PS Zhang
Heritage
When I was little, my mother used to feed me the blood of her enemies. It happened every Wednesday during my afternoon snack. She’d wave to the driver as the school bus came to a halt. The accordion sign stating STOP stretched across the road while the rest of the vehicle lit up in red and white flashes.
“Mama,” I cried as I jumped down from the bus in my pink polka-dotted rain boots and yellow leggings. I leapt from the last step into her arms. She covered me in kisses and pulled on my nose. “Sorry,” she said. “I just want to make sure all of you came back in one piece. Nothing’s loose or broken?” Our house always smelled so good when she walked me through the door. She helped me take off my boots and jacket. I held my backpack to my chest and bounced on the balls of my feet.
“Go on, Daughter. Get to the kitchen, I’ve got something special for you.” She held my face, then turned me around and patted my butt. “Go on.” Halfway down the hall, she yelled, “And don’t forget to wash your hands.”
I found the platter of burgundy-colored sugar cookies and put one on a dessert plate. Mama came into the kitchen and bent over, her hair almost touching the floor, and gathered up the black strands into a tidy top bun. “There. That’s much better,” she said, touching the nape of her pale butter neck. Mama only wore her hair down in front of strangers.
“Eat up, it’s good for you,” she said, placing another cookie onto my plate. I dutifully took the snack and thanked her. “Don’t forget milk.” She tapped the counter. “For your bones. You’re growing up so quickly; you need strong bones for this world.”
I nodded and sipped the whole-fat milk. The coolness felt like slipping through an inner tube and floating down the river naked. “Do you want to tell me who it was this time?” I said as I aged through each chew, my childhood fading. The life of another human being slid into my own.
The first time I ate blood, I thought it was devil’s food cake. It didn’t taste like chocolate, but the icing was cream cheese. I imagined that maybe while Mama was making the cake, she ran out of sugar and improvised with a bit more salt instead. Mama always said to try everything once. I assumed this was one of her efforts.
There was a heavy magnetic effect on my tongue, like licking the metal monkey bars at the school’s playground. I used to challenge the other kids to see who could do the most chin-ups, and sometimes I’d lick the bar on my way up to show off. The cake also tasted vaguely of liver, but who was I to reject my mother’s made-with-love desserts?
“Did you like that?” Mama asked as she cleared my plate and served me another slice. “You’ve been so good—I’m so proud of you. I don’t tell you that enough. And one day you’ll grow up from my little girl to a true woman. Maybe even a mama!”
After the third slice, I told Mama I was full. I had never been allowed so much dessert in my life. She smiled and played with my hair, plaiting the strands until I had two French braids. Mama smelled the crown of my head and held me close to her chest, her chin on my head.
“That was the blood of my enemy I just fed you,” she said. “That was a dirty schoolteacher who followed me to the bathroom when I was young and insisted on helping me.”
“Huh?” I said.
“I followed him to a bathroom; finally our paths met again. I said, ‘Sir, do you need help?’ He didn’t recognize me, the fullness of my womanhood—never saw me past that little girl. No matter. I kicked in the stall and stabbed him in the gut. I cut off his hands and drained the blood from the stumps.”
I held my palm to my mouth and gagged. Vomit churned in my throat and frothed in my mouth.
“No, you mustn’t,” she said and pulled my hand from my mouth. “Swallow down. The enemy of your mother is your enemy too.”
Mama said every parent does something weird to mess up their kids. Most of them will never ever fess up to it. Our family is not like that. We know our history. She can’t remember which ancestor started the tradition, but now every woman in my mother’s bloodline has not just the blood of those women before her, but also of those who have wronged them. Over time the practice became second nature, subconscious. It just happens. Humans injure; humans kill. Some blood always makes it into the food.
Though I knew my heritage, that didn’t hinder my blind denial when I too became a mother. “It’s better when you mean to,” Mama told me as she held my hand in the postpartum room. “She will understand why you’re the way you are. For the benefit of your own daughter—it’s better when you mean to.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I cried. “I’m not like you or Grandmama or the ancestors. I won’t pretend to heal the sick but harvest their misery instead. I can’t kill a lover or hurt anyone for this family.”
“It doesn’t work like that. When she grows, something inside you will trigger. It’ll be the way she looks at you, her body and how it reminds you of your own, the things she says—even what she never says. You will be called to find the people who hurt you. They will bleed for their transgressions, and you will feed that blood to your daughter.”
