Story

My sister says she’s going blind, and I think she’s being dramatic as usual. When I was five, she told me she was dying, right there, on the spot, and she clutched her throat, ripped off a little piece of my art project that I had finished at school and brought home to show mom and dad, put it in her mouth (it was the piece with some dried macaroni and clear Elmer’s glue), and made a horrible sound as if she were a completely fake dinosaur, not a real one, like the dinosaurs whose bones hang from the ceiling of the Natural Museum of History, but an extremely fake dinosaur, like the ones in Jurassic Park the movie, the stupid ass movie that I’ve now watched a hundred times, two times for each day I’ve had to baby-sit my brother last year, which if you do the math, is fifty days.

While her hand was still holding onto her throat, she took a small break from faking her death and told me the story of the man who married a woman, and every hour of every night and day she wore a small pink ribbon around her neck and told her husband never to touch or, heaven forbid, untie it, and it drove him so mad that he gave her a bunch of sleeping pills one day, and then when she was snoring like a passed out alcoholic, he untied the ribbon, and BAM, her fucking head rolled right off.

“Please don’t die,” I begged her. At the time, I was in my first month of kindergarten, and already, I was so fucking stupid. I spent all of my afternoons alone with my sister in our house. We lived ten blocks from the beach, and they were ten short blocks. In the summers, the air smelled bad. It smelled like uncooked seafood, and sometimes, I wanted to puke. The house would get really still during the day when no one was there, although later, I found out my sister sometimes hid in the basement until my parents had dropped me off to school and gone off to work, and she would emerge into the morning sun, which shone straight into our living room and kitchen and illuminated all of our furniture, my mom’s green plants, the block of iced meat that my dad set out every morning to thaw for dinner, and my parents’ after-work clothes, which consisted of long underwear and pajama sets from China with hideous designs like cheesy potted plants and garden tools with the words “J’aime le soleil,” in ugly cursive that even I could do better than, spread out on the living room couch, and my sister would emerge into all of that, into all of the things I thought no one got to touch or see or be around during the hours of 8:30 AM and 3:30 PM, but she, the sneak, the liar, the deceptacon, actually got to see it quite often, and she was also the reason why our heating bills were always higher than my parents expected because she would turn the thermostat to 85, so she could prance around in my mom’s old clothes, her skirts and water-filled bras, and right before I came home, she would turn it back down to 58, which was the same as freezing butt-ass cold, and she would calm down, and the two of us would sit at the kitchen table, eating whatever snacks our parents had bought us the Sunday before, and twiddle our thumbs in our cold, static house.

____________

My sister is in love with the video store clerk. He has small green eyes and wears the same thing everyday. I don’t tell her, but I was in love with him first. He doesn’t actually work there anymore, but sometimes, we see him around town with paint splattered over his clothes. He paints houses now, and last year, when Cindy came home, we schemed to get him to paint our house by chipping off paint from the side wall with sticks and our brother’s baseball bat. We would have been dead meat if mom and dad had caught us.

The first time we went into the video store was a few weeks after we moved into this town. It was a long time ago, and we were all jazzed to see so many trees, parking lots that didn’t charge by the hour, and such clean street corners. I checked out Home Alone 2, and my sister checked out some movie about two girls too wild to stay home, so they hopped into a car together and ran off to the desert to smoke pot, pick wild flowers to put in their hair, and sleep with boys who never wore shirts. It was a stupid movie, and the parts where the boys unzipped their pants were the parts when my mom told me to cover my eyes, and I did but still saw everything through the slats of my parted fingers.

That night, my sister had a shouting match with my mom, and my dad looked like he wasn’t going to get involved, but by the very end, he started looking like he was going to slap her. We all shuddered in anticipation, but instead of slapping her, he shouted louder than anyone else in my family has ever shouted, and we all felt the ringing in his voice, that frightening linger of anger in our bones for days afterwards.

I used to love the video store clerk too. Cindy still loves him, but she won’t admit it.

I can just tell by the way she acted last year when we bumped into him in a grocery store. Cindy was home for the President’s Day long weekend, and we saw him in the dairy aisle.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

They’re so dumb. That’s the only thing they said to each other.

The reason why I loved the video store clerk with the green eyes is because I started sneezing like crazy the first time we went into the video store. Earlier, I had been playing with my friend Chrissie’s cat, and it turned out I was really allergic to cats, so the whole rest of the day I couldn’t stop sneezing, and Gary, the boy I loved, the boy who recommended Cassavetes films when I got older, who got skinny in the winters, and heavy in the summer, the reverse of everyone else, the most divine video store employee that has ever been and will ever be, gave me a box of Kleenex, and while I was blowing snot into the Kleenex, he showed me how to make a tissue flower, and he said, “A white rose for the girl with the allergies!”

____________

On the day my brother was born, I was exactly nine years old, and my friend Hanzhi, who later changed his name to Harry, was eight years and some months, and it was a beautiful time because no one had started to make fun of us yet for being best friends (we had about a year and half of this bliss left). We were asking for it though. We were really asking for it. We spent all our time outside, role-playing, acting out the kind of lives we wanted for ourselves. They all went along the lines of: I was his wife, he was handsome, I had a sharp wit, he had good arms, I knew an impressive amount of words, he could bench 250, we served in the secret service and had committed to spending our entire lives trying to vanquish enemies from the outside and traitors from within (his dad and my dad of course, and their code names were Diarrhea Daddy and Constipation Papa), and after we completed a mission (usually took about an afternoon’s time) we would pretend to sleep like husband and wife, and since we were so hyper all the time and would exert massive amounts of energy in trying to capture Diarrhea Daddy and Constipation Papa, whenever we ‘pretended’ to sleep, we would actually fall asleep, and all the grown-ups fawned at us, stood over us, and whispered annoying things like, “They’re little monsters when they’re awake, but look how beautiful they look now,” as if we were better unconscious, as if the most beautiful state we could ever achieve was akin to being in a coma!

____________

On the day my brother was born, Cindy was a junior in high school, and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of the grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why she would want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me, picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a shithole.”

On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas, also known as Cindy and mine’s joint birthday. I begged my mother the year before, when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas, to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please, please, please not forget to get me a real present, two real presents, one real present for Christmas, and one real present for my birthday, if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on my/Cindy’s/Jesus, son of God’s birthday. But despite all that, I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not digest properly because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekends, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of giant cylindrical presents coming out of Santa’s butt.

“Guess what? You’re brother is being born.” Hanzhi crumpled one of his pictures and threw it at my face. “He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.

“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano. My mom made me do one full hour, and it didn’t matter if I did in the morning or afternoon. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I was cute all morning, my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.

