Welcome Me to the Kingdom by Mai Nardone

Author:Mai Nardone [Nardone, Mai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Pinky ruined high school for me. Even after moving out eventually, I was never able to see beyond my classmates’ pettiness, their small secrets and passing sadnesses. Their contained lives, compared to Pinky’s one of extravagance, seemed like so many cramped, windowless rooms. Not so different from my own, really. High school became four years of competing for the government scholarship to go to a university abroad: a five-year plan, Pinky had said. I, too, was trying to leave the country.

Even though I was finally living away from my father, I didn’t exactly have freedom. Money, that was freedom. Saturdays I went to the mall, where every storefront showed me what I couldn’t have. Whole hallways of forbidden wants that circled back on themselves, the escalators looping infinitely. Like other kids doing weekend school activities, I wore my uniform—my way of leveling the field—while always keeping that golden bracelet prominent, intimating, as Pinky might have said, more.

Pinky was always gone on Saturday. Of course, I went through her room. Maybe she expected it. I put on her bathrobe. But what looked like ivory on her was only yellow fuzz against my skin. I tested my way around the workshop of her makeup table. In a chest under the bed she had a collection of odd clothing. Leather jackets studded with rhinestones, sequined suits, belts laced with seed beads, rings of gaudy semiprecious stones. The clothes looked large for Pinky. Of her family she’d only mentioned her dead father, whom she called a magician. She’d said he was a master at possessing the dead. Only after he died, Pinky felt that, actually, it had been she that he possessed.

On Sundays Pinky dressed me in her old clothes and we revisited the places she had been with Pradit. She ate everything she hadn’t the night before. It was her own magic, the bottomless hat of her appetite.

First the food was familiar. Shrimp and popping mushrooms in the herbed richness of tom yam. Fatty Hainanese chicken rice. Stir-fried pickled mustard greens with eggs, side of stewed pork knuckle. But soon we moved on to pink fish (salmon, she told me) served almost raw, tossed in lime and chili, curing white at the edges, slipping around my mouth like a second tongue. We ate sea urchin right out of its prickly shell, a fort of black spines, each of which, Pinky said, studying my reaction, was poisonous. I held the flesh in my mouth, tasting first brine and then, underneath, a sweetness.

These meals were also her stage for unveiling Pradit’s gifts. She had the right showmanship to pull this off in a restaurant, drawing attention from the waiters, irritation from other diners. It embarrassed me that she took up so much space when the city was about the opposite. Always, she deprecated his gifts. There were perfumes in bottles cut to glimmer like jewels (“stuffy”), opalescent pearls (“fish scum”), and flower bouquets (“vulgar” or “short-lived”). Then, having unveiled them, having gauged their effect on the public, she made the gifts disappear.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.