Sour Heart Read online

  And it did, she took in strays all the time: our house was never just our house, it was a place that people in need passed through. We were running the world’s first zero-dollar-a-night hotel and let all kinds of randos in. Sometimes it was a young family recently emigrated from a small village in Hunan, who all smelled so bad I had to stick cotton balls up my nostrils just so I wouldn’t faint in my own house, and when they took their once-a-month bath they always left a ring of rat scum around our tub. Or else it was a young Taiwanese woman my mother met in the supermarket, who had all kinds of weird facial tics we weren’t allowed to even react to because my mother said this woman had lived a traumatic life beyond anything you could ever imagine, and I said, Well, I can imagine anything so that doesn’t count, and my mother said, Oh, but you can’t imagine this, no one can, and I said, Then how can it be true if no one can even imagine it? and my mother said, This conversation is over and don’t let me catch you staring.

  Before we took in Frangie the worst was when my father’s old classmate from Shanghai brought his wife and his daughter, Christina, who had a face so gloomy and teary that she made me think being ten was going to be the most sorrowful year of my life. They stayed for nearly six months until my mother finally said it was not appropriate to bring women over to our house when there were young, impressionable children in the home, and Eddie had laughed at that and said to me, What does she think we see out there every day? and I asked him, Where? and he said, There, gesturing outside where, at that exact moment, our neighbor Sally was showing off her pet rattlesnake to her boyfriend, who, a week earlier, had slapped her on the mouth so hard that she stumbled backward and fell on her ass in the middle of the street. She sat there dazed while her boyfriend got in their car and drove away. I saw the whole thing from my living room window and counted to fifty in my head before going outside to help her up, trying not to stare at the blood between her teeth when she smiled and thanked me for giving her a hand.

  But in conclusion, my mother told me, there was only one polite thing for a family as lucky as us, a family who loves each other as much as we do, and that was to take Frangie in as one of our own, which was why I had to call her my cousin, sometimes even my sister, and why she ate dinners with us and slept over at our house a lot, forcing me off my own bed and onto the floor so that she could have a “warm and happy home life.” I wanted to wring my mother’s neck and say, HELLO, what about your real daughter? What about her warmth and happiness and home life which you’ve so callously denied her and given to a total stranger who has a really weird name? I was supposed to feel sorry for Frangie just because her mother died (so what) and her father spent three months in a mental institution (who cared), where I imagined him to look like the costume I came up with for the Monsters’ Ball bash in third grade when I got my mom and Eddie to wrap me in a big roll of gauze from CVS. As usual, I was dancing on turbo-charge when all the gauze unraveled and suddenly, I was standing there in my underwear and my little nubby breasts, and everyone was staring openmouthed at me.

  Just kidding, that only happened in my dreams the night before the dance, and in real life the gauze flapped around my arms and legs gloriously, the lights in the gymnasium followed me everywhere I went, and surely I was the shining, burning asteroid-comet-sun-galaxy-universe-rings-of-Saturn-ninth-wonder-of-the-world-never-gonna-burn-out star of the dance. The next day though in school Minhee and Yun Hee were talking about who was dancing with who and who had their butt all poking up against whose thingie thing, and I coughed loudly as I walked past them and said, “All I know is this butt is tiiiiiired,” and Minhee looked at me with that bored expression that made me feel like I had never been interesting in my whole life and Yun Hee asked, “Why? You didn’t even go,” and that’s when I realized for all the lights and for all the moves I had in me, for all that I naturally dazzled and sparkled, I still had to work harder to be noticed, and so I said to them, “That’s because I was at my stupid crazy-rich cousin’s house trying on pearls from the sea, you pinwheel,” and Minhee was like, “Whoa, what’s your problem?” and I was, “Whoa, what’s your problem?” which was the first sign of defeat, when all you could do was repeat someone else’s words.

