This essay begins with DNA and silver mining.  One could argue that life begins with a double helix of DNA, and life ends as a result of silver mining, but that’s fairly political and this essay is not about politics.  I could also point out that there are only slight differences between my DNA and the DNA of a bonobo monkey, a monkey who seems to have a sexual appetite similar to my own, but that is also another essay. But before this becomes too many things and you wonder if this essay ever begins (and I begin to wonder that myself), I will say that it does begin, and it begins with DNA and silver mining.

            When sperm met egg, I received an X chromosome from my mother, and an X from my father as well, who could have given me a Y but thought the better of it.  Because of that, my name is Amanda and not Ralph, Charles, Nicholas, Peter, Ezekiel, Jebediah, Yashu, or Thomas Paul Junior, which would have made my initials TPSJ, which sounds sort of like a venereal disease.  If I had received three X’s instead of two, (as a result of a mutation), I would have been a SUPER FEMALE and the result of that would have been extremely large breasts and hips, early menopause, and a hooded vagina.  Then I would be dating men who have conversations with my chest and buying bras made by Wagner Awning instead of not wearing them at all, but that too, is a separate essay.  If I received two X’s and a Y I would have had a penis and breasts.  I told someone I’m dating this, and he sat and stared into space with a silly smile on his face for a long time. 

            But thanks to those two chromosomes, I get to fill in the little “F” box on scantron sheets, and I got to receive a box when I was twelve that contained my first collection of menstrual goodies.  My only disappointment in being a female is that I will never know the feeling of wearing a jockstrap, waking up with morning wood, or participating in a jerk-it circus with some of my more adventuresome friends.  But since I don’t imagine very many of you have partaken in a jerk-it circus, and that is also another essay (perhaps the same one as the bonobos), I’ll move on.

            This essay is about DNA, because it’s something I received from my parents, two XX’s, two little letters that scientifically equal me.  I am half my father, half my mother, and in spite of this scientific phenomenon, I don’t look like either of them.   In an effort to understand this, I have concocted a variety of theories. I just came up with a new one a few minutes ago, and I’ll share it with you.  When I come up with these theories, I have to ask for a moment of silence, because something profound is about to happen.  Little bells start ringing in my wee head signaling that a thought is taking place, that the four or five brain cells I have not sacrificed are hard at work, churning out this idea with everything they’ve got before they can retire for an evening of comfort and dull conversation about the ever-changing flavor of coffee.  I think this deserves some recognition, damn it.  That having been said, the moment of clarity produced this: perhaps children who don’t look like anyone in their family resemble God in some way.   Perhaps, if you combine us all together, all of us mystery children that are quite possibly products of one-time encounters with UPS truck drivers or postal workers, perhaps collectively we hold the face of God.  Perhaps we are not unsolved puzzles, but rather pieces of a larger one that, when properly assembled, can answer questions we have fielded to one another over the course of time (what is the meaning of life?).  And perhaps this means we are among the privileged instead of the confused, and we have something worthy of envy.  I could go on and on about this new theory of mine, but since this essay is not about delusions of grandeur, I’ll move on.  But I will say that it can be comforting to the child staring in the mirror, thinking...

            Silver mining.  My friend Darissa has the misfortune of being an anthropology student, which renders her unemployable until she resigns herself to the completion of multiple degrees in graduate school, beauty school, or hamburger college.  Darissa informed me about silver mines, and because I’m in a good mood today, I’ve decided that she knows everything.  Now that you know she’s a reliable source, I’ll reveal silver mining to you: in Latin American countries, and every other place where silver mining occurs, a cocktail of cyanide and mercury is used in the silver mines in order to separate the silver from the ore.  The mercury and cyanide then run down the cliffs and rocks and hills and mountains and into the streams and rivers and creeks, and then people bathe in these rivers and creeks and streams and get cancer or their limbs turn ashen or their fingers fall off (maybe) among other things.  Then, there is only one word I know for the outcome, (unlike the 99 names of Allah or the Inuits’ 40 or so words for snow)...they die. 

