The Love Wife (3 page)

— I like to play chess, said Wendy, looking at the floor.

No fat roll under her chin. Though she had been a fat baby in China, she’d thinned out almost as soon as she got to America.

— Will you teach me to play? asked Lan.

— I’ll teach you right away! said Wendy. I’m a good teacher! I take lessons! You can practice on the computer! At school I have to play with the boys because none of the girls will play, but on the computer there are these websites.

— You teach me, said Lan. I practice with you.

It was impossible not to like her. I tried to smile at her, and to gauge whether she was smiling back. And sometimes I thought so. Yet still, as the luggage snaked around, I remained outside the circle of her charm. Perhaps this was because I was occupied with walking Bailey. Hunched over him like some newfangled plant support, I helped him step step step his way to the stairs—Bailey loved stairs. He wore his brand-new white leather tie-up shoes; his hot fists gripped my fingers.

— Look what you can do! Lan cooed at Bailey as, on one tour, we slowly passed her way.

Right, left, right, left.

— Such a big big boy, said Lan on the next round.

She touched his cheek—her nails were beautifully groomed, oval and pink. Bailey, shy, motioned to be picked up. But once in my arms he cooed back, showing off his teeth. He batted his lashes and clobbered my upper arm, mysteriously emphatic.

— Why everybody talk to baby instead of talk to big girls? she asked Lizzy and Wendy. — Have you ever notice that?

Bailey’s face crumpled then—at what no one could say. He wailed; the girls showed Lan his pacifier. They showed her the stroller too, and how it folded up. They let her try it once herself. She folded it perfectly, without coaching, the first try.

— In China, this kind cart, many people have it, she explained.

— Really? said the girls.

— How do you call it?

— Stroller, said Lizzy. Strol-ler.

— Stro-er, said Lan.

— Strol-ler. Strol-ler.

Her one suitcase arrived damaged. Lan squatted gracefully, placing the suitcase on the floor. The girls squatted beside her as if they did this every day. The suitcase had been wrapped in plastic. She opened this, not by tearing the wrapping, but by slicing it neatly on the diagonal, with a pair of fold-up scissors. Nothing seemed to be missing. Still Carnegie strode off, indignant, damaged bag on a luggage cart, to demand the airline do something. We trailed him like ducklings, gathering obediently outside the claims office until, triumphant, he reappeared, with the announcement that he had arranged for the bag to be replaced with a new one.

At this, Lan smiled her first full, true smile—a completely sweet, open, girlish smile, so guileless and lovely that Carnegie Wong, my husband of fourteen years, blushed.

WENDY / 
In the car she insists on sitting in the third seat, in the way back, so that Mom and Dad can sit together and we three kids can sit together too, in the middle seat, not that we want to. She doesn’t talk at all in the beginning, but when we talk to her she turns around, and after a while she talks too.

— Do you have favorite color? she asks.

— Guess, says Lizzy.

And Lanlan—she makes us call her Lanlan—says: — Black.

Or at least sort of. She doesn’t say ‘black’ exactly, really she says ‘brack,’ but we understand her because we like her.

— You knew because I’m wearing black! says Lizzy.

Lanlan nods. — Black very nice, she says. Do you like draw picture?

— Yes! says Lizzy. But how did you know that?

— Black very—how do you say?—artist, says Lanlan.

— You’re wearing black! I say. You’re wearing Lizzy’s favorite color.

— Wow, she says. Or do you say Wow-wee.

— Wow, says Lizzy.

— I see, she says, though this frown like nests in her face. 
— How about Gee whiz? Or Gee, what. Gee willikers.

— Gee willikers? says Lizzy.

— Better stick with wow, I say.

— Wow, she says.

— Are you artistic? Lizzy asks.

— Me? Oh, no no, she says. Then she says: — I can see American fashion is not like Chinese fashion.

— We have bellbottoms, I tell her, and flower power!

— Not everybody wears that stuff, says Lizzy. Like I personally don’t pay attention to fashion at all.

