Eleven Days to China
Emily Meier
Think I wanted to give my firstborn to the Chinese and before they’ve even got their act together? Not me. You can guess again.
I mean he did go. That much is true. A flight to Tokyo and then Beijing, but no way that took place because his mother said go on, kid, save the world. It was more me saying don’t go, you son of a bitch, which makes me the bitch but OK. Didn’t we need him at home cleaning up the mess his father left with his brother a zoned-out pothead and his sister having low self esteem? Haven’t I worked two full-time jobs?
There are things I would be happy to do for any son of mine—like let his friends sleep off their high school drunks on my living room floor or, when they didn’t have their licenses yet, take the whole bunch out to the desert so they could shoot off their pop guns at the lizards and watch them splatter. But Travis meeting an ambassador and going to the Forbidden City and being paraded around on some bus at my taxpayer expense. He could’ve told me to forbid him Phoenix if he wanted that.
You raise your kids. Maybe you get them to Mass sometimes and even switch and get born again once in a revival tent, and when you throw a ketchup bottle at their no-good, whoring father, you clean up before they see it and maybe you say a prayer being thankful the bottle’s plastic that time because your aim’s right on and what good is somebody’s mother doing permanent time for killing his dad? Forbidding a city, though.
I could’ve managed that.
Travis Donald Sanagamon, U.S.-China Friendship Volunteer. Peace Corps. They found a fancy name: China D. This, to me, is like Rocky III or Naked Gun 2 1/2 or whatever number it was before O.J. meant that name was finished. Not that I ever thought O.J. did it. There are women who tell me with my experience of men (you can read that Donny) I should be Denise Brown’s #1 supporter, but I could never see that he had the time. Forget the forensics. You know how long it takes to scrub a carpet clean of just one spurt of ketchup?
I am not agreeing with violence against women. But women can egg a man on or throw the first punch. I know women that fight back for real.
When it hit me Travis was leaving, he had eleven days to go. The dishwasher timer was broken, and I was at the sink washing glasses and looking at my cactus garden. I had the air conditioning on, but with my hands in the water I felt warm anyway. It was like when Travis was little and I was pregnant with Josh, and Travis would stick to my legs like a hot little bug and I’d push my bangs back with a damp wrist trying to keep the soap from my eyes. I remembered him on my legs. I could feel it like it was right now, and it was then this thing came out of me like the whistle of a train, like the whole damned train. This wail. They’re sending him to China. To CHINA.
I mean Travis is my ace in the hole. No slight to Josh or Jenny and I love them every bit the same, but he is the one truly perfect thing to come out of the whole crazy turmoil of Donny and me. Donny knows it too. At school, Ms. Gomez or Mr. Harris or Dr. Evers would compliment us to death and then, before we went on to Josh and Jenny’s teachers, Donny, who in the looks department is like Travis’s graying twin, would say, "One of us must have fooled around. How can this kid be ours?"
But China. I am from a big family, five kids, and even with three of us in Arizona, it’s hard to stay close. Dottie lives in San Diego, and every year she arranges the family reunion here, and Leon comes in from San Francisco and, no, in spite of what Donny blabs around, Leon’s not gay. My friend Maureen’s husband left her for a guy and her brother came out to her the same day and Maureen’s totalled in margaritaville, but I still wouldn’t care if Leon’s gay.
However, Leon isn’t.
I left the dishes in the drainer and went down the hall to Travis’s room. He was packing already. He’d been packing for two weeks, checking things off on a list and weighing books and white-out and markers and his camping stuff on the bathroom scale. I sat on his bed. "We got Mexicans right here you can teach English to," I said.
"Hispanics," he answered. "Chicanos. Chicanas."
"Well they’re right here."
"Mom," he said without looking at me, and when I picked up a shirt to fold it, he pointed toward the door and I kicked the shirt under his bed on my way out.
"You think the Chinese need you more than Josh and Jenny do? What if your Uncle Glancy gets pneumonia again? What if it’s worse and you aren’t here?" I was talking to a shut door and the volume went up on Sting, who is the one performer I recognize that Travis plays. I knew already he was gone. With him not even answering about Glancy, I knew it.
The fact is Travis worships Glancy. Glancy’s my baby brother, and back when he was nineteen he was in an accident with his Harley, and he would’ve made the para-Olympics this time, but he was in the hospital again during tryouts. He’s got a woman living with him here in town. Her and her two little girls that every time I see them I wish I’d had another girl for Jenny to have a sister, except after she was born I decided no more kids with that bastard. No pushing down and Donny walking in loaded, hitting on the nurses. I was jealous for one reason only: if they had wanted to, those nurses were entirely free to clobber Donald S. Sangamon since they weren’t in the middle of having a baby.
