by Ann Hood
Maya watched the fish swim endlessly. The tank reminded her of the kind in a doctor’s office. They were intended to calm the patients, but Maya felt anything but calm. She wished she could leave now for her flight back to Providence, but that would mean calling a taxi—if taxis even came out to this desolate condominium complex in Florida where her parents had retired. It would mean sitting for six hours in the airport, reading women’s magazines and dreading the long night that awaited her back home. New Year’s Eve. It had been a toss-up deciding which was worse: being alone at home or enduring another night with her parents.
At dinner, her father had announced that they were moving to Costa Rica. “Time for a little excitement before it’s too late,” he’d said.
“Remember the Pettys?” her mother had asked. Maya didn’t, but that didn’t really matter. “They moved there and they love it. Absolutely love it.”
The good news, Maya supposed, was that she would see her parents even less once they moved to Costa Rica.
She closed her eyes, but in her mind she saw her daughter. That daisy hat. Maya had bought it at a street fair when she was pregnant. That day, she could only imagine the baby who would wear it. What if it’s a boy? Adam had asked her. He’ll look funny in this hat, then, she’d said. And they had laughed, because they were so happy and could not imagine anything happening to the baby who would wear that hat.
Reluctantly, Maya got up. She tiptoed across the powder blue carpeting, down the stairs, into the kitchen. She turned on the coffeemaker and sat watching the coffee drip into the glass carafe. If she could bear it, she would take her coffee down to the beach that sat at the end of a weathered wooden path. But she was a coward. The beach reminded her of Hawaii, Hawaii reminded her of her old life, her old life broke her heart.
Instead, Maya sat at the glass-topped table. She sipped her weak Maxwell House coffee and waited for the morning to finally arrive so she could go home.
MAYA KNEW IT was a cliché to sit alone on New Year’s Eve, eat takeout Chinese food, and watch television. But here she was, doing just that. Maybe she was more her mother’s daughter than she liked to admit.
She worked her way through a complete order of fried dumplings, and was starting in on her crispy beef when her doorbell rang. Emily and Michael had gone to Vermont for the weekend, and Emily was her only friend who would think to show up on her doorstep with a bottle of champagne and some silver party hats. Maya decided that even if she found missionaries at her door, she would listen to their spiel.
She did not find missionaries, though, only Jack standing there, with a bottle of champagne and two party hats.
“Happy New Year?” he said.
Maya wondered if she’d ever been so relieved to see someone. She resisted the strong urge to hug him good and hard.
“I have Chinese food,” she said.
“I hoped you would,” Jack said.
“Do we have to wear the hats?”
“They’re just symbolic.”
Maya stepped aside to let him in.
“I CAN’T DO THIS,” she said on their third day together.
“So you keep saying,” Jack said.
She did keep saying it. That first night, New Year’s Eve, when they didn’t get to the Chinese food until well after midnight because they went straight to the bedroom. Again the next morning when she woke up to the smell of Cajun food and found him in the kitchen making beans and rice. “It brings good luck for the new year,” he explained. “I can’t do this,” she said later that day as they sat frowning over a jigsaw puzzle of the Taj Mahal together. He knew she meant be in a relationship, not finish the puzzle. She said it again that night, after they made love. And again the next morning as he made shrimp and grits. And she said it now, as they walked through the snowy city on this gray afternoon.
“Maya,” Jack said gently, “you are doing it.”
“But I don’t want to,” she said.
“Ah. That’s different.”
Their boots fell heavily on the packed snow.
Last night he had asked her where her daughter was buried. Her name.
Maya couldn’t answer either question. These were things she did not say out loud.
“I’ve worn out my welcome?” he said. His words lingered in the air between them.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ll miss my cooking.”
“I will,” she managed to say.
“You can keep sending me away,” he said, “but I will keep coming back.”
He took her hand in his. She was wearing lumpy Ecuadoran gloves that her parents had given her for Christmas, along with a Peruvian sweater, Laotian socks, and a quilt with appliquéd sea creatures from Honduras. He was wearing big suede gloves lined with fleece. Maya was not a small woman, but Jack was a very big man, and her hand felt fragile in his, even with the layers of wool and suede and fleece between them.
He held her hand the whole way back to her house. He got in his car and drove away. Maya watched him go, then she went inside and threw away all the leftovers. When she was done, she scoured the pots and dishes they’d left behind. She washed the sheets and towels. She vacuumed the floors. She cleaned until she finally believed she had erased every trace of these last three days.
Hunan, China
MING
On the same day, both of Ming’s dreams came true. The first arrived in the form of a letter. The envelope, a large manila one, was covered with postage stamps and large red block letters in English. When it arrived, she did not open it right away. Instead, Ming propped it on the kitchen table against the pots of herbs her husband planted. Fragrant basil and cilantro leaves. Gnarled gingerroot. Something Ming could not identify, a brown stalk in dry dirt.
Ming ate her rice and the spicy pork with three peppers that her husband had made her before he left for work this morning. Her husband was called Buddy because of his time in America as an exchange student twelve years ago. Buddy meant friend. But it also meant America. Buddy made the spicy pork with three peppers, then he came into the bedroom and he kissed her goodbye: first on the lips, then on her belly.
