Each of us had had that same moment where we saw ourselves in a photo, caught one of those wonky glances in the mirror that tricks you into thinking that you’re seeing someone else, and it’s electric. Kapow boom sizzle, you got slapped upside the head with the Korean wand, and now you felt weird at family gatherings that veered blond, you felt weird when your friends replaced their Facebook profile photos with pictures of the celebrities they look like and all you had was, say, Mulan or Jackie Chan, ha-ha-ha, hahahahaha.
You felt like you could do one thing wrong, one stupid thing, and the sight of you would become a terrible taste in your parents’ mouths. “I’ll tell you this,” Mini had said. “None of us actually knows what happened to our mothers. None of our parents tell us anything. We don’t have the cool parents who’ll tell us about our backgrounds and shit like that.” For Mini, this extended to everything else. When her parents decided to get a divorce, Mini felt like she had a hive of bees in her head (her brain was both the bees and the brain that the bees were stinging). She searched online for articles about adoptees with divorced parents. The gist of the articles was that she would be going through an awfully hard time, as in, chick already felt kind of weird and dislocated when it came to family and belonging and now it was just going to be worse. Internet, you asshole, thought Mini. I already knew that. The articles for the parents told them to reassure their children. Make them feel secure and safe. She waited for the parents to try so she could flame-throw scorn all over them. They did not try. She waited longer. And she had given up on them long before Mom finally arrived.
WE WERE HANGING out in Mini’s room, not talking about our unsuccessful attempt at magic. Caroline was painting Ronnie’s nails with a color called Balsamic.
“I love this color,” said Caroline. “I wish my parents would let me wear it.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“I can’t wear dark nail polish until I’m eighteen.”
“Wait—they really said that?”
“How many things have they promised you when you turn eighteen?”
“You know they’re just going to change the terms of the agreement when you actually turn eighteen, and then you’ll be forty and still wearing clear nail polish and taking ballet and not being able to date.”
“And not being able to have posters up in your room. Although I guess you won’t need posters when you’re forty.”
“Fuck that! No one’s taking away my posters when I get old.”
Caroline didn’t say anything. She shrugged, keeping her eyes on Ronnie’s nails. When we first started hanging out with Caroline, we wondered if we shouldn’t shit-talk Caroline’s parents, because she never joined in, but we realized that she liked it. It helped her, and it helped her to not have to say anything.
“You’re all set. Just let it dry.”
“I don’t know,” said Ronnie. “It doesn’t go with anything. It just looks random on me.”
Mini said, “Well.” She squinted and cocked her head back until she had a double chin, taking all of Ronnie in. “You kind of look like you’re in prison and you traded a pack of cigarettes for nail polish because you wanted to feel glamorous again.”
“Wow, thanks!”
“No, come on. You know what I mean. It’s great. You look tough. You look like a normal girl, but you still look tough. Look at me. I’ll never look tough.” And she so wanted to, we knew. “I’d have to get a face tattoo, like a face tattoo of someone else’s face over my face. Maybe I should get your face.”
“Makeover montage,” said Caroline. “Koreans do makeovers like pppppbbbbbbth,” we said. Caroline laughed and the nail polish brush veered and swiped Ronnie’s knuckle. We saw Ronnie get a little pissed. She didn’t like physical insults. Once she wouldn’t speak to us for an hour when Mini flicked her in the face with water in a movie theater bathroom. “Sorry,” Caroline said. She coughed. Something had gone down wrong. She coughed some more and started to retch, and we were stuck between looking away politely and staring at her with our hands held out in this Jesus-looking way, figuring out how to help. There was a wet burr to her coughing that became a growl, and the growl rose and rose until it became a voice, a fluted voice, like silver flutes, like flutes of bubbly champagne, a beautiful voice full of rich people things.
MY DAUGHTERS
MY GIRLS
MY MY MINE MINE
Mom skipped around. When she spoke, she didn’t move our mouths. We only felt the vibration of her voice rumbling through us.
“Did you come to us because we called for you?” asked Mini. Mom liked to jump into the mouth of the person asking the question. Mini’s mouth popped open. Her eyes darted down, to the side, like she was trying to get a glimpse of herself talking.
I HEARD YOU, MY DAUGHTERS
“You speak really good English,” Caroline said.
I LEARNED IT WHEN I WAS DEAD
We wanted to talk to one another but it felt rude with Mom in the room. If Mom was still in the room.
LOOK AT YOU, SO BEAUTIFUL
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD
Who was beautiful? Which one of us was she talking about? We asked and she did not answer directly. She only said that we were all beautiful, and any mother would be proud to have us. We thought we might work it out later.
OH, I LEFT YOU
AND OH
I’LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN
AT FIRST WE found Mom highly scary. At first we were scared of her voice and the way she used our faces to speak her words, and we were scared about how she loved us already and found us beautiful without knowing a thing about us. That is what parents are supposed to do, and we found it incredibly stressful and a little bit creepy. Our parents love us, thought Caroline and Mini. They do, they do, they do, but every so often we cannot help but feel that we have to earn our places in our homes. Caroline did it by being perfect and PG rated, though her mind boiled with filthy, outrageous thoughts, though she often got so frustrated at meals with her family during her performances of perfection that she wanted to bite the dining room table in half. I’m not the way you think I am, and you’re dumb to be so fooled. Mini did it by never asking for anything. Never complaining. Though she could sulk and stew at the Olympic level. Girl’s got to have an outlet.
