The Medicine Burns Read online

  “Why should I go?” she asked. “It’s your problem.”

  Well, at one point it was my problem, then it was my father’s problem, and now it’s the witch doctor’s problem, I thought. Anyway, with much resistance, she and my father drove me to her office and decided they would come in for a short while.

  Before my mother sat down, she asked, “Have you made any progress with him?”

  It was the first time that I saw my therapist caught off guard, but I had warned her. She urged them to sit down, and took a seat herself. She regained her composure then, asking my mother, in a volley, what kind of progress she had expected.

  While my mother turned uncomfortably in her chair, Miriam began speaking verbatim, as though a copy of Freud’s famous letter to the mother of a homosexual son had been freshly drawn from its envelope. All the great lines were there, “‘It cannot be classified as an illness…a variation of the sexual function…many highly respected individuals of ancient and modern times…’” But her most impressive performance came when, quoting Freud, she directed his appeal to my mother as though they were her words. “‘By asking me if I can help you, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place…’” She shook her head, sadly explaining that my sexual preference was not the source of my conflicts. “It is the family—” she began to assert.

  My mother was enraged. “You want to tell me what’s normal?” she asked, her voice painfully restrained. “I suppose you regard it as normal the fact that he dresses like a woman? That he steals his father’s underwear?”

  I turned to watch my father as he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes under his glasses. He reached out and took my mother’s arm. “Let’s go, honey,” he said sniffling.

  She pulled away from him as though she was disgusted with everyone in the room.

  “And what kind of role model do you think you are?” she asked my father scornfully. “Sitting there crying. You’ve never had a moment of strength in your life.”

  “That’s not fair,” I interjected.

  She gathered her purse and coat and stood up.

  “What’s not fair?” she asked. “All I wanted was for you to have a chance at a normal life. They’ll never accept you. It’s like you’ve chosen to be deformed. Why would anyone choose that for themselves?” I wanted to answer her, but she and my father were already at the door. “We won’t be needing your services anymore,” she informed Miriam before slamming the door behind them. My heart was pounding with anger.

  “She can’t get over that foot of hers,” I managed. I then told Miriam about her cast and how she’d never been able to admit how it had humiliated her and set her apart.

  Miriam made the generous offer of seeing me again, free of charge. I told her I appreciated the offer, but didn’t feel right about it, and when I left her office a half hour later I was surprised by the feeling of friendship that gripped my throat and made it hard to say good-bye.

  I expected tension when I arrived home, but was surprised to find my parents dressing to go out for dinner. They urged me to dress quickly and join them. I thought, maybe Miriam had made an impression, maybe my mother was sorry for what she’d said, or just felt better for saying it. But I thought, in the spirit of coexistence, it was best to accept and make concessions, or at least not disturb the respite.

  I was startled by my parents’ suggestion that we order drinks before dinner, and more startled still when we continued drinking throughout the meal. An unfamiliar and desperate intimacy found its way into our nostalgia. My mother brought up the time when my father had come back from the Korean War, his body mottled with boils, and how she would have to force him to get undressed in front of her, and how she’d use a washcloth on his back but she couldn’t be gentle enough. He would try to hide the fact that he was crying, but his whole body was shaking with his sobs. And he said to her that he was crying not because of the pain, but because no one had ever shown him so much care.

  And my mother asked if I remembered the time I was in elementary school and I wanted a pair of platform shoes like the teacher, Mr. Gutierrez, wore, and how she’d taken me out to get a pair even though she worried it would be bad for my feet. And I reminded her how my teacher, Mrs. O’Connor, southern trash that she was, had asked me to model them for the whole class while she told them only fairies wore shoes like that. My mother had stood up to Mrs. O’Connor then, and I was transferred to another class by the end of the day.

