Sour Heart Read online

  My grandmother lived with us in America for a year. She taught me how to knit and after school, I watched her make dinner and do dishes and sew curtains. At first, I wouldn’t let her sleep with me in my bed. She cried and came every night to my bedroom and sat at the edge of the bed saying nothing. She had small red eyes and no teeth at night, except for four on the bottom row and a couple in the back. She ate daily bulbs of garlic so she’d live to be 117 and see me grow for another forty-five years, and the first few times she brought it up, I imagined myself running away from home just to get a few years to myself, but after a few weeks, the smell was comforting and I needed it near me before I could close my eyes, and just when I started to call for her more than she called for me, my parents announced that she had to move back to China to be with her dying husband. “Your grandfather,” my grandmother said with disgust, “says the only proper way for a man to leave this world is in his own home with his wife by his side. Have you ever heard anything so spineless?”

  My grandfather had been begging her to come back for six months. He had been diagnosed with lesions in his throat and he didn’t want to die without her. For a year, I had slept in her bed, pressed up against her like she was my bedroom wall, and after she left, I stayed in her bed for two weeks, refusing to return to my own bed even after my mother threatened to push me off if I didn’t get out.

  “This room reeks,” she said. “It smells like several people have died. You still want to sleep in here?”

  I nodded.

  “On sheets that haven’t been washed for weeks?”

  I nodded. “She said she’s coming back after Grandpa dies.”

  “She also said you’d learn English in middle school. She said she learned to drive in her dreams and that’s how she’ll pass the driving test and take you to Mount Rushmore for your birthday. You believe everything she says? Have you gone back in time and lost all sense?”

  I shook my head. Finally, she and my father dragged me out, my arms wrapped around the cheap white lacquered bed frame as my father held my legs and my mother pried my fingers free.

  “You’re going to sleep on your own,” my mother said. “Like you did before she came around.”

  “You hear your mother?” my father said, wiping the tears from my face and blowing softly on my hot red cheeks. “Just a day at a time.”

  “Don’t indulge this,” my mother said.

  “You want to beat the sadness out of her?” my father said. “Because that’s what your mother wants. For us to be the bad guys and her to be the hero when she comes back.”

  “I’m not inviting her back,” my mother said.

  —

  My grandmother came back two years later. I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night—I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread. I started to fake illnesses so I could stay home with my two-year-old brother. I followed him around everywhere, crawling when he crawled and walking on my knees when he learned to walk so that we were the same height.

  When my grandmother moved in for the second time, she told us that this time she wasn’t leaving. She was going to apply for a green card and raise my brother until he was old enough to be on his own—eighteen, maybe nineteen.

  “We’ll see about that,” my father said in Chinese, and then to me and my mother in English, “Let Grandma believe what she wants to believe. My gut says we’ll be back at the travel agency in March, or my name isn’t Daddy, problem solver of this house.”

  I laughed at him. “But that isn’t your name.”

  I made a point of telling my grandmother that I’d been sleeping by myself this whole time. “I also know how to cut my own toenails and braid my hair and make my own snacks.” My mom was looking at me without pleasure. “Hi, Grandma. I missed you,” I added.

  Then she was babbling, hugging me up and down and side to side. “Nainai xiang ni le,” she said. “Grandma missed you, oh, Grandma missed you, oh, Grandma missed you—”

  “ ’Kay, got it,” I said.

  She stepped back and took my hand. “Baobei, you can sleep with your nainai if you want, but your brother will too. I don’t know if three will fit, but I’m very happy to try. Does anything make your nainai happier than having her two grandchildren by her side? Your brother will sleep with me until he’s old enough to sleep in his own bed. Most people say thirteen is the age when a child learns to sleep on their own but most people are selfish and looking out only for themselves. Not me. I say sixteen. I say seventeen. I say eighteen. And if he needs me to, I’ll gladly sleep with your brother until he’s twenty-one!”

  I laughed. “Allen’s not going to do that. It’s different here. We wrote you about this.”

  My grandmother pulled me in so close I faked choking noises to make my point known. “Oh, baobei, I missed you. My hearing has gotten worse. In China doctors are crooks and charlatans. They take your money and make everything worse, or if you’re lucky, exactly the same. I lost my hearing in this ear running away from boys who were throwing bricks. Why were they throwing bricks? Who knows. There was a violence back then no one can understand now. And where did those boys get the bricks? That’s the real question. In those days no one had brick houses. Everyone lived like animals. You wouldn’t have been able to tell your nainai had skin as white as a porcelain doll because she was covered in dirt. These rotten boys chased me until I tripped over a fence and a sharp spike of wood pierced my eardrum. I lay there for a night until the shepherd’s daughter found me, curled up like a child.”

  “I thought you lost your hearing when a horse ran over a fence and trampled you.”

