7. Emma
7
EMMA
O ne of the things, one of the many, many things that I simply adored about stepping onto the block where my grandmother lived, was that it felt like coming home. She had been in the same tiny little fourth-floor walk-up my entire life, above a quaint neighborhood street full of small shops owned by her neighbors.
It was the kind of multicultural epicenter that happened organically, only in places like New York City.
As a kid, I was allowed to run almost freely with my neighborhood friends, as long as we didn’t leave the block. There was no, “We’re just around the corner.” There was no, “We’re in the back alley.” The street was somehow considered safe for us.
Maybe it was because everyone’s parents and grandparents worked in the little shops that opened onto the sidewalk, keeping an eye on us. Maybe it was just the magic of the seeming perfection of childhood memory, because I know when I was with my parents, that freedom never existed.
But with my grandmother, it did.
I knocked three times, as I typically did, just to let her know it was me before I opened the door and announced myself.
I called out, “ Ni hao , I’m here, Zumu .” I only knew a smattering of Mandarin, and I was ashamed to admit that for the most part, the only words I remembered, other than “hello” and “grandmother”, I had mostly picked up from watching Kung Fu movies.
I was not bilingual by any stretch of the term, and I had a deep suspicion that my parents knew even fewer Chinese words than I did.
“Emma, you’ve come to see me,” my grandmother said as she came to greet me in the kitchen.
She held out both of her hands and lifted them up to pat my cheek. She was a tiny woman, which always surprised me because my father was slightly taller than average. He wasn’t a walking skyscraper like Marcus Walker, but for a Chinese-American man, he was tall.
Grandmother’s hair was still black as jet and pulled back into a tight bun. The few silver streaks she did have twinkled in her hair like glitter. She wore wide-leg pajama pants and a loose, layered Mandarin-collared tunic.
“I was just here last week,” I responded.
She always complained that she never saw me enough, even if I had just been there the day before.
“Yes, well, your father never comes to see me anymore.”
“You know, you could go visit him,” I said as I carried the bags of groceries I had hauled upstairs for her into her small kitchen. I placed the bags on the pristine kitchen table. Everything about her apartment was pristine and colorful.
“What do I need to visit for? He should come see me.”
“Grandmother, stop acting so old. You’re not that old. You can go visit him.”
“No, he should come visit me.”
When I was a kid, Mom always talked about moving out of the city, and my dad made that happen when I was in middle school, when we moved to Connecticut, close enough for frequent visits, far enough away that we could enjoy a standard middle-class suburban existence. I think my mom did it just to get away from grandmother.
Once we were in Connecticut, Mom started letting Dad know that when she was ready for them to retire, she wanted to move to Florida. And like the good husband my dad was, he also made that happen.
But what he couldn’t make happen was getting my grandmother out of this apartment. At some point in time, she wasn’t going to be able to make it up to the fourth floor, of course. And at some point, this neighborhood wasn’t going to be friendly or healthy for her. But for now, she was happy.
I let out a sigh, unpacking the groceries and restocking the cupboards. “I’ll be sure to tell him next time I talk to him. You know, you can tell him yourself. There are phones in Florida, you know.” I pointed to the old black rotary dial phone that was mounted on the wall in her kitchen. “That thing still works, doesn’t it?” I teased.
“Well, he can call me too,” she said.
“I’ll be sure to remind him.”
“Let me see what you bought.” She squeezed into the small space, barely big enough for two of us, and began rummaging through the groceries as I tried to put them away.
“Did you get the rice? I needed more rice,” she said, searching through the bags.
One of the bags had been nothing but rice. I was going to have the forearms of a prizefighter from carrying her twenty-pound bag of rice up those stairs. When I was a kid, the bags of rice were bigger. They certainly felt heavier.
When I got the groceries put away, I folded up the bags and stored them under the cupboard under the kitchen sink. I didn’t even make it back to the living room before I collapsed in one of the chairs in the kitchen.
“You seem so tired, Emma. You work too hard. Have you eaten?”
I shook my head.
“Not since breakfast,” I mentioned.
“I’ll make you supper.”
