Piñata

To understand why the fuck I tried to make the piñata myself, against all common sense and logic, you have to start with Manuel Alcazar’s tenth birthday party.

It was late October in Seven Vespers. Halloween was close at hand. Construction paper chains of teal and pink swung over the threadbare grass of the Alcazars’ backyard. Cartoon dinosaurs romped across the tablecloths. Folding tables sagged under the weight of croquetas and casseroles and an impeccably symmetrical layer cake whorled in blue icing. Manuel, as rosy-cheeked and thick-limbed as my son Garrett was pale and angular, grabbed Garrett’s hand as soon as we arrived; they disappeared into a cluster of shrieking children. I stood to the side, hands in my pockets, smiling politely when glanced at by other parents who didn’t recognize me. I’d been reluctant to bring Garrett to the party: reluctant to ask my chief resident for Saturday afternoon off, reluctant to interact with a bunch of other parents I’d never met. And Garrett himself had never been a big socializer. He mostly kept to himself, even at school. But he and Manuel had become fast friends since fifth grade started in September; this was the first friend’s birthday party he’d ever asked to attend. What could I do?

The other parents, mostly mothers, tried to make conversation with me. “We’re only here for a little while,” I explained. “I have to head back to the hospital later.” The mothers nodded in sympathy, heads bobbing like robins on the power lines crisscrossing the cloudless blue October sky above them. I was a privileged white guy and a minority in the Alcazars’ backyard but this, at least, was common ground: the constant negotiation between life and livelihood, between family and feeding them. “At least stay for the piñata,” Manuel’s mother said. “The children love it.”

My only personal experience with a piñata was a hazy memory, pulled out of the elementary school vault: panic overtaking me as they fastened the blindfold over my eyes, and then a hot rush of shame as I swung once, twice, three times and never connected, whiffing the mallet into thin air. The children’s laughter around me pitched and crested with each successive swish. I tore off the blindfold and stormed away. I hid myself around the corner of the house with a cupcake, crying silently over the quickly emptied wrapper. I hated looking foolish, being ridiculed. What if the same thing happened to Garrett? He was so happy at that moment, jostling in the dinosaur-shaped bouncy castle the Alcazars had rented, giving me a thumbs up seconds before he collided with a little girl in pigtails and they both ricocheted away from each other, laughter charting their trajectory. I wanted him to live in that pocket of joy forever, unmarred by embarrassment or self-consciousness. Still, I sensed an electric thunderhead of disapproval building in anticipation of my refusal to stay for the piñata. I murmured, “Of course we’ll stay.” The mothers smiled and then, like a veering flock of birds, turned their attention elsewhere. I had been dealt with.

I braced myself for Garrett’s turn at the piñata to go badly. He was like me at that age—at any age—the kind of kid my mother referred to as “indoorsy” with an equal mix of indulgence and disapproval. He showed no interest in football or other sports. He was content with books, or video games where you role-played as a farmer, tending pinkly pixellated rows of virtual crops, milking polygonal cows. But, as they put the blindfold on him and spun him ’round and ’round and ’round, I couldn’t deny the happiness, kinetic and infectious, rolling off him like heat—my bookworm, my little monk. His laughter spiked, high-pitched with excitement and maybe a little anxiety, as the bat was placed in his hand. He lifted the bat in his scrawny white arms and unerringly brought it down, smack smack smack three times on the aquamarine donkey strung from the only tree in the Alcazar’s backyard. A plume of candy burst from its side, showering all the kids in sugar and plastic. Garrett tore off the blindfold, face flushed, mouth agape in something beyond a smile. The other children’s cheers crested around him like a wave and bore him up and away into the blue.

Four months later: a Friday morning in late February, a few weeks before Garrett’s birthday. A cold front pressed itself to the windows. The morning was sunny, but wind shook the front hedges. Winter covered Seven Vespers in a cold without snow or ice, as if the sun was radiating chill instead of warmth. Garrett came downstairs in his coat and blue knit cap, backpack slung over one shoulder. I sat at the kitchen counter, drinking coffee and looking up piñatas on my tablet. “Here,” I said, handing him the tablet. “What do you think of this one? For your birthday?” The piñata was donkey-shaped like Manuel’s, but this one was a deep lavender—Garrett’s favorite color—instead of turquoise.

