Sitting at the rear table, Lila had felt more and more uncomfortable as Hannie talked about getting old.
“There must be some way to stop it,” she said.
It was a foolish remark, but Hannie didn’t laugh. She nodded and bit a sugar cube in half, keeping one half between her thumb and forefinger, the other in her cheek to dissolve.
“There is a way,” she told Lila. The fortune-teller’s eyes were small, and a little too bright, so that people sometimes had to look away from her for no reason at all. “But I wouldn’t wish it on you.”
Lila got it into her head that Hannie knew some secret way to stay young, and already, at eighteen, she knew that certain men, like Stephen, couldn’t tolerate a woman’s growing old. Lila imagined that the secret was a lotion, a cream made of roses and diluted water and fruit, or a powder you dusted over each eyelid before you went to sleep. For days she pestered Hannie; she swore she wouldn’t tell another soul. Hannie avoided answering; instead she told Lila the ingredients of the beauty treatments women in her village had sworn by: egg whites left on your face for one hour, cinnamon under your pillow, tea leaves mixed into your shampoo. But none of this was what Lila wanted, and she brought it up again and again, until Hannie finally gave in.
“When I was a child,” Hannie told her, “there was a woman who was so beautiful that ravens used to come to her window just to see her. At night when she went inside the moon grew duller, the frogs who sat on her front porch never made bellowing noises like the ones by the river—they sat there silently, as though they were waiting for a glimpse of her feet underneath the crack of the door. Her husband adored her, her children refused to let go of her skirts because she smelled like lavender and sweet butter. She was so beautiful that no one was jealous of her, and others enjoyed her good fortune as if it were their own.
“But then something went wrong. She cried all day and all night, there were dark circles around her eyes and her skin looked like ashes in the chimney. This is what happened: She had found some gray hairs, and that had caused her to look even closer. When she borrowed a mirror from her mother-in-law she saw wrinkles that she had never noticed before, she saw that she had begun to grow old. She wrapped herself in a quilt and slept on the wooden floor, weeping in her sleep. Her children grew thin, her husband began to lose his hair. And then, one day, she suddenly seemed herself again, only now she smiled shyly, as though she had a secret. Everyone in the village watched carefully, everyone knew that something was about to happen, and sure enough, on their way to the schoolhouse one morning, the children found her body hanging from a pine tree. She had hung herself with a white silk scarf, the same scarf she had worn at her wedding. They buried her the very same day, and from then on she was talked about so much that everyone could still see her: all they had to do was close their eyes. In time her husband came out of mourning, her children recalled her tenderly, the men in the village talked about her each time they sat down by the river and got drunk. All the women in the village knew that she had managed to stay beautiful—she had simply paid a price she would have had to pay anyway, a little later on when her skin was all wrinkled and her hair so white you couldn’t see her when she bent over in the snow. And all the young women envied her courage, but the old women looked at each other and knew her for the fool that she was.”
Lila knew it was true—her daughter was the only one who didn’t get lost in her confusion of time. The baby was always the same, quietly sitting on Lila’s lap out in the garden, or waiting to be picked up from her bed in the dresser drawer. But the visions drained Lila’s energy, and she went to her daughter less and less often. Sometimes she simply pulled a chair up beside the dresser and watched her daughter sleep. All day long she sat on a hardbacked chair, guarding her daughter, and when she went to sleep her dreams were murky so that in the morning she could never remember them.
Each day she was more on edge, and one evening in March, when the air was light and clean and the acacia tree in their neighbor’s yard had begun to flower, Lila suddenly couldn’t stand to have another dinner alone. She knew Richard wouldn’t be back from the shop until sometime after eight, and so she took a tray out to the table on the patio. She was wearing corduroy slacks and one of Richard’s wool sweaters; the evening wasn’t very cool but she began to feel a chill. At first she thought it was the kind of coldness that accompanied a vision, but it was different, it was more like a steel knife that cut down her left side, from her fingertips to her chest. For some reason she couldn’t smell the lemon tree, she couldn’t hear jets when they passed overhead.