I looked down at the newborn latched to my swollen breast. I hadn’t found a woman or man to love me, but perhaps a child could. So nine months ago I decided, with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, to go at motherhood alone. I thought it would be easier. But why had I chosen ignorance and dismissed this curse? It could have ended with me. Charity’s warm pink skin rested on the coolness of my amber chest. She continued to feed from what my body produced.
“It’s your responsibility. For the benefit of your own daughter—it’s better when you mean to,” my mother said again, this time tugging at my elbow.
“What if I say no? What if I never tell her about us? I think you’ve done enough for me.”
“You can try. Others have and failed. There is no other way. This is our heritage.”
I pulled my shoulder back and covered Charity’s face.
“It hurts me to see you fight yourself. Have some faith in your destiny. You were always meant to carry out the will of this family. Here, I brought you something.” Mama rummaged through her handbag and set down a red-speckled muffin. “It’s been too long– you’re so far away.”
Two mountain ranges between us but habits are still hard to break; awareness, harder to keep. No matter how old I got, in front of Mama, I was still a little girl at the kitchen table. Mamas can do that.
“I’ve changed. I’m not like you,” I said to the muffin.
“It will be all right,” my mother said. “There’s no need for hate.”
I threw the muffin across the room. Wasn’t the blood Mama fed me enough? Didn’t it already run through my baby’s veins? It lived through me and traveled through a cord to her—whether I wanted it or not, whether I meant it or not.
Mama picked up a broken red chunk from the floor. “Open your mouth, Daughter.” I locked my jaw. She squeezed my throat and shoved the crumbs of the muffin through my lips and into the cracks between my teeth. It was a Wednesday afternoon.
She didn’t kill everyone she fed me. It was only the schoolteacher and a raspberry chocolate mousse, which I later found out was an emerald-eyed college boy my mother encountered while walking alone in the Vermont woods one summer when she was sixteen. “I used to like to take a midnight stroll. Me and the frogs and the owls. I felt safe barefoot in the dark as a girl. That was naive. But now that he’s gone, I feel safe as a woman.”
It never occurred to me to sneak out of my room and roam the forest at night, though after the mousse, I understood why my window was always locked.
“Not everyone has to die for their wrongs. I am not without fault, and yet I am not dead,” Mama told me the following week, when I was hesitant to eat a plate of cherry pie. “You’re too sympathetic. No one died. It was only a flesh wound.”
I found out later that some desserts did die of old age or accidents. My mother scurried to the hospital, where she was, like our ancestors before her, conveniently the senior physician, and found the room where her enemy was waiting to ring Death’s doorbell. “It’s me,” she told them, tugging their eyelids up so they saw her. She lifted their hands and felt for the last bounce of a vein, between two knuckles. “It’s all right, what’s fair is fair. I haven’t come to hurt you the way you have hurt me.” Then she extracted a few fluid ounces of their blood and disappeared under the sterile white fluorescence.
Others, she only had to give a call or knock on their door. Contrition convinced them before my mother did. “I’ve been waiting for you,” they told her from inside their sitting rooms and asked if she took cream or sugar with her coffee. “Cream,” she replied.
After one such incident, we had berry trifle. “This is beautiful, Mama,” I said, admiring the layers of vanilla sponge, red custard, fluffy white whipped cream, blue and purple berries. The familiar magnetism tingled my tongue. I finished my helping and scooted the bowl back toward my mother. She smiled and served up another, making sure to dig deep into custard.
“I didn’t know if there’d be trifle today.” Mama said her old coworker had initially been less than generous. “The cheapskate said I could have an ounce or two. I told her that after what happened between us, I was entitled to eight at minimum.” Mama lifted an empty measuring cup, a trace of red shading the three-quarter mark. “We compromised,” she said as she wiped down a long boning knife. The blade flexed from her slightest pressure. “It was the least she could do.” Mama picked up her spoon and took a scoop of trifle from my bowl. “Not bad. I expected it to taste bitter. That woman lied about our final exams. She screwed me out of a career. I could have been a neurosurgeon had it not been for her, and you’d be at a very different school in a very different house.” She took a second spoonful and swished the custard and whipped cream in her mouth. “But fair is fair.”
