Cathy Song

The sky has been dark for many years. My skin has become as damp and pale as rice paper and feels the way mother’s used to before the drying sun parched it out there in the fields. Lately, when I touch my eyelids, my hands react as if I had just touched something hot enough to burn. My skin, aspirin colored, tingles with migraine. Mother has been massaging the left side of my face especially in the evenings when the pain flares up. This morning her breathing was graveled, her voice gruff with affection when I wheeled her into the bath. She was in a good humor, making jokes about her great breasts, floating in the milky water like two walruses, flaccid and whiskered around the nipples. I scrubbed them with a sour taste in my mouth, thinking: six children and an old man have sucked from these brown nipples. I was almost tender when I came to the blue bruises that freckle her body, places where she has been injecting insulin for thirty years. I soaped her slowly, she sighed deeply, her eyes closed. It seems it has always been like this: the two of us in this sunless room, the splashing of the bathwater. In the afternoons when she has rested, she prepares our ritual of tea and rice, garnished with a shred of gingered fish, a slice of pickled turnip, a token for my white body. We eat in the familiar silence. She knows I am not to be trusted, even now planning my escape. As I toast to her health with the tea she has poured, a thousand cranes curtain the window, fly up in a sudden breeze.

I wrap the blue towel after washing, around the damp weight of hair, bulky as a sleeping cat, and sit out on the porch. Still dripping water, it’ll be dry by supper, by the time the dust settles off your shoes, though it’s only five past noon. Think of the luxury: how to use the afternoon like the stretch of lawn spread before me. There’s the laundry, sun-warm clothes at twilight, and the mountain of beans in my lap. Each one, I’ll break and snap thoughtfully in half. But there is this slow arousal. The small buttons of my cotton blouse are pulling away from my body. I feel the strain of threads, the swollen magnolias heavy as a flock of birds in the tree. Already, the orange sponge cake is rising in the oven. I know you’ll say it makes your mouth dry and I’ll watch you drench your slice of it in canned peaches and lick the plate clean. So much hair, my mother used to say, grabbing the thick braided rope in her hands while we washed the breakfast dishes, discussing dresses and pastries. My mind often elsewhere as we did the morning chores together. Sometimes, a few strands would catch in her gold ring. I worked hard then, anticipating the hour when I would let the rope down at night, strips of sheets, knotted and tied, while she slept in tight blankets. My hair, freshly washed like a measure of wealth, like a bridal veil. Crouching in the grass, you would wait for the signal, for the movement of curtains before releasing yourself from the shadow of moths. Cloth, hair and hands, smuggling you in.

The mornings are his, blue and white like the tablecloth at breakfast. He’s happy in the house, a sweep of the spoon brings the birds under his chair. He sings and the dishes disappear. Or holding a crayon like a candle, he draws a circle. It is his hundredth dragonfly. Calling for more paper, this one is red-winged and like the others, he wills it to fly, simply by the unformed curve of his signature. Waterwings he calls them, the floats I strap to his arms. I wear an apron of concern, sweep the morning of birds. To the water he returns, plunging where it’s cold, moving and squealing into sunlight. The water from here seems flecked with gold. I watch the circles his small body makes fan and ripple, disperse like an echo into the sum of water, light and air. His imprint on the water has but a brief lifespan, the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing. This is sadness, I tell myself, the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind, because he will not remember that he and beauty were aligned, skimming across the water, nearly airborne, on his first solo flight. I’ll write “how he could not contain his delight.” At the other end, in another time frame, he waits for me— having already outdistanced this body, the one that slipped from me like a fish, floating, free of itself.