She was at the table, the tray of cottage cheese and fruit and iced tea right in front of her, when she began to feel paralyzed. She told herself that all she had to do was move and she’d be all right. But once she was back inside the house, it was worse. Her blood was ice. She went to the phone in the kitchen to call Richard at the shop, but she couldn’t remember the number she had called a thousand times before. As she stood there Lila could swear that it was August, the air was so warm and still. She could hear someone down the hallway stir in bed. It was Janet Ross—she couldn’t sleep so she got out of bed and went to the closet for her robe as the birds out on the lawn began to sing.
Lila reached up and dialed for the operator.
“I need to reach my husband,” she said as soon as the operator answered.
“Can’t you dial him directly?” the operator said.
“I can’t,” Lila said.
“Tell me his number,” the operator said.
But that was just it—she couldn’t remember.
Outside, the birds were making a terrible racket. Lila knew that any second Janet Ross would come to the nursery, so she crouched down, next to the crib. At first she thought her daughter was sleeping, but then she saw that the baby’s eyes were open. Lila leaned her face against the wooden slats of the crib, and when her daughter exhaled, Lila swallowed it in. The taste was so sweet that she knew it was a last breath. As she crouched by the crib Lila heard her baby’s heart stop. Just like that, on a morning when people all over East China were sleeping beside their husbands or wives, her daughter’s heart stopped beating.
The curtains in the nursery were drawn, but anyone could tell it would be an ideal day, it had been that kind of summer. Eighty-two, and cooler in the shade. Eighty-two, and Lila was freezing. Her daughter’s arms trembled slightly and rustled the crib sheet, and then, much too quickly, her body grew heavy as a stone, and pale as the sky in early morning. Lila cried out only once, but that one cry could break glass, it could break through time itself.
“Oh, please,” Lila said. She was holding on to the phone receiver so tightly that her fingers were numb.
The operator recited Lila’s number and asked for her address. But Lila couldn’t answer, and by the time the operator had looked up the address herself, Lila had dropped the receiver on the floor. Everything was failing her now—her lungs, her eyes, her ears. She ran back out to the garden, desperate for air. Snails had begun to wind their way across the patio, but Lila couldn’t see them; she stumbled and stepped on several and their shells broke beneath her feet. Her headache had taken over; it shattered into pieces that cut into her temples. She could feel herself falling, and although she had always expected herself to give in gracefully, she tried to hold on.
That evening was the last Lamaze class. They’d finished learning breathing techniques and tonight they were seeing a film. As soon as the lights were turned out and the credits came on the screen, Rae closed her eyes. Richard reached over and held her hand, but neither of them could stand to watch as the husband and wife on screen welcomed their infant son.
Later, as they walked out to their cars in the parking lot, Rae looked through her bag and couldn’t find her keys. “Oh, shit,” she said, and she sat down on the curb, disgusted.
Richard sat down next to her. “You don’t really want me to be your labor coach, do you?” he said.
“Sure I do,” Rae said
, but she didn’t look at him. She found her keys at the bottom of her bag and nervously swung them in a circle until the jangling made Richard put his hand on hers to stop it.
“Headache,” he explained. “I can tell you’d rather have Lila.”
“Well, she obviously wouldn’t rather do it, so I appreciate the fact that you will.”
“You could go talk to her,” Richard said.
Rae looked over at him.
“She needs somebody and it sure isn’t me,” Richard said.
“I’ve already been to talk to her,” Rae admitted. “She wouldn’t open the door.”
Richard got up and pulled Rae to her feet. It was just getting dark and the rest of the people in their Lamaze class were already on their way home to supper.
“I just want you to know I’m not insulted,” Richard said.
“You’ve got nothing to be insulted about,” Rae told him. But when he looked at her she had to laugh. “All right,” Rae said, “maybe I would rather have another woman there with me.”
