Home Remedies

by Xuan Juliana Wang

  For the first time he didn’t seem all that excited about the duck organs. In fact, he choked on some imaginary mouthful and went to drink from a bowl that wasn’t there. Afterward, he misjudged the circumference of the Lucite coffee table, leaned too far forward, and fell off the edge.

  The rest of the afternoon Maggie followed him around as he bumped into the carefully curated objects in the living room. She tried to anticipate his movements by repositioning planters and table lamps in his way. The bronze water bowl and food dish were nudged over to new spots beside the ceramic herb planter and to the right of the sofa.

  His automatic feeder sounded, but instead of shooting over to scarf down his food in a ghostly blur, Small Cow didn’t even seem to notice. It was as if he’d finally gotten over the indignity of his heritage, of having once been a wild thing.

  “Greg lets me have a cat even though he’s allergic and we had to get a bunch of air purifiers,” Maggie remembered bragging to Maxi, the only time she got to see him again. It was he who reached out first. He sent her a message from an unknown number, asking if she was safe. Earthquakes and wildfires, much like terrorist attacks, have the unintended effect of bringing old lovers out of the woodwork. It had been awkward when they met up in front of the restaurant, not knowing where to put their faces when they hugged.

  The woman who ended up taking care of Maxi’s visa situation was called Samantha, a serene, teenage-looking girl according to the picture he showed Maggie on his cellphone. Maxi tapped his fingers at his screen, talked about Sam, “Sammy,” who had grown up on a soybean farm in Virginia but had been working as a concierge at a hotel in Colorado. The hotel was associated with an artist residency and it was while immersed in the scenic mountain splendor of the West that they first met. He inundated Maggie on the details of the elaborate salads Sammy made for lunch and the twins she was growing in her belly. “She’s such a sweet person. She’s planning on running a kindergarten from our living room,” he said, holding up another photo.

  “Greg and I could have but we chose not to,” Maggie said, her mouth around a chewed-up straw. “You know, if we did, we would have already.”

  She never told Greg about seeing Maxi again. She kept meaning to bring it up casually, but never did. Now three whole months had passed and it would seem suspect. She did tell her friend Bobbi, during one of their “writing dates” at a Starbucks disguised as a neighborhood bistro. Bobbi had just started an online business and cut her hair into a bob and started applying her makeup cynically.

  “Where is this going?” Bobbi interrupted five minutes after Maggie got started. “You didn’t, like, have sex with him, did you?”

  “What? No. He is married now.”

  Bobbi stuck her neck out across the table. “So…”

  “I can’t stop thinking about him,” said Maggie. “What if he’s the love of my life?”

  “Maxi? That emaciated homeless-looking guy?” Bobbi laughed. “Greg is a million times better for you. He’s so positive and seems genuinely supportive of your work.”

  “Don’t you think he’s supportive of my work because he’s too dumb to understand that it’s garbage?”

  “I can’t listen to this anymore,” Bobbi said, putting up a hand in front of her face and closing her eyes. “This is just a form of procrastination.”

  “I know, I know,” said Maggie, and returned her eyes to her computer. They were sitting there at that unreasonably small table with both their laptops at angles, trying not to spill coffee on their laps. Perhaps this was why most of their friends from college had stopped even pretending to write. They spent their energies pretending to be creative consultants and cultural influencers and other cooler-sounding things. Maxi and Bobbi might have had a fling way back when. Maggie vaguely recalls, or this could be her imagination, once seeing them make out at a party. So it could have been for myriad reasons why Bobbi always asserted that Maxi was nothing special.

  Perhaps sensing Maggie’s skeptical expression, Bobbi abruptly looked up from her typing and said, “Look, it was a million years ago and you were both idiots. Just let it go.”

  At around five o’clock that night, Greg asked her to meet him for a quick bite at one of those old-school French restaurants in Pac Heights that was definitely not cool anymore, judging by the color scheme and how courteous the older waiter was when he interrupted them to take their order.

  “You feel like eating?” Greg asked, a rhetorical question to which the answer was clearly no.

  It was six o’clock. Maggie had two glasses of wine waiting for him and hadn’t eaten anything but a fistful of quinoa all day.

  No, no. She shook her head agreeably. She wasn’t expecting an actual dinner, of course not. No, they’d get a drink before he returned to the office to prepare for an important investor meeting the following morning.

  “Sorry, one more email,” Greg said, not looking up from his phone as he explained that the cofounders were debating changing directions on the game itself. “They’ve got this sick interface, but they can’t decide if Chicken Tinder is going to be about doing dares or matchmaking for people with chickens.”

  While Greg typed on his phone, Maggie talked about her adventures with the Wine Ager. She described in detail the pear rotting from the inside out, the wilting of the basil plant, and even the snail, only leaving out the part about her cat living in another dimension.

  “So what you’re saying is that it’s really a time machine,” he said.

  “Yes!” she cried. “But it’s only capable of moving in one direction. Forward.”

  “That’s too bad, huh,” he added, one hand on her thigh and the other signing for the check in the air.

  “Is that all you’re going to say? Don’t you want to use it?” she asked.