Mama was full of truisms. “If you don’t wait till the end, blood always comes back, ” she would say before going out at night. Mama put on her black turtleneck and tucked her hair inside a black knit cap. She spoke to me through the mirror. “People can be so selfish. Grab my boots, will you? It’s the people who act as if they haven’t any to spare when they damn well know what they’ve done.” She didn’t like to hunt, but sometimes it was necessary. Mama unpinned her silver earrings and placed them into a jewelry dish. “It’s better to be honest with yourself. It’s better to mean to. No one is without fault in this world.” She took my hand and led me to bed, tucking me in with my favorite story about a family of hippos that swallowed bigger and bigger things, first a watermelon, then a kitchen table, later a school bus.
As a child, I believed everything Mama told me; I ate whatever she made. Sometimes we even baked sweets together. She steadied my hands and we mixed blood into eggs and diary. Flour puffed into the air and dusted Mama’s black hair. She tickled me and we giggled like geese at the park. A fleck of icing landed on my cheek; my mother was there to kiss it off. “Sweet, sweet, sweet,” she said. There were cakes and brownies, jellies and milkshakes, thumbprint cookies with centers redder than any strawberry. How could anything she made be wrong? I savored her creations in different ways. I nibbled edges and licked creamed centers. I sucked down puddings and crunched on candies. Through sugar, my mother was my hero, blood and all.
* * *
“There are others like us,” Mama said when I turned eighteen. It was the night before I left our home for college.
“People who hurt and destroy so that they can be strong?” I snapped. We had grown apart. Teens have their own thoughts and opinions. My back was toward her as I wrestled more clothes into an already overstuffed suitcase.
“Hurt people hurt people,” Mama said. “I know what I am because I know what my mother was.”
“But that’s not all you are. You are not Grandmama. You are your own person.” I got on top of my suitcase and pressed my knees into the luggage. “This stupid thing won’t zip.”
“Maybe don’t force it so hard?” she said, pulling on my ankle. “I did the best I could for you. I did more than what my mother did for me. I’m not feeding you the blood of a dead father. Your father escaped, while mine was sacrificed. It wasn’t perfect, but we don’t choose our heritage. I’m not saying it’s my baby’s fault that I kill.”
“How much longer will you blame Grandmama and the ancestors? How much longer before you take responsibility?” The bulging suitcase finally closed. I stood it upright and leaned against it.
“I tried to do things my own way. A gentler way. Grandmama made anyone her enemy. She terrorized innocents—even children! And then she lied about it. I never knew what we were. She didn’t bother to tell me. I caught her! I’ve never done that to you.”
“So you’re better than her? Let me just shut up then.”
“You can’t understand what I’ve gone through. When you are a mother, you will.”
“The only person in this world who is my enemy is you. When I am a mother, will I kill you?” A loud snap echoed in the room. The luggage zipper had given way.
“It is a privilege in your life not to have to kill,” my mother told me over the phone when I first announced my pregnancy. “To my knowledge, there is no one you know who must die.”
It was a question masquerading as a statement. My mother and I had almost completely stopped talking after college. She didn’t know the specifics of my life. I couldn’t tell her she was right though. The truth was I knew no one. Too ashamed to ask others what their family heritage was, I avoided intimacy with society. I hated myself. Who could I admit blood-eating to? No one had ever mentioned such dark secrets to me.
“You did this to me,” I screamed. “I have no one because of you. And all you can tell me is this is what mothers do to daughters. This is my heritage. Accept myself. They did it, you did it, and now I’m supposed to do it.” I paced around my living room, knocking over books and a vase of dry flowers.“ No, Mama. It stops with me.” I slammed the receiver into its socket, yanked the phone from the outlet, and flung it into the trash.
Mama sent a letter a week later. “You must prepare. You can deny yourself but not others. Give them what they deserve.”
After I crossed my first trimester, a frighteningly old woman with emerald eyes approached me in the grocery store parking lot as I unloaded tins of tomato juice into the trunk. “My son’s enemies are my enemies, and your mother killed my only child. I have waited a long time for this. Now give me your blood. I don’t care where or how you procure it. What’s fair is fair.” She handed me a box with a vial and a syringe. The address was a location in Vermont.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I called my mother that evening with the box in front of me.
“You knew this would happen once you were a mother. I warned you, we’re tethered together. We have harmed her.”
“We? You killed him. I have nothing to do with this.”
“You ate his blood.”
“Because you made me. I never would have done that if I weren’t a child.”
“Did I make you have a second or third helping?”
She had caught me.
“What I’ve done is rarely all good or all bad,” she said. “A person can be right and wrong at the same time. When the women in our family become mothers, those we’ve wronged and whose heritage is like ours take an accounting of all they have experienced in life. And whatever deficits are owed to them, they take and give to their descendants. There was never a world in which you wouldn’t have owed that woman something.”
