The Love Wife

by Gish Jen

  That way the children will at least speak Chinese, not like Carnegie.

  — Do we even know this orphan wants to come? asked Blondie. And: — Isn’t there some way around this?

  We probed and queried, but our stalwart Hong Kong relative was, in his e-mails, quite adamant. He wrote:

  I myself am an attractive widower who nonetheless never remarried subsequent to a vow I made to my wife on her deathbed. As she died, I promised her I would never lay eyes on another woman, and I haven’t. Eyes, or anything else, I might add. Moreover, I gave up beer and ice cream subsequent to a vow I made to my mother, on her deathbed. You may think this strange, but I do not mind at all. It gave her peace of mind to have a guarantee I would take care of my health in her absence. People always like guarantees, don’t you find? It’s human nature. Whenever I see people drinking I think of that guarantee and feel a kind of peace in my heart myself.

  We wrote back. In another long e-mail Mr. Peace-in-His-Heart explained that he did not care whether Mama Wong was demented or not.

  Her brilliant mind was obviously clear as a bell when she wrote the will. If you were to behold the writing, you would be astounded; it is so perfectly intelligible. I would be happy to fax you a copy. And behold the fact that she managed to get the letter posted. Behold the fact that she to all appearances recalled the address from memory, making only one small mistake, on the apartment number. Instead of 726, she wrote 762. Now are you not mightily impressed? I myself was mightily impressed.

  — We could use someone new, I said.

  BLONDIE / Our present live-out, Leesa, was completely unreliable, it was true. Bailey liked her, but she called in sick when her cat disappeared. She called in sick when her boyfriend came to town. She called in sick when she had a headache.

  On the other hand, the live-in stories! We had a friend who hadn’t cooked a thing since her dear Lucy came. And we ourselves had had an absolutely perfect Chinese sitter one year, when the girls were young—Ying, her name was. All our friends said how present she was.

  But there was also the nanny who stole the baby’s clothes. There was the nanny whose ex-boyfriend stalked her. There was the nanny who hid booze everywhere.

  Of course, Lan—her name was Lan—wouldn’t be a regular nanny. As for how to sponsor her, Carnegie said that we could bring her in as a student.

  — It can be arranged, he said.

  I wished I could say no. But even now, when I closed my eyes, I sometimes saw Mama Wong falling, falling.

  — A second wife, I said. Only your mother.

  — What second wife?

  — Only your mother, I said, would send us, from her grave, the wife you should have married.

  PART II

  10

  Trying to Be Happy

  BLONDIE / How could a collection of pages have meant so much? Not even an actual book, but the promise of one—a promise sent by e-mail. Who even knew if there was such a book? And this Mr. Peace-in-His-Heart! Sometimes I pictured Mama Wong fresh from her harbor swim. I pictured her dripping wet, her basketballs still in her arms, buzzing her relative’s apartment from downstairs. What sort of person would simply say, Come up? And would not such a person be capable of other help? Of even agreeing, perhaps, to contact her son after her death—promising him this family book though there was, in fact, no book? Though there was, in fact, only her determination, fierce as the determination that got her off the Mainland, to replace her daughter-in-law with someone more to her liking?

  — I believe this is called paranoia, said Carnegie.

  Never mind the million-dollar incident. Never mind the promise that turned into What million dollars? As if I had a million dollars. He believed what he wanted to believe.

  Of course, there could be a book. I believed that, too. But Carnegie would believe nothing else. He believed not only that there was such a book, but that he had an obligation to get hold of it—that it would be unnatural to keep such a book from being passed from generation to generation.

  I understood this, in one way.

  And yet I asked: — What if it is simply a list of names you cannot read?

  He admitted that some of these books said a bit about each family member, but that some did not—that some were simply genealogies.

  And if his was simply a genealogy he could not read—would that not make him feel, more than anything, plain American?

  I tried to ask this gently, but still Carnegie was upset.

  — Is that how your family keepsakes make you feel? he demanded. Plain American? How about your Grandma Dotie’s empty boxes?

