Monstress

by Lysley Tenorio

  The Brothers

  My brother went on national TV to prove he was a woman. I don’t know which talk show it was, but the episode had a title that kept flashing at the bottom of the television screen: IS SHE A HE? IS HE A SHE? YOU DECIDE! The show went like this: a guest would come out onstage, and the audience would vote on whether or not she was the real thing.

  They came out one at a time, these big-haired and bright-lipped women, most of them taller than the average man. They worked the stage like strippers, bumping and grinding to the techno beat of the background music. The audience was on its feet, whistling and hooting, cheering them on.

  Then came Eric.

  My brother was different from the others. He was shorter, the only Filipino among them. He wore a denim skirt and a T-shirt, a pair of Doc Martens. His hair, a few strands streaked blond, fell to his bony shoulders. He was slow across the stage, wooing the audience with a shy girl’s face, flirtatious, sweet. But he wasn’t woman enough for them: they booed my brother, gave him the thumbs-down. So Eric fought back. He stood at the edge of the stage, fists on his hips and feet shoulder-width apart, like he was ready to take on anyone who crossed him. “Dare me?” he said, and I saw his hands move slowly to the bottom of his T-shirt. “You dare me?”

  They did, and up it went. The crowd screamed with approval, gave him the thumbs-up. Someone threw a bra onstage and Eric picked it up, twirled it over his head like a lasso, then flung it back into the audience.

  I looked over at Ma. It was like someone had hit her in the face.

  He put his shirt down, lifted his arms in triumph, blew kisses to the audience, then took a seat with the others. He told the audience that his name was Erica.

  He’d left a message the night before it aired, telling me to watch Channel 4 at seven o’clock that night. He said it would be important, that Ma should see it too. When I told Ma she looked hopeful. “Maybe he’s singing,” she said, “playing the piano?” She was thinking of Eric from long before, when he took music lessons and sang in the high school choir.

  I reached for the remote, thinking, That bastard set us up. I turned off the TV.

  That was the last time I saw Eric. Now he’s lying on a table, a sheet pulled to his shoulders. The coroner doesn’t rush me, but I answer him quickly. “Yes,” I say. “That’s my brother.”

  Eric’s life was no secret, though we often wished it was: we knew about the boyfriends, the makeup and dresses. He told me about his job at the HoozHoo, a bar in downtown San Francisco where the waitresses were drag queens and transsexuals. But a year and a half ago, on Thanksgiving night, when Eric announced that he was going to proceed with a sex change (“Starting here” he said, patting his chest with his right hand), Ma left the table and told Eric that he was dead to her.

  It’s 6:22 P.M. He’s been dead for six hours.

  “We need to call people,” I tell Ma. But she just sits there at the kitchen table, still in her waitress’s uniform, whispering things to herself, rubbing her thumb along the curve of Eric’s baby spoon. Next week she turns sixty-one. For the first time, she looks older than she is. “We have to tell people what’s happened.”

  She puts down the spoon, finally looks at me. “What will I say? How can I tell it?”

  “Tell them what the coroner told me. That’s all.” He had an asthma attack, rare and fatal. He was sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park when his airways swelled so quickly, so completely, no air could get in or out. As a kid, Eric’s asthma was a problem; I can still hear the squeal of his panic. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, he’d say, and I’d rub his back and chest like I was giving him life. But as an adult, the attacks became less frequent, easier to manage, and he deemed his inhaler a thing of the past. “The severity of this attack was unusual,” the coroner explained. “No way he could have prepared for it.” He was dead by the time a pair of ten-year-olds on Rollerblades found him.

  The look on her face makes me feel like I’m a liar. “He couldn’t breathe,” I say. “It’s the truth.” I go through cupboards, open drawers, not sure what I’m looking for, so I settle for a mug and fill it with water and though I’m not thirsty I drink it anyway. “He couldn’t breathe. And then he died. When people ask, that’s what you say.”

  Ma picks up the spoon again, and now I understand: “Ang bunso ko,” she’s been saying. My baby boy, over and over. Like Eric died as a child and she realized it only now.

