“Wah!” cried the mother upon seeing the mirrored armoire in the master suite of her daughter’s new condominium. “You cannot put mirrors at the foot of the bed. All your marriage happiness will bounce back and turn the opposite way.”
“Well, that’s the only place it fits, so that’s where it stays,” said the daughter, irritated that her mother saw bad omens in everything. She had heard these warnings all her life.
The mother frowned, reaching into her twice-used Macy’s bag. “Hunh, lucky I can fix it for you, then.” And she pulled out the gilt-edged mirror she had bought at the Price Club last week. It was her housewarming present. She leaned it against the headboard, on top of the two pillows.
“You hang it here,” said the mother, pointing to the wall above. “This mirror sees that mirrorโhaule!โmultiply your peach-blossom luck.”
“What is peach-blossom luck?”
The mother smiled, mischief in her eyes. “It is in here,” she said, pointing to the mirror. “Look inside. Tell me, am I not right? In this mirror is my future grandchild, already sitting on my lap next spring.”
And the daughter lookedโandย haule!There it was: her own reflection looking back at her.
Lena St. Clair
To this day, I believe my mother has the mysterious ability to see things before they happen. She has a Chinese saying for what she knows.ย Chunwang chihan:ย If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold. Which means, I suppose, one thing is always the result of another.
But she does not predict when earthquakes will come, or how the stock market will do. She sees only bad things that affect our family. And she knows what causes them. But now she laments that she never did anything to stop them.
One time when I was growing up in San Francisco, she looked at the way our new apartment sat too steeply on the hill. She said the new baby in her womb would fall out dead, and it did.
When a plumbing and bathroom fixtures store opened up across the street from our bank, my mother said the bank would soon have all its money drained away. And one month later, an officer of the bank was arrested for embezzlement.
And just after my father died last year, she said she knew this would happen. Because a philodendron plant my father had given her had withered and died, despite the fact that she watered it faithfully. She said the plant had damaged its roots and no water could get to it. The autopsy report she later received showed my father had had ninety-percent blockage of the arteries before he died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four. My father was not Chinese like my mother, but English-Irish American, who enjoyed his five slices of bacon and three eggs sunnyside up every morning.
I remember this ability of my mother’s, because now she is visiting my husband and me in the house we just bought in Woodside. And I wonder what she will see.
Harold and I were lucky to find this place, which is near the summit of Highway 9, then a left-right-left down three forks of unmarked dirt roads, unmarked because the residents always tear down the signs to keep out salesmen, developers, and city inspectors. We are only a forty-minute drive to my mother’s apartment in San Francisco. This became a sixty-minute ordeal coming back from San Francisco, when my mother was with us in the car. After we got to the two-lane winding road to the summit, she touched her hand gently to Harold’s shoulder and softly said, “Ai, tire squealing.” And then a little later, “Too much tear and wear on car.”
Harold had smiled and slowed down, but I could see his hands were clenched on the steering wheel of the Jaguar, as he glanced nervously in his rearview mirror at the line of impatient cars that was growing by the minute. And I was secretly glad to watch his discomfort. He was always the one who tailgated old ladies in their Buicks, honking his horn and revving the engine as if he would run them over unless they pulled over.
And at the same time, I hated myself for being mean-spirited, for thinking Harold deserved this torment. Yet I couldn’t help myself. I was mad at Harold and he was exasperated with me. That morning, before we picked my mother up, he had said, “You should pay for the exterminators, because Mirugai is your cat and so they’reย yourย fleas. It’s only fair.”
None of our friends could ever believe we fight over something as stupid as fleas, but they would also never believe that our problems are much, much deeper than that, so deep I don’t even know where bottom is.
And now that my mother is hereโshe is staying for a week, or until the electricians are done rewiring her building in San Franciscoโwe have to pretend nothing is the matter.
Meanwhile she asks over and over again why we had to pay so much for a renovated barn and a mildew-lined pool on four acres of land, two of which are covered with redwood trees and poison oak. Actually she doesn’t really ask, she just says, “Aii, so much money, so much,” as we show her different parts of the house and land. And her laments always compel Harold to explain to my mother in simple terms: “Well, you see, it’s the details that cost so much. Like this wood floor. It’s hand-bleached. And the walls here, this marbleized effect, it’s hand-sponged. It’s really worth it.”
And my mother nods and agrees: “Bleach and sponge cost so much.”
During our brief tour of the house, she’s already found the flaws. She says the slant of the floor makes her feel as if she is “running down.” She thinks the guest room where she will be stayingโwhich is really a former hayloft shaped by a sloped roofโhas “two lopsides.” She sees spiders in high corners and even fleas jumping up in the airโpah! pah! pah!โlike little spatters of hot oil. My mothers knows, underneath all the fancy details that cost so much, this house is still a barn.
She can see all this. And it annoys me that all she sees are the bad parts. But then I look around and everything she’s said is true. And this convinces me she can see what else is going on, between Harold and me. She knows what’s going to happen to us. Because I remember something else she saw when I was eight years old.
My mother had looked in my rice bowl and told me I would marry a bad man. “Aii, Lena,” she had said after that dinner so many years ago, “your future husband
have one pock mark for every rice you not finish.”
She put my bowl down. “I once know a pock-mark man. Mean man, bad man.”
And I thought of a mean neighbor boy who had tiny pits in his cheeks, and it was true, those marks were the size of rice grains. This boy was about twelve and his name was Arnold.
Arnold would shoot rubber bands at my legs whenever I walked past his building on my way home from school, and one time he ran over my doll with his bicycle, crushing her legs below the knees. I didn’t want this cruel boy to be my future husband. So I picked up that cold bowl of rice and scraped the last few grains into my mouth, then smiled at my mother, confident my future husband would be not Arnold but someone whose face was as smooth as the porcelain in my now clean bowl.
But my mother sighed. “Yesterday, you not finish rice either.” I thought of those unfinished mouthfuls of rice, and then the grains that lined my bowl the day before, and the day before that. By the minute, my eight-year-old heart grew more and more terror-stricken over the growing possibility that my future husband was fated to be this mean boy Arnold. And thanks to my poor eating habits, his hideous face would eventually resemble the craters of the moon.
This would have been a funny incident to remember from my childhood, but it is actually a memory I recall from time to time with a mixture of nausea and remorse. My loathing for Arnold had grown to such a point that I eventually found a way to make him die. I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have
been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether that’s true or not, I know theย intentionย was there. Because when I want something to happenโor not happenโI begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid. I found the opportunity. The same week my mother told me about the rice bowl and my future husband, I saw a shocking film at Sunday school. I remember the teacher had dimmed the lights so that all we could see were silhouettes of one another. Then the teacher looked at us, a roomful of squirmy, well-fed Chinese-American children, and she said, “This film will show you why you should give tithings to God, to do
God’s work.”
She said, “I want you to think about a nickel’s worth of candy money, or however much you eat each weekโyour Good and Plentys, your Necco wafers, your jujubesโand compare that to what you are about to see. And I also want you to think about what your true blessings in life really are.”
And then she set the film projector clattering away. The film showed missionaries in Africa and India. These good souls worked with people whose legs were swollen to the size of tree trunks, whose numb limbs had become as twisted as jungle vines. But the most terrible of the afflictions were men and women with leprosy. Their faces were covered with every kind of misery I could imagine: pits and pustules, cracks and bumps, and fissures that I was sure erupted with the same vehemence as snails writhing in a bed of salt. If my mother had been in the room, she would have told me these poor people were victims of future husbands and wives who had failed to eatย platefulsย of food.
After seeing this film, I did a terrible thing. I saw what I had to do so I would not have to marry Arnold. I began to leave more rice in my bowl. And then I extended my prodigal ways beyond Chinese food. I did not finish my creamed corn, broccoli, Rice Krispies, or peanut butter sandwiches. And once, when I bit into a candy bar and saw how lumpy it was, how full of secret dark spots and creamy goo, I sacrificed that as well.
I considered that probably nothing would happen to Arnold, that he might not get leprosy, move to Africa and die. And this somehow balanced the dark possibility that he might.
He didn’t die right away. In fact, it was some five years later, by which time I had become quite thin. I had stopped eating, not because of Arnold, whom I had long forgotten, but to be fashionably anorexic like all the other thirteen-year-old girls who were dieting and finding other ways to suffer as teenagers. I was sitting at the breakfast table, waiting for my mother to finish packing a sack lunch which I always promptly threw away as soon as I rounded the corner. My father was eating with his fingers, dabbing the ends of his bacon into the egg yolks with one hand, while holding the newspaper with the other.
“Oh my, listen to this,” he said, still dabbing. And that’s when he announced that Arnold Reisman, a boy who lived in our old neighborhood in Oakland, had died of complications from measles. He had just been accepted to Cal State Hayward and was planning to become a podiatrist.
“‘Doctors were at first baffled by the disease, which they report is extremely rare and generally attacks children between the ages of ten and twenty, months to years after they have contracted the measles virus,’ ” read my father. “‘The boy had had a mild case of the measles when he was twelve, reported his mother. Problems this
year were first noticed when the boy developed motor coordination problems and mental lethargy which increased until he fell into a coma. The boy, age seventeen, never regained consciousness.’
“Didn’t you know that boy?” asked my father, and I stood there mute. “This is shame,” said my mother, looking at me. “This is terrible shame.”
And I thought she could see through me and that she knew I was the one who had caused Arnold to die. I was terrified.
That night, in my room, I gorged myself. I had stolen a halfgallon of strawberry ice cream from the freezer, and I forced spoonful after spoonful down my throat. And later, for several hours after that, I sat hunched on the fire escape landing outside my bedroom, retching back into the ice cream container. And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.
The thought that I could have caused Arnold’s death is not so ridiculous. Perhaps heย wasย destined to be my husband. Because I think to myself, even today, how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites? Why did Arnold single me out for his rubber-band torture? How is it that he contracted measles the same year I began consciously to hate him? And why did I think of Arnold in the first placeโwhen my mother looked in my rice bowlโand then come to hate him so much? Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?
And even when I can finally dismiss all of this as ridiculous, I still feel that somehow, for the most part, we deserve what we get. I didn’t get Arnold. I got Harold. Harold and I work at the same architectural firm, Livotny & Associates. Only Harold Livotny is a partner and I am an associate. We met eight years ago, before he started Livotny & Associates. I was twenty-eight, a project assistant, and he was thirty-four.
We both worked in the restaurant design and development division of Harned Kelley & Davis.
We started seeing each other for working lunches, to talk about the projects, and we would always split the tab right in half, even though I usually ordered only a salad because I have this tendency to gain weight easily. Later, when we started meeting secretly for dinner, we still divided the bill.
And we just continued that way, everything right down the middle. If anything, I encouraged it. Sometimes I insisted on paying for the whole thing: meal, drinks, and tip. And it really didn’t bother me.
“Lena, you’re really extraordinary,” Harold said after six months of dinners, five months of post-prandial lovemaking, and one week of timid and silly love confessions. We were lying in bed, between new purple sheets I had just bought for him. His old set of white sheets was stained in revealing places, not very romantic.
And he nuzzled my neck and whispered, “I don’t think I’ve ever met another woman, who’s so togetherโฆ”โand I remember feeling a hiccup of fear upon hearing the words “another woman,” because I could imagine dozens, hundreds of adoring women eager to buy Harold breakfast, lunch, and dinner to feel the pleasure of his breath on their skin.
Then he bit my neck and said in a rush, “Nor anyone who’s as soft and squishy and lovable as you are.”
And with that, I swooned inside, caught off balance by this latest revelation of love, wondering how such a remarkable person as Harold could think I was extraordinary.
Now that I’m angry at Harold, it’s hard to remember what was so remarkable about him. And I know they’re there, the good qualities, because I wasn’t that stupid to fall in love with him, to marry him. All I can remember is how awfully lucky I felt, and consequently how worried I was that all this undeserved good fortune would someday slip away. When I fantasized about moving in with him, I also dredged up my deepest fears: that he would tell me I smelled bad, that I had terrible bathroom habits, that my taste in music and television was appalling. I worried that Harold would someday get a new prescription for his glasses and he’d put them on one morning, look me up and down, and say, “Why, gosh, you aren’t the girl I thought you were, are you?” And I think that feeling of fear never left me, that I would be caught someday, exposed as a sham of a woman. But recently, a friend of mine, Rose, who’s in therapy now because her marriage has already fallen apart, told me those kinds of thoughts
are commonplace in women like us.
