“I understand,” she’d say. “Yes, I understand.”
And sometimes I’d tell her my dreams, something I hadn’t done since we were kids together in that little house down on Sylvania Avenue that our folks bought two or three years before our mother died, and our world exploded, after which Claire seemed to head down one path in life and I down another.
In one dream, I’m driving and the kid’s in the car seat behind me, facing backward. (My wife and I had a knock-down-drag-out about how long the car seat needed to be facing backward, by the way. As long as possible, it turns out, given their pencil-thin necks and the driving skills of the average resident of our fair city.) Anyway, the kid and I are taking turns listening to my music and then hers, mine then hers, switching back and forth. That’s it. I’m just listening as she laughs and asks me what instrument it is when my music is playing. Or me singing some song or other or telling her that in a little bit on my side of the car there’ll be a yellow school bus or one of those construction vehicles she loves so much. In the dream, it’s sunny and warm, and we’re traveling along the parkway with the windows down.
I had the exact same dream a couple of weeks after Eunice returned, but this time she was in the car too. We were driving down the same stretch of the parkway, the three of us laughing and talking.
When I woke up, I turned to my daughter in the bed between us, it felt so real. Then I ran to the window to look out at the car, even though I knew I had put the car seat away in the garage along with that other stuff boxed up there gathering dust.
I knew at that moment that if I didn’t tell Eunice everything about the dream, I would die. Not actually die, of course, but in that slow inexorable way that men die daily, the kind of death that leaves families broken and marriages empty. So I told her the dream as we lay there in bed: what our daughter was wearing; how her voice sounded; how warm it was outside. Eunice asked for an ever-increasing level of detail: Did she seem happy? (Yes.) Had she eaten? (She had a bag of sour cream chips, I think.) Did she have on her cream-colored jacket? (No, a jumper, blue with some kind of animal on the bib. I can’t be sure.) Some of the details I supplied without knowing whether they were real or whether I was making them up as I went along.
Then for a long, long time we just lay there with a breeze coming through the window. It was late spring by then; the warm weather had arrived for real. Then, I can’t say why but I reached out and touched her arm with the tips of my fingers and, I don’t know, just waited. A lot of people think once you’re married it no longer takes any kind of courage to express your desire, but sometimes it can be just as scary as the first time: I didn’t have the slightest idea how she’d react. Or exactly what it was that I wanted. But eventually she put her hand on mine, and our hands slowly intertwined, moving together and letting go and intertwining again, as if we were circling some invisible thing between us.
It was like that first time we went to the movies together on our first date, sitting there in the darkness. Not long after, she told me she had thought it was corny at first, the way I caressed her hand, but then she said everything else fell away and it was only our hands, moving together in the darkness. It was like that again now, except it was her body and mine, slowly moving, intertwining and reconfiguring in the half-light of early morning.
Like a knife, she cut through the layers of fatted flesh down to where my wounded heart had hidden itself and, once exposed, oh, I wailed for my lost little one, and Eunice, she burrowed into that flaccid flesh, and I covered her naked grief as best I could as she wept, and we spoke her name over and over again: Veaunita, Veaunita, Veaunita. Then sleep—long and hard and dreamless—descended upon us and relieved us of our names.
When we woke in the late afternoon, I was the one who asked if she was hungry. She said she was, and I knew she meant it. And I was too and keenly aware of it. I’m no cook, but growing up in Jersey my dad was famous for the breakfast he’d make. It was one of the things he passed on to me. So I fired up the stove and made hickory-smoked bacon, scrapple, eggs sunny-side up, grits, pancakes, Belgian waffles, real whole-wheat biscuits from scratch, fruit salad, and a side salad with dressing. Hot coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. As I cooked something, I put whatever I had finished in the oven to keep warm. Then, after everything was done and the table was groaning under the weight of it all, we eyed each other across the table and dug in as if it were for the first time ever, or maybe the last, sopping up the bright yellow yolk of the eggs with the biscuits until they were dripping, washing it down with hot coffee, wolfing down the fruit with our hands, stuffing slabs of pancakes in our mouths.
Our hunger was inexhaustible, bottomless, with neither beginning nor end.
When every plate was empty and piled one on top of the other, we sat there in silence, happy for once. Then after a while Eunice looked over at me and said, “Run it back again, Charlie Chaplin. Run it back.” I looked at her to see if she was serious and she gave me a look, and I knew she meant it, so I turned on the stove again.
Seven months later, we were back in the same hospital as before, and Eunice gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I can do the math. But it doesn’t matter. Like my old man says, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
When the baby was three months old we took her to Baltimore to meet Eunice’s sister. Steven, the old beau, was there, too. He stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting, it seemed, for someone to tell him it was all right for him to be there, even though Eunice had expressly said she wanted him there. When she lay the baby in his arms, he cradled her like a little doll.
“She’s light as air,” he said smiling, then repeated it. “She’s light as air.” Then he passed her back to Eunice, still smiling, and shoved his hands in his pockets and hopped lightly from foot to foot, saying, “She’s as light as a feather.”
