by Zoe Chant
At this rate, Doris thought as she proceeded into the woods, every person in the house was going to take a turn looking for the playhouse just to get away from everyone else.
She loved her family, but they were just so … much.
And she wished Mom and Sylvia would stop trying to micromanage Nicola. Brad seemed like a good dad. He clearly cared about Nicola; the little grins he’d give her and the way he sat hip to hip made it clear that he had very sincere feelings for her.
Doris could understand her mother’s worries—she came from a generation that had put security above everything. But Sylvia didn’t have that excuse. She’d been the world’s champion serial dater ever since her messy divorce. Doris couldn’t understand why Sylvia wouldn’t be relieved that her daughter seemed to have found a decent guy, after three duds in a row.
And she should definitely drop trying to pair off Nicola with Isidor. Nicola and Isidor had a beautiful friendship, which would never be anything more.
Like I should have with Joey, Doris thought as she tramped up the south trail. Pure friendship. Nothing messy or scary.
Was every person in their family doomed to be unlucky in love?
Except Mom and Dad. Maybe that was why Mom was so determined to see them all happy and paired off.
She walked on through the falling snow, aware that at some point, though the trees looked the same, she would be crossing onto the next lot. Dad had bought it to keep it undeveloped, the way nature made it. Except for the kid-sized fantasy house, where Doris and Sylvia had played all day during those halcyon summers, when anything seemed possible—even magic.
But as they hit their teen years, Sylvia had blossomed into the family beauty, and began living those princess roles. She was Homecoming Queen in high school, and had had five guys ask her to the prom. Her marriage had seemed a fairy tale—handsome man, go-getter taking over his dad’s business—until it wasn’t.
Ever since the divorce, Sylvia seemed to scorn the possibility of fairytale endings.
“At least you’ve never had to pick up a man’s messes,” she’d said once to Doris, eyes flashing, her auburn curls thrown back, reminding Doris of Bette Davis in forties melodramas. “Date ‘em, dump ‘em, and move on.”
Doris sighed, and looked upward at the falling snow. The hush was so soft and yet intense. The trees, outlined in a thousand shades of white, had transformed to fairyland.
The snow was thickening underfoot—she could not hear her steps. Oh, the quiet!
Then she heard voices. She slowed, worried. Maybe someone had come after her, after all.
But the voices were coming from up ahead. There was an old road cut into the woods, looping around the back of the undeveloped lot, but with the snow coming down like this, it was a terrible idea to try to drive on it. Had some tourist gotten stuck?
It was this concern that made her call out, “Hello?”
The voices hushed suddenly. It seemed like a somehow guilty hush.
Doris shoved her way through a tangle of ferns, sending snow flying in all directions, then stopped short when she peered through the curtain of snow at a set of shockingly familiar faces.
“Vanessa?” Doris said incredulously, recognizing Joey’s pretty blond niece.
That couldn’t be… but the tall figure behind Vanessa was her dark-haired twin, Vic. Next to him stood Xi Yong. And farthest away, his silvery blond hair nearly obscured by the snow that was falling faster and faster . . .
“Joey?” Doris said faintly, her entire body flashing with heat, then a delicious, tingling chill. “What are you doing here?”
“Camping!” Vanessa declared. Her eyes were wide and looked almost yellow in the fast-dimming light. “We wanted to go up by the lake, but . . .” She waved her hands skyward. She didn’t even have mittens on. They were all gathered around a battered old Jeep and appeared to have been in the middle of some kind of argument.
“There’s a storm coming,” Doris said. “Where are you staying?”
“We have tents,” Vic said. “A tent.”
“A tent?” Doris repeated. “With a blizzard coming on?”
“I’m truly sorry that we stumbled what appears to be your family’s land. We did not know that the weather would turn foul,” Joey said, coming forward. “We’ll be gone right away.”
There was no mistaking how surprised, even bewildered the twins were to find Doris in what must to them look like the middle of the woods. Even that quiet foreign exchange student, Xi Yong, gazed at her with wide eyes.
