by Kathy Wang
“Palo Alto,” Norman repeated. “What a nice city. We always thought of moving there, because of the good schools. And you mentioned something earlier about a triplex in Cupertino? So that must be an investment property then? Very good rents, I hear, near Apple.”
The evening’s flirtatious light took on a sinister glare; all at once Linda saw that Norman was the sort of widowed-slash-divorced man she had been encountering in ever greater frequency, a tribe whose solitary goal in dating was to secure a suitable replacement for the deceased or estranged as rapidly as possible. Michael Chan, who together with his wife, Faith, had been one of her and Stanley’s most frequent mah jong partners, had put out feelers less than a week after Faith’s funeral, when the donations to battle lymphoma in her name had still been rolling in. There was no other choice—he couldn’t keep a household, couldn’t cook, couldn’t do anything, Michael despaired. He needed a wife!
One appeared on his arm a few scanty months later, a self-described hairstylist with an awful haircut, thirty years his junior. Recently from China, of course. Most of them were. Young, but given the ages of Linda and Stanley’s classmates, not too young; faces of regional newscasters past their prime, an occasional failed marriage left behind on the mainland.
Not all of these recently unattached men ended up with younger consorts. There were some who sought an entirely different bracket: women their own age, or near it, who like them had arrived in the United States on educational visas decades earlier. Women similar to their first partners in career or schooling, who could read and understand an English-language newspaper. Women who’d already established families, raised adult children, heckled them to the Ivy League, and had no desire to repeat the process. Women who were rich. That last attribute was always the key qualifier, and Linda recognized the housing chatter currently being lobbed her way as the nefarious tentacles of a single man on the make for a wealthy partner. No doubt her would-be suitor was moving through a list of open questions in his mind right now, as he sought to accurately gauge her resources. Would she be able to assume the entirety of her own medical costs until the ultimate end and, if necessary, assist with her husband’s? What level of health coverage could she afford? Was it basic—as in no frills, no private rooms, no specialist referrals, long wait times—or was it concierge medicine at Stanford Hospital? Had she selected, and already paid for, a funeral plot (as they could reach up to $40,000 and beyond, depending on the size and location)? Did she already possess her own paid-off housing and fully funded 401(k) (and thus not serve as competition against the man’s own adult children for future inheritance proceeds)? What was the state of her investments? What percentage of them were in a Roth IRA? Had she already started taking distributions?
Linda personally knew of several examples from her own social circles who had made such matches; Stanley himself had been the recipient of attentions from a certain older woman years back, a fellow Taiwan University graduate who possessed the double whammy of both childlessness and substantial real estate holdings in the Bay Area. Linda had heard through her friend Yvonne Ho that the woman had invited Stanley on several overnight outings, their relationship proceeding to the point where they had planned a riverboat cruise on the Danube. Ultimately, however, Stanley hadn’t been able to commit. He had given the excuse to Kate and Fred—the latter of whom had been particularly disappointed, given the woman’s ownership of several prime lots in Woodside—that she was simply too old to keep up with him. Privately to Linda, however, during a quiet lull at the wedding of a mutual friend’s daughter, Stanley had admitted that he couldn’t cope with her money. “I already had one wife more capable than me,” he commented. Stanley was always magnanimous in private, especially back then, in the throes of a burgeoning social life with widows of distant acquaintances and thirtysomething Cantonese shop girls with poor English.
Linda never let herself forget that the freedom she enjoyed had come only after carrying a man on her back for thirty years. Maintaining her steadily increasing salary at IBM until retirement, while she doggedly combed through the library’s Value Line archives at night. Making copies of the investment reports for each of her target companies, painstakingly analyzing the numbers. Taking great care to hide from Stanley any knowledge of the accounts, for she’d known he’d surely usurp the funds for some hideously flawed scheme.
It wasn’t until the day she asked for a divorce—carrying in her hands the binder from Charles Schwab to soften the blow—that she came clean on all she had done for him, on top of raising his children, preparing his healthy and fine-tasting Chinese food, and keeping a spotless home. What a 17 percent annualized return looked like, when sustained for more than two decades.
It occurred to Linda that perhaps it was no longer her right to demand from life an alternative; that if she were to continue meeting men from Tigerlily they’d all turn out to be identical anyway, the same man wearing a different face. Mercilessly hunting for the financially capable woman to fold his laundry and iron his shirts, the nurse with a purse to smooth his path toward life’s inevitable end, never daring to cross the finish line first herself. That maybe over the years she had worked herself into a groove so deep that no matter how much she tried to deviate from it, she’d always eventually find herself tumbling right back in, rolling down its curve with natural momentum.
After the initial ten matches, each member of Tigerlily was limited to one new profile a day unless they paid for additional currency, called Petals. Most users never forked over a cent—they simply signed on and checked their results before moving on to the next free option. Linda only knew of Tigerlily, however, and at this point in her life she almost always opted to spend for convenience. The indulgence in overt luxuries such as handbags had lost its luster as she grew older and more paranoid about events like home invasions; she’d spent so long being frugal that she now found it difficult to enjoy the release of money on physical goods. Before long she’d spent $200 on Tigerlily. Then $500, an amount that unlocked additional privileges: suddenly there were increased messaging capabilities, and a whole slew of privacy filters had been removed, which meant she could see how often a prospective candidate had viewed her profile. Once Linda hit $5,000, a fat packet arrived at the house, welcoming her to Tigerlily Deluxe. The materials inside detailed an entirely new tranche of services at her disposal.
