How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa.
Title: How to Pronounce Knife.
Author: Souvankham Thammavongsa.
Genre: Fiction, short stories, immigration, refugees.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2020.
Summary: A collection of 14 short stories about Laos-Canadian immigrants and refugees, and their children. In How to Pronounce Knife, with the family recently having immigrated from Laos and struggling to learn English, a young girl's unconditional love for and trust in her father transcends the fickleness of language. In Paris, a young woman working at a chicken plant dreams one day to move up to the coveted office position, and be selected by her boss to be his next fling, while avoiding the advances and friendship of a fellow Laotian and co-worker whom she considers beneath her dreams. In Slingshot, a seventy-year-old starts a complicated relationship with her her thirty-year-old neighbor. In Randy Travis, in a family recently immigrated from Lao, the wife and mother begins to disappear into her obsession with a country singer. In Mani Pedi, a washed out boxer working at his sister's nail salon sets his dreams on a wealthy client, and contemplates things that will always be out of his reach. In Chick-A-Chee!, two siblings living a secretive life with two overworked immigrant parents are taken by their father trick-or-treating for the first time in their lives in a very fancy neighborhood. In The Universe Would Be So Cruel, Mr. Vong, a printer who prides himself on being the only one catering to Lao weddings and having a perfect record of predicting the outcome of those weddings, as well, is faced with a dilemma on his own daughter's wedding day. In Edge of the World, a woman recalls her brief but strong relationship with her mother, and all the secrets she could not penetrate as a child, before her mother permanently walked out of her life. In The School Bus Driver, a school bus driver grapples with how much he is willing to give up in order to fit in as his wife assimilates quickly and flawlessly into their new culture, and develops a suspiciously close friendship with her boss. In You Are So Embarrassing, a mother watches her daughter's happy life from afar and hides her own health issues and tough circumstances, so as not to embarrass her like she did when her daughter was in highschool. In Ewwrrrkk, an eight-year-old girl has a frank conversation with her great-grandmother about breasts and sex. In The Gas Station, a woman living a dreary and lonely life starts a doomed affair with her small town's gas station man. In A Fair Distant Thing, a young woman recalls an important friendship from her younger years, before they inevitably lose touch because the friend's family is upwardly mobile. In Picking Worms, a fourteen-year-old girl begins to work part-time at a hog farm picking worms with her mother, but everything changes for them when they bring along her classmate and he ends up getting the job coveted by her mother.
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ He waved the note away. "Later." He said this in Lao. Then, as if remembering something important, he added, "Don't speak Lao and don't tell anyone you are Lao. It's no good to tell people where you're from." The child looked at the centre of her father's chest, where, on this T-shirt, four letters stood side by side: LAOS.
♥ Later that night, the child looks over at her father during dinner. How he picks up each grain of rice with his chopsticks, not dropping a single one. How he eats, clearing away everything in his bowl. How mall and shrunken he seems.
The child does not tell him the k in knife is silent. She doesn't tell him about being in the principal's office, about being told of rules and how things are the way they are. It was just a letter, she was told, but that single letter, out there alone, and in the front, was why she was in the office in the first place. She doesn't tell how she had insisted the letter k was not silent. It couldn't be, and she had argued and argued, "It's in the front! The first one! It should have a sound!" and then she screamed as if they had taken some important thing away. She never gave up on what her father said, on that first sound there. And none of them, with all their lifetimes of reading and good education, could explain it.
As she watched her father eat his dinner, she thinks of what else he doesn't know. What else she would have to find out for herself. She wants to tell her father that some letters, even though they are there, we do not say them, but she decides now is not the time to say such a thing. Instead she tells her father only that she had won something.
At the end of the school day, Miss Choi was waiting for her by the door. She asked the child to follow her to the front desk, where she unlocked the top drawer and pulled out the red velvet sack. "Pick one," she said. And the child reached inside and grabbed at the first thing her fingers touched. It was a puzzle with an airplane in the sky.
