Lance laughed. "Actually, I kicked her out. Yeah, in a way, you did me a favor. If it weren"t for you, I wouldn"t have found out she was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around. Oh sure, I kind of suspected it for a while. But I told myself, Man, you got to have trust. And you know what, she didn"t trust me. Can you believe it? Me? Let me tell you something, you can"t have a marriage if you don"t have trust. You know what I mean?" He looked at her.
Ruth desperately nodded.
"Nah, you won"t know for another ten years." He lit another cigarette. "You know, in ten years, you"ll look back and say, "Boy, I sure was dumb about how babies are made!"" He snorted, then c.o.c.ked his head to get her reaction. "Aren"t you going to laugh? I think it"s kind of funny myself. Don"t you?" He started to pat her arm and she flinched without intending to. "Hey, what"s the matter? Uh-oh, don"t tell me.... You You don"t trust me. What are you, like her? After what don"t trust me. What are you, like her? After what you you did and what I certainly did did and what I certainly did not not do, do you think I now do, do you think I now deserve deserve this kind of treatment from you?" this kind of treatment from you?"
Ruth was quiet for a long time, trying to make her lips move right. Finally she said, in a cracked voice, "I trust you."
"Yeah?" He patted her arm again, and this time she didn"t jerk stupidly. He continued talking in a weary but rea.s.suring voice. "Listen, I"m not going to yell at you or nothing, okay? So just relax. Okay? Hey, I said "Okay?"" "Okay?""
"Okay."
"Give me my smile."
She forced her lips to pull upward.
"There it is! Oops. Gone again!" He stubbed out his cigarette. "All right, are we friends again?" He stuck out his hand for her to shake. "Good. It"d be terrible if we couldn"t be friends, since we live next to each other."
She smiled at him and this time it came naturally. She tried to breathe through her clogged nose.
"And being neighbors, we gotta help each other, not go around accusing someone innocent of doing wrong...."
Ruth nodded and realized she was still gripping her toes. She relaxed. Soon this would be over. She saw that he had dark circles under his eyes, lines running from his nose to his jaw. Funny. He looked much older than she remembered, no longer as handsome. And then she realized it was because she was no longer in love with him. How strange. She had believed it was love, and it never was. Love was forever.
"So now you know the real way babies are made, don"cha?"
Ruth stopped breathing. She ducked her head.
"Well, do you or don"t you?"
She nodded quickly.
"How? Tell me."
She squirmed, her mind turning around and around. She saw terrible pictures. A brown hot dog squirting yellow mustard. She knew the words: p.e.n.i.s, sperm, v.a.g.i.n.a. But how could she say them? Then the nasty picture would be there in front of both of them. "You know," she whimpered.
He looked at her sternly. It was as if he had X-ray eyes. "Yeah," he finally said. "I know." He was silent for a few seconds, and then added in a friendlier voice. "Boy, were you dumb. Babies and toilet seats, Jeez." Ruth kept her head down, but her eyes glanced up at him. He was smiling. "I hope you one day do a better job teaching your kids about the facts of life. Toilet seat! Pee? Pee-you!"
Ruth giggled.
"Ha! I knew you could laugh." He poked his finger under her armpit and tickled her. She squealed politely. He tickled her again, lower along her ribs, and she spasmed as a reflex. Then suddenly, his other hand reached for her other armpit and she groaned with laughter, helpless, too scared to tell him to stop. He twirled his fingers around her back, along her stomach. She balled herself up like a sow bug and fell to the rug below with terrible gasping giggles.
"You think a lot of things are funny, don"t you?" He twiddled his fingers up and down her ribs as if they were harp strings. "Yeah, I can see that now. Did you tell all your little girlfriends? Ha! Ha! I almost put that guy in jail."
She tried to cry no, stop, don"t, but she was laughing too hard, unable to take a breath on her own, unable to control her arms or legs. Her skirt was tangled, but she couldn"t pull it down. Her hands were like that of a marionette, twitching toward wherever he touched as she tried to keep his fingers away from her stomach, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her bottom. Tears poured out. He was pinching her nipples.
