And Before That
I woke with a yellow film in my eyes as if someone had soft-boiled my eyeballs. I called my family doctor but the nurse wanted a photo before she would let me into the calendar. So my husband took two and I sent it to the doctor but the email never arrived.
And before that, I lost my appetite and as a result thirteen pounds, which I understood to be a bad thing, doctor or no doctor. So I tried to tempt myself with my childhood comfort foods: shrimp wonton soup, savory rice porridge flecked with scallions, mashed potatoes slathered in butter. I would eat one or two spoonfuls and turn away the rest. The shrimp wonton soup eventually went bad, a milky film troubling the clear chicken broth, and that made me feel worse because my husband had cycled all the way to Chinatown to pick some up from New King.
And before that, I weighed thirty pounds more than I should. My face swelled, my thighs rubbed with every waddle, my boobs spilled out of my bra and onto my face when I hoisted myself into a shoulder stand in yoga class. I could have blamed my weight on menopause but I knew the cause for my flab. A family-sized bag of Lay’s barbecue potato chips every night after dinner. Or Iranian roasted pistachios or a bowl of popcorn shiny with ghee or white corn chips with salsa.
And before that, I read an article in The New Yorker that claimed corn chips should have a snap of four pounds of pressure per square inch. This according to the Taco Bell innovation team. And even as I absorbed this factoid while reading in bed with my husband grumbling about the light, I remembered the days of being hangry all the time, barely weighing a hundred pounds, when I survived law school and then lawyering on vending machine potato chips and Coca-Cola, so who cared about snap?
Which in turn reminded me that, long before all that, I was a child who craved the foods my mother derisively labeled as American: Hamburger Helper and canned tuna fish and Bake’nShake and lime Jello. How, as a latch-key kid I would drag one of the dining chairs into the kitchen to make mashed potatoes from a box of instant potato flakes. These were the only kinds of potatoes I knew and I loved them with an ardor most children reserve for household pets. So I used a whole family-sized package and floated Land O’Lakes butter on top before settling in front of the television to watch Dark Shadows.
And before that, I was a skinny kid who never spoke until spoken to and then in a whisper. So when Mom offered me more white rice or steamed fish or water spinach sauted in garlic, she did so with a ladle or her own chopsticks and to a question like that there is no no.
But that never stopped me from thinking about the fact that, before dinner, I had played stickball or Red Rover or marbles with the kids on our block like I was one of them. And they were now probably sitting down to frijoles and tortillas and sopa and salsa made from the cactus in their backyard and I wondered if I could ever become normal like them.
And before that, I sat in the backseat of my mother’s station wagon to accompany her on her grocery shopping trips. I could recognize the vegetables and meats and even some of the jars of spices she bought though I did not know their English names. Everyone in those stores spoke Cantonese: the man who sprayed the greens, the butcher who chopped the oxtail, the fishmonger who caught the fish my mother chose from the swarm in the fish tank. I did not understand a word they said but I did understand that this was unimportant. My task was to carry the fish, slit head to tail and eviscerated, now squirming in a plastic bag.
And before that, I suppose that I was content to drink my mother’s milk from her dusky nipple but I don’t remember that.
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