My Grandmother Fucked Me

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My Grandmother Fucked Me
On the morning I accompany my demented grandmother on a bus from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, my Uncle Bartolo makes pancakes in his kitchen. He's the brother my mother and my aunts are always scolding and protecting, because of his displacement and his sins.
Fifteen years ago, when I met him during a family trip to Nevada, Uncle Bartolo smiled and sat poolside, his tanned arms over his head. His white American girlfriend, a casino waitress, laughed and mussed his hair. I didn't know then about the wife and five sons Uncle Bartolo had left behind in the Philippines, and the dollars he sent to support them over the decades.
Now he's alone in suburban Las Vegas. I don't know what happened to the waitress. As I read the steady resignation of his movements, I know not to ask. It's 2008, I'm twenty-three, and Uncle Bartolo is still tall and lean in his forties, his hair black and full over his youthful face.
Uncle Bartolo gasps and moves his palm to a sharp pain in his back. He freezes before he feels safe to move again. I don't know what to do. He does not explain the pain.
My grandmother sits at the table with us, peeling a banana with deliberation. Her white hair is a disheveled puff. She wears a rumpled yellow sweatsuit; she's skinny as a cigarette. Mamang was once a woman protective of her appearance, tying elaborate silk scarves around her neck and perfecting her eyeliner.
"I don't want her in a home," my uncle says. "Depressing. Your aunties, they want the home. It's good you're taking her to visit your mom in California."
My grandmother mutters in Filipino. She has a different relationship with my relatives when speaking Filipino, a language she uses with adept relish until one of her children uses it back at her. During post-World War II Philippines, she beat her children with long aluminum strips, smoked through marathon mah-jong tournaments, and yelled if her kids asked for food, school supplies, hugs. I sometimes wonder if that's one reason my mother never taught me Filipino: to spare me the torturous matriarchal reprimands.
Uncle Bartolo does not reply to my grandmother now in any language. He watches TV. There is a rerun of an evening news feature on the Netherlands.
My grandmother leaves the table. I see that her walk—formerly upright, the deportment of a doña—has slowed to a stagger. She reaches in front of her, both hands groping the empty air, and, finding the walls, guides herself back to the room. Her mouth moves quietly all the while.
In the Netherlands, citizens receive preventative health care free of charge!
"Is that true?" Uncle asks me. "Free doctors in Amsterdam?"
I smile. But he looks at me in all seriousness. Uncle Bartolo has been a perfume salesman, vacuum-vendor, ballroom-dance partner. He's trying to be a real estate agent.
He stares at the stock shots of Amsterdam. Bicycles, water canals, white people. "You help your grandma pack," he says.
I walk back to my grandmother's room. She has already begun to pack.
"We don't come back here," Mamang says. Then, angry and looking toward my uncle, "Everything is missing! ID, passport, money."
I see her passport, ID, and money on her dresser.
"You want to watch Price Is Right, Mamang?" I ask.
She pauses. She says one of the only Filipino words I understand, the word my mother used to finish every loud and happy conversation with a friend far away. "Sige." Okay. The thought of Bob Barker, that pale host totemic to so many budget-minded Filipinos, has suddenly soothed her.
I turn on her TV. I can't find The Price is Right.
I begin to feel a bit of panic. Panic that we haven't left yet. Panic that we aren't moving. As if not being on the bus to California yet means I will be trapped in my family's Las Vegas life, waiting, eating bananas, speaking to ghosts, hustling, hustling in pain, letting my anger and fear drown what's left of my independent thoughts.
We ride in Uncle Bartolo's aging Mercedes to a strip mall. In the noontime daylight the Vegas suburbs are stuck in sad, perpetual dusk. There are brown lawns, shuttered homes, empty parking lots.
"Oh," I say. I decide to be honest. "The same. No job. Staying with friends."
After my parents' violent divorce, my younger brother—twenty-one now—could never decide on a life. The only routine he seemed able to keep was showing up at my mother's house, angry.
"I try to talk to him last time I see him," Uncle Bartolo says. "James only laughs. You know, I am very far from my boys in the Philippines. But I call all the time, email all the time." Uncle Bartolo glances at me, sensing my skepticism. He hasn't seen his sons in twenty years.
"You know metal?" he says. "It won't move. But gentle pressure, all the time, it changes. I talk to my boys every day, I'm calm with them every day. And so my boys came up straight."
All of Uncle Bartolo's sons have names that begin with "B," in honor of his name, and all of them gave their own children "B" names in turn. Bobby, Benjamin, Barry, Bart Junior, Bill. They still beg him to return to the Philippines.