You’re clean shaven in this country where trees grow beards of moss, where even bank tellers look a little like banditos in vests as pungent as sweatsuits. Still, you prefer the vegetable air to almost any other place on the map. After the heart attack, you considered Paris— the flying buttresses, the fractured light of its cathedrals; the entire city refined and otherworldly, ascending on its architectural wings— but decided you had no use for glory, boulevards fur-lined with statues and expensive trees. You admit, on the whole, the towns in this country are ugly. One summer you drove toward Nicoya (a beautiful name that became your destination), expecting a fragrant town of mango trees but found cattle grazing in the plaza, rattling the tin plates in the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant. A Coca-Cola sign hung weathered and askew. That’s perhaps why you like it, it’s a country you can’t count on, a country of misfits. Unable to take root in the mud, the twentieth century has failed miserably, creating neither factory nor industry but a thirst for soda pop; like cosmetic surgery, it is skin deep. The clock is stuck in the rain and the mud of four o’clock. There’s nothing to do but wait as if in a dry cave, a room with a view of the waterfall, pinned as you are beneath the downpour. The waiter bends over your cup without filling it, the storekeeper holds your change until the rain, hypnotic and dramatic, leaves the streets and the gutters, the balcony and the air greener, heavier— mildew blooming in the closet where your shoes, powdered with a sea-green lichen, resembles old bronze, a pair of ancient goblets. While iguanas lounge in the attic (a prehistoric version of the domestic rat), the Office of the Ministry (a pink and crumbling building surrounded by dusty rose trees) prints more money to prop the flimsy flowered currency. You can’t predict what your American dollars will bring by morning. In the hotel restaurant you meet the Undesirable American. He learns just enough of the local lingo to swing by, living on a dwindling account and, here and there, a real estate swindle. Or the pensionado who buys two cigars, offering you one the day his Social Security arrives. Like the cockroach, the displaced have crawled through the cracks and selected for themselves an agreeable niche. A place to start from scratch. They thrive in the vegetable air. You wonder how you’ll survive, unfit, unable to work. Lacking the predatory skills, you’ve stayed in the trees, a dreamer, all your life, even now wanting to believe a change of scenery will get you back on your feet. A brief hiatus in the vegetable air. Tonight, you walk along the damp streets, an average steak, a glass of wine swishing in your belly, to your small room wedged between a jukebox and a dance hall. There are so many things you can’t change— like the dull thrashing music. You draw the blinds, switch on the tiny cassette. Silence. The click of the tape. And then the familiar aria, rising like the moon, lifts you out of yourself, transporting you to another country where, for a moment, you travel light.

Somebody been giving you Stink Eye? Let me tell you about Stink Eye. Stink Eye no mean nothing when you owe somebody money. Pay up, girl. No be in debt. But Stink Eye means something when you owe somebody nothing. Remember when Connie Mamazuka, the girl with the mustache, grabbed your lipstick in the PE locker room and smeared it all over her big fat lips? Wasn’t ’cause she like your lipstick. Was ’cause you was one cute skinny chick. She was giving you Stink Eye all along and you never even know it. Now you know it and now you watch for it. You was always catching Stink Eye, always crying to your mother about somebody icing you out. When Stink Eye is cold, it is fucking freezing, it can make you shiver and cry, “But Mommy, Mommy, what did I do?” Took you long time to know you never do nothing but you was good at something, something Stink Eye like try steal not ’cause Stink Eye going use it. Stink Eye just no like you use it ’cause if you use it only going make Stink Eye feel more ugly, feel more stupid. Easy for spot Stink Eye coming from one mousy thing. More tricky for spot Stink Eye coming from some of the friendliest faces. And you the dumb one, left dazed and hurt. “But she seemed so sympathetic.” Yeah, right. Stink Eye sideswipes into you out of nowhere where somebody been thinking evil thoughts about you, wishing bad luck to blow bad breath upon you, knock you down, forget your words, drop your tools, make you sputter and drool. Under the bed, in Stink Eye’s room, get one picture of you stabbed like one pin cushion with so many needles, stabbed like one cactus, stabbed like one porcupine. Stink Eye even dreams about you. Careful of that coat you wear, the one you blossom in, feel loved in, the one that keeps you warm. Stink Eye like snatch it right off you ’cause Stink Eye just no can stand to see you look so cool. Stink Eye wants a piece of you. So choose to be naive, girl, or wake up ’cause Stink Eye been waiting to sit on your chest, pounce on your flesh, squeeze the living air right out of you, watch you flatten like one used-up tube of toothpaste. Suck up your goodies, Glutton-of-Stink-Eye, ready to gorge on your talents, feast on your fears. So girl, run fast, spell good, write well, add up, think quick, talk sharp, walk pretty, jump high, throw hard, sing sweet, leap far. Now you know it and now you watch for it ’cause Stink Eye gets bigger and meaner and stronger as you get better and smarter and stronger. Scary thing about Stink Eye, Stink Eye always looking for more— as much as you willing to give.

