by David Leite
The dish started with my father. Or at least it did back then, when Mount Hope Bay was bracingly clean and fresh. We’d wade in knee-deep water in Tiverton, Rhode Island—him in a madras bathing suit, me in cut-off jeans. My father was milky white except for his arms, neck, and face. If you squinted, it looked like he was wearing a T-shirt with a smudge of dirt where a few chest hairs clustered. (He, like me, wasn’t a particularly good specimen of Portuguese hirsuteness.) He could divine where quahogs were nestled just by ambling along. He’d stop suddenly and put his arm out, to prevent me from walking over the clams, as if that could somehow make them scatter in the sand. Then, using his nearly opposable big toe like a trowel, he’d pivot his leg deeper and deeper into the sand, tongue twisting in unison, until his face blossomed with a smile. If he got it just right, he could grab the clam in his toes and lift it right out of the water, hopping on the other leg as he offered it to me.
Even when we were just walking along the beach in Swansea, my mother tucked low back in the car, wearing her clip-on sunglasses and a kerchief—she was never a fan of the sun or the water—he’d suddenly stop and twist his leg while I squirmed and whispered, “Stop it!”
“Take it!” he’d say, his toes clutching a huge quahog.
“Daddy!” No one else’s father was hunting their own food.
“It’s not going to bite.”
Broiling with embarrassment, I’d snatch it and stick it in my bucket.
To make the dish, my mother would leave Portuguese bread to get stale on the counter for a few days, then break it up and soak the pieces in the liquor spilled from a big pot of steamed quahogs. She’d chop the clam meat and links of chouriço, add them to the softened bread along with my father’s fermented pepper paste, tomato paste, and her secret blend of seasonings, and beat the mixture until it was perfectly smooth and as red as desert clay, with bits of clams and sausage studding it. The shells that had yawned open while steaming were carefully washed and dried overnight. She would then feed giant spoonfuls of the stuffing into the shells—so much that they couldn’t close, leaving an inch gap of exposed stuffing—and wrap them with twine. She’d line up the clams in identical rows in the blue broiler pan with the white speckles, their openings facing up, so that they crusted over in the oven.
When you unraveled one and snapped off one half of the shell, the stuffing was steaming hot and amazingly moist. It tasted of the sea, briny, with just a hint of the sweetness from the chewy clams. The sausage and pepper paste gave it heat and heft. Whenever she presented a platter of them to my father and me, or to guests—and that’s what she’d do: present them, with a flourish and the knowledge that she was about to delight us immeasurably—she’d stand back, worrying a dishrag or shredding a paper napkin, waiting for the sighs of pleasure that always followed. “You like them?” she’d ask, relieved, every time, even though they’d never been anything less than spectacular.
When I was full, I clicked off the TV and I put my plate of Tuna Helper on the floor for the dogs to lick clean, then dumped the skillet in the sink. Shit. Written on the banana at my place at the snack bar:
Don’t forget to shovel the driveway!
Shit, shit, shit.
Bundled in my blue parka with the matted fake fur ringing the hood, I bent my head low against the whip of the wind and fought the relentless snow. My breath formed tiny spikes of ice on the fur collar, and I chewed on them. As I made my way toward the street, rectangles of wet snow thudding where I tossed them, I twisted my head inside my hood to the left, then right; I was the only person out in the storm. No cars, not even kids playing. Sound was dead, killed by the snow. The sudden sense of isolation, of being so terribly disconnected, unconnected, was like a punch to my windpipe. I closed my eyes against it. My guts started dropping. You’ve been here before—I took a deep breath—it will stop. More deep breaths. But without the distraction of cooking and TV and Elton the Bitch, I was helpless against it. The dread, the blackness rushed in, as if filling a vacuum. At least the morning was good. I should be grateful for that. I leaned against the shovel and sobbed. Snot ringed my nostrils and froze there. I looked up and screamed: “Enough! No more, please. No more.” And just like every other time I had pleaded with God to make it stop, no relief came. If I wanted help, I had to get it myself. I could feel veneta hurtling up from the cradle of my pelvis, and I flung the shovel into the snow, where it disappeared, and walked into the house, tracking slush and mud.
In front of the phone—the beige flat-panel model with the cord that retracted into the wall—I hesitated. I knew that once I did this, I could never take it back, never reverse it. From this point on, my parents would forever see me differently. I grabbed the phone and dialed.
“Fernandes Supermarket, Ellie speaking. How can I help you?” my mother chirped in the phone. I could see her, in her pink smock, phone cradled against her shoulder, organizing coupons, or waving goodbye to a customer.
“If you don’t let me see a psychiatrist, I’ll kill myself.”
She was quiet. No one we knew saw a psychiatrist. Even though it was the early seventies, and housewives were knocking back Valium with their morning coffee while they pulled on Virginia Slims, not one friend of hers partook, or at least admitted to partaking, in modern psychiatry. It simply wasn’t done. A rumor rumbled on the periphery of family gatherings that my Aunt Jessie, Uncle Joe’s wife, had a sister who was crazy, but my mother made it clear she wasn’t related to us, and that it was from Jessie’s side of the family that my cousin Kevin inherited his paranoid schizophrenia. I was beginning to wonder.
