35
Since my last visit to Connecticut, a cousin had written me. Joan had given her my e-mail.
What do you remember? I asked her. The cousin remembered her mother’s stories about walking with Pop in Hartford and the white men who glared at him. He was dark, you know, she said. Indians were treated the same as blacks in the fifties. His kids didn’t like to talk about it. Nobody liked to talk about it.
The cousin belonged to a group of native descendants and wanted to find pictures of our ancestors in traditional dress, so that she could dress accordingly at their gatherings. I did not mention how unlikely I knew this was.
Not long before Mina died, the cousin heard that she had been researching our family history. When the cousin contacted Mina and asked what she’d found on the native side, my aunt refused to show her anything. She wasn’t happy, the cousin told me. Mina stopped corresponding with her.
An afternoon of my own research led me to a 1935 census. In the small empty box indicating ethnicity, Pop had scratched a single word: Polish.
Why should this dead stranger’s hand move me? What did I know of his shame? I had seen nothing but a few photographs. But when I read his smudged script, I tasted the word—Polish—and my lips drew the kiss of that p, my tongue tucked through the ring of o. I might have licked the page, if there’d been one. His small lie—a seed in the shook rattle of me.
Research was easier than sitting next to Jon. But the document on my computer screen smeared a stripe of that same feeling in me. That word carried something I saw in Jon—maybe the very thing that blurred his edges, that clenched my chest when I looked at him. We all knew the impulse to erase oneself, the dark smudge it left behind.
At the kitchen table, Joan and Jon and I picked at our sandwiches as Pat devoured her cheesecake. Mmmm, she muttered, licking her lips. When we laughed, she laughed too, raining graham cracker crumbs on the tablecloth.
She cried all the time, Joan said. After Mina died. Eight years previous, Pat had come to live with them, and for months she sobbed all night, begging her to come home. When Joan woke her in the mornings, Pat remembered and wept again, asking, Why did she leave me here? How can I go on without her?
I stared at her working jaw, her gaze cast out the kitchen window.
She’s happy now, said Jon. As long as she has her sweets. As long as she gets to the casino once in a while.
Ssshh, said Joan. Don’t let her hear you. She’ll be bothering us to take her.
When I asked about Pop Lightman, Jon leaned closer. First, it was Light Man, he said, but Pop changed it, because Indians weren’t really citizens. Someone, he claimed, told him about a reservation.
I nodded. I didn’t tell him that Lightman was a name brought here from England, that the natives had taken, or been given white names, that there was nothing light about it. I didn’t tell him that according to a 1930 census, we were Polish. I didn’t tell him that no Wampanoag tribe was recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs until 1974, and that the tribe Pop had most likely descended from was still unrecognized.
I’d be happy to take Pat to the casino sometime, I said to Joan.
Oh, she’d like that, she said. But I might have to go with you—she doesn’t like to be separated from me for long. She brought a hand to her mouth and began coughing.
Jon shifted in his chair, agitated at the change in subject. When her cough quieted, he spoke. You wouldn’t mind going yourself, either, would you?
Joan smiled at me, unembarrassed. I used to have a problem with the casinos, she said.
Sometimes, you still do, Jon reminded her.
It was bad a few years ago, she continued. It was a dark time for me. I started taking pills, speed pills. She stared at her hands. I don’t think they even make them anymore. She half smiled. I used to hide them in my knitting.
She used to smoke a lot of pot, too, Jon added. Half an ounce a day!
I’d done some things I regretted, Joan said.
But then she found Jesus, said Jon with a grin. And became a holy roller. He mocked her for my benefit, but she just smiled, perhaps knowing that I was an unlikely candidate to judge her.
36
On a wet weekend in early spring, Amit and I packed our computers and drove to the Cape, as we sometimes did to write for a few days at the kitchen table of my childhood home. As usual, I was waiting for Amaia to call me. When stuck or distracted, I often circle around my work, looking words up in the Oxford English Dictionary. On Saturday, as Amit typed across the table, I looked up the word abandon.
