Mel was hunched over, scrawling something complicated to Douglas. The errant hair like an exclamation point was standing up. I reached over and brushed it down. “Your gas station lady won’t recognize you, you’re so dark.”
“Nothing compared to you.”
“I could stay here forever.”
“I know what you mean, honey.”
“What’s going to happen? I mean, when we get back.”
“I’m going to summer school and you’re going back to New York City to your advertising job.”
“What about us?”
“We’ll talk.”
I knew, then, for certain, that it was over. Something was over.
After a while I asked: “What are you telling people? About the hospital, I mean.”
“The truth. It’s kind of hip to have a screw loose, don’t you think? Especially if you’re an artist.”
“Not if you’re a graphic designer.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He grinned and then leaned over and whispered: “You know what I’m going to be thinking about every single second I’m on the road?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Swear on my mother’s honor. You are unquestionably the sexiest woman I have ever known.”
“Out of how many? You are so full of it.”
“Admit it, Sally. You know we’re a match.”
And it was true, driving back to my uncle and aunt’s, I wasn’t sure whether I could let him go. I had an image of us pulling up in front of the house and him asking one last time if I wanted a ride up and I’d say yes and run in and pack in two minutes and we’d be off, speeding up 1-95 where it would grow cooler and cooler, back into early spring like a time warp. Somewhere in the Carolinas we’d pick up a six-pack and check into a No-Tel motel and mess up the sheets. But he didn’t ask, and after we’d kissed good-bye he let me off at the corner and said, “I’ll miss you, honey.” As he pulled away, honking the horn wildly, I felt something extreme lift from me, and I was almost relieved, as if this were a signal that I could go on with my life, although I knew I was going to be sad later.
Uncle Richard wanted lobster, but my aunt took the menu from him and gave the waiter directions: scrod, broiled, margarine, no sauce. Uncle Richard pointed at me. “Niece, you order anything you want. Shrimp, huh? They have them delicious here, jumbo prawns, you’ll like.”
“I think I’ll have the lobster.”
My uncle leaned back, unbuttoning his vest. “So how old are you, Niece? Twenny-eight? What was I doing when I was twenny-eight? I got my accountant’s degree, thought I was a big shot. Impress your aunt, huh?”
“Ding-ah!”
“Work extra hard to impress this lady. She’s so sophisticated, from good family. I wear flashy clothes, doesn’t impress her. She wants to know how much money I have in the bank.” My uncle hoisted his glass of Perrier. “To my niece on her twenny-eighth birthday. Prosperity, long life, and good fortune.”
When our entrees came I broke off a claw of my lobster and put it on my uncle’s plate. Vertical lines appeared in Aunty Mabel’s forehead but then she said: “Okay, it’s special occasion.”
Daddy hadn’t believed in birthdays. New Year’s is everyone’s birthday, he always said. In fact we never did anything for his, which was sometime in September, I don’t even know the date. On hers Ma would get a call from Aunty Mabel. For her daughters she’d buy bakery cake, devil’s food with chocolate frosting for me, and two weeks later, strawberry cream for Marty. Every year Daddy would say the same thing: “Remember, this is not a day to celebrate yourself. This is a day to remember your mother’s pain and your father’s sacrifice.”
Ma had called just before we left the house. She wanted to know what time my flight was arriving, when she should pick me up at Connecticut Limousine. I told her I was going straight to my apartment in New York.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, happy birthday. You think I forget?”
“Thanks,” I said.
“With your sister home, maybe we can have double celebration when you get back.”
There were gifts. A package from my mother, fancy stationery, cream-colored with my name embossed: Sarah Collisson Wang, I guess to replace the dozen boxes of Sarah Wang-Acheson stationery she’d ordered for me when I got married. From my aunt and uncle, a set of Chinese calligraphy brushes in a satin box. I fingered the bristle: fox, sheep, goat. The sheep was the softest. Good for ink, of course, or watercolor.
“San zhi mao bi,” I said.
“Three Chinese brush.” Uncle Richard chuckled. “Very good.”
