Either the Beginning or the End of the World

by Terry Farish

  Leap is my grandmother’s name. “Leap’s,” I say. “I am Leap’s granddaughter.”

  “Do you know what they do to Leap mother?”

  “Sophea, I tell you later,” my grandmother says.

  “What did they do?” I say. I know they mean the soldiers, the Khmer Rouge. Maybe old people have told this story before. I don’t remember. Maybe I wasn’t there. Maybe I didn’t listen. Today I listen. Luke makes me want to understand what happens to people far away in war. With Luke, I am a Cambodian girl. Someone brings me a Cambodian beer. I take a very long drink.

  My grandmother continues to slice vegetables for the egg rolls. I slice the fruit from the mangoes, very clumsily.

  “Like this,” she says. She guides the sharp blade with her thumb, lifting the skin along the curve of the mango. I continue, following her example.

  The storyteller begins. “Her mother, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge say she too old, she do not work. Do not feed her. If you feed her, we will not feed you, too. They starve her to death.”

  My grandmother’s and my fingers hold the knives with skill as we cut.

  “Every day she brush Leap hair until she cannot lift her hand. She still miss her.”

  This makes no sense to me. “Why didn’t you take her food when they weren’t looking?” I ask my grandmother.

  “The guard is a boy with an ax. He starving, too. They promise him rice if he will guard. His life or Leap mother. He can choose.”

  My grandmother stirs pork that sizzles in a black skillet.

  “Every day she do Leap hair. The boy watch.”

  I drink the Cambodian beer. “You are telling folktales,” I say, heavy-headed instantly from the beer.

  “Is not a tale. This happen.” The woman is angry. She shouts, “She beg for food. She say, ‘If I could just taste food one more time.’

  “Your grandmother bring her rice she hide in her scarf and the boy is sleep. Mother eyes shine with happiness to taste the rice. She eat it all, even if her body look like sticks and she does not stay alive. For this, she love your grandmother.”

  She said this very loud, a few inches from my face. I shut my eyes. I see the image of sticks on the ground, one stick holding a brush. And I have stepped out of this world. I make myself open my eyes and be here in this kitchen in New Hampshire even though I am spinning with the beer.

  I turn to my grandmother, who swiftly grates gingerroot across the tines of a fork. But her face is unchanged. It is as if she did not listen. Or that story is in her bones and tissues and the air she breathes and she lives in that other world all the time. I don’t know what to do with this. My grandmother touches my hair. I feel the pressure of her hand on my head and I spin. I fill the egg roll wrappers with the sliced cabbage, ginger, and a little of my blood because I am not fast enough for my grandmother and I have rushed the knife. I toss in the pork in small pieces.

  My grandmother folds them and drops the egg rolls into boiling oil. In the fryer, the oil bubbles around them. The smell makes a burning in my throat. “When I come,” she says, “I tell you more folktale.”

  THAT SONG

  Rosa has come because she couldn’t find me at school. I’m on the couch in my living room, the weight of my dog on my feet.

  “I feel sick, Rosa. I am sick.” But then I can’t remember what I’m saying.

  Rosa puts her arm around my shoulder. “Come to school,” she says.

  “How can I go to school?”

  “You have to pull yourself together.”

  Luke sent me a text. Can you come tonight?

  “I’ll make you some breakfast. And then maybe you’ll hear what you’re saying.”

  “Cambodian beer,” I whisper.

  “Is it good?”

  I shake my head and my mind spins and spins and spins.

  But I can see the words on my phone. Can you come? I would like to see your eyes.

  “Do I still live here? Where’s my father?”

  “You must have been really drunk,” Rosa says.

  “Must have,” I say.

  “How did you get here? You said you were going to some party. At your mother’s.”

  I’m forced to try and remember. “My mother,” I say. “I came with her. She’s here somewhere. Maybe she’s in my father’s bedroom.”

  “It must have started off bad,” Rosa says. “Rooming with your mother.”

  “She is just . . .” I pause. “. . . crazy.” I am beginning to come back to the house, to the light streaming into the back window, to my mother. And my grandmother.

