Gone Lawn 58 : Iris Cai

The day Ma died, I learned that I couldn’t cut down her apple tree. I had argued, The roots will mess with the foundation. Each gnarled finger creeping towards the dirt-eroded planks, eating the house from the inside out. But the construction worker simply scratched his head, shrugged. That tree’s got to be at least twenty. The roots are already tangled. You can’t pull out something that’s been with you forever.

I had nightmares about the tree as a child. It was taller than the roof and grew in an asymptotic arc, pockmarked trunk kissing our eastern wall. That side of the house hung perpetually in shadow. Once, I asked Ma why even the brightest midday sun couldn’t escape the tree. She pointed to the strings of blue apples that wreathed each branch, craning their necks towards the feeble sunlight. They’ve drunk it all, she said. There’s none left for us.

Ma loved her apple tree, or at least cared for it in a way that resembled love. Despite this, she griped often: the work it took, the cost of fertilizer, the way the trunk never grew straight despite her stakes and strangling straps. Not worth it, she groaned, almost laughing, after we’d both collapsed in the dirt after a particularly brutal summer pruning session. Sometimes I just want to cut that thing down. I asked her why she took care of it still. She said it was duty. Then I asked if she felt the same way about me. Ma grew foreign. Scanned me from head to toe. The hair she braided to the dirt-speckled cuffs of my old blue jeans. Aì, you’re mine, she said eventually. Some things you don’t get a choice.

Other children in the neighborhood climbed trees. When I turned nine and she first saw my tempted gaze fall upon our own blue apple tree, Ma pulled me indoors and closed all the blinds in one fell swoop. Asked, didn’t I see the braided trunk, its deceptive smoothness? Trees were like men: greedy and proud. There are three thousand ways to kill a girl, she warned, all of which started with love. Fen shen sui gu, Ma hissed, Chinese syllables hurled through her mouth like a girl breaking again and again.

Because I couldn’t climb trees, I became an avid reader of biology textbooks. So naturally, I thought I knew everything. How it was impossible to live without a heart. How heart failure leads to sepsis leads to death.

After reading about the human skeleton, I remembered what Ma said about climbing trees. How could a body possibly splinter into ash, bones crushed to ivory powder? When I brought this up, she told me that there is a pain much worse than death. Like being all alone, she said. Left with a baby and a stupid apple seed.

That night, Ma and I creaked open her mahogany bedside drawer. Inside were a collection of dust-eaten memories: a polaroid of a young couple, a stack of recipes for the restaurant, a pockmarked seed bound with a lock of hair. I gave him my entire youth, but he wanted a woman who had blond hair and a quick tongue. He wanted what he could never have. She spat on her thumb and wiped the film of dust off his face. He had hungry eyes and a hollow mouth. This is why he was never happy, she explained, pointing out his features. Shame he gave you his face. A sliver of moonlight escaped the apple tree and darted into the room, illuminating Ma’s eyes and mouth. Empty.

I turned sixteen on the first day of summer. Every day, I biked three miles with Ma to the restaurant, bringing fried rice and noodles to pairs of golden-haired customers. I held the door when they left, spun syrup from their apple tanghulu drizzling to the pavement outside. Once, a teenage customer lingered after his meal. Somehow we ended up talking about love, and I thought he was talking about me.

Ma had seen me from the kitchen. She threw down the towel and cursed the man who gave me my body. I named you Aì so you’d never need love. So you’d never need anything a boy can offer and then take away.

Later, after work, I found Ma hunched over in the yard, watering the apple tree. The side of her face held a sliver of blue, outlined in the dying light. She was very small.

Ma didn’t leave a will, but she left me the house, the restaurant, of course, the apple tree.

The first day, I cleaned out her entire room, packing her life into suitcases. When I finished, I wandered in lopsided circles, inspecting the hairline fissures in the too-empty walls, the small blue smudges on the floor from where the dust once clung and refused to leave. For months that followed, I didn’t enter her room again.

Once, I paused in the driveway after arriving home from work. The house was smaller than I remembered it. Perhaps it was too small to carry both love and family—scraped knees and tax returns and dinner special leftovers and Ma's room—the tree still growing out of its wall, its apples melting into a blueish pile, a penumbra stolen down from the sky.

Aī means sorrow. In English, the tone in which you say things makes no difference. When Ma followed that nameless, unhappy man to America, she gave up the right to choose whether her daughter would know a life of love or sorrow.

I fell asleep on the floor of her room one day. When I woke, the wind had picked up, but the room was static under the listless yellow light. Suddenly, I remembered a night from when I was very young, and had snuck into her room and fallen asleep.

The days leave and leave. I relearn the house the way I once learned the stray dirt streaking through the ridges and valleys of my mother’s hands. Between shifts at the restaurant, I write lists: all the things I know, all the things I have forgotten.

The first time I eat apples again, I shake so hard I almost drop the fruit. But I tell myself to push forward: twirling a knife through its core, skimming the peel off in one long ribbon.

Iris Cai is a senior from the SF Bay Area. Her writing has been recognized by YoungArts, the Adroit Prizes, Poetry Society of America, and the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and is published in or forthcoming from COUNTERCLOCK, Rattle and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Eucalyptus Lit. When not writing, Iris plays piano and takes too many pictures of her cat.