How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,27
a thing. There was one book about a sheep, with a cotton patch inside. My mother would pet the cotton with her finger as if it was alive.
At night, she would bring a book to my bed and insist I read it to her. There were not too many words inside. Sometimes she’d fall asleep right away, but when she didn’t, I would make up stories for her. “No one is ever alone in the world,” I said. “There is always a friend somewhere for everyone.” She must have been twenty-four then, but she seemed much younger—and smaller. I watched over her, and when she shivered I pulled a blanket up to cover her, trying not to wake her. Sometimes she had nightmares. I could tell by how she was breathing—short, panicked breaths. I would reach out and stroke her hair, tell her things would be all right, though I didn’t know if they would be or what it meant to say those words. I just knew it helped to say them.
I never thought to ask my mother why she slept in my room most nights. I was just glad not to be alone in the dark.
ONE SATURDAY MORNING, we wandered into the toy section of the Goodwill, and my mother picked something out for me. It was a map of the world, a puzzle, a thousand cardboard pieces inside a paper box for fifty cents. Each piece had a unique shape that fit into another. The point was to find the other pieces that fit into it somewhere in this pile of shapes and lock them together.
When we got home and I sat down to work on the puzzle, she did not pick up a piece or try to help me put it together. Instead, she watched me and what I did. She’d say, “That one doesn’t go there. Try another one.” When one fit, she’d say, “Every piece belongs somewhere, doesn’t it.”
I worked on the puzzle when I came home from school, and piece by piece, I put the colours together. First the blues, which stood for the oceans. Then the reds, greens, oranges, yellows, and pinks of all the many different countries. Weeks later, there were only a handful of pieces left, and when I put in the last piece, I announced, with pride, “Ma, I’m finished!”
My mother peered at the puzzle and pointed at a green spot, said that was where she was from. A tiny country on the lower far right. Then she pointed to where we were at this moment, a large pink area at the top far left. After a moment, she pointed to the puzzle’s edge and then to the floor, where there was nothing. “It’s dangerous there,” she said. “You fall off.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “The world is round. It’s like a ball.”
But my mother insisted, “That’s not right.”
Still, I continued, “When you get to the edge you just come right back around to the other side.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“My teacher says. Miss Soo says.” There was a globe on Miss Soo’s desk at school, and whenever she talked about the oceans or the continents or plate tectonics, she would point to those features on it. I didn’t know if what Miss Soo was telling me was true. I hadn’t thought to ask.
“It’s flat,” my mother said, touching the map. “Like this.” Then she swept the puzzle to the floor with her palm. All the connected pieces broke off from each other, the hours lost in a single gesture. “Just because I never went to school doesn’t mean I don’t know things.”
I thought of what my mother knew then. She knew about war, what it felt like to be shot at in the dark, what death looked like up close in your arms, what a bomb could destroy. Those were things I didn’t know about, and it was all right not to know them, living where we did now, in a country where nothing like that happened. There was a lot I did not know.
We were different people, and we understood that then.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER, we went to the park. It was cold and the grass was yellow underneath a lumpy sheet of ice. Earlier, I had been reading and my mother had been watching television. She usually found a show to make her laugh, but that day she couldn’t settle on one. She kept pressing the button on the remote control, flipping to the next channel,