A Glasshouse of Stars

by Shirley Marr

  CHAPTER ONE House

  You have arrived for a better life at the New House in the New Land. It has been a long journey, the first time you’ve ever been on an airplane. It was nerve-racking when they checked the suitcases at the airport, even though your family has next to no possessions, let alone anything to hide. You didn’t know what big meant until you saw the city with the glass towers that touched the sky, the suburbs with houses so close together. You tell yourself everything is going to be fine. The hardest part is over. You made it.

  You’re all too scared to go inside. First Uncle could be in there. He insisted on a funeral as per the local customs of this land—one that possibly didn’t include the ritual of telling him he was now dead, so he might have come home unaware.

  Ma Ma’s knuckles are white from grasping the yellow protective talisman with both hands. Ba Ba pretends superstitions are for ignorant people. He inserts the key into the door. He doesn’t turn the handle.

  The rag doll that Ma Ma made out of an old rice sack is clasped tightly in your arms—you are much too old for her anymore, but she’s all you have. You stare up at the huge white columns propping up the crumbly tofu triangle of a roof. The long drop down to earth from the winding stone staircase you have climbed creates the same scary feeling in your stomach.

  You turn instinctively toward Ma Ma’s side as you used to do, to bury your face inside the folds of her dress. But now that she is huge with child, she has taken to gently nudging you away, so you pull away before she does.

  “I didn’t expect it to be… a mansion,” says Ma Ma.

  “Houses in the New Land are all supposed to be big. I have been warned,” replies Ba Ba.

  You stare up, disorientated. You don’t know if the house is truly too big or if it’s only big because you’re used to living in a cramped space.

  Long fingers of cactus reach all the way up to the second floor, covering the walls like hands on a face. Balanced on the roof at the very top is a third story, a single room with a semicircular window like an open eye.

  A light inside the window flickers on and then off again. A wink. No, it is just your imagination. But what a strange thing to imagine. You look over at your parents, but they don’t seem to have noticed.

  The cold winter wind blows, an icy chill that none of you have ever felt before. The amber pane in the middle of the front door is frosted and blind. Ba Ba rattles at the handle, which appears to be stuck. Suddenly, it gives way and you all tumble into a musty darkness.

  It takes your eyes a while to adjust. Soon you realize you are staring at a world made completely out of dark brown wood and motes of dust that float past your nose like magic.

  Ba Ba turns the hallway light on, and everything is a yellow glow. He takes the talisman off Ma Ma and sticks it outside, above the front doorframe, where the wind flaps it all about. You think the protection spell written on it is for babies, because magic is childish, but you are relieved all the same.

  Inside the house, on the brown brick wall facing the entrance, Ba Ba places an octagon with a piece of mirror in the middle called a bagua. To reflect bad luck away. Later he will go outside, light incense sticks, and thank First Uncle for your new home.

  Ma Ma is told to go straight to the bedroom and have a lie-down, even though she protests. She says she will have time enough to rest after the baby is born, because for a whole month Ma Ma will not be allowed to do anything. Not even have a shower, even if she complains her hair is oily or her armpits are stinky, not one.

  The only thing she will be allowed to do after the birth is rest. Your Aunties told you that there is nothing more important than looking after the baby—and why would Ma Ma want to be doing anything else, anyway? That, and the fact that Ma Ma has to eat lots of stewed pork knuckle. Ginger and sweet black vinegar, too, but mostly pork knuckle.

  This is how things are. Like the bagua on the wall. Like the fact your parents seem much more relieved now that the bagua is up. Like the fact you have come to this New Land to start a new and better life. You don’t question it.

  You have to be a good girl.

  Free to explore by yourself, you find the kitchen is completely orange. The bathroom is lime green. The rest of the house, though, is that dark wooden brown. You don’t think these are the prettiest colors in the world, but they’re the colors New House is, and you are determined to get along. Because when you look down at your skin, you know it is darker than the people in this New Land, and when you see the plait of hair over your shoulder, you know nobody here has coarse black hair like yours. Maybe you look frightening and different.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet First Uncle,” says Ba Ba. “It would have been nice to all live together. There’s definitely the space for it.”

