Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  Zoe’s mother had a Southern pedigree she wore with equal parts pride and loathing. The middle daughter of Stork and Mary Austin of Jackson, Mississippi—and the prettiest of the three sisters—Billie was always happiest when she was singing. Since she had a resonant alto voice and her daddy was a deacon, she became the youngest soloist ever at the Methodist church (the white one, of course) at the tender age of eleven. The deep green robe went particularly well, people in the congregation told Billie, with her richly auburn hair.

  In high school, Billie became the kind of girl people talked about. Not that she was a slut like the girls from the shacks. Her daddy was Winston Tyler Austin, after all; best known as Stork since his high school basketball star days. Besides being a deacon, Stork Austin owned the town’s biggest real estate company. No, people talked about Billie because she was often seen headed toward the woodsy place where teenagers parked and made out. “True love,” she told Zoe years later, “is a matter of letting everything go. Even your better judgment.” And it seemed that Billie had always been in love with someone. In her senior year it had been the football co-captain; she went off to Ole Miss with him, despite earlier plans to run away to New York City the day she graduated. The love affair soon disintegrated into nasty accusations and beer bottle throwing, prompting her to join the Campus Crusade for Christ circuit which had a spirit-lifting rock band going northeast that summer.

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to be a missionary,” Billie had informed her father. Billie had an ability, particular to feisty Southern belles, to be simultaneously outspoken and chameleon-like; which is to say, she understood the value to be gained from telling people what they wanted to hear, especially her adoring father. She knew that Stork would shake his head over her going so far away, say, “You’ll be the death of me, girl,” then let her do what she wanted.

  Besides Billie, the band consisted of six other backup singers—two girls and four guys. The lead singer said “Hecky becky!” instead of swearing when his mic went dead. He laughed a little at his own prudery, glancing at Billie as if he hoped she’d laugh too, which she didn’t. One night after a performance at a church in New Paltz, New York, she sneaked out the back door, where two boys who wore tight jeans and said “fucking” as a modifier to pretty much everything were waiting for her in a dented VW van.

  After that, Billie traveled with a very different kind of band to the same windswept summer places that people were always visiting in movies: Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Connecticut. Before the Northeast had turned to the red and gold hues that matched her hair, Billie had run off to live with another musician in New York City. She lived with him, then another boyfriend and another, along with a moving parade of visitors and crashers, in a walkup in the East Village—back when the East Village still had cheap rents and stores with piles of dusty bolts in the windows. She spent a fall, then a winter, and all the way into the next summer in a velvet haze, and it often felt like God was unzipping her blue jeans.

  Somewhere in that haze, a celestial love came along. He was a guitar player. They moved in together that summer—a summer of making love all day when they weren’t fighting and screaming at each other to get out and never come back. They’d get stoned and live on heat and lust, then they’d fight and he’d take his guitar and stay with one of the girls downstairs, or down the street, then he’d come back, repentant and dying for her, and they’d make love until dawn. Sometimes Billie found someone else to keep her company, but a white-hot force always lured her back to the man with the guitar. He wrote a song for her that went: “I’m here for you baby, I like to fix things.” He wrote the song after she’d missed two periods.

  Her girlfriends said don’t worry, we’ll pool our money and we’ll all ride the subway with you out to the women’s clinic in Flushing. Of course, getting rid of the baby was the only thing that made sense. Until the voice of God thundered through her head one night.

  “This child is going to save the world!” Billie told the guitar player and everyone else who had tried to persuade her to go to the clinic. She took to wearing long white dresses and told the guitar player she thought this might be an immaculate conception and sex would taint things. That might have been the reason he called her “fucking cunt Virgin Mary” one night that December. She didn’t remember why they had fought, and she tried to forget the bruises on her legs and her pregnant belly—the only traces left of him. He’d walked out, backpack and guitar case swinging down the hallway. “Don’t ask—he never existed,” she’d told Zoe over and over, as her hands assumed the position of prayer.

