The Things We Swallow
By M.C. Schmidt
Skeet has measured me, throat to naval, and he’s convinced I can do it. I’m of average height for a woman, so I was skeptical, but Skeet says it isn’t about height; he says I have a long torso, and that’s what’s key. I trust his judgment because he’s been swallowing swords since he was a teenager, and he’s been a professional at it for almost seven years. Also, I trust him because that’s what love is.
I wouldn’t say this to him, but there are a lot of bullshit records in this field: ‘Most Swords Swallowed Underwater,’ ‘Most Swords Swallowed While Riding a Unicycle,’ and so on. Skeet, himself, holds the world record for swallowing the most swords while jumping on a trampoline. He was still an amateur at the time, and it’s what got him his job with the Pepperdine & Goldthwaite Traveling Show. I work there too, behind the scenes for now, setting up and tearing down and running games. I aspire to be in the show someday, but not with a silly record like that. I’m training for the most impressive of all: longest sword swallowed by a female. Sixty-two centimeters is my goal because that’s the current male record, set a few years back by a performer in Perth. I’m at the beginning of my journey, yet to swallow my first sword, but I have a long torso and a strong will, so I’m not worried.
My phone rings while I’m training in the breakfast nook of Skeet’s trailer. Training to become a sword swallower mostly involves shoving your fingers farther and farther down your throat until you learn to suppress the gag reflex. At this early stage, I still dry heave every time my fingertips glance across the base of my tongue, and I make an involuntary husky bark like a softball pitcher or one of those hot tennis women when they serve the ball. My vision is blurred by tears, but I can see it’s Mom calling. I remove my fingers from my throat and spread them apart to wipe away the slime. I have a wash rag especially for this purpose. “Hello?” I say, bringing the phone to my ear. I can smell the sourness on my hand.
“Hi, Kaya.” She always sounds enthusiastic to talk, even though she and Dad loath the path I’ve chosen. “How are you doing, dear?”
“Fine. You guys?”
I’m already headed to the mini fridge for a bottle of water when she says, “You sound hoarse. Have you been crying?”
“It’s just the desert air.” I uncap the bottle. They’re still upset that I took a job with the show instead of using my degree; they don’t need to know I’m training to be a performer until after I’ve secured the female record. Both my parents have a feminist streak, so it might help soften them if the news comes with documented proof that I’m equal to any man. “I’m staying at Skeet’s in Arizona. I’m not used to the dryness yet.”
“Yes, last time we spoke, you mentioned you were coming up on your off season. Was that last month? The month before?”
“We spoke a few weeks ago, I think. Sorry, it’s been hectic.”
“I’m sure, life on the road.” She says this pejoratively, the way you might say, life on a chain gang or life in a doomsday cult. “That’s why I’m calling. Since you’re off through the holidays, Dad and I thought we might buy you a plane ticket, and you could spend some time back home.”
“I don’t know, Mom…”
“You missed Christmas last year, Kaya.”
“I know.”
“People see their families for the holidays. Even cool people like you and Skeet.”
“I know.” I return to the table in the kitchenette. As Mom lectures me, I stare out the window at him. He’s trying for his own new record—largest curve in a sword swallowed while standing (ninety-two degrees)—and he’s currently practicing with more shallowly curved blades. He’s beautiful, shirtless, and tan and glistening in the sun. Against the backdrop of the flat, empty desert, he looks like he’s performing his tricks on the moon. He practices outdoors because he needs to move, to stalk the ground, to spread his arms. When things aren’t going well, he sometimes needs to stomp and curse and throw his swords without fear of hitting anyone. Skeet is passionate about his craft.
“And Dad and I wanted to tell you about a new adventure we’re on,” Mom is saying.
“Mm-hmm. Which adventure?” Stray hairs from Skeet’s ponytail are stuck to the sweat on his back. They’re spread across his skin like the legs of one of those face-huggers in Alien.
