Memory Sickness

by Tiffany O’Neill

The BART train rumbles under weekend-empty Market Street, then jerks to a stop and opens its doors to admit a crush of shoppers at Powel Station. I sit, like a bird on a perch, on the dingy blue seat and clutch the white bag with “Christie Cherie’s Fine Stationery” in black script on the front. I slide my hand inside the bag and run my fingers over the book’s silk binding, tracing the raised embroidered pattern of leaf, branch, and cherry blossom. The gilded edges of the paper are slick and cold, like wedding china.

I stood in front of the shelves of journals for almost forty-five minutes, trying to decide. Never have I paid so much for what is essentially a blank notebook, but it is for a special purpose. This book is for my baby. It will keep the memories I have of this time, the very first time—maybe the only time—I am pregnant.

The train zooms under the Mission District and the baby in my womb turns a rib-jabbing somersault. I take my pen out of my bag. It is a Bertoni; heavy and silver, discreetly etched with my old company logo. The pen was the last Christmas gift I received from my boss. I can’t hold back a sigh when I think of my job. It was nice working for a company that had class. It was nice working. I quickly remind myself that I am still working. Isn’t sustaining life and growing organs and ears while I wash spinach and shop for organic cotton baby clothes work?

I can’t wait so I open the memory book to the first thick, creamy page. Slowly, between the jerky stops of the train I begin to write. Saturday, August 23rd. Then I stop and tap my pen against my chin. How do I start?  Mommy is going to the salon for a pedicure. Daddy is– here I pause again. How should I describe what Todd is doing? I want this to be an honest book. Otherwise what’s the point? Still, I can’t bring myself to write things exactly as they are: Daddy is drinking beer and watching The Three Stooges with his immature and understandably single brother. So instead I write, –is spending some quality time with Uncle Chad. I smile. There. Tasteful, yet still honest.

“Glen Park Station, Glen Park.” The muffled voice of the train operator startles me. I slide the journal back into the bag. I tuck the pen into the zippered side pocket of my purse, away from scratching keys and loose lipstick tubes. I try (and fail) to look graceful as I pull myself up. I smile in thanks to the man who gave up his seat when I got on board. People are kind. Even in San Francisco.

It is just two short blocks from the train station to Glen Park Salon, but they are steep uphill blocks. I breathe heavily through my nose for a minute before I push the button on the door. On the other side of a glass wall that is nearly covered by street fair fliers Kay looks up from the toenails she is busy filing, grins and waves. She gets up and pushes a button under the counter. I open the door when I hear the buzzer.

“Heyyyy, Princess!” Kay gives all her clients nicknames. She turns on the taps and water gushes into the basin of a black vinyl and faux marble pedicure chair. “You not come in last week. We think you have baby already!”

“Oh, no. A couple of weeks to go.” I skim through stacks of Glamour’s and Cosmos, trying to decide if I should find out how to keep him coming back for more, or how to know if he’s cheating. Then I remember my memory book, and leave the magazines.
Kay shouts something in her language to her assistant Diane. Diane takes Kay’s place with the lady in the other chair. The woman is very large, her calves easily as big as Diane’s thighs.

Diane goes to work with a pumice stone on the woman’s heels. Kay says something and Diane laughs.

I hate when they do this. I always feel like they’re laughing because I have hair on my big toe or bitching because I don’t tip enough. The woman in the chair doesn’t seem to notice. She never takes her eyes off Oprah.

“Princess, pick your color,” Kay says and gestures to the tiers of nail polish on the wall. She holds up the other woman’s freshly painted nails. They’re purple with hot pink flowers on each tip. “See? Big Mama going on vacation tomorrow. Hawaii. Maybe you want flowers, too? Very pretty.”

I smile and shake my head. “Very pretty, but I’m not going on vacation. French for me. Same as usual.”

I hoist myself onto the chair, and ease my swollen feet out of my flip-flops and into the hot, soapy water. I rest the memory book on my belly, and lean my head back onto the vinyl pillow. Kay pushes a button and the chair begins a gentle rocking vibration.

“No, thanks, Kay. Just a pedicure today.” The massage feels amazing, but it costs extra.

Kay makes a dismissing clucking noise. “Yeeees, massage today! Baby like it.”

I won’t argue because to Kay that would be rude. I know this one is on the house.
Kay says something unintelligible to everyone else but Diane. Diane gently eases Big Mama’s feet into the soapy basin.

“Back in the water, please. One minute.”

Diane shuffles into the kitchenette and comes back with a pink plastic shopping bag, the kind from Chinatown with a red rose and “Thank You” on it. She holds it out to me.

“Mangos,” she says. Diane is young and round-faced and is very pretty under her mask of acne.

I smile and take the bag. “Thank you. How kind.”

“Mango good for morning sickness,” Kay says and turns off the chair. Free massages are short massages.

