Either the Beginning or the End of the World (10 page)

- - -

Pilot and I plow a path into the new snow, heading down to the river. Once more I stand on the skeleton beams of the pier. The wind cuts into my face and my neck. Pilot races through the strip of horizon.

Alone in our house, I shower. It's taking my mother and grandmother some time to get organized, so I have one day alone. I imagine my family crowding beside me, around me. Puppies in a bed. I dress. I sit on my bed and brush my hair. I lay my hands on my belly. It feels jumpy with tension, the way my father described the sea. I hear every sound in the house without him.

I look at my hands and suddenly see my grandmother's hands—Yiey, as my father calls her. She sat with one palm lightly over the other as they rested on her belly. Like mine.

Rosa gives me a ride to the co-op to pick up my father's truck before school. I go to Mr. Murray's class, but I don't want any of the world he'll offer to me. My world is closed in. Now it's February. A long dark month. As my father steams south, he'll have only the new moon above.

MY MOTHER'S PARTY

My mother invited me to a party with Cambodians the night before they move in.

I go only for the purpose of establishing control with my mother and grandmother. I'll tell them what time to come. Tell them where they can and cannot park. They have been staying with another Cambodian family in the next town, and the house where I go smells like garlic and ginger and fish paste.

In the kitchen, my grandmother spreads open wrappers for egg rolls. The men are drinking beer in one room. The women work and talk in another.

“I tell the police, take him. He is my son, but I cannot control him. You take him.”

“The police will send him back to Cambodia.”

“He will die.” The women fall into the Khmer language.

Then the mother returns to English. “Only half die,” she says. “The other half, they grow crazy. I turn my back on him. I say to my son, why are your eyes red? Why do you steal the dollars I earn helping old people bathe their bodies?”

“You be careful,” my grandmother says to me.

“What?” I say, startled. Her eyes frighten me. They are an emergency. Everything she looks at could be on fire.

“Be careful.” She raises the volume. “Stay away from boy who do drug like they say. Boy who drink too much.” She speaks sharply at me while the women talk in the language I don't understand. I back away. I'm wearing khakis and a tank top because I told Vincent I could fill in after this and am half dressed for work. I can fly out the door.

The host of honor hasn't come.
Now,
I think.
I'll go now.
“I'll be home from school by four tomorrow. You can come then,” I say to my grandmother.

She hands me a mango with something in the glint of her eye that says,
This
is what's important.

“You are Cambodian, too,” she says. She gives me a knife.

“Where's my mother?” I say. “Isn't this her party?”

“It is not today. It will be another day.”

No one knows what day. No one knows where my mother is. Why are Cambodians so crazy? How long have these women been in this country and they still don't speak English?

“You are hungry,” my grandmother says. The women are looking at her and me. “You eat before go to work.” Her eyes turn agitated.

A woman looks at me and demands to know, “You are Leap granddaughter?”

Leap is my grandmother's name. “Leap's,” I say. “I am Leap's granddaughter.”

“Do you know what they do to Leap mother?”

“Sophea, I tell you later,” my grandmother says.

“What did they do?” I say. I know they mean the soldiers, the Khmer Rouge. Maybe old people have told this story before. I don't remember. Maybe I wasn't there. Maybe I didn't listen. Today I listen. Luke makes me want to understand what happens to people far away in war. With Luke, I am a Cambodian girl. Someone brings me a Cambodian beer. I take a very long drink.

My grandmother continues to slice vegetables for the egg rolls. I slice the fruit from the mangoes, very clumsily.

“Like this,” she says. She guides the sharp blade with her thumb, lifting the skin along the curve of the mango. I continue, following her example.

The storyteller begins. “Her mother, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge say she too old, she do not work. Do not feed her. If you feed her, we will not feed you, too. They starve her to death.”

My grandmother's and my fingers hold the knives with skill as we cut.

“Every day she brush Leap hair until she cannot lift her hand. She still miss her.”

This makes no sense to me. “Why didn't you take her food when they weren't looking?” I ask my grandmother.

