by Spencer Wise
“That’s a Chinese favorite,” Dad said. “They think he’s the Jewish Confucius.”
Here’s the part where you pledge devotion until death, I told myself. And I saw my name bloom in wet ink.
2
I COULDN’T SLEEP that night. I lay in bed trying to make sense of it. What the hell had Dad been thinking? Why would he start this transition now? To train me, sure. Hawk over me as I learned on the job. Okay. But he clearly didn’t trust me. So why now? For himself, of course. Always. Because it was his immortality on the line. So he needed to pass the company over to me. It was his way of saying, You’re the heir to my empire. You’re locked in. You’re not going to leave in two years. You’re on the line. On the hook.
You’re on the hook to be me.
There it is. That’s what it meant. I pulled a pillow over my head. It was obvious now. Still, I didn’t think he had any confidence in me and that was why he was always throwing little tests at me. This morning had been one. Over breakfast downstairs. Dad had been eating a grapefruit as I slurped away at the house congee. “You’re going native on me,” he said. Usually he watched CNN on the TV behind my head, but this morning he’d studied me closely. He wagged his spoon a few inches from my face. “Alex,” he said—I tried to ignore him and continue eating my congee, this watery rice gruel with dried pork flakes that look like hair from our cowhides—I didn’t even like it, but I kept ordering it every morning. Stubborn. As if one morning I’d love it. “Alex,” Dad said, tapping my hand with the back of his spoon. “Alex. Tell me how, if you had to, you’d manufacture this spoon.”
“That spoon?” I said, looking up.
He waved it slowly back and forth, close to my nose, like he was trying to mesmerize me. “Grapefruit spoon,” he corrected me. He ran the tip of his finger along the serrated edge. “Come on, who’s your buyer?”
“No one’s buying grapefruit spoons, Dad. Hotels. F&B managers at the hotels...”
“There you go,” Dad cut me off. “These hotels are a business. Say a guy comes in right off his flight from Chicago, he’s all ishkabibbled, comes to this restaurant, last thing he wants is that watery shit you’re eating.”
“Congee.”
“Congo,” Dad said. “No, he wants a good old-fashioned pink ruby.”
I had an idea. “You know what’s in these days—broiled grapefruit.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Dad said, leaning forward in his seat. “This happens?”
“Fancy dinners,” I said. “First course. You’re with the boss talking around a promotion and the waitress sets a broiled grapefruit on your plate. But you got a common spoon like this.” I held mine up.
Dad held his right beside it, pensive for a second, before saying, “I like that—‘common spoon.’ Puffs mine up. Puts it up there with the lobster cracker or oyster fork in the rank of elite utensils. The Cohain of spoons. So fine, you got your customer. Now what do you do?”
He wasn’t going to let up. Right then I knew it was a test.
“Okay,” I said. “Selling’s the easy part. Making is another story. We’re not hand-forging spoons here. The goal is to mass-produce. Not sixty. We need six hundred thousand.”
He nodded.
“Now if we can make it for pennies on the dollar then we can sell it. Materials are our number one cost. You know the shoe-dog saying—leather’s worth more than labor. Same with spoons. We got to maximize materials. Vertically integrate. And never stop the line, not even to shit.”
I thought at the time: I’m fucking with him, parroting his own slogans back to him, and there he was enchanted with the sound of his own voice, but Jesus, now, lying in bed, I understood that was the moment that put the pen in my hand.
That convinced him.
“Wow,” he said, smiling. “That’s damn good. You surprise me sometimes.”
“The real question is why you eat so many grapefruits. Are you trying to give yourself an ulcer?”
“Lately it hurts on my side, is this an ulcer?”
“You know,” I said, “if we were really going into spoons, the way things are changing here, I’d have to move the factory to Cambodia or Vietnam.”
He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. Then he hit me with that broad inviting smile, the one that made my chest swell, the one I wanted so badly and that somehow always left me feeling bruised on the inside.
Now I pulled the pillow tighter around my head, but I kept seeing that smile. Replaying it all in my head. Finally, sometime in the middle of the night, I dozed off.
