I was born in America, but I was raised with my mother’s Taiwanese cooking. Pork and eggs stewed in soy sauce. Fish from the Chinese supermarket, steamed with ginger and green onions. Pork chops with chopped mustard greens. I can still eat these things, but not from Taiwan, cooks who serve food to Taiwanese first-and second-generation immigrants in Cupertino, or hip, Taiwanese Brooklyn eateries. Only my mother, who taught me to love these foods in the first place, knows which ingredients to use and which to lovingly replace. If I want to experience these gustatory experiences, they must once again occur in the home.
TWO YEARS AFTER my last trip to Taiwan, my brother and sister-in-law had a daughter: my first chance to be an aunt. For my niece’s one-hundred-day celebration, a Hong Kong tradition celebrated by my sister-in-law’s family, I ate almost everything but that which seemed obviously gluten filled. I avoided noodles, but devoured foods that likely had soy sauce—which does contain wheat—in them: chicken with crisp skin, gelatinous crab on greens. I wanted it all so badly that I descended into recklessness. I assumed that I’d know if I’d eaten something improper within five or ten minutes.
“It’s been years since I had anything like this,” I said to my husband.
He asked if I was okay. I told him that I’d waited for a reaction and hadn’t had one. I ate until I was stuffed full of memories.
But at night in my bed, everything hurt. My stomach ached; my hips were shot through with pain like fire; wandering pain lit up my muscles and made my hands twitch. I lay in bed, trying to find an inch of skin that didn’t hurt. Eventually, I took an emergency painkiller.
The next morning, I still hurt. I drank coffee and wrote prayers in my journal while nerves lit up throughout my body, reminding me of my transgressions. For that day and the next, I lay in bed, unable to decide whether I regretted what I’d done—yet the memory of that terrible pain has kept me from attempting similar culinary experiments, as much as I yearn for them.
A FEW MONTHS after the one-hundred-day debacle, and knowing how much I missed the food of my childhood, my husband made Taiwanese beef noodle soup with gluten-free noodles and gluten-free soy sauce. I was feeling unwell, and so he prepared the soup until our house smelled of the cramped, raucous noodle joints of my youth while I lay in bed, occasionally coming out to see what he was doing based on The Food of Taiwan: Recipes from the Beautiful Island by Cathy Erway. For the first time, I learned what actually went into the dish that I’d eaten almost all of my life: five-spice and star anise, stew beef, black-bean paste. Once the soup had simmered for a good, long while, I took a sip of the liquid from a wooden spoon and found that it tasted correct—it was not so much about the actual taste-on-tongue, but about the aromatics settling into the nostrils, filling one’s head with properly scented steam; it was correct in my heart, filling the emptiness that had formed over the years through degeneration, creating the yawning spaces where my sense of home once lay. Before eating, I took photographs to seal the meal in my memory—this was the day my husband took the time to make me beef noodle soup, and the day I was able to eat beef noodle soup without pain.
We settled in for a reunion, the bowl and I. I gulped it down gladly, drank all the soup, and I smiled at him: happy, home.
Cul-de-sac
Chaya Babu
The day of the Post-it was like any other really. The house a lull, the pink-gold of gloam peering through the thin metal blinds everywhere. Ribbons setting the walls aflame. What happened before or after, I don’t know—I just know that my fingertips grazed the grain of the wood on the banister before I left the bottom step and that the hush of the kitchen as I turned matched the whispering swells of my unsuspecting breath.
The pens, coins, tube of lip balm, and mini pads of paper emblazoned with pharmaceutical logos formed the only hint of clutter on the first floor. It was here that the sticky note hung askew, one side angled slightly north, the bottom edge flapping up. Why it caught my eye as I passed an unremarkable point on a path I had tread thousands of times is tough to call; it was as if some invisible thread tugged on my right cheek, as if some part of me knew the words would stand out from the usual mindless doodles my mom scribbled while talking to her friends. There was meaning laden in the message, which read: “Bradley had a baby girl Sophie.”
