Useful Phrases for Immigrants

by May-lee Chai

  The training bras at Stern’s were hidden in the back behind the women’s slips and the silky pajamas, far enough away from the regular brassieres so as not to be intimidating. That was a relief. To see them hanging discretely on a divider between the lingerie and hosiery sections.

  The light shone from above so the white polyester looked even whiter than usual, like an advertisement for bleach, and I said, loudly, “Oh, look at the bathrobes” and pointed past the bras to the tangled rack of robes, just in case anyone was watching us, just to throw them.

  Mama walked right up to them, though. She scanned the rows and plucked one from the hanger. Then she held it up to my body to check the size, pressing the fabric against my blouse, against the flatness of my chest, right there in the aisle for the whole world to see.

  “Oh my god! Mama!” I exclaimed, and, dying, I slipped away into hosiery, disappearing into the displays of upturned plaster legs kicking into the air. My heart was pounding, my cheeks burning, and my eyes stung. I blinked and blinked again. All around me were picture after picture of women with their arms crossed over their naked torsos, lounging in nothing but pantyhose over their long legs in taupe, suntan, nude, and shimmer. It seemed they were deliberately mocking me as I crouched near the floor in shame, pretending to tie my shoelaces.

  Fortunately, Mama didn’t come looking for me. Or worse, call my name.

  I watched from my hiding spot as she found a saleslady to ring up the bra.

  I crouched down again and hid, watching Mama walk away with a silver and black Stern’s bag under her arm. After a pause, I was going to come out again, wander over nonchalantly holding a package of tights, but there weren’t any for girls. I was in the wrong section entirely, I discovered, when I heard Mama’s voice rising in laughter.

  I hoped none of my friends’ mothers were here. I didn’t want anyone to find out about this until I’d had time to tell them myself. Humiliation was easier to control that way.

  But the next voice wasn’t a woman’s. It was low and rumbly. A man.

  What crazy father would be here in the women’s section? I thought. Seriously, not even Mr. Glinbizzi would do that. That’s why there were chairs by the elevators. Men waited there for their wives and talked to each other. I’d seen them.

  I followed the sound of Mama’s voice and found her in the aisle, my Stern’s bag still under her arm. She was laughing at something that man was saying. He was wearing a suit jacket, tweed; I knew because Papa had one like that too. But this man was older, with gray in his curly hair, and he was white.

  “Linda,” he said, and the way he said it made Mama laugh again.

  I hurried over. “Hey, Mom,” I said, my voice a little too loud in my own ears. “They didn’t have any tights in my size.” And I bumped into her arm.

  “And this must be Lu-lu,” the man said.

  I didn’t like that he knew my name.

  “That’s not how you’re supposed to say it,” I said. “It’s Chinese. It has tones. Lu. Lu.” I tried to pronounce it just like Ye-ye and Nai-nai did, loud.

  “Oh, Lu-lu,” Mama said, the way she always did, but the man laughed, so Mama laughed, too.

  “Well, it was very nice running into you, Linda,” he said.

  “Likewise,” Mama said. She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear as she spoke. “Lu-lu, Tom is a colleague from work. He teaches in the extension program.”

  Tom, I thought.

  “I’ll work on those tones,” the man said. “LU LU.”

  I smiled in a tight way, the way Maria and Cindy and I did when we were being fake polite to girls we didn’t like in school, but this man didn’t seem to notice.

  “She’s just beautiful,” he said to Mama.

  And Mama said, “Thank you,” as though she’d been the one he was complimenting.

  Even though Mama didn’t say anything more, I was in a sour mood the whole drive back home.

  I couldn’t even look forward to calling Cindy and Maria and telling them about my bra. What could I say?

  THAT NIGHT at dinner Mama was particularly happy. Papa said her spaghetti was delicious, and Charlie asked if he could get another dog. He’d been reading about Bassett Hounds in school and he would like a Bassett Hound.

  Papa said, “Absolutely not.”

  Mama said, “Honey, George will resent another dog.”

  “I think we should get another dog,” I said. The words just fell out of my mouth, surprising me.

