by Sam Michel
So I went on in. Not right in, mind you, here again I had my difficulties—“all good things are difficult”—my difficulties in this instance owing to the handle, which I ought to call a knob, and to a little strip of carpet, olive shag, which happened to be stapled to the doorjamb to obstruct the draughts, I guessed, and dust, in recognition of the season and the climate. The door stuck, I mean to say, and the knob, like the air, seemed slippery, as if whatever coated what a person breathed here also coated what he touched. This made sense to me, in the way that soap made sense of rendering, in the way that I required of myself the memory of my chair, in order to make sense of my endeavors with the shovel, and the vet, each succeeding thought and act required to secure the boy a dog. The memory of my chair, for instance, made sensible my thinking on the Asiatic physiognomy, my thinking being that the slipperiness I noted in the air and on the doorknob must occur as well within the Asiatic colon, serving there to speed the transformation of ingesta to digesta, which process served in turn to nurture those more lithesome, more placid, less constipated races I myself have sought to emulate by giving up my meats.
Yet where was sense? Where lithe? I walked inside the place and there I saw that Lily Fong had gotten fat, and mean, as soon as I had grown sufficiently accustomed to the dimness of the place to see her, and the place itself, I saw, was nothing that a country boy could sensibly have guessed of his Chinese. Here at Lily’s, Chinese meant the shag I stepped across was just a remnant of the stuff they’d hung the walls with, an olive border someone must have thought would be most pleasing if concluded roughly halfway to the ceiling. I suppose that I foresaw a wallpaper of leafy, golden scrolls and solid crimsons in velour relief, a teapot and a fishtank, paper lanterns, maybe, a shrine to an imperial past. I was prepared at least to see a booth. Did it make sense, I asked myself, to run a joint without a booth? Did it make sense for Lily Fong to keep fast to her stool, not to rise, cross the room and greet me?
Well, so, perhaps her weight upset her; maybe, seated on her stool, she was able to forget the weight she carried on her bones, just as I was able, seated in my chair, to forget sometimes the weight I carried in my thinking. Perhaps I had recalled her to her gland. Then, too, I recalled from my experience with persons of her bulk how deeply their activities depended on some system of digestible reward. She could not help herself. She could not eat me. And what could she have made of me, I wondered, my face, the whole while I assessed her person? Because I did not limit my assessment of her person to her weight, no, I had also to assess the way she chose to clothe her weight, her kimono, or her robe, something legless, in any case, conical and woolen, though a person could have wished that it were pile. Something not so itchy. A proprietress of eateries, I thought, should be a little more aware of the unsavoriness of scratching; I thought, in Lily Fong’s case, that she was being almost pointedly repellent in choosing where to scratch. Now, imagine how a person such as I am must have felt, given the complexity of what there was to feel, when I discovered that it wasn’t Lily I have been describing here, but Lily’s mother! This woman, there she sat, called out from her darkened corner, labored up and groaned and scratched across to me and asked me would I like to see a menu, Lily’s mother!
“Riry,” she said, “rike.” As in, “You rike see menu,” and in, “Riry gone. Clistmas. Riry go to Birgin Irands.”
So we understand her reticence. We may understand her costume. Her corpulence, I think, may be understood in terms of a systemic vulnerability, her unimmunized exposure to a corpulent culture. Surely, here was a woman unused to the principle of having anything she asked for. She shifted nearer, reoffered me a menu. I told her no, I did not like to see a menu. I asked her why so many cars were parked out there, and why the place was empty, asked her why I kept on smelling garlic if there wasn’t anybody there to cook for. I spoke loudly, thinking that I might be better understood by volume, and that volume might distract me from whatever I was smelling here that wasn’t garlic. I asked the elder Fong how she found our country, asked her was she awfully proud of Lily. I insisted on the fame of Lily’s Vegetable Delight. I supposed her boots must keep her feet warm. I made a little bow. I told her these days I ate only vegetables, though in the old days, in a place like this, I would glut myself on mooshoo porks, kungpao shrimps and sizzling cusk. I asked her might I use her restroom. I pinched my knees together, flexed my knees and cupped my hands against my zipper, saw myself proceeding with this woman just as I’d proceeded with my son. By question and by countenance, I mean—my questions, her countenance—how adroitly I might fathom her intentions by her chin, where she chose to scratch, the maybe’s and the yes’s and the no’s that showed up from her brain and lit her ocher eyeballs. I appealed to Christmas, the beneficence of Christ. I attempted to describe a pound. Humane Society, I called it. Dogs. Cats. I pointed to her telephone, held my hand against my ear and asked to make a call.
