Page 39 of Kitten

My mother’s hands were always cold, like they’d just been washed, her ring hard against my knuckles. While waiting in lines I liked to bring my nose to her hand and smell the cracks between her fingers. She was rigorous about applying lotion, her silken hands proof. If you only looked at her hands, she said, you’d believe she was very young, almost a teenager. She cared about things like that.

My mother did not have any siblings. When she was a child, she immigrated alongside her parents from Shanghai to America. Her mother was a painter, her father a postgraduate cancer researcher. He chose Arkansas because of its nickname: the Diamond State. His other option was Utah, the Beehive State. He was allergic to bees. I would never know him.

They arrived in Little Rock the year after Bill Clinton became governor, one decade fading into the next. For his American name, my mother’s father choseBill. He liked toclarify: “Like the dollar, not the Clinton.” My mother’s mother refused to take English lessons and did not adopt an American name. I would never know her, either, not even what she was called.

Little Rock was full of fat roads, lush woods, and flower-studded hills of gravel. For my mother, naturally gutsy and unfazed by bugs, the outside world delivered the heights of pleasure. At seven, she gained a scar on her stomach from biking down the hill at the end of the road, slamming the brakes at the bottom and flying into the next street. If the neighbors were cruel to her or her parents, which they often were, she dug holes in their front lawns. Once, she found a turtle near a pile of dead leaves and fashioned for it a home out of a shoebox. Four hours later, trapped beneath the sun, the turtle dried to a crisp. She recounted this to me when I developed a passing love for turtles in the fourth grade. “Turtles are difficult pets,” she noted gravely while I cried.

One night, when my mother was ten, her own mother left without a word, leaving behind only the keys to a little red house on the other side of town. I would eventually grow up there. But for most of my mother’s childhood, its existence was a secret.

My mother always insisted it didn’t matter that she only had her father, because he was the only person she needed. For any hole left by her mother, Bill filled it twice over. Spontaneous trips to Hot Springs. Goodies he swiped from the cancer lab, plastic pipettes filled with apple juice.

Bill worked at the medical school at the local university. He devoted three decades to researching lung cancer before eventually dying of it. He never rose above the role ofadjunct professor but was loved in the lab, which kept his name on the door after his death.

My mother did not share her father’s academic heart. She was an unserious and capricious student and barely completed her biology degree at the same university. What she really wanted to do was paint. After a few months interning at the university’s biology lab, she quit to enroll in a local arts college. But in her first semester there, Bill got sick. She dropped out to care for him, eventually taking up work as a technician at his lab, assisting the staff. Bill’s interns became her friends. They spoke about Bill like he was their father. Bill paid them more than they were contracted for, making up for the difference out of his own stipend. That was the kind of person Bill was.

Only two weeks before he passed did Bill reveal that my mother’s mother had another lover in Shanghai. Throughout the years, this man had sent her large sums of money, which explained their new car and my mother’s nice clothes. It was unclear whether the money was an act of love or a ploy to show her the life she could have in Shanghai. But it didn’t matter, she could never quite bring herself to leave—until the Shanghai man bought the little red house and put it in my mother’s name. It was his final gesture, one grand enough to assuage my grandmother’s guilt about leaving her family behind. It was enough.

Now it was time for my mother to accept the gesture, too. Once Bill died, their home would be returned to the university. He was very sorry, he said, he should’ve told her sooner. But he didn’t expect to die.

In the same month that she lost her father, my mothermoved into her new home. One month later, she got pregnant.

My mother told me all this once and never again. I always wondered about this stranger-lover in Shanghai. Whether he was calculated or simply generous, if his children, my mother’s mysterious half-siblings, were spoiled or unhappy or kind. Why he’d chosen that horrible red wallpaper.

The house was red everywhere, from the brick exterior to the cupboard lining. My mother hated it. She covered the walls with paintings, calendars, and old movie posters she got for cheap on eBay. Her best find was a black-and-whiteCasablancaposter the size of a car windshield, which she taped on the wall opposite our dining table. In between bites I’d meet Humphrey Bogart’s smoldering gaze, gun cocked in fist. “See?” my mother said sagely. “He wants you to eat your vegetables.” I refrained from inviting anybody over.

Casablancawas Bill’s favorite movie. He watched movies constantly, used them to sharpen his English. He loved the old-timey Hollywood ones so much that he delivered certain words with a transatlantic tilt. My mother spoke English with a neutral native accent except for when she stressed theTsound in the middle of words, which she got from her father, which he got from the movies. Butter, not budder. Twentty, our house number. Kitten, which was what she used to call me, because I would never grow big.

Bill left behind a modest amount of money. My mother used this money, along with her small income at the lab, to raise me. Despite the passage of the years, her role at the lab never changed; she cleaned equipment and preparedsamples and turned off the lights at the end of the night. Sometimes, when she took me to work, I stood in front of Bill’s plaque and clenched every muscle of my body. I wanted to feel something big, his spirit whooshing around my brain, sharing something secret about my mother. Come to me, Grandfather Bill, I whispered in my head. I know all about you: the way you pronounce specific numbers, your affinity for the US dollar. Don’t you want to know about me?

