by Chelsea Cain
One day we wandered into one of the many rough-framed buildings on the property to take shelter from the midday heat. Cinder block and knotty pine bookshelves lined the walls. Up near the ceiling, a long sagging board supported Lenin’s collected works. A sink and countertop unit pulled out of a remodeled kitchen shored up one wall. There was no running water; spider webs stretched from the tap to the drain. A propane stove sat on the drainboard, and beneath it, on the floor, were jugs of cooking fuel and water.
My father moved to the open door, raised his arms up to the door frame and stretched like a cat. He was there in body—a body honed by hours in the weight room, on the courts playing ball with the other prisoners—but in another way he was fitfully absent. At five, I was having trouble pinpointing this. He circled the room slowly, traced a pattern in the countertop’s dust, not pent up, but aimless, as if he had lost something and didn’t know where to search. I squatted near the sink, playing with a set of plastic measuring cups, watched him closely. He moved through the doorway—for a moment framed by light, a dark cutout of a man—then passed out of view.
Thirsty, I decided to make a tea party. I went outside to see if my father wanted to play, and found him sprawled under a large oak tree near the door. He was staring up at the leaves, his hand spread open in the air above him, and didn’t answer at first.
‘Do you want some tea?’
He raised his head and his eyes slowly focused, placing me. ‘No thanks, honey.’
I went back into the shack and filled two of the cups from a jug on the floor. I pretended to have a partner for my tea, and chatted with him a while before drinking from my cup, thumb and forefinger on the short handle, my pinkie raised high.
From the first sip I could tell something was wrong. The water burned my tongue, and when I opened my mouth to scream all the air in the room was gone, there was only fierce vapor. I spat out what I could and yelled, feeling a white heat unfurl down my throat. My father dashed in, smelled my breath and the spilled gas and scooped me up from the floor. He ran with me toward the spring and over his shoulder I watched the shack jiggling smaller and smaller in the field. It seemed lonely, canted off to one side on its foundation like a child’s drawing of a house. The dry, summer hay swayed like the sea, and I heard his breathing, ragged as surf.
When we reached the spring, a bearded man was there filling a green wine bottle. Water spilled down a rock face into a pool bounded by ferns and moss. My father gasped out the story and together they hovered over me, making me drink from the bottle again and again. ‘That’s good,’ they said. ‘You’re doing really good.’ My father stroked my hair. And though I wanted to stop, I tipped my head back and drank for him.
That night we stayed in the main house. My lips and throat were chapped and burning. I began to have visions. A crowd of ghosts led by a goateed figure marched with torches through the room. I told this to the grownups and they seemed alarmed. Some of the other people staying at the house lit extra kerosene lanterns to soothe me, but I could still see the figures. The leader looked furious, driven, his whole body straining forward toward some unknown mission.
My father moved with me to a bedroom upstairs and held me in a worn corduroy arm chair, talking softly, telling me stories of what we would do together when it was light. The vagueness I felt in him during the day had disappeared. He was dense, focused, his legs pressed long against the sides of the chair, his arms around me heavy and still. I sat in his lap, leaning into the rise and fall of his chest. In my last rinse of delirium, I closed my eyes and saw his body supporting me like a chair, the long, still bones, and under him the real chair, fabric stretched over wood, and all of this twenty feet above the ground on the upper floor of the house, held up by the beams and foundation, and beyond that the quiet fields, silver under the moon, alive with animals, the punctured cans lying still by the stump. I saw us perched in the center of this, neither safe nor doomed, and in this unbounded space I fell asleep.
Angela Lam
Strange and Wonderful
Sometimes in your life someone gives you permission to be exactly who you are. For me, that person was Nina.
