Helen picked up the plastic bag and held it to the light. ‘It’s fat,’ she said. She set her soapstone eyes on him. ‘They are good luck, you know.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘She could have given us something we could use.’
‘Yu means wealth,’ Helen said.
Jeff rolled his eyes. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But my mother doesn’t speak Chinese.’
She managed to buy the fish, though. Must have been from the sinewy man on a tricycle who hung around the end of their street. It was one of the many creaky cargo trikes that hawked goods and services to the neighbourhood: knife sharpeners, cardboard collectors, sellers of cabbages and, yes, pets. The pet man unstacked his tanks and buckets to make a stall. Guppies, tiny turtles, snails, sometimes small white rabbits. A glut of fish.
Of course his mother was too short-sighted to buy them a tank, so for the first few days Confucius – the name was Helen’s idea – lived in temporary digs, a plastic juice bottle with the top cut off with scissors, until Jeff finally acquiesced to its persistence and bought a glass fishbowl, a squat sphere that sat like a model planet on the counter, in the place where he usually dropped his keys. For weeks Confucius did laps around its planet, glowering at him. Reminding him. He hated it. Its eyes took everything in and gave nothing away.
‘Wow, look at all those fish!’ his mother had said. Jeff watched her lean over the stone bridge without actually putting her weight on it, because you can’t trust the buildings here, they’re not like American buildings.
‘Yeah,’ said Helen, ‘that really is a lot of fish.’
Jeff tried to catch his girlfriend’s eye to transmit an apologetic expression, but his mother’s round face was in the way, smiling at him. It was the third day of their visit and she was still excited, she was proud of herself, making an effort. He smiled vigilantly back. Helen didn’t look up. She leaned her whole weight on the bridge, bent over the fish; a wing of straight hair closed around the single eye of the camera. A hand came up to adjust something. When she rose, Jeff’s mother had moved across the courtyard to admire a stone dragon. It was ordinary, but she couldn’t know that.
‘I love this lion,’ she said.
‘Let’s go see if the arhat hall is open,’ Jeff said. The arhat hall was his favourite part of the temple. All those smiling statues, like a wax museum, and their hands full of symbols, animals and instruments. Something Disney about it, he’d planned on saying. Disneyesque.
He headed off, leaving Helen to round up his parents. It was hot in the sun and sweat was pooling in his lower back, under the polo shirt. He could hear Helen in conversation with his father, her kindness frothing out of her like over-boiled milk.
‘It’s a very nice camera,’ she said.
‘Actually, this model looks impressive, but it’s not all that expensive,’ his father was saying. It was a lie. The digital slr he’d bought himself last year was top-of-the-line, a ridiculous thing that required its own backpack.
‘See this setting? You know macro?’
Jeff cringed. Helen could have been a professional photographer, she was that good. He wished she’d risk more, believe in herself. But you can’t make someone else courageous.
The arhat hall was closed for repairs, and he found he had to wait for them by the entrance, standing with his hands in his pants pockets in the hot sun, the concrete car park stretching inauthentically in front of him, and his parents and Helen approaching with their cameras held up, like aliens with probes.
On the way out his mother wanted to buy slices of melon on skewers from a stall, and he told her not to buy from those guys, they only cheat you, but Helen didn’t hear him. She bought four of the sticks herself and handed them around. Too sweet, he thought, and twice what you would pay away from the temple.
The day Confucius died, Helen came home first, and when he arrived she was already sprawled on the couch, her shoes off, rubbing a toe that had been bothering her.
Jeff kissed her cheek, gave the foot a perfunctory pat, which excused him from a massage later, then got up to put his keys on the counter and check on the fish. She hadn’t said anything and he was ready to pretend to notice for the first time that it was dead. He’d been preparing expressions of surprise on the subway. Confucius was still floating on the surface, suspended there, staring at nothing.
She hasn’t noticed it, he thought. For weeks he had been cursing the fish, willing it to die, but he couldn’t actually take the step of killing it – it seemed too brutal, to poison his own mother’s gift, and he knew she would ask about it when he went home for Thanksgiving. Now he almost felt sorry for the fucking thing.
‘Helen,’ he said.
She had her feet up on the armrest and was unrolling her socks, straightening her toes. ‘Hmm?’
He wondered how long it would be before she noticed.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. He made a move to sit down again but she made no room for him on the couch. She just looked at him, totally self-contained, and then bent in half to touch her toes. She could reach right past them.
He had made a little calendar on the back of a cereal box so that they could cross off the ten-day visit, thought it would amuse her, but after four of the longest days of his life it seemed like the calendar was only helping slow time down. He wished his folks had stumped up the extra cash and stayed in a hotel. He took long showers to avoid them, he let the water run cold. When he turned off the tap he heard his mother’s nasal voice, asking Helen the stupidest questions about China, her horrifying attempts to pronounce a few basic phrases in Mandarin. Helen, softly spoken, had a voice that didn’t tunnel through walls. He could only hear his mother’s half of the conversation, which went like this:
‘I’ll never forget all those fish.’
Pause.
‘Do you eat those? Goldfish?’
Pause.
