The Mutual UFO Network

by Lee Martin

  They are upstairs in the spare bedroom, and Don has just opened a window. She can hear the squeals and shouts of Buzzy Shabazz and her friends.

  “I’ve always had a big mouth, haven’t I, Lily?” “You tried to tell me too much.”

  “I thought I had to take care of you. You seemed so frightened when we first came here.”

  “I’m not frightened now,” she says. “You are.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “And so is Polly. And we don’t know what to do.”

  He bows his head, and Miss Chang, from habit, does the same. So many times, in China, they sat beside each other, arms touching, as he watched her write out verb conjugations. Now she notices that one of his shoes is untied. She remembers one day downtown, after she had come to America, a strange man asked her to tie his shoes. “I can’t believe you did that,” Don said when she told him the story. “His shoes were untied,” she said. “He wanted someone to help him.”

  Don stoops to tie his own shoe; his fingers fumble with the laces. And suddenly something comes undone in Miss Chang, the knotted fist of her bitter heart, and she says to him, “You’ll come here. That’s what you’ll do. You and Polly. You’ll live with me until this is all over and it’s safe for you to go home.”

  “Here?” Don lifts his head. Sunlight slants across his face. “Polly and I? We can’t.”

  “You will,” Miss Chang says.

  “The three of us? Here?”

  Miss Chang nods. “We will.”

  Her invitation startles her. She knows if she were telling a story, this would be the place where her listeners would frown and shake their heads and call her a liar. “You didn’t,” someone might say. “Well, I can’t believe it.” She thinks of her customers, and how they tell her things they wouldn’t dare tell the people they love the most. She lets them talk until they know they’ve said too much and they’re embarrassed by what they’ve shown of themselves. “You never would have guessed that about me, would you?” someone might say. “Oh, I shouldn’t have told you any of that.” Some stories, she knows, are too true to be told, but she can’t escape this fact: she has asked Don and Polly, her ex-husband and his wife, to stay with her, and because they are frightened, they have said yes.

  It is the first time since her divorce that Miss Chang has someone in the house each evening to take meals with her, to sit with her and chat, to make her feel safer in the night when she sleeps, pleased to know she isn’t alone. And they are such good company. Relaxed now that they are away from their own home, they are cheerful and eager to please Miss Chang. The first night, Don plays records on his phonograph and takes turns dancing with her and Polly. Later, they watch Club Dance and Don shows Miss Chang the steps to the Achy-Breaky. When it is time to say goodnight, Polly kisses her on the cheek.

  “I can’t tell you how much this means to us,” Polly says. “I’m glad we can still be friends, considering the circumstances.”

  “Ancient history,” Miss Chang says with a wave of her hand. “Sleep well.”

  They sleep in the spare bedroom. They use the guest bathroom. Miss Chang lays out fresh towels and washcloths. Each morning, she rises early to prepare breakfast and sees a dove or two at the patio feeder. When she leaves the house for work, she starts to miss Don and Polly, not with the raw yearning she felt when she left her parents for Mongolia, but with a sweet, lovely anticipation that she will come home and there Don and Polly will be to welcome her.

  “Lily,” Polly says to her one evening. “My sweet, sweet Lily.”

  “Thank you,” Don says. “Thank you for having us here.”

  Then one night Polly complains about Buzzy Shabazz and her friends and their game of Marco Polo. Polly and Miss Chang and Don are eating dinner, and through the patio doors they can see Buzzy Shabazz with a white handkerchief tied around her eyes. She is running wildly, her arms outstretched. She calls and her friends answer until the air is filled with their din, and it’s impossible to distinguish their words. Their sound is a shriek, a siren, the wind’s howl.

  “That noise,” Polly says. “That dreadful noise. I don’t know how you live with it. I really don’t. Whose children are they?”

  “Neighborhood children,” Miss Chang says. “The girl with the blindfold is Buzzy Shabazz. She lives with her mother in that house. There. The one with the beautiful yard.”

  Don leans forward to get a better look at Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s yard. “Her white pine needs to be pruned,” he says. “You should tell her that.”

  “Miss Shabazz Shabazz?” says Miss Chang. “You don’t know Miss Shabazz Shabazz.”

  “I know those children are horrid,” says Polly.

