Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  “Looks good,” I say.

  “And these earrings to go with? Or should I wear the black pearl ones from Nai-nai?”

  “No, stay with the jet.”

  “Ma, are you ready?” It’s my father calling from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Just a minute,” Ma calls back, annoyed.

  The house itself seems to breathe a sigh of relief when they are finally gone. I put on an old nightshirt that belonged to Fran’s grandfather—white flannel with very pale blue stripes. She gave it to me when I admired it. I feel that it’s armor, that it will protect me somehow. I take out my pastels and a sketch pad and set up my easel by the window, planning to draw a view of our new yard, with its dramatic trees that I can’t yet name, but soon it’s too dark to see. I turn out the lights and light a candle and with a broken-off piece of indigo begin to sketch in the shapes of my room: the bed, the baby rocking chair, the row of miniature Peking opera masks, the quivering giant shadow of the carved wooden horse on my bureau. I’m still at work when my parents come home.

  Two weeks later, when I show it to my art teacher, he says: “You have made the object into a subject. And the mood! Such foreboding.”

  “Thank you,” I say, thinking, I can do this. At least I can do this.

  After that the vacations start to blend together in my memory. On the way home from the train station, I think it’s spring break my sophomore year, Ma tells me two things. First, the accident. Since moving from Coram Drive we’ve completely lost touch with the Katzes. Dusk on a rainy night, the blind curve around Lake Whitney where Ma herself once scraped a fender trying to avoid a crossing turtle. The boyfriend was driving. He lived two days, but Darcy was killed instantly.

  I keep trying to picture Darcy with a boy, and failing.

  “Did you go to the funeral?”

  “No. But I send flowers. White carnations.”

  “Ma! That’s like a wedding.”

  “You know white is mourning color in China. And besides, it reminds me of Darcy.” Ma is silent for a minute and then she says: “I’m worried about your sister. You know we send her to the best private school in New Haven.” Marty has finally conceded to this, because it’s where Schuyler goes.

  Into my brain jump possibilities: flunking out, drugs, pregnant.

  “She got arrested,” Ma says. “At Macy’s, with her friends. She was shoplifting.”

  I think of another time she got caught shoplifting, with me. I say: “That’s not so bad.”

  “Not so bad? I had to go down and pick her up. So shameful! She and those girls, all their parents so rich, can buy anything they want.”

  “What did she take?”

  “Some kind of jumper, not even nice-looking. She tried to wear it under her clothes.”

  “Did they press charges?”

  “Not this time. I think she won’t do it again.”

  “What did Daddy say?”

  Ma presses her lips together. “Of course he’s very upset. But she doesn’t listen to him. Maybe you talk to her.”

  When I go up to her room, Marty is sprawled out on her blue-and-white-checked comforter, leafing through Vogue.

  “That’s sad about Darcy, isn’t it?” I sit down next to her, noticing she has on way too much eye makeup.

  “The guy was shitfaced.” She yawns and turns over onto her back, stretching like a cat. “Christ, am I hung over.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Not personally. He was a townie.”

  “You’re a townie.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Ma told me about your crime,” I say.

  “It was stupid.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Sa. I’ve already had all the lectures.”

  “Ma thinks you’re sorry.”

  She laughs, flipping her hair out of her eyes. I’m losing patience.

  “Are you going to keep on acting this way?”

  “What way?”

  “Like a self-centered bitch.”

  “Oh God, I don’t believe you. Who’s the one going to the fancy-schmancy boarding school?” She sits up. “You know, I read your journal last summer. I know all about your jaunts by the river, how you get your liquor and your pot.”

  “What?”

  “You know what Ma and Daddy would do if I told them?”

  “I can’t believe you read my journal.”

  “I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing how perfect you are.”

  “At least I don’t UPSET them.”

  “Because you’re a hypocrite.”

  “You could have gone away.”

  “And leave Ma? No way.”

  “Ma can take care of herself.”

  “How do you know? You’re not around.” Marty flops back onto a mound of pillows, her arms folded behind her head. “But you know what? I wouldn’t be you for all the money in the world. You’re so goddamn passive. You can’t stand up for yourself. You have no personality.”