  We told these stories as if to practice their success, to rehearse the feelings of resolve they each provided. One of us would take up the threads the other had thrown out, and so it was like an intangible weaving that transpired between us, like the sewing up of a fabric that had been unraveling. And by the time we had eaten our desserts and my father had assured us he could drive the few blocks back home, I had forgotten along with them the ugliness of the afternoon, and the months that had led up to it, and I told my mother that she looked more beautiful than I ever remembered her looking.

  Late that evening, I sat listening to records in my room, feeling vaguely disquieted by our excursion to the restaurant, already thinking about how I would tell Miriam if I were to see her again. In some way, our levity and nostalgia felt like a betrayal of Miriam, as though the cloth we were weaving was to be put over our heads, blinding and deafening ourselves to what she had tried to say to my parents earlier that day.

  I heard a quiet knocking at my door and my mother came into the room wearing her nightgown and slippers. She sat down next to me on the bed and took my hand in hers.

  “You know,” she said, “I just don’t understand what it is you don’t like about women.” I pulled my hand from hers and sighed exasperatedly.

  “Is it breasts?” she persisted, and this time I noticed her touching her own through the thin nightgown. “Are you worried that you couldn’t please a woman? I’ve seen you in the shower—now don’t be shy with me—you have a nice body. There are a lot of women out there who would be happy to have a man like you.”

  I suddenly felt trapped as she took my hand again.

  “What could I have done to make you fear women so much?” And with her other hand she dropped the strap of her nightgown and began to pull my hand toward her. I stared at her breast first with disbelief, then revulsion.

  I twisted my hand from hers, saying very slowly and clearly, “Please get out of here.”

  When I’d pulled my hand from hers, she seemed almost to awaken and her expression was awkward and confused. She pulled the strap up on her nightgown and padded silently from the room, and I, shaking, locked the door behind her.

  Months later, I was back to my same old tricks. My parents had discontinued their curfews and inquiries. My father had opened his own business and both he and my mother were concentrating on that. I was left to pursue my own pleasures.

  One night, there was a large drag party planned at one of the clubs and I’d decided to dress for the event. That afternoon, while my parents were at work at the store, I went through my mother’s closet. I thought it would be amusing and a little perverse to go as my mother. I found what had to be one of the ugliest dresses in her wardrobe, some synthetic green and white checkered dress with gold decorative buttons up the front. I was carefully going through her drawers for underwear and stockings when I discovered a plastic bag with something inside it. I sat on the floor before her dresser and opened the bag up on my lap. There, as new as the day they were delivered, were the plain, white baby shoes Mrs. Rosenbloom had brought to my bris. I felt suddenly stricken, shocked that she had kept them all these years. I put the shoes back in their bag and into the dresser, and then, sadly, I hung the dress back on the rack.

  Undertow

  The smell of cut grass and a tint of blue from the moon across its razed surface made me think of blood. I walked, well-dressed, across a wet, open field into an unfamiliar neighborhood where I’d been invited to a party. At the edge of
the field, my elementary school stood squat, in darkness, finally small, arbitrary. Monkey bars in the distance looked like wire cages, domelike, sunk into the earth and the limestone beneath. I remembered watching my bicycle being stolen across this field. A teenager with an institutional walk, an apelike, slumping gait, carried it past, while I ran last and out of breath around the track. I stopped to watch him guide it away, intimidated by his sideburns and hairy arms. I was tearfully parting with the glowing red bike, its streamers from the handlebars lifeless and severed.

  I was too afraid to say anything until he’d gone. Then the rush of real time, of consequence and loss, the sting of irremediable experience that would demand honest retelling, humbling repetition. Passing the school, small as a shoebox on the playing field, with portables like roach traps, bolted closets stacked with autoharps and recorders, I think of trapped voices, a clench of words, screams.

  I slipped through a fence and crossed the street, into another field littered with cans and tires and magazine pictures. Three houses with gravel driveways sat in a cul-de-sac, yellow, blue, and pink, with ornate plaster seahorses chalk white against their walls. Cuban music played from a car outside the pink house. A man slumped in its front seat, smoking, feet on the dashboard. A heavyset girl stood outside the front door in a shirt of gathered popcorn fabric, kinky hair pulled back. It was her party, though most of her friends hadn’t arrived. She had the worst English of anyone in our school. She was, they said, slow. I tutored her, and was the only non-Spanish speaker at her party.