  He has a newspaper open and is struggling to read beyond the meager handful of words he knows.

  “Can you understand this?” he asks.

  LABORER NEEDED

  NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

  You shake your head. You become aware that you haven’t said anything since this morning, when you realized it was the day to get onto the plane and leave your old home forever. You get the sinking feeling you’re going to find it hard to talk much again.

  The words are too big anyway, and the only word you can read (which is “no”) doesn’t help at all. Ba Ba rubs his chin. You are both in the same boat. Ba Ba gives up and turns the page to see if anything makes more sense on the other side, but it is the same story.

  Now that you have seen everything down here, you are determined to go upstairs.

  You think of that window.

  It blinked once at you.

  Perhaps if you find the room, you might find the eye and the face and the part of the giant behind it, looking through the entire house like a camera. Maybe this house was built by giants. That would explain why it’s so big; otherwise, why would First Uncle have all this space for one person?

  “Don’t wander too far, Meixing,” your father calls. “I might need you for something else.”

  New House has lots of different tiles—small multicolored patchwork in one bathroom, white with yellow daisies in another bathroom, and brown-and-orange circles in the kitchen. Everywhere else, uneven squares the color of baked earth undulate and shift like sand. The house wears all of them like scales.

  Tiles are something you are used to. The tiny apartment you lived in was made of white uniform tiles that were everywhere, even the bedrooms.

  “Fit for the hot weather. Easy to sweep,” Ma Ma had said.

  Upstairs, though, there is something strange on the floor. Shaggy, spongy, and dirty, with round patches of dark burgundy here and there. This, you presume, is New House’s fur; the marks, her spots.

  You stretch out and place your bare foot on top, trapping the fibers in between your toes. You don’t know what you were expecting, perhaps a growl. Instead, you feel a vibration. It could be your imagination, it could be the house settling, it could be a purr.

  First Uncle has made a bedroom for you, but it is only half finished because he had a heart attack while picking oranges out in the backyard, one week before you were all to arrive—this is the awful news First Uncle’s lawyer told Ba Ba. This is why only one of the walls is painted. One perfect pink square, like a sheet of joss paper.

  But you have your own bedroom.

  You no longer all have to sleep together, two mattresses on the floor pushed together like an ill-fitting puzzle. Feet against head, head against feet.

  In comparison, New House is a palace. You should feel like a princess, but you instead feel more like an intruder who might at any moment be told to go back home. You place your rag doll on the bed, with the superstitious worry that it will b
e rejected by some unwritten rule of this inner universe. Nothing happens to the doll. She slumps against the pillow and you are relieved.

  As if sensing that you need a distraction, a door creaks somewhere beyond your bedroom. This prompts you to go out and investigate. The house appears to watch you as you wander down the hall and find a pale pink door you swear you didn’t pass before. You stick your head inside.

  The ceiling in this room is not in line with the height of the other ceilings. It is three times as tall, to fit what you discover is an entire playground complete with a rocket, a slide, and a spinning wheel. It is too much.

  You run away in fright and bolt back down the hallway. You stop at your bedroom door, your hand over your heart. It is beating like mad. How big is this house? How scary?

  Big Scary.

  The house slowly closes the door you have left open; the creaking sound, a sad whimper.

  “It’s not your fault you’re scary, but it’s not my fault I’m scared,” you whisper to the house, the first words you have said all day.

  There is a tapping noise along the hallway. Big Scary is composing a long response.

  “If you’re angry about me being here, know that I wish I wasn’t here either.”

  You shut your bedroom door behind you and sit cross-legged on the bed, staring out the window into the backyard. You see waist-high weeds and a broken-down house made of glass. You don’t see any orange trees. The orange trees were all First Uncle ever talked about in his letters and on the phone. About watering and pruning and what type of animal poo was the best and when and how to apply it.

