On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Page 6
“Maybe you shouldn’t call me Grandpa anymore.” Paul’s cheeks pinch as he sucks the second joint, killing it. He looks like a fish. “That word, it might be a bit awkward now wouldn’t it?”
I think about it for a minute. Ulysses Grant’s Crayola portrait quivers from a breeze through the dimming window.
“No,” I say after a while, “I don’t got any other grandpa. So I wanna keep calling you that.”
He nods, resigned, his pale forehead and white hair tinted with evening light. “Of course. Of course,” he says as the roach drops into the glass with a sizzle, leaving a thread of smoke that twirls, like a ghostly vein, up his arms. I stare at the brown mash in the bowl before me, now soggy.
* * *
—
There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.
I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?
When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure. Just as I don’t know what to call you—White, Asian, orphan, American, mother?
Sometimes we are given only two choices. While doing research, I read an article from an 1884 El Paso Daily Times, which reported that a white railroad worker was on trial for the murder of an unnamed Chinese man. The case was ultimately dismissed. The judge, Roy Bean, cited that Texas law, while prohibiting the murder of human beings, defined a human only as White, African American, or Mexican. The nameless yellow body was not considered human because it did not fit in a slot on a piece of paper. Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.
To be or not to be. That is the question.
When you were a girl in Vietnam, the neighborhood kids would take a spoon to your arms, shouting, “Get the white off her, get the white off her!” Eventually you learned to swim. Wading deep into the muddy river, where no one could reach you, no one could scrape you away. You made yourself an island for hours at a time. Coming home, your jaw would clatter from cold, your arms pruned and blistered—but still white.
When asked how he identifies his roots, Tiger Woods called himself “Cablinasian,” a portmanteau he invented to contain his ethnic makeup of Chinese, Thai, Black, Dutch, and Native American.
To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.
* * *
—
“I remember one time, while visiting you all in Hartford—this must be a year or two after you landed from Vietnam—” Paul rests his chin on his palm and stares out the window, where a hummingbird hovers at the plastic feeder. “I walked into the apartment and found you crying under the table. No one was home—or maybe your mom was—but she must have been in the bathroom or something.” He stops, letting the memory fill in. “I bent down and asked you what was wrong, and you know what you said?” He grins. “You said that the other kids lived more than you. What a hoot.” He shakes his head. “What a thing to say! I’ll never forget that.” His gold-capped molar caught the light. “‘They live more, they live more!’ you shouted. Who the hell gave you that idea? You were only five, for Christ sakes.”
Outside, the hummingbird’s whirring sounds almost like human breath. Its beak jabs into the pool of sugared water at the feeder’s base. What a terrible life, I think now, to have to move so fast just to stay in one place.
After, we go for a walk, Paul’s brown-spotted beagle clinking between us. It’s just after sunset and the air’s thick with sweetgrass and late lilacs frothing white and magenta along the manicured lawns. We veer toward the last bend when a plain-looking lady, middle-aged, hair in a blond ponytail, approaches. She says, looking only at Paul, “I see you finally got a dog boy. Good for you, Paul!”
Paul stops, pushes his glasses up his nose only to have them slide back down. She turns to me, articulates, “Welcome. To. The. Neighbor. Hood.” Her head bobs out each syllable.
I hold tight the dog’s leash and step back, offering a smile.
“No,” Paul says, his hand raised awkwardly, as if waving away cobwebs. “This is my grandson.” He lets the word hover between us all, until it feels solid, an instrument, then repeats it, nodding, to himself or the woman I can’t say. “My grandson.”
Without a beat the woman smiles. Too widely.
“Please remember that.”
She laughs, makes a dismissive gesture before extending her hand to me, my body now legible.
I let her shake my hand.
“Well, I’m Carol. Welcome to the neighborhood. I mean that.” She walks on.
We head home. We don’t speak. Behind the row of white town houses, a column of spruces stands motionless against a reddish sky. The beagle’s paws scrape the concrete, its chain clinking as the animal pulls us home. But all I can hear is Paul’s voice in my head. My grandson. This is my grandson.
I’m dragged into a hole, darker than the night around it, by two women. Only when one of them screams do I know who I am. I see their heads, black hair matted from the floor they sleep on. The air sharp with a chemical delirium as they jostle in the blur of the car’s interior. Eyes still thick with sleep, I make out the shapes: a headrest, a felt monkey the size of a thumb swinging from the rearview, a piece of metal, shining, then gone. The car peels out of the driveway, and I can tell, from the smell of acetone and nail polish, that it’s your tan-and-rust Toyota. You and Lan are in the front, clamoring for something that won’t show itself. The streetlights fling by, hitting your faces with the force of blows.
“He’s gonna kill her, Ma. He’s gonna do it this time,” you say, breathless.
