“Gramma really fooled us all these years, pretending she didn’t know what we were saying, forcing us to speak Mandarin!” Lily said as they slopped through the water to the storage area in the back. “And all those things that happened to her.” She whistled softly, eyes sparkling in the dim light. “Now I want to go with her to India and see that house.”
“I want to see that house, too,” Cameron said.
If people could be compared to houses, Uma thought, then Cameron was as secretive as Jiang’s former home. Who lived within his shuttered inner rooms? In the bleakness that Uma’s life had shrunk to, the mystery of Cameron gave her something to anticipate. Ramon, now—he would be a traditional Japanese home, walls built of rice paper so that light could shine through and reveal every silhouette. Perhaps that was what she had loved about him, his transparency. He never tried to hide anything, not even how much he cared for her.
But why was she thinking of him in the past tense?
Mrs. Pritchett had locked herself in the bathroom, though she didn’t need to use it. Jiang’s matter-of-fact voice, speaking of love crumpled up and thrown away like a letter with too many mistakes in it, of families blown like spores across the desert of the world, had calmed her and made her remember something that she needed to check on. She searched through the inner compartment of her purse and came up with a small Ziploc bag that she had secreted there weeks back, just in case. It held a few pills. Mrs. Pritchett congratulated herself on the superior intelligence with which she had foiled Mr. Pritchett. She considered taking a pill but decided she would save it for later. Right now, she had to think about the story.
For Mrs. Pritchett, one item in Jiang’s story had shone out like a lighthouse in a storm. It was the bakery-restaurant, the site of a slim, pencil-skirted girl’s first forbidden date with a boy whose shirt-sleeves were rolled up with holiday abandon. Flurys, she whispered to herself in the mirror, a delicious name that melted in one’s mouth like the lightest of pastries. Was it large and cool and old-fashioned, set inside a high-ceilinged colonial building with pillars and chandeliers, protected from the harsh sun by a striped awning? Or had it been modernized into gleaming metallic sleekness? She hoped not. If she got to India, she would somehow make it to Flurys and offer them her services. If they demurred, she would give a demonstration on the spot, baking for them—she’d carry the ingredients in her suitcase—her irresistible white chocolate–macadamia nut cookies.
CAMERON GAVE THEM A TERSE UPDATE ON THE SITUATION. HE didn’t sugarcoat the facts—he wasn’t that kind of man: the phones were still nonoperational; the water was rising, though very slowly; the air quality seemed safe; there was food for one more meal. People looked glum at his assessment, but Uma noted they didn’t press around him as they had earlier, bumping into one another like befuddled moths, demanding to know what would happen. When she asked if they wanted to continue with the storytelling, they returned to their chairs at once.
“Who would like to be next?” Uma asked.
“First I must tell you one more thing,” Jiang said, surprising them again. I left this out because I was embarrassed. But without it the story is not true.
“The first night on the ship, Mr. Chan and I lay on the floor. I could not stand to think of him as husband. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mohit’s face. That made me angry with myself. Mohit was not thinking of me, I was sure.
“The Lu family was on the bed, on the other side of curtain. We could hear them. Mr. Chan put his hand on me. I pushed him away. I felt like I would vomit. If he forces me, I thought, I will jump from the deck tomorrow.
“But he did not force. He put his hand on my head and stroked my hair. I realized he knew I had a boyfriend! Most Chinese men would not have married a girl who had a boyfriend. I started to cry. He did not say anything, not even tell me to stop. He just stroked my hair. For seven-eight nights it was like that.
“One night I kissed him. I thought, He is so kind to me, I must give him something. What else did I have to give? So even though I did not love him, we made love. I thought, It could be worse. It is possible to live without love with a gentle man.
“Finally we came to Chinatown. He could not be a dentist, even though he longed for it. Instead, we were working day and night in the grocery. Also, I was sick with the pregnancy. Some days we were so tired, we had no strength to say even one word to each other. There was no time to think of silly things, moon and roses and romance.
