by Amy Tan
At four, Agapi called to discuss final edits for Righting the Wronged Child. An hour later, they were still talking. Agapi was eager to start a new book, which she wanted to call either Past-Perfect Tension or The Embedded Self. Ruth kept staring at the clock. She was supposed to pick up her mother at six for dinner at Fountain Court. “Habit, neuromusculature, and the limbic system, that’s the basis…” Agapi was saying. “From babyhood and our first sense of insecurity, we clench, grasp, flail. We embed the response but forget the cause, the past that was imperfect… . Ruth, my dear, you seem to be somewhere else. Should you ring me later when you feel more refreshed?”
At five-fifteen, Ruth called her mother to remind her she was coming. No answer. She was probably in the bathroom. Ruth waited five minutes, then called again. Still no answer. Did she have constipation? Had she fallen asleep? Ruth tidied her desk, put the phone on speaker, and hit automatic redial. After fifteen minutes of unanswered ringing, she had run through all the possibilities, until they culminated in the inevitable worst possible thing. Flames leaping from a pot left on the stove. LuLing dousing the flames with oil. Her sleeve catching fire. As Ruth drove to her mother’s, she braced herself to see a crackling blaze eating the roof, her mother lying twisted in a blackened heap.
Just as she feared, when Ruth arrived she saw lights flickering in the upper level, shadows dancing. She rushed in. The front door was unlocked. “Mom? Mommy! Where are you?” The television was on, blasting Amor sin Límite at high volume. LuLing had never figured out how to use the remote control, even though Ruth had taped over all but the Power, Channel Up, and Channel Down buttons. She turned off the TV, and the sudden silence frightened her.
She ran to the back rooms, flung open closets, looked out the windows. Her throat tightened. “Mommy, where are you?” she whimpered. “Answer me.” She ran down the front steps and knocked on the tenant’s door.
She tried to sound casual. “By any chance, have you seen my mother?”
Francine rolled her eyes and nodded knowingly. “She went charging down the sidewalk about two or three hours ago. I noticed because she was wearing slippers and pajamas, and I said to myself, ‘Wow, she looks really flipped out.’ . . . Like it’s none of my business, but you should take her to the doctor and get her medicated or something. I mean that in the good sense.”
Ruth raced back upstairs. With shaky fingers, she called a former client who was a captain in the police department. Minutes later, a Latino officer stood at the doorway. He was bulging with weapons and paraphernalia and his face was serious. Ruth’s panic notched up. She stepped outside.
“She has Alzheimer’s,” Ruth jabbered. “She’s seventy-seven but has the mind of a child.”
“Description.”
“Four-eleven, eighty-five pounds, black hair pulled into a bun, probably wearing pink or lilac pajamas and slippers…” Ruth was picturing LuLing as she said this: the puzzled look on her mother’s face, her inert body lying in the street. Ruth’s voice started to wobble. “Oh God, she’s so tiny and helpless… .”
“Does she look anything like that lady there?”
Ruth looked up to see LuLing standing stock still at the end of the walkway. She was wearing a sweater over her pajamas.
“Ai-ya! What happen?” LuLing cried. “Robber?”
Ruth ran toward her. “Where were you?” She appraised her mother for signs of damage.
The officer walked up to the two of them. “Happy ending,” he said, then turned toward his patrol car.
“Stay there,” Ruth ordered her mother. “I’ll be right back.” She went to the patrol car and the officer rolled down his window. “I’m sorry for all the trouble,” she said. “She’s never done this before.” And then she considered that maybe she had, but she just didn’t know it. Maybe she did this every day, every night. Maybe she roamed the neighborhood in her underwear!
“Hey, no problem,” the policeman said. “My mother-in-law did the same thing. Sundowning. The sun went down, she went wandering. We had to put alarm triggers on all the doors. That was one tough year, until we put her in a nursing home. My wife couldn’t do it anymore—keeping an eye on her day and night.”
Day and night? And Ruth thought she was being diligent by having her mother over for dinner and trying to hire a part-time housekeeper. “Well, thanks anyway,” she said.
