On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

  Sure enough, there she is, standing at the far end of the little chain-link yard, beside a flattened basketball, her back to him. Her shoulders are narrower than he remembers from hours ago, when she tucked him into bed, her eyes glazed and pink. Her nightgown, made from an oversized T-shirt, is torn in the back, exposing her shoulder blade, white as a halved apple. A cigarette floats to the left of her head. He walks up to her. He walks up to his mother with music in his arms, shaking. She’s hunched, distorted, tiny, as if crushed by the air alone.

  “I hate you,” he says.

  He studies her, to see what language can do—but she doesn’t flinch. Only halfway turns her head. The cigarette, its ember bead, rises to her lips, then flutters near her chin.

  “I don’t want you to be my mom anymore.” His voice strangely deeper, more full.

  “You hear me? You’re a monster—”

  And with that her head is lopped off its shoulders.

  No, she’s bending over, examining something between her feet. The cigarette hangs in the air. He reaches for it. The burn he expects doesn’t come. Instead, his hand crawls. Opening his palm, he discovers the firefly’s severed torso, the green blood darkening on his skin. He looks up—it’s just him and the radio standing beside a flat basketball in the middle of summer. The dogs now silent. And full.

  “Ma,” he says to no one, his eyes filling, “I didn’t mean it.”

  “Ma!” he calls out, taking a few clipped steps. He drops the radio, it falls mouth-down in the dirt, and turns toward the house. “Ma!” He runs back inside, his hand still wet with a single-use life, looking for her.

  Then I told you the truth.

  It was a greyish Sunday. All morning the sky had threatened downpour. The kind of day, I had hoped, where the bond between two people might be decided on easily—the weather being so bleak we would see each other, you and I, with relief, a familiar face made more luminous than we had remembered in the backdrop of dreary light.

  Inside the bright Dunkin’ Donuts, two cups of black coffee steamed between us. You stared out the window. Rain slashed down the road as the cars came back from church service on Main St. “People seem to like those SUV things these days.” You noted the caravan of cars at the drive-thru. “Everybody wants to sit higher and higher.” Your fingers thrummed the table.

  “You want sugar, Ma?” I asked. “What about cream, or actually, maybe a doughnut? Oh no, you like the croissants—”

  “Say what you have to say, Little Dog.” Your tone subdued, watery. The steam from the cup gave your face a shifting expression.

  “I don’t like girls.”

  I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it—pê-đê—from the French pédé, short for pedophile. Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have a name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.

  You blinked a few times.

  “You don’t like girls,” you repeated, nodding absently. I could see the words moving through you, pressing you into your chair. “Then what do you like? You’re seventeen. You don’t like anything. You don’t know anything,” you said, scratching the table.

  “Boys,” I said, controlling my voice. But the word felt dead in my mouth. The chair creaked as you leaned forward.

  “Chocolate! I want chocolate!” A group of children in teal oversized T-shirts, just back, judging from their paper bags full of apples, from an apple-picking trip, poured into the shop, filling it with excited shrieks.

  “I can leave, Ma,” I offered. “If you don’t want me I can go. I won’t be a problem and nobody has to know. . . . Ma say something.” In the cup my reflection rippled under a small black tide. “Please.”

  “Tell me,” you said from behind the palm on your chin, “are you going to wear a dress now?”

  “Ma—”

  “They’ll kill you,” you shook your head, “you know that.”

  “Who will kill me?”

  “They kill people for wearing dresses. It’s on the news. You don’t know people. You don’t know them.”

  “I won’t, Ma. I promise. Look, I never wore one before, have I? Why would I now?”

  You stared at the two holes in my face. “You don’t have to go anywhere. It’s just you and me, Little Dog. I don’t have anyone else.” Your eyes were red.

  The children across the shop were singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” their voices, their easy elation, piercing.

  “Tell me,” you sat up, a concerned look on your face, “when did this all start? I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy. I know that. When?”

  * * *

  —

  I was six, in the first grade. The school I was at was a refurbished Lutheran church. With the kitchen forever under renovation, lunch was served in the gymnasium, the basketball court lines arcing beneath our feet as we sat at makeshift lunch tables: classroom desks bunched together in clusters. Each day the staff would wheel in huge crates filled with frozen, single-dish meals: a reddish-brown mass in a white square wrapped in cellophane. The four microwaves we lined up behind hummed throughout the lunch period as one meal after another was melted, then pinged out, blistered and steaming, into our waiting hands.

