We both already know this. She just enjoys showing me the dry air.
“I don’t think I can do that by myself.” I wish I hadn’t said that.
She slaps me again. My cheek hadn’t stopped stinging from last time.
“Do you love Mom and Dad? Dump that slab of beef. Find a Chinese woman to marry. Put your penis in her vagina and make Mom and Dad a grandson. Make them happy.”
She turns to leave but not two steps stomp by before she whips around. Coming out to Mom and Dad, she hasn’t ordered me not to do it yet.
“And you’re not coming out to Mom and Dad.” With that command, she leaves.
No water. She must mean it. She’ll never leave me alone with Mom or Dad.
I close my eyes and remind myself why I’m doing this. Right. Gus. He refuses to stop insisting it’s okay if I don’t come out to them. He’ll understand if I don’t. That just makes me want to do what he really wants, but won’t say out loud. Coming out would have hurt less a decade ago and it’ll hurt less now than a decade from now. Unless I just keep quiet and wait for my entire family to die off. Now there’s a cheery thought.
Christmas day. When I wake, Gus is most of the way through his forms, his movements silent and precise. I make an exaggerated show of sneaking out of the bedroom. His face cracks the tiniest smile when I look back at him from the door.
My sister pointedly ushered us to different rooms last night. I return to the den where I was supposed to sleep to get ready to join Dad for his daily early morning walk. It’s awful. We’ll plod in circles at some local mall while I try to get him to talk about himself and he answers in single syllables. At least this time, I’ll actually have something to talk to him about. I guess I’ve had something to talk to him about for years. This time, though, I’m going to do it.
When I get downstairs, my sister insists on joining us. First time in… Actually, she’s never done the morning-walk thing with Dad before.
“Great, sis.” I start back up the stairs. “You go with Dad to the mall this time. See you two later.”
I ignore her sputterings. If she wants Dad to keep thinking that she’s their Good Child, she won’t dare to do anything to me right now, and she’ll go with Dad on the mall walk. I’ll pay for this later, of course, but by the time she comes back, Mom will have woken up and I will have had a chat with her.
Or at least that was Plan B. The morning-walk ritual is supposed to be that, after the walk, he goes to have his sausage biscuit, luxuriates over a cup of coffee, two if you count the free refill. Only then do we come home. However, they’re home too early. Mom’s still asleep. My sister has apparently forced Dad to skip the fast food breakfast part of his morning ritual.
When I hear the garage door, I lean over the sweeping staircase’s handrail. Dad’s grumbling. My sister’s chirping bright words about how the kitchen has something just as good. She glares at me as she rushes Dad past. Like it’s my fault he’s angry at her.
The rest of the day is like an extremely tedious game of basketball. My sister plays a tight defense, but legal. No contact while there are witnesses. Since I’m trying to get time alone with my parents, one of them is always a witness.
She’s even helping Mom make tonight’s feast. I’m kneading the dough for Mom’s steamed, stuffed buns when my sister inserts herself into the process. After years of preparing meals for large gatherings together, Mom and I have a system. At some point, she stopped insisting that my wife would cook for me someday and started teaching me to cook. Either she got sick of me nagging her, or she realized I kneaded dough more quickly than she did. Anyway, with some luck, dinner won’t be too much later than if my sister had just left us alone.
Gus is doing his best imitation of an apartment mate who had nowhere else to go for Christmas. I wish he’d stop that. He spends time with my nieces, my brother-in-law, even my parents, but he only skirts the kitchen. I get that he doesn’t want to out me for me, but I like his conversation too. It’s stupid to be in the same house as him and still miss him so much. After my first few whacks at the duck with the cleaver, Mom takes the heavy knife away from me then tells me to go rehydrate mushrooms.
It doesn’t take a solid day of cooking to make dinner, but my sister conveniently has questions about how to make the filling for the stuffed buns and how much sesame oil for the scallion pancakes. She leaves the kitchen occasionally, but never long enough for me to work up the nerve to tell Mom. Whenever I leave the kitchen, it isn’t two minutes before she finds me, claiming she needs my help. I manage to say, “Yes, I think you’re a terrible cook too” in front of her husband and her parents-in-law in our respective languages in common before she drags me back to the kitchen. Water doesn’t fall when I say that. I have to take my pleasure where I can.
When the nieces pull Mom away to play with their Erector Set, she decides that my sister and I can finish dinner without her. My sister complains that she needs Mom’s help. I agree wholeheartedly, but it’s not enough. The two of us are stuck with each other.
“You do know why Gus doesn’t come into the kitchen, don’t you?” Despite her casual tone, we both know this is not idle chatter.
“Does it matter?” I’m slicing pickled radishes. “You’re going to tell me anyway.”
“Do you really think you can keep him?” She drops spinach into a skillet pooled with oil. The water coating the spinach hits the oil and splatters back at her. “He’s spent more time with Kevin today than with you.”
I force myself to slice slowly. Cutting my fingers off is a distraction I don’t need right now. My heart pounds in my ears. I’m not sure who I’m more angry at, my sister or my lover.
“I have no idea what you mean, sis.” We immigrated here when she was a teenager and I was a little kid. There’s a good chance she’ll miss the sarcasm. The water gets it though and I stay dry.
“Kevin’s a good-looking guy, maybe…” The line would have more impact if she didn’t look scared of the spinach sautéing before her. She jabs the spatula as if it were a fencing foil.
Kevin’s not my type. I’m pretty sure he’s not Gus’s, but I guess I don’t know. It’s not like he didn’t date lots of men before me. It’s not as if they don’t all throw themselves at him. My mind spins for seconds before I realize she hasn’t actually accused Gus of anything. Kevin is stolidly straight, and if Gus has tried anything with Kevin, not that he would, she’d throw Gus and me out of the house, not taunt me with the possibility that Gus might be unfaithful.
“Maybe what?” Usually, I don’t have this much trouble arranging sliced radishes in a pretty pattern. Right now, they’re just a bunch of ugly yellow discs.
“You understand what I’m saying. I shouldn’t have to spell it out. You don’t trust your own sister?”
When I was eight, she convinced me that she was psychic, then foretold exactly how horrible my life would be if I didn’t do exactly as she said. It’s embarrassing how many years she got away with it. If the water had been falling back then, she’d have flooded the house.
“Only your family loves you enough to tell you this.” Listening to her is like being pelted by rocks. “What can he possibly see in you? Dump him and marry a nice Chinese woman instead. Stay with him and he’ll cheat on you or dump you.”
Three words into her last sentence, I know what she’ll say. I leap to pull her pan away as I shut off the burner. The water that falls from nowhere drenches her and the burner where the pan was. Had the water hit the pan, the steam and splattered oil would have burned her.
“Go get warm.” I plate the spinach onto a dish on the counter. “I’ll mop up the water.”
“People change, but maybe he’ll still love you, even as you shut him out like you have me, Mom, and Dad.” Her arms wrap around her body and her words come out between chatters. “We still do, but I wonder why we bother. You’ll break Mom and Dad’s hearts if you never pass their name and blood on. Are you really willing to abandon your family for that man?”