When she shows her father the prize, he is delighted because, in some way, he has won it too. They take the prize, all the little pieces of it, and start forming the edge, the blue sky, the other pieces, the middle. The whole picture, they fill those in later.
~~How to Pronounce Knife.
♥ In this town, a girl either worked at the chicken plant or the Boobie Bungalow. At least at the Boobie Bungalow you could make some quick cash ad get the hell out of town, never look back, or you could get someone who could love you just long enough to take you away. Any man you met there was single or on his way to being single. At the plant, most of the men were married, and if they weren't they would be eventually, to someone who didn't work there.
Red knew, for her, it was going to be the chicken plant. She didn't have much in the chest area, and couldn't dance to music even if it had a beat. The way men never looked at her gave her the sense that the Boobie Bungalow wasn't going to be an option for her. At the plant, you made enough money to pay for what you needed. But the big things in life, the things that could make you happy, well, you just never made enough to get all that.
♥ After the front office job became available again, all the women who worked on the line did what they could to get it. Some started by getting themselves nose jobs. Where they found a surgeon was something Red didn't know. No facility around here to support that kind of thing. ..Most of the girls at the plant started to come to work with their hair curled and pressed and wearing heels and office clothes. They'd change into their work gear, the plastic shower cap and the matching white plastic pullover, then change right back when their shift was over. They looked so glamorous. But all of this was for nothing. None of them got the job. It was given to a girl just out of high school whose father worked in the front office.
♥ Dang was what people who knew Red called her. it means red in Lao. It wasn't her real name, just a nickname she got because her nose was always red from the cold. She hated that he called her by a nickname. It made things feel intimate between them in a way she didn't want. The way he said "Dang," it was like a light in him had been turned on and now she had to be responsible for what he could see about himself.
♥ "I want to get one too, you know," Red had confessed, before she realized she should not have said that to Somboun. Now that he knew she wanted something for herself, he might think he was some kind of friend to her.
"No. Not you. Not you. No way."
"Why not me? You think I don't want to be beautiful?"
"Why in hell would you do that to yourself! You're already beautiful." Somboun said this with such sincere conviction that she was embarrassed for him. How naked and bare, his want.
♥ He was the one who slit the necks in the other room before they got to Red. He saw the chickens when they were still alive. She shuddered at the thought of doing anything with Somboun. What kind of gentleness could a man who did that for a living be capable of?
♥ When Red saw Somboun standing at the entrance that morning, still smoking even though he often talked about quitting, and wearing the same drab uniform and the same haircut all these years, he reminded her of all the things she wanted for herself but still didn't have. Day after day, the sight of him in the same place and in the same clothes and giving her the same greeting each morning showed that, for them, nothing had changed. Nothing had happened.
♥ But he took what she said as if she was teasing and he smiled widely. To know someone's dislikes was to be close to them.
♥ Red often used the time to be alone. The smell of raw chicken flesh and loosened guts and all that killing and packaging sometimes made her forget she was alive and living in the world too.
♥ Red made her way outside. A short time later, Tommy and the girl came out and walked to his car, where all of it took place. Red wondered what that felt like, to be seen, to feel the mouth of someone who wanted you. It didn't matter if what Tommy did wasn't for forever. He did it and you got to be something to him for a little while.
♥ From where Red stood, she could tell Nicole's eyes were smeared with mascara, and her quivering lips looked a clownish red now. Women like Nicole are who the romantic movies were made for. They are always the star of their own lives and they always got their man in the end. But beauty, for all it could get you and all that fussing it took to get it, seemed so awful a burden to have to carry and maintain. There was so much to lose. In that moment, Red felt grateful for what she was to others-ugly. It's one thing to be ugly and not know it. It's another to know.
♥ The only love Red knew was that simple, uncomplicated, lonely love one feels for oneself in the quiet moments of the day. It was there, steady and solid in the laughter and talk of the television and with her in the grocery aisles on the weekends. It was there every night, in the dark, spectacular and sprawling in the quiet. And it all belonged to her.
