by Amy Tan
Ruth wound up staying the night at her mother's, sleeping in her old bedroom. The foghorns were louder in this section of the city. She remembered listening to them at night when she was a teenager. She would lie in bed, counting the blasts, matching them to the number of years it would be before she could move out. Five years, then four, then three. Now she was back.
In the morning, Ruth opened the cupboards to look for cereal. She found dirty paper napkins folded and stacked. Hundreds. She opened the fridge. It was packed with plastic bags of black and greenish mush, cartons of half-eaten food, orange peels, cantaloupe rinds, frozen goods long defrosted. In the freezer were a carton of eggs, a pair of shoes, the alarm clock, and what appeared to have been bean sprouts. Ruth felt sick. This had happened in just one week?
She called Art in Kauai. There was no answer. She pictured him lying serenely on the beach, oblivious to all problems in the world. But how could he be on the beach? It was six in the morning there. Where was he? Hula dancing in someone's bed? Another thing to worry about. She could call Wendy, but Wendy would simply commiserate by saying her own mother was doing far crazier things. How about Gideon? He was more concerned about clients and contracts. Ruth decided to call Auntie Gal.
"Worse? How can she be worse?" GaoLing said. "I gave her ginseng, and she said she was taking it every day."
"The doctor said none of those things will help—"
"Doctor!" GaoLing snorted. "I don't believe this diagnosis, Alzheimer's. Your uncle said the same thing, and he's a dentist. Everybody gets old, everybody forgets. When you're old, there's too much to remember. I ask you, Why didn't anyone have this disease twenty, thirty years ago? The problem is, today kids have no time anymore to see parents. Your mommy's lonely, that's all. She has no one to talk to in Chinese. Of course her mind is a little rusted. If you stop speaking, no oil for the squeaky wheel!"
"Well, that's why I need your help. Can she come visit you, maybe for the week? It's just that I have a lot of work this week and can't spend as much time—"
"No need to ask. I'm already offering. I'll come get her in one hour. I need to do some shopping there anyway."
Ruth wanted to weep with relief.
After Auntie Gal left with her mother, Ruth walked a few blocks to the beach, to Land's End. She needed to hear the pummeling waves, their constancy and loudness drowning out her own pounding heart.
SIX
As Ruth walked along the beach, the surf circled her ankles and tugged. Go seaward, it suggested, where it is vast and free.
When Ruth was a teenager, her mother had once run off in the middle of an argument, declaring she was going to drown herself in the ocean. She had waded in to her thighs before her daughter's screams and pleas had brought her back. And now Ruth wondered: If she had not begged her mother to return, would LuLing have let the ocean decide her fate?
Since childhood, Ruth had thought about death every day, sometimes many times a day. She thought everyone must secretly do the same, but no one talked openly about it except her mother. She had pondered in her young mind what death entailed. Did people disappear? Become invisible? Why did dead people become stronger, meaner, sadder? That's what her mother seemed to think. When Ruth was older, she tried to imagine the precise moment when she could no longer breathe or talk or see, when she would have no feelings, not even fear that she was dead. Or perhaps she would have plenty of tear, as well as worry, anger, and regrets, just like the ghosts her mother talked to. Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown. And that contained all sorts of bad possibilities. It was that unknown which made her decide that no matter how terrible and unsolvable her life seemed, she would never willingly kill herself. Although she remembered a time when she had tried.
It happened the year she turned eleven. Ruth and her mother had moved from Oakland to the flatlands of Berkeley, to a dark-shingled bungalow behind a butter-yellow cottage owned by a young couple in their twenties, Lance and Dottie Rogers. The bungalow had been a potting shed and garage that Lance's parents remodeled into an illegal in-law unit during World War Two and rented to a series of brides whose husbands had departed for battle in the Pacific via the Alameda Naval Station.
The ceilings were low, the electricity often shorted out, and the back wall and one side abutted a fence on which alley cats howled at night. There was no ventilation, not even a fan over the two-burner gas stove, so that when LuLing cooked at night, they had to open the windows to let out what she called the "greasy smell." But the rent was cheap, and the place was in a neighborhood with a good intermediate school attended by the smart and competitive sons and daughters of university professors. That was why LuLing had moved there in the first place, she liked to remind Ruth, for her education.
