My mother has always been very proud of those red banners. She doesn’t write the typical congratulatory sayings, like “Good Luck” or “Prosperity and Long Life.” All the sayings, written in gold Chinese characters, are of her own inspiration, her thoughts about life and death, luck and hope: “First-Class Life for Your First Baby,” “Double-Happiness Wedding Triples Family Fortunes,” “Money Smells Good in Your New Restaurant Business,” “Health Returns Fast, Always Hoping.”
My mother claims these banners are the reasons why Ding Ho Flower Shop has had success flowing through its door all these years. By success, I suppose she means that the same people over the last twenty-five years keep coming back. Only now it’s less and less for shy brides and giddy grooms, and more and more for the sick, the old, and the dead.
She smiles mischievously, then tugs my elbow. “Now I show you the wreath I made for you.”
I’m alarmed, and then I realize what she’s talking about. She opens the door to the back of the shop. It’s dark as a vault inside and I can’t make out anything except the dense odor of funeral flowers. My mother is groping for the piece of string that snaps on the light. Finally the room is lit by the glare of a naked bulb that swings back and forth on a cord suspended from the high ceiling. And what I now see is horrifyingly beautiful—row after row of gleaming wreaths, all white gardenias and yellow chrysanthemums, red banners hanging down from their easels, looking like identically dressed heavenly attendants.
I am stunned by how much hard work this represents. I imagine my mother’s small hands with their parchmentlike skin, furiously pulling out stray leaves, tucking in sharp ends of wire, inserting each flower into its proper place.
“This one.” She points to a wreath in the middle of the first row. It looks the same as the others. “This one is yours. I wrote the wishes myself.”
“What does it say?” I ask.
Her finger moves slowly down the red banner, as she reads in a formal Chinese I can’t understand. And then she translates: “Farewell, Grand Auntie, heaven is lucky. From your favorite niece, Pearl Louie Brandt, and husband.”
“Oh, I almost forgot.” I hand her the bundle from Sam Fook’s. “Mr. Hong said to give you this.”
My mother snips the ribbon and opens the package. Inside are a dozen or so bundles of spirit money, money Grand Auntie can supposedly use to bribe her way along to Chinese heaven.
“I didn’t know you believed in that stuff,” I say.
“What’s to believe,” my mother says testily. “This is respect.” And then she says softly, “I got one hundred million dollars. Ai! She was a good lady.”
“Here we go,” I say, and take a deep breath as we climb the stairs to the banquet room.
“Pearl! Phil! There you are.” It’s my cousin Mary. I haven’t seen her in the two years since she and Doug moved to Los Angeles. We wait for Mary to move her way through the banquet crowd. She rushes toward us and gives me a kiss, then rubs my cheek and laughs over the extra blush she’s added.
“You look terrific!” she tells me, and then she looks at Phil. “Really, both of you. Just sensational.”
Mary must now be forty-one, about half a year older than I am. She’s wearing heavy makeup and false eyelashes, and her hair is a confusing mass of curls and mousse. A silver-fox stole keeps slipping off her shoulders. As she pushes it up for the third time, she laughs and says, “Doug gave me this old thing for Christmas, what a bother.” I wonder why she does bother, now that we’re inside the restaurant. But that’s Mary, the oldest child of the two families, so it’s always seemed important to her to look the most successful.
“Jennifer and Michael,” she calls, and snaps her fingers. “Come here and say hello to your auntie and uncle.” She pulls her two teenage children over to her side, and gives them each a squeeze. “Come on, what do you say?” They stare at us with sullen faces, and each of them grunts and gives a small nod.
Jennifer has grown plump, while her eyes, lined in black, look small and hard. The top part of her hair is teased up in pointy spikes, with the rest falling limply down to the middle of her back. She looks as if she had been electrocuted. And Michael’s face—it’s starting to push out into sharp angles and his chin is covered with pimples. They’re no longer cute, and I wonder if this will happen to Tessa and Cleo, if I will think this about them as well.
