by Gish Jen
She touched her feet together. Wendy sat up.
Bailey struggled and wailed, rolling away from me.
— Lan, I said. You have to tell them no TV until they are done with their homework.
— You do not like TV, there is no TV, she said finally.
— This is just so typical, said Lizzy then, capping her marker. —Typical! You can’t let us have one thing of our own. You have to ruin everything!
In an effort to calm Bailey, Lan offered him a piece of candy from her candy bowl, which sat on a small side table. He quieted and began to unwrap it, expertly.
— Lan, I said. I told you no candy.
In a voice I could hardly hear, she said: — That is date candy, kind of like fruit. Not the real candy.
Bailey wailed louder than ever when the candy was with-
drawn.
— Can-dee! he cried. Can-dee!
— If you do not like candy, there is no candy, said Lan.
She stood outside the light circle. Her voice was perfectly flat.
Behind us, the door opened. Russell sauntered in, unannounced.
— Hey, man, he said. What’s happening?
Russell had blond dreadlocks and an aggressive unflappability I recognized from the corporate world—the mark of someone for whom everything was a showdown. He wore bleach-splotched blue jeans, and a shirt with its sleeves ripped out.
— May I ask what you are doing here? I said.
— I’m here to get Lizzy.
— What on earth could you be talking about? I said. Elizabeth Bailey Wong, you know you are not allowed to go out on weeknights.
— This is what I mean, said Lizzy, finally sitting up. Her marker rolled across her math sheet but was stopped by the carpet nub.
— Weren’t we all happy until she walked in? And will you listen to her voice? Elizabeth Bailey Wong, you know you are not allowed to go out on weeknights. Can you hear how fake it is? Why don’t you just yell? That’s what I want to know. In fact, that’s what we all want to know around here. Why do you have to talk in that fake voice?
— In this family, we—
— Then who even wants to be in this family! yelled Lizzy. Because I do raise my voice! Because I do yell! Because I am not fake like you, as everyone can totally see!
Bailey froze in alarm.
— Come here, cutie, I said. It’s okay.
I reached for him, but Bailey sidestepped my embrace, stomped over to the side table, and grabbed a piece of candy.
CARNEGIE / — Lan loves them, I said.
— She’ll do anything to win them, said Blondie. She never says no.
— How can we expect her to micromanage the girls when she isn’t even supposed to be on in the evening?
— She encourages them. Don’t you see? How she encourages them? Do you know what Lizzy said to me? Why do you have to talk in that fake voice. That’s what we all want to know around here. We all. We all. You tell me who she means.
— Blondie. Think about what we tell her to do at school. Ignore people, right? You should practice what we preach and forget about what she says. Put that aging memory to work for you.
— Forget about what she says? Ignore her? She’s my daughter.
— She’s fifteen.
— And what about Lan? How old is she, please tell me. How old is she?
BLONDIE / I quit my job a week later.
CARNEGIE / — You don’t have to do this to get the family back, I said.
And: — Can we really afford for you to do this?
A minor matter of mutual interest that I did think we should discuss.
— I can’t afford not to, she said.
BLONDIE / Porter, my boss, was no more enthusiastic. He worked over a paper clip, bending and unbending it, then placing it on a pad of yellow paper to contemplate.
— Do we mind your deserting us? he said. Absolutely we mind.
Creatively, he offered me stock. Reduced hours, too—he knew this was a beef. More flex. More support. Even a company garden. There was a little south-facing plot that had apparently been double-dug then abandoned, over by the foundation of the main building. I did not know it had been double-dug, and was surprised that Porter knew. But I had noticed it, too. A plot right next to the foundation, the heat of the concrete bumping it up a whole growing zone, I guessed.
I would never have had the time, though, to actually work that garden. Porter had no idea how long things took, and never had.
