Ma spent every Saturday arguing with our neighbor over the hedges. At first we thought it was hatred, but only later did we learn it was a form of symbiosis, the mating of needs and wants, marriage of routine. Ma warned us about her daily, our neighbor, a white woman with graying hair and eyes the color of turquoise beads from Marshalls, with flecks of paint flaking off at the corners. That’s where her insincerity pokes through, Ma argued, her Cantonese thick with fervor as she pressed our vowels clean of accents, wiring our bones with McDonalds and Panda Express – the closest she could approximate to home that was still American enough to taste, American enough to swallow. We looked every day for the insincerity in our neighbor’s eyes, the gray spots Ma claimed existed. We thought maybe they were like the craters in the moon, which only existed when the moon turned over to sleep on its bad side, the dark side, and we promised ourselves we would find our neighbor’s dark side, the side with gray smudging her face like a glove.
Our neighbor’s name was Caroline. We found out that she was sixty-four and retired. One Friday after school, we followed her home from the grocery store, trailing behind her like a pack of lost puppies, waiting for her facade to crumble open. We pooled together the change we scrounged from drain pipes and water fountains, the pennies dusting our fingers with copper, slinging brass on our cheeks, until we left a metallic sheen on every item she bought. We bought them too, hoping to find the secret recipe that narrated her livelihood. Cleaning spray, a carton of candy, a banana still ripening on her kitchen counter, and it reminded us of the banana bread that was always sitting on our kitchen table even though our mother never baked. Caroline’s making poisonous banana bread, someone guessed, made with bleach instead of milk. We laughed, thinking Caroline was a fool. Ma had already bleached her hair of white, bleached her skin of wrinkles, bleached her accent to its lightest shade. Ma could not be killed with disinfection. We were already finding pieces of her strewn on the lawn, in the bathtub, in the sink — fragile parts broken and discarded.
The next morning we snuck into Caroline’s house, leaving mud on her carpet and chairs. We tried to blame our presence on the cats, made our footsteps soft and feline, but our curiosity was a heavier material than we were aware. When Caroline found us weaving our laughter into her curtains, she sighed and resumed her knitting, pointing to bookshelves heavy with words. Take a book home with you, she told us, her voice the same resonance as disuse. I can’t read anymore; it’s my eyes. We looked at her carefully, trying to find where her insincerity lay, hiding in wait like a tiger, ready to pounce, but all we could find was loneliness, sadness, a familiar breed of discontent. We left brass fingerprints on her pages, like breadcrumbs, and thought about her finding remnants of us for years to come.
That Saturday, we watched Ma and Caroline argue again. They were fighting over the length of the hedges, we thought, something like that, their movements textured out of routine, each syllable ironed into place and strung into line. Caroline complained about the constant noise, Ma complained about Caroline’s night light. You left something on my lawn, Caroline said, and we watched her return a handful of Ma’s discarded vowels, the ü vowel that didn’t exist in English, a recipe for char siu that Ma had thrown away last week, a tin of banana bread. You left this on my porch, Ma responded, handing Caroline a well-worn book, pages creased with comments, her reading glasses annotated by use. We watched them stalemated on the grass, each clutching the gifts they had received, their faces impassive, and we saw Caroline’s eyes flash grey, the moon shadowed behind the iris — insincerity, Ma had called it, but she wore the same look in her eyes and we didn’t have any words for it except the terms we had learned in science class about the relationship between two animals in the wild, a mutually-beneficial arrangement. We watched both women return to their houses, the silent acceptance, and we thought about trading things ourselves — our bruises and chipped teeth, our fire-engine red shirts, how to scatter pieces of ourselves throughout the neighborhood, how we’d all go looking for each other.
