“Rudy’s never had any problems driving it,” my mother said. “For a Stanford student, you sure are fucking dumb sometimes.”
Robert’s wedding banquet had been a rowdy family dinner at a Love’s Bar-B-Que; Paul’s, at a fancy Vegas steakhouse. This meal was in the parking lot of Pink’s Chili Dogs. Four chili cheese dogs each for my mother and Rudy, and two dogs for me and Sofie eaten out of greasy cardboard boxes. We drove back to the house with two cold chili dogs for my grandmother, who, once again, had refused to attend the ceremony.
“This is all you brought me back?” my grandmother asked. “Did everyone only have two hot dogs?” she asked Sofie.
“I think Mom and Rudy had four,” Sofie said in complete innocence. How could she think that a mother and a daughter would fight over hot dogs?
“You and Rudy had four hot dogs apiece, but you could bring me back only two?” my grandmother asked.
“It’s my fucking wedding day!” my mother screamed. “You’re actually fighting with me because I had two more hot dogs than you did on my wedding day?”
“You’ve had five wedding days!” my grandmother shouted. “How many more weddings do you need?”
“I feel really bad for your mother,” Sofie said to me later. “I thought you invited me so I could see what our wedding day might be like. If this had been my wedding day, I’d have killed myself.”
“Our wedding day won’t be like this,” I said and laughed. “This is Rudy’s fault,” I added. How did my family devolve into this hellish caricature? Had they always been this way? “We’re in this together,” I said.
“I know,” Sofie said. Then she said, firmly, “If we have kids, I don’t want your family anywhere near them.”
• • •
That summer break between sophomore and junior year, Sofie asked to move in with me. She’d had a fight with her parents and thought this would be the best way to make her stand.
“It’ll be like what our life is like when we’re married,” she said. “It’ll be fun!”
“You only see a part of who my family is when you’re here,” I warned. “You don’t want to live here.”
“Your parents can be bad sometimes,” Sofie said, “but I think I know how to handle them.”
“Mi casa, su casa,” my grandmother told Sofie. “That means ‘My house is your house.’”
What this actually translated to, though, was that Sofie’s showers were timed, her bath towel usage and food eaten from the fridge (even the groceries she bought) tracked scrupulously. Using the phone, sitting alone in the backyard, or playing with the dog without including my grandmother were all off-limits. Sofie sat alone in my tiny room all day waiting for me to come home from my summer job the same way that my mother sat by herself in her room. I’d come home to a storage facility: my grandmother, mother, and Sofie each in her own room behind a locked door.
“Your girlfriend’s really antisocial,” my grandmother said.
My girlfriend was also, in my eyes, turning into my mother. Our relationship let me invest in the naïve dream that I’d choose a woman unlike my mother in every way and wouldn’t copy her romantic choices. One girlfriend, one relationship that leads to one marriage! Of course, insisting that I’d never be with anyone like my mother led me to a woman just like her. Dramatic emotional swings—Sofie’s and mine—that too closely resembled my mother’s made me feel Sofie and I were incompatible. Or too compatible. We both had to win arguments, both needed the last word, both heard anger at decibel levels louder than expressed. Our moods were like flights of stairs we shoved each other down.
My mother saw potential in Sofie and enlisted her in a prank call to Frank. Mom’s calling Frank wasn’t new: for years he got hang-up calls on Friday and Saturday nights that he assumed was my mother checking to see if he was out with someone or at home. When Sofie moved in, my mother told her that Frank was my biological father and gave Sofie a written script to read on Frank’s machine: “I just wanted to let you know that Brando doesn’t need a father anymore because he’s about to become one. You’ve always been a part-time father, but now Brando’s going to become a full-time dad. We’re going to get married, and he’s going to be the father he always wanted you to be but never could. Bye!”
Frank was offended that I would have my girlfriend tell him I was a father like this. He stopped calling me. When I heard what Sofie did—what my mother asked her to do—I thought, good! Why wouldn’t Frank call me if he thought I was a father now? He knew how many different father figures I had and how incompetent or incomplete they were. This is when I’d need his counsel and guidance the most. Even when he was twice removed, he still couldn’t handle the full-time responsibilities of a child. Why would he let me handle fatherhood alone?
I stopped calling Frank. We’d lose contact for two more years.
Sofie didn’t realize how destructive that one call was. She thought my mother’s schemes were fun, like one of my childhood playacting games. She was sweetly oblivious to what she was participating in or to how she was enabling—like we all were—my mother’s growing reclusiveness. Sofie planned takeout dinners with my mother and, since my mother hated calling restaurants, phoned in the orders. They watched long blocks of television shopping programs together: QVC for “Indian” southwestern turquoise jewelry and the JCPenney Channel for going-out blouses and skirts my mother would never wear “out.” My girlfriend also helped her choose items, as well as signed for my mother’s packages.
“I think the UPS lady has a crush on me,” my mother said by way of excuse. She sucked her thumb and forefinger together out of anxious habit, watching for the truck by creasing moist puckers into the window shades. The truth was that my mother was less afraid of the driver and more and more afraid of the outside world.
