ME: I’ve never lied to you.
MOTHER: You’re lying now. I don’t even know you.
ME: You’ve known me all my life. How can you know me so little?
MOTHER: You are not my daughter.
ME: You are my mother, I am your daughter.
But we drove home in silence. Later in the evening, after she’d been ignoring me for hours, I went to her and encircled her waist and said, “I’m sorry, it was my fault and I love you.” She melted and touched me at last. She said, “I forgive you,” followed by something approving, like I was her easy and obedient child, the one who came back to her no matter what.
I stayed silent to her characterization because it was true: I always did come back to her no matter what. But that “no matter what” included those times when she was wrong, and in the stalemate, if I was the first to bend, it was because I needed love, and if that were frailty, then I was frail.
2.
THE FIGHT BEGAN OVER NOTHING, and escalated. Once Arthur started to cry, that open sign of weakness propelled me to hit him harder. “You fat fucking loser!” I yelled.
He managed to pull away and bolted to his bedroom, applying his heft against the door. But I did not care about my body. I thrust an arm into the narrowing crack and found his head, pulled his hair, and clawed his face, which, once beloved, had become loathsome in its shyness. When I felt him cede slightly, I rose up and thwacked open the door, the knob cratering the drywall on the other side.
He backed away. “I hate you, Nuna!” he sobbed out.
I lunged.
His Hypercolor mood T-shirt changed colors with his body temperature, and as we struggled, under his armpits, down the middle of his chest between his swelling breasts, rivulets of pink and red appeared, and I laughed. I caught the neck of his ugly shirt, and only once he was huddled on the floor did I stop.
When he saw me withdraw, he came alive and rushed to the door to close it. From the other side, I kicked it in the manner of an angry horse; a dull ringing echoed in the hallway. I walked to the bathroom to wash my hands. From above the sink, I looked into the mirror. I blinked and saw, like a red open wound, that part of myself that was our father, the part that could hurt with glee.
Arthur was eleven, the age when I’d experienced sheer happiness with Macy, played flute in the band, and was generally hopeful. This had been the time, in short, of becoming—not the person I dreamed but the thing I thought could fill the shape drawn by the expectations of others. As for Arthur, my former teachers at the middle school saw his name on the roll at the beginning of the year and expected me all over again. But with a solid streak of Bs and Cs, Arthur was a lackluster student. For years, he had been one of the tallest in his class, but recently had only grown in introversion and weight, and since moving to Haversham, my brother was no longer my best friend. I thought everything Arthur was—retiring, introverted, and overweight—rendered him invisible. Umma goaded me, especially in the directions in which I already excelled, but Arthur? “He’s doing fine,” she insisted, making me wonder, Why the differentiation? In the end, perhaps it wasn’t his invisibility that set me against him but rather how absolutely seen he was by our mother in ways I was not.
Hours later, we were chatting on his bed, an uneasy peace knit between us. Arthur had returned from the mall, where he’d bought his first CD, a Smashing Pumpkins album. We pushed play, and the plastic disc whirred in the machine. Umma walked in to “Cherub Rock” ’s opening riff. She knelt by the bed and placed one arm on my leg and one on Arthur’s.
“Umma has a surprise.” She looked young, like a girl. She was forty-one. She took a breath and smiled. “How would you like it if I told you we were having a baby?”
The baby was born a few days after Christmas. Appa drove Arthur and me to the hospital, where we stared in disbelief. Behind the glass of the nursery was a barely human creature swaddled in a blanket and with a shock of black hair sticking straight up like a Kewpie doll’s. From the tops of her ears sprouted patches of fuzz. Her face was red, bloated from the trauma of entering the world.
We’d planned to call the baby Catherine, but once we saw her, she didn’t seem a Catherine at all, and we named her Sarah. Within a week, her face lost its inflammation and turned porcelain white, and by the end of January, all the hair that wasn’t supposed to be there fell out. Macy came by and rocked the baby, and Mrs. Jordanowicz called her a china doll.
3.
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE start of senior year, Harrison Wiley called the house. We had recently seen each other at our old elementary. The seniors who had gone there as children—Hannah, Tori, Timothy Buckner—met to take a photo for the yearbook. The special, seniors-only festivities were already afoot.
When I stepped out of my new emerald Jeep Cherokee, Harrison exclaimed, “Whoa, is that a new car?” If it hadn’t been for my father working on his own steam, separate from my mother, who said no to everything, I would never have driven a cool SUV in Memorial, where a car said a good deal about you, though maybe not as much as your race. In my family, of course, my father was the one who said yes.
