The Love Wife (30 page)

But here it was still, and how odd our family looked in it—all those heads of black hair, with just two heads of blond.

The Wongs and the Baileys.

Any passerby would have thought that Lan and Carnegie were the husband and wife of the family, and that I was visiting with my son, Bailey. Was it true, too, that the Wongs moved their heads more, and that we Baileys, being less at home, moved them less? It did seem so to me, watching in the mirror. Watching in the mirror, it seemed to me that the Wongs owned the space, and that you could see it in the way they gestured back and forth to one another. Lizzy, of course, the most flamboyant member of the family, was the one most likely to lift and wave her hennaed arms in emphasis. Carnegie was the one most likely to lean in and make a funny face, or to stop midsentence, jaw agape, or to burst out into loud song. Tonight he was teaching the girls Beatles songs—Lan, too. ‘Nowhere Man,’ ‘Blackbird,’ ‘Yesterday.’ But even Wendy gestured freely, jabbering back and forth across the table with Lan. And how Lan had relaxed! She did not throw her arms about, but she did have a subtly seesaw way of sitting forward, interested, then straightening up and drawing her head back, her whole body lifting with delight or surprise.

For my part, I encouraged and encouraged. Turning and nodding, turning and nodding, like a mechanical bear in a toy store. How awkward I was. Banging things with my big bandaged thumb—my plate, my bowl. Once I knocked my chopsticks to the floor. In all this I was not unlike Bailey, who alternated between listening with much excited banging and focusing intently on his peas. Taking a break from the stimulation, I suppose. Bailey was my good eater. He was a good sleeper, too—a solid child.

What did it matter, how a family looked?

Beholding my daughters, I did not see Asians. I saw persons I knew better than I had known my parents. I knew what it had taken to potty-train them. I knew how they reacted to being scolded, to being held, to being sung to. I knew how stubborn they were, how ingenious, how dreamy. How verbal, how physical, how dramatic. (
I need to wipe my tears before I can speak again,
Lizzy used to say.) I knew their earliest heartaches. (
Those kids are biting my feelings,
Wendy once sobbed.)

In a tape recording, too, I might have seemed more part of the family than Carnegie, whose Chinese was improving so slowly. For most of the times I turned and nodded, I did speak. I supplied a word someone needed. I supplied the correct tone. I was surprised, in truth, by how much I remembered; it seemed my college Chinese teacher was right. I could feel it myself—I was a natural.

Yet our reflection seemed to say something willful to deny.

Would I have felt this so strongly if I had not spent years in design?

How large my body! An inflatable compared with everyone else’s.

I had not felt this way when the family was just Carnegie and Lizzy and Wendy and me. But Bailey had changed things a little, and Lan—I thought this even as I brought out the cake, and started the singing, and laughed at the trick candles—Lan had changed things more.

Carnegie, when we married, married more into my family than I into his. I am embarrassed to admit that I did not think much then about what it meant to be surrounded—what it meant to be outnumbered. I did notice that people did not talk about his nobility in marrying me. And I did correct them when they talked about my nobility in marrying him, especially since he came with Lizzy.
How open to difference!
they said all the same.
How loving! How willing to take risks!

I wish I could say I did not fluff up my feathers a little, after a while.

Numbers matter,
Carnegie used to say. He used to shake his head in that son-of-an-immigrant way and point out the painfully obvious.
Life is not about poetry.

How different it would feel—I could not help but feel how different—to be, say, a white couple with one Asian child.

Was there such a thing as being too open?

You could not help but wonder when you walked certain streets now, in certain cities and towns. What would even my mother say if she realized that there were parts of Los Angeles that felt like Mexico City—that there were towns in the Midwest swamped with Hmong?

Probably my mother would still say, with satisfaction,
Ah, the family of man.
Probably she would still be a person to drive the newcomers to church or to the library or to the hospital. Probably she would be disappointed in me.
Plain Jane, runt of the litter.
Of course, I would feel overrun; all my life, I had felt overrun.

But maybe even she would say,
I feel invaded
. Maybe even she would wonder,
Is this still my home?

Possibly—probably—she would say nothing. Unlike Mama Wong, who would certainly say,
Too many outside people here,
even if they were Chinese people.

In my shoes, Mama Wong would certainly have asked,
Whose family is this?