From the French, abandoner, “to give up, surrender (oneself or something), to give over utterly, to yield utterly.” Derived from a French phrase, Mettre sa forest à bandon, which meant to give up one’s land for a time, hence the later connotation of giving up one’s rights for a time. Etymologically, the word carries a sense of “put someone under someone else’s control.”
I snorted, and Amit looked up from her computer. What?
I read her the entry. She smiled. Aba means father in Hebrew, she said.
I checked my phone for missed calls. Nothing. My waiting was a wire fence that buzzed softly at my back, flexing the smallest muscles there.
Abandon led me to Abaddon, which the internet told me appeared in the Hebrew Bible as both a place of destruction and an angel, a duality that seemed to mirror the meanings of abandon. That place of destruction takes the form of a “bottomless pit.” In Revelation 9:11 of the New Testament, Abaddon is described as “The Destroyer” and “The angel of the abyss.” Though in some religious texts, the name is synonymous with the Devil, in more cases, he is the angel who destroys at God’s bidding. He is the holy destroyer.
I knew well that God’s work was sometimes that of breaking. But I still did not want to break. I did not want to mettre ma forest à bandon, and let her chop me down. But in each moment, more than anything, I wanted her to call me. Every minute that I waited, my need grew, until I felt only the hum of that fence, the growing current in my arms and legs, my blurred vision.
When the phone finally rang, I ran to the bedroom.
It was not her. It was the wife. In a voice sweet and split as the purple skin of a plum, she told me, You are hurting someone. She meant herself. I just want you to know what you are doing. You are destroying something.
When did it start? she asked me. What did she tell you about us?
I said nothing.
You are evil, she told me, her voice rising. You are a bad person. You are disgusting.
I hung up the phone. My hands shook. I blinked at the carpet. But I did not cry.
The wife, I knew, was the real abandoned. I had surrendered something, had abandoned myself to another power. But no one had left me yet. While I felt the grief of being left each minute that she did not call, elsewhere in me I knew that she would call. What kept her from me was not a lack of desire. And maybe, somewhere, I knew even then that she would never leave me, no matter how quiet she went. But the wife was living my nightmare. She had begged her beloved to stay and her beloved was leaving. For a moment, my heart broke for her, instead of for myself. Maybe I was the destroyer, the angel of the abyss that had swallowed all three of us.
Maybe I was evil. Why was I holding on so tightly? I knew that if I let go it would be easier for everyone. I would have if I could.
37
Joan’s previous house had burned in a fire. They’d lost almost everything, though much of Mina and Pat’s belongings were still boxed in the basement.
I had expected to descend the musty stairs alone, but when I rose, so did they, and in a slow procession we all staggered into the cellar, Joan’s arm hooked through mine, and Pat’s weight leaned on Jon. Joan’s breathing had worsened since my last visit, and when we reached the cement floor, she lowered herself into an old rocking chair, wheezing too heavily to speak. I dragged another chair beside hers and brushed off its seat. Jon guided Pat into it, his hands steady and patient as she adjusted herself, sett
ling like an old cat on a blanket, whispering softly to herself. Observing this small tenderness, I felt a flicker of warmth for him.
Before this audience, Jon and I began to open boxes. We swiped cobwebs from our faces and snorted as dust rose from the ancient cardboard. I was looking for Mina’s papers, the research she might have saved despite unwelcome findings. With each folder I spotted, hope swelled in my chest, punctured each time by stacks of yellowed receipts, invoices, and pay stubs from the doorknob factory.
Across the floor, Jon held up an old teddy bear, a moth-chewed coat, a squash racket.
Whatcha got there? Pat asked him about each. Whatcha got there? It was easy to imagine them fifty years earlier, that little boy craving her gentle attention.
A set of hot curlers, a box of shoes, a crate of records. A chalky coating of disappointment in my mouth. I would not find what I was looking for. As the tension of that desire slackened, I looked around, my vision sharper focused. The two women in their chairs. The bare light bulbs hung above us. And Jon, hunched over a box of old albums, in a buttoned shirt printed with guitars, thick glasses sliding down his nose.
