STill life
Julia Hou
I liked being a piano. I had legs, a solid mass, an imposing figure; I could stand without help. I was high-end, a Yamaha, because Porter deserved polish. I liked being a piano despite Porter’s stubby fingers, the way he pressed keys carelessly, jangling notes that made me wince. Sometimes, when he’d finished learning a sonata, he’d do a perfect play-through, and I would feel proud for having a part in its beauty.
So my reluctance, my desire to remain a piano a little longer, seemed to be why I couldn’t turn back into a girl. Porter had already finished practicing his piece for the day, had already plopped down on the couch and switched on his Game Boy. Our mother had already collected the practice books and returned them to the shelves. She tapped my soundboard. “Time for homework,” she said.
My strings particularly taut that day, the wood of the hammers swollen. A moment passed, then two. My grandmother watched me from the mantel, her carved eyes intent. My father cursed from somewhere across the house; he’d burned his finger on the stove. My mother tapped my soundboard again, the clack of it louder. “Sophia.”
Like ears popping, I returned to my body. My hands keeping, for a second, black varnish before returning to their usual suntanned brown. “Sorry,” I said, half-expecting D-flat to come out instead.
It happened again at school the next day, this time without any plausible cause. The district, worried about rising delinquency rates, held monthly assemblies for the middle-schoolers about sex and drugs and how we should absolutely, positively, never do either, especially not vaginal and especially not heroin. At the end of the assembly, Ms. Kelly gathered the boys from their seats and came to collect us from the back of the auditorium. The school’s enrollment had outgrown the auditorium long ago, and the boys couldn’t transform, so all the girls took the forms of statuettes to save on space. She knelt in front of the table where I perched. “Sophia, we’re going back to class now.”
I didn’t like being a statuette. It reminded me of my grandmother, who’d only taken her stone form when she died, the way the rest of the women in our family did. So I was itching to transform out of it. But my stone would not soften, would not elongate into limb. Ms. Kelly tsked, asked why I was suddenly making trouble.
Like a stuffy nose clearing, I came back to life. I shook out the lingering pins and needles in my legs and scurried to the back of our class, far from Ms. Kelly, my heart pounding. Emily and her squad, hanging back in that languid way of theirs, moved forward through the crowd to avoid me. But Mina waited, falling into step beside me.
“Watch out,” she said. “Emily’s collecting girls after school today.”
I took a breath, steadying myself. I was back, no longer static. “What do you mean?”
She pointed at Emily’s form through the shifting curtain of bodies. “You see that bracelet she’s wearing?” I squinted: white porcelain beads, curlicues of blue deep and bright. “That’s Jessica Luo.”
“Jailbird Jessica?” We called her that because when her family returned to China for her grandmother’s final transformation,
her parents had been detained at the border. “She’s prettier as a bracelet.”
Mina laughed. “Emily thinks so too. She thinks we’d all be prettier as bracelets.”
When school let out and we spilled into the playground, Emily gathered all the girls in the hopscotch corner, where, rain or snow, there was always a set of hopscotch squares etched into the concrete. Her squad had on lip gloss, blush like bruises. They formed a loose circle around us. One by one we transformed: jade, lapis. Cuffs, clasp, chain. Weighting Emily’s slender arms. I felt the tickle of her fine blonde down, the cool of her pale skin, reflecting sun.
While the other girls were transforming back, I slid off her bony wrist and landed with a clatter on the concrete. They forgot me, and I forgot them: an hour after the girls had gone, leaving only strands of shed hair in their wake, I was still a bracelet lost in the memories of my formation. Jade mined from the Earth’s crust, gold created in the clash of neutron stars, melded to form a single, pretty thing.
This idea of permanent transformation was not unheard of. In third grade, a girl named Polly disappeared from our class—her family’s house had burned down, and rumor was her bankrupt father, out of options, had begged her to shelter them and her three brothers. I once read a news article about a woman who became a getaway car for her drug-dealer boyfriend and was never heard from again. Even my mother had a story like this about a distant childhood friend—she called her Jie Jie, sister, because she didn’t remember her real name—whose drunk of a father beat her so often that she turned into a steel anvil on which he broke his
knuckles. And of course there was my grandmother, who at the verge of death became a nesting doll, enveloping the body of her mother, who had enveloped her own mother, and so on. The final transformation, my mother said they called it back home, meant to preserve the family line, which for us went as far back as the Han Dynasty.
