Boundless, p.6
Boundless, page 6
Time to stop being beige, Jen.
“No. Heck no,” I said loudly, forcefully, startling everyone around. “You can take your coffee and shove it.” I stared him down, daring him to make a scene. I heard noises behind me as Franky and Eddy and Helen moved to stand beside me.
Tim paused, his face hardened, and all traces of fake friendliness disappeared in an instant. His jaw tightened as he looked at Chance. With stiff fingers, he plucked his phone out of the breast pocket of his jacket. I hadn’t heard it vibrate. With an exaggerated frown on his face, he looked at the screen.
“Aw, well, we will have to hang out some other time. Looks like I got to get back to my parents’ house. It was nice to meet you, Jennifer,” he said and flashed that unnatural smile at me again. He did that little salute and walked toward the front of the hotel lobby.
Franky stood closer to my shoulder and snorted indelicately. “The weirdo never even looked at me the whole time. What’s his deal? Rude.” I nodded. Rude, indeed. She stared at me for a moment. “Want me to French braid your hair, Jen? I watched a couple videos on how to braid your texture of hair. I think it would look nice. You won’t have to tuck it behind your ears anymore.”
I nodded, grateful for an excuse to sit back down on the pile of jackets. I could feel the wave of adrenaline flooding my body. I took a few deep breaths, telling my body to relax. Franky sat behind me and pulled out a comb from somewhere, Helen sat back down nearby, and Eddy grabbed her gear and sat closer to watch as Franky worked the comb through my hair.
I wondered if I zoomed in to my DNA, like they do in the films they showed during biology class, if it would be braided like Franky was braiding my hair? Thin strands being woven over and over by Indigenous hands?
* * *
INVISIBLE
By Emiko Jean
Your office smells like a combination of disinfectant and clove oil. I google weird odor orthodontist on my phone as you lead Dad and me to the room with your desk. Tooth dust, it’s called.
Dad nudges me as you shut the door. “You almost ran into the wall back there,” he says. I look up, and he is grinning. He likes to tease me about walking and staring at my phone. His face blanks, and he mimics a stiff walking zombie.
I knock his arms down. “Please, don’t,” I say, stuffing my phone in my pocket. Dad has the worst sense of humor.
You laugh, flashing some teeth of your own as you slide an open folder across the desk. The front page is an invoice. Twenty minutes ago, you examined my teeth. Asked me to smile, then pressed pieces of crinkly graphite paper between my molars. Dad whistles low, seeing the bottom figure. “The price of a beautiful smile,” he remarks.
You reassure him that there is little work to be done. I’ll only need braces for a year and eight months if everything goes exceptionally well. It is my bite that concerns you. “It needs to be addressed,” you say.
Dad nods and studies the figures. While he does, your gaze bounces between the two of us. You have that look in your eyes—a curious squint. One I have seen before. Your whole face is a question mark. How? How does Dad have sandy blond hair? How do I have black? How are the shapes of our eyes and faces, the shades of our skin so different? How do we fit together as daughter and father? Maybe you think I’m adopted. Where did you get her from? a woman asked at the grocery store when I was eight.
Behind your desk is a file cabinet, and on it sits a picture of your family. Two girls and two boys with fair skin and fair smiles. They match you. Your wife. If Mom were here, I might make more sense to you. You would see me in her. But she left when I was seven. And I am more my father’s daughter than my mother’s.
Dad signs the paperwork. On our way out, he pays the deposit, and we make the first appointment. Two weeks later, I am back in your office. My friends are texting me GIFs. Pictures of girls with mouths full of metal, headgear, and even a couple stuck together by hooked wires in their mouths. I text them back a thumbs-down. I am the last of the group to have braces. I shouldn’t have waited so long. But I was too scared in middle school. And Dad wouldn’t make me. He’s no good at tough love.
