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."

May in the Summer

           

                Sometimes a journey “home” is an encounter with oneself. May in the Summer (release August 22) tells the story of a young, sophisticated woman who lives in New York and whose first novel was a success. She’s engaged and travels home to visit her mother and plan her wedding. While there she must deal with the usual travails of familial discontinuity, a tale that has been told countless times. The difference here is that May’s home is in Amman Jordan. Her mother is a Palestinian who married an American. May and her sisters were raised in the U.S.

                Wait, there’s more. Her mother is a fundamentalist Christian and May’s fiancé is Muslim. Yikes! Amman is not Gaza, but you can see Palestine across the water from a Western style beach resort as you float in the Dead Sea. Oh, and there are not too many women in jogging shorts for the local men to ogle. Only one: May. These dislocations serve as much needed reminders that even though May and her sisters are pop culture savvy and are not just Westernized-they’re as American as apple pie served at a NY deli. All of which adds up to an old story told and set in a new world.

                Diversity is a word I embrace and May in the Summer displays all its nuances in an engrossing and even affectionate manner. The script is good and the acting is outstanding. May encounters more familial secrets which I won’t reveal here. It’s a new twist on an old tale well worth viewing.

DIRECTOR(S): Cherien Dabis SCREENWRITER(S): Cherien Dabis CAST: Cherien Dabis, Hiam Abbass, Alia Shawkat, Bill Pullman, Nadine Malouf, Elie Mitri, Alexander SiddigDISTRIBUTOR: Cohen Media Group 

The Icing Twins

The old man’s hooded eyes focused on the photo of two teenaged girls smashing their faces into slices of birthday cake. He tapped the picture and said, “Snuck up on them for this one, but they heard me coming. Yep, last picture of the girls we have.”

The reporter glanced at the picture. “That’s the picture the FBI used?”

The old man sighed. “Lotta good it did them. Change their hair color. Use a different color of icing and all youse got is a headline—”

“The Icing Twins Strike Again!” the reporter said in the exaggerated tones of an anchorman announcing late-breaking news.

“Most successful bank robbers ever!" The old man raised his chin, proud and defiant. "Never been caught. Never heard from them once they began their life of crime.” He looked down at the picture again. His hand trembled. “My granddaughter broke her mother’s heart.”

The reporter consulted his notes. “Debbie and Ellie swore they were twins even though they had different parents?”

“They had a connection. It ran between them strong. You ever seen a dog and an electric fence?” He didn’t wait for the reporter to answer. “It was like that. A line of electricity between them that warned everyone away, like they might get shocked if they got too close. We figured it was just teenage lesbo stuff.”

“Yes, well, according to reports Debbie and Ellie finished each other’s sentences, had the same gestures and facial tics and made the same impulsive decisions.”

“They got tired of people saying, ‘But you don’t look anything alike.’ It made ‘em angry. ‘Nobody sees us,’ our Ellie said. It was then they decided to never have their pictures taken again."

“Why do you think they started their life of crime?”

“If I knew that, mister, I wouldn’t be sittin’ here in my pajamas talkin’ to you. Oh sure, maybe we shoulda told Ellie she was adopted, but how was we to know Debbie was adopted, too?” The old man set the picture down and twisted his arthritic hands together, agitated. “What are the chances of them endin’ up in the same neighborhood? Plenty of folks is adopted and they don’t rob banks!”

“Hmm, do you think Ellie and Debbie, um, became lovers?”

The old man struggled to his feet. “What kind of a sick sumbitch are you? That’d be incest!”

He showed the reporter to the door and went over to the mantle to raise a picture he’d lowered just before the man arrived. He smiled down at the latest photo of Debbie and Ellie. A new one arrived on their birthday every year. This one showed the sisters with their three children. All five of them had their faces smashed down in birthday cake.

Flash written in response to the photo above.

PEACE LOVE & JOY DISCOUNT ON THE SANDOVAL SISTERS

As many of you know, the last few months have been rough on my family with two funerals, lots of travel, and a crushing workload for which we've had to play catch-up. There have been some high notes for me which have helped me keep my focus. The reviews for The Sandoval Sisters continue to be outstanding, and I want to share my good fortune with you.

Books make great presents. My gift to you is a special discount for the paperback version of The Sandoval Sisters’ Secret of Old Blood. $7.99 through the end of December. Go here to purchase: http://bit.ly/16J3A47

Be sure to enter this special discount code when you check out: UV8WT22L  

Peace, Joy, Love

THE SANDOVAL SISTERS SIZZLE!

