She was never going to take me.
“Did I tell you I’ll be coming in on Saturday mornings?”
The smile got unstuck and swooped across her lips. “I start teaching extra classes after the Christmas holidays. Saturdays, nine to one. If you’d like,we could meet for lunch both days.”
I told her Saturday was my day with Dad, which was more or less true.
The day she’d left us, Columbus Day, she’d come downstairs to the basement and sat on a trunk. I kept playing because what could I say? Bye Mom, have a good time. Don’t forget to send a postcard.
“Call me whenever you want. If you want to talk or see me. Really, Josh, I mean it. Call me about anything.” She slipped a note in my shirt pocket. “That’s An-ling’s phone number, but my cell’s best. She doesn’t have an answering machine.”
“You call,” I said.“On my cell.”
She stood there while I played.We’d already gotten the “I love yous” out of the way earlier. I didn’t know what she wanted now. Her eyes were red and mushy, but why was beyond me, since she was doing what I thought she wanted.
I wasn’t going to feel sorry for her. I wasn’t going to beg her to stay.
I lost the beat at some point.“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. She didn’t budge. “I’ll call you.”
I stood up. She stood up. I leaned over my drum kit and gave her a half-assed hug. She could have walked around the drums and wrapped her arms around me. I guess I could have done that too.
“It’s just for a few days, Josh.” She stood there for the longest time. I went back to my drums.
It never entered my head that maybe she was waiting for me to stop her.
Emma
I lay on a mattress on the floor, hidden by a screen made of four tall canvases An-ling had hinged together, on which she had painted branches laden with pomegranates as red and round as Christmas balls. Their bright color was meant to bring happiness. A rectangle of cold white light from the window rested on the lower part of my legs, reminding me of Nonna’s crocheted blanket lying at the end of Josh’s bed. Outside the window, a sky without limits, still a shock to my eyes after years of seeing walls outside my bedroom. In this loft I felt like a pioneer who had moved out west and discovered vast open spaces.
It was Christmas, a day to celebrate the birth of a son, a day that has always filled me with the dread of its unmet expectations. My eyes to the window, I let my mind reel back to the skylight above our bedroom in Westchester. Back then in the mornings I would listen, through the intercom, to Josh gurgling safely in his crib, and look up at that quadrant of sky and feel that, if I lifted my arm, I could touch it.
From behind the screen, An-ling’s voice surprised me. “Half the morning is gone.”
She had a talent for silent movement.After two months I was often still surprised to turn and find her at my elbow. I would look up from reading, expecting her to be sitting across from me, only to find her at the far end of the room. Josh and Tom announced their comings and goings from a distance, scuffling feet, jiggling keys, whistling, calling out for clean clothes, food, a missing sock. An-ling came and went on ghost feet and asked for nothing.
“Good morning, An-ling.”
“Christmas is a lousy day!” She stayed behind the screen.
“Why is that?”
“Because you’re sad. Invite Josh to visit. Call him now.
Tell him I’ll cook Millionaire’s Chicken for him and next year he’ll become fabulously rich.” An arm sheathed in red curved around the end of the screen. My cell phone dropped between my feet.
I sat up.“Let me see you.” She slipped around the screen on all fours and sat on her haunches in the rectangle of white light at the end of the mattress. Her hair was neatly gathered in a ponytail. Her knees peered at me from behind the careful fraying of her jeans. Over the jeans she wore her new red fleece shirt. Following Nonna’s tradition of keeping Christmas Day free of material thoughts,we had opened our presents on Christmas Eve.
An-ling picked up the cell phone and held it out to me.
“Call Josh.”
“He’s in Pittsburgh with Tom.” I missed him terribly.
“Call him in Pittsburgh. He’ll come when he’s back.”
I had called him the night before. Our conversation wasn’t long. I think Tom was in the room. Josh was having a good time, but didn’t enter into specifics. I managed to tell him I missed him, but when I tried to say, “I love you,” shame stuffed my mouth. I ended up mumbling that I’d love to hear from him as soon as he got home.With my real family I had lost the ability to act on love. I needed lessons on demonstration techniques.