She called every meal ‘supper’. I didn’t think it was a memory thing or a language issue. She just called everything after breakfast “supper”. She always had.
“I could really use a fresh, homemade meal.”
My grandmother was the best cook. Even when she made egg fried rice, it was always the best I had ever had.
“Here, help me. While you sit there, you’re not so tired that you can’t chop an onion.”
She handed me a knife and the cutting board. I grabbed the onion out of the hanging basket and began chopping it into finely diced pieces.
“You want some of that broccoli, too?” I asked.
She nodded as she stirred together a fragrant blend of spices. I could identify the ginger, garlic, and pepper, and then she added more ingredients I no longer knew or cared about. It was all just so wonderful.
“You haven’t brought that nice boy around in a long time.”
“Nice boy?” I asked.
“Yes, Dr. Kevin,” she said.
By the time Kevin and I had broken up, I no longer thought of him as a nice boy. I couldn’t see past his manipulative ways.
“I stopped seeing him a long time ago,” I mentioned.
I scraped the chopped onions into a bowl and set them aside before I started working on the broccoli. I got up, rinsed it off, peeled off a few leaves, and began chopping the stem into small, concise squares. A lot of people didn’t use broccoli stems when they cooked, not realizing that the stem could be just as tender and flavorful as the florets.
“Maybe that’s why you’re so tired. You need to see young people and go out. All you do is work.”
“How do you know I don’t see young people and go out?” I asked with indignation in my voice.
She turned around and held her spatula out, pointing at me.
“Because you talk to me like that. That is the voice of somebody who is trying to hide something.”
She was right. “Not guilty of anything, Grandmother.”
“But you are guilty of working too much.” She grabbed the onions before turning back toward the stove.
“I don’t have time to date,” I said.
“I didn’t say that. You just meet the young man, and then you spend time with your young man.”
“That’s not exactly how it works.”
“Of course, that is how it works. This is why your parents should never have moved away. It’s your parents’ job.”
I didn’t miss the strain in her voice when she said, “Your mother would see that you are struggling to find a partner, and it would be her duty to contact a matchmaker for you.”
“Oh, my God, Grandmother. Stop it. This is not feudal China. I do not need a matchmaker.”
“If you cannot find someone for yourself, you should be able to trust your family to find someone who will take care of you.”
I set the knife down before I hurt myself. I may be a professional surgeon, but this was a kitchen knife, not a scalpel.
“I take care of myself, grandmother. I don’t need someone to take care of me.”
“We all need someone to take care of us,” she proclaimed, holding her spatula high in the air.
I wasn’t going to point out that my grandmother had been a fiercely strong, independent woman her entire life. I didn’t know what the story was, some big family secret that even my father wouldn’t tell me, but when my grandmother moved into this apartment with my father, his dad was already out of the picture.
I always thought to myself, ‘If Zumu can do it, I can too.’ But it wasn’t something I was going to say out loud because I didn’t want to upset her, and I was under the impression that this was some kind of secretive shame. Otherwise, why didn’t I know about it?
“A matchmaker, you say? What would your matchmaker say about me? About my job? I work with smart, important men—doctors.”
“Matchmaker could set you up with another doctor. And then there would be no jealousy, would there? She’d call it a match made in heaven.”
“Doctors don’t go to matchmakers, Grandmother,” I said. “And I mean that. I don’t want you to hire a matchmaker for me.” I thought dating apps were bad enough. How humiliating would it be for my own grandmother to hire a matchmaker?
“How else are we going to find someone to take care of you?”
“I don’t want someone to take care of me. I can take care of myself just fine.”
“Maybe you will meet somebody new at work, and then I won’t have to hire a matchmaker for you.”
“How did you know there was somebody new at work?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
“Oh, really?” She turned to me with wide eyes. “Is he the kind of man who would take care of you?”
I didn’t know much about Marcus Walker. What I did know was that he made my body tingle just by being in the room. His comfort had been calm and soothing the other day.
“Maybe,” I said, not wanting to admit that I didn’t want my grandmother to hire a matchmaker to set me up with somebody who wasn’t him.