And then I see her.
“Daddy!”
“Ai-yah, what’s this?”
“Minnie Mouse. Look, Daddy, right there.”
“Mickey Mouse?”
“No, Minnie Mouse. See, in the red dress.”
“She’s the one you like, huh, Sealy?”
“Yes.”
He looks at me and then before I know what’s happening my father has lifted me up and I’m sitting on his shoulders, just like the other kids. But Daddy is so tall that together we’re taller than anybody else. We march through the crowd to Minnie and then he sets me down, exactly in front of her, so she can’t help noticing me. I can’t believe it. I stare at her white gloves—so clean, like Nai-nai’s—her white stockings in their slender lady legs, and then finally at her big smiling white and black head with its red and white polka-dot bow that matches her dress.
“You’re more beautiful than Miss America,” I say.
The head tilts toward me like she’s going to say something, but then I remember that of course the cartoon characters don’t talk. Instead, she bends down—she’s wearing a petticoat, I can hear it rustle—takes my hand in her gloved one and gently shakes it, as if I were already grown up and we were meeting at a party.
Behind me Daddy makes a sound. It’s only many years later that I recognize it—my father is crying.
Part Three
15
In the end Ma never carried out her threat and I went to St. Petersburg as planned, two days after my discharge from Willowridge.
During those two days I wandered around the house on Woodside Avenue, trying to convince myself I was normal now, fit to be a citizen of the outside world, although normal was the last thing I felt. Jury-rigged was more like it. The pieces reassembled, and, as Sylvia P. would say, stuck together with glue. A month and a half of medication and group therapy had made me more talkative, but it was an uncensored kind of talkative, the kind that wouldn’t wash at a cocktail party, for instance. Still everyone—Valeric, my group, the MHs—had agreed that I was ready. And it was true that there were things I could do again, like sit down and read the New Haven Register from front to back, or call Fran in Cambridge—I thought she sounded a little off, but maybe it was because she was finally sick of my angst.
The house was too damn quiet. My sister was gone again—this time to Vermont, where an old boyfriend of hers had dropped out of Wall Street to become a carpenter. I avoided my bedroom with all its heavy furniture that was familiar but wrongly placed, like objects in a nightmare. The pink runner on the floor by the bed, which used to lie in the front hall of the house on Coram Drive, was stained forever by my vomit. Our old baroque telephone stand, with its one latticed shelf, was my bed table, mismatched to the simple blond lines of the twin bed that had lost its twin. Most disturbing of all was the wallpaper—enormous abstract brown and beige daisies that had looked to me like deformed children, all those long days I’d lain staring at it. Almost as bad as the apple blossoms on Coram Drive.
I did check the top drawer of the bureau, and the empty vials—Valium and Elavil—were still there. I’d taken thirty-six pills in all, for the thirty-six hours my mother had been in labor with me. Kind of a last private joke. And I noticed that someone—Ma, of course—had removed the envelope containing my will, which I’d anchored under the prancing wooden horse.
My first session with Valerie, I’d asked her what was wrong with me.
“You’re acutely depressed.”
“That’s all?”
It had sounded too minor, like the flu. I was sure that whatever I had was causing my internal organs to rot—I could smell it on my breath.
Understand this: at first death had been a mere flirtation, for instance, catching my foot lying hard on the gas pedal at the curve around Lake Whitney, the one that had killed Darcy and her boyfriend.
But then it became a true love affair, my heart was swollen for it, it lay down with me in bed and seeped into my pores while I slept.
I knew it was a sin. I knew that in the West human life was valued above all else, that it would be considered a virtuous act to keep this body of mine alive, no matter how stupid I got. Valerie had already begun talking about a hospital. Facility, she called it. Nothing facile about it, if you’d asked me, except for the people who wouldn’t have to deal with you anymore.
I was sorry thinking that Ma would be the one to discover me. She had found her own father’s body, face twisted, pillow soaked with the life blood he’d coughed out in his sleep. His favorite, my mother had run into his room every morning, even before the servants came with hot water.
