Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  When I frowned, inching away from her, Reno scowled back. “You dense or what? Don’t you get it—dat’s dah teet’ stay biting at her head.” She crossed her legs, leaned forward to prop her chin in the cup of her hands, and studied my mother. When my mother’s eyes drifted shut and her breathing settled into a rumbling rhythm, Auntie Reno spoke: “All my life, I heard about people like dis. You know, my maddah said dis kinda thing supposed to run in our family, but I nevah seen anyone wit dah gift dis strong.” She touched the tip of her finger to my mother’s forehead. “Some people—not many, but some—get dah gift of talking to the dead, of walking true worlds and seeing things one regulah person like you or me don’t even know about. Dah spirits love these people, tellin’ em for ‘do this, do that.’ But they hate em, too, jealous of dah living.”

  Auntie Reno likes to say she saved my mother and me from life in the streets, and I suppose she did. “Out of dah goodness of my heart, I’m telling you,” the story goes, “I became your maddah’s manager. I saw how she could help those in need, and I saw how those in need could help your maddah and you.” Which is true, I guess, but Auntie Reno also saw a way that she could help herself.

  Whenever the spirits called my mother to them, Auntie Reno insisted I dial her beeper, punching in 911 to let her know my mother had entered a trance. After the lunch crowd and before the dinner rush, Auntie Reno would phone the people who waited sometimes for months for my mother to deliver messages to and from the city of the dead. Then Reno closed the store and rushed over to our place.

  While my mother wandered through the rooms talking to ghosts, Auntie Reno would place the large ceramic Wishing Bowl and a stack of red money envelopes on the coffee table, and I would stack oranges and light incense sticks in the corners of the apartment. Auntie Reno, who asserted that atmosphere was just as important as ability, hung bells and chimes and long banners of kanji on our walls. When I asked her what the characters meant, she shrugged. “Good luck, double happiness, someting like that.”

  Then we’d catch my mother, dress her in a long white or blue or yellow robe—whichever one we could throw over her body without protest from the spirits—and turn on the music that would start my mother dancing. She liked heavy drumbeats, and once she got going, my mother could tell all about a person and the wishes of the dead that circled around her.

  It got to be that whenever my mother slipped into her spells, we’d have people camping in our kitchen and living room and out in the apartment hallway, all waiting for my mother to tell them about the death and unfulfilled desire in their lives. “Your father’s mother’s sister died in childbirth, crying out the name of the baby who died inside her,” she’d tell one elderly customer with a growth in her uterus, “and she hangs around you, causing sickness and trouble, because she is jealous of all your children and grandchildren.” Or she’d tell someone else that her husband was cheating on her because of her bad breath, caused by the vindictive first-wife ghost who died craving a final bite of mu kimchee.

  For each of the seekers, my mother would pray and advise. And before they left, she would fold purified rock salt, ashes from the shrine, and the whispers of their deepest wish into a square of silk as a talisman against the evil or mischievous or unhappy spirits inhabiting their homes. In return, to ensure the fulfillment of their wishes, they folded money into a red envelope and dropped it into the Wishing Bowl.

  And milling through all the mourners-in-waiting—the old ladies with their aching joints and deviant children, the fresh-off-the-boat immigrants with cheating husbands and tax problems, and, later on, the rich middle-aged haoles looking for a new direction in life—was Reno, who served tea or soda and collected the fee between her shifts at the restaurant.

  Everyone seemed so respectful of my mother, so in awe of her, and Auntie Reno played it up, telling people my mother was a renowned fortune-teller and spirit medium in Japan and Korea. “Akiko Sonsaeng nim,” she’d say, attaching the Korean honorific to my mother’s name—something she would never do when my mother was conscious—“stay famous in dah old country.”

  Auntie Reno’s words impressed so many people that customers would wait for hours in the dank hallways and decrepit stairwells. Finally the apartment manager, fearful of the potential liabilities and law-suits related to substandard housing and building codes, evicted us. And Auntie Reno saved us from the streets once again, informing us that my mother’s share of the money enabled us to put a down payment on a small house in Waipahu, Kaimuki, Nu’uanu, or—if we weren’t too choosy—Manoa Valley.

