by Sandi Tan
The drama class’s main draw was Mr. Zehring, a boyish man who could have been twenty-six—or forty. His light-brown hair bounced on his head like a toupee whenever he made jazz hands, which was often. And he did so derisively, which was odd for a theater guy. He always seemed at a slight remove from the room, a bit soliloquyishly meta. She thought he looked like a handsome JFK, though his patter was less presidential, more motivational speaker. He made the kids call him Mr. Z, for short, and some actually called him by his first name, Bryce.
At first, the class wasn’t something that Rosemary was dying to do—theater kids and their transatlantic affectations gave her the creeps—but the guidance counselor had suggested she take up an extracurricular activity that wasn’t purely academic so her college application would look less stereotypically Asian. She started Mr. Z’s class and enjoyed his approach so much that she didn’t feel insulted when he funneled her into a supplementary class with three other students of East Asian descent who had trouble, in his words, “releasing their face.” Until they learned to be expressive with their bodies, he said, they would be of no value in a regular drama class.
He said that as someone who was raised as a Lutheran in the upper Midwest, he had some of the same problems—his face was “all closed up” and his feelings were “compacted.” He’d been programmed not to show emotion because his father believed that emotion in boys was evidence of weakness.
“It was like my entire face was cast in concrete, and the real me was roiling underneath.” He ran his splayed fingers down his face. “I knew that what I was on the inside and what I was on the outside were two very different things. Separate entities, even. And that’s not even counting what I thought I was versus what I wanted to be versus what I really was. You follow?”
The kids nodded placidly. He went on:
“But people couldn’t see my true self. People couldn’t look past my carapace. And it was incredibly, incredibly frustrating for me, as I’m sure it is for you. They thought I was this dull, well-behaved boy with nothing remarkable to say about anything—if they thought of me at all.”
Mr. Z said he had to “reprogram” his face, doing funny expressions in the mirror every morning and night, massaging his forehead and the areas around the eyes to relax the muscles. There were tongue and mouth-stretching exercises, too. A cheap and chippy chopper on a big black clock . . .
“Think of yourself as a tree. If you let your fears and inhibitions fall away, only then can you start conquering them, picking up each negative feeling like a rotting piece of fruit and mashing it up in your hands.” He was a great mime. Rosemary could almost smell the sourness from the imaginary peach that was macerating between his palms.
She did all his facial exercises in the bathroom for a half hour every morning. They chased away her terror of being in her dad’s death chamber—the grout around the tub was stained tea-brown. After two weeks, Mr. Z told her she had succeeded in smiling with her eyes and gave her two thumbs up.
In the final session before the four East Asians were allowed back into the drama class, he screened the movie Dead Ringers. He asked them to watch how the lead actor—“a Pinteresque British mummy”—released his face during the course of the film.
The movie, directed by David Cronenberg, whom Mr. Z singled out as “the sickest director in the world,” told the story of identical twin brothers, played by Jeremy Irons. Rosemary recognized him as the voice of Scar in The Lion King. The brothers were both gynecologists, and in love with same weird French Canadian lady. But because they had a twisted relationship, one of them dominant and the other submissive, the rivalry for the lady evolved into a deeper psychic battle. There were nude love scenes too bizarre for the kids to find sexy—and none of them were into watching the middle-aged fuck.
Rosemary found the movie spooky and touching but couldn’t quite articulate why, and so kept those thoughts to herself. In contrast, Alicia Hwang paraded her enthusiasm, repeating everything Mr. Z said.
“You’re so right—it is about the split in each of us. The ego and the id!” Alicia Hwang was the kind of Asian suck-up that would make most Asian suck-ups vomit.
After class, Mr. Z pulled his Nissan Maxima up to Rosemary at the bus stop. “Hop in.” He said he had to run an errand anyway. His car smelled like toothpaste—or mouthwash. When they turned onto Santa Claus Lane, he slowed his car down. She felt herself get goosebumps, waiting for him to just say something.
“Did you know that this area used to be a giant graveyard for the Pascualite Indians? The only thing that grew here was poppies. Then, in the 1890s, a man named Luther Burbank brought these deodars over from the Himalayas and planted them here.” He pointed up at the beardy pine trees lining the street. “He was a brave guy.”
“For planting trees?”
“Well, for one, he told people he was a freethinker, but he was really an atheist. And you know how they went for nonbelievers in those days . . .”
He pulled the car over to the side of the road, and she felt her stomach tighten.
“He published a pamphlet called Why I Am an Infidel in which he wrote, ‘Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity.’ Pretty bold stuff, huh?”
“I guess,” she said.
“Ironically, deodar means ‘tree of God.’”
“Huh. That’s funny.”
He looked out the window.
“Are you a believer, Rose?” The way he said it made her hair stand on end. He cooed it, like he was asking if she loved him.
“My dad was a pastor.”
“No kidding? Was? Has he retired?”
“In a way. He killed himself.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry, Rose.” He winced with his eyes but his mouth was still smiling.
“No, it’s okay.” She wanted both for him to drop her home so the awkwardness would end and for the ride to keep going. “How come you know so much about . . . trees?”
