The art therapist tacked our drawings up on the bulletin board, with mine in the middle.
“What do we think about these shapes that Sally has created?”
“Trees,” said Rachel. In January her boyfriend had been thrown from a motorcycle and killed as she stood waiting for him on the porch of her parents’ house half a block away. When she first got here pieces of the accident were still in her mind, but now she just looked blank when people talked about it.
“What else do we see in Sally’s drawing?”
“Blood vessels.” Lillith, of course.
I myself was surprised at how thick and violent the lines came out, because I’d started each time with great delicacy, tracing a faint curve and then working it gently into the paper with my fingers.
“Does anyone notice a human shape about this?”
A couple of stools scraped.
“Douglas?”
“I definitely see a tit.”
“Excellent! There’s a head, and a torso—see? And here as you said the curve of a breast, but it’s hazy, like it’s just beginning to emerge.” The art therapist folded her hands in front of her stomach and beamed at me—her newest discovery. “Okay, honey, this is what I want you to do. I want you to study yourself in a full-length mirror. And the next time we meet, draw exactly what you see there, draw from memory.” I could hear Douglas snickering.
As we were leaving, Rachel went up and studied my drawing. “Sally. If this is the face, here, you forgot to put in a mouth.”
One of the upstairs bathrooms had a full-length mirror on the back of the door. I closed the door behind me—I could do this now—and dragged a footstool against it. The only locks in the unit were on the outside doors.
I am tall, even for an American woman, though not as tall as my father. My hair has a reddish undertone, not the pitch black people expect of Asians. I have a big oval face and a square chin—an overdeveloped jawbone, my dentist used to call it. My eyes are long and narrow, with no lashes to speak of, and I have the kind of lips women’s magazines say you should wear very pale colors on, to de-emphasize. The only truly beautiful feature in my face is my nose, which is small and straight, and has more of a bridge than Marty’s—she’s always complaining about her sunglasses slipping.
As for body, I’m big-boned and long-waisted. Hips and thighs, but no chest to speak of, unlike Marty and my mother, who are buxom. My hands are freakishly large—long palms and fingers—bigger than most men’s.
I was not meant to be looked at; I was meant to be one who looks.
Thank God I could still draw.
It was family therapy night. By six-thirty, when we got back from dinner, the dayroom had already begun to fill up. Lillith pointed out a well-dressed couple—Rachel’s parents. Mel, who was from a large Italian family, had a retinue: mother, father, siblings, an aunt or two, even a grandmother. I noticed a man who looked like a haggard Jack Lemmon moving uncertainly around the edges of the crowd. His deep-set eyes, darkly shadowed, were just like his son’s. Douglas. The two of them huddled in the corner, as thick as thieves, the son dwarfing the father.
There was my mother, stopped in the doorway, peering around, sure she was in the wrong place. She was still in her teaching clothes, carrying two Lord & Taylor bags, and she was alone. What did I expect, my sister wasn’t the type to cut a vacation short to go see someone in a loony bin.
When Ma saw me her mouth turned into a line.
“Sal-lee.” Without inflection, as if I were a student she were calling on in class.
Still, she was worried. I could see that.
“Hi, Ma. Come in and sit down.”
As she lowered herself into one of the TV armchairs, my mother inhaled deeply and pulled the hem of her skirt over her knees.
“You gain weight.” I was conscious of her accent, as I always am when I haven’t seen her for a while.
“Maybe next time you could bring some of my fat clothes.”
She snorted, looking more comfortable. “You’re not fat.” She held out a shopping bag. “Some jeans you left, a sweatshirt I found you used to wear at boarding school. Also grapefruit. Your Aunty Mabel sends a whole crate, I don’t think I can finish it all. And look.” From the other bag she plucked an old silk dress I’d bought to wear on my honeymoon, that I had forgotten I owned, even. It was a black-and-pink flower print, wrap waist, with puffy sleeves. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.
