As Luck Would Have It: How I Became Me and Not Her

     

     For someone who said she'd never marry nor have children, motherhood and marriage are recurrent themes in my writing. I remain married and have two sons and no one is more surprised than a few friends from my disco days. You read that right.
     
     Motherhood and family play strongly in The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood. Even though only one sister bears a child in the story, family and the legacy left to future generations is important to the sisters. As it is to me.  The Sandoval sisters look back at preserved memories in the ancestral diaries in order to make sense of their present.  Nothing like that was left for me; I create my present from my interpretation of the past. 

     After my parents' divorce, I lost my mother to 10-hour waitress shifts, six nights per week. I became the de facto “second mother” to my younger brother, even though I was only eight. My mom said I was smart, which is why I was blamed when my brother was hit by a speeding car when I was ten and he was three-years-old.

     It’s true that I told him to cross the street. I remember the car being way down the block. I turned away because someone behind was calling me. The next thing I remember is the screech of tires.

     That accident changed all our lives. My brother was hospitalized for several months and my mother began to breastfeed him when she visited. She also arranged for me to go to work with her at Claude’s, the new jazz hotspot on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, where she worked a 5:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. shift. Claude’s was a step-up in Mom’s waitressing work. It was 1959 and she was paid only $15 per week (6 nights), but on a good night she could make $25-$75 in tips. Besides the jazz, Claude had live lobster flown in daily. They arrived in wooden crates packed with ice. There were no rubber bands around their claws and they defended themselves by grabbing the tongs with which I poked them.

     I had to stay in the kitchen and out of the way, but other than the lobsters, my entertainment was Claude’s beatnik girlfriend, replete with long, dark hair that fell in a straight line to her shoulders, bangs and big glasses, straight skirts and a turtle neck sweater. And flats. No one wore athletic shoes in those days. Women either wore heels, or they wore loafers like Claude. Did I mention that Claude was a woman? A crop-haired lesbian of the men’s shirt and khaki variety. But her girlfriends were feminine, pretty . . . and smart. They toted slim volumes of poetry and were kind to me.

     
On slow nights, I got to sit on a chair outside the kitchen and listen to the music and people watch. I learned quickly not to compliment the women. “A tightwad,” Mom would say, “women are the worst tippers,” or, I might get, “She’s cheating on her husband with the saxophone player.” This person was a classmate’s mom. Worse was when she told me that an attractive man at the bar was not only married, but had a male lover. There was no room for crippling romance in my mom's life.

     Yes, my childhood education was nontraditional, so please forgive my eccentricities.

    Three major events occurred which changed my life and which were somewhat maternal. At least that’s how I choose to view them. Claude and her beatnik girlfriend came to our house one day with a gift for me: a subscription to National Geographic. While many people, celebrities and others, choose Santa Fe as their personal nirvana, I learned from that yellow-trimmed glossy that there were other destinations in the world and other ways of thinking. 

   

 Later, a good-looking young man, a "friend" of mom's, stopped at our home to drop off some LP’s: Gershwin, Ravel, Mozart. Mom played honky-tonk love songs; this music was new and complex. He was on his way to Spain to study flamenco. 

     I never told my mother about the bullying I endured in school, but even with her grueling schedule it became clear to her that I was scared to go to the local junior high. Mrs. Garcia lived three doors down from us and taught at a parochial school. She was stern and distant and kept her daughters in the house while I played baseball and hide-n-seek outside with her son. If I stayed too late at their house in the summer, I’d get trapped into having to kneel on the hardwood floors and say an entire rosary around the furnace grate with all nine of her kids. Somehow Mom worked it out with St. Anthony’s and Mrs. Garcia for me to attend 7th grade at a reduced tuition. I’d commute in with her in the morning. We never spoke. She didn’t smile.

     It was the best school year of my life in Santa Fe.

     American physicist, Joseph Henry:  The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them. 

                                                                              

      

Pino Daeni, Serendipity

     Writers ask "what if?" Of all the magazines one might choose to give a child, why did Claude and her lover give me a subscription to National Geographic? Why did the flamenco dancer give me those three albums? Mom was the only divorced woman on the block (which meant she couldn't receive communion)-did Mrs. Garcia hope Catholic school would save me from a disastrous future?  

