The Love Wife (16 page)

People stopped to stare, at the accident and at us. I caught an occasional Mandarin sentence through my open window.

Sile ren ma?
—Did anyone die?

An argument began.

I jiggled Wendy, looking for another pacifier. How fat she was! What with the extra creases on her upper and lower arms, she looked to have three elbows on each arm. And the texture of that fat—so silken.

I rolled my window up and told Lizzy to do the same.

— Also the front windows, I said. And lock the doors, please.

I worried she was going to complain that it was too hot to close the windows, but thankfully she just dove into the front seat and then back again.

People began to press their faces to our window glass. Wendy cried. In the half dark I could hardly make out more than the gleam of eyes and teeth, but Lizzy seemed able to see fine.

— What are you staring at? she demanded, making faces at the people. She hit the glass with her hands, scaring a few away. — You are so nosy!

I found another pacifier. A different type than the first, but Wendy took this one, too.

Mostly the argument involved Mr. Qian and the driver. I couldn’t follow exactly what was being said, especially with the windows up, but stiff Mr. Qian seemed to be blaming the seething driver, who in turn, between shouts, jabbed wildly in Carnegie’s direction. The argument was in dialect. I wished I were not upset; my comprehension of dialect was at best a guess, but my guesses were better when I wasn’t distracted.

I opened a Thermos to mix some formula, just glad that there were raised markings on the baby bottle so I could tell how many ounces of water I was pouring. Was I right to try the soy-based powder first? So many Chinese babies were lactose-intolerant. Milk-based formula, though, was closer to what they were used to, people said, and less constipating. I had brought both, in any case, and a selection of nipples—traditional and natural with both cross-cut and regular openings—all of which fit the special no-air-bubble bottle. The moment of truth. Wendy took a suck, then spat the nipple. Did it taste funny? Did she not like that nipple? I was considering adjustments when, funny-tasting or not, she tried again and began to drink. Happy, I watched her gulp. I stroked her fat legs.

— Good for you! I cooed; then began to piece together the picture, somehow, beginning with the cigarette butt. Apparently it had hit someone, who had hurled a retaliatory melon at the car. The car had slowed; a crowd had formed. It was in an effort to get past them that the driver had hit this man. This something or another, he had apparently said. Perhaps he had called the man a turtle’s egg or one of the other odd things the Chinese found so offensive.

Of course, we had not had our headlights on. Even in the dead of night, the drivers drove without lights then, to save the bulbs.

Was the man hurt? It was hard to see past all the faces pressed against our window. Carnegie, too, had disappeared from view. Kneeling down, I guessed. Then he stood, sure enough—there he was, for an instant. How substantial he looked beside the other men, even in the near dark. How tall, how well fed, how well clothed. Commanding a spot of his own—people stood back from him a little. Of course, he was the same race as they were, but he seemed a different race; if I had been walking by, I might have thought him white. In the hotel, his button-down shirt had looked less than fresh. Out in the street, though, he looked crisp, rich, young, lucky. American. He stood with authority, hands on his hips. Gestured, then took off his beautiful shirt.

With no particular flourish—not bothering with the buttons. Carnegie simply grabbed the back of the collar and pulled his shirt off over his head in a motion as familiar to me as the feel of his back. Now he was naked to the waist—a pale, smooth expanse of shock. Many people stared; others continued to yell. What did those men want? There were more of them now—a hundred of them, maybe. Or maybe more—a mob. No women. The accident had become a man’s business—possibly because of Carnegie’s naked chest? As most of the men wore those thin undershirts, with deep armholes, I could make out their sharp ribs heaving as they shouted, pointed, glowered. I made out their scrawny necks and wiry arms.

CARNEGIE / 
— Could we not at least give the man a ride to the hospital? I asked. Having run him over, after all.

But it was no go. Mr. Qian and the driver, suddenly a team, adamantly opposed even this basic humanitarian action, never mind that the man’s leg was bleeding badly. I had no choice but to remove my shirt to serve as a tourniquet.

BLONDIE / 
— Should I go see what’s going on? I asked the air. Try to help translate?