“Josh can’t come here,” I said. An-ling’s warmth seeped into the blanket. “Tom threatens to file for divorce if I let Josh visit.” He had written me a note at school after he had refused my attempt at a Thanksgiving reunion, the four of us. I didn’t add that, in Tom’s mind, she was the one Josh could have no part of.
“Tom is mean.”
“He’s angry. I’ve broken his rules.”
“You’re going to leave me soon, aren’t you? All this is just for a little while, right? Until the clock strikes midnight or something like that.”
“It doesn’t mean I’ll stop seeing you.” Part of me wanted to extend this irresponsible interlude until the day An-ling slipped out the door, chasing a wish across the street, the river, the country. Another part wanted Josh.And Tom.The parts were at constant war.Tom and Josh were going to win, but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I was still too angry with Tom to walk back, too involved with An-ling. Dumbly, I still hoped I could keep all three in my life.
“It is a perfectly lousy day,” An-ling said.
“How about throwing a New Year’s Eve party?” I suggested while we finished the previous night’s leftovers for lunch. We’d decided to treat this day like any other. I was preparing lesson plans and An-ling was lining up rows of the different-shaped bottles that it had taken us weeks to collect for a new series of paintings.“Invite all your friends. I’ll help.”
An-ling could be shy, aggressive, giddily happy, rude one moment, sweet enough to bring tears to my eyes another. Now she turned sullen. “I don’t like parties.”
I cleared the dishes.“OK.Then don’t have one.”
The next day, when I came back from grocery shopping, I found An-ling on the phone inviting someone over for New Year’s Day.“Day is better,” she said to me, as she dialed the next number. “I want to show off the light.They’ll be purple with envy.”
“Purple for rage, green for envy.”
“They’ll be a rainbow of colors! Eighteen, twenty people, is that too many?”
“Just right. I’ll help you set up, then leave. I won’t cramp your style.”
“No way.You are honorable Lady Teacher.” She turned on the radio and started to dance to Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.“This is the first party in my life.”
I stopped giving parties in my home after Tom thought one of my students stole Josh’s Discman. That was at least five years ago. I started dancing, too.
An-ling insisted on offering only homemade food. For two days we cleaned and cooked. I baked the cookies. For the rest of the menu I followed instructions. We chopped, churned, folded ground pork into small triangles, rolled chopped vegetables into spring roll wrappers, sealed dough with wet pinches. A few hours before her friends were due, she fried and steamed. I cleared An-ling’s work table and set out paper cups, plates, and napkins.
Boots scraped up the stairs; then voices.There were doorbells downstairs, but no buzzer to let people in, and we had left the metal front door open with a note saying the hand-operated elevator was broken. It saved us from having to ferry people up and down. An-ling lived on the fifth floor but none of her friends had reached thirty, a fact I used to convince myself we weren’t being selfish.
“Someone’s coming,” I called out as I slipped a tray of dumplings into the microwave. A first cluster of friends walked t
hrough the door. A blonde girl let out a shriek, revealing her tongue stud, and pointed to Zhong Kui, the demon slayer.That morning An-ling had moved him from his place above her futon. Too tall to fit above the front door, the canvas tilted ominously over whoever crossed the threshold. A guaranteed ice-breaker.
“He’s the Chinese St. George. Don’t worry, he’s tied to a sturdy nail.” I waved them in, introduced myself and pointed them to the food table. “Help yourself. Drinks are in the fridge.”
Steve wore a ponytail of dreadlocks that fell below his shoulders and drank only tea. His painting of a black woman’s hand cleaning a white refrigerator had just been selected for a group show in a Chelsea gallery.
Komiko, a tall stringbean of a Japanese Texan, wearing purple bangs and tight black, stuffed spring rolls in her mouth between deep drags of her cigarette. “I’m not into edgy or politics,” she said.