      Who is the her mentioned in the title of this piece?  

      Serendipity prepared me for a different life. I've always thought that if I'd remained in Santa Fe, I would have died young. No future was tangible in my meager surroundings. My mother's youthful hopes and dreams had been squashed and she did nothing to foster any in me. With age and experience, I know now that it's possible I would have just stepped into my mother's shoes, maybe not as a waitress, but as some other hard-working female who never got to live her dreams. This would have been what my mom called "life" but for me it would have been death.                                                                                                 

                     

This blog also appears in Latino Voices at the Huffington Post: 
http://huff.to/1Pbat79

WHITE LIES

My sister has been through two husbands, both tall and fair. There were children, one from each husband. They cheated on her, and she cheated on them. There was drinking. There were drugs. They'd slap Lydia around, and she'd beg forgiveness. They always took her back. Or, she took them back. It depended on the whim of the week. They did this until it played out.

"Remember that time your dad came for a visit?" Lydia said to me one day. She was in the hospital recovering from her latest beating. "I was around four."

I remembered and felt guilty all over again. He'd come for my graduation from high school. His occasional presence always sent my brother and me into father-worship hysteria. Some of it must have rubbed off on my little sister. Lydia was the sweetest kid, shy and quiet, never a problem. She hung around my father's knees, staring at him adoringly, and asked, "Can I call you daddy?"

"No," came his stern reply.

Lydia looked hurt, but she didn't cry. She never asked again, nor did she mention the incident, but her questions regarding her own father increased: the unraveling of my mother's past had been set in motion.

Lydia's birth seven years after my parents' divorce had always needed some explaining. Back then, Mom had filled in the details in her own enigmatic way. "Your daddy thought you were beautiful," she'd say to Lydia with a sigh. "But, he was a musician, and it just wasn't meant to be."

My brother and I accepted this version of the affair that produced my sister with few questions, even though Lydia looks completely different from the rest of us. Mom is a long-legged Latina, but my brother and I take after our father. We're both tall blonds. Lydia is petite and cinnamon-coffee dark with tightly curled blue-black hair.

"Your father was Sicilian," Mom said. 

We anxiously believed that somewhere below the boot of Italy, there was a whole flock of people who looked just like our sister.

"I want to find my real father," she said now, forty-five years later.

We had the name of the man Mom claimed to be Lydia's father. With the internet the rest was easy. So Lydia called this guy, Sam Gianni in Michigan and said she was his grown-up daughter in Santa Fe just calling to say Hi! Yes, he told her, he was a musician who had traveled there to play for the opera, but no, he was not aware of the birth of a daughter and what's more, he didn't remember our mother.

All hell broke loose at that point.

Sam's loss of memory regarding their affair hit Mom's vanity dead center. Her bedroom eyes snapped open, but turned hard and small in the depths. "Just like a man," she said. Her slippered feet pounded off in the direction of her bedroom, but her shoulders slumped like the little old lady she is. She refused to discuss the matter further.

A few weeks later, we went out for drinks--my little sister, Mom, and I. While sitting at the bar together, Lydia started begging for the truth. Again. 

"Who's my real father?" she said. "Why won't you tell me?"

  

"I've got a confession to make," Mom said in her smokiest storytelling voice. "Around 1966, when I was bartending at the El Corral . . . something happened." She took a slow puff of her cigarette, drawing in deeply since it's a low tar brand, her only concession to the Surgeon General's report.

"Business was slow," she continued on the exhale. The nimbus of smoke surrounding the three of us excluded everyone else at the bar; we were in our mother's world now. "I locked up early to get a head start on inventory. I was in the backroom when I heard a noise behind me." She paused here, holding Lydia's enraptured gaze.

"A black man was standing there. He said not to be afraid, that he wouldn't hurt me if I didn't scream. He emptied the cash register . . . and then he raped me." Lydia and I gasped.

Mom looked pleased. "I had been with Sam earlier that day. So, you see, I really don't know who your real father is." Lydia stared at Mom, her mouth slightly open.

