by Paige Clark
Before they even ordered dessert—tiramispoons, individual portions of the Italian dessert served in a soup spoon—the woman was a convert. A vegetarian. Never mind her mother. Her darling po po. Never mind the whole of her extended carnivore family.
Over the course of the evening, the man talked about enough of the right things to prove to the woman he was sane. And wasn’t that in itself a rare treat? They both had no taste for sport. They’d enjoyed a few of the same novels. One of the man’s pupils was slightly larger than the other, which made him appear constantly surprised. Had she mentioned that he was a doctor?
By the time he paid the bill—he insisted—and said, ‘My last relationship ended when my girlfriend ate a steak in front of me,’ the woman had consumed too many glasses of wine to want anything else than for him to take her home.
Outside, it was raining lightly. Under the awning of the restaurant, they made a charade of ordering rides to go their separate ways. The woman pressed up against the man, knowing full well what would happen next, picturing his pointy tongue in her mouth. She thought of the whole parade of dishes she could prepare with baby carrots, legumes and soy products, foods she knew all vegetarians liked.
But when the ride arrived, the man gave the woman a kiss on the lips and a squeeze, and put her in the car.
He said, ‘I’m sorry. I like to go slow.’
As her car sped off, she looked back at the man, who gave her a small wave before he was out of sight. Visions of miniature vegetables danced in the woman’s head.
The woman got home to the apartment she once shared with a boyfriend, though he’d not lived there for a long time now. They didn’t break up because of a cut of beef, but because the boyfriend’s parents did not approve of the woman. In his defence, for many years he’d trusted his parents would come around. During the last fight they had, the boyfriend said he wanted to raise their future children as Christians. The woman was an atheist—an agnostic at best. She never said anything condescending about people who were believers. But she knew what her boyfriend meant. He would not marry a Chinese woman. His parents had won. The entire time they dated, the woman’s boyfriend had not been to church once.
The woman sat down in front of the television with a bag of marshmallows. This was what her friend Cisco called ‘private eating’. She switched between the two food channels she watched exclusively. Tonight, on a farm-to-table program, a chef turned farmer slaughtered his pet goat to make dinner. He cried when the goat was shot in front of him at the humane abattoir, then turned the goat’s hide into a rug for his dog and the goat’s brains into a stew. The woman ate the entire bag of marshmallows before she realised her mistake. She’d forgotten her puffed treat was made from horses’ hooves. She would try again to be a vegetarian tomorrow.
Getting ready for bed, she noticed her skin had gone splotchy from the wine. She was glad the man hadn’t come home with her. From bed, she texted Cisco and told her that she was home safe and that the man was normal. Then she got a text from the man thanking her for the dinner and asking when they could go out again. She thought of a Bolognese recipe she knew that substituted lentils for pork. She wondered if she could use the sauce to make a lasagne, dotted with expensive parmesan and cold-pressed olive oil.
The next morning, she went out for breakfast with Cisco, who showed up five minutes late in head-to-toe neon athletic wear. The woman did not order bacon with her eggs. She did not think about the ham and gruyere toasted sandwich, even though it came with béchamel sauce and jalapeño mustard. When Cisco’s fried chicken and waffle dish arrived, she remembered the man’s beautiful, watchful eye and had to stop herself from sneering. It was as if she were seeing everything as the anaesthetist would—her friend butterflied on an operating table, the crisp chicken moving down her oesophagus, through her digestive tract, into her stomach and coagulating on her most vital organs. Her reverie was not medically sound. Still, she could not forget this pilgrimage of battered and deep-fried meat.
‘What’s he like?’ Cisco asked.
‘Furniture made in Australia,’ the woman said.
‘No—is he tall? Blond? What?’
‘He’s doctor tall.’
‘Doctors come in all heights.’
‘You’d think they would. But it turns out they’re actually taller than regular people.’
‘What about George Clooney?’
‘You know he’s not a real doctor, right?’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I’m not eating meat anymore,’ the woman said.
