by Weike Wang
But he has already hung up.
Later, the best friend finds me unbelievable. You called him and didn’t tell him to come back?
I just forgot.
Even if I had made it to a wedding day, I could not have made it down that aisle. All those eyes on me, two per person. A joke Eric then made was that he would walk the aisle and I would stand up there.
But I could not have done that either.
There is no such thing as a perfectly still molecule. Even in solids, the molecules keep moving.
···
One more.
She drives us to Bay County Fair, my first real amusement park, with terrifying rides like the Sand Storm and the Zipper.
Outside the Zipper, there is a sign that says NOT FOR THE WEAK-HEARTED, and then below that sign is another sign—WE MEAN IT, DO NOT RIDE IF YOU HAVE HEART PROBLEMS. I am just above the minimal height to get on. Like all foolish children, I believe my heart to be strong.
It is two and a half minutes of extreme spinning, with me in a free-moving cage that rotates nonstop. I am dizzy, light-headed, my vision so blurred that I cannot see anything except a smear of flashing lights.
That too is how I feel when waiting in the driveway for my father. Once he sees me, he frowns. Once we are inside, he throws things.
At you? the shrink asks.
At the wall, the TV. One time he tries to lift the TV but reconsiders: a TV is expensive, also a terrible shame to break the cathode ray tube inside.
I believed my heart to be strong, but not that strong.
···
The baby is born? The baby is born. The baby is born!
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She is placed in my arms when the best friend visits on the first not so summery afternoon.
So tiny, I say. But what a disproportionally large head.
I touch the head carefully. I point: Here is your temporal lobe that controls speech. Here is your frontal lobe that controls thoughts. Here is your hippocampus that controls memory. All brand-new and humming.
The baby has black hair and black eyes and white skin. She looks charcoal-drawn.
Your brain must be tired, I say to the baby, who finally falls asleep.
What do I do now? I say to the best friend, who is also about to fall asleep.
Let me just lie here for a minute, she mumbles, and drifts slowly toward the ground.
The dog sniffs the baby and deems her okay. I decide to take them both out. Look, I say, there is the sun, the grass, the fresh air—all this you will take for granted someday and then rediscover with a baby in your arms.
How old? a woman asks from across the street.
I am not exactly sure. But I think 2.4 months and a few hours.
We go to three parks. We walk nonstop or else she cries. The baby likes moving, especially moving at high speeds, so we go on swings. She opens one eye and looks at me with profound suspicion. What is this contraption? she asks silently, a tiny cyclops in my hands.
This is a simple harmonic oscillator, I say, a pendulum; this is periodic motion.
Wheeeee is the sound I think her temporal lobe wants to make.
My new hobby is to teach this baby about the world. I will write it all down. Or whisper it into her ears. I still want her to be a supermodel but, if possible, a genius one.
When we return, the best friend is awake but yawns after every sentence.
The husband has recently been promoted. He has more deadlines and late nights than before. How are they going to do this? In shifts, they decide. He sleeps while she mothers. She sleeps while he fathers. But to keep up with work, the husband must also be highly efficient. She says that at night, he makes business calls to Asia while rocking the baby to sleep.
Does she sleep well?
Not really.
I remember learning this at some point and thinking it was cool. While still in the womb, a baby is an aquatic animal. For the forty weeks before birth, it lives and sleeps in a water-filled sac.
What if you put on wave sounds? Maybe this mimics the inside of a womb.
The best friend says she hasn’t tried. We try it, googling ocean sounds, but the baby couldn’t care less about the ocean or waves. She likes the glow of the computer, the sound of any one of us typing.
Before they leave, I flap my arms around so that she will bob her head in that funny way.
···
I come back to C. S. Lewis’s advice:
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one. Not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
I do not want any of these things for my heart.
So, leave the casket and go elsewhere.
···
Leaf peeping is what it’s called.
Every September, Eric and I drive up to New Hampshire to see the foliage. Then we find a bed-and-breakfast and do both of those things. Then we find the tallest mountain and hike it.
This year I go without telling anyone. I hike up the second-tallest mountain, while the dog blazes ahead.
Eric said to each passing tree, You have been peeped, and I said, Peep peep, coming through. The trees that were still lush and green we called la résistance.
This year, la résistance is in full swing. It has been a warm summer and now a warm fall. The dog is the first to summit while I am still a half mile behind, but he barks at regular intervals to guide me.
The second-tallest mountain has a better view, I realize, than the tallest one. There is a lake in the distance I hadn’t noticed before.
At higher attitudes, the body makes more red blood cells to compensate for the thinner air. This is what gives athletes who do elevation training the competitive edge and also some hikers the feeling of being more alive.
Up here, I feel awake but no more alive. The dog on the other hand is running around in circles.
