19
The fifth time her mother-in-law slapped Miaow, not long after her first birthday, Hom raised her hand in fury, and her mother-in-law took an amazed step back and screamed. Instantly, Hom’s arm was seized from behind, and she whirled to find her husband, Daw, standing stone-faced with his own open hand raised and ready to strike. When she backed away from him and turned to comfort Miaow, she saw the gleam of satisfaction in her mother-in-law’s eyes.
Her face burning and her throat almost clogged with fury, Hom let her lids drop in submission; she’d learned by then that any display of resentment would only make things worse. She brought her breathing under control, and the three of them endured a tense, precariously balanced silence, enveloped in the scent of the rice on the stove, until Miaow, in a delayed reaction to the slap, began to scream—in pain or rage, Hom was never quite sure which. Ignoring her husband’s sharp question and her mother-in-law’s reproving tut tut tut, Hom stooped down and gathered the crying child to her, pushed her way out of the kitchen, and hurried through the cramped rooms of the house, out into the merciless midday heat.
Much of the village was indoors in sheer self-defense. Even the dogs were quiet, either sleeping or licking themselves with admirable focus as they took shelter in the shaded dust beneath the wooden houses, raised a meter or so against the rainy season’s inevitable floods. She smelled food; people had come in from the paddies and fields either to nap or to sit around tables together, talking and joking as they rewarded themselves for the morning’s work and strengthened themselves for the afternoon’s. Families, people who lived and worked side by side, coming together over the shared sacrament of food.
To Hom, who had come to dread mealtime, the day stunk of food.
Straddling her hip, the baby had stopped crying and made the transition to the hiccups that usually followed tears. The hiccups were also a sign that the child was hungry.
The child was always hungry.
Her mother-in-law had insisted, practically from the beginning, that the baby should be weaned as quickly as possible. At first, Hom had thought it was just about the time it took her to breast-feed Miaow, which cut into her time in the paddies, but she soon realized that it was really about control. The relationship between the baby and Hom’s breast was the only one in the house the old woman couldn’t command, and she had to disrupt it. She had to own it. So Miaow was weaned early—too early, according to Hom’s own mother’s view of things.
Not that Hom had been able to see much of her mother. Somehow, the time was never right for her to go home. There was always some imperative, some emergency, that was manufactured to keep her in her mother-in-law’s house. Only in Miaow’s fifth month, after Hom subjected her husband to three days of wooden silence, behaving as though she and Miaow were the only people in the world—only after that, and after the first time Daw struck her to bring her back in line—only then did her mother-in-law permit her son to take Hom home for an afternoon so her mother could hold the granddaughter she hadn’t yet seen. Permission had been given again several months later, but except for that, Hom’s mother had heard her granddaughter’s voice only on the telephone; Miaow usually protested when her mother’s attention was focused elsewhere.
Hom’s stomach grumbled, and she knew that the baby was hungry, too, but going in to eat would just start another skirmish. Her husband’s mother insisted that Hom overfed Miaow, saying she knew more about babies than Hom did, and that overfeeding her now would make Miaow fat and lazy and useless, “a little lump of grease,” she had said, “squatting in the kitchen corner all her life.” When the child graduated from the breast to rice gruel, her mother-in-law watched the path of every spoonful of Hom’s own rice that was lifted to the baby’s lips; several times, she even moved the bowl out of Hom’s reach. The old woman had demanded that she look at the big strong man, her son, whom Hom had wisely married, and claimed that even he, an active male, hadn’t eaten as much as Hom was forcing down Miaow’s throat. She’d also suggested that Hom needed that food herself to supply the energy for her day’s, and night’s, work.
So Miaow was hungry day after day, and fretful about it. Hom had taken to sneaking into the kitchen when her mother-in-law was out, stealing a paddleful of rice, and putting it into a little jar that had once held mashed peaches, which had been Miaow’s favorite before they were relegated to the proscribed list. “Fruit is no good for a girl,” she’d been told. “It makes them soft and sweet and useless. Girls need to be strong. Women carry the world.”
Five times now, the old woman had slapped Miaow, and the baby was only a little past a year old. It wasn’t right. Life couldn’t be like this. It couldn’t.
It had never been like this before.
And she knew—her eyes told her, and the neighbors confirmed it almost daily—that Miaow was a beautiful baby, an unusually beautiful baby. She looked very much the way Hom had as an infant, when the old village ladies gathered around her and sighed, and floated prayers heavenward to help her avoid the vengeance of envious female ghosts. As she’d grown older, become a teenager, the village aunties still told Hom what a lovely child she had been. And she had been, she knew it; as one of a trio of beautiful sisters, she had heard often when she was growing up that she was the loveliest of the three, that she was the most beautiful girl in the entire village. Even Daw had once told her so. But now she felt like a drab, colorless collection of aging, aching muscles and infrequently washed hair, held together by resentment and sentenced to a life of labor by people who couldn’t recognize a beautiful baby when they saw one.
