"Everything I Never Told You"

[fiefoe]

Celeste Ng writes as if we needed another cautionary tale about how dangerous parental expectations can be. The missed connection between Nath and Jack is delicately handled, but I object to the conveniently disposable young lover side-plot. Ultimately the novel feels lighter than its length suggests.

• Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.
• now, everyone had more or less forgotten it. Newcomers to the school district assumed Mrs. Walker was a widow. Her mother herself never mentioned it.
• So they called it keeping house for a reason, Marilyn thought. Sometimes it did run away. And in English class, on a test, she wrote, Irony: a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things, and received an A.
• It would be almost eight years before school would seem real and possible and tangible again, but Marilyn didn’t know that. As she left the dean’s office, an indefinite leave secured, she was certain that everything she had dreamed for herself—medical school, doctorhood, that new and important life—sat poised for her return, like a well-trained dog awaiting its master.
• He has never seen an autopsy report before and expects charts and diagrams, but it opens like a teacher’s progress report: The subject is a well-developed, well-nourished Oriental female. It tells him things he already knows: that she was sixteen years old, sixty-five inches tall; that her hair was black, that her eyes were blue. It tells him things he hadn’t known: the circumference of her head, the length of each limb, that a small crescent moon scarred her left knee.
• And then it begins in earnest: The chest is opened using a Y-shaped incision. He learns the color and size of each of her organs, the weight of her brain. That a white foam had bubbled up through her trachea and covered her nostrils and mouth like a lace handkerchief. That her alveoli held a thin layer of silt as fine as sugar.
• She thought with sharp and painful pity of her mother, who had planned on a golden, vanilla-scented life but ended up alone, trapped like a fly in this small and sad and empty house, this small and sad and empty life, her daughter gone, no trace of herself left except these pencil-marked dreams. Was she sad? She was angry. Furious at the smallness of her mother’s life. This, she thought fiercely, touching the cookbook’s cover. This is all I need to remember about her. This is all I want to keep.
• So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew: what it was like to be teased, what it was like to never fit in. The other part of him wanted to shake his son, to slap him. To shape him into something different. Later, when Nath was too slight for the football team, too short for the basketball team, too clumsy for the baseball team, when he seemed to prefer reading and poring over his atlas and peering through his telescope to making friends, James would think back to this day in the swimming pool, this first disappointment in his son, this first and most painful puncture in his fatherly dreams.
• From Lydia’s dresser she took a single barrette, cherry-colored Bakelite with a white flower, one of a pair she seldom wore. From the cigar box beneath Nath’s bed she took a marble, not his favorite—the cobalt with white specks like stars—but one of the little dark ones, the ones he called oilies. From the inside of James’s overcoat, the old one he’d worn in her college days, she snipped the spare button from the underside of the lapel. A tiny token from each, tucked into the pocket of her dress—a gesture that would resurface in her youngest child years later, though Marilyn would never mention this small theft to Hannah, or to anyone. Not something treasured and loved; something they might miss but would not grieve. No need to tear another hole, even a pinprick, in their lives.
• In kindergarten, he had learned how to make a bruise stop hurting: you pressed it over and over with your thumb. The first time it hurt so much your eyes watered. The second time it hurt a little less. The tenth time, it was barely an ache. So he read the note again and again.
• At dinner, Nath asked, “What does indefinitely mean?” Their father looked suddenly at the ceiling, as if Nath had pointed out a bug and he wanted to find it before it ran away.
• “You’ll be okay,” Jack said suddenly. He leaned closer to Nath, as if he were telling a secret. “My mom says kids only need one parent. She says if my dad doesn’t care enough to see me, it’s his loss, not mine.” Nath’s tongue went stiff and thick, like a piece of meat. Suddenly he could not swallow. A trickle of syrupy spit nearly choked him, and he spat the half-chewed candy into the grass. “Shut up,” he hissed. “You—you shut up.” He spat again, for good measure, trying to expel the taste of cherry. Then he stumbled to his feet and back inside, slamming the door so hard that the screen shook. Behind him, Jack lingered at the bottom of the steps, looking down at the fish trapped inside his fist. Later on, Nath would forget exactly what Jack had said to make him so angry. He would remember only the anger itself, which smoldered as if it had always been there.
