Fiction from The Literary Review

Lip

TINLING CHOONG

T he key is to follow your skin. Listen to your skin. Let your skin feast. It will open and loosen and lose itself and lead you to the meat, then the bone, then the essence your eyes can't see your mind can't read.
     Listen to your skin. Let it breathe. Let it give you the births you need.
      I was born four times. Tonight is the last of the four.
     The first was choice-less. It was 1969. My Irish mother, a hair dresser at Alger in Boston, had gotten pregnant by a Harvard hippie from Hartford, Connecticut, who claimed to be one of the descendants of Yung Wing, the first Chinese to graduate from an American University—Yale, in 1854. According to Mom years later, no one cared enough about his Yung Wing connection to believe or not believe him. But when high he would burst into eloquent stories of his exotic ancestors. Mom said he had told her that he studied Eastern Civilizations. Well, that helps explain the eloquence, I said. Mom also said that when she met him, he had just broken up with his girl friend from Hong Kong. Rice King in rebound, I said. Despite the Yung Wing claim, Mom said that he only looked Chinese to her whenever they ate in a Chinese restaurant, as in he only looked Chinese holding chopsticks, eating from a bowl, ordering food in mandarin, and being surrounded by Chinese waiters and Chinese deco. Well, that explains why when I am on projects in China, people say I look a little Chinese, and when I am on projects in Korea, people say I look a little Korean. I remember Mom burst into a big laughter at what I said. But I know she was glad that I resembled her. According to my mom, my face is, in every sense of the word, celtic. But your size, Mom said, gladly, is surely chinese. It is a perfect combination, she said, a celtic face and a chinese slenderness. Anyway, he died in bed at the peak of a carnal ecstasy, Mom pinned underneath. He had a Berry aneurysm. In short a body too tight for too much pleasure of the flesh. Mom moved back to Tyson, Vermont, where grandpa and grandma lived in a small oak house twenty girl-steps from the northern bank of Echo Lake. There, she gave birth to my twin sister and me, exactly eight months and eighteen days after his death. Yes, I had thought of the possibility. Despite the vexing possible link between his death and the making of me, I have often found my lakeside birth a comfort. And I can't say why precisely. Mom named me Lake and my sister Wing, Wing in memory of my father's possible Yung Wing linkage. My father's family name was Cox. My mother's family name was Joyce. I was born Lake Joyce and my sister Wing Joyce.
     I was again choiceless-ly born the second time when I was nine. My twin sister had managed to pick the lock of the drawer in which the pistol had been kept. My grandpa's oily pistol stretched across her small palm. We touched it as though it were the tightly feathered skin of a very angry crow. Russian Roulette, she said, let's play Russian Roulette. It was a game we witnessed in a TV show called the Wild Wild West the night before. Left handed, she pointed the pistol at her left temple. We felt our power combined. We paused for seconds. We smiled. The water closet was tiny. We were chest to chest. Hero to hero. In Wild Wild West. She pulled the trigger. For years, remembering back, seeing every detail come alive, I heard and saw the first and only click of the pistol sent a small shadow swimming across my sister's forehead. She looked as though she could not understand the essence of Russian Roulette; how could it be a one-shot game? She looked as though she thought she could stop the bullet from traveling further to the other side of her head. I saw the bullet-shaped lump stop above her right brow, at the peak of her hill-like brow. Her right eye turned white. I saw a gray and small me in her eye-white. Silence and bullet stood still for as long as we could hold our breath. But always the weaker one, I accidentally let go of my breath. Out was a metallic bullet on the other side of my sister's head. It was chased by a fat column of red. Another column of hot red gushed down from between my thighs.
     I became a woman that spring morning when I was nine, when my stronger and braver half died, when my stronger and braver half became mine. Me. I.
     As I stood watching droplets of water growing fat and elongating at the tip of the tap, with my sister's partial head resting on my shoulder, I thought I could hear her whispering into my ears her favorite cue. Fly, forget the line. When a droplet grew to its fattest, I could see a tiny twisted pair of us. In red. Fly, she said, forget the line. It was the very last time we stood chest to chest, sister to sister, half to half, for in the course of those silent hours in the water closet, as our blood turning rustier and rustier, I came to learn to ignore the line. I also came to learn how to fly.
