Paws, Tongues

Teresa Pham

The kittens are guarding the entrance to a world I once knew. Their eyes roll like white marbles in the night; they follow me as I drop down each step of the concrete stairs that smell of urine and faded chalk. A couple laughs behind me and I turn my head to face the mortal streets, the pavement slick with spilled oil and droplets of reflected neon signs. On the sidewalk, the girl presses her hand against the boy’s arm and the lean towards each other, the top of her head grazing his ear. From just out of sight, I watch them.
They’re bright young things in polyester rain gear that swishes when they touch bodies.
“You can say anything you want to me,” the girl says. Her voice carries the breathlessness of young girls in gym shorts as they run laps behind the boys they like. “You can say anything at all, and I could never stop loving you.”
The boy tilts his chin down, pecks her on the forehead. There is symmetry in the way they angle their bodies to face each other, to press closer.
His lips move. I turn away.
They are buoyant soap bubbles rising from the rain gutter. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. Superfluous in their sentiments, uncomplicated in love.
She and I, we are nothing like them.
I make my way down the stairs, one step at a time. I move toward the door and the kittens part like water, their sleek backs rippling as they press themselves against the walls. They look at me with a wariness that borders on hostility. I could easily imagine Adina inspiring that kind of blind loyalty.
I rap at the door with the back of my fist.
The door creaks open and there she is, standing in her bare feet with a jeweled ring on the second toe of her left foot. The bend of her waist beckons. Inside, the tiled floors are spotless.
“Come in,” she says, and the cats yowl in response.
xxx
“What’s with the cats?”
Inside, Adina’s is a mess in some spots and sterilely clean in others. The floors are perfect and white. I think of my own carpeted floors, of the scattered crumbs of animal crackers lining the hallway to the bedrooms. Even Adina’s clutter appears foreign and sophisticated; it is all hers. The tables are coated with a layer of loose pages, glass beads and ceramic animals. I move to the table and roll a purple bead between my fingers. Adina reaches over; her hand hovers over mine before dropping.
“Don’t touch that,” she says. Her voice should be unfamiliar; I haven’t heard it since she wore white linen nightgowns that fell to her ankles to bed, emanating the faint scent of baby powder. That is not the Adina who stands before me now.
But that voice – rasping over consonants, but otherwise high, a singsong melody – remains familiar.
I put the bead down and nod towards the door once more. “The cats,” I repeat.
Her lips purse and she moves across the floor and in a fluid movement, sits cross-legged on a red and gold Persian rug. “They’re strays,” she says, her tone warning, defensive. “I feed them when they come around, and I’ve come to enjoy their presence. What’s it to you?”
“Nothing. You were just never an animal person.”
“Well.” A smile curves at the edges of lips. “You don’t see any in here, do you?”
There are no animals in the house, no parakeets in the metal-wrought birdcages where she keeps her books. No living, breathing anything except for us.
“Well, the reason I came-”
“I know why you came,” she cuts me off. The smile still lingers, but her eyes have darkened.
“It’s not my choice,” I say. It is almost the truth.
“Do you think it’s mine?”
She sighs, turning the rings on her fingers as though she is winding a clock. She wears them, two on each finger. The only unadorned one is her left ring finger, which remains naked, tanned. I imagine there are lines on each of her other fingers, ghost rings that linger when she takes them off at night and tucks herself under white sheets alone. “You’re here because we have to discuss the will, yes?”
I nod, and she sighs again.
“Death is so inconvenient sometimes.”
We raise our chins unison and I move to kneel on the ground just as she rearranges her weight and shifts to her knees as well. Synchronization once became us. Now, I am not so certain.
“Inconvenient, but you have to remember that he left us everything.”
She raises an eyebrow, folds her hands into her lap and straightens her shoulders primly.
“Did he?” she asks. Her tone goes up a pitch. “I always thought that he left us with nothing.”
xxx
In the beginning, we were terrible at splitting things up; later on, we became too good at it.
As children, no barriers came between us, not even the walls of separate bedrooms. The sides of the room were painted straight down the middle – my half green, hers, a creamy peach. We would stand side by side on the border, the side of our left feet touching as we looked in opposite directions to the other side.
Our fingers would touch. It made us feel closer, as though we were two parts to a single piece melding together.
Mother discouraged our attachment, pushed us towards separate friends and separate interests. “You can’t be the same,” she told us, pointing towards our aligned feet, our clasped hands. “You can’t always be together.”
