by Sandi Tan
She made a toast to the capitol building, shimmering against the black winter’s sky. She toasted the uneven tan on the wallpaper. She toasted the decades of toe cheese in the thick-pile wall-to-wall. She toasted the butt sweat in the leather club chair, the tumbler that probably once held some old industrialist’s dentures. The whole hotel was a dying white man. Iowa. Fucking Iowa, man.
When she was done toasting, she shut off the lights and crawled into bed.
Mary-Sue spent her teen years in Des Moines plotting her escape, reading New Yorker listings in the public library and studying the subway map that her father brought home from a business trip. Cosmopolitan Manhattan, she believed, was where her destiny lay, and she vowed that once high school was over, she’d hop on the quickest train there and never look back. When the time came, she did just that.
Life wasn’t exactly what she expected. The real East Coast people, like her roommates at Barnard from whom she first learned that bourgeois was a bad word, were WASP natives with beach houses, and they formed an impenetrable tribe that would never let her in long enough to belong. On weekends, she’d be their special guest star, the Midwestern charity case who was offered a peek at their peculiar rituals involving boat shoes, gingham napkins and thank-you notes, but she’d read enough Wharton to know that she would be a fool to try to parrot their ways. She learned the meaning of “shabby genteel” when she made her first Boston friends. They sleepwalked through life with passed-down manners borne of creaky Nantucket estates long since carved up, fought over, and lost. The Iowan in Mary-Sue felt that their frayed aristocratic style was vastly overprized, especially when it showed itself in their inability to locate the post office or, more pointedly, to pay for their share of a meal. The smart Jews were the ones she most longed to run with, but even the ones she bedded made her the brunt of quips about rednecks and anti-Semites. Most of these New York smart alecks had never been out of the five boroughs, let alone west of the Mississippi, yet they talked as if they knew everyplace and everything—a quality she once admired but quickly found repellent. She also had another disadvantage—she couldn’t stand jazz.
With school not providing the social nourishment she craved, she dropped out in her junior year and bounced up and down the Eastern seaboard, trying to find a perch to call home. After a few years, she headed west. Her third month working at a desolate used book store in Grass Valley, she met Chad, a prairie-voiced drifter from Omaha who caught her eye when he spent two hours picking his way through a copy of the I Ching. He seemed soothingly familiar to her—loose-limbed swagger, corn-fed grin; she wanted to scoop him home right away and make him pot roast or read his palms. But he had ideas of his own. He and his friends were starting up a commune on the coast north of San Francisco and needed one more person to make the rent. He told her, somewhat sheepishly, that the other six were also exiles from the Midwest. She jumped at it.
In their shared, wood-frame house over the eucalyptus-scented cliffs of Gualala, two hours north of the Golden Gate bridge, the group lived an idyllic existence. The women made and sold kites and wind chimes to passing motorists and the men rented themselves out as Sherpas to hikers who wanted to explore the nearby hills. Mary-Sue and a girl who’d grown up on a farm in Wisconsin made cheese using milk from the goats they raised; one of the boys brewed organic tofu in the feed barn. They grew their own food, made their own clothes. At night, they often discussed books but not to the exclusion of any slow readers, so the standbys were The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Wizard of Oz. Mary-Sue donated her collections of Rimbaud and Céline to enrich the communal stash but as far as she could tell, nobody cracked a single tome, not even out of curiosity.
Every month or two, the residents got punch-drunk and gave each other haircuts. Every week or two, they traded partners. Mary-Sue shared her bed with Chad for about three weeks, off and on. When a former cattleman from Colorado moved in, she went with him as soon as she saw his big hands.
Bobby came out to visit the summer their parents were separating. Their mother had been strident in her demands, and Daddy began retreating into dark afternoons of bourbon and Bullwinkle cartoons. He wanted to tag along whenever Bobby went tooling around for skirt and that was more than the boy could take.
“Daddy’s losing it. I’m blowin’ this pop stand.” That was how he’d put it on the phone. Within twenty-four hours, Bobby was strolling through Mary-Sue’s front door in Gualala, licking his lips when he glimpsed the ocean through the kitchen window.
