SEX ON PISMO BEACH by Tweet

by ATLANTIC LIBRARY PRESENTS Jackie Christian

  “I’m glad that place is in the past,” she told her husband in mid-flight, but Adam wouldn’t look at her. No—he was a Crown. For him, mere words or coming to blows would not be action enough.

  “Honey—please don’t let this get to you.”

  But with his fist perched atop the flight rest, Adam Crown kept his eyes trained on the clouds beyond the window seat glass.

  The Girl from Oregon

  Dao Ming wasn’t answering her cell phone. In fact, when the beautiful Oregonian flipped the phone open and saw that Buck Knuckle-Joy and Noble Sinatra had been ringing her almost non-stop, she made sure to keep the ringer turned off.

  As always, the chronic whispering drove up her up the wall. It seemed that even in the confines of their own house, a house their father, Yim Ming, had built almost forty years ago—they still whispered as though it were a library, a hospital or a morgue.

  Mostly, it was her little sister Ling Mae: “Sp, sp…Auntie Lao left…Sp, sp…she ran back to China. It grew back together, Dao Ming! Just as she threatened it would…Sp, sp…and then it died.”

  The wiggling earth worm that her father’s sister had once pulled out of the back yard soil, sliced in half and placed in a jar to curse their mother had finally grown back together and died. No one from Dao Ming’s world in either Southern California or the place she’d been born in—the Portland, Oregon suburb of West Linn—could ever understand what the worm’s growing back together meant for her family.

  “…now it will happen,” Ling whispered as she set down a tray of Har Gau dumplings and tea. As though haunted, nineteen year old Ling Mae looked to the family mantelpiece, her gaze burning at the old Polaroid photo from their childhood.

  “Don’t look at the picture,” Dao Ming told her, but Ling Mae couldn’t help herself. She stared at it hard. There had once been three of them; three heart-stopping beautiful Ming daughters—Yin Sara, the first born; Dao Ming and Ling. But just two years after their Auntie Lao cut the worm in half and told their mother Chen, “You will pay bitch…for what you did to my brother!”…fourteen year old Yin Sara died at her own birthday party.

  Biting into the delicious wheat starch crust of shrimp and bamboo shoots, Dao Ming tried to occupy her mind with thoughts of how she wished she had learned to cook as well as Ling Mae. But when Ling brought up the funeral, it was impossible.

  Even though Dao Ming was only six years old at the time of their father’s funeral—she could never forget Williamette Cemetery or how the curse unfolded. Everyone holding umbrellas as the girls’ mother Chen tried to ignore the sobbing declarations of their father’s drunken sister, Lao. But then the angry woman had held up the jar with the worm for the first time.

  Ling had been just a baby in Chen’s arms, but the innocent little faces of Yin Sara and Dao Ming were stricken as they watched their Aunt scream “You killed his real wife and then you used him until you used him up!”

  According to Lao, their father Yim had been a handsome and very well paid scientist working for the Chinese government when their mother, fourteen year old Chen Chao, first showed up begging his wife, Luan, for a maid’s position. In fact, Auntie Lao had been present that very afternoon when the kindhearted Luan took pity on the shabbily dressed and nearly starving fourteen year old Chen.

  “Luan already had five maids, but she took you in anyway Chen! And look at how you repaid her you dirty whore!”

  Auntie Lao conveniently left out the fact that she and Luan had been secret lovers—the two of them pressing the warm brown nipples of their banana white bare breasts together in the dark awnings of the Shanghai house at just those same moments when Yim had his office door locked so that he could fuck pretty little Chen.

  “You sat naked in my brother’s lap and rode off with his mind, Chen. On your sixteenth birthday, when my brother kicked Luan out of the marriage suite and told her that you, her maid, would now be sleeping there and that he wanted her to occupy one of the guest room’s—poor sweet Luan jumped from the marriage suite balcony to her death. She killed herself.”

  And that’s when Auntie Yao had twisted the top off the jar and pulled out the worm. “So now my brother’s dead, too—he’s turned into a worm.”