            This essay is about silver mining, not because I long for a silver mine in my backyard, or because I was thinking the other day about how the world sure could use some more silver mines, or because my father is a silver miner, or because I was ten years old when I started working in a silver mine.  It’s not about silver mining because it’s a great thing and I think all the kids should be doing it, and I hope to be a silver miner when I grow up.  This is about silver mining, because without silver there wouldn’t be film. Silver allows the film to “see the light,” and therefore we have photographs.  Fact: Kodak is the number one consumer of silver in the United States.   Without film there wouldn’t be photographs, and without film or photographs I would not have a photographic camera, and my grandmother would not have had a photographic camera, and no one would have ever had a photographic camera, (though the wait for prices of digital cameras to drop might have been shorter).  And without the use of such photographic cameras, the search for the origin of my face might have ended at the painted wedding portrait of my great grandmother Julia Szczepanski.  Without silver mining, there would not have been my mother’s photo box, which in reality is merely a shoebox and therefore thoroughly uninteresting in construction.  Due to it’s poor structure and the manner in which photographs are packed into it, it could not be rescued in event of a fire, because if my mother tucked it under her arm and ran it would burst at the seams and photos would spill everywhere.  I know from experience that photos burn very slowly. 

         
            Due to both silver and DNA, there are pictures of me as a baby, and I would very much like a memory of that.  I would love to remember the first drops of light I witnessed after nine glorious months floating contently in my mother’s womb, living off of her body, eating what she ate, drinking what she drank, smoking what she smoked.  I would like to remember reaching my hands out to touch, stretching my legs to kick, greeting a soft lining of flesh while being suspended in water.  I would like to remember the movement in general, so when you ask what it’s like I can say it’s sort of like being an astronaut, moving slowly in liquid like astronauts do in space, but being attached to an umbilical cord instead of a cord that goes to a space craft.  I would like to remember feeling the rush, the need to escape, and then finally being pushed through and into the hands of an over-eager doctor who found me almost too slippery to hold on to as he slapped me into existence.  There’s something strange about your first out of womb experience being a slap. 

            After that, I would like to have a memory of a gaggle of relatives gathered around my crib, each one more eager than the other to get a glimpse at Marilyn’s new baby.  I want to hear them make “goo-goo, wook-at-da-widdle-baby!” noises, while tickling my nose and touching me, touching my baby skin, my tiny baby feet, marveling at my laugh, my cry, every motion I make.  I want to see the face of my mother’s best friend, who was at the time trying desperately to become pregnant, only to discover that after more than a decade of taking a primitive version of the birth control pill, that dream was basically over.  I want to know what that longing for a child looks like.

            I would like to know me as baby to remember the purity of birth.  I would like to remember feeling fragile and helpless, because in every photograph from the age of nine on I resemble the village elders, armed with a wisdom gained through wandering too close to the fire too many times before I accepted that it was hot.  I have found that I’m not alone in this early aging; I find fellow young elders everywhere.  We can easily be identified, because when we turn our heads a certain way, all our innocence, all our beauty, is lost.  Such absence leads to accusations of being alien, of being less (or more) than human.   

            I imagine that the fictional people surrounding my crib, laughing at my big eyes and long spidery fingers, would be people I wouldn’t see again until the next funeral or wedding, where they would approach me in half-drunken states and comment about how they remember me from when I was “this big.”  I would like to hear one of these grandmothers, uncles, great-aunts, third cousins twice-removed, best friends from college, or childhood next door neighbors comment about how I have my mother’s eyes, my father’s nose, grandma’s cheekbones, and Aunt Natalie’s mouth.

            If these conversations did take place, they were insincere, as I believe all conversations of that nature are.  Not that a baby is a baby is a baby, but almost.  And I was, in fact, a baby-- bald, huge brown, almost black eyes, tall body, and long fingers, even then. I didn’t look like anyone, and even though it’s never been said, I know from observation that scores of relatives have poured over picture books, making comments and shrugging shoulders. 

