My Father’s Mother’s Daughter
Elizabeth is my father’s mother’s daughter and was my best friend growing up. Born two weeks apart, we were raised as sisters, though she was technically my aunt.
We grew up knowing she held this ranking. She sometimes used it to get what she wanted. I’m your aunt, she’d say, so you have to share your ice cream. I’m your aunt, so you have to. It made school awkward, a feeling made worse by a family tree activity when we were in third grade. I had to keep asking my teacher for more and more leaves to write down the names of my family members: my father’s brother Angelo, my father’s sister Alicia, my father’s sister Alodia, my father’s sister Ana, my father’s brother Arnel, my father’s brother Antonio, my father’s brother’s son Fernando, my father’s brother’s son Francisco, my father’s brother’s daughter Francine, my father’s sister Alma, my father’s sister’s daughter Blessica, my father’s sister’s son Benigno, my father’s sister’s son Bernardo, my father’s sister’s daughter Bianca, my father’s sister’s daughter Bernila, my father’s sister Althea, my father Allos, my mother Corazon, my brother Enrique, my brother Ernesto, my brother Eduardo, my sister Empress, my sister Elena, and me, Eva. This is not to mention my mother’s similarly prodigious side, nor my parents’ parents’ siblings and their offspring whom we still call titas, titos, and cousins. This is not to mention my parents’ parents at all, except for my father’s mother, Maria Rosa, and her daughter, Elizabeth.
My classmates’ construction paper maple trees were neat and contained to the page, but my tree looked like a tree, with so many leaves they had to be layered. And when people saw Elizabeth Cruzada, 8 years old, aunt, they were curious to the point of cruel invasiveness.
I turned my nose up and said, “Yes, she’s my aunt, isn’t that so cool? She sits with all the adults at Thanksgiving,” but my heart was cowering in my chest. And I apologized to my teacher every time I had to go up to her desk, saying, Three more leaves, please, thank you very much. Sorry, three more, three more.
*
Elizabeth and I don’t talk anymore. Once she got a passport, she started constantly traveling, making money through cobbled-together amateur modeling gigs and sponsorships. She’s written me letters from wherever she is in the world and includes photos of herself in front of various wonders.
It’s easy to see how we could have been sisters. We both have slick straight hair, a straight nose and pointed chin. Elizabeth was a touch lighter-skinned, but darkened easily in the sun so that we matched. Our eyebrows were thin and needed to be filled in with eyebrow pencil. We wore the same sized clothes, though she was slightly wider in the hips, a fact she emphasized in her poses.
I answer her only with Christmas and birthday cards. Her letters are long and sound more like diary entries or travel blog posts: part confessional, part performance. She ends these missives with a plea to forgive her one day.
My greeting cards are empty in comparison, containing only the date, the prefabricated platitude, my signature, and a polaroid selfie of me and my daughter, Samantha.
My daughter loves taking these photos for “Auntie Liza,” whom she has never met but knows all about. Since I’m unable to hide the letters entirely from my daughter—we live in my parents’ house and my mom would have shared everything about Elizabeth anyway—I’ve read Elizabeth’s letters as bedtime stories, stopping just before the ending non-apology. When I read these letters, Samantha is always transported, and my voice becomes just wind in the leaves.
*
Samantha rushes through the airport when we step off the plane. I feel the heat from outside already, and I slip on a pair of dark sunglasses. “Put on your hat,” I tell my daughter, and she pulls her straw sunhat down on her head, flattening her curls.
My father had arrived the week before to help with the party set up and planning, so when Samantha rushes out the airport doors, he is there to scoop her up. He leans over so that she’s practically upside down and screaming in delight. Mother and I follow behind. My father sets my daughter on her feet.
“Did you have a good flight?” he asks.
“Mm, the food was okay,” my mother says.
My father reaches out to me. During our quick hug, I see my double over his shoulder. Elizabeth’s eyes are wide and shaded by the brim of her straw sunhat, and she is smiling like she doesn’t know what else to do with her face. My father pulls away from me, looks down at Samantha, and says, “There’s someone here you should meet.”