“You see how they are,” Mary says apologetically. “Jennifer just got her first nylons and high heels for Christmas. She’s so proud, no longer Mommy’s little girl.”
“Oh, Mother!” Jennifer wails, then struggles away from her mother’s grasp and disappears into the crowd. Michael follows her.
“See how Michael’s almost as tall as Doug?” Mary says, proudly watching her son as he ambles away. “He’s on the junior varsity track team, and his coach says he’s their best runner. I don’t know where he got his height or his athletic ability—certainly not from me. Whenever I go for a jog, I come back a cripple,” Mary says, laughing. And then, realizing what she’s just said, she suddenly drops her smile, and searches the crowd: “Oh, there’s Doug’s parents. I better go say hello.”
Phil squeezes my hand, and even though we say nothing, he knows I’m mad. “Just forget it,” he says.
“I would,” I shoot back, “if she could. She always does this.”
When Phil and I married, it was Mary and Doug who were our matron of honor and best man, since they had introduced us. They were the first people we confided in when we found out I was pregnant with Tessa. And about seven years ago, Mary was the one who pushed me into aerobics when I complained I felt tired all the time. And later, when I had what seemed like a strange weakness in my right leg, Phil suggested I see Doug, who at the time was an orthopedist at a sports medicine clinic.
Months later, Doug told me the problem seemed to be something else, and right away I panicked and thought he meant bone cancer. He assured me he just meant he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out himself. So he sent me to see his old college drinking buddy, the best neurologist at San Francisco Medical Center. After what seemed like a year of tests—after I persuaded myself the fatigue was caused by smoking and the weakness in my leg was sciatica left over from my pregnancy—the drinking buddy told me I had multiple sclerosis.
Mary had cried hysterically, then tried to console me, which made it all seem worse. For a while, she dropped by with casserole dishes from “terrific recipes” she “just happened to find,” until I told her to stop. And later, she made a big show of telling me how Doug’s friend had assured her that my case was really “quite mild,” as if she were talking about the weather, that my life expectancy was not changed, that at age seventy I could be swinging a golf club and still hitting par, although I would have to be careful not to stress myself either physically or emotionally.
“So really, everything’s normal,” she said a bit too cheerfully, “except that Phil has to treat you nicer. And what could be wrong with that?”
“I don’t play golf,” was all I told her.
“I’ll teach you,” she said cheerily.
Of course, Mary was only trying to be kind. I admit that it was more my fault that our friendship became strained. I never told her directly how much her gestures of sympathy offended me. So of course she couldn’t have known that I did not need someone to comfort me. I did not want to be coddled by casseroles. Kindness was compensation. Kindness was a reminder that my life had changed, was always changing, that people thought I should just accept all this and become strong or brave, more enlightened, more peaceful. I wanted nothing to do with that. Instead, I wanted to live my life with the same focus as most people—to worry about my children’s education, but not whether I would be around to see them graduate, to rejoice that I had lost five pounds, and not be fearful that my muscle mass was eroding away. I wanted what had become impossible: I wanted to forget.
I was furious that Doug and his drinking-buddy friend had discussed my medical condition with Mary. If t
hey had told her that, then they must have also told her this: that with this disease, no prognosis could be made. I could be in remission for ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years. Or the disease could suddenly take off tomorrow and roll downhill, faster and faster, and at the bottom, I would be left sitting in a wheelchair, or worse.
I know Mary was aware of this, because I would often catch her looking at me from the corner of her eye whenever we passed someone who was disabled. One time she laughed nervously when she tried to park her car in a space that turned out to be a handicapped zone. “Oops!” she said, backing out fast. “We certainly don’t need that.”
