by Gish Jen
His black telephone sat captive in a pool of light, ready for interrogation. Ralph switched off the light, put out his hand. He felt the heat radiating up from the receiver, hoping to take heart from this release of stored energy. How unpredictable a thing it was, really, that light should produce heat, and that a telephone should be able to absorb it. Was that a thing anyone would have thought? He never would have figured it out, certainly; it was the sort of thing that occurred to smart guys. As for guys like him — there was much they didn't know, much in which they were mistaken. Thankfully; perhaps then he was wrong in his forbodings. He grasped the receiver, locating his faith.
As a first step toward cutting costs, Helen volunteered to go to work in the chicken palace, as the cashier. Ralph objected, but they both knew there was no choice; and so she found herself sitting at the front register, on a stool, no lady at all. The whole trick is watch the overhead, she told herself.
Once she'd gotten used to the idea of leaving the house, of going outside to work — after all these years in America, she still envisioned a wall between her home and the world — she did not particularly mind the work involved. Neither did she mind that the family now ate at the restaurant every night, one fried chicken part after another. She just found it hard to be owned by customers; men especially thought nothing of appraising her through her clothes. Cross-examining her. "You Chinese? Japanese?" They'd squint. "Filipino?" Sometimes adding, "I once had a little, ah, woman like you. In the War." They patted her when they felt like it, grasped her hand. She tried to smile. "How do you like the chicken?" she'd say, pulling away. Or, "Thank you, please come again." It was her penance for having taken those lilacs in from the mailbox. "Please come again." One day a bum grabbed her. "You're my dragon lady," he insisted, in a drunken slur. He thrust his face into hers, forcing her to breathe his rancid breath; his untrimmed nails bit into her arms.
She got herself a larger apron after that, one that covered her whole front, rather than just the waist down, with very large ruffles. For a while, she pretended to barely speak English. "Dank you, prease come again." Then she began to look boldly at people — she stared, even — finding that this bra-zenness made them look away. She was glad she could not see herself do this; she shuddered to think what her opinion of someone who did this would be, though it did make work more interesting. She felt as though she had come once more to a wholly new country, where certain heavy girls dragged their feet, almost knock-kneed. Where certain sorts of men marched in ahead of their wives. There were fashions to look at too, the new sheath dresses, the bouffant hairdos. But mostly she saw the way the wives felt their hair for flyaways; the way their children flocked to one parent, then the other; the way their babies twisted unhappily, as if finding the world already too tight. She saw the way groups of boys jostled each
other with their elbows, keeping their hands carefully in their pockets.
And also she saw, after a while, that the wall of the first floor of the chicken palace had developed several fresh, fine cracks; it looked as though someone had drawn a few pencil lines from the new wood panelling up to the new suspended ceiling.
"The inspectors inspected every step" Ralph was weary, older. His stomach hurt all the time. "We put in an extra beam for support. I checked the calculations over and over.*'
Every night after the help left they snuck back into the restaurant to doctor the crack-crazed walls. Mona and Callie had grown tall enough to help a little, and old enough to understand that certain things should be kept in the family. "We won't tell," they promised. "Cross our hearts and hope to die."
Still, one day, Morton, the boxing busboy, announced, "I quit."
"Something wrong?" asked Ralph.
"I ain't going to hang around here, you or nobody can't pay me any amount," he declared. "This building be falling down."
Ralph searched through his files. The previous owner was one Jeremy Finch, who at the time of the sale had lived in Larchmont. Of course, he was supposed to have since moved to Florida. Still Ralph dialed information, and sure enough there was a listing; Mr. Finch had not moved. All Ralph had to do, now that he had the number, was try it.
He called Grover's number instead, quickly, before he could reconsider. Three rings, and a familiar voice. "Ding residence."
"Hello, Grover," said Ralph. His voice seemed to reverberate, loud, unnatural; it sounded like his voice come over a loudspeaker. "This is Ralph."
"Ralph."
