Up For Renewal

by Cathy Alter

  The quiet followed us home. Up until that point, the mood in our apartment had always been one of happiness and consideration. We sat down on the couch, and for a long while, I watched the dust particles hit the midafternoon sun. I watched my cat flick his tail around and wink at me. I watched Karl’s chest steadily rising and falling.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” he finally asked. “Anyone else I don’t know about?”

  I had remained fairly stoic while telling Karl about Zelly, but when I realized I was just about to admit to Bruno, I hung my head in defeat, a change in gravity that caused a cascade of lumpy tears to explode onto my jeans.

  “Who?” was all he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Who?” he said louder and with more panic, like I was about to explain how I got on an airplane, flew to Georgia, tracked down his father, introduced myself, and then fucked his brains out.

  “Bruno.”

  “Bruno?” he repeated in disbelief. “Your idiot coworker?”

  I was crying with relish by now. “Believe me, I’m not proud of it.”

  “How could you?” Karl may have been slow to boil, but he was at a full roll now. At least he had temporarily forgotten about Zelly.

  “That’s a good question,” I said, still too ashamed to lift my head and look Karl in the eye. “I’m still trying to figure out the answer.”

  We sat quietly for a while, but it was a different kind of quiet. I no longer had control, since my control was in the telling. So in one sense, I felt calm, because my part was over. But in another sense, in what I imagined was the more Catholic definition of confession, I had no idea what kind of Hail Marys were in store for me.

  I was about to meet my maker, and as a result, I was hyperaware of my time on the chopping block. The way the sun highlighted the mummified bees in the window screen; the cracking sound of Jason, our upstairs neighbor, dropping the toilet seat down after peeing; Karl’s electrified foot bouncing up and down and up and down—these things were all etching their unique stamps into my memory.

  Karl sighed. Most men, I realized, wouldn’t have responded like this. Most men, men like Bruno, would have stormed out, phoned their gang of miscreants, and gone out carousing on the town in a passive-aggressive fit of whiskey and whores.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked gently.

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  That I hope you don’t love me any less.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked again.

  “Nothing,” I said again. “Really.”

  That I hope this won’t change anything.

  Desperate to explain how things could have gone so wrong, I showed him the article from Glamour and pointed to the section on secrets.

  “These magazines are ruining my life,” he huffed. “And it’s all Oprah’s fault.”

  “But this came from Glamour.”

  “Well, screw her anyway. She’s evil.”

  “I’m the evil one,” I countered, tossing the magazine on the ground.

  Walking into the kitchen to start dinner, he stopped and looked over his shoulder. “What month is cooking month?” he asked.

  “Soon,” I promised. “Soon.”

  FEBRUARY

  Western Style

  i was in the peculiar position of mistrusting the counsel I was receiving from magazines while still desperately seeking it. In a way, I was developing the same relationship with them as I had with my mother. Something was hurting, and I needed help making it stop. And just because my mother often failed with her cheery guidance (for example, whenever I sobbed to her after a routine dumping, she always said the same thing: “Just put your lipstick on, someone else is right around the corner”) didn’t mean I packed up my tears and went elsewhere. I was learning it wasn’t about rejecting the advice I was getting—from the magazines, from my mother, from friends, from Dr. Oskar—it was about developing a better filter through which to funnel it.

  Even when that advice included my own. As our trip to Hong Kong approached, I began to worry. A lot. Mostly about how I’d get along—with Karl’s mother, his doting sister, and his Cantonese-speaking relatives. Not to mention an entire city of tiny people. Whose words were symbols. Who ate things with tentacles. I was afraid I’d be hospitalized within the first day. I got myself so worked up that one morning, a week before our departure, I awoke convinced that I needed a root canal and made an emergency appointment with my dentist who took one look in my mouth and asked if I was clenching my jaw for any particular reason.

