Picasso Face
content warning: suicide
Once my Chinese teacher made us read an article about yang lao yuan and then asked, when your parents grow old will you make room in your house for them or will you put them in a nursing home? One kid raised his hand and said, I will put them in hospice because I don’t want them to die in my house, dead people smell bad and if they die it will make my house smell bad. We all laughed as if we didn’t secretly agree. Chen laoshi raised her eyebrows, then frowned at the answer as if impersonating Confucius.
At first when my father and I trudged up the stairs to her apartment, we thought perhaps the fish we bought was spoiled, and that quelled any doubts we had about the scent. It smelled like all of this marinated together: chalk; KBBQ; my underwear when I haven’t changed my pad for twelve hours on the heaviest day of my period; petrichor and algae and eggs left out to spoil in the summer, kind of like the time our recycling club went down to pick up trash by the stream and found this fleshless coyote skeleton with the neck vertebrae still dangling from the back of its skull.
The body was in the kitchen. Facedown, thankfully, because even in life I wouldn’t have been able to make eye contact with her. There were dehydrated vomit flakes on the white walls and the faucet and the acrylic copy of Thiebaud’s cupcakes I’d painted in fourth grade. Some of it was white like a bird’s turd; other pieces were bright pink. Sprawled over the counter were half a dozen empty paper Tylenol cartons.
Two years before her death, Mother had lost her job, and the bitterness grew in her, sharpening her already shrill voice until every word became a command. By then even her zhajiang noodles and dill-and-turkey dumplings weren’t apology enough for the constant nagging for me to rub my monolids and pinch my nose (as if some Chinese folk magic would miraculously morph me into the beauty she desired and expected). I’d grown sick of the way she’d watch YouTube shoulder-to-shoulder with me while reminding me to do my homework. I’d grown sick of the mirror she installed in the dining room that mocked my size as I ate. So my father and I moved out. We were freed to inhabit our own identities, to chase our own dreams and aspirations instead of fulfilling Mother’s. I started eating pizza and fries instead of rice and tomato stir-fried with eggs. I stopped listening to Chinese music, stopped speaking Chinese altogether, because, as the mother tongue, it would always belong to her. The only time I’d have to see her was when Father and I stopped by the apartment to drop off groceries every Sunday.
The Sunday before we found her body, she had drawn me in for the last goodnight kiss and I had reluctantly succumbed, as had become my custom during our weekly reunions, my hips twisting evasively away from hers. As our lips approached, the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes came into focus, stacked like the thousand-layer sesame pancakes she baked that child-me could never resist eating. Dark freckles of age were splattered across her bronzed face, her face so close to mine it writhed, it turned, it distorted itself—I could still see it, the two of us twisting our foreheads against each other slowly as our lips still bridged during the kiss to give the impression of the other’s face melting asymmetrically. “Picasso face!” seven-year-old me had exclaimed with glee at the creation of a new bedtime game.
The day they lifted the corpse away, I got on my knees and washed every single tile three times with a rag and lemon-scented cleaner, polished the dining room mirror. That’s the way she would have wanted it, the way she would have done it every night after cooking four dishes and a soup, traditional Chinese style. The dawn after they lifted the corpse away, the sunlight slanted through the window shades in the kitchen and the rays were still straight even after they passed to the mirror, still straight even when they reached the chocolate wooden floorboards in the dining room. For once the kitchen was so empty there weren’t any bottles of spices or vases of snowy carnations that the light had to tiptoe around.
The week after I scrubbed Mother’s house down three times by hand, the way she used to do every week, I asked my best friend out to the mall. I headed straight to Sephora and swatched so many lipsticks and primers and eyeshadows and eyeliners that—for she hated the emptiness of naked skin—she would have been proud. Then I filled the cart to the brim with eyeshadow and blush palettes and cakes of soap and skin cleansers. Yes, indeed she would have been proud.
The week after that was that of Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day, and I reserved a table at a modern Chinese restaurant in the heart of the city. The napkins were pink in anticipation of the holiday, and as the sun set its rays cascaded down like a warm blanket, descending over my friend’s dress like a quilt of liquid gold. From across the table her eyes glowed a milky hazelnut brown, a shade brighter than the boba particles in the glass perched in front of her. She looked like she had been peeled out of Mother’s favorite Klimt painting.
When we left the restaurant it was already black outside. Impulsively, I grabbed her and instead my arms reached further, tumbling further into the recesses of memory, searching, yearning, longing for the thick muscular shelter of her arms, of a mother’s comforting haven. The curves of our lips caressed, pressing into one another, pulsating warmly against each other like apricot skins warmed by the sun. I closed my eyes and suddenly she was again in my arms, the scenes merging. Bitter residue of all the homecoming rejections were wet on my cheeks when she had unfurled a bouquet of the reddest roses I’d seen, a shade that echoed the hue swatched over her withered lips. “I love you,” she had pronounced, “even if all those boys don’t.” How pathetic that the only flowers I will ever receive are from my mother, I remembered thinking resentfully.
As I let go, the world was still reeling, the buildings a string of bright yellow lights dancing, rippling through my field of vision. I turned away from my friend just as the raindrops started to trickle down. In the periphery of the fog the stone lions guarding the restaurant entrance opened their jaws in half-yawn, half-laugh. When your mother grows old will you make room in your house for her?
Rui-Yang Peng is an incoming freshman at Princeton University, where she plans to major in neuroscience. She is an avid biology enthusiast and aspiring visual artist/writer. She believes that love as we know it is nonexistent and has made peace with the fact. Her work lives on adelepeng.com and on Instagram @linaria17.