Let me explain: I grew up listening to the Eagles, Air Supply and ABBA and watching The Monkees and The Brady Bunch on TV. I gave my Barbies first and last names and family histories. I learned to count to one hundred before kindergarten and tie my shoes before anyone else in class. I was the only one I knew of with more than one sibling and more than one parent living at home. I had a mixed heritage, half Chinese, half German; I conversed in English and cursed in Cantonese at school and at home. I attended Mass every Sunday and learned to pray the rosary. On birthdays and special occasions, I traveled with my family to San Francisco where we sat in banquet halls with hundreds of five-foot Chinese relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins twice removed who spoke Cantonese, ate fifteen-course meals and toasted with sparkling cider to happiness and good luck.
Outside of my family, my father said, there was no one you could trust. The world was a dangerous place, my father said. The only safe place was home. Now, nearly twenty years later, I know that sometimes it is dangerous to be safe. Sheltered—that’s how my friends and colleagues put it. My childhood, that is. Fiercely protected by a father I respected and feared as much as I loved, I grew up in the shadow of rules and regulations, of ‘Don’t do this’ and ‘Don’t do that.’ When other children were going to birthday sleepovers, I stayed home. It was dangerous at other people’s houses, my father reasoned. You never knew what was going on, what hurtful games children played, what danger parents either ignored or allowed.
Afraid of my being molested, my father taught me about sex when I was old enough to understand the word ‘no.’ By the time I was seven, I knew I was conceived by a bodily function, not delivered by a stork. There were other disclosures, too. When other kids believed in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, I knew neither existed. My father tried to rob me of an imagination. Instead, he created a girl who would conjure up worrisome events that never happened, who would dream of disaster before it occurred, who would lie awake at night with a tummy ache and a headache and her mind in a whirl. Nothing was safe, although much was sacred. The body, especially. And the mind.
I remember wondering what a normal childhood was all about. I remember trying desperately to make friends. I remember being told to keep secrets, to protect my honor. Even with a lie—although I didn’t lie, not early on. I remember these things the way some people remember a drunken relative or an abusive parent. With fear, with avoidance. But running only makes the past easier to find you. It is better to stay still and let history wash over you and cleanse the pain.
‘Everything is dangerous’ my father told me. ‘Trust no one.’
The year Summer and her family moved in was the worst. I broke promises. I told lies. I kept secrets. I woke with tummy aches and headaches from fear of discovery. Sometimes it is easier to be caught and to deal with consequences than to escape. For the prison of your mind holds no escape, and your heart does not forget.
Everything is dangerous, my father said. Trust no one.
How then shall I trust you?
It was July 1979, the year before Reagan and voodoo economics, the year before my cousin Ken bought his first suburban house, the year my mother returned to work full-time, the year I started babysitting my two younger sisters and taking on more and more responsibility around the home.
Summer and her family, a group of vagabond hippies, moved into the house at the end of the block. ‘Renters,’ my father told me. ‘Just as bad as criminals,’ he said. Of course, they were not to be trusted.
Curious as any eight-year-old, I spied on the new neighbors. I crept up to the front window and peered into the living room. Nothing telling of what evils awaited me there. The room was empty except for a tattered brown recliner and a standing lamp. Not even a TV. The house seemed lonely, sad. A little lost. I didn’t think about it anymore until school started and the bus picked up
one of the new neighbors, a tall, thin girl with stringy golden-brown hair and dreamy eyes. She wore floral and tie-dyed dresses and open-toed sandals even in the rain. She smiled and laughed a lot at things other kids did not find funny. She did not curl her hair or wear jeans when everyone else thought it was cool. When kids called her names, she made a sign with her hands. ‘Peace and love,’ she’d say.
I was enchanted.
She was a year older than I was and every bit as mysterious as her name. Summer. A promise of warm weather and clear skies and swim parties and suntans and lazy afternoons at the beach. When she waltzed by the playground, her long hair drifted like seaweed. On the jungle gym bars, she was the only girl unafraid of swinging upside down with a skirt on and letting the boys see her cotton underwear. There was a lack of inhibition about her, an I-couldn’t-care-less about the judgment of others, a spring in her step. Everything about her, from her unkempt hair to the silver beads on her wrists, spoke of magic. When she confided in me that she knew witchcraft, I believed her.
