Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  During that garage meeting, James also encouraged my dad to continue to postpone hip surgery if that was what he chose. When my father justified his inaction with “Your brother agreed,” there was no mistaking the bitterness in my sister’s and my responses. James had never endured the smell of urine on my father’s pants or the rank odor heat-baked into the broken upholstery of the driver’s seat of his car. My brother had no way of knowing my father’s real condition because he was never around long enough to observe that his father’s deteriorated hips couldn’t get him to the bathroom fast enough nor allow him to bend sufficiently to wipe well once he got there. He didn’t see him take a full five minutes to roll out of the driver’s seat of the car nor recognize his complete inability to move quickly enough to come to my mother’s aid.

  In retrospect, the failed attempt at home care for my mother probably went the way it was supposed to. My mother’s fierce opposition and the stalemate of fear and resentment that was the fabric of my parents’ marriage may not have allowed for any other course of action. In this sense, my brother was blameless, constructing his advice on a fantasy marriage where the husband is not afraid of becoming an orphan and can monitor his wife’s well-being with the confidence of an endowed knowing. Perhaps my brother needed his illusions about his father, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

  My brother’s authority, as the eldest and a male, went unchallenged within our family. In this respect, James remained inextricably Mexican; for it was my mother who had crafted my brother into the role of patriarch, the same role her elder brother and father had occupied in her own life. His long absences notwithstanding, my brother’s word was law. In all other aspects of our cultura, James was, as he once described it, “just passing through.”

  LIKE THE HERON

  We knew we had been functioning in the spirit of “last times” for a few years. Although the pretext was a family birthday, my mother’s last trip to my home in Oakland signaled in many ways her final experience within the grander world outside of her home.

  In their own house, my parents continued to cope in the best way possible, managing to construct a semblance of a life by simply responding to the requirements of aging: three meals a day, doctor’s visits, and a decent night’s sleep. My mom did her best to stay busy, clothed, and out of the way of the stove’s flame. La familia came to visit, but less and less as my mother’s forgetfulness meant hospitality was reduced to shorter and shorter present-tense sentences, sudden bouts of irritability, and a cup of reheated coffee. It seemed that our extended familia was shrinking in proportion to my mother’s brain, as the disquiet in her heart grew beyond the possibility of remedy or respite.

  * * *

  My parents arrived at the Oakland airport peaceably enough in the late afternoon, under the watchful eye of my sister. We all returned back to my house to prepare the cena, allowing my mother a few small tasks that occupied her, drying a few dishes, slicing celery, etc. But after dinner ended, my mother grew anxious. She was tired and ready to go home. We reminded her that she was in Oakland and that they had flown in a plane to get here. She became irate. She had told my father not to give “that man” their car. I looked over to my sister confused. “She means the valet parking at the airport.”

  I smiled as I watched my mother cross to the kitchen, where Celia was washing pots. My mother approached her with her formal face, the one she used for people not related by blood. She appealed to Celia’s good sense: “I am a very important businesswoman,” she entreated her. “I’ve got a lot to take care of at home.” Celia was compassionate, but unyielding. “Entiendo, señora, you can go home tomorrow,” she said. My mother exited the kitchen, her fury building.

  We, her family, watched in stunned silence as she moved about the house, desperately trying to figure a way out. The split-level hillside house confused her. She became increasingly disoriented, increasingly volatile. I stood up from the table, as all heads turned toward me. “I’ll talk to her,” I say. My sister’s eyes locked with mine. This was how our tag team worked. She, the ardent crusader for my mother’s health care; I, the caretaker of the heart.

