12-20-06

After Cindy came home from Paris, she complained all day long about how mom and dad never drink any red wine.
“What’s the point of having lived in the United States for twenty plus years if you are just going to drink the same liquor you drank in China? And every time I come home, we’re still eating the same food, driving all the way out to Flushing to every friggin’ week to buy the same groceries.” Cindy turned to my mom and pointed right in her face, “You know, you’d like cheese more if you’d just try it.”
“I don’t like cheese. Why should I try it.” Sometimes, I think if my parents were the kind of parents who had gotten into the habit earlier on of slapping their children, then Cindy would get constantly slapped by my mom. They are kind of the same person, except Cindy has a sallow complexion and never smiles in pictures. They’re always accusing each other of things that the other person can’t help. When Cindy was away in France for the summer, I was in the eight grade, and Dennis was in second, and I was taking him to the park every day and pushing him in the one swing that the kids from the neighborhood didn’t graffiti or mess up in some way by throwing the swing all the way around itself. My favorite thing to do was to twist the swing around and around ten or thirteen times and then pick up Dennis and put him the swing and let it go. Sometimes he cried, and one time he yelled out, “Help!” and that had made me laugh so far that I dropped to the ground and muddied up the bottoms of my jeans. My second favorite thing to do was more straightforward. I just liked pushing Dennis in the swings even after he said, “Now, stop.” I would say, “Now, go? Okay, fine.”
“No, stop.”
“What, more? You’re awfully high, but if you say so.”
“No, stop, stop, stop.”
“I think I heard you say, more, more more.”
It was a boring summer otherwise, and I didn’t talk to Cindy on the phone hardly at all. My mom and her talked everyday and I would come with Dennis from an afternoon in the park and find my mom crouched up in the corner of our living room that gets no direct sunlight and talking animatedly to Cindy. I acted like I could really care less.
Cindy said she fell in love with a boy in Paris, and I said, “So, what else is new?” But Cindy showed me pictures of him that a woman had snapped for a magazine and he was sort of beautiful after all. He had this really long curly eyelashes and very messy blonde hair.
“He’s Scottish, and he took me on holiday to the south of France. We swam in the sea, and kissed on the streets. The people on the train were grinning at us because we were kissing so much.”
“Must have been a painful grin,” I mumbled, but Cindy was ecstatic from her love affair in France. She had gotten my parents to buy red wine for the house, a wedge of brie, and in the mornings, she would go down to our local bakery, which none of us had ever done before, and buy a fresh cut of bread.
“Do you know why the French live so long?”
We all shook our head and continued to watch Friends on TV. Dennis was crashing cars into my dad’s left foot.
“Because they actually enjoy life. They enjoy food, they enjoy living. It’s not like how it is here, everyone is always so concerned about their next promotion, working an extra hour because they think that’s the thing that’ll bring them closer to their raise in March. It’s just incredible the way Americans are obsessed with these trifling matters and miss out on the entire grand statement that is life. In France, everyone takes a six week holiday, and everyone enjoys their weekend, instead of hovering over their computer, madly trying to work from home and—”
“Where do you think you got the money to go to Paris from? Huh? Where did it come from? Did you produce it out of thin air?” my dad asked.
“Dad, this isn’t an attack on you. I know you work hard and it’s for us—”
“—So you can stop talking then. I don’t want you to talk about this in my house. I don’t want anyone to talk about anything, in fact, for the rest of the day.” Dennis rammed another car into dad’s foot, and dad picked up the car and threw it in the trash. I held Dennis in my arms for a bit to keep him from crying. I could kind of understand what Cindy was getting at. It was one of those things where suddenly I woke up in the morning and I realized that I had barely seen my dad more than an hour or two each day for the past year, and I loved my bed, I loved my posters, I loved the small pens my mom and dad bought me last year just like I asked, I loved my new jacket with the fake fur lining, and the earrings that dangled and made a clinking sound when I walked down the street, and I loved our skylight windows that made the mornings seem magically draped with sunlight, and I loved this house so so much, but like everyone else, I felt convinced that I could give at least some or maybe even all of this up, just to see my dad a little bit more.
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We have another neighbor who gives us candy for no particular reason, and she wears nice sunglasses even on cloudy days, and she wears shorts even on cold days, and we call her Aunt May, even though she’s not our aunt, and we never see her in the month of May. She says she has to hibernate in the spring because it’s the birth of life she’s afraid of, not the end, and ever since she’s said that, I’ve wanted to ask her, “So, does this mean you’re not afraid to die?” but it not really a question I’ve ever dared to ask anyone.
Aunt May is older than my mom but younger than my grandmothers, and she has no children or husband, so she spends all her time doing things for children in the neighborhood, like baking cookies and making fresh lemonade and she’ll just stand outside holding plate of cookies in one hand, and a pitcher of lemonade in another, never getting tired of holding these things up, and waiting for someone to come home from school or leave their house to play ball on the street, and get thirsty or hungry. When I talk to Aunt May, she smiles a lot and has little tiny folds of skin that bunch up around the edges of her eyes and once she had a bit of dirt in those folds and I told her to close her eyes so I could rub them and she pulled away and said, “That won’t be necessary,” and went back inside her house for a moment.
Aunt May thinks I’m more beautiful than Cindy but that I’m going through an awkward period of my life, and I tell her that I’m sixteen, and what about all those songs men sing about being sixteen and beautiful, and how it’s the most lovely year of a young girl’s life, and she tells me that the kind of beauty that has everlasting powers, that remains till the very end is the kind of girl who blossoms slowly, and I ask her, if she means painfully slowly, and she tells me, yes, painfully slowly.
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