Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus Page A

country, my father asked if she would allow him to come with her. She radiated an excited yes. Boxes were packed, my father got a job in the lab at her new school. Within a year, they were living together. And then they had me.
    When I was born, my mother sent my grandmother a photograph. My grandmother—mind you, she took after her father in her dark brown, stocky Mexican Indian appearance— said: “At least she looks white.”
    It was true; the only trace of Mexican Indian visible in my features was the flatness of my cheekbones. In every other way I’d taken after my father, a man who was living evidence of old Mexico’s European colonialization. Like him, I was fair-skinned, hazel-eyed, big-footed, taller-than-short, longlimbed, strong-nosed, and vaguely French-looking. Ironically, it was exactly because I didn’t look “Mexican”—because I so entirely resembled my father, the man my grandmother had forbidden my mother to love—that my grandmother resented me.
    For the first two years of my life, whenever my grandmother’s friends asked if her daughter was enjoying living in Connecticut and how her little granddaughter was doing, she replied that she didn’t know, that she didn’t have any family living in New England. For real. She said that.
    My mother’s mother was a grand liar.
    Somehow, I don’t remember how exactly, my grandmother mentioned to me once that she’d voted for Nixon. Both in 1968 and in 1972. I couldn’t understand how she—a woman who read the entire newspaper from front to back each day, a registered Democrat, a Mexican-American living in a working-class neighborhood—could have supported such a conservative prick. It just made no sense to me. So, precocious teenager that I’d been, I tried to discuss the topic with her. Much to her annoyance.
    At first I thought maybe she had voted for Nixon because he was a local boy. He’d grown up just a few towns away. Nixon’s Yorba Linda birthplace and my grandma’s City of Orange were both old citrus towns. They were sister cities. But I was pretty sure that alone didn’t explain her allegiance.
    I asked. She didn’t answer.
    Then I proposed that maybe she had voted for Nixon because of the whole visit to China thing in early 1972. I said I could sort of get that being the reason she liked him because publicly reinitiating relations with a Communist country back then was a seemingly radical thing for a Republican to have done. But, I prodded, even though that may have contributed to her decision to vote for his second term, it still didn’t explain why she’d voted for him in 1968.
    No reply from my resistant debate partner.
    When I learned Nixon was supported through each campaign by evangelical church leaders, things began to make a little more sense, especially considering all the speaking-intongues and no-dancing rules of my grandma’s strange whitey church. Still, something about the intensity of her loyalty just didn’t add up.
    It wasn’t until 1994 when Nixon died and I saw old press footage on the evening news that it all clicked in my brain. There was a familiar essence to Nixon’s face—the flat gleam of his eyes, the drooping jowls, stiff smiles, and that unquantifiable something I recognized from the faces of my mother’s family … and then I knew. My grandma had Nixon’s back because they played the same game—the lying game.
    Maybe accomplished liars can pick up the scent of deceitfulness on each other, because I’m pretty sure that even before the Watergate fiasco, my mother’s mother had looked at Nixon, and she had known that together they had plenty in common. Both of their families started out working class and scratched upward. Both told pretty lies all the way. Just like Nixon, my mother’s family was the Great American Dream come true via the untrue.
    By the time I graduated from high school and moved out of my mother’s house, I’d long been unwilling to play along quietly in my maternal