Nothing from my sister, but it had been years since we’d exchanged presents.
After dinner we drove into Tampa to play bingo at the Seminole reservation. Over a thousand people, mostly over the age of sixty, were seated in numbered plastic chairs at long tables with cards and good-luck charms lined up in front of them. They used monster highlighters to daub each number as it was called out. Except for the caller, it was as still as an examination room. When someone won they’d raise their hand or say “bingo” very quietly, and the whole room would go up in a sigh.
Was anyone even having fun?
Bingo at the slot machines was depressing in another way, because you could lose so much hard cash so fast. “Not your game, Niece,” Uncle Richard said finally. “Like basketball not my game. Too bad we never go back see the puppies run.”
“Next time, Uncle Richard, I promise.”
What I couldn’t tell him was that my power wouldn’t work if I tried to do it on purpose. Luck could be chased away if you took it too seriously, like those silent bingo players. The trick was to concentrate without focusing, to let yourself feel without understanding.
When we returned to the house I went out to the patio to smoke. Before lighting up I just sat there, staring into the dark, breathing the now familiar mix of jasmine and honeysuckle. Then I saw the mother armadillo. She came lumbering through the grass to the edge of the pool of kitchen light, a homely plump hunkering shape like one of those old-fashioned rag dolls where limbs, head, and torso are each a separate stuffed piece. Her tiny black elephant eyes caught the light and she squinted. I don’t think she saw me, but she must have sensed something alien because she froze before backing off into the darkness.
When I went back into my room to pack, the tiger kitten appeared out of nowhere like cats do and followed me, jumping up onto the unused bed next to the stuffed white cat. Aunty Mabel knocked at the open door. She was carrying six gemlike jars, sealed with wax and labeled. It was the calamondin made into jam.
“Here, you take. Give some to your ma-ma, too. She like sour thing.” She set the jars in a row on the bed next to the kitten, who matched them in color. I imagined my aunt bent over the stove stewing the fruit on one of those sultry afternoons Mel and I had spent in bed.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been home much lately, Aunty Mabel.”
She waved her hand. “You marry too young,” she said, as if that explained it in some way. She watched in approval as I wrapped each marmalade jar in an article of clothing as carefully as I had packed Lillith’s food sculptures in her socks. “You know, back when your ba-ba died I was so worry about you.”
“I was okay,” I said. “I had friends.”
“Friends not like family. Your ma-ma and I discuss this. What if we were in China? What if you grow up surrounded with relatives, like you’re supposed to? Maybe you both be happier, you and Marty. And your ba-ba is such a sad man. You know how his father die?”
“No.”
“He commit suicide.”
“I didn’t know that.”
My aunt was silent for a moment, and I saw from her face how difficult it was for her to say what she was about to say. “I know about this thing your ba-ba did when you were small. I know what he did, Sal-lee. Terrible.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak and then I said, “Incest.” I said it to hear the word out loud, and to make sure we were talking about the same thing.<
br />
“This is rare in China. Chinese adore their children.”
“Ma told you.”
“She call me before you come down.”
“She doesn’t believe me.”
“Don’t be so sure.” My aunt lowered herself onto the unused bed, carefully, as if her joints ached. “If I know then, I would tell your ma-ma send you girls come stay with us.”
“I wish you had.”
“You know I can’t have children,” my aunt said. “In China that’s a big big tragedy, my husband can divorce. Well, you know your uncle, when we find out he says we can get cats. Always joking. And he says I have you and Mar-tee, I shouldn’t be sad.” My aunt began running her fingers over the satin spread, smoothing it out. “I remember when you were born. I was there.”
“I thought you were in New York.”
“No, no. Yes, I was still at Grumman, your uncle and I just start to date. One day at work I get a call from your ba-ba—’Your sister says she wants you. I pay your airfare roundtrip.’ “
“Was she in labor?”