If I had beheld our family’s reflection from the doorway, I would have thought it a testament to human possibility. If my mother had beheld it, she would have felt me to be her own true daughter.

But if I thought about this being the group that would gather around my deathbed; if I pictured myself lying, as my mother had, with tubes snaking everywhere and everything on a monitor, I thought of myself as dying abroad—in the friendly bosom of some foreign outpost.

I decided to take that mirror down. I found a crowbar in the basement the next morning, and Carnegie’s ancient safety goggles—from his high school days, these were. I smiled as I lifted them off their hook, envisioning my husband hunched over a Bunsen burner. I could see him surrounded by beakers he was trying to take seriously; I felt sorry for his lab partner. I found too the Shop-Vac Carnegie had asked for one Christmas, back when he had thought woodworking might be good therapy for Lizzy—never mind that he did not know a ripsaw from a jigsaw. I lugged my equipment up the stairs. Not so easy with my thumb. I upset some cans.

Once in the dining room, though, I paused in front of the mirror and laughed at my reflection. Had I come to resemble Carnegie over the long years of our marriage? Carnegie, not I, was the type to be discovered, first thing in the morning, with safety goggles on. Waving that big white thumb.

I was about to ask him for help. I was about to ask, too, whether a crowbar was the right tool for the task—shouldn’t there be screws somewhere, holding the mirror up?—when the doorbell rang.

— 
Buon giorno!

12

Blondie Takes a Day Off

BLONDIE / 
The storm door was off having a screen made for it, so she wasn’t even behind glass. There was simply a ring and—Gabriela! In enormous rhinestone sunglasses.

CARNEGIE / 
A guide to sacred places. I asked her what she was working on in Italy, and that’s what she said. First she had to find the places, and then she had to write sections on their mystical significance. Then suggest rituals.

— The rituals are hard, she said. You can’t just meditate everywhere. Neither can you howl.

— How true, I said.

— But that’s what my editor wants, she said. So rituals there will be.

— Naturally, I said. One must consider one’s editor.

— Of course there’s always candles, she said. And incense. And it’s not too inconvenient for most people to pack some rattles or a small drum.

BLONDIE / 
She twirled in the kitchen that I might see that she had not been ‘abusing food,’ as she put it. Not that she was interested in cutting a
bella figura,
either. She had, in fact, thrown out her mirror and her scale. Her frizzy hair, formerly tamed, was now an enormous radiant mass, with the front third tied into five or six knots such as one found at the ends of lightbulb pull strings; the knots dotted her head. Her fingernails, too, were not shiny with polish, as on her last visit, but simply themselves. And though she had yet to replace her sunglasses, she had given up her Eurotrash jeans and leather jacket. In place of stiletto heels, she wore running sandals.

— And-a guess-a what-a? she cried. I-a found-a myself a house-a!

CARNEGIE / 
For all her time in Italy, her Italian manner was exactly that of Bobby the Greek in the local pizza parlor.

BLONDIE / 
She had not e-mailed her big news, wanting to tell me in person. First, that she had practically bought an Umbrian farmhouse—old, of course, they were all old—a ruin, with the idea that she and Giorgio would fix it up themselves. Of course, there was a lot of red tape. But he had connections, and they knew a retired English couple willing to live in an outbuilding, as caretakers. And the beams! The floors! The courtyard! There were open showers, and half-moon windows, and a walk-in fireplace . . .

— Giorgio? I said.

— A surprise-a! cried Gabriela. We’ve-a been together for-a four weeks-a!

He was a puppeteer from Sicily, a genius, in the process of leaving Palermo and his wife, and moving his theater north to Umbria. She’d met him on the steps of the Duomo—a warm, earthy man, not at all sneaky as some people said people from the
Mezzogiorno
could be, although something of a mama’s boy, that was true, and not sure why a man shouldn’t have a lover or two. Or so he said, anyway; who knew what Italians actually did besides talk—mostly, it seemed to her, about how Americans did not know how to relax, witness how uptight they were about drinking, smoking, everything. And working all the time! He didn’t know how anybody could think of America as free, he thought it was like a prison. The only words he knew in English were ‘politi-cal-ly correct-a.’

But there was no time to talk. There was barely time even to say hello to her goat—though we did do that, of course, quickly—Tommy! Tommy! she cried. Do you recognize me?—before we jumped in the car. For we were late, it turned out, for the shower.

