I look out the window, wishing that what this nurse seems to think of me was true. I could be a good daughter, filled with compassion and sympathy and kind thoughts, instead of the raging, sullen, hard girl I really am. I could run and run, but even I doubt that I could ever escape myself.
Jackie walks in, holding two muffins and a coffee. I am so relieved that I stand up immediately to give her my chair. In the hallway, I breathe deeply and eat my muffin while sitting on the floor.
Bleach. Vomit. The smell of the hospital clings to me; I know from experience that it is almost impossible to wash off (I remember scrubbing my skin raw after every visit to my father’s room, but it was never any use). I step out of the taxi and onto our front lawn, glad, for once, that I am coming home.
After changing my sheets and wiping down the floor in my bedroom, my mother sits on the edge of my bed while I drink the hot soup she’s made. It’s like dishwater, and just bland enough to make me feel better. She hands me a little packet of crackers, which she probably stole the last time she ordered soup at a restaurant.
“Are you sure you’re feeling better?” She puts her hand on my stomach.
“I’m okay. The doctor gave me some pills for the cramps.”
She looks out the window, and I can see the reflection of the trees outside in her glasses. She blinks, and the miniature trees sway. She looks back at me, and now it’s only her eyes I see.
“Are you sure you’re telling me everything the doctor said? There’s nothing else?”
I don’t know what she suspects. I become sweaty.
“Did that white boy do this to you? The redheaded one, from the wedding? Or is there another one? Your Aunt Susie is always telling me that the boys are worse these days, expecting things from their girlfriends.”
I look at her hair, her nose, her mouth, anywhere but her eyes. “There is no white boy, Mom. Not anymore. I’ve told you everything.”
I know she doesn’t believe me, but she stops asking. She gives me a hot water bottle and stays with me until I close my eyes. In my sleep, I can feel her moving around the house, the unmistakable noises of her presence (shuffling slippers, throaty coughs). Instead of waking me, they lull me into a deeper sleep, where I lie dreamless, caught in a world where I don’t hear or see or feel. When I wake up hours later, I can hear her singing in the kitchen; the bang of her pots and pans accompanies her in a wild, rhythmless way. “Que sera, sera,” she sings, doing her best Doris Day impression. Somehow, not knowing what will be is a comforting thought.
I sit up, rub my eyes and walk to the kitchen, following the sound of my mother’s voice. She stands in the middle of the room, holding a Bundt pan with her oven mitts. She nods at me, smiling. “You want some? It’s still warm.”
She slices me a piece of apple cake, the first apple cake I remember her baking for twelve years. She smiles widely at me, passes me a plate and sits down, watching as I eat.
“It’s good, Mom.”
“Isn’t it? Do you know, your Aunt Susie gave me this recipe in 1964.”
She leans back in her chair, places her hands over her stomach. I look at her, suddenly aware that she sits like a mouse, all bones and skin and nerves. Where has her stomach gone, her fearsome bulk? I blink and look again. In the living room, the curtains are open, and music is playing from the radio.
Years ago, when it was all over, when the house fell silent and my sisters had gone back to their everyday lives (back to their real homes, or back to work, where they could teeter in high heels and pretend that they were independent and business-like, hard as lacquered red nails), my mother wrapped herself in layers—knitted vests, fleece sweatshirts, elastic-waisted sweatpants—and burrowed herself into the living-room sofa.
My body—twelve years old and so, so angry—pushed itself into uncomfortable new directions, and I slinked about the house with greasy hair and hunched shoulders. Through my stringy bangs, I peered at her (wet, pink eyes, tissue clamped in her left hand, the other resting on the bony shelf of her clavicles).
The only times she moved off her spot were for dinner and, sometimes, for bed. She cooked and we ate, sometimes leaving chunks of food in our bowls—our silent, hungry protest. Sometimes she cried, silent tears that rolled quickly down her cheeks and disappeared in the folds of her turtleneck. There were a lot of leftovers. I don’t know if she ever really slept.
