by Rachel Khong
Today we went to the bowling alley, where it turns out Sam still works and looks exactly the same, with hair the same color and shape as a Q-tip. He could still look at our feet and give us shoes in the exact sizes. You kept picking up the heaviest ball.
That one’s too heavy, Dad, Linus and I kept saying.
It’ll be fine, Mom said.
You bowled three strikes in a row and Mom did a happy dance. You were given a turkey—Thanksgiving dinner.
We’ve been trying to figure out why the Honeybell tree out front never used to produce any fruit but, this year, won’t stop. Nobody has a satisfying explanation for why. Mom thinks rainfall and you keep insisting the tree’s triumphed, finally, over a silent and murderous disease. I think it has to do with bees and their unknowable bee whims.
I like to watch insect specials when nothing good is on TV, and nothing ever is, anymore. There’s a lot to admire about bees, I think. For one thing, they know exactly what to do in life—they have jobs and they do them. Also, they see life frame by frame, with those panels for eyes, like movie screens.
“They recognize faces,” I told Mom.
“You’re saying they missed you?” she joked.
I was in the kitchen when you approached. You cast a look of concern at the colander of cauliflower.
“No more crucified vegetables,” you said.
“But they died for you, Dad.”
“No more.”
“Lasagna?”
“Lasagna,” you agreed, and so I made a lasagna. The sauce we made with a sweet onion and sweet butter and pork that I braised. We ate it with big spoons, and no vegetables were sacrificed in the process.
While I was mopping the kitchen, a creature, winged, flew my way. After a few lame swats I propped the broom against the wall and decided to flee. I headed to Theo’s.
“Can cockroaches fly?” I asked, when he opened the door.
“Is that why you’re here?” He meant to sound exasperated, I knew, but he was grinning.
“It’s looking good, this place,” I said.
He patted his new couch, in the way somebody might gingerly pat a stranger’s dog, to indicate that I should have a seat. It was a nice couch, and I said so.
“But I’m no expert,” I said.
“You’re not?”
“Nope.”
“What are you an expert in?”
“Nothing,” I said. Then, after some consideration: “The fetal position.”
“You’re supposed to get into a fetal position during a bear attack, aren’t you?” Theo said. “Because it indicates to the bear that you’re not a threat?”
“The fetal position—exactly. And, get this, I know all kinds.”
Last night Theo dropped by for dinner and afterward the five of us walked to the park, and then you, Mom, and Linus peeled off, citing exhaustion, so Theo and I sat on a bench by the water, trying to catch the comet that we’d been told, by the weatherman, was going to pass.
“That duck over there is having a drink,” Theo said, pointing to the duck on the side of the pond, with his bill probing the mouth of a tallboy.
“What do you think that duck is going to do without inhibitions?”
“The real question is what inhibitions does that duck have in the first place?”
“No more flying south for the winter.”
“No more Mr. Nice Duck. No more politely accepting stale bread from strangers.”
“I’m more interested in the morning after. A duck’s self-loathing.”
“A duck’s regret.”
“Look,” I said, cutting to the chase.
I told him I felt “generally positive” about him. He said he felt “generally positive” about me, too. He gave me an awkward hug and later I found that he’d put a peppermint in my jacket pocket.
Today, like a lot of days lately, you forget some names.
“The one I’m carrying a torch for,” you said.
“Mom? Annie?” I said. “Are you talking about Annie?”
“That’s the one,” you said.
The mind tells you what or whom to love, and then you do it, but sometimes it doesn’t: sometimes the mind plays tricks, and sometimes the mind is the worst. But I’m trying—I really am—not to think about those things.
In the garage, I found my rock tumbler. You and Mom gave it to me for Christmas years ago. Inside I found a smooth and beautiful misshapen pearl—one of my baby teeth, I remembered.
Today I gave you my old seashell collection. You arranged all the shells at the bottom of your fish tank in a pretty way.
“Thank you for the exoskeletons,” you said to me.
“You’re welcome,” I said to you.
Today you and Linus both left for somewhere, and I don’t know where you went or what you did, but when you came home you sat together on the couch and shared a Sprite.
Today was Thanksgiving. I stared stupidly at the turkey, not knowing what to do with it, even after spending the month in a sea of cookbooks on turkey preparation, on loan from the library. You would not believe the vastness of literature and debate over wet versus dry brine, stuffed versus unstuffed, breast-side up or down.
I cried uncle, my only uncle. I called John.
“The bigness is irrelevant,” he said, sounding fed up. “Think of it as a large chicken.”
But still John sacrificed his whole afternoon to help stud the ham with peppercorns, while—in the living room—you and Mom napped straight into the evening, her feet inside the bottoms of your pants.
