Mambo in Chinatown (16 page)

I didn’t know how Dennis and Grace were supposed to fall in love anyway, when they’d been seated at opposite ends of an enormous table. With all of the disapproval of my conversation with Dennis, I had no choice, so I turned to Winston. “How have you been?”

He was considering me. “You’ve grown up, Charlie.”

“What do you mean?”

“The way you look, the way you carry yourself. You’re so confident.”

I lowered my eyes to the table. “Well, thank you.”

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

I didn’t answer.

Winston bent in close to my ear and whispered, “I’m sorry. About everything.”

I carefully swallowed the dumpling in my mouth, then met his eyes. “It’s all right. I’m past that now.”

Half of his mouth pulled upward in that smile I’d loved. “I can see that. This new you is very attractive.”

“And that’s our problem right there.”

He looked puzzled. “What?”

“You like the new me but I liked the old you.” And with that, I turned away from him.

—

Pa caught up to me as I walked away from the restaurant. “Pa, you set me up!”

He spread his fingers. “You wouldn’t have gone otherwise.
Anyway, it was Godmother’s idea. She came to the noodle restaurant to ask my permission.” Of course. Why hadn’t I realized that before? She couldn’t have me, an unmarried girl, present at a matchmaking session without Pa’s permission, whether or not I was the intended victim.

Pa continued, “So I said it was all right as long as they invited Winston too.”

“Pa!” Sometimes I could just strangle him. “Did you know Dennis would be there too?”

“No, she didn’t tell me who the suitor would be. I recognized him at the restaurant, but I only got there a few minutes before you did. You seemed to like him better. He must come from a good family if the matchmaker recommended him. You pick.”

I breathed deeply to calm myself. “Pa, I want to be free to make my own choices.”

He blinked, confused. “But I’m letting you choose.”

“Between two guys that you know!” I wondered if a person could get arrested for yelling on the street in Chinatown. “Leave my love life alone. I don’t want anybody.”

Pa furrowed his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

I couldn’t trust myself to answer and stalked off down the street, fuming.

—

The next weekend, Lisa and I were making up our beds as usual. She stumbled as she bumped into our old coffee table, which had been in the middle of our room for as long as I could remember.

“Come on, help me set up the mattresses, Lisa.” I hated it when she tried to get out of helping me. She staggered over to the sofa and sat down abruptly on the floor. She had missed the couch.

I sped over to her. “What’s wrong?” I tried to help her up but it
was like she’d lost all connection to her legs. I managed to haul her onto the sofa and laid her on it.

“I can’t feel my feet,” she whispered.

“Pa!” I yelled. “Something’s wrong with Lisa!”

As Pa came running from the kitchen, Lisa said, “No, I’m all right.” Her calves started spasming, as if the muscles were out of control.

“She’s having a stroke.” I placed my fingers against my throat, hardly able to breathe. This was too similar to what had happened with Ma.

Lisa’s legs went limp. Gingerly, she lowered first one, then the other foot onto the ground. “No, I’m not. I’m just very tired.”

“You lost control of your legs.”

Pa was aghast, his skin ashen, the lines on his face deeper than I’d ever seen them.

“We need to call an ambulance.” I reached for the phone.

“No, do you remember what happened to Ma? My legs are fine now.” Even though Lisa was too young to remember Ma’s death herself, she was aware of all the bill collectors who had harassed us for years after Ma died.

I looked at Pa and he pressed his lips together. I understood. We wouldn’t be calling.

At the beginning of Ma’s illness, when she’d almost fainted from a severe migraine, Pa had called an ambulance and they’d brought her to the hospital. I remember that long night with them both away. Aunt Monica had come over to our apartment and stayed with me the whole night. She’d slept in the living room on the floor by my feet. When I cried, she’d held me until I fell asleep again. Often when I was irritated by her, I remembered that night.

Ma returned the next day, looking frail. They’d run tests on her
but they were still inconclusive. However, the bills were clear. We were pursued by creditors and bill collectors for years, until long after Ma was dead. In the end, Uncle Henry paid the rest of them off for us and refused any repayment. That was partly why Lisa had to keep working at his office, to try to pay back a small part of that debt, which both brothers understood, although no one would speak of it.

