Happy Birthday or Whatever (8 page)

“Mom, this is enough. You're even ruining the bathroom.”

She had placed a framed copy of the poem “Footprints” between the soap dish and the toothbrush holder in my bathroom. The poem is about a man who reflects back on his life and sees two sets of footprints, a set that belongs to him and a set that belongs to Jesus. The man discovers that during the hardest parts of his life, he sees only one set of footprints. He gets angry because he thinks Jesus abandoned him. It turns out he was wrong: “During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.” That was in my bathroom, the least inspirational place in our house. “Ruin? Why ruin? I think nice.”

“Then put it in your bathroom.”

Etched on a mirror in blue type, the poem was not enlightening, but just one more thing I had to clean. It often got stained stubbornly with dried lather and toothpaste spit.

I'm not sure why my mother collected all this kitsch. Why does anyone collect anything? You buy one thing, it makes you happy. So you buy a hundred more. I see it all the time—my friend's mother collects ceramic pigs, which may or may not be worse than my mother's religious paraphernalia. It's possible that my mother thought having more Catholic knickknacks made her more Catho
lic, although I have trouble believing that she attached deep spiritual meaning to a plastic Virgin Mary golf tee carrying case. All I know is that by the time I was seventeen, our house looked like a roadside Catholic gift shop.

During my senior year of high school, my mother and members from her church went on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina where the Virgin Mary allegedly appears and sends messages through six chosen people. It's a site not officially recognized by the Catholic Church, but that really didn't matter to my mother. She brought back a staggering number of statuettes. She unwrapped each one carefully and lined them up proudly on the kitchen counter. By this point I should've been accustomed to all my mother's holy trinkets, but these statuettes both depressed and angered me. All the bric-a-brac littered around the house were eyesores and embarrassments, but visiting a war-torn country to see a ghost defied logic. She was in the same category of people who worshipped vegetables, mud stains, and cow pies that look like the baby Jesus.

“What's this?” I pointed to an angel with wings outspread. He was wielding a menacing spear and stepping on the head of a man, who looked quite uncomfortable. In contrast, the angel looked very tranquil.

“It angel, so nice you think?”

“Why is he stepping on that guy's head? Angels aren't supposed to do that.”

“Because, that man was bad man.”

“What did he do?”

“Bad thing.”

I rolled my eyes and moved on to a wooden cross with a gold Jesus. “You bought another cross? We have like a million of them.”

“This one from church in Bosnia.”

“But it looks exactly like the one you got from downtown L.A.” I turned over the cross. “It says ‘Made in China.'”

“Really?”

“No.”

She smacked me on the shoulder. The cross ended up above the enormous photograph of the pontiff, which had once stood out in the Korean-ness of our home. Now it acted as the focal point that tied the house and all its Catholic kitsch together.

 

During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, most of my mother's figurines broke, and the floor was strewn with pieces of Jesus, some of which cut into my bare feet when I ran to take cover. No one in the family was hurt and our house suffered no structural damage (just hairline fractures in the drywall and cracked floor tiles), but my mother agonized over her keepsakes. Many of the larger statuettes fell on top of the more delicate ones, pulverizing them into a powder. The Pope, however, clung resolutely to the wall. Not even a bit off center. The Pope survived a 6.7 shake in his usual mild manner, much to my disappointment. My mother tried to repair some of her figurines with glue, but it was difficult to figure out which bleeding heart and which praying hands belonged to which figurine. Unfortunately, the earthquake only gave her an excuse to buy more Catholic tchotchkes and within a year, my mother replaced all of her keepsakes and added more, including a plastic angel that doubled as a toothpick holder and a cross with a coat hook.

 

A few years ago my parents decided to downsize to a smaller house, and I returned to Los Angeles to help them pack. The first thing I did was turn my attention to the kitsch.

“Where are you gonna put all this crap?”

“You mouth so dirty, Anne.”

“The new house is smaller. There's no room for any of this.” I held up a box of laminated Jesus and Mary trading cards with prayers printed on the back.

“I find room.”

“Mom, seriously, you have to throw this stuff out. Give it away.”

“No, no, I don't think so.”

“You won't even know it's MISSING.”

I paused. I recalled all the stuffed animals my mother had doled out to those snotty Korean kids and my unwillingness to let them go, to surrender my beloved one by one. I remembered the time spent loving each one and the pants-wetting joy of getting another. And I could see how my mother thought my animals were multiplying beyond control and her concern over my obsession. I could see why she wanted to thin my herd.

