Sour Heart

by Jenny Zhang

Didn’t it bother him that he was teaching his students poetry when he was certain it wouldn’t make a difference in how their lives turned out? Didn’t it bother him to be so sure that it was futile to even try? And what about us? What standards did we have? Weren’t our fates sealed as well? What was I ever going to become? What stopped other people from looking at us and pitying us, how we didn’t see the pointlessness in working so many jobs, moving from one shit place to another and scrimping on pennies, how we couldn’t face the reality of our situation: that none of this was leading up to anywhere that was any different from where we had just been.

I came up with something even more generous, which was to give her a thousand of my father’s dollars so she could stop bothering my family, and it wasn’t like my father didn’t have it to spare, because my mother never seemed to worry much about money, and neither did I, and she said once, “Our family is so rich,” and technically the rest of that sentence was “with love for each other,” but still.

I’m sorry, I said to her in my head, all the time, but never in real life, just like my mother, who never said I’m sorry to me in real life either, only I had no idea if she also apologized in her head, and if she realized that she had the power to hurt me, to disappoint me as much as I disappointed her, to make me feel so alone that sometimes I couldn’t recognize myself in front of mirrors or in pictures.

Surely there was someplace where it was safe, where who you thought you were matched up with how others treated you, where there was forgiveness in great abundance, never to be depleted, and as far as I knew, the first step to getting there was to have a boy who loved you and only you.

Yeah, I was lucky. I was chosen. There was just one problem—the whole wet-dream thing made me wish I knew how to drive a bus so I could ram it into Jason, ideally disabling his penis but leaving him alive, although a dead boyfriend would probably give my mother a reason to stay home from work and spend a few days with me.

I mean, all touch was wonderful and the small amount I had experienced in my life was too precious to split off into categories of “wanted” and “unwanted.” And what if we wanted more touch? I felt like asking but never did.

Typically fourth grade was too young for even pre–sex education sex education, but a woman with spiky blond tips and big pins all over her blazer informed us at a mandatory assembly that we had been targeted as a high-risk school and measures had to be taken to ensure for the future. She spoke to us spitefully, as if we were awful, terrible children, and used the words “at risk” several times without going into detail. What were we at risk for?

Nearly everyone in my grade, except me and this really mousy, quiet girl Mande who I kept forgetting even existed, had more tits and more ass than my own mother. It’s the hormones, my father said, that they inject into the chips and the Cheetos. My God, my mother exclaimed. It’s in the Cheetos?

It was lovely to be above it all and when my father motioned to leave, I felt the pleasure and panic of doorways that had once seemed impossible to reach looming ahead of me. I felt sure I was on the verge of something wonderful. I wanted to come right up to it, and shake its hand and say, I’m ready I’m ready I’m ready I’m ready.

I should have told him, I would never hurt you. I would set fire to any tree harboring branches that might one day fall on your head, cut the arms off the first kid who tries to punch you in the face, pave down and smooth over the bumps on our street where you always trip, go into your nightmares and vanquish the beasts who chase you so you never ever have to be afraid. But what right did I have? When would I finally get it? That I was the one he needed to be protected from?

One winter, when I was home from college, I went outside in the dark, crossed the playground behind my house, and followed a narrow road up a hill. I forgot my glasses and for a while, I sat on a patch of grass, looking down at the town where I spent my adolescence, the town my family had moved to not long after my brother was born. The streetlights appeared as big as tangerines, blurry and orange. What I wanted was for someone to come looking for me, for someone to worry about me, for two adults to argue about me. I wanted everyone I knew and everyone I could know one day to wonder about me, to think of me as if I were the last Popsicle on earth, and oh no, before anyone got to eat me, I had already gone ahead and melted entirely! What I wanted was for someone to kneel down on the ground and lick the red sugary water of mememememememe curving and rolling down streets half-paved in asphalt. I worried about a world where my existence barely mattered. A world where I did not exist at all. Maybe that was the world I was headed to. Maybe that was the world I deserved.

I wanted to hug him, to kiss his cheek until it was sore, but I knew he was getting older. He would protest, he would one day no longer hug his arms around my legs because he was short, or make a fist around my pinky when I picked him up from school, or crawl into my bed with his wet hair and face, no longer say it hurts me to leave you before going to his friend’s house, or I missed you all day after coming back, because he would get old, and I would get even older. Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about “family” we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from. From that point on, I would refer to him as “your uncle” and he would mostly refer to me as “your aunt” and it would take a long time for our children to even understand that we were siblings first, but more than that, our children, just as we hadn’t, would likely not think much about a time before they were born, a time when he was my brother and I was his sister, and together, we were our parents’ children.

It turns out that this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again. Mememememememe.

No matter how many times I saw my mother’s watery eyes in my doorframe the summer before I left for college, it wasn’t enough to stop what had been put in motion: that I was leaving home and I wasn’t going to wait until thirty to do it.

I worried about how I was seen, who I was seen with, and what kind of abysmal creature other people thought I was—these fears disfigured me though the damage was invisible to my parents, whom I could never compete with as they were always a hundred times more worried, more fearful, more occupied than I could ever be.

That was the secret to being me back then: if you never say a word, people will think you don’t know anything, and when people think you don’t know anything, they say everything in front of you and you end up containing everything.

Why did my mother, a grown woman, get to talk like all her hopes and dreams had been shat on, kicked, and set on fire, all the while pushing me, a mere girl, a child, to do better, to accomplish more, to face down all the odds and become a legend? Where was I supposed to go to complain the way they did? To be validated the way they validated each other?

I started to see how delusional I had been to believe that words could only lift me into the glorious upper stratosphere of possibility instead of pulling me down into the drowning waters of inarticulation.

My cousin and I were beginning to understand why our grandmother cried so often, and how there were so few options for coping with the reappearances and disappearances that we would both continue to make in each other’s lives.