2.
Connecticut, September 2016
“Who the hell invented the Crab Rangoon?” I asked. They were pustuled from deep-frying. I licked sugar, grease and cream from the back of my teeth. “Who guessed cream cheese in a wonton would be delicious? They were a mad, fucking genius.” I sucked my fingers and downed somebody else’s unfinished cup. After the funeral service, we’d served Dad’s best champagne, as a celebration of life, or some bullshit. I just wanted it drunk. I refused to spend the next ten years imbibing what should’ve been his.
Dad was driving down to visit his granddaughter when he swerved to avoid a deer. My father sacrificed himself to save Bambi’s damned mom. I had planned to ask him how to love a child. How to hold it. How to understand its screaming. How to understand my own.
“And sour cream, seriously, when did sour cream even get to China?”
“I don’t know, Jay. Google it,” Mimi replied. She didn’t like it when I drank. But it was a waste to pour all the sweet ethanol-sunshine down the drain. We’d held the reception in his house. The room was disordered. Paper plates and cups were confettied everywhere. All the chairs at the dining table were untucked. It never looked like that in his life. For the most part it had just been the two of us.
“Hands,” I said. “Sticky.” My aunt had brought the wontons for the ash scattering. Now, everyone had gone home, even my aunt. She was his older sister, and her cheeks were whittled with age. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad that Dad would never look frail. As I thought it, the champagne in my stomach went flat.
“Also, Dad is dead, so could you please not be a bitch?” When we cremated him, there was a Band-Aid around his right thumb. I didn’t even know what caused the small wound. I pressed my own thumb between my teeth, feeling tooth on nail and tooth on skin, trying to understand even that inch of pain. “You know he said he bought that stupid SUV because he wanted a car that could win in a fight.” The car had been less than a year old. He’d purchased it the day I told him Mimi was pregnant. “So I really, really can’t take you being a bitch right now.”
Mimi ran her hands through her hair, and her bangs puffed up like a pompadour. “You don’t get special days off to be an asshole,” she said. Upstairs, the baby squawked. Mimi added, “But, I’m sorry your dad is dead. It sucks. I know.” She did. Mimi’s parents died when she was in college. Her inheritance paid for the down payment on our gallery. She paused, her legs already turned to the stairs but her face still turned to me, some expression flickering beneath her eyes. “I love you.”
I fumbled for her hand, but she slipped it away. “Sorry I called you a bitch.”
Eliot screamed.
“It’s okay. Well, no it’s not, but I’m too fucking tired to think about it.” Mimi turned around, already heading up the stairs. “I don’t suppose you’re going to deal with your daughter.”
“How am I supposed to deal with her?” I replied. “Do I have breasts?” Mimi had already left the room.
Dad was good with children. He’d been good with me, and he could’ve taught me the language of fatherhood or at least the key phrases. In guidebooks they know you can’t speak the language, but they give you enough to get by. I needed the Lonely Planet guide to parenting.
Every conversation was interrupted by wailing. We never slept. We hadn’t fucked since the second trimester. I’d never dreamed of leaving my wife until this creature came into our lives. When I was a kid, I used to ask Dad, was it my fault Mommy left? He always said she’d just been an unhappy person. My old psychiatrist said it was ridiculous to blame my two-year-old self. I believed her, until I had a baby of my own.
Was I an “unhappy person”? My dad was dead, and my wife despised me, so I didn’t feel great. But would an outsider look at me and say, “That guy. He’s an unhappy person”?
I opened a window and stuck head and shoulders out into night air. I’d never smelled the Connecticut pine growing up because it had been as familiar as my own sweat. The upstairs window was open. Mimi was singing to the baby. She didn’t sing well, and her repertoire was Top 40 hits from our teenage years, most of which were about fucking or killing. Supposedly, Mozart primes a baby’s mind for mathematics. By that logic, Eliot would grow up to be the CEO of a drug cartel.
A series of gentle blows knocked against my knee. I pulled my torso inside. I knelt down to be level with my cat. Celeste was bald, and each tendon on her neck was visible as she wound her tongue around my fingers to lap up the last of the grease. She purred a slow exhale. When Mimi banned my cat from our apartment at the onset of her third trimester, my father had taken on Celeste’s care.