  And anyway I didn’t have blood cousins in America and had never touched a real pearl to my neck, though my mom kept plenty of fake ones in her jewelry box and said this was all for me someday, but it was much more likely she would end up giving away all her jewelry to people she barely knew—Frangie-types who she felt more sorry for than she felt for her own kids, which was maybe why she was always trying to get me to call Frangie my cousin, but I came up with something even more generous, which was to give her a thousand of my father’s dollars so she could stop bothering my family, and it wasn’t like my father didn’t have it to spare, because my mother never seemed to worry much about money, and neither did I, and she said once, “Our family is so rich,” and technically the rest of that sentence was “with love for each other,” but still.

  My mother said I needed to stop thinking materialistically, and I said, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and she said, Stop talking back to your MO-ther, and I said, You stop talking back to your DAUGH-ter, and she said, I’myourmotheryougotthat? all in one rushed breath, like she was blowing on a dandelion, fully aware of how little it took to destroy one. She kept saying, I’m your mother, you got that? I’m your mother, you got that? not letting me get a word in and putting her hands over her ears to show me she couldn’t hear me even if I could get my thoughts together fast enough, and finally, because I felt like my head was going to explode, I screamed as loud as I could:

  STTTTT­TTTTT­TTTTT­TTAAAAA­AAAAA­AAAAA­AAAAA­AAAAA­AAAPPPPP­PPPPP­PPPPP­PPPPP­PPPPP­PPPPP­!

  My mother looked at me with disgust and said, Are you crazy? Did you become crazy? What possessed you to scream like that? You know what, Lucy? I’m your mother and you’re my daughter, so you do whatever I say, and if I say you have to be nice to your cousin Frangie, then you are going to be nice, and if you mention the thousand dollars again, I’ll cut your hair as short as your brother’s and I’ll shave off the long hairs on the back of your neck and it’ll take five years for your hair to grow back and if you try to resist me, I’ll tie up your hands and shave your head bald.

  It was during the long summer before fourth grade started when Frangie was my “cousin” and when my brother boiled frozen dumplings that my parents kept in the freezer for lunch, or else microwaved frozen pizzas for us, or sometimes, if he was in a great mood, he would fry up an omelette or make ramen and crack an egg on top when the broth boiled, that Frangie and I watched shows where every other word was “you beep little beep beep beep, I’m going to beep beep on your beep-ing beep-hole, you deserve a beep-ing so beep-ing hard that I might just beep you right the beep now, and don’t you beep-ing try to beep-ing stop me from beep-ing the beep-ing crap out of your beep-ing beep-beep-beep-beep-beep worthless brain. So beep you, and suck my beep like you beep-ing should have in the beep-ing first place, you beep-ing, beep-ed out slutbag.”

  We watched them all day long on the couch, or sometimes slumped halfway down to the floor, sometimes on the floor completely, sometimes lying on each other like we were forming the letter T or the letter L or the letter V or the letter A without the middle line or the letter O, except Frangie was as inflexible as a tree trunk and I had vertebrae like a fish and could bend myself into a sine wave if I wanted to.

  The first thing I said to Francine, my best friend in the whole world, when school started up again for fourth grade was, “Hey beep, beep beep beep beep beep-ing beep beep you.”

  “What’s that?” she asked me.

  “Cursing!” I said, proud to finally know something before Francine did.

  “Beep is not a curse.”

  “You mean is. Is a curse.”

  “You’re fucking crazy!” Francine said. “See? That’s cursing.”

  I didn’t get how Francine already knew how to curs
e, and I was still imitating the sound that covered up curses. I wanted to know what TV shows she was watching that I wasn’t getting on my cable box. It put me in a bad mood, and on the walk home with Frangie, I told her that she might not want to come over to my house today because I might feel like slipping some crushed-up poison into her soda when she wasn’t looking and she better not tempt fate and just go back to her real home and not be such a little wimpy piece of hangers-on in my home, my one and only home that because of her felt like it wasn’t even mine, and because of her, I felt like an awkward intruder in my own house, so go away already.