It could have happened like this. Or maybe not. Mom's older sister told on her. "Your mother was dating a black guy back then. I don't know why she can't admit it." My aunt tapped her fingers and stared off into space. "He played the saxophone at the jazz club."

Sam the Sicilian's instrument was the violin.

Mom doesn't understand why it's so important to Lydia to know her father. "I was the one who took care of her," she told me. In my mother's world, the fathers and the truth are always expendable. "I know you all think I'm a bad mother," she added, a question beneath her armor.

"No, Mom, it's not that we think you're a bad mother," I said. "It's that we think you're a bad liar."

That day in the hospital with my sister I held her bruised and swollen hand, and remembered another incident from our shared past. When Lydia was five, I came home for a weekend from college. My brother and I, along with our little sister, had driven over to a shopping center to buy shoes. A demonstration for Black Power was in progress in the parking area. A lot of that went on in those days.

As I helped Lydia down from the car, a tall, very thin, and very dignified, Afro-haired young black man stepped apart from the crowd and approached us. He was carrying a stack of leaflets with various slogans printed on it. Ignoring my brother and me, he stooped low and handed Lydia one of the papers.

"Here you go, sister," he said to her.

My brother and I laughed, standing there in the hard sunlight. My memory is an unrelenting snapshot: our heads tilted back in the same way, our blond hair and strong teeth gleaming mercilessly bright above the rare blue-black luster of our sister's curly-topped head. We laughed back then, looking into each other's eyes and never told Mom, nor kept the memory alive for Lydia.

No father ever came to claim Lydia.

No son of Sicily, memory restored and classically trained, arrived to lift my sister's spirit on lofty waves of Bach or Mozart. No ebony patriarch appeared to teach my sister about her roots, dark and deep, black pride reverberating on the complex notes of his sax.

"Black is beautiful, sister," he could have told her. "Take pride."

The Tattoo Lady, Mother and Me

             I’ve come back to Santa Fe from my home in Los Angeles because Mother is ill with throat cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. All her teeth have been removed and her dentures look ridiculous, but I tell her she looks the same. She seems to believe me. She can’t wear the bottom plates, and so every meal is a challenge. She’s losing weight and has already lost her hair.  But she’s full of stories. I get the usual Tattoo Lady updates. "You know how fat Humpty Dumpty was?" she asks. "Well, Tattoo Lady is fatter than that.”

            The Tattoo Lady, her dead husband, her incarcerated son, her other recently released son, and her truant grandchildren provide Mom with stories to rival any soap opera. I imagine Tattoo Lady with tattoos all up and down her arms, across her chest, encircling a vast abdomen, and traveling down her dimpled backside.

            “And she never takes a bath," Mom says. I glance down at my mother's dirt encrusted fingernails.

            I'd tried to get her in for a manicure that morning, but she'd refused, stamping her foot in the salon and making a scene. "It's too much money," she said. The Vietnamese manicurist stood by patiently, the lower half of her face covered with a hygienic paper mask. "I like your mask," Mother said. "Can I have one?" I forced a smile, and guided Mom from the shop. Before we made it out, she spotted a quarter and swooped down on it. "And they say I can't see good." She pocketed the money. I heard a groan behind us, but didn't look back.

            I drive Mom home, to the adobe structure she'd built with dime and quarter tips and the child support check from my father. She lives with six or eight small, unruly dogs, four or six ungrateful cats, and one immortal finch. Then there are the feral cats that Mom calls her “homies.”

            She’s kind of a cat lady, but any non-housebroken pet can fill her need. She's had monkeys, ferrets, white rats, and sugar bats. I’m considered the animal hater in my New Mexico family, even though I have one dog, two cats, two hamsters and a snake.

            "I've lost my sense of smell," Mom says, excusing the mess. She resents my unwillingness to stay with her, and she refuses to understand why she doesn't get many visitors. It wasn't that bad when I was growing up. In those days, I cleaned the cat box and the dogs went outside to do their business. Her habits degenerated over time, but the potential for allowing the animals to take over was there long before.

            Mom trusts animals more than people.

            Her house is not set up to be inviting to guests, so we eat out everyday. We breakfast, lunch and dinner together. She doesn’t drive anymore, so I try to take her to the places that she can’t reach easily.  "Did you see that T.V. movie on Martha Stewart last night?" I ask over dinner.