But what came to mind wasn't sympathy. It was payback.

I gleefully removed several plastic rosaries hanging from the lamps in the living room. Years of dangling near blazing light bulbs had melted the beads into blobs.

“I'm throwing these away.”

“No you can't, Anne.”

“They're melted. You have a thousand more.” I showed her the blobs and flung them into the trash. My mother winced. I held up a set of glass Jesus candles. “These are going, too. They're done burning anyway.” I tossed them and they clinked together in the trashcan, like champagne glasses toasting. My mother reached into the trashcan and I swatted her hands away.

“ANNE!”

“Look, there's no more wax in them. You can always buy more.
I promise I'll buy you another one.” I smirked. I looked around hungrily and grabbed a chipped plate depicting one of the Stations of the Cross.

“NO, ANNE, NO! SAVE!”

“OK, OK you can keep this one.” I set it aside. I picked up a clear plastic Jesus with a gold wire halo around his head. “What is this?” I threw it away. My mother opened her mouth to protest. I cut her off. “Listen, the new house is half the size of this one. Where are you going to put all of this?”

My mother shrugged. I had a point. Score one for Annie. With each dusty and chipped statuette I threw away, I thought of the stuffed animals my mother had given away when I was little. I was doing this for the koala in the Dodgers jersey, the white seal, the kitten. I relished the thud of the figurines in the trashcan and when they actually shattered or broke, I tried to hide my delight. Moving had never been this fun.

“No, Anne. Stop. Put in box and I save in garage. Don't put all in trash! You understand?”

“Some of this has to be tossed.” I showed her a Precious Moments figurine of a praying child. Her leg was fractured—an earthquake injury probably.

“IN BOX, ANNE!”

I rolled my eyes and grabbed a box. I started adding my mother's keepsakes: a few Jesus figurines, plastic saints and angels, Virgin Mary magnets, prints of nativity scenes, candles. One box led to another, much bigger box. Bookmarks with inspirational prayers, a chintzy Saint Christopher paperweight, a knicked plastic music box that played a flat hymn. When my mother wasn't looking I deftly carried a few boxes to the trunk of my car. Three of them went to Aardvark's Odd Ark, so that they could wind up in someone else's house, and
one box of items in disrepair went to my favorite charity, the trashcan.

But there was one more item. After fifteen years, it was time to detach JP2 from the wall, from my mother.

“There's no way you are bringing this.”

“Anne, it Pope, yes I bring.”

“Where are you going to put it? There's no room in the new house.”

“I make room.”

“You're being totally unreasonable. There's no place to put this. No wall space. Look how old this looks. We have tons of photographs to bring over.
Of us.
”

Little spots of mildew stained the white silk border. Fifteen years worth of dust sat on top of the frame, just out of reach from my mother's rag. I found a gray moth that had crawled behind the picture to die.

“I have to bring. How I can throw like trash?”

“Well how about you give it away. I'm sure your friends wouldn't mind taking in the Pope.”

“No, no one want.”

She was right. Who would want an old, oversized Pope? Not one of her friends; they probably had one in their houses anyway. It would have to be one of my friends.

“OK what if I told you my friend wanted it.”

“Who?”

“J.D. He's Catholic. He loves the Pope.”

J.D. is Catholic and he does love the Pope. He has a Pope-Soap-on-a-Rope in his shower. He has a Pope-O-Scope, a kaleidoscope of the pontiff he fashioned out of a cardboard tube. He had decorated his house with Jesus candles and in his bathroom had installed a bleeding heart nightlight that cast a creepy red glow
over the toilet. The first time he saw JP2 gracing my mother's wall, he was nearly moved to tears of ecstasy. I didn't even bother asking J.D. If he didn't want it, the trash would gladly take it.

“He want picture?”

“Yes, he wants it.”

“You not lie?”

“Why would I lie? Look, I'm telling you, there'll be no room for this.”

“I don't know.” My mother sighed.

“You can't bring it all. Where you gonna put the picture of The Last Supper?”

“I don't know.”

“So, J.D. has the perfect place for the Pope.” I wasn't sure where this perfect place was in J.D.'s house, but as far as I was concerned, any place that wasn't in my parents' house was perfect.

I loaded JP2 into my car and drove it over to J.D. He greeted me in his driveway and nearly fainted from excitement when I showed him the pontiff lounging in my backseat.

“Are you sure your mom doesn't want this? Like seriously?”

