Typical American (11 page)

No answer. No answer.

Real worry took a chair. They huddled out the night together, until Helen's hair had straightened like Theresa's; Janis's likewise was turning into a lion's mane. Helen and Theresa borrowed slippers. It began to seem that the room smelled like cigarette smoke. But no; they ascertained that the smell was coming from their clothes. That Grover! Finally, at dawn, news. The car had been found, abandoned at a diner in Pennsylvania.

"They must of drove it 'til the gas run out on 'em," said the sergeant.

What about Grover? Ralph?

The sergeant was sorry.

It was better to have known nothing. Their fears began to circle the abandoned car, then to pile into it, tense new passengers with theories in their laps. Who met Ralph and Grover by the roadside, and what for? Where were they all headed? Was this what Grover was up to, making those phone calls in the bedroom? Helen began to sob in short, ragged bursts, like hie-

cups, gnawing so hard at the base of her thumb that she drew blood.

Theresa called a taxi for them. It was a sticky morning, foggy, with no sunrise that they could see.

"I wanted to go home" explained Ralph.

"You wanted to go home"

"I asked him where we were going"

"You asked him."

"I asked, but we weren't going anywhere. We were driving around"

"Ah."

"I had no choice."

"You were kidnapped?"

"Kidnapped" he affirmed.

"Ah! Did he give you liquor?"

"Dinner," said Ralph. "We had dinner, then lunch, then breakfast, in a diner. He owned it."

"Dinner, then lunch, then breakfast?"

"I had a burger, with ketchup and mustard and relish and a tomato and onion and French fries. And a black-and-white ice cream soda."

"So much!"

"And some other things," finished Ralph.

"How come you didn't call?"

"I thought to call. But I couldn't."

"How did you escape?"

"He called a taxi to take us home."

"There was a phone."

"There was."

"And the taxi took both of you home?"

"It dropped me off first."

Theresa, frowning, stood up to put on some tea.

"It was all Grover's fault." Helen offered this conclusion as though they could make it the truth; all they had to do was agree on it.

"3

Theresa pursed her lips.

And that bit of story-making allowed the family to go on.

"It was" said Ralph, with relief.

Later, though, he regretted having given in, as he thought of it. Was that what a self-made man would have done? Hunched over his small wooden desk, he knew what he should have said instead. He should have said, with sonorous finality, I'm the father in this family. For he was the father, and could do whatever he liked — to remind himself of which, he ripped his soft, gray desk blotter in half and wrote, in large red letters, ACTUALIZE. What exactly did that mean, again? He thought he had better reread that part of the book. In the meantime, he tacked the sign up on the wall in front of him. Then he took out Grover's card. He was an imagineer, invisible, dialing. Secretive, like Helen. Grover's phone was ringing. What was he going to say? Hello. That was right, yes. Hello, and he'd like to be a self-made man too.

No answer.

He let the phone ring twenty times, thirty, tried the line again, let it ring forty times. But Grover didn't answer that day, or the next day, or the next week. Was the card a phony card? Was the number a phony number? Ralph couldn't believe it. He was an imagineer! This wasn't supposed to happen. Should he check the number? He could check it, he supposed, with the new super, a tough-talking veteran with a pit bull.

Ralph, though, never did. Partly he was afraid of what he might find out. Mosdy, though, he wanted to have faith. Wasn't imagineering a matter of faith, like going to church? And indeed, in church, he often considered Grover. He worked to dispel his doubts about his friend as though to pass another test, like his ordeal in the park. He sat with his eyes closed in the pew. He felt his knees.

News: Janis and Old Chao's child had been stillborn. "Dead?" said Ralph. "A little baby?" Helen cooked pots of food. Janis

wouldn't eat. "She cries all day/' Helen reported. "She doesn't change her clothes. She doesn't wash her dishes." Then, "She doesn't want me to come visit anymore. She thinks she's bad luck."

Ralph began to think then of what children meant, and how Helen ought to rest more. Man man zou, he told her — go slowly, take it easy. Xiuxi, xiuxi — rest.