In the morning, down in the lobby, there was no sign of Dad in his usual spots, either over by the shoe-dogs or hovering by Karri’s terminal. He no-showed for breakfast too, and a thought flashed that maybe I’d tuned him out when he delivered some important information like the fact he was leaving China forever, goodbye and good luck. Had he said that? Did he leave me alone? For a moment I stood in the lobby with this uncertainty swelling in my chest.
Foshan’s four main manufacturers were sitting in separate areas like a high school cafeteria: bras, shoes, ceramics and electronics. At the main desk, Karri was checking in a new guest in a red tapered fez and gray suit. She looked exactly as she did yesterday, as she always looked. I’d never seen her change.
The lobby was crowded with loudmouth foreigners waiting for their drivers. We were all one thin pane of glass away from being totally lost. I didn’t even know how to get to the factory from here. I’d never driven myself there. Forced outside, I imagined us all walking aimlessly down the street in a herd, scrutinizing signage we couldn’t understand, ignoring the plosive tongue-clack of cabdrivers, a slow barn-animal procession down the highway; cud-chewers ready to walk off Shusheng Bridge into our own reflections.
The two bellhops, boys in red caps and jackets with gold buttons, stared at me as if to say, “Go sit with your division. Hovering makes us nervous.” I couldn’t bring myself to go sit because of Don Bauer, a Hasidic Jew, an old shoe-dog from back in Lynn. Dad had brought Bauer over here to head our leather purchasing department a few years back. I heard his high voice lecturing to some new kid I’d never seen before about China while I pretended to study the gold metal statue in the middle of the lobby that either depicted the local karst mountains or an epileptic stock chart, impossible to say which.
I saw my old friend Bernie enter the lobby in a gabardine suit. It was tolerable with Bernie here. I didn’t see him every day, but we grew up together. Both our families in the footwear business. As kids we used to get baked and play pickup basketball in the basement of the synagogue, this infernally hot little court, sliding off the sweaty, hairy backs of paunchy old shirtless Jews wearing rec specs and rainbowing hook shots. Jews only. Bernie levitated because he could jump three inches off the ground. Everyone took a schvitz afterward. Splayed out on wood benches. Everything hanging out. The shamelessness of those men. Me and Bernie in our tighty-whities giggling.
I walked over to the purple couches by the tall sunny windows where Bauer, reeking of the canned tuna fish he carried in his suitcase, was telling the new kid which red-light streets in Hong Kong to visit on the weekends.
“Actually,” Don said, answering his own question, “I prefer a lineup of girls. What can I tell from a book of pictures? Do I have chemistry with a photo? One mamasan, get this, asked me for a photo. To show her girls. Even the hookers are getting picky. Everyone in China’s asking for more.”
Don’s new employee had hair that was blond and straight as Midwest corn, and a round scar between his eyes like maybe a vestigial horn had been removed at birth. When Don ran out of air, I said hi to Bernie and I stuck out my hand and said hello to the new kid. Kid’s name was Todd. I was about to say, It goes with your face, which wasn’t my instinct, but something Dad would say. Christ, Dad was probably halfway to Boston by now and engaged to a Chinese stewardess from Cathay Pacific. It’s those re
d scarves, Alex. They hurt my insides, is this my liver? That knot—double-French, Boho loop?—so fluffy and delicate like a red butterfly exploding from her neck. These slipups, mistaking Dad’s words for mine, kept happening more and more. I put his voice out of my head, and told Todd that if he wanted to see something local, a temple or something, I’d show him. The kid’s face lit up at this and he said, “Geez,” and I felt bad for him. I had a hunch he wouldn’t last. Maybe his dad sent him. Maybe Perdue did. We got a lot of our hides from their Dallas headquarters, and they always sent over these barrel-chested suppliers in ten-gallon hats who slapped the Chinese hard on the shoulder and called everyone Buddy. Maybe Todd was Perdue’s apology to China. How else would a kid like that end up here?
Don said, “Nah, once you’ve seen one temple you’ve seen them all.”
The four other old-timers agreed.
“And I’m a religious man,” Don said humbly.
“You were a Sunday school teacher,” Bernie said. “That’s the scary thing.”
