Sometimes it is difficult to identify exactly what is at work in a great piece of fiction. Is it the voice? The character? The plot? Often, the better the writing, the harder it is to talk about what makes it so good. Chang works her magic with this piece, leaving the reader hopeful, yet sad, laughing, but reflecting. She has injected into her work that special something, a secret seasoning that is the key to all good writing.
Rachel Ephraim is Founder and Director of FreeBird Workshops. For more information, visit: www.FreeBirdWorkshops.com
My sister’s house was burgled last week. Someone broke in through the window in front of the kitchen sink. They just smashed it right in, she said over the phone, kind of neatly, right into the sink. The cops told her it was one of the tidiest burglaries they had ever seen. They joked that the burglar must have been a pretty nice guy. It looked like he even took off his shoes, they said. Too bad for him that my sister’s a real kook. She doesn’t own a TV. She doesn’t have any jewelry but her wedding ring. She doesn’t even have a full set of silverware. My wife asked her one time, “Why don’t you just buy a TV, even a little one, for Tyler.” My sister said “I don’t want to be reminded that we’re all going to hell for the same reasons.”
She does this a lot, my sister. She says things that have quick expiration dates. They make sense for a little while because of the way she says them. And then later you go home and you think, What gives? But it’s too late to argue because you’re at home taking out the garbage, and she’s at home making that face that women make sometimes when they’ve just hung up a heavy framed thing with a hammer, two nails, and their own bare hands.
She called me the day after her house was broken into and asked me if I could come over and fix a broken window. I asked her how she broke it, and she said she didn’t break it. I asked her who did–she said she didn’t know. I asked her if she called the cops, she said yes. I asked her what they said. She answered, “They said I got robbed by a pretty nice guy.”
Normally Laurie would never call to ask me for help. She gave up asking for help when she was six years old. Do not be fooled into thinking that my sister is a capable woman. She just gets by with less. If she can’t carry something, she won’t have it. And if she can’t open a jar of something, she won’t eat it. That sort of thing. Her husband Jim is a very handy man, smart too. He likes to fix things for her, the poor guy. He makes things easier for her so that she doesn’t have to give up so often. One time I saw him take a jar of pickles right out of the grocery bag, pop the lid, close it again, and put it in the fridge. Laurie heard the pop and whizzed back in, eyes narrowed, cradling a watermelon in one arm and a bag of onions that looked like a sack of little faceless heads in the other. When I turned around, Jim had the jar back out and was already crunching.
“Just felt like a pickle,” he shrugged.
But Jim was in Montauk for the week, visiting his brother whose diabetes was so bad his hair was falling out. So Laurie asked me to fix the window. But not the way a woman normally asks you to fix a window. She didn’t offer to bake me a pie in return, or tell me if it was too much trouble I shouldn’t bother. She said, “I figure you’ve done it before, so it might be more rewarding for you.”
What gives?
I have fixed a shattered window before: a glass panel in the sunroom of my parents’ house in McLean, Virginia. My parents used to live in a gated community called The Reserve in a town where the lowest salary was earned by the security guards of gated communities. After they retired, my parents transformed from working people into bird people. And bird people of a certain age take birds very seriously. When I lived with my parents, we never chatted at the dinner table about Laurie who was living in Atlanta or my mother’s cirrhosis or the rising prices of produce. We talked squirrel tactics. How could we stop the squirrels from eating all the birdseed? How could we invite one genus of wildlife but repel another? In the war my parents waged against the growing squirrel population, it was hard to say who won and lost each battle. Sometimes our yard was overrun with squirrels pawing at my mother’s birdfeeders and nibbling at whatever fell to the ground. Other times my parents were the victors, shooing the squirrels away with a broom and a broken tennis racquet and then triumphantly waiting for the nervous birds to come back.
One morning in particular, my mother was standing in the sunroom glaring through the window at the squirrels breakfasting in her garden. Out of the blue, she just lashed out at them, pounding the glass with her fist, yelling “Hey! HEY!” until she just smashed right on through it.
So I offered to stay at Laurie’s for a couple of nights. I figured she needed a man in the house to protect her and Tyler from burglars, to fix the broken window, to open new jars of pickles. I told her I would be there around seven but there was traffic on I-95 and I got there at eight. I walked in to see my sister crying her goddamn eyes out. She was sitting in a lumpy chair the color of a ham and cheese sandwich, and her face was all pursed up like a prune. A mug was steaming on the end table next to her, and the stereo looked like it had been playing a CD but wasn’t anymore. A cat was sleeping in the curve of her slumped-over body. She was weeping and her shoulders were quivering and she wasn’t making a sound.
I said, “What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to wake the cat.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s Tyler,” she blubbered through sobs. “He’s too old to h-h-hold.”
She sat there and cried, and I stood there and stood. I took a box of tissues from one end table and moved it to a closer end table and then took my things to the guest room.
