The Love Wife (22 page)

— He had something to do.
Ta you shiqing.

— Not coming today?

— Not today.

I placed a fresh wonton in her bowl.

— Eat, I said. Delicious.

She ignored it.

— Not coming! His old mother stuck in hotel, he is not coming to pay the bill?

— No, no, don’t worry. He pays the bill.

— How much? Expensive. How much?

Her shoe stopped swinging.

— Five thousand dollars, I said.

— Five thousand dollar! Highway robbery! For one night!

— No, no. Not for one night. For one month. Or no—forty-five hundred, I think.

— Five thousand dollar! Who can afford that kind money? Nobody! Highway robbery! Who can afford that kind money?

— Have another
huntun,
I said.

Bailey was beginning to smack his lips and butt his cheek against me.

— Are you thinking about eating too? I asked him.

Settling in the chair, I prepared to nurse.

— We lived in a tall house, said Mama Wong suddenly. Way up in sky.

I thought for a moment. — A stilt house? I guessed.

— We throw things down. All kind things. Down down, into river.

— That must have been fun. What kind of things? Do you remember?

She ground her teeth and scowled. — Who can afford that kind money?

— Nobody, I sighed.

— Nobody!

An attendant appeared.

— And how are you today, Madam Wong?

Ranginna parted her hair exactly and drew it back severely, but was cheerfully flexible as she opened the curtain.

— Too sunny for you?

She closed it again with perfect equanimity.

— Look, Mama Wong, did you see? You have a new grandchild.

I lifted Bailey quickly out of his sling—just for a moment, knowing he was hungry. Supporting his head. Spittle foamed at the corners of his mouth; his onesie rode up under his tiny arms. But Mama Wong was not distracted.

— Crazy money! Crazy! Who can afford that kind money?

— Nobody.

— Nobody! Especially he marry that Blondie, all she know is spend money.

— Another
huntun
?

I started Bailey as we talked. Thanks to the cracked nipple, the left breast was not producing as well as the right; I therefore began on that side, to stimulate it with Bailey’s first, hungriest sucks. But the pain—I could barely keep myself from crying out.

— Went to bathroom, said Mama Wong.

Her voice dropped suddenly—so faint, now, I could barely hear her.

— Wheelchair, she said.

— Mouth, she said.

— Not coming, she said.

— Not coming, I echoed, watching the clock.

Bailey sucked. Mama Wong grew agitated again.

— Five thousand dollar! Carnegie not coming! I know you! I know you!

She edged out of bed, picking up a
huntun
as if it were a snowball she was going to throw.

— I know you! she shouted. You are not Carnegie!

— No, I’m not Carnegie.

— Carnegie not coming! Who can afford that kind money? Nobody! Nobody! I know you! You cannot fool me. That is a doll.

She began to stand, steadying herself with the tray cart.

— Sit down, I said. Calm down. And be careful, that cart rolls. Do you want a glass of water?

— You are Blondie! yelled Mama Wong, throwing the
huntun.

The wonton flew over my shoulder, landing on the dresser.

— Where is Carnegie? she went on. You are Blondie! Blondie! You are not Carnegie! You are Blondie!

Three more minutes. Bailey sucked.

— My name is Janie, I said, in case you’ve forgotten.

— I did forget.

Mama Wong did not sit down.

— Blondie, she said, short for Jane.

I almost cried.

— Thank you, I said. This is your new grandchild. Bailey.

I opened the sling a bit, so she could see. She was still standing, leaning on the tray cart.

— My name is not Mama Wong, she went on calmly. My English name is call Lucille. I am Lucille, mother of Carnegie. Next time I make sure he do his homework on time.

— Thank you, Lucille, I said.

— Is that a baby?

— This is your grandchild. Bailey.

— Bailey.
Hen ke ai,
she said—very cute.

— Your grandchild, Mama Wong, I said. Carnegie’s son. He is going to carry on the Wong name.

What her reaction would have been before she got sick! But all she said now was: — Good girl. Beautiful.

Bailey sucked; I watched the clock.

— This is your grandchild. He’s ten days old. His whole name is Ellison Bailey Wong. But we’re calling him Bailey.

