Sour Heart Read online

  Sour Heart is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Jenny Zhang

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Lenny, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LENNY and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories have been previously published in different form: “The Empty the Empty the Empty” in Diagram, “We Love You Crispina” in Glimmer Train, “You Fell into the River and I Saved You!” in The Iowa Review, and “The Evolution of My Brother” in Rookie.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Zhang, Jenny, author.

  Title: Sour heart : stories / Jenny Zhang.

  Description: New York : Lenny, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016058411 | ISBN 9780399589386 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780399589393 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Coming of Age. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3626.H36 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016058411

  Ebook ISBN 9780399589393

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover image: © Bridgeman Images

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  We Love You Crispina

  The Empty the Empty the Empty

  Our Mothers Before Them

  The Evolution of My Brother

  My Days and Nights of Terror

  Why Were They Throwing Bricks?

  You Fell into the River and I Saved You!

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jenny Zhang

  About the Author

  Back when my parents and I lived in Bushwick in a building sandwiched between a drug house and another drug house, the only difference being that the dealers in the one drug house were also the users and so more unpredictable, and in the other the dealers were never the users and so more shrewd—back in those days, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment so subpar that we woke up with flattened cockroaches in our bedsheets, sometimes three or four stuck on our elbows, and once I found fourteen of them pressed to my calves, and there was no beauty in shaking them off, though we strove for grace, swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas. Back then, if one of us had to take a big dump, we would try to hold it in and run across the street to the bathroom in the Amoco station, which was often slippery from the neighborhood hoodlums who used it and sprayed their pee everywhere, and if more than one of us felt the stirrings of a major shit declaring its intention to see the world beyond our buttholes, then we were in trouble because it meant someone had to use our perpetually clogged toilet, which wasn’t capable of handling anything more than mice pellets, and we would have to dip into our supply of old toothbrushes and chopsticks to mash our king-sized shits into smaller pieces since we were too poor and too irresponsible back then to afford even a toilet plunger and though my mom and dad had put it on their list of “things we need to buy immediately or else we’ve just lost all human dignity,” somehow at the end of every month we’d be a hundred dollars short and couldn’t pay the gas bill in full, or we’d owe twenty dollars to a friend here and ten to a friend there and so on, until it all got so messy that I felt there was no way to really account for our woes, though secretly I blamed myself for instigating all our downward spirals, like the time I asked my father if he would buy me an ice-cream cone with sprinkles, which made him realize I had been waiting all month to ask and he felt so sorry for me that he decided to buy me not only an ice cream with sprinkles but a real rhinestone anklet that sure as hell was not on the list of “things we need to buy immediately or else we’ve just lost all human dignity,” and that was the sort of rhythm my family fell into—disastrous and depressing in our inability to get ahead—and that was why we were never able to afford a toilet plunger and why our butts were punished so severely in those years when it wasn’t as simple as, Hey, I’m going to take a crap now, see you in thirty seconds, it was more like, I’m going to take a crap now, where’s my coat and my shoes and also that shorter scarf that won’t dangle its way into the toilet and where’s the extra toilet paper in case the Indian guy forgot to stock the bathroom again (he always forgot), and later, when we finally moved, when we finally got the hell out of there, it still wasn’t simple either, but at least we could take shits at our own convenience, and that was nothing to forget about or diminish.

  —

  Before Bushwick, we lived in East Flatbush (my parents and I called it E Flat because we loved the sound of E Flat on the piano and we liked recasting our world in a more beautiful, melodious light) for a year and a half on a short little street with lots of stoops that needed fixing. We knew everyone on our street, not by name or by way of actually talking to them, but we knew their faces and we knew to nod and mouth, “hi, hi, hi,” or sometimes just “hi, hi,” or “hi!” but always something.

  Our neighbors were island people from Martinique and Trinidad and Tobago. A couple of them confronted my father one evening to set the record straight that they weren’t Dominicans. We’re West Indians, they said. Tell your kids that. My father came home confused by the entire interaction, but later my mom and I figured they must have been referring to those asshole Korean kids who lived a little ways down from us and hung around outside their apartments wearing baseball caps with the bill unbent and pants that sagged around their knees, calling out whatever pitiful insults they could think of. Once, when I was walking home from the bus stop, they yelled, “Yo, it’s the rape of Nanking! It’s really the rape of Nanking!” as if yelling out the name of a terrible war crime had the ability to scare me when I was nine and had been loved my entire life by parents who vowed daily to spend their whole lives protecting me, and though in 1992 it was true that I was a small, unexceptional thing, one thing I never was was scared. Those Korean kids were goons who were going to end up dead or incarcerated or dead one day, and my parents and I loathed them and loathed being confused or associated with them just because to everyone else in our neighborhood, we were the same.

