The Leavers(68)
Shrug.
“Do you miss Yi Gong?”
“Yeah,” you said in English.
“Me, too.” I pushed my straw against the bottom of my cup. “Do you like Leon?”
“He plays with me.”
“You can call him Yi Ba. He says he won’t mind.”
You stared at me as if you were tasting the word, trying to figure out if you liked it or not.
“Next month, we’re going to move to a bigger apartment and live with Leon and his sister Vivian. It’s not far away, in a part of the city called Bronx. There will be another boy for you to play with, Leon’s nephew. His name is Michael.”
“How old is he?”
“Around your age. I think he’s five.”
You scowled. “I’m six.”
“I know you are.” Thick shocks of hair erupted around your face, as if in protest. I walked to the other side of the table and squeezed into your seat with you. “We’re going to move in with Leon, but we’ll always be a family, Kid, you and me.”
You blew bubbles into your tea, made another farting noise, and giggled. Your face became serious. “Is Auntie Didi coming, too?”
THE APARTMENT WAS TOO small for all of us. Me, you, Leon, Vivian, and Michael. Michael’s father, Leon said, had been a good-for-nothing Taiwanese with no papers who’d split on Vivian long ago.
My roommates had said the Bronx was dangerous and not enough Chinese people lived there, but when we arrived on an April morning and I looked at the signs in English and Spanish—not a single Chinese character anywhere, not even at the takeout spot down the block—I felt like I’d been in rehearsal all this time and this was the real thing. It had taken six years, and I was still in the same city, but finally, I had gone elsewhere. Another woman was already waiting to take my bunk on Rutgers Street.
Leon and I slept on one mattress in the bedroom, you and Michael on the other, Vivian on the couch. It cost a hundred dollars more a month to live with Leon than it did to live in the boardinghouse, but I could take on more hours at the salon, since when you came home from school, Vivian or Leon took care of you and Michael.
Opposite-world Leon, he woke with the moon. The city buses would screech and hump across the Bronx, Leon slouched on one of their back benches, riding to the edges of Hunts Point. For a living, he dealt with the dead. He deboned ribs, pigs shrinking from whole animals into separate parts: belly, shoulder, intestines, from pig to pork. Boots coated in blood, gloves slippery with innards, Leon sliced at slabs, cleaved bones from muscle. On the kill floor, swinging from giant hooks, the hogs were stunned with electric shocks, their necks severed, scraped clean. The disassembly line. Sometimes I saw these animals in my sleep. The frozen pig, dazed and muted, the hog heads with their gaping mouths, all those groaning ghosts. Leon swore off sausage, ham, bacon. What separates the pig from the person? In bed he’d name my parts and chops, trace my cuts of meat with his fingers—leg, loin, ribs, rump; the skin around my belly—until I squirmed. “Stop!”
We were all meat. Fat and gristle and tendon and bone. Cartilage and muscle, thighs and breasts. Leon had come over as a stowaway, washed ashore in New York on a garbage barge of old computers. The ship had sailed around the world, China to Thailand to Mexico, across the Pacific, but riding in the cargo Leon never saw ocean. Back when he came, you could enter without papers and customs would release you into the streets; there was nowhere for them to detain you. You’d get an order to appear in court and rip it up and throw it away when you hit the sidewalks, hail a cab to Fuzhounese Chinatown and fade sweetly into the crowd.
“Is it scary being with a man who kills?” Didi asked, and I said I supposed it would be, but Leon didn’t kill, and despite how broad his back was, how his shoulders and arms could choke you, he was a gentle person. When he came home from work he took long showers, crawled into bed and dampened the sheets, climbed over me and onto me, pressing his weight into mine. It soothed me. He talked in his sleep, mumble-spoke, and at first it had confused me. “No,” he would laugh, and I would say “Yes,” clear awake, translating his mumbles to the language I wanted to hear.
Between shifts, we lay together, half-dressed. He told me the few memories he had of his parents, who both died young. Once, as a small boy, he had skipped into his house with a ladybug, excited to show off the colorful insect, and his mother, scrubbing pots, had taken the bug and squished it between her fingers. It was a story not intended to be sad, only true, but it made me so damn sad I couldn’t find the right words to say, the comfort and sympathy that was supposed to come naturally to women. I wanted one memory, just one, of my own mother. I worried I couldn’t be a good mother without having known my own.
I told Leon about Haifeng, the riverbank and the factory, the day I walked into the ocean. Our legs were intertwined, his foot brushing the inside of mine, an evil tickle, the sun forming a triangular shadow on the sheets. “Do you ever wish you were with a woman who didn’t have a child?”
“Of course not. I don’t want to be with another woman.”
The more Leon comforted me, the less comforted I was. His solidity was so different from Haifeng’s fawning, but it felt dangerous, it could be a trick, and I had to be careful. I was disappointed at Leon for not being able to properly reassure me and annoyed at myself for needing him to do so. I told myself I didn’t want to be married, especially not to someone without papers. Told him I didn’t care for weddings.