  “In the name of sweet Jesus, don’t listen to her,” Chen had calmly said to all gathered at the funeral, but of course people were entertained. Chen grabbed up her girls and tried to exit, but it was no use—her husband’s will dictated that his sister be allowed residence in the house he’d built for the rest of her life.

  Even after Yao cut the worm in half and stated in front of everyone at the funeral that unless Chen stayed in her bedroom until the worm had grown back together—all three of her daughters would die; Chen and the girls were stuck with her. A Judge said that the woman was merely suffering grief from the loss of her brother and that because of his will, they couldn’t throw her out.

  “Your mother was so beautiful,” Auntie Yao would tell the girls as she sipped vodka and played Scrabble with them in the basement. “Dao Ming, you’re the spitting image of her. But she was also selfish and full of a maid girl’s dreams. She wanted to be an American. And she had no use for anyone who couldn’t make those dreams come true.”

  Again…Auntie Lao left out the part about how she and their mother had become lovers following Luan’s suicide. When Yim drew the line at certain extravagances, Chen had taken advantage of the fact that Lao lusted after her just as strongly as he did. She’d let both brother and sister have her any way they liked, she and Yao keeping their “girl baths” a complete secret—but the older she got, the more sophisticated her scheming had become. She used Lao to help her push Yim into giving up science so that he could bring them all to America.

  “Your mother’s main ambition in life was to sleep with a white blue eyed man. That’s what finally killed your father.”

  “Fuck you!” twelve and ten year old Yin Sara and Dao Ming would shout at their aunt during those Scrabble games in the basement, but Lao ignored them.

  “In America—the CIA kept tabs on your father. He wasn’t a threat in any way, but several agencies of the U.S. government made sure that he couldn’t work as a scientist and that’s when he started drinking—that’s when we both started drinking. He finally had to take a job at West Linn High School as a janitor, but he worked his way up from that. Eventually, he started the laundry business on Salamo Road, but your mother was too busy fucking white men to help him wash the clothes. You know what she used to do? She used to make jokes about your father’s wee-wee. How compared to the big Clint Eastwood American men—he didn’t have one! That’s the kind of whore your mother is.”

  “We don’t believe anything you say,” Dao Ming would hiss with Yin Sara adding, “That includes your stupid curse.”

  But then on Yin Sara’s fourteenth birthday, she fell out of the boat Chen had rented for her party on the river at Williamette Falls. Chen, Dao Ming, several classmates and neighbors had all jumped in behind her—but the autopsy showed she’d had a seizure before falling in. She sank and drowned at once.

  And this has been the beginning of Dao Ming becoming the family’s breadwinner; the beginning of her sacrificing herself and doing whatever it took to keep the house up, her mother’s medical bills paid and provide for Ling to go to college.

  That day at the water park when Chen and Dao Ming had come out of the water trailing the man carrying Yin Sara’s lifeless body, Auntie Yao had been standing among the picnic benches holding little Ling in her arms. Calling out, “I told you already Chen—there is a curse on you. That you must stay in my brother’s bedroom until the worm grows back together or all your children will die.”

  Like a slave helplessly watching its child be sold away to another plantation, Chen had nodded in tears, obediently. In her mind, Yin Sara’s death meant that the western prophet she’d adopted, Jesus Christ, wasn’t protecting her any longer. Like a lamb accepting the penetrating rape of a coyote, she embraced the curse. W
hen it came to either religion or curses, she did the one thing Dao Ming had never been able to do…she believed.

  ~*~

  Pismo Beach, California

  Using her cane to push the door forward, Caprice Sinatra entered the board room just as her son, Noble, was appraising the daisy-shaped diamond ring he’d had made for Dao Ming’s engagement. Her failure to answer his phone calls while she was in Oregon had prompted him to make a decision about his marriage to the sexy blond he kept stashed a few miles away.

  “I’m asking Dao Ming to marry me.”

  “You’re absolutely insane,” Caprice told him. “Not only is Dao Ming not a Catholic, she doesn’t believe in god.”

