Take This Man (17 page)

I'd invited over my newest crush, Sofie, a Vietnamese girl who'd been a friend for almost six months. My mother and grandmother were completely oblivious to my feelings for Sofie; Pat wasn't, and courted her with extra servings.

“Make sure she's comfortable,” he told me. “She's not just here for the food.”

After dinner, my friends played board games while I sat next to Sofie and counted the times we accidentally brushed against each other. On the patio, the adults sipped wine, cussed without malice in a tryptophan afterglow, and listened politely as my mother spent the entire Thanksgiving dinner talking about a concert she and Pat were going to in a couple weeks. The tickets were for Fleetwood Mac, but they actually were a passport for my mother to meet her “Goddess”: Stevie Nicks.

I'd saved up enough from my summer job at a stock brokerage house to buy her and Pat twelfth-row floor tickets. The concert would be my mother's first “night out” in a year. She idolized Stevie Nicks, whose smoky voice was like a drug to help Mom escape from her life. My mother deputized herself a high priestess in Stevie's faux Wiccan army; if Stevie had formed a country, I'm sure my mother would have found a way to make us citizens.

Mom went to a beauty salon for her hair and nails, and then spent the afternoon in front of her closet interviewing potential outfits. Pat bought a gold box of long-stemmed roses that my mother was to use to get to the stage. During a darkened encore break, a security guard let my mother approach the barricade. There, for about thirty seconds, my mother became the rock star she had wanted to be her whole life.

She could hear a lumbering roar float up from the front of the stage, rise like a wave to the back of the arena, cresting up in the cheap seats, and then snapping back down to her. Why all this cheering? Were they cheering, she wondered, because she'd made it up to the barricades? Were they cheering for
her
? (Oh,
Mom
.) She didn't see the band's silhouettes slide across the stage. Leaning over the metal barricade, my mother shoved the box of roses onstage just as the stage lights came on. My mother was ten feet from Stevie Nicks.

“I love you, Bella Donna!” my mother screamed. Stevie flip-twisted her hair and smiled, and then cradled the gold box of roses and handed them off to a roadie. She mouthed the words “Thank you.”

My mother had looked into the eyes of her Goddess. And it was good. She recounted that story for a week and a half—and, uncharacteristically, told it the exact same way—wanting to stretch that moment out to experience it every day.

“I'll never forget what you did for me, Brando,” she said. “You really do love me.”

She'd forget, of course. But she remembered that night.

• • •

On New Year's Day, 1991, Pat and my mother invited Sofie and me to Disneyland. Sofie and I had already been on several platonic dates, and this was the day I'd hoped we'd consummate our relationship with a kiss. Having breakfast together on Main Street, U.S.A, in the ­Carnation Café inhaling piped-in candy-cane-scented air, we could have been a bad barroom joke: a large Irish man, his Mexican wife and stepson masquerading as American Indians, and a young ­Vietnamese girl walk into the Happiest Place on Earth and order breakfast. But this time there wasn't a cruel punch line. No stuffed Mickeys were abducted, no messy entanglements with undercover Disney police officers. My mother had a content, tranquilized glow about her. She was feeling safe and secure with Pat, and also taking new diet pills. My mother was genuinely happy, but years of seeing her miserable had made it difficult for me to tell. It was easy to mistake what happiness looked like at Disneyland.

Pat and my mother split off halfway through the day so that Sofie and I could spend time alone together. We rode the Skyway from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland. Sofie was facing me, looking back at Fantasyland and what we were leaving behind, while I looked ahead to Tomorrowland and what was yet to come. It's a perfect metaphor, sure, but it's hard to see us in that moment here, knowing what was about to come: for us, for my family, for me. If I could take that ride again, I'd sit next to Sofie with her hand in mine and my back to the future too.

Sofie sat on my lap in the backseat on the night ride home.

“I think we should be
together
,” I said.

