“You okay?” I ask.
She shrugs again. “I should probably eat something. I never feel like it and then I forget.”
In the kitchen, she opens the fridge and makes a face. “Does your mom still drink that stuff?”
I look at the row of shiny pink cans as if seeing them for the first time. It seems my mother has been addicted to diet grapefruit soda for over ten years.
“Remember she didn’t let you drink it because of the chemicals,” Bev says, “and I dared you to sneak one and down it in the basement? You were such a sweetie pie though. Daddy’s little girl.”
I don’t mention my longstanding fear of our cellarlike basement full of spiders and broken furniture. She cracks open a can and chugs, then wipes her mouth with her parka sleeve. “And that time when your dad gave us stalks of rhubarb and told us to lie down on the grass so he could put the sugar for dipping in our belly buttons? And you believed him?”
I have no memory of Bev being in our leafy backyard. In my mind, we were always at her place, sitting on the roof of their toolshed, pointlessly shouting at joggers as they huffed down the lane on a perfect summer morning. “Hey, mister, your fly’s undone!”
“Oh”—Bev groans—“and your dad’s nachos. Those were the best ever. I still hate black olives, but I totally loved them on those nachos.”
When did my father ever make Mexican for Bev?
“I could totally go for those nachos,” Bev says.
“My mother’s banned all chips and sour cream,” I say.
Her lips have gone almost as pale as her face, and she’s using the fridge to hold herself up.
“What about yogurt?” I ask. “We’ve got the high-protein Balkan kind.”
By the time she sits down with a spoon at the kitchen table, I swear she’s ready to pass out. She starts shoveling in peach-mango yogurt like a robot programmed to open and close its mouth every 2.5 seconds.
“So where did you move?” I ask. “I mean, back then. I don’t even know.”
She talks between spoonfuls like there’s nothing to it. Swallow, speak, swallow, speak, repeat. “After my dad sold the restaurants, we went to Sarnia. Then I went with Lara to Vancouver. Then Ray came back here last year, and so did I.”
I remember there were always leftover desserts at her house—day-old cheesecakes and mixed-berry pies—and her father, Ray, left a satisfying scent of cooking oil and cigarettes and vanilla.
I try not to stare at her stomach. It’s hard to believe skin can expand like that, stretchy as Silly Putty. “Whereabouts are you?” I ask. “What school?”
She finally pauses, turning the spoon over on her tongue as if to ensure that every last bit is consumed. “Doing correspondence. With the move and everything, it seemed stupid to start somewhere new for my last year.”
“Right,” I say, like I talk to people doing high school by correspondence every day.
She leans back in the chair and groans, resting her hands on her belly. She lets her head drop back, but her lips have regained some of their adorable pinkness. She waves her hand in a square, following the crown molding around the ceiling. “We had that in our old house too. Then Lara took it down because she was all into clean lines. She still talks about it. She says going all modern was the beginning of the end.”
I don’t know what to say to this. I remember the day Lara’s new egg-shaped coffee table was delivered and we spent a happy half hour pressing our faces into the glass, imprinting every inch with kisses and nostril marks.
She lifts her head and smiles her slightly crooked grin. “Remember that glass coffee table?”
Pregnant Bev Novak, groaning in my parents’ kitchen chair, has read my mind. “I remember the mess we made of it,” I say.
She laughs, and her belly moves with her. “It busted in the moving van. And not into just a few pieces. A million pieces.”
My phone buzzes, and I act like I have no choice but to check it out.
Hey, birth buddy. Weather news, plse. Rubber or fur? To-do list: cool toy store by museum, Greek place with gravy/fries, vintage. Bringing surprise. Hint: green hair, schoolboy tie. Flight 134 from TO arrives 4:12 pm, your time. TTFN...Em/Liang
“Excuse me a sec,” I say, but Bev has already gotten up and is nosing around the dining room.
I sneak upstairs and check my messages for the first time since this morning. My doctor has said that OCD symptoms are exacerbated by stress. I stand for a moment in the dim quiet, with nothing but the familiar hum of the computer hardware, and try to collect my thoughts.