But that wasn’t the only reason, and she knew it. She still had the feeling that without Lila there she’d have nothing but bad luck. On her way home she drove past Three Sisters Street; she circled around and drove past again, and when she finally pulled over and parked she was surprised to find that her heart was beating fast.
When no one answered the door right away, Rae considered leaving. She leaned over to the window; with her face pressed against the glass she could see through the house to the kitchen—the back door was ajar. There was already the sound of a siren somewhere close by when Rae walked around to the garden, although the ambulance didn’t arrive until Rae had covered Lila with her sweater and knelt down beside her. She screamed to the attendants when she heard them bang on the front door; they rushed the stretcher to the back of the house and found Rae kneeling over Lila, who was sprawled on the cold patio, unconscious. As the attendants lifted Lila they couldn’t help but notice the gashes in the slate next to her, left by her fingernails when she tried so hard to hold on. And although it grew less noticeable with time, from that day onward the slate was scarred by fine lines, like the marks you find on wrists that never quite heal.
It wasn’t until three days later that Lila was aware of anything, and then it was only a dream. She was in a place where the sunlight was blinding and tropical. The sky itself seemed white, and it took a while before she realized that it wasn’t the sky at all but a thousand snowy egrets. The landscape was flat, and there were enormous trees that dripped moss into a bayou. In the water there were huge flowers, each one larger than the largest sunflower. And even while she was dreaming Lila knew that there was no place on earth where egrets fly straight toward the sun, nowhere where the water in a bayou is turquoise, where tropical flowers are as cold and as white as milk.
It occurred to Lila that she might be dying. She had always thought death would come for her in the form of a man dressed in black silk. He would be waiting in an alley on an icy night, lanterns would burn, and wolves would howl so horribly that the sound would send shivers down the spines of children as they tossed in their sleep. It seemed impossible for the end to happen here, in this tropical place. The only escape was to wake up, and she seemed to be stuck here, in this dream. When she did finally manage to wake up it was agonizingly slow. The bayou dried up and receded by inches, leaving behind a gray tiled floor that seemed to have ripples in it, perhaps because she looked at it through the curtain of an oxygen tent.
Richard had sat at her bedside for three days, waiting for her to die and blaming himself. At the end of the third day he seemed to have shrunk a little—he was wearing the same clothes, but they were all too loose for him now. Rae came to the hospital after work and relieved him so that he could go home and shower and sleep for a few hours on something other than a hardbacked chair. She had been there for nearly two hours when she heard the sound of something moving against the bedsheets—it was Lila, struggling to lift her arm under the weight of the IV. Rae leaned closer to the bed, and as soon as Lila opened her eyes Rae rang the buzzer on the wall.
“Don’t call for the damned doctor,” Lila said, but her voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper and Rae couldn’t hear her through the oxygen tent.
“She’s awake,” Rae called shrilly when the nurse responded through the intercom.
Lila tapped on the oxygen tent with one finger and Rae leaned toward her.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Lila said. “Don’t call the damned doctor.”
“You don’t know how worried we were,” Rae said.
“Nobody has to worry about me,” Lila said, but her voice betrayed her, and when Rae pressed her hand against the plastic tent, Lila didn’t move her hand away.
While Lila was being examined, Rae went out to the hallway of the Intensive Care Unit and telephoned Richard. He was there in less than twenty minutes, and he told Rae it was all right for her to leave. Lila’s doctors cornered him in the hallway. They advised him that even though Lila’s heart attack had been mild, there was always the chance of a second, more brutal attack. Richard nodded when they told him her recovery might be slow; he really tried to listen, but all he wanted was to see her. Although when he finally went into her room he was suddenly shy, a twenty-year-old all over again. He stood near the door, ready to back out into the hallway.
“If you don’t want me here, I’ll understand,” he told Lila. His voice sounded hoarse, even after he’d cleared his throat. “Maybe you don’t want me to be your husband any more.”
