The Love Wife (17 page)

— It was really crowded, she would say. All these people pushing. And it was so hot! Like an oven! Only hotter. And the mosquitoes—once I got fifty bites in one day. I am never ever going back there.

Later the conventional wisdom held that it was important to bring children to China before they were nine—that after nine they sometimes developed negativity. Lizzy was six. It should have worked out.

do you really want to shut down lizzy’s real self, that’s the question,
e-mailed Gabriela.
do you really want her to grow up saying the nice thing until she herself doesn’t know what she thinks?

Of course not,
I wrote back.
But what am I going to do?

have you tried aromatherapy? i know it sounds flaky. but you might try lavender spray. lavender is calming.

CARNEGIE / 
Whose house was this? Smelling like a country-home outlet store. I was half afraid, walking in, that I was about to behold a trunk show of faux naïvery, the sort of folk junk with which corporate America has thoughtfully sought to homeify our mobile society. Heart and goose dish towels, picket-fence napkin holders. Items meant to stop us mid–rat race, that we might pay homage to the stencil.

What a relief to find Blondie laboring with Lizzy instead, on a photo album of good memories. Freeing the birds! The Great Wall! First days with Wendy! (After the accident, that was.) Sprawled on the great-room rug, obscuring at least six of its cabbage roses, Blondie and Lizzy were ringed by acid-free mounting supplies. (Thanks to her art-restorer mother, Blondie had a horror of the non-archival.) That Lizzy might help write the captions, Blondie was giving her a choice of markers. The passion purple? The flamingo pink? Lest I fail to recognize this as a mother-daughter moment, the sun obligingly backlit them, gently suffusing the scene with something peachy rosy. The exact color you would imagine called Sunset.

But already in school Lizzy had learned that there could be many different versions of a fairy tale. Using the legend of the gingerbread man, for example, she had done exercises where she filled in the parts of the story that seemed to be missing in a particular version. Now she brilliantly applied what she had learned to the China photo album. She wrote:

What you don’t see in this story is how crowded it was, and how people pushed, and how hot it was, like an oven.

Blondie frowned at her pen assortment.

BLONDIE / 
Any mother would have been dismayed, yet I was particularly so. How had I ended up an outsider in my own family? The person who could never admit how hard she herself had found China—who had to be more careful than everyone else. Who felt, I suppose, a kind of guest.

When I strolled Wendy through town now I was reminded of the days when having a child of another race was simply a matter of fending off ignorance. How simple that was—how easy to know what was right. When people asked,
Is she yours?
or,
Where did you get her?
I could laugh and feel proud—of myself, of my family. It was a species of vanity. I had struggled against it when Lizzy was a baby. But now, I sometimes brought Wendy out into the world to feel that challenge, and my own fine resistance. I had always drawn strength from the fact that my hair next to Lizzy’s should be a picture that challenged the heart. Now I drew on it purposefully, the way other women drew on the knowledge that they were intelligent or thin. I had had the heart to take these children in, after all. Had I not loved them deeply and well, as if they were from the beginning my own?

7

A Kind of Guest

CARNEGIE / 
Still, confoundingly, Lan refused to set a place for herself at the dinner table. Still, patiently, we set a place for her. She had proven herself knife-and-fork competent; still, hospitably, we provided chopsticks every day, and a cup of hot tea, so she wouldn’t feel she had to drink our cold water.

The water business—I understood that much, my mother having drunk everything room temperature.

Gently, sensitively we inquired, did she like the food? Serve yourself, we said, please. Serve yourself. But though she half-smiled back and did eat, it was nibblingly. One bite, two.

Several evenings Blondie left food out for Lan at the base of her stairs. An after-school snack, in case she was hungry when she came home.

She never touched it.

BLONDIE / 
Wrote Gabriela:

you know what she is? she is chopsticks.

I e-mailed back:

Isn’t it more understandable, though? For her to be chopsticks than for us to be forks? I think it is more understandable.

She replied:

it’s more understandable if you understand it.

WENDY / 
She has no place in America, that’s what she says late at night in her apartment. Or that’s what she means. ‘No any place’ is what she actually says.

— America is cold, she says. In China, many more people help you.

— Help you? says Lizzy. I thought people were mostly out to get you.

— Help you too, insists Lanlan.

Sometimes Lizzy and I go over to her apartment after she gets back from class, when we are supposed to be asleep. We eat snacks. Nothing tastes right in America, she has no appetite, but she still likes eating with us, we find out. And so we come, so she’ll eat and not starve, most of the time we boil up some of those frozen dumplings that she said from the beginning were just like the ones you can get in China. We eat chicken ones, and pork ones, and vegetable ones.