“I absorb all kinds of information. My wife calls me a sponge—an animal and not a mineral, by the way, nor a tree.”
Rosemary waited a moment then said: “You’re married?”
“You assumed I was gay, didn’t you?” He inhaled dramatically and raised an eyebrow. “Because I teach drama. And care somewhat about my appearance.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s . . . you don’t wear a ring.”
“How right you are. I don’t wear a ring. I’m allergic. My skin’s very sensitive. Um. So . . . where exactly do you live?”
She turned red—she’d never said. She waved her hand five or six houses down. Mr. Z pulled into the center of the road and started driving. He stopped outside Raymond van der Holt’s house.
“Whoa, nice crib, girlfriend!”
“No, mine’s that little gray thing next door to it.”
Rosemary gathered her things together slowly and opened the car door. She unbuckled her seat belt last.
“Rose,” he said. She turned. “If you ever need anything or just someone to talk to, call me. Let me give you my cell number.”
The term “cell number” always made her think of prison. Her heart leapt nonetheless. He brushed her bare thigh when he opened the glove compartment and reached for a red plastic pen. Then he scrawled his number on the back of an old gas station receipt and unthinkingly handed both pen and paper to her. She took both, pocketing the pen before he could notice.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll see you at class on Monday. If not sooner.” He waved as she got out of the car. What did he mean, if not sooner?
Suddenly, he exclaimed, “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“In the window of that big old house.”
“Where?”
“It’s gone now. I thought I saw a naked girl in there looking right at us.”
Rosemary turned to the van der Holt house. Was he putting he
r on? “It’s unlikely . . . I’m quite positive the guy who lives there doesn’t like girls.”
“Hmm. Then I must’ve imagined it. That’s what I get for watching Dead Ringers with you.”
II.
GIRL ON THE PLANE
—
December 1975
to
April 2006
– 4 –
HOMECOMING
Mary-Sue Ireland’s path to Santa Claus Lane began at her father’s funeral in 1975, in a land that felt completely alien to her, the kind of place she’d never dream of visiting, let alone dying in. She would sooner find common ground with a Hindu mendicant on the streets of Calcutta than with any of the well-fed citizens of this dreaded town.
She had rarely given Des Moines, Iowa, a moment’s thought (except to curse it) since her jailbreak at age eighteen. Since then, she’d visited her father at his retirement home maybe four times, which was four times more than she’d wanted to. Even with the cloud of Alzheimer’s, Bob Ireland always managed to pull himself together for enough time each year to send her an airline ticket from San Francisco. His checks kept Mary-Sue coming back, and she was too proud to make any bones about it. He’d been a distant father to her, spiritually absent even when physically present, and if this was his way of making up for it, she’d take every penny.
Of course, he’d gotten on just fine with her little brother, Bobby—in those days there were no two Ioway men baseball couldn’t bond. Mary-Sue knew she was too old to let such inequities eat at her. She was thirty-three. When Daddy was her age, he’d already built a splendid career and had been for five years the head of a Midwestern rubber company that dealt in condom technology. What had she done?
Driving up ice-slicked Locust Street, Mary-Sue saw the blistering gold dome of the state capitol in the distance. That was the big-city beacon of Daddy’s youth, his beefy adolescence squandered in a farm town named Anita where the big excitement every night was waiting for the Rusty Razor barbershop sign to light up. Des Moines was far from a metropolis in his day and even less of one now. Its streets had become exemplars of wounded glory, gray with once-grand office buildings that collected more echoes and shadows with each passing winter. It was a ghost town in progress.
She’d gotten a call about her father’s death from some kind of relative who still lived in Des Moines and worked part-time at the hospice where he’d spent his last days fighting liver disease.
“Everything’s been arranged, dear,” said the cousin-lady, with her overly soothing switchboard voice. “All you need to do now is show up.”
Mary-Sue remembered screaming into the receiver: “Where do you get off talking to me like this? I’m his fucking daughter!” The rest of it, from the packing of black clothes to the flight from San Francisco to Des Moines, was a complete blur. She had vague recollections, however, of lighting up a joint at the Denver airport and stubbing it out when some silver-haired cowpoke stared at her.
Cruising along the streets of Des Moines, pointedly avoiding her old neighborhood, she peered into the other cars and surprised herself thinking that, apart from the overeaters and the high-waisted geezers with the Dust Bowl faces, Iowans were, by and large, a good-looking people. Donna Reed had been an Iowan originally. John Wayne, Jean Seberg. The people at the airport were all easygoing, wholesome types. A far cry from the hollow-eyed crazies she often encountered roving the streets of San Francisco, vibrating with such intensity they scared even her. She’d always thought that her father was good-looking in his prime, just enough off-handsome he might have been plopped into movies as the leading man’s valet. She had inherited her father’s brown curls and big, watchful eyes; now if she’d simply stop smoking so many damn cigarettes and put some of her old chub back, she’d probably pass for a wholesome Iowan herself.
