Face

by Aimee Liu

  Something about their speed, that shout, made me nervous, but I had barely cleared the stile when Henry was back, shoving me aside in his haste to get to the phone. His hand wobbled so he had to dial three times before he reached the hospital. I’d never heard his voice crack as wildly as it did saying someone had been shot.

  Johnny Madison did not die that day or in the days after. The bullet caught him in the shoulder. He said it hurt like hell and made it hard to move his arm. But the doctor said it wouldn’t keep him from flying, which was all Johnny really cared about.

  Henry vowed to my mother that he would never touch a firearm of any kind ever again, and it seemed pretty likely that he’d keep his promise. At least it was not the kind of thing he could shrug off—or ever forget.

  But Johnny told Henry he didn’t hold it against him, said he’d even fired a gun once himself, though he didn’t like the kick.

  “Besides,” he said, “I thought it was Glabber’s ghost come back to get me. Heck, I was relieved it was you.”

  When he and I were alone, though, Johnny told the truth. How it felt to see his flesh torn open, the hole tunneling deep inside his body. The skin so much thicker, the bone so much farther below the surface than he’d ever imagined.

  “The pain was like fire, Maibee,” he said. “But it didn’t seem real, almost like it was somebody else’s fire, if you see. It was so sudden— when I saw the blood it didn’t have nothing to do with me. There was this hunk of metal inside my arm, but I couldn’t think how it got there. I didn’t see Henry or your grampa. I thought it had to be Glabber. Or else it was some kinda sign.”

  “What do you mean, sign?”

  “Like they always talk about in church. The hand of God ’n all that.” His voice quivered a little and he looked away. “’Cause of what we were doing yesterday.”

  I was sitting on his bed. I’d been about to hold his hand because I thought it might make him feel better. But suddenly there was a rock in my throat, and I couldn’t move.

  “You told somebody?”

  “Course not.” He looked at me and his face crushed down a little. “But God sees. Nothing you can do about that.”

  “You think God thinks it’s bad?”

  “Naked can be bad.”

  “You said everybody did it.”

  “Well, maybe we oughtn’t be like everybody.”

  “I thought it would be weird, but it wasn’t at all.”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head as if to convince himself. “And it wasn’t God shot me, I don’t think.”

  “Wasn’t Glabber, either.”

  “Naw. It was just a accident.” Johnny pulled his magic kingfisher’s feather from the bedside table and waved it in the air. “But you can’t keep a good bird down.”

  I leaned over and kissed him quickly, unashamedly, on the mouth and asked if he still planned to marry me.

  “In China?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Maybe we don’t need to go that far, after all.”

  In a day or two Henry’s color returned. He apologized for treating Johnny like a demento and the three of us made our peace by playing cards together. Johnny was no slouch at poker and won so much money that pretty soon Henry was acting like the victim.

  My grandfather ended up taking the brunt of the blame. Gramma Lou made him write a letter explaining what happened and taking full responsibility. (Grampa considered anything to do with pen and paper to be a form of torture.) He paid for the doctoring and extra help the Madisons needed while Johnny was mending, and offered the use of his combine to finish harvesting the Madisons’ rye.

  Mr. Madison still might have sued, but Gramma Lou had delivered one of his children and Mrs. Madison said she would not stand for war with their closest neighbors.

  The one who would not forgive Grampa was his daughter. Mum refused to even speak to him after the accident.

  “I was willing to put up with his bigotry and infantile behavior for your sake,” I overheard her telling Gramma Lou. “I thought it was important for the kids to know you both, to see where at least one of their parents came from. But this time he’s gone too far.”

  I peeked into the living room, where they sat together on the faded davenport. My grandmother was nodding, holding onto Mum’s hand.

  “I can’t bring the children back here, Mother—not as long as he’s here.”