“Goodbye in there,” he said, his mouth pressed to her stomach. “If you decide to come out today, wait until I come home.”
Ming chewed her food, enjoying the perfect combination of crunchy and soft, hot and sweet. She stared at the envelope. Her friend Yi had told her that good news from Brown University came in a large envelope. “Small envelope, small news,” she’d said. “Big envelope, big news.”
Inside that big envelope, then, was her letter of acceptance to the Ph.D. program in American literature at Brown University.
Inside that envelope, was her dream.
Inside her belly was her second dream. She and Buddy had waited for a baby. First, he got his promotion in the Economics Department at the university in Changsha. Then Ming finished her master’s degree. Then Buddy went for further studies at the London School of Economics. When he returned, Ming applied to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in the United States. Providence, Rhode Island, was a speck on the map. So tiny it seemed to dangle off North America, into the Atlantic Ocean.
While they waited for news, Buddy said: “Time for a baby.”
Buddy was impetuous. Ming more thoughtful. She thought: Nine months until I hear from Brown University. Nine months to make a baby. Her friend told her the number nine was good luck for people born in the Year of the Monkey. Both Buddy and Ming were Monkeys.
“Time for a baby,” she whispered to Buddy that night in bed.
Two weeks later, Ming was walking across the campus to her office and without warning she was lying flat on her back on the sidewalk looking up at the green leaves and blue sky.
A woman with a panicked face screeched at her: “You fainted! Bad blood! Sickness!”
Ming lay looking up at the puffy white clouds floating past and the sunlight that came through the green leaves and she smiled. Baby, she thought.
; Now she sat at her kitchen table eating spicy pork with three peppers and staring at the big envelope from America. She thought of that tiny speck dangling into the Atlantic Ocean. On the website, Brown University was full of smiling students, brick buildings, autumn leaves. Ming imagined herself walking across the campus with her baby in a sling. She would be smiling too. She would have books by Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald in her backpack. She would have stories in her head and happiness in her heart.
Ming put down her chopsticks and picked up her cell phone.
Big envelope, she texted her husband.
The people in the apartment upstairs walked loudly all day. Above her, they pounded across the floor, back and forth.
Hooray! Buddy texted back to her. Celebration tonight.
Ming took her bowl to the sink and squirted dishwashing detergent on it. The people above her pounded and pounded. But even all that noise could not change her high spirits.
She set the bowl to dry. She walked across the small kitchen and picked up the large envelope. Sliding a chopstick under the flap, she opened the envelope and took all of the papers from it. Before she could sit back down to read them, something inside her made a small pop, like the first fireworks of New Year’s. Immediately, Ming felt the warm liquid flow out of her.
Come home now, she texted to her husband.
The first pain rippled across her lower back. She sat down, and waited for her second dream to be born.
MING AND BUDDY WERE from the same village. Their mothers traveled four hours by train together to meet their granddaughter.
“She is so ugly!” Ming’s mother said with delight. This ensured that the ancestors wouldn’t want her.
“She is stupid,” Buddy’s mother said, grinning.
Ming met Buddy’s eyes and tried not to laugh. Their families still clung to superstition and old wives’ tales. Her mother had brought her elephant garlic to eat raw; this would keep the baby healthy. His mother had brought a shard of jade to be placed in the baby’s crib; this would ward off evil spirits.
When Ming stood to make tea, her mother shrieked. “Bad for your blood to walk around so soon!”
That night in bed, with their daughter nestled between them, Ming whispered, “When are they going home?”
Buddy stifled a laugh. “Bad luck!” he said. “Mothers must stay and drive new parents crazy!”
Ming reached across the baby and found his hand.
“We are so lucky,” she said, closing her eyes. Sleep was approaching fast.
“Ssshhh,” Buddy said. “Don’t tempt fate.”
Her last thought before sleep came was that Buddy sounded serious when he said that.
AT THE BUS STATION, her mother took Ming by the arm and led her away from the crowd gathered to board the bus north.
“I know you have good education, Ming. I know I’m a silly old woman,” her mother said, holding on tight to Ming’s arm.
“I don’t think that—” Ming began.
“But sometimes we need to pay attention to omens.”
Ming smiled at her mother. “I know,” she said.
Her mother’s face was smooth and round, but when she talked, creases appeared like the wrinkles in the apple dolls they used to make together when Ming was a little girl. She would make those someday with her own daughter. The thought filled her with hope, and with love for her own mother.
“The astrologer at home sees disruption in your chart,” her mother said.
The good feelings that had surged through Ming just a moment ago turned cold.
“Don’t be foolish,” she snapped. She stroked the tuft of black hair that stood upright on her daughter’s sleeping head.
“Perhaps the disruption is this Brown University? You taking Geng away for so many years?” her mother offered, peering up at her taller daughter.
Oh! Ming thought. I get it now. This is her way of making me feel guilty for going to America. Her way of trying to get me to stay here.
“Perhaps,” Ming said, nodding.
“Perhaps it is something more,” her mother added.
