I Grew My Boobs in China (25 page)

When we told Mom later that day, she didn’t cry. She didn’t shout. She didn’t act angry or shocked, nor even sad. She did not defend, did not accuse. But she didn’t deny it, either. Her composure in the light of our revelation confused Bree and me.
News to us HAS to be news to everyone else, right???
We tried to convince her that it was a bigger deal than she thought.
She obviously does not fully understand what we’re telling her.

If we’d known then that she already knew what had been going on for the past twenty years, we might have handled it differently, but this is how she handled it. She never turned her back on Dad or tried to make him look like the bad guy. She kept their relationship issues private. We were what people would consider the “perfect” family. Our parents rarely appeared to be unhappy, and there were no signs of conflict, like avoiding or snapping at each other, or sleeping on the couch. I never thought we had those kinds of problems.
They not only fooled the outside world but us, as well
.

Only weeks after our discovery, we received a call from Dad while we were visiting our cousins. Our Aunt Diana had been warned about the coming phone call’s content and was prepared to comfort and support us. Bree and I were each led into a room and given the telephone so Dad could try to explain that he had moved out. Bree emerged from the room a blubbering, slimy mess. I walked in next, feeling intimidated and confused, but also determined that, whatever I heard, I would not react in the same fashion.

“When you get home, I’m not going to be there, and neither is any of my stuff,” he’d said. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t still love you. I’m still going to come see you guys, and I’ll never stop loving you.” I walked out as composed as I’d walked in, my features unchanged. It had not yet fully sunk in.

It still didn’t hit me when I walked in the house to find half our stuff gone. There was no TV, no desk, and no couch. It didn’t affect me much until Mom came home from work and was shocked by the missing items. I realized then that they hadn’t discussed any of this. She’d had no idea what was coming. It hit me when I saw her cry.

“He just walked out. It was going so well, I thought he was doing so much better,” Mom had said, tears welling up as she confided all to Aunt Pam over the phone. That really hit home. Then my tears came in a flood of rage that he could hurt her and us like that. I suddenly felt abandoned and, like the house, my soul was empty and hollow. He had been renting an apartment with money he’d been stashing away for months before he was finally able to work up the guts to leave, and we felt used and deceived by someone we loved and trusted.

Then, lo and behold, he turned around and came back. Oh yes! He was “just going through a mid-life crisis.” I don’t know how or when it turned around; it might have been months or weeks or even just days, but everything went back to normal again. Gradually, the TV reappeared and furniture filled the empty floor space. It all returned, along with my guilty father, like nothing had ever happened. But that was just the beginning. His third wave of moving in and out generated a much stronger reaction than the first, and he left with Mom’s final words ringing in his ears – “I am NOT taking you back!”

And she didn’t. She’d turned a corner in their relationship. She would no longer plead with him to come back. Why should she try to keep him someplace where he obviously wasn’t happy? You cannot offer more than you are to try to please someone. She’d given her love and support freely through all of their years together and pulled him up when he was down. She finally accepted that it was not her fault, that she had done everything humanly possible to keep their marriage together. If that wasn’t enough to make him happy, then there truly was nothing more she could do.

Our lives as a complete family seemed to fold in and collapse upon us like a castle built of cards destroyed with the flick of a finger.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was unreal to see where that discovery and all the ensuing drama had led us. There was Mom, lying on a cramped little bed in the mountains of China because of Dad. That knowledge accounted for some of my resentment towards him. I also often blamed him for losing Harrison and the life I’d had before the trip. I watched Mom a while longer as she talked to Sky on the phone. I had seen her hundreds of times working on the phone back home just like that. Everything was so different here, though, that I hadn’t thought of the oh-so-familiar scene in weeks.

The setting was cold, dark, and slightly decrepit, and yet she seemed happy, lying contently on the old bed and chatting with Sky while the curtains billowed loosely in the wind. I saw something different in her. For one thing, she didn’t have that aura of underlying worry and grief I’d so often seen before. She was strong, full of energy, and most importantly, healthy. She had changed somehow, but I couldn’t yet pinpoint how.