“Nu-uh kit-kat, no crab. You’ll just puke it up.” Most things made my cat sick. There was still some organic cat food that I’d driven over the month before. I couldn’t find the can opener, so I used a butter knife and my fist.
My father’s plate was still in the drying rack. During my childhood, Dad and I used the same two plates, two glasses, two sets of knives and forks. We left them in the drying rack, never bothered putting them away because the next meal would arrive soon enough. I lifted the plate up. It didn’t feel right to let it go out of circulation. The gilded trim had scrubbed away, but there wasn’t a single chip. I couldn’t remember Dad ever dropping anything. How had I not recognized this minor superpower?
I shook the cat food onto it and set it on the floor. Celeste ate quickly, eyes squinted shut, and I stroked her hairless back. She was seventeen years old, though she’d looked wizened even as a kitten. I willed myself to see her as Mimi did, as most people did: a lizard-toddler-cross. Celeste stopped eating for a second and scraped her tongue against my knuckles. I picked her up. She smelled of rust and talcum powder. Her pulse tapped a regular, even beat. I rubbed my thumb over each paw feeling for splinters, but they were unharmed.
Celeste and I were assigned to each other when she was just a kitten, a blue-gray skin sack. My psychiatrist paired us as much for Celeste’s good as my own. Her former owner had committed suicide just after purchasing her. The shrink claimed this wasn’t as bad a sign as it seemed. At the time, I was a high-school senior, and the last thing I wanted was a therapy cat. I refused to name her. She was chasing dust across our kitchen floor when Dad put down his coffee and said, “Celeste. We should call her Celeste.” Celeste’s large ears swiveled around the tiny skull. In her dusky skin, she did look like an extra-petite elephant. He used to read me the Babar stories from French editions my grandmother mailed from Québec. Looking back, they were a strange colonial fantasy: an elephant civilized to French social mores. But I’d loved Babar in his green suit. I’d imagined it to be the same corduroy as Dad’s weekend pants that smelled always of sourdough and garden mulch. I ignored Celeste, the elephant queen, as I didn’t have much use for wives or mothers.
I didn’t hear Mimi coming downstairs, until she spoke. “The cat’s not coming back with us.”
Gently, I lowered Celeste back to the floor and her dinner. “Where’s she supposed to go?”
“I told you, I’m not having her in the same house as our baby.”
Celeste’s mastication filled the silence. We heard each gravelly lump swallowed. Mimi crossed her arms. She’d changed into one of my old college sweatshirts. There were holes in the wrists that her thumbs stuck through. She looked as she must have done as a teenager: smeared mascara, ruffled hair, and revulsion playing across her mouth.
I stepped backward and my foot hit something slimy and hard. There was a splintering sound and the scrabble of Celeste’s nails on the oak floorboards. I’d stepped on the plate. There was a long crack in the white china. It was dark with meat juice. I touched it, rubbing my finger along the split surface. I thought is this what bone looks like when it breaks? Were the cracks that ran through him anything like this? My phone, wedged inside my pocket, nudged me as my weight shifted. In the age of Google there is no mystery in death. My still-dirty fingers found the phone’s screen, ready to type in the relevant
search terms—as if knowing how similar my father was to gilded china would answer everything. But my vision had blurred and the screen was a white glow. White as the door to heaven in every movie. Cinema Death is always black or white, as if color is buried with the body. I dropped the phone and it clattered against the china.
Mimi was next to me. She wiped off the phone, then took the plate and dropped it in the trash, which sighed softly under its weight.
“Are you okay?” She pressed a palm against my cheek.
“No.” I didn’t want her hand on my face and each of my teeth was a claw. “So stop trying to exile my cat.”
Yuki
1969, Celadon
A pale blue-green. It was thought a celadon-glazed plate touched by poison would crack. Untrue, but the plates were prized anyway.
