by Lindsay Wong
“That Woman says I have to be friends with you or I can’t use my credit card anymore,” Pizza Head announced, huffily. “That Woman says our job is to make the entire block like us, so you better take this stupid necklace. If I don’t like you, then your parents won’t like us.”
“I don’t want your necklace,” I said, which was true. “Why would I want to wear necklace with an ugly rock on it?”
“What wrong with you?!” Pizza Head said, horrified. “It’s Swarovski! What you want instead? Chocolate? Money?”
“Maybe,” I admitted, and thought that if she had just brought over five or ten bucks, I could forgive her for dismissing me earlier. I did not know what Swarovski was and did not want a gigantic, heavy rock. How could she think that she could repair our friendship by giving me a collar for a St Bernard?
“Fine,” Pizza Head snapped. “Let’s go back to my place and That Woman will give you present. I’m gonna keep necklace, but don’t tell That Woman.”
“Whatever,” I said, trying not to let her see that I cared very much.
I still felt hurt and betrayed, so I did what I thought would cause anyone else pain. I stomped at the back of Pizza Head’s heels as I followed her across the cul-de-sac—the quickest thing I could think of.
“Owwwww!” Pizza Head complained, rubbing her heels so that more of her skin flaked off. “Watch where you going, idiot!”
“Don’t be baby,” I said, recognizing that I was being as callous as I could, and stepped on the back of her flip-flops again. Soon, this turned into a competition of cruelty: name-calling and grass-flinging. Eventually, I decided that I didn’t want a friend anymore.
“Where you going?” Pizza Head asked me, a little shocked when I turned to go. “Come back right now!”
It took a long time before I could see that Pizza Head was permanently stuck with That Woman and Him, as I was stuck with my own parents, and that we were like unfortunate amphibians locked in the same pet store terrarium. She was most definitely a victim of her circumstances, as unhappy and surly as I was. Whereas her sores were bright and open, mine were dark and hidden inside, like termites or a dead body in an eccentric uncle’s freezer.
Certainly, I recognized her misery on some fundamental level, as much as I accepted essential forces like hunger or schoolyard malice, yet instead of making me feel a little more sympathetic, it just made me dislike her even more. I saw my ugliness and short-tempered wretchedness mirrored in her scrunched-up skin and glassy, bewildered eyes. It was as if I was hearing my voice for the first time on a tape recording and was shocked by how strange and tinny it sounded.
Suddenly, I despised her for being so goddamn sad all the time. Of course, later I realized it was because I was seeing myself.
As a Neanderthal sixth grader, my first instinct was to scream and make the monster go away.
So in that moment I reacted instinctively and cruelly. I threw a rock at Pizza’s head before stampeding away.
Maybe the openly generous Pizza Family drew unwanted attention with their exorbitant hydro bills because a month later there was a major police raid and all the neighbours were ordered indoors for the day. Three police cars and a special unit van containing a narcotics team kicked open the Pizza family’s McMansion doors. One of the mahogany panels fell off, and a police officer lugged it out of the way as if he were dragging a body.
From our front window, I watched a team of eight cops smash their basement windows, the glass falling like wilful icicles, the sound deafening and frightening. One by one, officers with heavy shields and gas masks confiscated more than 500 marijuana plants in black pots. I had never actually seen a grow-op before and was so disappointed—these were just plants that anyone, rich or poor, might grow in a garden. I had envisioned marijuana to be beautifully packaged candies, delicious despite the stink. I didn’t understand all the fuss over a bunch of potted plants that made our neighbourhood smell like dead skunk and old man breath.
Pizza Head and her parents were not home that day. Maybe a loyal neighbour had tipped them off. For the next six hours, I peeked through our foyer’s grimy windows to see what the exciting Pizza family would do next. When the police raid was finally over, and it was dark and only the coyotes were prowling the garbage for dinner bones, I saw the Pizza’s family’s BMW creep into the cul-de-sac. As soon as they saw that half their front door was missing and that their first-floor windows had been boarded up with planks and industrial garbage bags, they backed up and vanished.