It was unclear who the note was intended for, possibly a reminder to herself about something, or even who it was about, and I almost dismissed it and kept on my way. But then my mother appeared from behind the open door of the god closet, where she had been kneeling with her eyes closed in front of a large plastic Ganesh and silver oil lamps upon which twists of cotton sat immersed in ghee, one end of each burning a tiny teardrop-shaped fire. She glared at me, her thin lips clamped shut, tight.
Pausing in my tracks, I said, “Bradley Meyer?” more out of instinct than genuine curiosity.
We stood there in silence for a beat, and then she squinted a little, never taking her beady eyes off of me.
“Cheryl is so depressed; he hasn’t even finished his education,” she said, the words a verdict—slow, deliberate, tragic, a quiver emanating from the back of her throat. “The mother is some girlfriend.”
I said nothing as the familiar chain of terror coiled hard and heavy in my belly, the truth, that I was to be held answerable for things untouched by me, clawing itself from the shadows. On that slip of paper and all over my mother’s face was the scald of accusation, as if I had singlehandedly let the stain of wanton sex and out-of-wedlock children spread into our otherwise neatly bleached and pressed world.
The cul-de-sac was a vortex, and what was real and what was not was ever shifting. Someone was to be charged with carrying the mistakes, the messes, that did not, could not, fit here—and here, our roles held fast and blame rolled over to whomever had unwittingly assumed it in the first place.
CUL-DE-SAC IS FRENCH. In America it signifies a circular dead end or blind alley. Ours, Briars Corner, fell in order with the others like it. Strung at uneven intervals along Carlton Avenue, like charms hanging from an unclasped bracelet, no two are exactly the same yet they form a pattern nonetheless: up from Iron Ridge to Doxbury Lane, down to Fox Run and Woodsford Bend. Similar to its sisters, the cul-de-sac opens with reserve, tight at first, the constricted strait of a globular jug, making way then for what lies beyond the widening—the chiaroscuro of weathered asphalt, raised slightly in the center where a pewter disk covering a manhole serves as the anchor between four houses set back from the through street. The inner homes are partly shielded from view by numbers one and two, which sit perched on the corners facing Carlton at the inlet. Each comes with its black tin mailbox, affixed to the foot of a driveway paved smooth, and the gilding of verdant landscaping. Over time, the Meyers planted a rosebush at the cusp of their yard and the cement curb, the Callahans, a wall of white pines marking the rim of their property, and my parents, a short, solitary cherry tree that blooms and fades each spring and sheds its blossoms on an island of woodchips amidst a million spears of grass.
In kindergarten, before the flowering tree took root out front, I’d get off the minibus at noon and ring the doorbell at the mudroom. Every day, the housekeeper would answer the door. This was the woman my parents had hired to keep the house spotless while my mother wasn’t there to wipe our fingerprints off of the cream-colored Formica cupboards. Every day, I’d ask, “Is my mom home?”
“She’s at work,” she’d say.
We’d stand like this for a moment, she in the doorframe, I a step down and still outside on the porous concrete stoop, clutching the straps of my backpack as if I might turn on my Converse high-top heels if her answer was no. Instead I’d look up at her, my face at her hip, both of us with blank stares. She’d shuffle aside so I could enter.
I spent a lot of time across the cul-de-sac at Jessica Meyer’s. Her house was a mirror image of ours: contemporary eighties angular monstrosities that nobody wants now. Her mom stayed home during the day. It wasn’t until years later that I reali
zed how much time it must have taken Cheryl to coat her lashes in that lacquer and feather her big blond hair. And to go where? Her soft leather handbag, large enough to fit my mother’s purse as well as the hard otoscope case she pulled down from the closet whenever I had a sore throat, had a rabbit’s foot dangling from the zipper and sat on the kitchen table next to a ring of keys, lots of keys that jingled in tandem with the clack of her stilettos and opened who knows what, but there were so many that I inherently assumed her life was as large as the things she carried.
