by Kathy Wang
“You like my earrings?” Shirley asked, pivoting. “You should buy a pair.” She tucked a strand of dyed brown hair behind her ear, revealing a diamond solitaire surrounded by two halos of accent diamonds. “I can refer you to my jeweler. We used a Harry Winston design!”
“My ears are not pierced.” Even if they were, Linda would never have considered the Vegas showgirl monstrosities currently on display, which covered nearly the entirety of the chubby lobe they adorned. Linda herself preferred simple jewelry that didn’t draw unwelcome attention, though lately as her portfolio had climbed to uncharted heights she had indulged in a few Seaman Schepps brooches for variety. Not that she’d ever reveal her favorite designers to Shirley; she’d immediately go out and purchase the most ostentatious pieces, rendering the entire brand untouchable.
“Sit closer,” Shirley urged. “Check out my game.” She tilted her tablet so that its screen could be seen only by the two of them. “What do you think?”
Linda looked down. The blurred image of a man in his seventies wearing an argyle sweater was nestled in Shirley’s lap.
Milton Y, 72 years, Sunnyvale, California.
“What is this?”
Shirley flashed a secretive smile. “It’s my dating game,” she whispered. “I use this to meet men.”
“A game? What kind of game is it where you can meet men?”
“It’s not actually a game! Linda, you really are so naive sometimes. It’s a dating program called Tigerlily. It’s like those personal ads newspapers used to have, but it’s all on the internet now. Look.” Shirley swiped, and another Asian septuagenarian appeared. “There are millions of single men on here. And a lot of Chinese! Of course there are other races—I’ve even seen a few blacks—but you can adjust for all that in your settings. Although you can’t select for Taiwan as a separate group from China. I guess they don’t want to be political.”
She expertly maneuvered the program to display various levers for ethnicity, age, and location and then brought up another screen. “This is my profile. Sometimes my dates are surprised when they meet me after seeing my photo, but never as surprised as I am to see them, believe me. It’s something you’ll find out; everyone uses old pictures.”
The one Shirley had selected was actually fairly recent, from their last reunion in Taiwan, though something was different about her face. It looked as if a child had scribbled a fat peach-colored crayon all around her forehead and eyes, giving her skin the puddled, waxy look of a melted candle. Below her avatar was written Shirley C, 65 years, Hillsborough, California. She had chosen a different town ostensibly to protect her privacy, though Linda noted Shirley had made sure to select for her fake address an equally prestigious location as her actual city.
“You can’t blame me for reducing my age a little bit, ha. I can pretend I don’t even get Social Security yet! Want a referral? We’ll each get $20 in free credit. I need it. Who knew love and dating could be so expensive?”
Linda felt a shudder of revulsion. The word dating incited a puritanical embarrassment in her, the same feeling she got when someone her age referred to their boyfriend or girlfriend. These were descriptors she believed she and her cohorts should have long aged out of, on their way to more dignified pastures. Of course none of them had ever really dated, as Taiwan in the ’50s and ’60s had been an exponentially more conservative setting than the United States. Almost all the women she knew had married the first boyfriend they ever had, with a wide margin of results. Practically no one got a divorce—she was the only example in their group—which was why the suicide rates were so high, and Shirley was now showing her this disgusting program.
Ever since Alfred passed, Linda had noticed Shirley cropping up in her periphery with increasing frequency. For a while, each time her phone rang, there had been a decent chance it was Shirley, calling to invite her to some opera outing, mah jong night, or private shopping event. As if all of a sudden they had something in common, as if being alone were enough to link them together! Linda felt strongly that her choosing to be single set her apart from Shirley, who would have never opted to live alone had her husband not just up and expired, probably to rid himself of her incessant chatter. As a general rule Chinese women of their generation didn’t believe in separation; they would suffer bankruptcy, shadow families, abuse (mental and even sometimes physical) and still consider a dissolution of their marital union outside the realm of possibility. So who but Linda knew the true difficulty of divorce after three decades of marriage, the endless suffering and self-humiliations endured to cross the finish line? There was a reason why no one else had done it; they hadn’t the determination to push through the fear. And now Shirley felt she had the right to show her this . . . trash!