  I sat down with my mush square beside a boy with a yellow polo shirt and black comb-over. His name was Gramoz and his family, I learned later, came to Hartford from Albania after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But none of that mattered that day. What mattered was that he did not have a white square with grey mush, but a sleek, turquoise lunch bag with a Velcro strap, from which he presented a tray of pizza bagels, each one the shape of oversized jewels.

  “Want one?” he said casually, biting into his.

  I was too shy to touch. Gramoz, seeing this, took my hand, flipped it over, and placed one in my palm. It was heavier than I imagined. And somehow, still warm. Afterward, at recess, I followed Gramoz everywhere he went. Two rungs behind him on the monkey bars, at his heels as he climbed the ladder to the yellow swirly slide, his white Keds flashing with each step.

  How else to repay the boy who gave me my first pizza bagel but to become his shadow?

  The problem was that my English, at the time, was still nonexistent. I couldn’t speak to him. And even if I could what could I say? Where was I following him? To what end? Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation. To stay close to Gramoz was to remain within the circumference of his one act of kindness, was to go back in time, to the lunch hour, that pizza heavy in my palm.

  One day, on the slide, Gramoz turned around, his cheeks puffed red, and shouted, “Stop following me, you freak! What the heck is wrong with you?” It was not the words but his eyes, squinted as if taking aim, that made me understand.

  A shadow cut from its source, I stopped at the top of the slide, and watched his shiny comb-over grow smaller and smaller down the tunnel, before vanishing, without a trace, into the sound of laughing children.

  * * *

  —

  When I thought it was over, that I’d done my unloading, you said, pushing your coffee aside, “Now I have something to tell you.”

  My jaw clenched. This was not supposed to be an equal exchange, not a trade. I nodded as you spoke, feigning willingness.

  “You have an older brother.” You swept your hair out of your eyes, unblinking. “But he’s dead.”

  The children were still there but I no longer heard their small, perishable voices.

  We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.

  “Look at me. You have to know this.” You wore a face. Your lips a violet line.

  You went on. You once had a son growing inside you, a son you had named, a name you won’t repeat. The son inside you started to move, his limbs running
the circumference of your belly. And you sang and spoke to him, like you did to me, told him secrets not even your husband knew. You were seventeen and back in Vietnam, the same age I was sitting across from you.

  Your hands cupped now like binoculars, as if the past was something that needed to be hunted down. The table wet beneath you. You wiped it with a napkin, then kept going, telling of 1986, the year my brother, your son, appeared. How, four months into your pregnancy, when a child’s face becomes a face, your husband, my father, pressured by his family, forced you to abort him.

  “There was nothing to eat,” you went on, your chin still cupped over the table. A man on his way to the restroom asked to get by. Without looking up, you scooted over. “People were putting sawdust in the rice to stretch it. You were lucky if you had rats to eat.”

  You spoke carefully, as if the story was a flame in your hands in the wind. The children were finally gone—only an elderly couple was left, two puffs of white hair behind their newspapers.

  “Unlike your brother,” you said, “you were not born until we knew you’d live.”

  * * *

  —

  Weeks after Gramoz handed me the pizza bagel, you bought me my first bicycle: a hot-pink Schwinn with training wheels and white streamers on the handgrips that rattled, like tiny pom-poms, even when I rode, as I often did, at walking speed. It was pink because that was the cheapest bike in the shop.

  That afternoon, while riding in the tenement parking lot, the bike jammed to a stop. When I looked down a pair of hands were gripped on the handlebar. They belonged to a boy, maybe ten, his fat wet face wedged atop a towering, meaty torso. Before I could make out what was happening, the bike flipped backward and I landed on my butt on the pavement. You had gone upstairs to check on Lan. Stepping out from behind the boy was a smaller boy with the face of a weasel. The weasel shouted, a spray of spit rainbowed in front of him in the slanted sunlight.

  The large boy took out a key chain and started scraping the paint off my bike. It came off so easily, in rosy sparks. I sat there, watching the concrete fleck with bits of pink as he gashed the key against the bike’s bones. I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.

  That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.

  That night, in the bare-bulb kitchen, I knelt beside you and watched as you painted, in long strokes that swooped, with expert precision, over the cobalt scars along the bike, the bottle of pink nail polish steady and sure in your hand.

  * * *

  —

  “At the hospital, they gave me a bottle of pills. I took them for a month. To be sure. After a month, I was supposed to release it—him, I mean.”

