“Your right hand!” my grandfather repeated.
Those words haunted me for years because my cousins, witnesses to my ineptitude, repeated them whenever I threw a weak ball or accidentally dropped a spoon. “Your right hand!” they'd scream. Then they'd limp their wrists for added humiliation.
My father became disheartened when I held the guitar with the neck pointing to the right, my left fingers anxious to strum.
“You're holding it the wrong way,” he said, correcting the direction of the strings immediately by flipping the neck to the left. “Like this.”
The weight felt bulky against my left shoulder. My right hand, that bumbling hand that couldn't kill flies, was now burdened with the responsibility of rhythm. My fingertips scratched; they didn't graze the strings. I poked, I didn't press down. The instrument wailed and screeched in my arms like a wounded cat. In contrast, my brother cradled the guitar with a gentleness that produced delicate sounds. Each of his beginner's notes soared in harmonious flight. Our mother listened patiently from the kitchen. In the back of my mind I secretly wanted to stand next to her behind the stove, frying those delicious homemade donuts on the skillet. Her nails glistened with a coating of butter, grease, and sugar. When she took her thumb into her mouth to lick it, my mouth watered. Later that night I too sucked my fingers after handling a donut, but it didn't taste quite as clean and sweet with that lingering metallic flavor of guitar strings.
After a few weeknights of tolerating my wooden touch, my father gave up, but with the assurance that once we got a guitar for left-handers, I could enroll once again in his solo teacher music school. At the look of disappointment in my eyes he quickly added, “But why don't you learn the songs. That way you can accompany your brother's playing.”
That's when we came across a second setback.
I was never a bad singer. In fact I was quite good. In school I had joined the chorus, though my mother had asked me not to reveal this to my father. When we still lived in Michoacán, my mother's family had even considered sending me to audition for Los Niños Cantores de Morelia, just a few towns away. Morelia housed the oldest conservatory in the Americas, and Los Niños Cantores was México's answer to the Vienna Boys Choir. But that pipe dream vanished without an explanation. I deduced—a guess that was later confirmed by my mother's insistence that I keep the school chorus a secret—that my father had a low opinion of boys who sang not like men, but like women.
At six, my high-pitched voice made me a budding contralto. However, a girlish voice was much more endearing on a six-year-old than on an eleven-year-old. According to my cousins I sounded like a maricón, a sissy. I could only imagine what my father thought when I hit those high, shrilly notes.
My brother once went around the house imitating a choir of singing nuns we saw on television. In falsetto he kept crooning, “Dominique-nique-nique” until my father heard him. My father raised his hand and threatened to strike if my brother didn't shut up. My brother jumped and cried out, very much puzzled, “What? What did I do?” No answer.
I knew why, and it shamed me to think I embarrassed my father with that feminine voice. No matter how much I tightened my throat the pitch didn't get lower. Two years younger, my brother's voice was already thick and heavy. The question popped into my head for the umpteenth time: What if I was meant to be a girl? How many afternoons on the way back from school had I been reminded of that possibility when I stumbled across a dandelion puff? I'd pick it up, shut my eyes, blow on it to scatter the tiny parachutes, and then I'd wish I were a carefree, light-hearted, simple girl. Like one of my female cousins, who at nine, had already mapped out a life: “I'm going to get married, have two sons, and be that lady who blows the recess whistle at school.”
I wanted to be a girl because I wanted to do girl things: comb my long hair, sit on the back of the pickup truck and whisper secrets, and wash dishes and stick my tongue out at the boys when I caught glimpses of them playing ball through the window over the sink. All the boy activities just seemed like too much work.
To relieve my father of his teaching duty to his left-handed, high-pitched son, I feigned loss of interest in both the guitar and the songs, and instead I watched reruns of Charlie's Angels at low volume. In the background I heard my father coaching my brother, “Do, do-re-mi, do-re-mi-fa...” as they picked at the strings together.
