“Your ba-ba so handsome.” In the living room after dinner, my aunt and I were looking through old photograph albums. I remembered that she had once been interested in my father. We had come to a photograph of my parents just before they got married. They were leaning against the railing of a ship, hand in hand, hair blowing every which way, eyes only for each other. Daddy’s face was angled a little away from the camera, smiling and shadowed. Even in that casual pose, you could see the intensity in the twist of his neck. Ma, dimpled in a big-shouldered dress, looked fragile beside him.
“Bau-yu and Pau-yu,” my aunt said. “Similar and not similar.”
We had the same picture in an album at home; I knew the story that went with it. After the ship photographer snapped their photo, they’d set out on a cruise around San Francisco Bay. Although it wasn’t particularly rough, in ten minutes my father had completely ruined his fancy seersucker jacket. “I never saw anyone so sick in my life,” Ma told us. “I had to take it to the cleaners three times.” Back on land, Daddy told her how he’d suffered on his voyage from China. He’d lost eighteen pounds on the way.
I studied the face in the photo, noticed how the young man’s side-parted hair fell in a way that reminded me of Marty’s. Daredevilish.
Then came my parents’ wedding. What touched me most was Aunty Mabel standing alone, her big, good-natured face framed by a bad perm, wearing a light-colored dress with petal sleeves and a straight skirt too tight around the hips. When she smiled her eyes disappeared into half-moons and you could see her crooked top teeth. Ma said that Aunty Mabel did better than anyone expected. She moved to New York and six months later started dating Uncle Richard, who was an accountant at Grumman, where she worked as a secretary.
No photos of their wedding, they’d gone modestly to City Hall. The next series showed my aunt and uncle standing in front of a two-family brick house in Flushing—they’d lived there only three months before my uncle got a job with Martin Marietta in St. Pete. Uncle Richard was chunky and broad-faced and beaming, a heaviness around his chin foretelling the jowls to come. My aunt looked dazed in her heavy jewelry and unbecoming dresses.
“Ding-ah!” she called to my uncle, but he had fallen asleep on the couch across the room.
Me as a lumpy infant, a cowlick I still have springing from the left side of my head. Marty, smaller in every way, and more self-contained. The album chronicled the two of us growing up into our late teens. Between us, often, stood my mother. Seeing Ma and Marty together over and over made me note the difference in their beauty. My mother had a portrait prettiness, with her styled hair and regular features, while my sister’s face was narrower, feline, a little dangerous. It wasn’t just the generation gap—my sister was born knowing something my mother never learned.
At first Ma’s look changed dramatically from scene to scene, her hairstyle and clothing reflecting each passing fashion. You could practically pinpoint the year by looking at her. There we were at Disneyland, in front of Cinderella’s castle, my mother in a modified beehive and Bermuda shorts, me in stripes, my sister in snowflakes. In front of the White House: Ma in a boldly patterned sleeveless shift and the Twiggy crop Daddy had hated so much, Marty and I on either side of her with our arms clutching the crosspiece of the fence, pretending we were being strung up.
Then suddenly my mother’s fashion sense seemed to regress until finally it froze. The pixie haircut, the school-marm outfits, the tight mouth. She remained static, only growing older, while my sister and I blossomed.
Daddy, usually the photographer, was in few of the pictures. I watched him age, hair whitening first at the temples and then clouding through. His eyes got smaller, darker, and more brilliant. His body shrank to bones inside the endless similar sets of loose shirts and trousers that he wore year after year. The ties got more and more excessive. The rare smile become nonexistent. How bitter the lines framing his mouth, how resentful the hunch of his shoulders, how desperately his long hands groped the air by his sides.
For the first time I saw my parents’ marriage as a love story gone terribly awry.
“Your ba-ba ever tell you he want to be pilot?” Aunty Mabel reached down into her wicker workbasket, fished out a card of bright orange embroidery floss, unwound it, and licked the end into a point, which she threaded through a darning needle.
“No, really?”
