Typical American (22 page)

It rained three days that week; and just as he had predicted, they made much more money on those days than they had before. Helen began to relax. How tense she'd been! — clenching her fists at night, digging her nails into her palms. Also she'd been straining her eyes until her sockets throbbed. Trying to see what? Maybe she had overestimated her importance to Grover entirely. Maybe he was mad for a while, then not mad. Who knew? Emotions sometimes lingered, but other times they shattered like thermometer mercury; and wasn't everything on plan, busi-nesswise? She gave up straining to espy, past the apparendy real, something denser. Ralph described a customer who apologized to his chicken before eating it; she laughed. He reported that Otis had returned to the stove; she shook her head. The new busboy, Morton, boxed in his spare time; Helen, like Ralph, hoped he wouldn't pick any fights in the chicken palace. Someone ripped one of the new red vinyl seats; she agreed that instead of using tape, they should replace it.

The news, when it came, therefore shocked her. "Grover gone to jail?"

Not for the stolen grease, Ralph explained — that charge Grover had beaten, just as he'd boasted he would — but for tax evasion.

"I didn't even know he was in trouble for that"

But that was what Grover's right-hand man, Chuck, had told Ralph. Chuck had exercised as they talked, flexing his arms with nice ferocity, his veins straying over his muscles like snippets of blue yarn. He had narrow, pointy teeth, cowboy boots to match, and a letter "nominating" him to act on Grover's behalf, in all of Grover's "enterprises, interests, affairs, and loans." The letter (clearly in Grover's handwriting, which Ralph recognized) had been notarized.

"So now we make the checks out to Grover, but give them to Chuck" Ralph told Helen. "We're not supposed to try to call or write until things calm down, Grover doesn't want the government to know who he deals with"

"So sudden!"

"No warning at all."

"Another sudden thing."

What could be wrong? Business was booming. People were sick of pizza, it seemed. Thinking ahead to the day they'd be sick of chicken too, Ralph considered adding hamburgers to the menu. Maybe barbecued ribs. Or what about egg rolls?

"We're all right?" Helen asked.

"Better than all right." Ralph explained just how much so. €t Which is a good thing."

(< What do you mean?"

"Think. Grover just went to jail for tax evasion."

"No more tapes?"

It seemed to Ralph, as he and Helen tried to figure out what paying their full taxes would mean, that mistakes were harder to erase than he remembered. Was he using a different kind of pencil? Also, the numbers themselves seemed solid, obdurate, much less fun. Instead of many ways, among which he could pick, they came out one way. And the way they came out, he

and Helen listed between barely squeezing by and undeniably short. Maybe, he said, they could still cheat a little; in the restaurant business, everyone did.

"Do they, though?" asked Helen.

"That's what Grover said. Of course, Grover got caught and went to jail"

"Or at least that's what Chuck said."

Ralph began erasing the numbers, slowly.

What a coward he was! Afraid to find out the truth — first from his wife, and now from his partner too. Ralph had never even asked what jail it was that he wasn't supposed to call. How then would he marshal the courage to dial Grover's house? He sat at the telephone, wishing he could forget Grover's number. He remembered how once he could not summon it up. Now he could no more excise it from his brain cells than he could sever his past from his future. Helen. Grover. Chuck.

His black telephone sat captive in a pool of light, ready for interrogation. Ralph switched off the light, put out his hand. He felt the heat radiating up from the receiver, hoping to take heart from this release of stored energy. How unpredictable a thing it was, really, that light should produce heat, and that a telephone should be able to absorb it. Was that a thing anyone would have thought? He never would have figured it out, certainly; it was the sort of thing that occurred to smart guys. As for guys like him — there was much they didn't know, much in which they were mistaken. Thankfully; perhaps then he was wrong in his forbodings. He grasped the receiver, locating his faith.

As a first step toward cutting costs, Helen volunteered to go to work in the chicken palace, as the cashier. Ralph objected, but they both knew there was no choice; and so she found herself sitting at the front register, on a stool, no lady at all. The whole trick is watch the overhead, she told herself.