  Frangie stared at me with her deep-set, unblinking raccoon eyes, looking like she had been scarred even though she was the same as me, and if she was scarred, then I was scarred, and no one had the right to look more scarred than anyone else because the sympathy that a scarred person who looked scarred could elicit was so much more than a scarred person who didn’t look scarred could get, and that wasn’t fair at all. I stopped in the middle of the street, crossed my arms, and said to Frangie, “You know, not everyone feels sorry for you.” She smiled a little but it looked really painful, and then she ran in the direction of her father’s house where she almost never lived because he was so irresponsible and out of it that once Frangie told me her dad let her drink beer and she got super tired and fell asleep on the floor. I waited until I couldn’t see her overalls and purple backpack to continue walking home.

  When I got home, I started a fight with Eddie, telling him that I needed to draw a picture of his butt on his bedroom wall for my science class because we had to come up with a hypothesis that could be tested out, and I wanted to test out my hypothesis that if I drew a picture of my brother’s butt on his wall then his real butt would disappear. Eddie got really mad at me every time I charged toward his wall with a marker and at one point he pushed me back so hard that I thought he had dislocated my shoulder. Of course, he didn’t care that he was six years older than me, because he wasn’t the type to budge an inch for his little sister who only had nine years of practice fighting with other people against his fifteen years of hard-earned training. He pushed me down on the carpet and grabbed my ears tight and said he wouldn’t let go unless I said, “I’m sorry for being a little twat, I’ll never bother you again,” which made me so angry, I hacked up a big glob of spit and sent it flying into his face. It landed right between his eyes, and as he was wiping it off, I wriggled out of his grasp, sprinted into my room, and locked the door.

  When my mom came home from work, she asked me how my first day of school was and I told her it was okay except that Eddie made me cry and now I was going to have to go to school with puffy eyes, which wouldn’t at all match the pink cotton skirt I had picked out and lacy anklet socks with patent-leather Mary Janes that I had been wearing around the house all summer in preparation for wearing them outside all autumn.

  “Honey, you shouldn’t fight with your brother. He’s very stressed these days. There’s a lot of homework for high schoolers. You should let him do his work and you should do your own homework and help Frangie with hers when you finish yours.”

  “How can I do my homework when Eddie’s bothering me? And anyway, Frangie’s always here and she never leaves, and I don’t like it when she invades my privacy.”

  “This is Frangie’s home too. She needs to be here until her dad gets better and you shouldn’t be making her feel unwelcome. When did her dad pick her up?”

  “He didn’t. She just ran home by herself.”

  “Lucy.”

  “What? If you gave me your car, I could drive her home,” I said, pretending to paw at my mom’s arm like I was a kitten, and smiling with no teeth, the way I had practiced thousands of millions of times in front of the mirror when I was alone.

  “Lucy.”

  “Mom, why can’t Dad order the good cable? Francine gets like a hundred more shows than us. It’s not fair.”

  “Everything’s not fair to you, little complaining girl.”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  “Lucy, you know your daddy is very busy right now. He’s studying for his exams so he can get a better job so we can move into a bigger house, remember? Do you ever see him sleeping? No, you don’t, because he has to stay out all night delivering food so that we can keep this house and have good things to eat.”

  “So?”

  “So?” my mother said, and I immediately regretted asking. She had this way of looking at me that made me feel like I had to apologize for being her daughter, that it wasn’t fair she had to love me no matter how obstinately stupid I was, or how I constantly frustrated her with my inability to comprehend what was beyond obvious. I’m sorry, I said to her in my head, all the time, but never in real life, just like my mother, who never said I’m sorry to me in real life either, only I had no idea if she also apologized in her head, and if she realized that she had the power to hurt me, to disappoint me as much as I disappointed her, to make me feel so alone that sometimes I couldn’t recognize myself in front of mirrors or in pictures.

