Goodbye, Vitamin

by Rachel Khong

  “This is Katrina and this is Sandy,” she introduces. The children are four and eight, and even so young, their expressions look overcast.

  March 13

  Okay, and then today: I dropped stamped mail into a trash can.

  Online I read that the youngest person to have ever been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s was aged thirty.

  March 14

  I’m spending the weekend with Bonnie. We are at the drive-through. Someday we’ll make more money, Bonnie is certain. I’m less. For now we’re buying hamburgers because cheese is ninety-nine cents more. Bonnie has slices stowed away in a pocket in her purse that we insert into our burgers.

  After, at an estate sale, inside a tackle box, we find a compartment with teeth in it: filled and gold-capped teeth, and bits of pried-out gold fillings. We buy them.

  We have a job to do tonight: we’re seat-filling for the Oscars—there to make the ceremony look full. Bonnie talked her boss into letting me work, too. We’re sharing the same tube of Chanel. The color is “Pirate.” I’m wearing loaned diamonds, and Brad Pitt is two rows away.

  In the bathroom, we discuss things I could do for an actual living. I could get a job nannying? Parents I did ultrasounds for would sometimes bring me their born babies—let me hold them.

  “No,” Bonnie remarks, without missing a beat. “Repeat what you just said to yourself.”

  Afterward, we’re paid in cash, and we decide to spend it at Jared’s sushi restaurant. The restaurant is called Tomorrow. It’s in a strip mall in Tujunga, and we have to step over a dead cat in the parking lot.

  We order omakaze. Seeing us, Jared claps his hands together. He carves me a rose from a radish.

  “Let’s see that eel peeling,” I say, and he turns suddenly shy.

  It’s fine. The sushi is fine. Because there’s no alcohol at home, I haven’t had a drink in weeks. I put too much sake into my body, by mistake.

  Back at Bonnie’s place, I say to Bonnie, “Let me cut your hair, just to try.”

  “This is terrible,” she says, once I’m through, staring into her reflection. “That’s my professional opinion.”

  March 16

  The sun is out and it feels like spring so we propose having class outside, which Dad thinks is a great idea. He suggests the lawn outside the library; we suggest Mission San Gabriel for the historical element. It’s not chronological, Dad protests. We’re past the 1700s. But we have our way, and the class divides into carpools. We spend the sunny day in the grass, all of us in sunglasses, in view of the tombstones.

  On the way home Theo, Dad, and I, in Theo’s Subaru, stop by an In-N-Out. Theo orders a hamburger rather than a cheeseburger. I hold the burger hostage instead of immediately handing it over, and interrogate.

  “Why a hamburger? Because it’s cheaper?”

  “It’s not that,” he says. “It’s just, I don’t know if it’s worth it. I don’t think I can taste the cheese.”

  March 18

  Mom and Dad are watching a recording of this year’s Oscars, to see if Bonnie and I are visible. All the actresses in ball gowns tell us what they’re wearing: I’m wearing Dior Haute Couture. I’m wearing one hundred small emeralds. I just had a cheeseburger, I’m starving.

  And Dad pokes fun at the actors and actresses—remembers all their names, like any regular, not sick person.

  It’s Mom who finds us. She pushes pause and points her finger to the screen, and there we are, though out of focus: Bonnie and me in our borrowed dresses and jewels and too-bright lipstick, looking not like ourselves.

  “Brad Pitt!” Mom exclaims, thrilled. “Look how close you are!”

  March 20

  Because I’ve read that sulforaphane, produced in the body, and found in broccoli, can help keep the brain sharp, I cook broccoli for lunch and broccoli for dinner.

  The vegetables are called “cruciferous” because their flowers are cross-shaped, I also read.

  Sometimes I switch it up with cauliflower. I cook small, oily fish for their omega-3s. For breakfast we have oatmeal with flaxseeds, which also have omega-3s, and berries, which have antioxidants.

  A diet can’t reverse harm that’s already done, I know. But what if it could halt the decline?