Mom took turns with us, and in this way we got used to her. A few days after Mom’s first appearance, Caroline woke herself up singing softly, a song she had never before heard. It sounded a little like: baaaaaachudaaaaa/neeeeed- eowadaaaa. Peaceful, droning. She sang it again, and then Mom said:
THIS IS A SONG MY MOTHER SANG TO ME WHEN I DIDN’T WANT TO WAKE UP FOR SCHOOL. IT CALLS THE VINES DOWN TO LIFT YOU UP AND—
“Mom?” said Caroline.
YES, SWEETIE
“Could you speak more quietly? It gets pretty loud in my head.”
Oh, Of Course. Yes. This Song Is What My Mother Sang In The Mornings. And Her Hands Were Vines And She Would Lift Lift Lift Me Up, Mom said.
Caroline’s stomach muscles stiffened as she sat up by degrees, like a mummy. Caroline’s entire body ached, from her toenails to her temples, but that wasn’t Mom’s fault. It was her other mom’s fault. Summers were almost worse for Caroline than the school year was. There was more ballet, for one thing, including a pointe intensive that made her feet twinge like loose teeth, and this really cheesed her off most of all, because her parents didn’t even like ballet. They were bored into microsleeps by it, their heads drifting forward, their heads jumping back. What they liked was the idea of a daughter who did ballet, and who would therefore be skinny and not a lesbian. She volunteered at their church and attended youth group, where everyone mostly played foosball. She worked a few shifts at a chocolate shop, where she got to try every kind of chocolate they sold once and then never again. But what if she forgot how they tasted? She was tutored in calculus and biology, not because she needed any help with those subjects, but because her parents didn’t want to wait to find out whether she was the best or
not at them—they wanted best and they wanted it now.
Once Ronnie said, “Caroline, your parents are like Asian parents,” and Mini said, “Sucks to be you,” and Caroline answered, “That’s not what you’re going to say in a few years when you’re bagging my groceries,” which sounded mean, but we knew she really only said it because she was confident that we wouldn’t be bagging her groceries. Except for Ronnie, actually. We were worried about Ronnie, who wasn’t academically motivated like Caroline or even c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, what’s next motivated like Mini.
That first day Caroline enjoyed ballet class as she never had before, and she knew it was because Mom was there. She felt her chin tipped upward by Mom, arranging her daughter like a flower, a sleek and sinuous flower that would be admired until it died and even afterward. Mom had learned to speak quietly, and she murmured to Caroline to stand taller and suck in her stomach and become grace itself. The ballet teacher nodded her approval.
Though You Are A Little Bit Too Fat For Ballet, Mom murmured. Caroline cringed. She said, “Yeah, but Mom, I’m not going to be a ballerina.” But Mom told her that it was important to try her best at everything and not be motivated by pure careerism only.
Mom told us we were beautiful and special and loved, but that is not to say that she was afraid to criticize the fuck out of us. Once Caroline tried to sing the song about getting up in the morning to please Mom, and Mom just laughed. Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha, Oh Sweetie, Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!
“Mom,” said Caroline. “I know the words.”
You Don’t Speak Korean, Mom told Caroline. You Will Never Speak Real Korean.
“You speak real English, though. How come you get both?”
I Told You. I’m Your Mother And I Know A Lot More Than You And I’m Dead.
It was true, though, about Caroline. The words came out of Caroline’s mouth all sideways and awkward, like someone pushing a couch through a hallway. Worst of all, she didn’t sound like someone speaking Korean—she sounded like someone making fun of it.
But if we knew Caroline, we knew that this was also what she wanted. Because she wanted to be perfect, so she also wanted to be told about the ways in which she was imperfect.
MINI WAS THE first to actually see Mom. She made herself Jell-O for dinner, which was taking too long because she kept opening the refrigerator door to poke at it. Mini’s brain: c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon. She walked around the dining room table. She tried to read the New Yorker that her mother had been neglecting, but it was all tiny-print listings of events that happened anywhere but where she was about five months ago. She came back to the fridge to check on the Jell-O. Its condition seemed improved from the last time she checked, and anyhow she was getting hungrier, and it wasn’t like Jell-O soup was the worst thing she’d ever eaten since her mom stopped cooking after the divorce. She looked down at the Jell-O, as any of us would do before breaking that perfect jeweled surface with the spoon, and saw reflected upon it the face of another. The face was on Mini, made up of the Mini material but everything tweaked and adjusted, made longer and thinner and sadder. Mini was awed. “Is that what you look like?” Mini asked. When she spoke she realized how loose her jaw felt.
“Ouch,” she said. Mom said, Oh, Honey, I Apologize. I Just Wanted You To See What Mom Looked Like. I’ll Stop Now.
