The Love Wife (27 page)

Some of the movies aren’t even in color.

Russell tells her what to see, but she doesn’t like what he likes, like she doesn’t get this movie
Dirty Harry
at all.

LAN / 
I thought that
Harry
very strange. What kind of hero was that? So rude. But sexy, it was true. I thought that
Clint Eastwood
almost as handsome as
Gregory Peck.

WENDY / 
She’s more interested when Russell gets hold of some Hong Kong kung fu movies, and then some new movies from the Mainland. Some of them she saw in China, but some of them she didn’t. A lot of them she says don’t have anything to do with any Chinese she knows. Why do they have to make movies about such strange places, places nobody ever even heard of? But of course she watches them anyway, even though she says she would rather watch James Bond. She likes James Bond even though the British are the good guys.

— Of all things! she says.

And the way she says it we know it’s like a practice phrase from school.

LIZZY / 
She hated the British because of the Opium War and gunships, which her father used to talk about all the time. Apparently he used to talk about this humiliation and that humiliation, so that ‘humiliation’ became, like, this big word for her.

WENDY / 
I’m not even sure what it means exactly, but when she says,
They humiliated us,
I can feel how
us
doesn’t mean her and me and Lizzy.
Us
means her and people in China, which makes me sad. She says the American government is different than the American people, but when she says
they,
I still hear
you.
Very soft, it’s like when you stare at something red for a long time and then look up and see green.
You humiliated us.

But she still loves James Bond one hundred percent.

— Bond, she says, in that James Bond voice. — James Bond.

The way she does it, even Bailey thinks it’s funny.

— Bon! he says, with like this little bounce up and down. He does that without holding on to anything, like he’s dancing.
— Bon! Bon! he yells, and then falls down
bump
on his bottom. His diaper makes this crinkly sound when he does that, and his cheeks jiggle up and down. Because he is like really really fat, Mom says he has the most chipmunk cheeks of all the kids.

LIZZY / 
Lanlan went around humming the tune to
Goldfinger.
And talking about who was sexier, Sean Connery or Roger Moore. She was fascinated by their chest hair.

LAN / 
In China, we feel foreign men are very sexy. People say they can make love ten times a night, but I don’t know if that’s true.

LIZZY / 
Also we talked about whether the later movies were as good as the old ones. I said they weren’t, there being too much of a formula. But Lanlan said she loved the formula.

WENDY / 
Why does she still watch sad movies by herself when we’re not there? Outside it snows and snows, it’s so beautiful, but she doesn’t go out, she just stays at home and watches those movies.

She likes us to visit her. Like she never shoos us out if we go bother her, even if she’s off duty and not supposed to be taking care of us. Her studying is important, but if we knock on her door, she always opens it up with a big surprised noise, as if no one has ever visited her before.

— Hello! she says. Come in, come in! Then she says: — What’s this?

And from behind her back come all kinds of treats.

Some of the stuff we’ve had before, Mom’s always made us eat rice cakes and melon cakes and noodle cakes and red bean everything. But it tastes better when Lanlan gives it to us, who knows why, maybe we like it more because we eat it all the time now, maybe we’ve
xiguan le,
gotten used to it. Or maybe we like it because liking it is liking Lanlan. Also she gives it to us right out of her hand with a napkin, and maybe breaks it in half for us to share, and lets us walk around with it. She’s not like Mom, who takes it out of the refrigerator and then checks it to make sure there’s no mold or anything on it, and then puts it on a plate. One lump for me and one for Lizzy and none for her because they use lard. And then she watches to see our reaction, smiling like she smiles at assemblies even if we’ve totally messed up. Encouraging like. Lanlan is completely different, she brightens up as if she has this whole net of lights in her skin. Also she makes treats herself, after a while, using stuff we can get right in our grocery store, or from this Japanese market. Suzhou specialties like
qing tuanzi,
meaning green rice balls, or these itty bitty
zhongzi tang,
which are these candies you can pop into your mouth, and that have pine nuts in them, or mint.