‘Now I know you’re full of shit,’ her friend said.
Throughout the week, the woman found it easy to be a vegetarian. She went to her job as an academic where she taught introductory media studies classes and researched the cultural impact of high-profile Chinese detention cases. During the day, she ate very little. At night, when she finally got home from work, she ordered embarrassing quantities of pizza by phone. When the food arrived, she put on sunglasses and a long coat and met the delivery person outside a house across the street from her apartment building. On Wednesday, her neighbour spotted her waiting for her pizza and commented that she looked like a woman having an affair.
‘An affair with pizza!’ she replied. Though afterwards she regretted not telling the neighbour she’d been buying drugs. For many reasons, this seemed like the less humiliating option.
Back inside, the woman ate quickly, sometimes forgetting to breathe. Or perhaps she did not chew enough. She could feel the thick crusts moving down her throat, through her chest and into her stomach. On the television, white women with eye-catching dye jobs made cupcakes in lurid colours. They made them by the thousands. Then the cupcake women consulted with a carpenter, who made towering displays out of wood and PVC to showcase the small and delicious snacks.
The woman messaged the man. When he did not reply, she ate a small bar of chocolate. The cupcakes on TV came in flavours the woman found perplexing. Things that did not go together like pepperoni and peanut butter and cacao nibs. The carpenter made a four-foot-tall high-heeled shoe with risers that the bakers filled with cupcakes, each adorned with a miniature replica of the same high-heeled shoe.
The woman’s last boyfriend only watched serious television. Often, the woman would see academics she knew on screen. They were brisk and professional and made the journalists seem dull. She was interviewed herself once and that night she and her boyfriend stayed up late, watching her segment on each passing hour’s news update.
When the man wrote back and suggested a Thai restaurant, the woman was pleased. There would be many vegetarian options. Plus, her last boyfriend hadn’t liked Asian food. When they went out to eat with her family, he ordered plain rice and a pot of jasmine tea.
‘It’s nice, but it tastes a bit like grass,’ he said once.
This made the woman feel self-conscious, although she could never put her finger on what exactly it was that embarrassed her.
The man evaluated restaurants by the quality of their rice.
‘You can always tell,’ he said. He held up an individual grain of long-grain rice. ‘Look at this!’
The woman knew for a fact that she made excellent rice. Other people strained rice like pasta.
‘It’s a great restaurant,’ the woman said.
‘I love Thai food,’ the man said. ‘Not just the food. The people.’ Maybe the woman should have been offended, but she was not. Instead, she thought about washing rice. She thought about the pale china bowls she would use to serve the man dinner one day. Which wooden chopsticks she would set the table with. She decided that if he stayed the night, she would borrow a bamboo steamer from her mother and make egg cake for breakfast. Perhaps she could get up early enough to bring it to him before he’d even got out of bed.
‘Shit,’ the man said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
The woman did not hear the anaesthetist’s pager go off, but Cisco watched a lot of ER and had told the woman all about doctors. Mainly,
that they had to leave places quickly at inconvenient times.
‘I understand. It’s important,’ she said.
The woman also had important work to do. That afternoon, she had found out that the wife of a famous Chinese poet had been arrested for inciting subversion. She had managed to give a comment to the media before meeting the man at the restaurant but skipped applying eyeliner. She hoped he was not leaving because of this misstep.
This time she was the one who paid the bill and stood in a drizzle, waving to the man as he drove off in a car. When he was out of sight, she texted, ‘Raincheck?’ and the man replied with a winky face that resembled his own.
The woman went back to her apartment and invited over Cisco, who brought a family pack of chicken nuggets and a cheeseburger wrapped in paper, at the woman’s request.
‘Semi-private eating,’ Cisco said.
Even though the woman had just eaten dinner, she ate readily. Sweet and sour dipping sauce decorated the corners of her mouth. A sliver of diced onion fell into her lap. With her thumb, she crushed a rogue ant that ambled towards her nuggets.
