The Bookmark
The Bookmark
The mother worked alterations in the front room of their Mt. Roskill flat. Hems, waistbands, wedding dresses taken in or let out according to the bride’s nerves or the weight she had gained or lost since the last fitting. Afternoon light came through venetian blinds in strips across her sewing machine. The work required distance. You could not pity fabric. You saw the pull, the gap, and corrected it.
Three years in Auckland. Her son had arrived at fourteen; now he was nearly eighteen and spoke Mandarin only when she spoke first. The church mothers nodded: boys become men. They push away. Some things cannot be mended with thread.
She came home early that afternoon. A client in Epsom had cancelled — a funeral. She thought of starting rice early, or cleaning the kitchen.
The flat was quiet. No television meant her son was not in the lounge. His door stood ajar four inches. Through the gap she saw him on the bed’s edge, shoulders curved forward as if listening to something distant. Then the other boy, standing. Her son leaned into him — not desperately, but wearily, the way one leans against a wall when tired. The other boy’s arms were around him. One hand rested on her son’s back, fingers spread just below the shoulder blade.
The hand was still. Not clutching. Simply there, like a bookmark placed in a page one means to return to.
They stood silent in the grey-gold winter light, her son’s face hidden against the other’s chest.
She stepped back. The floor creaked. They did not turn.
In the kitchen she measured rice, rinsed it until clear, started the cooker.
An hour later her son emerged alone. They ate at the small table, television on low in the next room.
“Can I go to the movies Saturday?”
“With who?”
“People from school.”
“Which people?”
“Just people.”
“Fine.”
“Thanks.”
Their conversations lived in the silences between.
That night she lay awake seeing the hand. The stillness that said, wordlessly: I am here. I will stay.
She had never touched anyone that way. Not her husband. Not her son, beyond the practical holding of small childhood. Those were duties. This was different.
An old phrase surfaced, half-remembered from her mother’s kitchen back in China: 英雄难过美人关. Even heroes cannot pass the beauty barrier. She had always thought it a joke about men — strong men brought low by a woman’s face, a smile, a glance. But what if her son never reached that gate at all? What if he walked past it without noticing, rootless forever?
She had married at twenty-four because time demanded it. In China everyone asked why she was still single. In New Zealand no one did. Her husband was steady. He worked. He drank little. He never struck her. He wanted intimacy she did not feel. She gave it, then stared at ceilings until dawn.
After ten years he said she was cold. He was right. She had thought it normal. Marriage was obligation, not longing. Everyone pretended.
The divorce left her nothing. She brought her son to New Zealand for a clean start. No one here knew her failure at the single role women were assigned.
Now she understood her fear was not his possible homosexuality. It was the shape of a life without the expected form. Rootless. Alone. Staring at ceilings, wondering why desire never arrives.
She would not let that be his future.
At the corner dairy she asked for Playboy. The Indian man placed it in a brown paper bag without expression.
While her son showered she slipped it under his pillow.
Next morning it lay in the recycling, bag unopened, atop eggshells.
She tore it open.
The women were beautiful. Recognition came before shame. Bodies curved in soft light, hands resting — not grasping, simply present.
One photograph: short hair, prone, eyes half-closed in quiet acknowledgment.
The old saying returned: 英雄难过美人关. But these pages showed the barrier clearly, inviting, inescapable. Why had she never felt it? And if her son felt nothing for this, what shape would his life take?
A small tug stirred in her chest. A seam beginning to loosen.
She closed the magazine, buried it again, and returned to a dress that needed taking in.
The eyes stayed with her.
After the service one Sunday, Aunty Chen — round-faced, always in floral blouses, the kind who remembered everyone’s children’s ages — touched the mother’s arm as the congregation milled in the foyer. She leaned in close, voice low amid the chatter of Mandarin and Cantonese.
“Your boy,” she said, eyes flicking toward the door where young people gathered. “He’s eighteen now? Still no girlfriend?”
The mother gave a small nod, smile automatic.
Aunty Chen sighed, the sigh of long experience. “My nephew was the same at that age. Quiet. Always in his room. My sister worried he would never… settle. You know how it is — here, in this country, boys can drift if no one guides them.” She paused, glancing around as if checking for eavesdroppers. “Sometimes they need a gentle push. To understand what a man should want. There are kind women who help with that. Discreet. Just to learn.”
She pressed a folded slip of paper into the mother’s palm — neat handwriting, a mobile number, no name.
“For a friend,” Aunty Chen added quickly, patting her hand. “If ever needed. No shame in asking for help. We look after our own.”
She smiled then, warm and conspiratorial, and moved off to greet someone else, leaving the mother standing with the small square of paper burning against her skin.
Three weeks later the mother called from a mall payphone.
The woman gave an address in Sandringham, Tuesday at three.
