The Moth (24 page)

Invariably at some point Mother would beg Helen and me to rub her feet, so Helen and I would take turns sitting at the foot of Mother’s bed for hours kneading and twisting and tickling and pulling at her feet. We played “This Little Piggy Goes to Market” with Mother’s toes deep into the night.

Often in the middle of the night, Mother would decide that
we had to talk to the Ouija board. So we’d all sit around the board with our fingers poised lightly on the planchette. When Mother was at the board, the planchette would fly around wildly, and the board would say things like “Tonight is the night of the killer. Don’t go to sleep or you’ll wake up dead!” So we’d sit in our beds waiting for the killer to strike.

But sometimes the Ouija would say, “He’s coming tonight! Get out now!” So we would all dash downstairs and jump in the car and go check into the Travel Motor Lodge on Bay Street, which Helen and I always loved because we loved staying in motels. But the man at the reception desk always found it rather odd because he knew that we lived in Savannah.

Helen and I had almost never spoken to a grown-up. In fact grown-ups used to wonder out loud what our voices sounded like. The only time we would speak to grown-ups was when we went to drive-ins, which we did a lot since we were always driving. And Mother was so paranoid that she would refuse to place an order. She didn’t want to speak to the people at the counter. So Helen and I would have to go up and make the order.

And invariably the girl at the take-out counter would peer over the counter at us and say, “Y’all talk funny. You’re not from here, are you? Where are you from? Are you from Transylvania?” And then she would say, “Come look at the two little Transylvanian children! Are you two twins?”

If ever any of our friends from school did walk home with us, as soon as they saw what house we lived in this look of terror would come over them, and they’d say, “You live in
that
house? How do you dare go inside? I wouldn’t dare set foot on the front porch! That house is haunted!”

And then their look of terror would transfer itself from the
house to us, and they would back away from us and say, “Your mother is a witch!” And then they would run off without even saying good-bye to us over their shoulder.

Helen and I always wondered why other children reacted that way. And we decided that maybe it was because sometimes, when Mother’s sorrowful rages took hold of her, she would go into the backyard and climb a ladder onto the roof of the shed, and she would stand on the roof and claw the air and curse the sky in her rage.

When I was thirteen and Helen was fourteen, we began to study French obsessively. It became our secret language that Mother couldn’t understand. And we would speak French together madly while rubbing Mother’s feet. Those conversations with Helen in French were some of the most passionate conversations of my whole life. We dreamt of being poets and painters and wild Bohemians rolling drunk in the gutters of Paris.

Even when I was in high school it never occurred to me that I would ever learn to drive. Helen never learned to drive either. I think that we somehow thought that Mother would always be there to do the driving.

We did, however, both get bicycles, which we kept in the downstairs hall. At this point Mother had begun to practice self-hypnosis. Helen and I would sit beside Mother as she lay on the upstairs couch and put herself through a series of hypnotic autosuggestions. Mother would tell herself that she would feel full of self-esteem and wildly good about herself, and that she would no longer be driven to eat banana splits.

And when Mother had placed herself in a deep, sound sleep, Helen and I would rise quietly and sneak downstairs. Mother kept a folding chair wedged under the front doorknob with two
long strands of camel bells dangling from it. Mother said that the ringing of the bells would warn us in case a burglar tried to get in. But Helen and I had become convinced that Mother kept the camel bells there so she would hear us if we tried to leave in secret.

Very slowly and carefully we would move the chair out from under the doorknob without making a single one of the camel bells ring. Then we would grab our bikes and run outside and quietly shut the door and zoom off—alone, without Mother, together—the most wild, adventuresome feeling!

But invariably, no matter how far we’d gotten into whatever godforsaken part of town, we would look back over our shoulders and there would be Mother’s blue Chevy II bearing down on us at top speed, with Mother at the wheel biting her lip and driving like a maniac, trying to drive us off the road. It seemed like Mother didn’t care whether she killed us, so long as she stopped us from going off without her.

Our longing to get away from Mother began to grow very deep.

When I graduated from high school, we all three took the train up north to Washington. Helen and I were going to attend George Washington University, and we were all going to live together in that room on the top floor of Mr. Schwoyer’s rooming house in Georgetown and it would be the three of us, like it always was, like it always would be.

But Helen and I knew that that summer would end differently. We were going to run away together to Paris.

We had made our plane reservations in secret. We had some money in trust from our father, who had died before I was born of a morphine overdose. We wrote to the bank in secret, asking
that the monthly checks be sent in our names, and no longer in our mother’s name. By running away, we were pulling the financial rug out from under Mother’s feet.

At the end of the summer I began to pretend to go to my classes at George Washington, but instead I would go every day to the Greyhound bus station to put quarters in a locker where we had our luggage kept.

The day came for us to fly away. Neither of us had ever flown before, but what concerned us was getting Mother to go to the National Gallery alone, without us. I think I said that I had to go to my classes at GW, and Helen said that she was feeling sick.

I kissed Mother good-bye and walked downstairs and waited in the alley that ran along the side of the house. Helen was going to pull one of the blinds down in the top-floor bay window as a signal to me that Mother had left.

