(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter

by Amy Tan

  So Ruth did not ask her mother. She decided instead to set aside several days when she could concentrate on the translation. She told her mother this, and LuLing warned, “Don’t wait too long.” After that, whenever her mother asked whether she had finished her story, Ruth answered, “I was just about to, but something came up with a client.” Other crises also intervened, having to do with Art, the girls, or the house, as did vacation.

  “Too busy for mother,” LuLing complained. “Never too busy go see movie, go away, go see friend.”

  The past year, her mother had stopped asking, and Ruth wondered, Did she give up? Couldn’t be. She must have forgotten. By then the pages had settled to the bottom of the desk drawer.

  Now that they had resurfaced, Ruth felt pangs of guilt. Perhaps she should hire someone fluent in Chinese. Art might know of someone—a linguistics student, a retired professor old enough to be versed in the traditional characters and not just the simplified ones. As soon as she had time, she would ask. She placed the pages at the top of the heap, then closed the drawer, feeling less guilty already.

  When she woke in the morning, Art was up, doing his yoga stretches in the next room. “Hello,” she said to herself. “Is anyone there?” Her voice was back, though squeaky from disuse.

  As she brushed her teeth in the bathroom, she could hear Dory screeching: “I want to watch that. Put it back! It’s my TV too.” Fia hooted: “That show’s for babies, and that’s what you are, wnnh-wnnh-wnnh.”

  Since Art’s divorce, the girls had been dividing their time between their mom and stepdad’s home in Sausalito and Art’s Edwardian flat on Vallejo Street. Every other week, the four of them—Art, Ruth, Sofia, and Dory—found themselves crammed into five miniature rooms, one of them barely big enough to squeeze in a bunkbed. There was only one bathroom, which Ruth hated for its antiquated inconvenience. The claw-footed iron tub was as soothing as a sarcophagus, and the pedestal sink with its separate spigots dispensed water that was either scalding hot or icy cold. As Ruth reached for the dental floss, she knocked over other items on the windowsill: potions for wrinkles, remedies for pimples, nose-hair clippers, and a plastic mug jammed with nine toothbrushes whose ownership and vintage were always in question. While she was picking up the mess, desperate pounding rattled the door.

  “You’ll have to wait,” she called in a husky voice. The pounding continued. She looked at the bathroom schedule for August, which was posted on both sides of the door. There it said, clear as could be, whose turn it was at each quarter-hour. She had assigned herself to be last, and because everyone else ran late, she suffered the cumulative consequences. Below the schedule, the girls had added rules and amendments, and a list of violations and fines for infractions concerning the use of the sink, toilet, and shower, as well as a proclamation on what constituted the right to privacy versus a TRUE EMERGENCY (underlined three times).

  The pounding came again. “Ru-uuth! I said it’s the phone!” Dory opened the door a crack and shoved in a cordless handset. Who was calling at seven-twenty in the morning? Her mother, no doubt. LuLing seemed to have a crisis whenever Ruth had not called in several days.

  “Ruthie, is your voice back? Can you talk?” It was Wendy, her best friend. They spoke nearly every day. She heard Wendy blow her nose. Was she actually crying?

  “What happened?” Ruth whispered. Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, she mouthed in rhythm to her racing heart. Wendy was about to tell her she had cancer, Ruth was sure of it. Last night’s uneasy feeling started to trickle through her veins.

  “I’m still in shock,” Wendy went on. “I’m about to… Hold on. I just got another call.”

  It must not be cancer, Ruth thought. Maybe she was mugged, or thieves had broken into the house, and now the police were calling to take a report. Whatever it was, it must have been serious, otherwise Wendy would not be crying. What should she say to her? Ruth crooked the phone in her neck and dragged her fingers through her close-cropped hair. She noticed that some of the mirror’s silver had flaked off. Or were those white roots in her hair? She would soon turn forty-six. When had the baby fat in her face started to recede? To think she used to resent having the face and skin of a perpetual teenager. Now she had creases pulling down the corners of her mouth. They made her look displeased, like her mother. Ruth brightened her mouth with lipstick. Of course, she wasn’t like her mother in other respects, thank God. Her mother was permanently unhappy with everything and everybody. LuLing had immersed her in a climate of unsolvable despair throughout Ruth’s childhood. That was why Ruth hated it whenever she and Art argued. She tried hard not to get angry. But sometimes she reached a breaking point and erupted, only to wonder later how she had lost control.

  Wendy came back on the line. “You still there? Sorry. We’re casting victims for that earthquake movie, and a million people are calling all at once.” Wendy ran her own agency that hunted extras as San Francisco local color—cops with handlebar mustaches, six-foot-six drag queens, socialites who were unknowing caricatures of themselves. “On top of everything, I feel like shit,” Wendy said, and stopped to sneeze and blow her nose. So she wasn’t crying, Ruth realized, before the phone clicked twice. “Damn,” Wendy said. “Hang on. Let me get rid of this call.”

  Ruth disliked being put on hold. What was so dire that Wendy had to tell her first thing in the morning? Had Wendy’s husband had an affair? Joe? Not good old Joe. What, then?