“Thanks, Ma.”
She leaned back a little in her chair, appraising the furnishings. “Not so bad, huh? Doesn’t look like hospital. But darker carpet would show dirt less.”
The MH who was going to lead our session came over to introduce himself. To him Ma probably looked like a harmless little old Oriental lady in her pixie hairdo and schoolmarm outfit. I’d heard that her students routinely made the same mistake at their first class—grossly underestimating her.
“I hope Sally is doing all right,” she said to the MH as if this were a PTA meeting and he was my teacher.
“Oh, we think she’s making great progress,” the MH told her, and smiled at me.
Ma leaned toward him confidingly. “How much longer she has to be in here?”
“It depends on Sally, of course. But I think she still has a lot of work ahead of her.”
My mother looked disappointed. It was the same expression she’d worn when she told her friends I hadn’t gotten into Yale.
“I have theory about why Sally gets sick,” Ma said.
“And what is that, Mrs. Wang?”
“She’s the type who needs a husband. It’s so traumatic for her, to divorce.”
“Why do you think she is the type who needs a husband?”
“She’s an American girl but she has old-fashioned Chinese mentality.”
“And what exactly is that mentality, Mrs. Wang?”
“Oh, you know, be a good daughter, be a good wife. Obedience. Confucian law. This is what her father teaches her.”
I looked down at my hands and saw a bit of charcoal under one thumbnail. Surreptitiously, I began to scrape it out.
“I notice this especially when her father died,” Ma went on.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Wang, but why do you always refer to your husband as ‘Sally’s father’?”
My mother looked surprised. “We’re talking about Sally, right?”
“We’re talking about you too.”
“Okay.” I could tell Ma thought the MH was stupid.
“Let’s talk about exactly what happened when your husband died. How did you feel, Mrs. Wang?”
“Of course I grieve, he was my husband. And my younger daughter, she cried for days. But it’s Sally who has really hard time. No crying, no speaking.”
“Is that true, Sally?” the MH asked.
My father had his first stroke near the end of my senior year at boarding school. It was right after I got rejected from Yale, and although no one ever pointed this out to me, they didn’t have to.
At my graduation, Marty showed up as the lone family representative, boyfriend in tow. She was wearing a very tight sheath splashed with purple cabbage roses and lipstick to match. “Egad,” she said, looking around the lawn, which was strewn with girls in airy white dresses. “You went to school in this place? What did they feed you—strawberries and cream?” She waved the old Instamatic at me. “Honey, they made me bring this, but you don’t really want a bunch of pictures of you and your virginal friends standing around looking goofy, do you?”
I told her I didn’t care.
“Let’s go find the champagne,” my sister said. She winked at the boyfriend. It was still Schuyler then, a hulking blond who maybe said five words the whole time he was there.
I never went home that summer but took the train straight into Boston, where I had a job at the chocolate chip cookie booth at Quincy Market. Ma called every couple of days to keep me posted. Daddy was home, Daddy was sitting up in the living room reading new
spapers, Daddy had taken a walk around the block after breakfast, the doctor said that Daddy was well enough to teach the last session of summer school. When I got Marty on the phone she said that you couldn’t tell anything had happened to him at all, except that it took him a beat longer to answer when spoken to.
“Just as well,” I said.
Fran had invited me to her cousins’ house in Wellfleet for the last couple weeks in August, and I went to Providence from the Cape, taking the bus with my two suitcases, one filled with clothes, the other with art supplies. All the other kids had parents with station wagons or U-Hauls. I settled into my first semester at the Rhode Island School of Design, taking it seriously.
I hadn’t seen my father in over a year when, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, I got a message to call home.
At breakfast that morning, Ma had looked out the kitchen window and seen that the last rain had stripped the oaks in the front yard. “We have to get the boy to rake,” she said to my father. When he didn’t answer she turned to look at him. His jaw was slack, as if he were amazed at what she had said, but his eyes were pinched, focused on something behind her, beyond the window. He was dead by the time the ambulance pulled up in front of the emergency room entrance.
