Like Chalk

FICTION

by Lucy Zhang

          Popo says not to drink milk because it contains puréed calf brains and chalk and embalming fluid. She doesn’t trust milk—says it’s too white, too homogenous, and when you can’t see through things, there must be something to hide. Formaldehyde kills kids, and there’s no greater crime besides not signing them up for summer school. You know, brains don’t taste half bad, a bit mushy but buttery and rich like pudding, which Popo also disapproves of: foods that come in plastic cups and jiggle with a tap. Her son, not the one who went to Harvard, the other one who took a leave from high school, failed to get into state school, gamed all day while his parents thought he was working on a start-up, finally left the house to go to community college, just up and disappeared without a suitcase or a backpack, leaving behind a note stating he had gone to study robotics and not to donate his Nintendo Switch. But the house isn’t entirely empty, not with her filial son’s wife staying the month while they prepare to move into a freshly purchased townhouse. The next big thing: homeownership, maybe a dog but better a cat or best a garden of scallion and Swiss chard which have no fur, no hair, no sweat, no condom wrappers, no stench to lint roll away or sweep under the bed. But Popo knows to pick her battles since kids always want pets and if they can handle Bao Bao the ragdoll kitty who doesn’t seem to shed, and if she doesn’t need to take care of the litter when they’re on vacation, she will concede this one. Popo knows best, truly: when she’s dusting the stair rails with old napkins to save paper, when she’s scouring the web for traces of her son, the failure who may or may not be at community college, not the one headed for promotion this cycle—she has her doubts but muffles them up, smothers them with love because her other son is expecting a family, a baby who has yet to dig its roots into the earth, find a patch of dirt with enough sunlight, oxygen, nitrogen, a baby who cannot, under any circumstance, be nourished by milk. Popo uses a computer like a tech wiz, understands a user interface before her sons can even familiarize themselves with it, knows what terms to type into Google to get her answer in the first search result, but she is unable to find her son’s name in any graduation list. It would’ve been nice for the entire family to be around, sitting at the dinner table, praising her Suan Cai Yu, a dish whose heat she can’t handle but her sons loved—always extra chili peppers, another heaping spoon of doubanjiang, doused in white pepper, but she tries to forget the disappearing son by thinking about her daughter-in-law and the fetus. Our bodies don’t do well with milk, Popo warns. Some things can’t be compromised, and especially now, Popo must secure a future where her grandchild sprouts like a tree, strong and infallible.