The Love Wife

by Gish Jen

  She put her hands to her lower back, stretching a little. Her elbows flared. She turned the heat off.

  Something between us relaxed.

  But then to my surprise and confusion, she turned to me. There was a new sluggishness to her grace; you could see how soon she’d be moving like a largish piece of low-gear construction machinery. Still, we kissed.

  We cooled down later with ice cream.

  LAN / It was like a grade-B movie. I could see that, how my life was like a grade-B movie. I wanted my life to be like a grade-A movie now, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. I thought I should watch some grade-A movies and find out, but when I went to the video store and asked for a grade-A movie, that Eileen behind the counter just laughed.

  — You were on the right track in Maine, Carnegie told me. You were working hard and making things happen. You were the immigrant success story.

  — But everybody just hate us, I said. Is that part of the story?

  CARNEGIE / — Let me ask you, I said. Could you really not afford to use local help? Did you really need to import immigrant labor?

  — Not clear, she said. With the high rent price we were not sure we could make money or not.

  — And did you give the black customers smaller portions?

  — We didn’t like it, she said. But we heard too many black customers can kill your business. So we feel we have to be careful.

  — And did you check about the peanut oil? When you knew the kids had allergies?

  — That we were very careful, she said. Children health very important. Then she asked again:—Why everybody hate us?

  —Red-eye disease, I said.

  You don’t know what America is.

  LAN / So so much trouble over an old-economy business.

  WENDY / Mom stays and stays in her new house. Her new house is a cottage, not a house exactly, and she likes that. It’s not so full of stuff, she says she feels free there, she’s buying her new furniture one piece at a time. So far she has a green loveseat, and a green reading chair, and a bookshelf. She’s trying different colors on the wall, and for Bailey she has a small sunny playroom, all carpeted, with built-in shelves. She’s bringing stuff from home little by little, to fill them up. Not a lot of stuff, but some, so the shelves won’t look so empty. And for me and Lizzy she has a bunk bed in a special room that opens right onto a porch with a hammock. A long time ago the porch was for hanging laundry, but now it’s full of flowers.

  She has a little yard with a new garden, and she likes that too. She likes it that the garden is small but big enough for sunflowers, in fact it was already planted with sunflowers when she moved in, that’s how she knew this place was for her. They weren’t blooming yet, but they were there, and now they’re going to bloom any day. She says the other garden was too big, she felt behind all the time, and she likes it that this neighborhood is full of children. She likes it that she and Bailey can walk down the street to the park where there are lots of other mothers and other kids. Of course she has her friends from our neighborhood too, it’s not as if she is really so far away, but her new place makes her feel like she never has to leave her block.

  — I don’t even subscribe to the newspaper anymore, she says. Why take all of that in? I feel like a clamshell these days. You know—

  She makes this closing motion with her hands.

  It’s weird going to visit. Mom’s so happy and glad to see us, and has so much time. She makes special treats for us—roll cookies and teacakes and even plain brownies when Lizzy complains she never made us plain brownies—and she listens to everything we say. She loves us and loves us.

  Lizzy’s upset but she eats Mom’s treats anyway, even if the brownies make her cry. And she only comments every now and then about how the rest of the world is like starving, and how if Mom has so much energy she should volunteer in a soup kitchen.

  Says Mom: — I’m done feeding the world.

  — Of course. Why feed the world, says Lizzy.

  — I am exhausted, says Mom, a word you will understand someday.

  And she goes on to talk instead about how she’s going to force some bulbs over the winter. She doesn’t say anything about coming home to live, and we don’t ask, not even Lizzy asks.

  We play with Bailey more than we used to, first of all because when we go to Mom’s house there’s not a lot else to do. Besides doing homework and talking on the cell phone all the time, like Lizzy does, she talks so much to Derek she has to get one of those headsets like telephone operators wear, and carry her cell phone on a belt clip.

