Moon Orchid managed to sit upright, but she seemed stiff and frozen.
"You"re just tired from the ride. Put some blood into your cheeks," Brave Orchid said, and pinched her sister"s withered face. She held her sister"s elbow and slapped the inside of her arm. If she had had time, she would have hit until the black and red dots broke out on the skin; that was the tiredness coming out. As she hit, she kept an eye on the rearview mirror. She saw her son come running, his uncle after him with a black bag in his hand. "Faster. Faster," her son was saying. He opened the car door. "Here she is," he said to his uncle. "I"ll see you later." And he ran on down the street.
The two old ladies saw a man, authoritative in his dark western suit, start to fill the front of the car. He had black hair and no wrinkles. He looked and smelled like an American. Suddenly the two women remembered that in China families married young boys to older girls, who baby-sat their husbands their whole lives. Either that or, in this ghost country, a man could somehow keep his youth.
"Where"s the accident?" he said in Chinese. "What is this? You don"t have a broken leg."
Neither woman spoke. Brave Orchid held her words back. She would not let herself interfere with this meeting after long absence.
"What is it?" he asked. "What"s wrong?" These women had such awful faces. "What is it, Grandmothers?"
"Grandmother?" Brave Orchid shouted. "This is your wife. I am your sister-in-law."
Moon Orchid started to whimper. Her husband looked at her. And recognized her. "You," he said. "What are you doing here?"
But all she did was open and shut her mouth without any words coming out.
"Why are you here?" he asked, eyes wide. Moon Orchid covered her face with one hand and motioned no with the other.
Brave Orchid could not keep silent. Obviously he was not glad to see his wife. "I sent for her," she burst out. "I got her name on the Red Cross list, and I sent her the plane ticket. I wrote her every day and gave her the heart to come. I told her how welcome she would be, how her family would welcome her, how her husband would welcome her. I did what you, the husband, had time to do in these last thirty years."
He looked directly at Moon Orchid the way the savages looked, looking for lies. "What do you want?" he asked. She shrank from his stare; it silenced her crying.
"You weren"t supposed to come here," he said, the front seat a barrier against the two women over whom a spell of old age had been cast. "It"s a mistake for you to be here. You can"t belong. You don"t have the hardness for this country. I have a new life."
"What about me?" whispered Moon Orchid.
"Good," thought Brave Orchid. "Well said. Said with no guile."
"I have a new wife," said the man.
"She"s only your second wife," said Brave Orchid. "This is your real wife."
"In this country a man may have just one wife."
"So you"ll get rid of that creature in your office?" asked Brave Orchid.
He looked at Moon Orchid. Again the rude American eyes. "You go live with your daughter. I"ll mail you the money I"ve always sent you. I could get arrested if the Americans knew about you. I"m living like an American." He talked like a child born here.
"How could you ruin her old age?" said Brave Orchid.
"She has had food. She has had servants. Her daughter went to college. There wasn"t anything she thought of that she couldn"t buy. I have been a good husband."
"You made her live like a widow."
"That"s not true. Obviously the villagers haven"t stoned her. She"s not wearing mourning. The family didn"t send her away to work. Look at her. She"d never fit into an American household. I have important American guests who come inside my house to eat." He turned to Moon Orchid, "You can"t talk to them. You can barely talk to me."
Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face. She wished she could also hide her dappled hands. Her husband looked like one of the ghosts pa.s.sing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts.
"Do you want her to go back to China then?" Brave Orchid was asking.
"I wouldn"t wish that on anyone. She may stay, but I do not want her in my house. She has to live with you or with her daughter, and I don"t want either of you coming here anymore."
Suddenly his nurse was tapping on the gla.s.s. So quickly that they might have missed it, he gestured to the old women, holding a finger to his mouth for just a moment: he had never told his American wife that he had a wife in China, and they mustn"t tell her either.
"What"s happening?" she asked. "Do you need help? The appointments are piling up."
"No. No," he said. "This woman fainted in the street. I"ll be up soon."
They spoke to each other in English.
The two old women did not call out to the young woman. Soon she left. "I"m leaving too now," said the husband.
"Why didn"t you write to tell her once and for all you weren"t coming back and you weren"t sending for her?" Brave Orchid asked.
"I don"t know," he said. "It"s as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago."
"The least you can do," said Brave Orchid, "is invite us to lunch. Aren"t you inviting us to lunch? Don"t you owe us a lunch? At a good restaurant?" She would not let him off easily.
So he bought them lunch, and when Brave Orchid"s son came back to the car, he had to wait for them.
Moon Orchid was driven back to her daughter"s house, but though she lived in Los Angeles, she never saw her husband again. "Oh, well," said Brave Orchid. "We"re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we"re alive together during the same moment." Brave Orchid and her son drove back north, Brave Orchid sitting in the back seat the whole way.