"You"re just a little girl," he panted. "You don"t even have any t.i.tties yet. Why would I want to mess around with you? s.h.i.t, I bet you don"t even have any tushy hairs-" And when both of his hands shot down to pull off her flowered panties, her voice broke free and blasted out as screeches. Over and over, she made a fierce, sharp sound that came from an unknown place. It was as though another person had burst out of her.
"Whoa! Whoa!" he said, holding up his hands like someone being robbed. "What are you doing? Get a hold of yourself.... Would you just calm down, for chrissake!"
She continued the sirenlike wail, scuttling on her bottom away from him, pulling up her panties, pushing down her dress.
"I"m not hurting you. I am not not hurting you." He repeated this until she settled into whimpers and wheezes. And then there came just fast breathing in the s.p.a.ce between them. hurting you." He repeated this until she settled into whimpers and wheezes. And then there came just fast breathing in the s.p.a.ce between them.
He shook his head in disbelief. "Am I imagining things, or weren"t you just laughing a moment ago? One second we "re having fun, the next second you"re acting like-well, I don"t know, you tell me." He squinted hard at her. "You know, maybe you have a big problem. You start to get this funny idea in your head that people are doing something wrong to you, and before you can see what"s true, you accuse them and go crazy and wreck everything. Is that what you"re doing?"
Ruth got up. Her legs were shaky. "I"m going to go," she whispered. She could hardly walk to the door.
"You"re not going anywhere until you promise you"re not going to spread any more of your G.o.dd.a.m.n lies. You got that straight!" He walked toward her. "You better not say I did something to you when I didn"t. "Cause if you do, I"m going to get really mad and do something that"ll make you sorrier than h.e.l.l, you hear?"
She nodded dumbly.
He blew air out of his nose, disgusted. "Get out of here. Scram."
That night, Ruth tried to tell her mother what had happened. "Ma? I"m scared."
"Why scare?" LuLing was ironing. The room had the smell of fried water.
"That man Lance, he was mean to me-"
Her mother scowled, then said in Chinese: "This is because you"re always bothering him. You think he wants to play with you-he doesn"t! Why do you always make trouble?..."
Ruth felt sick to her stomach. Her mother saw danger where there wasn"t. And now that something was truly really awful, she was blind. If Ruth told her the actual truth, she would probably go crazy. She"d say she didn"t want to live anymore. So what difference did it make? She was alone. No one could save her.
An hour later, while LuLing was knitting and watching television, Ruth took down the sand tray by herself. "Precious Auntie wants to tell you something," she told her mother.
"Ah? " LuLing said. She immediately stood up and turned off the TV, and eagerly sat down at the kitchen table. Ruth smoothed the sand with the chopstick. She closed her eyes, then opened them, and began.
You must move, Ruth wrote. Now. Now.
"Move?" her mother cried. "Ai-ya! Where we should move?"
Ruth had not considered this. Far away Far away, she finally decided.
"Where far?"
Ruth imagined a distance as big as an ocean. She pictured the bay, the bridge, the long bus rides she had taken with her mother that made her fall asleep. San Francisco, San Francisco, she wrote at last. she wrote at last.
Her mother still looked worried. "What part? Where good?"
Ruth hesitated. She did not know San Francisco that well, except for Chinatown and a few other places, Golden Gate Park, the Fun House at Land"s End. And that was how it came to her, an inspiration that moved quickly into her hand: Land"s End. Land"s End.
Ruth recalled the first day she had walked by herself along this stretch of beach. It had been nearly empty, and the sand in front of her had been clean, untrampled. She had escaped and reached this place. She had felt the waves, cold and shocking, grab at her ankles, wanting to pull her in. She remembered how she had cried with relief as the waves roared around her.
Now, thirty-five years later, she was that eleven-year-old child again. She had chosen to live. Why? As she now kept walking, she felt comforted by the water, its constancy, its predictability. Each time it withdrew, it carried with it whatever had marked the sh.o.r.e. She recalled that when her younger self stood on this same beach for the first time, she had thought the sand looked like a gigantic writing surface. The slate was clean, inviting, open to possibilities. And at that moment of her life, she had a new determination, a fierce hope. She didn"t have to make up the answers anymore. She could ask.