Once she'd gotten used to the idea of leaving the house, of going outside to work — after all these years in America, she still envisioned a wall between her home and the world — she did not particularly mind the work involved. Neither did she mind that the family now ate at the restaurant every night, one fried chicken part after another. She just found it hard to be owned by customers; men especially thought nothing of appraising her through her clothes. Cross-examining her. "You Chinese? Japanese?" They'd squint. "Filipino?" Sometimes adding, "I once had a little, ah, woman like you. In the War." They patted her when they felt like it, grasped her hand. She tried to smile. "How do you like the chicken?" she'd say, pulling away. Or, "Thank you, please come again." It was her penance for having taken those lilacs in from the mailbox. "Please come again." One day a bum grabbed her. "You're my dragon lady," he insisted, in a drunken slur. He thrust his face into hers, forcing her to breathe his rancid breath; his untrimmed nails bit into her arms.

She got herself a larger apron after that, one that covered her whole front, rather than just the waist down, with very large ruffles. For a while, she pretended to barely speak English. "Dank you, prease come again." Then she began to look boldly at people — she stared, even — finding that this bra-zenness made them look away. She was glad she could not see herself do this; she shuddered to think what her opinion of someone who did this would be, though it did make work more interesting. She felt as though she had come once more to a wholly new country, where certain heavy girls dragged their feet, almost knock-kneed. Where certain sorts of men marched in ahead of their wives. There were fashions to look at too, the new sheath dresses, the bouffant hairdos. But mostly she saw the way the wives felt their hair for flyaways; the way their children flocked to one parent, then the other; the way their babies twisted unhappily, as if finding the world already too tight. She saw the way groups of boys jostled each

other with their elbows, keeping their hands carefully in their pockets.

And also she saw, after a while, that the wall of the first floor of the chicken palace had developed several fresh, fine cracks; it looked as though someone had drawn a few pencil lines from the new wood panelling up to the new suspended ceiling.

"The inspectors inspected every step" Ralph was weary, older. His stomach hurt all the time. "We put in an extra beam for support. I checked the calculations over and over.*'

Every night after the help left they snuck back into the restaurant to doctor the crack-crazed walls. Mona and Callie had grown tall enough to help a little, and old enough to understand that certain things should be kept in the family. "We won't tell," they promised. "Cross our hearts and hope to die."

Still, one day, Morton, the boxing busboy, announced, "I quit."

"Something wrong?" asked Ralph.

"I ain't going to hang around here, you or nobody can't pay me any amount," he declared. "This building be falling down."

Ralph searched through his files. The previous owner was one Jeremy Finch, who at the time of the sale had lived in Larchmont. Of course, he was supposed to have since moved to Florida. Still Ralph dialed information, and sure enough there was a listing; Mr. Finch had not moved. All Ralph had to do, now that he had the number, was try it.

He called Grover's number instead, quickly, before he could reconsider. Three rings, and a familiar voice. "Ding residence."

"Hello, Grover," said Ralph. His voice seemed to reverberate, loud, unnatural; it sounded like his voice come over a loudspeaker. "This is Ralph."

"Ralph."

"I thought you were supposed to be in the jail."

"Oh, ah—" Grover laughed.

What was there to say? Ralph hung up.

He returned from his visit to Jeremy Finch with this to report: that there were logs in the soil. At some point their lot had been a pit, into which someone had dumped trees. These could no longer be removed, having long since started to rot; the land, therefore, was unstable and unbuildable. "And cheap." Ralph felt as though he had a cardboard tube

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down his throat as he described how Grover had bought the land, built anyway, then sold it. Of course, when this Mr. Finch found out the building was sinking, he tried to sue. The judge being Grover's good friend, though, Finch was stuck.

Except that he was losing barrels of grease from the back. This didn't bother him too much actually, but when he heard Grover was being charged again, in a case with a different judge, he threatened to testify unless Grover bought the property back. Grover didn't want to, however; he thought it would look bad.

