Nothing But the Truth (23 page)

Earlier, I told Abe I wasn’t a baby anymore, but now, all I want is for Stu to put his arms around me and protect me. Shoot myself up with his kisses so that I’ll forget all about Mama, Dad, his fists, me.

I pull on sweats and sneakers, and tiptoe across the floor without worrying about tripping and falling. There’s no sound coming from the other rooms. The window easily slides open all the way now that it’s no longer blocked by junk.

Leaning out, I stare at the one-story drop to the ground. Just this morning, I wouldn’t have dreamed of escaping by window. But after buildering across Encina Hall, shimmying out of a suburban house should be as easy as climbing off a step stool. I slip out the window onto a tiny ledge. Side stepping carefully, I reach out for the overgrown fig tree.

And just like Mama before me, I sneak out of the house.

To put as much
distance as I can between Mama and my memories, I start off in a sprint. But it’s hard to run when you can’t see farther than a couple of feet because your contact lenses are in the bathroom and you’re on the verge of crying but can’t since you’re breathing too hard. Halfway to campus, it dawns on me that I’ve been running in the dark my whole life. I’ve always assumed it was my mother who drove my dad away. In reality, she was the one who drove away.

I slow to a jog-limp, holding my cramping side.

My father, he of the fantasy rescues, was the one Mama rescued us from.

As fast as I can, I sprint up the steep hill to where music is blasting out of Synergy. Everybody’s partying tonight—Abe, the math groupies, Auntie Lu’s next-door neighbors. I’m the lone reveler at my own pity party. I brighten. At least the Synergy party is on a college campus.

College + party = booze.

I am ready to get drunk for the first time in my life, ready to lose total control.

The music literally pounds in the darkened common room, and the thumping bass replaces my own heartbeat. The furniture has been pushed off to the side for a makeshift dance floor. The only people dancing are Jasmine and Anne; a swarm of boys are twitching around them. You honestly couldn’t call their jerky motions dancing.

I spot the huge bucket by a couple of kids playing chess. When I paw eagerly into the ice, I pull out nothing but soda. Naturally.

“Patty!” shouts Jasmine over the music and sways over to me. “You escaped.”

Now that I’m here, I don’t want to talk about Mama and my father. I don’t want to hear this techno non-music. I don’t want to think about the problem set I blew off. I just want Stu. Being one of the tallest guys in camp, he’s hard to miss. But I don’t see him in the room, on the dance floor, or with the chess players.

What I do see is the wary look Jasmine exchanges with Anne.

And then, I know. Anyone who confides in one of those women’s magazines or daytime talk shows that they had no idea, not the foggiest clue, that their partner was cheating on them is an idiot. I know why Stu’s not out here and why Katie of the Big Hair isn’t pushing her big boobs against him on the dance floor. I could hide this betrayal in my own Pandora’s box, tucking away a new bad memory that I don’t want to deal with. I could pretend that nothing is happening, that every thing is perfectly fine.

But something is happening. Right now.

I race up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

“Wait!” Jasmine runs right behind me, holding me back on the second-floor landing. Anne brings up the rear. Their ner vous glances sandwich me. Jasmine says, “Don’t.”

But I break free and head up the last flight. My hand is on Stu’s door when Jasmine places hers on top of mine and tells me again, “Really, don’t.”

“Why not? You’d do the same if it was your ex in there with another girl,” I say and her hand drops off of mine.

So we are an Asian troika, standing together, when I throw open the door. People say that it’s the weird details you
remember clearly after the shock wears off. Like that girl on
Oprah
who lost her leg in a shark attack and just remembers a loud POP! Yes, Mama made me watch the show on amazing survivals in case I ever found myself stuck in a crevasse or in the open seas with a shark stalking me.

But Mama and Oprah never prepared me for this. My own personal Torture Chamber, smelling of booze, and my almost-boyfriend in bed with someone else.

What I wish I’d remember is how Stu lifts his head and turns to me, his eyes blurry in drunken surprise. Or how Katie tosses her hair over her shoulder, smirking like she wanted me to find her mashing with him.

