Naked and Vulnerable, the Rest Is Circumstance

Abstract

Naked and Vulnerable, the Rest Is Circumstance Sylvia Chan (bio) My foster friend pushes me into the carpet and slides into the sucker punch before I would have taken it. This is 1999, the end of the twentieth century and the advent of y2k. Of Destiny's Child's The Writing's on the Wall. Of Bill Clinton speaking forcefully over our group home mother's FOX News broadcast. Everything is white in the living room: the walls, the cheap carpet that unraveled with each vacuuming, the couches sooty with grime on the plastic seat covers there because Group Mama didn't tolerate our skins on her furniture. Everything untouched yet blanketed in a run-of-the-mill living—a single mother whose children had grown and departed, who had registered to house a group of four to eight foster kids to make ends meet. She was there, but she left us alone, and as the popular media foster stereotype depicts, she was happy with her check; we were all right if we had a home. The sucker punch throws Evan Isaiah against the fireplace mantle. Before he hits the fire irons, Maria is on him again, digging her nails into his sternum. At fifteen, she is older and bigger than his fourteen- and my eleven-year-old body, but Evan Isaiah, even when his head slumped on his left shoulder, seems renewed. I watch his wiry muscles tighten and relax and then charge straight into her stomach, hitting her below the belly button. Maria oomphs and falls onto her back. Just when I want to believe they'll stop, they're at it again, and all I think is, how many times will he fight for me, did he not break his body enough. And yet I didn't want him to fight. Evan Isaiah would age out of the foster system; we knew his mother, an English teacher who taught Harlem Renaissance poetry, had remarried and fostered her stepchildren. I would have a different fate, a successful opportunity to reunite with my biological family, the less popularized but still irrevocable "take me back" story. I wanted every opportunity for us to both get out on our own terms. Meaning: no fighting. No sneaking out. No punishments or slaps against the [End Page 160] wrists for Group Mama to report to the Legislative Court Angels, or our case managers, Child Protective Services, and our parents' attorneys against us. The brawls were routine. Group Mama retreated into her bedroom when we came home from school or truancy. I was small and quiet, but everyone knew I could read three languages and tell any story so convincingly they would cry. I won over visiting parents with my recitations on Paul Celan and why reading a man who walked out of Auschwitz broke my heart. But I refused to lie. I'd let my mother smile and tell me her truths—that she would never choose a man over her daughter, that she would never let him touch me—and I refused to become my mother. When the others asked or demanded or tried to force me into writing their papers and coming up with a sob story to win family brownie points, I hid under the bathroom sink cabinet. Nobody except for Evan Isaiah thought to look for me there. And when I emerged, they found me. All day and night the summer of 1999, I hid and listened to the other foster kids lather their conversations shit talking Evan Isaiah and Sylvia Lin. I remember the slurred juxtapositions of their speeches, how they drifted into the bathroom, used it, and floated away, never pausing to hear that I was there. That, at sixty-eight pounds and four feet ten inches, I fit perfectly and comfortably in the sink cabinet. I remember everything; I dissected every snip at my lisp and my red-brown hair, of Evan Isaiah's blackness and the sureness they felt that he pitied me for being unworthy of saving. That's what Maria said while bumping her knee against the cabinet knob: "Can't anyone see she's not a damsel at all? She's a...