  Papa and Mama turned to stare. They weren’t used to my taking Charlie’s side in anything.

  “A Bassett Hound would be nice,” I said. “It could be my dog. I don’t have a dog.”

  “But, Lu-lu, you’ll be too busy. You’re starting school in two weeks. And junior high is very different from elementary school,” Mama said. She smiled then, but not a nice one. She said, “Lu-lu and I went shopping for junior high today.”

  And I knew then she was going to mention the training bra. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, the betrayal from my own mother, but she had the same look in her eye that teachers got when they were going to spring a pop quiz, the look that meant business.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m going to be too busy. Besides, George will feel bad.”

  “But, Maaa—” Charlie started, drawing his voice into a whine.

  “Listen to Lu-lu!” Papa said, saying my name in tones. “Your sister’s older. She knows what she’s talking about.”

  Charlie dropped his chin into his chest. “It’s not fair!” Then he pushed back his chair noisily and ran up the stairs.

  Papa sighed and continued eating, and Mama turned to me and wrinkled her nose. I knew that was how she winked, her own special version to compensate because she couldn’t quite close only one eyelid at a time. She used to do this when I was younger and she took me to get ice cream on Saturday mornings after grocery shopping, just the two of us, while Charlie was at home watching cartoons and Papa worked in his study. “Girls have to have their secrets,” she’d say, wrinkling her nose.

  And automatically, I winked back at her, first my left eye, then my right, because that was how I’d practiced in the mirror, over and over till I’d gotten it down.

  But this night, I didn’t feel happy winking with my mother. Who ever said I’d wanted to have secrets? Whose big idea was that?

  There was nothing I could do, however. Secrets were better than telling the embarrassing truth. A girl didn’t need to be in junior high to know that.

  THAT NIGHT long after my family had gone to bed, I lay in my bed reading. I had two books hidden under my pillows—a Trixie Belden mystery and a new Nancy Drew—and a third tucked between the mattress and the wall that I could pull out as soon as the lights went out in my parents’ room and I knew Mama wasn’t going to come back in and tell me to turn off the light. I also kept a flashlight on my dresser for times when Mama stayed up very late and insisted, “Lights out, Lu-lu!” in the voice that meant business. Sometimes I was too absorbed in my reading and she came in to check on me before I could turn off the light and pretend to be asleep. Then she’d say, “You’re ruining your eyes! Turn that light off and go to sleep!” I’d told her the eye doctor said that wasn’t true. Reading had nothing to do with ruining my eyes. He’d told me he would’ve been able to predict I’d need glasses if he’d been able to peer into my irises when I was first born, but Mama didn’t believe it.

  But she was sound asleep and hadn’t come creeping through the hall since she went to bed.

  This night none of my books could occupy me. I read a few pages in one, part of a chapter in another, but I could not enter the stories and live with the characters as usual. The world outside my books seemed suddenly too noisy. I could hear the faucet dripping in the bathroom and water running through the pipes in the wall. The wind was not particularly strong, but I could hear the maple trees swaying. A few leaves had already started to turn, the yellow seeping into the green along the top branches, and now I c
ould hear the crisper leaves take flight, crackling like fire as they fell.

  Outside George was shaking his head and jangling the tags on his collar. He yawned and stretched and I heard his toenails click against the cement floor of the patio, and then he was off, launched, running through the yard, chasing something in the night.

  I lay in bed waiting. He ran round and round, his feet thundering against the grass, and then he stopped abruptly to shake his head and yawn. I could hear his tags as he circled, chasing his tail, before plopping back down.

  Summer was coming to an end. George didn’t run like that when it was hot. He lay on his side, panting, twitching his tall, stiff ears to keep the flies away, drool running off his tongue. He only liked to run when the weather was cooler.

