“Yuki—”
“Move.”
She shoved him, her palms smacking against the hairless chest. It was mottled from heat. But in the pushing, she fell, slipping and skidding on the floor of the tub. A red pain arched through the back of her skull. She’d hit the taps. Her fingers couldn’t feel blood.
“Are you okay?”
“Can’t you be a fucking human being?” She sneered, “Are you okay, Yuki? Yuki, can I get you anything? Yuki, can we pay someone to make it better? Yuki, it’s okay; I don’t need to fuck. I just love you, KeeKeeee. It’s gross.”
She stood. His prematurely thinning hair clung to his forehead. She felt damp and terrible. He wouldn’t fight back, wouldn’t let her rage reach a purifying blaze. He was always dampening. If she didn’t burn, she’d rot.
“Get the fuck out of my way.” She slapped him across the jaw. Stubble scraped her palm. He swayed over the edge of the tub. Shocked, blinking.
“Yooey?” It was Jay. Edison had changed him into his banana-yellow romper. Water had splashed all over the bathroom floor, and Monkey’s face was being dragged across a puddle.
She pushed past Edison, running naked, not stopping for a towel. She slammed the door to their bedroom shut behind her. How could she go to Jay now? She smacked her forehead with the edge of her knuckles. She’d hit her husband. Being hit by Lou had been like searing coffee. It burned, jangled her nerves, but at least she felt awake. Hitting Edison had sent her hand dead. She moved her fingers, just to check she still could. When they moved, she felt almost betrayed. How had the nerves not withered and the muscles not atrophied? Why had the skin not scarred? Why did it look only like a hand, a soft white bowl of flesh? She had hit her good husband. Hit her husband in front of her child. His fatherly reassurances came sweet and low from behind the bathroom door. Sweet and Low, said the stupid bitch inside her head, and fake as sucralose. But it was not fake. It was Yuki who had the imitation smiles, imitation mother voice, and she wasn’t even a good fake.
“Mommy and Daddy were playing a game. Oh, look now you’ve got Monkey all wet. Poor Monkey. He doesn’t want to be wet does he? Shall we dry him?”
The comfortable hum of the hairdryer filled the room. He was a good dad. Jay was a good kid. She was a bad mother. Which one of these does not belong?
Edison pulled the covers over her.
“You’ll catch cold.”
“Why do you have to be so fucking perfect all the time?” Rage drained, she was tired. “There are so many smart, beautiful women. I’m a shit mother and a worse artist.” She hadn’t even painted an apple or an eye since Jay was born.
Edison crawled in behind her, wrapping himself around her.
“I Love You.”
“But, why?”
“I love you, because you’re you. Because you care. My job is fine. My colleagues are fine. My parents are fine. The weather is fine. But you ache about angles of light. Colors flip your mood around. Sure you get sad, but you’re beautiful when you’re sad.”
“Really, really?” She’d heard this speech before. It was a tautology. I love you because you’re you. But hearing it made her feel okay. Better. Or it usually did. Now she just wondered if there was something defective about him, that he needed to care for two. Three now.
“Really, really.”
But, no, it wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She tried to sleep, to sink into some sort of oblivion. Light glinted off the brass bedstead. She’d never liked this bed. The twisting metal reminded her of a Victorian hospital. It made her think of bedpans, coughing children. Edison was right; she cared about the little things. They abraded her mind.
She could hear the crumpling and uncrumpling of his breath. Edison slept when stressed. He turned off, instant as a light bulb. But she was vibrating.
She crept out of bed and into Jay’s room. He was sleeping too. Father and son looked so alike—they had the same smooth forehead and sleep-scrambled hair. Jay slept on his side. His little fists opened and closed, grabbing at air.
“I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you,” she said.
He needed to know that. They said children took things in subconsciously. She would get away. Not for long, just a while. She would get her head straight, then she’d come back and be a real mother.
