Picture Us In The Light(5)
“It’s for good luck,” my mom says. They’ve taped the bag shut. My family’s not the wrapping-paper type.
Inside it’s a sweatshirt, the expensive embroidered kind, that says RISD. They forgot to take the price tag off. It cost nearly seventy dollars.
“Try it on,” my dad says, beaming, so I shove my seat back far enough that I can shrug into the sweatshirt. It has that new look, the creases still showing where it was folded, and it’s at least two sizes too big—for whatever reason both my parents think bigger clothes are practical, maybe because you get more fabric for your money or something—and just enthusiastic enough to look dorky. That, or dickish, like I’m the kind of guy who’s going to work it into conversation every chance he gets that I’m going to my first-choice art school. My dad says, “What do you think?”
They must have bought this when I applied, must have had it waiting all along. I feel my eyes filling.
“It’s great,” I say, and put on the biggest smile I can muster. I try to keep that image of the tape on the bag, those creases like he’s been clutching it close, to draw later on. “Wow. Thanks. I love it.”
“Good.” My dad meets my mom’s eyes and smiles. “This is so big, Daniel. This is—” His voice breaks, and he swipes at his eyes. “This is everything we wanted.”
“You will have the future we hoped for,” my mom says. Her eyes are shining at me.
My dad unfolds his napkin into his lap, then smooths it out on the table and refolds it. It looks lumpy and inexact. He glances up at us, like he’s going to say something. My mom’s eyes are still glittering, but it suspends a little as she looks at him, leaves open space for something like alarm to flash across her face. “What is it?”
He draws a long breath. He looks back and forth between us and starts to speak, but then he stops himself, covering it with a smile. “Nothing. It can wait.”
I say, “No, what was it?”
“Another time.” He raises his glass of water. “To Daniel. Our beloved son.”
“To Daniel,” my mom echoes after a second or two, and they clink their glasses against mine.
After that we spend nearly ten minutes settling on our order, and I keep the sweatshirt on until my mom fusses in this proud way and tells me I should take it off, that I don’t want to spill anything on it. The waitress hovers by our table, impatient, and I give her an apologetic smile, but I’m not actually sorry. Because these are the best kind of moments: all of us plotting what we’ll eat, that comfort you can slip into with the people who know you best, who love you with a fierceness you’ll probably never understand.
I’m lucky. I’ve always been.
I wake up early to get ready for the Journalism field trip to San Francisco that Regina’s making us all go on, and there’s a note on the kitchen table, my mom’s loopy lettering scrawled on the back of a junk mail envelope saying my parents went to Costco. They always come back weekend mornings laden with cardboard flats of frozen chicken breasts and dumplings and greens.
I’m low on cash, like always, so I should bring something to the city in case I get hungry. I’m pretty sure I remember seeing packs of beef jerky in the hall closet, and so I go to look. When I open the closet door, a barely contained twelve-pack of Costco paper towels tumbles out. My parents—I’ll just put this out there—are like one Great Depression away from being full-on hoarders. They keep everything. They’ve always been too Asian to throw away things like plastic bags, but they also keep stuff like expired coupons just in case, plastic utensils and packets of condiments that come with fast food, single socks where the other one’s missing.
I start to put the paper towels back. Behind where they were stuffed is this medium-size box labeled with just my dad’s name. And something about the careful, centered way my dad’s name is lettered on, like someone took the time to do it, and also the way the box is jammed in the closet like it’s supposed to be out of sight, catch my attention. I pull it out to look at.
It’s taped, and I peel the tape up gently so none of the box comes off with it. Inside there’s a little stuffed bear I used to play with that I haven’t seen in years. My dad gave him to me when we moved to California, and I named him Zhu Zhu, which at the time I thought was hilarious, a bear named Pig. I hold him a moment, finger his synthetic fur, and get that rush of nostalgia, your memories compressed into some intangible feeling mixed with the searing longing you get for a time that’s lost to you now. For a long time after I outgrew Zhu Zhu, my dad kept him on his pillow. I’m kind of touched my dad saved him.
Zhu Zhu was resting on the type of piles of clutter that steadily collect everywhere on our counters and in our drawers: a few old carbon copies of checks made out to people I haven’t heard of and a handful of what look like some kind of loan documents, a sleeve of pictures that must be from China—some roads and scenes from a car trip, a high-rise apartment building, a pharmacy—and two small unsigned watercolors, good but not quite professional, one of a dark blue bird and one of a multicolored dragon, not at all the kind of art I’ve ever known my dad to collect. I flip the dragon one over to see if there’s anything on the back, but it’s blank. Underneath all that is a bulging file in a yellowed rubber band labeled, in my dad’s handwriting, Ballards. When I slide off the rubber band, a news clipping flutters out onto my desk. It’s a real estate article about a house for sale in Atherton, which is where all the venture capitalists live, thirty or so minutes north of here.