Yuki sprawled on Odile’s bed reading the January 15th issue of The Paper. It was from three days before—there were always old copies lying around the apartment. Supposedly, Andy Warhol had suggested the publication’s name as a joke. Yuki flipped past the stuff about the Super Bowl in LA, looking for news about the war.
“Stop it.” Odile tugged, and the page ripped at the corner. “Seriously, you’re obsessed.”
“I’m not obsessed.”
“You are,” she said. “He was a boy, he tried it on. That’s what they do.”
“He kissed me. My first kiss.” That sounded like a song on the radio and wasn’t what she meant at all. He had left her with feet that felt permanently bare. She wanted him dead, but then didn’t—he’d turned her into a broken traffic light blinking stop and go all at once.
Stupid. He was a boy who had wanted something from her. It happened everywhere all the time, and anyway, Yuki was going to Tokyo to be surrounded by Japanese boys.
“I just want to know if he’s alive.”
“What if he is?” Odile asked. “Are you going to wait for him?”
Their friendship bracelet was woven from that night of fear and streetlight. They stole the afternoons, cutting school together. Yuki didn’t care about The Scarlet Letter, Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant. In Japan, no one used middle initials. Men came up to Odile on subway platforms and at the diners where the two girls sat drinking free refills of black coffee. But if Yuki reached out, Odile would hold tight to her hand, as if they were crossing the road together. Yuki explained that it worried her mother too much if she stayed out late, and miraculously Odile only said, “That must be nice,” without pressing the issue further. By second semester, Yuki didn’t need to reach out any more, because she knew the sharp-nailed hand was there.
Odile taught her to dance to the Rolling Stones, to move her shoulder to her ear, to chew on her lip and shut her eyes as if the music were stroking its fingers down her ribs. Odile taught her not eating could feel like being drunk or like floating. Odile said it was possible to feel yourself move out of your body, as the Sufis did, though neither of them had ever met a Sufi.
Yuki still went to school on Fridays for art class. Light and shadow required no translation, and while drawing she forgot herself in the whisper of charcoal on paper.
On the first of February, the two girls stood shivering on the roof of Odile’s brownstone. Snow choked the gutters, and the only green was a broken wine bottle shattered on the street below. The girls’ teeth clattered like tin cans rolling in the wind, as Odile set up her mother’s Nikon. It was black, covered in knobs and looked like a machine of war, not an instrument of art. Odile added pins to Yuki’s bangs. They’d spiraled their hair into thick ringlets, but the uncaring wind ripped and twisted, pulling out pins as fast as Odile added them.
“Rub your cheeks like you’re polishing silver,” Odile said.
“You’ve never polished silver.”
“Used to—Lillian’s jewelry.”
They stood side by side in the snow. Yuki held the cable release behind her back, but the thick rubber cord that connected the trigger to the camera couldn’t be hidden.
Odile said, “Another one.” And a moment later, “Another.”
As Yuki felt the click, she wondered if the camera would see their silvery breath. Did the ache in her eyes show? She wished the camera could fix her in the snow with her friend, and it would be the photograph-girl who would leave the roof and then the country. They used all thirty-six exposures. Their knees turned vermilion as the Red Delicious apples that sat in the kitchen uneaten. The photographs were to be split between them. A memento. They folded up the tripod. Odile steadied the top, while Yuki bent in the snow and unfastened the latches. With her face down, her nose weeping from the cold, Yuki said, “I don’t want to go.” It had taken her a decade to make this friend. She was not ready to lose her.
“So stay,” Odile replied.
“Parents would never let me. Where’d I live?”
“With me. Obviously.”
Odile lived with her mother: Lillian Graychild, authoress, as she was known on the backs of her paperback romances. Odile had no memory of her father and didn’t care to ever meet the jackass.
“Your mom wouldn’t mind?”
“What do you think?”
The fire escape sang under their heels. How had Yuki never noticed the abundance of these skeleton stairways? They weren’t just at school. There were illicit pathways all over New York. Yuki and Odile climbed in through the window, shaking the snow from their dresses. The flakes left wet prints on the floor, as if mice had been dancing there.
Lillian looked up from her desk.