She’d long ago thrown out the hard-sided case that she had carried in and out of Lou’s life. But Edison had a silver Samsonite that he took to conferences. She took it down from the hall closet and gathered up her passport, checkbook, wallet, and keys. Edison was asleep, and she was afraid to wake him by opening drawers and counting out underwear. She hated all her clothes anyway.
Yuki looked down at her provisions. They didn’t even cover the bottom of the Samsonite. She felt oddly happy. The suitcase was an emptiness she could fill. Her mind had never felt so clean.
Yuki circled back to her son. “I love you,” she said a last time.
She might be gone for a whole month. She might even be gone for two or three. She wanted him to have enough love saved up. Monkey curled in the corner of the bed. The nightlight cast red pupils in the button eyes. How had she made something so evil-looking to watch over her son? She bent down; not daring to touch Jay, she skimmed a finger over Monkey’s plump skull. The ears were sticky from Jay’s sucking. She lifted Monkey out of the crib. She hugged the woollen creature, as tightly and urgently as she wished she could hold her son. She was about to put it back, but her hand stopped. No, Monkey would come with her—she’d learn how to mend his holes, and they’d come home together sturdier than when they left.
In the kitchen, she pulled a pen from the chipped mug where she kept the pens she used for groceries. As she began the swoop of the J the ink stuck, mute. She dug harder into the paper—nothing, then a blue slash across the white. Start again. She couldn’t even do her goodbye note right. On a new piece, she began again.
Jayjay,
Monkey and Mommy have gone on an adventure.
Be back soon. We love you so much!
Xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
Mommy
She folded the paper in half and wrote his name on the front, curling the tail of the y into a heart. It looked all wrong, like a birthday card, but how could it ever look right? Now for Edison. She stopped then, holding the pen. She knew he would see this as a stabbing. The pen was so flimsy; then again maybe that cheap plastic shaft was appropriate. She was a flimsy wife. She pressed down on the end and it gave a humble click. What could she tell Edison? He had been good. He had been kind. What had she lacked? Could he understand that paddling through the translucent hours of her life had exhausted her? There had been golden shallows once, but the waters had darkened. She could feel herself drowning. A flimsy excuse. But what excuse wasn’t flimsy, when you were running away from your son and husband? She thought of the side of Edison’s face, the way her hand hadn’t even felt his cheek as she’d hit him. There had been only noise and heat. Jay’s eyes had been so large. Edison said they were her eyes, but she didn’t want him to grow up looking at the world like her. So Yuki wrote her flimsy words:
I’ll be better.
Y
She just needed to find somewhere clean and clear to think. She would find a way of loving that didn’t maim. Then as soon as she was worthy of these people, she’d come back.
Yuki clutched Monkey under one arm. Would Jay be okay without him? Perhaps she should return him. She rubbed a thumb over the loose button eye that her son so often sucked. She felt the ridges where his teeth had nicked the plastic. No, if she saw Jay’s sleep-soft mouth again, she’d stay. And if she stayed, a vulture hanging over her child, he’d have to live in her black-winged shadow.
At the horizon, green light bloomed. The piney air felt cool, and she stopped on the porch steps, letting it trickle down her shirt. She was still wearing her sleep T-shirt, the logo of Edison’s firm branded across her chest. Her flip-flops clapped loudly on the paving stones, but the house stayed asleep.
No light came on when the car grunted awake. It was not too late to go back inside, but someday it would be too late to leave. Her fingertips still smelled of jasmine and orange bath salts. She wondered how long that would last. She propped Monkey up in the passenger seat. The car was alone on the road, and her way was smooth. The headlights illumined each blade of grass. Her vision had never felt so clear. She turned over her shoulder, to clear the turn in the driveway. The house was dark, but as her lights hit the kitchen window, they hung a new gold moon. Her baby was a good baby. Edison was a kind man. Someday soon, she too would learn to be kind.
“We can’t be gone for too long, or Jay will miss us.”
Jay
20.