When she returned to her mother, LuLing complained right away: “Grocery store ‘round the corner? I walk ‘round and ‘round, gone! Turn into bank. You don’t believe, go see youself!”
Ruth wound up staying the night at her mother’s, sleeping in her old bedroom. The foghorns were louder in this section of the city. She remembered listening to them at night when she was a teenager. She would lie in bed, counting the blasts, matching them to the number of years it would be before she could move out. Five years, then four, then three. Now she was back.
In the morning, Ruth opened the cupboards to look for cereal. She found dirty paper napkins folded and stacked. Hundreds. She opened the fridge. It was packed with plastic bags of black and greenish mush, cartons of half-eaten food, orange peels, cantaloupe rinds, frozen goods long defrosted. In the freezer were a carton of eggs, a pair of shoes, the alarm clock, and what appeared to have been bean sprouts. Ruth felt sick. This had happened in just one week?
She called Art in Kauai. There was no answer. She pictured him lying serenely on the beach, oblivious to all problems in the world. But how could he be on the beach? It was six in the morning there. Where was he? Hula dancing in someone’s bed? Another thing to worry about. She could call Wendy, but Wendy would simply commiserate by saying her own mother was doing far crazier things. How about Gideon? He was more concerned about clients and contracts. Ruth decided to call Auntie Gal.
“Worse? How can she be worse?” GaoLing said. “I gave her ginseng, and she said she was taking it every day.”
“The doctor said none of those things will help—”
“Doctor!” GaoLing snorted. “I don’t believe this diagnosis, Alzheimer’s. Your uncle said the same thing, and he’s a dentist. Everybody gets old, everybody forgets. When you’re old, there’s too much to remember. I ask you, Why didn’t anyone have this disease twenty, thirty years ago? The problem is, today kids have no time anymore to see parents. Your mommy’s lonely, that’s all. She has no one to talk to in Chinese. Of course her mind is a little rusted. If you stop speaking, no oil for the squeaky wheel!”
“Well, that’s why I need your help. Can she come visit you, maybe for the week? It’s just that I have a lot of work this week and can’t spend as much time—”
“No need to ask. I’m already offering. I’ll come get her in one hour. I need to do some shopping there anyway.”
Ruth wanted to weep with relief.
After Auntie Gal left with her mother, Ruth walked a few blocks to the beach, to Land’s End. She needed to hear the pummeling waves, their constancy and loudness drowning out her own pounding heart.
SIX
As Ruth walked along the beach, the surf circled her ankles and tugged. Go seaward, it suggested, where it is vast and free.
When Ruth was a teenager, her mother had once run off in the middle of an argument, declaring she was going to drown herself in the ocean. She had waded in to her thighs before her daughter’s screams and pleas had brought her back. And now Ruth wondered: If she had not begged her mother to return, would LuLing have let the ocean decide her fate?
Since childhood, Ruth had thought about death every day, sometimes many times a day. She thought everyone must secretly do the same, but no one talked openly about it except her mother. She had pondered in her young mind what death entailed. Did people disappear? Become invisible? Why did dead people become stronger, meaner, sadder? That’s what her mother seemed to think. When Ruth was older, she tried to imagine the precise moment when she could no longer breathe or talk or see, when she would have no feelings, not even fear that she was dead. Or perhaps she would have plenty
of tear, as well as worry, anger, and regrets, just like the ghosts her mother talked to. Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown. And that contained all sorts of bad possibilities. It was that unknown which made her decide that no matter how terrible and unsolvable her life seemed, she would never willingly kill herself. Although she remembered a time when she had tried.
It happened the year she turned eleven. Ruth and her mother had moved from Oakland to the flatlands of Berkeley, to a dark-shingled bungalow behind a butter-yellow cottage owned by a young couple in their twenties, Lance and Dottie Rogers. The bungalow had been a potting shed and garage that Lance’s parents remodeled into an illegal in-law unit during World War Two and rented to a series of brides whose husbands had departed for battle in the Pacific via the Alameda Naval Station.