LAN / 
Why make believe I belonged in the dining room? What use was it? Anyone could see it was
bu heshi
—inappropriate.

WENDY / 
She says she’s the servant, really, and that’s why it isn’t fitting, since when does a servant belong at the table? I tell her that she isn’t a servant, I don’t think we even have servants in America.

LIZZY / 
In America, we have cleaning women, which is different.

LAN / 
And who is given the leftovers to eat? Is that not the servant?

Wendy / Lanlan says if she were a real family member she would live inside the house. We try to tell her that we’ll help her if she wants and that she can definitely live in the house if she wants and that Mom just has the idea Lanlan wants to clean and stuff and can’t really be stopped.

Still she insists she is the servant to the rich Americans, meaning us.

LAN / 
For did not Blondie decide I should live in the barn with the goat instead of in the guest room? Could anyone deny this?

BLONDIE / 
We served her as if we were at a banquet. We heaped her plate with food while she protested. We treated her as if she were an honored guest, with that exaggerated politeness the Chinese love.

She seemed to view all this as so much insincerity.

LAN / 
Was it not completely fake? I never saw them treat anybody else that way.

Of course, Blondie talked so nice. But I felt
xiao li cang dao
—that her smile hid a knife.

Sometimes I sat in my room and thought about my great-aunt’s house. Who was living in it now? And what was I going to do when I went back? Carnegie had relatives in Beijing. I wondered if they could help me.

America did not want me. But could I say that the new China wanted me either?

The only people who really wanted me were little Wendy and Lizzy—girls with no mothers, like me. Sometimes Bailey too. I was getting used to Bailey, strange as he was.

BLONDIE / 
Outside, the days grew shorter. Colder. I knew this mostly by continuing to drive to work with my windows down long after others had stopped. I did this so that I could feel how the summer sun, which had shone on my elbow on the way home, did so no longer. How I began to need a sweater, and then to bundle up. How I began to become aware of my legs—that they were cold though my torso was warm. The day came when I welcomed the soft blow of heat on my toes, when the
ssssshh
of the heat fan simply belonged to my day.

By that time the trees were well into dropping their leaves. I tracked certain trees on my route—for example, a stand of birches like the ones we had at home, only so much more massive, so much more extensive, that I could not behold it without making that comparison—without thinking of our stand. And vice versa. The difference in scale so bordered on a difference in kind as to fascinate me. Of course, the stand by the parkway went by so quickly; that explained some of my seeing it in the way that I did. But I was generally less occupied when I beheld the birch stand at home; and yet I could not see that stand in relation to other stands either, only in relation to the stand by the parkway. I could not see it in a way that was not already my habit.

That was all right with me sometimes.

But there were other times when I felt I would like to know whether I was capable of disengaging the two stands from each other.

I tried to tell Carnegie about this once. He listened politely enough, head bent—a sign he was trying to focus. He cracked his knuckles.

I rubbed his back to reward him.

Yet he didn’t understand, in the end.

There was also an old maple on a knoll by my office that I watched. That tree had had an enormous hole hacked into its branches by the telephone company—because it was obstructing the wires, they said. Yet still it put on a show with what it had left. For was that not the nature of nature, to carry on? I always slowed as I passed that tree. Once I expected that, with its leaves down, its mutilation would be less glaring.

But no, it was not.

Or so I remembered from last year. Now here it was again—more glaring, as I recalled.

My sunflowers, of course, were long cut down by now.

The maple, bare. Then, many trees. Then, all the trees. The giant street cleaners with their huge round brushes and second-story drivers actually seemed to be doing something for a change. People raked and raked their yards. Only a few people hired those backpack blowers, thank goodness—most being more considerate of the neighborhood peace. Stuffed leaf bags lined the streets on Mondays.

I was sorry to see the leaves go. Yet I loved watching the structure of the trees emerge too. Those branches—so brave and forthright. Straightforward. Comprehensible. I loved being able to see, now, where the birdsnests were.

We were ready for Lan to help herself. To make herself at home.

She appeared to be losing weight.

E-mailed Gabriela:
did you try chinese food?

But of course we had. Maybe it wasn’t the right kind of Chinese, though; we only had two Chinese restaurants in town, one Cantonese, one nouvelle. And to be honest, we did not try the restaurants in other towns. Honestly, we were preoccupied, when we walked in the door, with connecting with the children. What with only two hours before their bedtime, we did not want to lose a minute.

I thought we should bring Lan to a therapist. I thought she had an eating disorder. But Carnegie didn’t want her to think we thought her crazy.