  — I’m sure I would feel differently about them if we had to have some German relative move in with us for years.

  — It’s all I have, he said. I have no sisters, no brothers, no uncles, no aunts. I am as on a darkling plain. Of course the book matters to me. I have no family.

  — What about your children? What about me? Aren’t we your family?

  He paused, then said: — I hazard you know what I mean.

  And, of course, I did.

  He kissed my neck.

  — Don’t worry, he murmured. I’m sure this woman will remind me of my mother. And think what it will mean one day to the bambini. Bailey especially, but the girls too. To know where they might have come from. Trust me. This book, this nanny will have zilch effect on our marriage.

  But already they were affecting our marriage—already I felt his unwillingness to defend us against his mother’s scheming. And the intensity of his desire—already he seemed to have half left us. He might as well have been having an affair.

  Leave it to Mama Wong, to prove more powerful dead than alive!

  Wrote Gabriela in an e-mail:

  i would feel abandoned too, but maybe you should give him time. maybe he’s still in mourning, that’s all. i think i read somewhere how being in mourning and being in love are a lot more alike than you’d expect.

  To which I responded:

  What about the second wife? Should I let her come?

  Gabriela:

  do you have a choice? i’m not sure you have a choice.

  The will did seem to have precipitated some new phase of mourning. Carnegie was more closed off now than when his mother first died.

  — All I wanted, you know, when my mother was alive, was to get away from her, he said one day. — All I wanted was to be free.

  — And now that you’re free . . .

  — I freely chain myself to her.

  He laughed at the irony of it—a hopeful sign. Still he spent hours, now, chatting on the Internet with people who had family books.

  CARNEGIE / How many volumes would it be? What color? And what would the pages be like? Would they be rice paper? Would they be conventional pages bound into a conventional book? Or those horizontal scroll-like sheets I had heard about, folded in half and bound with silk thread? Would it need restoration? Would I understand its dating? Apparently the Chinese used a Byzantine system involving intersecting ten- and twelve-year cycles, which began anew with each emperor. Or so said one chat-room buddy. Luckily another volunteered that there were tables converting the Chinese system into ours, which you could buy easily enough in Chinatown.

  BLONDIE / How long this obsession hung over us!

  Eventually, though, he began to obsess less. Eventually he became more peacefully convinced that the book would be his—developing, finally, some of the focused ease of faith. This was in one way lovely. In another, it was disconcerting. His certainty was so substantial that he could almost have stood it, in place of the book to come, on the bookshelf. He had only, he believed, to be patient.

  CARNEGIE / And, of course, to secure the iffy cooperation of my wife.

  BLONDIE / — Our family will always be our family, he reassured me.

  — Will it?

  — And you will always be my Blondie.

  We made love that night, and again at dawn—having fallen asleep naked, without brushing our teeth, curled up together
like newlyweds. We were, miraculously for our age, not tired. Still we kissed ourselves back to sleep for a while before the alarm rang—how loudly! And in the bathroom mirror, there we were—flushed rose, still. How mottled, I. How even-toned, he. Happy.

  Was this not love?

  Our family will always be our family.

  I thought of his words some months later as I e-mailed Gabriela:

  The girls are no longer quite mine.

  and why do you say that? she replied.

  Last night Wendy said, “Lanlan is like us. She just is, I can’t explain it. Lanlan understands everything, even if you don’t tell her. She can read our minds.”

  and lizzy?

  Lizzy says she honestly would not be surprised to find out Lan was her real mother. “Lanlan gets things,” she says. “Like she always asks what the other kids think, and doesn’t say things like why do you care. Plus she knows a fake when she sees one.”

  i can see why you’re worried.

  WENDY / Lanlan teaches us Chinese, starting with Ni you mei you Zhonguo pengyou?—Do you have any Chinese friends? That’s weird.

