Christmas is a few days off and my family and friends wait for me in California. I look forward to going home as much as I dread it. I think I say this before every trip.
My father requested that I take three of my watches back to him (he will get each one cleaned and overhauled). I got my first watch when I was about seven years old. It was an Omega with a tiny face and a thin strap. He and my mother decided it was time for me to have it -- it was the first expensive gift he had ever given her. One day at school, I washed my hands and water seeped into the watch.
A year later, a Cartier. Stainless steel and 14K gold for an eight-year-old. My mother, then with a gambling problem, took this watch from me and pawned it. When my father found out, he kicked me so hard I rolled off my parents' bed and onto the floor. Later that night, he said he was sorry.
When I first heard the Elizabeth Bishop poem The Art of Losing, I thought of all the watches I’ve owned. There is but one line about losing a watch but for that I will never forget the poem.
Now, at 36, I own about six watches. Limited edition Cartier, Bulgari, Gucci, a Panthere, others I don't remember the names of. Last year, I found the balls to refuse my father’s extravagant gift. And this year, I told him I wanted nothing. We will see what I find under the tree when I go home.
I like the gift that most people would not think much of – a pearl one of the Muslim relatives gave my dad, it is large and discolored and worthless. My mother had it set with a diamond and a platinum chain. I love that the imperfection cannot be disguised. The diamond is lovely and clear, and it deepens the scratch on the pearl as if someone ran a jagged fingernail across the surface.
One evening a few years ago, at a black tie affair in Florida, a woman approached me and complimented that necklace. When she was close enough to me, she noticed the scratch, and she understood that it was not ignorance of gemstones that made me wear that necklace. She understood that it was a kind of sentiment. She invited me to her apartment and to one of her concerts in New York – she was a pianist and a crazy lady who doted over a potted azalea that lived on the window sill of the kitchen in her Central Park West apartment.
I have travelled in circles my parents never dreamed of. I’ve met actors and divas, pundits, the very rich, Elie Wiesel and Queen Noor. After each brief encounter, I wanted nothing more than to return to my bed and put on the white shirts I buy from the hardware store. Sometimes, after long days of schmoozing with the rich, I would daydream about calling my very own old friends -- the strivers who would never feel comfortable standing where I happened to be in the moment I thought of them.
My parents gave me what they could to prepare me for the kind of life they didn’t quite understand. This is not to say that they wanted me to mingle with the famous (and really, it was an occupational thing – I was working at these events). This is not to say that they gave me much.
Without rancor, I will say that my parents gave me everything half-assed. It was not what they intended, but it is how things turned out. I have often wondered if they wanted to give me too much and everything was bound to fall short.
I have always been a drop-out. My elementary school education happened in three countries, and I did not complete the third, fourth, fifth or sixth grades. My mother gambled away the tuition and sometimes we would have to stop going to school. Sometimes she gambled away the money to pay the electric bill too so we’d move to one of her sisters’ houses and stay there until my dad sent more money.
Oddly, my father had no knowledge of all the financial problems. It puzzles me to this day. That is how I love my father – I don’t ask him why or how.
I skipped the eight grade, discovered the dictionary and fell behind in math. Because of all the missed school, I have never doubted my intelligence. I came back after each hiatus with a new lie to explain why I’d been gone. I researched countries I’d never been to so that I could say I’d been to Rome or Luxemburg. The reality was that I was home, listening to bad pop songs and reading romance novels until four a.m. I was never the dumb kid.
What is the point of all this?
“We are made of others” is the point.
There are two new girl cousins who have moved to California from the Philippines. They will fare better than my family has because they have more realistic desires. They want, simply, to have a life in America.
I want to give the 12 year old girl a copy of Anne of Green Gables but that is a gift that will disappoint. I want to give the 18 year old a dictionary and The Elements of Style because her written English is not good. But these things are not important to them or their parents.
Would any of my family give any credence to my belief that it is language that sets a person apart? What do I have? I have no education, no money, no whiteness—I’m not throwing a pity party for myself, I am stating facts. But more than any of my family, more than any of the people I went to school with, I am the one who fits in and the one who can fake it.
I want to teach those girl cousins something that has brought me a kind of intangible success, but it was strongly suggested that for Christmas I should buy them perfume.
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