Gardena, California 1993

 

“My father was a patient man and a hard worker. He raised my brothers and me and cared for all of his grandchildren.”

            He cared for us alright, especially me.

            “He came from the Philippines with a dream and brought my mother over three years after he arrived to fulfill that dream.”

            Was it a wet dream?

            “A dream of starting a family in a new land where they could have the freedom to pursue whatever dreams they might have. Today we lay him down to rest with God in front of all of his family.”

            My mother starts crying. I wonder if he did it to her. Did he dress her and let his fingers play in her panties too? No, she must have been older, a teenager when she met my father. She would have met him when she was my age now. Did he find a way to have her before his own son? Did she say I do in front of the man who wouldn’t stop before her cries?

            “Myself and my two brothers, his granddaughter Sherry and…”

            He points to me and my mom hugs me. Everyone is looking to see if I’ll cry, but I want to tear my hair out and rip off this stupid dress and spit in his ugly dead face. I can’t hear. I feel my mother’s fingers trying to stop my hands from ripping handfuls of black vines from my steaming scalp, pulling them down over my gnarled face.

            My mother’s hands are usually soft. They feel mechanical as her tears rust her circuit boards and she begins to overpower me. I twist from her robotic grip and my arms swing uncontrollably as I fall from my chair.

            Crying faces turn and stare through clouds of stained irises, red from spicy tears. My mother gives me the look, but this time it can’t control me. I run down the aisle past puzzled grimaces dressed in jet black jackets and blacktop dresses.

            My father is behind me, still talking behind a podium of lies. An uncle stands and they nod at each other. In brother he tells him that he will get his niece. Funny how they can communicate silently, but my own silence was never translated into their language, my sorrow never recognized.

            The ladies room is safe. In a stall I change my past. Can I forget what happened? No. He introduced me to my pussy. I reach in and touch it. I was scared the first time. I cried from a place I never went to before. I kissed it goodbye. It was uncomfortable. I closed my eyes and begged God to make him stop. It was so strange and then it started to feel nice.

            He stopped when I moaned and I opened my eyes. I saw him pulling his pants up and rushing out without even looking at me. I cried like a little girl because that’s what I was then. I was a little girl who lost her loving grandfather. I turned fifteen this year. He hadn’t touched me since I was twelve. Three years of wondering when it would come. Three years of dreading the next time I would be left alone with my Lolo.

            At a family party once he called me into a room while I played with my cousins. I thought he would make me cry again and that I’d have to face them all as they played tag and I played innocent. He gave me fifty dollars and told me that he loved me. He hugged me and patted my butt like a coach telling his best player to get back in the game. I almost cried from relief that our secret would stay a secret and I wouldn’t have to be ashamed and I wouldn’t have to talk about it. It could stay inside and never come out.

            I touch her and I hate him afterwards. I hate him. If I told my father he would break him into a thousand puzzled pieces. I can’t break their world into a million. They need to believe I’m still a little girl. When betrayal presents itself at the most intimate level the protectors of the betrayed become the protected.

            The door opens. My mother walks in angry shoes and I hear the motorized smoothness of her well oiled knees and ankles. The tears fall down my face as I take my hands from inside of my panties. Why do I feel hollow inside, like an anvil is floating in a dark room inside of my chest? I was holding her. A comforting hand cupping her and letting her know that it’s O.K. now.

            “Open the door, Sherry,” she orders like a rusted general in her usually short and precise English like an exotic female Hemingway.

            “No.”

            “You are embarrassing me. Come out now,” she says in the same twisted Filipino accent that has made communication with her so difficult all of my life.

            I answer her with silence and I see her through the crack of the door. I watch her turn and look into one of the mirrors above the sinks. She grabs the sink with her titanium claws and I wonder if she’ll pull it from the wall and open the pale blue stall door with a porcelain battering ram. Her eyes change and I can see that somewhere in her programming she is finding a way to interpret my silence. She throws her glasses and they shatter on the floor.

            I scream. She falls down. I turn the shiny circular lock, open the door, and walk to her. I struggle to hug her as she crumples on the floor under the sink. Her hands are soft again and we cry and we cry.

            Finally, we look up at the plumbing of the mortuary and laugh. We realize how stupid we must look sitting under a sink hugging with our faces black with eye shadow dancing down our cheeks. With no explanations or words struggling to exit our mouths in unfamiliar tongues we get up and wash our faces. We do our make-up side by side, and when we are finished we blow kisses at the mirror.

            He’s gone. I look at myself and realize I will live the rest of my life without him. I’m free. A fresh start is waiting for me. If I open the door I’ll be in a new city where pain doesn’t ride the jeepney through my heart and stop in between my legs to let  an unwelcome passenger hold on for a free ride.

            The family looks at us as the door opens. Limousines have already come and are being filled with five foot tall figures wrapped in sadness and decorated by hats holding flowers and silver hair chewed with a pocket comb’s teeth, the bite marks still visible in the immaculate vanity of the elderly. They are all so sad and we are so happy.

            The robot is gone and my mother holds my hand and pulls me into a limo where my father is sitting and holding my little sister’s hand. She’s too young to understand what is happening, what has happened, and what will never happen again.

            “Are you O.K.?” he asks me.

            “I’m fine, Dad.” His eyes search for more but find female emotions he can’t decipher and won’t pretend to understand. His daughter’s smile is all he wants to see.

            “Good,” he says.

            The classic limo starts and our parade of illusions begins to roll through the city, happiness riding inside a reflective black paint job. The end of innocence smiling behind tinted windows.