            "I can't stand that woman," Mom says. "Do you like her?" She fixes me with a challenging look, but I recognize it only in retrospect, and stumble into the trap.

            "She's all right. I don't try all that stuff she demonstrates, but it's oddly relaxing–"

           

            "I hate her," Mom says.

            I laugh, and again I miss the warning. "She's amazing—"

            "Tattoo Lady likes her, too." Mother presses her lips together, and gives me that look again. "Watches her all the time."

            I stop mid sip of my gin and tonic and laugh, trying not to spit it across the table at her. The thought of Tattoo Lady, fatter and sloppier than Humpty Dumpty after he fell from the wall, sitting engrossed and happy as can be watching the pristine Martha Stewart is even too much for Mother. She laughs with me. "She does," Mom says. "Loves her and everything she does. Just like you."

            The next day, I take Mother to collect commodities—surplus food for seniors. She doesn't need them, doesn't even like most of it, but it's free and that's reason enough. "I pay my taxes," she says.

            Mom plans to pick up commodities for her friend, Ellen Romero. We swing by the Senior Citizen’s Center where 84-year old Ellen is the receptionist. Mom had volunteered here, as well, before she got sick. Ellen has her authorization papers ready. I get introduced all around. All the old people want to hug me. Mom goes from table to table chatting up her friends. She looks light on her feet, and full of fun and life, just like she did when she worked her tables, waitress light years ago. Her friends had been her fellow workers in those days, and they still are. The Center is where Mom first met the notorious Tattoo Lady.

            We discover that Mom needs to be recertified by Social Security before she can get her commodities. There are about 100 people waiting to be called, but Mom charges to the front of the line, saying that she has to go to chemotherapy in two hours. She shows them the pack she wears. Inside is a bag of chemicals attached by a silicone tube to a port in her chest, where the doctors have placed a special pump leading right to her heart. The workers are unimpressed: rules are rules.

            There are two windows occupied at the Social Security department, two miles away. An elderly couple is waiting, and a machine dispensing numbers is prominently displayed. Mom is number 92. One client is just leaving and Mom beelines for the open window. The lady explains that she must go by the rules, looks at her number, and calls 91. The elderly couple sit in a corner clutching their number. The lady calls 91 again, and they consult their slip of paper, adjusting their eyeglasses and discussing with each other if they are actually seeing the same number "91.” Meanwhile, Mom has continued to badger the lady in the window with her questions, so she finally relents and processes her request. As she hands the authorization to Mom, the couple holds up their paper.  "91," they call out.

            We head back to the commodities place. It's a big, metallic warehouse sitting on an unpaved mound of earth.  People park willy nilly, ignoring the blue handicapped parking spaces that have chaparral growing in them, almost obscuring the signs.  This is very different from Los Angeles where handicapped spaces are cherished and people fake limps in order to park in them. 

            Mom walks in brandishing her papers. We're told we'll have to wait until all the other people are attended to. This does not please Mother, and she launches into her chemo tirade, telling the woman in charge, the only one carrying an official clipboard, that she’s got a chemo appointment in half-an-hour, that the treatment is killing her, and that she’s lost all her teeth and her hair is falling out. She pulls off her wig. This time it works.

            "I'll get you in front, Nellie," the clipboard lady says, and dashes off. She pulls out a chair in front for Mom to be seated. Mom takes the chair until the clipboard lady turns her back, and then she gets up to talk with friends she’s spotted. Commodities are not just about food.

            We get processed and return to the car. Mom wants to flirt with the guys who load the boxes, so I drive the car around. "They're really nice here," she says. “But I won't let them push me around just because I’m old.”

            We go directly to the cancer clinic where Mom really does have an appointment to have more chemicals dumped into her. I buy her soup and juice and a brownie to nosh on while she's attached to the drip. She'll be hooked up for three hours.

            The plaza is only a few blocks away and I stroll into a few galleries before entering a mercantile.

            "I hate to spend money, but you should see that Tattoo Lady go though dough," Mother had told me earlier. I hide my purchases in the trunk of the car.

