End of East, The

by Lee, Jen Sookfong

  “I know.”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Susie thinks for a moment, screws her eyelids up. “You need to do something, honey. I know you’re not used to doing things for yourself, but you have to change your life if you’re unhappy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t really know. I just think that you have to get out of the house or find something to do, you know? Your mother-in-law does everything, so you feel like you don’t own anything, not even your own daughter. Maybe if you had something else to do, you wouldn’t hate the baby so much. You could take a class, or learn how to manage the house on your own. Just take it slow—one thing at a time.”

  Siu Sang sighs, dabs at her eyes. “I think I need to fix my makeup.”

  Susie laughs. “Yes, and we need to go back to our table, or else our husbands will think we’ve run away together.”

  When they walk back, a woman has started singing, her silver gown pooling on the floor around her feet. She sings an old, old song about a girl who dreams about her prince. Siu Sang closes her eyes and follows the sound of her voice as it rises and falls, floats through the air and settles over the well-dressed, cool-as-vodka crowd.

  In the mornings, Siu Sang, in capri pants and a light jacket, walks to the park with Wendy in a stroller. When she returns home, she eats a lunch that her mother-in-law has cooked and sits in the living room that her mother-in-law has furnished.

  As Susie told her, one thing at a time.

  Siu Sang has had a lot of practice at being quiet, at going unnoticed. It’s easy for her to creep around the house and watch her mother-in-law as she bustles through her day. When Shew Lin is in the living room, dusting the mantle and beating the furniture, Siu Sang sits on the stairs, half-hidden by shadows. When Shew Lin is cooking, Siu Sang plays with the baby at the kitchen table, feeding her mashed-up fruit.

  There are perfect, invisible reasons for her to be anywhere, anytime.

  The house is all angles, with windows recessed deep in darkly papered walls. Dark corners are everywhere, in every room, even during the day.

  Siu Sang sticks close to the walls.

  At first, she watches her mother-in-law to make sure she isn’t reading Siu Sang’s mail or hiding food, but then she begins to see the cooking and cleaning, receipts and groceries, hundreds of small tasks, each an equal component in the running of a family. Shew Lin talks loudly, moves with hurricane-like energy. Everything she does is meant to be noticed and the centre of attention. And so it is.

  Opportunity never comes to those who are impatient.

  One day, Shew Lin drops one of the grocery bags on the front steps. Siu Sang emerges from the corner and picks it up, gathering the spilled fruit. She carries the bag into the kitchen and puts the food away.

  Siu Sang pools all her energy, sleeps through the night like she never could before (strained and pulled tight like a violin string on the verge of snapping, she had spent most of each night immersed in her fantasies or, lately, crying into the sheets balled up in her hands). Pon Man seems relieved at the relative quiet and has not said anything about the change in her behaviour, likely afraid that any word will disturb the thin, fragile peace. She is glad for his silence.

  Another day, Siu Sang heats up some leftovers for dinner when Shew Lin is late coming home from the dentist.

  She visits Susie in the afternoons after her shift at the sausage factory. Siu Sang walks briskly down the sidewalk with the stroller, thirty minutes there and thirty minutes back. Susie teaches her cooking shortcuts, how to knit and read a pattern, the right way to plant beans in a garden. Siu Sang asks her where she learned all these things.

  “I don’t know. Some of it from my mother, I guess, and some of it I just learned from watching people or reading things.” Susie shrugs and goes back to beating the egg whites for her basic sponge cake.

  Little by little, Shew Lin’s work is whittled away. One task. A second. Soon enough, entire sections of the house are Siu Sang’s to manage—the bathroom, the front deck, the upstairs hallway. Siu Sang can see her mother-in-law’s confusion: Should she be happy, afraid, suspicious?

  I’ve got her off-balance, Siu Sang thinks. It won’t be long now.

  the morning

  The pain is bad. It’s not the pain of a paper cut or a sprained ankle, or even of a cramp from swimming just after you eat. It’s a deep, inner pain, the pain you think of when someone says, My guts are twisted. If you could close your eyes and forget the dimensions of your body, it feels like it’s coming from your very core, a hot place miles away from the surface, where only the deepest pain is felt. It’s almost good.