“You still play this?” Bev shouts.
I come down and she’s pointing at the hulking black case in the corner. Twice I’ve moved the cello case from that corner onto the back porch, and twice my father has put it back. “Not for a while,” I say.
I remember the one and only time I played my cello for her. I was eight, and my latest big accomplishment was Gounod’s Meditation on Ave Maria. We were outside on the front porch, and the acoustics of the breezeless evening weren’t bad. For once, she was speechless.
“So?” I had asked.
She looked at me as if I’d just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
I shrugged. “I want to quit. It’s boring.”
“Shut up,” she said. “You’re a crappy liar. Play something else.”
Now, she cocks her head and looks disappointed, like when I told her about my father’s heart scare. “Really? You quit? You’re lying.”
I can’t tell if she’s trying to mock or flatter me. She sounds so sincere, as if she’s going to say something like You should never give up on your dreams. I tell her what I’ve basically been telling everybody. “I guess I just needed a break.”
She nods, having already moved on to examining the Scottish teacups my father inherited when his mother died. “They’re a little twee for us,” my mother had said, but she’d put them on display anyway.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m sorry, but my mom just puked at work and she needs me to pick her up.”
Bev finishes off the last of the soda and holds her hands up like she’s about to dance. “Hey, no problem. I should get going anyway.”
I silently plead with her not to ask for a ride. “Sorry,” I say.
“No problem, Faye,” she says, handing me the can. She pretends to try to do up her parka zipper and laughs at her own joke. “You guys always were three little peas in a pod.”
The cab company is on her speed dial. She gives them the address of her old house across the street, then has to correct herself. “It’s the Little Alien,” she whispers to me. “It’s stealing my brain cells.”
Her arms are around me before I know what’s happening. “Thanks for the refreshments. I’ll be in touch. Winnipeg is such a great place to raise a kid. We know that, eh?”
She’s out the door before I can answer. There’s no way the cab is even on its way yet, but I let her go. I let her go stand out on the sidewalk in the frigid spring night, or walk to the corner, or whatever her plan is, because I don’t know how to stop her.
I don’t want to stop her.
Alone in my bedroom, I shove my face into Sasha’s sweatshirt and inhale. This scent, his scent, usually brings back the night, but really, I’d smelled him long before that. Like in the school band, where I played the flute and he pretended to.
I tell myself our story, from the beginning, for the thousandth time, because I have borderline OCD and because I don’t want to imagine where Bev and her belly are.
Sasha showed up in September, the beginning of school, but rarely came to class. When he did, he would slouch in a few minutes late and park his conspicuous sixfoot-three-inch frame in a chair behind me. He always sucked on one of those hard citrus candies that are wrapped in cellophane, the kind a restaurant might hand out with your bill. He’d quietly assemble his flute and then pretend to join in with whatever we were playing.
As lead flautist, I should have got to the bottom of it, but
what could I have done? What would have been the point in confronting the exchange student who probably didn’t even know how foreign he really looked in the middle of the girlie instrument section? Now and then, when someone wasn’t quick enough to look away, he would smile, showing off his silver tooth, and nod formally, as if to say, Good day to you, miss. Celeste dubbed him the Freaky Russian and dismissed him with “nice long legs, nice blue eyes, shame about the bad teeth and general weirdness.” I pretended not to notice that, miraculously, he could suck candy and maintain his embouchure at the same time. Whether he noticed me, or even gave me a second thought in those lead-up weeks, is unclear.
Cut to the night. For the band trip in November, I’m billeted with a nice enough jock named Hannah, who’s obsessed with skiing in some future Olympics and whose sprawling Calgary bungalow is covered in cat hair. We go to a party at another sprawling Calgary bungalow, somewhere in the foothills. Celeste is not there. She’s in Winnipeg and has no say in what I do or don’t do. She is not there to tell anyone who will listen that if you can’t have a good time without alcohol, she feels totally sorry for you.