Even if Joey hadn’t been with them, she couldn’t possibly leave them out here. In the back country, you just didn’t do things like that. “Don’t be ridiculous. My family’s house is right here. There’s plenty of room if you don’t mind couch-surfing.”
Joey’s hands flew up, waving away her invitation. He looked desperately embarrassed. “We’ll be fine. Really. It’s not that cold.”
“Are you kidding? None of you even have gloves on! I insist. If you won’t come with me, I’ll have to call the fire department to send out search and rescue. I couldn’t have four frozen bodies on my conscience.”
“We could stay in a garage,” Joey said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Well, I’m not. Good grief, I’m glad I stumbled on you. We didn’t know about the bad weather either. But luckily, Lebowitzes don’t believe in stirring an inch without packing for an army, and we’ve got tons of food.” At the hopeful look the twins couldn’t hide, Doris laughed. “And it’s good food, too. My parents will be delighted to rescue stranded campers. They’ll stuff you till your eyes pop.”
Vanessa broke into a grin. “This is so nice of you!”
Vic loped up on her other side. “It’s so weird to find you here!”
“If you like camping by lakes, there aren’t that many around here. So I suppose it isn’t as weird as it seems.” Doris felt absurdly happy, almost giddy. She liked all four of them. And best of all, with her family around, she could enjoy Joey Hu in perfect safety.
“Any chance we can drive the Jeep around to your family’s place?” Joey asked.
“Not unless you have snow chains,” Doris said. He shook his head. “It’ll be safe here. If the weather’s too bad to drive it out, no one can steal it.”
“True,” Joey said, and grinned at her. She found herself helplessly grinning back at him. Life took such strange turns sometimes.
And so, like a mama duck with a very strange string of ducklings behind her, she led them to the grandpa house.
“What a huge place,” Vic exclaimed.
“It’s not exactly a mansion,” Doris said. “More like a couple of small cabins joined together, then renovated, then added onto. You will see signs of different decades once the snow isn’t hiding it.”
“It’s awesome,” Vanessa said.
“It’s got character.” Joey’s voice warmed with admiration.
Doris thought of his charming ranch house, so unlike her box-on-a-lot in Playa del Encanto. She smiled. “Come on in. This is the mud room. You can leave your coats in here.”
Once they’d hung up their coats and brushed the snow out of their hair, Doris opened the door to the hallway. It had the kitchen to one side, and the pantry and laundry room on the other.
She led the way into the kitchen. Her mother and Sylvia stood on either side of the room in identical fighting postures, arms crossed, chins up. But when they saw that Doris was not alone, they dropped their arms and put on their polite faces.
“I’ve come to the rescue,” Doris said, hearing that she sounded a little too fast and airy. “Joey Hu is a professor at the university. This is Xi Yong, an exchange student, and Joey’s nephew and niece, Vic and Vanessa. They came up here to camp by the lake, and were driving around looking for shelter when they got stuck in the snow.”
Doris could see the words acting on her mother: professor—university—rescue. Her polite face broadened into a real smile. “Come in, come in already! What wonderful timing! W
e love rescuing strangers on Purim! I’m Elva Lebowitz, and this is my daughter Sylvia. You seem to know Doris. I hope you brought your appetites.”
“We don’t wish to put you out,” Joey said, the ring of sincerity in his voice. “We have our camp food. We can eat that if you’ve got a corner out of your way. We’re very grateful just to get out of the snow.”
Mom exclaimed in a voice of genuine horror, “Camp food,” throwing up her hands as if it had been scavenged from the bottom of a dumpster. “Not while I live and breathe! Look out that window! I can’t even see the big pine ten feet away!” A dramatic finger whipped toward the window. “Doris found you just in time!”
Doris was astounded to see that the snow had worsened in the time it had taken to take twenty steps—her attention had been entirely on trying not to stare at Joey. The view was obscured by a curtain of snow, beyond which the trees were vague shapes.
Doris didn’t argue, seeing how much enjoyment her mother was getting out of imagining the emergency was still going on. This was far preferable to ganging up on Nicola and Brad.