In the beginning, Phil and I vowed to lead as normal a life together as possible. “As normal as possible”—it was like a meaningless chant. If I accidentally tripped over a toy left on the floor, I would spend ten minutes apologizing to Tessa for yelling at her, then another hour debating whether a “normal” person would have stumbled over the same thing. Once, when we went to the beach for the express purpose of forgetting about all of this, I was filled with morbid thoughts instead. I watched the waves eating away at the shore, and I wondered aloud to Phil whether I would one day be left as limp as seaweed, or stiff like a crab.
Meanwhile Phil would read his old textbooks and every medical article he could find on the subject. And then he would become depressed that his own medical training offered no better understanding of a disease that could be described only as “without known etiology,” “extremely variable,” “unpredictable,” and “without specific treatment.” He attended medical conferences on neurological disorders. He once took me to an MS support group, but we turned right around as soon as we saw the wheelchairs. He would perform what he called “weekly safety checks,” testing my reflexes, monitoring the strength of my limbs. We even moved to a house with a swimming pool, so I could do daily muscle training. We did not mention to each other the fact that the house was one-story and had few steps and wide hallways that could someday be made wheelchair-accessible, if necessary.
We talked in code, as though we belonged to a secret cult, searching for a cure, or a pattern of symptoms we could watch for, some kind of salvation from constant worry. And eventually we learned not to talk about the future, either the grim possibilities or the vague hopes. We did not dwell on the past, whether it had been a virus or genetics that had caused this to happen. We concerned ourselves with the here and now, small victories over the mundane irritations of life—getting Tessa potty-trained, correcting a mistake on our charge-card bill, discovering why the car sputtered whenever we put it into third gear. Those became our constants, the things we could isolate and control in a life of unknown variables.
So I can’t really blame Phil for pretending that everything is normal. I wanted that more than he did. And now I can’t tell him what I really feel, what it’s like. All I know is that I wake up each morning in a panic, terrified that something might have changed while I slept. And there are days when I become obsessed if I lose something, a button, thinking my life won’t be normal until I find it again. There are days when I think Phil is the most inconsiderate man in the world, simply because he forgot to buy one item on the grocery list. There are days when I organize my underwear drawer by color, as if this might make some kind of difference. Those are the bad days.
On the good days, I remember that I am lucky—lucky by a new standard. In the last seven years, I have had only one major “flare-up,” which now means I lose my balance easily, especially when I’m upset or in a hurry. But I can still walk. I still take out the garbage. And sometimes I actually can forget, for a few hours, or almost the entire day. Of course, the worst part is when I remember once again—often in unexpected ways—that I am living in a limbo land called remission.
That delicate balance always threatens to go out of kilter when I see my mother. Because that’s when it hits me the hardest: I have this terrible disease and I’ve never told her.
I meant to tell her. There were several times when I planned to do exactly that. When I was first diagnosed, I said, “Ma, you know that slight problem with my leg I told you about. Well, thank God, it turned out not to be cancer, but—”
And right away, she told me about a customer of hers who had just died of cancer, how long he had suffered, how many wreaths the family had ordered. “Long time ago I saw that mole growing on his face,” she said. “I told him, Go see a doctor. No problem, he said, age spot—didn’t do anything about it. By the time he died, his nose and cheek—all eaten away!” And then she warned me sternly, “That’s why you have to be careful.”
When Cleo was born, without complications on my part or hers, I again started to tell my mother. But she interrupted me, this time to lament how my father was not there to see his grandchildren. And then she went into her usual endless monologue about my father getting a fate he didn’t deserve.
My father had died of stomach cancer when I was fourteen. And for years, my mother would search in her mind for the causes, as if she could still undo the disaster by finding the reason why it had occurred in the first place.
“He was such a good man,” my mother would lament. “So why did he die?” And sometimes she cited God’s will as the reason, only she gave it a different twist. She said it must have been because my father was a minister. “He listened to everyone else’s troubles,” she said. “He swallowed them until he made himself sick. Ai! Ying-gai find him another job.”
