Chapter 18
ELI
Icall my mother on a Sunday because Sunday is when Carmen Mercer is home from the ER and has opinions, and Carmen Mercer's opinions require a full day's energy to receive.
She picks up on the first ring. In the background: the sound of something sizzling, a radio playing salsa, and my father saying something indistinct that is probably "tell him I said hi" because my father's contribution to family phone calls is "tell him I said hi" delivered from an adjacent room.
"Mijo," my mother says. "You sound different."
"I sound the same."
"You sound like a person who is eating. You have been eating?"
"I eat every day, Mami. There is a nutritionist. The nutritionist is very committed."
"Nutritionists do not know about rice and beans. Nutritionists know about protein powder and sadness."
This is my mother's position on sports nutrition and it has not changed since I was fourteen and she packed a thermos of arroz con pollo in my hockey bag because she did not trust the arena cafeteria to feed her son food that "had a soul."
"Mami. I need to tell you something."
The sizzling continues. The salsa continues.
My mother's silence is not silence. My mother's silence is the ER-nurse silence, the silence of a woman who has heard "I need to tell you something" from patients and families and doctors for twenty-three years and who has learned that the thing after the telling is what matters, not the telling itself.
"I'm seeing someone. His name is Nikolai."
The sizzling stops. I hear the stove click off. The salsa continues because the radio is not aware of the conversation and the radio does not care.
"His," my mother says.
"His."
Three seconds. Three seconds of Carmen Mercer processing.
Three seconds during which I can hear my entire childhood in the silence: the rosary beads on the nightstand, the crucifixes in the hallway, the Sunday masses at Saint Lawrence where Father Dominguez talked about love in a language that did not include the version of love I am describing.
"Is he feeding you?" my mother says.
The question breaks me open. Not because the question is profound.
Because the question is my mother. Because my mother's first response to learning her son is in a relationship with a man is to ask if the man is providing adequate nutrition.
Because the nutrition question is the Carmen Mercer version of "is he taking care of you," and the version is specific and Cuban and impossible and exactly right.
"He cooks pasta at ten-thirty at night," I say.
"That is not dinner. That is a cry for help. What kind of pasta?"
"Garlic. Parmesan. Basil."
"That is acceptable but insufficient. He needs sofrito. I'm sending you rice and beans."
"Mami, you don't need to..."
"I am sending rice and beans. This is not a negotiation. A man who cooks pasta at ten-thirty needs beans in his life. Beans have substance. Pasta is a wish."
I laugh. The laugh is wet because my eyes are stinging and the stinging is the relief.
The relief is that my mother heard "his name is Nikolai" and the first thing out of her mouth was not a Bible verse or a question about whether this is a phase or any of the things I spent twenty-two years preparing to hear. The first thing was: is he feeding you.
"Tell me about him," she says. The stove clicks back on. The sizzling resumes. My mother processes through cooking. My mother has processed every crisis in our family through the application of heat to food.
I tell her. The accent and the cooking and the reading glasses and the way he sees through the grin. I tell her about the quiet and how the quiet with Nikolai is different from every other quiet because his quiet is safe and his safe is the thing I didn't know I needed.
"He sounds serious," she says.
"He is serious. He's also funny, but the funny is a secret. The funny is underneath the serious and you have to earn it."
"Like your father."
I stop. The comparison is the second time someone has compared Nikolai to a parent (Irina compared Eli to Marcus in Detroit). The mirror is bilateral. Both mothers see the echo. Both mothers see their partners in their son's choice.
"Dave is funny?" I say.
"Your father is the funniest man I have ever met. He just does not perform the funny. The funny arrives when he is comfortable. Your father told me a joke on our third date that made me laugh so hard I spilled café con leche on his shirt and the stain never came out and I married him anyway."
"That is not a story about humor. That is a story about dry cleaning failure."
"All love stories are stories about stains that never come out, mijo."
The sentence is the Carmen Mercer sentence.
The sentence that arrives between the sizzling and the salsa and that contains more wisdom than my mother would ever claim because my mother does not claim wisdom.
My mother claims cooking and working and the specific, load-bearing, Cuban-American-mother love that holds a family together through moves and mortgages and a son who just told her he is dating a Russian hockey player.
"Mami. I'm bisexual."