“The guard is a boy with an ax. He starving, too. They promise him rice if he will guard. His life or Leap mother. He can choose.”

My grandmother stirs pork that sizzles in a black skillet.

“Every day she do Leap hair. The boy watch.”

I drink the Cambodian beer. “You are telling folktales,” I say, heavy-headed instantly from the beer.

“Is not a
tale
. This
happen
.” The woman is angry. She shouts, “She beg for food. She say, ‘If I could just taste food one more time.'

“Your grandmother bring her rice she hide in her scarf and the boy is sleep. Mother eyes shine with happiness to taste the rice. She eat it all, even if her body look like sticks and she does not stay alive. For this, she love your grandmother.”

She said this very loud, a few inches from my face. I shut my eyes. I see the image of sticks on the ground, one stick holding a brush. And I have stepped out of this world. I make myself open my eyes and be here in this kitchen in New Hampshire even though I am spinning with the beer.

I turn to my grandmother, who swiftly grates gingerroot across the tines of a fork. But her face is unchanged. It is as if she did not listen. Or that story is in her bones and tissues and the air she breathes and she lives in that other world all the time. I don't know what to do with this. My grandmother touches my hair. I feel the pressure of her hand on my head and I spin. I fill the egg roll wrappers with the sliced cabbage, ginger, and a little of my blood because I am not fast enough for my grandmother and I have rushed the knife. I toss in the pork in small pieces.

My grandmother folds them and drops the egg rolls into boiling oil. In the fryer, the oil bubbles around them. The smell makes a burning in my throat. “When I come,” she says, “I tell you more folktale.”

THAT SONG

Rosa has come because she couldn't find me at school. I'm on the couch in my living room, the weight of my dog on my feet.

“I feel sick, Rosa. I am sick.” But then I can't remember what I'm saying.

Rosa puts her arm around my shoulder. “Come to school,” she says.

“How can I go to school?”

“You have to pull yourself together.”

Luke sent me a text.
Can you come tonight?

“I'll make you some breakfast. And then maybe you'll hear what you're saying.”

“Cambodian beer,” I whisper.

“Is it good?”

I shake my head and my mind spins and spins and spins.

But I can see the words on my phone.
Can you come? I would like to see your eyes.

“Do I still live here? Where's my father?”

“You must have been really drunk,” Rosa says.

“Must have,” I say.

“How did you get here? You said you were going to some party. At your mother's.”

I'm forced to try and remember. “My mother,” I say. “I came with her. She's here somewhere. Maybe she's in my father's bedroom.”

“It must have started off bad,” Rosa says. “Rooming with your mother.”

“She is just . . .” I pause. “. . . crazy.” I am beginning to come back to the house, to the light streaming into the back window, to my mother. And my grandmother.

Or I could meet you on the strip. By the statue. I'll read Kerouac to you.

The morning sun lifts.

“Sing me that song, Rosa, about the Spanish dancer.”

But then a river of light blinds me. It is beautiful and dazzling.

Rosa hums while she tries to get us going. I remember pictures of beautiful Cambodia on the wall last night with my grandmother. Is beauty still beauty when you are starving? No, not if the morning sun brings the boy hauling his ax to guard an old woman to make sure she is starving, since then he'll get food to keep himself alive.

“Do you think your mom and your dad are getting back together?” Rosa says.

Again, I try to come back to the river where I live. I focus on Rosa in the kitchen. She wears a gauzy white shirt and turquoise hoops in her ears. “You're such a romantic, Rosa.”

“I can't help it.”

“Do you have any condoms?” I say.

She is popping toast from the toaster, spreading it with butter. She knows this is a life-defining question. But we both know things we have not talked about. She nods.

“Did I call in last night? God, I hope so. I think I did, before I knew I couldn't drive.”

Instead of my grandmother's fierce bird eyes, I see her composed lips, how they gently meet. I think of how even her lips, her whole body, must hold the memory of the story her friend told.

I pick up my phone.
After work. Your cottage
.