With its small-paned windows and yellow shutters, the bungalow resembled a dollhouse. But Ruth's initial delight soon turned into peevishness. The new home was so small she had no privacy. She and her mother shared a cramped, sunless bedroom that allowed for nothing more than twin beds and a dresser. The combined living room, eating area, and efficiency kitchen afforded no place to hide. Ruth's only refuge was the bathroom, and perhaps for this reason she developed numerous stomach ailments that year. Her mother was usually in the same room as she was, doing her calligraphy, cooking, or knitting, activities that kept her hands busy but left her tongue all too free to interrupt Ruth when she was watching TV. "You hair getting too long. Hair cover your glasses like curtain, can't see. You think this good-looking, I telling you not good-looking! You tune off TV, I cut hair for you. . . . Eh, you hear me. Tune off TV. . . ."
Her mother took Ruth's television-watching as a sign that she had nothing better to do. And sometimes she would see this as a good opportunity for a talk. She would take down the sand tray from the top of the refrigerator and set it on the kitchen table. Ruth's throat would grow tight. Not this again. But she knew that the more she resisted, the more her mother would want to know why.
"Precious Auntie mad-it me?" her mother would say when Ruth had sat for several minutes without writing anything in the sand.
"It's not that."
"You feel something else matter? . . . Another ghost here?"
"It's not another ghost."
"Oh. Oh, I know. . . . I die soon. . . . I right? You can say, I not afraid."
The only time her mother didn't bother her was when she was doing her homework or studying for a test. Her mother respected her studies. If she interrupted her, all Ruth had to do was say, "Shh! I'm reading." And almost always, her mother fell quiet. Ruth read a lot.
On good-weather days, Ruth would take her book to the dwarf-sized porch of the bungalow, and there she'd sit with tucked legs on a bouncy patio chair with a clam-shaped back. Lance and Dottie would be in the yard, smoking cigarettes, pulling weeds out of the brick walkway or pruning the bougainvillea that covered one wall of their cottage like a bright quilt. Ruth would watch them surreptitiously, peering over the top of her book.
She had a crush on Lance. She thought he was handsome, like a movie star with his neatly cropped hair, square jaw, and lanky, athletic body. And he was so easygoing, so friendly to her, which made her even more shy. She had to pretend to be fascinated by her book or the snails that slimed the elephant plants, until finally he noticed her and said, "Hey there, squirt, you can go blind reading too much." His father owned a couple of liquor stores, and Lance helped with the family business. He often left for work in the late morning and returned at three-thirty or four, then took off again at nine and came back late, long after Ruth had given up listening for the sound of his car.
Ruth wondered how Dottie had been lucky enough to marry Lance. She wasn't even that pretty, though Ruth's new friend at school, Wendy, said that Dottie was cute in a beach-bunny way. How could she say that? Dottie was tall and bony, and about as huggable as a fork. Plus, as her mother had pointed out, Dottie had big teeth. Her mother had demonstrated to Ruth by pulli
ng her own lips back with her fingers so that her gums showed on the top and bottom. "Big teeth, show too much inside out, like monkey." Later Ruth stared in the bathroom mirror and admired her own small teeth.
There was another reason Ruth thought Dottie did not deserve Lance: She was bossy and talked too loud and fast. Sometimes her voice was milky, as if she needed to clear her throat. And when she yelled, it sounded like rusty metal. On warm evenings, when their back windows were open, Ruth listened as Lance's and Dottie's garbled voices drifted across the yard and into the bungalow. On quite a few occasions, when they argued, she could hear clearly what they were saying.
"Damn it, Lance," she heard Dottie yell one night, "I'm going to throw out your dinner if you don't come right now!"
"Hey, gimme a break. I'm on the can!" he answered.
After that, whenever Ruth was in the bathroom, she imagined Lance doing the same, the two of them trying to avoid the people who nagged them without end.
