Mama
“You need money?” her mother said, and her voice sounded faint, as though she’d called from a million miles away.
Sasi picked at one of the loose threads on her quilt. She knew her mother expected her to say no.
“No, I took out the maximum student loan, and my meal card is good for the semester.”
“Your classes — are they hard?”
“Yeah. I mean, they’re not that hard, you just can’t miss any. It’s easy to fall behind if you don’t go to class…” Sasi’s voice trailed off. In the quiet that ensued she heard her mother’s heavy breath travel like a ghost over the line, a pale echo, she suspected, of the true effort required.
“Why don’t you go to class? You spend a lot of money to go to college.”
Sasi silently cursed to herself.
“I’m not not going to class. I’ve just missed a few.” She waited a beat and then asked, “Are you okay? You sound weird.”
“I’m fine. Why are you missing ‘a few’ classes?”
Now her mother sounded like she trudged up a hill.
Sasi worked to keep her voice level. “I dunno. It can be hard to adjust to everything, I guess.” She added lightly, “It’s not a big deal. Normal for the first semester.”
“Why is it so hard? I thought you were happy to go, to get away from me.” Her mother tried to laugh sarcastically, but it just sounded like creaking and wheezing.
“Why would you even bring that up?”
“Just trying to understand why you want to call such a bad mother like me.”
Sasi took a slow, deep breath, and then let it out.
“You don’t sound good. Is your asthma acting up?”
“Yeah. Bad air all over this city.” Her mother struggled to get the words out.
“Do you need to get a refill for your inhaler?”
“No, no, I just forgot to use. Wait a minute.”
Sasi heard the sound of footsteps receding into the distance, and then their return. A paper bag rustled and her mother tore something open. Then, a quick puff of air. Another second or two, and Sasi heard the release of a slow, voluminous gust of breath.
Her mother quickly demonstrated that she had her voice back.
“You miss class because you’re drinking, doing drugs?”
There was no point in responding. They were just going to get into an argument, and she couldn’t take that at the moment.
“If you do drugs,” her mother continued, “you can go crazy. Lose your mind.”
Maybe so, she answered silently.
“If you drink too much, you will act stupid.”
Yup.
“You have a boyfriend?”
Sasi coughed and pulled the quilt around her shoulders.
“No.” She can’t help but add, “Well, I did.”
“What happened?” demanded her mother, and Sasi’s hands curled into fistfuls of the green quilt.
“Some stuff,” she replied dully.
“What did you do?”
“Why do you just immediately assume it’s my fault?”
“So, his fault? He cheat on you? He hit you?”
“No.”
Her mother snorted. “So, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. I’m not… I don’t want to talk about it.”
Sasi heard a sudden thunk on the other end of the line, a rustle of fabric, a banging sound, and her mother cursing.
“I dropped the phone.” Another pause, and then as though she heard everything unspoken, her mother said, “Men do what they’re going to do, Sasi. You can’t stop them.”
“Okay, Mama, I should get going.”
“You want my advice?”
No, she really didn’t.
“Make sure your next boyfriend has no friends and is ugly. Make sure he loves you more than you love him and marry him. My friend, she had an ugly husband. So, so ugly. No hair, very bad teeth, no muscles, very thin and weak. But he loved my friend so much. Never hurt her. Never cheated on her. That was my mistake. Your father was too good-looking. Not ugly at all.”
After they hung up Sasi opened the novel assigned for her Intro to American Lit class, but she couldn’t concentrate. She found herself reading and re-reading the same sentence ten times. Her mother’s words skipped and stuttered in her head, like a needle stuck on one spot on a record:
“Men do what they’re going to do, Sasi. You can’t stop them.”
The party in the room next door grew so loud that Sasi felt like she was there, drinking, laughing, and flirting. She gave up on studying and told herself she’d just wake up early to do it, which of course she wouldn’t. She crawled into bed and turned out the light just as the party reached a fevered pitch and pulled the pillow over her head. She wondered, idly, if there was a danger of suffocation, going to sleep with a pillow over her head. Probably not, but she wasn’t sure.
* * *
The bus groaned to a stop and her mother shook her shoulder roughly. Sasi woke from her awkward position drooling against the hot window. She stumbled off, hating the too tall steps that she always feared she’d trip on. She hated their bus stop, too. Dry, dusty dirt seemed perpetually underfoot, a gritty layer coating the sidewalk, kicked up by cars roaring up and down the busy boulevard.
She trailed behind her mother, feet dragging. It felt like all the dirt and black exhaust belched onto them clung to her hair and clogged the pores of her skin. When they reached their apartment her mother unlocked it, removed her shoes, and stepped inside.