Just as she had so long before, Ruth now stooped and picked up a broken sh.e.l.l. She scratched in the sand: Help. Help. And she watched as the waves carried her plea to another world. And she watched as the waves carried her plea to another world.
SEVEN.
When Ruth returned to LuLing"s apartment, she began to throw away what her mother had saved: dirty napkins and plastic bags, restaurant packets of soy sauce and mustard and disposable chopsticks, used straws and expired coupons, wads of cotton from medicine bottles and the empty bottles themselves. She emptied the cupboards of cartons and jars with their labels still attached. There was enough rotten food from the fridge and freezer to fill four large garbage sacks.
Cleaning helped her feel that she was removing the clutter from her mother"s mind. She opened more closets. She saw hand towels with holly motifs, a Christmas present that LuLing never used. She put them in a bag destined for Goodwill. There were also scratchy towels and bargain-sale sheets she remembered using as a child. The newer linens were still in the department-store gift boxes they had come in.
But as Ruth reached for the old towels, she found she could not get rid of them any more than her mother could. These were objects suffused with a life and a past. They had a history, a personality, a connection to other memories. This towel in her hands now, for instance, with its fuchsia flowers, she once thought it was beautiful. She used to wrap it around her wet hair and pretend she was a queen wearing a turban. She took it to the beach one day and her mother scolded her for using "best things" instead of the green towel with frayed ends. By upbringing, Ruth could never be like Gideon, who bought thousands of dollars" worth of Italian linens each year and tossed out last year"s collection as readily as last month"s Architectural Digest. Architectural Digest. Perhaps she was not as frugal as her mother, but she was aware of the possibility that she might regret the loss of something. Perhaps she was not as frugal as her mother, but she was aware of the possibility that she might regret the loss of something.
Ruth went into LuLing"s bedroom. On the dresser were bottles of toilet water, about two dozen, still in their cellophane-bound boxes. "Stinky water," her mother called it. Ruth had tried to explain to her that toilet water was not the same as water from a toilet. But LuLing said that how something sounded was what counted, and she believed these gifts from GaoLing and her family were meant to insult her.
"Well, if you don"t like it," Ruth once said, "why do you always tell them it"s just what you wanted?"
"How I cannot show polite?"
"Then be polite, but throw it away later if it bothers you so much."
"Throw away? How I can throw away? This waste money!"
"Then give it away." it away."
"Who want such thing? Toilet Toilet water!- water!-peh!-like I big insult them."
So there they sat, two dozen bottles, two dozen insults, some from GaoLing, some from GaoLing"s daughter, who were unmindful that LuLing rose each morning, saw these gifts, and began the day feeling the world was against her. Out of curiosity, Ruth opened a box and twisted the cap of the bottle inside. Stinky! Her mother was right. Then again, what was the shelf life of scented water? It was not as though toilet water aged like wine. Ruth started to put the boxes into the Goodwill bag, then caught herself. Resolute but still feeling wasteful, she put them into the bag destined for the dump. And what about this face powder? She opened a compact case of a gold-tone metal with fleur-de-lys markings. It had to be at least thirty years old. The powder inside was an oxidized orange, the cheek accent of ventriloquists" dummies. Whatever it was looked like it could cause cancer-or Alzheimer"s. Everything in the world, no matter how apparently benign, was potentially dangerous, bulging with toxins that could escape and infect you when you least expected it. Her mother had taught her that.
She plucked out the powder puff. Its edges were still nubby, but the center was worn smooth from its once-daily skimming over the curves of LuLing"s face. She threw the compact and powder puff in the trash bag. A moment later, she panicked, retrieved the compact and nearly cried. This was part of her mother"s life! So what if she was being sentimental? She opened the compact again and saw her pained face in its mirror, then noticed the orange powder again. No, this wasn"t being sentimental. It was morbid and disgusting. She stuffed the compact once more into the trash bag.
By nightfall, one corner of the living room was jammed with items Ruth had decided her mother would not miss: a rotary Princess phone, sewing patterns, piles of old utility bills, five frosted iced-tea gla.s.ses, a bunch of mismatched coffee mugs bearing slogans, a three-pod lamp missing one pod, the old rusted clam-shaped patio chair, a toaster with a frayed cord and curves like an old Buick fender, a kitchen clock with knife, fork, and spoon as hour, minute, and second hands, a knitting bag with its contents of half-finished purple, turquoise, and green slippers, medicines that had expired, and a spidery thatch of old hangers.