  My mother disappeared down the hallway. I followed, finding her at the foot of a half set of stairs leading to my office. I knew she had no idea where she was. “Mom,” I try. She spins around and her look chills me. I am in her way, that’s all she knows, an obstacle to the home, the bed, the familiarity, which even the face of her youngest daughter cannot provide. I am terrified; there is no other word for it. I outweigh my mother by at least forty pounds, but her rage completely immobilizes me. My mind races for a solution, a strategy. How do I stop her? Suddenly it comes to me, as a seduction of sorts. I feel myself literally growing into the compassionate husband, the devoted eldest son, all the missing men in her life—the ones I know she will submit to, if only to be relieved once and for all of the burden of her own control. I feel myself more man than ever before.

  I hear my voice deepen. “You’ve got to stay, Mamá.” It has dropped to a register I intuitively feel she might respond to.

  “I’d rather take poison than stay,” she spits back at me.

  So it is war. I try again: “Well, I’m not giving you poison and you are staying.”

  Then, nada. No comeback. This is the opening. I go to her, put my arms around her, no longer man but lesbian daughter. Her body remains stiff but does not resist. I escort her downstairs and into Celia’s and my bedroom. I remove her clothes and put on her pajamas, all the while speaking to her those small cariños I learned from her own mouth, the ones she showered me with as a child. I put her into bed and draw the clean sheets and comforter up around her neck. I kiss her forehead and lay her down to sleep. And she does sleep peacefully throughout the night.

  In the morning, she is in good humor. Upon awakening, I had assumed we would put my parents on a plane that morning, but by 8 a.m., my mother’s distress from the previous night is long forgotten. Hours later, I find myself walking with Elvira on a short flat trail surrounded by the sand dunes of Point Reyes Seashore, an hour’s drive north of Oakland. My father, unable to walk any distance, sits with his walker at the edge of the parking lot, taking in the view of sand dune and open blue sky. My sister has hiked with Rafa down to the seashore, their pant legs rolled up and ready for the frigid September waters.

  En route to a lagoon nestled among the dunes, Elvira’s step at eighty-eight is as steady as a sixty-year-old’s. I wrestle with the contradiction that my father, his mind intact, is unable to accompany us on this walk due to stubbornness and fear of hip surgery, while my mother’s withering mind is housed in a body of enduring agility. I am grateful for this moment alone with her, as though last night’s encounter in the hallway had earned us this intimacy.

  A heron tips into the shallow waters.

  “Mira, Mamá,” I say.

  She seems to take it all in—the long-necked elegance of the shorebird, the quiet green rippling of the lagoon, the limitless generosity of blue above us, the faded outline of the moon that floats inside it. The leather of my mother’s palm clutches my hand—always the measure of her love. Like the heron, I drink in this liquid knowing—the permeability of the moment. Elvira had worked so damn hard for us and she was slipping away …

  And then, without warning, la mujer que recuerdas como tu mamá returns to you con todo su ánimo. And you begin to forget the years of aggravated grief caused by the turmoil of her illness and you tell yourself, She has come back to stay. You begin to doubt the truth. You think it was only the wrong combination of medications; it was only that she drank too much wine; it was only that she was so tired; it was only the chronic pain from her arthritis; it was only my missing brother, my distracted father, my too-earnest sister …

  But it was only a matter of time until the harsh fact of my mother’s departure became undeniable.

  THE MOTHER OF THE BRIDE

  “I always knew you didn’t love him,” my mother had announced to my sister when aft
er twenty years and four children, JoAnn decided to divorce her first husband. Elvira applauded JoAnn’s decision in the hopes that true love awaited. Ten years later, JoAnn wanted to convince her mother that love had in fact arrived.

  Weren’t the tall, kindly Anglo husband, the handsome adult sons who “gave her away,” the tasteful cream-colored wedding dress, and the well-shaped middle-aged body that fit into it, meant as the ultimate romantic farewell for my mother? There was a certain logic to JoAnn’s resolve in that she had fashioned many of her life choices in the hope of Elvira’s favor. The fact that my mother’s state of mind had recently become less and less predictable did not dissuade my sister. It only made the execution of the wedding plans more urgent, more driven.