  So with our departure date less than a week away, I again turned to the comforts of the glossy page for help managing my teeth-grinding stress. And that’s when I ran smack into my own article. About six months prior, I had proposed a story to Self’s Happiness editor (conveniently, the most cheerful woman on the planet) about the unique ways some women employed to help them unwind. “I find it very calming to unknot my tangled necklaces,” I wrote in my pitch letter. “Nothing beats the feeling of freeing my Elsa Peretti bean from my Me&Ro lotus.” She agreed and assigned me a piece we jointly titled “Offbeat Ways to Unwind.” Besides my technique, I interviewed my friend Marty, who de-stressed by removing stains from her clothing, and a woman who replastered her entire dining room during one particularly taxing episode in her life.

  Now, seeing the resulting story and accompanying byline, I wondered if anyone was ruining their lives by trying out some of my proffered advice. What if women all over the country were shaking their angry fists in my direction when wall plastering failed to soothe them?

  Who was I to intrude on someone else’s life with my fancy opinions? What did I know? Reading my own words in a magazine had left me feeling like a bit of a fake. It would only take so long before everyone found out and I was exposed as an impostor. It was like that scene from the movie Happiness in which Lara Flynn Boyle, playing a poet, has a meltdown while trying to work out a few stanzas. Throwing herself on her bed, she screams, “I’m no good! I’m no good! I am nothing! Nothing! Zero!”

  This is exactly what it feels like to be a writer sometimes. And ultimately, this was what had me so stressed out about my trip. I was an interloper—in Karl’s family, here and abroad. In order to survive Hong Kong, I needed to figure out how to fit in when I always felt so out of place.

  If I was worried about where I stood, Karl’s mother was equally unsure of her own footing. Lately, Joy was having some major boundary issues. (Or, more precisely, I was having issues with her not having any.) My parents were the boundary setters in my family—often reminding my brother and me that we were guests in their home and had to abide by their rules (which included no flushing the toilet once my father was asleep). So I wasn’t accustomed to seeing a parent who was so boundaryless.

  With Joy, I had the double whammy of trying to coexist with a mother who was both Jewish (she had converted when she married Karl’s father) and Chinese. In case you’re not familiar with this cultural combination, this is like walking around with an octopus Krazy Glued around your throat for the rest of your life. Ever since her number-one son had gotten engaged, Joy had displayed the type of abandonment issues normally associated with family dogs who get left on the side of the road. And, in a way, she had. After less than a year of marriage, her first husband was killed in a car accident. Her second husband, Karl’s father, left before Karl’s bar mitzvah ( leaving Karl in the awkward position of literally becoming a man at thirteen), and her mother had died when Joy was barely out of diapers. Her father, who was now also deceased, had quickly remarried the family servant, to great scandal, and it was her stepmother’s birthday we were attending in Hong Kong.

  Life had let Joy down profoundly. Is it any wonder she expected the same betrayal from her son, who left her for another woman? From her daughter, who left her for another home, moving across the country to attend graduate school? Joy perceived any proof of her children’s individuation as disloyalty.

  Even her own name had
betrayed her.

  I couldn’t help but think of Joy when I read Dani Shapiro’s essay in Real Simple. Looking for any articles having to do with tricky family relationships, I had latched onto Shapiro’s “Mommie Dearest?” In it, Shapiro wrote of her own mother’s troubles in accepting her new husband. “When my mother met my future husband, I think she sensed, with the instincts of an animal in danger, that she was being threatened.” But when her mother met Shapiro’s in-laws, Shapiro continued, “the full force of her primal rage truly began to assert itself.”

  Her mother was so endangered by these outsiders that Shapiro began to hide the frequent trips she made to her in-laws from her mother. “She hated it when we went up there, and made me pay for it weeks afterward. ‘But you never bother to visit me,’ she’d complain.”

  Joy was misbehaving in similar ways. For one, she was willfully ignoring our “no calls after 10:00 PM” policy, phoning us at exactly 10:02, night after night. When Karl calmly reminded her to please phone before bedtime, she said things like, “I could be dead on the side of the road and you wouldn’t care.” Then, she’d give us the silent treatment and refuse to answer her cell or respond to emails for days on end—further guaranteeing that no one would be able to find out if she was indeed dead on the side of the road.

