"It was a neighbor"s dog."
"Then why you let neighbor"s dog come your backyard? Now see what happen! Ai-ya, die no reason!"
Her mother was speaking far too loudly. People were looking up from their knitting and reading, even the balding man. Ruth was pained. That cat had been her baby. She had held her the day she was born, a tiny wild ball of fur, found in Wendy"s garage on a rainy day. Ruth had also held her as the vet gave the lethal shot to end her misery. Thinking about this nearly put Ruth over the edge, and she did not want to burst into tears in a waiting room full of strangers.
At that moment, luckily, the receptionist called out, "LuLing Young!" As Ruth helped her mother gather her purse and coat, she saw the balding man leap up and walk quickly toward an elderly Chinese woman. "Hey, Mom," Ruth heard him say. "How"d everything check out? Ready to go home?" The woman gruffly handed him a prescription note. He must be her son-in-law, Ruth surmised. Would Art ever take her mother to the doctor"s? She doubted it. How about in the case of an emergency, a heart attack, a stroke?
The nurse spoke to LuLing in Cantonese and she answered in Mandarin. They settled on accented English as their common ground. LuLing quietly submitted to the preliminaries. Step on the scale. Eighty-five pounds. Blood pressure. One hundred over seventy. Roll up your sleeve and make a fist. LuLing did not flinch. She had taught Ruth to do the same, to look straight at the needle and not cry out. In the examination room, Ruth turned away as her mother slipped out of her cotton camisole and stood in her waist-high flowered panties.
LuLing put on a paper gown, climbed onto the examining table, and dangled her feet. She looked childlike and breakable. Ruth sank into a nearby chair. When the doctor arrived, they both sat up straight. LuLing had always had great respect for doctors.
"Mrs. Young!" the doctor greeted her jovially. "I"m Dr. Huey." He glanced at Ruth.
"I"m her daughter. I called your office earlier."
He nodded knowingly. Dr. Huey was a pleasant-looking man, younger than Ruth. He started asking LuLing questions in Cantonese, and her mother pretended to understand, until Ruth explained, "She speaks Mandarin, not Cantonese."
The doctor looked at her mother. "Guoyu?" "Guoyu?"
LuLing nodded, and Dr. Huey shrugged apologetically. "My Mandarin is pretty terrible. How"s your English?"
"Good. No problem."
At the end of the examination, Dr. Huey smiled and announced, "Well, you are one very strong lady. Heart and lungs are great. Blood pressure excellent. Especially for someone your age. Let"s see, what year were you born?" He scanned the chart, then looked up at LuLing. "Can you tell me?"
"Year?" LuLing"s eyes darted upward as if the answer were on the ceiling. "This not so easy say."
"I want the truth, now," the doctor joked. "Not what you tell your friends."
"Truth is 1916," LuLing said.
Ruth interrupted. "What she means is-" and she was about to say 1921, but the doctor put up his hand to stop her from speaking. He glanced at the medical chart again, then said to LuLing, "So that makes you... how old?"
"Eighty-two this month!" she said.
Ruth bit her lip and looked at the doctor.
"Eighty-two." He wrote this down. "So tell me, were you born in China? Yes? What city?"
"Ah, this also not so easy say," LuLing began shyly. "Not really city, more like little place we call so many different name. Forty-six kilometer from bridge to Peking."
"Ah, Beijing," the doctor said. "I went there on a tour a couple of years ago. My wife and I saw the Forbidden City."
LuLing warmed up. "In those day, so many thing forbidden, can"t see. Now everyone pay money see forbidden thing. You say this forbidden that forbidden, charge extra."
Ruth was about to burst. Her mother must sound garbled to Dr. Huey. She had had concerns about her, but she didn"t want her concerns to be fully justified. Her worries were supposed to preclude any real problem. They always had.
"Did you go to school there as well?" Dr. Huey asked.
LuLing nodded. "Also my nursemaid teach me many things. Painting, reading, writing-"
"Very good. I was wondering if you could do a little math for me. I want you to count down from a hundred, subtracting seven each time."
LuLing went blank.
"Start at a hundred."
"Hundred!" LuLing said confidently, then nothing more.
Dr. Huey waited, and finally said, "Now count down by seven."
