When We Were Infinite: List 3

For a measure, before I returned to my immersion in the song, I let myself pretend.

A little ringing, a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus, started in my ears.

She reached out, tentatively, and tucked my hair behind my ear.

With their happy families, the Christmas bustle—they would think I was pathetic, and I would cast a pall over their day.

When I went downstairs a few hours later, my mother had made a tableau on the kitchen counter: the newspaper flat before her in a way it never was when she actually read it, a full cup of tea that had cooled.

It was perpetually foggy there, gray even when it had been sunny driving in, and all the telephone and Muni lines crisscrossing overhead tessellated the sky.

My grandparents were very particular about things—even though we always drove into the city, they were adamantly against driving within the city limits and refused to go anywhere they couldn’t walk or take the Muni.

I was possibly the only person in this restaurant who didn’t speak any kind of Chinese—at least from a cursory glance, I was the only one who was half white—and I felt the emptiness of it, my own rootlessness.

As the table filled with bowls and bamboo steamers, jook and dao miu, har gow and shumai and char siu bao, I was suddenly ravenously hungry—it had been years, I realized, since I’d had dim sum.

Everything tasted like childhood, the char siu bao pillowy and soft, the tripe crunchy and clean-tasting, steamed with chiles, and I was reaching for another piece of tripe when my grandmother tapped my hand away, clicking her tongue in disapproval.

My mother picked at a chicken foot and then pushed the bones around on her place, and after a little while she deftly emptied the rest of the platter of chow fun noodles onto my plate and said, “Here, Beth, eat this,” and resentment swelled inside me—of all the times for her to suddenly decide to act like nothing was wrong.

I looked at my plate and imagined myself telling her how repugnant her comment before had been.

For nearly four seconds, then, Jason sank through the air, his clothing billowing up above him and the mist from the water rushing up at him like a wave.

All this time we’d been waiting, all the things I wanted to say had been crescendoing inside me, rising to a din.

The left half of his face was scraped, and his head was encased in a plasticky apparatus that looked vaguely gladiatorial.

I like to think it wouldn’t have changed anything, that I understood then all the shortcomings of remorse and how impotent it is against the past.

Every time I imagined saying it aloud, speaking it into reexistence, there was that same heaviness on my chest and that same cold torrent of fear.

In that moment I saw myself as he saw me, I understood the shape I took in his life: I was, paradoxically, simultaneously too much and not enough.

When someone who’d been in BAYS ten years ago ran for Congress, and I watched both pundits and my father declare her shrill.

We were a family; he was my father; I’d thought those things were immutable as eye color or birthplace.

“I just feel like I don’t know the right way to handle things.” There was something clinical in the way she said it.

Immediately when we went inside, the smell of the house, astringent like cleaner, tunneled me back to when we’d been here—a lifetime ago—on Brandon’s birthday, and my stomach clenched.

I could see something akin to desperation in his expression.

We would do this for him: We would inter that night forever in our past, that past we shared, because he’d asked.

And besides that, I still couldn’t play at home, and at BAYS it was rote and flat.

To anyone else who didn’t know us, it would’ve looked like such a small thing—just a little gesture, daily, banal.

But the room that day didn’t feel big enough to contain what that wave meant: all the things it encompassed, all those years it held.

All day my stomach had been in knots imagining Jason besieged by well-wishers, imagining what it might take to make him snap.

I couldn’t fathom what Grace had been thinking, or what it would be like to be Chase, to so confidently imagine myself fully welcome in any situation, with any group of people.

“I tried this new cookie recipe last night. Anyone want some?”
“Whoa, kind of buried the lede there,” Brandon said. “You have cookies, and you’ve been holding out on us? Oh, I got some of those shrimp chips too.”

When he opened the door, it was a palpable relief to see him.

That meant, though, also, that I should be able to do better than this—I should have more to offer him than my silent and unsolicited presence in his kitchen.

Why had I thought it was any kind of talisman against anything—against his pain, against further disaster?

“What are you—saying, exactly?”
“I'm saying—obviously very eloquently—I’m saying if that’s how you feel, I don’t know, I think maybe we should give it a shot.”

When he arrived, he was smiling in a way that suffused the morning with warmth, that plunged away at least most of the lingering terror I’d felt from his call.

“I guess she’s kind, sure.”
“You don’t think that’s pretty great? You can find some good in most people, but I wouldn’t say most people are kind, per se.”

I’d tried practicing on my own a little—I didn’t want him to hear how bad things had been—but had given up, and by the time he came I was mostly just scrolling frenetically on my phone.

He’d brought a small picnic: a thermos and two paper cups, a plastic clamshell of strawberries, a bag of Japanese rice crackers. I said, inanely, “This is for us?”

But lying next to him like this, both of us staring at the sky—I felt a profound safety, that there was space enough to hold all these things I was saying to him.

But there was an almost flu-like quality in a burnout, a general
malaise, nothing this sudden or acute.