by Aimee Liu
My mother froze. “And?”
“I’ve already signed the lease.”
Her voice, when she finally located the words, sounded like splitting wood. “You just don’t see it, do you, Joe? You don’t see at all.”
She did not make him break the lease. She did not ask for a divorce. But she did exact retribution in decorator’s and contractor’s fees. Every room but Dad’s workshop was transformed into Milan moderne. And, although Dad still combed the classifieds and suburban shopper gazettes, he never so much as suggested that Mum furnish the new place at discount.
“Maibee?”
He waved from the doorway as if saying goodbye instead of hello, and I was struck at once by how much older he looked. His hair was grayer, his back more stooped than I remembered. I hurried across the terrace to save him the walk.
But his appearance was deceptive. He clamped me in a bear hug with the strength of a much younger man, rumpling my hair as if I were five and surrounding me with those familiar masculine smells—tobacco, Brylcreem, the English Leather my brother ritualistically gives him for his birthday every year. I could feel the ridges of his seersucker jacket making marks in my skin. His paunch pressed against my stomach. His chest, which my arms easily encircled, felt as delicate and inviolable as the bamboo armature of a birdcage.
Finally he released me, gave my ponytail one more sweep of the hand, and stood back for a look. “Well, well.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of Kents, fumbled with the wrapper as he stared at me. His eyes were smiling, but his mouth worked awkwardly as if he had a candy he’d like to spit out.
“I missed you, Dad.”
He slid the cigarettes back in his pocket and reached around my shoulders for another squeeze. “We missed you, too.”
That was it, and about par for the course, as far as conversation with my father went. We walked back inside. I admired the rolling waves of beige in which my mother had most recently done the living room. He took his designated position behind the mahogany desk in the corner, hooked his glasses over his nose, and picked up his newspaper.
A minute or two later, he looked at me. “How have you been?”
“Fine. It’s good to be home.”
He nodded. “You look good.”
“I quit flying.”
He laid down the paper, his expression unreadable. “Mum just told me.”
I checked the hallway to see if she was watching, listening, but it appeared empty and I could hear the thump of cupboard doors from the kitchen.
“I have an apartment in the Village.”
“Nice down there.”
“You should come visit. I’m working for a catalog company. Photographing gadgets. Some worth your taking a look at maybe.”
“Ideas, eh? I’m always looking for ideas.”
“Look alive, everybody!” called my mother. “Anna’s here.”
“I told you, it’s Aneela Prem.” And, with that, in strode my sister the vision in red.
Last time I saw her she wore orange, the time before mustard yellow. Now, from the scarlet ribbon in her hair right down through the garnet worship beads, ankle-length coral print skirt, and pink high-top sneakers, the only contrasting color on my sister’s body was the green of her eyes, which match mine. A cosmic dress code, I was sure, but my mother managed to rationalize.
As she watched Anna fold me in her arms and carefully kiss each cheek, she said, “Aren’t those colors smashing on her, Maibelle?”
“The Dhawon says they’re the colors of joy and love,” Anna said. “If everyone wore them, our combined auras would bring world peace.”
My father made the soft, clucking noise at the back of his throat that he used to signal regret or disapproval. He came out to give Anna the usual bear hug, but retreated quickly behind his desk again.
“Well,” said Mum, “the colors do wonders for your complexion.”
It was true. Scrubbed clean, no makeup, my sister looked positively cherubic. I could hardly see the acne scars that had earned her the nickname Pockmark from her Chinatown classmates.
“It’s the vegetarian diet. Of course, my whole life now is grounded in meditation and love, but the Dhawon says the improvement in my skin is a direct result of diet, helped by the colors. And frequency of sex, of course.”
My mother clamped her jaw shut so fast I heard her teeth.
“Anna—”
“Aneela Prem. Please.”
“It’s so good to have both you girls home.” My mother strode past us to the coffee table, laden with glasses and ice bucket, and loudly began to undo the foil on the first bottle of champagne.