Harrison drove a sporty red Honda with a spoiler that his parents had bought him the year before. I didn’t know who said yes or no in Harrison’s family, but the Honda seemed a dad car, and the spoiler? I didn’t know why it was called that. Even on our first date, I didn’t ask.
Harrison proposed a picnic. He fetched me on a torpid August morning, and we drove to the Rice Epicurean to buy our lunch supplies. I’d only been to the Epicurean a couple of times with Macy when we were kids. It stood in the same shopping center as Fox Photos and French Bakery, where we used to buy pastries with the crisp twenties her dad peeled from his wallet. Mr. J. had been the kind of father who said yes and no at all the right times.
But this was high school now, and Macy and I weren’t best friends anymore. I was in all AP and honors courses, had skipped a grade in math, and was in Gifted and Talented. Macy didn’t care to do any of that. At Epicurean, I examined the overpriced wilting produce with an eye trained by my mother and thought, We should have gone to Kroger’s. Harrison ordered turkey sandwiches at the deli counter and grabbed strawberries and drinks, moving about the grocery store with no trace of the tightness and calculation that accompanied shopping with Umma. At the checkout, I went for my wallet but he said no, no, he’d love to pay for everything if that was okay. “I have so much money saved up from my summer job, and I’m never going to use it all.” I smiled and didn’t say, “You should save your money for college,” which is what Umma would have said. I thanked him and pretended this was not a big deal, stopping by Rice Epicurean, which did not take coupons and where Umma had never stepped foot.
At the park, Harrison, who had a lot of foresight, laid out a blanket he’d packed, and we sat down in the thin shade of a tree in the breezeless day. I tried not to devour all the delicious things too quickly because this was a date—my first. The turkey sandwich had the perfect amount of Dijon, and Harrison had bought Mint Milanos, my favorite. In the summertime, I rarely ate Western food, mostly subsisting on the Korean breakfast Umma prepared before she left for her shift. At the end of our meal, Harrison pulled out a chilled bottle of Martinelli’s apple cider as if we were drinking champagne al fresco, and it never occurred to me all this thoughtfulness and strategy came at a price.
In the spring of senior year, by the time Harrison had already broken up with me and started dating my friend Nora—Nora, who did not have a father and whose mother said yes a lot, to makeup in middle school, to Dooney & Bourke, to boyfriends when we were too young—I learned that he had called Emilia Browne that summer, too.
“But not to ask me out,” Emilia added quickly. Harrison had gotten it into his head that to have a complete senior year, which would be filled, naturally, with senior year events like football games, tailgates, parties, formals, and prom, he needed something—a girlfriend. A banner year required a mate.
He had surveyed the girls of the rising senior class, and “it came down to you and Nora,” Emilia said. She had met Harrison at Wang Chung’s, and over beef and broccoli, the two debated the merits of her friends in order to decide who would be the more suitable senior year consort.
As Emilia recounted what had entered into the pro and con columns for each of Harrison’s candidates—me: smart, drum major, leadership positions; Nora: smart, too, fun to be around, easygoing—I shrank in disgust. Is this what people did? Make back-of-the-envelope calculations about people’s values? But then I recalled that Emilia was the best AP Calculus BC student in two grades. “Per usual, I was forced to utilize Emilia Browne’s exam as a grading key for the rest of your very flawed attempts at applications of integration,” Mrs. Willis announced in the bored tone she reserved for shaming the class. Emilia’s ability to calculate was legendary.
As she rattled on, I was afraid to say what I felt, which came to me slowly, as the naming of my emotions always had: that she had wronged me as a friend and had been a pawn. When she blinked, my disgust flared—she had been flattered to have been called for the consultation. By then, however, I knew Harrison, and I knew he’d chosen her because of her proximity to both Nora and me, and not because he valued Emilia’s opinion.
I interrupted her. “Did he pay for your lunch?”
Emilia blinked. “What does that have to do with it?”
“Just curious. Did he pay for your lunch?”
“I guess?” She shrugged.
Every time he came to the house, Umma announced from the door, “Your friend is here,” instead of calling him “Harrison” or “your boyfriend,” as if the denial would make things so. Well, she was right. She had left me very uneducated, and I had spent my adolescence suppressing my intuition about relationships, which I ought to have been honing, in favor of my mother’s dictum, which she held up as a morality tale, prime and primitive. It never occurred to me to ask whether I truly liked this accomplished boy from a good family in the neighborhood. Did my inclinations even matter in the face of Harrison’s power, which brought preferential access to powerful friends and powerful experiences? Of course, power here meant whiteness.
