by Amy Tan
Later that afternoon, Ruth heard the sounds of the Pontiac pulling into the driveway. She peeked out the window. Lance, grim-faced, carried out some boxes, two suitcases, and a cat from the cottage. Then Dottie came out, dabbing her nose with a tissue. She and Lance never looked at each other. And then they were gone. An hour later, the Pontiac returned, but only Lance got out. What had Dottie told Lance? Why did Dottie have to move out? Would Lance now march up to their door and tell her mother what Ruth had done and demand that they move out that same day as well? Lance hated her, Ruth was sure of that. She had thought being pregnant was the worst thing that could have happened to her. But this was far worse.
She stayed home from school on Monday. LuLing became increasingly fearful that a ghost was trying to take her daughter away. Why else was Ruth still sick? LuLing rambled about bony teeth from a monkey's jaw. Precious Auntie would know, she kept saying. She knew about the curse. This was punishment for something the family had done a long time ago. She put the sand tray on a chair by Ruth's twin bed, waiting. "Both us die," she asked, "or only me?"
"No," Ruth wrote, "all O.K."
"What okay-okay? Then why she sick, no reason?"
On Tuesday, Ruth could not stand her mother's fussing over her any longer. She said she was well enough to go to school. Before opening the door, she looked out the window, then down the driveway. Oh no, the Pontiac was still there. She was trembling so hard she feared her bones might break. After taking a deep breath, she darted out the door, scooted down the side of the driveway farther from the cottage, then edged past the Pontiac. She turned left, even though school was to the right.
"Hey, squirt! I've been waiting for you." Lance was on the porch, smoking a cigarette. "We need to talk." Ruth stood rooted to the sidewalk, unable to move. "I said we need to talk. Don't you think you owe me that? . . . Come here." He threw the burning cigarette onto the lawn.
Ruth's legs moved shakily forward. The top half of her was still running away. When she reached the top of the porch, she was numb. She looked up. "I'm sorry," she squeaked. The quiver in her chin shook open her mouth, and sobs burbled out.
"Hey, hey," Lance said. He looked nervously down the street. "Come on, you don't have to do that. I wanted to talk so we could have an understanding. I just don't want this to ever happen again. Okay?"
Ruth sniffed and nodded.
"All right, then. So settle down. Don't get all spooky on me."
Ruth wiped at her teary face with her sweater sleeve. The worst was over. She started to go down the stairs.
"Hey, where you going?"
Ruth froze.
"We still have to talk. Turn around." His voice was not quite so gentle. Ruth saw he had opened the door. She stopped breathing. "Inside," he ordered. She bit her lip and slowly climbed back up, then glided past him. She heard the door close and saw the room go dim.
The living room smelled like booze and cigarettes. The curtains were closed and there were empty TV-dinner trays on the coffee table.
"Sit down." Lance gestured toward the scratchy couch. "Want a soda?" She shook her head. The only light came from the TV, which was tuned to an old movie. Ruth was glad for the noise. And then she saw a commercial, a man selling cars. In his hand was a fake saber. "We've slashed our prices—so come on down to Rudy's Chevrolet and ask to see the slasher!"
Lance sat on the sofa, not as close as he had been that night. He took her books from her arms and she felt unprotected. Tears blurred her eyes, and she tried hard not to make any sounds as she cried.
"She left me, you know."
A sob burst out of Ruth's chest. She tried to say she was sorry, but she could make only mouselike sniffles.
Lance laughed. "Actually, I kicked her out. Yeah, in a way, you did me a favor. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have found out she was screwing around. Oh sure, I kind of suspected it for a while. But I told myself, Man, you got to have trust. And you know what, she didn't trust me. Can you believe it? Me? Let me tell you something, you can't have a marriage if you don't have trust. You know what I mean?" He looked at her.
Ruth desperately nodded.
"Nah, you won't know for another ten years." He lit another cigarette. "You know, in ten years, you'll look back and say, 'Boy, I sure was dumb about how babies are made!'" He snorted, then cocked his head to get her reaction. "Aren't you going to laugh? I think it's kind of funny myself. Don't you?" He started to pat her arm and she flinched without intending to. "Hey, what's the matter? Uh-oh, don't tell me. . . . You don't trust me. What are you, like her? After what you did and what I certainly did not do, do you think I now deserve this kind of treatment from you?"