I grew some more, my unnoticed body taking on a leaner, harder edge. Some nights I didn’t come home, and when I did, everything about me smelled like beer or pot or cigarettes or all three. Still she sat, nodded at my staggering self as if I were coming home from a Bible study. By then, I was used to it. By then, anything else would have been alarming.
I shake my head, stare at her face, wonder if that could truly be satisfaction over apple cake she is feeling.
“Are you feeling okay, Mom?” Somehow, this isn’t right. She sits there, flour smudged on the tip of her nose, head tilted to the side as if she is trying to see me in the right light.
“Oh, I’m just fine. How are you doing? You need to rest, you know, after what happened at the hospital.”
“All I’ve done today is rest.”
“Yes, but …” she folds her hands in her lap. “You haven’t been the same since you came back. What happened in Montreal? I mean, you never seemed to like it there that much, but you seem sad now.”
“Sad?” I’m confused. The sweet cake fills my mouth, and my head swims. “How do you know I’m sad?”
“I just noticed. You’re not working or in school. You stay at home all the time.”
“But you never notice anything. I can’t remember the last time you asked me how I was doing.” I put my fork down, swallow the last crumb.
She picks a napkin up, folds it down the middle, pushing on the crease with the palm of her hand. “Well, you know. It’s hard sometimes, keeping track of what all you girls are doing. You see, we’re alone now, so I have more time for you.” She leans forward. “I don’t know why you were so sick, and maybe I don’t need to know, but I want you to tell me what is really going on with you.”
She’s trying, I think. How is this possible?
“You feel sorry for me,” I say quietly.
She blinks hard. “Yes, I do. I know what it’s like to be sad.”
“This is different.”
“No, it’s not. How? I moped around the house, didn’t talk to anyone—same as you. I’m trying to change things now, don’t you understand?”
I shake my head. She leans back again, holds her hands in front of her chest as if she is trying to prevent her body from cracking in two. “I want you to do something. I want you to stop looking at me like that. I want you to try, too. Will you at least think about what I’m saying?”
I push my chair away from the table. “Thanks for the cake, Mom.” I place my dish in the sink (quietly, for any noise would ruin the moment, and then we might be back where we started) and walk briskly toward my room through the living room, drawing the heavy curtains on the way. I turn to look back and see the piano—spotless, smooth, unplayed. I can never walk past without seeing it. My eyes can’t skip over its solid, silent shape like they can with the silk flowers on the dining-room hutch or even, in the past, my mother sitting in the dark. Its noiselessness is not really noiseless at all. I step forward and run my hands over the dusty bench.
I can hear, still, the violent thumping of my hands playing scales. I sounded nothing at all like those children we saw in the news, the ones who won musical scholarships and the top awards at contests. Those girls (eleven years old, bespectacled, long, smooth braids) looked years younger than me, their imminent pubescence hidden by bibbed dresses and shiny Mary Janes.
I banged out my lessons, stormed my way through “Long, Long Ago.” I wanted to fling myself at the piano, break through its dark wood frame, ruin its innards. My sweatshirt sagged at the collar, and as I watched my hands on the keys, I could keep track of my hangnails, the ragged edges of my
cuticles.
When I quit, I simply stopped. I said nothing. My mother said nothing. The piano stood between us, its cover growing a fine layer of undisturbed dust. I didn’t touch it, and my mother didn’t ask me to. I waited and waited for her to say something, until the waiting became the past. The piano itself disappeared under mismatched doilies, china figurines and Christmas cards from relatives in Oakland, Toronto, Perth.
All those things that belong nowhere else are now marooned on the piano. There is no escaping that I disappoint her, that the piano remains so that she can remind me of my failure. Although, perhaps, it reminds her of something too. I head to my bedroom, knowing that, underneath it all, it’s still just a piano.
When I wake up on sunny mornings, the first things I see are the mountains. They’re painfully sharp in the morning light, reassuringly real and yet unreal at the same time. I want to reach out my hand and touch them, yet I know if I did, all I would get is air. My love for them is no less for this.