  The Martinicans and the Trinidadians were the kind of people who acted like their homeland would always form a small, missing, and necessary bone in their bodies that caused them ghostly aches for as long as they were alive and away from home, and it bothered me how they clung to their pasts and acted like bygone times were better than what was happening in the here and now. They were always having cookouts in the summer and dressing in bright colors as if our streets were lined with coconut-bearing palm trees and not trash and cigarette butts and spilled food. Eventually though, I came to admire them greatly, especially the women because they had such enviable asses, which caused their belts to dip into a stretched-out V right at the spot where their cheeks met, and I used to follow that V with my eyes and so did the men, who apparently never got bored of seeing it either.

  My mom had no such ass, but commanded attention anyway. The men on our block liked to stare at my mom whenever she walked past—fixed, long, concentrated gazes. Maybe it was because her hair was so straight and long and fell down her back like heavy curtains and she had skin so white that it reminded me of vanilla ice cream. That was why I drew little cones all over her arms, which she let me do because my mom let me do anything as long as it made me
happy.

  “What makes you happy makes Mommy happy,” she would always say to me, sometimes in Chinese, which I wasn’t so good at, but I tried for her and for my father, and when I couldn’t, I would answer them in English, which I also wasn’t so good at, but it was understood that while I could still improve in either language, my parents could not, they were on a road to nowhere, the wall was right up against them, so it was up to me to get really good, it was up to me to shine and that scared me because I wanted to stay behind with them, I didn’t want to go any further than they could go.

  Sometimes, I would forget what I was supposed to say after she said something like that and I would say the wrong thing, like, “And what makes me happy is eating ice cream. Mrs. Lancaster can go suck it. Who cares if I don’t show the work? I still got all the right answers. She’s a tool, Mom.”

  “Sour girl,” my mom said. “If your teacher asks you to show work, then show the work. Can’t you speak anymore without using ugly words? And I take it that what makes your mommy happy doesn’t make you happy? Am I right, sours?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, I meant what makes you happy makes me happy too. I just forgot to say it.” It embarrassed me whenever my mom or my dad trumped me (although it was never on purpose) with how thoughtful they were, and by comparison, how thoughtless and selfish I had been in only thinking of myself when it seemed like every second of every day my parents were planning to undergo yet another sacrifice to make our lives that much better, and no matter how diligently I tried to keep up, there was always so much that was indiscernible. It was so hard to keep track of every detail, like how my parents shared the same pair of dress shoes, alternating their schedules so my father could wear them during the day and my mother at night even though they were four sizes too big for her and that was why she tripped so often and had so many scrapes on her body.

  There were so many days when I came home to an empty house with nothing at all to distract me except an oozy desire to come up with all the ways I could possibly sacrifice enough to catch up to my parents, who were always sacrificing. But I didn’t know how I could compete with my mom, who got fired from her job baking donuts after spending a night scavenging for a desk so that I wouldn’t have to do my homework on the floor or the bed or standing up with my workbook pressed against the wall, and how she found me a beautiful desk that was perfect except someone had sprayed FUCK YA MOMMA on the side of the desk, and how she dragged it down twenty-something blocks on her own and was too exhausted to wake up in time for work, and that was why she was fired and why she couldn’t ever keep a job because she was so tired all the time from taking care of me. Or how was I supposed to compete with my father, who was so good about not wasting a single thing, like how when I was four, I used to always throw up my food and no one was able to figure out why except maybe it had something to do with how the previous year, my parents and I left the only country we had ever known to come to this one, or maybe it had to do with the time I caught severe pneumonia after my mom put me in a beautiful blue tiered-lace dress for my first birthday in the United States in the middle of a snowstorm in December without a proper coat or tights, and I had to spend a month recovering in a hospital even though we couldn’t afford more than a night, and the bills from that were part of the reason why, for so long, my parents had to work three jobs at a time and even then, still couldn’t seem to get a leg up on their various loans—official and unofficial. After my bout of pneumonia, I was terrible at keeping food down and there were times when my dad would spoon the food I had vomited up directly into his own mouth so that not a single morsel of food went wasted because back then we had strict daily portions of what we could afford and the only way to replace the food I had vomited up was for my father to give me his portion of breakfast or lunch or dinner while he had my regurgitated rice and vegetables and pork—that was how much he was willing to sacrifice for us.

  When I got home from school (if I went to school that day), I would sometimes wait, slumped against the wall, for my parents to come home with a box of donuts at one in the morning, or leftover mei fun at eleven at night, or a pair of earrings with the paint peeling off from when my mom worked as a seamstress for a woman named Donna who gave my mom treats to give to me because she liked how I wore my bangs so high and pouffed and how I thanked her a million times whenever I went with my mom to work, and as I waited those six or seven hours alone in the apartment, I wondered what I could do to show my mom and dad that I, too, was part of this amazing, intricate machine that saved us from the kind of utter and complete desperation that coincides with everything falling the fuck apart.