It’s unclear who gives me the first beer. The fat percussionist who is hosting, or someone I know from school? It is a light amber lager with snow-covered mountains on the label. It’s unclear whether I finish three bottles or four. Or what makes me go outside—the bloated feeling or the spinning feeling? I close my eyes and watch the stars do their little dance.
There are others outside, mostly smokers, scattered in small groups around a vast backyard pool that’s been covered for the winter. I find a dark corner where a faulty solar light has failed. I lean against the edge of a waterless concrete fountain to get my balance. I breathe in the mountain air, cool and yet unusually warm for this time of year.
“You no smoke?”
He appears out of the darkness, a slouched outline, dim except for the orange glow of the cigarette hanging from his lips.
I shake my head.
The glow grows stronger for a moment before it’s sent flying into the yellow November grass. He looks down at his feet. “Is good. My father smoke and smoke and then lung cancer. That’s it. But that is Russians. We smoke, smoke, drink, drink, and we don’t live too long.”
The Freaky Russian is speaking to me like we’re old friends. It’s like I can feel the world spinning on its axis. I hug myself in the chill, but my insides burn. My voice is hardly my own. “I’m sorry. About your father.”
He looks up and shrugs. I can’t make out real color, but there are contrasts in his face. Dark lips. Light eyes. “This happens.”
I nod, like I have a clue.
He grins, reaches out for my arm, and his hands feel very big and very hot. “You cold? You want to walk? To go?”
Then we’re walking through the suburban quiet, warming ourselves with the small bottle of whiskey in his pocket. He asks if I’m Chinese, if I’m China-born, and I explain it to him for what seems like forever. It’s unclear exactly what I say.
“Ahh,” he says, “you are a foundling.”
This makes me laugh. It sounds like something out of a fairytale.
“What?” he asks. “Is this not right? Foundling?”
To talk and walk with me, he must not so much slouch as bend. I am laughing so hard I’m afraid I might pee.
Now and then, he holds on to my elbow and we hold each other up.
“So what’s with your flute playing?” I ask, because I am suddenly fearless.
He stops and straightens, then grins down at me. His eyetooth gleams under the streetlight. “You know my secret, yes? You know why I do it? Joan, my church lady who sponsor me, she ask if I read music. Why? I ask. She say I can go to the Rocky Mountains with the school. I tell her, yes, of course. I see at the church there is a flute. I tell her the flute. So here I am.”
I’m laughing again. “Was it worth it?”
“No!” he shouts, joining me, outdoing me, in his laughter. “Nyet. My home, it is dull, it is poor farms, poor factories, it is shit. I think, give me the wild Canada mountains. But now not so much. The day before, the sights are beautiful, but then I feel like they are too close, too big. How you say? Dungeon? Like a dungeon.”
Never before have I met someone who doesn’t dig the mountains. I tell him something I’ve never told anyone. I tell him I felt the same way in China, that the magnificently rising steppes and moving walls of people were suffocating.
He wipes his nose on his sleeve and waves dismissively. “And this rich place. These houses, all the same. I hate them, and I want them. They are, how you say—they are a contradiction for me.”
Then he takes my arm and guides me to a wroughtiron bench placed in a circle of gravel on someone’s front lawn.
“What a moronic place for a seat,” I say. “Who’s going to sit out here watching traffic?”
He ignores me. He puts his hand on my thigh, and I both like it and do not like it. He offers me more whiskey, and I take a long, hot drink. “It’s good to sit,” he says. “I see you now. I see your face.”
The world turns on its axis again and we are kissing. Our breath is steamy in the night air, and his hands move across my back, my stomach, my cheeks, like he’s a blind man trying to see me. Never before has it felt like this. I am not going through the motions. There is no vague sense of letdown even as it’s happening.
Now and then he stops and grins like he did in band class. “Is good?” he asks. “Okay?”
“Is good,” I say.
“This bench,” he finally says. “This bench is no good.” He whispers the words into my neck, just below the earlobe. “We go somewhere. Somewhere different.”
