For the next few weeks he popped up like that, every time I left the house. I could not call the police. What could I say? “My brother-in-law who is not really my brother-in-law is following me, asking me for money and the address of my sister who is not my true sister”? And then one day when I stepped outside to go to the market, he was not there. The entire time I was out, I expected I would see him, and I was prepared to be miserable. Nothing. When I returned home, I was puzzled and felt a strange relief. Perhaps he died, I allowed myself to hope. For the next week, I saw no sign of him. I felt no sudden cold breeze. Could it be that my luck had changed? When I opened the next letter from GaoLing, I was convinced this was true.
“I was so angry to hear that Fu Nan has been bothering you,” she wrote. “That turtle spawn will stop at nothing to satisfy himself. The only way to get rid of him for a few days is to give him money for his opium. But soon this will no longer be a problem for you. Happy news has arrived! I have found another way you can come. Do you remember the brothers I told you about—one is studying to be a dentist, the other a doctor? Their family name is Young and the father said a person like you can come if a person like him sponsors you as a Famous Visiting Artist. This is like a tourist with special visiting privileges. The family is very kind to do this, since I am not yet related to them. Of course, I cannot ask them to pay your way. But they have already completed the application and supplied the documents. The next step is for me to earn more money so we can buy the boat passage. In the meantime, you must prepare yourself to leave at any moment. Obtain the boat schedules, have a doctor’s examination for parasites… .”
I read the long list she provided, and was surprised at how smart she truly was. She knew so much, and I felt like a child now being guided by a worried mother. I was so happy I let tears fall right there as I rode the ferry home. And because I was on the ferry, I did not think to be afraid when I felt a breeze. To me it was a comfort. But then I looked up.
There was Fu Nan. One of his eyes was missing.
I nearly jumped off the boat I was so scared. It was as if I were seeing what would happen to me. “Give me some money,” he said.
That night, I put Precious Auntie’s picture on a low table and lighted some incense. I asked her forgiveness and that of her father. I said that the gift she had given me would now buy me my freedom and that I hoped she would not be angry with me for this, as well.
The next day, I sold the oracle bone to the second shop I had gone to all those months ago. With my savings as a maid, I had enough money to buy a ticket in steerage. I got the boat schedules and sent GaoLing a telegram. Every few days, I gave Fu Nan money for his habit, enough to put him into dreams. And then finally the visa was approved. I was a Famous Visiting Artist.
I sailed for America, a land without curses or ghosts. By the time I landed, I was five years younger. Yet I felt so old.
PART THREE
ONE
Mr. Tang was in love with LuLing, though he had never met her. Ruth could sense this. He talked as if he knew her better than anyone else, even her own daughter. He was eighty years old, a survivor of World War Two, the civil war in China, the Cultural Revolution, and a triple coronary bypass. He had been a famous writer in China, but here his work remained untranslated and unknown. A linguistics colleague of Art’s had given Ruth his name.
“She is a woman of strong character, very honest,” he said to Ruth on the telephone after he began to translate the pages Ruth had mailed to him. “Could you send me her picture, one when she was a young woman? Seeing her would help me say her words in English the way she has expressed them in Chinese.”
Ruth thought that was an odd request, but she complied, mailing him scanned copies of the photo of LuLing and GaoLing with their mother when they were young, and another taken when LuLing first arrived in the United States. Later, Mr. Tang asked Ruth for a picture of Precious Auntie. “She was unusual,” he remarked. “Self-educated, forthright, quite a rebel for her time.” Ruth was bursting to ask him: Did he know whether Precious Auntie was indeed her mother’s real mother? But she held off, wanting to read his translation all at one time, not piecemeal. Mr. Tang had said he would need about two months to finish the job. “I don’t like to just transliterate word for word. I want to phrase it more naturally, yet ensure these are your mother’s words, a record for you and your children for generations to come. They must be just right. Don’t you agree?”