I was mad at my mom, and I decided I would not practice piano that day. She had broken her promise to me, and later, she would probably say something like, “No, I never promised you that. No, I didn’t.” She would make me cry, and I would not have anything to say back because she was my mom, and she always had to have the final say. I said good morning to Hanzhi’s mom and she hugged me tightly, her dirty apron getting on my cheek.

“You must be so happy, Cici,” she said in Chinese. “Your family is the first family to have three children.” She shook her head and looked away for a minute, “Well. Some couples don’t even have one child yet. You have to wonder why some people aren’t trying to have children when they’re getting on in their age. They’ll be crying alone, with no children to take care of them when they get old and start peeing on their own shoes before reaching the bathroom..” She hugged me again, and I tried my best to crane my neck away from the spilt soy sauce on her apron.

I ran up the stairs to find Cindy. I wanted to pounce on her with the stink of a night’s sleep still on my breath and yell into her face, “We have a baby brother!” but when I threw open her doors, there was no one there. I had been left along in the house. They woke up Cindy and took her with them to the hospital, but they left me and called up Hanzhi’s mom. I was hopping mad.

I read a children’s book once about why bees sting humans. The story was extremely biased on the side on the bees. The tone of disdain for humans was something I only picked up on many years later when I was cleaning out my old bookcase that was filled with storybooks my father brought home from work back when he was the Language Coordinator at PS 156.

On one of the last pages of the book, there was an illustration of a bee that had been provoked by a thoughtless human. The bee had slits for eyes and was diving, stinger pointed southward, into a beefy, red-faced kid’s arm. The message was clear: the kid had it coming. For all intensive purposes, when my brother was born, I felt like a pissed off bee, and I zipped through the rooms of our house, hitting all the things I could hit without getting in trouble: my parent’s mattress, my sister’s mattress, the clothes hanging in both of their closets, all of my own stuff, including a Clue board that I ripped in half and was never able to tape back together properly.

When my parents finally brought him home to me, I stared at him and dreamed of all the things I would do to make him miserable: twist his arm behind his back when my parents were away, shake his head because Cindy told me that her Biology teacher told her that children have soft brains until the age of two, and you should never ever, ever, ever shake a child before the age of two because you could incur brain damage, so yip yip hooray, that was going to be my new mission.

____________

I didn’t end up strangling my brother. Every time I got near him he would start drooling, and it was so pathetic that I couldn’t get my arms around his neck. I touched his nose, and it was very wet and very cold. I blew hot breaths onto his nose, and I remembered the time when Cindy told me that all boys are the same, they talk to you in the same way, and I didn’t even want to know this because I hated boys, I would always hate boys, and I hated when a boy hit me on the shoulder just so he could touch me, but Cindy was always telling me things about the boys she saw in the middle of the night when both our parents were asleep, and when she could con me into guarding the front door until she came back. I used to sit at the front of the steps eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, catching crumbs with my nightgown, and waiting for her to come back angry, pissed off at another boy who was just like that other boy who was just like that other-other boy.

“If you kiss them on the nose, they say, thank you,” she told me. “Then, if you let them get at your boobs, they stop thanking you.”

“Why don’t you just hang out with girls then, if you’re so sick of boys.”

“God, Cecilia. You’re such a baby.”

“I’m not. Dennis is a baby. Get it right, for once.”

“Thanks for watching the front door. Let’s go.”

The things I’d get for watching the front door for Cindy included: a big, fifty cent lollipop she got from the school president who was selling them so the French club could fund their annual Spring Break trip to Paris; a big, stinky kiss on my cheek right as we were waking up in the morning, and my mom was putting on her makeup in the bathroom, and my dad was making us eggs in the kitchen; an invitation to borrow one thing from her closet and wear it to school on a day that wearing good clothes didn’t matter that much to her, like when she had gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she didn’t want to get her good clothes all sweaty.

It was a nice time for me. I loved Cindy, and I loved Dennis, and I think they both might have loved me too.

__________

When my mother was fifteen, she was a foot taller than all her girlfriends, and her back was often spotted with red marks from the boys who followed her after school and threw pebbles at her. During my last year of elementary school, a boy knocked me against the wall of the gymnasium and said, “I love you,” and it scared the living shit of me so I started running, even though we were in the middle of gym class and I was four turns away from being tagged for the relay race, because I figured running was running, all the same, who cared what direction you were supposed to go in, as long as you kept those legs moving. So I ran through the gymnasium doors, into the long hallway, skidding past the band room, past the various art rooms, past the main office where the hunched over ladies worked and barely blinked or looked you in the eye when talking to you or handing you a form, and I ran right through the double doors that led into the small lobby, straight into the last set of double doors, and into a blinding white nothing. Bam, bam, bam—I hated boys. I wanted them dead, I wanted to develop muscles that could kill any boy who lurched at me, any boy who teased me or tried to write things on the back of my stockings with white out pens, and I wanted to kill the adults who peered at me with their pocked faces and asked me if I wanted to get married and move out of my parent’s house, and would I like to marry that boy or that other boy who, of course, was the son of whoever was asking me these questions, who was, of course, sitting right there, across from me and pretending to look at the ceiling cracks or the bitten-off part of his cuticles. The whole affair, the whole charade of pretending boys who were my age didn’t immediately make me convulse with disgust and complete terror only made me love the video-store boy who sometimes gave me a Starburst at the video store more. It made me jealous of my sister that she was already the age that I would have to be if I wanted to kiss a boy who was in high school, or better yet, in college, or the very absolute best: A GROWN MAN!

“Mom, I hate boys my age. I want to kick them in the legs, but I think I inherited a really weak body from you,” I told her, one day, at night after dinner, when my sister Cindy was upstairs doing a project, and my dad was downstairs putting in some numbers and bills into this new accounting program he had gotten. Our basement downstairs was filled with computer monitors and keyboards and mouses and hard-drives and so many cords and outlets and plugs. There was a constant hum that covered the smell of our washed laundry, which we also kept in the basement, hung up in the door next to my dad’s computer room, where the furnace was and where my dad rolled up sheets of insulation with gloves and pushed them up against our unfinished walls and told me that I ever tried to touch those pink insulating sheets, if I even went two feet near it, I would have a terrible case of the itchies from that moment on, and remain so until the end of my life, and if I was planning to live a long life, then boy oh boy, it was going to be one long and itchy life.

Most of my friends now have computers that are small and sleek. The grayish, beige-ish Dell and Compaq hard-drives that are still packed into my dad’s computer room look so antiquated to me now. They look so sad—a sign of my father’s permanence mixed in with decline. I constantly wanted new things, and every now and then, I would get them. My father wouldn’t even buy himself a new pair of sneakers until the hole in his old ones got so big that the tip of his big toe was nearly ice blue with frostbite after a long hike through the top of Bear Mountain to find my brother on an overly cold November morning. I didn’t want my father to let me have the things I wanted. I didn’t want him to spoil me to the point that he could make me aware of the fact that I was increasingly ashamed by him, the shabby clothes he wore, the over-the-top outdated computers he was still using. I stopped going to the computer room when I was fifteen, except rare moments when I wanted to just stand there and have a chance to look at the only private space my father has ever had as long as I have known him.

