by May-lee Chai
“Well, we might as well sit down and wait,” Mom smiled, pretending. I stared at the pages of my book, but I couldn’t concentrate. I stared at a faint stain on the tablecloth. Oyster sauce, I figured. I never noticed the stains when Ye-ye and Nai-nai were here.
Then Aunt Marcie stormed through the dining room, steering a stroller between the tables. She was wearing one of the long polyester caftans she’d adopted as a uniform ever since her pregnancy. It had been six and a half months since the baby was born, but she was still dressing like that, like a flowered awning had attached itself to her body.
“Vivian!” she called too loudly. “Can you believe it?”
My cousin Margot trotted after her. She looked hot, her cheeks flushed, her limp, black hair sticking to her neck and face. Aunt Marcie believed in cutting Margot’s hair very short; she said it would make it grow thicker that way. Margot was almost seven but small for her age. The short hair didn’t help.
“Whath wrong with Ye-ye?” Margot lisped, sidling up to me. She set a Barbie on the tabletop. “I’m thared.”
“What happened to your tongue?” I asked.
Margot sighed, rolling her large black eyes. “Ith thore.” She opened her mouth and pulled her lower lip down so that I could see. There was a red plastic bead wedged in the gap between two of her baby teeth.
“How did you do that?”
Margot shook her head. “I wath playing with the baby on the floor, and it juth happened.”
“Gross.” Lewis wrinkled his nose.
“Don’t make fun of Margot,” I said. It was hard to keep track of the little kids and eavesdrop on the adults at the same time.
“I suppose we’ll be the last to find out what’s going on.” Aunt Marcie flipped through the menu as though she actually planned to order something. “Where are the waiters?”
“As far as I can make out, Ye-ye has had a second heart attack.” My mother shook her head.
“Uncle Lincoln found him on the kitchen floor,” I interjected.
Mom and Aunt Marcie turned to stare.
“Poor Ye-ye,” Mom said.
“Like I said, we’ll be the last to know.” Aunt Marcie put her hand in the air and actually snapped her fingers.
Now they’re going to spit in our drinks, I thought. The way Uncle Lincoln always said he and Uncle Harry used to back when they had to wait tables in high school.
But the bad part was only beginning.
Aunt Marcie looked straight at Mom, as though she were just noticing the highlights, which Mom had just had redone. “My great-aunt Agatha went blonde, too. Just before she died.”
Mom and Aunt Marcie didn’t get along. Aunt Marcie was insecure, Mom said. She and Uncle Harry were going to get a divorce last year, but then Aunt Marcie had the baby and now they weren’t. I knew because I’d overheard Mom on the phone with Aunt Marcie. Mom made me promise not to say anything.
I took a breath and held it until it hurt in my chest, pressing inside me like a dying balloon. There’d be a fight at home now. All the bad moments were converging, everything at once, like we couldn’t hold them off anymore, as though there weren’t enough good memories to keep the bad ones from winning. Mom and Dad would fight in the kitchen or worse in their bedroom and Mom would say she wanted to go back to her family in California, and Dad might shout, and she’d shout back, and glass would break, something small, a decorative vase, a picture frame, that red ashtray we used to have for guests. What small thing was left to break? I tried to remember from my dusting all the little tchotchkes in their bedroom. The purple glass perfume bottle. The blue clay plate from Laguna Beach that Dad kept his loose pocket change on. The giant conch shell we could all hear the ocean in. I didn’t want anything else to break. We didn’t have anything left that I wouldn’t miss.
Mom put her hand on her hip, her sharp elbow pointed out.
Aunt Marcie pushed at her own permed black hair, as though to make a point.
But then the waiters came with short, sweaty glasses of water with ice and Mom ordered food for us from the English menu, which Ye-ye never used, and the fight somehow died before it could begin.
The baby woke up and made some gurgling baby noise.
Mom turned away from Aunt Marcie and bent toward it, remarking how sweet and beautiful it was.
I pressed my hands to a spot above my heart and held them there. As if. As if. As if.
TWO AND a half hours passed before Dad came bursting through the front doors, his mouth in a tight straight line. His concern made me feel nervous all over again.