It was late, but Ruth felt even more energized, full of purpose. Glancing about the apartment, she counted on her fingers what repairs were needed to prevent accidents. The wall sockets needed to be brought up to code. The smoke detectors should be replaced. Get the water heater turned down so that her mother could not be scalded. Was the brown stain on the ceiling the result of a leak? She followed where the water might be dripping, and her discerning eye skidded to a stop on the floor near the couch. She rushed over and peeled back the rug, and stared at the floorboard. This was one of her mother"s hiding places, where she h.o.a.rded valuables that might be needed in time of war or, as LuLing said, "disaster you cannot even imagine, they so bad." Ruth pressed on one end of the board, and lo and behold, like a seesaw, the other end lifted. Aha! The gold serpentine bracelet! She plucked it out and laughed giddily as if she had just picked the right door on a game show. Her mother had dragged her into Royal Jade House on Jackson Street and bought the bracelet for a hundred twenty dollars, telling Ruth it was twenty-four-carat gold and could be weighed on a scale and traded for full value in an emergency.
And what about LuLing"s other hiding spots? At the never used fireplace, Ruth lifted a basket containing photo alb.u.ms. She pried at a loose brick, pulled it out, and-sure enough-it was still there, a twenty-dollar bill wrapped around four singles. Unbelievable! She felt giddy at finding this small treasure, a memento from her adolescent past. When they moved into this place, LuLing had put five twenty-dollar bills under the brick. Ruth would check every now and then, always noting that the bills lay in the same perfectly aligned wad. One day she put a piece of her hair on top of the money; she had seen this trick in a movie about a boy detective. Every time she looked after that, the hair was still there. When Ruth was fifteen, she began to borrow from the stash during times of her own emergencies-when she needed a dollar here and there for forbidden things: mascara, a movie ticket, and later, Marlboro cigarettes. At first she was always anxious until she could replace the bill. And when she did, she felt relieved and elated that she had not been caught. She rationalized that she deserved deserved the money-for mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, being yelled at for no good reason. She replaced the missing twenties with tens, then fives, and eventually, just the singles wrapped with the one remaining twenty. the money-for mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, being yelled at for no good reason. She replaced the missing twenties with tens, then fives, and eventually, just the singles wrapped with the one remaining twenty.
And now, thirty-one years afterward, in seeing the reminder of her small larceny, she was both the girl she once was and the observer of that younger version of herself. She remembered the unhappy girl who lived in her body, who was full of pa.s.sion, rage, and sudden impulses. She used to wonder: Should she believe in G.o.d or be a nihilist? Be Buddhist or a beatnik? And whichever it should be, what was the lesson in her mother"s being miserable all the time? Were there really ghosts? If not, did that mean her mother was really crazy? Was there really such a thing as luck? If not, why did Ruth"s cousins live in Saratoga? At times, she became resolute in wanting to be exactly the opposite of her mother. Rather than complain about the world, she wanted to do something constructive. She would join the Peace Corps and go into remote jungles. Another day, she chose to become a veterinarian and help injured animals. Still later, she thought about becoming a teacher to kids who were r.e.t.a.r.ded. She wouldn"t point out what was wrong, as her mother did with her, exclaiming that half her brain must be missing. She would treat them as living souls equal to everyone else.
