Chapter Ten #2
Hoang,
Gus told me you’re in Colorado, I hope you’re enjoying it there. I don’t know when you’re back, but tell me when you are. I’m writing this on a bus. I just tried to go see my mom, but she wasn’t home. I haven’t seen her since I was thirteen. Maybe it was good she wasn’t there. I think I wanted mostly to see her expression when she saw me. I’ve been trying to conjure it, the expression more than the face, if that makes sense. I have an outdated idea of her face, but I wanted to see emotion on it. I wanted her to be stricken. Now that I’m writing it out, I remember feeling that way as a kid. She said smiling and frowning would give her wrinkles. I remember specific occasions when I made her smile, that’s how rare it was. I always just wanted her to react to something with her face . . . which sounds weird but I don’t know how else to put it. I guess I was thinking that seeing me today could have been surprising enough to make her
I stopped. It was like I had forgotten I was addressing Hoang and started to write a diary entry. I tore out another page, copied down the first two lines of the letter to send to him, then shoved the first piece of paper to the bottom of my bag.
The scenery became uninteresting on I-95. We passed a long single-story white building. preferred N services , it said. We passed some kind of business park with dark brown windows and Toyotas and Mitsubishis parked out front. Next to the cars was an area of grass, and a very small pond. We passed a long gray building. amazon fulfillment center , it said, and then up ahead I saw four deer grazing on the side of the highway, clustering around the tufts of weeds that sprang up between the road and the chain-link fence. We passed the deer. I looked at my hands, prone in my lap, and then up at the window again, where now there were no more deer. I concentrated on the trees flickering against the road and the flat fields beyond them and tried a difficult mental exercise I attempted sometimes. I tried to imagine what the land had looked like before it looked like this. I looked until I could make myself see what it might have been like before the highway, before the parking lots and storage facilities and the land cut up into invisible parcels of ownership. There would have been hills and forests and streams and there would not have been boundaries, and the deer would not have had to avoid the cars on the road to get to the grass they wanted to eat, or to roam, and there would have been many more of them, and they could have raced to the other side of the continent if they liked, no highways or cities or toll booths blocking their way, or they could have stayed right here, and right here would not have been called New Jersey.
“Siri, what’s my phone battery?” the man next to me said to his phone.
“Fifty-six percent,” said the female voice. Unbidden I thought: I have heard the voice of this software more than I’ve heard the voice of my own mother. I didn’t know if that was true now but I knew at some point it would tick over into being so.
Maybe what I had to accept was that sometimes you loved someone and there was no reconciliation. Sometimes you loved someone but there would never be a place for them in your life, or for you in theirs, and that was that. Of course, because you loved them, it seemed as if there had to be some magical solution to this problem of not fitting in each other’s lives, but there wasn’t. You loved them and the love didn’t end, and maybe they even loved you back, and, notwithstanding those details, you were bound to remain apart.
Near the state border, crossing back into Pennsylvania, we passed a cemetery where all the headstones were embedded flat into the ground, and vases of bright flowers stood upright. A man driving what must have been a mower, but looked like a quad bike, bumped up the slope between the graves, and the wheels kicked up dirt and grass. I couldn’t see how he avoided running over the headstones and the flowers; maybe that was an unavoidable corollary. Four lanes across, behind a tall fence, schoolboys played lacrosse in neon vests. Small brown birds whirled in the air, making shapes out of nothing, and then alighted on the tele phone wires in perfect rows. Their flight paths and landing spots seemed predestined, like guided missiles. I wondered how they knew where their place was on the wire and if they ever got it wrong and landed on another bird, or missed, or stepped on one another’s toes. I wondered if it was right to call them toes. It was always a relief to see the Philadelphia skyline come into view, even if I never spent any time in those tall buildings. As we crossed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, I craned my neck and tried to count the sky-blue suspension tines.
Back in Chinatown, the soothing smells of wet-market water, vegetables and fish, street grime, and dried conch. In the vestibule, the scent of cloves. Xinwei was grading papers on the couch. I asked her if there was any mail for me, and she said there wasn’t. I asked for the key.
“Postman comes once a day,” she said.
“I know, but can I have it anyway?”
“Are you waiting for something?”
“No.”
“Then why are you always checking?”
Raymond was elsewhere, so we spoke in Mandarin.
“There’s someone I talk to, but he doesn’t have a phone, so he sends me letters,” I said.
“Boyfriend?”
I shook my head.
“Then?”
I decided to give her an abridged version of events. It was possible that because of my mood, I painted myself as the victim of the story, but unconvincingly, because when I finished telling it, Xinwei was unimpressed.
“I don’t think you’ve considered how he might be experiencing this situation,” she said.
“What do you mean? That’s all I consider!”
“You wonder whether he likes you back, how he feels about you, but you’re not really thinking of how he sees things.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re trying to guess what he thinks, but from your perspective, not someone else’s.”
I was astonished, because this was how I characterized Apple’s way of thinking about other people. Was I only as self-aware as Apple? It was an alarming thought. Xinwei was still speaking.
