by John Chu
When I get downstairs, my sister insists on joining us. First time in . . . Actually, she’s never done the morning-walk thing with Dad before.
“Great, sis.” I start back up the stairs. “You go with Dad to the mall this time. See you two later.”
I ignore her sputterings. If she wants Dad to keep thinking that she’s their Good Child, she won’t dare to do anything to me right now, and she’ll go with Dad on the mall walk. I’ll pay for this later, of course, but by the time she comes back, Mom will have woken up and I will have had a chat with her.
Or at least that was Plan B. The morning-walk ritual is supposed to be that, after the walk, he goes to have his sausage biscuit, luxuriates over a cup of coffee, two if you count the free refill. Only then do we come home. However, they’re home too early. Mom’s still asleep. My sister has apparently forced Dad to skip the fast food breakfast part of his morning ritual.
When I hear the garage door, I lean over the sweeping staircase’s handrail. Dad’s grumbling. My sister’s chirping bright words about how the kitchen has something just as good. She glares at me as she rushes Dad past. Like it’s my fault he’s angry at her.
The rest of the day is like an extremely tedious game of basketball. My sister plays a tight defense, but legal. No contact while there are witnesses. Since I’m trying to get time alone with my parents, one of them is always a witness.
She’s even helping Mom make tonight’s feast. I’m kneading the dough for Mom’s steamed, stuffed buns when my sister inserts herself into the process. After years of preparing meals for large gatherings together, Mom and I have a system. At some point, she stopped insisting that my wife would cook for me someday and started teaching me to cook. Either she got sick of me nagging her, or she realized I kneaded dough more quickly than she did. Anyway, with some luck, dinner won’t be too much later than if my sister had just left us alone.
Gus is doing his best imitation of an apartment mate who had nowhere else to go for Christmas. I wish he’d stop that. He spends time with my nieces, my brother-in-law, even my parents, but he only skirts the kitchen. I get that he doesn’t want to out me for me, but I like his conversation too. It’s stupid to be in the same house as him and still miss him so much. After my first few whacks at the duck with the cleaver, Mom takes the heavy knife away from me then tells me to go rehydrate mushrooms.
It doesn’t take a solid day of cooking to make dinner, but my sister conveniently has questions about how to make the filling for the stuffed buns and how much sesame oil for the scallion pancakes. She leaves the kitchen occasionally, but never long enough for me to work up the nerve to tell Mom. Whenever I leave the kitchen, it isn’t two minutes before she finds me, claiming she needs my help. I manage to say, “Yes, I think you’re a terrible cook too” in front of her husband and her parents-in-law in our respective languages in common before she drags me back to the kitchen. Water doesn’t fall when I say that. I have to take my pleasure where I can.
When the nieces pull Mom away to play with their Erector Set, she decides that my sister and I can finish dinner without her. My sister complains that she needs Mom’s help. I agree wholeheartedly, but it’s not enough. The two of us are stuck with each other.
“You do know why Gus doesn’t come into the kitchen, don’t you?” Despite her casual tone, we both know this is not idle chatter.
“Does it matter?” I’m slicing pickled radishes. “You’re going to tell me anyway.”
“Do you really think you can keep him?” She drops spinach into a skillet pooled with oil. The water coating the spinach hits the oil and splatters back at her. “He’s spent more time with Kevin today than with you.”
I force myself to slice slowly. Cutting my fingers off is a distraction I don’t need right now. My heart pounds in my ears. I’m not sure who I’m more angry at, my sister or my lover.
“I have no idea what you mean, sis.” We immigrated here when she was a teenager and I was a little kid. There’s a good chance she’ll miss the sarcasm. The water gets it though and I stay dry.
“Kevin’s a good-looking guy, maybe . . .” The line would have more impact if she didn’t look scared of the spinach sautéing before her. She jabs the spatula as if it were a fencing foil.