  As long as my mother’s trance lasted, Auntie Reno would show up at our door every morning before I went to school, leading a new gathering of people. After she organized the customers, packing them tight against the railing and down the stairs so that the line coiled from our second-story apartment into the alley below, she’d pull me aside and hand me a pastry and a small bag of money collected from the Wishing Bowl.

  Always, when I went to hide the money in my room, I’d slip out a dollar bill, roll it tight as an incense stick, and lay it in an ashtray on the dresser. Careful to hide from Reno’s eyes, I’d strike a match and burn the money for the spirits. Then, pulling out my father’s picture, I would begin to pray to my only connection in the spirit world. “Please please please, Daddy. I’ll give you everything if you give my mother back.” I begged, reasoning that as a dead preacher, my father would be able to get God to intercede on my mother’s behalf, or—as a spirit himself and in collusion with the other vengeful ghosts holding my mother captive—he might be persuaded by my own burnt offerings and bribes to free her.

  When my mother began talking about how she killed my father, I thought that the spirits were coming to claim her again. “Stop, Mommy,” I said, rubbing the shrimp juice from her fingers. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” At ten, despite all the people coming to hear her talk this way, I was still afraid that someone would hear my mother’s craziness and lock her up. It wasn’t until I reached high school that I actually started hoping that that would happen. “You’re not yourself,” I said loudly.

  “Quiet!” My mother smacked my hand, just as she did when I couldn’t memorize the times table. “Who else would I be? Pay attention!” She took the dishcloth, folded it into a rectangle, then a square, smoothing the wrinkles. “I wished him to death,” she said. “Every day I think, every day I pray, ‘Die, die,’ sending him death-wish arrows, until one day my prayers were answered.”

  “Oh God,” I groaned, my eyes rolling toward the back of my head. “So you didn’t actually, physically kill him. Like with a knife or something.”

  She whacked my hand again. “I’m teaching you something very important about life. Listen: Sickness, bad luck, death, these things are not accidents. This kind stuff, people wish on you. Believe me, I know! And if you cannot block these wishes, all the death thoughts people send you collect, become arrows in your back. This is what causes wrinkles and make your shoulders fold inward.”

  She looked at me slouching into my chair, shoulders hunched into my body. I straightened up.

  “Death thoughts turn your hair white, make you weak and break you, sucking out your life. I tell you these things,” she said, touching my hair with her blistering hands, “to protect you.”

  She leaned toward me, and as she bent forward to kiss or hug me, I could see veins of white hair running through her black braid. Before she could touch me, I pushed away from the table, turning toward the sink to prepare the shrimp for the annual meal that made my mother’s hands crack open and bleed.

  I look at myself in the mirror now and see the same strands of white streaking across my dark head. I squint, and the lines in the corners of my eyes deepen, etching my face in the pattern that was my mother’s. And I think: It has taken me nearly thirty years, almost all of my life, but finally the wishes I flung out in childhood have come true.

  My mother is dead.

  SEXY

  Jhumpa Lahiri

/>   It was a wife’s worst nightmare. After nine years of marriage, Laxmi told Miranda, her cousin’s husband had fallen in love with another woman. He sat next to her on a plane, on a flight from Delhi to Montreal, and instead of flying home to his wife and son, he got off with the woman at Heathrow. He called his wife, and told her he’d had a conversation that had changed his life, and that he needed time to figure things out. Laxmi’s cousin had taken to her bed.

  “Not that I blame her,” Laxmi said. She reached for the Hot Mix she munched throughout the day, which looked to Miranda like dusty orange cereal. “Imagine. An English girl, half his age.” Laxmi was only a few years older than Miranda, but she was already married, and kept a photo of herself and her husband, seated on a white stone bench in front of the Taj Mahal, tacked to the inside of her cubicle, which was next to Miranda’s. Laxmi had been on the phone for at least an hour, trying to calm her cousin down. No one noticed; they worked for a public radio station, in the fund-raising department, and were surrounded by people who spent all day on the phone, soliciting pledges.

  “I feel worst for the boy,” Laxmi added. “He’s been at home for days. My cousin said she can’t even take him to school.”

