Limbo
/Sarah Huang
I started smoking again after a long time of going without. There was no gradual development on the slope of cigarettes smoked. There was the lone Marlboro, bummed from a stranger on the street, and then soon after followed the packs in cartons bought cheaply from a bodega. I felt terrible, as you can expect, but I have a method: I only smoke at night when the air is crisp with evening dew. When you limit your smoking sessions to just four hours a night, you can imagine how hard it is to chain-smoke an entire pack.
Every night I sink myself deeper in debt. I pay off this debt, one breath at a time, each morning with my first intake of air, which feels foreign in my lungs—a painful reconciliation. By early afternoon, I can breathe as well as any non-smoker. By late afternoon, I can breathe as well as I used to.
But by nightfall, I will hold a light golden pack filled with twenty glorious sticks, all white with a thin strand of gold wrapped along the tips. And come morning, I will wake with the same thought on my mind: how many breathes will it take to expel the poison from my lungs? It’s exhausting, this loop of motions, this limbo.
The nights blend almost seamlessly into one another, almost, except for the occasional puncture of thought, of fear, of realization that I am doing nothing productive and for the first time in a decade, out of a job.
It’s on these lonely nights, smoking the hours away, that I notice her: a little old woman hunching against the sweep of wind. She pushes a shopping cart with one hand; her other hand is clamped on to the red knitted cap atop her head. I can hear, from my seat on the top steps of my apartment building, the rattle of metal within those black bags.
I light a new cigarette with the dying embers of the old one between my fingers. Throngs of crickets from a nearby wood begin to chirp—slow and sporadic, then together, like a symphony. Last week, I read from a Snapple bottle cap that only male crickets chirp. All night, for hours, the male crickets stridulate their want for a mate. When I was a girl, I used to think their calls were charming. But now, I can hear a trace of forlorn desperation in their song, layered beneath the other notes; I wonder if it was always present.
I watch the old woman stop at each trashcan and, without peeking, stick her whole arm in and pull the cans free as though the cans awaited her. I note the methodical approach in her orbit around the cul-de-sac. I study her wobbling form bumble from one trashcan to the next like a bee in a garden. And when she arrives at the steps of my apartment building, I am ready to offer a single can of my own, its inside still moist from guzzled beer.
The old woman takes it from me with the slightest grasp of fingertips. She is even smaller up close, slight and shrunken with age. Her hair in two neat plaits is streaked with silvery gray strands. She mumbles a thank you thick with accent before moving on to another trashcan. I watch her load the bags, cumbersome with metal, in her rogue shopping cart and drift away.
The wind gathers momentum, knocking askew trashcans and scattering loose papers, but I manage to light another cigarette—the last one of the pack, or as my father would call it, The Lucky. The Lucky is a cigarette chosen upon opening a fresh pack, reinserted upside down, and saved last for smoking. When I was a girl, I chose my father’s Lucky’s. It was like playing god: I’d sit on my father’s lap, watch him unwrap the glossy carton, and with my forefinger raised to my lip, I’d gaze grandly over the neat rows of sticks, taking my time in deciding which among the ordinary would be made special. Much like the promise of a wily lover, a Lucky is a smoker’s promise: I chose you, and even though I am going to set you aside for now to smoke other cigarettes, I will come back for you. To choose a Lucky is to draw a contract between your lungs and cigarettes, a promise to smoke the entire pack.
I smoke my Lucky down to its filter, and think about the old woman. I wonder if her days are the same as her nights. I imagine her part of a large but poor family, and collected cans and bottles as a means to contribute. I imagine her proud, ready to brace hail and sleet, just to earn a few bucks to dote on a little granddaughter.
I think about my mother who, for pocket money, also collected cans. My mother hid her earnings in an old coffee can tucked beneath the sink. No matter how much my father worked, he never had enough money in his pockets. He’d find my mother’s stash and empty her savings. My mother never protested. It was an unspoken rule in our household. How could she complain about something she was not supposed to have in the first place?