CARNEGIE / 
She had an antipathy for outdoor labor; no doubt associating yard work and suchlike with peasants. But indoors, what a dynamo! She not only watched the children and handled the laundry, she also did a good bit of cleaning. Nothing heavy-duty; that remained our housecleaner Damiana’s job. But Lan kept after the kitchen, and the playroom, and the kids’ bedrooms. She organized the sports rack, the gift wrap, the front hall closet, and the linen closet—all without being asked. She seemed to anticipate things we might ask and do them before we could—a preemptive strategy—thereby avoiding the indignity of being ordered about. She was not, she said several times, like Damiana. She did not need things pointed out. We tried to stop her, but it was like trying to get her to eat, more challenging than it would seem. And so we settled for fulsome expressions of appreciation and awe.

The only subject we ever had to raise with Lan was goat care. Blondie brought this up. Sounding Lan out, she said later. Proposing nothing.

Should Blondie have realized that Lan would feel forced to say yes?

WENDY / 
Lanlan says Tommy doesn’t listen to anybody. She says the goat is above her in the household, she thinks the goat is like a feudal boss, and we are its oppressed workers. What are oppressed workers? I ask, and she says it is like what I would be if I had a job and my boss was Elaine.

— You mean like a slave, I say.

And she says: — Right! Like a slave. We are all slave to the goat. How should a goat be so precious?

— Taking care of a goat doesn’t make you a slave, I tell her. It doesn’t make you anything. It’s just something you have to do, like math.

Still she hates it that she has to feed Tommy. She says that in Shandong she was always being butted by her neighbor’s goat, especially when she went to pee in the fields, once she was knocked right over.

BLONDIE / 
We had to spell out every single thing. It was not enough to tell Lan the goat needed water every day. You had to tell her that the water should be in a bucket. You had to tell her that a large puddle after a rainstorm was not enough. You had to tell her to refill the bucket if Tommy drank it all. You had to tell her to change the water every day even if Tommy didn’t drink it all. You had to tell her to tell us if the bucket was leaking.

It was the same with the feed bucket. You had to tell her to change the food every day. You had to tell her to tell us when the food was running low.

LAN / 
Everything I did, Blondie criticized.

Blondie / Then there was cleaning out the stall.

Honestly, we would’ve taken this job back, if we knew how. We told the girls to go help. But the more they tried to help, the more Lan insisted on doing it herself.

WENDY / 
She can’t understand what the goat is for.

— For fun? How is a goat fun? she says.

CARNEGIE / 
The goat would levitate, plant its hooves on the barn wall such that it was well nigh horizontal, then push off. Landing neatly on the driveway a moment later, free! Its furry wattles swinging.

Said Lan, the first time she saw this: — Your goat can fly.

The next time: — Maybe it will run away.

But goats generally stayed close to home.

— No, no, the goat is ours until our friend returns from sunny Italy, I explained. Or until one of our neighbors reports us to Animal Control. Whichever comes first.

— What is Animal Control? she asked.

— Don’t give her ideas, said Blondie.

WENDY / 
She doesn’t think it fair that a goat should have such an easy life. Every day Chinese people eat bitter, she says, every day real people suffer.

BLONDIE / 
Sometimes I wanted to say,
You see, I have my goat, and Carnegie, well, has his.

— You can cut him, said Lan, indicating an ankle tendon. —Then he will not fly anymore.

— We don’t do that here, I said.

CARNEGIE / 
We explained that Americans in general adored things farmy. That it wasn’t just Blondie. That it had to do with our agrarian past.

Of course I regretted the word ‘agrarian’ even as it emanated pretentiously from my lips. But naturally, she knew full well what it meant.

— I understand, she said. Before capitalism you were feudal landlords.

WENDY / 
One day when Tommy butts her, she throws a pail at his head.

— In this country, we do not throw pails at animals, says Mom. And when was the last time this stall was cleaned out?

BLONDIE / 
When would she start eating? E-mailed Gabriela:

healing. lan needs healing. what about a sweat lodge?

This, it seemed, was a kind of retreat where the participants huddled in a sauna for days, then burst out naked into the cold outdoors, reborn. I e-mailed back:

I don’t think so. To begin with, Lan is horrified by sweat.

Gabriela:

didn’t she sweat in the countryside? or did she carry her umbrella around with her then too?

I tried to explain, ending with:

Honestly, we are just too busy for this nonsense. It is too much to spend the day running from meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting—for half of which I am underprepared—only to have to psychoanalyze our nanny when I come home. Does not our attention at the end of the day rightly belong to our children?