“He want to join the Chinese air force. You think he’s so healthy, a tall man like that. But he failed the physical. All those childhood diseases make his constitution weak.”
“I thought he wanted to be a physicist.”
“That too. Afterward. Pilot was childhood dream.” My aunt shook her head. “Your father was a genius, you should hear him talk! So clever, all those stories. His sisters would be so proud of him. Too bad he was stuck in the United States. All the time he hopes China opens up again so he can go back. He is almost thirty years old when he comes. You come to a new country too late, you are always stranger. Your mother and me, we go to school here, we make friends. Not so your ba-ba. He is incurable Chinese.” “He did go back. To Taiwan.”
“When a Chinese returns to China, he goes to lao jia.” In the early 1970s, when it was beginning to be possible to do so, my parents had written to their respective families. Ma had received several letters back: her oldest sister had died (one of those aunts whose blurry heads Marry and I had scrutinized in Nai-nai’s ancient sepia family portraits), such and such a cousin was professor of German at the foreign language institute in Shanghai. Since it was impossible for those in China to obtain visas to the United States, would Nai-nai and Ma and Aunty Mabel please come back to visit them as soon as possible. Nai-nai had wanted to, had made plans, but the cancer had gotten to her bones by then. Her daughters had never gone.
My father had received only one letter back, on onionskin paper, the characters drawn with blue fountain pen ink in an uncertain hand. It was from a stranger, a primary school teacher in the town where he’d grown up. So sorry to have to be the one to convey such news to his illustrious American colleague, etc., etc., but Wang Pau-yu’s younger sister had passed away several years ago from the sugar sickness. Diabetes, Daddy explained. She’d been a laborer, a farmhand, unmarried. No one knew what had become of the older sister. She’d held a local government post, and then joined the Communist Party and moved to Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. She’d changed her name and was impossible to trace.
I asked my aunt: “Do you think Ma should have married someone else? Someone more her class?” I remembered Uncle Richard and hoped Aunty Mabel wouldn’t take offense.
She didn’t. “More than difference in class. Difference in character. Your father had a very bad childhood. So insecure, always afraid. Your mother—well, you know, she’s the baby. A little spoiled, like your sister. She doesn’t understand this kind of fear.”
I was flipping the pages of the album fast now, until a large group photograph made me stop. There was our whole family, La Guardia Airport, Christmas, my sophomore year of boarding school. My parents still the perfect couple for the camera: Daddy, his hair almost completely white now, my mother close beside him with her dutiful, distant smile. Uncle Richard in a Russian fur hat, which he must have kept mainly in mothballs, for who would need such a thing in Florida, his arm raised in a bon voyage salute—his other arm around my aunt, who looked caught off-guard. Me in an army jacket and ragged-hem jeans, my sister with heavy mascara and a bad layered haircut. Between the two of us my Nai-nai, wearing the long beige cashmere coat my mother and aunt had given her for Christmas. I could see in the photograph how it hung off her shoulder blades, she had gotten so thin. By that time she was wearing turtlenecks rather than high-collared blouses to hide her mole because she couldn’t manage buttons. A couple of years before, she had broken her hip, and still sported an ivory-handled cane.
“Your Nai-nai look distinguished, eh?” she said to me. “Not just like any old lady.” When I walked her to the boarding gate she lean
ed against me, clutching my arm, and I could feel the brittle bones of her fingers through her soft leather gloves. It was the last time I ever saw her, touched her.
My mother was fussing, asking if Nai-nai was sure she had her ticket. My grandmother ignored her. “You much taller,” she said to me. “It’s good to be tall. Tall girl stands out.”
And I remembered how I had felt comforted, although I had heard it a hundred times before.
The phone rang and my uncle started, in the middle of a snore. “Hello?” Aunty Mabel said. Then she handed the receiver to me. “For you.”
“Ma?” I asked, but my aunt shook her head.
“Sally? It’s Mel.”
“Oh my God, how are you?” His voice was like elixir, cool, filling, impossible to describe how glad it made me feel. “Where are you calling from?”
