by Tiffany Tsao
It was early afternoon by the time we reached Bakersfield. We drove through what appeared to be the downtown district, past low-slung buildings in varieties of beige, their unremarkableness offset by the splendor of the Californian flora—spindly palms and dark, shaggy pines, carmine-tongued bushes and pale-barked trunks wreathed in brittle gold. The printed MapQuest directions instructed us to turn onto a road lined with ranch-style houses and manicured lawns. We pulled into the driveway of number 2307.
“We’re here,” said Estella, sounding almost as if she couldn’t believe it. She stepped out of the car.
“Let’s hope she is too,” I said, following her lead. The exterior of the house, the lawn, the mailbox were all emphatically neutral, providing no clues about who lived there or what they were like. No garden gnomes, no wind chimes, no children’s toys, no bird feeder. In fact, the house showed so few signs of life that it might have been uninhabited. Estella looked as doubtful as I felt.
We climbed up the stairs to the front porch, rang the doorbell, and waited. A little while later, we rang it again. And one more time. We knocked. “Hello?” we called through the door. We walked into the yard and peered through the large front window, which was screened by curtains.
“Looks like she’s out,” said Estella.
“Or whoever it is who lives here. Or maybe it’s empty.”
“Great. Just great.”
“Hello?” someone warbled suddenly from our right. “Are you looking for someone?” It was the next-door neighbor, an elderly woman wielding a pair of pruning shears. She was completely pink: her tracksuit a peppy fuchsia, her visor a cotton candy hue, her translucent skin a salmon fillet baked by the sun, the rims of her blue eyes a sensitive magenta. She peered uncertainly at us across the strip of concrete lane separating her property from where we stood.
I continued to scour the window for a gap in the curtains and let Estella speak with her. “Yes, I’m her niece,” I heard Estella say, “assuming this is the right house. The woman who lives here is named Sandra, yes? Sandra—” She was clearly just about to add “Sulinado” but stopped. Who knew whether our aunt had kept her last name? Then again, who knew if she’d kept her first name either?
“Your aunt, you say?” the woman asked, as if by receiving further affirmation, she could ascertain whether Estella was telling the truth. I gave up looking through the window and watched the exchange from a distance.
“My mother’s sister,” explained Estella.
“Is Sandra expecting you, then?”
Estella threw me a glance before flashing the woman her best conspiratorial smile. “No, it’s a surprise visit.”
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed, suddenly tickled. My sister could be so charming when the occasion demanded it. “You came all the way from China, then?” the neighbor asked. “Sandra said all her relatives live abroad.”
“So, this is the right address?” Estella asked excitedly, letting the mistake pass. Or maybe that’s what our aunt had told her—that she was from China.
“Sure is,” the woman said, evidently having decided we were trustworthy folk. “But she’s away at the moment.”
“What time will she be back?”
“What time?” The neighbor’s face dissolved into confusion before she realized we didn’t share her knowledge. “Why, she’s back on Monday. She’s gone away for the weekend. Asked me to keep an eye on things.”
“Monday,” I repeated. The day after tomorrow.
“What now?” Estella sighed, looking helplessly over at me.
“How long are you in town for?” the woman asked.
“We’re staying in Los Angeles,” I explained over Estella’s shoulder. “And we’re flying back tomorrow night.”
The woman looked surprisingly crestfallen on our behalf. “Oh, I see,” she said, shaking her head. “Seems an awful shame to come here all the way from China and not get to see her.”
We thanked the neighbor and walked back to the car to discuss our next move.
“Doll, she’s here!” squealed Estella. “Can you believe it? We’re so close! I’ll get my secretary to rebook us on a later flight.”
The miracle of our circumstances suddenly dawned on me, making me dizzy. I placed a hand on the side of the car to steady myself.
