Picture Us In The Light(23)
All that day after getting home from San Francisco, I think about the 30 Under 30 show at the gallery, and before dinner I finally sit down and look up the submission guidelines. I wanted to just forget about it, but imagining my work being chosen as the innovative, with a fresh and surprising point of view portfolio they’re looking for fills me with a kind of desperate hope. The submission deadline is January. By then—by then I should’ve come out from under this slump. I have to.
I look up Clay Ballard while I’m on the computer. I don’t know quite what I expected, but he’s the same person he seems to be in my dad’s files, and you can only scroll through so many articles about seed capital and startups named things like Marquetz and LunchBunch and StumblPAAC. I look up Clay Ballard Joseph Cheng and Clay Ballard Joseph Tseng, but there’s nothing. I wish I remembered my dad’s Chinese name. But I really only saw it a couple times in my lifetime that I can remember—as a kid you’re not, like, writing out your parents’ legal names anywhere. And I’m sure my dad would get suspicious if I just randomly asked.
For dinner that night my mom’s tried a pasta recipe with basil and the last of the tomatoes from her garden. She’s peering at the tomatoes in the sauce, watching for our reactions, when my dad sets down his bowl and says, abruptly, “I will be searching for a new job soon.”
The hum of the refrigerator cuts through the stillness. We both stare at him. My mom says, blinking rapidly, “What do you mean you’ll be searching for a new job?”
He clears his throat and rearranges the bottles of vitamins on the far side of the table. “Dr. Rodriguez has asked me to search elsewhere.”
“Search elsewhere?” My mom sits up straighter. “She wants you to look for a professorship?”
“No.”
“Then why is she asking that?”
“Because—” He hesitates. “We had a difference.”
“What difference? What happened?”
He ignores that. “So I won’t be going back to the lab and I’ll find another job instead.”
“You’ll find another job? Who will hire you?” Her voice is rising. She reaches wildly for the edge of the table and grasps it with both hands. “Joseph, were you fired? You weren’t—”
She makes a high-pitched gasping sound. She curls over the table, her hands cupped over her mouth.
I get up, shoving my chair back. “Are you okay, Ma?”
My mom used to get panic attacks all the time. It’s been a while, but I have memories of being woken up at two, three, four in the morning to rush to the emergency room because my parents didn’t want to leave me at home alone. It was always the same story, my fear that this would be the time something was really wrong, the normal EKGs and pulse oximeters and eventually the doctors sliding from their initial quickness and worry into something tinged with impatience. They’d give her Xanax, but it would always end up jammed into the medicine cabinet, shoved behind the bottle of Kwan Loong oil and the herbs she took for the supposed kidney deficiency she always blamed for the panic attacks.
“I can’t breathe,” she gasps. Her arms fly out again, flailing, and I grab one and hold her hand.
“You can breathe if you can talk,” I say. “Remember the doctor who told you that? She said if you can still talk you don’t have to worry, even if it feels—”
My dad, who’s been sitting motionless, his hands wrapped around the vitamin bottles, comes to life again. He rubs my mom’s shoulders and motions for me to back away, then crouches next to her, murmuring in her ear. She’s always felt better with him there, a shield against her own self.
I hover on the other side of the table, my own throat constricting. “Do you want anything?” I say. She shakes her head. I make her tea anyway, partly to try to help, partly to escape into the steps of heating water and steeping and watching for the color to change.
When I set the mug down next to her on the table my mom holds it and takes a sip, less I think because she wants to and more because I went to the trouble of getting it for her. My dad watches her drink. This must be what he started to tell us the other night when we went out.
“Everything will be fine,” he says loudly, in English. “Nothing to worry about. All fine.”
People change jobs all the time, I know that. My mom greets most news like it’s a monster at the threshold, and I don’t think her reaction on its own would be enough to unnerve me. It’s my dad’s expression that does it—that part twines itself around my lungs like weeds. Also, this: at home with us he never uses English on the things that come naturally or from his heart.
I don’t say anything; it’s clearly not the right time. After a while my mom’s breathing catches its regular pattern again. She nods to us, and we sit back down. We finish the pasta, the noodles gone cold, in silence. After dinner my mom unfolds a piece of foil from her stash next to the oven and covers the leftover pasta to put in the fridge, and my dad doesn’t offer more details or tell us why he was fired, and we don’t ask.
“I love your shoes,” Noga Kaplan says to me Monday morning when I come into AP Bio. My lab group’s standing Monday morning tradition is a potluck breakfast during class (Mrs. Johar doesn’t care if we eat on non-lab days), and Noga’s setting out her four red Dixie cups for the bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and pint of milk she always brings.