The last time I visited the salon I spent most of the appointment throwing up in the bathroom. My morning sickness lasted all day for months, but was gone now, thank God. I drop the pink bag onto the floor next to my re-usable tote from Trader Joe’s. My mind forms a futuristic picture: a mass of pink plastic shopping bags are churning around the base of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Kay goes to work removing old nail polish and I open my memory book. While I’m thinking what to write next, Big Mama lets out a loud moan. “Mmmmm-mmm! Marry me, Diane!”

Diane smiles and keeps rubbing the meaty calves in the grand finale massage. The smell of coconut lotion fills the air, almost covering up the sting of acrylic and remover.

Kay laughs. “She can’t marry you, Big Mama. Diane got a boyfriend. Nice, too. Pretty soon, marry, have a big belly like Princess!”

“Getting close, huh?” Big Mama turns to look at me with the smile of a co-sufferer.

“Yes. I’m due September 26th.”

“Be here in no time. Do you have names picked out?”

I love this question. “We do. Tucker for a boy and Madison for a girl.”

Diane wrinkles her pimply brow. “What do they mean?”

Kay clicks her tongue. “Nothiiing! American names don’t mean nothing, just names.”

Diane gathers up Big Mama’s shoes and purse and talks as she helps her climb down from the spa chair.

“My real name is not Diane. Diane my eighth-grade teacher’s daughter. Very pretty girl, blonde. My real name is Dung—means flower, in my country. But here, means poop! The teacher tells me, so I pick Diane.”

Kay laughs a silent laugh and stops filing to wipe her eye. “And me—I’m not Kay. When I get here, my first boss say my name not right, people think it sound funny. My name Kau—lots of girls name Kau in Laos, where I was born. And in Cambodia, too—where I grow up. But here it’s like moo-moo cow!”

Diane says something and when Kay finishes her quiet, shaking laughter she translates.

“Diane say how about we change name to Kau Dung Salon? We get a lot of clients then!”

I smile. Sometimes they did this—translate. But not often.

Big Mama shakes her head and chuckles. “Where are you having the baby, honey?”

“Oh, we’re staying home.” I pat the lump curled against my rib cage. We have a midwife. Todd and I want a natural birth.”

Big Mama raises her eyebrows and slides her feet into wash-nubby house slippers.

“Natural birth?”

I nod. “Yes. You know—no meds. I want to experience the pain.”

For a second I think Big Mama is going to laugh, but then she draws her lips together tight.

“Oh. Well, I’m sure everything will turn out like you want it to, honey. Aloha, ladies!”

Diane waits until the door closes before she starts disinfecting the basin of Big Mama’s chair. I lean back and look around the room. There is the big Buddha in the corner, snug inside a red pagoda. The plate at his feet is always filled with some kind of offering. Sometimes it’s cigarettes, and even once a half-empty bottle of whiskey. I think today’s oranges must be a disappointment.

Beneath the mounted television, which seems to only have two channels—Lifetime or whatever channel Oprah is on—is a picture of gold horses galloping over a string of characters on a red background. I thought the writing was Chinese. I’m surprised to hear Kay say she’s Laotian. Isn’t every Asian in San Francisco Chinese?

Well, I know something about Southeast Asians, and Kay isn’t like any I’ve ever met. I remember when they came to my hometown in the early eighties. I was in elementary school. They moved into brand-new apartment houses and cooked their dinner squatting around hibachi grills in the parking lot. Three families moved into a one-bedroom house on the corner of my grandma’s street and grew corn in the front yard. All of the fathers and uncles I knew who had been to Vietnam, and many who hadn’t, called them gooks.

“Lock up Fido,” they said. “Gooks’ll eat your dog, sure as shit.”

I had a cat named Oscar who often went missing for a few nights. Before the Southeast Asians came, Dad always told me not to worry.

“He’s just out tom-cattin’. He’ll turn up.”

But one time Oscar went out and never came back. The rumor was he ended up on a hibachi grill.

Above the shelves of nail polish, hung way too high, is a framed poster of manicured hands. Each nail is a different color, cupping a wineglass with a red rose floating in it. Next to the poster is a family portrait. Kay, her husband and their three children pose in their best clothes and look seriously at the camera. The photo is hazy and taken with the mottled blue background of a cheap mall studio.

“Kay, where did you have your kids? The Kaiser in South City?”

I know this hospital is near where she lives.

Kay strokes polish across my big toe. It’s getting harder to shave it now, but I managed this morning. Kay’s head is down, the part in her hair as white as a painted line on a highway. Without looking up she answers.

“No hospital. Camp. Refugee camp in Thailand.”

I feel my eyes blink too many times before I speak.

“Oh.”

