Training Days. May-lee Chai

clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I didn’t need a bra until I was thirteen.”

      I wanted to add that she hadn’t grown up in America, but in Canada, far away. Who knew what was normal there? But I held my tongue.

      The thing I wanted most was to be just like my friends in school. I knew this meant that I should do the things they did. My parents did not always understand. Neither of my parents had been born in America, and sometimes I wondered if that was why they argued so much. My friends’ parents seemed to argue less, but it was hard to say. Sometimes parents hid things in front of other peoples’ kids. My parents did that.

      The handouts for junior high were clear. The list of things we had to buy before we started in the fall was printed in bold: book covers, No. 2 pencils, three-ring binders with “No Imagery on the Cover,” gym shorts and T-shirts in school colors, the right kind of sneakers (no black soles that would scuff the gym floors), and “gender-appropriate underwear.” And then in parentheses, it was spelled out so everyone knew what that meant: bras for girls and jockstraps for boys. I pointed this line out to Mom. She glanced at the sheet and said, “Oh, bother.”

      Mom later handed me the Sears catalog with the corner turned down on the page for training bras. There were three kinds, all of them as white as a starched nurse’s uniform. One had a tiny pink-and-blue tennis racket between the cups, one had a white daisy, and one was plain.

      Mom was going to order one from the catalog, but then she said, “You’re probably going to need to try it on first.” And she sighed, as though I were becoming one more burden she had to deal with in the day. You’d have thought I was like my cousin Madison the time she got ringworm. Mom’s voice sounded like I had caught some illness that could spread. I didn’t tell that to Maria, though.

      I hadn’t thought much about bras up till this point. My chest was flat and straight, and my belly was round and smooth and still pressed against my shirts. I wondered if my lack of breasts might be due to the fact that I was Chinese (no one said Taiwanese in those days). But I had no other Chinese classmates, no one to compare myself to except my mother, who always seemed perfect in her womanhood, the opposite of me. I had no way to tell if I was normal.

      But when I talked to Cindy Van Lenten, I noticed she was even flatter than I was—and six months older. I felt some relief. I asked her straight up if she was going to try to do without, but Cindy shook her head gravely. It was too risky, she said. If you didn’t wear a training bra in gym class, for example, and your boobs started to come in, they could grow crooked, and they’d be two different sizes. They would never be normal when you grew up, she said, unless your training bra was there to press them into place. That’s what the orientation packet meant. They hadn’t fully explained because they didn’t want to scare us.

      I nodded, because that seemed right. Adults were just like that. They only ever said half of what they meant.

      Chapter 3

      Mom told Aunt Mei about my needing a training bra. I couldn’t believe my ears, the way she just blurted it out. I thought my mother would have had a clue. After all, Mom had been my age once. But adults were always disappointing me.

      It was late in the summer. Mom’s night classes were finally over, so we’d gone to pick up Madison to play at our house, but Madison was still at her swimming lesson. Aunt Mei let us in to wait. She said the twins were finally sleeping. We all sat down in the living room, Mom on the piano bench and me on the armchair and Aunt Mei on the rocker. There were laundry baskets on the sofa and a diaper genie in the corner. For the first time, the house didn’t smell like Madison’s rabbit. It smelled worse.

      “I was just soaking myself,” Aunt Mei said. She unbuttoned her blouse and I saw her nursing bra. It was bright white and thick, with snaps and triangular flaps that opened. She put wet, cold Lipton tea bags through the openings, sighing.

      “Old wives’ trick, my mom used to say.” She laughed, a short bark, like a seal.

      Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the rocking chair.

      “I bottle-fed Jun-li,” Mom volunteered. “I wanted to breastfeed her, but I was under a lot of stress. I lost all my milk.” (I kept waiting for her to add, “And she turned out all right,” as she had at home, when she’d told my brother and me this story.) “But when Jeremy came along, I was able to breastfeed a full six months. And he had quite the appetite.”

      “My mother breastfed me until I was almost four years old,” Aunt Mei said with her eyes closed. She rocked back and forth, back and forth.

      “Oh, is that so?”

      “Mom was old-school. Everything had to be the way her mother had done things. And my grandmother, Po-po, was a tyrant. I remember when I was growing up, Mom and me had to scrub the floors on our hands and knees. Po-po said it was the only way to really get the dirt. She lived to be ninety-seven, if you can believe it. Outlived Mom by five years.”

      “Did I meet your grandmother at the wedding?”

      “That was her in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank.” Aunt Mei let out another seal-bark laugh. “I don’t think she knew who I was anymore. Kept calling me by my mom’s name. Really, she took care of me more than my mother did. She lived with us the whole time I was growing up so Mom could work.”

      “When did your father die?”

      “Dad died of a heart attack before I was born. I always blamed all my problems on his dying. If I’d grown up with a father figure. A father, I mean. If I’d gotten used to having a man in the house, maybe I’d understand them better.”

      “No,” Mom said. “Nothing prepares you. Nothing helps. I had a father and two brothers.”

      “And no mother. You had to raise yourself.”

      “I had no training for life. It’s true,” Mom said.

      Slumped into the rocking chair, Aunt Mei looked as though she were asleep. But her right hand was moving, patting at the tea bags, adjusting them, prodding them. The rest of her body just lay there, dead.