“Well, it’s no big deal, but Dad and I started a YouTube channel. Fine Foods with Doug and Gerta. We’ve been visiting restaurants around Indianapolis and rating the food, going over the menus and hours of operation and such. We’ve already dropped two videos.”
“Dropped, Mom?”
“People drop content. Kaya. That’s what they do. Or that’s what we do, I guess. We content creators.” She titters.
I shake my head for the benefit of no one. “That’s very strange, Mom. I’m not sure how to process this.”
“Well, dear, maybe you could process some excitement on our behalf. And if you still have enough processing power left, you could even muster some encouraging words.” I don’t respond, so she continues, “We’ve started thinking through ideas for merch, and Dad’s looking into Patreon. We’ll wait, probably, until we have a few more subs, but we want to be ready.”
It’s horrifying hearing my mother talk in jargon I associate with kids on Tick-Tock. “I’m sure it’s great, Mom,” I say, not meaning it. “I just worry.”
“About?”
“I don’t know. You guys putting yourselves out there, I guess? The Internet is cruel, Mom. People are cruel. They leave mean comments, and there are scammers who try to bilk you out of money with bogus marketing ploys. They see two nice, older people online and they’ll take you for marks.”
“Marks, Kaya?” she says, throwing my judgmental tone back at me. “Do you talk in carnival lingo now?”
It’s a dangerous path we were headed down, so I tell her I need to go. I’ll get back to her about Christmas after I talked to Skeet.
As soon as I end the call, I look up their YouTube channel on my phone. The oldest video was posted in early November, so I guess she was right that it’s been a while since we talked. In the thumbnails, my parents are making those exaggerated faces video creators use to entice viewers. For me, it has the opposite effect—forbidding faces, faces of warning. Beyond this point lies embarrassment and regret. Children take heed! As I back out of the search, a startlingly loud bang sounds against the side of the trailer. One of Skeet’s swords. He has a way to go with his training.
#
At dusk, we bathe in the metal tub behind the trailer. It’s still warm from the sun and feels wonderful in the evening air. He got sweaty during his practice, so it’s a little gross to share the water with him. Also, it’s the same water from our bath a couple of nights earlier. It’s worth it, though, to be with him, naked and soapy in the open air with the sunset painting the sky a cinematic orange and pink.
Since I had never given sword swallowing a second thought until I met him at the ripe, old age of twenty-three, I lately wonder how many people in the world go through life never meeting their Skeet, never discovering their calling. What if the person who could have been the world’s fastest runner was self-conscious about her knees and never went out for the track team? What if the songwriter whose music would have pierced my soul more than any other had a learning disability that kept them from ever mastering their instrument? I’m convinced these people are out there, living regular lives with vague longing in their hearts, never knowing what they might have been, and I’m determined not to end up like them.
I shiver, and he opens his arms, inviting me to come closer. I slide across the length of the metal tub and begin to turn so he can wrap his arms around me, but he says, “No, no. Face me.” I do as I’m told because he used the flat, commanding tone that designates this as a moment where he’s my tutor rather than my lover. “Open your mouth. I want to test you.”
I close my eyes and try not to think about water-born bacteria as he places his finger on my tongue. My job is to have no reaction. Success means not reacting, and I concentrate completely on succeeding. He places the wet pad of his index finger first on the tip of my tongue, and I fight the instinct to close my lips around it. I remain open to him—mouth, throat, head, body. I am an open vessel, a sturdy vase, a pit from a fairy tale into which one could fall and fall and never reach the bottom. He lifts his finger. My tongue is a dead thing. My tongue is an organ of concentration. The worst part will come next, I know, so I squeeze my eyes tighter and take a deep ugly breath, bringing air in and out around the obstruction of his hand. The knuckles of his thumb and pinky push into the corners of my mouth as he goes deeper. He touches the base of my tongue and I gag and reflexively push him in the chest like a panicked animal, causing a wave of dirty water to splash over the edge of the tub into the sand. I open my eyes and smile an apology. At least I didn’t vomit on him this time.