“George, how is your father?” My mother stood up, and my father sat down, slumping.
My mother poured him some tea. He drank without looking at it.
“He’s okay,” Dad said. “No heart attack. Just palpitations.”
“Thank God,” my mother said.
Aunt Marcie stood up. “Where’s Harry? Am I supposed to wait here forever?” She marched off toward the front door.
“How you doing, Margot?”
My cousin perked up, smiling. “I’m fine, thank you, Uncle George. Look at my tooth!” She pulled her lip down to reveal the bead.
“That’s good, that’s good,” Dad said without looking. He ran his hand through his hair so that it stood on end. “The cardiologist is keeping Ba overnight for observation.”
“How’s your mother?” my mother asked.
“She’s back in the apartment. Lincoln’s staying with her.”
“Uncle Lincoln’s not coming?” I asked, disappointed.
“Lincoln’s responsible. Or at least he feels responsible. He told Ma he’s engaged. That was the good news.”
“What?” Mom stood up.
The baby started crying.
“Oh, no. Not again.” Margot covered her ears and put her head down on the table.
Aunt Marcie came back. She looked at her crying baby: “Like clockwork. I was beginning to leak.” Aunt Marcie shook her head and felt for her own breasts through all the fabric of the caftan. “I’m a regular automat these days.” She laughed in a way that showed she didn’t think it was funny. She sat down heavily in one of the chairs.
“But Lincoln can’t get married,” Mom said.
“Who’s Uncle Lincoln going to marry?” I asked and for once, like a miracle, my voice carried, above the whimpering baby, and the murmur of the restaurant, and the plates clattering, and the traffic outside. Dad turned to look at me like he’d just realized I was there.
“His secretary. The grad student.”
“Mariceles?” Mom exclaimed. “He can’t marry her.”
“She’s pregnant apparently,” Dad said. “That was what caused the fight.”
“Well, well, well, Lincoln’s long bachelor days are finally coming to an end,” Aunt Marcie said.
“But that can’t be Lincoln’s baby!” Mom was waving her hands in front of her as though she needed to create a wind that would put out a fire on the table. “I mean, I should know. I was his best friend. We were dating.”
“You weren’t dating.” Dad shook his head.
“Well, yes, we were,” Mom said angrily. “And I know Lincoln doesn’t like her that way. He can’t marry that-that-that woman. He’s …” and she paused, before whispering loudly, “you know.”
Then Uncle Harry came running in; he didn’t even sit down. “I’m double parked!” he announced. “We have to go!”
“Well, you’ve missed the show, as usual,” Aunt Marcie said. “Apparently we’re the only two who’ve been out of the loop.”
Then he noticed Aunt Marcie feeding the baby. “My god, Marcie, cover yourself.” He took his jacket off and slung it over Aunt Marcie’s shoulders.
“Don’t worry about me. At least I’m natural.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Mom said.
Aunt Marcie stood up with the baby still hooked to her breast. “We should go, Harry. I, for one, am tired of being the last person on earth this family thinks about. To think,
I let Lincoln babysit Margot while I was giving birth.”
I didn’t know why she was upset about that. Uncle Lincoln babysat all of us. He always brought us toys from Chinatown, snakes made out of bamboo, magic wooden boxes that made coins disappear, packs of cards with instructions on how to pull aces out of ears and hide hearts up our sleeves. He was our favorite babysitter.
Aunt Marcie didn’t even wait to see if Margot was following her. She just walked out while Uncle Harry grabbed the stroller and ran after her.
BACK IN the car, Mom and Dad were fighting. Or rather, Mom was. She was angry. “What got into him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Lincoln figured Ba and Ma won’t last forever and he thought he’d make them happy for once. Maybe this is another of his do-gooder projects. He’s always trying to fix broken things and making things worse.”
“Oh, George. That’s awful to say.”
“Anyway, Ba’s going to be okay. But what a disaster.” Dad sighed.
It turned out Nai-nai had been upset about the engagement. Not because Mariceles was already pregnant without them being married, but because, Dad said, she was Puerto Rican and not Chinese.
“Mom’s not Chinese,” I said from the backseat.
“Yes, but she’s white.”
