the family silence
BY HANNAH TERAO
Dear Father,
I loved your sister, my Aunt Macy. Before she died, she was my favorite relative. Did you ever know that? When I was young, it was easy for me to see the child in her.
Aunt Macy was a swimmer. I always picture her surrounded with water, her long hair damp and stringy and hanging down the open back of her one-piece swimsuit. Every year, when she came to Chicago to visit us for the holidays, she took me and the cousins to her hotel—she would always stay at the Embassy Suites by the airport—and watch over us as we splashed around in the shallow end of the pool. It was a rare treat, swimming in the middle of winter. It used to make me feel special because I knew it was a holiday tradition none of the other kids had.
Once we had tired ourselves out and resorted to dead-man’s floating with our prune-wrinkled fingers and toes, Aunt Macy would bundle us up in fluffy white cotton towels brought down from her room. She would set us up in a plastic lounge chair to watch as she swam her laps. That was the part I enjoyed the most about those days: watching her swim. The cousins would chatter amongst themselves, reveling in the half hour of relatively unsupervised time, but I’d just sit there quietly, swinging my legs in and out of the water, and pulling them out entirely to make room for Macy when she whizzed by.
I was fascinated by the control she had over her own body, the way she lined her limbs up in precise angles before launching herself into the water—so accustomed to the movements that she didn’t even have to make the conscious decision to dive in. And in the water, she became a creature of liquid and chlorine, her skin colored aqua blue with the reflection of the ceramic tiles that lined the bottom and sides of the pool. Even when her arms or head broke the surface, she still didn’t seem entirely human; she was more akin to the droplets that splashed up with her: belonging wholly to the water despite their temporary separation from it.
On land, she wasn’t quite so graceful. I remember her swinging her body out the doorway at the end of our New Year’s parties, stumbling haphazardly down the sidewalk. I didn’t know back then what it meant to be drunk. I didn’t know why you steered her away from the bubbling golden drinks and slipped water into her glass. I didn’t know why you looked at her as though you were ashamed.
I remember those days now, piecing them together with the few photos you have shown me of your childhood years. Ever since Aunt Macy’s funeral, I have been trying to match them up to the rough edges of the woman I knew.
She was wild when she was young, wasn’t she? I figured that out from the gaps of silence at her memorial service. Her eulogies were carefully edited to glaze over decades of her life, and I knew that it was because our family will never speak ill of the dead.
Macy was her mother’s child.
Such a sweet, loving girl.
Macy was a wonderful aunt.
I’ll miss having her at parties.
I can see through her your eyes when she was a child, your reminiscences carefully chosen to be sanitary enough for my ears. I can see her through my own eyes when she was my aunt. I know she was all of the things they said about her at the funeral. But what happened in those years in between?
She was devastated when your older brother Danny left for war. I can see that in the one photograph we have of her, hidden on the mantelpiece by a progression of framed family 23 vacations. It is black and white, the still image of a teenage girl with her thick hair held back by a paisley headband, watching her twin walk away from her in the hazy pre-dawn light. The image is reflected in a dirty windowpane as Macy presses her hands and nose to the glass. Below, also reflected in the glass, a little boy clings to her leg and looks up at her with wide, questioning eyes. I imagine that you have just asked her when Danny is coming back. I imagine she has just told you that she doesn’t know.
When are you coming back, Danny? she echoes in her own mind, directing it down the street. She keeps that question at the front of her mind, pressing it into her thoughts the way her thumbprints press into the glass. If she lets her mind wander, she knows, that word, “when,” will turn out to be as transient as the clouds of her breath fogging up her view of the world, and the question will become something very different. Macy can’t bear to think that way, even as her subconscious mind scrambles to work out the probability of ever seeing Danny again.
At least, that is the story I tell myself—and because it continues to haunt me no matter how I try to shove the idea aside, I think it must be true. It hurts me to think of that moment, to know what the girl in the picture does not.
So I focus instead on the strength of her hands against the window and her will against the logic. I look at the reflection of her dry eyes as she struggles not to cry, knowing that her mother—and more importantly, Danny—would not want her to cry. I remind myself that this same girl isstrong enough to survive the pain of seeing this moment reflected back at her six months later when Danny is shot down in Khe Sanh and the government sends his dog tags and a black bag back home. A life wasted on the fight for a country and a cause that were not his own.
Or so Macy thinks. She spends the summer staring at the ceiling. She counts the cracks in the paint and deliberately avoids the corner where Danny scribbled a sloppy sketch of Explorer 1 orbiting the earth. It has been there since they were kids.
In August, she goes to college the next year as her mother—my grandmother—wants her to. Grammy says that there aren’t enough opportunities in this country for women, let alone Asian women, and Macy better damn well walk through the door that’s been opened to her and does she think Danny would want her to waste her life like this? Macy packs her bags and tries to ignore the nagging thought at the back of her mind that wonders why Grammy doesn’t seem to be mourning Danny even though Macy knows she is haunted by the same memory of him leaving.
In college, she goes to parties because the music drowns out the echo of gunshots in her mind. She listens to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan and is drawn to the protests when she hears the SDS singing in the streets around campus. Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? And where have you been, my darling young one? She starts painting signs with words like self-determination and peace and bring ‘em home.
And then what happened to her, Father? Are those protests the place where she discovered weed and cigarettes and decided she liked the burn of chemicals in her lungs? Is that where her arms discovered the sting of needles and her blood discovered the tragic joy of whatever drug she could find to inject into her veins? Is that the shame you thrust upon her when she came to Chicago one year smelling of smoke and cheap liquor? Is that why you only ever allowed her an hour with me and the cousins when she visited, and only ever at a hotel where there would be plenty of eyes to watch over us?
I have searched through black and white pictures from the 60s, trying to find a young woman with dark hair and sun-freckled skin and Macy’s long elegant nose. Maybe I never found her because I can only picture the innocent girl with the long braids at the windowsill, or the woman at the poolside with her eyes red-rimmed by chlorine. Or maybe I never found her because you erased that piece of her life so completely from my world.
And maybe you never realized how utterly it destroys me, not to know the story of the aunt I loved. Not to understand how her vitality burned alongside an unimaginable grief, or how the little boy who had once clung to her leg turned into the man who once turned his own sister away at our door, hissing that a woman just out of rehab had no place near his children.
I need you to tell me how much of what I imagine about Aunt Macy is true. I need to know how much of the silence at her funeral belongs to her own poor decisions and how much belongs to our family for pushing her away.
I know talking can be hard for you sometimes. It is for me too. But if I can write these words on this page, surely you can write some of your own. Will it be easier for you this way, if I am not there to watch you fight to push the words out of your mouth—if the words don’t have to come out of your mouth at all? Will that make them less real to you?
I don’t need you to sit down with me and say, “This is the story of my life.” I don’t need you to bare your entire soul. But I need you to say something. Please, Father.
Please.