by Weike Wang
He said, Chew with periodicity. Don’t just swallow it whole. Also, what is this idiom? To miss something by a hair?
I told him.
Ah, now calculate for me the width of that hair.
In the evenings, he said, Tell me the time. No, not like that. Tell me the time in arc second per second or don’t tell me at all.
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But even he had his superstitions.
Remember this, he said. A spider landing on your shoulder is good luck. A slug crawling across your hand is bad luck. Inspect your study site before you proceed. Sit down with care.
Dreams of teeth falling out mean sickness.
Dreams of white clothing mean death.
Dreams of fish means luck.
Unless they are dead fish.
Try not to dream.
Sharpen all your pencils with a knife. It is the best way to conserve lead.
This technique he has shown me. You want to know how to get through life? Here’s how you do it. You must keep your thumb on the blade and push down. You must push down forcibly. Your thumb will most likely hurt before the pencil is very sharp.
···
There is a new episode of the cooking show and a Chinese American chef is competing. She has electric-blue hair. She can do cool tricks with her knives. For these reasons, I drop everything to watch her cook.
All French food.
All delicious looking and expertly cut.
In between rounds, she talks about her upbringing. Her mother was very quiet. Her father was very strict. They expected certain things of her and cooking was not one of them. But here she is.
Ready to fight.
There is then a round of applause from the judges. Bravo, they say, to have found your own voice and rebelled.
But something about the way she tells her story frustrates me. Perhaps it is the broadness of her smile or how casually she dismisses them. And my mother is quiet like a lot of Asian mothers. And my father is strict like a lot of Asian fathers. And we are unhappy like a lot of Asian families.
I prevailed above all that, she makes excruciatingly clear. I am a chef and not a sheep.
It was the Chinese roommate who first said to me, We are our own worst propagators of those clichés. We are constantly throwing each other under the bus.
But I am also angry at these judges. Why encourage this of us, to constantly rebel, without understanding why some of us do not?
···
With each passing car on this walk, I have stopped to hear the whooshing sound it makes.
That is the Doppler effect.
·
What Tolstoy said about unhappy families.
···
Tell me about the baby. How much has she grown? What shape are her fingernails? The length of her lashes? Send me a picture of the mole on her back. Two moles now? Send me a picture of the other one as well.
The best friend says that the baby is much improved, able to look at the thing she is pointing at instead of just the finger. Able to sense the passing of time and wonder the same thing she is wondering. Where is the father, the husband?
But isn’t he always busy?
Yes, there is that and then there is something else she suspects.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that to determine the precise location of a particle will only speed up the particle. The same goes for a husband: to ask him exactly where he has been all night will only make him squirm and wiggle and dodge the question more. He will only disappear again.
So the best friend has stopped asking.
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In the college writing class I took, the instructor was very against writing what you know. Write what you don’t know or write what you want to know.
So I wrote about a girl meeting a boy and them living happily ever after.
It cannot be that easy, he said, all over my margins, in all caps. Put in pain and struggle and any other obstacle that you can think of.
I had the girl chop the boy up and hide him in the walls.
I had the girl chop the boy up and fry him in hot oil.
At least it is not bland, he said. Next time, before she chops him up, have them talk to each other. The boy must know why.
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For a few days, the best friend is reeling from the cliché of it. She would have first guessed the nanny, but it is a slightly different story. The husband has a new secretary. The new secretary has great breasts.
I must kill them both, she tells me. It is her newfound solution to everything. It is a surgeon’s approach—if malignant, then cut. If benign, then leave.
In his defense, he says that the secretary with great breasts was not a cause but a symptom.
What did you say when he said that? I ask.
I didn’t say anything. I threw the frying pan.
That’s good. Always lead with the frying pan.
·
Something from the news: in China, a girl newly single and unhappy about it sits in a KFC for ten days before being coaxed out by the police.
Four nights in a row, I have the same dream. The husband is placed on a conveyor belt and sent into Earth’s inner core. He comes back a bucket of fried chicken.
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It is one of those sunless weeks. For seven straight days, the sky is gray like elephants. And then on the eighth day there is fog. I wonder if the sun has gone to Antarctica. For a couple of weeks in December, the continent sees sunlight for twenty-four hours a day.
The best friend is a bit distant these days and slower to return my texts. The mind is busy processing what the body feels.
Are you sobbing? I ask over text, and she says no.
But I am not allowed to ask her that question twice in one day or she sends back an angry emoji.
On a rare day off work, she calls and says, Entertain me. No more talk of the husband. A different topic: What’s going on with your student? She and the baby are at a shopping mall. It’s noisy, so I try to change the subject—Did you say something? Are you there? Sorry, but I can’t hear you.
I don’t like him in that way is my go-to line.
Why should I like him? is my other go-to line.
···
One morning, while putting on my sweater, I realize that I have forgotten how to say sweater in Chinese. I panic all morning until I find my way to a dictionary.
