I miss my mom. I don't call her as often as I did last year - come to think of it, not at all. But I crave our meandering conversations just the same. Last year, I kept no secrets from her, and I would recount whatever joy or grief that was on my mind in the most eager, urgent detail. This year, I've barely given her a recap. Partly, it's because there is so much happening anyway, that I couldn't hope to find the time to fill her in. Partly, it's because I'm pretty open with the people in my hall, and I weary of retelling the same dramatic (albeit, extremely comical) stories. But this week, my eyes have been hurting me, and I've been falling asleep in my classes. It reminds me of the days over the summer when I rode the train back from work with her. This was the ritual each day that I sought, simply, necessarily. It was a signal to an end of long days, and a perfect opportunity to fall asleep on her shoulder or her lap. When I awoke, some stranger would invariably be smiling at this perfect image of a grown girl and her mother resting against each other. Other times, I'd raise eyebrows from nearby passengers as I gibbered in my own concoction of Chinese and English, words falling out of me so quickly that my mom sometimes gave up and just watched me in amusement. And yet, she was listening. I miss those trainrides the most. I want to crawl up next to her in that moving vestibule, share our tasteless pretzels, and pour out my heart. |
| “Hanwell, what are you doing, for Christ’s sake? It’s two in the morning or something like it.” “This is the girls’ room,” said Hanwell, climbing down from his ladder, looking sheepish. “I mean, I hope it will be for them. I hoped you might help me, actually.” “Paint it? I suggest you hire a bloody painter, Hanwell—I came for a drink, not to be your skivvy.” “No—” said Hanwell, urgently, “not that. I wanted an opinion. Is it the right kind of yellow? I’m color-blind—I didn’t like to ask the assistant—it’s called Deepest Sun. I want them to wake up and feel that the place is always full of sunshine, you see.” “Yellow?” “Don’t tell me it’s not right,” he said, looking at me rather desperately. “This is all the paint I can afford at the moment. But there’s that small pot left there—I’m going to do the skirting with that now. And the window frames. I want it to be just like sunset wall to wall, do you see? It’s a small room, though, for three girls that age.” “How old are they?” “Seventeen, sixteen, and fourteen. They’re with their uncle and aunt at the moment, in Bromley. I write, but they don’t send back.” “Have you got another paintbrush, Hanwell?” I went to work on the windows while Hanwell got on his knees for the skirting board. He was meticulous about it. He had a tiny brush for the corners and he went over the whole thing three times. By the time I’d done my second coat on the window frames, the real yellow sun was coming up. The red paint was so dark that it repelled the light, and though we could see the day beginning outside, inside the room it felt as though my night and Hanwell’s would never end. At about 6 a.m., it was clear even to poor Hanwell’s color-blind eyes that we could put no more red on the red wall. I stepped down from my ladder and brought in two more shots of whiskey. We sat on the floor and admired our handiwork. We had made a room for you and your sisters. It was a good feeling. It had been so long since I made anything at all. “Are you sure they’ll come, Hanwell?” I thought it extremely unlikely that any daughter of Hanwell’s would ever spend a night in this room as we just had, but again I held my counsel. More and more, I suspect that men of our generation were not to be lived with. We made people unhappy because we ourselves were made unhappy in irrevocable ways. My own daughter takes great pleasure in knowing the measure of me, of judging and convicting me, and maybe she is right, and maybe you are, too. These days, everyone passes the blame backward—but we couldn’t do that. We kept blame close, we held it tight. I’m sorry your father made you so unhappy. I think you are too hard on him. And I think you were wrong to think that he knew all the time you and your sisters wouldn’t come, or that he didn’t want you to. Hanwell had a beautiful way of hoping. Not many men can hope red yellow. |
Cathy I'm lost I said though I knew she was sleeping |
| i just deleted a little over two years worth of xanga entries, with the exception of a select few. god, deleting never felt so satisfying. |
I am most afraid of settling, of sinking into the mundane. I'll concede that sometimes, there is beauty in the mundane, like a ritualistic "I love you, good night". Or putting exactly the right amount of sugar into his or her coffee. Or passing each other in the bathroom in the morning - one holding an eyeliner, the other holding a razor, and both reaching for the lotion. That's the sort of mundane beauty in an Edward Hopper painting. Chop Suey. Automat. Then there is this excerpt that follows a train of thought so trivial and yet, so secretly true that I want desperately to believe that it is not: |
"Sometimes I don't think people realize how lonely it is to be a kid." When I come home, pieces of childhood come back again. The most mundane things can inspire my recollecting something from long ago. After my appointment at the hair salon, my mom and I went to buy preserved duck eggs at the nearby Asian grocery store. I must have been seven years old when I first entered that particular store, but I haven't stepped inside since eighth grade, when we stopped going to church . It used to be on our way home every Sunday. I remember my dad would read the day's newspaper while halfheartedly attending the cart with a small pout. I've always noticed his pout because I, too, pout accidentally when my face is relaxed and drawn blank. I'm alot more like my dad than I'll ever admit out loud. I remember Mom would bustle around the store, thinking of all the different foods that would prevent cancer and explaining each item to me as I put them in the cart for her. She would always tell me to check the label, and make sure the product wasn't made in China because their food inspection regulations were lax to the point of ineffectiveness. She's so scared of poisoning us with food from a grocery store. Today, as I picked up a small package of pineapple cakes, I noticed that I have developed my mother's habit of turning everything over, even searching beneath the flap, just to find that label. One time, she explained to me that there were germs swimming all over the yogurt drinks that I loved so much. I remember how sticky my hands used to get. I remember the day that I suddenly began to hate those small plastic vials of thin sweet drink. How, in eighth grade, I was suddenly furious with my mom for thinking that these small pleasures could temporarily cure me of adolescent angst. Some weeks, Mom would put something in the cart for me. This was a treat. Even this, however, would have dual purposes: either vitamin c, or a boost of iron to correct my paleness. My mom is convinced that I am pale because I eat too many vegatables and not enough iron- and protein-packed meat. I remember most these aluminum canisters of fruit candy that she used to buy me, and even now, my mouth puckers at the sourness of those things. They were hard candy, and imperfectly made so that when you sucked on them, your tongue could get caught in the cracks or ridges, and then there would be a perverse pleasure to the sting that you knew was vitamin c, like lemon juice over a paper cut. I could feel my tongue burning and healing by the time I finished one, and then I would pop another. Today, I was in a listless and rather bad mood for a number of reasons, none of which are actually describeable in any way that wouldn't make me sound nit-picky or high maintenance. My mom suggested that we go to the snack aisle for the guests that we are to have on Saturday, but I know that she was treating me like a five year old, mitigating my moodswing with food. I let her do that because it humors her to pretend that I'm not almost twenty, and sometimes, it feels good to let myself be the brat that I never got to be in my younger days. As I stood in line at the cashiers, I saw the irregular inverted cone shape of those Chinese cracker stick and chocolate snacks, and suddenly, the memory of myself at seven years of age came back to me. I used to sit in the back seat on the way home, and gauge how much chocolate dip to use on each cracker so that I wouldn't have leftover dip. For most children, there was never enough dip, but for me, the chocolate was a necessary evil. It never occured to me to just ignore the dip, because it was too fun to play around with it. At the end of all my crackers, if I had miscalculated, I would eat the rest of the chocolate dip with my pinky, and I knew that my dad would get mad if he ever looked in the rearview mirror so I would be slick about it. Today, my mom found out that I never liked the dip. I had always cleaned it out so well that she thought it was my favorite part. I begin to think that she began to know me only after eighth grade. |
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