paper teeth
PAPER TEETH
Lauralyn Chow
NEWEST PRESS
Copyright © Lauralyn Chow 2016
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication — reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Chow, Lauralyn, author
Paper teeth / Lauralyn Chow.
(Nunatak first fiction series ; no. 43)
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-926455-63-1 (paperback).
ISBN 978-1-926455-64-8 (epub).
ISBN 978-1-926455-65-5 (mobi)
I. Title. II. Series: Nunatak first fiction ; no. 43
PS8605.H7P37 2016 C813'.6 C2016-901682-X C2016-901683-8
Editor: Nicole Markotić
Book design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Author photo: The Estate of Sam Chow
Paper Teeth is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Where actual institutions and real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning those entities and persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to describe actual events. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
# 201, 8540 – 109 Street
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6
780.432.9427
www.newestpress.com
No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
Printed and bound in Canada
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16
In memory of my parents,
Sam and Mary Chow
Preface
Chrome paper napkin dispensers, mini-juke boxes at each Formica tabletop booth, a tall paper calendar on the wall at the back featuring a Chinese ink drawing of a pink orchid in a square plant pot, an illuminated analogue wall clock with rectangular flip-down advertising, a small plastic cog flipping the plastic pages of the ads down every fifteen seconds, (Silverwood’s Dairy, Player’s Navy Cut Cigarettes - Filter, Texaco Motor Oils, Allstate Insurance), a jade plant, round white tea pots filled with leaves and boiling water.
Round banquet tables, covered with white cotton tablecloths, in turn covered by large round Lazy Susans, enormous rectangular fish tanks (lyretail mollies, angel fish, neon tetras, bronze catfish, orange swordtails, bleeding heart tetras, kissing gouramis) with aerators disguised as plastic deep sea divers, illuminated cigarette vending machines with chrome-plated pull knobs, behind the host’s desk, a large glass mirror etched with sprays of leaves and flowers.
Small red-and-gold altars, incense spiraling smoke, golden statues, tiny vertical banners of Chinese calligraphy, oranges.
A multi-page English language menu (sometimes bilingual with Chinese writing), plastic laminated, offering forty-seven, eighty-eight, one hundred and twenty-nine, different Chinese dishes, all listed by number. Sometimes, one printed page in the menu for Western cuisine. At the back of the menu, a short list of beverages. No pots of Chinese tea or bowls of steamed rice; these come to the table under their own steam.
A Chinese language menu (never bilingual), written on pink paper, sometimes in a plastic pocket inside the English menu, sometimes in a plastic page protector given only to certain guests, listing at most seven dishes.
An unwritten menu of non-replicable Chinese dishes, food that no other table is served, after Dad goes into the kitchen, only with his son, to visit with his friends, the cooks.
Of course, you are bilingual, English and French (un petit peu). No Chinese, though. In Chinese restaurants, you only eat unscripted, Chinese food from the unwritten menu for the first half of your life. The calendar flips. On your family tree, you get closer and closer to the ground. On your family tree, no one eats from the unwritten menu anymore.
Illiteracy makes you hungry.
PAPER
TEETH
Today’s Menu
Number 25. Eight Precious Jewels with Bean Cake
Number 88. Spicy Beef in Lettuce Wraps
Number 183. Seafood-Steam Whitefish with Scallion Chop
Number 57. One Thousand Year Old Eggs
Number 117. Almond Guy Ding
Number 19. Egg Drop Soup
Number 124. Shark’s Fin Soup
Number 29. Fragrant Meats with Chinese Baby Greens
Number 188. “Peeking” Duck
Number 1. A Bowl of Rice, A Plate of Sliced Oranges
Number 25. Eight Precious Jewels with Bean Cake
“Please, Dad?”
Right beneath his chest bone, Dad feels six day’s worth of gravity pinning him to the driver’s seat. Gravity from feeding the big dreams that Mumma dreams for everyone: herself, Dad, the kids, extended family, neighbours, the world. Gravity in knowing that winning bread makes life a game, a competition with real stakes and not a small amount left to chance. Gravity in discerning that the playing field has nothing to do with play.
