Thinner

Grandmom kept receipts, invoices, statements, bills,
bundled with now-decayed rubber bands,
placed there carefully by her gnarled hands,
stacked and boxed, 1992 Home Savings,
1952, here's a Valentine's Card from her children
and a letter from her sons in the orphanage
where she kept them, being too poor
to house them at home with their sisters,
now tiny black and white contact prints
from negatives so rich from silver
dimes practically spill out of them -
Mom at 10 months like every other baby
in the lineage, squint eyes and dark hair
held at a distance by her unsmiling father.

And here is another: Pete The Greek, Grandmom's step-dad,
his only photo, saved perhaps because his wife is in it too,
plus the laminated prayer card announcing his funeral,
Mary Mother of God on one side, his life in two sentences
on the other, only it doesn't say what she always called him
"that son of a bitch" with the calumny that can only come
from close acquaintance.

Here they are together in bathing suits at the beach, Grandmom and Grandfather
   (though it doesn't sound right, Grandfather, he never returned
   after the war, stayed in Hong Kong far from his children, Mom
   didn't say much the day he died, just sobbed into her hands
   for the only time I ever remember her crying)
their arms around each other, Joe tall and handsome, Jean nearly as tall
showing her legs, the sand blaring, and on the reverse, August 3, 1935,
and I count
which means this photo was pretty
much taken when Mom was conceived
which also explains why Grandmom's smile
was the widest in any of the images
until the one captured the day her baby
graduated from University.

Our days are thinner now.
Images don't count
as much as when 90 cents for a packet of photos
cost a day's labor, and the one-inch-square memory
tucked away in an old envelope
next to a child's scrawled note, kept safe for 60 years
sustained imagination and memory
and eyes thick with living

Gift

Feet climbed into stockings, into shoes with wiggling toes, as though heavy-lidded eyes on the tips of five snakes darted to and fro seeking communal entrance to a sheltering cave.

A sigh, a groan raced up the telephone wire nerve interchange from those grounded feet, rising through an upside down pachinko game, pinging and slinging sideways then up through the knees - those two half-pendulums - up thighs that once spread to planted seed and later to bear children and then, on occasion, to form a lap, through the swinging hips that knew how to expertly buttress a glass-windowed kitchen door, up the laddered spine with its rungs of pain, past a neck longing for sober kisses or even drunk ones, slotting into a cerebellum with its own take-a-number turnstile: take a number, aching arches, compressed toes, get in line, you'll get your turn of attention next time we assemble at the shoe store.

For now, get on.

For now, for fifty years of now, slipping the shard ends of bone into wrapped leather taught Grandma a chief life lesson which she then gifted to me. Exhorted, even, when she finally put up the "Closed" sign on serving food to mostly paying customers.

"Always buy good shoes."

She looked at me with clear eyes that pierced like sewing needles, stitching me up against a hard world. With a glance she could see down to cold bone, but her half-smile was never a smirk.

"Always buy good shoes, and good scotch." One for standing up, one for sitting down.

Some gifts come at Christmas, some on the day celebrating when your mother did all that work pushing you out into the embrace of others, but maybe the best come any time, for all time:

"Pour me a Scotch, hon', and yourself too, and come sit, and have a drink with your ol' Grandma."

Would love to, Grandma, anytime.

Wherever you are - Merry Christmas.

Hands

I don't think she ever got a manicure in her life.

I'll have to ask. Grandmom's fingers were twisted from arthritis, red from ten thousand pans of hot dish water and heavy pan lifting. At market, she expertly knuckled tomatoes and peppers, gingerly held up ginger and mushrooms to muster eye-level confirmation of her digital inspection, and in kitchen she still firmly grasped the very well-honed chef's blade.

She left Mom her knives. The tines are still good. The handles have seen better days, and the 10" blade is now probably 8-1/2", with the thickest part sharpened down to barely more than a paring knife. But it cuts.

Everything made it through multiple uses. Plastic bags ended up rinsed, inverted on the dish drain or hanging by clips from a line. Paper towels, rung out, draped over cups. Tin foil was crinkled and wrinkled, folded and creased before being replaced in a drawer. New towels sat unused in the drawer, so each visit one or another of us would spirit an old one out when she wasn't looking. They had no fluff left, no absorbancy. They weren't even good for washing cars or dogs.