Garrett took the tablet and stared at it in silence. As the seconds ticked by without any reaction, my self-satisfaction at finding such a close replica of the piñata he had loved soured into doubt. Garrett often looked at something without seeing it; he went inside himself, waging an internal debate about what to say, what action to take. He set the tablet down carefully on the counter. He was always so careful, even with things that weren’t fragile. He carried the laundry basket from the basement to his room like he was carrying water from a well.

I cleared my throat. “I mean, that’s just one option. I thought it looked just like the piñata at Manuel’s party.”

“It does,” Gareth said. “It’s just that . . . Manuel’s mom made his piñata.”

Okay, stop the tape.

First, you have to understand why this was such a weird thing for my son to say. Even in his worst moments, he never acted ungrateful. I’d drilled him in courtesy and self-awareness with the same fervor my mother had drilled me. His moments of selfishness or bad manners were rare.

Second, he had never shown any interest in things being “homemade” before. New clothes or toys came slick with plastic straight to our front door, by-products of late-night online shopping sprees when I couldn’t sleep after staying up too late reading studies about Parkinson’s or therapeutic infliction of brain lesions, staring into the blue light of my phone until 2 a.m., 3 a.m. Garrett had never questioned this before. Nothing in our life was homemade, not even the meals we had delivered in bulk every Sunday. My few attempts in the past to make things for him from scratch usually ended in disaster: brownies burned, a half-finished scarf unraveling for a year in my closet. Once he’d caught me trying to make him a birthday card. He was four; I was crying, mostly out of sleep deprivation but also a little frustration, the glue-and-glitter letters of his name stretching oblong and unreadable across the crookedly cut pink construction paper. I’d tried to play it off—“It’s no big deal, little man, I’m just not feeling well”—trying to hide the card under the other supplies I’d spread out on the kitchen counter. He’d stared at me somberly and then reached beneath the scissors and glue and construction paper pad and pulled out the card. He looked at it for a few moments, then carried it to his room and propped it open on his nightstand like he was proud of it. That had touched me, but it had also made me feel fragile, like I was the kind of parent coming apart at the seams who needed kindness and understanding from their child instead of the other way around.

So, his question took me by surprise. The words struck me like steel against flint, casting off sparks that felt at first like anger. What difference did it make whether the piñata was homemade or not? What was that supposed to mean, anyway? That Manuel’s mother loved him more because she took the time to make his piñata by hand? Didn’t I spend time with Garrett, pizza and movies and parks and bedtime stories? Wasn’t that enough? What more did he want?

I was so taken aback I did something I’d never done before in his entire life. I ignored him. I picked up the tablet and stabbed the Amazon window closed, stared down at a screen full of apps without opening any of them, hiding my face in my coffee cup. I stayed that way until he got the hint. He didn’t even say, “Bye, Dad.” The only indication that he left was the back door opening and closing so softly it reminded me of the one and only time I’d snuck out of the house to meet up with a boy when I was teenager, the paranoia about being caught pulling my body so taut that the only thing I remember about the experience is nausea.

As soon as Garrett was gone, I rushed to the kitchen window. His walking route to school was visible from there. He disappeared down the sidewalk into the winter morning. His back stayed resolutely to the house, to me. His blue knit cap sat askew on the downy-blond of his head.

His comment spun unprompted in the centrifuge of my thoughts for the rest of the day and well into the night, until finally, in sleepless stillness around 2 a.m., the centrifuge stopped, and I realized what I was left with, which was, improbably, embarrassment. I was embarrassed: embarrassed that I didn’t do enough things by hand for my son, like other Pinterest parents. Embarrassed that, despite pizza nights and parks and trips to the canyon, when it came to Garrett’s needs, my first impulse, my first weapon to hand, was money instead of time.

I fought the impulse, at first. Don’t get me wrong; I honestly wished I was one of those parents on Instagram and Pinterest who handmade everything for their children from scratch, whether it was toys or clothes or food or bedroom decorations. I envied the love and attention that seemed to emanate from those cherry-varnished toy baskets and embroidered terrycloth bibs. I wanted to make a rattle out of an old silver tea strainer and dehydrated black rice. I wanted to decorate Garrett’s shoes with self-made jewel-toned butterfly appliques. But my neurology research fellowship required long hours and constant study outside of work. The brain is the least understood organ of the body. Where other medical fields work from an established body of scientific knowledge, neurology is like the Wild West: lawless and strange, where unknown light throws phantoms against an endless prairie sky. A common assumption that seems steadfast one week can be contradicted by strong evidence a week later. To stay competitive and engaged, I had to stay up-to-date; it was like being in grad school all the time. So, I didn’t exactly have time to make gourmet snacks every day, to learn how to sew a button back on a pair of shorts. Beyond that, I had no skill whatsoever at crafts.

