Father’s Day

They didn’t tell me right away.

First there were greetings and cookies. My husband chatted with his father in the kitchen, where I slid the cooler onto a counter, moving down the stairs to call the boys up from the basement.

Let’s wash our hands, I said, and we went through the motions. Out of sheer exhaustion and annoyance, I no longer sing the ABCs while we’re scrubbing. Normally wary of disposable products, I was glad to see paper towels. I wouldn’t have to worry about contamination. We were good to go.

It was Father’s Day. A celebration. An 87-year-old grandfather should be venerated by multiple generations, no matter what. That’s what I learned growing up in a house full of immigrants. My abuela taught me that paying respect to my elders requires showing up and listening hard.

The truth is, I let my guard down. The first time we visited my husband’s dad and stepmom, we stayed outside except to use the bathroom. We wore masks. We had packed snacks because my boys don’t do well without food for very long, and I don’t like asking to be fed right away. I didn’t have the best serving ware – a cracker box opened up along its seams and flattened into a platter – but we made it work.

Even though I had just sanitized my hands, I was conscious of having erred when I touched the cheese to slice it. So, too, the sausage. Before and after the family snack time, I sprayed alcohol mixed with aloe onto each of our hands. I was glad when my father-in-law held out both palms; it showed that he also followed protocols to prevent infection and believed in their necessity. The boys played with their Legos on camping cots set up ten feet away in the patch of shade cast by the upstairs deck. We left with a weary sense of accomplishment. We had been careful.

We moved inside on our second visit. Their outdoor patio furniture, which belonged to their subletter, had been removed and not replaced. They assured us that they were still on lockdown, so they were not going to wear masks, and we decided to do the same. My stepmother-in-law said she only went to the grocery story wearing a mask.

It was his dad who poked the bear. In my efforts to see my husband and his father somewhat united, for the past decade I have decided not to bring up what some would call politics, a coda for morality. I have learned to lower my standards. The roads, the weather. No book in this house but the one. But. “What do you think about all the protests for George Floyd?” my father-in-law asked, deadpan, and we were off.

The following twenty minutes pitted our words against theirs, and with them, visions for our nation. He was a criminal, they accused. Due process, my husband reasoned. Why the looting, they asked. Fringe elements, our reply. But he was a bad guy, they claimed. Our country is better than summary execution in the street, I countered. They did not agree that what occurred was a public lynching. Not with a rope, but a knee. Whenever their racist presumptions met a logical impasse, their morals doubled back on themselves, tangled in knots that would sheer off to another point meant to provoke rather than illuminate. Again. Again. Until finally.

“Why don’t they learn English when they come to this country?” she asked.

With that they, she was coming for me. For my abuela, who died three months ago, having lost large swaths of her English. For my mother, who learned her second language by watching television for six months. I knew it would happen. My stepmother-in-law had been bumping and nosing toward this moment all along. I knew too that it didn’t matter what I would say, the beautiful arguments I’d build, one by one, as she looked at me with baleful reproach. In this room, there was a they, and they were not us, or rather, I was not us, my sons grandfathered in by blood and happenstance.

I have the kind of husband who asked, right away, with an easy smile, “why didn’t you learn Navajo?” Which was clever enough to make his dad laugh. Really, I think part of what he wanted, after being cooped up for so long, was some excitement. But the conversation with these people – the oldest living patriarch of my sons and his third wife, twice widowed – never improves, and hasn’t for the entire 16 years that I’ve known them. With my contributions, I only ever reveal how little we share and how unlikely it is that we can bridge that gap.

“I know where I’m goin’,” she often says, referring to her belief that accepting Jesus as her savior guarantees her spot in heaven. “I don’t know about the rest of yous.” (Yes, she pluralizes you into yous, a rural Midwestern dialect I had not previously encountered.) I have gone to extraordinary lengths to be polite to someone who implies that my children and I will burn in literal hell.

“It’s all the work of Satan,” she said, standing up to cook dinner to conclude our discussion of Black civil rights protests and Latinx immigration. “That’s what I believe.”

It was at this point that I took our sons to the pond at the heart of the subdivision. To do so, we needed to pass through unfenced backyards kept green and clipped and empty. When we arrived, we watched ducks crest the hill, quacking, anxious. So too am I coming to my point.

Mama duck went for it. Watching her lead a line of ducklings into the pond, I wondered at mothering, she on her hill, me on mine, the both of us trying to ward off something that wants to come out of hiding for keeps. Just as her last duckling was launched, a raccoon waddled hard and fast – a thing I had not known possible – from the clump of reeds nearest to us. I was astonished.

For the fact that we witnessed no carnage, the raccoon apparently not in the mood to get wet, the ducklings rippling through water that silvered with the fading day, I remain grateful. When we returned to the house, I packed up our things and loaded them into the car as an unsubtle signal. To my regret, my husband had accepted her offer of garbage bags of her old clothes.

This last bit was too much for me to bear. In the car, on the way home, I welled forth, raging at how our narratives would never converge. For her, today would be the day that she cooked us dinner and offered me charity. For me, today will forever be the day she said that I, my sons and other Latinos were Satan’s work, destined for a furnace.

I have seen enough of these people to last me a lifetime, and yet, I did go back once again, a week later, on a Sunday, which becomes an important detail.

