The Natural Laws of Good Luck (32 page)

Five students quit. Zhong-hua could not sleep. He felt awful. He was breaking the form down into parts, proceeding bit by bit, and repeating many times. He couldn't go more slowly without coming to a complete standstill. Besides, he didn't think memorizing one list of forms was too hard for these smart students, at least not compared with the task his third sister's daughter in China had undertaken when she memorized the entire
Oxford English Dictionary
, complete with alternate pronunciations and multiple definitions. Zhong-hua was baffled and pained by the students' unexpected resistance to hard work.

“Zhong-hua, you need to tell them that if they try their best and come to every class, they will pass. Maybe you should teach them half of the form. They are Americans.” Assurances helped class morale, but then two members of the ski team wanted to miss two days of class for a race and pled for release from the unreasonable demands of Tai Chi class. The dean refused. Zhong-hua agreed to let them miss the two classes, but only if they spent extra time with him after class. They did. Less athletic students grappled with the painful challenge of high kicks and complicated dancelike maneuvers. These students were sweating it out.

Homework reading was the ancient Chinese classic
Yenshi jiaxun
(Family Instructions for the Yen Clan), a sixth-century scholar's admonitions against greed, ambition, gossip, and debauchery, which he took great care to write down for his descendants shortly before he died. The students delighted me by not dismissing the opinions of the Confucian bookworm as irrelevant, though most objected to the chapter that condoned hitting young men with sticks to ensure good character development.

Some of them admitted that although they understood what it meant to be physically fit, they were not absolutely clear on the distinction between internal and external nourishment of life. Yen recommended a balance: “Shan Pao took care of his inner self, but
a tiger took his life externally; Chang I took care of himself externally, but disease destroyed him internally.” Every last one of the students learned all seventy-four forms of the difficult Chen-style Tai Chi, and on the final day, the twelve of them moved more or less in unison, wearing blue shirts, black pants, and expressions of total concentration.

I myself was feeling vulnerable to destruction, from the inside and the outside. Friday I came home, ate one bite of bread, and announced wearily that I had to go to bed. Zhong-hua bustled around preparing to teach his local Tai Chi class. He had only one student at this time, “Small John.” Small John had not improved noticeably and routinely neglected to pay for the class. Zhong-hua remarked, “Small John very interesting; come to class nine months, pay one time twenty dollars. Good!” That was the night Zhong-hua was in a hurry because he had to give Small John a ride to class. I had given up reprimands, such as, “One person is not enough to keep a class going!” or “We cannot do business like this anymore. Small John has to pay!” For one thing, it was up to my husband to decide whether he wanted to keep the class open. For another, I didn't really believe that one person wasn't enough. My growing stinginess made me disgusted with myself, so I headed to bed.

Sweet Sweet was watching SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons. That, too, made me groan. What was I to do with an infantile almost-twenty-year-old? I no longer bothered repressing my bad thoughts, like “Get off your ass and help out around here” or “You really need to grow up.” But the harshest thing I ever said out loud was: “Hey, how about cleaning up your hair when it gets all over the sink? I don't want to.”

I lay down, and soon silence fell, punctuated by her room door softly clicking shut. Sweet Sweet was exhausted, too. I had forgotten that part—she was working and preparing for the English Regents, a state exam she needed to pass in order to graduate high school. She had done badly last time. I dozed off while vaguely prodding myself: “Do something. You need to do something.” In
my dreams, I sniffed the air and smelled sweet pine. Nice. I liked that smell.

The next thing I knew, I was flying down the stairs and flinging open the cellar door. To my horror, an ominous bank of smoke rose up the stairwell. I screamed for Sweet Sweet, and when her sleepy face appeared, I shoved her out the door. “Get Dave!” I yelled. “Call the fire department!” She disappeared into the freezing darkness. I called Small Dog, but he didn't come. Smoke was scalding my throat and lungs; there was no going back in. I fled the house in long underwear, bare feet, and no coat.

Twenty minutes later, Sweet Sweet and I were sitting in the warm cab of a volunteer fireman's truck hugging each other while the house burned down. “I just lost everything,” she said. “I don't care. I really don't care. We can all work hard.” Then she took a small bear that dangled from the rearview mirror and danced it in front of my face, singing, “I am very happy because I am alive!”

