My parents are liars. Depending on what day of the week you ask, my parents met in New York, or Guatemala. They had a church wedding, or maybe a courthouse wedding. My mother was only nineteen when she met my father; my mother was only sixteen when she met my father. They were married before she was pregnant. They were married after she was pregnant. She had me at the age of . . .
These are my parents’ love stories. My parents met in Guatemala when my mother was only sixteen years old, and she is currently a certain age. What age? I don’t know. My father was ___ years older than her. That number fluctuates depending on how old my mother is that week. They lived in both a small town outside of Guatemala City, and right in the center of Guatemala City. Neither of them went to school, so they never learned to read or write. However, both of my parents text me. Even without an education or the ability to read or write, my mother was a lawyer’s assistant at the age of twenty.
My father was one of twenty-six children. He had two mothers, one mother, no mother. The twenty-six children came from a math problem: two women. Thirteen each. Actually, eight from one and eighteen from the other. My dad was born to the woman his father was married to. He was also born to the mistress. He met my mother at the age of twenty-two. One thing that never changes in their stories is the hideous blue shirt with robin eggs that my father still wears to this day. That’s the only thing I actually believe.
My parents met at a park in New York. My mother was sitting on a park bench eating a hoagie when my father saw her. He approached her, speaking Spanish, pretending to be lost, asking for directions to the DMV. My mother had given him the directions. And because she had only been in New York for a few weeks, she asked if she could see him sometime. She had also lived there for two years by then. He, of course, agreed, and they met at a small, locally-owned Mexican restaurant the next week. They were inseparable after that and remained faithful in their marriage. I have two stepsisters.
The stepsisters weren’t real until I was fourteen. My parents had never told me. The story goes, more or less, that my father had been in a relationship with this woman for years before he met my mother. She had been cruel to him, she had cheated on him, and she had tricked him into impregnating her twice. He had lived with her out of necessity, not love, and after he met my mother, he never went back to her. My two stepsisters are named Maria, Estefani, Paola, Patricia, and Flor. The younger of the two sisters is my age.
My father had never been married to the woman who bore him my two stepsisters, but he somehow needed to get a divorce before he could marry my mother. They didn’t have very many friends in New York, but it was a big wedding that took place at a Catholic church next to the courthouse. There are no pictures.
My father had to pay child support until my two stepsisters turned eighteen, by which point, he’d had three more kids. Me, and my two brothers. The names they gave us were well thought out, but I was almost named Miguel, until my parents couldn’t figure out if the English version was spelled Michael or Michelle. I tell them to call me Ishmael. After their third child, all boys, my father had a vasectomy. I have one younger sister.
We lived in the basement of this old man’s house who’d been nice enough to rent us a cheap apartment on the sixth floor of an apartment building. While we were living there, before my younger brother was born, my father was shot in a mugging. Fact: there is a bullet wound. Fact: I don’t know how it got there. Supposedly, my father, my mother, and I had gone to the store when I was a little over a year old. We were robbed, and my father was shot.
A lot of things happened during the next twenty-four years. Things that remain true in all versions of the story. My parents asked me if I was gay when I was fourteen. My father said he would disown me if I was. He wanted to know why I wore my girlfriend’s pants. The irony was lost on him. He said that a man should be with a woman, anything else was unnatural. This was also the age that they’d found out that I’d lost my virginity at thirteen, to a girl. My father was pissed, saying he would disown me for not waiting until marriage. My parents moved to New York before they were married, when they found out they were pregnant with me. This is not what they tell me, but I can do simple math. When they found out she was pregnant, they had already been married for a few years. They also had me five months into their marriage.
My parents always encouraged me to be anything I wanted to be, as long as what I wanted to be was a lawyer or a doctor. Didn’t I know that my parents had been top of their classes in school, and that my mother had worked in a law firm? I became neither of those things. My parents are so proud of me for pursuing my passion to be a writer, and they are very disappointed that I don’t live in an operating room. I tell them I write fiction and explain that I mean stories. “But not real stories? Made up ones?” They tell me the Bible says, “Thou shall not lie.” And I ask them how it was they met, again.
My parents brag about what their children have accomplished, and they feel embarrassed that none of us are lawyers. They love all of their children equally, but are very glad that at least one of them is pursuing a career in business. During the winter holidays, they say they’ll come visit, but they visit the business major. They tell me they don’t understand why I would write lies when the truth is much easier to keep up with, and I tell them I agree, and ask my mom how old she is.
I met my wife when I was fourteen years old. No, she’s not the same girl to whom I lost my virginity. I met her in Little Rock, Arkansas, at a church my parents forced me to attend. I played in the band. My parents were very proud, but hated that I played guitar. My wife didn’t become my wife until this year. We have two children, but only one of them was born after we were married. The first encounter I had with my wife involved my walking up to her and playfully pushing her, and her kicking me in the shin as hard as she could. The bruise was there for weeks. I’m twenty-six years old; I write fiction; I lie orally; and, you don’t have to believe me, this is my first nonfiction piece. My parents will never read it, but I assume they would be proud and disappointed that I’m not lying.