~~Paris.
♥ On the bike tour, he told us about a woman he'd loved once. He showed us where they ate and skipped out on a bill, the places they kissed. There was something about the way he told this story. The city became his. Later, when I walked by that building, that corner, his stories were there. His gloomy voice played in my head like an old record.
♥ "There's no such thing as love. It's a construct," Richard told me one day when I went over to his apartment. I had gotten a package if his in my mailbox. "You know anyone who is in love?"
I thought of Rose, who always said she was in love whenever she met a new guy and then would wait by the phone all day, crying. Then I thought of my friends and my own experience. We had all known love, but it happened a long time ago. It was not something we sat around wondering about. It happened, and when it's happened, there is no need to think too hard about it.
♥ The way he described it to me, it was like I had done it too, like I had also been inside them, just like him, as a man. There was no metaphor, no seed and soil and growing flowers. Just the facts.
♥ Then Richard said, "Well, I'm in love," and pointed to me. "With her." We laughed, Richard and I, as if this was our joke and Eve was outside it. You can do that with a joke, hide how you feel and mean what you say at the same time, and no one will ask you which it is.
♥ We did not know what to say to each other. We were there at the same time, wanting the same thing but from different people. If there were anyone else who understood what it was like to be on the outside looking in on those two, it was Daniel.
After a while, he said to me, "You ever seen a tornado before?" I told him I hadn't. He nodded and went on, "They destroy everything. You can see it coming in the distance. Most people would try to get the hell out of there. Some people see it coming and can't help but watch." I didn't say anything. And then he winked at me.
♥ She said, "He's never going to love you, you know. Have you forgotten how old you are? Look at all your wrinkles." That's the thing about being old. We don't know we have wrinkles until we see them. Old is a thing that happens on the outside. A thing other people see about us. I didn't know why she was talking to me this way. Maybe it had nothing, really, to do with me. I didn't say anything. It seemed to me she'd been drinking, so I let her talk. After a while, I didn't hear anything she said.
♥ It seemed strange to me to see him go back to her. And it seemed strange to me for us to have done the things people who loved each other did, and for it to seem now like none of it had ever happened. But it was not just him. What kind of person was Eve, to see someone else's love and agree to see it wasn't there. But after a while, it didn't matter.
♥ ..I left. I looked back at the black everyone was wearing. I could not tell which figure in the crowd was Richard. I was beginning to forget his face.
♥ Once, when I was walking down the street in front of my old building, Richard called out to me. I must have been closing in on eighty then. I looked through him and spun around. I wanted to be in the distance, beautiful and dark, spinning all by myself, in the clear. I didn't want him to come close. Nothing, not even the call of my name, could make me stop.
~~Slingshot.
♥ She held this little radio up to her ear like a seashell and listened. The host always spoke briefly between songs and there was the occasional laugh. A laugh, in any language, was a laugh. His laugh was gentle and private and welcoming. You got the sense that he, too, was alone somewhere. Grateful for the sound of a human voice and for the music that kept her company, she listened to the radio constantly while I was at school and my father was at work.
♥ My father was nothing like Randy Travis. No one noticed who he was or what he did for his living. He never used the word love or showed much sentiment. For my mother's birthday, he gave her a few twenty-dollar bills. Not even a birthday card or plans for a night out. He thought that because he was there, that was all that was needed to show his love. He thought his silence was love, his restraint was love. To say it out loud, to display it so openly, was to be shameless. He thought it was ridiculous to be moaning about love so much. What kind of man was Randy Travis, with his health, his looks, his fame, and his money, that he should ever have anything to cry about?
♥ But then when my mother asked him to sing, he failed spectacularly.
He did not know how to pronounce the words.
Her broad and hopeful smile vanished from her face, but my father only tried harder, belting out the chorus louder, holding on to the vowels, trying to produce a southern twang. He was no star. He was no leading man. He packed store furniture into cardboard boxes for a living. No one would pay to see him sing, but he didn't care. He was only trying to be what my mother wanted.