Still, it was the attempt to make the piñata that mattered, somehow. I knew with a certainty—the same kind of certainty I’d felt years before, when I got the call from the adoption agency that Garrett had been born—that despite realistic objections to the contrary, this was the only possible choice. I was sliding into a groove in time that felt as if it had been etched for me before I arrived. If I was religious, I might ascribe it to divine guidance. But I was a scientist, and the longer I surfed on neuroscience’s bleeding edge, the more I realized that every new brain study and experiment wasn’t building a map of the labyrinth; it was rendering the labyrinth out in dimensions we didn’t have names for. The brain is such a mysterious, ever-shifting ocean of contradictory phenomena that any distortion in one’s perception could accurately be classified as your mind playing tricks on you. The brain is like a Shakespearean jester, referred to as a “fool” by the other characters in the play but whose perception of reality sits just outside theirs, unspooling insights half-understood by the characters but fully grasped by the winking playgoers. The brain is always conducting a conversation heard by us but aimed at an audience undetected and, possibly, unknowable. The brain dangles truth tantalizingly, frustratingly just out of a reach, like a bell dangling from the tip of a cap.

* * *

I quickly realized that building an actual donkey-shaped piñata was beyond my capabilities. I spent a frustrated evening in my home office with the door closed, watching video after video of donkey piñata processes, each one more fussy and intricate than the last. Even practiced piñata artisans bemoaned the trickiness of building a complex shape like an animal. They debated the most aesthetically pleasing and efficient methods of building the frame, layering the papier-mâché, mixing the papier-mâché solution. The next night, I narrowed my search: how to make a piñata.

This was better. The first hit was step-by-step instructions on how to make an “easy” piñata, in the shape of a strawberry. It wouldn’t be exactly like the piñata that Garrett had loved so much at Manuel’s birthday, but it would be close enough. Hopefully.

According to the instructions, the piñata had to dry for at least twenty-four hours before it could be painted and filled with candy. I blocked out two nights right before Garrett’s birthday. I worked longer hours at the hospital for a week prior so I had those two evenings completely free. I asked my mother to drive up from Desoto and entertain Garrett while I closed myself away upstairs in the study with a pack of loose balloons, a stack of old newspapers, a bowl of water, and a container of flour. I laid a faded blue bedsheet on the floor. I turned on instrumental electronic music, slow and soothing. I poured a big glass of red wine. I lit a candle. I was procrastinating, hiding behind rituals.

Right away, a problem. The first step said: “Mix one part water with one part flour to create paste.” But how much was one “part”? A cup of water? A cup of flour? Less, more? I resisted the immediate urge to text my mother downstairs. She dabbled in crafts and scrapbooking and probably could have accomplished this task easily. I decided I would try it with a cup each. The resulting mixture resembled watery oatmeal.

Then there was the matter of the newspaper strips. How thick should the strips be? Ribbons? Bands? These were hardly adequate directions for people with no experience making piñatas. It would have been like reading a medical instruction textbook that just said: “Suture a kitchen knife wound across the palm.” But no mention of what kind of suture, what gauge of needle. No description of technique. These things mattered. The details mattered. These parents on Pinterest who did this every day of their lives posted instructions for people like me but purposely held back details so that no matter how hard I tried and how closely I followed the instructions, I would never be able to make something that resembled the perfect picture of the end product. I thought, I should give up here and now. I have literally no hope of making this how it’s supposed to be. But then, I thought, isn’t this the point? Isn’t what why you’re doing this?

I upended my glass of wine. The Merlot coiled down into me and built a small fire. Enough light to see by. Enough heat to keep my fingers nimble. I can at least finish this. I can at least see it through.

I made myself lightheaded blowing up the balloon. When was the last time I even blew up a balloon? I’d had balloons for Garrett’s birthday parties in the past, but I’d bought those, foil monstrosities of cartoon characters professionally inflated by tanks in a party store, drifting listlessly on the ceiling for days afterward. But as for lifting the burned rubber smell of an actual balloon to my lips . . . who could say? A birthday party for my friend Candace right out of college, maybe. Or penis-shaped balloons to cover the honeymoon car when she got married. There’s a tension to blowing up a balloon by mouth; despite the initial difficulty, it’s possible to overdo it, possible to stretch the balloon’s thin membrane too tight with hot air. An inflated balloon has a taut, alien texture. All that breath, all that life, all that carbon dioxide, a little self-contained nightmare of global warming. I let the first one go when I tried to tie it. It zipped across the room from me as if trying to escape. The second balloon popped, a sting of air that shocked me like a slap. The third attempt worked, though by then, I was lightheaded, and the room felt a little fuzzy. The balloon wasn’t quite as full as the first two attempts, but it would make for a nice round strawberry.