"She peed," my uncle says, looking at my grandmother. "Can you smell it?"
He gasps again at the sharp pain in his back. Soon, Uncle Bartolo will discover the pain is lung cancer. He will die a few months after my grandmother dies—after his sons in Manila watch him wither, over Skype, to half his weight. This moment is the last time I will ever see Uncle Bartolo.
He hands me a stack of bills and leaves.
The bus from Vegas to Los Angeles—a company run by Chinese immigrants—pulls slowly up to the curb. I pick up my grandmother's bag, she slaps my forearm, thinking I'm trying to steal from her.
Her incontinence pads fall out, scattering across the floor of the mall. I feel heavy. I want to feel unburdened of—of what? I can't precisely name what it is I want to escape. My grandmother? The trip? Family? My cowardice? Inevitable death? Pee pads?
My grandmother grips my arm as we proceed up the bus stairs. She pauses. I wonder if I will have to carry her by her underarms.
But she is, for all her age and decline, still powerful. She grips the railing with both hands, then pulls herself up. We sit in the first seat. My grandmother sighs and looks out the window. Her mouth moves.
Across the aisle from us are a Filipino-American teenager, about fourteen, and his little brother. The brother is eight, maybe, and playing a Game Boy.
The bus moves. It moves past the mall, the casinos, the Strip, Vegas traffic, and into the bare beige desert. The bus is filled with sleepy, elderly Asian Americans.
"Fuck, man," he answers. "My Tita fucking took away my favorite fucking hat, like totally fucked my style, you know? Fuck." His listener interrupts, and the kid scolds him. "No it's aunt. Tita. In fucking Filipino. Tita, not titty, dumb shit—"
The little brother stretches out across the teenager's lap. The teenager holds the kid casually, as if the holding of his brother is another extension of his toughness. I decide that this—his paradoxical tenderness—is a sign that it would be safe to say something. I tap his skinny arm.
"There's, like, old people on the bus. Could you cool it with the cell phone?"
"Oh my bad," the teenager mumbles. His brother squeaks a mocking laugh at him. "Ha, ha."
But the teenager puts his cell phone away. His brother turns over on his lap. I remember my brother James, who was once this small and liked to read Calvin and Hobbes with me before bed, before he grew six feet tall and broke windows and doors.
"Do the thing?" the eight-year-old asks.
"Fuck you," the teenager says. But he uses his palms to drum his little brother's shoulders in a familiar, soothing way. His brother falls asleep in his lap.
My grandmother begins to hit the back of the seat in front of us with her fist. A man looks at us, annoyed. "No, Mamang," I say.
I give her my iPod to listen to. My grandmother used to sing at the piano during the 1940s Japanese occupation of Manila. Her voice is why my grandfather fell in love with her, asked her to be the lead actress in a musical he wrote.
The headphones rest on her ears. My grandmother listens and stares out at the vast expanse of sand. She does not sleep.
Moving across the desert for hours, I feel I'm moving between realms—not across the line between Nevada and California, but treading the line between the living and the dead. Suffused with this sense of urgency, danger, and transition, I wonder if I should tell my grandmother something. Something like: I'm sorry you have come to this. Are you afraid? How can I help you?
She gives the headphones back to me.
She starts to move her lips. Perhaps in conversation with the dead. I don't ask.
We cross into Los Angeles county limits hours later. The bus stalls more and more. Electric-red and metallic lines of traffic gnarl before us.
The teenager gets back on his cell phone. Through his new monologue of curses, I realize he's bartering.
"Yeah I can carry. I can get a Glock from Vegas. Two hundred. Naw, fool, fuck that, two hundred cash. Fucking murder someone with that."
I decide not to say anything to the kid this time.
"Kuya, why are you so angry?" his little brother asks brightly.
"Man, you don't fucking know, man. Don't talk about shit you don't know."
The teenager pauses and shuts his eyes. "Shit just gets inside you man. It's gotta get out."
I remember James sitting at the foot of my bed, crying after one of our parents' fights. You don't even care, he tells me as I sit, silent with fear that the fight will continue. You don't even give a shit! His voice rising like our white father's.
"It's okay, Kuya," the little brother says. The teen says, "Shut up."
My grandmother says, "This is the worst bus trip of my life."
We pull into our final destination. The driver brakes sharply. An elderly Filipino man vomits all over his dress pants and the bus floor.
The man's wife yells in Filipino—again, I can't understand, though the anger translates. The man looks at the floor. His wife keeps yelling. I close my eyes, try to un-smell the vomit, and fail.
