After school a few days later, I dump my backpack in the mudroom, nod at one of the groundskeepers through the bank of windows, and try to ignore the feeling that I’ve misplaced something. Say, my entire heart. And now, without Bao-mu bustling about, clucking over my day, force-feeding me some Chinese dish that she whipped up (never mind that Lena prepares a low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie snack for me per Mama’s instructions), I can’t get rid of Age’s words still ringing in my head with the perfect pitch of truth.
I rush upstairs to finish packing Bao-mu’s suite, but when I get there, her sitting room is empty. Everything, and I mean, everything, is gone—furniture, artwork, pictures. I stride into her bedroom. Even the macaroni necklace I made for her in preschool, which she displayed next to her bed, is gone. Fifteen years of being with our family, with me, vanish as though she was never here.
Packing up for Bao-mu, the one thing I could do for her, wanted to do, is no longer necessary. Disappointed and feeling about as useful as the one stray dust bunny on the hardwood floor where her sofa used to be, I shuffle out of the suite, my footsteps loud with nothing to muffle the sound. Down the hall, I spot a note hanging like a public notice in the middle of my door. Great, maybe Mama’s announcing that I’m about to be evacuated without warning, too.
Mama’s spiky handwriting reads: Syrah: The Fujimoros canceled tonight. We need you to fill the table. See you after my pedicure. Mama.
When I rip off the note, I see the invitation to a black-tie event paper-clipped underneath. My parents have been gone since the family meeting on Saturday, virtually an entire week, and seeing me ranks lower than toenails on Mama’s to-do list.
I fling open my bedroom door and slam it closed. In the middle of my room, I scream, “I don’t want to go!”
No one hears me, not the house manager nor Mama’s personal assistant, who are no doubt in a shopping-organizing-errand-running tizzy now that The Empress is back home.
The last thing I want to do tonight is truss myself in a girdle, hobble around in heels, and smile until my cheeks go into spasms. I kick my antique bed, the one that makes me feel caged with its carved canopy and three walls, immediately feeling guilty. Besides, now my toes throb inside my scuffed-up sneakers, the ones Mama hates because they make me look like a poor waif.
Funny, isn’t it, because a waif is a hungry-thin girl, not a hungry-fat one like me.
If I can’t be thin, I can at least feel thinner. That is The Syrah Cheng Way, after all. So after I check my messages—no RhamiWare, and naturally, no Age, I run to Mama’s pavilion, not her office on the first floor, but her workout studio on the second. Mirrors span the entire light-filled space. Why, may I ask, would anyone want a 360-degree view of their butt, even if Mama has the cutest one on the Pacific Rim? Her scientifically calibrated scale, the one she has serviced once a quarter, dominates the front corner of the studio. I avoid it since according to my scale this morning, I’ve regained one of the two pounds I’ve lost in the last week. On the opposite side of the room is Mama’s Reformer, the medieval-looking Pilates device she uses to stretch herself into a lean, mean shopping machine.
For forty-five minutes, I run on the treadmill. The first four miles are easy enough, mostly because I keep thinking about Bao-mu’s empty room and how much I wish she were here so I could talk to her about Age. As I approach mile five, the front of my knee starts aching.
So I hop off the treadmill and lunge down the room, gripping fifteen-pound weights in my hands. My knee wobbles, my balance off. What I wouldn’t give for that false sense of security of a custom brace. As I work hard at keeping my abs tight, chest upright the way my physical therapist taught me, I make three circuits around the room when I wonder if that’s what Age was getting at. That he was my crutch, only good enough to squire me when I needed him. But that’s not true. Or is it?
On my sixth circuit around the room, my legs can’t take a single squat more and I don’t want to face the fact that I never ask Age over when my parents are around. As much as I tell myself it’s because I don’t want Mama to make some derogatory remark about him or Baba to interrogate him about his future plans, I wonder if it’s because I don’t have the guts to stand up for Age. I pit-stop at the water cooler. As I inhale cup number three as if that will wash away my guilt, I spot a floral notebook on the floor.
Partly out of curiosity and mostly out of procrastination because who, truly, likes doing lunges, I open the planner.
Breakfast: green tea, multivitamins
Lunch: grilled chicken breast on spinach (no dressing)
Dinner: edamame
There’s no doubt whose this is. Like a sales ledger, Mama has tracked her daily workouts in red ink: one hour treadmill (600 cal.), half hour weights (300 cal.), forty-five minutes Pilates (300 cal.).
This is no journal to pour out thoughts, make sense of feelings, or, in my case, rewrite history. It’s a personal profit-and-loss statement where being calorie-poor and exercise-rich is the goal. Sickened because I now have physical evidence that what I eat at breakfast is more than Mama’s entire caloric input for a day, I lunge away from her journal, adding bicep curls to intensify my workout. That’s got to be worth another ten calories.
Halfway across the room, I can’t help it. Don’t do it! Don’t do it! I tell myself, even as I stop to examine my reflection. My right thigh, the one used to harvest hamstring muscle for a new knee ligament, is still thinner than my left. Instead of bulking it up, I wonder how I can lose the fat on my good leg, make it atrophy, too. I turn to my side and press at the bulge of my stomach, wishing that it were as flat as Mama’s. That greenish-yellow bruise still flowering on my shoulder? It’s the least of my worries.
I add another fifteen minutes on the elliptical machine, pumping my arms hard, watching my calories add up on the digital board. But no matter how hard and long I go, I can’t run away from Age’s words and the image of him sneaking into my hsuan, never using the front door.