All Roads Lead to Blood

by Chau, Bonnie;

  She felt something brush by her head. She looked up. The man had lowered his newspaper. Le Figaro. He had glossy combed hair, a blind-brown mustache and beard. Both of his eyes looked straight at her, and saw just her version of her. If they were parallel laser beam sightlines—he would only be able to kill off people coming from one direction. She felt deprived. He blinked his dark lashes at her, once, twice. He blinked his pale naked mouth, full lips touching, not touching. She swallowed, it wasn’t until she had to swallow that she realized she hadn’t completely closed her mouth. The girl in the lace shirt stared down impassively, both eyes. Her breasts were perfect, paper white, delicately turgid. The man shifted his stance. The woman wondered what still surface she might be disturbing if she reached up and touched him. She lifted her hand, lightly brushed her fingertips over the front of the man’s jeans. She did not care, did not even wait to look at the reaction or response. She groaned a little, by accident, feeling as if she had wet her own pants. The feeling was, was that once her vagina had been covered, held in place by something, and now, something had fallen away so suddenly, been yanked out so completely, leaving there a nestled, pulsating animal, and there was something else that needed to go there, fast. She looked up, to see the man shifting closer. In one motion, one moment, she stood up, and the train car emptied.

  Only the man with the lazy blue eye was left. The woman took the tray of shrimp cocktail from his hand and placed it on the table, on top of the Bible. They walked to the bathroom down the hallway by the kitchen. Inside the bathroom, he pulled down her pants and underwear together, lifted her by her waist onto the bathroom counter by the sink. She opened her legs, mouth watering, vagina watering. He got down on his knees, and the woman thought he was going to push his tongue in her, but instead, he parted her thighs further with his hands, and put his eyes to her. She imagined his lazy blue eye, slightly off, looking very exploratory and renegade. She could feel him seeing her, through her soaking cunt. That was probably part of it, you could probably see more, and more easily, the wetter you were. She didn’t care what he saw, that he could probably see everything she had ever hated about herself. She wanted to stick him inside her, his whole self. Starting with his cock, which she was reaching for. It was a hot, sticky world inside those pants. The woman couldn’t wait, was dying for that first penetration, she was wet, but further, deeper inside, and first, as she pulled the tip of his penis inside her, it rubbed, sticking, full of friction, resistance, like rubbing two erasers together. But she could feel the dripping, the coating, that waited further in, and, Hey, he said, easy. She liked that, that he said this, as if she was out of control. She was out of control. She would swallow him whole, down there. He would come out the other end a moth, dusty paper wings fluttering from her mouth, a gray powder left on her lips.

  I See My Eye In Your Eye

  1990

  There is the dry heat of August, and there are the two of us, pushing lightly through it. My sister and I are eleven and nine. Our mother is taking us on our annual visit to Dr. Chinn, the eye doctor, to kàn yănjīng—see the eye.

  Hailey and I dread seeing our eyes. She says nothing to me, but I assume it must be the same for her as it is for me, because we are sisters and this is how it is for us. The visits are excruciatingly shameful horror-shows, as we dig our own graves with our halting recitation of the letters and numbers. Then comes that small sheet of paper, torn off a pad. The new prescription is concrete evidence that our eyesight has deteriorated yet again. I eat dozens of baby carrots in the week leading up to our appointment. But there is no hope, not really.

  The sallow-skinned teenage receptionist is a cousin or niece of the Chinns, forced to work there for free during her summer vacations. She asks politely, in perfectly enunciated Mandarin, “Would your mother like to go in with you?” I look back at my mother, hoping that for once she might let us go in by ourselves. But she always follows us in, sits on the bland mauve chair, crosses her ankles, presses her lips into a tight horizontal line, watching us as we stumble over our Es and 3s and Fs and Bs. The eye chart moves further and further away and becomes a rapidly escaping, glowing blur. Everything inside my quiet nine-year-old body starts to twist and furl, compressing itself into a tight foil ball sitting inert in my abdomen. When I struggle, my mother presses her lips even tighter, and then tightly announces that we shouldn’t be reading so many books. I dread this pronouncement every year. All I have are books. We walk out of the medical plaza, seemingly hours later, the sun white, the buildings blinding, my eyes feeling sorry for themselves. But at least we are free until next summer.