I said, “Well.”
And, “Well, well, well.”
“Facilities?” I said.
“Bathroom?”
“Potty?”
“John?”
“Latrine,” I asked her. “Loo?”
“Local call,” I told her, “home. Wife.”
“Hu-mane Society,” I said. “Many doggies. Cats.”
She would not move. From my references to Christ and a society appealing to humanity, I saw perhaps how she derived from me an application for a handout. Whereas business here meant business. You paid. You liked to see a menu. I thought she understood completely, had me sized down to another spoiled American, another shoeless layabout who saw his right to the pursuits of liberty and happiness as license to relieve himself, uncharged, in your refurbished, lemon-scented urinal, your freshly minted toilet.
Canny Asiatic, I was thinking, stinker, fatty, shrew. Me, I thought, a freeloader? Me, Lincoln Dahl, the rancher’s son, native-born, Republican? Well, you judge a man as something less than what he is, you straighten him right up. Perhaps, I thought, there was yet a little of the animal in me, a liquid nerve I felt infuse my spine when I observed that what was called for here must be a double-measure of my mama’s loric backram. I went ahead and jingled my pocket change. I fished out a nickel, flipped it several times, yawned and then produced my whole, entire wallet, as if I were a man whose means could not conceivably decide him. I held my wallet by a corner, tapped it on the fat part of my leg and said to Lily’s mother that, okay, I understood, I would order something take-out.
“A box of rice,” I said. “A large one, if you’ve got it.”
For the promise of a coin, we did not become great chums, myself and Lily’s mother, we did not break out and gab, we continued nearly not to speak, though I want to say that briefly, superficially, we appeared to be linguistically conversant. She asked me how I’d like my rice, flied or stimmed, and did I rike a shicken with that rice, or biff, or begetable, or pouk. She bowed, I think, said that she was solly in her Engrish, she was bery, bery new for coming in my country, she was only Riry’s mother. For my own part, I confessed that I was only Lincoln Jr.’s father, and commenced to raise my voice another several decibels, omit my syntax, asking her again where Lily go, and where go renderer’s, explaining to her that the boy like have a dog, we come here for dog, boy so sad, not have dog for birthday.
Yet soon enough I saw the wool seize through her shoulders, saw her scratching, with her pencil, with an urgency by which I gathered I had inadvertently recalled her to a stronger itch. Had she suspected I was feigning my ability to understand? Did my face betray my urge to school her in the right pronunciation of our people’s consonants? No, no, a person might have guessed some time ago it was the dog. The elder Fong picked up a menu from the register, jabbed her pencil there and told me, “Dog? No dog. Dog? No dog. Rook. Onry shicken, biff, pouk. White shicken onry, best biff. Sometime we have a fish, scrid. We have a no dog Chinese. Closs tlacks, go Viet, eat dog. Riry have a shicken, biff, sometime a scrid. Prease,” she said, “yo
u rike?”
Well, enormous languages were pitched against us. Naturally, it occurred to me that I might take this woman out to show her Hope. I thought perhaps that in the image of the grieving boy there was an opportunity for understanding we might easily exploit less perilous than language. Yet what point? I asked myself: Would such a gesture bring us any nearer to the pound? Were Humane Societies a fixture in her country she would recognize in mine? And whatever could have made me think that Lily’s mother, a stranger to the boy, would have recognized in little Lincoln’s tears and sniffles the insignias of grief? She might have thought, as I had thought, that he was simply sick. Or cold. He had been sitting out there in the car for quite awhile now. This boy, that shoe, my reluctance to extend myself beyond a box of rice—well, I saw how any honest soul in Lily’s mother’s boots could think that we had found Hope on the road somewhere, or had maybe run her down ourselves, and had come to Lily Fong’s to sell her.