‘You’re bloodthirsty,’ Cisco said.
‘Don’t you dare tell the doctor about this when you meet him.’
‘When exactly do you imagine that will be?’
The woman’s last boyfriend had also known how to cheer her up. When she was having a hard day researching, he would bring her hash browns, slightly frozen orange juice and Turkish delight chocolates. She would sneak out and meet him across the road from her office.
‘Fancy meeting you here,’ he would say, taking her hair out of its French twist and watching it cascade over her shoulders.
It took six dates before the man came over and they consummated their relationship. The woman removed all of her meat paraphernalia from the apartment before he arrived. They did it once with the lights off and then once with the lights on. Both times he was careful with condoms. Before they had sex the second time, the anaesthetist offered the woman dexies.
‘You’re not on call?’ she asked.
‘You’re cute,’ he said. ‘I got off for you.’
After the sex, the man said goodnight and rolled over, facing his back to her. She draped her arm around his body and he took her hand in his. He stroked her thumb for a short time. The woman’s heart skipped a beat. Granted, this happened whenever she took amphetamines.
‘Still awake?’ he asked.
Then he pressed a Xanax into her hand, threw her arm off and moved further to his side of the bed. The woman did not take the pill, but she managed to fall asleep. She was certain she would wake up before he did and be able to surprise him with her steamed egg cake, maa laai gou. Her mother had dropped off the bamboo steamer the day before.
In the morning, she felt like someone had taken an ice-cream scoop to her brain. Also, the man was gone.
The next day, the woman had yam caa with her mother and Cisco, who was invited so they could order more food. The woman couldn’t tell her mother she was dating a vegetarian, a crime more offensive than her last boyfriend’s dedication to overcooked meats and boiled vegetables. Instead, she would remain faithful to the doctor by eating seafood. Wasn’t there science that proved molluscs didn’t even have brains?
‘Did you hear about the doctor?’ her mother asked Cisco.
‘He sounds too good to be true,’ her friend replied.
The woman dipped into some haa gaau.
‘It takes a long time,’ her friend continued, ‘for some people to show their true self.’ Cisco leant in towards her and a wayward neon drawstring bobbed in the woman’s cup of tea.
The pork buns arrived. The woman salivated like a conditioned dog. She was weak. She gave in. First, she ate two baau, desperate to buy her friend’s silence. Then she ate everything.
‘It’s natural to be guarded at first,’ her mother said.
The woman knew then that she had her mother’s blessing. After all, her mother had her own daydreams of having a doctor in the family. Hadn’t she hated that the woman’s last boyfriend worked in a factory? Even though he had made decent money and was kind.
Sitting between her mother and her friend, the woman wasn’t worried about the previous morning. Her cup whenever empty was immediately refilled with hot tea. There was siu maai dotted with jewelled fish eggs. Sticky rice with chicken and sausage steamed in a lotus leaf.
The woman ate until she was full. Then she had dessert.
After three months of dating, the man accepted the woman’s invitation to dinner at her apartment. She was thankful. He didn’t seem to mind that she was Chinese. In fact, he told her she was well made, like a car manufactured in Japan. Since meeting the man, the woman had improved her carbon footprint. Of course, there were cheat days, but now that they’d dated a few months, she planned to come clean and tell him about her occasional consumption of animal muscle.
That night, she made roast cabbage, cauliflower and carrots. A chickpea bake. Rice pilaf speckled with vermicelli noodles. A white cake with vanilla icing crowned with macerated strawberries. She did not make Chinese food because she was still trying to surprise the man. He continued to confuse her, mostly by leaving places with little explanation. She was empathetic to the pressures of high-stress, demanding jobs. He’d lost a patient on the table earlier in the week. The woman herself was planning a research trip to Singapore to interview a recently released detainee.
Maybe if the man had not been an anaesthetist, or if the expensive bubbly wine she bought for the occasion had not been corked, or even if the man had showed up on time, apologetic for being empty-handed but sorry in the way the woman loved most, she wouldn’t have told the truth.