Back when we first met, I would say things, do things. When my husband’s stepmother told me she would never “stoop so low” as to allow an unmarried couple (family members) stay with them, even as she was staying in our house while I was not yet married to her son-in-law, I blinked at her, over the overpriced doughnuts and coffee I had just provided, and said nothing. The next morning, I left to visit my sister, though it was two days before their planned departure Nothing good would come of more contact, so I curtailed it.

Over the years, I have looked to find common ground. She made us the most beautiful petit point Christmas stockings, which, if you don’t know, require a combination of very expensive threads and a blinding number of hours. An expert quilter and seamstress, she has an eye for artisanal quality and is an expert restorer of antique wooden furniture. She made new curtains out of silk I chose with her tutelage. Every holiday season, though I am agnostic, I hang those stockings. In the glow of the Christmas tree that I decorate with no belief in resurrection, I admire her handiwork and feel a sense of nostalgia for something that never was.

Retirees, the both of them, I see that they can’t or won’t spend a lot on themselves, and so I am doubly grateful for her offering of intergenerational heirlooms. It smarts to be less resourced. I’ve lived enough to know that. When things got hard, I kept the peace.

The most I’ve done, until now, is restate her most hideous statements to challenge their premises. When she told me about their only black neighbor who, living in a subdivision carved from farm fields, installed a motion sensor spotlight over his garage, I listened past what she was saying (that it was rude and unnecessary, given that “no one else” had them), and heard what she couldn’t concede. This man did not feel safe until his family had a blinding light to protect them.

At the end of a fraught argument with him about said light, which would be annoying, let’s face it, especially to white people who walk through the night with no fear, she told me she said, “God bless you.” (In a tone reserved for telling people to go fuck themselves).

“And a week later,” she added, triumphant, “he had a heart attack. Out of the blue.”

Since then, I have suppressed her racist, religious and conspiratorial content on Facebook so I can still meet her gaze in person. Around them, I try to be careful with my expressive face. Look what my silence bought me – my sons know that their father has a father. In physical form, at least, they are alike. Long legs, square jaws, broad frames. Big white men. They like puns and when they’ve made one, they’ll look without looking to see if others saw it. My sons can be rather clever in this way, which makes me proud of their wordplay. That is not nothing, though my double negation has felt like hurling myself into The Nothing.

So I asked, “Are you saying that your blessing led to his heart attack? That you invoked God’s wrath to smite this man because he didn’t feel safe in your neighborhood?” When confronted with the ugliness of her intention, her face went blank, her body stilled so that her meaning delved into her tone. “Well,” she said, drawing out her acquiescence with an upward lilt.

It is the patriarch’s day. I’m only here to get gone without a fight. I praise the chocolate chip cookies. Next to the glass cabinets that house her crystal, she tells me they went to church. I was startled. I thought they were on lockdown.

Just after disclosing that they had attended a crowded service, she had this to say: “And we were hugging everybody.”

I did what I often do when confronted with betrayal. I pretended it wasn’t happening while it was happening. Nonreaction, or failure to recognize the actions of another human being as valid, is one way of topping from below. In Get Out, it’s called the sunken place, which made so much sense to me because I’ve experienced this feeling as quantum. I am both here and not here. I’ve come to recognize the appearance of this estranged dislocation as fresh trauma.

In my own life, if I reacted strongly every time someone wronged me, I would have no time for my work, let alone joy. But later, I caress the memory in private, puzzling it out. Knowing that society extrudes women’s anger like shrapnel from the body politic, I nurse my hurts alone while deciding how I will act. For women, life is full of strategic deferrals.

You might imagine that I avoid all confrontation. It is not true. I take people on. Corporations. Governments. Laws. I’ve challenged power structures in the court of public opinion afforded by journalism. But these private fallouts sap my strength and my certainty. What am I to do? Cut off contact between my children and their grandfather?

Instead, I asked a question. “Were you wearing masks?”

“No.”

“Was anyone?”

“No. The pastor did ask permission before he hugged me.”

“What is the name of your church?” And this only for news searches of super spreading events in the days to come, in which headlines would blare Bars, Strip Clubs and Churches as the new epicenters of the pandemic.

With each answer, my husband and I made careful meetings of the eyes, following each other’s lead into hardened listening. Here I am, realizing as if for the first time that my particular method for handling trauma, which has helped me stay in relation to my family, could get me killed. I could be complicit in orphaning my own children.

For the record, I regret that I didn’t make a scene and leave. Instead, for the remaining hours of our visit, I kept our kids in a separate room, reading a children’s literary anthology my stepmother-in-law bought at a garage sale. In the days since, my body has flickered through chemical waves of anger and self-recrimination. I even cried.

The truth is that my tacit agreement to maintain the status quo has threatened my very existence all along. A real danger is made manifest, for me and all people born of my blood, in the form of a virus that could inter the humans I love most. But it is white supremacy that is the poisonous fog, so pervasive that it becomes hard to see until it is already inside you.

What does it mean to do the work? For what should we spend our energy, and on whom? I want to heal our nation and protect our elders. But my own family is riven. Led by his pastor, my most vulnerable ancestor endangered himself, and by proxy, his progeny, to prove a political point. Their oblivious aggression intimates future violence.

I am waiting to see what my error will yield. Watching for symptoms in myself and my kids. Anticipating the damage I’ve wrought with what I once told myself was tolerance.

_________

Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction, a Paris Review staff pick and a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards (best novel and best first novel). A prize-winning journalist and essayist, Kristen served as 2018-2020 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle. Her personal essays, book reviews and investigations appear in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, the Guardian, and the anthologies Latina Outsiders, Pie & Whiskey, and Alone Together.