  “They’re trespassing,” says Don. “This is your property. Don’t they realize that? They have no right to be here.”

  After dinner, Miss Chang pays a visit to Miss Shabazz Shabazz. “Your trees are lovely,” Miss Chang says. “But your pine. It needs pruning.”

  Miss Shabazz Shabazz is gathering firewood from the stack behind her utility shed, and when Miss Chang mentions the pine tree, Miss Shabazz Shabazz drops the canvas tote sling she has filled with logs and they clatter about on the ground. “Not a word for months,” she says, “and now you come to stick your nose in my business? Speak up. Are you a mouse? Are you a little mouse who’s crawled out of my firewood?”

  Miss Chang remembers how, when the schools in China finally reopened after the revolution began, she and the other students recited from Mao’s Red Book. “Chairman Mao says this” and “Chairman Mao says that,” over and over until the slogans stuck in their heads. The one that comes to her now is, “Chairman Mao says, ‘A revolution is not a dinner party.’” So she says to Miss Shabazz Shabazz, “It’s your daughter. Your Buzzy. I don’t want her and her friends playing their game in my yard.”

  Miss Shabazz Shabazz laughs. Her lips are the color of cranberries. Her teeth are white, white, white. The power of her laugh startles Miss Chang.

  “Don’t be silly,” Miss Shabazz Shabazz says. “Look at your yard.” She points behind Miss Chang to the open space. “There’s nothing there. Let children be children. What harm can they do?”

  Each evening, after work, Miss Chang stops by Don and Polly’s house to collect their mail. She brings it to them, and they sort through the envelopes. When they find nothing out of the ordinary, they give each other a hug and Miss Chang knows she is one day closer to losing them. “It looks like this is all going to blow over,” Don says. “Then we can go home, Lily, and get out of your hair.”

  I K-N-O-W W-H-E-R-E Y-O-U L-I-V-E

  When Don reads the note, he runs a hand over his head, mussing his hair. “That’s it,” he says to Polly. “I won’t be bullied.”

  Polly reads the note and folds it very neatly along the creases Miss Chang’s own fingers have traced in the paper. “It’s your fault,” Polly says, and her voice is very low and even. “You had to open your mouth. You couldn’t keep quiet. I’ve always hated that about you.”

  And suddenly, Don is shouting. “You put up with too much.” He is waving his arms about. “Damn it, Polly. You always have.”

  “I just expect the best from people,” Polly says, still in that calm voice. “That’s all.”

  “Well, I’m going to put an end to this,” Don says. “I’m going to stop it tonight.”

  Miss Chang remembers the last night Don spent with her. He was cutting a coupon from the back of a cracker box, and he was having trouble keeping the scissors moving in a straight line through the cardboard. Finally, he slammed the scissors down on the counter, and he told her he thought he should leave. “For how long?” she asked him. “A few hours?” “For good,” he said. “Not come back?” “No, Li. I won’t come back.”

  And now, again, he is moving toward the door.

  “Lily, you talk to him.” Polly turns to her, and Miss Chang thinks of how Polly comes to her at the Mane Attraction and begs her to do something with her thin hair, trusts her to do what she can
to hide her baldness. “You tell him, Lily. You tell him he can’t go.”

  Miss Chang knows she should stop him. She knows she should say, “Wait. Let me tell you. You won’t believe this. It’s the craziest thing.” But all she can think of is Mao’s Red Guard and how they tore silk clothes from people on the street, how they destroyed Ming Dynasty vases, burned books, bulldozed the graveyards because burial was an old custom and took up valuable land. No more old ideas, no more old culture, no more old customs, no more old habits. She remembers the times when Don told her how to behave in America. “Toughen up,” he told her. “Get mean.” If she confesses to sending the notes, she imagines his smug grin and how he might say, “You see. I was right all along.” When what he can never know—what he never even suspected those days at the university, when she so meekly recited her verb conjugations—is the cold, cold heart she could never leave behind her in China.

  So she says nothing. And then, Don is gone.

  “Lily,” Polly says. “You’ve been so good to us. And now look at what we’ve brought into your house.”

  After Don has left for Eddie Ball’s, Miss Chang steps out onto her patio, and there is Buzzy Shabazz only a few feet away. She hoists her green schoolbag up on her shoulder. She is wearing high-top leather basketball shoes, the laces undone.

