Non-Fiction
Tamago / Jami Nakamura Lin
Photo by Katie Bernotsky on Unsplash
My husband gives my daughter an egg. It is boiled in an As Seen On TV gadget and sliced with another As Seen On TV gadget and placed on the tray of her high chair. She inspects the perfect rounds, their exacting symmetry. “Kiro,” she says, pointing to the yolk in each round. “Shiro,” she says, pointing to the white perimeter. She prefers to say her colors in Japanese.
But when she holds up the last slice of egg—the yolkless tip—her face crinkles in confusion. “Kiro?” she asks. “Where are you, kiro?” She holds up the slice to her eye.
There’s no yellow yolk in that slice, my husband explains.
She does not believe him. “I find it,” she says. After a minute of digging through the slice with her fingertips, she gives up. “Shiro,” she sighs, and nibbles on the rubbery remains.
My daughter is two and does not yet understand the god of imperfect things. Her food must be pristine. She watches the watermelon vines grow in our backyard but insists on eating them only in perfect cubes, perfectly red and perfectly crisp, no hint of white rind or grainy mush or seed. The pieces she deems unworthy she puts into the cupholder on her tray while shouting “Mazui!” Unappetizing!
She loves eggs because the kind we get from the store harbors very little deviance—she knows the egg she eats today will be exactly the same as the egg she ate yesterday—but also because my sister introduced her to the YouTube video “I Love Egg.” According to my sister, this is a viral song from our childhood, whose eggy characters adorned many a flip-phone charm in the way of Hello Kitty or Pikachu, but I don’t remember it at all. Wiggle jiggle, yellow middle, the song goes, that’s the best of what you are. The bubbling chorus, with hard boiled eggs zipping in the background: I love you—fresh eggs! I love you—white eggs!
When my sister comes over, my daughter often climbs into her lap and demands “eggy song,” which they watch together, her forehead knotted in concentration.
*
Once I lived in Japan and the eggs had yolks as orange as orange drink. I couldn’t believe it. The sugar cookies came out a different shade, the yolks were so bright.
Once I lived on a farm and the eggs collected from the chickens sat on the counter, the shells the color of fawns. You don’t have to refrigerate them? I asked the farm manager. No, they said. Only pasteurized eggs need to be chilled.
I was young when I lived in both of those places. I lived in both of those places just for a few months, specifically to write. I could come and go as I pleased; I did not yet have children.
Because the farm-fresh eggs had shells that clung tight to their outer membrane and were hard to peel, I preferred the supermarket styrofoam eggs. After boiling, these eggs needed only the faintest knock on the edge of the dish, the softest pressure from my thumb, to pong out of their shells and spin buoyant into the center of the plate.
I like an easy thing. Sometimes I don’t even halve the egg before eating it. Sometimes I just take a bite off the pointy end and pour shoyu straight into the cavity. I always pour too much, creating little umami rivers that spill over the edge of the egg white and onto the floor before I can suck out all the brown wet salt from the gash.
*
I’m not present for the story about my daughter and the egg, though you wouldn’t know from my telling of it. It is a story my husband texts me when I am at a writing residency far away from them, sixteen days away from them, days my two-year-old daughter counts with a print-out calendar and a packet of heart stickers.
“After breakfast, I get special treat, Mama,” she tells me on a video call, referring to the gummy bear my husband gives her each morning I’m away. “How many days until I come back?” I ask her. “Ju-roku,” she says—sixteen. I ingrained this into her mind before I left—Mama will be gone for ju-roku days, and then I’m coming home. In our house our language use, like our pronoun use, is all mixed up.
Does she understand what’s happening? my mother texts me, my first night at my residency. Yes, I say, explaining how I showed her a photo of the cottage I’ll be staying in, taught her how to pronounce the name of the state I traveled to. Arkansas. “Ah-kan-sah,” my daughter says.
I love being at the residency. I love being alone. I love interacting with people as a person before as a mother. I love getting to wear a purse instead of a fanny pack because I always have the use of both my hands. I love getting to eat a meal without putting my fork down three dozen times.
And I love the landscape so different from my own, though I cannot describe it adequately either to myself or to my daughter. I don’t know their proper names. There’s a lot of trees here, I tell her, and the land is tilted. She thinks I mean upside-down. Hills, I say, though that’s not quite right either. I don’t have the words for what the town is like: carved into a mountainside, built into a forested cliff, so the second story of a house can open up onto a road above and the basement of a house, open to the sun and air, is open to the road below.
I’m from the Chicago suburbs, where we never need to use our parking brakes, where the land is flat forever. I don’t know the words for what I am seeing and in this way all I see blurs together. I wake up to deer skipping down the road.