            I don’t look like my mother, the first X, and an XX herself.  My mother is pure Deutsch.  She has red hair, hazel eyes, round German cheeks, small fingers.  She has gigantic breasts that I frequently used as pillows when I was a small child, curled at her side half-awake, half-asleep, staring lifelessly at the television.  I used to want to have breasts like hers, but after hearing her complain of the pain in her back, and how she just wants to take a fucking knife to them some days (menopause) I’m rather happy with my breasts.  She was (and is) a beautiful woman, but she’s lost the confidence captured in the photographs I have of her; pictures of her looking right into the camera, head held high, eyes focused, a slightly bored smile on her face that is a characteristic of someone who’s been photographed too often.  Age has made her self-conscious; age and the repeated bouts of skin cancer that have eaten away at patches of skin on her face, and led her into biopsies and plastic surgery and biopsies and glasses and nervousness, and she is my German mother. 

            I don’t look like my father, the XY who gave me an X, and I’m not just saying that because I don’t happen to have a van-dyke beard or a penis or chest hair (or back hair) and I never had to take a test where I turned my head and coughed.  He has the odd skin coloration of a Polish Gypsy, a color not noted by Crayola, that on a good day I can only describe as a deep, yellow-ruddy paleness; sort of like the paintings of Persians that line the walls of some art museums.  His eyes are light brown, small, and guilty.  His hair is nearly gone now, but when he married my mother he had long, flowing, hippie hair and it was thick and straight and black.

            Constant Comment (a tea, and a reality) to me and my two sisters: “Oh gosh, you two look just like your mother!  And who is this?” 

            For a while I thought that I was adopted.  We read a book in my third-grade class about this adopted kid, and how she always suspected as much, and then one day she broke down and riffled through her parents’ things and discovered the papers.  She asked her parents about it, and they told her that she was still their daughter; she was just “special.”  I wanted to be “special” too.  I wanted to be the child that my parents fought for, the child that my parents carefully decorated a room for in neutral, non-gender specific colors (like yellow) so that when a representative from social services arrived, they would see that a room was prepared for their prospective baby.  I wanted to be the child so desperately desired that my parents subjected themselves to probes and tests of their mental and financial stability. I wanted to be more than two XX’s, sperm meeting egg, a scientific accident, a creature born due to an ill-fated birth control pill that my parents would curse after taking yet another test with a positive (yet negative) answer.   So, like the girl in the book, I riffled through my parents’ things.  All I discovered were things I didn’t want to find, like lambskin condoms from about thirty years ago and a pair of white, lacy thong underwear.  I didn’t feel guilty; I thought I had good reason to be looking.  There are no pictures of my mother being pregnant with me. 

            But there’s another reason why I figured I might be adopted/spawned/the mailman’s, and that has to do with XY, who gave me my second X, my father.  My father hates my face.  Actually, my father hates a lot of things.  He hates the Vietnam War, his father, people who cut him off in traffic, his father, rednecks, his father, anyone who spends more than twenty minutes grooming their lawn, his father, the Catholic Church, his father.  This fairly constant rage that wavers between an ominous simmer, and boiling over onto the smoldering burner, leads me to believe that perhaps he is not an XY, but an XYY, which is a SUPER MALE.  An anthropologist conducted research on the genes of violent offenders in a prison, and it was discovered that, in the prison where she did her research, ninety percent of the inmates who committed violent crimes had the gene mutation XYY.  Maybe I should tell my father about this. 

            I do mean to sound bitter.  There are good things to say about my father, I just can’t think of them right now.  And it’s been said that if you can’t say something nice about someone, say it behind his or her back.   