“My parents’ house.”
“Are you on pass?”
“I’m out, Sal. They sprung me.”
“That’s great! What are you up to?”
“Well, for starters, I thought I’d come down and see you.”
“I thought you said you were broke.”
“There are ways, darling, there are ways. I think I can borrow some wheels.”
“It’s a little crowded here—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, Sal, I wouldn’t impose on your family. I have a place to stay.”
“When?”
“Not sure yet. I’ll call you in a couple of days. Is it hot down there?”
“Ninety-five in the shade.”
“Beautiful. We’ll go sailing. I have to go, hon. Just sit tight, I promise I’ll call you. Bye.”
Aunty Mabel was bowed over her embroidery, but my uncle, now fully awake, leaned forward on the couch, rubbing his pudgy palms together. “Boyfriend, eh?”
“No. Just friend.”
“Just friend. Ni kan,” he said to my aunt, “see how she blushes.”
18
Aunty Mabel was in the kitchen, answering questions: Is she eating enough, is she sleeping, is she being a help to you. My aunt’s Shanghainese was so quick the sibilant syllables seemed to trip over each other.
I was summoned to the phone. Before she handed it to me, my aunt whispered: “Your sister’s in an accident.”
When I asked, Ma said: “No, no, nothing serious. Marty’s rental car, it went into a ditch. Insurance covers everything. She has a broken arm, that’s all.”
“Where is she?”
“Still up in Vermont now, but she’s coming back down. Her friend drives her this weekend.”
“Are you sure she’s all right?”
“Of course, of course. I think she’s getting tired of there anyway. I think it’s time for her to come home.”
While my aunt was out of the house at her library job, Uncle Richard and I played gin rummy, a penny a point. The cards were special ones, with giant print, for people with bad vision. My uncle leaned back on the sofa, his eyes sly over his half glasses. On the table in front of him was a pair of silver globes, the kind you see for sale in Chinatown in satin boxes, that he picked up and clacked together when he was thinking. It drove me crazy.
“You’re just like Captain Queeg.”
“Hah hah. Humphrey Bogart.” My uncle had four cards left. His eyes narrowed and he threw down the queen of hearts into the discard pile. I reached for it, hesitated, and then pulled my hand back. He laughed. “That’s right, Niece. You have to weigh things, think them out. You think it looks like a treasure, it might be a poison.”
“I need a cigarette.”
Without taking his eyes off his cards, Uncle Richard reached behind him into the crack between the cushion and the back of the sofa and pulled out a battered pack of Camel nonfilters. He shook them expertly so that one slid out toward me. “Be my guest.” With his slippered toe he poked under the sofa fringe and nudged out an old tuna can full of butts.
“Looks like you’ve got it all set up.”
“That’s right.” He took a gold lighter out of his shirt pocket and lit my cigarette, then his, and set the can on the coffee table.
“Doesn’t she smell it?”
“Nah. She too busy worry about other things.” He frowned down at his hand.
“Uncle Richard, what did you think of my father?”
“What’s this, you studying your roots?”
“No, I’m just curious.”
“Pau-yu was a very intelligent man. And he has charisma, like movie star. Not like your old uncle.”
“Do you think he loved my mother?”
“Why you ask all these questions, Niece? He cherish your ma-ma. She is very able woman. Your turn.”
I picked up the king of spades, one of my favorite cards, but I couldn’t use it, since all I was holding was low clubs, so I laid it down. I remembered, sinkingly, that I hadn’t seen a lot of high spades in this game. “Ah,” my uncle said. His hand hovered over the facedown pile, teasing me, then swooped down for the king I’d just discarded. “Gin. Forty-five points.” Jack, queen, king, ace. Royal flush.
“Luck,” I said.
“I tell you, Niece, that’s what it is. Luck. Everything is luck.”
“Someone else’s good luck is your bad.”
“In cards, maybe. Not in other things. You know feng shui?” He pronounced it the Cantonese way, “shwee.”
