“But —”
“Yes, of course, I did offer to take her, but she said he’s going to pick up all three of his mother’s friends. It was all planned before she came here. Don’t worry about it.”
“Leo?”
“What?”
“Forty years from now, I’m going to have this selfish, bad-tempered, puffy-eyed, nasty, controlling, dismissive niece who makes me feel like an unwanted guest in her home, right? I mean, she isn’t even born yet, but she’s waiting for me, big laundry-list of meanness, that whole scenario’s just waiting for me, right?”
“Oh probably.”
She slaps his arm. He wraps his arms around her, smiling, “I don’t know what it is with you and your aunt. You’re probably more alike than you think.”
Jane disengages her mind from the hugging, thinks, When I am in Leo’s thoughts, does he see almond eyes?
Jane sits in a tepid bath, trying to acclimatize to the dark, pungent air. A shower is out of the question. The entire length of the oval-shaped shower rod is festooned with brown-stained beige tensor bandages of varying lengths. The effect, to Jane, is like taking a bath at a mummy laundromat.
“I’ll never bug you about hanging your pantyhose again,” Leo says, coming into the bathroom. “Whoa, baby. These things really stink.”
Jane pins her lips together. Li-Ting thinks you stink.
“I know. And they’ve been washed,” she says.
“No.”
“Yes. They’re for her joints. She puts this stuff on them, let’s them dry, then wraps them around her back and knees.”
“Oh, the car, right. And the cab ride, huh. No wonder. I thought she wore everything big and loose, because she wants her skin to breathe.”
“You just can’t measure people with such fine instruments. Everyone’s a mass of contradictions.”
“Room for two in there?” Leo pulls his tee shirt over his head.
Jane pulls the plug. “I’m getting out. Stinks in here.”
Jane spends Sunday afternoon at her office. As promised, Auntie Li-Ting will cook Sunday dinner to thank them, but she has banished them from the house, she wants to surprise them. Leo is at a friend’s place, helping Bruce with the wiring on his boat.
Jane rests her cheeks in her hands, discouraged by all the In in her In basket. It’s not that we don’t like each other, Jane thinks, but the smell of those bandages, the cut-out shoes, the chicken, that bluntness, so judgmental and loud. But she means well most of the time. In her own way. And Auntie Li-Ting is a great cook. Maybe she’ll make lemon chicken, all moist with that salty crisp skin, lemon juice sprinkled all over. So juicy. Or she’s boning the chicken and stuffing it with sweet rice, scallions and Chinese sausage. Or soy chicken, braised whole with soy sauce, and ginger. Maybe chicken simmered with Chinese dates, mushrooms and lily buds. Or hot and sour soup with big, tender pieces of chicken and tiny matchstick-sized vegetables. Mmmm. If I hurry, Jane thinks, I can have a cooking lesson too. Maybe we can find common ground in cooking.
The idea of a Chinese cooking lesson buoys Jane. The extent of Jane’s Chinese repertoire is stir-fry, filled with red peppers and broccoli. But Jane’s stir-fry’s bland, tasting nothing like the food she grew up loving. She rings the front doorbell so Auntie Li-Ting won’t be startled, and turns the lock.
“It’s just me, Auntie.”
Jane waits for the wall of garlic and ginger-infused steam to hit her. It doesn’t. She strains to hear the cooking, but no noise comes from the kitchen at all, no tschwshhh of vegetables searing in hot oil, no chop-chop-chop of ginger being minced.
Auntie Li-Ting comes out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on Jane’s Kiss the Cook apron.
“Oh. It’s you,” she says, “You have such a nice kitchen. And you see. I surprise you. Come.”
Jane follows her aunt into the kitchen. On the counter, one of Jane’s magazines stands open on the counter, propped in a clear acrylic recipe holder. The cooking smell, a clean patrician thyme and peppercorn smell, wafts discreetly from the oven.
“See,” Auntie Li-Ting says, pointing at the recipe holder, “I cook this.”
This is Cuisine Courante Revisited. Chicken oven-poached in white wine broth. Parsleyed red potatoes, boiled, with a strip of skin peeled from the diameter. Carrots, cut into matchstick-sized pieces, tied into bundles with a strip of blanched scallion and steamed.
“Wow. You did all this.”