Ruth was quiet for a long time, trying to make her lips move right. Finally she said, in a cracked voice, "I trust you."
"Yeah?" He patted her arm again, and this time she didn't jerk stupidly. He continued talking in a weary but reassuring voice. "Listen, I'm not going to yell at you or nothing, okay? So just relax. Okay? Hey, I said 'Okay?'"
"Okay."
"Give me my smile."
She forced her lips to pull upward.
"There it is! Oops. Gone again!" He stubbed out his cigarette. "All right, are we friends again?" He stuck out his hand for her to shake. "Good. It'd be terrible if we couldn't be friends, since we live next to each other."
She smiled at him and this time it came naturally. She tried to breathe through her clogged nose.
"And being neighbors, we gotta help each other, not go around accusing someone innocent of doing wrong. . . ."
Ruth nodded and realized she was still gripping her toes. She relaxed. Soon this would be over. She saw that he had dark circles under his eyes, lines running from his nose to his jaw. Funny. He looked much older than she remembered, no longer as handsome. And then she realized it was because she was no longer in love with him. How strange. She had believed it was love, and it never was. Love was forever.
"So now you know the real way babies are made, don'cha?"
Ruth stopped breathing. She ducked her head.
"Well, do you or don't you?"
She nodded quickly.
"How? Tell me."
She squirmed, her mind turning around and around. She saw terrible pictures. A brown hot dog squirting yellow mustard. She knew the words: penis, sperm, vagina. But how could she say them? Then the nasty picture would be there in front of both of them. "You know," she whimpered.
He looked at her sternly. It was as if he had X-ray eyes. "Yeah," he finally said. "I know." He was silent for a few seconds, and then added in a friendlier voice. "Boy, were you dumb. Babies and toilet seats, Jeez." Ruth kept her head down, but her eyes glanced up at him. He was smiling. "I hope you one day do a better job teaching your kids about the facts of life. Toilet seat! Pee? Pee-you!"
Ruth giggled.
"Ha! I knew you could laugh." He poked his finger under her armpit and tickled her. She squealed politely. He tickled her again, lower along her ribs, and she spasmed as a reflex. Then suddenly, his other hand reached for her other armpit and she groaned with laughter, helpless, too scared to tell him to stop. He twirled his fingers around her back, along her stomach. She balled herself up like a sow bug and fell to the rug below with terrible gasping giggles.
"You think a lot of things are funny, don't you?" He twiddled his fingers up and down her ribs as if they were harp strings. "Yeah, I can see that now. Did you tell all your little girlfriends? Ha! Ha! I almost put that guy in jail."
She tried to cry no, stop, don't, but she was laughing too hard, unable to take a breath on her own, unable to control her arms or legs. Her skirt was tangled, but she couldn't pull it down. Her hands were like that of a marionette, twitching toward wherever he touched as she tried to keep his fingers away from her stomach, her breasts, her bottom. Tears poured out. He was pinching her nipples.
"You're just a little girl," he panted. "You don't even have any titties yet. Why would I want to mess around with you? Shit, I bet you don't even have any tushy hairs—"
And when both of his hands shot down to pull off her flowered panties, her voice broke free and blasted out as screeches. Over and over, she made a fierce, sharp sound that came from an unknown place. It was as though another person had burst out of her.
"Whoa! Whoa!" he said, holding up his hands like someone being robbed. "What are you doing? Get a hold of yourself. . . . Would you just calm down, for chrissake!"
She continued the sirenlike wail, scuttling on her bottom away from him, pulling up her panties, pushing down her dress.
"I'm not hurting you. I am not hurting you." He repeated this until she settled into whimpers and wheezes. And then there came just fast breathing in the space between them.
He shook his head in disbelief. "Am I imagining things, or weren't you just laughing a moment ago? One second we 're having fun, the next second you're acting like—well, I don't know, you tell me." He squinted hard at her. "You know, maybe you have a big problem. You start to get this funny idea in your head that people are doing something wrong to you, and before you can see what's true, you accuse them and go crazy and wreck everything. Is that what you're doing?"