  But also we play with Bailey because otherwise we’re going to have to talk to Mom the whole time, she just wants to talk and talk and talk. She’s kind of like Bailey, in a way, except that his questions aren’t all about you. Like he wants to know what bites. If you show him a bug, he asks, Dat bite? And if you see a kitty cat, he says, Dat bite? And even butterflies, if you see a butterfly, he asks, Dat bite? He likes to pretend he’s a bird, or a cat, or that he’s spitting, which he isn’t supposed to do.

  Of course when Mom sees me playing with Bailey, she’s happy.

  — What a good sister you are! she says.

  She says playing with Bailey is keeping me in touch with my childhood, it’s a wonderful thing.

  But Lizzy says Mom just wants us not to hate Bailey, since we do.

  — I don’t, I say.

  She says I do, though. She says that I might not realize it, but that I hate him for being bio and a boy and a Bailey, not like us, the one child Mom took with her from the house.

  — He isn’t a Bailey exactly, I say, he’s soup du jour, like you. He’s just been like more adopted by Mom than by Dad.

  Lizzy laughs when I say that.

  — How can he be adopted, she says, he’s natural.

  — He is, I say. You’re just jealous because you think he’s more adopted than you.

  CARNEGIE / Blondie promised to keep up the garden at the house, but in the end it grew so jungly that I mowed the thing down with Mitchell’s weed whacker. I mowed down her out-of-control goatsbeard. I mowed down her yellow-leaved ligularia. I mowed down her overgrown malva and her ratty, ratty beebalm. And everything else too—more plants than I could name—I terminated them all. I did it all in an hour, with the sun beating on my back; and when I was done, I looked at my work and wept.

  Of course it gave me hives.

  To Blondie, apparently, it gave nothing.

  — I thought I loved that garden, she said, looking around. — But now I have a new garden.

  BLONDIE / Perhaps I was becoming a little like Bailey, from being around Bailey. From seeing how he could love something so so so much one day—his Pooh bear, or his train set—but the next day move on.

  CARNEGIE / The more Lan thought about Blondie, the more she hated her.

  LAN / Blondie was fake. From the very first moment, I felt she was fake. Lizzy said it too, how fake she was. From the very first moment she wanted me to go home.

  CARNEGIE / I tried to convince Lan that wanting someone to go home was not the same thing as not liking them, exactly.

  It was tough going.

  Neither was talking to Blondie a walk in the park.

  — Lan will never take your place, I said. We all say that, you know. The girls too. How you’re their real mother, their one and only mother.

  To which she answered: — Of course I’m still their mother. I am simply no longer your wife.

  Sometimes I argued on Bailey’s behalf. How could I not? When every night I dreamed of my serious-faced boy—felt him on my knee, tense with worry. I heard him asking for his room, with the sand, and ocean, and blue sky. Heard him asking for Lanlan. Asking for Tommy.

  — How can you do this to him? I said. Do you know what he asked me today? He asked me if daddies bite. And what’s a fire? he wanted to know. Do fires bite? This is his childhood. Do you see how you’re robbing him of his happy childhood?

  That at least made her cry, when I said
those things. She did cry.

  But other days she returned to her mantra: — Mama Wong won. End of game. I quit.

  One day, I read her a poem:

  Short and tall, spring grasses lavish

  our gate with green, as if passion-driven,

  everything returned from death to life.

  My burr-weed heart—it alone is bitter.

  You’ll know that in these things I see

  you here again, planting our gardens

  behind the house, and us lazily gathering

  what we’ve grown. It’s no small thing.

  That day she listened, and bowed her head, and closed her eyes; and when I said that I thought these Chinese poems had more to do with her, in the end, than with my mother, she cried. She cried and allowed me to take her in my arms, but later gathered up her bags just the same. How those bags bulged! Mostly with Bailey’s stuff, but with other stuff too—all being removed, mini-load after mini-load, to her house. Which I had never seen; which she did not want me to see. As if I were so full of cooties that my very gaze would cooty-ize anything on which it fell.