Next to her the offender sat unaware, grunting as her fingers flew past an array of the bald and graying. “Here’s someone I went on a date with last week,” she said. “But he was only interested in, you know, a nurse with a purse.”
“I do not know how to use these sorts of things,” Linda said, cutting her off cold. “I am too worried about scams and my reputation.” To her these were fighting words, meant to wound, but Shirley simply shrugged and waddled to another seat.
Linda instantly regretted having spoken so quickly. It wouldn’t have hurt to hear Shirley out. It’d been harder than she thought, to be on her own. The house was frightening at night—there had been three break-ins on her street that year alone, and each week she spent the evening before trash pickup day in a state of paranoid agitation as the sounds of cans rolling to the curb jolted her awake. Linda had detested Stanley so much by the end of their marriage that she’d dedicated nearly every modicum of available energy toward the singular goal of his vacating the house—she hadn’t given nearly as much thought to what it would be like after, the yawning of weekends and weeks glommed together, how early the days turned black once winter began.
It wasn’t until a week later, on a Sunday, that Linda recalled Tigerlily. Kate was supposed to have shuttled Ethan and Ella over in the morning—an event Linda had looked forward to all week—but then huffily declined after Linda caveated that she could take them for only two hours instead of the entire day. “My shoulders are hurting,” she explained on the phone.
“It takes us thirty minutes just to get everyone loaded in the car to get over there,” Kate said. “Not to mention the fact you won’t drop them back off at my house.”
“I don’t understand the car seats! They make me so nervous.” She hated those enormous contraptions, which the children had howled at the sight of when they were younger; the octopus-like straps she could never completely untangle, Kate’s warnings about the risk of severe injury or decapitation were the seats not used exactly right. Who would possibly want to drive, under such frightful conditions?
“It’s the law. I’m happy to walk you through the steps again. Didn’t I even write them down last time?”
“My back, it aches when I bend for the buckles. How about I put pillows on the seats instead, make it higher for the kids to sit?”
“Let’s just forget the whole thing,” Kate said with a loud exhale. “Okay?”
Linda had hung up abruptly and then called Fred, who hadn’t answered, twice to complain. She pondered, as she did occasionally, what it would be like to have a third child. One of Shirley Chang’s few redeeming qualities was a son who at thirty-six was still unmarried and living in her guesthouse; now that Linda was alone and past a certain age, she had to admit there was a certain appeal in having a shut-in for a child, provided he or she wasn’t your only one or engaged in active terrorism. A little companionship at dinner and the knowledge of another body in close proximity at night would be of comfort. There had been another burglary on the street behind hers that week, and the rumor was that thieves were targeting houses with shoes outside, as they were an indication that the inhabitants were Indian or Asian and had hidden stores of gold. In response, she’d gone to Home Depot and purchased an inexpensive doormat
that read wipe your paws in swirling script. It was the kind of item Linda thought only a white family would have on display, the sort with a brave male presence on the premises, eager to confront intruders.
With her morning now free, Linda weighed her options. She had a standing invitation from Candy Gu to join in her weekly ballroom dancing class, but the thought of so many people her age in good cheer was too intimidating for her current mood. The one time she’d gone, nearly all the women had worn colorful full skirts and clattered about in flashing heels; she’d stood near the back in her usual loose blouse and slacks, feeling drab.
She decided to speed walk at the school track several blocks away. Neither Fred nor Kate had attended Oak Elementary—instead they’d gone to Auburn, a considerably lower-ranked institution where the classrooms had teemed with children and the teachers bore a uniform expression of grim determination. It had been due to their address at the time, a location for which Stanley was completely to blame (as if she’d ever choose to live in Campbell!). Linda recalled how busy the field at Auburn always was, continually crammed in the off-hours with young mothers pushing cheap strollers. The lower bleachers dotted with exhausted grandparents who prodded their charges to run ragged, while they sat stonily on the metal benches, dreaming of their home countries.
