Typical American

by Gish Jen

  Rendering the future all the more impossible. How could he begin to atone? He could give the dog away, to a boy in the next town. He could install a pet door in the kitchen, so Ken and Barbie could go in and out as they liked. He could be kind to them, endlessly kind. But what use were these things?

  Still he did the useless things. He combed Theresa's iusterless hair, every day. The nurses had said that he could, had shown him how. Sometimes he washed it too, and twice he cut it, with Helen's help. They wet her hair with a bottle of water and a basin, and then they parted it into sections. How white her scalp! Her hair seemed to be turning gray, a cruelty upon cruelty; there were too many clocks running. They began the cutting, with barber's shears. Afterward he watched Helen trim Theresa's nails; that was her job. Theresa's fingers could not be straightened, but Helen did her best to cut smoothly. Unable, as she worked, to look at him — such an intimate estrangement, theirs. He watched her clip Theresa's toenails too. He picked the clip-

  pings off the floor. They listened to Theresa breathe. In, out. She breathed the way anyone would, but her breath smelled so heavy and foul, like curdled milk, that they could not associate it with life. Instead, finally, they began to wonder — they had to wonder: Was death possible in this bright country? It was, they knew. Of course. And yet they began to realize that in the fiber of their beings they had almost believed it a thing they had left behind, like rickshaws; so that the very idea of death now seemed twice death for them, doubly absurd — death in some ways resembling a first crocus. There was a dewiness to it. No one in the world had ever died before. They ran their hands over the blue relief of Theresa's veins, and shuddered — then shuddered more as understanding took slow hold. It seemed she had disappeared, as if into a revolving door; and around now to take her place had swung a man to sit at supper and never eat — a man with his eye on everyone, even Helen, even Callie, even Mona.

  rest of the house seemed so much real estate. Sometimes she remembered how precious it had once been to her, and the memory girdled itself around her chest, squeezing. Theresa was here then. Now, now, Helen realized: Theresa had made that world possible. She must have, for her absence made it impossible. In one thing, Grover had been right — Helen had understood nothing about love. She had understood nothing about how people could come to mark off her life. For example, she had considered the great divide of her self's time to be coming to America. Before she came to America, after she came to America. But she was mistaken. That was not the divide, at all.

  She began to think about looking for an apartment. This, she knew, would entail getting dressed, and making phone calls, and examining maps. She tried to force herself to imagine it. But in the end Janis found a place for them, a garden apartment nearby. The girls wouldn't have to change schools. Helen was glad. Sadness, though, streaked every happiness like plaster dust. She recalled a Chinese expression: Chi de ku zhong ku, fang wei ten shang ren — eat the bitterest of the bitter, become the highest of the high. Small consolation. She continued to drift. Anticipating nothing; nothing sped up, nothing slowed down. Her moments drove past, one after another. Droning.

  And what could change that? Except maybe those sons she and Ralph had always talked about. There was nothing like a baby to put a face on time. But how to conceive? She and Ralph were keqi with each other, endlessly polite — keeping their proper distance. Love floated above their marriage, unachievable, divine. Even when Ralph's stomach began to hurt so much that he had to check into the hospital, and came home only able to eat certain foods, she found herself lined with stiff indifference. Not that she blamed him for what had happened, or not simply — she blamed herself too. But when he stirred his food listlessly, she held Theresa's hand; when he lost weight, she felt it lose its grip.

  Before they could move, Theresa's room had to be cleaned out; as these days Helen was often too tired to move, though, the job fell to the girls. They had already taken over many household tasks. Besides never leaving their things lying around, and always making their beds, they put rice on for supper and chopped vegetables. They vacuumed, they mopped, they kept after the hair on the bathroom floor. They bought a new shower curtain. How changed they were! They were proud of themselves. Mona had even grown tactful. Callie did not have to kick her, or nudge her, or pinch her; Mona once began to tell someone that her father had hit her aunt with a car so that now her aunt was in a coma, but she did not finish that sentence; and never again did she even begin it. "There's been an accident in our family," she would say instead, correctly. Or else, like Callie (drawing her head up to convey august victimhood), "We've had a family tragedy."

