Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 15
When I called Guillermo to ask him directly about his relationship with Annie, I reached him in the midst of work. He’d just purchased a van to start up a portable mechanic’s shop and was headed to a junkyard to pick up an engine. He could still remember the first time he’d met Annie, back in the early ’90s, when he’d come home to find a stranger standing outside his house, taking photographs, and had no idea what she was doing there. He hadn’t seen a lot of Americans. The first thing he ever said to her was “Someday, I’m going to get to your country.”
Now that Guillermo was here, he still insisted that—even under Trump—it was a better life for his children. “We are a little bit afraid,” he told me, and then I heard Gloria say something in the background, and he corrected himself: “We are a lot afraid.” Whenever he left the house, he said, Gloria would make the sign of the cross for his safety, and he would tell her, “If I don’t come back, you’ll know why.”
When I asked Guillermo how his relationship with Annie had evolved over the years, he paused for so long I wondered if the connection had dropped. But eventually he said, “I think…too much,” and I realized he was struggling to describe a relationship that felt so encompassing. Annie had photographed his entire life. “When I don’t remember something about my life,” he told me, “I ask Annie, because she has probably photographed it.”
On her visits, he explained, she was constantly taking photographs. “When we are eating, she photographs us eating. When we are working, she photographs us working. All the time. All the moments.” He could look at her photographs and see his children as infants, or himself as a child, living in poverty in San Martín. When he was just a teenager, Annie gave him the money he needed to move away from his hometown. She had always been there for him to talk to. She had always told him he would be able to live his dreams. As we spoke, I kept waiting for darker notes to creep into his voice—for any suggestion that perhaps sometimes he felt invaded by Annie’s attention, or betrayed by it. But I never heard those notes. Those were simply the tensions I’d conjured when I’d imagined the narrative for myself.
When I asked Guillermo what single thing he would want someone to know about Annie and her relationship with his family, he said: “She is a good person.” And then: “She is my sister.” Not like, but is. And to his kids, she is Tía Anita. Tía Anita. He didn’t say it once, but several times. He wanted me to understand.
Annie calls her work a form of love, and considers love a form of focused attention. In the academic programs where I’ve studied and taught, where bromides are kryptonite and emotion is expected to footnote its own presence, it is always risky to use the word love without cautionary quotes. But that’s part of why I keep coming back to Annie: there’s no room for scare quotes in how she speaks. She owns the heart in her work. It’s another kind of transgression.
And if Annie’s work is fueled by love, then it’s a form of love that doesn’t blunt or distort her gaze. Her love sharpens her sight. Her work has helped me trust that an enduring emotional investment—even in all its mess and mistakes, because of its mess and mistakes—can help you see more acutely. It can sensitize your gaze to the competing vectors of emotion churning beneath ordinary moments: the particular angle of a woman’s body over her laundry; a father’s bewilderment as he stares down at his crying daughter; the posture of a man at the doorway of his new home, grinning as he holds his tired son, right before carrying him across the threshold.
When I look at Annie’s early proof sheets, from her first visits to Baja, I see some version of what she saw then: a mother with her infant, a father with his encyclopedias and his tequila bottles and his towering stacks of bricks. But I also see the long shadows cast by everything that hasn’t happened yet: years of day jobs and rejected grant applications and ruptured love affairs; fights with mothers and unexpected pregnancies; addictions and fires and bus rides to new lives. I see the lurking horizons of a project that would keep leaving Annie humbled, more confused than when she’d begun. After nine years: I understand nothing. In those early negatives, I see cornflakes and cigarettes and stubborn wind and sudden laughter. I see everything the photos knew alongside everything they didn’t know yet, and this unknowing is one more definition of love: committing to a story you can’t fully imagine when it begins.
— III —
Dwelling
Rehearsals
Weddings are holiness and booze, sweat under the dress, sweet icing in the mouth. A whaler’s church in the afternoon, sunlit and salted, gives way to the drunken splendor of a barn, and an entire island is suddenly yours, yours and everyone’s. You feel the lift of wine in you, you feel the lift of wine in everyone, and you’re all in agreement—not to believe in love, but to want to. This, you can do. You dance with a stranger and think, We have this in common, this wanting to believe. In what, again? In the possibility that two people could actually make each other happy, not just today but on ten thousand days they can’t yet see.
Weddings are hassle. Hassle is spending money you don’t have to celebrate the lives of people who have more money than you do. Hassle is finding yourself booked on a round-trip flight, Boston to Tulsa, and wondering, How did this happen? Hassle is driving to an Oklahoma conference center in the middle of the night. Hassle is getting stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and listening to your friend’s boyfriend talk about getting his pilot’s license. Hassle is taking the PATH train to Hoboken at two in the morning, shoulder to shoulder with the drunkest bridge-and-tunnel crowd, thinking, “Bridge-and-tunnel” is such a demeaning phrase, and also, These people are really drunk! Weddings are taking a plane, a train, a bus, a ferry, and then setting down your bulky backpack in a little internet café to check your email and finding a note from your new boyfriend saying he just talked about you with his father for the first time. This makes the wedding ahead feel swollen with possibility. You’re someone who might someday be loved. You’re in the game.
