Things to Make and Break

by May-Lan Tan

  First U.S. edition published 2018

  Copyright © 2014 by May-Lan Tan

  Cover illustration © Carolyn Swiszcz

  Cover design by Christina Vang

  Book design by Ann Sudmeier

  Author photograph © Bettina Volke

  First published in the United Kingdom by CB Editions in 2014

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Tan, May-Lan, author.

  Title: Things to make and break / May-Lan Tan.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2018. | “First published in the United Kingdom by CB Editions in 2014”—ECIP galley.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018011504 | ISBN 9781566895354 (eBook)

  Classification: LCC PR6120.A46 A6 2018 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011504

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Legendary” first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, “DD-MM-YY” in Areté, “101” in the Reader, and “Julia K.” in the Atlas Review.

  The author is grateful to her mother and her father and to Siu-Lan Tan, Danny Kim, David Riding, Kevin Sampsell, and Gordon Lish. Special thanks to Emily Gould and Ruth Curry.

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  For Siu-Lan

  Contents

  Legendary

  Date Night

  101

  Julia K.

  DD-MM-YY

  Laurens

  Candy Glass

  Ghosts

  New Jersey

  Transformer

  Would Like to Meet

  Legendary

  He doesn’t really talk about them. At least, he never tells me anything I want to know, their hang-ups or what kind of pretty they are. He tells only half a story about each of them, and he tells it three times. Verbatim, as if he has it written on the cuff of his sleeve. Normally he doesn’t have two words to rub together, but when he does, something kind of flickers. These broken sparks and the three-times-telling make his exes seem mythical, crystalline.

  When he tells me about Holly for the first time, we’re at the movies sitting too close to the screen. We’re watching the trailers and he’s tracing shapes on the sensitive part of my wrist with his thumb. Every one of his exes has a thing—they’ve been molested or are a cellist or something. Holly shattered seventeen bones falling from a trapeze. She was wearing a cast and working in a library when he met her. Ten weeks later, when all the bones were knit, he finally saw her do her act. That’s when he dumped her. He doesn’t say, but I guess she must have looked too free and capable up there, swinging from the ropes. A girl like that could never honestly need you.

  We’re fighting and driving to the coast. His sister is marrying a guy he made out with at prep school, and we’re late for the rehearsal dinner because I put the car keys in my coat and then packed it. After being quiet for twenty minutes he tells me about Holly again, a way of making up.

  “Why do you like her so much better than the others?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s the only one with a name.”

  “That’s crazy,” he says.

  He has one of those desks with a rolly top, and in that square, shallow drawer on the right is a manila envelope labeled TAX PAPERS with naked pictures of all of them. I open it only because I know he would never name an envelope “tax papers”; he would have separate ones for the different kinds of receipts and forms. The photos he’s taken of me are still coiled inside his camera. At the time, he’d pretended it was a very spontaneous thing to do. I wonder why he thought he had to lie. Knowing what it was actually for would have made me want to do it more. I would have tried a lot harder.

  I study their loose-limbed, puppyish bodies like flash cards. Is the margarine blonde with Satan eyes the one who got sick from the smell of blown-out candles? This one, freckles the color of fresh dirt sprayed across the bridge of her nose, she’s the slow eater. Or she always left really long messages on his machine and used up the tape. Who could have raised show dogs and given him the clap? I hope it’s the expensive one with the cheekbones, who’s making a kiss-face.

  Holly is the only one I know for definite; she’s dangerous-looking with a muscly body, one arm a shade paler and thinner than the other. She’s the worst kind of pretty: classically, mathematically gorgeous. I’m surprised to find that she’s quite covered in long, white scars. Somehow I’d imagined the bones smashing inside her without any damage to the surface, but I guess there had to be. I picture the two of them standing on a bleached wooden pier, his arm wrapped around her, a choppy, salted wind ruffling her fawn-colored hair. He reaches under her sweater and traces his blunt fingers along those shiny ridges, the skin there impossibly silky. She is herself, unmistakably.

  I teach myself to smile in a more teeth-baring way, showing off the little space between the two in front. I buy sunglasses, sign up for a night class in life drawing, and start to wear black. I laugh with my head flung back, saying ha-ha-ha instead of making suction sounds.

  “Why have you started dressing like a Mafia widow?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I pencil in the mole beneath my left eye and sign up for two more classes: karate and Italian.

  I wear my own clothes to work, but with a vest on top that has the Superman logo on it. It’s meant to mean SuperCourier.

  “This is probably too many classes now,” he says when I deliver my karate uniform to the house. “Why didn’t you just have them mail it?”

  “It’s cheaper this way. I used the employee discount.” He makes a face at my motorcycle.

  “Can you get my sandwich from the fridge?” I say.

  He sighs and goes inside. I did have the uniform mailed to me, but then I took it into work and logged it as a delivery. It’s the best way of announcing things. He comes back out and gives me the sandwich.

  “This is very sticky,” he says. “What is it?”

