Typical American

by Gish Jen

  sight. Theresa looked away, noticing that though the girl's jewelry, like her clothes, had been removed, her nail polish remained. This was a summery, watermelon pink, just the sort of color that a carefree young lady with her life in front of her might pick. Theresa shuddered.

  And yet what was hardest about training was not such horrors. It was not the hours. It was not the responsibility, or the pain, or the patients, or the politics, or the masses of information tumbling and reeling in her head like cars on a circus ride. It was not the mnemonic devices, as hard to recall as the facts. ("The Argyll-Robertson pupil accommodated but did not react." What was the joke, though? Something about a prostitute.) It was not the fatigue. Or not exactly. What was hardest about training, for Theresa, was having to sleep in that dank, little room the interns all shared, with men. "If there were more women..." someone had explained, with a shrug. Now, as weary, she headed that way — finally, finally done — she thought about how soundly the men slept. She thought about how the men snored and tossed. They cried out. They moaned. They farted. They scratched themselves, and worse. Even the still ones, who slumbered soulfully, who curled up neatly, even they disturbed her; she could feel their radiant presence, against which she had to stand guard. Maybe they bothered her most, the sweet ones. So peaceful, but what dreams they might stir up in her if she slept, all throbbing, and sliding. A spinster's hot heaves; how pointed her needs were, it was impossible to sleep. It was impossible to think about people witnessing her sleep. What if she moaned, and cried out, and scratched herself, or worse?

  And so it was that when Old Chao phoned, Theresa was lightheaded with fatigue. Taken aback, she not only dropped the receiver but admitted to him that she had — a small intimacy. Who would have predicted the larger ones to follow?

  "So clumsy," she said. "1 don't know what's the matter with me."

  He laughed. The conversation could have loomed, a mountain range of awkwardnesses. Instead, it rolled. Anyone would have thought they spoke on the phone all the time. "And I don't know what's the matter with me either" he said. "Do you know, I managed to leave my briefcase in the examining room. Under that chair" They agreed on a time for him to come pick it up.

  But she could not find the briefcase. The next day, she called and left a message at the department.

  "What message?" Old Chao adjusted his belt in the hospital hallway.

  "Anyway, since you're here, we can have another look around for it."

  The examining room was occupied. They waited in adjoining chairs, chatting. The weather. His various ailments. And, at one point, "Why isn't your Little Brother attending the conference next month?"

  "What conference?"

  "The space conference. Everyone else in the department is going."

  The door opened. No briefcase, and no one they asked had seen it. The lost-and-found was closed for the day.

  "We should have tried there first" Theresa lamented.

  "It seems I'll have to return tomorrow," said Old Chao.

  She was surprised, Theresa told Ralph, that he didn't go to more conferences. She herself was rather looking forward to going to conferences, she said. She wondered, Did schools pay for engineers to go to conferences the way hospitals sometimes paid for doctors?

  "They do," said Ralph shortly. "In fact there's a space conference coming up that Old Chao wants me to attend. But I'd rather finish this paper I'm working on."

  "He has a paper to write," Theresa reported to Old Chao. "He thinks his time would be better spent on that."

  They went together to the lost-and-found. There it was! Old Chao's briefcase. Old Chao rifled through the manila folders.

  "Nothing missing?"

  "Nothing!"

  To celebrate, he treated her to a Spam sandwich in the cafeteria.

  Was Ralph right or wrong? Was he headed for disaster? Theresa couldn't decide. All she knew was that, crossed with shadow, their family life took on a poignancy sharper than she could stand.

  "Brew." Mona was blithely pointing at a red turtle.

  "Red," said Callie. "Red."

  "Brew." Mona gnawed on her knee.

  "Mona, it's red. Red!"

  "Brew."

  As if she could tell from her sister's tone that there would be no setting her right, Callie diplomatically went on to the next page, a green horse.

  "Brew," said Mona.

  "Green."

  "Brew."

  "Green, Mona, green!"