Weddings are getting dropped at a post office on a dusty road in the middle of the Catskills and waiting for a ride to the lodge. There’s always a lodge. There’s always cocktail hour at the lodge, and group activities at the lodge, and a hurried hunt for a bridesmaid’s missing shoes at the lodge. We go distances to celebrate the love of people we love, but sometimes it hurts the heart to stand alone on an empty road and think, What am I doing here?
Everyone talks about weddings as beginnings but the truth is they are also endings. They give a horizon of closure to things that have been slowly dissolving for years: flirtations, friendships, shared innocence, shared rootlessness, shared loneliness.
Weddings are about being single and wondering about being in love, and being in love and wondering about being in love—what it’s like for other people, and whether it hurts as much as it sometimes does for you. At every wedding, all of a sudden, all bets are off and everyone is asking when your boyfriend is planning to propose, and you are watching your boyfriend talk to the girl at the cheese table, and the wine in you wants to fight, and the wine in you thinks, You will never love me like I need you to.
You thought you knew drunk crying before you went to weddings. You’d gotten tipsy on cheap wine in the middle of the afternoon, alone, and cried rereading emails ex-boyfriends sent before they were ex-boyfriends. But you didn’t know this kind of drunk crying: alone in the bathroom at your brother’s wedding, or your other brother’s wedding. And you couldn’t even explain it properly, because you were happy for them, you were, but you were also feeling something else, only you’d gotten too drunk to remember what it was. You learned there was a kind of crying that was okay, and another kind of crying that wasn’t—a violent, angry crying—and without quite noticing, you’d crossed from one to the other.
Sometimes the best weddings are the weddings of strangers. You are only a date. No particular feelings are required. You cry as a groom remembers his mother, who died of cancer years earlier, and even though you’ve never met this guy, he’d once been in a band with your boyfriend, you can see the way he looks at his wife, and you think his mother must have loved him well. When you step outside the barn, it’s sunset in early June and there are fields of something under the light, and you think of that Sting song, the one you were always embarrassed to love, except maybe it’s not embarrassing to love it here. You have a little quiche in your palm, and you feel your boyfriend’s arms wrap around you from behind—he has only one suit, you know its crispness well—and this moment might be a little too sweet, like wedding cake, but it’s yours. You summon your most primal, shameful dreams—for some kind of life you learned to love in magazines—and feed them tiny quiches, these dreams, and hope that these will be enough.
You wonder what they feel, people who get married, at the precise moment they commit to their vows. Is it only bliss, or also fear? You hope for fear. Because mostly you can’t imagine feeling anything else. Except when you can summon the edge of a man’s suit against your back, familiar, his hand on your arm, his voice in your ear.
By you, of course, I mean I. I wonder about fear. I don’t want to be afraid.
At thirteen I took a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco and wondered what my father loved in the woman he was about to marry, and what he’d loved in my mother, and if there was anything he still loved in my mother, and how these circles might overlap, if laid across one another. At the airport my mother hugged me and tried her best to pretend she didn’t feel betrayed that I’d chosen to go, that she wasn’t buckling under the weight of thirty years ending. Or maybe she was going to buckle once I left. I could see it. I took it with me.
At the wedding I cried what my mother hadn’t cried in front of me. I cried in a room full of the relatives of my father’s new wife. I was that terrible stepdaughter, the one from terrible movies, making a scene in front of everyone. I sat in the corner of a dim banquet hall and my brothers patted me on the back so I wouldn’t feel so fully out of place, so fully without an anchor. They didn’t have wives yet then. I didn’t want anyone to look at me. That was part of why I started crying even harder, which of course must have seemed like just the opposite: a plea for everyone’s attention.
When my parents first separated, my father had moved into a dark apartment in a corporate-looking building facing a grove of eucalyptus trees. I remember he got an ice-cream maker so we could make ice cream together. I remember the ice cream tasted like ice crystals. I remember finding a photograph of a beautiful woman with a blurry face on his dresser. I remember thinking the whole place felt incredibly lonely. I remember feeling sorry for him.
Months later, when he told me he was getting married, to a woman I hadn’t yet met, I thought of the woman in the photograph and realized that his loneliness had lied to me. It wasn’t his but mine, my own loneliness reflected in the cage of his new life, a space in which I felt I had no place.
When I cried at his wedding, I cried for the betrayal of that dim apartment—how I’d imagined him lonely when in fact he was happy, and how my sympathy had made a fool of me in the end.
The Long Trick
When my grandfather died, I lost a man I’d never really known. I was nearly thirty and I’d seen him maybe three times in my life. He existed mainly as legend: a drunk and a pilot. He was a colonel in the Air Force, stationed in Brazil during World War II, and for the rest of his life he claimed that country as a second home: bought a tract of land in the jungle, off the grid, and eventually got sober in Natal. He raised my father and my two aunts before he quit drinking and started taking lithium; after doing these things he got married again and had two more daughters. Over the years, I came to realize he’d been a very different father to them.