Ying-gai was what my mother always said when she meant, I should have. Ying-gai meant she should have altered the direction of fate, she should have prevented disaster. To me, ying-gai meant my mother lived a life of regrets that never faded with time.
If anything, the regrets grew as she searched for more reasons underlying my father’s death. One time she cited her own version of environmental causes—that the electrician had been sick at the time he rewired our kitchen. “He built that sickness right into our house,” she declared. “It’s true. I just found out the electrician died—of cancer, too. Ying-gai pick somebody else.”
And there was also this superstition, what I came to think of as her theory of the Nine Bad Fates. She said she had once heard that a person is destined to die if eight bad things happen. If you don’t recognize the eight ahead of time and prevent them, the ninth one is always fatal. And then she would ruminate over what the eight bad things might have been, how she should have been sharp enough to detect them in time.
To this day it drives me crazy, listening to her various hypotheses, the way religion, medicine, and superstition all merge with her own beliefs. She puts no faith in other people’s logic—to her, logic is a sneaky excuse for tragedies, mistakes, and accidents. And according to my mother, nothing is an accident. She’s like a Chinese version of Freud, or worse. Everything has a reason. Everything could have been prevented. The last time I was at her house, for example, I knocked over a framed picture of my father and broke the glass. My mother picked up the shards and moaned, “Why did this happen?” I thought it was a rhetorical question at first, but then she said to me, “Do you know?”
“It was an accident,” I said. “My elbow bumped into it.” And of course, her question had sent my mind racing, wondering if my clumsiness was a symptom of deterioration.
“Why this picture?” she muttered to herself.
So I never told my mother. At first I didn’t want to hear her theories on my illness, what caused this to happen, how she should have done this or that to prevent it. I did not want her to remind me.
And now that so much time has gone by, the fact that I still haven’t told her makes the illness seem ten times worse. I am always reminded, whenever I see her, whenever I hear her voice.
Mary knows that, and that’s why I still get mad at her—not because she trips over herself to avoid talking about my medical condition. I’m mad because she told her mother, my Auntie Helen.
“I had to tell her,” she explained to me in an offhand sort of way. “She was always saying to me,
Tell Pearl to visit her mother more often, only a one-hour drive. Tell Pearl she should ask her mother to move in with her, less lonely for her mother that way. Finally, I told my mother I couldn’t tell you those things. And she asked why not.” Mary shrugged. “You know my mother. I couldn’t lie to her. Of course, I made her swear not to tell your mother, that you were going to tell her yourself.”
“I can drive,” I told Mary. “And that’s not the reason why I haven’t asked my mother to live with me.” And then I glared at her. “How could you do this?”
“She won’t say anything,” Mary said. “I made her promise.” And then she added a bit defiantly, “Besides, you should have told your mother a long time ago.”
Mary and I didn’t exactly have a fight, but things definitely chilled between us after that. She already knew that was about the worst possible thing she could have done to me. Because she had done it once before, nine years ago, when I confided to her that I was pregnant. My first pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage early on, and my mother had gone on and on about how much coffee I drank, how it was my jogging that did it, how Phil should make sure I ate more. So when I became pregnant again, I decided to wait, to tell my mother when I was in my fourth month or so. But in the third month, I made the mistake of confiding in Mary. And Mary slipped this news to her mother. And Auntie Helen didn’t exactly tell my mother. But when my mother proudly announced my pregnancy to the Kwongs, Auntie Helen immediately showed my mother the little yellow sweater she had already hand-knit for the baby.
I didn’t stop hearing the laments from my mother, even after Tessa was born. “Why could you tell the Kwongs, not your own mother?” she’d complain. When she stewed over it and became really angry, she accused me of making her look like a fool: “Hnh! Auntie Helen was pretending to be so surprised, so innocent. ‘Oh, I didn’t knit the sweater for Pearl’s baby,’ she said, ‘I made it just in case.’ ”