Taco Bueno

I knew you to be there, even at three and a half years old. Those opaque, numbered days as a small child in a house of many. Sunbeams filtered through the upstairs hallway as I tip-toed down to your room, the floorboards giving me away under their hundred-year-old weight. Your room was at the end of the hall and I wanted to peak in, perhaps, and catch a glimpse of you. The ceiling light that hung just inside your door reminded me of a skeleton, plastic and groovy-looking, and I would stare at it sometimes when you weren’t there. But today you came out of your bedroom door before I could get there, and you smiled at me, bonking me on the head with a rolled-up piece of paper. This is my first memory of you. Brother.

You were sarcastic and funny and sometimes I felt that you weren’t allowed to be mine, that my time with you didn’t count. You left when I was three, graduated and gone. My memories with you were limited to the times you’d come home, arms full of gifts at Christmas-time and trips to the airport to fetch you. We’d sit on the viewing deck of the airport and watch the planes land, our breath blowing cold in the frost, and every plume of jet fuel a fascination to me. Then there you were, laughing and looking just like the rest of us with dark hair and brown eyes. You slipped back into the fold and our small town for a few days then skipped away just as fast. But everyone knew where we – and you - belonged.

“You’re a Sundheimer, aren’t you?” they’d say, fitting us neatly into a package, a puzzle piece in a 2000-part mosaic. And that’s how small towns are wont to do, make sure they know where to file you and pluck you out of so the world doesn’t rotate off its axis.

You moved to Florida and we’d receive pictures every so often, of roommates and palm trees and cosmetology school you were attending. Every picture had different faces to examine as the years would pass, and I would pore over each detail wondering who they were and why we never met them. I felt their faces were a clue into your life that I could never solve.

One day we did visit your tiny apartment on the gulf coast, and I remember how it was tucked off the street with tropical foliage obscuring it from full view. We had dinner with you and your roommate in your home, and I watched him as he shook hands with us and made us dinner with hands that were trained as a chef.

The eighties were a decade of excess that embraced me as I grew into a teenager. You moved to Dallas and up, up, and up into a high-level position at a big-name hair care company. And we would see you, sometimes, at Christmas or in summer. I never wondered why you didn’t marry because I knew. It was never talked about in front of me, in open spaces where the words would echo so loudly. If there were spoken moments held behind closed doors I wasn’t privy to them, but there were none that needed said because I knew. Words change nothing anyway.

If you don’t speak it out loud the large elephant in the corner will go away.

A tribe is set in hot blood that courses through your veins, and no matter if you strip those pulsing lines of iron where they rest, it doesn’t change your tribe. You moved to Nashville and ever upward, with a new roommate and house. And my boyfriend, now husband, came to stay for Christmas and you came too. There was much laughter and merriment, but strangeness as you wouldn’t sleep in the bed offered you. The couch was fine, you laughed, I’ll be fine on the couch. And my now husband asked me later, as we lay by the Christmas tree with the twinkles of greens and reds splaying off our faces, “Is your brother gay?” I looked at him and for the first time in my life I said out loud the thing that had never been said, at least in front of me. “Yes, he is.”

To speak a thing brings it to life, but I felt bereft for all the years it had never been spoken. When I traveled to visit my boyfriend in Texas the following Easter, I called home from a phone booth at the corner store. As I talked to them they told me that my brother was sick, in the hospital, that he had something unknown. When I hung up I turned to my boyfriend and told him what she had said. We were deep in the AIDS epidemic at that moment, forever frozen in time, and I knew that my brother had it.

When I came home the whole family drove to Nashville to see him. We piled into his room and stood around his bed as we talked. I remember feeling furious that this disease had been what it took to talk about what no one wanted to talk about. Religion be damned, because your tribe is your tribe and beliefs will only separate you if you let them. I reached out and took his hand, and he could barely speak, and garbled several words together as I tried to understand what he was saying. When I got the meaning, a rush of tears came to my eyes because he never lost his sarcasm, not ever.

He’d said, “Taco bueno.”

My now husband is from Mexico, and it is never easy gaining acceptance in small town Ohio. Here was my brother deathly ill, forcefully holding my hands telling me “taco bueno.” He knew a thing or two about acceptance. He was telling me that George was good, a “good taco.” I talked to him on the phone that summer before I left for Mexico, on our way to shuffle paperwork to get married, in the vast bureaucracy of a million dusty government offices. I’ll never forget what he told me then. He said, “Don’t let them tell you that he’s not right for you. Listen to yourself. You won’t go wrong.”

And I held those words close to my, clutched as a fine diamond.

I was sitting on the orange plaid couch in our living room, staring out the window, and pondering the new adventure that was upon me, as I held that phone to my ear. He was the only one that had told me to follow my heart. Aside from him there were warnings, admonitions, and fearful glances as I stubbornly embarked on a journey that has now netted us a marriage of twenty-eight years. Taco bueno.

I had been gone for six months, living in Mexico with George's family, when there was a knock at the door. A cousin was there, who sometimes received mail for the family as they didn’t have a box at the post office. He was holding a Fedex package that was addressed to me. I took it and ripped it open, reading the contents inside, and fell back on the bed as the tears came hot and hard. My brother was dead, had died three days ago, and the funeral was in the morning. The last thing he had told me in that phone call back in the summer was this, “On your way home from Mexico, I want you and George to stop here in Nashville and have supper with us. I’ll make you a good roast.”

I picture that roast sometimes. It always makes me cry.

I walked outside into the chill night air and contemplated the sky. The stars were vast and highly-visible at the altitude we lived in there. And just as the tears slid down my face again, I felt something brush my back, like a hand, and linger for a moment. I turned around and there was no one there, nothing but the still, velvety black of the evening. And then I smiled and knew my brother had given me a gift, a small consolation, for my sorrow.

 

My brother’s name was Scott Allen Sundheimer. He died in 1990 when he was thirty-six years old of AIDS. My moments with him were short, abrupt, and full of  life. I found out I was pregnant several short weeks after he died, and felt the circle of life more intensely than I ever had. And I vowed to never be silent about things that made me – us - uncomfortable, to hold them silent in a rigid space between my ribs.

Words withheld cause a thing to die in the dark.

To speak a thing gives it life, and life is meant to be lived.

To love someone gives that love life, and we’re meant to be loved.