by Yasuko Thanh
I also had my own closet, which, small as it was, stood for another world, separated from my room with its own door. Though not large enough for me to play in, I’d shrink myself to fit the space, contort enough to allow the door to at least shut behind me. In that sanctuary I’d fend off attacks from my little brother, who would often invade my room with the force of an advancing army. This was the universe’s way of preparing me for that haven’s forfeiture, not to my brother but to my grandparents, who will be sponsored by my father in a few years’ time. They will take my room. I’ll move in with my brother. Then, after another few years, they’ll move to France where my aunt and uncle live, where they will stay until they die.
A few weeks or months after moving in I got my first real bed, with captain’s drawers that slid out from under the mattress, all my clothes folded and placed inside. Like an interior designer I’d sit back and look at the tableau of my neatly made bed, my fluffed pillows. Ponder. Absorb. Rearrange. Able to stop only when it felt “right.”
It never did.
Even then the clash between the blue-painted wall and the olive carpet, between my mismatched bedding and the wall papered burgundy, disrupted the peace I was trying to cultivate.
Kitchen Gods and Flying Ghosts
My parents had no friends to stay for coffee and accept biscuits, litter the table with crumbs, leave dishes in the sink. More than anything I wanted to fit in, but I could count on my fingers the number of times I’d stayed for dinner at a friend’s house or asked a playmate over after school. While my friends spent weekends in each other’s rec rooms, living out of their sleeping bags, eating popcorn, watching movies, I sat alone in my room and made up stories. In those stories I talked with ease about Luke Skywalker, or the best games to play at Chuck E. Cheese’s, or how it felt to have your ears pierced.
In the other photograph, I am five. I point to my own grin, delighted by my birthday cake. Strawberries, five candles. My mother’s hands rest on the shoulders of my sundress, and she manages to smile to hide her sadness just now when my father snaps the photo.
Although I appear bold and fearless in these photos, at that time I still wet my bed or awoke crying for no reason. Photos of family camping trips and Christmas trees, Santa’s lap, and bicycle outings don’t show my misery. When worried or afraid I’d scratch my arms raw, looking for answers beneath the first layer of skin. But in snapshots of me roller-skating down the street, or surrounded by fall leaves, or sitting in snow at my mother’s side, all you can see is my smile. How do I reconcile the ribbons my parents saved with their absence from those races won or lost? How to reconcile my smile in those pictures with the sorrow I know I felt?
Sadness coexisted with happiness like rats in the walls of a house—trapped but staying hidden, and in that darkness continuing to breed. I knew a secret loneliness, triggered at the age of five or six by a realization that hit me with the power of a tsunami. I’d been sitting in the kitchen, looking at one parent, then the other. I was separate, alone in the universe. I was coming to understand that you had a whole long life to live but you’d never be able to see the world through anyone else’s eyes. No matter how badly I wanted it, I could never know what other people were thinking. Indescribable sadness came with registering the vast distances between each of us, a sadness that has stayed with me in variations to this day.
* * *
—
The summer I was six I filled a fifty-page notebook with my first novel. Loneliness spurred the writing, but the release it bestowed kept me at it. In writing, I didn’t have to be lonely. I could be whoever I wanted, see the world through anyone’s eyes. Writing emulated the interpersonal; I could write friends into the plot—go to as many sleepovers as I chose. I wrote about a parade, a dress-up contest, a girl who raises money for the March of Dimes. Though writing was different from love, when I inhabited my characters on the page connection occurred, acting as the balm I needed.
* * *
—
Fall, 1978. I am seven years old. I watch my neighbour’s dirty fingers, rounded at the tips, sorting through the candy in the salad bowl. He and I huddle together on the steps of the apartment building. Shawn is eight and his hair is defiant and unruly, not like mine, bone straight and serious. His older brother Sully sits with his arms loose around his knees.
I write as though I’m writing about someone else. “I” is an invention to prove we exist. “I” is the line drawn through the fabric of time. “I” imposes meaning on random events. “I” implies significance.
I jam three Allsorts and two wine gums into my pocket.
Unlike me, both brothers stuff their candy into their mouths. Sometimes we make candy salads out of what we’ve begged going door to door. Shawn twists his face to the sun. He and his brother astonish me with their beauty. Some kids call Sully with his pigeon toes a cripple and they think Shawn’s eyes are oddly wide-set, but I disagree.
“When I grow up,” I say, “I’m gonna give candy to anyone who asks.”
“That’s just stupid,” Shawn says.
My stomach tingles when Shawn speaks. But now I snatch the bowl.
“You’re stupid.” With a focused urgency, knowing they’re watching me, I run away from them. Life gains on me but I won’t stop to look back.
* * *
—
The next day I look for Shawn and find him puttering by the swing set. When he sees me I offer him my most winning smile and twirl on one foot, my hands folded behind my back. Shawn can switch from fun to mean in a second. I’ve seen it. He has something inside him, wild as a feral cat, familiar yet frightening, that I want to harness.
I wrap my fist around yesterday’s candies still in my pocket. Rub them, then reluctantly release them. “You want to learn how to fly?” I ask.