  On the fence sits a black-and-white cat, wondering if she is brave enough to jump down into that long, wild grass. She looks at you and you look back at her. She winks and then jumps back to the safe side of the fence she came from. You rub your eyes in surprise, and then you rub them again. Looking all around you with blurred vision at these strange new surroundings, you wish you could jump back to safety too.

  CHAPTER TWO Noodles

  After a while, once you have tucked all your feelings back inside where they belong, you resume your mission to explore. You circle the entire second floor, but you can’t find a door that takes you up to the Room on the Roof. The pink door with the rocket behind it has been hastily withdrawn, and you cannot find it again. That makes you deeply sad because you hate seeing things leave you, even if you never liked or wanted them in the first place.

  You touch the wall and the wall touches you back. You pull away in surprise. Taking a step backward, you almost fall down a small spiral staircase. This little secret takes you round and round all the way downstairs, to the door of your parents’ bedroom. You wonder why this staircase exists—if it is to connect children to their parents, why do they have to be so far apart in the first place?

  “Did you go exploring? What do you think?” Ma Ma asks as you climb into her bed.

  You don’t reply. You want to snuggle underneath her arm, but you are too afraid to touch her—not with her swollen feet and sweaty, irritable personality prone to suddenly changing from glad to mad, as if controlled by the mystery force growing inside her. Your arms wouldn’t be able to wrap all the way around her anymore, anyway.

  “How do you feel?” Ma Ma asks.

  You feel nervous, upside down, inside out, heart in your mouth, snakes in your stomach, intimidated, and scared. But you don’t say so, in case the fear crawls out of your mouth and takes the form of monsters. Not of the type that can be repelled by Ba Ba’s bagua, but of the realities of new people and new places and an unknown future.

  “I would like that pony I saw on the TV at the airport,” you whisper instead.

  You are thinking of that soft plastic horse with the rainbow hair, the one that smells like strawberries and can be any color as long as you like pastel. The cargo ship that used to arrive at your island every three months (and not at all during the typhoon season) only ever brought boring things like food and basic supplies. You made your own toys with matchboxes, bottle caps, and rubber bands looped together to form a skipping rope. Ma Ma cut up an old cotton rice bag and sewed the white bits together to make your rag doll, the colored bits into her dress. You never named her.

  “Of course,” Ma Ma replies with a laugh. “Now we are starting our lives fresh over, we can have anything we want.”

  “What do you want?” you ask Ma Ma timidly.

  “Well, I would really like one of those brand-new kitchen appliances that can turn from a mixer to a blender to a grinder. Imagine how much of a whiz I’d become in the kitchen!”

  You both laugh as you remember the time Ba Ba had gifted Ma Ma with a new electric eggbeater, only for Ma Ma to still use her old metal whisk. You are glad to see Ma Ma can be the funny person here that she was back home.

  “I don’t really need a magic kitchen appliance,” says Ma Ma. “All I want is for us to be happy in our new home. For everything to be wonderful.”

  She reaches over and finally engulfs you in a hug, and you remember how things used to be; you love her so much. And one day you might learn to love the baby in her tummy, like you’ve been told you have to, even though right now it is an abstract, unformed idea in your head.

  The doorbell rings. You both stare at each other in surprise. No one knows you’re here. You have no friends. Know not a single soul.

  Ba Ba has already opened the door by the time you’ve raced over. A woman and man stand on the tattered doormat. The woman is holding a tower of plastic containers, which she passes awkwardly over to your father.

  “Huynh,” the man says. He points to himself and his wife.

  “Lim,” replies Ba Ba, patting his chest. He puts his hand on your head.

  “Aunty. Uncle,” you say politely. They are not related to you, of course, you’ve only just met them, but it is custom for you to call anyone older than you by these names as a sign of respect.

  Mr. Huynh takes a step back and points over to the single-level, brown-brick house next door, to the left of Big Scary. “Home.”

  “Please, come in,” says Ba Ba. He is careful to enunciate the New Language carefully.