After, when we’re in bed for the night, I get a text from Mom. It’s a camera phone photo of a child’s drawing. The subject of the drawing is a smiling, amorphous animal, unidentifiable were it not for the crayon title, “Whistle Pig.” The drawing is familiar to me, but I don’t know for sure how old I was when I made it. Found this in a box in the closet, she texts, so cute! I’ve always loved how you call them whistle pigs like me and Dad. It makes me feel like you’ve taken something of us with you, no matter how far away you are. This from the woman who grew me in her body and raised me for eighteen years. It’s some kind of manipulation, but I’m too tired to get into it. I text her a series of heart emojis before turning off my phone.
#
A few days later, Skeet catches me looking up the Fine Foods with Doug and Gerta channel. We’re sitting side by side on cheap lawn chairs, drinking beer, under the tin canopy he welded to the side of the trailer to create a postage stamp of shade in the barren desert planet he calls Arizona. It’s my reaction he notices first, a slight shake of my head. “What’s up, babe?” he asks, straining to see my phone.
I darken the screen and slide the phone between my legs. “Nothing important,” I say, casual, but Skeet has a way of getting what he wants from me with only a look. It’s this thing he does with his eyebrow, raising one independent from the other, a sexy Mr. Spock look that I can’t face without spilling my darkest secrets. It’s a look of complete authority, possibly because he’s eleven years older than me, wizened and worldly. “It’s my parents. They started this dumb restaurant review channel online. I mean, how lame can you get, right?”
He makes a face like yikes and asks, “The videos are that bad?”
I take a sip of beer and stare out across the desert, mostly to avoid his facial enchantments. “I don’t know. I haven’t watched them.”
“Seriously?” He’s excited by this prospect. “Well, let’s watch them now.” He scoots his ratty aluminum chair closer to mine.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I’m not comfortable with it yet. Maybe another time. It’s still too weird.”
He makes a fleeting pouty face. Skeet has never met my parents. I don’t think he’s ever even seen a photo of them. It makes sense why he would be interested. Still, he doesn’t pressure me. “Why is it so weird?”
This strikes me as an excellent question. Why indeed? “Because they’re my parents? Because they aren’t showy people, but now they’re making fools of themselves on the Internet?”
I make the mistake of glancing at him. He’s adopted that Buddha smile, which should be obnoxious on a white man’s face, but somehow isn’t on his. Actually, strike that—it is still a little obnoxious; it’s just softened by being on a face I love. “How do you know they’re making fools of themselves if you haven’t watched them? I think it’s kind of beautiful they’re stepping out of their comfort zones. And at their age? Trying new things? I can see where you get it from.”
I pull my bottle away from my lips and do a barking laugh. The expelled air makes a brief, low-pitched whistle across the bottle mouth, like a tiny foghorn. I picture the little sailors navigating the ocean of beer in my bottle, the squall I make for them each time I tilt it to my lips, their fate at the whims of my thirst. Skeet has honorably misunderstood my parents to be actual, three-dimensional people, separate from their context to me, and, meanwhile, I’m imagining devouring an armada of tiny sailors. Probably, he’s a better person than me. This is why he’s good for me.
“What’s funny?” he asks.
“Only that you’re sweet, but you don’t understand.”
“So, explain it to me.” He raises up, bracing himself with his hands on his chair’s arms, and re-situates his body so his legs are folded beneath him. He has turned toward me, all ears. There’s nothing for me to explain, though. You either get it or you don’t, and if you didn’t grow up in that house with me, then you don’t get it. “Kaya?”
“They want me to come home for the holidays,” I say.
He thinks about this for a moment, trying it out as the explanation he was anticipating before correctly determining I’ve changed the subject. He goes with it. “I think that’s a wonderful idea if you can afford to travel out there. I assumed that’s what you were planning, anyway.”
He might as well have stabbed me in the heart with one of his swords. “What about our Christmas?”
“Our Christmas? Babe, I going to go see my folks and my brother.”
“Are you kidding? Christmas is in, like, a week and a half. When were you going to say something?”