♥ This time it was slot machines. She sat up close as those machines lit up her face and swallowed her hope coin by coin. I knew my mother was no stranger to hoping; it's how we all ended up here in this country in the first place. She got in the habit of not coming home, sleeping in the car most nights in the parking lot of some casino, my father waiting up to see if she'd come home. It wasn't long after that we were told she was found collapsed in the parking lot. People die sometimes, and there doesn't have to be a reason why. That's just the way life is.
It seems wrong to say, but I felt relief for her then.
~~Randy Travis.
♥ They only ever talked about winning and knockouts and the ways in which he didn't measure up. But, in his mind, the joy of boxing was in the small details no one was there to see. He loved what it took to get here-the routine, the training, the discipline. And the buildup before the fight, the few moments after he finished wrapping up his hands and put on his gloves, his heart racing, and before he entered the ring and touched gloves. Before anything had been decided about him, when the possibility that he might win this one-just this one time-was a chance as good as any and all he had to do was step into that opening.
♥ He came from nothing, and to stand up anyway and to try for something-well, if that wasn't courage, he wasn't sure what was.
♥ Raymond didn't like to talk back to his sister, but this time he thought she was wrong to say what she did. "Well," he said, "you know, maybe Miss Emily ain't ever gonna be with a man like me, but I want to dream it anyway. It's a nice feeling and I ain't had one of those things to myself in a long time. I know I don't got a chance in hell, but it's something to get me through. It's to get through the next hour, the next day. Don't you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me."
Raymond's sister didn't say anything. She just stared straight ahead beyond the steering wheel. He knew his face resembled hers, but damaged-a dented nose, the left eyebrow split and made crooked by a scar. Although her face was treated to facials and creams and anti-wrinkle serums and was smooth and glowing, Raymond could tell she felt the way his face looked, beaten and busted. She didn't want to recognize that face and see it hoping. Hope was a terrible thing for her-it meant it wasn't there for you, whatever it was you were hoping for.
♥ They sat there in silence, in the oncoming darkness, the car windows still open. They could hear a family in their backyard somewhere nearby, the sizzle on the barbecue, and the giggling-young and fragile and innocent. It was the kind of giggling they themselves did as kids. Now, that kind of giggle seemed foolish for them to do. It was like a far distant thing, a thing that happened only to other people. All they could do now was be close to it, and remain out of sight.
~~Mani Pedi.
♥ He liked these clients best. The farmers with dirt under their fingernails from working out on the fields all day, the butchers who didn't have time to change out of clothes stained with blood, the seamstresses who only had twenty minutes before they had to get back to work. They reminded him of himself-all of them doing the grunt work of the world.
Te clients he didn't like were the salesmen who came in wearing expensive business suits yet always asked him to give him a deal. He recognized them by the sheen of the watches on their wrists, their slicked-back hair and warm-weather tans, their perfect English. The way they looked at him like he was going to be some joke they'd tell a friend about later, calling him "buddy," correcting his spelling. He always chased these men away with a "Fuck you!"
..Those men were protected by their glass office towers and their secretaries and lawyers and cheating tax accountants, but in his shop, one he owned and operated alone, he was boss! To own a thing yourself, and to be able to say, "Fuck you! All of you all! Fuck you to hell!" It had bee something that was said to him and it was fun to turn the tables and say it to someone else, to see them lose their cool and make a quick, fumbling ext.
♥ The wedding was cancelled. Called off.
"Dad, seriously, how did you know?"
"Look, I know these things. You just can't have a Lao wedding without Lao letters on the invitation. And you have to have your real given name on there. Yeah, it's a long name-but that's your name. Why would you want to be Sue when your name is really Savongnavathakad? Because, you know, the real Sue will end up marring the guy if it says so right there on the invitation."
♥ On the day of the wedding, Mr. Vong's daughter wrote a sleeveless white wedding dress. It was plain, without lace or buttons, but the fabric cascaded down her body like a fountain of milk.
