Driveway

The first time I visited, before we moved in, I was astounded by the length of the driveway. It wasn’t paved at the time, and it’d just rained. Holding my mom’s hand, I’d hop across muddy puddles, kicking pebbles down the dirt path that led to my soon-to-be new home. The driveway seemed to be carved out of the earth around it—on both sides was a creek in a ditch. When it rained, the creek would overflow. As I looked out the window, driving to school, driving home, I watched the water flow alongside me.

The gate to the driveway used to work, activated by a little keypad next to the mailbox, a four-digit code. It seemed to be just one of the new rituals that came with the new house: stop in front of the gate, get out to get mail, enter the code, and wait for the whirring of the gate’s motors to end, then drive down the length of the driveway. I guess it saved time to just leave the gate open—after all, it wasn’t as if it was keeping out thieves or something. You could just as easily walk around the gate and open it from the inside, maybe a 2 minute ordeal.

The driveway’s length was not without its annoyances. My bus stop was at the top of my road, and my driveway started at the very end of the cul-de-sac, a 0.33 mile walk one way. Coming home from school, I imagined a dinosaur chasing me; it was motivation to run faster, to get home faster. My backpack’s straps would dig into my shoulders, sometimes the saxophone case would tug on my wrists, jostling as I ran from whatever imagined beast that was snapping at my heels. Sometimes, I’d tire myself out just before I got home, and I had to walk, had to let the dinosaur maul me right in the middle of the driveway. Maybe the patch of grass that grew by the side of the driveway was once another little kid that got caught by the dinosaur, I thought. Little kids’ bodies make good fertilizer.

Shovelling in the winter was a pain. My dad first sent me out with him just to watch, blue plastic scraping against asphalt and snow compressed to ice. Soon, it was my dad and I working in tandem. I refused to wear gloves or mittens (my hands will overheat!, I’d complain), and as consequence, my fingers would be raw and pink by the time I got done with my “strip” of snow. I didn’t know anything about physics, but I knew there was something about leverage at play. Experimenting, every strip I did, I decided to hold my bottom hand at a different length down to see if it was more efficient.

Garage

I don’t remember the last time we used the garage for actual cars. At one point, my dad had a nice Ford hybrid, and he’d plug it in to charge in the garage every night. From the backseat, I like looking at the little virtual compass spinning around next to the speedometer. It’d always settle on W, West, as my dad pulled into the garage.

The floors are concrete and slippery. They feel like heaven to roller-skate on, though not when the wheels are wet. Over the summer, bored, I’d sometimes set up obstacle courses in the garage, take up all the floor space with random bits and bobs that I found unused. After my maze was set up, I’d go at it with my little bike, trying not to crash. More often than not, the setting-up of the obstacle course was more fun than actually riding in it. There was something fantastic about using the junk at my disposal (and believe me, the garage is full of junk) to make something fun.

The far side of the garage was always for junk. Fishing rods we never used, an old sofa that we’d eventually get around to selling or moving, an old toy car that I’ve since lost the rechargeable battery to, bikes that no one rides anymore, every kind of car fluid under the sun, a leaf blower, weed whacker, snow plower, road salt, wooden planks and metal wiring, bags of recycling. Last summer, I tried cleaning out the garage, throwing away what we didn’t need. I gave up after 3 straight days of digging.

Nowadays, the garage smells like hockey. There are two little scratched-up stickhandling pads sitting near the garage door, and my sisters’ and I’s hockey bags are all splayed out on the beige carpet my mom decided to repurpose. My mom bought these little PVC-pipe drying racks off of Facebook marketplace, now twisted and effectively dysfunctional. We got a Sparx skate sharpener a while ago, and it seems like there’s always some buzzing, grinding noise coming from the garage on the weekends, last minute preparations before the games that never seem to end.

Muddy Room

We never enter the house via the front door. The muddy room connects both to the back door and the garage, so it’s a lot more convenient. When my mom tells me to lock the door, I know to go to the muddy room—the front door is always locked anyways. It’s not very big, room enough for two shoe cubbies, two shelves, and two hangers. Across from the door is the kitchen, to the right of it is a little bathroom, to the left is the door to the garage.

The bathroom next to the muddy room is always the coldest room or warmest room in the house. In the wintertime, I used to lay toilet paper on the toilet seat, not because there was any doubt in the aiming abilities of the men in my household, but because the icy cold of toilet seat enamel didn’t sit right with my butt. In the summertime, the bathroom always had a kind of stink to it—the heat was unbearable, sun streaming in through the window too high for little me to open or shut. My grandpa smoked a lot in the summer, and either it was the tiny confines and poor ventilation of the bathroom that made it smell like the tobacco on his breath, or it was the open window that made it smell like cigarette smoke itself, wafting in from outside.