Your face, my mother said, is entirely Chinese, so it is a prerequisite that you speak your mother tongue. Also, you are my daughter.
But what you don’t speak often, you will eventually forget.
So I have started to talk to the dog in Chinese.
But the dog is having an identity crisis as well. There are times when he thinks he is a cat. Convincingly, he does the licking of the fur and the coughing up of fur and the arching of the back.
Stop that, I tell him, and repeat what Eric had firmly believed: that all cats are assholes.
Don’t be an asshole.
The dog is also a sock lover. He has never been that interested in shoes. This, I am told at the dog park, makes me a lucky person. Each sock he finds he will ball up in his mouth and go from room to room presenting. He is doing it right now.
What do you have there? I ask, and must pry it out of his mouth.
It is not one of my socks. It is one of Eric’s.
Where did you get this?
He rolls over.
Stop avoiding the question.
He keeps rolling over.
I end up putting the sock on the nightstand where I can see it. Whenever I see it, there is that soreness again.
The shrink calls this self-punishing.
In general, I have a hard time throwing out clothes, even when holes appear. I cannot throw away that blouse. I wore it to a party. I cannot throw away those pants. I wore them to the dentist. That shirt with a gash down its side, no, definitely not, I wore it on a hike with Eric and then it caught on a bush.
A possible reason for this behavior. Wha
t are girls wearing when I start going to school? Limited Too, Abercrombie, Gap. These clothes are expensive. My mother refuses to buy them. Here is when I realize that every penny is saved. It is not the studio we live in—a closet. It is not the food we eat—never Applebee’s. As a child, I get new clothes so rarely that when I do, I put off wearing them. It then happens that when the big day finally comes, the clothes no longer fit.
···
In the middle of a sunless week, the best friend arrives unexpectedly. She is shivering when she arrives.
Just for a day or two, she says, until everything over there is in order.
They’ve been in the bedroom, she says, so the mattress must be burned.
In her hands, the baby, much bigger than I remembered. The eyes still black marbles, the skin now blush tint.
We skewer the husband first. He who cannot tie his own ties. He who will not change one diaper. He who smells of cigarette smoke, every day, toward the end. He who cannot cook worth a damn. We say damn quietly, while covering the baby’s ears.
That is not true, she says after she has calmed down. He changed a lot of diapers. He tried to cook some things. Macaroni and cheese. Dino nuggets.
What do I do? she asks.
Leave him.
What else?
I think that’s it.
I find the best friend asleep on the floor, curled up. She says the bed is too comfortable for what she is trying to accomplish.
Which is what?
To feel the hardness of something.
Is it working?
I don’t know. Everything hurts.
If she has cried, she has not done so in front of me. She has done so in the shower where it is hard to tell.
Together we watch movies late into the night. Only movies with long car chases and explosions and fistfights are allowed. Movies like Mad Max. We like Mad Max. The more machine guns the better. None of that sissy stuff, we say.
The baby is on the same page and has been nicknamed the Destroyer of Small Things. She takes everything out of our wallets and then throws it on the floor.
The best friend says to the Destroyer, Can you please go away for thirty seconds and come back a sweeter child?
The Destroyer nods while pounding our empty wallets flat.
The next day, they are back in New York City. There is no clothes flinging or hand-wringing or second frying pan.
Take nothing, she tells the husband, just vanish.
···
Proverbs about the sky:
Do not look at the sky from the bottom of a well.
If you are willing to take a step back, there is boundless sky.
I wonder if I should call him again, but it never goes beyond that. I try not to say his name or think it, but it’s such a common name. I go into a CVS and see the air freshener brand Air Wick and leave without buying anything.
Also, there is that famous Jimi Hendrix lyric; he said, Excuse me while I kiss the sky, which always gets confused with Excuse me while I kiss this guy.
In differential geometry, two curves are said to kiss when they share the highest possible number of contacts.
The first time he and I kiss, it is outside my old apartment building. He is waiting for a cab. I am waiting to be kissed. Our teeth clank because we are smiling too much beforehand. Then he blushes and tells me about Jimi Hendrix.
The ancient Chinese were also enthralled with the sky. They attempted to catalog every single star but showed little interest in planets.
At the edge of our galaxy, there is said to be a planet made out of diamonds. This was quickly disputed. It isn’t diamonds. It is graphite. The thing inside every pencil. The atomic difference between diamond and graphite is nothing. They are both made out of carbons. The carbons are just arranged differently.
The song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” he doesn’t care for. He knows why his former bandmates like it. A simple melody on top of a complex chord progression, a time signature change from the verses (in three) to the chorus (in four), which is a baller move, he adds, for 1967. But overall he finds the song kind of silly. Then the long-standing controversy over the title. Of course, they were high, he says.
Did you love him? the shrink asks.
I almost laugh at such a straightforward question.
But did you tell him? Did you say it out loud?