But the groom was no there. Jilted.
When it became clear the groom was not coming, Mr. Vong's daughter lifted up the bottom of her dress and ran over to him, furious. "It's all your fault, isn't it? The invitations. Something must have gone wrong!"
Mr. Vong tried to think of an answer, one he could use to explain how the wedding had come to this. "I... I found one invitation behind the door," he said. "I must have missed it. All invitations must go out at the same time. It was just the one. I didn't know the universe would be so cruel. I am sorry."
It was not true, of course. Not even close. He had accounted for everything! And now, no amount of fuck-you-to-hells could make a difference to that boy. But how could he tell her that the boy she loved wasn't kind or good, that he didn't love her, that sometimes what felt like love only felt like love and wasn't real. He couldn't do anything about that but say, "Yes, yes, it was my fault. It was all my fault."
~~The Universe Would Be So Cruel.
♥ When I was about four, my mother and I spent our days sitting side by side on the couch, watching soap operas and eating chocolates and laughing. My mother's laugh was loud and wild. She never covered her mouth, which would open so wide I could see the half-chewed chocolate mashed up against the inside of her cheek. She would only laugh this way when we were alone. With my father or in the company of others, she would giggle and put a hand over her mouth. I wanted everyone to see what I saw when we were alone.
♥ Occasionally, we were invited over to get-together at the homes of other Lao refugees. There were those who had been here a long time, like us, and there were those who had just arrived. These parties were where everyone went to dance and listen to music, play cards and eat, reminisce and talk about old times. They would laugh all night-sad, faint bursts of air-and shake their heads in disbelief at what they had made of themselves in this new country.
♥ She must have been twenty-four then, but she seemed much younger-and smaller. I watched over her, and when she shivered I pilled a blanket up to cover her, trying not to wake her. Sometimes she had nightmares. I could tell by now she was breathing-short, panicked breaths. I would reach out and stroke her hair, tell her things would be all right, though I didn't know if they would be or what it meant to say those words. I just knew it helped to say them.
I never thought to ask my mother why she slept in my room most nights. I was just glad not to be alone in the dark.
♥ "The world is round. It's like a ball."
But my mother insisted, "That's not right."
Still, I continued, "When you get to the edge you just come right back around to the other side."
"How do you know?" she asked.
"My teacher says. Miss Soo says." There was a globe on Miss Soo's desk at school, and whenever she talked about the oceans or the continents or plate tectonics, she would point to those features on it. I didn't know if what Miss Soo was telling me was true. I hadn't thought to ask.
"It's flat," my mother said, touching the map. "Like this." Then she swept the puzzle to the floor with her palm. All the connected pieces broke off from each other, the hours lost in a single gesture. "Just because I never went to school doesn't mean I don't know things."
I thought of what my mother knew then. She knew about war, what it felt like to be shot at in the dark, what death looked like up close in your arms, what a bomb could destroy. Those were things I didn't know about, and it was all right not to know them, living where we did now, in a country where nothing like that happened. There was a lot I did not know.
We were different people, and we understood that then.
♥ All this was years ago, but I can still feel the sadness of that time, waiting for her to come back. I know now what I couldn't have known then-she wouldn't just be gone, she'd stay gone. I don't think about why she left. It doesn't matter anymore. What matters is that she did. What more is there to think about than that?
Often, I dream of seeing her face, still young like she was then, and although I can't remember the sound of my mother's voice, she is always trying to tell me something, her lips wrapped around shapes I can't hear. The dream might last only a few seconds, but that's all it takes, really, to undo the time that has passed and has been put between us. I wake from these dreams raw, a child still, though I am forty-five now, and grieve the loss of her again and again.
My father did not grieve. He had done all of this life's grieving when he became a refugee. To lose your love, to be abandoned by your wife twas a thing of luxury even-it meant you were alive.