— Bailey, Mama Wong said again. Hungry.

— Yes, I said. The baby’s hungry.

— What’s the matter with her hair?

— He was born that way.

— Ah, said Mama Wong. Another Blondie.

— Another Blondie.

Mama Wong craned her neck to see better. She took a step, using the tray cart as a walker; her bowl and chopsticks shone in the sun.

— Beautiful, she said. Strong.

— Thank you, I said. He is strong.

— Adopted?

A surprise there.

— No, I said. He’s real. Your real grandchild.

I didn’t like saying it that way, but there it was. I had said it. One more minute.

— Be careful, don’t lose her, she said.

— Don’t worry, I won’t.

— I gave babies the bottle, she said. Warm up in a pan of hot water.

— Breast milk is always the perfect temperature, I said. It’s very convenient.

— Where Carnegie? Is he dead? He have bad heart, you know. Big trouble. He told me.

Such sentences! If only Carnegie were here to hear them!

— No, no, he’s fine, I said. He just took a day off to—

— Day off!

— He hasn’t had a day off in years, and—

— Because of you!

— That’s not quite true. He took the day off—

— Who can afford that kind money?

— Nobody.

— Day off!

— He hasn’t had a day off in years, and—

— You going to be the death of me!

— No one’s going to be the death of anyone, I said. Sit down. Calm down. Have a
huntun.
Very delicious.

I switched Bailey to the other breast—hooray—closing up my bra flap and slipping in a nursing pad just as, instead of eating the
huntun,
or hurling it at me either, Mama Wong simply dropped it. Its white folds spread like a nun’s wimple on the blue carpet as Mama Wong put one hand to her chest and slowly, heavily crumpled, knocking aside the tray cart and toppling sideways into a half-sitting heap on the bed. Her hand was not splayed, the way it is in the movies, but curled, as if she was pressing something to herself.

— Mama Wong!

I grabbed her knee with my free hand.

She rocked. Her hand left her chest; there was nothing in it. Using the bed rail, she pulled herself upright, surprising me.

— I am not your mama, she said clearly. Why is my child not here? All my life, I do everything alone. Now still I am alone.

— He’s coming back, I said. Soon. In a couple of days at most.

— I am alone woman, she said. You tell the doctor. Very hard to cure, even the doctor is number one in his class.

She tried to stand up again.

— Day off! she cried. Day off!

— Mama Wong, I said. Don’t stand. Sit.

I tried to pat her knee but with Bailey nursing, couldn’t quite reach. She stood, unsteady, her bare foot on her loose shoelace.

— Day off!

Bailey was slowing, his body relaxing. Soon he would be asleep—as I would be too, if we were home. Having trained myself to sleep when he slept; having not slept more than four hours at a stretch in days. How heavy my body. I closed my eyes.

— I am very hard to cure even the doctor is number one in his class, Harvard Medical School, she said.

Then she fell. I opened my eyes in time to see her topple without trying to stop herself—hitting her tray cart as she crashed to the carpet. Sending her bowl sliding. I stood to help her—Bailey still nursing, with renewed interest, in the sling between us—but something was wrong. Her eyes and mouth were open; she was not breathing; she had no pulse. I pulled the emergency cord for help, but by the time I knelt again her skin was already turning cool.

Bailey left off.

Cradling him with one hand, I put my other on her heart—nothing. I kissed her on the cheek, half expecting that some reflexive indignation would jolt her back to life.

She accepted my kiss.

I stood to pull the cord again.

No one came.

Bailey fell asleep in the sling, unburped, his little chest filling, collapsing, filling, collapsing—unnaturally, it seemed. As if he were on a respirator.

Carnegie was right, I thought idly. The staff was overloaded. Overworked. Underpaid.

I ducked out of the sling, settling Bailey in a nest of pillows at the foot of the bed. Then I picked Mama Wong up—how heavy she was, weighing nothing though she did. I laid her out on her bed, above Bailey, as I hoped someone had laid my mother out. I took off her orthopedic shoe, and closed her eyes, and watched her cheeks sink—pulling the emergency cord one more time. Carnegie, Carnegie, Carnegie. Where are our cell phones when we need them? Is it really possible to die without saying good-bye to your children? I knew I should go out into the hall to get help. But instead I lay down beside Mama Wong. How bony she was—nothing but bones.

