Either the Beginning or the End of the World (7 page)

“Why does the world revolve around you?” I say.

“Oh, it's okay,” she says. “I'll find a way.” Perfectly applied to shift the blame to me. Watch your mother with morning sickness turn and walk out the door. Seven and a half months.

“I don't have a car.” I am both seething and helpless.

She takes me in, measuring me. She doesn't ask,
How would you go to work?

“I do,” she says. “But they took my license. Please drive.”

I do not ask what she did to lose her license or why she would drive to my house and not to the doctor. I imagine the archived tickets in her gold-lacquered vase, the driving without registration, insurance, license, glasses, Johnny to help her.

- - -

My mother and I sit at opposite ends of the doctor's office waiting room. My mother is a snow queen in her white jacket, hood up, fake fur around her eyes.

Her eyes are black and wide with fear. Are mine? I move a couple chairs closer.

“What's the matter, Mom?”

Her dark eyes flash to mine, almost as if she is embarrassed to show this side of herself to me. “There's a ghost in me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's true. You can feel it.”

She holds out her hand to me. I can't bear it. I move to the seat beside her.

She takes my hand. She holds it to her belly under the white jacket. I am wearing finger gloves. I lift my naked fingertips. Only my protected palm feels the jump, of feet? Of a butt?

“Sometimes at night I hear the ghost singing,” she whispers.

I pull my hand back. I pick up
New Hampshire Home
from the stack of magazines.

I open to a house on the Piscataqua, a long porch with a view of the river, an elegant table set for dinner with goblets, and with napkins folded like birds.

“It's true,” my mother says. “I remember the singing of ghosts. I heard it in the camp when I was a tiny girl.”

In the picture in
New Hampshire Home
, a single green rocker faces the water. I am there. I pretend Luke and I pull up to the dock by the porch in the boat, and we are sprayed with water and laughing.

“They are the ghosts of the people that died. They take you over. Do you remember when we lived in Lowell?”

I feel like I'm looking into a mirror. Who's that girl? I remember my sparkly tiara.

“But the ghost crept into me there,” my mother tells me.

“It wasn't a ghost. Dad said you couldn't take care of me.”

My chest. There is a monster. It is squeezing my chest between its hands and taking my breath. I drop the magazine on the stack.

“I'm opening a fresh-off-the-boat shrimp stand. I'll make good profit. So, Mom, maybe he doesn't need to go to Chincoteague.”

Her scared black eyes meet mine. Does she know what this means? That she can't move in. She and the ghost.

The nurse calls, “Lydia Sun.”

It's my heartbeat you should check
, I think.
Something is the matter with my heart
.

I don't have one.

I wonder if I have a ghost in me. If it can happen to my mother it can happen to me. I have her fear, like a little animal in me.

FEAR

My father had a good trip. A good day. We don't mention the soldier. But that night we let our guard down, exhausted, sitting by the woodstove in dim light. I'm on the couch, my father's in his wide-armed chair, the seat sunken to his weight, our long legs stretched forward, feet crossed at the ankles toward the stove, leaning back, our heads against our clasped hands. Pilot, asleep on my boot.

This is us. But we're also different. There's something butting in. I want to give it a shove into the open; I want to talk about it. I say to my dad, “What scares you?” I wonder if the Motel 6 in Chincoteague is creepy; I wonder if the expanse of ocean off Virginia has more ghosts than the Gulf of Maine. He thinks about my question.

“Well,” he says. “Sometimes thinking about you scares the life out of me. When you were younger, you'd fall asleep, your hair would fall over your cheek. Just looking at your cheekbone scared me with how much I wished I could protect you.”

We are silent. I think about begging him to take me to Chincoteague. Me, Rosa, and Mr. Murray. But I don't. I say my fear. “My fear is—trying to figure out how to say this. It's about your first wife.”

“Who am I marrying next?” His exhausted eyes twinkle at me, and I love him.

“Don't know yet.” The fire pops. “But the first one, she's a wild card, isn't she? We're doing good, you and me, and then here comes Lydia, and everybody starts to fight. Who needs this?”