But he was late and slightly damp, as he always seemed to be when they met. He stood at the door with a bottle of shiraz, though the woman never drank heavy reds.
He was still wearing his wedding ring. She noticed its foreign shine on his hand.
‘I had a Filet-O-Fish for lunch,’ the woman said. Then she moved to slam the door on him and he backed away. With the door shut, the woman could only picture his sizeable pupil, glowing brightly as he retreated from her apartment.
She did not eat her dinner. Tomorrow, she would message Cisco. For now, she sat on the couch, basking in food television. A chef on the screen stuffed and roasted a chicken. He basted it frequently.
Behind the woman, the first worker ant made its way to her meal. By the time she got up from the couch to put herself to bed, the entire table would be infested. Grease ants would wade through bowls of hummus. They’d pepper the banquet of Mediterranean roast vegetables. The rice pilaf would quiver. Everything would appear to be alive.
Except for the cake.
She’d made a cake that not even the ants wanted to eat.
WHY MY HAIR IS LONG
If my mother had called me and asked, ‘What have I done that you can’t forget?’
I would have said, ‘I can forgive anything.’ But she never called and that is what I can never forget.
Instead I get an email. It shines bright and blue on my phone in the dark bedroom of my new boyfriend. It says, ‘When people ask how you are doing, I will say that I tried my best and it was not good enough for you.’ I am confused. I am always the one who is not good enough.
I turn off my phone quickly. I do not want to wake up my new boyfriend. He sleeps with a smile on his face, as if he is having the most pleasant dream. When I ask him about it in the morning, he says he dreamt we were in Hawaii and I was learning to hula, my dark hair reaching to my waist.
‘How wonderful,’ I say. I forget to tell him about the email.
It all started with my mother’s hair. It stopped growing. In a photograph from her youth, she is standing in a red gingham shirt and short jean shorts eating an ice-cream sandwich. Her hair floats behind her like a sheet hung out to dry. A morsel of chocolate cookie dots her lip. She looked at this photo often, wondering why her hair would not grow past her shoulders anymore.
Then it started falling out in clumps. I could see bits of it wrapped up in toilet paper and stuffed into the bathroom wastebasket. The shower drain was constantly clogged with loose strands, so I stood ankle deep in murky water every time I shampooed my hair. She never said anything to me about it. I took out the trash often and secretly bought drain cleaner from the supermarket.
She enlisted a famous hairdresser that she saw on David Letterman. My mother forced me to go with her to the salon, all the way over in Beverly Hills. She said she needed company for the long drive. She raced through Laurel Canyon to get to the appointment. Her urgency rounding every corner made me uneasy, as if I knew already what disappointment awaited her. Or maybe I was just afraid of the canyon, how it seemed like it could swallow a person whole.
When we arrived, Ringo Starr was paying his bill. My mother’s eyes flashed when she saw him, but I noticed he was balding, just slightly, on the crown of his head.
My new boyfriend likes his mother. She wears lipstick in contemporary colours like fuchsia and mandarin. She drives to his apartment with spare keys when he accidentally locks himself out, and looks after his dog when he travels for business and even for pleasure. When I first meet her, I notice her hair is platinum blonde. My mother hated women who dyed their hair. ‘They think they look younger,’ she said.
If my new boyfriend asks about my mother, I switch the subject. It is easier to change the topic than to change the mind. Tell someone you do not speak to your mother and they always say you should instead of why.
‘Maybe we should go to Hawaii,’ I say. His face goes dreamy and quiet.
‘Will you wear your hair down?’ he asks.
‘I’ll even get a tan.’
Next my hairbrush went missing. This was after several visits to the fancy salon and a few bottles of shampoo that smelt like parsley and powdered soap. It was after my second conversation with Ringo Starr, the first one being about the weather. He said, ‘You are such a beautiful young girl. Look at how you shine.’