"I thought you were supposed to be in the jail."
"Oh, ah—" Grover laughed.
What was there to say? Ralph hung up.
He returned from his visit to Jeremy Finch with this to report: that there were logs in the soil. At some point their lot had been a pit, into which someone had dumped trees. These could no longer be removed, having long since started to rot; the land, therefore, was unstable and unbuildable. "And cheap." Ralph felt as though he had a cardboard tube
i
down his throat as he described how Grover had bought the land, built anyway, then sold it. Of course, when this Mr. Finch found out the building was sinking, he tried to sue. The judge being Grover's good friend, though, Finch was stuck.
Except that he was losing barrels of grease from the back. This didn't bother him too much actually, but when he heard Grover was being charged again, in a case with a different judge, he threatened to testify unless Grover bought the property back. Grover didn't want to, however; he thought it would look bad.
"On our side, it wasn't a bad deal. The building would have sunk, but very slowly, and in the meantime, we were able to buy it with no capital at all. So, great. But then Grover let us build. And now — trouble." Ralph gazed off into the air like a tourist at a panorama. "Of course, I wanted to build. That part was my fault. The question is, why did he let us go ahead?"
Helen held her breath.
"A tree is not a tree, it's an opportunity." Ralph swallowed grimly. "Ha. Trees are trees."
What should they do? At supper they continued to talk while the girls ate quietly.
"What does Daddy mean, san banfa?" Callie asked finally.
"Xiang banfa. Find a way," Helen explained. "That's what Chinese people like to say. We have to find a way."
"Find a way to what?"
"Typical expression," said Ralph absentmindedly, and went back to talking to Helen in Chinese. They could stop paying Grover for the store itself. But what about the loan for the addition? They discussed this knowing that Grover had claim to their house.
"Seems like there should be someone we can sue," Helen said.
But how could they sue Grover over property they didn't own?
They went on serving chicken, trying to keep operating for as long as they could, figuring and figuring as they went. What if Helen got a job and if, in addition to his usual course load, Ralph taught summer school and night school? "We should sell
the house/' Helen acknowledged once; but when Ralph continued the subject, his common sense seemed a cold box into which he could not ask her to place her heart. So instead he took down all the signs in his study, and in their place put up a new piece of paper that read, Bai Man cheng gang — a hundred smeltings, become steel.
They carried on for another month, every night inspecting to see how dangerous things had gotten. They didn't want anyone to get hurt, after ail. They put up signs — please do not jump! — both upstairs and down, so as not to arouse suspicion. They hung posters to hide the cracks.
The cracks got so large that one of the letters outside fell off and could not be put back up. Now the sign read, Ralph's
CHICKEN P LACE.
Ralph shrugged when he saw it. "At least it still spells something" This was part of his new pragmatism.
They stayed open one last month, then one last month again. For upstairs they hired the smallest, lightest busboy they could find. They tried to discourage fat people from going up.
"Maybe the building's not going to fall down after all"
Ralph mused. "If it didn't have to be inspected every year ..." They began to wonder how to get the inspector to pass their building.
Even as they conferred by the register, though, they heard the building creak loudly — a strangely ancient sound, it seemed, a foreign timbre wholly out of keeping with the pop and sizzle of the chicken, the wha-ingg! of the register. Ralph spoke through the periscope. "Everyone come down," he ordered. "Everyone. Please. Down to the ground."
in school already, much less that they could jump rope, and say the rosary, and play the piano. They were taking ballet lessons; Mona wanted to be a ballerina. Callie wanted to be a saint. Ralph and Helen talked again about having more children; two sons would be perfect. Even without the sons, though, how much luckier they were than Grover! How empty his life! They agreed they wouldn't change places with him for the world. "For a million dollars," Ralph said. They agreed that there was something the matter with Grover. "With his head" Ralph said. Helen said that she had read articles about people like him in magazines. "His family probably didn't take very good care of him" she said. "He was like a child, in need of attention."