  But pretty soon she figures out what works. She gives us all Chinese names, to begin with, which we sort of had already, Dad says, I guess his mom gave us some. Except nobody can remember what they are, that’s why Lanlan has to give us new ones, and why she has to teach us to write them. So we won’t forget. I am Wenli, meaning culture strength. Lizzy is Zili, meaning self strength—independent. Bailey is Baili, white strength. Also she figures out all about us. Like she asks whether or not I like Ping-Pong. And do I like to draw pictures? And do I like to sing songs? I like learning to grind Chinese ink with an inkstone, and to paint bamboo with a Chinese brush, and I can make a bunch of paper animals myself now, like a panda bear, and a frog, and a phoenix. Sometimes I teach Lanlan chess while Lanlan teaches me Chinese, we can talk about the Sicilian defense for like hours.

  I like hearing Chinese versions of stories we know. Like ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ only with a soldier hero who gets the grandma back out of the wolf’s stomach, and who doesn’t shoot the wolf but tames him instead, so that by the end everyone is friends. And there are Chinese versions of songs we know too. Like ‘Frère Jacques’ turned into

  Two-oo tigers, two-oo tigers.

  How fast they run,

  How fast they run.

  O-ne has no ea-rs,

  O-ne has no tail.

  Ver-y strange. Ver-y strange.

  Mom doesn’t like that song because it calls the tigers strange, she says she doesn’t like all the talk about strangeness.

  BLONDIE / The Chinese had so many charming expressions involving the word ‘strange.’ For example, guai wu, ‘strange animals’—meaning foreigners.

  WENDY / But Dad doesn’t care, he’s just glad that whatever Lanlan’s teaching, it’s Chinese. He thinks it’s good for us, Bailey especially, not that it’s not important for me and Lizzy too. But it’s like he wants everybody to be at least a little Chinese, and me and Lizzy have the black hair. He doesn’t have to worry as much about us, we’re not in danger of turning total Baileys.

  — I want Bailey to be Bailey Wong, he says. Not Bailey Bailey.

  Still Mom says she doesn’t like that song, she doesn’t like calling things strange. Not that Mom doesn’t find as many things strange as Lanlan does, Lizzy says, she just doesn’t think it’s nice to say so.

  — And which is worse? says Lizzy.

  Lizzy is all excited because of her boyfriend Russell who’s into music too, although not exactly Chinese music, obviously. He’s more into stuff like Korn, and Creed, and Rage Against the Machine, and Lenny Kravitz. He’s a senior and plays the guitar—like seriously, Lizzy says. Also he fades his own jeans instead of paying like two hundred dollars for somebody else to fade them, and he can borrow his parents’ car whenever he wants, because they have three. Lizzy says Russell wants to live in a cabin and catch his own food and not see anyone he doesn’t want to. Meaning like he just wants to see Lizzy, and the guys in his band, and maybe Lizzy’s best friend, Xanadu, who’s going out with the drummer.

  — I don’t think you’d like catching your own food, I say.

  Of course that just makes Lizzy roll up her sleeves to look at her henna tattoos as if my saying that is making them smudge or something.

  But then she says: — I could never gut a fish.

  She’s shivering a little. It’s getting cold out.

  — You’d probably have to eat squirrels, I say.

  And for a while we sit there and watch the goat run across the yard. It’s misty down near the woods, there are these cold pockets, so all you can see is hooves going kick kick kick in the fog. Of course he’s not supposed to be out but there he is anyway, oh well. We let him run. And that makes us feel like sisters in a way—that we both sit there and see that and just sit some more. Because we know he’ll come back, Tommy always comes back.

  — Squirrels, ugh, says Lizzy.

  We laugh.

  I like the Chinese songs because it’s like doing everything I did when I was little, only different. It’s like growing up again, only someplace like Russell is talking about, where there is no Elaine.

  — You’re Chinese! says Elaine when I come to school. — You’re Chinese!

  — I’m Chinese American, what are you? I say.

  That’s what my mom says I should say, first of all because plain Chinese means you don’t really live here, like Lanlan, and of course I live here. Also I think it’s supposed to confuse the other person a little and make them not sure what to say back.

