It was among the embarrassments of his youth. Thanks to his oldest sister, Lucy, the family flirted from time to time with real food. What real people ate. With forks and knives, your own plate, your own portions, no more dipping into the communal soup bowl. Food from boxes and cans. The best were Swanson TV dinners. Meat loaf, Salisbury steak. He was convinced Salisbury steak was served in the White House every night. Meat in one compartment, vegetable medley in another, apple crisp next door. What a concept! Everything had its own house or its own room. That was how real people lived. By the time Lawrence was eleven, he had cooked his first meal: roast beef, Green Giant canned corn, Betty Crocker instant mashed potatoes, Pillsbury Pop ’n’ Fresh rolls. Call it the march of generations.
They were not a family of big eaters. Lily and Patty pecked. Lucy consistently left half her rice. Lawrence and his parents were the family jaws, though since his operation his father had slacked off from his usual two-bowl pace. Consider this then: as the household was presently constituted there was a three-to-two diner-to-refrigerator ratio.
Lawrence was partly responsible for the excess. He had helped his father bring the second refrigerator home. It happened one New Year’s Eve, Lawrence returning from school to find his sisters already pressed into service of the new year, scrubbing and dusting and vacuuming every inch of the store for that clean start, just as they would for the same reason wash their feet and hair later that night. In the kitchen his mother was frying the New Year’s fish, a porgy for the ancestors, while his father sat like an ancestor himself, stolid, in a nimbus of smoke, his hand serving his Lucky Strikes up to his lips, the cigarette like a thick stick of incense, the action like a prayer to his own spirit.
“Where have you been?” his father asked, pouring a cup of hot water into a bowl of broken saltines and evaporated milk. He had been awaiting his return and motioned for Lawrence to eat.
When he finished they went out to the backyard, the parking lot, and Pop handed Lawrence the keys to the family car. Pop did not drive and Lawrence only had a learner’s permit. Lawrence turned the ignition, the engine churned, started, and stalled. Ma stuck her head out the metal door; the expression on her face was a hybrid of hurt and confusion, and before she could utter a word the engine turned over and Lawrence gave her the gas and she roared at Ma, and Pop yanked down on the bill of his orange hunting cap and tapped the gearshift, signaling Lawrence to go.
Lawrence was a good driver even without a license. He liked the idea he and his father might get into trouble together. Bad boys. He didn’t see how he could lose: “He made me do it, Officer,” he would say, his finger like a gun at the earflap on Pop’s cap. And now he got to drive without the encumbrance of his nervous driver’s ed teacher or his bossy sisters. For the briefest instant Lawrence wondered why his father had not enlisted one of his sisters, and that way kept things legal, instead of waiting for him to come home from school. But hadn’t Pop always waited for Lawrence? Waited for a son as his wife delivered girl after girl after girl; waited for the son to mature into a second pair of hands to help him with his chores; waited for him to turn into a set of wheels. He knew that was all there was to it. He knew that he wasn’t singled out as someone special, someone necessary.
Lawrence played with the radio dial and he was pleased, impressed even, by how adept he was at the maneuver. He switched on the heater, the blower on high then lo, and tried the wipers and upped the volume on the radio. When somebody honked he honked back; long blasts, as if to say, “YOU’RE WELCOME. I LIKE THE WAY YOU DRIVE TOO!” After the rush of that first honk, he clutched the steering wheel at the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions and braced for his father’s fierce bark or flying hand or both. But there was no reprimand, no thwack to the back of his head. For a split second he felt cheated. He glanced over at Pop. He was sitting on the edge of the vinyl seat, gripping the dash with both hands, his body so rigid one high-pitched screech and he’d shatter like glass. It was then Lawrence realized that in the car the rules that governed their life together had changed. Their common ground had shifted, a tremor enough to make you stop and reevaluate your days. As illegal as he was in the car it looked far worse for his father. Whatever advantage Pop might have claimed by virtue of his age he had forfeited when he slid in next to Lawrence and told him to go.
