Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (24 page)

The face of perfection.

My own petty jealousy crouches inside a tiny box buried in my chest (it sits alongside the ring-sized box of panic from the day I swam the Amazon). It pushes against the lid, threatens to spring forth like a demented jack-in-the-box. Why shower the stranger in this old photograph—and other strangers, too—with unconditional adoration? Why not my mother, when she was your young wife, nineteen years old with a newborn baby, living in a tent in the backyard? Why not your daughter on her eleventh birthday when she handed you a gift, the songbird T-shirt? A bar of soap? Really? I still carry the tune of that certain song in my head:
I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I'd like to hold it in my arms and keep it company
. And I still carry the secret with me, that I was the one who scratched your record the morning after you returned from your night on the town. I rubbed my finger into the record because I didn't know how to express my jealousy, my bitterness over your physical absence the night before, your emotional absence that morning and every preceding day of my life.

How could that be? I checked it in the store.

I don't know.

The face of perfection.

As I sat on the couch across from my father, reading his soul-baring letters to an unearned and unrequited love, the paper butterflies on the wall behind him seemed to swarm around his head, flapping their paper wings like bone-dry laundry broken free from the line, whirling furiously through the desert winds of San Vicente. I recalled the night my father and I watched the meteor shower in the courtyard of the Mexican motel, and how he lectured about the Big Bang and the origins of the universe, how he explained the cosmos in a way that accounted for me, a Carole-centric universe where atoms crash, then dissolve, then reassemble again. The universe, life on Earth—scorpions, butterflies, people—continually shifts from one shape to another, either gradually, like Darwin's theory of adaptation, or suddenly, like Gould's spin on punctuated equilibrium theory. It's the same for relationships between people, too—our connections shift, our circumstances change, our needs evolve—sometimes slowly, sometimes in an instant. But here's the thing: beneath the glow of the meteor shower that night in the desert, my father remained oblivious to the domestic life buzzing around us—men sharing a laugh as they leaned against an open pickup truck, women hanging laundry on the line. In contrast, I was interested in him, and in the children kicking a soccer ball against the courtyard's cinderblock wall, and the fact that I had become a real-life version of the fictional Holly from
Land of the Lost
, living a real-life adventure to recover lost time and familial experiences. Searching for my lost father.

To my dismay, the woman replied to his initial letter and many letters thereafter. They corresponded for several years—I guess
precious beating heart
doesn't bother everyone like it does me. She kept her letters quite brief, rather impersonal, and she specifically told my father several times that she was happily married, did not want to be contacted by phone, and had no interest in meeting up. I don't know if it was on the day my father first showed me the letters or sometime after, but eventually he would show me where he often kept his folder of correspondence and photos: on his pillow at night, so he could imagine her at his side.

The afternoon I sat on my father's couch with the face of perfection in my lap, I didn't know that a few years later he would call me from Mexico to say he'd decided to stay forever. I didn't know he'd say into the phone, “I don't have long for this world. I need you to ship me some things.” When he rattled off the list of things he wanted to me to send—his Great Lectures DVD collection from The Teaching Company, his
Encyclopedia Britannica
set, odor-free garlic tablets, and five pairs of leather shoes—he also requested the manila folder containing his correspondence to and from Sandy Lynn Milmoe and the photocopies of her black-and-white portrait. “I have the original photograph here with me,” he would say on the phone, “but I need the enlarged copies, too. I don't sleep well here in Mexico. I need you to send me the whole folder.”

 

Fifty

 

(2013)—

He has the folder.

What he doesn't have is the butterfly painting, the former nucleus of his butterfly montage. I kept it for myself. It hangs on my living room wall now. Not long after he moved to Mexico and asked me to send some of this favorite belongings—not long after I stole the scorpion from his desk and ravaged his filing cabinets—he called again, telling me he had forgotten about a certain painting he'd left at the framing shop, and that I should pick it up for him. The butterfly.