I still had, however, my school chorus, where my high notes and dedication were better appreciated. I had even secured a spot on the first row for the upcoming Spring Recital, which only meant I had all the songs memorized. Everyone from the second row and back kept the chorus sheets hidden from view behind the person in front. Three afternoons out of the week I was excused from P.E. to attend rehearsals. I was the only boy in the fifth grade willing to make that sacrifice, so I became the only boy left in the chorus.
At about this time my mother fell ill from a recurring heart condition and had to be hospitalized. I held back the tears because my father did, and so did my brother. At night her absence was painfully obvious because none of us came out of the shower smelling like scented talc or body lotion. It was as if the apartment had suddenly gone dull and sterile. My father tried to distract us with card tricks and trips to the drive-in. I got to ride in the front. It felt odd. My mother's seat in the car was too big for me. Yet it also thrilled me. I had been promoted somehow to an adult place, a woman's place.
Coming home from school to an empty apartment allowed me to explore my mother's private things: her bras, her panties, and her makeup kit. I absorbed the smells and textures, releasing the memory of my mother back into the air. But after a while the strength of those smells took over, seizing my senses in a way not even music could. I became mesmerized by the erotic power of it. I wanted to own that power. I imagined the scent wafting over to the school bully, thawing his hard face into a pillow of lovesickness.
Each afternoon while my brother lost himself among the neighborhood streets on his dirt bike, I practiced dabbing rouge on my cheeks in slow and delicate circles just as I had seen my mother apply it to her own soft skin. I pushed her roll-on deodorant against my chest, spotting my T-shirt with strong traces of perfume. I powdered my bare underarms and neck. I would have worn the bra, but I couldn't figure it out, so I simply flung it across the room a few times, quickly rushing over to press my nose into the cups. The panties were too big so I stuck my hand through one of the leg openings and stretched the material over my shoulder. The panties would slip down and I'd pretend my bare shoulder had become exposed. “So sexy,” I'd declare.
This daily after-school routine reached yet another peak when I dared to open the nail polish—red as only my mother could wear on a Sunday morning. We weren't a church-going family, so my mother's primping was in preparation for our weekly visit to a fast-food restaurant or to the grocery market.
I twisted the cap off the nail polish, took in the sharp odor, and watched the thick liquid slide down to the tip of the brush, flattening into a drop of blood. I considered my short, stubby nails and wondered about my mother's method: Stroke, shake, blow. Stroke, shake, blow. I imitated her strategy, recognizing that the unevenness of the paint job could only be worked out with practice. I managed to apply one complete coat by the time my father came home unexpectedly. In our little home on top of the garage, opening the front door was like removing every wall at once—there was no place to hide.
There I was, his firstborn, his namesake, experimenting with fingernail polish. I froze up, hoping I'd become invisible. I tried to trigger a seizure but my brain went numb. There was nothing I could do to distract his attention away from the shabby paint job and the spilled polish. The panties crawled down my arm and caught at the elbow. My face burned with fear. All I saw were my father's eyes growing in size and intensity as he took in the whole living room without blinking. Would collapsing at his feet begging for mercy help? It was worth a try.
But to my surprise he suddenly looked away without uttering a word and headed str
aight to the bathroom. He spent enough time in there for me to clean myself up, though it seemed I had wiped and hidden every last shred of evidence within seconds of his closing the bathroom door. There was an uncomfortable gap of time left over for me to sit on the couch and do nothing but contemplate the bodily harm that would be inflicted on me. I even thought of injuring myself first to diffuse my father's fury and to spare myself the anxiety of the wait for punishment. The smell of nail polish remover lingered in the air. I picked at the cotton hairs caught on my chewed nails. Then, without giving it much thought, I unhooked the guitar and pressed it tightly against me like a shield. Sliding my hand across the smooth surface consoled me. Biting into the triangular plastic pick kept my teeth from chattering. My jagged nail digging into the ridges of the strings produced the only sound in that dead silence.
