“What do you mean ‘why’?”
“Why do you need to go to the movies right this minute?” An edge entered her voice.
“I don’t know. It’s summer. I did all my math enrichment.”
“We have videos from Phar-Mor.”
“I don’t want to watch an old video from Phar-Mor.”
“I can take you to get new videos. Why does it have to be a movie?”
“I’m not asking for money. I’ll use my tutoring cash.”
She stopped ironing and looked up, her eyes slits. “Who are you going with?” She thought I was meeting someone and didn’t want to tell her, but the truth was, I had opened the Houston Chronicle and read that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was playing in fifteen minutes. It was a matinee, so I could pay a discounted price instead of the seven dollars it usually cost. I could see there would be getting no popcorn or Coke money out of her.
“I sometimes go alone, you know.”
“Are you sure you aren’t meeting anyone?”
Lately, because I was now a full-fledged teenager, her inquisitions came more frequently, as if she was afraid of me or didn’t know me. She thought I was mixed up with some boys or a gang. The idea was laughable.
I took a breath. “Yes, I’m sure. I’m going alone.”
In the car, Umma proceeded to ice me out. She liked to do that. If she was displeased with something you did, she didn’t say a word; she just wouldn’t look at you, as if you were invisible, as if you were dead. If you tried to materialize again for her, if you said, “Umma, I love you, I’m sorry,” even if you weren’t, she wouldn’t respond until you couldn’t stand it anymore and really wanted to die. You learned love was entirely conditional, and you could vanish—even to your own mother—at any moment.
Instead of dropping me at the entrance, she parked and accompanied me into the mall. I found it hard to seethe with anger properly, thinking how dumb we looked, me walking steps in front of my pissy mother, who obviously belonged to me.
I bought a ticket and passed through the doors into that extra-special level of cold. In my peripheral vision, Umma slinked like a meerkat along the glass walls, her eyes shooting around the inside of the theater in search of the boy. In search of the gang. Let her wait there all one hundred forty minutes if she wants! I raged.
But the narcotic experience—the ice of the Coke rattling in the sweating cup, the warm mental bath—was ruined. I watched Kevin Costner play a surfer version of Robin Hood but never managed to lose myself in the cold vault of the movie theater.
When I got out, Umma wasn’t there with her face pressed up against the glass, but as I swung out the doors of the mall into the evening, I spied her tightly permed clown head in the parked Oldsmobile. She had been waiting for me, and for whomever else she thought I was with.
I got in and slammed the door. I didn’t say a word. Even though she had seen nothing, because there was nothing to see, she thought she had missed the offending party and that I persevered in my wicked lying, and I didn’t understand because I simply never lied to my mother.
In my head I held this conversation:
MOTHER: Stop lying to me.
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.
