Tiger Girl (3 page)

“I don't know,” gasped the dancing girl. “I've never felt like this before.” Suddenly her stomach growled with the sound of a tiger cub, and she shrieked. “Did you hear? There's a wild animal inside me!”

The old man laughed now. “You've had a dream, that's all. Why are you acting so foolish?” It was only her stomach
growling, he said. And he told her it was time for her to make them breakfast.

After she had eaten a little and calmed her stomach, she stood up again and discovered that she felt a pressure inside her intestines. The old man explained that she had to go outside to relieve herself, so she climbed down the rungs of the rough wooden ladder, splinters pricking the soles of her feet. The smell of the pig and the oxen assaulted her nostrils immediately. The night wind swept around her, carrying terrifying sounds of laughing birds and chattering monkeys and roaring beasts. The pressure inside her did not abate, so she swallowed her fear and made her way through the tall reeds toward the bank of the river, where she squatted and was able to make the pressure go away.

Then the dancing girl stepped into the river to cool her feet. Splashing the soothing water against her skin, she leaned over the water and gasped. For there in the water looking up at her was the face of a very old woman with loose skin and missing teeth. The old woman stared at the dancing girl.

Finally, she understood what had happened to her.

She went back to the house and continued to live as a human being for many years, until her husband died. Then she wept bitterly. She shaved her head like a nun and rubbed ashes on her skin. Her sadness was like a pin in her heart, always pricking her; each hour now seemed a century long, each day an eternity. The sun shining in the sky did not make her happy and the stars at night offered no solace.

She had given up her immortality to be with the man she loved, but now he was gone anyway.

The children of the man and the dancing girl worried about their mother. They offered her delicious food to eat, soft noodles and boiled crabs and fine white rice. But she would only eat one bite before she sighed, “My food has no taste anymore,”
and she refused to eat another nibble. Finally, to ease her loneliness she began to speak her happy memories out loud. Each day when one of her children came to check on her, instead of eating, she told the child one of her memories. She continued this way for a hundred and twenty days, for she and the man had had many, many children. She described the way the man wrote with a fine hair brush dipped in black ink, the robes he wore when he went to court, the poetry he composed, the first time he'd seen her dance.

The children thought their mother had lost her mind. They remembered none of these things, these stories from the previous lifetime that the dancing girl had spent with her husband before she'd taken his soul to Heaven. The father they remembered was a poor peasant who'd never learned to write his name, let alone a poem.

Finally the dancing girl had no memories left to share, and she died. Her children burned incense for their mother and paid nuns to cry at her funeral, but nothing made them feel any better at all.

They were sitting together in the house of their parents, crying, when one son began to tell the story that his mother had told him. Then a daughter told another story. And they told the dancing girl's stories to each other all night long and all day. For four months they talked, until finally all her stories were told. While the children were talking, a seed took root in the remains of the dancing girl's fish pond. This seed grew into a giant tree as tall and as wide as a tree that had been growing for forty years. Then the children all bowed down before the miraculous tree and gave thanks to Buddha.

“That's not a good ending,” I said, pinching my mother's elbow, trying to wake her.

She stirred, her eyelids fluttered.

“What really happened? What happened to the dancing girl and her children? She can't just die.”

My mother smiled slightly and sleepily patted my leg with one hand. She fanned herself with the other, and the breeze brushed against my cheek like a kiss.

“Tell me,” I whispered.

Back in school for the fall semester of my sophomore year, I was haunted by dreams. I was a child again, lying in bed next to a woman who was telling me stories.

The light on the bed stand flickers—a power surge as a storm approaches on giant's feet. Lightning cracks the sky like an improperly fired kiln. My mother pulls the mosquito net close around us, creating a cocoon of gauze. The light glows distantly. I press my face into my mother's side, her nightgown smelling of jasmine oil, smoke and garlic, a hint of perfume. Her skin is smooth against my forehead. She strokes my arm absently.

The rain is coming. The air is thick with water, and sweat collects on both of us, mother and daughter, although we lie very, very still, waiting for the storm. Then my mother begins to tell her story, her voice softer than a whisper, a tickle in my ear.