— In China, we have fashion too, says Lanlan. But I am like you. Do not pay too much attention.

— Not even a little? I say.

— Well, okay, she says, smiling. — A little. Last few weeks. Now I am—how to say—fashion victim.

— I pay a little attention too, says Lizzy.

— A little? I say. A lot! That’s all she knows, is fashion! A lot of people dress like Lizzy. Like her friend Xanadu. Ask her about Xanadu, Xanadu is practically her twin!

— That is totally untrue, says Lizzy.

— Wow, says Lanlan calmly. And how about you, Wendy? Are you fashion victim?

She talks and talks to us, patting Bailey on the head every now and then even though he’s asleep.

— My turn! My turn! Lizzy and I begin to shout at the same time, but when Lanlan puts her finger in the air, even Lizzy shuts up like magic.

— My English not so good, Lanlan keeps saying. I only know a few phrases.

— Like what? says Lizzy.

— ‘Call 911,’ says Lan. ‘In case of emergency call 911.’

— Your English is fantastic! we tell her. Did you study in college?

She smiles a little, then says: — Not exactly college. But like college. Usually we say university.

Instead of ‘usually’ she says ‘u-ally
.’

— Like university? we say.

— In China, many people, maybe they not so rich, or have difficulty pass exam, try study by self, she says. See teacher every once a while.

— Wow, we say.

— Can get degree this way. Of course, take some time.

— Did you get a degree? we ask. Did you?

She doesn’t answer but just smiles and sits there kind of ladylike with her back straight up and her knees pressed together, so that her lap is like a table.

— We are rich Americans, says Lizzy. Aren’t we?

Lanlan looks out the window at the big mist, as if there’s something to see. There’s nothing to see but still you can see her eyes jerking back and forth, because of its going by so fast.

BLONDIE / 
Of course, she was amazed by our house. We ourselves were amazed by our house—a lovely old farmhouse, walking distance to town, with a porch, and a large rolling lawn, and a converted barn housing cars and, these days, a black-and-white pygmy goat—Gabriela’s, actually, as you will hear. Even in the fog you could see how the house commanded its little knoll. The land settled in green swales around it, like a skirt. I had my eccentric sunflowers in back—you couldn’t see them right away. But there, by the driveway, stood our small orchard of seven wide apple trees, planted in a circle so that their arms all but touched. Of course, individually those trees were awkward, as apple trees can be. They had that arthritic look. As a group, though, they appeared, charmingly, to be playing ring-around-the-rosy. And in the spring they formed a ceiling of blossoms. If from the front yard you made your way up the little incline—there were five or six stone steps—you ascended into a low sky of bloom—a heaven. Who could get enough of that magic? And in the fall! You could see the branches bending with fruit now—most of it edible, though we did not use pesticides. Soon the girls would be out apple picking, the old branches bending so low they all but dropped their fruit into the baskets. Both Lizzy and Wendy climbed on those branches when they were little, and pretended to be high in the air; both walked the branches like a circular balance beam when they were older. And both made it to the tops of the trees, one day, and yelled for Carnegie and me to come see.

CARNEGIE / 
The middle branches were squirrel diving boards; our Olympians sprang from them onto the driveway, that around the bikes and trikes, Rollerblades and roller skates, they might race. Overhead, the mockingbirds blithely popularized (okay, plagiarized) the more original songs of others.

Clouds drifted. The wind wafted.

Dew baubled the grass.

Altogether the house was a vision—the vision of my lovely wife, Blondie, whose extended description I here interject.

For Blondie, at forty-five, was herself a vision.

She had, it must be said, a dewlap. Lines patterned her forehead; she sported an asterisk on the bridge of her nose. Certain age spots, once indistinct, had found their proud round own. Her ears were both pinker and downier than they once were. Her in-truth lemon-lightened hair, once fluffy, now tended to go flat. How she would have been undone were it not for mousse! She sported a childbearing- related protuberance that disposed her toward rumpled linen jumpers. You would not call her limber anymore. The words Blondie brought to mind were all
lum
words:
lumber, lumbar . . . 
I stop out of husbandly delicacy, but also because those words miss her paradoxical large lightness. A pufferfish, she was. A zeppelin buoyed by a certain singular gas.