  “They took me to the village doctor and he grafted skin from my knee to my ear. I was bleeding so much I thought I would die. That was the worst I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve experienced awful things. Your nainai has lived through two wars and saw her own mother gunned down by Japanese soldiers. No child should see their mother die. But do you know what was worse than lying there in the mud with blood in my ears? Worse than seeing my own brother come back from war with only half a leg and no right arm? It was living in China with your grandfather, who didn’t have the decency to die like he said he would, and being thousands of miles apart from you and your brother. I was hurting for your brother so much I told your lowlife grandfather that unless he died right this instant, he would have to learn to leave this world just as he came into it—without me. What could he do? Stop me from going to America? I said to him, ‘Come with me if you need me around so badly.’ ‘But no,’ he says. ‘I’m comfortable here. This is our home. You should want to live in it with me. These are our golden years.’ Blah blah blah. My home is where you and your brother are. Oh, I’ve missed him like I miss the skin from my knee.”

  “You just met him today.”

  “Speak louder, my heart, so your nainai can hear you.”

  “My mom says I can only call my grandmother on my dad’s side nainai, and you’re actually my waipo.”

  “Your father said he’s going to replace this hearing aid. I might as well have kept that spike of wood in here. They wouldn’t know technology from the inside of their asses in China. And it’s filthy over there. Can you imagine some illiterate doctor with dirty hands touching your nainai’s ear? This is why I couldn’t stay in China. I missed your brother’s birth because your grandfather said he was dying, and then I go back and guess who isn’t dying? Guess who’s walking around the garden and smoking? Every day he goes to the lao ganbu huodongshi to gamble. Does that seem like a man on his deathbed to you, my sweetheart, my baobei? Do you think your grandmother will forgive your grandfather for making her miss the birth of her one and only grandson? Will your grandmother fall for his bluff again? Not ever. I’ll be here until I pass to another realm, my baobei.”
/>
  “I’m not going to call you nainai.”

  “All of my grandchildren call me nainai because nainai is the dearest, closest name you can call a person in your family. You refused to call me waipo when you were little. You said to me, ‘You’re not my waipo, my waipo is that strange lady over there who feeds me food I don’t like and has a cold bed.’ Remember how you said that? Where’s your brother now? I missed him so much. I pray hummingbirds peck my eyes and leave their droppings in my pecked-out sockets before I have to experience this heartbreak again. But I’m healing already. When I see your brother’s precious face, I’ll never know sadness again. My heart will be overrun with joy until my last dying breath. Where’s your brother, baobei?”

  —

  The third time my grandmother came to live with us, I was fifteen and my brother was five. “Please don’t let her get to you again like last time,” I said to him. “You were obsessed with her.”

  “No, Stacey. Was not.”

  But soon he was sleeping in her bed again and talking back to my parents and getting mad when I wouldn’t let him have the last Rice Krispies treat. Whenever he was upset with me, he ran to my grandmother, and she would come into my room and pretend to spank me in front of him, when really she was just clapping her hands near my ass.

  “Your sister is crying so hard from my spanking,” my grandmother said to my brother. “See? Nainai is punishing your sister for taking what’s rightfully yours. You hear how hard I’m spanking her? Her tears are everywhere.”

  “I’m not crying,” I said over my grandmother’s clapping. “I’m not crying,” I repeated until I was so frustrated that I actually did start crying.

  My brother cried on the weekends when my grandmother went to work at a factory where she folded dumplings for five cents apiece. Most of the other workers could only do fifty an hour, and when the owner noticed my grandmother typically clocked in at a hundred and was teaching her trade secrets to the other ladies during their fifteen-minute lunch break, he instituted “quality control” rules, mandating a certain amount of flour on each dumpling and folds at the edge between .4 and .6 centimeters. My grandmother pointed out that he was arbitrarily docking pay for “unfit dumplings” without any real inspection, and all the dumplings she folded, including the unacceptable ones, were thrown into the same freezer bags, and that was exploitative. She convinced the other workers to collectively demand back pay for all the rejected dumplings, and even organized a walkout one morning for higher wages. “Six cents a dumpling!” they chanted. The owner caved, and that day my grandmother came home pumping her fists like she was at a pep rally. Listening to her recount the day’s victory, even I had to admit that she’d done a great thing.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said, “you’ll grow up to be just like your nainai one day.”

  “See, Grandma’s a hero,” Allen said. “She can do anything.”

  “Ugh,” I said. “She just did it to get paid more. What’s so great about that?”

  I tried to save my brother, but my grandmother was too cunning. When we walked around the neighborhood at night, he hid inside her big, long nightgown. If I tried to ignore them my grandmother would tap me on the shoulder until I turned around and then she would ask, “Where did your brother go?” and I’d begin to say, “Oh God, no, please no,” but it was always too late—by then, my grandmother had already flipped up her dress to expose my brother, tumbling out from under her and onto the grass.

  “I’m alive,” he shouted. “I’m born. I’m born. I’m zero years old. I’m suddenly born.”

  “That’s how you were born,” my grandmother cried out. “It was beautiful and majestic and everyone cried, and I cried the most. When you fell out of me, you awakened the gods and made them turn this world from an evil, corrupt world into one that is good and beneficent, eliminating poverty and hunger and violent death.”