The word. The word I said to Ava and to the team and to the reporter and to the internet. The word that belongs to me. The word needs to be said to the woman who gave me the mouth that says it.
The sizzling continues. The silence is four seconds.
"Your tía Luisa told me this when you were fourteen," my mother says.
"What?"
"Luisa called me. She said: Carmen, that boy looks at everyone the way you looked at Dave. Everyone, Carmen. Not just girls. I said: Luisa, he is fourteen, he looks at his phone. She said: I know what I see."
"Tía Luisa knew before I did?"
"Luisa knows everything before everyone. It is her gift and her curse and the reason nobody plays cards with her."
I sit on the couch in Nikolai's apartment.
Our apartment. The couch where his arm goes around me and the Bulgakov sits on the side table and the reading glasses are somewhere (counter, pocket, nightstand, the glasses migrate now, the glasses no longer have a fixed position because the fixed position was the discipline and the discipline is loosening).
"Are you okay with it?" I ask. The question is quieter now.
The question is the son asking the mother.
The question is the fourteen-year-old who lay in bed in Tampa and didn't have the word yet but had the feeling and the feeling was a secret and the secret lived in the same house as the rosary beads and the crucifixes.
"Mijo." My mother's voice is the mother-voice. The voice that transcends the rosary and the crucifix and the Sunday mass and Father Dominguez. The voice that says: I am your mother before I am anything else, and the before means always, and the always means this.
"You are my son. I love you. The love does not have conditions. Your tía was right and I should have said something sooner but I did not know how to say it and the not-knowing was my failure, not yours. You hear me? The not-knowing was mine."
The tears arrive. Silent, the way Mercer tears work (we cry inward, we cry quiet, we learned it from Dave, who cries at commercials and pretends he doesn't).
The tears are not about the pain. The tears are about the absence of pain.
The absence of the thing I was afraid of.
The thing I prepared for and rehearsed and built walls against and the thing did not arrive because my mother is my mother and my mother loves me and the love does not have conditions.
"Dave!" my mother calls. "Your son has a boyfriend. His name is Nikolai. He is Russian. He cooks pasta."
My father's voice, from the adjacent room: "That's great, buddy."
He says it the way some men say "I love you" when the real sentence feels too large to hold in one mouth. The response is Dave, fully Dave, and I love him for it.
"Your father will need time," my mother says, lower now, private. "He loves you. The love is immediate. The understanding takes longer because your father processes the way he watches football: slowly, with replays."
"Ava said the same thing. She said he needs a pamphlet."
"Ava is not wrong. I will make him a pamphlet. I will include diagrams."
"Please do not make my father a pamphlet about bisexuality with diagrams."
"Too late. I am already planning the diagrams."
We talk for another twenty minutes. She asks about my eating (again).
She asks about my sleeping. She asks whether Nikolai's apartment is warm enough because "Russian men come from cold places and cold places produce cold apartments and cold apartments produce illness.
" I assure her the apartment is warm. I do not tell her the apartment is warm because Eli Mercer is in it and Eli Mercer generates warmth the way the sun generates light.
After we hang up, I sit on the couch. The apartment is quiet.
Nikolai is at the facility doing extra film work.
The quiet is not the empty quiet from before.
The quiet is the full quiet, the quiet that contains the residue of my mother's voice and the sizzling and the salsa and the word "mijo" and the sentence about stains that never come out.
The rice and beans arrive four days later. The package is a flat-rate USPS box, taped with the thoroughness of a woman who does not trust the postal service, containing two large Tupperware containers, a bottle of homemade sofrito, and a note in my mother's handwriting:
For both of you. Your father says hi. Your tía says she was right.
Nikolai tastes the rice and beans and is quiet for three seconds, which is the Nikolai version of a standing ovation.
"Your mother," he says, "is a better cook than I am."
"I know."
"This is not a compliment I give."
"I know."
He eats a second serving. I watch him eat my mother's food in our kitchen and the watching is the warmest thing I have felt since the Beltline doorway.
My mother's food in Nikolai's hands. The Cuban in the Russian.
The Tampa in the Atlanta. The crossing of every line that the performance was designed to prevent.
The sofrito goes in the cabinet next to the pasta.
The cabinet holds both.