I admired his restraint. To me, his apartment was the embodiment of his uncluttered life, exactly the kind of life I aspired to — both feet planted, eyes on the future. The present tripped me up. I was forever sorting out my bearings. Will, on the other hand, was tuned towards a distant point. It seemed to me, then, that the troubles of day-to-day life would never burden him as they did ordinary people. Will was also fearless and I loved this in him. He jumped headlong into our relationship, throwing caution to the wind.
The wedding was fast, the kind that’s over in half an hour and then you’re outside, pictures flashing, thinking, What just happened? but overcome by happiness the whole time. During the ceremony we couldn’t stop laughing. Even saying our vows. Wills face was lit up like a kid’s and I started laughing so hard I had to bend over, holding my stomach, A bit of hair was sticking up at the side of his head and I reached out to smooth it down. We were all laughing inside the church and even my mom, hair full of gray now, couldn’t find a moment to cry.
We had rushed into marriage. I always joked it was the motorcycle that did it, swept me off my feet, and he would say, “I know it.” I had no words to describe how exhausted I was that night when I walked into the alley in front of him. Afraid of everything. I thought I’d give it one last go, talk to him. At that time, something in my life was eating away at me. I couldn’t shake it. And there was Will, always on the move. I should just grab hold.
My father was not present at our wedding. He called in the early morning, his voice weak and sorry. “A cold,” he said, “has knocked me down.”
It did not surprise me, my father’s last-minute decision. At that time, he was living alone. When he left my mother, some years earlier, he had stepped away into a different kind of life, one where family obligations no longer weighed so heavily. In some ways, by leaving, he gave my mother and me our freedom. We moved on with our lives while he remained in the background, the one we had never understood. Who took his own failures so much to heart, he could no longer see past them, and obliged them by leaving.
My father rarely tried to contact me. I believed, then, that he had chosen his own circumstances and imposed solitude on himself. In some ways, this came as a relief to me. When Will and I married, I was twenty-one years old and I didn’t want to take my eyes off the future.
Years ago, it was a different story. My parents and I would drive across the city, going nowhere in particular, all of us bundled into the Buick. Through downtown and Chinatown — those narrow streets flooded with people — then out to the suburbs. On the highway, we caught glimpses of ocean, blue and sudden.
I was the only one of us born in Canada, and so I prided myself on knowing Vancouver better than my parents did — the streets, Rupert, Renfrew, Nanaimo, Victoria. Ticking them off as we passed each set of lights, go, go, go. Stop.
But nothing in Vancouver had the ring of Irian Jaya, where my parents lived in the first years of their marriage. In 1963, the country was annexed by Indonesia. They outlawed the Papuan flag, named the territory Irian Jaya, and flooded their own people onto the island. My parents, Chinese-Indonesians, arrived during this wave and lived there through the 1960s. “There were no roads,” my father said, on one of our long Sunday drives. “Nothing.”
My mother nodded her head. “The aborigines came into Jayapura looking for work. It was a rough town. Like a frontier. And the fighting. Do you remember the stories?” She shivered, one hand floating down to rest on my father’s knee.
“People thrown from helicopters. The Indonesian army threw resistance fighters into their own valleys. There were many rumors.”
Despite the violence and the political tension, my parents missed Indonesia. It came out in small ways, their English interrupted by a word of Chinese, a word of Indonesian. The exotic exclamations at the end of their sentences, ah yah!, or calling me to dinner, makan, makan. My mother told me that irian, a Biak word, means “place of the volcano” and that jaya, an Indonesian word, means “success.” But those were the only Indonesian words I learned. At home, they spoke Indonesian and Chinese only to each other, never to me. My mother would stand on the porch watching kids race their bikes up and down the back lane, and say, out of the blue, “But isn’t it so much cleaner here?”
In 1969, the United Nations led a vote, the “Act of Free Choice,” to allow the Irianese to determine their future. The Irianese voted to become part of Indonesia. “Rigged,” my mother told me, her eyes clouding. “And everyone knew it.”
My parents said the resistance attacked the gold and copper mines. The Indonesian army, unable to penetrate the jungle, swept through villages. They burned them to the ground and people disappeared. My parents decided it was time to leave. They gave up their Indonesian citizenship for good.
“In Irian Jaya,” my father told me, “the road stops dead at the jungle. If you want to reach the next town, you must go by boat or plane. You can’t just get in your car and drive there.” My father was suspicious of Canadian highways, the very ease of crossing such a country.
Perhaps he drove to test them. On those Sunday drives, we piled into the car, my father losing us in side streets, winding us along highways. In winter, the roads were icy with rain but we hurtled through the dark roads anyway, gutters of water shooting sky-high.
On Sundays, the furniture store was closed. Month after month, the old sofas and chairs remained unsold, and my parents fell further behind on their mortgage payments. All the savings they had brought with them from Indonesia seemed to trickle in a thin river out the door, down the street, to some place from which we would never recover it. My family’s luck, if a family could have luck, was running dry. This was the high point, the three of us packed in the car, my mother’s voice wavering thin and high over the words on the radio. We didn’t know how peaceful we were. Only years later, when my father lay in the Intensive Care Unit at Vancouver General Hospital, a thick tube in his throat to carry his breathing, did it strike me just how much we had changed and how far away that earlier time had gone.