“Trust me. It's all yours.”

“This is the coolest thing ever. Really. I love it all hard.” He grinned and carried it into his house.

J.D. wanted to put the Pope in his bathroom but couldn't find enough wall space. His girlfriend refused to let the John Paul II into the bedroom. His housemates weren't excited about having a Pope in the living room. Or in the kitchen. They cursed me for passing on the picture, as if I had passed on gonorrhea. J.D. wandered around his house surveying the walls.

“Don't sweat it, J.D. I mean, if you can't find a place for it, you can throw it away.”

“Throw it away? No, no, even if I wanted to, I couldn't throw it away.”

J.D. wrapped the Pope in an old, filthy blanket and shoved it in the dark corner of his garage, between boxes of dusty magazines and outdated computer parts. To the best my knowledge, it's still there today.

 

When my parents finally settled into their new home, there were noticeably fewer figurines gracing the tables. My mother managed to exercise some self-control. She bought a cabinet where she displayed many of her Catholic treasures alongside her china. There were, however, countless boxes of religious decorations tidily stacked in the garage, and I regretted not throwing out more boxes when I had the opportunity.

Still, each time I visit my parents' house, I notice more and more crosses and pictures and candles and statuettes. Slowly, my mother has been adding to her collection: tissue box covers embroidered with crosses, a wine decanter etched with prayers, a clock depicting Jesus' last days on the cross (something J.D. would kill for). I hope that they'll move again, and I wonder if praying for a minor earthquake makes me a horrible person.

D
espite all the pressure to get into Harvard and achieve my parents' American dream, I ended up at the University of California at Berkeley, which may not be the best school in the country, but it is the best public school, at least according to
Newsweek
. At first my parents grumbled—maybe I should've taken advanced placement physics or maybe I should've done more volunteer work or cured diseases in Africa. Eventually they awoke from their crimson haze and learned to love the Golden Bear.

My first week of college, I got a phone call from my mother every half hour. Mornings were a particularly rough time—she's one of those criminally insane morning people who believe that if they are up at dawn, the rest of the world is, too. On my first day of school, my mother called at 6:00 and asked why I wasn't getting ready for school, and I groggily explained I had class at noon. At 6:30, she wondered why I still wasn't up yet. At 7:00, she asked what I was going to eat for breakfast and I replied, “sleep.” At 7:30, she announced she was going to go for a quick walk, so she might not be home if I called her. At 8:00 she told me how nice her walk was and that I should walk every morning, too. At 8:30, she called in a panic, that if I didn't wake up NOW, I'd miss my noon class. I growled that I didn't need three and a half hours to get ready for class, but I did need three and a half hours of more sleep. At 9:30, she inquired about my plans for lunch. When the phone rang at 10:00, my exhausted roommate blurted out, “Please, please tell her to stop!” I explained to my mother that she didn't have to wake my roommate and me up every morning because we had a special machine called an alarm clock that served the same purpose. But the phone calls still didn't stop. She called to tell me she dropped off her dry cleaning. An hour later, she told me she bought a new brand of hair gel. When she called to tell me to save all my mismatched socks because she had found a few loners in her laundry room, I threatened to cut her off forever.

I understood that she was lonely, now that her children were out of the house, and I understood that she worried about me, especially as the baby in the family. But the calls were out of control, beyond what was reasonable and healthy. I assured my mother that I was responsible—I was going to all my classes on time and even found a job—and that I didn't want or need to know that her grocery store reorganized the fruit section. Finally, my mother
agreed to talk once a week, and my roommate and I got an answering machine and a phone with a ringer we could turn off.

My first semester went smoothly; I enjoyed independence and life without my mother. I realized how much she held me back—from irresponsible boozing, bouncing from party to party, and smoking an acre of weed, all on a school night. I can't say that I missed her too much, but I did like talking to her once a week. One March afternoon, I called to chat with my mother, and I was surprised when my father picked up the phone. I normally called him at his lab, where he spent his fourteen-hour days analyzing metals and compounds and watching the Lakers or Dodgers on a tiny black-and-white TV.

“Hey, Dad, why you home? Shouldn't you be at work?”

“I'm taking the day off.”

“Cool, what for?”

“To take care of you mommy.”

“Oh did she sprain her ankle again? Or throw her back out? She's always doing that kind of stuff.”