Anna pressed ahead with a well-rehearsed monologue about “spirituai awareness,” “articulation of joy,” “knots of negativity,” and “vigilance of conscience.” She had just come from meditation camp in Amsterdam and wanted to tell us what she’d learned.
I wanted to ask if she still made strawberry sodas with mint chip ice cream, or woke up at three in the morning from dreams of giant toads and witches, or had the gold Chinese coin she’d unearthed long ago in Columbus Park. I wanted to ask if she still would gladly give up that coin, along with every other possession she’d ever prized, in exchange for naturally blond hair. I wanted to ask if she, by chance, knew what was wrong with me. But I didn’t ask any of these questions because I knew that although the answers were probably all yes, she would tell me no—or, in the last case, that my problem was spiritual confusion intensified by unsatisfactory sex.
I helped Mum pop the champagne, but Anna said she had stopped consuming substances that altered consciousness. She would fix herself a cup of the herbal broth she’d brought with her.
“Oh, Maibelle,” Mum said a little too brightly as Anna drifted into the kitchen. She took a deep gulp from her glass and blinked hard. “Someone’s been calling for you. I wrote it down here somewhere. Last fall he phoned and then again last month. That boy Henry used to play with in Chinatown. Lived next door.”
I knocked the tray, nearly toppling the wine, and scanned her for telltale signals, but she wasn’t really paying attention. As she rummaged through a drawer in the sideboard her rings tapped like a woodpecker. “His parents ran that poultry shop. Remember?”
“Tommy Wah.” The name wobbled in my mouth. He’d called again last month. That must mean he hadn’t found someone else. The dare was still open, and I was sweating as if I were back aboard a diving plane.
She came at me, the white paper dangling between her fingers.
“He didn’t say what he wanted.” I realized too late that I’d meant to pose this as a question.
She folded the note, held it out. I wiped my dripping palm on my skirt and took the message without making eye contact.
“Four days ago I hadn’t heard from you in three years and didn’t know if I ever would again. I did not see any point in asking him what he wanted.” If she was lying, she didn’t show it. Besides, if she knew what he was asking, why would she conceal it? Not Mum. She might even approve. I wondered which would be harder to take.
I shoved the paper in my pocket, resolutely consigning Tommy and Chinatown to the nether regions of my mind, and took a glass to my father. I was about to propose a toast to Anna, who had floated back in with her tea, when my brother joined the fray.
In polo shirt and chinos, with his freshly cut hair combed neatly to one side, he was the only one of us who looked like his mother’s child. He punched me in the shoulder hard enough to hurt, then kissed me between my cheek and mouth. I hugged him in return. As Anna bestowed the obligatory two-cheek kiss, he just stood blankly grinning. Then, without waiting for an invitation, he poured himself some champagne.
“Here’s to my fugitive sisters who’ve returned however briefly to grace our family nest.”
“Briefly is right,” Mum said. “Can’t we persuade you to at least spend the night, Anna?”
“I’m sorry. I’m scheduled to attend the Dhawon during darshan tomorrow mo
rning.”
The rest of us exchanged appropriately blank stares.
“So, Maibelle,” my brother said, “how, when, where, why, and with whom, or can’t you tell in present company?”
“Come again?”
“Why’re you back in the Big A?”
I braced myself with a drink and told him half the truth. “Fear of flying. It’s a professional liability. Besides, I was up to four years and with seniority, if I’d stayed any longer I couldn’t have afforded to stop.”
“Tough break. But you could have stayed out in sunny California. Why come back to the soot belt?”
“So she can get her career back on track.” My mother refilled her glass.
“No. That’s not why.”
“Oh?” she said. “Why, then?”
I glanced at my father and felt immensely relieved when he smiled back.
“She has a job,” he said. “For a catalog studio.”
“Hans Noble.”
“I know them,” said Henry. “They’re hotter than Lillian Vernon.”
“Lillian Vernon!” Anna grimaced.
“Actually, I’m sort of my own studio.”