  JHUMPA LAHIRI was born in 1967 in London, England, raised in Rhode Island, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She has published fiction in The New Yorker, Agni, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. In 2000, she received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in which this story appears. Her acclaimed first novel, The Namesake, was published in 2003.

  “It sounds awful,” Miranda said. Normally Laxmi’s phone conversations—mainly to her husband, about what to cook for dinner—distracted Miranda as she typed letters, asking members of the radio station to increase their annual pledge in exchange for a tote bag or an umbrella. She could hear Laxmi clearly, her sentences peppered every now and then with an Indian word, through the laminated wall between their desks. But that afternoon Miranda hadn’t been listening. She’d been on the phone herself, with Dev, deciding where to meet later that evening.

  “Then again, a few days at home won’t hurt him.” Laxmi ate some more Hot Mix, then put it away in a drawer. “He’s something of a genius. He has a Punjabi mother and a Bengali father, and because he learns French and English at school he already speaks four languages. I think he skipped two grades.”

  Dev was Bengali, too. At first Miranda thought it was a religion. But then he pointed it out to her, a place in India called Bengal, in a map printed in an issue of The Economist. He had brought the magazine specially to her apartment, for she did not own an atlas, or any other books with maps in them. He’d pointed to the city where he’d been born, and another city where his father had been born. One of the cities had a box around it, intended to attract the reader’s eye. When Miranda asked what the box indicated, Dev rolled up the magazine, and said, “Nothing you’ll ever need to worry about,” and he tapped her playfully on the head.

  Before leaving her apartment he’d tossed the magazine in the garbage, along with the ends of the three cigarettes he always smoked in the course of his visits. But after she watched his car disappear down Commonwealth Avenue, back to his house in the suburbs, where he lived with his wife, Miranda retrieved it, and brushed the ashes off the cover, and rolled it in the opposite direction to get it to lie flat. She got into bed, still rumpled from their lovemaking, and studied the borders of Bengal. There was a bay below and mountains above. The map was connected to an article about something called the Gramin Bank. She turned the page, hoping for a photograph of the city where Dev was born, but all she found were graphs and grids. Still, she stared at them, thinking the whole while about Dev, about how only fifteen minutes ago he’d propped her feet on top of his shoulders, and pressed her knees to her chest, and told her that he couldn’t get enough of her.

  She’d met him a week ago, at Filene’s. She was there on her lunch break, buying discounted pantyhose in the Basement. Afterward she took the escalator to the main part of the store, to the cosmetics department, where soaps and creams were displayed like jewels, and eye shadows and powders shimmered like butterflies pinned behind protective glass. Though Miranda had never bought anything other than a lipstick, she liked walking through the cramped, confined maze, which was familiar to her in a way the rest of Boston still was not. She liked negotiating her way past the women planted at every turn, who sprayed cards with perfume and waved them in the air; sometimes she would find a card days afterward, folded in her coat pocket, and the rich aroma, still faintly preserved, would warm her as she waited on cold mornings for the T.

  That day, stopping to smell one of the more pleasing cards, Miranda noticed a man standing at one of the counters. He held a slip of paper covered in a precise, feminine hand. A saleswoman took one look at the paper and began to open drawers. She produced an oblong cake of soap in a black case, a hydrating mask, a vial of cell renewal drops, and two tubes of face cream. The man was tanned, with black hair that was visible on his knuckles. He wore a flamingo pink shirt, a navy blue suit, a camel overcoat with gleaming leather buttons. In order to pay he had taken off pigskin gloves. Crisp bills emerged from a burgundy wallet. He didn’t wear a wedding ring.

  “What can I get you, honey?” the saleswoman asked Miranda. She looked over the tops of her tortoiseshell glasses, assessing Miranda’s complexion.

  Miranda didn’t know what she wanted. All she knew was that she didn’t want the man to walk away. He seemed to be lingering, waiting, along with the saleswoman, for her to say something. She stared at some bottles, some short, others tall, arranged on an oval tray, like a family posing for a photograph.

  “A cream,” Miranda said eventually.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  The saleswoman nodded, opening a frosted bottle. “This may seem a bit heavier than what you’re used to, but I’d start now. All your wrinkles are going to form by twenty-five. After that they just start showing.”