I wait, in the stink, until we're last, so I have enough time to help my grandmother off the bus without reprimand from other passengers. If she smells anything, she doesn't say.
I vomited once, a few years ago, when my grandmother was living with us. It was just after the divorce, and my mother, busy working, had left food to rot in the fridge. I hadn't noticed it; I had only been hungry.
In between puking, I had curled on the living room couch. At night my grandmother leaned over me, smiling and saying something in Filipino. I would wake, sweating, hear the familiar language I couldn't understand, and close my eyes again. Only later did I realize: my grandmother was praying for me.
Together, with three years left in her life, my grandmother and I clear the last step of our journey.
Laurel Fantauzzo divides her time between Quezon City, Philippines, and the United States. A longer version of this essay first appeared in the journal Kritika Kultura.




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I don’t have much of a relationship with my paternal grandma. She and my dad got in a fight over the way she took care of us while my parents were on a trip when I was a little kid, and after that, she stopped visiting or even really talking to us at all. This was also around the same time my younger cousins were born, and they lived a lot closer to her, so she used them as an excuse to not come see us.
When I went away to college, she wanted my address to send me cards. I thought it was going to be the obligatory Christmas, Easter, and birthday cards, but it quickly got out of control: She sent a lot of cards, and the cards had increasingly longer notes in them until this past spring, when a card came with a whole letter tucked inside it. She wanted to come visit me, which was out of the question (my mom came to visit once and it was a logistical nightmare because I was so busy—I decided I never wanted any family to visit me at school again). My grandma also rambled on in the letter about wanting to build a better relationship with me now that I wasn’t living with my parents full time. She blamed my dad for her not being closer with us, even though she is the one who stopped putting in the effort to spend time with us. I was too overwhelmed to do anything with the letter except throw it away. I had come to the decision on my own that I didn’t want to have a close relationship with her.
Her behavior is strange: She once showed up at a party we gave for my grandfather (her ex-husband) without being invited. Now I have moved again, for grad school, and she’s asking for my address again. I don’t want to give it to her, but she’s messaged me a few times and ignoring her hasn’t been working. I feel stuck because, historically, she hasn’t liked when people create boundaries with her and often gossips and lies about what happened with other family members. I’m also worried she’s going to continue to blame my dad for the way I interact with her, even though he’s been clear that his relationship with her doesn’t have to determine mine or my sibling’s. I know that I can’t ignore her forever, and I know that I don’t want her sending me things or knowing where I live; but I don’t know how to handle that while trying to reassure her that I don’t mind interacting on social media or potentially visiting her if I have the time/money. How do I handle something so messy?
It’s not clear to me, I admit, why you are so certain that it was your grandmother’s choice to keep her distance after the fight with your dad in your childhood. Can you be sure that she’s the one who “stopped putting in the effort” and used her other grandchildren as an excuse not to spend time with you? Your father explained it that way—I get that—but your grandmother’s perspective, it seems, is different. Just the fact that she immediately made contact once you left home, and increased contact the longer you were away from home suggests that there is at least the possibility that your parents asked her to stay away (or said something so unforgivable in the course of that fight that she made the decision to do so). Sure, she might be a terrible person—toward the end of your letter you mention that she’s a gossip and a liar, and that she doesn’t like boundaries—but if you haven’t had much contact with her over the years, I’m guessing that this may be hearsay, at least to some degree.
Since your father has made it clear that it’s OK with him if you have a relationship that’s separate from his (nonexistent) relationship with her, why not give it a chance? At least for long enough to find out for yourself what sort of person she is? I know you said you made your own decision not to have a relationship with her, but if this was a decision based on what you’ve been told and not on what you experienced directly, are you sure you want to stick with it? (My apologies if there are in fact plenty of examples of your firsthand knowledge of her general undeservingness of your forgiveness or kindness that you just didn’t offer in your letter. Her turning up at a family party without being invited, while nervy, doesn’t seem to me to rise to the definition of “strange”—or unforgivable—if she felt it was her only chance to see you and your sibling, for example.)
Finally, it puzzles me that you’re fine with social media contact and would be willing to visit her once you have the time and money, but you don’t want to correspond with her. Why not? What have you got to lose? People who love you—or who want to love you, and want to know you—don’t grow on trees. Nor do grandmothers, of course. You don’t have to let her come visit you if you don’t want her to. But what harm do her cards and letters do? Are you really afraid that if she knows your address, she’ll show up on your doorstep? If so, things are even “messier” than you suggest. But given what I know—which is all I have to go by—I would not be so hard on her. — Michelle
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