Two very different photos of the same person taken within a couple of years.
A person who I had believed without question would forever remain an enigma now emailing me at [email protected]. Orange, a color I would have said I hated if someone had asked me; Chel-
sea, the name my mom gave me because it sounded English and modern;
girl, perhaps the only identifying detail my father knew about me.
In emails, he would tell me what was going on in his life and I would tell him about whatever my mom or brother was doing at the time, which seemed more interesting to me than whatever I was doing. He didn’t ask me much about my life, and I didn’t like talking about myself unless I was asked a question. Also, it wasn’t obvious to me where our relationship was going: if this was supposed to be the beginning of a classic parent/daughter relationship, with heart-to-hearts and a reasonable amount of interest in all the boring details of each other’s lives, like I had with my mom, or if this was just a conversation that would stop and start over the years with no real purpose, like the ones I had with some of my aunts and uncles. I didn’t want to be caught making the wrong assumption.
I don’t recall asking myself what my feelings were for him. I only recall the desperate search for signs indicating whether he loved me already or if that was something I was going to have to wait for.
I’d called my stepdad “Dad” once, when I was seven years old, right after his and my mom’s wedding ceremony, and had been met with laughter. Seth and I hadn’t really bonded, so it did feel a bit contrived for me to call him “Dad,” but his laughter was shocking and upsetting, so I never used that word again.
When my mom became pregnant with my brother, River, a year later, I was thrilled. Not only had I always wanted a sibling, but I also thought a new baby would act as a glue to bind our tiny, mishmash family together. I was aware of myself trying extra hard to become close with Seth during my mom’s pregnancy, when she became very sick and Seth was tasked with cooking for me and driving me to school. I asked him to play video games with me, to which he reluctantly obliged, told him I loved him in that cowardly way where I would run out the door before he had a chance to answer, and started using his last name, the one my mom took when she married him, the one my brother got when he was born, instead of my own, at school and in my diary, which
I never pointed out to him and I doubt he ever knew.
As the excitement of the new baby wore off and the feeling of normalcy set in at home, it started to become clear to me that Seth saw me as someone else’s kid. His opinion of me was much clearer now that I was able to compare his behavior toward me to his behavior toward River. He didn’t love me the way he so obviously loved River. He had no interest in my interests, but had an intimate awareness of which objects River responded to in what ways at what time of day. He didn’t hear me when I spoke unless I made a point of asking him a direct question, but was obsessed with trying to identify which words River was trying to say, impatiently waiting for his first word to be “Dada,” though when River finally started talking, Seth and I were called the same thing, “Datties.”
“She’s using too much sour cream,” Seth would say to my mom while we were all at the dinner table. I looked at him directly as he spoke about me, daring him to address me, but he didn’t. “That shit is expensive. Tell her not to use so much.”
“She likes sour cream,” my mom would say. I would reach for another small scoop of sour cream and defiantly deposit it onto my baked potato, an early example of what would become my years-long dedication to making Seth as unhappy as possible in ways I could easily deny were intentional if I were ever questioned.
A few months after River was born, I developed a crippling fear of being away from my mom, even for an hour. I remember crying, wailing, at the threat of being taken to the county fair for the day with my beloved nana. It got so bad that I was even allowed to leave my third-grade class and go on home study for several months. I don’t know exactly what I was afraid of, but I think it had something to do with the idea of the three of them—my mom, River, and Seth—being together, for even a minute, without me. The perfect, uncomplicated family unit, finally rid of the parasite child pathetically pretending to have the same last name.
Two years later, when my mom became pregnant with my sister, Kylie, I begged her to get an abortion, not because I didn’t want another sibling, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of my last name representing an even smaller fraction of the family than it already did. My mom considered the abortion (for totally different reasons, mostly having to do with her unstable relationship with Seth), but ultimately didn’t go through with it. She gave Kylie both my last name and my brother’s, connected by hyphen. It’s still one of the most gracious things anyone has ever done for me.
•
After a year or so of emails, my dad told me he was going to come to Clearlake to meet me.
I felt angry at the thought of meeting him now. Anger was my go-to emotion at the time, but it seemed justified in this situation. Why now? Why had he waited a year? Why had he waited sixteen years? Why did he assume I wanted to meet him? Why did it feel like if I said no I would lose him again forever? Why was I suddenly considering him not being in my life a “loss” when I never had before?
I felt angry that he thought he had the right to enter my life whenever he found it most convenient, and I felt angry that he wanted to meet me at all, that he couldn’t just commit to his decision to leave, that he selfishly put me in the position of having to meet the person who I had accepted would be irretrievably absent, who was now complicating the image I had of myself because now I had to be the daughter of another person and I didn’t know how to do that. I had failed with my stepdad and I never expected to have to attempt something like that again, and I felt angry that he had such a lack of sensitivity that he would think it was appropriate not only to enter my life at all but also to enter my life when I was at an age that is known for being awkward and unbearable and confusing. I was sixteen, in a new high school, with new braces and a new prescription for birth control to alleviate my relatively new acne. In other words, I was feeling lonely, pathetic, ugly, vaguely horny, and desperate for bagels. (I was super into bagels.) Now I had this new issue to deal with, and no resources with which to work out my confusion.
