by Gish Jen
— You can see everything in the feet, she says sometimes. You can see what that person’s life is.
That’s what she says, but when me and Lizzy look at our feet, we see nothing.
— Also you can hear everything, she says, if you listen.
But when we listen, all we hear is Tommy naa-ing downstairs.
— Do you hear it? Can you hear it? Of course you have to know how to listen, she says.
She mostly says these things to me and Lizzy. Mom only hears a little bit, but Mom loves it all, especially the part about needing nothing. It’s like Lanlan is the best newspaper article she ever read.
— She is rich in spirit, Mom says. We have too much stuff.
Since Lanlan came Mom has been throwing stuff out, giving stuff away.
— We are choking on possessions, she says one day. Every day I am going to get rid of three things.
And another day she says: — These things have a life of their own. They have more life than I do.
Yesterday she gave a whole bunch of appliances to Goodwill. Like I think a toaster oven, and a pressure cooker she was always afraid was going to blow up, and a cappuccino machine that didn’t foam that great. Today she is giving away a pair of ski boots, and an old watch, and a casserole, and a bunch of travel books. It’s hard to stick to three things, she says, there is so much she wants to get rid of.
— Do you know what we do? she says. We consume to avoid living.
— That is like so true, says Lizzy.
She comes into the kitchen all of a sudden, who even knew she was listening, and instead of eating by herself because we bug her, the way she sometimes does, she gets a normal plate like a normal person because actually she likes Dad’s French toast. Not that she would admit it. He makes the French toast with corn bread so he can say how corny it is, but nobody does think it’s corny, everybody loves it. Even if it does sort of crumble all over.
The morning light is yellow, just like the kitchen Mom painted yellow so it would be warm and kitcheny even in the rain. So that everything now is yellow yellow yellow, even the plates, which are white.
Says Mom: — It helps us avoid questions like, Are we alive? And, Can we call this a life?
Mom says this because she was up half the night. The end of the quarter and you know how Porter is, she says. But Dad says that’s not really the problem.
— Your problem, he says, is that you actually believe responsible investment will change the world.
— Absolutely it will, she says, cutting stuff up for Bailey. — Think of externalities such as the environment, and how much pressure . . .
— At the same time you wonder, Do you really believe it the way you used to?
Mom sips her coffee.
— Or does the spiel just come spieling out? says Dad.
Mom covers her nose with her mug. Then she uncovers it, which makes her nostrils flare just like this very little bit. Her nostrils are sort of oval, not round like Lizzy’s and Daddy’s and Lanlan’s and mine, and usually sort of pink, but not today. Today the bottom of her mug is yellow, and her nails are yellow, and of course her hair, which was already yellow. Everything except her eyes.
— On the other hand, it’s a job, says Dad. At least you’re not laying people off, like my own dear Document Management Systems.
— Is getting laid off the same as getting fired? I say.
— Not exactly, says Dad. But of course you worry.
— You worry because you have a family to support, says Mom.
— You have a family to support. But here’s the thing, says Dad. In one way you definitely, one hundred percent want to hang on to your job.
He turns around with a fresh delivery to dump on the plate in the middle of the table.
— But in another way you wonder if for all that work we’re really that much happier than Lan.
— Of course we’re happier than Lan, says Mom.
— We’re more comfortable than Lan.
Me and Lizzy start putting on syrup.
— Please! says Mom. You can’t seriously envy someone who’s lived through the Cultural Revolution! Do you realize what life is like there?
— I’m not saying I’d change places with her.
Mom cuts up her own French toast.
— And yet, she says finally.
— And yet the last time I used the words ‘endless possibility’ it had to do with the myriad uses of a griddle.
He flips stuff over.
— You guys sound like you’re sorry about your whole entire life, I say.
— A lot of things are written, and can’t be rewritten, says Mom.
— Like what? says Lizzy. Like what would you write over, anyway?
— Our family would be the same, of course, says Mom.
LIZZY / She just said that because she had to.
— You can’t exactly say you wish you hadn’t adopted me, I said. Or Wendy. Not to our faces.
— I wouldn’t say it, period. Because it isn’t true.
— But you wish I was less dramatic and Wendy was less shy, and if we weren’t adopted, maybe we wouldn’t be like that. Maybe we’d be more like Bailey, and like you.
BLONDIE / — We’ve lived with you every day for fifteen years, I said. We couldn’t begin to imagine life without you.
— Think of yourself as a body part, said Carnegie.
— Yeah, but what if you could do plastic surgery, said Lizzy. We’re like the tummy flab you would fix.
WENDY / — Speak for yourself, I say. I’m not like tummy flab.
— I’m glad you realize that, says Mom.
— I’m more like a lung or something, I say.
Bailey rocks back and forth, meaning he wants more of something, but it must not be French toast, because when Mom gives him that, first he puts it on his head, syrup and all, and then he sends it flying.