These invocations always left me with shame over my inability to speak Mandarin. I figured no ghost would want to spend their afterlife trundling through their second language. Eventually I stopped looking at his plaque altogether, frightened by the possibility that he might finally speak to me, and I would not understand him.

The only thing I knew about my father was that he was also Chinese American. My mother met him at art school. At the time, he had a girlfriend, white and the daughter of somebody relatively important in local politics. My mother hoped he’d leave her, but he didn’t, and they never spoke again.

I hated that I didn’t look like my mother. I pored over her few childhood photos obsessively, reluctant to accept that her big hooded eyes were something she’d always had, not a feature she’d grown into. I had a narrow crease and short lashes that pointed down. My mother said the shape of my eyes signaled a predisposition for suspicion. My nose bridge stood thin and high, while hers was flat all the way until the tip, like a pinch of meringue. She called my nose Western. For months I squished my face against my pillow to flatten it, holding my breath, counting to fifty.

My mother always insisted that she would’ve dropped out of art school even if Bill hadn’t gotten sick. She just wasn’t good enough, she said. Though she could reproduce a painting to its exact detail, she could not come up with her own ideas. “Besides,” she said. “If I hadn’t continued at the lab, they would’ve taken down his name by the end of the year.”

When she painted, my mother became focused to the point of self-neglect, not eating or drinking for entire evenings. Her paintings decorated our walls, perfect yet partial renditions of the greats: theMona Lisa,but just close-ups of her face in different sizes;Girl with a Peal Earring,but just the earring, its liquid shine. I learned to draw by copying her copies. She kept my drawings in the top drawer of the mahogany dresser in her room.

When I first came acrossGirl with a Pearl Earringon the internet, I experienced a flash of recognition mixed with panic. The ear I knew, but the face that extended from it was unfamiliar, a betrayal. It wouldn’t be the last time I felt this way, reality a fast car that left me behind. Discovering that the woman in theMona Lisahad hands, or that an entire town sat beneath the sky inStarry Night—the possibility of encountering the truths of more such paintings haunted me. Each time, I had the sense that the world had doubled, and the world in which I belonged was the ersatz one of my mother’s half paintings.

My mother produced the most artwork in winter, when she tended to become withdrawn and hermitic, sometimes even shutting me out of her bedroom. But she always came alive again in summer, our favorite season. Even if it washot out, summer didn’t truly arrive until my mother wore her long hair in a ponytail. With her hair up she looked even younger, and strangers often mistook her for my sister. On those humid ponytail nights, crickets would gather beneath our windows and sing at such a volume that neither of us could sleep. Lying on my mother’s bed, listening to the crickets sing, I wondered what they knew that we didn’t—if something awful was coming. It was always a relief when, in late summer, thunderstorms vanished the cricket song. I liked the way the rain rapped the window above my mother’s bed, rapped it hard like knuckles asking to be let in. I longed to open the windows but was afraid of getting wet.

Sometimes I wished I could be more free. But my mother’s bed was warm, and we held hands when we slept, and that always seemed better than whatever freedom might be.

My mother worked weekends, but in the summer, she often skipped shifts to play with me. In the garden, we set up two white plastic chairs that were always covered in tree pollen, which we smeared on our cheeks until we sneezed. I liked the way my body jerked, liked the budding itch and seismic release. Liked the way my lungs wenthah, hah, hah,liked the way the sneeze shot through my nose and scattered the birds. We would take turns sneezing, trying to outdo the other’s, eventually choking on our pollen-flavored laughter.

During one summer at the height of my childhood, the year my mother first stopped eating and I learned to swim, I gained a neighbor named Sam. He was from California and had more freckles than seemed natural. Sometimes his mother brought over fancy treats like biscotti andmadeleines, and Sam crept behind his mother’s leg and waved at me. I was suspicious of Sam because I was suspicious of everything, and he had eyes like holes that stood too close. All the kids made fun of him because he acted like a baby. He was my first friend.

Sam replaced my mother in my garden afternoons. He always blew the pollen off the chairs before I could rub it on my cheeks. We made fairy dust by mixing the pollen with glitter and the crushed petals of dead roses. My mother grew erratic and sometimes mean during this time. If I left the fairy dust out overnight, I’d find it in the trash the next day.

My mother became reluctant friends with Sam’s mother, Eloise. Eloise gifted me many things, among them a pink puffer jacket two sizes too big for Christmas. My mother’s eyes narrowed to see it, so I knew it was expensive. With it on, my feelings fluctuated between joy and embarrassment. I stood before the mirror, removing then re-wearing it, no longer recognizing the girl I saw: a stranger in a stranger’s coat, older than I could ever be. I didn’t understand then that it would be this way forever—I would always be losing my own face.

In winter, my mother and I wore our coats indoors because the heating made our skin dry. The puffer from Eloise was my warmest, but I kept it untouched in the back of my closet. The trees shed their leaves overnight. I admired this about them, that they cried in private.

A few months later, Sam and Eloise moved back to California. I asked my mother if she was sad. “I’m happy for them,” she said. “There’s nothing here for anybody.” In my room, I wept with the door shut and a pillow over my head.

Another summer went, reliable heat and familiar cricket song. There were fewer thunderstorms, and when they did arrive, I slept through the knocking of the rain. Once, when my mother was away, I tried at last to open the window above her bed, only to discover it was painted shut.