When I was young, my father used to tell me stories about going to the airfield with his dad when he was a boy. He loved watching Marshall inspect his plane, circling the tires and checking the glass canopy for cracks. These stories didn’t make me feel close to my grandfather so much as they made me feel close to my father. They brought me into his awe. Once, I asked my dad if he’d been proud that his dad knew how to fly a plane. He was quick to specify: not just a plane, a bomber jet. That meant yes, he’d been proud. That meant he still was.
His voice got soft when he spoke about the way Marshall held his helmet case like a briefcase in his hand, like any regular businessman going to work, except his office was an airfield, and his business was in the sky.
My father never learned to fly a plane, but he spent a lot of time in flight. For my whole childhood, his work took him all over the world. The casual ease with which he mentioned a round-trip to Beijing was thrilling, his voice gravelly with authority and elusiveness, his presence electrified by the fact that he always had commitments elsewhere. His passport was a patchwork of entry stamps and visas. He always had to order extra pages.
I grew up worshipping the men in my family, my father and my two older brothers, but once I turned nine, they all started leaving. My brothers went to college. My father moved across the country for work. I don’t remember being angry about it. He was gone so often anyway. I knew his work was important, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why my parents got divorced when he got back. I didn’t get angry about that either. Instead, I got angry that my middle brother, Eliot, went to college, two years after Julian, my oldest. These ordinary departures carried the full weight of betrayal. They made me realize I wasn’t as central to their lives as they were to mine.
The house was very quiet in those days. It was just me and my mother. A few months into Eliot’s freshman year, I made a drawing on our computer, using an early-’90s graphics program that made everything look like an Etch A Sketch. It was a self-portrait of me sitting on his bed with big fist-sized teardrops pasted under my eyes. I called it Jealous Sorrow.
I used to call Eliot in his faraway dorm room and refuse to get off the phone until he told me he loved me. I love you, I’d say. I love you I love you I love you. I’d say it until he said it back. Sometimes he did. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes there was just silence. I felt so wronged. Really, of course, I felt wronged by my father. Really, of course, pleading to that quiet line, I was talking to my father.
Before my brothers were gone, and before my father was gone, my grandfather was gone. He was the original absent man. The distance between him and my father—the fact that they saw each other so rarely—was almost never discussed. But decades later, when my grandfather was dying of cancer, my father asked me to come to the small fishing town on the Chesapeake Bay where Marshall lived with his second wife. Eliot and I sat with our father at a seafood shack about a ten-minute drive from the house where his own father was dying. He’d camped out there over a dish of crab cakes because he wanted to grant his stepmother and his half sisters their privacy. It made me sad to think my father thought he would be intruding on his own father’s death.
Marshall died with his youngest grandson, just one month old, tucked into the crook of his arm. When I saw his body an hour later, still lying on the bed, he looked frail and jaundiced: a smooth wax statue, yellow face capped with a pale blue beanie, eyes partway open.
During the days after his death, life in his house felt physical and proximate: soft blankets on chairs, soup on the stove, babies crying. My father’s stepmother, Linda, and his half sisters, Danica and Kelda, were gracious in their grief. They welcomed us into a home that smelled like shampoo and cooking oil and diaper cream. They read us the poem they had read to Marshall as he was dying: I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, / To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife. Both of my aunts had newborn sons who remained oblivious in the face of mortality: they got hungry, got gassy, got confused and amazed by every little thing. Danica told me that for days life in that house had been all about bodies: nursing her son, turning her father in bed so he wouldn’t get sores, helping him get to the bathroom when he was able to walk, then changing his bedpan when he wasn’t.
Eliot was reserved—he was almost always reserved—but he was comfortable holding the babies. His posture with them summoned his whole life back home: everything he had built, the kind of father he had chosen to become. Back in Vancouver, he had a wife and two young sons and a split-level house and a job in infrastructure: bridges and railroads and highways. Nothing in the air. He hit suburban playgrounds on weekends. He wasn’t afraid of presence. That’s what I told myself back then. Now I think maybe he was afraid of presence, just like the rest of us, and kept showing up anyway. He carried a briefcase but it held no helmet. He stayed on land.
On the other side of the continent, in Connecticut, I was smoking cigarettes on my stoop and feeling sorry for myself by replaying arguments I’d had with my boyfriend before we broke up. At the tail end of my twenties, newly sober and newly single and still regularly commuting to other people’s weddings, I had just broken the lease on the apartment I’d shared with my ex and moved into a one-room studio with a fridge full of seltzer water and a dryer whose indoor vent laced the humid air with tiny particles. It always smelled like mint from the extract I’d sprinkled everywhere to repel the mice that kept coming back anyway. The loneliness of that apartment seemed like apt punishment for fleeing my relationship instead of working on it harder—for being fickle, unstable, and uncertain; for being needy but unable to reciprocate the love I needed. My mother wanted me to have children, and some part of me wanted that also—a part of me buried deep beneath the fear of being constantly accountable to another person.