  And so it seemed natural enough, after a while, that the girls would help more. One sunny Saturday morning, Callie put on a gray sweatshirt; Mona covered a pink-flowered shirt with a darker shirt of Helen's. They were careful about their work, protecting Theresa's shoes with lunch bags, folding her clothes so as to fill their father's old black trunk with precision. They buttoned all the buttons, zipped the zippers. They packed outfits together, taking sad satisfaction in the ease with which they matched the tops and bottoms. Only once did they argue. Though Theresa had bought an ivory blouse to go with a certain green skirt, in practice she'd worn it with a beige skirt. That left the green skirt without a blouse, which bothered Callie. And what to do with the mauve sweater she hadn't worn once? Mona thought they could put the two orphans together, why not. But Callie couldn't see doing that — mauve and green? In the end the green skirt and beige skirt were sandwiched around the ivory blouse; the mauve sweater was layered in with a gray skirt Callie thought Theresa would have worn with it. If only she could ask her aunt, if only she could be sure! They sprinkled in moth flakes and latched the trunk closed.

  That was not the end of the work; there were still Theresa's books to do. These they packed in boxes, preserving the order in which she had shelved them. Which was what? They could see that the medical texts were together, but many books were in Chinese, a mystery. And some of them bore jottings, also in Chinese, in their margins. What did they mean? Callie, leafing through one particularly marked-up volume, began to cry. The clothes had been easy, familiar; this belonged to a stranger. She threw it across the room. Then another, another, another. "Stop it!" Mona yelled. "Whaddyagoing? You're messing them all up!" And she was right. Callie cried more to see that a page of one book had ripped on account of her, and that several other pages had gotten creased. "Don't cry," Mona said then. "It's okay. She might not ever read them again anyway." Callie cried more still. Mona pretended to remember which volume Callie threw right after the first one, and so on; but they both knew she was just trying to make her big sister feel better; actually the order was lost. Later they taped the boxes up, in silence. "There," Mona said. "All done," agreed Callie. Theresa's geranium they moved outside, with vows to water it every single day.

  It was Janis who called the movers, Janis who checked the boxes off as they were unloaded, calling to the men, "Be careful! That's breakable." Hands on her hips, she made sure that what belonged in the living room ended up in the living room, what belonged in the kitchen, in the kitchen. She pointed. It was all part of her trying to stay busy. Helen tried to thank her for coming. After all that had happened. Who wouldn't understand if she hadn't?

  Janis answered slowly. Daintily. Hands limp. "I've never had much pride," she said. "I've never been able to afford it." And then: "Henry just wanted to leave me. I said, if you want to mourn, I'll mourn with you. But he said he had to mourn by himself." She stopped.

  Helen didn't know what to say; until Janis squinted at a chair,

  wondering, '7s that a scratch*" And then, though she didn't think it was, Helen squinted too, and said, "Is it?" to keep her friend company.

  Devotion replaced hope. No one knew how or when the change had come, but they did know they went to the hospital mostly to pay their sad respects. And so they were stunned when one day, the hospital called with News! Progress! Helen cried to hear how Theresa had begu
n to groan with a certain intermittent regularity; and how, if she were rubbed hard just below her collarbone, she would groan louder. "It's good news, good news," Helen sobbed. "I'm so happy."

  The rest of the family was as shocked as if Theresa had died. They coalesced, quiet, at the foot of her bed. Waiting.

  Nothing.

  "She's been groaning a lot," the nurse claimed.

  Nothing.

  "Come on now, what's the matter with you. Groan for your family like a good girl." The nurse rubbed Theresa's chest again.

  And obediently, like a good girl, Theresa groaned.

  "She did it!" Mona yelled. "She did it! She did it!"

  Theresa groaned again, as if having a bad dream.

  "She's doing it! She's doing it!" The girls jumped up and down, rattling the footboard, Helen clapped. Now it was Ralph who cried for happiness. Progress! Theresa gave an encore; the family leaned over the rail like operagoers, glorying in the sound.

  But when would she open her eyes? When would she talk? The doctors were straightforward — Progress was only progress, they said. Ralph and Helen nodded. They explained about the progress to the girls. But ting bu jian — none of them understood. Mona moved into Callie's room of the new apartment, sharing so that Theresa could have a room. They cleaned it up.

  They unpacked the trunk. According to the man at the garden center, Theresa's geranium had died of drowning; they got a new one, the same color, and vowed not to water it more than once a month.

  Theresa stopped groaning again. Preparing to break the news, the nurses stocked up on candy bars for the girls. A setback, they said, pulling the sweets from their pockets.

  Progress, setback, progress, setback. The bouts of progress began to seem like no progress at all; the family braced for them just the same as for the setbacks. The days of no news had almost been easier. At least then they had suffered peacefully! This suffering allowed them no rest; it was simple but relentless as a geologic cycle. Freezing, thawing. This suffering could split boulders, and did.

