?
He’s not wrong, I said to our mother.
After the first session the therapist called. You had trouble completing tasks, paying attention, and keeping organized, she reported. Our mother had listened, wondering if this was the great revelation she was paying for. Recently during an exam you had quit midway and put your head on the table, closing your eyes over your test paper.
What do you think of her?
Who?
The therapist.
I don’t know. She’s white.
Our mother shuttled us from appointment to appointment, until soon I was driving and then she just shuttled you. This is a place where the narrative splits again, each of us setting off into the wildernesses of junior high and high school. I had my own reasons for being angry, I was gangly and A-cupped and covered in acne, but I could hide in the crowds at a time when it hurt to stick out. It was a relief to slip into the landscape, to erase myself. It was a relief that I could do it.
I remained unaware of so much that was going on with you then, all the degradations of your school day, too caught up in my own. I just knew there was always some drama when you came home, a fight, another stern phone call from a parent or teacher. There was the afternoon the principal called because you’d paid a girl to walk twice around the track, holding your hand.
* * *
PEOPLE WERE ALWAYS TELLING YOU how much better off you were in America.
Who? Other kids?
The moms, you’d say. Always the moms for some reason.
Thailand was very hot. Thailand was very poor. Thailand was very far away. No Big Macs there, someone said to you, which was untrue.
A classmate asked if you missed your mother.
No, you said, I’ll see her later.
No, dummy, he’d said. Your birth mother.
He’s the dumb one, I’d said when you told me.
I know, you said, but you looked unconvinced.
I don’t remember, anyway.
You don’t remember what you said?
No. I don’t remember her.
I looked at you and waited.
It’s stupid, you said, and shook your head. Because I can’t remember. You said this as if it were a joke. How can I mi
ss her if I can’t remember?
* * *
WHEN YOU’D HAD A REALLY BAD WEEK at school, when the basketball court wasn’t enough, our father would take us to Best Buy. You loved it there—something about the shiny yellow signs and scent of electronics would transform you, as you’d count and recount the cash in your pocket from your small weekly allowance. One weekend we took you there for your birthday because you had two gift cards and your head was full of plans: you scanned the aisles hungrily until finally deciding on an MP3 player. But our father explained that the value of the cards didn’t match the price of the item, and that you’d have to wait and save or pick out something else. Your whole body grew rigid, your eyes cast at the floor, and I wondered for a moment if you were going to have a tantrum for the first time in almost a decade.
Then I’ll take these, you said, grabbing headphones from the rack, almost at random. You have headphones, our father said, but you insisted. At the register you came up short with the money; the cashier said that one of the gift cards had already been spent. How? I said, and the same cloud passed over your body, more darkly this time. Our father looked at the long line behind us and handed over his credit card to cover the difference. You said nothing. Back in the car you cradled the bag while our father explained how installments worked, how you would pay him back over the next few weeks with cash from your allowance. I watched him take the receipt from his pocket and write carefully on the back the letters IOU.
* * *
AS PUBERTY STRUCK, your looks confused the girls and made the boys manic with envy: your skin stayed smooth; your nose fit your face; you developed a very suave move where you’d brush all the long hair out of your eyes without using your hands. You found cross-country and muscles popped out of your boyish frame overnight.
One day after school you came home and asked if you were a nigger. I can’t remember how old you were; I only remember the feeling the question produced, as if you had brought the opossum back into the house again, except that this time it was dead, maggot-filled, and you held it bloodied in your arms, offering it up.
Our mother retrieved the name of the person who might have given you this idea, and immediately called the principal while I stood with you in the kitchen. I was in high school then and didn’t know what to say. Maybe language was the current we were all working against, not just you. We were all trying to find our way through it or, on the worst days, around it.
What did you say? I asked.
I told him I was a chink, you said.
* * *
HOW SHOULD A FAMILY TALK about this when talk so often felt like a stampede, flattening the answers. We didn’t know how to combat the racism that ran through our town, trampled into our home. Despite the counselors, the conferences, the paperwork, the questions we asked you directly, it was hard to understand how feelings got processed. And even though we loved one another, we’d return to our separate corners to cope. In time I moved out to college, our parents called more professionals, and you found the addiction that would follow you into adulthood. What would our friend Rosemary have said of us then.
* * *
* * *
SOMEHOW, by fifteen or sixteen, you discovered that money could brighten a bad day, and I’m guessing by then you had many. I was out of the house, the information funneled selectively through you and our parents on the phone.
There’s still so much I don’t understand about this, how it’s always isolated action and consequence in your mind. When you took our father’s credit card and bought yourself a new bike off the internet, for example, you didn’t seem to consider the inevitable response when the bill arrived, or when our mother noticed you taking a joyride on something she hadn’t purchased. There was only the feeling of it in your hands when it arrived: happiness, I supposed. Maybe as you rubbed your fingers over its surface it dispelled the bad names and the girl problems and the distress of being invisible in a world where you only stuck out. The bike was the first of the offenses, as far as I remember or was told, and the high must have been like nothing else. You rode around the block and perhaps only then did the long day at high school become a distant memory. Then the bill came and our mother noticed the bike in the garage. A shock resonated through the house and you were punished, though the bike stayed where it was, next to the Christmas decorations.
