The swollen sun amplified the brilliance of turquoise, yellow and orange storefronts in Oaxaca that Christmas. I was thirty-one and along with my relatives on my mother’s side, had rented a villa with a central courtyard, where we gathered daily. I was still under the impression that I had the perfect family. My grandfather sat in a tall wooden chair in an argyle sweater with a striking shock of white hair. My aunts cut avocados and squeezed limes into a giant ceramic bowl. My cousins lay on woven blankets with ear candles inserted halfway into their brains. These were cone shaped gadgets designed to burn slowly and draw the wax out of ear canals. My cousin’s wife read the instructions aloud emphasizing the fact that you shouldn’t be surprised to find bugs in the residue of your eustachian tubes. They all screamed and laughed hysterically at such a thought.
I was struck for the millionth time by how beautiful they were. A familiar stew of admiration and envy coursed through me. As children, I was the brunette in a flock of blonde relatives, the ugly duckling who didn’t fit. From my earliest recollections I was vaguely aware that one’s hair color dictated their status. Luckily I was the eldest cousin which trumped everything when it came to pecking order.
My veterinarian uncle was telling the story of how he had perforated his own ear drum after foolishly using a horse Q-tip one day. I yearned to join the antics, but I was on my way to my parents’ room for a family meeting, initiated by my father.
My brother’s door stood open to the patio and I peeked in to see if he had left yet. His wife was nursing their new baby in an armchair by the window. I waved and scanned the shadows for Jed. He came out of the bathroom, stepped into a pair of flip flops and took his daughter’s tiny foot for a moment. With an endearing smile and bright blue eyes, he was the one who resembled our cousins.
Stepping into the afternoon sun he asked, “What do think this talk is about?”
“Something ominous,” I said, recalling our father’s sober demeanor at lunch.
We walked together along earthen tiles and paused outside a rustic oak door. In the dimly lit room, our mother greeted us from the edge of a sofa, her long legs tucked sideways in an oddly self-conscious gesture. Our father fidgeted in a crooked chair. We sat on the crisp floral blanket that
covered the bed. I tugged on a stray green thread that had escaped it’s embroidered leaf.
In my childhood home, when Star Trek was on, I perched on the couch with my parents and Jed, balancing dinner plates on laps. Awash in blue light from the TV screen, we ate bean casserole or hamburger pie while the Starship Enterprise explored strange new worlds. My father, volatile as Captain Kirk, worshipped Mr. Spock’s commitment to logic and reason. I inherited a love for science fiction as well as a fascination with philosophy.
On occasion we would go on outings, just the two of us, to the Stamford Diner or Baskin
Robbins. He sipped a double chocolate milkshake while I licked a mint chocolate chip cone and
speculated about whether a tree that falls in the woods makes a sound if there is nobody there to
hear it.
“You make me feel smart,” I told him once and he was so charmed that he quoted it for
many years to come.
In college I took a philosophy class called Theories of Knowledge and Reality. I couldn’t
resist that title. Although I was majoring in photojournalism and graphic design, I enthusiastically took as many random electives as I could. It may not have been a great strategy for maintaining a high grade point average, since it maxed out my credits each semester, but I was abundantly curious and interested in the world. I took everything from astronomy to scuba to History of Magic and Witchcraft.
The philosophy class was graduate level and I have no idea why an art major like me, with no prerequisites under her belt, was allowed to enroll in it, but I sat in a small metal chair attached to a folding desktop in a row of older students and had my mind blown all semester. I was my father’s daughter. He had been a philosophy major and there was nothing he liked more than debating questions that had no answers.
One day after class, I dropped my backpack in the hallway of the rental house I shared
with six other students and snatched our rotary phone off the credenza. I stretched the cord all the
way into my room and sat cross legged on the blue rug. Still out of breath from racing up the
stairs, I dialed my father’s number.
“Have you heard of the Ship of Theseus?” I asked him, leaning back against my bed and kicking off my boots. It was a thought experiment that we had discussed in class that day, about a wooden ship. Over time, each plank decays, is taken away and then replaced. Despite the continual reparation, the question is whether it remains the same ship. If so, what gives it its same-ness? And if not, when does it stop being itself? If somebody kept the old planks and reassembled them in the same order, would that be a second ship or the original ship?
“Yes, it’s an interesting paradox,” my father replied. “Do you think it’s the same ship?”
“At first I did, but later I wasn’t so sure. I guess I’m less interested in ships and more concerned with people. Am I the same Kendall that was once your little baby even if all my cells have changed? Even if my form has changed?”
“That’s the essential question, isn’t it? If you were once and always my Kendall then
what is the enduring quality that makes you, you?”
“It must be something beyond the physical world. Is it my memories? My personality? My soul? My name? I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the same. Maybe I have no identity,” I said.
“What if you’re not a thing made of parts, but instead you’re a concept?”
“And the concept of me persists even when all of my physical matter is replaced?”