But we could, we thought. When Mother died, we stood in the backyard underneath the lonely laundry line, holding up our arms as though the tips of our fingers were pinched by the clothespins above us. We pretended that we were hung up, that the only thing keeping us from fluttering away in the next gust of wind was our collective pain, concentrated in the pads of our fingers.
“The clothespins won’t let us go,” Adina said, standing on tiptoes as the black ribbon on her dress flared out behind her like a spray of ink. She spoke hypothetically even at the age of seven. “And we’ll be stuck in the same place forever.”
“I’d pull you down,” I said, shifting my weight. My new black shoes shone darkly. I rubbed them against the grass.
Adina turned to me, her eyes clear. She had not cried and so neither had I. Despite the cold stone lodged in a crevice of my chest, I could not betray myself to asymmetry.
“You couldn’t save me,” she said. In the background, I could hear the hum of cars pulling into the driveway, the relatives and friends drifting in like rows of paper dolls uniformly cut from black construction paper. “You’re just as trapped as I am.”
But still, when she saw me gulp, she pulled one hand free from the imaginary constraints and extended it, a horizontal line polarized towards me.
xxx
Father certainly did not know how to take care of me, but after Mother died, he seemed at a greater loss as to how to handle a growing girl. When Adina cried in her sleep, I was the one who woke up and crossed the dividing line of our bedroom to cradle and comfort her. For Adina and our father, the dining room became a point of contention. “You should sit where Mother did,” Father told her in a misguided attempt to impose a new order on our family life.
Though our grand oak table held half a dozen extra place settings, Mother’s softness and levity had always made us forget that we were in a room more empty than full. Adina shrank in her seat when told to fill this duty; she clutched at my hand beneath the table. “I can’t,” she said, her voice small. “That’d be wrong.”
At first, Father tried to wheedle Adina into changing her mind; perhaps he thought that she demurred out of shyness. But after several failed attempts, he stopped pushing the issue and resigned to eating meals with an empty place to his right. I could see the disappointment radiating in his gaze whenever it fell on the empty seat beside him.
That winter, Father began taking more and more trips for business, leaving us in the care of the housekeeper. In his absence, Adina and I took our meals sitting cross-legged on the floor of our bedroom, our knees touching as we faced each other. We would bring our forks and spoons to our mouths simultaneously, tasting everything in the same moment.
xxx
The cat first came to Adina that same year, large and black with a cross of white on its face and eyes like a fish. Adina would wake me at night, crawling over to my side of the room and touching my cheek with her hot palm.
The cat sat outside her window, gazing in unblinkingly. Its silence kept her awake; its round yellow eyes followed her as she treaded across the room.
I never saw it.
“She has the coldest eyes,” she’d whisper, her fingers clenched around my wrist.
I moved to lean forward on my elbows, the flannel of my pajamas scratching against my shoulders as I shifted my weight. “How do you know it’s a girl?”
“Because she’s beautiful,” Adina said, her breath in my ear. “But she’s also frightening.”
I had to agree with her. I had just begun to feel a strange discomfort even when around the young, unformed girls in my classes. Grown women were a stranger breed altogether, and I looked upon them with equal parts trepidation and awe.
But Adina was something else – she was a part of me, and so when she told me that she was afraid, I rolled over in my bed to make room for her, and side by side, we lay supine, the tips of our fingers barely touching.
The cat came every third night without fail, but I never stayed up late enough to see it. I would try keeping my eyes open and trained on the shadows on the darkened ceilings, following their slow drift across the room in order to keep myself awake. But I gave in to the tendrils of sleep that wound a veil over my eyes each time, waking only when Adina rasped urgencies against my ear.
In time, I learned to sleep on my side, to keep my body cupped in a way that would leave room for her to slide into. It is a habit I still cling to. I would stroke her hair, tuck it behind her ear, and together we would breathe until we had synchronized our exhales and heartbeats, one, two, one, two. Only then would we fall asleep.
Once, during stilted dinnertime conversation, our father asked why Adina seemed so tired. Her eyes shifted towards mine, and I knew that I was not to say anything about her nighttime visitor. I filled my mouth with mashed potatoes as Adina mumbled excuses. It did not matter what she said; our father did not listen. Mother had been the attentive listener, the one who sat by our bedside and soothed our nightmares. We were not so unreasonable as to expect our father to fulfill the duties of his other half.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” I asked her that night as we lay in the darkness, loose strands of her hair grazing my neck.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
Adina rolled over onto her side. Her breath warmed my cheek. “You know how sometimes keeping a secret can make you feel so alone? Well, I think that giving away a secret can make you feel even emptier. There’s nothing left for you to hold onto, just for yourself.”
