Superbloom by Maggie Weng
That spring, the wildflower bloom was the biggest in seven years. The Hollywood Hills turned green, soaking up unexpected rain. The mood in Los Angeles was good. If there were climate change and smog and drinking water flavored with industrial pesticides, there were also the flowers. Those and the mass butterfly migration that swirled through the Valley like a cloud of confetti.
Ma celebrated the end of water rationing. After the wet winter, the reservoirs had more water than they could hold. There was talk of diverting the surplus into the Mojave Desert, of pumping it back through the mountains, of overfilling the dam. Ma turned the hose on and soaked the ground beneath her trellises of eggplant and squash. They had clung to life during the dry years with extra water from a bucket in her shower. Whenever I visited her, she pressed a grocery bag of vegetables into my arms. I arranged them artfully in the fruit bowl in my apartment, where they stayed until I discovered mold growing on their undersides. Ma viewed hunger as a personal insult to her hospitality: most quality time with her was spent thinking about, preparing, or eating food. My sister Linn found this exhausting. I took it for granted.
I squatted with Ma in the garden as she weeded the tomatoes. She wore beat-up plastic clogs for yardwork and her hair was pulled back in a tight bun. Bald spots were beginning to show at her temples.
“How’s Linn doing?” she asked me.
I leaned forward and yanked at a crabgrass shoot. “Haven’t you seen her?” The tip broke off under my fingers, leaving the stubborn root system intact. Ma tsked at me.
“You know she doesn’t tell me anything,” Ma said. “I tried to bring her some cucumbers the other day, she pretended she wasn’t home even though I could hear the baby crying. I had to leave them on the doorstep. Imagine! Ignoring your own mother!”
She let out a disgruntled sigh and leaned forward to pull out another weed. Her glance told me I was shirking some responsibility.
“I’m sure she’s very busy,” I said idiotically.
“Busy!” Ma cried. “We’re all busy. You’re busy and you still come visit so I don’t forget what you look like.” She leaned forward and gripped my arm, possibly for balance. Her small fierce eyes drilled into me. “You’re a good daughter,” she said. “I’m lucky to have one good daughter.”
~
I called Linn from work. I was on a fifteen-minute break, and it was comforting that our conversation couldn’t last any longer. Talking to Linn was difficult. Between our silences I could hear the baby crying. It seemed like he was always crying. Eventually she picked him up and shushed him, and he quieted.
I asked her how the baby was doing. He was six months old now, and I hadn’t seen him in at least a month. I supposed he was a lot bigger than I remembered. Could he crawl now? “He’s fine, Birdie,” Linn said.
“You haven’t called me that in a while,” I said, smiling at the nickname. We were veering inevitably into dangerous territory, the contemplation of the past few months and its lack of nicknames. “Have you seen Ma lately?” I asked.
“Jesus, you too,” Linn said. “Come on.” It was the same way she always shut me down. Even as her older sister, I was cowed by her judgements. I heard her shift the baby to her other hip.
“She’s worried,” I said.
“Well, there’s nothing to be worried about.” Linn was about to make an excuse and get off the phone. That would be our contact for the week. I didn’t want to let her win.
“Wait,” I said. “I’ve been reading about the wildflowers. Do you want to come with me to see them this weekend?”
“What wildflowers?” Linn asked.
“The poppies,” I said. “They’re in Antelope Valley.” The line was quiet. “You could bring the baby,” I said.
“Just us?” Linn was suspicious. She smelled a motherly scheme. It was something my mother would suggest: a drive someplace hot and faraway, to see something nobody but her was excited for.
“If that’s what you want,” I said.
She sighed into the phone. “You’re in charge of planning it,” she said.
~
I signed up for something called the “Poppy Tracker” that sent alerts to my phone whenever poppies were spotted blooming or about to bloom. The map was speckled, and then quickly covered with bloom sites across the Antelope Valley region. In the State Park, people weren’t allowed off the trails. Picking or crushing the flowers damaged the fragile habitat. The flowers grew all over the valley, however, and for a picnic or a shot of yourself lying in the field you could just leave park grounds.
I wondered if Linn would like a picnic.
I started texting her articles when I found them at work. Some were about the superbloom, some weren’t. I learned that bees make honey with regional terroir that tasted of all the flowers they visited that season. Some insects will only pollinate particular flowers. They can die hungry in a field filled with blooms.
That’s stupid of them, she wrote back.
I biked to and from work. I liked the feeling of the air against my legs. Ma believed she could tell the difference between a wind from the desert and a wind from the sea based on how the palm fronds turned over. I knew what the next day’s weather was going to be like based on how the air felt on my way home, whether it evaporated into the seamless afternoon or closed around me like a fist.