“You say it’s hard to understand how he feels, but to me, he seems clear, while you’re giving mixed signals. Wouldn’t that make him more cautious?”
“I don’t—”
“You feel your feelings and then wonder what’s correct based on that. But men do the opposite. They try to understand the situation and then they decide how to feel. You want him to be overwhelmed by emotion for you, but he won’t act until he has the emotion. Maybe he likes you, but he won’t think about it until he understands the situation. Or he liked you, and you rejected him, so now he’s moving on. And you should have gone to the zoo. It’s disrespectful to change plans without warning.”
Later, on the fire escape, I looked through the photos I’d taken at work. One object that was no longer appearing in the exhibition was a shadow puppet of a girl with bound feet from around 1900, one of the ones I’d hoped to use for an interactive performance. I thought it was funny that the rods were attached to the arms of the body of the puppet, and the legs didn’t move, because it meant they were purely ornamental, like bound feet themselves, which sacrificed function—the ability to walk—in order to sig nify beauty. According to the slip of paper attached to the puppet, a man named Walter Barr donated it to the museum in 1932. The typed description didn’t even mention the bound feet, I suppose because they were a given. It read:
shadow puppet of a girl from a respectable family. Black hair in braided bun. Black chemise with orange lotus flower pattern. Red pants. Teeth.
An email popped up on my phone: it was from Paul. He wanted to tell me, again, that it had made him happy to see me, and he wanted me to know that he would be back in New York in the summer if I wanted to “see one another again.” Regarding our last meeting, he conceded nothing. He never spoke frankly, only in abstractions. “I sensed a desire to relitigate trials and perhaps selfishly evaded its fulfillment” was a sentence he had written. What? He also included a link to an article about the gilets jaunes that he wanted me to read. This was why I’d had to block him on everything—not because he had done anything especially egregious, but because if I let him, we would just keep talking, and it would go on and on, and it would never stop meaning something to me, and what it meant to him would always be a mystery. I looked at the email for a while. There was a time in my life when I was incapable of leaving Paul unanswered, when the very thought of doing so caused me distress. What a pleasure it was to betray one’s past self, I thought, and then I pressed delete.
The next day, I allowed myself some time to recover from my stressful and unfruitful excursion to New Jersey. Raymond and Xinwei were visiting relatives, so I had the apartment to myself. In the morning, as she and Raymond were preparing to leave, Xinwei asked me if I had slept well, “Because your skin looks very gray.” I told her I had slept fine, which wasn’t true, and she said she knew that I hadn’t eaten dinner or, it appeared, breakfast, and that this was the cause of my gray skin. She instructed me to eat; I placated her with promises that I would.
When the doorbell rang around two in the afternoon, I was sitting on the floor, resting my head against the seat of the sofa and staring at the ceiling, listening to the 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations . Through the peephole I saw Apple, frowning in her Canada Goose parka, her eyes obscured by the thick coyote fur trim of the hood. I let her in and then returned to my position on the floor, hoping to reenter the semi-meditative state into which I had lulled myself. Apple stood over me, coat still on, eyebrows raised, inspecting.
“Are you on drugs?”
“No.”
“Pining for mouse boy?”
“No!”
I turned off the music and remained on the floor. I was weighing whether or not to tell Apple about my mother, imagining how she might react, what she might say. I decided I didn’t have the energy for such a conversation.
“Have you eaten?”
I shook my head.
“Were you planning on it?”
I shrugged.
“I can make you something. And by something I mean like tinned sardines and rice. Maybe a fried egg if you’re lucky.”
I nodded, looking into Apple’s familiar face, the pursed lips, the perpetual arched brow, the thin chin and cute plump cheeks that she hated to have pinched.
“Pee, are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “All good.”
I hauled myself off the floor to demonstrate that all was good, only to be engulfed by lethargy and flop onto the sofa.
“Dude,” Apple said. “Toska.”
She shrugged off her jacket and went into the kitchen. I listened to the fridge door open and close, the clatter of the loose-hinged cabinet doors, the click of the stove spark and the whoosh of the gas. I wondered whether Apple had inherited her brisk caretaking from her mother, through blood or experience. I remembered at Thanksgiving when Apple’s mother had cut a pineapple after dinner and, finding it slightly unripe, brought out salt and told us to sprinkle it over the fruit so that it would be sweeter, and would not singe our tongues.
“Did Xinwei tell you to come here?” I called over the kitchen noise.
“Can’t hear you!” Apple shouted.
After some more sputtering and cursing, she set a plate on my lap. Rice, sardines, and a fried egg, as promised. She handed me a pair of chopsticks.
“Thank you,” I said. “Looks great.”
She scrolled her phone while I ate. After a while she said, “Xinwei did tell me to come over. She even told me to heat up the leftover rice. I didn’t know she had my number. I had no idea who was calling, so I didn’t pick up the first few times. She has a very abrasive voice.”
“She’s just unselfconscious.”
Without looking up from her phone, Apple said, “Do you think she’s like a replacement mother figure for you?”
I stopped chewing. “Why the hell would you say that?”
“What? You’re the one who’s always going on about how you feel comforted when she scolds you for drinking the wrong soup or whatever.”