‘Wow.’
Pause.
He managed to get his parents to go out on their own for a couple of hours on a Sunday, promising to meet them for dinner at the gate of the Forbidden City, and when he had closed the door on them he cozied up to Helen on the couch, but she shrank away from his body.
‘It’s my parents, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re actually quite nice.’
‘Americans are so fake sometimes.’ He sat forward to untie his shoes.
‘I guess,’ she said.
When he thought of it after they had gone to bed, the fish floating there in its bowl, he should have flushed it but the plumbing here was so bad, he remembered they hadn’t had sex since before his parents had arrived, maybe even a couple of weeks before that, and he tried to put his arm around Helen but it slumped over her like a seal flipper and she flipped it back off.
‘It’s too hot,’ she said. ‘I’m not comfortable.’ And he waited for her to go to sleep instead.
They used to have great communication, he thought, it wasn’t as if there was much of a language barrier, her English was perfect, but since his parents had visited it was like they had used up their conversation at the end of the day, used up all their nice.
In the morning he found her drinking green tea and fidgeting with camera lenses, her busy hands right next to the fish. He pulled up the opposite stool and sat down.
‘Everything okay?’ he prompted. He glanced down at Confucius floating in his bowl.
She stared at him. Her eyes were a closed black aperture. He wondered how long she was going to go on like this.
‘I’m going to work,’ he said.
‘I’m just going to finish something,’ she replied, her head down, her hands mucking with the camera.
Alone in the crush of the subway he thought of something else his mother had
said, when they were at dinner. A local Taiwanese place, Helen ordering food for them from an English menu, his own attempts to be breezy disappearing into the noise of the restaurant. A confusing moment when Helen translated his order to the waiter, from his Mandarin into hers. His father looking through the day’s photos, peering into the view screen of the ridiculous camera. His mother passing paper napkins around, even though they could all reach them.
‘You’re very brave, you two,’ she said. ‘Having a cross-cultural relationship.’
‘I think they all are,’ Helen said.
When he came home the apartment was empty. He dropped his keys beside the fishbowl. On top of the water, there was something floating: a piece of card. He fished out a glossy colour photograph. In the photograph, Confucius was still alive. Its expression was so blank that it could have been a rubber replica. He shook the drips off and flipped it over. Nothing written on the back.
He tapped the counter, thinking what he’d tell them at Thanksgiving. He’d sit down with his mother and tell her that she shouldn’t be so naive. You can’t buy pets from those street guys, he’d say. They always cheat you.
The jungle will swallow anything
With her calves pressed against the warm concrete step, Mia listens to her mother’s voice. It would be close enough to understand if her voice wasn’t being tuned in and out by the roar of the highway like an old radio. Even so, Mia knows what is being said. Thank you gentlemen – yes, of course, anything for you, my darlings, and so on. Mia picks at a scab on her ankle and stares into the jungle across the road. Fake, fake, fake, she mouths, making only the tiniest of sounds like the child of an insect. A baby ant. She glances through the plastic sheeting into the shop to see if she’s been heard, but her mother hasn’t turned from the men, and the men never turn from her.
Her mother brings Cokes out to three of the drivers seated around a table under the Virgin. The round Coke bottles hugged under a breast, the drivers’ round middles balanced on plastic stools like those topple-toys you push and push and can’t knock over. All of it made from circles and spheres except her mother, thin and pretty, like a needle threading into the pattern. Like the spikes shooting out around the Virgin, which are as sharp as pins and make Mia think of the saguaro she saw when they went to visit her aunt in Chihuahua. That was the last holiday they had and it was before she was in school, so five, six years ago. Her mother hasn’t got time for holidays. She hasn’t even got time to complain about it.
The sun is going down behind the tangle of vines across the highway and the mosquitos come out to sing their tiny songs into the sweaty air. Mia stands and shuts the screen door and goes to her room. She folds her clothes, packs her books for tomorrow. She knows her mother works too hard. Seven days a week and late most nights. Instead, she is possessed by work. There are other kids whose mothers don’t work at all. She’s never met one but from books and television she knows they exist. They are big, smiling women with enormous breasts. Not like her mother, still so skinny, still so much like a teenager that the truck drivers all call her muchacha. Up all night and sometimes she even dances with them. It’s embarrassing.
On the weekends her mother sends Mia out to the highway to wave down the men with soft drinks and packages of fruit. Pretty little Mia, big eyes like her mother, a polystyrene box strapped around her neck, the weight supported by her hands. The trucks loom over her like moving buildings, shiny and noisy. Her shoulders get tired but the more she sells the lighter the burden. Her mother won’t let her work after school, only the weekends. Her mother says, School is more important, with school you can get out of here.
The money she makes on the weekends goes into a jar just for her. It pays for schoolbooks, shoes and socks, a pink plastic lunchbox. Other kids spend their pay on junk but she can take anything she wants from the shop. Her mother always says that Mia is good to help pull her weight because it’s just the two of them, they’re in it together. When her mother sees the drivers slip Mia an extra coin, she doesn’t take it away. There’s no reason to hide her tips from her mother, but sometimes Mia doesn’t say anything. Sometimes the drivers give her twenty-, fifty-peso notes. There is a small pile of these notes under the jewellery box covered in pink satin, which was a gift from her aunt. When she lifts it up to look at the colourful money she has a tired feeling in her stomach as if she has eaten too much candy.
