the table and caught hold of my wrist with one hand.
“I’m not afraid of hard work,” Ma said, smoke emerging from her mouth in a series of small, blue clouds. “Nor should my children be afraid.” Her fingers tightened uncomfortably around my wrist then, but I didn’t try to pull my hand free.
“I’m not afraid,” I said, and Ma nodded happily.
“That’s my good girl.” She patted my wrist, her fingers stroking my skin softly, and for that moment her rough fingers felt smooth again, like silk, like smoke.
I let her be happy then. I let her think that I was a good daughter, the kind she wanted, the kind she deserved. But really, I was a terrible daughter, the kind who lied.
CHAPTER 8
Auntie
Auntie, I soon discovered, liked to complain about unusual things.
“The sky is too large. I feel I am being swallowed alive.” She waved her hand airily in the direction of the cornfields and the soybean fields and the blue dome of the sky that seemed to stretch all the way to Minnesota.
“And the wind here is too fierce. It is treacherous and uncivilized.” Auntie drew her arms across her chest then and shivered.
When Auntie talked like this, Ma laughed. “You haven’t changed at all,” she said cheerfully as though saying something with enough confidence would make it so.
Auntie turned from the glass of the front door of the Palace where she was surveying the empty parking lot. “Time to practice our English.” And she turned on the television set Uncle had set up behind the counter next to the soda machine and the metal cabinets for the plates. “You must all lose your Texas accents or none of the people here will ever understand you, Sister Dear.”
Then Auntie sat down on one of the swivel stools to watch her favorite soap opera, which consisted of nothing but people getting married and then divorced then married again, as far as I could tell.
While Auntie watched TV, mouthing the lines along with the actors, Ma cleaned the Palace, scrubbing everything in sight, the tables and the counters, the metal cabinets, the soda pop dispenser, the cigarette machine by the front door. She joked about the customers and the strange ways they seasoned the food, adding soy sauce to their rice, salt to their vegetables, sugar to their tea.
Auntie didn’t know how to cook or clean, of course, not when she’d always had servants for such matters, and so Ma didn’t expect her to help.
“Nea, take the children outside to play. I can’t have them running around when I’m busy,” Ma commanded as she mopped the floor. “Sourdi can help me inside.”
I was only too happy to obey. It was hot outdoors, but the cold inside the Palace frightened me.
I immediately installed myself in the shade behind one of the large green dumpsters where I could read one of my favorite books, a dog-eared copy of The Martian Chronicles that I’d borrowed from the public library in East Dallas before we left. Reading about the adventures of astronauts on Mars appealed to me in a way that watching my younger brother and sisters throw scraps of garbage to the seagulls did not. It’s true; by now, even the once miraculous appearance of the gulls no longer thrilled me.
Time passed while I explored an empty Martian town, eerily reminiscent of my hometown on Earth, but empty and ancient.
“Ugh! Filthy birds!” Sourdi said, emerging from the kitchen with a dun-brown Hefty bag. She tossed it into the dumpster where it split, exposing the chicken bones and cabbage hearts and tin cans inside.
She swatted the air as the birds swooped closer for inspection.
Sourdi wiped the sweat beading across her forehead with the back of her hand. Her skin was moist, her pink T-shirt ringed with dark bands beneath her armpits. Her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail off her neck, but her face was red all the same. She looked miserable. Because she was almost sixteen, she couldn’t sit in the shade and hide from the adults like me, but had to keep busy all the time.
“Who all wants to help me peel the shrimps?” she asked hopefully.
I ducked my head back into my book. They were not just shrimp, I knew, but in fact the Special of the Day, $8.95, Imperial Prawns. They didn’t entail peeling so much as ripping their long, black spinal columns from their fat, spongy bodies.
“Not me!” Sam squeaked up immediately.
“Not me!” the twins repeated.
“Come on, y’all like to eat ‘em,” Sourdi cajoled us.
“We do not,” Maly said, which was true enough. The twins had come to like only the most American of foods, cheese that came wrapped in plastic, soups that came out of cans, meat that sat between buns. They constantly astounded us with their strange eating habits.
“I only like them if they’re cooked,” Sam said.
Sourdi sighed. More sweat was gathering across her forehead. She blotted her face daintily now with the edge of a tissue pulled from her pocket. She was having trouble with acne and no longer indiscriminately wiped her face on the hem of her T-shirt like the rest of us.
“Don’t any of y’all want to help me?”
“I am helping,” I insisted, pointing to our siblings. I tucked my book beneath my legs surreptitiously.
“You monkeys,” Sourdi said, but then she smiled, unable to hold a grudge. My older sister had been cursed with a sweet disposition. She dabbed the sides of her nose carefully with her tissue one last time then went back inside the steamy kitchen.
We were all relieved that she had not made us go back inside, especially me, although I felt guilty admitting as much. Sourdi reminded us of what was to come when we were adults, or at least old enough to be considered an adult by our mother. I didn’t look forward to the prospect.
“We’re gonna show you how to pray to the Holy Ghost,” Maly announced next as I tried to return to my book. My twin sisters now jumped up and, standing side-by-side, rolled their eyes back into their heads so that only the whites showed. Then holding their arms outstretched, palms upwards, they began to make crazy noises, looping nonsense syllables that rose up and down in pitch. Their eyelids fluttered rapidly over the whites of their eyeballs.
“Cool!” Sam exclaimed.
“Yo, that’s whack,” I said. “Y’all act like that, the police gonna come lock you up like you on some kinda drugs.” I hoped I could shame my sisters back into normalcy. The last time I’d seen anything like this, it was in a movie, and the little girl’s head had started to spin around her neck like a top.
“Ubba ubba ubba,” my sisters moaned, their voices rising. They flailed their arms in unison.
“You’re acting like freaks, don’t you get that?” I forced my voice to sound calm, a little bored even. Sam, switching allegiances now, giggled.
My sisters’ eyes flapped open. “Y’all don’t know nothin’! That’s how the Holy Ghost is s’posed to talk!” Maly announced indignantly.