  I wanted to leave, to say stop. But the price of confessing, I learned, was that you get an answer.

  A month into the pills, when he should have already been gone, you felt a jab inside you. They rushed you back to the hospital, this time to the ER. “I felt him kick as they whirled me through the grey rooms, the chipped paint on the walls. The hospital still smelled of smoke and gasoline from the war.”

  With only Novocain injected between your thighs, the nurses went in with a long metal instrument, and just “scraped my baby out of me, like seeds from a papaya.”

  It was that image, its practical mundanity, the preparation of fruit I have seen you do a thousand times, the spoon gliding along the papaya’s flesh-orange core, a slush of black seeds plopping into the steel sink, that made it unbearable. I pulled the hood of my white sweater over my head.

  “I saw him, Little Dog. I saw my baby, just a glimpse. A brownish blur on its way to the bin.”

  I reached across the table and touched the side of your arm.

  Just then, a Justin Timberlake song came on through the speakers, his frail falsettos woven through coffee orders, used grounds thumped against rubber trash bins. You eyed me, then past me.

  When your eyes came back you said, “It was in Saigon where I heard Chopin for the first time. Did you know that?” Your Vietnamese abruptly lighter, hovering. “I must’ve been six or seven. The man across the street was a concert pianist trained in Paris. He would set the Steinway in his courtyard and play it in the evenings with his gate open. And his dog, this little black dog, maybe this high, would stand up and start to dance. Its little twig legs padded the dust in circles but the man would never look at the dog, but kept his eyes closed as he played. That was his power. He didn’t care for the miracle he made with his hands. I sat there in the road and watched what I thought was magic: music turning an animal into a person. I looked at that dog, its ribs showing, dancing to French music and thought anything could happen. Anything.” You folded your hands on the table, a mixture of sadness and agitation in the gesture. “Even when the man stopped, walked over to the dog wagging its tail, and placed the treat in the dog’s open mouth, proving again that it was hunger, only hunger, not music that gave the dog its human skill, I still believed it. That anything could happen.”

  The rain, obedient, picked up again. I leaned back and watched it warp the windows.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.

  A few months before our talk at Dunkin’ Donuts, a fourteen-year-old boy in rural Vietnam had acid thrown in his face after he slipped a love letter into another boy’s locker. Last summer, twenty-eight-year-old Florida native Omar Mateen walked into an Orlando nightclub, raised his automatic rifle, and opened fire. Forty-nine people were killed. It was a gay club and the boys, because that’s who they were—sons, teenagers—looked like me: a colored thing born of one mother, rummaging the dark, each other, for happiness.

  Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?

  Where have we been, Ma?

  * * *

  —

  The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language—perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue. At four or five months, my brother’s placenta was already fully developed. You two were speaking—in blood utterances.

  “He came to me, you know.”

  The rain outside had stopped. The sky an emptied bowl.

  “He came to you?”

  “My boy, he came to me in a dream, about a week after the hospital. He was sitting on my doorstep. We watched each other for a while, then he just turned and walked away, down the alley. I think he just wanted to see what I looked like, what his mom looked like. I was a girl. Oh god . . . Oh god, I was seventeen.”

  * * *

  —

  In college a professor once insisted, during a digression from a lecture on Othello, that, to him, gay men are inherently narcissistic, and that overt narcissism might even be a sign of homosexuality in men who have not yet accepted their “tendencies.” Even as I fumed in my seat, the thought wouldn’t stop burrowing into me. Could it be that, all those years ago, I had followed Gramoz in the schoolyard simply because he was a boy, and therefore a mirror of myself?

  But if so—why not? Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped ou
t. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.

  I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases—a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist. And yes, it was not pizza bagels, all those years ago, that I wanted from Gramoz, but replication. Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to.

  It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

  “I have to throw up,” you said.

  “What?”

  “I have to throw up.” You rush to your feet and head to the bathroom.

  “Oh my god you’re serious,” I said, following you. In the bathroom, you knelt at the single toilet and immediately hurled. Though your hair was tied in a bun, I knelt and, with two fingers, held your three or four strands of loose hair back in a mostly obligatory gesture. “You okay, Ma?” I spoke to the back of your head.

  You hurled again, your back convulsing under my palm. Only when I saw the urinal beside your head flecked with pubic hair did I realize we were in the men’s bathroom.

  “I’ll buy some water.” I patted your back and got up.

  “No,” you called back, your face red, “lemonade. I need a lemonade.”