Moonface Read online

  But Charlie’s deepest desires always kept him looking for his partner, even if it meant running away from home, which he almost did one day when he was eight. He put on his maroon plaid suit and a clip-on bow tie, packed a hard-shelled suitcase with his stuffed penguin collection, and started out the door.

  “Where are you going?” his mother called from the kitchen.

  “I’m running away,” Charlie answered.

  “But why are you dressed up in a suit?” his father asked, trying to hold back his laughter.

  “Because I don’t have a tux,” he said, with a wink before walking out the door and sitting out on the front curb all day. Until dinner.

  For most of his childhood, Charlie grew up on the western end of Maryland in a sleepy railroad town that overlooked the Potomac. His family moved there after living in Baltimore, upstate New York, and West Virginia. Charlie was only eight when his father told the family that they were moving to a house that sat at the top of a hill and way down below at the bottom was a river. Of course, Charlie didn’t imagine there’d be a town in there somewhere. No, he imagined that their new house sat alone on a mountain, and if he were to open the back door and start rolling down the mountain’s slope, he’d roll right into the water. That’s just how Charlie saw the world: as his own amusement park. Why couldn’t he open the back door and dive right in?

  Charlie says that some day in our childhood we probably met, both our families traversing the same highways all along the east coast in our respective station wagons. Charlie says that at some point, we must have crossed each other at an arcade or a candy shop. But I tell Charlie I would have remembered if I saw an eight-year-old kid in a suit and bow tie.

  My earliest childhood memories begin in Queens, New York, in the fourth-floor apartment of a horseshoe-shaped building on Yellowstone Boulevard, a broad street that ran through the borough. My father was a young Filipino doctor finishing up a residency at a nearby hospital. My father, my mother, my brother, and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with bars on the windows and a front door that was crowded from floor to ceiling with locks. While most people would complain about sharing a room with their brother, I didn’t mind it. While my father was gone, spending long nights on-call at the hospital, my brother was the one I idolized, the one who could play stickball and run down the street so fast that I’d have to call for him before he went out of my sight. He’d fly down those alleys fearlessly, careening around Dumpsters and telephone poles. “Joel,” I’d yell, “waaaaait,” my arms cupped around the sides of my mouth, my voice ricocheting against the tall buildings that tunneled a side street.

  While he was the strong one, and the fast one, I was the skittish one. While he was growing bulges in his arms and slowly becoming able to help my father lift luggage and groceries, my features were always more delicate: bony elbows and sharp shoulders. “Just like Olive Oyl,” my mother would say when she looked me over. “Maybe if you ate some spinach, you’d be stronger.”

  I sat out many of those stickball games, and often I stayed out of school for a stomachache or fear of an impending stomachache. I blame that fear on my father’s precautionary mindset that, while trying to keep me safe, instilled great worry in a young impressionable me. His scenarios always shot straight for the worst: “Don’t laugh during dinner or you will get indigestion and diarrhea.” Or, “We’d better clean up that cut or bacteria will seep in and you’ll get an infection. Then, you’ll have to take antibiotics.” One summer I told him that someday, I’d like to get a summer job at the local Baskin-Robbins, where those pretty older girls wore pink polo shirts. But my father closed the subject immediately. “Scooping that hard ice cream?” he said, looking at skinny wrists. “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.”

  While I walked carefully through those early years in New York, my brother seemed untouched by my father’s warnings. He threw his head back in total abandon and laughed at what seemed to be dangerous and confusing situations. I tried to follow his cues, tried to understand what was funny and what was not. For instance, according to my brother, Benny Hill, the fat, pasty Englishman in boxer shorts, was hilarious. I was a grade schooler, then too young to understand the innuendo between him and the other characters on his TV show—why he was an old man dressed in women’s clothes, why the busty blonde behind him was scantily clad and hitting him over the head with a frying pan. My mother sat on our couch giggling with her entire body, pressing her hand on my brother’s shoulder as if she could not contain herself anymore, as if she had to physically pass off the joy of the moment to someone else. I remember my brother trying to come up for air during those shows, laughter coming out of his mouth like horns blaring from a boat: loud and then soft, loud and then soft. But I sat still and watched.