“Four years went like that. One night he was very sick. The flu had killed many people that winter, so I was worried. I gave him medicine. Put a wet cloth on his forehead. He was burning up, babbling nonsense. Suddenly he went stiff. His eyes rolled back. I thought, He’s dying. My insides turned cold. Don’t die, don’t die, I shouted. I love you.
“Maybe he heard me. His eyes cleared for a moment. He lifted a hand. I clutched it. But he was trying to pull it away. Then I understood. He wanted to stroke my hair. I bent over so he could do it. Who knows why, next day his fever was less. In a week he was better.
“Later I thought I had said those words out of fear. Or because that is what they say in movies to dying men. But I had not been afraid. I knew I could take care of the store and the children, with or without a husband. And movies are foolish fancies. Then I knew I really loved him.
“When had it happened? Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That’s what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel—and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside.”
NO ONE SPOKE FOR A WHILE. MAYBE THEY WERE TRYING TO DECIDE if they had ever been similarly ambushed by love. Maybe they were wondering if they had it in themselves to be as honest as Jiang. Then Lily said, “I’ll go next.”
“Would you wait a bit, sweetheart?” Cameron said. The endearment sounded natural in his mouth, though it was the first time Uma had heard him use it. Sweet my heart, they would have said in Chaucer’s time, an expression that bound the speaker and the listener together, in one body. “We’ll need your story more after a while.”
Lily, who under normal circumstances would not have suffered anyone to call her sweetheart, flashed him a gamine smile. “What makes you think it’s that kind of story?” But she nodded yes. Her eyebrow ring must have fallen off during the tussle. Without it, she looked more vulnerable. But at the same time, as she leaned over to stroke her grandmother’s shoulder, she was more grown up. Then she said, her voice fearful, “Gramma’s arm is hot.”
When Cameron checked Jiang’s arm, his lips thinned into a line. He gave her two aspirin, though they all knew she really needed antibiotics. “Let’s get started with the story,” he said brusquely.
Mrs. Pritchett straightened her shoulders and drew in her breath. But before she could volunteer, Mr. Pritchett said, very quickly, “I would like to go now.”
8
In the boy’s earliest memories, his mother is always asleep, like Sleeping Beauty in the picture book she bought for him at a garage sale. And even though the boy loves his mother—loves her so much that sometimes he feels breathless, as when he’s trying to blow up a stiff, new balloon—already he realizes she isn’t that kind of pretty. She sleeps stretched out on the nubbly salt-and-pepper couch with a phone book wedged under the corner where one of its legs used to be. Her own legs are propped up on the frayed armrest because they tend to swell by the end of her shift, and when the boy is sure she’s fast asleep he sometimes presses down on her shinbone with a finger and watches the dip that forms. Her mouth is slightly open, its corners pulled down as though she’s just been handed a surprise of the less-than-pleasant variety. She snores softly. The sound comforts the boy, partly because it’s soothing and familiar, and partly because it’s so much better than those moments when she stops breathing and he’s afraid she’s died and left him alone.
Sometimes there’s a bottle of Hires Root Beer on th
e floor beside her outflung arm. Sometimes (but rarely, because this is before the days of serious drinking that are waiting around the corner) there’s a bottle of real beer, which smells and tastes so awful that he wonders why anyone would want it. But mostly there’s nothing, because by the time his mother gets home from Mickey’s Diner and Take Out she’s too tired even to make it to the fridge. She shucks off the uniform right there, by the couch—she has only two uniforms, and the washateria is too far away and too expensive for more than one trip per week. Besides, she doesn’t like doing laundry and waits until the last possible moment, a fact that will earn him certain unpleasant nicknames when he begins kindergarten next year. It’s his job to pick up the brown pants and tunic and hang them over the back of the couch. If the night is warm, she sleeps in her underwear. If not, he fetches her nightie for her. She wrestles with the worn cotton shift, which is getting tight under the arms. (His mother is involved in a long-drawn-out, losing battle with her weight.) Once it’s on, she thanks him with a hug for being her sweet boy. At those moments, her voice never fails to send a thrill through him. It’s the one part of his mother that’s more beautiful than Sleeping Beauty. Sometimes on the weekends, when she’s in a good mood, she sings to him about a lady with green sleeves, a song that she says is hundreds of years old. And, best of all, she reads to him.