     My weaker half had died.
     But flying is not just a state of mind. It requires facilities. That is if you want to really, I mean physically and corporeally, fly.
     I have had no problem flying in my mind. And I have had no problem running or shouting or stomping or stoning or climbing or leaping from a tree or flying a kite when I was a girl acting like a boy.
     But against a real and adult sky, my wings were too small to lift and flutter in the wind.
     This is why. It was a sticky day in the summer of 1987. The summer of Oliver North and the Iran Contra. In the lounge waiting to see a gynecologist for the first time, I could not take my eyes away from a man, baseball-capped, who could not move his eyes away from the TV screen. He was with a wife-looking woman. He was cheering to every line uttered by Olie as though he was cheering for the Giants or the Mets. From between his tightly controlled lips, you could hear his tightly controlled pride. Yes, you get them, man, you get them, right on, man, right on. Democracy. America is for democracy. America stands for the good. We are against the evil. Evil. His wife's downcast eyes lifted to offer the room a silent apology. Anyhow, my name was called and upon the elevated seat cornered in a small room I was told that my excruciating period which I had endured for years was caused by the size of my hymen. My gynecologist said, you had the vagina of a seven year old girl, your hymen is half the size of the tip of a pinky, she said showing me her pinky, you will need an operation to snip it, you know, like cutting a functional opening, otherwise, it will be unbearable. Do you understand what I am saying, Lake, unbearable, she said. Unbearable. Now, that instantly explained my break-up with John Miller, my high school sugar of two years. You see, the summer of 1987 was my summer between high school and college. Earlier in the spring I had boxed John Miller in the jaw in reflex when he tried to penetrate me per my consent. He almost bit his tongue in half. Well, for my sake, imagine pushing a watermelon up your nostril to your brain. John Miller broke up with me in a week. And for all the months leading up to the appointment with the gynecologist, I thought I was a lesbian, and for months I was acting lesbianish. Now that I know, I said to my gynecologist, I think I should find me a man whose penis is small enough to fit. My gynecologist made a cough-like laugh. I thought of John Miller's best friends, Paul and Brendon, who named their penises, respectively, Winston and Salem. The size and the image and the actual smoking of a cigarette became my soul-comforting prop ever since. The summer day of 1987 was a very dali day indeed. It was a day of Salem and Winston and Olie North and conspiracy and good and evil and a small piece of skin. My skin. It was a day in which I also thought of the rumor John Miller had begun in the months when I was acting lesbianish. He told, via umpteen veins of vines, that I am a lip. A new slang word was created by John Miller who did go on to win the poetry prize at our high school graduation. Lip, he said. Singular. Not Plural. As in a mouth without an opening. As in a mouth in the form of one big lip.
     Years later, at Harvard, the semester before I graduated, in my Chinese poetry class, as Professor Egan was reciting a 950AD poem about the peach-like mouth of an empress and how her peach breaks when she sings, I sat in quiet bliss thinking about John Miller and lip and the dali summer day, and how John Miller had no idea how sexy his rumor and my knowledge of others knowing of my lip had made me feel, and how real flying requires a functional orifice, and how one month after that summer day, I successfully persuaded my mom, and how she spent five thousands bucks in the breaking of my peach. I treated the entire outpatient surgery sacredly. It was after all the unlocking of my born chastity belt. I was also thinking about how three months after heaven was unsewn with a snip of a thread, I let a man sniff through the slit of my peach. I was eighteen.
