political history, our family, subjects I know he can talk about
with pleasure and authority (and that I, now, am
genuinely interested in), letting him apply the gas
to the conversation while I steer it with just a light grip
of thumb and finger, enjoying the opening space
of two drives, and he’s supplying me with dates, telling me
he was born in 1945, went to high school in the early
sixties, served in Vietnam in the early seventies, married Mom
in 1973 and moved to America in 1974, none of which
I knew, exactly, until now, growing up as I did not just
with gaps in my knowledge of family history
but a whole obliterating fog, and as he talks I realize
how greedy I am for this knowledge, the simple facts
of my past, notched in dates, the credentials of a twentieth-century
personal history, as if my self were a hole finally filling
with the proper topsoil of information, the featherweight
seeds at the bottom abruptly catching into life,
and I feed him questions at greater speed, with more reach,
asking about the Korean War, how badly our family
was affected by it, whether we had to flee our homes,
whether anybody fought or (gulp) died, slightly afraid
that he’s going to reveal a whole substrata of slaughter
and suffering beneath my level of consciousness,
but he says, No, our family was lucky, the war never reached us.
Daegu was the last line of defense and it was never crossed.
Grandpa was a police chief so he didn’t need to fight in the war.
And I’m thinking, Whew! but at the same time, Is that it?
wondering how I managed to evade history even in a country
literally split in half by it, almost disappointed
by the narrative, musing, This is not the Korean
American Experience publishers are looking for,
“may you never remember and may you never forget,”
that sort of thing, but digging Dad’s no big deal attitude,
the cool way he recounts all this, the partly surprised
expression he wears on his face, as if he hasn’t thought
about this stuff in years and is not exactly sure why
I’m asking. We’re driving through New York State,
both of us feeling pretty good about ourselves, Dad damn near
chatty, but I start to feel that old familiar tug
toward silence again, the not-quite-ease of the conversation,
the buildup of so many previous car rides in silence
to and from the airport, school, violin and tennis lessons,
the silence more a father than my own father,
when he asks, Do you want to go to Cooperstown?
And my immediate reaction is No, not really, but I can
sense how much it means to him, how he’s starting to believe
in the romance of the father-son relationship again
and needs to cement this feeling with a solid event,
and something tells me it’s now or never, that if we don’t go today
we’ll never go, and then I’ll have to take my son,
so I say, Sure—do we have time? since it’s Sunday, 3 p.m.,
the museum likely closes at five and we still have a good
seven hours to go until home, and Dad needs to work
tomorrow. He calculates, Well, it’s about twenty, thirty
minutes detour, and we have about thirty minutes to go before that,
which leaves us almost no time to see the museum
but we go for it, shooting through the countryside,
and even though it’s only supposed to be about a half hour
off our route, once we’ve made the turn for the museum
it seems to take an eternity to get there, our car proceeding
more and more into nowhere, no cars before or behind
us, and I joke, What genius put the Baseball Hall of Fame
way out here, trying to keep the mood light, since the landscape
is no Field of Dreams (especially under a light rain
during the off-season) and I know Dad’s sense of romance
must be fading; but I think we’re supposed to feel
we’re moving back in time to a “mythic” America,
leaving the evil of cities and the twentieth century behind,
though all I feel is anxious and out of place, the growing
obviousness of our faces, and I’m half-hoping the museum
will be closed when we get there so we won’t be seen.
But it’s open. And Cooperstown itself is charming, all
the stores and restaurants baseball-themed—everything
bats and balls!—and I can imagine this whole experience
would have been less threatening to me as a child,
in the summer, in the sunlight. We approach the ticket
counter and I find myself bristling slightly at the man
who addresses Dad in a louder-than-usual voice, Hello, sir!
How can we help you today? But I’m determined
to feel welcome, so I smile, joke with him, ask
a few questions about the Hall in crisp English.
Then Dad surprises me: Could I have one adult, one senior citizen?
At first I think he’s trying to put one past this guy
but then I realize he is that old, and for the first time
since coming home I look him steadily
in the face, notice the skin is paler, blotchier
than I remember it, the already thin hair not just thinner
but weaker, the scalp more glazed. We take the man’s advice
and start on the second floor to make sure we see
the permanent exhibition before the museum closes,
the window display of history from the nineteenth century
to the present, all the browning artifacts, the long cool bats
of sluggers, Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, the homerun balls
notching a number, 60, 61, 714, the no-hitter balls all lined up
neatly together on a wall, some smudged and greasy,
others surprisingly clean, each bearing the whorled imprint
of its author somewhere in the cowhide and seams,
the tightening of a grip, fastball, forkball, slider, erosion
of oil and saliva; but as I’m looking at all this I’m struck
by how much effort of imagination it takes to get inside
the history, how groomed and clinical this history is,
the objects mute, almost helpless in their Plexiglas cages,
robbed of movement, the real record of the game,
the signature of each swing and delivery upon the air,
the weight shifts, positionings, balances, the digging
of cleated toes into dirt, the pitch-to-pitch, inning-to-inning,
game-to-game, season-to-season accumulation of tension
and release in memory—so that I want to dump this all
into stadiums, foul the objects off into stands,
fleck them with beer, mustard, relish, the dirt and germs
from each grasping hand. Nothing feels organic, least of all
me in my black leather jacket and shoes, leaning in to read
each accompanying paragraph of information (I learn
a pop-up was once called a “skyrocket”), the objects
kept from me not only by the glass but by my image
on top of the glass and then my glasses on top of that.