____________

When I told my mom that I hated boys and that I wanted them dead by my own physical prowess, she smiled and wrapped her beautiful long, thin hands around my cheeks.

“Boys are strange,” she told me. She had a particular smell and that smell was a thousand flowers dripping with honey—a tiny hint of fairy dust. She could charm me and my sister into doing anything for her one minute and then the next, anger us into taking her lipstick and scrawling YOU’RE A SELFISH BITCH XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (we had no idea what the X’s meant but for some reason, whenever we were mad, we slashed X’s to emphasize how crazy, raging mad we were) onto her dresser mirror in the afternoon when we were alone, only to guiltily wipe it off with Fantastic minutes before she came home, hastily throwing the lipstick out the window and feigning ignorance the next morning when she got up to do her make-up.

“Once, there was this rascal,” my mom continued as she covered her hands with lotion, “who only had a father, no mother, which was why maybe he never understood the psyche of a woman, and he would follow me home every afternoon. From the minute class was let out to the moment I walked into my apartment, he would stand five steps behind him, taunting me, calling me names, threatening to push me into the mud, making fun of the way I walked, making fun of my long neck,” and she craned her neck up and measured it with her thumb and forefinger to show me, “making fun of the color of my hair, which was really quite red when I was younger, making fun of my parents, my mom, my dad, my brother, my friend who I walked home with, and I thought for sure he hated me, but I didn’t know why. I had never talked bad about anyone behind their back or to their face the entire time I was growing up. I don’t think I had ever spoken to this boy before he started following me, and even then, I never really spoke to him. I just ignored him and wondered why he hated me so much.”

“Mom,” I started to say.

“But it turned out he was in love with me. He was in love with me, and the only way he could express it at that age was by teasing me, throwing things at me. Once, he even threw broken glass at me, and my friend ran up to a police officer to tell him to arrest the kid, but those were corrupt days. The police officer only arrested kids if they were the kid of a professor. They left the poor ones alone to terrorize the city.”

“Mom, of course he liked you. It’s so obvious. Did you really not have any idea that he liked you?”

“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea whatsoever. I just had no idea whatsoever. You’re better than me when I was your age. When I was your age,” and she pulled in close to me and bent her head down low, “I thought maybe if I sat too close to another man it would get me pregnant. Your father took me on a walk once and suggested we rest our feet underneath the shade of a tree. I wouldn’t touch his hands the entire time we were seated because I was shaking and sweating with fright. I thought I had gotten pregnant just from him looking at me. Can you believe your mommy?” she asked me.

____________

In school the next day, the other kids asked me why I ran out of gym, and some kid, Sophia or something, pushed me and said I made our team lose, and I pushed her back and said, “So freaking what?”

“So—so that’s so uncool of you, Celia. If you were going to run that fast out the door, you should have at least stayed and helped the team out first.”

“Leave me alone, you’re worse than a mosquito.”

____________

My mother was the type of beautiful that I only read about later in books. I felt a startling alliance between the stories I read on the page and the stories my mom told me. When I read a 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, I pictured my own mother floating into the air, a halo of picked flowers, of hummingbirds singing a lovely song not too high, not too long, around my mother as she ascended, and I imagined that was the reason why sometimes I could tell that she was looking at us—my sister, me, and later on, my brother—but not taking us in. Sometimes, we were obstacles, and we blocked her from the things she was interested in, whatever they were, we sometimes stood right in front of them, or our shadows cast a darkness, a sourness over the things that set her alight, glittering in the middle of winter when we were all gloomy, and she was just a momentary sprite of a thing that we tried to catch.

____________

What I mean primarily, is that my mother grew up spoiled, used and inured to the idea of being a spectacle. Starting in the fourth grade, she no longer needed to do her chores. There was always someone to do them for her. The boy, who wore his hair greasy and parted in the middle, liked how long and shiny my mom’s hair was, and he offered to paint the fence around her parents’ tomato garden in exchange for ten strands of her hair wrapped in a small paper bag. After he painted her fence, my grandmother invited the boy up to their apartment and fed him a boiled tea egg and a soup with plenty of green onions.

“You’re young. You have your whole life to live. Don’t choose to waste it on painting fences for other people’s daughters. This one,” and my grandmother pointed sternly at my mother, “is not worth your time.”

At school the next day, my mom gave him ten strands of her hair, and he wanted her to promise it was her hair by letting him twist her arm behind her back, but my mom refused, and he couldn’t do anything because their teacher was watching, and in fact, my mom hadn’t given him ten strands of her own hair, but a strand of hair from each of her ten closest girlfriends who dared her to do this over hiccupped giggles.

The boy came to her the next day and thrust the bag of her hair into my mom’s face and yelled out, “You’re a goddamn liar.” It turned out he had memorized the smell of her hair, and when he got home to smell the strands of hair he had walked home with, he realized immediately that she had played him.

“Mom,” I said to her, after hearing this story for the first time, “do you know what you’d say if this had happened now instead of back then?”

“No, what?”

“He’d go, ‘Can you give me some of your hair for being your bitch slave,’ and you’d be like, ‘Fine,’ and then he’d go on and be your slave and do your chores, and you would give him the hair and a minute later, you’d be all like, ‘I told you I’d give you some of my hair………….. SIKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’”

____________

The reason why my sister thinks she’s going blind is because she can’t see her boyfriend’s face anymore. She calls me in the middle of the night and wakes up the entire family with her call. My dad emerges from his room, and I allow myself to admit this: he’s getting old. The lines around his eyes are beautiful and deep. They come out the most when he smiles. He looks like a man who could seduce a much younger, much more beautiful woman than my mother, the kind of man who girls look at and think, “He’s got sad eyes,” and it would have been a compliment, a brilliant remark as sweet as a dream that interrupts your waking life.

When he’s angry, or tired, like he is tonight, they look drawn-in, fake, as if someone went in and penciled lines of deep irritation right onto his face. It scares me.

“Who is it Celia?”

“It’s just Cindy.”

“Chuh.” That’s the sound he makes when he want to evoke a certain emotion, or pass a certain kind of judgment on me. It’s the sound of him shaking his head at me, or the sound of him seeing the things I do as ridiculous and illogical and only possible to someone who has not suffered for the past twenty years and continues to suffer to this very day, even up to this very second. A.k.a., the main difference between me and him.