Though Bobby was Mary-Sue’s baby brother, she never felt she needed to protect him. He’d leapt out of the womb with a natural knack for taking care of himself. It might have been his lopsided smile. You could have dropped six-year-old Bobby in a Harlem sandbox or the dining hall of an English boarding school and he’d be telling jokes and shaking hands. Unlike Mary-Sue, he always belonged.
Bobby stayed in the group house for three weeks, and nobody complained. He regaled the men with news of Iowa inter-city politics—regurgitated from Daddy’s mutterings—which for some reason they found fascinating. The women he charmed by playing the new boy with the greedy, greedy penis. He slept with the farm girl from Wisconsin until her Hare Krishna boyfriend put an end to it. After that, Bobby bicycled into town for fresh bait, some of them housewives more than twice his age.
Every day Bobby was there was further torment for Mary-Sue. She resented his intrusion into the private universe she’d found for herself, the way he appropriated everything of hers as his. Even worse, she knew he was primarily there so he could make a grand entrance when he returned home as the prodigal son. Her family was never huge on biblical thinking but everyone everywhere went awww for that one.
Finally the last straw. Mary-Sue was enjoying a couple hours of afternoon delight with her Colorado cowboy, Steve. Because locks went against house rules, Bobby walked into her bedroom while Steve was going down on her, right as she was about to come. Instead of leaving, Bobby stood and watched. Mary-Sue’s thighs were hiked up over Steve’s shoulders, her head and torso falling off the side of the bed like a trapeze in flight. She shrieked, plucked whatever books she could off the floor, and hurled them at Bobby until he finally cackled and walked away, leaving the door wide open.
“Nice jugs, sis,” he said. She made him pack his bags before the hour was up.
After Bobby went home, Mary-Sue’s housemates spoke so fondly of him that she realized she’d been living with a bunch of halfwits. The peach had lost its bloom. Mary-Sue split Gualala and joined a colony of modern ascetics up the coast in cold, wet Humboldt County, one hundred miles south of the Oregon border. These colonists lived in single huts in the redwoods with the barest necessities: electricity tapped from a nearby power line that went out without warning and a grimy communal cold-water shower. It was as far from a suburban split-level as she’d ever encountered; everything about it made even the group house in Gualala seem plastic and phony. Bourgeois.
The colony didn’t care what you believed in as long as you believed in something and kept yourself clean, kind, solitary and silent. There were a handful of Buddhist, Hindu and Roman Catholic hermits but the rest of them didn’t have names for their beliefs yet—they were still too new, still too original.
And in that atmosphere, she strove to be good. She stopped smoking, stopped drinking, kept celibate, ate only whole grains, seeds and vegetables, and scrubbed herself in the shower till her skin was raw. Sadness, she felt, was a by-product of baggage—material wealth, family, lovers, all of which were physical reminders of the past and instigators of unnecessary regret and desire. The simpler she kept her existence, she felt, the easier it would be to chase away unhappiness. It helped that the colony permitted neither televisions nor radios, and only the elders kept luxuries such as fridges and space-heaters. Life was uncomfortable, medieval even, but it had meaning because everything, from brushing her teeth to boiling water, posed a challenge. She stopped taking thi
ngs for granted, especially tampons. She rose at five and went to bed at midnight. The nights without electricity, she sat by lumpy tapers and just listened—owls, crickets, the rustling of leaves in the wind.
Gradually, the sadness went away, overtaken by the cold, the damp, fleas and general anxieties about her health. When she cried her endless tears, it was from sheer exhaustion. And exhaustion heightened all amazement. The mute beauty of a sunset, the elaborate fretwork on an acorn, the clear taste of stream water, all of it was more pronounced than ever before. If this was mystical ecstasy then she had found it, through cuts, bruises, scabs, blisters and painful wood splinters too tiny to be extracted by candlelight.
Three years into Humboldt County, there came a letter from her father. It was, inevitably, about Bobby. After the shooting of war protesters on campus, Bobby had decided to drop out of Kent State and enlist in the army. He wanted to go to Vietnam and “kick some ass.” Daddy was beside himself. Even though he considered himself an old-fashioned patriot, he didn’t want his only son going over to fight a war on a side that wasn’t winning. He asked for Mary-Sue to call home collect and help talk her brother out of it. To speed her up, he’d enclosed a check for $500.
