by Dave Lowry
I woke up to a truck horn blasting and, simultaneously, the sun coming up just enough to edge over the side of the car and hit me right in the eyes. I tried to burrow deeper into my parka. My arms had twisted around and wadded it, and it wouldn’t go any higher. I kicked around a couple of times before giving up and rolling over onto my back. She was already awake, sitting up, looking at the frosted interior of the windshield. All the windows in the car were covered in an icy rime. It was the view beer must have from inside a frosted mug.
“Exotic?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Last night you described me as—I think I am quoting you correctly here—an ‘incredibly beautiful, exotic Asian babe.’”
“So you’re objecting to ‘exotic’ but not to the other stuff?” I asked.
“I did find the ‘Asian babe’ reference to be simultaneously sexist and racist,” she said.
“I can’t tell you how deeply sorry I am,” I said. “I’m very poor at apologizing for the inherent racism of my breed. I can only blame it on our natural genetic superiority.”
“Yeah,” she said. She rubbed her face with both hands and pulled her hair back. It was longer and a glossier black than it had seemed last night. “Whatever.”
“Did you sleep okay?” I asked her.
She nodded. “You?”
“I tossed and turned a little bit,” I said. “I was trying to figure out how you could use an ax to castrate someone.”
“Likely there would be a lot of collateral damage in the process.”
“I prefer not to think about it,” I said. “I’d rather think about breakfast.”
She polished the window on her side of the car with her fist, clearing a little, golf ball–size hole through some of the frost. She peered out.
“I’m guessing room service is out of the question,” she said.
We opened the doors and stiffly stepped outside. It hadn’t gotten any warmer. The morning air was so sharp it seemed brittle. Our exhalations exploded in clouds of steam. The snow and sleet had stopped. There was just a dirty white crust on the ground. I could see a long hump of snow out on the side of the highway. The plows must have come through while we slept. There was a kink in my neck that wasn’t going away soon, and a sore spot on my right hip where I’d laid on the loose seat belt buckle part of the night. I had never spent the night in a car. I wasn’t looking forward to doing it again.
“Think this part of the New Hampshire interstate might have some places where we can get a bowl of zhou and a side of crispy youtiao?” I asked her. The thought of a classic Chinese breakfast of hot soupy, fragrant rice with toasted bread sticks made my stomach grumble.
“I’d settle for waffles,” she said.
“Wow,” I said. “You are exotic.”
5
Rule #60: You can go home again, although the place might be slightly dusty.
We stopped at a gas station, where we took care of the Toyota’s dietary needs and then walked across the lot to fill ourselves at a restaurant. She glanced at the menu after we sat down. “Would you order for me?” she said. “I need to—uh—‘freshen up.’” She told me what she wanted and disappeared in the direction of the restrooms. I ordered. Waffles for her. With blueberry syrup. Scrambled eggs for me. I looked out the window. The sky was a bright blue bowl. The sun was harsh, with a chilly light. Cars pulling out of the gas station belched out wisps of steam from their mufflers. I rubbed my hand over my cheeks and felt the stubble. I’d shaved last at Chris’s place. I needed to again.
She came back to the booth and saw me brushing my fingers along my chin.
“You could use a little freshening up yourself,” she said.
It was an odd thing to say. But I was distracted. It was the first time I’d seen her with her hair combed, without the stocking cap. Her hair was blue-black, long and straight. She wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t anything like the China doll she’d mentioned last night. She wasn’t ugly, either. Or even homely. Her face was long, with high cheekbones. She didn’t look like a Han, the most common ethnic Chinese. She looked a little Mongolian. I realized I didn’t know her name. I decided not to ask. She hadn’t exactly been a fount of information about herself. Maybe she had her reasons. If she wanted me to know, I concluded, she’d tell me.
“We’ll be in Andover before noon,” I said. “I’m thinking of freshening up there, with about a one-hour hot shower.”
“What’s in Andover?” she asked.
“It’s where my parents live,” I said. “It’s where I grew up.”
“So now that we’ve slept together, you’re taking me home to meet the folks,” she said. Which I also thought was a weird thing to say.
“The folks won’t be there,” I said. I told her about the trip. My parents and two other couples they’d known since their college days had been talking, ever since those days, about a sailing cruise around Indonesia. They finally decided if they didn’t do it soon, they weren’t ever going to. So they did. They rented a fifty-foot ketch and the captain who came with it, and they became the crew. They would be on the high seas until spring or until, as my mother said, they were taken captive by Indonesian pirates.
We crossed the line between New Hampshire and Massachusetts a little after ten. I didn’t get off the highway until we were at Methuen. My passenger was quiet, watching the scenery.
“Ever been to this part of Massachusetts before?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Ever been to Massachusetts period?”
“Nope.”
“Pity,” I said.
I pulled off just outside Andover and went to a market at Shawsheen Village. At the meat counter, I got a plastic-wrapped chunk of pork belly. Most people in this part of Massachusetts use pork belly, chopped into bitsy pieces, to flavor clam chowder. So lots of stores carry it. I added some knobs of fresh ginger, two heads of broccoli and one of garlic to my basket. Unless my parents had raided my stash in the pantry, I was fairly certain I could find whatever else I needed there. She followed me around, hands in her coat, watching, not saying anything.