Berlin, October 2016
We didn’t hold hands or talk about the past. But together we bought a Tempurpedic cat bed and a six-month supply of kitty kibble. I wanted to buy more, but my mother pointed out that we couldn’t see far into the future. I wrote down and had laminated Celeste’s medicine-dinner-kitty-litter schedule. My mother said I was like a mom sending her kid to school for the first time. There was an awkward hiatus as I remembered that my father had given his business cards to each teacher, lunch lady, and even the janitor, in case anything went wrong.
Stopping off at the grocery store, I picked up some name-brand multivitamins for my mother, which she tried to refuse, but I refused her refusal. At a street market, I bought jars of candied ginger to bring home to Mimi. I filled bags with spinach and ruffled cabbage to cook soup for my mother’s recovering throat. She kept saying she’d been fine all these years, that I’d done enough. In the supermarket, I made her translate detergent, disinfectant, drain-unblocker. I collected the tissues from her bedroom. As the first one crumpled, I might catch what she had—but I didn’t really mind. I was proud when my honeyed tea eased her throat. Honey with ginger. She said that was the way my father made it, and I said I knew and we both sniffed as the steam from the tea worked its way up our sinuses.
I took her laundry to the dry-cleaner, hefting it in my own suitcase. Half her wardrobe seemed to be woollen sacks, the next third scarves.
“I get cold a lot.”
So on the way back from the dry-cleaner’s I pulled her into a store so expensive that their logo was written in white font on the white facade. My mother stood in the doorway, not touching anything, while I examined the produce. High art and high fashion are both exhibited surrounded by blank space. This is what you are paying for—breathing room. Enthroned on a walnut veneer shelf was a pale pink bag. Stippled ostrich leather, where each nub stood up like a goosebump. I laughed. Such an old joke. The purse as vagina was old news. Was it the Dadaists, Freud, who had thought of that first? Then, I saw the faint gold tattoo just above the buckle—GRAYCHILD in thin sans serif caps.
“She came by the gallery.”
My mother looked up at me, puzzled.
“Odile Graychild. She said she knew you. That you’d been friends.”
My mother squinted like someone undoing a difficult knot. “When we were very young, I suppose, before you were born. We—well, I’m surprised she remembers me.”
I thought of the woman’s speech and the crack of her shoes on the gallery floor. But, her fight was not my fight. If Odile Graychild wanted to fly to Berlin, to climb the stairs, to knock on my mother’s door, I would not stop her. But, I, we, had enough to deal with without her.
I bought my mother a scarf, with yak fibers, to wear while the virus-ridden scarves were dry-cleaned. It cost as much as a one-way plane ticket to New York, and as my card slid through the register I thought, Dad, is this what you wanted?
And then so soon, there was one day left before I was to return home.
As I scrubbed her long window, standing on the wobbly chair, she said, “I left you a note.”
“What note?”
“When I left.”
“Dad never showed me.” It was too late to ask him why. I scrubbed around and around, circling the sun that stabbed at the glass. Was he protecting me? Her? The sweet taste of fury filled my mouth. Because what could she have written that would have excused leaving? There was no number of words I could accumulate to make it okay to leave Eliot. So what daub could she have made? So Dad was sheltering her. Sheltering this woman who had left us.
Celeste began to hack, her whole body trembling with the cough. A moment later, my mother hawked into her elbow. The cat squeaked. My mother wheezed. And I laughed. Laughed at us all in this half-clean room, and I heard the tremble of Mimi’s giggles seeping in from a future where I told her, our bodies wrapped into one comma beneath our sheets.
Yuki was not looking at me but up and out the window, as if checking the weather. “He told me when you got the cat. He wrote it. In a letter. But he said you were okay. You’d gotten into such a good school.”
“What?”
“Your father. He used to write to me. I wanted to ask the cat’s name. He never said.”
“You could have asked.”
“Writing back. I . . . It sounds stupid. But I didn’t want to disturb anything. You looked so happy in your pictures.”
“You’re an artist. And you think—” You think photographs tell the truth? But I didn’t ask it. As a dealer, I should’ve known better than to expect an artist to be honest with herself. “I want to buy Celeste a goodbye present.”