But those stories involved choice; I had never heard of involuntary permanence. By the time Porter broke his glasses a week later, I’d spent more time trying to transform back than I spent transformed. The transformation there still happened with ease, but the way back was like groping through a forest, blindfolded. Sometimes after Porter’s piano lesson, I’d feel the piano’s weight for the rest of the night, my heart struggling under the strain.
Holed in my room, I was reading about igneous rocks when my mother barged in, Porter sullen behind her, his thumb thrumming against the Game Boy’s buttons.
“Porter’s new glasses aren’t coming until next week,” my mother said.
“I can see fine,” he said.
“No, you can’t,” she said. She looked at me.
I closed my textbook. “I have school.”
She sighed. “It’s only a few days, Sophia. This is what family does for each other.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“I have work,” she said. “I’m putting food on the table.” She took the textbook from me and put it on my desk. “What’s wrong with you? You like transforming.”
“What if I can’t turn back?”
“What?” My mother peered at me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
I became Porter’s glasses and perched on his face. I saw what he saw, one lens nearsighted and the other farsighted, dizzy from
JULIA HOU 17
the asymmetry. The velvet fuzz of his ear, the slick oil from his pores. My mother called the school to excuse me from class.
Porter needed his glasses every hour he was awake. Before bed, after he’d put me on his nightstand, I transformed back, just to make sure I still could. When he was in class, I dozed. He went to a private elementary school that he’d gotten into on scholarship, so his classes were about as advanced as my classes, even though I was three years older. I only paid attention during earth science, when the teacher drew the layers of strata and explained the process of erosion, how it removed the newer formations of rock, exposing the ancient and permanent foundation.
The bullies came for him Monday during recess. They made fun of his new glasses, called him Ni hao like it was a slur. Porter balled his hands into fists. He avoided eye contact. They knocked me off his face. Yells, legs pounding the ground like pistons.
He picked me up from the ground before he went inside and shut himself in a bathroom stall, draping me over the lock. He was crying, loud sobs draining into quiet heaving. I reached for him the way I did when he was a baby crying often out of hunger. I used to sneak over to his crib from my bed, pick him up and pretend I was his mother. When he was finally quiet, I’d set him back down for the night, imagining that I’d cocooned him in a love that had taken a physical form outside my body. I reached for him now, straining, kicking toward him, but my arms were an unmoving wire frame, my body cold glass. He cried and cried.
Porter took his new glasses to his room and set me down on his desk in a patch of sun. His “thank you” was stiff, no doubt one that our mother had ordered him to say. He waited for me to transform. When nothing happened, he poked me with his finger.
“Hello?” He poked me again. “I’m not carrying you to your room.” After another minute of nothing, he carried me to my room. He left me on my desk in shadow. I waited. And waited.
Hours later, he checked on me. “Sophia?” He brought me back to his room and put me on his nightstand in the same spot he’d put me every night for the past week.
Long after he’d fallen asleep, just before the sun rose over the horizon, I returned. I hopped off Porter’s nightstand and stretched my arms above my head, delighting in my moving parts, in a body more complex than a bridge and two hinges. I kissed Porter on the forehead and closed the door softly behind me.
*
For a few weeks, I managed to avoid shifting. Porter never showed me his bruises, but I’d catch glimpses because I was looking for them. The strip of skin around the waist of his jeans when he lifted his arms. The swell of his shoulder. My mother stopped his piano lessons because, it turned out, he hadn’t done his homework in weeks. He locked himself in his room during dinner, refusing to eat unless my mother brought him a plate. I caught her in the hallway once, staring at the closed door as if it would reveal a secret to her.
“Does your brother talk to you?” she asked me. We were folding dumplings at the kitchen table, my mother rolling out the dough with deft hands and me wrapping, clumsy. Porter in his room, my father in his office.
“No,” I said. Technically true.
“But you know who’s hurting him,” she said. I looked away from her.
“Kids are mean,” I mumbled.
She nodded. Stared at the skin she’d just rolled and floured, its perfect roundness. “He doesn’t fit in.”