How much longer was it before the laptop? Months, maybe. Weeks. When our mother discovered it in your room, you told her that it was on loan from school. Our mother couldn’t really imagine the town’s public high school loaning out new laptops, but the truth was so ludicrous that she chose to believe the lie.
What’s remarkable is that you did nothing to prevent the rest of the cycle from occurring. The bill came, announcing a charge for the same device that now sat on the desk in your room. Our mother’s voice reached an octave that I hadn’t known it could; our father’s voice became very, very low. It was a big expense for our parents and when they tried to return it, it was too late. So they donated it to a local charity, perhaps in hopes of dispelling the eeriness in the house that had suddenly replaced the shock.
Why? I said over the phone. Do any of your friends have their own computers?
No, you said. You didn’t offer an answer.
* * *
THEN OUR MOTHER GOT SICK and it was as if the universe ceased to move; because how could the earth possibly summon the strength for its rotation with our mother stuck upstairs in her bed. Later, we would try to forget how she looked that year: cheeks sunk in, all the color drained from her rosy nose. The hair loss around the back of her head and neck. The new color of her skin, how it turned from a robust Italian bronze to the color of hospital bedsheets. And that awful feeding tube in her stomach, like an umbilical cord. The way her sweatpants suddenly billowed.
I took comfort in you in those months. You understood what it was to see our mother weak, brought to her knees by something invisible. You were someone who didn’t need it explained. And I think you needed me, too, because it was the one time in our lives when we spoke every day on the phone. I was living and working in San Francisco, driving home on the weekends, and we would talk each other through Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, the calls often containing no questions. Hi, you would say. She just fell asleep again. Okay, I would say. I’m just sitting here. I’d hear the microwave beep or the TV come on. Same. You were mad at the doctors for not catching it sooner, you’d tell me. Our mother had asked you to pray and sometimes you did and sometimes you didn’t because God seemed more to blame than anything. How do you pray? you’d ask. I don’t know, I would say honestly, I just beg in my head. You were mad at the abstractions, the chemo that left her unable to finish a sentence, and I’d tell you I understood because I did. Sometimes I would read from The Maltese Falcon and our mother would have to tell me to stop, she couldn’t keep up with all those words stacked in a row. TV produced the same problem. What did she want to do? I would ask. Just sit, our mother would say. It frightened you and me terribly, that faraway look that developed from the treatments. It banished all the awareness that joy requires, it seemed to sweep her soul out along with the bad cells.
* * *
WE WANDERED around the house zombielike, as if we’d ingested the treatments, too. On Sundays I’d go to mass to receive a consecrated host from the priest to bring back to our mother; you drove her to appointments on the days our father couldn’t work from home, helped administer drinks and pills. In that way the time was harder for you. You were the one, after all, who was home with her. I would hug you goodbye Sunday night and often think of you instead of our mother as I drove away. Once or twice I called you from the car and you picked up on the first ring.
One day we freed ourselves from the house, which had become a museum, all the hung pictures curating a time before. We took that long bike ride in the Putnam hills. Neither of us spoke while we pedaled, breathing in our town’s contradictions: the dry heat interrupted by Pacific wind, the scents
of parched grass and damp oak groves. I began pedaling a little faster, and you went faster, too. Toward the bottom of a hill my tire snagged and I flew off my bike in the middle of the path. A moment later I heard you swerve to try to avoid me, instead landing right on top of my back.
We lay for a few moments, not speaking.
Danny? I said, turning my head.
We must have looked like a crime scene, and from under the wheel I reached for your arm. I’m okay, you said, rolling off me slowly. I’m okay. You’re bleeding, though.
I put a hand to my face and then saw my red fingers. Is anything broken, you think? I said.
No, I don’t think so.
Nothing hurts.
Me neither. You didn’t win, though. Just so you know.
Then I said: What will Mom say? I think I meant it to be funny, a continuation of the joke, but the delivery was off and at the thought of her the tears came.
Everything is okay, you said, a little strangely, and because I felt like you were saying it for me, I agreed with you. We were seventeen and twenty-three. Then slowly we picked ourselves up, walked our bikes all the way back to the car. I don’t know what moments like this have meant to you, but lately I’ve been carrying them around.
You never asked her what was going to happen next, like I did. In the end, what you allowed yourself wasn’t a question but a command, and maybe that’s the thing that actually brought her poisoned body back to life. One afternoon you said to her, I’m not going to lose another mother. Her eyes came into focus then. I believe she got better, in the end, for you.
Immediate Family Page 10