I said nothing.
“The cat scares me,” she whispered. “But I have you. You’ll keep me safe, won’t you?”
She curled up, nosing into my shoulder and I reached over in the darkness to stroke her hair. That night, I stayed up while she slept until dawn, watching the dark circles fade from underneath her eyes. The cat did not come again.
xxx
On the first day of intermediate school, Adina sat at the kitchen table with a ribbon in her hands, fastening it to the end of braid with nervous fingers. Just the day before, my father had taken us back to school shopping to make up for the fact that he’d been gone for the past month in some large city from which we received postcards of lit-up skyscrapers and luscious rose gardens.
Adina had filled her basket with spools of glimmering ribbons and dark dresses that fell past her knees. As she stood in front of the three-way dressing room mirror with her toes pointed inward, she smiled at me awkwardly. I thought she looked lovely.
For lunch, our father took us to a small, expensive café where he drank fancy coffee and ate bread rolls while Adina and I picked at sandwiches that had too many herbs for us to stomach. He hardly said anything to us as we compared our purchases – deep velvet and headbands for Adina, cotton shirts and denim for me. When we came home that night, I watched as Adina tried on each of her new dresses, testing them out with her schoolbag.
“Are you excited?” I asked her as we walked side by side to school.
It was a moment before she smiled, reaching for my hand. “Not really, but I think it will be fine. I hope it’s not too different.”
In our class, there were twenty-four in all – twelve boys and twelve girls. Things were not so old-fashioned that we had to sit on opposite sides of the room, but we were arranged in twos, and each desk couple shared the same gender. I was placed next to a boy named Willard who suffered from premature acne and ill-fitted collared shirts. Adina’s desk mate turned out to be a pretty light-haired girl named Evelyn who I paid more than usual attention to. Adina and I both had aisle seats, but we were placed diagonally each other. Adina sat closer to the front and when we shared looks, she suffered the teacher’s punishment.
By the end of the second week, we had fluidly slipped into comfortable social groups. I spent my time as part of a group of seven, four boys and three girls. There was another group of five, one of eight and a small group of three girls who huddled underneath a tree during lunchtime and shared secrets none of us cared to listen in on.
And then there was Adina.
From the first day, Adina sat alone, the backs of her knees knocking against a wooden bench in a corner of the yard that had been made smooth and glossy with time.
That first lunch period, I made my way towards her, but the boy I sat with in class intercepted my path with such a look of expectation that I wavered. And when he nodded his head towards the rest of the group, cross-legged girls and boys arranged haphazardly on asphalt, I could only smile and sit down. How else do we fall into social groups, but through arbitrary eye contact and a sense of obligation?
“You left me today,” Adina said that afternoon, as I sat behind her on her bed, brushing her hair.
“You didn’t even make an effort,” I defended myself. My fingers caught on a tangle. “You have to at least try to make friends.”
She shrugged, her shoulders jutting out from beneath her velvet dress. I could not see her face, but her voice was soft. “Why do you need all those other people?”
“Because, I don’t know. I want them to be my friends. Don’t you?”
Adina shook her head, and the knot of hair in my hand loosened, spilling back down her neck. “I think you’re enough for me.” She hesitated as I continued to stroke her hair. “I know you might spend time with the others at school, but would you promise me that you’ll be all mine everyday when school lets out?”
“Of course,” I responded. “I promise.”
So during the school day, I would eat lunch and trade test answers with my group of friends. I would flirt with Evelyn and run laps with Kevin. Adina would sit apart, not so much watching as she was taking in her surroundings. She barely seemed to move. When other students approached her, she flinched backwards and furrowed her eyebrows into worry lines. It was understood that she was strange and there were days when I was glad that she did not attempt to situate herself in the social groups at our school. It seemed easier for all of us.
But at the end of the day, we would walk home together. Our discordant steps would fall side by side until they found the same rhythm, and the backs of our hands would graze each other again, and we would fall back into the comfort that sharing the same womb had once afforded us.
“What happened today?” Adina would ask me.
“Nothing much. Just the usual conversations, the same this and that.”
Her lips would curve in a smile, and I would always falter a step when I saw it. Her face would turn towards mine, her eyes shining like new dimes. “I’m much more interesting, aren’t I? You’ll always like me best?”