“Nai-nai is prejudiced,” Lewis declared, in the way that little kids can just blurt things out, and a silence fell over the car. I wanted Dad to say something else, like Yes, and we will all stand behind Lincoln and Mariceles because Nai-nai is wrong, but he didn’t say it. My parents’ silences about many things alarmed me. They made me aware of invisible lines that I couldn’t see that they drew between themselves and the rest of the world. I never knew when that line might be drawn to exclude me.
THE NEXT month everything in the family changed. We didn’t meet for Sunday brunch at all. There was too much fighting. Uncle Harry and Aunt Marcie announced they were boycotting the wedding. Aunt Marcie had just gotten a gig as the organist at St. Anne’s. She wasn’t even Catholic. At best she was a lukewarm Lutheran, but she said, “How would it look?”
And Uncle Harry wasn’t talking to us at all. Mom said he’d been in denial. It wasn’t her fault that she’d spilled Uncle Lincoln’s secret. No one told Ye-ye or Nai-nai why everyone was fighting, so Nai-nai assumed the family was taking sides, for and against Mariceles. She wrote long letters to my father, with pictures of various Chinese girls that she’d solicited from friends, from other old ladies at her senior center, her old missionary acquaintances, who knows where else.
“Ugh, what a mess,” Dad said, when he said anything at all. Mostly he buried himself in his schoolwork, refusing to answer the phone or come to dinner on time. He had taken over the family room for his study, his piles of notes and typed pages spreading across the two folding tables and the end table, so Lewis and I weren’t allowed there anymore either, which meant there was no more TV for us that summer. We were confined to the backyard or our own rooms until the house was finished, which seemed an ever dicier proposition.
I couldn’t even have tuned in to Soap if I’d wanted to. I had no idea where to turn for more information, for guidance. I didn’t feel like this situation was something I could talk to my friends about. I was left to stew in my own ignorance, my Nancy Drew mysteries providing no clues whatsoever.
“TO THINK,” Mom said, “I could’ve married him someday if I’d only known!” She said this several times a week, at dinner, or in the car while we were driving to the grocery store, and once before breakfast during the middle of the Today show. I had the TV on in the kitchen because Gene Shalit was going to talk to Pamela Sue Martin, and I refused to leave for school until I saw the interview. I’d become obsessed with Ms. Martin, her dark red hair, her sleepy eyes, the voice like a girl who’d just gotten up no matter what time of day she was speaking. I didn’t have words yet for the way I felt about her. That, too, was a mystery.
Dad had already left for work, and it was just the three of us around the table.
Mom said, “It’s not that I don’t love your father. But I never realized I had a chance with Lincoln.”
She sighed in a long dramatic way.
“But then you wouldn’t have us,” Lewis said.
“Oh, I’d have children like you,” Mom said, quickly, and then she laughed. Ha ha ha. Dramatic and deliberate. “I’m just kidding. I love you very much.” She pulled Lewis close to her and kissed him on the top of his head.
THAT SEPTEMBER, school started and our house was still in disrepair. I hoped that meant we might not really move and I might be able to stay with my friends. Junior high began just like any year in elementary school for me, except Nancy Drew Mysteries was cancelled on TV and all my friends started reading Trixie Belden.
Dad took over the ping pong table for his books as the construction spread to the basement, and that meant no more ping pong for Lewis and me. My skills got rusty, and Gertrude Harter was able to beat me in gym class, 11–9, 13–11, 11–7.
Then at the last minute, just before Christmas, Lincoln announced the engagement was called off. Mariceles’s old boyfriend came back, and at first Mom thought that meant Mariceles would marry him. But instead Mariceles told Lincoln she found marriage to be a bourgeois establishment affectation to oppress women, and she had decided to stay single.
Uncle Lincoln moved to the West Coast after that. To California.
“I wish we could all go with him,” Mom said.
THE FAMILY had started getting together again, even if there was a Lincoln-shaped hole in our universe. Nai-nai liked to bring his letters to read bits out loud, as though he were seated at the table still, so his brothers could hear how he was doing. He’d found a couple of teaching jobs at a community college, nothing tenure-track yet, and one Sunday Nai-nai announced proudly that he was running a Saturday enrichment program for at-risk youth.
