by Tiffany Tsao
I remember too a hotel room—maybe in Monte Carlo, where the hotel would host our family on the house as long as Opa and our parents hit the gambling tables with abandon. Tante Sandra was curled up on the bed in a fluffy white bathrobe, crying. Something about Opa being a vicious and dangerous man. Something about not knowing how Oma could stand being married to him. The revelation of it: that Opa was not just stern, but bad; that he could or should be reviled.
And then there’s this one isolated fragment, more vivid but more incomprehensible than the rest. I can’t account for it at all. A hotel as well, this time in a luxurious ladies’ room with floors and countertops of pink marble, and a separate powder room with enormous mirrors and upholstered ottomans. An evening function of some sort. A wedding reception for one of the families we knew, perhaps. That would explain the height of her hair and her strapless forest-green evening gown, though it doesn’t explain her sitting there looking listless, staring dully at her reflection. Or her turning to ask us, bizarrely, “Do you ever feel bad about being Chinese?”
I’m misremembering the question. I must be. It makes no sense at all. But I dredge up these imperfect recollections to illuminate, if only for my own benefit, how my sister convinced me to embark on that impromptu mission to find our long-lost aunt. Estella’s invocation of what Tante Sandra once meant to us—frankness, guilelessness, innocence even—threw me off balance. I found myself swaying in her direction.
“She’s alive,” I whispered, the miraculousness of it bowling me over anew.
“And you will come with me, won’t you?” urged Estella. “I can’t do anything without your help. Look at what’s happened to me every time we’ve been apart: when I let Leonard come between us; even that short time when you went away to Paris. I need you, Doll. I always have.”
There was an intensity in her expression—an energy I hadn’t seen in her for a long time. It was an Estella I’d almost forgotten existed. The sight moved me, and her pleading did so even more. Call me a fool, but I was flattered. Until now, I had always been the one tugging at her elbow, trying to drag her away from the family so she and I could live our own lives. Now the tables had turned: There she was, in my company headquarters, on my turf, attempting to win me over. I knew helping her search for Tante Sandra would mean entangling myself once again in the family web. But my sister was hard to resist, as was the prospect of being reunited with the aunt we had so idolized when we were kids. I tried to imagine what Tante Sandra was like now, but all I could come up with was what she was like back then: wholesome and lovely and sincere and everything we aspired to be when we grew up into young women ourselves.
“It’s possible that she’s moved again,” I said, struggling to remain sensible.
“True,” Estella acknowledged.
“But let’s say we do find her. What then?”
“Tell her the family needs her,” Estella replied promptly. “Ask her to come back.”
“What makes you so sure that she’d want to? From these letters, it seems like she disappeared on purpose, that she didn’t want to be found.”
“She doesn’t know how much worse we’ve become,” Estella said, shaking her head. “Not if Oma was the only one in contact with her. Oma’s been dead for almost fifteen years.”
“Even if we do convince her to return, what would she do? How would she make a difference, exactly?”
“How does a breath of fresh air make a difference?”
And believe it or not, that silly answer worked. I finally capitulated to the romance of her nonlogic.
“Fine, I’ll come,” I said. And as her face broke into a grin, I rose and walked to the great glass windows behind my desk. She’d won me over, and for some reason I felt the urge to reestablish my autonomy, as if distancing myself physically from her would help.
She walked two steps behind me. “Great view,” she said, following my gaze across the city skyline.
“The view’s never good in Jakarta,” I demurred, secretly pleased. “It doesn’t matter how high up you go.”
We stood there for a good while, contemplating the high-rises and shantytowns, the roads jammed with traffic and the trash-choked canals. Arteries of sooty green snaked through the gaps, sometimes pooling in a sorry excuse for a park. Here and there peeped the silver cupola of a neighborhood mosque, attempting to catch the sun’s rays through the smog. Billboards dotted the landscape too—advertising cigarettes and swanky real estate, margarine and coffee—the images plastered on them corroded by the city’s toxic fumes.