“At first I thought it was because I was raised with all this Chinese humility,” Rose said. “Or that maybe it was because when you’re Chinese you’re supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves. But my therapist said, Why do you blame your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it’s all diminishing returns after a certain age.”
And after my talk with Rose, I felt better about myself and I thought, Of course, Harold and I are equals, in many respects. He’s not exactly handsome in the classic sense, although clear-skinned and certainly attractive in that wiry intellectual way. And I may not be a raving beauty, but a lot of women in my aerobics class tell me I’m “exotic” in an unusual way, and they’re jealous that my breasts don’t sag, now that small breasts are in. Plus, one of my clients said I have incredible vitality and exuberance.
So I think I deserve someone like Harold, and I mean in the good sense and not like bad karma. We’re equals. I’m also smart. I have common sense. And I’m intuitive, highly so. I was the one who told Harold he was good enough to start his own firm. When we were still working at Harned Kelley & Davis, I said, “Harold, this firm knows just what a good deal it has with you. You’re the goose who lays the golden egg. If you started your own business today, you’d walk away with more than half of
the restaurant clients.”
And he said, laughing, “Half? Boy, that’s love.”
And I shouted back, laughing with him, “More than half! You’re that good. You’re the best there is in restaurant design and development. You know it and I know it, and so do a lot of restaurant developers.”
That was the night he decided to “go for it,” as he put it, which is a phrase I have personally detested ever since a bank I used to work for adopted the slogan for its employee productivity contest.
But still, I said to Harold, “Harold, I want to help you go for it, too. I mean, you’re going to need money to start this business.”
He wouldn’t hear of taking any money from me, not as a favor, not as a loan, not as an investment, or even as the down payment on a partnership. He said he valued
our relationship too much. He didn’t want to contaminate it with money. He explained, “I wouldn’t want a handout any more than you’d want one. As long as we keep the money thing separate, we’ll always be sure of our love for each other.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted to say, “No! I’m not really this way about money, the way we’ve been doing it. I’m really into giving freely. I wantโฆ” But I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted to ask him who, what woman, had hurt him this way, that made him so scared about accepting love in all its wonderful forms. But then I heard him saying what I’d been waiting to hear for a long, long time.
“Actually, you could help me out if you moved in with me. I mean, that way I could use the five hundred dollars’ rent you paid to meโฆ”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” I said immediately, knowing how embarrassed he was to have to ask me that way. I was so deliriously happy that it didn’t matter that the rent on my studio was really only four hundred thirty-five. Besides, Harold’s place was much nicer, a two-bedroom flat with a two-hundred-forty-degree view of the bay. It was worth the extra money, no matter whom I shared the place with.
So within the year, Harold and I quit Harned Kelley & Davis and he started Livotny & Associates, and I went to work there as a project coordinator. And no, he didn’t get half the restaurant clients of Harned Kelley & Davis. In fact, Harned Kelley & Davis threatened to sue if he walked away with even one client over the next year. So I gave him pep talks in the evening when he was discouraged. I told him how he should do more avantgarde thematic restaurant design, to differentiate himself from the other firms.
“Who needs another brass and oakwood bar and grill?” I said. “Who wants another pasta place in sleek Italian moderno? How many places can you go to with police cars lurching out of the walls? This town is chockablock with restaurants that are just clones of the same old themes. You can find a niche. Do something different every time. Get the Hong Kong investors who are willing to sink some bucks into American ingenuity.”
He gave me his adoring smile, the one that said, “I love it when you’re so naive.” And I adored his looking at me like that.
So I stammered out my love. “Youโฆyouโฆcould do new theme eating placesโฆaโฆaโฆHome on the Range! All the home-cooked mom stuff, mom at the kitchen range with a gingham apron and mom waitresses leaning over telling you to finish your soup.
“And maybeโฆmaybe you could do a novel-menu restaurantโฆfoods from fictionโฆsandwiches from Lawrence Sanders murder mysteries, just desserts from Nora Ephron’sย Heartburn. And something else with a magic theme, or jokes and gags, orโฆ”
Harold actually listened to me. He took those ideas and he applied them in an educated, methodical way. He made it happen. But still, I remember, it was my idea.
And today Livotny & Associates is a growing firm of twelve full-time people, which specializes in thematic restaurant design, what I still like to call “theme eating.” Harold is the concept man, the chief architect, the designer, the person who makes the final sales presentation to a new client. I work under the interior designer, because, as Harold explains, it would not seem fair to the other employees if he promoted me just because we are now marriedโthat was five years ago, two years after he started Livotny & Associates. And even though I am very good at what I do, I have never been formally trained in this area. When I was majoring in Asian-American
studies, I took only one relevant course, in theater set design, for a college production ofย Madama Butterfly.
At Livotny & Associates, I procure the theme elements. For one restaurant called The Fisherman’s Tale, one of my prized findings was a yellow varnished wood boat stenciled with the name “Overbored,” and I was the one who thought the menus should dangle from miniature fishing poles, and the napkins be printed with rulers that have inches translating into feet. For a Lawrence of Arabia deli called Tray Sheik, I was the one who thought the place should have a bazaar effect, and I found the replicas of cobras lying on fake Hollywood boulders.
I love my work when I don’t think about it too much. And when I do think about it, how much I get paid, how hard I work, how fair Harold is to everybody except me, I get upset.
So really, we’re equals, except that Harold makes about seven times more than what I make. He knows this, too, because he signs my monthly check, and then I deposit it into my separate checking account.
Lately, however, this business about being equals started to bother me. It’s been on my mind, only I didn’t really know it. I just felt a little uneasy aboutย something. And then about a week ago, it all became clear. I was putting the breakfast dishes away and Harold was warming up the car so we could go to work. And I saw the newspaper spread open on the kitchen counter, Harold’s glasses on top, his favorite coffee mug with the chipped handle off to the side. And for some reason, seeing all these little domestic signs of familiarity, our daily ritual, made me swoon inside. But it was as if I were seeing Harold the first time we made love, this feeling of surrendering everything to him, with abandon, without caring what I got in return.
And when I got into the car, I still had the glow of that feeling and I touched his hand and said, “Harold, I love you.” And he looked in the rearview mirror, backing up the car, and said, “I love you, too. Did you lock the door?” And just like that, I started to think, It’s just not enough.
Harold jingles the car keys and says, “I’m going down the hill to buy stuff for dinner. Steaks okay? Want anything special?”
“We’re out of rice,” I say, discreetly nodding toward my mother, whose back is turned to me. She’s looking out the kitchen window, at the trellis of bougainvillea. And then Harold is out the door and I hear the deep rumble of the car and then the sound of crunching gravel as he drives away.
My mother and I are alone in the house. I start to water the plants. She is standing on her tiptoes, peering at a list stuck on our refrigerator door.
The list says “Lena” and “Harold” and under each of our names are things we’ve bought and how much they cost:
Lenu
- chicken, veg., bread, broccoli, shampoo, beer $19.63
- Maria (clean + tip) $65 groceries
- (see shop list) $55.15
- petunias, potting soil $14.11
- Photo developing $13.83
Harold
- Garage stuff $25.35 Bathroom stuff $5.41 Car stuff $6.57
- Light Fixtures $87.26 Road gravel $19.99
- Gas $22.00
- Car Smog Check $35 Movies & Dinner $65
- Ice Cream $4.50
The way things are going this week, Harold’s already spent over a hundred dollars more, so I’ll owe him around fifty from my checking account.
“What is this writing?” asks my mother in Chinese.
“Oh, nothing really. Just things we share,” I say as casually as I can.
And she looks at me and frowns but doesn’t say anything. She goes back to reading the list, this time more carefully, moving her finger down each item.
And I feel embarrassed, knowing what she’s seeing. I’m relieved that she doesn’t see the other half of it, the discussions. Through countless talks, Harold and I reached an understanding about not including personal things like “mascara,” and “shaving lotion,” “hair spray” or “Bic shavers,” “tampons,” or “athlete’s foot powder.”
When we got married at city hall, he insisted on paying the fee. I got my friend Robert to take photos. We held a party at our apartment and everybody brought champagne. And when we bought the house, we agreed that I should pay only a percentage of the mortgage based on what I earn and what he earns, and that I should own an equivalent percentage of community property; this is written in our prenuptial agreement. Since Harold pays more, he had the deciding vote on how the house should look. It is sleek, spare, and what he calls “fluid,” nothing to disrupt the line, meaning none of my cluttered look. As for vacations, the one we choose together is fifty-fifty. The others Harold pays for, with the understanding that it’s a birthday or Christmas present, or an anniversary gift.
And we’ve had philosophical arguments over things that have gray borders, like my birth control pills, or dinners at home when we entertain people who are really his clients or my old friends from college, or food magazines that I subscribe to but he also reads only because he’s bored, not because he would have chosen them for himself.
And we still argue about Mirugai,ย theย catโnot our cat, or my cat, butย theย cat that was his gift to me for my birthday last year.
“This, you do not share!” exclaims my mother in an astonished voice. And I am startled, thinking she had read my thoughts about Mirugai. But then I see she is pointing to “ice cream” on Harold’s list. My mother must remember the incident on the fire escape landing, where she found me, shivering and exhausted, sitting next to that container of regurgitated ice cream. I could never stand the stuff after that. And then I am startled once again to realize that Harold has never noticed that I don’t eat any of the ice cream he brings home every Friday evening.
“Why you do this?”
My mother has a wounded sound in her voice, as if I had put the list up to hurt her. I think how to explain this, recalling the words Harold and I have used with each other in the past: “So we can eliminate false dependenciesโฆbe equalsโฆlove without obligationโฆ” But these are words she could never understand.
So instead I tell my mother this: “I don’t really know. It’s something we started before we got married. And for some reason we never stopped.”
When Harold returns from the store, he starts the charcoal. I unload the groceries, marinate the steaks, cook the rice, and set the table. My mother sits on a stool at the granite counter, drinking from a mug of coffee I’ve poured for her. Every few minutes she wipes the bottom of the mug with a tissue she keeps stuffed in her sweater sleeve.
During dinner, Harold keeps the conversation going. He talks about the plans for the house: the skylights, expanding the deck, planting flower beds of tulips and crocuses, clearing the poison oak, adding another wing, building a Japanese-style tile bathroom. And then he clears the table and starts stacking the plates in the dishwasher.
“Who’s ready for dessert?” he asks, reaching into the freezer. “I’m full,” I say.
“Lena cannot eat ice cream,” says my mother. “So it seems. She’s always on a diet.”
“No, she never eat it. She doesn’t like.”
And now Harold smiles and looks at me puzzled, expecting me to translate what my mother has said.
“It’s true,” I say evenly. “I’ve hated ice cream almost all my life.”
Harold looks at me, as if I, too, were speaking Chinese and he could not understand. “I guess I assumed you were just trying to lose weightโฆ. Oh well.”
“She become so thin now you cannot see her,” says my mother. “She like a ghost, disappear.”
“That’s right! Christ, that’s great,” exclaims Harold, laughing, relieved in thinking my mother is graciously trying to rescue him.
After dinner, I put clean towels on the bed in the guest room. My mother is sitting on the bed. The room has Harold’s minimalist look to it: the twin bed with plain white sheets and white blanket, polished wood floors, a bleached oakwood chair, and nothing on the slanted gray walls.
The only decoration is an odd-looking piece right next to the bed: an end table made out of a slab of unevenly cut marble and thin crisscrosses of black lacquer wood for the legs. My mother puts her handbag on the table and the cylindrical black vase on top starts to wobble. The freesias in the vase quiver.
“Careful, it’s not too sturdy,” I say. The table is a poorly designed piece that Harold made in his student days. I’ve always wondered why he’s so proud of it. The lines are clumsy. It doesn’t bear any of the traits of “fluidity” that are so important to Harold these days.