And he bought a new desk pad, that, like a real father, who needed to make a real living, he might apply himself to the doctorate on which the future of his children depended. "Crack Stress of Airplane Bodies by Computer Analysis" — he was looking for a numerical solution to analytically insoluble equations. Every day he punched cards, punched and punched, trying to avoid instability, divergence, distortion.

his own secrets now, a barrier between them that was at the same time a kind of bond.

Was it enough? She hoped so, prayed so, haunted as she was by her latest, most dangerous secret: that the night Ralph disappeared, she'd worried not only after him, but also after Grover — winking, rich, handsome Grover. What a scoundrel that man was! She knew it. Still she saw herself as though in a magazine. A lady again after all, and more — she saw herself wildly in love. He lived for her, only for her. And in her dreams, she lived for him too, this man her parents would never have picked.

Callie — in Chinese her name was Kailan, Open Orchid — was two weeks early, a blizzard baby. The storm curled along the coast like a question mark; all over the city people braced themselves. Food. Blankets. Helen and Ralph and Theresa stocked their cupboards like everyone else, only to have to leave them. It was a hard delivery, long and painful; Helen felt as if she were giving slow birth to a rock. Outside the window, the sky mocked her with its spectacular spill. Until finally — finally— there was a sliding and a bawl. A girl! Theresa didn't mind, but Helen and Ralph were disappointed until they held her, and saw the way she nestled her plump cheek into her shoulder, as though she had no neck. And then they could not imagine how parents drowned their daughters, as they knew farmers in China often did — bathing the baby, it was called. They were won over by her extremities. Her mashed-in nose, her downy ears, her miniature fingers with their miniature nails and wrinkly knuckles. Her toes — five stubs, like a little stub family, on each fat foot. Her head was conical, an extremity too, and so thick with black hair that she almost needed a haircut. What wasn't perfect? Gently trying her working parts — her elbows, her wrists, her knees — they decided they'd have their boy next time, who'd be a scholar, and maybe a millionaire too How much more work a boy would have been anyway,

all that schooling. As it was, they had their hands full just learning how to fuss. Proper bundling was important, that she not catch cold. Were all babies this floppy? They experimented with different techniques.

to writing up his results. And by the time Mona was born (so vigorous and wriggly that she managed to get herself dropped on the floor first thing; Helen named her Mengna, Dream Graceful, all the same), Ralph had finally finished. Hands were shaken, backs slapped.

Graduation was ninety-eight humid degrees, the sort of day when even the rare breeze feels like the fond approach of a hairy, panting animal. Still Ralph heard every word of every speech as though it were the crystalline note of an ice chime. For the occasion, Theresa had borrowed a second camera, so they would not be relying on one picture-taker for the big moment; now Ralph, accepting his diploma, hesitated, to be sure to give the women a good shot. Everyone was clapping. He turned to the audience and waved a little, like a movie star. He, Ralph Chang, was now Doctor Chang!

"Congratulations," said the president of the university, loudly, again. He was a tall, narrow man, like one of the marble pillars, except that, sheathed in sweat, he gleamed more.

Ralph shook his hand a second time. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm just wish my father, mother, could be here."

The president mopped his brow patiently. "I understand," he said.

The pictures came out so beautifully that Helen hardly knew which of them to frame, and finally had two of them done, professionally, as well as his diploma. She hung these in the living room, near the wedding pictures. Level? Ralph backed up to look. "Level," he affirmed. Then, to his amazement, he started crying. "Father/' he said. "Mother."

"They would have been so proud!" Theresa turned emotional too. "You know, in the pictures, you look like Father."

"Do If" Ralph didn't think so until Theresa pulled out some old photos; then it was striking that in profile, he did.

Helen hung one of these photos next to Ralph's. This was followed by a picture of Ralph and Theresa's mother, to keep

their father company; and by pictures of her own mother and father, with a little shelf, for flowers. Not that their parents were dead — they were not to make offerings to the pictures, as if their parents had become ancestors. But when, shortly after they hung the shelf, Ralph was blessed with a tenure-track job (Old Chao had put in a word for him), they thanked their parents for whatever help they might have been.

They did this again when Theresa got her M.D.