For the first time Lila realized that she was in pain. She pushed the oxygen tent away and signaled for him to come closer. Richard stood by the side of the bed.
“I’ve been going crazy,” he said.
While Lila was unconscious Rae had brought her a potted blue hyacinth. In the overheated hospital room its scent was hypnotic—you could almost imagine yourself on the East China Highway during that one week in April when everything suddenly began to bloom.
“They’re going to release you at the end of the week,” Richard said. He still could not look anywhere but the floor. Yesterday he had forgotten to call his father, and when it was midnight in New York Jason Grey had phoned him. As soon as he’d heard his father’s voice he’d started to weep, and ever since then he couldn’t seem to control himself.
“I’m glad my doctor is talking to someone,” Lila said. “He hasn’t told me a thing.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” Richard said.
When neither of them spoke they could hear the/click of the IV as glucose dripped into Lila’s vein. Lila tried to think about her daughter, left alone for days in the dresser drawer, but all she could see was that flat, white landscape of her dreams. It was so lonely there you could die of it, it made you want to turn and throw your arms around whoever it was you loved best.
Richard pulled up a chair and sat close to the bed.
“We can start over,” he said.
Lila shook her head.
“Sure we can,” Richard told her. “Even people who get divorced get back together sometimes, and we never even got divorced.”
“Maybe we should,” Lila said. “Maybe that’s the answer.”
Richard leaned toward her. “Is that what you want?” he asked. “A divorce?”
On the day he picked up that bucket of water he did it so easily, as if it was nothing more than a china cup. She knew she shouldn’t have stood there for as long as she did, she shouldn’t have looked at him twice.
“Why do you keep asking me such stupid questions?” Lila said.
Richard knew that it was now all right for him to lean over and take her hand. “I’ll come and get you Friday,” Richard said. “I’ll close the shop and take you home.”
The pillow under Lila’s head was so soft it made her sleepy. As soon as Richard left she planned to close her eyes, she might even be able to sleep for an hour before they brought her dinner in on a tray. As she fell asleep she’d tell herself t
hat she’d given in because he’d just badger her anyway until she agreed. But she had already begun to count the days until Friday, and really, after all these years together, she just couldn’t imagine going home without him.
In the twenties, when the block was owned by the Three Sisters, pelicans nested on the roof and foxes came to sleep on the veranda at midday. The chaparral in the foothills was thick with manzanitas and wild morning glories. The aqueducts from Owens Valley had been completed, but you could still feel the desert every time you walked out your front door. Everyone was thirsty all the time—you could finish a pitcher of water and still have the urge for more, you just couldn’t get enough to drink.
The Sisters regretted coming to California the instant they stepped off the train. The smell of citrus groves and the hollow clanking of oil riggings just made them more homesick. At night they dreamed of New Jersey and cried in their sleep. One sister had been persuaded to leave her fiance behind, the other two had both passed thirty and they’d assumed they had nothing more to lose. But the odd afternoon light coming in through the windows was enough to frighten them so badly that they lost their voices from two until suppertime. Every day the real-estate boom grew closer to their estate; they could hear cottonwoods and eucalyptus being chopped down, and all night long, workmen hammered out the wood frames of new bungalows. In time the Sisters became fiercely protective of their property and they built an iron fence whose gate had only three keys. But they could never tolerate the luxury of their house, and the fact that the brother who had brought them out to California had designed it only made them more bitter. They fired the gardeners, drained the turquoise-colored cement fountain, sold the pair of screaming peacocks at auction. Most of the furniture was taken away in huge wagons, and the screening room was torn down before they had viewed even one of their brother’s pictures. After a while their brother stopped inviting them to parties at his own house up in the hills. Instead he sent them handwritten notes once a month, and although he received polite replies he soon gave up altogether. In the end the Sisters rarely left the confines of their property.