  But, then, one weekday afternoon, with the apartment windows open and the television on full blast, I heard Lucy’s whiny voice on I Love Lucy. She cried like a baby one minute and squinted her eyes like a cunning mastermind the next. I sat on my parents” bed and watched as Lucy tried to keep up with a conveyor belt of nonstop chocolate drops. There she went, twisting her face and jerking her limbs as the belt turned faster, too quickly for her to hold the chocolate drops and wrap them in tissue paper. Panicked, she stuffed the chocolates down her shirt, under her hat, and into her mouth until her cheeks were full like balloons. Now that was funny.

  I mimicked her antics in front of the mirror for the rest of the afternoon, pretending Lego pieces were the chocolates and sheets from a memo pad were the wrappers, then stuffing them into my shirt and under the Red Sox baseball cap I was wearing. Later that evening, when I tried to reenact the scene for my family, I stood in front of the dinner table and pretended it was a conveyor belt and that the popcorn shrimp were pieces of chocolate that I had to wrap, and I stuffed my face until my cheeks puffed out like a trumpet player’s. I put them down my shirt and on top of my head.

  “Ethel! Ethel!” I cried. When I looked up, my brother stared at me blankly.

  My mother, so confused by the chaos, grabbed at my hands and said, “No, no! One by one!”

  “You’ll choke!” my father said.

  Incredibly, I got out of my childhood unscathed. That is, until college, when it seemed that all my father’s nightmares finally materialized. It began one day when Marsha, a big-breasted Italian girl, came into our dorm room and found me sitting on the edge of my twin-sized bed. She took one look at me and said, “Oh, my god, you’re pregnant.”

  This was the beginning of my freshman year. October, to be exact. Just enough time for me to center my Pearl Jam poster perfectly over my bed, just enough time for an enormous pile of laundry to accumulate in the corner of the room.

  Marsha was looking at my ankles, which, once perfectly chiseled, slipping into slim flat shoes with ease, were now swollen like two boiled potatoes.

  “I’m not pregnant,” I told her.

  “If you don’t think you’re pregnant, then you should call your dad.”

  I knew I wasn’t pregnant, and I knew I should call my dad, but I just sat on the edge of the bed staring at my feet. Earlier, when I came home from sociology class, I noticed that the short walk was suddenly longer, that the hill that led from campus up to the dorm was suddenly higher, and by the time I reached the front door, I was exhausted.

  Marsha knew that I should call my dad, because her dad was a doctor, and my dad was a doctor, and overprotective dads like ours—hers Italian, mine Filipino—would want to know this. I had always had little things like this going on—a stomachache or a cold sore that my father could fix. By this time, my family had already moved to the suburbs of Pittsburgh, where we were far away from the bustling streets of the city. My school was only a few hours from home, and when my parents drove me down to Baltimore that first weekend, my mother insisted that I take a crucifix, while my father pushed a plastic box full of pills and elixirs clearly labeled medicine into my hands. “Just in case,” he said.

  I kept checking my ankles to see if the swell
ing went down. It didn’t. So, I called my mother and told her that my ankles were swollen and that I didn’t know why, and she snapped back, “Ay! I know why. You are drinking too much, anak. Stop drinking. It makes your ankles swollen, you know. It’s a proven fact.”

  I told her that I wasn’t drinking that much, and that drinking did not lead to swollen ankles. “You don’t know. You think you know, but you don’t know. Ay, anak ko!” she said before giving the phone to my father, who had obviously been listening to the entire conversation.

  “Do your ankles hurt? . . . How do you feel? Hot? Cold? Worn out? Do you have a fever? . . . Headache?” I answered no to all his questions, none of the symptoms he named striking a chord with me. Until he said, “Baby, are you out of breath?”