  Billie suffered from lost time after that; she slept for days or maybe weeks, but then one morning she bounded out of bed and tightened a belt about her expanding waistline. She got a job as a waitress in a coffee house and enrolled in an acting class at NYU, financed via a credit card. Her parents would have had her locked up if they’d known what was really going on, but they had a pretty good idea by April when the divine evidence finally appeared.

  In fact, Stork and Mary Austin fought for custody of the new baby, and Zoe spent the first years of her life with her grandparents. Billie showed up on Zoe’s fifth birthday, full of tears and tenderness, with a story her parents hadn’t heard before of a secret marriage to a theology student tragically killed in a private plane crash. Billie had provided him with an exotic history—a mother from a family of Brazilian landowners—which was her way of explaining the taste of piquant shores that seasoned Zoe’s complexion.

  The child, in fact, looked nothing like her mother except for a hair color loosely conjoined in the family of red, Zoe’s hair the color of a new copper penny. Billie had a hair-trigger kind of beauty, all porcelain and glitter in public but subject to thunderous pallor and migraines on a bad day. She was several inches too voluptuous to be a screen siren in the modern era, while her daughter had a wiry body that took to qi gong as if she were born to leap and inhale the wisdom of infinity.

  By the time she was six and in first grade, Zoe knew she had some grown-up jobs to do. She learned how to make her own breakfast, administer cold compresses to a mother in bed, tune out parental meltdowns and bury herself in homework, get herself to her own child-actor auditions, and cultivate friends with fathers whose names were mentioned frequently in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal for their corporate deals and accomplishments. The matter of her missing father plagued Zoe every time she was invited for dinner with an intact family, but, like her mother, she became adept at improvising her own life script.

  Zoe had accompanied her mother from one school headmistress to another, embellishing a story that sometimes began with, “We’re from Mississippi, you know. Her father was part Cherokee,” but had innumerable variations. Another one Billie had tried was, “He was Persian. Very sadly, he went back to take care of his family’s business when his father died, but because I didn’t think Iran was a good place for a girl to grow up, he left us, abandoned…Can you imagine my child growing up in a harem…?” Her eyes teared up and her hands shook in her lap.

  One of those stories provided Zoe with a scholarship to Brearley. Her mother had given her a script for that, too. “We can’t afford for you to be a fashion queen, so you must be a brain instead,” she told Zoe as she smoothed out her lower school tunic that first day. Zoe had learned a few things about playing a role. She became an opinion leader among the girls who cared about participating in juried art shows or getting the part of Lady Macbeth in the school play. It didn’t hurt that she got a TV commercial, thanks to her mother’s agent talking her up, which ran for years; as a result, everyone, even the cool girls, knew of her as the kid who leaped around the TV screen because a certain breakfast cereal gave her the stamina of Super Girl.

  For two splendid years mother and daughter lived in a cavernous Upper East Side apartment with a theatre director named Nathan, and Billie got good reviews for a bubbly ingénue role on Broadway. A few weeks after they moved
in, though, Zoe started hearing loud voices from her mother’s bedroom. The first time, she told herself that her mother and Nathan were just rehearsing some play about a fighting couple. After that, when she saw how they sometimes walked right past each other without speaking and other times they’d be tangled up together in one chair kissing, she knew anything might happen. Then one morning Billie stormed out of the bedroom, her face almost orange with rage. “Pack everything!” she snapped. “We’re moving out.”

  Billie went to lots of auditions after that. Critics praised her soulful sexiness as a country singer in an indie film. But Billie blamed the role, and the hot-air-balloon sized falsies the director had insisted upon, for typecasting her. “I can lose this damn southern accent any time, honey,” she railed to her daughter. “That asshole director said I don’t have much dramatic range…bullshit! I can come across as a New York intellectual…can even sound British.”

