Thirty-One
Helen shows up to dinner at her parents’ house with cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery, and she remembers trying to re-create the buttercream frosting in their kitchen with Michelle one Christmas morning, the air sweet with the scent of warm vanilla. Helen isn’t staying here tonight, she’s decided boldly to branch out into the world of Airbnbs in her old hometown.
The house she’s picked isn’t in a part of town she’s overly familiar with and the fussy floral curtains and pink carpets remind her of Mrs. Stover, the fussy, floral geometry teacher from her sophomore year of high school. The owner is a Polish man in his late fifties whose kids are now off to college, and he brings Helen warm cookies when she checks in. He asks her what she does for a living and writes down the titles of her books so he can send them to his daughter at Columbia.
Mom opens the door when she rings and her eyes sweep from Helen’s face to her toes.
“I already made a cake,” she says, but takes the box of cupcakes from Helen anyway.
“Nice to see you too, Mom,” Helen says as she takes her shoes off.
She resists the urge to run upstairs to Michelle’s old bedroom and instead follows Mom into the kitchen, where various pots and pans sizzle and steam deliciously with soy sauce and ginger and green onion. Dad’s sitting on the couch, watching some bootlegged Chinese historical drama series on his iPad. He gives her a casual wave.
“How’s work?” she asks him first.
Dad tells her it’s not going very well at all. He thinks he’s gone as high in the company as he can go because of his English, and he’s getting too old to be as impressive as the kids coming straight out of college. He tells her he’s been thinking of getting into the start-up business back in China, that there are more opportunities for someone like him, and his English language skills would be more appreciated back there.
“I think your English is great,” Helen says, and means it. Dad grumbles, and asks how the show is going.
Helen tells him about postproduction and how the program she’s using to sit in on the edit sessions remotely is glitchy and terrible and sometimes she isn’t sure it’s really worth her being there at all. She tells him about how occasionally, an edit session will go long and Suraya will leave the session to make dinner for her kids, and then Helen takes point, and those are her favorite sessions of all, when she and the lead editor unfold their bodies on opposite coasts and talk random shit about their lives while they wait for sequences to render for playback.
It’s like therapy, in some ways—sitting on a couch and revisiting all the mistakes of production and highlighting the good parts and then cutting and trimming out the awkward pauses, then finding perfect takes blown by the most inane things like a fly landing in the actress’s hair, and getting mad all over again at someone off camera dropping an apple box during the big climactic speech. Watching the editor reshape and polish a scene until it resembles the thing in her brain the closest, she feels like she experiences a million cycles of excitement (the raw footage is so good!), disappointment (why did the director pick that take?), frustration (oh, that’s why), fuck-it-I-don’t-care-anymore (throw in the weird take with the fly, maybe no one will notice), and pleasant surprise that no, actually, with a few creative strokes of the keyboard, it all worked out in the end.
“And your next book?”
Helen doesn’t have an answer for that yet. Her agent did tell her she could probably staff as a screenwriter on someone else’s show, if she wanted. “We’d have to bring on someone to represent you full-time in that area, if that’s something you’re interested in.”
She flirted with the idea of really trying it out for a while, but the truth is, she has no idea what that would look like. She isn’t sure she could casually float from show to show and let go of things because it’s not her baby and she’s just here to do a job. She thinks maybe she could learn something working under someone else, another Suraya maybe, but then she wonders—does she even want to learn whatever vague lesson that might be, or does she want to find a way to fix whatever’s blocking her from doing her real job, that she loved so much once (loves still, her heart insists reflexively, and she thinks, be quiet, we’re not talking about him), so she can deliver on the promise of the premise of herself as a novelist.
“I’m still trying to figure it out,” she tells Dad, and Mom claps her hands in the other room to announce that dinner is ready.
She finds herself repeating most of the things she told Dad to Mom across the dinner table, and Mom nods and blinks rapidly and sometimes looks like she’s thinking about a million other things while Helen’s talking, but finally she says, “You will figure it out soon. You always do.”
Helen’s surprised by the warm gust of air that seems to blow into her chest from that and she says, genuinely, “Thanks, Mom.”
Mom waves off the acknowledgment like it’s a fly in the air, and Helen feels something familiar settling into place. This is what reconciliation looks like, in our family.
“I’m sorry,” Helen says, suddenly gripped with a need to say it out loud. “For what I said in the hospital that day. I was angry and hurting, and I—I wish I’d handled it better, instead of trying to make you hurt like I did.”
Dad gives Helen a short, embarrassed nod. Mom stands abruptly to clear their bowls.