“Both of you have too much time on your hands,” he says, and if he wasn’t so tired, he’d suggest a way for us to not have as much time. “Why don’t you mow the lawn and repaint the house? That should take up all this free time you seem to have and otherwise spend complaining.” That was one of his favorite things to say. Or, “Try being daddy for a day. You go to work, you get yelled at, you take care of twenty computers and twenty shouting stock brokers, and then you come home and make dinner, then you clean up, then you tell mommy you have to finish paying the bills when she looks at you with her lower lip sticking out and tries and get you to watch another episode of the latest TV show she’s watching, and then you, the next day, calm her down when she’s going off about all the bills we should have paid yesterday. I’d be happy to switch out for your life. When should we initiate the swap?” Tonight he simply says “Chuuh,” to me and retreats back into his room.

“Celia?”

“Hi Cindy. You sound distressed.”

“I can’t see his face anymore. When we’re lying in bed together and I lean in to give him a kiss, or sometimes, when I just want to see him up close, everything suddenly goes completely blurry.” Cindy lets out a breath, and if I could illustrate it, it would look like a jagged staircase. “I’m losing my vision.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“I’m not. I can’t see him at all. It’s been one week, and I swear there are these things about him that I absolutely love and can’t stop talking about. I think I’ve probably told you hundreds of times by now how much I love his long, long eyelashes, and the little craters on the right side of his cheek from his bicycle accident, but now, I can only remember what these little body marks look like from zooming in on pictures from my computer, and because I keep a really detailed journal.”

“Well, you’re obviously not losing your vision if you can see pictures on your computer.”

“Um, how is that obvious again?”

“Well. Losing your vision means you lose the ability to see. Having the ability to see something, such as a picture on your computer, means you do not meet the central criteria that would qualify you as a blind child.”

“You’re a regular whip-smart, ass-fuck these days, aren’t you?”

“Yup.”

“I can’t exactly see the pictures on the computer either.”

“But you just said you could.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. By the way, why do you always lie?”

“By the way, no I didn’t, and no I don’t.”

“By the way, yes you did.”

“I said that looking at photos on the computer is the only way for me to stir up an image of his face. I don’t even know if I really see anything. It’s like when mom keeps bringing up the time you got yourself completely covered in mud, and you came out of the garden and told her you planted four seeds, and in a few weeks, we’d have roses, and instead, it turned out you planted her two earrings that dad gave to her as a gift and some loose pearls that had come undone from her necklace. None of us actually remember that, except maybe mom, but we all know it vaguely, and there are these random, fairly innocuous things that trigger this memory for us. Like anytime mom wears her pearls. Or anytime we read Jack and the Beanstalk to Dennis.”

“Ok, what are we talking about?”

____________

Around this time, I start to worry about dying. When I take my brother to the YMCA for his swimming lesson, I unbuckle my seatbelt during a red light and reach back to hold his hand for as long as the light stays green.

He asks me, “Why are you doing that?”

“I’m scared to lose you.” I close my eyes and imagine myself being shot in the face at night; being spent spiraling down the side of the highway in the morning when my dad takes the shorter, windier route to Flushing; going to the doctor’s for a check-up and being told that I’m fine, only to have a vein in my brain explode as my mom takes out a ten dollar bill for the co-pay; or worst of all, just getting old, fast, quick, each year feeling like a minute in retrospect, and laying on my deathbed, already eighty, already seventy, just about to die, and maybe doing something like getting up on my knees and begging, head to the sky, for whatever sort of God that could possibly exist to let me live just a few more years.

“Can you let go of my hand now?” Dennis asks me.

I continue driving to the YMCA and drop him off at the men’s showers and locker. I laugh when he comes out, his small seven year old body so, so small, I think maybe he belongs on a toy store shelf, and I ask him over and over to please come here and let me hug him, and when he finally does, I do the same thing I did in the car, hug him so long and so hard that he starts to push me away with both his hands and when that doesn’t make me let go, he head butts me, which actually hurts a lot, so I release my grip.

“Don’t hit me. I’m your sister and I just took you to your swimming class when I could’ve been at home watching TV.”

“You said come here for a second. That was more than one second.”

I let him go and watch him waddling around in his section of the pool. He takes a long time to learn how to swim, so even though this is his eighth week, he’s still a guppy, and Andrew Keneti, the other kid who attends Tuesday night swim lessons and is evenly matched to my brother in size, is already on his way to being a shark.

I sit in the waiting room and all I can thinking about is dying, what it feels like, how it will happen to me, if I will even know that I’m about to die the moment before I die, if it’s better for me to just be obliterated without warning, or if I’d like to know so at least I can be aware of the days I have left to be happy, to feel the small cheeks of my brother against my hair and shoulders, to fall in love with the boys I see on the streets, to shout and hoot at them and then duck when they raise their heads, to ask my parents if they are scared to be the age they are now, and if they think about their own parents, and then to ask my grandparents if they are scared of the time they have left, if they feel like it’s meaningful to do anything, if they think it was worth it after all, to have been born, to have been given a life that only feels good as long as you know it will end one day, and when it does, what if it means you no longer feel or remember the life you led, what if it means you don’t know you were once born, that someone once wrote you love notes and sang to you under the rain, that you once fought in a war and came back to a world that forgot about you, and I think these thoughts and lead them through a path so circular and repetitive that I end up opening and closing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the book I brought with me to read in the waiting room, until the pages in the middle start to wiggle loose and drop to the floor like leaves at the start of Autumn.

I go into the pool area and watch my brother swim. He looks like a small tadpole high on sugar, and to me, he’s the one everyone else revolves around in the pool. I barely can see my surroundings, I’m just so covered in my own frantic thoughts that I think briefly to myself, Maybe it this is what she means by I’m losing my vision Celia, you gotta believe me.

____________

None of us forget each other’s birthdays because we were all born on the same day: December 25. Cindy is seven years older than me, and I’m nine years older than Dennis. Cindy and I used to kiss him simultaneously, her on his left and me on his right cheek. We smushed him with this immense love that I still feel, but I guess no longer express. We called it the Flattening Love Experiments. I don’t know who came up with the name. It sounds stupid now.

____________

After my sister graduated from college, I started writing letters to people I wanted to meet. First, I wrote a letter to Hansen, the washed-out teen band I once had a sex dream about—I woke up with my hands dug into my underwear and felt so ashamed that I took two showers in a row, then went outside and dirtied my hands with dirt from the backyard, went back and took another shower. I started off the letter like this:

Dear Hanson brothers!

Dear Hanson trio!

A trio of brothers!

Hanson bros!

Trio of bros!

Tro bros!

I’m writing to you today in hopes that I will sound crazy enough so that whoever sorts through your mail, (probably someone who looks like me, is the same age as me and is in your immediate family, in which case, that person would not actually look like me since I’m not blond, blue-eyed, or a white girl!) will find me interesting and startling enough that they will pass this letter on to you.