You’d think, given my history, I would have chosen to cut. And I admit I did consider it, standing in front of the mirror in my parents’ bathroom, that ghastly fluorescent light illuminating the blue veins in my already scarred left forearm. There was even a package of Daddy’s razor blades left in the medicine cabinet. But in the end I chickened out. Although I could imagine the kind of pain from a vein rent clear through, could even imagine existing through it, I simply did not want to die in that kind of agony. It would have to be sleep.
I chose the day, a Saturday, when my mother would be away at a Smith luncheon in New York City. The night before I made my will, which was simple. When I was finished I saw that my handwriting was illegible so I did it all over again in big block letters, simplifying as much as possible.
FRAN—ART. MARTY—EVERYTHING ELSE. CREMATE. They’d figure it out.
Then I opened the bottles and spilled the pills onto the scarf Aunty Mabel had embroidered for my sixteenth birthday. Fuchsia satin, with clumps of white kittens in the corners. Counting, I had trouble focusing, the color contrast was so vibrant, the tablets so tiny. I pushed the pills into the middle of the scarf and knotted it up into a bundle. Someone long ago had taught me to do that, I didn’t remember who.
That night I was too keyed up to sleep, still staring at the ceiling when Ma leaned into my bedroom. She had on a brown tweed suit with a yellow and red scarf wrapped around her throat and her favorite earrings, Nai-nai’s black pearls.
“Sure you don’t want to come to New York with me?” she asked. “You can go to museum. Or I give you my Bloomingdale’s charge card.”
“No.”
“I’ll be back before six. If you need money it’s on top of the radio in the kitchen.”
I waited for the front door to slam, the gust of the taxi making the turn down the hill. Then I lay for a while more, listening to the silence of the house, punctuated by random bird and squirrel noise from the backyard. From a crack under the window shade, I could see that the day was overcast, and for this I was thankful.
I took a shower, out of habit I guess, and afterward went into Marty’s room. Over the bedpost was flung a crimson feather boa. Somewhere there was a Polaroid of my sister in costume: gold-painted eyelids, black unitard, spike heels, and that boa draped across her breasts. I got into the bed and reached up and pulled it down, wrapping the ends of it around my face, inhaling that scent of my sister, a smell that I could distinguish from a thousand other people’s in the dark.
Then I went downstairs, only glancing into the half-open door of my parents’ bedroom, the double bed immaculately made with its blue-and-white-striped spread, the low bureau cluttered with straw trays of cosmetics and jewelry and a couple of the Chinese movie star magazines my mother still read. My parents’ wedding picture in its silver frame was propped in the comer.
In the kitchen, Ma’s tea mug filled with swollen green leaves sat on the table, still warm to the touch. There was one more thing I needed to do. I slipped my feet into the old sneakers my mother kept by the back door for gardening—they were so small my heels hung over the backs—and then went out and climbed onto the curb of the driveway. Standing there I could see my breath, but the cold seemed to just lie on my skin, like snow on the ground, without penetrating it.
I’d come out to say good-bye to my favorite tree, the black walnut. It
stood stark and plain at the bottom of the hill, the dark brown trunk rising straight for fifteen feet until the limbs began reaching upward.
I’d wanted that image to be the last thing branded into my brain in this world, but now, seven weeks later, I was standing at the top of the hill again, watching the shadow play of pale green flower and unfolding leaf in an angle of sun. In the tortured narcissism of my attempted suicide and its aftermath it had not occurred to me that this tree would bud and bloom, that in fact things would simply continue.
16
Right before takeoff I had this sudden urge to stand up in the aisle and announce that I was fresh out of the loony bin, what did everyone think about that?
But how perfectly easy it was, after all, to appear normal: just stay in your seat and keep your mouth shut. I thought that if Mel had been in my place he’d have been practicing his charm on the flight attendant, trying to cadge a drink out of her.
