Sigrid Nunez

He could be cruel. I once saw him blow pepper in the cat’s face. He loathed that cat, a surly, untrainable tom found in the street. But he was fond of another creature we took in, an orphaned nestling sparrow. Against expectations, the bird survived and learned to fly. But, afraid that it would not know how to fend for itself outdoors, we decided to keep it. My father sometimes sat by its cage, watching the bird and cooing to it in Chinese. My mother was amused. “You see: He has more to say to that bird than to us!” The emperor and his nightingale, she called them. “The Chinese have always loved their birds.” (What none of us knew: At that very moment in China keeping pet birds had been prohibited as a bourgeois affectation, and sparrows were being exterminated as pests.)

I sit on her bed watching her get ready to go out. The process of putting on her face takes a long time and is always the same, but I never tire of it. Those tempting little pots and tubes with names like desserts: Iced Mocha, Plum Passion, Peaches ‘n’ Cream. The magic mascara wand. Abracadabra: blond lashes are black. She says it helps if you keep your mouth open when putting on eye makeup. She is in her slip and stockings, the bumps of her garters standing out on her thighs. When she crosses her legs, there is the hiss of nylon against nylon. She says that European women are better at using cosmetics than American women. “American women look so cheap.” She always puts her lipstick on last, but first she rubs a dry toothbrush lightly across her lips to smooth them. I pick up the tissue she uses to blot her mouth and fit my own mouth to the imprint. The next part of her toilette I don’t like. Before pulling on her dress, to protect it from stains, she ties a scarf over her face. Standing there in her nylons and slip with the scarf over her face is a disconcerting sight.

I do not think it can be possible that I never dreamed of marriage. But if I did, that dream died early and left no trace. What stayed with me was a horror of marriage, and I don’t owe this to my parents alone. I saw no happy marriages when I was growing up—at least, not outside of television. (Once, when I complained to my mother about our family life, she shook her head and said, “You’ve been watching too much television.”) The peaceless households of the projects. Wives and husbands forever at each other’s throats, and children overwhelmed. Maybe they could fool themselves but they couldn’t fool the kids: Mom and Dad wanted to kill each other. I still get anxious when I am around couples. Almost always that tension, the little digs and huffs. A woman who survives being pushed onto the subway tracks by a man from behind said, “The first thing that flashed through my mind was that it was my husband. We’d had a fight that morning.”