She was not young. She complained of stress. She complained of short-term memory problems. She was perimenopausal. She took gingko, ginseng, echinacea during cold season. Huperzine A. Calcium with soy. Black cohash. She needed reading glasses and could not for the life of her remember names. Yet somehow, brilliantly, she managed to head marketing for a socially responsible investment firm she had helped found, even while imbuing her station-wagon life with the illusion of unharried ardency. This was non-trivial. It filled one with awe to see how she worked around her work haunted houses for Halloween (complete with dry-ice effects), not to say all manner of other wonders involving yogurt, cheesecloth, two-liter soda bottles. How enraptured she could manage to be (for the purposes of a school assignment) by the history of navigation, the idea of India, the point system of dog shows!

No one went in for homework like Blondie.

She had smooth, delicate, in places transparent, skin, through which her veins most touchingly showed. Her plump forearms tapered into surprisingly small, twinkly hands. Her fingers moved deftly, but in a slightly splayed way, as if she had just left a manicurist’s table. Other small surprises: a surprisingly small nose, and small but round, lively eyes. The last time Blondie had gone to a hairdresser she had come back with a wayward crew; an anti-flop strategy. Now she looked like Laurie Anderson gone Smith & Hawken.

In short, in her broad middle age Blondie had retained a certain unforced sweetness and small-town spark. She could be shy, but she could surprise you. And she was sincere, my Blondie, a precious block of something pre-veneer.

Yet, inexplicably, she did resemble a Realtor as she showed Lan her new digs, an apartment in the garage-née-barn built especially for an au pair.

— This is your kitchenette, said Blondie.

She indicated with an open hand the wood-tone doors of the Pullman kitchen. She demonstrated the use of its apartment-sized electric stove. Next, the half-height refrigerator. All these things had been put in by the previous owners, who had in general abhorred the genuine and full-sized. She picked a hair off the butcher block–look counter.

— Ah! said Lan.

She was, I thought, at least semi-smiling. She nodded. She stepped into the main room, with its sculpted acrylic carpeting, then just stood there, pressing her fingers together. She contemplated the carpet.

BLONDIE / 
—We thought we’d provide the basics and let you do the decorating, I said. So you wouldn’t have to live with someone else’s taste.

— Ah! she said.

— If you don’t like the white, we’d be happy to help you paint. The girls love that sort of thing.

— Ah! she said again.

CARNEGIE / 
The furniture was my mother’s. Big boudoir-y mahogany we had no place to store. You could hear the goat bleating downstairs.

BLONDIE / 
Carnegie would have given her the guest room. He thought it would have made her feel more welcome to be in the house—part of the house.

But that was right below our bedroom, and the apartment was larger. It had a kitchenette, and a bath. It had skylights. There were windows on two walls, and a ceiling fan. Even in the fog you could see how airy it was. And you did not enter through the garage—there was a separate entrance opposite the house, behind the toolshed. You went down a little path, then up a spiral staircase.

CARNEGIE / 
— If I were her I’d want my own space, said Blondie. If I were her, I would want privacy.

One must consider one’s chromosomes before speaking these days. Still, summoning my piddling male courage, I tendered a sensitive observation.

— Did you see how she looked down at her feet? First she looked at the carpet, and then at her feet. There was something she didn’t want to say.

— I did see her bow her head, said Blondie, after a moment. — I thought it was after she saw my sunflowers out back. You know what a mess they are.