Once on a ski trip my mother swerved to miss a tree and collided into my father instead. He was fine, but she sprained her knee and had to be taken down the mountain by the Snow Patrol. She was really embarrassed because she fancied herself a good skier. Whenever we waited in line for a chair lift, she adjusted the zippers on her puffy orange snowsuit, tightened her enormous amber goggles, and practiced going into a low-tuck position. She hopped from left to right and pretended to race down moguls, making a
shh shh
sound through her teeth.

“No, no, Annie, not this time.”

“She got a cold or something? Just tell her to take some NyQuil and she'll get over it. You should take some too; she's probably contagious.”

“No, not a cold.”

“Then what? What's left? You give her a rash or something?” I laughed at my own joke.

“Mommy has cancer.”

I lost control. I felt as if my body had lost its shape, as if my muscles and bones had melted away. My hand loosened around the receiver and I dropped it. I slowly slid off my chair and slumped to the floor, my head gently resting on the carpet. She has what? For some reason, all I could think about was my dorm room carpet. It reeked like feet and beer and I wondered when the last time it had been shampooed, certainly not in my lifetime. This carpet probably had lice. Maybe scabies—can scabies live in carpet? My feeble brain was unable to process
Mommy
and
cancer
in the same sentence, so it moved on to something it could deal with—filthy carpet infested with mites. Somehow, I summoned the strength to pick myself up and climb back into my chair. I took the receiver and lifted it to my ear, but the spiral cord got tangled into an enormous dreadlock and left about two inches of slack. I tried to untangle it, but got frustrated, so I leaned over to talk into the receiver with my nose an inch from the rest of the phone.

“Annie, you there? Hello? You OK?”

“I don't know.”

“She has breast cancer but it OK, I think we catch it in time. Don't worry, Annie, nothing to worry. She got biopsy. Then she got surgery; she got mastectomy. They took it out, the whole thing.”

“Is she going to die?”

The question gushed out of my mouth. The words were so ugly and grotesque; I wanted to swallow them again. What a horrible thing to say. Why did I say that? My father was silent. No, I thought, don't say it again. Don't do it
.

“Is she going to die?” I felt nauseous and I had a funny taste in my mouth, something sweet and sour. I remember reading in a magazine that some people tasted metal in their mouths before they got heart attacks. I wiggled my tongue in my mouth. No, not metal, Fruity Pebbles maybe.

“I tell you don't worry. She start chemotherapy already.”

“When did this happen?”

“Three month ago.”

Three months ago? My hand, which had gone limp just moments before, now gripped the phone so firmly I could hear the cheap plastic crack. She had been diagnosed three months ago, in January—probably right after I started my spring semester. We had talked so many times since then, and she seemed fine. She had gossiped about her friend's tragic plastic surgery and complained about my uncle's unruly six-year-old who was already expressing interest in explosives. She asked me if Berkeley was safe at night and if I had classes with any hippies. But I remember once she sounded sick and tired and she blamed it on the flu. I guess it was cancer. I never once thought anything was wrong. How could I have known if they didn't tell me?

I thought about a moment in sixth grade when I came home from school to find my mother packing her china into cardboard boxes. When I asked what she was doing, she mentioned nonchalantly that we were moving in two months and asked why I was so surprised because the family had been discussing it for a long time. It was the first I had ever heard of it. Our house wasn't even for sale—they were going to sell it after we moved to the new house, which they already bought without showing my brother and me. I asked Mike about the move and he responded, “We're fucking moving?” My parents never told us because they knew we would get angry. They waited until the last possible moment, when the
bad news could no longer be hidden and they needed us to pack up the house.

“Dad, you knew about this three months ago and you didn't tell me? She had a goddamn
mastectomy
three months ago and I didn't know about it?” Heat flooded into my chest and I started shaking from fear and fury.

“Annie, we not want to worry you.”

“Worry me? You didn't want to fucking worry me? Why didn't you tell me? I've been talking to you this entire fucking time and no one told me shit. Why would you fucking do that to me?”

I slammed the receiver down. No, I thought, Don't be like this. I immediately dialed again.

“Dad, I'm sorry, I'm just…”

“It's OK Annie. Everyone be OK.”

“I'm coming home.”

“No. You can't come home. You have to finish school.”

“What the hell are you talking about? School's not important.”

“No, Annie, no. Mommy and me want you to finish school. You have month and half more. You finish first.”

“No way, I'm coming home now. I can't finish the semester. How can I finish school? Tell me how I can fucking finish school. Do you think breast cancer will be on my finals? Because that's all I'll be thinking about.”