  Mona looked bored. Callie turned the page impatiendy; Helen had to yell to be careful with the book. But then the girls settled into a sweet disharmony that brought tears to Theresa's eyes.

  "Purple," said Callie.

  "Brew."

  As if her sister had agreed with her, Callie simply turned the page. "Yellow.'

  :iiuw," "Brew.

  Ralph made up stories for them. One about an ant climbing a tree. Another about a monk hiking a mountain. Up, up, up, he said. Higher and higher.

  And every time he told a story, as if to counterbalance the motion, Theresa's heart sank.

  What should she do? Theresa analyzed the relative merits of action versus inaction until her choice seemed not so much between paths, as between going blindly left or right in a featureless wood. How tired she was! The problem began to expand to levels at once more profound and absurd. How had they come to this crisis? What use was reason to her now? Why try to alter fate?

  It was a release to be paged for a phone call.

  "I've forgotten my briefcase in the cafeteria," said Old Chao.

  "Not really!"

  "I don't know what to think." Old Chao's voice was strangely rough, perplexity cut with cheer. "I can't seem to keep hold of it."

  "I'm just sorry I won't be making a real salary sooner. Then you could buy a place right away."

  "Oh, that's okay."

  There had been a time, Theresa remembered, when Helen had held the paper gingerly, to avoid getting her hands full of newsprint. Now she grasped the pages with enthusiasm, her fingers so black they left their prints in the margins.

  'Two bedroom cape with add-on potential. Nu to market, builder's special. Contemporary ranch with extras galore." She looked up. "Today Janis took me to this house with a winding walkway. Really darling! However, it was very overpriced, they're going to have trouble selling it for anything near what they're asking. And yesterday I saw a breakfast nook with built-in benches —"

  "Be careful you don't fall in love," laughed Theresa, wagging her finger.

  Helen laughed back.

  Six weeks later, though, Theresa came home from yet another lunch with Old Chao (her fourth) only to find Helen aglow with dismay.

  "Oh! You'd have to see it. It's beautiful, perfect, brand-new, and you wouldn't believe how affordable. Janis says no one in her office has ever seen such a good deal, ever. It's on an odd lot, which makes it a little cheaper to begin with, plus the builder wants to sell quick. The only reason he has it is because the original buyer's mortgage didn't go through, and he's got a shopping center going so he needs cash." Three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a walk-out basement. "And so many extras/" A nook off the kitchen. A brick planter. A big backyard. "Plus the location's perfect, on a dead-end block, very quiet, with all young families." Helen stopped. "We'd fit right in. And good schools."

  "This one's the one."

  Helen's eyes misted over. "Of course, there'll be other houses.

  But not like this one, not at this price. We'll never be able to afford one like this. I guess I really didn't expect to find anything."

  "No one knows what she's going to find." Theresa sighed heavily as she unbuttoned her coat.

  Once, while Theresa was taking his history, a glittery-eyed patient grabbed her waist and put his mouth to her ear — or so she gathered later. What she remembered better was her scream, the scream of someone she didn't know and didn't trust, a screech so bloodcurdling that even the emergency room, whose very livelihood was disaster, stopped dead still. A
s the chief resident joked later, it was as if Theresa were Vesuvius, and the rest of the staff, Pompeii. "Never knew you to be such a show-stopper," he quipped. And, "You sure do know how to get a man's attention."

  What she would have done then to get him to leave her alone! He didn't seem to realize how shamed she felt. How exposed. Everyone saw me, she kept thinking. Everyone saw me, everyone heard me. Yet he continued, with just that sort of relentless bantering she seemed to attract from men who were married; until finally, happily, it did begin to seem almost all right, what had happened. This was months later. In the end she'd felt grateful for his help, that was true, for the help of all married men. What was the harm of their flirting?