“You need anything?” I asked.
“I’ll meet you at the checkout,” she said.
When she did, she put a package of tampons on the checkout conveyor belt. She could have separated from me when we came in the store and bought them discreetly. But she didn’t seem embarrassed or shy about it. Maybe she was just doing it to—what?—shock me? I’d seen girls do that before: deliberately use language “nice girls” weren’t supposed to use or whip off a shirt in front of you to change—stuff that seemed like it was meant to prove some kind of point. I thought this was sort of like guys in school who take up smoking because they think it makes them look older or tougher. On the other hand, maybe she just needed the tampons and she didn’t really care one way or the other.
It’s funny how you don’t see your house the same way other people see it. I’d grown up there. It was my home. I never thought much more about it than that. I knew it was bigger than some homes. It sure wasn’t a mansion, though. We pulled into the driveway. I heard a low whistle beside me.
“Nice how you’ve obviously got the slave quarters out of sight of the main house here at the plantation,” she said.
“It’s not a plantation,” I said. “It’s a cross-gabled Victorian. With shingle siding.”
“What it is,” she said, “is big. It’s also beautiful,” she added quickly, like she thought I might be offended at being accused of growing up in a big house. I wasn’t.
“Do your parents own the Internet?” she asked. “Or some small country? Like Denmark?”
“My parents,” I said, “specifically my mother, specifically her great-grandfather, worked on the Boston & Maine Railroad, as a conductor. He had a lot of time on his hands while the trains were running, so he hung out in the mail car. He came up with a way that made it faster for trains to transfer mail from the mail car to the station. The train didn’t even have to stop to make the trans
fer. He came up with some hooks and poles so they could just switch out as the trains came running by. He sold the idea to the train company. He sold it to a lot of other train companies. He made a lot of money. He built this house, back in the twenties. My mother inherited it.”
“So will you inherit it?” she asked.
“Probably.” Although after the way I’d left Beddingfield, maybe the will would be changed.
“Maybe this is a little forward of me,” she said, “but would you consider marrying me?”
“Maybe later,” I said. “First let’s go inside and make sure the domestic staff haven’t been stealing from our Rembrandt collection again.”
6
Rule #21: It’s not quite as weird if the person doing your laundry knows your name.
My parents didn’t own any Rembrandts. We had a couple of Fitz Hugh Lane landscapes hanging on the walls—or seascapes to put it more accurately. In one a long schooner tilts across the horizon sailing out from Rocky Neck Beach over in Gloucester. In the other, a ship hull lies on its side, careened at Brace’s Rock. I liked the way Lane had captured the light in his paintings. It looked like it was coming from inside the paintings themselves. I used to study them when I was a kid. I finally narrowed down the times of the day they had been painted, just by looking at the color and the slant of the light. Mostly, though, there were family photographs on the walls. Nothing had been disturbed. No one had been in the house for at least a couple of weeks, not since my parents had left.
We dropped our stuff in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, and I took her upstairs to the extra bedroom.
“I’m going to get to work on dinner in a minute,” I said. “Make yourself at home.”
“I will,” she said. “I’ll do some laundry if that’s okay. You have anything that needs to go in?”
“Just my entire wardrobe.” I showed her the laundry room in the basement and left her with the intimidating pile of clothes that had accumulated since I’d left the dorm at Beddingfield. Walking back upstairs, I thought about all my dirty underwear in that pile. It wasn’t that dirty. It wasn’t gross. Nothing organic was actually growing on anything. Or at least if it was, it wasn’t flourishing. It was just that no one except my mother and I had ever done my laundry before. I turned around at the top of the basement stairs and went back down until I was near the bottom. She was squatting over two piles she’d made of both our stuff, sorting it by color. She squatted like a lot of first-generation Chinese, flat-footed instead of on the balls of her feet like a Westerner would.
“Listen, I said. “If you’d prefer not to do my laundry, I can get to it later.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “I mean, it’s a little personal, I guess, having someone I just met doing my laundry. Especially considering I don’t even know your name.”
“Okay.”
I retraced my steps back up the stairs and went into the kitchen. As I was pulling the rice cooker off the shelf in the pantry, I heard her come up to the top of the steps. She stuck her head around the doorway.
“My name’s Corinne,” she said. “Corinne Chang. So now is it okay if I do your laundry?”
“Absolutely.”
Cooking, after I hadn’t done it for a while, was like slipping into a warm bath. It was that relaxing. Maybe in some ways even more relaxing than a soak. My cold rolled-steel wok was still sitting on one burner of the stove, just where I’d left it when I’d been home for Christmas. My parents never used it. I think they left it out on the stove, though, to remind them of me. It had a deep, rich black patina from having been used so long. I turned on the burner. I found my cleaver in the knife drawer, the blade tucked inside the cardboard sheath I made to protect the edge. The round slab of a tree trunk that functioned as a cutting board was on a shelf under the cupboards. I chopped the broccoli for steaming, then shredded the onions and sliced the ginger into papery slices that gave off a sharp perfume I realized I’d missed. I wished Corinne was here to watch. It isn’t easy to slice ginger thinly with a big Chinese-style cleaver. I was cutting the slices so finely that light would have shown through if I’d held them up to a window. I’d spent a lot of time perfecting that skill. But apparently she’d finished packing the washing machine and had gone into the library. When I glanced in there, she was curled up in my father’s overstuffed chair, looking at a book on early American marine painting.