“Wind water.”
“Very good. I have friend in Queens, expert in this. He came down, look at our house, make recommendations. You gotta bad angle on your door, he says, no money can come in, you put a mirror here to fix. Energy trapped behind this window, you put something glass to catch it. Then what happened? We get a six-thousand-dollar refund from IRS. What do you think?”
“I think you had something to do with that refund.”
“See these bells and chime hanging here? That’s for chi to play. You give it toy, good luck wants to come in. Hah, I can see you don’t believe. I tell you what. We go see some real luck in action. The puppies. You ever see greyhound race?”
“Once. A documentary on TV.”
Uncle Richard laughed raucously. “Forget TV.” He counted his cards quickly, swept them together. “One hundred thirty points. You owe me seven dollars.”
“What’s the matter, Niece? This old car is too much for you? Japanese-made, very good, we got it secondhand.”
“No, no, everything’s fine.” It was a good thing my uncle was nearly blind, he wouldn’t be able to pick up details like the fact that my palms were sweating all over the steering wheel. It was the first time I’d been in the driver’s seat since I’d gotten sideswiped in Ma’s Honda. I put on my sunglasses and adjusted the rearview mirror, casual, like I did it all the time, like I was born driving.
“So what we say to your aunt?” Uncle Richard tested me.
“We saw Cousin Cousine.” Aunty Mabel had come home with one of her migraines and had gone to lie down after lunch. I’d scrawled the note we left on the kitchen table: Going tothe movies. Be back for dinner.
“Good. You tell me the story.”
I glanced behind me and in front of me and when I was surer than sure it was absolutely safe pulled out of the driveway. I was usually bad at recalling the plots of movies, but this one I remembered, because it was the one Carey and I had seen on our first date and we’d argued about it afterward. He’d thought it was immoral.
“They’re these two couples, the man in one couple is the cousin of the woman in the other couple. Anyway, the man cousin is a real jerk, always having affairs, and the wife is good, the actress’s name is Marie-Christine Something.”
“Make a left at this light. What does this Marie look like?”
“Oh, I don’t know, long blond hair, not pretty pretty but very attractive. And in the other couple, it’s the wife cousin who’s the jerk. She’s extremely beautiful, dark hair, neurotic as hell, always threatening to commit suicide. For attention. You know she’s never going to do it. You following this, Uncle Richard?”
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“Ummhmm.”
“Her husband’s totally easygoing, totally sweet. A doll. So guess what happens.”
“Either the good and the good or the bad and the bad get together.”
“But the bad and the bad are related by blood.”
“When I was growing up cousin could marry cousin. You make a right at this intersection. Watch out for trucks. Right, Niece.”
“Sorry.” It seemed as if my uncle’s eyesight was improving geometrically the farther away we got from the house. We’d been following the Gulf shore a ways, and now we were heading toward downtown St. Pete. We passed a low-slung stucco hospital with a row of those tall gangly palms, the kind where the trunks were skinny at the bottom and widened toward the top. “Bends in hurricane,” Aunty Mabel had explained to me when I’d pointed this out.
“You ever miss New York?” I asked my uncle.
“Of course. Chinese food. You think you can get decent here? Seafood is okay, but has American taste.”
“How about your friends?”
“All retiring now, and they come down here, you know, or to Miami. Miami, Miami. Big deal. Sometimes your aunt and me, we think Hawaii.”
“Hawaii! That would be great.”
“Yeah. Honolulu. You come visit us there, eh?”
“Of course.”
Now we were in a particularly seedy section, auto repair shops and bars and very few people on the street. I found the automatic door lock button and pressed it. Per capita, there was much more crime here than in New York. I remembered what Lillith had told me about the town of Starke, near Gainesville. “You want to hold your breath when you pass that,” she’d warned.
“Why?”
‘“Cause that’s where all the worst serial murderers are penned up. And that’s where they keep Ole Sparky.”
“What?”
“The electric chair.”
“I thought they didn’t use that anymore.”
Monkey King Page 18
