Marty and I had been seated with Ma, Aunty Lilah, Mimi, and old Mr. Lin. I hadn’t even known Mr. Lin was still alive. He was shriveled like a dried shrimp in his chair, with those Coke-bottle glasses they have for people with cataracts.
It was never clear to me exactly how Mr. Lin had made his living. Daddy used to say, “He has beautiful calligraphy,” as if that were enough to grant him distinction, a place in the world.
When a lazy Susan containing hors d’oeuvres was set down in front of us, Ma said, “Look, duck feet!”
“Calling them that is not the way to make people want to eat them,” my sister said peevishly. She began drumming her fingernails on the table.
I decided to be polite to Mimi who was seated next to me and asked her how her dad and sisters were. “How come they’re not here, anyway?”
“My father had to mind the store. And my sisters both moved to the Midwest.” She didn’t need to say married. I tried to remember what she did for a living. Some kind of medical thing. Physical therapy, that was it. I could see it. She had big, strong hausfrau arms and the right kind of incurable cheerfulness.
Aunty Lilah spun the lazy Susan around so the sliced eggs on their bed of cellophane noodles were facing Mr. Lin. “Hey! You take first, huh?” He scrutinized the eggs through his lenses and then waveringly approached his chopsticks and plucked out the biggest slice. Aunty Lilah leaned across Mimi and said to me: “Not too many girls look good in black like you, Sally.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to figure out the barb inside this compliment.
“Actually I’m surprise you look so good. Your ma-ma tells me you have a bad time with your divorce.”
“I’m fine now.”
“Just remember, most important thing for woman in America is be financially independent. I keep all the books for the store, did you know that? If your Uncle Frank dies I could take over in a minute, no problem.”
They were pouring champagne for the first toast. I got up to go to the bathroom. When I was at the sink washing my hands my mother came in.
“Ma, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Tell everyone about my life.”
She went into a stall, slammed the door and locked it. Over the noise of her peeing she called out: “Everyone ask. It doesn’t matter. You know how your Aunty Lilah is, so nosy, such a gossip.”
“But I barely know any of these people. Why do they have to know about me?”
The toilet flushed and my mother came out and joined me at the sink. “You’re like a sponge, Sally. You take everything in. Why don’t you let bounce off?”
“I just don’t like it, that’s all.”
“If you want me to talk good things about you, why don’t you tell me good things? Every time you call, it’s something bad. Getting divorced. Worried about money. Might get fired.”
“I’m sorry if I can’t be Marty.”
“You and your sister two sides of the same thing. You complain, even when it’s not so terrible. Your sister says everything’s fine, when I know it’s not so fine.”
When we got back to the table, Marty was smoking in quick, short jerks, and I noticed she was the only one who had emptied her champagne glass. The Peking duck had arrived, sliced and accompanied by pancakes and scallions and sauce. Mr. Lin was constructing a crepe. For some reason he had taken off his glasses to do this. Although his eyelids were now densely wrinkled, I could see that they had once been double.
My mother and Marty were arguing about something. Then Ma reached over to the ashtray for my sister’s cigarette to put it out. “It’s not bothering anyone,” Marty said.
“Bother me,” Ma said.
Aunty Lilah jumped in with one of her non sequiturs. “Bau-yu, listen, you’re still so good-looking. You should get married again.”
Ma gave Aunty Lilah a look—not in front of the children.
Aunty Lilah ignored her. “Lots of eligible men. Widowers.” We all looked at Mr. Lin, who was slobbering over his plate, and then we looked away.
But what Aunty Lilah had said about my mother was true. She was barely fifty, and with her new hairstyle easily looked ten years younger. Her complexion was still as translucently pale as it had been on her own wedding day, complemented by the luster of Nai-nai’s black pearl earrings. She was still that contained aristocratic Shanghai beauty my father had fallen in love with.
“And you girls, if you want meet, just call me,” Aunty Lilah went on. “I know many nice young men, Ivy League, good family.”
Ma said to me: “Sal-lee, you don’t take any kao ya.”
“I don’t want any.”
“This is wedding. You have to eat at wedding.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Mar-tee, what about you?”
My sister didn’t answer.
“Look, I make a sandwich,” my mother said. “You take some.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just a bite.”
“Just a bite for me too, Ma,” Many said.
Using her chopsticks, my mother cut the crepe exactly in half and gave one piece to me, one piece to my sister.
I leaned across the table. “Mr. Lin, remember the duck my father used to make for Chinese New Year?”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Such a talented man, your ba-ba. And talented daughter too. You still paint pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “You’re a good girl. Obedient to your parents.”