• Up there—eighty-five miles high, ninety, ninety-five, the counter said—everything on earth would be invisible. Mothers who disappeared, fathers who didn’t love you, kids who mocked you—everything would shrink to pinpoints and vanish. Up there: nothing but stars.
• That most important word: tomorrow. Every day Lydia cherished it. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the museum to look at the dinosaur bones. Tomorrow we’ll learn about trees. Tomorrow we’ll study the moon. Every night a small promise extracted from her mother: that she would be there in the morning. And in return, Lydia kept her own promise: she did everything her mother asked.
• “Doctors use these,” her mother would say. It was far away then, tiny in the distance, but Lydia already knew it would happen. The knowledge hovered all around her, clinging to her, every day getting thicker. Everywhere she went, it was there. But every time her mother asked, she said yes, yes, yes.
• It was too big to talk about, what had happened. It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn’t find its edges. It would always feel too big. He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.
• Usually her mother gave her books—books that, although neither of them fully realized it, her mother secretly wanted herself, and which, after Christmas, Marilyn would sometimes borrow from Lydia’s shelf. To Lydia, they were always too hard no matter what age she was, less presents than unsubtle hints. Last year, it was The Color Atlas of Human Anatomy, so large it wouldn’t fit on the shelf upright; the year before, she had received a thick volume called Famous Women of Science. The famous women had bored her. Their stories were all the same: told they couldn’t; decided to anyway. Because they really wanted to, she wondered, or because they were told not to?
• In a few months he would be gone, and she would be left alone to win friends and influence people and pioneer in science. Before Nath could snap the photo, she dropped her gaze back to the book, hair curtaining her face. A smile says, “I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.” That is why dogs make such a hit.
• Then Nath punches the countertop so hard it leaves a crack in the old, worn laminate. He runs out of the room, footsteps thundering up the stairs, and James lets his bag fall to the floor and slumps back against the counter. His hand touches something cold and wet: the crushed remains of the hard-boiled egg, shards of shell driven deep into the tender white.
• “Well, Mr. Lee,” Officer Fiske says, and James knows now it is bad news. No one called you by name so insistently unless they were trying to be kind.
• A drop of water trickled out of Nath’s hair, like a shy little mouse, and ran down the nape of his neck. It made its slow way between his shoulder blades, and where his back curved, it dropped straight down, as if it had jumped off a cliff, and splashed onto the back of Jack’s hand. Nath, facing away from Jack, didn’t see it, and neither did Lydia, peeking up through the slits between her fingers. Only Hannah, arms curled around knees, a little way behind them, saw it fall. In her ears, it made a noise, like a cannon shot. And Jack himself jumped. He stared at the drop of water without moving, as if it were a rare insect that might fly away. Then, without looking at any of them, he raised his hand to his mouth and touched his tongue to it, as if it were honey.
• But the moment flashed lightning-bright to Hannah. Years of yearning had made her sensitive, the way a starving dog twitches its nostrils at the faintest scent of food. She could not mistake it. She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn’t care and went on anyway. It was too familiar to be surprising.
• To be pulled both ways—no dress, no book, no locket could help that.
• “There we go,” James said, the catch springing open at last. He refastened it at her nape, and the metal cut a line of cold, like a ring of ice, around her throat. “What do you think? Do you like it?” Lydia understood: this was meant to remind her of all he wanted for her. Like a string tied around her finger, only this lay around her neck.
• To James, years of unabashed stares prickling his spine, as if he were an animal in the zoo, years of mutters in the street—chink, gook, go home—stinging his ears, different has always been a brand on his forehead, blazoned there between the eyes. It has tinted his entire life, this word; it has left its smudgy fingerprints on everything. But different had been different for Marilyn. Marilyn: young and unafraid in a classroom of men. Draining the urine from her flasks, plugging her ears by filling her head with dreams. A white blouse in a sea of navy-blue blazers. How she had longed for different: in her life, in herself. It is as if someone has lifted his world and turned it sideways and set it down again. Marilyn, packing those dreams away in lavender for their daughter, disappointment layered beneath her smile. Triply sequestered by house and dead-end street and tiny college town, her hands soft and uncalloused but idle. The intricate gears of her mind ticking silently at no one, thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee.
• It has been so long since he thought of his wife as a creature of want.