Then he told him to stop. They were in the middle of a tree-lined street of brick houses and, up ahead at the intersection, businesses, including a laundry run by a family friend. Lawrence eased off the brake, letting the car roll; it only stood to reason that “stop” meant at the corner. “Stop,” Pop said. “We’ve arrived.”
“What do you mean? Arrived where?”
Pop looked over his shoulder, out the rear window, and Lawrence put the car in reverse, driving to meet his father’s gaze.
“We’ve arrived,” Pop said excitedly, once, twice. He bounded from the car, circled past the front end, crossed the street. Lawrence had never seen him so frisky. There on the curb he grabbed the handle of a discarded refrigerator, as if he were shaking its hand.
It was colder outside than it could ever be inside a refrigerator.
“How do you like it?” his father asked.
Lawrence had never thought of a refrigerator as something you liked. It was just there, like your arms or your teeth. He shrugged.
“I won it,” he said. “It’s all mine.”
Lawrence wasn’t sure but he thought he heard bragging in Pop’s voice. And why shouldn’t he brag, he reasoned, a refrigerator is—if nothing else—impressive for its size. Then he quickly recognized that this particular refrigerator was no prize from Let’s Make a Deal. It was nothing more than a big piece of junk. What had he won but hundreds of pounds of garbage? It was an old Frigidaire with rounded corners like a bar of soap and a dent where its heart would be if this were the body of a man.
His father removed a homemade dolly from the trunk of the car. Double-thick plywood and black supermarket carriage wheels. Then a length of coarse rope. “Two are always better than one,” Pop said. “Has to be that way, except maybe in the case of children.” He was pleased with himself, making a joke at others’ expense, as the cigar-smoking men in tuxedos did on television. Then he said in English, “I have two kit, I feed two mouth. I have four kit, I feed four mouth. I have two refrigerator, we have more food to eat. Hey, goong hee faht toy.” He chuckled. “This way New Year start off in very good style.”
Snow started falling, large heavy flakes. Lawrence and his father inched the refrigerator off the curb and onto the dolly positioned in the gutter, the icy snow acting as a lubricant. “Does this thing work?” Lawrence asked.
“It has to work,” he said. “It’s all mine now! Good machine better than money. Money you spend; no more; all gone. Paper turn into air. But a machine like this refrigerator is different. If I keep it full up, it always give you plenty good food to eat.”
Following his father’s directions Lawrence backed the car inches shy of the Frigidaire. Pop lashed the refrigerator to the car’s bumper, then twined a draped bedsheet over it. “Chinese people don’t like to show off,” his father said, addressing the look of disapprobation Lawrence wore. “We don’t want to call attention to ourselves. I don’t want people to say, Oh look at that big shot, he must have won that nice refrigerator.”
Even from his sixteen-year-old’s perspective Lawrence was dubious about his father’s scheme. Such an opinion was fully consistent with others he held for whatever his father did or whatever he put his mind to doing. Pop’s intentions and deeds arrived in Lawrence’s brain like the sight of a man who tips his hat and reveals a head of blue hair: the man is a whole human being, bearing all the requisite parts, but at the same time everything about him feels wrong, patently untrustworthy.
Lawrence put the car in drive. The tug at his rear made him feel suddenly important, heroic. The enormous weight, the mystery beneath the white sheet, his father’s winnings and how he would not brag on it to the world, the
big snow and hard wind, the wipers barely keeping pace with the storm, the wheels’ flimsy contact with the road.
His father was smoking, more relaxed now than he was before, and when his son reached for a cigarette fully expecting his hand would be slapped away Pop tilted the package to facilitate the maneuver.
“One time,” his father said, flicking his steel lighter in his son’s direction, as if it were a cigar in celebration of the birth of a son, the sheet-swathed baby riding in back.