  * * *

  “You over there!” the foreman shouted across the crowd of expectant faces. The women pressed up against the gates of the Los Angeles walnut factory. It was 1939 and an assembly-line job was hard to come by in those times. Elvira had returned from Tijuana, jobless, with a widowed mother and siblings to support.

  “He spotted me out of all the women.”

  My mother had told us the story many times.

  “Me?” she asked.

  Dressed in what remained of her Tijuana Salón de Oro attire, she could feel the bitter envy of the women around her.

  “Yeah, you.”

  And the MexicanAmerican foreman offered her the job on the spot.

  Romance for Elvira resided mostly in the story. She was a woman who knew not to appear desperate even in desperate times; who knew how to place a stylish hat on her head at such an angle that people spotted her in a crowd and offered her refuge. This is what distinguished a person: that knife-edge balance between humble circumstance and the pride of survival. “No matter how poor we were, we always had a clean tablecloth to sit down to.”

  * * *

  Ironically, my sister’s wedding did result in being about Elvira. True to form, my mother stole the show when at the reception she ended up knocked out on the dance floor. The groom had spun la delgadita Elvira around for a turn, let her hand slip from his, and she went flying. She hit her neatly coiffured head on the edge of the Mexican-tiled bar, and was down for the count.

  Celia and I had been out on the balcony overlooking the man-made lake, a moon just beginning to form on the surface of the water. My eldest niece rushes out to find us. “Grandma’s fallen!” We quickly wend our way through the crowd and I spy my mother, two bird legs sticking out of the circle of people hovering over her, her dancing shoes pointing straight up at perfect right angles. The Wicked Witch of the West, I can’t help but think. The house of age and pure stubbornness has finally fallen on top of her. Or maybe it was my sister’s stubbornness that came crashing down: her insistence on grabbing this one last glimpse of recognition from my ailing mother.

  I go to my mother, kneel at her side. My niece, Nancy, is bent over her, giving her CPR, her recent stint in the Army having trained her for such emergencies. “Is she breathing?” I ask. She appears to be, but I grow frightened as I see my mother’s eyes roll white into her head.

  I think, No. She can’t die at my sister’s wedding. It’d be too bitter, too cruel. “Mamá, quédate con nosotros,” I plead. “Te necesitamos, Mamá.” And I watch as my voice summons her back. My brother comes and kneels at her other side.

  “Mamá,” I say. “Mira, aquí ’stá mi hermano, Mamá. Tu hijo.”

  She mumbles to him in Spanish.

  “She shouldn’t be drinking,” my brother pronounces.

  I turn to him. “That’s not important now. Your mother is talking to you.” I hold myself back from saying more.

  “But I don’t know what she’s saying,” he replies, meaning the Spanish.

  “Just talk to her, James. She needs to hear your voice.”

  Within minutes the ambulance comes and drives my mother and me away in it, leaving the guests to somberly eat their wedding cake with the bride and groom. Soon after, my father and James meet me in the hospital waiting room, while my mother undergoes a series of brain scans and blood tests.

  Sitting there, I find myself impatient with the perfunctory exchange of conversation among the three of us. This was not just a random accident. My mother was not well. She needed help. She needed home care and a proper distribution of medicine and companionship other than my father hiding out in his office. Some part of me remained incensed by the arrogance of my brother’s counsel, which had led to the failed attempt at getting a home attendant for my mother.

  Challenging my brother had always resulted in my humiliation … and failure. And my father never spoke up to my brother in his wife’s defense. For decades, my sister and I had tried to intervene on our mother’s behalf through letters, then emails, imploring our brother to visit her or at least to regularly call. Such efforts had only left my sister and me feeling ashamed, as if we had somehow misbehaved by confronting him.

  “Protect your sisters” had been my mother’s refrain to her son as JoAnn and I grew into womanhood. She didn’t realize, however, that when she entreated James’s brotherly protection she was speaking to the American side of the MexicanAmerican. James was trained to be a man of Mexican values in a gringo world where the values do not always translate. This was the missing piece to the cultural puzzle that my mother could never quite locate.