There is my mother, the navigator, a map of the city unfurled on her lap. Me in the back seat, watching my father’s eyes as they glance in the rear-view mirror, the way he searches for what might appear. Now, with the distance of time, I look back at my parents differently — I try to re-read their gestures, the trajectory of these events. If I change the way shadow and light play on them, will I find one more detail? Some small piece that I could not see before.
In the first years of my own marriage, I could not look beyond Will. Our day-to-day routine was calming to me. He brought a certain contentment to my life, a settled happiness that I had not yet experienced.
When he read late at night, I fell asleep to the scratching of his pencil, the sound of a page turning. Sometimes he would nudge me awake, show me a photograph. The spires of the Angkor Wat, or a rock painting unearthed on the Tulare River. Will has an open heart, he can see the mystery in anything. When he tapped a photo with his index finger, I allowed myself to move with him, swept up in one idea and then another, losing myself in Will’s generous imagination. I opened myself up to it, letting this old history settle over my own small past.
By the time I was seven, the furniture store had fallen on hard times. I still accompanied my father after school or on weekends. More and more, I caught him resting. He would be sitting on a couch, looking out the window, just waiting. He had always been a restrained man, and whatever emotions he carried, he kept well hidden. Looking around at the couches and the chairs, my father simply waited in silence, turning his head at the sound of the door opening.
One night at dinner, my mother bowed her head. “We better sell now,” she said, her voice low.
Beside me, my father ate quietly, bowl held in one hand, his chopsticks lifting slowly.
“There is nothing else we can do. We can’t afford it any more.”
I pretended I wasn’t listening, the polite thing to do. I kept eating, with my legs swinging quietly under
the table.
“What about the mortgage?” she asked, shaking her head. “We can’t pay the mortgage or the car payments. At this rate we will lose the house, not just the store. Please, don’t be so stubborn.”
My father pushed his plate away, then stood up and left the table. Beside me, my mother sighed and continued eating. When she was done, she pushed her chair back and went upstairs. I was always the last one. Sitting on my own, I’d forget all about dinner and let my mind wander. Sometimes I was still there at nine or ten at night, lost in thought, my bowl still half full. All the light in the kitchen gone so I would curl my legs up on the chair and rest my face on the table. Small bits of rice stuck to my cheek. Eventually my mother would come and take the bowl away.
That night, my parents went into the bedroom to argue. Their voices were faint through the house like a distant television. Someone slammed a door hard. Eventually I got up and tipped my own bowl of food over the garbage. When I went upstairs to bed, all the doors were closed and the house was quiet.
The next morning, my parents started up again. I was already sitting at the table, eating breakfast.
My father came out of the bedroom and circled the kitchen table. “What do you want me to do? What do I do when the store is sold?”
“Go back to school. Do something for yourself, make yourself employable.”
“I am employed, I’m working as hard as I can. Is it so disappointing to you, everything that I have done?”
She shook her head impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
I stared from one to the other. My father laughed suddenly. It was a harsh sound, sad and bitter. He smiled, one hand waving up into the air then falling slowly. “Who is it?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The one at work, the one who promoted you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What did he do that for, promote you? In Indonesia you couldn’t hold down a job. Here, a promotion. I can’t understand it.”
My mother looked at him in disbelief. “I was miserable there. You know that.”
“You tell me,” he said, his voice even. “How is this possible? Remember, you are the one who wanted to leave Irian Jaya. It is because of you that we are in this situation.”
My mother burst into tears. “This has nothing to do with who you are and who I am. I am only trying to do what is best for us.”
I stood then, picking up my plate. My hands were shaking and the dish tipped, spilling milk and cereal. My father looked at me, then turned towards the sink. He picked up a cloth and ran it, end to end, across the table. Then he turned back to my mother. “I do not think so,” he said, “And it is not your decision.”
My mother picked up her purse and walked out the back door, the screen swinging behind her.
“I’m doing the best I can,” my father said. “Your mother, she wants everything. Do you see that? She wants everything.”
I tried hard to behave as I’d been brought up, to ignore what I was not involved in and to hold my tongue and pretend I was deaf and blind. Eyes lowered, I stared at the table.
Afterwards, when he bundled me up and walked me to school, he said nothing. He let go of me and I ran into the schoolyard, immersed myself in hopscotch and California kickball. I would adapt. He knew I would grow up and do well here. My father turned around, he started walking home again.
For six more months, the store pushed on. Whenever my father thought he might have to give in, somebody came along and bought a couch. A sofa here, a loveseat there — this somehow kept us going from week to week.
Now, looking back, I see that the store had an impoverished look to it, that the couches were old and worn, and that my father, once so patient a salesman, had begun to speak to his customers with an air of quiet desperation. At home, my parents had fallen into a deep silence, speaking to each other only when necessary. “Tell your mother that…,” my father said, and I was thrown out like a line between them.