“Annie, don't make this hard on Mommy and me. Mike is around, he help.”

“Let me talk to Mom.”

“Annie, you help by staying in Berkeley. If you here, you will give Mommy stress because she worry about you, because you worry about her. You understand? I going to hang up now. Mommy sleeping.”

I was angry. I was angry she had cancer and I was angry that I couldn't go home to help; they didn't need my help. Families are supposed to rely on each other and they had cut me off. I felt so betrayed and useless. Mike went to school two hours away from my parents' home, so he found out earlier. Everyone had known except for me. I called my brother.

“What the fuck, Mike? Why didn't you fucking tell me?”

“Annie, I couldn't. You know that I couldn't.”

“But you're my brother. You're supposed to tell me shit like this. That's part of the whole brother-sister deal.”

“What could you have done? No one can do anything except for the doctors, don't you get it?”

“Mike, is she OK? Tell me the truth, is she OK? No one's telling me anything. It's all fucked up.”

“She's tired all the time; she sleeps a lot. She lost some weight. Look, she's going to be OK.”

“Promise?”

“Annie, come on. Don't make me do that. Don't be a pussy. We'll take it slowly, dude.”

I sat in my room for the rest of the afternoon and I cried. Theresa, a round-faced girl who lived on my floor, dropped by to see if my roommate was home. I tried to explain between my sobs, but only key words would come out—“Mom…cancer…Chemo…” Theresa's brown eyes welled up with tears.

“Hey now, you got to keep it together.”

She tucked me into bed and sat for a while, stroking my hair. People were coming back from classes and parties were beginning. The sounds of clinking bottles and gangster rap and inebriated voices and high-fiving leaked into my room, so Theresa put on music to drown out the noise. I woke up the next morning, to find that my roommate had left me alone for the evening and the
CD was still playing—Theresa had put it on repeat. It was the soundtrack to “Little Women,” the campy version starring Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, and a lot of bonnets. With my eyes swollen shut from weeping, I reached for the phone.

“Mom?”

“Anne, you OK?”

“I want to know if you're OK.”

“Oh, I fine, don't worry. You know I just tired. I sleep a lot and chemo make me throw up, but not too bad. I watch TV, I read. But I get so much headache. All time headache.”

I was surprised by her even voice. She sounded a little tired, but strong. No wonder I couldn't sense anything was wrong for the past three months—she was good at hiding any fear or pain. Before I called her, I was worried that I was going to lose control and cry into the phone. But if she could keep it together, I could too.

“That's not good. What are they from? Did you tell the doctor?”

“I get headache because everyone worry and I say, why you worry? I not dead. But everyone worry. So I tell my doctor and he say there no cure for worry.” She laughed at her joke. I forced a dry chuckle.

“We care about you, that's why we worry.”

“You know what make Mommy very happy?”

“What?”

“Daddy stop smoking. I so happy, he smell much better now.”

I thought about what would happen if my father had cancer, too. No, I thought, stop that. “Can I come home to see you?”

“Anne, you make easy on Mommy and Daddy, OK? You stay in Berkeley, get all A and then go Harvard.”

“Mom, you know I love you, right?”

“I know, Anne, I know. Everyone know.”

“Because I don't know what I'd do without you.”

“Oh Anne, you sound so…so…what word you always say when you see bad movie on TV. Like movie about man who drink too much. Then he get divorce and life so sad. His life so much trouble and everybody cry and you get headache?”

“
Cheesy
?”

“Yes, yes, you sound very cheese. Promise me you not worry.”

“Promise me you'll tell me everything.”

Just as my mother had pestered me with incessant phone calls when I first started school, I began running up my phone bills. I called every hour to find out how her chemotherapy was going, what she was eating, what medications she was taking, or what she was watching on TV. She explained that therapy was going slowly and her hair was falling out, but she didn't mind so much. (“I have so much hair before, you can't tell it get thin.”) My grandmother made her favorite meals, especially baked mackerel and bean sprout soup. She took all her medications, whatever was on her nightstand. She forgot what all of them did; she just knew when to take them. She started watching American soap operas but found them hard to follow. I offered to watch them and explain each episode, but she didn't like the idea because it interfered with my studying.

A few weeks passed and just as she was coping with the nausea and fatigue from chemo, she developed swelling and an infection in the scar tissue where surgeons had removed her breast. She went to the hospital to get the area drained and then she had an allergic reaction to the anesthetic. Within minutes she ran a fever and developed bright red hives all over her body. I called her at the hospital.