“But no dessert. We have tea.” Auntie Li-Ting opens a wheel-shaped paper package with Chinese writing printed on the outside. Inside, a large compressed cake of fragrant tea leaves. Li-Ting’s fingers break off a chunk, and holding it over the mouth of an empty glass jar, the leaves crumble between her deft fingers, quickly filling the jar. “Don’t worry. I wash the jar today. With soap. Now, you look at your table. Better than the magazine.”
Li-Ting follows Jane into the dining room. “You have many different knife and fork. I just follow the picture.”
The table shimmers, formally set. Bread plates. Teacups and saucers. Water glasses. Wine glasses. Rows of gleaming cutlery. Beside one dinner plate is a silver ball with tiny holes puncturing its surface. Li-Ting picks it up and holding Jane’s hand, she places the ball in her palm, wrapping her fingers around it. “For you. To make real tea.”
Number 19. Egg Drop Soup
[Note: a savoury chicken broth in which some Chinese greens, spinach, or green peas are simmered. Just before serving, it’s the chef’s skill and technique in dropping one cracked fresh egg into the soup that makes this dish remarkable. That one egg will disperse into a thousand surprising pieces, complementing and bringing out new flavour in all the other ingredients. And if the chef is especially skilled, while people will remember the soup, they’ll never forget the singular egg that made everything else happen.]
To see something close to the floor but not on it, Dasha discovers that she must bend her head down, but turn her eyes up in their sockets. She admires the decorative scrollwork at the bottom of the third pew across the aisle from the one she occupies.
“Mother, we should get your eyes checked. You probably need glasses, at least reading glasses,” Nancy whispers beside her.
When Nancy travels through Dasha’s ears, the words sound fast and choppy, moving chup-chup, up then down, pick after pick, like jagged teeth, a saw-tooth blade. Dasha thinks Nancy spends too much time in the kitchen, so much so that she’s come to sound like the beloved Pulse on her chrome electric blender. Nancy’s pulse purees words.
Dasha knows she needs glasses. But her eyes work good enough to enjoy seeing pulse-lipped Nancy whenever her mother goes out in public wearing the black-and-silver wire horn rims belonging to Nancy’s dead father. They make do, a pretty good fit, and the bit in the top half works best for seeing things close to the floor.
Head down and eyes up, Dasha’s eyebrows telegraph the direction of her focus. Across the narrow aisle, one row ahead, Dasha watches a woman’s shoes firmly planted, the curtain of skirt rising just above her ankles. Dasha’s right forefinger presses against her cheek, her fingertip holds the eyeglasses in place. Thumb cradling the underside of her chin, the rest of her fingers curl near her mouth. Dasha’s left arm wraps tighter around the waist of her waistless cotton shift. She trivets her right elbow against the back of her left hand.
Chickens have stronger looking ankles, she thinks, chickens before slaughter. How will Dasha be able to grip tight, keep those legs still enough, her hands moving thickly against panic in motion? Then Dasha remembers she hasn’t slaughtered a chicken for over thirty years. Time is playing tricks again. She takes off the glasses, perches the oval pads against the flannel nosepiece inside the burgundy leather glasses case. The black legs folded, the click of the metal clasp on the glasses case reassures Dasha that she’s put time back in its box.
Dasha holds her hands before her eyes, palms down, fingers tight against each other. Slivers of light show between her fingers where there were none before. He t
hought he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by looking at their hands and eyes. Dasha turns her hands over, fewer lines, but the same slivers of light. She thinks she can tell everything she needs to know about a person if they are too quick, agree too easily, to show you their hand.
Rotating the back of one hand into the palm of the opposite hand, back and forth, the warmth and the sound of dry skin washing over dry skin makes the muscles in Dasha’s shoulders relax. She presses her hands together, each hand moving in a forward circle, her hands never losing contact with each other, commanded by an invisible rotating axle.
She smells burnt leaves, the salty tang of fermented beans and fish. The back door of the Empire Cafe, Vanguard, Saskatchewan. The grease drum. Wooden crates stacked up the wall, the one on the bottom has a splintered slat. Above the door, a grey metal gooseneck pole, a heavy mesh cage surrounds the light.