“I always go home for the holidays.” His voice has risen to a defensive pitch, and he suddenly looks less like a sage and more like a standard-issue unthoughtful boyfriend. “You can come, too, if you want. I mean, it might be a little weird since we’re still pretty new…”
“And I’m supposed to do what? Just stay here by myself?”
“I thought you were going home. I just said that. They’ll probably pay for your ticket if you tell them you can’t swing it. I’d help you out, obviously, but with the cost of gas and presents for the family, I’m going to be busted.” For such a spiritual man, Skeet has a strange habit of introducing the topic of inflation into any conversation that takes even a passing glance at his personal finances. Generally, I think of him as existing above the earthly political fracas, but maybe that’s because I secretly fear his politics won’t align with mine. “At any rate, no, you can’t stay here. For your own safety. It’s too dangerous out here if you aren’t used to it.”
“I’ve been here for three weeks, and I seem to be doing fine, thank you.”
“Yeah, babe, but that’s because you have me.” He reaches to touch my shoulder, probably ready for the sex he thinks will heal this spat, but I pull away and rise to my feet.
“Do I?” I ask him and then carry my empty bottle and my phone out into the darkness of the desert. He calls after me, but I don’t answer. When I’m pretty sure he can’t see me, I hurl the bottle out into the night. I squat, my pee splattering into the sand, and make the whole thing worse by lighting my phone and sending Mom a text agreeing to come to Indiana.
#
We don’t make up before I leave. Instead, we fall into a formal politeness that enables cohabitation. It’s a tension that’s familiar to me from relationships I’ve had with regular boys, earthlings. It’s weird to feel it with the man I think of as my mentor. When he drops me off at the airport, he doesn’t tell me he loves me because that’s not something we have ever said to each other. I thought we just hadn’t gotten around to it, but now I’m not sure how he feels about me. Perhaps just to say something, he reminds me to keep training, or else I’ll lose my progress. What progress? I think and slam the door of his truck.
They seat me by the window, next to two children—a boy and a girl—whose parents must be elsewhere on the plane. That or they’re travelling by themselves, which I’m not entirely sure is a real thing outside of movies. Six hours with only child companions seems to me like a perfectly pitched omen for this trip, and, as awful as I’m sure it will be, I can’t help but respect the universe for making this little joke at my expense. I shift my body away from the children and commit to staring out the window for the entire flight.
As I reflect on it, I can’t seem to pinpoint exactly why I’m so angry with Skeet. He should have told me his holiday plans; I’m not wrong about that. Still, it’s not as big a deal to me as I’m making it out to be. The problem, I think, is he wants to be with his family, and he clearly doesn’t think of me that way. Some people call their neighbors and coworkers family, for God’s sake. The Skeet of my fantasies would decline to participate in Christmas at all—the commercialism, the normie tang of it all; he would want to celebrate only with me, the two of us hiking deep into the desert with peyote buttons, screaming happy birthday to Jesus into the otherworldly Arizona sky, naked and tripping and covered in sand and sweat and the ripe stickiness of each other’s fluids. A vision flashes through my mind of him sitting in his childhood bedroom, wearing an ugly sweater his mom picked out for him at the mall, and it makes me feel ill. He’s banishing me seventeen hundred miles away to a place I don’t want to be so he can have that experience, be that person. And why don’t I want to go where he’s sent me? I have no good answer for that either. All I know is, unlike Skeet, my parents want me, and something about their desire feels infuriating and unforgivable.
The boy, who is seated beside me, pokes me lightly on my side, just above my hip. When I turn to him, he presents me with a tablet and says he can’t put it on airplane mode. His sister, on the aisle, older than him by a couple of years, is quietly enjoying her own device. She catches me looking at her and correctly surmises that I’m thinking this is more a problem for her than me. “I showed him at home, and I showed him in the car,” she says pertly, before washing her hands of us. The boy has tears in his eyes like he’ll personally crash our plane if he doesn’t work this out. I take his tablet and alter its settings. He doesn’t thank me when I return it to him; he just wipes his nose across his bare arm and then navigates to a series of videos featuring a blue cartoon cat I don’t recognize. He shudders every time he takes a breath, his body still primed for the distress I’ve helped him to avoid.