  I lean over and punch her, hard, in the soft part of her biceps. She’s caught off guard and tries to hit me back, but misses and goes toppling off the bed. The way she falls is overdramatic, just a little too graceful.

  “Get out of my room,” she growls, facedown on the rag rug. I can’t tell whether she’s crying or not.

  “No one’s making you stay in this dump.”

  “GET OUT OF MY ROOM.” She jumps up and then her hands are in front of my face and I feel the biting pain of her fingernails in the flesh of my neck. I reach and slap her fingers away, slap until my own hand bones sting. I’m still bigger, after all. She lunges forward and with all her weight shoves me toward the door. “GET OUT.”

  “You’re such a baby,” I shout back. “Just wait until you’re out in the real world without Ma to protect you. You’ll be a big failure.”

  She slams the door in my face.

  I begin spending more and more of my breaks with Fran at her mother’s apartment in New York City. During the day we go shopping or to museums and at night we get stoned and send out for Chinese food and watch old movies on TV. Sometimes we go out with the boys Fran grew up with, who like her are smart-alecky and good-looking. The two of us dress up in our best thrift-shop outfits—Fran in a lime miniskirt and an orange chiffon blouse, me in a pink strapless gown threaded with silver beads. I have to stuff the top with Kleenex to make it stay up. Fran scrutinizes the effect. “You have a beautiful neck,” she says, “but maybe next time you should wear evening gloves.” She never directly refers to the scars on my arms.

  My boy is always excruciatingly polite. Fran says not to worry, these guys aren’t sophisticated enough to handle someone as exotic as me. What reassures me most is that she doesn’t seem to take them very seriously herself. Once a couple of them come to visit us at school and we go skinny-dipping in the river. Fran’s pale round breasts, illuminated by the moonlight, fascinate all of us. “You’re thinner than you look,” my boy remarks to me, and I know it’s not a compliment.

  Summers, when I have to go back to Woodside Avenue, I hide out in my bedroom, avoiding my parents as much as possible. I do volunteer things: arts-and-crafts counselor at a day camp, teaching life skills at a shelter workshop for the mentally handicapped. Maybe my sister is right, I’m a complete wimp, and helping people worse off makes me feel better. Weekends when the weather is good I’m out in the back yard drawing or painting. It’s the one thing I do that takes me away from this world. I buy a field guide to learn the trees: silver maple, sugar maple, pin oak, blue spruce, and my favorite, the two black walnuts that form a kind of gateway to Ma’s garden. A matched pair, the tree man says to Daddy, the wood worth twenty thousand dollars at least. One summer one of the trees is struck by lightning and has to be carted off in huge splinters, worthless. I notice Daddy doesn’t brag about the one that is left, as he had with the pair. It seems that symmetry is terribly important to most people.

  Marty has a string of summer jobs—the longest
as hostess at a fancy steakhouse downtown, but she quits after a fight with the owner. “He wanted me to be goddamn Suzie Wong,” she says.

  “Useless, both of you,” Daddy says at the dinner table. “Walking pieces of meat.” He points out that the younger sister of one of his summer school students is a page in the U.S. Senate. Not to mention Xiao Lu, who is going to physics camp in the Adirondacks.

  I have trouble sleeping, those summer nights at home. I read till I’m too restless to lie in bed anymore and then I go out to the backyard and smoke, and sometimes I even dream about this boy or that. It’s not sex I’m thinking about. I want them to want me. That would be enough.

  Back at boarding school I keep working on my portfolio, and on April 15, senior year, I get in line for the dorm phone to tell my parents I didn’t get into Yale. Ma is the one who answers.

  “That’s a shame,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re going to do now.”

  “Half our class applied, you know, and they took only seven people.”

  “Your father will be very disappointed.”

  “I’m going to the Rhode Island School of Design, Ma. It’s a very good art school. Maybe the best in the country. They gave me a scholarship and everything.”

