The light from the T.V. highlighted my great uncle’s fingers as he showed me how to string the beads. In the gray green light, his fingers reminded me of elephant legs: sturdy, rough, and deeply creased. His hands were large and wrinkled and shook as he brought the small bead to the end of the string.
I was fascinated with his hands. They were huge and old and seemed to hold stories within. He talked with his hands and wore an array of gold rings. They were masculine, but at the same time, soft and comforting. He had been a surgeon, although I didn’t know it then, and his hands seemed important, like they’d had so many lives.
I yawned. It was mid-morning, and Sesame Street had just ended. Araceli opened the door, and a stream of light fanned its way over us. She swept the mess of beads covering the bed quilt into a pile with her hands. I was six years old and unaware that she was his nurse, or that in two months, he’d be dead.
That he chose to spend his last months with a six-year-old makes perfect sense to me now. We needed each other.
“Mister M, it’s time to take your medication, and maybe a nap,” Araceli whispered, her accent highlighting the s and sh sounds, making it sound like she was comforting a baby or imitating the ocean as she spoke. She was small but mighty, with a beautiful rope of braided black hair down her back.
“And you.” She looked at me, “art and craft time is over. Come to the kitchen and we can make some buñuelos. Or you can go for a swim. Ok? Give your uncle a kiss, y andale.”
I crawled over to kiss Great Uncle Gordon, and as always, he held my cheeks between his hands for a moment to tell me he loved me as he studied my face with his watery eyes behind thick glasses.
I carefully navigated my way off the bed between newspapers, copies of Reader’s Digest, and trays with empty glasses of orange juice and prescription pill bottles. I followed Araceli into the kitchen and watched as she prepared my uncle’s midmorning grilled cheese sandwich.
My mom was recently divorced and working at a hardware store during the day while going to nursing school at night, so spending the summer days with Araceli and Uncle Gordon was one of a few childcare options she had. Every Sunday, Mom would bring up my choices for the week as she made a big roast of whatever meat had been on sale at the grocery store. I could choose from Uncle Gordon’s, my aunt’s, or my grandpa’s house.
My relationship with my mom carried weight. My dad had moved out and across the state, but the walls still felt saturated with tension. My dad’s sharp, terse tones drowning out my mom’s pleading. They tried their best to cover up the fighting, but it always felt palpable, the air thick and pressurized. Small drops of water beaded on my forehead as I sat in my room and played records on my Fischer Price record player, as instructed. But I could still hear their voices rising and falling, and I was able to put together a narrative from fragments of sentences. “I didn’t want any of this. I don’t know who I am anymore. Making the best of it. Nothing is ever enough. You, the kid. Needing. Wanting. What about me? College. My dreams. Freedom. Angry. Bitter. Stuck.” Mom always looked at me with guilt or apprehension. How much did I hear? How much did I understand?
I’d see these questions in her eyes. Stay out of the way was the conclusion I settled on. And I did. But Sundays were different. Sundays felt like I had her back, even just for a few hours. We’d talk about the week ahead, and she’d laugh when I’d explain why I couldn’t possibly go to my aunt or grandpa’s house.
My aunt, who had seven kids, seemed unable to speak in full sentences. The majority of what I heard was “no,” “put that back,” or, “stop.” She had an elaborate cubby system in the garage for the kids to place their shoes and belongings and to prevent small spars that involved someone taking someone else’s snack, or someone touching someone else’s stuff. The cubby system was a sacred ritual I could never figure out, and I would get yelled at by her or the oldest kids for losing my shoes or putting my bag in the wrong spot.
Then there was grandpa’s house. He was Uncle Gordon’s brother, but I didn’t know this for years. They never spoke of each other, and I don’t think I ever saw them in the same room. My family felt like a chain of islands, all independent of each other, but floating in the same sea. Holidays or birthdays would bring us together, but there was something foreign about the closeness of those celebrations. Everyone seemed to do better with space and ocean between them. I wonder now how that happens? What small event sparks a chain of detachment, what things said or unsaid carry enough force to move the earth beneath your feet?
My grandpa was a Korean War veteran who became an insurance salesman. He was younger than my Uncle Gordon, but like his brother, he lived alone. Grandma had died a few years earlier from breast cancer. Grandpa did his best to take over the household duties, but he struggled. The house was well-organized, but everything had a layer of dust or grime. The towels in the bathroom were stiff and smelled of mildew, and when I played on the shag carpet, I would find crumbs, dried up olives, and an assortment of loose change. It also seemed that he only knew how to make two meals. Tuna sandwiches were one, and the other was Shit on a Shingle. I’d watch him from the table as he opened a can of chipped beef and poured it onto burnt pieces of toast. He’d scowl at me over his paper as I’d carefully eat the edges of the toast, the shingle, and avoid the pile of gelatinous meat, the shit.