She told her son a package needed collecting before his shift. He took the paper, shrugged, left.
At three forty-five she drove there, parked down the street, watched an ordinary weatherboard house with a lemon tree.
At four ten a young woman emerged — jeans, plain sweater, hair knotted messily. She looked like any student. She glanced at the car, met the mother’s eyes, then walked away, hands in pockets.
The mother waited until four thirty, bought milk, went home.
Her son returned at nine fifteen, said nothing.
Next morning she called again.
“He came,” the woman said. “Paid. Sat on the bed. Talked twenty minutes. About you. His father. He’s gentle.”
Then: “He said to tell you: you don’t have to fix me.”
The mother hung up.
She stood in the mall, people flowing past.
英雄难过美人关, she thought bitterly. She had tried to force him through the gate, certain he was stuck before it. Instead he had refused the path altogether — and refused her help in refusing it.
That evening she made his favorite stir-fry. After dinner he rinsed his bowl, turned.
“Ma. It wasn’t a package.”
“I know what you tried.”
The refrigerator hummed.
“I don’t need fixing. I just need you to see me.”
He closed his door.
She sat with empty bowls.
She had looked at him for eighteen years.
Had she seen him?
She went to the central library on Lorne Street. Warm, quiet, paper-scented.
At information a Chinese woman in navy — Grace Chen on her badge — waited.
In Mandarin the mother asked for books on homosexuality.
“Second floor. 306.76.”
Grace’s hands rested still on the desk.
The books treated it as variation, not illness.
She returned the next week, then the next. Grace was always present — information desk, shelving, office.
Get Dwang’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
One afternoon: “More books?”
“I don’t know why I keep coming.”
“Sometimes we don’t know until afterward.”
Grace sold houses part-time. “Empty ones are best. Full of possibility.”
The mother thought of her flat’s closed doors.
Saturday she waited near the desk.
“I did something. I don’t know if it was wrong.”
Grace suggested the café across the street.
They sat with tea.
The mother told her about Sandringham. The message.
Grace listened.
“What are you afraid of?”
The mother spoke of her marriage. Coldness. Duty without desire.
“I don’t have the word.”
“Wanting,” Grace said.
Their eyes met.
Grace said, “I came here twenty years ago. To escape people who wanted me different. A place I couldn’t be myself.”
The mother turned her palm up.
Grace placed her hand in it. Warmth. A faint tremor.
The mother felt her pulse quicken in her fingertips. Heat rose, unfamiliar, like a seam she had never dared unpick.
She drew back slowly.
Grace left her hand where it had been.
The mother stood and left.
On the bus: I touched her hand. I felt something.
Sarah appeared one Sunday. Round face, ponytail, backpack pinned with slogans. Psychology student from Whangārei.
She rested her hand briefly on the son’s forearm while laughing — present, then withdrawn.
They sat close on the sofa.
After they left for the movies the mother sat at her silent machine.
Relief: he would fit the expected shape.
Disappointment: months of fear, library visits, perhaps for nothing — or for something else.
Confusion: had she misread the embrace?
Sarah’s hands were restless. They did not rest.
Two weeks of work swallowed her.
Then she returned with an overdue book.
Grace was there.
“My son has a girlfriend.”
“That’s good. Isn’t it?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
Fifteen minutes later, same café.
“He seems happy,” the mother said.
Grace: “Sometimes fear looks like love. But it isn’t.”
The mother brushed the back of Grace’s hand — three seconds. Pulse beneath skin. Breath caught.
She withdrew.
Grace said, “Whenever you’re ready. The door’s open. No pressure.”
The mother nodded and left.
On the bus: It felt like possibility.
Her son came home alone one evening.
“Sarah asked me to move in next year.”
“Is she good to you?”
“Yes.”
“Does she make you happy?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s okay.”
“Thanks, Ma.”
He closed his door. Music started softly.
She stood in the kitchen.
He would leave. Children do.
What then?
A flyer arrived from Grace Chen Real Estate. A nearby house. Open home Sunday 2–4.
On the back: No pressure.
She pinned it under a kiwi magnet.
She did not go that Sunday. Or the next.
But she kept the flyer. Kept the card.
In afternoons, light falling in strips across her machine — grey to silver to almost gold — she thought of empty houses. A woman who waited without pressing. A door not yet opened.
She thought of her son’s closed door. Music on the other side. A life unfolding.
She thought of the bookmark left in place. The hand that rested still. The stillness she had begun to understand.
She thought of Grace’s open hand.
Maybe someday.
Maybe.
She threaded her needle, bent to the fabric, let the machine’s hum fill the room — the same hum as always, only now she heard the spaces between stitches, the quiet where something might yet begin.
Outside, Auckland light shifted, faded, returned. Clouds moved fast. The world went on.
She sewed.
End