And I cannot stop the moment. My daughter gasps and presses her hands to her mouth. She doesn’t run, doesn’t even move until my mother’s hands gently push her forward. Elizabeth giggles and steps closer, crouching to match Samantha’s height. Bent down and balancing on three-inch wedge heels, Elizabeth nonetheless looks graceful in a vermillion sheath dress that ends above the knee. “Hi Sammy,” Elizabeth says. “I’m—”
“Auntie Liza!” Samantha yells, and she launches herself forward, throwing her arms around Elizabeth’s neck, nearly knocking both of their sunhats off their heads.
Elizabeth lets out a full laugh. She says, “I can’t believe it! We’re finally meeting!” And she and Samantha both look so delighted that I feel almost guilty about keeping them apart for so long. Samantha begins regaling Elizabeth with all her favorite parts of her letters, and my father starts herding us away from the entry, towards where the family van is parked.
Elizabeth interrupts Samantha’s ramble and says, “Actually, there’s another person you should meet.”
It happens before I can say anything, before I can react. The driver’s side door of the van opens, then closes. A man jogs around the front. He’s wearing a heathered gray t-shirt stretched across his chest and shoulders, a worn baseball cap with no logo on his head. And when he gets around to the side of the vehicle facing us, Elizabeth stands next to him, wraps an arm around him, puts a hand on his chest.
In each photo Elizabeth sent us, there was an invisible presence: the one holding the camera. He never took pictures of himself, never asked a stranger to take a photo of them both.
“This is Jared,” Elizabeth says. There’s a ring on her finger.
Jared stretches his arms out in a joyous gesture. “Sammy!” he says. “It’s good to meet you!” He laughs as Samantha wraps her arms around the Elizabeth-Jared unit in a hug.
“You’re married!” Samantha yells.
Elizabeth laughs. “Just engaged. But we’ll be married soon.”
Samantha begins a new wave of excited chatter, but I can only stand and stare at the face of the man who has not yet looked at me.
*
Jared drives the van. Elizabeth is in the passenger seat, her hand on top of Jared’s on the gear shift, the ring glinting in the sunlight. She twists in her seat to talk, answering Samantha’s questions with a smile on her face. My parents are in the back row speaking only to each other. Occasionally, when Jared glances up at the rearview mirror to check behind him, I meet his eye. I look away immediately.
I want to cry, but I can’t. I want to sleep, but I can’t. I want to ask every question I never got the chance to, but I can’t, not in this van, and not as we get to my father’s mother’s house.
A gate encircles a small front yard. Jared parks just inside of it, and we unbuckle our seat belts, get out of the van, and walk with all of our things to the front door where we are stopped by Tita Lodie, whose glasses are so thick they shrink her eyes to nearly half their size. Tita Lodie presses kisses to Samantha’s cheeks in greeting, sniffs the top of her head because that’s what titas do, and then turns to me and says, “You look like you could use a drink.”
“It’s ten in the morning,” I say.
“It’s the middle of the night for your body,” Tita Lodie says. And she takes my elbow to lead me into the house. “Come on, you have babysitters aplenty here. Let someone else take care of your daughter.”
But that’s what I’m afraid of. Someone else taking care of her, revealing more than what I have kept from her. When Tita Lodie leads me to the kitchen, somehow Samantha is already seated on the floral-patterned couch in the sitting room, a leather-bound photo album open on her lap. I know it contains pictures of me and Elizabeth at various stages of our growing up. Samantha giggles at our bumped hair, our low-rise jeans, our dream shots taken at the mall when we started hanging out with friends more than family. I know that near the end of that album there’s a photo of me and Jared posing at Turnabout. I’m behind him wearing a black dress and three-inch heels. I’m wrapped around him, my cheek on his shoulder, and I smile at the camera. His head is leaned back as he laughs, curly hair flopping off his forehead. When she reaches that photo, Samantha may wonder why I am the one holding him, but maybe will not understand the significance. Not unless she notices that her hair is his hair, her nose is his nose, that her ears are his ears. And even then, she may not understand paternity, may just think she’s found someone similar, a kindred spirit.