I don’t normally like to look back at my diary entries once I’ve written them. I especially would not like to look back at my seventh and eighth grade diary entries, but if I did, I would probably find a few entries that are trying to be all deep and pose the question, “Can you love someone you’ve never met before?” Obviously, what I was really getting at was: is it weird that I want to have mad, wild sex with Taylor Hanson, and if not Taylor, then okay, I’ll take Ike because he’s got a good name and I could do with an older man, and if not Taylor or Ike, then fine, I’ll take Zach even though he sings like my brother, and I’d rather not be thinking of my brother while boning a Hanson.

I also wrote letters to Denzel Washington, Devon Sawa, Posh Spice, the English teacher who left my school when I was in tenth grade, and I was so sure he touched my arm once and lingered there longer than he should have, and another time, I thought maybe he was giving me the once-over during exam week when it was hotter than a baked turkey and I wore my old green shorts that were too small for me. I thought for sure when he asked me to stay behind at the end of class, he was going to shut the door, pull down the blinds, and whip out his dick, and I had it all figured out—I would confidently say, “I wore a special bra today. I was hoping you’d get to see it,” and he would rip off my bra, (because he could care less about what I was wearing compared to the wild passionate fucking we were about to engage in), but it turned out in the end that he just wanted to congratulate me on my excellent scores and performance this year, and that I should feel free to call him or write him next year when I was a junior and he was teaching a bunch of private school fuckheads in Southern California the multiple dimensions of Hemingway’s imperialist ambitions. I kept his address in a box with the Kleenex pack the video store clerk gave me when I first moved into this town.

The letter I wrote my English teacher went like this:

Dear Mr. Clarke,

Hi, do you remember me? I used to sit way up in the front and the girls behind me sometimes threw things at me, like packing peanuts. Sometimes, I would walk into class with glassy eyes. I had long straight black hair, and no matter summer or winter, I would always wear a skirt to class. If you remember me then you might not want to keep reading this letter.

I wanted you to notice me when I crossed my legs at the front of the class, and I wanted you to notice me when I raised my hands and waited an extra second before speaking because I had seen my older sister do that once, and boys go wild for her. I practiced lowering my voice at home by reading Daisy’s lines from The Great Gatbsy, which you said was the greatest book ever written, and to be honest, I read it and didn’t think much of it except, hat an exciting life Daisy led, and how Fitzgerald wrote her character with such disdain and admiration, and how spoiled she seemed through and through, and how I didn’t want to read another book about rich people who think they have it hard, that whole dumb debate about which sort of pain is worse, emotional/mental or physical/material, and god almighty, how is it that privileged dipshits are the only ones who don’t know the answer? You taught us not to use clichés, and isn’t it a cliché—the whole idea that just because you’re rich in material wealth doesn’t mean you are rich in emotional wealth. The only reason they make shows like Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 is because they want people, who would otherwise feel pissed off about being poor, to have the illusion that being rich isn’t all that, and actually it’s quite tough to have a million bucks at your disposal because your daddy don’t love you, your mommy only loves jewels, your boyfriend treats you real bad, etc, whatever.

I didn’t mean to get into a tangent (another thing you told us to not do when we spoke in class, or when writing an essay for you, and I had raised my hand, do you remember, and I asked, “Then how come when Joyce or Jane Austen does it, it’s considered wonderful and intriguing and important to the development of the English canon,” and you had said, “Well, there is an overused saying that goes, ‘you have to know the rules to break them,’” and I was not satisfied with your answer but I was sort of aroused and excited, and I wanted you to see that, to see the fire and vigor I had for you and for your class.) The whole time you were teaching us, I wanted so badly for you to want me and think about me, and I dreamed of you during the day, sometimes inadvertently at night. During the day, I had strange daydreams about you because I didn’t dream about being with you, or being kissed by you, as much as I dreamed about you dreaming of me, and of you fantasizing about me, so I guess in a way you could call me really narcissist or a special form of lesbian. (Does that turn you on by the way?)

Anyways, I hope I one day get the chance to be fucked by you and that you will one day call me dirty names like you no good f*cking wh*re, sl**, worthless c***sucker, etc. No, I’m totally kidding. I’d like to engage in mature, consensual love-making with you one day. I hope you do too, as my boobs are in pretty good shape, my butt is perky, and I bet there aren’t too many sixteen year old girls throwing themselves at you, except for the one writing this letter: ME. So, I suggest you take advantage of me while you still can.

Yours Truly,

Celia

I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish with these letters, but I kept writing them. I included my real return address, and felt absolutely petrified when I licked shut the letter to Mr. Clarke. I covered my eyes with one hand, like I did during horror films, as I dropped his letter into the post office box. I nearly screamed as I slammed the handle shut and heard the sound of my envelope sliding down with the other letters and packages.

I started to write the video store clerk a letter as well, although I didn’t know his name so I addressed it to, “The boy I have loved ever since I moved into this crappy, shithole, no-future-whatsoever-in-store-for-me-here town,” and I meant it completely. I had decided early on that I would agree to have sex with Mr. Clarke, if he ever asked, I would do it in a heartbeat, I’d do it doggy-style if that was his prerogative. As for the Hanson brothers, I’d have no problem jacking all three of them off simultaneously, and if they were into kinky shit, I’d oblige that too, nipple clamps, stiletto heels, laying out on the beach, the whole nine yards, hard-core porno style and everything.

I had no trouble imagining these scenarios and mentioned my willingness to do them in my letters with some edits. (I ended up including the three handjobs at once thing, but omitted the bit about nipple clamps, and I was too chicken-shit to write the word ‘doggy-style’ in a letter to one of my favorite teachers, but I did implore him to come back to New York and have sex with me in his car, or any other discreet location.) Of course, at the time when I was writing these letters, the most experience I had ever had was kissing my ninth-grade boyfriend, who drew X’s on his wrists every morning before going to work with magic marker, and when the jocks slapped him in the hallway and said, “You’ll probably die of ink poisoning before you get around to committing suicide,” (which I found to be an unusually astute observation for that crowd), on the cheek, outside of Computer Science class. Oh, and also the time when I ripped my hand away from his when he tried to put it over his hard-on during Chasing Amy. We broke up shortly after that. He was a fucking perv.

My fantasies of the video store clerk were entirely pure. I counted the number of times he smiled at me when I was in the store, and sometimes I lurked and watched out of the corner of my eye the number of times he smiled at the other girls in the store. One time, I counted seven smiles, and I was so very happy because seven was a lucky number, and I also happened to like its shape very much. In fact, I was so happy that I shouted “I love him, I really really love him,” in my room, and my mom ran in and asked me why I was shouting when other people were trying to sleep, and I was too embarrassed to tell her, so we got into an argument instead and made each other cry.

She asked me, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, of course I am. Now get out, would you? How would you like it if I ran into your room whenever I felt like it without asking, or knocking first?”