Kevin’s not my type. I’m pretty sure he’s not Gus’s, but I guess I don’t know. It’s not like he didn’t date lots of men before me. It’s not as if they don’t all throw themselves at him. My mind spins for seconds before I realize she hasn’t actually accused Gus of anything. Kevin is stolidly straight, and if Gus has tried anything with Kevin, not that he would, she’d throw Gus and me out of the house, not taunt me with the possibility that Gus might be unfaithful.
“Maybe what?” Usually, I don’t have this much trouble arranging sliced radishes in a pretty pattern. Right now, they’re just a bunch of ugly yellow discs.
“You understand what I’m saying. I shouldn’t have to spell it out. You don’t trust your own sister?”
When I was eight, she convinced me that she was psychic, then foretold exactly how horrible my life would be if I didn’t do exactly as she said. It’s embarrassing how many years she got away with it. If the water had been falling back then, she’d have flooded the house.
“Only your family loves you enough to tell you this.” Listening to her is like being pelted by rocks. “What can he possibly see in you? Dump him and marry a nice Chinese woman instead. Stay with him and he’ll cheat on you or dump you.”
Three words into her last sentence, I know what she’ll say. I leap to pull her pan away as I shut off the burner. The water that falls from nowhere drenches her and the burner where the pan was. Had the water hit the pan, the steam and splattered oil would have burned her.
“Go get warm.” I plate the spinach onto a dish on the counter. “I’ll mop up the water.”
“People change, but maybe he’ll still love you, even as you shut him out like you have me, Mom, and Dad.” Her arms wrap around her body and her words come out between chatters. “We still do, but I wonder why we bother. You’ll break Mom and Dad’s hearts if you never pass their name and blood on. Are you really willing to abandon your family for that man?”
She stomps off before I can answer. Hiding so much of myself from my family, in retrospect, that totally counts as shutting them out. There was only so much of my life I could share with them. Once the water began falling I couldn’t even lie to them. But I hid because I wanted to keep them, not abandon them.
Dinner is going well, too well. My sister is a gracious hostess, too gracious to complain when Gus and I sit next to each other. Instead, her eyes question my every action. Why is my right hand below the table? Why am I spooning tofu onto Gus’s plate? What am I saying when I whisper into his ear?
Gus eats as if he has pig’s ear and cow’s tripe every Christmas. When we get home, the next time it’s my turn to cook, he’s getting pig’s blood soup for dinner. I’ve wasted years afraid he’d hate my favorite foods.
My nieces love him. They stop dueling each other with chopsticks when he asks them to. To half the adults at the table, he may as well be speaking classical Greek, but they laugh at his jokes and listen with rapt attention as he talks about the time it thunderstormed as he and his brother were climbing the steep eastern face of Mount Whitney. My mom resuscitates stories of her childhood in 台南. Even my sister is sick of those stories. Gus, however, asks about raising chickens and about the grandmother I barely remember. Okay, I’m translating like mad, but the point is they enjoy Gus’s company and Gus enjoys theirs. In the rapid fire exchange of words, my parents surprise me by asking about my research in biotech. I almost forget the impending doom hanging over me like an uttered paradox.
“你已經三十多歲了,” my sister’s father-in-law says as I’m clearing the table after dinner. “你甚麼時候會給你的父母生孫子?”
No family meal is complete without the marriage question. Actually, it’s always some variant of “You’re ov
er thirty. Where’s the grandson?” Marriage is just the necessary precondition.
I think I’m smiling blandly, but Gus’s eyes reach mine and I realize he sees the marriage question on my face. It’s hard to believe the man doesn’t read minds. My sister’s glare is this pressure that squeezes my chest.
Telling everyone I haven’t met the right woman might humidify air, but it won’t cause the water to fall. It’s true so I won’t even feel any angst. Gus will understand and, for once, my sister will be happy with me. She and I can’t be in the same room for ten minutes but we’ve always wanted the best for each other. But she doesn’t need to tell me what that is anymore.
