Wipe My Tears with Marigolds

Today I mourn you, Mother, but I no longer mourn us: we found each other in the end. I place a single marigold on your grave to reach out across the waters of time and bring you the scent of my childhood memory of you.

I was seven and had woken up blind. Well, not technically. I couldn't open my eyes because my eyelids, itchy and crusty, were sealed shut.

"Mami!" I called, hoping Mom could hear me over the vacuum cleaner.

Nothing.

Carefully, I sat up on the bed and tested the tile floor with my right toe, finding it as cold as an icy river. I planted both feet on the ground, fighting through the shock, and waited until the temperature stabilized before walking to the door.

Still sightless, I fumbled for the door handle, pushing it down clumsily and throwing the door open with a bang as it hit the outer wall and a thud as I hit the ground.

That, Mom did hear.

"Mijo, are you okay?" The vacuum went quiet and I could hear her hurried steps approaching. Then her soft hands were caressing my face. "Ay, Dios! Look at your eyes mijo. You have La Mirada China."

La Mirada China literally translates, "The Chinese Gaze," a culturally insensitive name for conjunctivitis that many South Americans use because the puffy eyelids resemble slanted slits, shut closed by the infection.

"Ay, Leo. You're a lion when you're well, but a lamb when you're not." Although I could be vulnerable in her embrace most of the time, with Dad around I had to be Leo the Lion, even when mortally wounded.

"Get back in bed, mijo. I’ll pick some flores amarillas from Doña Ana's garden."

Marigolds, known in some Latin countries as flores amarillas—yellow flowers—were Mom's favorite remedy. They reminded me of the children's song Mom used to sing when she was pregnant with Teresa, the baby sister that had never come.

Teresa the countess,

Had a golden crown,

Made of yellow flowers,

Tee-pee-tee, tee-pee-ton.

I was still singing the song when Mom returned with the boiled marigolds, their musky breath already filling the room.

"Amor, you're too old for girly songs. Your father is right; I shouldn't teach you songs like that." She gently pushed my head back onto the pillow and began to rub marigolds on my eyelids. “Keep still.”

I flinched a little as the hot liquid percolated into my eyeballs but relaxed as the itching and aching started fading away.

"I guess if I had a sister, she'd get to sing those songs," I said meanly.

Mom paused briefly but then continued applying the marigolds, finally leaving them on the eyelids. She kissed my forehead. "Lie still for a while, mi amor."

Guilt hit me coldly. "Sorry, Mami; I didn't mean to bring up Teresa."

"It's okay, mi amor. God plucks the best flowers for his garden in Heaven."

"Am I a flower too?"

"You're a lion and God created the lion to rule over the lamb, not to wear crowns of yellow flowers."

"Not even a crown of diente de león?" I meant Lion’s tooth, the Spanish name for Dandelions.

"The things you say, Leoncito. Rest; I will come back with more flores amarillas in a couple hours."

Sleepily, I dreamt of my almost-sister Teresa in a field of marigolds, a crown of the bright flowers on her head. We were holding hands and dancing until the sun reached its zenith. We became one person, a single girl wearing a yellow dress and a yellow crown.

If I collect enough yellow flowers, I would often think for the next thirty years, I can wipe Mom's tears away.

*****

"You're up in five, Teresa," Kadeesha shouted into the changing room.

"Thank you, Kad." My face was flawless, the makeup magically concealing the nuances of masculinity that the hormones had not yet erased. My features were less Leo now and more Teresa la Leona—Teresa the Lioness, my drag name.

"Girl, you about done beating your face?" Dolly, still in her boy form, sat next to me. "I need your concealer."

I could feel her eyes on me, but the image in the mirror held me hostage: I looked just like Mom.

"Would you stop staring at yourself and go perform? I am up after you and got a bitch of a zit to hide."

"Sorry. Here." I handed her the bottle.

Dolly took my hand. "It'll be fine, sweetie. Your dad's going to see the beautiful woman and performer you have become."

"He's never seen me perform."

"Yeah, but he already drives you to your transition doctor and even holds your purse in the waiting room!"

"I just—look too much like Mom."

"What's wrong with that? We're all Momma's boys at the end of the day. Plus, she was a looker."

"Used to be," I said as I walked to the stage. I hadn't seen or spoken to Mom in over a decade, but through Tía Claudia I knew Mom had been in and out of consciousness since the cancer had reached her brain. When lucid, however, her edges were as sharp as ever, like a rose growing fiercer thorns to counteract the budworm eating it from the inside.

Before my song played, I checked for Dad in the audience, shaking my head when I saw him with my drag sisters Marissa and Nada Notherhoe. When the song started, the world around me vanished and Teresa la Leona came to life.

"Girls, boys, move it to the beat; high, low, sync in with my feet." My lips moved as I danced with the fluidity of a trained dancer—speech in motion, my teacher used to say. Off the stage, I went to each table like a flower-hopping butterfly collecting her pollen of dollar bills.

