by Anthology
Monica leaned into his shoulder, a whispered breath in his ear. “Why are we here, baby? Isn’t the Statue of Liberty next on the itinerary?”
Anthony turned his head slowly from side to side, both negating and trying to take in each of the faces as they went past. He tried to imagine each one forty years older, to match them to the face he had argued with years ago. His heart twisted more with each small wave of people that passed. He was only able to see a few of them. There were too many—the ferry was emptying too fast.
They both swiveled at a joyful cry. A man, still in dirty work clothes gathered up a woman and child into his arms. The woman was speaking fast, high, excited, and then was stopped by the man’s passionate kiss. A small wordless sound escaped Anthony’s lips, his mind filled with memories of his father returning from business trips.
Monica looked at Anthony, then at the family, and then at Anthony again. He felt the wetness in his eyes, a tear running down his left cheek. He watched her piece together the snippets of his story, shared over coffee and pillows during their engagement. Her eyes widened, mouth shaping into a small O.
“Your grandfather,” she said.
Anthony nodded, wiping away the tears from both cheeks. There were still a few people getting off the boat.
“The records say he was here. I haven’t seen him yet,” he said, gaze roving back across the faces. She punched his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Monica stepped in front of him, pressing closer. The lavender of her perfume mixed with the lingering antiseptic scent. She grabbed his chin, forcing him to look at her. “Talk to me, husband.”
Anthony closed his eyes, listening to the waves, the seagulls. The crowd was thinning; he could pick out individual voices, words in different languages. He took a deep breath, willing the dark despair back down his throat before opening his eyes.
“Talk to me, baby,” she said. “Let me in your head.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Anthony looked past her face, past the sunlight in her hair to the ferry beyond.
“Bullshit.” Anthony’s attention snapped back to her. Her cheeks burned red, the light flashed in her eyes. “It does matter. You brought me here, you chose this for our honeymoon, and you didn’t tell me the real reason why.”
It sounded stupid as he said it. “I thought you would be mad.”
“Jesus,” she whispered, pulling away and turning to look back at the boat. “I want to hold you and slap you at the same time.”
The few immigrants who remained clutched multilingual handbills promising work while following better dressed men into the city. Anthony slowly reached out to her. When his hand brushed the soft hair on the side of her neck, she tensed, and then leaned back into him.
Her voice was soft. “This is your grandfather who had the stroke, right?”
“Yeah,” Anthony said. “I was an idiot, arguing with him over stupid things. Probably sent his blood pressure through the roof. Caused it.”
Monica slid under his arm until she was facing him again. “Good to know some things don’t change,” she said smiling, and kissed his cheek.
Anthony pulled her close and spoke into her hair. “They’re raising the ramp now. I missed him. I only know he was on this ferry, then in the mines two weeks later.” He sighed. “We only have a few hours left before we have to go.”
Monica kissed him again. “We can finish the tour. We can just go to that speakeasy, baby, and try to enjoy ourselves.”
Anthony tried to smile as they turned away from the dock. “This is the past, and I have to concentrate on the present, right?”
The alley outside the club stank of piss and nausea. Inside, it was clean and glittering. The jazz quartet’s jackets shone silky blue, and waiters brought gin in teacups to the tables. Cigarette smoke hung in a low cloud over the dancing crowd.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Monica asked when the music paused.
“Relax,” Anthony said. “There’s no raid here tonight. They checked that when they made up the itinerary.”
With a musical slide of notes, the trumpet player led the band into another song. A young woman, hair bobbed and hose turned down, danced past their table. Her arms and legs flew in a frantic Charleston.
Monica drank the rest of her gin in a quick motion. “C’mon baby,” she said, grabbing his hand. “Let’s dance.”
Despite the month of lessons at home, Anthony’s limbs did not want to cooperate at first. A live band and a busy dance floor just seemed different from the living room floor and old recordings. But after a few missteps and one slightly mashed foot, he started to feel his body relax into the music. Monica’s mouth had broken into a huge grin as their hands flitted from knee to knee.
Then Anthony saw him.
The busboy was clearing a table, as awkward as Anthony had originally felt on the dance floor. Anthony stumbled, his limbs suddenly numb and unresponsive. The earliest pictures of his grandfather had not prepared him for how much the young immigrant would resemble the man he had grown up with. The wood floor banged into Anthony’s knee, a sharp spike of pain sweeping aside the rest of his confusion.
“Are you okay?” Monica asked as the band finished the song.
“He’s here,” he said, gesturing to the busboy. Monica glanced over while Anthony picked himself up. “I’m going to talk to the owner.”
A ten dollar bribe and ten minutes later, Anthony watched confusion ripple across his grandfather’s face. The stern man he expected was not there. The lines, the weariness from the mines, had not yet appeared. He was just a boy, alone in a new land, summoned away from his new job by a tip for more money than he would make in a week.
“How can I help you?” his grandfather said in his thick accent.
