Free Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng Page B

“Maria,” I crooned.
    “I’m not Maria. I’m a leaf monkey. That’s a monkey the size of a leaf!”
    At the top of the tree, there were three orange leaves, fluttering page-like in the wind. This surprised me for in my unscientific, melancholy state I’d thought every last leaf had fallen to the ground. But these leaves were still alive, their colors vivid as pumpkins. I felt the way I had at age eleven upon walking out of the optometrist’s office for the first time, at last seeing the world as others saw it: a world so crisp and colorful it was cartoonlike, a world with the look of a dream.
    I began to climb; my climbing always pleased her. She clapped her hands and then laughed as she lost her balance and then quickly clasped the branch once more. “You look so big!” she observed.
    I hoisted myself up to the branch above her and sat astride it. “I’m a big mama.”
    “It’s a little tree.”
    “It’s not that little.”
    “Yes it is,” she insisted. “You’re not that big. The tree is little.”
    “Do you always see things as they truly are?” I asked playfully.
    She looked off in the direction of the road. “Yes,” she answered gravely. “Yes I do.”
    That night in the dark she asked, “Did your mother love you?” We were looking up at the glowing stars that the previous tenant had pasted pell-mell to the ceiling. It was not the first time she had posed this particular question and at bedtime which, in general, was the time that she reserved for her most pressing inquiries about mortality and love. Before I could answer her she said, “I want to be under your arm.” It was a phrase she uttered nightly and always as I slid my arm under her warm body, I felt the urge to correct her sentence—for my arm was under her and not the reverse—but then as I pulled her closer to me, my arm curled and wound its way around her until she was indeed “under my arm.” Nightly I realized her sentence was correct and so was silent. “Did your mother love you?” she asked again.
    “When I was a little girl you mean?”
    “Yes. When you were a little girl.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose.”
    “But she must have loved you. You were her little girl.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Probably you’re right. Probably she did, but I don’t really know for sure.”
    “I know she did.”
    “Really?” I smiled. “How do you know?”
    “Because you love me.”
    “You’re right, I do.”
    “Do you know why?”
    “Why?”
    “You love me because I’m here. If I weren’t here, you’d love another child. You love me because I’m here and I’m here because you love me.”
    I was silent, not so much because I disagreed but because I had found the less I spoke, the more quickly she fell asleep. “Really!” she said loudly, as if I didn’t believe her.
    “Okay,” I said softly and kissed her head, the smell of which after nearly five years still brought me to a new brink of pleasure. “How did you know that?” I asked sincerely.
    “I was born knowing a lot of things.”
    “Yes, you were.” I wished then, rather selfishly, that I could ask her for the answers to other questions, questions about right and wrong, devotion and happiness, questions about what, if anything, would happen tomorrow between the young man and me. But I said nothing. We lay there for a few minutes in silence, perhaps contemplating together all there was to know in the world, and then her breathing slowed and became more audible. I picked up one of her hands and let it fall.
    Sedated by the mere prospect of pleasure, I slept heavily, my subconscious journeying nine hours to some never before seen glittering underworld, a place similar in location and intensity to hell and yet belonging visually and emotionally to heaven. When morning arrived, I swam directly to the surface of my dreams, bypassing countless sensual diversions en route, and burst like someone who has nearly drowned, panting and short of breath,