“Really!” Mum sat on the arm of Henry’s chair. They sipped their champagne in tandem. “How did you find this position, Maibelle?”
“Through a friend.”
“What friend?”
“The woman who had my apartment before me.”
“I have friends who could give you a real job.”
“I know.”
The vacuum cleaner had embossed colliding tracks on the rich wheat-colored carpet. Was she still doing her own cleaning on top of everything else?
“You’re getting along, then, are you?” my father said.
“Just fine.”
“Well, it beats waitressing, I suppose.” Mum waved one hand like a baton and summoned us in to lunch.
Having inspected Mum’s partridge salad with radicchio and arugula and the accompanying crisp baguette, my sister declared that she ate no animal flesh or refined-flour products. Instead she produced a bag of seeds and a slab of brown bread which she covered with a green whipped substance from a mason jar. This, with a cup of her herbal brew, was her celebration lunch.
The rest of us heaped our plates with the food Anna wouldn’t touch. My father opened the second bottle of champagne, and we clinked our glasses in a toast of homecoming that was really an appeal for truce. My sister, of course, abstained.
“Henry,” she said, “the Big D is holding a meditation camp down in Tennessee next month, and I really think you’d get a lot out of it…”
I watched my father fiddle absently with the stem of his glass. He ate his lunch and tugged at his nails (my mother outlawed smoking at the table years ago) and occasionally his gaze landed on one of us. He’d smile, and a trace of his old charm would glint through.
People used to say my father was handsome. Though handsome, to me, was Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, I knew what they meant. Dad was more like a sad Desi Arnaz. Dark with high, wide cheekbones and eyes that carefully studied the world from the shelter of heavy lids. Beneath his eyes he’s always had the classic Oriental pouches, which I used to call moonpuffs. They become softer and deeper when he is tired, giving him the look of a weary wise man. I was fond of those moon-puffs until I grew up and realized I, too, had them. Then I called them bags.
Now, looking from my fanatical sister to my feckless brother, my hypercompetent mother to my muted father, I wondered for the first time if there could be more to my madness than bad dreams. Some genetic common denominator. Some shared historical virus that had twisted us all in small ways and large.
“Anna,” I interrupted.
“Call me Aneela, please.”
“Whatever. You remember that time down in the basement in Chinatown when we went through Dad’s old boxes?”
“No.”
“Oh, yes, you do. It was raining, remember? I was five and you were twelve and for possibly the only time in our entire childhood you were so bored you actually played with me.”
“Maibelle.” Deep in her patronizing tone I heard echoes of the girl who’d once called me a moron for not knowing the lead singer of Cream. “Maibelle, please try to understand. I have been rebirthed. I have died to the past and to the future. As the Dhawon says, I have opened myself to the timeless, eternal present. Memories are irrelevant.”
With that she tossed a handful of birdseed into her mouth and began methodically to chew. Henry manfully struggled to reverse the passage of an arugula leaf that he’d snarfled into his nasal cavity during Anna’s speech. My mother excused herself to make a pot of coffee, which Anna reminded her she wouldn’t drink. But to my amazement my father took the bait.
“You believe that.”
“Absolutely. Caffeine poisons the blood—”
“No. About memories.”
“Absolutely.” But then Anna swirled her tea and let her gaze amble toward the blue beyond the window. She had prepared no defense for a statement of such inherent truth.
“Sometimes I think they’re all that is relevant,” my father said. “Too bloody relevant, in fact.”
“You see? They become an encumbrance, a distraction from the beauty and joy that surrounds us in the Now.”
I tried to kick her under the table, but my boot fell short. “What do you mean, Dad?”
My father’s face darkened. He turned away from us both. “Beauty and joy my ass.”
The baize door to the kitchen swung heavily behind him. My sister started in again and Henry egged her on. Neither of them apparently considered Dad’s defense of memory or the swiftness of his anger to be unusual. But then, neither of them had tripped his lock. I had, with my mention of Chinatown and the basement. The old China box. It was our memory she was talking about. Of a particular day we’d spent together which she’d just as soon forget, but those were his memories we’d dug into that day. Boxed and buried. Never mentioned. But apparently never forgotten.