Nowadays, the muddy room smells a bit like cat litter. In front of the door to the garage, we have two litter boxes: one normal, one self-cleaning, both filled too-high (less work for me, grinned my dad). If you’re sitting in the kitchen, you might hear the shifting of cat litter as the self-cleaning one rotates. My cats have gotten into the habit of doing their business, pawing up the litter, then bolting. I know this because I hear it. First, it’s the light thump-thump-thump of paws on the floor. Then, a brief silence followed by the all-too-familiar pshhhhh pshhhhhh. Once they’re done with pawing up the litter, burying the evidence of digested meow-mix kibble or whatever it is that they eat, I hear the sounds of little grains of litter falling on the floor. Finally, I take the liberty of vacuuming up the litter off the floor.

Kitchen

I miss the sparkle of the granite countertops.

These days, my mom is especially protective of them. When my sisters and I cook for ourselves, we tend to put our pots and pans directly on the counters, and my mom is eager to point out the dark spots in the granite that “came from the bottom of our pans.” I find it hard to believe that every little speck of black in the stone is burnt Buldak or frozen Trader Joe’s gnocchi sauce residue. I know for sure that when I first studied the countertops, the black biotite sparkled far brighter than the rest of the granite.

The kitchen island has become a place of comings and goings now. The microwave across from the stove times each family member’s arrivals. First, it’s my grandparents cooking the meals at five. At six, a third of the food is gone, and the heap of dishes in the sink grows. By the time my grandfather leaves just before eight to pick up my dad from the train station, the food has long gone cold, then hot, then cold again. When my dad gets home from work, the microwave clocks in for its last shift.

The stove is equipped with six burners, but now only two work. Everyone who can cook in my family knows how to use a lighter—it’s the only way to get the last two functional burners going. Bottom middle is my favorite, though I bet top left is going to outlast it. Once bottom middle goes, I think the stove is finally going to be fixed. That, or my grandparents learn how to bake. After all, going from four burners to three, or three burners to two hasn’t stopped them from making do.

Living Room

Login: bo hu
Password: 1**JETEAIME

I always remembered the computer password to be “jet” “tea” “amy.” I think it’s a nice sentiment, a keep-sake of my mom’s time in French 101 in college. She always spoke in an exaggerated French accent to demonstrate her proficiency. She stopped after I started taking French, after I could correct her pronunciation…

Do you think she forgot the contraction “te aime” to “t’aime” on purpose? When she does her exaggerated French accent, nasals to the nines, I hear the “uh” after the t, everything blending together into a weird “zhuhtuhhhhehmeh.” In any case, I never understood it as anything more than a barrier that kept me away from playing videogames after school. It’s funny how special things become mundane day by day.

JETEAIME, JETEAIMAIS, JETEAIAIMÉ.

Piano Room

I love Christmas, and for my family, Christmas comes in the Piano room. Right outside, we set up the same fake tree we use every year, taking turns hanging ornaments on every branch. Some ornaments came from sets of twenty, others from elementary school arts-n-crafts projects. Mittens has taken a liking to hiding under the tree, and that leads to some very cute pictures, especially with the exposure turned up.

The piano room only has one light: a dim spotlight in front of the faux fireplace. In the early Spring and late Fall, the lack of light just means it’s a bit harder to read sheet music. Somehow, that light turns into something real warm and cozy before Santa comes. It’s almost as if the shitty lightbulb with its terrible energy efficiency is somehow bringing the fireplace to life, heat and all.

This year, my best gift was a letter from my youngest sister. There were so many gifts, I almost forgot about the stockings hung in front of the fireplace. When the wrapping paper frenzy finished, my mom pointed at a sheet of paper sticking out of my stocking. I’ll spare you the details, but let me just say: she is a wonderful, “fantastic and supportive” sister and I promise not to “ABUSE MY BACKSCRATCH POWERS” (I received several vouchers for free backscratches as my gift from her).

Parents’ Bedroom

It’s been years since my mom has taken my phone, though she still threatens it from time to time. I know all of her best hiding spots, but she has a lot—the bedstand, her jewelry cabinets, the shelves in the laundry room, behind the mirror—I could go on and on. When she’s feeling lazy, she just tosses it into one of the cabinets by her bed. Rifling through them, I find all sorts of oddities and trinkets. Never-hit golf balls, random photo albums from years ago, and a loaded pistol roll around and thud as I look for my next hit of dopamine. I still remember when my dad caught me going through the drawers for the second time in a single day, and likened my behavior to that of a crack addict.