“Take off your shoes.”
For all twelve years of her life Sasi had known she couldn’t wear shoes in the house. One time, four or five months ago, she had just wanted to put her book bag down first and had walked a couple steps inside with her shoes on. Her mother acted like she’d made a blood sacrifice on their carpet. After that, she told Sasi, every time, to take off her shoes.
“I always take off my shoes,” Sasi mumbled as she bent down to untie her laces. Before she could get even one shoe off, she felt her mother smack her on the left side of her head. A blow to the ear always felt frighteningly raw and springy, and the muffled noise accompanying it always disoriented her.
“Ow, stop, stop it!” Sasi raised her hands over her head, trying to block the storm of blows.
“Do what I tell you. Stop talking back!” Her mother’s voice echoed through the still open front door, into the breezeway between the two buildings where a couple with their new baby walked to their own apartment. Their faces looked pinched, and they walked more quickly. Her mother didn’t acknowledge them and withdrew to the kitchen, leaving Sasi alone.
Sasi stood very still. The flurry of blows could have been a preview of things to come. She finished removing her other shoe and placed it very quietly next to the other shoes that lined the wall behind the door. Clutching her backpack to her chest, she tiptoed out of the living room, past her mother rummaging through the refrigerator in the kitchen and down the hallway towards her bedroom, avoiding the creaky center of the floor. Behind her, her mother began cursing and banging pots and pans. Too late, Sasi realized she forgot one of her chores after dinner last night.
“Goddamnit, Sasi, you didn’t scrub this pan like I told you. You’re so lazy. Such a lazy girl!” Her mother’s voice reached the edge of fury and Sasi gave up on silence. She bolted for her bedroom, her mother’s feet drumming down the hallway behind her.
Sasi didn’t dare look behind her. If she made it to her bedroom, she could put her desk chair under the handle and hold it closed until her mother got tired and gave up. She almost made it through the doorway to her room, but then she felt the nails on her scalp, her head snapping backwards as her mother yanked on her hair. Her mother’s hands reminded her of iron claws, the fingers rigid and unmovable— no matter how desperately Sasi pawed at them.
Sasi tried to jerk away, but she couldn’t move her head. It felt like the hands twisting through her hair would rip chunks of her scalp out. She tried again to pry her mother’s fingers away, whimpering from the pain that lanced through her head. When that didn’t work, she dug the ivory-tipped crescents of her own small pink nails into the smooth, dry skin of her mother’s brown hand.
Her mother shrieked, let go of Sasi’s hair and pushed her away. Sasi stumbled, lost her balance, and fell through the open bedroom door, slamming her face into the thick modern world history textbook lying on the floor. A stunned silence descended, the only sounds that of her mother breathing in short, staccato bursts and a strange mewling sound. Sasi felt warmth oozing from her mouth and realized the noise actually came from her. She curled into a fetal position and covered her head with her arms. The air above her shifted with movement, but she kept her eyes tightly closed and braced her body for the impact of the next blows. When she felt her mother’s hand on her arm, she shrank away, but the touch was light, and her mother urged her,
“Get up, get up.”
Sasi wondered wildly, for a moment, if she could somehow make it under the bed.
“Come on, Sasi, you have to get up. You’re… hurt.”
The oozing warmth flowed down her chin and beneath her mother’s soft, coaxing voice she heard something else: fear.
In the bathroom, her mother washed her mouth, her touch delicate. Sasi stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her top lip had swollen to several times its normal size, and she couldn’t help but think of the last episode of Tom and Jerry she saw, and the way Tom the Cat’s human owner stomped on his hand, making poor Tom’s fingers turn an angry red and swell up to twice their size. Her lip looked more angry purple than red, but like Tom’s fingers, it could have been a balloon waiting to be popped. She started to worry that her mouth would stay that way forever and wondered what it meant for there to be so much blood, if something terrible and permanent had happened to her face, and a sob escaped her.
Her mother shook her shoulder, her fingers steel-like as they dug into her flesh.
“Stop it,” she said. “It’s not bad. Not bad at all. You’re fine.”
In the dim evening light filtering through the dirty window above the tub Sasi met her mother’s eyes in the mirror. Her mother made a disgusted noise, threw the washcloth in the sink, and stomped out of the bathroom, pulling the door closed behind her. She yanked on it too hard, though, and it bounced against the latch, remaining open. Sasi listened to the silence and watched, in the mirror, as a pearl of blood formed on her monstrous, distended lip and turned into a crooked trickle down her chin.