  Finally, I got up to get a glass of water. And while I was standing in the bathroom, Dixie cup in hand staring at my reflection in the mirror, I realized this would be a perfect time to try it on, my bra, while everyone was still asleep. I tiptoed back to my room and pulled the Stern’s bag back from under my dresser where I’d hidden it. Carefully peeling apart the crackly paper bag as quietly as possible, I pulled the bright-white bra from within, rumpled it tightly in my fist, and then brought it under my pajama top, as though the whiteness would show through like moonlight or the rays of a tractor beam. I ran back to the bathroom and locked the door.

  I pulled my shirt up and slipped my arms through the loops then I had to hook it from behind, which was harder than I’d thought. I had to bend over at the waist, my elbows bowed out like wings, till I could slide the hook into the eye.

  Then I turned and faced the mirror.

  The training bra was white as chalk against my skin, like crime scene outlines across my chest where a bosom was supposed to appear, or worse, had been murdered and taken away. My breath caught in my throat and for a second I wondered if something really was wrong with me. Why did my nipples seem to be so low? Why did my belly protrude from beneath my rib cage, round like a baby’s? With the bra strapped in place, I could suddenly see what my body was supposed to look like, like women on magazine covers in bikinis or Jane Russell crossing her heart on TV, and I was nothing like them. I was lumpen and doughy, but not in the outlined areas. Before the bra, I had never even imagined I was supposed to resemble them, but now I felt profoundly inadequate.

  I pulled my pajama top back on over my head, hoping that maybe the bra looked better under clothes, but the effect was even worse. The soft cotton t-shirt no longer lay flat against my skin. Instead the outlines of the bra showed through, disturbing the lines of the picture of Princess Leia cradling her blaster on the front. I’d seen girls like this, teenagers whose bras showed through their t-shirts so that you couldn’t focus on the picture or saying in front, all you could notice was the bra. I’d always felt sorry for them. Now here I was. The same.

  Then I heard the noise from downstairs. A rustling. Not a breaking or a smashing, but a soft sound, like the time George had gotten out of the family room where Mama had put him during a storm, and we’d returned from school to find him lying on the living room carpet methodically chewing on Charlie’s sneakers.

  I held my breath and listened. I couldn’t hear George running outside anymore, only the wind.

  It didn’t seem possible he could have gotten in, but I thought I should check. I tiptoed down the hall and paused at the top of the stairs, listening. Then I stepped onto the first stair, adjusting my weight slowly so that it wouldn’t creak. Just in case it wasn’t George but someone else. I wasn’t stupid. I knew how to be very quiet. This was how I’d discovered Mama and Papa putting the presents under the tree instead of Santa Claus when I was five, unlike Charlie who bounded about wherever he went. You had plenty of time to hide things before he arrived.

  I crept down one stair at a time, stealthy as a real detective, and when I reached the bottom, I crouched and peered around the corner, but George wasn’t in the living room. It was Papa stretched out on the sofa, asleep.

  I stood up.

  He shouldn’t have been there. He only slept on the sofa when he came home from work late and didn’t want to disturb us by creaking up the stairs. I know, because he used to do that. Come home late and wake us up, but Mama got angry. She told him that was very inconsiderate. He knew how much trouble she had getting Charlie to settle down in the first place, and now Charlie would have trouble getting up in the morning for school. After that, Papa said he was sorry, and he promised to sleep on the couch the next time he was late.

  But he hadn’t come home late. And here he was all the same.

  I tiptoed to the middle of the living room so that I could see him better, past the piano and right up to the coffee table with the picture books of Great Works of Art and Treasures of the Natural World from National Geographic and the empty cloisonné bowl that was just for decoration.

  His face was slack, his mouth turned down, and his eyes puffy-looking without their glasses over them. He lay very still. I held my breath, suddenly thinking something terrible, something terrifying, but then he breathed out, very slowly, his chest falling from under the chenille throw that was supposed to be in the family room. I wanted to wake him up immediately, the way I had when I was a little girl and I needed something right away. One year I’d gotten up at dawn for Christmas, but Mama said we couldn’t open any presents until everyone was awake. Papa slept late on holidays, and by mid-morning I couldn’t stand the wait. I filled a glass with cold water from the kitchen and brought it to the bedroom and poured it on his face.

  He hadn’t been angry.