We took a trip to a fancy pet store in the fashion district. I’d wanted to buy Celeste a goodbye sweater. But even in this store in this rich part of town, with beeswax-polished pine floors and cat stands made from hemp, there were no sweaters. I fingered a lambskin leather collar, supple and black. It was a hundred euros, so the minuscule handwritten tag said. The store had a concept: Our concept is that everything is made by local designers, the materials sourced from local, German farms. I wondered what was so much better about German farms than Chinese farms.
I considered buying the collar. I knew it was foolish, but I needed to do something for Celeste. My mother took the collar from me and put it back next to its variants in lapis lazuli and peach.
“I have an idea,” she said.
We went back to the first pet store, the one with a dead carp floating in the pond and three packs of kibble for the price of one. We stopped by the rodent cages. In the mouse tank, bodies crawled over bodies and the sawdust was black with shit.
“When I left home, your grandmother packed me the biggest bento. Boxes and boxes of rice, fried chicken, sautéed chicken, shrimp dumplings, sweet eel, red bean cakes, and an apple cut into pale smiles.”
“Yes?”
“So I thought maybe a special dinner for Celeste?”
I was sad for the first time that this woman was not my mom, but only my mother. I didn’t ask if she’d made me any food before she left. I purchased three mice, the attendant scooped out a fist of fur into a white cardboard box. Two white mice and one tin-gray, all three with eraser-pink noses. I could feel them moving against the side of the box, sharp feet tapping. I thought of those people who say, “I’m not a vegetarian, but I could never kill a chicken myself.” I could kill these mice. I could kill them as easily as I’d slapped fish against flint with my Canadian uncles. The first time they took me hunting, they painted my face with two smooth red lines, one down each cheekbone. Perhaps that was why when she suggested it, I didn’t think she was crazy. Killing bonds people. So as we rode the U-Bahn over the River Spree, I held tight to the six-by-six box of life.
Celeste lay on my mother’s chair, wearing her festive sweater. She’d tucked her tail under her paws. She seemed relaxed with my mother, as if she recognized her savior. I cupped the mouse in my palms. It lay corpse-still, but warm. I brought it right
under Celeste’s nose before slowly opening a slit for her to see her gift. She twisted her head to one side. Celeste had sharp eyes for a Sphynx cat, neither protuberant nor slitted; they were a puddled blue. She blinked. I widened the crack between my palms. The furred crescent lay still, so I opened wider. Nothing. I dropped the mouse between her front paws. The curled moon of white mouse remained terror-rigid for ten seconds, then, with a heave and a twitch, it made a comet’s arc off the chair and toward the bathroom.
Yukiko’s giggle twisted into a delighted cackle. Her chipped incisor—how had that happened—danced rakishly. “Let me try.”
She lifted the second mouse by its tail. The diminutive lungs inflated and deflated hysterically as it clawed at the air. She lowered the mouse over Celeste’s nose. Lower and lower until the mouse’s translucent whiskers tickled Celeste’s nostrils. Celeste pulled back her neck, flesh folding and wrinkling, then, snake-like, snapped forward. The severed tail dangled between my mother’s fingers. She laid it carefully down on the kitchen table.
“Maybe I’ll paint it,” she said.
“You’re weird.” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. I smiled, broadly to show it was a joke.
“So are you.” She said it like a fact, not an accusation.
“I guess so.”
I wondered if Eliot would have her smile. I thought maybe they shared a nose. The last mouse remained backed up against the top corner, unable to hide. My mother gestured to the gray comma of wriggling flesh.
“This is your goodbye gift, not mine.”
I pinched him by the tail, but he jerked violently out of my hand, contracting his tiny thighs in a great leap toward the bathroom.
“I knew I should’ve shut the door.”
“Don’t worry about it. There’re rats the size of babies living under the stairs. Anyway, I have a cat now.”
“Celeste was never much use on the pest front.”
Harmless Like You Page 26