  “I just talk to Xiao Lu’s mother. He got into Harvard and M.I.T.”

  For graduation I give Fran a hammered silver bangle and she gives me a pair of silver earrings shaped like teardrops.

  10

  Some memory you keep underneath, so you can get on with your life.

  It doesn’t work. What happens is that you end up moving from dream to dream.

  But you, you have your father’s blood.

  He walks away into the night, his white shirt a flag. As in life, his shoulders are bowed and he travels hunched forward, not looking back.

  I want to call out to him but realize that I don’t know his language.

  It’s my ninth birthday. Ma doesn’t get a cake or presents because we’re busy getting ready to go to visit our Nai-nai in San Diego. That is, Marty and I are going while Ma and Daddy spend the summer in Taiwan, where my father has a teaching job. “We celebrate when we come back,” my mother promises me. In the front of the tunnel to the plane she hands us over to the stewardess, who wears white gloves like Minnie Mouse. Marty cries but I don’t. Daddy stands behind Ma, mixed in with the crowd. We don’t say anything to him and he says nothing to us. When he raises his hand to wave good-bye I look away, and that’s the last I see of him.

  During the flight the stewardess keeps coming over with Jack and Jill magazine, coloring books, magnetic tic-tac-toe. Not that we need distractions; we sit quietly, buckling our seat belts when the sign says to. Most of the way I read Eight Cousins, feeling my sister’s hot skull pressed against my shoulder as she sleeps.

  My Nai-nai is so glad to see us, she has tears in her eyes. “Ni kan!” she says to her cousin Su-yi, who has come to the airport too because our grandmother doesn’t drive. Nai-nai used to live with Su-yi, but now she has a separate house on the same street. Su-yi has a dough face and smokes cigarettes. Her hair is curly and black-dyed, I can tell.

  Ma has warned us: “Nai-nai old lady, don’t tire her out.” But my grandmother is inexhaustible. Mornings, when she comes to wake us, she’s already dressed, hair up, face powdered, lipstick on. The first night when she tucks us in Marty asks, “When do you go to bed?” and Nai-nai answers: “Very, very late. Old lady doesn’t need much sleep.”

  Over my grandmother’s shoulder I am watching the curtains, patterned with cobalt and fuchsia primroses, dancing over the open window. I have brought Piggy, although I am way too old. Marty left her Raggedy Ann on her pillow at home. Nai-nai doesn’t make fun of me. “Poor old man,” she says, when she notices Piggy’s tattered chest. She looks in her drawers and finds a baby T-shirt I can dress him in.

  Every morning the three of us go marketing, Nai-nai handing Marty or me the netting bag when it begins to fill up. We walk the ten blocks to the supermarket, where Nai-nai leans over the mountain of oranges to haggle with the produce man, who is fat and wears a white apron. Her voice is so loud that the other customers stare. “In China, I have maid to do this,” she explains as we leave the store, Marty stomping hard on the rubber mat to make sure the electric door opens.

  At the fish store I drag my sister over to watch the lobsters bumbling over each other in their tank. Although I would never admit it, it makes me a little sick to see my grandmother glaring into the eye of each fish as if it were a lifelong enemy and then pointing—“This one, and this”—and the fish lady slaps each carcass onto the sheet of butcher wrap she has laid across the scales. At home Nai-nai chops the heads off and puts them in a pot to make stew. “Good food for old lady,” she says, and that’s her lunch, while Marty and I get the bodies, steamed in a brown sauce so sweet that, when Nai-nai isn’t looking, we stick our faces into our bowls to lick up the last drops.

  Our grandmother has lots of opinions.

  “Sal-lee going to be tall. Tall girl not so beautiful, but stands out.” She looks me up and down. “You press your clothes, you’re fine.”

  To Marty: “You like your mother. Sloppy.”

  “WHAT?” Nai-nai is the only one who can make my sister squirm.

  “Mar-tee, you walk like water buffalo.”

  “Crabby old lady,” my sister mutters under her breath.

  “You don’t talk back to elders,” Nai-nai says serenely. “Now please wash rice for lunch.”