Fear washed through me. Hot under the arms and hairline, hands tingling, heart racing as if I’d woken and found myself in a strange basement, surrounded by sad strangers, as if my whole life had been a dream from which I was now waking. I looked down at my big hands curled around a yellow sweater that I let fall back into its box.
I thought of Edie’s big hands in that picture, the sad seas of her eyes, and as I breathed, I pulled it all into me—the thick smell of that basement, the oily film of Jon’s lies, Pat’s grief, the knowledge that I had come here looking for something and found nothing but these broken people, who were my people.
For a terrible, senseless moment I believed that we would never leave that basement, that maybe I never had, that the only true things were the things I’d tried to erase, and that now, finally, had claimed me.
Jon said my name. I looked up at him, startled. My name has always startled me, like finding a familiar face on a foreign street, in a strange basement, in a stranger’s mouth, a mouth that resembles my mouth. Look at this, he said.
In his lap, a water-stained photo album, its stiff cover opened to the first page. Pat and Mina in front of palm trees, in front of houses, in front of a mechanical bull—each photo neatly captioned. Grand Canyon 1950. Carlsbad Caverns 1950. Pat in a cowboy hat. Mina in the same hat. Mina holding a prop guitar.
Bermuda 1951. A picture of Pat and Pop, seated on a porch bench. He wore a collared shirt, she a smile. Then, Mina and Pop on a beach, this one in color, both of them squinting, his face dark as wood. Another of Mina and Pop, seated under a patio umbrella, Pop indeed dark as a black man. Bermuda. How ironic to have brought her Wampanoag father to that island where his people had been enslaved, where a cohort of them still lived.
On the next page, Mina smiled up at me, her body hidden behind a wooden cutout of a man’s body. Cartoonish knobby knees and ribs, a Tomahawk tucked in his breechcloth. Mohawk Trail 1952.
I thought of Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters—those mysterious love letters found in her papers, never sent. To a lover, to God, to the devil—we’ll never know. Unlike her poems, they are plaintive with longing, with submission to her unnamed Master. My favorite lines: I’ve got a Tomahawk / in my side but that / dont hurt me much, / [If you] Her Master / stabs her more- / Wont he come to her- / or will he let her seek him. How alike is the longing for love and the longing for our hidden selves. If Jung is right, then there is no difference at all.
Next was a photograph of Pat, her small face atop the wooden shape of a massive woman’s body, long black braids falling over her enormous breasts. Mohawk Trading Post, Shelburne, Mass.
Next, a cluster of teepees. Wigwam Motel, Gallup New Mexico. On the opposite page, Mina wore a feathered headdress and stood between a man and woman in native dress, their faces dark as her father’s. Real Indians 1950. I squinted at the picture, and almost laughed. Real Indians? This woman, unwilling to acknowledge her own native blood, on a tour of native lands, posing for pictures with Real Indians.
Me at twenty, in shooting galleries, so sure that I was different from those junkies, so sure that I had a choice. Me in the dungeon, drunk on strangers’ desire, sure I was different from every woman there. Me, never crying when the Captain left, never chasing anyone, believing I was immune to abandonment. I believed in free will. I believed in reinvention. Look how close I can stand to the fire and not become it. Unable to admit the truth: I was already burning.
38
All the kids were doing it. That’s what I told my mother when I came home from fifth grade with a bloody hand. I didn’t actually see any other kid do it. I already felt like Houdini—with the right pants, a baggy T-shirt, I could disappear myself. What else could I do with that body, all the things that it wanted? Those boys dared each other, pointing that eraser, an accusation of softness, of the wrong kind of want. The Faggot Test, they called it. Prove it, they said to each other. I grabbed it. They hadn’t even seen me standing there. I pressed the pink tip against the back of my hand and scrubbed. Bits of rubber and skin peeled away, left a burning white stripe, beaded with blood.