Once, during the year I turned nine, she managed to hide the coffee can in a place she thought my father would never think to look: behind the washer. She had meant to surprise me with an iPod for my birthday. Then my father found the money and drank it all up. On the morning of my 9th birthday, I found her weeping in the kitchen, cradling the empty coffee can. She said she was crying because she had nothing in the can to buy me a present. I said, with as much brave assurance a nine year old could muster, she could refill the can and this time, we will hide it in a place he would never find. My mother pulled me close to her warm body. I sank into her soft embrace, and inhaled her powdery scent. “There are people who refill the can and there are people who empty the can. That’s just how it goes,” she said. Then she tied on her apron, and set the table for my father.
I ate my birthday breakfast—a pancake face topped with two sunny eggs for the eyes, three blueberries for the nose, a strip of bacon for the mouth—and tried to suppress the resentment I felt for the man seated across from me. I watched my father shovel eggs into his mouth with a fork in one hand, and motioned to my mother with a breezy wave of the other hand for more coffee. I chewed mechanical bites and sipped orange juice; with every bite, I thought less and lesser of him. After several pointed looks from my mother, he remembered that today was my birthday. He laughed, slapped his knee, and reached over the table to clap me on the shoulder like a father would to his son.
“And what do you say,” my mother asked testily.
My mother liked the idea of a family who ate breakfast together. She protected this fragile image at all costs.
“Well?” she said. “We’re waiting.”
I looked up from my plate and into my mother’s anxious face. “Thank you, Daddy.”
Like a captive audience, we waited. The tip of his mustache was smeared with runny egg yolk. He responded with a curt nod. A satisfied customer. Then he picked up his mug and motioned with another wave of his hand for more coffee. My mother not only poured his coffee, she poured it with a smile.
“That’s just how it goes,” I say. I shake the can of beer in my hands. It’s half-full and some of it sloshes onto the ground between my feet. I open my throat like a baby bird and drain the rest of the beer. The can crushes easily under my fist. “That’s just how it goes.”
“Much like the promise of a wily lover, a Lucky is a smoker’s promise: I chose you, and even though I am going to set you aside for now to smoke other cigarettes, I will come back for you. To choose a Lucky is to draw a contract between your lungs and cigarettes, a promise to smoke the entire pack.”
The next night is warmer, at least by March standards; the air is sultry and carries the taste of a premature spring. I sit outside, ready with more cans. My silhouette framed in the shadowy dark by silver blue curls of smoke emitted from the tip of my cigarette. My fingers drum lightly on the step I sit to the monotonous rhythm of chirping.
I consider the crickets. Every night their numbers seem to grow. I think of the male crickets scattered unseen among the shrubbery; each of their heads lifted with earnest hope that tonight a mate will respond to their call. For hours they stand in the same spot, frantically rubbing their wings in the dark, with nothing but faith to carry them through the long night. I think to be a cricket must be the loneliest thing in the world.
Finally, at a quarter to midnight, she comes tottering down the lane with her shopping cart in tow. I could see from my seat tonight had been a good haul—her cart was nearly full. I fling aside my half-smoked cigarette and walk toward her with the bag I saved swinging gently against the length of my thigh.
“Hey!” I shout. “I’ve got something for you.”
I didn’t mean to shout, truly I didn’t, but when you’ve been drinking since sundown, as I have, shouting feels the same as whispering.
Her body jerks at the sound of my voice. She looks up with the eyes of a frightened doe. I walk closer, stop a few feet short, and present the bag with outstretch hand. But she only looks at it, mystified at the black bag in my hand as if she didn’t have half a dozen of the same in her cart. I place the bag gently on the ground, and turn to walk away. A slow rustle of plastic and clink of tinny metal trails after me.
“Wait.”
I halt, and turn back around. “Yes?” I ask.
“Thank you,” she says, in her warm accent. “Did you have a party? There’s so many cans in here.” She gestures to the bag with a careless shake and a trio of Coors Light beer cans tumble onto the pavement. She bends to retrieve them but I am faster.