  1995

  Hailey is sixteen and I am fourteen, and I am in eighth grade. The first two weeks of health class have been reserved for sex ed. This phrase, sex ed, has been sprinkled into our middle school conversations, with a feeling similar to the tentative first uses of swear words, forbidden and sweet. Our homework assignment is to find an empty box, wrap it in wrapping paper, tie a bow on it, make it nice, and bring it in. On Monday afternoon in fifth period, Ms. Kruger explains the significance: these gift-wrapped boxes are ours to keep and treasure, because our virginity is a gift that can only be given once. It must be kept intact for the perfect person who will receive our gift. She keeps repeating that word, gift.

  At the end of class, to review the various genital parts and functions we had learned about the Friday before, Ms. Kruger calls me up to the paper cutouts taped on the whiteboard in front of the room. “Make the penis erect,” she orders. I have no idea what I’m doing, but I shift the paper penis on its brass paper-fastener axis, and make it perpendicular. “More,” she says. I move it again. It swings back down. Nobody makes a sound. I clench my teeth, smile to nobody in particular, sit back down.

  My mother got upset at me the afternoon before, when I hadn’t been able to explain why I was wasting so much of her wrapping paper and ribbon. The only box I had been able to find to wrap was a really big one, the box the vacuum cleaner came in. My sister snickered from the family room coffee table where she was spread out doing homework. My mother had left the kitchen where she had been busy preparing dinner, washing something, chopping something with the big rectangular Chinese knife on the big white cutting board. She stood in the middle of the living room and sounded stricken, while I sat on the ground in front of the hall closet, wrapping paper everywhere. I ran upstairs and tried to slam my bedroom door—even though it had been designed to be slam-proof—and in my head angrily did direct literal translations of things my mother said in Chinese into English. “Are you wanting to harm me to death?!” It made her sound stupid.

  1996

  Hailey is seventeen, I am fifteen. We are in high school when the storm hits. El Niño. The boy. It hits some of my girlfriends like a cartoon punch in the stomach, a stampede of boy-craziness. Hordes of boys. Everyone else is blooming, flowers everywhere, the sky dusty with pollen. People can’t see. I keep my head down, my throat back, mouth in perpetual laughter, as my eyes watch it pass me by.

  I am late to the party. A “late bloomer,” I decide later. But for now, I am tortured, scarred from being barred from sleepover parties in elementary school because a number of my friends’ parents were divorced. “You can’t trust that,” my parents had countered. “Who knows what strangers might be in their homes? New boyfriends, new girlfriends...” They considered this explanation an act of generosity. They weren’t under any obligation to provide me with an explanation—they were my parents.

  1997

  Hailey is eighteen, and I am sixteen, and we are feeling it. We are trapped in Orange County, where suburbs mean rich and safe and uniform, not like the banlieues of Paris. In French class, Madame Vaillant smuggles in a copy of La Haine from her sister, a professor in the film and television department at USC. Madame’s graying feathered hair sways back and forth as she vehemently paces around the classroom. She wants us to see what Paris is really like. She wants to di
spel all the romantic notions we had that made us want to take French in the first place. “This is the real France,” she says, jabbing the top of the A/V cart. I leave class on Friday repeating aggressive phrases of French slang in my head. Quoi! N’importe quoi! De quoi tu parles?! Je m’en fou! Ferme ta guele!

  1999

  We are twenty and eighteen now, my sister and I. Along with our mother, we are making our annual summer pilgrimage back to Dr. Chinn’s office. We still make our appointments together after all these years, and always in August, in the clean, shimmery heat of the Orange County summer. The only difference is that now my sister drives the station wagon instead while my mother rides shotgun. On the way there, I think about the eye chart. What font was that anyway? An ugly one. Though I can make spot-on judgments about the typeface and kerning, the receptionist is still a desperate-looking Chinese teen who speaks perfect Chinese. She makes me feel angry—at her, at myself.