  “She had a rough childhood, mom.”

  “And you would marry an atheist?”

  “Mother—didn’t you once pay a heavy price for being a hardcore feminist and all around unconventional thinker? Wasn’t it you who told the Pope to go get laid?”

  Noble reached up in his book case and pulled down a copy of Caprice’s 1973 book “Burn the Bra” and pointed to the provocative photo on the back cover. It showed a much younger Caprice with her bare breasts exposed as her bra was burning in front of her.

  Caprice ignored him. “Where’s that bitch January? This meeting today is very crucial.”

  “She and Tiger are on their way mother.”

  “We can’t leave this room until January embraces the Red Panty Kit. She’s got to finance it.”

  Noble wasn’t listening.

  He was on the beach with Dao Ming again, his bare hairy chest pressing against her small bosom as the California surf splashed against his massive soccer player’s legs. Sensuously, Dao Ming had caressed the muscles of his chest and arms as she confessed with her tiny pretty little mouth, “You’re the most handsome man I’ve ever been with, Noble.”

  “Then why do you give me such a hard time?”

  “Because I don’t want to be with a man unless he’s married—that’s my rule Noble. It protects me.”

  “Protects you from what, Daisy?”

  “From love and all the stupid curses love brings into the world.”

  “Well, your eyes are saying something else.”

  And indeed, it was because of Dao Ming’s slanted eyes that she’d fallen in love with Noble. Buck Knuckle-Joy had convinced her to undergo a surgery to make them rounder—eyelid surgery to Europeanize them when Noble insisted she just wouldn’t be as special without him. He had been the first man in her life to say, “I love you Dao Ming. Not just your hairstyle, not just your perfect tiny little Asian girl’s figure. I love all of you, and if you go altering yourself to look like something you’re not—it’ll corrupt your beauty.”

  “But it’s not marketable,” she had wailed, and Noble told her, “You’re crazy. Nothing in this world is more beautiful than a woman with slanted eyes. It’s real and it’s your art. You are not getting any surgery to change anything—you hear me?”

  Waves had crashed in as he grabbed her in his arms and kissed her and kissed her and kissed her.

  “Now promise me, Dao Ming—promise me that you’ll keep these sexy Chinese eyes just as they are.”

  “I promise,” she had smiled. But even then she had pushed him away and declared, “It’s true that I might be in love with you—but just know that I’m going to keep working against it.”

  “Noble—are you listening?” Caprice snapped with annoyance. “Stop obsessing over that little Chink bitch. Everything is riding on the Red Panty Kit!”

  “I know, mother. I’ve been listening to you for years.”

  “Why couldn’t you be fucking January instead of Dao Ming? All the women want you—you’re one of the best looking men at this spa.”

  “I don’t want to sleep with my grandfather’s leftovers.”

  Caprice sat down at the long board room table and looked up at the giant nude portrait of singer Grace Jones that hung above January’s chair—the chair that Papa Sinatra had occupied for so long. The photo was the cover of the classic Grace Jones’s CD “Island Life” and it held a secret meaning for Caprice and all of the older members of the Sinatra family. Caprice told her son, “I want you to pull out all the stops in this meeting, Noble. We can’t allow January to reject the Red Panty Kit again. We just can’t!”

  “I’ll do my best mom.”

  And with that—a beautifully radiant January Knuckle-Joy entered the board room flanked by Tiger Holden.

  ~*~

  Dao Ming stood at the bottom of the staircase looking up. In more than a decade, she had not been able to get their mother to leave the prison that her father’s bedroom had become. By now her mother’s spirit had been destroyed by the curse. Premature gray hair and languid tired eyes draped Chen’s face and body in a mood of sullen defeat that seemed permanent. And between Ling’s whispering and Chen’s bed sores, it took everything for Dao Ming not to murder her Aunt. Although she worked very hard to keep everything stable for her mother and sister, their physical, mental and emotional submission was why she never came to Oregon. This was why she didn’t want to climb that staircase and see her mother lying in that bed. Only Dao Ming had had the courage to defy Lao’s determination to control them.