Ruth got up. Her legs were shaky. "I'm going to go," she whispered. She could hardly walk to the door.
"You're not going anywhere until you promise you're not going to spread any more of your goddamn lies. You got that straight!" He walked toward her. "You better not say I did something to you when I didn't. 'Cause if you do, I'm going to get really mad and do something that'll make you sorrier than hell, you hear?"
She nodded dumbly.
He blew air out of his nose, disgusted. "Get out of here. Scram."
That night, Ruth tried to tell her mother what had happened. "Ma? I'm scared."
"Why scare?" LuLing was ironing. The room had the smell of fried water.
"That man Lance, he was mean to me—"
Her mother scowled, then said in Chinese: "This is because you're always bothering him. You think he wants to play with you—he doesn't! Why do you always make trouble? . . ."
Ruth felt sick to her stomach. Her mother saw danger where there wasn't. And now that something was truly really awful, she was blind. If Ruth told her the actual truth, she would probably go crazy. She'd say she didn't want to live anymore. So what difference did it make? She was alone. No one could save her.
An hour later, while LuLing was knitting and watching television, Ruth took down the sand tray by herself. "Precious Auntie wants to tell you something," she told her mother.
"Ah? " LuLing said. She immediately stood up and turned off the TV, and eagerly sat down at the kitchen table. Ruth smoothed the sand with the chopstick. She closed her eyes, then opened them, and began.
You must move, Ruth wrote. Now.
"Move?" her mother cried. "Ai-ya! Where we should move?"
Ruth had not considered this. Far away, she finally decided.
"Where far?"
Ruth imagined a distance as big as an ocean. She pictured the bay, the bridge, the long bus rides she had taken with her mother that made her fall asleep. San Francisco, she wrote at last.
Her mother still looked worried. "What part? Where good?"
Ruth hesitated. She did not know San Francisco that well, except for Chinatown and a few other places, Golden Gate Park, the Fun House at Land's End. And that was how it came to her, an inspiration that moved quickly into her hand: Land's End.
Ruth recalled the first day she had walked by herself along this stretch of beach. It had been nearly empty, and the sand in front of her had been clean, untrampled. She had escaped and reached this place. She had felt the waves, cold and shocking, grab at her ankles, wanting to pull her in. She remembered how she had cried with relief as the waves roared around her.
Now, thirty-five years later, she was that eleven-year-old child again. She had chosen to live. Why? As she now kept walking, she felt comforted by the water, its constancy, its predictability. Each time it withdrew, it carried with it whatever had marked the shore. She recalled that when her younger self stood on this same beach for the first time, she had thought the sand looked like a gigantic writing surface. The slate was clean, inviting, open to possibilities. And at that moment of her life, she had a new determination, a fierce hope. She didn't have to make up the answers anymore. She could ask.
Just as she had so long before, Ruth now stooped and picked up a broken shell. She scratched in the sand: Help. And she watched as the waves carried her plea to another world.
SEVEN
When Ruth returned to LuLing's apartment, she began to throw away what her mother had saved: dirty napkins and plastic bags, restaurant packets of soy sauce and mustard and disposable chopsticks, used straws and expired coupons, wads of cotton from medicine bottles and the empty bottles themselves. She emptied the cupboards of cartons and jars with their labels still attached. There was enough rotten food from the fridge and freezer to fill four large garbage sacks.
Cleaning helped her feel that she was removing the clutter from her mother's mind. She opened more closets. She saw hand towels with holly motifs, a Christmas present that LuLing never used. She put them in a bag destined for Goodwill. There were also scratchy towels and bargain-sale sheets she remembered using as a child. The newer linens were still in the department-store gift boxes they had come in.