Mary-Sue was reluctant to break her calm of the past three years and let the world back into her life, with its Pandora’s box of chaos, anger and grief. She needed her father’s money but she’d learned from experience that anything to do with Bobby was poison. Once she picked up the phone, the orderly life she’d made for herself would be no more. She could not do it. She could not sacrifice her peace.
But she acted honorably. Because she didn’t call home, she never cashed the check.
From the jungle, Bobby wrote her—not their father—a series of long letters, full of braggadocio and operatic violence. Science fiction, as she thought of them, stories from another planet. It was as if he was trying to incite some kind of sisterly reprimand from her, but she refused to take the bait. She never once wrote back.
The morning her father’s accountant told her that Bobby was killed, she vomited right there in the phone booth. Her only pair of sandals was now permanently wrecked.
Not long after, she received word from the colony’s elders that her behavior was interfering with “the equilibrium” of the others. She wasn’t surprised. One evening, feeling paranoid, she’d thrown a sandbag at a Buddhist monk named Nguyen. But because the community did not believe in the brutality of expulsion, they requested that she leave voluntarily. Quietly, she packed up her things.
She drifted from town to town in the Northwest like a ghost, stopping wherever she saw signs for organic produce. Daddy never contacted her to discuss Bobby. She knew it was on her to call him, and she wasn’t about to do it. No fuckin’ way.
The day after her father’s funeral, Mary-Sue woke up from her alcohol-induced coma, jumpy and discombobulated. She pulled the drapes open. It had snowed heavily while she slept and the city appeared to be covered in icing sugar. The capitol looked beneficent with its white papal beanie. I absolve you, Mary-Sue Ireland.
She drove to the funeral home and charged right into the chapel. An easel with an old woman’s portrait named the honoree as Mary Susanna Lombardi. Mary-Sue took a seat in the back while the organist with Parkinson’s played a hymn that seemed well-known to everyone but her. Only about seven guests were in attendance. Mary Susanna Lombardi’s body lay serenely in a steel coffin that looked to Mary-Sue like the hood of a Rolls Royce. The coffin trade—what a racket. She glanced around for Mr. Evans, the funeral director. It turned out he was standing at the far end of the stage, his eyes fixed on her. There was a flesh-colored Band-Aid over his brow. He nodded at her slowly and began his approach.
“Hello, Mary-Sue. Would you like to sign the guest book, too?”
Mr. Evans led her to his office in the rear of the home, and gestured for her to sit in one of two overstuffed armchairs.
“Honestly, I was hoping I’d see you back here.” He closed the door and retreated behind his desk. There was a smugness to his smile. “You know, I didn’t file a police report. I thought we’d settle this mano a mano.”
He was baiting her. She held her fist down. “I came to get my father’s ashes.”
“Oh?” Mr. Evans feigned surprise. He leaned his swivel chair back. “Your aunt said she’d come and collect them this afternoon. Should I call and tell her not to?”
“Yes. Do that.”
“All right, I will do that. It shouldn’t be a problem. You had the right of first refusal after all. All children do.” His fingertips leaned into one another, forming a pyramid. Then darting forth, he withdrew a single-sheet pamphlet from his drawer and slid it across the desk to her—“On Anger.” The author was one Gregory H. Evans. “In case you’re wondering—yes, I wrote this myself. I write most of the guides we produce. Many people have told me that this one was especially helpful. I know you’re a woman of strong opinion and I will be curious to hear your feedback.”
“You want me to read this now?”
“No, no, take it with you. You can always tell me later. Grief lasts.” He studied her reaction and, when she expressed no ire, gave her a wink. Still nothing. “Now, let me go and fetch your beloved father.”
He brushed by her shoulder deliberately as he took his mincing steps out of the office. While he was gone, she studied the plaques and framed photographs on his walls. He was evidently a good friend to old women. There were multiple certificates in the mortuary sciences, a state of Iowa registration for the practice, and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from Iowa City. On his desk, a plastic organizer overflowed with paper clips, rubber bands and Bic ballpoint pens with their caps gnawed into odd shapes. Scrawled on a Precious Moments memo pad in bubble letters were the words order formaldehyde!