  Greg laughed. He tugged his coat over his shoulders, ready to leave as soon as the check came. “No way. Look at me. I don’t have any time as it is!”

  If she could make time go backward instead of forward, she would have rewound it to that autumn evening that had felt too short. That night with Maxi, when they talked until the restaurant turned up their lights. Maxi had come close enough to kiss her goodbye, how she marveled and panicked, as if a girl who had been hibernating inside her had just woken up. Even when they were in the deep of it, their skin still touching, her mind had been full of questions, racing ahead. Why had it taken him so long to find her again? And also, where would they live? How could they afford to buy all the crap she was addicted to buying now?

  Then it was Maxi who put a stop to it. “Whoa. What are you doing, Mags?”

  He was pulling his face away from hers so that a short stack of chins gathered at the top of his neck.

  “I can’t do this,” he said urgently, as if her lips contained a contagious disease. “I haven’t even been granted conditional status yet!”

  He touched her left earlobe with his thumb and forefinger and she nearly passed out with yearning. “You’re funny, Maggie,” he said. “I never know what you want from me.”

  How long had she been sitting there, touching her earlobe, staring vacantly at the old waiter before he asked her politely if she needed anything else. She shook her head. Pretending as if she knew where she was going, Maggie slid off the chair, walked past the other diners, and made a sharp left at the door against the light of the oncoming cars. By the time she turned the corner onto her tree-lined street, she felt absurd and sad.

  Maggie stormed up the stairs, slammed her front door, kicked off her shoes in the foyer, and studied her face in the hallway mirror. Her eyes welled up painfully. Maybe it was just a kind of allergy for women of all ages whose bodies could not stand that relentless coming coming coming of spring.

  It must have been past midnight, the cafés below her apartment were quiet. Picking up her purse, she walked into the living room where Small Cow seemed to be waiting for her at his perch by the window.
Maggie scooped him up as he mashed his smirking face against her arm.

  There had been another Small Cow once, a black-and-white fur ball whose name, spoken in the language she grew up speaking, was less cumbersome. She wanted nothing more than to forget that kitten, that language, all those times, but, alas, nostalgia does not care for the suffering it inflicts.

  She still remembered the morning at the courthouse when one of Maxi’s friends married another person’s girlfriend so they could give each other citizenship. Afterward Maggie and Maxi had gone hand in hand to the same immigration lawyer’s office. The lawyer leaned in and looked meaningfully at Maggie, explaining the paperwork and interview process, step by step, month by month, year by year, until she could transmit her citizenship to him like a disease.

  She shook her head as if to dispel those memories, still pure and aching, and Small Cow scrambled away from her. She didn’t have the confidence, the wisdom, to be sure of her decisions. Her past had not yet reconfigured into something she could understand, reordered in a way she could accept.

  So there was really no choice. Maggie retrieved the Wine Ager from her collection of useful small appliances in the living room and plugged it in. She tied her hair into a high ponytail and laid her head, left ear down, on the center of the plate. With her eyes closed, she pressed the age button. She pressed it again and again. The life of a memory, how long would it take for her to be able to live with it? How much faster could she speed through slow-churning time and grow up?

  Through chambers and tunnels she went, in chilly darkness. A terrible headache lit up her eyes, followed by nausea and her hands going numb. Cold sweats passed through her, but then she relaxed into a meditative state, as if she were watching a fire.

  How she would have loved to take the time to taste her next meal with Greg. It would begin with baked eggs in tomato sauce over a slice of five-seed home-baked bread with a sprinkle of sesame seeds, served in a blue dish with white flecks. But then time speeds forward to dinner, and her hair grows a streak of white. Bobbi opens an online store that sells Korean face lotion and becomes a sensational success. Maxi moves to the Pacific Northwest with his wife and children without telling her, and her longing for him falls from her heart like rotten fruit. The dish now is black and the waiter who brings it to Maggie is older than her father, who grows sick and passes away suddenly before her. And at his funeral Maggie notices that beside Greg sits a woman who turns and looks right back into her own eyes. Different possibilities rise to the surface, people revealing themselves to her and then moving to the peripheral darkness.

  It was obvious to her that Greg had married her and had done so quickly not just because he liked the way she looked but also because he was really in love with her. He was a bighearted boy from a broken family. He wanted to provide the gift of a comfortable life, a gift that not many people have to give, and he gave it to her.

  As the years moved forward, Maggie’s world shifted in an irretrievable way. She was grasping for something in the deep recess of a large cave, traveling through the inner world of her mind, feeling the essence of time and its possibilities. She was awakened to each new truth, which always corresponded to something that she already knew.

  How could Maggie possibly have explained it without sounding heartless? Her own parents had spent most of their lives trying to become citizens of this country. She witnessed the years her father wasted working at fast-food restaurants in order to keep earning that useless degree for his student visa. Those months her mother worked as a nanny, nearly for free, for a lawyer’s family simply because she needed him to apply for a green card. She knew there was always a price to be paid, higher than anyone ever anticipates. Maggie didn’t want to go through any of it again for anyone. Not even for Maxi. She couldn’t bear the thought of getting back in that line.