  Or I could meet you on the strip. By the statue. I’ll read Kerouac to you.

  The morning sun lifts.

  “Sing me that song, Rosa, about the Spanish dancer.”

  But then a river of light blinds me. It is beautiful and dazzling.

  Rosa hums while she tries to get us going. I remember pictures of beautiful Cambodia on the wall last night with my grandmother. Is beauty still beauty when you are starving? No, not if the morning sun brings the boy hauling his ax to guard an old woman to make sure she is starving, since then he’ll get food to keep himself alive.

  “Do you think your mom and your dad are getting back together?” Rosa says.

  Again, I try to come back to the river where I live. I focus on Rosa in the kitchen. She wears a gauzy white shirt and turquoise hoops in her ears. “You’re such a romantic, Rosa.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Do you have any condoms?” I say.

  She is popping toast from the toaster, spreading it with butter. She knows this is a life-defining question. But we both know things we have not talked about. She nods.

  “Did I call in last night? God, I hope so. I think I did, before I knew I couldn’t drive.”

  Instead of my grandmother’s fierce bird eyes, I see her composed lips, how they gently meet. I think of how even her lips, her whole body, must hold the memory of the story her friend told.

  I pick up my phone. After work. Your cottage.

  CHECK THE WIND

  I had called in last night. Oh, Jesus, I’m relieved. I still have a job. At five p.m., wind cracks a branch from a tree and hurls it onto Woodbury Avenue. The temperature is so low, the truck groans. Streetlights show ribbons of ice in the trees. In my father’s coat, I pick my way over ice from the truck to the door of the shop. I hold the door from the wind and find haven in Dunkin’ Donuts with my hair pressed to my face.

  “You’re late,” Vincent says.

  I’m relieved to see his jowly jaw. “Sorry,” I say, shedding the slicker and shaking out my arms. I wipe my face with my cocked elbow. Thank god nobody is here, just Mrs. Bennett, who holds a small coffee cup with grace. The streetlight features one side of her face and silver hair, the other side in shadow.

  “I’ll make it up,” I say breathlessly. I smell the cold wool of my sweater as I pull it over my head. I say, “I’ll stay and close on Saturday if you want.”

  Vincent doesn’t answer. He goes back to the crossword folded on his clipboard. I hear the sound of the black fine-point marker scratching across the squares.

  “Thursday,” I say. Puzzles get worth doing on Thursdays.

  “Yup,” he says.

  Maybe I’m not here. Maybe I don’t exist. Maybe I am that ghost in the tree the Cambodians talk about. Except I can’t be that with Luke. With Luke, I am all body. I am nothing but my body. Fingertips. Shoulders, throat. My mind softens.

  Vincent zips along, filling in tiny black letters. I pull my hair into a ponytail and put on the cap. Wet strings of hair slip down. What story am I made of? I check the coffee pots and brew a new pot of dark roast. It is already black outside the window. Desperate people come in for coffee in the middle of storm winds.

  I text, Dad, how’s the wind?

  I check the other pots. The counter shines with jimmies and circles of milk under the fluorescent lights, and I wipe it down. My phone signals. Steady. You are in the storm. Stay where you are
.

  Yes.

  I know I’m going to Luke’s tonight. My mother has been at my house all day. I don’t know what her routine will be in the night, if she’ll stretch out under the afghan and sleep after dinner. I don’t know what she cooked for dinner. I don’t know what my father’s room looks like now that it’s hers.

  “Vincent,” I say.

  “Mm,” he says. He’s growing a sprout of a beard on his chin.

  “Do you believe things happen for a reason? You know, the belief that there’s a universe and we’re just here tonight in a storm, with all of our problems, but there’s some reason why we’re here. Some . . . I don’t know.” I make circles with my hands. “Some shape?”

  “You mean like fatalism. Over my head, babe.”

  “Don’t call me babe. Is that what fatalism is? Like things aren’t random?”

  A siren sounds from the snow-packed street.