“All right, let’s get started,” you say, rounding the dental chair. You slap on a pair of blue latex gloves. “Cool shoes,” you say. I glance down at yours. Nike Air Force 1’s tucked into khaki pants. Mine are Converse, with two holes in the corner of each where my pinkie toe has rubbed away the fabric. You roll toward me on your stool and pick through gleaming tools set on a tray with a blue napkin. “Ready, Tammy?”
“Tami,” I say, pronouncing my name correctly, emphasizing the phonics—Tah-mi.
You pause, place the tools down. “Tah-mi? Like the boy’s name?”
No, not like the boy’s name. Like my grandmother’s name on my mom’s side. It means pearl. I nod mutely. You switch to a keyboard, click, and open my chart. Next to my name, you type out Tommy. You hand me a pair of sunglasses and recline the chair. A hygienist arrives to help you. I close my eyes as you shift the overhead light closer. You get to work. I zone out while you clean and dry my teeth. While you glue on brackets and shine a blue light on them. While you slide on the bands and archwires.
An hour passes before you say, “Nearly done.” You tighten a wire, ask me to open and close. I do, and one minute later, you say, “Looks good.” You peel the gloves from your hands, rattle off aftercare instructions, and hand me a sheet with printed directions. The hygienist holds up a mirror and tells me to take a look. I smile, but it’s more of a grimace, and my mouth gleams with metal. My God, it’s worse than I thought. I run my tongue over the braces, then curl my lips inward, trying to adjust to the feel.
The hygienist lays the mirror down and pats my shoulder. “You’ll get used to it,” she says before leaving.
“Where are you from?” you ask, pushing a button. The seat rises, and suddenly I am upright.
I blink, startled. This is not the first time I have been asked this question. In fact, I have lost count of how many times I have been asked this question. But it’s always surprising. There is a drop in my stomach as if I am teetering on the edge of a minefield. “Oh, um.” I’m flustered, and my jaw is sore. I touch my lip. A little blood comes away on my fingers. You hand me a napkin, and I dab the corner of my mouth. You’re waiting for me to answer. “I am Japanese. Half, I mean. My dad is white, Jewish.” I cringe at my words while you nod thoughtfully. I swore I wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t divide myself up. Not after a teacher called me half-and-half in elementary school, like coffee creamer or as if to measure me like one does a recipe, segmenting me into parts. Am I too much of something? Not enough of another? I know what I am not—whole.
“Were you born here?” you ask, writing some notes into my chart.
“Yes,” I rasp.
“That’s cool,” you say. But it doesn’t feel that way unless you mean cool as in cold. As in exiled, left out in the darkness of space. I shouldn’t be surprised. There are thousands of years of history of people expelling what they don’t understand, what doesn’t conform, what doesn’t fit. You stand, and I have to crane my neck to find you. The light obstructs your face. “Give us a call if the tenderness lasts more than a few days.”
As I walk out, I see you with your next patient, hear you through the open door. “You play sports?” you ask him. I can’t see his face, but I can see his hands loosely gripping the armrest of the dental chair. He’s white.
I drive myself home, and when I get there, Dad’s special tennis shoes (that I wish he wouldn’t wear out in public) are by the door. They’re black with at least three-inch soles that help with his plantar fasciitis. Enya blasts through the house. We drove six hours one summer to see her in concert. The only thing Dad loves more than Enya is magic. If Enya ever put on a show with David Copperfield, my dad might actually die. I laugh with my friends about it.
Dad is in the kitchen. “Hey, you,” he says. A towel is thrown over his shoulder. His sleeves are rolled up and in his hands is a mixer, which he’s using to whip mashed potatoes. The whole space reeks of garlic. “How was your appointment?” he asks, then in the same breath says, “Let me see.” He clicks the mixer off and wipes his hands on the towel, waiting for me to show him.
“Fine,” I say, then pulling my lips into a smile, which quickly deflates into a frown.
“You okay?”
I think about you. Your words. Where are you from? It’s hard to process right now how I feel, so I focus on the physical. “My mouth is sore,” is all I say.