— Bailey! Lizzy yells.
That’s because a piece of French toast lands right between her boobs.
— Perhaps that blouse is a bit revealing, says Mom.
— Perhaps you should feel sorry for me instead of making sure to tell me what you don’t like about the way I’m dressed! yells Lizzy. And anyway it’s not a blouse. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a blouse.
Lizzy stomps up the stairs so loud that even in the kitchen a bird flies away scared from our new bird feeder, which is stuck on the window with suction cups and supposed to be squirrelproof.
Even the bird feeder is yellow today, that’s just the kind of morning it is.
— In my family, this was called overreacting, says Mom. Being too sensitive.
— We can call it that in this family too if you like, says Dad, finally sitting down. — She’s being too sensitive.
— Perhaps I should quit work, she says. People say that the time to be home isn’t the first couple of years, it’s now, when you don’t know when they’ll want to talk.
— If someone quits it should be me, he says.
— Dearest, you’re not going to get laid off.
— Dearest, this is America, says Dad. Anything is possible.
Later I report all this to Lizzy.
— Overreacting! she says. Sensitive! Of course I’m sensitive. I’m sensitive because I totally don’t belong to this family!
Her room is like the most amazing place these days, completely empty and neat like a monk’s cell. It’s like she’s too mad at the world to even have one single thing on the walls, all you see are CDs and headphones and a picture of her new boyfriend Russell the Musician, in the exact same spot that she used to have Derek the Normal. And there’s her cell phone of course. She doesn’t have a regular bed, all she has is a futon on this platform, which I guess I wouldn’t mind having either, now that I lie down on it. It makes the room look so big, like the ceiling is so far away. Like you have all this room.
— You belong to this family, I say. You do.
— Someday I am going to go back to wherever and find my
real mom.
— How’re you going to do that?
— I’m just going to, she says.
She’s sitting on her other piece of furniture, her beanbag chair.
Then she says: — At least you know where you come from. At least you can like go back to that orphanage in China.
— That’s not true, I say. They don’t even know my foster mother’s name, forget about my real mother. Or my real father, you can like double forget about him.
— And why is that? says Lizzy. Have you ever wondered how come there are all these adopted girls from China where their parents at least know the foster mother and you don’t?
— They’re not supposed to, I say.
— But some do, says Lizzy. Like Lily does, and Mimi too. Don’t you ever wonder how come?
She says that and looks out her big window, which you realize is the other thing in her room, like her third piece of furniture. A big big window she has, so big it’s hard to open.
— I guess, I say.
— Because their parents made sure they knew, says Lizzy.
— But the foster mothers ask for money, I say. Lily’s parents only know because her foster mother sewed a note into her clothes. Like over her heart, Lily said, in the very inside layer of all her clothes, it was just lucky her parents found it. Plus they could barely read the writing after it went through the wash.
Lizzy stares at me a little. Sometimes I wonder if she would stare like that if she went back to her old hair, it’s like once she went blond nobody could stare at her anymore. Because they like so noticed her they had to try not to, and then she could stare at them.
— You don’t get anything either, she says. I really, completely don’t belong to this family.
— You do, I say.
— I do not, she says.
But she’s sprawled out more on her chair, and like staring a little less.
— I’m like a visitor, like Lanlan, she says.
— What about me? I say.
— You can be whatever you want, she says. It’s a free country.
— I like visitors, I say.
— Good for you, says Lizzy.
— I like Lanlan, I say.
— Good for you, says Lizzy.
— There is something about Lanlan that gets Mom and Dad to say the same thing the other one just said, I say.
— Hmmm, she says, and then is kind of quiet, which is practically the nicest thing she’s ever said to me.
4
A Family Is Born
CARNEGIE / And again backward: to fifteen years ago, and the story of how Lizzy came to us.
BLONDIE / For this is how our family came together, Lizzy first. And is that not the start of the story?
CARNEGIE / I was a grad student back then, living in the Midwest, which I did not particularly like; and getting a master’s in double e, which I did not particularly like. It so happened too that I had signed up for an opera class in the church annex with the copper beech tree. Did I like it, particularly?
My mother detested opera.
And so yes, I did like it most particularly. Yes.
I thought, what’s more, that there might be interesting women in that class, women who would prove, surprise, unlike my mother. And should one of them prove particularly interesting, I knew what I would do: invite her to an opera. The local conservatory was always mounting something, so to speak. I warmed its shiny schedule in my pocket.
In the meantime, I passed and passed the smooth-barked beech tree. I looked up into that tree and thought about climbing it. But I was a man now; climbing the tree was like a question I did not have to answer. My life was full of new questions, questions so large I did not know what they were.
They preoccupied me with their vagueness.
