Useful Phrases for Immigrants

by May-lee Chai

  “Okay.” Rose tried to remember where she’d left her gym bag. When she’d arrived at dawn, she was both exhausted from the drive and still hopped up from Mountain Dew and nicotine. She tiptoed out into the hallway, found her bag by the front door with her sneakers. Sam and Marisol were whispering in the kitchen. Rose walked past the open door twice. The whispering never stopped.

  Rose lit a cigarette for Ma then one for herself. The last two in her pack.

  Ma inhaled deeply. She barely coughed at all and managed to exhale a large ring of smoke like a halo. “You see, perfect,” Ma said, triumph in her voice.

  “They’ll smell the smoke. Maybe I should light some of the incense on the shrine.” Rose got up and checked around the dresser top. She finally found a cone—Night Jasmine—in a red ashtray. She lit it with her Zippo. Out of habit, she bowed her head quickly, three times before the framed picture of the Buddha.

  Then she sat back down on the bed. They stayed like that, side by side, without talking, until Ma dunked her cigarette into her cup of morphine-spiked fruit punch.

  She exhaled two streams of blue smoke from her nostrils.

  “There’s no hope for us. I can’t see how we’re going to survive in this world. I saw your bruises.”

  “I’m fine. I fell.” Rose didn’t want to argue with Ma about her life again. Some days it seemed all she did was argue with people. Customers at the coffee shop. The kids she tutored on weekends. Their parents. But no, not everyone. Rose had made the police officer smile from the back of the squad car. The neighbors were still screaming, and she was spotting blood, but she told him jokes until he cracked a smile. “Sunshine, don’t let nobody put a cloud over that face of yours. You got the light in you,” he’d said.

  Tell that to my asshole boyfriend, Rose had thought but not said. Instead she’d smiled. Rose had learned cops were easier to control when she smiled.

  “You don’t know how to manage in this life,” Ma continued, ticking off Rose’s many failures: she hadn’t finished her degree, she had every opportunity that Ma had not but still no profession, no marriage.

  “I’m going back to school soon. I just needed to take a break.” Rose wasn’t lying exactly.

  The door opened and Sam stuck his head inside. He kept his hair cut short, like he was still in the Marines. All the baby fat was gone now, his cheekbones seemed chiseled from a warm, smooth stone. But he was still wide-eyed, just as he had been as a child, alert, observing everything.

  He sniffed.

  “You can’t smoke around Mom!” He scowled.

  “Sammy, you look so tired. You should not work so hard.” Ma switched to English, just for her son.

  Sam could have been all of eight years old again in Ma’s presence.

  “Mommy! Can I get you anything? I’m heading to work.”

  “When did you get so polite, Squirt?” Rose smirked, but her younger brother ignored her.

  “You change the fruit? I dreamed about your father last night,” Ma said.

  “We put up a new bowl yesterday.”

  “That wife of yours, she didn’t throw them away?”

  “Marisol even picked some flowers for the vase. I bought some oranges and apples and a banana.”

  “All the praying she does to God, I don’t know what she wants.”

  “Mom, she wants you to get better.”

  “She makes me pray a rosary every night,” Ma stage-whispered to Rose.

  “It’s for your health.” Sam’s voice trembled. “God can still cure you.”

  “My sister used to do that, too. Before she died. Didn’t do any good. All those Catholic prayers.”

  “Ma, do you want Sam to get anything before he goes to work?” Rose asked quickly. She didn’t drive all night and lose so much sleep just to play referee in a fight over religion.

  “You look tired, Sammy.” Ma patted his head, smoothed his hair. “You let that wife of yours do some work. When I first married, I worked all the time.”

  “Did you remember, Sam? It’s Ma’s birthday.” Rose was sure her brother had forgotten.

  “At my age, what do I care about my birthday,” Ma said.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot. Happy birthday!” Sam noticed her cup. “Do you need some more juice?”

  “No, no, no. Rose is here. She can help me. You rest. You work too hard.”

  Sam sniffed, on the verge of breaking down. He bent close to Ma, and she wrapped her arms around his muscular shoulders and patted him on the back. “You’re my good boy,” she said. Sam sniffed again and turned away so Rose wouldn’t see him tear up.