He gives me a sympathetic look. “I figured. That’s why we’re eating like Great-Grandma Rose tonight,” he announces. The table is set with green Jell-O, oatmeal, mashed avocado, and applesauce. “In fact,” he says, spooning mashed potatoes into a bowl, “I figured we’d have an old-lady night—early dinner and bedtime, maybe a puzzle in between.”
I hold up my hands and say, “Woo-hoo.”
When I go to bed, my mouth is numb from ice cream. I don’t sleep very well—I toss and turn and think about you, your question and how I wished I’d answered differently.
* * *
Four weeks later, I am sitting in the chair again. As I wait for you, I stare at my name in my patient chart. The letters blur together—Tommy, like the boy’s name. Just like last time, you start right away. Probing my mouth, tightening wires. But you’re done quicker. Just a check-up. “All looks good,” you say. You write something in my chart. “Where are you from?” you ask, finger perched above the keyboard. The glow of the monitor highlights your cheeks.
It takes me a moment to understand your question. That you are asking me the same thing again. Don’t you remember? Clearly, you do not. You wait for me. I mumble out an answer. A little better than last time. “I’m Japanese and white.” Whasian is what some of my friends call it.
“Have you ever been to Japan?” you ask, turning to me, hands braced on your knees.
I shake my head.
“I’ve heard it’s beautiful, the country and the culture,” you say. “My brother has been. Do you speak Japanese?”
You are not the first to ask me to downplay my whiteness, to play up my Japaneseness. I feel a tug-of-war inside me. Between you and the articles I read online on how to lighten my hair and make my eyes appear larger. “Some,” I say. More than some. But I keep it to myself. I don’t feel like pleasing you in this way. Proving myself.
In the car, I text Dad I am on my way home. He asks how my appointment was. I tell him fine, because all I want to do is forget about you.
The month goes by too fast. Soon I am back in your office, dread settling like a pit in my stomach. It grows as the minutes tick by. You are running late.
“He’ll just be another minute,” the dental hygienist assures me and pats my arm. I am already reclined. Sunglasses on and bib pinned to my shirt, ready for you. My toes curl in my sneakers, and my heartbeat increases. You are in your glass office with another parent and child, sliding the open folder across your desk. I watch you stand and shake the mother’s hand. Squeeze the kid’s shoulder.
Then you walk toward me and start without much preamble. While you tighten my braces and finger my mouth, I think about you. What you have asked me before, what you will probably ask me again soon. Somewhere you learned that it was okay. To say what is on your mind. To speak without considering the consequences.
I flex my hands and cycle through responses.
What if you ask me again? What will I tell you? These questions—where are you from? What are you mixed with? What are you?—are like bombs with timers. They detonate later inside me. Why can’t you see the fallout? Why can’t you see that I belong here, too? I want to say that you make me feel unnatural having so many cultures living inside me. Like Frankenstein, I am made up of spare parts.
Or maybe I’ll make it more personal. Maybe I’ll say, Your daughters, your sons, do you think they have ever been asked a question like this? Where are you from? Sweden? I hear that’s a beautiful country. Wonderful culture. Were you born here? Do you speak Swedish? It is your privilege not to have been asked such things.
You finish up. Withdraw from me and strip off your gloves, leaving them crumpled on the tray. Someone else will clean them up. “Where are you from?” you ask, as I predicted you would.
I swallow. Feel the blood in my mouth not from your ministrations this time but from biting my tongue. “I’m Japanese and white,” I say, and that is all because somewhere I have learned to be silent. If I point it out, you might deny it. Would you be angry? Offended? Defiant? Open? Hostile? It is the uncertainty that keeps me quiet. Somewhere deep down, I know. You want to talk about race. But you are not ready to talk about race.
I schedule my next appointment with you.
Dad is there when I get home. He is in the kitchen. He is holding a pan, and the house stinks of burned food. “Well, my risotto didn’t turn out,” he says with a frown. I pause in the entryway of the kitchen. Dad turns, sees me. “Honey?” he says. “What’s wrong?” I wonder if you know your children so well. If you can read their faces like maps. Dad’s eyes climb the hills of my cheeks, settle in the pools in my eyes.