I sliced the square of pork belly into two pieces, then used butcher’s twine to tie them like little birthday presents, with a bow around each. The wok was starting to send up thin drifts of smoke. I drizzled oil into it and swirled it around, then slid the porky presents in. They burst into a satisfying sizzling hiss; clouds of smoke and steam billowed up, reminding me to turn on the overhead fans before the fire alarm was triggered.
While the pork was browning, I found my clay pot. Its sandy outer surface was chocolate dark with use; inside there was a creamy smooth finish that came from having cooked so many meals. Its handle felt in my hand just like the cleaver had. It was like shaking hands with an old friend. I got a couple of clumps of rock sugar from the pantry and tossed them in the pot, adding a gurgle of light soy sauce and another of the dark, and a generous dollop of Shiaoxing cooking wine. The pork had tanned nicely by now. The surfaces of both pieces were crispy, golden brown, with little delicious-looking bubbles forming. The sweet scent of hot pork fat filled the kitchen, mixing with the starchy aroma of the rice from the automatic cooker. I drained the pork, then added it to the clay pot, along with the ginger and onions; put the top on; and set the whole thing on the burner, turning the flame down to low. Done. All it needed was about three hours in the pot. What I needed was a shower to wash off the accumulated grit of everything between here and Beddingfield. And maybe a nap. Tucker’s Rule #39: There’s usually time, if you plan life well enough, for a nap.
I was never an overachiever. Even so, I managed to get in both.
7
Rule #14: Knowing what you don’t need to know is at least as important as knowing what you do need to know.
The diary’s right there. Somebody left it. You’ll get it back to them, of course. But take a look first, skim through a few pages? Peek in the medicine cabinet when you’re using the bathroom in someone’s house? It’s just natural curiosity. It isn’t like you’re prying into state secrets. What are you going to find out? The diary’s author has a crush on someone? You suspect that anyway. The owners of the house are using some kind of birth control? Does that really come as a surprise?
You’re just taking a harmless peek into someone’s private life. That’s the sort of thing you tell yourself. Just before you open the diary. Or the cabinet door. Except me.
I don’t tell myself any of that to justify any snooping I might contemplate. I don’t look at other people’s stuff. It isn’t that I’m not curious. I am. More than most. It’s just that I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” when I was a freshman in high school. Goodman’s a trusting young guy, believing the best in everyone, and then, wandering around out in the woods one night, he comes across some kind of kinky cult, where all the town’s upstanding citizens, including his own wife, are about to start a bizarre ritual. And suddenly he’s waking up, all alone out in the woods, and he doesn’t know if what he saw was real or just a bad dream. And he spends the rest of his life bitter and cynical. It made a big impression on me. That’s when I came up with Tucker’s Rule #14: Knowing what you don’t need to know is at least as important as knowing what you do need to know. And Rule #14a: It might even be more important.
That’s why, when Corinne’s cell phone started buzzing, I didn’t have the slightest intention of answering it. An hour had passed since I’d gone down for the nap. Before I did, I’d heard the door to the room I’d shown her close just as I was drifting off. I assumed she’d gone in there and done the same. She was still in there.
Buzzzzz.
Showered clean, wearing my best Boston College sweatp
ants and a fresh shirt, and feeling much better after my nap, I was walking right by it when it went off. Corinne’s phone.
Buzzzz.
It wasn’t exactly one of my rules, more like a Tucker’s Rule addendum, but I always figured I wasn’t going to get into any kind of trouble by not answering a phone. Especially when it wasn’t my own.
Buzzzz.
Minding one’s own business is an often-neglected, little-appreciated quality in a person. As I said, I pride myself on not sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. Yeah. Sure. You bet. Which is why I’d approached Corinne in the first place, back at that New Hampshire rest stop. And why she was now sleeping in my parents’ house. And why I was taking her a couple of hundred miles without knowing the reason why. Mind. Your. Own. Business. Words to live by.
I picked up the phone and hit RECEIVE.
“I know where you are,” the voice said in Mandarin. “You and I need to have a little talk. You know what it’s about.”
There was silence. The voice was obviously waiting for Corinne to answer. I answered instead with a sickly sweet politeness that’s almost impossible to duplicate in English. I answered as if I were a court eunuch receiving a visitor to some princess at the imperial court in the Forbidden City.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I regret to inform you that the young lady is not at this moment receiving calls.”
“Who are you?” the voice snapped, like a dog growling when you get too close to its food bowl. “You need to tell the woman who owns this phone that she’s in a lot of trouble, and it’s not going to get any better until she’s talked to me!”