Our outings consisted of either going to a matinee, or a Rocky and Bullwinkle themed mini golf park down the street. I usually chose mini golf because the theater meant he’d fall asleep halfway through The Lion King and snore throughout the remainder of the film. Mothers or nannies would look back at us, and I was thankful my head was barely visible over the seat. He seemed to navigate his life in options of two: Two choices of food, two places to go, and mostly two things to talk about: school or my mom.
“Is your mom okay?” he’d ask, and I would nod. I’d explain the gifts from the hardware store that she’d bring home. A birdhouse, a bucket of ladybugs, and a small multipurpose measuring tape that had a level and both a Phillips and flat head screwdriver built into it.
When she would complain about his cheapness or his indifference to her, I’d tell her Grandpa asked about her on our visits. A brief smile would flash across her face, and I would feel like I successfully navigated the world of adults. A world that always felt so heavy and full of secrets and things unsaid.
So every Sunday I would make the same choice, Uncle Gordon’s house. He and I would have dinners of pesto pasta that seemed so exotic. We usually ate outside, next to his pool, and he would light candles and turn on the fairy lights. After dinner, if he was feeling good, we would dance to Dizzy Gillespie or Harry Belafonte records, and Uncle Gordon would drink gimlets and twirl and swish in his silk robes.
He lived in those silk robes that summer, saying they helped him keep cool in the desert heat. Some were shipped directly from China, he would say, pointing to the elaborately-stitched dragons and lotus flowers on the shiny peach or turquoise fabric. When he wasn’t wearing them, he kept his robes on fancy padded hangers in the front of his closet. I’d sneak in when he was sleeping to walk beneath, dramatically parting them with my hands and pretending I was walking out from behind a stage curtain. Next to the robes were dull-colored suits of grey and brown. I’d stick my head inside the stiff jackets and breathe in his smell of musk and stale cologne. At the end of the closet, above the dresser, was a shelf with three mannequin heads. One held his toupee, and the other two held women’s wigs. There was a short blonde one, and the second was longer with a reddish tint and big curls. These were Aunt Susan’s old wigs, he told me, referring to his late wife. After a few weeks, he started to wear them daily.
Back in the kitchen, on that summer day, Araceli transferred the sizzling hot tortillas from the pan to a plate with a paper towel and coated both sides with cinnamon and sugar. She batted my hand away and told me to wait, “esperas.” As I did, she gave me Spanish lessons and smiled as I tried to roll the r of “azucar.”
“Let the buñuelo cool one minute more and take this to your uncle.”
She pushed the grilled cheese from the other frying pan onto a plate and handed it to me. The hallway back to his room contained pictures from when Uncle Gordon lived in New York. He met Aunt Susan at the theater. She was a costume designer for the Broadway shows he loved. She was beautiful in the black and white photos, with short blonde hair and a flirtatious grin. In most of their pictures, she looked directly at the camera in a sleek dress while he looked at her, his mouth open as if he were laughing. The cigarette smoke in the photo made it look like a dream. “A different life,” he would tell me when he’d catch me looking.
“They look so in love, no?” Araceli asked as she came up behind me in the hall. “Enamorado,” I repeated after her.
Uncle Gordon was asleep and propped up with pillows. The light from the T.V. highlighted the shadows on his face with his mouth open and his head tilted back. His cheeks were full and his face round in the pictures, but in bed his cheeks were sunken in and his skin loose and concave around his bones. I knew he was changing, but I assumed it was all a part of the aging process. I didn’t know he was so close to death. No one in my family had died yet. Sure, I sent a few goldfish down the toilet, and when our dog Bigfoot died, I was told he went someplace else. Some place filled with open grassy fields and plenty of dog friends to play with. Death wasn’t scary. It seemed like a transition. When Uncle Gordon let slip that he was dying, I don’t think I flinched. I assumed he’d go somewhere colorful with music and come back to visit from time to time.
I’m pretty sure it’s one of the reasons he loved our time together. My ignorance allowed him simply to live, without having to answer questions. I didn’t recoil at his kisses or embraces as I had seen my aunt do. I didn’t comment on his weight or his habits. I didn’t scold him when he stopped taking his medication.