  — You are becoming like Lizzy, I told her.

  For Lizzy had had phases where we were not allowed to touch certain things, see certain things, even speak of the certain things we had not touched or seen.

  — She just wants her privacy, Lizzy explained now.

  And: — You give her the creeps. Leave her alone.

  I was trying to leave her alone. But each time she came, she left with more bits of our old lives.

  — I’ll thank you not to look through the bags this time, she said pleasantly. — I’m not stealing anything.

  — I don’t look through the bags, I claimed.

  — How interesting, she said.

  — Stay home! Stay home! cried Bailey one day as they left.

  — Stay home!

  But still she took him, openly—the greatest theft of all, for which she did not even need a bag. Bailey cried and cried, bereft, as she hauled him down the walk and strapped him into his car seat; but as soon as she put on Baby Beluga, he stopped. How blond he looked in the car; as one would expect, it being the end of the summer. And why shouldn’t he be? Blonder and blonder. If I weren’t myself—if I were Blondie—why would I want him to be Chinese in the least?

  Lan came up behind me as I waved to Bailey, in case he looked up. Which he did not.

  — Blondie looks so happy, she said. Maybe she already found new boyfriend.

  — Not that fast, I said.

  Still I punched a door so hard that day, I almost broke my hand.

  BLONDIE / My new sunflowers were not as tall as the flowers I once had. Their glory, too, seemed somehow less glorious.

  Still they brought me joy—the flowers growing so thickly that I could cut them for bouquets. Indeed, had to cut some. How to describe the pleasure in this duty? In crunch-clipping, if not sawing, those coarse, hairy stalks—in felling the flowers. The stalks were so substantial and yet hollow, some of them—quite wonderfully so. I could have spent an afternoon face-to-face with the pebbly plates of the flowers, but I could have lived in the glow of light inside the stalks. The larger stalks especially seemed to emit their own light; their green was peace; if there were a place I’d want to go in my next life, it would be there, into that pure light. I imagined it, sometimes, in my dreams. I pictured myself surrounded by green light—turned into light. I was happy. I was on a happy adventure—the light was glad—but I was alone. Where was Carnegie?

  Once upon a time—how long ago it seemed—we had bought resting places together, he and I, in the same cemetery. Not grave plots exactly, like Mama Wong’s. Instead we’d chosen a new fashion—spots just adequate for an ash urn and, above it, a modest commemorative stone. The latter, if we liked, could be set in the ground, like a stepping-stone, in a path. The spots were beautiful, on a piney trail, flanked on one side by azalea bushes, the deciduous kind. The bushes were mature and pruned to show their lovely tiered branching; in the summer they were densely leafy.

  Ours was a beautiful spot.

  But would I see, from heaven, for all eternity, how Mama Wong’s plot overlooked ours in the winter?

  Honestly, I thought that even then.

  Honestly, even before Lan, I went down the green hall alone.

  WENDY / Mom comes for my eleventh birthday. My class party won’t be for another week, around Labor Day, when everybody’s back, but we have a family celebration on the day itself. And even though my birthday is so close to Bailey’s, I have my own party like always, Mom has always made sure I had my own birthday. She makes my favorite dinner, ham and creamed onions, and she decorates the dining room with a chess theme. She makes a chess cake, and for a present gives me a book of certificates, every one of them good for something I love—chess lessons, chess books, a promise to bring me to a tournament if I want. My friend Mya brings her new Siamese kitten named Pad Thai, and I am so so happy except at the end.

  — Will you stay? I say. Just this one night? For my birthday? Please?

  I am crying so hard asking that when she says yes she will, I don’t even hear her, she has to say it again. And then yes! She does stay! For a whole night she stays, Bailey too. Bailey stays in his old room, on some blankets on the floor. Mom stays in the guest room.