But it’s too late. The hard moronic bench is enough to break the spell, and I’m pulling away, like always. “I should go. My ride will be wondering where I am.”
He pulls his sweatshirt over his head and I glimpse the crop of shiny blond hair around his belly button. “No, no,” he says. “Is good.” I let him wrap me up and pull me toward him. “Like this then,” he says. “Like this a little longer. Is good, no?”
I drop my head onto his chest, and his T-shirt is so thin that I can feel each individual rib.
“You are a little bird,” he says. “I have to hold, or flit, flit, you fly.”
I laugh, kiss him before he can say anything else. It is so, so good, our tongues hot in the cold night, just like this, going nowhere.
Until we have no choice—we must walk together across the dead, manicured lawn, past the cookie-cutter dream homes, past the police cruisers shutting down the party and then separately onto a plane crowded with hungover band students who are one minute of turbulence away from mass vomiting.
Now, I hear my parents coming in the door, eager to share their zany middle-class night of curling.
Maybe perfect Celeste is right. I’m getting nasty. I keep things from her—like Sasha, like Bev—and I don’t know why exactly. Just for kicks, maybe. Or take annoying Emma. She’s the closest link to my birthplace I’m ever going to get, and I wish I never had to see her again. Or my smug, oh-so-doting parents, who only want the best for me—I’d rather get a cavity filled or drink one of those hideous diet sodas Bev poisoned her fetus with earlier than talk to them right now.
I lied to Bev for no particular reason, except that I suddenly wanted to be alone with a cheap poly-blend sweatshirt and my borderline OCD. I just wanted to sit here, on my cesspool of a bedroom floor, with the Chinese robe on my wall looming over it all.
Only its silver embroidered dragon is no longer smiling at me like it used to. Now it’s laughing.
THREE
For the first eight months of my life, my name was Xiao Shang Chang and Emma’s was Xiao Jin Liang. Now and then, you hear of some Chinese orphanages giving their tiny charges flowery names like Bright Lotus and Tender Blossom. But whoever was in charge of handing them out at the Nanning Center for Infants and Children didn’t believe in sugarcoating things. We were Miss Market and
Miss Bridge, in honor of where we were found.
Our parents love to tell stories about the two of us as babies. On the flight home from China, Emma was moonfaced and sleepy. I was bony and alert. She charmed the entire plane, seeming to say her new name over and over—“Amma, amma, amma.” I wailed pretty much the whole time, which my parents saw as a sign that I’d bonded with my orphanage caregiver and so was behaving in a healthy and appropriate manner given the situation.
Now, sixteen years later when Emma comes down the escalator at the airport, she’s holding two eerily lifelike Japanese dolls in her arms. The male is dressed like the leader of a boy band and the girl looks like any teenage hipster you’d see in any major city in the world.
“May I present Lily and Yashiro,” Emma says to my father and me. “Don’t ask how much they cost.”
Years ago, I realized that Emma is beyond mockery or irony. Even when visiting me and my atheist parents, she’s never shy about saying her own grace before meals. She struts around in her one-piece bathing suit at the pool like she has no idea she’s fat. She is the only person I know with less sexual experience than me, and she doesn’t seem to care.
On the ride home, she tells us that Yashiro cost over eight hundred dollars, and though he looks quite feminine with his fine features and elaborately coiffed hair, he is all man. She tells us she’s just received a full scholarship to Queen’s, so her parents kicked in three hundred for Lily. She tells us Yashiro’s suit was hand-sewn by a London tailor.
I can’t help thinking of the pictures I’ve seen from the 1960s, during the height of China’s communist fervor. Men and women wore the same androgynous uniform: shapeless rough cotton pants with a shapeless tunic on top. But when we went back last year, the women on the streets were something to behold—designer outfits with matching phones, $200 haircuts and funky, cartoonish shoes. Meanwhile, my birth mother was probably hidden away in some factory, wearing hideous pink coveralls with a matching hair cap so she could stand there, all day, every day, assembling toasters.
“Are they a couple?” I ask, and my father can’t help laughing.
Your Constant Star Page 3