We’d said our good-byes out by the lake, after breakfast on the day my mother came to pick me up. He gave me his poetry anthology and told me he’d marked certain poems for me.
“But you’re always reading that book.”
“Consider it a loan. That way I’ll be sure of seeing vou again.”
The sun was tipping the wavelets gold, too dazzling to focus on. The ducks, who didn’t seem to care that this was a mental hospital, had glided hopefully to shore as they did anytime anyone passed. I dug into the pocket of my jacket and found the remains of a packet of oyster crackers, which I tossed out onto the water.
“Ciao, Club Willowridge,” Mel said. I laughed.
“We never got to play tennis.”
“You’ll play in Florida.” He studied me, as if searching for something in particular. “You get better down there, you hear? At least get a tan.”
“Visit me,” I said impulsively.
He scrubbed at the wet grass with the tip of his sneaker. “I don’t have the dough.”
“We’ll talk about it.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t have the number with me, but they’re listed. Richard Ding. I’m sure they’re the only Ding in St. Petersburg.”
“Okay.” Mel smiled and reached behind me to slide the elastic out of my ponytail so that my hair fell down around my face. Then he leaned forward and gave me the lightest of kisses on the mouth.
The book of poems was in Daddy’s black leather bag, along with warm-weather clothes I’d scrounged from my sister’s bureau: gym shorts and a couple of giant T-shirts, all of which I was sure were originally Schuyler’s. The pickings had been pretty slim. This was the story in our family: when Marty and I weren’t looking, our mother would give our clothes away. There was always someone in need: a distant relative or a friend who had just arrived in America. Or someone who, although not exactly in need, was more deserving than my sister or me. My camel hair jacket went this route. Ma donated it to Aunty Winnie, Xiao Lu’s mother. It was true that I’d left it hanging in the front hall closet, deciding it wasn’t cool enough for sophomore year, when everyone was wearing distressed denim. But it had after all been mine.
“You never wear,” Ma said. “She thinks it’s chic.”
Marty would fly into a rage. I remember her hollering down the stairs, demanding to know what my mother had done with her purple sweater, black jeans, gold scarf.
A few months after Daddy died, Carey and I came up to New Haven and found Ma in the midst of sorting clothes to give away. She was very organized about it, having lugged several moving boxes from the attic and labeled them: THROW OUT, GOODWILL, NEARLY NEW SALE, FLORIDA.
“What’s ‘Florida’?” I asked.
“I send to Uncle Richard, maybe he can use.” Uncle Richard was considerably shorter than my father but easily weighed twice as much. I looked in the box and saw that it was full of ties—brightly colored, bold patterns. Daddy had grown conservative in dress, but always favored loud ties.
In the GOODWILL box were piled dress shirts. Even though they’d been washed, I thought I could still detect his smell on them. A dry, slightly stale odor.
“Why don’t you take?” Ma asked. “They fit you perfectly.” She was right; I was broad enough through the shoulders. But I shook my head.
Ma picked up a tan V-necked sweater and held it up for us to inspect. “Definitely too small for Uncle Richard. Carey, you like this? Such nice cashmere, feel.”
I said quickly: “It’s not his color.”
My mother frowned at it, then refolded it and put it aside. “Maybe I wear for around the house.”
All the trousers were cut baggy. Ma laughed suddenly. “Look at this.” She laid out two pairs on the bed side by side. We could see that one was much larger than the other.
“Your daddy got very fat right after we married. Everyone says it’s my good cooking.”
“I can believe that,” Carey said, and I rolled my eyes at him. My mother was a terrible cook.
“It was your daddy who liked to cook,” Ma said to me. “Every night, he made a feast, six courses at least. He used up every knife and pot and pan we had.” She sat back on her heels with a dreamy look. “When I was pregnant with you, Sally, I have to tell him to stop, I was too tired to do the dishes.”
“So did you cook?” I asked.
“No one cook. We go into Monterey for spaghetti with clam sauce.” I could see my parents sitting in front of their enormous plates of pasta, looking daunted. “This American food,” Ma would have sighed. Daddy would have pointed out that spaghetti was invented by the Chinese.
