The Love Wife (25 page)

How unlike her sister Lizzy!

— I’m sorry you’re not excited, I said.

She shrugged.

I wanted to cry. How could she not be excited?

CARNEGIE / 
Had we not, after all, done Chinese lanterns and Chinese dragon races and Chinese dumplings since she was two? Chinese culture camp? The Chinese Community Center? We subscribed to the
Families with Children from China
newsletter. And how mightily we had strived to build her self-esteem, to give her ‘tools for her tool kit.’ Did we not balance our checkbook on the abacus? Find the girls Asian dolls? Provide them with multiracial crayons?

BLONDIE / 
We had not gone so far as to move to Chinatown, the way some people had. But I wasn’t the one who resisted that idea. It was Carnegie who laughed and claimed to hear the voice of his mother.

China-crazy those people are.

CARNEGIE / 
What one week with Mama Wong would have done to them.

BLONDIE / 
And yet we had seriously talked about moving, way back when—wanting to do something, anything for this child who cried all night in her sleep. We could never have imagined that, before Wendy—that a child could sob as she slept. It went on for months. If we had believed Chinatown would feel like China to her, we would have moved.

Sometimes at night I still woke up, thinking I heard crying. Sometimes I still entered her bedroom, and put my hand on her warm bony back, thankful for the even peace of its rise and fall. I was thankful it no longer heaved and shuddered as it once did, night after endless night. Wendy’s window looked out onto the yard—slightly bowed, the land glowed in the dimmest moonlight like something rising. How thankful I was for that, too. What a blessing to have something to gaze on, in those long hours.

— You’re not going to have to speak Chinese in front of your classmates, I said now. If that’s what you’re worried about.

She arranged some dark polished stones on her desk, placing them, one at a time, in a shiny line.

— Though I bet they’ve never known anyone their age who spoke Chinese, I said.

— I knew you were going to say that.

She messed up her arrangement.

— I’m sorry. You don’t have to. I mean it.

Wendy stared at the stones. In their shiny curved surfaces I could see her thin face reflected over and over.

I had not meant to push her. Yet I hadn’t wanted to reinforce her shyness, either. It was hard to follow my instincts with Wendy. For example, my instinct now was to hug her. Yet I did not, as she had never really liked hugging, just as she had not, when she first came to us, liked being held in our arms and gazed at. I had anticipated attachment problems—I had read that I should carry her all day in a Snugli, facing in. But I had also read that I should follow the baby’s lead; and she so strongly preferred to be laid down in her crib. Or better yet, to be strapped into her car seat, the molded part of which snapped out and rocked. This sort of seat was really designed for infants—I never intended for her to spend hours in it. But apparently it felt familiar to her. And gaining weight as slowly as she did, once she came to the States, she fit in it longer than most children.

Back in the Chinese orphanage, in an unsupervised moment, we had glimpsed a brown room full of green plastic chairs with straps. Could our Wendy really have been strapped into such a chair? We told ourselves that the children were probably strapped into the chairs to keep them from crawling on the floors, which were broken tile and concrete. Why would they have done that to our Wendy? Who, though supposedly ten months when we adopted her, was not yet crawling. We told ourselves, too, that though the foster mother worked in the orphanage, Wendy, theoretically, had not lived there. Our Wendy, theoretically, had lived in the foster mother’s home.

Yet Wendy loved the rocker seat, and plastic seats in general.

That changed once she was vertical.
My third leg,
I called her then. How she clung to me! And how happy we were about that—how relieved. So much so that I sometimes wondered if we didn’t in small ways encourage the clinging—wanting to fill her with the warmth we felt she had missed.

Did that make her shyer than she would have been anyway?

I gently touched, now, her knee.

— I mean it, I said again.

She took her knee back for herself—staring, still, at the stones. Her hair curtained her face. Her back curved, as if she was trying to make herself into a stone, too.

— I hate doing stuff in class, she said. I hate even raising my hand.

— I know, I said, resisting the impulse to draw aside the curtain. I talked through it instead, as if to a priest in a confessional. — If you’d like, I’d love to come into class and do something.

