by Gish Jen
Nowhere was this sense stronger than here, at the family summer place. This had in fact at one point been Mr. Buck’s sleep-over camp; but at another, a boys’ day school. Besides Mr. Buck’s own cabin, there was a library and a mess hall. The cabins all had blackboards; the Baileys were still finding compasses and ink bottles and pen nibs among the pine needles. What with Renata’s husband the mapmaker ably charting where each artifact was found, this activity constituted one of the island’s principal pleasures, surpassed only by the restoring of Mr. Buck’s original abode. For Mr. Buck had been a Michelangelo of home improvements. His many windows opened via homemade crank-and-bicycle-chain mechanisms. The bathroom featured a chute for baby diapers, as well as a self-setting timer on the shower. (The water shut off when the timer ran out.) Was he not a kind of genius? So the Baileys agreed.
But every proper genius has limits, as the Baileys liked to point out, and so too did Mr. Buck. Exhibit A being the foundations of his cabins, for there were no foundations to speak of. He had simply built the cabins on wooden ties, placed directly on the ground; the Baileys would have given anything to know why. Or what to do about it, now that the water table was rising. The plateau sank a few inches every year.
— Have them replaced, I said when the subject first came up in my presence. — Jack up the buildings and have some footings poured.
— We hereby name you Sir Buildings and Grounds, intoned Gregory immediately. — Our Own Home Repair Counsel, whom we do love as we love ourself.
BLONDIE / Our place had become something of a headache. It was so far north, no one could get there very often. And it was assessed at so little that major repairs just didn’t make sense. What’s more, a developer had recently bought up twenty acres directly across the water from us.
CARNEGIE / An eighth of an acre each, his plots were going to be; his cockamamie plan was for, count ’em, one hundred sixty ‘quality residences.’ As if the market would support anything near that! We pictured tattered tarps, abandoned Dumpsters. Pits, rubble, wild dogs. Or worse, against our predictions, success: lane upon lane of cookie-cutter condos, in perky shades of aluminum cladding.
It was enough to make the Baileys think about selling. Not for the first time; a trailer park too was growing right smack at the base of their peninsula. But where else to buy? Downhill skiing had come to Maine, sending prices up. They could no longer begin to afford anything waterfront, other than where they had it. And hadn’t Independence Island been in the family forever?
BLONDIE / I wore Grandma Dotie’s dress. Neither of my sisters had worn it, but Gabriela had thought it blowsily marvelous enough that I had been moved to at least try it on. And then how could I not wear it? For it fit me perfectly—an old-fashioned, fairy-queen affair with a high neck, and long runs of covered buttons.
CARNEGIE / Not to say a bustle Peter called the apotheosis of the drape.
— No doubt it involves pulleys, he said.
Gregory said it put him in mind of various phenomena of the insect world, to wit, physogastric queen bees.
— Oh, be quiet, you bachelors, said Gabriela. Or I won’t marry either one of you!
They were chastened then, and admitted the dress to be fun, a spoof of a pouf. For both of them were a little in love with Gabriela, indeed asked her two or three times a day if she would marry one or the other of them, her choice.
To this she would reply: — Oh, go marry your mama in heaven.
Or else: — I thought I married you already.
Back then Gabriela was a sexpot redhead, always in a flurry, who secretly longed to be serious, as everyone knew.
— But I am not serious, I am not! she would moan, while all around her men assured her: — No, you are! You are!
— About what? Tell me! she would demand.
— About something.
— Something, she would snort. Something is nothing. But you wait and see. One day I will find my true self.
She smiled dreamily.
— I imagine it will be through massage.
BLONDIE / People said I was the spitting image of my mother.
CARNEGIE / Maybe that was why she began talking, endlessly, about what her mother would have worn to the wedding (blue). What her mother read (nonfiction). How her mother died (cancer). She talked about her mother’s painting restoration. How she had worked for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts at the end. How she had worked on a Turner. How this had involved many substances besides paint. How people had called her a genius.
— Is that so, I said.
I wondered how well I knew my fiancée.
Her lashes after the ceremony seemed longer than I had noticed; she felt like an alien in my arms. When I kissed her in the pavilion, her bustle forced me to support her waist in a new way. How beautifully her arched back fit my outspread hand; that was marvelous, I supposed, though did not those covered buttons dig into her back? I was glad, in any case, to see her hoist excited Lizzy up onto her hip, a familiar gesture, and to see Lizzy wrap her bare legs around Blondie’s waist.
Mama Wong and her friends had been the only party to arrive by car, i.e., her new air-conditioned Mercedes, complete with chauffeur, from which they had to be coaxed out.
— We can see through the windshield, said Mama Wong. Mosquitoes have plenty to eat already.
Once out, though, she softened. The brothers Bailey fanned her and brought her drinks. They told her jokes. They made her teach them Chinese. They complimented her on her hairdo, so very like a beachball.
But Doc Bailey, more importantly, agreed with her.
— One thing I tell you: that trailer park no good for property value, she said.
He nodded.
— And that is foundation rot down there. Foundation rot mean big trouble.
He nodded.
— You know what this place is? This place is so-called white elephant.
He nodded.