Playing hide and seek with my sisters and guests, my go-to was behind my mom’s dresser in her little closet. Her dresser’s always been a bit chaotic, necklaces and earrings and bangles all tied together in a knotty, sparkly mess in this kind of dish-bowl of gold. One time, the seekers did particularly poorly, and they took so long my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Glimmering underneath the dresser were earrings, diamonds and all. I considered reaching under, sticking my hand into the dusty darkness, and tossing them into the dish-bowl with the rest of her things, but I chose to leave them. I’m not sure if they’re still there.

The best feature of my parents’ room is the giant bubble bath in their bathroom. It’s kind of gross nowadays, and whenever I’m sick and I have the house to myself while everyone else is off at school or work or something else, I have to first take a sponge and scrub off the oily residue left behind. I’m not completely blameless—as a kid I’d mix in heaps of conditioner into the water, and as I turned on the jets of the bubble bath, the conditioner would make these thick-filmed bubbles that piled higher and higher. When the bubbles popped, I’d revel in the scent of my mom’s hair. I’m not sure if the control panel for the bubble jets are operational anymore, and I’m not willing to take a gamble on them. There’s too much gunk in the little holes to justify all the scrubbing I’d have to do.

I’m amazed at the sturdiness of the room’s floors. They’re hardwood, and we have this shaggy carpet that’s been there probably since we moved in. When my mom was really into fitness (and really into making my sisters and me exercise), she’d hop around on the carpet with dainty 2 lb weights, doing HIIT workouts with whatever video she found that day. She’d tell us, 30 jumps before bed, and I’d hear the ground shake and the pictures on the wall rumble as my sisters and I leapfrogged from one wall to the next.

Sister’s Bedroom + Former Room

I’ve been displaced, or at least it feels that way when I take the back stairs up to what’s “my” room now.

What used to be my room is now my youngest sister’s. At one point, it was hers too, when she’d just come home from the hospital after spending two months in the NICU. During that period, when it seemed like all she’d do is cry and cry, I moved into my middle sister’s room.

During that stretch of time, Nevaeh and I developed a code. We’d chat in secret, past our bedtime, and the proximity to our parents’ room meant we had to stay hush hush. I’d whisper: “You still awake?” She’d whisper back: “Yeah.” Soon, I’d whisper: “A?” She’d whisper back: “B.” We added vocab until we got to X, but I don’t remember what any of it meant other than A and B. One meant “mom’s coming,” one meant “we’re safe.”

Outside of our code, I had an instinct to teach. I’d talk about the Civil War and its causes over and over again, all while she hardly understood the concept of war. My instinct to teach was mirroring—I got it from my dad, who’d been teaching me about history and science every night before bed. I’d beg, “peipei wo, peipei wo, accompany me, accompany me.” Some nights, it was ‘til real late, other nights, it was a quick five minute chat.

Our rooms are connected. Each of our rooms has a door to the hallway, and we’re connected by a bathroom: two sinks, one toilet, one shower. When I was little, I had a little set of stairs up to the sink so I could brush my teeth without standing on my tip toes. When I graduated that set of stairs, it was given to my middle sister, and then after she graduated that set of stairs, it was given to my youngest sister. After she graduated that set of stairs, we just left it in the bathroom for a few years. Sometimes, I’d bang my shin on it, but it never occurred to me that I could just move it somewhere else or retire it. It was a fixture of the hallway bathroom, and that was that.

After a while, I reclaimed my room. “It’s right,” my dad said, “that the boy gets the room with blue walls, and the girls get the room with pink, after all. It’s just how it is.”

My room is the same as when I left it, moving out for boarding school. When I was its occupant, the walls were bare, but the furniture seemed to move every few months. Overnight, I’d get bursts of motivation to change things up, and voila! The bed would be up against the other wall, my desk was in the middle of the room, and my dresser would be on its side. Now, walking in, everything’s exactly where it was, but now the walls are covered in polaroids and fairy lights, and my desk’s surface is buried under Sol De Janeiro (SDJ, as my sister abbreviates), 6th grade math homework, and random skincare products.

In a way, everything’s changed so much when nothing’s changed at all.

Grandparent’s Room

Each of my grandparents smells really differently. It’s been too long since I’ve seen my paternal grandfather to remember how he smells, but I remember my paternal grandmother’s smell is strong and sharp, Chinese medicine-esque. I don’t think they’ve stayed in the house for more than a month since I was nine, so forgive me for leaving you with such a short description.