Dad had helped Bernie get his first job over here and now he was a major accounts sales manager at Blakes. We’d grown up in the same town outside Boston, going to the same temple, listening to Rabbi Gelman drone on that Moses was the JFK of the Torah and we should all strive to reach those higher offices of kingdom.
But Bernie had always been a little weird. One time he came to our place for Passover and he was in the kitchen talking to my mother and pulling a sweatshirt from his book bag when out flew a pair of handcuffs. The look on my mother’s face as she spread butter and jam on a latke. Who brings handcuffs to Passover?
Right then I saw Dad stagger off the elevator, frazzled, his fly wide open.
“I overslept,” Dad announced to us all. “It’s official—I’m out of control.”
“Don’t hang yourself,” Don said. “We’re getting old.”
Dad looked at the ceiling. “What’s next?”
“What’s next is you start using the hotel pool,” Bernie said, and the guys laughed.
“You mean I become a tourist?”
“We evolve,” Bernie said.
“Not me. I’m no common tourist. I’ve been here. I smelled Nixon’s greasy Brylcreem in the Beijing airport. That’s how long I’ve been here.”
If we were alone, I’d call him out. Dad was fifteen years behind Nixon. Soon he’ll claim he was on Air Force One arguing over the window seat. Dad looked past Don’s head at Karri, who was behind the front desk checking in two Japanese businesswomen. She looked up from her screen and smiled. All the hems and edges and folds of her garnet blouse were ironed sharp enough to cut your finger. I wanted to confront Dad about her but I knew this wasn’t the time.
“She called my room. Thank God for Karri,” Dad said, short of breath, as if she’d saved him from stepping off the curb into the path of a bus. “Alex would have let me sleep all day.”
Outside, the blue Chrysler factory van was just pulling up to the door.
“Zip your fly,” I said to Dad, and he did so with one quick flash, telling the shoe-dogs goodbye. I told Bernie I’d call him soon. Dad clipped his fanny pack loaded with emergency pharmaceuticals around his waist.
“This way, Mr. Cohen,” the bellhop said, and he set our bags in the trunk. Dad reflexively reached into his pocket and palmed the bellboy a few bills.
“Thank you, Mr. Cohen,” the bellboy said. “Your children will be famous.”
Dad stopped abruptly and pointed at me, “This is my son. Does he look famous to you?”
I apologized to the puzzled bellboy as Dad climbed into the van. As usual, he sat in the row of seats facing backward. Facing me. Even though we were the only ones in the van, he loved riding backward. It made me sick as hell. Plus it bothered me that he was looking at me the whole way with our knees touching.
“Face forward, why don’t you,” I said.
“I like it,” he said and gazed out the window.
Ten minutes into the ride, he announced that he wanted me to run the presentation that afternoon with Abelson’s, our main customer. We were showing our new spring line—seven styles I helped Dad design, and out of instinct to please I said brusquely, “Got it,” before realizing what I’d agreed to. “Wait, what am I supposed to do?”
He unzipped his fanny pack, took out ChapStick and rubbed it over his lips. “Give ’em the whole works. Bring in the foot model. Sing about these shoes like they’re stitched with gold. Close the deal. Hard, soft, who cares. Just make the deal. But stay relaxed. I’ll save you before you crash and burn.”
As he was putting away the ChapStick, I said, “No one’s crashing, Mr. Fannypack.”
“This is called a waist belt,” he said. “For emergencies.”
He kept Cipro, Imodium, amoxicillin, Sudafed. A whole pharmacy hidden in there.
“Made in China from 75 percent hypochondria and 50 percent mishegas,” I said, realizing my mistake a second too late.
“You can’t even add,” he said. “How can you run a business?”
“Where’s your faith? Where’s the man from last night making speeches, bring him back, I like him better. He thought I could do this.”
“That was all for show. What I say in front of the Chinese has almost no basis in reality.”
“So you were lying?”
“Saying what they need to hear. Look, if you want me to lie to you too, I will.”
“Why do we have to lie to anyone?”
“Alex,” he said with a theatrical sigh, “you have a way of making everyday life sound like a crime.”
