Sour Heart Page 4

  “No, no, no, no—”

  “Good night,” my mother said.

  “No, no, no—”

  “Good night,” my father said.

  I tried to steady my breathing in the dark. We whispered our love you’s and the next morning, I woke up thinking I was born sad.

  —

  My parents promised they would involve me in every decision, they promised that there would be time to figure out other ways, they promised me a yellow room with painted flowers and a living room filled with green plants for my mom and an all-white office with wooden floors and a single desk and chair for my father, but we were broke and eating food we found in dumpsters outside of Chinese bakeries—the mayo and the dried pork gave my stomach seizures, and once, I ate a fish sandwich that my dad found in its original packaging and broke out in hives. My mom stopped getting her period because she was so stressed. I saw her sitting on the toilet, clutching her stomach. “There’s something in here that wants to come out but it won’t.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “It’s okay, my tart.”

  My mom applied to twenty jobs and my dad applied to twelve. There was one day when he came back with his hands in the air, telling us that there were no jobs in the newspaper today but we knew he was seeing his Taiwanese slutmaster and my mom slapped him across the cheek in front of Xiang Bo and his wife, who later told us that we ought to find a new place to stay as soon as possible because the house was too small and her children—a self-absorbed, acne-ridden boy named Eddie who never spoke except once to yell, “Get your perv ass out of here,” the time I accidentally walked in on him when he was peeing, and his hyperactive little sister, Lucy, who didn’t seem to understand “no” was a word that meant something and would spend whole afternoons prancing around, saying, “Aren’t I just so beautiful”—were easily frightened, and besides, Xiang Bo’s wife said, Things aren’t exactly Versailles around here. Her husband had to work two jobs to support the family and one of them involved biking through rain and snow to deliver Chinese food to rich white people who hated us but loved our food and that was why we needed to go.

  My mom was always on the lookout for ways to make some extra cash. She caught wind of this new thing where a bunch of old Chinese geezers with nothing to do would spend the whole day taking the bus to Atlantic City and back. Apparently, a few of the bus companies paid passengers to make the trip, and as long as you didn’t squander the money gambling, you were looking at a solid net profit of twenty bucks per round-trip. My parents and I planned on going together so that we could be three-fifths of the way to a Ben Franklin. My mom crimped my hair and I begged her to let me smoke so my voice could be all husky like the gambling women in the black-and-white movies I sometimes saw my parents watching late at night on TV but she said I had to wait until I was eighteen and I asked her if she had waited until she was eighteen and she said, No, but that was in China, and I said, Well, another reason why you shouldn’t be sending me back to that hellhole of a place, and my parents looked at each other and my dad told me to drop it and my mom held my hand very tightly.

  It turned out that the twenty dollars was a raw deal because the bus only ran once in the morning and once in the evening. We were dropped off super early and every time we sat down somewhere on the casino grounds to rest our feet, one of the security guards would come over and tell us that we were in a No Loitering zone and my dad said, “How is a little girl sitting down loitering?” and the guard said, “This is Atlantic City, right? If you aren’t gambling, you’re loitering,” and then when twelve o’clock rolled around I started to get so hungry that I felt pins in my stomach and by twelve-thirty, those pins had become knives, and by one, those knives had become detonated bombs, and by two, I had fifty exploding land mines in my stomach, and finally my mom took me to the food court where all the food was overpriced and expensive and we spent twelve dollars on a sandwich and soda and then my mom started to get hungry so we spent another seven, and after we ate, my mom said her ankles were hurting and my dad said, You should have worn sneakers, and my mom said, You should have supported the family with any job you could get.

  By the time the bus came back to pick us up, my mother was in tears and we had already spent twenty-seven of our forty-dollar profit. (The bus company didn’t pay me a cent because I wasn’t old enough to gamble.)

  “It’ll always be like this,” my mom said, pressing her head against the seat in front of her. “We’ll always try to be ahead but we’ll always be behind. We’ll be like this forever.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “We’re thirteen dollars ahead.”

  “You see how awful we are to our own daughter?” my mom said to my dad. “You see what a shithead you really are? All of your games and all of your jokes and all of your smiles and all the things you do to make yourself seem like a good father are just shit. You’re just a piece of shit covered in vomit sitting in a pool of shit that everyone vomits on and it makes me sick. You’re such a piece of shit that I could vomit on you right now.”

  The guy in front of us turned around and told my mom to stop pushing his seat. “And can you shut the hell up while you’re at it?”