I grew to trust her like I trusted my sisters, implicitly, without words.
One day, Summer invited me over to her house after school. ‘I can show you my record collection,’ she said. When she smiled, I knew I would say yes, even though I knew the answer from my father would be no.
But I was still my father’s daughter, honest and obedient, eager to please. I asked him when he got home from work. He took me aside and closed the door to his bedroom and said, ‘I don’t want you playing with that girl. She looks like a tramp. I bet her parents make her walk the streets at night. She’s not a good influence for you or your sisters. I do not want you going to her house.’
My mother offered a compromise. ‘Invite her over here to play.’
But I wanted to see her record collection. The color of her room. The width of her bed. The closet that stored her clothes.
A week later, when Summer asked again if I could come over, I said yes. I did not tell her my parents forbade it. It was my first lie, my first secret, and the power of it burned in my stomach like a hot fist.
I jumped off the bus and headed across the street and into the empty living room of Summer’s home. A warm sweet scent arrested me. Summer grabbed my hand and led me down the hall through a beaded rainbow-colored curtain and into her room. I sat down in a beanbag beside the unmade twin bed with its rumpled sheets and strong odor of dogs and urine and something else, something I did not recognize. Summer opened her closet door and withdrew albums I had never heard of. She gathered the ones she liked best and we stepped into the family room where a teenage boy lounged on a sofa with his arms around two teenage girls. ‘That’s my brother, Sky,’ she said. ‘And his girls, Tina and Lori.’ Another young man with long hair and a beard sat cross-legged on the shag carpet strumming a guitar. ‘That’s Hunter,’ she said. ‘My mother’s brother.’ An older woman with a long braid down her back rocked in a hammock. ‘That’s Nina, my father’s mother.’
Without asking permission. Summer proceeded to play Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Manic Depression,’, ‘Break on Through to the Other Side,’ by the Doors, and Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb.’ Hunter stood up and retreated to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of steamed vegetables and a glass of water, which he passed around the room. Tina stood up and adjusted her bikini top and said she was going to make an alfalfa sandwich and pour herself a glass of goat’s milk. Sky paused from kissing Lori and patted Tina’s bottom and said, ‘Go get us something, too.’
Tina glanced down at me. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ I remembered my father telling me never to eat or drink anything at anyone’s home: The food could be poisoned; the drinks could contain alcohol; I could get sick, maybe die. ‘No, thank you,’ I said.
From across the room, Nina beckoned me. I expected to be reprimanded. But she gathered me into the hammock and wrapped her arms around my chest and said, ‘I want to tell you a story. About how we came here.’ Her deeply bronzed skin creased when she smiled. ‘We started in New York—Brooklyn, to be exact. Nothing to talk about there. Just smutty skies and mean-spirited people. Summer’s father met Yellow Bird at a concert in Central Park, and they decided to run away together. That was the year Summer was born. I went with them. There was nothing in New York for me. Nothing worth mentioning, that is. We packed our belongings into two duffel bags. We had a roll of quarters and hearts full of love and hope. After spending the night on a park bench, we found a trucker going west. Said he’d drop us off in Chicago. We didn’t like it there, too much like New York, and we wanted to see the Grand Canyon, so we found another trucker going west and headed out again. Never did make it to the canyon. Got stuck somewhere in Idaho. Walked twenty miles in the snow. Don’t ask me how. We were young and invincible.’ Nina hugged me tight against her chest. ‘Tell me, child, do you believe in magic?’
I thought of the life-size statue of Jesus nailed to the cross, and the promise of eternal life. I guessed it must be magic. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘When we die, we live forever.’
Nina nodded and looked entranced by the thought of eternity. ‘We come back sometimes, you know. Depending on how good we are and what we’ve done. I was an eagle once. I flew so high I could kiss the clouds. I bet you were a coyote or a wolf. You have the hunter in you, child. A brave soul. Of fire and water. A daughter of the moon.’ She touched my eyelids with her fingertips. ‘Even your eyes are like crescent moons.’