And this was not just wounded vanity on Miaow’s behalf. Hom believed that people who were blind to beauty were blind to goodness, immune to goodness, because what was beauty but a sign of goodness in a former life? Her husband didn’t see the beauty of his own daughter. Neither he nor his terrible mother loved Miaow; and it was clear to her now, despite almost two years of stubborn, stupid refusal to see it, that they didn’t love her, either.
She tiptoed as invisibly as possible through the remainder of that day, trying to anticipate her mother-in-law’s demands and avoid any additional conflict. She even sidestepped the frequent dinner-table squabble over how much, or how quickly, she was feeding Miaow. Before she went to bed, in the shed she and Miaow shared because the child’s middle-of-the-night calls for attention disrupted Daw’s sleep, she took half an hour or so to lay out the things she would need, and as she closed her eyes, she commanded herself to wake up at three. The baby often awoke a little after three and wanted company; Hom had trained herself to anticipate the noise and get up in time to have a pacifier in her hand before the child could begin to squall in earnest.
That night, she snapped awake a good four or five minutes before Miaow stirred, and she had on hand something better than the usual pacifier to keep the child quiet: little balls of soft rice, flavored with the overripe bananas that she hung up in their room for just this purpose. The child’s relationship with ripe, even browning, bananas—a carefully guarded secret between mother and daughter—was a passionate one: when Miaow ate them, she made low, barely audible moans deep in her throat, so extravagantly satisfied that they sounded almost feral.
While Miaow was adrift on waves of banana bliss, Hom sat at the edge of her cot in the oil-scented, spider-ridden tool room where Miaow had drawn her first breath. Rubbing her hand gently over the center of her chest and willing her heart to stop pounding, Hom listened and, without knowing it, counted off the seconds. At last, at the absolute edge of hearing, she isolated the sleep-sounds made by Daw, who somehow snored with his mouth closed. Still, even after she heard it, she hesitated, asking herself questions, answering them, one by one, in the negative, and instinctively popping more banana rice balls into the baby’s mouth the moment she had swallowed the previous one.
She released a sigh that felt like it came all the way from her feet. Given the answers to her questions, she couldn’t stay here all night long. She couldn’t stay here at all. In the end it turned out to be a blessing that she and Miaow had been banished to the shed: the floors of all the other rooms in the old wooden house sang out every time a foot pressed down on them. Within a couple of weeks after her arrival, Hom had learned to map out which rooms people were moving through just by the sounds they made. The floor in the shed, though, was poured concrete, as solid as it was silent, and it was placed only one high, awkward step above the street, so she didn’t even have to worry about the stairs, which played melodies of their own.
Before she had gone to bed that evening, she had changed into her lightest and most comfortable clothes and set out her most trustworthy pair of shoes, the only ones without at least one flapping sole to trip her in the dark or one hole just the right size for a snake’s fangs. After she slipped into the shoes, she had very little left to do to take the steps that would change her life completely, that would bring an end to the chapter that she’d thought—had even, at one point, hoped—would last the rest of her life. All that remained was to take her child and pass through a door that squealed like a ghost in a trap, close it behind her, and start walking.
From a hook on the wall she took down an over-the-shoulder canvas bag she had partly filled with rice from the cooker in the kitchen, and then she surveyed the room one last time. Ugly, lonely, spidery, and smelly as it was, this was where her child had come safely into the world here, and she closed her eyes and said a silent thank-you to the spirits of the room. Carefully, she picked up Miaow, still working happily on her latest rice ball, and seated her in a sort of sling, just a loop of cloth she had cut from her bedsheet and double-folded for strength. Giving the child another tiny mouthful of the sweet rice to keep her occupied, she held her breath, bent her knees and slipped her arm through the loop in the sling, then straightened slowly so that Miaow was dangling from her left shoulder, the one that didn’t have the rice hanging from it. She stood there, congratulating herself on the fit. She’d been careful when she cut it out, but it was still a relief to see that the baby was sitting precisely where she sat when she straddled her mother’s hip. This was important, because it meant that she would be able to shift the baby’s weight from her shoulder to her hip and back again whenever she grew tired. The sling, now that it had the baby in it, was surprisingly heavy; in spite of the miserly meals she’d been given, Miaow had put on weight, and Hom was facing a long walk.
She said a prayer, a call to the good spirits of the night world she was about to enter. She didn’t bother with the bad ones: they would know she was there no matter what she did, and it was useless to try to placate them.
With the fingertip of her right hand resting on the inside of her left wrist, she counted ten heartbeats—not as fast as they might have been—and then she lifted up on the door handle to keep the hinges from squealing, and tugged inward. Immediately, she saw the moon, plump and almost full, floating a few hours above the horizon to the west, waiting for her to follow it into the night. Easing the door closed behind her, she stood perfectly still, listening to the house one last time. No one seemed to be moving inside. With her eyes on the yellowing moon that would guide her, at least at first, she took a deep, deep breath, and said a silent goodbye to the husband, who, whatever else he was, was Miaow’s father. Then she lifted her right foot to take the first step of her journey.