“It’s time for cake,” she says briskly, without looking at Helen.
The cake is a Betty Crocker angel food cake and Helen remembers making this with her mom when she was little—so little, Michelle was too small to help. She had watched her mother crack the eggs and marveled at how magical they looked, their golden yolks trapped in a clear aura. She had learned that word from some animated movie and it radiated such a perfect elegance that she looked for excuses to use it everywhere for an entire year.
Mom had shown her how to use chopsticks to mix up the eggs and cake flour, introducing her to the concept of bonding agents and chemistry, and she had sat cross-legged in front of the oven as delicious, golden-brown, sweet smells filled the air. This is what it feels like to be truly happy, she remembers thinking, and Helen wonders if some part of her remembers this feeling every time she walks past the boxed cake mixes in the grocery store and doesn’t buy them.
Something flickers in Mom’s expression when Helen asks if she can bring some of the cake back to her Airbnb host, but Mom just sniffs and says, “Suit yourself.”
She moves off to hand wash all the dishes and place them in the dishwasher for storage, and Helen sits with her cake and tea across from Dad as he frowns at things on his phone. After she finishes her tea, she goes to the kitchen and starts toweling off the cups that Mom is setting down.
“You don’t have to do that,” Mom says.
“When has that ever stopped you,” Helen answers, and she thinks she almost catches a smile at the very corner of Mom’s mouth.
They clean in silence and finally Mom gets out a stepstool. Helen tries to do it for her but Mom insists—“I know where everything is”—and pulls down their old Tupperware from the top cabinets.
“Why do you put stuff you need so high out of reach?” Helen marvels, and Mom lets out a soft “ha” to herself.
“We need a lot of things, and there isn’t enough space for everything to be convenient,” she says. “I get them when I need them.”
Helen thinks sometimes Mom sounds like she’s talking in metaphors, but the Tupperware is thoroughly rinsed and carefully dried with a paper towel before Mom cuts off a large chunk of the cake.
“For your Airbnb host,” Mom says, her eyes blinking rapidly.
Helen feels like she wants to cry just then, thinking suddenly of all the fruit and cake and sugar they’ve exchanged over the years instead of I’m sorry and I love you, and she excuses herself to use the restroom before she gets on the road.
When she arrives back in her temporary bedroom, she puts on her favorite stolen T-shirt (she has a flannel button-up he left at her apartment too, but she didn’t pack it) and brushes her teeth.
As she crawls into the creaky bed, she thinks about that old haunted hard drive and ugly last words she can’t delete.
Sometimes I wish you weren’t my sister.
If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have one.
Helen thinks of what she’d say to Michelle if they could have one more conversation, now. They wouldn’t linger on the past. She would tell her about Dad and how she’s worried about him getting older. She’d tell her about Mom snubbing her cupcakes, and Michelle would say that bitch while rolling her eyes. Helen would admit she didn’t go upstairs to pay her respects this trip, and examine the strangeness of wanting to apologize for that. She’d tell Michelle about Grant, and ask her sister if she thought she’d fucked up horribly where he was concerned, and Michelle would say, yes, obviously, and I forgive you for fucking him so many times and falling in love with him.
Maybe not that last part.
Helen opens Facebook on her phone and scrolls back through her old profile pictures, watching herself age in reverse until she lands on one of the earliest photos, from 2007. Her own too-thin eyebrows and aggressive side bangs greet her, and her head is tilted, pressed against her sister’s. Michelle wears impressively applied winged eyeliner, considering it was an age before beauty tutorials and YouTube. Her hair is piled into a ponytail at the top of her head, and she still looks so cool. Helen wears a cardigan and pearls in the photo, and she vaguely recalls them snapping this before heading out the door to her National Honor Society induction ceremony.
That had been a promising day that had soured at dinner, she remembers, when Michelle had gotten into a fight with Mom and Dad because of something she said to their waitress. Helen had been pissed at her little sister for always finding a way to make things about her. But she’d still made the photo her profile picture, because she had liked the way her cheekbones looked.
I miss you, she thinks, and it doesn’t feel as unbearable to admit anymore.
Helen takes a deep breath and does the only thing that seems to make sense now.
She opens the notes app on her phone and starts typing.
Dear Michelle,
She pauses and tries to think of how to continue.
How to address her dead little sister, after all this time.
Dear Michelle,
You dumbass idiot.
No. That’s more likely how Michelle would respond. Helen laughs at her phone screen—it sounds strange in this cold, empty room, devoid of even the hope of old, familiar ghosts—and she starts over.
Dear Michelle,
It’s been a minute . . .