Kay taps a bottle of French white and switches feet. “A man cut my first son out of me—use dirty knife! He say he a doctor, but not really.” With great care she paints the white tip of each toenail, her hand still and controlled, so that the horizon is straight. “I almost die from bleeding.” She looks up at me. Her eyes are black and ageless.

“You know. No meds.”

I swallow a lump that has lodged in my throat and look to Diane. But she is rearranging the polish bottles by color, not listening. She must know this terrible thing already.

“When I have my son, my father dead a long time. But I see him anyway. I see him standing behind doctor—phony doctor—and he was smiling at me.”

Something warm and wet falls on my toe—the one Kay has just painted. She clicks her tongue and re-paints the smudge her tear has made.

“He was wearing his glasses. Everyone think I’m crazy because I shout, ‘Take off your glasses! Do you want to get killed?’ But he already dead. They shot him when I was fourteen, even though he stop wearing his glasses and walk around pretending to see, but really almost blind. Still, the soldiers know he smart—a scholar. He look smart even without glasses. So they kill him.”

She pumps more coconut lotion into her hand and begins the massage. This is usually my favorite part.

“I live because I see my father,” she says, shrugging shoulders small enough to belong to a child.

I look at the television because I can’t look at the little woman at my feet. Oprah raises her arms like a prophet and the studio audience roars its praises.

“What about your mom?” I finally ask. “Was she with you when you had your first baby?”

Kay shakes her head. “No. Killed, too. Soldiers hear my mother talk about her wedding day to a girl—new bride. She was nervous and my mother was trying to comfort her. But Khmer Rouge not like people to talk about the past.”

I think of the last voicemail from my mother. She wants to come to San Francisco for the birth. Todd and I discussed tactful ways of discouraging her.

Diane speaks from the corner. She mutters words that sound like, “Chew stick a Rome.”

Kay nods. “Yes, memory sickness. That’s what they say killed my mother. If you talk about old life too much, you always die of memory sickness. But it look like a gun, to me.”

Kay kneads and pounds my calves. I marvel that tiny hands can be so strong. My stomach growls loud enough to be heard over the frenzied screams of Oprah’s audience. I realize I haven’t eaten since my egg white and soy cheese pita this morning.

Kay gets up and goes to the spotless kitchenette. She unwraps a Styrofoam bowl and pops it into the microwave. A moment later the microwave beeps and Kay carries the bowl to me. I feel like Buddha with my belly so round, Kay holding out her lunch to me as an offering I don’t deserve.

“Eat this. Good for baby.”

I glance at the bowl of noodles. Thin strips of meat float in brown broth. I hate myself for thinking of Oscar.

I shake my head, with a weak smile. “Oh, thank you, no, Kay. I’m not really that hungry.”

Just then my stomach gives me away with another groan.

Kay nods, looking at the bowl, then at me. She shrugs and puts it in the apartment-sized fridge.

I want to explain and absolve myself. I want to say, “It’s my parents’ fault! They said gooks ate my cat. I’m a decent person, really I am!” But I don’t say anything, because I don’t speak Kay’s language. She speaks mine, but I don’t speak hers.

The door buzzer cuts through the air and I am so glad. Kay waves through the glass to a tall woman in a leopard-print cat suit. “Hey! Miss Kitty!”

I leave before the top coat is dry. Kay doesn’t t try to make me wait the way she sometimes does, just mumbles something to Diane as she pockets my tip and tells me to be careful with my toes. I leave without booking my next appointment.

On the way to the train station I stop in front of the new coffee shop on the corner. Blues pumps from speakers mounted outside. I stare at the chalkboard menu tented on the sidewalk, but my appetite is gone. Still, I have twenty minutes before my next train, so I go in. I give the tattooed barista in a Che Guevara tee-shirt my order. “Decaf,” I shout, to make sure he hears me over Buddy Guy.

I find a table in a corner and take out my memory book and my good, heavy Bertoni pen. I close my eyes; will my fingers to scrawl something poetic and happy onto the page. But all I can think about is nervous brides and old ladies murdered for their memories and why isn’t Kay’s father immortalized as a hero on a tee shirt? Why isn’t Kay, herself?

I set the scene in my imagination: A room, empty except for one desk and two chairs, bare light bulb and a fly strip dangling from the ceiling. My parents sit on one side of the desk and I march back and forth in front of them. “Number 3,475 on the ‘What You Did Wrong’ list! All you ever talked about was how much money the gooks were getting from the government and how they should all go home. Someone should have explained why they came here in the first place! Now I’m thirty-five and I have to be someone’s mother and it’s too late.”

I will be better than my parents, I resolve. I put my hand on my belly and think-say to Tucker or Madison, I will try to be a good steward of your mind. I leave the coffee shop, tossing the half-full cup and the memory book into the recycle bin on the way out. There’s just too much pressure to lie, to keep things pretty, between the covers of a book so lovely.

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