“Not yet. You were two weeks late. He call me the day you were due. I lie to my boss. I tell him my mother is dying. It’s bad luck, I know, but I can’t think of anything else. All the way, on the plane, I worry that I’m too late, she’s going to have baby without me. And then your mother came to meet me at the airport. Can you believe? So big, like this, all by herself she drives the car.”
There were pictures in the album. Ma like a beach ball, dark lipstick, her hair perfect.
“I sleep in the nursery, where they were going to put you, yellow and pink and blue, all the little diapers folded on the bureau. And so many stuffed animals, I guess they already know you liked stuffed animals.”
I buckled my bag shut and sat down on my bed, across from my aunt.
“Your ma-ma and I go to the movies every day. Fifty cents, can you imagine. We both like James Dean, Natalie Wood. You like Natalie Wood too, I remember. Sometimes we see the same movie three times. Always, people stare at your mother. Not many pregnant Oriental women in Monterey. She has only one outfit that fit her, a blue jumper. You remember May in Monterey, how beautiful. We are walking on the beach when the pains come. Your ma-ma is so stubborn, she sits down and doesn’t move. I’m so scared, I leave her on the rocks and run to the house and call your father at school. He comes and takes us to the hospital. The doctor says she’s slow, it’s going to take a long time, he wants to give her this medicine and that medicine.” My aunt’s eyes were shiny. I could see that she would have gladly undergone that kind of pain, and much worse. “Your ma-ma says no, she doesn’t want any drugs, but then she cries and cries and I say Mei you must be brave and she says you don’t know what it’s like, this yang guidoctor is going to let me die. This scares me so much, you know your ma-ma is always the cool one, always knows what to do. She wants Chinese remedy, so I go to grocery store and buy brown sugar and stir it in hot water. At the end, when it’s the worst, she curses your father, calls him disgusting peasant, even worse names. In Chinese, lucky, so the doctor doesn’t understand.
“You were a long baby, twenty-three inches. Your ma-ma has a private room, third floor, overlook the ocean. She has you in the bassinet by the bed. ‘Look, Jie, such a pretty room they gave me!’ She can see the cliffs from her windows, all the flowers. She can hear the seals. And I think, What a lucky mother. What a lucky baby.”
“I’m sorry, Aunty Mabel.”
“Sorry? Why be sorry? True, she’s not like my baby sister anymore. Doesn’t need me now. Your Nai-nai comes up from San Diego on the bus. A lot of hair, she says. It’s a good sign. But I am so stupid, I almost lost my job. I got back to the house and remember I must call New York, my boss. So I do. My boss asks me, How is your mother? and I say everything is all right, my mother is going to live, we are all very happy.”
Uncle Richard came to the airport to see me off, sitting by himself in the backseat like the wooden laughing Buddha my parents had brought back from Taiwan, making comments on the roads, how all the repair work they’d been doing hadn’t helped the traffic any. We were barely in time, and as we rushed toward the boarding gate, my uncle pressed something folded into my palm. “For good luck, eh? No, no, don’t open now.” I tucked it into the pocket of my jeans, having already caught a glimpse of Ben Franklin.
“G’bye, Slim,” my uncle said, laughing at his own joke. “I think I start calling your aunt that too.”
All of a sudden I couldn’t think of anything to say, and there was no more time. “Xie xie,” I said. “Zai jen.” Not adieu, but au revoir, see you again. All languages make that distinction.
“You hear,” Uncle Richard said to my aunt. “She has northern accent, just like her ba-ba.”
Part Four
23
At La Guardia I decided to treat myself to a cab, although I had hardly any luggage, just the black bag. I contemplated what I was returning to: clustering traffic, glowering skyline, the nervy discontented hum of the city and its denizens. How had my Aunty Mabel felt, landing here alone for the first time, the phone number of a friend of Nai-nai’s tucked into the flap of her purse, on her way to Penn Station to take the train to Long Island for her job interview? I could feel my own adrenaline as we pulled onto the FDR Drive.
