Woman in a Silk Dress

by Justine Teu

Eighth grade ended, and I procured a husband. He told me his real name was Michael, days into the marriage. I said the name out loud. He would not hear me.

He would not hear me, because this was not the type of marriage where two people slept in the same bed or inhabited the same house. We made our first home not in Queens, New York, where we both lived, but in an online role-player game where the goal was to simply level up. 

“Michael,” I tried again, fidgeting in an office chair in my family’s computer room. What an unremarkable name for a new husband. I must’ve known fifteen Michaels. Regardless, hearing Michael made him into someone.

As with most games, we gave ourselves disguises. Michael was Serenade, and I was Miraculous Kira, or Mira for short. We were royalty in that he led a respectable-sized guild, and that he’d chosen me as his second in-game wife. Before then, I’d only ever seen him in town, surrounded by twenty of his underlings. As a higher-leveled guildmaster, Michael was a lord knight amongst the regular knights, and wore a giant golden headdress that only the most experienced players unlocked.

After a Canadian girl named Bubblez left him and the game altogether, I’d joined his guild casually at the apex of his heartbreak, where I would then witness him e-wallowing in the town square, decorated with black accessories. Sans golden crown, Serenade would confide in players from Brazil and Germany, and lament that Bubblez had chosen school over him. Quote-unquote, real life.

“Miraculous Kira,” he said to me one day, as we were hunting orcs, or banshees, I don’t remember. He rode on a bird-horse hybrid, his faithful steed, while I ran after him in heels. “I hope you realize how unimportant things like good grades are when you’re older.”

“Oh.” From my keyboard, I glanced over my shoulder, in case my parents decided I’d spent too much time on the computer that day. “Well, you can actually call me Mira,” I said, not sure what to do with this worldly advice.

At the time, I’d only understood this game as the sum of a few actions: kill, die, level up. When I used to hold my own sword, my own shield, I died a lot. I actually started out as a knight, before finding that I was leveling up too slowly on my own, killing low-leveled monsters. So, I learned to do what the other girls did in-game: wear flower accessories in our hair, put down our weapons, and pick the characters the girls were supposed to pick. Healers. Dancers. The support characters. The ones who did their work in the back as the men in the guild slashed away at bigger game. If we were lucky, the men would share their experience points with us, becoming our digital breadwinners. They would marry us, and have us at their sides forever.

A month after Bubblez deleted her account, Serenade decided that I should die less. “I’ll help you get better,” he told me. “Do you want to be my new healer?”

“Why me?” I asked him. We’d spoken a dozen times via the chat function, but never in the same way he confided in the Brazilians or the Germans, whom he spent hours playing with every day.

“You caught my eye. Don’t you know how beautiful you are?”

No one knew my actual face. In reality, there wasn’t anything worth seeing. My body still swelled with adolescence; with acne, with a bulging stomach I couldn’t shake, with my proto- breasts, pyramid-like, all listless in the nipples. In-game, I was already grown: a woman who made her way through the town, in heels, in a long gown with a slit up the side. Mira was shapely; she knew how to show a little leg. She wore a garter belt akin to a bride on her wedding day and knew how to hold her hands folded in front of her, obedient and ready for anything.

She was all he had of me. Maybe Serenade knew something that I didn’t, that the older one got, the better they were at mining for spectacular souls—and that, somehow, he could see the beauty in me before I could.

I don’t remember what I said to him that day, but I knew he would slash and burn, and I would heal wounds I did not understand.

When I got my first laptop at thirteen, my mother warned me of the dangerous horrible internet predator people. Approach with caution. Don’t share your passwords. Better yet, don’t share anything at all.

“Can you send me pictures of your feet?” someone in the guild once asked me in the game, in a chat window addressed only to me.

“So random!” I’d responded as a diversion. Although I had some intuition that he wasn’t asking something wholly innocent, I didn’t know his exact reasons for needing the pictures; not knowing for sure, I decided, was enough for me to feign complete ignorance.

In response, he threw me a lowercase lol. He called me cute. No one had ever called me cute before.

“But seriously. Just one picture. Can you do that for me?”

I looked down at my feet from my computer. I liked to walk barefoot in the summer, even on the broken cement outside my house, which left my toes mangled and frosted with dead skin. My feet were out of the question, but at thirteen, I didn’t understand that I could respond with things like disgust, or indignation. “No” was not in my vernacular.

He asked again. 

He asked because he knew he could without repercussion.