I thought of my father saying I was nothing because I was a girl. In China, girls are bad luck. A curse on the family. I knew I was lucky. I had been born in America to an American woman and allowed to live, not forgotten and drowned in a well.
But I liked Nina’s story better, of how I was the daughter of the moon, a brave soul, a hunter.
Nina twirled a brown beaded necklace around her neck. The beads clacked in time with the rhythm of the music. Nina’s skin creased into folds above her eyebrows and beside her mouth. There was a peacefulness about her, a quiet consistency that echoed in the room. I wanted to know her better, to feel her leathery skin against my palm, to listen to more of her stories.
A sliding glass door opened, and a naked woman entered from the backyard. Nina introduced her as Sally. She was Summer’s mother’s sister. An aunt. Only no one called her that. They called her Sally. I remember turning away from her nakedness, a sight I did not want to acknowledge, although everyone else looked and did not say a word. In my home, the body was hidden and ignored or protected from strangers. Sally rubbed her arms and her breasts and her belly and her thighs with a large terry cloth towel and massaged lotion into her skin.
‘Sunbathing,’ Nina explained. To get the bronze Nina had. I wondered about my yellow skin, how it would deepen in the sun, and I thought about how much trouble I would be in if I ever stripped down to nothing and lay outside to burn.
Sally slipped into a bikini and joined us. Hunter grabbed a bowl with a pipe and announced it was time for a peyote feast. Sky and his girls gathered around on the carpet. Nina and Summer joined them. I stood, waiting to be invited. Nina smiled and patted the space beside her. I slipped between Nina and Summer and felt exhilarated and frightened. My chest tightened in the billows of sweet-smelling smoke. The bowl and pipe were passed around the circle after each person inhaled a few breaths. When it was my turn, the heat from the pipe stung my throat. I coughed and choked. My head spun. Nina’s face, with its gentle brown creases, grew large and floated like a giant moon in a pale sky. She shook my shoulders gently. ‘Are you all right, child? Breathe. Deeply. From the bottom of your chest. Feel your belly expand. That’s right. Slower. Steady, now. Don’t go too fast. That’s it. Do you want to try again?’
I did not know whether or not I wanted to try again. Someone was knocking on the front door. Someone was yelling my name. My mother.
Hunter answered the door. Nina joined him. Voices rose and fell. I thought about the hurt in my belly, the tightness in my chest, the swelling in my head. I did not want to
go home to precision and order, responsibility and consequence, rules and regulations, silence and lack of love. I wanted to stay in the chaos of smoke and music and exotic foods and vivid stories, of nakedness and openness and acceptance and love. I wanted to sleep beside Summer with her arms around me, her naked belly pressed against my naked back, not alone with an armor of cotton around me. I wanted to listen to the strange rhythms of guitars, not to the sappy love songs or brokenhearted tunes my mother played on the radio. More than anything, I wanted the freedom of Summer’s world.
Nina drifted around the corner, looking for me. ‘Your mother is asking about you,’ she said. ‘I told her not to worry. I would walk you home.’
I stood up, dizzy and nauseated. Nina linked her arm around my waist and led me outside. I could see my parents’ house down the street with its yellow stucco and bright red trim. My family was different. I knew how others judged us—except for Summer and her family. They were different, too.
I stared at Nina’s bare feet against the pavement. She smiled and wiggled her toes. ‘I can feel the vibrations of the earth on its axis. It is the pulse of the universe.’
‘Aren’t you afraid of stepping on glass and cutting your feet?’
‘All cuts heal.’ Nina hugged me close. Her flowing gown smelted damp. ‘Nothing can be broken that can’t be fixed, you understand? We are human, strange and wonderful. We are meant to be broken. By pain. By grief. By disappointment. By each other.