Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  We thought Mr. Bullock was giving us a routine assignment, but what if a junior high English teacher with hair in his ears is an agent of destiny? He’d made us read a Robert Frost poem about a bird flying off a snow-dusted bough. “The Muse,” he’d encouraged us, “notices the humblest object and the tritest movement and turns them into the gold of passion and poesy.”

  Mr. Bullock said he wanted for us to write about something we knew, something we knew so well that we didn’t see it anymore. And so I wrote about the lacy, summertime shadows of the squat oak that Grandpa DiMartino had planted in the backyard to celebrate his escape from the Bronx—so the family story goes—the day he got the deed to the Schenectady house, and that set me thinking that the grandpa who’d planted that oak and landscaped the garden and put in the lily pond was Angie’s grandpa and not mine after all. That made me hear tiny gypsy moth jaws on the tender skin of stalks, and that made me remember other leaf patterns against other horizons. I wrote another about the dogs I’d seen at the pound, pretending that I was alone and that I was a dog myself. Take me, love me, shelter me, my barking said. I felt more deeply than Debby’d ever dared let herself feel. Words ribboned out of me. And when the assignment was done, I felt cheated of places I couldn’t draw and of parents I didn’t miss. I blamed the poem for robbing me of what I’d never owned. It was as if a psychic with a 900 number had said to me through the poem, You’re just on loan to the DiMartinos. Treat them nice, pay your rent, but keep your bags packed.

  Back then, in Schenectady, I waited for the call. Not to be a model or a poet, which was to be not extraordinary enough. The call would be to something more special, to satisfy the monstrous cravings of other Debbys hiding inside. I didn’t envy Angie as I helped her into the Greyhound bound for Manhattan and her modest transformation of a Hudson Valley accent, hair color, clothes, muscle tone and skin. I knew by then that there was a life beyond the state lines waiting for me to slip into. Star Quality just plays taller and thinner and younger than it really is; second bananas just look older and fatter than they really are. All I’d have to do was be beautiful, be available, and my other life, my real life, would find me.

  The summer I fell for Frankie Fong I was telemarketing Elastonomics out of an abandoned shopping mall near Schenectady. The Elastonomics frontman ran my job interview from his room at a Ramada Inn. He was a fat boy in a tight yellow shirt with a HI, I’M TONY TUCCIANI name tag. I knew I had the job because the first thing Tony said to me was “Okay, you’re a natural.” The second thing he said was “Miss DiMartino, you have the voice of a sexy nun.” I waited for the third thing. I could tell what a strain it was for him to call me Miss DiMartino instead of sweetheart or Debby. Because I don’t have trouble being kind to myself, I translated Tony’s compliment to mean my voice came on as warm but implacable. I was so innocent back then that I didn’t guess that the scratchy voice that got me in trouble in church choirs was thick and low not with sexy promise, but with scar tissue.

  Elastonomics, Tony Tucciani explained, was the newest product manufactured in Asia by Fong Home Products, a multinational fitness equipment company. “We’re in the business of promoting all-round well-being” is how he put it. Tony, then, offered some of FHP’s tested-in-Hong Kong tips on making the sales pitch. Like, turn the question “Expiration date?” into a command. Like, if a sucker doesn’t bite in four frames, cut him off. After that he made his move. Bending forward, he said, “In other words, Debby, leave his dick flapping in the wind.”

  I asked for him to practice me a couple of times. I’d had the usual upstate after-school and summer jobs, waiting tables, ringing up cash registers in the mall, demonstrating everything from sorbet makers to electric drills, but selling invisible fitness equipment for a Chinese company was a first. Tony wasn’t worried about taking a risk on me, because I had this great telephone voice, he said, gritty and seductive, like I was lying naked in bed smoking raw Camels and swilling gin. I was going to ask him if he praised all his interviewees like this when he explained, “The boss doesn’t do scripts anymore. Improv’s his new shtick.” Niceties over, he said, “So when we going out, Debby?”

  I saw what I saw: sweaty-frontman longing, motel, fifteen minutes, cute girl wants the job, give it a shot. I did need the job; he was right about that. I said, “Zip it up, fat boy!” and slammed down an imaginary phone. Then, sweetly, “How was that? Did I come on a little too strong? Too rude?”

