World and Town

by Gish Jen

  The sorrows of the rich are not real sorrows. Hattie does not hear her father’s voice too often, but she hears it now. The sorrows of the rich are not real sorrows; the comforts of the poor are not real comforts. Was that a Chinese saying or something her father just liked to say? She doesn’t even know.

  And never will, now, probably.

  Mud. The mud sucks so hard at her boots as she tromps uphill, she is just glad they are tied on. Then there she is again, returned to her own damp but springy grass. Down below the white lake glitters; the treetops toss. Some advanced clouds are already starting to move back in, and somewhere far off a car beeps in a way you don’t hear much around here.

  Hattie’s no artist. Joe used to call her Miss Combustible, and probably in her day she was indeed lit more by the blindness of the world than its beauty. Vietnam! Staff firings! Library closings! She fought them all. But her chief job these days is to reconstitute herself. (That you might rise and fight again, Lee would say—one of her favorite quotes being from some old warrior who is said to have said, as he lay a-drip on a field, I’ll but lie and bleed awhile. Then I will rise and fight again!) And, well, the painting has been a help with that—especially on bad days it’s been a help. Maybe just because it’s something Hattie did growing up—her childhood associations tied to her muscle motions—who knows. Anyhow, it’s gotten her up out of the voracious depths of Joe’s reclin-o-matic—her official mourning chair—starting with the slow making of ink in her father’s old inkwell. That inkwell being a mini-doorstop of a thing, into which she pours a bit of water, and above which she circles her wrist, ink stick in hand. Circling and circling. The best ink being made wú wéi—by acquainting the stick with the water, never pressing. Dissolving the fine particles of lampblack one by one, practically. Who needs meditation? By the time she’s ready to dip her máobĭ in the dark ink, Hattie’s full, not so much of Western-style contentment as of detachment—what the old Chinese scholars used to seek. Dá guān—a feeling that one has risen above life, seen through it. Attained a monklike lightness by sitting the proper way—back straight—and by holding her goat-hair máobĭ, likewise, not at an angle like a pen, but straight up, like a lightning rod. She pauses, poised. And then—the judicious pressure, the traveling lightness, the slowing, pressing lift that produces a segment of bamboo. The segments narrow through the middle of the stalk, then grow wider and darker again; each stroke shēng yì, as her father used to say—a living idea.

  Bamboo: the plant that, as every Chinese knows, bends but does not break.

  It’s absorbing. Still she does listen, a little, for her neighbors as she paints. Finding, as she does, that if she opens a window in the right wind, she can sometimes hear chopping and washing. Frying, pounding—a lot of pounding. Meaning spices, probably. Who knows what Cambodians eat, or with what. Do they use their hands, like Indians? Hattie’s delighted to hear the noises in any case, if only because of what it says about her hearing. Studies say the hairs of a young inner ear can detect motion the breadth of a hydrogen atom. Well, hers are nothing like that. What with the loss of some of her higher frequencies, in fact, she’s finding even mouse squeaks sounding different these days—more sonorous, as if their little mouse chests have been getting bigger.

  Thanks to the inevitable sad stiffening of your basilar membrane, Lee would say.

  Something she learned from Hattie, actually, who used to measure the highest frequencies her kids could hear and chart them, showing how they lowered every year.

  But Hattie’s neighbors. She’s delighted to be able to hear them and delighted, too, that she can glimpse a portion of their doings, it turns out, from various windows as she crosses the room to wash out her brushes. Not spying, exactly.

  Hattie nose full of beeswax.

  She does try not to spy. Trained in observation as she’s been, though, she can’t help but notice how in the mornings there’s only the outside of the trailer to see: that black plastic crate; that beat-up front paneling; those small metal windows with their oversized louvers; and that one good-sized picture window, mullioned tic-tac-toe style. In the afternoons, though, she can see both inside and out by the low west sun. Nothing too much through the ruffle-curtained bedroom windows, but the picture window affords a fine view, and by night the living room lights up clear enough that she’s begun keeping her spare distance glasses on the windowsill. She has, nota bene, stopped short of parking her binoculars there, too; she does have some pride.