I lead him to the staircase next to our suite, climb up and balance on the inside of the railing, fifteen feet above the grass. I sweep my leg out over it. He watches me and waits.
When I leap out, away from the staircase, I imagine his gaping mouth, his awe and shock, heavy as a star launched out of the heavens, but when I hear him race down the stairs toward me I want to hide.
I’ve landed bent double and can only wipe the hair from my eyes, spit it out of my mouth.
The moment he touches my shoulder I force myself to stand. I slap my palms together to brush off the grass.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I will not let him see me cry. “Loser,” I say, limping toward the stairs to catch my breath. I wish I’d flown. As I laugh through my tears, I wish I’d made Shawn wish he’d flown as well.
* * *
—
“I’m bored,” Shawn says. “Aren’t you?” He challenges, admonishes me the way a parent would.
First I think we’re going to go begging candy door to door again, but we end up at the corner store down the street. If I stick with Shawn things will happen to me.
In the cool darkness of the shop Shawn fingers rubber balls, candy cigarettes, jawbreakers. I slip a grape Lik-a-Stix into my pocket. We walk out of the store, expecting to run away whooping, the owner trying to grab us, but nothing happens.
We find a spot up the block where I smear my lips with the stolen purple powder. I pass it to Shawn and watch the powder dissolve to a plum-coloured stain. I think of clowns and laugh.
* * *
—
Shawn leads me to the playground at the bottom of the ravine. The swings and the slide are tangled in morning glory vines that snake up over the teeter-totter. I pull at the collar of my T-shirt. Summer gets in anyway, hot and sticky as molasses. Shawn swats at mosquitoes.
He marks the air with his pee in a yellow arc the shape of a rainbow. Some lands on leaves and ants scurry. I wonder if they think it’s raining.
After he stops he tells me to pee, too, and when I’m done he pushes me down and climbs on top of me. Dead leaves and moss on the flat rock chill my bare bum. He rubs his body against mine. The rock chi
lls my back, dampens it. He closes his eyes as he bucks. I’m not sure whether I like this game or not.
I look over by the bushes where the creek bed rises and meanders into sloping yards. Today a man is sitting on a plastic lawn chair. I want to say “I think we should get out of here,” but Shawn traps my hips beneath the vise of his legs, which are unbelievably strong, and his face stretches into a smirk.
* * *
—
I stay home for seven days. On the eighth day I hang around the staircase, the landing from where I flew, hoping to bump into Shawn. I wind down the path to the ravine playground. When at last I’m sure I’ll never see him again, he appears by the monkey bars.
The night before, I dreamed of him. I dreamed of his hand in mine, then I dreamed of flying off the staircase and away, my wings as strong as a hawk’s.
His brother Sully joins us and before they can leave me, before they can walk away, I tempt them by asking, “How strong do you think I am?”
Shawn shrugs. I’m just a girl acting stupid.
But Sully regards me with curiosity and sits down. Painted stones perch side by side and the three of us sit like crows on a wire.
“Stronger than you.”
Sully’s eyes twinkle yet he turns away, whistles through his teeth. “Strong?” he says. “Right.”
Shawn jumps me unexpectedly. We wrestle on the warm grass, which makes my stomach tingle in the same way as when I listen to him speak or watch him eat stolen candy. But he can’t win. Not like this.
I push him off. “Bet I can break your finger,” I say.
They laugh.
“Yeah, right,” Shawn says. “Try it.”
He extends his hand and I grab the middle finger with all the strength I have.
He snatches his hand out of my grasp. “Ha!”
Sully can’t stop giggling.
Shawn smiles, self-satisfied. “Betcha I can break yours,” he says.
Am I pouting? Teasing? Part of me wishes I could draw my knees to my chest, say “I don’t want to.” The other part needs his touch.
“Or maybe you think I’m not strong enough?”
I stretch open my hand but it’s Sully who takes it. Someday, looking at it from the outside, I’ll postulate how our experiences became the net that surrounded us, separated us from others. What was about to happen, my hand moving toward Sully’s, his first grasp tinged with gentleness and friendship, this belonging, was why I’d come. Although in my dream it hadn’t happened this way. Sully grabs hold and yanks my middle finger back. Do I hear it snap? Or think I do?
Either way, I now understand that the universe listens. It tries to give us what we wish for—but in a way we don’t always expect. Now I know that Sully doesn’t love me, and that Shawn never did.
City of Innocent Deaths
Eight years old, sitting in a vinyl chair decorated with flowers, I wrote on a blue typewriter. A suitcase typewriter, hard shelled, white handled, Smith-Corona stamped across the front. Clack-clack-clack. The satisfying ring at the end of the line, like the bell in the boxing matches my father watched. Back to your corner.
If you didn’t aim properly your finger would sail past the plastic letter into the machine’s metal innards. Accuracy. Speed. A little strength. This is what counted.
I armed myself with discount bottles of Wite-Out. Three mistakes per page—I’d read the rules—or start over. I wrote “How the Leopard Got Its Spots.” “Why the Turtle Has a Shell.” “The Elephant and Its Trunk.”
My grade three teacher sent me to Mrs. Kendrick’s grade four class to read, out loud, my story about airplanes, and a war, and a little girl.