The knuckle tips on her right hand were askew perhaps 30 degrees from the main digits. From scrubbing? Gripping? When she curled it around the scotch tumbler she had me pour - "two fingers, dear - you're having a drink too, aren't you?" she left no doubt that the glass would remain firmly grasped, whatever the color or angle of her fingers.

At 93 she finally let loose her grip, before I would. As she lay in the bed at CHOMP, many of her offspring milling around the waiting area, children hanging over the benches to look at the koi in the indoor pond, adults doing the low-volume huddles here and there, seated in the neutral-colored fabric chairs, I took my turn at bedside. My aunt, a physician, patiently explained to my younger son what each of the tubes were for. "What's this?" he'd chirp, one after another, fascinated at the dials and fluids and, oh, GG, who was awake and smiling. I gripped her hand and looked at her face and she said, finally, you can let go, when it appeared I wouldn't.

I think she smiled. It would make sense if she smiled. I'll remember it that way, arrange her lips and mouth just so, put the words in her voice, in my mind's ear. We'll hear the timbre and the silence and feel goosebumps and it may as well be her hands that held mine and let go, finally, when they finally let go.

Joshua Tree

The Joshua tree stationed next to the driveway sagged in the Victorville summer heat. If he could stand tall. If he could, like his brethren who hopscotched across the desert floor, but here roots were cramped by cement, and instead he crouched like he would spring free at any moment. But he never did. And the crouch became a slouch.

His was a crown of crow diadems.

Red velvet curtains lined the living room window. Every morning he greeted them as they faded from black into blood. Faintly, he once heard them referred to as hooker drapes, then laughter. The brown haired human who turned the lights on and off, and who every few days dripped a water drink on the brown dirt, that would be her laugh.

He did not have hands.

He did not have fingers to brush her soft cheeks, or a mouth to speak with. Only his many arms could stiffly wave, when fickle Wind chose to visit. Not so fickle, perhaps: the human brought out a stick with thin twigs and brushed away his fallen skin, which Wind would shake free on her visits. His skin, once green, then yellow, then brown, would snap free and flutter. They could be butterflies, if they could fly upwards, couldn't they?

His other skin was also his tongue and nose and ears and armor. Its name sounded nothing like the voice of the black and white creature who squatted and made water and who had a mouth. He had skin that fell away and drank the sun and changed colors, and he had skin that had long memory and was constant and rough.

If he had had fingers that could have caressed her cheek, he would have found it soft as the underside of a new leaf. For her kind, she was old. Sometimes her acorns came to visit, parking their cars on the cement shoe that kept him contained. They would slink past him on the walkway carrying bags and boxes, commenting on the drapes, on the bright, on the dry air. He knew their names. When she watered his roots, she talked to him, words tumbling from her human mouth. Without a tongue, he became adept with his bark ears and listened.

Once when she was young with child she had sailed across the blue water and landed among dark haired people. There she had more young with black-brown hair, five in total who knew of each other. If there were others that didn't breathe, well, he had no mouth to speak for them. He listened as the bombs fell and rose in her voice, between the tinkle of water splashing from leaves to earth. He heard the march of millions of feet, and the grumbling hunger from millions of mouths, and he was curious why they didn't just turn skin into leaves and drink the sun?

She stayed with him for a number of turns. He was not old for his kind; trees don't count so much as live. He paid no attention to the flickering box that somehow deafened all the people. He didn't use soap, and if he was happy, it was when the damp earth cozened his skin and he could stretch another few leaves into the sky, and breathe in the wind and the sun and the sharp stars who kept him company in the dark.

Air

Like every night, the windows are blacked out. Snippets, mere slivers of light invite whistling then silence and stilled breathing, then the end of silence and the end of breathing, for some. Others will scream into the void, into the brick returned to dust and mounds.

Black is safest, but it’s not really black: the moon still shines, starlight twinkles, and from heaven the bombers can see silhouettes like in a child’s school performance in a darkened theater: enough to illuminate the crouching figures, enough to see what waits.

Pass the popcorn (there is no popcorn). Turn on the light (for god’s sake don’t turn on the light! Can’t you hear the engines’ whine?) Momma I’m scared (hush, hush baby, it’ll be all right.) You want to breathe again but the pilots might hear you. You want to breath again but closing your eyes is like a bear hugging you too tightly, it’s like that time in the swimming pool you got held under the water and fear ripped out your heart and you wanted to breath, anything, open your mouth and suck in water just to fill your lungs with something besides fear but it’s still dark. And the planes are still overhead. And you want to check the corners of the window to make sure no light can escape, like picking a scab – it won’t change anything for the better.