She gave vent to these feelings by writing them down in a diary that Auntie Gal had given her for Christmas. She had just finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank The Diary of Anne Frank in soph.o.m.ore English cla.s.s, and like all the other girls, she was imbued with a sense that she too was different, an innocent on a path to tragedy that would make her posthumously admired. The diary would be proof of her existence, that she mattered, and more important, that someone somewhere would one day understand her, even if it was not in her lifetime. There was a tremendous comfort in believing her miseries weren"t for naught. In her diary, she could be as truthful as she wanted to be. The truth, of course, had to be supported by facts. So her first entry included a list of the top ten songs on the radio hit list, as well as a note that a boy named Michael Papp had a b.o.n.e.r when he was dancing with Wendy. That was what Wendy had said, and at the time Ruth thought in soph.o.m.ore English cla.s.s, and like all the other girls, she was imbued with a sense that she too was different, an innocent on a path to tragedy that would make her posthumously admired. The diary would be proof of her existence, that she mattered, and more important, that someone somewhere would one day understand her, even if it was not in her lifetime. There was a tremendous comfort in believing her miseries weren"t for naught. In her diary, she could be as truthful as she wanted to be. The truth, of course, had to be supported by facts. So her first entry included a list of the top ten songs on the radio hit list, as well as a note that a boy named Michael Papp had a b.o.n.e.r when he was dancing with Wendy. That was what Wendy had said, and at the time Ruth thought b.o.n.e.r b.o.n.e.r referred to a puffed-up ego. referred to a puffed-up ego.
She knew her mother was sneaking looks at what she had written, because one day she asked Ruth, "Why you like this song "Turn, Turn, Turn"? Just "cause someone else like?" Another time her mother sniffed and said, "Why smell like cigarette?" Ruth had just written about going to Haight-Ashbury with friends and meeting some hippies in the park who offered them a smoke. Ruth took some glee in her mother"s thinking it was cigarettes they were smoking and not hashish. After that interrogation, she hid the diary in the bottom of her closet, between her mattresses, behind her dresser. But her mother always managed to find it, at least that was what Ruth figured, on the basis of what she was next forbidden to do: "No more go beach after school." "No more see this Lisa girl." "Why you so boy-crazy?" If she accused her mother of reading her diary, LuLing would become evasive, never admitting that she had done so, while also saying, "A daughter should have no secrets from a mother." Ruth did not want to censor her writing, so she started recording it in a combination of pig Latin, Spanish, and multisyllabic words that she knew her mother would not understand. "Aquatic amus.e.m.e.nts of the silica paniculate variety," was her reference to the beach at Land"s End.
Didn"t Mom ever realize, Ruth now mused, how her demands for no secrets drove me to hide even more from her? Yet maybe her mother did sense that. Maybe it made her hide certain truths from Ruth about herself. Things too bad to say. Things too bad to say. They could not trust each other. That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets. They could not trust each other. That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
Ruth now remembered the last place where she had hidden her diary. She had forgotten about it all these years. She went to the kitchen, hoisted herself onto the counter with less ease than she had at sixteen. Patting along the top of the cabinet, she soon found it: the heart-patterned diary, some of the hearts coated with pink nail polish to obliterate the names of various boys she had immortalized as crushes of the moment. She climbed down with the dusty relic, leaned against the counter, and rubbed the red-and-gold cover.
She felt her limbs drain, felt unsure of herself, as if the diary contained an unalterable prediction of what would happen the rest of her life. Once again she was sixteen years old. She undid the clasp and read the words on the inside of the jacket, scrawled in two-inch block letters: STOP!!!
PRIVATE!!! IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOU ARE GUILTY OF TRESPa.s.sING!!! YES! I DO MEAN YOU.! YOU.!.
But her mother had read it, had read and committed to heart what Ruth had written on the second-to-last page, the words that nearly killed them both.
The week before Ruth wrote those fateful words, she and LuLing had been escalating in their torment of each other. They were two people caught in a sandstorm, blasted by pain and each blaming the other as the origin of the wind. The day before the fight culminated, Ruth had been smoking in her bedroom, leaning out the window. The door was closed, and as soon as she heard her mother"s footsteps coming toward her room, she dropped the cigarette outside, flopped onto her bed, and pretended to read a book. As usual, LuLing opened the door without knocking. And when Ruth looked up with an innocent expression, LuLing shouted, "You smoking!"
"No I wasn"t!"
"Still smoking." LuLing pointed toward the window and marched over. The cigarette had landed on the ledge below the window, announcing its whereabouts with a plume of smoke.
"I"m an American," Ruth shouted. "I have a right to privacy, to pursue my own happiness, not yours!"
"No right! All wrong!"
"Leave me alone!"
"Why I have daughter like you? Why I live? Why I don"t die long time "go?" LuLing was huffing and snorting. Ruth thought she looked like a mad dog. "You want I die?"
