Chapter 24 #2
His family home looked smaller than he remembered and exactly the same, except his dad had repainted the door.
He’d noticed it on New Year. It gave him an odd sense of déjà vu and he stood there, taking a moment to re-orient.
He hooked Cassiel’s sleeve with two fingers and tugged lightly.
Cassiel tilted his chin. May smiled, let go, and climbed up the steps to knock.
The door opened to his mother. She was in a yellow cardigan and her hair was shorter than it had been on Thanksgiving. It looked better than his attempt pre-intervention, though she probably hadn’t done it herself.
“My son is here.” She was not wasting time. She turned her head and yelled down the hall. “Huang Guochun your son is here!”
“Hi, Mama,” May said, smiling and reminding himself that he was good at smiling. Famously. “This is Cassiel.”
May elbowed the man beside him, who was just standing there.
“Hello,” Cassiel said, profoundly unhelpful.
“Wuyue’s friend.” May’s mom smiled at Cassiel and May did not roll his eyes or say anything as she opened the shoe cabinet to retrieve two pairs of identical blue checkered slippers.
They were too small, because they were a Chinese women’s M and the subject of countless arguments in the years they’d lived at this house.
May watched Cassiel step into the slippers without comment, like a good Asian boy. He followed suit.
May set the paper bag by the door and sniffed.
His father was cooking. Something with garlic—probably spinach.
His mother led them into the living room and May tried to recall if he’d been in here the night of Chinese New Year, or if he’d only passed through it.
Had he walked the other way around into the dining room?
A tiny snap made him look up, and it took a moment for May to realize what it was. Cassiel’s hand in his pocket, fiddling with the hair clip. He smiled.
“Thank you for having me, Auntie,” Cassiel said.
“I’m very happy you’re here,” said May’s mother. “Dinner isn’t ready yet. You should sit. Do you want tea? Tie Guanyin, from—”
“He doesn’t want tea,” May interrupted.
Cassiel was still looking around the room. May couldn’t imagine what there was to see other than the piano and the photographs on the wall. May took his boyfriend’s arm. His mother sighed the way she always, always sighed, and disappeared into the kitchen.
“You wanna see my room?” he asked Cassiel.
Cassiel looked at him.
“Upstairs. Come on.”
May tromped up the stairs, hand running up the wooden railing.
His parents’ room was the end of the hallway.
Anna’s old room was closest to the upstairs bathroom, a premium location, and had the window overlooking the front yard with a decent view into the street.
His parents had turned that room into a study, which by their standards meant there were now three bookshelves and an exercise bike in it.
To the left, Louis’s door was closed, a thin line of purple light creeping out from underneath.
“You’re impatient with her,” said Cassiel. May didn’t respond. The statement wasn’t wrong. Instead, he nudged open the door to his old bedroom.
May walked inside, expecting stale air but smelled something lemony instead.
The windows had been open recently, the surfaces dusted.
Nothing had changed about the room. No exercise bikes or extra bookcases.
His posters from high school and college were still up, bed made as if he was going to be sleeping in it again.
The corkboard he’d stolen from Anna and plastered with ticket stubs and polaroids was as he’d left it, a foul monument to the year 2018. His mother had kept it all.
“She annoys me,” May said. He knew he was impatient with his mom.
He also knew that it was childish. Being in this house made him feel like a child.
He could feel Cassiel raising an eyebrow.
Cassiel did not talk to Miss Mary like May talked to Teresa Ma.
He was a better son than that. “It’s like…
I know I should be better but it’s hard, you know? I just regress around her.”
“I understand. I can be short, too.” Cassiel’s voice was soft. May tried to imagine what ‘short’ meant between him and his own mother and couldn’t conjure up anything.
“—Oh, check this out.”
May found the milk crate by the closet door where the handful of records he’d bought in college lived. He had tried to display them at one point, putting up a floating shelf that collapsed within a week. Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, and Green Day’s Dookie.
“No record player,” Cassiel observed.
“None. I was manifesting. It was on my vision board.” May gestured at the corkboard, which was vision-less unless you considered a printed out AFI 100 Years 100 Movies List with less than ten entries crossed off to be a ‘vision,’ in which case nineteen year old May was a true luminary.
Cassiel ran his finger along the edge of one of the records and said: “It worked out.”
