The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

—

  The third time my grandmother came to live with us, I was fifteen and my brother was five. “Please don’t let her get to you again like last time,” I said to him. “You were obsessed with her.”

  “No, Stacey. Was not.”

  But soon he was sleeping in her bed again and talking back to my parents and getting mad when I wouldn’t let him have the last Rice Krispies Treat. Whenever he was upset with me, he ran to my grandmother, and she would come into my room and pretend to spank me in front of him, when really she was just clapping her hands near my ass.

  “Your sister is crying so hard from my spanking,” my grandmother said to my brother. “See? Nainai is punishing your sister for taking what’s rightfully yours. You hear how hard I’m spanking her? Her tears are everywhere.”

  “I’m not crying,” I said over my grandmother’s clapping. “I’m not crying,” I repeated until I was so frustrated that I actually did start crying.

  My brother cried on the weekends when my grandmother went to work at a factory where she folded dumplings for five cents apiece. Most of the other workers could do only fifty an hour, and when the owner noticed my grandmother typically clocked in at a hundred and was teaching her trade secrets to the other ladies during their fifteen-minute lunch break, he instituted “quality control” rules, mandating a certain amount of flour on each dumpling and folds at the edge between 0.4 and 0.6 centimeters. My grandmother pointed out that he was arbitrarily docking pay for “unfit dumplings” without any real inspection, and all the dumplings she folded, including the unacceptable ones, were thrown into the same freezer bags, and that was exploitative. She persuaded the other workers to collectively demand back pay for all the rejected dumplings, and even organized a walkout one morning for higher wages. “Six cents a dumpling!” they chanted. The owner caved, and that day my grandmother came home pumping her fists like she was at a pep rally. Listening to her recount the day’s victory, even I had to admit that she’d done a great thing.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said, “you’ll grow up to be just like your nainai one day.”

  “See, Grandma’s a hero,” Allen said. “She can do anything.”

  “Ugh,” I said. “She just did it to get paid more. What’s so great about that?”

  I tried to save my brother, but my grandmother was too cunning. When we walked around the neighborhood at night, he hid inside her big, long nightgown. If I tried to ignore them, my grandmother would tap me on the shoulder until I turned around and then she would ask, “Where did your brother go?” and I’d begin to say, “Oh God, no, please no,” but it was always too late—by then, my grandmother had already flipped her dress up to expose my brother, tumbling out from under her and onto the grass.

  “I’m alive,” he shouted. “I’m born. I’m born. I’m zero years old. I’m born. I’m suddenly born.”

  “That’s how you were born,” my grandmother cried out. “It was beautiful and majestic and everyone cried, and I cried the most. When you fell out of me, you awakened the gods and made them turn this world from an evil, corrupt world into one that is good and beneficent, eliminating poverty and hunger and violent death.”

  “You have to stop doing this with her,” I said to him. “That’s not how you were born and you know it.”

  “Grandma says it is.”

  “She’s wrong,” I said.

  “And when your brother was little,” my grandmother shouted with her hands in the air as if waiting to receive something promised to her, “he suckled on my breast because your mother’s milk dried up, but my breasts have always produced milk whenever my grandchildren were born. Your cousin drank from my nipple too, but no one drank as hungrily as your brother. He drank until it was all dried up. And when it hurt for me to produce any more, he would cry out in anguish for it. I had to pray to the gods for more milk so your brother could go on.”

  “This is disgusting. This never happened,” I said, but as usual no one was listening, not the trees that bent away from me; not the road ahead that sloped up and curved into a C; not my grandmother, who only heard what she wanted to hear; not my brother, who was being slowly poisoned by her; not my parents, who didn’t listen when I said they’d lose my brother if they didn’t start spending more time with us. What time? my father demanded. Yes, what time? my mother asked. Should we stop working and paying our mortgage and saving for your college fund? Should we go back to sleeping ten people to a room where someone’s kid was screaming all night about needing to scratch her legs? Should we stop eating and stop owning clothes and a car for this “time” you speak so highly of?

  But I knew what I knew. One day, he’d be sixteen and still cowering underneath our grandmother’s dress, clinging to her before she woke him up, waiting for her to make lunch or clear away dinner, curled up around her like a twisted vine in the living room. Don’t you want more than this? I would ask him. Don’t you want to make friends and kiss someone you aren’t related to? And he would say, No, I just want nainai, and then I’d see her next to him, with her toothless nighttime smile and small, satisfied eyes, and the outrageous lies she inserted into our lives until they became strange trivia in our family history, and there was nothing any of us could do to stop it from being that way.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon I came home to an empty house. An hour later, I saw my brother and my grandmother walking down the street, hand in hand. He was sweating even though it was still winter.

  “Why are you sweating like that?”

  “I was jumping.”

  “Jumping?”

  “Grandma did it too.”

  “She was jumping with you?”

  “Yeah. On that bouncing thing.”

  “What bouncing thing?”