Harrison talked about the world in a way unfamiliar to me, as if everything were pawn-takes-rook. Sometimes I thought that was his power: because he already had everything, he could angle for more. In contrast, my family, now financially comfortable, still approached life as something to be survived at great cost and struggled to read the rules of the culture; we, certainly, were not writing them.
Sometimes, during a Calculus assignment, I peeked over at his blond head buried in the textbook and marveled at how elegantly the toggles of his brain slid over the integrals—how clever my boyfriend was! And I was so busy admiring him I was unconscious to the wee kernel forming in my mind that wanted this boy as a capstone, to know Haversham had bought me what I wanted all along—permission.
And what permission was it? To demand more from life and to harbor the expectation that I would get it? I did not just want dreams and happiness—the American construct—but to be able to reject things that came my way and not accept in famished gratitude whatever the world fed me. In hindsight, I didn’t like Harrison romantically. But he was my first boyfriend, and wasn’t a boyfriend simply a boy you did friend things with exclusively, as Umma maintained? In reality, the prospect of kissing him when I’d spent the last year masturbating to my poster of Keanu Reeves, was unfathomable. Keanu, a hapa fantasy, remained just that, a fantasy.
Harrison never let on there was any problem with the fact that we’d kissed but once (a chaste peck after he’d dropped me off after a football game). During the five months we dated, I broke up with him twice. Both times, he’d sent flowers and gifts to the house and written poetry I was too embarrassed to read. Each time I was astonished at how I yielded, and it was as if I had been played somehow, like getting me back was another move in his chess game.
In between breakups, Harrison still came over to do Calculus homework together. (He was arguably as good as Emilia, arriving at novel solutions in a way she could not. He discovered his own circuitous but ultimately brilliant methods in a Bismarckian long game, whereas Emilia tended to rely on clear-cut strategies presented by Mrs. Willis in her lectures.) When he and I found out we’d both been deferred early from Harvard, Harrison’s youthful blond mother made lasagna to take our minds off the disappointment. At the first football game of the season, his friends chalked “Doin’ the drum major” on the back windshield of his Honda, and a pleased look spread over his face. I had the vague notion “doin’ ” here meant something sexual, but the reality was nothing sexual was happening, not even in my mind.
4.
A SEXY, BARE-LEGGED MAID IN a cloak and high heels stood next to a nineteenth-century gentleman in a top hat. Sprawled under the illustration was, “Take your Longfellow in hand and work like the Dickens to find Victoria’s Secret.” I didn’t know what the secret was, but I did know about the bra-and-panty store in the mall and was bewildered that a parent-sponsored club had designed such an overtly sexual shirt. I didn’t say anything though. Senior Men’s was an exclusive invitation, and only a couple of my friends had been asked to the formal, including Nora, who was going with my classmate from quiz bowl, Lawrence Gimball. And so, like the other dates, I wore my shirt to school that Friday.
After the dance at the country club, Harrison and I caravanned to Galveston with a group of his friends whom I had also been close to in elementary school but had grown apart from in the ensuing years. When we arrived, the beach house on stilts was covered in fog. The boys went out to smoke cigars on the windy terrace overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, while the girls settled by the fire inside. While they chatted companionably, I stayed silent and watched the fire rise and die.
The boys came in smelling of whiskey and woody tobacco, and the girls coupled off with their dates, disappearing into bedrooms. When Harrison walked over to me, I told him I was hungry—at dinner, the steak had been too rare—and he said agreeably, “Let’s go on a food run.”
“I hate bloody meat,” I said, taking his hand.
It was almost midnight, which was when I was supposed to show my face back at home, but Galveston was more than an hour away. I tried not to worry about missing my curfew and accepted being called a slut when I got home. Harrison drove us around the empty streets of the beach town. Even the gas stations were closed, and I peered out the window, trying to locate an open convenience store or McDonald’s, but all was shuttered. Only the January wind was alive, whipping around trash and newspapers. After a while, he pulled into an empty parking lot and killed the engine.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Just thought we could take a break.” He unclasped his seat belt and angled himself toward me.
I was naive back then. I turned away and looked out the window, annoyed he’d quit the search so soon. In the silence, I misread the expectancy in the air for something else. My stomach growled.
