Excerpt from Cecilia
BY K-MING CHANG
When I went home it was just past nine, and Ma and Ama were watching TV in the living room of our apartment, the one we’d been renting since before I was born. The duplexes on our street were split into front and back, and their interiors were mapped differently: In the front units, the bathrooms and kitchens were planted far apart. In the back units, each toilet sat in a closet at the end of the kitchen counter. The toilet is so close to the stove, Ama joked, you can cook the food and then slide your meal straight in. Bypass the body entirely! Forget digestion, it’s too slow! Save time and expedite the process. Everything you eat is going to end up in the toilet anyway.
Through our thin bedroom wall, we could eavesdrop on the front unit. We heard the Nings boiling broths, taking showers, and chasing each other around the kitchen. The Nings fought so often Ma said their shouting was more regular than their shitting. It was true that we never heard their toilets flush, and yet we heard them yelling every morning. Unlike the Nings, we were rarely constipated, and no one got hit by Ma. She said this was because Ama used to hit her. One time, after it rained, Ma wanted to roll in the mud, and Ama broke Ma’s ankle to keep her from getting her dress dirty. It was a special dress printed with butterflies. After that, Ma made a promise that if she ever gave birth to something, she would love it as lightly as a fly landing on a cow’s ass. A love you feel instinctually, the way a cow always knows when there’s a fly on its ass. But the fly will never bruise the cow’s ass or permanently attach itself. Because the culmination of every relationship is separation. It’s death. Every relationship is just practice for parting. I admired Ma’s devotion to detachment, her belief in severance as the only certainty, though I refused this faith. To me, love was lodging yourself in the wall between two units, growing in the dark like a mushroom. The three of us could cling there forever and feed on moisture, undiscovered. Death was no reason to separate.
The living room was dark except for the TV screen. Our landlord still didn’t know about the peach-faced lovebird Ama kept in a cage on top of the TV, and I warned Ama that the lovebird would probably go deaf if it continued living there. If nothing’s lopped off our ears yet, Ama said, gesturing at the ceiling and the sky above, where airplanes swung like hatchets at our heads, then nothing ever will.
The lovebird’s face was red as an opera mask. Red down its neck and chest too, like a slit throat. It clung to the side of its cage and rattled the bars with its beak, but Ama told me to ignore it, it was just upset the door was locked with a paper clip, but she’d had to do it, because last night it escaped and started flying around our bedroom, and your mother nearly zapped it out of the air with the electric flyswatter, luckily she recognized that it was too fat to be a fly or a mosquito, can you imagine a mosquito that size, how much blood would be inside it, I knew a few mosquitos that size, barges of blood, so full they don’t even fly away, they can’t even move, but there aren’t mosquitos here, thank god, and the ones that are here are so skinny-hungry.
When I approached the cage to refill the lovebird’s dish of red-dyed melon seeds, it cracked open its beak and stabbed at me, bridled only by the bars. Though I shied away, Ama always said it wouldn’t hurt me. They were naturally territorial, she said, but they were a prey species.
There are two species in the world, Ama used to explain. Predators and prey. Everyone is born from one of these two lineages, and you can’t predict which. Whether your parents are prey or predators doesn’t matter. It’s a combination of factors, and history isn’t the only handle on it. When I asked Ama how you knew which one you were, and what it meant to be predator or prey, she didn’t explain. She only said it was as inevitable as a baby growing molars. Whatever you are will emerge and announce itself, like sugar in your pee. Like blood lifted up by a cut.
I wedged myself between Ma and Ama, careful not to kick over the mug of sunflower seeds sitting between the sofa feet. Our sofa was swathed in towels to protect its surface from stains and the erosive properties of sunlight and air and voices. But because the towels absorbed our sweat, Ama complained that it felt like sitting in a giant diaper. Still, we never uncovered the sofa, and I asked Ma if it wasn’t defeating the point, covering something to keep it clean: if it was always sheathed, how would anyone know if it was clean or not? And what was the point of having a nice sofa if it was going to stay unseen? But Ma shook her head and said it wasn’t about seeing. It’s about knowing what you keep clean, Ma said. You don’t have to see what’s underneath. You don’t have to touch something to love it.
I settled in one of the craters, and Ma turned to touch the ends of my shoulder-length hair, saying she would cut it again for me soon, she knew I liked it chin-length, that I didn’t want long hairs clinging like worms to white towels, I wanted something easy to pluck from a surface, how about even shorter this time, like hers? I looked at Ma and said no, I didn’t mind it this length for a while. Cecilia’s hair today was about the length of mine, but on her it looked longer, long enough to play our old game of horses, our hair yanked like reins, our jaws clamping pencils like bits.
Ma and Ama were wearing their matching baby-blue uniforms, both ready for the night shift at the retirement home. Leave some sleep for us, they always said before leaving. Though Ama was old enough to be a resident there, she dyed her short hair black and set it with curlers, wrapped her knees in drugstore bandages, left her cane on the sofa—she didn’t allow us to call it a cane, and instead said it was an anti-mugger defense weapon—and told me retirement was a recent invention.
