“I think she’s a bit tired, which is natural for the first day back. But I’m a little concerned that she’s so quiet. She didn’t say a word all day, not even ouch.”
“She never complain,” LuLing agreed.
“It may not be a problem, but we’ll need to watch if this continues.”
“No problem,” LuLing assured her. “She no problem.”
“You must encourage her to talk, Mrs. Young. I don’t want this to turn into a problem.”
“No problem!” her mother reiterated.
“Make her say ‘hamburger’ before letting her eat a hamburger. Make her say ‘cookie’ before she gets a cookie.”
That night LuLing took the teacher’s advice literally: she served hamburger, which she had never done. LuLing did not cook or eat beef of any kind. It disgusted her, reminded her of scarred flesh. Yet now, for her daughter’s sake, she put an unadorned patty in front of Ruth, who was thrilled to see her mother had actually made American food for once.
“Hambugga? You say ‘hambugga,’ then eat.”
Ruth was tempted to speak, but she was afraid to break the spell. One word and all the good things in her life would vanish. She shook her head. LuLing encouraged her until the hamburger’s rivulets of fat had congealed into ugly white pools. She put the patty in the fridge, then served Ruth a bowl of steaming rice porridge, which she said was better for her health anyway.
After dinner, LuLing cleared the dining table and started to work. She laid out ink, brushes, and a roll of paper. With quick and perfect strokes, she wrote large Chinese characters: “Going Out of Business. Last few days! No offer refused!” She set the banner aside to dry, then cut a new length of paper.
Ruth, who was watching television, noticed after a while that her mother was staring at her. “Why you not do study?” LuLing asked. She had made Ruth practice reading and writing since kindergarten, to help her be “one jump ahead.”
Ruth held up her broken right arm in its cast.
“Come sit here,” her mother said in Chinese.
Ruth slowly stood up. Uh-oh. Her mother was back to her old ways.
“Now hold this.” LuLing placed a brush in Ruth’s left hand. “Write your name.” Her first attempts were clumsy, the R almost unrecognizable, the hump of the h veering off the paper like an out-of-control bicycle. She giggled.
“Hold the brush straight up,” her mother instructed, “not at a slant. Use a light touch, like this.”
The next results were better, but they had taken up a whole length of paper.
“Now try to write smaller.” But the letters looked like blotches made by an ink-soaked fly twirling on its back. When it was finally time for bed, the practice session had consumed nearly twenty sheets of paper, both front and back. This was a sign of success as well as extravagance. LuLing never wasted anything. She gathered the used sheets, stacked them, and set them in a corner of the room. Ruth knew she would use them later, as practice sheets for her own calligraphy, as blotters for spills, as bundled-up hot pads for pans.
The following evening, after dinner, LuLing presented Ruth with a large tea tray filled with smooth wet sand gathered from the playground at school. “Here,” she said, “you practice, use this.” She held a chopstick in her left hand, then scratched the word “study” on the miniature beach. When she finished, she swept the sand clean and smooth with the long end of the chopstick. Ruth followed suit and found that it was easier to write this way, also fun. The sand-and-chopstick method did not require the delicate, light-handed technique of the brush. She could apply a force that steadied her. She wrote her name. Neat! It was like playing with the Etch-A-Sketch that her cousin Billy received last Christmas.
LuLing went to the refrigerator and brought out the cold beef patty. “Tomorrow what you want eat?”
And Ruth scratched back: B-U-R-G-R.
LuLing laughed. “Hah! So now you can talk back this way!”
The next day, LuLing brought the tea tray to school and filled it with sand from the same part of the schoolyard where Ruth had broken her arm. Miss Sondegard agreed to let Ruth answer questions this way. And when Ruth raised her hand during an arithmetic drill and scrawled “7,” all the other kids jumped out of their chairs to look. Soon they were clamoring that they too wanted to do sand-writing. At recess, Ruth was very popular. She heard them fussing over her. “Let me try!” “Me, me! She said I could!” “You gotta use your left hand, or it’s cheating!” “Ruth, you show Tommy how to do it. He’s so dumb.”
