My Sister Will Be Hungry: Part I

There is a photograph my mother is fond of showing people whenever she explains how far I have fallen. I am insolent now, uncharacteristically so, and she is unused to seeing my anger so unhidden. “See how happy we were?” she laments, phone in hand, zooming in on the expertly cropped image. In it, we are standing soldier-like behind a table overflowing with food. The corners of our mouths are upturned in the same way. “10th grade, Thanksgiving break,” she explains. “She had just gotten back from boarding school.” And then, invariably, she turns to me and asks, “Do you remember that? What a nice girl you were? Do you remember?”

I do, no matter what I try. I do.

* * *

As my parents stared me down for refusing my aunt’s casserole, my sister quietly finished her second helping of Thanksgiving turkey. She was fearless where I faltered.

Hard-boiled eggs, hollowed and rinsed of any remaining yolk, were not dangerous. Neither were watercress leaves in sealed plastic bags. I carried these things in tin lunch boxes, like a child. My mother often scolded me for wasting food. She had watched girls thinner than I was wrestle over cups of flour, knobbed fingers caught in the spaces between ribs. My sister always took the rejected gray yolks into her mouth without complaint. Later, she would remark on their smoothness.

I pushed a plate of sautéed collard greens across the table. I didn’t like the way the oil glinted at me.

Of my own volition I had been hungry for almost three months. There were certain dietary staples I did not stray from, romaine lettuce and steamed broccoli chief among them. I had a fear of growth and a fear of death simultaneously. Faced with fats and starches I felt lust and disgust in equal measure. Sometimes it was hard to differentiate learned from innate revulsion. I never liked bacon before and when I began to comprehend the meaning of the grease it left on the griddle, I grew to hate it. The same went for cream cheese and bagels, whose rich blandness was best complemented by the brininess of stomach acid and the hot relief of mistakes forgiven. My tongue forgot flavor—my mind invented it in plates of naked green things.

Being home scared me but not for the reasons it should have. I had succeeded, and hating decline as much as I did made success a paranoid place. The tomatoes were too sweet to be trusted. The measuring spoons were warped from the heat of the dishwasher. I imagined my body growing withered. I imagined my body growing swollen. No salad bar safety. No dorm room hiding place. There would be lunches —matinées—and dinners and dinners and dinners.

“Audrey,” I found myself whispering, “Aren’t you afraid?” I imagined biting into the turkey’s thick roasted flesh, the gravy coating my lips with a slimy layer of fat.

“Afraid of what? Them?” She glanced toward my mother and father. “No, not right now.”

I opened my lunch box in my lap and extracted one half of an egg white. I couldn’t bear to chew it. My tongue ran involuntarily along the concave surface, picking up forgotten flakes of yolk, whose quasi-creaminess I held in my mouth for several minutes.

“Mommy, can I have some more?” Audrey gestured to the mashed potatoes. My mother gazed past her, unhearing as usual.

I stood, faced the wall, and emptied my cholesterol-contaminated mouthful into a napkin. When I turned back, I felt my mother’s arm curl around my body, watched her face contort into a red carpet smile. Before I could brace myself, I saw the flash of my uncle’s camera from across the table.

—Staff writer Angela F. Hui's column, "My Sister Will Be Hungry," is a serialized work of fiction centered around a college student's relationships with her mother and sister. The story explores the effects of collective cultural trauma on the second generation of an American family.