Because although Samantha knows she has three uncles and two aunts who are her mother’s siblings, and she knows she has a whole universe of her mother’s father’s siblings and their children, and she knows she has an Auntie Liza who technically should be called Lala Liza, she still believes that she has sprung from me, and me alone. I am waiting as long as possible to tell her about the facts of this life in particular.
I drink the Bloody Mary that Tita Lodie puts in front of me. Tomato juice and vodka slurry fill my mouth, then I swallow when I can’t take any more.
*
Elizabeth does not try to force conversation with me, and every time I see her work up the nerve, I subtly rebuff her by talking, instead, with my parents, my siblings, my cousins. I take Samantha around and around, getting my family members to introduce themselves, again and again. I add in my own commentary, too. That’s Tita Frannie. She won the singing competition at the annual fiesta three years in a row. That’s Lolo Tonio. He’s teaches Math at the local high school. That’s Tita Benny. She once got stung by a jellyfish and Tito Nando fished it out of the water. A few of us ate it later. It tastes like salty jello.
I don’t stop Elizabeth from approaching Samantha, or vice versa. My daughter asks to ride in the same pedicab during the hot days. She lifts her water glass in imitation of Elizabeth at dinner. At night she cuddles up to me, but welcomes Auntie Liza to share the full-sized bed we’ve been assigned to in one of my father’s mother’s guest bedrooms. Elizabeth lies down long enough for Samantha to fall asleep, but then gets up and leaves—to join Jared in his bed, I assume. The first night, she looks at me silently for a moment, her eyes gleaming from the night light plugged in next to the bedside table. I meet her gaze but don’t move, rarely blinking, until she leaves.
The short time Samantha has been in my life is the happiest and saddest I’ve ever been. Just talking with her—playing her games, listening to the way she steals words from Elizabeth’s letters and spins them into her own stories—makes me feel so motivated to do something extraordinary, and yet more unable to actually do it. Time passes so quickly that Samantha is throwing tantrums in her high seat and flinging food against the walls one day, and then going to school with a plastic backpack high on her shoulders the next day, and then coming home with spelling bee trophies and invitations to slumber parties with her friends the day after that. I know that soon she will be old enough to leave me, and I will still be young enough to leave myself.
And yet, sometimes what keeps me up at night is the terror of becoming a parody of my younger self searching for a lost youth and living vicariously through my daughter. I can imagine myself, when Samantha is old enough, sharing a closet with her, getting matching haircuts, feeling pleased when people mistake me for her sister instead of her mother. Already, she is wearing some of my old clothes from middle school that my parents had in storage. Already, she asks me to straighten her hair when it’s picture day at her school. Already, I can tell that she’s going to grow up to be taller than me, though she can still curl up so tightly and tuck into my side as she sleeps that I remember what it was like to carry her in the womb, alone.
When Elizabeth leaves the bed and it’s just me and Samantha, my stomach lurches and I can’t look at her for very long. Normally, I’m happy to watch her sleep. But now, I can’t help but notice how her face is a perfect hybrid of my and Jared’s features. Her chin is our chin: two sharp, slanted lines that meet in the middle with a dimple. Her eyes are our eyes: his single-lidded shape and my color. Her hands are our hands, his long fingers and my square nails.
Still, I close my eyes against a wave of nausea. If Samantha were Elizabeth’s child, she could look exactly the same.
*
My father’s mother’s birthday party is on the second-to-last day we are in town. I already packed Samantha’s and my luggage, but Samantha keeps unpacking it, plucking clothes out of their places because she wants to change outfits to better match Auntie Liza.
My father’s mother’s name is often shortened to Marisa—Mari(-a Ro-)sa—but she also goes by Risa, and also by Rebecca, and also by Maring, just because. The birthday banner and the cake have her full name, Maria Rosa Bituing Cruzada, and she wears a plastic crown and a sash that says BIRTHDAY GIRL in blocky letters.