She led her guests out of the kitchen, saying, “I’ll give you a tour of the house. It can be confusing, as it’s, ah, oddly built.”
“It’s a fine house,” Joey said, admiring the worn banister of the back stair. “Look, you can see all the evidence of the different hands who made it.”
Doris was so used to the house that its component parts had become invisible to her. Until Joey spoke she’d been trying to see it through his eyes, hoping it wasn’t too shabby—unlike his lovely place. But his obvious appreciation and the way he focused on the hand-carved wood made her perspective alter. She imagined her father, her grandfather, all the way back to that distant grandfather, each enjoying the work of building, sanding, and hammering, more often than not inventing it all as they went.
Vanessa caught Doris’s arm and said with a nervous look, “Doris, may I ask why your mother said that thing about loving getting saddled with strangers? Was that sarcasm?”
“No—the opposite!” Doris laughed. “One of the Purim traditions is to give food baskets to friends and to the poor. Our synagogue will offer a big meal to the homeless and the guests will leave with baskets. But it’s just us up here, so we can’t carry on the tradition. But the storm has given us friends to rescue, so my mother is happy.”
“Oh. I’m glad we’re not a hassle,” Vanessa said, and glanced around. “This is a cool house. I like how it’s varnished, not painted that boring white you see everywhere.”
“The original house was a cabin,” Doris explained, eyeing Joey to see if he was bored. “The mud room back there used to be the kitchen—it had an iron stove, which was also the heating for the cabin. The pantry next to it was the main room. There was a loft above it, which is now a bedroom.”
She’d used that loft ever since she was a kid. The equally small room next to it—above the pantry—had once been Sylvia’s, but the Titans had declared that Nicola must sleep there. Meanwhile, Brad was ordered to take the downstairs bedroom at the far end of the added wing, with the kids on a futon.
There’ll be no hanky-panky under MY roof, Mom had declared, as if Nicola and Brad were teenagers.
“There’s four more bedrooms upstairs. Behind the back stairs is the added wing, which we call the TV room, and a bedroom beyond that. Um, what else? There’s the den and a couple more bedrooms—my sister and my grandmother use those. And now we’re back to the kitchen!”
Doris opened the door. The hissing conversation inside promptly stopped, and there again were Mom’s and Sylvia’s company smiles, looking—Doris thought—exactly as deer-in-the-headlights as a freshman stepping on stage in front of a packed auditorium for the first time.
“We’ll go through to the den, so you can warm up,” Doris said, leading them to where the fireplace burned merrily. The den was filled with comfortable old furniture, none of it matching. “I’ll bring hot drinks. We’ve got hot chocolate, coffee, and a limited choice of teas, as no one drinks it but me. I have Oolong and Matcha.”
“I’m fine,” Joey said. “You’ve been to enough trouble already, rescuing us.”
The wide-eyed twins nodded mutely. Xi Yong said softly, “Thank you, but I am fine.”
“Well, if you change your mind, just ask. Or just help yourself—everybody else does,” Doris said, sensing that she was sliding down some sort of cliff. Into what? A little desperately, she said, “I’ll introduce you.”
Marrit didn’t even look up from her phone, but Doris’s father put down his magazine, looking interested. “An exchange student from China? How are you finding California so far?”
Xi Yong said he was enjoying it very much, and he was very glad to be here. Once Dad discovered Xi Yong had studied architectural history, he happily launched into his favorite subject—building and construction.
The twins crouched by the fire, holding out their hands to the warmth. Marrit looked up from her phone, and eyed Vic as she said sardonically, “Camping in winter? Since we’re actually having a winter this year, instead of a hot, dry season with shorter days.”
“At least it’s not fire season,” Vanessa said, steam rising gently off her knitted sweater.
Marrit gave a faint snort that served as her version of laughter. For the first time that Doris had seen, she actually put down her phone. Doris watched, fascinated, as Marrit slithered another glance at Vic, her eyes tracking from his dark hair falling so picturesquely over his brow, down his lean length.
“The weather report had said it would be clear,” Doris said, hoping to ward off the worst of Marrit’s deadpan sarcasm, her habit when she wanted to get someone’s attention.
