“Someone certainly has enough to eat,” Mom said to her wineglass. Fried rice was my favorite, but I refused to take any. Instead I ate so much duck my face felt swollen.
As we were leaving, Mom stopped in front of a bulletin board inside the foyer and studied the flyers: lost pets and calls for babysitters and personal ads and advertisements for music lessons, all edged with phone numbers that waggled in the heat from the radiator. She tore off a couple of numbers and stuffed them in her coat. Before my parents divorced, Mom hadn’t worked, aside from the odd babysitting job here and there. On school mornings, she would wake me up with a ritualistic cheerfulness—throwing open my door, setting out the cereal and the milk, warming the car for twenty minutes before we drove to school. I hadn’t really paid attention to it all until, in Silver Lake, it stopped. She had liked to hunt for flat stones to paint on—a hobby that pained me. Haesung loved the one my mom made for her; she kept it on her bureau. Her initials curled around the waist of the tiny cello painted on the stone’s broader side. I keep one of those rocks on my desk at work—a flat gray stone transformed into a sunflower, two of the petals half chipped off. Another on the shelf above the stove. I put my phone beside it when Mom calls me, hitting Speaker so I can hear her while I cook or open mail, her voice filling the apartment. I regret that I spent so many years trying to escape her; the second I really did, I wanted her back. I can say it easily—I love my mother. But that year, and for five or so after, I could hardly think it. I remember hating how all my friends adored her—I sometimes wished she wasn’t mine, so that I could love her so easily, so naturally, too.
“Look, housecleaning,” Mom said when we were in the car, turning around to me and waving a slip of paper. “Thanks to you kids, that’s something I know I’m good at.” I wasn’t listening. All I cared about was how long I could get away with not going to school.
*
That night, I had a lot of trouble falling asleep—a condition that had seemed to come with Silver Lake. I slid my right hand under the waistband of my pajama pants and knuckled my middle finger into myself. A tingle spread all over my lower body, so that I lifted my pelvis toward my hand. I shut my eyes, trying to erase what cycled through my mind as my finger moved; a collage of colors and smoke and the chipped lilac on Marlena’s nails and words too, like Dad, like her, like no and then yes, okay, yes, yes, yes. Through it all swirled the image of a muscular, tattooed arm wound up in hair, white-blond but somehow mine, as in a dream when you’re yourself and also not. My scalp itched.
The sensation intensified, frustratingly so, and sweat broke out along my upper lip and around my temples. I threw the covers off my body and pushed my pants partway down, still rubbing myself over my underwear, full of a weird, physical certainty that if I stopped, whatever huge and terrible thing I was on the verge of would not happen. I looked up at the window, suddenly nervous that Marlena, all the way inside her sleeping house, could somehow hear me. I pressed into myself harder, but the urgency ebbed and the feeling turned back into a tingle. I removed my hand and covered my eyes with my palms. My fingers smelled. I pinched the skin on my upper arm, tugging it away from the bone. Flabby. Flabby and gross.
It was as if, for a moment, I’d forgotten who I was. My body embarrassed me, especially the parts whose normalcy I couldn’t confirm by judging them against other people’s. Haesung, I knew, had liked to use the detachable shower head in her parents’ bathroom to come. But I couldn’t replicate the intensity of what she described—every time I told her I thought I’d done it, gotten myself off, she looked at me smugly. “It’s not something you think,” she’d say, quoting from the women’s magazines I’d read too. “It’s something you know.”
“I know that I think I have,” I’d say, but her look would stay. What was it supposed to feel like? I usually tried in the shower, standing up, with my eyes screwed shut. Finally, after what felt like a million long, agonized minutes, I would feel something, like teetering on the edge of an itch, the start of a crescendo—and then, gone. Haesung told me to fantasize, so I’d picture the guys from the Abercrombie billboard, who would eventually devolve, thanks to my focus, to rows and rows of abs. Back then, I secretly believed there was something wrong with me. This worry extended beyond sex, but was especially potent in that arena, mixed, as it was, with a powerful current of shame. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe it had something to do with Mom and Dad, how they were either icy or on top of each other, the atmosphere in our house determined largely by something that went on—or didn’t—in their bedroom, and that caused both of them a lot of grief. Or maybe it was just the fact that I was a girl.
I got up and went to the bathroom, where I washed my hands twice in scalding water, soap frothing up my forearms. Back in bed, I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d been seen. Somewhere along the way, I’d internalized the idea that sex, my body, wasn’t something I could take pleasure in unless a man did first. If I wasn’t hot, and so far I’d had no reason to think I was, what was my body for? I burrowed under the covers, pulling them over my head. Like so many teenagers, I was always worried that someone would catch me up to no good, and full of a contradictory, deflated surprise when no one found me out—or ever paid anywhere near as much attention to me as I paid myself.
And so I missed a lot. About Marlena, and especially about my family. Those three people with whom I’d spent most of my life would turn out to be as unknowable as everything else.
*
The next morning, I took the bus to school—no sign of Sal, though Marlena said that he rode it—and kicked around near the entrance for a while, waiting for everyone to go in, thinking I’d see her, or maybe Greg or Tidbit, which was the only name I’d heard for the painfully skinny girl.