  “Buzzy. Buzzy Shabazz,” Miss Chang says. “I want to ask you something.”

  “My mother told me not to listen to you,” says Buzzy Shabazz.

  One night last summer before the episode with the birdbath and the crepe myrtle, Buzzy Shabazz came to Miss Chang’s house and asked Miss Chang to please tell her about the pretty yellow birds she saw flying onto Miss Chang’s patio. “Goldfinches,” said Miss Chang. How, Buzzy Shabazz wanted to know, could she and her mother get such beautiful birds to come into their yard. Miss Chang remembered how long it had taken her to entice the goldfinches, how she had hung the feeding tube filled with niger seed and had waited and waited for her little goldies to find it. And now that they had, she hated to risk losing even one of them to her new neighbors. Of course, she knew it was selfish of her, but in China there had been so few birds (once Mao had even ordered all the sparrows killed), she delighted now to the brilliant yellow birds with their black caps and wings and the playful way they grasped the rungs of the feeding tube with their claws and then flipped upside down to peck at niger seed through the slots below them. “I’m sorry,” she told Buzzy Shabazz. “This is something I cannot tell.”

  Now Miss Chang says to the girl, “Every night you and your friends run through my yard.” Miss Chang points toward Buzzy Shabazz’s house. “How would you like it if I came into your yard? If I was an intruder come there uninvited?”

  Buzzy Shabazz’s eyes open wide. “It was you,” she says. “You’re the one.”

  “I’m not saying I’ve ever done it,” Miss Chang says. “I’d never even dream of it.”

  “You stole our birdbath, and you dug up our bush.”

  “No.”

  “You, you, you.”

  Buzzy Shabazz’s voice is rising, the way it does when she plays Marco Polo. It echoes across the empty expanse of Miss Chang’s yard, and all she wants is to make Buzzy Shabazz be quiet. She tries to clamp her hand over the girl’s mouth, but Buzzy Shabazz grabs her arm, and somehow Miss Chang’s hand ends up caught between Buzzy Shabazz’s shoulder and the strap of her schoolbag. Miss Chang is trying to let go, but she can’t. And Buzzy Shabazz is trying to yank herself away from Miss Chang. The two of them are dancing about the yard, and finally, the only way Miss Chang can free herself is to put her other hand against Buzzy Shabazz’s sternum and push. When she does, Buzzy Shabazz falls backward, striking her head, with a loud thud, on the ground.

  Miss Chang tries to apologize. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she says. “This is all a mistake.”

  But Buzzy Shabazz is on her feet and running to her yard, where Miss Shabazz Shabazz has come out to her white pine, pruning shears in hand.

  Miss Chang goes into her own house, and there is Polly sitting on the loveseat, staring out the window. After the divorce, Polly came to Miss Chang, and she asked her if she would mind if she started dating Don. “If it bothers you, Lily, I won’t do it.”

  “Do you love him?” Miss Chang wanted to know.

  She remembers how Polly ducked her head like a starstruck girl. “Yes, Lily. I think I do.”

  “Then why ask my permission?”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Lily. You’ve been so good to me. Dear Lily. I love you, too.”

  Now Miss Chang is crying. She is thinking about Don on his way to Eddie Ball’s, and how Polly, staring out the window, must be so frightened for him. Miss Chang is imagining Buzzy Shabazz telling her mother that their neighbor, that crazy Chinese woman, has attacked her.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Miss Chang says.

  Polly turns and rises so effortlessly from the loveseat. She comes to Miss Chang and takes her in her arms. “Do what, Lily? Poor dear. Tell me.”

  There is a sharp knock at the patio door, the sound of metal on glass. Polly looks at Miss Chang, and Miss Chang sees the same terror she saw in her mother’s eyes the day the Red Guard knocked down their door and dragged her mother out into the street.