Once upon a time a socially conscious money-market fund had seemed a thing to embrace. Not only because I had discovered it on my own, independent of Carnegie, but because I believed it. Would not such investing make a difference? It was easy to make the brochures beautiful, sick as I was—as we all were—of the Reagan go-go years. All that memememe. At the same time we founders were realists—realist idealists, I suppose.
Back then, the men in the company all had beards. The women wore their hair loose.
CARNEGIE / Hair. Everyone had hair.
BLONDIE / We all had the same size office.
CARNEGIE / There were quarters where the secretaries brought home more money than the CEO. Quarters where the managers barely eked out a living on their performance-linked compensation.
Then the nineties took off, and the same managers started taking safaris in the Serengeti. When their kids did Eygpt, they went boating on the Nile; they brought back papyrus for class projects. Their kitchens sprouted six-burner professional stoves, and Sub-Zero refrigerators. One-of-a-kind casseroles with whimsical handles and unusual glazes.
BLONDIE / In time, we founders all became wealthy—wealthy enough to live on one income with some belt tightening. Wealthy enough to live without any income, even, for a while, if Carnegie were really to lose his job.
Always we had talked in the office about what we meant by the word ‘good’—what it meant to do good, and whether that made you a good person. How you knew you had done enough good. Now we asked different questions. Was it okay to live the good life, for example, and Could we do more good if we felt good.
I worried the scar on my thumb as Porter appealed to me to reconsider.
— I’d be happy to up your profit sharing if you’d like, he said.
— We were making a difference, I said.
— We’re still making a difference.
— It used to be I was too busy to have lunch, I said. Now I’m so busy, I don’t always have lunch.
Porter frowned at his yellow pad. He never sat down without a yellow pad in front of him; however, he rarely wrote on it. Mostly he pushed it away, as he did now, like linear thinking itself.
— No one wants you to skip lunch, he said.
The first day of my new life I woke, as usual, at six-thirty. Carnegie reached out to hit the radio snooze bar, then he swung that same arm like a bat to tap me on the shoulder. Grunting.
— I don’t have to get up, remember? I said. You’re the one who has to get up.
To this he said something about cavemen and animals and at what point people began to force themselves awake when they really wanted to sleep and whether man was not truly a sick animal who had trouble taking even occasional days off until their mothers died. Then suddenly he had spirited himself out of bed; I could feel my body cool with the absence of his.
Of course, he sang while in the shower, sang and sang. He sometimes said that the reason he didn’t need to take a normal vacation was because he took a daily vacation. And indeed, the water flew. He was like a new-model garden sprinkler—the frenzied sort that spouted in all directions at once. He held the shampoo bottle high over his head so that the shampoo cascaded onto his scalp, then parked the bottle, uncapped, on a nearby shelf. The bottle would remain uncapped; he liked to throw the cap away first thing. Unlike me—why did I slavishly uncap my shampoo, use a bit of it, then cap it securely back up? I was a folder of towels as well, and of laundry, including underwear, before Lan came. Now she did it. But I used to do the folding,
a load every other day. Carnegie, in contrast, threw his underwear into his dresser drawer in a heap.
— What difference does it make? he said. Folding underwear has no marginal utility, and may I make a similar case for socks.
Might I also, in my new life, become a tosser of underwear?
The children were stirring; the hubbub began. I could hear it before they were up, even as they turned under the tangle of their blankets and began to realize that they’d been sleeping with one foot uncovered, or that their hand had somehow come to nestle inside their pillowcase—conditions Carnegie and I often discovered in the course of checking on them at night. Still I lay in bed—feeling how one of my toes had not yet woken up. This was my fourth toe, a toe in which I had mysteriously never enjoyed as much sensation as in the others. I wiggled it and felt the wiggle more than the toe itself. Then I stretched my arms over my head. Would I find in another year that I had stopped shaving my underarms, like my sisters? I felt the heaviness of my cheeks, the tensing of certain muscles at the corners of my mouth. My mother had tensed those same muscles—the line between her smile and her grimace could be hard to discern. She was the type, after all, to smile even as she expressed her displeasure.