  —

  Even though my mother was the sum total of everything you could ever ask for in a person, my dad was born with a wandering eye and would die with his eyeballs lolling around, still frantically on the lookout for attractive women, or at least that was what my mom told me. Shortly after we were kicked out of our Flatbush apartment and found the class A steaming heap of dung apartment in Bushwick, my dad started dating a woman he met through one of his waitering jobs, at the Chinese noodle house where he worked the late-night shift on weekends and holidays.

  Her name was Lisa and she was from Taiwan. She wasn’t beautiful, not like my mom who had eyes that reflected the moon, even in the daytime, and not like my mom who had thin arms and wore dresses all the time, even in the winter, and not like my mom who had a long high neck that made her look unapproachable; my dad’s girlfriend was short, like a broken tree trunk, and she had big breasts but that was all she had going for her. She wore heavy perfume that made her smell like the unwashed armpit of someone who, after running a half-marathon, had foolishly thought rubbing a bunch of flowers into their pits would mask the stink, but it was like my mother always said, “You can’t wash a turd with soap and expect it to smell nice.”

  The first time she came over to our apartment, I couldn’t stop sneezing because her perfume was so strong and I was allergic to artificial scents and bitchy dopeheads who had no business spending time with my dad. My dad introduced her to me as, “Your auntie Lisa.”

  “She’s not my auntie, Dad.” I looked at Lisa; her big stupid knockers hung down very low and I wanted to kick them back toward her face. “I’ll call her nothing, thank you very much.”

  After that, she would come over every now and then, always when my mom wasn’t there, although my mom knew and it wasn’t a secret, it was just one of those arrangements where one person got what she wanted at everyone else’s expense. Of course, Lisa didn’t give a rat about me or my mom and probably not my dad either, she was just a desperately lonely person who needed to be part of someone else’s world. She pretended to be nice to me when she came over, sometimes offering me sandwiches or once, she brought over a blender and asked me if I wanted a milkshake, and I told her I was picky about my food, and she asked me what I meant, and I said, I mean I only like the food my mom makes and I only hate the food that people I hate make, and she said, Oh, suit yourself, and I said, Your perfume makes me sneeze, did you know that? and she said, I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about that.

  Yes, you can, you cunt, I mumbled.

  What was that? she said and after that, there was just silence.

  I prayed nightly for her to be attacked and maimed on her way to our apartment in Bushwick, but she always made it intact, ruining my afternoon when I got home from school and found her already in our house, waiting for my dad to show up, sitting on the couch cushion that we pretended was a regular couch and not just a bunch of cushions on our floor, flipping through TV shows and making it seem like she wanted me to choose which program to watch, but the minute I got up for a snack, she’d immediately change the channel, and when I returned, she’d say, “Oh, I thought you didn’t want to watch that show anymore, so I switched over.”

  I told my father that I hated seeing Lisa in the apartment, but what I really meant was that I hated Lisa, period, and he told me to try for him and I said, But w
hy shouldn’t Lisa try for me? Why do I have to try for her? and my father said, Not for her, for me, and she did try, sour gummy. She brought you that bicycle, didn’t she?

  It was a boy’s bicycle and it used to belong to her kid who was all grown up and probably hated her for giving away his bike. I never used it even though I wanted a bicycle so bad for so long because I wanted things to happen for the right reasons.

  My mom didn’t complain about my dad’s girlfriend. He always had one, it turned out, I just never knew about the others because I never knew all the things that went on between my mom and my dad, but my mom knew and she accepted them and she told me not to sweat things like that because we still had each other, he still came home to us, he still loved us more than anyone else, we were still his number-one girls.

  My dad’s girlfriend entered our lives at the worst possible time: I was finishing up third grade and we were dead broke after my dad’s school was shut down and my dad decided he would never teach again and my mom lost her receptionist job on top of us having to move to Bushwick because we had lost our deposit on the apartment in East Flatbush due to our landlord being crooked and punishing us unfairly for not paying three months’ rent because my mom’s mom in China was dying of cancer and my mom had spent three months’ salary on flying back to see her mother at the end of her days.

  On the day we moved out, our landlord was watching us from his window (he lived on the third floor, right above us) the whole time, and I stuck my middle finger up at him and yelled, “Have some compassion, you shriveled-up cock. Haven’t you ever known someone who’s died?” while my parents were securing our two mattresses to the top of our maroon Oldsmobile.

  “Leave that old dried-up worm alone,” my mom told me, patting down my hair and pulling my fingers out of their clenched positions.