  March 21

  I’m looking for stamps. If I send in these empty coffee bags I’ll get a five-dollar manufacturer’s rebate. Five dollars buys me another bag of beans. The goal is to keep this up forever and never buy coffee again.

  My stamp search is turning up empty. What I find in the junk drawer, instead, are divorce papers, with signatures from both my parents, dated the year before last—meaning well after the physicist was purportedly out of the picture.

  I remember my parents used to let me have their old checkbooks, and the fake checks I used to write—to Linus, to my parents—worth billions. “VOID,” I would write on the memo line. Maybe, I thought, this had been somebody’s idea of an imaginative game. Divorce papers, all filled out.

  I can’t be in this house because of everything. Plus the kitchen sink is spitting food up and there’s a wasps’ nest the size of a head outside underneath the awning. I head to the Laundromat with our hampers. It’s a reassuring thought, that the machines work there.

  Outside the Laundromat, two drunks are sharing a cigarette. The man has a hand tenderly cradling the back of the woman’s head, which she appears to enjoy at first, before she begins to resent it.

  “You think it’s lumpy,” she says, pulling away, suddenly. “You think my head is lumpy.”

  “I don’t think it’s lumpy,” he says.

  “You do,” she says. “You think it’s lumpy.”

  “Baby, I love your head,” he says.

  “You’re saying I’m not smart,” she says. “Is that what you’re incinerating?”

  He says, “I’m not incinerating a thing.”

  “It’s nothing,” my mother says, when I ask about the papers. We’re watching a show on TV: families are having their homes redecorated by TV show people, who insist the families throw out all their belongings with sentimental value and replace them with brand-new items. The people always protest when their things are thrown out.

  “Mom,” I say.

  “Shhhhhhh,” she says, while a video game console gets appraised.

  “No way in hail,” says the owner of the video game console, unwilling to let it go.

  There was a time, I’m now remembering: she let Linus cry, until my dad finally came home and changed his dirty diaper.

  What could that have meant? That was before everything went wrong, though, wasn’t it?

  March 22

  Now I’m just looking in every drawer, like it’s my job.

  Cleaning the guest room, I find, in a drawer, written in my mother’s hand, on the back of an unopened envelope:

  Howard:

  — Leaving empty bottles in the car’s center console.

  — Crashing into a shrub in front of the house.

  — Peeling open a bunch of bananas, one by one, and abandoning them naked on the table.

  — Saying to me, Here’s a thought: I do not deserve you.

  And below:

  Howard drunk; Howard causing me sadness.

  Howard, Howard, Howard.

  In the glove compartment of his car I find expired packets of mustard. They were once my dad’s, I know, to fool my mother and the Breathalyzer.

  Also in the glove compartment: a photo from the first family vacation I can remember, a trip to Washington, DC. On the subway, coming back from the Lincoln Memorial, Linus and I were in a pair of seats, and my mom and dad in seats opposite each other. Leaving the memorial, they’d just gotten into an argument—who knows what the subject was.

  On the train, my dad had patted the seat next to him, a way to beckon her over. She shook her head slowly and seriously and tried to keep a stern face. It had taken a moment before she smiled.

  Later, in the house, I find a photo of us, at the actual memorial: Linus is brig
ht pink, like he’s been crying, and my parents are scowling and I’m eyeing the man with the cart full of ice cream, in the corner.

  “Let’s not talk about this now, okay?” Mom says.

  She rubs lotion into her hands and then opens the newspaper.

  “For better grip,” she says, from behind it.

  “You can ask me anything, dear,” she adds. “Just . . . later.”

  I wonder if this is why my mother asked me to stay: she didn’t want to be alone with him.

  “Don’t blame anyone else,” was what William Mulholland said, we learned, when the St. Francis Dam failed. “You just fasten it on me. If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human.”

  Fasten a failure! Like a pin on a necktie.

  March 23

  Class this week is off campus. Because it’s raining and there’s a leak, Theo tells Dad. We’re crowded around a small table at a café. A cupping is happening: they’ve given us little cups of beans that we are to smell.