Then came the papier-mâché strips. The instructions said to squeeze excess liquid carefully off each strip of newspaper after you dripped it in the paste mixture. You had to be careful, though. Soak it too long and it would tear while you lifted it from the paste. Slick your fingers along the slippery, delicate length of the soaked strip with too much pressure and the strip would tear, again. These things I discovered as the hours slipped towards midnight, as another glass of red wine and then another slipped down my throat. Periodically, I had to stop and mix more paste and cut more strips of newspaper, because for every strip I successfully applied to the balloon, I tore or oversoaked two more.

As I worked, I held Garrett in my mind, tried to invest each and every newspaper strip with my love for him. More than love, even. My hopes for him. I thought, with every strip that threatens to slip from my fingers, I will weave in a wish for my son. With this strip, I gift him patience. With this one, wisdom outside of his years. A layer of wishes covering the green balloon, and then another layer, and another, four layers deep of wishes building Garrett into the kind of man I wished there was more of in the world, an antidote to the systemic abusers in the news nearly every week, an imprecation against men who pick up guns to blow away strangers because the geyser of their stunted self-worth is so impacted that the only imaginable way to vent it is in violence and blood and fear, in the sharp, smoky iron smell of bullet casings. Maybe when Garrett busts this pitiful contraption open with his bat, maybe it won’t just be candy that spills out. Maybe all of these hopes and wishes and blessings will rain down on him, too, wreath around his head, mist his eyes, curl the corners of his mouth and the edges of his hair, soak him like flour paste in what being a good man means until he is flimsy enough with it to lacquer him onto the world in a new form, a secret prince stepping sideways into his destiny.

* * *

Sun streamed through the windows. I sat up with that panicked suddenness everyone gets after falling asleep without intending to in a place that isn’t your bed. I’d laid my head down in a puddle of flour paste, which had plastered itself to my cheeks, my temples. Paste flecked at the corner of my lips; the chalky bitterness of the paste warred with the sourness of red wine and morning breath in my mouth. The morning sun showed a tableau fit more for the aftermath of a battle than an arts and crafts project. Newspaper scattered the room in abstract blobs and jagged sheets. Flour paste congealed on the bedsheet I’d laid down, and on the tiles too, where I’d kicked the bedsheet aside in a haze of wine and frustration. The piñata rested on one uneven side on the desk in front of me, an orb of crispy newsprint, the balloon still encased inside. Two empty bottles of Merlot stared accusingly at me from behind the piñata, the morning sunlight turning the formerly black bottles clear green.

But the piñata was there. It wasn’t the most technically perfect thing in the world, but it was there. It was whole. Flawed, yes, but complete, needing only paint. I didn’t remember finishing it. I stared at it for a long moment with the untrustworthiness one reserves for other tasks done in the unremembered haze of alcohol: bar tabs closed, cars driven home, clothes shed in a snail trail stretching from the front door to the bedroom, an empty fast food bag crusted in crumbs and crumpled in the bed next to you. The newspaper strips were layered in tight concentric circles, five and six deep across the balloon. The strawberry, except for a slight lopsidedness and the lack of paint, looked remarkably like the picture still open on my laptop, spots of flour paste dusting its keys. I laughed, a laugh that made my head hurt but which opened up my chest. I sucked in a deep lungful of air, as if hadn’t taken a breath all night while I slept.

Garrett opened the door without knocking. “Dad, are you . . .” he said, and then stopped. He took in the chaos in the office with wide eyes. “Whoa. What happened?” Then his gaze lighted on the piñata. “What’s that?”