  A thousand sunrises and sunsets carry her along the edge of time. As she tumbles further from the age of infinite trajectories, from the outrages of her childhood, from birth. That haunted autumn evening becomes last autumn, the autumn before, and the autumn before that. Stop, Maggie blurts out. Knowing then that she doesn’t want to live through the hard moments anymore. She just wants to live! But she is still floating, dazed like a child swept away by a big wave while playing in the surf. Battered from all sides, choking down seawater, arms reaching again and again for the light. She thinks she can hear life calling for her then, like a phone ringing under a pillow. Sooner or later, the present will catch up to her. She will emerge hurled back onto the shore, spitting out sand, crying, shivering and grateful to be alive.

  The Art of Straying Off Course

  I met an architect in my parents’ office in Burbank. It was Friday and I was pretending to solve math problems behind my father’s desk while the adults gathered around a table covered with blueprints, holding up the scaled model of our future home.

  When the architect came to talk to me, he was smiling beneath a full mustache, his green eyes behind strange round glasses. I took his leather jacket and worn tennis shoes as evidence of citizenship in an exciting world. He knelt down so we could talk eye-to-eye and pulled out a briefcase. He extracted from it a light bulb, a golden leaf made of silk, and a rubber doughnut and asked me to pick what I wanted to hold in my hands, which thing I wanted to keep.

  Instead, I chose to bring him things. A poem about a watermelon, my grandmother’s pearl Mao Zedong button, and a long-stemmed bird-of-paradise. Watching his large hands taking the neck of the flower, I closed my eyes around his smell and learned his name was David.

  Years later, he would tell me that he liked me even then, that he had wanted to kiss me right there. Those were the years when I thought he was handsome.

  “Forgive me,” he said after we slept together in that old hotel in Pasadena.

  “What for?” I asked. I had just turned eighteen and I thought I knew everything there was to know about everything. The architect was a concept, a book on the top shelf no young person dared to read. Nobody but me. My hair was everywhere when we kissed. Construction had just been completed on that house but I missed the chance to wake up to that view of the Griffith Observatory. I was going away to college. The architect was too old to be taken seriously. He cupped my cheek with his hand and said, “Go play, explore the world. I can wait for you.” I didn’t return for seven years.

  On the phone, his voice was so far away; we were not experiencing the same rains.

  In Cassis I spent all my parents’ money on a single silk dress. For a month I couldn’t afford to eat anything but baguettes dipped in vinegar. I ran away for days, feeling dark and interesting and free. To my old pal, I wrote a postcard at La Vieille Charité, trying to describe the light in between Corinthian columns.

  Someone wrote “I still love you” in Arabic on the walls of the church’s never-ending passageways, but who knew if that was still true.

  My mother flew over to meet me in Madrid. She was leaving me, she was leaving my father, and even though our hearts had grown distant, we wept for days over many variations of tapas. “Don’t worry about money,” she said. “I had the lawyer set up a fund your father can’t touch.” I do not remember much of anything about Madrid.

  After they divorced, they both remarried and individually collected and spawned sets of children I could not keep straight in my head.

  During those years I was constantly untangling necklaces and wires.

  “You’re so lucky. You have everything we didn’t have. Now you must go and do something spectacular with your life,” my father said, while he rocked one of his new babies to sleep. It was his way of saying goodbye.

  I rented an apartment on top of a chocolatier by the Santa Maria La Nova in Naples. Each night the owner offered my friend Rachel and me rum shots in chocolate cups after retelling love stories that I’m sure he made up on the spot. The basement was occupied by a limited bookstore and an out-of-tune guitar. Three women chatted in diale
ct around a toppling tower of philosophy books.

  One night the bartender asked if he could sleep with me, but I was just too tired.

  When in Shanghai all Rachel wanted to do was sleep with cute bartenders. “You don’t understand. It’s not the same thing here.” I tried to explain that here the bartenders slept in the booths after the jazz players packed up their instruments and the customers went home. They weren’t also trying to be actors.

  Only one of them was dumb enough to fall in love with her. He handed over letters, which I roughly translated, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He rowed her around the lake in Century Park in a plastic boat while she texted me gagging noises. I felt so sorry for him. I couldn’t really be friends with Rachel anymore after that.

  Everything I thought was cool was actually Berlin. Mitte gallery chic, graffiti murals, hookers wearing fanny packs.

  I ran into David by accident, in San Francisco outside the SFMOMA. I thought it was fate.

  “I’ve been traveling, I’ve seen things!” I told him on an innocent walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.

  In Oakland his house was always too cold to stay naked in. David built it himself, so he must have liked it that way. He told me the secret to building things was listening. You had to open yourself to the wants of the materials, the feelings of the stones, the wind and water surrounding the earth, the nature of the wood, and feel their responses to your touch. Then after you reach an understanding, you can play.

  I applied for schools, all the while fearful of terrorism both domestic and abroad. I passed exams and qualified for certificates. I tried to keep in touch as best as I could manage. I dyed my hair blue; it turned green and had to be shorn. I decided I was done playing with boys. David was finally forgivably twenty years older than my twenty-six, and I married him.