My father doesn't answer that. I wonder if he knows about Bong Proh, the man too old for my mother, but someone from that war so they must be tight. The baby's father. The baby who comes walking into our lives curled inside my mother's belly.

In this deep scaredness inside me, there's Luke. I don't understand. I see his eyes bleary with no sleep, but they also warm me and hold me. So I make a fear up for Luke, one I don't tell my father.

What would Luke's fear be? Not the 95 bridge. Not the cars screaming. Not the speed of the current if a guy jumps. All these can ease a body. His fear is behind the eyes. It wedges his eyelids open. I imagine the clock ticking, the waves against the rocks, nothing he wouldn't do for sleep. His fear is that he can't go there. What do you do if you can't sleep? He needs to keep sorting the net as it flies through the winch and shave the snow from his nostrils and mouth the way I've seen my father do on the boat. And now he doesn't have a boat and that adds to his sleeplessness.

Pilot wakes and paces by the door, as if she feels tension in the house and she's worried we might leave.

SPANISH DANCER

Rosa holds out a white paper bag. “My mother made these.” Inside are warm circles of pastry sprinkled with cinnamon. “
Pastelitos
,” Rosa says.

We sit at the Formica table and eat, dusting our lips in confectioners' sugar.

“It's illegal,” I say. “But we'll do it out of the garage. Word of mouth. You in?”

“What do you mean it's illegal?”

“Nothing's going to happen. It's a fisherman thing.”

Rosa lifts her guitar and begins to strum.

“We're just selling shrimp, right?

“That's all we're doing. Just a hundred pounds. One tote.”

“I don't see why you're doing it. If it's illegal.”

“If I can sell for him—by myself, to see how it works—it will change our whole business model. We're not making it.”

“Sofie, nobody's making it in the business. It's not your dad. It's the ocean.”

I feel my lips grow taut like my father's when he's angry, even though I know she's right. Just last night Pete was talking about selling his quota of what the government allows him to catch to try to get out from under some of his debt.

“Forget it, Rosa. Just forget it, okay?”

Now Rosa tries to fix us. She says, “Okay, so my mom's a pastry cook. What do I know?”

I don't answer. I want to say,
You're right
.
.
. you don't know anything.

“I'm worried about you, Sofie. Don't you eat anymore? Look at you.”

She reaches forward, runs her hands down my cheekbones. I put my face up to hers and trace my lips with my finger to show her the confectioners' sugar I can still taste.

“Who doesn't eat?” And she traces her lips with her finger and we stick out our tongues and we laugh. But it's true about how little I feel like eating.

“I'll do it,” she says.

I say, “I have to fix the ocean. We need to make it here together, my father and me. Or he's leaving.”

Rosa puts her guitar down and pulls up a song she's been learning on her phone.

“Hold off,” Rosa says. “Fix the ocean later. Get your guitar.”

“No, you play.”

We listen to this melody while I begin to letter a sign for our illegal trade on the back of an old poster project.

Rosa plays along to the song on her guitar, “Spanish Dancer.” It's a girl nervous about love, wondering what it was like for her mother, when she was young.

I pull up the chain of the dog tag that I now wear around my neck.

Sanna

Lucas

O negative

Protestant

Universal donor. His blood will match with anybody's. Even mine.

- - -

We wear half gloves with the red tips of our fingers working machine fast. We pack plastic bags with Mrs. Tuttle's shrimp. Put ten bags of shrimp over ice in an ice chest, with the sign mounted on poster board.
Sweet Northern Shrimp Fresh Off the
Karma.

We sit, our heads propped on our mittened hands, ready. Drivers do stop.

“How much would it cost for shrimp without heads, ready to cook?” a serious young woman asks.

“Six dollars a pound,” I say, believing a person would never pay six dollars for a pound of shrimp.

“Atlantic asks seven,” she says. “And I know your father. I'd rather have the
Karma
's shrimp.”

“Take these, and the next time you come, we'll have processed shrimp.”

The woman finally does take the whole shrimp and pays three dollars for two pounds. We sell all the shrimp we have.