  The morning after the show, my brother called me at work. When I picked up, he said, “Well … ?” like we were in mid-conversation, though we hadn’t spoken in six months.

  “You grew your hair out,” I said. “It’s blond now.”

  “Extensions,” he said.

  “They look real.”

  “They’re not.” He took a deep breath. “But the rest of me is.”

  It was a little after seven. I was the only one in the office. Not even the tech guys were in yet. I turned and looked out my window, down at the street, which was empty too.

  “Goddamnit, Edmond,” my brother said. “Say something.”

  I didn’t, so he did. He said he was sorry if it hurt Ma and me, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “I showed the world what I’m made of.” He said this slowly, like it was a line he’d been rehearsing for months. “What do you think of that?”

  “I saw nothing,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I saw nothing.” It was the truth. When Eric lifted his shirt, they didn’t simply cover his breasts with a black rectangle. They didn’t cut to commercial or pan the camera to a shocked face in the audience. Instead, they blurred him out, head to toe. It looked like he was disintegrating, molecule by molecule. “They blurred you out,” I said.

  I could hear him pace his apartment. I’d never visited, but I knew he was living in the Tenderloin in downtown San Francisco. The few times he called, there were always things happening on his end—cars honking, sirens, people shouting and laughing. But that morning, there was just the sound of us breathing, one, then the other, like we were taking turns. I imagined a pair of divers at the bottom of the ocean, sharing the same supply of air.

  “You there?” I finally said. “Eric, are you there?”

  “No,” he said, then hung up.

  And that’s how it ended, for Eric and me.

  I go to my apartment to get clothes, but stay the night at Ma’s. My old bed is still in my old room upstairs, but I take the living room couch. I don’t sleep, not for a minute. Before light comes, I call Delia in Chicago, but her fiancé picks up. I ask for my wife, which irritates him. But technically, I’m right: the divorce isn’t final, not yet. I’m still her husband, and I won’t let that go, not until I have to.

  “No message,” I tell him, then hang up.

  Somehow, I’m wide awake all morning. Driving to the funeral home in North Oakland, I don’t even yawn.

  Loomis, the man who handled Dad’s funeral eleven years ago, waits for us in a small square of shade outside the main office. He’s heavier now, his hair thinner, all white. Back then he walked with a limp; today he walks with a cane.

  “Do you remember me?” It’s the first thing Ma says to him. “And my husband?” She pulls a picture from her wallet, an old black-and-white of Dad back in his Navy days. He’s wearing fatigues, looking cocky. His arms hang at his sides, but his fists are clenched, like he’s ready for a fight. “Dominguez. First name Teodoro.” Loomis takes the photo, holds it eye level, squints. “I do remember him,” he says, though he saw my father only as a corpse. “And I remember you too.” He looks at me, shakes my hand. “The boy who never left his mother’s side that whole time.”

  That was Eric. Ma knows it too. We don’t correct him.

  The funeral doesn’t take long to plan: Ma makes it similar to Dad’s, ordering the same floral arrangements, the same prayer cards, the same music. Only the casket is different: Dad’s was bronze, which best preserves the body. Eric’s will be mahogany, a more economical choice.
“It’s all we can afford,” Ma says.

  Later, Loomis drives us through the cemetery to find a plot for Eric. We head to the north end, pull up at the bottom of a small hill where Dad is buried. But his grave is already surrounded, crowded with the more recent dead. “There,” Ma says, walking uphill toward a small eucalyptus. She puts her hand on a low, thin branch, rubs a budding leaf between her fingers. “It’s growing.” She gives a quick survey of the area, decides this is the place.

  “But your knee.” I point out the steepness of the hill, warn her that years from now, when she’s older, getting to Eric will be difficult.

  “Then you help me,” Ma says, starting toward the car. “You help me get to him.”

  Back home, Ma calls the people we couldn’t reach last night, and each conversation is the same: she greets them warmly, pauses, but can’t catch herself before she gives in to tears. Meanwhile, I get the house ready, vacuuming upstairs and down, wiping dirty window screens with wet rags, rearranging furniture to accommodate the foot traffic of all the guests who will pray for my brother’s soul. This will be the first of nine nights like this.