  When Zoe was eleven, they moved from a walk-up with peeling linoleum on the East Side to a place just off West End Avenue that they both adored. Some of Billie’s friends had meandered into the bourgeoisie; one had moved to Connecticut with her new husband and let Billie move into her rent-controlled apartment. There was no doorman, and the apartment was a tad shabby, but in a way that Billie said was just right. They had saggy bookcases everywhere, hardwood floors they sanded and varnished themselves, an ancient claw-foot bathtub, and even a small terrace where Billie planted flowerboxes.

  “This place fairly screams we are civilizers, not robber barons,” she told Zoe. “Always remember you’re a civilizer. We entertain people—enriching them in ways that are a lot more important than money.”

  In fact, they had to put on an act just to live there. It was an illegal sublet, and they had to pretend they were the friend, Brennan Leichtling, and her daughter. Fortunately, the real Brennan had been spending most of her time at her fiancé’s house for several years, and the landlord and many of the neighbors didn’t know what she looked like. When Zoe talked to the neighbors she was careful to refer to herself as Zoe Leichtling, and, if anyone asked, to say that Billie Austin was her mother’s stage name.

  “If the landlord ever figures it out, we’re out on the street,” Billie warned her. But, so long as the landlord remained oblivious, there they lived, amidst a glorious clutter of antiques that Billie had inherited from a great aunt’s house in Mississippi.

  Billie cobbled together a living from occasional commercials and royalties, part-time hours at a pet grooming business, and from Grandpa Stork, who she called when they needed a handout. The job she loved the most, however, was the one that paid the least. She’d found a community center in Harlem where the director employed her to teach drama to middle school kids two afternoons a week. “These kids…” she told Zoe, “you think we’re poor…they don’t even know there’s a world out there, but they want to do something with their brains and their energy. They see drug dealers and pimps on the street, and it’s not like they aspire to that. Why does everything have to be all about money?”

  Even so, Zoe knew that she and her mother were always teetering on the edge. Sometimes a boyfriend with money would take them out to a fine restaurant, but then the next few would be struggling actors for whom Billie would buy things on credit. Near the end of every month, when the bills came due, Billie would spend at least one day in bed with a migraine. No lights allowed. By the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth of the month, she would emerge from her stupor—hair in tangles and face blue-white and not so pretty—and solemnly place her checkbook on the kitchen table. It would sit there like a spiteful god. On the thirtieth, Billie would lay out the various bills in a fan pattern around the checkbook. “Okay, hold my hand,” she would order Zoe. “Say a prayer.”

  As Billie wrote out the checks for rent, phone, utilities, and half a dozen credit cards, she would take pains to impress upon Zoe what a heart attack might feel like. “Your heart practically leaps out of your chest, then you can feel it going fffttt ffffffftttttt glop glop like an engine dying, all because you don’t have enough in the bank to pay the credit card minimum so you use another credit card to do it,” Billie told her.

  “Méiyǒu xīnzàng bìng fāzuò!” Zoe pleaded after she learned how to say “Don’t have a heart attack” in Mandarin.

  “You’re showing off.”

  “You can’t be having a heart attack if you can talk.”

  After the checks had gone off, the rest of the month was better. Sometimes at night they’d curl up together and watch television in Billie’s big bed with the silk comforter. Once Billie said, “You’re better company than most of the men I know, and to think soon you’re going to grow up and move on. Promise you’ll visit me—assuming I still have a home?”

  When Zoe was thirteen, she had an audition of her own for a few lines in a movie, but when they called out a list of kids they wanted to come back the next day, they didn’t call her name. “I don’t care. I’m going to be a director anyway, not an actress,” Zoe told her mother. She didn’t know what made her say that, except she had a vision in her mind of peering down at the world and wishing she could tell people which way to move and how to feel.