I lean close, closer, trying to hear what she is saying, but her voice grows raspy, hoarse. I tug on her sleeve, I pull on her gown, but her voice turns to a growl, and I realize I've been tricked. This isn't my mother, it's a wild animal, a panther about to pounce.

I woke up in a sweat, my heart pounding, my sheets twisted around my waist. My roommate's snores thundered around me.

Lying in the dark, I watched the charcoal shapes of my dorm room gradually coalesce as my eyes adjusted to the
moonlight slicing through the space beneath the shade and the windowsill, its blue light spilling through the shadows. I could see the edge of my desk, the top of my wooden chair, the soft lumpy outline of my roommate's bed, and the dresser with her ticking alarm clock atop it, the earring tree, and her framed family picture—everyone smiling with all their teeth exposed as they stand in matching ski outfits on a snowy mountain in California, taken when she was a child. I couldn't imagine my roommate's childhood. I couldn't imagine how she lived before she became this person farting softly and snoring loudly in the dark on the other side of the room. Her life seemed like something out of a TV movie.

I'd never realized such shiny people could actually live a flesh-and-blood life. My roommate Shannon was always cheerful. She drank regularly on weekends beginning Thursday late afternoon, she puked loudly in the women's bathroom, and then slept heavily, breathing acrid-smelling vomit breath into the air. She had the good grace not to ask me anything about my family after our first awkward conversations. I'd needed a roommate as my freshman roomies had decided to move off campus, and Shannon's roommate had ended up transferring to a different school, so we'd been paired in the room lottery.

Shannon had a steady boyfriend who played some kind of team sport, whose games she attended regularly. She'd shown me her albums of photos she'd brought to remind her of her wonderful family, her happy days in high school.
Here's me at prom, here I am at drama camp, this was my first boyfriend, this is me with my girlfriends on graduation
. If she lacked anything, it seemed to be an imagination, but that worked to my advantage. I didn't want a curious roommate. I didn't know how to explain my family to anyone, not even to myself. With Shannon, I could pretend that I too had the bland suburban life that she assumed was normal.

As I lay on my bed in the dark, as she snored like a giant, mouth open, I could not force my nightmare to recede and fade. If anything, each breath made the dream more vivid. The sound of the wind through an open window, lifting the edges of a white mosquito net. The mother reaching out her hand to touch my face. I flinched in my real bed in my dorm. My whole body shaking, I was suddenly cold.

I felt her hand against my skin.

Then I woke up a second time.

Night after night, I dreamed of my mother, not knowing which woman I was dreaming of.

In December, after months of this misery, I woke up in the middle of the night with a feeling like cobwebs around my heart and knew I had to do something. Better to confront the past, or it would keep haunting me.

And so I decided to visit Uncle. I had his last known address and the name of his donut shop.

I sold my textbooks, took my wages from my part-time job washing pots and pans in the school cafeteria, and bought a bus ticket to California to find my father. I had no idea what I'd tell him, what I'd accuse him of, what I'd ask him to do for me.

I didn't tell Sourdi. I told a story to Ma, said I wasn't able to come home for Christmas this year. Claimed I was going to spend winter break in California with my roommate. Shannon and I were applying to summer internships there, I said, and I'd have to stay for the interview. Her family said I could stay with them.

Like that, I lied to Ma, and she believed me.

Then I bought a long-distance bus ticket and left.

Riding the bus nonstop across the country, I was reminded of Ma's story about the 108 little hells. There were eight big hells,
she said, for souls that had committed really bad sins like murder or rape, for monks who violated their orders by eating meat or by starting families, obvious things like that. But for everyone else there were the little hells for all the sins that were just bad enough, the ones you had to work off before you could be reincarnated and try again to get life right.

“You mean everyone goes to Hell?” I asked. We were living in Texas in those days, and I was in elementary school. I couldn't completely understand the Baptists yet, but I knew they'd painted a different picture. “Doesn't anyone go to Heaven?”