Giving out a reassuring air, I rummaged coolly through the diaper bag again, this time for a cloth diaper so I could burp Wendy. Wendy could hold her head up easily. All the same, I supported her neck with my left hand.

The engine was still running—galumphing unhealthily, sending a message about itself that the driver or Carnegie could receive, but that I could not. Fan belt? Engine mounts?

— Lizzy, I said. Do me a favor and climb into the front seat again, would you?

— Why are these people staring at us? Why are they yelling?

— I want you to turn the engine off, please. Now.

— Aren’t you going to say I shouldn’t say ‘these people’?

— Now.

Lizzy grumbled but dove into the front seat a second time, her skinny legs midair, one sandal dangling. She kicked over the bag into which we’d stuffed Wendy’s orphanage clothes.

Wendy burped—a loud, solid, whole-body burp.

— Good girl! I told her, feeling the warm wet through the diaper on my shoulder.

It had been a long time since I’d burped a baby; I’d forgotten what a satisfaction it was. I’d forgotten too how surprised the baby always seemed, and yet how instantly ready for whatever the next moment might bring.

She began to cry again. Should we have left her with the foster mother? What were we doing?

How the car stank of cigarette smoke! It was in the fabric of the seats.

— Which way do you turn it, anyway? Lizzy asked.

I settled Wendy back down for another few ounces of formula, stuffing her orphanage clothes back into their bag. Those precious clothes, after all. I knew how much they would mean to her one day.

Unfortunately, as Lizzy pushed away from the steering wheel, levering her body over the seat back, she hit the horn. A long beep, unbelievably loud. Wendy startled just at the point she might have fallen asleep, and began to cry yet again. People pressed even closer to the glass now—faces, body parts. The car began to rock. Not so much because anyone was pushing it, exactly—it was more the sea motion of the mob. Or so it seemed. Where was Carnegie? Someone banged on the roof.

— This car is a tin can, I told Wendy, offering her the bottle again.

She was too upset, though, to take it. Long past the newborn whimper stage, she had a good strong wail.

— What is going on anyway? demanded Lizzy, banging some more on the window.

The car stopped rocking, then began again.
Luan.
I remembered a professor lecturing at the front of a classroom. Chaos.
Luan.

That smoke smell.

If only we had not turned off the engine! The running engine had kept people back, I now realized.

The formula sloshed. Wendy was still crying.

— Dad! Lizzy called, starting to cry, too. — Dad!

For there was bare-chested Carnegie, waving his arms, engulfed. I held on to our wailing Wendy, trying not to panic. The car was rocked so hard that it heeled like a sailboat, the seat tilting at a thirty-degree angle; I braced myself with one hand in order to avoid sliding into Lizzy.

— This is like sailing, I said calmly. We ought to hike out.

— Are we going to tip over? Lizzy sounded terrified. — I don’t know how to sail.

The car thudded back to the ground, bouncing. Where was Carnegie?

— I can’t see Daddy, yelled Lizzy. And will that baby ever shut up?

— In this family, we do not use the phrase ‘that baby,’ I said.

— That baby! That baby!

I tried the bottle yet again. Wendy, thankfully, took it. Quieted.

— They’re hurting Dad! shouted Lizzy. I know it. We have to go help Dad!

— Lizzy. You cannot get out of the car. Do you hear me?

The car began to rock again. We were set back down and heaved back up, set back down and heaved back up. The pitch was so steep now we could not keep from sliding.

Still Wendy, amazingly, drank.

— We’re going to go over! shrieked Lizzy. We’re going to tip over!

Was she right?

The wildness in the theater, that boy who almost fell out of the balcony.

— Calm down, I said. Then: — Lizzy!

I grabbed her forearm just as the whole car really did tip over.

The baby!

The car landed on its side, so that Wendy and I were heaped on top of Lizzy, who screamed. Our belongings avalanched down on us; Wendy’s head hit the glass. I dropped the bottle. Bodies thumped against the window glass above us—much yelling. We appeared to be at the bottom of a pile of people.

— My arm! Lizzy cried.

Wendy shrieked, her whole body clenched.

— Are you all right? It’s all right, it’s all right, I cooed at Wendy, trying to right myself.

— You’re stepping on my hair! cried Lizzy.

