Sour Heart Read online

  “You want typos all over your room?”

  “I like it.”

  “It’s just so typical of these kids.” He shook his head. “They don’t care about doing things right. They have no standards. Where do you think they’re headed?”

  “Home?” I guessed.

  “Nowhere. They’re headed nowhere. Their lives are going nowhere.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, even as something soured inside me (and not in the delicious way) like it always did whenever my dad talked like that, as if he was so sure. Didn’t it bother him that he was teaching his students poetry when he was certain it wouldn’t make a difference in how their lives turned out? Didn’t it bother him to be so sure that it was futile to even try? And what about us? What standards did we have? Weren’t our fates sealed as well? What was I ever going to become? What stopped other people from looking at us and pitying us, how we didn’t see the pointlessness in working so many jobs, moving from one shit place to another and scrimping on pennies, how we couldn’t face the reality of our situation: that none of this was leading up to anywhere that was any different from where we had just been.

  —

  When my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Lancaster, sent my mom the FOURTH AND FINAL notice that her presence was required pronto for a parent-teacher conference or else I was in danger of being left back again, my mom tore up the notice and said, “I’m worried we aren’t letting you grow up. Are we stifling your development, baby girl?”

  “Let me worry about that, Mom.”

  “Let you worry about that? You can hardly be the one worrying about yourself.”

  “Why not? I know what’s bad and what’s good.”

  “Wrong,” my mom said. “That’s exactly what you don’t know.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “How what, my stone-tough peach?” my dad said, coming in through the front door on his day off with two bags of groceries in each hand.

  “What took you so long?” I asked, running up to him. I took a bag from him and carried it to the kitchen. “Mom thinks I should sleep by myself tonight.”

  “You know I agree, tartberry,” my dad said, unpacking the groceries, which were all nonperishables because our refrigerator wasn’t working well and all the food we had bought the week before had soured.

  The only good things about sleeping by myself in my own bed were, firstly, it was just a smaller mattress on the floor next to my parents’ bed and, secondly, I was still close enough to hear them whispering to each other in the mornings when they thought I was still asleep. Sometimes, my fraudulent sleep lasted for what felt like hours, but there was not enough time in the world to help me understand what they were saying or what my dad was doing to make my mom slap him in that way that sounded as tender as when she stroked my hair away from my face and scratched the parts of my cheek that had gotten itchy from my loose hair, and I gave up at some point on trying to figure out their whisperings and would instead bolt straight upright and start to get dressed, knowing my mom would ask me to stop what I was doing and slide in between her and my dad just like I used to when I was itchy all the time, and I would say, “How come you don’t need me to be independent now?” and she would say, “I want you to be the hot dog and your dad and I will be the bun,” and I would jump in between them and my dad would say, “Or what if our lovely daughter is the turkey and you’re the cheese, my lovely wife, and I’m the lettuce?”

  “Then who’s the bread? And who’s the mayonnaise and who’s the mustard?” And the work of parceling out who was who and what made each type of sandwich or burger or hot dog or any sort of meat-between-bread thing so delicious was a project that we devoted ourselves to until the morning sun became the afternoon sun and our arms were cramped from holding each other, and I knew somehow that I wasn’t supposed to like this, that I was supposed to want to go over to my friend’s house and I was supposed to want to paint my nails and play tag and jump rope and do the things that kids my age did, but the truth was I only ever wanted to be sandwiched between my parents, I only ever wanted them to need me and I only ever thought about them and all the ways in which I could please them or, better yet, impress them with how much I wanted to remain their daughter and how much I wanted them to remain my parents.

  “You know,” my mom said, “one day, you’ll be a parent and you won’t feel so much like our daughter.”

  “But you’ll always be our daughter,” my dad said. “And you’ll still know you’re our daughter.”

  “Of course you’ll feel like our daughter. That much won’t change. But you won’t feel like the only thing you are in this world is our daughter.”

  “That’s right,” my father said. “Because one day you’ll also feel like a mother. And the feeling of being a mother can be so much more extraordinary than the feeling of being a daughter.”