  But I didn’t dare do that now. I wasn’t a little girl anymore, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know better.

  I crept back to the edge of the staircase and sat on the bottom, my knees bent against my chest, my head against my arms, the tags on my bra scratching at my skin. I didn’t even have a book to pass the time, but it didn’t matter. The answer I needed wasn’t in a book. Instead I sensed that I should sit, I should be patient, I should wait like this until my father finally woke up.

  THE LUCKY DAY

  I’M AWAKE. YOU don’t have to sneak around.” Ma’s voice drifted like smoke from beneath the covers.

  “Ma, it’s April twelfth.” Rose spoke in Chinese to her mother, but that meant there were things she couldn’t explain, like how she had hoped things would be different between them this time, how she hoped Ma would be pleased by this visit, would see her for the kind and thoughtful daughter she was.

  She’d driven from Colorado to Iowa through the night, eight hours, despite the snow pack on the interstate, just to see Ma for her birthday. But now Ma didn’t even seem surprised to see Rose.

  “I know what day it is. Why are you standing in the dark?”

  Rose set the pink box of lucky dried fruit on the end table, pushing the pill bottles to the side. Her mother’s room smelled like overripe bananas.

  “I’ll open the curtains. There was a snowstorm last night, Ma. A real blizzard,” she added in English for emphasis. “Wanna see?” Blue-white light flooded into the room.

  Ma shielded her eyes with one hand. “Well, this killed the flowers. There was a crocus and three yellow daffodils right by the driveway. I could see them from the window. Dead now.”

  “There’ll be more.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? Look at me.”

  “You look good,” Rose lied.

  “I look like a skinned rat. I look like something your grandfather would have eaten. I look like an ugly old woman.” Ma put her face in her hands.

  “Where’s your hair?” Rose didn’t know how to say “wig” in Chinese, but her mother understood.

  “I don’t know.”

  Rose searched in the dresser and the closet shelf and under the bed and finally, patting around Ma’s covers, found it buried under the blankets along with a pair of wool socks. It was a dark brown bob with curls, nothing like Ma’s real hair.
<
br />   Ma set the wig atop her skull, adjusting it by feel, twisting it this way and that. She patted it with one hand.

  “How does that look?”

  “A little bit more to the right. There. That’s perfect.”

  Suddenly Marisol poked her head in the door.

  “Good morning, Sleepyhead! Did you have a good rest last night?” Rose’s sister-in-law spoke in the bright metallic English of a host for a children’s television show.

  Ma winced.

  “Make her go away,” she hissed in English, loud enough for Rose’s sister-in-law to hear.

  “Better try to eat your breakfast today. You know what the doctor said. We don’t want to be a bad girl now, do we?”

  Ma put her hands over her ears, shut her eyes tight.

  “Do what you can, Rose. She’s been cranky wanky like this for weeks.” Marisol dropped the smile and disappeared, shutting the door behind her with a sharp click.

  Rose tapped her mother’s arm. “She’s gone.”

  “I need my eyebrows.” Ma waved a hand at the shoeboxes.

  Rose dug around until she found Ma’s Mary Kay compact and eyeliner in a box marked VITAMINS but filled with empty pill bottles.

  “Here, Ma.”

  Ma pursed her lips and turned her head from side to side, examining herself in the tiny mirror.

  “Well.” She sighed. The mirror cast diamonds across her cheekbones. “I used to be good-looking. I turned a lot of heads in my day. I was really something.”

  “Drink a little Ensure, Ma. It has vitamins.”

  “I don’t like Ensure. But put a little of the morphine in my Hawaiian Punch. There’s a dropper. Count the drops. I’ll tell you when.”

  Rose found Ma’s cup of juice with a bendy straw in it and the bottle of Roxanol. “One, two, three … four?”

  “Good enough.” Ma took the cup, fitted the straw between her lips and sucked. She handed the cup back to Rose. “And I need a cigarette.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do. I can smell the smoke. They stole all my cigarettes.” Ma nodded at the door. “Even the pack I hid in the closet. That’s how I know that woman spies on me.”