“Yes, of course,” I murmured, too dazed to say anything else. But Estella was already making the call. While she was doing that, I walked down the driveway and peered up the length of the street. Rectangles of grass, interrupted by the occasional picket fence, stretched as far as the eye could see. Tricycles and strollers idled on porches, and here and there the American flag fell gracefully from underneath an eave. As I listened to the lazy barks of bored golden retrievers and the docile roar of a distant lawnmower, I wondered how on earth Tante Sandra could have ended up here.
We’d brought the photos of our aunt with us—it had seemed the obvious thing to do, though it made no sense upon further reflection. What use would we put them to? Show them to strangers in the street and ask, “Have you seen this woman?” Shove them in Tante Sandra’s face and cry, “It’s you! We have proof, see?”
I took out the envelope and slid out the photo of her in London, which I’d mentally captioned, Bell-bottomed and bohemian at Buckingham Palace. Holding it up, I inserted Tante Sandra into the scene before me, standing her next to a coil of garden hose, reclining her in a freestanding hammock in someone’s yard.
As if to protest the indignity, a memory flared like a struck match: the Tante Sandra of the photograph running at full tilt toward us through a wet expanse of paved stone, congregations of pigeons flying up on either side of her. She slowed to a trot as she approached us, pink-cheeked and triumphant. Her right hand clutched a brown paper bag. “Chestnut?” she asked and before we had time to answer, she cracked one between her palms and stripped away the leathery shell. “While they’re hot,” she explained. She broke the nutmeat in half and zoomed one of the pieces through the air in loop-the-loops. “Open wide! Here comes the plane!”
“Done,” cried Estella, returning her phone to her purse. “Where to now?”
I blinked. “Where else? Back to the hotel.”
She opened her mouth in an exaggerated yawn. “What? How boring.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Let’s go see the monarchs.”
I stared at her. “You’re insane.”
“Come on,” she pleaded. “Remember how much fun we had the last time? We have two days to kill! It’s even the right time of year.”
I put up a good fight. We hadn’t brought any of our clothes or makeup or toiletries; we’d be paying for two hotel rooms at once, which seemed silly; we might not be able to find a hotel room at all. Inevitably, I lost. As I said, she was growing stronger, more vibrant, more forceful. And this change, I recognized, was good. I should encourage her, I thought.
Before we left, we asked the pink neighbor if she would be so good as not to tell our aunt we had dropped by. We would return and we wanted it to still be a surprise. The ready assent on her face suggested this was the most excitement she’d had all year.
We stopped at a mall on our way out of Bakersfield and bought enough clothes and toiletries to tide us over. I fell asleep in the car again. When I woke, we were gliding through the night and fog and the soft clementine glow of the streets of Carmel.
We’d stayed in Carmel the last time too, even though the prime grounds for monarch-peeping were twenty minutes’ drive away on the peninsula’s northern side. The city of Monterey might have been closer to the butterfly overwintering sites, but Carmel was less tacky and far more genteel—paved with cobblestones and populated by expensive restaurants and quaint stores advertising their presence via tastefully weathered wooden signs.
Guided purely by memory, we even managed to check ourselves into the same inn where we’d stayed eight years ago. We could have gone hotel hopping to find something more luxurious—with freestanding villas or an ocean view or
a more extensive spa—but Estella was taken with the idea of staying at the exact same place. I was mystified by her desire to re-create the flight taken by our younger selves, but I tried to see things her way. Dining at Matsuhisa had been about conquering past trauma; perhaps she hoped this impromptu trip to see the monarchs would reignite the hope and optimism of the first one.
Our room, the receptionist informed us, was technically the honeymoon suite. There was nothing too obvious to declare it as such, thank God, but it did boast an enormous Jacuzzi in the bathroom, not to mention an oversized four-poster bed draped in dark velvet and silk. Also, the hotel directory on the vanity had been left open at a list of “couples’ activities,” which included a couple’s massage, a lovebird brunch package, and champagne and strawberries in the evening.
“You must have stayed in a lot of these kinds of rooms with Leonard,” I remarked, running a finger down one of the wooden bedposts. “Right after the wedding, I mean.”
My sister smiled in a world-weary sort of way, as if to intimate that the answer was yes, but that she’d had her fill of them and everything else to do with romance.