At the center of it all, at least from where we stood, was a man-made lake, or a reservoir, or who knew what the proper term was, its water an unholy shade of brown, its shores a combination of concrete barrier and heaps of rubbish. Scrawny figures in floppy hats stood on these banks, fishing with long poles for debris and sometimes casting nets to haul in their catch. Suddenly, the oblong piece of machinery set in the middle of the lake began to quake, and as its mechanical teeth churned the water, a thick black substance rose to the surface. From our glass-walled, air-conditioned perch, it looked like tar.
What a contrast to the desert landscape of Tante Sandra’s photo, the cloudless blue sky and the red cliffs and plateaus vulnerable in their barrenness, like the open palm of an outstretched hand. I remember feeling fleetingly and inexplicably that of course it made sense—of course our youngest aunt belonged not here but against the backdrop of that uncontaminated expanse.
“You should get back to work,” whispered Estella excitedly. She gave me an affectionate squeeze on the arm. “I’ll let you know once the flight details are confirmed.” She returned the letters to her purse.
I offered to walk her out. “Don’t trouble yourself,” she said happily. “I know the way.”
“DOLL, LOOK,” ESTELLA whispered, gently sliding the headphones from my ears. She nodded toward the window on our left. “It’s snow.”
I paused my movie and leaned over to look with her at the white blankness stretching below us, interrupted every so often by patches of ice-blue water.
“We’re crossing Antarctica,” I said to her solemnly, as I was supposed to, in this game we hadn’t played for years.
It hadn’t started as a game. When we were little, we had genuinely believed we were seeing snowy lands. The view was even better from the windows near the giant mechanical doors, next to where the flight attendants sat. “Snow!” we would point out to them, and they would part their cherry-red lips in a laugh.
The fact that they never corrected us proved we were right, as did the indulgent nods of our nanny, although once during one of Ba’s periodic visitations from first class, he had the nerve to inform us that they were clouds.
They can’t be clouds, we’d protested with certainty. Clouds are fluffy and round. It’s snow, right? We hailed a passing flight attendant to ask and she nodded and smiled. “See, Ba? Snow.” And he had smiled too and slipped us some chocolates wrapped in a cloth napkin before passing back through the pleated purple curtain to join our mother.
We never minded sitting apart from them. Life had always been so ordered—with separate accommodations and activities for grown-ups and children—allowing each party to do what pleased them best. Grown-ups sat at the table inside restaurants; children, under Nanny’s watchful eye, ran about outside. Grown-ups spent weekend mornings unconscious in cold, lightless rooms; children watched cartoons on TV and coaxed Nanny into making pancakes. At hotels, grown-ups went for massages and spa treatments. Children splashed around in the pool, and Nanny ordered them cheeseburgers and fries. The same separation applied on long-haul flights.
When we were older and quieter, our parents told us, we could sit up front as well. And we nodded pleasantly, not wanting to hurt their feelings by saying that we would probably never want to. The few times we had visited first class, we’d found it boring. We weren’t allowed to run up and down the aisles there, or even talk much: the flight attendants were much stricter than those in the back.
We were confined to sitting at our parents’ feet, coloring pictures or playing cards, or else fiddling with the hole-riddled plastic boxes and pegs we invariably received on every flight—a game called Mastermind that we wouldn’t figure out how to play until we were older, when we finally accrued the patience to read the accompanying instruction sheet.
The economy-class cabin, on the other hand, was a playground—the secret warrens where the leg room was supposed to be, the amusing metallic click of the little ashtrays embedded in the armrests, the round button that compressed softly whenever we wanted to lower and raise and lower and raise and lower and raise the backs of our seats. Even the food was fun: It came in little plastic boxes and didn’t taste like real food, so Nanny let us do all sorts of things with it. We made smoothies of orange juice, coffee creamer, and rice, and urged Nanny to try our concoctions, which she did with an infinitesimal sip and an approving murmur. We crumbled the crackers and strewed them up and down the aisles like Hansel and Gretel. We created men, or at least the heads of men, embedding olive eyeballs and soggy carrot mouths in bread rolls. We helped Nanny slip the metal teaspoons into her purse. (She said they were perfect for stirring tea and coffee. The teaspoons we and our parents used at home were the same size, but naturally, she wasn’t allowed to use those.)