  Joan, a graduate student, maybe my age, always sits near Dad. She has far-apart eyes and long, blond hair. Actually, none of her hair isn’t impressive. Her eyelashes curve in this logic-defying way, as if each set of lashes might be able to support a mothball or a marble. She bears a resemblance to Kristin, Joel’s new girlfriend. They look like they might own the same breed of dog or buy the same type of groceries. Immediately I don’t like her.

  I notice Joan trying to catch his eye, my dad not picking up on it. That’s when I realize, Oh, and try not to follow that thought any further.

  “Why her?” I’d asked Joel, about Kristin.

  I don’t know why I thought he’d give me an answer.

  Outside, there are undergraduates putting tags on trees.

  When I ask what’s going on, one of the girls says, “We’re tracking squirrels.” That’s the moment Theo appears beside me.

  “Squirrel teeth, I recently learned,” he says, “grow continuously. It’s something like six inches every year. But eating all those nuts and things keeps their teeth from ever getting that long.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say. Dad and Joan are talking. They aren’t touching. But for some reason, beneath the doorway, they look like two people who’ve slept together.

  “Believe me or don’t: it’s true,” Theo is saying.

  “So if we trapped a squirrel, and tied its hands and feet behind its back—”

  “And fed it.”

  “And fed it. A strict no-nut diet.”

  “Or a liquid nut diet—”

  “Liquid nut?”

  “Like almond milk. Or peanut butter.”

  “A liquid nut diet of almond milk and peanut butter—”

  “We could grow a saber-tooth squirrel.” Theo nods.

  I try not to make it obvious that I am watching Joan, who is talking with my father, who is shaking his head.

  “How cool would that be?”

  “What?” I say.

  “The squirrel,” he says.

  “Very,” I agree.

  I watch Howard put a hand on Joan’s shoulder, to say goodbye.

  “You’re not as into this as I am,” he says.

  “The squirrel?” I say.

  He nods.

  “It sounds dangerous,” I say. “That’s all.”

  I look over and Joan is gone and my father is alone, and when he sees me he taps his watch.

  March 24

  Okay, but listen: this is why I so seldom visited. I didn’t want Linus’s claims confirmed. I wanted to preserve my memory of my perfect father. I didn’t want to know the many ways he’d hurt my mother. I didn’t want to have to pick sides. Unlike my brother, I wouldn’t have been able to do it as easily.

  A couple of years ago, Dad visited me in San Francisco. He was in town for an academic conference, and staying at a hotel downtown. We had an early dinner with Joel, but Joel was on call, so he left Dad and me to drink together.

  At first it was exciting: I had never seen him drink to excess; I had never gotten drunk with my dad before. It felt like a way to be closer. But then it became apparent we weren’t drinking together: he was drinking like it was a race. And I drank and drank to keep up.

  I don’t know how many drinks in we were when he confessed to having had that affair with the physics professor, the one that Linus had told me about, and that I had hoped to myself wasn’t true. It was years ago, he continued, and it had been a mistake. He loved my mother. He felt that he was still being punished, even though it had happened so long ago. He didn’t know how to make things right, but he would—he had to.

  Did he bring up divorce then?

  Try as hard as I can to remember, I can’t.

  I don’t remember making the decision to go to bed. I woke up on the hotel couch, jeans still on, a blanket pulled over me. On the floor was an empty bottle of whiskey, drained, and another bottle of wine I don’t remember.

  Dad left for the airport early, and I could smell whiskey on him when we hugged goodbye.

  It was clear he didn’t remember much of the night. He didn’t seem ashamed about it. I was still a little drunk. Everything smelled like alcohol and was repulsive. The smell might have been coming from inside my nose. I could smell it in the waistband of my jeans, so I took them off and chucked them across the room. I picked up a glass of water that was sitting on the nightstand, took a swig, and spat it out: it was gin or vodka or some combination of the two. I tidied the hotel room in my underwear—throwing the bottles away, straightening things. I drew myself a bath.