And he didn’t remind me about the situation with my parents, about getting sent home from the last day of school because I bit Tiffany Howard when she said I was a sad orphan. About feeling so angry sometimes I would burst into tears. “Not now,” my mom would say. “What is it, why are you always crying.” I could feel my rage percolate in my sternum, not knowing how to answer her questions, how to give what I was feeling a word. It was eating me from the inside, too.
I plopped the grilled cheese on his lap, and he jumped awake.
“Mr. M, how about a swim, or some sun?” Araceli asked as she went around the room, opening the curtains.
“Today may not be my day,” he said, taking a handful of pills and shaking them in his hand before tossing them in his mouth.
“Is it because the pool is too cold?” I asked.
“No, I just think I need to dry out on land today, love. Right here in bed.”
“I think it is better to dry out in the sun, no? Como una iguana,” Araceli said and threw one of the robes from the closet on the bed.
He agreed and smiled a big grin that filled his thinning face. He ate his sandwich, and I ran to get my suit on and meet them outside.
It was summer in Lancaster, and the transition from the cool-tiled house to the hot June air made my skin prickle. He apologized as he sat in his lounge chair in his peach silk robe. He was having a bad day, he said.
“Why are you having a bad day?”
“I don’t feel good, and I’m a little sad about it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m running out of good days. I’m running out of time.”
I didn’t know what he meant by that. I worried he didn’t want me at his house anymore. After the divorce, I had become a chess piece in an adult game where I didn’t know the rules. At times, the moves felt strategic, as when my mom kept me with her for my birthday instead of sending me to my scheduled visit with my dad. But more often, I felt like a pawn they didn’t know what to do with. It was either he wanted me gone, or I had mistaken August for June and would be going back to school soon.
“The summer just started,” I responded.
“You’re right, love. I guess I’m already sad anticipating the summer ending and you leaving me.”
“What does anticipate mean?”
“Well, when you anticipate, you worry about something. And time kind of speeds up.”
“Time feels slow to me,” I told him.
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know; I just do what I do.”
“I think you’re fully invested in what you do,” he said, “and that makes everything else disappear. Yesterday, I watched you try to catch lizards for hours outside my window. What was that like?”
I sat on the edge of the pool, swishing my feet in the water and thought about the lizards. I had developed a way of holding one hand out so the lizard saw the shadow on the ground and wouldn’t run towards it. With my other hand, I would approach from the opposite side. The lizard would freeze, and I would freeze. Before trying to scoop it up, I would study its small body covered in different shades of brown and army green. Its little gold eyes would dart back and forth between my hands, and sometimes its pink tongue would flick out and touch the hot stone wall. Time would stand still.
I described this the best I could to him.
“Can we catch lizards together tomorrow?” he asked.
“Sure.”
I stood up and jumped in the pool and when I surfaced, he was laughing his deep laugh with his head back and the gold fillings in his molars flashing in the sun.
“You know what else I think may slow down time?” he said.
“What?” I asked between chattering teeth.
“Not being afraid. Last week, you asked me to heat up the pool. But this pool is old and doesn’t have a heater. So, I lied when I told you I would,” he said.
“Hey!” I yelled.
“Just look at you. You won’t let a little cold water stop you.”
He sat on his lounge chair and watched me swim, and I’d ask him to judge my dives. “Ten out of ten,” he always said as he sang along to his American in Parisrecord.
The water was safe. I felt held in the liquid blue. It was one of the only places I could fully feel like me. Not the sad, scared daughter. Not the student who brought home bad grades. In the dry world, I felt like a husk of a self. In the water, I was fully formed. I’d dive down to the deep end and scream underwater, watching as my rage bubbled up to the surface. Sometimes Uncle Gordon would look over the edge to check on me at the bottom. I’d see the shape of him, wavy, and distorted, and colorful. I was what I wanted to be down there, and he was what he wanted to be up there. All color and vibration and life.
The next day he was having a good day, so we went on a lizard hunt. He came out of the house in his robe, Aunt Susan’s strawberry blonde wig, and one of her big sun hats.
“You look beautiful,” I told him.
“Thank you, love. So, what’s the plan?”
I directed him to the other side of a bougainvillea plant that crawled up the wall bordering the yard and explained that I would scare the lizards out and that he should use the hand shadow technique I had taught him. He tipped the brim of his sun hat and crouched low. I rattled the dry plant with its pink, paper-like flowers, and a few lizards shot out next to him. He was too quick with his movements and scared them back into the thick tangle of leaves and branches.
Araceli called us in for a late lunch, and when we walked inside, my mom was in the entryway. I ran to hug her, and her eyes were locked on Uncle Gordon. He yanked off his hat and wig and smoothed the patchy fuzz on top of his head as I explained our lizard hunt to her.
