Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  Before we ate, François placed a so-called Chinese Neolithic pot in front of these guests and they admired the whirling, primitive pattern painted on the belly.

  “Isn’t that a copy?” I said. “Ch’ing dynasty. They liked to mimic pieces from the past.”

  “Rumi.” My father’s eyes danced with irritation. “Please.”

  “No, I’m sure.” I disappeared into the office. Ten minutes later, I returned to the dining room while everyone else was eating and placed a monograph on the table in front of my father. I opened it to a page with an old black-and-white photograph from an archaeological dig in China where the very same pot had been unearthed alongside some statuettes from the thirteenth century. “You can see,” I said. “The paint is faded in the same places. It’s the same pot.”

  I could feel Snowden-roshi watching me, his mouth bent in a slight smile of amusement.

  My father carefully set his napkin down on the table but I could see his fingers trembling when he picked up the book. “How … interesting.” His vocal cords were drawn tight.

  Later that evening, he came to see me in my room.

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to embarrass me publicly.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “And you thought it was appropriate to find fault with me in front of everyone else?”

  “I …”

  “These people came to us as customers, and you stood there in front of them, insisting that I made an error. Do you have any idea what kind of an impression you made? You even ignored them at dinnertime. I didn’t force you to eat with us because I have always indulged you in your little moods. But add it all up together, Rumi, and I’m deeply disappointed. Embarrassed on your behalf.”

  “I …”

  “I don’t understand this self-righteousness. It speaks to some deeper problem between us. You behave as though I have offended you and you want to retaliate by humiliating me in public. I cannot imagine what I have done to you to deserve this treatment.”

  I shook my head.

  “Disagree with me if you want, but do it in private.” With that, he slammed my door shut.

  The following evening, we ate dinner in separate rooms.

  As a child, I had always feared his disappointment. Now I discovered that his anger at me was an even worse thing. How could I make it right? Perhaps I was wrong to speak up when I saw him make a mistake. Perhaps my unusual relationship with objects was flawed. Alone, I ate my plate of grilled fish and vegetables and wondered what I could do to restore our earlier harmony.

  For a few days, I tried to ignore the voices of the objects. When François issued a judgment about a painting or a scroll, I agreed on principle. But the objects would not leave me alone. They demanded attention, voices echoing against the ceiling of the store, like the flapping of birds inside a bell tower. They were gentle but insistent, saying to me that I was right when my father was wrong. My conviction would not die. The more certainty I developed, the more mistakes I saw him making. I began to wonder. All these years, I’d assumed that he was the one with the superior eye, and that my reliance on the way that objects spoke to me was a handicap.

  At night, I continued to hear the woman’s voice. She seemed to come from deep within the house. She knew my name and liked to say it while I was falling asleep. She said very little else, though I gathered that whoever she was, she felt lost or trapped. “Find me. Find me,” I once heard her whisper. I didn’t know at first where she wanted me to look. I’d get up and drift through the hallway half-asleep until I would wake up, startled to find myself out of bed. I would return to my room, but a few days later I’d just repeat the process.

  “François,” I said at work after we’d gone a few days without arguing and had resumed taking our meals together.

  “Hmm?”

  “Did you lose something?”

  He gave me a strange look. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe there is an object missing?”

  Slowly he shook his head. “From the catalog?”

  That must be it. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to spend a few days doing inventory.”

  He pushed his glasses back against his brow. “Rumi, what’s troubling you?”

  For the first time in my life, I discovered that I had the ability to hide what I was thinking. “I just think I would feel better if I could keep things in a little better order.”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Whatever you need to do, my dear.”

  I knew that if there was something lost or hidden in the house, there was only one logical spot to look. For our home had a place for hidden things, a room within a room.

  My father had told me this when I was thirteen. “Consider it a challenge,” he said. “See if you can find it.”

  There were clues over the next few days.

  In the living room, my father began to sing a French folk song he must have learned as a child. He carried a glass of wine and disappeared around the corner into the bathroom, and the sound of his voice traveled through the books on Chinese porcelain. The singing stopped and my father came back into the hallway with me.

  “Did you like my song?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I stared at the bookshelf.

  “A little song about a genie in a cave,” he said. “Sort of like Aladdin. You remember how he freed the genie?”

  I took a sheet of paper from my room and drew a long rectangle standing on its end. I labeled the bottom length “books.” On the right-hand side, I wrote “bathroom door.” I put in a horizontal line, effectively slicing the rectangle in half and creating two squares. In the top square, I wrote “bathroom.” I labeled the left-most line of the entire rectangle “outside.” There was a square room on the bottom that remained unaccounted for. The secret room.