I knew my mother was silent because of the shame she thought it would bring onto the family. She saw how heads lowered and voices dialed down to whispers when discussing Jessie’s sister. Shame prickled our family. It hamstrung our behaviors, our career choices, even our dress. My mother stewed when in fourth and fifth grade I began wearing strings of sunflower-seed love beads. Things weren’t much better when I moved on to a metal peace sign the size of a saucer in sixth grade.
“Why do you have to wear that getup?” she asked, shaking her head.
“Because it’s cool.”
I always found it odd, because the Costa side of my family was crowded with outsize personalities, my mother included, as if we were consciously trying to prove to the world: We don’t give a rat’s ass what you think! But in the end, all of us kids were literally, or later, when we were too big, figuratively yanked back by our wrists, our parents hissing, “What will people think?” But I had made it impossible for her to balk this time. The threat of suicide wasn’t a bluff she was willing to call. She loved me too much to let that happen. Plus, the shame that she’d heap upon herself if her only child killed himself would be too much to bear. Through those past two years, I had learned to play my hand well.
“We’ll talk about this tonight when your father gets home.” And then she hung up.
With a sweep of her arm, an officious-looking woman ushered my father and me into a large waiting room in Emma Pendleton Bradley Hospital, in East Providence. It looked like the elegant living room in a mansion. My father lowered himself into an overstuffed couch and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and massaged his forehead.
“Daddy, what’s the matter?”
He looked up. “Oh, nothing, Son,” he said in a too-cheerful voice. I felt obligated to lift his worry. I leaned against the fireplace, crossed my right leg in front of my left, and planted the toe of my shoe in the carpet.
“Hey, look. I’m Jay Gatsby.” He furrowed his brow and cocked his head, like he was trying to recall the name of a friend from the Old Country.
“Gatsby. Jay Gatsby,” I repeated, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “From The Great Gatsby?” Just a couple of years before, all three of us had driven down to Newport, because they were filming the movie with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow there. I’d read the book and begged them to let me audition to be an extra, but they’d refused.
&nb
sp; My father shook his head, confused, and went back to studying the carpet between his feet.
A young woman came into the room and called my name. My father jumped up and extended his hand as he walked to her. I was relieved it was a woman. I didn’t want to talk to a man about what I was feeling.
“Bye, Dad,” I said, leaving the room. I felt thrilled, delirious. I was finally in the hands of professionals, professionals that my parents had picked out, who would talk to me and find out what was wrong and make it right.
Before I could begin seeing a psychiatrist, the woman said, I had to take some tests. The first was simple, she promised. All I had to do was look at inkblots and tell her what I saw. She explained that it would help her understand me better. As she held up each image, I pointed out killer bees, described a giant with huge feet trying to step on me, traced the outline of two angry pink jackals with my fingers. I didn’t see how looking at these moronic images would in any way help, but she kept on nodding and urging me to find more.
“Anything else?” she asked sweetly after each picture. I tried to find more for her. I liked her. I thought she was the kind of woman I could have coffee with outside of the hospital. I didn’t drink coffee, but there was something about her that made me think I could.
I shook my head. “Nope, nothing else.”
Next she showed me scenes of people and wanted me to tell her a story about each one. Picture after picture was so depressing. Jesus. In one, a young woman was revolted by the pregnant town slut, who was sleeping with the farmhand with the impressively muscular back whom the young woman secretly loved. So she’d grabbed some books and was waiting for the bus so she could go to college in the city, far away from all this. In another, an old woman was looking out the window, failure hanging from her face. I see why. Her son, who was dressed in a jacket and tie and was holding his hat, had just told her he was a homosexual and was moving to a big city so he wouldn’t embarrass her and his father, I said.
Wait a minute! Where did that come from? I was tricked.
“There’s no right or wrong answer, David,” she said cheerily. I looked back at the picture of the young man. Still a homosexual. Still on his way to a big city.
She put the pictures away and handed me paper and a pencil.
“Next, I want you to draw a person.”
“Any person?”
“Anyone.”
I grabbed the pencil and hunched over the paper. This was going to be a cinch. I didn’t think too many of the kids she saw had taken several years of private art lessons like I had. I drew a woman with soft billows of dark hair, a white dress that was tight through the bodice and flared from the hips. On her feet were white matching pointy pumps.
“I’m done,” I told her, sliding the overturned paper across the desk. I was certain she’d turn it over and gasp. That’s how good of an artist I was.
Instead, what I got was nothing. No gasp, no flutter of a hand over her mouth acknowledging she was in the presence of genius.
“What’s the matter?” I asked of her appalling lack of response.
“Nothing.” Her smile seemed genuine, but I had an unusually well-honed gift for reading women. Something was up.
“Did I do something wrong?” I ask Dr. Joyce Brothers, as I duck into her cubicle on Hollywood Squares.
“No, of course not, David,” she says. She lifts her head toward the makeup woman so that she can powder down her oily nose.
“Then why did the doctor hold back?”
“Thank you,” she says to the woman when she’s done.
“Is it because I drew a lady?”
