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By Root 231 0

We said it to each other at home, one chanting, one listening. The teacher called on my sister to recite first. It was the first time a teacher had called on the second-born to go first. My sister was scared. She glanced at me and looked away; I looked down at my desk. I hoped that she could do it because if she could, then I would have to. She opened her mouth and a voice came out that wasn’t a whisper, but it wasn’t a proper voice either. I hoped that she would not cry, fear breaking up her voice like twigs underfoot. She sounded as if she were trying to sing though weeping and strangling. She did not pause or stop to end the embarrassment. She kept going until she said the last word, and then she sat down. When it was my turn, the same voice came out, a crippled animal running on broken legs. You could hear splinters in my voice, bones rubbing jagged against one another. I was loud, though. I was glad I didn’t whisper. There was one little girl who whispered.

You can’t entrust your voice to the Chinese, either; they want to capture your voice for their own use. They want to fix up your tongue to speak for them. “How much less can you sell it for?” we have to say. Talk the Sales Ghosts down. Make them take a loss.

We were working at the laundry when a delivery boy came from the Rexall drugstore around the corner. He had a pale blue box of pills, but nobody was sick. Reading the label we saw that it belonged to another Chinese family, Crazy Mary’s family. “Not ours,” said my father. He pointed out the name to the Delivery Ghost, who took the pills back. My mother muttered for an hour, and then her anger boiled over. “That ghost! That dead ghost! How dare he come to the wrong house?” She could not concentrate on her marking and pressing. “A mistake! Huh!” I was getting angry myself. She fumed. She made her press crash and hiss. “Revenge. We’ve got to avenge this wrong on our future, on our health, and on our lives. Nobody’s going to sicken my children and get away with it.” We brothers and sisters did not look at one another. She would do something awful, something embarrassing. She’d already been hinting that during the next eclipse we slam pot lids together to scare the frog from swallowing the moon. (The word for “eclipse” is frog-swallowing-the-moon.) When we had not banged lids at the last eclipse and the shadow kept receding anyway, she’d said, “The villagers must be banging and clanging very loudly back home in China.”

(“On the other side of the world, they aren’t having an eclipse, Mama. That’s just a shadow the earth makes when it comes between the moon and the sun.”

“You’re always believing what those Ghost Teachers tell you. Look at the size of the jaws!”)

“Aha!” she yelled. “You! The biggest.” She was pointing at me. “You go to the drugstore.”

“What do you want me to buy, Mother?” I said.

“Buy nothing. Don’t bring one cent. Go and make them stop the curse.”

“I don’t want to go. I don’t know how to do that. There are no such things as curses. They’ll think I’m crazy.”

“If you don’t go, I’m holding you responsible for bringing a plague on this family.”

“What am I supposed to do when I get there?” I said, sullen, trapped. “Do I say, ‘Your delivery boy made a wrong delivery’?”

“They know he made a wrong delivery. I want you to make them rectify their crime.”

I felt sick already. She’d make me swing stinky censers around the counter, at the druggist, at the customers. Throw dog blood on the druggist. I couldn’t stand her plans.

“You get reparation candy,” she said. “You say, ‘You have tainted my house with sick medicine and must remove the curse with sweetness.’ He’ll understand.”

“He didn’t do it on purpose. And no, he won’t, Mother. They don’t understand stuff like that. I won’t be able to say it right. He’ll call us beggars.”

“You just translate.” She searched me to make sure I wasn’t hiding any money. I was sneaky and bad enough to buy the candy and come back pretending it was a free gift.

“Mymotherseztagimmesomecandy,” I said to the druggist. Be cute and small. No one hurts the cute and small.