“My parents are on YouTube,” I tell him to be friendly.
“My parents are in Row C.”
“Neat.” I wait, but he doesn’t need me now, and so I turn back to the window.
I spend some time hating his parents. I hate that they pass their children off on strangers, and I hate that, in this case, the stranger is me. His sister gets a pass because she’s still their victim too at this stage. There will be plenty of time and plenty of strangers to hate her when she grows up to become the same kind of asshole as her parents. It will be the boy’s fate too, probably. When I was a child, we never travelled, but I can’t imagine my parents leaving me on my own like this. It would have been Mom and me in two seats and Dad and my sibling—a theoretical person made up for this analogy—sitting together in Row C. I sulk, thinking if Skeet and I had a family, he would insist on the same arrangement, not out of duty to the little people we’d made, but because he would want to sit beside a family member, and that would mean his child, not me. I would be in the cargo hold, maybe, or wherever you put your much younger girlfriend and mentee when a more important companion is available.
I can hear the boy’s cat video bleeding through his headphones—bangs and booms and silly music. He has the fancy, cordless kind. I fish my own out of my pocket and unwind them and put them in my ears. I don’t plug them into my phone, though; I just use them to dampen his noise.
#
Mom and Dad look good. We don’t have the kind of relationship where I feel comfortable volunteering a compliment like that, but I don’t need to; on the drive from the airport, Dad immediately starts talking about the gym, how they’ve made a pact to look better in their sixties than they have since their thirties. And they really may. They aren’t fit in the sense of being like those older celebrities who look hotter than regular people of any age; they’ve just tightened their bodies to a point where, if you glanced at them in a crowd, you wouldn’t worry about them or search behind them for someone on their heels with a black cloak and a reaper’s hook. They’re the kind of fit older people whom you wouldn’t think twice about inviting along on a moderately strenuous hike or to help you move a couch.
Even though I lived here for most of my life, I somehow envisioned that I would come home to the wintery suburbs of a holiday movie, but Indianapolis is just drizzly and damp and not even all that cold yet. Mom asks me questions about the travelling show and about Skeet, and I answer everything with as few non-committal words as possible. Dad asks, not for the first time, if Skeet’s belly leaks when he takes a drink of water, so there’s no way I can tell them I’m currently in training to become a sword swallower too, not that I was planning to. Eventually, we settle into silence, our old family dynamic, as if no time has passed at all. I stare absently at block after block of nice midwestern homes mortgaged to nice midwestern people, ornamented in lights and baubles. It’s still daylight, so the giant inflatable decorations that are a fixture in most of the yards lay limply like a Christmas massacre, a wasteland of exsanguinated Santas and snowmen and penguins in winter hats and scarves. “Where are we going?” I ask when Dad skips the turn into our neighborhood.
“Dinner,” he says, as if it’s obvious. He looks questioningly at Mom.
“It didn’t come up,” she tells him. Then, to me, she says, “We have a dinner reservation at a new Thai place downtown. We assumed you’d be hungry, so we thought you’d want to come along.”
“It’s, like, four o’clock,” I say. “And since when do you eat Thai food?” The feeling of being home has been so familiar I forgot about their food channel. I don’t remember until this moment.
“We’re food critics now,” Dad says. “We’re expanding our horizons.”
“We go early to avoid the crowds. It makes it easier to video.”
“No,” I say, “no, Mom… I don’t want to be in one of your videos. Let’s just… Can we just please go home?”
“The reservation is at four fifteen,” Dad says. “There’s no time to drop you off now. It would be unprofessional for us to show up late.”
“You don’t have to be in the video, honey. All you need to do is enjoy a nice meal.”
A noise escapes my throat that even to me sounds petulant, but I don’t argue. It crosses my mind that I could stay in the car like a peaceful resister fighting for the dignity of all humans everywhere to not have to watch their parents make public fools of themselves, but I’ll be living with these people for the better part of a week, and I owe it to my future self not to make the arrangement more uncomfortable than it needs to be.