LuLing hesitated. "Ninety-two, ah, ninety-three. Ninety-three!"
This is not fair, Ruth wanted to shout. She has to convert the numbers into Chinese to do the calculations, then remember that, and put the answer back into English. Ruth"s mind raced ahead. She wished she could lay out the answers for her mother telephatically. Eighty-six! Seventy-nine!
"Eighty... Eighty..." LuLing was stuck.
"Take your time, Mrs. Young."
"Eighty," she said at last. "After that, eighty-seven."
"Fine," Dr. Huey declared, with no change of expression. "Now I want you to name the last five presidents in reverse order."
Ruth wanted to protest: Even I can"t do that!
LuLing"s eyebrows bunched in thought. "Clinton," she said after a pause. "Last five year still Clinton." Her mother had not even understood the question! Of course she hadn"t. She had always depended on Ruth to tell her what people meant, to give her what they said from another angle. "Reverse order" means "go backward," she would have told LuLing. If Dr. Huey could ask that same question in fluent Mandarin, it would be no problem for LuLing to give the right answer. "This president, that president," her mother would have said without hesitation, "no difference, all liar. No tax before election, more tax after. No crime before, more crime after. And always don"t cut welfare. I come this country, I don"t get welfare. What so fair? No fair. Only make people lazy to work!"
More ridiculous questions followed.
"Do you know today"s date?"
"Monday." Date and day always sound the same to her.
"What was the date five months ago?"
"Still Monday." When you stop to think about it, she"s right.
"How many grandchildren do you have?"
"Don"t now. She not married yet." He doesn"t see that she"s joking!
LuLing was like the losing contestant on Jeopardy! on Jeopardy! Total for LuLing Young: minus five hundred points. And now for our final Total for LuLing Young: minus five hundred points. And now for our final Jeopardy/ Jeopardy/ round... round.."How old is your daughter?"
LuLing hesitated. "Forty, maybe forty-one." To her mother, she was always younger than she really was.
"What year was she born?"
"Same as me. Dragon year." She looked at Ruth for confirmation. Her mother was a Rooster.
"What month?" Dr. Huey asked.
"What month?" LuLing asked Ruth. Ruth shrugged helplessly. "She don"t know."
"What year is it now?"
"Nineteen ninety-eight!" She looked at the doctor as if he were an idiot not to know that. Ruth was relieved that her mother had answered one question right.
"Mrs. Young, could you wait here while your daughter and I go outside to schedule another appointment? "
"Sure-sure. I not go anywhere."
As Dr. Huey turned for the door, he stopped. "And thank you for answering all the questions. I"m sure you must have felt like you were on the witness stand."
"Like O.J."
Dr. Huey laughed. "I guess everyone watched that trial on TV."
LuLing shook her head. "Oh no, not just watch TV, I there when it happen. He kill wife and that friend, bring her gla.s.ses. Everything I see."
Ruth"s heart started to thump. "You saw a doc.u.mentary," she said for Dr. Huey"s benefit, "a reenactment of what might have happened, and it was like like watching the real thing. Is that what you"re saying?" watching the real thing. Is that what you"re saying?"
LuLing waved to dismiss this simple answer. "Maybe you you see doc.u.ment. / see real thing." She demonstrated with motions. "He grab her like this, cut neck here-very deep, so much blood. Awful." see doc.u.ment. / see real thing." She demonstrated with motions. "He grab her like this, cut neck here-very deep, so much blood. Awful."
"So you were in Los Angeles that day?" Dr. Huey asked.
LuLing nodded.
Ruth was flailing for logic. "I don"t remember you ever ever going to L.A." going to L.A."
"How I go, don"t know. But I there. This true! I follow that man, oh he sneaky. O.J. hide in bush. Later, I go his house too. Watch him take glove, stick in garden, go back inside change clothes-" LuLing caught herself, embarra.s.sed. "Well, he change clothes, course I don"t look, turn my eyes. Later he run to airport, almost late, jump on plane. I see whole thing."
"You saw this and didn"t tell anyone?"
"I scared!"
"The murder must have been an awful thing for you to see," Dr. Huey said.
LuLing nodded bravely.