This is the official story, the one Ma told driving me home from the train station. I remember that she was wearing a rust-colored turtleneck sweater, a Christmas present from me, and a tweed skirt, lipstick on perfectly. She drove as smoothly as always, signaling in plenty of time before all her turns—thwack! and the clicking—and this somehow seemed to me the most astonishing thing of all.
But I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Ma was always businesslike about death. I’d come home for summer vacation my junior year of boarding school and Marty told me she’d flown to San Diego the day before to bury my grandmother. That was how I’d learned of Nai-nai’s death. I called California and begged Ma to let me come. “Not for kids,” Ma said. “You remember your Nai-nai like last time you saw her.”
The day after my father died, Marty was at the front door of our Woodside Avenue house, leaning up to hook her arm around my neck. It was the most affection she had shown me since we were kids.”Honey, I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered, and when we pulled apart I saw that she was holding a dustpan and brush. “I’m cleaning,” she said. “I guess that’s our job, you and me.”
That night Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard came over from the Holiday Inn with Chinese takeout. Marty and I spooned food into serving platters and the rice into bowls, while Ma sat at the head of the dining room table and spoke in exhausted tones to her sister and brother-in-law.
“This is time when it’s good to have daughters,” she said.
The morning of the funeral, as I was getting dressed, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Marty standing in the driveway, one foot up on the stone curb. At first I thought she was smoking a cigarette and then I realized that it was a joint. She lifted her chin steady after each toke, to hold the smoke in. For the first time since I’d heard Daddy was dead, I wanted to cry.
The service was held in the old Congregational church with its long light windows and plain furnishings that Marty and I had attended as kids. We went with Ma except at Christmas, when she’d drag Daddy along and he’d shift embarrassingly in the pew, not knowing when he was supposed to stand up or pray or open the hymnal, much less the words to any of the hymns. Daddy’s old friend Mr. Lin gave the eulogy in Chinese. Even though I couldn’t speak the language, I could tell that his accent was the same as my father’s. It was odd to hear the separate precise syllables of Mandarin in this stark white Christian chapel. Mr. Lin ended the speech in English: “Such a brilliant man, could have gone on to distinguished career in physics, he sacrifice to make good life in the United States for his daughters. We all miss him, eh?”
Sacrifice, I thought. Who exactly had sacrificed? Or been sacrificed?
Ma’s face was pale and perfectly composed over the white collar of her navy silk shirtdress. In the middle of the eulogy I happened to look over and saw a small glistening tear collect at the inside corner of one eye and begin to slide, oil-like down her cheek. She reached into her handbag and stopped it cold with a folded Kleenex. I don’t remember much else—mostly I was concentrating on not looking at the casket, because I thought I would throw up if I did.
At the house we served small glasses of sherry and fried sugared walnuts and hundred-year-old duck eggs that Aunty Mabel had sliced into quarters. “Everything from Sung Trading Company,” she whispered to me. “Remember to thank Aunty Lilah.”
All my parents’ friends were Aunty and Uncle, though Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard were the only blood. Ma stood resolutely straight as the guests came to pay their respects, leaning to kiss her and then me and Marty. My sister’s face looked ravaged, from grief or being stoned, I couldn’t tell which. Rosy-cheeked Mimi Sung was being helpful as usual, passing dishes and showing people where the bathrooms were. She had gotten quite busty, I noticed. And there was our old enemy Xiao Lu, in line with his mother and father. At nineteen, he towered over everyone else in the room. “Sorry” was all he said to us. His tone sounded preppy. Marty turned to roll her eyes at me. “What the fuck is he doing here?”
Toward the end Ma’s calm broke. She nudged my shoulder and said in an odd rushed way: “You’re in charge, you take care of everything,” and then she disappeared upstairs. Fortunately, people took this as a cue to leave, and finally Marty and I were alone in the kitchen loading the dishwasher.