"Not like a grown man," Ralph said.
"People like that will do anything," Helen said.
"If I ever see him again, I'll kill him," Ralph said.
That is, until Helen said, "I feel sorry for Grover."
Then Ralph's anger was transformed, and he realized that he felt sorry for Grover too. "That man, he has no family. All he has is his empire, and so much money, he doesn't know how to spend it." He shook his head.
It was a kind of sympathy he had begun to feel for almost anyone — not only bums, and orphans, and dogs with porcupine quills in their snouts, but also people he might at another time have envied. Presidents of corporations, state governors, movie stars — people he didn't know but nonetheless understood to be lonely, and afraid of failure. How much wiser he was than they! He talked to their pictures in Helen's magazines, explaining the nature of life difficulties — how matters that one day seemed material, and hard with importance, could the next day simply vaporize. "You'd be surprised," he told them, "I've never had such a peaceful mind as I have now. After a hundred smeltings, I indeed have become steel."
Sometimes he drove by the building, just to feel how dispassionately he could look upon it. What self-control he'd achieved!
He was Confucius. He was Buddha. He was his idling car motor as he looked, looked, looked — observing with some satisfaction how almost impossible it was to tell from the outside of the building that inside it was collapsing. There was that one letter missing, and the framing bulged slightly out of kilter, but overall, it looked as solid as ever. It was not a building to sag pathetically. It was firm in adversity, especially the well-designed addition, which showed no cracks at all.
If only he could separate his part of the building from the part that came from Grover!
But, of course, he couldn't. He accepted this with an equanimity so complete that he had to get out of the car and go for a walk. He paced. Was it fair, what Grover had done? Was it right?
He thought how sorry he felt for Grover, stuck with his hollow victories. He thought of Grover letting Chuck in on a little scheme he'd come up with: "How about we tell him I've been thrown in the slammer ..."
Ralph calmly paced faster. Just around the block, swinging his arms with nonchalant vehemence. It was a gray day, the clouds so low and heavy and ready to rain that they begged, Ralph thought, to be punched. How sorry for Grover he felt! How sorry, sorry, sorry! His sympathy was like one of those clouds in the even blue of his calmness — that's how sorry he felt, so sorry, and sorry, and sorry. What was this frenzy of sorriness? He felt so sorry that he gave a dollar to a panhandler, so sorry that, tears leaking from his eyes, he found himself holding a door for a woman with two shopping bags and a stroller. And when he came upon a couple trying to give away a box of snarling puppies, he felt so sorry that, quick, before it rained and the box got soggy, he picked out the noisiest tough of the litter as a present for the girls.
"A dog?" said Helen, at home. "Now we really are Americanized."
Ears back, the puppy yapped furiously at her, baring his teeth
*5*
as though he'd been assigned the kitchen cabinets to defend with his life. He was a shorthaired dog, gray with black and brown spots — to call him nondescript would be a kindness. He had a flat, triangular head like a crocodile's, and his legs were strangely spindly; they looked as though they were not his legs at all, but a charitable donation from a relative with a spare set.
"I felt sorry for him," explained Ralph.
Helen frowned. "Your sister got a cat not long ago. Did I tell you? Two of them, actually."
"This has nothing to do with that/' he insisted. "This is a present for the girls."
But the girls were terrified of the dog, who, growing more and more excited, barked and lunged at Callie, and nipped Mona's socks.
"Stop!" yelled Ralph, trying to catch him.
"He bites," wailed Mona.
"And goes xu-xu" said Callie, observing the several yellow pools dotting the kitchen floor.
"Can you bring him back?" asked Helen.
The dog, still yelping, was circling the girls, who huddled together in the middle of the room. Ralph chased after him. "Come here, dog! Come here!"
"Go away," yelled Callie. "Shoo!"
"How come he doesn't bite you?" Mona cried. "How come he bit me? "
"Because you're the smallest," explained Callie.
"How come he doesn't run after Dad?"