Partway through dinner there was a knock on the door. I opened the door, and there was Grooms, looking coiffed and perfect as usual. She had Kevin in her arms and a crate of pears at her feet.
“Hi,” she said.
I screamed, and hugged Grooms as hard as I thought I could without killing Kevin, who was between us.
She’d driven down, on the vague invitation to spend Thanksgiving with her ex-husband’s family in Laguna Beach. Brady had said something cryptic to her about wanting to meet Kevin. The house was in a gated community; she gave Brady’s sister’s name to the security guard. She circled the house a few times, changed her mind, and headed here.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, sheepish.
“You’re fine,” I said, and ushered them in.
You and Mom took turns with Kevin in your laps, spooning him potato.
“He’s so fat!” you exclaimed, happily. You bounced him on your knee.
Today you put a whole cabbage into our Ronco Showtime rotisserie.
Today, into the enormous salad I was making, you slam-dunked a whole tomato.
Today you took my hand and filed a nail, the way people do to babies.
Today, I caught you in the garage, eating the peaches from the earthquake kit. I joined you. We drank the syrup and then we drank the packets of water.
Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments.
Collecting—I guess that’s the operative word. Unless it’s moments.
December
Linus—who still loves Christmas the most of any of us—did the decorating. He walked around and around all the trees in the front yard, winding each of them with Christmas lights. He spray-painted the oranges gold. He came home from the supermarket with red and green candy corn—“reindeer corn,” the packaging called it. He built a gingerbread house and tasked me with the job of applying the icing mortar. He bestowed, upon each of us, a brick-sized gift in snowman wrapping paper—wrapped so expertly and taped so excessively, it would be impossible to unwrap and rewrap the gift without detection.
You said, You’ll be free to go soon.
You said, I’m still your father and I still make the rules around here.
And when I said, Sure, Dad, what are my rules? you said that after Christmas, you wanted me to leave. You didn’t want me feeling obligated to stay. You said you didn’t want me feeling guilty. You said you didn’t want me seeing you act loony tunes. Loony tunes:
that’s what you said.
I told you that I would think about that rule. You said there was no thinking about it: you were my father, a rule is a rule. I told you I was a grown-ass woman, unfortunately, and didn’t have to listen to you.
Theo and I went to a restaurant. A date, I guess, you could call it—and in fact you did, when you opened the front door. You whistled at us when I climbed into his car.
At the bistro, our server struggled to remember the pie list. Theo put glasses on to read the menu. We watched a waitress—who didn’t think anyone was looking—down half-full beer glasses left by patrons. Later, we walked along a street that was remarkable in that it was completely unremarkable. There were no stores of any interest. There were two tanning salons. Theo took my hand and I didn’t try to wrest it free.
“The cat’s name was Fluffy,” he said, and when I imagined Theo as a little boy getting his hand scratched up by a mean cat with an inappropriate name, my heart went insane.
Later that week there was Theo calling and Theo saying, “Look at the moon.” Us sharing a bottle of bourbon he’d tucked into a mitten. Me saying, “How farsighted are you?” pulling him really, really, really close, so close that you could string a tightrope tautly from his pupils to my pupils and an insect could tiptoe across it.
“What can you see?” I asked.
When he didn’t answer right away, I flinched, a little.
“Enough,” was what he said, finally. It might’ve been an insult. It felt like the correct answer.
There was a night, a few nights later, at his place, when he thought I was asleep, and said, “You’re too perfect.”
I knew I should protest; I had a list of reasons with which I could. I also knew I couldn’t, because we’d both be embarrassed if I did.
This morning, we opened Linus’s impeccably wrapped presents. He’d gotten each of us a walkie-talkie, which he’d labeled with our names.
You and Linus watched a Christmas movie marathon on TV, and Mom and I cooked dinner. We invited everyone: John and his girlfriend, Lisa, and the Nazaryans. Mom cooked the turkey and I helped with the hundred other things: a pecan pie with chocolate in it, two stuffings, macaroni and cheese, vegetables both cruciferous and not.
I made unsuccessful gingerbread men—the recipe was a stinker. Mom had always recommended eating the legs first, so your gingerbread men wouldn’t run away. It’s something I still do, I noticed yesterday, taking the legs off these bad cookies without a second thought.
Cleaning out my purse earlier in the week, I had found Cookery by Carl, the endive guy, and I made his recipe for boats: endive leaves and cheese and nuts and honey.
My earliest memory, I think, I’ve narrowed down to this. I’m two or three, maybe, I’m with you, in Riverside, in the one-bedroom apartment where you and Mom slept on the bottom bunk and me on the top.
In that same apartment, the next year, I caught pneumonia, remember? And you gave me a sponge bath? And my temperature rose and now I know the worry you probably had, the worry that I’d have brain damage.