On the weekends, I kept my father company in the store. Sometimes, during the afternoon lulls, I fell asleep on the lawn chair. Once, just waking, I sat up and listened for my father’s movements, the creak of his chair, his shoes on the polished floor. There were no sounds at all. Thinking he had disappeared, I pulled the curtain open and ran out. I can see myself, a small girl in blue sweatpants and a faded T-shirt, my John Denver ears, all keyed up. He was sitting at his desk. I looked at his face, his furrowed brow, and asked, “Is there something wrong?”
He looked at me for a long time, his expression melancholy. Then he said, “No. There is nothing to worry about.”
Not long after, the bank sent my father a letter saying they were foreclosing on our mortgage. When we moved out of our house on Curtis Street, my father would be the one who packed. While my mother kept me occupied on the back lawn, he would go from room to room, throwing everything into bags, my mother’s good dresses and shoes, my toys and socks. Driving away to our new apartment, we would turn back to the house, catch a glimpse of our excess furniture lined up on the sidewalk, the line of boxes and Glad bags stretching down the block.
But that day in the furniture store, my father was calm. He stood up from his desk and walked to the door. He turned the sign over and said to me, “I don’t think anyone else is coming today.” My father gathered my crayons and drawings and I started telling him about the book I was reading, Dumbo and the crows and how at the end he flies and his mother who cradles him in her trunk. My father just looked at me. This was the last business he would ever own.
That was the end of it. I don’t recall stepping inside the store again. When I saw it next, the windows were papered over so that I could no longer see the interior from the road.
The other day, my father telephoned to give me the news. “Fighting in Aceh,” he says. “And another ferry has gone down.”
I tell him about Will’s new teaching position.
He says, “That’s very good news.”
This new relationship we have is tentative, like moving in the dark. A step forward, then back, feeling for the perimeter of the room.
“Are you free?” I ask. “We can have coffee.”
“I can’t drink coffee,” he says. “It gives me heartburn.”
I file this information away, then I suggest tea.
Silence, as he considers this. “Will you come in the car? I’m having some problems with my knees.”
“Of course.”
When I hang up the phone, I feel a surge of hope, of fierce protectiveness over him. Perhaps, knowing everything that has brought us here, I would redraw this map, make the distance from A to B a straight line. I would bypass those difficult years and bring my father up to this moment, healthy, unharmed.
But to do so would remove all we glimpsed in passing, heights and depths I never guessed at. That straight line would erase our efforts, the necessary ones as well as the misguided ones, that finally allowed us to arrive here.
In the summers, Will and I left Vancouver at every opportunity. When the college shut down after spring semester, we headed out along the west coast. I was doing secretarial jobs then, temp work in law firms or ad agencies. I loved the transience of it, learning a routine then forgetting it in place of another.
Once, we spent the week in Neah Bay. I had set my finger down on the map, touched the westernmost reach of the Olympic Peninsula. “Here,” I said, turning to Will. “I’d like to go here.” We raced the motorcycle south, then west. The town sat high on a cliff of rocks overlooking the Pacific Ocean. That first night, in our tiny motel room, Will told me that piercing a lime with pins is said to cause pain for the person you love. “That’s it,” I said. “Were throwing all the limes out.”
He smiled. “Who needs limes?”
Not us.
“But children, on the other hand.”
“To cause us pain?” I said, laughing.
When he didn’t respond, I looked over at him. Will’s
face was serious. He pushed himself up on one arm. “It scares me too. But let’s think about it. It won’t be so terrible. We can get a car seat for the motorcycle. We can get a baby helmet. Our lives won’t change so much.”
“Okay, I’ll think about it.”
He rolled over on top of me. Some emotion, fleeting and sad, hit me then. “What’s wrong?” he asked, moving his fingers against my face. “I haven’t been near any limes.”
I smiled, circling my arms around his neck. We could do this, I thought, if I didn’t stop to think. We could have the kind of future Will imagined and that I, in moments of abandon, admitted that I wanted too. Outside I could hear cars on the gravel road, here and gone, the shifting pebbles. Will picked my hand up and I should have said then what I feared. Instead, I allowed the moment to pass. I let it drop there like glass in the sand.
After the furniture store closed so many years before, my parents declared bankruptcy. In the years that followed, they lived from hand to mouth. My mother took on a second job in order to support us. My father tried his hand at different careers. For a time, he cooked in an Indonesian restaurant. Afterwards, he sold encyclopedias, door to door; then cars at the Ford dealership. Finally, my father went into real estate. I was fourteen years old and I would follow him to Open Houses. Sunday mornings, the city half asleep, we loaded my father’s signs into the trunk of his car: Open House Today, they said, Come on in! He planted them in the soft ground, into the dewy grass.
For years, my father sold “Vancouver Specials.” Two bedrooms up, one down, they spanned the east side. Cutout houses, prefab. In his gray polyester suit, my father never did what other agents did. He never brought flowers to set in the foyer, he never sprayed air fresheners or adjusted the lighting. He just tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, shaking his head at the outside lawn.
When visitors came, he bustled out, all smiles and handshakes, ushering them up the stairs. I sat on the grass reading. I could hear them from the balcony, their offhand negotiations. The wife, surveying the neighborhood: “Yes, but it’s not quite what I had in mind.”
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