In the end, which was not so long in coming, I was decided by my wallet after all, and also by my conscience, and my sloth, was decided by my cowardice on ordering the No. 7, as Lily’s mother had suggested. She rang me up. She showed me to a telephone and had me understand that I was free to use the potty. Yet I did not feel free. She’d got inside my pockets, I was thinking, I been took. Inevitably, my last grab at a little power was to cause this woman to repeat herself.
“Lestloom,” says the elder Fong, and left me.
Next, I cannot go. My thing won’t work. Too many thousand watts, I thought, of green, unsteadying fluorescence. The shag-and-panel riff continued. A poured floor of painted concrete, an unsubtle pitch from all four corners toward a rust-flecked drain-grate. Underneath the sink, a rubber bucket and a gummy scrubrush. On the wall, a metal box dispensing studded prophylactics, a candid snapshot of a pouty, European beaut the craven likes of which, presumably, a man might safely service for a couple quarters. Pottymouth graffiti. Theories on the hairlessness of Asiatic trim. Names and numbers, inky renderings of Daphne’s Gash and John’s Schlong, illuminating motion-marks and arrows binding John and Daphne at the points where it is written in the margins they may jerk and plunge and suck.
A prude, am I, a prig? Finicky, perhaps, I expect a citizen at least to flush his stool, to wait and see and flush it twice, should one flush leave behind itself a bowl of floaty, leafy remnants. I felt exposed, abused. I rezipped myself. I considered possibilities for registering complaint. I would raise my voice, shake my fist, pinch my nose and make a face whose meaning could not be mistaken in translation, one culture, language, sex or generation to another. Certainly, I decided it was high time I got on the horn to home. Yet what then? The phone rings, my wife says her hello and I discover she cannot be made to hear me! I shook the phone, punched the buttons, banged the earpiece on the counter. I pretty nearly shouted. It was me, I said, her husband. “Is this a joke?” she said. “Who is this?” She lowered her voice, abruptly, conspiratorially, said a word I did not hear, then said, “Liebchen,” and then, “Later,” then hung up. Raise our hands now, who here thinks I really heard the word I would not hear? Who here thinks the word I would not hear was Hans? On the other hand, I think that Hans was all I heard. I think his name, as it was sounded by my wife, unstaid me. The elder Fong came at me in her mukluks and her wool, and there I stood, my hand still resting on the cradle, the unacknowledged murmur in my heart repeating Hans, Hans, Hans.
I felt confused, nauseated, civil. The sack this woman handed over of the rice and No. 7 weighed a soy-soaked ton. I believe I was enough defeated here to thank her. And then there I went, she saw me to the door, helped me jerk it past the lip of shag, stood behind me on the threshold and produced a sound from in her throat I might have thought was caused by sexual excitation, had it not been Lily’s mother who produced the sound, or had there been a locus more provocative, sexually, than a threshold or myself or my few dollars to excite her. She laughed, and when I looked to see if it were me she laughed at, saw that she had moved off to the plaster bestiary in the parking lot, where she turned herself in circles, her hands extended from her sides, palms up, her face tipped to the sky, tongue out, catching snowflakes.
I felt my eyes dim and my bowels tire; I turned quickly toward the car again, afraid should she be dizzied, capsize, crack her skull against a hjerk and call out bleeding through her pidgin tongue that I should come and help her. Plenty left to help myself, I thought, the boy there and his dog. Yet when I opened up the car door I saw the boy did not need help, no, it seemed the boy had needed sleep. There he lay, underneath his coat, with the dog, his arm hooked at the elbow where her collar shined up through the Visqueen to embrace her. Were Hope not dead, a person could not fail to recognize the trappings in this picture of our nation’s most beloved illustrative painter. The ruddy cheek, the parted, heart-shaped lips, the tenderness a boy cannot abandon either sleeping or awake toward the canine species. Had she lived, then I believe that I would not have waked him up, but rather might have sat there in the car with him until he waked up on his own, such periods of unselfconscious beauty being worth preserving, to my mind, to their natural expirations. Fleetingly, I wished I had a camera. Though how many times, I wondered, at my wife’s request, had I run to fetch a camera to record the boy while rolling in the clover, only to return to find him screaming from the bee-sting? My wife’s insistence, along with my belatedness, have caused us to preserve the image of our boy in welts and tears and bruises, the thousand little hurts my wife predicts we all will one day gather at the kitchen table to review and thank our lucky stars the boy cannot remember having suffered.