An alone woman.

I needed to rest.

Outside her live silence, the hall noise grew and grew.

9

Time

CARNEGIE / 

What time is it?

What time is it?

What time is it?

I washed the body with a hospice worker. Turning, sponging, turning, sponging. The hospice worker, Cleopatra, was a short, strong woman, with a nose like her namesake but a conquering disposition of a different sort. She knew how to plant her feet and lift with her knees, glowing with a competence so equal to death that my mother, by contrast, looked deader. Her skin had no color. Her jaw hung open and would not stay shut, affording a fine view of her dental work. At least Blondie had managed to close her eyes; I was grateful for that. I was surprised how loose my mother’s skin was, like a body bag that did not come in her size. I was surprised too how thin she was, and yet how heavy, being dead weight. And how little hair she had, and how little that hair covered. What a large word, ‘mother’; how puny its incorporation. Like the words ‘her family,’ meaning me. It was at times like this that I missed having a father, but not only for myself. I missed my mother having a husband—someone for whom her body would have been a long-loved familiar, not a conglomeration of body functions in need of management until they ceased.

When I come to this country, I did not know I end up alone.

She smelled.

Apparently she had broken a rib as she fell, and punctured a lung. Everyone agreed that Blondie was in no way responsible.

— I missed her, Blondie said anyway. Why didn’t I tie that shoelace? I should have put Bailey somewhere out of the way. So I could bend down.

Said Blondie: — I was the death of her.

But that honor, I believed, fell to me.

Mama Wong always claimed to have buried my father in style; I chose for her a top-of-the-line package the funeral home called The Ultimate.

How did Mama Wong’s suite mate’s daughter come to hear about the wake? I’d barely talked to Crissy back when she used to visit Corinne; yet how overwhelmed I was now to see her, a woman who had witnessed at least one part of my mother’s decline. Distractedly, of course; she was preoccupied too, back then. Still I greeted her with excessive warmth, which she either failed to notice or graciously overlooked. I examined her too, as if she were a loved one. Taking stock, noting minor changes. I thought she looked more diminutive than she had in the Overlook, as if she’d lost weight. More elegant. She wore a dry line of corrugated lipstick and a cross complete with suffering Jesus such as you didn’t much see anymore; but most notably, despite her best efforts, she radiated a somber joy. For Corinne was still alive, it turned out.

Alive!

I was glad for the news yet could not forgive Crissy for it.

— My ma started having seizures in the hospital, Crissy said. That’s when they discovered she didn’t have Alzheimer’s after all. She had a tumor. Now they’ve operated, and she’s better.

So someone had outlived Mama Wong. Mama Wong had not won.

— Of course, we wish there hadn’t been a misdiagnosis to begin with. But Alzheimer’s is tricky, as you know. There are mistakes all the time. She’s coming home soon.

Did Mama Wong have a tumor too? Was that why she lasted so long? Had there been a mistake?

— I’m so sorry about your mother, said Crissy. How old was she?

— Eighty-four.

— Eighty-four. I’m so sorry. She was in the Overlook a long time.

— Nine years.

— So she went in when she was seventy-five. That’s how old my mom is now. I’m so sorry.

— Thank you for coming, I said, and meant it.

Still I hated her little French suit, as she turned away. I hated her little waist and little hips, and her faith in her little gold cross—the whole little unbroken package of her.
Corinne daughter Prissy,
my mother had called her once.

I had a more reasonable reaction to my work colleagues.

— Yes, there are relatives in China, but frankly, even if we knew how to contact them, she would not have approved of their coming, I said. That is, if it meant taking time off.

My direct-reports laughed.

— Don’t worry, boss, we have our laptops out in the car, they said.

And of course I laughed too. Glad they had come, even as I heard my mother’s voice:
How many people care if work get done, so long as they get paycheck?