The long flights were magical for Estella and me: All time blended together, so nobody could tell when it was or what anyone should be doing. We played by artificial light and fell asleep in the flickering gray glow of a silent movie. We woke at intervals and curled ourselves into different configurations, or fought for the blankets, or sleepily pulled on the headphones to tune in to one of the in-flight radio channels. We never asked if we were almost there because we knew we never were. Perpetually, we were still far away, still soaring over the lands of snow.
Even as adults, on that flight to LA, knowing full well that our father had been right and what passed beneath us were clouds, I found it hard not to believe my eyes. The white windswept plains, the banks, the rifts, the peaks—all said plainly, “Land.” But to pass into adulthood is to attain the knowledge that you must sever believing and seeing from each other.
“Do you really think we’ll find her?” I asked, readjusting my goose-down duvet, pressing my call button to ask for another cup of green tea. We’d long outgrown our fondness for economy class.
“I certainly hope so,” said Estella. Then the childlike glow faded from her expression and her voice turned to lead. “To be honest, I don’t know what I’ll do if we don’t.”
She was thinking about dinner with our parents the night before, during which she’d told them about our trip.
“You’re leaving tomorrow?” our mother had exclaimed. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Estella had tried to affect nonchalance. “It’s only for a few days,” she’d explained.
“A shopping trip. That’s all,” I’d piped up.
At this, our mother nodded approvingly and recommenced pretending to eat. “That’s wonderful,” she said. Then, addressing my sister: “I’m glad you’re treating yourself. You’ve been moping about for far too long.”
Ma’s insensitivity never ceased to amaze me. For a moment, Ba’s eyes flashed as if he were going to intervene and, briefly, I was grateful, even if his attempts often made things worse. But I was mistaken. He merely let Ma continue, oblivious to the wound she had inflicted.
“Do you remember Tante Susie?” she asked, conveying a single grain of rice to her lips with her spoon.
“The short one with big hair?” I chimed in, taking over for Estella and me. I sensed where this was leading and I didn’t like it.
“No, that’s Susie Onkowijoyo. The other one—Susie Sutanto. Her family owns the Angsa hotel chain? Her son Octavius went to school with you.”
“What about her?” I asked.
“Octavius just got divorced.”
“So?”
“So nothing,” said Ma, trying to sound innocent. “I thought you’d like to know, that’s all. Just something to keep in mind.”
As she spoke, she turned to Estella. And when no one said anything, she pressed on, mistaking silence for a sign that things were going well. I used to wonder how someone so clueless could have been such a successful socialite in her youth. But then again, looks and money—money especially—more than made up for lack of tact.
“Stell, I know you’re still recovering from Len’s death. We all are, I daresay. But you should keep an open mind.”
She hadn’t really said that, had she? It was like something out of a bad dream. Ba’s face paled.
“You’re still recovering?” I sputtered on my sister’s behalf.
Ma stared at me in confusion. “Yes, of course,” she replied. “It wasn’t easy for any of us. And he was my son-in-law, after all.”
I was practically choking at that point. I wanted to say something, to yell even, but hadn’t the faintest clue where to start.
Then Estella began to cry. Startled, Ma began patting her hand. Even our father sprang into action, reaching for the bottle and topping up her glass.
“Oh no. I’m sorry, dear,” Ma said hurriedly, “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just want the best for you, that’s all. I didn’t know you were still so sensitive about it. I won’t mention it again, I promise.”
It was the sincerity of her alarm that made it all the more terrible. And though she hastily moved on to another subject, she must have still been feeling repentant when dinner was over because, before retiring upstairs, she said to us by way of good night, “Have fun in LA, okay? Splurge.” As if we’d ever been encouraged to do otherwise.