“Still,” she said, continuing what she hadn’t uttered out loud, “if I had known what would come after, I would have locked myself in a honeymoon suite for good.”
IT WAS DURING that first trip of ours to see the monarchs, back in 1996, that I’d finally learned the full truth about Estella’s initial three years of marriage. She’d started recounting it to me after the ugly scene at Matsuhisa and the enervating drama with our mother in the car. And she’d continued filling me in on the gory details all through the long drive there and back.
Prior to that, I’d had some awareness that my sister must have been unhappy, but as I’ve said, several factors combined to conveniently justify my inaction. I was depressed; I was preoccupied with my studies during my last year at Berkeley; Estella rarely contacted me, in an attempt not to displease Leonard; and out of a twisted consideration for my welfare, she wanted to refrain from saddling me with her woes. The only other people who could have enlightened me about the extent of Estella’s misery were our mother and father. And they were busy convincing themselves that she was happy and nothing was wrong.
The honeymoon really had been the best part of Estella’s marriage, but not for the usual reasons. There were no torrents of passion, no heights of ecstasy; rather, it had an opiate effect—on both her and Leonard. Drugged by the wines and herb-scented earth of Tuscany, by Kyoto’s fiery foliage and Tokyo’s sapphire luminescence, Estella felt thoroughly serene. It was the equivalent of easing a lobster into a warm bath before heating the water by degrees. Under these conditions, Leonard was unusually tranquil as well, stupefied perhaps by the fact that a whole other person now belonged exclusively to him.
Once she and Leonard returned to Jakarta, the novelty of the opulence and decorum that characterized Angsono family life kept her stunned for a while longer—so I surmised. From her lips, I learned it was a world governed by a series of unspoken rules and implicit understandings, mystifying, but also enthralling to those who hadn’t been raised in their midst or initiated into their ways. Estella was awed; our family—new money by their standards—had never placed much emphasis on the “proper” way of doing things, except in the areas of business and making money. Certainly, one bought furniture and clothes of a certain quality and mixed with people whom one might consider generally respectable, but beyond that one didn’t give these matters too much thought.
And so months of married life passed before Estella’s comprehension of her new situation ripened into fullest despair. It came slowly, as with any other fruit: a shedding of petals, a green swell blushing yellow, then brazen purple and red, sinking its twig earthward with the weight of its juice. But the gradualness of the revelation didn’t make it any less cruel.
The most important difference between their family and ours, she noted, was that their married women didn’t work. Our mother and aunts, including our aunts-in-law, all contributed to the family business in some capacity—if not overseeing new ventures or partnerships or consolidations, then keeping an existing wing of the business chugging along, or at the very least holding some high-ranking position in name only for advantageous tax or legal purposes. Even Oma, for all her domesticity, had been a titular member of several company boards. The Angsonos, in contrast, believed firmly that business was best left completely to their men, with the single women permitted to help in minor capacities only until they found suitable husbands. Sono Jaya, the Angsono family’s conglomerate, was headed by Leonard’s father, Om Albert, who was aided by his two younger brothers—Leonard’s uncles. Leonard and his male cousins occupied all the topmost senior positions.
As Estella found out, patriarchy didn’t mean that nothing was expected of her. Until the completion of their new house, which would be a short drive away from that of her in-laws, she and Leonard were to live in a luxury serviced apartment, which Estella was responsible for furnishing and decorating. My sister had done so quickly, using perfectly serviceable furniture that various members of our family had been keeping in storage or simply had lying around the house, her reasoning being that they would only be in the apartment for a year at most. But upon sharing this good news over dinner at Leonard’s parents’ house, where they were staying until that apartment was ready, an uneasy silence settled over the table.
Leonard broke it. “You used secondhand furniture for our apartment?”
Estella knew immediately she had made a mistake. “It’s not ‘secondhand,’ ” she reasoned. “It’s my family’s. There’s nothing wrong with it. And I didn’t want to be wasteful.”
