Except for the light, rapid tapping of the rain on the trees outside the window, it’s very quiet in the room. Even the radio out front is momentarily silent, before the soft drone of a man’s voice announces the next piece. Laura’s empty cup sits between her thighs. Intent, she circles her index finger along its rim, back and forth.
“Catherine, I was wondering . . . was it weird at Min’s brunch when I said I was in love with her?” She looks up at me suddenly. I’m startled by her question, embarrassed.
“Well, truthfully? Yes.”
She nods, glances down at her circling finger, moves her hand away from the mug.
“Do you think that’s homophobic?” I ask. “Min would. But I have to add that when you said it, I wasn’t exactly surprised.” I pause. “I think, in a way, you and Min have been in love since fifth grade.”
Laura flashes me a quick smile, shy again. “I don’t know about that.” But she seems pleased that I would think it.
“When I was younger,” she continues, “I always felt that I could talk to you about anything. I knew you wouldn’t blame me or tell me how stupid I was. You were really helpful to me.”
I look at her closely. Her hair is short enough now that even with her head bent, it no longer falls forward, hiding her face. “You can still talk to me, Laura.”
She hesitates. “I don’t know who else I can go to about this. I’m sorry, I don’t want to burden you or anything. The problem is that Min isn’t in love with me back.” This time she doesn’t raise her head, as if she is admitting to a great failing within herself.
I need to tread carefully here. Anything I say could carry too much weight, and in the end it might prove useless, or worse. I wait.
“I feel like I’ve finally found the love that I’ve been looking for all my life. Like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Home was in my backyard all the time. I thought Min would feel the same way. Maybe it’s not the same for her because she’s had so many girlfriends already.”
She looks up at me pleadingly, desperate for help. Does she think I can tell her something my daughter might have confided in me? Does she think my age and experience give me the power to stave off a breaking heart?
“Did Min tell you she doesn’t love you?” I ask.
“Oh, she loves me, the same way she always has.” Laura stresses the word “love” as if it no longer holds meaning for her. Not enough, apparently. “But she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life with me. I can’t imagine myself alone anymore, without her. I sometimes look at her and I’m afraid I’ll split open from so much love. I worship her. The only thing I want in my life is to be with her.”
“I see.” I am humbled by Laura’s bare passion, this force of nature tearing through the landscape of her daily life. I don’t think I could say I was ever in love, not even with Jonathan. Since my marriage broke up, each successive relationship seems to have ebbed in intensity, waning to a pale sliver of devotion, to mere affection, until now I feel, with Lloyd, as if I’m with a friend, not a lover. And isn’t this what I wanted? Like the bookstore, where all the titles are labeled, shelved in their proper place. Like what I want my garden to be: something pruned, held back, controlled. Something predictable, something known.
The rain has stopped. When I stand up I realize how tightly I have been holding myself. The muscles along the right side of my neck are rigid with pain.
“Why don’t we go for a walk?” I suggest.
Before we leave, I tape a note to the front door for Mark, who works in the afternoons after school lets out, explaining why the store is closed. The brisk air has the clean, sweet after-rain smell I love. It helps dispel the claustrophobic atmosphere from inside the store. I turn to Laura, who has stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets, and I slip my arm through hers. She grins at me, that radiant smile. We set off down the street.
I am half-hoping we don’t need to speak, that the walk itself will shake up and clarify something for Laura. I don’t know how to help her. She said that in the past talking to me was useful, but back then her problems were containable, and they were separate from me. How can I advise her about my own daughter? Overhead the sky is brightening slightly. I steer us left, toward the edge of town and Deer Park, where there are trails leading up into the wooded hills.
“Catherine, does Min ever talk about me?” Laura asks.
I take a breath, telling myself that the least I can do for Laura is be honest with her. “Well, no, not really. She doesn’t like to discuss her . . . involvements with me.”
Laura nods thoughtfully, then says, “She’s had so many lovers, I don’t think I even know about them all. And she remembers their names, even the one-night stands. For me, this is all so new.”