♥ The other night, I saw an image of the Earth on the evening news. I had seen it many times before, and although my mother was not there, I spoke to her anyway as if she was. "See? It really is round. Now we know for sure." I said it out loud again, and even though it disappeared, I knew what I said had become a sound in the world.
~~Edge of the World.
♥ He thought for a few seconds that she was talking about someone else, or to someone else. But then he realized, that's what his name was now. Jay. Like blue jay, a small blue bird, a little dot in the sky. He wanted to remind his wife that his name was Jai. It means heart in Lao! he wanted to yell. But then she would just remind him how men in this country do not raise their voices at women. Or tell him to practise his English. "No one here knows jai means heart," she would say. So what if that's what it means? It doesn't mean anything in English. And English is the only language that matters here.
"That is just the way things are here," she said.
And if he was going to live here, he had to learn to adapt and fit in and not be so uptight.
"Be cool," she said in her perfect English, sounding just like Frank.
~~The School Bus Driver.
♥ When you're a mother, you create a life and then you watch it go on its own way. It's what you hope for, and want, but when it happens, it happens without you.
The woman slipped back into her car and drove away.
♥ She drove herself back to the hospital, and this time they kept her for two months. How she was able to drive herself back and forth like that, she couldn't explain. But she had been lucky. When you live alone, it can take a while for someone to discover you've died. You know, the insides go first. That's what people smell when they smell a dead body. It's the insides.
♥ "You know," she said, trying around to face her daughter. That's what that person was back there-her daughter. But a stranger might have been more kind. "You won't understand this now, but some day, when you're a mother yourself, you'll remember what you just said to me and you'll hate yourself for having said it. You don't know what it's like to give birth, to have your body bust open like that. And then to have to clean and bathe and feed that life-just a bunch of cries and burps and shit to attend to. And I did it on my own! You just don't know!" Her daughter stared out the window as if there was something off in the distance. She went on, "But let me say this to you. And you, you remember it! You remember it! No one really wants to be a mother. But you can't know this for sure until you are one." She turned forward again, started the car, pulled the seat belt over her left shoulder and clicked it into place too, securing herself. Then she checked her side and rear-view mirrors and waited for a clearing.
~~You Are So Embarrassing.
♥ "That won't happen to me!" I said, shaking my head vigorously from side to side and puffing my chest out, so full of pride.
"No. Especially you. You think you're so smart, but in the end that's the thing that will get you. That 'I love you' will do it for you. It gets everybody," she said with another laugh. "Don't think you're some exception now. I know you're just a kid, but that doesn't mean you can't know things. Might not make much sense now, but it will. Eventually."
~~Ewwrrrkk.
♥ Because the tax form asked you to declare a marital status, she saw every stage of love. There was the initial giddiness at having found each other, the boredom of having been together for too long, the anguish of separation, the finality of a divorce, the clinging one did in the hopes of a reconciliation that was not coming. She liked spending her days listening to people describe how tings had fallen apart. It was like watching a play being acted out in front of her, the feelings raw and real-all of it up close. She didn't have to feel what they felt, but what they told her about themselves stayed with her.
♥ The gas station. He came out to pump the gas. He was not beautiful, but she liked looking at him. Beauty was boring. To be ugly was to be particular, memorable, unforgettable even. He was uglier than that. Grotesque seemed right to describe him. It was not yet spring and there was a chill in the air, but the man was shirtless. He had hair like barnacles all over his chest. It reminded Mary of pubic hair, messy and wet and shining. There was something bold about him, walking around so bare like that.
♥ He had a reputation for being someone women fell in love with, and he was known to abandon them when that happened, leaving them walking in the street below his window, begging to know why. Mary wondered what it was he did to make them lose themselves that way. She wanted to know if it could happen to her.
♥ He noticed her sitting at her desk and came over. "Hey," he said. "Can I ask you some questions?"
She did not like how he used that first word. Hey. As though she were some hole in the wall you could just stick your questions into.
