Natalie Villacorta
Maria Mendoza
Professor Karl Ditlevsen
ENGL 1001
25 January 2012
Rhetorical Analysis: Re: PLEASE CALL ME. Mom is upset and won’t say why
Have you ever felt like family life was suffocating you and you needed to leave your marriage in order to survive and then you fled the country for a “business trip” to Japan and left your 18-year-old daughter to pick up the pieces? Well, this was precisely the situation Raph Mendoza, an intellectual property attorney for the firm, Gold, Gold, and Hamilton, found himself in when he authored “Re: PLEASE CALL ME. Mom is upset and won’t say why” on the morning of December 5, 2011, just under two months ago. Mendoza, who had just arrived in Japan for a business trip, was prompted to write this email in response to an inquiry from his daughter. She had called home from college, as has become her habit on Sunday nights, only to be told by her 14-year-old brother that their mother was asleep and had been crying, which alarmed her because her mother never cried: not when Pappy died, not when Mittens got eaten by a fox, not when Jack froze and sank to the bottom of the ocean. She then wrote Mendoza to find out if he knew why her mother was upset. In his reply, Mendoza admits to being the “source” of his wife’s pain, though he does not specify what it is that he has done. He offers justification for his actions and then concludes by claiming that he still loves his wife, as well as his daughter and her two siblings. In this paper, I will demonstrate how the purpose of this text is to convince his daughter that he was right to leave his wife as well as to gain his daughter’s forgiveness. Mendoza attempts to achieve his purpose by establishing credibility, offering justifications for his actions, and eliciting nostalgia in the reader, but he ultimately crashes and burns.
In the opening of the email, Mendoza attempts to draw his daughter in by taking responsibility for what he has done and asking for forgiveness. Responding to his daughter’s question about whether he has something to do with her mother being upset, he writes, “Yes, I am the source of your mother’s pain. Please forgive me for what I have done.” By taking culpability and asking for forgiveness, Mendoza attempts to gain the reader’s trust and thus hold her attention so that he can get to the real purpose of the email. However, this work is undermined by the fact that Mendoza does not articulate what it is that he has done. Perhaps it was too painful, too shameful, and he was too cowardly, or perhaps, as a lawyer, he knew that anything he said could possibly be used against him in a court of law. Regardless of the reasons for his omission, the effect is to distance the reader.
After admitting that he has done wrong, Mendoza continues to try to gain the reader’s trust by expressing remorse. He writes, “I am very, very sorry.” The repetition of “very” attempts to express the depth of his remorse. Thus, in the opening of the email, he signals to the reader that he recognizes the seriousness of the crimes he has committed. He is not callous, despite what his daughter might remember from her childhood—such as Mendoza screaming at her when she touched the windows of his Audi with her grubby kid fingers, or him taking her to Kids R Us to purchase a Nintendo 64, only to reveal later that it was a gift for her younger brother, or responding to her short story “The Mystery of the Missing Furby,” winner of the Longfellow Middle School Story Prize, with a single, critical comment (“There is a comma splice in the penultimate paragraph.”). Expressing his remorse communicates that he is no unfeeling sociopath, however it may seem, given the fact that he has lied for six years, purchased souvenirs for his mistress while on family vacations, including a pair of socks with bear paw prints on them from Yosemite and a cat bookmark from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and refused to help her mother get treatment for her alcoholism (“There’s no point. She won’t change.”). He is such a reputable guy that he even clarifies: “I am not going to abandon anybody.” This statement does two pieces of work—it communicates his caring nature while simultaneously offering the reader her first clue that the nature of his crimes is related to abandonment. The word “abandon” suggests that he is leaving—though it is not yet clear for what reason.