  “You’re talking to a guy who grew up on Alice in Chains. But you know what I think? I think we use about a fraction of our brains, and there’s a whole lot going on we don’t know about, like a reality outside our frequency.” Vincent writes “100 percent” in tiny letters at the top of his crossword. Then “A+.”

  I almost ask him, “Vincent, do you write those messages about your lost love on the seawall?”

  - - -

  At Rye Cottages, I check the wind in a stand of birch trees like I always do when my father heads into the sea, the unknown. Winds are building. Branches are swaying. I worry because now the electric wire begins to whistle. Could be gusting to thirty knots off shore. But I’m here.

  LEAVE YOUR SLEEP

  I changed to my jeans and sweater after work, same black lace-up boots. I put on eyeliner, green, all around, which is how I picture the Spanish dancer. I am someone different tonight. Will life continue its normal progression at school at seven thirty in the morning? And will I continue?

  Luke is bundled into a padded olive-drab jacket.

  “Let’s walk,” he says, not looking at me.

  “The wind bends you sideways,” I say.

  He touches my hand. My hand.

  “I’ll show you the boat I’m planning to go fishing on.”

  “I don’t go on boats,” I say. “I don’t go on water.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve always been afraid of water.”

  He doesn’t question this. He doesn’t say my fear is unreasonable, just a phobia—here are ten steps to conquer your fear. I like how I say something, and he listens—he accepts it. What would he do if I told him the story about starving a woman? If I could find the words to repeat it. My great-grandmother. But he is the only one I could imagine telling this terror to. Maybe because what he did is raw in his eyes.

  I glance at Luke as we walk. He doesn’t wear a hat, and the wind whips his hair.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” he says.

  I am uneasy to hear. But I lean my head in to him in the wind that rushes us forward.

  “I’ve been out a few months, back from Afghanistan longer, but every night, I’m there,” he says. “Every night I’m on the same patrol. Every night.” He shouts the words in the wind, and somehow it makes them more impersonal. More okay to say. He puts his bare hand on the metal of a guardrail that I know could take off a layer of skin, but he pulls his hand away and does not even grimace. “My head keeps me playing out scenes, trying to change the end,” he says. “With your father I was too busy to think.” The words are stark in the cold air as we march. “This kid dies. I dream it over and over and over.”

  We have reached the road before the harbor. I turn down in. He follows. We come to a house with a glassed-in porch facing the breakwater. The fishing boats rock at their moorings across from the breakwater. We hear the steady horn of a buoy. The cold seems to free him to talk. A cocoon of cold.

  “You got to be fast when you get them out. No time to stop. No time to ask. No time to say, ‘Fuck, I don’t know what to do.’ You can never hesitate. This guy’s heart will quit. You’re gonna lose him.

  “Sometimes I dream I go in ten times, a hundred times. Every time I think this time I’ll save him . . . give me one more time. The kid is screaming.”

  “You mean a child?”

  “No, young kid, eighteen, a soldier.”

  I imagine the fear of closing my eyes to try to sleep when it means you are going to live that again, that second of the possibility that you could save him. Someone is screaming. I stand very close so I can listen. At the same time I remember. I remember, very young, waking in my mother’s house and someone is screaming. It woke me and I raced to her bed. I needed to keep her, don’t leave me alone. Did we sit in the dark in a huddle, my mother who was screaming and me, and I pointed my finger for her to look at the moon?

  Beyond the jetty, Luke and I see the fishing boats jostling and banging in the wind. One would be the boat Luke’s going out on.

  I say, “I’d go on a boat if I could. I’d fish with my father.” I want to talk about the boat.

  “Every second,” he says, “you got to know what to do. I don’t have any respect for a person who . . . there’s no time to say, ‘Fuck, what’s next?’ Your father’s like that, he always knows, you and your father.” He is slowing down. The words start slowing down. How does he know me?

  The wind shoves us. And under the black sky I grab his hand and we race on the edge of the icy road, piercing the snow with our boots. We race back to Luke’s cottage.

  We stand in the dark inside his door.

  “Did I scare you?” he says.

  “No.”

  Around us is silence.