  I ask my grandmother about Chinese ghosts.

  “Two kinds,” she tells me. “Men ghosts and women ghosts.”

  “Which are worse?” We are in the kitchen making jiao zi, pork dumplings. Marty and I call them boiled ears, but we can eat two dozen apiece, dunked in a sauce of soy and vinegar, in one sitting. Nai-nai examines each one I make, frowns at some, smiles at others. Not in a million years could I pleat them shut as quick as she does—pinch, pinch, pinch—without even looking.

  “Men ghosts are very strong. Make a lot of noise, like child. Women ghosts charming and often beautiful. Some say women ghosts worse.”

  When I first get to California I sometimes bolt awake in the middle of the night. I pad down the hallway to my grandmother’s room and slip through the door, which is always ajar. “Ai-yah, awake again!” Nai-nai whispers, lifting the covers so that I can climb in.

  “I heard a scary noise.”

  “Nothing, nothing, just the wind, so many big bush around this house.”

  “It didn’t sound like wind.”

  “So what if ghost? They’re dead, you’re alive. They can’t hurt you. You should feel sorry for them. They’re like your sister, tease because they’re jealous.”

  But it’s not ghosts I’m afraid of. I can’t tell her, but it helps to lie there in the sweet musty-smelling bed, listening to my grandmother breathe. She’s the same height as me but sharp-boned. Tough. I imagine being old like her, so that nothing can hurt me.

  The kids on our street are easygoing, unlike those in Connecticut. No jumping out of the hedges and making Chinese eyes or yelling, We beat you Japs in World War II. There is even a family on the block with an American father and a Japanese mother. Their two daughters are teenagers, beautiful, long-legged, with red-brown hair parted down the middle. They always call out to us: “Hey, you two!” About Marty they say: “Isn’t she precious?” After dinner we lurk on Nai-nai’s front porch to watch their dates come pick them up. The boys are indistinguishable from each other, with booming American voices and faded polo shirts to match their faded blond hair.

  We play softball and kickball. One girl takes me into her house and lets me borrow from her Nancy Drew collection, which is the largest I’ve ever seen. Sometimes we go to the beach, along with a lot of other kids in bathing suits, crowded into the back of a station wagon that smells of hot rubber and coconut suntan lotion. When we get there the mother sets up the umbrella and lays down the beach towels and says, “Shoo!” and we all
run screaming like crazy people to the ocean, waving our arms. It is the most beautiful ocean I have ever seen, with all different kinds of blue in it, rolling like fluted glass toward us.

  I tell the other kids about the Gulf of Mexico, where Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard live. There were things waiting there in that warm flat water, crabs who’d clamp your toes no matter how carefully you stepped. Then I tell them about the beach in Monterey, where I was born, with all the wildflowers in the spring, and of course the seals. I say that when we went swimming they’d slide off their rocks to join us. Actually we never went swimming in Monterey—the water was much too cold.

  Marty and I get very tan, and Nai-nai scolds us. “You become like peasants. Why don’t you stay under umbrella?”

  But she softens when she sees how hungry we are after our days at the beach, how we wolf everything down, no matter how strange. When we first got here we were picky, polite. Nai-nai corrected the way Marty held her chopsticks and made her cry. Our grandmother serves the meal in courses, unlike Ma, who sets everything down on the table at once.

  Now we compromise. Marty is allowed to use a fork, and Nai-nai sometimes gives in to our pleas at the grocery store. “Hawaiian Punch? You sure you want red drink?” One night she even makes hamburgers, following the recipe from Joy of Cooking, although we forget to get buns so we have to have them on toast.

  On the first rainy day, Nai-nai climbs the stepladder and takes out boxes from the top shelf of her bedroom closet. They are filled with presents from her admirers, back in her youth when she was a lieder singer. She kept everything: dried sprays of orchids, brittle and black-edged; a collection of music boxes from Switzerland; perfume, never opened, the bottoms of the crystal flasks coated brown. I imagine the perfume to be like orange juice concentrate: if you added water it would be as good as fresh.