Many of the drivers stop and come into the shop to eat and drink, and most of them buy the little packets of powder to stir into their coffee. Everyone drinks the coffee, there are jars of it on every plastic-covered table. But the powder is hidden away. Once a month the tall man comes to see her mother. Her mother closes the shop and Mia stays in her room listening to them talk in whispers. There is nothing between her mother’s room and her own but a thin wall. There are plastic sounds and tearing sounds and the smell of money. Her mother says, Mia, we are in this together, we have no secrets from each other. No secrets but the tall man.
The tall man will be back soon. Her mother is always anxious for a day or so before he comes. She moves faster, her voice gets higher, she turns into a whirlwind and then crashes and sleeps for hours.
Mia peers out her window into the dark where the insects are singing in a choir now, the sound as thick and tangled as the jungle.
She has been told it’s dangerous outside after dark, and she knows her mother means the highway, but Mia thinks also of the men in the jungle. Some nights she sees their shadows coming out of the bushes, hears the sounds of sucking and tearing, the zippers and belts. From her window she sees the men climb back into their trucks. She sees the lights of their trucks come on and hears them roar away. They are always gone before dawn.
Mia’s mama gives it to them, the boys at school say. Once or twice she has asked her mother if someone is there in the house with them. Mia, there is no one, it’s all in your imagination, her mother says. It’s just you and me, remember that.
The pact between Mia and her mother is as complicated as the spiders’ webs that stretch between vines and tree limbs in the jungle, which move in the wind and with the swing of the branches. Strong and delicate at the same time. Stringy and see-through and sticky as sugar.
After Mia goes to bed her mother doesn’t close the shop for hours, not until the last customer is fed, and sometimes the men sit around all night smoking cheap cigars and drinking beer, or pull up their trucks in the dark to order more little packets to stir into their instant coffee. They scratch their feet at the table, fart and belch, sing and grab her mother’s thigh as she twists by. The stink of cigars floats into Mia’s room and she can’t sleep. Even though the house is a separate building to the shop they are too close.Sometimes she gets up and peers through the plastic sheets into the shop. It’s always the same. Her mother cleans dishes, brings drinks, laughs at the jokes. Removes a meaty hand from her waist, wipes her own hands on her apron. She is always the same, giving everything until she closes and falls asleep in her clothes. Unless the tall man has come. On those nights everything is different.
The tall man is also very thin and he is the only man Mia has ever seen in a suit. He has come for as long as Mia can remember. When she was little, she once asked if he was her father. Her mother crouched down and made her face go old, with eyes hollowed out and skin grey. The way her pupils darted suddenly from side to side made Mia feel cold.
Your father has gone away, her mother said. He’s not coming back.
Mia didn’t like the old face of her mother so she didn’t ask again. Sometimes she thinks that the tall man is her father anyway. And sometimes she thinks that her father is dead.
Mia first hears about the vampires from a boy at school named Álvaro, who is fat and often in trouble. On this day he is in trouble for skipping class and coming back from the jungle with leaves in his hair, claiming to have discovered some secret Mayan ruin. It is a day after a long night at the shop and Mi
a has gotten in trouble for falling asleep at her desk. They are both in detention at lunchtime, shut together in a small hot classroom to write I Must Nots. After ten minutes the teacher leaves the room to smoke, and the fat boy slides over to sit beside her. He comes so close that the whole side of her is warmed by his body heat.
They say your mother gives it to them, he says.
Mia taps her pencil against the desk.
They say this, but it isn’t true, he says.
She looks at him then. His brown eyes are full and shining like the back of a beetle.
I know it isn’t true, he says. His bottom lip twists slightly and he glances at the door and back. It’s vampires, he says. She is protecting the vampires.
You’re crazy, says Mia. Everyone knows it. She wriggles away from him, hunches over her lines and presses the pencil so hard into the paper that the point clicks off. She brushes the tiny pile of broken lead onto the floor and it leaves streaks across her work like the claws of an animal.
I’m telling the truth, he says, catching up to her on her walk home. He is puffing and toad-ish in his oversized t-shirt and in the sun he squints so his eyes no longer shine.
Everyone knows there are no vampires, she says. Not in Quintana Roo.
There are, he says. I will show you.
You’re crazy, she says again, and runs from him, her feet light over the asphalt of the highway. By the time she is home she is so breathless that her chest hurts.
She doesn’t see Álvaro again for three weeks. His family takes him out of the school for a while. Everyone says it’s because he’s crazy and has gone to a hospital to have his head examined, but when he comes back he claims to have been at the beach. He claims there is a cousin who works in a hotel in Cancún. She got them a cheap room. For evidence he produces his sunburn, a small collection of seashells and a postcard of some flamingos standing around in grey mud. The other boys take the postcard from him, pass it around, and then tear it into tiny pieces and throw it on the floor.
The Rest is Weight Page 2