In the next part of the email, Mendoza justifies leaving his wife with a series of three sentences that start with the first-person pronoun. He begins: “I cannot go on pretending that I can have it all.” Here is where the reader begins to suspect the reason Mendoza is leaving: another woman—though she doesn’t yet know who she is. Though this statement communicates that he is putting an end to his selfishness, the subsequent repetition of the first-person pronoun reveals that in leaving he is still putting himself (“I”) first—his wants and needs—over those of say, his wife—similar to the way in which he has done so, say, in the last 15 years of his marriage, going to the gym after work instead of helping with homework, playing golf on the weekends instead of coming to swim meets, soccer games, and outings to the Smithsonian, playing golf on family vacations instead of hanging out on the beach building sand castles, boogieboarding, cutting out the nude linings in his daughter’s bathing suit bottoms so that she did not get sand stuck in them and both look and feel like she was wearing a diaper.
The email concludes proleptically—anticipating the reader’s response to the email and thus trying to demonstrate the capacity for empathy. “And yes,” he writes, “it may be hard to understand or believe me, but I still love your mother, and of course each of you, our wonderful children.” The “and yes” suggests that he is responding to a question that he anticipates the reader may be asking herself: “How could you do this to us?” He is anticipating that I’m thinking that he could only possibly have done this if he didn’t love us, and in this anticipation, he is demonstrating that is he is in fact thinking of me, of my feelings, and not just his own. He insists that he does love us, though he fails to provide any evidence for this claim, such as the fact that he buys me and my siblings Christmas gifts that reveal deep familiarity with our individual interests and aesthetics rather than say, buying us all the same set of scratchy wool scarves and gloves from Banana Republic, where our family doesn’t even shop, suggesting, perhaps, in retrospect, that it wasn’t even him who picked these gifts out, but his mistress. Finally, he inserts the word “wonderful” to describe me and my siblings to suggest that he recognizes our value/worth, but it really just comes off as flattery, and the reader is insulted that he thinks she would fall for this cheap trick, as though the reader were still a child, a child whom he let pluck out his greasy black chin hairs that were difficult for him to reach, a child whom he let pick out his ties back in the days when he wore a suit to work daily because he was trying to make partner in his law firm, a child whom he taught how to tie said ties in the Waldorf style, a child who asked him to gather her hair into ponytails because her mother was not meticulous enough to smooth out all the bumps, a child whose feet he rubbed when she was having growing pains, pains so sharp she couldn’t fall asleep, that no painkiller could dull, but was no match against his warm brown hands.
In conclusion, the long-term legacy of this email is yet to be known, but his daughter did not respond to it. After she received the email, she called her mother, who informed her that the previous day, while she and her father were lying in bed the night after attending a wedding, her father had asked her how she would feel about “sharing him” and then revealed that he was in love with his secretary. First, he claimed that his secretary did not know about this and that they had not slept together, and then he admitted that was a lie, at which point, her mother said, she leapt from the bed, called him an asshole, fuck you, you can take care of Francis, I don’t care, I’m not living in this house and being the laughingstock of the neighborhood and letting you buy some new apartment in the city. Not long after this outburst, it was time for him to go to the airport, and she drove him, no doubt hoping he would come home when he returned from Japan, and they would reconcile. But he did not come home; he moved out of the house, to a new apartment in the city. Since then, his daughter has not answered his emails, texts, or phone calls. She only saw him at Christmas because he showed up at her mother’s house unannounced with his shitty presents, which she and her siblings promptly returned to the mall. In fact, she has hardly thought about him since receiving this email. Why should she give her attention to a man who cares only about himself? A man whom she thought she knew but who turned out to be a stranger, just as when, at age six, she ran up to her father from behind at the neighborhood pool and threw her arms around his legs and buried her face into the buttocks of his swim trunks, but upon feeling the thick, wiry hair on his thighs panicked because her father’s legs, his tan, Filipino legs, were virtually hairless, and she released her grip, and the man turned around, and I saw that he was not my father at all, but instead a stranger who was wearing the same pair of striped blue Tommy Hilfiger swim trunks.
Works Cited
Mendoza, Raph. “Re: PLEASE CALL ME. Mom is upset
and won’t say why.” Received by Maria Mendoza,
5 Dec. 2011.
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Natalie Villacorta’s fiction has been published in Joyland, Hobart, and is forthcoming in the Beloit Fiction Journal. Her nonfiction appears in the Cincinnati Review, the Offing, and Brevity. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, where she teaches creative writing at Agnes Scott College.