“She paints meticulous flower arrangements that will never make it in the marketplace,” whispered pink-cheeked Jeffrey, Caucasian, proudly gay, the Cassandra of the group. His artistic vision was the depiction of huge pale spider webs that were meant to point out how delusional our sense of freedom was.The others I forget.
I stayed out of the way, stepping out of my role as Honorable Lady Teacher, into one as Very Honorable Clean-Up Maid. I gathered beer bottles, half-eaten sandwiches and emptied ashtrays while An-ling wove through her guests as they ohhed and ahhed over the amount of space she had, the open view, the light. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat, the beer she was drinking and the joy of being young, talented, and surrounded by friends.
Hours later we sat on a sagging Salvation Army sofa. Her friends had gone. Most of the mess was in garbage bags. She chugged on a bottle of water. She was tired and had said little since everyone had left.
I got up and opened a window. An icy wind from the river swept in and cleared some of the smoke and my own stale body smell.The bottom edge of the sky was bleached by the lights of Manhattan.The rest of the night was black, unlimited. I took a deep breath. The air was cold enough to crack lungs. Again my thoughts traveled back—a recurring symptom of the holiday season and the wine—to Nonna standing above me as my body shivered in the cold water she poured over me every morning.How I hated her for it, and yet, remembering, I was filled with good feeling.
“I had a good time,” I said.
“Thanks for helping,” An-ling said. “It was a wonderful party, wasn’t it?”
I closed the window and sat down next to her.“The best.
I loved seeing you have fun.”
“Never in a million years could I imagine having such a beautiful home, giving a party,” An-ling said. “Before they came I was scared. I thought this is too good. It can’t last. I’ll drop the dish.The cloud is going to pass over the full moon.
A rooster is going to call in the moonlight.Then I heard you in my head.”
“What did I say?”
“Get over yourself.”
“I don’t think I would ever say that.”
“Then you should. Anyway I chucked the Chinese superstitions and had a great time. Thanks to you.” She pecked my cheek.
“You did most of the work.” I leaned back against the sofa. Nonna came into my head again.“On New Year’s Day, my Italian grandmother would stay in bed all day and refuse all food to avoid indigestion. It was her way of making sure nothing went wrong, because she believed that if the first day of the year was a good one, the rest of the year was going to be good too.” I turned to An-ling. “According to Nonna, we’re going to have a great year.”
She looked uncomfortable, as if she were sitting on a sharp-edged thought.
“What is it?”
“You’re leaving soon.”
“I have a son and a husband, An-ling. I’ve been gone from home too long.”
“When?”
“I don’t know yet.” I needed to talk to Tom first.
She curled up against me. I lifted my arm and let her slide into it.
“I’ll miss you so much.” Her breath heaved, trembled. I stroked her hair as she cried.
“I’m still here,” I said.
Here’s a fact:What I felt for An-ling had nothing to do with sex.Yes, I loved her body—the rough spots on her elbows that she would let me dampen with a sponge and rub with cream, the calm sea of her back on which the blue junk sailed, the half-shells of skin hooding her eyes, the powerful silent sway of her walk. Most of all, the triangle of her face, happy one time, sad another, a moody flower of a face, opening and closing at the least touch.
I never violated her body.Never had the desire. I held her when she needed me to. I kissed her cheeks, stroked her hair. In my bathroom she gave me a child’s kiss on the lips.
I gave back a mother’s kiss.
Subj: Fairtytales and fantasies
Date: 04-11-05 00:31.53 EST
From: Chinesecanary@BetterLateThan Never.com
To: [email protected]
Explanations for Bad Behavior
“Careless, dumb girl.” The round-eyed woman used to call me that a lot and for a while I thought it might be the American pronunciation of my true Chinese name. “Careless, dumb girl.” I broke things. My hands were too small to hold the dishes and the glasses in the sink. The water made them slip. The shiver of splintering glass, the whiplash of cracking china—terrifying sounds that sent me running to the broom closet to hide. “Careless, dumb girl.” The woman opened the door and told me I had dripped all over the floor and my shoes had left mud prints. She wrapped my hands over the stick of a mop. It was an important lesson to learn, the need to clean up after yourself. It would get me far in life, she promised. Besides, Chinese girls were supposed to be obedient and clean and where did I come from if not from China?
