by Dave Lowry
“Might I inquire as to the nature of your business with the young woman in question?”
“Who are you?” the voice repeated.
“I am her social secretary and confidant,” I said. “Might I inquire as to your name and your position?”
“My name? My name?” He wasn’t sounding any friendlier. “My name is this: I’m the guy who has some questions she’d better be answering if she knows what’s good for her.”
“I see.” My mind was racing. Hard to tell how old the voice was. My first thought was Corinne must have some seriously screwed-up boyfriend.
“If you will leave your name and number,” I said, “I will alert her, at the earliest opportunity, to your efforts to contact her.”
“I’m not leaving you shit,” the voice said, “except this: If you’re involved with her, you’re in trouble. You like trouble? You think she’s going to be worth the trouble that’s coming?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You hear me? You still there?”
I was. But then I pressed END. I just stood there, phone in hand. The guy sounded like a jerk. Just as I could sound more obsequious and slimier when speaking Chinese than I could in English, it was also possible for him to sound even jerkier speaking Chinese. The intonation, the way the words are put together—you can come across like an arrogant ass in Mandarin if you want to. This guy sounded good at it. It irritated me. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because I was only a couple of steps away from putting together a really great meal and I didn’t want the mood spoiled. Maybe it was something else.
I still assumed he was some boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. In a couple of seconds, staring at the phone in my hand, I’d worked out a scenario. She’d dumped him. I could understand why. Maybe when he got angry, he got violent. Maybe she was trying to make a clean break. That’s why she was out on the road. Starting over. That’s why I’d overheard her talking on her phone back at that rest stop, telling someone she’d had to get out of town fast. Maybe I was so far away from minding my own business, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I opened the menu for the phone. Then I deleted the record of the call.
I set the kitchen table with ceramic bowls and stabbed a bamboo paddle into the rice maker, splashing the paddle under the tap first so the rice wouldn’t stick. Then I laid out napkins and plastic chopsticks. When I lifted the lid of the clay pot, the aroma was so overwhelming that my stomach gave a quick, sharp squeeze of anticipation. I carried the pot to the table and set it on a hot pad; then I brought in a bowl of the broccoli I’d steamed, tossed with sesame oil, and sprinkled with sesame seeds. I filled both bowls with rice and gave it all one last look, making sure there weren’t any spills or smears on the side of the serving platter. In a Western restaurant kitchen, it’s called “plating,” making sure the whole presentation looks clean and neat just before the waiter takes it out to the dining room. In a Chinese kitchen, it’s called “pecking the nest,” because it looks like a mother bird using her beak to clean out any debris from her nest. I started for the stairs to wake Corinne. When I turned around, though, she was walking through the hallway into the kitchen. She had changed clothes. She was wearing jeans and a gray sweater. She was thinner than she’d looked in her traveling clothes. Not skinny. Actually, she was pretty nicely built. I assessed this information without lingering on it.
“Dinner is served,” I said.
She sat down. I took the chair on the opposite side of the table.
“Dongpo rou,” she said, studying the square of pork on her plate.
“Yep,” I agreed. “Dongpo pork. Tell me what you think.”
She lifted a slice of the pork belly. It was soft enough now that it separated into layers, each with its own portion of chewy tender meat and glistening, succulent pork fat.
“You didn’t deep-fry the pork first,” she said.
She glanced up, a piece of the pork poised between her chopsticks.
“That’s what a lot of restaurants do,” I said. “Cuts the cooking time way down.”
“But it makes the meat greasy.”
“It does.”
We ate. We didn’t talk. I was thinking about the jerk on the phone. I was thinking about telling Corinne I intercepted the call. I was thinking that might be a bad idea. Especially since I’d deleted the call. It had been a long time, though, since I’d eaten good Chinese cooking. So after a couple of bites, I decided that the jerk was either going to call back, in which case there was no reason for me to tell her he’d called the first time. Or he was going to think maybe she had a new boyfriend, someone who knew her well enough to have answered her phone, and he’d give up. In which case there was also no reason to tell her. After that, I just concentrated on the pork.
After dinner Corinne did the dishes. I went to the basement and transferred our clothes from the washer to the dryer. Her bra and panties were both black, matching. As with her body in the sweater and jeans, I didn’t dwell on it. At least I tried not to. When I came upstairs from the laundry, the dishes were done.
“I think I’ll turn in,” she said.
“See you in the morning,” I said. She’d reached the first step of the stairs when I said, “You know, last night, when we slept together?”
She stopped and half turned, her hand on the rail. She looked at me. Her eyebrows went up.
“Was it as good for you as it was for me?”
She pursed her lips, looked up at the ceiling for a second, then she said. “It was every bit as magical as what I’d imagined sleeping in a Toyota at a rest stop would be like.”
“Great,” I said in English. “Every girl’s dream.” Then I said good night in Mandarin and went to bed.
8
Rule #50: There are a lot of amazingly wonderful things in life, but if they involve lifelong celibacy, that’s almost always a dealbreaker.