“So now that I’m pregnant, I’m responsible for everything you’ve done?”
“And everything you’ve done, Daughter. No one lives without mistakes.”
Three months later, a childhood classmate knocked on my door. “It’s time you gave me what I deserve,” she demanded. I said I didn’t understand. I hardly remembered her and thought we had been on friendly terms. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” She pulled a switchblade out.
I tried to scream, confident I had done no wrong, but my voice was gone. Taken. I was a muted television. In that moment, I didn’t deserve words; I was only meant to listen.
“In fifth grade, I confided in you about a dream where I kissed a girl. You ran your mouth to all of our friends and said I wanted to touch them. You told them they weren’t safe around me. I trusted you and you damaged me.”
I remembered that pool party, the whispering I incited. How I thought it was a funny joke. The girls got out of the pool and said they were cold despite the August heat. They huddled under the canopy wrapped in giant beach blankets. Only their faces were exposed.
“I had to move away after that because no one would acknowledge me. Do you know how long I suffered? And then, a few years ago, I saw you in a parade carrying a rainbow flag, and I wanted to run out into the crowd and strangle you. I wanted to climb on top and stop your breath with the flag you held. I could have taken your life with my hands, but I didn’t. I spared you. How can you dare to be a mother?”
She held me down on the sofa, lifted my shirt and pulled away my bra. She sliced under my left breast, using the curve of my pregnant belly as a guide. The blood trickled down my side. I didn’t move, only apologized and told her to take what she needed. It’s better to mean it.
Who doesn’t easily forget the harm they’ve wielded in this world? Moments you weren’t even considerate enough to recall. Everyone’s a victim; no one’s a perpetrator. After my classmate left, I cleaned the wound. She had been kind though I didn’t deserve it; the cut spared Charity and would not require stitches. As I looked at my changing body in the bathroom mirror, I wondered who I really was. I called Mama and told her what happened, what I had done without meaning to.
There’s not much time in life to forgive and repair. Last year Mama turned seventy-one and was diagnosed with leukemia. Her blood was killing her. Why do we wait till the end to tell the whole story? She had less than three months to live when she finally showed me her scars.
“Do you know my regrets? Do you remember my apologies?” She raised her black turtleneck above her stomach. “When much is given, much is owed. Our kind live in the shadows of this world. It is a shame we keep inside; something we never admit. Inside, we are our own worst enemies.”
I touched the scars on her belly, some thin like filigree ghosts, others thick and jagged.
“That was your aunt I said I loved but didn’t.”
“These were the fights with your father. I cut him deep and drank the blood myself. Will you believe me now, he’s better off without us?”
“That was a friend I betrayed.”
“This,” I traced a shiny purple welt around her navel. “I got from my mama. I didn’t know the food had blood. She didn’t watch me when I ate. I had too much and became very sick. It happened, whether she meant it or not. I never wanted that for you. If it’s a curse, so be it. I tried the best I could. Something different—better—for you.”
Is your dying mother still your enemy? What you hated is what killed her. Did you win after all? And in her last moments when she asks for your forgiveness, is she still the woman who forced you against your will?
“You’re the only one I’ve hated and the only one I’ve loved,” I said to her, and she smiled hearing it.
“I’ve loved you, Daughter, with my whole broken heart, with all the blood of the women before me, with all the blood they have taken. This is my reparation to you: let it be you who delivers me to Death. Take all of my blood. And when you feel weak or angry at me, on the anniversary of my death, on your birthday, when your child screams at you and you feel lost and that you should blame me, take my blood and let it mix with yours. Remember who you came from and what I gave to you. Good and bad, I did these things for you. You’re a mother now; you don’t need blood sweetened and transformed into pastry. Let it defrost and sip or gnaw on it frozen, like a wolf to a bone.”
I wait for Charity to get home from school. Pine needles litter the driveway to the road. The yellow bus comes to a stop and she bounds towards me with her purple lunchbox in hand.
“Hi, Mama.” I swaddle her in my arms and think of my visit earlier today. A bandage of white gauze is wrapped around my wrist.
“You have a good time at school?” I ask.
“Yes,” Charity says, and she tells me about art class, PE, and learning to count by fives.
“You’re getting so big so fast. When we get home, I have a special treat for you.”
It is a Wednesday afternoon.