Since moving to America, mother no longer wears makeup, jewelry, or even good quality bras. Only exception? Nail polish. Not flashy red but baby pink, like the colors found on gender reveal cakes. Mother grows younger and ages, silently tying her sneakers in a squat.
In the closet, one dress hangs like an exoskeleton. Two sensible skirts sleep in plastic bags. Blouses outgrown, houndstooth pants with nowhere to go. She lugged them from the old country and stuffed mothballs in the pockets. But this land stretches and widens you, with its cheese and steak, its endless highways.
Untrained in the art of throwing things away, mother drags in new-old things for an old-old apartment — toaster at a yard sale, futon by the dumpster, chewed-up rug from Goodwill. At dinner, she watches the tips of chopsticks as they emerge and disappear from husband’s and daughter’s mouths.
Look! She wants to say, but a mewl comes out.
Before washing dishes, she licks butter from the rims. Depression is more filling than rice. No one notices that mother has turned into a cat. In fact, she herself was unaware of it until a visit to the supermarket, when a blonde teenager pointed at her armpits and giggled. A glance at white women in the store revealed a strange lack of hair where it sprouted on her. When the woman in front reached for a jar of marinara, the leathery folds of her underarm opened like an accordion. The sight filled mother with both repulsion and longing.
She had thought herself one of the less hairy species. For the first time she becomes keenly aware of the follicles at the back of her head, long hairs around her aureolas, shy wisps right below the navel, wires between her legs tangled like the cables behind the TV stand, the fine down along her calves, even the feathers at the knuckles of her toes. This sudden knowledge leads her to scratch impulsively, leaving streaks on her skin, the tip of a nail dragging out a dotted line. Wherever she walks, hairs fall. At home, she becomes obsessed with vacuuming, knowing each day she has shed all over the carpet. Out of compulsion, she licks herself whenever she’s nervous and, days later, coughs up a hairball in the trash.
At work the other biogenetic researchers complain that she is not a team player, especially since meows are a language they can’t understand. They look askance at her whiskers, her spotted tail. Her ears pick up everything nowadays. When she walks by lunch tables, her large eyes dart surreptitiously from one stern face to another. Conversations pause, only to pick up with a different subject.
She used to microwave marinated fish with rice and eat lunch at her perch, across from vials of viruses and pipettes, until Boss barged in one day.
“Stinks like the ocean in here,” Boss said, wrinkling his big nose.
He’s a bulldog — she could tell from the pores on his face and the whiteheads that live there like maggots. From then on, mother ate salads that reminded her of rabbits she’d fed during the cultural revolution, how their teeth ground against alfalfa leaves, how her own teeth chewed that grass until the rabbits were ready to become meat.
Unfortunately, her cat brain has fewer processing capabilities. She stares for minutes at the ceiling, trying to recall the tasks she’s been assigned. Boss spits out names of proteins to be distilled — MYO 6s1, RAD51… The letters float through ears and intertwine like yarns in the head. Her mission is to keep a specific line of cells alive.
The centrifuge gurgles. She opens it with gloved paws.
They say that a new country changes you. Mother grimaces as she flosses in front of the mirror at night. Spinach and tilapia bits splatter the reflection. In the old country, her name meant Beauty. Mei-mei, they called her, with a lilt at the end, vowels dipping then rising like a wave. She wore her hair twisted in a bun, clasped by a peony clip.
When she first got married, she used to nuzzle against husband and press her nose into his armpit, purring as his hand stroked her back. She imagined then that the comforts and riches they yearned for were within reach.
In America, because of the steep currency exchange rate, husband stops buying gifts. They hardly touch each other except to pass a plate. He stops filling her bowl. He does not have enough energy to play, he says, for he also doles out viruses into little cells all day. In his dreams, pipettes dip in and out of vials. The hopeful box of condoms sits still in the armoire.
“It’s not your fault,” husband insists then goes back to the garage to fix the car.
Mother touches her belly and thinks about the black hole inside. Doctor had said they needed to take out everything, after the not-yet-kitten died. Lying in her thin, open gown, just before going under, she had thought about the red sluice staining the toilet bowl. Then she felt her mind being sucked down the pipes.
Her beauty leaves in stages. The colors go first. Each mispronounced word is a finger smearing across the chalk drawing of self. Brows migrate toward the center. Whiskers grow untrimmed. She spends time in the kitchen at odd hours. Nights while shuffling to the bathroom, daughter finds a figure in pink pajamas hunched over the counter, illuminated by a shaft of yellow light from the fridge door. In the morning mother is curled up on the couch.
Daughter wants to buy mother lipstick for Christmas.
“It will look ridiculous,” husband interjects. “Why would anyone put lipstick on a cat?”
Mother slurps from her bowl. In the old country she had a whole bag of makeup — tapered brush, rouge, scented perfumes. Now she cannot remember what it felt like to put on shoes.
She asks for a box, and husband saves one from their grocery run. Real Florida Oranges, it says on the side. She sniffs the cardboard then climbs in, tentatively.
For hours she lies there, blinking slowly at the brown corrugated walls. Husband and daughter feed her when they remember. It surprises them how difficult it is to cook, but they substitute with takeout, which mother barely touches. Sometimes she allows herself to be coaxed onto the hardwood floor, but most of the time she naps.
After a few days, Boss finally notices her absence.
He calls the house and yells, “What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you worried about your H1B1 status?”
Mother chews off the cord.
Boss has spoken what the family, too, has been thinking. They discuss sending her back to the old country, alone.
Mother shakes her head violently and drags husband by the hem of his khakis out to the driveway. She has not spoken for two months at this point, has been communicating solely through meowing and body language. She jerks her head toward the overgrown lawn and smacks her tail against the cracked asphalt. She’s telling husband what she wants. And for the first time he understands.
After a somber dinner and many tears, husband and daughter carry her in the box to the town library, a red brick building with hydrangeas planted under each window. They set her on the sidewalk and hold her paws for a few minutes. Under the soft street lights, mother’s eyes glow eerily human.
The box is gone the next day. Soon after, bizarre events begin to occur around town. A fire burns down the local university lab. Fish filets go missing from grocery stores. The beauty store on Main Street is ransacked in the middle of the night. One day husband wakes up with a tickle in his throat and coughs up something. He stares at the misshapen object which reminds him of a vestigial organ. Only a few minutes later does he recognize it as a hairball.