Ruth was shaking but shrugged as nonchalantly as she could. "I really don"t care."
Her mother panted a few more times, then left the room. Ruth got up and slammed the door shut.
Later, over sobs of righteous indignation, she began to write in her diary, knowing full well her mother would read the words: "I hate her! She"s the worst mother a person could have. She doesn"t love me. She doesn"t listen to me. She doesn"t understand anything about me. All she does is pick on me, get mad, and make me feel worse."
She knew that what she was writing was risky. It felt like pure evil. And the descending mantle of guilt made her toss it off with even more bravado. What she wrote next was even worse, such terrible words, which later-too late-she had crossed out. Ruth now looked at them, the blacked-out lines, and she knew what they said, what her mother had read: "You talk about killing yourself, so why don"t you ever do it? I wish you would. Just do it, do it, do it! Go ahead, kill yourself! Precious Auntie wants you to, and so do I!"
At the time, she was shocked that she could write such horrible feelings. She was shocked now to remember them. She had cried while writing the words, full of anger, fear, and a strange freedom of finally admitting so openly that she wanted to hurt her mother as much as her mother hurt her. And then she had hidden the diary in the back of her underwear drawer, an easy enough place to look. She had arranged the book just so, spine facing in, a pair of pink-flowered panties on top. That way Ruth would know for sure that her mother had been snooping in there.
The next day, Ruth had dawdled before coming home from school. She walked along the beach. She stopped at a drugstore and looked at makeup. She called Wendy from a phone booth. By the time she returned home, her mother would have read the words. She expected a huge fight, no dinner, just shouting, more threats, more rants about how Ruth wanted her dead so she could live with Auntie Gal. LuLing would wait for Ruth to admit that she wrote those hateful words.
Then Ruth imagined it another way. Her mother reading the words, pounding her chest with one fist to shove her suffering back into the private area of her heart, biting her lips to keep from crying. Later, when Ruth came home, her mother would pretend not to see her. She would fix dinner, sit down, and chew silently. Ruth would not give in and ask if she could have some dinner too. She would eat cereal from the box at every meal, if that"s what it took. They would act like this for days, her mother torturing Ruth with her silence, her absolute rejection. Ruth would stay strong by not feeling any pain, until nothing mattered anymore, unless, of course, it went the way it usually did, and Ruth broke down, cried, and said she was sorry.
And then Ruth had no more time to imagine any other versions of what might happen. She was home. She steeled herself. Thinking about it was just as bad as going through with it. Just get it over with, she told herself. She walked up the stairs to the door, and as soon as she opened it, her mother ran to her and said in a voice choked with worry, "Finally you"re home!"
Only she realized in the next moment that this was not her mother but Auntie Gal. "Your mother is hurt," she said, and grabbed Ruth by the arm to steer her back out the door. "Hurry, hurry, we "re going to the hospital now."
"Hurt?" Ruth could not move. Her body felt airless, hollow and heavy at the same time. "What do you mean? How did she get hurt?"
"She fell out the window. Why she was leaning out, I don"t know. But she hit the cement. The downstairs lady called the ambulance. Her body is broken, and something is wrong with her head-I don"t know what- but it"s very bad, the doctors say. I just hope there"s no brain damage."
Ruth burst into sobs. She doubled over and began crying hysterically. She had wished for this, caused this to happen. She cried until she had dry heaves and was faint from hyperventilating. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Auntie Gal had to take Ruth to Emergency too. A nurse tried to make her breathe into a paper bag, which Ruth slapped away, and after that someone gave her a shot. She became weightless, all worries lifted from her limbs and mind. A dark, warm blanket was placed over her body, then pulled over her head. In this nothingness, she could hear her mother"s voice p.r.o.nouncing to the doctors that her daughter was quiet at last because they were both dead.
Her mother, as it turned out, had suffered a broken shoulder, a cracked rib, and a concussion. When she was released from the hospital, Auntie Gal stayed a few more days to help cook and set up the house so LuLing could learn to bathe and dress herself easily. Ruth was always standing off to the side. "Can I help?" she periodically asked in a weak voice. And Auntie Gal had her make rice or wash the tub or put fresh sheets on her mother"s bed.