They returned the chopstick to Ruth. And Ruth wrote quickly and easily the answers to their questions: Does your arm hurt? A little. Can I touch your cast? Yes. Does Ricky love Betsy? Yes. Will I get a new bike for my birthday? Yes.
They treated her as though she were Helen Keller, a genius who didn’t let injury keep her from showing how smart she was. Like Helen Keller, she simply had to work harder, and perhaps this was what made her smarter, the effort and others’ admiring that. Even at home, her mother would ask her, “What you think?” as if Ruth would know, just because she had to write the answers to her questions in sand.
“How does the bean curd dish taste?” LuLing asked one night.
And Ruth etched: Salty, She had never said anything bad about her mother’s cooking before, but that was what her mother always said to criticize her own food.
“I thought so too,” her mother answered.
This was amazing! Soon her mother was asking her opinion on all kinds of matters.
“We go shop dinner now or go later?” Later.
“What about stock market? I invest, you think I get lucky?” Lucky.
“You like this dress?” No, ugly. Ruth had never experienced such power with words.
Her mother frowned, then murmured in Mandarin. “Your father loved this old dress, and now I can never throw it away.” She became misty-eyed. She sighed, then said in English: “You think you daddy miss me?”
Ruth wrote Yes right away. Her mother beamed. And then Ruth had an idea. She had always wanted a little dog. Now was the time to ask for one. She scratched in the sand: Doggie.
Her mother gasped. She stared at the words and shook her head in disbelief. Oh well, Ruth thought, that was one wish she was not going to get. But then her mother began to whimper, “Doggie, doggie,” in Chinese. She jumped up and her chest heaved. “Precious Auntie,” LuLing cried, “you’ve come back. This is your Doggie. Do you forgive me?”
Ruth put down the chopstick.
LuLing was now sobbing. “Precious Auntie, oh Precious Auntie! I wish you never died! It was all my fault. If I could change fate, I would rather kill myself than suffer without you… .”
Oh, no. Ruth knew what this was. Her mother sometimes talked about this Precious Auntie ghost who lived in the air, a lady who had not behaved and who wound up living at the End of the World. That was where all bad people went: a bottomless pit where no one would ever find them, and there they would be stuck, wandering with their hair hanging to their toes, wet and bloody.
“Please let me know you are not mad at me,” her mother went on. “Give me a sign. I have tried to tell you how sorry I am, but I don’t know if you’ve heard. Can you hear me? When did you come to America?”
Ruth sat still, unable to move. She wanted to go back to talking about food and clothes.
Her mother put the chopstick in Ruth’s hand. “Here, do this. Close your eyes, turn your face to heaven, and speak to her. Wait for her answer, then write it down. Hurry, close your eyes.”
Ruth squeezed her eyes shut. She saw the lady with hair to her toes.
She heard her mother speak again in polite Chinese: “Precious Auntie, I did not mean what I said before you died. And after you died, I tried to find your body.”
Ruth’s eyes flew open. In her imagination, the long-haired ghost was walking in circles.
“I went down into the ravine. I looked and looked. Oh, I was crazy with grief. If only I had found you, I would have taken your b
ones to the cave and given you a proper burial.”
Ruth felt something touch her shoulder, and she jumped. “Ask her if she understood everything I just said,” LuLing ordered. “Ask her if my luck has changed. Is the curse over? Are we safe? Write down her answer.”
What curse? Ruth now stared at the sand, half believing the dead woman’s face would appear in a pool of blood. What answer did her mother want? Did Yes mean the curse was gone? Or that it was still there? She put the chopstick in the sand, and not knowing what to write, she drew a line and another below that. She drew two more lines and made a square.
“Mouth!” her mother cried, tracing over the square. “That’s the character for ‘mouth’!” She stared at Ruth. “You wrote that and you don’t even know how to write Chinese! Did you feel Precious Auntie guiding your hand? What did it feel like? Tell me.”
