Things You Should Know (2 page)

Connection, I am thinking. I want connection.

“You want something I don't have,” she says.

 

I am at my desk, drifting, remembering the summer my parents divorced and my bar mitzvah was canceled due to lack of interest on all sides.

“I just can't imagine doing it,” my mother said. “I can't imagine doing anything with your father, can you? I think it would be very uncomfortable.”

My father gave me $5,000 to “make up the difference,” then asked, “Is that enough?” I spent my thirteenth birthday with him in a New York hotel room, eating ice-cream cake from 31 Flavors with a woman whose name my father couldn't remember. “Tell my friend about school, tell my friend what you do for fun, tell my friend all about yourself,” he kept saying, and all I wanted to do was scream—What the fuck is your friend's name?

On Memorial Day weekend, my mother married her “friend,” Howard, and took off on an eight-week second honeymoon, and I was sent to my father's new townhouse condo in Philadelphia.

There was a small room for me, made out of what had been a walk-in closet. My father was taking cooking lessons, learning a thousand and one things to do with a wok. On different days, different women would come for dinner. “I'm living the good life,” my father would tell me. “I'm getting all I want.” I would eat dinner with my father and his date and then excuse myself and hide in my closet.

I spent my summer at the pool, living entirely in the water, with goggles, with fins. I fell in love with the bottom of the pool, a silky sky-blue, a slippery second skin. I spent days walking up and down, trying to figure the exact point where I could still have my feet on the ground and my head above water.

“It's vinyl,” I heard the lifeguard tell someone.

The extreme stillness of the sky, the hot, oxygenless air, the water strong like bleach, was blinding, sterile, intoxicating, perfect.

The only other person who came to the pool regularly was a girl who had just been in the nuthouse for not eating. Deformedly thin, she would slather herself with lotion and lie out and bake. She was only allowed to swim one hour a day, and at noon her mother would carry out a tray and she had to eat everything on it—“or else I'm taking you back,” her mother would say.

“Don't stand over me. Don't treat me like a baby.”

“Don't act like a baby.”

And then the mother would look at me. “Would you like half a sandwich?”

I'd nod and she'd give me half a sandwich, which I'd eat still standing in the water, goggles on, feet touching the bottom.

“See,” the mother would say. “He eats. And not only does he eat, he doesn't make crumbs.”

“He's in the water,” the girl would say.

In the evening I would crawl into my cave and read postcards from my mother—
Venice is everything I thought it would be, France is stunning, London theater is so much better than Broadway. Thinking of you, hoping you're having a fantastic summer. I am imagining you swimming across America. Love Mom.

“We're still your parents, we're just not together,” became the new refrain.

Later, when I started to date, when I would go to girls' houses and their mothers and fathers would ask, “What do your parents do?” I'd say, “They're divorced,” as though it were a full-time job. They'd look at me, instantly dismissive, as though I too was doomed to divorce, as though domestic instability was genetically passed down.

And then, later still, there were families I fell in love with.
I remember sitting at the Segals' dining room table, happily slurping chicken soup, looking up at Cindy Segal, who stood above me, bread basket in hand, glaring at me in disgust. “You're just another one of them,” she said, dropping the bread, unceremoniously dumping me. Too stunned to swallow, I felt soup dribble down my chin.

“Don't go,” Mrs. Segal said, as Cindy slammed upstairs to her room. After that, the Segals would sometimes call me. “Cindy's not going to be here,” they'd say, “come visit.” I went a couple of times and then Cindy joined a cult and never spoke to any of us again.

My mother used to say, marry someone familiar, marry someone you have something in common with. The flatness of Susan, the hollow, the absence of some unnameable something—was familiar. The sensation that she was on the outside, waiting to be invited in, was something we had in common.

Never did Susan ask for an accounting of my past, never did she pull back and say—“You're not going to hurt me, are you? You don't have any weird diseases, do you? You're not married, right?”

Susan looked at me once, squarely, evenly, and said, “Nice tie,” and that was it.

In the morning, after our first night together, she rearranged my furniture. Everything immediately looked better.