The bride and groom came around to our table. Grace leaned over and said into my ear, “My old boyfriend has the biggest crush on your sister. He wants to know if she’s free or not.” Marty had gone over to the bar to have another cigarette.
“Your old boyfriend’s the usher?” She nodded. “Yes, I guess she’s free.”
Xiao Lu was grinning in kind of a glazed way, so what came out of his mouth shocked me.
“These two Wang sisters were the bane of my existence when I was growing up.”
“What?” I said. Grace frowned, wrapping her red stole tighter around her shoulders.
“It took me years to recover. I don’t think you ever realized how stupid you were. Making fun of me was like making fun of yourself.” Then he laughed, weakly, as if trying to turn what he’d said into a joke.
“Oh, all kids tease.” Aunty Lilah to the rescue.
“Xiao Lu doesn’t have any brothers and sisters,” Ma said. “My girls toughen him up.”
“Grace, I love your reception outfit,” said Mimi.
“Thanks,” said Grace. The photographer was setting up in front of our table and she put her arms around me and Ma and gestured with her head to Xiao Lu to come join us.
Snap. Everyone smiling, everything perfect.
“A bunch of us are going out to hear Zachary Richard. You wanna come?” My sister was refreshing her eye shadow in front of the ladies’ room mirror. I watched as she dipped her fingers under the tap and then ran them through her hair to make it stick up in spikes.
“Okay.”
“We’re leaving right now. First show starts in ten minutes.” We went back to the table where Ma and Aunty Lilah and Mr. Lin were working on ba bao fan. “Don’t wait up for me, Ma, I’ll get a ride back,” Marty said, leaning to kiss my mother on her greasy cheek.
“Okay,” Ma said with her mouth full. Without thinking I leaned over and kissed her other cheek. I could feel her powder on my lips.
“Huh,” said Aunty Lilah. “Too bad they didn’t get a picture, all three of you together. That Marty, she hasn’t changed a bit.” This was Aunty Lilah’s way of saying she didn’t approve of my sister’s dress.
As we headed for the door I asked Marty: “Does Ma know that you’re moving back to the city?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t you think you’d better tell her soon?”
She rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.
I ended up sharing a cab with Mimi and a couple of members of the wedding party. Poor Mi
mi. The photographer had caught her unsuccessful lunge—Grace had aimed perfectly into the arms of her maid of honor. As our driver slammed on his brakes for the fifth time, Mimi turned to me. “How can you stand to live in this city?”
“I don’t drive.”
Mimi lowered her voice. “My mother told me about your trouble. If there’s ever anything I can do to help—”
“There’s nothing you can do,” I said. She looked so wounded that I added, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel like talking about it.”
“I understand,” she said, in her best social worker manner.
When we got there the warm-up band, a couple of twangy girls with acoustic guitars, was just finishing their set. Marty and the others had arrived before us and managed to secure a table in the corner. They waved us over. This was lucky because by the time Zachary Richard got onstage it was standing room only.
The music was zydeco with a strong rock influence—great for dancing, and pretty soon Marty got up with the usher. I could tell he didn’t know Cajun from a hole in the ground but was good-naturedly making it up as he went along. When he twirled my sister the skirt of her flimsy dress hiked right up to her garter belt snaps, giving every guy in the room a bird’s-eye view.
Beside me, Mimi was getting drunk. “This music is SO GREAT,” she shrieked into my ear. “Why aren’t you dancing?”
“Why aren’t you?” I asked, and she laughed, tilting her head toward the man sitting next to her. I couldn’t tell what this meant.
When the song ended Marty’s partner kissed her hand and she gave a little curtsy.
Mimi said to me: “I thought Grace was beautiful. That train—it had little diamonds cut out in it. Did you see?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“It’s amazing that Xiao Lu ended up with someone Asian at all. All through high school he was obsessed with the blond cheerleader type.”
The band had begun playing a slow song, a lullaby, with what sounded like Cajun baby talk. Fais do do. It was very sexy. I wanted to close my eyes and just listen but there was Mimi yammering in my ear again: “Did you know Xiao Lu lost his virginity with me?”
“Really?” She was drunker than I’d thought. “And you with him?”
“Uh-huh. And I threw that fucking lingerie shower for her.”
“You’re a good person, Mimi.”
“I am, aren’t I.” Her gaze was caught by something on the dance floor.