  Or so she'd thought. Was Old Chao in love with her? And was she in love with him? It seemed to her that great harm could indeed come of their flirting. If to sit and talk was flirting — if, indeed, it was anything at all. She should talk the situation over with Helen, she thought; but then said nothing. And what about Old Chao? Had he said anything to Janis? She plucked up the nerve to ask him. He answered, quietly, no. Conspirators, they were then. She would not have guessed him a conspiring type. But then she would not have guessed many things about him. That he loved to watch ice skaters, for example, and surfers on

  TV, and that he could skip stones — one of his students had taught him how on a field trip. So much he knew about water, about its freezing, its surface tension, its turbulence and flow; he once explained to her about eddies, and how they broke away in certain alternating patterns as they drifted downstream. Yet he could forget his learning too, baldly enjoying the phenomena produced. She had realized this slowly. She had admired it, deeply.

  Was this "getting to know someone"? How litde she'd understood the joy of it! Here she could envision a man's skeleton, his musculature; she could describe the workings of his lymph nodes. But what he remembered, valued, feared — all this was news. Listening, she revelled. His mind was nothing like hers; she tried to understand in which ideas his maleness lay. She spoke too, and was heard; she spoke more, surprising herself with what she said. What more could anyone ask? Their talk was enough for her, more than she'd dreamed of. She did not consider passion. Passion! Guilt kept its cold grip on that pleasure.

  "If only I could do something!" Theresa lamented, trying to console Helen. "Do you want me to go see it?"

  That would only make things worse.

  "Maybe there's some other way?"

  Helen shook her head, practicing acceptance. She was pretending she was ill. There was nothing to do but rest. "Don't ask me how I could get so silly over a house, anyway" she said. "A house! What is it? Four walls and a roof"

  Three days later, Theresa found Helen jumping up and down. "A special kind of loan," Theresa told Old Chao, glumly. "A new program to encourage people to move to the suburbs." She explained how they only had to put ten percent down. The monthly payments, however, were quite high. "For our income, they figured out how much I'll make, added that to how much Ralph will make once he gets tenure."

  Old Chao was surprised the bank would agree. "Don't they realize — f"

  "Janis arranged it."

  Old Chao played with his fork. "My wife, you know, will do anything for anybody. Everyone has to like her. Everyone has to like me." He set the fork on its tines. Their booth was so close to the kitchen that their napkins leapt and settled to the bursting rhythm of the swinging doors, which did not so much swing as boom. "So what are you going to do?"

  "I don't know. Ralph, you know, thinks his life is going to go up and up and up."

  "Maybe I should tell him ... ?"

  She frowned. "No, I don't think so."

  "You're sure?" He grasped her hand. His touch was firm and warm, his reaching out somehow unextraordinary.

  "If there were some way he could save face," she began; and before she knew what she was doing, she had removed her hand from Old Chao's, that she might massage her brow.

  The first time in her life a man had ever touched her, and all she'd done was fret about her brother! She felt veiled in cobwebs, a woman wedded to her family.

  "Say Ralph found some kind of job," she said the next day, "for which he got paid something like what he gets now. Then if I moonlit in the emergency room in addition to my practice, we could manage it."

  "How could you moonlight on top of your practice?" asked Old Chao. "When would you sleep?"

  "I'm used to no sleep. I don't sleep now." She wished Old Chao would put his hand on hers again.

  "And look at you," he said instead, gently.

  "It's my duty."

  Old Chao called for the check.

  They would hop up, take the steps by twos, jump them backwards, all without using their hands; and then they would bump down on their stomachs like alligators. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Mona liked the going down part, even though she got rug burns, but Callie preferred the going up. She liked the work of it, the feeling that she was getting somewhere; and she liked the view that was her reward, a tunnel of impressions that moved from their plaid sofa to their cardboard-box cocktail table, and from there on out the picture window, through which she could see almost everything going on at the Kennedys' across the way.