But I know what’s going to be permanently lodged in my memories is Stu, slurring my name so it sounds like it’s spoken with an Asian accent: “Pad-dy?”

When I climbed out of my window tonight, all I wanted was to erase the image of Mama’s battered face. What replaces it is no better.

29
Unbinding

O
n a rare, lucky
day, I can shave a fraction of a second off my personal best time running a 10K. But more often than not, I’m a couple seconds over. Now, Mama, I can always count on for accounting accuracy, down to the last cent and down to the last second. It’s how she was able to support two kids on her own.

Precisely at five the next morning, her guest room door opens. I sit up straighter on the sofa where I’ve been waiting since Brian dropped me off around midnight. On the drive home to Auntie Lu’s, Brian told me that drunk boys use their little heads to think.

Little heads = big mistakes.

I suppose if I had a little brain, Brian would have made me feel better. But I don’t. Which means that my heart feels like a gym floor that Stu’s used to practice his dribbling and shooting.

The woman who has judged me every second of my life shuffles down the hall, toting a large black briefcase and pulling a trim suitcase. Her flight doesn’t leave for another
four hours, but Mama’s mantra is that you can never be too early finishing your taxes or getting to the airport.

Even though I don’t make a sound or a move, Mama somehow senses that I’m in the room. The sun has barely dawned, yet Mama’s eyebrows are already furrowed in permanent concern. “Patty, what you doing?”

I lift her secret box of hurts.

Mama’s breath whooshes out in instant recognition. Time may heal all wounds, but it doesn’t seem to do much to obliterate certain memories. “
Aiyo,
Patty. Where you find that?”

“Auntie Lu’s office when I helped her space-clear.” Was that really only twelve hours ago?

I can almost hear every slap and every punch in Mama’s answering sigh. I bite my lip, wondering whether I’m doing the right thing. Will bringing up her past accomplish anything? But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Mrs. Meyers’s comments on every one of my papers, it’s to “Dig deeper. Give me more.” All my life, I’ve felt like my mouth has been bound shut—don’t ask too many questions, don’t call attention to yourself, don’t complain, just endure. It is generations too late to unbind my great-great-grandmother’s feet. But the ties that bind my lips loosen enough for me to whisper the question I have to ask: “Why did you even marry him?”

Mama’s lips tighten the way they do when she doesn’t think a subject is worth talking about.

“Mama, I saw the picture.”

She sits heavily on the chair opposite me, her back to the
tansu
chest and the beautiful shoes that once hid a cruelty I can’t imagine. I’m not sure she’s going to answer, but she surprises me. “He so nice in Taiwan. We have fun on his motorcycle.”

Motorcycle? If I needed more proof that I had no inkling of who Mama really is, I just got it.

“I see his blue eyes. So blue like ocean, sky, freedom. Then we move to America, we have two babies, no money. He still in school. Lots of pressure. Then I know what his blue eyes mean. I lost in air. I drown in water.” She sighs and brushes her hair out of her face. “I not trust him with you kids. He already yell lots at Abe. You so cute when baby, Patty. But you grow up. Not so chubby. Not so cute anymore.”

Once upon a time a couple of days ago, I would have bristled:
Not so cute anymore? What? Am I ugly now?
But now I’m just startled. She didn’t leave Dad just because he was coming after her. She left because she was trying to protect me, too. As I shed my baby fat, I was slimming down and toughening up to become a future punching bag.

Mama’s lips purse like she’s sipped a batch of my Tonic Soup. “Sometimes people little mean. It take long time to know someone. I not know him when marry him.” Mama swats the air sharply in front of her, like she’s fanning away a stench. “That so long ago.”

At PTA meetings and neighborhood get-togethers, Mama thaws slower than a glacier to new people, and I’ve always wondered why. Why the only people she considers friends are the ones she’s known for at least ten, fifteen years. My eyes go to the luggage next to the front door. Always an escape exit at her fingertips.