I imagined the phone call she’d had with Aunt Pam, particularly the question that smacked her in the face and revealed a whole new range of possibilities to her. “What do YOU want to do? Don’t do what you think you HAVE to do,” Pam had said. The realization that she wanted and needed to travel hit her over the head like a sledge hammer.

NO! She did not HAVE to run the business alone. She did not HAVE to be a slave to anyone anymore. And she did not HAVE to do anything she didn’t want to. What better circumstances could a person ask for? This was her time to go for what she’d always wanted: what she deserved and what she’d already paid for, ten times over. I imagined she’d have been in the exact same position as she was now, sitting in bed picking at her right eyebrow while talking on the phone with Aunt Pam.

For just a moment, I saw her as a woman instead of as just my mom, a woman making choices that worked for her, for a change.
She is living her dream and loving every minute of it, after all those years of worrying how everyone else felt, solving everyone else’s problems, and being the rock everyone else leaned on. And who had been there for her? Certainly not Dad, I thought cynically – or me either, for that matter.

She had finally and triumphantly escaped her previous life of untruth and deceit. I felt mine had been torn away from me, and yet it was the only way hers could be restored, re-established, and re-energized. I could now see that she appreciated every single moment of this freedom, something that was easy for me, who’d never had any real responsibilities or suffered any significant hardships, to overlook.

“To Hell with it,” I imagined her heart screaming, and I was proud of her for standing up for what she needed after all this time. And then the emotional reality of our situation finally hit me.
After everything she’s done for me, maybe it isn’t too much to ask that I might sacrifice a year of my life for her!

Chapter 24

Bree’s Birthday Fun

“Hey! What is this? You’re trying to get rid of it already, are you?” Ammon accused when we got back to Granny’s. He slid Rhett out from under the bed where I’d safely left him.

A sigh of relief that the book was still there escaped me before I simply replied, “No,” in a non-defensive manner that I hoped would not reveal too much of my new perspective on reading. I wanted to leave them guessing for a while.

“What!! What is she doing now?” Mom asked curiously.

“This was conveniently kicked under the bed,” Ammon said, holding up my copy of
Gone with the Wind
.

“Savannah! C’mon,” she said, loosening my pack and putting it back where it belonged.
Little do they know.
After
they’d left, I snuck over to get him out and said, “Don’t you listen to them. I would never!”

Making my way down the attic stairs, I slipped in next to Ammon at the table. He acknowledged my arrival by asking, “What is she doing?” with an eyebrow raised in Granny’s direction. Hunched over in her little vegetable garden, she was slowly sneaking up on flies; every so often, she’d whack one! When she finally noticed that she had an audience, she looked up, smiled, and waved the big yellow swatter at us before returning to her task.

Seeing the mob of fat, black flies surrounding our table, I felt sorry for the poor woman.
She doesn’t have a prayer of keeping up with them!
There was such a lovely, quiet atmosphere at Granny’s that I began to regret having to leave so soon. She was a gentle, sweet, and humorous soul I would not soon forget.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The next morning, we were all sitting on the beds, packing our bags.

“I can’t believe my whole birthday has to be spent on trains and buses!” Bree exclaimed.

“Yep, eight hours on the bus followed by a thirteen-hour train ride. I can’t think of a better way to spend a birthday!” Ammon said, ever the brat.

“We aren’t going to do anything fun?” she double checked.

“You won’t even get a cake,” he told her, and that was a fact.

“This is my eighteenth birthday!! That’s a big deal! Well it
would
have been a big deal,” Bree said, slumping in her corner. “What does Savannah get to do on
her
birthday?” she demanded, diverting the conversation to where I was bending over to grab a boot from the pile I’d emptied onto the floor after the last trek.

“I don’t know yet. That’s like, what? A month from now? How am I supposed to know?” Ammon questioned.

“Well, you
are
our fearless leader,” I pointed out, bringing the boot up to my nose and taking a brief sniff. I recoiled with a forceful “Phew!”

“We could be anywhere by then. Probably on a bus, too, for all I know,” he said after a moment.