“You disrupt the things I do all the time. Please don’t forget that I’m also your mother.”

“That doesn’t take away my right to a little bit of privacy.”

“A little bit of privacy? Look at you. You’re a spoiled brat. You have this entire room to yourself, we give you an allowance every week, you get to lock this door whenever you want, and then when dinner’s ready, you get to come down and eat, and then you get to go back up to your room and ignore your family. Look at how much you have, and you’re still whining.”

“And look how self-absorbed you are, mom. You never even try to listen or understand the things I say—”

“Don’t talk to your mom like that.” When my mom said that, I always knew that we were headed for a bad turn. It usually signaled the end. She would follow it up with a something like, “I’m your mom and I don’t care,” or “You have to do anything I say,” or “I’m right. You’re wrong. Apologize now.” I knew the argument was over but I was feeling bold.

“You can’t just end the argument with that. It’s not fair. It’s not even relevant.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying. Relevant? What do you mean, relevant?” Nothing angered my mother more than when I used an English word she didn’t understand. She fought with me in Chinese and I fought back in my broken Chinese-English mish-mash, going heavy on the English when I thought I had a chance to humiliate or trump her.

“It means instead of just responding to what I say, you end the argument by declaring you’re my mom and that’s that.”

“Right. That’s that. Apologize now to your mother. Apologize to me and say that you were wrong.”

That was when I started crying, and later, she cried too because I wouldn’t apologize. All that just for a boy who smelled a little bit like the rubber tip on a #2 eraser.

____________

Cindy is coming home in two weeks, and my mind is still fixated on death. My friend Diana says it’s a morbid curiosity, but it’s not that. It’s not as if I’m interested in people who are dying, or the physical aspects of death. I’m not fascinated by death or interested in exploring what it means, I’m just afraid of it.

Sometimes in class, I feel a jolting reminder that in a blink, I’ll be gone, and I can’t get myself to listen to anything the teacher is saying. I just focus on what it would be like to no longer have feelings, to be asleep forever, to have never remembered that you once hoped for this, wanted that, cried over those things, and it makes me feel so fucking terrified. When I get into bed, I slap myself all night long because I don’t want to fall asleep, I don’t want to do anything that would be similar to being dead. I’m afraid of not feeling anything, so I hit myself, and I scratch blood out of my legs, and I sneak off to the bathroom with a book underneath my nightgown and read three or four books in the bathroom to stay awake.

I quickly realize that the only thing that gets my mind off death is constant and nonstop masturbation. In health class, we have an entire discussion about why men masturbate more than women, and all the girls in our class, except Micky Ravener, the token slutty girl, make a big fuss about how they never masturbate, and all the boys get uproarious and shout out the number of times they masturbate in a day.

“Three!”

“Four!”

“Five!”

“Six, or until it starts to chafe!”

“Until it becomes numb!”

“Until I’m jizzing blood!”

I feel embarrassed that I’ve started to masturbate just about every night now, and when I wake up, I do it again. It sounds ridiculous, but I’m afraid if I don’t I’ll start to think about dying again.

I tell Cindy on the phone about my death fixation, but I don’t tell her about the masturbation, and she responds by telling me I’m self-obsessed.

“Well obviously, everyone is afraid of dying.”

“Not everyone,” I tell her on the phone. “This kid in my class, Marty, claims he’s not afraid of what happens after death—”

“What, is he a devout Christian or something?”

“No, he’s an atheist actually. And the reason is because he says if you weren’t afraid of not being born, and if death is the like the mirror image, the complement of not being born, which is not being alive, then you can’t be afraid of that either.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Well the point is that not everyone’s afraid of death.”

“Well, everyone is afraid of death. Deep down. Of course they would be. But, it’s just so typical of you that you, at age seventeen, would be afraid to die, when you know people like grandma and grandpa who are probably three breaths away from actually dying, and instead of worrying about missing them when they are gone, you worry about yourself. And what about mom and dad? Their lives are half over.”

Cindy depresses the hell out of me sometimes, and I want to tell her that she’s older than me, she has at least some sort of responsibility to me, and c’mon, take care of me, make me see that I have three people guarding over me, and sure she only has two, but she was the firstborn so their love for her has to be deeper and more intense than anything they could ever feel for me or Dennis, which is why Dennis needs all four of us to take care of him. Everyone knows love flow downwards, so please, stop moving in the wrong direction, Cindy.

____________

This Christmas, it will be the first time in four years that we have all been together for our birthdays. I had a dream last night that we were triplets, the three of us, and mom put us in a suitcase with two dividers and rolled up through Flushing Meadow Park. When I was five, my dad used to take me to the park, and our favorite thing to do was stand above other things. We walked on every bridge, every extra step, climbed on the big rocks by the east end of the park, and we leaned over to look at the things beneath us—some grass, a bit of dirty water, a few ducks fighting over bread, other children and their fathers walking through the same world we lived in.

I could put my arms out now, as I walk downstairs to make myself a cup of instant noodles, and I would bump into every hanging picture, every ornament my mother has ever bought from a local merchant at a holiday fair, every Chinese saying that has ever been written on a wooden block and then sold to suckers like my mom and suckers like my dad who get conned into paying for it by beautiful women like my mom, and everything that makes up this house would eventually touch my fingers, but I don’t think, in the end, I would come any closer to being part of this house. Is it possible to hang up memories like a painting, only invisible, and woven in like a sweater? Is it possible to wear a sweater that’s threaded with all your favorite moments from childhood, and threaded with the memories you’ve preserved of your mother, how she looked when you were in elementary school, the dresses she wore every time you celebrated a birthday or a graduation or the first certificate anyone ever presented to you, even if it was just for not missing a single day of school, which was really because both your parents worked and they didn’t have the money for a babysitter, so you had to go to school, even the times when you felt like puking, and even that one time when you actually did, but at least you did it on Suzie Fredericks, the bitch with a twitch, and what else, what else?

I’m excited to see Cindy, but she hardly makes a blip in Dennis’ radar screen. He’s turning eight this year, and she’s been gone missing from half of his life so far. Next year, it will be more than half. When I was six, I told Cindy I love the house we lived in when I was three, that it was my favorite house. So she picked me up and pretended to try and throw me in the air, but I knew she couldn’t—she’s so weak she’d have trouble lifting Styrofoam—and she pulled me back down to her and held me against her shoulder, all of her hair was falling around me, and I felt so happy putting my nose in her hair that I started to laugh and shake my head, which hurt her because I have a really heavy head, and she has really limp bones, but even still, she was pleased with me, and she asked me, “You loved that house? That ratty house? You thought it was better than this one?”

“Yeah. I liked that house better. This one’s boring.”