“Yes, thanks to perceptual continuity,” my father said.
I could feel my brain stretching to match his intellect and I desperately wanted him to think I was smart. In his world that equated to love.
“I like that term,” I replied. “But does that mean that my identity relies on someone perceiving me? It makes me feel like a tree falling in the woods that only makes a sound if there’s somebody there to hear it.”
“I hear you and I love you very much, Kendy.”
In the dim room in Mexico my father said, “I wanted to talk to you kids about something.”
On the street outside, a brass band wailed joyfully.
“Do you have an illegitimate child or something?” my brother joked.
It was typical for him to use sarcasm in uncomfortable situations. My Dad leaned back in his chair and glanced at my mom. Something unspoken seemed to tumble in the air between them. I wrinkled my forehead and funneled all of my awareness onto my father, the abstract planes of light reflecting off his glasses, his black and white beard, his round nose.
“Actually, yes, a daughter,” he answered.
“Holy shit,” my brother said with an incredulous laugh. The rest of us were speechless.
The contents of my mind evaporated. Suddenly I had the disorienting realization that all the planks in my ship had been rearranged. My father began to explain, but I was on the ocean trying to reconstruct the only boat I had ever known.
“Long before I met your mother, I had a romance with a woman from Brazil. I was only twenty-one and had no capacity to take care of anyone, let alone myself. She became pregnant and I offered to help, but she insisted on returning home and raising the baby without me.”
I couldn’t assimilate this new information into our family story and I didn’t want to. It meant two things about my father that were too incongruous to fit my understanding of him. He condoned secrecy and he was capable of abandoning his child.
I turned to gauge my brother’s reaction. His high cheekbones and clenched jaw revealed
only stoicism.
“Did you ever wonder about her?” I asked.
“No, you’re my family,” he insisted.
Did he think that this was what I wanted to hear? No, he was not in the habit of appeasing others. He was honest to a fault and he had carried on for thirty-nine years without thinking about his daughter. Somehow this called into question his love for me. I felt inexplicably adrift. Abandoned. Fatherless.
He was still talking, his beard moving in rhythm with the words. Tucked into the awkward chair, he seemed unusually small. I was processing bits and pieces. Her name was Tania. She was eight years older than me. She lived in California. She had five children and a granddaughter.
My mother interjected, “That means that Dad is a great grandfather. Can you believe it?
They all had teen pregnancies.” Disdain has a way of being contagious. I wrinkled my nose in
solidarity with my mom. Outside a stray dog let out a yip. Then came a canine chorus of call and response.
My dad described the phone call in which a timid voice said, I think you’re my father. He traveled to California to meet her. He had given her money to buy a car, but she had relinquished it to a needier friend. My mom said that they lived in a trailer park with bunches of kids. I noticed how that term made it sound more like an infestation than a family, but it would take me years to recognize that my parents were packaging this story to discourage me from getting involved. My brother was still sitting quietly. All at once a memory snuck up on me. It was a refrain that my father often repeated in affectionate moments. You’re the best daughter in the world, except for all the daughters in Brazil. It had seemed preposterous at the time and I never understood where it had originated,
but even as a child I was unnerved by it.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “That thing you used to say, except for all the daughters in Brazil. Why would you do that?”
He paused. “I suppose it was a humorous nod to your mother. A private joke, if you will.”
“That’s horrible,” my voice faltered as I ricocheted through a series of questions. “Why did you keep it a secret?”
“Your mom,” he said. “She asked my not to tell anyone. Left to my own druthers, I
would’ve told everyone.”
My mother explained, “I wanted my parents to have a happy, non-judgmental view of my
fiancé. My father would never tolerate breaking the rules of sex and marriage.” She reached up,
pinched a lock of her hair between thumb and forefinger and twisted it fiercely enough to make a
gritty sound. Her nervous habit.
“And what about now?” Jed asked. “Is it still a secret?”
“Yes, please keep it to yourselves,” my mother said.
Jed nodded, appearing to capitulate.
“So you break this news to us on a trip with the whole extended family and now we’re supposed to guard the secret? Am I the only one who thinks that’s weird?” I replied.
Nobody answered. I shrugged, exasperated.
My father set a collection of photographs onto the bed. They varied in size. I picked up a small black and white one and recoiled. It was like looking straight into my own childhood. She was an elementary aged kid with a reluctant smile and enormous teeth. The very same ones that had caused me seven years of braces. I reached for another. She was in high school with feathered brown hair. She was my twin, awkwardly closing her mouth over those unwieldy teeth. Her bottom lip was full and the corners turned down in a perpetual pout that I knew well. In another photo she was an adult and her hair tumbled down in a wavy cascade. She had my eyebrows, dark and arched, and heavy eyelids which made her seem both surprised and sleepy. I had never looked like anyone before. A sister’s life story was in this pile of photos where only moments ago she hadn’t existed at all. If a daughter grows up in Brazil and there’s no father there to hear it, does she make a sound?