Ruth shook her head. What was happening? She wanted to cry but didn’t dare. She wasn’t supposed to be able to make a sound.
“Precious Auntie, thank you for helping my daughter. Forgive me that she speaks only English. It must be hard for you to communicate through her this way. But now I know that you can hear me. And you know what I’m saying, that I wish I could take your bones to the Mouth of the Mountain, to the Monkey’s Jaw. I’ve never forgotten. As soon as I can go to China, I will finish my duty. Thank you for reminding me.”
Ruth wondered what she had written. How could a square mean all that? Was there really a ghost in the room? What was in her hand and the chopstick? Why was her hand shaking?
“Since I may not be able to go back to China for a long time,” LuLing continued, “I hope you will still forgive me. Please know that my life has been miserable ever since you left me. That is why I ask you to take my life, but to spare my daughter if the curse cannot be changed. I know her recent accident was a warning.”
Ruth dropped the chopstick. The lady with bloody hair was trying to kill her! So it was true, that day at the playground, she almost died. She had thought so, and it was true.
LuLing retrieved the chopstick and tried to put it in Ruth’s hand. But Ruth balled her fist. She pushed the sand tray away. Her mother pushed it back and kept babbling nonsense: “I’m so happy you’ve finally found me. I’ve been waiting for so many years. Now we can talk to each other. Every day you can guide me. Every day you can tell me how to conduct my life in the way I should.”
LuLing turned to Ruth. “Ask her to come every day.” Ruth shook her head. She tried to slide off her chair. “Ask,” LuLing insisted, and tapped the table in front of the tray. And then Ruth finally found her voice.
“No,” she said out loud. “I can’t.”
“Wah! Now you can talk again.” Her mother had switched to English. “Precious Auntie cure you?”
Ruth nodded. “That mean curse gone?”
“Yes, but she says she has to go back now. And she said I need to rest.” “She forgive me? She—”
“She said everything will be all right. Everything. All right? You’re not supposed to worry anymore.” Her mother sobbed with relief.
As Ruth drove her mother home after dinner, she marveled at the worries she had had at such an early age. But that was nothing compared with what most children had to go through these days. An unhappy mother? That was a piece of cake next to guns and gangs and sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention the things parents had to be concerned about: pedophiles on the Web, designer drugs like ecstasy, school shootings, anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation, the ozone layer, superbacteria. Ruth counted these automatically on her hand, and this reminded her she had one more task to do before the end of the day: call Miriam about letting the girls come to the reunion dinner.
She glanced at her watch. It was almost nine, an iffy time to telephone people who were not close friends. True, she and Miriam were bound by the closest of reasons, the girls and their father. But they treated each other with the politeness of strangers. She often ran into Miriam at dropoff and pick-up points for the girls, at school athletic events, and once she’d seen her in the emergency room, where Ruth had taken Dory when she broke her ankle. She and Miriam made small talk about recent illnesses, bad weather, and traffic jams. If it weren’t for the circumstances, they might have enjoyed each other’s company. Miriam was clever, funny, and opinionated, and Ruth liked these qualities. But it bothered Ruth when Miriam made passing remarks about intimacies she had shared with Art when they were married: the funny time they had on a trip to Italy, a mole on his back that had to be checked for melanoma, his love of massage. For Art’s birthday the year before, Miriam had given him a certificate for two sessions with her favorite massage therapist, a gift Ruth thought inappropriately personal. “Do you still get that mole checked every year?” Miriam asked Art on another occasion, and Ruth pretended not to hear, all the while imagining what they had been like together when they were younger and in love, and she still cared deeply enough to notice the slightest change in the size of a mole. She pictured them lazing about in a Tuscan villa with a bedroom window that overlooked rolling hills of orchards, giggling and naming moles on each other’s naked backs as if they were constellations. She could see it: the two of them massaging olive oil into their thighs with long-reaching strokes. Art once tried that on her, and Ruth figured he must have learned the maneuver from someone. Whenever he tried to massage her thighs, though, it made her tense. With massage, she just couldn’t relax. She felt she was being tickled, pushed out of control, then felt claustrophobic, panicky enough to want to leap up and run.