  “So, this is the food everyone eats in this country?” you whisper to your father in the Old Language. There are rice noodles in one of the clear boxes, an aromatic beefy flavor coming from it. You think you can smell coriander and mint.

  “No, not exactly…,” replies Ba Ba. “They are more like us.”

  This only confuses you. You’re sure they haven’t come from the same place you did. This is not a dish that Ma Ma cooks.

  In the kitchen Ba Ba points to the ad in the newspaper, and Mr. Huynh says, “Work,” then mimes lifting something heavy off the ground. No one can understand his charade. So he uses the phone on the wall to call the number and speaks to the person on the other end in a pause-and-go staccato, but it is much better New Language than you are capable of.

  Ma Ma comes out of the bedroom. She looks tired, one hand on the small of her back, one cupped underneath that giant belly. There are so many questions you have for Ma Ma. Who are these people who are neither the Old People nor the New People? What is this food that is similar to what she cooks, but not the same; what is anything anymore? But she sees you open your mouth and, as if she fears what might come out, quickly looks away and out the window. You feel her emotionally pull away from everyone, even you.

  There is a kind pressure on your arm, and Mrs. Huynh leads you away and walks around the house with you. She takes you into the formal dining room, where there sits a huge wooden table with legs that end in cat’s paws. She points at the ancestral photos on the walls. You have no idea who any of these people are, just that they all look unhappy. The unhappiest of all is the beautiful bride in the black-and-white wedding picture.

  Mrs. Huynh smiles and takes your chin in her hand.

  “Son. No friend,” she says to you. She tries to gesture with her hands, but the meaning doesn’t come out. She clicks her tongue at herself. Yo
u are lost with each other and lost in this land.

  As they are leaving, the Huynhs invite you all over to their place. Ma Ma declines and says maybe tomorrow. Through the sliver of the closing bedroom door, you watch as Ma Ma lies down and stares up at the ceiling. Then you follow Ba Ba next door.

  The house is really small, uniformly brown, and does not appear to be alive like your house. It is also extremely cluttered. Nothing is thrown out, not even empty boxes or the newspapers stacked up high, slowly turning into fossils.

  Ba Ba and Mr. Huynh go out back to look at something. You sit down in front of the television on a neon green and black leopard-print rug, which you definitely expect to be alive, but it is not.

  The news is playing, and you learn of a civil war happening in a faraway place called Lebanon, but it does not look civil at all. There is also a cold war between two countries, but it seems heated and rash instead. A shuttle blasts into space and a woman prime minister gives a speech. Mrs. Huynh gets up and switches the channel.

  You watch a cartoon about a princess of power who holds a glittering magic sword high up in the air. Mrs. Huynh sits behind you in the armchair, sewing buttons on a huge stack of clothes that appear too big to belong to either of them. There is a large jar of buttons and a large jar of coins on either side of her.

  There is a feeling that you are being watched. You quickly turn your head, and something comes crashing down, but whatever or whoever it was has disappeared from the doorway. You keep watching and, sure enough, a hand comes creeping around the corner to retrieve the dropped toy spaceship. You watch for a little while longer, but the rest of the body that belongs to the hand does not show itself.

  You go back to watching that colorful cartoon. Mrs. Huynh stares at the empty doorway, shakes her head, and clicks her tongue again. After you leave the house, you are still left wondering about the owner of that mystery hand.

  First Uncle must not have cooked much at home, as both the pantry and the fridge prove to be bare. Ma Ma unpacks the noodle dish from Mrs. Huynh with suspicion and gives it a good sniff. Your parents won’t eat the noodle dish because they don’t eat beef. But they say you can because you are in the New Land now. When you point out that they are part of the New Land too, they laugh and say that they are too old for some things to change. Ma Ma and Ba Ba share a rice dish instead. You push the mound of raw mint, bean sprouts, and chiles aside, but you eat everything else. The meal is delicious. You tell yourself some new experiences are good.