The restaurant is called Sawasdee Thai Cuisine, and it’s in a strip mall storefront that used to be a Petco. I hang far back in the parking lot while they shoot the introduction to their video, cringing as Dad holds his phone out on a selfie stick like he and Mom are tourists in their own hometown. They take forever. I look all around to see what kind of attention they’re drawing, but no one seems to care. When they’re finally through, Mom waves, and I follow them into the restaurant.
They’re greeted by an older woman who is pure enthusiasm. “Doug and Gerta! Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!” She takes them each by one elbow and leads them to a table deep in the restaurant. I tag along, mystified. Even the back of her head is beaming. She chatters to my parents the whole way and continues after seating them at a four top. She doesn’t seat me. She barely notices me at all. Maybe my newly glowed-up parents are hotter than I realized.
After she floats to the kitchen, I pull the empty chair from beside Mom and move it to the side of the table, out of view of their camera, before sitting. “Are you regulars here?” I ask.
“Never been here before,” Dad says.
“So, what then? You’re just this famous from your two videos?”
I meant it as a joke, but he says, “Yes, Kaya, we kind of are. Around here, at least.”
“We have ten thousand subscribers, honey.”
There’s no way. I pull out my phone and look up their channel. “What the heck?” I say after confirming the number. They have twelve thousand and forty, to be precise. I hadn’t noticed previously; I had been too horrified by the channel’s existence to focus on those kinds of details. “That’s bananas,” I say.
“Some people have hidden talents,” Mom says, shrugging like it’s no big deal. “This seems to be ours.” I think back on the runner with the ugly knees and the songwriter with the learning disorder, the characters I had made up as inspiration for my own late attempt to be special at something. I should find this to be inspiring too, but it only depresses me.
“Anong actually reached out and invited us to come here and do a review,” Dad says. “She’s a fan. That’s why she was so friendly.”
“And why she didn’t leave menus,” Mom adds. “We’re sampling a bit of everything.”
I see she’s right: there are no menus on the table. A platoon of skinny young men and women, led by Anong, begin streaming from the kitchen with plates and trays and bowls. Mom is facing them, so she snatches the phone from Dad and starts videoing their arrival. There’s much sizzling and smiling teeth and chatter that sounds joyful, even in a language I don’t speak. The food is so plentiful it takes our table, plus those on either side of us, to hold it all. It’s overwhelming, and I find myself standing and weaving between the workers. No one calls after me because Mom is still recording, and Dad is narrating and no one else cares about me. I hear an unfamiliar laugh, loud and bellicose, in Dad’s voice as I slip into the lady’s room.
The bathroom is a single with a locking door, and I quickly push my thumb into the lock like someone is after me. I take a seat on the closed lid of the toilet and light my phone screen. It takes me nearly thirty minutes to get through both videos. Afterward, I sit in silence, staring at the wall. I call Skeet with no conscious thought to do so because Skeet is my person, and your person is who you call in moments like this.
He’s surprised to hear from me. “Oh, hey babe,” he says. If I didn’t know he was with his parents, I might have judged from his tone that he was gesturing to another woman to keep quiet in the background. “Did you make it home okay?”
“They’re incredible,” I say, cutting him off.
“Who is?”
“My parents. They’re funny. They’re charming. The videos are well-edited, and they’ve got, like, a ton of subscribers. I would subscribe if I didn’t know them, and I hate Indianapolis.”
“Subscribe, then,” he says. “They’ll love that.”
“That’s not the point,” I shout, and my voice reverberates off the ladies’ room walls. “Mom has this thing she says when she takes a bite, like ‘that’s some fine food,’ and she draws it out, like ‘fiiiiiiine,’ and it’s hilarious the way she says it. My mom isn’t hilarious, Skeet, and that’s not something she’s ever said. It’s an invented catchphrase. And it works, for Christ’s sake.”
“Kaya,” he says, and I wait for his wisdom, the advice of my enlightened older lover. “I have to go.”