She doesn’t speak English except the words she learned that day and a very few stray words on the journey that led to today. French, yes, Ukrainian, yes. Russian, fluently. And German, of course. The story of how she comes to be at the back door of the Empire Cafe in Vanguard, Saskatchewan, 1921, secured tightly under the scarf that covers her head, as she raps her fist on the wooden frame of the screen door.
Nancy catches her mother’s eye, and looks scornfully at Dasha’s hands. Mo-ther, she silently mouths. Nancy raises her gloved finger to her lips, and places a Bible in her mother’s hands to quiet them.
Dasha studies Nancy’s profile, sees the rise of her husband’s cheekbone, the rounded “L” of his mandible. He never asked. How could a grown woman, Dasha, sprout up like a sunflower, or be dispatched over telegraph lines, clicks and dashes sliding off the paper and whirling in the air to form people to walk into Vanguard, Saskatchewan, in 1921? Or was she part of a supplies order carted off a freight train, a drum of lard, check, a sack of flour, check, a woman, check. Dasha smiles. It’s not that she wanted him to ask. He thought he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by looking at their hands. And eyes.
It’s work that Dasha wants in 1921. A place to stay, food to eat. In 1921, Dasha knows that this means work. She goes to every business in Vanguard. By the time she reaches the last door, the Empire Cafe, it is almost supper time, and there is only a light at the back door, but by then, she does know to point to herself and say, “I want work,” after a day of a few shop owners attempting to show her how to see through the smeared mirror of “Not You, I.” Finally, “I don’t want work, you do, so you say, ‘I want work, I want work’,” Jeb Olson at the Vanguard Hotel said, pointing at himself.
Bliss opens the screen door at the back of the Empire Cafe. Dasha has seen Chinese men before, but never up close. Her speech forgotten, she stands there, tongue hiding below her lower lip. He swallows hard, lines furrow his forehead, he looks behind either side of her head as if he expects one or more people to be hiding behind her. Dasha looks over her shoulders too, the idea planted in her mind. But there’s no one behind the café except her. Bliss’s eyes vibrate with his mind’s desperate attempt to anticipate the crucial next step, to figure out the set-up. She opens her mouth wide, to force the English words out, and Bliss’s eyes grow black, anticipating the scream. At this time of the year, Bliss closes the café at five p.m., more customers for breakfast at four a.m. than the few troublemakers past dark.
“I want work,” the syllables rasp against the chords of a dry voice box.
“No work. Sorry.”
Dasha opens her mouth wide, the fear in Bliss’s eyes contagious.
“Come inside, quick,” Bliss says, “Come inside the café,” he adds, weakly, as if a woman’s scream inside the café is better than one in the alley behind the café. What Dasha remembers is his brown eyes deepening black as the pupils spread over the colour, even after Bliss turns ablaze all the lights, and opens the front door widely. After they arrive in the public part of the café, Bliss walks to the back and locks the back door. He comes out wearing a white jacket with a worn neckline. Dasha never got this far inside the other places. She picks up a rag and pantomimes washing and rinsing a bowl and plate, setting them to dry, as Bliss repeats, “No work. Please go. No work.” She wipes a part of the lunch counter and the nearest two tables with strong, competent strokes, then picks up the string mop leaning against the cash register, and makes vigorous esses on the linoleum. Bliss opens the till, sweeps his fingers through the empty coin compartments, and shrugs his shoulders at her. Crescent moons spread wetly under the arms of his white jacket. Bliss is the first person Dasha ever sees who shows fear but doesn’t stink from fear. The heat from the ceiling lights inside the café rouses the flies languishing in the bowls of the lamps. Their noise distracts Dasha. Her hands drop to her waist, the handle of the string mop smacking the floor. Whether it’s hunger, or the relative paucity of words from this last prospect, or his incomprehensible fear, or the fact that it’s already dark and Dasha has no plan other than this one, or all combined, Dasha unbuttons her coat, pulls the scarf off her head, and sits down on a stool at the counter.
Before Bliss can move behind the counter, before Bliss can say, Sorry, we closed, before Bliss can stop himself from saying that in a lit café with the front door wide open, Dasha speaks.
She starts, in French, you do not know who I am but I am a good person and I know of no other way to tell you this, in Russian, I have come a long way and I want to work and this is as far as I have come and about as far as I have money to go, in German, I do not know who you are but if you knew me, you would know that I can work, that I am a good person, and I will wash and clean and better than you, better than anyone you hire.