So why remind him? Why torment him with another dog? I had the thought that possibly my wife’s intention all along had been to deepen and to broaden the divisions she perceived between the boy and me; I thought perhaps she saw the most effective distillation speaking to a father’s distance from a son resided in the story she was urging me to tell him of my birthday. Naturally, my son would never know the time and place that made me. He would never know a favorite horse. He would never build himself a strawbale fort or nurse a calf or hunt each autumn with his papa. Where was my Whim? From what heights could I deliver him a sunrise? I was me, after all, the middlemost Lincoln, the provider for our humble house on O Street, very little to transform there, not much to prepare for.
I took the boy and shook him by the ankle.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey, Lincoln. Wake up, boy, it’s snowing.”
The boy sat up. I stooped nearer, opened up the paper sack of take out. Well, the boy leaned in, as I suggested, and was rewarded with a sackful in the face of steam that put a solid fog across his glasses. I apologized, took his glasses off and wiped them on my shirt tail. I explained that in that sack was lunch, a box of rice, a box of no. 7. The boy seemed not to know what this could mean. I put his glasses on him and I drew the kind of breath a person draws in order to deliver news as hurtful as I thought the demolition of the pound would be to someone as committed to acquiring a puppy as my son was. I looked him in the eye, as I believed I ought to, and I exhaled, as I had to, and there I fogged his glasses over once again before I got the first sure word in. So again I took his glasses off, and again I wiped them on my shirt tail, though this time I stood up, allowed my son to put the glasses on himself, having seen the only way for him to fully realize my sympathies was if I were to raise my voice and keep my distance.
I said, “Cat still got your tongue?”
I said, “Well, if you don’t want this food, we can give it to your Gram. My guess is that she’ll know where to find that pound. She could be our guide. She loves take out. Loves to drive. What do you say? You and Gram and Poppy?”
The boy said nothing. I asked him if he minded if I sat. I was tired, I explained, weary in the legs, all that time while he was napping, I was standing. Could I sit down in the back with him, there was room, I thought, him and me and Hope? Yet the boy appeared to say that there was even more room in the front; where I so
ught sympathy in him I thought I’d found disgust. By and by, I resolved to close the door, walk around the car and get in on my own side. I put the key in the ignition. I sat. I did not turn the key. Very strange, I thought, with the windows fogged up on the inside, and a skiff of snow accumulating on the outside, very old to me and quiet. I had forgotten what a wonder.
I aimed the rearview mirror at the boy, to see if there were not some vestige in him of myself, and by regarding first the boy, and next that upper corner of my face still in the mirror, was made to see that there was not. So what was there? When a father holds the mirror to himself beside his son, what does he see? Speaking as a father, I hardly saw myself. I was something, someone else. I was gray-skinned, unaccountable, this close to the mirror, wrinklier beside the boy and pitted. Looking at the boy, I saw the need to readjust the mirror, and to move, to start the car, get out of the car and knock the snow off from the windshield and then wait on the defroster. All of which I did, and after which, while waiting, I could feel the boy still looking at me, watching me, I thought, as if at last he understood that it was possible for him to judge me. Broadly, I mean, as if the history of my transgressions had inscribed itself for him to read across my cheek and neck: Daddy left me sitting in the car. He couldn’t dig a hole. If Daddy would have fixed the fence, then Hopey would be still alive still. Something like that. Only broader, farther. Perhaps he judged me by the gift I’d made him of that knife. Perhaps he judged me by the fear I must have put in him of horses...