“Had fun, girls?” She sat at the kitchen table at her typewriter, in a red dress, and red heels. Odile had explained that her mother believed it was important to be beautiful when courting the gods. But Yuki noted that the backs of her stilettos were striated by long scratch marks, and the leather curled away to reveal the pale wood beneath. The sharp wrinkles on Lillian’s unironed dress stood out as clear as the glue lines on the Graychilds’ mugs. But Yuki thought of her own mother polishing the frames from which their unamused ancestors gazed out. Was such perfection any better?
“Can Yuki stay with us next year?”
“I don’t see why not. Neither of you eat much.” Lillian seemed unfazed, as if Odile had been asking if Yuki could stay to dinner.
Yuki, who was still shy around the strange woman, asked, “You’re sure?”
It had the barest edge of possibility because Yuki’s father was an American citizen. He’d been born in a hospital in California and grown up in the Bay Area. His own father was a doctor, an ophthalmologist. His mother had been nothing but his mother. They were happy then.
“Completely. I always wanted more children.”
Odile looked at her mother skeptically.
When he was six, Yuki’s father took a train to the internment camp in which he would spend the next four years. They made us salute the flag and list the presidents and prove every day that we were American. But if we were really American, would they have put us in camps?
“Really. First children are like first books. You imagine they’re a splinter of your soul. You overthink them. Later, you’re more haphazard, but often better.”
“You lost me on the subway when I was two,” Odile said. “How much thinking were you doing?”
“Hemingway lost all his stories on a train, and anyway, first children, first books, it sounds good. I’m considering using it for something.” She lit a cigarette and the blush-pink tip glowed gold, before browning, then blackening.
“Before or after the princess gets molested?”
After the war, Yuki’s father and his parents moved back to Japan, where no one could afford a fancy ophthalmologist. His father was reduced to a subduer of coughs. His mother ruined her eyes sewing for the wives of American officers, who appreciated her good English.
“I’ll save it for my memoirs.” Lillian turned back to her typewriter. “Be a dear, make me a cup of instant.”
“I’ll do it.” Yuki didn’t know how to insert herself into the bladed iron
y, but she could be useful—her mother had trained her in that. Yuki had visited enough to know that the chipped mugs lived behind the smoggy glasses. The kitchen was so narrow only one person could stand in it at a time. Her legs had gone dead, and as the kettle boiled she hopped up and down, working the blood into her toes. Needles of pain danced in her feet.
Yuki’s father used his smooth American accent to slip into a top university and then a top company job. He moved up and up the ranks until he was sent back to America. And so they were all three of them American citizens with matte blue American passports, American Social Security numbers, and California-grown rice in the cupboard below the sink. Looking around Odile’s kitchen, Yuki saw no rice at all, but she could live without rice.
To her father, America was a snare. It was as if each time he said the Pledge of Allegiance, America’s rope tightened, and now he was finally about to struggle free. She didn’t want to hurt him. But she didn’t want to return to a country of offerings to the dead.
Odile had retreated to her bedroom and was painting her toenails taxicab yellow.
“You could you know,” Odile said, dabbing at a stray spot of polish. “Stay I mean. Lillian can’t back down. It wouldn’t fit her persona.” Odile began a new nail. “You never know, she might even put you in her memoir.”
It was Sunday morning. Yuki’s mom had laid out fresh rice topped with a soft fillet of salmon for their breakfasts. Yuki shaped her rice into a star, a cross, a rabbit. Dissatisfied, she smashed each design. Even the plate was ugly, chipped brown china. Her mother had examined the chinaware, ornaments and picture frames. If she found a chip or crack she put it back on the shelf. The perfect things she had placed into boxes to be shipped back to Tokyo. They were living with the rejects. This coffee-scum-brown plate would be allowed to stay when she was not.
Her father’s newspaper was on his lap, and he ate without looking up. As he shuttled flakes of pink flesh to his mouth, she felt a heat pressing on her temples. Fish for breakfast? It was ridiculous. He expected her mother to cook it, to prepare the rice and to pour seasoning into a little bowl. It would never have occurred to him that he was demanding.
Harmless Like You Page 4