JULIA HOU 19
I resisted the urge to laugh at the way she was dumbfounded, as if this were a concept she were encountering for the first time. “Maybe he can transfer back,” I offered. “He was getting good grades before, and he had friends—”
“This is a good opportunity for him.” She returned to rolling, pressing too hard, the skins she tossed me too thin. They would tear and burst in the boiling water and their fillings would clump together and sink to the bottom. “If he doesn’t fit in now, he’ll learn how to.”
We finished the dumplings in silence. *
When Emily and her squad approached me during music class, I knew I was in trouble. The school had a limited arts budget, so the recorders we used had passed through the hands and mouths of dozens of grubby seventh graders. The plastic of mine was permanently cloudy.
Jessica hung from Emily’s wrist, porcelain glinting in the light. “I’m sick of this,” Emily said. “These old recorders are disgusting. Help me out?”
I glanced at where Mina had been sitting beside me, but she was gone, a ragged bear plushie in her place. Coward.
“You can have my recorder.” I offered it to her, its beak slathered in my spit.
She looked like I’d just vomited in her face. “I don’t want that. I want a shiny new one.”
“Get one of your friends to do it.”
They exchanged glances, as if they’d never considered this possibility before, but Emily was unmoved. “I’d rather you do it. Like, don’t you want to? That’s the only thing you’re good at.”
My mother had said a similar thing when she was guiding me through my first transformations, impressing on me how
important it was to learn this skill well. It’s the only thing we’re good at. She’d spent months as a ship, bringing my father across the ocean. When they landed on freer shores, she’d turned into a feather to give him less to carry.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to.”
Emily moved closer to me. I closed my eyes, and to my alarm, I started to feel it happening—lip splitting into reed, neck thinning, becoming a corridor for air. Kidney, stomach, artery vanishing. My old body a memory more than anything.
I forced myself back, forced my eyes open. Emily was close enough that I could see the ooze of mascara between her lashes. I pushed her away with a yell, and she stumbled back, tripping over a chair and landing hard on the floor. Then she was wailing, her friends erupting in concerned babble. Ms. Kelly ran over to help her up, and once she’d dropped Emily off at the nurse, she returned to me. “I expected better of you,” she said as she pointed toward the principal’s office.
Verdict: suspension. “So,” my mother said when she’d picked me up. We sat in the car. I was in the backseat, watching the strip of her face visible in the front mirror.
“I know,” I said, though I’d vowed to stay sullen and tightlipped. “You’re disappointed.”
“Why did you push that girl?”
“She wanted me to transform.” I crossed my arms across my chest to steady my hands. “I’m not going to anymore. Not for anyone.”
“Why not?”
“I’m scared.” She glanced at the mirror and our eyes met. We looked at each other for a few seconds until her eyes flicked back to the road.
“Sometimes when I’m transformed—when my duty is done and I can return to being human—I don’t want to come back.” My mother said this matter-of-factly. “I think about what it would be like to stay there.”
It startled me to hear my mother vocalize a thought I’d had before, because it meant that we were the same. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I’d thought sometimes, to stay a thing. Things could not be hurt. They could get scrapes and cracks, but they had no organs, no nerve endings or skin. Things were handled gently. Things were coveted. Things weren’t expected to change.
“But I don’t stay,” she continued. “I come back.”
I was silent for a while. We passed the graveyard near our house. I’d once asked my mother why we hadn’t buried my grandmother there along with my classmates’ grandmothers. Emily says it’s barbaric, I said, what Chinese people do, I mean, forcing women to transform forever.
It’s tradition, she said, and that was the end of it.
“Why do you come back?” I asked.
I expected her to say you. I expected her to say: because you; because Porter; because your father. Because country, and home, because of the wilting cabbages in our garden and the ants in our kitchen. Because our life calls to me and I would not give it up for anything.
Instead, she leaned forward, gripping the steering wheel hard. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do.”
She started to drive unusually fast, passing cars already breaking the speed limit. But even with her foot pressed to the gas, she was in control, her movements sure. I didn’t buckle my seatbelt when she was driving because I knew she would never crash. “One day,” she said, “you’re going to grow up. And you’ll see there’s nothing to be afraid of.” *
For the next few days, while I was suspended, my mother didn’t ask me to transform. If Porter or my father needed something, when normally she would look to me, she would do it herself. I spent the first day tense, waiting for the catch, but then I became used to the miracle.
