ISSUE 06   ||   FALL / WINTER 2009

Symbiont

Robert Aquino Dollesin

I am fourteen and today I stopped loving Marie Osmond. My new love is Patricia Hearst. I love Patricia so much that I can't get myself up off the carpet, where I've been sprawled out on my belly for most of the afternoon, watching photographs of the kidnapped heiress flash across the television screen. Along with the details of Patricia's privileged life, the newsman gives histories of the terrorist organization – The Symbionese Liberation Army – that snatched her.

My father calls me. He's in the dining room, and he wants me to please get up and check on my mother in her bedroom. Today is my mother's birthday. She is thirty years old. All morning my father has been over the stove in the kitchen. He's been cooking Filipino foods that smell wonderful. Also in the kitchen are my younger brothers and sisters, making a fuss about who gets to do what.

I push myself up off the floor, but before heading to my mother's bedroom, I walk over to the bookshelf and grab the dictionary. I flip through the pages, search for the word Symbionese. It doesn't exist. The closest thing is symbiosis, which means unlike organisms coexisting harmoniously for mutual benefit.

After replacing the dictionary on the shelf, I go down the hall to my mother's bedroom. I open the door and find her sitting on the edge of her bed. She glances up at me and smiles. Then she pats the mattress with a palm, indicating that I should come sit beside her. I know my mother's been on the telephone trying to get a hold of my biological father, who was an American serviceman stationed in the Philippines when they got married. She needs his birth certificate to prove my American citizenship.

While next to my mother on the edge of her bed, I keep picturing poor Patricia Hearst. I try to understand what's been happening to her. Ever since she was kidnapped, broadcasts have been pouring out of the television and radio. Right now she's probably cooped up somewhere in some uncomfortable closet, guarded by a bunch of crazy terrorists. Alone. Afraid.

My mother holds the telephone in her left hand, a ballpoint pen in her right. A spiral notebook bounces above her knees. While she waits for someone to pick up on the other end of the line, she plays with the pen, clicking the ball again and again.

In the past month she's tried to call my biological father in Alabama a dozen times. But always, after whoever answers the telephone hears my mother's clipped Filipino accent, they slam the receiver down.

This afternoon it is dark and cloudy outdoors. Rain batters the window. The wind sighs as it knocks the leafless branches of a small maple tree against the glass. In the dim light of the bedroom, my mother's face looks very pale.

I look down a minute at my damp and trembling hands. Closing my eyes, I think about Patricia Hearst's sad face in the photographs shown on TV. She is not as pretty as Marie Osmond, and I don't know if she can sing. Why did they take Patricia? She must be so alone right now, so afraid.

Symbiosis, I think, what a strange word. I weave my hands together in my lap and wait for my mother to start talking on the phone.

Finally, my mother's back straightens. She clears her throat and speaks softly into the receiver, saying, “Please don't hang up. Please. Joe's son needs to speak with you.” After a moment, she places the telephone in my hands and nods.

I have never talked to them before. Never had any desire to. Not really. Nervous and frightened, I try to give the receiver back to my mother. But she pleads with her eyes. I raise the phone to my ear and hear someone breathing on the other end.

In a small voice, I say, “Hello.”

The reply comes by way of a man's voice, heavy with a southern drawl. He says, “Who is this?”

Because my mouth is so dry, I have a difficult time answering right away. I glance at my mother and try to shove the telephone back into her hands. But she shakes her head and folds her arms across her chest. She bites her lower lip, the pen in her hand clicks, clicks, clicks.

"Who is this?" the man on the end of the line says again.

“Bobby.”

"Who?"

I clear my throat. "Bobby."

He's upset, annoyed. I can tell he hates me. I'm glad I'm far away from him, in California, where I live with my mother, my stepfather, and my brothers and sisters. Although my siblings are pesky sometimes, I can't imagine not having them around.

While I wait for the man on the line to speak, I picture Marie Osmond on the cover of last month's Tiger Beat. She has lots of brothers, but she is the only girl. That makes her different. Like me. Different.

I wish my mother never told me about her first marriage. I don't like knowing my biological father disappeared when my mother was seven months pregnant. He left the Philippines and though promising otherwise, he never came back. My mother had to go through the pregnancy, the labor, and the delivery alone. It wasn't until just before I was born that she finally got news from my biological father. An official letter from Alabama. An annulment signed by a judge and stamped by the courts saying the marriage between my mother and my biological father never really existed.

That quick. That easy.

Finally, the man on the phone says something. But his accent is so thick I don't catch it. “Excuse me?” I say.

Suddenly, there is some commotion and a woman comes on the line. In an abrupt, angry tone she says, “What is it you folks want?”

I let her words sink in. You folks. You folks. You folks.

Then I clear my throat again and repeat what my mother and I had rehearsed so many times before. “This is Bobby,” I say. “Are you my grandmother Roberta? I was named after you.”

For a few moments the woman keeps quiet. She just breathes. Breathes. Breathes. Finally she spurts out, “Why can't you people leave Joe be?”

You people?

In the early months of her pregnancy, she used to receive packages from Alabama. Blankets. Toys. Baby clothes. They were for the future mother. The beloved grandchild. Because no one was sure if I was going to be born a boy or a girl, the new clothes were both blue and pink. My mother, once the beloved bride, got things, too. Shampoo. Jewelry. Makeup. Books.

You people?