  I got up and walked around the corner to a portion of wall. Here my father had hung up a scroll of a Chinese tiger. Below this was a small wood table holding an orchid and, beside this, a bench. I had always avoided this corner of the house. As a rule, I liked paintings of animals, but this tiger had always frightened me. “His eyes are always going to follow you,” my father had teased when he had first hung up the painting. I dragged the small table and orchid off to the side. Then I pulled a chair up next to the painting, climbed on top, and unhooked the painting from the wall. Still standing on the chair, I began to roll up the hanging scroll until I was sure it would not touch the ground when I descended. Then I carried it over to the dining room table and set it down on the white lace tablecloth.

  “Aha!” my father exclaimed.

  I had not heard him come into the hallway. “It has to be here,” I said.

  “What does?”

  “The doorway.” The wall looked just like any other wall in our house, covered with panels of chocolate-colored wood. I ran my fingers along the seams.

  “You won’t get it open that way,” my father said impatiently. He set his wine glass down on a side table, then pressed a corner of one of the panels. Nothing happened. He pushed harder. Still nothing. “It must be stuck. Well, I couldn’t expect you to get it open if it was just going to be stuck like that,” he said, as though the fact that I had not succeeded in prying open the wall required an excuse. “It must be all the moisture in the air. Things become so wet in this climate.” He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and pounded the wall. It popped open with a comical boing. I smelled musty air. “There you go,” my father beamed at me. “Your Aladdin’s cave. And I am your genie. Look!” He whipped a flashlight out of his pocket, turned it on, and pointed it at a suit of armor. “Tell me the insignia.”

  I sniffed and stepped into the room, floorboards creaking under my weight.

  “Come on. Insignia.”

  “Imperial.”

  “Now, how much should we charge?”

  I shook my head. A newspaper cost a dollar. A full tank of gas cost twenty. Beyond that I had no sense of number
s.

  “It’s all good and well for you to know the difference between lacquer and wood. But you’re going to have to learn how much to charge people,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He was genuinely surprised. “Why, if you are going to be an art dealer, Rumi, these are the kinds of things you have to know.”

  So it was that I now turned to the secret room under the premise of conducting inventory. I removed the tiger painting, popped open the false wall, and flipped on the light. Here, crammed from floor to ceiling, were hundreds of wooden boxes. While François was downstairs working, I spent the next hour or so opening boxes and crates, some stamped with the Chinese symbol for export and others unmarked, checking their contents against the catalog. Nothing.

  Then I wondered: What if the object wasn’t exactly lost, but purposely hidden? I dug deep into the inventory, past the front rows of jades and pots, back toward the paintings and sculptures François said we would need to house for several years before they could be sold. Still nothing.

  By late afternoon I was exhausted, and I settled back against two crates to rest. The secret room had no windows, and I was dependent on the overhead light and my flashlight to see anything. I turned the flashlight off and closed my eyes. When I opened them a moment later, a glimmer like the underside of a minnow caught my eye. It was one of our Japanese mirrors. I shifted my focus to the metal surface and picked it up. There it was: my face. I could see angles and lines. Slim eyes that were almost, but not completely, Asian. High forehead. Dimples. An aquiline nose inherited from François.

  I had spent many hours looking at my face, partly from disappointment and the secret hope that I might suddenly become beautiful—Snowden-roshi had said that my mother was beautiful all those years ago—but also out of curiosity. If I could dissect my face into its discrete parts, I could attribute certain features to my father and assume that the remainder belonged to my mother. She would not have had my chin. She would not have had my hair, which was too light in color and texture to be Japanese. Her eyes would have been brown. Her nose would have been smaller, and less obtrusive.

  I imagined this second, separate face beside my own. She would have been young when she had been with François. She must have had thick, straight hair, which had fused with François’ to give me mine. There was her round face, and her large eyes—unusually large for someone Japanese—which smiled when the rest of her face smiled as it did now. I smiled back. We both had the same strong teeth. In subtle ways we looked the same—the way our mouths were shaped and connected to our cheeks.

  Dust rose from the boxes. I sneezed and sent a spray of water on the mirror’s face. I wiped it dry with my sleeve, and when I looked at the mirror again, the woman’s face—my mother’s face—moved.

  I looked to the side. There, gazing at me, was a woman. Her hair was unbound and hung heavily as though wet. Her brow furrowed with pain, and her white lips parted to reveal a row of tiny teeth. There was a vacant, hungry expression in her eyes, the look of someone who has not eaten for many, many days but has instead been overtaken by hallucinations. Her face was pale and luminous, like the moon, and the flesh of her neck pure white and translucent like a lychee.

  I heard a wail. A low, throaty throb trembled up in pitch. The sound wound up my spine, climbing in a chromatic scale, a shivering finger of rising ivy.

  And then she was behind me. She must be standing right behind me.

  I whirled around.

  “Rumi,” she said.

  I saw the tail end of her kimono disappear around a stack of crates and when I followed her, I found myself alone in the entry to the secret room.

  The figure had disappeared.

  “Mother?” I called.

  Over the years I had asked my father many times about my mother. François told me that while she had loved me very much, she had grown quite ill and died shortly after my birth. “But I will always be your father and your mother,” he would say.