While Mr. Tang translated, Ruth lived at LuLing’s house. She had told Art of her decision when he returned from Hawaii.
“This seems sudden,” he said as he watched her pack. “Are you sure you’re not being rash? What about hired help?”
Had she downplayed the problems over the past six months? Or had Art simply not been paying attention? She was frustrated by how little they seemed to know each other.
“I think it would be easier if you hired help to take care of you and the girls,” Ruth said.
Art sighed.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that the housekeepers I get for my mother keep quitting, and I can’t get Auntie Gal or anyone else to take care of her except for an occasional day here and there. Auntie Gal said that the one week she spent with her was worse than running after her grandkids when they were babies. But at least she finally believes the diagnosis is real and that ginseng tea isn’t a cure-all.”
“Are you sure something else isn’t going on?” he asked, following Ruth into the Cubbyhole.
“What do you mean?” She took down diskettes and notebooks from the shelves.
“Us. You and me. Do we need to talk about something more than just your mother’s mind falling apart?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You seem—I don’t know—distant, maybe even a little angry.”
“I’m tense. Last week I saw how she really is, and it frightened me. She’s a danger to herself. She’s far worse than I thought. And I realize the disease is further along than I first thought. She’s probably had it six or seven years already. I don’t know why I never noticed—”
“So your going to live there has nothing to do with us?”
“No,” Ruth said firmly. And then in a softer voice, “I don’t know.” And after a long silence, she added, “I remember you asked me once what I was going to do about my mother. And it struck me. Yes, what am / going to do? I felt it was all up to me. I’ve tried to handle it the best I can, and this is it. Maybe my moving out does have to do with us, but now, if there’s anything wrong with us, it’s secondary to what’s wrong with my mom. That’s all I can handle right now.”
Art looked uncertain. “Well, when you feel you’re ready to talk…” He drifted off, so miserable, it seemed to Ruth, she was almost tempted to assure him that nothing was really wrong.
LuLing was also suspicious as to why Ruth needed to live with her.
“Someone asked me to write a children’s book, with illustrations of animals,” Ruth said. She was now accustomed to telling lies without feeling guilty. “I was hoping you’d do the drawings, and if you did, it would be easier if we worked together here, less noisy that way.”
“How many animal? What kind?” LuLing was as excited as a child going to the zoo.
“Anything we want. You get to decide what to draw, Chinese style.”
“All right.” Her mother looked pleased at the prospect of being vital to her daughter’s success. Ruth sighed, relieved yet sad. Why hadn’t she ever asked her mother to make drawings before? She should have done it when her mother’s hand and mind were still steady. It broke her heart to see her mother trying so hard, being so conscientious, so determined to be valuable. Making her mother happy would have been easy all along. LuLing simply wanted to be essential, as a mother should be.
Each day, she went to her desk and spent fifteen minutes grinding her inkstick. Luckily, many of the drawings she did were of subjects she had drawn many times for scroll paintings—fish, horse, cat, monkey, duck— and she executed the
m and the characters from a neuromotor memory of the strokes. The results were shaky yet recognizable renditions of what she once had done perfectly. But the moment LuLing attempted the unfamiliar, her hand flailed in synchrony with her confusion, and Ruth became as distressed as her mother, though she tried not to show it. Every time LuLing finished a drawing, Ruth praised it, took it away, then suggested a new animal to draw.
“Hippo?” LuLing puzzled over the word. “How you say in Chinese?”
“Never mind,” Ruth said. “How about an elephant? Do an elephant, you know, the one with a long nose and big ears.”
But LuLing was still frowning. “Why you give up? Something hard maybe worth more than easy. Hippo, what look like? Horn right here?” She tapped the top of her head.
“That’s a rhinoceros. That’s good too. Do a rhinoceros, then.”
“Not hippo?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I not worry! You worry! I see this. Look your face. You not hiding from me. I know. I your mother! Okay-okay, you don’t worry hippo anymore. I worry for you. Later I remember, then tell you, you be happy. Okay now? Don’t cry anymore.”