Mr. Evans returned to the room with the jade-colored urn.
“Your aunt made a fine choice—this is genuine jadeite, from our Exquisite Treasures line. We listed the urn alone at eighteen thousand dollars.”
“It was my father’s money anyway.”
“I don’t doubt that. He was quite handy with the pocketbook. Or so I was told.”
Mary-Sue took the urn and got up to leave.
“Hang on, I’ll need you to sign this.” He put a stack of carbon copies in front of her and offered her one of his pens. “It proves that you collected the ashes and that they didn’t just vanish into thin air. Though that has been known to happen from time to time.”
She signed the documents without reading.
“Very trusting.”
“Very impatient.”
“And please don’t forget my pamphlet.” He folded the “On Anger” tract and placed it in her hand, grazing her skin meaningfully. “Let me know your thoughts. I know you can be brutally honest, but I’m a big boy. Really, I am.”
He walked her to the door. “When I phone your aunt, is there anything else you’d like for me to tell her?”
Yeah, tell her to eat shit and die, she thought. “Tell her, thank you.”
“Very good. I shall do that very thing.”
As soon as she’d driven a block from the funeral home, she crushed Mr. Evans’s pamphlet into a ball and flung it out the window as far as she could. She hoped it would land in the mobile home park called Club Paradise.
“Sayonara, sucker!”
It landed in the middle of the street.
When she got back to San Francisco, Mary-Sue found a stack of mail waiting at her door. There was a condolence card from her landlord, Mr. Antonio, a letter from her father’s accountant, and a bulging envelope from FCVN, Friends of the Children of Viet Nam. It was the last piece of mail that she tore open first, and with greatest optimism.
– 5 –
KATE IRELAND
Mary-Sue grabbed the pale blue dress with the smocking across the chest. Size three. For ages two to three. Sh
e pulled out a size four and compared the two side by side. Size four was only a little bigger, longer mainly, but this could make all the difference.
Kate, as she’d already named the daughter she hadn’t yet met, was three years old and due to arrive the following day. Mary-Sue had no idea what she looked like, whether she would be small for her age, like the Third World orphans she’d seen on TV, or sized more like her Kmart counterparts. She took both dresses, and a large stuffed panda to remind Kate of her Oriental heritage.
The trial-and-error nature of family life terrified Mary-Sue. Her Des Moines clan had enjoyed every chance of success. In a more scientific universe, they might have been a control group—handsome Daddy, pretty Mom, teenage daughter and cute little Junior, tucked away in a sprawling ranch house next to a bluegrass fairway. Yet the Ireland family experiment had failed—in strengthening community, in fostering stability, in producing happiness. When she was young, she assumed that blood bound everything, but as she got older, she came to realize that blood bound nothing. Family was a coincidence of birth—it was no more than spilled soda. She figured she could do no worse on her own, creating a nuclear-nuclear unit with its variables lowered from four members to two, and the odds for failure reduced by half.
She stopped at the market on the way home to pick up things a hungry child might enjoy—milk, apple juice, vanilla ice cream, chocolate-chip cookies, Cheerios, frosted cornflakes, Grape-Nuts and pretzels. She added a carton of soy milk, just in case Kate turned out to be lactose intolerant. Later that evening, she went to collect the Mickey Mouse–shaped cake she’d ordered from her neighborhood bakery, panting as she bustled up Telegraph Hill to her apartment with it. Such a large cake might have been excessive for one little girl, but the next day also happened to be her own thirty-fifth birthday, and such a doubly auspicious occasion called for as much sugar as they pleased.
Myrna LaBoeuf, her counselor from Friends of the Children of Viet Nam, called at dinnertime to run through the next evening’s program at the San Francisco airport. President Ford had just given the mission a name, “Operation Babylift,” and the FCVN social workers who’d been toiling for months were relieved to have their mission legitimized at last, even if the name he chose sounded like a playground contraption.