It feels like I have been walking in on my sister weeping silently since the day I was born. When we were younger I’d see Laurie sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of tea shedding tears into her Earl Grey, or hunched over outside crying onto a bed of blameless snapdragons. One time when she was home from college, I found Laurie—all knotted up on the stairwell like a pretzel—finishing up a crying spell. I asked her what was wrong. She took a deep breath and said, “My body is so ready to have a baby. I know it. But I can’t just have one myself!” I took a roll of toilet paper from the hall closet and left it on the step below her. I tried to be warm, “Well, that’s a real dilemma.” She was bristly. “Well, it’s nature, Simon.” And she stormed off, leaving the toilet paper roll on the stairs. Do they know they’re crazy? Or do they think they are normal?
My dad jokes that Laurie got another heart where her brain should have been. When she was pregnant with Tyler, Laurie would eat a lot and she would repeat herself a lot. She would call me and sigh into the phone, and say “There’s so much in the world, and I can feel all of it. Everything touches me. I see too much. I hear too much. Everything is always something.” It was hard to hear sometimes amidst all the crunching—she had developed a carrot thing during her last trimester—but she called to tell me so many times that it became a mantra for me. I held Tyler when he was seven pounds and thought, Everything is something. I crack an egg on the edge of a pan in the mornings and think, Everything is something. I drive to the hospital where my mother is always dying and think, Everything is something.
Laurie had already gone to work the next morning, but she left a mushroom omelet, two waffles, and a variety of coffees for me on her kitchen counter. After I finished breakfast, Tyler still hadn’t woken up. He’s an okay kid. Likes to run around a little too much, but what do I care. So I sat down to read the paper and noticed two things. 1) We are all going to hell for the same reasons. 2) It was getting very hot. This wasn’t the kind of dry heat that you forget about sometimes when there’s a breeze or you’ve got a cold drink in your hand. This was thick, viscous heat. Georgia heat—so heavy it clogs your ears like you’re underwater. Laurie has a perfectly functional air conditioning system, but she refuses to turn it on. I visited her in the dead of August last year and cranked it up. The next time I came back to visit she had printed a little sign and taped it over the thermostat. It said, “Do not lower temperature. Think of (y)our environment.”
I sat on the edge of the sink taking out the screws and chipping away at the putty from the old frame. By now my shirt was drenched in sweat, so I threw it on the floor. Shirtless and sticky, with my feet in the empty sink, I stretched to reach a banana from the fruit bowl. A howl of laughter erupted behind me. Tyler was standing in the doorway, wearing a set of pajamas with bubbles on them. When we locked eyes, he ran away shrieking with laughter, “Ohohoho! Monkey Alert! Monkey Alert! Whoowhoo! Monkey Alert!” Surely he understands that body hair is hereditary.
I finished working (fully clothed) at around three o’clock and stepped back to look at my work. It was better than the panel I had replaced for my parents a while back. I hadn’t seen Tyler for most of the day. He would come in to check on me every once in a while when my back was turned. I would hear him stifling giggles, but when I turned around he wasn’t there and all I heard were bare feet pattering on the linoleum. Whoowhoo!
The front door woke me up from my nap. Laurie was back from work and I could hear another voice with her. A woman’s voice, low and musical. I hopped up off the bed, put my jeans on, and walked over to the hall. But as I approached them, something held me back. It was the look on the other woman’s face. She had burnt orange hair and pale eyes. She looked at me, and either she knew something I didn’t know or we both knew something together. I stood at a distance from them. She was hugging Laurie, and Laurie’s back was to me, and the woman kept saying, “I know, honey, I know. There’s always something.” She held Laurie for a long time. Just held her body and swayed a little bit like they were dancing on a cruise ship.
I turned on my heels and slid toward the guest room, not wanting to bother them. I decided to shower, so I got to the bathroom and started stripping down. Were my socks something? Was my shirt something? Were the towels something? Was the sink something? I stood naked in front of the mirror. Was my face something? No. My face was blank as a brick wall. I wanted my face to be something. Like the way Laurie’s face was something when I found her frowning on the stairwell of our old house in McLean. I tried to make my face something. Tried to twist it up the way you wring a wet towel. But I just made that face you make sometimes when you take a whiff of a tub of cottage cheese you left in the back of the fridge for a few months and when you found it again there was something wispy and fuzzy growing in there that you would almost like to eat if you didn’t know it was the opposite of what used to be in there. Everything in Laurie’s body was something. Everything around her body too. But when I looked down at my body, at the stupid hairs all over it, I couldn’t see something. I couldn’t see anything. And all I could hear in my mind was an echo, loud and shrill, “Whoowhoo! Monkey Alert! Whoowhoo! Monkey Alert!”
Elysha Chang lives in New York and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She is originally from Virginia.