I turned and saw them too. Fais do do. Marty and the usher, his hands on her waist, hers locked playfully around the back of his neck. She was laughing, but when wasn’t my sister laughing as if the whole world were some colossal joke? She reached up and pressed her cheek against the guy’s and then said something into his ear.
I turned back to make a snide comment to Mimi and my forearm accidentally brushed my half-full beer. It went crashing to the floor. I found myself mesmerized by the jagged shards swimming in the rapidly spreading puddle. Why had I never thought of broken glass—surely it would make a spectacular scar, unlike the neat little controlled surgeries my tiger stripes were. I could even aim for a vein this time.
I thought this and then I got up abruptly with no idea what I was going to do. I stepped carefully around the beer and broken glass and began negotiating my way through the crowd. As I passed the dance floor, I saw the usher cup my sister’s chin and turn her face toward him. Marty looked disoriented for a second, from liquor or coke or whatever she was doing, and then, like the actress she was, recovered and smiled up at him. It was her most winsome smile, the one she used when she was in big trouble or when she wanted something very badly.
But the stage lights were cruel and brought out the lines around her mouth and across her forehead. She had Ma’s complexion, but unlike Ma had not shunned the sun to protect it. In that moment I saw this: that despite her beauty, my sister was after all very ordinary.
I left the club, knowing that she could take care of herself. I wasn’t worried about Mimi either. Maybe she’d have a great one-night stand with the guy next to her.
It was a week until the first official day of summer, but with the sulfur smell off the sidewalk, the scanty way people were dressed, you’d have thought it was already in full swing. I turned south, into the hoi polloi of the Village, the angled streets crammed with cafes and strolling couples, calm, as if I could keep walking forever. Eventually I found myself on Hudson Street, where the breeze freshened off the river, which I could glimpse each time I passed a cross street.
I had just enough left in my bank account to meet my July rent and living expenses. I knew I’d never see a cent of the money I’d given Marty. On Monday I’d call my boss, commit to some freelance I could do at home. It was time.
Three months ago I’d wanted to leave this world. In the hospital they told us that pain is something you experience and then put behind you. I disagree. I think you hold everything, pain and pleasure, in your heart, and that memory only deepens the next experience.
In painting, it’s gesture that counts. Prime the canvas and use anything, a dirty brush will do, to lay out the first strokes, and then whether you realize it or not you’ve begun the rhythm. When it’s dry, a finished piece, what onlookers should feel is the tension of your wrist cocked as you fed leaf blades into whiteness, dipping again and again into your palette, the precision and confidence of the three seconds it took to draw the curve of a limb with your brush angled like a pen nib. All the steps of that particular dance, as well as the particular whole.
The morning I’d tried to kill myself, I’d stood on the curb of the driveway looking down at the backyard, and what I’d felt, finally, was failure. Whatever would I have done with that pale New England sky, the spreading boughs of the pines etched so mercilessly upon it, how could I have expressed the simplicity of the black walnut so that it would have meant anything to anyone but me? I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t nearly good enough. I wouldn’t even know how to begin. It was my doom to be able to see, to feel like this, and not be able to translate.
Still, at that moment I’d known: this life is exquisite.
Epilogue
I never told anyone, not even Valeric, what I was dreaming about when Ma woke me up that Saturday afternoon after she got back from New York five hours earlier than she’d planned. She’d known, my mother, as she sat through her alumnae lunch, because she excused herself before dessert and hailed a cab to Grand Central to make the 2:05. When she saw me she began to scream, and miraculously they said, I was jolted back to consciousness.
I didn’t want to wake up. At first it had been like any kind of going to sleep, except more serious, I could even feel my heart slowing down, my breath becoming shallow. I was dreaming of Carey, more of a feeling than a dream, of lying in a narrow bed with him, the long bones of his body pressed against mine like those times he’d held me the last few days, before I moved out, after we’d quit having sex, but the warmth of him was something I still craved.
And then I dreamed of a pattern, repeated over and over: white bears carrying pink and yellow balloons on a light blue background. I hadn’t seen it in twenty-six years, but I recognized it instantly: the walls of my crib in Monterey.
Finally I dreamed I was flying. Not by myself, but on the back of an enormous white crane, up into the eye of the sun.
That’s when she called me back. OPEN YOUR EYES. OPEN YOUR EYES. THIS IS YOUR MOTHER. OPEN YOUR EYES.
Before he died, Uncle Richard sent me a present, a key chain with a single charm—a little silver greyhound. Like Nai-nai’s hairpin, I keep it with me always, because, even with the way things turned out, I need all the luck I can get.
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Monkey King Page 28
