The street they lived on was all ranch houses, each with its own tiny backyard. Uncle Richard opened the door for us, wheezing. “Welcome, Niece.” He was fatter than ever, thinning gray wisps combed back from his forehead, eyelids so heavy with wrinkles it made him look sleepy. “Typical Cantonese,” Ma always said about him. “You know, that round face.”
“You bring your pretty sister with you?”
“Not this time.”
I followed my aunt down the narrow hallway. The guest room was practically unrecognizable from when Marty and I had visited as children. Then it had been all white-gauze curtains, flimsy spreads, like in a beach house. Now it was filled with heavy, bright embroidery: the spreads peach-colored satin with intricate scarlet rose borders, matching curtains with valances, a footstool plump like a pincushion. On one bed was a large pillow in the shape of a ladybug and on the other a toy cat, white and fluffy, like the ones on my bureau scarf, like Lili, who had gotten run over. Aunty Mabel had a lot of time on her hands.
After I’d unpacked—even the satin hangers had little daisies embroidered on them—I went back into the living room. The TV on a rolling cart was blasting a basketball game. On the sofa beside my uncle, Niu-niu, whom I’d only seen in a snapshot as a kitten, was sprawled out arthritically. There were flecks of white in her black coat. Uncle Richard stroked the cat absent-mindedly as he watched the game. When the action got exciting he’d heave her up by her shoulders and point her at the screen.
“See that breakaway? Good for three points. I knew it!”
“Who’s playing?”
“Wildcats versus Hoosiers. I have one hundred smackers on this game. You don’t tell your aunt.”
I settled myself into a rocking chair with gingham frills over the arms. “Who are you betting on?”
“Wildcats, of course. You play basketball?”
“No.”
“Too bad, you’re tall and slim. Like your aunt, but she’s also not sports-minded.”
I remembered our Willowridge rec therapy games, where the therapist would keep switching the rules. “Okay, now both teams go for the same basket!” “Men against women!” “No dribbling for the next five minutes!” This last call usually got a laugh. Lillith, for some reason, would always pass to me, underhanded, arms flailing, as if the ball were way too heavy for her. It got so I would expect it.
It was too sad to think about.
Mel and I had tried calling her a couple of times at State, leaving messages she’d never returned. We did find out that she’d been transferred from Medical to a regular ward.
The Wildcats were down by ten when Aunty Mabel came in with a tray holding a pitcher and three glasses. “Turn down TV,” she said to Uncle Richard. He obeyed, winking at me, and then began clearing a place on the coffee table by shoving aside a pile of magazines and newspapers, including, I noticed, an old Racing Form.
“So you were in the hospital.” Uncle Richard took a big sucking sip of his lemonade. “They call it a mental breakdown, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Your mother tells us you try and kill yourself.”
“Ding-ah!” my aunt said.
“You are Chinese, not Japanese. Japanese like hari-kari, honor, all that. Chinese have other way out of troubles. Chinese know it’s all luck. So they try to change luck.”
“Sally’s luck is changed,” Aunty Mabel said. “She comes to visit us.”
“That means our luck is changed. You come to cheer old man up.” Uncle Richard poked at Niu-niu, who didn’t budge. “See this cat? I’m like this cat now. Decrepit.”
“Come on,” I said.
“Good for nothing. They should mercy kill me.”
“See how he talks?” my aunt said to me.
“Every time I go to doctor, he gives me more medicine to take. Now it’s my heart. Like a rusty valve, Mr. Ding, he says. You get older, things start fall apart.”
“You smoke too much,” Aunty Mabel said.
Indeed, I’d noticed that on the ceiling over where my uncle was sitting was a distinct brown stain, spreading out from the middle like an aura.
When I offered to help with dinner my aunt shook her head and pointed through the glass doors at the back patio. The red-and-white-webbed lounge chairs that had been there when I was a child had been replaced by ones cushioned in lengths of squishy lime green tubing. “Xiuxi.”