I read it to my parents. They asked me if I’d plagiarized it.
When I grew up I could be Harriet the Spy. The recorder, the experience thief. I captured things in a notebook like a spy. I’d pull it out of my back pocket and write down licence plate numbers, describe the clothes people were wearing. Both spies and writers got to be other people, something denied them in real life. Unlike actors, their stakes were higher. More like missionaries who might end up as dinner, dying for their beliefs. Both spying and writing seemed dangerous.
At the library I was always looking over my shoulder—lest an adult should question what someone my age was doing in the windswept women section, the ones who adorned the covers of the Harlequin and Silhouette romance novels I devoured like popcorn. Their plot structure mirrored the affairs themselves: introduction leading to a climax. I learned that if you were beautiful people would trip all over themselves to please you. I could hold my own at street hockey, but being beautiful was a better goal. Why not be worshipped?
* * *
—
I cut images of gymnast Nadia Comăneci from magazines and taped them to the wall. I did handstands on the grass, in my bedroom. I did push-ups and practised the splits. I’d read somewhere that the greatest insult to God was thwarting His dream for you, and I wanted no part of insulting God. God had given me a passion for gymnastics. I was going to honour His gift.
A coach at the Y must have seen me jumping around in the dance room one Saturday and made a few phone calls. Overnight, it looked as if my prayers had been answered. Victoria’s best gymnastics program for girls called my parents to say they wanted me to train me—they wanted me!
My parents would have to say yes!
When I heard my father refusing their offer something inside me crumbled like the pages of an old fairy tale when touched, brought into the light. The light shed on my parents revealed their desire to hurt me by taking away my dream. Here, finally, had been proof—that there was someone out there in the world, the gym coach, who wanted me. I had no inkling why my parents wanted to sabotage me. A few years later I assumed the lessons had been too expensive. Then, as an adult, I’d learn that my father had been convinced I’d injure myself.
“I wasn’t afraid,” my mother said, “but he was.”
Each time the gym phoned my father turned them down. Not realizing that my life swung in the balance, he ended these intrusions as he’d have hung up on a telemarketer. The calls stopped. Confused, broken-hearted, I took down my pictures of Nadia.
When gymnastics competitions aired on TV I changed the channel.
What could I do?
What would I do?
I had to move forward. My conclusion was that the universe wasn’t benevolent. Like the rest of nature, it was at best only cruelly indifferent. This forced a couple of truisms to the fore.
One: don’t expect anything just for being born.
Two: the best thing you can do is stop asking and start taking. Like a kid in a candy store, this and this and this.
Fill your pockets. Don’t look back.
* * *
—
Victoria, 1982. I’m eleven years old. I stand in the playground, the centre of a universe swaying with tire swings, the paint flaking from see-saws, green scabs peeling onto the black asphalt, the hum of the thoroughfare beyond the chain-link fence, the blades of grass browning in the sun, the incessant barking of a dog that circles its owner who’s muttering in pretend Chinese as he karate-chops the air like Chuck Norris, a June sky and a telephone wire spotted with pigeons, the smell of oil from the white stucco restaurant on the corner as the cook lowers the day’s first orders of battered cod into the deep fryer.
In my neighborhood, whether we were playing street hockey, soccer, or conkers, any arena would do when it came to enacting our offensives. Our violence was a form of love, the connection between them woefully clear to me even at eleven. The fighting spirit of my neighbourhood is deeply woven into the fabric of that time, into my understanding of the topology of those dead-end streets.
* * *
—
What will happen to the boy in this story will happen after I’ve gone to bed and completed all my rituals. I recorded the time for Jesus in my diary. I wrote 9:12 p.m. because it’s imperative that I tell the Son of God the precise time. My parents won’
t love me, even if I hurt myself to make myself more lovable, but God will. When I look at the clock a minute later it’s vital to record this too. 9:13 p.m. 9:24 p.m. 9:31 p.m. In between I read passages of my Bible, and then, compelled to touch my curtains a certain number of times, I rock on my bed, repeating “Get thee behind me, Satan”—a line from one of my Christian Crusaders action-duo comics—and look in the mirror to make sure the devil isn’t staring back.
In my memory it’s the sound that rouses me from sleep. It’s so loud the windows rattle, paintings tilt on the wall, a collection of ceramic owls slides off a shelf and shatters. The newspaper accounts will contradict me, saying the explosion (which hasn’t yet happened), not the crash, caused the sliding and shattering. The crash was a boy driving into a ditch to go around a roadblock he hadn’t expected to be there. But no one’s memory is more accurate than your own.
I ran outside and watched with others, watched the boy tumble out of the car with his girlfriend. Years later it’s her face I remember, even though this cannot be. The way she cried, mascara running down her cheeks, is a memory I’ve invented. She wasn’t there.
The boy had driven this street so many times he could be forgiven for believing it went straight through. But now in his way stood a barrier of steel and wood, a little gap on one side so that pedestrians could pass. The city had recently erected it, after my father had petitioned for a roadblock, persuaded them to protect us at our games of scrub, soccer, and hockey that spilled onto the street.