When her mother started banging pots and pans, she picked up the washcloth and finished cleaning her face. She brushed her lip by accident, and it felt like someone stuck a pin in it. She couldn’t help the whimper that escaped her then, and footsteps approached. She held her breath, the footsteps slowed as if to listen, and then, hearing nothing, they retreated back to the kitchen.
* * *
“Oh, look, Sasi, look!”
They never went inside the stationary store. Usually, they didn’t even look in the window, except for Christmas, when they put a little electric train and Santa in a sleigh with reindeer flying in a big circle around a miniature town. The rest of the year it looked boring, especially compared to all the rest of the stores in the mall. But they had changed the stuff in the window and her mother seemed really excited.
“I wrote with fountain pens like that when I was in school— when I was your age. They make a big mess, leaking everywhere. I always had ink drips on my school papers.”
Glossy and sleek, the pens reclined on little stands covered with some kind of soft material, like fancy ladies lounging on velvet sofas. It seemed weird to Sasi that her mom used a pen like that when she was in school. If Sasi had turned in homework covered with a bunch of messy ink blobs Mrs. Kelly would have returned her paper with a big “N” for “Needs Improvement” that her parents would have had to sign. But maybe because Mama was old and not American, things were different for her.
“Oh, look at the journals! That one looks just like the one I had when I was a girl!”
A bunch of books with different covers lay stacked next to the pens: red, green, or black cloth, some kind of shiny plastic material, and a couple thick leather ones in dark blue and purple.
“That looks exactly like the one I used when I was a girl in Thailand,” her mother said, pointing at a plain black leather one tied with some kind of cord. “We have to go inside.”
“Aww, Mama, please. It’s so boring. I want to go home.”
“It’ll just be a minute, Sasi. I want to see how much it is.”
The store smelled like wood and paper, and a little like the soft, oily leather of her mother’s best purse that she never took out of the box. Sasi couldn’t believe her mother dragged her into this store, but she tried to smile at the man behind the register, anyway, and he gave her a blank look in return.
Her mother ignored him and looked around the store. Soon, she spotted what she looked for and pulled Sasi to the back, where a lot of shelves lined the wall, filled with row after row of journals wrapped in clear plastic. Her mother flipped through the unwrapped samples on each shelf, telling Sasi how smooth the paper is, and lifted a couple of them to her nose to smell deeply. It was very dull for Sasi, and she couldn’t understand what the big deal was. After picking up and looking at each one of the samples Mama frowned.
“I don’t see the black one in the window. I want to look at the black one. Come on, Sasi, help me look for it.” They slid and shifted the samples aside so that they could look at the plastic wrapped books behind them, searching for the book in the window. They were so focused on the hunt for the black journal that neither of them noticed the woman watching them.
“Hello,” Sasi heard the voice behind her. “Is there something I can help you with?”
The woman speaking wore her silky brown hair piled high on her head, a pretty dress covered in pink and purple flowers, and high-heeled pastel pink shoes. Her arms in the short-sleeved dress looked very pale and very slim. Sasi couldn’t stop staring at them. Her mother’s arms looked nothing like that.
“The black one in the window. Where is it?”
The woman frowned, which caused one nostril of her nose to wrinkle a little more than the other, reminding Sasi of a cute bunny rabbit scrunching its nose.
“I don’t think we have a black one. Everything in the window is right there.” The woman pointed to the wall and something in her voice made her mother’s question seem silly.
“I saw a black one in the window,” Sasi’s mother repeated. “But it’s not here.”
The woman looked confused. She scooted past them and started picking up some of the journals, looking at them, and then putting them back on the shelf.
“I’m certain we don’t have a black one. If you don’t see it here, then we don’t have it.” She smiled at them, but it looked more like an animal showing its teeth.
“No.” Her mother’s mouth formed a flat, stubborn line. “It’s in the window.”
“Well,” the woman sighed and looked over at the cash register, where the male clerk watched them. “If it’s not here, it’s not for sale,” she added, biting off the words.
She took a step towards them, and then she was too close, forcing Sasi and her mother to take a step back.
“How about the one in the window. Can I buy that one?” Mama had to look up into the woman’s face.
The sales woman towered over Mama and folded her arms, so that she looked like a parent, scolding a child.
“Maybe you don’t understand what I’m saying.” She took a breath and then said, very slowly, “We. don’t. have. what. you’re. looking. for.” She looked at the other clerk again. He started walking towards them. “Perhaps you should try somewhere else?”
Despite the question mark Sasi heard at the end of the woman’s sentence, she also heard an instruction, and Mama probably did too because she said nothing, turned around, and marched out, tugging Sasi behind her. She didn’t stop when they left the store, either. She kept on going until they walked out of the cool, air-conditioned mall and into the roasting heat and bright sunlight, the whole time holding Sasi’s hand so tightly that it felt like the bones might break.