Dad thanks the Lord for his plead-y, needy kids, because sometimes, on the seventh day, Dad gets to flay gravity wide open to a place with no game-playing, no stakes, no worries. Dad seesaws on his sit bones. He scans the smooth asphalt ribbon before him, then the rearview mirror, and finds three pairs of hopeful, supplicating eyes.
“Airplane ride?”
“Yeah, Dad, Please?”
The youngest, Jane, sits quietly in the front seat between him and Mumma, her lips resembling a thin curved darning needle, both ends pointing down. She stares at the radio dials, her eyebrows connected by ragged worry lines, premature wrinkles for any preschooler. Dad senses that for Jane, there’s never a seventh day.
“Ah please, Dad?” Tom, his only son, begs one more time.
The sound of an engine suddenly submitting to a command to speed and the palpable acceleration captures the attention of every passenger. As they approach the House of the Lord, the white Pontiac Strato-Chief attains peak velocity at the crest of the hill, and soars over the 109th Street overpass, locally known as the Rat Hole, leaving six days of Gravity to eat dust. No one hears the metallic springs and shocks of the car’s suspension banging and resettling the chassis. Not for all the giggling and hooting and cheering, all enlivened by the disbelief that yet again, Dad, the very model of seriousness and sobriety, caution and responsibility, just did something illegal, a little bit dangerous, and so much fun. Squeeee! After a week of being so good, what a thrill (for most of them) to be capital N naughty. After all the commotion has died down, what a fly inside the car might hear is Mumma’s stiletto heel being withdrawn from the new hole punched in the rubber floor mat, a round hole just below where the brake pedal might be if the front passenger’s side of the Strato-Chief’s bench seat came with a brake.
Sandwiched between the bread of the Foon Kee Bean Cake Company and the Coffee Cup Inn stands the House of the Lord. The Coffee Cup Inn, a whitewashed building in the shape of a giant coffee cup, pessimistically surveys the street through grimy, hexagonal-shaped windows. Two brown stripes near the flat roof line mimic the heav
y whiteware cups used to serve up, or so the big sign says, Hot Coffee, Best Cup in Town. Another sign hangs in the top window pane of the aluminum screen door, says Closed. The building slumps over most of the lot that it sits on, the big coffee cup threatening to tip over and spill on its crumbling asphalt saucer. A narrow sidewalk with big cracks rounds the little corner lot.
The Foon Kee Bean Cake Company occupies a grey stucco saltbox house, three skinny wood-framed windows bunch together at the front, with three round ventilation holes at the bottom of each window. Someone’s planted a painted sign on two wooden stakes at an angle to the sidewalk. Red letters advertise: “Foon Kee Bean Cake Company,” and then Chinese calligraphy which says God knows what. Shards of white paint have peeled away from both the sign and the window frames, the exposed wood weathered silvery grey. No one in the Lee family ever sees anyone inside the house, or coming out with a nicely tied bundle of funky bean cake. That’s the kids’ joke: Foon kee bean cake, What’s that foon kee smell?, P-U, must be that foon kee bean cake. Mumma doesn’t buy her tofu there. Mumma’s bean cake isn’t funky, although it may be foon kee, God knows.
On Communion Sundays only, the Lees park the car across the avenue from the Coffee Cup Inn behind a brick flatiron building, the House of the Lord does not offer ample parking. On the Jasper Avenue side of the flatiron building, over one of three wooden doors without numbers, a solitary blue sign in the shape of a long sideways capsule hangs, with white letters which read “Turkish Baths.” Above the lettering, the sign painter has created a painting of a woman, with orange Gibson Girl hair. A woman taking a bath. She’s lowered herself into the blue sign, her back to the street, her undrawn parts engaged in the pleasure of Turkish Baths. Her head in profile shows a long comma of a nostril, turned slightly upward, the alabaster skin on her back faded by the sun. Bits of plywood show through parts of her skin, but a black curvy line running the length of her back is continuous. Even on Sunday, pink neon lines pelt her about the shoulders, and the same colour bubbles froth on and off, concentrating at her waist and parts below.