“Go? Go where? You’ll be there for a week. You can’t give me five minutes?”
“We’re singing,” he admits finally.
“I don’t understand.”
“Christmas carols.”
“I don’t understand.”
With big separations between his words, he explains to me like I’m a child, “My family and I are singing Christmas carols, and they’re all waiting for me to come back.”
“Like you’re practicing to go out caroling later?” This would be bad enough.
“No. It’s just something we do. For us. It’s the holidays.” He surely knows this is the least cool thing he could be doing, a desert-dwelling, sword swallowing, near-Buddha such as Skeet. When I tell him so, he says, “Not everyone hates their family for no reason,” and hangs up. It makes me die inside to realize he was probably talking to me while wearing one of those headbands with the glittery antlers and sleigh bells attached.
I dissolve into tears. He’ll break up with me now. Or I’ll break up with him. It’s inevitable because neither of us is who we thought the other was. Who will train me if that happens? No one. I’ll go through life wasting my long torso and my desire for excellence. I’ll be like the runner or the songwriter; I’ll be like my parents before they found content creation, only, unlike them, I’ll be this way forever. I rock on the toilet, moaning into a nest of toilet paper I’ve wrapped around my hand. I feel like I could throw up, so I open the lid and kneel. I wait, but nothing comes; the sickness stays inside me. It’s more than nausea. I can see that now. Like a goblin in my belly, the thing that’s hurting me is an accreted mass of disappointment and sadness and anger and self-doubt and fear and misgiven love and withheld love and everything that has ever been wrong with me and will forever be wrong with me unless I get it out once and for all. When I stick my fingers down my throat, though, nothing happens. I push them deeper, but still nothing. I have no gag reflex, which has been my unattainable goal for months. Slumped on that dirty bathroom floor, with one mummy-wrapped hand of tear-stained toilet paper and something wet beginning to bleed through the left knee of my jeans, I laugh and laugh like a mad woman.
The video is basically done by the time I return to the table, and both my parents give me a look that says we’ll talk about this in the car. I smile at them and say, “Sorry, travel belly,” which may or may not be a documented medical condition.
“Do you feel better, at least?” Mom asks. I can tell from her tight smile she thinks I’ve purposefully tried to ruin their shoot. I can’t blame her.
“I do. Sorry I was a little shit earlier. How did it go?” I sit down and start mindlessly picking at various plates with my fingers. Dad’s phone is still harnessed to the selfie stick, probably for some parting footage, but it’s off duty for now, lying in the chair beside him.
“It was good,” Dad says. “You should have had some.”
“I’m having some now.”
“Well, take your time, I guess. Just avoid this one,” he says, pointing at a plate filled with a dozen little unglazed doughnut balls.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Pastries with Dorian cream.”
“Stinky fruit, they call it.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it on Food Network,” I say. “Isn’t it supposed to smell like garbage?”
“Tastes like it too. I took one bite and had to spit it out.” As if he’d just said a slur, he clarifies, “I’m sure it’s very good once you get a taste for it; I’m not putting it down.”
“We just can’t use it in the video,” Mom says. “We like to stay positive.”
“It’s a shame. Anong was so excited for us to try them. She says this is the only Thai restaurant in Indiana that serves them.”
“I can see why,” Mom says. They both begin to laugh but stop abruptly when Anong appears at the kitchen door. She looks different now, stern, or possibly sad. Several other faces peek out too, the young kitchen staff. I wonder if they’re her children and nieces and nephews, if Sawasdee Thai Cuisine is a proud family affair.
I trace her disappointed stare to my parents’ faces, and I see their disappointment reflected at me. I deserve it, I know, but it can all still be fixed. Action is the antidote to despair. Skeet taught me that back when he liked me better. I clear a path of dishes between me and the confections and then drag the full plate toward me. “Get your camera, Dad,” I say, knowing I’m finally capable of rewarding their love for me. I open my mouth, ready to show love to the people of the world, all twelve thousand and forty of them.