“I do, too,” she said, and we kissed. Over her shoulder, I saw Pat eyeing us in the rearview mirror, grinning. When he dropped her off, he said, “I knew she liked you. Now all you have to do is keep her happy so you don't lose her. That's the hard part. There's a lot of little things and tricks to keeping a woman happy.”

I waited for my mother to chip in some brutal, acerbic comment. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. Pat looked at me in the rearview and mouthed “See?”

• • •

“You didn't get either of us
anything
for Valentine's Day?” my grandmother asked. It didn't take my mother and grandmother long to figure out they wouldn't be getting their customary sweetheart cards.

“You have a
girlfrien
d
?” my mother asked. “You sure you aren't gay? You'd be so much more interesting if you were.”

My parents soon realized how valuable a new person to talk to would be. Drawn to Sofie's sweetness and naïveté, my mother tried being my girlfriend's girlfriend. When Sofie came over, my mother took off her sweaty phone headset, roped Sofie into her bedroom, and stunned the poor girl with her ribald, adolescent vigor. Sofie had never heard the words
skinny
and
bitches
used as a compound phrase before.

“This is what speaks louder to a real woman than any fucking thing,” my mother said, and pulled a rolled-up ball of cash from her cleavage, fanning it. “You must get your ‘men' to pay to be around you.”

My grandmother had noticed how much time Sofie spent with my mother and wanted to see if she, too, could connect with her.

“Did I tell you about my worthless son?” my grandmother asked. “I've left him one dollar in my will. He's never getting this house!”

Or: “Don't you think Pat makes too much food?”

Then: “Why is Brando such a horrible grandson to me?” Like Pat, Sofie found it odd that I'd just now graduated to my own bed, and the wet kisses my grandmother gave her when she walked in the front door made her uncomfortable.

Pat was Sofie's safe zone. He told G-rated versions of Andrew Dice Clay routines and sang goofy songs like “Stray Cat Strut” while he led Sofie and me into the kitchen to watch him make restaurant-sized omelets with fat chunks of fresh “overstock” lobster and blueberry pancakes smeared with peanut butter.

“Sometimes it seems like Pat's the only normal one here,” Sofie said.

• • •

Pat had lived with us for close to two years when he revealed that he was in the running for a senior management position at his chain restaurant's corporate headquarters in Northern California.

“Starting salary is ninety thousand a year,” he said, a staggering amount to our family. His mantra repetition of that sum just made it seem more unreal.

“Think, Brando,” he said, “you could have a
real
bedroom. Big enough for an actual bed. With only three of us, you could have two rooms, one when you come home from college you could use for your studies, like an office. Wouldn't you like that?”

Was it safe to imagine a middle-class life outside of Echo Park provided by a man who disappeared from his own apartment? Or whose new erratic work schedule led him to stash white burlap money sacks with rolls of coins under my mother's bed? (“It was too late to visit the bank,” he said. “I'll deposit them tomorrow.”)

I never stopped to ask because I was dreaming of an escape to college. I'd been identified a gifted student in second grade and took advanced courses throughout junior high and high school but didn't know how realistic my dreams were. I carried my college ­catalogues—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—everywhere, as if they'd disappear like my fathers if I let them out of my sight. I woke myself early on test days, hitching rides to test centers with friends, and stayed up late playing MTV with no sound, teeth chattering while I wrote bad college application essays and struggled to fill in tiny, precise spaces with a moody electric typewriter. I pictured me and a multiethnic group of friends smiling outdoors on a sunny patch of grass,
just like in the glossy pictures
! I saw Pat lugging a heavy steamer trunk—­something I didn't even
own
—up a narrow flight of dormitory stairs on a hectic orientation day, winking at me when a cute girl said hello. It was like the playacting I did with my mother, except the stuffed animals were gone, and I didn't need my mother as a partner to pretend anymore.

I didn't discuss what schools I was applying to, campus tours, or how I'd pay for it all, because no one I knew had ever gone to college; my mother had some community college and beauty school. It was just assumed I'd go
somewhere
.