Glancy’s got spastic legs and you wouldn’t believe how strong they look from all that surprise clenching. But he can’t move them even a bit on his own and even if Glancy gets along fine, I’d lock my boys up before I’d let them on a bike. Hear that, Mr. China Ambassador? You give Travis a motorcycle, and I’m writing to Mike Wallace before you can spit.
I was hoping Travis would come out to the kitchen after I talked to him. Maybe get a coke or pick up a dish towel to help even if he didn’t say anything. Maybe get out the chocolate chips and start making cookies, which I taught him to and he is better at than Jenny. But his door stayed shut, loud shut on all that music and packing, and here I’d never even thought about it before that one of my kids would leave Phoenix. Let alone the state.
My dad was the one that decided to come here. He was in Tucson during the war, and his mother had bad lungs and he wanted her to come out after he and Mom and Leon got settled, but she stayed in Kentucky. My dad always said it was still a smart move in case one of us kids got asthma, but we never did. Once he went to California for six months, but his job fell through and he came back and took the house off the market. He owned half a gas station when he died. My mother lived off his share that his partner bought, though he cheated her good. She lived on that with her Social Security until she strangled to death on a piece of meat in a diner that didn’t know the Heimlich move.
I miss my dad the most. One summer he taught me how to scrape a boat and paint it and what’s the good of that in the desert, but we had a great time. We listened to Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies—Linda’s a Tucson girl—and when he died the whole family went in a pickup caravan out to the desert. Sunset. The sky boiled orange from the copper mines. Mom said to shake his ashes where he could see the rain falling down the mountains in sleeves, and so we did. Even now, sometimes a screen door bangs shut and, before I remember, I wait to hear him coming in with the grease spots on his shirt and the Standard embroidered on his pocket. I tell Jenny, don’t you get down on yourself. Your grandpa was as sweet on you as anybody could be.
Josh is my bigger worry, and I do not understand how Travis could walk out on that. Josh is a sweet boy, not planning for himself like Travis does, but just blundering into things that hurt him. His eyes are bad for a boy and we got him glasses when he was nine and that helped except for the names he got called. I even took boxing with him after Donny left and I thought that helped too, and so did my sister Angie who had the idea, but she is married to a Mexican and lives in Nogales and she is half in another country in all ways. She named my niece Ling-Ling, and Donny says to me, "Wait till she gets to kindergarten. Ling-Ling Ortega. Your sister the ding-a-ling named her baby after herself."
I was mad he said that, but then I laughed because I knew it was funny. It’s not like there were never any good times with Donny and me.
I mean we got together, right? What a dumb kid I was. Donny isn’t any Nick Tortelli, but I was still dumb. He had this line he practiced on every girl he saw and I was in the 1% that bit. It wasn’t even a line. It was poetry, or he said it was—poetry from the spirit of his grandfather who was part Navajo—and it was high speaking about things that are mystical and like aliens. I thought wow. Now I know it was poetry the way three sheets to the wind is poetry, but he said I was pretty and that I’d remember his hands on me the same way I remembered using my body to swim or hit a ball. Like you don’t forget how to ride a bike. And this is the part that was best with Donny and me. The way he touched me before I knew it wasn’t just me he was doing it to. Also, when he took the time, he was good with the kids the way a charmer is.
I am thinking this is what hurt Josh more than anything else. When Donny left, Josh had so much rage. Finally, I had to close his door just
to keep the feather lint in from when he pounded his pillows. They don’t tell you in counseling that when your family breaks up, one kid lives in the library and one puts fingernail polish on her eyebrows and the other one turns your house into an allergy zone. How do you get there from when Travis was a baby doing crawling races with Donny and I thought this is easy, this is how it’s supposed to be?
When I went to see Donny about Travis leaving he was at his trailer building a barbecue pit, though why this is necessary for a trailer I don’t know. I pulled up in my Camaro, which being my father’s daughter I have kept mint in spite of two boys. I waited, and I thought Donny would come over to the car window, but he had his trowel and he kept spreading mortar on the bricks and smacking them together though he knew I was there. I mean this isn’t something normal like a Weber. It’s a brick grill.
It’s not even adobe and rock.
I got out of the car and and showed him where the mortar had squeezed over the bricks. He had overalls on, which must be the idea of some woman I never met, and a painter’s cap that looked basically ridiculous. He told me I could mind my own business and what did I want.