  The only “protection” I remember from my brother was the heavy weight of his forearm over my shoulder when he required me to behave in a social situation. His arm held me in place.

  * * *

  He has me in a chokehold as I cross the threshold of his newlywed home.

  “You feel okay?” His question directs the answer.

  “Yeah.” I pull away.

  I hate him at that moment. Hate the disgrace of it. Hate that he felt he had to ask his wife’s permission for me, the newly out lesbian, to be allowed in their home for a family dinner.

  “I have to see how she feels about it,” he had said to me during the one real conversation we ever had about my lesbianism.

  It is 1977. We walk along the Berkeley Pier. The night bay waters surround us, an obsidian black.

  “That’s all right,” I respond, really meaning to say, It’s you I want, not her. But he had already betrayed me.

  * * *

  That day in the hospital waiting room, the best I can muster in my mother’s defense is: “Now do you believe us?”

  He glares back at me.

  “This is not the time or place,” my father quickly inserts for his own protection. He is nervous, complicit in the cover-up. I wonder when and where that time and place will ever occur.

  In my brother’s presence, I am no more than a girl.

  The next morning, as JoAnn sets off for her honeymoon, my mother will enjoy a honeymoon of her own: a full weekend of hospital bed rest with my brother holding her hand at her bedside. Celia had been the one to make me ask him. “It’s your sister’s time to think of herself. And you have your own family to care for,” she reminded me. (James had come to the wedding alone.) “Ask him to stay.”

  Remarkably, he agrees.

  By late morning, my mother, sweetly drugged, falls into a dreamless sleep in her hospital bed, while my brother, father, and I meet for breakfast in a nearby Denny’s. Seated at the table with the men of my family, my eyes measure my brother’s and my indeterminate color against the mottled ivory of our father. Without my mother’s presence, James and I blend generically white.

  I would’ve liked to have told a “browner” history of my relationship with my brother where he hadn’t believed he had to choose a life apart. From James’s vantage point, as a well-heeled businessman with a family of Anglo-surnamed children, he may indeed have succeeded in erasing his Mexican past. For that’s all, I feared, Mexicanism really meant to him: a past, embodied by the intractable will, old worldviews, and withering bones of his female elders. Simply put, there was no future in it.

  From a Mexican point of view, however, fami
ly can never be disowned like property, cousins are not distant or once, twice, or three times removed. And “compadre” is as close to hermano as you can get.

  * * *

  December 1996.

  Elvira spots her youngest brother, Eddie, in his usual rumpled khakis and smeared eyeglasses, slowly walking toward her down the blacktop driveway. The family has just learned of their brother Bobby’s passing. My father stands at a distance and swallows the loss of his compadre, a thick lump in his throat. Elvira drops the garden hose, runs to meet Eddie, and falling into his arms, she just cries and cries and cries. I would’ve liked that in a brother.

  * * *

  Instead, James and I speak the language of logistics. Pickup and delivery schedules; my mother’s projected discharge from the hospital. James confesses his concern, having witnessed his mother getting up from her hospital bed that morning and heading to the bathroom to “get ready for church.”

  “She thought she was home,” he says, fearing her amnesia was the result of the head injury.

  “She’s been disoriented like that for some time now,” I say. “It’s normal,” which portends something far worse.

  The conversation falls silent.

  In this town of fake lagoons and shopping malls, I glance across the Formica table at my closest living male relations. And there is no one there to assure me against the prospect of my oblivion: my life without a Mexican mother.

  “A VERY NICE MAN”

  On Indigenous People’s Day, my Mexican mother announced to my sister that the gringo who had occupied the other side of her bed for the last fifty-five years was not her husband. She refused to sleep with him again. She did not know who he was, she confessed, but she knew that she wasn’t “his woman,” and he had no business in her bed.