Tita Lodie makes me a Bloody Mary at breakfast, though she goes lighter on the vodka. In the small courtyard where we’ve set up card tables with folding chairs in haphazard clusters, Tito Tony uncomfortably tells me to take his middle son Francisco out to the bakery that’s a famous date spot in town, and I don’t care enough to figure out if he actually means to tell me to date my cousin or if he genuinely doesn’t know the implications of his statement. My younger sister, Elena, fans herself as she watches her just-learned-to-walk triplet boys follow Samantha around the yard in some game of make-believe. I try to answer my cousin Bernie’s questions about high school in the U.S., but between the heat and overlapping conversations in three different languages happening around me, I nearly faint.
I’m tipped onto the back two legs of the chair I’m sitting in, but before I completely topple over, my chair gets righted. A cool, wet cloth is pressed to the front of my neck. Above me, Jared blocks out the late morning sun, his large hand holding his dampened bandana to my feverish skin. Of course he is there already. He slips his hand out from under mine when I reach up to my neck to keep the cloth there.
“You okay?” Elena asks me.
I don’t look at her, but keep my eyes on Jared. I stand, pushing my chair out. “I’m going to go inside. Cool down.”
We are not subtle as Jared follows me inside the house. He gets to the door first and opens it for me. I nearly push him, my hand leaving a damp print on his t-shirt.
Once the door is closed and we’re alone in the sitting room, Jared looks at me, really looks at me, and says, “Lizzy says that we should talk.”
“Of course she does.”
“She says that we shouldn’t get married before you’ve forgiven her, before we’ve had,” and Jared grimaces, his lips twisting on the word, “closure.”
I laugh, and it is a low, ugly sound. “Of course she thinks we need closure.”
“Don’t we?” Jared crosses his arms.
“Do we?” I say back to him, because it is so easy to just hate him that it doesn’t even feel like holding a grudge. “What could we possibly have to say to each other now?” I say to Jared.
“How about, I’m sorry?” Jared says.
“Who’s sorry? What are they sorry for?”
“E, don’t be like this—”
“Who’s E?” I almost yell. I’ve always hated the nickname, worse than the randomly-assigned titles everyone else in my family gets, because E could be anybody—me, Eva, or it could be Empress, or Elena, or even Enrique, or even—“When you say E, who are you calling?”
“You,” Jared says. His face scrunches, and he spits his next words. “What kind of guy do you think I am? I know who I’m talking to.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say. And Jared closes his eyes, hangs his head, places his face in his palms. I’ve said these words to him before. They are only a little bit unfair. He has always been there for me, just like he was there for Turnabout when I asked him to the dance and he said, Yes. He was there for me, just like Elizabeth was there for me when I took the at-home pregnancy test and then immediately said, But those tests give false positives all the time. He was there when it was impossible to get an appointment in any of the cities close to our hometown, there for me when too much time had passed, there for me when I said that we had to tell our families, then do the right thing and get married, at least for practical reasons. There for me, up until they both weren’t, and I had to hide, hide, hide by myself until I couldn’t hide anymore.
A door opens somewhere, and I look away from Jared. “I don’t believe you,” I say again, because in the aftermath of being left, all I have are memories, and they are imperfect. A photograph repeatedly handled and placed in the sun. “We don’t need closure.”
*
Outside in the courtyard, I watch as Samantha sits in my father’s mother’s lap. Samantha listens to her mother’s father’s mother recite the names of all her children, and her children’s children, and also tell Samantha that she is the first of her children’s children’s children. And with that comes a lot of responsibility. “Will you take care of your family? Of your cousins, and your cousin’s children, and their children after that?”
Though my daughter is way too young to understand such responsibility, she says, “Yes, yes I will.”
My father’s mother smiles and turns the naming of all the family members in the courtyard into a game. “Who’s that?” she asks. And Samantha returns with the right name, or the wrong one, or the right name, but not the right nickname, or the wrong name, but the right nickname, and it goes on and on, my father’s mother cheering after every right or wrong name, until it’s time to sing Happy Birthday and cut the cake.
