The long stretch of manure-soaked highway outside Visalia reminded those who so rarely strayed from their air-conditioned temples about the existence of soil and livestock. My mom referenced the smell more than a couple times as we drove, as if to eradicate the piles of cow dung through ritual chant. Contrary to her perception, the valley of farms, orchards, and tilled plots of land did not conjure a water-color pastoral scene found on a china set, or smell like refrigerated fruit. Instead it was aching backs, dirt-covered knees, zigzags of strawberries, variants of red stretching into the horizon. And most importantly, shit. Tons of shit. People waited in parking lots, hoping for work outside the scattered Home Depots and Lowe’s. I peered out the window, shoving gluts of bread into my mouth as I watched them smoke cigarettes, the sun beating down on the hardened tar.
“Did you get your pee and timber, woman?” I asked.
“You always give me a hard time,” my mom responded, as if I’d hurt her feelings.
“I’m not giving you a hard time man, it’s just funny how you have to pee every three miles.”
“Wait till you’re my age, then you’ll regret the days you gave your poor mother shit.”
“We’ll see.”
She promised two hours of swift driving, but instead we broke off thirty minutes in, having spotted fresh fruit on the side of the road. The rain had come early: mercy for those breathing the dry dusty August air, but malady to the confused, disfigured fruits. Citrus dropped mutated with tentacles, GMO strawberries bulged before bursting into icky stick, owing to perpetual, endless rainstorms. I looked at them nestled and felt a strange kinship to those things brought into the world too early, malformed, lives shaped by freak sequences of weather, life seemingly unjustified in its malformity, jutting not from intent or purpose but more for the fuck of it. With the strawberries and mangoes on my lap I gave my lame philosophical sermon. My mom’s response was divine interference; tactically, one of the easier responses. Of my whole family she, my mother, was the last lingering Christian, at least truly. I thought something had brought me to where I was, but doubted it was god. I decided it was useless to unearth the deeply planted roots of others when the roots went to the core, one is better off disengaging. I watched the pink of the sunset on my mom’s soft face, eyes delicate enough to still need sunglasses, even as the sun went down.
“Why did your sister tell me I look ‘exotic?’” I asked, knowing why.
“I don’t know sweetheart did it bother you?”
“No.”
“Okay then.”
So I figured I had built myself like a gas station bathroom, at best a dilapidated construction of comfort and familiarity to those I met, conjured by pastels, general cleanliness, stored colloquialisms, and it was enough—at least it usually was. It was always my mom’s sisters who looked at me funny, but she usually hated her sisters anyways.
Henry sat waiting under the orange tree in the dark smoking yellows as we pulled up. I exited the vehicle quickly, almost too quickly, slapping the door closed like I’d forgotten the woman inside. She followed me swiftly, feeling the coldness of the speed.
“You sure you have a ride back?” she said, her voice strained as I had already begun moving a bag into the house.
“Yeah, Henry will drive me it’s fine.”
“Okay.” She waved to me once more, Henry waved, and then she pulled away.
Henry looked up at me, letting out a puff and pulling the chair out in one swift jolt. We stared down at our calloused feet on the brick, quietly pulling cigarettes.
“So you’ve decided you’re going?” Henry asked.
“Well I’ve made it this far, she wants to meet me, and I feel I have to go.”
“We’ll be in California again, it’s not like this is the only time.”
“I’m ready, okay. I need to do this, I have to.”
“Whatever you say. What do they think?”
“Oh I didn’t tell her. Or my dad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“It’ll be fine, this is your journey.”
“Yeah … ”
I looked off past the oranges and cascading smoke to the strong four or five lingering. It seemed possible in desert skies, held by mysterious beautiful fabric, the plentitudes of stars a symbol of the infinite. But here, with the scant city sky, felt familiar, in all its deep darkness.
“You sure you don’t want me to come in with you? Or at least drop you off at the house?” he asked me. We hadn’t talked the whole way.
“No, leave me here, it’s fine.”
“Call me if you need me.”
“I won’t it’s okay.”
I sat in the kitchen of the woman who had given birth to me. She was a head and a half shorter, almost amusingly short compared to me, with a thick black bun of hair at the base of her skull. Almost the entire time, her barefoot children clung to her maternal figure with great enthusiasm. They glared up at me with something like a deep gawking curiosity, in a twinkling, harmless way. I couldn’t tell if they knew. On her fridge were little magnets of faeries and trees. I could see her impish children dancing among them. It was the afternoon but she poured me wine. It sat in my hand like a dark red weight. I felt calm, steady and easy, but I thought to myself, steady and easy. It wasn’t entirely real.
She asked if we could sit outside and we did. It was warm and sunny, plus outside, there's more. More to pick at. To point out in harmless observation. Plants, dry walls, disparate people wandering through weedy backyard. Kindling for a conversation between two strangers, and also not strangers. She told me about when she didn’t leave bed for months, about having me at seventeen. Not going to college until she was twenty-one. To not to waste time on men. But also about her boyfriends, her current boyfriend, his training to become a nurse. About drinking too much. About living with a spirit that seeks destruction. I offered her the soft white stripes on the inside of my arm, as if to say, me too.
I even got tipsy enough to tell her how I had forgotten I was adopted for years. How, while standing in the shower at seventeen, I felt it, and remembered it, really for the first time realized it. I walked inside and went to the bathroom, the same as her family. Without thinking I rifled through her hair products. In the living room were photos of living blood, dead blood, fumbled origins of recent immigrants, cultish garb and years lived in India. Portraits and all the forgettable easily passed-by trinkets of a home gathered and clumped in lovely dusty corners, candy wrappers and mermaid toys. I knew I was not a part of it. I was dumb lucky, and I knew it, but also truly felt half of me ripped and oozing lost blood. I did not find it in the photos of strangers with hair dark like mine, the other part of me, the ghost limb. I couldn’t trace it. Even as a mutant occurrence, as a fundamental accident, I wanted the woman who complained about the smell of shit, who had driven me, many miles by pink churches peppers and adobe graveyards, she would hear me cry at night, and come to my room.
After leaving I sat in a green place. I wished I could burrow deep into the soil, joining the generations in the dirt, how they suffered, I would never know their suffering, even though everything was beautiful and perfect. It was not a guarantee to be alive but a part of me wished to donate it back, to not be a parasite clinging to the lives of others. But the plants sprung neon and crept up the mountains and lay glistening with dew under trees. And even though nature at times seemed a horrible dance, there was palpable joy in the eerie aliveness of plants and grasses so long left without rain. When rain did come to them they were overfed, gluttonous, jolting with invisible electricity conjured in the most desiccant of times.
The little instances came to me, hearing cracks in the voices of others, the color of air fresheners at gas stations, weddings around large turquoise fountains. The horribly mundane details. Times when it seemed all the living things withered away from the world. Many agreed, without knowing it, as they expeditioned around to see the anomalies of a great rain, golden poppies and decorated fields that the most vibrant and beautiful lands were often the ones left longest deprived. The lands left longest without gully washers and rains, the ones that thought they had seen their own end. I placed my hands on the plants and trees that make their own food and watch the world quietly and thought, the river continues to flow, how can I keep from singing.
Mommy Issues | December 2019