  “And your own daughter won’t ever look at you and think that you must also be a daughter. You know what we mean, sour candy?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “That’s why I wish you could stay this age forever,” my mom said. “What if I could always be thirty-six and you could always be nine and your father could always be thirty-seven? What if, sour honeybee?”

  “I’ll do that,” I said right away. “I’ll stay nine. I don’t want to be someone else’s mom.”

  “Oh, sours, you say that now,” my dad said. “You say that now, but you will not want to miss being ten and you won’t want to miss being eleven and twelve and thirteen, and you won’t want to miss dating boys and learning how to drive and having your first cigarette—”

  “Zhang Heping,” my mother said.

  “Sorry.” he said. “And you’ll want to be twenty and you’ll want to fall in love for the first time and the second time and the third and the fourth—”

  “Heping,” my mother said again. “So, how many times have you fallen in love? Over a hundred?”

  “Just the one,” my father said, drawing my mother and me closer to him.

  My mother rolled her eyes. “You can’t give up the rest of your life to stay this way.”

  “I want to. I like the idea of staying here.”

  “Oh, sours.”

  “I really do, Mom. This is what I want. To stay like this forever.”

  “Let’s ask the gods for help,” my father suggested.

  “Okay,” my mother said, and we got out of bed and into a circle, the three of us, and we stomped our feet and shouted, “Let us stay, let us stay, let us stay, let us stay,” until our voices got hoarse and the next day mine was squeaky and my mom’s was sultry and my dad liked the way she sounded and I saw them holding hands and my mom fixing my dad’s shirt collar in the morning and I felt like this was the reason why I never wanted to get older, because why move forward when it was so brilliant to just remain as we were?

  —

  When we moved to Bushwick we all slept on the same mattress again because there wasn’t room for my smaller mattress and because the hoods on our block stole it before we even had a chance to drag it up the stairs to our new apartment. They also stole my dad’s car radio every few weeks and then sold it back to him on the street corner by the Jewish deli.

  “It’s a hundred.”

  “What? A hundred? I got it for ten last week.”

  “Times have changed, brother.”

  One time, the three of us came out of the subway and saw that the kids who routinely jacked our possessions were having a garage sale with stuff from our apartment.

  “We can’t buy everything back,” my mom said, looking at our pillows and our sheets and our bowls and her winter coat and our TV (which we had found broken outside on the street on garbage day, but my dad, whose survival skills were so amazing he could learn anything just by closing his eyes and visualizing the steps, had fixed it in a week’s time) and our VCR that had been given to us by my dad’s restaurant boss who liked to give him things every now and then to remind my dad who was in the position of giving and wh
o was in the position of taking.

  “I’ll cut a deal with them,” my dad said and closed his eyes briefly to visualize his strategy and walked over to talk to the main thug, who had the whitest sneakers out of all three of them and the longest T-shirt—it went down past his shorts when he stooped. “A hundred for everything.”

  “Fuck you. Five hundred or get out of my face.”

  “Look, you’ve run us dry. You think we have the money?”

  “You’re richer than us,” I yelled out and then hid behind my mom.

  “So she talks,” he said. “Five hundred or get out of my face. That’s the last time I’ll say it. The next time, I won’t be saying it.”

  “Look, I’ll give you a hundred. That’s more than you can get for this stuff.”

  “I don’t care if I get twenty and I buy myself a shitty steak dinner, but I’m only selling this shit to you for five hundred and I told you not to ask me to say it again.”

  “Please,” my father said.

  The white-sneakers hood turned to his friends and shouted, “We in for a steak dinner. Drinks on you, shit talkers.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” they all shouted.

  —

  “There are a couple of ways that people will always know you are my daughter,” my mom used to say to me.

  “What’s one way?” I asked.

  “One way is that we both love eating sour things.”

  “Okay, what’s another?”

