Mom left. Dad didn’t tell us anything. He just got up, and dressed, and told us to eat something. I saw some bananas on the kitchen counter with a few freckles on them and tore one from the bunch. Dug a nail through the end and peeled its yellow skin off. It came away in strips, three thick strips. I looked for bruises. I can’t stand eating a banana with bruises and was glad to see there were none. I peeled another one for my brother. “We don’t have much time,” my dad said, hurrying us out the door.
I looked for a smile from my dad.
He had a great smile, a mouth full of even teeth, and a dimple in each cheek. He was wearing his work clothes, not his nice ones. He wore nice clothes no matter the occasion, except when he went to work. None of the wool suits at the shops around here fit him, so he would buy the fabric at a store and take it to the one tailor he knew. That way, the shoulder stitching wouldn’t hang below his shoulder and his pants wouldn’t drag on the ground. You couldn’t tell he was short.
The tailor worked out of his home, not far from where we lived. My dad’s pieces were side projects the tailor took on for extra cash. He worked on them when he had time. There was never a finish date set, and my dad wasn’t pushy about it. My dad wasn’t tall, but he was handsome, especially when he wore his suits. He wore them to weddings, funerals, any kind of party or place with a dance floor. And he loved to dance. With Mom, especially. They were the first ones on the dance floor at a wedding. My dad always made sure that anyone who wanted to dance would have a chance to with him.
Whenever my dad went to drop off fabric at the tailor’s or received a call letting him know that the pieces were finished, we’d go with him, to give Mom a break. We’d wait in the car outside the tailor’s. It wasn’t long. Twenty minutes, maybe. He said, “That man doesn’t like kids.” Even if my father was angry or disagreed with someone, he smiled. Just smiled through it all.
My father worked somewhere that had a lot of cardboard boxes. We had a lot of cardboard around our place. We lived in a basement with two bedrooms. My father taped cardboard to all our windows so that no one could see us from the outside, but that also meant that we couldn’t see out from the inside. Still, he kept the cardboard taped to the windows because, he said, “It’s cheaper than curtains. More privacy, too.” My father also cut out a small square of cardboard for us to put our winter boots on. He said, “This way we won’t ruin the floor in the entryway.” I don’t know why he worried about that. It wasn’t like he owned the place. “Doesn’t matter. What if we move out, and someone else comes to live here? We don’t want them to think we’re pigs,” he said.
My brother and I shared one bedroom. He took the top bunk, and I took the bottom. He was two years younger than me, but that difference wasn’t a big deal. We talked about all our friends at school, and their parents, and our parents. “Did you see her dad? I thought he was her grandfather because he was sooooo oooold!” We were proud of how young our parents looked. They were often mistaken for teen-agers at the high school just down the hill from our school. And the guys in sixth grade would say to our mom, “What’s uuup, girl? You new here?” She’d smile, and me or my brother would say, “That’s our mom!” They’d apologize and ask, “Why’s she young?”
At night, there was always some noise outside that I couldn’t recognize, and it would take me a while to make up something to explain it away before I could calm down and go to sleep. I was a child who lived in my own mind and scared myself, and had a hard time talking myself out of it. Once, I thought I heard gunshots outside, but it was firecrackers going off. It was the Fourth of July. I thought there was a fire outside when what I was smelling was a car’s exhaust. A woman screaming at night turned out to be the blaring siren of an ambulance. For the longest time, there was this pretty, ethereal sound, as if a fairy were about to appear before me, but the fairy never appeared. I couldn’t sleep. When we walked to school, my brother showed me what it was. “Look, it’s that fairy music you hear,” he said, pointing to a porch with a small wind chime hanging from the ceiling.
My brother was really sensitive and noticed things that I didn’t. “Did you see Ryan at school today? He didn’t have anything to eat, and his mom doesn’t pick him up anymore. It’s a woman, but it’s not his mom. And Miss Stevens got a perm,” he said. “Someone called her Miss Curly in class, and everyone laughed. It must be hard to be a teacher. To go to school for so many years and know all that stuff and then come teach us so we know it, too.”
