As a young man, Father spent hours in front of mirrors, a hopeful actor training his eyes to express loneliness. On cue, under stage lights, a cadmium hemorrhage swelled over his muscled chest where the villain’s knife struck, again and again. As a child, I saw him murdered on stage, and learned to await the stabbing, later dreaming the knife was in my hand.
“Why do you boys dance like women?” he asks tonight shortly after he forgets who I am. He can’t recall his own name. “The bodies sparkle with translucent powder their mothers wore. They feel the need to bond to every person, telling details of their suffering. This is how men train actors in certain countries, the same way they train prostitutes.”
“Really?” I whisper to the ceiling above his bed.
“I warned you,” he said.
He didn’t want to improve what God made gangly, the unwanted child who adored his fearful mystery. Pity passed, a hawk through night.
Every now and then, I remember the affection my father has always had for blown glass, bright and fragile and valuable, museum pieces as lovely as hollow jewels, a symbolic space I could never truly inhabit.
Details of blackouts, a dream in firelight, the shadow moving between his legs, my skeleton, as I starved, was a sign of strength smoldering inside. I needed nothing, not even food or companionship to survive. Alone, I sculpted children of paper, straw, clay, homemade glue, and disgorged newspaper. Papier-mâché became my religion, a way for me to populate a world that no one else wanted to live in. I called myself Billie because that’s what my father was suddenly calling me.
“Hands trained to fend for themselves claw like dogs, stroke like fiends,” he whispers.
“If you say so,” I say.
“Who asked you?” he asks. “I don’t know who the hell you are. Where am I?”
Love is always the far distance, the square leading out of the painting to the unseen cradle. It’s true—I’m attracted to women, breasts as soft as my hands passing under thin blouses, palms cupped, fingers trembling, wrists free.
“Dance,” he says, and I dance in the little hospital room until the nurses threaten to call security.
In my teenage years, gathered in darkness, I choked on thin crusts of bread. Even now, sorrow flows like wine. Men pass women drinking alcohol, washing their jeweled nipples. Stained teeth clack on bottlenecks.
Somewhere far away is a place my father once traveled where trains carry sisters between two houses, linked by a bridge. My mother was the wounded one living in a blue house with imaginary friends, weightless, dancing, feeling at home in her haven, her lovers as light as air as she wove their wings of straw. Having to be a mother to her, I became the artist she was and the child she could never be.
How many hilarious nights have I spent, weeping songs of dark-haired women into the river that ran her life? If her love were visible, she could have painted it in the years before she abandoned me, sending me back to America, to my father who could give me a better life—how terrible to know nothing lies beyond, a child who went through a world of colors.
“I’m the devil,” my father whispers as he dies, “passing rain through night. I’m a sick person and all my life was sick. Your mother’s blue-black hair is painted, murals over the river. Go with bridge-side guitarists, strum their women. Pass like visions, saints and whores dancing over dark water.”
I’m his son and his daughter, but he doesn’t know that now. I’m nowhere I want to be, just standing in this dim hospital room and wondering what he means.
Under the white paper gown, a spattering of blood shoots like red stars just as he claims he senses a child growing inside me, years before I’m reborn in the Baptist church, taking time to come back to life, hanging my head after the baptism, still wet, completely alone. He feels the jade beads of my eyes light on him, the other women in photographs frozen in time, immobilized by my youth, hands passing over a cheap blouse. On his deathbed, he’s talking through metaphor—apparently, my mouth tastes of money, my face is ash and dust, my eyes are moths, the rough skin of my lipstick is red wine. My chin is lemon pulp slick with blood.
“Your mother was magnificent, not pretty,” he says, his left foot twitching under thin blankets. “She was more of a man than I ever was, and that’s why I wanted her. I warned her. Don’t dream of marriage. There is no such thing.”
“Damn straight you will,” he says, as if I have just agreed to something that could make things right.
“I warned you,” he said when I was just a little child, and my mother promised to become a better mother, not a better painter.
Starving herself, her head as light as water in clouds, rarely feeling the difference between night and day, she stretched canvas, elegant fingers revising thumbnail sketches. Scrawled captions begged strangers to remember her: dawn sky washed over a girl with a ribbon tied around her waist, woman in white on the blue-house patio, a trained dancer, her naked arms outstretched. Never as hungry as the mouths she wanted to feed, her hands moved over the child who gave her visions, fainting spells, violet water. Tonight fingers fly over her eyelids like fireflies above the river, and in the darkness she dreams two fireflies are my eyes so that I am with her as she finally speaks my name.