Anyway, the memory: You are holding my hand. You’re cutting my fingernails, and I’m crying, first because I’m expecting that the procedure will be painful, later because it doesn’t meet my expectations: it feels like nothing, and the feeling of nothing is disorienting.
I remember your large hand, holding my small hand. Your being so careful to clip the nails off my tiny, tiny fingers. I remember that sponge bath, too, and how I was so scared the water would be too cold, but it wasn’t—to my fevered body, it was just cool enough.
Theo arrived first, wearing a khaki shirt. He lingered at the threshold. I told him I liked his shirt. He said he had advice on it. He asked a waitress what he should wear on a date. She’d told him a khaki shirt.
“Is this a date?” I asked. “It’s Christmas.”
“It’s never not worked,” he said. A pause, and then he took my wrist and knocked my knuckles to the wooden door frame.
Next was Uncle John, with Lisa, then Bonnie with her parents and a macaroni salad heavy with mayonnaise.
John set up the bar, and for the rest of the night he played bartender, putting eggs into drinks: Golden Slippers, which are apricot brandy, chartreuse, and a yolk. The whites he saved for September Mornings: rum, brandy, lime juice, and grenadine. He was using real limes because he hated those squeeze bottles, and so a line was amassing for the drinks, out the kitchen and into the living room; John squeezed each lime individually, and one had to smile patiently if one wanted a good drink, because he was testy otherwise, as usual.
You carved the turkey and you carved the ham, and we drank John’s cocktails and you binge-drank Shirley Temples and, Dad, you were making fun of Mom’s affinity for reggae, which she blamed us for—she only got into it because we loved dancing to it, as babies—and Uncle John was talking angrily about his neighbors, who own cows, and Lisa was pushing her hand lightly on his arm as if to say, Easy now, and everybody was holding paper plates that were bending into parabolas with the weight of all the food.
And much later, after everybody is gone, and when it is just the four of us again, and we’ve dealt with all of the dishes, this is what you do: you turn the low doorknobs and we walk single file out the door, staying within sight of one another, in our light-colored clothes. “Testing, testing,” Linus says, over a walkie-talkie. “Roger that,” I respond. It’s after midnight by now, meaning it isn’t Christmas anymore. It’s an ordinary, regular night—and I prefer it, to be honest. The moon is doing something beautiful. Mom’s trailing you, clutching your little finger.
She pulls a peeled orange from her jacket pocket and hands it to Linus to distribute the segments.
“Mom’s brought an orange, Dad,” Linus says. “Do you copy?”
“I copy,” you say, then “Over and out,” and all of us follow your lead, one after the other, into the darkness: over and over and over. Out, out, out.
Acknowledgments
This book began in Gainesville, Florida, so I’ll start there: Thank you to my teachers, Padgett Powell, David Leavitt, Jill Ciment, and Mary Robison. Thank you to my inimitable MFA@FLA cohort, especially Christina Nichol, Philip Pinch, David Blanton, Kate Sayre, James Davis, Kevin Hyde, Hai-Dang Phan, Harry Leeds, and Diya Chaudhuri. Thanks also, Terita Heath-Wlaz, for loaning me a Dante-ism, and Andrew Donovan for the two lovely words in sequence. I finished this book in San Francisco, but never would have were it not for the mornings spent at Charlie’s with Mimi Lok. Thank you, Namwali Serpell for your early read and insight; thank you, Lauren Ro and Jessica Wang for your unwavering friendship and encouragement. Thank you, Dave Desmond, Daniel Roubian, and Ken Kirkeby in Diamond Bar, and John Crowley, J. D. McClatchy, and Caryl Phillips in New Haven.
Incommensurate thanks goes to Marya Spence and Sarah Bowlin for all of the things. I could not have lucked out any harder than with you brilliant two. Thank you to Barbara Jones, Kerry Cullen, Kanyin Ajayi, and everyone at Holt who did the magical work of turning this Word document into a book. I’m so very, very, very grateful.
Thank you to my parents, Edward and Lynn, for your unending and unconditional support, faith, sacrifice, and love. (This book is for you. Sorry for all the curse words.) Thank you to my brothers, Clement and Ben, for your cheerleading and good humor. Thank you to my grandmother, Chew-Lai Ping: We miss you. And thank you to Eli Horowitz: Your feedback was imperative and your love is even more so.
About the Author
Author photo © Andria Lo
RACHEL KHONG grew up in Southern California, and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011–16, she was the managing editor, then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, American Short Fiction, the San Francisco Chronicle, California Sunday, Tin House and The Believer. She is the author of All About Eggs: Everything We Know about the World’s Most Important Food, and Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel. She lives in San Francisco.
First published in Great Britain by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Goodbye, Vitamin
Acknowledgments
About the Author