My mother loved everything about her Buddhist practice. She loved her mala with its varicolored juzu beads of jasper, amethyst, white jade, and Jerusalem stone. She loved the altar she and Rick set up together in a corner of their bedroom, with its candles, incense, water cup and bell. She loved the branches of shikimi flanking these items. Later a photograph of Dominic, my youngest brother, would be added to this display.
She loved the meditative state she could access so easily by chanting. The chanting itself was magic. She experienced that magic firsthand too many times to discount it, and never more so than on the day of the crash.
The car accident happened on her impromptu trip to Mexico with Rick and all of her children. By that time, she’d asked Louie to move out so Rick could move in.
Louie did not go gently. He punched a hole in the cheap wall of their apartment when she told him it was over. There were terrible scenes: tears, shouted recriminations, bitter words to describe her. She was a puta, a whore; she had ruined his life. Just how did she think she was going to pay the bills with him gone?
My mother shrugged. There were her waitressing tips; there was welfare. Rick had a few ideas of his own. My mother urged Louie to buck up and go back to the Bronx. He said he would never go so far away from his own children.
Poor Louie. He’d come three thousand miles west for the sake of her happiness, and now he was trapped here if he wanted to live close to his kids. There was nothing he could do about it. She had never really loved Louie, but what she felt for Rick left her nothing to decide.
Louie moved into the cheapest local motel he could find, where he proceeded to soothe his broken heart with Spanish rum and various street drugs. Rick moved in, and my mother was never happier than she was then.
Meanwhile, as she’d noted, Rick really did have an idea of his own. He’d heard her say that her mother—a resident of Mexico for the last several years—had some money. He thought they should pay her a visit in her adopted town of Guadalajara and see if she couldn’t be persuaded to part with some of it.
My mother had a mysterious grudge where her own mother was concerned and preferred not to be within a hundred miles of her. But then and forever, she was helpless to deny Rick whatever he said he wanted. Like a snake charmer, he drew her beyond her boundary lines; she emerged from the vessel of her own heedless whims and undulated in front of him. Rick wanted to go to Mexico? To Mexico they would go, then.
My mother was easy but not naïve. She knew Rick was just after money. When it came to that man, she was like a junkie who would lie down in traffic and let a truck roll over her if it meant she could get her next fix. She didn’t care what she had to do to make him stay. If he was at her side and in her bed because of her own mother’s money, she would lead him to it and help him get it.
The day they were married at the Ananda church was the happiest day of her life. My mother wore a dress that a neighbor helped her make. It had a gathered purple bodice and a pink-and-purple flowered skirt. Rick wore a white shirt.
At the altar they exchanged roses, a white one for her and a red one for him. Neither of them had a single family member in attendance, but two friends showed up, and one of them served as their official witness.
Not long afterward, Rick got a job at the local Salvation Army. He held it just long enough to steal a retired and donated mail truck, and we all set out for Mexico in this. My mother sat holding six-month-old Dominic in the front seat, and the rest of us rode in the back, along with an unsecured vanity table that had been in the back of the truck when Rick took it. My mother liked it so they decided to keep it.
She and Rick were chanting together—nam myoho renge kyo, nam myoho renge kyo—when they plowed straight into an oncoming battered and brown Chevrolet.
“THE CHANTING PROTECTED US,” my mother told me as I faced her on the sofa in her living room, my phone, set on audio record, beside me on the seat.
“How so?”
“Well, it was an awful crash, a head-on collision. That car smashed right into us. The driver had been drinking. Well, we had been drinking too, to tell you the truth, but the accident was his fault.”
“A full-on car crash while chanting is proof of protection?”
“Well, none of you kids were hurt. Dominic was just a baby, and he hit the dashboard but he was fine. Allan bumped his knee on the dresser but that was it. You didn’t have so much as a scratch. Rick got the worst of it. He was almost impaled by the steering wheel. And I smacked into the dashboard hard. But none of us broke any bones or needed to go to the hospital or anything like that. Not like the other driver.”
“What happened to the other driver?”
“His windshield was shattered. His face—I’ll never forget it. That poor man’s face was slashed to ribbons.”
“Good God,” I said.
“Like I told you, it was his fault just as much as ours. He was as drunk as Rick was. He didn’t want to involve the police any more than we did.”
“So what happened then?”
“Well, the truck was finished in the crash,” my mother recalled. “We were stranded in Tecate, so we called your Aunt Beth,” her brother’s wife, “and she drove down from San Diego and picked us all up in her car.”
“That was nice of her.”
“Oh, that woman was a bitch,” my mother snapped. “Just a bitch to the core.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Once we were back at her place and we unpacked our things, she would not stop carrying on about some of the stuff we had with us. She said we put her life at risk, smuggling drugs across the border in her car without letting her know. She kept saying if we’d been caught, she could have been sent to prison for years. She was just so uptight. And she was ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful for what?”
“Well, I did the dishes for her one time during the weeks that we stayed with her, and she didn’t show any appreciation at all. And she made us get rid of our entire stash before she would let us back in her car. I mean, we used it up at her place anyway, but she insisted on looking through all our bags before she drove the six of us back to Mexico.”