“And only idiots listen to the weather report,” Vic stated, side-eyeing Marrit. “Yeah, we know.”
As Doris listened to the teenagers, her awareness was fixed on Joey, sitting eight feet away.
In her family’s house.
She was aware of his every slight move as he switched between the weather discussion and the architectural one—which, she realized belatedly, had morphed to Chinese gardens.
“Everything has meaning,” Xi Yong was saying. “Directions, the sun’s pattern, the winds and the water. All must be laid out according to feng shui, which translated is wind-water, but it means enabling the flow of good . . . energy, to contribute to peace and harmony.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Dad said. He gave a rueful glance around the den. “Won’t find much of it here, I guess.”
“Every home has its own energy,” Xi Yong said. “Yours is warm and inviting. But I have little to do with house designs. Living gardens, there is my joy.”
“Well, if you like gardens…” Dad began.
Joey smiled at Doris. “I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee, if you’ll show me where it is.”
Glad to have something to do, she led him back inside the kitchen, just as Sylvia was saying, “Nicola will stay where she is. We can put Marrit in the other den—”
She broke off on their entrance.
“Here’s the coffee maker,” Doris said a little too loudly, waving at the unit right in front of them—as if Joey couldn’t see it for himself. “Pods are in the drawer below. We just have Kona and French Roast. It’s not fancy coffee, I’m afraid.”
“I like both,” he said easily. “Kona is one of my favorites.” He turned his sunny smile toward Mom. “What a handsome kitchen! It has to have been designed by someone who loves to cook.”
Mom flushed to the ears with pride. “That would be me,” she said graciously. Now the four of them were in one conversation instead of divided by a wall of air. “I redesigned it twenty years ago.”
Doris said, “Joey loves cooking as a hobby. A few days ago he demonstrated some country Chinese cooking for my friend Bird and me.”
“I like Chinese food.” Mom smiled brightly at Joey.
Doris backed against the prep table, where Granny Z’s challah dough was rising, and watched Joey charm Mom and
Sylvia. They traded stories about Mom learning to cook on the old iron stove when she first married Dad, until the women of the family had united in demanding something made in the current century. Joey told them about learning on the outdoor brick stove at his family’s country home in China.
“You grew up in China?” Sylvia asked. “Your English is perfect.”
“I was born in Oregon,” Joey said. “But I was sent overseas to my grandmother’s side of the family when young, and I spent a number of years there before traveling, then eventually ending up in California. I go back often.”
Granny Z appeared at the door. “I was about to take a nap when I heard voices,” she said, beaming at them all. “Guests!”
Doris introduced Joey, and Granny Z smiled up at him. “I already met that one young man in the other room. Are you Chinese, too?”
“On my mother’s side,” Joey said.
Doris remembered what she’d seen at Joey’s house, and turned to her grandmother. “Did you know that mahjong is actually from China? I always thought it was brought over from Europe.”
Granny Z laughed. “You California kids never were inside the house long enough to learn much about it. Long games are more popular in places with months of snow. My mother told me mahjong crossed the Pacific with Chinese people, but it got popular here after it was introduced at the World’s Fair. My grandmother was a girl then, and she remembered how fast it became a fad in Chicago, where she lived.”
Granny Z turned to Joey and said, “You must know something about it, nu?”
Joey spread his hands. “Only a little. I know how to play, and that it is a very old game in China, with numerous variations.”
Granny Z nodded. “The game I learned on was very beautiful. Each piece hand carved and painted. That might have been some of the appeal, because we didn’t have many nice things. But mahjong was a game that women could, as my mother said, play and ploysh.” She smiled Joey’s way. “Ploysh is Yiddish for chatter. But one thing I never learned, what all the terms meant in Chinese. When I was ten, I thought they were Yiddish!”
Everyone laughed at that, and Joey said, “Mahjong is the American pronunciation of ma jiang. I can’t say for sure where the name came from, but the explanation I like best is that it meant sparrow. The name came from the sound the tiles made, like the clacking of sparrows.”