  “There’s a purple bouncing thing and Grandma said it was okay to play on it.”

  “You mean a trampoline?”

  “What’s a trampoline?”

  I drew him a picture of our grandmother in her nightgown suspended over a trampoline and, in the distance, five cops with their guns raised and pointed at her. Over their heads, I drew a collective dialogue bubble: Kill her! It’s the LAW!!!!!

  “Oh yeah, that’s the bounce thing,” he said, ripping the police officers out of the picture. “It was at the purple house.”

  “Let me get this straight. There’s a purple trampoline in that purple house down the street where no one lives?”

  “Not in the house. In the backyard. Grandma said I could jump on it. She did first.”

  “She jumped on the trampoline?”

  “Like thirty times.”

  “Did you tell her to?”

  “No, she just did it on her own. Then she was like, ‘Allen, come jump on the trampoline with nainai.’ ”

  “My God. You two are criminals. How many times did you do it?”

  “Jump on the thing?”

  “How many times did Grandma take you there?”

  “I don’t know. Every day.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Didn’t you see my picture? You’re breaking the law.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Yes, you are, and you’re going to go to jail if someone finds out. I could call the police right now,” I said, walking toward the kitchen phone.

  “Stacey, don’t. Please don’t put Grandma in jail.”

  “Who cares if she goes to jail?”

  “I don’t want her to. Please, Stacey.”

  “Who would you rather go to jail, then? Someone has to go. Mom or Grandma?”

  “Mom.”

  “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is stupid,” I said.

  “Don’t call the police, Stacey. Grandma didn’t do anything.”

  “Grandma didn’t do anything,”
I said, imitating him.

  * * *

  —

  She left that year after a neighbor’s dog knocked her down against the asphalt. She split her head open and had to get stitches, several CAT scans that turned up inconclusive, and an MRI. She had overstayed her visa and we didn’t have insurance for her, so the hospital bills ended up burning through several months of my parents’ savings. They were never able to diagnose her with anything, but she complained of frequent headaches and started sleepwalking. Once, our neighbor down the street, a retired judge who’d fought in Vietnam and walked on crutches, returned her to us. “She knocked on my door. Now I’m knocking on yours.”

  “We have to send her home or we’ll have to sell our home just to keep her alive,” my father said to my mother, later.

  “I know,” she said. “She won’t go. But I know.”

  Things reached peak crisis mode when one night my grandmother sleepwalked her way to the main road and stepped out into oncoming traffic, causing a four-car pileup and several police to show up at our door.

  “I won’t send her back in a body bag,” I overheard my mother say to my father.

  “We’ll have to tell her that she either leaves on her own accord or INS will have her deported and banned from ever coming back.”

  “I’m not going to lie to her.”

  “Do you think she agonizes like you do every time she tells a lie? Look, I know you want to be fair to her, but this isn’t the time to be virtuous.”

  The night my grandmother left, I told my brother she was never coming back and he tried to hit himself in the face with closed fists.

  “You have to get used to this,” I said, holding his hands together. “I know how you feel. I felt this way once, too. I thought I was going to die without her. But it’s not so bad. You think it is now, but it’s nothing. You just have to get used to it. Every day you’ll miss her less. And then one day, you won’t even think about her at all. I promise. And you can always talk to me if you feel sad.”

  He wasn’t listening. His face was red all over like someone had slapped every part of it. The only time I had ever heard someone cry so violently was in a documentary about the Vietnam War. This village woman had jumped into her dead husband’s freshly dug grave. She wanted to be buried with him. The sight and sound of her crying, seized-up body being dragged out of her husband’s grave haunted me for days.

  “This is a good thing, Allen. It’s not even the worst thing you’ll ever experience. Honestly, I’m happy. I’m happy she’s gone, and you know what? I won’t let you ruin this moment for me,” I said, my voice cracking a little.

  * * *

  —

  The fourth and final time my grandmother came to live with us, I was seventeen. My brother had forgotten her in the two years that had elapsed. He and I were close again. He slept on my floor or in my bed whenever I let him and played computer games with headphones on while I did my homework. He asked me to sit with him when he practiced the violin, which he was terrible at, though it wounded him if I laughed. When my friends came over, he lurked in the corner pretending to check the doorframe for bugs. I told him he couldn’t always attach himself to someone, even though I liked it. I liked his small body leaning on mine in restaurant booths, and the way he pulled his chair up close to mine at home and sat with half his body on my chair, and how he often said he wished I didn’t have homework or friends so I could spend all my time with him.

  My grandmother tried to get him to sleep with her at night again, but he only wanted to sleep in my room. He taunted her sometimes, like when she asked if he would get under her dress like old times, and he did, but then punched her between her legs and scurried out and into my room. That was one of many days when she came and sat on the edge of my bed, waiting for my brother to apologize and tell her that he loved her and never meant to hurt her, but he never did.