  But Elaine doesn’t get confused.

  — I’m real American, she says.

  We’re supposed to talk about our roots in school so the first thing she says when she raises her hand in circle time is: — Wendy is from China.

  — Thank you, Elaine, please allow Wendy to tell us where she is from herself, says Miss Tobey. And then she says: — Wendy. Where are you from?

  But I don’t say anything, it’s just like they say on my report card, sometimes I don’t say anything.

  — She isn’t saying anything! says Elaine. She knows how to talk but she doesn’t talk! She’s shy!

  — Thank you, Elaine, that’s enough, says Miss Tobey.

  — I’m not shy! says Elaine. I’m outgoing!

  — Thank you, Elaine, says Miss Tobey again, and this time you can see how her head twitches to the side when she’s mad.

  — I’m outgoing and that’s a good thing in America because if you don’t get yours nobody is going to get it for you! says Elaine.

  — If I have to thank you one more time, says Miss Tobey, you are headed to Think Tank.

  Miss Tobey told Mom we’re going to do a whole unit on China soon, everybody’s excited except me.

  BLONDIE / — You’re not proud? I asked her.

  She shook her head no.

  — It’s that Elaine, isn’t it, I said.

  She looked at her knees.

  — I’m going to talk to Miss Tobey.

  — Don’t, she begged then. I mean it.

  We sat in her bedroom surrounded by Chinese slippers, Chinese paper cuts, Chinese dolls, Chinese brush paintings. She had a Chinese birdcage and a Chinese cricket cage. She had a Chinese silk quilt embroidered with bats.

  CARNEGIE / Concentrating the chinoiserie in the adopted children’s bedrooms: a classic mistake.

  BLONDIE / But Lizzy in a fit one day had bequeathed her Chinese everything to Wendy. So there it all was in her room.

  CARNEGIE / A veritable Chinatown tchotchke shop.

  BLONDIE / Of course, there were non-Asian items also. Besides the stuffed panda, there were many other stuffed animals. Books. Wendy’s upstairs chessboard, on which she was playing a game against herself. That being the sort of thing Wendy could do—take both sides of something, and play it right out.

  How unlike her sister Lizzy!

  — I’m sorry you’re not excited, I said.
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  She shrugged.

  I wanted to cry. How could she not be excited?

  CARNEGIE / Had we not, after all, done Chinese lanterns and Chinese dragon races and Chinese dumplings since she was two? Chinese culture camp? The Chinese Community Center? We subscribed to the Families with Children from China newsletter. And how mightily we had strived to build her self-esteem, to give her ‘tools for her tool kit.’ Did we not balance our checkbook on the abacus? Find the girls Asian dolls? Provide them with multiracial crayons?

  BLONDIE / We had not gone so far as to move to Chinatown, the way some people had. But I wasn’t the one who resisted that idea. It was Carnegie who laughed and claimed to hear the voice of his mother.

  China-crazy those people are.

  CARNEGIE / What one week with Mama Wong would have done to them.

  BLONDIE / And yet we had seriously talked about moving, way back when—wanting to do something, anything for this child who cried all night in her sleep. We could never have imagined that, before Wendy—that a child could sob as she slept. It went on for months. If we had believed Chinatown would feel like China to her, we would have moved.

  Sometimes at night I still woke up, thinking I heard crying. Sometimes I still entered her bedroom, and put my hand on her warm bony back, thankful for the even peace of its rise and fall. I was thankful it no longer heaved and shuddered as it once did, night after endless night. Wendy’s window looked out onto the yard—slightly bowed, the land glowed in the dimmest moonlight like something rising. How thankful I was for that, too. What a blessing to have something to gaze on, in those long hours.

  — You’re not going to have to speak Chinese in front of your classmates, I said now. If that’s what you’re worried about.

  She arranged some dark polished stones on her desk, placing them, one at a time, in a shiny line.

  — Though I bet they’ve never known anyone their age who spoke Chinese, I said.