 

It is late in the afternoon; I have spent the day lost in thought. There are contracts spread across my desk waiting for my review. Outside, it is getting dark. I leave and instinctively walk uptown. All day I have been thinking about the house, about Mrs. Ha, and now I am heading toward our old apartment as though it were all a dream. I am walking, looking forward to seeing the grocer on the corner, to riding up in the elevator with Willy, the elevator man, to smelling the neighbors' dinner cooking. I am thinking that once these
things happen, I will feel better, returned to myself. I go three blocks before I catch myself and realize that I am moving in the wrong direction. I belong in Larchmont—Larchmont like Loch Ness. I hurry toward the station. Stepping onto the train, I have the feeling I am leaving something behind. I check my messages—Susan has left word, something about a client, something about something falling, something about it all being her fault, something about staying late. “I don't know when,” she says, and then we are in a tunnel and the signal is lost.

I am going home. I imagine arriving at the house and having Sherika tell me Mrs. Ha is gone again. I picture changing into hunting clothes, a red-and-black wool jacket, an orange vest, a special hat, and going in search of her, carrying some kind of wooden whistle I have carved myself—a mother-in-law call. I imagine Mrs. Ha hearing the rolling rattle of my call
Mrs. Haa…Mrs. Haaa Haa…Mrs. Ha Ha Ha…Mrs. Haaaaaahhhh
—it ends in an upswing. She is roused from her dream state, her head tilts toward the sound of my whistle, and she is summoned home as mystically as she was called away.

I phone Sherika and ask—can she stay late, can she keep an extra eye on Mrs. Ha. I take a taxi from the train—there is the odd suburban phenomenon of the shared cab, strangers piling in, stuffing themselves into the back of the sedan, briefcases held on laps like shields, and then each calls out his address and we are off on a madcap ride, the driver tearing down the streets, whipping around corners, depositing us at our doorsteps for seven dollars a head.

Home. The sky is five minutes from dark, the floodlights are already on in the backyard. Kate and Mrs. Ha are down in the dirt, squatting, elbows resting on thighs, buttocks dropped down, positioned as if about to shit.

“Mrs. Ha, what are you doing?”

“I am thinking, Georgie. And I am resting.”

There is something frightening about it—Kate imitating Mrs. Ha, grotesque in her gestures, rubber-limbed like a circus clown, contorting herself for attention, more alive than I will ever be. Her freedom, her full expression terrifying me—I am torn between interrupting and simply watching her be.

“We are planting a garden,” Sherika says, straightening up, extending to her full six feet. “After lunch I took them to the nursery. We are putting in bulbs for spring.”

“Tulips,” Kate says.

Sherika drops sixty-nine cents of change into my hand and somehow I feel guilty, like I should have left her a hundred dollars or my credit card.

“What a good idea,” I say.

“We are just finishing up. Come on, ladies, let's go inside and wash our hands.”

I follow them into the kitchen. They wash their hands and then look at me, as though I should have something in mind, a plan for what happens next.

“Let's go for a ride,” I say, unable to bear the anxiety of staying home. Not knowing where else to go, I drive them to the supermarket. Sherika takes Mrs. Ha and I have Kate and we go up and down the aisles, filling the cart.

“Are you the apple of your daddy's eye?” A clerk in the produce section pulls Kate's hair and then looks at me. “There's lots of these Chinese babies now, nobody wants them so they give them away. My wife's sister adopted one—otherwise they drown 'em like kittens. You don't want to be drowned, do you, sweetheart,” he says, looking at Kate again.

“She's not adopted. She's mine.”

“Oh sorry,” the guy says, flustered as though he'd said something even more insulting than what he actually said. “I'm really sorry.” He backs away.

Sorry about what? I look at Kate. Her head is too big. Her
skin is an odd jaundicy yellow and now she's playing some weird game with the cantaloupes, banging them against the floor. It occurs to me that the guy thought there was something wrong with her.

“Did you find everything you were looking for?” Sherika asks as we're wheeling up the frozen foods toward the checkout.

“I'm finished.”