She never told Art about the panic; she said only that with her, massage was a waste of time and money. And although she was curious about Art’s sex life with Miriam and other women, she never asked what he had done in bed with his former lovers. And he did not ask about hers. It shocked her that Wendy badgered Joe to give her explicit details about his past escapades in beds and on beaches, as well as tell her his precise feelings when he first slept with her. “And he tells you whatever you ask?” Ruth said.
“He states his name, birthdate, and Social Security number. And then I beat him up until he tells me.”
“Then you’re happy?”
“I’m pissed!”
“So why do you ask?”
“It’s like part of me thinks everything about him is mine, his feelings, his fantasies. I know that’s not right, but emotionally that’s how I feel. His past is my past, it belongs to me. Shit, if I could find his childhood toy box I’d want to look inside that and say, ‘Mine.’ I’d want to see what girlie magazines he hid under the mattress and pulled out to masturbate to.”
Ruth laughed out loud when Wendy said that, but inside she was uncomfortable. Did most women ask men those kinds of questions? Had Miriam asked Art things like these? Did more of Art’s past belong to Miriam than it did to her?
Her mother’s voice startled her. “So how Fu-Fu do?”
Not again. Ruth took a deep breath. “Fu-Fu’s fine,” she said this time.
“Really?” LuLing said. “That cat old. You lucky she not dead yet.”
Ruth was so surprised she snorted in laughter. This was like the torment of being tickled. She couldn’t stand it, but she could not stop her reflex to laugh out loud. Tears stung her eyes and she was glad for the darkness of the car.
“Why you laugh?” LuLing scolded. “I not kidding. And don’t let dog in backyard. I know someone do this. Now cat dead!”
“You’re right,” Ruth answered, trying to keep her mind on the road ahead. “I’ll be more careful.”
FOUR
On the night of the Full Moon Festival, the Fountain Court restaurant was jammed with a line flowing out the door like a dragon’s tail. Art and Ruth squeezed through the crowd. “Excuse us. We have reservations.”
Inside, the dining room roared with the conversations of a hundred happy people. Children used chopsticks to play percussion on teacups and water glasses. The waiter who led Ruth and Art to their tables had to shout above the clatter
of plates being delivered and taken away. As Ruth followed, she inhaled the mingled fragrances of dozens of entrees. At least the food would be good tonight.
Ruth had picked Fountain Court because it was one of the few restaurants where her mother had not questioned the preparation of the dishes, the attitude of the waiters, or the cleanliness of the bowls. Originally Ruth had made reservations for two tables, seating for her side of the family and friends, as well as the two girls and Art’s parents, who were visiting from New Jersey. Those she had not counted on were Art’s ex-wife Miriam, her husband Stephen, and their two little boys, Andy and Beauregard. Miriam had called Art the week before with a request.
When Ruth learned what the request was, she balked.
“There isn’t room for four more people.”
“You know Miriam,” Art said. “She doesn’t accept no as an answer to anything. Besides, it’s the only chance my folks will have to see her before they leave for Carmel.”
“So where are they going to sit? At another table?”
“We can always squeeze in more chairs,” Art countered. “It’s just a dinner.”
To Ruth, this particular gathering was not “just a dinner.” It was their Chinese thanksgiving, the reunion that she was hosting for the first time. She had given much thought to setting it up, what it should mean, what family meant, not just blood relatives but also those who were united by the past and would remain together over the years, people she was grateful to have in her life. She wanted to thank all the celebrants for their contribution to her feeling of family. Miriam would be a reminder that the past was not always good and the future was uncertain. But to say all this would sound petty to Art, and Fia and Dory would think she was being mean.
Without more disagreement, Ruth made the last-minute changes: Called the restaurant to change the head count. Revised the seating plan. Ordered more dishes for two adults and two children who didn’t like Chinese food all that much. She suspected that Fia’s and Dory’s fussiness over unfamiliar food came from their mother.