One summer afternoon, the UPS truck arrived while Sofie and I were having sex. When my mother saw the truck, she drum rapped on my bedroom door to get Sofie and then shoved her way inside, the flimsy lock giving way. Realizing what she saw, my mother snapped awake and shut the door.
“I didn’t see anything,” she lied. “I’m so sorry.” My mother signed for the package and then retreated to her bedroom. I couldn’t remember when my mother last apologized in earnest.
Sofie cringed out of embarrassment as she went to my mother’s bedroom to ask for forgiveness. My mother said, “You and Brando should eat dinner together. Let’s get takeout. I’ll pay for it, but call the restaurant for me. I don’t want to talk to anyone new on the phone.”
My mother was a revelation to Sofie as a parent compared to her conservative Vietnamese family. “All she wants is someone to take care of her,” Sofie told me when my mother and I collided daily over petty slights. “She’s like a big tornado. You have to know when to duck. She’s not like your grandma. Your grandma’s a black hurricane. She scares me.”
Once, while I was gone with Rudy and my mother was working, my grandmother invited Sofie into her bedroom and sat her on the bed. The shade was drawn and the lights off.
“I’ve been in this room a long time,” my grandmother began. “I had a girlfriend that lived with me right here,” she said. “We loved each other very much.” Sofie didn’t know what a lesbian was, never having heard the word before.
When June was in her thirties, she fell in love with a Spanish woman in her forties named Eleanor. There had been before, and would be again, other women in June’s romantic life, relationships conducted through rendezvous in Spanish-language movie theaters that sometimes led back to the Portia Street house where a confused little Maria and an angry Oscar and Emilio watched from their bedrooms. Eleanor was different. Young June moved her into the house and nicknamed Eleanor “Tata” (Spanish for “nanny”). Their closeted relationship resulted in Emilio’s moving out for a time—though he continued to make the mortgage payments—and Tata became a kind of surrogate parent to both my mother and Osca
r, albeit one prone to hysteria, melancholy, and botched, alcohol-fueled suicide attempts. One evening Tata wanted to watch Mexican wrestling on TV. My eight-year-old mother wanted to see a special about Disneyland’s grand opening. June sided with my mother, so, while little Maria watched a black-and-white vision of the Happiest Place on Earth, Tata retired to the bedroom she shared with my grandmother and hung herself in the closet.
My mother believed that June blamed her for Tata’s suicide. June believed that Tata sought vengeance from her from beyond the grave. After Tata’s death, my grandmother heard over the next few weeks a series of late-night knocks on the sliding glass patio door. The sounds stopped whenever she went to investigate. One night she ran to the patio and saw a floating blob of golden light.
“Go home to the dead!” June shouted. “We don’t want you here! I don’t love you anymore!”
The knocks stopped, but Tata’s painted portrait remained in a living room archway for years after, her short brown hair, stabbing cheekbones, needle-thin red lips, and pink-haloed background a mysterious yet unchallenged cipher. When I was old enough to ask who it was, my grandmother removed the portrait and hid it in her bedroom.
“Eleanor killed herself, right here in this very room,” she now explained to my seventeen-year-old girlfriend. “It was in that closet. Sometimes at night, I can still see her shadow swinging in there.”
Sofie said nothing, desperate to hear me walk through the front door.
“Go on and look in the closet,” my grandmother said.
“No, that’s okay,” Sofie said. “I’ll do it when Brando gets back.” She considered it impolite to leave a room while any adult was talking, but she excused herself and ran to my room, where my mother found her. Sofie told her what happened.
“We like men,” my mother said. “Grandma isn’t like that.”
Sofie lasted two weeks before she moved back home. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Brando. I’ll never doubt you again,” she said.
“Sofie’s welcome back anytime,” my grandmother said.
• • •
Sofie and I kept dating, but she wouldn’t return to the house until the holidays to help me wrap presents. When I was eight, my mother made me the house’s official gift wrapper, and the job stuck. For years I knew what I was getting before Thanksgiving, plucking my presents straight from the Sears Christmas Wish Book catalogue, breathing in the smell of those pages, like uncapped markers left in the rain. How cool was my mother! When her unexpected turns of heart worked to my advantage, I loved her capriciousness and embraced my unique situation as her child.
Then I became her teenager, which made it easy to curse her borderline behavior.
The ritual of opening up presents that contained no surprises for me made the day a chore. My mother already hated Christmas. Her maybe-real son Shane had died, she said, on Christmas Eve, so she’d stay locked in her room watching Scarface on repeat, pausing to check a TV channel for her favorite part of It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart loses his shit on Donna Reed and his kids.
“Why isn’t the whole movie like this?” my mother asked. “This is how Christmas feels for everybody.”
Presents were a good distraction for my mother—as long as she got the most gifts. If she didn’t, she’d sulk, rage, scream, or retreat back to her room with a paper plate of my grandmother’s Christmas meal.
To fix this, I stretched out my mother’s gifts by wrapping things separately. Four pairs of panty hose were wrapped in four different boxes. I laid out the presents under the tree throughout December so she could count how many gifts the three of us (or four, if I had a father that year) got. If someone was ahead of her in the present count, my grandmother rushed to neighborhood stores on Christmas Eve to buy my mother more things. It wasn’t uncommon for Santa to bring my mother seventy to eighty gifts. Then, on Christmas Day, amid rivers of festive red and green paper, stick-on bows, and loose tinsel, we feasted on a briny holiday ham to honor the American Indians.