Bliss retrieves the mop from the floor and leans it against the cash register. He moves behind the counter, and reaches for the water jug and a glass under the counter. He places the full glass on the counter in front of Dasha and hands her a menu. Dasha places the menu on the counter with her scarf, turns her head slightly and her right hand rises to conduct the linguistic symphony of her life.
A deceptively complex score, the words compose themselves one after the other in her mouth, the key of French, Ukrainian, Russian, changing with the scene, the tempo. Bursts of allegro, but mostly andante. Voice, sotto voce, for some scenes her eyes telegraph bravura. She looks at that hand of hers, then never looks at it again as her head starts to move very slightly as if keeping time, the words travelling along the curve of movement, rising and falling dolce.
Her right hand cradles perhaps a songbird, a loaf of bread, a doll with real hair. Her right hand balls into a fist, her voice imitating a confrontation between two people, appassionato, perhaps enemy combatants, or two rivals, possibly a quarrel between a beloved daughter and father. Her right hand recoils and trembles in front of a hardened shoulder, perhaps the recounting of a deep wound reopened, as sudden and scarring as the original assault. Her right hand turns over and lies on the counter, fingers spread, perhaps reconciliation, a resolve to move forward, perhaps both. Elbows bent, she opens her palms on either side of her body. Dasha’s voice projects a cocoon of sound that envelopes Bliss and the counter between them. In the filament of words, Bliss hears “Daryna,” as the woman turns her hands towards her body, gently cradling her chest bone. “Daryna,” she repeats and as she enunciates the word, her hands slowly unfold from her heart.
“Daryna. Daryna.” Her right hand strokes her collarbone and glides across her scarf lying on the counter. Maybe the word for scarf, Bliss thinks. Maybe whoever gave her the scarf? Dasha takes the scarf off the counter. Tenderly, she holds the transparent layer of fabric between her fingers to the light, the spools of her words whirling threads into the cloth. “Dar-y-na.”
As she puts her scarf down, Dasha notices Bliss turn his head away from her. In French, she concludes, you still do not know who I am, but I am strong, I am a good person and I will work hard, very hard.
Bliss has been translating her eyes, her moving mouth, her hands, but not i
nto words. A clever man by any measure, by the time Dasha has finished speaking, Bliss has figured out that he can surmount the law which prohibits him from hiring Dasha, by all appearances a white woman, by making her a partner in the café, getting all the paperwork right. Years later, when asked by his oldest son to explain what happened when they first met, Bliss will say: language didn’t matter, I understood her. No, not what she was saying, but at the same time, I understood all at once. Inside the café, your mother’s tongue, the threads of her words, how she spoke with her hands, and the person she is, she connected for me for the first time who I was at that very moment to all the life I had already lived, and all the life I still wanted to live. I knew I wanted to join all my lives with all the lives in your mother. I just hoped to God that she felt that I would be worthy of her. I knew that day that I wanted the threads of our lives to write a story for the both of us.
Dasha places the Bible back into the small wooden rack attached to the back of the pew in front of theirs. She opens up the glasses case and holding the end pieces in both hands, makes quite a show of adjusting the glasses onto the bridge of her nose. Just below the left leg of the glasses, Dasha watches Nancy’s pencil-lined eyebrow jump, her head shake ever so slightly with the snik of the metal clasp on the burgundy glasses case. Dasha picks up a hymnary, as the Minister requests that people turn to page 235. “That’s page 267 in the blue hymn book,” the new volunteer translator says, in English.
As they rise to sing, Dasha holds her hymnary as low as her arms and torso will allow. As a point of principle, she will not use the same hymn book as her daughter, or her teenage grandson, Benny Pon. When Dasha sings in the Chinese United Church, she always sings in Chinese.
Number 124. Shark’s Fin Soup
Chinese walls surround me on the twenty-eighth floor of Martell McMillan, downtown Edmonton law firm. Evening in my office, I sit cross-legged, stare at my computer screen, tap code into the keyboard I balance on the arms of my chair: Trust Indenture. Ironic, oxymoronic, Trust Indenture, the name of the document I draft. Hereinafter, now therefore, I draft within these Chinese walls. Chinese walls press inward, I feel smaller than a child.
Paper Teeth Page 12