  My grandmother closed her eyes. She seemed suddenly very old, a cloth doll with weakening seams. Her skin was as thin and wrinkled as crepe paper, and the flesh in certain parts of her body—around the sleeveless shoulders of her shirtdress and just above her collar—sagged as if by a gravitational pull all its own. Even her gray hair looked fatigued, sticking in fed-up wisps to her forehead and the back of her neck. When she finally opened her eyes, I realized they had gone gray, too. She turned those eyes on my mother, and they seemed to look straight through her.

  “The two of you are so alike,” said Gramma Lou. “You’ll never forgive each other for that.”

  My mother drew back. Her expression hardened.

  “Oh? Just exactly how am I like him?”

  “Diana, ever since you were a little, tiny girl, you’ve done exactly what you wanted. No one could get in your way. No one could tell you right or wrong. Close the gate in your face, put a boulder in your path, and in two seconds you’d find a way around it. If this comes as news I’m very sorry, but you are your father’s daughter.”

  My mother looked appalled. “Well, if I’m so goddamn determined, how come I never seem to get what I want?”

  “Maybe because you pay more attention to what’s holding you back than what you’re aiming for.”

  “Maybe it’s just that there’s nothing to aim for here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I’ve listened to you tell me that for thirty years, Diana. And you may be right. I assume that’s why you left us. But your father and I are still your parents, and this is still where you come from. No matter how far away you go or how you change your name, you can’t change that. And if any of your children want it to be, this is their home, too.”

  “Oh, don’t go getting all sentimental, Mother.”

  “Everyone needs a place to come back to.”

  “For me and the children that place is New York.”

  “I don’t think you really believe that.”

  “Well, think again. I love you, and I suppose some part of me loves Dad, but I’ll be damned if I come out here anymore. The next time, the person who gets shot could be Maibelle or Anna. Or Dad.”

  We left the farm at dawn the next day, drove on into the night, and along about one in the morning arrived back in Chinatown.

  The old lady next door is teaching her parrot to sing. She’s from my grandparents’ generation, give or take, so it shouldn’t surprise me that she knows their songs, but the sound of her wiry, angled voice climbing through the chorus of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” is hardly the way I expected to greet this morning. She wavers just like the needle on Grampa’s old Victrola.

  She’s put a collar around the feathered neck. Now she opens the door to the cage, reaches in, and brings the macaw out on a scarlet ribbon. She lets him hop on the shoulder of her blue housedress, peck at her loose white curls. His brilliantly colored head twists as if it’s screwed on.

  I duck inside and come back out onto the fire escape with a telephoto lens, through which the animal’s black eyes glare at me. My neighbor’s skin is delicately wrinkled under a veneer of irregularly applied rouge. Her nose is sharp, narrow, her hands thin to the bone. Her head turns so I can’t look into her eyes, but her profile shows the tracks of a lifetime of polite smiles, hollows where my father would have moonpuffs. I try to imagine my mother becoming this woman someday.

  But you can’t make substitutions for parents, and anyway, what do I know of this lady beyond my imaginings? The bird could be right. She could be a hateful old bitch, for all I know. She keeps the leash wrapped around one wrist like a no
ose.

  And begins to warble, “La da, da da. Da, da da. Sugar’s sweet, so are you.”

  The parrot hops off her arm to the table.

  “Bye,” she sings. “Bye. Blackbird.”

  The macaw listens intently, head cocked to one side for three or four rounds, then picks up the verse as accurately as an echo. His mistress claps her hands to her cheeks and rocks from side to side.

  He lifts one leg, then the other, as if stretching from the vocal exertion. She repeats the verse and they sing in duet. “Sugar’s sweet, so are you.

  “Bye. Bye. Blackbird.”

  The old lady raises her face. Her eyes find me. She beams an indescribable smile. I lower the camera.

  “Can you believe it!” she calls to me.

  “You’re wonderful,” I holler back. “You two should go onstage.”

  I’m too far away to tell for sure without putting the lens back between us, but I could swear she blushed at that. She lowers her eyes, shaking her head, and strokes the ruffled feathers.