He asked, and I went looking for the digital camera. We only had one that we used on family vacations, and soon pictures of palm trees and Caribbean wildlife would find themselves mixed in with my feet. In my room, I applied lotion to my heels, the crevices of my toes. The art of applying nail polish left me hunched over, trying to coat neon pink onto my nails.

I sent the pictures. The chat went silent for two hours. When he returned, he said my feet were the most beautiful he’d ever seen, and that it’d resulted in “a very fun afternoon.” Winky face. I didn’t understand then and took it to mean that my feet were the first things to develop, to be worthy of flirtation. How unlucky! Some girls already had beautiful faces, and slender bodies. It seemed that my feet, the things at the very bottom, were my only redeeming quality for now. Did feet even go through puberty? Did I now have adult toes? I did not know. But I lotioned them every night from then on, in case he wanted more pictures.

A month into the marriage, Michael told me about this wonderful time he’d had in a salon in Shanghai. He was there for the month, visiting extended family on his mother’s side. He said a woman laid him down in a reclining chair, took his hair into her hands, and massaged his head with shampoo and conditioner. Her hands, he said, were soft and milky. She smelled like strawberries and wore a cheongsam.

“God,” he told me, unaware of my jealousy, all the way from Queens. “She could be a model, if she wanted to. What is she doing washing hair?”

I saw her in a vision. The hair washer’s body, perfect, appeared to me in a way I would have loved to achieve but didn’t know how. The length of her hands compared to my stubby fingers; her never-ending legs, the ones that had to be, if Michael said she looked like a model; her flat stomach in a body-hugging cheongsam, a Chinese dress made of silk that girls in my family wore at their wedding receptions.

I lashed out. I wanted to be known. If some girls had their whole bodies, I could at least be proud of my very beautiful adult feet.

“I hope you had a good haircut after,” I told Michael. “And by the way, someone in the guild has been asking for pictures of my feet.”

Michael was appalled. He immediately asked for names. I asked him why it was such a big deal.

“It’s a sex thing. He gets off on looking at your toes. Fucking sicko—you’re a minor, for god’s sake.”

Suddenly, the slew of words across the screen made me aware of how little I knew. I scanned the most unfamiliar ones again: sex thing, gets off, fucking sicko. Masturbation, to me, was still years away, as well as the idea that people could be aroused by very specific things like feet. It forced me to think of Michael in a way that remotely involved sex. He knew about things called fetishes, and the eroticism of getting your hair washed by a beautiful girl in a silk dress. He called me a minor, and for the first time, I had to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t.

Shortly after, the foot guy got banned from our guild. Michael started looking after me more, in the way people love endangered species only after they are endangered. His friends in the guild no longer called me by their pet names or sent me heart emojis. He would check on me during all hours of the day, through game chat and text and AOL instant messenger, and ask if anyone else dared to ask me for feet pics. He never brought up the sex stuff again, or the hair washer. 

In his protection, I dabbled with various words: to love, to cherish, to hold. I counted our age difference—my thirteen to his twenty—and told myself seven years would look like nothing when we were older.

In his last week in Shanghai, he asked if we could meet in real life, when he was back in Queens.

Again, I stared into the computer screen until the screen was nothing but white.

“Yes,” I said, deciding that this is what people did on their way to love. You suffer. You reveal yourself. You accept, even when you are scared.

I looked for the wastebasket under my desk. I leaned over the office chair and dry heaved.

Bent over and confronted with the soft stomach spilling over my thighs, I wished I was a girl who could pull off a cheongsam. I prayed, and prayed, to turn into a sliver of silk.

We would meet in the basement of an Asian supermarket, outside a trading card shop behind the sushi stand. I knew the place well; my mother often took me to this supermarket on weekends, where she would let me pick out one snack and a soft drink for my little sister and I to share. To me, it was a fated place to meet—to think, Michael was here all along, with the other trading card enthusiasts, while I was upstairs, hand in hand with my mother.

That day, I put on my best polo T-shirt from the Gap kids’ section, as well as a miniskirt so hardly mini that it went to my knees. I donned a headband with red cherries on it, and jelly sandals to match. Magenta granny panties. I decided I was even lovely enough for a purse, one of those little baguette-style ones you hold on your shoulder, to complete the look. My mother, who now allowed me trips to the supermarket alone, jokingly asked if I was going on a date.

Michael and I never said it was a date. “I’m meeting friends.” It gutted me to lie to my mother in such a way.

