by Sonya Chung
Alice and Charles spoke to each other every so often, but Hannah couldn’t make out what they were saying; their words were drowned out by the radio, tuned to an oldies station. When the Jackson 5 came on to sing “I’ll Be There,” she and Veda both quietly sang along.
On arrival they were rewarded with cool, clean, spacious lodgings at the Sea Colony. The condo had a living room, full kitchen and dining area, two bedrooms. Everything bone-colored or pastel, in wicker and faux bamboo. The children’s room had two twin beds; they would call up a cot that Benny would sleep on. Hannah offered to sleep on the cot, but Alice said No, absolutely not.
“You’re much too tall for it—or you will be by the end of the week at the rate you’re growing.” Alice winked at Hannah when she said this; her way of saying she’d noticed. It was true: in the last three months, Hannah had grown nearly two inches and had changed from a training bra to a regular one. It was Teresa who was first to say anything, and who went bra shopping with her.
Charles had stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru and now spread the wrapped packages of food across the round dining table. Hannah only went to McDonald’s when James took her (otherwise, Soon-mi prepared every meal, every single day). She’d ordered a bacon double cheeseburger, large fries, and a chocolate shake, and Charles had turned to look at her before adding it to the order, a smile on his lips. As if to say, Well all right, girl. Alice, taking his look for a different kind of teasing, said, “Charles, for God’s sake, don’t make her self-conscious, the girl is growing.”
Benny marched from room to room, stuffing his mouth with fries from his Happy Meal box and inspecting everything.
“Sit down, Benny,” Charles said. Benny obeyed, cheerfully. He was both tired (from the morning’s battles), and refreshed (by the new surroundings and Happy Meal). The salty ocean air blew through the condo. Charles had opened the balcony door and all the windows when they first arrived. The smell of frying oil and meat mixed with the ocean air, and Hannah inhaled deeply. From her chair she could see the huge blue sky, the horizon stretching on forever. The sound of the waves crashing and lapping reached them on the seventh floor, and in the distance seagulls flapped and cried out. Hannah opened her mouth wide and bit into her burger; a burst of warmth and juiciness filled her mouth, and all at once she was overcome with two conflicting thoughts: what had she done to deserve such pleasure, and why so long in coming.
11.
At dusk, they went to the boardwalk. The air was hot and thick, but the ocean breeze cooled everything down, and everyone was out; you could hardly walk without bumping shoulders. Alice held both the children’s hands, and Hannah and Charles walked behind them. “This reminds me of Seoul,” Alice shouted, half-turning her head. She said it in a buoyant way, and Charles gave her a puzzled look that said, This is nothing like Seoul. Hannah wondered which one of them was more right and felt strange that she didn’t know.
Suddenly, Benny pulled on Alice’s arm. He turned around and pulled with both hands. They’d fallen into an especially noisy pocket, outside an arcade, so no one could make out what Benny was whining about; but up ahead the lights of the Ferris wheel glimmered, the tea cups darted and twirled. They continued walking, and Alice turned her head nearly full around on her neck to look at Charles, whose black eyes were filled with the gigantic wheel’s circle of light. He shrugged and nodded at the same time.
“Okay,” Alice said, “but just one ride. We need to have a proper dinner soon. We can come back another day to do the rest.” The children’s faces lit up. They dropped their mother’s hands and ran.
“Slow down!” Charles shouted, and they did, but they turned and motioned for their parents to hurry up. It was Benny who led the way; Veda was giddy, deferential, full of trust in her brother’s one-track exuberance, as if she’d been always waiting for this clearheaded Benny to relieve her of the burden of blithe maturity. She pattered behind him, carried along in his tailwind; like the little girl she was.
“You should join them,” Charles said to Hannah. It was an invitation, an encouragement, not an employer’s demand.
“Oh, Hannah’s too old for the kiddie rides,” Alice said.
Hannah said nothing, which did not seem rude or strange. The three of them were walking together, but looking ahead toward the children, speaking into the multitudes.
Benny chose the pirate ship. He ran up the ramp, elbows out, head down. He barreled through a young couple, breaking apart their entwined fingers.