Her mother was good at being quiet when Ruth was working. “Study hard,” she would whisper. But if Ruth was watching television, LuLing, as she always had, figured she was not doing anything important. Her mother then gabbed about GaoLing, rehashing her sister’s greatest insults to her over the years. “She want me to go love-boat cruise to Hawaii. I ask her, Where I have this kind money? My Social Security only seven hundred fifty dollar. She tell me, You too cheap! I tell her, This not cheap, this poor. I not rich widow. Hnh! She forget she once want marry my husband. Tell me when he die, lucky she choose other brother… .”
Sometimes Ruth listened with interest, trying to determine how much of the story LuLing changed in each retelling, feeling reassured when she repeated the same story. But other times Ruth was simply irritated by having to listen, and this irritation made her feel strangely satisfied, as if everything was the same, nothing was wrong.
“That girl downstair eat popcorn almost every night! Burn it, fire alarm go off. She don’t know, I can smell! Stink! Popcorn all she eat! No wonder skinny. Then she tell me, this not work right, that not right. Always complaining, threat me ‘lawsuit in-jury, code vio-la-tion’ . . .”
At night, as Ruth lay in her old bed, she felt she had come back to her adolescence in the guise of an adult. She was the same person and yet she was not. Or perhaps she was two versions of herself, Ruth1969 and Ruth1999, one more innocent and the other more perceptive, one needier, the other more self-sufficient, both of them fearful. She was her mother’s child, and mother to the child her mother had become. So many combinations, like Chinese names and characters, the same elements, seemingly simple, reconfigured in different ways. This was the bed from her childhood, and still within were those youthful moments before dreams, when she ached and wondered alone: What’s going to happen? And just as in childhood, she listened to her breathing and was frightened by the idea that her mother’s might one day stop. When she was conscious of it, each inhalation was an effort. Expiration was simply a release. Ruth was afraid to let go.
Several times a week, LuLing and Ruth would talk to ghosts. Ruth pulled out the old sand tray stored on top of the refrigerator and offered to write to Precious Auntie. Her mother reacted politely, the way people do when offered a box of chocolates: “Oh! . . . Well, maybe just little.” LuLing wanted to know if the children’s book was going to make Ruth famous. Ruth had Precious Auntie say that LuLing would be.
LuLing also asked for updates on the stock market. “Dow Jones go up or down?” she asked one day.
Ruth drew an upward arrow.
“Sell Intel, buy Intel?”
Ruth knew her mother watched the stock market mostly just for fun. She had not found any letters, junk mail or otherwise, from brokerage firms. Buy on sale, she decided to write.
LuLing nodded. “Oh, wait till down. Precious Auntie very smart.”
One night, as Ruth held the chopstick in her hand, ready to divine more answers, she heard LuLing say: “Why you and Artie argue?”
“We’re not arguing.”
“Then why you not live together? This because me? My fault?”
“Of course not.” Ruth said this a bit too loudly.
“I think maybe so.” She gave Ruth her all-knowing look. “Long time ‘go, you first meet him, I tell you, Why you live together first? You do this, he never marry you. You remember? Oh, now you thinking, Ah, Mother right. Live together, now I just leftover, easy throw away. Don’t be embarrass. You be honest.”
Her mother had said those things, Ruth recalled with chagrin. She busied her hands, brushing off stray grains of sand from the edges of the tray. She was both surprised by the things her mother remembered and touched by her concern. What LuLing had said about Art was not exactly right, yet she had pierced the heart of it, the fact that Ruth felt like a leftover, last in line to get a helping of whatever was being served.
Something was terribly wrong between Art and her. She had sensed that more strongly during their trial separation—wasn’t that what this was? She saw more clearly the habits of emotion, her trying to accommodate herself to him even when he didn’t need her to. At one time she had thought that adjustment was what every couple, married or not, did, willingly or out of grudging necessity. But had Art also accommodated to her? If so, she didn’t know how. And now that they had been apart, she felt unweighted, untethered. This was what she had predicted she might feel when she lost her mother. Now she wanted to hang on to her mother as if she were her life preserver.
