Things to Make and Break

by May-Lan Tan

  “The One. I can’t see a thing.”

  “At least you’re on the inside of the curves. You’ll hit someone instead of falling in the sea.”

  “How’s the place, is it nice?”

  “Gorgeous. Tufa stone, and salvaged wood.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We got a massive upgrade. They gave our room away, and then all they had left was a suite with a Jean-Marie Massaud bed. A Lipla. We have our own Zen garden.”

  “Stuff like that always happens to you.”

  She laughed. My sister laughs for longer than anyone I’ve ever met. No one else ever seems to mind. “We had lunch at the most incredible place. They served pear jellies and espresso sorbets between courses. Something about resetting the taste buds. Have you eaten?”

  “We just—grabbed something.”

  “OK, well. Love you,” she said.

  At a diner in Castroville, we sat by a window eating breakfast food and watching the sky turn pink and silver. You told me when you were a kid, you spent so much time in the water, all your dreams were set in swimming pools. Now you dream of the ocean. You surf every morning before class, and again at sunset. We left town on the 156, running onto the 101 beneath a bruising sky. Later I followed you into a sweetish mist. The city flashed blue and gold, and the lights on the bridge pulled tracers through the fog. Then hours of buzzing road, and green signs sizzling like ghosts.

  The redwoods glowed darkly in the aquarium light of the moon. I felt like I was driving across a dim, carpeted room. My phone buzzed and scuttled across the dash. I switched it to speaker.

  “Should we be doing what we’re doing?” you said.

  I peered through the back window of the van up ahead, trying to see your silhouette. “I mean, I think we can do whatever we want.”

  “Well, sure. But you know, our families are connected. It’s almost as if we’ll be in business together for the rest of our lives. Maybe we’re putting something at stake.”

  “I just don’t see how it will ever affect them. It’s not as if we’ll get carried away and make this into a thing.”

  “Really?” you said.

  “Well, because it’s bound to fuck up. I mean, we’re not them.”

  “Right,” you said. “You OK to keep driving?”

  “Fine. Coffee has me wired.”

  It was midnight when we pulled up in front of their building. We ferried the presents up in the elevator and piled them around the piano. Later as we sat on the L-shaped couch, laughing at the TV and passing a box of Cheerios back and forth, I thought I glimpsed a year or two of borrowing your sweaters and seeing you wear glasses at night. Your soft, shiny hair, clogging my sink.

  As soon as you put it in, the phone began to ring. It kept ringing. The sun was bright and the lights were on.

  “Their voicemail must be full,” I said.

  “Uh,” you said.

  “Should we pick up? It’s probably them.”

  You just kept bumping me against the wall.

  When you cut the engine, the music stopped. I could smell trees. It was night, but the sky above the dorm was blue.

  “Thanks for the ride.” I felt around for my bag on the floor.

  “Can we do this? Think we should try?”

  You almost touched my hair. I stared at the whitish knees of your jeans and then I climbed out and shut the door. For the first time that summer, the air was body temperature.

  I walked up the steps. There were sputtering fluorescent lights and people carrying stuff around in laundry baskets. It was too late to get my things out of storage. I fetched my key from the RA and unlocked the door to my room. I went inside and sat on the sheetless bed.

  By Columbus Day, I’d had two missed calls from you. A few days later, a pink plus sign appeared on a stick. I went to the store and bought another stick. Both sticks agreed. I phoned my sister and she picked up right away.

  “Oh my God, sister telepathy,” she said. “I was just about to call you. I’m pregnant!”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Wow.”

  “We’re not telling anyone for three months, not even Mom and Dad, OK?”

  “Sure, I understand. Hey, congratulations.”

  “Thanks. We think it happened on our honeymoon. Isn’t that neat?”

  “Aw. So neat. Uh, listen, can I call you back a little later?”

  “We’re going out, so maybe tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Great.”

  “Byeee,” she said.

  I put down the phone and covered my face.