:-) :(
An-ling
THIRTEEN
GUZMAN CALLS KOMIKO Tanuki to the stand. A Texan with Japanese parents, Tanuki was a fellow student of An-ling Huang’s at the Art Students League. Today, in what she has said is a sign of mourning, she is dressed in a white tight-knit ankle-length dress and white sandals. She has sprayed her bangs with white paint.
“Miss Tanuki, was Miss Huang a good friend of yours?”
“Sure.”
“Can you tell us what she was like?”
“She was shy. I’d push her to join us for a beer after class.
Most of the time she didn’t come. She did give a party at her new place on New Year’s Day and invited a bunch of us, but she didn’t really need other people.”
Judge Sanders turns to the defense counsel with a barely hidden look of surprise. Fishkin stands. “No objection, Your Honor.
We welcome this witness’s impressions.”
Guzman glances at Fishkin, hesitates. Perhaps he is thinking that continuing this line of questioning may, in the end, come back to haunt him. Slowly he turns back to the witness. “What do you mean by Miss Huang not needing other people?”
“She was always running home to ‘Lady Teacher.’ That’s what she called the defendant.”
“Did Miss Huang explain her relationship to Mrs. Perotti?”
“She said she’d never been loved like that before.”
“Did you have these conversations with Miss Huang in person?”
“We talked at school a lot. On our cells. Then, in March, I think, she bought a laptop from a student going back to Hong Kong and we started e-mailing, but before that sometimes she slipped notes inside my locker at the League.”
“What did you do with those notes?”
“I kept every one. They were drawings torn out of her sketchbook that she’d scribble something on. I love her work.” Tanuki’s chin trembles. “Excuse me.” She reaches in her pocket, takes out a tissue and blows her nose.
Guzman picks up two sheets of paper from his desk and hands them to the court clerk. “I offer People’s Exhibit Twelve A and B in evidence.”
After the exhibits have been labeled and given to the witness, Gu
zman asks. “Do you recognize those two drawings as being done by An-ling Huang?”
“I do.”
“How do you know they are hers?”
“She signed them.”
“Could you please read what Miss Huang wrote under the drawing in People’s Exhibit Twelve A.”
Tanuki reads silently, looks up and nods.
“Do you recall when you received this drawing?”
“Almost two years ago, late August sometime. This was her first one. We weren’t sharing any classes yet.”
“Please hold up the drawing so the jury can see it.”
The drawing Tanuki holds out is a realistic depiction, in red ink, of a woman’s naked torso. The woman’s hands hold up two large breasts with exaggerated nipples.
“Miss Tanuki, please read what Miss Huang wrote underneath the drawing.”
“Lady Teacher said my breasts are beautiful. By the way, you’ll be happy. My hair’s Asian again.”
“Thank you. Would you now look at People’s Exhibit Twelve B, please? Do you recall when you received that drawing?”
“January or February of last year.”
“Please read what she wrote to the jury.”
“I’ve hooked up with a kid. He’s a virgin—WAS—which really turned me on.”
“Show the drawing to the jury.”
Tanuki turns the sheet of paper around to show a pencil drawing of a baby with an erect penis twice his size.
“Miss Tanuki, is there anyone in this courtroom, besides the defendant, who you have seen before?”
Tanuki points to the defendant’s side of the courtroom. “That boy with the striped shirt.”
“Where and when did you see the defendant’s son, Joshua Howells?”
“Outside the League a couple of times in February when it rained the whole time. He was standing in the pouring rain without an umbrella, waiting for her. I asked An-ling if he was the kid that turned her on. She laughed and said it was none of my business.”
“When did you see Miss Huang for the last time?”
The Price of Silence Page 14
