The Balance Tips by Joy Huang-Iris

Author:Joy Huang-Iris [Huang-Iris, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2021-08-26T03:10:37+00:00

Turn the Phrase

Hua

While it’s happening, she looks at his eyebrows. They’re fine, like shaved flakes of cheese. Except black. Especially moldy cheese, perhaps. Or the kind that’s supposed to be moldy because that’s its specialty.

Because he always complains about the eye contact. How he needs her focus, how she must join her pupils to his. She remembers helping Jia find “pupil” in the dictionary. Origins in late Middle English. Derived, the entry read, from the Old French, “pupille,” or the Latin pupilla. Pupil, the black circular opening, the diminutive of pupa, “doll.” And the selection of “doll,” due to the small, reflected images perceived to be seen by the eye. Captured, encapsulated by eyes. But there’s also pupil, the student, willing consumer of knowledge. From where and whom is this knowledge absorbed? All those pupils watching, watching for data that will shape their perceptions and actions.

Are you into this? Are you here with me? Are you paying attention?

Sweat drops derived from his forehead pelt her face. He’s spitting on her in every possible way, figuratively and metaphorically. A pupil needs a teacher. Two teachers can never be. One needs relegation, degradation, submission. She hates forced learning. She misses her agency.

The motions, the reactions, he’s instructed her to perform these. Implicitly and explicitly. Through the command of voice and body and expectation. She thinks of the last time she and a colleague took a spin class.

Instructor language: faster; push harder. That all you can give? Work like you mean it! Put yourself into it. Let’s see you surpass your comfort zone. Beauty’s pain, women!

She’s become his skin bike. Ridden skin, razed insides. The hurt lives and swells inside. Vessel body. Conduit for his revelation. He wears her in and out, on and over, with endurance.

The odd fact: She knows better. She participates because she’s tired of arguing. Her excuses sound flat to her own ears. No thanks. Feeling unlike you. Out of the mood. Rejection’s a bitch for the provider and receiver.

Oh, she knows why. Why she’s never feeling like that. And the reason beneath the tabletop of her mind, the seed inside the seedless grape…stays. If she said it, if she extracted the root from that self, would she rip out her complaisance, too? She tethered her center to complaisance.

She’s waiting: an endurance game. How funny, the etymology of the word. Endurance, “capacity” to “last or to withstand wear and tear.” How much can one handle? Can one take into oneself? What’s the expiration date on “continued existence, ability to last”?

Obsolete, absolution. She no longer wanted the power of acceptance. She wanted the acquiescence of rejection. She wanted. She wanted outside the lines. She wanted crushing release. No! She desired. But did she deserve desire? Did that matter? When had desire become an entitlement? The pursuit of desire—did it lead to pursuing happiness?

Back to the eyebrows, fine and disarrayed. Like faded lines of ink. Attenuated by derivations. Passed from son to son through a stream of subjugated daughters. Fold into the collapse.

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