"Because I'm not afraid of him." Ralph ordered, sternly, in a deep voice, "Stop."
The dog looked up, cocking his head. His tongue lolled, long and unnatural, out the side of his mouth.
Actually Ralph felt leery of the dog too, but because the girls were watching, he picked him up. The dog yelped some more, then licked Ralph's hand and panted before struggling away.
*53
"Please give him back," Helen begged.
By the next morning, though, the girls had decided the dog was cute. Ralph came down to breakfast to discover that Helen and they had reinstalled some old baby gates; also they had set out newspapers for the dog to go xu-xu on, and put out a plate of food. His claws, clattering across the linoleum, sounded like mah-jongg tiles in play.
"He licked me!" said Mona. "We're friends!"
"We're going to call him Daddy," said Callie. "After you."
Mona tittered.
"Girls!" admonished Helen. "We're going to find him a nice
name."
"No, Daddy, Daddy," sang the girls. "We want to name him Daddy."
"No," said Ralph firmly; and just as it had worked on the dog, it worked on his daughters.
Momentarily, at least. "How about Uncle Grover?" Callie piped up then. "Can we name him Uncle Grover?"
"He's not your uncle."
"He used to be."
"He's not anymore."
"Anyway," said Helen, "those are people, and this is a dog."
"How about —" The girls thought. "How about —"
"Grover," mused Ralph.
"Grover!" the girls shrieked. "We'll name him Grover!"
Grover wagged his spotted tail, lifted his flat head and, sidestepping the newspaper, went xu-xu again.
"He needs," said Ralph sternly, "to be trained."
Ralph had never heard of taking a dog to school, but Helen said that was exactly how dogs got trained in America, so he signed up for a class. It was good to have to be someplace every once in a while, and though he did not like the way the dogs nuzzled each other — such familiarity! it was obscene — he took intense pleasure in the classes themselves. Who would've believed people
*54
could reach an understanding with dogs? Ralph burst with pride when Grover was paper-trained; and when he'd shrunk the paper down and moved it successfully outside, he felt such a profound sense of accomplishment that all his organs seemed to
relax and settle. He had been having some trouble with his stomach; Helen thought he was swallowing air, but it felt more like fire. Anyway, his appetite now seemed to be returning to him, and eating more put the flames out.
Ralph taught Grover to sit, and to sit and stay longer than any other dog in the class. Teaching him to stop straining maniacally on the leash was harder, but Ralph kept at it like a man who knew what he wanted, and after a while it was sheer joy to take Grover out for a walk. Particularly as Grover never bit anyone, but often looked as though he might; so that Arthur Smith, for one, was much more respectful when Ralph ran into him. A few months before, he'd asked what Ralph was going to do with the restaurant, and when Ralph answered, "We have so many buyers, we have to consider which to choose," he'd more or less snickered. "I had me a business once too," he said. Now he unsquinted his eyes and unbunched his mouth and edged away, and he wasn't the only one. In general, Ralph did not have to talk to people for as long as he used to, unless they had dogs; and then, as the dogs socialized, he could chat dog-owner style. He'd learned all the things he should say in dog training class — What kind of dog is that? How old is he? What's her name? It was easy.
With Grover, he patrolled the neighborhood calmly, like a man of steel. This gave him time to evaluate different people's grass and bushes and cars, and to ponder. "What are we going to do?" Helen had asked a hundred times. Meaning, Ralph knew, what was he going to do.
"Do?" he joked. Of course, he realized they had to do something. Why else would he spend so much time walking around with the dog?
"We have to do something" she said.
,
*55
"Don't worry," he told her. "Relax. You'll see. 'Dying ashes will burn again.' We'll 'rise again from the East Mountain.' Believe me." He hadn't been able to tell her about Grover's pretending to be away when he was not; even so, she wasn't sleeping very well, he'd noticed. "I'm investigating possibilities" he said. "I have a feeling we may be wrong about the taxes. Maybe we can still cheat some."