When my father finally exited from the bathroom, it was as if he had forgotten what he had just seen. The bathroom door slid open, my breath stopped, and instead of lunging straight into me like the bull to the matador, my father quietly stepped into the kitchen and began to cook our dinner. I resisted the urge to follow him with my eyes. Instead I strummed absent-mindedly on the guitar as I concentrated on the clattering of pots and pans. With the frying of the oil and garlic, I pretended that it was my mother behind the stove, and that soon she'd ask me to stop playing with that guitar and search for the good tomatoes in the fridge.
I replayed the entire scenario in my head repeatedly, imagining a different outcome if it had been my mother who had opened the front door.
“Tonto,” she would have said, perhaps amused. “Put that away before your father sees you.”
She might have even removed the nail polish herself, wiping off the redness with a firm but delicate hold on my hands.
My mother corrected my habits and mannerisms repeatedly. She kept warning me about that limp-wrist swat on the shoulder I sometimes gave my brother when he was pestering me; she had asked me not to imitate the school drill team exercises in the living room; she told me to stop putting my fists on my hips when I was lost in thought; and she absolutely refused to let me play with dolls.
Besides my brother's Star Wars action figures I never actually kept dolls in the house, but I had this little game in which I tied a knot at one corner of a bandanna. The knot became the head, the small piece of cloth at the top was like a gush of hair and the larger piece of cloth under the knot was like a dress. I created two, sometimes three of these rag dolls and made up little scenarios for them on the couch, which became my stage.
At first my mother didn't seem to care if I acted out these fantasies. My game kept me out of her way as she cooked dinner in the kitchen. I enjoyed staying home in the evenings instead of joining my rambunctious brother in the streets. In fact for the longest time I didn't think anyone had noticed my nightly entertainment until that evening my brother and I got into an argument over the television. I can't recall how it started, but it ended when, as a strategy to shut me up, my brother exposed me to my father.
“He's so stupid,” my brother said. My father was drinking a beer at the kitchen table while my mother cooked. “Look at this stupid game he plays.” My brother pulled out a bandanna and performed the knot trick. He showed it to my father. “Dolls!” he exclaimed.
A lump in my throat prevented me from quickly defending myself. I was completely humiliated. All I could squeeze out of my throat was: “They aren't dolls. They're snakes.”
My brother mocked my explanation. “Snakes?” he said. “Snakes don't go shopping on the couch.”
“That's enough, you,” my mother said. She lifted the greasy metal hand of the spatula.
“But it's true,” my brother persisted. “He makes them talk and say stupid sissy things to each other.”
“Stop it, I said.” My mother took one step forward. The threat worked and my brother said no more.
Meanwhile, my father looked away as if he had not heard a thing, and that made me feel even worse—I had shamed him. My mother turned toward the stove and looked at me through the corner of her eye. I stood frozen with guilt.
That night while I pretended to sleep in the dark, my mother crouched down to whisper in my ear that I was not to play that game again. And I never did.
I learned quickly that my mother's actions were not necessarily meant to protect me, but to protect my father. My father didn't beat me for being a sissy, but I knew it bothered him greatly, so it became my mother's responsibility to censor and punish me. At her kindest my mother pinched me from behind, like the time I started to comb my cousin's hair on the steps while my father was parking the car. Never mind that my cousin had asked me to do her the favor. My mother grabbed the brush away from me, pushed me back, and took over nervously. My mother's reaction didn't make much sense to me at that moment.
For extreme offenses in my father's presence I got the belt. One occasion I remember quite clearly was when I walked out of the shower with a towel wrapped turban-style on my head. I had no idea I was doing anything wrong because I had seen my mother do this every night. I liked the way a few damp strands of hair stuck to the skin of her nape and forehead. I tried to imitate this look right down to the wet body talc and traces of roll-on deodorant at the wrinkles of her bare armpits. My mother would be impressed, I thought, and I kept right on thinking that as I stepped out of the bathroom. My waltz had been carefully choreographed from the bathroom to the living room so that everyone in the house got to see me. But no sooner had I made my way to the kitchen than my mother yanked the large white towel off my head, sending me stumbling to the side. My father caught the second part of this awkward dance from the living room couch. With one swift step out and back into the kitchen my mother held in her hand my father's belt and gave it four solid swings. The leather coming into contact with my fresh-out-of-the-shower skin made a clean snapping sound I couldn't quite connect to the hot stinging on my arms and legs.