Who are all these women Min has been with? I somehow assumed that the six or so girlfriends she has rather summarily informed me of were all there were. I feel naive suddenly, and old, as though my own life has already gone past, insignificant. We enter the woods, walking side by side until the trail rises steeply and narrows to a washed-out gully. All around us, trees drip with rain. I am so relieved to be outside. What happened at the bookstore has faded a little, become tinged with unreality.
I suggest, “Maybe Min is afraid that once the novelty wears off, your feelings will change.”
Laura nods. “She’s always telling me she expects me to go back to men. How can I prove to her that’s not true?” Laura falls silent, then says, “Besides, she wants my feelings to change. She says I’m too intense.”
“Min?” I interrupt, then start to laugh. It’s so ironic.
“Yeah, well . . .”
Seeing Laura’s face, I stop laughing. “Min struggled with a lot of things while you were away at school. She may be confused about what she feels. Try to give her time.”
“What if she never feels the same way I do?”
There’s no sound here beneath the trees except for the squelch of our shoes on the soggy mulch of fallen bay leaves. I can’t think of an answer.
After a while, Laura asks, “Do you think being adopted is hard for Min? I don’t mean that she’d wish she had another mother,” she adds quickly, glancing at me.
I smile, but her question makes me uneasy. “We adopted her as an infant. Her life has always been here.” I’m speaking slowly. It’s an effort, trying to find the truth. I’ve never given much thought to what her adoption might mean to Min. “Jonathan and I were always open about Min being adopted. Of course, we had to be, she’s Korean.” Abruptly, I stop speaking. The words Andy and I exchanged at Point Reyes hover nearby, perilous, just beyond my memory.
“There’s that part of it too,” Laura says.
“What?” I ask, not following her.
“Her being Korean. Racism.”
“Yes, well, people are idiots.” I hear the anger in my voice, feel it surge inside me. I remember how Andy looked as he stood on the beach that day, scuffing at the sand, unyielding. I couldn’t even tell Jonathan about our argument that afternoon. I knew he would say Andy was immature and then tell me to forget about him.
Laura and I switch over to a wider trail. We’re in the open now, surrounded by tall golden grasses and the view of hills, one folding back into the next.
“Laura . . .” This is a mistake, I warn myself. At the same time I am summoning my courage. Laura is not Jonathan. “What I said before about Andy’s last visit to me?”
“Yes?” Does she sound afraid? Am I being unfair to Laura by unburdening myself? But I can’t stop now. I don’t want to.
“Andy visited Jonathan and me a few months after we adopted Min,” I say. As I start to recount it, my memories wash up, like ocean waves smoothing out the sand. “I was so happy that week. I had everyone I loved with me.” Laura smiles, encouraging. I look away, concentrating on what I have to say. “We fought the last day because he said he couldn’t accept Min as my daughter. Not because she was adopted, exactly, but because she was Asian. She was too different from me. From us.
He’d never talked like that before. All I knew was that he was rejecting my daughter because of how she looked. I was livid. And helpless. How could he not love her too?”
“Yes,” Laura says softly. It feels like a hand on my back.
“None of what I said to him seemed to make any difference. After he left, we didn’t have any contact with each other. Then he died that summer.”
I stop speaking. I don’t know how much she will comprehend about the position I was in.
“Oh,” Laura breathes out, barely audible. As we walk, she reaches out and puts her arm around me. My eyes tear up again. I look over at her quickly, not really seeing her before I look away, back at the trail. I feel a rush of relief. She understands. I reach up and squeeze her hand on my shoulder. She lets go, stuffs her hands in her pockets.
“When he died, I lost any way to resolve it with him. How could I ever have told Min that her uncle disavowed her? And for something so basic to who she was? How could I do that to her?”
“You couldn’t.”
“Then why do I feel I’ve done something wrong?”
Laura frowns. “I think you did the best you could. What happened with your brother is over. It would only hurt Min to bring it up now. Maybe you need to be easier on yourself. I don’t think you can control what other people say or do. Or think.”
