by Rachel Khong
In the waiting room, under the fluorescent light, her transparent, vein-rich wrist, holding a water bottle, looks even more transparent. I never once heard my dad say she looked pretty. Instead he’d say, “Annie, you look so memorable.”
During the worst of it, my father was regularly carrying gin to class in a clear plastic water bottle. There was a day my mother found him passed out on the couch, with his shoes and tie still on, sleep talking as though to a classroom.
When my mother noticed him, she took off his shoes, removed his tie like a wife who might greet her husband home from work. Then she unbuttoned his shirt and gently lifted him out of his pants and boxer shorts, and left him to sleep in the nude in the living room until morning. She is telling me, now, that why she did this—out of kindness or malice—she still isn’t positive.
“You know what I miss the most?” I remember her telling me once, on a vacation to Mexico we took together in my sophomore year of college, after we’d had a couple of margaritas. “I miss that time your dad broke his leg.”
He’d fallen from the apex of an A-frame ladder. He’d ascended in the first place to extract leaves lodged in the basketball net. That was a long time ago: I was fourteen. After the injury they would practice walking backward. It was doctor’s orders, because going backward puts less strain on the knees. Mom would hold both Dad’s arms as he proceeded slowly in reverse—even up and down the stairs. He needed her, and that’s what she missed.
“Of course he needs you,” I’d said. I still don’t know if it was true back then. In any case, it was becoming true now. It was what my mother had wanted, although these circumstances were different, perhaps, from what we had pictured.
In a tabloid in the waiting room I read that Blake Lively’s mother, lacking blush, once licked an Advil and rubbed its pink on her cheeks.
Dr. Lung talks differently to my mother than he does to my father. When my mother asks him how he’s doing, he tells her. He tells her that they went on a vacation—he and Mrs. Lung, without the kids—to the Bahamas.
“You see this?” he says happily, removing his glasses, showing her the white stripes of skin on his temples and nose, hidden behind the band—evidence of his tan.
Nearing the end of the appointment, Lung says that caregivers will often ask him what they can do.
There’s nothing really to “do,” he says. Just be present.
“Like in the moment?” I say.
“I meant ‘around,’ ” he says. “But sure, that, too.”
June 6
The present: there’s this woman in the same aisle of the supermarket, curling a large dog bone like it’s a barbell.
June 7
The present: glancing in the mirror, I notice a segment of noodle on my cheek. But I can’t remember the last time I ate noodles.
June 8
The present: we pound schnitzel with Dad’s dictionary that we’ve plastic-wrapped.
June 11
The present: he doesn’t mention Joan. He doesn’t mention the physicist.
June 12
The present: he’s saying everything with a Southern twang and making Mom laugh and laugh.
The present: Mom laughs so hard she loudly farts.
June 13
The present: Linus and I are lifting Bonnie’s couch from the moving truck to her new living room. Vince, Bonnie explains, is shooting a commercial for Audi.
The present: on the freeway, on the drive back, I notice a black truck that says EAT MORE ENDIVE on the side.
The present: I scream, “That’s Carl!”
The present: “Drive, drive, drive!” I command Linus.
But when he pulls up beside the truck it isn’t Carl after all. This trucker is fatter and paler.
“Who’s Carl?” Linus asks.
“He drives endives,” I say, so disappointed.
June 14
The present: I wash the windows and clear, from the sill, what seems like a hundred perished ladybugs.
June 15
The present: Linus cooks us French toast for dinner and we’re out of syrup, so we go to the door of a new neighbor and inquire. She has a little Aunt Jemima.
June 16
The present: a little boy, walking between his parents, screams, “I don’t like dogs!” when a pair of joggers jogs by with their Chihuahuas.
His mother leans down to whisper something—maybe tell him that’s not appropriate? In response, he clarifies, very loudly, “I don’t like SMALL dogs.”
June 22
The present: I chip out a tile in the bathroom. I start to pull on the caulk, and it comes out in one long strip, like it’s the tub’s hangnail.
June 23
The present: the carpet cleaners are here. We push all the furniture—the coffee table and ottomans and armchairs—to the tiled kitchen. The shampoo takes the morning, and afterward, we open the windows and sliding glass doors to rid the room of the chemical smell.
The present: I go to the store to buy milk and when I get home, there is my dad, perched on top of the coffee table, head between his knees in the crash position: like he’s on a plane about to make an emergency landing.
June 25
The present: Mom’s asleep and it’s just the two of us, past midnight, watching TV, and Dad says, “You’re my daughter?”
“I’m your daughter,” I say.
“You sound different,” he says.
“How?” I say.
“More sonorous,” is what he says.
“Well, thank you,” is what I say.
June 29
The present: the phone rings and it’s Theo asking do I want to get breakfast tomorrow?
June 30
The present: we’re eating eggs. He’s telling me about visiting his older sister, and her toilet paper roll holder that plays “Ring of Fire” when you unspool the toilet paper. Why “Ring of Fire,” he’s asking, and not something more relevant?
“A Boy Named Poo,” he says.
“Pee of heartbreak?” I try.
“Exactly,” he says.