I wondered what was going on inside that car: were they yelling and screaming and blaming each other for something that had gone terribly wrong like a real family would, or were they unsentimental professionals, stoically accepting the setback and moving on? Had this happened in their last-cul-de-sac? Did they have multiple backup marijuana houses and fake passports and IDs? I imagined Pizza Head would be scratching her flaky pie-crust arms in agitation, and when they reached their new destination, there would be nothing left of her except a mound of dead skin, like a pile of unbleached flour collected in the backseat.
If this incident had happened in my early twenties, I’d have packed a bag, rushed over, and begged to become a member of their absurd little tribe, offering to pose as someone’s big sister or bratty niece, if it meant getting my hands on some free weed. Instead, I just stared passively through the blinds. In the mountain blackness, which meant total darkness at five p.m., the house, without its door, no longer looked like a fun Disneyland palace. It was menacing and unclean. Just a broken, deserted junkyard castle.
I called Pizza Head and tried to message her online, but her cellphone and MSN account were suddenly deactivated. Eventually, I gave up and watched their house with a voyeuristic, vulture-like curiosity. That week, several police cars patrolled our cul-de-sac, but all of our neighbours insisted that they didn’t speak English. They were not talking.
During my watch, I once saw a chrome-coloured Mercedes slowly drive by with a group of youngish Asian men in business suits, who must have seen the boarded-up windows, because they shouted something panicky before zooming away. The house stayed shut down for only a few weeks. Then some real estate tycoons fixed it up and two grinning, charismatic Vietnamese men named Moolah and Poodle purchased it for a bargain price of $1.9 million to manufacture more cash-crop drugs.
For a while, our cul-de-sac began to see female carriers on foot, hired catalogue models dressed like country club tennis players—at least fifteen different girls each day—in brand-new sun visors and sporty white dresses, their identical blue duffel bags most likely stuffed full of drugs. They looked too upscale and sophisticated for weed, so it must have been cocaine or ecstasy. The hired girls would jog their circulatory route back and forth from the ex–Pizza home, always looking over one shoulder, eternally smiling—a perfect J. Crew catalogue of our specialized Poteau lifestyle. They’d deliver their moneymaking goods to different houses on the mountain, never once stopping at the Poteau country club where they were supposed to be playing tennis.
When I look back at this, I think about how amazing it all was, and how you could make people do anything for free lobsters and chocolate. It wasn’t as if you couldn’t acquire live crustaceans or sweets from the local supermarket, but people, no matter how much money they had, enjoyed free things. It seemed that as long as you hid behind your immaculate house with its green lawn and were kind to your neighbours most of the time, you had absolutely no one to answer to, except yourself.
I too then convinced myself that I was inherently special, exempt from and above the rules, better than many people, or at least better than everyone else my age, so I continued skulking behind my grisly bamboo bush. And with grand and unmistakable glee, I resumed my illicit water-gun activities, soaking anyone dumb enough to wander into my staked-out territory.
CHAPTER 3
ON THE ICE
After a year without paranormal incident, when I was twelve years old, my mother suddenly checked out again. It was j
ust before the semifinals of my peewee winter hockey tournament at our home rink, Planet Ice, and I still had to play.
During the year without incident our family had been surviving, at least to our very minimal standards, and one night, my mother and father had woken my siblings and me at two a.m. and ordered us into the van because they had suddenly decided to drive from Vancouver to California.
“No ghost follow Mommy to Disneyland,” my father happily promised us, as he handed out Costco-sized bags of discounted Halloween candy for the trip. During those three weeks we were frighteningly spontaneous, and I think it was the only time my parents seemed like they weren’t furious at each other and themselves.
And then, without consulting any of us, when I was at the start of seventh grade my father signed us all up for little league hockey, which was supposed to keep us “busy” and distract my mother from her ghosts. She had no choice but to become a hockey mom of three, a transformation that bewildered and terrified her—What the fuck is the point of this Canada sport?!