My street was deserted and creepy, I’d forgotten the cracked sidewalks, the stairwell of my building shabbier than I’d remembered, with its worn marble steps and peeling black-and-white honeycomb wallpaper. I could smell acrylic fumes from the loft of the other artist, a sculptor, who lived on the first floor. When I’d undone all three of my locks, including the police one, and swung open the heavy steel door, I saw a space that was plain, even homely, smaller than I’d remembered, but in some ineffable way soothing to my soul. I’d painted the walls of my studio stark white and hung them with only Japanese prints and a blotchy green and violet painting I’d been working on before I left. Somewhere in the still, stale air, beyond the first whiff, I could smell that blend of turpentine and linseed oil that used to intoxicate me.
I walked over to the north bank of windows, lifted away the dusty sheet, and looped it around the nail I’d fixed to the wall for that purpose. Across the street two men were in a huddle in front of the candy store. A young Hispanic woman strolled by in heels and purple spandex, walking an old English sheepdog, and they both turned to look. I shoved one of the windows up as far as it would go and New York blew in. Exhaust, warm pavement, and weeds from Tompkins Square Park.
There were three phone messages. The first one was from my old boss—“Sally, please call me as soon as possible, I have an offer I think you’d be interested in.” The second was from my sister. “Sa, are you there? Call me, I’m at home.” The tinny girl voice on the last message I didn’t recognize right away. “Hey there. Thought I’d give you a try. I’m out in the real world, sort of, at the place I was last winter. Things are going okay, though I wouldn’t wish my last stay at State on my worst enemy. Although I’m the first to admit that I might be my own worst enemy. Okay, guess you’re not there. I’ll try you again sometime.” She didn’t leave a number. I wonder if Mel had beat me up north, as he’d boasted he would, whether he had dropped by to see her on his way home. On the tape Lillith sounded almost normal, as she had on her best days in the hospital.
I took one of the jam jars out of my bag and went downstairs and knocked on the door of the sculptor, whom I’d asked to collect my mail while I was gone. “You been to the Caribbean or something?” he asked, referring to my tan. I told him Florida. “Well, your timing was good,” he said. “At the end of March they turned the heat off for two weeks and of course we had that record cold spell. And the water pressure’s been completely fucked up, although at least it’s hot now.” I could tell he wanted to get back to work and I didn’t exactly feel like having a long conversation so I asked him for my mail. He handed me a shopping bag of what looked like mostly junk. I gave him the jam as a thank-you and went back upstair
s.
The water pressure, as the sculptor had warned me, was not what it used to be, and while I waited for the rust to run out of the kitchen tap I put on a tape of Chopin scherzos. Fran used to say that the scherzos reminded her of cats chasing each other over a bare floor. She wasn’t too fond of the recording I had, according to her the pianist was a little too showy, but I had always loved it. I put on water for tea and lay down on my floor mattress and listened until the kettle shrilled.
I’d left when it was bitter cold, and now I needed to figure out where I’d stored my fans. As I drank my tea without honey I noticed a sheet of memo paper taped to the refrigerator. I had to squint to make out my tiny sick scrawl:
join gym
eat better
find out specs for group show
call Reik center and get therapist?
I had accomplished none of these things. I ripped the paper off the fridge, turned it over, and made a new list in bold handwriting:
call people
call work
groceries
drugstore
My mail contained threatening notices from Con Ed and the phone company, but nothing from my landlord—I’d kept up with my rent at least. There was an enormous square envelope of heavy stationery that looked like a valentine—I could see that the card inside was red. It was, of all things, a wedding invitation. Silver curlicues on crimson:
Mr. and Mrs. Winston Woo request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Grace Loo-yi to Mr. Jian Lu.
Good God, Xiao Lu was getting married. Wimpy Xiao Lu who had once eaten an inchworm and two ants under the threat of being hung upside down by his ankles from the top bar of our swing set. Who was this girl who was willing to spend the rest of her life with him? A sweet one, for sure. Sweet as pie. One who wouldn’t laugh when he screwed up his face before bursting into tears, that is, if he still burst into tears.
Monkey King Page 23