  “This year will be better, Mom. I know it.” Sam looked as earnest as he had as a boy bringing home his report card for his mother’s approval.

  “Of course it will. The horoscope book says it will be my best year ever.”

  Sam nodded and headed out the door. Then he turned back toward Rose. “Don’t wear Mommy out with all your talking, Rose.”

  “Shut up, Squirt.”

  Sam flipped Rose the bird cheerfully and headed out, shutting the door softly behind him.

  Ma waited until she heard his car pull out of the driveway. “Pick me up,” Ma demanded. “I would like a shower.”

  “Are you sure it’s a good idea?”

  “It’s my birthday. I deserve to be clean. You can help me.”

  Ma wrapped her arms around Rose’s neck. Rose could almost count Ma’s ribs through her sweater.

  They walked to the bathroom in tiny steps. When Rose was a teenager, the house had seemed so small compared to houses on TV, she’d felt her siblings’ presence in every room, Lily and Daisy and Sam suffocating her, but now the hallway seemed to stretch, her mother leaning on her heavily, each step a struggle.

  When they got to the bathroom, Rose was sweating slightly, but Ma was in good spirits. “Now get the water ready,” she commanded. “It’s been so long since I had a good shower. That woman wants me to take a sponge bath!”

  Rose set her mother gently on the toilet seat then bent over the tub, adjusting the water. When she turned around again, she was startled to find Ma, normally so modest, completely naked, smiling like a mischievous child, her cotton pajamas and panties and wig lying in a heap at her feet.

  “I’m ready,” Ma announced.

  Rose helped Ma into the tub, leaned her against the tile wall, then sprayed her with the removable shower nozzle.

  Ma closed her eyes. “Over here,” she directed, pointing. “No, there.” She rubbed her hands in the warm water and splashed it over her bald head. She smiled.

  “I’m the baby now,” she said. “You’re the mother!” She splashed water at Rose.

  “Ma, stop it!” But Ma only laughed.

  “It used to be the tradition to bathe for the new year. But that was long ago,” Ma said, lifting one arm then the other so that Rose could spray the sides of her body. “Back in the village, we just had one tub of water for everyone in the family.”

  “Yuck.”

  Ma opened her eyes just to glare at Rose. “Careful. Don’t get water in my face.”

  Rose put the plastic nozzle back on its metal hook and grabbed the white bar of Dove from its dish. She soaped Ma from her flat feet to her wide thighs, across the folds of her belly, underneath her saggy breasts, over the hard, raised bump where the port for the chemo lay beneath the skin, up and down her thin arms, which had once been ironed with muscles. She washed the wrinkles of Ma’s neck and the whorls of her ears and the top of her smooth, round skull. And then gently, she cupped her hands beneath the shower nozzle and poured handful after handful of water over Ma’s skin until the soap had been washed off completely and the water ran clear.

  Finally, she gently wrapped Ma in two thick bath towels like a glass figurine that might break.

  “I turned a few heads when I was a young girl,” Ma said. She stroked the pale blue towel about her head as though the ends were plaits of long, shiny hair. “My sister had the prettier face, but I had a better
figure. My breasts were round like melons, and my waist was so slender. It’s a pity none of you girls looked more like me.”

  Rose helped Ma shuffle back through the hallway.

  “Are you two girls all right?” Marisol emerged from the kitchen as though she sensed a conspiracy.

  “Ma wanted a shower. For her birthday.”

  “I could have shown you, Rose. We have a bath chair for her.” Marisol folded her arms across her chest.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Ma shuffled faster into her room. She called behind her, “Go to work now. My daughter will take care of me.”

  Rose locked the bedroom door behind them.

  Ma eased herself onto the edge of her bed as Rose searched for clean clothes in the dresser. There were balls and balls of socks, neatly folded t-shirts, but no underpants. “Do you know where Marisol puts your underwear?”

  “We should commit suicide together.”

  “No, Ma. I can’t do that.” Ma and her dramatic pronouncements. Rose remembered the way her parents used to argue, the shouting that made the walls shake, the deathly threats. She hadn’t realized when she was a child that her parents’ arguments were a sign of their verbal creativity, not actual violence. She hadn’t recognized the difference in her ex until it was almost too late.