“What use for?” asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. “You put something else on top, everything fall down.ย Chunwang chihan.”
I leave my mother in her room and go back downstairs. Harold is opening the windows to let the night air in. He does this every evening.
“I’m cold,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“Could you close the windows, please.”
He looks at me, sighs and smiles, pulls the windows shut, and then sits down cross-legged on the floor and flips open a magazine. I’m sitting on the sofa, seething, and I don’t know why. It’s not that Harold has done anything wrong. Harold is just Harold.
And before I even do it, I know I’m starting a fight that is bigger than I know how to handle. But I do it anyway. I go to the refrigerator and I cross out “ice cream” on Harold’s side of the list.
“What’s going on here?”
“I just don’t think you should get credit forย yourย ice cream anymore.” He shrugs his shoulders, amused. “Suits me.”
“Why do you have to be so goddamn fair!” I shout.
Harold puts his magazine down, now wearing his openmouthed exasperated look. “What is this? Why don’t you say what’s really the matter?”
“I don’t knowโฆ. I don’t know. Everythingโฆthe way we account for everything. What we share. What we don’t share. I’m so tired of it, adding things up, subtracting, making it come out even. I’m sick of it.”
“You were the one who wanted the cat.” “What are you talking about?”
“All right. If you think I’m being unfair about the exterminators, we’ll both pay for it.”
“That’s not the point!”
“Then tell me,ย please, what is the point?”
I start to cry, which I know Harold hates. It always makes him uncomfortable, angry. He thinks it’s manipulative. But I can’t help it, because I realize now that I don’t know what the point of this argument is. Am I asking Harold to support me? Am I asking to pay less than half? Do I really think we should stop accounting for everything? Wouldn’t we continue to tally things up in our head? Wouldn’t Harold wind up paying more? And then wouldn’t I feel worse, less than equal? Or maybe we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. Maybe Harold is a bad man. Maybe I’ve made him this way.
None of it seems right. Nothing makes sense. I can admit to nothing and I am in complete despair.
“I just think we have to change things,” I say when I think I can control my voice. Only the rest comes out like whining. “We need to think about what our marriage is really based onโฆnot this balance sheet, who owes who what.”
“Shit,” Harold says. And then he sighs and leans back, as if he were thinking about this. Finally he says in what sounds like a hurt voice, “Well, I know our marriage is based on a lot more than a balance sheet. A lot more. And if you don’t then I think you should think about what else you want, before you change things.”
And now I don’t know what to think. What am I saying? What’s he saying? We sit in the room, not saying anything. The air feels muggy. I look out the window, and out in the distance is the valley beneath us, a sprinkling of thousands of lights shimmering in the summer fog. And then I hear the sound of glass shattering, upstairs, and a chair scrapes across a wood floor.
Harold starts to get up, but I say, “No, I’ll go see.”
The door is open, but the room is dark, so I call out, “Ma?”
I see it right away: the marble end table collapsed on top of its spindly black legs. Off to the side is the black vase, the smooth cylinder broken in half, the freesias strewn in a puddle of water.
And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can’t see her face.
“Fallen down,” she says simply. She doesn’t apologize.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. “I knew it would happen.”
“Then why you don’t stop it?” asks my mother. And it’s such a simple question.
Waverly Jong
I had taken my mother out to lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant in hopes of putting her in a good mood, but it was a disaster.
When we met at the Four Directions Restaurant, she eyed me with immediate disapproval. “Ai-ya!ย What’s the matter with your hair?” she said in Chinese.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s the matter,’ ” I said. “I had it cut.” Mr. Rory had styled my hair differently this time, an asymmetrical blunt-line fringe that was shorter on the left side. It was fashionable, yet not radically so.
“Looks chopped off,” she said. “You must ask for your money back.” I sighed. “Let’s just have a nice lunch together, okay?”
She wore her tight-lipped, pinched-nose look as she scanned the menu, muttering, “Not too many good things, this menu.” Then she tapped the waiter’s arm, wiped the length of her chopsticks with her finger, and sniffed: “This greasy thing, do you expect me to eat with it?” She made a show of washing out her rice bowl with hot tea, and then warned other restaurant patrons seated near us to do the same. She told the waiter to make sure the soup was very hot, and of course, it was by her tongue’s expert estimate “not evenย lukewarm.”
“You shouldn’t get so upset,” I said to my mother after she disputed a charge of two extra dollars because she had specified chrysanthemum tea, instead of the regular green tea. “Besides, unnecessary stress isn’t good for your heart.”
“Nothing is wrong with my heart,” she huffed as she kept a disparaging eye on the waiter.
And she was right. Despite all the tension she places on herselfโand othersโthe doctors have proclaimed that my mother, at age sixty-nine, has the blood pressure of a sixteen-year-old and the strength of a horse. And that’s what she is. A Horse, born in 1918, destined to be obstinate and frank to the point of tactlessness. She and I make a bad combination, because I’m a Rabbit, born in 1951, supposedly sensitive, with tendencies toward being thin-skinned and skittery at the first sign of criticism.
After our miserable lunch, I gave up the idea that there would ever be a good time to tell her the news: that Rich Schields and I were getting married.
“Why are you so nervous?” my friend Marlene Ferber had asked over the phone the other night. “It’s not as if Rich is the scum of the earth. He’s a tax attorney like you, for Chrissake. How can she criticize that?”
“You don’t know my mother,” I said. “She never thinks anybody is good enough for anything.”
“So elope with the guy,” said Marlene.
“That’s what I did with Marvin.” Marvin was my first husband, my high school sweetheart.
“So there you go,” said Marlene.
“So when my mother found out, she threw her shoe at us,” I said. “And that was just for openers.”
My mother had never met Rich. In fact, every time I brought up his nameโwhen I said, for instance, that Rich and I had gone to the symphony, that Rich had taken
my four-year-old daughter, Shoshana, to the zooโmy mother found a way to change the subject.
“Did I tell you,” I said as we waited for the lunch bill at Four Directions, “what a great time Shoshana had with Rich at the Exploratorium? Heโ”
“Oh,” interrupted my mother, “I didn’t tell you. Your father, doctors say maybe need exploratory surgery. But no, now they say everything normal, just too much constipated.” I gave up. And then we did the usual routine.
I paid for the bill, with a ten and three ones. My mother pulled back the dollar bills and counted out exact change, thirteen cents, and put that on the tray instead, explaining firmly: “No tip!” She tossed her head back with a triumphant smile. And while my mother used the restroom, I slipped the waiter a five-dollar bill. He nodded to me with deep understanding. While she was gone, I devised another plan.
“Choszle!“โStinks to death in there!โmuttered my mother when she returned. She nudged me with a little travel package of Kleenex. She did not trust other people’s toilet paper. “Do you need to use?”
I shook my head. “But before I drop you off, let’s stop at my place real quick.
There’s something I want to show you.”
My mother had not been to my apartment in months. When I was first married, she used to drop by unannounced, until one day I suggested she should call ahead of time. Ever since then, she has refused to come unless I issue an official invitation.
And so I watched her, seeing her reaction to the changes in my apartmentโfrom the pristine habitat I maintained after the divorce, when all of a sudden I had too much time to keep my life in orderโto this present chaos, a home full of life and love. The hallway floor was littered with Shoshana’s toys, all bright plastic things with scattered parts. There was a set of Rich’s barbells in the living room, two dirty snifters on the coffee table, the disemboweled remains of a phone that Shoshana and Rich took apart the other day to see where the voices came from.
“It’s back here,” I said. We kept walking, all the way to the back bedroom. The bed was unmade, dresser drawers were hanging out with socks and ties spilling over. My mother stepped over running shoes, more of Shoshana’s toys, Rich’s black loafers, my scarves, a stack of white shirts just back from the cleaner’s.
Her look was one of painful denial, reminding me of a time long ago when she took my brothers and me down to a clinic to get our polio booster shots. As the needle went into my brother’s arm and he screamed, my mother looked at me with agony written all over her face and assured me, “Next one doesn’t hurt.”
But now, how could my motherย notย notice that we were living together, that this was serious and would not go away even if she didn’t talk about it? She had to say something.
I went to the closet and then came back with a mink jacket that Rich had given me for Christmas. It was the most extravagant gift I had ever received.
I put the jacket on. “It’s sort of a silly present,” I said nervously. “It’s hardly ever cold enough in San Francisco to wear mink. But it seems to be a fad, what people are buying their wives and girlfriends these days.”
My mother was quiet. She was looking toward my open closet, bulging with racks of shoes, ties, my dresses, and Rich’s suits. She ran her fingers over the mink. “This is not so good,” she said at last. “It is just leftover strips. And the fur
is too short, no long hairs.”
“How can you criticize a gift!” I protested. I was deeply wounded. “He gave me this from his heart.”
“That is why I worry,” she said.
And looking at the coat in the mirror, I couldn’t fend off the strength of her will anymore, her ability to make me see black where there was once white, white where there was once black. The coat looked shabby, an imitation of romance.
“Aren’t you going to say anything else?” I asked softly. “What I should say?”
“About the apartment? Aboutย this?” I gestured to all the signs of Rich lying about. She looked around the room, toward the hall, and finally she said, “You have career.
You are busy. You want to live like mess what I can say?”
My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory. I still remember the first time I felt it.
 |
I was ten years old. Even though I was young, I knew my ability to play chess was a gift. It was effortless, so easy. I could see things on the chessboard that other people could not. I could create barriers to protect myself that were invisible to my opponents. And this gift gave me supreme confidence. I knew what my opponents would do, move for move. I knew at exactly what point their faces would fall when my seemingly simple and childlike strategy would reveal itself as a devastating and irrevocable course. I loved to win.
And my mother loved to show me off, like one of my many trophies she polished.
She used to discuss my games as if she had devised the strategies.
“I told my daughter, Use your horses to run over the enemy,” she informed one shopkeeper. “She won very quickly this way.” And of course, she had said this before the gameโthat and a hundred other useless things that had nothing to do with my winning.
To our family friends who visited she would confide, “You don’t have to be so smart to win chess. It is just tricks. You blow from the North, South, East, and West. The other person becomes confused. They don’t know which way to run.”
I hated the way she tried to take all the credit. And one day I told her so, shouting at her on Stockton Street, in the middle of a crowd of people. I told her she didn’t know anything, so she shouldn’t show off. She should shut up. Words to that effect. That evening and the next day she wouldn’t speak to me. She would say stiff words to my father and brothers, as if I had become invisible and she was talking about
a rotten fish she had thrown away but which had left behind its bad smell.
I knew this strategy, the sneaky way to get someone to pounce back in anger and fall into a trap. So I ignored her. I refused to speak and waited for her to come to me.
After many days had gone by in silence, I sat in my room, staring at the sixty-four squares of my chessboard, trying to think of another way. And that’s when I decided to quit playing chess.
Of course I didn’t mean to quit forever. At most, just for a few days. And I made a show of it. Instead of practicing in my room every night, as I always did, I marched into the living room and sat down in front of the television set with my brothers,
who stared at me, an unwelcome intruder. I used my brothers to further my plan; I cracked my knuckles to annoy them.
“Ma!” they shouted. “Make her stop. Make her go away.” But my mother did not say anything.
Still I was not worried. But I could see I would have to make a stronger move. I decided to sacrifice a tournament that was coming up in one week. I would refuse to play in it. And my mother would certainly have to speak to me about this. Because the sponsors and the benevolent associations would start calling her, asking, shouting, pleading to make me play again.
And then the tournament came and went. And she did not come to me, crying, “Why are you not playing chess?” But I was crying inside, because I learned that a boy whom I had easily defeated on two other occasions had won.
I realized my mother knew more tricks than I had thought. But now I was tired of her game. I wanted to start practicing for the next tournament. So I decided to pretend to let her win. I would be the one to speak first.
“I am ready to play chess again,” I announced to her. I had imagined she would smile and then ask me what special thing I wanted to eat.
But instead, she gathered her face into a frown and stared into my eyes, as if she could force some kind of truth out of me.