  At just twelve years old, she had grabbed her aunt and beat the shit out of her—socking the woman in the stomach and then kicking her in the face after she’d fallen. And from there she learned to annoy Yao by listening exclusively to black music—En Vogue, Freddie Jackson, SWV—Yao couldn’t stand to hear black voices in the house. She said it frightened her. But worst of all, Dao Ming brought home all the American white male types that her Aunt Yao had feared her mother would have been with had there not been a curse to keep her locked away.

  “You’re dirty like your mother!” Yao screamed.

  “That’s right,” Dao Ming had taunted with a lip-glossed mouth and sexy halter tops. “I’m going to let every white boy in Oregon fuck me right here in my Chinese daddy’s house! You got a problem with that, bitch?”

  But in reality, there had been only one boyfriend for Dao Ming—high school football star Jared Presser. And after sweet talking her out of her virginity, Jared had not only dumped her for a white blond blue eyed cheerleader—but during a school dance he’d gotten stoned on pot and innocently referred to Dao Ming’s family as the town “Chinks”.

  Now talking to Ling on the staircase, Dao Ming noticed the glowing pink hickey on her nineteen year old sister’s neck. For some odd reason, it brought back memories of Jared Presser and all that he’d stolen from her. She had no idea, however, that Jared the football star had returned to their home town.

  “Mother still won’t come out of her bedroom,” Ling whispered. Then she got nervous as she realized that Dao Ming had noticed the hickey on her neck. She knew how protective her big sister was and had no intention of letting her find out that she’d gone out with her sister’s ex-boyfriend Jared Presser.

  Seeing Jared hadn’t meant anything. In fact, he had come by the house looking for Dao Ming. But when he saw what a spinster Ling had grown up to be, so pretty and sheltered, he’d insisted she go for a burger with him. And that had led to necking in the back of his car—Ling feeling confused and then slapping him to get away. Him yelling, “You’re still a virgin, aren’t you? I can tell.”

  Ling had escaped Jared’s advances, her virginity intact, so she wasn’t about to unleash Dao Ming’s protective rage. She kept the focus on their mother. “I told mother that the worm has grown back together and that Aunt Yao’s gone back to China-but she still won’t come out. She’s worried about the second curse.”

  The second curse had been issued when Dao Ming was a teen and wouldn’t stop giving white boys her phone number or practicing vocal gymnastics along to the Regina Bell and Stephanie Mills CDs she blasted from her bedroom.

  “Your real punishment begins when the worm grows back together,” Auntie Lao had threatened while standing over their mother’s bed. Lao had reached down to care
ss Chen’s beautiful face, but Chen had spit on her fingers and slapped her hand away. Dao Ming hadn’t been home that night, but Ling Mae had cried pathetically as Auntie Lao told their mother, “You’ll pay for all the slutty blood you passed to my brother’s children. The worm growing back together will mean that there’s a worm inside you, Chen—growing in your bowels like cancer.”

  Like cancer.

  Of course, the reason Dao Ming had come back to West Linn was to fight for her mother by convincing her that the curse wasn’t real and that it only had power if they believed in it.

  Passionately, Dao Ming had clutched her mother’s hand, saying, “Auntie Lao said that you would die from cancer once the worm grew back together, Mom—but look it—the doctors checked you out and you don’t have any cancer.”

  Chen only nodded. By then, she was down to sixty pounds and looked skeletal. True enough, the doctors had given her a full bill of health, but in her mind, they were lying to her. Just as her daughters were lying.

  Every night, Lao had come to her bedroom and whispered in her ear, “The worm is in you…its growing…it’s my brother Yim taking his revenge, taking Luan’s revenge. Remember how Yin Sara had to drown because of you? Remember how she paid for you being a whore? Yim is inside you.”

  And now, after all these years, no matter what anybody said—Chen could see the worm inside her. It was Yim and he was eating away at her insides, draining the life from her, punishing her.