  While the saleswoman dabbed the cream on Miranda’s face, the man stood and watched. While Miranda was told the proper way to apply it, in swift upward strokes beginning at the base of her throat, he spun the lipstick carousel. He pressed a pump that dispensed cellulite gel and massaged it into the back of his ungloved hand. He opened a jar, leaned over, and drew so close that a drop of cream flecked his nose.

  Miranda smiled, but her mouth was obscured by a large brush that the saleswoman was sweeping over her face. “This is blusher Number Two,” the woman said. “Gives you some color.”

  Miranda nodded, glancing at her reflection in one of the angled mirrors that lined the counter. She had silver eyes and skin as pale as paper, and the contrast with her hair, as dark and glossy as an espresso bean, caused people to describe her as striking, if not pretty. She had a narrow, egg-shaped head that rose to a prominent point. Her features, too, were narrow, with nostrils so slim that they appeared to have been pinched with a clothespin. Now her face glowed, rosy at the cheeks, smoky below the brow bone. Her lips glistened.

  The man was glancing in a mirror, too, quickly wiping the cream from his nose. Miranda wondered where he was from. She thought he might be Spanish, or Lebanese. When he opened another jar, and said, to no one in particular, “This one smells like pineapple,” she detected only the hint of an accent.

  “Anything else for you today?” the saleswoman asked, accepting Miranda’s credit card.

  “No thanks.”

  The woman wrapped the cream in several layers of red tissue. “You’ll be very happy with this product.” Miranda’s hand was unsteady as she signed the receipt. The man hadn’t budged.

  “I threw in a sample of our new eye gel,” the saleswoman added, handing Miranda a small shopping bag. She looked at Miranda’s credit card before sliding it across the counter. “Bye-bye, Miranda.”

  Miranda began walking. At first she sped up. Then, noticing the doors that led to Downtown Crossing, she slow
ed down.

  “Part of your name is Indian,” the man said, pacing his steps with hers.

  She stopped, as did he, at a circular table piled with sweaters, flanked with pinecones and velvet bows. “Miranda?”

  “Mira. I have an aunt named Mira.”

  His name was Dev. He worked in an investment bank back that way, he said, tilting his head in the direction of South Station. He was the first man with a mustache, Miranda decided, she found handsome.

  They walked together toward Park Street station, past the kiosks that sold cheap belts and handbags. A fierce January wind spoiled the part in her hair. As she fished for a token in her coat pocket, her eyes fell to his shopping bag. “And those are for her?”

  “Who?”

  “Your Aunt Mira.”

  “They’re for my wife.” He uttered the words slowly, holding Miranda’s gaze. “She’s going to India for a few weeks.” He rolled his eyes. “She’s addicted to this stuff.”

  Somehow, without the wife there, it didn’t seem so wrong. At first Miranda and Dev spent every night together, almost. He explained that he couldn’t spend the whole night at her place, because his wife called every day at six in the morning, from India, where it was four in the afternoon. And so he left her apartment at two, three, often as late as four in the morning, driving back to his house in the suburbs. During the day he called her every hour, it seemed, from work, or from his cell phone. Once he learned Miranda’s schedule he left her a message each evening at five-thirty, when she was on the T coming back to her apartment, just so, he said, she could hear his voice as soon as she walked through the door. “I’m thinking about you,” he’d say on the tape. “I can’t wait to see you.” He told her he liked spending time in her apartment, with its kitchen counter no wider than a breadbox, and scratchy floors that sloped, and a buzzer in the lobby that always made a slightly embarrassing sound when he pressed it. He said he admired her for moving to Boston, where she knew no one, instead of remaining in Michigan, where she’d grown up and gone to college. When Miranda told him it was nothing to admire, that she’d moved to Boston precisely for that reason, he shook his head. “I know what it’s like to be lonely,” he said, suddenly serious, and at that moment Miranda felt that he understood her—understood how she felt some nights on the T, after seeing a movie on her own, or going to a bookstore to read magazines, or having drinks with Laxmi, who always had to meet her husband at Alewife station in an hour or two. In less serious moments Dev said he liked that her legs were longer than her torso, something he’d observed the first time she walked across a room naked. “You’re the first,” he told her, admiring her from the bed. “The first woman I’ve known with legs this long.”