I come up laughing. I laugh at the ludicrous idea of hosting a party, of people mingling in my kitchen with stacks of unwashed plates in the backdrop. The family of mice living in the wall behind the couch will scurry across the dirt streaked living room floor, and I will laugh at their hysterical shrieks. I picture my imaginary guests dancing atop the half-empty pizza boxes and Chinese food containers scattered in heaps on the floor, crushing the leftover food to mush with the soles of their shoes.
“Nope, no party. I’ve just been thirsty,” I say. I chuckle, steady myself, and change the subject. “So—I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.”
“Rosa.”
“Rosa,” I repeat, feeling the roll of her name on my tongue. “You do this every night?”
She draws herself up straighter, which adds a few inches of height. “Yes, it takes a long time to do but it makes some money. There’s not much else I can do,” she says, “you know, being so old.”
I nod and say, “You’re a hardworking woman.”
She grins and flashes a set of very white teeth with receding gums. “I want to do something. My grandson, he wants this game thing all little boys want. His mama and papa says no but I will give it to him. He’s a good boy, he should have what the other boys have.”
I nod again and say what a good grandmother she is.
Rosa beams with pride. “I like to stay busy. Like I always say, ‘a bored mind creates all sorts of illness’ but you know that,” she says, with a dismissive toss of her hand.
“Oh, I’m hardly young anymore,” I say.
“Nonsense,” she says. “There’s a difference between being young and feeling young. You’ll know what I mean when you’re actually old.”
“I’m sure I will,” I say. I reach into the back pocket of my jeans and place a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. “I hope this helps your grandson get his toy. It was nice to meet you.” And it’s true—it was nice. I wish her a good night and turn to leave.
“Wait,” she calls after me. “I can’t take this.”
I turn back. “Please take it. I’ll just drink it up.”
She considers my words and glances down at the bag in her hand. I watch her eyes sweep over me, lingering on my unkempt hair, ketchup stained sweatshirt, and matted terry cotton house slippers. I have not showered in three, four days? I can’t remind. I take an unconscious step backward. Shame runs up and down my spine and I feel the sudden need to apologize. An old habit.
But Rosa merely smiles, warm and grateful. I look away to stop the moisture I can feel forming behind my eyes. Drinking has always made me emotional. Even my father would weep and beg on his knees for my mother’s forgiveness after a dozen beers.
“Thank you,” she stammers. She examines the bill with both hands. She blesses me and calls me an angel.
Then she is gone: cans rattle, wheels squeaky. I watch her walk away; her path illuminated by the amber streetlights, casting her shadow further than my sight could follow.
I want to disagree. I want to tell her I’m an unemployable drunk who no one loves. That I’m lonesome and fall asleep every night wishing I could wake up as someone else. That I have these aches and pains that flood the length of my body with dull stupor, and not one of the half dozen doctors I’ve consulted with could diagnose a cause. For a stretch of time, the word fibromyalgia was thrown around a lot, then arthritis, Lyme disease, anemia, and more seriously, cancer.
One doctor, after two months of biweekly visits, flat out asked if I was a drug addict. I crossed my arms, stared at the space above his shiny bare head and informed him that sugar affects the brain the same way drugs do. “Are you saying you’re addicted to sugar?” he said, incredulous. I assured him that I was not, and never went back.
But most of all, I want to tell her that I have become exactly what my mother said I would.
You’re just like your father, my mother would say. As a child, I would touch my aquiline nose, the only resemblance I had to the man who spent his days glued to the couch and his nights passed out on the lawn, and scrunch my face, confused as to how I, a girl, could be just like my father, a giant. Later, when I was older, I would think of advertisements in glossy magazines. A nose makes a face! Get a nose job and change your life!
I didn’t want to change my life, only the way my mother viewed me. Too often, I’d catch her staring at me with the same grim look she wore on mornings when the couch my father slept was empty. She’d stomp her way to the front door, fling open the door with a bang and see my father prone on the lawn, snoring with his pants around his ankles.