  “Hmm, yeah,” I said. “I was out of breath on the walk home. It was weird. And it wasn’t even that far.”

  There was a long pause in his voice, the way my father pauses when he’s turning something over in his head, like the time he couldn’t figure out how to assemble our new mailbox post or like the time he got us lost in Washington, DC. Then he said, “Tonight, sleep with your legs up on a pillow. Call me tomorrow if they’re still like this.”

  When I did call him the next day to tell him that nothing had changed, that, in fact, the elastic in my socks had made deep pits into my fat skin, he said two words: “Come home.”

  I heard the concern in his voice, but I didn’t want to go.

  I had recently gotten the attention of a particular boy in my philosophy class who was, for the most part, oblivious to my existence. There were other boys who were looking at me, too, I think. Also, I had done my first beer bong and keg stand, without spitting beer out of my mouth like an amateur. More recently, I had obtained a decent, authentic-looking West Virginia driver’s license from two guys in the next dorm over who had bought a gold-colored blanket for a picture background and invested in a laminating machine. With a good ID I could get into any Baltimore bar I pleased within the five-mile radius of our sheltered campus, where the doormen—who were mostly seniors at my school—would take one look at the ID and then at my boyish hip bones and my fresh face and let me in anyway.

  I didn’t want to leave because it felt like my life was just beginning—a life in which I didn’t worry what would happen if I stayed up late or if I stood outside without a coat. To relinquish such a status so early in the game, even for just one weekend, would offset any hopes I had for status or consistency, for making a name for myself in the partying world on campus.

  I got a ride home that weekend, not the least bit concerned about the state of my health. I knew my father could make the swelling in my ankles go away, just as he had so easily done with my other ailments in the past. As soon as I left campus, I was hurrying to get back.

  “My anak,” my mother said, pulling my head down to her chest as I walked into the house, not yelling now, but clinging to me and not letting go. My father pulled my feet up on the couch, looked at my ankles, and shook his head.

  I began missing classes shortly after then, sometimes weeks at a time, as my father dragged me from one hospital to another, to doctors with blood pressure machines and needles and tongue depressors who told me to wait in the other room as they talked to my folks in private. I sat outside reading magazines, and when they came out and asked me if I had questions for them, I said, “Yeah—when am I going back to school?”

  On car rides home, my parents yelled at me for not paying attention to the doctors, and told me to stop complaining about my puffy face and what the medications were doing to me. At the hospital, the doctors pulled my father aside in the hallway and said, “I think she’s more concerned about the aesthetics of this disease than what’s happening to her.” I overheard that and thought it might be true.

  I went back to school for a time, and then a result from my blood test required me to come home again. My dad drove down to Baltimore by himself this time, and picked me up and took me back to Pittsburgh. I stood in the parking lot waiting for him while girls walked by and said, “Going out tonight?”

  I said, sadly, “No, going home,” without an explanation.

  This went on for weeks, all a blur for me, as I scrambled to get my missed assignments when I got back to the dorm, and as Marsha recounted the weekends for me, telling me who had hooked up with whom, and who had beat up whom, and I was so jealous of her and her big ballooning tits bouncing as she talked with her big Italian gestures.

  Then, just when I got home for winter break, when I thought I’d finally have time to relax after trying to play catch-up all semester, a doctor with a thick German accent and a white lab coat brought us into his office. His eyes were warm and understanding across the table, and he spoke slowly. “You have Glomerulonephritis, which is a kidney disease. Your kidneys are failing, and now we’re going to have to treat them. It may work with medication or may not. I don’t know, but we’re going to try our best.” He tried to make himself sound clear, but to me his words just sounded vague and cruel.