“The six of us? Don’t you mean seven?”
“No. She offered to keep your brother Allan until we got back to California, and I agreed,” she said. “Why not? It was one less kid to worry about.”
“Why did she want to keep Allan?”
“I really don’t know. She seemed to think all you kids were going to die, and she said they had room in their house for one child, so they decided to save him. Maybe they picked him because he was the oldest, and he was white like them.”
“As opposed to Puerto Rican like the rest of us?”
“Well, you’re white too,” my mother said. “Your father was the man who raped me, and he was white.”
My mother had told me this all my life and it was like an ice pick in my heart every time. But I didn’t believe her. I looked Puerto Rican too, and by all accounts Louie had treated me as his own.
“I hate when you say that,” I told her.
“Well, it’s true. Louie wasn’t your father.”
I resolved not to have this conversation with her again. There was no point.
“What was Grandma’s house in Mexico like?” I asked instead.
“It was very nice. She had a lot of space, especially compared to the neighbors around her. She had an outhouse for a bathroom, who knows why? She had the money for a proper bathroom, but I guess she didn’t mind going outside every time.
“Her house was all white inside. No decoration at all. No pictures hanging up anywhere, not even her own artwork. She kept all her paintings stacked against the wall.
“She had a good life in Mexico. She sketched and painted all day. She had a maid, and a lover named Roberto. I think he was her driver. He couldn’t have been much older than I was back then.
“Oh, what a time that was. All four of you kids were sick with stomach parasites. Dysentery. Probably fro
m the water. I thought you’d die of dehydration. I thought Beth was going to be right, you were all going to die!
“And Stephanie, that was when you stopped talking. After the accident, you didn’t say a word for the next six months. You were a little chatterbox right up until the crash, the noisiest little thing I ever knew, but after that you went silent. Even sick as a dog, you didn’t make a sound.”
SOMETIMES I TRY to imagine why Rick would have been at that Buddhist temple. I can only guess that he was hoping for what actually happened: that some crazy flower child woman would be his next mark and give him shelter.
My mother had never offered my siblings or me any structure or safety, but with Rick’s entry into our lives, things devolved into total mayhem. With Louie in the home, there was relative stability. There was order and sanity and solvency.
When he moved out and Rick moved in, the fabric of our lives began to unravel. Our family had no real income, and soon we were homeless. Rick dragged us to Mexico, hoping for some of his new mother-in-law’s money. When my grandmother wanted nothing more than to keep us in her home and take care of us, he was the one who dragged us back to California.
On our return trip from Mexico, we visited the home of Rick’s estranged mother, not far across the border. He hadn’t spoken to her in years, but all of us kids stood waiting in the front yard while he rang her bell. When a white-haired woman in a print dress opened the door, he begged her to let us in, pleaded for a hot meal.
At long last she said yes, but—after looking over my siblings and me, and noting that most of us were brown—she added: “Those little niggers better not touch my furniture.”
She allowed us to sit at the kitchen table, where we ate plates of warm and filling Rice-a-Roni. Sticky and flavorful.
TIMES WITH RICK were overwhelmingly dark.
I stepped into our garage to try out a bicycle that arrived one day when Rick walked it home. He was sitting on the concrete floor against the far wall, a bandana tied around his head. There was a bandage wrapped around his upper arm and just below, a needle stuck in his skin. I was eleven or twelve years old. His head was thrown back, resting against the wall. His eyes were closed. He must have sensed someone. He opened his eyes and looked straight at me. The emptiness of his gray gaze that day will always be with me. I was scared. He was like a spirit in a story, there and not there at the same time. We didn’t speak. I took the bike by the handlebars and hurried past him.
He beat my mother. Often. Throwing her on the kitchen floor and kicking her. Dragging her by the hair. Neighbors called the police in response to the bedlam they heard: the crash of overturned furniture and thrown objects and her screams rising above it all. They came and arrested Rick, and he didn’t come back for months.
There were times he was so drunk behind the wheel of our car that he would use the sidewalk to pass people.
He made me steal food from the grocery store when we needed it. Sometimes I was sent to buy drugs for him and my mother. “The pigs won’t hassle a little girl,” he’d said, and my mother would agree.
Their dealer lived in a corner house a few blocks away from our apartment in the worst part of Hillsboro, a town just west of Portland. Two of its front windows were covered with plywood, and the rusted shell of a car took up most of the front lawn. I would walk to the front door with a five-dollar bill and knock. The same hefty and long-haired, dead-eyed man came to the door, emerging from the darkness of the dimly lit house. He never spoke. He just took my money and handed me a baggie, pungent with “herbs.” I would push it to the bottom of my sock before running home.
Yet there were glimmers of goodness here and there. Sometimes Rick smiled at me. He called me his Ragamuffin. He and I would talk about things that mattered to me and when I told him about my day, he made eye contact and listened. He showed me some semblance of tenderness that I never got from my mother, and I loved him for that.
