I’ve seen my dad cry twice in my life. When I was ten, his stepfather passed away. Passed away is actually too peaceful for what happened, his stepfather owned a small store and late one night, he was shot by some teenagers trying to rob the place. I remember my dad looking stern the morning we found out, shuffling around stirring cream into his coffee. My mom drove me to school that day and told me quietly what had happened; I didn’t cry, it felt very distant from me. When I got home from school that day, my dad was still at home, sitting at the dining room table where a gift basket full of muffins and fruit with a sympathy card sat. I left my backpack by the front door and sat down opposite him. I stared at him and he stared at the basket. Suddenly, he picked the whole basket up with his big hands and walked towards a hall closet. He opened the door, shoved the basket inside, and slammed the door closed. When he turned to walk back towards his den, I could see tears streaming down his cheeks, into his mustache. My dad looked really small then and somehow I knew better than to follow.
My dad has never been one to cry. He is small and stout; actually when I was a kid I was convinced they modeled the Pringles guy after him. He’s lived a big life in his sixty-nine years. He grew up in Camagüey, Cuba and lived in Mexico for a while. When he was young, he spent summers working on sailboats and fishing boats. He taught me everything I know about the ocean. When I was little, we used to go out on the boat with a fishing net and catch these tiny little fish, hundreds of them at a time. We would come back to shore and he would show me how to cook them by rubbing them in your hands in salt and pepper and then frying them in a sizzling pan over a fire built on the sand.
“If you get sand on them, it’s okay, they’ll taste better,” he said, as he tossed another handful of tiny fish onto the pan.
Once they were fried to a crisp, he would take them out and lay them on brown paper to cool for a bit. Then he would pick up the crunchy fish by its little tail and stick the whole thing in his mouth and eat it.
“Their bones are so tiny that when you fry them, they become crunchy. You can eat them whole,” he said to me. No matter how many times we did this together, I would never eat one, content to just rubbing the little fishes in salt and pepper and sand, and throwing them on the fire.
My dad was a teacher of the practical things for a childhood. If my mother taught me about literature and good films and beauty, my dad taught me how to fish, how to ride a bike, how to build a quality experiment for the science fair. In the fifth grade, he helped me build an invention which would hold a nail in place while you hammered it. My dad was a crafty parent due to being a contractor and he built me things with his hands, doll beds and a cedar chest for the end of my bed. We went camping together and he shared with me his love of mountains, just as strong as his love of the ocean. He and I became tan in the ocean and the mountains, watching the way nature surrounded us and made us feel infinite.
I claim my mother to be the patron of the arts in my life but my dad also helped greatly to develop my tastes in this area. I love spaghetti westerns and action movies because of him; I listed A Fistful of Dollars as one of my favorite movies in our first grade “About Me” project. My dad also instilled in me a lasting love of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Let me tell you, you’ve never heard the Beatles sung until you’ve heard them sung in a thick Cuban accent. He would let me play Hey Jude all the way through in the car, singing every na na na along with me. If we were about to arrive at our destination and the song was still going, he’d drive circles around the block until it was over. He played drums in a band when he was a teenager and he respected music in a very serious way. When my mom was pregnant with me, she declared that she alone would be selecting my first name but told my dad he could select my middle name. Being the Dylan fan he is, he chose Marie from Absolutely Sweet Marie.
My dad is complicated, a good person but with the kind of early life damage that colors everything going forward if you don’t face it. He was the middle child and soon after his baby sister was born, his parents divorced; his mother, my other abuela who is living to this day, left and took my uncle and my aunt and left my dad with his maiden great aunts. He was little, no more than 7 or 8, and it didn’t make sense to anyone then just like it doesn’t make sense as I type this out now in a completely different century and country. My dad never talks about it but the way his breath catches at the rare instances it’s mentioned tells me this is the big one for him. Ironically, he’s the child closest to his mother now, visiting and caring for her in her old age. Maybe it’s not that ironic, maybe it’s just exactly what you do when you want one specific person’s love. My dad masks a lot of hurt with humor and I know I learned this from him. We are experts at deflection, at building walls, at the sleight of hand that keeps eyes off of our pain. Sometimes I feel like I’m not close to my dad at all; sometimes it feels like we are so much more alike than we can stand, coexisting better 1200 miles apart than in the same city. But I never saw him cry about any of that.
The same year I was born, my dad was blessed with another baby: his 1967 blue Ford Mustang. To be honest, I’m still not sure which arrival, mine or the car, he was more excited about. My earliest memories include my dad underneath that car in our driveway on Saturday mornings, tinkering with it and fixing it up. He had it reupholstered in gorgeous leather, replaced a shattered back window, repainted it a beautiful smoky blue. He helped my mom create me in probably less than twenty minutes and was proud of me, but he spent years nurturing that car into top shape; if he could have given birth, that would have been his child. He finished that car when I was about four years old, and I remember riding in it with windows down.
