A Long Stay in a Distant Land Page 7

  The stewardess handed his mother her food and drink, and rolled on.

  The bag crunched as his mother opened it. She dropped two nuts in her mouth, chewed, and wiped her lips with a napkin, clearing away grains of salt.

  "What a fatuous request," he said. "Fatuous. F-a-t-u—"

  "We thought about it. We were looking for a new house. We could have used an extra ten thousand dollars, no questions asked."

  "You thought about it?"

  "Three days later, I told her we decided to keep you. She was heartbroken." His mother sighed wistfully as if she was remembering a handsome ex-boyfriend or a lunch that had hit just the right spot.

  "We could have given you to her," his mother said. She sipped from her plastic cup. She chewed on another peanut. "Imagine that. A sixteen-year-old going out on dates, bringing girls home to meet his grandmother. You could have spent your youth buying denture cream and Metamucil, learning CPR, squeezing her nose at night to make sure she was still breathing. Like living with Miss Havisham."

  "Miss Havisham?" Louis asked.

  "A woman with money. You'll read about her in high school." His mother picked the catalog up off her lap and began

  searching for the page she'd been studying. She found it and whistled at a redwood wine rack with gold trim. "Well. Aren't you glad we decided to keep you?"

  It happened in room 204 of the Port Royale Hotel in Montreal.

  After a day of walking through Montreal's downtown, a day of Louis's father asking the natives for directions in slow English, these French speakers who also spoke perfect English and didn't need slow-pitch softball, after a day of marveling at Stationment signs that denoted the exotica of parking lots, and after a day of wandering the stately stoned walkways and soft green mounds of McGill University, the "Harvard of Canada," the university attended by William Shatner, Burt Bacharach, and most important to Louis's father, James Naismith, the Inventor of Basketball, and therefore the Father of the Greatest Sport on Earth, they arrived back at room 204, where Louis's parents, sweaty and tired from the day's trek, went to the bathroom to freshen up. They didn't lock the door.

  Louis turned on the TV and sat at the foot of his bed. Brown bags and suitcases lay on the floor around him. He kicked the shoulder straps of his backpack while the weather reporter forecasted continuing high pressure and heat for the coming week.

  "Why don't they say that Harvard is the McGill of the U.S.?" Louis heard his father ask. "Why is it when something's good in some foreign country, it's the Harvard of that country?"

  "Nobody except Wes calls McGill the Harvard of Canada," his mother said, turning on the bath. "That's because he graduated from there."

  Wes was one of his father's coworkers, but Louis didn't care about Wes or McGill. He needed to pee. He heard his parents giggling, the sound of water splashing that heightened the pressure in his groin. His parents were probably joking around, throwing water on each other. He heard his mother ask, "Sonny, is that your horn of plenty?"

  "Oh, Mirla."

  Louis, nine years old, had no idea what that meant. He forgot to knock. They'd only been inside a few minutes and he assumed their clothes would still be on as he opened the door.

  He had seen his father's chest many times before, out in the yard or around the house on a hot day. It was nothing spectacular. His father had a pale, almost pink hairless torso that resembled an uncooked salmon steak, but his mother's breasts shocked him in the same way that Grendel's mother, as portrayed in the comic book series Beowulf: Bloodstained Days, had sent a shiver down to the core of his heart. Louis had always considered his mother a beautiful woman, but her nakedness shamed him and seemed monstrous in a way her fully clothed self never had.

  He turned his eyes away from her body, thank god her lower half had been shielded by the side of the tub, and said, "Shit!" to which his father said, "Jesus!" to which his mother said, "Shut the door!"

  He felt like a drunken Dane stumbling through the mead-hall, dazed, not sure where he was, and looking for Unferth and other comrades who weren't there. He shut the bathroom door, ran out of the hotel room, and sped down the gray carpeted hallway toward the elevator.

  In the following weeks, he tried not to visualize his mother's breasts, but his effort to forget only crystallized the picture, the way the word Beelzebub sounded repeatedly in his head after he'd heard Pastor Elkin's sermon on keeping Satan out of one's thoughts.