Anthony opened his mouth to speak, but his chest and throat tightened around the words. Monica spoke into his silence. “Are you Antonio Marinelli?”
His grandfather’s eyes widened. “I am he. Who are you?”
Anthony felt the vibration in his pocket. Monica looked at him a second later; her recall device had vibrated its five-minute warning to her, too. Their vacation was nearly over. Anthony took a large drink from the teacup.
“What are your plans, Mr. Marinelli?” he asked.
His grandfather took a long look at Anthony, and then laughed. “Plans? I have a room I share with five men, and they say we are lucky! The padroni get me a room, this job, but they want me to work more. They tell to get me to go work in the mines, but . . .” His grandfather sank back in the chair. “Is it worth it? Perhaps I return to Italy soon instead. America could be a mistake.”
The recall vibrated again. Three minutes. Anthony covered his grandfather’s left hand with his own. “It will be worth it, I swear. All of it.”
His grandfather’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know me?”
Anthony kept his eyes locked with his grandfather. He spoke fast, hoping the man’s English could keep up.
“It will be hard. After you leave the mine, when you think you are done with work and children, an ungrateful child will be in your home.”
His grandfather tried to pull back, crossing himself with his free hand. “Una maledizione!” he whispered.
Anthony held tight. “No curse. You will think this child is a failure. He will be too stupid to appreciate you. One day, though, he will be successful. He would have made you proud. He will realize how much you meant to him.” His grandfather stopped pulling his arm away, instead leaning toward Anthony. “But by then, it will be too late to tell you.”
His grandfather lapsed into muttered Italian again for a moment, and then said, “Are you an angel? A demon?”
“I am no demon, Nonno.” Anthony said. The room began to fade as his recall device pulled him back through the centuries. The music of the band faded, too, sounding less like a live band and more like a record played long ago.
Anthony threw himself on the bed, and then glared back at his grandfather through his bangs. The old man
looked small next to the oversized black light posters, his starched white shirt and teeth glowing.
“You cannot go out with them, Anthony. You are grounded. They are bad boys, and you cannot go with them.”
The ancient jazz from his grandfather’s record player in the living room was yet another way the old man was behind the times.
“You don’t understand! You can’t understand. You’re not even from this country. You don’t get it!”
Anthony stared at his headboard, not wanting to even give his grandfather the satisfaction of eye contact. But out of the corner of his eye, Anthony saw the old man smile a little, his lips curving into the words, “You’re welcome.”
Anthony shook his grandfather’s hand one last time. “Thank you,” Anthony said.
And they were gone.
MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER
Ken Liu
Ten:
Dad greeted me at the door, nervous. “Amy, look who’s here?”
He stepped aside.
She looked exactly the way she did in the pictures hung everywhere in our house: black hair, brown eyes, smooth, pale skin. Yet she also felt like a stranger.
I put down my book bag, unsure what to do. She walked over, leaned down, and hugged me, first loosely, then very tight. She smelled like a hospital.
Dad had told me that the doctors had no cure for her sickness. She had only two years left to live.
“You’re so big.” Her breath felt warm and tickly on my neck, and suddenly, I hugged my mother back.
Mom brought me presents: a dress that was too small, a set of books that were too old, a model of the rocket ship she rode in.
“I was on a very long trip,” she said. “The ship went so fast that time slowed down inside. It felt like only three months.”
Dad had already explained it all to me: this was how she would cheat time, stretch out her two years so that she could watch me grow up. But I didn’t stop her. I liked listening to her voice.
“I didn’t know what you would like.” She was embarrassed by the gifts that surrounded me, gifts that were meant for another child, the daughter of her mind.
What I really wanted was a guitar. But Dad thought I was too young.
If I had been older, I might have told her that it was all right, that I loved her gifts. But I was not yet so good at lying.
I asked her how long she would stay with us.
Instead of answering, she said, “Let’s stay up all night, and we’ll do everything Dad says you can’t do.”
We went out and she bought me a guitar. I finally fell asleep at seven in the morning in her lap. It was a fantastic night.
When I woke up she was gone.
Seventeen:
“Why the fuck are you here?” I slammed the door in my mother’s face.
“Amy!” Dad opened the door again. Seeing him next to my mother, still twenty-five, still exactly the same woman from the pictures, I suddenly realized how old he had grown.
He was the one who held me when I was scared out of my wits by the blood I found in my panties. He was the one who, red-faced, mumbled to the store clerk to beg her to fit me for a bra. He was the one who stood there and held me while I screamed at him.
She has no right to dip back into my life once every seven years, like some fairy godmother.
Later, she knocked on my bedroom door. I stayed in bed and said nothing. She came in anyway. She had crossed light years to get here, and a plywood door wasn’t going to stop her. I liked that she pushed her way in to see me and I also hated it. It was confusing.
“That’s an elegant dress,” she said. My prom dress was hanging from the back of the door. It was elegant and cost me half my savings, but I had torn it near the waist.
After a while, I turned around and sat up. She was in my chair, sewing. She had cut a guitar-shaped piece from her own silver dress and patched it over the tear in mine. It was perfect.