And my father’s mother smiles and gives the top of her head one final sniff because that’s what lalas and titas do, and then says, “Go to your mom,” as Tito Arnie and my dad bring out the giant, tiered cake. But instead of pushing Samantha towards me, my father’s mother pushes my daughter towards Elizabeth, who’s nearby and watching the interaction with something like fondness on her face.
Samantha looks back at my father’s mother, her head tilted in confusion. She takes a step towards Elizabeth, and the earth shifts beneath me, my mouth is dry. I can’t call to her and get her attention. I can only watch as my daughter takes another hesitant step, looking around. I can only watch—and I only want to watch and see how she tries to make sense of the contradiction of being told to go to her mother when she’s pushed towards someone who is, in appearance, just barely not her. My daughter, the product of a night with my father’s mother’s daughter’s now-fiancé, can maybe instinctually notice the difference, but may also be oblivious enough—young enough—that her consciousness just flattens those differences anyway. After all, how many times have I mixed up my father and his brothers when they all wore the same Beatles-style bowl cuts in my earliest childhood memories? And how often has my mother mixed up me and Enrique when I got an ill-advised pixie cut in middle school? How many times have our friends and family members mistaken me for Elizabeth? And has it ever happened the other way, where they mistake Elizabeth for me?
Winter break, sophomore year of high school, when most of our free time was spent in the church basement preparing for Simbang Gabi. Elizabeth and I had two different roles: she as a liturgy reader during the Mass, and me as one of the candle dancers in the opening procession. We had a day of rehearsals, and a dinner provided to us by the parents who planned the whole suite of Simbang Gabi celebrations in the region. Jared—contracted to DJ for the afterparty and also dance tinikling—had approached Elizabeth when we were all in line to serve ourselves from foil trays full of pancit. He leaned over and complimented her dancing, said that the candle dance was beautiful, but she made it even more so.
Elizabeth laughed, then looked at me. I was a few people behind them in line and holding an empty paper plate since I hadn’t reached the part of the buffet table—the part with all the barbecue and fried rice—that I actually liked.
“I think you meant my niece,” she said, nodding at me. I wasn’t really paying attention at the time, but I looked over when Jared turned around. It wasn’t some grand meeting. I didn’t think this guy was the love of my life or anything, and in a way I had kind of written him off because he was so obviously interested in Elizabeth. His body and the way he held it told me so.
But I remember I heard him say, “I’m sorry, did you just say your niece?” And I remember rolling my eyes because at that point anytime Elizabeth pulled rank, it felt more like she was embarrassing herself instead of me. I sat with the other candle dancers instead of Elizabeth, and I kept meeting Jared’s eye and didn’t think it was because he was looking at me, but that I happened to catch him looking in the distance.
Before I left that church basement, he asked me for my number. I shrugged and gave it to him, and it took a long time for me to realize that he did mean it when he said he wanted to know me, and not simply use me as a way to get to my elder. And he learned every name, every nickname, every little detail about the family tree, and played the role of doting boyfriend so well that sometimes I wonder why no one ever found it strange that he was my boyfriend first but is with Elizabeth now. Only Tita Lodie ever thought to ask me anything. Only Tita Lodie looks at me now as if she knows what I’m thinking, knows what I’m waiting for, yet is also silent and waiting for Samantha to take her next step in one direction while looking in another.
Then, Samantha sees me. She grins and runs toward me, arms outstretched. I meet her halfway and lift her into a hug, placing her on my hip, though she is much too big to be carried that way. When she turns in my arms to face everyone else, my eyes close in a brief moment of thanks, to her and to whoever, that at least in this moment she made the choice to come to me. Samantha’s the loudest voice singing Happy Birthday, high-pitched and a little like screaming, but joyful nonetheless. When we reach the part of the song, Happy Birthday, dear, the name is muddled, everyone singing something different—Nanay, Tita, Lala, Maring, Risa. I choose Lala—grandmother. Samantha chooses what I choose.
Caroliena Cabada‘s fiction has been published in Pleiades, Five on the Fifth, and elsewhere. Her first book of poetry, titled True Stories, is available from Unsolicited Press.