From where I often sit on my favorite corner of the couch, my gaze settles on two paintings that hang alongside each other on my living room wall: the butterfly, painted by my father, and a purple lady, painted by my mother some four decades later, sometime around 1995. The two paintings are diametrically opposed in every way possible: subject, medium, technique, style, and intent.

The butterfly, a meticulously detailed and accurate rendition of a Western Tiger Swallowtail (
Papilio rutulus
) native to North America—including Baja, Mexico, where we frequently traveled as a family during my early childhood, and California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, where my father and I often hiked while he lived in my neighborhood—could pass as a scientific illustration in a biology textbook. The butterfly itself is one-dimensional, void of foreground and background, and there is no use of shading to create depth or perspective. The viewer of the painting peers straight down—through a microscope or magnifying glass, perhaps—onto a specimen long flattened between two glass slides. I wonder how my father achieved such anatomical perfection. I imagine he projected a photograph via slide projector onto the wall, then traced the details onto paper, creating a color-by-number diagram that could be filled in and layered with acrylic paint. I suppose it was a tedious job, one that took him several weeks, perhaps months.

On the contrary, my mother's watercolor painting is a freeform, rather abstract version of my great-grandma Grace, a craggy-faced woman wearing a purple dress and a red hat, her ruby lips pursed at the arch of a permanent scowl. On the realism-abstraction spectrum, I'd say the old woman, while leaning toward abstraction, certainly, sits somewhere near the middle of the continuum. Her jowls protrude at a sharp angle and span wider than her forehead, one shoulder concaves to the armpit, and both arms trail into the ether just above the elbow like a ghost summoning the energy to complete its manifestation. The perspective, though, creates depth: the woman's nose, breasts, right arm, the turn of her head, the angle of her torso. A certain realism in perspective compensates for the watery scrawls, overlapping scribbles, and patchy globs of acrylic.

Their juxtaposition, the butterfly and the purple lady, creates a quiet tension, an unarticulated contrast that holds me captive, taunts me with the promise of some secret, some transcendent truth that, once uncovered, would seem so obvious, so simple. Dad's painting. Mom's painting. How do I read them, and thus paint myself as daughter? Dad created a perfectly detailed but flat rendition of a non-human organism. He created the center of his montage universe. Mom created an imperfect portrait of the woman who came before us, a rendition that oozes with sharp-tongued personality. I don't know what the paintings reveal. Transcendent truth has yet to whisper in my ear. For now I cling to them both, along with the scorpion.

What I do know: I had such high hopes when my father moved to Visalia. It was an opportunity for a do-over. Come live near me. We'll be one big happy family again after all these years. So what if we'd never been the Cleaver family? It's never too late. You play Ward. I'll play Beaver (or Betty). We'll hike. We'll hang out.

And now here we are, all these years later; our roles, my parents' and mine, have shifted. Like I said—if we had been the Cleaver family, perhaps our new terms of engagement would be simple. Maybe I'd look forward to my daily visit to the rest home, eagerly tuck the blanket around my mother's feet. Maybe I'd urge my father to catch the next flight from Guanajuato to LAX. Maybe I'd stop wondering if I'm a good daughter or bad, if my life adds up to anything yet, and whether or not I'm satisfied with my mix of big and small potatoes.

The answers I seek can't be found in my father's lecture on the origins of the universe. I've long since ransacked his home. I've sent a few of his belongings to his apartment in Mexico. Most of his one hundred and one Office Depot boxes still crowd the shed. I continue to paw through his files of correspondence, analyze his love letters to a woman he'll never meet again, yet to whom he still writes. I'm driven to know my father, understand what makes him tick, what makes me similar to and different from him. Despite my neurotic snooping, I avoid his phone calls and give him all the reasons why now's not a good time to visit.

Like my father, I'm caught in a conundrum of attachment and detachment.