  I look over at my bedroom door, where I’ve stuffed old sweaters in the crack by the floor. I put my hand over his mouth, hoping that my mother won’t hear us in her room down the hall.

  In the dark, he moves like a white eel in deep water—fluidly, easily, with a faint, electric glow My body disappears in the dim and he is alone, moving around the room in a narcissistic dance, like a restless sleeper. He reflects what little light there is (the red hair burns in the night); I absorb it.

  He’s beautiful, and my eyes ache with it. His skin is perfect. His body is tall, broad-shouldered. He is in control of his muscles, the integrated movements of his arms, legs and torso. And the rippling of bad intentions under the surface, somewhere beneath his smooth, cool skin, only makes him sexier. A black light shining behind a white curtain.

  My legs ache from being over his shoulders and, from where I’m lying, they look like the legs of a mannequin—stiff, detached, not really human. Everything seems ugly now, and the pain is just pain. I feel like something inside of me has been shaken loose and is rattling around. A lost organ in a hollow body.

  His eyes are closed, and he has forgotten, for the moment, that I’m watching him.

  When it’s over, I stay in bed while he creeps down the hall to pee. “There’s no mistaking the sound of a man pissing in a quiet house,” he says, “so I hope your mother is still asleep.” He lets himself out, and I can hear his car start and then drive away. I wait until I can no longer hear it before I close my eyes. If I can’t see anything, then perhaps I’ll forget that I even have a body.

  My sleep is shallow, and I feel thick, like I’m stuck, trying to run through mud. I open my eyes slowly, feeling sick with bad sleep but not wanting to wake up either. Through the window, a faint light. Five in the morning. Dawn.

  I breathe in; his smell (beer, hair gel, acid sweat) sits heavy in my room even now, four hours later. I get up to pee, feeling that there’s something I need to be rid of. I stand up for a second, sway and fall down. My knees hit the floor and I wince. I put my hands on the bed to lift myself up again, and I feel something wet, a little colder than lukewarm, and thick. I look, and there’s blood, a pool of it in the middle of the mattress, streaks of it on the quilt, drops of it on floor.

  Whose blood is that?

  It’s coming from me, and it’s still coming, inevitable and steady. The blood on my thighs is still warm, and I put my hands between my legs to try to stop it or hold it in. It comes out anyway, through my fingers, hot. I stand up again, and my feet slide on the slick puddle I’ve left on the floor. Something twists inside me and I start to fall again. I steady myself on the dresser. I leave a red handprint that starts to drip as I walk down the hall to the bathroom. Water, I think, all I need is a little water. The bathroom is mercifully cool.

  “Mom?” I call out. “I need you.”

  judgment

  The second baby arrives. Another girl.

  Shew Lin wants to laugh, cackle loudly at the way fate is playing her daughter-in-law. When Pon Man arrives home from the hospital late on a foggy November night (the smell of apples and burning leaves in the air, a smell, Shew Lin often thinks, that is nothing like the mangoes and dust of the village), he seems afraid to mention the baby at all. Shew Lin carefully looks grim, nods slowly when he recounts the baby’s weight, the d
imples already in her knuckles.

  “Daisy,” Pon Man says, washing his hands at the kitchen sink. “Like the flower. You know, the white one with the petals and the yellow heart.”

  Seid Quan nods, smiles uncertainly and congratulates his son with a handshake. Pon Man looks disappointed that he has already washed his hands.

  When the baby and Siu Sang return home, Shew Lin’s heart secretly jumps at the pain of wanting to hold the little girl all the time, of loving her so hard that her entire body shakes with it. But her broad face never changes from the same stony look she has always had, the one that falls away only when Siu Sang leaves the room. Still, she knows that a grandson will somehow fix things, give Seid Quan and Pon Man a miniature version of themselves (amalgamated, an unbreakable hybrid of him and him, a living example of how they could live together without the silence that bats down spoken words).