Tante Elise hastily stepped in. “My dear, why didn’t you say you needed help finding furniture? We could have gone shopping together.”
Before the wedding, said my sister, she might have apologized and assented, or tried to laugh it off pleasantly. But she told me a fighting desperation had risen within her—probably that impulse we all experience at critical moments in our lives, when we perceive that personal liberty and principles might be in danger of being swept away if we fail to take a stand at that very instant.
I remember musing, sadly, on how often that impulse to toe the line comes too late, welling up only when there is no longer sand under our feet and we find ourselves adrift with no land in sight.
“It’s silly to waste money on new furniture if we’re only going to be living in the apartment for a little while,” Estella had maintained.
Leonard had replied, in that same overly reasonable, and therefore dangerous, voice, “Well, if you did your planning properly, the new furniture could be used in the new house as well.”
Estella leaned back in despair. “Len, how can I plan that far ahead? I haven’t even chosen the interior designer for the new house yet! And we can’t just live in an empty apartment!”
Without a word, Leonard slammed his fork and spoon down and stomped out of the dining room. Om Albert, who absented himself from all domestic dramas, mentally if not physically, continued eating as if nothing had happened. Tante Elise slipped her hand over Estella’s and smiled.
“Don’t worry, Stell. We can go furniture shopping tomorrow. Money should be no object when it comes to creating a comfortable family home.”
Estella said the next day she had called our mother for help. Ma was instantly indignant: How dare Leonard say our family’s furniture wasn’t good enough? How dare he call our sofas and beds “secondhand,” as if they were no better than some stranger’s musty, flea-infested rubbish? Ma hung up in a huff, saying she would have a word with Leonard’s mother. Estella pleaded with her to be tactful, but as it turned out, she had nothing to fear. When Ma called Estella back a few hours later, her tone had changed entirely. Leonard’s mother had explained the situation: Estella had misunderstood. Leonard hadn’t meant any offense—he’d simply been encouraging Estella to consider the best solution for the long term.
Ma made no m
ention of the fact that while Estella and Leonard had been on their honeymoon, Opa had coaxed Leonard’s father into investing in Tante Betty’s ill-conceived cotton plantation project. Ma didn’t need to. Leonard’s father told Estella about it over dinner later that night, before his wife gently reminded him not to discuss work at home. Om Albert had brought the subject up innocently enough—the only two topics he enjoyed conversing on were business and golf. Deprived of the first and knowing his new daughter-in-law had never picked up a club, he then lapsed into his usual silence and left the talking to everyone else.
* * *
My sister began to worry about what she had gotten herself into. During the courtship and engagement, she had known Leonard’s mother as a pleasant woman with elegant manners and faultless taste. And Leonard had not provided any greater insight into her character, rarely speaking of her and giving almost no indication that he thought of her at all. Now that Estella had been welcomed into the family bosom, the full extent of her mother-in-law’s power disclosed itself.
It was owing to Tante Elise that the pale green breakfast china was laid out every morning at 7:30 and that every member of the household, upon being seated, could expect a small crystal glass of freshly squeezed orange juice at the top-right corner of their place setting. It was also owing to her that lunch and dinner, when taken at home, were served on the dishware specially reserved for those meals, and that all family members present in the house at four in the afternoon were approached by Rina or one of the lesser maids and asked if they would care for tea or coffee and a little snack. Under Tante Elise’s direction, the servants kept every room and its objects in immaculate order. If you moved a cushion from one armchair to another, ten minutes later the cushion would return itself to its original place. If you rearranged the coffee table books, or the candles, or the photos on the shelves, when you next entered the room, they too would be restored to their original places, with an extra luster to boot, as if they’d been wiped with a clean rag, which they probably had. There was even an order to be found in the bathrooms: pajamas and dressing gowns were refolded every morning and placed on the ottoman by the bathtub or shower, except every third day, when they were replaced with fresh ones; all towels were changed every second day; all toiletries left out on countertops were arranged on mirrored trays in order of height.