He was living the life. Wife, daughter, nice house, dream car. My dad was probably on top of the world right then when someone decided to give me a present. I remember my mom’s friend from high school sending me this amazing glitter t-shirt painting kit. Being four years old, glitter was a drug to me and I grabbed at it with an otherworldly focus. I followed my mom around so she could help me get set up for painting but my mom knew better. She sent me out to the driveway and put down cardboard and my t-shirt and my painting supplies and left me to paint away from her rugs.
Nothing is more magical than glitter when you’re a child. The way it shimmers on everything and reflects light, it’s fantastic. At the time, I lacked the part of my brain that says, “That’s enough glitter, Anaïs, you look like you belong in Labyrinth.” That’s the same part of my brain that sometimes malfunctions when I’m stoned and see a Jos Louis now. I painted my shirt along with my arms and it was glorious, a creation of hot pink and gold and silver. As I sat hopped up on glitter fumes, I realized that glitter could only make things better so I began to leave my mark on the sidewalk. I looked at my work and was so pleased.
I looked around for something else to make beautiful and set my eyes upon my dad’s Mustang. For a split second, I worried he might get mad but I really didn’t see how making something prettier could be a bad thing. I grabbed my little paint tray and brush and went to work on the back chrome bumper. I painted swirls and tiny flowers; it was really quite subtle work, mostly in silver. I worked on it for a bit and then stood back to admire the masterpiece. It looked amazing, silver glitter popping from the blue paint and the chrome. I ran inside to my dad’s den and grabbed him by the hand.
“Daddy, come outside. I have to show you something!” I said, barely containing my excitement.
“What is it, princesa?” He smiled at me and got up from his chair. He was always really good at paying attention to anyone who required his time.
“It’s a surprise for you.” I led him by the hand down the hall and out through the garage door onto the driveway.
“Is it cake? You know I could go for that right now,” he replied, smiling as I led him to the back of his car. I pointed to the back and grinned, beyond pleased with myself.
“TA-DA!” I threw my arms in the air and stood back so he could take it all in.
My dad’s eyes widened in that Ricky Ricardo way and he opened his mouth but no sound came out. His face got red and he put his hands up to it, shaking his head no again and again.
“Don’t you like it?” I said, still not entirely sure why he hadn’t hugged me and thanked me for taking the time to do this.
“My.. oh my god. Ugh,” he groaned. He sank to his knees and began to cry with his head in his hands.
I sensed that perhaps this audience was not yet ready for my art and so I crept behind him and ran inside to get my mom. By the look on my face, she didn’t even ask questions. She ran out to the driveway and I followed close behind.
“Hiram, are you alright? What happene-” she asked as she laid her eyes on the back of the Mustang, covered in glitter.
My mom stared for a while in shock. She tried to inch closer to my dad and put her hand on his shoulder but he pushed her away. The man was a mess. My mom looked from me to the car.
“It’s art.” I mouthed to her and she tried not to laugh. She began to pick up my painting supplies and she grabbed me by the hand to take me back inside. We left my dad outside, hysterical on his knees.
My mom sat me on the bathroom counter and used a washcloth to wipe my arms and face clean of glitter. She tried to scold me but she kept laughing every time she started talking about it again. There was no need for her to reprimand me, I felt bad enough seeing my dad cry. I tried to peek out the living room window to see what he was doing but only caught glimpses of him pacing around his car, inspecting the damage. He came in before dinner, washed his hands, and kissed me on the forehead; it was rarely mentioned again.
He had the paint fixed and pretty soon the Mustang was back to her glory, although I still thought she looked pretty grand in glitter. My dad picked me up from school in that car every day and no matter how much time had passed, I still felt nervous about doing anything to that car even though my dad didn’t hold a grudge. Hell, I wouldn’t even drink water in that car. I was careful to never make my dad that upset again which was hard anyhow seeing as he was the most laidback person in the whole world. The glitter was forgiven by him but not forgotten by me.
My parents got divorced when I was fifteen, and my dad sold the Mustang; he said it didn’t feel right to ride in it alone. He sold it to a friend of a friend and I was there when the man came to pick it up. The man was busy paying my dad for the car while I walked around it, looking at the car that had chauffeured me around my entire childhood. I stopped at the back of the car and looked at my former canvas. I squatted to inspect the back of it and found that near the edges of the Mustang logo, there was still some silver glitter in the paint. I smiled and wondered if my dad had noticed that after the paint was fixed. He had to have noticed, he knew every inch of that car better than he knew himself. I realized he must have left the little bit of glitter there for reasons I didn’t fully understand.
I walked back to him as he gave the man the keys. We watched the new owner drive away in the Mustang and my dad put his arm around me as we stood on the driveway. He and I stood still for a long time, neither of us letting the moment pass; we soon would be moving out of the house we’d lived in almost my whole life. We watched cars come and go in the cul-de-sac and stood together until the sun went down. I thought of how we used to stand on the sand together, frying fishes. He turned toward the house and walked inside with his hands in his pockets.
This time I was the one standing on the driveway with my head in my hands; it would be a long time before we would stand anywhere together again. It’s going to be even longer before we can stand together again.