“What a sweet, brave girl you are.” I held her close.

“No, not really brave. Just not afraid.”

Fire trucks from four rural stations spun their red beacons in the dark. Snowflakes glittered in the light, and the long hanging boughs of the Norway spruce whipped around like dancing ladies. The men passed back and forth beneath this footless dancing, bulky and yet weightless, like dream workers. An hour or two later, a fireman knocked on the window holding up a subdued bundle from which Small Dog's quivering nose peered.

Some of the men approached my husband and touched his shoulder. That night he was like any other man whose family was in distress. The true bond among all beings is vulnerability. Later we slept on a broken couch at my friend Kathy's house, my feet at Zhong-hua's head to make room for his big chest. Sweet Sweet slept in a room with skulls and crossbones painted all over the walls, left over from Kathy's son's Goth period.

The next day, neighbors we had never met except to wave at piled out of a pickup and boarded up the gaping windows of our
house, stepping over Chinese brush paintings and frozen carrots from the fall harvest, photos of my kids, and pages of my notebooks flung from the house. Two men came up to Zhong-hua and gave him one hundred dollars for food. Another neighbor gave him a Wal-Mart gift card, yet another a warm coat, hat, and gloves. Zhong-hua tried to refuse, but they said, “No, take it. This is what we do here.” They left their footprints in the snow.

Where Magicians Live

K
ATHY TUCKED
us into her house, which seemed a kind of Noah's ark frozen in ice a few miles from our burned life. We brought only the bags of clothes given to us by friends and neighbors. Zhong-hua wore women's pink velour sweats under his jeans, and I was uncharacteristically stylish in a black fitted shirt threaded with gold. In my displaced mornings, the light shining through the colored glass bottles on the windowsill cast rainbows on the ceiling and cupboards. There was a peach-colored one with a deer head for a stopper, a green one with a hummingbird stopper, and a cobalt one shaped like a car. I found a rag and polished each one with Windex. Easy moments, like the dog licking Kathy's cat's face, deceived me that we were floating in a new world and would soon see the spot for anchor.

The floating illusion gave way to a down-to-earth, deluxe camping out. Kathy's house was a labyrinth of hallways and small rooms heaped with accumulated junk. Mattresses ejected their cotton stuffing, and stacks of old
National Geographics
loomed four feet high. Whole drawers full of rubber bands resisted opening. Nothing worked. The phone beeped loudly and then died. The toaster never got hot. Only half the TV screen functioned, so that the tops of people's heads and their batting eyelashes had to do double expressive duty. There were pliers and hammers in
the kitchen, dumbbell weights in the dining room, and Nabokov in the bathroom. The shower didn't work, and the hot water trickled out of the faucet so slowly that it took half an hour to fill the tub. With no railing, the stairwell appeared as a frightening abyss in the middle of the upstairs hall, but soon we were all mincing nimbly around the edges without an involuntary gasp or a tragic thought.

Small Dog didn't know which cat to chase first and ran about in perpetual ecstasy, only momentarily put off by the hostile hissing. We washed Kathy's dishes, sorted her Tupperware, Lysoled her bathroom floor, and scrubbed her shower stall, which disintegrated under the pressure into pieces that looked like bites of meatloaf. Zhong-hua did great heaps of laundry with fabric softener that he mistook for detergent. Kathy thanked him and told him sweetly please not to bother her bins of dirty laundry. She also requested no MSG in the saltshaker. Kathy had no other rules. Since the insurance company agreed to pay Kathy some modest rent, the arrangement conformed to Zhong-hua's ideal of the most good for the greatest number of people.

I watched Small Dog break down social barriers with the three cats, each twice his size and grumpy. First, he sat politely at the foot of the chair or couch where the cat reclined. Next, he rested a paw on the seat of the chair. The process required careful timing of advances, but in the end he curled up, if not touching, at least close enough for companionship. He won over all three cats and developed an amorous relationship with one of them. Zhong-hua shook his head. “This will not work. The dog's pajamas and the cat's pajamas do not match.”

I set up an office in Kathy's closet. There was a stair-climber in there, just like the one we used to have in our kitchen for a coatrack, except this one worked. Kathy kept her scuba diving gear in there, too, and the last fifteen years of
Rolling Stone
magazine. When I couldn't think, I got on the stair-climber and looked up at the shelves where she had her video collection:
Man Bites Dog, City of Angels,
Digging to China
. She had recorded them off the TV, so, when played, some of them ended in the middle, while others began in the middle.