On one of our trips, Eric and I get lost. We have been following marked trees but then the markings disappear and the sun goes down fast.
Watch us panic. The forest smells of wet leaves and mildew. I can no longer see the details of his face or the dog’s, but I can hear them both panting beside me. We hike one way and then another.
Which way is north? Eric keeps asking, a rhetorical question.
I look to the sky. I can find Orion’s belt every time. But never the Big or Small Dipper. Never the North Star. The light from a star travels many years to get to us. What we are seeing is what the star looked like in the past. The star could be gone for all we know.
Finally, we come upon a river. We see beyond that river is a highway with cars. Cross, we say, and the dog does. Cross, we say, and stay exactly where we are. The dog is already on the other side when we finally wade into the freezing river with all of our equipment. The waters come to my waist. Rocks are slipperier than they look.
A year later, he says, I thought you were going to dump me that day.
Dump you? Why?
For making you walk through a river.
I didn’t mind.
I know. That’s when I knew we were going to work out.
···
Instead of a bed-and-breakfast, I find a motel. Why eat breakfast alone? I decide. Why give others more reason to talk?
The trouble with Chinese is that there are so many homonyms. Easily you could mix up the word for mother with the one for horse. The word for mother with the verb for scold. And then the two-character homonyms. The ones that I said when I was little and she would start to laugh.
You just said coffee cup instead of comforter. Ice coffin instead of motel.
But some motel rooms turn out to be ice coffins. Like this one. The heater is broken, the blankets thin. At night, the
temperature drops below 50.
How did she do it? I wonder. Come to a place like this and stay for seven days straight. Did she eat? Or did she just sleep through it?
Bears give birth in hibernation. I imagine that to suddenly wake up a mother must feel bizarre, but there are no instances of the mother bear leaving her cubs from shock. It is possible that my mother had moments of shock when raising me. How did I get here? What am I doing? A daughter, you say? You must be mistaken.
When I first tell Eric about the amusement parks, he says, Your mother is a terrible person. Who does that to a child?
And then I put my hands up and say, No, no, no, she’s not terrible. I explain my theory of shock. It shocked her sometimes to realize that I was there. And, I think, this prompted her to leave.
But that’s no excuse, he says.
I have a hard time getting through to Eric what I think.
If my mother had done that to me, he says, I would have hated her for a long time.
The shrink also asks if I resent her and, logically, I think I should. What if someone had come along and snatched me? Also, didn’t she ever want to leave my father a note, in case she decided not to come back?
If one parent should go, let it be the father. The absent father is more common and not always a terrible person.
Before Eric knows about all this, he takes me to Six Flags. It is supposed to be a surprise. I have just published that paper. What better way to celebrate, he thinks, than to do something he loved doing as a kid, in hopes that I will love it too. The rides: Wicked Cyclone, The Great Chase, Mind Eraser. But as we are driving up to the gates and I realize where we’re going, I ask him to pull the car over so I can throw up.
He thinks I am kidding. He doesn’t pull over.
Then, quietly, I throw up into my hands, and this makes him panic, drive faster, while I try not to spill the liquid in my hands.
···
I return from the ice coffin to find that the city has also cooled. The neighbors are not happy about it. Now there is only talk of how short this fall will be and then the long, impending doom.
During my time away, the best friend has made me an online dating profile.
Don’t even think of it as dating, she says. Think of it as reentering the world and meeting guys along the way who can also keep you company while you eat.
Everyone has to eat, she says, and I don’t disagree.
Also, she has called my body type svelte and my eye color umber. Because who has brown eyes these days? she says.
The questions she gives me to answer:
·
Describe your typical Friday night:
Stay in, watch a movie, have debates with myself.
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Describe your perfect weekend morning:
Wake up, time stops, resolve debates with myself.
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Look into my eyes, I am later caught saying to a receptionist at the DMV. They’re umber or bister or taupe, but they are definitely not brown.
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The debates that I have:
Popcorn, no popcorn, popcorn, no popcorn. Popcorn.
I’m fine, you’re sad, I’m fine, you’re confused and hurt and messed up and definitely not fine.
I once thought I would have all the answers by now.
Message me if…and I write, Message me if you know how rockets fly.
·
My gas particle trajectory problem might come from a simpler issue. In English, I cannot intuitively tell left from right. I can in Chinese, but in English, I must make my fingers into the letter L and the hand that says L correctly instead of backward is left. Eric found this funny. It was another way he could tell that I was not a native speaker. He would ask me to get him a mug. On purpose he would say the mug on the left, just so he could watch me make Ls at the open cabinet to figure out which he meant.
The next one will not know of this small handicap. I will simply never heed his directions and grab the closest mug I see.
·
The answers that I get:
Rockets fly in space because there is no gravity.
They can and believe that they can, and anything you believe in will happen with more or less certainty.