Uncle Harry said, “Lincoln is a pervert. They should keep him away from children.” He said this loudly enough for us to hear at the kids’ table to the side.
None of the other adults said anything after that. Silence fell over the table and the congealing plates of brown sauce long beans and half-eaten moo goo gai pan. Soon it was time to leave, to drop Nai-nai and Ye-ye back at their apartment. Nobody was hungry enough to order a final soup.
Dad said that Uncle Harry had always been jealous because Lincoln was the youngest. After Lincoln was born, he felt he never got any attention.
Mom cried all the way home, through the grim traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel. I watched the condensation dripping down the stained tile walls, and Lewis wondered aloud what kept the water of the Hudson from seeping inside and drowning us all.
I didn’t say anything, but I felt the problem was that no one in the family had learned to stand up to Uncle Harry’s bullying. He was considered the clever one, the successful businessman, and he had the most money, which intimidated my grandparents into thinking he was something they should be proud of.
After that, we didn’t get together so much.
NAI-NAI AND Uncle Lincoln remained close, however. Over the years, they gossiped over the phone long-distance. Ye-ye complained about the phone bill, but there was nothing he could do. A mother must talk to her son, she told him.
I envied them. Mom had found my VHS copies of Battlestar Galactica and Blade Runner and thrown them in the trash. Drawn to their smoky eyes, I taped pictures of Maren Jensen and Sean Young torn from magazines next to my mirror. Mom took me to volunteer at church, washing dishes every Sunday during the donut social after Mass. She made me work with her after school and volunteer on Saturdays. I was too busy to go to movies with my friends, so I might as well have moved, I never got to see them anymore. I never had time even to watch TV, even though Pamela Sue Martin was now on Dallas every Wednesday night.
I did not understand many things: why my mother seemed intent on punishing me while my brother was allowed to keep crumpled girlie magazines in his closet as though we didn’t both know they
were there; why I had more chores than he; why he was allowed to stay out late and I was expected to do the dishes and clean the house and keep up my grades on top of work and church. My mother complained that I did not even resemble her, as though I were growing my hair straight and dark deliberately to spite her. I seemed to be punished for having been born female, as though she wanted to extract some penance for her own life having turned out nothing as she had once imagined. I did not understand why I found both girls and boys attractive, but not all, not always, and never the boys my mother liked, the ones who carried her groceries to the car, the ones who attended her Bible study classes. I could not imagine my mother ever dating Uncle Lincoln. I could not imagine her as a young woman with dreams.
WHEN I was in high school, Uncle Lincoln wrote a long op-ed that was published in the Los Angeles Times. He sent copies to Dad, to Mom, to Uncle Harry and Aunt Marcie even. Uncle Lincoln and his partner, Rafael, were running a clinic to offer free tests for HIV, and together they’d denounced Reagan’s silence on AIDS.
Mom said, “So it’s official.”
Dad said, “Good for Lincoln.”
But nobody translated the article for my grandparents. I don’t know if they ever saw it, if they knew what a good person Lincoln was.
JUST BEFORE my high school graduation, Nai-nai died in her sleep. Everyone had thought Ye-ye would be the first to go. We went to her funeral instead of my commencement.
Uncle Lincoln was despondent. He shaved his head, he refused to eat, he said he wanted to move back to New York to take care of Ye-ye.
“You were an impeccable son,” Mom told him, over and over, at the funeral banquet, while he sat in a daze at the table, unable to greet any of Ye-ye and Nai-nai’s old friends who’d come to pay their respects. “You loved your mother.”
It made me envious to see how solicitous Mom was over Uncle Lincoln’s feelings. And it made me wonder what it would feel like to love a mother the way Uncle Lincoln loved Nai-nai.
WHEN I was twenty-seven, Mom died, too, after a short and brutal fight with breast cancer. She was fifty-six. She and I had been fighting for years, and this continued until the very end. Uncle Lincoln was the one who helped Dad find the burial plot, make the funeral arrangements, notify the papers. Dad was practically catatonic with grief. He’d believed up to the end there’d be a miracle that would save her.