  Zoe and her mother were curled up on Billie’s bed, looking for something to watch on television. Zoe kept scrolling with the remote, trying to avoid any show where Billie would see actors she recognized and say, “I don’t look as old as he does, do I?” or “How the hell did she get the role?” She stopped on PBS, a channel that seemed safe. The face of a man with shaggy dark hair filled the screen. Wire-rimmed glasses rested on a sculpted nose, and he had a gap between his front teeth. He spoke earnestly about his recently released book about China, his speech punctuated by awkward pauses and innumerable ums and uhs. Definitely not an actor, Zoe thought.

  She pushed the button to hold the channel. “I want to know about China,” Zoe told her mother, assuming that Billie would have preferred a more entertaining show. But Billie was staring intently at the man. He was talking about capitalism and democracy.

  A caption flashed, identifying him as Charles Engelhorn, a Columbia professor and author of The Price of China’s New Wealth.

  “In the past,” the man on TV explained, his dark eyes intense behind his glasses, “uhm, well, individuals in China were supposed to sacrifice everything for the Revolution. Now, the imperative is to sacrifice everything to obtain wealth and make the country economically prosperous. That, uh, could mean, conversely, that if you’re poor, you’re nothing but a burden. You’re holding the whole country back. It’s the religion of China now, but, uh, I think it’s a faith that could pick up followers everywhere.”

  Billie grabbed the remote and lowered the volume. “You know,” she said softly, “that man could be your father.”

  “What…?” Zoe felt a lightning bolt charge through her limbs.

  “Oh, I knew him when I was living in the East Village…” Billie looked strangely sorrowful.

  Charles Englehorn had dark hair, not like Zoe’s. Still, he gestured on TV with lanky arms, and Zoe had long, thin arms too.

  “It’s funny how these things work,” said Billie, apparently reading her mind. “Maybe your ability to speak Chinese is in your genes.”

  “Mom, I speak Chinese because I’m studying it.”

  “Too bad I can’t call Professor Charles and tell him I have a smart daughter who speaks Chinese. I’m guessing he’s not rich, but….”

  “He’s wearing a wedding ring. I saw that when he moved his hands around,” Zoe pointed out.

  The next morning, Billie sprang out of bed, announcing that she was starting one of her periodic juice fasts. Zoe threw beets and carrots into the machine and watched its jaws grind everything into a magenta liquid. As she poured the juice into tall glasses, she eyed Billie—all made up and wearing one of the filmy blouses she saved for auditions.

  “Why can’t you call that man?” Zoe
demanded.

  “Who, that Charles guy? I was mean to him. I should have been more practical, for your sake.”

  At school, Zoe watched girls get out of cars, their fathers behind the wheels, and others whose dads walked them to school every morning. That night, she asked Billie if Professor Engelhorn was really her father.

  “Aren’t I enough for you? Two parents make life doubly complicated.” Billie grabbed Zoe’s hands as if leading her to salvation. “You were born to save the world. God sent me a message and you came along.”

  Zoe’s lips quivered.

  “Don’t cry, baby.”

  “You were mean to him? Was he in love with you?”

  “Yes, and don’t act like that’s a good thing. I did it on purpose, so he’d stop bothering me.”

  Over the next few days it occurred to Zoe that Columbia wasn’t so far away. They lived a couple of blocks from a station where you could catch the Number 1 subway and take it right to the campus, although it was slightly beyond the reaches of where Billie allowed her to go alone. She even found the name “Engelhorn, Charles” in the phone book. He lived on Morningside Drive. She found it on a map—it was near Columbia, and she imagined getting on the uptown subway and going there. But what would she do once she arrived? Stands outside his building to catch some glimpse of him coming or going? Creepy, pathetic people did things like that.

  Instead, Zoe filed the address and phone number away in the back of her mind and returned to her Mandarin textbook.

  In martial arts class, she thought of her possible father as she aimed for the sun with a kick across the side that looked like a forward kick but wasn’t. When she leaped and kicked, Zoe imagined her fists and feet were knocking against the heavens, reaching for a message that would tell her who she was. In high school, she dated boys who used words like imperative and conversely and liked to talk about all the things they knew, sometimes in foreign languages.