Out in West Des Moines, her happy thoughts about iconic Iowans faded. A panhandler stood by the intersection, wearing a raggedy Santa suit. The red had bled into the white and his buckle dangled loose off the belt. The Yosemite Sam beard was the man’s own, chest-length and snow-dusted—he could have been a rogue member of the Manson Family. Bony fingers held up a cardboard sign: will work 4 bus ticket. Mary-Sue entertained the idea of paying him to attend the funeral in her place, and this made her laugh so hard she narrowly missed a flatbed full of hogs. The driver gave her the finger. She rolled down her window, called him a country-ass pigfucker, sped away, and felt good.
The funeral was very tasteful. Nameless former colleagues from Cedar Falls had driven through a small blizzard to be there. Nameless relatives from the Iowa countryside showed up in ill-fitting borrowed suits. One of the Cedar Falls sophisticates remarked on how classy it was for the funeral home to have hidden its hearses from the visitors’ lot.
What Mary-Sue had been told was correct—she didn’t have to do anything but show up. The entire program had been planned without her. The moment she arrived at the door, she was escorted by Mr. Evans, the funeral director, to the front-row pew and handed a box of Kleenex. The aunt or whatever who’d spoken to her on the phone smiled at her smugly from the far end of the chapel but never once came over; she planted herself by the row of wreaths, greeting well-wishers and fiddling with the hundred gold bangles she wore on her arm like Slinkies. Mary-Sue was grateful she’d smoked a joint in the parking lot or she’d be running at her with a clenched fist.
On the stage, atop a table with a burgundy silk runner, sat a jade-colored urn. She hadn’t even known that her father wished to be cremated. Everybody at the funeral, it seemed, knew her father better and loved him more than she did. She was a stranger.
When the service began, a fifty-ish pastor with a comb-over came to the lectern. He had the face of someone who’d fallen asleep at the sewing machine and woken up with his features stitched together funny. Then the aged organist with shaky Parkinson’s hands played a couple of songs from The Music Man, which Mary-Sue felt were wholly inappropriate. Some people cried during this time—perhaps they knew these songs had meant something to her father.
Nobody stopped to talk to her after the service. They were all too busy. A couple of old biddies nodded sympathetically at her before hurrying over to the pie and cookie cart, where the snickerdoodles tasted like sawdust (and she was stoned). When did Iowans stop knowing how to bake? She’d had better at a macrobiotic cantina in the Haight where the cook was often too baked himself to tell sugar from salt. She exchanged nods with a teenage boy who’d been dragged there by his infirm grandmother, car keys jangling impatiently in his hands. Everybody was occupied. She’d make a clean getaway.
She was halfway across the lot to her red rental Mustang when somebody came running after her, shoes shushing in the snow, asking her to wait. It was Mr. Evans, the slow-talking funeral director. He wanted to know if she’d be taking the ashes.
The ashes. She hadn’t even given them a second’s thought.
“No!” she said, then repeated in a calmer voice, “no, but thanks.”
“I didn’t think so.” The funeral director pursed his lips and started back to the home, snowflakes melting on his bald pate as they landed.
Mary-Sue watched him walk away with mincing steps, shaking his head ever so slightly. Now it was her turn to run after him. She followed him back to the entrance of the building.
“What the fuck did you mean by that?”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Ireland?”
“What did you mean ‘I didn’t think so’? You don’t even know me, you parasite! You feed off the misfortunes of others and you think you’re entitled to judge me?”
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you in some way, Miss Ireland. I really didn’t mean any disrespect at all.”
“God! You passive-aggressive motherfucker!”
“Well, I really should be going back in to see how the others are doing. Please take care of yourself, Miss Ireland. You obviously need to get some rest.�
��
He leaned forward to give her a hug. She returned with what her gut told her to do—she clocked him hard on the face with her handbag. Its large metal clasp hit him square in the left eye and an inch-long cut under his brow began to bleed. He staggered back a couple steps, stunned. Before either of them grasped what had happened, Mary-Sue struck him again. This time, he fell back onto a snow-covered bush, sending clumps of white into the air. There was more blood on his face now, and the snow he touched instantly turned scarlet.
“Please, Miss Ireland . . .”
“Stop saying my name, you condescending asshole! You don’t even know me!”
She lunged for him but did not strike him this time. He fell to the ground in anticipation all the same. He tried repeatedly to stand himself back up but his patent-leather shoes kept slipping on the ice. Mary-Sue laughed. Each time he fell, he became more and more disheveled.
“Help . . . !” His voice was hoarse. “Somebody help me!”
“Look at you, Mr. Evans. Look at you now.”
She walked briskly to her car, got in and vroomed away.
Mary-Sue gathered up all the little bottles from the minibar. She lined them up like a firing squad in front of the TV and drank them one by one. She was in a suite that had been booked for her at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, another old landmark that had become as shabby as the rest of the Midwest. Anyone who had any sense at all moved out to try their luck in California or New York; the ones who stayed either had no imagination or no choice. Her father she once imagined had both, but he’d chosen to remain in his home state out of some spiritually ruinous notion of loyalty.