“We riding. We riding helicopter fast.” Lan is in her own mind, red and dense with obsession. “We riding where?” She clutches the flip-down mirror with both hands. I can tell by her voice that she is smiling, or at least gritting her teeth.
“He’s gonna kill my sister, Mama.” You sound like you’re flailing down a river. “I know Carl. It’s for real this time. You hear me? Ma!”
Lan rocks side to side from the mirror, making whooshing sounds. “We getting out of here, huh? We gotta go far, Little Dog!” Outside, the night surges by like sideways gravity. The green numbers on the dash read 3:04. Who put my hands in my face? The tires squeal at each turn. The streets are empty and it feels like a universe in here, an everything hurling through the cosmic dark while, in the front seat, the women who raised me are losing their minds. Through my fingers, the night is black construction paper. Only the frazzled heads of these two before me are clear, swaying.
“Don’t worry, Mai.” You’re speaking to yourself now. Your face so close to the windshield the glass fogs a ring that spreads in equal measure to your words. “I’m coming. We’re coming.”
After a while we swerve down a street lined with Continentals. The car crawls, then stops in front of a grey clapboard town house. “Mai,” you say, pulling the emergency brake. “He’s gonna kill Mai.”
Lan, who all this time had been shaking her head from side to side, stops, as if the words have finally touched a little button inside her. “What? Who kill who? Who die this time?”
“Both of you stay in the car!” You unbuckle your belt
, leap out, and shuffle toward the house, the door left open behind you.
There’s a story Lan would tell, of Lady Triệu, the mythical woman warrior who led an army of men and repelled the Chinese invasion of ancient Vietnam. I think of her, seeing you. How, as legend goes, armed with two swords, she’d fling her yard-long breasts over her shoulders and cut down the invaders by the dozens. How it was a woman who saved us.
“Who die now?” Lan swings around, her face, made stark by the overhead light, ripples with this new knowledge. “Who gonna die, Little Dog?” She flips her hand back and forth, as if opening a locked door, to indicate emptiness. “Somebody kill you? For what?”
But I’m not listening. I’m rolling down the window, arms burning with each turn on the handle. Cool November air slips in. My stomach grabs as I watch you mount the front steps, the nine-inch machete glinting in your hand. You knock on the door, shouting. “Come out, Carl,” you say in Vietnamese. “Come out, you fucker! I’m taking her home for good. You can have the car, just give me my sister.” At the word sister your voice cracks into a short, busted sob, before regaining control. You bash the door with the machete’s wooden butt.
The porch lights turn on, your pink nightgown suddenly green under the fluorescent. The door opens.
You step back.
A man appears. He half lunges from the doorway as you backpedal down the steps. The blade locked at your side, as if pinned in place.
“He has a gun,” Lan whisper-shouts from the car, now lucid. “Rose! It’s a shotgun. It shoots two eaters at once. They eat your lungs inside out. Little Dog, tell her.”
Your hands float over your head, the metal clanks on the driveway. The man, huge, his shoulders sloped under a grey Yankees sweatshirt, steps up to you, says a few words through his teeth, then kicks the machete to the side. It disappears in the grass with a flash. You mumble something, make yourself small, cup your hands under your chin, the posture you take after receiving a tip at the salon. The man lowers his gun as you back away, shaking, toward the car.
“It’s not worth it, Rose,” Lan says, cupping her mouth with both hands. “You can’t beat a gun. You just can’t. Come back, come back in the helicopter.”
“Ma,” I hear myself say, my voice cracking. “Ma, come on.”
You edge slowly into the driver’s seat, turn to me with a nauseated stare. There’s a long silence. I think you’re about to laugh, but then your eyes fill. So I turn away, to the man carefully eyeing us, hand on his hip, the gun clamped between his armpit, pointed at the ground, protecting his family.
When you start to talk, your voice is scraped out. I catch only parts of it. It’s not Mai’s house, you explain, fumbling with your keys. Or rather, Mai is no longer there. The boyfriend, Carl, who used to slam her head against the wall is no longer there. This is somebody else, white man with a shotgun and a bald head. It was a mistake, you’re saying to Lan. An accident.
“But Mai has not lived here for five years,” Lan says with sudden tenderness. “Rose . . .” Although I don’t see it, I can tell she’s brushing your hair behind your ear. “Mai moved to Florida, remember? To open her own salon.” Lan is poised, her shoulders relaxed, someone else has stepped inside her and started moving her limbs, her lips. “We go home. You need sleep, Rose.”
The engine starts, the car lurches into a U-turn. As we pull away, from the porch, a boy, no older than I am, points a toy pistol at us. The gun jumps and his mouth makes blasting noises. His father turns to yell at him. He shoots once, two more times. From the window of my helicopter, I look at him. I look him dead in the eyes and do what you do. I refuse to die.