  “So would you like to stay up all night biking all over the city? Would you like to come back from school and go to another school and then come back from that school and go to yet another school?” I nodded my head at my mother, forgetting I was supposed to be shaking it side to side, the whole time apologizing furiously in my head, Sorry, Mom, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorrysorrysorry, sorry again, sorry again, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry again, now I’m sorry again, I’m sorry, so sorry, I’m sorry, really sorry, really sorry about this, I’m sorry, I feel so sorry, I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry Mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll never stop being sorry, I’m sorry forever, I’m always sorry, I’m sorry for everything.

  “Of course. Of course you’d say yes. You think it’s funny, but your father is killing himself for us and all you can do is complain. Lucy. Lucy! Are you listening to me?” In my head I said, And sorry on top of the first sorry, sorry for this, and also sorry for before this. “Forget it. I can’t be bothered with you right now.”

  That was the way fourth grade went. I tried to soar through the air like an eagle, tried to cut through the wide expanse of sky to reach some realm of infinite possibility, infinite compassion and understanding, but it was impossible—I kept crashing into things and receiving head injuries. My mother made me feel clumsy when I thought I was graceful, she made me think my faults were incorrigible, her sudden bouts of impatience made me feel small and slow as a turtle, like the time I dreamed I was a giant who poked out the windows of skyscrapers with my fingers and then suddenly Elmer Fudd showed up and shot me in the knee, and I started shrinking until I was no bigger than a turtle the size of a thimble, and then I was a turtle the size of a pebble, and then I was a turtle the size of a period and when I woke up, I couldn’t help but see turtles everywhere, in the small brown birthmark on my brother’s upper lip, in the pierced holes in my mother’s earlobes before she put her prized pearl earrings through them (the ones that looked the most real even though they were plastic just like all her other earrings), in the tip of the ballpoint pen my father used to sign my field-trip slip so I could go with my class to see the dinosaur bones in the American Museum of Natural History—my day was infested with turtles.

  Thankfully, I wasn’t a turtle, not even close, and though I wasn’t exactly an eagle either, I still stretched out my arms and looked to the sky. Surely there was someplace where it was safe, where who you thought you were matched up with how others treated you, where there was forgiveness in great abundance, never to be depleted, and as far as I knew, the first step to getting there was to have a boy who loved you and only you. For the first two weeks, Jason was the perfect boyfriend. When our teacher, Mrs. Silver, asked us to describe what we liked in the opposite sex, Jason raised his hand and said, “I just like it when they’re pretty,” and everyone turned to look at me, the pretty one. Yeah, I was lucky. I was chosen. There was jus
t one problem—the whole wet-dream thing made me wish I knew how to drive a bus so I could ram it into Jason, ideally disabling his penis but leaving him alive, although a dead boyfriend would probably give my mother a reason to stay home from work and spend a few days with me. How, I wondered, did Francine know about his wet dream and how did she know that was what it took for a boy to get a girl pregnant? There was no way in hell she learned it from the mandatory pre–sex education sex education we started having in the second half of the year, something that was supposed to be a punishment but we all took as an honor. After all, we had never heard of any other fourth graders getting to take pre–sex education sex education and most of our parents, when they found out, revealed to us that they had never learned a single thing about sex when they were in school.

  The day it was announced that boys and girls would be separated for an hour each week to learn about S-E-X, we lost our freaking minds. Minhee gathered all the girls around at recess and spun her finger at all of us, “Who here has done it?” Francine jokingly wiggled her hand in the air and I smacked it back down.

  “Stop lying,” I said. She smiled at me the same way she’d smiled when I cursed wrong on the first day of school, which bugged me.

  I was actually looking forward to learning something, but all we ended up doing on the first day was sit around in a circle looking at diagrams of girls’ bodies at various stages of development from no boobs to tiny nubs to big fat round globes, and then somehow got into a long conversation about what sort of touch was appropriate and what was inappropriate. The whole thing was as foreign to me as a house free of Frangie. I mean, all touch was wonderful and the small amount I had experienced in my life was too precious to split off into categories of “wanted” and “unwanted.” And what if we wanted more touch? I felt like asking but never did.