  “Now, wait. Don’t just brush that off. You and I love eating sour things. Sour grapes, sour plums, sour peaches, sour apples, sour cherries, sour strawberries, sour blueberries, sour nectarines, sour candies, sour soups, sour sauces, sour sour sour everything. Most people like sweet grapes and sweet peaches and sweet apples and sweet berries.”

  “I guess that’s true,” I said.

  “It’s remarkable, don’t you see? And we also like really hard fruits.”

  “Yeah. True. We hate soft peaches. We hate soft, sweet peaches and we love hard, sour plums.”

  “That’s right,” my mother said. “We’re two of a kind. Remember yesterday? The man outside of the subway was selling grapes. Remember that?”

  “Yeah, he kept saying, Sweetest grapes you’ll ever find in Brooklyn. He was like, Dontcha wanta try a sweet grape, you two sweet things?”

  “So we went to look at his grapes and I said, You say they’re sweet?”

  “And he said, Yes, so sweet.”

  “And I said, You’re sure they’re sweet? Very, very sweet? You aren’t lying to me?”

  “And he said, Put it this way, there isn’t a single sour grape in the lot.”

  “And I shook my head at him, and said, Well, you just lost our business then, because my daughter and I only like sour fruits.”

  “And the man started yelling after us going like, Hey hey hey EY you, EY, EY you two. Check this out, these grapes are sweet and tarty. Oh look, I’m sucking in my cheeks, it’s so tart.”

  We laughed at our own cleverness, the little signs that proved we were running our own lives, that, in fact, what had made that day profound was that we had outsmarted the hey EY guy, and not that it was the day my mom lost her job working as a receptionist for a local apparel company, and not that it happened in the same month that my father’s school finally shut down and he quit teaching because he was tired of breaking up fights and having his car broken into while he was at work and feeling like a social worker when he wasn’t even fond of humanity to begin with, coming home defeated every evening and vomiting in the morning sometimes from pure anxiety for the day ahead. That this day was significant not because it was also the very night when my father didn’t come home for dinner because he was with his girlfriend, which meant my mom and I had nothing to eat because my dad had all the cash we had left and he was supposed to come back with food for us. The two of us went hungry that evening, our stomachs aching at first from hunger, then from laughing, then again from hunger, and then later when we went to sleep we heard each other sniffling but it was the sort of night when neither of us could be moved to console the other and that was when the great depressed hollow opened up between us and remained for the duration of the night and only closed up a tiny bit when we woke up to my father standing over us, asking if he could be the top bun and if my mom could be the bottom bun and if I could be the cheese and the pickles and the burger and the ketchup and the mustard and the onions and all the things that make a cheeseburger the most astounding food in the entire world.

  —

  We left Bushwick not because we finally saved up enough money but because our apartment in Bushwick collapsed when no one was in it and the reason why no one sued or anything like that was because we were living in this house that had been divided up into four apartment units and the slumlord who owned the apartment only rented to desperate people like the Cambodian family of eight who lived above us and didn’t have proper documentation, or the Cantonese ladies below us who ran a shady massage and hairstyling parlor in their living room, which my dad went to a few times for a shave and a trim, and once when he came back with a botched haircut, my mom cried and said, “You’re the reason why we suffer. You’re the reason we live like this and I can’t do it anymore.”

  The only good thing about our apartment collapsing was that after we loaded up our maroon Oldsmobile to drive to my dad’s former co-worker’s brother-in-law’s house out on Long Island (where everything was clean and there were no sidewalks, just big wide empty streets that curved into dead-ends and long-ass driveways and perfectly manicured lawns that led to massive houses that seemed haunted and unapproachable, where we had an open invitation to stay until we found another place to live) but before we got into the car, the three of us picked up the broken rubble from the street and hurled the pieces at the windows of buildings where we thought the hoods lived, the ones who assaulted our neighbor Mrs. Lili and were the reason why she moved back to Taiwan, and the reason why we were never moving out of New York, and even if we did move, it would be because we felt like it and not because we had to. I don’t know if we knew that then but we must have because why else did we stay? Why else didn’t we move down to North Carolina where my aunt and uncle lived in a new house at the top of a beautiful rolling hill, where they took long walks at night and never felt afraid or watched and kept their front door unlocked during the day and left valuables in their car? Why else didn’t we pack up and drive down there to live the good life with them unless we were trying to stand our ground, trying to prove that we belonged here?