My feeling of triumph evaporated. I saw the piñata through Garrett’s eyes: a small misshapen thing, unpainted, barely big enough to hold an exciting amount of candy inside. The specter of Manuel Alcazar’s turquoise donkey loomed tall and stately beside it. I gestured helplessly at the strawberry. “I’m making a piñata. For your birthday.” Then, as if by way of apology: “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

Garrett stepped forward and examined the piñata the way he examined all things: slowly, with great care, as if every commonplace object he encountered in his little universe was an artifact brought out from beneath the earth. I braced myself for disapproval: a privileged sniff, an ungrateful eye roll, or worse, dead-eyed lack of reaction, the neutrality of good manners speaking louder than a tantrum. “Manuel’s mom made his piñata” . . . that had gotten so far under my skin that it had metastasized, sliding from system to system in my body until I was riddled with defensiveness. Here I was, spattered in flour paste, hungover and running on three hours of passed-out, perpendicular sleep. And why? Because I’d let a ten-year-old hurt my feelings?

I started to laugh. Suddenly the whole thing seemed completely absurd. Me, of all people, trying to make a homemade piñata. For what? To prove a point? That I could? I couldn’t stop laughing. Garrett turned his appraising look on me. I imagined what I must look like to him—wearing the same clothes from last night, bleary-eyed, covered in paste—and it made me laugh even harder.

“What’s funny?” he asked, earnestly. But I couldn’t answer him because the laughter was rumbling up out of a deep place I rarely laughed from, laughter that had nothing to do with amusement, the very muscles of my body expelling something they’d been holding onto too long. And as my shoulders shook and my eyes teared, I gestured again at the piñata.

Garrett looked at me for a long moment. Maybe he was thinking about calling for his grandmother—asleep in the guest room downstairs—or the police. Help, my dad’s lost it. He stayed up all night making a piñata by hand and now I think he’s gone crazy. The thought made me laugh harder, my body clenched with it even though I was trying to stop.

Then, Garrett reached for the piñata.

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s not done. It’s not fully dry. I need to paint it.” But it was too late. He picked up the piñata, easily as big as his head, and cradled it in his arms. The damp paste left a pale smear on the blue of his school uniform coat. Without speaking, he turned and walked out of the room.

My laughter faded. I wiped my eyes with chalky hands. I called his name, once. Then I got up and followed him.

In his room—impossibly neat for a little boy, everything always put away—he was carefully putting the piñata on his windowsill, in the sun, trying to find the perfect place on its side to rest it.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Garrett looked up at me with a puzzled expression, like someone had just asked him what color the sky was or if the sun rose in the east. “I’m putting it in the sunshine. It needs to finish drying.” Then he picked up his backpack, hugged me goodbye, and left for school.

I don’t remember how long I stood there in his doorway, watching the strawberry piñata dry in the spring sunshine on his window, an odd artifact among his collection of books and video games and superhero movie posters. The future announced itself to me unbidden—split-second, neutronic, there and gone—but in that second all was clear.

We will never break the piñata. We won’t even paint it. It will sit on Garrett’s windowsill until the next time he rearranges his room, at which point it might sit on his desk, or on top of his bookshelf. It will gather dust more readily than any other surface or object, but to avoid it possibly being broken I will tell the maid service “Don’t dust the piñata; it’s fragile.” For years, it will move from spot to spot in his room, a curiosity that friends and then girlfriends or boyfriends will comment on, thinking it was some school project he made in second grade that he couldn’t bring himself to throw out. This will be a secret pact between Garrett and me, unspoken and inviolable. As if he senses somehow what I’d woven into those strips of newspaper, what I wanted. And it won’t break my heart when Garrett moves away to college and I go into his mostly empty room and find the piñata still sitting there, one of the few things he hasn’t taken with him. I will understand. The spell is cast, the incantation complete. And then, alone at night for the first time I can remember, I will take the piñata to the kitchen.

I won’t have any candy, but there are granola bars, grapes, sticks of sugar-free gum, a package of marijuana gummi bears. I will pack these things into the piñata, and then I will tie it to the cast iron light fixture in the living room. I will get the baseball bat I keep hidden behind my bedroom door in case of intruders.

I will make short work of it. No blindfold, no disorientation. There will be no one to see, and this time, I won’t miss. I swing the bat once, twice, three times. A pop that sounds more like a gunshot than an implosion fills the room as my bounty pours forth, and I swing again and again, eyes blurred with tears, until the remnants of what was once a strawberry piñata tears loose from its shoelace and flutters to land on the coffee table in a pile of gum and gummies and grapes, its newspaper insides uncurling in black and white like messages from outside of time.

MARK PURSELL

Mark Pursell’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Mid-American Review, New Orleans Review, Nimrod International Journal, and the 15 Views of Orlando anthology series. His pop culture reviews and commentaries have been featured in Glide Magazine and The Drunken Odyssey. He lives and works in Orlando, Florida.