Third Thumb

Ma has a third thumb. It hangs from her pocket when she thinks no one’s looking, drags behind her as she bruises across the hardwood floor. When we were younger, meimei and I used to take turns unhooking it from her hand while she slept, then butterflying its joints over our cheeks. We’d press ourselves against the end of the couch so her feet dangled above our heads and timed our movements with her snores, so we wouldn’t get caught. Then her feet would twitch ever so slightly, or she’d choke on her saliva, and we’d screw the third thumb on and skitter back to our bed, flattening our bodies beneath the covers.

No one knows where that third thumb came from, not even Ma. It goes in the same category of stories about Ba – the drunk, sordid kind. Once, she fragmented her wineglass onto the table, and when I leaned over, I saw a million versions of myself, fish-bowled and googly-eyed. “That’s what he did to me,” Ma moaned, before staggering to her room, third thumb straying along the walls. That’s when we learned Ma’s first lesson: the dead are dead for a reason.

Meimei and I still had our suspicions, though. In the afternoons, we clandestined in our shared bed, undressing our favourite legends. Perhaps Ma had been born in rice paddies at midnight, the thumb an inheritance of waipo’s cleaved stomach. Or perhaps she’d been one of those thousand-limbed goddesses, defending her village from things that roared like men. Or maybe she’d hidden it from Ba, and that was why he left.

That last one was mine. When I told meimei, she smacked my knee hard enough to shine it into a coin, growling: say sorry, right now. I’d forgotten that this was after Ba became a bad word; I was still thinking of the romcoms Ma always watched, the kind where the girl was white as a fishbone, and the guy was tall and muscular, and they looked like they could be cousins if you squinted.

I had no words for meimei, so I just grabbed my feet, roly-polying between my head shakes until her mouth stopped resembling a powerline. Even now, we could hear the TV echoing through the crack of the bedroom door. I knew if I went out, I’d see Ma perched on the couch, legs fused together like Buddha, and the screen bright enough to backlight bone.

Sometimes, if she were at a particularly good part of the movie, she would ask us to massage the thumb. We’d kneel beside her, hands grasping the joint as she closed her eyes. Then her mouth would either grasp into ahhs and ohhhs, or she’d stay silent. If it was the latter, we knew we’d done a good enough job, and that she’d bring us goodies from work. She’d been a janitor at a nearby school since Ba graduated from our lives, and after the bell, she would scuttle under the desks, using her third thumb to pluck the abandoned wads of gum and granola bars and candies. Then she’d tuck them into her bag, her armpits, or wherever things went to disappear so that when she scampered out, her janitorial uniform thick as a cigarette, no one checked her for prizes.

Another one of Ma’s lessons was that all things tasted better half-gone. So we mythologized our half-eaten bags of chips, half candies, half-lives. For dinner, meimei and I split the noodles she cooked, convinced we could make it last forever. We spooned each other one noodle at a time, swishing it in our mouths and pretending we were baby birds. When Ma came home, she found our bodies bent over the bowl, heads searching for those doves from the magic tricks. Then she chased us with the slipper until we vanished ourselves into the closet, our limbs mimicking clothes hangers until the slipper thudded to the floor and her footsteps trickled back to the couch.

Ma’s favourite part of any rom-com was when the guy takes three flights, two hitch-hiked car rides, not including the stop at the roadside supermarket to buy a bouquet before biking to the next closest town, and steals a motorcycle to arrive at the girl’s house for her birthday. See, she explained once, she’d flown across the country to get away from him because she thought he loved another girl, but that was a lie made up by the guy’s jealous brother because he’d inherited the family business and left him with nothing, but that’s because he’s a big gambler, and if it weren’t for the girl the business would’ve gone down, like bam, because when the guy, not the brother, met the girl, she helped him win the business, even though their fathers were rivals. I wasn’t sure where the rivalry came from– maybe some mistake in a will, because maybe they really were cousins – but now the girl was standing in her pyjamas at the door with a full face of makeup and perfectly mussed-up hair. When they kissed, Ma looked at me, a single tear bobbling out of her eye. “Find yourself boy like that,” she said fiercely.

I excused myself and went to bed. Later, when I took meimei to pee, she was still on the couch, except with her hand flossing between her thighs. The floorboards creaked as we backpedaled, and Ma sprung up and chased after us, her third thumb waving like a battle cry, and beat us until we were round and purple as grapes.

The morning after, we awoke to the stovetop popping. We tip-toed out of our room, braided together like flowers to see Ma in the kitchen, hunched over a simmering pan of eggs and tomatoes. “Try some,” she beckoned, and when we got close enough, dipped her third thumb into the red. “Here, and here,” she said, swabbing her thumb over our cheeks, our mouths, so we could taste the salt and tomato and everything else she’d left behind.