  On top of all that, there was also some indication that Joy would be an unreliable travel companion. We had all recently driven to Flushing, Queens, to attend the wedding reception of one of Joy’s nephews. After picking us up at our apartment (more than two hours late) and personally helping me lay out my black cocktail dress across the backseat of the car, Joy waited until we were two hours outside of D.C., at a Burger King along I-95, before announcing, “It’s bad luck to wear black to a wedding.” When I burst into tears, crying something nonsensical about Round Eye Lady bringing death and destruction to the happy couple, Joy offered to loan me the extra pantsuit she had packed. “But I’m twice your size,” I sobbed. Joy spent the rest of the car ride trying to determine, in rapid Cantonese yelled at full volume into her cell phone, if I would curse the family by showing up in my black frock. “Okay,” she announced at one point, “Ronnie says you can wear it.” Then, her phone would ring again and she’d deliver the opposite news. “Now Stella says you can’t.”

  By the time we hit the reception, I was a mess. Until I saw that most of the men were wearing black tuxedos and almost all of the women were in some form of black gown. In the end, after I kidded her for making me a wreck for no reason, Joy admitted that she herself was afraid of insulting the bride’s grandmother, an honored elder, by saying the wrong thing or bowing the wrong way. Joy was merely projecting her own anxieties on me.

  I knew what to expect from Joy on U.S. soil, but I was worried that as soon as we landed in Hong Kong, a place of sorrow and loss to which she hadn’t returned in thirty years, she would go a little Joy Nut Club. I didn’t need Real Simple to tell me that traveling to Hong Kong on another airline, on another day, and staying in another hotel were all smart tactical moves (and all heartily approved by Karl).

  But even though I was sharp enough to get to Hong Kong by myself, I still needed to figure out what to do once I got there. In the same way I turned to the magazines to help me navigate rough waters, I would need Joy to guide me through an unfamiliar landscape—introducing me to her family, protecting me from foods that would end my life, and ultimately, teaching me how to gain her acceptance.

  But before I could pull off any of that, I needed Joy to clarify the Chinese color code when it came to birthday party attire, which were functions, I was guessing, with rules that were the polar opposites of those in Chinese weddings.

  “Okay,” I said when I finally reached Joy at the hospital where she worked (to further her theme of loss, Joy was a hospice nurse). “Let me in on your crazy Chinese rules. I don’t want a repeat of Flushing.”

  “Just don’t wear black,” she said. “Or white. White is what you wear to a funeral. And nothing with black or white in the pattern.”

  Considering this was the color scheme of my entire closet, I was a walking Grim Reaper.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Don’t put anything in your hair that’s pink.”

  “What could I possibly put in my hair that’s pink?” It wasn’t like I was prone to wearing the kind of floral hair wreaths usually seen at Renaissance festivals.

  “And no white ribbons in your barrettes,” she continued, speaking to me like I was dressing for my first communion.

  “What about red?”

  “That’s a lucky color,” she granted. “But maybe not on you.”

  “Hey!” I said in a tone of mock insult. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means navy might be better.”

  Unfortunately, the big look this month was death. Elle was pushing the Goth look hard, with page after page of white silk dresses with Edward Gorey–esque bats flying across the bodices and skull and crossbones done in Swarovski crystals emblazoned across the backs of jackets. A poet’s blouse by Libertine displayed a silk-screened medallion of a nineteenth-century image of Abraham Lincoln (how punk!) across the front.

  More unfortunate, red was the other big trend. “Red picks up where black left off,” wrote Marie Claire. A collage of models dressed for Sweeney Todd’s house of ill repute paraded around the page: “Paired with black accessories, red takes on a slightly Asian influence.” Apparently the fashion editors weren’t aware of black’s mournful impact. Finally, I found a dress in Allure that met my requirements: a navy print jersey-blend wrap dress by BCBG Max Azria. Not only was it appropriate in color, the wrinkle-free material would transcend even the lamest packing. ( I hadn’t yet come across an article on proper folding methods.)