  And yet somehow she soon knows that right around four the girl is almost always out front, swatting flies. She sits sideways on the milk crate, keeping the light out of her eyes—which position puts her body half in shadow, half in light, as she works her glinting knife or gray mortar and pestle. There’s a colander beside her, usually, and a bunch of plastic bowls—green and yellow and fish-belly white. Assorted dish towels, too, for the heaps of peels. All of which helps perk up the otherwise bleak scene, like her shocking-pink jacket, which she generally leaves open.

  Today, though, it’s zipped shut like Hattie’s fleece—Hattie having moved her painting table onto the back porch for fun, only to find some winter teeth left in the early-spring air. She’s had to warm up her red hands several times—tucking them into a spot under her breasts, right in the fold there, as she likes to do. It’s a private pleasure. For though she is mostly an old lady with an old lady’s epithelial cells, that part of her body, if she may boast, is still soft and new. Of course, if she had gone out running in her underwear the way the girls do these days, well, who knows. But never mind. The girl’s jacket is zipped up, is the thing, half on account of the cold, and half because the baby is with her, and zipped up in it. Hattie watches the bouncing going on in the girl’s lap—a live pink jiggling—the baby poking its head out every now and then so that its face is right in front of the girl’s. It pats her face and pulls her hair; that’s when it doesn’t look to be trying to eat her. And has she ducked into her jacket now, too? All Hattie can see is squirming—the hood flapping up and down and the two armless sleeves flying around like a scarecrow’s. How loud the girl and baby squeal! Hattie couldn’t block them out if she wanted to.

  But here comes Chhung, now, opening the door. He looms in the doorway over them and, just like that, the squealing lets up. The girl’s head pops out from the neck of her jacket; her hands pop out from the sleeves. The torso does keep on heaving, but now with a loud, frustrated wail as the girl leans awkwardly forward to pick up a carrot. She peels away with something half kitchen knife, half machete—an enormous, curved blade that glows in the late-day sun like something just forged for a mountain king.

  Chhung closes the door shut behind him.

  A brown truck rumbles up the road. Never mind that it’s mud season, with vehicles stuck all over town, this thing heads unhesitatingly down the mire of the Chhungs’ drive. There’s a ratcheting up of the hand brake; then a loud bong as a deliveryman appears. He’s dressed all in brown, to go with his truck. The girl jabs her bright knife into the ground, jumps up from the crate, and shouts; she’s bundling up her peels, stacking up her bowls, unzipping her jacket so the baby can see—the baby holding close but leaning out, too, and affording Hattie, as it does, a good glimpse of its thick black hair (something she would probably never have noticed, had she never come to the States and found the babies bald as melons). A woman appears briefly in the door—younger than Chhung, by the looks of her; or maybe she just dyes her hair, which is soot-black, like the girl’s and baby’s. Anyway, she’s tiny and lithe. And there’s Chhung, and the boy Chhung mentioned—a hair-dyer for sure, with a low, blond ponytail. He runs to help the deliveryman wheel a box down the truck ramp. A gargantuan box, this is—so big the men have to unpack it outside the trailer. They strew around an ungodly amount of Styrofoam as they do, the enormous chunks multiplying like the calves of an iceberg; their lively white bobs in the brown of the caked-mud sea. And what’s this screened thing emerging from it all like a weird rectangular sea
monster? A TV, Hattie would say, except that this is so much bigger than any TV she’s ever seen. If there were another one like it, the town would have to build a bar to put it in, for ball games. It is hard to imagine the thing fitting into the Chhungs’ living room.

  And sure enough, when a little later Hattie sees—cannot help but see—one part of the screen shining through the window, it does look to take up the better part of a wall. She hesitates, but finally goes to fetch her binoculars from inside. Is that a videotape they’re watching? Some kind of MTV? Asian guys with cars, anyway, Asian girls with long hair. A perpetual wind. Back out on the chilly porch, Hattie adjusts her focus wheel and makes out an abandoned girl, heartbreak, rain. Then a cell phone call; a change in the weather; and off the girl goes on the boy’s motorcycle, her arms around his waist. Just like in real life. They head into a neon sunset, leaving the city for something very like a prairie. Hattie is half expecting to behold, in the background, not a water buffalo, but a buffalo buffalo, when the dogs start to bark—Reveille and Annie with five-alarm excitement, but judicious old Cato more alarming than alarmed. He barks twice, gives Hattie a look through the screen door, then barks twice more. An incremental approach. Hattie nods a quick thanks. She has only just stashed the binoculars away under her seat cushion when Judy Tell-All appears.