The grass in the backyard was overgrown and weedy. From where I lay I could see that the grapefruit trees hadn’t been kept up, but here and there among the glossy dark leaves a patch of yellow showed through. A palmetto plant made a sagging fountain in the middle of the yard. There was even a full-fledged palm tree, a short one whose trunk was the shape and pattern of a pineapple. Honeysuckle draped from the eaves of the garage, entwined with a vine that shot out trumpet flowers the color of blood oranges. The flowers were so beautiful I knew they must be poisonous. And the air was brimming. It wasn’t just honeysuckle I smelled, there was something even more heady, a fragrant rush that was almost decadent.
The South pulled no punches when it came to decadence.
I fell asleep and dreamed I was five years old again and very sick. Pneumonia with complications. It was our first winter on Coram Drive. There were ghosts in the room, hiding in the pattern of the apple blossom wallpaper, in my clothes. I was staring at my favorite T-shirt folded on top of the bureau. It was red and blue stripes, with very thin black stripes between. Ma came in and I pointed to the shirt. “What?” she said. I pointed again. She picked it up and shook it and a ghost flew out and into the open door of the closet.
I opened my eyes and was back in Florida. In the yard to my right a sprinkler was going. What had awakened me was the sound of a car pulling into the gravel driveway. A middle-aged women in a pink top and mint green denim shorts carried grocery bags into the house. She gave a friendly nod as she passed. “We have such nice neighbors, this quiet old Oriental couple,” I imagined her telling people. “And now their sweet young niece has come down from Connecticut to keep them company.”
A heavy, slow breeze stirred against my pale chill northern skin, teasing the blood to the surface. I enjoyed the caress, not moving until my aunt called me for dinner.
She told me the smell was confederate jasmine. “Behind the garage, you see. All yellow.”
“Watch out for armadillo,” Uncle Richard added.
“Armadillo?”
“What do you think makes all those tunnels in the lawn? Big Mama Armadillo. Your aunt is out by the garage the other day and she sees one of the babies. Usually they don’t come out in daytime. She jumps and says, ‘Ai-yah!’ Armadillo jumps even higher than she does!”
As easygoing as my aunt and uncle were, conversation with them was exhausting. After dinner I excused myself as soon as was tactfully possible, and retreated back to the guest room. I took out Mel’s book and propped myself up in the twin bed farthest from the door, near the window, where I’d slept so many years ago. On the sill was a parade of little glass animals, starting with the rat. The signs of the Chinese zodiac. I picked up my year, the dog. It looked like some kind of spaniel. Strong and reliable. Last in line was pig, Marty’s year. Lazy but lucky.
I set the dog back in its place and let the book fall open to the page that had been read the most. It was Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
I knew it by heart. It was one of the poems Fran had recited to me over and over on the banks of the Sudbury River. I saw that Mel had marked the last two lines:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
17
Next morning was overcast and cooler, the house perfectly silent as I checked my watch. I’d thrown my wedding ring into the East River, given the pear diamond back to Carey (it had been his grandmother’s), but this token of my marriage I kept because it was from
Ma, the most expensive present I’d ever gotten from her. Six-thirty. I was still on hospital time. I got out of bed and, still wearing the T-shirt I’d slept in, pulled on my corduroys. In the kitchen, my aunt and uncle’s other cat, a little tiger, rubbed against my ankles and then shot through my legs when I slid open the glass doors to the patio.
I went out barefoot into the backyard and made my way through the tall grass, cold and heavy with dew, leaned against the back fence, and lit up a cigarette. That was a terrible habit I’d picked up in the hospital, smoking first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, but there was something divine about it too, the buzz so strong it was sick-making. I noticed the grapefruit lying scattered beneath the trees like bocce balls. They were rotting, riddled with insect holes. The grapefruit still in the trees didn’t look much better. The ones Ma had brought to me at the hospital were obviously not from this yard. For a moment I entertained the urge to paint them, and then I stubbed out my cigarette and put the butt in my pocket and began picking up the decaying fruit, making a heap in the corner by the fence.