Before nine, before they left America for good, my grandparents would rotate. Six months here, six months back, and with them, they’d change ownership of the room too. During those transition periods, the room would smell really strongly, almost overwhelmingly so, of too many people in one bed, too many medicines and pheromones mixing together.

My maternal grandparents have become kind of permanent residents of the room now, though they still leave for 3 month stints back in the “homeland.” When they leave, the room freezes. There’s no evidence that they’ve gone, other than the smell fading and the hallway near the door being silent, devoid of CCP-shill short-form content. They leave their medicines, their clothes, the quilts, and the cigarettes. The room becomes a hazy charcoal still life of their routines, waiting for them to breathe some liveliness into it again.

The two windows let light, soft light, onto the floor and pink couch. I’m not sure what cardinal direction the windows face, but it always seems like there’s some warmth making its way in, passing through the diaphanous green curtains, and spilling, almost lazily, across every surface of the room. I suspect that if my grandparents treated my cats more nicely, they’d never leave the room, spilling and stretching out on the warmth just as I do.

Sometimes, I climb in bed when they’re gone. I have to be strategic about when I do so—I don’t want to dissipate the smell too much. Their bed is creaky yet soft, and I fall asleep the easiest in their thick blankets (it’s just so comfortably warm). When I’m trying to take a nap and I don’t want to get caught for “wasting time” or “being lazy,” their room is my go-to. Even when they’re home, they spread out across the house, and the room is mine to borrow during the day. It’s only after dark, when the warmth leaves, that I know it’s time to return the room to its owners.

Office

Ever since my eviction, this room’s mine.

Or more accurately, it’s not really mine, because every morning, I wake up to my mom having her work-from-home meetings, chatting away about spreadsheets and quarterly projections. Once I’m up, I have to evacuate. The room will be mine again after 5:00PM.

In front of my bed is an old TV from the house we moved from. I don’t use it. Leaning on that TV is my dad’s shotgun. I’ve never seen it out of its case. Behind the shotgun, dusty books. Everything from The Basics of Economics to old family albums, none of those tomes have been touched in ages. Under those books, a bunch of hemp tinctures, relics from a failed business venture. Somehow, the office is where everything old and unwanted piles up. At least temporarily, I’m part of that pile.

My mom doesn’t eat lunch downstairs. The desk that my mom works at is always heaped high with paper and plates. Maybe she has a meeting or she’s working pretty hard, but I suspect she just doesn’t want to be in the same space as her parents. Instead, when my grandparents make lunch, I lug a plate up the stairs and drop it off. At dinnertime, she brings the plate back down, at least when she remembers.

I’m not one to judge. My nightstand accumulates mugs too, until I loop my index and middle fingers through one each, and take my four used mugs down to be washed.

After five, the room’s technically mine, but I won’t go out of my way to be there. It’s sort of like exile in the sense that it’s the most remote second-floor room, but even when I’m trying to avoid people, I opt for my grandparents’ room or the attic instead. There’s nothing homely about the room except for my clothes strewn about the floor. What’s the point of putting them in a drawer if I’m just on break for two weeks? When I go back to school, the room goes back to just being an office anyways.

Attic

Up the stairs between my old room and my grandparents’ room is the attic. There are two rooms, a play room lined with multi-color “alphabet learning” foam tiles, and an office that doubles as a karaoke venue when guests are over. As a kid, I spent hours in the play room upstairs, messing around with my coveted Thomas the Tank Engine play sets. Over time, more toys got added to the collection—lego tanks, my sisters’ things, even some kind of tent(?) It’s a bit sad, now, seeing all the toys that I don’t play with anymore. I can’t help but think, what a waste.

I grew up only singing Lady Gaga and Micheal Jackson, partly because those two artists seemed to be the only ones that my parents liked to play on the Karaoke machine that didn’t sing in Chinese. The karaoke machine used to be a lot more active; sometimes the family would go up for no reason in particular, singing off-key until our throats were hoarse. I even used to go up alone, trying my best to follow along with the lyrics on the screen. My Chinese reading comprehension was probably better then, but I still sang mostly from memory.

When parties happen, it’s always a bit of a do-it-by-ear situation that requires knowing a bunch of different parameters to properly decide what to do. Do the visiting families have kids? Do the visiting families have grandparents? How well do I know the kids? How old are the kids? Are the parents drinking? How late are they staying? Once I understand the basics, sometimes the course of plan is to go up with the parents to the karaoke room, to sing along. Other times, we divide by generation, the parents drinking with the karaoke, the kids playing hide and seek, poker, watching TV, mafia, whatever either in the playroom or in the second floor, and the grandparents occupying the couches.

