In the summers the boredom cut as thick as the air itself, which pushed a hundred-ten degrees and felt the same inside the house as out. Every afternoon I waded through the back door into the fiery moisture outside, lying out there on the dry yellow grass. What else was there for a girl to do in this quiet subdivision called “Oak Forest” after the oak trees?



What did I see under the clouds on a typical afternoon? The twins from down the street, a boy and a girl, running up, the girl asking me something serious. She stood there, hands on knees, panting it all out: “Hey. You seen our dog around here?” I shook my head no.

The white sun illuminating itself from behind the outline of the next-door neighbors’ wide palm tree. The neighbors hated us because the leaves stretched out far beyond the invisible line dividing their grass from ours, and we had every right to cut it down. But they didn’t realize how beautiful the tree was anyway.

Our neighbors on the other side, a Vietnamese family comprised of a mother and father and their two daughters. The father mowing the lawn, greener and cleaner than ours. Their cousins came over there all the time, so we counted them as our neighbors too. I’d gone into their house once to discover that they had one of those secret bookcase hiding spots. They watched our house when we were away, and we watched theirs.

I saw the elderly couple strolling across the street, hands clasped behind their backs. They were friends with my grandparents, part of the group that always got together to play mah-jong in this lonely dull suburb. They’d been here for years, since the birth of their granddaughter, and their visas had long since expired. The longer they stayed, the bigger the homesickness grew. But once they returned to China, they’d never be able to come back. Who would let them, after they’d let their visas go out for that long? But not returning meant not seeing their granddaughter grow up. So I’d prop myself up on my elbows and wave.

Sometimes I would hear a bitter string of honking weaving its way down the street, followed by a red car lurching back and forth between the curbs. I could never see the driver through the tinted windows, but I knew who she was. All the mothers on the street would share stern looks. “She’s not right in the head,” they’d say. “Drugs and alcohol. Who knows what else?” I’d only seen her once, when her window was rolled down. Smooth olive skin under smooth black sunglasses, a pink frown outlined by tufts of dark hair. I went to school with her older son, Shalen. All the kids on the street would share stern looks. “His head’s too small for his body,” they’d say.

The tall high school junior a few doors down holding a chicken in his hands. He was one of those kids who participated in the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo every year, roping babe calves. Learning livestock like it was a regular science course, designed for lanky strong kids like him in a cowboy hat and boots.

You know, the twins’ dad down the street on the other side wore beautiful suits too. I saw him from the window of the school bus every morning, kissing his kids a final goodbye before they got onto the bus and he got into his car. He carried a briefcase and had the beginnings of a combover, but there was just enough hair to make it work. Perfect posture, perfect car, perfect dog.

My mother coming home, having just gotten back from visiting Joanie’s mom a few streets away. Joanie’s mom was a skinny woman shorter than I was. Scared, now, too, ever since her husband had been paralyzed by a bad case of shellfish poisoning on one of their glamorous tropical vacations. Who was to support them now? Now he could only mumble his words and manage a weak half-smile at the shame of it all. But there was no shame, just fear. Joann herself, a couple of years older than me, hid her feelings about the whole situation by talking about clothes and the boy in her cello section at school.

My sister’s own cello teacher teacher, a young woman from Shanghai with a teenage son and soft creamy skin. The jealous Chinese mothers in the neighborhood all gossiped at dinner parties about whether she was a transplanted mistress sent to live in America while her husband lived a real life back home. Was she? Who cared, as long as there was something to talk about?


It always got cooler at sunset. I sat out on our front step, a bowl of sliced fresh watermelon in my hands. The twins walked past again, fruit flies buzzing about their sandy blond heads.
“Hey!” I called out. “Did you ever find your dog?”

“Oh,” the boy told me, walking up the sidewalk. “We found him hours ago, hiding out in the corner of the garage. Turns out he was there all along.”
So all along, it was there, what we’d been seaching for. It was there, in the expatriates and the fortune-seekers. It was there, in the exiles and the hopefuls, the mad and sad and lonely, the family men and the newlyborns. In rodeo boys and city slickers. It was all there, in our own beautiful Oak Forest, and I had to look no further.