The jade slipped from my wrist with the smoothness of water leaving the mountains, silk falling from a shoulder, melon slices sliding across the tongue, the fish returning. The bracelet worn since my first birthday cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells. The sound could be heard ringing across the water where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief. Her nightgown slapped in the wind as he howled clutching his hoard. The cultured pearls. The bone flutes. The peppermint disks of jade. The clean hole in the center, Heaven: the spaces we left empty.

The couple is traveling up the mountain. They have been traveling a long time to get to the mountain. They left early with their son who strums sweet songs with his fingers, songs his mother sang when she was young, singing sweetly like him for all that was yet to come. In the morning they saw snow on the mountain, waking as if to another country, far away from rain on the island of orchids where smoke is indistinguishable from mist, rain from stone. They wanted to get there before the snow melted, before it vanished like a memory. They left early, leaving the house they had built in the forest, the house that had aged with them, skin as dry as the logs they threw into evening fires. Before the son could talk, he walked among the trees, dreamed where roots lifted as if to let the earth breathe, resting to the sounds of his parents pulling, clearing, dragging, the sounds he later understood as what needs tending. The boy would climb the ladder to the loft, survey the trees and, peering through a curtain of leaves, proclaim himself ruler of all that he saw. His mother and father moved in and out of the mist, lumpy shadows lifting rocks, carrying water, planting heart-shaped flowers, speaking wordlessly to each other. The boy is alone in the back seat as they drive past the tin-roofed town, the market where under blue waves of tarp orchids spray out of buckets, bananas hang like tropical chandeliers, coffee beans slide down waxy pyramids and vendors fan at the jeweled flies, keeping fish on ice. His fingers pluck single notes, random at first and then combined as if his fingers could find a way to string his thoughts the way the road progressed past the last house, the last fern, the last tree sparkling fireworks of red blossoms. Pickup trucks hauling snow speed down the mountain, racing to unload the precious cargo for children who will run from TV sets to fall like angels in small fenced yards. The man is thinking about another woman as he climbs the slopes into clouds. It is all confusion — a whiteout he must negotiate, the puny engine unsuitable for the elevation, the dangerous road conditions. The woman is wondering how she will ever be able to leave him. The boy strums the guitar, strums and looks out the window. They break into sky, a blue unimaginable in the dome of the forest. The white glare hits their eyes like splintered glass. Clouds erupt in a thousand directions, tumbling below them like a cascade of white water. Observatories rise above the snow. At this hour, even though the gigantic lenses are shut, someone is watching the stars, predicting the trajectory of orbits spinning out of control.

The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smudged, breathed upon by small children and large animals flicking out hope as she whirls by, flap of tongue, scratch of paw, sweetly reminding her. The man moves earth, the woman sweeps air. Together they pull water out of the other, pull with the muscular ache of the living, hauling from the deep well of the body the rain-swollen, the flame-tipped, the milk-fed— all that cycles through lives moving, lives sweeping, water circulating between them like breath, drawn out of leaves by light.

The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smudged, breathed upon by small children and large animals flicking out hope as she whirls by, flap of tongue, scratch of paw, sweetly reminding her. The man moves earth, the woman sweeps air. Together they pull water out of the other, pull with the muscular ache of the living, hauling from the deep well of the body the rain-swollen, the flame-tipped, the milk-fed— all that cycles through lives moving, lives sweeping, water circulating between them like breath, drawn out of leaves by light.

Wahiawa is still a red dirt town where the sticky smell of pineapples being lopped off in the low-lying fields rises to mix with the minty leaves of eucalyptus in the bordering gulch. We lived there near the edge where the orchids grew huge as lanterns overnight and the passion fruits rotted on the vines before they could be picked. We grew there in the steady rain that fell like a gray curtain through which my mother peered: patches of depression. She kept the children under cover. We built houses within houses, stripping our parents’ bed of pillows and sheets, erecting walls out of The National Geographic which my father had subscribed to for years. We feasted on those pictures of the world, while the mud oozed past the windows knocking over the drab green leaves of palm fronds as we ate our spinach. The mildew grew in rings around the sink where centipedes came swimming up the pipes on multiple feet and the mold grew around our small fingers making everything slippery to touch. We were squeamish and pale. I remember one night my sister screamed. All the lights blinked on in the house. In the sudden brightness, we rushed to her room and found her crumpled in the far corner of the bed, her nightgown twisted in a strange shape; her eyes were as huge as mine, staring into the eyes of the bat that clung to the screen. Its rodent fingers finally letting go as my father jabbed its furry body with the end of a broom.