A lump the size of her homemade dumplings sticks in my throat. I’m not nodding my head like a bobble head. Not smiling through my hurt like a porcelain-perfect China Doll. It’s been my personal policy since seventh grade not to cry in front of Mama, ever. She’s so impatient with tears, proof
of weakness. I just didn’t realize that she had no time to be weak.

“That not important, Patty,” she says. “What important now is you—”

I complete her mantra for my life, “Go to good college. Get good job. Find a Good One.”

As fast as I wipe away my tears, another one rolls down my cheeks. So I duck my head and study the muted colors of the carpet, hoping Mama doesn’t notice that I’m crying.

“I not do good job,” Mama says heavily, her words boring into my heart.

I lift my head now and study Mama’s downcast face, the gray of her badly permed hair. How could I have mistranslated the lines around her mouth as grooves worn from pure disappointment in me? Some of them might be, but those lines on her forehead and under her eyes are worry. The same worry that compels Mama to hoard articles about dead, dying and damaged girls is the reason why she flew out to check on me. It’s not that Mama doesn’t trust me so much as she doesn’t trust the rest of the world.

“No, Mama, you’ve been a Good One,” I tell her. And I’m surprised at how much I mean it. She may not mother the way Janie’s mom does with intimate talks that are more girlfriend than parent, with the easy understanding I’ve always craved, but Mama’s been the Best One she knows how to be. And that is good enough.

“There other boys,” Mama says suddenly, patting me on the hand.

My head jerks up to search her eyes again. How did she know? How did she know that the someone I hardly knew had hurt me so much?

“You get Good One later when you go to Stanford. Some one you friends with long time.” Mama looks knowingly at me, her dark eyes that are so much like mine. “You want tea?”

I nod because tea with Mama sounds perfect.

An hour later, Mama
is anxious to leave for the airport. She tells Auntie Lu that she can’t afford to take any more time off of work. Otherwise, she says, looking more at my aunt than me, she would stay. From the way Auntie Lu nods, I know that they’ve reached some kind of rapprochement, but one I don’t quite understand until I spy Auntie Lu slipping a newspaper article into the
tansu.
Before she does, I read the headline: “True Love After All These Years.” Maybe Mama’s decided that whatever Victor’s faults and profession—“What photographer do all day?
Hunh!
”—he might be a suitable match for Auntie Lu after all.

My heart squeezes hard when Mama slides into her rental car. I close the car door for her. Auntie Lu is right, I realize. Mama works so hard. Not just because of Abe. But for me, too.

After a quick shower, I head back to Stanford and end up getting all sweaty again after eight minutes because I break into a run. I can’t help it. I’m hoping the steady pace of my run will space-clear the thoughts cluttering my head. Instead, it’s Palo Alto that disappears quickly under my feet.

So little of what I’ve known to be the absolute facts in my life are true. I almost feel like calling Abe just to make sure that he’s still a pain in my ass. But then I’d just wind up even more confused. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been jealous of Abe’s relationship with Mama, how she dotes on him. How she revels in his every accomplishment. But who else,
aside from Abe, did she have when she first immigrated to America? Auntie Lu didn’t even move to the states until after I was born.

Soon, I cross El Camino, already congested with morning traffic, and run onto the Stanford campus. When Brian first drove us to the campus, I thought I had a good grip on who I was, but now I’m not so sure anymore. Am I Zebra-woman, trying to outrun a prison of my father’s making? Or am I a buildering wannabe, trying to climb to a place I belong?

Or am I just a Stu reject, a girl who’s so easily forgotten?

The ghosts of chants and cheers in the Stanford stadium urge me on:
Run faster.

When I reach Museum Drive, I keep running until I’m on the south side of the Cantor Building. Modern and white, the art museum sticks out on this campus the way I stand out without trying back home. Of all the runs I’ve done here at Stanford, I’ve always detoured around the Rodin Sculpture Garden. I mean, who really needs to see
The Gates of Hell
in person when being a mixed-race, mixed-up teenager can be pure hell anyway?