            I know and I don’t know why he hated his father so much.  One evening, my aunt, his sister, who was the second in what my grandmother hoped to be a long line of Natalies, came over and cried, and from my spying place on the staircase I found out bits and pieces of why he hated his father so much.  The reasons were similar to why I hated mine.  I never met the man, and I’m told my father never would have let me.  My father explained to me that he only went to his father’s funeral (I don’t even know his father’s name) to make sure that he was dead.

            I’ve been told that it takes half the time you’ve been emotionally wounded to recover.  If that is the case, my father should have been over this 23 years ago. 

            My father has always despised my face.  He often commented in very colorful ways that he thought I was hideous.  If I stared at him for too long he would yell at me to “stop looking at him!” and if I didn’t turn away fast enough he would reach out and turn my face for me.  I don’t remember staring very often, but I remember being accused of staring. I knew I was odd looking, my eyes were huge and my head was tiny, which earned me creative nicknames from my father like ET and Yoda.  But there was one time when I turned my head a certain way, and he said that I looked pretty when I did that.  I spent the next half hour, and come to think of it, the next several years of my life, trying to turn my head in that certain way so I would appear attractive again. 

            I wish I could remember more of what he said, but I blocked out a lot about that time, I only have fragments of memories, like spliced together images from different movies that I’m trying to turn into an artistically creative film.  One of the few things that I remember clearly is that I hated the sound of my name, which wasn’t Amanda at the time, but rather a nickname my father’s side of the family bequeathed to me, that never suited me: “Mandy.”  Barry Manilow (who my Aunt Natalie loved and who I loathed) had a popular song out called “Mandy.”  I remember my father and sisters sitting in the living room, my sisters staring at my father wide-eyed, he the conductor of an evil orchestra, leading them in the obnoxious crooning of  “Oh Mandy!” I remember running from the sound of their voices to the kitchen, where my mother was playing solitaire, running to the kitchen where my mother looked up at me when I entered, panicked and hysterical at the sound of the song, and she also began singing, “Oh Mandy!”  I’m not sure why, but I hated this, and I had no allies, none except for my dog Pepper who barked angrily at my father (sick 'em Pepper, sick 'em!) as I grew more frantic at the nightmarish singing of the song, unending and ever more annoying,  “Oh Mandy!  Oh Mandy!  Oh Mandy!”  And I remember spinning and spinning in place, staring at the heavily stained carpet,  I covered my ears and spun, because for some reason that seemed like the appropriate thing to do to bury yourself, to push away the destruction you’re surrounded by.  I wanted to stop spinning, feel the room move for a moment or two, struggle to hold my balance, and then open my eyes and find myself somewhere new, where people were more inclined to hug than to hit and no one had ever heard the song, “Mandy.”  To this day I hate hate hate that fucking song.

            My father especially hated the way I looked when I was nine, and very sick.  My shoulders were hunched up, my eyes had huge, dark circles around them, I only weighed forty pounds, I couldn’t breath, I couldn’t climb the stairs at school, and in short, I was dying.  Not knowing what to do with this (I say this on days where an excuse seems appropriate), he made fun of me for it, he hated me for being sick, and he encouraged my sisters to mock me as well, to imitate my breathing motions, to call me names, to toughen me up.  It didn’t work, and my third grade teacher mumbled threats that if they didn’t take me to the hospital, she was calling children’s services.  They took me in, and left me there for a week with my stuffed dog, Nickles.  Before they left, my mother stepped outside of the hospital room to talk to the doctor about my lungs, which were almost completely white with pneumonia.  I sat on the bed, because I couldn’t lie down; the mucus in my lungs was too thick for me to breathe if I did.  My father, who was sitting across the room, looked up at me.  “Now, don’t cry or anything when your mother and I leave,” he said. “She feels bad enough about this, it’s not her fault.”  I read his eyes: “It’s yours.”  And at the time I believed him. 