I managed a kind of half crouch, standing on a side window, which cracked but, to my surprise, held. Wendy by a miracle was still on my arm. One of my feet was on the diaper bag; the other on the panda. Was Lizzy hurt? Dampness—Wendy needed a new diaper.

— Lizzy. Lizzy. Can you straighten up? Here, try to sit up.

CARNEGIE / 
Lizzy sat up only, apparently, to see calm Blondie keel over. I slogged my way through the crowd to find Lizzy popped up through a window as if from the hatch of a submarine, cradling the baby with her good arm.

— She’s making my arm hot! she cried.

For her part, Wendy, astoundingly, had fallen asleep. Her hair bow was askew but still affixed to her fuzzy head.

The police dispersed the crowd, wielding their sticks with the delicacy of mad apes.

Meanwhile, Mr. Qian, reinforced now by a Chinese Frankenstein, continued to insist that we foreigners be removed from the scene immediately. Before the injured man was seen to; before the injured man—who had lost a lot of blood but was conscious enough to swear—was taken anywhere.

And so it was that by the time Blondie came to, we were being grandly escorted in a brand-new, air-conditioned Toyota van to the hotel, where we could at last let Blondie lie down; see about Lizzy’s swollen arm (a sprain); and liberate the baby from her distinctly gooey diaper.

BLONDIE / 
There was poop on everything.

Wendy cried all night.

Her orphanage clothes were lost.

CARNEGIE / 
As for myself, I had been shoved a few times but, lo and behold, had escaped with my life, I reported. Though of course my shirt was history.

Later we discovered that—just our luck—a local textile factory had shut its fair doors that very afternoon. One of those gloriously inefficient, state-run enterprises, this was, to which one could only say good riddance in the long run. But in the short run, how were people supposed to live? And what about their pensions? Et cetera. In the process of closing, the factory leaders had conveniently blamed American quotas for what was happening. Never mind their fantastic mismanagement, they kept anger at bay with rumors: that America set quotas because it could not compete with China. That America was afraid of China. That America was determined to keep China weak.

Or so we understood via a chance dinner, once we got back, with Peanut Butter Clark, as we called him. Who, it turned out, was in textiles himself, and had, what’s more, learned much from the Belgian professors. Over peach cobbler he argued that the mob was about nationalistic resentment.

Did the crowd even realize we were American, though? we wondered as we did the dishes. Maybe any car, any sign of privilege, would have drawn ire.

How lucky, in any case, that we’d lived to analyze the tale.

BLONDIE / 
I wanted to report the incident, but Carnegie just wanted to get home. We’d been in China too long already, he said, and what good would it do? The man was okay, or at least that’s what the guide said. In fact, we would never know.

— Do you realize we’ve been gone for five weeks? he said.

And: — Please remember they haven’t signed off on the adoption yet.

CARNEGIE / 
Shots—poor Wendy. Papers papers papers.

BLONDIE / 
What artwork we brought back!

— Look at the workmanship, I said. The detail. The colors.

My sisters framed every last paper cutting. My brothers wore their fur-lined vests all winter.

CARNEGIE / 
Making fine use of gravity, Doc Bailey parked Chinese boxes on every available horizontal surface. I.e., his home desk, his work desk, the cocktail table, the hall table. Anywhere there wasn’t a box, there was a bowl. He dusted his cork carving with the puffer cleaner for his camera lens.

Still Lizzy insisted she was never ever going back to China. Nothing traumatic could be recounted without Lizzy putting in,
You think that’s bad, you won’t believe what happened in China.
At least the memory was sometimes comforting: the day she fell out of a tree and broke her arm, for example, she did tell the doctor,
It wasn’t as scary as what happened to me in China.

BLONDIE / 
Of course, we did not respond to these comments. Naturally.

This infuriated her.

— Why don’t you ever say anything when I talk about what happened in China? she demanded.

— The accident was upsetting, I said sometimes, when Lizzy brought it up.

Other times, I said: — You know, what happened to us was very unusual. Most people go to China and have a perfectly nice time. Think how you would feel if we’d left after the Great Wall.

But Lizzy began to elaborate on what was the matter with the trip, in addition to the accident.