The result: she seemed almost touched when, late in the afternoon, Blondie changed out of her mother’s dress and into a red silk qipao. Also when Blondie knelt with me (this took some doing in that dress) and asked for her blessing. Never mind that this was a creative traditional touch straight out of The Compleat Ethnic Wedding, which Gabriela had given Blondie for a shower present. Mama Wong was moved.
— Okay, she said. She was seated in a baronial chair dug up in a flea market; the pillow behind her shone gold, with a deep braided fringe that could have come from a Gilbert and Sullivan admiral’s uniform. — You are married now. Nothing anybody can do.
— Thank you, said Blondie, her hands clasped as if in prayer.
— Don’t say anything, said Mama Wong. Let Carnegie say. Bride not supposed to talk too much.
My neck began to itch.
— Thank you, I said.
— And next time don’t put white flower in your hair, she said. Chinese people consider that very bad luck, white is the color people wear when parents die.
— Do you at least like the dress? I asked.
— She found a good dressmaker, said Mama Wong. She is not easy to fit, I can see.
Blondie’s eyes welled up, threatening her mascara; I thought I heard her dress rip as she stood. We turned toward the assembly.
How everyone clapped! The tear, happily, turned out to be minor. A septic-tank scare turned out to be just that, a scare. Neighbors from the trailer park came and ate cake; one man was heard to yell, You leave our women alone! but was quickly hushed by others. Anyway, I did and didn’t hear him, having developed a mystery case of hives. This, happily, responded to an antihistamine in the medicine cabinet, though the expiration date on the box had long since passed.
Our local blue heron perched at the end of the dock—staring, with pencil-point attention, toward the moving water.
Meanwhile, every guest with a son or a cousin or a niece who had married in an unorthodox way proudly got out pictures of their new family members, and sometimes of the products of the union. They showed these to my m
other. I held my breath, but Mama Wong generously oohed and aahed even over the mulatto babies, agreeing that they were unutterably precious and beautiful. The new face of America.
— You see what kind luck that baby bring you, she told one parent.
The parent beamed.
To another couple, she said: — Don’t worry. Carnegie and Blondie’s babies going to look even funnier than that.
How people laughed!
BLONDIE / How people danced! Even Mama Wong and her friends danced, their faces red—with one another, and with my family, and with other people too. The dancing spilled out of the tent, onto the lawn.
Outside the circle of our gathering, quiet gathered. The air cooled; the ground cooled. The mountains seemed to be assuming their rightful power as their shadows deepened; the drape of the willows was silhouetted by the sun. Still everyone bounced and swirled, magically unbothered by mosquitoes. But Mama Wong asked the time, and finally we pushed off in an old wooden rowboat—our ever-faithful Daedalus—with Lizzy in the stern, on the bench. She was bundled up in her bunny PJ’s and asleep, amid many blankets.
A shower of clattering rice. Then, to the music of our oarlocks, we bid everyone good-bye and headed to a campsite across the way—the first place I had ever spent a night alone. The music resumed, but receded. We could see the crowd begin to thin. Loons crooned. There was a distant echo, and there were bats over the water—hundreds of bats. Every now and then one passed so close we thought we could feel, not so much its wing, as a push of air. My own thoughts then were flying too, circling. I wanted to give voice to one of them, but how to settle long enough on one, and not another, to speak? I hovered near Lizzy, trying to make sure she didn’t get bitten; I had read once that a child could get bitten by a bat without anyone noticing. I crossed her bunny ears over her face, to protect her.
CARNEGIE / — Your mother seemed so happy, said my wife—my wife!—after a while.
— That red dress appears to have done the trick, I agreed.
— It’s so tight I can hardly breathe. I shouldn’t have eaten any cake. I was fine until I ate the cake.
Blondie was still wearing the Chinese dress. She had intended to change into a third outfit, as per Chinese tradition, for her leavetaking. But that involved spaghetti straps, which at the last minute she had thought too much for my mother and her friends.
— She’s so crazy about you now, she’s hoping you’ll go into business with her, I said; trying out the idea in a joking manner.
Blondie laughed so loud she seemed to be startling the early stars out of the just-dark sky.
— I thought there would be some strings on that million dollars, she said.
Million dollars?
It seemed that after I had left Mama Wong, the night of the rehearsal dinner, she had summoned Blondie to her room. Blondie had responded to the summons, accepted a juice from the mini-bar, then sat as directed in the armchair. Mama Wong had offered her the million dollars not to get married; Blondie had accepted. Whereupon Mama Wong gave Blondie permission to marry me after all.
— You mean you agreed?
I stopped rowing. The boat rocked.
— I didn’t agree, exactly. I just, you know.
— You know what?
She didn’t answer.
I pushed the oar handles into my lap, so that the blades lifted like wings from the water, dripping. The boat rocked some more; the current nosed at it, nudging it clockwise. Lizzy woke and began to cry. Jane cuddled her.
— What if she had held you to your word? I asked. What if she hadn’t relented? Would you have taken the money and married someone else?
— Of course not, she said.
— Then why did you agree?
— I’m an agreeable person.
— How can you not have told me?
— She said you knew.