“我找到了我的對象. Gus.” I’ve come this far; I might as well go all the way. “他上月向我求婚.”
Providing a grandson can’t be that important in the grand scheme of things. Kevin’s parents still love him. Maybe mine will still love me. And they seem to like Gus as my friend. Now that they know he’s proposed, maybe they’ll also love him as their son-in-law.
My sister’s fury explodes and overwhelms every other reaction in the room. Her words are clearly in English, but the only ones that make any sense are “Get out, and don’t ever come back.” Kevin’s trying to calm her down. Gus weaves around the family toward me. However, I’m upstairs in the bedroom before I realize I’ve moved.
Gus is extremely tidy. It’s easy to repack his luggage. I never unpacked so I don’t have to repack. He’s such a generous soul. For all I know, he may still think we’re not leaving. I shouldn’t have left him downstairs. Maybe the nieces can translate for him.
“Matt, you’re leaving out of spite.” The doorjamb neatly frames Gus. “Okay, your sister had a bad reaction, but poe poe and gohng gohng don’t seem to be taking it badly.”
I blink and shake my head. It takes me a few seconds to realize that he’s talking about my parents.
“Did you just call my parents 婆婆 and 公公?”
“Yeah, poe poe and gohng gohng.” He looks confused. “I tried to call them Mr. and Mrs. Ho this afternoon, but they both corrected me before I got past hello. Am I pronouncing it wrong?”
“We can work on that, but that’s not my point.” I shut his suitcase. “‘婆婆’ means husband’s mother and ‘公公’ means husband’s father.”
That he can call them that without water falling on him . . .
“They’d already figured us out.” Gus steps into the room to make space for Mom, trying to burrow past him. “Hi, poe poe.”
“Lonely boy.” My mom looks at Gus, but points at me. “He always lonely boy.”
I really wish she’d just let me translate for her. In Chinese, she’s effortlessly witty and erudite. That’s the person I want Gus to know, not the inchoate stranger I knew until I’d spent a decade trying to get my Chinese up to snuff.
Gus takes her hands and doesn’t speak too loud or down to her. Metaphorically, that is. Literally, he’s about a foot taller than Mom.
“Not if I can help it, poo-oh poo-oh.” He’s trying too hard to imitate the way I said it and now he’s overpronouncing. “I’ll make sure he’s never lonely again.”
Mom turns to me. At first, I think she wants a translation, but she must have understood because she doesn’t give me a chance to speak.
“你是研究生物科技的. 孫子能給我嗎? 有你們兩個的基因的?” Ok, this isn’t an example of her being witty or erudite. My mom is also very practical and direct.
I hear my heart pound. Gus is looking at me for a translation. We don’t have a relationship if I filter what he hears.
“She said: You’re a biotech researcher. Can you give me a grandson? One with genes from both of you?” Gus must have really impressed her. “What were you two talking about this afternoon?”
“Not that.” He looks as surprised as I feel. We’ve never discussed kids. He turns back to her. “We need to talk about it.”
And I need to win a Nobel Prize if she’s dead set on a grandson with both our genes. Parents.
The clincher is that she leaves, trusting Gus to talk me back from the edge. Normally, she tells me that once Michele calms down, she’ll want me to stay. Michele’s only angry at me because she loves me. But now, it’s Gus’s job to keep me civil. Mom’s probably so happy about this, she doesn’t care that Gus is a guy. Gus isn’t any better at keeping me from the edge than Mom though.
The motel is a five minute drive from my sister’s house, but it feels like another planet. For one thing, we’ve gone from Victorian Christmas Land to Operating Surgery Land. It still smells like pine, but the flat, medicinal one. For another, when I drop my suitcase and curl into a ball on the bed, it’s as if I’ve held one of Gus’s bizarre isometric exercises for weeks and I’ve finally let go. Just like the end of any other trip home except this time I’m still tethered to the world. Gus stands at the door. Snowflakes glisten off his hair and hooded sweatshirt.