Ba’s usual after-dinner custom was to beat a hasty retreat to his wine cellar, but tonight he lingered long enough to give us limp hugs.
“Your mother means well,” he said, voice trailing away, taking its leave in advance of its owner.
His words were hardly consoling. And despite Estella’s attempts to inject our mission with fresh enthusiasm, the horror caused by that exchange with our mother had followed us onto the plane and was crossing the Pacific with us.
“I still can’t believe it,” muttered Estella, looking out the window again. “To hear Ma talk, you’d think that nothing was ever wrong. That Leonard and I were… happy or something. That everything was fine up until the day he died.”
“I know,” I said. “But then again, what should we expect? Isn’t this how the family deals with everything? We’re so good at hiding the bad stuff, we manage to fool ourselves.” I meant this last sentence as a joke, but there was too much truth in it.
“We have to find Tante Sandra,” Estella declared. And I detected a new note in her voice—a combination of resolve and fatigue. She spoke in the same way someone stranded in the desert might about getting out alive: urging herself to succeed despite being weakened already by thirst and heat and the grinning specter of death.
Silence again. Then, out of nowhere, those words. Hysterical, I would have called them, if they hadn’t been uttered in such a soft voice: “God, we’re so screwed up, Doll. How did we ever get this way?”
Binge-watching movies dulled our sorrows. Estella dozed off, as did I. We slept through breakfast, as we’d told the flight attendants to let us do, and woke to gentle voices informing us we would be landing soon.
The sun was an angry welt on the horizon when the plane touched down. Nevertheless, our hearts leapt, responding as if it were a sunrise, though we knew it was actually evening and that soon it would be dark. By my newly adjusted watch it was a quarter to five. Outside, the stocky silhouettes of airport workers lumbered around on the tarmac.
It took over an hour for us to get through immigration. And by the time the porter had collected our bags and we stepped outside, it was so dark that it might as well have been the dead of night.
“I like cold weather,” Estella remarked with a yawn as we rode the shuttle bus to the car rental lot. She flexed her neck from side to side and adjusted the f
ur-trimmed collar of her down vest.
“You do realize that when we were at Berkeley, all you did was complain about the cold.”
“Northern California is too chilly. Southern California is just right.”
How long had it been since we’d last talked about our college days? They seemed so irrelevant now, so far away and fantastic, that they simply never came up anymore. But we were in America again. And whenever I landed on American soil, I felt it, whatever “it” was—the “it” that made me feel like I’d been released from one of those flesh-tinted girdles that fat women wore. My stomach, lungs, and heart reinflated. A breeze ran through my ribs, making them tingle and flutter. I felt vulnerable, but also inexplicably hopeful. Endless promise and possibility rose up from the earth and permeated the air.
Since she was far more familiar with the city’s geography, Estella offered to drive to the hotel.
“What time is it?” she asked as we loaded our suitcases into our rented sedan.
I told her and she grimaced. “Still rush hour,” she said. Without another word she slipped into the driver’s seat and, avoiding the 405 altogether, drove us north up La Cienega. We had both made regular trips to LA while we were at Berkeley: There had been too many friends and relatives attending school or vacationing in the City of Angels for us not to spend at least a few weeks there every year. But by the end of our sophomore year, Estella had been flying down every other weekend to visit Leonard. And after she and Leonard got married, because her in-laws had a house there, she visited two or three times a year.
We careened past freeway exits and halted for red lights beside stucco-walled strip malls and surprisingly familiar signs: Hollywood Nails, Chik-A-Dee Chicken, Togo’s, Best Buy, Vacuums Plus, Godzilla Sushi. It’s amazing what memories the mind conceals. I recognized them all: the red-letter bubbles of WIG WORLD, the twenty-four-hour Tastee Donuts, the quirky handbag store next door to Reuben’s Deli.