Our dad said that he never got to go to school like us. In Laos, the war came, and that was it. At least he knew how to read people, he said. “I just poo-poo paa-paa my way around until something makes sense to them. That’s how English works.” He smiled, like someone who was about to be hit but thought he could stop the blow if he shrank into himself and made like he was so tiny he wasn’t worth anything. Our mom didn’t know how to read and would tell us to take our questions to our dad. When she was still living with us, she’d grab the side of her head and tell us it hurt, and then she would go into their bedroom and close the door. Because of the cardboard, our place was always so dark.
When I think about it, other people were always trying to break up our parents. There was the woman on the sixth floor, who often forgot her keys and would press our buzzer to get Dad to go out and open the door for her. She knew that our intercom didn’t work properly and that the superintendent hadn’t come around to fix it. So she’d buzz, and Dad would have to go out there and let her into the building, and they’d talk in the hallway. I don’t know what they talked about, but Dad would come back and Mom would be so angry. He’d do his three smiles for her. He’d start with a smile that made his dimples sink in, then his lips would turn tight, as if he were pretending to smile, and then he’d flash a more relaxed smile where the wrinkles in his forehead didn’t show. He’d say he was ugly and no one wanted him, let alone wanted him enough to steal him away. “What for, to be a pet?”
It wasn’t the same when it came to Mom. Any man Mom talked to, our dad said, was a man trying to steal her. So it was our job to watch out for these men and make sure they didn’t come near our mom. “She’s married,” I would say if a man sat next to her on the bus. Me and my brother would squeeze in between to let him know she had children.
One time, at a park on a hot summer day, an old man came out of nowhere and sat on the blanket with our mother. He had hair the color of my pee, and there were so few hairs on his head I could count them all. I’d never seen him before, and I didn’t know who he was. He was the type of person who called my mom a lotus flower or yelled “Ten dollars! Ten dollars!” at her. People like that were always telling us to go home. I don’t know why. It was just a basement. We didn’t even have a balcony.
I tapped my brother on the shoulder and showed him that I had some stones in my hand, and I turned my chin toward the man with my mom. My brother understood. We crept close and hid behind a tree stump that was half poking out of the ground, and we threw the stones at him. We were nice about it at first, using small ones that mostly hit him on the arm. He laughed and kept on trying to talk to her. After that, we knew we had to do greater damage.
I signalled like a soldier to my brother to try a spot on his face. He said, “I don’t want to. He’s just a man.” I did it myself—picked up some more stones, heavier ones, and threw them. They whizzed by the man’s head. Then I picked up another one, and it hit the man on the mouth. My mom looked at us, and then back at the man, and laughed. The man got up off the blanket and shouted at me, “Fucking kids!” I stared back at him and took my index finger and slid it across my neck like it was a knife. I yelled “Fucking old man!” and stuck out my flat chest. My brother slunk away and hid inside an orange tube slide.
We didn’t tell our dad. He wouldn’t have been able to get past the fact that some man had come to talk to our mother, so I couldn’t even tell him how I’d protected her. Some things you just do and you know you did right. You don’t have to wait for someone to tell you.
I didn’t know what homework was. And since my parents had never gone to school themselves, they never asked me about it. I thought that because we spent all day at school sitting at a desk—working—when I got home my evening was supposed to be like Dad’s. It was supposed to be for rest, for watching television as long as my eyes would stay open. I brought schoolwork home with me, but I just left it in a plastic bag by the door. The science project, though, was a big thing. Our teacher had talked about it since the first day, and we were supposed to work on it all year. I’d forgotten about it after Mom left, and now there were only three weeks until this big show. There would be prizes. I’d never won anything before, and my brother said, “Dad can make something easy. First place, too, I bet,” so I told Dad and we scrambled something together two nights before it was due.
He took a piece of cardboard from the corner of our kitchen window and asked me to cut it into small strips, the size of Popsicle sticks. We needed more sticks, he said. The more cardboard we took from the window, the more light we let in, and the more we let people see us. But once we’d got about a hundred of those sticks he began building something. It looked like a house, but not like the houses here. It was on stilts. He said he’d lived in a house like that before we came here. “Now I’m a refugee,” he said. I didn’t know what a refugee was, and neither did my brother, but I thought that since my dad had said he was one that must mean that we were, too, like the way we carry our last name. Whether we wanted that name or not, it was just there, telling everyone where we came from and that we were related.