The boy knows how to dress and undress himself, how to brush his teeth (which he does in the bathtub because he can’t reach the sink yet). He gets his own dinner, mostly cereal, which he has learned to eat dry on the days when they’re out of milk. If he feels ambitious, he’ll fix himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but he’s not too good at spreading the peanut butter and usually ends up tearing the bread. His mother eats at Mickey’s—one of the perks of working there—and sometimes she’s able to sneak home a hamburger or French fries or a bit of leftover pasta for him in the oversize tote she carries for that purpose.
The boy eats and watches his sleeping mother—the way her chest rises and falls with each breath, the line of hair that runs from her bra line, down her stomach, to the wavy elastic of her faded pink panties. Her body twitches from time to time like that of the animals he watches on the wildlife shows on TV. Those are his favorite shows, even more than Howdy Doody, and sometimes he and his friend Jimmy get into a fight about this. Should anyone ask him what he wants most in life, the boy wouldn’t hesitate. A dog, he would say—though this is not completely true. He would prefer a tiger. But already he has learned that some desires must be held unspoken in the dark core of one’s being.
When he is sure his mother has sunk into sleep, the boy will turn off the TV. Mostly she watches I Love Lucy, with its baffling jokes. (As he grows older, he will recognize this about himself: most things that people find funny fail to amuse him.) He’ll go to the old tape player with reels as big as his head and carefully rewind the tape that’s on it. He’ll curl up on the floor with his blanket and listen to Lassie Come Home, which his mother recorded for him one week when she hurt her foot and couldn’t go to work. There’s a bed in the other room, but he’d rather lie here so that he can keep an eye on that undependable breath of hers while he follows Lassie over a thousand dangerous miles, determined to find her little boy. In the middle, he’ll fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that before he wakes she would have concluded her quest.
Is the boy unhappy? No. When you’ve known only one thing all your life, you accept it as natural. It isn’t until Mary Lou brings them the stolen math workbook that he will figure out that happiness is a whole different feeling.
THE BOY’S MORNING MEMORIES ARE OF MARY LOU BANGING ON the door of the apartment, shouting his mother’s name—Hey Betsy, are you dead or what—and his mother stumbling bleary-eyed to the door, still in her underwear and cursing, but under her breath because she doesn’t want her son to pick up any bad words. Jimmy runs in through the crack of the open door, shouting, “LL, look what I got.”
In the background he can hear Mary Lou saying, “Shoot, girl, you look like death warmed over. You better go see the doctor.”
The boy’s chest hurts until his mother says: “Now don’t start, Mary Lou. Nothing wrong with me except too many hours at a crappy job.”
Jimmy pulls at his arm. “Look! look! You ain’t looking.”
Jimmy is here because the boy’s mother and Mary Lou, who lives a few apartments over and works in the cafeteria of their neighborhood elementary school, babysit for each other. The boy likes Jimmy. He’s fun to play with, even though he’s always wanting the boy to look at things the boy doesn’t find particularly interesting. Besides, Mary Lou, at whose apartment he eats dinner when his mother works overtime, is a great cook, and her lasagna (though the boy would never admit this, not even if someone tortured him using a cattle prod, like he once saw on Gunsmoke) is way better than anything the boy’s mother cooks. The boy’s mother, who is responsible for lunch, usually serves them canned soup and hot dogs wrapped in slices of white bread. Right after payday, they get real hot-dog buns, along with apples.