Erasure is never simple. Whack the mole and another one pops up behind you. Scrub the page or the skin or the census, draw the curtain and you don’t disappear, you only replace yourself with darkness. Hide a body and the harder it will fight to remind you what it feels. The longer you starve it, the hungrier it gets.
I rubbed my skin until it screamed. Why did you do that? my frightened mother asked me. What could I have said? I am trying to beat back this body, to feel only the things that I choose. She thought I wanted to hurt myself, but I wanted to spare myself that greater hurt. I was only practicing. It’s nothing, I said.
39
The final pages of Pat and Mina’s album began with the heading, Cape Cod, July & August 1952. A house with a thatched roof. Early Pilgrim Dwelling, Plymouth. Then, Pat, on the steps of a familiar stone tower. Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown. A plaque from inside the monument. Society of Mayflower Descendants 1878. Mina atop the tower, against the black guardrails, the bay rippling below her. Mina, on the fence of a small church. The Little Church that was So Peaceful.
As a teen, my friends and I would skip class and drive to Provincetown. We ogled the men in their miniature shorts and rolled down the dunes, stoned silly. There were dunes in every Cape town—we went to P-town because it was queer, because I was queer, though that word didn’t mean what it means today. My mother was queer, too; her most significant relationships after my parents’ separation had been with women. But among my peers, I was an anomaly. Not an outcast, but I knew my difference and always had. As a teenager, I didn’t know about Provincetown’s history—the site of the Pilgrim’s first landing, the early whaling capital, a gay haven by the beginning of the twentieth century—but I knew a part of me eased there.
By the time Pat and Mina visited in 1952 there were already drag shows. I wondered if they had gone. I wondered if they had felt, after decades of unacknowledged partnership, the same ease that I had felt more than forty years later.
In this country, if we are not too poor or too dark, we are allowed the fantasy of self-invention. This country was predicated on that fantasy. Mina didn’t want to be a queer Indian girl. Who could blame her? She passed like all those other white people, posed next to the Real Indians, with her best friend Pat.
I did blame her, a little bit, crouched on that basement floor.
40
The wife had read all of our correspondences, Amaia told me. She had cut up Amaia’s clothes with kitchen scissors and smashed all the gifts that I’d sent.
What had you told her? I asked. It seemed like a strong reaction from someone who already knew about us, but I did not say this.
I already told you, she said.
I’m sorry, I said.
I need some time, she said.
I can’t do this, she said.
41
Joan’s church resides in the town where she and Jon were raised. On a spring Saturday, I picked her up in Torrington, the Connecticut air furred with pollen, smelling of green and dirt. We wound through small towns like hers, farmland and woods stretched between clumps of houses, each with a church, a two-pump gas station, a liquor store with a hand-painted sign. Purse clutched in her lap, she told me about her pastor. A lozenge clicked against her teeth, its menthol scent filling the car.
The pastor had been diagnosed with cancer, she said, and the doctors only gave him a few months to live. She prayed and prayed for him, the whole church did, and, One day, he woke up—cured. She turned to me and opened her fingers like a fast flower to indicate the magic trick of his recovery. He has twin daughters, she said. They are … she can’t remember, not Cambodian, but—
Filipino? I guessed.
Yes, that. Oriental. They sing during the service. Her favorite was “Jesus, What a Friend to Sinners.”
Joan squeezed her inhaler, gasped its chemical mist into her wasted throat. I stopped at a minimart and bought her a bottle of water. Thank you, she said, wheezed, and took a small sip.
My husband used to drink, she said. Like Jon. A little ice, splash of Coke, and gin. Mostly gin. One night, she said, he didn’t come home until early morning. Crawled into bed like a ghost, wearing only a hospital johnny. When he refused to explain, she called the hospital. He’d flown through the windshield of their car, the nurse said. Received twenty-five stitches in his head and chin. He had fought the doctor who’d tried to wire his jaw. He wasn’t welcome back at that hospital, the nurse said.
Joan shrugged. I took pills. I couldn’t feel a thing. I was just—she squinted at the road ahead—nothing. I committed adultery.
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