Time doesn’t pass with the sweep of a second hand. It doesn’t freeze like the top of a swing’s arc, the moment you leap into the void, and you see how the nearby tree limbs sieve light through dust, how the baby’s red hat sticks to her head, how far away lies the earth, how your heart is overhead until all at once gravity reaffirms her smooth embrace and your feet ache to find the ground, and laughing you land and roll and sound re-emerges from your ears.

It’s over. The all-clear sounds.

How do they know, Momma? What, baby, know what? To sound the sirens. How do they know it’s safe?

Brown haired ghost

Chatter and laughter: the fall of evening and the ascent of night. Mirth mingles well with bright lights: all those shiny faces and gleaming teeth and the pulse of conversation supporting crescendos, between sips or swigs.

The baby bounced with her amah after grandfather had doted: he rolled her feet like soft dough gently in the long fingers of his two hands and blew kisses onto the pink nubs, quite unseemly for a man of his station. He smiled. Jean beamed in reply, if her sisters-in-law froze their faces.

Candles dotted the sideboards and the mantle blazed; the chandelier blossomed like white fuchsia. Ice clinked. Heels clicked on teak. The windows reflected rivers of red, a blue chiffon torrent, an ache of frost frocks against arch black suits.

Whispers sound the same in every tongue.

Drinks were trimmed and replenished as if by magic, the night was magic, the din was only voices and yet the murmur kept the march of war at bay.

Joe kept council in the sitting room with old school chums and the lieutenants. His narrow face and sharp chin jutted like a single large tooth from beneath his straight, black, parted-in-the-center hair. Jean could see when Joe reached into his vest pocket for the silver cigarette case. He always held it in his left hand, clicked the clasp open with right, and slid out the white stick in a quick, fluid motion. She loved his hands. He’d snap shut the lid, tap the cigarette once twice, hold, once more, then place it between his dark-ruby lips, while in a single motion replace the case in his pocket and pull out a packet of matches. Flare; inhale and brightening ember; flick out the flame – what to do with the spent match? Jean watched Joe’s head swivel and glance land on the tray of a nearby server; he motioned him over and exchanged a snifter for the extinguished match. He saw her looking, held her gaze for a long second, then returned to his companions. Jean wasn’t quite sure if he smiled at her, or as he turned away.

She stood out. The white ghost, dark brunette hair, the American girl. Joe’s bride. They all spoke with British accents when she stood with them; her English was flat Philly, with drawn-out “o’s” and “ewe’s” and no intonation. Half a pace away, she might only have turned her head, and the conversation might veer suddenly back to Cantonese, quick as a shadow. She wouldn’t understand. Not the slight; not the content. Trilled laughter; Jean’s smile seemed coincidental.

C.T. attracted his own coterie: ministers and their wives, colonels and generals in regalia. None expected him to don traditional garb, a silk robe, ponytail; he did not. His suit was more charcoal than coal, however. His roundish glass frames shined subdued gold beneath his close-cropped pate. He still wore his wedding band, though widowed nearly a decade. His eldest son looked, long face expressionless, across the room at the man who stood conveniently at the center of the glow cast by the chandelier.

He told a joke, evidently: the gathering laughed. Jean, standing nearby, laughed, not overly loudly, but clearly. C.T. stopped and turned to her; suddenly a bubble of silence expanded outwards like an island in the stream of voices that still ran through the room.

Jean became conscious that her father-in-law had inclined his head towards her, eyebrows raised, expectant. “Why do you laugh, daughter?” If his son’s sisters frowned at the familiarity, the possessiveness – the acceptance – no watchers made comment.

“Why, your joke was funny, father.” Jean beamed.

He was still, and a look of amusement crept from his chin, across his expressive mouth, up his cheekbones. It rippled upwards into his eyes and brows and forehead, and he tilted back his head and laughed. “You understand!” It was more a confirmation than a question. “I am delighted!”