Was that true?
You can’t trust that Blondie.
I watched her jostle Lizzy and rummage in the diaper bag, and decided not to say more. Our wedding night, after all. The water; such stars as there were; the moon. I lowered the oars to the water and let go. The blades splashed and caught, my left handle driving in toward my waist, my right swinging away.
— I’ll warm up the bottle, I offered.
We had a portable bottle warmer that recharged in the microwave, one of a panoply of nifty items that had recently filled our lives. All you had to do was crush it, to generate heat.
The warmth felt good. The air smelt of a campfire somewhere. From far away, across the water, came the surprisingly clear sound of people arguing.
The plan had been to leave Lizzy with her regular sitter, Zoren. But when Zoren, just our luck, developed an appendix, we decided not to leave Lizzy with her aunts. Seeing as how she knew them but not well, and was in the middle of stranger anxiety.
— We need to find someone we can trust her with besides Zoren, I said.
— We do. But first have a look at your daughter.
The moon shone on her sleeping face. Her face was not as perfectly circular as it had been that very first time I held her; still, her eyes seemed freshly inscribed. She had eyebrows, but no brow bone as of yet. Her chin too was more of a location than an actual feature. By day her cheeks were identifiable by their pinkness; at night they were yet one more idea we had about her face. Her bangs stuck up stick-like, softly bristly. Her mouth was still tiny—way too small for a grown-up spoon. How pure she was; it seemed to me that there was nothing left in the world that could be described as pure, only this child. These days when I picked her up, she still nestled her head into my shoulder and kissed me—mmma! And curled up her legs. How I loved that, the way she picked up her little legs, so high her knees approached her belly button. I loved the way she curled her feet up like shrimp and turned them in toward each other. A ball of life she was, still; more ball than forked stick. So much in life fell short of its billing—but a child, a child! How extraordinary her lashes! And what was her skin made of? In the moonlight it appeared a semisolid, something just poured. She was asleep again.
— Are you happy?
I volunteered that it felt odd to be wearing a ring.
— You know, this evening is not as romantic as it could be.
You really think you can trust that Blondie?
I rowed. My wife, settling Lizzy back in her Polarfleece nest, came and nestled herself in her own nest by my feet, amid our sleeping bags. She undid the frogs of her dress, revealing a distinctly bordello bra.
— Ah, she said. That’s better. Don’t stop rowing.
And so it was that she was half naked when we were set upon at the campsite by wild bears who turned out to be friends as well as Blondie’s sibs and Gabriela.
Lizzy was up the rest of the night.
BLONDIE / Later, the gifts were of two sorts. There were practical items like cookie jars and toaster ovens, mostly from his side, and Asian selections, mostly from mine. There was a trivet made from the character for ‘long life,’ a Japanese lantern, an Asian-fusion cookbook; a feng shui manual, a set of rice bowls, two pairs of zebrawood chopsticks, and a bamboo desk fountain. I loved all of these. The Chinese things from his side were harder to be enthusiastic about—a pair of baroque jade carvings, complete with ornate rosewood stands, for example. An elaborately embroidered tablecloth, too big for any table we owned. Happily, there were more simply embroidered pillowcases too, and an amazing grain of rice, onto which had been inscribed an entire Tang Dynasty poem. This came with a stand and magnifying glass.
CARNEGIE / Mama Wong indeed gave us the million dollars she had promised Blondie, only with the new stipulation that it be used for an investment property we would manage and own jointly with her. But that wasn’t the only surprise. Doc Bailey, with the blessing of the other Bailey children, was inspired to give us the summer house.
— No no no, we said. It’s the family house. We can’t accept it.
Doc Bailey, though, had real support.
&
nbsp; — Don’t worry, we’ll all visit, said Peter cheerfully. We’ll bring our dogs and expect to be fed and never leave. You’ll just take care of it.
How to respond to such largesse?
5
Nothing’s Plenty for Me
WENDY / She doesn’t need much, but she does carry an umbrella if it’s sunny, to make sure she doesn’t get tan.
— In America it’s good to be tan, we say.
But Lanlan wants to be pale anyway. This Indian summer starts almost as soon as she comes so that she does not put her umbrella away until practically October.
— I am not American, she says.
It’s just a little beige fold-up umbrella, and she only uses it around lunchtime. Still we think it’s weird.
— Would you want to be? says Lizzy. American, I mean.
— No no no no, says Lanlan, smiling. Too many beeps here. Other times she says: — This is not my home.
— But would you want it to be your home?
— Better to want nothing, she says. Then nothing means nothing.
She puts her finger up when she says stuff like that, it’s like the finger is talking instead of her.
LAN / In Chinese we say wu ai—without love. That it is better to be without attachment. Just as it is better to do things—wu wei—without effort.
That is how my father used to talk. Like a Daoist monk.
WENDY / How can you do stuff without doing it? That’s what we say in the beginning, but after a while we sort of get it or at least Lizzy does.
LIZZY / Because it was like so true! Like I could see that if I tried to get some guy, it just messed things up. It was better to go with the flow.
WENDY / — Better to want nothing, says Lanlan again, her finger up. — Ask for nothing. Expect nothing.