     He entered my body and became my first wings. I flew, really, from between my thighs through my chest, my cheeks, the roof of my head, the trees, the stars, the void, the uncertainties, the unknown beyond the slit until I reached the pure peak. I flew immensely. He was my Professor in Psychology. Keith Brent. The first time he looked at me, he looked as though I was partially dressed. I was not. I was enwrapped in jeans and turtleneck. I returned his looking with a quiet boldness as though I could undress him just as profoundly. Later, my breasts would harden in his looking. And I would wear matching black underwear to see him in office hours. Every week. And I would go in my black mini skirt. And I would always arrive so that I would be the last seen. He leaned over to touch between my thighs on my eighth visit. No words were spoken. But I knew it would happen that late afternoon when I walked into his office, for I smelled a piquant smell of roots of spring. In his dim office that late afternoon, I saw a peach being snipped and snipped and nibbled until its juice squandered and I felt the peach skin loosening and loosening and out from within came a body. Very born. Very woman. Very new. Very wet. Very pink. A body teased by self-love. A body eaten by the face of a man. A body stretched and released by the rutted fingers of seas. A body screamed and creamed in pure ecstasy. I also saw how I could make a man cry with my skin. The pleasure was too big to repeat twice; it was our only time. I will not forget Keith Brent and the smell of him and his dark oily skin and the orgasmic pleasure my skin felt in his mere looking. Never. He left in the early autumn of my sophomore year with his fiancée of five years to Seattle, Washington. The day he flew off to Seattle, he called from Logan Airport and left a one-sentence voice message. Lake, he said, I know now, he paused, I will never forget your lips. Never.
     But soaked in the fierce smell of berry roots that late afternoon, I knew that the blackberry pleasure, big as the ball of my heel, ebon in body, was not love, true love I mean. I did not care enough for Keith Brent. I opened my body for him because I saw in his body a pleasure I wanted. I saw in his strides a man who knows. I saw in his lips a rut I craved. And because I saw us spooning naked in squalls for weeks before that late afternoon. But I did not care enough for Keith Brent. I did not fear losing him. I only wanted a man who knows what he is doing for my first flying.
     After Keith Brent were several catalogues of men. I was driven by skin and only skin. I was letting my skin feast.
     But I did not care for the men after Keith Brent.
     Until him. Moghai. Until this evening with him. How should I describe it? Parts water and parts fire?
     Look at him. He sleeps like an ancient railroad station. Imbued in history and fantasy. In the dim light of moon, his brows sit like houses, pensive and honest. His Adam's apple a small hillock, his lips, how should I describe his lips? He reminds me of my first wings. Full. Wet. Warm. Attentive. His lips can rub well. We have faxed in our resignation letters this evening. We are leaving for Christmas Island tomorrow. To start anew. New space. New bodies. New eyes. New sense of time. Information-less-ly. Competition-less-ly. Market-less-ly. Face-less-ly. We will build a small house in the migration path of red crabs. We will see love making reef squids and egg-shooting corals in the surrounding seas. We will plant okra and cook stingray okra curry. We will make the sky our blanket and we will spoon naked underneath it. I can't help thinking about pleasuring him. Repeatedly. Really, linearity is not that relevant. Almost all causes and effects are circular. Essence is what you can't see in the middle of layers of circumferences. Do you see?
     Look at me, I am over thirty. Mom died in 1993. For eight years now I have been an orphan. I have had no family. I have had a network of acquaintances and colleagues and clients and men. I have consumed services. I have been fearless in business. I have also been fierce in pleasuring my eyes my ears my nose my flesh my taste buds with the best gourmet money and status can buy. But what does it all mean? Re-allocating wealth and wealth only. Re-rousing skin and only skin. I am not afraid of Labor. I am not afraid of Insignificance. I am not afraid of Silence. In fact I often imagine a world of no data no words no ideas no brands no names. A world of anonymity. A world of simplicity. A world of good repeats.
     My fear, you ask? I fear I am not frightened enough. I fear a life rushed and not lived, a life many layers buried, a Skin Me not frightened enough when I have long lost the Raw Me--the Raw Me whom I can't see. Do you see?
     I think I have found the Raw Me. This evening. I think I have found an inarticulate meaning. An inarticulate bond. An inarticulate understanding between two human beings. Really, if a meteor is to hit this tower and collapse it onto the midtown nightlife traffic now, this very moment, I will enter my next life with a smile. Heedless of whether I enter my next life a girl, a boy, a lotus, a starfish, or a Nothing, I will be smiling. Smiling.
     The key is to follow your skin. Listen to your skin. Let your skin feast. It will open and loosen and lose itself and lead you to the meat, then the bone, then the essence your eyes can't see your mind can't read.
     Listen to your skin. Let it breathe. Let it give you the births you need.