She didn’t notice. At the time, she was busy cutting fresh fruit for my father, and her father, who was in town for the weekend to visit. She presented them with apples. They ate, and ate. My mother, who did not get to eat a single slice, brought the plate back to the kitchen sink to wash with all the other dirty dishes. I watched her scrub the porcelain, and then watched her dry them and put them back in the cupboard. Her hands, though wet, looked shriveled, coarse. A Band-Aid covered her thumb from a cut, while a burn, still healing, boasted about the meal she’d cooked just an hour before.

I left for the supermarket basement. At thirteen, maybe this is what I thought women did: healed men through their apple slices, their fingers working dry scalps. We soothed, with our cherry headbands and feet pictures.

On the bus to the supermarket, I watched as a man gave up a seat for a woman he was presumably dating. Maybe this is why we heal: for a chance at an open seat that the man might give to us one day, and then forever. I tapped my feet. I looked out the window. I imagined what it might be like, the day Michael would give up a seat for me on a bus we were taking together, somewhere.

An account of the events that transpired:

Husband and wife meet for the first time in a supermarket basement. The wife, excited, makes her voice an octave higher, because she thinks girls should be light, and make good first impressions. The husband looks up and down his new wife’s body. He sighs, as if owed a great debt. He takes her around the supermarket, never stepping in line with her. Always a few feet ahead, he does not look back at the wife he’s chosen, and pretends he is busy looking at wet market fish, still in their tanks. Tilapia, specifically. It reminds her of the game, and how she’d chase after him on the battlefield, looking for monsters for him to kill. And that’s what this is, a battlefield she does not know—her stomach hurts, as if she’s been hit, while her whole body bangs a drum she can hear against her fingers. But the wife, at an age so eager to please, laughs when the jokes aren’t funny. She listens, and absorbs, and digests him into a rosy memory. She does not listen to her own body in danger.

The husband, looking for any way to pass the time, raises a question.

“Did you know that fish fry means just-born fish? And here I thought it meant something beer-battered and cooked in oil.”

The wife knows this. She remembers learning about it in school, in a biology class.

“Yes,” she answers. “The mother fish carry the fish fry in their mouths for a few months, to keep them safe.”

The husband doesn’t look happy that she knows about the tilapia; that she knows anything at all.

“Mother fish and father fish and children fish,” he says, peering at the dead ones sleeping on ice. “It’s a strange concept. I don’t even want to think about fish sex. To me, they’ll always be these sexless things, somehow making more fish along the way.”

Husband and wife stare at the dead fish on ice for a little while longer. For a moment, the wife pretends they are deciding on what to make for dinner, salmon or trout, and that it is an equal decision she will make with her very agreeable husband. She should be happy, she thinks; she should be happy that the husband sees things as sexless, because this means he might see her as sexless, too. It should be this way. They should hold their romances in until the wife is no longer a fry, but a grown fish with her lusts, and fetishes, a cheongsam body. It is better this way, to be seen at the edges, just barely over the shoulder.

And yet—she knows. She doesn’t understand it quite yet, not completely at least, but she knows that men don’t bring girls they like to the supermarket.

A few days later, the foot guy chatted me in the game. Michael had welcomed him back into the fold, despite his past indiscretions, because he needed someone who could stay up late for extra rounds of killing. Foot guy still used winky faces.

“Mira,” he said. “I am so sorry to tell you, but Serenade would like a divorce.”

I asked why.

“He said he had a change of heart. He’s still very much in love with Bubblez.”

I tried to remember Bubblez. We both played support characters and wore flowers in our hair. We had the same heart-shaped faces with big eyes. We donned the same pre-set hairstyle, number five with the braids, and picked the same pink dress in the character title screen. We were alike, she and I; I could have been Bubblez.

So, I asked again. I asked again so hard that I broke a half-chewed fingernail on the keyboard, over the letter Y.

“In truth, Mira, he said he felt let down.”

“By the last raid? I was just having a bad day. I’ll be better next time.”

“No, by the meeting he says you two had.”

The wastebasket lingered under my desk, ever faithful. This time I did not need it. Instead of dry heaving, I chewed off the rest of my fingernails. I chewed, until the tips of my thumbs looked like ground meat, pulped and totally unfit for anyone with a hand fetish.

Without answering, I logged off the game, shut down my laptop. Michael would find a new wife in a few weeks’ time. A twelve-year-old from Astoria.

My mother, cutting pineapple in the kitchen, spotted my red-covered hands. She grasped one of them and chided me in the way that she always does in Cantonese: Ah, look at you, silly egg! How will you find a husband when you do this to your hands?

One hand over mine, this mangled thing, she continued chopping fruit with the other, a mother to us all.

I tried to imagine her in a silken dress. I couldn’t. Instead, I watched the curve of her palm around the knife.

Published February 28th, 2021