“Benny,” Hannah whisper-shouted, and she was off—up the ramp, apologizing to the couple—and on him. She put her hand on Benny’s shoulder, and was surprised by how small he was—had she really grown so much? But then she realized he’d squirmed around her and was slightly down from her on the ramp.
Veda came to stand next to them, chin up and looking off somewhere. Charles came around the other side of the railing and handed Hannah three tickets. “Enjoy,” he said, and Hannah took the tickets, smiling and dropping her eyes. Charles paused, a bare instant but long enough to see Hannah flush, before he walked back into the crowd of parents and grandparents at the base of the ship.
“Your face is so—” Veda started to say.
Hannah grabbed Benny’s hand and rushed up the ramp to fill the gap in the line, waving her other hand in front of her face. “It’s so hot,” she said.
The great ship rocked back and forth, gently at first. Some teenagers in another row yelled “Whoooooaaaa!” in mock fear. Hannah sat between Benny and Veda, in the ship’s very end row, which Benny had chosen. They’d watched as every row in front of them filled. The mechanical safety bar lowered and clicked into place, grazing Hannah’s hipbones while hovering well above Veda’s and Benny’s legs, almost to their chests. Benny had barely made the height cutoff, and so he could stand—or at least raise up his bottom with his legs bent—which he did, hands raised, as the ship widened, and steepened, its arc.
“Sit down, Benny.” Hannah tugged hard at his shirt.
The ship rocked wider and steeper. At the crest of the arc, the passengers hung suspended for what felt like many long seconds. Veda slipped her hand into Hannah’s. Hannah looked over and saw that Veda was smiling with her eyes closed. Benny wriggled his hips, with his hands raised, and yelled, “Whoooooaaaa!” along with the teenagers.
Two more long, wide swings, then the ship tipped, inchingly, into full inversion. Coins spilled and clinked down onto the pavement far below. Hooting and hollering shot out all around. Benny’s hands were still raised, but he’d been silent the last two swings. His face had turned a deep orange color, and his eyes were bulging. He wore a grimace, and Hannah couldn’t tell if it was one of pain, or joy, or something else; but there was something unmistakably terrifying in that grimacing, bulging, orange silence. What was wrong with him? Something was wrong. Why wasn’t he making any sound? Hannah could see the red veins of his eyeballs.
She looked away, then down into the crowd below. She looked, she looked … she found him. Charles. There were not many black people in the crowd. Charles’s head tilted up, arms by his sides. Alice stood next to him, arms folded, one hip out. The ship tip-tip-tipped over and then swung full around again, whipping through the air. Hannah closed her eyes.
She opened them and looked again at Benny. He was the same. Something was wrong. He was ghoulish—metamorphosing, like the undead in those awful zombie movies James used to watch in the basement late at night. Hannah felt a sharp pressure in the space between her eyes, a dizziness spreading over her whole brain. Her mind was a psychedelic sheet of terror. She heard a piercing, high-pitched movie scream in her ears and suddenly realized it was her own throat making the sound.
The ship tip-tip-tipped again, and swung. Then again. And again.
“Owww!” Benny shouted. “You’re hurting my ears!”
Hannah turned to see that Benny was no longer a terrifying zombie; he was the regular Benny again. She stopped screaming.
The ship swung several mor
e times, no longer inverting, shallower and shallower in its arc, until it slowed to stillness. The safety bars dipped and hissed, pressing into Hannah’s pelvis (someone else felt it too and made an errgghh sound) before lifting. The people poured out one side of the ship, as others poured in from the other. The children ran to find their parents and arrived at their sides, breathless.
“That was awesome!” Benny said.
“Hannah was scared,” Veda said, giggling.
“Was that you?” Alice asked, with both disbelief and amusement. “We heard someone screaming bloody murder.”
“That was her!” Benny shouted, shooting his whole arm at Hannah, his finger at her nose.
“Enough, Benny,” Charles said sternly. “Why does everything have to be shouted? Stop pointing.” He grabbed Benny’s hand and yanked it away.