I was planning to leave the next morning. Considering the choking blitz of traffic we’d have faced if we’d left any earlier, though, I was just as happy when I finally woke up and rolled over and looked at the clock beside my bed and saw we were well past the morning rush. I was still getting dressed when I heard Corinne go downstairs. She was standing in front of the kitchen table, my mother’s laundry basket in front of her, taking our clothes out and folding them. She’d folded my shirts into neat packets like they do at the dry cleaners. I thought that a remark about Chinese and laundries was too easy. And maybe a little dated. I let it go. It was midmorning when we packed the Toyota and locked up the house.
I never liked leaving home. That’s not entirely true. I liked to travel. I’d enjoyed my time at Beddingfield, being on my own. I just always liked the house where I grew up. I had a lot of good memories there. I knew the time was coming, was probably already here in some ways, when this place wasn’t going to be “home” anymore. It was exciting, but it was also sad in a way I couldn’t exactly explain, not even to myself.
We cruised across western Massachusetts on I-90 and ate lunch at a burger chain in Stockbridge.
“Not as good as the pork last night,” she said.
“Few meals can be,” I said. Then I asked Corinne if she’d ever heard of the Shakers. She hadn’t.
“Are you in any hurry to get to Buffalo?” I asked. She wasn’t.
Instead of getting back out on the interstate, we drove through Lenox, past Tanglewood, the famous music camp and performance center, and on up a few slow and winding miles lined with maple woods and neat stone-fence-lined fields on both sides of the road to the Shaker Village at Hancock.
I gave her the abbreviated tour of the village-size museum: the sprawling round stone barn; the dairy; the Brethren’s workshop, still filled with eighteenth-century tools, looking as if some Shakers might be showing up for work any minute to make their famous flat brooms and chairs. My parents had first brought me to this place when I was still in grade school. A lot of the original buildings in the Shaker community were still here, restored and rebuilt to re-create the village that
was home, back in the early nineteenth century, to more than three hundred Shakers in western Massachusetts. I was only about eight or so when I visited the first time. I didn’t know anything about it or the Shakers who’d lived there. My parents just told me it was an outdoor museum when they took me out there one summer day. I could remember wandering around. At that age, I didn’t get entirely what the Shakers were. They seemed like some kind of cross between a back-to-nature cult and the Amish. What I did know, as soon as I walked into one of the buildings, was that in some way I didn’t fully get—and still didn’t get more than twelve years later—the place was speaking to me. The buildings; the things in them; the perfectly simple, spare architecture; the long, low range of the emerald Berkshires that spread out all around—being there was like tuning into a radio station that, in the middle of static on the dial, suddenly came in, clear and strong. Some people need to go to the mountains to feel renewed. Or to the woods. I needed this place.
The Shakers were a sect, I explained to Corinne. One that got started in the middle of the 1700s and lasted for about a century. They were a part of the Great Awakening, a huge religious revival that swept across the whole country. The Shakers decided to get away from what was then modern society, to live in communes and support themselves with farming, furniture making, and other kinds of crafts.
“They didn’t waste a lot of money on decorations,” Corinne said. We were walking by the main village dormitory. At this time of the winter, there weren’t many tourists. We had the place to ourselves. Bare walls, plain planked floors, simple, clean lines. There wasn’t a single piece of unnecessary furniture, not one superfluous angle of architecture. Only what was needed to get the job done and nothing more. I’d asked to come back here every summer since that first trip, and I still never got tired of it, of wandering around. It almost felt like I was breathing in the beauty, the peacefulness of it all.
“You know all those temples and palaces in China, all painted brightly, decorated over every square inch with dragons and phoenixes and all that stuff crawling all over them?” I asked her. “That’s pretty much the antithesis of Shaker architecture. Pretty much the antithesis of everything they were about. The Shakers wanted things bare-bones. Function created beauty for them. Anything that wasn’t necessary they didn’t want. You get to that kind of simplicity, and it has a lot of beauty in it.”
“You like that,” Corinne said. It was a statement.
“I like things simple,” I said. “That’s Tucker’s Rule Number One: ‘Keep it simple.’”
“Okay,” Corinne said. “Gee, I’ve got numbers one and three now. ‘Keep things simple’ and ‘Don’t expect Asian chicks to be serial killers.’ Weren’t you supposed to save Rule Number One for a more dramatic moment? Didn’t you kind of ruin the big workup to revealing it?”
“I didn’t think it was fair to keep you in suspense.”
“So will you fill me in on Rule Number Two so I can have all of the first three in the set?”
“‘When you’re making dough for jiaozi dumplings,’” I said, “‘use cold water, so the wrapper stays soft and chewy. When you’re making the same dough for guotie pot stickers, use boiling water.’”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said. “The hot water helps release gluten, so the dough doesn’t get dry and crack when it’s sizzling on the side of the hot wok.”
“No, I mean ‘really,’ as in that’s really Rule Number Two?”
“Yep.”
Out in front of the round stone barn, we watched a little spaniel-like dog herd a flock of woolly black-headed sheep while his trainer shouted commands. The village had its own flocks of sheep and cows, and gardens that were brown and empty now, the raw dirt frozen into furrowed clumps. The dog nipped at the hind legs of a dawdling sheep, fat and thick in its winter coat. The sheep unleashed a kick, then jumped and pranced to join the rest of the flock.