It was barely four months since Jean, her baby girl, and her prodigal husband had landed on the eastern shore at Shanghai. Four months of standing in the kitchen with the cooks; trailing them to the market; sitting while they bantered and laughed at the goings-on in the house of the Ambassador’s son, his father the emissary so recently returned from China’s participation in Hitler’s Olympiad. This brown haired ghost who sometimes shared the bed of her husband (when he came home) had sharp ears.

The island sank beneath the waves of sound and laughter; the moment passed. C.T.’s smile remained, however, throughout the night. Color mixed with the hours and alcohol and affixed itself into memory. The brown haired ghost had painted herself into her father-in-law's heart.

Joe kept silent in the sitting room, smoking. He shook off conversation, watching Jean, as she sometimes watched him: as though behind one-way glass. She didn’t turn to look at him the entire time.

It's like this:

It’s like this: Pete will take it. Mom won’t say a thing. You go out, sew all day, have lines in your fingers from where the needles press, a couple of dollars and some dimes and he better not find out you kept a dime for yourself.

Don’t let him kiss you when he leans in. Stand in the doorway, don’t step through and for God’s sake don’t stand with your back against the wall or the icebox or the door. Have air behind you.

Maybe keep your overcoat on, or a sweater, even in the summer.

He’ll smell like onions and garlicky lamb and sour yogurt if you’re lucky. If he smells like beer or it’s after 10 o’clock or the lights are out when you are walking up the sidewalk, I don’t know what to tell you.

Have the cash out, I guess. Don’t make him wait. OK, that’s what. Have the money out.

Get up the stairs and close the door and turn the key. But listen for the door in case I come home later and unlock the door for me when you hear me coming up the steps.

Don’t come out looking if you hear the door but don’t hear me coming up the steps.

Don’t cry, Jeannie. Don’t get that look. I don’t know why Mom… it doesn’t matter, it’s how things are. Come here, hug me. You look nice, honey, when you smile. Try to smile. See? I’m smiling, it helps, doesn’t it?

I think there’s a new movie at the RKO, with Cary Grant. Do you want to see it?

We should go now.

Whistle

You want to learn to whistle.  You’re six.  There’s a bird, the kind that were silent when it was loud with bombs, and then when to make a sound meant the humans could find you to eat you.  Now, the war is over, at least the war against the emperor.  The other war is still marching: there are still soldiers over the hill, or over the next hill.  But still far enough away so that the singing bird makes you want to whistle.

You purse your lips like a duckbill. That doesn’t work. All that happens is a whooshing noise like you’re blowing out a birthday candle (which you won’t see for another three years, but you don’t realize that yet) or rather, just a candle. You hyperventilate trying desperately to make the whistling sound. The bird calls again. It is a mockingbird even if it’s not a mockingbird: the sound stings you.

Light falls between the trees like arrows. Among the trunks other boys play; your older brother is ganged up with the other bigger boys. You are always the Indian. Your younger brother is sitting on the porch, again, wide eyed. You know how to whistle now, remembering that day in Hong Kong when the whateverbird taught you that sound is a choice, even if you don’t yet know how to make it. You learned that you can choose to purse your lips like a duck and someday a bird will fall out, on command.

You have knock knees, skinny thighs, and socks with no elastic. You have hair the color of coal and teeth like full moons. You can trace circles in the dirt with your toe. Like a dancer. Like the dancer you will be someday. You can whistle low, tunelessly, to make yourself happy. All your older brother can do is growl.

“Hey, Frank!” You turn toward the familiar with only the briefest of hesitation. You have come to learn that hesitation equals an arm punch. You don’t want to turn. You know, you can hear the heavy breaths, four or five of them. Joe isn’t in the lead – you can tell he wants to be, but defers to the oldest boy. When no one else is around he is the boss, but has learned to become obsequious and deferential, in a sneering way. “Frank, we’re playing.” It’s not a question, or even a command. It’s just a fact. It was time for you to become the Indian again, to slip among the trees and disappear down dirt paths if you didn’t want to be the bottom cushion to a gaggle of fists. Before they can organize you take off running, dodging in case a rock flitters by like that time two months ago when Joe actually got in trouble when Mom visited, because of the welt and blood on the back of your head. Joe only smiled when you’re in pain, you realize. You hit the treeline 15 yards ahead of the pack and slalom like a rabbit. A laugh escapes and you whistle in bursts, laughing that you can’t whistle. It doesn’t matter what happens next: you’re running and laughing and every so often a bird escapes your mouth into the tiptop leaves, heading for the sun.