She was not like Mama Wong, who just let you have it.
Usually I sprang out of bed organizing—planning and noting, my options laid out. When, today, I finally opened my eyes it was to admire a shaft of light emanating from the side of the blind. It formed a narrow bright hallway that extended clear across the room, disappearing into the opposite wall—a shortcut for spirits, it appeared. A few minutes later, another such passageway appeared; I could actually see the passages begin and grow with the minutes, magically elongating. How could I never have realized our room so gloriously banded, floor to ceiling, by the morning light? I traversed the bands, arms out to either side. Light, dark, light, dark, light, dark. How could I have thought myself living?
The girls crashed into the room, yelling, What are you doing? I showed them. Lizzy and Wendy tried it too, then, in their nightshirts. Prancing, whirling, tilting, giggling. Even Lizzy was giggling—how long since I’d seen her giggle like that! Bailey toddled in and began to jump too, but with a diaper so wet from the night I had to stop him and take it off. Should I have let him jump without a diaper? I did, with predictable results. But what fun to hear him shriek, and to see him run run run—as he had started to, all of a sudden, just this week—nonstop, his legs flashing, his body seeming to weigh nothing at all. How slow his sisters, in comparison. How already slowed by their years.
Lizzy lay down on the massage table for a massage, but it was time for those ancient ladies to get going if they weren’t going to be late for school. I shoved everyone out, and opened the blinds, feeling the force of the light—like something that could tumble you back, knock you over and drown you.
We were washed happy down to breakfast. How long the day already!
It stayed that way, all day.
For years my days had been about running late. A little late, fashionably late, inexcusably late. Now there was morning, and then afternoon, and then evening. There was even early morning, and late morning. Early afternoon. Late afternoon. Twilight. Who needed to live to a hundred when every day was a year? I saw how the sun moved, and how the moon moved; how the far corner of the yard roiled with earthworms. How the fine white mushrooms lifting clear from the soft ground left craters in the earth at the base of their stems, and—look—sported little soil hats.
My father had cataract surgery. I was able, for once, to fly home and help out. My father could not bend down, because of the pressure this would exert on his eyeballs; it was good to be able to help him get things, and send e-mails, and cook, and not leave all the nursing to my sisters. It was good, too, to see my father enjoying his vision. In just one eye—he was going to have the other one done soon. It was good to laugh with him; he saw like a teenager now! I got more exercise keeping up with him than I had gotten for a long time, a turn around the block quickly stretching into five miles of walking a day.
WENDY / Mom quits her job and in the beginning it’s like, Oh I love having time. She loves it that she has the time to walk places. She loves finding out things she didn’t know, like that I love grilled cheese. Somehow she missed that, she says, she doesn’t know how she could have missed that.
BLONDIE / I took the kids to the beach several times a week. We caught hermit crabs, and a real crab. We buried one another in the sand. We made drip sculptures—a family of hoary creatures with elaborate sea-grass hula skirts.
I took the girls on city expeditions, too—playgoing, museumgoing, concertgoing.
— Guilt tripping, said Carnegie.
I didn’t care. I could not believe my good luck—that I could stop whenever I wanted—that I could pause. That I could examine, for no good reason, a dragonfly—its stick-pin eyes, its stretch-net wings. And that gray-green skeleton pattern that traversed the length of its back; it seemed to be wearing its X-ray. I could stop to watch the throttle of a bird’s throat as it warbled—to note how the bird tucked its tail under its body with the effort. One day I saw a snapping turtle. Probably there were always snapping turtles in our yard; there was a pond not far from us. But this one! An enormous prehistoric-looking creature with a great leathery dewlap. He looked like the march of time personified—determined, serious, inexorable.
How sufficient life seemed, for once. Every day I felt satisfaction. Every day I saw the birch trees in the yard anew. I saw them as protected, beclouded, wind-fluttered, earthbound—and in the now blowing, now settling, now alighting of my mind, felt rapture.