  She must fear me, she thinks as she watches Siu Sang leave the living room, or the family will fall apart. Without fear, she will never do as I want. She looks over at her husband and son, reading newspapers at opposite ends of the long, narrow room, facing each other yet almost totally obscured.

  It wasn’t so long ago that she first stepped off the boat, saw the two of them together for the first time. She arrived, her loose dress hiding all the accumulated flesh of childbirth and old age she acquired in those lonely years. She was the family’s connection between the small village in China where she was born, and had once expected to die, and a port city in Canada where she knew no one except these two men, both, in different ways, products of her body.

  She was unsure which old man standing on the dock was her husband. The other wives, all in their fifties and sixties, were standing behind her, murmuring their confusion. These men were thin, ghostly figures in the mist, no more tangible than the cloudy blue mountains in the distance. A whole army of phantoms, she thought as she scanned the crowd for something, anything that looked familiar. Perhaps a cough, a cologne, a thin hand raised in greeting. Anything.

  Pon Man stepped forward, the only young man there, and held his hands out to his mother.

  In her hurry to reach her son, she forgot to look for her husband. She held Pon Man’s face in her hands, making sure he was as flawless as he had been when he left her.

  “So tall,” she said, “so handsome. Must be the cold Canadian air.”

  It was only then that she saw Seid Quan, wearing a suit stiff with newness. His Adam’s apple poked out above his collar, and his face, finally in full colour, was crooked, wrong somehow, and old. This was not the face she remembered from his last visit home, the visit during which they conceived their son.

  But then he reached out and touched her hand and she remembered. The surprising softness of a hand that knows almost nothing but hard work.

  She walks back to the kitchen, intending to look into the garbage can to see if Siu Sang—who, since she returned from the hospital, has remained remarkably silent—has thrown out any food that could still be eaten. I did not work so hard to keep my husband and son together just to have her come in and disturb it all, she thinks. I am the glue and spine of this house, and she will have to remember that.

  On the kitchen counter is a small porcelain figurine, a tiny ballerina with one perfect foot pointed in the air. Shew Lin picks it up, stares at its white face and black arched eyebrows. She remembers seeing this in Siu Sang’s room, and now that silly girl has carelessly left it in the kitchen, probably after washing it in the sink. Well, who knows what could happen to such fragile things in a house with children? Shew Lin hurls it against the wall, watches the ballerina’s head split into two, her slippered feet splinter into jagged, sharp pieces. She turns around and walks out, leaving the mess for her daughter-in-law to find.

  All day, every day, the house is silent. Sometimes, when the weather is bad, a draft whistles through the hall, front to back, carrying the sounds of outside in. When Shew Lin opens the door to collect the mail, she can hear the traffic two blocks away on Broadway, the shouts of the children at the school across the street, the hammering at the new house being built around the corner. When she shuts the door again, the only thing she hears is her own slippers on the parquet floor.

  “I can see you are unhappy from your letters, daughter, even if you never really say so. When I was young, I had many fights with your father’s family. They did not hesitate to make me feel stupid.”

  Shew Lin has steamed open a letter to her daughter-in-law from the girl’s mother. She has been looking for signs that Siu Sang has been complaining about her and the way she has been treating her. She’s a crazy girl, Shew Lin thinks, crying like that all the time and then becoming silent, like she is made of stone. She will pass on her insanity to my grandchildren.

  But here is evidence.

  “If you are having problems with your husband’s family, your husband should never know it. It is a terrible thing to choose between your parents and your wife.”

  Shew Lin laughs. Weak advice from one rich woman to another, she thinks. So then we are both keeping secrets. She glues the envelope back together. She tiptoes outside again and places the letter back into the mailbox.

  Ten minutes later, Siu Sang walks through the door, the letter in her hand. She pushes the double stroller into the hall and hurries into her bedroom, leaving both girls strapped down, still wearing their overcoats and woollen hats. Shew Lin watches as the babies begin to whimper, and then listens as Siu Sang begins to cry for the first time in months, her weeping masked by the simultaneous cries of her daughters.