Another night, as Ruth and her mother sat at the kitchen table with the sand tray between them, Dottie's husky voice rang out:
"I know what you did! Don't you play Mr. Innocent with me!" "Don't tell me what the fuck I did, 'cause you don't know!" This was followed by two door slams and the revving of the red Pontiac before it roared off. Ruth's heart was racing along with it. Her mother shook her head and clucked her tongue, then muttered in Chinese, "Those foreigners are crazy."
Ruth felt both thrilled and guilty over what she had heard. Dottie had sounded just like her mother, accusing and unreasonable. And Lance suffered as she did. The only difference was, he could talk back. He said exactly what Ruth wished she could tell her mother: Don't tell me what I think, 'cause you don't know!
In October, her mother asked her to give the rent check to the Rogerses. When Dottie opened the door, Ruth saw that she and Lance were busy unloading a huge box. Inside was a brand-new color television set, brought home in time to watch The Wizard of Oz, Dottie explained, which was going to air at seven o'clock that night. Ruth had never seen a color TV before, except in a store window.
"You know that part in the movie where everything is supposed to go from black-and-white to color?" Dottie said. "Well, on this set, it really does turn to color!"
"Hey, squirt," Lance said, "why'ncha come over and watch with us?"
Ruth blushed. "I don't know. . . ."
"Sure, tell your mom to come over too," said Dottie.
"I don't know. Maybe." Then Ruth rushed home.
Her mother did not think she should go. "They just polite, don't really mean."
"Yes, they do. They asked me twice." Ruth had left out the part about their inviting LuLing as well.
"Last year, report card, you get one Satisfactory, not even Good. Should be everything Excellent. Tonight better study more."
"But that was in PE!" Ruth wailed.
"Anyway, you already see this Ozzie show."
"It's The Wizard of Oz, not Ozzie and Harriet. And this one's a movie, it's famous!"
"Famous! Hnh! Everybody don't watch then no longer famous! Ozzie, Oz, Zorro, same thing."
"Well, Precious Auntie thinks I should watch it."
"What you mean?"
Ruth didn't know why she had said that. The words just popped out of her mouth. "Last night, remember?" She searched for an answer. "She had me write something that looked like a letter Z, and we didn't know what it meant?"
LuLing frowned, trying to recall.
"I think she wanted me to write O-Z. We can ask her now, if you don't believe me." Ruth went to the refrigerator, climbed the step-stool, and brought down the sand tray.
"Precious Auntie," LuLing was already calling in Chinese, "are you there? What are you trying to say?"
Ruth sat with the chopstick poised for action. For a long time nothing happened. But that was because she was nervous she was about to trick her mother. What if there really was a ghost named Precious Auntie? Most of the time she thought the sand-writing was just a boring chore, that it was her duty to guess what her mother wanted to hear, then move quickly to end the session. Yet Ruth had also gone through times when she believed that a ghost was guiding her arm, telling her what to say. Sometimes she wrote things that turned out to be true, like tips for the stock market, which her mother started investing in to stretch the money she had saved over the years. Her mother would ask Precious Auntie to choose between two stocks, say IBM and U.S. Steel, and Ruth chose the shorter one to spell. No matter what she picked, LuLing profusely thanked Precious Auntie. One time, her mother asked where Precious Auntie's body was lying so she could find it and bury it. That question had given Ruth the creeps, and she tried to steer the conversation to a close. The End, she wrote, and this made her mother jump out of her chair and cry, "It's true, then! GaoLing was telling the truth. You're at the End of the World." Ruth had felt a cold breath blow down her neck.
Now she steadied her hand and mind, conjuring the wisdom Precious Auntie might impart like the Wizard. O-Z, she wrote, and then started to write good slowly and in large letters: G-O-O. And before she could finish, LuLing exclaimed, "Goo! Goo means 'bone' in Chinese. What about bone? This concern bone-doctor family?"
And so by luck all fell into place. The Wizard of Oz, Precious Auntie was apparently saying, was also about a bone doctor, and she would be happy for Ruth to see this.
At two minutes to seven, Ruth knocked on Lance and Dottie's door. "Who is it?" Lance yelled.
"It's me. Ruth."
"Who?" And then she heard him mutter, "God damn it."
