The Foremost Good Fortune (31 page)

Thorne laughs then, but it’s a nervous laugh, as if he’s not sure if he should cry along with his brother. My mother and I exchange a look. It’s one we’ve practiced over years. It’s such a relief to have someone in the apartment in China to exchange the look with, I almost don’t care about Aidan’s crying. The pigeon is eerie and peaceful-looking at the same time, if that’s possible. Perhaps we’ve been so starved for wildlife in China that we’re in a state of collective shock over the pigeon. Where has this bird come from? And why us? Why now?

The pigeon looks like it’s been sent to our apartment with a purpose—a little old man who needs to gather his thoughts and then he’ll begin to explain. I hold Aidan in my lap on the couch and rock him until he quiets. I’m about to put him down on the rug. Thorne is back at Monopoly. It’s his turn and he rolls a three and a five, which makes eight.

That’s when Mao Ayi walks into the den with her hands covered in dumpling flour. She’s making traditional Chinese jiaozi for my mother—one kind filled with glass noodles and tofu and egg, and then another with pork and green onion. It’s no small thing for Mao Ayi that my mother is here. For days Mao Ayi has been asking what she should cook on my mami’s first night. That’s what she calls my mother—my “mami.” And Mao Ayi has still not gotten over how tall, how incredibly tall, my mother is. In Mao Ayi’s eyes, it’s like some matriarchal giant has arrived in our midst. Mao Ayi is not sure what to do with my mother’s height. Height equals power in China. The Chinese put a great deal of importance on how tall people are—it can dictate whom they marry and whether or not people think they’re smart enough to go on in
school. My mother has claimed all the power in the apartment simply by walking in tall.

Mao Ayi stands in the doorway and asks in Chinese what the yelling is about. “Yi ge niao,” I say in Mandarin and point to the window. “Wo men kan kan yi ge niao.”
We all take a look at a bird
. Mao Ayi leans over the back of the couch, and when she makes out the shape of the pigeon down below, her eyes light up. It’s a look I haven’t seen before from her.

Things happen fast after that. There’s no warning. Mao Ayi sees the bird, and then she reaches for the handle on the window and goes after the kill. “Hao chi!” she yells with a huge smile.
Good food
. Before I can stop her, she’s opened the window and is waving her right arm at the pigeon, trying to catch him by the tail.

Aidan begins screaming again. “Bu yao!” he cries loudly.
Don’t want this
. It’s a primal scream. Mao Ayi is trying to trap dinner with her bare hands and Aidan does not even bother with the English. “BU YAO!” he yells again. For some reason he’s decided this pigeon means harm. What fascinates me, besides Aidan’s fear, and besides the fact that Mao Ayi would like to eat the bird if she caught it—let the blood run in the sink and pluck its white feathers—is that my five-year-old is screaming in Chinese without translating first. “Bu yao! Bu yao!” he says again.
Don’t want. Don’t want
.

I need to take action. I can’t let Mao Ayi get this bird in her hands. I reach and pull her back from the window. Then I turn the handle closed, lock the casing, and say in English, “All done. It’s all over.”

Thorne is crying now; I think only because the whole scene has been exhausting to watch. My mother takes him in her lap, and I bend down again for Aidan, who’s lying in a heap on the rug. Who knew a pampered bird (because that’s what it is—it’s no visitor from the wild; this bird has come straight from someone’s plush pigeon den) could arrive and set the boys off like this?

Grabbing pigeons off window ledges and boiling them for dinner isn’t something we’ve experienced. The boys and I have never seen a bird beheaded. Someday I think this will be important. I’ll want Thorne and Aidan to understand where their meat comes from and to imagine a food chain leading to their dinner plates. But I don’t think this December night in Beijing is the right time for a live kill. I smile at my mother again and raise my eyebrows. It’s easier to be calm around
these children when I have a witness. Because they are sort of driving me crazy now and if my mother was not here, I might yell at them. So often what I think I’ve needed in mothering is just a witness—someone to make a small acknowledgment. Someone to say,
A bird just flew into your window
.