···
Aerial perspective is what happens when things in the distance look cooler, more blue. It is a way to create the illusion of depth in any painting.
How did we get on the topic of painting? I ask the math student, who doesn’t know either.
He brings me a plate of olives.
He brings me a bowl of nuts.
When I am not chomping on all of those things, we learn a little bit of math. To remember your trig, recite Soh Cah Toa. To remember you colors, recite Roy. G. Biv.
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The next day, I decide to paint my bedroom some kind of blue. It has always been white but the starkness is just now getting to me. I go to the store where we bought the fan and look around, but the paint colors are infinite and confusing.
What is sapphireberry?
What is Adriatic mist?
I stumble across a color called sea sprite and try to joke with the man behind the counter.
See spite. Get it? You know see, with two es. And spite, that angry feeling?
He says he gets it.
If Eric were here, I think he would have laughed.
In the end I like the sound of permafrost. I will surround myself with four walls of it. When the best friend comes to help me paint, she is less convinced. Are you sure about the color? Isn’t it already pretty bad out?
The Destroyer tries to help as well. She sticks a finger in her yogurt cup and smears a little on the wall, then looks at us deviously, then smears a little more on herself. By the time the room is painted, we have to get the yogurt-covered baby into the tub. But she is also anti-water. Once we do get her into the tub, we must speed-wash her before the thrashing gets too out of control.
Chinchillas clean themselves in a shallow bed of sand. They don’t ever go near water. Maybe the baby is secretly a chinchilla. We take her to an indoor playground with a sandbox and it doesn’t seem to be the case.
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From a TV documentary on Antarctica, I learn that you cannot work there unless you have both your wisdom teeth and appendix removed. There are very few full-time dentists. There are very few physicians.
Fifty-three million years ago, palm trees grew along the shores.
Now there is ice a mile deep.
A volcano that spews crystals.
No polar bears, just penguins and fifteen hundred different species of fungi.
I don’t think I am teaching him math anymore. All we do sometimes is look up videos of penguins doing clumsy things.
At the end of each session, he gives me a good-bye hug. He takes to putting his chin on top of my head during our good-bye hugs.
It feels nice, having some pressure up there.
Did you know, he asks, that oxygen is sky blue colored when frozen?
I did but say that I didn’t.
···
The husband vanishes. By vanish, she meant seek out one of your finance buddies and crash with him until further notice. Do not try to contact me. Do not call my friend in Boston and have her relay a message. He listens. He leaves her alone. For a while, she is not so livid.
But then a month later, in January, she sees the secretary at a doughnut shop, and, livid again, she digs through her purse for something sharp. Her stethoscope. Is it wise to kill someone with an instrument of health? She decides against it, storms out, runs straight to another coffee shop, and calls me.
How do you know it was her? I ask.
Because she has looked up the secretary extensively. She has gone through every online picture of her available. Not only great breasts, it seems, but also a winning smile.
I decide it is be
tter to listen and say nothing. The best friend has begun to talk in that hopeless, breathless way of the estranged.
The husband is gone.
He’s gone, she says.
What Mad Max said: The chain in those handcuffs is high-tensile steel. It’d take you ten minutes to hack through it with this. Now, if you’re lucky, you could hack through your ankle in five minutes.
When we got to that part in the movie, we agreed that Mad Max must also be married.
Silly things we now say to each other: Don’t be such a Debbie Downer. Don’t be such a Wet Nancy.
The last one I said by mistake when I was trying to remember that phrase about blankets.
Why are all the sad idioms about girls? she asks—a fair point, but neither of us knows.
···
The weather people were not kidding about the snow. Inches turn into feet and under the white mounds are cars and buses and doorways. Also, the air hurts my face. Why do I live in a place where the air hurts my face?
When here, the baby does not always like to sit still and eat her food. So I am trying something new. I stick rice on the baby’s face in the shape of palm trees and clouds. I make a banana slice sun.
The baby sits incredibly still for this and then, giggling, while looking at herself in a mirror, eats the landscape off her face.
But the trees are all white, says the best friend.
Ignore your mother. They’re clearly palm trees covered in snow.
On one hand I am playing tug with the dog, on the other I am smoothing out the baby’s hair. The moment comes when we can put the hair up into a one-inch ponytail and the best friend has a look of shock. This is the most incredible thing ever, she says, hands around the head.
This good moment is followed by a bad one, when we go shopping and the best friend passes a lingerie store. She stops and stares at the large posters of models.
This is all your fault, she says to one of the posters. You did this to him, you and your female wiles. Then she moves on to next poster. I follow and apologize to each woman in turn.
Sorry, my friend is not quite herself today.
You would like her normally.
I understand, all this is just a job.
When she is done with the posters, she sits down on the ground. Secretly, I am envious, she says. I want it all. To be smart and beautiful, physically beautiful. It is vain, I know, but that is what I want.