In the beginning she gives us different things to choose from, in the beginning she asks, Do you like try this one or this one? But after a while she says she knows what we will like. And we do like it, she’s right, she knows our mind.

— You are become like Chinese, she says, and her face is so happy her smile isn’t even lopsided.

And when one day Lizzy says Mom never cared about us enough to bake brownies, these are our first brownies, that’s what it means to have a mother who works, Lanlan says: — I am like you, have no real mother. Have no real family.

Sometimes she lets Bailey cruise around by himself in his play area while she tells us stories. Or play with the vacuum, he’s like in love with the vacuum. She tells us famous stories about things we never heard of but that she thinks we should if we’re not going to be one hundred percent American. Like filial piety. What’s filial piety? we say. We have no idea, she’s right, we’re like
xiao ba wang,
the little emperors you see all over China these days, completely spoiled, which is why she tells us this story about some sixty-year-old man who played on the floor pretending to be a baby so his parents wouldn’t feel old.

— That is filial child, children are supposed to do anything for their parents, she says.

— For our parents? says Lizzy. Our parents?

— To make them worry less, to make them feel better, anything, says Lanlan. Children are supposed to sacrifice themselves.

— But what if they aren’t even our parents? says Lizzy.

— Yeah, and like what does that mean, sacrifice? I say.

LAN / 
Of course, I am amazed. What kind of human doesn’t know what sacrifice means?

LIZZY / 
We tried to picture this old guy, like our dad’s age, but crawling on the floor like Bailey. Would he drool? Would he put stuff in his mouth and get his food all over?

WENDY / 
Would he say, Da! like Bailey, for door and Daddy and dog and some other stuff too?

LIZZY / 
It was weird, but we listened anyway, if only because we knew how much Mom especially would hate these stories. Even if the crawling around was for the benefit of her and Dad, she would hate the crawling part. And what about the stories about taking care of your mother-in-law? Like the one about a woman who breastfed her sick mother-in-law, to give her strength. Could you imagine Mom breastfeeding Mama Wong? Even I hated that one.

— I can tell you one thing, I said. I am never ever going to breast-feed my husband’s mother. I mean, if I even get married. And I am never going to China again if that’s what you’re supposed to do. And I am so glad that if I have any Chinese in me, at least it’s not one hundred percent.

— Even in China nobody do that anymore, said Lanlan then. That is just old story.

— Whew, we said.

— China is very nice place, she said. But in China, that is the kind of story people all know. If you do not know that kind of story, you are not real Chinese.

— Hmm, we said.

— Or Japanese either, she added. Because Japanese way of thinking is very like Chinese way. Everything they have is come from China.

WENDY / 
And the way she looks at us you get the feeling that she doesn’t think we are real anything except American.

She tells us stories about relatives of hers, which I guess makes them relatives of ours, sort of. So that we’re interested in them even though they make us sad in a way, Lizzy says she just wishes she knew one single person who was related to her by blood, and as soon as she says that I wish it too.

Some of the stories are normal, but a lot of them are weird. Like one day during Bailey’s nap, Lanlan tells us this story about a baby girl.

LAN / 
— So the baby is born, a girl, and when the mother found out, she know the father would be very mad at her for give birth to another girl. So she tell the servant to take that baby away. Throw out. So the servant leave the baby to cry cry cry. Nobody wash the baby, nobody wrap the baby in blanket, nobody give the baby milk. But still the baby cry. Even after all the blood become dry and brown all over, that baby is still cry cry cry until finally the
ayi
feel sorry for the baby. So she wash the baby, take the brown off. She wrap the baby in some newspaper, even find somebody to nurse the baby. And the baby grow up big and strong, and so beautiful the father mother are so surprise, they just love that baby. The way she smile and sing, everybody love her so much.

LIZZY / 
— Wow, we said. But that’s an old story too, right? Like from a long long time ago?

— That story is—how do you say? My great-aunt, she said. My father’s mother’s sister.

— You know her? You know that baby?

— Not when she was a baby. When she was grow up.

— Wow, we said.