  That must have been why we hurled the rubble at the apartment buildings where the hoods lived, the ones who stole from us and beat up our friends, the ones who smashed in our car window and bent our steering wheel all the way until the top and the bottom of the wheel touched each other like a pair of lips, and that must have been why my dad yelled out, “Why don’t you wipe your assholes somewhere else because no one lives here anymore?” and my mom said, “Go eat a couple of dicks for breakfast, you assmunchers,” and I said, “And wash it down with some of your own liquefied shit, you specks of crap,” as if we were reading from a script. No one bothered to ask where the others had learned to talk like that. It was obvious and we knew that one day we would forget those words and only know words like, “Would you pass the caviar?” or “Could I have another bottle of that $200 wine and yes, it’s okay to waste,” only it would be more refined, more natural, a manner of speaking we had not yet conceived of and so could only crudely imagine.

  We jumped into the car, wild and scared. My father gunned it and we sped past yellow lights turning red and before any of us even had a chance to catch our breath, we were on the highway and the construction on both sides felt to me like the old way rebuilding itself, even though I knew nothing would ever emerge, that ten years from now, we would be on this highway again and I would see the orange vests and the safety cones and the men deep down in the ditches calling out to each other and the same old lanes, still dangero
usly narrow, and the traces of the faded white safety lines that we were as dependent on for marking the passage of time as scientists were dependent on the whorls in the trunks of trees to reveal the long history of what had been and what would now be.

  —

  My father wrote to his father and mother for help six weeks after our apartment in Bushwick collapsed. We took too long to find another place to live and had to leave Long Island because it was too far and too expensive to get from there to the various places in Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn where my parents were going to get better jobs, so we took our things to Flushing and camped out in the living room of my dad’s friend Xiang Bo and his wife, who said we could stay with them if we paid a third of the rent, chipped in for groceries, and did all the cleaning. Ten days later, we received an invitation from my grandparents for me to come live with them in Shanghai for a year while my parents got back on their feet.

  “A child is a great expense,” they wrote, “and it’s unnatural for a child’s paternal grandparents to die without seeing their grandchildren grow. A child should go to a good school and gain high marks, and a child should come home to adults who have already prepared a warm snack, and a child should have dinner at six-thirty sharp every evening, and a child should be put to bed by adults who love her before nine-thirty every night, and a child should wake up to a family who will all still be in the house when she leaves for school, and a child should have many beautiful and healthy friends.” My mother read the letter out loud in Chinese and my father translated the parts I could not understand, although who knew what he was making up and what he was leaving out and what he himself did not have the words for.

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said to my parents, banging my fist on the floor. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said, throwing the stuffed bear my parents bought for me in Williamsburg at Xiang Bo’s window, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my mother explained to me the benefits of going away for a year, maybe less, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my father called me all of the sweet names of sour things that I loved so much, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my parents promised that I could skip the next full week of school if I would just calm down a little right now, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my mother begged me to stop hitting myself, “no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my parents each grabbed ahold of my wrists and held them down by my sides, “no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my father got down on his knees and prostrated himself in front of me and begged me to stop crying because I was breaking his heart, “no, no, no, no, no,” I said, crying myself into a terrible weakness as my father picked me up in his arms and carried me past the kitchen to the living room, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my mother held my hand while my father carried me, telling me that nothing was set in stone yet, there was still a lot of hard thinking ahead and we would only do what was best for us as a family, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my father spread a blanket on the floor, “no, no, no, no, no, no,” I said when he went into the bathroom while my mother undressed me, “no, no, no, no, no,” I said as my mother put my pajamas on me and my father came back and lay down next to us.