I let myself into my apartment. The messes from this morning were still there, dishes congealing in the sink. The trash needed to be taken out. I pulled off my bike helmet and set it on the table. The messages would start coming in soon as other people got home, the work-after-work grind. I stepped into the shower, the jets unkinking some of the knots in my shoulders, washing away the patina of smog from the road. “You need a husband,” my mother said every time she came over, tipping dish liquid onto a sponge in the sink. I’d watch her as she washed every plate spotless by hand, ignoring the dishwasher, then toweled them off and put them away.
I changed into sweatpants and turned on the TV for noise, an episode of some interchangeable comedy. The laugh track was soothing. When I got hungry I microwaved a frozen curry. The next time I looked up, it was dark outside. I’d missed the sunset. The end of the day had been robbed from me.
I turned on the lamp beside the couch, texted Linn. Are you okay?
Fine, the reply came back. Then, a minute later: You have to stop doing this.
She was always fine. When you try to kill yourself and it doesn’t work, there isn’t any other way to be. She knew this and was tired of the reminder. Except: she had been fine when she left the baby with me that day, to run some errands she said. The baby was very young. Six months later he still didn’t have a name. We called him Baobei, Bao for short. On his birth certificate it had just said “Baby Boy Wong.” We were lucky they’d spelled the last name right. Or maybe they hadn’t: maybe he was a changeling plucked from a row of nameless, black-haired babies. My nephew, who clutched the bottle of formula I gave him that day with such ferocity that I had trouble pulling it away.
See you tomorrow, I wrote back to her. She didn’t reply, but it was enough.
~
The next day was Saturday. I drove to Linn’s place, a low-slung ranch house in Sherman Oaks she shared with five other women. When I rang the doorbell at ten she answered sleepy and disoriented, still wearing boxer shorts and an oversized t-shirt.
“Shit, Birdie,” she said. “He’s been up since four. Give me a few minutes to shower?”
“Sure,” I said, following her in. The house had what a realtor would call nice bones. The furniture was an assortment of secondhand and the odd Ikea splurge. The dining room had been turned into a makeshift bedroom, a printed curtain strung across the doorway for privacy. Tinny music wafted from behind it. I saw the shadow of a woman against the curtain and realized I had been staring for too long.
“I forgot you haven’t been here before,” Linn said. “It’s not like the old place.” She went down the hall to her bedroom and peeked in. “He’s quiet,” she said. “You can wait here while I shower.”
I nodded. Her room was exactly as I remembered her: the photographs pinned to the corkboard above her desk, the UCLA flag by the window. She hadn’t taken it down despite what she told Ma. The only sign that things were different now was the crib in the corner of the room next to the bed. Linn closed the door behind me.
The old place was the apartment she had lived in with her best friends while they were juniors in college. It was in Brentwood: tiny, expensive, but with a eucalyptus grove outside. In Linn’s photos the four of them were polished and beautiful, their hair ironed in dark waterfalls. I wondered if she still talked to any of them now.
I heard footsteps outside. Someone tried the door to the bathroom and cursed. “Use the other one!” Linn yelled from inside. The footsteps stomped back down the hall.
Bao turned in his sleep, whimpering fitfully. I went to the crib and looked down at my nephew. His eyelashes were long and delicate. I tried to see if he looked like Linn, or any of the boys I’d met on the rare occasion that she brought me to a party with her. To this day Linn maintained that she didn’t know the baby’s father. She was drunk. There was a rave. The faces were indistinct, strobed with red and aqua green. She had taken something when she arrived, a little white pill, and was beginning to understand that the world was a beautiful place. On an impulse she had taken his hands, commanded him to dance and he did. He moved fluidly and watched her from the corners of his eyes. “He wasn’t like the other Asian boys,” she said to me. Only to me. She’d told Ma nothing, that she couldn’t remember.
We were all surprised when she decided to keep the baby. Ma wasn’t religious. Ma had actually begged her to get an abortion—Linn told me this later, her hands indignant atop her swollen belly. Ma said she had not sacrificed everything and saved every penny so that Linn could throw it away on a bastard. “She actually said that word,” Linn said to me. “How old-fashioned is that?”
I heard the door open again and smelled Linn’s shampoo. The baby stirred and began to whimper. I picked him up and held him against my chest, patting his back. Linn pulled open a drawer and took out a pair of striped underwear, letting her towel fall to the floor. The stretch marks on her belly were angry red, but she had lost a lot of her pregnancy weight.
I held the baby, rocking him as he cried louder. Linn sighed and reached into the minifridge beside her desk, pulled out a bottle of formula. She popped it into the microwave resting on a nearby shelf. The minifridge and microwave had come from her dorm and used to hold her beer and ramen. When the bottle was warm, she attached a rubber nipple and took the baby back from me. He quieted as she nestled him expertly in the crook of her arm, sucked eagerly when she offered him the tip of the bottle. I watched them like that, and I willed myself to believe that my sister was fine.