When my father came back to the table, he put more sugar in his coffee than I remembered him using. As he stirred he spilled a little and cursed himself, grabbed his napkin and blotted the damage. My brother and Anna kept talking. My mother interrupted to ask Anna how the weather had been in Amsterdam, and then she went on about how she’d always wanted to go there herself, see the canals, the Van Goghs. Dad sipped his coffee and stared at the wall.
That treasure hunt had been Anna’s idea. I resisted because Henry had convinced me a bogeyman lived in the second basement—a bogeyman who ate small girls. But Anna insisted Henry was full of shit and no bogeyman was going to get her, and once we’d left the narrow, rickety stairway and were in our own storage cubicle with the door locked from inside and all the lightbulbs burning and no bogeyman in sight, I actually started to enjoy our adventure. I liked the dank subterranean smell and the sloshing of traffic up in the street, the cut-off feet of shoppers, and the occasional drenched cat peering at us through the overhead window. The muffled squawks of birds awaiting Mr. Wah’s cleaver next door made me feel as if we were in the belly of an ark nosing through an urban ocean.
Anna rummaged through Dad’s discarded inventions and Mum’s old clothes until at last she found the China box. It was just a pasteboard crate tied with rope, but the stamps that covered it dated back to 1937. It seemed ancient to me, and mysterious.
From the few barely legible scraps inside, my sister discovered that Dad’s father, Chung Wu-tsai, was the son of a wealthy, educated official. His one remaining picture showed off a receding hairline and pudgy cheeks, but his pedigree was that of a gentleman and a scholar.
Our grandmother, Alyssa Billings, was the only child of a U.S. Navy captain. Judging from a tattered hand-tinted photograph, she’d been a pretty, blond, green-eyed child. But she had thin, tightly drawn lips that turned down at the corners and a glum stare that seemed at once resigned and dejected. I guessed I could understand that dejection when Anna told me how, after Alys
sa’s mother died in childbirth, her father was always leaving Alyssa with other people’s families. The father—our great-grandfather—went by the name Cap Billings, and his letters chronicled my grandparents’ meeting, their early years of marriage. It was like the little match girl marrying the prince, said Anna, reading between the lines. Two star-crossed lovers against the odds. No wonder it didn’t work out.
My grandparents met outside a Shanghai telegraph office in 1910, on what was supposed to be my grandmother’s last day in China. She’d been traveling for the summer aboard her father’s ship and, the next morning, set sail as scheduled for Indochina. By the time she saw Singapore, Chung Wu-tsai had telegraphed a proposal of marriage. Alyssa never returned to America.
The captain’s later letters were addressed to China. They mentioned the birth of Alyssa’s three children and warned about the world war. A notice of Captain Billings’s death was dated 1920. And that was the end of the written record of my father’s youth. The only other document was a “We regret to inform you” letter dated 1937 from the States Steamship Company. Alyssa and her two daughters had been aboard a ship that was bombed just before it was due to set sail for America.
The trove also contained a three-tiered lacquer basket filled with calligraphy brushes, wetting stones, and ink sticks. Anna and I picked up the brushes and began to paint a scroll of air, but the play soon dissolved into dueling and she said we better put the brushes back before we ended up breaking them.
There were silk vests embroidered in peacock greens and blues, and one long coat with a golden lion brocaded on a scarlet background. Anna put on the coat and pretended to be an empress. I put on one of the vests and called her “Your Majesty,” which pleased her a great deal. With her fine brown hair trailing, her upturned nose and arched eyebrows, she truly did look majestic. I knelt down, as a loyal subject should.
“Lower,” she commanded. “Kowtow.”
I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I bowed lower, down, down until I was practically licking the floor at her feet.
“Get up,” she said at last. “You’re getting the vest dirty.” She took off the robe and refolded it, then turned on me. “Don’t always do everything you’re told.”