May grinned. He moved over to the desk to look at a note he’d tacked onto the corkboard, and his hand rested on the back of the desk chair, only to find it softer than expected.
A dark orange puffer was draped over the back of the chair; the room’s only anachronism.
He’d bought this thing at Uniqlo on sale a year or two ago, and he’d been looking for it for months now. Someone had arranged it here.
He stuffed it into his backpack while Cassiel watched. Probably he was just happy that May now had two warm jackets.
* * *
They came back downstairs with three records under May’s arm. He set them by the door next to the bag with his dad’s jacket.
May’s mother was in the kitchen doorway, murmuring something to his dad in Hokkien—low, fast, the dialect May had never learned because it was never for him. His dad replied in two syllables. She said something else, and he said nothing, and then she came back out.
“Wuyue, does your friend play piano?”
“He’s not my friend, Mama, he’s my boyfriend, and no.” He paused. Actually, he had no proof that Cassiel didn’t play the piano, he’d just decided this was so.
“What instrument do you play?” she carried on, turning to Cassiel, because she was determined to get a microaggression correct.
Cassiel, who was looking at the metronome on top of the piano from three feet away, said, “I took cello lessons. But I have sensory issues.”
“Ah.” Her hand went to the piano lid. She lifted it, the action habitual. The piano keys were yellowed at the edges, worn into shallow dips from decades of use. “I tried to teach him. Two years. Every week, screaming and crying.”
May’s voice pitched up in indignation. “Oh my God. I didn’t cry—”
“Crying.” She pointed at him, then poised her hands above the keys and did her impression of a nine-year-old who did not want to play the Minuet in G minor, was not allowed to learn “My Life Would Suck Without You” and was crying about it an hour before his piano recital.
“Stop laughing,” May said to Cassiel, whose face was entirely still.
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’re laughing with your eyes. Like when you swear at me with your eyes. Mama, he has very expressive eyes, don’t you think?”
This stopped his mother mid-mockery, and she turned her gaze to Cassiel, studying his face, serving him right.
“Bigger eyes than Wuyue,” she said. It wasn’t even true.
His dad started bringing food out from the kitchen—the first time all night that May had seen him.
The hong shao rou was his dad’s best dish, so it came out first. Then a whole steamed flounder, ginger and scallion heaped on top of the white flesh.
Spinach with garlic, glossy with oil, what May had smelled when walking into the house.
There was soup, too, wood ear and silken tofu with egg ribboned through it.
It was over-peppered and the wood ear was probably rubbery and May wanted it in his stomach.
The rice bowls were the same ones they’d used throughout recorded history, the lacquered black with the dark red interior, still holding on, with a set of smaller metal soup bowls with mismatched spoons.
His mother lingered in the doorway, supervising, and then turned her head to the stairs and shouted “Huang Liuyuan!” as his dad sat down at his end of the table.
“This is Cassiel,” May said. “Cassiel—my dad Anthony.”
His dad dipped his head. “Hello,” he said.
He gestured at the pork belly. Cassiel obliged—his chopstick grip was steady and almost pretty, something about how his fingers rested on them. He placed the meat on top of his rice. Dad started eating, and Cassiel followed. May’s stomach felt marginally less unsettled.
“Wuyue, serve your friend some fish,” his mom said.
“He can serve himself, he’s not five.” May had given up on the ‘friend’ narrative.
“It’s polite.”
May scowled and served Cassiel fish. Cassiel looked at the fish on his plate, then at May.
“Thank you,” he said.
Louis was in the chair next to him. May hadn’t heard the stairs. He’d just appeared, already reaching for the rice.
“Hey,” he said. Then looked at Cassiel. “Hey.”
May served himself pork belly and said nothing about Louis’s sparkling conversational skills. The little asshole had been on the debate team in high school, once bragged about going to symposiums, and his entire vocabulary these days consisted of ‘fuck’ and ‘hey.’
His mother asked what Cassiel did for work.
He answered. The watch-fixing confused her, probably because she hadn’t considered this was a job people still had outside of fairytales, which May supposed was fair enough.
Cassiel then made the rookie mistake of naming Linden & Pratt as well as where it was located, so now she had that and would be asking about ‘Shenme Lincoln’ for the rest of time.
“Where is your family from?” she asked.
“Fremont,” Cassiel said, but because he had been adequately prepared in the morning, pre-empted the but where are they really from with, “We moved from Korea when I was six.”