Cecilia

(by K-Ming Chang)

What if you hadn’t seen your childhood friend/crush/obsession for ten years, since you were fourteen, and then you unexpectedly ran into her at your workplace? What if she was waiting for you at the bus stop the next day? What if you rode next to each other until the last stop? That’s the plot of Cecilia, basically, except the plot isn’t really the point.

I love how this book captures the slippery power dynamics of girlhood friendships and the intensity of childhood memories. Cecilia is 9 months older than the book’s narrator, Seven, and when they’re kids she’s the one who knows things before Seven does. Like how boys hold their dicks to pee, or how those buckets on the sidewalk by the market are full of tripe, not rags, or how “we shouldn’t be doing this”, where “this” is the two of them on the floor in Cecilia’s living room, trying to act out a sex tape they’ve heard their moms talking about.

There’s a lot of imagery tied to disgust in this book: crows picking at trash or carcasses, piss and spit and shit, slugs, fish guts. And there’s a lot of discomfort tied to desire, and desire as possible predation. As Seven’s grandma explains, “There are two species in the world […] Predators and prey. Everyone is born from one of these two lineages, and you can’t predict which.” Seven thinks she knows which one she is, and which Cecilia is, but the narrative, particularly the way the book ends, points to something else.

While I was reading Cecilia I found myself a little impatient with the moments of magical realism and grotesquerie, but having finished the book I feel like those parts work better than I thought they did, in the moment. There are also some really lovely/elegant sentences and phrases. I love this, about the table Seven cleans as part of her job at a chiropractor’s office: “When I sprayed it down after appointments, patting its glossy flank to soothe it, convincing it not to buck anyone, I squinted at its stillness and imagined what word it wanted to say.” Or the description of Cecilia and Seven as “tinned inside a bus, narrowed inside night,” how it captures that particular feeling of being on a brightly-lit bus moving through the dark. Or this: “I used to think that working nights meant you were the moon, that somehow the night couldn’t run without you, but it turned out your mother cleaned things while people were sleeping.”

Meanwhile: this book’s epigraph has reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline for years now. I should really get on that.