  “You have to stop doing this with her,” I said to him. “That’s not how you were born and you know it.”

  “Grandma says it is.”

  “She’s wrong,” I said.

  “And when your brother was little,” my grandmother shouted with her hands in the air as if waiting to receive something promised to her, “he suckled on my breast because your mother’s milk dried up, but my breasts have always produced milk whenever my grandchildren were born. Your cousin drank from my nipple, too, but no one drank as hungrily as your brother. He drank until it was all dried up. And when it hurt for me to produce any more, he would cry out in anguish for it. I had to pray to the gods for more milk so your brother could go on.”

  “This is disgusting. This never happened,” I said, but as usual no one was listening, not the trees that bent away from me, not the road ahead that sloped up and curved into a C, not my grandmother who only heard what she wanted to hear, not my brother who was being slowly poisoned by her, not my parents who didn’t listen when I said they’d lose my brother if they didn’t start spending more time with us. What time? my father demanded. Yes, what time? my mother asked. Should we stop working and paying our mortgage and saving for your college fund? Should we go back to sleeping ten people to a room where someone’s kid was screaming all night about needing to scratch her legs? Should we stop eating and stop owning clothes and a car for this “time” you speak so highly of?

  But I knew what I knew. One day, he’d be sixteen and still cowering underneath our grandmother’s dress, clinging to her before she woke him up, waiting for her to make lunch or clear away dinner, curled up next to her like a pair of twisted vines in the living room. Don’t you want more than this? I would ask him. Don’t you want to make friends and kiss someone you aren’t related to? And he would say, No, I just want nainai, and then I’d see her next to him, with her toothless nighttime smile and small, satisfied eyes, and the outrageous lies she inserted into our lives until they became the strange trivia to our family history, and there was nothing any of us could do to stop it from being that way.

  —

  One afternoon I came home to an empty house. An hour later, I saw my brother and my grandmother walking down the street, hand in hand. He was sweating even though it was still winter.

  “Why are you sweating like that?”

  “I was jumping.”

  “Jumping?”

  “Grandma did it too.”

  “She was jumping with you?”

  “Yeah. On that bouncing thing.”

  “What bouncing thing?”

  “There’s a purple bouncing thing and Grandma said it was okay to play on it.”

  “You mean a trampoline?”

  “What’s a trampoline?”

  I drew him a picture of our grandmother in her nightgown suspended over a trampoline, and in the distance, five cops with their guns raised and pointed at her. Over their heads, I drew a collective dialogue bubble: “Kill her! It’s the LAW!!!!!”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s the bounce thing,” he said, ripping the police officers out of the picture. “It was at the purple house.”

  “Let me get this straight. There’s a purple trampoline in that purple house down the street where no one lives?”

  “Not in the house. In the backyard. Grandma said I could jump on it. She did first.”

  “She jumped on the trampoline?”

  “Like thirty times.”

  “Did you tell her to?”

  “No, she just did it on her own. Then she was like, Allen, come jump with nainai.”

  “My God. You two are criminals. How many times did you do it?”

  “Jump on the thing?”

  “How many times did Grandma take you there?”

  “I don’t know. Every day.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Didn’t you see my picture? You’re breaking the law.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Yes, you are, and you’re going to go to jail if someone finds out. I could call the police right now,” I said, walking toward the kitchen phone.

  “Stacey, don’
t. Please don’t put Grandma in jail.”

  “Who cares if she goes to jail?”

  “I don’t want her to. Please, Stacey.”

  “Who would you rather go to jail, then? Someone has to go. Mom or Grandma?”

  “Mom.”

  “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is stupid,” I said.

  “Don’t call the police, Stacey. Grandma didn’t do anything.”

  “Grandma didn’t do anything,” I said, imitating him.

  —

  She left that year after a neighbor’s dog knocked her down against the asphalt. She split her head open and had to get stitches, several CAT scans that turned up inconclusive, and an MRI. She had overstayed her visa and we didn’t have insurance for her so the hospital bills ended up burning through several months of my parents’ savings. They were never able to diagnose her with anything but she complained of frequent headaches and started sleepwalking. Once, our neighbor down the street, a retired judge who’d fought in Vietnam and walked on crutches, returned her to us. “She knocked on my door. Now I’m knocking on yours.”

  “We have to send her home or we’ll have to sell our house just to keep her alive,” my father said to my mother later.

  “I know,” she said. “She won’t go. But I know.”

  Things reached peak crisis mode when one night my grandmother sleepwalked her way to the main road and stepped out into oncoming traffic, causing a four-car pileup and several police to show up at our door.

  “I won’t send her back in a body bag,” I overheard my mother say to my father.

  “We’ll have to tell her that she either leaves on her own accord or INS will have her deported and banned from ever coming back.”

  “I’m not going to lie to her.”

  “Do you think she agonizes like you do every time she tells a lie? Look, I know you want to be fair to her, but this isn’t the time to be virtuous.”

  The night my grandmother left, I told my brother she was never coming back and he tried to hit himself in the face with closed fists.