“What bothers me is that I don’t feel lonelier without Art,” she told Wendy over the phone. “I feel more myself.”
“Do you miss the girls?”
“Not that much, at least not their noise and energy. Do you think my feelings are deadened or something?”
“I think you’re worn out.”
Twice a week, Ruth and her mother went to Vallejo Street for dinner. On those days, Ruth had to finish her work early and shop for groceries. Since she did not want to leave her mother alone, she took her along to the store. While they shopped, LuLing commented on the cost of every item, questioning whether Ruth should wait until it was cheaper. Once Ruth arrived home—and yes, she reminded herself, the flat on Vallejo Street was still her home—she seated LuLing in front of the television, then sorted through mail addressed to her and Art as a couple. She saw how little of that there was, while most of the repair bills were in her name. At the end of the night, she was frazzled, saddened, and relieved to go back to her mother’s house, to her little bed.
One night, while she was in the kitchen cutting vegetables, Art sidled up to her and patted her bottom. “Why don’t you get GaoLing to babysit your mom? Then you can stay over for a conjugal visit.”
She flushed. She wanted to lean against him, wrap her arms around him, and yet the act of doing so was as scary as leaping off a cliff.
He kissed her neck. “Or you can take a break right now and we can sneak into the bathroom for a quickie.”
She laughed nervously. “They’ll all know what we’re doing.”
“No they won’t.” Art was breathing in her ear.
“My mother knows everything, she sees everything.”
With that, Art stopped, and Ruth was disappointed.
During the second month of their living apart, Ruth told Art, “If you really want to have dinner together, maybe you should come over to my mother’s for a change, instead of my schlepping over here all the time for dinner. It’s exhausting to do that all the time.”
So Art and the girls started to go twice a week to LuLing’s house. “Ruth,” Dory whined one night as she watched her making a salad, “when are you coming home? Dad is like really boring and Fia is all the time like, ‘Dad, there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing good to eat.’”
Ruth was pleased that they missed her. “I do
n’t know, honey. Waipo needs me.”
“We need you too.”
Ruth felt her heart squeeze. “I know, but Waipo’s sick. I have to stay with her.”
“Then can I come and stay here with you?”
Ruth laughed. “I’d like that, but you’ll have to ask your dad.”
Two weekends later, Fia and Dory came with an inflatable mattress. They stayed in Ruth’s room. “Girls only,” Dory insisted, so Art had to go home. In the evening, Ruth and the girls watched television and drew mehndi tattoos on each other’s hands. The next weekend, Art asked if it was boys’ night yet.
“I think that can be arranged,” Ruth said coyly.
Art brought his toothbrush, a change of clothes, and a portable boom-box with a Michael Feinstein CD, Gershwin music. At night, he squeezed into the twin bed with Ruth. But she did not feel amorous with LuLing in the next room. That was the explanation she gave Art.
“Let’s just cuddle, then,” he suggested. Ruth was glad he did not press her for further explanations. She nestled against his chest. Deep into the night, she listened to his sonorous breathing and the foghorns. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe.
Mr. Tang called Ruth at the end of two months. “Are you sure there aren’t any more pages?”
“Afraid not. I’ve been cleaning out my mother’s house, drawer by drawer, room by room. I even discovered she put a thousand dollars under a floorboard. If there was anything else, I’m sure I would have found it.”
“Then I’ve finished.” Mr. Tang sounded sad. “There were a few pages with some writing on them, the same sentences over and over, saying she was worried that she was already forgetting too many things. The script on those was pretty shaky. I think they were more recent. It may upset you. I’m just telling you now, so you know.”
Ruth thanked him.
“May I come over now to deliver my work to you?” he asked formally. “Would that be all right?”
“Is it too much trouble?”