After that, when Ma’s symptoms returned, Pa was afraid to call the medical authorities. He had Uncle help us and when Uncle couldn’t, Pa went to the temples and the witches. He returned to our own kind of medicine, which he understood and trusted. In his eyes, the western doctors had failed to discover anything with their tests and had charged us a fortune on top of that, only burdening us with a huge debt. When Uncle Henry fed Ma cool, yin energy foods like pears, lotus seeds and white gourd to help rebalance her energy, Pa believed it helped her headaches. It didn’t stop her miscarriages, though, which continued until she finally had Lisa. But then she died a few years after that. None of us really knew what the cause of death was. In the months before her death, she’d started losing feeling in her legs, just like Lisa now. She’d been disoriented and dizzy, until she’d hardly been able to walk any more. Then she died from what seemed to be a massive stroke one night.

Most of Uncle Henry’s patients weren’t covered by insurance and neither were we, which was normal in Chinatown. I was pretty sure that most of the dancers weren’t insured either. It was too expensive. They paid their own bills and desperately tried not to be injured. Most of them were young enough that they didn’t have many physical problems. It seemed so wrong to me, now, that we couldn’t bring Lisa to the hospital for fear of the costs. But Pa was right that we couldn’t control which tests they would do in an emergency
room. Who knew how high the bill would be? If I was certain they could help cure Lisa, I would sell my soul in a second, but what if they sent her back to us with no answers and we were then up to our necks in debt with nothing to show for it? We’d be worse off than ever.

Still, we’d spent so much money on the Vision and traditional cures and Lisa was only getting worse. I was starting to doubt. What if she suffered from the same thing as Ma, whatever it was? “Pa, we need to bring her to a specialist who can figure out what’s wrong. Maybe a neurologist.”

“They won’t find anything. They’ll just take our money.” Pa ran his hands, coarse from all his manual labor, over his face.

—

That afternoon, Lisa and I sat on the couch in the apartment waiting for the Vision to come, while Pa set tea in the kitchen. This was supposed to be a major emergency ritual.

Lisa had panic in her eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Maybe we could make a run for it.”

My eyes trailed to the door. I was afraid of that old witch messing around with Lisa, but I was willing to try it if she might help. “Pa’s already agreed to hire her, so if she comes and you’re not here, he’s going to pay her anyway. That’s the way he is.”

“Do you think she’s going to make me eat something?”

“Could be. But I think she’s more about spells and incense and that kind of thing.”

Lisa shivered and looked like she was going to cry. “I hope they don’t move on to Uncle Henry’s type of treatments next. I hate taking medicine or being poked with a needle.”

I hugged her. “Hey, I thought you wanted to be a doctor.”

“I want to be the one doing the poking.”

“It’s going to be okay, Lisa. Whatever it is, it’ll work out.”

She started to sniffle for real. “No, Charlie, it’ll never be all right again.”

I pulled away and looked at her. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.” She avoided my eyes. “I’m just tired and scared and I don’t want to have all these problems. I wish I could go away and everything would be gone.” There was something new in her eyes, a resentment I’d never seen before. “You’re fortunate, Charlie. Lucky you don’t have to be me.”

I felt a spark of anger. “You’ve always been the pretty one, the smart one, the one who was good at everything, while I was the inept, stupid one. Now it’s my turn.” I was shocked by my own words but somehow also couldn’t stop. “I’m allowed to be decent at something too.”

“And because you were so bad at everything, you always got out of things. I was the one who was stuck at Uncle’s.”

“You’re jealous.” It had never occurred to me that Lisa might be resentful of the changes in my life. Were her problems a way of calling attention to herself? “All our lives, you’ve been the one who was praised by Pa, Aunt and Uncle, the teachers, by every single person we knew.”

Her eyes blazed. “A whole lot of good that did me. You had an easy way out. If you didn’t like something, you just became too clumsy to do it.”

“That is unfair!” I wanted to smack her. “I was desperate to stay at the dance studio but I still got fired as a receptionist. I was just lucky they saw potential in me as a dancer instead.”

“Well, maybe you should have tried harder. Goodness knows, what you had to do at all your jobs wasn’t that difficult.”