II
Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it. But if you were a god you would see them. You would look down at this grove of pines, the fresh tips flared lucent at each treetop, tender-damp in their late autumn flush. You would look past the branches, past the rusted light splintered through the brambles, the needles falling, one by one, as you lay your god eyes on them. You’d trace the needles as they hurled themselves past the lowest bow, toward the cooling forest floor, to land on the two boys lying side by side, the blood already dry on their cheeks.
Although it covers both their faces, the blood belongs to the tall boy, the one with eyes the dark grey of a river beneath somebody’s shadow. What’s left of November seeps through their jeans, their thin knit sweaters. If you were god, you’d notice that they’re staring up at you. They’re clapping and singing “This Little Light of Mine,” the Ralph Stanley version they’d listened to earlier in the afternoon on the tall boy’s stereo. It was his old man’s favorite song, the tall boy had said. And so now their heads sway side to side as their teeth glow between the notes, and the caked blood crumbles from their jaws, flecking their pale throats as the song leaves them in fistfuls of smoke. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. . . . All in my house, I’m gonna let it shine.” The pine needles spin and sputter around them in the minuscule wind made by their moving limbs. The cut under the tall boy’s eye has reopened from his singing, and a black-red line now runs down his left ear, curving at his neck and vanishing in the ground. The small boy glances at his friend, the terrible bulb of an eye, and tries to forget.
If you were god you would tell them to stop clapping. You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on. But you are not a god.
You’re a woman. A mother, and your son is lying under the pines while you sit at a kitchen table across town, waiting again. You have just reheated, for the third time, the pan of fried flat noodles and scallions. Your breath fogs the glass as you stare out the window, waiting for the boy’s orange New York Knicks sweater to flash by, as he must be running, it being so late.
But your son is still under the trees beside the boy you will never meet. They are yards from the closed overpass, where a plastic bag thrashes against the chain link surrounded by hundreds of one-shot liquor bottles. The boys begin to shiver, their claps slow, nearly inaudible. Their voices subdued as the wind swarms hugely above them—needles clicking down like the hands of smashed watches.
There are times, late at night, when your son would wake believing a bullet is lodged inside him. He’d feel it floating on the right side of his chest, just between the ribs. The bullet was always here, the boy thinks, older even than himself—and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn’t me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother’s womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around. Even now, as the cold creeps in around him, he feels it poking out from his chest, slightly tenting his sweater. He feels for the protrusion but, as usual, finds nothing. It’s receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.
Across town, facing the window, you consider reheating the noodles one more time. You sweep into your palm pieces of the paper napkin you had torn up, then get up to toss it out. You return to the chair, wait. That window, the same one your son had stopped at one night before coming in, the square of light falling across him as he watched your face, peering out at him. Evening had turned the glass into a mirror and you couldn’t see him there, only the lines scored across your cheeks and brow, a face somehow ravaged by stillness. The boy, he watches his mother watch nothing, his entire self inside the phantom oval of her face, invisible.
The song long over, the cold a numbing sheath over their nerves. Under their clothes, goose bumps appear, making their thin, translucent hair rise, then bend against the fabric under their shirts.
“Hey Trev,” your son says, his friend’s blood crusted tight on his cheek. “Tell me a secret.” Wind, pine needles, seconds.
“What kind?”
“Just—like . . . a normal secret. It doesn’t have to suck.”
“A normal one.” The hush of thinking, steady breaths. The stars above them a vast smudge on a hastily-wiped chalkboard. “Can you go first?”
On the table across town, your fingers stop drumming the Formica.
“Okay. You ready?”
“Yeah.”
You push back your chair, grab your keys, and walk out the door.
“I’m not scared of dying anymore.”
(A pause, then laughter.)
The cold, like river water, rises to their throats.
Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.
Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I’ve never felt, the palms already callused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. How you’d come home, night after night, plop down on the couch, and fall asleep inside a minute. I’d come back with your glass of water and you’d already be snoring, your hands in your lap like two partially scaled fish.
What I know is that the nail salon is more than a place of work and workshop for beauty, it is also a place where our children are raised—a number of whom, like cousin Victor, will get asthma from years of breathing the noxious fumes into their still-developing lungs. The salon is also a kitchen where, in the back rooms, our women squat on the floor over huge woks that pop and sizzle over electric burners, cauldrons of phở simmer and steam up the cramped spaces with aromas of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mint, and cardamom mixing with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol, and bleach. A place where folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country are told, expanded, laughter erupting in back rooms the size of rich people’s closets, then quickly lulled into an eerie, untouched quiet. It’s a makeshift classroom where we arrive, fresh off the boat, the plane, the depths, hoping the salon would be a temporary stop—until we get on our feet, or rather, until our jaws soften around English syllables—bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that cost a quarter of our wages.