What a lovely community I belonged to now! Margie, Lindsay, Jaime, Cindee. Over the years I had lost friends, one by one, for lack of time. Now the world of friendship sprang effortlessly back to life. Soon I was joining friends at the park at nine, in running sneakers; I was joining them at the Tuesday farmer’s market at ten. A book club formed around us—a reincarnation, apparently, of an earlier group. We read clusters of books—about blindness, about Australia. About religion, death, daughters.
I gardened as I had not gardened in years—truly tending to my plants.
Bailey and I spent hours in worm play now. We also did water play, sand play, pebble play. We walked funny. Talked funny. Took two baths a day. The girls and I slipcovered some furniture in natural muslin. How serene our new living room!
— Like a spa, said Lizzy.
— Like heaven, said Wendy.
We made cloud pillows, sky afghans. We admired our work—patted ourselves loudly on the back. And then sitting there, ensconced in it all, the too-warm afghans spread at our feet, we began to talk—Wendy especially, but Lizzy too. They began to tell me things in a way they hadn’t since they were toddlers. There was a boy in love with her, Wendy said. He turned red whenever he saw her; his name was Lionel. She beat him at chess, but he beat her at Scrabble. And there were girls in her grade wearing real bras, with cups, she said, not trainers. They had to buy their bathing suits in the grown-up department, otherwise their nipples would show.
Lizzy announced that she was going to become a journalist when she grew up, seeing as how she was good at giving people a hard time and could always tell when people were lying. Also she asked me if you really always had to make the guy wear a rubber—a baggy, she called it.
— Oh, Lizzy, please yes, I said. Will you promise me you will? Will you promise?
— I promise, she said solemnly, her head to one side. — I’m not saying it’s an issue. Just that it would be so stupid to get AIDS.
— It would, it would be stupid, I said. It would be very very stupid.
It was worth having quit just to have that conversation.
Other conversations, too. For example, the conversation about whether she could go camping with Russell, even if a whole bunch of other people came along. The conversation about seeing Dr. Mark—my friend, yes, but a wonderful gynecologist to boot, I assured her. The co
nversation about permanent tattoos; we agreed she could do what she liked once she was eighteen. The conversation about whether she was allowed to turn her cell phone off when she was out with Russell—the upshot being no.
And what about expensive gifts? We had a conversation about what Russell was and was not allowed to give her.
— In this family, we don’t accept electronics, I said. In this family, we recognize that no gifts come free.
— That is, like, so cynical, said Lizzy. Why shouldn’t he give me stuff his family has extra of?
Still, she returned to Russell the CD Walkman he wanted to give to her—a good thing since it turned out to belong to his stepmother.
— She would never have missed it, Lizzy declared at one point.
But another day, she said: — I can’t believe Russell thought that was okay.
Both girls had programs for the summer. Wendy was in arts camp and Lizzy in a drama workshop. But while Wendy could take days off whenever, Lizzy had rehearsal to think about. For guess what—she was going to be Maria in The Sound of Music!
— The director thinks I have a voice, she reported, dazed.
Maria! A voice!
— He doesn’t think anyone will care that I don’t look Austrian, she said. I told him two of my great-grandparents were German. He said that must be why it seems so natural.
Carnegie rehearsed almost as much as Lizzy:
How do you make her stay
And listen to all we say?
But Lizzy sang, too:
Ed-el-weiss, ed-el-weiss . . .
Only in her room, of course. Here she was, preparing to sing for an auditorium full of people, and yet she still wouldn’t sing in front of us. Out in the hall, though, we could hear her; I spent whole evenings in the hall, listening.
Her play was a success. Was this our Lizzy? In a dirndl? Jittery the first night, but in finer and finer voice every night after that, until by the end of the run she filled the whole stage, the whole auditorium. We clapped and clapped, crying.
— Lizzy is going to be okay, said Carnegie later. We can stop worrying. She’s going to be able to support us in our old age after all.