“As far as I’m concerned,” my brother exclaimed, “Dad is just a sperm donor. They’re not our family.” He tossed one of the photographs back onto the bed.
I wondered how a new father could be so callous. Didn’t paternity carry any weight for the men in my family? I wished that I had an ally in my brother, someone with whom I could process this strange experience, but he seemed unapproachable.
“Tania asked if she could contact you,” my father specifically addressed me.
“No,” I responded hastily, overwhelmed by the splintering of our family’s ship. “She
cannot.”
I must have levitated through dinner that night, barely present. I remember tortilla soup with cilantro. I remember a parade in the street with children in angel wings and actual donkeys. When the sun came around the next morning, we were walking on faded grass among the forlorn ruins of the Zapotec city, Monte Alban. Its carefully laid out pyramids and temples still had a commanding presence even though their time had come and gone. The wide swath of stairs monopolizing the exterior of each building made me think that the whole point was to reach the sky. I tested the uneven stones through the soles of my sneakers, cautiously setting my toes on each tread. They weren’t deep enough to accommodate my heels which hung precariously over the edges. I tiptoed up each small riser to the flat summit of a soaring pyramid. The centuries and the elements had erased any signs of the human sacrifices that had occurred there. Gazing back down, my ascent looked as steep and wide as an Olympic ski jump. My family was scattered in tiny cliques on the ancient plaza below. The Oaxaca Valley fell away for miles and was trimmed by hazy mountains. I was dizzy with vertigo and the weight of my parents’ confession. I considered throwing discretion to the wind by leaking the blood of this secret to the whole clan, but I didn’t dare. I hadn’t fully excavated my own feelings yet. So I turned inward instead of lashing out.
During the next several days at the villa, even with our secret contained, family ties unraveled. I observed it with uncharacteristic detachment. The recent death of our matriarch, my beloved grandmother, amounted to removing the keystone and unlocking a rockslide. My aunts competed to be the caretaker of their widowed father. Significant others complicated the dynamic and fights erupted more impulsively than ever before. My mother wove herself over and under the drama, muttering about how everyone was on their very worst behavior. I was grateful when it was time to fly home to my life in Colorado.
Over the years I thought of Tania. Somewhere in California there was a half sister who shared my face, but the picture my parents painted had dissuaded me from reaching out. Her husband was a loose cannon. They had lost custody of their oldest daughter. They squandered the money my father gave them.
Still, a current of curiosity lurked at my core and led me to type her name into the search bar on Facebook. There she was metamorphosing over the years. A skinny buck toothed little girl. A self conscious teen with lonely eyes. A wavy haired young mother. A plump grandma surrounded by nine grandchildren. Her dream was to see the Eiffel Tower. She adored stray dogs. She quoted Star Trek often. She was a sucker for conspiracy theories. She hated Muslims. She loved guns. She was vehemently opposed to abortion and she demanded a Christian in the White House. Most perplexing of all, she despised immigrants, although she had moved here from Brazil. I decided we were polar opposites. To be honest, I was a little scared of her, so I let the years pass without contacting her. I married, moved to a house in the mountains and had two babies.
My father gave me the occasional update. She was in nursing school. Her mother passed away. His voice in the phone always sounded like mahogany, smooth and resonant.
“I thought you might want to know,” he said one day. “Tania has cancer. They’ve given her six months to live.” I searched his demeanor for any sorrow and found none.
“Do you feel any emotions for Tania?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t as impervious as he
seemed.
“I think what I feel is a sense of duty,” he replied.
All at once I longed for the little girl in the black and white photos who had never been loved by her father. In my mind I began drafting an email to Tania. How do you introduce yourself to a dying sister you’ve never met? Fifteen years ago, I had rejected her. Perhaps she hated me for everything I had and everything she lacked. A father, financial security, a future. Why me and not her?
At bedtime, lying on the blankets with my children, I said, “Once upon a time, there was a young woman who thought her life was normal until the day when she discovered she had a sister she’d never met.”
“Will this story have a firefighter in it, Mama?” Rowan asked.
“And a fairy?” Chloe added.
“Of course. All of our stories do,” I replied.
After the kids went to sleep, I sat at the desk in my office and nudged my computer awake.
“Dear Tania,” I wrote. “I hope that you are OK with me contacting you. I’ve been curious about you. We share a father who is a very interesting and unusual character. He’s smart, funny, anxious, bossy, creative, articulate, obnoxious, loyal, combative, critical, enthusiastic, talented, tortured, philosophical, musical, loud, obsessive-compulsive, quick-witted and rebellious. And he dances an impressive Mambo. That picture of you as a little girl looks just like him.”
I tried to look into the darkness beyond the window pane, but it was impenetrable. I leaned toward the desk and read my message over and over, while the wheels of my office chair slowly crept out from under me. Finally I hit send.