  Miss Chang feels Polly’s shoulders tremble, and she remembers one day last summer when a goldfinch, convinced it saw clear passage through the glass, flew into the patio door and fell to the step. When Miss Chang picked it up, she could feel the wings trying to open—the slightest shudder—and she wished for something she could do, some miracle, to give the bird’s life back to it. She remembers the letters she cut from the newspapers, the dancing turns and dips of her scissors, her gentle, flowing rill. She sees the letters in her mind, scrambled, swirling into words she hadn’t thought to form: “LOVE,” “ME,” “NOW.” They startle her. All along, she imagines, this plea has been rising—this sweet yearning—and now here it is, flaring up with such an overwhelming majesty and force, she can’t help but confess it.

  “It’s me,” she says, and her voice is barely a whisper. “I’m the one who’s been sending you and Don those notes.”

  When the Red Guard took her mother, Miss Chang ran. She was just a girl, still light and fast. She ran and ran until she stopped in the botanical garden where the greenhouses were jagged with broken glass, where the azaleas and the dwarf cedars and the rhododendrons were charred and smoldering. She was so far from home. She was alone and ashamed. But she would never be able to forget the splendid motion of her swift and graceful flight. She recalls it now as Polly steps back and slips from her embrace, and all Miss Chang can do is turn, her feet clumsy and slow, to the patio door where Miss Shabazz Shabazz waits.

  WHITE DWARFS

  ONE SATURDAY IN JUNE, FRANK’S WIFE DISAPPEARED. THE POLICE found her car along Route 71, the hood up as if there had been some sort of mechanical breakdown, but a detective told Frank there wasn’t “jack-stump” wrong with the car. It ran like a dream.

  The detective wanted to know whether there had been any difficulty between Frank and his wife. Had she been depressed or upset in recent days? Would Frank mind if he had a look around the house? Sorry, but sometimes it happens, the detective told him. One day someone decides she’s had enough—Frank’s wife, maybe—and bingo, she walks away.

  The detective’s insinuations embarrassed Frank, because indeed he had been considering, just before his wife’s disappearance, how different his life might be without her. From time to time, he would catch sight of some woman. A stylish hairdo, a bold shade of eye shadow, a daring skirt or blouse would attract his attention, and he might even strike up a conversation, harmless chit-chat. Later, he might allow himself to wonder what it would be like to be married to someone else. He had never felt guilty about his speculations, considered them par for the course after a couple had been together as many years as he and his wife—just a natural curiosity he suspected she herself indulged from time to time. The theory
that she had run from him, perhaps escaped with a lover, would make good gossip, he knew, but seriously, he doubted she had been planning such a move. She had even asked him to go with her that morning, he told the detective, pleased that he could offer up this small piece of evidence that he and his wife had enjoyed each other’s company.

  “But you didn’t,” the detective said. “Go with her, that is.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Frank told him, ashamed.

  He knew his wife’s invitation to accompany her out into the country to pick strawberries had been an offer of reconciliation. A few days before, they had argued. He had taken her to a boutique downtown, one of those trendy shops, The Ozone, and he had encouraged her to buy something, anything she wanted—“Just pick it out, kiddo, something with a little pizzazz, and it’s yours.” She hadn’t been able to find anything to suit her. She had been shy around the sales clerk, a girl with a gold loop pierced through her eyebrow, and refused to take anything into the fitting room. She preferred corduroy trousers in winter and twill skirts in summer, and blouses made from broadcloth that Frank thought made her look too severe.

  On Sunday, one of his wife’s credit cards showed up in Rocco, found there in the parking lot of the Free Methodist Church. That afternoon, a farmer came upon one of her shoes at the end of his lane. It was the shoe, a Keds tennis shoe, that undid Frank, the streak of mud across the white canvas, and he grieved, a deep, honest grief that left him raw with weeping.

  For weeks, the police had nothing more to go on. No clues, they kept telling him. No leads. No further developments. They were “intensifying their search,” they said, something they always said, Frank knew, when they didn’t have “jack-stump.”

  With the help of friends, he organized a candlelight vigil, a prayer service. He helped distribute leaflets with his wife’s picture on them. He had used a photograph of the two of them taken that winter for their silver anniversary. Someone had cropped the picture so it appeared it was only a shot of her, but if anyone looked closely they would see a hand, his hand, resting on her shoulder. That small detail made him feel that wherever she was, he was with her. He liked pointing that out to the news reporters who came to interview him, but after hearing it said back to him on their broadcasts, he decided it sounded delusional and terribly sentimental.