            I lost something of myself there.  I cried briefly when they left, and I let the small part of me that was still trying to be nine drift away.  Good-bye mother.  Good-bye father.  I never had you anyway.  For a while I thought my mother would come back, but she didn’t.  I was told by a teacher in school once that I should tell my mother that my father was a bad man, because mothers always love their children more than their spouses, and would do anything to protect them.  I asked my mother if she loved me more than my father and she said, “No, I love your father more.”  A few years later, when I was about twelve, I thought I would try again, and I told her what my father had been up to while she was at work all evening, and her whole face contorted with rage and she yelled, “Shut up, he’s a good father!”   For a long time, when hatred was still something I had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I hated her more than I hated my father, because at least my father knew he was an asshole.  It was my mother who denied it.

            I never told anyone about what happened at the hospital, no one but Nickles, who was there to witness me staring at the white walls and muttering, “I am no longer a child.”  I could talk about this for a long time; what happened and what should have happened; what the doctors and nurses said; how my third grade teacher visited me and what she said; what happened afterwards, but all of that is also another essay, and not one about DNA or silver mining.  I got out on Valentine’s Day, the day I got a heart-shaped cookie with sprinkles on it wrapped in plastic wrap with my hospital lunch.  One of the nurses who had taken care of me all week cried.  I wonder what she was thinking.  I went home to my mother and father, and my father established a new rule that every time someone made fun of me for not being able to breathe, they had to pay him a dollar.  The rule went away after my first day back, after Valentine’s Day, but the part of me that cared about such things was hiding.  My mind carefully split in the hospital, and a new part had been created for the purpose of dealing with my father.  It was a tougher, colder, more angry me that could easily maneuver her way around hostility and was equipped to react to his rages with a blank, dead stare, and his temper-tantrums with boredly walking away.  She was born on Valentine’s Day.  To this day, I allow myself a moment of silence on that false holiday.  A moment of silence, to show that I am grateful for being alive, and thankful to the warrior-self that managed my life for me when I couldn’t. 

***

            When I was eleven, my father had had enough of my ugliness, and he got me a super deluxe make-up kit that I didn’t ask for as a birthday gift.  It included several different kinds of eye shadow: pinks and blues and purples and greens and yellows, renamed glamorous names like tawny and kohl and russet.  It also had lipsticks in wild red colors that I imagined would create fabulous open wounds come Halloween, as well as nail polish that had one of the few scents I could pick up, since I had lost most of my sense of smell when I was sick.  My growth had also been stunted, which meant that I would never fully grow into my hands and feet.  And the bags, the deathly-dark, blacker than black circles that were under my eyes had lightened, but they never fully went away.  

            My older sister Dawn took me upstairs and played with my eyelids, which were so huge (to cover my huge eyes) they made the perfect canvas for multiple color use.  But my father’s expensive make-up didn’t hold my attention any more than Dawn’s collection of ninety-nine cent Wet N’Wild cosmetics did.  As soon as she was finished and I showed my father her handiwork and he expressed approval, I promptly washed it off.  I did use the make-up kit: for pictures, collages, and drawings that I put up on my walls.  I thought it was sort of like using pastels.

            I’ve been told it takes half the time you’ve been emotionally wounded to recover.  I still have six years to go.

            I’ve grown into my face for the most part now, enough that I figure I should begin to resemble someone.  Which leads me back to silver mining and DNA, and a box of photographs, a shoebox, not any sort of special box, loaded with pictures.  Pictures of my mother’s relatives wearing World War I German Uniforms and World War II American ones, which leave me torn as to whether I should feel proud or ashamed.  My grandmother: my mother often says that I look like her in hopes that maybe one day I will, in hopes that she will see the face of her mother in one of her daughters.  If I have any feature of my grandmother, it’s her legs, delicately curved and slightly thin at the ankle, with full thighs and hips.  There’s a picture of her posed in a bathing suit that she sent to her husband Walter, who was fighting the Japanese, with “Ain’t I sexy?” written on the back. I don’t look German, no, my face is definitely Polish Gypsy.  My eyes are dark and suspicious looking, my profile is prominent, and I have what my Polish grandmother used to refer to as “the Gypsy stare,” which allows me to look into a person’s eyes for only a few moments before they become uncomfortable.