According to my husband, she does not talk about me much when I am gone. On our calls she is fidgety and runs away. I miss you, I tell her, I love you, I tell her, and she grins and waves bye-bye. Does she miss me, I ask my husband. He thinks so. He tells me at night she wakes up and cries. “Are you scared,” my husband asks her. “Yes,” she says. “Why are you scared?” he asks her. “Mama,” she says.
In Japanese the same phrase can mean both it’s/you’re/I’m scared and it’s/you’re/I’m scary. Like many things, you have to use context clues. There is guilt too in this land.
*
Before her, there was another one that cracked inside me, its viscous yolk spilling into my underwear, drip drip, into the toilet, drip drip, until the doctor waved her wand and said the shell was empty. Afterwards I walked back through the waiting room, full of other Fertile Myrtles sitting there with their expectant smiles and their resting hands, and cried. The next day I went to the hospital to make sure everything was all sucked out. You expect one thing and you get another.
When I was little at Easter we would hold crayons in candle flames and draw on eggshells with the softened wax, before dunking the egg in dye. After my mother would wipe away the wax with a rag, show us the design in relief.
After the year we forgot about an egg hidden in a junk drawer, my mother put the kibosh on decorating hard-boiled eggs. She showed us how to prick the top and bottom of an uncooked egg with a sewing needle, how to remove a fleck of shell with the needle’s tip, until the hole was just big enough that you could blow into it. We’d puff our cheeks, blowing and blowing and blowing—thinking the hole wasn’t big enough—until all at once, the albumen swam out the other end in all its goopy glory.
Often there would still be drips of yolk still left in the shell, so my mother would blow in the hole after us, making sure everything was gone, before rinsing the shells under the sink.
“Be careful,” my mother warned us at every stage of this process, “The shells are more fragile than the boiled ones.”
Still, sometimes I blew too hard, or pressed too hard with the crayon, and crushed the shell between my fingers, and I would hold in a sob. There were more eggs in the refrigerator, waiting for me to press my little lips on them in the shape of an O, but they were not the ones I had chosen.
Before my first pregnancy, the one that ended in the D&C and the heated blanket and the mid-day weep in the Shake Shack next to Northwestern Memorial, whose hospital bracelet I wore on my wrist for weeks after, to prove that it—all of this—had existed, I didn’t know how much you could love a place you’d never visited, a dish whose name you had only ever read on a menu.
Before my second pregnancy, the one that ended in our daughter’s birth and my father’s death and the cement breasts and the endless nights and the endless, endless googling, I didn’t know how much all the love you held for things that would not or were no longer or will never be could leak into your love for all things that would and will.
*
My daughter does not understand the concept of descending numbers, or of time. After a week has passed, there’s still ju-roku days left. I’ve given up on trying to talk to her normally on video chat. Instead we draw each other pictures on Zoom’s whiteboard function, a virtual game of Pictionary.
“Broccoli,” I say, of a green spiral she’s made with her finger on my husband’s iPad. “Hai,” she says. “Ichigo,” she guesses, of the red strawberry-like thing I’ve tried to scribble with my finicky trackpad. “Hai,” I say.
If I tell my daughter I love you, I know what will happen. She’ll look at me blankly, maybe giving me a half-smile, the way she does when she knows I’m waiting for something but she does not know what it is.
If I sing my daughter I love you, I know what will happen, because it’s the same thing that’s happened many, many times before.“Fresh eggs!” she’ll shout, completing the lyric, her little toddler lisp shaping the r into a w: fwesh eggs.
“Silly mama!” she says, each time I sing this to her, her face crinkling with delight. “Silly mama singing eggy song.”
She eats her eggs with voracity and pleasure. Sometimes she pokes out the yolk first, pressing it with her thumbs until it is the consistency of the wax I scrape out of her ear canal with my pinky nail.
On one of my last nights of residency there is a strawberry moon and I sit on the edge of a—what, a bluff?—and look up at it. On one of my last days of residency the sky is gray and thick and the air is wet and thick and the atmosphere is heavy as we wait for the rain to break. When it comes, I sit in my writing room at the window watching the rain flowing downwards in the streets, this town of angles and altitudes. It shocks me how quickly asphalt can turn into stream. Where I come from the water rises but it does not flow. Rain turns into swamp, not river.
I go outside and stand in the current. Part of me wants the stream of time to speed up and wash me back home to my family, and part of me wants it to slow and still until I can finish saying all the things I want to say.
To long for the nest and also for the sky above it—to believe that they can / must / coexist—can this too be called love? Or else I do not want to know its name.