Oratoria, The Spinster and Keeper of the Secrets

     You're nobody until someone at La Bloga likes what you've created.  Featured below is Michael Sedano's review of The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood, which he graciously bought at the Autry after a reading there. Click on the link above for the full review:

     "When I took The Sandoval Sisters’ Secret of Old Blood off my “to-be-read” stack it was none too soon and about time. What a treat to enjoy the joys of sly smiles and breathless intervals between racist attacks, yanqui invasions, local color, gender ambiguity, jealous lovers, patient lovers, huge cultural paradigm shifts.

   

   Set in New Mexico in the decades leading to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the story of four women comes ready-made with cultural references and a literary heritage. Most notably, as a uniquely New Mexico story with plot lines filled with miracles and mystical prescience, O’Briant fits into literary space created by Rudolfo Anaya’s timeless Bless Me, Ultima.
 
      O’Briant’s story of the Sandoval sister married into a slave-owning Texas family has a counterpart in Arturo Madrid’s In the Country of Empty Crosses. Set in New Mexico beginning fifty years after the Sandoval Sisters stories, Madrid’s depiction of ever-present tensions between Catholic and Protesant gente, raza and anglo, reflects the creative history O’Briant thrusts upon the indomitable Alma.  

     Historicity sets a background and defines cultural rules that constrains an author’s work. Eroticism has fewer boundaries, and here Sandra Ramos O’Briant gives herself an almost free hand. There’s the soltera sister, the keeper of familia knowledge. There’s the consolation prize bride, Pilar, a 14-year old. Her middle-aged husband looks forward to training her body. Alma, the intended bride, runs off to Texas with a nice cowboy.  The author enjoys placing characters into sexual situations just because she can.  But that’s why it’s a romp of a novel, lots of passion."
                                                    

Short reviews of The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood

Linda Quinn and I each had a story in Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery.  She recently posted this review of The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood:  

This is a fascinating family saga from the viewpoint of the sisters of the Sandoval family who live in New Mexico. The story is one of survival in a time in history when New Mexico is struggling for its independence, and the sisters are doing the same. Women at that time had nothing but marriage and raising children as an option in their lives, but these women go their own way and succeed while incorporating the past (curandismo and diaries of past Sandoval women) into their futures. A very GoodRead.

From Amazon:

Everything you could want from historical fiction - a largely unexplored part of Mexican/American history, the spectacular vistas of New Mexico, a well researched, finely tuned plot, a dynastic family with not one but three incredibly distinct, sensual, powerful female voices. Mystical like Garcia-Marquez, spanning centuries of family lore like Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches, this novel answers the question "What would life have been like for educated, intelligent, empowered women in the 1800s?". When the story ends, you miss the characters ... and you want to know what happens next to Oratoria, Alma and Pilar. CindyD 

What surprised me about this book, besides the feisty female characters and multi-generational saga, is that I realized I've never read a fictional account of the war that brought New Mexico into the United States and what it meant for the people who had lived in New Mexico before the Anglos arrived. The description of the arrival of the long line of stagecoaches after statehood was declared and the assumption of a superior culture was visually striking and thought provoking. Anyone who is curious about this under examined part of our history that is the Mexican-American War if 1844 to 1846 should pick this one up. Marianne Cotter

More short reviews Here

Artist Alfred Kubin did the piece posted above.

Sexual Congress: is that like a political organization?

Audio interview link in which I grapple with literary questions in the southwestern gothic triangle of the union that occurs between the covers of a book, yes, that one, between the writer and the reader, between you and me, babe.  Unless, of course, you've gone digital and then it's whispernet darling, or whatever the nook craves, the mac wants . . . is a click away.

Yes, I am an idiot, but here it is:

Writers Alive 2012

8 Ways To Say I Love My Life

         Saturday was a fun and fulfilling day that began with a reading from The Sandoval Sisters at the Los Angeles chapter of the Historical Fiction Society.  I had the opportunity to not only meet other writers, but also readers of historical fiction who were looking for something new.

            That evening was very special.  Not only did my husband and I get together with old friends we hadn’t seen all summer, but we headed out to Boyle Heights and Casa 0101 theatre for the play, 8 Ways to Say I Love My Life. The 2009 Imagen Award-winning show has been restaged in celebration of the publication of the book by the same name.