The sun, low over the hills, finally breaks through the clouds in gauzy strands of light. I stop to look at it, unwilling to admit to Laura that I need to rest. The entire sky is astounding, changing every moment, in shades of gray and silver and blue. On the edge of the trail, pennyroyal’s tiny purple flower is blooming. I breathe in peppermint. There’s another plant I don’t know that smells like chamomile but probably isn’t. I have the feeling that I’ve never actually smelled them before, and I’ve never seen so many gradations of color in the sky.
Three days later, Min arrives at my house, hauling her table in its teal carrying case from her car. I have been needing this massage ever since the afternoon I spent with Laura. It is clear to me now why I’ve had so many headaches and stomach cramps. It has been about Andy all this time. The headaches have gone, but I still feel a constant knotting in my stomach like a fist of fear pressed hard inside me. I don’t know if this is something she can help me with.
We hug and chat a little, small talk about the traffic and a movie she and Laura saw last night. There are dark smudges under her eyes. She doesn’t seem particularly happy. “You look tired,” I say.
“I am. Laura and I stayed up late talking. We’re having a hard time.”
I don’t want to get in the middle. It’s her life, hers and Laura’s. I can’t protect them. Besides, Min isn’t asking for my advice.
In the living room, I help her push the chairs and coffee table to the side. Then, as she sets up her table, unfolding the sheets and warming her oil bottle on the electric heater I plugged in half an hour ago, I prowl through my rooms in search of cash to pay her. I sit at the end of my bed, having forgotten what I am looking for. I realize I am nervous. I need to tell Min what I told Laura.
On the wall to my left is a framed photograph of Min, four years old in a grassy, wind-flattened field on Mount Tam. It’s a photograph I love for her unselfconscious glee at being alive, at being her very self. She is wearing a t-shirt stitched with daisies that I had made for her, and strands of her chin-length hair blow across her eyes. Her mouth is wide open with laughter. She looks as if she might float away, she is so suffused with joy. That day we climbed to the top of the mountain up the rutted dirt paths, and when Min grew tired, Jonathan and I traded off carrying her. He let her sit on his shoulders, holding her by her ankles while she clasped his forehead where the hair was thinning. I carried her on my back, my hands grasping her legs, her arms around my neck. In the field where Jonathan took the photograph, we had stopped to share a Hershey’s chocolate bar. We sat in the tall grass on the gentle slope of the field, looking out on the sun-dazzled city of San Francisco in the distance, trying to imagine what it had looked like when the Indians lived there. I remember the heat that day and Jonathan breaking off the softened sections of chocolate. He didn’t divide the bar in thirds but handed the squares out one at a time, to make it last. I remember how much Min enjoyed receiving her small piece, letting it melt on her tongue, then reaching toward her father for more. When I stand up to look at the photograph closely, I see a smear of chocolate on Min’s raised hand.
I think of Laura asking me for advice, Laura holding me while I sobbed. I told Laura things about my family that my own daughter doesn’t know. Even though they affect her. Our family. I raise my fingertips to the glass as if to touch Min’s gleeful four-year-old face. I want so much for Min. Most of all, I want her to be happy. I can’t tell her now.
When I return to the living room, Min goes to wash her hands, closing the bathroom door behind her. For a moment I stand in front of the glass door looking out beyond the deck at the eucalyptus trees towering behind the garden. I never cut the flowers back or pruned the bushes as I hoped to do last summer. I turn away, take off my terrycloth bathrobe and my glasses, and get on the table to lie on my stomach, pulling the top sheet up above my shoulders, around my neck. I turn my face to the left. The laurel bay beyond the side window is a blur of green. I hear Min entering. She asks if I’m warm enough. She rests her hands on my back over the sheet, runs them down my legs, my arms. All this is ritual, formal and familiar, and right now I depend on it.