  I had a scan where they hid the screen. I swallowed a pill. I sat on a chair in a pale blue room, drinking from a paper cone. I unstuck my thighs from the pleather and went home. I came back a few days later and pushed four pills inside. I lay behind a curtain, the music in my headphones sounding sugary and angelic. I bled into a tray. Someone came in sometimes to empty it. I tried not to picture a small red heart or tiny ribs or muscles. In the evening as I waited for the bus, you phoned. I didn’t pick up.

  I started calling my sister almost every day. I drove up to see her. I felt the bump. She read me stroller specs and detailed descriptions of what the fetus looked like. She told me it had fingerprints and eyebrows. We spent hours on the phone, holding names in our mouths, rolling them against the name you share with your brother. I went into stores and bought things and sent them to her.

  At Thanksgiving, she told me you’d been seeing someone. I gave her sharp bones and cellophane hair. Skin that burns. Over Christmas, your brother said you were in Costa Rica. I pictured you and her in jeweled waters, doing Eskimo rolls beneath the oncoming waves as you paddled your long-boards out to the line-up.

  Around Easter I received a letter from my sister. I slipped it in my bag and went to class. A few nights later I was sitting on my bed, writing a paper, when it fell out of the pages of my textbook. I opened it. It was a card with a photo of unlaced baby shoes on the front, an invitation to the shower. At the bottom, she’d scrawled in her boyish handwriting: IT’S A GIRL! (WE THINK).

  Tucked into the card was a Xerox of her latest ultrasound. All of the earlier scans had appeared to depict distant galaxies, but here, you could see the baby folded up, a hand curled against its cheek. My mind started flashing all the pictures that would follow this one. I saw them riffle across the bed like a croupier’s stack. I knew I was destined never to forget: I would always know how old, which grade, an approximate size. On the morning of the shower, I made my excuses. When the birth announcement came in June, I mailed a check.

  I’ve stayed in the city all summer, punching a till and swimming at the Y. On bad days I’m still afraid. I think the baby’s a ghost, a reproach or even a punishment for what I did, or didn’t do. On better days, I wonder if she might be a window into a parallel universe. A mirror in which fates are reversed. A card arrived last week: white, with a small white cross, an invitation to the baptism. That tiny wrench turned inside me just the same, but before too long the feeling went away.

  I fill the tank at a gas station overlooking Arcata Bay. I buy a soda and drink it sitting in the car with the door open. The service begins in an hour. I’m scared of seeing you, scared I’ll look into your eyes and you’ll know. Or worse, you won’t. They’ll probably force me to hold her and breathe her scent. I think I’m lucky. Most people never know exactly what they’ve missed.

  The water in the bay shines like ice. I pull the invite out of the glove box to check the address and a photograph flutters out. She has tufty, rockabilly hair and your triangular eyebrows. My defined cupid’s bow. She reminds me of my sister and me in our baby pictures, but you can tell she’s from a different generation. She appears more poised and person-like, more together than we were. She seems smart and modern somehow.

  Julia K.

  We met in the metal garden and smoked on top of the slide. It was usually dark, and in the dark her words emerged as a lit cortège, cutting the horizon.

  “When I grow up,” she said, “I
want to be a disease.”

  Language, as she deployed it, was neither a line cast nor a bullet fired. It was a catholic mechanism: the sharp twist of a pilot biscuit into the waifish body of a christ. A word, placed on her tongue, became flesh. One night it was almost morning, I could almost see her, every sentence a necklace she was pulling out of her mouth, tangled in smoke.

  “I want to be filthy with beauty,” she said, “loaded on stink and swagger. I want to be heart on bicep, balls in throat, with my best friend’s eyes in my pocket, and a flaming comet of hunger clutched in my fist like a pet rock.”

  She had a large, stretchy mouth and spoke like an X-ray, stripping every word to bone. “I want to be a jet-fueled mass of chrome and steel, circling the planet with an infinite supply of packaged almonds, missing no one, my strong, clean body rippling in the heat that rises from the landing strip, my little feet, wheels that never fail to find it.”

  “I want doll skin,” she said, “sticker eyes. I want to be a black flash of lashes against a desiccated white lie, stamped with a smooch. I want bendable limbs, high-heeled feet, and a plastic snatch.