  My mom lost it and ran up to the front to tell the driver to stop the bus immediately and throw out the creep in the back who was sick and twisted and trying to harm her and her daughter. At first my father and I thought she meant the guy sitting in front of us but when we heard my mom shouting, “His name is Zhang Heping and I’m going to throw myself off this bus if you don’t stop driving it right now,” we realized we were all going to have to get off the bus and maybe that constituted hitting rock bottom. Maybe we were beyond repair, standing on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike, not speaking to each other until my father made the joke of unbuttoning his shirt to get the attention of one of the cars whizzing past us and when my mom ignored it completely, he started to unzip his pants, and when my mom said, “No one wants to see that and you’re not helping,” my dad undressed down to his underwear, and the semis and the sedans and the pickup trucks and the clunkers with the scraped-up side doors, and the convertibles with perfect paint, and the cars with too many bumper stickers, all of them beeped their horns at my family, and I wondered then how magic was distributed in the world and when and if my family would receive our fair share because I was no longer worried about how we were going to travel the seventy-something miles to get home without spending the last of our thirteen dollars, I just needed my mother to turn around and look at my father and laugh at how skinny his two legs looked, sticking out from under his protruding stomach that we once joked was a home for the world’s roundest watermelon—that was the kind of magic I was after.

  —

  This was how I pictured it happening: we would pay off our debts, my parents’ friends would forgive us for all that we had asked of them and were forever unable to repay. My father would re-enroll in school, start teaching again, and he would tell his girlfriend to go take a hike. My mother would find a job where she could better her English skills and be as good as me and my dad. As for me, I would go to school four or even five days a week, and we would rid ourselves of the toxins that surrounded us.

  “Push harder,” my mom said, putting her hands over mine as we leaned our weight against the car. Earlier that evening, our maroon Oldsmobile broke down while we were on Harlem River Drive. We knew it was going to happen one day and we were surprised our car lasted as long as it did. It was the middle of the night, the closing hour of midsummer, and five days before I had to go back to Shanghai. We had no idea where we were going, we just wanted to spend time together as a family, away from everyone else.

  We pushed the car off the road, all the way down to the riverbank. My dad took off the plates and decided we had to dump it in the river and run. We didn’t have the money to tow it to a junkyard.

  “It’s not even moving,” my mom said.

  “It’s moving. I can feel it moving,” my dad said. It was in the momen
t when we felt the car starting to move away from us, when we realized we could let go now, that I suddenly couldn’t bear to leave it floating alone in the Harlem River with all the junk and debris and foam and the smell of urine and garbage and shit and decaying stuff. I flung myself into the water, climbing onto the car and shaking my head no when my dad said he was going to bring me back to shore.

  “I told you I didn’t feel like driving out tonight.”

  “Oh, tartberry, you said you wanted to spend every night this week together. You said you wanted to see the city at night,” my mom said.

  “Don’t make me swim,” I said before jumping back into the water and swimming away from the sinking car. I looked back at my father who was swimming after me. “Don’t make me swim away from you.”

  “I won’t, my sourest apple,” my dad said. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”

  “Don’t make me go,” I said as my dad pulled me onto his back.

  “Just hold on very tightly to me, sour grape,” my father said, swimming us back toward my mom.

  “Don’t make me go, Dad. Don’t make me go,” I said, once on solid ground, looking at my mother, who was crying and holding her arms out to me. I let her pick me up even though I was too big and she was too skinny because I knew how brief these moments had always been and always would be, and if there was still a chance to be in my mother’s arms, I was going to take it, I would always take it.

  “It’s temporary,” she said, stroking my wet hair. “It’s only temporary, it was always only temporary.”

  “It’s not temporary,” I said. “You said we’d always stick together. You said you’d never give me up.”

  “We aren’t, my sourest grape,” my father said. “You will always be our darling. Our Christina.”

  “That’s not enough,” I said. “I want to stay here. It’s not enough. Don’t give me away.”

  “We haven’t given you up,” my mother said. “It’s only temporary. It’s going to be as short as possible. It was only ever going to be the smallest amount of time.”

  I felt her shivering, and I felt myself fading out, feeling like it was remarkable that on this night, of all nights, my mom and my dad and I were huddled together promising each other things that could never be.

  “Take care of us,” I said, shaking my fist up at the sky where a plane was flying overhead. “Watch over us,” I said to the people in the plane, who must have seen me because everything went white for a moment and when the colors of the world came back to me, I was on my father’s back again, my mother a few feet behind, and when she caught up to us, I told my father to put me down and let me just stand there for a minute. We stood there and did not move. What I would have given to know exactly what they were thinking then, the graveness of our thoughts suddenly becoming petty when we realized the car had risen back up again, floating on the Harlem like a monster of our own creation, and we knew it would take nothing short of a gargantuan effort to push it back down to the bottom of the river.