"On our side, it wasn't a bad deal. The building would have sunk, but very slowly, and in the meantime, we were able to buy it with no capital at all. So, great. But then Grover let us build. And now — trouble." Ralph gazed off into the air like a tourist at a panorama. "Of course, I wanted to build. That part was my fault. The question is, why did he let us go ahead?"

Helen held her breath.

"A tree is not a tree, it's an opportunity." Ralph swallowed grimly. "Ha. Trees are trees."

What should they do? At supper they continued to talk while the girls ate quietly.

"What does Daddy mean, san banfa?" Callie asked finally.

"Xiang banfa. Find a way," Helen explained. "That's what Chinese people like to say. We have to find a way."

"Find a way to what?"

"Typical expression," said Ralph absentmindedly, and went back to talking to Helen in Chinese. They could stop paying Grover for the store itself. But what about the loan for the addition? They discussed this knowing that Grover had claim to their house.

"Seems like there should be someone we can sue," Helen said.

But how could they sue Grover over property they didn't own?

They went on serving chicken, trying to keep operating for as long as they could, figuring and figuring as they went. What if Helen got a job and if, in addition to his usual course load, Ralph taught summer school and night school? "We should sell

the house/' Helen acknowledged once; but when Ralph continued the subject, his common sense seemed a cold box into which he could not ask her to place her heart. So instead he took down all the signs in his study, and in their place put up a new piece of paper that read, Bai Man cheng gang — a hundred smeltings, become steel.

They carried on for another month, every night inspecting to see how dangerous things had gotten. They didn't want anyone to get hurt, after ail. They put up signs — please do not jump! — both upstairs and down, so as not to arouse suspicion. They hung posters to hide the cracks.

The cracks got so large that one of the letters outside fell off and could not be put back up. Now the sign read, Ralph's

CHICKEN P LACE.

Ralph shrugged when he saw it. "At least it still spells something" This was part of his new pragmatism.

They stayed open one last month, then one last month again. For upstairs they hired the smallest, lightest busboy they could find. They tried to discourage fat people from going up.

"Maybe the building's not going to fall down after all" Ralph mused. "If it didn't have to be inspected every year ..." They began to wonder how to get the inspector to pass their building.

Even as they conferred by the register, though, they heard the building creak loudly — a strangely ancient sound, it seemed, a foreign timbre wholly out of keeping with the pop and sizzle of the chicken, the wha-ingg! of the register. Ralph spoke through the periscope. "Everyone come down," he ordered. "Everyone. Please. Down to the ground."

in school already, much less that they could jump rope, and say the rosary, and play the piano. They were taking ballet lessons; Mona wanted to be a ballerina. Callie wanted to be a saint. Ralph and Helen talked again about having more children; two sons would be perfect. Even without the sons, though, how much luckier they were than Grover! How empty his life! They agreed they wouldn't change places with him for the world. "For a million dollars," Ralph said. They agreed that there was something the matter with Grover. "With his head" Ralph said. Helen said that she had read articles about people like him in magazines. "His family probably didn't take very good care of him" she said. "He was like a child, in need of attention."

"Not like a grown man," Ralph said.

"People like that will do anything," Helen said.

"If I ever see him again, I'll kill him," Ralph said.

That is, until Helen said, "I feel sorry for Grover."

Then Ralph's anger was transformed, and he realized that he felt sorry for Grover too. "That man, he has no family. All he has is his empire, and so much money, he doesn't know how to spend it." He shook his head.

It was a kind of sympathy he had begun to feel for almost anyone — not only bums, and orphans, and dogs with porcupine quills in their snouts, but also people he might at another time have envied. Presidents of corporations, state governors, movie stars — people he didn't know but nonetheless understood to be lonely, and afraid of failure. How much wiser he was than they! He talked to their pictures in Helen's magazines, explaining the nature of life difficulties — how matters that one day seemed material, and hard with importance, could the next day simply vaporize. "You'd be surprised," he told them, "I've never had such a peaceful mind as I have now. After a hundred smeltings, I indeed have become steel."