 

Fifty-One

 

Cataviña, Mexico (1994)—

When my father and I finally reached the cave, we sat in the shaded
respaldo
overhang. We sipped from our canteens and gazed silently at the mysterious hieroglyphs on the ceiling and walls. Much as we would later on top of Moro Rock, we each wandered in our private thoughts. The rock paintings looked different than I expected. All during the hike I had envisioned we'd find clearly defined symbols—stick figure humans, a blazing fire, rain pelting down from a sheet of clouds, or a mural depicting some adventure, perhaps with a narrative arc. I'm not sure what the pictographs illustrated, with their reddish-brown curves and overlapping lines. In my mind I created a story from the abstract markings, the way you find pictures in a cloudy sky on a hot summer's day or stare at an abstract painting through squinted eyes until a definitive image pops out—that's a sun, a moon, a mountain, he runs toward the cactus, do you see it? One version of the story I reassemble contains seven parts:

i.
    
Light, Time, and Earth

ii.
    
Scorpions, Snakes

iii.
    
Sitting-Up Mud

iv.
    
Starry Nights

v.
    
Songbirds

vi.
    
The Face of Perfection

vii.
    
Presence

That afternoon in the Mexican desert, after we'd stared at the tantalizing rock paintings for some time, my father finally spoke. “I want to talk to you about so many things,” he said. “But first, let's take a photo.”

Funny thing is, we had forgotten the camera. We hemmed and hawed for a while, deciding whether or not we should go back to the car and get it. I wasn't about to make another round trip through the snake-infested sand—I voted we forgo the photos. My father couldn't be deterred, though. He'd go back for it.

I stayed put while he climbed back down the wall of boulders, down to the trail of deep-shifted sand. I stood at the mouth of the cave for a while, trying to relax in the grey threshold between Snake-Infested Out There and Indecipherable In Here. Today, I wonder which really scared me more—navigating a trail spiked with hidden sidewinders, or decoding a faded story peopled with flawed characters. Out There promises adventure, albeit danger, too. In Here requires a certain kind of attention, where old stories crash, then dissolve, then reform anew, like elements of the cosmos evolving from one life form to the next. Remember Gould:
We originated from an improbable accumulation of accidental contingencies. If the evolutionary tape were played again, there is no way to predict what would happen.

By now my blip of a lifespan is at least half over. My parents need looking after, and as difficult as our relationships have been, I cannot turn away, not totally. I can't name the chemical compounds of the Sun or spout the diameter of Saturn, but perhaps I can make a pile of potatoes and see how high they stack up. In the end, I suspect the small spuds will comprise the largest part of my Square Units of Overall Quality. Getting to know my dad—whether or not I like what I find—rates at least medium-sized. Maybe even big. Maybe that's what the universe is all about: finding a neglected part of yourself, a dry and withered row in your personal garden, and nurturing it, growing it, giving it a second chance. A do-over.

 

PART VII

Presence

 

Fifty-Two

 

The sun had shifted farther to the west by the time my father emerged from between two giant stone slabs. He paused at the base of the rock pilings and shouted up to me. From my perch, I watched him climb toward the mouth of the cave with the camera bulging from his breast pocket. Beyond him, the boulders' shadows stretched across the bone-dry terrain. Mirroring the sun's migration, the shadows overlapped, blended together in some places, yet remained distinctly separate in others. They stretched eastward and elongated so slowly that their inch-by-inch evolution was almost imperceptible.

We set the camera on autotimer and posed in front of the paintings. The little red light flashed several times, letting us know when to expect the aperture to open. I reveled in the moment right before the click.
Presence: when time stands independent of past or future; a moment captured on film; an ever-shifting point on the continuum of existence; what liquid prolongs for a pickled scorpion, still moist; where curiosity leads; a grain of sand so fine, so small, it settles, sinks beneath your feet unnoticed, unheard.

Click.

What next, we wondered. Back to the highway. My father fingered the map poking out of his pocket. “Let's play it by ear,” he said.