“Why do you tell me this?” she finally said in sharp tones. “You think it is so easy. One day quit, next day play. Everything for you is this way. So smart, so easy, so fast.”
“I said I’ll play,” I whined.
“No!” she shouted, and I almost jumped out of my scalp. “It is not so easy anymore.” I was quivering, stunned by what she said, in not knowing what she meant. And then
I went back to my room. I stared at my chessboard, its sixty-four squares, to figure out how to undo this terrible mess. And after staring like this for many hours, I actually believed that I had made the white squares black and the black squares white, and everything would be all right.
And sure enough, I won her back. That night I developed a high fever, and she sat next to my bed, scolding me for going to school without my sweater. In the morning she was there as well, feeding me rice porridge flavored with chicken broth she had strained herself. She said she was feeding me this because I had the chicken pox and one chicken knew how to fight another. And in the afternoon, she sat in a chair in my room, knitting me a pink sweater while telling me about a sweater that Auntie Suyuan had knit for her daughter June, and how it was most unattractive and of the worst yarn. I was so happy that she had become her usual self.
But after I got well, I discovered that, really, my mother had changed. She no longer hovered over me as I practiced different chess games. She did not polish my trophies every day. She did not cut out the small newspaper item that mentioned my name. It was as if she had erected an invisible wall and I was secretly groping each day to see how high and how wide it was.
At my next tournament, while I had done well overall, in the end the points were not enough. I lost. And what was worse, my mother said nothing. She seemed to walk around with this satisfied look, as if it had happened because she had devised this strategy.
I was horrified. I spent many hours every day going over in my mind what I had lost. I knew it was not just the last tournament. I examined every move, every piece, every square. And I could no longer see the secret weapons of each piece, the magic within the intersection of each square. I could see only my mistakes, my weaknesses. It was as though I had lost my magic armor. And everybody could see this, where it was easy to attack me.
Over the next few weeks and later months and years, I continued to play, but never with that same feeling of supreme confidence. I fought hard, with fear and desperation. When I won, I was grateful, relieved. And when I lost, I was filled with growing dread, and then terror that I was no longer a prodigy, that I had lost the gift and had turned into someone quite ordinary.
When I lost twice to the boy whom I had defeated so easily a few years before, I stopped playing chess altogether. And nobody protested. I was fourteen.
|
“You know, I really don’t understand you,” said Marlene when I called her the night after I had shown my mother the mink jacket. “You can tell the IRS to piss up a rope, but you can’t stand up to your own mother.”
“I always intend to and then she says these little sneaky things, smoke bombs and little barbs, andโฆ”
“Why don’t you tell her to stop torturing you,” said Marlene. “Tell her to stop ruining your life. Tell her to shut up.”
“That’s hilarious,” I said with a half-laugh. “You want me to tell my mother to shut up?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s explicitly stated in the law, but you can’tย everย tell a Chinese mother to shut up. You could be charged as an accessory to your own murder.” I wasn’t so much afraid of my mother as I was afraid for Rich. I already knew what she would do, how she would attack him, how she would criticize him. She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, one from this direction, another from behind, more and more, until his looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away. And even if I recognized her strategy, her sneak attack, I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into
someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections.
This happened to my first marriage, to Marvin Chen, with whom I had eloped when I was eighteen and he was nineteen. When I was in love with Marvin, he was nearly perfect. He graduated third in his class at Lowell and got a full scholarship to Stanford. He played tennis. He had bulging calf muscles and one hundred forty-six straight black hairs on his chest. He made everyone laugh and his own laugh was deep, sonorous, masculinely sexy. He prided himself on having favorite love positions for different days and hours of the week; all he had to whisper was “Wednesday afternoon” and I’d shiver.
But by the time my mother had had her say about him, I saw his brain had shrunk from laziness, so that now it was good only for thinking up excuses. He chased golf and tennis balls to run away from family responsibilities. His eye wandered up and
down other girls’ legs, so he didn’t know how to drive straight home anymore. He liked to tell big jokes to make other people feel little. He made a loud show of leaving ten-dollar tips to strangers but was stingy with presents to family. He thought waxing his red sports car all afternoon was more important than taking his wife somewhere in it.
My feelings for Marvin never reached the level of hate. No, it was worse in a way. It went from disappointment to contempt to apathetic boredom. It wasn’t until after we separated, on nights when Shoshana was asleep and I was lonely, that I wondered if perhaps my mother had poisoned my marriage.
Thank God, her poison didn’t affect my daughter, Shoshana. I almost aborted her, though. When I found out I was pregnant, I was furious. I secretly referred to my pregnancy as my “growing resentment,” and I dragged Marvin down to the clinic so he would have to suffer through this too. It turned out we went to the wrong kind of clinic. They made us watch a film, a terrible bit of puritanical brainwash. I saw those little things, babies they called them even at seven weeks, and they had tiny, tiny fingers. And the film said that the baby’s translucent fingers couldย move, that we should imagine them clinging for life, grasping for a chance, this miracle of life. If they had shownย anything elseย except tiny fingersโso thank God they did. Because Shoshana really was a miracle. She was perfect. I found every detail about her to be remarkable, especially the way she flexed and curled her fingers. From the very moment she flung her fist away from her mouth to cry, I knew my feelings for her were inviolable.
But I worried for Rich. Because I knew my feelings for him were vulnerable to being felled by my mother’s suspicions, passing remarks, and innuendos. And I was afraid of what I would then lose, because Rich Schields adored me in the same way I adored Shoshana. His love was unequivocal. Nothing could change it. He expected nothing from me; my mere existence was enough. And at the same time, he said that he had changedโfor theย betterโbecause of me. He was embarrassingly romantic; he insisted he never was until he met me. And this confession made his romantic gestures all the more ennobling. At work, for example, when he would staple “FYIโFor Your Information” notes to legal briefs and corporate returns that I had to review, he signed them at the bottom: “FYIโForever You & I.” The firm didn’t know about our relationship, and so that kind of reckless behavior on his part thrilled me.
The sexual chemistry was what really surprised me, though. I thought he’d be one of those quiet types who was awkwardly gentle and clumsy, the kind of mild-mannered guy who says, “Am I hurting you?” when I can’t feel a thing. But he was so attuned to my every movement I was sure he was reading my mind. He had no inhibitions, and whatever ones he discovered I had he’d pry away from me like little treasures. He saw all those private aspects of meโand I mean not just sexual private parts, but my darker side, my meanness, my pettiness, my self-loathingโall the things I kept hidden. So that with him I was completely naked, and when I was, when I was feeling the most vulnerableโwhen the wrong word would have sent me flying out the door foreverโhe always said exactly the right thing at the right moment. He didn’t allow me to cover myself up. He would grab my hands, look me straight in the eye and tell me something new about why he loved me.
I’d never known love so pure, and I was afraid that it would become sullied by my mother. So I tried to store every one of these endearments about Rich in my memory, and I planned to call upon them again when the time was necessary.
After much thought, I came up with a brilliant plan. I concocted a way for Rich to meet my mother and win her over. In fact, I arranged it so my mother would want to cook a meal especially for him. I had some help from Auntie Suyuan. Auntie Su was my mother’s friend from way back. They were very close, which meant they were ceaselessly tormenting each other with boasts and secrets. And I gave Auntie Su a secret to boast about.
After walking through North Beach one Sunday, I suggested to Rich that we stop by for a surprise visit to my Auntie Su and Uncle Canning. They lived on Leavenworth, just a few blocks west of my mother’s apartment. It was late afternoon, just in time to catch Auntie Su preparing Sunday dinner.
“Stay! Stay!” she had insisted.
“No, no. It’s just that we were walking by,” I said.
“Already cooked enough for you. See? One soup, four dishes. You don’t eat it, only have to throw it away. Wasted!”
How could we refuse? Three days later, Auntie Suyuan had a thank-you letter from Rich and me. “Rich said it was the best Chinese food he has ever tasted,” I wrote. And the next day, my mother called me, to invite me to a belated birthday dinner for my father. My brother Vincent was bringing his girlfriend, Lisa Lum. I could bring
a friend, too.
I knew she would do this, because cooking was how my mother expressed her love, her pride, her power, her proof that she knew more than Auntie Su. “Just be sure to tell her later that her cooking was the best you ever tasted, that it was far better than Auntie Su’s,” I told Rich. “Believe me.”
The night of the dinner, I sat in the kitchen watching her cook, waiting for the right moment to tell her about our marriage plans, that we had decided to get married next July, about seven months away. She was chopping eggplant into wedges, chattering at the same time about Auntie Suyuan: “She can only cook looking at a recipe. My instructions are in my fingers. I know what secret ingredients to put in just by using my nose!” And she was slicing with such a ferocity, seemingly inattentive to her sharp cleaver, that I was afraid her fingertips would become one of the ingredients of the red-cooked eggplant and shredded pork dish.
I was hoping she would say something first about Rich. I had seen her expression when she opened the door, her forced smile as she scrutinized him from head to toe, checking her appraisal of him against that already given to her by Auntie Suyuan. I tried to anticipate what criticisms she would have.
Rich was not onlyย notย Chinese, he was a few years younger than I was. And unfortunately, he looked much younger with his curly red hair, smooth pale skin, and the splash of orange freckles across his nose. He was a bit on the short side, compactly built. In his dark business suits, he looked nice but easily forgettable, like somebody’s nephew at a funeral. Which was why I didn’t notice him the first year we worked together at the firm. But my mother noticed everything.
“So what do you think of Rich?” I finally asked, holding my breath.
She tossed the eggplant in the hot oil and it made a loud, angry hissing sound. “So many spots on his face,” she said.
I could feel the pinpricks on my back. “They’re freckles. Freckles are good luck, you know,” I said a bit too heatedly in trying to raise my voice above the din of the kitchen.
“Oh?” she said innocently.
“Yes, the more spots the better. Everybody knows that.”
She considered this a moment and then smiled and spoke in Chinese: “Maybe this is true. When you were young, you got the chicken pox. So many spots, you had to stay home for ten days. So lucky, you thought.”
I couldn’t save Rich in the kitchen. And I couldn’t save him later at the dinner table.
He had brought a bottle of French wine, something he did not know my parents could not appreciate. My parents did not even own wineglasses. And then he also made the mistake of drinking not one but two frosted glasses full, while everybody else had a half-inch “just for taste.”
When I offered Rich a fork, he insisted on using the slippery ivory chopsticks. He held them splayed like the knock-kneed legs of an ostrich while picking up a large chunk of sauce-coated eggplant. Halfway between his plate and his open mouth, the chunk fell on his crisp white shirt and then slid into his crotch. It took several minutes to get Shoshana to stop shrieking with laughter.
And then he had helped himself to big portions of the shrimp and snow peas, not realizing he should have taken only a polite spoonful, until everybody had had a morsel.
He had declined the saut ้ d new greens, the tender and expensive leaves of bean plants plucked before the sprouts turn into beans. And Shoshana refused to eat them also, pointing to Rich: “He didn’t eat them! He didn’t eat them!”
He thought he was being polite by refusing seconds, when he should have followed my father’s example, who made a big show of taking small portions of seconds, thirds, and even fourths, always saying he could not resist another bite of something or other, and then groaning that he was so full he thought he would burst.
But the worst was when Rich criticized my mother’s cooking, and he didn’t even know what he had done. As is the Chinese cook’s custom, my mother always made disparaging remarks about her own cooking. That night she chose to direct it toward her famous steamed pork and preserved vegetable dish, which she always served with special pride.
“Ai! This dish not salty enough, no flavor,” she complained, after tasting a small bite. “It is too bad to eat.”
This was our family’s cue to eat some and proclaim it the best she had ever made. But before we could do so, Rich said, “You know, all it needs is a little soy sauce.” And he proceeded to pour a riverful of the salty black stuff on the platter, right before my mother’s horrified eyes.
And even though I was hoping throughout the dinner that my mother would somehow see Rich’s kindness, his sense of humor and boyish charm, I knew he had failed miserably in her eyes.
Rich obviously had had a different opinion on how the evening had gone. When we got home that night, after we put Shoshana to bed, he said modestly, “Well. I think we hit it offย A-o-kay.” He had the look of a dalmatian, panting, loyal, waiting to be petted.