“Why would you even consider not meeting him?” Marcy said.
“If you don’t meet him, you’ll always wonder,” my ceramics teacher said.
“It’s completely up to you,” my mom said, determined to be neutral.
We planned to meet at his brother’s house. Uncle Jett lived mere blocks from where we had lived for the past couple years, and only a few miles from everywhere we had lived before that. I wondered how many times my dad must have visited his brother there, and if he had known how close I had been to him at those times, or if he had thought about me at all before he decided to contact me. Maybe this was something he’d thought of spontaneously. Maybe he’d been looking through an old yearbook one day and thought, Oh yeah, I got that girl pregnant. That daughter I have. I should see how that all shook out. Or maybe he had thought about me a lot over the years. Maybe when he visited his brother he had looked us up in the phone book and drove past our house to see if we were home. Maybe he saw that we were home and panicked, drove to his brother’s house, and talked it out with him.
My mom and I arrived at Jett’s place and, amazingly, there was my dad, standing there, looking nothing like the two photos of him I had examined just that morning, extending his arms toward me.
My mom and my dad did most of the talking while I sat across from them quietly. These are my parents, I thought, feeling a vague appreciation for the history of the world, imagining all my ancestors sitting in the room with me and my parents, the whole of their lives culminating in the moment that was now occurring. Jett was in the kitchen adjacent to the living room makin
g a mayonnaise-based guacamole that I would refuse to eat.
They talked about my teeth: how I had a couple that never came in and how it fucked up the orientation of the rest of my mouth, how braces had helped correct the orientation but how I still had to wear a partial denture until I got implants, which would need to happen someday, hint, hint. My dentist had told us that the issue was hereditary, and I could tell my mom was trying to get my dad to admit that he’d had his teeth fixed. He had clearly lost the gaps in his mouth that were visible in the smiling photo.
Then they talked about my acne: how they both had it pretty bad as teenagers but how mine seemed to be much, much worse, as if I had both of their worst breakouts ever on my face at once.
“It just doesn’t seem to be going away,” my mom said.
“She needs to use a benzoyl peroxide wash in the morning and a serum at night,” he said.
“Yeah, we’ve tried all that,” said my mom. “Birth control cleared up some of it, but the rest is pretty stubborn.”
“She may need colon hydrotherapy at some point.”
Meetings between parents and their estranged children looked so emotional and dramatic on TV. I had readied myself to be hugged and cried upon, and to be told in countless different ways that I was special and beautiful and that he was sorry he would never get to know the littler versions of me that were undoubtedly special and beautiful in their own ways.
When the five-year plan for tackling my acne had been settled, my parents and Jett began laughing and reminiscing about high school. There was no crying. I don’t remember being hugged. I do remember thinking, Fuck Carl Anders, as they talked about someone none of them had seen since tenth grade.
Jett served snacks and gave us a tour of his house, and then my mom drove us the half-mile home.
I didn’t hear from my dad again until months later, when he invited me on a trip to Mexico during spring break, with him, his girlfriend, Rozanna, and Jett’s two children, Jessica and Aaron, who were twelve and thirteen and who I had never met.
We stayed at a luxury resort in Cabo San Lucas. Before then, the only hotels I’d ever stayed at were the cheap motels next to interstate freeways that my nana and papa rented when we went to Oregon to visit my cousins. We would spend the whole day at the motel, swimming in the outdoor pool and making up pool games, only leaving to eat at a local chain diner for dinner.
In Mexico, we had Mexican street food several times a day, ate fancy Italian dinners, toured the coast in a rented Jeep, listened to my dad carry on long conversations with locals in broken Spanish, and bought souvenirs from tourist shops.
There were no getting-to-know-each-other moments with my dad. There was no heart-to-heart about how weird it must be to suddenly have a second parent after spending your whole life believing you were never going to experience such a thing, or even about how weird it must be to suddenly have a teenage child after being a childless adult for many years. I didn’t have any one-on-one time with him and there was no special treatment given to me over my cousins, who, judging from all the cute little nicknames they had for one another, had clearly spent time with him before. The idea that a man would be more interested in his own offspring than the offspring of others, as I had believed was the case with Seth, seemed not to apply in this situation.
I did feel drawn to Rozanna. She was beautiful and graceful and seemed able to remain detached from the emotional trajectories of the people around her and to enjoy her time in Cabo San Lucas as if it were a Mexican vacation, which I guess it was. What a strange woman, I thought, to go on vacation with her boyfriend’s till-then estranged teenage daughter and her boyfriend’s brother’s children, without getting caught up in the complicated inner workings of that and enjoying full days on the beach with a magazine, never looking up. What a strange, amazing woman. I was hesitant to talk to her, not sure what I wanted to talk to her about, not wanting to insult my dad.