BREATHING IN THE BUDDHA

It's Sunday. My father's out fishing. It's today or maybe never. Could be only a few more landings till the government closes shrimp season. That's the rumor.

I lift a tote of shrimp I could have taken to Atlantic Co. I lift it up the porch steps, over the door sill, then slide it across the floor and into the kitchen. One batch at a time, I drop the shrimp in my pot of boiling water. One minute.

A car pulls up in the street. In the full light of day I see a maroon car, Luke's car, with the rust of New Hampshire winters eating into the fenders. He's not in camouflage; he's in jeans and a navy fisherman's sweater. He is coming toward my door. I rub my hands dry and watch him. His walk is deliberate. He turns to glance at a kid up the street, the neighbor's cat that streaks by.

He knocks. My hands are red and wet. Pilot is barking. I am wearing leggings and a ribbed shirt. My hair is up in a clip. My body's tender on the first day of my period.

I open the door.

Pilot leaps into his arms. She never forgets someone who has given her food. Luke comes down to his knees for her. I see Luke's bowed head of dark hair.

“My father's not here.” I back up to keep from touching his hair.

“I need to talk to him,” he says. “Find out when he's planning to fish.”

“He is fishing.”

“Did he say how long?” He looks up.

“Till supper. Maybe.”

He lifts his hands from my dog's ears, slowly stands.

“Are you good at processing shrimp?” I say.

“Teach me.”

Lines from Rosa's love song almost spill out of me. I cover my mouth to keep me from laughing and manage to open the door all the way without tripping on Pilot.

He comes in.

Has he ever seen a kitchen as small as this one? We work over the mound of shrimp in the kitchen sink, ready.

“Flip it over,” I say. “Open the shell. Pull out the meat. It's a three-step process.”

I glance at his face. The past is in his face. I see that he hasn't slept. He turns his exhausted eyes to me.

“Just be careful of these.” I touch the long needle tail of the shrimp he is holding.

“You got to pop the head,” I say. “Like this.”

I hold a shrimp so he can see my finger slide down the line from the shrimp's head to the tip of the sharp tail. I twist the tail to expose the eatable flesh. Then pull the flesh out of the head and shell that encases it. I drop the curve of meat into the basin. I drop the crusty outside—eyes and all—into the trash bin.

Luke gets it in a heartbeat.

Open, twist, pull. We work.

I am aware of his hands. They are large and careful, manipulating something so small. There is something about what we are doing that feels sacred. An image of my grandmother comes into my brain. When I was little, I remember seeing her lift her hands, palms touching, and bowing to a fish. She said something in her strange, bad English. Something about giving respect.

The work with our hands—Luke's and mine—is as regular as breathing. I turn a shrimp in my hand. I begin to pull open the peel and a stream of water spews into my face and Luke's face.

“Ahh, it peed,” I burst out laughing. “Ahhhhh.” Luke wipes the wet from my face with the heel of his hand, holding the carapace in the other. I am laughing. Pilot yelps, waiting for a shrimp to drop.

“You must be a great cook,” Luke says. “You're cooking for a banquet.”

I don't say yes, I don't say no. I don't say it's illegal what I'm planning to do with these shrimp. I say, “I don't know what it is about you, but when I'm with you, I wonder what it would be like to be a Cambodian girl. Things about my mother's culture. Maybe because you're so different from my life. I've always been my father's girl.”

“You're an enigmatic girl.” He studies me. “Your mother who's coming. She's Cambodian?”

“She's crazy.” I shrug. “She's not anything to me.”

Pilot catches a shrimp and runs with a pink tail hanging from her mouth.

“Out,” I yell at her. “Out.”

I want to talk about the gun. Where's the gun? I hope you have gotten rid of the gun.

I remember a story. My grandmother and her friend sit together in the dusk. They talk in Khmer. When I was little I must have understood some Khmer. It's a story tucked deep inside me; it's hard to find and let into my head. I don't remember the story now, but I smell the hot peppers my grandmother was pressing with a mortar at dusk. Her story scared me so much-—or maybe it was her own grief as she told the story—the smell of the peppers reminds me: be very afraid.