“My mother died when I was a little girl,” she said. “I never got to know her. So I decided that I would do something different when I . . . found out.”
It was strange to hug her. She could have been my older sister.
Thirty-eight:
Mom and I sat together in the park. Baby Debbie was asleep in the stroller, and Adam was with the other boys by the jungle gym, screaming with joy.
“I never got to meet Scott,” she said, apologetic. “You weren’t dating last time I visited, during grad school.”
He was a good man, I almost said. We just grew apart. It would have been easy. I had been lying for so long to everyone, including myself.
But I was tired of lying. “He was an ass. It just took me years to admit it.”
“Love makes us do strange things,” she said.
Mom was only twenty-six. When I was her age, I had been full of hope too. Could she really understand my life?
She asked me how Dad had died. I told her that he went peacefully, even though it wasn’t true. There were more lines on my face than on hers, and I felt that I needed to protect her.
“Let’s not speak any more of sad things,” she said. And I was angry with her for being able to smile and I was also glad that she was there with me. It was confusing.
So we spoke about the baby, and watched Adam play until it was dark.
Eighty:
“Adam?” I ask. It’s hard for me to turn the wheelchair, and everything seems so dim in my eyes. It can’t be Adam. He’s been really busy with his new baby. Maybe it’s Debbie. But Debbie never visits.
“It’s me,” she says, and squats down before me. I squint: she looks the same as always.
But not exactly the same. The smell of medicine is stronger than ever, and I can feel her hands are shaking.
“How long have you been traveling,” I ask, “since you started?”
“Two years and counting,” she says. “I’m not leaving again.”
I’m sad to hear this, and yet I’m also happy. It’s confusing.
“Was it worth it?”
“I got to see less of you than most mothers do, but also more.”
She pulls up a chair next to me, and I lean my head on her shoulder. I fall asleep, feeling very young and knowing that she’ll be there when I wake up.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
Nalo Hopkinson
“Whatcha doing, Kamla?” I peer down at the chubby-fingered kid who has dug her brown toes into the sand of the beach. I try to look relaxed, indulgent. She’s only a child, about four years old, though that outsize head she’s got looks strangely adult. It bobs around on her neck as her muscles fight for control. The adoption centre had told Babette and Sunil that their new daughter checked out perfectly healthy otherwise.
Kamla squints back up at me. She gravely considers my question, then holds her hand out, palm up, and opens it like an origami puzzle box. “I’m finding shells,” she says. The shell she proffers has a tiny hermit crab sticking out of it. Its delicate body has been crushed like a ball of paper in her tight fist. The crab is most unequivocally dead.
I’ve managed to live a good many decades as an adult without having children in my life. I don’t hate them, though I know that every childless person is supposed to say that so as not to be pecked to death by the righteous breeders of the flock. But I truly don’t hate children. I just don’t understand them. They seem like another species. I’ll help a lost child find a parent, or give a boost to a little body struggling to get a drink from a water fountain—same as I’d do for a puppy or a kitten—but I’ve never had the urge to be a father. My home is also my studio, and it’s a warren of tangled cables, jury-rigged networked computers, and piles of books about as stable as playing-card houses. Plus bins full of old newspaper clippings, bones of dead animals, rusted metal I picked up on the street, whatever. I don’t throw anything away if it looks the least bit interesting. You never know when it might come in handy as part of an installation piece. The chaos has a certain nest-like comfort to it.
Gentl
y, I take the dead hermit crab in its shell from Kamla’s hand. She doesn’t seem disturbed by my claiming her toy. “It’s wrong,” she tells me in her lisping child’s voice. “Want to find more.”
She begins to look around again, searching the sand. This is the other reason children creep me out. They don’t yet grok that delicate, all-important boundary between the animate and inanimate. It’s all one to them. Takes them a while to figure out that travelling from the land of the living to the land of the dead is a one-way trip.
I drop the deceased crab from a shaking hand. “No, Kamla,” I say. “It’s time to go in for lunch now.”
I reach for her little brown fist. She pulls it away from me and curls it tightly towards her chest. She frowns up at me with that enfranchised hauteur that is the province of kings and four-year-olds. She shakes her head. “No, don’t want lunch yet. Have to look for shells.”
They say that play is the work of children. Kamla starts scurrying across the sand, intent on her task. But I’m responsible to Kamla’s mother, not to Kamla. I promised to watch the child for an hour while Babette prepared lunch. Babs and Sunil have looked tired, desperate and drawn for a while now. Since they adopted Kamla.
There’s still about twenty minutes left in my tenure as Kamla’s sitter. I’m counting every minute. I run after her. She’s already a good hundred yards away, stuffing shells down the front of her bright green bathing suit as quickly as she can. When I catch up with her, she won’t come.
Fifteen minutes left with her. Finally, I have to pick her up. Fish-slippery in my arms, she struggles, her black hair whipping across her face as she shakes her head, “No! No!”