“Uh-hmm,” I said. I was putting on an old nightgown, a hint that I was not feeling amorous. I was still shuddering, remembering how Rich had firmly shaken both my parents’ hands with that same easy familiarity he used with nervous new clients. “Linda, Tim,” he said, “we’ll see you again soon, I’m sure.” My parents’ names are Lindo and Tin Jong, and nobody, except a few older family friends, ever calls them by their first names.
“So what did she say when you told her?” And I knew he was referring to our getting married. I had told Rich earlier that I would tell my mother first and let her break the news to my father.
“I never had a chance,” I said, which was true. How could I have told my mother I was getting married, when at every possible moment we were alone, she seemed to remark on how much expensive wine Rich liked to drink, or how pale and ill he looked, or how sad Shoshana seemed to be.
Rich was smiling. “How long does it take to say, Mom, Dad, I’m getting married?” “You don’t understand. You don’t understand my mother.”
Rich shook his head. “Whew! You can say that again. Her English wasย soย bad. You know, when she was talking about that dead guy showing up onย Dynasty, I thought she was talking about something that happened in China a long time ago.”
|
That night, after the dinner, I lay in bed, tense. I was despairing over this latest failure, made worse by the fact that Rich seemed blind to it all. He looked so pathetic.ย So pathetic, those words! My mother was doing it again, making me see black where I once saw white. In her hands, I always became the pawn. I could only run away. And she was the queen, able to move in all directions, relentless in her pursuit, always able to find my weakest spots.
I woke up late, with teeth clenched and every nerve on edge. Rich was already up, showered, and reading the Sunday paper. “Morning, doll,” he said between noisy munches of cornflakes. I put on my jogging clothes and headed out the door, got into the car, and drove to my parents’ apartment.
Marlene was right. I had to tell my motherโthat I knew what she was doing, her scheming ways of making me miserable. By the time I arrived, I had enough anger to fend off a thousand flying cleavers.
My father opened the door and looked surprised to see me. “Where’s Ma?” I asked, trying to keep my breath even. He gestured to the living room in back.
I found her sleeping soundly on the sofa. The back of her head was resting on a white embroidered doily. Her mouth was slack and all the lines in her face were gone. With her smooth face, she looked like a young girl, frail, guileless, and innocent. One arm hung limply down the side of the sofa. Her chest was still. All her strength was gone. She had no weapons, no demons surrounding her. She looked powerless.
Defeated.
And then I was seized with a fear that she looked like this because she was dead. She had died when I was having terrible thoughts about her. I had wished her out of my life, and she had acquiesced, floating out of her body to escape my terrible hatred.
“Ma!” I said sharply. “Ma!” I whined, starting to cry.
And her eyes slowly opened. She blinked. Her hands moved with life. “Shemma?
Meimei-ah? Is that you?”
I was speechless. She had not called me Meimei, my childhood name, in many years. She sat up and the lines in her face returned, only now they seemed less harsh, soft creases of worry. “Why are you here? Why are you crying? Something has happened!”
I didn’t know what to do or say. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, I had gone from being angered by her strength, to being amazed by her innocence, and then frightened by her vulnerability. And now I felt numb, strangely weak, as if someone had unplugged me and the current running through me had stopped.
“Nothing’s happened. Nothing’s the matter. I don’t know why I’m here,” I said in a hoarse voice. “I wanted to talk to youโฆ.I wanted to tell youโฆRich and I are getting married.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting to hear her protests, her laments, the dry voice delivering some sort of painful verdict.
“Jrdaule“โI already know thisโshe said, as if to ask why I was telling her this again.
“You know?”
“Of course. Even if you didn’t tell me,” she said simply.
This was worse than I had imagined. She had known all along, when she criticized the mink jacket, when she belittled his freckles and complained about his drinking habits. She disapproved of him. “I know you hate him,” I said in a quavering voice. “I know you think he’s not good enough, but Iโฆ”
“Hate? Why do you think I hate your future husband?”
“You never want to talk about him. The other day, when I started to tell you about him and Shoshana at the Exploratorium, youโฆyou changed the subjectโฆyou started talking about Dad’s exploratory surgery and thenโฆ”
“What is more important, explore fun or explore sickness?”
I wasn’t going to let her escape this time. “And then when you met him, you said he had spots on his face.”
She looked at me, puzzled. “Is this not true?”
“Yes, but, you said it just to be mean, to hurt me, toโฆ”
“Ai-ya, why do you think these bad things about me?” Her face looked old and full of sorrow. “So you think your mother is this bad. You think I have a secret meaning. But it is you who has this meaning. Ai-ya! She thinks I am this bad!” She sat straight and proud on the sofa, her mouth clamped tight, her hands clasped together, her eyes sparkling with angry tears.
Oh, her strength! her weakness!โboth pulling me apart. My mind was flying one way, my heart another. I sat down on the sofa next to her, the two of us stricken by the other.
I felt as if I had lost a battle, but one that I didn’t know I had been fighting. I was weary. “I’m going home,” I finally said. “I’m not feeling too good right now.”
“You have become ill?” she murmured, putting her hand on my forehead.
“No,” I said. I wanted to leave. “IโฆI just don’t know what’s inside me right now.” “Then I will tell you,” she said simply. And I stared at her. “Half of everything inside you,” she explained in Chinese, “is from your father’s side. This is natural. They are the Jong clan, Cantonese people. Good, honest people. Although sometimes they are bad-tempered and stingy. You know this from your father, how he can be unless
I remind him.”
And I was thinking to myself, Why is she telling me this? What does this have to do with anything? But my mother continued to speak, smiling broadly, sweeping her hand. “And half of everything inside you is from me, your mother’s side, from the Sun clan in Taiyuan.” She wrote the characters out on the back of an envelope, forgetting that I cannot read Chinese.
“We are a smart people, very strong, tricky, and famous for winning wars. You know Sun Yat-sen, hah?”
I nodded.
“He is from the Sun clan. But his family moved to the south many centuries ago, so he is not exactly the same clan. My family has always live in Taiyuan, from before the days of even Sun Wei. Do you know Sun Wei?”
I shook my head. And although I still didn’t know where this conversation was going, I felt soothed. It seemed like the first time we had had an almost normal conversation. “He went to battle with Genghis Khan. And when the Mongol soldiers shot at Sun Wei’s warriorsโheh!โtheir arrows bounced off the shields like rain on stone. Sun
Wei had made a kind of armor so strong Genghis Khan believed it was magic!” “Genghis Khan must have invented some magic arrows, then,” I said. “After all,
he conquered China.”
My mother acted as if she hadn’t heard me right. “This is true, we always know how to win. So now you know what is inside you, almost all good stuff from Taiyuan.” “I guess we’ve evolved to just winning in the toy and electronics market,” I said.
“How do you know this?” she asked eagerly. “You see it on everything. Made in Taiwan.” “Ai!” she cried loudly. “I’m not from Taiwan!”
And just like that, the fragile connection we were starting to build snapped. “I was born in China, inย Taiyuan,” she said. “Taiwan is not China.”
“Well, I only thought you said ‘Taiwan’ because it sounds the same,” I argued, irritated that she was upset by such an unintentional mistake.
“Sound is completely different! Country is completely different!” she said in a huff. “People there only dream that it is China, because if you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.”
We sank into silence, a stalemate. And then her eyes lighted up. “Now listen. You can also say the name of Taiyuan is Bing. Everyone from that city calls it that. Easier for you to say. Bing, it is a nickname.”
She wrote down the character, and I nodded as if this made everything perfectly clear. “The same as here,” she added in English. “You call Apple for New York. Frisco for San Francisco.”
“Nobody calls San Francisco that!” I said, laughing. “People who call it that don’t know any better.”
“Now you understand my meaning,” said my mother triumphantly. I smiled.
And really, I did understand finally. Not what she had just said. But what had been true all along.
I saw what I had been fighting for: It was for me, a scared child, who had run away a long time ago to what I had imagined was a safer place. And hiding in this place, behind my invisible barriers, I knew what lay on the other side: Her side
attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in.
|
Rich and I have decided to postpone our wedding. My mother says July is not a good time to go to China on our honeymoon. She knows this because she and my father have just returned from a trip to Beijing and Taiyuan.
“It is too hot in the summer. You will only grow more spots and then your whole face will become red!” she tells Rich. And Rich grins, gestures his thumb toward my mother, and says to me, “Can you believe what comes out of her mouth? Now I know where you get your sweet, tactful nature.”
“You must go in October. That is the best time. Not too hot, not too cold. I am thinking of going back then too,” she says authoritatively. And then she hastily adds: “Of course not with you!”
I laugh nervously, and Rich jokes: “That’d be great, Lindo. You could translate all the menus for us, make sure we’re not eating snakes or dogs by mistake.” I almost kick him.
“No, this is not my meaning,” insists my mother. “Really, I am not asking.”
And I know what she really means. She would love to go to China with us. And I would hate it. Three weeks’ worth of her complaining about dirty chopsticks and cold soup, three meals a dayโwell, it would be a disaster.
Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East.
Rose Hsu Jordan
I used to believe everything my mother said, even when I didn’t know what she meant. Once when I was little, she told me she knew it would rain because lost ghosts were circling near our windows, calling “Woo-woo” to be let in. She said doors would unlock themselves in the middle of the night unless we checked twice. She said a mirror could see only my face, but she could see me inside out even when I was not in the room. And all these things seemed true to me. The power of her words was that strong.
She said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn’t listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.
The words my mother spoke did come from up high. As I recall, I was always looking up at her face as I lay on my pillow. In those days my sisters and I all slept in the same double bed. Janice, my oldest sister, had an allergy that made one nostril sing like a bird at night, so we called her Whistling Nose. Ruth was Ugly Foot because she could spread her toes out in the shape of a witch’s claw. I was Scaredy Eyes because I would squeeze shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the dark, which Janice and Ruth said was a dumb thing to do. During those early years, I was the last to fall asleep. I clung to the bed, refusing to leave this world for dreams.
“Your sisters have already gone to see Old Mr. Chou,” my mother would whisper in Chinese. According to my mother, Old Mr. Chou was the guardian of a door that opened into dreams. “Are you ready to go see Old Mr. Chou, too?” And every night I would shake my head.
“Old Mr. Chou takes me to bad places,” I cried.
Old Mr. Chou took my sisters to sleep. They never remembered anything from the night before. But Old Mr. Chou would swing the door wide open for me, and as I tried to walk in, he would slam it fast, hoping to squash me like a fly. That’s why I would always dart back into wakefulness.
But eventually Old Mr. Chou would get tired and leave the door unwatched. The bed would grow heavy at the top and slowly tilt. And I would slide headfirst, in through Old Mr. Chou’s door, and land in a house without doors or windows.
I remember one time I dreamt of falling through a hole in Old Mr. Chou’s floor. I found myself in a nighttime garden and Old Mr. Chou was shouting, “Who’s in my backyard?” I ran away. Soon I found myself stomping on plants with veins of blood, running through fields of snapdragons that changed colors like stoplights, until I came to a giant playground filled with row after row of square sandboxes. In each sandbox was a new doll. And my mother, who was not there but could see me inside out, told Old Mr. Chou she knew which doll I would pick. So I decided to pick one that was entirely different.
“Stop her! Stop her!” cried my mother. As I tried to run away, old Mr. Chou chased me, shouting, “See what happens when you don’t listen to your mother!” And I became paralyzed, too scared to move in any direction.
The next morning, I told my mother what happened, and she laughed and said, “Don’t pay attention to Old Mr. Chou. He is only a dream. You only have to listen to me.”
And I cried, “But Old Mr. Chou listens to you too.”
More than thirty years later, my mother was still trying to make me listen. A month after I told her that Ted and I were getting a divorce, I met her at church, at the funeral of China Mary, a wonderful ninety-two-year-old woman who had played godmother to every child who passed through the doors of the First Chinese Baptist Church. “You are getting too thin,” my mother said in her pained voice when I sat down
next to her. “You must eat more.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and I smiled for proof. “And besides, wasn’t it you who said my clothes were always too tight?”