  We both knew to keep my triumph low-key. “No, no, just testing,” he mumbled. “Just don’t mention fat. Guys who call in think they’re not getting laid because they’re fat. When you work the midnight-till-six shift, you’ll get all types.” Then he launched into the list of sales videos that FHP and I were going to blast the American consumer with.

  “I did okay?”

  “You were good,” the frontman assured me. “Very good.”

  So I became the sexy nun with the 800 number selling contrition by UPS. The telemarketing job made it possible for me to move out of the DiMartino split-level. I’d graduated from SUNY-Albany earlier that week. It was time. The sad, fat people punching out 800 numbers weren’t the only ones looking for change.

  The surprise for me was that my callers were romantics. They believed in me, not in salvation through Elastonomics. They begged, If I call back, how do I know I’ll get you? I made them effortless promises. Just ask for me, Helena. Or depending on the mood of the day, Staci, Traci, Eva, Magda, Desiree. Some nights I tried out thirty personas. My lies paid off. Loverboys and couch potatoes parted with bucks. What did they expect from me? Phone sex passing itself off as self-improvement, a date once they got in shape? Sounds good, Roger! You never know, do you, Dave? Expiration date?

  Debby DiMartino’s body might have been stuck in a cubicle in a failed mall, where fifty other telemarketers for eight hours a night were talking up rock-’n’-roll CDs, scam cruises, fat-burner pills, discontinued cosmetics and underwear in XXL sizes, but I felt I’d broken free of Schenectady. Most of my callers assumed I was in Florida or in California. Sleepless in Jersey told me he smelled surf in my voice. Three o’clock in the morning out here in East Orange, babe. Just midnight where you are, I bet. I never let on I was deep into eastern time. The customer’s always right. I’d never in my conscious life been out of eastern time, never west of Niagara Falls or south of Atlantic City. Hawaii, actually! the telephone voice taunted. Sun’s just going down. It’s lei and luau time … Expiration date?

  Mixed in with the dreamers, I got my share of jerks. Doesn’t it get to you, taking calls at three in the morning from slobs like me? The perverts had meaner questions. I know you, girl. Men don’t do it for you, do they?

  A marketing major, I didn’t need the boss to tell me I was very good at pushing his exercise gizmo, but he did. On my last night shift in June. He phoned me at my cubicle from somewhere overseas where tonight was already tomorrow. A kittenish voice came on first. “Hello, this is Cynthia, Mr. Francis’s personal assistant …” I stopped the voice right there. “I don’t accept an order that isn’t called in by the client himself or herself.” I heard a choking noise, then a click, a couple of smothered snorts or laughs and finally “Mr. Francis does not dial calls himself. He is a very busy man.” This time, Cynthia’s words had a speakerphone echo to them. Kids at a slumber party having fun at my expense. “Then he should have known not to waste the time of a busy career woman,” I snapped. “We aren’t your give-us-your-credit-card-number-and-we’ll-ship-you-hard-body-equipment kind of sleazy phone-order operation. If your Mr. Francis can’t get off his butt to place the order himself, he can’t be motivated to lose weight, shape up, turn his life around. You don’t think that we sell Elastonomics to any and every plastic-dropping Joe Schmo, do you? Mr. Francis has to prove to us he’s the kind of client Elastonomics wants. Get that message across. Then have him call us.”

  I didn’t hang up. It was a slow night, which meant that a telephone tussle with Cynthia & Her Slumberettes was better th
an no call at all.

  “Jolly good, Miss DiMartini!” A man’s voice came over the phone. A man with a silky, Britishy accent was on the other end of the line, and not a prepubescent partybeast lowering her voice into a manly growl. “Splendid performance!”

  “What did you just call me?”

  “Anthony Tucciani was correct about you. You have a future with FHP.”

  “You know Tony Tucciani? You work for Tony? Is he monitoring us employees? Listening in without my permission, that has to be a felony.”

  “Tony? That’s interesting. What if I said Mr. Tucciani is my employee?”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “What if I said I was Francis A. Fong, founder and CEO of Elastonomics? How would you address me?”

  “Frankie!” I retorted. “But seriously, who told you …”

  The man emitted long, tinkly laughter into the mouthpiece. Then he said, “For an American you have class, Miss DiMartini.”

  “DiMartino,” I corrected. “Ends with an o, not with an i like Tony’s.”

  “I’ll be in touch. I’m calling from Kuala Lumpur, but Cynthia’ll let you know when, Debby. I may call you Debby, mayn’t I?”