When Lawrence turned his head to catch the light, when his eyes momentarily left the road, when he sucked in the first big smoke and coughed into his hand, the traffic light changed from yellow to red without his notice, and the snow-slick road itself seemed to move, as he honked his horn and slammed on the brakes in this winter world with its white cars and white roads and white headlight beams. All he could see in his panic was the black word “STOP!” like soot stamped on his mind’s eye and all he could feel was shame building like a fire under his collar, a heat as mean as hardware on a burning door, and all around him he could smell it: the tobacco, the metal, the vinyl, the heater, the sudden aging of the man and the boy within the compartment.
Cars everywhere were honking. Theirs had skidded nearly perpendicular to the traffic flow. He could have killed them both, they came that close to crashing. And before his heart stopped racing and the pulse in his temples calmed, once that slow wave of relief and gratitude had passed, he saw how the worst could have just happened, and how he couldn’t even blame Pop for it, and how Pop couldn’t really pin this one on him.
When he started the car again he felt a lightness. A release, your opponent in a tug-of-war letting go. In the rearview the Frigidaire was free between lanes of traffic. A snowman adrift on wheels. A car swerved to avoid it. The car’s driver sped up until their cars were rolling side by side and the driver honked his horn impatiently and Lawrence motioned for Pop to lower his window and he did and the driver and his buddy stared into their car, two men with blue eyes who seemed to own the road, and the driver sneered, “Oh, it’s just some crazy chinks,” and as they laughed at his father—they couldn’t have been laughing at Lawrence—Lawrence came to the quick conclusion that these two thugs were right, there was something unerringly Chinese about hauling this useless machine, a won-at-cards slant-eyed prize, garbage-picker special, tethered to the car like Gregory Peck on the back of the Great White Whale; he could not imagine his friends and their dads doing likewise in their Electras or Continentals. Then as the other car peeled away in the slickness his father stuck his orange-hunting-capped head out the window, bracing himself with his Lucky Strike hand, and shouted, “Fuck you!” without a trace of accent, and flipped them off with his free hand, the right one, the one that lit the matches and in anger struck the blows. It was all too much for Lawrence. If Pop had a hold of that car he would have torn loose the hood, tossed the engine into their laps. Instead he had a hold of Lawrence, his hot words ripping a hole in his chest as fresh and smoky as the one those men just shot through his boy soul.
They parked and curbed the refrigerator. Pop told him to telephone one of his road-legal sisters. He brought out a palmful of change and let Lawrence pick his own coins for the call. This was unexpected, something new, dipping into his personal till, like drawing blood, and he didn’t flinch. Lawrence could smell the metal warmed by the heat of his leg. Drawing twice, two nickels.
Through the storm Lawrence walked to a pay phone, called home, and when he returned to his father he was standing beside the Frigidaire, both covered with snow. He wondered why he had not taken shelter inside the car but decided not to ask. He wanted to remember his father’s imitation of a real man, the man with the dangerous voice, the man with a palm of silver.
They sat in the car. Lawrence suggested they wait at Uncle Law’s place, Pop’s friend’s laundry up the block. Warm and steamy, fragrant with pressed cotton. Maybe even score a cup of hot tea. But Pop wouldn’t bite. He had lost face, his only son having failed him.
When Patty arrived, Pop stuffed a five-dollar bill in Lawrence’s jacket and zipped the pocket. A surprise reward. Perhaps he wasn’t so disappointed after all. Then his father and sister drove home. Lawrence was left guarding the refrigerator, and even as day darkened, and cold cut crosswise against his cheeks he did not stray from his post.