  “Bread and honey.” I sit on my bike and eat while he paces around me.

  “How’s the art class, any good?”

  “It’s OK. I sit next to an old lady who draws only butt cheeks, week after week.”

  “What if the model is facing her?”

  “She still draws their butt cheeks.”

  He stops pacing. It’s very grown-up, the way he’s wearing socks and shoes even though it’s Saturday morning and he’s just at home.

  “I don’t get it,” he says. “I mean, if you’re going to sacrifice three evenings a week, you might as well take a real course, get a degree.”

  “I have a degree,” I remind him.

  He nods primly at the giant S on my chest. I look around for my clipboard.

  “I didn’t even know you wanted to be an artist,” he says, exasperated. “How are you planning to manage all these classes?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I tell him. “Sign here, please.”

  He does something with stocks and bonds, and gets a haircut every three weeks. He drinks bourbon from a glass instead of from the bottle. He wears the kind of shoes that need to be polished. Not a practicing Catholic, just chronic. Sleeps fetal. He’s not my type but he has large, dry
hands and a complicated nose with a deep dent near the top. I always think you can tell what someone is like in bed from the shape of his nose. And a knobbly Adam’s apple, the white-knuckle kind you can see rise and fall.

  He ties me to the brass bars of his sleigh bed. The guys I’m usually with barely have a box spring under the mattress. They own two appliances—a coffee machine and a bong—and a jumble of chairs. Furniture is something that’s just supposed to happen to you. He on the other hand goes antiquing. I’m doing things I’ve never done before, such as picking up dry cleaning.

  It’s short but thick, and when he pushes it up inside he doesn’t use his hands at all. He doesn’t look me in the eyes, only at my mouth. He takes me to his druggy work parties and steers me around from room to room by the base of my neck. When he laughs his happiness builds just like a normal person’s, but at the top his eyes go blank, as if there’s nothing there.

  I take the subway to night school. Lately it’s always raining so I can’t take the bike. Downtown, I switch from the southbound to the eastbound line. I run across the concourse, reaching the platform just as the train comes sliding in. The doors open to reveal a tangle of bodies, and I clock her immediately, that bone structure, the lean look in her eyes. As she brushes past me, everything snaps into place. I turn and follow her down the platform, watching her calf muscles flex.

  “Holly?” I say, and touch her elbow.

  She freezes for a second before turning around, like someone expecting to be caught. “Oh, I’m not her,” she says. Then she looks right at me and narrows her eyes. “But you know, everyone always thinks I’m the person they’re looking for.”

  We stand there, blinking at each other. She blows a tendril of hair out of her face and walks away. The train I should be on goes shooting past. I wonder if it’s true that I’m looking for Holly. I must be, the way I just ran after this girl without even thinking. What if she had turned out to be Holly, what would I have said? There are things I want to ask her, but I don’t know what they are. Yet maybe if I really were talking to Holly, I’d know.

  The rain makes night school smell like what it really is, a high school at night. It’s a teenage movie where everyone is at least thirty, lumbering down the halls and hunching around too-small desks. In Basic Italian I sit next to the woman who would play the best friend in the movie. She’s technically prettier than me, the heroine, but not sexy enough. There’s a coffee station set up at the back of the classroom, as if we’re in AA.

  When I get home, I go to his drawer and look at the pictures of Holly. They must have been taken in a hotel bed because there are light switches on the headboard. Her nose is slightly burnt, her scars and tan lines glowing. I pretend to slide his cigar fingers along their crests again. Her body is warm and crisp, pumped full of sun. We’ve never been on vacation. I practice her stubborn, innocent demeanor in the bathroom mirror; and later, when he’s moving over me, I think of the constellation of beauty marks peppering her stomach and the underside of one breast.

  During the break between gesture and long pose, everyone huddles outside in the rain to smoke except for me. The life models usually tie on their slippery kimono robes and nip out for one, too, but this girl perches naked at one of the desks and starts pawing through her bag. She wears two or three silver rings jammed onto nearly every finger and presses her lips tightly together, which somehow makes her seem fully dressed.

  I watch her examining her skin in a tiny mirror. I didn’t go to boarding school, and in college I roomed by myself, off campus—I don’t know what women are really like or how they live. I almost had a sister, but she died before I was born. She was ten months old and had something wrong with her lungs. I found out about her only two summers ago, when I was still with one of the box-spring guys and his apartment was being fumigated. I didn’t want to crash at his mangy friend’s place, so I flew out to see my parents. They told me on the last night over lemon tagliatelle.

  My father did the talking while my mother twisted a dish towel and looked out the window and the tagliatelle shriveled.

  “You could have told me earlier,” I said. “What was she like?”

  “I don’t know. She was a baby,” my father said. “She was always sick, so it was hard to see her personality. But she was cute.”

  “Very cute,” my mother said. “Friendly.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said. They’re hopeless at describing people in a useful way. “So—what was her name?”

