My Mother’s Tapestry
In the hotel restaurant, my mother and I have talked about everything already. School, my brother, college. I’ve made a crane, then a dog, then a fish out of my cloth napkin, which now sits discarded in my lap. She squints at her phone from above her glasses, perusing her thousand unread messages, the bags she is eyeing to purchase, the headlines and markets of the day. My eyes wander toward the swath of velvet curtains, my reflection in the window, a sliver of city visible through the glass. The silence is unassuming and unbearable.
I drum my fingers on the table, stop.
Finally, I ask, “How did you meet dad?”
She puts down her phone and looks at me. “In college. Why?”
“I’m just curious. I want to know,” I said, shrugging. We rarely talk about this kind of thing. We are Chinese and therefore stoic.
“It was a long time ago,” she says. She takes off her reading glasses, runs her hands through her hair, the gray roots peeking out from beneath the purple-red. She chuckles to herself. “He liked me, a lot.”
I lean in.
That was the first dinner of many, where I could catch a glimpse of the tapestry of my parents’ love, riddled with holes and fortune and resentment. Each time, my questions snagged on a scrap of fabric, and with those pieces, I sewed together the story of two immigrants working their way from poor, rural China toward the American Dream. She gave me the outline. I filled in the details with memories of my childhood, or from movies.
My mother told me that my father played guitar for her. In my head, I picture their first meeting on a bench, freshly painted green, as in a romcom. A cherry tree stands above them, the petals pink and translucent against a cloudless sky. My father’s hands, still smooth and uncalloused, dance across his guitar, while his voice drags across the air like a tide receding from pebbles. He looks up, they catch eyes, they smile, and they know that it’s meant to be.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that she picked him out of many other suitors, all vying for her attention, because he was smart and loyal. But when they dated, his loyalty devolved into obsession. When she talked to other men, his face stiffened. He was always watching, listening, in class, everywhere. This was a sign of devotion, she believed. But looking back he had been possessive and jealous, and she had only mistaken that intensity for love.
So they got married. What I imagine of the wedding is stitched by the photos of them, newly-wed, that I found hidden in the back of my closet, behind my Bermuda shorts and Adidas tracksuits. The photos were glued underneath a cream cardstock behind a layer of glass, framed with mahogany and a thin gold inlay. They are how I know my father was handsome then, adorned with a full head of hair, minus his current potbelly and glasses. Poised, tuxedoed, he stands arm to arm with my mom. She is smiling, her hair still black and cropped short against her neck, neatly beautiful in her white wedding dress. They looked happy. Were they?
Any shred of that happiness was lost, I imagine, when they attended graduate school in pursuit of the American Dream. When they moved, my father abandoned his guitar. In Minnesota, snow grayed out the skies and carpeted the roads, until cars churned it into muck. Now they were utterly alone together in a cold foreign land with a foreign language. During lectures, the professor wrote out his words for my father on the board because with his mute, sterile English, he could not understand him otherwise. I imagine his furious scribbling, his eyes darting back and forth between the teacher and the language.
Meanwhile, my mother’s tongue would not roll around her l’s and r’s, in words like “world” or “walk,” in a way that pulled the corners of strangers’ faces downwards: not another one of those. In these cold months, the illusion must have started to slip. My father began to gain inches on his waist, or shed strands from his head, or they began bickering, and the arguments began to pile up like the snowdrift on their lawn.
How did their first argument go? What did it look like, the first time they screamed at each other, hit each other? Maybe I hadn’t been born. Maybe I was not old enough to remember.
In the tapestry of their love, my brother and I arrive late — ten years into the relationship. As I got older, however, my brother and I witnessed their anger often. Once, I was newly twelve and sat huddled in my room, their shouts ringing like claps of thunder through the house, the voices rising and falling, the walls trembling along with them. I shut my door, flinched at every word, my schoolwork all but abandoned. My mom must have been red-faced, flinging her words like knives against my father. My father rarely spoke up, but this time he too was bellowing, his shirt stained with wine. The house was too big and too empty and too cold all at once.
Later, when as usual she accompanied me until I fell asleep, she said, her voice on the verge of breaking, “Your father has done bad things to me.”
I froze. She sniffled and let out a long, shaky breath. In the dark, her body was warm and heavy beside me. Her fingers made a scuffling sound against her cheeks as she brushed away her tears. Her breath hung in the air. I turned toward her, underneath my polka-dotted duvet, attempting to make as little noise as possible. She sounded like me when I cried, all snot. Even without seeing, I knew her face red and her eyes puffy.
“Someday, when you grow up, you will hear the rest of the story,” she continued. “But I regret a lot because of him.”
In that room, in the dark, we were in some penumbral underbelly of reality, where I was her mother and she was my daughter. I couldn’t grasp the shape of her, who she was now, new and real and broken and lost. We were on the raft of my bed floating down a slow-moving river. Behind us, I saw the shape of the past, a stagnant pool laden with dead leaves, clutching and sinking. We lay there in the darkness for a long time, breathing.
I think I did know the story. She used to joke that a huli jing, a fox-spirit which takes the shape of beautiful women, would eventually carry my dad away. “One already has,” she would say under her breath. I laughed because it was a joke. But I also remember walking down a path, holding the hand of a woman who is not my mother. I could never tell if that memory was a fever dream or the truth, whether I imagined the orange streetlamp illuminating her red, glittering nails, the sweet of her perfume, her palm soft and damp.
We finish our meal in the hotel restaurant. She is holding a final piece of bread with perfectly oval nails, tipped with white. The chatter of the restaurant has dulled; the place is nearly empty. The light, now dimmed, masks the gray roots of her hair. I lean back, basking in the sight of this new, unfolded tapestry, watching this woman who raised me with so little love of her own.
“Don’t marry your first boyfriend.” She says this matter-of-factly, shakes her head in disapproval, and takes another bite of her dish.
“I won’t,” I say, laughing.
Her fork clatters onto her empty plate. I swig the last of my water. There is a long pause.
“Are you happy?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says immediately. “Yes, I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I have you and your brother.”
I smile. Eventually, my mother returns to her phone. I return to my tapping. I make another crane from my napkin.
ANGELA WEI is a senior editor for The Grotonian, creative director of Circle Voice, an alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and student writer at Groton School.