Year of the Snake

Transplanting

32 Transplanting For my mother, Yoshiko Horikoshi Roripaugh 1. X-Ray My mother carried the chest x-ray in her lap on the plane, inside a manila envelope that read Do Not Bend and, garnished with leis at the Honolulu Airport, waited in line—this strange image of ribcage, chain-link vertebrae, pearled milk of lung, and the murky enigmatic chambers of her heart in hand. Until it was her turn and the immigration officer held the black-and-white film up to sun, light pierced clean through her, and she was ushered from one life through the gate of another, wreathed in the dubious and illusory perfume of plucked orchids. 2. Ceramic Pig Newly arrived in New Mexico, stiff and crisp in new dungarees, her honeymoon, they drove into the mountains in a borrowed car, spiraling up and up toward the rumor of deer, into the green tangy turpentine 33 scent of pine, where air crackled with the sizzling collision of bees, furred legs grappling velvet bodies as they mated midair, and where they came upon the disconsolate gaze of a Madonna alcoved against the side of the road, her feet wreathed in candles, fruit, flowers, and other offerings. Nearby, a vendor with a wooden plank balanced between two folding chairs and the glossy row of ceramic pigs lined up across, brilliant glaze shimmering the heat. My mother fell in love with the redand -blue splash of flowers tattooed into fat flanks and bellies, the green arabesques of stem and leaf circling hoof, snout, and ear. So exotic. Years later she still describes the pig with a sigh—heartbroken, the word she chooses with careful consideration. She’d filled the pig with Kennedy dollars from the grocery budget, each half dollar a small luxury denied at the local Piggly Wiggly, until one day, jingling the shift and clink of the pig’s growing silver weight, she shook too hard, and as if the hoarded wealth of her future were too much to contain, the pig broke open—spilling coins like water, a cold shiny music, into her lap— fragments of bright pottery shards scattering delicate as Easter eggshell. 34 3. Sneeze My mother sneezes in Japanese. Ké-sho! An exclamation of surprise—two sharp crisp syllables before pulling out the neatly folded and quartered tissue she keeps tucked inside the wrist of her sweater sleeve. Sometimes, when ragweed blooms, I wonder why her sneeze isn’t mine, why something so involuntary, so deeply rooted in the seed of speech, breaks free from my mouth like thistle in a stiff breeze, in a language other than my mother’s tongue. How do you chart the diaspora of a sneeze? I don’t know how you turned out this way, she always tells me, and I think that we are each her own moon—one face in shadow, undisclosed seas and surprising mountains, rotating in the circular music of separate spheres, but held in orbit by the gravitational muscle of the same mercurial spinning heart. 4. Dalmatian There is an art to this. To shish kebab the varnished pit of avocado on three toothpicks above a pickle jar of cool water, tease down the pale thirsty hairs of root until one sinewy arm punches up and unclenches its green fisted hand, palm open, to the sun. 35 To discern the oniony star-struck subterfuge of bulbs, their perverse desires, death-like sleeps, and conspire behind the scenes to embroider the Elizabethan ruffles and festoons of their flamboyant resurrections. To trick the tomatoes into letting down their swelling, tumescent orbs in the cottony baked heat of the attic until their sunburnt faces glow like round orange lanterns under the crepuscular twilight of the eaves. Unwrapping the cuttings of succulents from their moist, paper-towel bandages, and snugging them down into firm dimples of dirt and peat, coaxing up the apple-green serpentine coils of sweet pea with a snake charmer’s song to wind around the trellis and flicker their quick pink-petaled tongues. The tender slips of mint, sueded upturned bells of petunia, and slim fingers of pine that pluck the metal window screen like a tin harp by the breakfast nook where my father stirs his morning coffee and waits for the neighbors’ Dalmatian to hurl itself over the back fence and hang, limply twisting and gasping on the end of its chain and collar like...