  Rose felt tired. Driving all night had been a bad idea. Once upon a time, she had never needed to sleep. Work, school, party, and up again to start all over. But she hadn’t been a teenager for a long time. Her smoking wasn’t helping. Rose stretched her hands deep into the sock drawer and found a pair of pink nylon panties in the very back.

  “Your next life might be better than this one,” Ma said.

  “Lift your left leg.” Rose slipped Ma’s foot through one side of her underpants. “Right leg.” Rose pulled Ma’s pants up over her hairless vagina, her protruding hipbones.

  “That boyfriend of yours will never leave his wife. You’re no longer young. What’s the point of living?” Ma trembled.

  “We broke up a long time ago.” Rose buttoned up her mother’s blouse. She held Ma’s bony shoulders in her hands and felt her tremble.

  Ma leaned against her pillows, perspiration beading across her brown forehead. “Open that Gatorade for me. It’s time for my morphine.”

  Rose found a cleanish mug on the dresser since the old cup was filled with ashes. Rose poured in the Gatorade, added four drops of Roxanol, leaned the bendy straw at just the right angle. “Just the way you like it.” Rose turned to the bed.

  But Ma had nodded off.

  She’d slid down so that only her tiny brown head appeared above the mound of pastel bath towels. Her face looked oddly at peace, as though she were a wealthy lady in an advertisement for a luxury spa.

  Rose leaned close and checked for breathing until Ma’s breath escaped in a slight snore.

  Relieved, Rose lay down on the floor beside Ma’s bed. She placed her hands over her belly, which rumbled angrily. She was hungry but not hungry enough to get up off the floor.

  Before she knew it, Rose fell into a deep, untroubled sleep. When she was very little, Rose used to sleep beside her mother in the same bed. In those days the restaurant hadn’t taken off and her father had to work a night shift at the John Deere plant in Waterloo to make ends meet.

  Lying by her side, Ma would tell Rose stories about her life in the village before she was married, when she fought with her sister, the adventures the two girls had swimming in rivers, spying on monks, catching insects and snakes, when she’d never imagined what it would be like to live in another country and to have children of her own. Rose fell asleep to the sound of her mother’s voice in her ear. Maybe this was the root of her insomnia, the silence that seemed to press around her in the dark when she was alone. Rose could never grow used to it.

  Maybe this was the problem with how she chose men, the louder the better to fill the Ma-sized hole in her bed.

  Ma woke first. She pushed at her tangle of sheets like a butterfly in a spider’s web. She called out, and Rose sat up on the floor without even opening her eyes first. Her mother’s voice had that effect on her.

  “You have to help me. Quickly.” Ma lifted her arms.

  Rose jumped to her feet too fast, the room spinning around her, and she tumbled into the bed beside her mother. “No, no, no. Help me up,” Ma said, annoyed, and Rose felt better. Her mother couldn’t be dying, not anytime soon, if she could sound so irritable, so very normal.

  Rose helped her mother out of bed. Ma leaned against the wall.

  “Now pick up the mattress,” Ma commanded.

  “What?”

  “Hurry! She could be coming any minute!”

  Rose picked up the end of the mattress. Ma leaned forward so quickly that Rose gasped, thinking her mother was falling. But no, Ma was reaching underneath, patting around with her long, thin fingers.

  “There!” she cried triumphantly. Ma waved a manila envelope in the air. “What are you waiting for? Put my bed down.”

  Rose set the mattress back atop the box springs and Ma sat down heavily, flipping through her envelope, thick and worn-looking and filled with cash. “You never know,” Ma said, rifling through the bills. “Maybe she already found it and took some.”

  “Marisol wouldn’t do that.”

  “You have no idea.” Ma sat on the edge of the bed, licked a finger, and counted, flipping fives and twenties and the occasional hundred-dollar bill.

  “You should have put that in the bank anyway.” Rose found one of Ma’s sweaters in the dresser and laid it over her thin shoulders.

  “All here.” Ma sighed. “Four thousand three hundred and fifty.”