  “What happened?” Joel said when he picked me up. My hair was still wet from the bath; my face was pink. I burst into tears, hideously. I hiccupped the whole drive home.

  March 26

  Mom’s been heading straight to the living room after work. Today she takes a bag of popcorn and a plate of the broccoli I’ve made for dinner—“Good,” she nods—and turns on the TV. I join her. The star of the show is a bachelor who is to select his future wife from a group of women. He is an ex–soccer star. He calls all the women “gills.” “There are so many beautiful gills to choose from,” he says. “How is it possible I can ever be able to make this choice?”

  During commercial breaks it’s:

  • Mom changing the subject.

  • Mom balancing popcorn on my knee.

  • Mom not letting me in on things and me having trouble eliciting it from her.

  And Dad without a clue. Eating his dinner, screwing pieces of wood to other pieces of wood, cautiously climbing a ladder, oblivious to any atmospheric disturbance.

  I walk to the nearest bus stop and board the bus. I get on without looking to see which bus it is. Not that I know what any of the numbers mean.

  A couple is sitting on the bus. The young woman is feeding her boyfriend yogurt.

  A mouth, if you aren’t interested in the person it belongs to, is disgusting.

  The couple gets off the bus, and a large man in a police uniform gets on. I wonder what happened to his car.

  “Hey, stranger,” somebody else says to him. His face snaps out of his dull bus-riding face.

  “Hey,” he says. “Hey.”

  “How many kids you got now?” she asks.

  “Five,” he says.

  Before I know it, we’re at the last stop. I don’t know what city we’re in. There are warehouses all around me—a vast, unending parking lot.

  I try Reggie—my only friend still in town—but he doesn’t pick up. I dial PHILLIP, and Theo answers after the first ring.

  “This is embarrassing,” I say, “but could you give me a ride home?”

  “Where are you?” he says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and read him the cross streets.

  He picks me up after not too long and doesn’t ask what happened, which I appreciate. Instead he tells me about his day. How he was, when I called, leaving a bad stand-up show and feeling outrage. How, earlier today, he returned bad avocadoes to the grocery store, and got a r
efund, and felt triumphant.

  We’ve been in the car for an hour. He pulls into my driveway.

  “Can we, I don’t know, sit here for a second?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says, still not asking any questions, and which I still appreciate.

  “What happened with them?” I finally ask Theo. Theo who knows Dad, who knows Joan.

  He inhales, holds his breath for a second.

  “It’s really none of my business,” he says. “There was a flirtation between them. Text messages. I think it started last semester, lasted a couple months. She said he led her on. He didn’t seem to think so.” He pauses. “It’s over, I think. Whatever it was.”

  “But,” I say. “Did anything happen?”

  “No!” Theo responds, sounding surprised. “I mean, I didn’t even . . . I don’t know. I doubt it. I don’t think so.”

  He looks, concerned, at me. He touches my shoulder.

  “You’re gonna be okay?”

  “I think so,” I say, opening the car door. “Thanks for getting me.”

  “Anytime,” he says.

  “Anytime?”

  “Well, at least a few more times.” He smiles. “Maybe, like, four more times?”

  “A gentleman,” I say, and turn toward our house. I turn back around before I enter and see he’s still looking. He gives a small wave and drives off.

  March 30

  Class today is at a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Lotus. On topic because Dad’s lesson is about the Chinese in California: by 1880, Chinese from Canton were a tenth of California’s population—first because of the gold rush, and then as workers on a railroad that would link the West Coast with the East. The Chinese men—and they were nearly all men—labored steadily and well. They could work longer hours than white men, who were nevertheless dicks to them.

  There’s an early bird dinner special. We sit around the lazy Susan and spin fried rice and broccoli beef. I’m not in the mood.

  There’s Joan, again, next to Dad, always flashing her white teeth, always pouring him tea, and using chopsticks in a stupid way, with her hand held absurdly high on the sticks.

  April 1

  The soap won’t lather and the reason, it turns out, is Dad’s painted the bar with clear nail polish. “April fool’s,” he says, happily.