  People look up as we enter the waiting room. They probably look up every time the door opens, but I imagine they stare longer at us because they are not used to seeing Asian kids like my sister and me: hot pink hair, camo pants, baseball tee that says ‘Label Whore’ (my sister), lightning bolt shaved into the right side of my head, hippie dress, and cowboy boots (me), and tattoos (both of us). I have never wondered about this before, how it must be for my mother to have the two of us as daughters in a town like this, two Chinese girls, who, while arguably obedient and well-behaved and polite enough, only care about literature and art and food and faraway places. In a town like this, the norm consisted of all the Asians and Jews and Persians and fifth-generation USC WASPs alike, climbing and clambering over each other in piles of straitlaced limbs, racing to become surgeons and corporate lawyers and masters of money.

  My sister and I have carefully cultivated low-culture tastes in order to balance out all those summer family vacations traipsing around Monet’s garden and the Burgundy wine region and the British Museum. I like Led Zeppelin, donuts, trashy romance novels, and monster truck rallies. Despite the inconvenience of my Chinese-ness, this basically makes me white trash in a place like Orange County. Or rather, as my sister writes in a Berkeley sociology class paper, “These second-generation immigrants are proto-western aliens: their survivor-class parents winnowing down into striver-class offspring, cultivated in a family dynamic that is pressurized by overachievement and suburban stasis. When these suburbanite children masquerade as white-trash wannabes in the big cities, they are defiantly enacting—performing, even—a sublimation of their parents’ upper-middle-class dreams.” Ta-dah! I find this very impressive at the time.

  2004

  “Mom says I have to go to the dentist,” Hailey is saying as we drive up the 110 toward Highland Park. She is twenty-five and I am twenty-three. We have managed to escape from the first obligation of the evening—a summer fundraiser party put on by the organization where Hailey works. We took advantage of the complimentary dessert buffet. We watched Young Hollywood and CAA agents and their assistants mingling their fucking hearts out. They were having the time of their lives in high heels.

  Hailey starts opening and closing her mouth, testing her jaw. “My jaw makes a weird clicking sound. Does yours do that?” She keeps jawing the air, brings a hand up to her jawline. “I don’t know, I think it might be because I used to grind my teeth. But mom says I might get lockjaw.” “Really?” I say, only half paying attention. Lockjaw seems kind of extreme. “I can hear that,” I inform her. “What?” “Your jaw.” “Oh, shit, really? You can hear that?” She resumes clicking her jaw. “Yup,” I say, turning back to look out the window. “Too many blowjobs,” she says, suddenly. “Ha,” I say. “That’s ridiculous.” “Think so?” she laughs. I shrug, and resume my survey of the passing scenery outside the window, the gas stations and pool halls.

  There are certain points in my life when I am sure that I’m not supposed to be doing what I am actually doing. Riding in the car with my sister after leaving some benefit to go play pool in Highland Park is something I probably am supposed to be doing. But last Thursday evening, I was the only person still working late in the office, for the tenth night in a row, and I was stabbing at my two-day-old leftover apple pear coleslaw and cold bacon lunch with a plastic fork, instead of at a gross, whisky-sodden party on Temple, where everyone else in the world was.

  Was. But I kept stabbing at the julienned fruit, skirting the curls of limp bacon.

  I don’t think I am supposed to be doing that, doing this. These days, these office hours, these smiles that appear and disappear, they carve the thinnest, most delicate of slices, a peeler skinning a mango. After the skin, I start peeling the fibrous yellow-orange flesh juicily away, and now I am skinning off pieces of the heart, sunny-squawking-toucan-yellow-orange pieces, and the tangy sweetness folds, pales, shrinks, disappears.

  I wish I were a snake. Rubbing, rubbing at my neck, rubbing until my entire body of skin, a skinsuit, rubs off in one piece, a one-piece skinsuit. I would shed, molt, all the fucking time. Get the shit out of my skin, get the hell out of Dodge.