Dad falls behind, fussing with his camera. He catches up
to ask if I can pry open the plastic packaging
on a battery and, when I can’t, goes downstairs to seek out
scissors. He returns,
triumphant, then has me move station
to station to create a storybook of our lives against
the century: first, Cy Young (a Cleveland Spider),
Bob Feller (ace of the last Cleveland Champs
in ’48), Mickey Mantle (my favorite legend as a kid),
and then the Thurman Munson Yankees of the seventies,
the team my parents followed when they lived in New York
and I was born. I think back to Cleveland, nights in the kitchen
when Mom would let me listen to the game on the radio
while she cooked, going over the heroics of Guidry, Jackson,
Lou Piniella (When he came up, we’d all go Loooooo), helping me
to believe in a possible immortality for my woeful Indians,
a time when I cared about each game with an intensity
that made Dad scowl ( Jay, it’s just gayyym), praying before
every Cory Snyder at bat (who hit .236), not wanting to leave
games until the final pitch (even the 17–0 rout we attended
as a family), believing each missed moment took a brick
out of the next, that I could build out of baseball
an edifice of meaning to house my lonely, unimportant self.
I would have given anything then for Dad to do
what he’s doing now, taking me to Cooperstown!
But he always just seemed to be annoyed with me,
and Mom, if anything, was the more indulgent of the two,
and she was not indulgent. Now Dad needs this
more than me, and I try to wait patiently as he takes
one picture after another with his digital camera,
often asking me to re-pose when the picture turns out
badly. I look too tall in all the images, overdressed,
not awkward enough, and I start to wonder if it’s too late
for father and son, the Hall closing, a long drive through the dark
still ahead, but Dad looks so happy, oblivious to all
the disappointment dusting his shoulders, trusting
in his camera to lock our experience into glossy rectangles,
that I can believe, for a moment, in the rightness of our presence,
the confirmation of the country around us,
until a rude old woman comes up to me and says, Sir, we’re CLOSING,
as I try to catch a glimpse of the inductee plaques.
I say, But we still have five minutes, and she says,
Don’t you want to go to the gift shop? and I storm out
thinking—I can’t help it—racist, small town, white trash,
where the hell does she have to be at this hour, just wanting
to get in the car and leave—but Dad wants to take
a few more pictures outside the museum. I stand there
stewing in the flash, thinking I’ll say something when
she comes out, like Don’t you understand going to Cooperstown
is a pilgrimage? But when she does come out, we’re still
taking pictures, and she doesn’t even look at us, just waddles
on her merry way home, and I look past her at the lights
twinkling the streets, the windowfronts softened by the rain,
and understand that confronting her would disrupt
this quiet passage home she likely looks forward to every day,
the clean pine air fresh on her skin, a comfortable couch
and a night of good television on up ahead, and the anger
of an Asian in this context just seems ridiculous . . .
I turn back to Dad, smile sincerely this time, defiantly, trying
to hold it as he troubles over the angle, the background,
and a car drives by and sees us Asians with a camera
Chicken & Stars
T Kira Madden
My mother is late. She is often late picking me up from school these days, but today she is later.
I am in the seventh grade, waiting outside under the palms. I have recently decided that I am depressed. I don’t look like any other kids in Boca Raton—my black hair, high cheeks—and people tell me I smell like a Nike factory. I want to be white. I want to have a nickname, a skirt rolled up at the waistline, smooth knees. I want to be pretty enough to kidnap. Murdered in an act of passion. Worth that much.
I always tell my mother to stay in the car at dismissal, don’t ever, ever get out to look for me, because more than anything else, I want to make friends.
Today my mother is later than late, and I think she must have fallen asleep somewhere. My mother and father have been in their Other Place lately—the place they go when the sweating glasses come out, the pipes and cigarettes that smell funny. I like to call them magic sticks, because it is only a matter of minutes between the blaze of the sticks and that Other Place, where my parents’ voices change pitch and their eyes bulge with colors and their throats bob differently.
It wasn’t always like this.
We used to have car rides, the three of us, clasped fingers on the center console. Music. Cigarettes flipped out the window in scabbed trails of light.