  Theirs was the last house in the neighborhood to be built, but when they moved in the area was still so new that local maps showed it as woods. The just-paved dead end was shiny black as the enamel walls of their oven, and all the yards were staked off with twine, as only the Kennedys had real grass (their rich uncle having had sod installed for them). Everyone else had spotty coverings of skinny, peapod-colored seedlings that they watered two, three, four times a day, depending on the weather. Rainy days were days off; sunny days it was back on the job. Some of the more ambitious neighbors had planted bushes and trees too — squat, well-spaced bundles of leaves and scrawny, solitary saplings — but the grass was the true binding hope of the neighborhood, and it was when the Changs spread their lot with lime and peat and 6-8-3 th at they started to get to know everyone. Mrs. O'Connor lent them her Rototiller; Mr. Rossi, his spreader; Mr. Santone, his abundant advice; and soon their sprinkler was casting its bit of the community spell, crossing and recrossing the soil in concert with its fellow magicians up and down the street.

  What had they understood about America? Evenings, they shook their heads at themselves. We didn't realize.

  We thought we knew. But we didn't know.

  We thought we lived here.

  But actually knew nothing.

  Almost nothing.

  Completely nothing!

  They would eat supper; then fortified, go on — really, nothing; nothing really — finding, to their pleasant surprise, that the deeper their former life sank in the black muck of ignorance, the higher their present life seemed to spring. So bright it shone, so radiant with truth and discovery! It was as if the land they had been living in had turned out to be no land at all, but a mere offshore island, a featureless mound of muddy scrub and barnacle-laced rock, barely big enough for a hospital, an engineering school. Whereas this New World — now this was a continent. A paradise, they agreed. An ocean liner compared to a rowboat with leaks. A Cadillac compared to an aisle seat on the bus. Every dream come dreamily true.

  Except, that is, that their corner of paradise seemed after a few days to be carpeted not with plush grass, but birds. A whole flock of birds; and not loopy-plumed songbirds, but scrappy, raucous brown birds with teeth. Callie swore they had teeth. Helen tried to set her straight gendy. "Birds don't have teeth." "In America they do," Callie answered. "I saw them! These are American birds, with teeth!" So insistent, that after a while Helen found herself going out to have a good look herself. Teeth? She was on her hands and knees on their flagstone walk when their neighbor Arthur Smith strolled by.

  "Problems?" Arthur Smith, once a slender man, now was slender still except for the beach ball he sported under his shirt. He squinted, pursing his lips. His hair was cut so short Helen could see sweat beading o
n his pink and brown scalp.

  "So many birds," Helen said weakly. She casually wiped her hands against each other, brushed her knees off.

  "That's life." He continued to stand there.

  "Maybe there's something wrong with that seed we used?"

  Mr. Smith considered the birds. "You folks Japanese?"

  "Chinese."

  "There you go," he said. "That's what I told Marianne. I told

  her, it ain't Japs moved in. Them Japs is farmers. These don't know dirt from dirt."

  Helen smiled weakly.

  "You ever raised up a lawn before?"

  "No."

  "There you go, I told Marianne that too. I could tell that just from our living room," he boasted. "Watching through the window."

  Did he really watch them through the window? By day, Helen moved self-consciously through the yard. By night, she watched back. This was how she found out he kept a gun. "A long one," she told Ralph. "He cleans it and shines it while he watches TV."

  The grass wasn't coming up. They waited.

  More birds.

  Until one bright day, at long last, a green shadow appeared; Helen had to examine it back on her hands and knees again (hoping Arthur Smith wasn't watching) to be sure it wasn't moss, or mold. Seedlings! So what, that one of their neighbors kept a gun? In among the birds, there were seedlings! Then there were fewer birds; and after that there was grass of an unearthly green, so bright it glowed far into the twilight, like a luminescent clock dial. Who wouldn't shake their heads to see it? The Changs agreed — a lawn like this was more than just nature, just life. A lawn like this was America. It was the great blue American sky, beguiling the grass upward. It was the soil, so fresh, so robust, so much better quality than Chinese soil; Chinese soil having been prevailed upon for too many thousands of years. The blades were a bit skinny now, but they would fatten. Of course! After all, this was top-quality grass, grown out of top-quality soil.