One day we’ll explain it all to her—how, long ago, an old man would rather die than cross a sacred bean field, and how a baby decided to come to us, to her old man and her mama, in this time and this place and in this manner, to spend a little while or all of our lifetimes by our side. In the meantime, I hold her in my arms and devour her with my eyes.
Stanley Patrick Stocker’s fiction has appeared in Kestrel and Middle House Review. He received an Individual Artist Award in Fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council. Originally from Philadelphia, Stanley lives with his wife and son in the Washington, D.C., area, where he practices law. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, he is currently working on a novel. He can be found at stanleypatrickstocker.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Zhang’s story, “Mandy’s Mary Sue,” was submitted as part of sinθ magazine’s summer writing contest. We had three prompts: “Set your written piece inside a cube”; “speculative futures”; and the following quote from the character Dr. Yu Tsun in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”: “I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.” I like to think that Zhang fulfilled all three prompts with this funny, relatable, and engaging story about a young girl’s coming of age. Not only does Mandy literally invent futures for herself, but her relationship to her identity is mediated through the magical cube that is her computer, which provides access to labyrinths within labyrinths of information, abundant and contradictory, sending Mandy spiraling into confusion yet providing solid anchors, using which she is able to begin deciding what kind of person she wants to be.
Reading “Mandy’s Mary Sue,” I was immediately struck by the strength of Zhang’s voice, the sustained, cyclical narrative, and the deft, almost effortless manner in which Zhang is able to sketch out this cast of characters. The story certainly reminded me of my own misadventures with anime and DeviantArt at Mandy’s age, and I’m sure that it will resonate with any reader who has spent any amount of time in an internet black hole, wondering what all th
ese pixels amount to. “Mandy’s Mary Sue” was short-listed for sinθ’s fiction prize, and judge K-Ming Chang said: “It’s full of language we can’t look away from: bodily, visceral, meaty, refusing to shy away . . . It comments so powerfully on desire, dis/embodiment, imagination and fantasy.”
Jiaqi Kang, Editor in Chief
sinθ magazine
MANDY’S MARY SUE
Qianze Zhang
MANDY DONG WAS only nine years old when she got her first period. By that time, she was also two years ahead of her class in math and had already been watching pornography for three months. Mandy watched porn on her family’s only desktop monitor, in a room that most white families would call a “study” but her family called “the computer room.” She preferred videos that showed women without men, because the sight of an erect penis horrified and confused her. When she browsed the thumbnails, she averted her eyes from the smooth rods of flesh disappearing halfway into another body. As she watched the beautiful women, she would passionately kiss the back of her hand, focusing first on the pressure felt on her lips, then on the softness felt on her hand, trying to understand what it was like to both give and receive. Each time she finished, she closed the browser tab, then erased the history, cookies, and cache from the past day. When she wasn’t careful and the porn websites installed malware on her family’s computer, she knew how to move the appropriate files to the trash and empty the bin, the resulting sound effect of rustling paper calming her small, hot core of anxiety.
At first, when Mandy noticed the mysterious red spots appearing on the crotch of her underwear, she was able to ignore them. Subconsciously, she understood that some people would see this as reckless. But Mandy was able to brush it off because she thought herself exceptional. Not in the way musical prodigies and toddlers excelling at acrobatics lessons are exceptional, but also not tragically exceptional, like unlucky children who have extremely rare diseases and die from them. Mandy knew she lay tepidly somewhere in the middle—she was exceptional because she managed to get straight As even with her porn and cartoon habits, because all her friends were boys, and because she was alarmingly good at drawing adult bodies even though hers was far from one. So the blood couldn’t have been anything serious.
It took her mother doing laundry on Sunday morning and discovering the multiple pairs of dappled underwear for her to finally address it. Mandy remained unconcerned, even when her mother called her name, her voice vibrating with a shrillness usually reserved for her father when he came home too late in the evening from work, pork fat condensed into beads on his brow. When the shrillness first appeared, about four years after their wedding day, he resented it because he didn’t want to accept that his wife was turning into his mother-in-law, who also used to be beautiful, and whose voice rang like a rooster’s cry every morning to jolt open the eyes of her neighbors and feed the sun to their irises.
Mandy’s mother ushered her into the bedroom. They sat down on the edge of the creaky mattress, the weight of her mother’s body forming a crater that Mandy nearly slid into. “Mantee—” she hesitated, and Mandy finally felt a spike of anxiety, worrying that a porn virus manifested without her knowing or that she forgot to clear her browsing history. “You are getting your period, which is a normal part of growing up.”
“I know,” responded Mandy. Which was strange, because she didn’t know. She meant that she knew that it was normal, and that everything was fine, and that she had heard of puberty before—the older girls at Chinese church once lifted their shirts up and invited her to feel their bras, the cool, slippery satin punctuated by cheap lace trimming. She knew what a bra was, and she knew that a brazilla was a bra that was just really big. She knew that her private parts weren’t broken, and anything she didn’t know, she could probably figure out by googling, so there was really no need for this conversation with her mother.