Fuel, duh.
·
I can count on two fingers the number of boyfriends I’ve had. How do I do this again? What do I say? The best friend says, Start with your name. Then ask him lots of questions, then use his answers to launch into more questions, then redirect any questions he has for you back on to him. Don’t look sad.
But how do you know if he’s interested?
If he shows up.
But how do you know if he’s flirting?
If he shows up.
·
There is a guy with an impeccable sense of style who is better dressed than I am. At dinner, when I sneeze, he unfurls from his coat pocket a handkerchief with his initials embroidered on it. I pass on the handkerchief. I don’t want to sneeze on anyone’s initials.
There is a guy who gets to the point right away and asks if I too am looking for something casual. If not, then forget it.
There is a guy who will not talk about movies. Movies kill the soul, he says. But films…
I tell him I know very little about films. Anything made before I was, I do not watch. Anything sci-fi related, he does not watch.
But what about Gattaca? I say.
I don’t even know what that means, he says.
·
I do this sometimes: hold my breath for entire conversations with men and then feel faint. I cannot hold my breath past four minutes. At four, I must interrupt the guy who is talking and make a gagging sound.
Afterward there is no more talk of second dates.
What I like about Gattaca is that it is not what you think when you think of sci-fi. There are very few special effects. There is a man in lab doing work day in and day out. He waits for the centrifuge to be done. He pipettes something into vials. The movie is set in the far future and yet nothing about the science is flashy. The movie is timeless in this way.
···
Even in limbo, Eric still practiced Chinese. He was learning it for himself, he said, but when I told the best friend this, she said, Oh come on, he is learning it for you.
But I acted oblivious to this fact. What would it mean if he actually became fluent one day? Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn, if not the hardest. It would mean that he cared for me a great deal. It would mean that I was crazy for not marrying him.
Before bed every night, he studies from a language app on his phone.
You don’t need to do that now, I say.
It helps me sleep, he says.
I don’t tell him that it helps me sleep too, him muttering Chinese beside me.
In the four years, he learns a lot of words. He can say simple phrases—the sun is here; the moon is there; look, a door! But whenever we visit my parents, he refuses to speak Chinese.
For an entire weekend, two years ago, he speaks only English to them and they speak only English back. I am beyond irritated. The looks of discomfort, especially from my mother. She forgets the word for salt and has to point to it. What that thing? she asks. Salt. Pepper. Pot. Pan. Eric doesn’t notice her tone and tells her each time. Later, we whisper-fight in my old bedroom.
That was not your place. This is their house. Also, what good is learning all that Chinese if you are never going to use it when it counts?
We argue around this question. Does it matter? What’s the big deal? The big deal? The big deal? I find myself no longer whisper-fighting. Eventually he says he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. In Chinese, he couldn’t get his personality across, or his humor. He felt limited.
Who cares about your humor? How do you think my mother feels right now, trying to get to know you?
That is not my problem. If she lives here, she is expected to speak the language.
The moment I hear him say that, I reach
for the nearest heavy thing. A stapler. Perhaps I was planning to staple his lips together so that he could feel even more limited.
···
The leaf-shoveling business is tedious.
So I have hired the boy next door to do it.
But the overnight wind is wicked and blows every leaf in the world to my doorstep.
A fortune cookie says, With your walkways obstructed, you will have no more visitors.
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My father’s seasonal garden is doing well. It has been a banner year for eggplants. He writes me a one-paragraph e-mail to tell me and I spend the afternoon trying to read it.
The way Chinese is supposed to be read is in groups of characters at a time but I can’t do this. I read one character at a time, with my finger glued to the screen. The words I don’t know, every third, I look up.
Soon, he will harvest everything and give some away to friends.
Soon, I receive a package of three dozen eggplants.
This makes me think of the time he had me take back to Boston a winter melon. It was too big to fit into my suitcase so I had to carry it through security. When the officer looked at it with suspect, I had to put it through the X-ray.
The phrase green thumb he learns in America. But it seems strange to him at first. As a boy, he works long hours in the field. The machine he is using catches on a branch and stalls. He must put his hand into the blades and pull the branch out. He is a second too slow. Green thumb? he thinks. More like no thumb.
The three dozen eggplants arrive, meticulously packaged, with each eggplant wrapped in foil. I line them up from smallest to largest. I worry that eating this many will turn me purple.
Is that possible? I ask the best friend, who says, Hmm. Then she says that human biology is very weird, but if I do turn purple, be sure to let her know. It would certainly make her day.
Her days are very long. There is feeding the baby, then playing with the baby, then feeding the baby, then putting the baby to sleep.
And you would think it ends there, she says.
But no, she must also watch the baby sleep and see the way her eyelids flutter during what we think is a very good dream.
The two of them visit monthly.