In contrast, the grounds at Oak were nearly empty. The denizens of Palo Alto had better things to do on their weekends, such as paid activities or partaking in brunch, a meal Linda had completed three times in her life and still failed to comprehend the merits of. The lone other soul present was a heavyset blonde in a tracksuit, someone she recognized from the neighborhood. The woman was circling the track at a lumbering pace while noisily talking on her headset, one of those rude Americans who unapologetically occupied shared space as if it was birthright. She was near Linda’s age (the hair was really more a stringy taupe) and appeared retired, but Linda knew there was practically no chance of interaction. The woman likely didn’t even think she spoke English, regarding her as just another sexless Asian dotting her periphery—someone who could be ignored at will, like a houseplant. She had a surprisingly deep voice, a booming alto, and Linda’s own efficient gait meant that she circled twice for every oval the blonde completed. Each time they overlapped, her peace was jarringly disturbed:
“Wish you were here, babe. I’d be making us dinner. Yep, my famous Costco roasted chicken. I unpack it myself and everything.” Cackle cackle. Cackle cackle.
“These days the kids are complaining that I’m the one who’s loud. Can you believe this shit. . . . I’m out on the back deck, having fun with my friends, and they’re texting me to be quiet. Texting! And it’s barely eleven p.m. What ever happened to good old face-to-face—”
“You don’t even know how old I am. Guess, just guess. Oh baby, stop!” Followed by an ear-splitting squeal.
In the evening, after she tired of playing Four Winds Supreme, her online mah jong game, and was perilously close to exhausting the $20 budget she allowed herself per day, it suddenly occurred to Linda that the blonde had been speaking to a man, a person she was romantically involved with. How stupid and unimaginative men were! A bottle of cheap hair dye, and from its results they were seemingly able to conjure up all sorts of romantic desires, even given a particularly base specimen like her neighbor. Each time Linda had overtaken her, she’d been hit with a rancid stench far worse than the Chinese herbs Fred and Kate used to complain about, and her pants had been saggy and stained. The woman’s dishevelment extended to her home, which appeared to have never been altered from its original tract origins, and her front yard was nearly entirely populated with discarded furniture and a decaying camper and motorboat. She was the sort of resident whose continuing presence in the area was the result of pure stubbornness, fiercely holding on to her dilapidated lodgings while contemporaries cashed out and moved away, to havens like Colorado or Nevada, where they would no longer be besieged by minorities recklessly driving expensive foreign sedans.
For the longest time Linda had herself avoided driving a luxury automobile for this very reason, the desire not to be seen as a stereotype. Now, such self-consciousness struck her as foolish. Why shouldn’t she have a nice car? She should go out and buy one soon, she thought. Life was short. And surely if this snaggletooth possessed the bravery to seek companionship, she might do the same? And she stared at the tablet in her hands and recalled the words of Shirley Chang.
Tigerlily was easy to install. Her information was instantly populated with the Facebook profile she never used, and the program immediately prompted whether she’d prefer the Mandarin keyboard as the default. When the list of available men in her area popped up, she quickly shut off the screen.
Throughout dinner she forced herself to ponder other topics—taxes and whether she was unhappy with either of her children. She ate methodically, watched a one-hour national news program, and wrote a polite email to her lawyer. It wasn’t until she had washed the dishes, taken out a small bag of trash, and settled into bed with her teeth brushed that she allowed herself to reopen the application.
Linda’s first viable Tigerlily match, a retired mechanical engineer named Norman Wu, asked her to dinner at Café Luca. Linda used to go to Luca when she’d worked at IBM and had fond memories of dining there with coworkers. In his messages Norman was polite and wrote elegantly—she had looked forward to the meal ever since the invitation. Would she order her normal Spaghetti Classico, even though it had red sauce and could be messy? She decided she would; she was a neat eater, and it was best not to make compromises so early in a relationship.