CARNEGIE / 
The video watching segued into, what else, stock watching. That all-American activity that, sad to say, felt far more immediately Chinese than studying Chinese characters or reading Chinese poetry. Every time I brought a stock site up on my screen I could hear Mama Wong’s approval.
That’s how family go up.

Yet let me say here, for all time: I in no way instigated this new interest of Lan’s. It’s true that I had thought to ask her to tutor me in Chinese, my self-study program having predictably petered out. Why not a conversation class? In fact Blondie had entertained the self-same idea. With a certain wistfulness; how hard, after all, to imagine that Lan, who barely spoke to her, would agree to any such thing.

Post–kitchen incident, though—no. Post–kitchen incident I too regarded the idea with more wistfulness than hope. Was it not better to avoid Lan as best I could? Seeing as how sharp-eyed Blondie noticed even that.

— You have feelings for her, she said.

— Do I?

— If you didn’t have feelings you wouldn’t have to avoid her.

— Is that so.

So I said. Yet could I really deny that Lan had appeared in my dreams? That in my dreams I did kiss her, once—just once—but over and over, saying all the time,
It’s impossible.
As she understood; that being the tenderest part of the dream, that she understood.
Of course, it’s impossible,
she said; her blouse grazing her pubic hair.
Of course. And this, is this impossible too? And this? And how do you call this? Ah, this also—such a big big impossible.
Having never had children, she was tighter than Blondie, also easier. It was natural. She was 24/7. She never had a meeting in the morning; I was her morning meeting. There we were, our coffee all made. Ah, PowerPoint! Better, yes, to close the conference-room door.

Which in truth, as fantasies go, wasn’t much. So missionary, to begin with; and how close its pleasures to those of good takeout. Still, I did not share it with Blondie.

Let me say again how Lan became interested in stocks on her lonesome. I would not have started anything.

But there was a sign posted outside the door of her ESL class, which she might never have noticed, except that one day an Asian person stopped smack in front of it; and as it happened, Lan had the habit—Mama Wong had had it too—of taking special note of other people of Asian descent. She thought nothing of squinting at them, in fact, as if at a vision chart. Taiwanese? Japanese? Malaysian? And of course she had heard so much about stocks in China without understanding the first thing about them.

LAN / 
I went to a meeting, and was surprised. So many overseas Chinese—from Canada, Macao, Vietnam. And people from other places too. Russia. Brazil. South Africa. Some of them were from my program. But how friendly they were, here! Everyone was friendly. Even the black people. It seemed the friendliest place in America.

Hello,
and
Welcome,
and
You need a blue sheet,
people kept saying.
Do you have the blue sheet? Will someone please get her a blue sheet?

And so I left with
a blue sheet.

CARNEGIE / 
The very sheet—‘Getting Started’—that she presented to me in my study one snowy day.

— Carnegie?

I looked up casually, as if she just entered my consciousness. As if I had not been aware of her whereabouts, not only before she appeared in my doorway, but long before. As if I had not heard her leave the kitchen, then stop by the playroom, then rummage for something in the front hall. I looked up as if I did not know whose light step that could be, as if it did not quicken my own step to think of it.

There she stood. Lan! Bearing her blue sheet.

Outside, the trees shone. They had been sheathed in thick ice for days, but a recent warm spell was making them snap and shift as if shaking their stiff coats off. Tinkling, crackling, pattering, they sounded, oddly, like spring rain.

— Come in, I said.

— I, she began; then jumped.

An avalanche—the gutter ice dam having given way. I laughed to have had the ice broken by breaking ice. How sweet, as Lizzy would say.

— Come in, I said. It’s nothing. Just the snow. Come in.

My study, being of new construction, was the only carpeted part of the house besides Bailey’s nursery. Lan’s footsteps fell silent as she crossed into the room. I did not know if Blondie monitored the meanderings of the household as I did; most probably my better half did not. Still I registered,
outside her radar.
I reached for the sheet of paper. Lan placed it, with solemnity, in my hand. Then, at my indication, she alighted on a chair.