Hannah’s heart pounded hard in her chest, but she tried to breathe as normally as possible. Alice was combing her fingers through Veda’s hair, which had flown into a divine supermodel mess.
“Worse than you thought?” Charles asked. It took a moment for Hannah to realize that Charles was speaking to her, but when she did, she also realized something else: it was him she’d been screaming for. Only he would understand what she’d seen.
Hannah blew her bangs, which were longer now, too long, out of her right eye. Her shoulders ached. “Yeah,” she said, trying to say what she meant. “It wasn’t what I expected.”
“Well, you’re all safe,” Alice said. “I swear, I age an extra year every time the kids get on these things.”
“We should ride with them,” Charles said. “When did we stop doing that?” He asked the question pensively, hands clasped behind his back as he walked, like a much-older man. Alice had already headed for the park exit, her hand on Veda’s back. Benny was walking a little apart from them, picking up red ticket stubs from the filthy-sticky ground. No one bothered to scold him.
Hannah was the only one to hear Charles’s question. She was calmer now, her heartbeat back to normal, space opening up in her chest. She watched the wood slats go by beneath her feet; the occasional sparkle from a broken bottle or a penny below.
They walked, side by side. The space between them was that of a third party, a ghostly interloper linking their elbows. In his mind’s eye, Charles turned slowly toward Hannah. The girl wore a turquoise jumper that tied around the neck and showed her collarbones and upper back. She was slightly pigeon-toed. He had asked his question—When did we stop doing that?—and there she was. Of course she doesn’t know the answer, Charles thought. But then, Hannah looked up at him, and he saw in her face an eerie comprehension. She didn’t know the answer, true; but she understood perfectly the meaning of the question.
12.
Hannah lay awake that night, fitful, and confused. Her mind and her body were both swarming—swarming—with she-didn’t-know-what. She had a sense that there were different kinds of swarming, and they did not work together in harmony, but wrestled with each other, at cross purposes. She thought about that weather girl on Channel Four, the one with the perfect cleavage-to-waist ratio that Teresa and Raj both were always going on about—how she swirled her thin-fingered hands in front of the map to show high-pressure and low-pressure systems. If they collided, the weather girl warned, they would burst into a storm.
Their eighth-grade science class had actually visited the Channel Four station on a field trip (the station manager’s daughter was in the class), which was how they had gotten extended close-ups of the weather girl’s perfectly proportioned figure. The production staff showed the class how the girl was really gesturing toward a blank black screen. The images were on a monitor in front of her; she gauged her motions by looking into this mirror version of herself.
If Hannah’s swarming was like high and low pressure, then she couldn’t decide which was high and which was low, between her body and her mind. Didn’t low pressure mean clouds and rain, and high pressure sun and clear skies? Everything felt stormy inside her, and hot. She kicked off her blankets. The air conditioning was on, and both Veda and Benny were nestled under the covers and sleeping soundly. Why was she so hot? At the same time, she could feel a shiver gathering up inside her, like a sneeze.
She rolled over on her side and stared at Veda, watching her little chest rise and fall, gently and evenly. Veda’s lips were parted slightly, her long lashes curled out like tiny black butterflies at rest in the moonlight.
Some girls are happy, Hannah thought. She didn’t know if this was a high-pressure thought, or a low-pressure one.
The room had a jalousie window facing the ocean. Alice had cracked the louvers open, even with the AC on, “to let the air circulate.” Hannah hugged one knee into her chest; her stomach hurt. She closed her eyes, blaming the ocean, all this salt and moon and water that wouldn’t stand still. She was swarming, and she just wanted to sleep. Tomorrow, she would swim. She would swim hard, and force out all the swarming.
A few minutes, or hours, later, a painful throb in her belly woke her. In her dream Hannah had been eating and eating at a table covered with her favorite foods—spicy tofu stew and cheeseburgers and dried wasabi beans—when suddenly, too late, she realized she was sick. Why hadn’t anyone warned her? was the last thing she remembered feeling, or thinking, whichever one does in a dream. When she awoke, the aching pulse in her stomach, and that acute sense of injustice, slid together into one thing, as if the question had taken on the physical form of the throb. Her hands were tingling and stiff, and she was filled with rage, hungry to blame. She felt strange, not herself: her parents had taught Hannah never to complain, always to take responsibility.