But as Ruth reached for the old towels, she found she could not get rid of them any more than her mother could. These were objects suffused with a life and a past. They had a history, a personality, a connection to other memories. This towel in her hands now, for instance, with its fuchsia flowers, she once thought it was beautiful. She used to wrap it around her wet hair and pretend she was a queen wearing a turban. She took it to the beach one day and her mother scolded her for using "best things" instead of the green towel with frayed ends. By upbringing, Ruth could never be like Gideon, who bought thousands of dollars' worth of Italian linens each year and tossed out last year's collection as readily as last month's Architectural Digest. Perhaps she was not as frugal as her mother, but she was aware of the possibility that she might regret the loss of something.
Ruth went into LuLing's bedroom. On the dresser were bottles of toilet water, about two dozen, still in their cellophane-bound boxes. "Stinky water," her mother called it. Ruth had tried to explain to her that toilet water was not the same as water from a toilet. But LuLing said that how something sounded was what counted, and she believed these gifts from GaoLing and her family were meant to insult her.
"Well, if you don't like it," Ruth once said, "why do you always tell them it's just what you wanted?"
"How I cannot show polite?"
"Then be polite, but throw it away later if it bothers you so much."
"Throw away? How I can throw away? This waste money!"
"Then give it away."
"Who want such thing? Toilet water!—peh!—like I big insult them."
So there they sat, two dozen bottles, two dozen insults, some from GaoLing, some from GaoLing's daughter, who were unmindful that LuLing rose each morning, saw these gifts, and began the day feeling the world was against her. Out of curiosity, Ruth opened a box and twisted the cap of the bottle inside. Stinky! Her mother was right. Then again, what was the shelf life of scented water? It was not as though toilet water aged like wine. Ruth started to put the boxes into the Goodwill bag, then caught herself. Resolute but still feeling wasteful, she put them into the bag destined for the dump. And what about this face powder? She opened a compact case of a gold-tone metal with fleur-de-lys markings. It had to be at least thirty years old. The powder inside was an oxidized orange, the cheek accent of ventriloquists' dummies. Whatever it was looked like it could cause cancer—or Alzheimer's. Everything in the world, no matter how apparently benign, was potentially dangerous, bulging with toxins that could escape and infect you when you least expected it. Her mother had taught her that.
She plucked out the powder puff. Its edges were still nubby, but the center was worn smooth from its on
ce-daily skimming over the curves of LuLing's face. She threw the compact and powder puff in the trash bag. A moment later, she panicked, retrieved the compact and nearly cried. This was part of her mother's life! So what if she was being sentimental? She opened the compact again and saw her pained face in its mirror, then noticed the orange powder again. No, this wasn't being sentimental. It was morbid and disgusting. She stuffed the compact once more into the trash bag.
By nightfall, one corner of the living room was jammed with items Ruth had decided her mother would not miss: a rotary Princess phone, sewing patterns, piles of old utility bills, five frosted iced-tea glasses, a bunch of mismatched coffee mugs bearing slogans, a three-pod lamp missing one pod, the old rusted clam-shaped patio chair, a toaster with a frayed cord and curves like an old Buick fender, a kitchen clock with knife, fork, and spoon as hour, minute, and second hands, a knitting bag with its contents of half-finished purple, turquoise, and green slippers, medicines that had expired, and a spidery thatch of old hangers.
It was late, but Ruth felt even more energized, full of purpose. Glancing about the apartment, she counted on her fingers what repairs were needed to prevent accidents. The wall sockets needed to be brought up to code. The smoke detectors should be replaced. Get the water heater turned down so that her mother could not be scalded. Was the brown stain on the ceiling the result of a leak? She followed where the water might be dripping, and her discerning eye skidded to a stop on the floor near the couch. She rushed over and peeled back the rug, and stared at the floorboard. This was one of her mother's hiding places, where she hoarded valuables that might be needed in time of war or, as LuLing said, "disaster you cannot even imagine, they so bad." Ruth pressed on one end of the board, and lo and behold, like a seesaw, the other end lifted. Aha! The gold serpentine bracelet! She plucked it out and laughed giddily as if she had just picked the right door on a game show. Her mother had dragged her into Royal Jade House on Jackson Street and bought the bracelet for a hundred twenty dollars, telling Ruth it was twenty-four-carat gold and could be weighed on a scale and traded for full value in an emergency.