“I thought you were so sick you couldn’t eat,” I said.
“Who said that?” My mother folded each pair of trousers over her arm, pulling the legs out so that the creases lay perfectly. She handles clothes meticulously. So did Nai-nai. But there was a difference in attitude. To my grandmother, clothes held a kind of magic—they could change your destiny one way or the other. To my mother, they were servile, like farm animals in China. Treat them well and they’ll perform their function.
Marty and I, American girls, were frivolous. My sister’s clothes lay heaped on chairs and strewn on the floor, forgotten until she needed something in particular. I bought things for the color, and liked to see them hanging arrayed in my closet—whites, blacks, warms, cools—almost more than I enjoyed wearing them.
“You want me to help you sort?” I asked my mother.
“No, easier if one person does.”
Her answer made me feel guilty. She knew I hadn’t loved my father enough to go through his clothes when he was dead.
As the plane taxied down the runway, I noticed that almost everyone was reading, or pretending to read. Not me. I sat straight up, waiting for that moment, exactly the space of a slow intake of breath, when we lifted off and began to climb steeply into the sky.
Those couple of days I’d spent at the house on Woodside Avenue, my mother and I had treated each other neutrally. We cooked meals, ate, cleaned up, watched the news, and it was as if I were just home for the weekend, had never tried to off myself, or been in the hospital. That last family therapy session might have never taken place.
The last thing Ma said, when she dropped me off at Connecticut Limousine, was that I’d probably have to take a taxi from the airport because Uncle Richard didn’t have a license anymore, his eyesight had gotten so bad, and Aunty Mabel hated to drive.
But there my aunt was, waiting behind the rope, in a pink-and-white-flowered shirtdress and big sunglasses. Thinner in some places, fatter in others. She waved so wildly when she saw me that everyone looked to see who it was. I felt like a movie star.
“Wo lai na, wo lai na ,” she insisted, holding out her arms for the bag.
“No, I’m okay. It’s really light.”
She regarded me critically. “Too thin. Come, I’m right outside.”
I barely had time to register the heat before we got to the car, an old maroon Tercel. My aunt switched on the radio to Muzak.
“Eleanor Rig
by.”
“I thought you didn’t like to drive,” I said.
“In Florida you have to drive.” My aunt’s voice had a lilt, a trace of southern. Her lips and fingernails were painted coral. I could tell right away I wasn’t going to blend in here. Florida was surreal, I couldn’t take seriously anyplace that had palm trees. And it was stunningly flat, the bay itself a vast plain, stretching out light blue and gleaming on both sides of us as we skimmed across toward St. Petersburg, which shimmered ahead of us through a fog of heat.
“You know, Sal-lee, my friend from the library has a pool, she says you can use. Or you can go to the beach. We have ninety-five degrees every day this week.”
“I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”
“No problem, we buy at the mall.”
“What’s this about a library, Aunty Mabel?”
“I have part-time volunteer job at public library. Shelve books, catalog, things like that. Once in a while there’s a kids’ art exhibit, I help organize.”
Despite myself, I began to relax. It was soothing to be driven like this, into a strange pale metropolis that whatever surprises it might hold, could never be as jangling as New York. When we got into the city proper, on the left, through the buildings, I could still catch glimpses of the bay. And even here, downtown, was that Florida light, with its peculiar empty quality, as if it were reflecting only ocean, like at the beginning of time.
Aunty Mabel said: “You know, your Uncle Richard isn’t so good.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Since he retired. I think he lose his spirit. Maybe you can cheer him up.”
“Me?”
“All the time he’s in front of the TV. Maybe you can do some project together.”
“Okay.”
“He always want daughter, you know. Never son, like most men. He’s so looking forward to your visit.”
Ma had once told me that my aunt and uncle couldn’t have children because when Aunty Mabel was young, she had been cursed by a beggar on the streets of Shanghai.
Monkey King Page 16
