Essay: Mixed Bloody Mary

By Christine Stoddard

Photo by Dustin Barlow.

The writer shared the following story at Queer to Tell for Pride Fest at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City on June 27, 2024:

Meet Lindsay. She’s one of my first friends ever and an early latent crush. She has two beauty marks on her left cheek and a Barbra Streisan bob. Adopted from Honduras by two white people, she’s stuck in suburban Virginia like me. Her adoptive parents are super white: Welsh and Irish descent. My mom is from El Salvador and my dad is of broadly British descent. He usually claims “Scottish.” Fast forward to my college days. He does the whole Ancestry.com and 23&Me thing; it’s clear he has Irish heritage, too. His very WASPy father would’ve hated that. The Irish are Catholics, not Protestant. Even at age 7, I know that. Mami has a hunch about Daddy’s Irish ancestry and goes overboard with St. Patrick’s Day enthusiasm. She’s big on fun. She also loves that the Irish are Catholic like her. Daddy’s father hated that she was Catholic and, you know, a “Spic.” His journalist son never should’ve married one of the “natives” he met covering their war. But he did and that’s how I, a “mutt,” was born. 

Anyway, back to Lindsay, my partner in crime. Lindsay and I bond in part for being othered at our upper-middle class, white school. Both of us have that Mayan and Spanish blood in us. Both of us are learning cultural things that our snotty classmates take for granted. Other classmates don’t have a pot of beans eternally boiling on the stove. They have never heard of “Sabado Gigante.” Their moms watch “Friends.” Their weekends are filled with tennis lessons. They know which fork to use for every bland dish at the country club. Since Lindsay’s parents are members, she knows. So she stands up for me when I get bullied for not knowing. But neither one of us knows about “Bloody Mary.”

Enter our friend Eddie. Eddie’s loud, confident, and knows everything. He even knows how babies are made. “S-E.X. Penis in vagina. Not just kissing.” Whoah, Eddie! When I double-check with Mami after school, she nearly cut her hand while slicing tomatoes. Her only response: “Who told you that?” That means Eddie is right. Naturally, Eddie is the first one to tell Lindsay and me about “Bloody Mary.” During recess, he leads us into the woods, chanting “Bloody Mary,” “Bloody Mary,” “Bloody Mary!” We copy him.
“The first one to see a face in a tree dies! Or at least gets cursed!”

He’s Eddie, so he must be right!

I see a face first and rush out of the woods, screaming. Eddie and Lindsay follow me, also screaming.

Everyday, Lindsay and I play with each other at recess. We pray to Bloody Mary to find Lindsay’s birth parents when Eddie isn’t around. When you want something really badly, you pray to Jesus’s mom and she makes stuff happen. We might as well pray to this Mary, too. After all, how different can the Marys be?  Lindsay and I find a big hole in the ground by the woods at school. It collects rain water for us to turn into magic potions, perfect for our spells. Er, prayers? Same thing, right? 

Lindsay misses her parents and she misses Honduras. I don’t really think about what would happen if Lindsay finds her parents, but I know my friend is sad. I also know that this game is more fun than another round of make-believe “Power Rangers,” especially since Meredith never lets anyone else be the Pink Power Ranger. Bitch. Too much fighting in that game, anyway. I also know that Honduras may be far away but it’s next to El Salvador. That’s the place Mami misses so much sometimes she cries. Mami says Honduras is sort of like El Salvador. I have never been to El Salvador, but if it’s special enough to make Mami cry and Honduras is similar, that must mean Honduras is special, too. I don’t want Lindsay to cry for missing a place and her people like Mami does.

Two years prior, I’m playing with my clique of mermaid dolls when I hear Mami tearfully tell Daddy she doesn’t want to live in Virginia anymore. When I leave my room to hug Mami and tell her to stop crying, she immediately wipes her tears away. She puts on an upbeat voice and announces that we’re moving to Miami, where she and Daddy lived before I came along. A month later, there’s a “For Sale” sign in our front yard. I’m partying with my mermaids one afternoon when some strangers enter my room. The real estate agent cheerfully declares that this room is great for a child’s bedroom or play area. But when the real estate agent takes down the “For Sale” sign a week later, it’s like nothing changed. No packing boxes or moving van like in “Toy Story.” Mami says we have to stay put because of Daddy’s job and so I can go to a good school. I still hear her cry when she thinks I can’t hear her. When I stumble upon her watching the news, I catch words about Central America, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. Guns, tanks, and explosions appear on the television screen. She changes the channel as soon as she realizes I’m there. Sometimes she hides fresh tears.

When I tell Mami about Bloody Mary, she’s intrigued but concerned. She knows I’ve seen her perform her own prayer rituals, but little girls shouldn’t know about pain and grief. Besides, to her Bloody Mary is a “grown-up drink.” Also something little girls shouldn’t know anything about. She wants to learn the details of the story because folklore interests her. So I tell her Eddie’s version and then what Lindsay and I are doing with it.

Mami tells Daddy. Daddy tells her that we got Bloody Mary all wrong. We are supposed to hold a candle and a hand mirror, then walk backwards up a flight of stairs at night. Only then might we see our future husband’s face in the mirror. If we saw a skull instead, it meant we’d die before marrying. But, Daddy says Lindsay and I are too young for that game. It’s for young women, not little girls, and just a story. I hear all of this from Mami because Daddy, per usual, is working.

When I find out the real story, I’m furious at Eddie. So I confront him the next day at school. He got the sex and babies thing right; how come he messed up the story of “Bloody Mary”? Lindsay gets sad, exactly what I didn’t want to happen. She’s convinced she’ll never find her birth parents. Instead, she’ll have to keep going to etiquette classes with too many forks. Eddie teases us for believing him in the first place. 

“Nobody wants to marry you because you’re too ugly. Or even if you’re not ugly when you grow up, marriage is gross, anyway! My aunt never married and she’s cool.”

Funny how all three of us ended up on the LGBTQ spectrum. Funny how I eventually married (and left) a man I realized I had zero attraction to, someone who sometimes made me wish I’d seen a skull in the tree bark at age 7.

It’s about a week before St. Patrick’s Day. Mami knows I’m disappointed about “Bloody Mary,” so when I come home from school, she has corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes ready for me. She knows I love the meal as much as she does, especially how she seasons everything with Adobo. Unfortunately for my siblings, they don’t feel the same way. Mami has bought enough of the meal to fill the freezer. Our family of five eats it for the next week and a half. 

​In time, the sting of “Bloody Mary” goes away. But I start noticing Mami’s sunny disposition crack more often. Sometimes, instead of swiftly moving on to a happier topic, she tells me something serious. Like how the scary pictures on the news show war, something where people kill each other. Or how Lindsay might never see her parents again. How it’s possible they’re not alive. How they could’ve been killed in Honduras. These wartime mentions come quickly in passing. Mami doesn’t dwell. Then she diverts to something fun about her new life in America. Like St. Patrick’s Day. Isn’t it funny how many things Irish-Americans dye green? And aren’t Lucky Charms, well, charming? These are Mami’s questions for her new country, but I have other questions, questions I sense might make Mami upset. Questions about growing up the child of an immigrant. More and more questions about sex. Could I ask Bloody Mary about those topics? Could Lindsay and I make a magic potion for them? Or are there potions I should just make for myself?

​#lgbtq #bloodymary #folktales #storytelling #firstperson