Night (continued)

Every child is a shadow. Like any mother who is a sun, she cast her children from her until one, then two, and finally five shadows lined the earth beside her against the sky, as time furrowed nine years of days into her forehead.

Shadows have neither mouths nor gender. They make no sound and never leave the earth. But if a shadow does leave, it becomes a shade, and only visits at night, or behind closed eyes. The mother of a shadow? She bleeds and cries and when there isn’t food or a roof or shoes, if bombs fall and barren earth disputes with a loud sky over who, who is to rise, who is to be left behind when the guns shut their spitting maws: the mother of a shadow gives her shadows mouths and ears and empty tummies and feet to run with, and beds beneath someone else’s roof.

That is where she ended up keeping three of her shadows: beneath someone else’s roof.

They grew names. They grew into real boys: no escaping, like Peter Pan’s tried. They had sisters who stayed up nights, sometimes, wondering what it must be like to go to sleep in a dorm every night. They had a father who may as well have been a shade; every bit of daylight they saw, he saw just night, since he lived on the dark side of the planet. They were shades to him, still ripples, cast like stones into a pond. They sunk when they walked up the gangplank to the ocean liner destined for Los Angeles, and he never had to look or listen again because, as shadows, they had no mouths, no ears. He didn’t have to fear them: hunger pangs, eyes silent as night fell, the clutch of small fingers into his palm. They had a father with nothing at all to fear from them.

What are their names? Does it matter? They are no longer boys; one is now a shade himself. They have names and voices and eyebrows and pent-up memories, like a locked chest with the key dropped down a well. If they speak their own names, or their brother’s, it’s only because silence so long can only be interrupted by a bellow. Raise fist against the sky, father: where were your ears when our mouths asked for food? Where was your shoulder and strong back? Where are you buried, now, still silent?

Joe was his father: extra women, strapping children, until he rebuked the name and reclaimed the initials of his grandfather, in the Chinese tradition. Joe could pass as white, though, and married a white, and his white children with the Chinese surname must surely still surprise any who cross paths: the blond Wangs. His own guilt must be strong to so tightly claim the mantle of Christ; isn’t it said those who protest the most, are the most defensive, have the greatest fear? What were those nights like, the oldest foreign boy who might have just passed if it weren’t for his name and his foreign looking brothers?

Night (an excerpt)

How many nights did she sit, tumbler finger-wrapped, pupils wide to catch whatever faint light the lone streetlamp filtered through the flat's dingey windows?

The circular wooden table was drenched in a faded, tidy gingham. She knew which floorboards squeaked, where to step silently when she pushed back to rise before falling to dent the already-slumping mattress.

For now, just her fingers moved. She slipped knuckles round the rim like hands on a clock: a day passed, a year, an eon, while the seconds ticked off between arriving home exhausted to tumble into bed, and tomorrow returning early.

Squeaks sometimes escaped, like a kitten or pup or three boys rumbling. Unbidden her left hand reached up, touched her temple and the locks cupping her ear: she remembered running hair, flowing hair, short bristles or longer bangs, each belonging to a pair of shorts and skinned knees and shy lips.

The girls slept.  She could hear their even breathing – no simulacrum of slumber, fake inhales and exaggerated exhales - but the steady rhythm of chests rising automatically. Would she dream of flying tonight? Of sitting beneath the orange tree guarding the edge of that orchard? Or would whistles and klaxons blare, and the dirt rise up to coat the street like an angry wave of soldiers?

An eon ended, and Jean raised the whiskey to her dry lips, sipped, swallowed, and placed the empty on the cloth. Tomorrow she’d clean it. As she rose she changed her mind and took the glass to the sink, swirling cold water with fingertips then placing it on the rack. Her toothbrush was there, somewhere, but she ignored it.  The board creaked when she stepped but not loudly enough to stir her daughters. She glided through the doorway, slipping off her dress all of a piece with removing her shoes, absently draping it over the chairback, before carefully removing her hose; they ran so easily.

The thin blanket swallowed her as best it could. Another night and her sons slept in a dorm fifty miles distant.  Her heart floated out the window, covered in moonlight and rain and swam against the night current to brush the brows of her non-orphan sons who lived among orphans; if only they knew to feel their mother’s touch enough to murmur but not wake with its brush.

She wondered, do any of those lost boys remember the silk of their mother’s hands?