The most vivid memory of a party I have was when I was maybe twelve or thirteen. It was a small get-together with some girls that I knew vaguely well, enough to have a good time, but not enough to not be aware of what the adults were up to. Of course we always started with a big dinner, a potluck. This time, the adults were drinking. Occasionally checking up on them singing, I could hear their on-pitched-ness deteriorate as more and more drinks were had. At a certain point, it was getting late, and the moms had had enough. At a certain point, it was just my dad with two other dads, still singing, drunk as all hell.

I don’t exactly remember if it was a school night or not, but it ended up being the case that the moms drove the kids back home for them to get ready for bed, the dads still singing away. One of the moms looked particularly concerned, driving back her two daughters saying that she’d come back in an hour or so for her husband. At this point, the party was very firmly over for everyone but those dads. My memory is hazy of how exactly my dad corralled those two other dads down the stairs in their drunken state, but in any case, one of the wives took her husband away, until it was just my dad and the husband of the mom of those two daughters. They were in a bad state. My dad was still coherent, but that guy was seriously shitfaced.

You know how when your memory contracts, hones in on one specific moment, the rest blurs together until I could tell the story a million different ways and have them all sound true to me, to the point that you wouldn’t even be able to peg me for lying to your face?

It could’ve been that I heard the thumping of his body rolling down the stairs, hollow thuds of middle-aged bones and liquor-soaked flesh. It could’ve been that I remember a cry from his wife, something either berating him or berating herself or pitying him or pitying herself. He might’ve said something about sobriety, he might’ve been so drunk he couldn’t talk. I might’ve been scared, watching from the upstairs railing as the scene unfolded downstairs. I might’ve been in the living room, eating a little bit more before bed when I walked into the living room to watch. All of these things could’ve happened, but I can only be sure of one moment.

The walls of the bathroom between the piano room and the living room are painted red. Red as a jar of Rao’s, red as New Year’s clothing, red as the faces of the two men slumped against one another, taking turns throwing up. My dad waved me in, and, being a good son, I entered and shut the door behind me. The bathroom wasn’t big. I was practically stepping on the two, stepping between cream-colored skin and cream-colored tiling and cream-colored vomit all swirled together. It smelled of rot, of stomach acid mixed with half-digested potluck, of despair. The other guy coughed a bit, then dribbled a bit more vomit down his chin. My dad took his head and roughly guided it towards the rim of the toilet. His chin splashed in the water.

It was only an hour ago that these two were singing some song about nanzihan, about what it meant to be a young man. My dad gestured at the scene I found myself in, then said: “This is what it means to be a man.” Laughing, he repeated himself until he started coughing. “This is what it means to be a man.” “This is what it means to be a man.” “This is what it means to be a nanzihan.” He said it one more time, until he threw up a bit, narrowly missing his buddy’s head. He choked on himself, said “this is what it means to be a real man” one more time, then passed out.

I stood, watching the two for a few minutes. At this point, the poor wife had gone home already. My mom had probably given up and gone to bed too. The house was dead silent, just the whir of the ceiling fan trying desperately not to choke on the noxious mix of acid, alcohol, and body odor that the air seemed sticky with. When I couldn’t take it any longer, when I didn’t want to see what manliness looked like anymore, I tugged at the bathroom door only to find that my dad’s foot had gotten in the way. I tugged at it first, and when it didn’t move, I scrabbled at it with desperation. I needed to get out. It was only when I succeeded in hauling my dad’s knee up and his leg out of the way that I was able to get away.

It was only after I got out that I unpuffed my cheeks and let go of the stale air in my chest. With my first exhale, my memory must have exhaled too, because I don’t remember what happened next.

Exhale

Exit 13 off the I-95—I’m close.

When I’m away for too long, I’m scared that I’ve somehow outgrown you, or worse, that you’ve somehow outgrown me. Hah! “Somehow.”

You look too picturesque at night, your windows aglow with warm light. It’s too perfect. You scare me. Did you know that I missed you?

When I get up close, I don’t miss you anymore. Can I come in? It’s nothing personal, you know? It’s just, well, home is all you are, no more, no less. You’re tremendous and tiny. Terrible and terrific.

You know, I always catch you in your silence when I come back. Say something. Are you mad at me? It feels like it’s not only til I wake up the next morning that you’ve come around to my presence again.

That’s petty. You’re petty, you know that?

Fine, fine. Be mad. Did you miss me that much? I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t love you. You’re so much, maybe too much. No, no—it’s not your fault I can’t handle you sometimes.

I’m sorry. Sometimes when I leave it feels like I’m able to fold you up and take you with me. You’re easier to deal with that way.

Okay, okay, okay! Let me come in now.