I swallow. The words I could not speak to you bubble up in my throat and block it, threatening to choke me. But then there is a tiny pinprick in the dam—my dad stepping toward me, hand outstretched, ready to swim in the flood. I inhale a deep breath. In the acrid smell of our kitchen, I tell him about you. When I am done, Dad declares, “This calls for the very best of Enya.” He switches on the music and plays “A Day Without Rain.” Then he announces, “I am going to defrost some matzah ball soup.”
He directs me to sit and wait on the couch—because he says I need to be somewhere it feels as if I am being held. He brings me a steaming bowl of hot soup. Placing it in my hands, he asks me to tell him again about you, about how I feel. So I do. I recount how you saw me—my dark hair, my roundish eyes that flared at the corners, how you made my body feel not like my own. It is agonizing, pulling this shrapnel from my skin. But I do. I let the wound bleed. Then, at last, it clots just as I finish telling my father how you saw me and how I have never felt less seen.
* * *
MARIACHIS VS. BLUEGRASS
By Loriel Ryon
The blast of trumpets startles me. I lock eyes with my sisters, Vero and Paola, through the misty hair-sprayed dressing room.
There’s no way.
Vero gives me a panicked oh-no-she-didn’t look.
The trumpets echo down the hall, and then there’s a guitar strum. Paola cringes.
“She did,” Vero says, her voice rising in panic. She pushes up from her seat and rushes to the door, her wedding dress swishing around her.
I knew it. Mom hired a mariachi band for the wedding. After we all begged her not to.
Dad is going to freak out.
Vero peeks through the crack.
“What if Matt sees you?” I run and push the door shut. “It’s bad luck!”
Vero closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. She’s rather lovely, all done up with fancy makeup and long dark curls. Though I’ve drawn at least a dozen portraits of her, she looks different on her wedding day, older somehow. Like she’s really ready to begin her new life with Matt, and leave me and Paola behind.
One stern look from her and I step aside.
She pulls the door open again.
A guitarrón player strums the rhythm and the reedy sounds of an accordion echo as an all-woman mariachi band wearing matching gold suits and sombreros marches by. Their ornamented trousers tinkle as their boots thump on the ground, the hearty voice of the lead singer crooning the opening lines of “Cielito Lindo.”
Mom went all out.
How did she even find a mariachi band willing to come all the way to the beach?
Vero shuts the door and leans against it. “Dad’s going to be furious, and then Mom will threaten to leave, and this whole wedding was a terrible idea.”
A few months ago, there was an argument about the bands. Dad wanted bluegrass. Mom wanted mariachis. Vero didn’t want either because choosing one would mean not choosing the other. Matt finally stepped in and said they knew a DJ who would do them a favor.
We thought that had been the end of it. But apparently not.
“Let’s leave,” Paola says, wrapping a strand of her own dark hair around the curling iron. She adjusts the small silver hoop in her nose while she waits for the iron to heat her hair. “Call Matt. He said he’d be thrilled to elope.”
Vero rolls her eyes at Paola.
Vero is our oldest sister and a typical first-born. She hates disappointing people. She didn’t want a huge wedding, but to keep from making waves, she relented. Paola, our middle sister, is a bit of a rebel. She doesn’t care what most people think of her, though I know deep down she cares what Vero and I think. They are both always there when I need them.
In their own ways.
Like when I got dumped by my first boyfriend last summer, Vero cuddled up in bed with me and handed me tissues while I cried, and Paola came into my room with an armload full of toilet paper rolls and asked for his address.
And then there’s me. Irene (EE-reh-neh) to my mom’s side of the family (the Mexican side); Irene (Eye-reen) to my dad’s side of the family (the Irish side). I’m the baby. I’m fifteen, and I love to draw. My goal in life is usually to keep my head down.