That was when online dating became truly, very interesting.
Chapter 4
Kate
In all her years growing up in various houses in progressively improving school districts of the Bay Area, Kate had never once seen her mother unnerved. Not during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, when as a kid she’d tripped and bashed her skull against the sharp corner of a cabinet, only to emerge after the shaking stopped, blood streaming from her forehead; not when Stanley—in a moment of deliberate rage—managed to kill one of the family pets; not even when Fred and then Kate herself failed to gain admission into Stanford, which had at the time been her mother’s most ardent dream. Linda was a consistently cool operator who considered emotions nearly meaningless—to her there was no point in wasting time talking when there was action to be taken. So when Kate picked up the phone her senior year at UCLA and heard a known yet unfamiliar voice on the other end, so rattled, so shaky, on the edge of pleading—it had been like a bright red-alarm flare shot into the sky.
“I cannot sleep,” Linda blurted, and then paused. “I can never sleep now.”
Kate looked at the wall clock. Eleven p.m., an hour that for her mother constituted the middle of the night. “Ma, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“My friends, they don’t understand. . . . I’ve made a mess of my life.”
“What’s going on?” Kate panicked. “What can I do? What’s happened?” And waited for Linda to give her action points, as she had her entire life, but instead her mother lapsed into silence.
“I want you to live your life,” Linda eventually said. “Don’t bother with mine. This is for m
e to handle.” She hung up. Kate called back immediately, letting the house phone ring, until finally Stanley came on the line.
“Don’t worry about Ma,” he said, sounding sleepy. “She’ll feel better in the morning. Okay?”
But then two days later the phone rang again, this time past midnight. “I have nothing to live for,” Linda confessed. “I should just die.”
And then again the next day, at 2:00 a.m.
Her mother always ended each conversation with “I want you to live your life,” insistent that there was nothing to be done. She refused to acknowledge Kate’s suggestions to see a counselor, confide in a friend, or spend the weekend with her in Southern California. It was an impossible situation, her silences indicated, one with no viable solution. Yet the calls only ceased—instantaneously, altogether—when Kate announced she was returning home.
Linda never asked what made Kate change her mind about moving to Cincinnati to take a job with Procter & Gamble after graduation; never inquired into the frantic last-minute recruiting that had been necessary, after which she’d hastily signed the first decent offer to come her way. Kate understood this to be her mother’s coping mechanism for having practically forced the move, cashing in twenty years of karmic chips of, until then, never demonstrating any weakness or violent emotion. What it must have already cost Linda’s pride to share, even in the broadest of descriptions, her despair over Stanley’s cheating, the bleakness of her marriage, the fright of finding herself in such a situation! And so Kate felt an important and simple mission had been placed before her: Finish school. Return home. Save mother.
By the time she graduated and was back in the house, however, Kate found her parents had already moved on to another phase of marriage, one vastly different from the psychological torture chamber vaguely alluded to in Linda’s calls. Far from being at war, Stanley and Linda instead appeared to be quite amiable, as if miming the parts of an American sitcom; Linda querying which toppings everyone wanted for pizza night, while Stanley watched television at a considerate volume and voluntarily cleared the dishes after dinner. On the weekends, Stanley took measurements of Fred’s old bedroom, plotting what exercise machines would make best use of the space; Linda scoured the Home Depot circulars, hunting for deals.
While there existed in the household a not-unwelcome surface placidity, it was evident to Kate that lurking underneath were disturbing elements of a scale and nature that mirrored the superficial cheer, and the first fault lines began to show a few months later. Arriving home early from work one afternoon, Kate parked the car in the garage, only to find the entrance locked from the inside. She had to use the bathroom, and her pounding grew more insistent until finally, Linda opened the door. Through the crack Kate glimpsed messy hair and a thin satin bathrobe—a violent divergence from the image she usually had of her mother, who left her bedroom fully dressed in a Brooks Brothers twinset every morning at seven. A man’s voice, one foreign to her, sounded lightly in the background.
“Come back later,” Linda hissed, and Kate fled to the restroom facilities of a nearby Barnes & Noble. She returned home well after dinner to find Stanley in the living room, watching TV, while Linda cut fruit in the kitchen. No mention was made of her earlier arrival, and Kate put it out of her mind. The experience jarred so greatly from her impression of Linda—who’d only ever displayed the most prudish of attitudes toward sex, leaving the room whenever a graphic scene came on TV—that it was easy and convenient to justify it as a fluke.
A few weeks later, however, Stanley asked her to dinner alone, a rare father/daughter outing. As they left the house, Kate saw Linda watching from the window with clenched teeth; at the meal itself, at Lemon Fish, her father extolled to her the virtues of his latest diet, which incorporated copious amounts of ginseng. “I just have to tell you, I feel such vitality,” he said. “My body is feeling its vitality.”