BLONDIE / I like to think of Carnegie in that phase of his life—passing that tree, considering his life. Considering the tree—how huge it was, and what a room it made under itself. So rich and venerable, and yet like a prison, he said. Its lowest boughs, big as trunks themselves, grazed the ground, which was resplendent with moss. Years later Carnegie was still talking about that moss, and the way the roots rose out of it like a day of reckoning.
I didn’t know any other men who stood back that way. Carnegie had big hands—like my father’s, strong, but smoother and more delicate. He kept them in his pockets as though he was saving them. He might have been a surgeon, or a pianist.
CARNEGIE / My mother had considered me a sap on account of the things I did not do. Forget about it! was one of her maternal refrains because as a child I had refused to eat eggs, insisting they were baby chickens. As an adult I was bothered by raccoon traps.
Then there was the matter of evictions. It was just Mama Wong’s luck to have her one child, her one son, her heir, turn out the type who was haunted by evictions. Several times I paid a tenant’s rent rather than see a certain old couple or young mother or rascally codger out on the street.
The couple proved worthy of help. Even Mama Wong saw the point, in the end, of providing two old geezers in wheelchairs with a place to set their brakes. Also I made a good case for the single mother with twins. Anita went on, in fact, to become the best super we ever had; the twins grew up happy to cut our grass and shovel our snow. But what about the codger? Didn’t he have two sons in sports cars who ought to have done their share?
— This is America. Nobody can count on a son, I argued once. Except, of course, you.
To this Mama Wong at first laughed appreciatively.
— You are the last real Chinese son in America, she agreed, her forefinger in the air. She crouched forward for emphasis, springing up at the end of the point like a conductor. Then she fetched her body back, her chin, her arm. Repacking herself, it seemed, in a kind of tai qi maneuver. — I know you will never forget what you are, she said. No one going to have to tell you.
But other days she waved her hand dismissively.
— For what can I count on you, you tell me? she said. Give money away to rich people, that’s what. How can you be my son? I tell you honest way, I don’t know who you are.
Her face then was resigned, and slack. Only her hands moved, dropping down to her desktop to rearrange the beautifully sharpened pencils. She watched some leaves, blown flat against her window; they lifted loose. Away they flipped, back out into the yard, flipping, flipping. Who cared? In her youth she had exuded a lovely suppressed animation. People had watched her, not because she was so beautiful, but because at any moment her face might break into something else. Something about her promised revelation.
Now, in her enfeeblement, she was becoming straightforward.
It was true that the codger, when he died, left half a million dollars to his favorite charity, the National Basketball Association. He left, in addition, one dime each to his sons. This was so they could each call a friend and cry. They wouldn’t have had to do this, he wrote, if they had learned to hustle like even the lousiest substitute player in the National Basketball Association. Also he left a broadcloth shirt to me, writing,
You would have given the shirt off your back to me. So I give the shirt off my back to you. You did touch me, you poor schmuck. But what kind of championship you ever going to win? You got this country all wrong, young man. You should listen to your mother. Rent is rent. Get rich, be happy. Isn’t that what they say in China? It’s the same here. Be poor, be miserable. Old world, new world, every world is still the world.
BLONDIE / Carnegie never wore the shirt.
CARNEGIE / I was in my poetry phase then; the phase in which I walked in the woods and considered myself working. I was entranced by the deathless morph of villanelles. And the compulsion of terza rima! Like a person with attachment problems. I owned an inkwell and a blotter and was never without a thesaurus.
Naturally all this was related to a lady friend who finally, finally slept with me, only to announce a half hour later that she wanted to be friends.
— Let’s have a corresp
ondence in verse, she said.
I switched to double e the next week.
BLONDIE / His mother was delighted.
CARNEGIE / She had a consolation girlfriend all picked out.
— Lily Lee, she said. Daughter of Filbert and Flora. Valedictorian in high school, now is medical doctor. But not just medical doctor. I’ll tell you what her character is. Look like her mother have some trouble with her kidney, right? So what is her specialty? Kidney! Her mother never have to go see stranger, always get the best care. That’s what kind of girl she is.
I declined to meet Miss Lee.
BLONDIE / Instead he stood by large trees with his hands in his pockets. Carnegie had left home; he had left his mother. He was awaiting something big and honest and potent.
We both had selves that were cresting some hill, then. Lives that before setting all four tires back on the road, could have said yes to almost anything.
CARNEGIE / To the opera. To the Midwest: to this sky, this wind, these grids. To these polite and helpful plain folk.
And, of course, to a most lissome, auburn-haired classmate who turned out, unfortunately, to be an anti–nuclear-arms activist and nun. Sister Mary Divine, she said her name was. I thought she must be joking. That really was her name, though, and she really was a nun, even if she seemed more of an anti-nun. To wit, she did not wear a habit or even a bra. She doodled. She carried a fanny pack. She swore. Not that she went so far as to take the Lord’s name in vain, but she was heard to say, upon occasion, Dammit.