Lan had looked down at her feet, her eyebrows a little raised; she had stared at her big toes through her stockings, as if looking to them for advice or friendship. Then she had very slightly shifted her weight. I heard a squeak, and saw how new her high heels were, how synthetic, how cheaply made. They dug into her feet. I saw how she rocked back onto her heels, inching the balls of her feet up the ramps, out from under the front straps. It was a movement I’d seen many women make over the years, without seeing it. The female equivalent of loosening a tie. But never had I seen an instep as swollen as hers, nor welts so lurid. Her heels hung over the backs of the lasts; those shoes were too small. Maybe her feet had swollen up on the plane. That was possible. Still, Blondie would never have worn shoes like that. Today she was, in fact, wearing semi-orthopedic Danish clogs. When she walked she clopped.

Blondie would have rightly complained about how her feet hurt. Lan simply gazed, meditative, upon hers.

2

Beam Me Out

CARNEGIE / 
Lan. Of course we have started the story with Lan, on whose account so much eventually came to pass. But I hereby restart it to begin two years earlier, when my mother was still alive; for in the beginning, believe me, was Mama Wong.

Is this not allowed? Never mind.

We will return to Miss Fine Spine soon enough, never fear.

How soberly exhilarating the first four or five years of my mother’s stay at the Evergreen Overlook Assisted Living Residence Home! Other residents of the Alzheimer’s unit came and went; only Mama Wong survived, survived. For the next couple of years too we remained guiltily proud. She was beating the odds. She was outliving other people. She was proving, as she would have liked, a winner.

Such victory was expensive. I could not help but note, by the seventh year or so, that it cost $4,500 a month and was not covered by insurance; also that one could not say so. One was not permitted to recall that Mama Wong, then eighty-three, used to boast how in her family women often lived to be a hundred. That would be unfeeling.

— How often does she even recognize me? I said all the same, revealing my inner beast one fine suburban morning.

— But the times it does happen, said Blondie immediately. The times she’s there.

Blondie held her hand to her belly as she spoke; she was then, at forty-three, to our most profound confoundment, pregnant. Before her thrashed the pygmy goat, its head stuck in a watering can. I was not too clear about the name of the goat; only that it belonged to Blondie’s dear friend Gabriela, who had suffered a fencing failure such as had led to the destruction of her garden by deer. This had in turn led to her allowing a hunter on to her land, a man who shot with a bow and arrow, and dressed like a tree. He had donated the meat to a shelter. Nevertheless, Gabriela had been forced to recuperate in Italy.

This was how her goat had come to live (illegally) on our nice suburban property, where he butted our children and nibbled on their ice skates. He denuded our kousa dogwood. He made a mockery of our lawn.

His one charm: he could hold his ears out straight to either side, like a parody of a crucifixion.

Still Blondie doted on the creature because he belonged to Gabriela, and because he evoked, lucky quadraped, her sacred family-farm past.

— The goat butted Wendy again today, I said. She fell and knocked a tooth out.

Blondie absently left the goat to thrash, its balloon belly, like hers, heaving. The clanging of the watering can was loud.

— Was she upset? she asked.

— She ran off crying about how she was just glad she didn’t live on a farm.

— And you said?

— I said she was right, she should be sure to remember this moment and stick to the suburbs all the days of her life. Also I asked if she wanted to eat the goat for dinner.

— Carnegie, said Blondie, putting a hand to her belly again.

I helped her free the goat, which in its eternal gratitude kicked me in the shin.

— He is not like your mother, said Blondie. He’s only a goat.

I eyed its wattles.

— You have to forgive her, Carnegie, you do.

I looked the goat in the eye; it stared back with god-given indifference. Its rectangular pupils were like mail slots.

Across the street, our neighbor hauled a stuffed leaf bag out to the sidewalk. Mitchell, distinctly resembling the leaf bag, sported a new black leather jacket with his also new bifocals; there was, blessedly, nothing new in his wave. I waved back. Mitchell was on his third wife, a Norwegian minx given to sarongs. Was she a sign of vitality or of illness? Was she ridiculously sexy or just plain ridiculous? Blondie thought Mitch obsessed with death. He had, after all, gotten the wife post-prostate scare. I, though, thought Mitch obsessed with breasts, just like his brother Nick with his several Asian mistresses, about whom, through some obscure racial association, I heard about all the time:
I kid you not,
they will do anything, singly or in groups.