I did not hesitate.
“Always,” I confirmed, meeting her smile with my own.
xxx
It was winter of our second year of intermediate school. We were thirteen, our legs still unshapely sticks, our fingers awkward and rough. The grass on the lawn was frosted over; it crunched underneath our boots as we trampled our way to the sidewalk. The grounds and rooms of our house seemed blanketed in a layer of hush and solemnity.
And against this laden winter, our cheeks bloomed with cold and Adina and I kissed in a corner of our room.
It was the first time, the only time. The bow in her hair came off into my right hand – the sweet pink gingham drifted to the floor, where I ground it into the dust with my heel.
This was practice, this was closeness; we were siblings, the best kind. Father was away on business, as always, as always. When I came towards her after closing our bedroom door, when I turned off the lights and flicked on the pale crescent-shaped night lamp, she did not move.
We stumbled cumbersomely in the dark, knees on knees on wooden bed posts, hands on cloth and faltering missteps into the edges of our dressers and trunks. I fell to the ground, knocking Adina’s hand mirror from her vanity table. It was Mother’s, but Father had it moved to our room for Adina.
“There will be a new lady of the house,” he had said. He did not mean a new lady to take Mother’s seat at the dining room table, to dust perfumed powder across her neck before bed. He simply referred to a rearranging of furniture, of frivolous accessories.
My knees hurt, we crashed into each other, Adina fell to the floor. We tangled up into a mess of shards as our feet scraped across the dividing line, unconsciously invading territories.
I pulled myself up and looked down to catch her hand, pull her up, but instead, my gaze snagged on a broken shard.
In the glass, I could see our images reflected – mirror eyes, mirror mouths, mirror dark tangles of hair resting against pale skin. We were the same, the same pulsing veins, the same polarized blueprints, the same darkness in fleeting eyes.
Adina knelt to the ground, her bloody lip level to my bruised knees. Her breath brushed against my waistband; my knees clenched together.
The distance between blood and skin was here, in these magnetic inches, in this vast and too-close space littered with landmines. I stumbled backwards and Adina turned her chin up, the strands of our hair falling into our eyes at the same moment.
“You’re all I have,” Adina whispered, and the bitter rasp of her breath startled me.
“We can’t,” I said. Perhaps I repeated it. My thirteen-year-old voice was still high and fast. “We just can’t, Adina.”
Adina grasped for my fingers, but I took a step back onto my side of the room. I pulled my hand from hers; the deliberation sparked like betrayal in her eyes. “You’re all I have,” she repeated, her voice pitching. My head hurt. “I’m all you have. Why can’t you see that?”
She shuffled forward on her knees and I reached out with my flat palms and pushed her backwards. There was no crash, no grand tinkling of breaking glass. Just a dull thud, and then the sound of pestle on mortar as she shifted her position on the floor, grinding the broken glass that lay beneath her.
“Adina–”
Her eyes were too, too large as she looked up at me.
xxx
We never talked about the incident afterwards. Things remained the same, yet not the same. Our sides of the room became more pronounced, we no longer had midnight talks in bed, and when we entered high school, Adina and I asked our father if we could have separate bedrooms. He granted our request immediately — I had the distinct feeling that he was embarrassed that the idea had never occurred to him before. Adina remained closed off, and though her bedroom stood adjacent to mine, the distance seemed overwhelming. The first time I brought a girl into my bed for the night, I knew that Adina was on the other side of the wall, listening for rhythms and sighs, and I gained more satisfaction from knowing this.
A cat set up residence on our grounds and though no one showed it any kindness, gave birth to a litter of kittens. They suckled on their mother just outside my window, and on cold winter nights, I could hear them mewing for warmth. Adina always kept her window closed and I wondered if it was because of the cats.
On the day we left for college, my father had a family portrait taken. He sat in the middle while Adina and I flanked his sides, dressed in deep green. We were strikingly similar, with our dark wavy hair. Adina had grown to be a tall young woman, and so even the tops of our heads reached the same horizon. “Look at my two beautiful children,” our father had said, holding each of us with one hand. In that last photo of us, we are not touching; our heads are tilted slightly away from each other. It creates an odd valley of negative space above my father’s head.
After that, I only saw my father when necessary. Visits home were sparse. Once I found my own career and my own apartment, I would grab quick lunches with him in the city during our lunch breaks. We were career men, and we understood each other better this way. In the later years, it even became comfortable and we could sit across from each other and speak without stiffness.