Sasi looked at Mama’s face, but it was so strange and closed that she didn’t look like herself. Sasi felt afraid, not because of what happened in the store, but because she had never seen her mother like this, and she didn’t really want to know that part of her mother.
* * *
“Mama? Mama?”
She knocked and knocked, but all was still. No light leaked through the crack beneath the bathroom door, even though it was almost midnight.
“Mama? Can you open the door? Please?”
She hammered the door with her fists until it shook, threatening to fall to pieces. Something was wrong. She knew it. Should she let it go wrong?
Sasi tried the door handle one last time, then retreated to her bedroom. She fished a paperclip out of her backpack and ran back to the bathroom.
“I’m coming in,” she announced. She straightened the paperclip and stuck it in the hole in the dead center of the door knob and rattled it around until she heard the click. “Here I come.” She turned the knob and eased the door open.
It was dark, but the bathroom was tiny, so she could see Mama sitting on the toilet, bent over, rocking back and forth. In the light from the hallway Sasi saw something glinting in one of Mama’s hands. She stepped into the darkness and her mother leapt up, teeth bared.
“Why can’t you leave me alone?” Mama screamed. “Leave me alone. Leave, why won’t you leave?”
Metal flashed in her mother’s clenched fist. It was a knife.
Sasi instinctively flung her arm up to protect herself. The cold metal cut her flesh, but for a moment it felt very far away, almost as if it happened to someone else. Then a raw, piercing sensation rushed into the wound, and the strangeness of this frightened her almost as much as the pain itself. She cried out, yanked her arm away, and grabbed her mother’s wrist.
Sasi had grown bigger and more powerful in the last few months, her clothes straining to contain her breasts and hips and legs. Her new strength surprised her as they wrestled, their panting breath too small a sound for the scrabbling of their hands and the twisting of their limbs. She succeeded in prying apart Mama’s fingers and grabbing the knife. It was slick and slippery in her grasp. Where had all the blood come from? It couldn’t all be from her arm. With her free hand, she slapped the light on.
Crimson streaked Mama’s face and hands, strangely vivid— like paint. The cuffs of her sleeves were tinged black with blood. Sasi looked more closely: ragged cuts scored her mother’s forearms.
“Oh my god, oh my god.” Sasi heard her own terror. She could get help, though. She could go knock on doors in their building and get help. But if the neighbors came in, would they leave? Who would they bring with them?
“Mama.” She searched for the voice that she thought calm adults used in emergencies. “Mama, you’re bleeding.”
Slowly, her mother’s lip uncurled, and she blinked. She looked down at herself. She peered at her own hands, then her sleeves, moaning at what she saw. Sasi coaxed her away into her bedroom, sat her down on the bed, and returned to the bathroom.
Red-streaks and smudges covered the floor and the door frame, and she wanted to scream, to run away and get help.
“No,” Sasi said to the mirror. Her foot nudged the knife on the floor and when she looked at it, she instantly recognized one of the steak knives her father tried to sell for some extra money before he left them. The company made him buy his own set, first. They were cheap: the handles had soon broken off and the blades rusted. This was the last one left.
Sasi grabbed the first aid kit from beneath the sink and returned to her mother’s bedroom.
Mama sat hunched on the bed, limp and small against the large mattress meant for two people. Sasi knelt before her, delicately probing one of the wounds, and her mother hissed. Sasi had seen people try to kill themselves in the movies. Usually they cut deep, and there was a lot more blood. Mama’s wounds didn’t bleed so much, now, almost as if she wanted to hurt herself, but wasn’t trying to die. A couple of them did bleed a bit more, though. She needed to bandage those first.
Sasi rifled through the first aid kit for gauze and bandages and felt something damp against her own skin. The left sleeve of her favorite pajamas, wet with blood from the gash on her arm, clung clammily to her. She didn’t want to peel back her sleeve and look at it. Maybe they had to go to a doctor.
“Mama, I think… I think we should go to the hospital.” Maybe she could make up some kind of story they would believe. “You’ve cut yourself up, and… and so have I.”
Mama’s eyes flashed. “No! No hospital. No money. We have to go to USC and wait all night with homeless people.”
Mama’s anger was almost a relief.
“These could get infected.”
“These are nothing. Not so bad.”
Sasi tightened her fist around the gauze and bandages. “But…”
“No, you clean them.” Mama shook her head firmly. “It’s fine. You have the first aid kit? Use that. That’s good.”
Sasi lowered her eyes to the bloody left sleeve of her pajamas.