  My father made a helpless gesture and turned to my mother, who shook her head.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “Now, don’t be angry,” my father said, as I stood up and pushed in my chair. “You have your own middle name.”

  I went into my teenage bedroom, where they keep their computer and all their vitamins, turned off the light, and stood in the middle of the room. I thought of the way my parents sometimes looked at me, glancing at a spot above my head and a little to the side. I crawled under the covers.

  In the morning my clothes were all wrinkly. I went to the den and found my baby album in the games cupboard. I lay on my bed and looked at the pictures, getting a creepy feeling whenever I saw the crib or the stroller. My father drove me to the airport. He took my bags out of the trunk and put them on a cart.

  “How could you?” I finally said as we went through the automatic doors. “Don’t you know what that means?”

  “It was a terrible time and we weren’t thinking straight,” he said.

  The life model twists up a stick of bandage-colored concealer and applies it with stabbing motions, using her ring finger to blend the marks. Now and then she licks her fingertip. I can’t stop watching her. I wish there were a channel on TV where all they’d show is women putting on makeup. There wouldn’t be any sponsors to donate special equipment; everyone would use their own stubby pencils and smushed lipsticks, and rub them in with spitty, grubby fingers.

  I’m sitting at his desk, slowly getting lit on the fifth of bourbon he keeps in a drawer. Holly fills my head like an annoying pop song. They must have met in this city. He’s lived here for fifteen years. And she has to be nearby, somewhere. No one ever leaves.

  His address book is by the phone. She’s on the S page, with eight or nine phone numbers scrawled beneath her name in alternating colors of ink, all crossed out except for one. It rings a few times and the message clicks on.

  “Hey, it’s Holly. You know the drill.” Her voice is soft and rough, a scraped knee. There’s a sharp intake of breath, then the sound of the tone. I hang up the receiver.

  In karate somebody hits me on the nose and it hurts so much I think it’s broken. It happens during the jumping jacks; we aren’t even sparring yet. My teacher is this exmilitary hard-ass who won’t let me sit out the rest of the class, even though my right eye swells completely shut and little droplets of blood and mucus keep appearing on the mats. On the subway, people wince and look away. I go to bed with scabs and snot crusted all over my face because it’s too tender to wash.

  In the morning the blinds are all lit up. He is inside me.

  “Hi,” I say, and start to move. He holds me by one hip.

  “Pretend you’re still asleep,” he says. “OK? Try not to move.”

  Later he showers and goes to work. I lie awake for an hour, then sleep all day in short, dreamless bursts. Everyone grows older except for me. Briars creep across the city streets, enveloping the buildings.

  Holly’s address costs eleven dollars on a website where they look it up from when she last voted. I bike across town in the middle of the night to stand on her tree-lined street. She lives in a lumpen, gray building tacked to a row of brightly sparkling ones, like a bad tooth. I squint up at the windows on the third floor, their swampy television light and the plants on the sills. I shuffle to the building’s entrance, and run my index finger over the cool buttons of the intercom. H SUNDEAN, it says, in slinky cursive on a strip of yellowing card stock. I peer through the glass sec
tion of the door at the metal mailboxes lining the narrow hall.

  The following day, between deliveries, I duck into the bookstore on Twelfth Street. I rummage around in the basement until I find a paperback that’s worn soft, the pages sprinkled with mold. Scribbled notes stuff the margins, spilling onto the typeface. On the first page in sloping fountain pen it says MR. CARL SPRING, and a date twenty years ago. During my lunch break I wrap it in brown paper and process it properly.

  It’s two-thirty in the afternoon when she opens the door, and her apartment is completely dark.

  “Oh,” she says, tugging the hood of a red sweatshirt over her messy, surfer-boy hair. She’s coltish in her cut-offs and bare feet, small and tired and pretty. Her face is shaped like a heart.

  “Are you expecting a package?” I say.

  She takes it, smiling to herself in an entitled way. When I pass her the clipboard, her fingernail scrapes my skin.

  “Sorry, I’m all—” She makes a vague gesture with her hands.

  I look at her tiny, bare nails and picture them making deep crescents in his back. I smile at her and give her the pen.

  She makes a face. “That cigarette just about wrecked me. God, I feel awful.”

  “Hey,” I say. “Listen. Would it be OK to use your bathroom?”

  “Oh. Sure.” She steps back and waves me through, and I notice she has a tattoo on the inner part of her wrist. I catch only a glimpse.

  The apartment is warm and airless, overly furnished but sort of empty, too. Nothing is out, not a photograph or a pair of scissors.

  The bathroom is full of ferns, and there are seashells printed on the shower curtain. I lock the door and touch the bristles of her electric toothbrush. They’re slightly damp. I inspect her toothpaste, her mint waxed floss and facial regimen. Apparently she has sensitive teeth and skin. In the mirror, I appear blank and marshmallowy, the way you do after too many magazines. Her medicine cabinet contains a blister pack of birth control pills and a sand-encrusted bottle of sunblock.