The final straw came two months later, when while hunting through the storage area in the laundry room for her old Helen Gurley Brown paperbacks, Kate unearthed a red Gump’s shopping bag. Inside, she found a delicates drying rack, the satin robe her mother had worn, and a bottle of female lubricant. That night, she crept to the front yard after Linda and Stanley had shut the doors of their respective bedrooms and called her brother for reinforcement.
“Let them deal with it,” Fred said. He’d already moved to New York by then and was working in banking at Morgan Stanley. “I don’t even want to imagine Mom and Dad having sex with each other, much less other people.”
“You think I do? I’m the one living here! It’s happening literally yards away from where I sleep. Coitus parentis.”
“So you think it’s some kind of open-marriage thing?”
“I’m not sure. I think Mom’s might have been a onetime deal.” Kate had carefully observed Linda after the initial incident, and since then she had returned home early several times unannounced. Each instance she’d found Linda sitting in the garden, fully clothed in her normal sweater and slacks, reading the Wall Street Journal. “All I know is that things here are messed up.”
“Ummm.” Kate could hear Fred typing; he was still in the office, even though he was three hours ahead. “So then how certain are you about this? Because I still can’t fully comprehend that our parents are hooking up with random people. I’ve never even seen the two of them kiss! Remember when they got trapped into doing that dance with all the other parents at Uncle Phillip’s wedding? I didn’t think it was possible to stand so far apart and still be partnered.”
“There’s definitely something going on. With Dad, I think if I just snooped around, I’d find proof pretty easily. With Mom, I’m not so sure. You know how secretive she is.”
“Then how do you know she’s doing anything at all?”
Kate squeezed her eyes shut—the memory of glossy material tied haphazardly; Linda’s hair in disarray. “I just know, okay?”
“Fine. Jesus.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can live like this.”
“Whoa.” Kate recognized in her brother’s voice the tendrils of panic, concern that their parents’ problems might somehow overflow into his territory, disturbing his carefully crafted distance. “I’ll think about how I can help, all right?”
“Swear? Because I really need some assistance.”
“I swear. Don’t do anything crazy in the meantime.”
Half a year later, the problem essentially solved itself, when she was kicked out of the house. Kate’s presence, her parents hinted, was getting in the way of their marriage, depriving them of the privacy necessary to complete its repair. They had enjoyed their time with her; now, she was encouraged to depart as quickly as possible. Likely out of guilt over the hasty expulsion, Linda offered to assist with the down payment on a condo in a nearby development. But by this time X Corp had gone public, and even a low-level analyst like Kate, thanks to a relatively early employee number in the low thousands, was flush with cash. After a brief search she hurriedly bought a town house near Peninsula Shopping Center; it was the immense gains on this property that, five years later, combined with some vested stock, she was able to trade toward her current home.
She’d debated between two properties at the time, and in the end opted to pay thousands more for the teardown on the superior lot. “You made the right decision, value wise,” her real estate agent, a sharp-nosed pro named Eileen Jacobs, told her. “A new house on that land is going to be worth a bundle, somewhere down the line. But it could be a while, and I don’t know how you’re going to stand living in there in the meantime.”
But Kate found that she actually enjoyed fixer-upper living: the squabbles with contractors, the organization of permits, the endless remodeling debates. Over the years she painstakingly updated the property as tranches of X Corp equity were refilled and became available, and she performed many of the smaller repairs herself over long, reclusive weekends alone. She gave the house a name, Francie, after the heroine in A Tree Grows in Brook
lyn, and baked cakes for the neighbors as a preemptive apology for the construction noise. Linda had insisted such gestures were unnecessary, arguing that given her unmarried status they could be interpreted as sinister: the spinster down the block targeting the husbands of distracted working moms. For once, however, Kate had known she was right. The residents on her street were predominantly white and enjoyed traditions like Christmas lights in December and American flags in July—a stark contrast to their neighborhood growing up, where the decor remained unchanged year-round and going door to door with baked goods would have been viewed with naked suspicion at best, an introductory volley to a heavy-fisted follow-up for a school fund-raiser. In Los Altos, Kate’s neighbors gushed over her Irish cream pound cake and inquired into how Francie was doing, as if the home were a real-life baby. Over the holidays, wonderfully twee hand-lettered Christmas greetings were dropped off in her mailbox, addressed to Kate and Francie Huang.
On one of her visits Linda picked up a card. She read the dedication out loud. “Who is Francie?” she asked.
“It’s the house, Ma. I gave it a name. It’s a little joke we have in the neighborhood, because I spend so much time working on the place that it’s almost like my baby. Get it?”
Linda’s mouth was set in a line. “A house is not a baby.”
“Of course not. But it’s important, isn’t it? You always said a family and a house were necessary. I’m just doing the second part now. You must understand; why else are you making such a big deal about keeping the Palo Alto place in the divorce?”
“The point is to have them at the same time,” Linda answered. “Didn’t I teach you this much?”
* * *