— And do what? she said. Talk about that car accident?

— How about Chinese New Year? I said. And how do you even know about the accident?

WENDY / 
— Lizzy told me, I say. Was it a secret? Lizzy says a lot of things are secret in this house.

— It is not a secret, says Mom. We just try not to dwell on unpleasant things.

— How come?

— We are trying to be happy, says Mom.

— Lizzy says you talk about all kinds of things behind our backs, I say. She says you talk about us.

— Of course we talk about you, says Mom. We talk about how you’re doing. What your teacher had to say and so on.

— But what do you say?

— Next time I’ll write it down, says Mom. Okay?

— You’re going to forget.

— You know I might, she sighs. I forget a lot of things these days, that’s why I take this herb, you know, this gingko? For my memory. Also I’m pretty busy. But I’ll try.

— That’s not why you’ll forget, I say.

BLONDIE / 
I heard Lizzy then, in Wendy. Second children were double-voiced that way.

— In the past, I said, I would have just said I won’t forget. I wouldn’t have burdened you with how hard it will be for me to remember. How many things I’m juggling. Whether I get enough sleep. That’s the kind of thing we keep from you. Do you understand?

She clicked her stones against one another while I tried to forget some of the things I was juggling. For example, her little brother’s ear infections—how many ear infections he had! And that interview with—what—some business magazine, in which I was asked three times whether our firm wasn’t first and foremost about profit. Could I deny that the social-responsibility angle was just a way of differentiating ourselves from other funds? Could I deny that it was just marketing?

Could I?

— It isn’t exactly being phony, I said.

— But there’s other stuff, too, right? That you don’t say?

It was chess, too, that taught her to lay traps.

— Yes, I said. I suppose there is.

— Hmm, she said. Here.

She dropped some stones then, still warm from her hand, into mine. I caught them with surprise. At closer range, by different light, I could see that the stones bore fingerprints—Wendy’s or my own, or both. How soft they felt, too, I was surprised how soft. Perhaps because they were warm?

WENDY / 
Mom rubs my knee the way she likes to for some reason, it’s like she’s polishing a doorknob.

— Thanks, she says. She tucks my hair around my ears so it’s out of my face, then says: — Do you want Lan to come to your class instead?  Lan can come instead.

— No, I say.

That makes her look so relieved I feel sorry for her.

— Lanlan says nobody in China does the New Year’s plate like we do, I say. She says they don’t do hot pot either, or at least not like we do, where everything means something.

— Well, that’s what they did in Dad’s family.

— Lanlan says no one in China eats fortune cookies.

— We can forget about the whole thing if you like.

— Okay, I say.

— Fine, she says, playing with the stones I gave her.

— Okay, I say again.

But while Mom can forget about it, Elaine never will.

— We’re going to do a China unit! she says. Every time she sees me she says: — We’re going to do a China unit! Are you going to talk Chinese for everybody? Everybody’s waiting for you to talk Chinese!

I’m picking up Chinese like gangbusters just like Mom says, already I can speak better than Lizzy and Mom too, and of course Bailey, who can’t talk. Mom says half the time she can’t even understand what Lanlan and me are laughing about, she says it’s because I heard all that Chinese as a baby.

Now Lizzy’s jealous.

— No speaking Chinese! she yells sometimes, and grabs Lanlan’s arm and pulls her real close. — No private jokes! No speaking Chinese!

But when we don’t talk Chinese, Mom’s as upset as Lizzy. Because sometimes we hang around and don’t even have to talk. It’s like Lanlan knows what I’m thinking anyway, and like I can feel how she’s feeling too, especially if she’s feeling sad.

— What are you lovebugs doing? Mom asks if we’re hanging around like that. Like if I have my arm around Lanlan, or if I’m playing with her hair. Or if we’re just sitting doing nothing, letting the day come, or the night.

— Lovebugs, enough! she says. And I mean enough!

BLONDIE / 
I always thought the Chinese so industrious. And yet how lazy they could be—how many corners they could cut. For example, was it really necessary to pin a handkerchief to Bailey’s shirt to wipe his nose with? Was it really too much work to get a Kleenex? Did we really need to see this snotty cloth hanging from his shoulder?

