Redefining Realness Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dad was her boyfriend. One gave birth to a green-eyed boy in January 1979; the second welcomed a son that February; and the third had a baby girl in April 1979.
    “Your daddy was wild, man,” Dad said, chuckling over fathering three children at only eighteen.
    With the contents of their baggage displayed, Mom became Elizabeth Mock, marrying Charlie Mock III in May 1982, with my sisters serving as their flower girls at the Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu. Mom said her father wasn’t too thrilled that she was marrying a black man, but she didn’t care what he had to say because Dad made her smile and she knew that his military career would allow her to see the world and take her away from Hawaii, which she desperately wanted to flee. After I was born the following March, Mom (pregnant with Chad), Dad, Cori, and I moved to Long Beach. Dad kept his promise of taking Mom away from Hawaii, but monogamy just “wasn’t his thing,” Mom told me.
    I had firsthand experience with Dad’s dalliances. I was four at the time, and it was just the two of us on his motorcycle, his true love back then. I was under the impression that we were heading to thetoy store, but we jumped off his bike in a neighborhood that didn’t look much different from ours. Though it wasn’t military family housing, it was similar in the sense that it had a cookie-cutter aesthetic.
    Dad, in his camouflage fatigues, didn’t knock on the door to this two-story town house. He didn’t even say hello when we walked in. Guiding me to a faux leather couch that made too much noise for furniture, Dad placed a box of Golden Grahams and a remote control in my hands. A woman who smelled of smoke and drugstore perfume soon appeared from the staircase. She was the color of Cheerios and had crinkly hair that looked like waffle batter fresh from the griddle. She told me her name was Dara and said I could help myself to strawberry Pop-Tarts. I was fighting the desire to be easily pleased.
    Dara hugged Dad, and I took notice of how he touched her. It mirrored the way he touched Mom, and that made me want to spit out my cereal. When Dad followed Dara up the stairs, I knew this was just between the three of us. Dad didn’t tell me to hush; he didn’t hold his index finger up to his mouth or wink at me in code. Instinctively, I knew Mom wouldn’t hear a word about the Dara detour—at least, not from Dad or me.
    Months later, Chad and I sat on our parents’ water bed in our pajamas. Though the bed rippled under us, the night was still and filled with the sound of sorrow. Dad’s eyes were wet. He hovered over the bed with his right arm across his chest and his left hand over his mouth. The sight of him prompted me to tears. Seeing my father cry was a shelter-shifting moment: I felt unsafe and exposed. Cori was seated on the floor, just a few feet away from the bed, holding a hand towel to Mom’s wrists, which she had cut as a cry for help, an intervention of sorts to save her marriage after hearing about Dad’s affair. I remember the silver threads of the monogrammed M struggling to shine through the blood it had soaked up.
    Mom had straight bangs that veiled her large eyes, heavily lashedand thinly lined. She was so pretty and didn’t even know it, as Dad described her. She had a sweet, soft voice and smiled with her mouth closed, which lifted her lips and emphasized her already prominent cheekbones. If you didn’t know her, you would think she was bashful and amiable, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But she had a fire in her lit by a string of disappointments, and it is her sorrow that permeates my bedroom memory of Mom on the floor.
    Recalling this in pieces feels like a betrayal of my mother. It negates the kind, soft-spoken, perfumed visions I associate with my childhood memories of her. I have photos of us surrounded by flowers and sun, and another of Mom applauding me as I blow out the candles to my birthday cake. Her head is level with mine, and she