            She's still hooked up when I return. "I wet my pants," she says. "I was almost to the bathroom and just couldn't hold it anymore."

            "Are you cold?" I ask. The nurse brings her a blanket, and says she's going to be going to the bathroom a lot.           

           

            At dinner that night, my last night, we dine at the Red Lobster, Mom's favorite place. We're concerned that she won't be able to chew the lobster, but order it anyway. I start her off with clam chowder.  I order extra for her to take home.

            The next morning she's got a dental appointment. I call and ask her to wear the pants I bought her, not so much because I want to see her in them, as that I'm worried she'll still be wearing her peed in jeans.

            "Mom, try to clean your fingernails ‘cause you're going to be pointing to your dentures and your gums."

            "Okay," she says, and sniffs, offended to her core.

            It’s my last day with Mom, and I'm a bit teary when she comes out and gets in the car. She gives me a startled look, and turns away with that tight curl-of-the-lip.

            "Tattoo Lady cries a lot," she says.

            She's wearing the new outfit, but her fingernails are still black. She's carrying a box with her dentures, her partial bridge (from when she still had most of her teeth), and a small container holding all the teeth they pulled. At the dentist’s office, she picks up one of her former teeth and holds it out to him.

            "See how small my teeth were," she says. “I never had a cavity.” She opens the container holding her dentures. They float in water and she pokes at them. "These are just too big. They hurt me." We all stare down at the dentures. A piece of black crud comes loose from her nail and floats in the denture water. The dentist labors over her false teeth, trimming and refitting. Mom leaves happy, her choppers liberally lined with an analgesic.        

            “Are you hungry?” I ask, pleased that she’ll finally be able to chew. Things have been going great. Mom orders sausage and bacon with her eggs and pancakes. We smile across the table at each other. Then, she brings up The Dog.

            "What was that dog's name? You know, the one you killed?"

           

            Once, when my sons were little and Mom and I were talking long distance, I put her on the speakerphone so we could all hear. In tones reminiscent of a bedtime story she launched into a story of The Dog, a pet they didn't even remember, with me featured as the cruel dog-murdering queen. I'll never forget their innocent eyes sweeping up to me for confirmation.

            "I didn't kill the dog, Mom. I had her put down. Remember? She had cancer and the runs, and Eric was starting to walk, and he'd step into dog shit all the time?"

            Silence. I could hear her sucking on a cigarette on the other end of the telephone line, arming herself with the heat of the smoke in her lungs. She exhaled, biting her words. "Yeah, I'm glad you killed her. She might have suffered." This is not agreement. This is Mother making her point in that reverse logic bordering on evil way she's perfected. I glanced at the boys—the word killed shining in their eyes.

            "Euthanized, Mom. Not killed. Would you rather your grandson play in dog shit?"

            "Dog shit never hurt anybody," she said. The boys giggled, covering their little mouths with little hands, totally in agreement with Grandma on the dog shit issue. My oldest is twenty now, and he likes to tease me by asking if I miss my dog killing days.

           

            The dog shit episode has become a fond Grandma tale for them. Grandma as the wolf in disguise. But does that make me Little Red Riding Hood, still trying to please with my little basket of goodies?

            Over fifteen years have passed, and she still brings up The Dog. "What was that dog's name?" she asks again. Another trap that I fail to see. I could have just changed the subject, started talking about the dog I have now or her dogs or pointed at the fat man walking past the coffee shop window.

            "Sallie," I say.

            "That dog was so smart. She followed Eric everywhere. I still don't understand why you had her killed." She bites into a piece of bacon with her startling white dentures, and chews meditatively.

            It’s my last day in Santa Fe. My last morning with my mother. Things have been going well. I’ve agreed with her on everything except Martha Stewart. I decide to make a little speech, the kind that allows rational people to save face.

            “I think I made the right decision, Mom. The dog was very sick. The comfort and well being of my family meant more to me than the dog. For you, animals are more important than people, and you don't mind the problems. Your way works for you, my way works for me. It doesn't mean that you're right and I'm wrong. It's just a different way."

            She sips her coffee. Curls her lip. "Yeah, Tattoo Lady says the same thing."

This piece was first published in INK POT #3 - 2004, a literary journal.

Mom, my bro and me