  “I want to cut teeth. To break bones in the street and use the pieces to draw pictures with my blood on the sides of buildings. I want to be the city melting behind the glass, and I want to be the glass, inlaid with wire mesh so when it breaks it hangs together still. And I want to be the breaks.

  “But I know what I am,” she said then. “I’m like you: the sweet spot, the rough patch, the missing rib.

  “I’m the coyness, the wheedle, faked passion, icicle tears, small betrayals, the accommodating orifices, the warm welcome and the long way back. I’m the pout, the prettiness, and dreams of the real thing. I am hard knocks and lost loves. I’m just like a real person—in a movie. I’m how much it hurts and how much that’s part of it.”

  She finished her cigarette. I leaned in to taste her mouth. It tasted bloody and torn apart. When I smeared her against the slide, she was a true thing bursting open in silver pieces against the pale fresh silent playground.

  Later, I lit up and she stayed lying down. Each time I pulled on the cigarette, the cherry burned a short film of her face moving against itself, the way rain wriggles down glass. There was something horrific in it. I let my smoke rise, and then I fastened my belt and walked away.

  It was spring when I saw Julia again. She lived above me, crying in the bath and moving furniture at night in high heels, but I only ever ran into her in the playground across the street from our mansion block. I was happy to see her. I liked her golden eyes and big waves of hair, her candlelit skin. There was something deluxe and unfathomable about her form. It seemed in continuous, almost imperceptible motion, like a body of water. She said she’d been to visit her father, she didn’t say where. As she sparked up I noticed a raised pink button of scar tissue, the size of a pencil eraser, on the back of each hand. I wondered if she’d been away long enough for these to be new, and if not, why I hadn’t noticed them before. It had rained and the world was black glitter. I listened to the suck and pop of her lips on the filter, the sizzle of burning paper, and her delicate, agonized sighs.

  She invited me to supper. “To celebrate,” she said.

  “Is it your birthday?”

  “My anniversary.”

  “Ah,” I said, flashing on the way she’d arched her back and gripped the sides of the slide. “Happy anniversary.”

  “Thank you.” She blew a smoke ring and poked it.

  I was surprised. Julia exuded such an air of freedom and solitude that I’d assumed she was single, and possibly an orphan. We left the playground and crossed the road, splashing through the puddles.

  I could smell hot, scented oils. The apartment was dark and glossy, all leather and blood-colored wood, and she didn’t try to make it brighter. When I looked around, I felt as if I’d died and someone else had moved into my apartment. There was no one waiting, and nothing on the dining table except a salmon-pink plasticky paper cloth, its sticky sheen reminiscent of scar tissue. I began to suspect that the person with whom she shared this anniversary was out of town, perhaps even out of her life, and I was to be their surrogate. I wondered how far I’d be expected to deputize the role. She poured me a glass of watery wine to drink while she made Bloody Marys. She mixed in Angostura bitters and celery salt, and scrambled a panful of eggs.

  “I’m tomorrow’s girl today,” she said, dishing all the eggs onto a plate and sliding it across the table.

  The eggs were runny and transparent in places, yet I couldn’t be sure whether the black bits were pepper or charcoal.

  “Aren’t you going to have any?” I said.

  “I don’t eat eggs.” She retreated to the kitchen and returned with a jar filled with rollmops suspended in cloudy liquid, and a box of saltines. A woman in a black chādor emerged from the master bedroom, pushing a metal walking frame. Only her long white hands and almost mouthless face were visible. Her eyes shone like olives. She looked like Julia might look if she became an owl.

  “My mother,” Julia said, unscrewing the jar. “She doesn’t speak.”

  I said hello. The mother nodded demurely and wobbled toward the couch. She wore squeaky red pumps that ticked against the floorboards as she scraped the walker along. I realized this was the sound I’d been hearing at night. I decided it was her, sobbing in the tub. She switched on a true crime show and cranked up the volume.

  “You mean she doesn’t speak English?” I shouted over the blare.

  “She’s taken a vow of silence,” Julia said, plopping a rollmop on my plate. “She had a vision when she was pregnant with me. My father says she was just dehydrated, but I believe it was something.”