Despite Mandy already knowing, her mother continued with a demonstration. There was a menstrual pad and a pair of panties in her mother’s lap. She removed the pad’s pale yellow wrapper and peeled off the small, individual pieces of plastic covering the wings, then wrapped them around the crotch of the panties. Mandy was familiar with these little foam squares. When she had to dig around for a new toothbrush or bar of soap in the bathroom sink cabinet, she often saw an opened bag of them with a few spilling out like oversized confetti. Once, next to the pads, she saw a large jar of supplements. By googling the brand name on the label, she learned that they were breast augmentation supplements. Mandy hated knowing this about her mother. It wasn’t because she was uncomfortable thinking about her mother’s breasts. She’d seen them by accident before and thought they looked regular. She wondered if her own nipples would also one day enlarge into Rolo candies. The discovery of the supplements disappointed Mandy because her beautiful mother, who never commented on Mandy’s appearance, who never wore makeup, not even on her wedding day, who scoffed at TV infomercials and taught her to do the same, was taking bogus herbal supplements to augment her breasts.
Later that night, Mandy was in the computer room again, this time on a website for watching serialized cartoons. Mandy preferred cartoons where men were the main characters and female characters merely flanked them. She liked having room to invent her own female character who stood out against the other women who were too weak, too ugly, or too bogged down by their feelings for a man. She took great pride and care in this process, taking time between watching episodes to contemplate how this new character could fit into the existing plot, forming a faint mental image of her expression, the line work of her limbs, crystalizing this new member of a universe by drawing a portrait of her in the style of the original cartoonist.
For the past week, Mandy had been working on a female character for a cartoon where humans have magical powers and use them to battle one another. The existing female characters underwhelmed Mandy because their powers felt passive, mostly used for healing and supporting other characters on the front lines of battle. So Mandy drew a woman whose long legs and skimpy black costume screamed “I’ll cut you!” Her hair was styled in a ponytail with two long strands on either side of her face, hanging on like garter snakes. She was armed with short knives for close-range combat and her power was mind control, but she didn’t always need to use it because her sexual charm was often powerful enough against her male opponents.
Mandy still had to choose a name for her new character. She googled “japanese baby names.” The first result took her to a flat, pink-and-blue website with hundreds of names organized in alphabetical order. She started down the list. Ai: Mandy knew this name meant love. It was too short, and promised too much. Aiko, Aimi, Aina, Airi. These names were too cutesy and pink. Her character was a badass. She figured any A name would be too predictable. She skipped forward to the M names: Mitsuko, Miyoko, Momoko—Mandy knew she had found the one. Three syllables was the Goldilocks length, and Momoko could even be shortened to Momo, a perfectly darling nickname to be used by characters who were lucky enough to be close to her.
Mandy felt like an intruder browsing the Japanese names when she wasn’t even Japanese. When her classmates asked her “What’s my Chinese name?” she would respond, “You don’t have one, your parents have to give you one right when you’re born. You missed your chance.” But Chinese names were usually just three syllables total, lacking grace, easily bastardized. She especially disliked her surname, so easily appropriated for the salacious entertainment of the grade school boys she spent most of her days with: Dong! It dully bounced off the tongue, like an irreverent sound effect in a slapstick comedy. The best cases were Zhang or Xiao, names that took what Americans thought was their alphabet and twisted it in unexpected ways, eluding mockery through cunning. Japanese names, on the other hand, had six, eight, even ten syllables, and seemed untouchable because the average American attention span is unable to make it past the first three.
Momoko was everything Mandy wished she could be. She had flaws programmed into her for narrative
plausibility, but Mandy still saw her as perfect. Porn did not exist in Momoko’s universe, but if it did, she would not watch it. Momoko, did, however, have sex, but just the right amount, which meant selectively, just with one man, who happened to be the character Mandy had a crush on. She also had a period, Mandy guessed, but it didn’t need a place in the plot. Mandy lulled herself to sleep by inventing scenarios from Momoko’s universe in her head, scenarios that perfectly showcased just how desirable-but-didn’t-know-it she was. She was the best of every binary, even when that meant embodying two opposites. She sometimes needed to be saved by men but also occasionally saved them back; she was an outcast but loved by many; her skin was scratched from combat but terribly smooth, cel shaded, only two colors, highlight and shadow.
The next morning, Mandy sprinted to the school bus stop. She was running late, having stayed up drawing Momoko. There was no way she was going to tell her friends about the menstruating, especially since they were all boys, a fact she took pride in but was just beginning to see the disadvantages of. For one, she would frequently develop crushes on them. The crushes waxed and waned and pinballed from boy to boy, but since the beginning of the school year in September, Mandy had her eyes on Chase, a shy boy with droopy eyes. It was now March, petals were dropping from the trees and being stomped into damp mush on the sidewalks, and Mandy hadn’t so much as dropped a hint.
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