“Eat more,” she insisted, and then she nudged me with a little spiral-bound book hand-titled “Cooking the Chinese Way by China Mary Chan.” They were selling them at the door, only five dollars each, to raise money for the Refugee Scholarship Fund. The organ music stopped and the minister cleared his throat. He was not the regular pastor; I recognized him as Wing, a boy who used to steal baseball cards with my brother Luke. Only later Wing went to divinity school, thanks to China Mary, and Luke went
to the county jail for selling stolen car stereos.
“I can still hear her voice,” Wing said to the mourners. “She said God made me with all the right ingredients, so it’d be a shame if I burned in hell.”
“Already cre-mated,” my mother whispered matter-of-factly, nodding toward the altar, where a framed color photo of China Mary stood. I held my finger to my lips the way librarians do, but she didn’t get it.
“That one, we bought it.” She was pointing to a large spray of yellow chrysanthemums and red roses. “Thirty-four dollars. All artificial, so it will last forever. You can pay me later. Janice and Matthew also chip in some. You have money?”
“Yes, Ted sent me a check.”
Then the minister asked everyone to bow in prayer. My mother was quiet at last, dabbing her nose with Kleenex while the minister talked: “I can just see her now, wowing the angels with her Chinese cooking and gung-ho attitude.”
And when heads lifted, everyone rose to sing hymn number 335, China Mary’s favorite: “You can be an an-gel, ev-ery day on earthโฆ”
But my mother was not singing. She was staring at me. “Why does he send you a check?” I kept looking at the hymnal, singing: “Send-ing rays of sun-shine, full of joy from birth.”
And so she grimly answered her own question: “He is doing monkey business with someone else.”
Monkey business? Ted? I wanted to laughโher choice of words, but also the idea! Cool, silent, hairless Ted, whose breathing pattern didn’t alter one bit in the height of passion? I could just see him, grunting “Ooh-ooh-ooh” while scratching his armpits, then bouncing and shrieking across the mattress trying to grab a breast.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Why not?”
“I don’t think we should talk about Ted now, not here.”
“Why can you talk about this with a psyche-atric and not with mother?” “Psychiatrist.”
“Psyche-atricks,” she corrected herself.
“A mother is best. A mother knows what is inside you,” she said above the singing voices. “A psyche-atricks will only make youย hulihudu, make you seeย heimongmong.” Back home, I thought about what she said. And it was true. Lately I had been feelingย hulihudu. And everything around me seemed to beย heimongmong. These were words I had
never thought about in English terms. I suppose the closest in meaning would be “confused” and “dark fog.”
But really, the words mean much more than that. Maybe they can’t be easily translated because they refer to a sensation that only Chinese people have, as if you were falling headfirst through Old Mr. Chou’s door, then trying to find your way back. But you’re so scared you can’t open your eyes, so you get on your hands and knees and grope in the dark, listening for voices to tell you which way to go.
I had been talking to too many people, my friends, everybody it seems, except Ted. To each person I told a different story. Yet each version was true, I was certain of it, at least at the moment that I told it.
To my friend Waverly, I said I never knew how much I loved Ted until I saw how much he could hurt me. I felt such pain, literally aย physicalย pain, as if someone had torn off both my arms without anesthesia, without sewing me back up.
“Have you ever had them torn offย withย anesthesia? God! I’ve never seen you so hysterical,” said Waverly. “You want my opinion, you’re better off without him. It hurts only because it’s taken you fifteen years to see what an emotional wimp he is. Listen, I know what it feels like.”
To my friend Lena, I said I was better off without Ted. After the initial shock, I realized I didn’t miss him at all. I just missed the way I felt when I was with him.
“Which was what?” Lena gasped. “You were depressed. You were manipulated into thinking you were nothing next to him. And now you think you’re nothing without him. If I were you, I’d get the name of a good lawyer and go for everything you can. Get even.”
I told my psychiatrist I was obsessed with revenge. I dreamt of calling Ted up and inviting him to dinner, to one of those trendy who’s-who places, like caf?Majestic or Rosalie’s. And after he started the first course and was nice and relaxed, I would say, “It’s not that easy, Ted.” From my purse I would take out a voodoo doll which Lena had already lent me from her props department. I would aim my escargot fork at a strategic spot on the voodoo doll and I would say, out loud, in front of all the fashionable restaurant patrons, “Ted, you’re just such an impotent bastard and I’m going to make sure you stay that way.”Wham!
Saying this, I felt I had raced to the top of a big turning point in my life, a new me after just two weeks of psychotherapy. But my psychiatrist just looked bored, his hand still propped under his chin. “It seems you’ve been experiencing some very powerful feelings,” he said, sleepy-eyed. “I think we should think about them more next week.”
And so I didn’t know what to think anymore. For the next few weeks, I inventoried my life, going from room to room trying to remember the history of everything in the house: things I had collected before I met Ted (the hand-blown glasses, the macrame wall hangings, and the rocker I had recaned); things we bought together right after we were married (most of the big furniture); things people gave us (the glass-domed clock that no longer worked, three sake sets, four teapots); things he picked out
(the signed lithographs, none of them beyond number twenty-five in a series of two hundred fifty, the Steuben crystal strawberries); and things I picked out because I couldn’t bear to see them left behind (the mismatched candlestick holders from garage sales, an antique quilt with a hole in it, odd-shaped vials that once contained ointments, spices, and perfumes).
I had started to inventory the bookshelves when I got a letter from Ted, a note actually, written hurriedly in ballpoint on his prescription notepad. “Sign 4x where indicated,” it read. And then in fountain-pen blue ink, “enc: check, to tide you over until settlement.”
The note was clipped to our divorce papers, along with a check for ten thousand dollars, signed in the same fountain-pen blue ink on the note. And instead of being grateful, I was hurt.
Why had he sent the check with the papers? Why the two different pens? Was the check an afterthought? How long had he sat in his office determining how much money was enough? And why had he chosen to sign it withย thatย pen?
I still remember the look on his face last year when he carefully undid the gold foil wrap, the surprise in his eyes as he slowly examined every angle of the pen by the light of the Christmas tree. He kissed my forehead. “I’ll use it only to sign important things,” he had promised me.
Remembering that, holding the check, all I could do was sit on the edge of the couch feeling my head getting heavy at the top. I stared at the x’s on the divorce papers, the wording on the prescription notepad, the two colors of ink, the date of the check, the careful way in which he wrote, “Ten thousand only and no cents.”
I sat there quietly, trying to listen to my heart, to make the right decision. But then I realized I didn’t know what the choices were. And so I put the papers and the check away, in a drawer where I kept store coupons which I never threw away and which I never used either.
My mother once told me why I was so confused all the time. She said I was without wood. Born without wood so that I listened to too many people. She knew this, because once she had almost become this way.
“A girl is like a young tree,” she said. “You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away.”
But by the time she told me this, it was too late. I had already begun to bend. I had started going to school, where a teacher named Mrs. Berry lined us up and marched us in and out of rooms, up and down hallways while she called out, “Boys and girls, follow me.” And if you didn’t listen to her, she would make you bend over and whack you with a yardstick ten times.
I still listened to my mother, but I also learned how to let her words blow through me. And sometimes I filled my mind with other people’s thoughtsโall in Englishโso that when she looked at me inside out, she would be confused by what she saw.
Over the years, I learned to choose from the best opinions. Chinese people had Chinese opinions. American people had American opinions. And in almost every case, the American version was much better.
It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices, so it was easy to get confused and pick the wrong thing. That’s how I felt about my situation with Ted. There was so much to think about, so much to decide. Each decision meant a turn in another direction.
The check, for example. I wondered if Ted was really trying to trick me, to get me to admit that I was giving up, that I wouldn’t fight the divorce. And if I cashed it, he might later say the amount was the whole settlement. Then I got a little sentimental and imagined, only for a moment, that he had sent meten thousand dollars because he truly loved me; he was telling me in his own way how much I meant to him. Until I realized that ten thousand dollars was nothing to him, that I was nothing to him.
I thought about putting an end to this torture and signing the divorce papers. And I was just about to take the papers out of the coupon drawer when I remembered the house.
I thought to myself, I love this house. The big oak door that opens into a foyer filled with stained-glass windows. The sunlight in the breakfast room, the south view of the city from the front parlor. The herb and flower garden Ted had planted. He used to work in the garden every weekend, kneeling on a green rubber pad, obsessively inspecting every leaf as if he were manicuring fingernails. He assigned plants to certain planter boxes. Tulips could not be mixed with perennials. A cutting of aloe vera that Lena gave me did not belong anywhere because we had no other succulents. I looked out the window and saw the calla lilies had fallen and turned brown, the daisies had been crushed down by their own weight, the lettuce gone to seed. Runner
weeds were growing between the flagstone walkways that wound between the planter boxes. The whole thing had grown wild from months of neglect.
And seeing the garden in this forgotten condition reminded me of something I once read in a fortune cookie: When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he’s thinking of pulling up roots. When was the last time Ted pruned the rosemary back? When was the last time he squirted Snail B-Gone around the flower beds?
I quickly walked down to the garden shed, looking for pesticides and weed killer, as if the amount left in the bottle, the expiration date, anything would give me some idea of what was happening in my life. And then I put the bottle down. I had the sense someone was watching me and laughing.
I went back in the house, this time to call a lawyer. But as I started to dial, I became confused. I put the receiver down. What could I say? What did I want from divorceโwhen I never knew what I had wanted from marriage?
The next morning, I was still thinking about my marriage: fifteen years of living in Ted’s shadow. I lay in bed, my eyes squeezed shut, unable to make the simplest decisions.
I stayed in bed for three days, getting up only to go to the bathroom or to heat up another can of chicken noodle soup. But mostly I slept. I took the sleeping pills Ted had left behind in the medicine cabinet. And for the first time I can recall, I had no dreams. All I could remember was falling smoothly into a dark space with no feeling of dimension or direction. I was the only person in this blackness. And every time I woke up, I took another pill and went back to this place.
But on the fourth day, I had a nightmare. In the dark, I couldn’t see Old Mr. Chou, but he said he would find me, and when he did, he would squish me into the ground.
He was sounding a bell, and the louder the bell rang the closer he was to finding me. I held my breath to keep from screaming, but the bell got louder and louder until I burst awake.
It was the phone. It must have rung for an hour nonstop. I picked it up.
“Now that you are up, I am bringing you leftover dishes,” said my mother. She sounded as if she could see me now. But the room was dark, the curtains closed tight.
“Ma, I can’tโฆ” I said. “I can’t see you now. I’m busy.” “Too busy for mother?”
“I have an appointmentโฆwith my psychiatrist.”
She was quiet for a while. “Why do you not speak up for yourself?” she finally said in her pained voice. “Why can you not talk to your husband?”
“Ma,” I said, feeling drained. “Please. Don’t tell me to save my marriage anymore.
It’s hard enough as it is.”
“I am not telling you to save your marriage,” she protested. “I only say you should speak up.”
When I hung up, the phone rang again. It was my psychiatrist’s receptionist. I had missed my appointment that morning, as well as two days ago. Did I want to reschedule? I said I would look at my schedule and call back.
And five minutes later the phone rang again. “Where’ve you been?” It was Ted.
I began to shake. “Out,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for the last three days. I even called the phone company to check the line.”
And I knew he had done that, not out of any concern for me, but because when he wants something, he gets impatient and irrational about people who make him wait.
“You know it’s been two weeks,” he said with obvious irritation. “Two weeks?”
“You haven’t cashed the check or returned the papers. I wanted to be nice about this, Rose. I can get someone to officially serve the papers, you know.”
“You can?”
And then without missing a beat, he proceeded to say what he really wanted, which was more despicable than all the terrible things I had imagined.
He wanted the papers returned, signed. He wanted the house. He wanted the whole thing to be over as soon as possible. Because he wanted to get married again, to someone else.
Before I could stop myself, I gasped. “You mean youย wereย doing monkey business with someone else?” I was so humiliated I almost started to cry.
And then for the first time in months, after being in limbo all that time, everything stopped. All the questions: gone. There were no choices. I had an empty feelingโand I felt free, wild. From high inside my head I could hear someone laughing.