~
By the time we got on the road it was almost eleven, and the midday heat was threatening. Bao was placid in his car seat, dozing in milk-sated bliss. Linn and I were less content. She leaned her head against the window and announced she was going to sleep. I put on a playlist I was already sick of, each song tracing a familiar groove in my brain. We stopped for gas before we got to the hills. I filled the tank while Linn went inside to get a snack. A text from Ma popped up: How is she?
She seems good, I wrote back.
Is she thin? Is she eating? Is the baby thin?
Baby is fine, I typed hastily, watching Linn walk back through the parking lot. I replaced the nozzle and screwed the gas cap back on. Linn had Corn Nuts and two cans of Arizona green tea. Our favorite road trip snacks as children. My chest gave a hopeful flutter.
“Thanks for driving,” Linn said, handing me one of the cans.
“No problem,” I said. I popped the tab and clinked it against hers. “Ginseng for health!” Ma didn’t believe in soda, but she would let us drink Arizona green tea because of the advertised ginseng on the label.
Linn laughed as we got back in the car. I turned back onto the highway and drove northeast, as the boutiques turned into chain stores, then gas stations, then nothing at all.
~
By the time we pulled into the Antelope Valley State Park visitor center, Bao had woken up and needed to be changed. The bathrooms were rudimentary. Linn spread a faded towel on the countertop by the sink. She unwrapped him and I tried not to wrinkle my nose.
“Could you hand me a wet wipe?” she said as Bao howled. I dug into the side of her diaper bag until I found them, crumpled and half-dry. She wiped him systematically, front to back, holding his fat little feet in her hand. Bao had stopped crying and was playing with a toy, a cheap plastic rattle.
When the new diaper was on, she pulled Bao’s pants back on and neatly rolled up the towel, disposing of the dirty diaper and wipes in the overflowing trash can. Then she washed her hands. I watched her in the dented mirror as she pulled out exactly one paper towel, wiped her hands, and folded it neatly before throwing it away. I saw her face lined with exhaustion as she packed up the bag of secondhand baby goods. She looked like the pictures of our mother upon her arrival in this country. I knew that was what upset Ma the most, not the child but Linn’s situation. Hard work, discipline, an American name: none of it had saved her.
Linn looked up and met my eyes. She knew what I was thinking; she dared me to say anything about it. I said, “Have you thought of a name?”
“Not yet,” she said. “I mean, God, I’ve thought of so many names. I just haven’t narrowed it down.”
It was the most she’d confided in months. She picked Bao up and brushed past me, through the swinging bathroom door. I followed her out, carrying the diaper bag. We headed toward the trailhead.
“Is he going to have a Chinese name?” I asked. I was still thinking of her resemblance to Ma, and also that Linn’s reluctance to name the baby might be due to her desire to spare him all of it—the story of our immigration, the relatives in China we barely knew, the bitterness of growing up without a country.
“Why would you ask me that?” she said, suddenly hostile.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just wondering.”
She let out a sharp breath. “You sound exactly like Ma, you know.” We were on the trail now, headed up the spine of a hill. “Do you ever think for yourself?” Linn stopped and looked at me. “I mean, is there even anybody in there?”
My eyes filled up involuntarily. I stopped on the trail and looked away from her, toward the parking lot. At school when people bullied me, I used to imagine I had swallowed a stone. It rested cool and heavy in the base of my throat, filling the space so completely no sound or sob could escape. The rest of my body heaved against it, and then, unable to budge, settled quietly again.
“I’m sorry,” Linn said. “I’m an asshole. Let’s just walk.”
“I’m real, you know,” I said, still not looking at her. “I’m a real person.”
“I know, Birdie,” Linn said.
“Sometimes I don’t,” I said, and it was true. “I feel like I just exist to do everything right, so that you can screw up as much as you want.”
Linn touched my shoulder and held out a tissue. I took it and blotted the dampness on my cheeks. “I knew you were angry at me,” she said, but I saw that she was smiling.
Bao cooed in his sling. I reached down and picked one of the flowers at the side of the trail and handed it to him. The stem leaked clear liquid onto his fingers. “I can’t be angry at you,” I said. “You tried to kill yourself.”
“All the more reason,” Linn said. She shifted Bao against her chest. “I just thought he’d be better off with you.”
I looked at her. The sunlight poured thickly from behind her, silhouetting her face against the bright blanket of poppies. “Christ, Linn,” I said. “How could you be so stupid?”
She ducked her head and I wondered for a moment if she might cry. Instead, she slipped an arm through mine and put her head on my shoulder, Bao sandwiched gently between us. I gave him my forefinger and he curled his tiny fist around it, holding on with all his strength. Below our feet the poppies wove their roots through the dirt, latticing the hillside, holding the earth together.
Maggie Weng is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University studying astrobiology, the search for life on other planets. Her research focuses on how life survives in extremely salty environments. She is also vice president of her labor union, and lives in the DC area with her feisty cat.
14 April 2023
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