Our manic hockey extracurricular was also supposed to make our family assimilate faster into North American culture. As if possessing enough money to throw three kids into organized sports meant that we had achieved a recreational version of the American sitcom dream. Hockey practice was also a way to toughen us up, which I didn’t realize until I was fully grown—my father wanted his children to learn discipline and heroic fearlessness by participating in a sport condoned by our country’s culture. He did not want us to be terrified and seemingly “weak” like our mother.
Unfortunately, he did not consider that the hectic four a.m. practice schedules and nine p.m. away games on school nights would make my mother crankier and more volatile.
At three one morning, she finally drove off. “Sorry,” she apologized to my sister, who was nine years old and an excellent worrier. “If you’re hungry, Daddy only knows how to make rice, so it sucks to be you.”
I said nothing, because this was her blunt way of stating a fact (Daddy was indeed a shitty cook). I watched her stomp away with her winter coat and car keys, disappointed. I felt like her least favourite child; she did not even acknowledge me, and I was already insecure, so this further unsettled me in a jealous, mercurial way.
“If you won all your hockey game,” my father said to me before the semifinal game, “she’d have stayed. No one like to watch loser. You need to win MVP so she will like you.”
He may have been attempting a joke, but at this point, I think even he knew he had failed at keeping her on track towards middling sustainable sanity. It was getting harder and harder to conceal his sadistic shame with humour—and his humour was becoming uglier and blacker.
“Okay,” I said, not understanding the whole situation, but I was dumb—i.e., desperate and hurt and disturbed—enough to try to please him.
During the preceding year, when the ghosts seemed to have forgotten about my mother, I contentedly spent an hour or two at craft classes at a local arts school, where I learned how to weave Eastern patterned tapestries and operate an old-fashioned printing press. But weaving and papermaking were not as stimulating or exciting to watch as real-time hockey for my father, who felt that I had a second-rate talent for crafts, so I was paid to hit other little girls in AA hockey.
Whether my father was training a small-time thug or just another pragmatic Chinese kid who valued money, I was paid a decent goon’s commission: twenty dollars per penalty, five dollars per goal, three dollars per assist. I did not particularly enjoy organized hockey, but it was a job, much like attending middle school.
In sixth grade, a dirty game of hockey could mean an easy sixty bucks. I became a little sumo wrestler, who leaped around on pointy designer blades, custom-made double E size 3 boy’s skates because I had fat, archless feet that seemed to expand sideways. I just had to vary and combine the main offences: charging, body-checking, tripping. Throw in some comedic high-sticking. If I busted my stick and still played during my shift, it was an automatic penalty (I ruined a couple good sticks before each game). My father checked with the scorekeeper, tallied up the money, and coughed up the cash when we got home, because otherwise, I refused to participate. Paying someone to partake in an organized team sport was much easier than spanking them or hitting them with plastic hangers, which was something he did when money failed him.
“She pull diva again,” he liked to complain to my mother when she called, always a little disappointed that I did not wholly appreciate a game that defined an entire nation. “Lindsay wouldn’t put on her gear, so I had to pay her extra. She doesn’t like to move, that’s why she’s a fat piggy. At least we know our kid will do anything for money.”
Hockey was my stop-and-go routine, as if someone punched play and fast-forward repeatedly on a remote control. Bundled in modern gladiatorial gear, I disliked the grid mask of the helmet. It was like squinting through a frightening checkered prison. And I hated the hefty shoulder pads—perverse spaceship armour that bulked up our wimpy girlish shoulders to look more astronautic. The hockey pants were basically oversized girdles developed by NASA. With three private coaches specializing in applied physical theory (skate, pass, slap shot) and abundant private ice time, I made assistant captain within a year and performed until the end of tenth grade.
Hairstyling was my father’s ritual before any hockey performance. It seemed to relax him and appeal to his grand and obsessive tendencies. He would compulsively fix my hair into a tight, twisty ponytail for a regular game or French-braid it beautifully for a tournament. He was responsible for hair because my mother was rough-handed and could pluck a strip raw by accident. My father’s only hobby, besides his family, was gently sculpting hair into tidy creations. This was his only attempt at bonding with me pregame; he did not know how to use words in encouraging ways, so he embraced drugstore hairbands and elastics, just like a girl feebly twining friendship bracelets for her first-grade class.