The ceilings were low, the electricity often shorted out, and the back wall and one side abutted a fence on which alley cats howled at night. There was no ventilation, not even a fan over the two-burner gas stove, so that when LuLing cooked at night, they had to open the windows to let out what she called the “greasy smell.” But the rent was cheap, and the place was in a neighborhood with a good intermediate school attended by the smart and competitive sons and daughters of university professors. That was why LuLing had moved there in the first place, she liked to remind Ruth, for her education.
With its small-paned windows and yellow shutters, the bungalow resembled a dollhouse. But Ruth’s initial delight soon turned into peevishness. The new home was so small she had no privacy. She and her mother shared a cramped, sunless bedroom that allowed for nothing more than twin beds and a dresser. The combined living room, eating area, and efficiency kitchen afforded no place to hide. Ruth’s only refuge was the bathroom, and perhaps for this reason she developed numerous stomach ailments that year. Her mother was usually in the same room as she was, doing her calligraphy, cooking, or knitting, activities that kept her hands busy but left her tongue all too free to interrupt Ruth when she was watching TV. “You hair getting too long. Hair cover your glasses like curtain, can’t see. You think this good-looking, I telling you not good-looking! You tune off TV, I cut hair for you… . Eh, you hear me. Tune off TV… .”
Her mother took Ruth’s television-watching as a sign that she had nothing better to do. And sometimes she would see this as a good opportunity for a talk. She would take down the sand tray from the top of the refrigerator and set it on the kitchen table. Ruth’s throat would grow tight. Not this again. But she knew that the more she resisted, the more her mother would want to know why.
“Precious Auntie mad-it me?” her mother would say when Ruth had sat for several minutes without writing anything in the sand.
“It’s not that.”
“You feel something else matter? . . . Another ghost here?”
“It’s not another ghost.”
“Oh. Oh, I know… . I die soon… . I right? You can say, I not afraid.”
The only time her mother didn’t bother her was when she was doing her homework or studying for a test. Her mother respected her studies. If she interrupted her, all Ruth had to do was say, “Shh! I’m reading.” And almost always, her mother fell quiet. Ruth read a lot.
On good-weather days, Ruth would take her book to the dwarf-sized porch of the bungalow, and there she’d sit with tucked legs on a bouncy patio chair with a clam-shaped back. Lance and Dottie would be in the yard, smoking cigarettes, pulling weeds out of the brick walkway or pruning the bougainvillea that covered one wall of their cottage like a bright quilt. Ruth would watch them surreptitiously, peering over the top of her book.
She had a crush on Lance. She thought he was handsome, like a movie star with his neatly cropped hair, square jaw, and lanky, athletic body. And he was so easygoing, so friendly to her, which made her even more shy. She had to pretend to be fascinated by her book or the snails that slimed the elephant plants, until finally he noticed her and said, “Hey there, squirt, you can go blind reading too much.” His father owned a couple of liquor stores, and Lance helped with the family business. He often left for work in the late morning and returned at three-thirty or four, then took off again at nine and came back late, long after Ruth had given up listening for the sound of his car.
Ruth wondered how Dottie had been lucky enough to marry Lance. She wasn’t even that pretty, though Ruth’s new friend at school, Wendy, said that Dottie was cute in a beach-bunny way. How could she say that? Dottie was tall and bony, and about as huggable as a fork. Plus, as her mother had pointed out, Dottie had big teeth. Her mother had demonstrated to Ruth by pulling her own lips back with her fingers so that her gums showed on the top and bottom. “Big teeth, show too much inside out, like monkey.” Later Ruth stared in the bathroom mirror and admired her own small teeth.
There was another reason Ruth thought Dottie did not deserve Lance: She was bossy and talked too loud and fast. Sometimes her voice was milky, as if she needed to clear her throat. And when she yelled, it sounded like rusty metal. On warm evenings, when their back windows were open, Ruth listened as Lance’s and Dottie’s garbled voices drifted across the yard and into the bungalow. On quite a few occasions, when they argued, she could hear clearly what they were saying.
“Damn it, Lance,” she heard Dottie yell one night, “I’m going to throw out your dinner if you don’t come right now!”
“Hey, gimme a break. I’m on the can!” he answered.