I blamed myself for the lack of conversation between me and my dad. I was too awkward, and too old to be so awkward, and I was too shy, and being shy was so stupid and embarrassing. I hated myself deeply and vividly, and was angry that I had allowed myself to believe that anyone else might feel any differently about me. I didn’t blame my dad for not wanting to talk to me. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. I would want to be far away from me.
“Yum,” I finally said the second day of our trip, somewhat desperately, referring to the Caprese salad, to the table of strangers that was supposedly my family, and was, unsurprisingly, ignored.
I wanted to make more of an effort. I wanted to be able to go home confident that I had done what was in my power to bond with these people.
“I love cilantro,” I said quietly, meaning to say that I loved basil. I didn’t bother to correct myself, and no one seemed to hear me anyway.
For the rest of the trip, I spoke only when someone asked me a direct question or when I had to order food. I retreated inward, berated myself for retreating inward, tried to be okay with being a person who retreated inward in an attempt to alleviate the anxiety that berating myself had caused, felt myself disconnecting from the group due to my endless emotional processing, and tried to be okay with being a person who disconnected from groups due to endless emotional processing.
I knew it was stupid, but I remember telling myself that I loved myself, and I remember it really helping.
At the end of the trip, my dad asked me to walk to the resort lobby with him to settle the bill. It was the only time we had alone together during the trip. On the way there, he said sharply, “There’s no point in punishing me. The past is behind us.”
“I’m not upset about the past,” I said, excited to finally be addressing our relationship, the one thing I had prepared myself to talk about during this trip. “I’m really not. I had a happy childhood. I was never mad that you weren’t around.”
“I can only imagine the things your mom has said about me.”
“She hasn’t said anything bad,” I said. “We never really talked about you until you called. She only said that you guys were very young and you got scared when she got pregnant and she was very sad that you left but she moved on.”
“When you get older you will realize that not everything your mom tells you is true.”
“I know that,” I said. “I’m just saying I’m not mad.”
We arrived at the lobby and my dad made small talk with the counter people while I stood idly behind him. He chatted cheerfully with the attendant, asked her about her day, and complimented her blouse.
That summer, several months after the trip to Mexico, my dad invited me to stay with him in Los Angeles for a few weeks. He wanted to pick me up and drive the ten hours to his place. Jessica and Aaron were going to fly down to stay with us as well. My dad told me about a red vintage Chevy Impala that he had purchased a few years ago.
He said he wanted me to have it, that he would give it to me if I got my driver’s license. I happily agreed, and he said he would register me
in driving school in L.A. while I was staying with him.
He picked me up at our house, and we drove south, listening to
a David Sedaris book on tape.
“Isn’t this guy great? I just love that story about all those tics
he has.”
“Yeah, he’s really funny. I have some tics, too, so it’s very relatable.”
“You don’t have tics like David Sedaris. You don’t count everything like he does. Or wash your hands repeatedly.”
“Right, but I do other stuff. Hand-washing is a really common compulsion but really anything could be a tic.”
“Do not become a hypochondriac, Chelsea. Did your mom put these ideas in your head?”
“No. I went to the doctor and he said I have mild Tourette’s or OCD.”
“Oh, please,” he said, sounding disgusted.
We stopped ov
ernight at a hotel somewhere in the Bay Area. The next day he gave me a list of things to accomplish while he was out doing errands that were never explained to me. My uncle Jett had told my mom that my dad had bought and then resold some kind of secret online business at the peak of the dot-com bubble and that it had earned him a million dollars. This explained his ability to travel and his apparent unemployment, but it didn’t explain what we were doing in the Bay Area. But, like every other mystery he presented me with, I didn’t ask.
My dad’s list for me looked like this:
Talk to a stranger about your diet – 5 points
Do twelve pushups – 15 points
Read Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker by Jonathan Little for twenty minutes – 10 points
Spend $5.00 or more – 5 points
Eat a vegetable – 10 points
Ask a stranger a question – 10 points
Teach me how to do something – 10 points
Drink a glass of water – 5 points
The number of points each task was worth was equivalent to the dollar amount. I sensed that this was some kind of morality test to see if I would try to get as much money from him as possible, and felt sad and misunderstood.
When he came back, he asked me how the list was coming along and I told him about my accomplishments: I had eaten a carrot, I had spent five dollars on cashews and potato chips at the corner store, and I had consumed four glasses of water.
“How many points is that?” he said.
“Uh, thirty-five?” I said, pretending to do math in my head, having decided hours ago that thirty-five was a number of points that conveyed participation in his game but not so many points that it felt money-grubbing.
Caca Dolce Page 11