— Shower?

The brunch baby shower of a good friend of hers, what else, who lived in the next town, and who she wanted me to meet—or no, two towns over—which was great since it gave us time to talk about Giorgio—who for all his talk had never actually had an affair before and luckily had only one child, a girl, one-quarter Algerian, which mattered more than you’d think; but first what had happened to my thumb?

The rest emerged as we bumped down roads I had not known existed, even though I’d lived in this area for years. Beginning with how this Giorgio had been living at home with his mother even though he was married. But recently she had died, and now he was getting divorced—how interesting, I said—an old story, said Gabriela, and yet in this case true. He really was leaving his wife; they would talk about it every day during the
passagiata.
She was still convincing me how true when suddenly we had arrived at a strange house in the woods—an octagonal house, a hippie house. It had the air of a ruin, or a folly—maybe because it sat on the edge of a swamp, covered with leaves even now; and because it had an associated tower, also octagonal, containing at its top a homemade sauna. This was fired with wood, and entered through a trapdoor in its floor. We undressed and ascended into a cloud—the heavens, it seemed—where we were welcomed by ten or so pink and brown archangels, all naked, like the shower honoree, Rain, who was, of course, pregnant.

The women, sitting or reclining on the half circle of tiled benches, were of varying races, ages, body types. They were variously marked and pierced, but it was my thumb that provoked comment. I explained. Murmurs of sympathy. I was neither the fattest nor the slimmest; neither the oldest nor the youngest; neither the fairest nor the darkest; neither the lumpiest nor the smoothest. Neither was I the only one who did not know Rain—who could only poke her interested head in from the window of the adjacent shower stall every so often. Extreme heat being a hazard, of course, to the fetus. All those pregnancy precautions; I had forgotten how many there were. Another newcomer was being introduced; then Gabriela was saying hello. I breathed deeply—one breath, the next—while Gabriela introduced me as Shine. Shine! Gabriela did this sort of thing from time to time; I laughed and leaned back, stretching my back. My skin was becoming slick—I was shining. People reminisced about their pregnancies. I added something; several people turned out to have had the same midwife, and to have chosen home births; two hospital-goers turned out to have delivered in the same wing. There was a comparing of C-section scars; and a frank admiration of the pristine bodies of the two women who had never been pregnant. These were Gabriela and a woman with a series of Chinese characters tattooed up her spine.

— You can see they’ve never breastfed, said one woman. Oh, to be pert!

Gabriela pushed her chest forward, military-style; everyone laughed.

— Oh, not to be stretched out, said another woman. You don’t know how lucky you C-section people are.

More laughter.

— Oh, not to leak when I leap, said a third.

Rain poked her head in repeatedly; her various friends took turns visiting with her. I visited only at the end, after showering and changing my dressing.

A large woman, expecting twins, Rain seemed monumental, especially semicloaked in a beach towel as she was. Her belly was alive, yet she reported that activity had slowed. The babies had gotten so big—they had no room to move. I had seen other people feel her belly on their way in or out of the shower, some with two hands; one woman kissed it, as if it was the Blarney stone. But I hesitated to touch her at all until she smiled and took my hand and placed it on her belly herself.

— My name’s not Shine, I said.

— But of course it is, she said, winking; and from the depths of her drum of a striated belly I felt a knobby something that took me back to the feeling of Bailey in utero. That enormous creaturely mystery, surfacing.

— You have a child, said Rain. No, more than one.

— Three, I said. Two adopted.

— And one natural.

— Biological, we say.

— Of course, she said. Three natural.

— Exactly.

— I’m having two girls, she said. I’m so glad they’re girls.

— A son’s a son until he finds a wife, I said. A daughter’s a daughter all her life.

— It’s true, isn’t it.

— I haven’t gotten there yet. I don’t know.

— Tell me when you find out, she said. Shine.

— I’ll send you a postcard.

— Don’t you wish someone would send us a postcard now? she said. To tell us everything else we should know?

— I do wish it, I said. Then I said: — You must have lost your mother.

— Yes, she said. You too.

— Me too.

— I could see it a mile away, she said.