After that, whenever Ruth was in the bathroom, she imagined Lance doing the same, the two of them trying to avoid the people who nagged them without end.
Another night, as Ruth and her mother sat at the kitchen table with the sand tray between them, Dottie’s husky voice rang out:
“I know what you did! Don’t you play Mr. Innocent with me!” “Don’t tell me what the fuck I did, ‘cause you don’t know!” This was followed by two door slams and the revving of the red Pontiac before it roared off. Ruth’s heart was racing along with it. Her mother shook her head and clucked her tongue, then muttered in Chinese, “Those foreigners are crazy.”
Ruth felt both thrilled and guilty over what she had heard. Dottie had sounded just like her mother, accusing and unreasonable. And Lance suffered as she did. The only difference was, he could talk back. He said exactly what Ruth wished she could tell her mother: Don’t tell me what I think, ‘cause you don’t know!
In October, her mother asked her to give the rent check to the Rogerses. When Dottie opened the door, Ruth saw that she and Lance were busy unloading a huge box. Inside was a brand-new color television set, brought home in time to watch The Wizard of Oz, Dottie explained, which was going to air at seven o’clock that night. Ruth had never seen a color TV before, except in a store window.
“You know that part in the movie where everything is supposed to go from black-and-white to color?” Dottie said. “Well, on this set, it really does turn to color!”
“Hey, squirt,” Lance said, “why’ncha come over and watch with us?”
Ruth blushed. “I don’t know… .”
“Sure, tell your mom to come over too,” said Dottie.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Then Ruth rushed home.
Her mother did not think she should go. “They just polite, don’t really mean.”
“Yes, they do. They asked me twice.” Ruth had left out the part about their inviting LuLing as well.
“Last year, report card, you get one Satisfactory, not even Good. Should be everything Excellent. Tonight better study more.”
“But that was in PE!” Ruth wailed.
“Anyway, you already see this Ozzie show.”
“It’s The Wizard of Oz, not Ozzie and Harriet. And this one’s a movie, it’s famous!”
“Famous! Hnh! Everybody don’t watch then no longer famous! Ozzie, Oz, Zorro, same thing.”
“Well, Precious Auntie thinks I should watch it.”
“What you mean?”
Ruth did
n’t know why she had said that. The words just popped out of her mouth. “Last night, remember?” She searched for an answer. “She had me write something that looked like a letter Z, and we didn’t know what it meant?”
LuLing frowned, trying to recall.
“I think she wanted me to write O-Z. We can ask her now, if you don’t believe me.” Ruth went to the refrigerator, climbed the step-stool, and brought down the sand tray.
“Precious Auntie,” LuLing was already calling in Chinese, “are you there? What are you trying to say?”
Ruth sat with the chopstick poised for action. For a long time nothing happened. But that was because she was nervous she was about to trick her mother. What if there really was a ghost named Precious Auntie? Most of the time she thought the sand-writing was just a boring chore, that it was her duty to guess what her mother wanted to hear, then move quickly to end the session. Yet Ruth had also gone through times when she believed that a ghost was guiding her arm, telling her what to say. Sometimes she wrote things that turned out to be true, like tips for the stock market, which her mother started investing in to stretch the money she had saved over the years. Her mother would ask Precious Auntie to choose between two stocks, say IBM and U.S. Steel, and Ruth chose the shorter one to spell. No matter what she picked, LuLing profusely thanked Precious Auntie. One time, her mother asked where Precious Auntie’s body was lying so she could find it and bury it. That question had given Ruth the creeps, and she tried to steer the conversation to a close. The End, she wrote, and this made her mother jump out of her chair and cry, “It’s true, then! GaoLing was telling the truth. You’re at the End of the World.” Ruth had felt a cold breath blow down her neck.
Now she steadied her hand and mind, conjuring the wisdom Precious Auntie might impart like the Wizard. O-Z, she wrote, and then started to write good slowly and in large letters: G-O-O. And before she could finish, LuLing exclaimed, “Goo! Goo means ‘bone’ in Chinese. What about bone? This concern bone-doctor family?”