  Hailey and I get to the bar. There are a lot of mountain-men-looking guys there—long hair, beards, plaid shirts—and some Latino guys who look straight out of Wassup Rockers. I have a brief run-in with my friend, Freddie, who is always texting me, “noodles.” “Noodles??” “Noodles!!” Sometimes spelled wrong: “Nooddles!” “Nodoles!” perhaps in the throes of hunger. After I say hi to Freddie, Hailey and I play pool with a couple of the rocker guys—one is Mexican, and the other Filipino—and then we go with them out front to smoke a joint. They have locked their fixies out front. One of them works as a bike courier downtown. They rhapsodize about bicycles. Hailey and I laugh at the same time, out of nowhere and for nothing. The two boys, Johnny and Ruben, grew up in Highland Park. Johnny is saying, “...yo, those white guys walk around this neighborhood and they’re not scared at all! And me? I’ve lived here all my life! And I walk around, and I’m scared. Why am I scared when these white kids aren’t scared?” Hailey and I wait for the answer, wait for it... “Well, it’s because they’re white. Nobody will bother white kids. And if they do get bothered, cops would take notice. People would care.” Hailey and I nod. “Do they bother Chinese people?” we ask. They shrug. “No, probably not.” My sister and I look at each other. Then we leave them to go get tacos.

  2007

  My sister and I are twenty-eight and twenty-six now, and the Hailey-and-Peter-Blackburn engagement after-party is at Peter Blackburn’s apartment on Lanterman Terrace. The narrow apartment balcony looks out onto a squash court, seemingly squeezed into a very odd courtyard space in the middle of apartment buildings and dark palms. On the other side of the buildings, I can see lights over by the L.A. River. Here, though, there is only a single light shooting vacantly down on the empty court.

  I turn back around to look through the sliding glass door. My sister is still explaining the rules of Taboo to the uninitiated. I haven’t seen her in about four months. She looks thinner. I glance over at Peter, watch as he teasingly slaps Hailey on the thigh. I look back down at my whiskey. They are in love. Hailey is marrying this guy at his family’s estate in the Hamptons next spring, and then they are moving to Chicago to attend business school together. This is a legitimate life she is taking on.

  Usually, I watch Hailey, and decide either to do the same or the exact opposite. Looking back down at my drink, I am blindsided by the notion that I don’t know how I feel about this new legitimacy. I don’t know if it makes me want to cry or throw up.

  I look up. “Where have you been all week,” Dieter asks impatiently, possessively, and I can feel it, can feel myself liking it, so I frown. I slide him a brief glance which is all I have to spare, and then look away. “Chinatown,” I say. He doesn’t say anything but continues to look at me. “A couple art show openings,” I say, as if I go to openings all the time. I shift my glance casually back to
him. “How’s it going?” “Good,” he says, but there is a layer or edge of something, in how he says it. We walk around to the other side of the balcony and down the stairs, so that we are standing on the cliff of one of the hills outside Peter Blackburn’s place.

  “For a city with so many holes, L.A. sure is impenetrable,” he remarks, nodding out toward the open valley below. There is smoke streaming out his mouth as he exhales in the dark. I wonder if he is trying to say something big, maybe something about me. Below: the lights of Frogtown, the empty black strip of the river, Cypress Park, Mount Washington. Lights, lots of them, but tiny pinpricked points.

  Back inside, Hailey waves me over to where she is sitting on a brown leather sectional sofa. “Remember when James and I broke up, you cried?” she says. I hold still for a moment, helpless to the feeling of alcohol in my blood, before I remember that this is true. She does this sometimes, brings up incidents that happened long ago, incidents that I have forgotten. Usually it involves me crying.

  “I totally forgot about that,” I say, kind of smiling. “I don’t know. I was really shocked. I thought that was it. I thought you guys would be together forever.” James was her first boyfriend. We had all gone to the same elementary school, middle school, high school, college. He had lived only three blocks away from us. But he was the star lacrosse player in high school, which made him seem far, far away.