The thing my father made was tiny and beautiful and so delicate and tender. If it weren’t for the glue, I was pretty sure the whole thing would have fallen apart real easy. I didn’t want to take it to school and have it on display. It was so obvious that I hadn’t built that thing. This was an adult’s hand at work. All the same, I was proud of my dad and what he’d made, and I wanted everyone to see it.
When I brought my dad’s little house into the classroom and placed it on top of my desk, a crowd formed quickly. Everyone was impressed. There were doubts, even accusations already that I hadn’t made it. I didn’t defend myself. I just stayed quiet. I looked around at the other projects. A bowl of water. If you dropped ice cubes into it and then dropped a thread with a bit of salt in, it would melt the ice and the thread would sink into it. A kid held up a thread, and an ice cube dangled from the end of it. Someone else had made an eyeball. It had labels, explaining what each part was called and how it all worked—what happened when a part got damaged and a person couldn’t see. What it means when we wear glasses. I thought that was interesting. Then, there was this brown thing that looked like a pile of shit. I really did not know what it was. It was gigantic and took up a whole table all by itself. Smoke came out of a hole. When someone poured liquid into that hole, you could hear something rumbling and foaming. It was impressive. The moment I saw that thing, I knew that the competition was over and it would win. By the time school ended for the day, the prizes had been awarded. First, second, third, and honorable mention.
I walked home with the thing my dad had made and left it in the living room. I should have just trashed it, but I didn’t have the heart. I knew it was something you didn’t destroy. So I just brought it home.
When my dad came home from work, he came running toward me, excited, and he asked me what we’d won. He was so certain and confident.
I told him that what he’d made didn’t win anything.
I don’t know why it meant so much to him, but my dad began to cry then. His shoulders dropped, and his arms hung by his side. He looked like he was smiling, but he was crying. Tears wet his whole face, even though his eyes were closed. My brother cried, too. He cries at just about everything, and the sight of my father crying—well, it didn’t matter why. He was done for.
I didn’t know what to do for my father then. It didn’t seem right to tell him that things would be fine. It didn’t seem right to tell him there was always next year. It was just that he’d never been to school. He didn’t know you could work so hard and no matter what you did, it wouldn’t be good enough. He didn’t know that once you began to understand something, something else would come along and you’d have to learn to understand it all over again.
He turned to me after he was done crying, wiping his nose and tears. Who won? he asked. He wanted to know. I told him that I couldn’t remember. And it really didn’t matter. What mattered were the hours he’d put into making his house. Making something beautiful that no one had ever seen before. And I don’t know why I said this or where it came from or what I meant exactly, but I said, “Sometimes the winner doesn’t win.”
I didn’t want my father to know that something called a “wall cano” that looked like a pile of shit with foam coming out of its hole had won first place. Or that an eyeball thing had won second. Or that a stupid trick with ice cubes had won third. I just knew not to bring my schoolwork home and have my dad help me ever again for as long as I lived. I would go it alone. The man just wasn’t cut out for that stuff.
Not long after this, I thought I saw my mom across the street from my school. I felt something bright draw my eyes, and when I looked a woman was standing there, but I wasn’t sure if it was her. She had messy hair, and her clothes looked too big. I told my dad that night. He smiled at me without showing any of his teeth and pretended that I hadn’t said anything, and told me to finish my dinner. I tried to talk to my brother about it when we were alone in our room. I thought maybe he could tell me if it was her, and we’d talk about where she was or might be. But he also got quiet, tried a few words, and then disappeared into the dark. He pretended that I hadn’t said anything, too. People become who they are, and I think that’s a moment when my brother became who he is now.
I am not ten years old anymore, but I still have the same feelings at thirty-seven. Once, I was visiting a friend when she put up a finger like she’d heard a sound from the ceiling, but that was her way of telling me to pause our conversation. She leaned back in her chair and called out to her ten-year-old to remind him about his book report. He said he’d done it already, and he brought the report over for her to read, to look for spelling mistakes, to check for clarity. She reminded him what to aim for. A clear beginning, a middle, and an end. My friend had gone all the way in school. She’d finished and taken all the degrees. When I was ten, I did not have her, someone like her. I had to learn all that by myself. Out of order, probably. Middle, beginning, end. End, beginning, middle. End. What is an end, and when you think you have one, where does it go, exactly, when there is no one to tell you? ♦