I smile at Mao Ayi and point to Aidan and explain in Chinese that Aidan is too tired to look at the pigeon anymore.
Hen lei
. She says that the bird would make good pigeon soup if I would allow her to catch it. She makes a tut-tut sound between her teeth, like I’m blowing a great chance here. Like she can’t believe I’m going to be so thickheaded as to let this bird go. She kneels on the couch again, watching the bird, and doesn’t take her eyes off the window while she talks.

I clarify things. At least I think I do, but there are always moments in China that get lost in translation. How could they not? I say we don’t want pigeon soup for dinner.
Bu yao
. I say we aren’t hungry for that kind of dinner. I remind her of our plan to eat dumplings. Then I motion to her that I’m going to close the curtains.

“Goodness,” my mother says. “My goodness.” She smiles at Thorne, who is back in her lap, and then she says to Aidan, “Aidey, I thought you would love the bird. I thought you loved animals.”

I worry that my children have changed and that in the haze of cancerland I’ve missed the signs. Maybe living in this polluted city for too long has given them pathologies about simple things like pigeons that land on our window ledge in the afternoon. I smile at my mom anyway and I say, “It’s all fine. It’s fine. Fine. Fine.”

Except it’s not, really. It hasn’t been since the day I found those little breast lumps. In fact, there are many things I still don’t understand. Like why the pigeon flew into
our
window, and why we happened to be playing Monopoly at the moment the bird arrived. We could have been anywhere else in the house and would have never known the pigeon was down there, gathering itself for flight.

I’m sure my cancer felt like this to my mother when she heard the bad news—a surprise that she had nowhere to place. Tony told her on the phone the night after the surgery here in China. I could not talk to her. I was too sad. There was no context for the cancer. No family history. No bad health. It’s as if cancer should fit into some larger story, but it doesn’t. It won’t. And this is also part of
the sadness. Where did the cancer come from and why did it come for me?

This is what my mother did when I got cancer: she waited for us to fly back to the States for the next surgery, and when we arrived she gave my boys bedrooms in her house in the town on the river. She fed them pancakes and cereal every morning. She baked them cakes. She turned her dining room into an art center—with pens and crayons and markers and glue sticks with purple glitter—and she did paintings with them on her big wooden table. She bought Wiffle balls and bats, and she set up a baseball diamond with my father, and together they played hours of Wiffle ball each day. My parents drove the boys to another town where they could learn how to play tennis. They needed things to do. We’d pulled them from school. I was often at the doctor’s office. My mother and father drove them for grilled cheeses and onion rings at the Fat Boy drive-in in Brunswick, then let them have ice cream before bed.

Mao Ayi nods at me while I pull the curtains closed. I sneak a look down at the ledge: the bird has begun to pace, which I take as a good sign. We need a healthy bird. A pigeon that is able to fly away. We can’t have this bird die on our watch. We’ve had enough talk of dying lately. It will be too much. But then Mao Ayi loses control and makes one more lunge for the window. “NO!” screams Aidan, this time in English. “NO BIRDS IN THE HOUSE!”

“Okay!” I yell. “Okay now!” I lean over again and I grab Mao Ayi around her little waist and pull her back toward me on the couch. She laughs but still doesn’t look like she’s given up. She’s lived in a Beijing hutong all her life. Made it through Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution. To my mind, the only reason anyone her age in Beijing is still alive is because they are immensely resourceful. They know how to survive. Which means, first off, that they know how to find food. Who can blame her for recognizing a good homing pigeon when she sees one?

She finally stands and heads to the door. Then I pull the curtains closed again and say to everyone in English, “This pigeon needs some rest now. This pigeon needs some peace and quiet.”
And let’s hope, for God’s sake
, I say to myself,
that this pigeon is gone before morning
.

But it’s December in Beijing: cold and windy and the bird does not go anywhere. All evening we check, my mother and I, while the boys
take a bath and put on pajamas and get in their beds for stories. Each time I look down, the bird is in the same spot. Then things get worse: he stops moving, which I take as a bad sign. This bird is going to freeze to death if he stands still like that all night out there on the ledge. Tony comes home from work, and I show him the pigeon. Then he and I and my mother begin a vigil. We seem to know without saying it that the bird has to live. It has to. But what else can we do but look at it? The window ledge is several feet down, and since Mao Ayi lunged for him, the pigeon has moved to the side, out of reach. Tony finally puts some raw hamburger meat out on the ledge, and a small plate of sunflower seeds.