— Just promise me one thing, Blondie had said the night before. — Promise me you won’t embrace everything you once rejected now that she’s dead.

— Let me guess. Gabriela read that in a book, I said. Or no. She e-mailed you an article from
Mindful Dying
magazine.

— I hope you’re not going to stay this way, said Blondie.

— What way?

But of course I knew, and tried to make up for it now by squeezing her hand when she squeezed mine. I was trying in general to share my grief, even as I heard:
You watch, the day I die she is going to say, Why don’t you take a workshop?

Blondie did not suggest a workshop. However, she did scatter
Mindful Living
catalogs around the house, with the ‘Living with Dying’ seminars circled.

— I’m so sorry about your mother, said someone.

— Alzheimer’s is the pits.

— I’m so sorry.

— You know, your mother very smart in business, never once lost money.

— Are you the son never learned one word Chinese?

— I’m so sorry.

— You think that you’d said good-bye years ago. That you’d given up years ago. Then she goes.

— I’m so sorry.

— Ah, but will your mother’s death kill you? That’s the question.

— Thank you, I said. Thanks for coming. It was a blessing, really. Alzheimer’s is indeed the worst. Did you see the picture board? You’re so right. I never did learn Chinese, it’s true. Yes, I should’ve become a doctor. She was a hard act to follow, no doubt about it. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Did you see the baby? Bailey, yes, almost two weeks old. Yes, how wonderful she at least got to see him. Yes, blond like his mother. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Yes, we were surprised too. Thank you.

— Dad, you already thanked that person, said Lizzy, wearing, for once, a dress. — Thanking them twice is weird.

— I’m glad the coffin is closed, said Wendy. And I don’t want to look in the morning, I don’t care if it is our last chance ever.

— You’re going to be sorry, said Lizzy. You are. Because even if we were adopted, she’s still our grandmother.

— Thanks so much for coming, I said. Thank you. Thank you.

— No she isn’t, said Wendy. She’s not anything, she’s a corpse.

The last guests to appear were our beloved neighbors Mitchell and Sonja.

— It’s tough, said Mitch.

Not content to put his arm around Sonja’s waist, he had his fingers tucked deep inside the twisted chiffon scarf she wore for a belt.

— My parents went one two, left me my inheritance just in time to get it eaten by the divorce, he said. Crunch, crunch. Worst period of my life.

— Thanks for coming, I said.

Mitch was wearing an earring—a little gold hoop that looked as though it ought to be hanging down, but instead was flipped up oddly.

Crissy wearing that cross; Mitch wearing that earring. What did it mean? Why was everyone wearing new jewelry? And what were we going to do with Mama Wong’s? Bury it or keep it?

What should we bury? What should we keep?

What bury?

What keep?

What time is it?

It was time to stand up and speak, it was time to bow my head, my heavy head, it was time to throw the dirt. How I wished the ground was warmer; I could not believe my mother’s body was being put into that cold ground. Actually that was only temporary. Her coffin was to be removed after the ceremony, and embedded in a concrete ‘surround.’ To ensure that the ground above the grave wouldn’t buckle as the coffin rotted.

I had nodded at this information, delivered by a man with a crew cut. His hair suggesting how perfectly even the grass over the grave would be. Of course. Of course. I agreed, submitting to his aesthetic, though in truth the idea made me feel claustrophobic for Mama Wong. As if her spirit would be unable to escape. What had happened to From dust to dust?

O brave new world, that hath so much concrete in it.

Lucille, the minister kept calling her. Lucille. At the end of the service his assistant began pulling roses out of the largest of the flower arrangements, distributing them to the assembled to toss onto the lowered coffin. Blondie and Lizzy and Wendy each threw one, as did Bailey, with Blondie’s help; and as did I, though I detested this scripting of my last moments by the grave. Had we asked for this? I wanted to complain to the manager:
I did not appreciate having some extra bit of mourning squeezed out of us.
I detested too the look produced: roses on shiny coffin, how Hollywood. How phony the whole thing. How I hated knowing they were going to take the coffin back out of the ground, roses and all. But this was my mother’s funeral; I did not want to make a fuss.