“The Pilgrims ate turkey,” my mother said, “and the Pilgrims are what led to the Indian genocide.”
“Fine, we don’t eat ‘white people’ food,” my grandmother said. “I still don’t understand why I’m the one who has to spend all day in the kitchen cooking a goddamn ham.”
When Pat moved in, my grandmother stopped cooking Christmas dinners and then didn’t start again when Rudy replaced him. My second winter break back from college, Mom asked Sofie to order pizza for dinner. One pizza for her and Rudy (she finished his portions), a second for my grandmother, and a third for Sofie and me. Three pizzas for five people. My mother hated sharing her food but hated more the thought that others had to share theirs. When we finished eating, she started a Monopoly game with Rudy.
“Do you want to play, Grandma?” Rudy asked.
“No, your wife cheats and gets mad when she loses,” my grandmother said, watching TV.
“How about you, Brando? You want to join us?”
“I need to drive Sofie home,” I said.
“Oh that’s right, you can’t spend time with us on Christmas,” my mother said. “This is just a hotel to you. We don’t need you. You’re not really a member of this family anyway.”
A kind crinkle in Sofie’s eyes said, Walk away. She wasn’t being magnanimous. Throughout our relationship, I’d often be on my way out the door to pick up Sofie when my mother called me into her room to ask a “quick” question:
“Brando, why are you such an asshole?”
She’d call my grandmother in for backup. An hours-long conversation unfurled, clotted with roundabouts of blame. Sofie would wait—outside of bus stations, on street corners, on elbows perched on her room’s windowsill—craning her neck for my car that was sometimes three hours late. She waited for me with that same eagerness, and then dashed hope, I once had when I was a child, sitting by an open bedroom window and waiting for Frank’s car to turn down my street.
“Why can’t you just walk away from them?” Sofie would ask, furious, teary. “They just have the same conversation over and over! They make time stand still in that house. They want time to stand still for you. What do you talk about with her?”
Sofie didn’t understand I wasn’t talking at all. I was waiting for my chance to speak, to tell my mother about me. I was in pain. I had an expanding list of maladies that I felt with a growing discomfort could be traced right to my mother. I wanted to stick my hurt out at her like a black-licorice-coated tongue. See my constant queasy physical nervousness that makes me airsick sitting in a chair when you raise your voice. Look at my abject fear of new experiences, my explosive tantrums at Sofie, my attention-grasping sudden departures whenever I feel anyone “challenges” or “insults” me, my terrified crabwalk around your rules—their one constant being their inconsistency and the punishment for violating them being your incantations that send me to hell or the abortionist’s claw. Here is the son you raised, Mom.
I didn’t want to cling to our fraying arrangement anymore, sandbagging for waves of rage that threatened to kick me out of the Portia Street house, a promise that had hung over me like a loose stalactite from the first time I heard it, when I was five years old. Every “argument” with my mother was building to the one confrontation where I’d argue back.
That Christmas afternoon, Sofie picked up her bag and strode to the front door. Walk away, her eyes and smile urged me again.
“We aren’t a family,” I told my mother. “We share a roof. We’re barely a family.” My voice shivered like leaves in a Santa Ana wind.
“You want to show off for your girlfriend, don’t you?” my mother said. “God, I know Shane would have been a better son to me than you.”
“When I see a mother, I’ll act like a son.”
My mother set down her Monopoly money and scraped her chair on the floor away from the table. She stared at me, just as
curious as I was about where my words were coming from.
“If you don’t like it, there’s the door,” she said.
“The door you never let me leave?”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
“Now, wait a second,” my grandmother said. “It’s Christmas Day. Do we have to have all this fighting and cussing on Christmas Day?”
“Fuck you, Momma!” my mother screamed. “And fuck you, too, Brando! Get the fuck out of my house! Don’t ever come back!”
“It’s not your house,” my grandmother said, “it’s my house, and nobody’s kicking anyone out. Not on Christmas Day. Wait until he gets back to college, then kick him out. See, this is why I don’t play Monopoly with you.”
The joke didn’t defuse the tension. My mother and I stood maybe ten feet apart. “Get the fuck out of this house,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She stormed up to me, her face an inch or two from my chest. “I hate you!” she screamed. “You should have died and not Shane! I wish I’d aborted you! I’ll kill you!”
“Then kill me!” I shouted. Here at last was the rage that had been boiling inside me for years. “Here I am! Quit being a coward and kill me!”
My mother ran to the kitchen. I heard her rustle through the silverware drawer. I looked at Rudy. What would he do to stop this? Each father had been a loose seawall for my mother’s rage. None offered complete protection but sometimes blunted the storm. I was nineteen years old but still looking for a father to shelter me. I’d been forced to call Rudy “Father” since he moved in but was ready to drop all my resistance and embrace him like an actual dad here and now in exchange for one moment of protection.
Take This Man: A Memoir Page 19