  I headed out for the BCBG store in Georgetown and, as I was now accustomed to doing, brought along the photo from the magazine.

  “Well, hello there,” said a fast-approaching young woman in a shiny violet blouse. “My name is Robin.”

  “I have a challenge for you, Robin,” I said, handing her the picture of the wrap dress.

  “Oh, jeez.” Robin shook her head sadly. “I don’t know this dress.”

  “Do you know another dress?” I asked. “One that’s not black or white?”

  “Oh, jeez,” she said again, surveying the racks. “That’s a tough one.”

  She led me to a dress that was yellow and strapless, with a faux diamond brooch pinned below the potential wearer’s cleavage.

  “Robin,” I said, leaning in, “I realize I forgot to mention that I’ll be wearing this dress at a birthday party. In Hong Kong. For the eighty-year-old grandmother of my fiancé. Who’s Chinese. Surrounded by a lot of Chinese people who don’t know me.”

  “So, like, this dress is a bit too much?”

  “If I don’t want this family thinking I have a lounge act in Vegas, it is.”

  Eventually we found a rayon-blend wrap dress in a pointillist pattern of blues, pinks, and greens. That night I showed it to Karl, who was standing in front of the huge suitcase we were sharing, absentmindedly tossing in Gold Toe socks.

  “Do you think this will be okay?” I asked, holding it up to myself like I was dressing a paper doll.

  Karl studied me like a set of directions. “I don’t know about this green,” he said, grabbing a section with the highest concentration of that color. “Did you talk to my mother?”

  “She didn’t say anything about green being bad,” I replied, realizing I had been clenching my teeth through Karl’s appraisal.

  “Then you should be fine,” he said, taking the dress from me and folding it neatly into the suitcase.

  Just to be safe, I packed an article I had torn from Marie Claire that featured Lara Flynn Boyle in her infamous pink tutu. The story was called “How to Survive a Mortifying Moment.”

  I woke up our first morning in Hong Kong crying.

  “It’s just the jet lag,” Karl explained, spooning me closer.


  Despite the Ambien, I hadn’t slept on the plane, mostly because a man across the aisle spent the entire flight buzzing the flight attendant and loudly complaining. Karl understood just enough Cantonese to translate. “He wants to know when we’re going to eat again.” Maybe there was some truth about eating Chinese food and then being hungry again twenty minutes later.

  But I also knew that I woke up crying for a reason less directly causal to sleep deprivation. Later that evening, our little cocoon would be split wide open by the arrival of Karl’s family—and Joy was already upset with us because we weren’t going to be at the airport, which was at least an hour’s taxi ride away, to receive them.

  “Why don’t you take a shower?” suggested Karl. “You’ll feel a lot better.”

  As soon as I looked in the bathroom mirror, I had another reason to be upset. There was a pimple the size and color of a pencil eraser alive and well on the center of my left cheek. As holdover advice from my July camping trip, I had only packed cosmetics and toiletries in miniature form—and benzoyl peroxide was not among my petite arsenal. I doubted that any of the stores in Causeway Bay would have even one of the items suggested in Jane’s “Having a Bad Face Day?” And if they did, what would the exchange rate be on Fresh’s Umbrian Clay Face?

  Our first order of business was finding some miracle-performing pimple medicine. I was under the impression that there would be Chinese herbalists on every corner for just that purpose.

  “Even if there were”—Karl laughed as we walked along a street that looked eerily similar to Midtown Broadway—“I wouldn’t know how to ask for it.”

  We passed by a store called Fancl that had huge photos of clear-complexioned Asian women in the window. Inside, the staff all wore white lab coats. Karl had already explained that other Asians did not easily accept the coupling of an Asian man and a Western woman, so I was not surprised when one of the staff approached us, nodding curtly to Karl and looking me up and down like I was oozing pus. Which, actually, I might have been. I pointed to my volcanic pimple, and she silently walked across the white tiled floors.