  Sometimes after work Ralph watched TV now, like Arthur Smith, never bothering to turn the channel, simply letting the words and images wash over him. The stories were nothing like his story; for this he felt a gratitude bordering on love. When the time came for him to turn the TV off, he watched the images waver and disappear as though it were a real world, all his world ought to have been, that was being sucked back into the set. The empty green screen stared back at him; he saw himself in its curved glass, a story as still as the others had been antic. A story with one character, doing nothing. A story no one would schedule for prime time. He swayed, watching his nose enlarge, his mouth, his ears. All was distortion.

  Still he sat; and so he was sitting when, one evening, Helen called with news. How he wished he had been there! Theresa had blinked a bit; the tape over her eyes had fluttered up like false eyelashes. Callie saw it and screamed. Mona and Helen hurried over. Theresa opened her eyes a litde wider, with a look so like her own that the tape across her cheeks, the tube up her nose — all the hospital artifice they'd come to accept as natural — looked once again, horribly applied. Her pupils dilated;

  *93

  her eyes drifted right, away from her family, then stopped like an elevator between floors. Was this eye movement, or sight? They followed her liquid gaze to the window — it was snowing madly out. A day to stay home. Did she think so too? Apparently. When they looked back down, her eyes had closed again. Helen began to cry. "Come back," she pleaded, "come back, come back, come back, come back."

  "Han," rasped Theresa then, eyes wide.

  Helen froze.

  The moment distended. Had Theresa really taken up residence in herself? They prepared to welcome her, even as they waited for her to be carried back out to the hungry sea, a distant head dipping out of sight once more.

  "Callie," Theresa went on. She moved her arm weakly. "Mona."

  *95

  running the rest of the way. Through the giant peonies, elaborately staked; racing. His sister won, of course; and at the end they dug up some stones they'd buried the day before. These were just to hold—cool to the touch, though the day was hot. He remembered holding the stones to his cheek, murmuring with pleasure; his sister did it too.

  Such was the simplicity of childhood, he thought now— events vanished, wordless. He draped a scarf around his neck, his elation fading. This time, an adult, he would have to say something. He would have to find words. But what words? As he left the apartment, he felt as if he were wearing a great animal of a winter coat. In fact, he did have on a coat—outside it was snowing wildly—and the coat was quite heavy. But his bones seemed to bend under the load, and that was odd; he could imagine a photoelastic image of them, all stress lines. If only he could take the coat off! He searched for his hat in slow motion. His keys. He patted his pants, feeling for his wallet. His stomach clenched. Such happy news!

  As Helen had driven to the hospital, Ralph had to take a cab. Outside, he realized that he should have called one from the apartment, but he was reluctant to go back in; to go back in would seem somehow to be making no progress. Instead, then, he raised his weighty arm. Earlier in the day, the snow had been delicate as dandelion puffs; the flakes had perched on top of each other with abandon and ease. But since that time, the storm had turned so sodden that it did not seem like snow at all that was showering, so much as something industrial—some unnatural tonnage dumped without permit out of the sky. Cars skidded. Behind the iced windows, drivers gripped their wheels, swearing. Ralph's hat molded itself to his head. Cold masked his face.

  No one stopped.

  His coat stiffened around him, a prison.

  What escape was possible? It seemed to him at that moment, as he stood waiting and waiting, trapped in his coat, that a man

  was as doomed here as he was in China. Kan bu jian. Ting bu jian. He could not always see, could not always hear. He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so. America was no America. Ralph swallowed.

  And yet even as he embraced that bleak understanding, on this, the worst day of the winter, he recalled something he'd seen on the worst day of the worst heat wave of the summer. This memory was one of watching—of peeking out his bedroom window to see what Theresa and Old Chao were up to. How hot it was that afternoon! He had wanted to know when he could come out. So he'd snuck a look: and there they were, floating on twin inflatable rafts, in twin blue wading pools of water. Spinning around and around, like airplane propellers. Theresa lay on her stomach, Old Chao on his back. Both sipped at lemonade, through straws, "join us! Join us!" they cried, giddy, to his wife.

  On the patio, Helen laughed. "Whose idea was this?"

  "His idea."

  "No, hers! It was hers."

  "His!"

  "Hers!"

  "Not true!" Theresa splashed Old Chao.

  Old Chao sat up, bobbing, preparing for retribution. "Watch out," he warned teasingly, his hand cupped.

  Were these people he knew? Ralph had watched the water fight with sadness in his heart, never guessing the scene would one day hearten him, as it did now. Shuo bu chu lai. Who could begin to say what he meant, what had happened, what he'd done? And yet Ralph held his arm up in the snow all the same, thinking how he hadn't even known Theresa owned a bathing suit. An orange one! Old Chao's was gray, a more predictable choice.

  END

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