  She waved as I came up the gravel front, then stood before me, embarrassed by so few guests drifting apart in her heavily decorated living room: the whole ceiling like the skin of a piñata, a rough, short fringe; a crystal bowl with punch, orange sherbet marbling its surface. Rented lights and a DJ overwhelmed the room, especially with so few of us there. It made our hearts pound.

  I went to the patio and sat on a beach chair, now and then lifting the cover from the parrot’s cage, fascinated by its angry wing beat and ferocious quickness. I sat in the chair, nodding to people as they came out onto the patio, picking up pieces of their conversations, imagining Sonia and I as clairvoyant mutes, able to foretell the deaths of each of her guests. They would laugh at the message the way they laugh at the messenger. Then, too bad for them.

  Leaning back in the patio chair, I thought of Key West. I was floating out over the hot backyard, flashes of green light and blue over the shrubs and trees, a tinted ocean of oil, the shrubs like stones jutting from it. I thought of my cousins, our playing in slow, elongated time, the long breathless dives and stretch of our bodies; my older cousin, whose body I watched for the past three years develop with rapidity against the slowness of our summers, like a swimmer against an undertow. I imagined the wet dark hair lying flat on his chest, tasting the salt of the water dried white on his body.

  Then a group of boys arrived: older, beautiful, and imposing. Their presence in the living room sends people out on the patio. It is suddenly crowded, and I have to stand to see what’s happening. People press against the patio screen, and some of the girls cover their eyes. I hear screaming and look out into the yard, flooded with light. A large pig ran through the yard, squealing, knocking into shrubs, while a gang of boys and men chased it with machetes. Some of the boys beside me laughed, holding their girlfriends like they do at movies, where squeamishness is sexual entreaty.

  Someone brought the blade down on the hind leg of the animal and the crowd reacted with horror and laughter. The pig dragged itself across the yard, the perimeters shrinking. The blood in the floodlights was as dramatic and high as a fountain. My knees buckled. I slipped in sickness to the ground.

  Sonia put me in her bed under a pink and white comforter, strangely cakelike and girlish. She is neither soft nor feminine, but strong and ruddy. Being in her room is like playing doctor with her, dispensation to look inside, touch things you’re not supposed to.

  The door opens and a crowd of Cuban boys, just three or four years older than I, stand around the bed. They reach for me as though retrieving a coat. “Someone has to dance with Sonia,” one says through a black mustache and gritted teeth. They are like heads of the same monster, each face mesmerizingly beautiful. My eyes linger too long.

  Another says, “Let’s teach the faggot to dance.” He is wearing a knit jersey, and I see his gold medallions of saints under the cuts in his shirt. They pull me out to the living room where people are gathered, expectant. There are plantains frying in the kitchen. One of the boys pulls a pint of vodka from his back pocket, pours it into the punch, then ladles out a glass and tells me to drink.

  They called Sonia out and pushed me beside her. She was thrilled, not understanding the spectacle we made—retarded girl and faggot. I’m thrown in the ring with something weaker. But her ignorance makes her powerful, natural. I stood woodenly against the music, colored by self-consciousness, a consciousness that comprehends everyone, the terrible probabilities of this amplified drunkenness. She began the Latin hustle to hoots and cheers. She took my hand and led. I could not match her rolling movements, the sensual slackening of her mouth, the low look of her eyes. Any expression of my being in my body would provoke the onlookers. She heard one of the boys comment, “maricon,” and frowned in his direction. They laugh at her dawning awareness. One girl said, “Let’s not watch anymore.” When the music ended, I walked through the group of boys who were throwing wadded up, wet napkins. I called my father to pick me up. “So early?” he asked.