  Even though Jason was the second shortest boy I knew and his nickname was Shrimpy Boy or sometimes Shrimpson, I still wanted him to be my boyfriend, and it was the easiest thing in the world to do. All it took on my part was nothing because I lived, breathed, and exuded mind-boggling, head-spinning, neck-craning, heart-pounding, ravishing beauty. I was the best-looking girl in fourth grade. I had straight, long black hair that never tangled. In the mornings before our teacher, Mrs. Silver, yelled at us to sit down at our assigned desks, the other girls, who were taller and fuller and already developing tits and asses, cooed and aahed at me and ran their fingers through my hair and told me they wished they could be me, they wished they could have my hair, have slender arms and legs like me, and sometimes, out of sympathy, I told them that I wouldn’t mind knowing what it was like to have tangly, messy hair, and sort of thick arms and legs.

  My clothes came from clearance sales for grown adult women who rummaged through the one- and five-dollar bins. My sweet, resourceful mother spent hours sewing and hemming the dresses and skirts to my size, and that was how I was not only naturally the most gifted in the realm of physical beauty but also how I became the most well-dressed fourth grader in all of history. I never played tag unless it was to give the boys in my school a good look at my rump whenever my skirt flew up, which always happened when I ran because, according to my classmates, I ran like a “demented psycho,” with my butt all stuck out in the air and my hands flying everywhere.

  I ran all the time and had to tell boys to stop chasing me especially during recess when everyone who was anyone played the game of Boys Chasing Girls, which was a game where boys chased girls, and the rules were simple: a boy who liked you had to chase and insult you, and then you had to insult him back, and if the boy really, really liked you and wasn’t afraid to show it, then he would do something really outrageous like spit on a spot you were going to sit on and say, “You should really sit there,” and if you did, he would explode in laughter and say, “I can’t believe you sat there,” and when that happened, you essentially won the game because that was the most real indication there was that he wanted your ass and you were going to give it to him.

  By February of fourth grade, Jason was my boyfriend. He pushed me during a game of Boys Chasing Girls.

  I said to him, “You can’t push me around.”

  And he said, “Well, I just did.”

  And then I said, “Hey, what’s that on your shirt?”

  He was supposed to look down and then I was supposed to slap him from his chin up to his nose, but he didn’t fall for it so I had to say, “Um, I just told you there’s something weird on your shirt, don’t you want to look at it?”

  And that was when he blurted out, “Do you want to be my date for the dance?”

  We went to the winter Snow Is Everywhere dance together, and I danced like a woman who was about to have her legs hacked off the next morning so tonight was all there was for showing everyone what these legs could do, and this boy Qixiang came up to me and said, “Wow, how do you get your feet to move so fast?” and I said, “It’s genetic!” The class gossip Minhee Kim saw Qixiang acting head-over-heels obsessed with me and went and blabbed to Jason.

  “Hey, Qixiang is trying to step on your girl. You guys should fight.”

  Jason came up to me and said, “I thought you were my girlfriend. Now everyone thinks I have to fight Qixiang.”

  And I said, “Well, I didn’t see you raise your hand when Mrs. Silver said, Raise your hand if you’re a pacifist, so…”

  So in fourth grade, by Valentine’s Day, Jason was my boyfriend of one week and already he was willing to fight for me. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was also willing to kill, maybe go to outer space to fetch a burning star and bring it to me to win my heart; anything was possible when a boy loved you that much. My best friend, Francine, who could throw a curveball like a pro, told me that Yun Hee Song and Lata Pargal had been telling everyone in our class that Jason already had his first wet dream.

  “You know what that means,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me, like the sick perverted puppy dog that she was fated to—and in some ways, had already—become.

  “No. What?”

  “Now we just have to wait for you to get your period and he can totally get you pregnant!”

  Great, I thought, as visions of daytime television talk shows flashed through my brain. I had spent the summer before fourth grade with my brother Eddie and our cousin Frangie, who was close enough to being Francine in name but not in spirit, and actually wasn’t even my cousin, but I had to call her that because my mother said it was the only polite thing to do for a nine-year-old girl whose own father had murdered her own mother less than a year ago with his deathly stinginess, and it was literally deathly, my mother said on the phone every day to anyone who wasn’t sick of hearing about it, because he refused to pay for an operation that would have removed the cancerous lump in her uterus in time to save he
r. He had essentially put her and Frangie in lockdown for all of last year, no one went into their house, and God knows how that woman must have suffered in that awful, shut-in place where no one was allowed to reach her, my mother repeated over and over again in conversation, shuddering and shaking her head as if the person she was telling this to on the phone could see her, could see how visibly shaken up and guilty she felt over this whole thing, how her compassion allowed her to feel so much for other people.