In person, Norman looked like his photos, albeit older. When she first saw him, Linda was struck by a grim fear that she too appeared that aged and scuttled to the bathroom to reassure herself. She pet her face in the mirror. She didn’t think she looked that bad—she thought she might still even be able to pull off handsome—but there was nothing she could do about it, either way. She applied a fresh coat of lipstick.
After she reemerged, Norman solicitously guided her to her seat. Linda noted that his brown tweed blazer and coordinating slacks were a fitting match for her gray crepe Max Mara. “It’s the best table in the restaurant,” he said. “I always tip big, so they know to save it for me.” The restaurant was nearly empty; aside from themselves, there was only one other group, a family of four with an upset baby. “It will fill up soon,” Norman assured her. “I had to make reservations.”
Over appetizers, they swapped details not covered by their Tigerlily profiles. While Norman had followed a high-achieving track similar to hers in Taiwan and had even gone to the same college, Linda was relieved to hear they were three years apart. The Bay Area Taiwanese community was small—she preferred any potential suitors not be exposed to gossip regarding her and Stanley. They discovered they’d shared the same statistics professor, and Linda’s update that Dr. Chao was now deceased surprised Norman and lent their conversation an air of shared intimacy. He was impressed she had obtained a master’s in chemistry at Stanford. He himself had earned a PhD in applied mathematics from UCLA. By the time their pasta arrived, they were chatting at a nice clip.
“How long have you been alone?” Norman asked. Linda liked that he didn’t use the word single.
“Let me think. Over ten years. How quickly time passes.”
“Your husband,” Norman ventured delicately. “He is no longer . . . here?”
“Oh no, he lives in San Jose. We divorced.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That is unusual. Most of the women I meet are widows.”
Linda laughed. “Not me,” she trilled. “It was my decision.” She was having a good time, she realized.
“As for myself, I didn’t have a choice. My wife passed away. Cancer.” Norman looked down and speared into a piece of penne covered in clam sauce.
Linda quickly composed herself. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “How long were you together?”
“Forty years. We married in 1975, right afte
r I finished my PhD.”
Linda resisted the forward math in her head. “My goodness,” she said. “That’s a very long time.”
“My wife, she was like a perfect angel,” Norman continued. “She knew everything. She cooked such mouthwatering Hunan food—my parents were from the Changsha region, and she always used just the right sort of rice noodles in the soup. Everything to do with the house was managed by her. We had two new roofs put on during our marriage, and I barely knew anything about either of them, because she always arranged for the work to be done when I was gone. She didn’t want me to be disturbed, she said! And do you know, the month after she died, I discovered I had no money in my wallet? Why are so many Chinese restaurants still all cash? And when I went to the ATM, I couldn’t understand how to use it! And then I figured out that Nancy had been putting twenties in my wallet, every week, all these years.”
“Home repairs can be very difficult. I’m constantly managing them. Just last month I received a quote for $16,000 for new windows. Sixteen thousand dollars for glass! Can you believe it? And after they finished I had to spend the rest of the day cleaning; they left streaks everywhere.”
“You sound just like my Nancy.” Norman shook his head. “Although to be perfectly honest she wasn’t the cleanest person; she could be very messy.”
“I’m the exact opposite. I can’t go to bed each night unless everything is back in its proper place.” Linda wondered if she was sounding too boastful but decided to charge forward. “I was the oldest of six, so I always had to take care of everyone, make sure everything was clean, before I could start my homework.”
“I would love to live somewhere neat. My mother kept a very clean household. Do you live in the same house as before your divorce?”
“Yes, for the last seventeen years in the same place. Palo Alto.” Stanley’s final and only compromise in their marriage, the house itself the stuff of horrors but built on the lot of her dreams. She’d begun the remodel the same year he married Mary.