“What’s so funny?” said Ted angrily.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just thatโฆ” and I was trying hard to stifle my giggles, but one of them escaped through my nose with a snort, which made me laugh more. And then Ted’s silence made me laugh even harder.
I was still gasping when I tried to begin again in a more even voice: “Listen, Ted, sorryโฆI think the best thing is for you to come over after work.” I didn’t know why I said that, but I felt right saying it.
“There’s nothing to talk about, Rose.”
“I know,” I said in a voice so calm it surprised even me. “I just want to show you something. And don’t worry, you’ll get your papers. Believe me.”
I had no plan. I didn’t know what I would say to him later. I knew only that I wanted Ted to see me one more time before the divorce.
What I ended up showing him was the garden. By the time he arrived, the
late-afternoon summer fog had already blown in. I had the divorce papers in the pocket of my windbreaker. Ted was shivering in his sports jacket as he surveyed the damage to the garden.
“What a mess,” I heard him mutter to himself, trying to shake his pant leg loose of a blackberry vine that had meandered onto the walkway. And I knew he was calculating how long it would take to get the place back into order.
“I like it this way,” I said, patting the tops of overgrown carrots, their orange heads pushing through the earth as if about to be born. And then I saw the weeds: Some had sprouted in and out of the cracks in the patio. Others had anchored on the side of the house. And even more had found refuge under loose shingles and were on their way to climbing up to the roof. No way to pull them out once they’ve buried themselves in the masonry; you’d end up pulling the whole building down.
Ted was picking up plums from the ground and tossing them over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. “Where are the papers?” he finally said.
I handed them to him and he stuffed them in the inside pocket of his jacket. He faced me and I saw his eyes, the look I had once mistaken for kindness and protection. “You don’t have to move out right away,” he said. “I know you’ll want at least a month to find a place.”
“I’ve already found a place,” I said quickly, because right then I knew where I was going to live. His eyebrows raised in surprise and he smiledโfor the briefest momentโuntil I said, “Here.”
“What’s that?” he said sharply. His eyebrows were still up, but now there was no smile.
“I said I’m staying here,” I announced again.
“Who says?” He folded his arms across his chest, squinted his eyes, examining my face as if he knew it would crack at any moment. That expression of his used to terrify me into stammers.
Now I felt nothing, no fear, no anger. “I say I’m staying, and my lawyer will too, once we serve you the papers,” I said.
Ted pulled out the divorce papers and stared at them. His x’s were still there, the blanks were still blank. “What do you think you’re doing? Exactly what?” he said. And the answer, the one that was important above everything else, ran through my body and fell from my lips: “You can’t just pull me out of your life and throw me
away.”
I saw what I wanted: his eyes, confused, then scared. He wasย hulihudu. The power of my words was that strong.
That night I dreamt I was wandering through the garden. The trees and bushes were covered with mist. And then I spotted Old Mr. Chou and my mother off in the distance,
their busy movements swirling the fog around them. They were bending over one of the planter boxes.
“There she is!” cried my mother. Old Mr. Chou smiled at me and waved. I walked up to my mother and saw that she was hovering over something, as if she were tending a baby.
“See,” she said, beaming. “I have just planted them this morning, some for you, some for me.”
And below theย heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.
Jing-Mei Woo
Five months ago, after a crab dinner celebrating Chinese New Year, my mother gave me my “life’s importance,” a jade pendant on a gold chain. The pendant was not a piece of jewelry I would have chosen for myself. It was almost the size of my little finger, a mottled green and white color, intricately carved. To me, the whole effect looked wrong: too large, too green, too garishly ornate. I stuffed the necklace in my lacquer box and forgot about it.
But these days, I think about my life’s importance. I wonder what it means, because my mother died three months ago, six days before my thirty-sixth birthday. And she’s the only person I could have asked, to tell me about life’s importance, to help me understand my grief.
I now wear that pendant every day. I think the carvings mean something, because shapes and details, which I never seem to notice until after they’re pointed out to me, always mean something to Chinese people. I know I could ask Auntie Lindo, Auntie An-mei, or other Chinese friends, but I also know they would tell me a meaning that is different from what my mother intended. What if they tell me this curving line branching into three oval shapes is a pomegranate and that my mother was wishing me fertility and posterity? What if my mother really meant the carvings were a branch of pears to give me purity and honesty? Or ten-thousand-year droplets from the magic mountain, giving me my life’s direction and a thousand years of fame and immortality? And because I think about this all the time, I always notice other people wearing these same jade pendantsโnot the flat rectangular medallions or the round white ones with holes in the middle but ones like mine, a two-inch oblong of bright apple green. It’s as though we were all sworn to the same secret covenant, so secret we don’t even know what we belong to. Last weekend, for example, I saw a bartender wearing one.
As I fingered mine, I asked him, “Where’d you get yours?” “My mother gave it to me,” he said.
I asked him why, which is a nosy question that only one Chinese person can ask another; in a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family.
“She gave it to me after I got divorced. I guess my mother’s telling me I’m still worth something.”
And I knew by the wonder in his voice that he had no idea what the pendant really meant.
At last year’s Chinese New Year dinner, my mother had cooked eleven crabs, one crab for each person, plus an extra. She and I had bought them on Stockton Street in Chinatown. We had walked down the steep hill from my parents’ flat, which was actually the first floor of a six-unit building they owned on Leavenworth near California. Their place was only six blocks from where I worked as a copywriter for a small ad agency, so two or three times a week I would drop by after work. My mother always had enough food to insist that I stay for dinner.
That year, Chinese New Year fell on a Thursday, so I got off work early to help my mother shop. My mother was seventyone, but she still walked briskly along, her small body straight and purposeful, carrying a colorful flowery plastic bag. I dragged the metal shopping cart behind.
Every time I went with her to Chinatown, she pointed out other Chinese women her age. “Hong Kong ladies,” she said, eyeing two finely dressed women in long, dark mink coats and perfect black hairdos. “Cantonese, village people,” she whispered as we passed women in knitted caps, bent over in layers of padded tops and men’s vests. And my motherโwearing lightblue polyester pants, a red sweater, and a child’s green down jacketโshe didn’t look like anybody else. She had come here in 1949, at the end of a long journey that started in Kweilin in 1944; she had gone north to Chungking, where she met my father, and then they went southeast to Shanghai and fled farther south to Hong Kong, where the boat departed for San Francisco. My mother came from many different directions.
And now she was huffing complaints in rhythm to her walk downhill. “Even you don’t want them, you stuck,” she said. She was fuming again about the tenants who lived on the second floor. Two years ago, she had tried to evict them on the pretext that relatives from China were coming to live there. But the couple saw through her ruse to get around rent control. They said they wouldn’t budge until she produced the relatives. And after that I had to listen to her recount every new injustice this couple inflicted on her.
My mother said the gray-haired man put too many bags in the garbage cans: “Cost me extra.”
And the woman, a very elegant artist type with blond hair, had supposedly painted the apartment in terrible red and green colors. “Awful,” moaned my mother. “And they take bath, two three times every day. Running the water, running, running, running, never stop!”
“Last week,” she said, growing angrier at each step, “theย waigorenย accuse me.” She referred to all Caucasians asย waigoren, foreigners. “They say I put poison in a fish, kill that cat.”
“What cat?” I asked, even though I knew exactly which one she was talking about. I had seen that cat many times. It was a big one-eared tom with gray stripes who had learned to jump on the outside sill of my mother’s kitchen window. My mother would stand on her tiptoes and bang the kitchen window to scare the cat away. And the cat would stand his ground, hissing back in response to her shouts.
“That cat always raising his tail to put a stink on my door,” complained my mother. I once saw her chase him from her stairwell with a pot of boiling water. I was tempted to ask if she really had put poison in a fish, but I had learned never to
take sides against my mother.
“So what happened to that cat?” I asked.
“That cat gone! Disappear!” She threw her hands in the air and smiled, looking pleased for a moment before the scowl came back. “And that man, he raise his hand like this, show me his ugly fist and call me worst Fukien landlady. I not from Fukien. Hunh! He know nothing!” she said, satisfied she had put him in his place.
On Stockton Street, we wandered from one fish store to another, looking for the liveliest crabs.
“Don’t get a dead one,” warned my mother in Chinese. “Even a beggar won’t eat a dead one.”
I poked the crabs with a pencil to see how feisty they were. If a crab grabbed on, I lifted it out and into a plastic sack. I lifted one crab this way, only to find
one of its legs had been clamped onto by another crab. In the brief tug-of-war, my crab lost a limb.
“Put it back,” whispered my mother. “A missing leg is a bad sign on Chinese New Year.”
But a man in a white smock came up to us. He started talking loudly to my mother in Cantonese, and my mother, who spoke Cantonese so poorly it sounded just like her Mandarin, was talking loudly back, pointing to the crab and its missing leg. And after more sharp words, that crab and its leg were put into our sack.
“Doesn’t matter,” said my mother. “This number eleven, extra one.”
Back home, my mother unwrapped the crabs from their newspaper liners and then dumped them into a sinkful of cold water. She brought out her old wooden board and cleaver, then chopped the ginger and scallions, and poured soy sauce and sesame oil into a shallow dish. The kitchen smelled of wet newspapers and Chinese fragrances.
Then, one by one, she grabbed the crabs by their back, hoisted them out of the sink and shook them dry and awake. The crabs flexed their legs in midair between sink and stove. She stacked the crabs in a multileveled steamer that sat over two burners on the stove, put a lid on top, and lit the burners. I couldn’t bear to watch so I went into the dining room.
When I was eight, I had played with a crab my mother had brought home for my birthday dinner. I had poked it, and jumped back every time its claws reached out. And I determined that the crab and I had come to a great understanding when it finally heaved itself up and walked clear across the counter. But before I could even decide what to name my new pet, my mother had dropped it into a pot of cold water and placed it on the tall stove. I had watched with growing dread, as the water heated up and the pot began to clatter with this crab trying to tap his way out of his own hot soup. To this day, I remember that crab screaming as he thrust one bright red claw out over the side of the bubbling pot. It must have been my own voice, because now I know, of course, that crabs have no vocal cords. And I also try to convince myself that they don’t have enough brains to know the difference between a hot bath and a slow death.
For our New Year celebration, my mother had invited her longtime friends Lindo and Tin Jong. Without even asking, my mother knew that meant including the Jongs’ children: their son Vincent, who was thirty-eight years old and still living at home, and their daughter, Waverly, who was around my age. Vincent called to see if he could also bring his girlfriend, Lisa Lum. Waverly said she would bring her new fianc? Rich Schields, who, like Waverly, was a tax attorney at Price Waterhouse. And she added that Shoshana, her four-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, wanted to know if my parents had a VCR so she could watchย Pinocchio, just in case she got bored. My mother also reminded me to invite Mr. Chong, my old piano teacher, who still lived three blocks away at our old apartment.
Including my mother, father, and me, that made eleven people. But my mother had counted only ten, because to her way of thinking Shoshana was just a child and didn’t count, at least not as far as crabs were concerned. She hadn’t considered that Waverly might not think the same way.
When the platter of steaming crabs was passed around, Waverly was first and she picked the best crab, the brightest, the plumpest, and put it on her daughter’s plate. And then she picked the next best for Rich and another good one for herself. And because
she had learned this skill, of choosing the best, from her mother, it was only natural that her mother knew how to pick the next-best ones for her husband, her son, his girlfriend, and herself. And my mother, of course, considered the four remaining crabs and gave the one that looked the best to Old Chong, because he was nearly ninety and deserved that kind of respect, and then she picked another good one for my father. That left two on the platter: a large crab with a faded orange color, and number eleven, which had the torn-off leg.
My mother shook the platter in front of me. “Take it, already cold,” said my mother. I was not too fond of crab, every since I saw my birthday crab boiled alive, but
I knew I could not refuse. That’s the way Chinese mothers show they love their children, not through hugs and kisses but with stern offerings of steamed dumplings, duck’s gizzards, and crab.
I thought I was doing the right thing, taking the crab with the missing leg. But my mother cried, “No! No! Big one, you eat it. I cannot finish.”