Now he’s lifting bacon and asking, “So you and Joel—that was your longest relationship?”
I tell him about the time, after the breakup, when I was sitting in the park having a picnic alone, a pigeon flew overhead and shat into my Tupperware of macaroni. How I considered simply scooping the shit out and continuing my meal.
How my friend Sam, who drives a refrigerated truck—he delivers produce and meat to restaurants in the Marina—was the one who helped me move to that new apartment. We unloaded it all together, and at the end, Sam patted me respectfully on the back, like I was an old, dying dog, and wished me luck, and I laughed, like, of course it was all under control. Sam liked Joel and me equally, or so it seemed, then—he hadn’t chosen sides.
How that first night, everything was cold: the couch was cold, the lamps were cold to switch on, my bed too big and too cold and my body couldn’t make enough heat to fill it.
How I’d swat at moths and reprimand myself. “You’re so mean!” I once said, loudly, to me.
And then it became pronouncing foreign labels out loud: yerba maté, I caught myself saying, really rolling the R. Jalapeño, I read the can. Like a crazy, broken-up-with person.
How, one of those first nights, walking home to what should have been our new apartment, it was after midnight, and I’d had a few drinks. Two point five, like Grooms advised. Not too many. And there was a hunched-over man with an eye stitched shut and a mouth of glinting gold teeth sitting on a stoop, and when I tried to walk fast, past him, without making eye contact, he said, “Be safe.”
“Thank you,” it took me a moment to say.
The present: I’m saying, “Your turn.”
She was his college girlfriend. They met in their junior year of college, on the Ultimate Frisbee team. She whupped him good. She had a beautiful voice. Has, I mean.
“Was she your longest?” I ask.
“Not the longest,” he says
. “But the most severe.”
They broke up because things didn’t feel right, according to her. But two weeks after the breakup she was cavorting openly with a photographer, who took her pictures and posted them on the Internet. Theo would have dreams set exclusively in dark rooms—everybody whispering, and glowing red.
This is what he’s telling me now, in the present. I’m not cheating here.
The present: Theo reading from Dad’s textbook in a Katharine Hepburn voice.
The present: me saying, but why did everyone talk like that, back then? Like Katharine Hepburn?
The present: Theo dipping a chocolate-covered cookie into his tea and it dissolving immediately, and his panic.
The present: me laughing uncontrollably.
The present: me remembering, Don’t get me wrong. It was what Joel had said. But I did! I got it all wrong.
And: be present, and the words falling behind me, quickly, into the past, too.
July 1
Sugar ants have crawled into the space beneath my laptop keys. This happened after I ate a Popsicle over my computer. They’ve taken up residence and now they won’t leave. For a week they’ve been my tiny advisers.
I’ll type, “What color blouse,” and wait for an ant to come up. If it crawls out from “R” that means “Red” and if it crawls out from “P” that means “Purple,” and if it is a yes or no question, I’ll wait for the ant to crawl out of either the “Y” or “N” or accept whatever comes closest. (I’ve taken an “A” for “No”; a “Z” has stood for “Yes.”) The questions tend not to be serious, because—even to myself—I prefer not to appear insane. Primarily I’ve been asking: What should we have for dinner? Should I attend this party in Irvine or this one, farther away, in Highland Park? I’ve been asking: Am I a good-enough person, yes or no?
July 4
On the Fourth of July, Uncle John forgets the ice. The fridge is full of food—broccoli and things that are not broccoli—and everyone is too lazy to drive to the store, so our sparkling lemonade stays warm. We watch fireworks from lawn chairs in the backyard. The highlights include a smiley-face firework—the eyes first burst together, then the mouth—and a green-and-gold firework that looks like a palm tree—green on the outside like leaves, gold on the inside like a trunk.
Hungry again later that night, we eat the hot dogs cold and without buns because we’ve run out, and we wipe the grease on Dad’s stained old apron that says boss of the sauce.
Theo and I clink our warm lemonades together, then our cold hot dogs.
“Do you have a picture of her on your phone?” I ask.
“Who?” he says.
“The most severe,” I say.
“Only if you show me yours.”
“Deal.”
Theo goes first. It’s a close-up, taken by Theo; their faces and happiness fill the frame. They were camping, it looks like. Behind them I can make out their sleeping bags, pushed very close together, and only one pillow: one of those long, king-size ones, they were sharing. The photo was taken during a week they spent in Yosemite.
On a night, during that trip, they forgot to throw their food out, and a bear came to their tent.
“We thought this was it, we were going to die,” Theo said. “We made a promise that if we made it out alive, things would change.”
She’d whispered, I give you my word. They had held hands and said they loved each other.
“This happened in the span of, like, a minute,” Theo says.
A moment later the bear looked at them and ambled away, wholly uninterested.
The photo I have is from a vacation Joel and I took to Florida. We rented a car and we drove from Connecticut to Key West. We were squinting in the sunlight. At one of the rest stops he had second thoughts about leaving my iPod exposed so he put a receipt over it, like that would deter thieves.