"You could talk to your son," I said. He was using his plumb line and his T-square, and he was sighting past my legs entirely on purpose.
"You are talking which son?" he said, which could be fighting words if I let them, but I know that my two sons are the only ones he’s got in spite of any implications, and when Josh needs talking to is when we both know you can’t. I let it slide.
"Your big-shot, saving-the-Chinese son," I answered.
"About what?" Donny said. He was pouring in the water for more mortar, and I didn’t tell him it was too much.
"About how good the job market is now and what will it be in two years and Glancy has been sick and Josh could use the example and what about Jenny. To say nothing of me working two jobs, which of course you wouldn’t know."
"You don’t want him to leave."
"I didn’t say that. Well if you put it that way."
"He can go where he wants. He can get a Ling-Ling. The real kind."
"You can shut your nasty mouth," I said, and then good looking Dennis Mateo came out of the trailer and I was entirely surprised. In court, Donny said we were drinking tequila once with Dennis Mateo and I started kissing him. Kissing Dennis. I don’t remember that, which I’m alive enough I would, but I know Donny was lying anyway and this is why. I’ve got a friend at work whose husband died, and she’s with this married guy who’s a long distance trucker. I don’t think they messed around before, but she’s one of those women that needs a man, and this guy’s it. I don’t think it’s right. I never believed in people fooling with somebody that’s married. I always saw it from the other side. Maybe Donny didn’t make me jealous, but he made me humiliated. So I don’t think I kissed Dennis Mateo, though if I was kissing somebody married, Dennis would be all right.
"Josie," Dennis said, heading for his car, and I told him hi back and maybe it stopped me from beaning Donny right then with the trowel instead of driving off. I knew there was no talking to Donny, although if you ask me, he didn’t want Travis going either. He’s just too mean-stubborn to say it.
I’m not defending myself, but this is relevant fact. I am careful about my kids. Growing up, I knew my mother was a little shaky. She’d lose it sometimes and just whale on us. It came from her mother, who was in a wheelchair with a stroke from having all her kids, and Mom lived scared, kind of nervous it would happen to her and she wouldn’t be able to tell anybody what she wanted. When Glancy got paralyzed, she was just frantic. "Will he talk all right? Will he be able to talk to us?" she kept asking and we told her, "Mom, cool it. It’s just his legs." I have thought sometimes what she went through with that meat stuck in her throat.
But this has made me draw the line at physical violence with my own kids. The week after Travis left, when Josh didn’t come home I would not have hit him even if he’d walked in the house instead of them calling from the emergency room to say he was freaked out loony on bad dope. I got Jenny up to go with me. She was mortified somebody’d see her without her makeup on. I yelled at her. "Forget it, Jenny. Hurry up. It’s not an improvement." Which is basically true, but I shouldn’t have said it.
The truth is I was mad at myself for saying it and mad at myself for being the kind of mother that would have her kid half-dead on pot—all right, angel dust—so he can’t think straight and maybe that’s why I ended up back at Donny’s, which is where he was, no Dennis Mateo this time, and too drunk even to get his sorry ass to the hospital. Donny’s a lousy carpenter and a worse bricklayer. He had more leftover bricks than bricks in his grill and that made me mad too, and that’s half why, when he came reeling and stinking out on his steps with me yelling in the yard, that
I grabbed a brick and sailed it at him. He was too drunk even to see it.
I swear he passed out and then got knocked out besides, though the doctor will not admit to that since I threw two more bricks before Jenny tackled me when I thought she had blubbered to sleep in the back seat.
This is how I am in this predicament. The psychologist says I feel betrayed by Travis and that is why it happened. That Travis escaped me and my mother love, and that getting dumped by your own child after their father leaves can make a person snap.
I don’t know if that is so. I know I am here. In the night I am locked up, and in the daytime I am walking the streets of Phoenix picking up trash with the chain gang. I have raw skin. I have a hip I did not know would be arthritic starting to be so from walking funny. I have met women you would not believe. The worst part is the newspaper. Angie brought it. There is Travis in his college picture and the article about him in China. And there smack next to him is his mother with chains and the garbage.
It does not say I am his mother, but people will know. The National Enquirer will make this discovery and there will be headlines at the grocery store: "Chain Gang Mom Has Good Seed." "Peace Corps Son of Maricopa Mom."
There is something I have done so very wrong in all of this. Something worse than maiming Donny or leaving Josh and Jenny alone. It’s about Travis who’ll be coming home now, though he’s so way too good for us.
It’s about him. It’s about Travis, but words and more would fail me if I tried saying what it is.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)