“Goddamn you,” her mother raised her right hand in a familiar, if bloodier, threat. “Do what I tell you.”
Sasi cleaned and bandaged the deepest cuts and examined her mother’s face when she finished. The brief flurry of fury had gone, and Mama just looked tired. As Sasi examined the shallower cuts the burning sensation in her own arm became an insistent throb. She imagined the wound pulsing, seeping with blood underneath her sleeve. She put the last band aid on her mother and then tried to roll up her pajama sleeve, but the cotton fabric stuck to the cut and Sasi gasped. At the sound, Mama reached towards her, but stopped, hand frozen in mid-air as though suspended from a string. For a moment they both sat, silent and unmoving, until Mama simply dropped her hand. With a deep sigh her mother lay back on the bed, turning her head to face the wall.
In the bathroom Sasi held her breath as she tried to peel the sleeve away from her arm. It would not budge. For a moment she had the hysterical fear that she wouldn’t be able to remove it. She’d have to go to school tomorrow like this. She set her jaw, gritted her teeth, and tugged harder on the sleeve until it tore free. It felt like ripping off the worst scab she had ever had, almost as though she ripped a layer of skin from her arm. When the pain subsided a little, she forced herself to look at her arm.
Blood dripped from the ragged edges of the gash, and she sucked in a breath at the sight of the unnatural opening in her own, whole body. She forced herself to dab antibiotic cream on the wound, gingerly placed a square of gauze over the cut, and then wound some of the white first aid tape around it. Satisfied that it was relatively secure, she washed her hands and examined her ruined pajama top.
No matter how closely she looked at the red streaks and spatters, she couldn’t tell how much of the blood was hers, and how much was her mother’s.
* * *
Mama says it’s not so hot on the floor, and she puts the green blanket down on the rug. Sasi likes to count the children on the blanket. How many of them play soccer? How many of them play tennis? Sasi likes the ones playing baseball the best, because of their red baseball caps and orange pants. The whole thing is bright green, like the color of grass at the park before it gets too hot and turns brown. Going to the park is a special treat that they only get to do once in a while.
It’s much cooler, lying on the blanket with Mama. She makes toast that she butters and cuts into strips. Other times they eat noodles and rice mixed together in a soup. Afterwards, Mama puts the bowls away and they take off their sweaty clothes so they can stretch out and take naps on the blanket in their underwear. When Mama’s eyes are closed Sasi tries to count the strange white lines on her body, all of them jagged like tiger claw marks. Mama has them on her arms, her legs, and a lot on her tummy. The child touches them, but lightly. A little bit bumpy, Sasi wonders if she will have these marks, and if they will hurt. Mama still sleeps and Sasi’s bored, so she starts counting the bright red dots on Mama’s body.
Mama pushes Sasi’s hand away in her sleep, and then scratches at the last red dot Sasi counted. Her eyes stay closed, though.
“Go to sleep, Sasi,” she mumbles.
“Why do you have red dots all over?”
“They’re just moles. All the women in our family have them. Go to sleep now, okay?”
“It’s too hot. I can’t sleep.”
“Shhhhhh. You won’t be hot anymore if you go to sleep.”
“That’s not true.”
Mama opens one eye. “How do you know?”
“I know.”
“You’re asleep. You don’t know if you’re hot or cold. All you know is the dream. Maybe it snows in your dream and you’re freezing. Or maybe you jump in the ocean, and you’re wet. You’re inside the dream, so you don’t know how your body feels out here.”
Sasi thinks about this, but she doesn’t really understand what Mama’s saying. When Daddy gets home from his work trip, she’ll ask him what he thinks happens to his body when he goes to sleep.
Mama pats the place in front of her, and even though it’s really too hot to snuggle, Sasi lays within the curl of her body, imagining that they look like two versions of the big, curved seashell in the bathroom that sounds like the ocean. A Mama shell and a baby shell. Even though it’s sticky and hot, Sasi doesn’t care. She wants to stay inside the Mama shell forever.
Maureen Bhutong Boyd is the daughter of a Thai mother and Scottish Canadian father. Maureen chose to pursue a career as a fiction writer after working as a labor union organizer for over fifteen years. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in 2021. Her MFA thesis became a novel for which she is currently seeking representation, and the short story “Mama” is excerpted from that novel. Maureen was a finalist for the William Van Wert Award for Fiction and participated in the Bay Area juried writing conference, Lit Camp. She read a selection from her unpublished novel as a Showcase Artist during APAture, Kearny Street Workshop’s festival for emerging Asian Pacific Islander artists. Her writing has also appeared in Joyland Magazine, Buckmxn Journal, and Repave Magazine. She currently resides in Oakland, California, with her family.