  In reflection years later, he would feel he'd judged her too harshly. He believed she'd been beautiful sitting there in the tub. He was certain she had not resembled Grendel's mother, whose spine bore a ridge of bony plates, whose forearms were covered with shaggy hair, whose breasts sagged, and whose nipples pointed forward like arrowheads.

  He could have told his mother she didn't look gross or monstrous, but those words didn't sound comforting, so he never spoke them. He could have said other words to make sure she knew he thought she was fine and normal looking, but for weeks after the incident they said nothing, and he treated her like she was physically repulsive, flinching back unconsciously if she reached out to hand him something, stealing glances at her during dinner until she said, "Stop that. What's wrong with you?" after which she'd continue eating with a confused and sometimes pained look in her eyes.

  The incident in the hotel bathroom remained a constant prick in his memory, haunting him in the most unexpected moments: while he showered or as he tried to fall asleep, treading that line between consciousness and dreams.

  It was a simple gesture. His father was reaching for his mother's breasts with the eagerness of a child about to pick pears off a tree, and slathered on the old man's face was the biggest, strangest smile Louis had ever seen.

  The Impassibility of Two Trains Colliding

  at One Hundred Miles Per Hour

  (1968)

  Sonny accidentally scorched a section of Teresa Ribisi's shoulder-length hair while lighting a Bunsen burner in chemistry class. This prompted Mr. Ribisi to demand that Sonny shave his head as payment for Teresa's suffering, which had arrived in the form of a barber shearing away four inches of burnt hair.

  Sonny asked his girlfriend what he should do. "Don't shave your head," Mirla said. "It was an accident."

  The following night, Sonny visited Mr. Ribisi and handed him a paper sack filled with his black hair.

  Mirla was not happy. "I owed the man," Sonny told her.

  "Why didn't you tell me you were going to do it?" She ran her hands slowly over his scalp. He liked her fingertips gliding across his skin. He liked anything that had to do with her touching him.

  When Mirla's father saw Sonny's head, he said, "I admire what you did for Mr. Ribisi. Brave of a young man to go slick." Mr. Ho ran his hands over the top of his own head, a gleaming dome traversed by a few strands of a comb-over. "But there are advantages to going goose egg, you know?"

  Sonny didn't think there were advantages to being bald. He looked forward to his hair growing back, but he was happy the man he considered his future father-in-law admired what he had done.

  The next day Mirla said they should break up.

  "We'll be apart next year anyway," she said.

  "Orange Coast is half an hour from UCLA," he said.

  "I need to see more of life," she said. "I've never truly felt alive."

  "Is it the hair? It'll grow back."

  I've never felt truly alive? He knew what it was to feel alive, and it wasn't an abstraction, another way of saying, I don't know what I'm saying.

  Life to Sonny had always been a series of pleasant tactile sensations. The relief in his belly after a satisfying, butt-numbing session on the toilet, the adrenaline high after an hour of pedaling a bike, her tongue against his cheek.

  He begged her to change her mind. They were in her kitchen when she proposed the math exam. If he scored ninety percent or better, she'd stay with him. If not, they were done.

  "Why are you doing this?" he asked.

  She glared at the top of
his head.

  He waited for an answer.

  She continued glaring at the top of his head.

  He stood and looked out the sliding glass door. He stared at the bike in the far corner of the yard, at the streamers dangling like hair from the handlebars, at the curved outline of its sloping frame, at the rear wheel raised up in the air. From this distance, it looked like a bucking stallion frozen in mid-buck.

  Mr. Ho had bought a Sears Spaceliner for Mirla's fourteenth birthday. She rode it for a few weeks before giving it up to devote more time to her studies. "Schoolwork!" Mr. Ho had said.

  "There are more important things to do." When he asked her to get back on the bike, she explained that the sidewalks had become too dangerous for riding. "Pigeons and kids every­where."