So we both turned awkwardly to opposite windows. We were up on the highway driving past the Nanguo Peach Garden. Without turning back, I said, “You had me fooled. For a second there last night, I thought you actually trusted me. Ridiculous.”
“I’m only kidding, Mr. Serious. It’s not just you. Everything I worked for, built up, is on the edge. This place is a ticking time bomb.”
“Okay, Mr. Despair,” I said, “all I can tell you is that we won’t be short on orders after today.”
“There you go. Good man. But we’re still short on labor.”
“We’ll recruit more,” I said.
“I’m trying. Greed has this country by the throat. We used to have to beat them off with a stick. Literally. We’d fill all the jobs and the leftovers we’d chase out of the gate with sticks. But they don’t need us anymore.”
We drove past rows of chop shops and ma-and-pa factory-garages, and roadside fruit stands, and the sky was gray as a tombstone; we hadn’t seen the sun in a month, Yong blamed fog, I said pollution, Dad said who the hell cares, we weren’t here to sunbathe.
“I want you to promise me something,” Dad said. “Keep clear from Gang. When he comes by, let me handle him. There’s procedures. That’s who we’re serving. We’re married to him. You understand? Everyone is.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask why. Just do like I say. Okay? Promise me that.”
“Okay,” I said, “I heard you.”
“Whatever he does, that’s his choice. We do things the right way. Look, my point is you don’t fuck over your own people. You understand? That’s all I’m saying. There’s ethics to this, it may not look like it most of the time, but that’s not us. We do things different. Honest. Just because you’re in another country doesn’t mean you change. We’re Cohains, the priestly tribe. Cohains first before anything else. From my mouth to your ear.”
Once he got all that out I could tell he wasn’t done thinking on it because he removed his watch and started rubbing the back of his wrist against his lips, which meant he was thinking hard, though I think he also liked the way his wrist smelled after wearing a leather band all day. The Cohain business was my grandmother Nana’s obsession. One of the original twelve tribes of Israel. High priests. Direct descendants of Aaron, brother o
f Moses. Jewish, she’d said, but with a little something extra.
When we lived for those couple of years in the Brickyard in Lynn, Nana kept putting cloth napkins down wherever she sat so she wouldn’t be infected by poverty. Kennedy had killed the domestic factories with the Trade Expansion Act, docking tariffs by 50 percent. Factories were shutting down in Lynn and Beverly and Haverhill, guys snowed under. The work moved offshore and these guys couldn’t or refused to move with it. Men like my grandfather who bought their wives fur coats and Cadillacs slumped off to the Brickyard or threw themselves off Haverhill Bridge like my uncle Max, who the sheriff scooped out of a sluice gate at the end of a mill run. Fish had nibbled off his eyelids and fingertips.
My Zayde held on. Tight on cash flow, he started pocketing the federal withholding tax to run the business. He swore that when it turned around he’d pay back the government. The feds got him on fraud and tax liability for ninety thousand, and we were sunk. The agents in slick suits walked right into the factory, and Zayde asked, “Do you have to do this here?” My dad was sweeping the floor with a broom. “Not in front of the kid,” Zayde said, even though Dad was already thirty and married.
In the Brickyard, Lynn turned seemingly overnight into a wasteland of looted factories. Hard to come by a single loaf of challah on the Sabbath. Nana said, as always, “We’re Cohains, a priestly tribe, and we find a way.” Zayde mumbled, “Vera, we don’t have two dollars savings. Give it a rest.”
We’d always succeed, she believed, and Zayde’s failure was just further evidence that she’d been snookered into a bad marriage, that he was, as she’d accuse him long after his death, never a true Cohain. A Levite maybe, Galitzianer or Yisrael, but no Cohain. The Jewish elite. The magic of that word, elite, mangled our blood. Everything was for Cohain, this legacy of grief.
All was lost until Dad saved the business. Nana fell to her knees and pulled at her hair in gratitude. She could finally ditch her Oldsmobile, go back to eating off Royal Doulton sterling silver. All of life’s necessities returned. By then she’d already sworn off Zayde as a lousy good-for-nothing, a New York shit, and she kissed the tops of my father’s shoes and called him the Moschiach, which is Hebrew for Messiah.