I gaped. Lisa had never turned on me like this. Perhaps because of the eleven-year age difference between us, we’d hardly ever squabbled like other siblings. “Who are you? Maybe something truly is wrong with you.” The moment I said it, I saw the hurt cross her face and regretted it. I shut my mouth before more words came out.

Lisa flung herself onto the sofa so that her back was to me and buried her face against the material. I moved stiffly onto the other chair, looking at anything but her. We stayed that way until the Vision of the Left Eye arrived.

—

Pa opened the door for her. Then Lisa and I both stood up and said, “Mrs. Purity.”

I was surprised she was alone, unaccompanied by Todd. The Vision went with us into the kitchen and lit all of the altars. She’d brought oranges and she set these up by Ma’s altar. She took out the sacred papers we would burn while praying, a red envelope and a piece of rock candy.

She said to Pa, “Would you make a pot of plain white rice?”

Then while he was busy, she went back out to the living room and sat next to Lisa. Lisa shrank away from her. Despite our earlier fight, I felt sorry for my sister. The witch took Lisa’s hands in hers. The Vision closed one eye and the other one stayed open, wandering far to the left.

I hovered over Lisa protectively, close enough that I could smell the witch’s scent of hair wax and sweat. Pa came out of the kitchen and also stood behind Lisa, listening.

The Vision began to speak. “She is infected by an evil spirit.”

Lisa gave a little gasp and I felt myself grow pale.

The witch continued, “The spirit has taken hold and must be removed. Today, we will start the process. This is the reason for the
nightmares. It is a hungry ghost, one that can never be satisfied no matter how much it consumes. If you leave it, it will take all of her and leave a shell in its place.”

I didn’t know what to believe. This was terrifying yet also sounded like something out of a story. Pa had wrapped his arms around himself, as if he were cold. Although the witch’s earlier Release of Life ritual had seemed to help Lisa, I didn’t like her scaring my sister now.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

The witch didn’t bother to answer me, though Lisa gave me a grateful look.

I pressed on. “How did you know which items to bring before you even had a chance to examine Lisa?”

“That is standard equipment for those in our trade.” The Vision’s normal eye glowered at me. “At home, I already made contact with the spirit world and I suspected. Now that I have touched her, I am sure. Not that I need to explain myself to a young girl like you. Put a bowl of plain white rice in front of the altar. Place a pair of chopsticks next to it.”

Pa went into the kitchen to do as she said. The Vision turned to Lisa. “Do you have something you wear regularly?”

Lisa went and found the worn blue T-shirt she always slept in. The Vision took it and went into the kitchen while we trailed after her. The witch paused in front of the altars with the shirt in her hands and bowed to Ma and our ancestors. She turned and gestured to the three of us so that we all stood behind her and bowed as well. Then she took the long sacred red-and-green papers that we burned for the ancestors and bowed again.

She brought Lisa forward and held her hand over Lisa’s head. The Vision closed her eyes, then took Lisa by the shoulders and forced her to her knees on the bare vinyl floor. Lisa sneaked a look at me,
trembling. I tightened my lips. If the witch hurt my sister, I was going to slug her. But all she did was indicate that Lisa should bow deeply, the way we did at temple to the gods. Lisa did it three times. Then the Vision had Lisa rise and she handed her the pair of chopsticks and the bowl that held the rice.

“Eat a piece,” the Vision said.

Lisa did.

Then the witch emptied the rest of the rice into the trash. She gave Lisa her shirt, the piece of rock candy, the red envelope, the bowl and chopsticks.

“Keep the bowl and chopsticks safe. Put the red envelope underneath your pillow. Also keep the T-shirt near your bed.”

“She sleeps in it,” Pa said.

“That is even better. It will protect her.”

“Are we allowed to wash it?” I asked.

Pa pinched the bridge of his nose.

“What? I know it’s supposed to be a magical item now that you’ve blessed it, but it’ll get dirty if she wears it. Will the magic wash off?”

“It is not magic,” the witch said, gritting her little square teeth. “It is power, my power. And it will not wash away.” With that, she swept out of the room. We heard the door slam as she left.

I cast my eyes downward, ashamed. “I didn’t mean to insult her, Pa.”