The ocean is different. It exists separately and does not enter into the daily workings of my life, except for the western breeze that blows across the city, that moves my curtains from left to right. It is not so much mysterious as all-knowing and silent. There is a lot it could say if it chose. A silent partner in this landscape I was born to.
I’ve driven through Vancouver with my mother, my sisters and, in the past, my father; so many things happen as we drive, watching the streets go by, the quality of the light changing as we travel from east to west, or east again on our way home. It is really the East Side that is Vancouver for me—the netless basketball hoops stranded in their concrete courts, the stained stucco on the sides of squat apartment buildings, the spitcrossed sidewalks that seem to lead everywhere you’d ever want to go until you realize that they can only end in ocean or mountain or trees. The smell of the city comes in through the windows, and it’s easy to forget the purpose of the drive, the lives we’ve left at home, the ugly days when it rains and we have to take the bus.
At home, the portraits on the wall are of the departed, and I can’t walk to the kitchen without seeing old images of my father, my grandfather and my grandmother. All in a three-quarter portrait pose, all smiling, all without a body. They hang there, three in a row, suspended on the dark wood panelling, fading a little more every year. But it seems my mother has come to life lately—bustling, grasping my wrist when I need it, even before I ask. Surely, this is life, even in the presence of the past.
I walk this city every day, sidestep the garbage, hold my breath through the alleys. But even in the dirtiest of places, where the sidewalk is covered with gum and the hum of traffic and city noise is so loud that you can’t even hear your own footsteps, you can always look north and see the mountains. And there’s always a breeze, faintly salt-scented, that touches your face as you turn to look west.
death
Pon Man shakes off the shreds of his dream (in which his mother follows him through his daily life like a shadow, disappearing when he turns his head, reappearing in his peripheral vision) and sits up, aware that he is alone in bed. Down the hall, he hears a low keening, the kind of sound he imagines lambs being led to the slaughter might make. He swings his feet over the side of the bed and into his slippers. He wonders if one of the girls is sick and Siu Sang has gone to help her.
He knocks on the bathroom door, listens at the crack in the door frame. He can see the light spilling out into the hall from the gap by the floor.
“Hello? Is anyone in there?”
And then another low cry—choking, wet, wordless. Pon Man reaches for the knob and turns.
Siu Sang lies on the linoleum floor, her pyjamas around her knees. There is blood coursing thickly from between her legs; there is blood on the floor, blood on the walls, blood all over the toilet and spattered on the mirror. She cries, her mouth an open hole amidst all the blood so that it seems to be streaming from her face as well.
Pon Man breathes through his mouth, knowing that, otherwise, he will gag.
He wraps her in three towels and carries her through the house to the car outside. Wendy opens her bedroom door and peers out at him. “I’m taking your mother to the hospital,” he whispers. “You’ll have to clean the bathroom.” He wonders if he should warn her about the blood, but decides there’s no time. He leaves quietly, as if he is absorbed by the night.
As they drive through the streets (empty and black and wet—not even a cat), Siu Sang begins to talk, her words a damp babble at first. But then she repeats herself, her voice slowly forming each syllable as if she can remember only the individual sounds and words themselves have lost their meaning.
“It’s a curse. She laid a curse on me.”
Pon Man does not dare take his eyes off the road. He squirms. “Who? Who are you talking about?”
“This is my punishment for hating her, for birthing only girls. I knew I was sick as soon as Sammy came out. I could feel the blood pooling inside.”
“Who put a curse on you?”
Siu Sang reaches up from the back seat, where she is lying, and grabs his shoulder. Later, he will see the thick red handprint on his jacket, like the devil’s mark. “Your mother, of course. Now that she’s dead, she has nothing better to do than torture me.”
Pon Man is afraid to speak. He hopes she will forget these words in her pain (he wonders if she is perhaps right, but then shakes his head, burying curse and torture and mother beneath the unordered clutter in his brain) and that he will be free to drive the rest of the way in silence. At the next red light, he turns to look at her. She is asleep. He is so thankful he could cry.