The parking space behind the flatiron building is best for the fast getaway onto Jasper Avenue, and for giving the kids a look at the woman taking a bath: Lizzie, the oldest, wonders what makes a bath a Turkish bath, is it the tub or the bubbles, do they put something in the water, is it deep like a swimming pool or shallow like the fish hatchery; Pen, her sister, has warm panty thoughts, she’s bathing nude on Jasper Avenue where everyone can see her; Tom lets his eyes follow the sign as it flows past the car side window, wishes you didn’t have to be from Turkey to go in there; Jane frowns, why does she always have to sit on the hump, one saddle shoe resting on either side of the carpeted hump on the car floor? On every fast getaway onto Jasper Avenue, Mumma looks at the bather in Turkish Baths and wraps the front selvages of her coat, one in each hand, a little closer around her body, arms crossed, balled fists hiding behind her elbows.
Mumma sees him first. One Communion Sunday, as the Lee family walks single file, as Dad, then Lizzie, Pen, Tom, Jane and Mumma walk on the narrow broken sidewalk around the Coffee Cup Inn on the way to the House of the Lord, Mumma sees him first.
“Look,” says Pen, “I see someone’s bum-bum. See? Uh-ohh, London France no underpants. See the top of his cra —”
“Pen, don’t point. Shhhh,” Mumma hisses from the back of the line. “He’s sleeping. Everybody, keep moving. C’mon Dad, keep moving.”
There’s no one else around. One of the man’s tan-coloured boots stands upright on the asphalt at the side of the building, near the handle. The boot gapes open, the lace threaded loosely through the bottom holes, the tongue pulled all the way down.
His feet barely touch the ground. Bent from the waist, the man lies face down through the handle of the Coffee Cup Inn, one boot on and one boot off, as if, in an attempt to dive through the handle, he only made it half way through and fell asleep.
As if. That’s one way to describe what the Lee family sees, one version. As if the man carefully took one boot off, to keep it nice, just in case, as he considered the puzzler of how to dive through the handle of the big coffee cup. As if he attempted to permute the trajectory calculations, velocity, point of departure, angle of projectile. As if the man, only a fair student in Grade 10 Physics, had made a life-defining decision to take Algebra instead of Physics 20, so that years later, outside the Coffee Cup Inn, at the moment of recall, a glass of water spilled on his mental notes concerning velocity, rendering them illegible. As if narcolepsy travelled up and down the man’s family tree like an irrepressible monkey on speed, hitting the man’s Uncle Billy hard. As if Billy, so the story goes, one day drove fifteen miles, took a cup of tea and toast with his brother Al, drove the fifteen miles home, all in his sleep, and does not remember a thing. As if narcolepsy almost missed Billy’s nephew, but a split second after he sprang into the air, narcolepsy grabbed him by the round knobs of his ankle bones, easier because of the preceding boot removal, and pulled him down to sleep in the cradle of a building handle. As if all that is how the Lee family comes to see the sleeping man and his bum, hanging by his waist through the handle of the Coffee Cup Inn on Communion Sunday. As if.
During that Communion, Mumma purses her lips into a small kiss to drink her tiny glass of Welch’s grape juice. As she bends her head to pray, she thinks, what if the man managed to get himself down from the handle, what if he staggered around and walked towards them, followed them here to the House of the Lord. What then? When Tom dips his fingers into the almost empty glass that Mumma has just returned to the wooden cup holder in front of them, she doesn’t quietly smack his hand and return it to his lap. Tom’s mouth gapes at Mumma who has her eyes closed, her head bent. He wipes the juicy-damp fingers on his corduroy pants and benches his own hands to his lap.