  In response, he nailed two blocks of wood close together and wedged the front wheel in between, fixing it in place. Then he ran several steel wires from the horizontal post of the yard fence to the bike's rear carrier, pulling up the bike's back end, suspending the rear wheel so Mirla could pedal continuously without moving an inch.

  She rode it for a few days before saying that the seat made her butt sore, and the bike stayed untouched in the back of the yard until Sonny found it next to the clothes line on which were hung the wet, dripping socks and underwear of the Ho family. It was coated in cobwebs, and the frame, formerly hot pink, had rusted to a deep shade of brown.

  He cleaned it, lubed the chain, and began riding an hour each night five nights a week while her parents read the newspaper in the living room.

  "That thing cost me a fortune," Mr. Ho said. "Ride hard. Ride it until it breaks."

  Riding a bike had always made Sonny happy, the feeling of his legs pumping and his heart beating rapidly, assurances that he was truly alive.

  He slid open the door.

  "Where are you going?" she asked.

  "For a ride." He walked out to the bike and got on it. He started pedaling.

  Mirla followed. She stood next to him, frowning. "You have two weeks to prepare. I'll let you write formulas on a notecard.

  One side only."

  She explained what the exam would cover, and he thought about the things they still had to do. They needed to get married. Then a honeymoon in Houston, where they could watch a rodeo. He had sharply defined quadriceps, powerful lungs, and a strong heart. He was chocolate ice cream. How could she not love chocolate ice cream?

  But math was hard. At seventeen, his grasp of first order differential equations was tenuous. Linear equations of higher order baffled him. He had no hope with power series solutions, and no chance in hell with Fourier Series and separation of variables. This wasn't even high school math. This was Mirla math.

  At seventeen, Mirla "The Human Abacus" Ho of Garden Grove High School was already a campus celebrity for having won the state Mathletics competition three times, appearing each year in the local section of the Orange County newspaper that'd given her the nickname.

  Mirla was one of two Chinese students at Garden Grove High, and the Register had written, "Chinese high school student wins state math competition with help from oriental genes." Sonny had always hated her nickname because it made no sense. An abacus wasn't human. Mirla, as far as he knew, had never even touched an abacus. And oriental genes had shit to do with anything. He was Chinese, and math was a foreign language he couldn't speak.

  "Are you listening?" Mirla asked.

  He nodded and wiped sweat from his forehead, the rear wheel whirring behind him.

  "What did I say about the exam?"

  "It's going to be hard," he said.

  "Then you should consider going home now."

  "Why?"

  "You've got a lot of studying to do," she said.

  He pedaled harder.

  "Suit yourself." She turned and walked back inside without saying another word.

  The exam began at noon in her kitchen. Saturday. Her parents were visiting her grandparents. Though he was gone, Mr. Ho had remembered to leave Sonny a batch of freshly baked butter cookies to keep his strength up during the test. He'd also left a note that read, "Good luck, Sonny. Don't let her intimidate you."

  She sat across the table from him. He smiled at her. She smiled back, looked over his head at the clock behind him, and said, "You may begin."

  Problem number one:

  1) A motor scooter starts from rest (x0 = v0 = 0). It moves at a constant acceleration of 9 ft/s2. Air + road resistance causes a deceleration of 0.5 ft/s2 for every foot/second of the scooter's velocity v. (a) Work out a first order differential equation for v(t). (b) Find v when t = 15 s. (c) Find the limiting velocity as t approaches + 8.

  Sonny's answer:

  (a) Who's riding the scooter? (b) Why not drive a car? (c) Why does there need to be air and road resistance? Why does there need to be a scooter?

  He flipped through the exam. All the problems had been neatly typed. The rest of the questions were as hard as, if not harder than, the first one.

  "If the max speed of two trains is one hundred miles per hour, they wouldn't collide head-on at that speed," he wrote. "They'd hit their brakes and try to stop. They'd collide at less than a hundred.

  "Nobody can throw a baseball faster than two hundred fifty miles per hour. Maybe a very strong Martian, but not a human being.