  I’m off base. It’s not about performing. This is not a triumph of training. The bird has replaced her photo albums and papers. He has lifted her out of her past. He has become her friend.

  Part III

  Chinatown Chicken

  8

  When I tell her I’m about to go out for my morning run, my mother tells me that New York joggers inhale two to three times more carcinogens than people who spend their free time in museums. I remind her I took up running in California, so those figures don’t apply to me. Besides, the chemicals keep me going. She asks, as if she has eyes through the phone, how I can bear to be seen wearing the rags I run in. I tell her they’re my only defense against muggers and besides, I’m moving too fast for anyone to get a decent look. She warns me I’ll need surgery on my knees and hips before I’m thirty. I tell her I’ll need a psychiatrist if I quit, and that finally shuts her up.

  My mother’s distaste for psychotherapy dates back to an elementary school social worker who told Mum at the age of nine that she was having difficulty with multiplication because she was in love with her father and wanted to kill her mother. Also that she’d best marry well because with her IQ the only employment she’d be fit for was waiting tables or teaching kindergarten. Mum took her revenge by clipping for her children tabloid stories about patient seductions, perfectly sane women whose lunatic therapists had locked them in asylums for years, and psychiatrists who used hypnosis to access their patients’ bank accounts. “The only people who go into that line of work,” she told us, “are the ones who most need it themselves.” To prove it she read us chapter and verse on Freud’s own sex life.

  “No, Mum,” I tell her now. We have come to the reason for her call. “No, I don’t want to go to Delong’s studio and see his latest masterpieces. I’m too busy shooting junk.”

  I was a junior in college and the nightmares had been stalking me for four years when I finally decided to defy my mother’s conditioning. Surely the counselors at the campus psychiatric services would be different from those tabloid monsters. I was referred to a thirtyish woman who looked like Morticia Addams in leather. Dr. Elsa Gertz spoke in a breathy whisper and drank from a large mug that said “U O Me,” which she refilled with black coffee twice during our hour-long session. She asked what was bothering me, and I started telling her about my nightmares, but got only as far as the Statue of Liberty before she cut me off. “People used to say that nightmares were evil spirits, like ghosts, that rose from the past to haunt or suffocate dreamers. Those evil spirits come from your childhood.” My problem, said Dr. Elsa Gertz, was that my father was an alcoholic and never loved me. My mother was a doormat and—did I have brothers and sisters?—well, yes, they were as wacko as I was, of course. The only solution was to cut off ties with all of them. No phone calls, no visits, no letters. “What do you owe them?” she demanded. “You didn’t choose them to be your family. You’ll only get better when you choose a unit of surrogates who can retrain you to love and be loved.” If I had any trouble breaking the ties, Dr. Gertz and her husband had a farm outside town where they ran a kind of “halfway family” for some of her clients. It was billable to insurance.

  “I need you,” Mum’s saying. “His studio’s in Harlem, you know, and neither Henry nor your father will go with me. Please, Maibelle. We’ll take a cab up together. It’ll be an adventure.”

  I can see her clutching the receiver, frown lines trenching her fore head. Deepest, darkest Harlem. The urban jungle. My mother, the champion of race relations.

  “You’ve been there before, though.”

  “No. He’s always brought his work to the gallery. Now he says if I want to show him, I have to come to him.”

  Her breath erupts in little gasps. I try to focus on her hypocrisy, tell myself she deserves to squirm, but the critic in me is silenced by a sudden, improbable but inescapable image of her struggling, hands trapped behind her back, face pressed against the pavement. Going down with a weapon at her throat.

  I never saw Dr. Elsa Gertz again, or any other licensed psychotherapist. But for all this woman spooked me, the invitation to implicate my parents was too tempting. If I just got clear of them, I thought, we’d all be better off. My nights would become as soft and comforting as an eiderdown quilt. I would discover how to love and be loved, and they would be forced to protect each other. Which is why, on my graduation day, I drove into the sunset with them waving me off and refused to look back for five years. But all the while I was running away, I still worried about them, still hoped my flight would remove a danger I felt but couldn’t name. This isn’t the first time I’ve envisioned my mother bound and threatened.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Come with me, Maibelle. Talk to Delong.”