CHECK THE WIND

I
had
called in last night. Oh, Jesus, I'm relieved. I still have a job. At five p.m., wind cracks a branch from a tree and hurls it onto Woodbury Avenue. The temperature is so low, the truck groans. Streetlights show ribbons of ice in the trees. In my father's coat, I pick my way over ice from the truck to the door of the shop. I hold the door from the wind and find haven in Dunkin' Donuts with my hair pressed to my face.

“You're late,” Vincent says.

I'm relieved to see his jowly jaw. “Sorry,” I say, shedding the slicker and shaking out my arms. I wipe my face with my cocked elbow. Thank god nobody is here, just Mrs. Bennett, who holds a small coffee cup with grace. The streetlight features one side of her face and silver hair, the other side in shadow.

“I'll make it up,” I say breathlessly. I smell the cold wool of my sweater as I pull it over my head. I say, “I'll stay and close on Saturday if you want.”

Vincent doesn't answer. He goes back to the
crossword folded on his clipboard. I hear the sound of the black fine-point marker scratching across the squares.

“Thursday,” I say. Puzzles get worth doing on Thursdays.

“Yup,” he says.

Maybe I'm not here. Maybe I don't exist. Maybe I am that ghost in the tree the Cambodians talk about. Except I can't be that with Luke. With Luke, I am all body. I am nothing but my body. Fingertips. Shoulders, throat. My mind softens.

Vincent zips along, filling in tiny black letters. I pull my hair into a ponytail and put on the cap. Wet strings of hair slip down. What story am I made of? I check the coffee pots and brew a new pot of dark roast. It is already black outside the window. Desperate people come in for coffee in the middle of storm winds.

I text,
Dad, how's the wind
?

I check the other pots. The counter shines with jimmies and circles of milk under the fluorescent lights, and I wipe it down. My phone signals.
Steady. You are in the storm. Stay where you are
.

Yes.

I know I'm going to Luke's tonight. My mother has been at my house all day. I don't know what her routine will be in the night, if she'll stretch out under the afghan and sleep after dinner. I don't know what she cooked for dinner. I don't know what my father's room looks like now that it's hers.

“Vincent,” I say.

“Mm,” he says. He's growing a sprout of a beard on his chin.

“Do you believe things happen for a reason? You know, the belief that there's a universe and we're just here tonight in a storm, with all of our problems, but there's some reason why we're here. Some . . . I don't know.” I make circles with my hands. “Some shape?”

“You mean like fatalism. Over my head, babe.”

“Don't call me babe. Is that what fatalism is? Like things aren't random?”

A siren sounds from the snow-packed street.

“You're talking to a guy who grew up on Alice in Chains. But you know what I think? I think we use about a fraction of our brains, and there's a whole lot going on we don't know about, like a reality outside our frequency.” Vincent writes “100 percent” in tiny letters at the top of his crossword. Then “A+.”

I almost ask him, “Vincent, do you write those messages about your lost love on the seawall?”

- - -

At Rye Cottages, I check the wind in a stand of birch trees like I always do when my father heads into the sea, the unknown. Winds are building. Branches are swaying. I worry because now the electric wire begins to whistle. Could be gusting to thirty knots off shore. But I'm here.

LEAVE YOUR SLEEP

I changed to my jeans and sweater after work, same black lace-up boots. I put on eyeliner, green, all around, which is how I picture the Spanish dancer. I am someone different tonight. Will life continue its normal progression at school at seven thirty in the morning? And will I continue?

Luke is bundled into a padded olive-drab jacket.

“Let's walk,” he says, not looking at me.

“The wind bends you sideways,” I say.

He touches my hand. My hand.

“I'll show you the boat I'm planning to go fishing on.”

“I don't go on boats,” I say. “I don't go on water.”

“Why?”

“I've always been afraid of water.”

He doesn't question this. He doesn't say my fear is unreasonable, just a phobia—here are ten steps to conquer your fear. I like how I say something, and he listens—he accepts it. What would he do if I told him the story about starving a woman? If I could find the words to repeat it. My great-grandmother. But he is the only one I could imagine telling this terror to. Maybe because what he did is raw in his eyes.