“That's what smart kids do,” my mother said. “You don't need my bullshit to interfere.”

“We'll mortgage the house if we have to,” my grandmother said.

Later my mother said, “Don't expect her to do that. Figure the money out on your own. If you can't afford it, remember you don't have to go to school. You don't have to go anywhere,” my mother said. “But I know you will.”

I kept the college process away from my mother. I was just ready to get
out
. The problem, of course, was Sofie. She'd become far too important a part of my life, and I couldn't imagine what would happen when—
if
—I went away to school. Pat was the only one who seemed to understand our relationship. Maybe I could talk to him about Sofie. I joined Pat on a rare afternoon spent on the living room couch watching my grandmother's television. It was just the two of us.

“About time I got to do
something
in this house outside of your mother's room,” he said. He didn't seem himself. There was a war movie on cable.

“Those ‘gooks' are really dug in,” he said.

“Hey, Sofie's Vietnamese,” I said. “That's a really racist word to use.”

“I know about your girlfriend,” he said. “I wasn't talking about her.”

“You should apologize.”

“What's got into you? You know that's not what I meant,” Pat said. “You're making something out of nothing, just like your mother.”

There was that slap to my face again: “just like your mother.” Was I just like her? What did that mean, exactly? How many of my fathers had said that to me?

I stormed off to my room.
Just like my mother would have
, I thought. Maybe he was right. I knew he didn't mean to insult Sofie. Why hold an Andrew Dice Clay fan to a higher standard than my mother or grandmother, who spouted racist, sexist, and ethnic stereotypes every time they opened their mouths? What I didn't understand was why he wasn't backing down this time, the way he'd done in every disagreement. His standing his ground was as much a betrayal as was my ­singling him out as a racist. We never cleared the air, just sort of dropped the discussion. He had other things on his mind.

The next week, I was called out of my fifth-period economics class to take a phone call in the guidance counselor's office. There were rumors among my college-bound friends that you were pulled out of class when you were accepted to a really big school. Was this how my new future would begin?

At the office, someone said, “Your father's on the phone.”

“I got the job,” Pat said.

“You did? That was fast. Wow,” I said, unwowed. Maybe this wasn't certain yet. Maybe the job would fall through.

“Ninety thousand a year,” he said. I already knew that. Why keep repeating what I knew?

“I have to go to Northern California to their corporate offices to begin the paperwork. I wanted to call you before I left.” I hadn't talked to him about Sofie. How had I run out of time with Pat already?

“You're going right now?” I asked.

“I want to get a jump on the traffic.”

“Oh,” I said. “Do you want to stop by here so you can say good-bye on your way out of town?”

I heard what sounded like the receiver shuffled around. “There really isn't time, but I'll call you when I get up there. I'll be sending for you and your mother in a week.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Ninety thousand a year,” he said. “I'll see you soon!”

That afternoon, I left school in a daze. I didn't want to leave the house I'd known my whole life. There were so many
good
memories here—weren't there?

At home, I tried calling Sofie but couldn't get a dial tone. The phone wasn't dead; someone had unplugged it.

• • •

Pat fled Los Angeles with some of the restaurant's money and the Bronco—my mother claimed it was ten thousand dollars. The restaurant gave him the option of returning the money—and then getting fired—instead of facing prosecution. There would be no bedroom of my own or an office to do my college studies, just as there was no ninety-thousand-dollar-a-year job in Northern California. It seemed that our Thanksgiving dinner and the many pies and boxes of lobster and steak that filled the freezer weren't all “overstock.” At least some of the bags under my mother's bed were restaurant deposits Pat never made. The Subaru he bought the year before had been repossessed when his check bounced. There wasn't a single emergency wire transfer from his parents, who, when informed of Pat's deceptions, responded with a brusque, officious air of incredulity that we'd been suckered in the first place. (Removing physical traces of Pat was easy; there was nothing to throw away because by then my mother had stopped posing for pictures.)