"You folks'll do anything to ruin Joe's life, won't you?"

Ruin Joe's life?

My eyes sting. Something is caught in my throat, making it impossible to reply. I shake my head and drop the phone in my mother's lap. Reluctantly, she picks the telephone up and raises it to her ear. She says, “I'm sorry to bother you. Really, I am . . . but we're having a problem proving Bobby is an American citizen. We need a notarized copy of Joe's birth certificate.”

Although I can hear the woman's muffled voice spilling out of the receiver, I can't make her words out. My mother nods and says, “Yes, of course I have the annulment, but the American embassy won't move forward without Joe's birth certificate.” After a pause, my mother frowns and says, “Of course we're not trying to make trouble for him and his family. What do you think of me? I'm also happily married and I also have other children."

She lowers her head and doodles on a page in the notebook on her lap. While she does this, she gives the woman on the other end of the line our California address, which is over two thousand miles from Alabama. She nods and says, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

After a minute of silence, my mother says, "Okay." Then she tries to hand me the telephone. “Your grandmother wants to speak to you.”

I shake my head and draw my hands away, but the frustrated expression on my mother's face tells me I had better take the phone.

“Hello,” I say.

The woman says flatly, “I hope you're old enough to understand we have nothing against you. Alabama wouldn't have been a good place for you people.” She pauses and adds, “I hope you get that.”

You people? Symbiosis: unlike organisms coexisting harmoniously for mutual benefit.

“Hello. Did you hear me?”

I don't answer and the line goes dead.

I stare at my mother and hand the phone back to her. She raises it and when she realizes no one is there, she replaces it in its cradle. For a moment she looks lost, far away. Then she touches my arm and says, “What did your grandmother say?”

I look at my hands and do not answer. I look across to the mirror above my mother's dresser and do not recognize the boy who gazes back. He is pale, his features clearly Caucasian. Before today, the boy in the mirror sometimes struggled with his identity. He was white, his family wasn't. And how many times had that left him confused?

Symbiosis. In some ways Patricia Hearst has become a Symbiont. In some ways Marie Osmond has always been a Symbiont. Me?

When my reflection in the mirror begins blinking tears back, I close my eyes. In the faint bedroom light, I feel my mother's comforting arm travel across my back. Her strong hand tightly cups my shoulder.

My mother says, “Are they going to send the birth certificate?”

Keeping my eyes shut, I shrug. “She said we shouldn't bother them anymore.”

For a long time we sit silently at the edge of my mother's bed. Finally she pulls me close. “Come on,” she says. “Let's go have some of my birthday cake before your brothers and sisters finish it off.”

She lets go my shoulder, gets up from the bed and sighs. “Thirty,” she says. “I can't believe I'm thirty.”

In the dining room my brothers and sisters are feasting on cake and ice cream. My stepfather stands at the head of the table, arranging wrapped gifts for my mother. Neither my father nor my mother say anything. They just exchange a long disappointed glance.

My brothers and sisters begin singing, "Happy Birthday to you."

I chime in. After we finish the song, we all clap our hands and stomp our feet.

Shrugging, smiling, my mother says, “Come on everybody. It's Mommy's birthday. Let's celebrate.”

It is nearly two months later, May, that I go to answer a knock at the front door. My mother is already there. The postman is standing on the porch in front of her, waiting for my mother to finish signing for a large Manila envelope. She hands the postman back his pen and shuts the door. She turns to me, smiling, and shows me the Alabama return address in the corner of the Manila envelope. I follow her into the kitchen, where she rips the envelope open. There is no letter inside the envelope. No photographs. Only a neatly folded birth certificate that bears a raised stamp. My mother gives it to me and for a few minutes I hold it in my hands and study the typewritten information that fills the spaces. Before now, I never knew my biological father's middle name, his religion, the year of his birth, or even the Alabama county where he was born.

I give the certificate back to my mother and head quietly to my bedroom, leaving her standing alone in the kitchen.

Lying in my bed, I wonder if I'm supposed to feel this way. Alone. Afraid. Like Patricia Hearst must have felt while being held against her will by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Although I don't love Patricia anymore, I still think about her. She's changed, though. Not long ago she helped rob a bank. She called herself Tania, and she was photographed toting a gun. She had on a long black coat and a beret.

Seemingly, Patricia Hearst had given up one culture and embraced another. Last night six members of her new gang were killed in Los Angeles.

Another person I still think about is Marie Osmond. But truthfully, I'm in love with Susan Dey now. She plays Laurie on the Partridge Family.

My bedroom door opens. I sit up in bed. My stepfather crosses the carpet, and when he sits down on the edge of my mattress, the bed springs creak. He runs his big fingers through my hair and says, "Why you looking sad?"

I shrug.

“You know I'm your father, right. I'll always be your father.”

I nod. Then I smile.

Grinning, my father pops my shoulder with his meaty palm. "That's what I want to see," he says. Then he laughs. I laugh, too. I wrap my arms around my father's big arms. He draws me close, and as I peer over his shoulder, I notice my mother and brothers and sisters standing in the doorway.

My mother says, "Who wants to go to Straw Hat for some pizza."

My younger brothers and sisters clap and cheer and shout. They scatter to grab their coats and shoes.

I ask my father if we can stop by the store so that I can buy a magazine, maybe one that has Susan Dey on the cover.

My father, in that very even tone of his, says, "You bet. Now come on, sport. Hop out of bed."