“Back at the dorm, you showed me the two staircases that led to the women’s and men’s quarters. So where did the married couples live here?” Corinne asked.
“The Shakers were celibate,” I said. “They didn’t believe in marriage.”
“Yikes.”
“Or sex.”
“Again,” Corinne said, “yikes. You ever think about becoming a Shaker?”
“They’re all gone now,” I said. “But I thought about it.”
“What kept you from it?” she asked.
“Weren’t you just listening to that celibacy thing?”
Before we left, I took Corinne to the white clapboard-sided meetinghouse, the closest thing the Shakers had to a church. It was here they met for services, to sing and to move about when they became possessed with spirits, bobbing and dancing, which is how they got their name. The angle of the sun coming through the windows was low. Shadows were crisp, so sharply defined they looked etched on the walls and wooden floor. The air inside was still enough I could hear my heart. The benches usually lined up inside had been removed so the floor could be cleaned. The floor planks had that kind of glow that can only come after hundreds of years and thousands of feet polishing them with use. I just stood and drank it all in. Corinne seemed to sense I wanted to be alone. She murmured that she was off to find a restroom. I stood some more and closed my eyes. It was something I’d done since my first visit here. Each time I came to the village, I tried to take a little time to think about how much had happened, how much had changed in my life since I’d been there last. This time, I thought about how much might happen before I came back here again.
It was early evening when we left and crossed over into New York. We got to just the other side of Albany when I suggested we stop for the night at a motel.
“You want a separate room?” I asked.
“We’re not Shakers,” she said.
We were not. I asked for a double, though. We got into the two beds and turned on the TV and watched a show about sharks until I asked if it was okay if I turned it off and she said yes. As I did, she reached over and clicked off the table lamp, and the dark closed in for a few moments until the lights from outside gave us a soft glow. It was quiet.
“You do this a lot?” Corinne asked.
“Nope,” I said. I was relatively sure I knew what she was talking about.
“You do this ever?”
“Nope.”
“Oh,” she said. “So you’ve never spent the night in a motel with a girl?”
“I’ve never spent the night with a girl in a motel or anyplace else.”
“Wow,” she said. I heard her roll over on her side to face me in the dark.
“Wow?” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re surprised that someone with my looks and my—let’s face it, frankly, irresistible personality—wouldn’t have had a lot of motel dates?”
“Wow,” she said, “as in, ‘Wow, I can’t believe a guy would actually admit he’s never slept with a girl.’”
“Lots of guys my age haven’t slept with a girl,” I said.
“Not a lot of guys admit it.”
“We’re fragile creatures,” I said. “If we say we’ve never slept with a girl, we’re afraid people might think we don’t have any sex appeal or that we don’t have the social skills necessary to successfully woo a girl.”
“‘Woo’?”
“Good word,” I said. “Too under-utilized nowadays.”
“Maybe that’s because it sounds like it comes from the era of the Shakers.”
“Possibly. Although they would have had little chance to put it to good use.”
“Good point,” she said. “Or maybe if you tell a girl you’ve never slept with one, it’ll cause her to think of you as a challenge. Reverse psychology. You come across as innocent and vulnerable and in need of a good—wink, wink—‘teacher.’”
“You Asian babes are pretty canny,” I said.
“Inscrutable too,” Corinne said.
We both lay there for a while.
“So,” I finally
said. “If a guy did tell you he’d never slept with a girl, would you take it as a challenge or would you assume he didn’t have the right stuff?”
“Not sure,” she said. I heard her roll over and punch the pillow. “I guess I’d have to look at the whole woo package.”
9
Rule #25: Some places are less destinations than they are accidental arrivals.
We were following the path of the Mohawk River, which slices right across the center of New York, almost the length of the whole state. Outside the Toyota, it was bright, a sharp January light. A scatter of fluffy clouds coasted slowly across the sky, moving sluggishly in the cold. The river, flowing in the other direction all along the New York State Thruway, was flat and silvery and floating a few flat, crusty, car-size chunks of ice in the sluggish current. The trees were naked and black, and when we dipped down below the hills, the sun started flickering through them, creating a strobe effect. I always worried when I was driving in this kind of light that I might be an undiagnosed epileptic or susceptible to some bizarre illness and I was suddenly going to have a seizure or a fit. To distract myself, I kept poking the SCAN button on the radio, keeping the volume low. The FM listening selection in western New York is a treasure if you like hillbilly music or hourlong discussions about the future of corn prices.
Corinne had been napping. I thought she was still asleep. She had her hands clasped together, pushed between her knees. She was leaning against the car door, with her coat jammed in between it and her head like a pillow.
“Okay,” she said, after a while, without moving or even opening her eyes. “I give.”
“You give?” I glanced over. She nodded, still not opening her eyes.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked. “How did you learn to speak Mandarin?”
“You mean bad Mandarin?”
She ignored the question. “How do you know so much about Chinese food?”