One night during the week before the next Communion Sunday, Mumma and Dad’s post-prandial conversation at the dinner table becomes budget dinner theatre for the kids — no dessert bar, but what a show. While the Anglophone kids would benefit from English subtitles providing instantaneous translation, that service will never be provided. The kids are not the intended audience, but they enjoy the body language, moving their heads back and forth to whoever speaks. Tonight’s drama is replete with body English, the food and table buried by windshield wiper hands arcing through the air, and forehead lines that magically appear like a Roman window blind drawn open by suddenly wide open eyes. In tonight’s drama, one character, Mystery Language, is a charismatic magnet, her monologue in two voices hidden in plain hearing.
Lizzie thinks her parents are discussing Communion this Sunday, Lizzie hears “Gawfeah Gup Ian” when Mumma talks. Tom thinks Dad is trying to explain to Mumma a possible loophole that will get Tom into Turkish Baths, hears Dad say “Gajasper Avanue.” Jane is the only one dead certain of her ability to interpret Chinese, at least some of the words. “Bei” [the verb, to give] means Big, “Douw” [the verb, to touch] means Doll, and “Wah Nynh” [the Chinese name of a family friend the kids call Uncle Freddy] means Walking; her birthday is only five months away but Jane knows Mumma is going to buy her a real, live walking doll. They must not agree on which doll to buy, because they’re talking, talking, talking, Jane thinks, but this is a big, important decision, so lots of talking makes sense. Jane hopes they settle on Little Francine and not Betsy Bell, because Little Francine has a green velvet coat, with a real fur collar and she also comes with a heart-shaped locket that Jane could wear. To make sure they pick Little Francine, Jane knows she has to be careful how she brings this up with Mumma, Gimmee-Gimmees Never Get, but not too careful because Mumma can be so wrong about important things. [Note: Years from now, when there is colour television, Mumma’s children will watch l’Hockey on the Canadian French language network whenever there is a game blackout for the local station, because their understanding of the language is not critical to enjoying the game.] Pen doesn’t care what they’re talking about. Although she has finished eating, Pe
n holds a sliver of beef between her chopsticks, pressing the morsel against the side of a small plate beside her rice bowl, until as much of the garlic and black bean sauce as possible runs out in a brown, aromatic rivulet.
“What did you say to them, Mumma?” Lizzie leans against Mumma’s coat, and whispers. The women in the House of the Lord cheerily endure the Lee children’s reserved manner once every month when the Lee family comes for Communion Sunday, swarming the Lee family pew, one of the eight pews donated by Dad. They will retreat, just as the choir processes down the centre aisle. Before that, in Chinese, they chatter excitedly, non-stop, every one, simultaneously, One Body with many mouths and multiple animated hands. They pinch Tom’s cheeks, move the skin all around his cheekbones. They take hold of the girls’ white-gloved hands, by the palms, to display the even stitching to each other, the posies of embroidered flowers on the backs of the girls’ gloved hands. While being gentle with their gloved hands, the women pinch and finger the nap of the girls’ coat sleeves, navy in Winter, beige in Spring. They never finger anything but the garments, never pinch or touch the girls’ arms.
As Mumma settles her purse on the floor, and opens her Order of Service, she replies, “I told them that your first language, of course, is Chinese, like I always tell them, but that you’re all a little shy.” Mumma says, shy, like shyness is in the same family of character traits as being vain, feckless, snooty. Mumma’s quiet voice sounds breathy but no more quiet than her normal speaking voice.
“That’s not true.” Sitting beside her in the pew, Lizzie turns to Mumma so Mumma can’t miss her peevish frown.
“Sure. I spoke Chinese to all of you when you were babies.” “Mumma, we don’t speak Chinese. Period. And we’re not shy,” Lizzie whispers.
“I didn’t tell them you spoke Chinese. And if you’re not shy, why don’t you sing in the choir, that’s what they want to know.”
Paper Teeth Page 1