I love that memory, but I have to try and force myself to not remember it too often. The thing about memory is that it’s constantly updating itself. I have this feeling that the only reason I loved our old house—the first one I remember living in, covered in yellow printed wallpaper that was later covered in oil from the foods my parents made, the house that was carpeted in the bedroom and covered with rugs in the living room, the house with a tiny backyard with tiny flowers, and all these small bugs that came out of nowhere in the morning and disappeared into nowhere at night—is because back then, my sister still agreed to play with me. She dressed me up and took pictures of me. She wrapped a black scarf around my head and covered my eye with our grandpa’s eye patch that he wore in the morning sometimes because he had injured his left eye somehow, during the war. Which war? We never knew. What sort of injury? We never tried to find out. Cindy took pictures of me looking like a pirate in our grandfather’s old relics, and I was happy to be her fool and test case. She let me sleep in her bed, and she said, “Wrap your legs around me. It helps me sleep.”

After we moved to the new house, she was worried all the time. Her pants were too baggy, the other girls had curly hair, no one gave her a ride after Art Club, she was always crying, things were always heavy, and I was alone for the first time, and after a while, all the time.

____________

My mother is so beautiful that last year, around this time, in the parking lot of Macy’s, a man came up to her and said, “You’re beautiful. I do photographs for women who are beautiful—not as beautiful as you—and in their forties and fifties. Please accept my card and consider the opportunity. I think you would catch the light of the camera beautifully.” But all she could think of was how he had been able to tell she was middle-aged. The adjectives that men had once used to modify her were now being modified themselves. She was beautiful for a woman her age. She was as beautiful as a woman half her age. These sentences depressed her and so, in turn, they depressed me. I wanted her to be happy so I started to tell her made-up things.

“Eric Martin said you were the hottest woman he’s ever seen in his life. He made this disgusting roof-ing sound. Like a dog. Yeah, he’s a dog, all right. He’s got out it for you.”

“My friend Tim thought he was gay until he met you. It sounds wild doesn’t it? But he really was about to go gay until you picked me up from his house.”

These were not things so far-fetched from the truth. My friends did think my mother was beautiful. Tim would probably deny his homosexuality for the next ten years, maybe more. For now, he’ll just keep getting blowjobs with his eyes sealed shut, maybe some nice pictures of buff dudes glued to the insides of his eyelids. My mother, for her part, bought it entirely. She did this thing where her eyes lit up, and her eyeballs started doing mad laps around and around. It was like she was taking in every piece of wall and ceiling and floor in our house. Then she smiled and said, “Hehehehehe!” The sound was really just that. And then, suddenly, she had her composure back. Her irises were still, no longer enlarged, she started talking about mundane things—charming, small things like fighting with the woman who sold her a pound of shrimp, and throwing our trash into our neighbor’s recycling after taking an allergy medicine, and the only change was that her words were newly infused with a ridiculously beautiful, golden happiness.

__________

If you want to know what my dad is like, ask someone else. He spends four hours of each working day on a train, when he gets home, he goes right for the phone or he works remotely from his laptop, and on the weekends, he drives into Manhattan, and sometimes, when the weather is good, offers to take us along with him. When Dennis and I go, we sit in the very back of our SUV and turn up the air conditioning and play go fish. I let Dennis win, and when I say, “You’re really good Denny,” he says, “I know,” and then I want to unbuckle my seat belt and give him a big kiss. Sometimes, I do.

My dad works in the World Financial Center with all the other big suits and women in heels. Every winter, my mom makes us pose right in front of the Christmas tree that stands tall at maybe nineteen or twenty feet, and it stands up straight right in the middle of the ‘Winter Gardens,’ which is just a bunch of tropical plants under a glass ceiling. Winter is the longest and saddest season in New York, so everything that happens in the winter months is sad too. Even the good things are tinged with a detracting gloom. Like falling in love in the winter with someone who doesn’t really love you but pretends to kind of love you.

____________

When I tell my friend Oscar that Cindy is coming home for Christmas, he practically pops a boner in his jeans and starts asking me all sorts of questions.

“How old is your sister again?”

“Twenty four.”

“So, is she bringing home—”

“Bringing home?”

“Yeah, is she bringing anyone home?”

“Like?”

“Like a boyfriend or fiancée or something.”

“She’s only twenty-four.

"Ever heard of the saying you’ve got to sow your wild oats?”

“Sew?”

“Yeah, sow.”

“So, no boyfriend?”

“She has a boyfriend. I don’t know if he’s coming with her or not. Why, do you think you want to try and tap that, because you know, you couldn’t. Not if you tried, not if you paid her. Unless you have the kind of money that Phil Knight has.”

“Who?”

“The CEO of Nike.”

“What?”

“Well, Cindy can be a greedy bitch sometimes, so if you had that kind of cash, I bet she’d blow you.”

“Why do you always say stuff like that?”

“To get attention. Did it work?”

“Yeah. It’s really annoying.”

“And you’re really desperate. You just care about getting a wankjob from my sister.”

You know, eventually you’re going to make everyone feel so awkward around you that people are just going to stop talking to you.”

“Fuck you Oscar. You’re not invited to my house for the party anymore. So fuck you.”

“Cecilia.”

“Fuck you.”

____________

I want to try again to explain my father. When he’s awake, he sits slumped in his bed, remote in hand, clicking through as many channels as we have. Sometimes, our parents stop paying for cable, and then we only have five channels and every show has a laugh track. Other times, my father is in a good mood, and we have sixty channels, and he always picks the ones that show old movies of Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris fighting a bunch of villains, and everyone has a twangy accent.

Could my father be that sort of hero? Severe, gruff, unknowable, altruistic, and altogether, the perfectly made man? Isn’t he the one who holds our house together? Doesn’t he get up first thing in the morning, shovels the snow before we get a chance, waters the lawn before we’ve even rubbed last night’s dreams out of our eyes, and at night, after driving us home from a boring dinner party, he picks Dennis up in his arms, climbs the stairs two by two, sets him down in his bed, tucks him in and flies back down, sets foot through the front door before my mother and I have even gotten our coats back on, and helps us out of the car as well.

____________

When Cindy first left home for college, my mom cried everyday. Dennis was only three years old. I was okay, just felt a tiny bit betrayed, a tiny bit emptied out of all the good parts. But my mother cried every day, and she did it sitting right in front of us, at the kitchen table, while the rest of us ate. Sometimes, I would take her bowl and put it on the far end of the kitchen table because I didn’t want her to cry and eat.

I remember sometimes, Cindy would come home and have a blank look in her eyes for days. Sometimes, she woke us up with her crying in the middle of the night. She had lost someone who she loved to another girl, or he had simply lost interest in her, and she said to me once when I came into her room after being woken up by a long hiccupped breath that came from her end of the hall, “You think it’s so dramatic when you hear about someone killing themselves just because they were dumped, but then you feel the complete pointlessness of being alive after someone you loved for a year just stops feeling that same love back to you, and then you understand a little bit.”