  Art ducked his head through the doorway and tapped his watch. Seven twenty-five, he mouthed. Ruth was about to tell him it was Wendy with an emergency, but he was already striding down the narrow hallway. “Dory! Fia! Let’s hustle! Ruth is taking you to the ice rink in five minutes. Get a move on.” The girls squealed, and Ruth felt like a horse at the starting gate.

  “I’ll be there in a sec!” she called out. “And girls, if you didn’t eat breakfast, I want you to drink milk, a full glass, so you won’t fall over dead from hypoglycemic shock.”

  “Don’t say ‘dead.’” Dory griped. “I hate it when you say that.”

  “My God. What’s going on there?” Wendy was back on the line.

  “The usual start of the week,” Ruth said. “Chaos is the penance for leisure.”

  “Yeah, who said that?”

  “I did. So anyway, you were saying … ?”

  “Promise me first you won’t tell anyone,” Wendy sneezed again.

  “Of course.”

  “Not even Art, and especially not Miss Giddy.”

  “Gideon? Gee, I don’t know if I can promise about him.”

  “So last night,” Wendy began, “my mother called in a state of euphoria.” As Wendy went on, Ruth dashed to the bedroom to finish getting dressed. When she was not in a hurry, she enjoyed listening to her friend’s ramblings. Wendy was a divining rod for strange disturbances in the earth’s atmosphere. She was witness to bizarre sights: three homeless albinos living in Golden Gate Park, a BMW suddenly swallowed up by an ancient septic tank in Woodside, a loose buffalo strolling down Taraval Street. She was the maven of parties that led people to make scenes, start affairs, and commit other self-renewing scandals. Ruth believed Wendy made her life more sparkly, but today was not a good time for sparkles.

  “Ruth!” Art said in a warning tone. “The girls are going to be late.”

  “I’m really sorry, Wendy. I have to take the girls to ice-skating school—”

  Wendy interrupted. “Mommy married her personal trainer! That’s what she called to tell me. He’s thirty-eight, she’s sixty-four. Can you believe it?”

  “Oh… Wow.” Ruth was stunned. She pictured Mrs. Scott with a groom in a bow tie and gym shorts, the two of them reciting vows on a treadmill. Was Wendy upset? She wanted to say the right thing. What, though? About five years before, her own mother had had a boyfriend of sorts, but he had been eighty. Ruth had hoped T.C. would marry LuLing and keep her occupied. Instead T.C. had died of a heart attack.

  “Listen, Wendy, I know this is important, so can
I call you back after I drop off the girls? “

  Once she had hung up. Ruth reminded herself of the tasks she needed to do today. Ten things, and she tapped first her thumb. One, take the girls to skating school. Two, pick up Art’s suits at the dry cleaner’s. Three, buy groceries for dinner. Four, pick up the girls from the rink and drop them off at their friend’s house on Jackson Street. Five and Six, phone calls to that arrogant client, Ted, then Agapi Agnos, whom she actually liked. Seven, finish the outline for a chapter of Agapi Agnos’s book. Eight, call her agent, Gideon, whom Wendy disliked. And Nine—what the hell was Nine? She knew what Ten was, the last task of the day. She had to call Miriam, Art’s ex-wife, to ask if she would let them have the girls the weekend of the Full Moon Festival dinner, the annual reunion of the Youngs, which she was hosting this year.

  So what was Nine? She always organized her day by the number of digits on her hands. Each day was either a five or a ten. She wasn’t rigid about it: add-ons were accommodated on the toes of her feet, room for ten unexpected tasks. Nine, Nine… She could make calling Wendy number One and bump everything back. But she knew that call should be a toe, an extra, an Eleven. What was Nine? Nine was usually something important, a significant number, what her mother termed the number of fullness, a number that also stood for Do not forget, or risk losing all. Did Nine have something to do with her mother? There was always something to worry about with her mother. That was not anything she had to remember in particular. It was a state of mind.

  LuLing was the one who had taught her to count fingers as a memory device. With this method, LuLing never forgot a thing, especially lies, betrayals, and all the bad deeds Ruth had done since she was born. Ruth could still picture her mother counting in the Chinese style, pointing first to her baby finger and bending each finger down toward her palm, a motion that Ruth took to mean that all other possibilities and escape routes were closed. Ruth kept her own fingers open and splayed, American style. What was Nine? She put on a pair of sturdy sandals.

  Art appeared at the doorway. “Sweetie? Don’t forget to call the plumber about the hot-water tank.”

  The plumber was not going to be number Nine, Ruth told herself, absolutely not. “Sorry, honey, but could you call? I’ve got a pretty full day.”

  “I have meetings, and three appeals coming up.” Art worked as a linguistics consultant, this year on cases involving deaf prisoners who had been arrested and tried without access to interpreters.

  It’s your house, Ruth was tempted to say. But she forced herself to sound reasonable, unassailable, like Art. “Can’t you call from your office in between meetings?”

  “Then I have to phone you and figure out when you’ll be here for the plumber.”