  “I hate the way Filipinos die,” Eric once said. It was the week of Dad’s funeral. “Nine nights of praying on our knees, lousy Chinese food, and hundred-year-old women keep asking me where my girlfriend is.” The businessmen were worse. On the last night of Dad’s novena, one guy—he said he was related to us but couldn’t explain how—tried selling life insurance to Eric and me. He quoted figures on what we could get for injury, dismemberment, death, and even took out a pocket calculator to prove how valuable our lives were. “Promise me, Edmond,” Eric had said, “when I die, take one night to remember me. That’s all. No old people. No kung pao chicken. No assholes telling you how much you’ll get for my severed leg.” He came close to crying, but then he managed a smile. “And make sure Village People is playing in the background.”

  “ ‘YMCA’?”

  “ ‘Macho Man,’ ” he said. “Play it twice.”

  He started laughing. I started laughing. The house was full of mourners but we stood our ground in the corner of the room, matching in our Sears-bought two-piece suits, joking like the closest of brothers. But now I know we were wrong to talk like that, as though I would automatically outlive him. I was five years older than Eric, and he was only twenty-six.

  Brothers are supposed to die in the correct order. I keep thinking: Tonight should be for me.

  By six, the house fills with visitors. A dozen or so at first. Soon it’s fifty. I stop counting at seventy-five.

  Strangers keep telling me they’re family. They try to simplify the intricate ways we’re related: suddenly they’re cousins, aunts and uncles, the godchildren of my grandparents. None of these people have seen Eric in years, have no idea of the ways he’s changed. All they know about my brother is that he’s dead.

  Twice, an old woman calls me Eric by mistake.

  When a neighbor asks, “Where’s Delia?” Ma answers before I can. She’s embarrassed by the idea of divorce, so she says that Delia is on the East Coast for business, but will be here as soon as possible. I wish it were true: I keep checking the door, thinking Delia might walk in any moment, that somehow she found out what happened and took the next flight out to be with me. Eric’s death would have been our breakthrough, our turning point. I try not to think of tonight as a lost opportunity for Delia and me.

  At seven, we get to our knees, pray before the religious shrine Ma’s set up on top of the TV—a few porcelain figurines of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, laminated prayer cards in wood frames, plastic rosaries. On the floor, an arm’s reach from me, in front of the TV screen, stands an infant-sized ceramic statuette of Santo Niño, the baby Jesus Christ. All good Filipino Catholic families have one, but I haven’t seen ours in years. He still looks weird to me, with his red velvet cape trimmed in gold thread and a crown to match, silver robes, brown corn silk hair curling down his face past his shoulders, the plastic flower in his hand.

  When Eric was small, he thought Santo Niño was a girl: I caught him in his bedroom kneeling on the floor, and Santo Niño was naked, his cape, robes, and crown in a small, neat pile by Eric’s foot. For the first time, I saw how he was made: only the hands and face had been painted to look like skin; everywhere else was unglazed white, chipped in spots. “See,” Eric said, his finger in the empty space between Santo Niño’s legs, “he’s a girl.” I called him an idiot, tried to get it through his head that he was just a statue, a ceramic body that meant nothing. “Santo Niño is a boy,” I said. “Say it.” He wouldn’t, so I took the Santo Niño from Eric, held him above my head. Eric jumped, reached, tried to get him back, knocked him out of my hands.

  Ma heard the crash, ran upstairs and found pieces of Santo Niño scattered at our feet. Before she could speak I pointed at the pile of clothes on the floor, told her what Eric had done and said.

  I tried putting Santo Niño back together in my room, and listened to Eric getting hit.

  But my brother had a point. This second Santo Niño, the one Ma bought to replace the one we broke, does look like a girl, with glass-blue eyes, long black lashes, a red-lipped smile, offering a rose. When everyone’s eyes are shut tight in prayer, I reach out, try to take it. It’s glued to his fist.

