Your intimacy makes me anxious, but you did well, successfully putting up with that discordant joke. Then you watched your husband pick up a second piece of pastry, and it felt like you’d never noticed before that his entire scalp moves when he chews. There he was, mouth working away, picking up a third piece for you. You smiled and declined. He let out a satisfied sigh, and you turned your face aside to avoid that burst of hot, sweet breath. You looked around you. Fat bodies pushing overweight carts, double chins and huge red faces. So much food, enough to drown these fortunate people. Yet it all tastes alarmingly bland. These plump chickens—it only takes them as little as a month to go from hatching to becoming a pile of meat, no longer than the life span of a mushroom, and tasting about the same. You rummaged around the chicken shelf, looking for a half dozen leaner drumsticks, but you failed. In their short, untroubled lives, these chickens’ feet never touch the ground, so their legs can grow till they reach a planned weight. Rows and stacks of plump bodies like in a group exercise class, whether male or female, weak or strong, their minds completely blank. How could they possibly taste of anything? The battle for survival, the urge to find a mate, the fear of natural enemies, the circulating blood and burgeoning flesh—all of that forms, fills each chicken’s life with possibilities. It’s precisely these possibilities that make a chicken what it is, rather than a mushroom. Finally, you picked up a pack of breast meat, because it was fifty percent off. You put it in the shopping cart, or rather tossed it in. I saw all the weariness, discontent, and helplessness in that moment. Your body language might be restrained, but it’s never monotonous.
Hongmei heard Glen making a call in the living room, his voice sounding youthful. He was discussing the candlelight vigil taking place in San Francisco’s Union Square the following night. More than two thousand people had registered online. Soon after that, she heard his excited footsteps charging over, pausing outside her door for two seconds, and then hurrying on to his own study.
She heard him get online, his fingers tapping smoothly away at the keyboard.
She read the secret talker’s email three times, all the while running through the faces she’d seen that day in the supermarket. She’d let this person get away again.
She asked her to please stop playing this spying game.
The reply came right away, asking if she was really interested in subletting that cheap house.
Hongmei felt a wave of revulsion and banged out the words: My husband’s next door, I could ask him how to deal with a pervert like you. He’s already suspicious because of my strange behavior recently.