Ruth was humiliated. Maybe he really had asked her only out of politeness. She bolted down the steps of the front porch. Now she'd have to hide in the backyard for two hours so her mother would not know about her mistake or her lie.
The door swung open. "Hey there, squirt," he said warmly, "come on in. We almost gave up on you. Hey, Dottie! Ruth's here! While you're in the kitchen, get her a soda, will you. Here, Ruth, sit yourself down here on the sofa."
During the movie, Ruth had a hard time paying attention to the television screen. She had to pretend to be comfortable. The three of them were sitting on a turquoise-and-yellow sofa that had the woven texture of twine and tinsel. It scratched the backs of Ruth's bare legs. Besides that, Ruth kept noticing things that shocked her, like how Dottie and Lance put their feet up on the coffee table—without removing their shoes. If her mother saw that, she'd have more to talk about than Dottie's big teeth! What's more, Lance and Dottie were both drinking a golden-colored booze and they weren't even in a cocktail lounge. But what most bothered Ruth was the stupid way Dottie was acting, babyish, stroking her husband's left knee and thigh, while crooning things like, "Lancey-pants, could you turn up the volume a teensy-weensy smidge?"
During a commercial, Dottie untangled herself, stood up, and wobbled about tipsily like the scarecrow in the movie. "How about some pop-pop-pop popcorn, everybody?" And then with arms swinging widely, she took one step backward and loped out of the room, singing, "Ohhhh, we're off to see the kitchen. . . ."
Now Ruth found herself on the sofa alone with Lance. She stared ahead at the television, her heart thumping. She heard Dottie humming, the sound of cabinets being opened and shut.
"So what do you think?" Lance said, nodding toward the television.
"It's really neat," Ruth answered in a small, serious voice, her eyes trained on the screen.
She could smell the oil heating in the kitchen, hear the machine-gun spill of popcorn kernels into the pot. Lance swished the ice cubes in his glass and talked about the programs that he hoped were broadcasting in color: football, Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies. Ruth felt like she was on a date. She turned slightly toward him. Listen with a fascinated expression. Wendy had told her this was what a girl should do to make a boy feel manly and important. But what came after that? Lance was so close to her. All at once, he patted her knee, stood up, and announced, "I guess I better use the can before the show comes back on." What he said was em
barrassingly intimate. She was still blushing when he came back a minute later. This time he sat down even closer than before. He could have scooted over to where Dottie had been, so why hadn't he? Was it on purpose? The movie resumed. Was Dottie coming back soon? Ruth hoped not. She imagined telling Wendy how nervous she felt: "I thought I was going to pee in my pants!" That was just an expression, but now that she had thought it. she really did have to pee. This was terrible. How could she ask Lance it she could use the bathroom? She couldn't just get up and wander the house. Should she be casual like him and just say she had to use the can? She gripped her muscles, trying to hold on. Finally, when Dottie came in with the bowl of popcorn, Ruth blurted, "I have to wash my hands first."
"Through the back, past the bedroom," Dottie said.
Ruth tried to act casual, walking speedily while clenching the tops of her thighs together. As she flew past the bedroom, she smelled stale cigarettes, saw an unmade bed, pillows, towels, and Jean Nate bath oil at the foot of the bed. Once in the bathroom, she pulled down her pants and sat, groaning with relief. Here's where Lance had just been, she thought, and she giggled. And then she saw the bathroom was a mess. She was embarrassed for Lance. The grout between the pink tiles on the floor was grungy gray. A bra and panties lay mashed on top of the hamper. And car magazines were sloppily shoved into a built-in wall rack across from the toilet. If her mother could see this!
Ruth stood, and that's when she noticed the dampness on her bottom. The toilet seat had been wet! Her mother had always warned her not to sit on other people's toilets, even those at her friends' homes. Men were supposed to lift the seat, but they never did. "Every man forget," her mother had said, "they don't care. Leave germ there, put on you."
Ruth thought about rubbing off the pee with toilet paper. But then she decided it was a sign, like a pledge of love. It was Lance's pee, his germs, and leaving it on made her feel brave and romantic.