  "How could a rabbit, lion, and man race together on a track? How would you keep the animals in their lanes? Rabbits are wild creatures."

  He ate a cookie, then another. "Have some. They're good." She glanced at the clock behind him. "You still have a lot of problems left. You won't have much time to check your calculations."

  He looked out at the yard. "It's a warm day. We should be outside."

  She used to stand by him as he rode her bike because she enjoyed watching the rivulets of sweat run down his face. "They're like tears," she'd say, tracing the path the drops took from his forehead down to the corners of his eyes and farther down to the edges of his lips. "It's like you're crying."

  "You like seeing me cry?"

  "I imagine I just got run over by a car or hit in the head with a brick, and you're grieving. It makes me happy to know you could care so much for me."

  He'd spin fast right from the start of each session. He didn't have time for a warmup. Didn't need one. When his face strained, when the sweat beaded on his forearms and soaked his shirt and shorts, she'd stop watching. She'd move up close. He'd push even harder and she'd run her tongue across his forehead and down his cheek.

  He'd had to work for these kisses, for the smooth warmth of her tongue cleaning his face. He'd had to work until his heart began punching his chest, sweat dripped off his chin, and his mouth hung open in exhaustion, sucking air that filled his lungs and pushed the heart that punched his chest.

  It was what Ah-Bah had said. Actually, it was what Ah-Bah had meant. His father had said the higher the monkey climbs up the tree, the sweeter the grapes it retrieves. Grapes didn't grow from trees, but Sonny had found the sweetness of labor to be true.

  His make-out sessions with Mirla away from the bike had lacked excitement and danger. Any chump could make out with his girlfriend in the safe confines of a plush carpeted bedroom. It was when he rode almost to the point of passing out that he felt most like a Spanish conquistador who'd trekked several thousand miles to discover the New World's gold on behalf of Queen Isabella. And Mirla licking him was like the queen come down from her throne to personally thank him for finding all this gold. Any chump could be kissed by his lady, but the kiss always felt twice as good after an hour on the bike.

  The riding provided other benefits. He'd been a chubby kid, and a year on the bike had burned twenty-five pounds off his body, which was now slim and hard. He was addicted to the workouts. If he missed a night, he'd feel anxious and jittery and wouldn't be able to sleep. He took the weekends off, and by Sunday night he couldn't wait to get back on the bike. Sunday nights he was doing squats in his garage and admiring his flat stomach in the bathroom mirror.


  "You're not taking this test seriously," she said. "Stop day­dreaming."

  "I've been up studying the last three nights." He stood and stretched his legs. They were stiff from all this sitting. He slid open the glass door and breathed the fresh, warm air outside.

  "You're not even trying," she said.

  "Doll, you don't even know." It was the first time he called her doll, and saying it made him feel like more of a man, like his body had just erupted with muscles, like his balls had just grown to the size of grapefruits.

  "What did you call me?"

  "Nothing." He sat back down and wrote answers for the rest of the problems. Seconds ticked away on the clock. Minutes passed. "Time's up," she said.

  "You don't need to grade this." He returned to the front page of the exam, wrote his name on it, and slid it across the table to her.

  "Why?" she asked.

  "I didn't get a single one right."

  "How do you know?"

  "I'm sure. Don't break up with me."

  She didn't respond. She looked at the front page, studied his answers, then shook her head. "First one's the easiest," she said. "You haven't given me one good reason. If it's because I shaved my head, that's not a good reason." He waited for her to respond. She remained quiet, looking down at the test.

  He stood and walked out to the bike. He got on and pedaled, beginning with a slow cadence.

  She watched him for a few minutes by the open door, then approached him.

  He felt relieved. Incredibly relieved. He was pedaling easily, going nowhere and not wanting to go anywhere because she was right in front of him. Her hair was in a ponytail. A new pimple was forming on the right side of her chin. She had on a blue skirt, a light blue blouse, white socks and yard sandals.

  "You don't want me to check the rest of the answers?" she asked.

  "I don't want you to waste your time," he said. The rear wheel whirred.