  “Dollars?”

  Ma rolled her eyes. “This is what I need you to do for me.” She handed Rose the envelope. “Put this in your bag. So they don’t find it.”

  For a second, Rose thought her mother was giving her the money. Rose’s heart rose like salmon swimming upstream, flipped against the barrier of her ribcage. “I can’t, Ma.”

  If I take her money, she will die, Rose thought.

  “You aren’t listening. Of course you can. I want you to drive me to Altoona.” Ma buttoned up her cardigan matter-of-factly. “It’s my lucky day. I can feel it. My horoscope said it’s my lucky year. Well, there’s nothing lucky about cancer, so there has to be something else.”

  Slowly, Rose found her voice. “You want to go to the track? It’s freezing outside. There’s a foot of snow!”

  “I only ask this one thing, and my daughter refuses to help her old Ma.” Ma pulled at the collar of her pink cardigan. “What kind of birthday is this?”

  “It’s not—I just don’t want you to catch cold.” If anything went wrong, it would be Rose’s fault. What would Rose say to everyone then? “What about your white count?”

  Ma wrinkled her wide, flat nose. “You sound like an old woman. White count, black count. I don’t care what count. I want to bet on the horses.”

  “We can’t leave,” Rose said desperately. “Sam and Marisol will throw a fit. They’ll be very worried.”

  “Sam is at work. He works in the restaurant every day. Never takes a day off. And that wife of his won’t care what we do. Tell her you’re taking me to the store. Or the hospital. She’s waiting for me to die. I was a daughter-in-law, too. I remember what it was like.” Ma turned to face Rose, her black eyes shining beneath her thin penciled-on brows.

  “Ma, you really shouldn’t go out in your condition. It’s too dangerous. You could catch—”

  “Aha! You do think I’m going to die!”

  “No, Ma, it’s just—”

  “Well, you’re right. I am going to die. I’m stage four. I know what palliative means. But I’m also going to bet on the horses.” She sniffed, her lids fluttering rapidly. “Just in time for my birthday. We should celebrate. My daughter has come home to see me. Even the snow couldn’t stop you. Not one of my other daughters could take the time. But you drive all this way. You see, it’s my lucky
day. I’m going to win. I can feel it.”

  Rose wondered how she could have forgotten about her mother’s stubbornness, her charm, her manipulative nature, her moods like storms. Far from home, in Rose’s memories, Ma had become like a black-and-white movie that she had watched on TV when she was a kid. Flickering and quaint. Up close in real life, Ma burned like a live coal against Rose’s heart.

  Rose slipped the manila envelope into the top of her jeans against her skin, pulled her Broncos sweatshirt down, and put her arm around her mother’s back. “Okay, let’s go,” she said.

  FIRST CARVEL IN BEIJING

  IT’S A LITTLE hole in the wall,” Luce says, humble-bragging, “but they make the best dan dan noodles in Beijing.”

  I just nod. Luce is trying to be sweet. She is trying to impress me. It’s been nine years, but I can tell she still has a crush on me. I find that I’m flattered.

  But what really catches my eye is the familiar sign for ice cream cakes on a new building facade. “Carvel!” I cry. “I haven’t been to one since I was a kid.”

  I can’t believe it. A full store. Fancy, too. Awning, plate glass windows, neon sign.

  I haven’t tasted a Carvel cake since my brother’s eighth birthday.

  Luce’s voice is too loud inside the Jeep. “Do you want to stop? It’s the first Carvel in Beijing.”

  We stop. Luce pulls into an alley lined with cars haphazardly parked alongside the bricks of the hutong walls. She finds a spot and eases her Jeep into place as a few bicyclists whiz past angrily ringing their tinny bells.

  “I’m impressed,” I say, and I am. I can’t imagine driving and parking in Beijing. I’ve been coming to China for nearly a decade, first as a language student and now for research for my dissertation, but taking public transportation is the extent of my courage. Maybe there’s truth to the cliché about historians studying the past because we’re not comfortable in the present.

  The air is moist and thick at the height of summer, but at least there are trees on this particular street, charming somehow French-looking plane trees that are strung with colored lights.