  “I don’t know exactly when I’ll be home. And you know those guys. They say they’re coming at one, they show up at five. Just because I work at home doesn’t mean I don’t have a real job. I’ve got a really crazy day. For one thing, I have to…” And she started to list her tasks.

  Art slumped his shoulders and sighed. “Why do you have to make everything so difficult? I just thought if it were possible, if you had time— Aw, forget it.” He turned away.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll take care of it. But if you get out of your meetings early, can you come home?”

  “Sure thing.” Art gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Hey, thanks. I wouldn’t have asked if I weren’t completely swamped.” He kissed her again. “Love you.”

  She didn’t answer, and after he left, she grabbed her coat and keys, then saw the girls standing at the end of the hallway, staring critically at her. She wiggled her big toe. Twelve, hot water.

  Ruth started the car and pumped the brakes to make sure they worked. As she drove Fia and Dory to the skating rink, she was still mulling over what Nine might be. She ran through the alphabet, in case any of those letters might trigger a memory. Nothing. What had she dreamed the night before, when she finally fell asleep? A bedroom window, a dark shape in the bay. The curtains, she now recalled, had turned out to be sheer and she was naked. She had looked up and saw the neighbors in nearby apartments grinning. They had been watching her most private moments, her most private parts. Then a radio began to blare. Whonk! Whonk! Whonk! “This has been a test of the American Broadcasting System’s early-warning signal for disaster preparedness.” And another voice came on, her mother’s: “No, no, this is not test! This real!” And the dark shape in the bay rose and became a tidal wave.

  Maybe number Nine was related to the plumber after all: tidal wave, broken water heater. The puzzle was solved. But what about the sheer curtains? What did that mean? The worry billowed up again.

  “You know that new girl Darien likes?” she heard Fia say to her sister. “She has the best hair. I could just kill her.”

  “Don’t say ‘kill’!” Dory intoned. “Remember what they told us in assembly last year? Use that word, go to jail.”

  Both girls were in the backseat. Ruth had suggested that one of them sit up front with her, so she wouldn’t feel like a chauffeur. But Dory had replied, “It’s easier to open just one door.” Ruth had said nothing in response. She often suspected the girls were testing her, to see if they could get a rise out of her. When they were younger, they had loved her, Ruth was sure of it. She had felt that with a ticklish pleasure in her heart. They used to argue over who could hold her hand or sit next to her. They had cuddled against her when scared, as they had often pretended to be, squeaking like helpless kittens. Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls.

  Dory was thirteen and chunky, larger than her fifteen-year-old sister. They wore their long chestnut hair alike, pulled into ponytails high on their heads so that they cascaded like fountain spray. All their friends wore their hair in an identical style, Ruth had noticed. When she was their age, she had wanted to grow her hair long the way the other girls did, but her mother made her cut it short. “Long hair look like suicide maiden,” Lu-Ling had said. And Ruth knew she was referring to the nursemaid who had killed herself when her mother was a girl. Ruth had had nightmares about that, the ghost with long hair, dripping blood, crying for revenge.

  Ruth pulled up to the unloading zone at the rink. The girls scrambled out of the car and swung their satchels onto their backs. “See ya!” they shouted.

  Suddenly Ruth noticed what Fia was wearing—low-slung jeans and a cropped shirt that bared a good six inches of belly. She must have had her jacket zipped up when they had left home. Ruth lowered the car window and called out: “Fia, sweetie, come here a second… . Am I wrong, or did your shirt shrink drastically in the last ten minutes?”

  Fia turned around slowly and rolled her eyes upward.

  Dory grinned. “I told you she would.”

  Ruth stared at Fia’s navel. “Does your mother know you’re wearing that?”

  Fia dropped her mouth in mock shock, her reaction to most things. “Uh, she bought it for me, okay?”

  “Well, I don’t think your dad would approve. I want you to keep your jacket on, even when you’re skating. And Dory, you tell me if she doesn’t.”

  “I’m not telling on nobody!”

  Fia turned and walked away.

  “Fia? Fia! Come back here. You promise me now, or I’m going to take you home to change clothes.”

  Fia stopped but didn’t turn around. “All right,” she grumbled. As she yanked up the jacket zipper, she said to Dory, loud enough for Ruth to hear: “Dad’s right. She loves to make everything sooo difficult.”

  The remark both humiliated and rankled her. Why had Art said that, and especially in front of the girls? He knew how much that would hurt her. A former boyfriend had once told her she made life more complicated than it was, and after they broke up, she was so horrified that his accusations might be true that she made it a point to be reasonable, to present facts, not complaints. Art knew that and had even assured her the boyfriend was a jerk. Yet he still s
ometimes teased that she was like a dog that circles and bites its own tail, not recognizing she was only making herself miserable.

  Ruth thought of a book she had helped write a few years before, The Physics of Human Nature. The author had recast the principles of physics into basic homilies to remind people of self-defeating behavioral patterns. “The Law of Relative Gravity”: Lighten up. A problem is only as heavy as you let it be. “The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The Centrifugal Force of Arguments”: The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.