She could not lie in bed any longer. She padded out into the main living area, then tiptoed to the bathroom, which was right next to Charles and Alice’s room. The shower light was on, the door cracked. She tapped it open. No one was there. She thought they must have left the light on for the children’s sake, although the apartment was bright with the glow of moonlight.
She bunched the hem of her nightgown into her armpit and pulled down her underwear; it was the sour smell that came strongest, then the darkness of the crusty stain, the color of BBQ sauce. Her stomach throbbed. Hannah sat down on the toilet seat and held her stomach with one hand, her nightgown in the other. She felt something plop out of her and looked down between her legs to see a thick red-brown glob floating and spreading. She peed, then looked again to see a bowl filled with pink, the red-brown glob smaller but still solid, like a yolk.
She stood, her panties at her ankles, nightgown still bunched in her hand. Now the pain had a color: Hannah imagined her stomach as a balloon filled with thick, stinky blood. How much would there be? How fast would it come out? She was so sleepy. She just wanted to lie down.
She’d paid attention in family health class. She knew words like “flow” and “uterine lining” and “ovulation.” Teresa had started her period in the spring, and Hannah always knew when she was on it, because normally Teresa liked to wear miniskirts and dresses, but during her time of the month she wore dark-colored pants for days straight. How many days? Hannah tried to remember. Teresa would say she felt “like shit,” or that she was PMS-ing; was this what she meant? She didn’t talk about it much, not with Hannah anyway; Teresa had an older sister, and they were very close. This pain was worse than Hannah had imagined. Was this normal? How did Teresa stand it, for days at a time?
She sat back down on the toilet seat. She had to do something, but she was so tired.
The bathroom was large; it was at least three steps to the double basin and marble countertop, where Hannah eyed Alice’s clear plastic cosmetics bag. She thought she saw something long and wrapped in pink-and-white shiny plastic. Ms. Bradford had said that young girls should use pads; tampons were for older girls and women. Hannah’s stomach swelled and tightened. She thought what idiots most of her teachers were.
She breathed deeply, in, out. Closed her eyes. Counted to three. Opened her eyes, then rolled o
ut a thick wad of toilet paper, placed it on her underpants, stood and pulled them up. Her steps toward the cosmetics bag, which were also steps toward the mirror that covered half the wall, were epic and absurd. Hannah wanted to cry, but she fought back her tears, thinking of Charles and Alice in the next room. She had to get out of this bathroom; she had to get back to bed.
The bag was unzipped. Hannah reached in and pulled out the tampon, which was one of three. Its familiarity reassured her; they’d passed them around in class. Despite her warnings, Ms. Bradford had shown them how to use it—which end was which, how to push the stringed end into the wider end like a plunger. Maybe Ms. Bradford wasn’t such an idiot, Hannah thought. Maybe she understood after all that circumstances were not always ideal; that a young girl, like anyone, had to calculate, to prevail in matters of survival.
Hannah observed herself letting the wrapper fall to the floor. She would pick it up afterward, she would clean up everything. She just had to get through this. She inserted the tampon and pushed. She seemed to be out-of-body now. It was hard to get it all the way in, there was so much resistance. Was she doing it right? She kept pushing, and then, out of desperation, she pushed the plunger part too. Other than the sharp pain, like fingernails scraping inside of her, the pink-and-white paper on cream tile was the last thing Hannah remembered, before everything went black.
13.
Charles had been lying awake. Alice was deep asleep, having swallowed some pill or another before getting into bed. Maybe the pill had nothing to do with sleeping; Charles didn’t know.
He heard Hannah in the bathroom. He knew it wasn’t one of the children, they wouldn’t have bothered with trying to be quiet. After a few minutes, he heard the crinkle of plastic, then a soft cry, a baby moan. Then, a strange sound he couldn’t identify. He thought maybe one of the heavy condo bathrobes on the door hook had fallen.