            As you might guess from the title the subject is self-affirmation, but the plot turns on how the eight writers whose stories are performed got to this point.  It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t always pretty.  The monologues are short, tight, and focused on domestic violence, the loss of a friend and mentor, latchkey children taken from their mother and put into the foster care system, a father diagnosed with schizophrenia, the choice not to have children, attraction to losers, and taking a chance to live your dream.

            These women don’t feel sorry for themselves, both in terms of what life dealt them, and their own choices.  Mistakes and screw-ups are described with humor, and their Aha! moments are met with forgiveness for any part they may have played in their in own low self-esteem days, which also happens to be the title of  Josefina Lopez's story, My Low Self Esteem Days, performed by Yvonne DeLaRosa. Pilar of Strength, a monologue written by Margo De Leon and performed by Kikey Castillo, struck a personal note with one of my companions, and Bel Hernandez Castillo's The Power to Say You Belong spoke to me loud-and-clear when she related her youthful ambition and the chances she took to achieve it.

        

The Heart of a New Mexican Beats in Beverly Hills

New interview from the Beverly Hills Weekly (Oct. 25, 2012; edited for length):  

Sandra Ramos O’Briant’s debut novel, The Sandoval Sisters’ Secret of Old Blood, is a historical fiction novel set around three sisters during the Mexican -American War in Santa Fe, N.M.

“There’s all of this history behind {that war} and no one had written how the influx of men {soldiers} affected the women in New Mexico,” she said. “There’s a strong emphasis on sisterhood: the Sandoval sisters but also sisterhoods that form whenever women get together -- nuns, prostitutes in a brothels, and the women in the streets worried about their husbands, brothers, and sons thrown in jail by Americans.”

Alma runs off to Texas with her young lover to escape an arranged marriage with an older man. When she leaves, her younger sister Pilar takes her place at the altar. The Mexican-American War begins and Santa Fe is invaded. Oratoria, the eldest, was adopted into the family Sandoval at the age of 5. The story is told from each of the sisters’ point of view as they document events in diaries, as had been the practice of the Sandoval family for hundreds of years.

The story also touches on superstition and includes an element of witchcraft and voodoo. “When people don’t understand something or feel oppressed or are losing their land, livelihood and loved ones, they turn and pick a target,” she said.

Though this is O’Briant’s first novel, her short stories have been featured in various anthologies and journals. O’Briant’s book launch was on Oct. 7 at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. She calls and skypes into book clubs across the country. For more information or to receive book discussion questions, you can e-mail her at sandra@thesecretofoldblood.com.

A Stranger and a Journey

"All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town." ― Leo Tolstoy 

In The Sandoval Sisters, a stranger came to Santa Fe and Alma Sandoval went on a journey with him.  

Sister, Sister

Now for something personal:

This is my sister. She recently forged our elderly mother’s name and stole thousands of dollars from her.

My mom worked six nights a week for years to support me, my brother and my sister. In her fifties, she took the GRE and got a job with the state. She was only able to save this money by living like a pauper. Once she retired, Mom insisted on subsisting on her social security checks, and banking the small pension she’d earned from the state.

It’s amazing how much interest can accumulate if you save every nickle and never spend a dime. She said the money was for her old age, so she wouldn’t be a burden to her children. Mom was sure she’d get cancer. She did. On her tonsils. Had chemo and radiation (The Tattoo Lady, Mother and Me), and beat it, although she still smokes.

Mom rescued my sister countless times from abusive relationships (White Lies), bought her cars, paid for repairs, saved the cars from repossession, paid down payments on homes, rent, and the list goes on. Every single one of my sister’s husbands and boyfriends were welcomed into Mom’s house where they mostly laid around. In order to discourage them from staying too long, Mom engaged in a peculiar form of domestic warfare where she put the lowest wattage light bulbs in their room and hid the toilet paper.

We — the sibs and Mom — laughed in those days at our mother’s eccentricities. We thought my sister would change, that things would get better. Why not? She’s smart and articulate, just has bad taste in men, and an addiction. To substance, yes, but more to a losing way of life. She's dedicated herself to bad decisions.

Mom’s heart is broken. She tried so hard to fix my sister, even lying to protect her when it put me in jeopardy. Mi familia. I got out, that’s my salvation, but my escape is only one of distance. I used to feel sorry for my sister, but this latest cut to our mother goes deep, beyond the blood, all the way to the bone.

"She’s bad, bad, bad," Mom says, all the orneriness gone out of her voice, making her sound feeble and old.

I think I might lose her any day, any hour, any minute, and it makes me so angry that my sister did this now.

All photos by author.