I BRUSH YOU

My grandmother sleeps in my father’s room with my mother. In my imagination, she comes to me in Luke’s cabin. I keep pushing her away, but she comes back. And I can’t push away the secrets she has told me.

They must be secrets. No one told me about crickets in the war. In school, we studied genocide. We studied war propaganda and the hope for what communism could bring in tiny Cambodia. For my family, I think their war comes at night. And in the day, they stuff it all in a pot and try again to live with each other. I’m what comes from it all. A rabbit running from them.

Yiey and my mother have brought taro chips and sweet and sour lotus rootlets into the kitchen, and ginger tea and cardamom, and the house has taken on these smells, too.

I am sitting with Pilot curled next to me in sleep. It’s dark, and Yiey and I can see each other by a streak of moonlight. Yiey sits on the couch, brushing her long hair. There is something about her stern face that makes me be still. I look at her lips that try to close over her teeth, and I think of her mother in Cambodia. What if she talks about Cambodia? What if she talks about the crickets?

But she doesn’t talk. She offers to brush my hair. “I brush you.” I shake my head no. But I don’t leave. I think about my great-grandmother, my father’s grandmother, who gave me her 1920s silver hairbrush she got from her mother. I add it to the picture, the way Luke added the angle of the ratty paperbacks to his sketch. My hairbrush has a round silver body with spots of tarnish and a slender handle. It is side by side with my whelk shell. Some of the horsehair bristles are broken off.

I look at Yiey. She’s not doing it, but I can almost feel her brush pull through my hair. Yiey’s mother brushed her hair, the women said at the party, until she was too weak and begged to taste rice once more.

This story terrifies me so much I can understand wanting the gun that is somewhere in Luke’s cabin to be able to wipe out the memory of that mother brushing my hair. How can my grandmother have this terrible memory and yet still have the peace of the sea in her bearing?