I didn't have to get whipped too many times before I realized that being a sissy-boy had no place in our home. And yet I could not stop myself. I had no control over my girlish behavior. It came so naturally. I had crushes on boys, I hung out with my female cousins, and my best friend in school was an even bigger sissy than I was. I tried only once to approach the subject about our girlie selves but I didn't get the response I wanted.
“What do you mean?” Carlos asked me. Everyone called him Carla and he reveled in that. We were swaying on the swings in the playground after school. Since we walked home we didn't leave until we waved good-bye to the last school bus as it hit the road, the boys in the back of the bus yelling out “Adiós, jotos!”
“Well, you know,” I said. “We don't like sports and our friends in school are all girls.”
“And what's wrong with that? I'd rather hang out with girls than with those nasty boys. I hate boys. Don't you?” He leaned back and let his head drop. His hair was long and curly. My parents would never let my hair grow that long.
“Well, what does your family think about that?” I asked.
He leaned forward and planted his feet on the ground to stop swaying. “My family loves me,” he said with conviction. “They don't care how I am.”
I confirmed the truth to this statement when I attended his twelfth birthday party later that year. There was Carlos in all his glory with a red construction paper crown on his head that no matter how you looked at it resembled a tiara. Carlos and his mother hugged frequently and giggled like girls. The house was decorated with frilly streamers and balloons that were dipped in glitter. Carlos shrieked each time someone new showed up at the door and shrieked again when he accepted each gift. But what really shocked me was his father's indifference to the whole spectacle. A big man with a heavy growth of beard on his face, Carlos's father simply stepped in and out of the house unfazed. He didn't even flinch when Carlos threw his skinny arms around his neck and shrilled with excitement. Even that was a bit much for me. I blushed on his father's behalf and resolved at that mo
ment that I would stop being Carlos's friend. How dare he get away with all of this? How dare his family love him for it? I was especially angry at his mother, who seemed to encourage her son's outbursts by running to him and working him up about any little thing.
“The cake, Carlos, the cake!” she would say one minute, flapping her arms in the air, and “The games, Carlos, the games!” the next. And every time Carlos let out a high-pitched cheer that annoyed me to the point of disgust.
Later that evening my father came to pick me up from the party. Carlos had tried to convince me to stay for the sleepover but I had had enough of him, and the idea of watching him play Carla well into the night did not appeal to me. When my father's car pulled into the driveway I noticed my mother's absence right away so I quickly asked, “Mami?” My father's silence could only mean one thing: that my mother was sick again.
My mother was getting sick more frequently. Ever since a rheumatic fever at the age of seventeen, my mother had been diagnosed with a weak heart and had been susceptible to bouts of cold sweats and body aches. I would come to associate my mother with hospital sheets, plastic bedpans, and white trays of soft foods that glowed with clear colors under the bright glare of the fluorescent lights. It was ironic how my mother's condition made me invisible. The focus shifted from my behavior to her deteriorating health. But even then I didn't have the energy to be girlish or silly because I had entered a deep state of depression. My mother was everything to me. I was everything to her. My brother acted like my father; I acted like my mother. My brother liked going hunting with my father; I enjoyed watching my mother when she cooked or put on her makeup or when she picked out a matching purse for her special occasion outfits. My brother was my father's boy; I was my mother's. I eventually came to think of myself as my mother's companion. In the absence of my father and brother, indeed the masculine element of the household, my mother and I got along fine. We exchanged fotonovelas (the Mexican picture books of soap operas with only snippets of dialogue) because she understood my love of reading and my interest in keeping myself literate in Spanish. I enjoyed keeping her company in her ESL classes. And though she could barely write, I loved her signature, a lower case script from beginning to end, and with so many as—Avelina Alcalá—the name was pure music.
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 10