“Feeding the mosquitos,” the neighbors next door said laughing. Their words made my mother seethe with an anger that twisted her pleasant features. Later that night, after a silent dinner of stale peanut butter and staler bread, I asked why she sprayed the neighbors with the garden hose. “I was embarrassed,” she said.
That’s when I learned embarrassment could be a reason for dumping liquids on people. So when, a week later, a boy in my class told me I smelled like manure, and I looked up the word manure in the dictionary and learned manure was just a fancy word for shit, I emptied my carton of milk on his head. And when Ms. Mabel asked why I did it, I said, in the same matter of fact tone my mother used, “I was embarrassed.”
You’re just like your father, my mother would say.
I am 16 years old and possessed with teen angst.
It was one beer, I would say, it was a party. Everyone was drinking. What do you want from me? I go to school; I get good grades. I help around the house and I haven’t gotten pregnant. What more do you want?
All I want is for you to not be like your father, she’d say, that’s all.
But that wasn’t true; it wasn’t enough for me to simply be unlike my father. My mother wanted me to be her, or rather, the girl she was before she met my father. Before, when she still had dreams of leaving for a place where the air didn’t stink of slaughtered cattle. Because in towns like hers, pregnant is synonymous with stuck.
It’s an old story really. A girl comes of age and escapes from the middle of nowhere to the big city where legends are made. Guess you’re not like your father after all, my mother says, you’re like me, like who I was supposed to be. She hands me my suitcase and I step onto the Greyhound bus, step into my new life. Unstuck.
It’s an old story really. A girl dreaming of making it. For a girl from nowhere, where shooting beer cans off the fence is a pastime, and white sneakers only stay white until you walk outside, making it meant envious glances from townies on your holiday visits back home. Making it meant shiny, city-styled hair and manicures. Sky high heels that clop like horses on cobblestone. Power suits, exotic beach vacations, a 401(k) plan. Making it meant making your mother proud—even if it was just for a brief beautiful moment.
It’s an old story, trying to escape the shadow of someone whose tendencies are embedded within the strands of your genetic code. I console myself with another drink and begin to think the lawn is a good place for a nap. Just a quick one won’t hurt.
It’s an old story, I started smoking again after a long time of going without.
It’s an old story really, this tale as old as time, this hamartia of a moth to a flame.
“Later that night, after a silent dinner of stale peanut butter and staler bread, I asked why she sprayed the neighbors with the garden hose. “I was embarrassed,” she said.”
Fifteen years from tonight, I will learn, while helping my son write an essay for school, that crickets are a symbol of good fortune in some parts of the world; crickets can hop only forwards. Fifteen years from tonight, I will be married to a man who abhors drink, thriving in a new career, and living in a house of my own hundreds of miles away. I will come again to think the sound of crickets chirping as charming, just as I once did as a girl.
But right now, I lay sprawled on the lawn, facedown. I lift my cheek from the wet grass and stagger to my feet. The orchestras of crickets continue to sing; their tempo crescendos into a single babbling pulse. I pull out a fresh pack from my pocket and rip off the plastic. I make my Lucky, think better of it, and place the Lucky between my lips. The smoke I exhale hovers in the air. For one gorgeous ephemeral moment, it shimmers like a mirage suspended. Then it is but a memory swept into the slick night sky.
Author’s Note: Stories come to me in waves. This story was inspired by transitional changes I experienced after being laid off from work. While writing “Limbo,” I found myself wondering what lasting influences do parents hold over their children? In addition, I was mindful of the usage of metaphors—crickets and cigarettes—scattered throughout to strengthen the symbolic message of coming full circle with one’s past.
Sarah Huang is a writer from New York City. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bookends Review, The Merrimack Review, and elsewhere. She tutors english and philosophy at the College of Staten Island.
Read an interview with Sarah Huang here.