  When I started high school I went through a brief phase when I demanded to know precisely what had happened. My father always responded with some variation of the following: “I can certainly understand a child’s desire to know about her mother, but it has been so long. And anyway, you did not know her.”

  “At least tell me what she was like,” I persisted.

  My father would launch into one of his characteristically enigmatic speeches. “You know the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu? She was born out of her father’s eye. Sort of like the Greek goddess Athena, except she was born out of her father’s head. Goddesses who don’t have mothers end up becoming warriors. They are very cunning and smart. Like Brünnhilde in Nordic mythology.”

  “And this has exactly what to do with me?”

  “If you are a goddess and you are only going to have one parent, it’s best to have a father. All the goddesses who only have a mother end up silly. I’ve done you a favor.”

  “You’ve done me a favor?”

  “Well, the fates have,” he interjected quickly, “in giving you a father who dotes on you and appeals to your intelligence instead of teaching you the insipid hobbies that most of your female schoolmates have learned from their socialite mothers. If it weren’t for me, who knows what would have become of you? Playing tennis and tanning, or screaming ‘Woo-hoo!’ over absolutely nothing of importance. By growing up with me, you’ve learned to do something useful with your life. And that’s far better than turning you into a woman every man will idolize, isn’t it?”

  Now I heard voices: François, Snowden-roshi, and others. They were climbing up the staircase from the shop and into the house. After our last dinner together when I had not helped entertain our guests at all, I knew I would be expected to help prepare a meal, to sit with them while we ate. Somewhat still in a daze, I hastily repacked the secret room, shut the door, and replaced the tiger painting.

  François was waiting for me when I turned around. “Oh, good,” he whispered. “I don’t want that open when guests are here.”

  “I heard you coming.”

  “And how’s the inventory?”

  “Messy.”

  He was going to ask me questions, but Snowden-roshi appeared just then with a bouquet of red and yellow roses for me. Behind him someone turned on the hallway and dining room lights, and abruptly the house was flooded with gold light.

  “A young woman can never have too many flowers,” he said, and I thought to myself how easy it seemed to be for men to have ideas as to what a young woman should or should not have.

  Though I had intended to be a better hostess this time around, I ended up keeping mostly to myself that evening, making a large pasta dish and salad, while François found a couple of bottles of wine that had been languishing above the refrigerator. I was rattled from my experiences in the secret room, but my job as host precluded any self-indulgent panic attack. There were ten of us that night, including Dr. and Mrs. Lorenzi, who had come looking for a Zen ink painting to put in their living room. François had managed to talk them into buying the black-and-white screen, which he’d repaired just a few weeks earlier. I could tell that the extra cash had made François ecstatic. He was gallant and funny all evening, punctuating Snowden-roshi’s stories with tales of his own. The priest told us how he’d gone for a pilgrimage like Bashō, walking from Solvang to Santa Barbara, and François recounted a time he’d escaped from China with a dozen pieces of jade sewn in his pants. Snowden-roshi had slept under oak trees, met with gentle Mexican farmers who had recognized him as a kind of monk, and given impromptu lectures about Buddhism to tourists gathered at wineries. François had been tested by an old antique dealer in Xian, who had placed three dishes on a table and been delighted when my father had chosen the “correct” one.

  Later, we drifted off to separate conversations and Mrs. Lorenzi pulled me aside to chat. “You two are so cute,” Mrs. Lorenzi cooed. “He’s never brought me flowers.”

  I kept my voice cool, but amused. “You misunderstand.
”

  “My dear, these things are never a secret. People always know.”

  When the evening was nearly over and the guests mostly departed, I wrapped myself up in an old horsehair blanket we kept folded over a corner of the sofa and stepped out onto the deck, which was through the kitchen. From here I had a view of a small garden and the backs of other similarly shaped houses. A black cat with a white bib paused under a lamp and looked at me before flying into a genesta bush. Off in the distance, I could see Coit Tower winking at me, and beyond this the glittering lights of the East Bay. I shivered, then turned around and looked into the sky. The cauldron of the ocean had whipped up a fierce plume of gray fog, and the moisture was now bearing down upon the city. Soon the contours of buildings and trees would be lost in the mist.

  “You’re not cold?”

  “A little.”

  Snowden-roshi came to stand beside me. “Did you have a good evening?”

  I drew the blanket more closely around me. “Do you remember when you asked me where my mother was buried?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you want to know?”

  “I told you. I thought it would be nice to take her some incense.”

  “I want the real reason.”

  He leaned against the deck railing. “Your father has a difficult time discussing what happened to her. What happened to her remains. Where she is buried. What he did with her things.”

  “Supposedly it’s too painful.”

  He cleared his throat. “You know him best, Rumi. You know if there is something he is hiding.” He moved very close to me now. I smelled something sweet and musty, like fruit and wine and smoke all at once. “You’ve remembered something, haven’t you?”