We were celebrating the job Joel had gotten; in Miami we splurged on an expensive hotel, with walls so white they hurt to look at directly. The hotel had a pillow menu. From the hotel window we could see the small brown people stretched out on the sand like iguanas, and even smaller, the actual iguanas.
Our photos aren’t so different—just some happy couple-ness.
I detect something like pride in Theo’s voice, talking about her. It’s not overt, but it’s there. I notice the pride because, talking about Joel, I can hear the disappointment in my own.
She is very pretty, though, I think later.
Who cares, who cares, who cares, I chase the thought.
July 5
Even though I know it will give me nightmares, lately I can’t stop searching the Internet for “feral goldfish.” They have huge bubbly faces. What happens is people flush their goldfish, presumed dead, down the toilets. They get into the waterways and grow and grow and grow—sometimes to the size of soccer balls, according to these photographs.
“DAD,” I shout. “COME HERE.”
“Is it important?”
“Very!”
And he knows from my voice that I want to show him an enormous fish with a huge bubbly face. I do.
“You’re a monster,” he says, pleasantly. “Let’s see it.”
This one was fished out of a lake north of Detroit. The fisherman is holding the body and his young son, in tears, is holding on to an enormous fin like it’s his mother’s dress. The fish itself has its translucent eyelids hanging down, and it looks to be asleep. I hope it is.
July 9
And now, as of today, I’m thirty-one years old.
As a birthday present to myself I sneak onto campus, into Levin’s office, and glue the caps to all of the prick’s pens. I consider what else I can do that won’t get me arrested. I’ve brought birthday gin with me to campus. It’s in a clear plastic water bottle, an homage to my father. I’m using one of those dwarf bottles, which—under ordinary circumstances—I consider wasteful and absurd. Now I’m throwing bills maniacally into the fountain outside the Life Sciences building. Students going to their summer classes pick up their paces and hold their books closer.
“Ruth,” I hear, about ten dollars later. It’s Theo. He’s walking toward me, holding something that looks like a deck of cards. As he approaches, I see that it’s an ice-cream sandwich.
“That’s a wish you want badly,” he says, noticing all the paper money, afloat. He looks all around us, like he’s looking for the money tree that dropped its leaves. He sits down, finishes the sandwich in a few solemn bites, and stands up to throw the wrapper away. When he sits back down, he sits closer, points to the bottle, and says, “May I?”
I shrug and hand him the bottle. He takes it.
I knew it started being over with Joel when I’d open a bottle of wine and he wouldn’t drink it.
Sharing things is how things get started, and not sharing things is how they end. Theo is looking nicer than usual, I think, but then again, I’m drunk. Thoughts are springing to mind, and I am dropping them all, irresponsibly, like dice.
“So what’s the wish?” he says, finally.
“Won’t come true,” I say.
“We both know you don’t believe that,” he says, observantly and correctly.
And because I am not going to make the same mistake I had when I was a kid, making those thousand wishes with Bonnie, all of them lost now, I decide not to keep it to myself. I have him lean over so I can whisper it. He smells like a delicious dryer sheet.
“What brand of dryer sheet is that?” I ask.
“Snuggle,” he says, inching closer.
“Bullshit,” I say. I inch back.
“Seriously,” he says. “It’s new. It’s supposed to smell like apricots.”
“You do smell like fruit,” I say. I think he takes it as some kind of punch line, because immediately after that he kisses me. Immediately after which, I panic.
“I better go,” I say, and stand up and flee.
“You’re drunk?” Linus says, right away, on the phone. “Already? Without me?”
When the car pulls up to the curb and I get inside, Linus, without a word, tosses me a soft package, wrapped in HAPPY BIRTHDAY paper. The remainder of the tube of gift wrap is in the backseat.
Inside there are four pairs of socks, quality socks that haven’t come from the dollar store, socks without type on the toes. He’s rolled them into sock balls.
At home, my mother has laid out one of her mother’s dresses, a gift for me, and my father has finally conceded that old journal of his. Happy birthday, Ruth, the Post-it affixed to it says.
Another Post-it opens to this page:
Today you asked why it was that people say cloudless but not cloudful. Today you made clear you did not know there was a difference in the spellings of “pitchers” and “pictures.” You scraped seeds off of bagels and planted them in the flower bed out front. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that there’s no such thing as a bagel tree. Today I thought: I’m nuts—I’m just nuts—about you.
July 10
Something else I appreciate about hangovers: you are given the chance to value your regular things. Water, for instance, becomes so delicious and appealing.
I like also that having a terrible day pretty much guarantees that the next day will be much, much better.
“Ruth,” says the voice on our machine. It’s Theo. “Call me, would you?”
At the café, there are pastries in the display case—croissants and bagels and bear claws—that look like uncomfortable people in a waiting room, trapped under bad fluorescent lighting.
The man in line in front of me orders a “small nonfat cap.”
A woman orders a salad, rudely.
“Hello, shorty,” says a lady to a dachshund outside the café door. “Hello!”
I have a staring contest with a gazing baby, and the way the baby, a fellow born human, looks at me it’s like he is seeing a deep hidden thing that all the grown people can’t. I look away first.