She stared hard at Ming, in a way that made her uncomfortable.
“Buddy prepared you a delicious snack for the long ride,” Ming said, taking her mother by the elbow and steering her back into the crowd. “Fried pork dumplings. Your favorite.”
“He’s a good son-in-law,” her mother said without enthusiasm. “A good man.”
Ming tried to get Buddy’s attention, but his mother had it all. She was fussing with his shirt, smoothing his hair, jabbering nonstop. Finally, the bus arrived in a noisy squeal of brakes and a blast of black smelly smoke. Buddy made sure the mothers had their dumplings, their small bags. He helped them push through the waiting crowd and onto the bus, where he selected the best seats for them, two together so they could gossip the whole way home.
Ming stood outside. She could see Buddy settling them in, then fighting his way off the bus. Ming’s mother pressed her face against the window and peered out until her gaze fell on her daughter and granddaughter. Ming waved to her. Her mother lifted one small hand and waved back.
The bus came alive with more smoke and a long, protracted wail of brakes.
Ming kept waving. The bus backed up in such a way that her mother appeared right above her. Ming stared up at her and saw that her mother was crying, her hands both open, palms pressed against the window like a plea.
THE BABY WAS CALLED Geng, which meant bright and shining to their mothers but to Ming it meant to have guts. Her daughter would be fearless. She would be brave. She would be daring. In America, Ming decided, the baby would be called Willa. That meant all of those things to Ming. Brave. Fearless. Daring. Gutsy.
She would write her dissertation on Willa Cather, a gutsy woman herself. Perhaps Ming and Geng would travel to Nebraska. They would be like pioneers themselves in this strange land. The two of them, side by side on this enormous adventure. Ming unfolded the Rand McNally map of the United States that Buddy had given her. It spread across the kitchen table, covering it with its thin blue lines of highways and mountain peaks and red stars marking capital cities.
With her finger, Ming traced the route from Providence, Rhode Island, to Red Cloud, Nebraska. Her finger gobbled up towns and states as it marked a certain path West. She uncapped a yellow highlighter and retraced the route in permanent ink, a bright yellow route shining halfway across the country. She traced another to New Hampshire, where Willa Cather was buried. So many journeys ahead of them.
Geng was five months old, a baby so beautiful that old ladies on the busy streets of the city of Chengsha and in the crowded markets by the river had to touch her. Her mouth was a perfect rosebud, pink and plump. Her hair shone black in the spring sunlight. She smiled readily. She lifted her arms and opened and closed her fingers when she wanted to be picked up.
Even though they would not leave for three more months, Ming began to make stacks of books to be shipped. She collected baby clothes to bring, warm sweaters hand-knit by the old ladies at the university, and blankets for the cold New England winters. She made endless notes on things to pack, things to see, things to do.
Sitting across from her husband, the baby sucking happily on her breast, the table full of long beans in garlic sauce and sizzling chicken, Ming listened as Buddy talked. He waved his chopsticks in the air to make his point about the world economy, office politics, the importance of this and that. Ming watched him and listened to him and loved him, but in her mind she was already leaving. She could picture the Atlantic Ocean from paintings she saw by Winslow Homer. It was rough and gray with waves crashing over rocks. She could picture the autumn leaves and smiling students at Brown University. She could see miles and miles of books in the John D. Rockefeller Library, stretching endlessly before her.
The baby sucked and gurgled. Buddy talked. Ming dreamed her new dreams.
THE DAY THE TICKETS to Providence arrived, Ming dressed extra nice to go to the
United Airlines office and pick them up. She wore her slim black skirt and a red silk blouse and the jade earrings Buddy had given her for her birthday last year.
“You don’t have a date, do you?” Buddy asked her when she walked into the kitchen.
“Yes, I do,” Ming said, smiling at him. “A date with United Airlines.”
Buddy chopped scallions and put them into a neat pile. “A formidable competitor,” he said.
They had done it before, separating like this to study abroad. During the three years that Buddy was at the London School of Economics, Ming had only visited him twice. Now, she and the baby would be the ones in the distant place, and Buddy would make his way to them once a year. When Ming thought of being alone in this strange place called Providence, she felt a mix of excitement and loneliness. Buddy had written down odd things she might encounter there, but the list made her nervous: SUVs, canned vegetables, large dogs.
Buddy began to julienne red peppers. “I am making a celebration dinner,” he told Ming. “We will celebrate the arrival of your tickets.”
Ming stood behind him and wrapped her arms around him. Buddy smelled like ginger and mint soap. She breathed deep, filling herself with Buddy.
“I’m going to miss you,” she murmured into his back.
He paused. “Me too,” he said. He didn’t turn around. He just went back to slicing the peppers.
Ming moved from him and began to pack Geng’s diaper bag.
“Don’t wake her,” Buddy said. “Go and get your tickets. I’ll be here.”
Ming hesitated. She always took Geng with her, tucked snugly in the sling. Ever since she’d had the baby, she did not feel quite right without her daughter resting against her chest.
“Go,” Buddy said. “She’ll be fine.” Then he laughed. “You’ll be fine,” he added.