            I have looked deeply into the box of photographs, looking for the pictures of my father’s family, the rare photographs, looking for some signal that I did in fact have the DNA my birth certificate promised me, that the work of the silver miners was worth it.  I was pleased that I did not look like my father, that I didn’t have to scream at myself in the mirror when he made me angry as a desperate form of therapy.  But I felt there should be something there, since I have the Polish face, and my grandmother always called me “grandma’s girl” for reasons I couldn’t quite understand.

            I thought it might be because of my very, very slight resemblance to my grandmother’s older sister Natalie, who was hit by a car and killed on Christmas Eve at the age of eighteen while shopping for gifts. Natalie was the second child, and so my grandmother named her second child after Natalie; and this Natalie died at the age of forty-one of something that I can only describe as depression.  My grandmother was privately disgusted that my mother did not name me, the second child, Natalie, and instead named me Amanda (which sounded like a man’s name to my grandmother) and then of all things, gave me the Deutsch middle name of Louise, which is also my mother’s middle name, thus creating a new tradition. 

            I dismissed this for a while, my desire to discover what made me grandma’s girl.  I had bigger things to worry about.  After all, while being Polish is genetic, to some extent, mental illness is too, and my grandmother also had that.  I remember her playing endless rounds of poker with my mother and father, sitting in our dining room with a camisole on and polyester pants, a big gray headband wrapped all around her head.  Everything we did turned into some sort of gambling excursion.  I remember being young (though I don’t know how young) and going bowling, and listening to my grandmother shout out  “A buck a pin!  A buck a pin!” as I stepped up to the lane.   I threw one gutter ball after the other. 

            My grandmother also had a superstition for everything.  Your dominant hand had to be your right hand, and you were to rest your left hand in your lap, because your left hand was your magical hand and would overwhelm your mouth if you ate with it.  You also didn’t want to go pointing that left hand at just anybody, or you were going to be in some serious trouble.  My older sister Dawn is left-handed, and my grandmother tried to get her to use her right hand repeatedly, until my mother intervened.  I think this prevented Dawn from becoming grandma’s girl.

            Have salt in your shoes to stay grounded... leave flowers in your window as an offering...place a small, dollhouse chair in your garden for the fairies. It was easy to be fascinated by all of this as a child, and since then, I’ve read enough to know that a lot of what she told me are historically documented superstitions.  But it’s hard to believe a woman who cut up a bunch of rubber bands one day, pronounced it spaghetti, and seriously tried to convince my sisters and I that we should eat it.  After that incident, I was fairly certain that the sole reason I was grandma’s girl was because I came the closest to eating the rubber bands that day. 

            This essay is about DNA, and therefore, it is about my grandmother, who provided the X to my father, who in turn gave an X to me.  But there was another half of the equation that is known as my father, the Y, which brings us back to silver mines, and the shoebox of photographs, and where I was in looking through it.  I was at the bottom of the box, and there was nothing, not one photograph of someone who even held a similar facial feature to me, a similar nose shape, nothing.  But there was something.

            Underneath the box, not within it, inside a dusty cardboard cover, rested a picture of my father’s father, my father’s Y.  The unnamed man, the grandfather I never would have seen even if he had been alive when I was born, who was cursed in multiple languages in my living room, in my great grandmother’s living room, in every living room but my grandmother’s, the woman who married him.  It was a portrait, obviously taken at a studio, of a young man, somewhat smug looking, staring straight ahead.  He had a squarish chin, thin, small lips, a prominent nose, and deep brown eyes, large and startling.  He slumped forward a bit, perhaps showing defeat from the Depression, from alcohol, from being a less-than-worthy father.  But it was his eyes that I kept going back to, thinking about the Gypsy stare. 

            The resemblance, to me, was uncanny.