I was waiting in the alley—waiting to betray Mother. I peered around the side of the house. Mother had just walked out the front door. She was walking away. Her back was to me. She was walking downhill to catch the bus at the foot of 30th Street. She was wearing her big Harris tweed men’s overcoat like she always did, and her crocheted hat that she had made herself that was shaped like a ziggurat, and her loony boots that she’d ordered from the Marcia Hill shoe catalogue that had fur tongues and that looked like boots a bear would wear. Her wild hair was poking out all around from under her crocheted hat. She was swinging her arms as she walked. She looked happy and innocent. She looked like a clown walking away.

Edgar Oliver
is a playwright, poet, and performer. After Edgar and his sister Helen ran off to Paris, his mother became a security guard at the National Gallery, guarding the paintings she so loved. Edgar is a member of the Axis Theatre Company, which is under the direction of Randy Sharp and which is located at 1 Sheridan Square in Manhattan. His one-man show,
East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House
—produced by Axis and directed by Randy Sharp—was the recipient of a Fringe First award at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Three collections of his poems are available from Oilcan Press:
A Portrait of New York by a Wanderer There, Summer
, and
The Brooklyn Public Library
(oilcanpress.com). His novel,
The Man Who Loved Plants
, is available from Panther Books (www.goodie.org). Mr. Oliver’s latest one-man show,
Helen & Edgar
, opened in New York City in October of 2012 and was called “a revelation” by Ben Brantley of
The New York Times
.

ELLIE LEE

T
here’s a kind of wisdom that fathers have, and then there’s the kind of wisdom that
my
father has. He thinks he’s totally brilliant, but I just think he’s crazy.

For example, when we first immigrated from Hong Kong, he thought it would be a good idea for all of us to have American names, which would make sense because it would make transition a lot easier. And so my dad chose as his American name “Ming” even though it’s not American or even his real Chinese name, it’s just another Chinese name—it’s a dynasty.

When we first came to America, we came to Boston. Being from Hong Kong, we had never experienced New England winters. We were penniless; we had very little money. My dad had the brilliant idea of making me my first winter coat, which he designed himself. He got this pink quilt material, which was totally inappropriate for a coat. The actual bodice of it floated away from my three-year-old body, so all the cold air could draft up. He didn’t have construction skills to make sleeves, so there were just these two slits in the front that I could use to
grab things. It was this big pink bell. The design made no sense. But to this day he thinks it’s
the best
design.

Another example: one day he came home and there had been a sale on belts, and he’d bought a monogram belt, and he was so excited.

He was like, “Look at this!” and it had this big, shiny letter “A” on it, even though our family name is Lee.

And I was like, “Dad, why did you get a letter ‘A’ belt? That doesn’t make any sense.”

And he was like, “Oh, I got ‘A’ because ‘A’ is for ‘Ace.’ ”

You have to understand something about Chinese people. Chinese people are obsessed about being number one. Like,
I have a belt now that says so. I’m number one! Ace!
If you’ve never noticed, in Chinatowns across the country Chinese businesspeople always have to find the best “number one” name for their business in order to bring in money and good fortune, which is why everything is an “Imperial Dynasty,” “Lucky Dragon,” or “Number One Kitchen.”

That is my dad, that’s his mentality.

So in the first few years of being in this country, he had no time off and worked like crazy, and managed to save a little money to start up his own business. It was a very modest grocery store in Boston’s Chinatown. And of course he called it “Ming’s Market,” but in Chinese the name of it was
, which literally means “bargain price market.”

And even as a little kid, I didn’t understand. He told me one day he would mark up something by just 5 cents, mark up another thing by 10 cents. I was like, “How are you ever gonna make money? This business model is insane.”

But you know, strangely enough, almost immediately he developed a really loyal following in Boston’s Chinatown,
because for the first time working poor families actually had a place where they could buy affordable, healthy groceries, and eat well, which is no small thing when you’re poor.

So after about ten years he built it up to be a very successful business, and by 1989 he had moved into an enormous space—it became New England’s largest Asian market.

I was a snotty teenager. I still thought, “Well you’re still crazy. You’re a successful businessman, but you’re nuts. You have crazy ideas.”

So he’d been running his business on the first floor of this vacant building. It had been vacant for thirty years. And the landlord was trying to renovate the other floors to rent them out as retail space. But he was doing everything on the cheap, so instead of hiring a contractor, he was welding and renovating on his own without getting permits. And one day something got out of hand and this big fire broke out as he was welding. But it was OK, they evacuated the building—about 150 people—and the fire trucks arrived immediately and everything was fine.

Until the fire department hooked up their hoses to the hydrants and there was no water to fight the fire. And they were like,
Huh, that’s weird.
So they went down a couple of blocks and tried the next hydrant, and it was also totally dry.

What had happened was, a few months prior, the city of Boston had done road construction, and generally if they drill deep, they turn off the water pressure in case they hit a water main. And when they sealed up the road, they forgot to turn the pressure back up, so the firefighters had no tools to fight the fire.

It was a disaster. An hour later, the building was still on fire, and there was still no water. They were trying to jerry-rig something from a nearby hydrant, ten blocks away.

And as if things couldn’t get worse, the fire jumped an alley and the building next door caught on fire, and on the top floor were ten thousand square feet of illegally stashed fireworks.

Now firefighters couldn’t safely scale the ladders, and it was a surreal moment because things were exploding in celebration as my dad stood there, completely helpless, watching his life’s work being destroyed in a moment through no fault of his own.

So I got a call. I was a sophomore in college at the time, and I went out to his store the next day, when it was just smoldering; it wasn’t on fire anymore. And as I made my approach to the store, I remember seeing three elderly women, and they were crying.