♥ She read a book that had belonged to her since she was a little girl. It was about a monster, but it wasn't scary at all. When she was about four, she wanted to be the beast. She roared and pounded at her chest and no one ever said that was not how a little girl should be. She could be ugly and uglier and even more ugly. She threw the book across the room. It left a dark mark on the wall, like a bruise. To be a monster, a beast of some kind. Watching everything shudder, down to the most useless blade of grass. She wanted that for herself.
♥ Something had unravelled. Everything was wet and muggy. She stepped back underneath the awning, where it did not rain, and noticed a little mound of dirt. At the centre of that mound was a hole-an entrance and an exit. She imagined the networks beneath her feet. How they went on forever. She hated that it was closed off to her-the ants and their secret world of working together and lifting things greater than themselves. None of them were like her, working alone. She lifted a foot and wiped away the mound. As if nothing had ever been there. They would build it back eventually. That was the magic they had, together.
♥ When the elevator arrived, there was a ding, like a service bell on a desk. Her black shoes clicked on the floor and when they stopped, the door to his apartment opened. He served dinner. He explained everything to her. How it would all unfold. He said it was going to be sweet and tender and loving. Then he'd tell her he didn't love her. "It'll be a lie," he said. "I don't like feelings."
When the evening was over, she noticed the paintings in the apartment. He said he painted only with black. He had very large canvases leaned against the wall. They all looked the same to Mary, until she got closer. The thing about these paintings was their strokes. Each one was particular, distinctive. She angled a painting toward the light, revealing where the strokes changed, where they thickened, where they swirled, when they began and ended.
She was going to go home, but then she saw him sitting there on the bed. Waiting for her to do something. She she stayed.
♥ After a while, he said, "I don't love you." Mary did not say anything back. She saw now that his eyes were grey. And she was not there. She said nothing about love, asked nothing about it, or how he felt. "You're lying," she said.
He said, "Don't be ridiculous."
What was the difference between someone who lied about love and someone who didn't love you? Nothing.
That night, Mary packed her bags and left town. No one would know she had been there, that anything had happened to her in that place. But that didn't matter. She knew what she was for him. A void that would be immense.
~~The Gas Station.
♥ He thought Katie's family was a bunch of nobodies and I'd end up a nobody too if I kept spending time with them.
Dad always talked about life as if it spilled out all at once and we wouldn't have time to think or do anything about what was going to happen to us. He talked like he had to tell me everything now because we'd never see each other again. I'd roll my eyes at him, but that only made him go on. It always circled back to how different Katie and I were, and how I wouldn't get the same things she got in her life.
In spite of what he said, he did give me something Katie had. I had told him how much I liked the paint colour of the walls in Katie's bedroom. I couldn't stop talking about it. So Dad went out and bought a can of red pain and a can of white paint-the pink paint was more expensive because it was popular and because they mixed the colour for you at the store. Dad put a dollop of white into the red paint and stirred. When the paint was wet on the wall it looked pink, but when it died it turned a dark pink, and there were smudges of red where the paint hadn't mixed well. The paint didn't cover up the mould. I didn't say anything about that. I would just look at those dark pink spots and smile to myself. I had my own room, after all, and he was trying.
♥ We couldn't believe they had their own bin and could walk to their own curb. We had to carry our garbage to a tiny closet at the end of the hallways and drop the plastic bags down a hole in the wall. Katie and I were afraid someone would come up behind us and push us down the hole too. Sometimes, before taking out the garbage, we would call each other on the phone just to let the other know. "If I go missing, you know what happened," she'd say. Sometimes we would even go to the garbage chute together. For a laugh, we'd take turns pushing each other from behind toward the hole-but not too hard. Just enough for us to feel our fear and then let it go.
♥ ..we quickly ran inside the building and laughed maniacally in the stairwell. I liked the sound of our laughter then. Even though it was just the two of us there, the way it echoed and multiplied made us sound like more.