When the weather is good, the boy’s mother sends them out to play, warning them to stay where she can see them, to not venture off the sidewalk. Playing cops and robbers, the boy watches her watching them as she talks on the phone, smoking, although she’s told Mary Lou she really wants to quit. “Bang! Bang!” shouts Jimmy. “You’re dead.”
“Am not!”
“Are, too! I shot you in the head. Your brains are splattered all over the ground.”
On days when it’s too cold, they look at the books Mary Lou brings them from the school, claiming they’ve been discarded. “Yeah, right!” her mother says, though not in Mary Lou’s hearing. But she, too, likes the books. Sometimes between phone calls, she sits beside the boys on the couch and exclaims over things she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a lot of things. One day they go through a workbook titled Fun with Math, in which a chipmunk uses nuts to teach baby squirrels about addition and subtraction. The boy’s mother loses interest after two pages, Jimmy after five, but the boy is riveted. Inside his head, the numbers fall into place with little clicks. His body buzzes as though it is filled with electricity. The chipmunk fades away. He does not need it to understand what’s going on. He asks to keep the workbook, and that night, instead of listening to Lassie, he goes over multiplication and division. Though the terms are unfamiliar, within a few minutes he finds that he can work out the problems in his head long before he turns to the page where the chipmunk has written the answers on a blackboard hanging from a tree.
ON WEEKENDS THEY SLEEP LATE AND WHEN THEY WAKE, THE boy lying next to his mother in the bed in the back room, the two of them snuggled in a quilt with blue spouting whales on it, she reads to him. If they’ve had time to go to the library, she reads him new books. If not, as is more often the case, she reads to him from their dog-eared King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, a book that with its small print and no illustrations isn’t really for children. But he loves its complicated cat’s cradle of stories, loves how the familiar names roll off her tongue, Guinevere, Parsifal, Gawain, the sword Excalibur, the Questing Beast, the Chapel Dangerous, and, most of all, his own name. When she speaks it, she gives him a kiss.
Later they go to the grocery in Mary Lou’s car, which rattles excitedly when it hits a pothole and sometimes dies at a stoplight. On the way back they stop at the bakery outlet and the boy’s mother buys them powdered doughnuts. Jimmy eats his right away, but the boy takes tiny bites so the doughnut will last until they reach home. In the front seat, his mother and Mary Lou discuss the no-good men they’ve been dating, bursting into such loud laughter that the boy smiles in the back even though he doesn’t understand most of the things they say. He knows about dates, though. That’s when his mother wears a flared skirt and a sleeveless top (his favorite one is black, with lace over the chest). She sprays herself with perfume and swipes bright lipstick across her mouth and squeezes her feet into shoes with tall, dangerous heels, though
later she’ll complain that they hurt. But recently she hasn’t been wearing heels because her new boyfriend, Marvin, is shorter than her and sensitive about the issue.
After they laugh for a while, the women get quiet. They turn up the music and talk in whispers, but the boy knows they’re lamenting the fact that they aren’t getting any younger, and that it’s hard to find a man out there who wants a serious relationship with a woman who’s carrying baggage. The boy wants to ask what kind of baggage, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid he knows already.
The boy doesn’t mind so much when he’s dropped off before a date at Mary Lou’s. But when Mary Lou has a date, too, he and Jimmy are deposited at Mrs. Grogan’s apartment, and that’s not so good because Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have a TV, only a radio that she keeps covered with a lace doily. Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have teeth, either. The boys can’t understand much of what she says, and that makes her angry. Besides, her apartment smells like pee, but when he complains of this to his mother, she says, “We’ll all get old like her—if we’re unlucky enough to live that long!”
(The boy’s own mother will not be unlucky, not in that way. When the boy is in fourth grade, she will collapse at work one day, dying of an aneurysm before the ambulance can get her to a hospital. Later the boy will look up the word in the dictionary, but it will still baffle him.)