“Could be. Who was the woman?” I explain that it was my mother. There’s a photograph of her sitting on the arm of an overstuffed chair, my father on the other, and in between is my father’s dad, Vu Leite. In front of them is Barry, still looking scuffed and beat up, despite wearing his white Communion suit. My mother has swirls of dark hair that softly frame her face. She’s wearing a white dress, sleeves to just below the elbow. Chunky buttons crawl up her blouse to a Peter Pan collar. Her shoes: white pointy pumps.
“I loved her white shoes. Does that mean I’m a sissy?”
“Did you ever want to wear them?”
I’m silent.
“David?”
“I tried them on once when I found them in an old box in the basement,” I blurt out.
“Did you like it?”
“Actually, no, they hurt.”
“. . . Interesting.”
“So what does it mean?”
“It means you have good taste.” She lifts a leg and laughs. On her feet are a pair of white pumps just like my mother’s. Paul Lynde looks over and smirks at me.
In my twenties I would once again be asked to look at Rorschach’s inkblots, interpret the images of the Thematic Apperception Test, and draw a person. This time they’d be administered by an old doctor wearing a fraying tweed jacket in his home office. I was having a hard time focusing, because bits of his lunch were nesting in his beard and bobbled as he spoke. Nonetheless, in each instance my responses were pretty much the same as when I was fourteen—giants, killer bees, jackals, a gay man who had grossly disappointed his parents, and a woman in a white dress with white high heels. The therapist who’d ordered the tests would explain it was unusual for patients to draw the opposite sex. She said it could indicate gender issues, which I deemed bullshit, once she explained what it meant. I didn’t identify as female. I was a guy, I liked being a guy, and I was quite fond of my junk. I explained to her that I’d drawn a woman—who, yes, was my mother—because I had briefly considered becoming a fashion designer in my early teens. That and the fact that dresses are a hell of a lot easier to draw than pants. She recommended we see each other twice a week. Three, if I could afford it.
The young woman at Bradley gathered up my papers and slid them into a folder.
“One last test,” she said. She then asked me to spell my first name backward.
“D-i-v-a-d,” I replied without stumbling.
She looked up from her pad as if she had misheard. “Spell your last name backward.”
“E-t-i-e-l.” Just as easily.
And so it went. Spell mother, father, today, and so on, backward. I barely stumbled. All I had to do was look off to the left, and I could see the letters unmooring themselves and then drifting into position. She was impressed, I could tell. Finally. I felt a shiver of superiority. From her reaction, I deduced that spelling backward was a sign of sound mental health. That I could somehow spell myself backward into happiness. From that point on, I obsessively spelled words in reverse. The better and faster I do it, I thought, the better I’ll become. I’d look at signs or billboards or titles on the TV and spell them backward in my head.
On the way home, my father asked me how everything had gone.
“Okay, I guess.” I told him about the tests, and how afterward I’d spoken to a doctor, who asked me all kinds of questions about why I’d come.
“Did he ask about us?” He meant my mother and him.
“Yes.” I braced myself for more questions, but he just nodded and kept driving.
Because we were observing meatless Fridays, even though Catholicism had come to mean nothing to me, my father drove us to a little fish-and-chip joint in Somerset. He must’ve felt guilty, because he allowed me to order whatever I wanted. At the small square table, I pulled apart the batter-covered cod fillet, watching it flake into neat white rows, as if chiseled. I felt deeply comforted, cocooned even.
Recently, I heard a research scientist talk about the act of eating in animals. For them, she said, there is no sense of pleasure or comfort; it’s strictly an instinct, hardwired in them for survival. She had a theory that when an animal’s tongue is injured, which you’d think would prevent it from eating, and therefore increase its chance of dying, the very act of eating actually tamps down the pain, allowing it to feed until it heals. That’s what eating had been for me for so long back then: somet
hing that tamped down the pain that was threatening my life, my existence, and was nourishing me until I healed. But for years, healing had ducked whenever I grabbed for it. Finally, now, with my first visit to the hospital behind me, I felt sure that health was within reach, was truly mine, and because of that, eating those fish and chips suddenly became something else: celebration. I was overwhelmed with an incandescent hope. I swiped a chunk of fish through tangy tartar sauce and offered it to my father. He scrunched his nose and shook his head. “Come on, Daddy, you love cod.” And he did, but only when it was salted and dried, the leathery slabs smelling of unwashed underarms.
“Sure?”
“Yes, Son.”
Although neither of us was aware of it at the time, that afternoon a divide that had been slowly cleaving our world in two was complete. I had turned from the closed, humid huddle of our family, and instead chosen the white, fluorescent-lit environment of the hospital, a place filled with strangers who weren’t Portuguese, for relief. That day proved I was different and perhaps even wiser than them all, because only I understood that my chances lay outside—of the home my father built, of the embrace of my parents.
12
SHRINK WRAPPED
During the weeks leading up to our return to the hospital, to meet with a doctor about the results of my tests and hear his recommendations, my mother seemed tense, like a fist, clenched and yellow knuckled. My father was quiet, unusually so. I, on the other hand felt expansive, as if a huge millstone had been cut loose from my neck.