“I thought I’d take the afternoon off and come and surprise you two,” Mom said.
“Surprise,” Uncle Gordon responded.
Araceli called me in to help with lunch, and between handing her plates and gathering silverware, I peeked through the door to listen.
“She’s already been through enough, and I don’t want to confuse or stress her.”
“You’re worried she’ll think I’m a fag?”
“Jesus, no.”
“She doesn’t see me any differently. She doesn’t even see me as sick. I’m dying, and I’m tired of making everyone else comfortable.”
I didn’t know that word then or the weight of it. I was used to words I didn’t know uttered in sharp tones, building up in a crescendo of yelling and fighting. But there was a long pause, and then Mom made a joke about his stubble and put her hand on his knee. The initial tension of their conversation unwound itself and began to lengthen, and they were laughing by the time Araceli and I came out with plates.
In the car ride home, mom tried to approach the subject of what she called “Uncle Gordon’s dress up times,” but I don’t remember much of what she said. It was one of those conversations I had become accustomed to. A conversation about something she saw that I didn’t. One that was mostly meant to help her validate her own decision or frame of mind, hidden in the guise of comforting me.
The summer days at Uncle Gordon’s continued, as did our quest to slow down time. We had figured out that learning new things also worked to stretch the day, so he taught me magic tricks with playing cards, and when Mom came to pick me up, she taught him how to do his makeup. It took him some time to figure out how to pencil in his eyebrows, and he often asked for Araceli’s help. She used it as leverage when he started to refuse his medication. On those days he would come out of his bedroom with eyebrows that made him look angry, confused, or comically surprised. Araceli and I would laugh, and Uncle Gordon would flip his wig hair at us.
“Como una actriz de telenovela,” she’d say.
Uncle Gordon seemed to grow less sick as he dressed more and more in drag and stopped taking his medication. His energy was infectious, and he danced more than ever. On hot summer nights when Mom was working late and I would spend the night, we’d dance on the patio with his Soul Train records bouncing off the concrete walls and into the bright moonlit night. In between songs he’d yell, tipping his head back to the sky, “Are we having fun?” More of a condemnation than a question. Sometimes I’d see the mascara streaking underneath his eyes, but I assumed it was from sweat as he took off his wig and fanned himself.
At the beginning of August, Uncle Gordon needed to go to the hospital. I cried for three days until he called one night and asked for me. His voice sounded pinched and tiny over the phone, but he told me he’d be seeing me soon, back in the pool. I stayed with my grandpa those days and showed him the card tricks I’d learned.
“Your Uncle Gordon taught you that?” he asked.
“Yes, and I taught him how to catch lizards, and Mom taught him how to do his makeup.”
“Oh,” he said and looked at me with the same big eyes behind thick glasses that Uncle Gordon had.
“Can you do me a favor and keep it a secret?” he asked.
He went to his room and came back with a small gold-banded diamond ring. “Can you give this to your uncle, tell him it was his mother’s ring, your great grandma?”
I agreed.
A few days after Uncle Gordon returned from the hospital, he let my mom know that he was ready to have me back. I spent most of those days with Araceli as he rested in bed. We watched the telenovelas she loved on the small TV in the kitchen, and she introduced me to the T.V. astrologer, Walter Mercado.
“Your uncle is better looking, no?”
“I think so.”
One afternoon, I crawled in bed with him to practice my card tricks. I remembered a new trick Grandpa taught me, and I showed it to him. He picked a card, looked at it and smiled, and held it to his chest. I asked him to put the card back in the deck, cut it, and hand it back to me. After a few tries, I found his card, the queen of diamonds.
“Your grandpa taught you that?” he asked, and I remembered the ring. I ran to my bedroom and returned with my backpack.
“Slow down, love. What are you so excited about?”
“I have a secret for you,” I told him and handed him the ring. He pushed his glasses up to examine it.
“From your grandfather?” he asked. I nodded. He slipped it on his little finger and held out his hand.
“The queen of diamonds,” he said, and laughed his big laugh. He patted the bed next to him, and I curled up under his arm. Held by his big hands.
When I woke up, my mom, Araceli, and a few men in uniform were in the room. Mom picked me up from under Uncle Gordon’s heavy arm and carried me away. Her chest rose and fell against mine with strained rapid breaths; she was crying. Half awake, I looked at him in bed over her shoulder. He looked like he was smiling in his sleep. The men in uniform lowered a gurney to the side of his bed, and as Araceli opened the curtains, he seemed to glow in the bright afternoon light of the room. I squinted as the sun sparkled off his blonde wig and shiny silk robe.