Louisiana Heat
Snapshots of Life | Izzy Deutsch | Colored Pencil
Louisiana Heat by Rin Scaduto-Mendola
I was a reckless kid, summer bronze cooking my limbs, brown as gumbo. I liked my hair short like my rowdy brother. The Louisiana heat boiled my family in a bayou.
We lived along an asymptote. Crawling limitlessly along a path that scraped our bellies. My nativity protected me from noticing the grotesque and exhausted forms of my parents, hitting each their own asymptote at rock bottom. I found my mother a quartz off the sidewalk, thinking I struck a diamond.
We’ll get out of this place, Mama. She takes another desperate mouthful of her wine glass, licking her lips bruised.
Around me, the house furniture disassembled or mixed wood, folding chairs for dining seats. Walls dusty and pale, like the Japanese kids in Dallas. Only I was a souvenir of the summer sun, and my hair sprung like a coil. I’d try my best at a Golden Corral, serving myself sushi, dousing the cheap nigiri in even cheaper soy sauce. It was the only Asian left of me in the vastness of American. Mama’s friends were back in New York, her family back in Japan. What she was left with was just the blistering heat of Louisiana and my broken Japanese. I forgave her when she cried. Some women aren’t meant to be Southern.
She took periodical sips from her glass, then she’d tip the bottle dry. I could see the thought swim around in her drunken mind. What to do with an Asian kid in the Deep South?
Papa picked me up at school—later than the rest—just when I was about to disappear into the sidewalk. A teacher stayed past their paid hours, tapping their foot, muttering under their breath with pure disdain: what to do with you? I knew my place: it was just between the cracks of the sidewalk, like dirty fingernails. I existed in the space between the asymptote and the line approaching. A confining space in which I could disappear if the view zoomed out enough. Just when the sun tipped down, Papa would rattle up in his beat-down minivan, stuffy from the Louisiana heat. We’d ride home quietly as he’d let me disappear into the stained suede seats. I forgave him over and over again. Some men aren’t meant to be fathers.
Moving up North permanently sheared off my summer coat and my skin no longer remembers the heat. I shudder at empty walls. I ask the dermatologist how to be less yellow.