  “You painting?” Judy Tell-All is a large woman with blunt bangs. “You never told me you painted.”

  Hattie shrugs and sniffs. Judy’s wearing a musky scent Lee would have called Eau de Pheromone.

  “Those bones?”

  “Bamboo,” says Hattie.

  “I thought you might be doing the lake.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Because most people do do the lake,” observes Judy, batting her stiff lashes, “when they’re looking straight at it. That some kind of Chinese brush?”

  Hattie takes her time answering.

  “And how can you paint with both your glasses up? I can see your driving glasses, but don’t you need your readers?”

  Hattie sighs—trying to compensate for the lump under her pī-pī, though it’s like trying to walk with one high heel—an awkward business. Judy, dammit, is about to catch her out.

  But Judy, luckily, is too full up with news to catch anything. Because guess who’s in town—the middle son great professor! she blurts. Expelling the rest like something under pressure: Here for a spell and retired, it seems—as a body might expect a sixty-seven-year-old to be, if you didn’t know the Hatches. But, well, everyone does know the Hatches, never mind that they moved away some ten years ago now, right after the real Dr. Hatch died. And never mind that they sold off that great old Adirondack lodge of theirs in the process, either, with that fireplace that looked to have been practice for Fort Knox. (And to city folk, get that!—city folk who took down everything but the fireplace!) Still, seeing as how the Hatches go back to the Revolution—seeing as how they’re as much of a local feature as the town green, practically—people talk about them just the same. How the real Dr. Hatch died at a lab bench at ninety-nine, and how Carter’s older brother Anderson’s still going strong. Starting up a start-up, in fact, in his seventies. People talk and hear less about little Reedie, for some reason—always have. But Carter, now—Carter! No one but no one would have expected the middle son to up and retire.

  Yet such be the mystery and miracle of human change, as Lee would say. He’s hanging out for the first time in his life, apparently—and having a crisis as a result—but then, aren’t we all, says Judy with feeling. What’s more, he knows that Hattie is here—Judy having dropped in with a loaf of date nut bread and told him. Told him that Joe died a few years ago, too—lung cancer, never smoked, and so on. Gave him the whole scoop.

  “Though I didn’t have to,” she says. “You know why?”

  Hattie swishes a brush in some water.

  “Because he already knew,” she says. “He knew it all—everything! And do you know why he knew?”

  The Turners told him?

  “Because he was interested, that’s why. Because he was driven to know! Consciously or unconsciously.” Judy lifts her painted brows.

  Hattie blots her brush.

  “Not that he would ever say so. He’s like his father that way—a clam of a man. Keeps his cards close to his chest.”

  “Like any card-playing clam.”

  “Exactly. Just like his father!” Judy bats her stiff lashes once more.

  And of course, Hattie knows she’s being baited. Can she just let people make of others what they will, though? Eyes on the far-off lake, she says, “He is not like his father.”

  “Is that so.” Judy’s eyebrows are painted kind of a fox red; they look like a bison’s brow from a Neolithic cave painting. “Well, I had an inkling you might want to know that he’s here, and I can see I was right.”

  You are not right, Hattie starts to say, but then—realizing that this is match point—already—she stops, puts her brush down, and laughs. How did she, Hattie Kong, come to be a woman worked over by Judy Tell-All?

  Judy frowns.

  “Is Hattie coming to the cell tower meeting?” she asks, after a moment.

  “Probably.”

  Save her a seat?

  Hattie shrugs—all right.

  As for whether she can guess who’s coming, though, Hattie just laughs again and declines to respond—to that, or to Judy’s And Ginny has news!—she and Everett have news!, either. Instead Hattie focuses, a few minutes later, on the happy sound of Judy leaving. Can gravel crunch happily? It does seem so to her.

  Judy nose full of beeswax.

  She liberates her binoculars. Then it’s down with her reading glasses and up with her jacket zipper—the metal a cold, hard press on her chin. A returning bittern flies on by; and there’s the one-note warble of the winter-hardy hermit thrush. If she sits long enough she could just hear a veery thrush and a wood thrush, too—kind of a trifecta. It’s happened before. And so Hattie listens as she paints, shutting her wandering thoughts out. Carter. Everett. Carter. Carter. Her stalks are rising fat but dry and light today—a bold shadowy vertical up the left side of her sheet. Not that she’s chosen that, exactly. It’s more bĭyì, the will of the brush. But there they go, in any case, with her hand’s blind help, one segment after another. They grow clear up through the top of the page.