“My mother was never like that.”
“But that’s what I’m saying , she’s—”
Apple broke off, perhaps seeing the look on my face.
I read what Gus sent about the general strike. I was skeptical, but it was rousing. I read more of Sentimental Education. The protagonist’s cynicism about revolutionary change, his emotional detachment from the political passions of others, felt very much like reactions I understood, but they also made him seem a little sad, and this made me wonder about myself. My father returned from the Gobi Desert, repentant, and called me in the middle of a weekend morning. I told him what had happened.
“Do you want me to tell her you went?” he said.
“I thought you weren’t speaking to her anymore.”
“I’m not. I can get Fei to tell her.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I was lying on the floor of my bedroom, balancing the phone on my forehead, staring at the ceiling.
“It’s probably just as well,” he said, “I don’t think she’s changed.”
“What do you mean? She’s still . . . ?”
“Hm. No. She’s taking lots of medications. But she’s not,” here my father paused, “remorseful. She has no explanation for it. She definitely has no apology. And that’s what you want, right?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
He cleared his throat. “With her condition, and the medicines she was taking, it can affect the memory.”
“So?”
“That incident .” He was referring to the last time I saw her; he had always referred to it in this way, with the English word, as if to distance himself from it. “I don’t know if she remembers. I could be wrong.”
I closed my eyes, and the ringed ceiling bulb transformed into a hazy green lozenge, multiplying in the blackness, and studded with other, imperceptible colors, like amoebas under a microscope slide.
“Why did you have to tell me about her?” I whispered. “Why did you have to tell me she was here?”
“You always told me I shouldn’t keep things from you. Now I’m telling you things and you’re unhappy?”
“Don’t you see? Now I know that she knows I’m here. I can’t pretend she’s in the desert, or on the moon, or dead. She’s so close, and she knows how close I am to her, and she doesn’t want to see me. She’s fine without me, and now I have to know that, forever.”
“I’m sorry, Niuniu,” my father said, using my childhood nickname. I could feel liquid tickling my ears. I wiped my face and sat up, suddenly furious. The phone dropped into my lap. I stared at it, waiting for my father to say more, but the other end was silent.
“I have to go,” I shouted at the phone. “Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.”
At the union office I helped glue hundreds of posters to hundreds of sticks of wood for people to hold up at the rally. As we glued, I asked Mariama about the woman who had found the poop in the room, and how she was doing.
“She is fine. That day, she came to me and said, ‘I cannot do this, because I know who I am.’ Good for her. It wasn’t even her section.”
Then Mariama began to tell me, after I prodded, more about herself. She said she used to take night classes at the community college because the U.S. didn’t recognize the accounting degree she had from Mali. But her housekeeping shifts never ended on time—she would be scheduled to work until half past four, but most days she didn’t finish until eight or nine in the evening—so she kept missing classes. If she missed a certain amount, she would lose her financial aid scholarship, but she couldn’t leave work early, because then she would lose her job. So she dropped out. She had teenage twins, she said, a girl and a boy.
“Do you think I should talk to my daughter about all that?” Mariama said.
“About what? The union?”
Mariama laughed. “No. You know. All that. How did your mother talk to you?”
“Oh,” I hesitated. “She wasn’t much of a talker.”
Mariama nodded. “Chinese culture is quite conservative.”
“Yes.” I patted a poster dry and set it aside. “Exactly.”
“My mother would always be direct with us. It was rare. To be honest, I liked it. Maybe I was a bit embarrassed, but I loved her for talking to us as adults, not as children.” Mariama started to laugh again. “And now I do even more, being a mother and feeling how hard it is to do the same!”
She asked me if I had any advice on parenting a teenage girl. I worried she thought I myself was a teenager, and could help because of this. I told her I couldn’t think of anything specific but from the way she described her daughter, I was sure everything would work out.
“What you say is too good to be true,” Mariama said gravely. “Any daughter of mine is bound to be a handful. I remember how I was at her age, hence why I worry.”
I asked her if she thought mothers and daughters emulated one another at different stages of life, and she said yes, they undoubtedly did. She said when her daughter was a toddler, Mariama’s mother was constantly telling Mariama how similarly she had behaved at the same age.
“And you?” Mariama said. “Did you act the same as your mother?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”
“How come?”
“I just mean, I don’t really know what she was like. When she was younger.”
Or now, I thought, or ever, but it didn’t seem worth bringing up. Mariama asked me if I had a boyfriend, if I wanted children. I said no, and yes, one day.
When I got home, Xinwei told me something had arrived for me in the mail.
“It’s something that will make you happy,” she said, and stuck out her tongue.
I found the postcard on my bed. The picture showed sand dunes, and snow-capped mountain peaks rising in the background behind them. On the other side, it said,
Penelope,
Finally got my license so I figured I had to drive somewhere far. I’m in a tent in Colorado, flashlight in my teeth writing this. It’s so cold & the stars are all over the place. I should be back in March. Thought of you this morning when I jumped into a freezing lake, the water was like fire, I never felt so alive.
Hoang