  Shew Lin thrusts her hands into the stroller and strokes the girls’ cheeks, wondering how long the babies will have to stay in the hall like this (for she cannot take them out, bound as she is by her own rules of fear and control), if Pon Man will have to arrive before they are taken out of their seats. Shew Lin sits on the floor in front of them, lets them pull on her worn, brown hands.

  In her head, she retreats into the continuous thought that runs like a loop through all of her waking hours. Grandsongrandsongrandson.

  I should have kept my mouth shut, she thinks. It’s only when you finally get what you want that you realize it’s no good. Even when she is not in the room, Siu Sang creeps into her thoughts, a cleaning hurricane that displaces all of the other things in Shew Lin’s head. She’s useful now, but does that mean that I am not?

  Siu Sang has suddenly turned into the daughter-in-law that Shew Lin had always wanted.

  Siu Sang wakes up at six o’clock, has the children clothed and fed by seven thirty, and begins cleaning at eight. Mondays, it’s the living room and hall. Tuesdays, the kitchen, bathrooms and closets. If she finishes before the week is over, she starts all over again, scrubbing invisible dirt, batting away invisible dust.

  “Don’t you think you should rest? It hasn’t been long since Daisy was born.” Shew Lin approaches her carefully one morning, measuring her words so that she sounds firm, distrustful.

  “Rest? Dust comes into the house whether I rest or not.” And she walks off, the toilet brush tucked into the waistband of her checked apron.

  Later, Shew Lin checks on the children. The older one rips paper into strips. The baby sucks her thumb and stares out the window, big eyes following the cars that drive past, the birds that swoop down from the power lines. Shew Lin only rarely touches them, does not even play with them and usually only peeks into their room before she sneaks off to her worn brown brocade chair, the only dusty thing left in the house.

  In the evenings, she has taken to listening outside her son and Siu Sang’s bedroom door. Tonight, she puts her ear to the keyhole and, when she’s sure no one is watching, down to the crack by the floor. But it’s as if Siu Sang knows when Shew Lin is crouching just outside, and not a sound escapes, not the scraping of a chair against the floor, not even the regular breathing of two people asleep. Closed tight, she thinks, room and mind. For so long, she was used to the sounds of her daughter-in-law weeping—the wounded anim
al, the rawness of a throat being torn into shreds by overuse. As Shew Lin listens to the quiet, she can feel the house slipping away from her, the family spinning counter-clockwise in a fury of dirt and suds and rags. She pulls her head back from the closed door and sits on the floor, her thick legs poking stiffly out the bottom of her wool skirt.

  When I came here, she thinks, rubbing the sore joints in her knees, I didn’t know what kind of family I would have. After all those years of dreaming about finally living with my husband, there I was.

  At first, shortly after her arrival, it was a little dance. They were carefully treating each other like mutual guests in a hotel, moving out of each other’s way in the hall. He knocked when she was in their bedroom, and they slept with a thin sliver of space between them.

  Their memories of each other hung in the air like a dividing curtain. They had expected certain things and were afraid to see if those things could really be.

  One night, Seid Quan walked to the closed door of his bedroom and heard his wife undressing for bed—the swish of her dress as it fell to the floor, the slap of her bare feet on the wood floor. He walked in silently.

  Naked, she was clearly an older woman. Flesh sat on her hips softly, in layers. Her breasts were flat, and the bones on her shoulders and neck stuck out, sharp like knives. She looked at him and her eyes flickered—once for embarrassment, twice for longing.

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s cold out in the hall.”

  That night, he touched her, his own body like a wire hanger, all angles, long and thin. She wanted to laugh at the way they looked, she the dumpling, he the celery stalk. But nights were short, and they had already waited long enough.

  Hours later, Seid Quan’s face was buried in the back of Shew Lin’s neck, his arm around her waist. The curtains of the window above their bed swayed in the draft. He ran his hand down her shoulder, her arm, felt the rough spot on her elbow.