“Maybe saints,” Ma conceded. “I don't know about Heaven. But in the 108 little hells, there's room for everybody on Earth in this life and the next and the next and the next after that.” Then she sighed to let me know that I was annoying her, that I was the kind of daughter who was earning her own place in one of the little hells right then and there. The Little Hell for Unfilial Daughters Who Questioned Their Mothers' Wisdom.

Later we made a joke of it. Every time something went wrong, we'd say which hell we'd landed in. When the car broke down in the heat and we had to pull over and let the radiator cool off while the traffic honked and sped past us, we were in number twenty-eight, the Little Hell of Endless Car Repairs. When the flurry of bills arrived at the end of every month, number sixteen, the Little Hell of Too Little Money. When the Church Ladies brought us another brick of cheese, it was number 102, the Little Hell of Painful Farts. If we fought over which TV channel to watch or which radio station to listen to or which of us was supposed to take out the garbage, Ma said she was in number five, the Little Hell of One Child Too Many, which made each of us feel simultaneously guilty and unwanted and jealous of each other. That was Ma's genius—she turned guilt into a sibling competition.

Riding in the Greyhound, I leaned my head against the window and watched the flat desert plains of Utah pass by. The interstate seemed to have been built through the ugliest part of each state. Perhaps it was the only land cheap enough to build a highway on, I thought. There was no snow yet, only monotonous waves of sandy dirt. Then the batteries in my Walkman died, and I discovered that all the truck stops charged exorbitant amounts for AA batteries. Then, just as we entered Nevada, the toilet in the back of the bus overflowed. After our half-hour bathroom break in Vegas, one of the other passengers played two dollars in quarters at the slots and, in the final pull, won so much money that he said he could now afford to fly and bid us all adieu. Thing is, I'd played the same machine but had only allowed myself to spend a dollar. I had figured that luck would either be with me or it wouldn't. In that sense, I was right.

Number sixty-six, I thought. The Little Hell of a Long-Distance Bus Ride.

On the final leg of the trip, for the last five hours to California, I still couldn't sleep, even though I'd been traveling for well over twenty-four hours. I couldn't even concentrate to read the paperback I'd brought along. But as we entered California, the world began to change. Looking out the window as the bus lumbered along the highway, cars and trucks and trailers passing us by, I watched the scenery grow more lush as we emerged from the desert. I stared at the glaring green of the oleander shrubs and palm trees, the stoplight reds and yellows of the McDonald's arches, the billboards for Marie Callendar's and Shell stations. As we followed the sun westward, the shadows grew longer, stretching black and oily across the median like an inky tide chasing our wheels.

The world seemed too bright, too vivid. My heart began to beat too fast. I didn't want a panic attack to come on, not here,
not now, so I closed my eyes and counted forward by fours to a hundred, then backward by sixes.

I always pictured the Little Hell for Ungrateful Daughters to be like the dark closet in the trailer that the First Baptist Church had rented for us. Ma locked me inside it once after a particularly heated argument. I no longer remembered how it started, but I remembered how it ended: with Ma dragging me by the arm and pushing me into the closet, the lock turning from the outside, a chair shoved against the knob just in case, although I didn't rattle it. I was too proud to try to escape. The whole time I was locked in the closet, I could tell exactly what my family was doing on the outside. I could smell Ma's cooking, hear Sourdi's laughter, listen to the cartoons on the TV, yet my family couldn't see me, couldn't hear me above their daily din. I'd never felt so lonely before, knowing my family could eat and laugh and watch Looney Tunes without me. I was like a hungry ghost at a family banquet, unable to partake of any human thing.

The whole episode probably lasted ninety minutes, two hours max. An eternity.

“How do you like that?” Ma asked finally, rapping on the door. “Are you ready to behave?”

“You're going to number ninety-nine, the Little Hell for Mean Mothers,” I shouted through the door. “It's filled with mean old ladies, like the crazy lady across the street. And every day, she's going to come out and yell at you, ‘Be quiet! Don't run on my lawn! Don't touch my dog!' Then you'll go back into your dark room that smells like medicine and bananas and—”