  “You’ve never heard her speak?”

  “She prays out loud.”

  I was starting to get a poppers headache from the scent of the oils. The TV blasted a detailed blood-spatter analysis and the pickled herring was gelatinous and hairy. I prodded the eggs with my fork. I looked at the wide, smooth bones of Julia’s face, her lips that always looked bitten, unable to grasp how such a beautiful woman could be responsible for this revolting food. I glanced at her mother, who was sitting there like a monolith. I wondered whether the cloak was a cultural or a personal accoutrement. I couldn’t place Julia’s ethnicity. She could seem Brazilian, Jewish, Jamaican, or Irish, as her mood shifted. She had been rather quiet since we entered the apartment.

  “What do you do?” I asked her.

  “I’m a laser technician.”

  I pictured beams of blue and violet light shooting from her fingertips. “What does that mean exactly?”

  “I remove tattoos, mostly. Sometimes freckles, hair, and port-wine stains.”

  This didn’t sound like it would pay well, and I wondered how she could afford to live in our building. I forced myself to take a bite of the eggs. They were lukewarm and slimy, and I tasted the grit of eggshell. I put down my fork, trying not to gag. Julia took my plate to the kitchen and reappeared with a paring knife and a bowl of figs. Finally, something she couldn’t destroy. I sliced one open and broke it apart. I’d never noticed before how fig flesh resembles putrid, maggoty meat. I dropped it on the table and pulled out my cigarettes.

  “We have to go outside,” Julia whispered. “She doesn’t know I smoke.”

  I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I could hear a slapping sound behind the door. When I pushed it open, I saw a huge black fish splashing in the bath. Something about its rubberiness, on top of everything else, made me want to be sick.

  I flipped up the lid of the toilet, but I didn’t want the fish to watch me throwing up, so I went into the hall and leaned my head against the wall. My stomach turned every time I heard the fish flop. I noticed that the door to the smaller bedroom was ajar. I could hear Julia banging around in the kitchen, so I nudged the door and went in.

  There was a desk, a chair, crammed bookshelves, and books stacked knee-deep on the floor. A ballet barre ran along the bottom of th
e window and the desk was piled with sentences handwritten on strips of paper. Some were arranged on the desk like refrigerator poetry. I noted the absence of a bed. I knew the apartment had only two bedrooms, but I resisted the notion that she slept next door with her mother. It just seemed too bizarre. I pictured her asleep on top of the books with snowy drifts of cut-out words forming a pillow and duvet.

  In the playground Julia held out her fists like she was sporting LOVE HATE tattoos. The smoke laced her fingers and I looked at her keloid scars.

  “This was seven years ago,” she said, as if she was showing me a photograph. “I was working as a pole dancer.”

  “No shit. What was your stage name?”

  “Proust.”

  I laughed. “Any special reason?”

  “I wanted to hear the announcer say it in his schmoozy voice when he introduced my act. Anyway. There was a patron who didn’t come in very often, maybe once a month.” She took a drag like a last breath. “Always alone. He was tall and slender, with half-European, half-Asiatic features that were so chiseled it seemed almost grotesque. Bright amphetamine skin and pointy black shoes. Instead of tucking fivers into my g-string, he’d slip me a long white envelope containing a cashier’s check. But first, he always reached up as if to shake my hand.

  “When I offered my hand, he slid his palm past mine and circled my wrist with his fingers. I felt a lift, like a drug rush, and he let go. No one was allowed to touch us, but since I appeared to initiate the contact, and because it looked so out of place, I suppose, the bouncers never stopped him. This went on for months. The mixture of need, anticipation, and gratitude established a bond. Sometimes when I was leaving the club or my building, I had the feeling I was being watched. One night the envelope was fatter and I thought he’d given me cash, but inside was a contract.”

  “A job contract?”

  “I won’t say how much he offered me, because that would be naming my price, but it was a lot. The contract had four clauses: I wasn’t to eat or to wear underwear or socks for four hours beforehand, or to press charges afterwards, and I shouldn’t be intoxicated. The final condition was a gag order lasting seven years. It expired today.”