I wrote my assigned reflection on why pushing Emily had been wrong and promised never to do it again. I spent the rest of the week reading, taking walks. Each day bringing an extra layer with me as an October chill fell over the city. On Wednesday night I offered to pick up Porter from school the next day as a sort of penance, though Porter’s immediate scowl cancelled out my mother’s approving nod.
“I don’t need to be picked up anymore,” he said. “I’m not a baby.”
But I went Thursday anyway, setting out early to make the two-mile walk a leisurely one. When I got there, the kids were spilling into the courtyard, clumping into knots to chatter until their parents or nannies arrived. From a distance, the bullies didn’t look particularly large, but I recognized the indifference in their faces, the way they expected the world to splay itself at their feet like a dog. They could have been mistaken for Porter’s friends, elbowing him and ruffling his hair.
The bullies snatched his Game Boy from his bag and Porter turned on them, so swiftly and quietly I almost missed it. He leapt for it and landed face-first onto a fist. The other bullies backed away from the bully with the fist, and for a split second they all looked frightened, like some notion of conscience had reached through their fog—but in the next second it dissipated, leaving smugness.
They closed in on him, a pack of dogs, and before they subsumed him, he saw me. I saw him. He’d gone slack. Like there was no more point in fighting. I ran toward them, rage swelling, and halfway through I felt myself transform. I wasn’t sure what
I was becoming until I’d finished: a motorcycle with a snarling engine, accelerating toward the tangle of boys. They scattered with seconds to spare, leaving Porter on the ground, gasping. He jumped on my seat and grabbed the handlebars, and in seconds we were out of the courtyard, leaving the adults shouting after us for reckless behavior.
I went faster and faster until Porter was whooping, until the force of the wind made it feel like we were wheeling through the atmosphere. Now rushing down the road our father took home from work, now past the graveyard, now into the next neighborhood. My tank bursting full with fresh fuel. We could go anywhere, I realized. Another mile or two and we’d be at the city border. We’d be free. Free to be anything we wanted, do anything we pleased; instead of living under Emily’s thumb, instead of marrying, instead of one day becoming a crib, a nursing home, I could spend my life studying rocks and what they told us about the shifting of the Earth. I revved my engine, going to max speed. “Wait,” Porter said. I didn’t hear him until he shouted it over the wind. “Wait.”
Reluctantly I slowed, stopped. He dismounted, surveying our surroundings. I didn’t recognize any of it—the foreign street names, the strange cars asleep at the curb. “I want to go home.”
I whined, stretched impatiently forward. My whole life, my own life, just out of reach. Porter touched my handlebars. “Sophia, come back.”
My name sounded strange to me, like a word whose meaning I had forgotten. What had I done? I tried to recall being a girl, to put myself back in that body, but all I could remember was the factory where I had been made, my parts pieced together in an assembly line. “Please, Sophia,” Porter said, the slightest tremor in his voice. “Please come back.”
Nothing happened.
“I can hear Mom shouting,” he said. “We’re late for dinner.”
We were too far from home for this to be plausible, but I listened anyway. First I only heard the faint chatter of birds, the tinkle of wind chimes. But then, to my surprise, I heard what Porter heard. In the distance: dumplings steaming with a hiss, our old radiator turning on for the night. My mother calling my father to the table. Even my grandmother creaking in the cold weather, reminding us that she is here, that we are always here.
Porter took off his glasses, shattered beyond recognition, revealing a swelling bruise underneath. He rested his glasses on my seat, shards of glass flaking from the frame. What if the glasses had been able to choose a different form? Or given the choice, would they stay as they were, simply because that was all they knew how to be? Because it wasn’t really a choice at all?
The skin around his eye puffed, purple and blue. He touched it and winced, and then he was crying again, silently now, opening his mouth but making no sound.
I reached for him, and just like that, I was a girl again. As easily as though I’d always been one. I put my arms around him, drawing him close. He buried his face in my shoulder, and we held each other until we were ready to go back.