  Town Hall was not made to hold so many. The lights of the suspended ceiling blink as if with surprise at the crowd, and up front, the cell tower people are blinking hard, too. They came during mud season on purpose, Hattie heard. Scheduled a meeting before the summerlings were back, so as to keep the turnout down. But look now how people keep coming—wave after wave of them, like something the lake’s washing up. Folding chairs are getting set up along the back and sides of the room, and there are extra chairs all along the front, too. Every last one of them squeaking as it’s opened until the metal chairs run short. Then it’s clatter you hear; those old wooden chairs do clatter. And there’s the family that stands to make out like bandits, right in the first row. The Wrights. A moat of empty chairs all around them, though cozied up with them does sit—can that be right?—Hattie’s walking group friend, Ginny. Who does not actually walk with the walking group—who actually only meets them later for coffee or lunch at the Come ’n’ Eat—but never mind. Hattie feels for her distance glasses even as Judy Tell-All waves her over. And sure enough: There indeed sits a certain pink turtleneck with bleached-blond do—that artichoke cut always reminding Hattie of how Ginny’s hairdresser does dog grooming, too. A versatile type. Maybe Ginny’s sitting up front on account of her hip? How uncomfortable the Wrights might feel, in any case, were it not for her. How marooned on their very own folding-chair island. Instead, Ginny leans in, saving them. They nod and joke and guffaw—Jim Wright proving himself a wit, it seems. A born funnyman.

  “When is a snake not a snake?” asks Judy as Hattie sits down.

  “When she has God on her side?” guesses Hattie.

&
nbsp; Judy smiles, but normally good-natured Greta, whom Judy has somehow managed to ensnare, too, is frowning. Her still-dark eyebrows all but meet over her straight, long nose.

  “Though, well, why shouldn’t Ginny sit with her relatives?” Judy goes on. “Maybe she just feels sorry for them. And they are her third cousins twice removed, after all.” She winks.

  “She wants something,” says Greta. Greta could almost be a Shaker, dressed as she is today in a handmade blouse and skirt, except that she brandishes the end of her braid like a police baton. “Ginny wants something.”

  “Do you think?” says Judy, innocently.

  Hattie gives Judy a look.

  “Well, hmm, let me think,” continues Judy. She’s wearing a floral print, but the flowers are all black and gray, as if grown without chlorophyll. “How about that new hip she needs?”

  “But of course!” Greta’s gray eyes flash. “Her hip!”

  “Do you really think they’d pay for a new hip?” Hattie waves at some people, wishing she could remember their names—Hattie gone batty!—then realizes, disconcertingly, that she does.

  “Maybe not, but they could help with health care, right?” says Judy. “Being family? They could put her on the feed store payroll and get her the employee rate.”

  Hattie stops waving.

  “That’s illegal!” says Greta.

  “How creative,” says Hattie, after a moment. “If it’s true.”

  Judy waves her hand. “You’d be creative, too, if you were in her shoes,” she observes. “If you had a hip like hers and were leaving Everett on top of it. You’d be creative, too.”

  Leaving Everett?

  “Giving him the heave-ho,” confirms Judy as Greta gasps. “Dumping him flat. Get that!” Judy folds her program up into a fan; and indeed, what with the crowd, the room is getting warm. She looks at Hattie as she crimps the bottom into a handle. “I told you Ginny had news.”

  Hattie makes her own fan then, thinking. For what Everett put into Ginny’s dad’s place!—everyone knew it. Obliging man that he was. And that farm being the oldest of the family farms and worth it, in his view. As in the view of many: Even Hattie the newcomer’s heard how the farm broke up when Rex died, and how something in the town broke, too. And now, for all of Everett’s effort, this fine reward. Ginny leaving Everett!—and without a word to the walking group, either. The fluorescent lights blink. Hattie uncrosses her legs so she can recross them the other way—these old wooden chairs being designed, it does seem, to put you in touch with your god-given overhang.