“Hrmph,” I brushed him off, before stringing my boots to my pack by their laces.

“No wonder you’re always complaining about the weight! You should wear your heavy things so you don’t have to carry so much on your back,” Ammon advised. I glanced down at the clunky boots he was wearing. Maybe he had a point. My lack of experience made it hard to get this stuff right.

“But it’s way too hot to wear them!” I said, not mentioning the fact that, because they were not yet broken in, they were still stiff and uncomfortable.

“Whatever you decide to wear, Savannah, tomorrow we’re going to Leshan to see the biggest sitting Buddha in the world,” Mom piped in.

“Hey! Wait a second; tomorrow it’ll be my birthday at home,” Bree interrupted gleefully. “That means I get
two
birthdays – Sweet!!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Turning around in his seat, Ammon wished Bree a happy birthday for the fourth time before noon.
Poor Bree,
I thought. Maybe Ammon was rubbing it in to be his usual tease or he could just be letting her know it was not the end of the world, though I thought the latter seemed a rather ineffective strategy.

I twiddled a little lucky charm that Granny had given each of us in my hand, inspecting every tiny feature of the doll made from a purple cloth sack of rice to relieve the restlessness resulting from having already spent three hours on the bus. The constant chewing, slurping, gurgling, and hacking noises coming from the other passengers really began to weigh on my nerves. I could see the man across the aisle noisily chomping on an apple and spitting out the peel from the corner of my eye. The man next to him was hacking loudly. The noises ripped through me until I reached the limits of my tolerance. All kinds of garbage was also building in the walkway that had initially been spotless. I could not wrap my mind around the fact that there were open windows everywhere. It would take even less effort for people to drop their apple cores or banana peels out the window for the birds to enjoy, but everything went onto the floor.

Two common snacks were always displayed close to the tills of Chinese supermarkets, much as M&Ms were used to tempt customers back home. The most popular impulse-buy items were spiced boiled eggs and chickens’ feet both sealed in airtight packages. I was actually surprised that Bree never tried them, since her favourite part of chicken is the fatty skin off the legs. For her, chickens’ feet should’ve been like buying the centre of an Oreo cookie.

Several people were gnawing contentedly on the clammy, dead claws. I’m also pretty sure I saw a man picking his teeth with a bird’s toenail after he’d chewed off the “meat,” which was more like a thick layer of skin. I began to feel more than a little stir crazy. My head tilted involuntarily and my eye twitched compulsively. The sound of every piece of egg shell hitting the ground was magnified, as was the next dead-chicken-foot wrapper, the next peanut husk, the next thick loogie. Rather than scream to vent my increasing frustration, I opened my book and let Rhett whisk me far away from the hardships of another full day of travel.

In little local restaurants, we had more than once seen customers throwing chicken bones on the floor instead of stacking them on their plates, almost as if they were waiting for an imaginary dog to come by to clean them up (strangely enough, we’d seen very few dogs, wild or domestic, in China). The only even slightly negative reaction we saw was when one poor waitress who ran the family’s restaurant grimaced at a man who’d dumped his leftovers on the floor. I could only imagine what kind of reaction I would get if I started throwing half-eaten burgers onto the floor of a McDonalds in Vancouver, but that’s just how it’s done in China. The bus got more and more suffocatingly filthy before it reached its final destination eight hours later, where someone would again painstakingly restore it to its impeccable state.

Another contradictory thing about China was how amazingly clean the cities were in comparison to the buses, trains, and toilets, all of which were uniformly atrociously filthy. We commonly saw people sweeping the streets with big branchy brooms. They’d trail behind the locals, gathering up their eggshells and apple cores so the garbage never had a chance to pile up. We never had to dispose of our water bottles either, because there was always a kid or an old grandma around who collected them to get the tiny refund. The people eye-balling our water bottles could be considered beggars, but we never had a problem with them coming up and asking for them; we certainly did not want to go to the trouble of saving and turning them in for the bit of change the effort would net us, though sometimes, I’d wonder what Ammon would’ve done if he’d known where to return them. Half the time, I would simply hold the bottle above my head and it would disappear within seconds, like magic.