When Pop returned with the upholstery man neighbor and his truck he said Lawrence was saw-saw for waiting outside by the refrigerator rather than waiting in the car. “Did you think it was going to run away?” he asked. After a protracted struggle they loaded the refrigerator onto the truck. As he was about to climb into the cab, his father grabbed Lawrence by his jacket sleeve. Pop would give thanks now, Lawrence thought, for a job well done, mission accomplished. Pin a medal on his chest, plant a kiss on his cheek, shake his hand firmly, tousle his hair. Robert Young and Fred MacMurray, slippered and piped, their depthless compassion and broad streaks of sanity, as white as their starched shirts. Right then, in the exhilarating moment of anticipation, the upholstery truck’s idling motor was music, its blue-burning oil perfume. But what Pop did was unzip Lawrence’s pocket and filch the five-dollar bill—a tip for the upholstery man.
Later that night after the New Year’s Eve feast and the chores and the homework, when everyone was washing their feet before sleeping into the next year and all the sinks and pails were occupied, Pop filled his refrigerator’s vegetable drawers with hot soapy water and rolled up his pants and plunged his blue-white feet in and said, “Who said it’s good for nothing?” He had cleaned his prize with Comet cleanser, scrubbing away dirt as well as paint, and defended it against the girls’ wisecracks, and by now had shed whatever diffidence he felt when he first introduced this newest member of the clan. Then he plugged the Frigidaire in and sat there, with the door open, soaking his feet, wiping down its insides, using a rag and soapy water from the vegetable bin. No one could see his face but Lawrence was on to him. Cut off from the rest of the family, his father basked in the refrigerator’s chilled air, in its silvery vapors, and the glow of its measly light. What Lawrence saw in his father’s gentle cleaning of each egg holder’s deep dimple was kindness, and the pang Lawrence felt, like fingers fanning in his throat, was envy, and the motor’s hum were murmurings of love. And he wondered then, if he’d ever be so brave as to love like that. A machine or the man.
FOURSCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO
Darrell Lum
S ixt grade, we had to give da news every morning aftah da pledge al legence and My Country Tis of Dee. “Current events time,” Mrs. Ching tell, and she only call on maybe five kids fo get extra points, so first, you gotta raise your hand up and hope she call on you. You should always try be ready wit someting fo say cause sometimes nobody raise up their hands cause nobody went listen to da news on da radio or read da newspaypah last night so if you raise your hand, guarantee she call you. Bungy Lau was always waving his hand almost everyday fo give news. And if only get one chance fo tell da news left, Bungy give you da stink eye and raise his hand mo high and wave um and almost stand up awready fo make Mrs. Ching see him. Us guys and most times da girls too, dey jes put their hands down cause we no like Bungy get mad at us. Mrs. Ching try look around da room for see if get anybody else she can call besides Bungy but by den we all stay looking down at our desk so she gotta call Bungy cause he da only one left, yeah? And Bungy he stand up, he big you know, and he stay cracking his knuckles and he no mo one paper or anyting and we know dat he going to give da wrestling results from da night before.
“Las night at da Civic Auditorium, fo da Nort American Heavyweight Belt, Nicky Bockwinkle pinned Curtis ‘da Bull’ Iaukea in two outa tree falls and retained da Nort American Belt. In tag team ackshen ‘Mister Fooge,’ Fuji Fujiwara and da Masked Executionah was disqualified in a minute and thirty seconds of da first round fo using brass knuckles dat da Executionah went hide in his tights.”
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1950, DARRELL LUM is a fiction writer an
d playwright whose work has been one of the pioneering voices of Hawaii literature. His stories celebrate the everyday lives of island people, growing up “small kid times,” and the use of pidgin. He and Eric Chock founded the literary journal Bamboo Ridge in 1978, which features the work of Hawaii writers.
“Da cheatah!” Jon go tell and everybody went laugh at him. Mrs. Ching shush da class.
“Da duo of Giant Baba and da Southern Gennelman, Rippah Collins retained their tag team title.”
Once I thot dat I would try dat too and I went listen to da radio, KGU Sports, da night before fo get da winners and I wrote um down
because no fair if Bungy hog all da points just by giving the wrestling results. Dat wasn’t news, was all fake. My fahdah said wrestling was like roller derby, all fake.
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