Later there was an outdoor brunch, and a rose-petal foot bath for Rain—this last a ritual involving not only petals, but lavender oil as well. Clothed, wet-haired, cross-legged, we sat on boulders, in a natural circle formed by the arms of a pair of enormous fir trees. Marry-me trees, Rain called them. The trees towered up and up and up, and seemed to touch at the top—a giant’s teepee. It was cool enough out that we probably ought to have moved into the sun, except that here in the light shade grew an entire forest of ladies’ slippers. It was like being surrounded by fairies, a bevy of puff-bellied fairies, who swayed—look!—like Rain. Pregnant too. We held hands and sang a song. We had stoked the sauna fire before we left, anticipating that some of us might like a warm-up after sitting outside. Now a big whiteness billowed beyond the trees; you might almost have thought the tower on fire. But no—I squinted. Happily, it was not.

The idea of washing the feet of a woman I’d only just met made me feel awkward; indeed, washing anyone’s feet seemed kooky. Not that I hadn’t heard, of course, about the New Age rituals so popular these days. Renata and Ariela had lots of friends given to drummings and howlings and placenta burials. And of course, Gabriela had always loved workshops. Even in college she had done jewelry making and glassblowing and journaling.

But now here I was. Each member of the group, in turn, poured warm oil over Rain’s bare feet, and sprinkled them with rose petals—then expressed a wish.

— I wish for you an easy labor.

— I wish for you sleep.

— I wish for you real support.

— I wish for you a way of taking it all in, and keeping it, and not losing it.

— I wish for you the courage to ask for an epidural if you need one. And dammit, may the drug thing work.

Soon it was my turn, and how lovely the liquid sound of the pouring—that
drip, pip pip pip.
The scent of the oil floated up to me—lavender, yes. I immersed my right hand and most of my left—all but my thumb. The dressing got a little wet at one edge, but never mind. It was good to be small, to be folded up humbly, to kneel before Rain, our madonna of the hiked skirt, who was sitting on a stump. Though I was wishing I had a sweater, she was perfectly comfortable, even without shoes; her body was running hot. She beamed down with such genuine kindness that I felt it as a shock. Her belly hung between her spread legs; she had no lap. She had no dignity. And yet her face, her kindly face, was the face of a saint.

Other women have wished to look like models; I have always wished to radiate that sort of kindliness. You had to have a wide, slightly plain face, and laugh lines. You had to have soft eyes and a bit of dough to your nose; and you had to have a slowness of glance, a way of turning your head as your eyes moved, as if your eyeballs did not rotate as easily as they might. The quick glance, the darting, roving glance belonged to someone else—the city person, the savvy person. The kindly person lifts her face in slow joy when she sees someone she loves, like someone half blind.

— Shine, Rain said. That suits you.

— I wish for you daughters who will appreciate you, I said.

— Better pour some extra oil on my feet, she laughed.

A number of the guests were neighbors who lived in an intentional community built along the edges of the swamp. After the foot bathing, a woman named Angela took Gabriela and me on a tour. A thin woman with long braids, Angela was almost painfully informative.

— You can see it all online, she began. On our website.

But the pictures, she went on to explain, didn’t do justice to the land, which had long been regarded as unbuildable, and which only the community founders had seen as one of the last unspoiled tracts in this region—beautiful and rich with wildlife. It was, in fact, home to a blue heron, and a host of smaller birds. In the summer there were acres of water lilies. Of course, there was the inevitable purple loosestrife, but they had managed to keep it back.

Gabriela and I nodded our approval.

Now, happily, Angela went on, the area was protected wetlands. How satisfied the community had been to know that this swamp and others like it would be left pristine, that no one would be allowed to build even what they had—plumbing-free stilt houses, each comprising three units. These had been grandfathered into the new legislation, partly because they had been shown to have so little impact on the land.

— Really, said Gabriela.

There was a series of boardwalks, for example, to keep people from trampling anything. They used composting toilets, and bio-degradable everything; and of course, cohousing in general was so much more efficient than the single-family house, which was in truth as great a scourge to the earth as the automobile.

— How true, I said.

Angela explained how the community members had meddled with the swamp in only two ways. One being the loosestrife control, the other being the introduction of bats to keep the mosquitoes down. She showed us the community house, where they held yoga and meditation, dances and potlucks and seminars. It was where some people did their homeschooling; where they had seminars on Buddhism; and where they held their annual New Year’s Day lantern ceremony. Beside it lay the community garden—they were committed to living closer to their food sources. In this and in other ways, they took their inspiration from communities in Denmark.