Once, he asked me if I had heard from Adina. He said that he still received letters from her, but she had refused all his requests to visit her. “You two were so close,” he said. “Do you know if she’s happy?”
I told him that I had not seen Adina since we had both left his house. He did not say anything to this, just took another sip of coffee and closed his eyes momentarily.
It was the truth – I never saw Adina after leaving for college. Well, at least not until much later, when Father died. At least not until now.
xxx
The will is straightforward, sensible, just like Father. His assets are divided equally between Adina and I – the only line of affection is when he refers to us as his “two dear children.”
Adina leans over the coffee table, poring over the document, her pale wrists exposed as she flips from page to page. Her head is turned away so that I can only see a sheet of dark hair, but still. This is the closest I’ve been to her in over a decade. I only have to move my hand several inches to cover her fingers with mine.
The temptation is strong.
“It seems like it’s all in order,” she says.
“You would think so. He was always painfully organized.”
She tilts her head towards me a little, and I can see a faint smile. “Yes, that’s the only thing I was sure about when it came to him. Nothing about what he loved or what he suffered through – just that he had a remarkable knack for keeping things from falling apart.”
The slim fingers close over the document and shuffle them together, and I am aware of the fact that my time with Adina must be running out. Small talk seems idiotic, but I do not know how I can tug out more about Adina, more about her life now. I settle on an obvious statement.
“You weren’t at the funeral.” She turns away again and goes still, the will lying still in her hands.
“It just didn’t feel important enough. It didn’t feel like his death held any significance for me, you know? One day you just get a letter and that’s that. The man who paid for your childhood and for your college education, the man who maybe came around and hugged you on national holidays is gone. He’s dead.” She took a breath. “And everything is still the same. You’re as alone as ever. Life doesn’t change.”
“What do you mean? He was our father. Of course it was important.” I am surprised by my anger, by the fact that it makes any difference to me whether or not Father’s death meant anything to Adina. To some degree, it did not change me. I made some calls; I paid for a coffin and claimed the plot of land that our father had purchased when our mother died. It had just been a matter of tying up loose ends.
I soften my tone. “Adina, I know how he was. But he provided for us in the best way he knew how.”
Adina shakes her head. Scooting to the side, she widens the gap between us; the bridge I’ve been trying to extend between us cracks and I feel the familiar panic of losing her.
“You don’t understand,” she says, and her voice is lower than I expect. “You never understood. Remember how dinnertime went after Mother died? We’d just sit there, shoveling food into our mouths to keep up the guise that it wasn’t an awkward silence – that we were just really concerned with eating. The food was always good. There was always more than enough, but I hated eating dinner with him.”
She pauses and reaches for a glass of water. I am left with the feeling that here is where I am supposed to say something, to commiserate, to validate her apathy towards our father’s death. But I say nothing.
I reach into my pocket to pull out my faded leather wallet. I flip to the middle, where I keep two or three photographs. I know that Adina can see my family portrait from where she sits; her back tenses like that of a startled cat and she looks at my face unblinkingly.
I offer the wallet to her. She does not take it.
“I just thought you’d want to know a little more about my life now,” I explain. I feel foolish looking at the photos – they are the type taken at every department store around the holidays. Mundane. Overtly sentimental. “It’s just… I want to know about you. Don’t you want to know about where I’ve been?”
The eyes finally close. The blink is quick and definitive; its unequivocal nature startles me. Adina stands up and I am left on the loveseat, looking up at her shadowed face.
“Thank you for coming,” she states. The window of opportunity in my mind clatters shut and I do not argue.
Standing up, I move towards the door. She opens it and I step into the doorway; we stand facing each other.
“Why did you hate eating dinner with him?” I ask. It is not the only question left, but it is one of the easier ones.
There is a moment of silence, and then Adina responds very, very softly. “It was just lonelier,” she says. “I never felt so lonely, except when I was with you.”
Adina pushes the door slowly, and it closes in, a solid wall building frame by frame. When there is just a slice of her face showing, Adina whispers, “Goodbye,” and pulls the door in so smoothly that I miss the transition from being with her to being without.
I stand in front of the door, my fist wavering in mid-knock. The likelihood of Adina opening and letting me in again is slim, is nothing more than a sliver of hope. Turning towards the street, I make my way up the steps and into the night. It is not until I reach the street that I feel the velvet softness of a cat’s ear against my ankle and realize that a shadow is still following me.