“They’re your only blood relatives in the country.” Gus flicks on the light and clicks the door shut. When I turn away, his weight dents the bed. My body falls toward his. “Matt, don’t freeze me out too.”
Gus’s words pummel me no matter how softly he tosses them. My own words scrape my throat. I taste salt and metal when I swallow. Lying then letting the water wash my throat and fill my lungs tempts me as much as pretending Gus isn’t sitting on the bed. Every trip, I decide that I’ll sort things out later. Then I go home and pretend the trip never happened. That won’t work this time. Gus is, if nothing else, a witness and a reminder.
“Fine.” I sit up and stare at the carpet. “Once, I gave Mom flowers for Mother’s Day and Michele humiliated me because flowers wilt and how dare I send Mom something that would die. Michele accused me of ruining her birthday because one year I sent her a card with blue birds on it. Like I knew her parakeet had drowned itself in her toilet. One Christmas Eve, Michele asked me to shave for Christmas day. I didn’t really have any stubble so I forgot. She couldn’t understand why I would refuse to do something to make her happy, especially something so simple, so she ambushed me with a razor. I wish she had better aim. Shaving cream stings your eyes. For weeks people wondered why I had scars around my neck and on my face. Is that enough, or do you want more? Why should I have to keep putting up with her?”
I am so tired. My body won’t stop shaking. Air won’t stay in my lungs. Melted snow pools around my boots. I wish Gus weren’t looming over me. I wish he were in his apartment, or visiting his own family.
Gus sits, mouth agape, for a moment, but if he expected water to fall on me, he’s done a terrific job of not showing it. His arm straps across my shoulders and pulls me to him. He presses a finger under my chin and guides my head until I face him.
Part of me wants to bolt, get into the rental car and find somewhere else to stay for the night. The rest of me knows that’ll hurt Gus and he’ll be too much the hero to admit it. Like screwing up all of my relationships at the same time is a good idea.
“You shouldn’t have to put up with her.” Gus unzips my jacket, then peels it off me. “But are you going to write your parents off too? Say we have a kid, and I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t, don’t you want the kid to know their grandparents?”
“So I’m right and she wins anyway?”
I rub my face. Telling me I’m right is a change. Once, Mom told me everything Michele does to me, she does because she loves me and wants the best for me. Why couldn’t she just hate me instead, I asked. That talk didn’t go well.
“What you mean by winning?” Gus shrugs. He hangs my jacket on the coatrack next to the door. “You broke today. It happens. Maybe some time away from her is a good thing. Tomorrow, we’ll go back and we’ll try it again, okay? If you want, I’ll stick to you the whole day.”
I take a deep breath. It feels like the first time my lungs have expanded in hours. The pine and wet leather assault my nose. “Sure.”
I take off my boots. Melted snow has soaked through
to my socks. My feet are cold and clammy. Gus is still standing at the door.
“I’ll be back in a few hours.” Gus holds a hand up to interrupt me when I ask him to stay. “You don’t want me around and frankly, right now, you’re too wigged out to be good company. I know you’re not angry at me, but it’ll be better in the long run if I leave now while we’re still on speaking terms.”
I’d protest but that would just make his point. Gus turns out the lights before he leaves. The comforter is wet from melted snow. It sticks to my skin when I fall into bed. I curl up into a ball and roll the comforter over me. Buried, I finally start to relax.
This time, I have left the world but it still doesn’t feel right. The mattress ought to be sunk deeper. My arms should be around the hulk of a man who can’t ever admit hurt or pain. I should be immersed in the warmth of his body as he is in mine.
“I love you, Gus.” Now, I just have to figure out how to say it while he’s in the room.
Snow evaporates off the comforter. I’m warm and dry. I wriggle my head out. Flowers and ozone replace the smell of pine. A spring breeze grazes me. I stare at the door in the dark, wishing it would open.
“The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” copyright © 2012 John Chu
Art copyright © 2012 Christopher Silas Neal
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