  The boss hung up without waiting for a yes or no from me. Given his Masterpiece Theatre voice and vocabulary, I pictured Mr. Francis A. Fong as Bruce Lee playing Hugh Grant.

  I didn’t have to wait more than a week to meet him, and when I did, at the Indigo Club, the newest jazz place on Caroline Street in Saratoga Springs, the Chinese part of Frankie wasn’t the first thing I noticed.

  Okay, I have to call time out for a confession. Frankie Fong took me to dinner and to bed on the first date. And handed me keys to my first apartment three nights later. It was mesmerism at first sight. Not love; love’s the surrender to guys you grew up with, and Frankie wasn’t like anyone upstate. Let’s say he leveraged me into dependence. You took in the hair, which was blue-black and wavy. You stared. The man had cheekbones, shoulders till Tuesday, a ballerina waist, bulging little buns: all of this you registered in a flash. Then you caught yourself staring, because he was smiling at you.

  Frankie hadn’t always been in the fitness equipment business. In his last incarnation, he’d been Francis “the Flash” Fong, star/director/producer of dozens of Hong Kong kick-boxing extravaganzas.

  He was born Francis Albert Fong, named for you-know-who, in Hong Kong or maybe in Manila or Surabaya (catching him in a consistency meant he’d fallen in love with one of his wilder inventions), to Aloysius and Baby Fong. Every time he told his life story, he gave himself the luxury of a different hometown. I loved his made-up childhoods. His father, Aloysius Fong, with the freakishly Sinatra-like voice, was the Don Ho of a dozen South Asian Chinatowns. Baby, his mom, was Al’s fourth wife. He’d lifted her from the chorus line of a Chinese opera in Manila. With Frankie, I traveled crazy worlds without ever leaving Saratoga.

  “ ‘One for My Baby’—Dad owned that song in Asia. You ask any Chinese over seventy who wrote that song, who sang it, and they’ll say it’s Al Fong. They’ll say Sinatra ripped Al off. ‘One for my baby … One more for the road’ … that’s the way we lived. That’s how we Chinese lived. Dad made it into a song of lost identity. That’s why Sinatra sounds such a whinge, to tell the truth.”

  I studied the color photo of the crooner with pomaded hair and a gold-capped smirk. Frankie would never wear Al’s blue satin jacket with the black velvet piping nor the gold lamé vest, but I could picture him—at twenty-two, at thirty-two—lounge-lizarding in a tacky Asian nightclub, cigarette in one hand, mike pressed to his lips with the other, eyes sparkling from the stage lights, the drops and the drugs, diamond cuff links glittering, karaokeing “My Way” to black marketeers and their mistresses. Those were Frankie’s origins, before he stripped off the finery, slapped on a headband, became Flash and took to beating sense into outer-space aliens, cowboys, bikers, Maoists and French colonials in a series of kick-boxing spectaculars.

  He didn’t ask me about my origins, and I volunteered nothing. I was the innocent upstate Italian, playing a cameo role in my own life.

  Frankie’s memories of growing up on permanent tours of China-in-exile made squalor and malice sound educational. From the way he talked about life-from-a-suitcase in hotel rooms, I understood why owning showy property on Union Avenue was so important to him. I coveted property too, but a different kind of property. I coveted the deed to my shadowy parentage. To a cornered rat, hunger and greed, ambition and wish fulfillment, are synonyms.

  Frankie needed to remember, and I needed to discover. He talked. But I wanted more; I wanted details, wanted to know the smell of fishing boats on Thai canals and the sound of monsoon rains on tin roofs. He reminisced. Of pariah dogs and flying foxes, floating bodies, ancient ruins, temple bells, Muslim calls, diesel fumes, painted “lorries.” More hash than butter, he boasted. Fevers, drugs, backroom-behind-the-beaded-curtain Asia. Playing card games with child prostitutes between clients, singing for the madams, picking the pockets of American marines on R and R, chasing monkeys in grassy ruins, shimmying up slippery trunks of giant palms, packing his father’s opium into false-bottomed trunks: Frankie made an Asian childhood sound great fun, something I wanted to claim, something I’d been robbed of. But by whom? By the California hippie who’d fucked a Eurasian thug so I could be born in that place, over there, where nightmare and poem merge? By the Gray Nuns who placed me oceans away from my orphan origins? By Pappy and Mama who believe love wipes misery clean?