“It’s okay,” said Mini.
Mom thought that Mini should be eating healthier food, and what do you know, Mini agreed. She told us about the dinner that Mom had Mini make. “I ate vegetables, you guys, and I kind of liked it.” She did not tell us that her mother came home near the end of preparations, and Mini told her that she could not have any of it. She did not tell us that she frightened her mother with her cold, slack expression and the way she laughed at nothing in particular as she went up to her room. Caroline would have said: “I can’t believe your mom had the nerve to ask if she could!”
Ronnie would have thought: there’s being butt-hurt about your parents’ divorce, and then there’s being epically, unfairly butt-hurt about your parents’ divorce, and you are veering toward the latter, Mini my friend. But what did Ronnie know? She was still scared of Mom. She probably hated her family more than any of us—we knew something was wrong but not what was wrong—but she wouldn’t let Mom come too close either.
“HAVE YOU BEEN hanging out with Mom?”
“Yeah. We went shopping yesterday.”
“I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
“Caroline, that’s not fair! You had her first.”
“I just miss her.”
“Don’t be jealous.”
We would wake up with braids in our hair, complicated little tiny braids that we didn’t know how to do. We would find ourselves making food that we didn’t know how to make, stews and porridges and little sweet hotcakes. Ronnie pulled the braids out. Ronnie did not eat the food. We knew that Mom didn’t like that. We knew Mom would want to have a serious talk with Ronnie soon.
We knew and we allowed ourselves to forget that we already had people in our lives who wanted to parent us, who had already been parenting us for years. But we found it impossible to accept them as our parents, now that our real mother was back. Someone’s real mother. Sometimes we were sisters. Sometimes we were competitors.
Our parents didn’t know us anymore. They couldn’t do anything right, if they ever had in the first place. This is one problem with having another set of parents. A dotted outline of parents. For every time your parents forget to pick you up from soccer practice, there is the other set that would have picked you up. They—she—would have been perfect at all of it.
RONNIE WAS WASHING the dishes when a terrible pain gripped her head. She shouted and fell to her knees. Water ran over the broken glass in the sink.
Honey, said Mom, You Won’t Let Me Get To Know You. Ronnie, Don’t You Love Me? Don’t You Like The Food I Make For You? Don’t You Miss Your Mother?
Ronnie shook her head.
Ronnie, I Am Going To Knock First—
Someone was putting hot, tiny little fingers in her head like her head was a glove, up her nose, in her eyes, against the roof of her mouth. And then they squeezed. Ronnie started crying.
—And Then I’m Coming In.
She didn’t want this; she didn’t want for Mom to know her like Mom had gotten to know Caroline and Mini; she didn’t want to become these weird monosyllabic love-zombies like them, them with their wonderful families—how dare they complain so much, how dare they abandon them for this creature? And perhaps Ronnie was just stronger and more skeptical, but she had another reason for wanting to keep Mom away. She was ashamed. The truth was that there was already someone inside her head. It was her brother, Alex. He was the tumor that rolled and pressed on her brain to shift her moods between dreamy and horrified.
Ronnie first became infected with the wrong kind of love for Alex on a school-day morning, when she stood in front of the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth. He had stood there not a minute before her, shaving. On school-day mornings, they were on the same schedule, nearly on top of each other. His hot footprints pressed up into hers. And then he was pressing up against her, and it was confusing, and she forgot now whose idea all of this was in the first place, but there was no mistake about the fact that she instigated everything now. Everything she did and felt, Alex returned, and this troubled Ronnie, that he never started it anymore, so that she was definitively the sole foreign element and corrupting influence in this household of Scandinavian blonds.
(“Do you want to do this?”) (“Okay. Then I want to do this too.”)
Ronnie hated it and liked it when they did stuff in the bathroom. Having the mirror there was horrible. She didn’t need to see all that to know it was wrong. Having the mirror there helped. It reassured her to see how different they looked—everything opposed and chiaroscuro—no laws were being broken and triggering alarms from deep inside their DNA.
Sometimes Alex told her that they could get married. Or if not marr
ied, they could just leave the state or the country and be together in some nameless elsewhere. The thought filled Ronnie with a vicious horror. If the Halversons weren’t her parents, if Mrs. Halverson wasn’t her mother, then who was to be her mother? Alex would still have his family. He wasn’t the adopted one, after all. Ronnie would be alone in the world, with only fake companions—a blond husband who used to be her brother, and a ghost who would rest its hands on Ronnie’s shoulders until the weight was unbearable, a ghost that couldn’t even tell different Asian girls apart to recognize its own daughter.
Mom was silent. Ronnie stayed on the floor. She collected her limbs to herself and laced her fingers behind her neck. She felt it: something terrible approached. It was too far away to see or hear or feel, but when it finally arrived, it would shake her hard enough to break her in half. Freeing a hand, Ronnie pulled out her phone and called Mini. She told her to come quickly and to bring Caroline and it was about Mom, and before she could finish, Mom squeezed the phone and slammed Ronnie’s hand hard against the kitchen cabinet.
YOU ARE A DIRTY GIRL
NEVER
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