  This time around she was deafer than ever and wore hearing aids in both ears. They were a new model my father had purchased at Costco but worked just as poorly because she’d only use five-year-old batteries. Sometimes I saw her in her bedroom taking old batteries out and putting new old batteries in. She’d developed new interests and was teaching herself calligraphy and the history of American Indians. “America belongs to the Chinese,” she said. “We were the first to settle North America.”

  “I thought the Native Americans were first.”

  “The Indians are the Chinese. Christopher Columbus saw Chinese faces and called them Indians. We invented spices and gum and paper; block painting on wood and then movable type for paper; paper money; gunpowder; fireworks; tea; silk spinning; alchemy, which later became modern chemistry; navigational tools for maritime exploration; weapons for war and machines for peace. That is why China sits in the center of the map.”

  “Not in American classrooms.”

  “This is why you should be proud to be Chinese.”

  “Nainai, the Chinese aren’t Indians.”

  “The first Africans were Chinese. The first South Americans were Chinese. No one lived in Australia for a long time. The civilization there was and is backward. Just think—all of North and South America, all of Africa, and most of Eastern Europe, all of Russia, Siberia—all first settled by the Chinese.”

  All of her was laid bare now—I saw her. She was just an old woman, raised in the country without education, who’d been told as a girl that women had been put on this earth to give birth and rear children and not be a burden in any way but to live as servants lived, productively, without fatigue or requirements of their own, yet had been resourceful and clever enough to come up through the feminist movement that Mao had devised to get women out of the house and into fields and factories, who had been given more power than any of the women in her lineage, who alluded to all the people she “saved” but never the people she turned in during the Cultural Revolution, whose hearing loss fed her fears of becoming useless, and who to counter those fears adopted a confidence that was embarrassing to witness, an opinion of herself so excessively high that it bordered on delusional. She tried to make her children believe they would perish without her, and when they learned better she tried the same with her grandchildren. But we were learning better, too, and it would be years before we had our own children, and by then she would be dead. My grandmother’s unwillingness to be a victim was both pathetic and impressive, and she deserved compassion. But fuck, why did she have to be so greedy for it? It repulsed me that she wanted my brother and me to love her more than we loved our own parents, more than we loved each other, more even than we loved ourselves.

  So I taunted her. I ignored her. I told her that she spoke Chinese like a farmer, the deepest cut I could make. “Here comes the Trail of Tears,” my brother and I would say whenever we heard her whimper and sniffle. We bet on how long she could hold out, sitting on the edge of my bed and being ignored by us, before she went downstairs to practice her calligraphy. She had a third-grade education and was teaching herself characters so that she could write a book about her grandchildren.

  “The world needs to know about you two,” she said. For a moment, I was moved. But I knew that for either of us to grow up into the kind of people other people would ever want to know about, we had to leave her behind.

  “You should write about your own life, nainai,” I said. “People should know about you, too.”

  “You and your brother are my life,” she insisted, tracing the strokes of my Chinese name in the air.

  * * *

  —

  After I graduated high school, my parents took my brother and me on a cruise to Canada with some other Chinese families. The night before we left, my brother started crying and wouldn’t tell my parents why.

  “Are you worried Grandma will be alone in the house crying a Trail of Tears?” I asked him when we were alone.

  He nodded. “Don’t you feel bad for Gr
andma, Stacey?”

  “I mean, it sucks to be alone in the house, but she can handle it. I know she can. That’s life. Not everyone can have everything they want.”

  “But Grandma doesn’t have anything she wants.”

  “That’s not true. She got to go to America four separate times and live with us each time. Some people don’t get to come even once. Ever think about that?” Allen’s lip was trembling again. “Look, why don’t we find her something really cool to bring back from the cruise. Wanna?”

  The cruise was so much fun we forgot to get her a gift. On the car ride back, I rifled through my backpack and found an empty mini Coke can with a bendy straw stuck in it. We tossed the straw and wrapped the can in a food-stained pamphlet about onboard ship safety.

  “We got you a present, nainai,” Allen said.

  “It’s a souvenir we bought from Ontario,” I added.

  “Sorry we drank it already.”

  “Oh, my two precious baobei. You have given me a gift fit for kings.” She hugged Allen, then hugged me, then hugged both of us in an embrace so tight that all three of us started crying for different reasons.

  That summer, my grandfather wrote to tell her that he was about to be diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. It was real this time, he wrote, and she had to go home and be with him.

  “He’s a liar, you know,” she told me and my brother.

  “We know, nainai.”

  “He’s jealous that it’s my fourth time in America when he’s too chickenshit to come even once. Why should I leave my grandchildren and my real home for that worthless sack of bones?”

  She returned to Shanghai shortly afterward. At the last minute, as my father was dragging the last of our grandmother’s suitcases to the car, I said that I wanted to go to the airport with them.

  “There’s no room for both of you,” my father said.

  “Who said I wanted to go?” Allen said.

  “Well, you can’t stay alone,” my mother said. “I suppose Daddy can stay with Allen.”