  I stood in the gravel driveway, in night air that felt hot with my shame. I felt tapping all around me, lightly at first, then harder, more insistent. A rain of pebbles crashed over me, then a large stone hit the back of my head. “Good-bye faggot cock-sucker,” one boy said from the porch, flanked by two or three others. I felt the back of my head, the hair already wet, thick with blood. Another handful of stones. I found the large rock and picked it up, angry, facing them, but unable to throw it. “You throw like a girl,” my father once said. He pulled his car up and stepped out of it, shocked by the blood on my hands. The boys don’t stop at the sight of my father, but continue throwing stones at him, his car. He quickly guides me to the car and steps in. “What did you do?” he asks. The boys come off the porch and prance around the car, they are like phantoms, or rather, like cartoon natives around a cauldron. They are unreal. What is real is the blood from my father’s eye sinking down his face into the velour seat of his Lincoln, and my pleading, “Nothing.”

  We’d board up the house with hurricane supplies before our drive to the Keys. We used corrugated aluminum sidings over the picture window, closed the awnings down over the bedroom windows, placed reinforcing pins in the sliding glass doors. We did this not for fear of hurricanes, but of marauding gangs, thieves, and opportunists. That year my parents wouldn’t go, my mother presiding over my father’s eye, the stitching of his cornea, his head in her lap like an embroidery pattern. “Filthy,” she spat. “Evil. No respect for anyone.” My father reached a weak, consoling hand up to her face. She shooed it away, “Mac and Evie will take you,” my mother said, referring to my aunt and uncle. “Your father and I have enough to worry about here.”

  For the first time, I am not to blame, not the provocateur. Guilt does not keep me from feeling satisfied that my father is hurt.

  That night I dreamed I was crouched with my parents in a house of tin with a gravel floor. I’d found a buckle in the gummed seam of the tin wall and could see out. Naked boys circled the hut and were shooting through the tin with beebees which penetrated the walls with a reverberating ping; then a rush of coned light would invade the dwelling, illuminating our family, one at a time, in a shamed huddle.

  Though we’d always left early in the morning for a road trip, I felt smuggled out that morning. My mother packed my bags the night before and placed them by the front door. She woke me at 4:30 A.M. and kissed me good-bye. I stood outside and there were still stars overhead, a strange, empty light t
hat seemed to restore richness to the lawns and telephone posts, the well-spaced palms and flowering plants.

  My uncle’s car approached; the bleary headlights of his Valiant made the driveway look black and soft. My Aunt Evie rolled down the window and told me to get my bags and put them in the trunk. The distinct shrillness of her voice depressed me.

  I looked through the back window expecting to see the odd shape of my cousin’s head, now so familiar to me. Tom had a birth defect, a bubble at the back of his head that gave the impression his brain was split and half of it sat on the top of his skull. Unlike scalp, it was virtually hairless and webbed with veins, like the jellyfish we’d find at the beach and his brother Randy would stab with a stick. They’d had some success in reducing its size through early surgeries. And when he matured, it became less pronounced. We were both thirteen. My heart sank at his absence. Except for Tom, they were all like strangers to me.

  I opened the back door where my cousin Randy was pretending to be asleep, spread out over most of the back seat. I noticed for the first time the facial hair that seemed to make him so much older than the eighteen years he was. Both he and Tom had been adopted, but it was Randy’s genes that seemed to possess a virulent teleology. He practically dwarfed my aunt and uncle, and had dark ruminative eyes and an almost disdainful expression to his mouth. The rest of the family were fair and light-eyed, even Tom. Each year Randy seemed less bound by the family, and my aunt and uncle conceded, perhaps out of fear, by granting him immunity to the rules they enforced on his brother.

  “What’s this?” Randy asked, pulling me by my necklace. It’s a black lava tiki my parents brought back from Hawaii, with little fake red gems for eyes. It’s a little bit of anger from a volcano. “It’s good luck,” I answered.