  But in the morning it’s not my birthday anymore. Dad comes out of the guest room looking like he’s been crying, and Bailey really is crying. Still Mom packs up a couple of more bags of stuff—fall clothes, she says, time for long pants.

  BLONDIE / Perhaps it was selfish. I asked myself, sometimes, if my actions were selfish.

  But then I would see Lan, or hear Lan. I would see her set a dish in front of Carnegie in so familiar a way I could cry. The girls said she knew all his favorite dishes now, that she made him something special every night, and just the way he liked it. I myself witnessed, one evening, how she stood at his elbow, her little belly bulging forward—waiting to see whether he liked some new fish.

  Of course he loved it.

  — You see, I know your taste now, she said, with that crooked smile of hers. — I can do everything the way you like. I know your taste.

  LAN / In one way, yes. I knew his taste, yes. In one way, I could do everything he liked.

  But in another way, zhi ren zhi du bu zhi xin—you can know a person, and know his stomach, but not know his heart.

  I felt that.

  CARNEGIE / So there we were: split, on most days, into two natural-looking households, but feeling distinctly halved. Missing quite keenly our true motley splendor.

  My wife informed me I was not to call her Blondie anymore. From here on out, she said, she was Janie.

  — You like me to say Janie, I say Janie, I said at first.

  But then I said: — Blondie! Blondie, you are Blondie, dammit!

  WENDY / It comes on a Friday afternoon right after school starts, a mailman brings it to the door himself. Or not a mailman exactly, this is a man with very short hair and what looks like a fish shaved into the back of his head. When I was younger, I probably would’ve asked him if it really was a fish, but now I know that even though people have things like that on their heads, you’re supposed to act like you don’t notice. In fact Lizzy would say that’s exactly why they have it, because they like making you uncomfortable, and I know she should know in a way. But still I think maybe he just likes fish. Because how do we really know? Lizzy would say she knows because she’s older, she just has that confidence. She says she knows all kinds of things now, pretty soon nothing will surprise her and then she’ll be an adult.

  Says Dad when I tell him that: — I myself still hope to be surprised every once in a while, if only to keep me alive.

  He is signing the fish man’s special electronic pad while he talks, he is saying, if only to keep me alive. Will I have to be kept alive one day? I am trying to figure out what that means when Dad says, Hong Kong!

  That’s because the package was sent
FedEx from Hong Kong. In the beginning Dad doesn’t know what it is, but then he finds it positively funny, he says, that this relative of Mama Wong’s who has held on to this thing for years suddenly had to send it rush.

  — A piece of work, that one, he says. No doubt some deathbed request got him in gear.

  He unwraps the book, which inside all the bubble wrap turns out to be three books, actually, with soft covers, all navy blue. They’re bound in thread along the side, and have these tall skinny labels stuck on what we would think of as the back, except that it’s the front, with these black Chinese characters going from top to bottom. Dad flips through the books looking at all the Chinese—there’s like no English anywhere. He looks at the way the pages work, it’s like each page is actually a sheet of paper twice as big, folded in half, so that the edge of each page is not an edge at all, but a fold.

  And inside one book there’s a note sure enough, that says this guy the Hong Kong relative just finished promising some dying friend not to get caught with like debts or something.

  CARNEGIE / ‘With debts unpaid and promises unkept.’ The note went on:

  And so here is your family book. It is the story of your mother’s family, going back 17 generations in Sichuan. Of course, she is the first generation where we write down the girls, lucky she is in it. Unfortunately, you are not in it, because you were adopted in the United States. Anyway you were not born yet when the book was updated. However your older sister will be happy to see her name, the only child in her whole generation.

  WENDY / Dad puts that letter down and turns pale and sort of sweaty. Of course it is kind of hot out for September, we’re all hot, but he has little beads of water on him, as if he’s a car window and it is drizzling out.

  LAN / Was something the matter? I came in to see.

  WENDY / He hands her the letter, which she reads over and over, her whole forehead is like a lake full of frowns.