Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

their parents flew in through one of the broken windows with worms in their broad beaks. After handing me back to Mother, Malory knelt and stirred the water with one of his large hands. The jujube Lord Jesus observed us warmly from where he hung. The angels on the walls were chasing the sparrows from the beams to the crossbeams, from the eastern wall to the western wall, from the spiral wooden staircase up to the rickety bell tower, and from the bell tower back down to the walls, where they rested. Crystalline beads of sweat oozed from their glistening buttocks. The water swirled in the basin, creating a little eddy in the center. Malory tested the water with his hand. “Okay,” he said, “it has cooled down. Put him in.”
    They had taken off my clothes; Mother’s plentiful, nutritious milk had made me fat and fair-skinned. If I’d changed my look of sadness into one of anger or I’d worn a solemn smile, and if I’d had a pair of wings on my back, I’d have been an angel, and those fat little infants on the walls would have been my brothers. I stopped crying as soon as Mother laid me in the basin, because the water was so comfortably warm. I sat up and played in the water, shrieking happily as it splashed all over the place. Malory fished his bronze crucifix out of the water and pressed it down on my head. “From this moment on,” he said, “you are one of God’s beloved sons. Hallelujah!” Then he picked up the water-laden loofah and squeezed it over my head. “Hallelujah!” Mother parroted Malory: “Hallelujah!” she said, and I laughed joyfully as the holy water bathed my head.
    Mother was beaming as she laid Eighth Sister in the basin with me, then picked up the loofah and gently washed us both as Pastor Malory ladled water over our heads. I shrieked happily with each ladleful, while Eighth Sister sobbed hoarsely. I kept grabbing my dark, scrawny twin.
    “They don’t have names yet,” Mother said. “That’s your job.”
    Pastor Malory put down his ladle. “This is nothing to be taken lightly. I need time to think.”
    “My mother-in-law said that if I have a boy I should call him Little Dog Shangguan,” Mother said. “He would grow up better with a humble name.”
    Pastor Malory shook his head vigorously. “No, that’s no good. Names like dog or cat are an affront to God. They also go against the teachings of Confucius, who said, ‘Without proper names, language cannot speak the truth.’“
    “I have one,” Mother said. “See what you think. We can call him Shangguan Amen.”
    Malory laughed. “That is even worse. Stop trying, and let me think.”
    Pastor Malory stood up, clasped his hands behind his back, and began pacing feverishly in the rank atmosphere of the run-down church. His quick steps were the outward manifestation of the churning in his head, through which all manner of names and symbols — ancient and modern, Chinese and Western, heavenly and mundane — flowed. As she observed his pacing, Mother smiled and said to me, “Look at your godfather. That’s no way to think up a name. He looks like he’s about to declare a death.” Humming to herself, Mother picked up Malory’s ladle, scooped up some water, and poured it over our heads.
    “I’ve got it!” he announced loudly as he stopped in his twenty-ninth trip to the closed front door of the church. “What will it be?” Mother asked excitedly. But before he could tell her, there was a clamor at the door. The noise of a crowd erupted, making the door rattle. Someone out there was shouting and carrying on. Mother stood up, seized with terror, the ladle still in her hand. Malory put his eye up to the crack in the door. At the time we didn’t know what was happening, but we saw his face redden, either from anger or nervousness, we didn’t know which. He turned to Mother. “Leave, quickly. To the courtyard out front.”
    Mother bent down to pick me up. She first threw away the ladle, of course, which bounced around noisily on the floor, like a bullfrog in mating season. Left behind in the basin, Eighth Sister began to bawl. The bolt snapped in two and clattered to the floor as the double doors burst open, and a shaven-headed young man holding a musket exploded into the church. He butted Malory in the chest, sending him reeling back all the way to the rear wall. A bare-bottomed angel was suspended above his head. When the door bolt clattered to the floor, I tumbled out of Mother’s arms and thudded back into