Like all the other kids, my baby sister Ronnie and I played doctor together when we were little, probably a little more intensely than most due to our loneliness and isolation, but it didn't get serious until that long, hot, west Texas summer when we first walked in the Garden.
One scorching June afternoon, cuddled together on a old worn-out brown army blanket in the back room of our family's restaurant, my kid sister and I accidentally discovered Eden.
People say that the Garden of Eden is guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. We found the gate guarded only by a thin white veil. When we pulled it down and started to explore, the very first person we stumbled upon was a friendly little man fast asleep in a boat. When by working hand in hand we finally managed to awaken him, he stretched, stood up tall and proud, and then showed Ronnie and me how to climb steep mountains, dance trembling on the waves of the sea, and slide down slippery slopes to lands yet undiscovered.
Still innocent newcomers, all summer long we continued our joint explorations of the incredible wonders of the Garden. Awestruck, we wandered wide-eyed for days on end through beautiful silken meadows and fresh sprouting forests. Side by side we probed hidden, secret caverns and gazed open-mouthed at warm, fragrant waterfalls flowing down like rivers of pure gold to water the thirsty valleys below.
One hot day as my sister was sampling fresh banana and kiwi fruit straight from the tree, and I was breathlessly enjoying firm, sweet blackberries, we were caught by surprise when the Fountain of Life suddenly sprang forth from the tree at the center of the Garden, with milk and honey.
At first we were puzzled and even a bit scared of its powerful flow, but by working together we quickly discovered how to draw its life-giving waters. Eventually we both drank deeply from it, me out of curiosity, she again and again out of sheer enchantment. It was a summer of bliss in an enchanted land.
We had thrilling adventures, races between our friend the boatman and his much larger opponent, races which, in spite of his size disadvantage, the brave and strong little boatman always seemed to win. There were even fierce swordfights between the two, mock combats which almost always ended up with both sides surrendering in heroic embrace. By the time we started school again after Labor Day, Doctor Livingston I Presume, Emilia Earhart and Indiana Jones had nothing over us except pith-helmets. My kid sister and I were world-class explorers.
But when Ma unexpectedly walked into the storage room of the restaurant one fall day after school and discovered her two kids all dressed up in rawhide, saddled and ready to ride into the west Texas sunset, we expected dire punishment. However, all she did was tell us to get decent. Then she called Ronnie aside and explained about the birds, the bees and the rubber trees. I guess she told dad too, but he never mentioned anything. In his culture, there are some things you just don't talk about out loud.
In any case, we kids were way too embarrassed to ever try anything like THAT again. All through school my adventuring was of a more pedestrian sort, limited to training for wrestling matches and then getting pinned to the mat, warming third chair in the school concert band, and ace'ing Mr. Garcia's AP history class. No more swordfights, damp caverns or perfumed waterfalls for me, and my best girlfriend had only five fingers.
My Khmer name is Oudum, but everyone calls me Adam. My kid sister, who's nine months younger than me, is Ronny. (Rathani, her Khmer name, means Jewel). We were always in the same grade since kindergarten. Everyone thinks she's anorexic because she's always been underweight and thin as a rail, and even up to now has no curves at all. But she eats like a horse and is as healthy as one, too. The doctor said it was just the effects of a poor diet in her first couple of years before we came to the States, plus a fast metabolism and our Khmer blood. The doctor told her she'd probably live to 120.
As a child she always preferred toy cars to dolls, and all through high school she cut her straight, jet-black hair short, wore boy clothes, and avoided girl-cliques. Except for a couple of gay guys who were her best friends and always hung out with her at school, the teenaged boys stayed away from her in droves. There were even rumors she was a lesbian, but the fact was that she gave an equal-opportunity cold shoulder to almost everyone else, gay and straight.
As the only two Asian kids in a small Texas Panhandle town, we were pretty isolated. The Black kids figured we were Chinese and teased us with ching-chong taunts, the Latino kids ignored us when they found out that in spite of our rich bronze complexions we didn't speak Spanish, and the White kids figured we were ugly colored kids with funny eyes and had no time for us. I was way too small for the Panhandle god-sport, high school football, so I went out for wrestling instead. But I was shorter and thinner than the others and never won a single match. Ronnie went out for the swim team and even won a couple of medals, which our parents display in a case, like holy relics.
Ronnie and I remained unusually close, and once, only once, on a late-night sophomore band bus to Austin, we shared a stolen, hungry kiss and wordlessly decided to revisit our secret Garden, which by now was wild and overgrown. The Band Coach and the Chaperone in the seat across the aisle were busily exchanging saliva and exploring mountains and jungles of their own, and slouched down in our bus seats, safe under our shared blanket, nobody could tell how far and wide we were roaming.
Before our breakfast stop, we had managed to reawaken the little boatman and his big friend, and found that both had now grown as much as we had. To our joy, we also found that the Waters of Life now flowed even more freely from their secret fountains in the deep than they had so long ago.
But that rare opportunity never happened again. Life settled into boredom: Every day after school we did homework and worked for our allowance and tips at the restaurant, and either Ma or Dad was always at home when we were. The storeroom was now padlocked. For obvious reasons we never had any dates in school, and Ronnie and I spent our senior prom working side by side as volunteers behind the snack bar.
After having strolled through the Garden of Eden, the plains of west Texas were pretty damn plain by comparison.
I turned eighteen in early September of my senior year. Ronnie's eighteenth was in June, three weeks after our graduation day. After high school, Dad wanted us to work in the restaurant full time, but Ma reminded him that they had come to the States to make a better life for us kids, not so we could steam Spring Rolls and serve bowls of Nuoc Mam to diners for the rest of our lives. I was kind of hoping to get into UT Austin, Texas A&M or some other school where I could finally date and fuck some girls who wouldn't recoil at the sight of my eyes and skin tone, but even with financial aid, the best we could do was Black Angus State College, Stafford, Texas, a hundred miles north of where we live.
Black Angus, whose football team is the Horny Toads, has more on-campus cattle pens than dorm rooms, so Ma agreed to dip into her personal savings to get us a furnished studio flat in an off-campus student apartment complex. The complex had a pool and everything. The place was clean and had a private bath. The bedroom was just barely wide enough to contain its single queen-sized bed. When we went to see the place, with Ma in tow, she apologized profusely that it was all she could afford, but Ronnie and I took one look at it and answered in unison, "Mom, it's cool! We love it."
We moved in a week before classes. Once we hauled in our stuff in and Ma left, we finally had enough time to take a break and check out the apartment swimming pool. There were already several other students hanging around the complex and a few were in the pool when I got there. I waited poolside for Ronnie, who was up in the apartment reassuring Ma on the cell phone that we were OK.
When my sister finally came down, my jaw hit the floor. Was this the little sister I knew, the one who wore checked shirts, utility jeans and work boots to school every day? On her narrow, boyish hips was painted the tightest, silkiest bikini bottom I had ever seen, so tight on her crotch that nobody would ever bother to ask her (as so many did in high school) whether she was really a guy in drag.