Later, as he sits in the waiting room while doctors remove Siu Sang’s uterus, he relives, over and over again, the sight of his wife lying, her eyes wide open, in her own blood. He could smell the fear in the air—his or hers, he doesn’t know—the sickening combination of flesh and blood and terror. He rubs his face with the heels of his hands. As if, he thinks, there hasn’t been enough sickness already.
Shew Lin’s funeral was only two weeks ago. That afternoon, the warm air smelled like berries and mulch to him as he rubbed his hands, red and sore from the casket handles. The funeral went well—lots of people, a touching service. He arranged everything himself, not knowing exactly what his mother would have wanted because, like many superstitious old ladies, she refused to talk about her death. So, as he made his way from funeral home to cemetery, he could only guess, imagine her voice in his head one last time, saying yes to this or no to that. As Shew Lin was the first to say, only her boy could know her so well.
When Pon Man walks into the recovery room to see his wife, she lies with her face to the wall, her back stiff and perfectly straight so that he knows she isn’t sleeping. Her whole body blames him, makes him feel like a foolish little boy whose selfishness has ruined everything. He can hear her thinking, Your children did this to me. It is your mother who wishes me to suffer. He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes and steps away from her, walks into the hall, where, under the fluorescent lights, his skin looks not quite there, in the process of disappearing.
When Pon Man brings her home, she doesn’t speak. The girls creep about the house silently, their eyes moving from left to right as if they are looking for hidden dangers that might leap out of dusty corners. Seid Quan carefully moves in the last of his things from his apartment in Chinatown, making sure not to bump the walls with his boxes, afraid, perhaps, that the vibrations will travel through the drywall and into Siu Sang’s bedroom.
Pon Man brings her hot water with lemon, ties on her apron so that he can cook the meals (meat pies and pork chops and casseroles made with canned cream of mushroom soup). He is silent as well, for if she begins to speak again in response to him, there is no telling what she might say. “I have children to think of,” Pon Man says to himself. “And if her madness comes back, I don’t want them to know.”
He lets himself wonder what she must be thinking. Does she want to hold Sammy? Does
being a mother make her crazy? What does she want—really, really want? The answer could not possibly be as simple as a genuine pearl necklace or a fig tree for the backyard. He searches his brain for the things she loves and can come up with nothing, not even the taste of watermelon on a hot day, or that movie where the girl is discovered and becomes a Hollywood star.
Picking up things that he knows she has touched, he wanders through the house, hoping that one of these objects will tell him that essential thing about his wife he needs to know. He touches them all: the feather duster, a white leather glove, the case she keeps her glasses in. Pon Man stares at each one, turns it over as if something might be hidden on the underside. Nothing. He even finds his old sketchbook, the last pages filled with drawings of Siu Sang, but these say more about him as a young, impatient artist than they do about her.
He rummages through the old boxes in the garage, hears the mice skittering away and climbing the insides of the walls. He plunges his hands into her forgotten things, pushes aside the red silk pillows her mother insisted she bring to Canada. He is sure that he will know what he is looking for when he finds it.
Pon Man lifts the lid of Siu Sang’s trunk, the one she brought with her from Hong Kong when she first arrived. In a pocket in the lining, he finds an old book, a romance novel with a picture of a young, open-faced girl on the cover. He wipes it off with his sleeve and lets out a tense breath.
“So this is it,” he whispers. The pictured girl is poised, ready for misfortune but knowing that the real happiness, the romantic ending, is a sure thing. He realizes it is the promise of the perfect life that Siu Sang lives for—a life of martinis and glamour and perfectly behaved, beautiful children. The kind of life this fictional girl on the cover of a book fully expects.
He thinks of Siu Sang’s middle-aged body: the unmistakable scars of motherhood and age, the thin snakes of stretch marks on her stomach and thighs and breasts. Even when she is naked, he can almost see the rose-coloured cardigan she wears every chilly day floating like a ghost above her damp skin, the cork-soled slippers on her feet and the tissue tucked into her sleeve.
End of East, The Page 17