One day he came home from his job as a sheet rocker with a vintage emerald sofa. He had done some work in a rich lady’s house, and she offered the crew extra money to drop it off at Goodwill. Rick brought it to our apartment instead. It was weathered and threadbare in places, and it bore the faint claw marks of the woman’s pet poodle, but it was so much fancier than anything else in our place that it was like a remnant of some fabled kingdom, glinting improbably against the grayish wall of our living room.
I loved that sofa. I loved to caress the jewel-toned velvet and run my fingertips over its intricately carved back. I regarded Rick with awe when he and his buddy carried it into our midst and set it down with fanfare. It was as if he’d strolled in with a treasure chest recovered from a shipwreck.
Life was worse in many ways—volatile, frightening, and unpredictable—when Rick was around, and yet in some ways it was better. My mother remained in his thrall for my entire childhood. She fell apart when he disappeared, as he often did, and it was like a holiday in our home every time he came back. I was sorry whenever he went away, and happy to see him when he showed back up.
IT HURTS TO know my grandmother wanted to shelter us kids from all of this but my mother wouldn’t let her. Our stay in her Guadalajara home was the first and last time I would ever see her.
I have one of her sketches on my desk at home: a dour Mexican troubadour walking along a dusty road. He has long hair and a drawn face, a downturned mouth, a guitar slung over his shoulder. He is wearing a thin jacket, and a pendant dangles from his neck. It looks as if it were rendered in seconds with a stick of charcoal, then passed over lightly with a wet brush so that the edges blur dreamily against the background. The paper turned sepia.
My grandmother was an eccentric. A survivor of breast cancer, she did nothing to augment the half of her chest left flat by the mastectomy, nor did she try to hide its asymmetry. She lived alone with at least a dozen Chihuahuas. She sat by her window for hours each day and sketched the people passing by, a can of Budweiser within easy reach. She was happy to see my mother and happy to see us kids.
Her warm welcome did not extend to Rick. She saw through him from the start. She wanted my mother to stay in Guadalajara so she could help raise us kids. She got us our own apartment and a maid but refused to hand my mother the wholesale transfer of cash she was hoping for. When Rick realized that no money was forthcoming and never would be, it was time to go.
My mother rounded us up and took us away willingly. She never went back, no matter how harrowing things became. She would sooner be homeless and live in a car on the beach than return to her own mother’s safe and spacious house.
Therein lay the mystery, the one she would never explain: the mystery of why my mother was always on the run. She had fled from her family of origin before; she’d gone to New York the moment she was old enough. And now, at her lover’s bidding, it was time to run again.
Chapter 5
“STEPH, I KNOW you were hoping to go to the gorge this weekend, but I need to work,” Jim said. It was the morning after my mother told me about Mexico.
“Oh, Jim, come on. You promised.”
It was a rote response; my heart wasn’t really in it. This was a timeworn argument I’d given up on winning. Jim almost never had a weekend to spend with the family. His ski trip with Andrea a few weekends before had been a hard-won concession, and I knew better than to expect another so soon.
“Steph?”
Gradually I became aware that Jim had said something else and I hadn’t caught it.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Stephanie, are you even listening? It’s like you’re somewhere else.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. It was true; I was somewhere else. I was learning that I’d always feel deeply disoriented after these conversations with my mother. The next day, I’d be in a kind of trance, replaying her words, arguing with her in my mind, grappling with the pieces of the past she’d laid before me.
The images she conjured were hard to look at. They were like a series of yellowed photographs u
nearthed from a dark drawer: the drunken man at the wheel of the mail truck, the drugged-out woman beside him, the defenseless baby in her arms, their zombie chant lulling them into oblivion. The five children in the back along with an unsecured vanity table, rattling around like dice in a cup.
And the woman who was certain we would die but who only had room for one of us. The shadowy grandmother who’d wanted to shelter us but couldn’t persuade my mother to stay. The four small children ridden with dysentery, one of them newly mute.
I always had the same pressing need after these conversations to gather my own family around me.
“Okay, forget the gorge,” I told Jim. “Just be home for dinner. The kids are coming, and I want us all to be together.”
“MOM,” JOSH ANNOUNCED at the table that evening. “We’re going to Quail Creek Ranch next weekend to get a Christmas tree.”
“Oh no,” I said. “Honey, please. The one in the garage did just fine for us last year. Why bother getting another one?”
“It’s fake, Mom. We let you try it but we agreed ourselves that it wasn’t as nice. We decided we’d go back to the real thing this Christmas, and didn’t say anything at the time because we didn’t want to upset you during the holiday.”
I looked around the table at my family. Jim and all three of our children were clearly aligned against me.
“Oh, come on. Seriously?” I asked. “It’s just not worth the hassle. It’s almost an hour’s drive, the farm is always mobbed, we stand around in the cold forever and then we have to haul it through the snow and tie it to the roof of the car and—”
“Mom, you don’t have to do a thing. Just stay home and relax. We’ll take care of everything.”
“No, I have to come,” I said.
Our children turned to their father. “Dad, tell her it’ll be fine,” Josh begged.
Jim put his hand on mine. “Let go for once, Steph. You have enough to do with the holidays coming. We’ve got this.”
“No, I have to come,” I said again. “It has to be the right tree.”
American Daughter Page 5