  The cottage’s heat makes me ache as I begin to thaw. I see my grandmother’s eyes. I feel her brushing my hair.

  Luke takes my hands, warms them in his bare hands that are somehow warm. “Some things you shouldn’t know.”

  He takes off my coat, unlaces my boots. I feel his fingers carefully unknot each lace while I lean against the door, my palms pressed into the cold wood.

  His touches my face. I don’t decide what to do in my head so much as in my body.

  I step in to him, and his breath is warm on my cheek.

  We stand in the pale light scattered by frost on the window. I feel his hips on mine. I let my hands wrap around him and hold him. He is so still that I think we will explode. I am pressing back, pressing into him. He holds me slightly away. We breathe.

  Then he fits his body together with mine. He finds my lips and kisses me. Slow and deep and rocking and aching. And I am transformed, like the seal who becomes a woman.

  I return his kiss in the way he teaches me, and it is as if we are discovering the universe.

  “Jesus,” I whisper. And he laughs and we fall down onto a couch that squeals and kills us with its springs. But I am too far gone with kissing. The discovery of kissing. And his body. And mine.

  - - -

  In exhaustion, he had fallen asleep on the bumpy couch. He whispers directions in my ear. “Hold on. You just got the good stuff. You’re the braveheart guy. As soon as they drop the line, you’re going up. Buddy!” Now he shouts the name Buddy.

  I stand. “Luke, you’re dreaming!” I say. “Luke!”

  Luke jumps from the couch. He lets out a moan like an animal. And then, “Aw, god.” He’s catching his breath. His black hair falls over his eyes.

  I see something on his bedside table. My tiger’s eye shines. My ring. It had been in his shirt pocket. But what time is it? I have to get out of here.

  “I never know where I am. Just keep talking to me. Are you okay?” He is alarmed. “Christ, I didn’t hurt you?”

  “You kissed me,” I say. “I kissed you. I never even did that with someone before.” I wish I hadn’t said it. I sound like a child.

  “I thought— Jesus, I’m sorry,” he says. “I startle bad. Sometimes if I sleep I wake up and we’re under attack.”

  “You were just talking,” I say. “I was Buddy.
You called me Buddy.” I feel the ring of the condom in my hip pocket. Who am I? “I’ll bring rice.” I’m putting on my coat. “Rice is good for nightmares.” How do I know this? “With ginger. Ginger is for pain. I’ll bring gingerroot to get through the night.”

  I am telling remedies that somehow I know.

  He is sitting on the edge of the bed, his head bent into his hands. His shoulders are so tight, I think if I touch him, he would snap like a wire bearing the weight of one of the tankers from Romania that come into the harbor.

  “Turmeric is also for pain,” I tell him. “Garlic for earaches.” I pull on my boots.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  I try to think of what I am. I say, “I never wanted to be with anybody before.”

  He sighs. I sit tight beside him.

  “I’m seeing a mess of ginger trees in here,” he says. His voice is husky.

  I rest my chin in the curve of his neck. We fit together.

  THEY WILL SEND YOU BACK

  I had not called my mother. I am used to my father leaving at all hours to go fishing. It never mattered when I came home, though I always came. Until Luke.

  I slip in the door past the stack of gear by the house. It’s midnight. I almost trip over Pilot, who is right by the door, as if she is on guard. As if she needed to warn me. She whines, and I hear her tail beat on the floor. I kneel to stroke her. She paces from me to my father’s bedroom door. The house seems like someone else’s house. It smells like someone else’s house. Their stuff smells different from my father’s and mine.

  I stay on the floor with my dog, not wanting to go farther. I belong more with Luke than here in what should be my own house. I am so tired, though, and want to climb the stairs to my bed.

  I think my mother is asleep in the bedroom, but she calls out. “Would you help me turn over?” she says. “Where have you been?” I force myself to enter the room. I lean beside the bed, and she wraps her fingers around my arms above the elbows. She pulls until she is on her side. “I can’t sleep on my back or my belly. He’s been kicking all night.”

  “Shhh, Mom, now you’re on your side. Go to sleep.”