Why you let them throw flowers? Next time tell them go to hell.

Concrete surround very useful, lawn mower can go right across. When you come visit, look all nice and neat.

Good-bye, Mama Wong.

Good-bye, Evergreen Overlook. We moved her furniture out the next day, but donated the clothes in her drawers. Both those that were hers, and those that were not hers, including the Astroturf green golf sweater. The rest of her effects fit into one box.

For some time we continued to notice funeral arrangements.

— That’s The Supreme, we’d say as we passed the funeral home.

Or: — That must be the standard-package casket, really it doesn’t look bad. The Value was probably indeed the best value.

— That hearse looks newer than the one we got.

— I like the gray. Mournful but fresh.

It surprised me that the world was still what it was, busy, even as it was nothing like it was. How thin daily life seemed now, like the earth’s crust floating on an unfathomable ocean of magma. How fragile; I cried for its fragility. I cried for the privilege of saying, Nice day out.

— Nice day out!

— Have a good day!

— How’s the family?

— What time is it?

My mother did not have many friends, but some did write:

What a smart cookie your mother was, number two in our whole class.

How proud she was when she moved into that big house.

How lucky you are to get her for a mother, and not somebody else.

Of course, she was rich, but still she loved plain food.

They wrote on paper I would never have thought to use myself. Massively substantial, expensive paper suitable for proclamations. Coated note cards with pine and bird motifs. Memo-pad paper.

Acquaintances wrote too, people I had never particularly noticed. A neighbor who lived, I thought, around the corner, in the house with the solar panels. The local dry cleaner. Her gynecologist. I tried to imagine myself writing to one of them about the death of a loved one, but couldn’t. It was hard enough to know how to respond on the subject of my mother.

Your mother was such a sweet and gentle woman. Her laugh was so clear and bell-like that I always wondered if she was musical. Was she musical? Did she sing in her youth?

We had boxed up Mama Wong’s accumulated effects when we moved her into the Overlook, but had not actually gone through them. Seeing as she was still alive, we had simply stockpiled her stuff in one corner of the attic, as if preparing for the day she might want it again. Now we felt freer to sort and rummage and begin to reduce the pile. The attic was warm; we pored idly. Trying, as much as anything, to get used to the idea that we could. I had friends who had made discoveries when their parents died—that their parents weren’t married, that their brother wasn’t their brother, that their father had applied to law school ten years in a row before getting in. Mama Wong was not a writer, though. Neither, it seemed, did people write much to her; and what notebooks and letters she did have were not only in Chinese, of course, but in complicated characters, and in script. Blondie, who had learned simplified characters, could not decipher one line.

— We could find someone to translate them, she said. If you want.

That’s when I announced: — I’m going to learn Chinese and read them myself someday.

— Well, who am I to say you won’t, said Blondie, fluffing up her hair.

— I am, I said. I am.

I found a list of the colleges I had applied to, with a checkmark beside the ones that had accepted me. Also I found a notebook in which she had recorded her daily temperature. For birth control, maybe? It covered a number of years with not one missed day. And here were pictures of my father I’d never seen. Nothing that revealed anything I didn’t already know; still I studied them. The pictures were black-and-white with wavy white margins, and mostly featured him with famous landmarks—the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge—looking as if he were on an all-expense-paid trip to America. He did not look like he missed his homeland and worked ungodly hours and was going to die in a senseless accident. He looked like a lucky man. A smart man, a worldly man. In several photographs he was not even looking at the camera, but at the famous landmark, appraisingly. My mother used to say he had the best English of all the Chinese students; it was just too bad he was in physics, where people could barely tell. He had longish hair, carefully Brylcreemed to resemble a car hood, or an ocean swell; a high, wide forehead that seemed an extension of that swell; and a brow almost as heavy as mine. In one picture, he stood in front of a blackboard, pointing at an equation with a bamboo backscratcher. In another, he held me, beaming as if I had just been handed to him from behind curtain number three.
Just what you’ve been waiting for—a brand-new baby boy!
In yet another, he stood arm in arm with my mother; how naturally the ripples of her permed hair seemed to emanate from his grander heave.