I, truth to tell, was the one obsessed with death.

Now Mitchell could be heard leaving, on his new motorcycle, for his new office. On a Sunday, no less.
Homo resurrectus.

Leave it to me to have a dying mother who would not die.

Her slippers appeared magnetically attached to the carpet. Her arms appeared magnetically attached to her sides. Not all Alzheimer’s patients were so infirm at first; but eventually they passed through Mama Wong’s stage. It was just luck she had arrived there and stayed.

Once upon a time—long, long ago—she had been an anomalous woman, languid looks married to the manner of a fishmonger. I did not resemble her. Her absurdly long fingers were hers alone, that enormous reach. Her nose was too flat to be typically Sichuanese, but she had the large eyes and long face of her region; also the special skin people attributed to growing up in Chongqing. It was the gift of living in a steam bath; life was a continual facial. She had too the sloped shoulders of a Chinese immortal; whereas I, apparently, had inherited my father’s block build along with his beetle brow. Barbarian looks
,
my mother said,
who know where you from.
That being the kind of sweet thing Mama Wong was given to say.

She liked to fish. This was something she had learned to do off a pier her first summer in America; and all her life she continued to love the long long lines that reached down toward the ocean floor. She loved the slippery mystery of the catch. She loved not knowing what was on the hook until it was out in the air—flipping madly, bigger or smaller or altogether different than what she had imagined.
Most people do not realize we are come from the sea,
she would say.
Those fish are our ancestor.
Sometimes she would laugh at herself as she said this.
Uncle dolphin, grandfather whale.
She was not above carrying, in her beautifully stitched pocketbooks, with their sleek calfskin sides and cunning gold-tone clasps, jars of bait. Mostly this was power bait or artificial bait, only sometimes was it live.

BLONDIE / 
How hard it was to diagnose her Alzheimer’s! How hard to say what was inappropriate behavior for her. All her behavior was inappropriate.

CARNEGIE / 
To wit: she had, in her day, escaped from the Mainland by swimming across the harbor to Hong Kong. How appropriate was that? Given that there were sharks in the water; given that she couldn’t even swim, exactly. Anyone else would have thought twice. But my mother, being my mother, simply snugged a basketball under each arm, kicked until she got there, then looked up a distant cousin.

Where there is will, there is way,
she would explain, years later, if asked.

Or else:
I just don’t like those Communists.

Now she still said these things, her eyes blank.

— Where there is will.

— Those Communists.

— My cousin surprised, yes. Surprised.

Once I gave her a nightgown printed with fish for Mother’s Day; she still wore it to bed at night. It had grown diaphanous with washing, so that you could see through the trout to her nipples, which sported the forlornly useful look of spare-the-counter stick-on appliance feet. Worse, you could see her diaper, which she needed. She cried and cried while I tried to get her to drink juice.

— You are going to become dehydrated, I told her. Do you want to dry up?

Often, in her early years at the Overlook, she still had her English, having attended a primary school run by American missionaries. How lucky for us! Often too, she still joked.
What? You think you are white? You are Wong! Wong! Wong!
she would say, banging her hand on her mattress. Or else:
Two Wongs—two Wongs—two—don’t make a white!
Those were the days I still hung on her words when she spoke. She had never liked talking about her past; now I waited, notebook at the ready, for whatever might emerge. And things did emerge, after a fashion, over time. A nun, a train, a girl who cried and cried. A dangerous place. A book. A bottle. But what place? What book? What bottle? Phrases emerged with more insistence than meaning.
Sounded like a cat. Like a cat. A cat sound.
My notebook stayed mostly blank—growing, it seemed, month by month, blanker—until finally I put it away.