"Thank you for sharing that. Now, if you"ll just wait here a few minutes, your daughter and I are going to step into another room and schedule your next appointment."
"No hurry."
Ruth followed the doctor into another room. "How long have you noticed this kind of confusion?" Dr. Huey asked right away.
Ruth sighed. "It"s been a little worse in the last six months, maybe longer than that. But today she seems worse than usual. Except for the last thing she said, she hasn"t been that weird or forgetful. It"s more like mix-ups, and most of it is due to her not speaking English that well, as you may have noticed. The story about O. J. Simpson-you know, that may be another language problem. She"s never been good at expressing herself-"
"It sounded pretty clear to me that she thought she was there," Dr. Huey said gently.
Ruth looked away.
"You mentioned to the nurse that she had a car accident. Was there a head injury? "
"She did b.u.mp her head on the steering wheel." Ruth was suddenly hopeful that this was the missing piece to the puzzle.
"Does her personality seem to be changing? Is she depressed, more argumentative?"
Ruth tried to guess what an affirmative response might indicate. "My mother"s always gotten into arguments, all her life. She has a terrible temper. And as long as I"ve known her, she"s been depressed. Her husband, my father, was killed forty-four years ago. Hit-and-run. She never got over it. Maybe the depression is becoming worse, but I"m so used to it I"d be the last one to notice. As for her confusion, I was wondering if it was a concussion from the car accident or if she might have had a mini-stroke." Ruth tried to remember the correct medical term. "You know, a TIA."
"So far I don"t see any evidence of that. Her motor movements are good, reflexes are fine. Blood pressure is excellent. But we"ll want to run a few more tests, also make sure she"s not diabetic or anemic, for instance."
"Those could cause problems like this?"
"They could, as could Alzheimer"s and other forms of dementia."
Ruth felt her stomach had been punched. Her mother wasn"t that that bad off. He was talking about a horrible terminal illness. Thank G.o.d she had not told the doctor about the other things she had tabulated: the argument her mother had had with Francine over the rent; the ten-million-dollar check from the magazine sweepstakes; her forgetting that Fu-Fu had died. "So it could be depression," Ruth said. bad off. He was talking about a horrible terminal illness. Thank G.o.d she had not told the doctor about the other things she had tabulated: the argument her mother had had with Francine over the rent; the ten-million-dollar check from the magazine sweepstakes; her forgetting that Fu-Fu had died. "So it could be depression," Ruth said.
"We haven"t ruled out anything yet."
"Well, if it is, you"ll have to tell her the antidepressants are ginseng or po chat po chat pills." pills."
Dr. Huey laughed. "Resistance to Western medication is common among our elderly patients here. And as soon as they feel better, they stop taking it to save money." He handed her a form. "Give this to Lorraine at the computer station around the corner. Let"s schedule your mother to see the folks in Psychiatry and Neurology, then have her come back to see me again in a month."
"Around the Full Moon Festival."
Dr. Huey looked up. "Is that when it is? I can never keep track."
"I only know because I"m hosting this year"s family reunion dinner."
That evening, as Ruth steamed the sea ba.s.s, she told Art in an offhanded way, "I took my mom to see the doctor. She may have depression."
And Art said, "So what else is new?"
At dinner, LuLing sat next to Ruth. "Too salty," she remarked in Chinese, poking at her portion of fish. And then she added: "Tell those girls to finish their fish. Don"t let them waste food."
"Fia, Dory, why aren"t you eating?" Ruth said.
"I"m full," Dory answered. "We stopped at Burger King in the Presidio and ate a bunch of fries before we came home."
"You shouldn"t let them eat those things!" LuLing scolded, continuing in Mandarin. "Tell them you don"t allow this anymore."
"Girls, I wish you wouldn"t ruin your appet.i.tes with junk food."
"And I wish you two would stop talking like spies in Chinese," Fia said. "It"s like really rude."
LuLing glared at Ruth, and Ruth glanced at Art, but he was looking down at his plate. "Waipo speaks Chinese," Ruth said, "because that"s the language she"s used to." Ruth had told them to call LuLing "Waipo," the Chinese honorific for "Grandmother," and at least they did that, but then again, they thought it was just a nickname.
"She can speak English too," Dory said.