I dream of a baby with the face of my mother. I want to kill the unwanted. Using a metal hook, the large type they use for kingfish, I pierce my belly, round like a balloon and slippery like jelly. Slipping through easily like a pin into Jell-O, I wiggle the hook around to snag her. She slips away from me, digging her elbows into the inside of my skin. She is fully grown and heavy. Laughing, she sings, I am here inside you. And I will always be your mother. When I awake screaming, soaking in sweat, my boyfriend cuddles me to his chest. He cuddles me until he finds out that I am weak. That I was scared and canceled our Thursday appointment.
“And you call yourself an independent woman! A liberal woman! Suddenly you playing virtuous and want to go fuck up our life?” My sky is falling, and he insists that his will fall harder. I wish I could rip him from within me. But I have begun to love the hardening jelly, the eyeless, legless, squirming thing. Finally my boyfriend leaves. He does not know I have already said goodbye.
“You think I stupid ah what?” May asks suspiciously, as I survey the mess around us. “I know you want these things. But is mine.”
I think about Ma Sheila, my father’s grandmother, whom May cared for when she went senile. Fed her daily and washed her face, all the while moving out her antique dressers and heirlooms. Our house became storage for stolen objects of love which May will not let his family have, not even her own sister Carol, whose children came all the way from Rio Claro to board with Aunty May to go to school. Paying one day late, Carol found her children with their empty lunch kits standing in the hot sun outside our house.
People say my mother went crazy after her husband died, but Aunt Carol says she showed signs before that. When she was in her teens, she ran after her mother with a knife. When I was born, she started talking to herself. May has no friends. No family left. But Carol lingers. She says she does it for me.
I have abandoned our cleaning. Sidling toward my bedroom, I slip inside and lock the door. The erratic pulsing begins, beating against my temples with water forming and slipping beneath my chin. My eyes get dry, then misty. Heat like anger, like passion on the verge of unmanageable, rises within. But outwardly there is only a slight twitching of the lips and a dimming of the eyes. A fleeting image of what grows inside me leaves slime in its squirming, with feelers for eyes...
“Maria, what the hell you doing in there?” May screams.
A poster with Keep Out crayoned against intruders grazes her face. I know she’s pissed, cheek pressed against the wood. I can lock her out, hide the tins of corned beef I have stolen from her bedroom, and clean my room till it looks like someplace else.
“Maria! What the ass you doing, you stupid little bitch?”
I ignore her. Scribbling lines on photographs I keep hidden under my bed, I leave the father, the two smirking children eating tamarind and standing aside. I blot out the pregnant woman, gouging her face with crayon and marker, darkening the belly where I once was.
“I was happy before you came,” I hear. “I should have gotten rid of you. But I was the one who wanted you. A girl. A girl!”
I picture her tears that do not slip from their pockets.
“He told me he didn’t want any children. He probably didn’t want you so he could go fuck Alyssa! Get some other woman pregnant.”
Alyssa was once my mother’s best friend. Alyssa would not have wanted to fuck anyone. She joined the convent when she and May stopped speaking. A slap in the face to my mother. To walk with the Virgin and turn her back on the Pentecostal faith—
“I want to go back! To undo you. You remember him after you were born, but I remember what he was before that! Too late! You hear me? He loved you too late!” Mother is still trying to convince me. But once is enough to convince. Anything more is for her personal pleasure.
I remember how I used to love her, dragging behind her, clutching at her dress. When I was a little girl, she used to try to want me. Now she thinks that I am possessed. That my rudeness and unwillingness to do as she says is a mark of the devil. You were born this way, just like your father, and no matter how much I try to beat it out of you, you remain the same. I feel the stinging from week-old beatings, and I smell his burning pictures from last month when she purged the house of the devil.
I keep scribbling. The lines move to my arms and my thighs. I use permanent marker now, not the cheap ones I used as a child. I zigzag onto my skin, pressing hard so the pain numbs my thinking. She will try to embrace me in the morning, try to rub my skin clean of yesterday’s pain. I dig another line into the door with metal scissors and color it purple. She will ask me to say, I love you. I promise myself that these lines will prevent me. After years of forcing myself to forget, I vow to remember.
Nothing eases me. He will still be dead. And he will still no longer want me.
I first asked Aunt Carol what abortion meant. Four years old and I was asking the whole family. I hadn’t yet learned about secrecy. That some things paraded openly through the doors of people’s homes, and that others were meant to hide behind them...
I wear black eyeliner now, thick and smudged. Don’t cry, bitch, I tell myself. I have entered a new phase of training. To bury my mother. I thumb my belly and poke at my navel. There is a small bulge now. The pounding on the door is replaced by a buzzing behind my eyes. I add to the list I have started on my wall in penciclass="underline"
1) She grew up in the country and thought her husband was Prince Charming, frolicking his horse into the affluent suburb of Palmiste. He would place her in a pretty house and pay her to raise babies.
2) Born into a family of nine, she was neglected by her parents, who preferred their younger English-speaking Chinese children who did not remind them that, with their slanted eyes and jarring accents, they would never fit in — “May, yuh want ah rice and ah char sue pok to tek friend in school?”
3) Prince Charming was never home, always escaping, then he died — escaping blame.
My pencil point snaps. So what, May? Your man died and mine ran. You remember my boyfriend. You sat on his lap asking why he was with a girl like me. Giving him the eye, dressed in your bra and shorts. The one who loved me till he met you — the famous crazy May. Like you say, all men are assholes that leave us fat and bitter. They eventually realize our biggest fear — they leave us to ourselves.
“When I sell this house, if I have my way, you will get absolutely nothing,” May taunts on the other side of the door. Her voice simmers again and she makes a clicking noise through pursed lips. “Parker wants to move in with me,” she says dreamily, “but I have to watch him, you know. He might be after my money. Once I sell this house — is plenty money it selling for.” May’s distrust for Parker cowers next to the seething of my own. My distaste for him resembles disgust between lovers, bubbling beneath the skin, heating the blood and sharpening the eye. It resembles in its intensity and its inability to resolve. It is not love but its opposite.
After my father died, university funds and insurance were transferred into her accounts. May enrolled me in the government school-feeding program. At night, hungry, I went to neighbors, palms outstretched, learning how to beg. All those years fed by neighbors, scantily clad and denied shelter, locked out at two in the morning, barefoot, in nightclothes, watching the wealth my father left me buy her fancy dresses, cars, jewelry...