09.28.06
sleepy times
Even now, I can feel the shame welling up in my chest like mud, caking my insides, stiffening my lungs.
I once thought that is was because as a young girl, I had asked my mother nicely for a brilliant sapphire ring and beyond all expectation, we left that store with the ring on my finger. The band was a little big, the shop woman said, but how pretty it looked on my finger, how precocious I looked as a little girl with a big woman�s ring. Only, it was a bit heavy on my little girl hand you see. I was obliged once or twice to take it off, leave it somewhere. Nothing would happen.
That was fine. I had lost something. I�d only harmed myself.
I used to go on trips with my mother to treat older sick people who had been left alone in the corners of cities to fend for themselves. Their homes smelt of skin, of urine, of the food in Chinese paper containers that caused cockroaches to come curiously out from their hiding places, shining under the living room lights. I, even then, did not feel safe in these places because I could see the houses growing smaller through the car window as we drove.
So, I distracted myself. In the back of the car, sitting next to me like an absent person, were my mother�s sack of tools and on top her Sphygmomanometer. She explained the word to me, her tired brown eyes looking at the road and saying how it squeezed a little but that it helped to know you were healthy. This she brought with her to this country, unchanged from the day she entered the profession and immediately I brought it into my hands to comfort me. The blue-green fabric of the bulb had faded a bit from the touch of her hands and as I pumped, the cuff breathed. It grew. Then, turn the knob she said, and it would hiss the air across my fingers, tickling me.
In it, I felt the warmth behind my mother�s taut butter skin. I heard the fluttering of her hummingbird accent, the gentleness of her pinch. It was better than a teddy bear could ever be. They do not make these anymore, she said. The Americans marvelled at it, at its antiqueness, at its surprising accuracy. She was proud of it. I could tell. She smiled.
So I played with it. Under the warm fading sun, I ran it over gingerly in my hands. It was a jewel. I felt the pressure of it on my own arm and imagined again that my mother was receiving the praise. When she left the car I would dare to do one more pump than the recommended dose. Two. Three. It became a game to see how far it would go.
Then the wind went out. The battered cuff instead of growing only hissed weakly at me from some unknown fissure and I hid it underneath the car seat before she came back. I hadn�t done anything. It had betrayed me.
The new Sphygmomanometer had a digital face, took temperature, automatically inflated. It was like all of the Americans�, shiny navy blue with my mother�s nametag on it so that it could not be mistaken for another. Its hissing was the gentle breeze, simple, uncomplicated. She said nothing to me with that tight young face of hers. I would no longer ride in the back seat.
This is why now my lungs seem to grow so large as to press together and punch each other so that I might suffocate. This is why the impotent Sphygmomanometer flashes before my eyes.
That is this shame.
shi-ou-sama at