  From that night on I envied Frankie. As a boy he’d been everywhere the Chinese had settled: Calcutta, Bangkok, Saigon, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, Sydney. He’d seen it all, the tin shacks and smoky dives of overseas Chinatowns, before assimilation or persecution closed them down. In Frankie’s Asia, the streets were always hot, loud, smoky, full of cheats and drugs and whores; the nightclubs were always places of viciousness and degradation and carnality. From Frankie the Son’s stories, I pictured Al the Dad, the sleek, hatchet-faced man with slicked-back, dyed hair, sitting offstage on a stool, alternately vomiting into a bucket and spraying his throat with a minty concoction mixed by Baby, then smoking a last cigarette down to Sinatra’s approved length before making his entrance. Pappy became my dad a million times removed. Thanks to those stories, for the first time I felt connected. The DiMartinos were the aliens.

  How could I explain all that to Frankie, who confided, “That’s why I took up karate, you see. It was either that, or become Al Fong’s little Michael Jackson.”

  He lingered on the books he’d devoured in libraries of faded hotels with colonial names, the Imperial, the Nelson Arms, the Lord Curzon. Had these same hotels been my backpacking mom’s haunts? He’d self-educated himself, he confessed, on Dorothy Sayers and H. E. Bates, on leatherbound sets of Dickens, Bennett and Galsworthy. I’d never heard of any of these authors except Dickens, but I could feel my fingertips touching Moroccan-leather spines, could see the sparkle of gold dust rubbing off in my hands.

  Forget the Asia that Mama raised mission money for, playing bingo every second Thursday night. From that night on, Frankie’s stories of Asia replaced the video as foreplay. And my mystery father became a back-alley customer of almond-eyed whores, a hanger-on in all those clubs in all those cities that Aloysius Fong’d played.

  “More!” I cried.

  “What? There isn’t any more.”

  “I want to know everything!”

  “You’re an exigent little tramp, aren’t you?” But he said that after he blew me a kiss. Then he launched into a word game he made up for me.

  “First het sex with hermaphrodites in Hyderabad.”

  “Jealous jockey jilted in Joliet …”

  “Ah, perfect, my pleasing paramour, Deborah! How about … parked with prostitutes playing Parcheesi while his parents performed. Your turn again, my dear.”

  “Moi? Let’s see … sultry, suburban, Schenectady schoolgirls studying suspicious signs of …”

  �
��Of what? Of mystic mendicants meditating on meekness?”

  “No, meditating on misted-over moons and menacing mango trees and missing mothers!”

  But it was just a game of words. It didn’t express what I really felt about mothers discarding daughters. But Frankie’s make-believe Asia of dogs and bats, heat, beggars, police sweeps, corruption, squalor, disease, trans-vestites, prostitutes, crows wheeling low over flat roofs, bony stray cattle ambling down muddy sidewalks, did stir up my desire for what might have been—must have been—a careless hippie mom’s Asia. You see, this is one more side effect of adoption. I can imagine myself into any life; I can wrench myself away from a thousand backgrounds. I can assess damage, then just walk away. Nothing shocked me in Frankie’s tales, nothing seemed absurd or false.

  Frankie wasn’t an immigrant the way that Paolo DiMartino had been. No steerage, no crippling gratitude. Ask not what you et cetera; ask what your new country can do for you. Frankie intended to hang on to the fortune he’d made, and not let the mainland or any fool socialist system steal it from him. With Hong Kong about to go down the tubes, he said he’d decided to shift his assets, rebuild an empire and relocate his vast family somewhere within it. Five nations courted the Fongs’ pool of liquid assets. Passports were offered in exchange for new investments. He’d done his homework; he’d scouted London, Vancouver and Toronto, Wellington and Auckland, Sydney and Perth, and chosen cheap and serene New York City.

  Why not California, I asked. He favored me with his silky, superior smile. “I might never have met you in Ell-Lay.” Which meant, too many Chinese in California. I might never have noticed him.

  He put the complications of the Fong diaspora simply. “I signed; I paid; we filtered south and west,” he said. The “we” included his aging parents, loutish uncles, layabout cousins, and fat-boy hangers-on, most of whom he employed in Fong Home Products or its parent company, Fong Family Growth Fund.