After school, Cheryl drove us places if we had places to go. In the car she listened to cassette tapes of Black Box and Technotronic and Janet Jackson. Jessica would dance in her seat to it, PUUUUMP PUMP THE JAM, PUMP IT UP, WHILE YOUR FEET AAH STOMPING, mouthing the words, her torso arching forward and back in sharp staccato movements to the beat, her seat belt pulling taut with the curve of her body. Together they went into the city some days to take classes at Broadway Dance Center.
“Chaya,” her mom called to me in the back seat one day, glancing briefly in the rearview mirror through her gigantic tortoise-shell sunglasses. “What kind of music do you like, sweetie?”
“Ummm . . .” I said, trailing off. I didn’t know. I was six.
THROUGH THE MEYERS I learned the ways I was wrong. In their yard, which Jessica’s dad Jack tended to routinely, we ran through sprinklers and ate hard pretzels and drank pink lemonade with ice cubes clinking against the glasses. They ate salad before their meals and put salt and pepper on everything. I had never seen salad tongs before. The floors in their living room were silver-gray tile as opposed to warm cedar covered with oriental rugs like in our house, and the walls in Jessica’s room were pale lavender. On her tufted carpet that reminded me of pussy willow catkins, her mother would blow-dry Jessica’s hair after giving her a bath until it was fluffy, a halo of spun-gold cotton candy.
We were small and quiet compared to them. My father didn’t take care of the lawn, which browned in patches and had haphazard sproutings of weeds. His hands didn’t hold baseballs or wrenches or dirt; day and night, they scalpeled and sutured the flimsy walls of veins and sketched the vessels of the human body on sheets of white paper on Saturdays. He came home late, too late to tickle or joke. He sometimes read us The Sneetches in bed before sitting cross-legged with a tiny tattered prayer book in his dark-lined palms.
Jack got home by dinner, beaming, smelling like cigar smoke and suede from the factory he owned. He scooped up Bradley, still a baby, and roared, “WHO’S MY BOY!” He built them a wooden swing set but also helped my sister Rekha with her math homework, though I’m not sure she needed it. Rekha who basked in the glory of the Meyers’ easy sophistication, who joined jazz classes with recitals for which she wore sparkly midriff-bearing spandex, who liked Donnie Wahlberg just like Jessica and so the two of them shared that, my crush on Joey McIntyre signifying some obvious lack on my part.
She was my big sister and yet somehow Jessica took her. She declared, “REKHA IS MY SISTER.” And nobody protested. Not even the parents. They just laughed. Despite the fact that Jessica and I swirled globs of paint on opposite sides of the easel at school to make identical puke-brown masterpieces and ran across the asphalt circle to each other the second the minibus drove off on most days, in the mornings she insisted on holding Rekha’s hand. I walked alone.
When I soon discovered I was suited to neither gymnastics nor ballet—or rather, I sensed something erroneous about my brown body in a leotard—I excused myself from the carpool. My afternoons were passed dwarfed in the Briarcliff house, its high sloping ceilings and faint echo through the hollowness of the Green Carpet Room. I watched Ghostwriter on the television from my parents’ bed, sat in awe as my grandfather built deft inventions out of discarded wires in the basement, or retreated into the pages of R. L. Stine books on the dense mauve cut pile in my room. To this, my mother said, “It’s not that you’re not talented, you’re just lazy.”
Still, if it was a bone-cutting New York winter, the kind that had the kids from all six houses walking backward to the bus stop in the mornings to keep the wind from whipping at our small faces, or if it was raining particularly hard, Cheryl would pick us up at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, where we got dropped off starting in first grade. We’d scurry out of the big bus’s accordion doors and see the boxy white Volvo parked there with the smack of its black wipers in the wetness, waiting, just yards from the safe, dry havens of actual shelter. Once I just stood there. Only for a minute, but nonetheless. Rekha and Jessica tumbled into the car next to a bundled-up Bradley, slick, heaving, relieved to be under cover at last. “Well, Chaya? Are you getting in or what?” Cheryl asked, peering out with raised brows. The storm poured around me, splashing onto the plush floor of the Volvo. “You can stand here, but we’re going to go.” Drenched, I had a lurking worry she might not make the three-second detour along the arc of the cul-de-sac to take me home.