While we’re sleeping, a light snow falls over Beijing, and when we wake up, the city is covered in white. Before the boys are out of bed, I run to the den and pull the curtain back quickly. The pigeon is still down there, and yes! He’s alive! Except now he’s got some bird friends who’ve come to visit. Two of them—pigeons just as big as he is, with plump white bodies and long black tails. Where have they come from? And how did they know where to find their friend?

I close the curtains and give each boy a bagel for breakfast and pour them apple juice. With them it’s like the bird never existed. I take their cue. We do not talk pigeon. What we talk about is how Nona is going to visit each of their classrooms today at school. Then Tony takes the boys down to the bus, and my mother and I finally pull the curtains wide. The pigeon (our pigeon) sits on the window shelf and listens while his friends balance across the way on the telephone wire. I am not making this up. His two friends call over in some kind of pigeon speak. I believe they tell him there’s a way back to the flock, that it won’t be that hard. That he can get over this—he just has to follow them.

All year the boys and I have watched flocks fly in formation above the hutong, and we never understood how prized the birds were. How coddled. The pigeons always take a tight path, up through the tops of the willow trees and then down between the nearby high-rises doing loop-de-loops and wing-dixies. We’ve seen white pigeons and speckled gray pigeons and pigeons the shade of charcoal. The plumpest ones look more like mourning doves. The smallest ones look like American sparrows.

I didn’t know these birds have been around since the Ming dynasty,
when they were used to deliver messages. I didn’t know there are sanctioned pigeon races now: from Shanghai to Beijing, with big prize money. There are over three million homing pigeons in China. A whole pigeon cottage industry. A national pastime. My mother sits in the den on the couch taking pictures, documenting the conversation. “Friends,” she says and takes a photograph. “This bird has got friends. They are trying to rescue him.” Then we both walk into the kitchen for more coffee. This is beyond anything we imagined.

When we go back to the window, the sill is empty. Poof. The pigeon has gone. And right away, I miss him. Until then, I’d been unsettled. Strange visitor. Unannounced guest from birdland. I didn’t know what the bird wanted with us. Now we’ll never see him again, and I’m filled with strange longing. I know Mao Ayi will think the bird was a missed opportunity—another example of my willingness to waste good food. But that pigeon was not hers for the taking.

Time moves ahead. Are the boys more easily startled now by the unexpected? Has cancer done this to them? Has China? Or maybe this is just the way they’ve always been around strange animals and I’ve forgotten. Cancer can do this—erase some of the time before the cancer, so I’m never sure what’s the same and what’s been changed. What’s been imprinted.

Israel

The day after my mother leaves China is sad, more so because I have an appointment at the international hospital where I became a professional breast cancer patient. The lobby is an innocuous-seeming place. There are long white couches covered in fake leather and blond wood coffee tables and English-language magazines. But this is the place where the lumps turned out not to be cysts, and the surprise of that fact does not wear off. I am here for my quarterly exam.

One of the Chinese nurses calls my name, and I follow her into the tiny windowless room where they take vitals. The girl wears a set of sky blue scrubs and a blue cardigan. Her hair is pulled back in a dark ponytail. She looks maybe twenty years old. She tells me to take off my coat, then asks why I’m here.

I knew she would do that. But I don’t want to answer. I can get snippy about this. I have no desire to tell this stranger the history of my cancer. I will never see this nurse again, and I’ve been through this conversation enough in Beijing to realize that the nurse wants to know because she wants to know, not because she’s going to be able to help me.

I look at her and then for some reason, I give up the fight and say, “Breast exam. I’m here for a breast exam.”

“Are you having pain in your breast?” she asks slowly in halting English.

“No,” I say. Which is sort of not a lie. I will not talk about cancer with this woman. I will not let her induce me into some kind of truth session.

Then the girl mentions that I’m wearing a beautiful ring. “Where did you get it?” she asks.

“It’s from Israel,” I answer, impatient. I do not want to talk about my ring. I want to see the doctor and find out about the new densities in my right breast that I’m afraid I felt in the bathtub. “The ring was made in Israel,” I repeat. In fact, I met the Israeli jeweler who made my ring the day I bought it. She was visiting Portland and brought her things to a funky craft shop my good friend Jenepher owns there.