I remember the hungry sounds everybody else was makingโcracking the shells, sucking the crab meat out, scraping out tidbits with the ends of chopsticksโand my mother’s quiet plate. I was the only one who noticed her prying open the shell, sniffing the crab’s body and then getting up to go to the kitchen, plate in hand. She returned, without the crab, but with more bowls of soy sauce, ginger, and scallions.
And then as stomachs filled, everybody started talking at once.
“Suyuan!” called Auntie Lindo to my mother. “Why you wear that color?” Auntie Lindo gestured with a crab leg to my mother’s red sweater.
“How can you wear this color anymore? Too young!” she scolded.
My mother acted as though this were a compliment. “Emporium Capwell,” she said. “Nineteen dollar. Cheaper than knit it myself.”
Auntie Lindo nodded her head, as if the color were worth this price. And then she pointed her crab leg toward her future son-in-law, Rich, and said, “See how this one doesn’t know how to eat Chinese food.”
“Crab isn’t Chinese,” said Waverly in her complaining voice. It was amazing how Waverly still sounded the way she did twenty-five years ago, when we were ten and she had announced to me in that same voice, “You aren’t a genius like me.”
Auntie Lindo looked at her daughter with exasperation. “How do you know what is Chinese, what is not Chinese?” And then she turned to Rich and said with much authority, “Why you are not eating the best part?”
And I saw Rich smiling back, with amusement, and not humility, showing in his face. He had the same coloring as the crab on his plate: reddish hair, pale cream skin, and large dots of orange freckles. While he smirked, Auntie Lindo demonstrated the proper technique, poking her chopstick into the orange spongy part: “You have to dig in here, get this out. The brain is most tastiest, you try.”
Waverly and Rich grimaced at each other, united in disgust. I heard Vincent and Lisa whisper to each other, “Gross,” and then they snickered too.
Uncle Tin started laughing to himself, to let us know he also had a private joke. Judging by his preamble of snorts and leg slaps, I figured he must have practiced this joke many times: “I tell my daughter, Hey, why be poor? Marry rich!” He laughed loudly and then nudged Lisa, who was sitting next to him, “Hey, don’t you get it?
Look what happen. She gonna marry this guy here. Rich. ‘Cause I tell her to,ย marry Rich.”
“Whenย areย you guys getting married?” asked Vincent.
“I should ask you the same thing,” said Waverly. Lisa looked embarrassed when Vincent ignored the question.
“Mom, I don’tย likeย crab!” whined Shoshana.
“Nice haircut,” Waverly said to me from across the table. “Thanks, David always does a great job.”
“You mean you still go to that guy on Howard Street?” Waverly asked, arching one eyebrow. “Aren’t you afraid?”
I could sense the danger, but I said it anyway: “What do you mean, afraid? He’s always very good.”
“I mean, heย isย gay,” Waverly said. “He could have AIDS. And he is cutting your hair, which is like cutting a living tissue. Maybe I’m being paranoid, being a mother, but you just can’t be too safe these daysโฆ.”
And I sat there feeling as if my hair were coated with disease.
“You should go see my guy,” said Waverly. “Mr. Rory. He does fabulous work, although he probably charges more than you’re used to.”
I felt like screaming. She could be so sneaky with her insults. Every time I asked her the simplest of tax questions, for example, she could turn the conversation around and make it seem as if I were too cheap to pay for her legal advice.
She’d say things like, “I really don’t like to talk about important tax matters except in my office. I mean, what if you say something casual over lunch and I give you some casual advice. And then you follow it, and it’s wrong because you didn’t give me the full information. I’d feel terrible. And you would too, wouldn’t you?” At that crab dinner, I was so mad about what she said about my hair that I wanted to embarrass her, to reveal in front of everybody how petty she was. So I decided
to confront her about the free-lance work I’d done for her firm, eight pages of brochure copy on its tax services. The firm was now more than thirty days late in paying my invoice.
“Maybe I could afford Mr. Rory’s prices if someone’s firm paid me on time,” I said with a teasing grin. And I was pleased to see Waverly’s reaction. She was genuinely flustered, speechless.
I couldn’t resist rubbing it in: “I think it’s pretty ironic that a big accounting firm can’t even pay its own bills on time. I mean, really, Waverly, what kind of place are you working for?”
Her face was dark and quiet.
“Hey, hey, you girls, no more fighting!” said my father, as if Waverly and I were still children arguing over tricycles and crayon colors.
“That’s right, we don’t want to talk about this now,” said Waverly quietly. “So how do you think the Giants are going to do?” said Vincent, trying to be funny.
Nobody laughed.
I wasn’t about to let her slip away this time. “Well, every time I call you on the phone, you can’t talk about it then either,” I said.
Waverly looked at Rich, who shrugged his shoulders. She turned back to me and sighed.
“Listen, June, I don’t know how to tell you this. That stuff you wrote, well, the firm decided it was unacceptable.”
“You’re lying. You said it was great.”
Waverly sighed again. “I know I did. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I was trying to see if we could fix it somehow. But it won’t work.”
And just like that, I was starting to flail, tossed without warning into deep water, drowning and desperate. “Most copy needs fine-tuning,” I said. “It’sโฆnormal not to be perfect the first time. I should have explained the process better.”
“June, I really don’t thinkโฆ”
“Rewrites are free. I’m just as concerned about making it perfect as you are.” Waverly acted as if she didn’t even hear me. “I’m trying to convince them to at least pay you for some of your time. I know you put a lot of work into itโฆI owe you
at least that for even suggesting you do it.”
“Just tell me what they want changed. I’ll call you next week so we can go over it, line by line.”
“JuneโI can’t,” Waverly said with cool finality. “It’s just notโฆsophisticated. I’m sure what you write for your other clients isย wonderful. But we’re a big firm. We need somebody who understands thatโฆour style.” She said this touching her hand to her chest, as if she were referring toย herย style.
Then she laughed in a lighthearted way. “I mean, really, June.” And then she started speaking in a deep television-announcer voice: “Threeย benefits,ย threeย needs,ย threeย reasons to buyโฆSatisfactionย guaranteedโฆfor today’s and tomorrow’s tax needsโฆ” She said this in such a funny way that everybody thought it was a good joke and laughed. And then, to make matters worse, I heard my mother saying to Waverly: “True,
cannot teach style. June not sophisticate like you. Must be born this way.”
I was surprised at myself, how humiliated I felt. I had been outsmarted by Waverly once again, and now betrayed by my own mother. I was smiling so hard my lower lip was twitching from the strain. I tried to find something else to concentrate on, and I remember picking up my plate, and then Mr. Chong’s, as if I were clearing the table, and seeing so sharply through my tears the chips on the edges of these old plates, wondering why my mother didn’t use the new set I had bought her five years ago.
The table was littered with crab carcasses. Waverly and Rich lit cigarettes and put a crab shell between them for an ashtray. Shoshana had wandered over to the piano and was banging notes out with a crab claw in each hand. Mr. Chong, who had grown totally deaf over the years, watched Shoshana and applauded: “Bravo! Bravo!” And except for his strange shouts, nobody said a word. My mother went to the kitchen and returned with a plate of oranges sliced into wedges. My father poked at the remnants of his crab. Vincent cleared his throat, twice, and then patted Lisa’s hand.
It was Auntie Lindo who finally spoke: “Waverly, you let her try again. You make her do too fast first time. Of course she cannot get it right.”
I could hear my mother eating an orange slice. She was the only person I knew who crunched oranges, making it sound as if she were eating crisp apples instead. The sound of it was worse than gnashing teeth.
“Good one take time,” continued Auntie Lindo, nodding her head in agreement with herself.
“Put in lotta action,” advised Uncle Tin. “Lotta action, boy, that’s what I like.
Hey, that’s all you need, make it right.”
“Probably not,” I said, and smiled before carrying the plates to the sink.
That was the night, in the kitchen, that I realized I was no better than who I was. I was a copywriter. I worked for a small ad agency. I promised every new client, “We can provide the sizzle for the meat.” The sizzle always boiled down to “Three Benefits, Three Needs, Three Reasons to Buy.” The meat was always coaxial cable, T-1 multiplexers, protocol converters, and the like. I was very good at what I did, succeeding at something small like that.
I turned on the water to wash the dishes. And I no longer felt angry at Waverly. I felt tired and foolish, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind and discover there was no one there.
I picked up my mother’s plate, the one she had carried into the kitchen at the start of the dinner. The crab was untouched. I lifted the shell and smelled the crab. Maybe it was because I didn’t like crab in the first place. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with it.
After everybody left, my mother joined me in the kitchen. I was putting dishes away. She put water on for more tea and sat down at the small kitchen table. I waited for her to chastise me.
“Good dinner, Ma,” I said politely.
“Not so good,” she said, jabbing at her mouth with a toothpick. “What happened to your crab? Why’d you throw it away?”
“Not so good,” she said again. “That crab die. Even a beggar don’t want it.” “How could you tell? I didn’t smell anything wrong.”
“Can tell even before cook!” She was standing now, looking out the kitchen window into the night. “I shake that crab before cook. His legsโdroopy. His mouthโwide open, already like a dead person.”
“Why’d you cook it if you knew it was already dead?”
“I thoughtโฆmaybe only just die. Maybe taste not too bad. But I can smell, dead taste, not firm.”
“What if someone else had picked that crab?”
My mother looked at me and smiled. “Onlyย youย pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everybody else want best quality. You thinking different.”
She said it in a way as if this were proofโproof of something good. She always said things that didn’t make any sense, that sounded both good and bad at the same time.
I was putting away the last of the chipped plates and then I remembered something else. “Ma, why don’t you ever use those new dishes I bought you? If you didn’t like them, you should have told me. I could have changed the pattern.”
“Of course, I like,” she said, irritated. “Sometime I think something is so good, I want to save it. Then I forget I save it.”
And then, as if she had just now remembered, she unhooked the clasp of her gold necklace and took it off, wadding the chain and the jade pendant in her palm. She grabbed my hand and put the necklace in my palm, then shut my fingers around it.
“No, Ma,” I protested. “I can’t take this.”
“Nala, nala“โTake it, take itโshe said, as if she were scolding me. And then she continued in Chinese. “For a long time, I wanted to give you this necklace. See, I wore this on my skin, so when you put it on your skin, then you know my meaning. This is your life’s importance.”
I looked at the necklace, the pendant with the light green jade. I wanted to give it back. I didn’t want to accept it. And yet I also felt as if I had already swallowed it.
“You’re giving this to me only because of what happened tonight,” I finally said. “What happen?”
“What Waverly said. What everybody said.”
“Tss! Why you listen to her? Why you want to follow behind her, chasing her words? She is like this crab.” My mother poked a shell in the garbage can. “Always walking sideways, moving crooked. You can make your legs go the other way.”
I put the necklace on. It felt cool.
“Not so good, this jade,” she said matter-of-factly, touching the pendant, and then she added in Chinese: “This is young jade. It is a very light color now, but if you wear it every day it will become more green.”
My father hasn’t eaten well since my mother died. So I am here, in the kitchen, to cook him dinner. I’m slicing tofu. I’ve decided to make him a spicy bean-curd dish. My mother used to tell me how hot things restore the spirit and health. But I’m making this mostly because I know my father loves this dish and I know how to cook it. I like the smell of it: ginger, scallions, and a red chili sauce that tickles my nose the minute I open the jar.
Above me, I hear the old pipes shake into action with aย thunk!ย and then the water running in my sink dwindles to a trickle. One of the tenants upstairs must be taking a shower. I remember my mother complaining: “Even you don’t want them, you stuck.” And now I know what she meant.
As I rinse the tofu in the sink, I am startled by a dark mass that appears suddenly at the window. It’s the one-eared tomcat from upstairs. He’s balancing on the sill, rubbing his flank against the window.
My mother didn’t kill that damn cat after all, and I’m relieved. And then I see this cat rubbing more vigorously on the window and he starts to raise his tail.
“Get away from there!” I shout, and slap my hand on the window three times. But the cat just narrows his eyes, flattens his one ear, and hisses back at me.