I MADE UP every excuse possible to go to work with my mom. We drove the forty minutes to the South Bronx in her mint-green Honda station wagon, a choice that deflected the wrong kind of attention in such poor parts, she explained, and then in the evening through the thick rush of taillights on the Sprain the opposite way toward Westchester. While she saw patients, I sat in her office off of what felt like a secret corridor in the behemoth that was Lincoln Medical Center. We always went through the ER entrance on Park Avenue near 148th Street, away from the noisy main roads that smelled like hot grease and fried food, but I never saw the actual ER. She described it for me once and then I envisioned trash littering its floors, the homeless loitering in its overcrowded lobby, and the smell of urine mingling with sounds of pain.
My mother, a pediatrician, left a private practice in Peekskill where she worked part-time while caring for my grandparents for full-time work at a pediatric AIDS clinic at the public city hospital. At this job, she spoke of how sometimes she didn’t know if she was supposed to be examining a child or the child’s mother, young women coming in at eleven and twelve years old with screaming babies. “Sometimes they will have many children,” she’d say, having become the expert on not just her patients but a whole lot of Americans, “the blacks,” as she put it. “And they don’t know who the fathers are.” Her universe existed like this: Briarcliff to the Bronx and back.
My parents picked the town—no, the Village of Briarcliff Manor—on the same basis as most of the other residents, for the public education system, ranked annually in news magazines eighteenth or sixth or eleventh best in the state for its allocation of some absurdly high number of tax dollars per student behind schools like Scarsdale and Horace Greeley. These were the ambrosial districts immigrants longed for from the other side, the hedges as manicured as the women’s hands, the streets green and the people crisp, white. There were no chains or franchises welcome within these borders, only quaint mom-and-pop shops lining the brief commercial stretch we called “town”—a hardware store, delis with cured meats, an ice cream parlor, and boutique salons where the ladies tag-teamed me, openly fearful of touching the rough black ropes I had for hair. Here, Drs. Babu and Rao built a dream house numbered four with geometric skylights and a crystal chandelier that cast rainbows over the marble foyer in a development with the newer money of Jews and Italians, far—well, ten minutes tops—from a country club with rules of belonging writ large. Here, we lived in the ways we knew how.
On Sunday mornings my mom made a week’s worth of food in the basement kitchen, an entire story dedicated to ensuring that the scents of coriander and cumin didn’t seep into the fixtures. One set of Ajji and Tata lived down there too, with the other on the ground floor because of my mother’s mother’s worsening Alzheimer’s. But that we had three refrigerators in our house, the back one stacked with pots of lentils, and none displaying our earnest drawings from Ms. Linville’s art class because my parents thought “it doesn’t look nice,” was a detail that did not go without notice on my part. I chopped vegetables while my mom sat
on the cold yet sticky floor with the coconut grater and as mustard seeds popped in bubbling oil over a blue flame on the second stove. Each night she lay at the foot of my bed singing “shuddha brahma paratpara rama kalatmaka parameshwara rama” and patting my leg tenderly off-beat.
THROUGH SOME ODD stroke of fate, Cheryl’s last name was Babu. Romanian roots apparently. For years, Jessica obsessed over this fact, staking her claim to some sort of meaningful connection to us, or, more accurately, to Rekha, that ran deeper than the cul-de-sac. “We’re family,” is what the adults would say. And since Bradley wandered through our front door frequently to have my mom feed him a bowl of cereal and I sat with the Meyers at the town pool in the summers drinking Capri Sun from their cooler, it’s not so much that I found this family a false construct as much as I could not fathom my belonging to it.
By fourth grade, even these ties felt tenuous, at least as far as Jessica and I were concerned. We were not friends. Things had started to matter, like fair, wispy hair and whether your clothes were picked by certain kinds of moms. Mine wore white coats and, if something more formal was called for, saris that smelled like suitcases. No matter the occasion, her long ponytail, tied loosely at the nape of her neck, was held in place by clear colorful balls that only kids should wear.
Go Home! Page 12