I felt apprehensive that our unsubtle presence would annoy Kathy but then remembered there was almost nothing she wouldn't do for me, though I never meant to take advantage of that fact by moving my family in with her. Almost ten years ago, she brought her daughter to me as an alienated teenager who had waded into drugs, alcohol, and dangerous relationships. She wanted to be an artist. Within two years she had surpassed me as a sculptor, and I told her to find another teacher. Kathy believed I had saved her daughter's life. I knew very well that Sarah had saved herself with a combination of talent and heart, but pointing this out did not change Kathy's loyalty.

With mattresses on the floor and food to eat, we had only to navigate the kitchen without tripping on the mousetraps and avoid falling down the stairwell. We resumed the elemental motions of daily life. Zhong-hua's first priority was a large-capacity rice cooker. Then he bought an expensive wok, which elevated our existence with variations on fish, tofu, and vegetables. The wok was an honored sentient being who had likes and dislikes. It did not like being touched by soapy water, sponges, metal, or anyone other than its master. I did touch it but half expected it to cry out “Master Lu! Master Lu!” Kathy rose early to go to her job as a mail carrier and usually prepared breakfast in her sleep. Three times she accidentally left the heat on high under the wok instead of under her teakettle and left to get dressed. Its Holiness was forever maimed after that and no longer nonstick.

Kathy's eight-year-old nephew Zack came over for a Kung Fu lesson from Zhong-hua on Sunday. Zack looked like a miniature version of my husband, who called him “Exactly,” not because he looked just like him but because that was how the name registered in him. After the lesson, the two of them sat down over ribs and eggs with hot pepper. Zack never flinched. I heard Zack say, “In
France if you say excuse me after burping, that means you didn't like the food.”

“Right, right,” Zhong-hua agreed between mouthfuls.

“I learned that in science class.”

“Yes, yes.”

The next weekend, Kathy and I took Sweet Sweet and Zack to an Afropop dance party. Too shy to dance, Zack stood frozen in place, a plump stoic amid the euphoric multitude, holding his ground for over an hour. Finally, Sweet Sweet took his hands in her own and began to sway back and forth. He didn't move a muscle, not even to escape the understated invitation. Then, after about twenty minutes of allowing Sweet Sweet to dance his limp hands back and forth, he began to bob his head to the beat. Twenty more minutes and he was mini–shuffle stepping to the right and left. There was perceptible twitching going on in his torso, too. By the end, he was swinging, and we all danced right out the door into the parking lot holding hands and laughing. I felt proud of Sweet Sweet, the wonder worker.

Back at work, I remembered an overdue promise to help my unhandy reclusive client hang the curtains we had shopped for together before the fire. I drove by Sam's house, looked up, and saw the dark brown curtains hanging in place. “Wow, that's a miracle,” I said out loud. When I stopped in, he admitted that he had astounded himself, that he never thought he could do it. Knowing how to wield a screwdriver is an empowering thing, as good as mastering a multipurpose word. I noticed that the kitchen window was bare. This was the only one that required curtain hooks, and though I had left a small bag, Sam could not fathom them. He said they looked like a strange lethal alphabet. I ripped the bag open, slid the first one into the cloth pocket of the curtain, and handed the rest to Sam. “Absurdly simple,” he noted, slipping the next one into place. Strange alphabets, like new dance moves, do sometimes turn out to be absurdly simple.

After work, I came home to Kathy's to find Sweet Sweet at the computer, looking up where to take hip-hop dance classes. After
dinner, Kathy, Sweet Sweet, Small Dog, and I huddled together on Kathy's high platform bed munching crackers and watching one of the vintage movies from the closet while Zhong-hua bent over pencil and paper at the table downstairs sketching a house. “For us, very simple is OK,” he said. I suggested it at least have a porch and a window to the west. He said that a cement house would be best. I hoped he meant brick, because I didn't want to live in a fallout shelter. The word
brick
had never lodged in his mind, and the Chinese word for brick refused to stay in mine. “You mean the made-of-clay things about this size?” I asked, using Chinese sentence structure and holding my hands out as measure.