 

In a strip mall across the street, I notice an Asian grocery store. When the light changes, I pull in.

“Ah,” Sherika says, “look at that.”

It is small, dingy, and a little otherworldly. There are wire racks for shelves, and things floating in tubs filled with melting ice—none of it incredibly clean. Mrs. Ha scurries around collecting tins of spices, bottles of vinegar. She seems happy, like she has recovered herself, she is chatting with the man behind the counter.

She shows me fresh vegetables: water chestnuts, shanghai cabbage,
“Bau dau gok,”
she says,—“snake bean.” Lotus leaves, brown slab sugar, and now she is in the freezer case, handing me a bag that says
FROZEN FISH BALLS
. She hands me others with writing in Chinese.
“Fatt choy?”
she asks the man behind the counter, and he points toward it.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Black moss,” she says.

“What is it really?” I ask.

She shrugs.

I want Mrs. Ha to feel comfortable. If pressed seaweed is to her what mashed potatoes are to me, I want her to have ten packages. Why not? I start picking things off the shelf and offering them to her.

She shakes her head and continues shopping.

The man behind the counter says something and she laughs; I am sure it is about me. I hear something about three
Georges, about water, and then a lot of clucking from Mrs. Ha. He talks quickly, flipping back and forth from Chinese to broken English. She answers—her speech, suddenly rhythmic, her accent shifting into the pure diphthong, the
oo
long, an ancient incantation.

The man takes a small beautiful box out from a shelf below the counter. Mrs. Ha makes a soft cooing sound before he opens it. “Bird's nest,” he says. “Very good quality.”

“What is bird's nest?”

The man blows spit bubbles at me. He drools intentionally and then sucks his saliva back in. “The spit of a swift,” he says, flapping his arms.

Mrs. Ha checks her pockets for money, finds nothing, and looks at me as if to ask, Can we get it?

“Sure, why not?”

“I have never had so much home in a long time,” she says.

“Come again soon,” the man says, as we are leaving. “Play bingo.”

I carry two shopping bags out to the car, imagining Mrs. Ha is going to start dating this man—I picture tracking twin positioning chips, two dots, one on top of the other. I make a mental note to ask Susan—is Mrs. Ha allowed to date?

In the car on the way home Mrs. Ha asks, “Do you like Sony? Mr. Sony make the tape recorder and Mr. Nixon make friends with the Chinese. Then Mr. Nixon erase and now Mr. Sony die, I read in your
New York Times
.” She laughs. “Stupid old men.”

 

Kate is on the floor in front of the television. Mrs. Ha is in the kitchen making soup. Sherika takes the car to the train station; she will drop it off and go home to Queens, Susan will pick it up and come home to us.

“What's that smell?” Susan says when she comes in the door.

“Your mother is making soup.”

“It's so weirdly familiar, I thought I was hallucinating.”

“Everything OK?” I am looking at her, trying to tell if she is lying, if there's more to the story or not.

“It's fine,” she says. “It's fine. He got hysterical, a little piece of the wall came down—it wasn't my fault. I was so upset. I thought I had done something wrong.”

I don't tell Susan that I was worried she might not come back. I don't tell her that I took everyone to the supermarket because the idea of staying alone in the house with the three of them inexplicably terrified me.

“Dinner is ready,” Mrs. Ha says.

“It looks delicious.” I stare into my bowl. There are white things and black things floating in the soup—nothing recognizable. I am starving. I assume it is mushrooms.

“Hot,” Kate says, her face over the bowl, blowing steam like a dragon.

Susan stares speechless at her bowl.

The broth is rich, succulent. I slurp. It is skin, skin and bones, small bones, soft, like little fingers, melting in the mouth.

I look at Susan. “Feet?” I ask in Latin. Susan nods.

I don't want to say anything more. I don't want to throw Kate off—she is eating, not noticing. And Mrs. Ha is clearly enjoying herself.

“Georgie took me shopping,” Mrs. Ha says.

“I had a late lunch.” Susan carries her bowl into the kitchen.

Later, I overhear her on the phone with her brother, whispering. “She tried to poison me, she made chicken-feet soup.”