♥ Asking for fifty cents was like asking for a million dollars-when you don't have it, you just don't have it. Once, though, to teach me some kind of lesson when I asked for bus fare, Dad said, "You know how hard it is to make fifty cents? Why don't you go outside and try to find one cent." So I did. I went outside and searched the ground for some change but found none. When I came back inside, I didn't say a word. I couldn't even find one cent, so I understood how hard it was for him to make fifty of them. And yet, as I went to bed that night, I felt a coldness underneath my pillow. It was two shiny quarters.
♥ I don't think too hard on it-it was the way it was. We lose each other, or the way we know each other gets lost.
Before that, though, the last time we were together, we stood outside on her balcony to look at the sunset. We hadn't ever seen one like it before. It had something to do with the way the Earth had lined itself up in the universe. Some rare planetary alignment. The sun was large and brilliant.
I told her, "Looks close, doesn't it? Like it's someplace we could walk to and grab a piece of for ourselves."
She leaned over and clawed at the air.
♥ I wanted to run up to her, ask her if she was married or if she had kids, if she was happy. But if I asked her all that, she'd probably want to ask about me too, and I didn't want to talk about myself. I didn't want her to see me as I was in my uniform and my work shoes. Sometimes people have a way of looking at you that makes you feel you have to explain yourself.
Then I thought of Dad waiting for me at home, still in the same building Katie and her family moved out of, and I didn't want to have to explain that either. The light turned, and I watched Katie walk away from the rest of the crowd.
When I got home, Dad asked about my night at work and what I cleaned. Then he said, "Sit down, eat."
I wanted to tell him that he'd been wrong about Katie. She wasn't a nobody. Katie and I had been friends. Good friends, even. The memory of it, that it had happened, was worth something to me. I wanted to tell him that, but then he told me there was mould on the walls again and that I'd let it get out of hand.
~~A Far Distant Thing.
♥ I didn't know what kind of job my mother had signed us up for, dressed like this at one in the morning. I had heard from a friend that there are always jobs at the hog farm, for those who can handle it. You can clean the shit from the floor, or clean the hogs when they're still alive, just before they put them out on the line. Or you can rub the male ones to get them excited to mate. I didn't want that to be my job and hoped my mother hadn't signed me up for anything like that. But a job is a job, and even one like that, you could still have your dignity.
♥ I had seen these men before at the card parties my mother went to. She cooked meals with their wives in the kitchen. When we all sat down to eat on those nights, everyone would talk about their work, their bosses, how hard it was back home, how they all came to the country we live in now-but no one cried or talked sad. They all laughed. The sadder the story, the louder the laughter. Always a competition. You'd try to one-up the person who'd come before you with an even more tragic story and a louder laugh. But no one was laughed here. Every face was serious.
♥ My father was a good man. No one who knew him had a bad thing to say about him. He died early in my life. I can hardly see his face in my mind anymore. I do remember that he used to call me Ugly. My mother said he called me that so my looks wouldn't go to my head. She said the time for thinking about looks was after you get educated and work a good job. Then looks, if they're any good, are worth something to you. But you couldn't do it the other way around.
♥ Back in Laos, the men who worked in this field had been doctors, teachers, farmers with their own land, like my mom. None had set out for a life spent crouched down in the soft earth, groping for faceless things in the night, this shit of the earth. And they picked like it. James had never been anything else, except a kid. James picked like a man who was free.
♥ I watched her heart break. She had been the best, but it hadn't mattered. The low count of her harvest now didn't tell you what had happened to the job or how it had changed. And yet the numbers could be used to say a picker was unskilled or lazy. Those things, I knew my mother was not.
♥ So much had changed and become confusing to me. I knew James as boss out at the farm, and I knew James as the fourteen-year-old boy I went to school with. They seemed like different people. When I was at work, I would watch him, waiting for this newfound coldness to turn into something else, the way one waits to be loved, to be recognized as someone to be loved. I didn't look at that face too long because I didn't like what I saw, and maybe what I wanted to see had never been there.
~~Picking Worms.