If only it could always be early morning or night. It was the day that killed me.
I heard the shrill of the teakettle from the kitchen and when I went back inside Aunty Mabel was pouring hot water into mugs filled with leaves. On the stove something acrid-smelling simmered in a clay pot. In the cool morning light I could see how my aunt’s face was a reflection of my mother’s. But where high cheekbones made Ma regal, in my aunt they were exaggerated, giving her the melancholy air of a Modigliani. My aunt’s eyes were long and narrow, like those in Chinese fairytale books. Like mine.
“Too cold out there without sweater.”
“I’m fine, really.”
I could hear my uncle coughing in the bathroom. He’d lost his basketball bet last night.
Aunty Mabel set two mugs on the table. “Who would think Pau-yu be the first to go,” she said as we sat there sipping. “I always think it’s your uncle.”
“Daddy was older.”
“Your Uncle Richard, six different doctors he has, for all his disease. Lucky we still have insurance and disability from his job.” My aunt got up to turn off the burner under the earthenware pot.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Special Chinese medicine for his heart. We have a friend sends it from Queens.”
I remembered the potion I’d taken the year I was eight, which I’d believed to be dried blood. I never did find out what it actually was.
After breakfast my aunt drove my uncle to the cardiologist and I sat out on the patio in the sun, which had finally come out, until I felt too much like a bum. I decided to gather the rest of the grapefruit, filling two giant trash bags. Insects had begun to hum in the jungly grass. Savannah was the word that came to mind as I stood there surveying the yard for any strays I’d missed.
The next task I set for myself was to clip the grass with hedge trimmers, wearing an old sun hat I found in the garage hanging beside the tools. When I was done I went in for lemonade and the last half of the Sally Jessy Raphael show—bulimic boys, not as entertaining as you’d think, or maybe I was finally losing my taste for talk shows. By then it was around eleven-thirty and my aunt and uncle still hadn’t returned, so I went out to the garage again and got out their old rusty rotary mower, which kept jamming on me. The ground was even more hummocky than it looked. I kept a hopeful lookout for armadillos, never having seen one before, but all I came across were lots of fat flying bugs and a tortoise, which I carefully picked up and put by the back fence, behind the grapefruit trees. The pastel lady from next door was hanging out her wash and waved to me.
Physical work doesn’t keep you from thinking! In fact sometimes it stimulates it. My aunt and uncle were as good as could be, but I was still in my life, I still had to return to New York City. As I struggled with the clackety mower I calculated my savings: I could survive for about a month and a half on what I had and then I’d have to find a steady income One possibility was freelance from my old boss, if she still trusted me. My last assignments had been delivered late and barely acceptable. I’d told her I was going to Connecticut to live with my mother for a while, and then with all the mess, going into the hospital and all, I had completely lost touch.
It was hard to believe now, but at the agency I’d handled all the biggest projects. I was known to be great under pressure. Crank up the Vivaldi, order out pizza, and I could work through the night, meet the toughest deadline with panache. Where I worked, the darker the circles under your eyes the more promising your career. Sally Wang-Acheson, senior art director. So chic, that hyphenated name, and so chic was I my long hair done up in all sorts of intricately casual styles—I had finally begun to accept my looks for what they were not beautiful but something else—with all those flowing tropical-colored outfits, dangly bronze and silver earrings Carey had given me every birthday and Christmas. A woman with style. A woman on her way up.
And then—catastrophe. A foot over on the other side, and it had affected me permanently, down to my brain cells. After degenerating to idiocy, I had to learn to be smart again, an adult in this world. How was it possible? Since I’d been sick I had taken to wearing the kind of asexual outfits I’d favored at boarding school—T-shirts, corduroys, sneakers. No makeup, no particular hairstyle. My reflection in the mirror was disturbing to me, the face thinner, childish, with a stripped expression I remembered from working with the mentally handicapped. Pure shock that you had to be out in the world at all.