It was like that.
I saw one of the magic sticks in a commercial recently. In the commercial, two boys swivel around in office chairs, smoking. One of the boys accidentally blasts the other boy in the face with a gun. I asked, Mom? Is marijuana one of your magic smokes? She said yes. I said, Did you know it is a DRUG and it will KILL you? She said all commercials want to do is make everybody walk around the world looking the same, acting boring. A patty-cake world, she says. And there is no sameness about us.
The other stuff I learned about from Whitney Houston on the news. I ask my mother about this, but she says it’s not the same thing. Sometimes she buys a white powdered ibuprofen from the pharmacy and mixes it into her ice tea. She says, See? Look. Read the package, it’s harmless. This is what you saw.
I am beginning to know better.
MY MOTHER’S BLACK truck grumbles up around the corner. Her truck is not fancy. It has dents all over, a few of my horse ribbons sun bleached, tangled, hanging from the rearview mirror. My mother likes to call this car “Big Beau,” petting the dashboard affectionately.
I use a suitcase on wheels as a backpack, because my spine can’t handle the weight. I roll it over to her car, yank the handle of it when the wheels snag on the sidewalk cracks. I open the backdoor of the car, chuck the suitcase in, It’s about time, slam the door. I open the passenger door and slide in.
My mother’s face is battered, blue. Her bottom lip drags down as if an invisible hanger were hanging her clothes on it. Her eyes are almost entirely sealed shut. Purple marks the size of boxed chocolates cover her arms. She reaches for my hand and holds it.
There was a fight, she says.
HE’S ASLEEP ON the couch when we arrive home. This is his place in our house. My father has never been a bedroom father, a kitchen father, a backyard father, an office father, a roof father; he is a father of the living room couch. I wonder if he was always this way, with his other family, that other life none of us are supposed to mention. He keeps a worn photo of two boys in the slip of his wallet, boys in the sun, playing ball. Even though their faces are crinkled as petals, I can see that they have his nose.
Now my father is facedown on the pink, leather cushions and I sit down next to him. His left arm dangles. I lift it and let it drop. He feels dead to me. I love him more than anyone I’ve ever met.
Beneath his arm, on the floor, is his crown-sized ashtray overflowing with orange filters. It’s almost beautiful this way, like an exotic flower or a Bloomin’ Onion from Outback. When my father is too drunk to walk or drive, he lights each and every butt in the ashtray. He sucks at them between his fingers like he’s drinking a milkshake through a cocktail straw. Around the couch are several empty vodka bottles, a cracked cobalt glass, one hundred dollar bills, a smashed mirror. My father doesn’t move no matter how much I touch
him.
I watch my mother fill a cup with water from the kitchen sink, holding steady to the counter. We use well water here. It smells like cheese water, the kind that collects in the refrigerator drawers, so we plug our noses to drink. My mother points over to our pantry, and I walk over to it. The white door hangs off its hinges like a loose tooth. The shelves inside are split perfectly in half, That’s where my face went, all the screws yanked from the walls. I lift a can of Campbell’s soup from the pile of them on the floor, Chicken & Stars, twist it around in my hand. It is easier to look at your favorite soup than it is at blood. Campbell’s soup, my every meal, the first thing I learned how to make for myself. A can of Campbell’s is exactly one pound, it says so on the label, and this is the measurement by which I weigh everything else in the world. I weigh eighty-one soup cans. My mother stares into the pantry, shaking her head. She sips slow and gently from her glass, careful not to spill.
What’s all this? I say.
My mother points to each shelf and there are noises now—words coming out between each cry: money, investment, snapped, pushed, and then, the soup cans, the money. I ask her to slow down. She says my father has been binging on his special stuff and hasn’t slept in over three days. The fight started in the kitchen, simple at first, before he took her by the wrists and didn’t know what to do with all his love. She says things like this all the time lately, words like love to describe our suffering. She doesn’t know if I’m old enough to hold the truth in my hands, to measure that.
I hug my mother at the kitchen sink, let her cry into my shoulder. She leaves black and blue and red there on my white, crisp uniform. I am only five two but we are the same size by now. From a slight distance, people mistake us for sisters.
I send my mother to her bedroom and tell her I will heat up two cans of Campbell’s for dinner. I pluck them from the top of the pile. I crank the can opener till the aluminum exhales. I smash the pots and pans around, bang them into each other like gongs. The stove coils throb red. The stars boil. I open and close the dishwasher in a crashing swing, like I’m bowling. I want my father to wake up so badly, for him to tell me his side of the story, to bury his head in his hands, apologizing, changed. He doesn’t move.
WHAT ARE WE going to do? my mother says, in the bathtub. It is one in the morning, and my father is still asleep. She has been in here so long the water’s gone cold, and I turn the Hot lever every few minutes.
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