By the time the fall semester began, Helen had found a new, larger place, in Washington Heights. Solid ceilings, she enthused, a room for Mona and Callie, and a dining room that could be made into a room for Theresa. The girls helped by unpacking the boxes almost as fast as Helen could pack them. But finally Helen had crumpled her last piece of newspaper; Ralph had rented a truck. How excited they all were! — though at the last minute, unexpectedly afraid and sentimental too. So long, old apartment. Mona and Callie kissed all the walls good-by. They kissed the stove too, and the radiators, and the crack in the back bedroom, which had gotten much worse. Once the file cabinets were walked away from the wall they could see that actual slivers of sky shone through it, lustrous and white.

Helen and Ralph furrowed their brows for a long time. Then Ralph climbed up the trap door to the roof, returning to report that the building really needed a turnbuckle or something to keep its corners from falling outward. Like this — he drew a diagram on a napkin. Mona and Callie shook their wispy-haired heads in imitation of everybody else.

"House could fall down?" Callie asked.

"Any day," Ralph said, patting her. And to Helen, "Any day that corner could have fallen out, especially with those heavy files there.*'

Helen shuddered at the idea; Callie shuddered too. Mona laughed.

But as it happened, the house had held, and now they were moving on.

in Chinese. The language of outside the house had seeped well inside — Cadillac, Pyrex, subway, Coney Island, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Transistor radio. Theresa and Helen and Ralph slipped from tongue to tongue like turtles taking to land, taking to sea; though one remained their more natural element, both had become essential.

And yet feeling truly settled was still a novelty. How easily they woke up now, and with what sense of purpose! They might or might not have counted themselves happy, though; happiness as they conceived it then was a thing attained, a grand state, involving a fiefdom to survey from the plump comfort of their dotage. It was only in retrospect that they came to call plain heartsease a happiness too; and though they sometimes thought that a shame, other times they thought differently. For if they had been able to nod and smile and say, How unruffled we are, then too, they might have been able to fret, We fear it all ending. Instead, this way, they were all innocence, all planning. They were, as Ralph thought of it, "going up," every day, with just enough time to take in an occasional movie or ball game, and to be glad that Mona and Callie were happy.

What a life those girls were going to have! Toddling Callie, wobbling Mona; they seemed to be always emerging from under the kitchen table — Callie on a mysterious errand, Mona forever chasing that sister gone around the corner. Helen and Ralph had agreed that they would have a second family in a few years, another two, who with luck would be boys; but in the meantime, Mona and Callie were as soft as their brothers would be, as enigmatic, bullheaded, goofy. They were a lively, durable luxury, to be "love-loved!" as Helen would say, tweaking their feet. She taught them to jiao ren: Though there was only one relative to name, Helen would ask, Who's that* as Theresa entered the room. And Callie would answer, properly, Gugu! — meaning her father's sister. Mona would clap.

This was how Callie knew herself to be clever, like Theresa. Everyone said so; she even knew that while her American age

1*5

was three-and-a-half, her Chinese age was a year more. Mona at one was good-natured, like Helen.

"And which is like me?" Ralph would joke. "Ah?"

"Memememe," the girls clamored in English.

They climbed over him and pulled at his fingers, his nose, his ears, as if to take them for their own. Mona reached into his mouth for his tongue.

Ralph, jaw agape, laughed.

"Won't come out," Callie told her sister.

Still Mona pulled, giggling, until finally Ralph extricated her wet fingers and closed his mouth firmly and bounced her on his knee to distract her. "No tongue," he scolded. "My tongue not so good anyway. You should go pick Auntie's."

Callie, standing, pressed against his other leg. "Am I your little girl?" Her voice was plaintive. ,

"You are," Ralph reassured her. "You're my litde girl — and you too." He hugged Mona, who had begun to twist. "I'm the father, and you both are my little girls."

"No-o-oo," Callie said then, singsong, laughing to have set her father up. Mona copied her, in her piping pitch. "No-o."

"Ye-e-ess," said Ralph, mimicking them.

"No-o-oo!"

"Ye-e-ess!"

"No-o-oo!"

"Ye-es!" cried Mona, by mistake.