I was almost done when I heard the car pull in. My aunt stood on the patio shading her eyes with her hands.
“Next year we spray the trees again.”
“Aunty Mabel, there’s some kind of other fruit out here. Little orange things on bushes.”
“Calamondin. Too sour to eat. You can make marmalade from.”
Unexpected treasures in your own backyard. I thought of the patch of lily of the valley behind the swing set on Coram Drive. Fortunately the bad boys missed it in their rampage. Once in a while Ma would pick a handful to keep in a glass in the kitchen. “This is what I have in my wedding corsage,” she told Marty and me, although she didn’t know the name in English. We didn’t know that they were so rare that it was actually against the law in Connecticut to pick them.
“Sal-lee, you come in now,” Aunty Mabel said. “After lunch we go shopping.”
In Montgomery Ward I selected the most conservative bathing suit I could find—a red one-piece with white polka dots and low-cut leg holes. I changed into and out of it as fast as possible, stopping long enough only to check that it was serviceable. Department store lighting was so cruel. “Let’s see!” my aunt called from the other side of the curtain and I said, “It’s fine, it’s fine.”
On the way to the cash register Aunty Mabel stopped at a rack full of tropical flowered sundresses, her coral nails fluttering over the hangers. “Sal-lee! Ni kan! This style become you very much.”
To please her, I tried one on. It had a full skirt—not my taste—with purple hibiscus on a green and white background that vaguely resembled leaves. But the bodice was cut in a sophisticated way, as snugly as an evening gown, with a graceful scoop neck and deep armholes. I wished the bones of my chest didn’t show, but they always had, as long as I could remember. This time I gave in to my aunt and stepped outside to model.
“Huh,” she said, drawing her eyebrows together in a delicate frown. I was barefoot and my ankles were raw from the sandspurs I’d picked up from working in the yard, but I could see that what she was looking at was the inside of my left arm where the tiger stripes overlapped delicately but distinctly from wrist to elbow.
“It’s gorgeous,” Aunty Mabel said, finally deciding she wasn’t going to ask. “I buy for you.”
For dinner my second night in Florida we had jiao zi. My aunt rolled out the dough and pressed circles into it with the rim of a teacup to make the wrappers. I spooned the pork and cabbage filling in and pinched the dumplings shut.
Thanks to Nai-nai I’d perfected my technique at making them dainty, evenly scalloped at the edges. My sister’s had too much filling and spilled out the sides. You could always tell which ones were whose when they came out of the pot.
“I’m not eating any of Marty’s,” I’d announce.
“Mine are better, they have more meat,” my sister would shoot back.
“No fight,” my father would say in his high-pitched starting-to-be-mad voice. But I noticed that Daddy ate more of mine than my sister’s.
Aunty Mabel asked how Marty was.
“She has an apartment in New York now.”
“How does she support herself?”
My sister lived off men, but I didn’t think my aunt needed to know this.
“When she’s in the city she works as a clown at South Street Seaport. Now she’s up in Vermont with a college friend of hers.”
“So she moves to the country?”
“No, no, this is just temporary. She still wants to be an actress in New York.”
“Actress.” Aunty Mabel sighed. “Your sister, she’s always so active.” She slid a pile of dough circles across the table to me. “And you! When you were little, you send us such beautiful cards. All kinds of animals, horses, dogs, cats. I still keep. You remember? And your ma-ma told us you won so many prizes in high school, for painting pictures.”
“She told you?”
“Of course she told us. I think this is a very difficult school you attend, lots of talented girls.”
“That’s what it was like.”
“So much talent, though, doesn’t help find a husband.”
“I did find a husband, Aunty Mabel.”
“You found wai guo ren. Maybe it’s better you find Chinese.”
“You mean like Xiao Lu?”
My aunt considered. “Those New York Chinese too small and pale. Maybe Hawaiian, or some big, strong California one. You ever think about moving out to California? We still have relatives there, you know.”
Monkey King Page 17