“God, I’m glad that’s over,” I said.
My sister drew a deep breath. “Sa, listen, I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
“It didn’t happen the way Ma says.”
“What do you mean?”
My sister turned her swollen eyes toward me to make sure I understood the importance of what she was about to say. “They were having a fight.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“Me.”
I slammed the dishwasher door shut and pushed the buttons. The hum and gush filled the house and then settled into a steady rushing.
“It doesn’t matter, Mar. You didn’t kill him. You know how he was. He would have gotten overexcited somehow, over something, eventually.” But what I was thinking was: I gave him his first stroke, you gave him his last.
My sister nodded, slowly, and arranged herself on a stool by the stove, watching me wipe off the counters and kitchen table. Her eyes were half-closed, as if she were in a trance. Upstairs we heard the toilet flush. “Do you think we should check on her?”
“No. I think she’s all right.”
I went into the dining room to pour myself a glass of sherry. Back at the kitchen table, I said, “I thought Roger was sweet.” Roger was Schuyler’s replacement, a Yale rugby player, who had shown up for the reception. I could tell he saw my sister as some delicate Asian flower. On my way upstairs to get more hand towels for the downstairs bathroom, I’d brushed past the two of them sitting on the landing. He was kissing the top of her hair and murmuring, “Baby, baby.” In my entire life no one had ever called me baby.
“Yeah, he is sweet,” Marty agreed absently, her voice trailing off and getting lost in the racket of the dishwasher.
The Formica of the table was a tan and cream design that resembled birch bark. Rubbed into the pattern I saw a faint soy sauce stain I had missed.
“To die in your own kitchen,” I said.
“He died in the ambulance.”
“But he was probably completely out of it by then.”
Marty stuck her hand out and I passed her the glass. She took a swallow and then said in a muffled voice, “This is what people drink at funerals, this wussy stuff. No, I saw him, there, before they carried him out.” She pointed to the floor below the kitchen table, across from where I was sitting, where Daddy always sat. “His face was a mess, he was drooling and everything. But he was looking at me. He knew what was happening all right
. Ma was the one who called 911. She woke me up and said: ‘Come down and stay with your father.’”
My sister looked up and repeated: “ ‘Stay with your father.’ “ Her mouth twitched and I thought she was going to cry.
I pictured the chair with its back to the floor and then, like an echo, my father lying beside it, half under the table. His long body fallen like a crooked tree. I could imagine his upturned face as my sister described it, all pulled down on one side, far worse than the first stroke, the gray skin quivering where it had been stretched. One eye staring straight up, embedded in a nest of wrinkles, and black with terror.
After a moment, Marty said dreamily, “Sa, do you think you’ll ever get married?”
“Maybe,” I said.
My sister tipped her head back so that I could see the clean line of her jaw and her throat convulsing as she swallowed the last of the sherry. She set the glass down on the stove with a little click. “Well, I’m never. I don’t see why I can’t just live with people.”
“Ma would love that.”
“Ma doesn’t care as much as you think.”
The dishwasher hiccuped and eased into the dry cycle. Now we could hear a car climbing the hill outside before making the turn down our long street, and then upstairs a slow, sighing creak as our mother turned over in her bed, alone. I was exhausted, but at the same time ready to stay up all night with my sister. I thought that if we sat there long enough, Daddy would be completely erased from the room.
Ma was ominously quiet as we walked side by side down the hallway to the foyer. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Lillith and her uncle. He was much younger than I’d expected—thin fair hair slicked back from a high forehead not unlike Lillith’s, wearing a white-and-purple-striped shirt and a green Hermes tie. Fastidious. Certainly not someone you’d think would stick tubes up someone’s anus or play with their shit. Lillith had her hands pressed to either side of her face and was mouthing something up at him.
My mother opened her purse and took out her car keys. “I forgot to tell you. Carey called.”
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