“Hair okay?” he would ask. “Now go kick ass.”
But if I lost, he sometimes became too involved with the game and punished me by letting me choose a plastic hanger from his closet. He would chase me around the house like a cartoon grizzly, swinging my pink or yellow hanger of choice. I would sprint to the bathroom and lock the door, wondering for how many hours or days or weeks I would have to hide.
Looking back, this is where my father snapped; all humour flooding from him, he resorted to transparent brutality—he intended to smack. He claimed it was to make me harder on the outside, “less of a loser like Mommy.” Once, I stayed in the bathroom for eleven hours, hoping that he might get bored and give up. Even though I had stolen twenty dollars from his wallet, I did not think I deserved a whacking. Hockey was a terrible idea for a parent who was already so tortured. The ritualistic team practices, the demanding tournaments with the finger-biting fifty-fifty raffles, the fierce head-cracking penalties—it was too much for a man who loved to win.
To make my mother come back from her three a.m. drive, that weekend I hustled in the semifinals against the Alaskan team so I could become MVP. In our league, I was known for playing brutal defence, and bloodthirsty parents liked to watch my “mean streak,” which flowed through me like an all-you-can-eat meal.
I believed that if I won a medal, there was a slim chance my parents might like me, that my mother might come back, even if the kids at school despised me, because it seemed fundamental that one of your parents should feel obligated to you via genetics or societal pressure. Wasn’t the main reason you reproduced to create the same, if not a better, version of yourself? I sensed that I was an irritation—like dust lodged in the eye or a small piece of meat stuck between the teeth. And friendless, still, I was horribly lonely. However unmotherly my mother was, I needed her home.
On my shift, I charged down the ice, delicately stick-handling our prized puck, but tripped over someone’s stick and somersaulted into the wooden boards like an amateur acrobat. A girl punted me with her skate. I was trapped on my
back, and another four or five piled up and pummelled the shit out of one another—our fathers’ live weekday entertainment. This was guerrilla hockey for girls who were practically apes, and I thought I was the baddest King Kong in the arena (a result of watching too many Sailor Moon cartoons). Boxy gloves were flung down. Black helmets were snapped off and tumbled onto the shimmery ice, little guillotined heads bouncing happily along.
To survive this beastly brawl, I was sly enough to shut my eyes and play dead. But a sick feeling lurched in my tummy, like I had swallowed a writhing beetle or part of my own tongue. It was a feeling that I didn’t understand—absolute wrongness.
Suddenly queasy, I threw up a little in my mouth but couldn’t tell if I had smacked my head too hard on the boards. I blacked out for a second, abruptly falling asleep. When I woke up, the paramedics said I had a minor concussion. But I could still perform to win back my mother, so I jumped up and insisted I play now. My skull thumped, helmet suddenly squeezing too tight, something perhaps not right. I felt my front teeth with my tongue, the bottoms were lightly chipped, my mouth guard stupidly left at home. No blood—not like last time I was clobbered in an offside fight. And not like when my father splintered his molar chomping into a walnut, gargling up gritty crumbs of ground-up enamel and nut.
I was going to be okay, and I was going to be victorious. I did not care if my team won, only if I won MVP overall. This was my deeply troubling mindset at the time: to appease my father and fix my mother.
A period later, I charged a girl centre ice and attacked ferociously, cracking the fleshy back of her lower leg with my stick. The shin guard obviously did not extend fully around. There was just the fuzzy, soft hockey sock to defend her spongy skin, and we both knew something had gone very wrong. She dropped. The linesman and referee allowed us to skate around for a few fast seconds. But then there was a sick little animalistic scream in the arena that got louder and louder. The girl I had whacked was flat on her back. Thrashing her arms in a useless backstroke, she looked like she was having a psychotic break, gone ridiculously mad.
