After listening for the twentieth time to the story of our mother and the king’s physicians—a story so much deeper, sadder, and more beautiful than I could ever begin to tell—Nannie turned to us one winter night as we chunked up the fire and said, simply, “Grandmother was very brave.” And there it was: a nugget of truth in the gravel of our tales.
“She was that,” I said, blinking away the tears that had suddenly come to my eyes. “She was that, child. The bravest woman I ever knew.”
We were born with our heads between each other’s legs (and not up our asses, as Gideon once informed us in the heat of an argument) on a hard bamboo mat on a houseboat tied to the shore of the Meklong River in ancient Siam, the exotic Orient, land of tigers and peacocks and little yellow people very much like us. Like little Tom Thumb and Anna Swan and Mr. Nellis, the Armless Wonder, we’d been blessed by God’s inattention, undercooked or too well done, a pinch of dough forgotten or triple what was asked for, a batch half-divided and sent on its way. Unlike them, we had the added blessing of our place of birth to be thankful for, which in the minds of our newly adopted countrymen, as old Phineas Barnum well knew, called up a wonderful hash of pagodas and harems, child kings and barbarian hordes. Ancient Siam, made visible in the cast of our skin and the shape of our eyes, was as far from State Street as you could get. It was sin and opium smoke. It was elephants with diamond collars and dark-eyed beauties with rubies in their navels. Siam was everything unfamiliar, everything our God-drunk countrymen feared and desired, and we were its exotic export, otherness distilled and hyperdistilled. And so they came in droves to stare and poke and prod. And pay. And pay again. We made nothing. We grew nothing. We were like priests, offering absolution for sins we had never known and could barely understand. For six years, like whores in the marketplace, we peddled the wares of God.
It might have been otherwise.
I can see our birth—I was there, after all—the small, tilting room with the bamboo mat, the smell of the water and our mother’s sweat, the women’s excited chatter when we gushed at last into this world, tight as a doubled nut slipping its shell. Twins. And two little buds in the mass of slippery legs and arms. Sons. For the first ten seconds of our lives, we were good fortune. And then the growing silence, the confusion as they attempted first to untangle us, the cries of fear at the band of flesh, suddenly visible, that grew between us like some unnatural plant.
They ran. Ran from a band of skin hardly two fingers wide at the time, ran—these women who had known my mother for years, and who would know her for years to come—as from something unclean. Our mother, as she always had and always would, did what was necessary. Left alone on a mat with a pair of unwashed twins crying between her legs, she pulled herself over to the knife the women had dropped in their rush, cut the twin ends of the blue, ropy cord that bound us to her, then tied off the ugly little tails that remained with a bit of string she found on the floor. Seeing how things were, she carefully untwisted us so we could lie head to head and settled herself to wait for the afterbirth. The rain began, hissing in the palm fronds, turning the shoreline outside the windows a pale, watery gray. By the time my father came home (no one had had the courage to get him), she had washed and suckled us and put us to bed.
I wonder what they talked about that night. From all I know, they took our birth for the fact it was and went on with their lives. They had three children already. Now they had two more. In many ways, the peculiar nature of our birth was like the weather: One might wish it to be different, but typhoons would be born in the Bay of Bengal and the river would flood when the monsoon came whether one wished it or not. Our father, I suspect—though I
“She was that,” I said, blinking away the tears that had suddenly come to my eyes. “She was that, child. The bravest woman I ever knew.”
We were born with our heads between each other’s legs (and not up our asses, as Gideon once informed us in the heat of an argument) on a hard bamboo mat on a houseboat tied to the shore of the Meklong River in ancient Siam, the exotic Orient, land of tigers and peacocks and little yellow people very much like us. Like little Tom Thumb and Anna Swan and Mr. Nellis, the Armless Wonder, we’d been blessed by God’s inattention, undercooked or too well done, a pinch of dough forgotten or triple what was asked for, a batch half-divided and sent on its way. Unlike them, we had the added blessing of our place of birth to be thankful for, which in the minds of our newly adopted countrymen, as old Phineas Barnum well knew, called up a wonderful hash of pagodas and harems, child kings and barbarian hordes. Ancient Siam, made visible in the cast of our skin and the shape of our eyes, was as far from State Street as you could get. It was sin and opium smoke. It was elephants with diamond collars and dark-eyed beauties with rubies in their navels. Siam was everything unfamiliar, everything our God-drunk countrymen feared and desired, and we were its exotic export, otherness distilled and hyperdistilled. And so they came in droves to stare and poke and prod. And pay. And pay again. We made nothing. We grew nothing. We were like priests, offering absolution for sins we had never known and could barely understand. For six years, like whores in the marketplace, we peddled the wares of God.
It might have been otherwise.
I can see our birth—I was there, after all—the small, tilting room with the bamboo mat, the smell of the water and our mother’s sweat, the women’s excited chatter when we gushed at last into this world, tight as a doubled nut slipping its shell. Twins. And two little buds in the mass of slippery legs and arms. Sons. For the first ten seconds of our lives, we were good fortune. And then the growing silence, the confusion as they attempted first to untangle us, the cries of fear at the band of flesh, suddenly visible, that grew between us like some unnatural plant.
They ran. Ran from a band of skin hardly two fingers wide at the time, ran—these women who had known my mother for years, and who would know her for years to come—as from something unclean. Our mother, as she always had and always would, did what was necessary. Left alone on a mat with a pair of unwashed twins crying between her legs, she pulled herself over to the knife the women had dropped in their rush, cut the twin ends of the blue, ropy cord that bound us to her, then tied off the ugly little tails that remained with a bit of string she found on the floor. Seeing how things were, she carefully untwisted us so we could lie head to head and settled herself to wait for the afterbirth. The rain began, hissing in the palm fronds, turning the shoreline outside the windows a pale, watery gray. By the time my father came home (no one had had the courage to get him), she had washed and suckled us and put us to bed.
I wonder what they talked about that night. From all I know, they took our birth for the fact it was and went on with their lives. They had three children already. Now they had two more. In many ways, the peculiar nature of our birth was like the weather: One might wish it to be different, but typhoons would be born in the Bay of Bengal and the river would flood when the monsoon came whether one wished it or not. Our father, I suspect—though I
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