"Crazy nights, my heart's delight. Crazy nights, let's do it right." Dad's face glowed when I stepped up to him, his smile something I hadn't seen since the divorce that made him flee to Honolulu for almost two decades. He handed me a twenty and blew me a kiss as I walked away.

"Down, down, let's energize this town." I twirled and fell right into a death-drop that made the audience explode.

After the show, Dad drove Nada and me home. “I didn’t know my son was such a performer."

"Son?" Nada exclaimed from the back seat. "There ain't no son left in there, Daddy, only 100% goddess."

Dad laughed heartily. “That, she is.”

“Oh, Dad. It seems only yesterday you dragged me out of dance class in sixth grade because that was not what boys did.”

“That was another life. I was blind then, Teresa.”

“If only Mom would come around while we still have time.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Two days later we bit the bullet and drove to Mercy Hospital.

“Something clicked that night at the show," he said as we walked down a long hallway. "A lot of what she put you through after you came out was my fault, my macho bullshit."

I kept silent; those wounds hadn't yet healed.

"Seeing you was like seeing her and—" He stopped and turned to me. "It was almost like seeing your sister Teresa realized in you. Losing her is what eventually broke us, hurting you in the process."

"I know," was all I could say.

"Well, now we'll walk in there united as father and daughter and reclaim your mami for whatever time she has left."

"As father and daughter," I repeated.

Stepping into the room was like jumping into waters of unknown depth. We stood on either side of the bed and watched the weak rise and fall of her breathing.

I took out the vial of marigold oil I carried in my purse, opened it, and rubbed some on her forehead, while singing, "Teresa the countess had a golden crown of yellow flowers, tee-pee-tee—"

Her eyes opened slightly, a thin wedge of emerald light visible between her eyelids.

"Flores Amarillas," she whispered. “That song. The girl wearing—“

"A crown of yellow flowers." My feminine tone sounded foreign. The last time I had spoken to Mom, my voice had been that of a flustered young man.

"Ah, yes. I always did love them. What do you call them in English?"

"Marigolds," I said.

"Marigolds." Her accent was much more pronounced than I remembered. "Didn’t I name her Teresa, my little girl?"

Dad touched her hand. "Yes, Dolores, we named her Teresa."

She turned to Dad. "Morgan? Weren’t you off to—" She seemed confused. "I can't remember. Dios mio, but you look so much older."

"It's been twenty years."

"That long?” She then addressed me again, her voice a little sharper. "Sorry, do I know you?"

"I—" My voice couldn't get past the knot in my throat.

"You smell of flores amarillas; you can't be too bad." The edge in her tone was gone.

Dad jumped in. "This is Teresa. She’s here to do a performance for you."

Mom's eyes brightened. "A performance? Que maravilla! Will you sing a ballad for this dying woman?"

"Lip-sync, actually,” I replied, holding back tears. "It's called A Flower in Disguise, by Penelope Rose. A bit sad, if that's okay."

"I grew up with sad songs. They get the pain out in the open, into the light and away from darkness. Someone famous said that."

"Reba," Dad replied.

"Ay, Morgan. You always did love your Country."

Dad powered the Bluetooth speaker and suddenly soft piano music filled the room.

I began.

She, the promise of a miracle ,

A hidden blossom in my womb,

A whispered secret not yet bloomed.

My lips were moving with the words, my hands dancing in space like the limbs of a tree in the breeze.

Now I sing my lullabies into the sky .

Into which cotton cloud did she fly?

Through a veil of tears I could see Mom, one hand covering her mouth, the other clinging onto Dad's arm. Her eyes followed my moves as if reading the longing in the rotation of my wrist, the loss in each unfolding finger.

Forever, your heart beats with mine,

However far, however lost,

Your cradle covered in winter's frost.

In her eyes there was a hint of recognition, her tears merging with mine in an endless river I would have to swim across to rescue her—or perhaps she would rescue me.

A flower in disguise, my little girl, wiping tears from my eyes.

The piano died off and we stood in a trinity of silence: her pain, his understanding, my memories.

When she spoke, it was with the lucidity of Mom's voice. "You always did move with the grace of a panther, rather than the mercilessness of a lion." Her arms were wide open, extended toward me.

"Mami!" I exclaimed, running into her arms, Jonah rescued from the bottom of an angry sea. I could be vulnerable in her embrace and now I knew that I would never have to be Leo the Lion, especially with my heart torn in two.

She reached for the little vial, which I had placed on the table next to her bed before my song. She opened it and soon her hand was on my brow, rubbing it gently with marigold oil.

The smell of the yellow little flowers took me back in time, making me feel each of the years we had lost and the years we would yet miss.

"It's okay mija," she said, using the feminine form of the affectionate word. "I opened your eyes once with yellow flowers, remember?"

I nodded, the tears unstoppable.

"Well, daughter, this time you have opened mine."

As a little boy dreaming of freeing the girl within, I had wanted to gather enough flores amarillas to wipe my mother's tears: tears over the baby daughter she had lost, tears that had become a river I hadn't crossed. As life had shown, it was Mom who crossed the river to wipe my own.