WENDY / 
— How about making something with paper, says Mom. You haven’t done that in a while.

And so we do, while Bailey’s still napping. We make stuff for the millennium, poppers and hats and window decorations, and funny-looking glasses where you look out of the middle two 0’s of 2000. Lanlan tries to pronounce ‘millennium,’ and I try to explain why everybody’s storing up food and stuff.

— It’s because of the computers, I explain. Dad says a lot of the computers go to 1999 and that’s it. They think after that comes nothing.

Lanlan shakes her head, and when I say ‘Y2K’ she repeats ‘Y2K
.
’ I’m not exactly sure what the Y means, or the K, but it’s computer talk, I tell her, for the whole mess.

— People are worried our lights are going to go out and nothing is going to work, and it will be like a disaster, I say.

Lanlan listens. Then she has to go get Bailey, who we can hear on the monitor is definitely awake, in fact jumping up and down in his crib like it’s a trampoline.

— It’s not fair, says Lizzy. It’s not fair that Wendy’s adopted from China and speaks Chinese, while nobody even knows what I am or where I came from. I hate being soup du jour.

And one day when she’s picking cookie crumbs out of the family-room rug, she suddenly looks up and says: — It’s probably how come my real mother abandoned me, don’t you think it’s how come?

— No, says Mom. I think she left you at the church because she loved you and knew she couldn’t parent you.

LIZZY / 
It was like some present she popped out of her pocket all wrapped up but that you know she didn’t wrap herself. It was like something she picked up prewrapped, like some bottle of perfume she was going to give to the school principal at Christmas.

— You’re just saying that! I said. How do you know? You’re just saying what it says in the adoption books you should say.

— You asked me what I thought, not what I knew.

— I could tell by the way you said ‘parent’ like that. That is like straight out of a book.

— And what should I have said?

— ‘Take care of.’ That’s what normal people say. My real mother knew she ‘couldn’t take care of me.’

— We try to say ‘birth mother.’ Because I’m your real mother too. Both your mothers are real mothers.

— That’s like out of a book too!

— It is not out of a book, said Dad, walking by. — It’s out of the adoption video.

Then he left.

— Carnegie Wong! said Mom. Please come back here!

But he had something to do in the basement. It was like the basement was his burrow, and he was a burrower, which he would actually admit if you asked him. I knew that because once I did, and he said he was by nature and long practice, like most men, shameless in this regard.

WENDY / 
Anyway, he’s calmed Lizzy down a little, Mom just wishes she could talk like Dad sometimes. But she can’t, it’s like her mouth just doesn’t move that way, I know because in that way I’m just like Mom. Even if she isn’t my birth mother, I’m like her anyway.

LIZZY / 
— And why should I learn Chinese when I might not even be Chinese? I said.

— You’re right, it’s not fair, Mom said, chopping up carrots for Bailey; she was always making these little containers of chopped vegetables and fruit and cheese. — You’re right, and you don’t have to learn Chinese if you don’t want to. Although it’s hard for a lot of people to say where they came from, they come from so many different places. Like me, I come from a lot of different countries. I don’t have a simple label, like German American or Scotch-Irish American. I’m soup du jour, too.

— Yeah, but it doesn’t matter as much because you’re white and not adopted. Nobody wonders where you’re from, nobody asks you.

— Well, I wonder myself.

— It’s different, I said. Because if you don’t want to wonder, you don’t have to.

— Do people ask you where you’re from?

WENDY / 
Mom means well when she says that, I can tell. She really does. Like she stops her chopping and looks at Lizzy and her whole face is so sorry, if I had any stones in my pocket, I would give her some.

But Lizzy doesn’t get whether people mean well, she just hears their words.

LIZZY / 
— What do you think! I said. I’m like the only kid in my class who’s soup du jour, do you realize that? The only one.

— Don’t let them get to you, Liz, Mom said. Do you see that you let them get to you? You just have to ignore them. And what about that Monique Watson? Isn’t she from someplace?