  So this was the point at which my higher education went from learning about Western civilization, philosophical anthropology, and basic bong hit methodology to taking a crash course in applicable premed. Now, I sat up in hospital beds and people pointed to anatomical diagrams of the kidneys, and showed me how they regulated blood pressure, how they filtered the waste from the body. It was the beginning of my father finally revealing to us the world of medicine that he had kept from us for so long, thinking that we simply weren’t interested. When I had specific questions, he explained my disease in a language that was logical and plain. Curling his forefinger into his thumb to show me how filters in the kidney worked, he said, “These filters in your kidney are usually very small, but yours are big for some reason. They’re letting all the wrong things in and out of your body, and that’s a problem.”

  Prior to this, I was not dependent on numbers, measurements, and ratings, even though I had gone through twelve years of schooling. But now I began watching as the nurses took my blood pressure, and I learned to watch as the needle swept along the scale before hiccupping at 200 or 220. It was the first time I’d try to use my psychic powers to determine that number or to lower it, begging that the needle move far down on the scale before it began to hiccup and slow.

  To my surprise, different things came more easily, like getting my blood drawn. I had gotten used to the smell of the alcohol pad that they smeared across my arm, and that quick prick that followed. I watched as the blood spurted into the tube, and I watched until the tube was full. These, I learned, were minor details in the process. The moment when I really needed to sweat? Waiting to see the reaction on the doctor’s face when he came in to tell me the blood test result, about my creatinine level, the measurement for how well my kidney was functioning. And I was beginning to get used to his face cringing uncomfortably as he read the number: 2.5, 4.3, higher and higher every time, when I knew it should be less than 1.0. That 0.7 is normal.

  This was not the beginning of my mother praying, or wrapping rosary beads around her hand, then tucking them under her sleeve and trying to be subtle about it (she had been doing that for as long as I could remember), but it was the beginning of her going to church daily, waking up at 7:00 a.m., and kneeling before God for an hour before coming into the hospital to see me. Near my bed she’d say, “Oh, anak, if I could only take this thing from you and put it in me, I would. That’s what I pray for.”

  Over those weeks, my father’s face grew permanently worried, sinking slowly from the lines in his forehead to the skin under his chin. His smile, which he usually flashed with ease, was now a struggle for him.

  Buxom Marsha started calling me more frequently then, first with more stories and more assignments, but later to tell me that the boy in philosophy class whose attention I had recently acquired? Yeah, well, she was dating him now.

  I held the receiver and thought that this was what kidney disease can do to you. It can make clear the things y
ou stand to lose.

  “Transplant,” the doctor said, when I finally asked him how we could make this all end. I traced back into my memory what I knew of this word: baboon hearts, organs in coolers on helicopters.

  The intern came in, her lab coat sagging with pocket-sized reference books. She held her hands against my hips and chest and asked, “Can I listen to your heart?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You’re a college student?” she asked. She wore braces and a ponytail and didn’t seem much older than I was. “Taking time off from your studies?”

  I nodded.

  “Breathe deeply for me,” she said, as she touched my shoulder blades. And I let out a slow deep breath.

  “Well,” she said, tossing her hair back and pushing her hand into my hips, “at least you’re learning some anatomy.” She laughed to herself, trying to make a joke out of all this. But it just didn’t seem all that funny.

  Chapter Three

  The Movie Classic Noly Brother of God, Complete with Beautiful Lighting Effects

  Later that summer, I woke in a hospital room in Pltts-burgh from a mid-afternoon nap. My mother stood over me with a half-empty plastic bottle shaped like the Blessed Virgin Mary. I thought to myself that somewhere in China there was a factory where small Asian women were melting plastic, pressing it into a mold shaped like Mary, pressing it again and letting it harden until her arms stayed outstretched without drooping or falling, and until you could see each individual fold in her gown. We always had little bottles like this around our house, and ever since I was little, I had always likened them to Mrs. Butterworth, also a woman in bottle form, a vessel for her own product.

  My mother splashed me with Holy Water that she shook off her fingers with force, the way superheroes throw fire with their hands.

  “It’s getting in my eyes,” I said.

  “Then you close them,” she said. She, in fact, had her eyes closed, and under her breath, she was mouthing a Novena.