  What started as praying is now a dinner party. Ma makes sure the egg rolls stay warm, that there’s enough soy sauce in the chow mein. I hear her swap recent gossip with neighbors who moved away long before, watch her hold the babies of women who grew up on our street. In the Philippines, my parents threw three to four parties a year, and Ma boasted how her wedding was the grandest her province had ever seen. She promised equally grand weddings for us. But I was twenty-one when Delia and I eloped, and she gave up on Eric long ago. Funerals and novenas, I think, are all Ma has left.

  People keep coming. I try to stay close to familiar faces: I comfort Mrs. Gonzalez, Eric’s second-grade teacher, who’s brought the crayon portraits Eric drew for her on paper sacks. I talk with Isaac Chavez, Eric’s best friend from grade school and the first boy, Eric confessed to me later, he ever loved. He never told Isaac; maybe I should. But when Isaac introduces me to his new wife, I see no need to complicate his night.

  Later, when the Mendoza brothers walk in, I stay away. A long time ago, at a Fourth of July picnic, they found Eric under the slide by himself, making daisy chains, singing love songs at the top of his lungs. I watched as they called him a girl, a sissy, a faggot. “That’s what you get for playing with flowers,” I told Eric later.

  Ma catches me in the kitchen. “We’re out of ice,” she says. Beside her is a Filipino woman rattling melting ice cubes in her plastic cup. She looks like she came to dance instead of pray: her black hair falls in waves past her shoulders, and her tight black dress is cut above the knee. In her high-heeled boots, she’s taller than almost everyone here.

  “No problem.” I take the cooler from the kitchen, step outside. The freezer is in the backyard, and its low hum is the only sign of life out here. The grass is weeds. Ma’s roses are gone. And the four stalks of sugarcane Dad planted when he bought the house—one for each of us—have been dead sticks for years.

  I take out a blue bag of ice, pound it against the concrete, breaking it up. Behind me the glass door slides open: it’s the woman in the tight black dress. “This okay?” she asks. She means the cigarette between her fingers.

  I slide the door shut. “It is now.”

  “I’m Raquel.”

  “Edmond.” We shake hands.

  “The brother.” She lets go. “Cold.”

  Icy flakes stick to my fingers. I wipe them on my pants. “You’re friends with Eric?”

  “Sisters. That’s what we call ourselves, anyway.” She lights the cigarette, takes a drag, then lets out a long breath of smoke. “I have no family here. They’re all back in Manila, pissed at me for leaving. So she became my sister. Sweet, huh?” Sisters. She. I feel like I’m being tested on what I know and d
on’t know about my brother.

  “Eric always wanted a sister.”

  “Well, if we’re sisters, then that makes you my kuya Edmond, right?”

  “Kuya?”

  “That’s Tagalog for ‘big brother.’ ” Without asking, she unfolds a lawn chair and sits down. She crosses her legs, rests an elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand, looks at me closely. “How are you?”

  Not even the coroner asked me that, even after I saw the body. “Fine.” I squat down, smash more ice. “Holding up.”

  “Not me. Last night, when you left that message at the bar, I wanted to erase it. I was thinking, I don’t know anyone named Eric, and I don’t know an Eric’s brother. But I knew who you meant.”

  She describes the rest of the night: how they closed the HoozHoo early, gathered the waitresses and the regulars together, drank and wept and sang songs until morning. Before everyone went home, they stood in a circle on the dance floor, held hands and said a prayer, music off but lights on, disco ball spinning above them. “It looked like heaven,” she says. “All the girls wanted to come tonight, but I told them no. It should just be me. Out of respect for your mother.”

  It’s like the start of a joke: a dozen drag queens walk in on eighty Filipinos praying on their knees … And I can picture the rest of it: six-foot-tall women in six-inch heels, glittering in a crowd of people dressed in black. I can see the stares, hear the whispers, Ma in the middle of it all, wishing them away. But maybe everyone would have been fooled, taken them as the very girlfriends that old ladies had pestered Eric about. Right away I knew what Raquel was, but so much of her looks real, like she was born into the body she’s made.