I wanted to tell her that my mom probably sometimes felt like there was no point to this house without Cindy’s presence. I wanted Cindy to know that it was the way that Cindy didn’t even think about mom at all, never cried about our mom, never counted missing us as one of her primary troubles, that made our mom feel like her life was over as well. Sometimes, I want to take Dennis with me and crawl into bed with my mom and give her little hugs all night long. Sometimes, I pretend I’m mom, and I make Dennis pretend to be me, and I imitate my mom when she’s wrapped up thinking about Cindy, as if Cindy might never come home again, as if she were gone from our lives forever, and not just temporarily, and I would rock back and forth and push my hair forward in front of my eyes while I pretended to cry, and then Dennis would come up to me and try to give me a hug, and he was so small that it just felt really nice, his small hands grabbing my shoulder, but we were in character so I would say, “Go away unless you’re Cindy,” which wasn’t something my mom ever said, but I worried sometimes that she was speaking to us in codes, and so I was always trying to crack them, and this was just what I came up with.

____________

I like our neighbors. Some of them own cats and dogs, and one of them owns a snake. The one who owns a snake wants us to call her Ms. F, and Dennis is the only one of us who actually does that. Cindy and I just call her “hey you” even though she’s older and it’s not really showing respect. Still, that’s just what we like to do. Ms. F wears a small gold jewel in the middle of her forehead, and she used to live in the jungles of Cambodia where she had to beat down snakes with her bare feet to survive, but she always secretly loved them, so she ended up taking buying a snake as soon as she arrived in the United States, and she also married an Indian husband who we never saw for more than a few minutes each month, but we always marveled at his moustache. How did he get it to be so perfectly curled at the ends?

____________

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 something I know I don’t like?” 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 have been constantly slapped by my mom. They’re 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 eighth grade, and Dennis was in Pre-K, 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. 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 made me laugh so hard 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 long 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, 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 these 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’s 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 one 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 Cindy, and maybe one day, Dennis, 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.

____________

We have another neighbor who gives us candy for no particular reason, and she wears nice sunglasses, even on cloudy days, and 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. She’s got great patience. She’ll just stand outside holding plate of cookies in one hand and a pitcher of lemonade in another waiting for the kids on our block to come home from school or finish up their game of softball. When I talk to Aunt May, I notice that 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 lodged in one of 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.

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 seventeen now, 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 whether she thinks I’m past that now, or if I never got there in the first place, and Aunt May tells me that the kind of beauty that has everlasting powers, that remains till the very end can only be found in the kind of girl who blossoms slowly, and I ask her if she means painfully slowly, and she tells me, yes, painfully slowly.

____________

My mom and I decorated the house today to welcome back Cindy. She’s been gone from my life for about two years now—two full years of her coming home maybe once or twice a year for a few days at a time, and even then, her coming home was no more important or eventful than eating ice cream for breakfast.

“Cindy, no one misses you anymore,” I said to her on the phone last year.

“Oh yeah? That’s great, because guess what? I don’t seem to give a shit about you people either.” My mom never measures anything in absolute terms, so to her, Cindy has been gone for an entire lifetime.

“I’m already a different person from the mommy you knew when you were a kid, Cici,” she tells me while dusting Cindy’s photographs of me and Dennis. In the photos, we look real shiny and somewhat deranged. “I’m entering my second life, darlingpie. I don’t think it’s as good as my first one. But maybe there’s more yet to come.”

We’ve decorated the house with things that we thought Cindy would like. We popped popcorn and strung some along the tree. Dennis ate half the popcorn we popped, so we were only able to drape the kernels over the bottom of the tree, which is anyway, the part that counts and looks the best.

Dennis is getting an older kid’s head, but he still laughs like a baby, and when I touch his hair, it’s soft like a baby’s hair, so I can’t bring myself to treat him like an older kid. He still wants to sleep in my room, so we sleep on the floor and pick lint out of my carpet before bed. We’re getting attached in a way that seems familiar. He wants me to take him everywhere, and he gets angry when I laugh.

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you. It’s a compliment. I think you’re funny.”

“I’m telling.”

“You can’t tell on me for that. I’m being nice. I’m showing you that I think you are really funny and charming. It’s a good thing.”

But everything hurts him, even the good stuff, and I know why. Next year, I will be leaving too, and Ms. F, who comes out in the morning with her snake wrapped around her neck, said to me, “Your family is dissolving, don’t you see? One by one, you’re all leaving, and when children leave they never come back.” But Ms. F only says that because her own children died in the jungle, and no one knows how it happened, but I’m not going to dissolve the family just by leaving, there’s no way.

No one knows that I’ve been thinking about death and dying—not that I’m suicidal, just that I can’t stop thinking about it, and up until Ms. F came up to me, I had only thought about it for myself, how horrible it would be, the day I lost all consciousness, feeling, and everything, but now I’m also thinking about my mom and dad, Dennis and Cindy, and all of a sudden, I start worrying that maybe one day they will all die in an accident on the freeway while driving up to see me at my college, wherever it might be, only Cindy, I guess, would probably not be in the car, because Cindy is always trying to be someplace that they are not.

____________

I showed mom and dad how to make cookies today with a recipe I learned from my friend Oscar and it made our house smell like a family staying in for the holidays.

__________

I have brief fantasies, while waiting for mom and dad to come back with Cindy, of stealing Ms. F’s snake and showing it to the video store clerk who doesn’t work at the video store, who maybe has read my letters and is trying to steer clear of me, if he even knows who I am, and impress him with my snake. Or, I would time warp and shrink myself into a little cane that fits in my mom’s ear and watch the boys come up to her and rack their brains for a reason to touch her. I think the less clever ones would hit her and say, “Ugly. Giant. Twiddly legs.” And the really suave ones would just say, “Excuse me,” and brush past her.

While Dennis and I watch cartoons and wait for Cindy, I daydream of our old house. We live there again, and Cindy is putting my hair in braids. Dad comes home at four and studies for his night classes, and I make him a snack of Oreos and dried fruit, and he shows me that trick where he catches raisins in his mouth with his eyes closed. My mother is wearing a dress with snowflakes on the sleeves, singing a ditty and twirling her feet. All three of us run to her, and we pretend to pick the snowflakes from her sleeves and blow them towards dad, and Cindy, oh Cindy the eternal liar, tells me that was how dad got his white hair, but I don’t fall for it. I’m an older sister now too, and I have my own ideas. Dennis is a little tiny baby who wears a blue knit cap and has fingers so small that I spend an entire afternoon trying to wrap a piece of ribbon around his thumb and pinky, so I can say, “Look mom, look dad, this is your gift to me this year, so can you return that bike? I don’t need it anymore. But thank you. Thank you so much.”