She begins. Head down in the face cradle, I keep my eyes open as long as I can, watching Min’s bare feet move in and out of my range of vision. The oil is warm, comforting. As Min spreads it on my back and I feel the weight of her hands glide over my skin, my eyes close, heavy, but I don’t fall asleep as I usually do. Instead, as though Min has flipped some switch inside me, I am plunged into long-forgotten memories so vivid I can hear and smell them. Andy consulting with me during one of my vacations from college about how he should ask out a girl at school that he liked. My excitement, even pride, when he called to tell me he’d gotten into Vanderbilt, his first choice. Ten years earlier, the bewildered look on his face when all the Christmas presents were opened and he realized our parents hadn’t given him the one thing he’d asked for, a book on tropical fish. Tears leak from my eyes; my throat is raw, my stomach queasy. Everything feels sore. Min’s fingers press into my back, push beneath a shoulder blade. Her touch is more penetrating than it has ever been. Neither of us speaks. If she knows I am crying, she gives no indication.
She picks up my foot by the ankle, lifts and shakes my whole leg, then lays it gently down again. She smoothes oil on my thigh, digs her fingers or knuckles, I can’t tell which, into the flesh around my hipbone. It is excruciating in a way I’ve never felt and, oddly, I want more. I remember the never-ending plane trip east, the days waiting for Andy’s body to wash up on shore, the funeral in the tiny chapel in Rhinebeck where my parents went to Sunday services. I remember the feeling that none of it was real, none of it made any sense. I had been waiting for a phone call or a letter from him for four months. When Min asks me to turn over, I realize that the small towel covering the face cradle is soaking wet. She hands me a tissue, then two more. I prop myself up on my elbows and blow my nose. I tell her I’m sorry. She says there’s no reason for me to be. I can see that my tears don’t frighten her; if anything, she is relieved.
I lie down on my back beneath the sheet. My body no longer feels part of me. It is in pieces, scattered about. Min is collecting them, pressing them back together. There is my skin, oiled and leathery, there are my arms and legs which stretch far away, and there is the inside of me, where pain resides. The air rushes loudly in my ears. I am here inside my head, nauseated. Min is down at my feet, cupping one in her hands like something newborn and fluttery. She tells me to breathe. I hear my bones creak. I think of the sound of a mast in high wind, the sail whipping, the boom swinging over, capsizing the boat. She presses the flat of her palm deep into my stomach,
rocking. It feels like being gored; it feels deeply satisfying. Min pushes down, her hands sliding over my skin, then lets up. Under my ribs, around my hip bones, to the center of my abdomen. Down, around. Over and over. It feels as though she has reached the center of my being at last.
I push down the plunger of the coffee press, slowly forcing the freshly ground beans to the bottom of the glass container. Min comes into the kitchen, having folded up her massage table and gathered everything she came with. I take a mug from the cupboard, pour the coffee, hand it to Min. “Thanks,” she says. It’s the first time either of us has spoken since the massage ended. She turns and opens the ice box, gets the milk from the door.
I’m completely wrung out. Sitting down at the kitchen table, I cross my arms and run my hands over the sleeves of my bathrobe.
“Here, you should drink water,” Min says, filling a glass at the sink and bringing it to me. “You’ll get dehydrated.”
I sip, then drain the glass. My body feels rearranged, weightless; when I got off the massage table I had trouble balancing to walk. Min won’t mention my tears earlier under her hands. As a masseuse she has very clear boundaries, as my therapist used to put it. It is up to me to reveal what I want to. But the habit of silence is hard to break. I don’t know where to begin, what words to use. I stand, refill my glass at the sink, sit again. Min spoons sugar into her mug, stirs it, sips her coffee.
“Min, I can’t tell you how amazing I feel now.”
She sits back and regards me, running a hand through her spiky hair. “You don’t have to. I can see it in your face. It’s brighter. It’s totally different.”
“I was crying for Andy, my brother,” I say. Instantly she’s alert, paying minute attention, though she hasn’t moved. But where I start is not with the history of my relationship with Andy, or even with his death, but right in the middle of that afternoon on the beach. I recount everything we said, as well as I can remember it. You’ve been acting like she’s not a real person. Why didn’t you adopt a white child who might look like you? She’s my child, you have to accept Min someday. She’s not part of you; you’re born into family.
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