As the years went on, more and more of her mumbling was in Chinese anyway. Sometimes Blondie could translate. Though Blondie had taken Chinese in college, and assiduously brushed up once Lizzy came to us, my mother used to insist she couldn’t even tell what language Blondie was speaking when she spoke Mandarin.
Sound like something strange
. Now Mama Wong listened carefully. Responded earnestly, sometimes. But it was like a language lab with wiring problems; all the dialogs were scrambled. And what about the days—more and more all the time—when she had forgotten her Mandarin, and knew, apparently, only Sichuanese? How well we were coming to know the sound of it. That argumentative, sibilant sound, irregular and explosive, like firecrackers. I wished she had taught me to speak it. But she never did. Could she ever have said why?

In any case, she could no longer.

Some days she just stared. Some days she seemed to be trying to get me to remember things for her.
The river,
she would say. But when I said,
What river? Do you mean in Sichuan?
she would look as if she had no idea why I was talking about rivers. Some days she was liable to throw things; we kept glass and heavy objects out of her room. Other days she was sweet and childlike. Once she cradled a flower I gave her, stroking its petals. She compared her shadow with mine, and watched mesmerized as one disappeared into the other.

I put on a little shadow-puppet show for her.

— Then the crow said
caw caw caw!
I told her. And that was the signal for all the forest creatures to sneak down into the valley.

— Friendly crow very useful, she said. Whole forest look like empty without it.

Another day she asked if I would tickle her.

— I tickle you back, she suggested.

— Okay, I said; but then was surprised when the tickling turned into a kiss on the lips.

— Oh, Ma, I said. I’m your son. It’s me. Carnegie.

She dropped her eyelids flirtatiously then, and pursed her mouth—for another kiss, I feared.

— That is your tough luck, she said.

BLONDIE / 
From time to time she recognized him. After staring or twitching for hours, she would suddenly cry,
Carnegie!
and ask him something. How many days he would be home over Christmas, perhaps. Or when he was going to learn no one cared what he thought?
Just shut up
, she would say.
Shut up. Just shut up
.

CARNEGIE / 
And what was the matter with my hair, it looked like even the barber couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me, she would say. No wonder I was stuck marrying that old maid Blondie.
Next you are going have funny-looking kids, no one can even say what they are
.

BLONDIE / 
He cried.

CARNEGIE / 
I cried to see her there in her heartbreakingly individualized, climate-controlled room. I cried to see its shatterproof window and equally impenetrable pictures of my father, me, the children. (We spared her pictures of Blondie.) She squinted at them vacantly. The pleasure in picking up pictures was still there in her hands, but the rest of the experience was missing, as she seemed to know. She looked puzzled, like someone trying to remember what was delicious about chocolate.

Was it easier to walk her through the garden of the Evergreen Overlook Residence Home—fondly called the Overlook—even if amorous patients accosted me, clucking,
Handsome, so handsome
if not,
Fuck me, fuck me?
Sometimes I thought so. Other times the garden seemed so cheery I wanted to rip out its wagon wheel. This was not because I was a nice Chinese boy. It wasn’t even because she was my mother, exactly. It was because I, alone of all the people left on earth, knew her.
Be mine!
people said on Valentine’s Day. But of course they didn’t mean it; no one would want another person to be his as Mama Wong was mine. No one would want to see her real self shimmering like a virtual reality beside her—bleating, banging, crying.
Beam me out, beam me out!
As if there had been a truly serious glitch. A grave, grave technical error.

Her younger self had not been easily confined. How much she risked, lived, made! A pioneer woman, alive to the real miracle of America; namely, mortgages. In the China of her youth, buildings were bought with cash. Meaning, as she pointed out, that the rich stayed rich. Only in America—O America!—were there mortgage loans open to all. She often recounted the thrill with which she discovered that she could buy a three-family house for just five thousand dollars down. How amazing that she and her little Carnegie could live in one apartment, and let the renters pay the mortgage payments. In just thirty years the building would be theirs.