  “Why?”

  “He can help you.”

  The image twists abruptly. Hands freed and ready, she rises, towers. Now I am the one going down. And my mother holds the weapon.

  “I don’t want that kind of help.”

  “Gerard, then. Come to the July opening.” Her breath quickens. The game revealed, she’s pushing for her goal. I remember how this works from all those years of listening to her sales pitch. The only danger to my mother is in my head. Always has been. “It’s the first time he’s been here in nearly two years. You could show him your work, at the very least talk to him, for God’s sake.”

  “What’s God got to do with it? I haven’t been to one of your openings since I got sick all over that Jerry Uelsmann print.”

  “You were allergic to that horrible man’s cigar smoke. It was only a test print, and not a very good one at that.”

  “What I’m allergic to is gallery openings. Especially ones where you expect me to suck up to your boss.”

  A long pause. “You don’t mean that, Maibelle.”

  “I never mean what I say, do I?”

  “Think about it. That’s all I ask.”

  “I’m going out for my run now, Mother.”

  I’ll admit it. I do get some satisfaction from my mother’s taboos. The same satisfaction, I imagine, that Henry got playing pinball all those years, or still gets from his homeless status. That Anna gets from her New Age immersion. Mine seems a minor infraction by comparison, but it’s a start. Dr. Gertz was right about one thing. I’d never stopped to consider whether I wanted to be the daughter my mother was assiduously grooming.

  That daughter is now running ten miles a week. A drop in mileage from the West Coast, where I used to jog an hour each day along the beach, but enough to help fend off the nightmares. I’ve gone as long as two weeks clear of dreams when consistently running. The exercise also helps draw out some of those ghosts Dr. Gertz talked about. In a flower on a window ledge, the exhaust from a home-style bakery, a small boy flying a paper plane, I’ll see or smell or hear a cue, and for the next two miles I won’t notice the catcalls or feel the concrete slamming into my knees. Or think about my mother’s invitation to prostrate
myself before the reigning tycoon of Art.

  This morning’s genie is a dancing chicken in front of a Hell’s Kitchen dime store. Here amid the throb of salsa and the sizzle of frying plantains, this withered fowl brings me to a full and unexpected stop. I stand gulping air and staring as the bird desultorily pecks at the wire floor of its glass cage. It cocks a leg and lifts its head and, in the space between one uncomprehending blink and the next, evokes an evening more than twenty years old that lasts the rest of my run.

  It began in the Chinatown arcade, where Henry routinely took me on days when Mum left me in his charge. Not that I went willingly. The arcade was a long, dingy ell filled with smoke and swear words, the stink of beer and laughter that sounded like machine-gun fire. It was a hangout for bad boys who ditched school and carried switchblades. Henry enjoyed the hoodlum atmosphere almost as much as the games and immediately disappeared into the arcade’s depths. That afternoon, like so many others, I stayed with the dancing bird up front.

  At one time the chicken machine must have been a popcorn maker—the kind some old-fashioned movie theaters still have in their lobbies, with a red base and butter-colored lights inside a wide glass cage. The popcorn works had been replaced with a trough for seed and water. In the middle of the cage stood the Chinatown chicken, whose particular identity changed over the years but who always had the same mangy feathers, half a tail, and eyes glazed over with a thick white film.

  When you dumped in your quarter, electric current ran through the cage’s mesh floor. As long as the bird’s nervous system still worked, these shocks would send it leaping and crazily flapping its wings. It looked a lot like my sister’s dancing in the mid-sixties, and later, after she got into psychedelics and hooked up with her Indian guru, I wondered if she and those chickens didn’t have even more in common. But I figured my sister at least had a choice in what happened to her body and mind. The chickens were trapped in the dancing machine until they simply gave out.