Several months went by with no letter from Moon Orchid. When she had lived in China and in Hong Kong, she had written every other week. At last Brave Orchid telephoned long distance to find out what was happening. "I can"t talk now," Moon Orchid whispered. "They"re listening. Hang up quickly before they trace you." Moon Orchid hung up on Brave Orchid before the minutes she had paid for expired.
That week a letter came from the niece saying that Moon Orchid had become afraid. Moon Orchid said that she had overheard Mexican ghosts plotting on her life. She had been creeping along the baseboards and peeping out windows. Then she had asked her daughter to help her find an apartment at the other end of Los Angeles, where she was now hiding. Her daughter visited her every day, but Moon Orchid kept telling her, "Don"t come see me because the Mexican ghosts will follow you to my new hiding place. They"re watching your house."
Brave Orchid phoned her niece and told her to send her mother north immediately, where there were no Mexicans, she said. "This fear is an illness," she told her niece. "I will cure her." ("Long ago," she explained to her children, "when the emperors had four wives, the wife who lost in battle was sent to the Northern Palace. Her feet would sink little prints into the snow.") Brave Orchid sat on a bench at the Greyhound station to wait for her sister. Her children had not come with her because the bus station was only a five-block walk from the house. Her brown paper shopping bag against her, she dozed under the fluorescent lights until her sister"s bus pulled into the terminal. Moon Orchid stood blinking on the stairs, hanging tightly to the railing for old people. Brave Orchid felt the tears break inside her chest for the old feet that stepped one at a time onto the cold Greyhound cement. Her sister"s skin hung loose, like a hollowed frog"s, as if she had shrunken inside it. Her clothes bagged, not fitting sharply anymore. "I"m in disguise," she said. Brave Orchid put her arms around her sister to give her body warmth. She held her hand along the walk home, just as they had held hands when they were girls.
The house was more crowded than ever, though some of the children had gone away to school; the jade trees were inside for the winter. Along walls and on top of tables, jade trees, whose trunks were as thick as ankles, stood stoutly, green now and without the pink skin the sun gave them in the spring.
"I am so afraid," said Moon Orchid.
"There is no one after you," said Brave Orchid. "No Mexicans."
"I saw some in the Greyhound station," said Moon Orchid.
"No. No, those were Filipinos." She held her sister"s earlobes and began the healing chant for being unafraid. "There are no Mexicans after you," she said.
"I know. I got away from them by escaping on the bus."
"Yes, you escaped on the bus with the mark of the dog on it."
In the evening, when Moon Orchid seemed quieter, her sister probed into the cause of this trouble.
"What made you think anyone was after you?"
"I heard them talking about me. I snuck up on them and heard them."
"But you don"t understand Mexican words."
"They were speaking English."
"You don"t understand English words."
"This time, miraculously, I understood. I decoded their speech. I penetrated the words and understood what was happening inside."
Brave Orchid tweaked her sister"s ears for hours, chanting her new address to her, telling her how much she loved her and how much her daughter and nephews and nieces loved her, and her brother-in-law loved her. "I won"t let anything happen to you. I won"t let you travel again. You"re home. Stay home. Don"t be afraid." Tears fell from Brave Orchid"s eyes. She had whisked her sister across the ocean by jet and then made her scurry up and down the Pacific coast, back and forth across Los Angeles. Moon Orchid had misplaced herself, her spirit (her "attention," Brave Orchid called it) scattered all over the world. Brave Orchid held her sister"s head as she pulled on her earlobe. She would make it up to her. For moments an attentiveness would return to Moon Orchid"s face. Brave Orchid rubbed the slender hands, blew on the fingers, tried to stoke up the flickerings. She stayed home from the laundry day after day. She threw out the Thorazine and vitamin? that a doctor in Los Angeles had prescribed. She made Moon Orchid sit in the kitchen sun while she picked over the herbs in cupboards and bas.e.m.e.nt and the fresh plants that grew in the winter garden. Brave Orchid chose the gentlest plants and made medicines and foods like those they had eaten in their village.
At night she moved from her own bedroom and slept beside Moon Orchid. "Don"t be afraid to sleep," she said. "Rest. I"ll be here beside you. I"ll help your spirit find the place to come back to. I"ll call it for you; you go to sleep." Brave Orchid stayed awake watching until dawn.
Moon Orchid still described aloud her nieces" and nephews" doings, but now in a monotone, and she no longer interrupted herself to ask questions. She would not go outside, even into the yard. "Why, she"s mad," Brave Orchid"s husband said when she was asleep.
Brave Orchid held her hand when she appeared vague. "Don"t go away, Little Sister. Don"t go any further. Come back to us." If Moon Orchid fell asleep on the sofa, Brave Orchid sat up through the night, sometimes dozing in a chair. When Moon Orchid fell asleep in the middle of the bed, Brave Orchid made a place for herself at the foot. She would anchor her sister to this earth.
But each day Moon Orchid slipped further away. She said that the Mexicans had traced her to this house. That was the day she shut the drapes and blinds and locked the doors. She sidled along the walls to peep outside. Brave Orchid told her husband that he must humor his sister-in-law. It was right to shut the windows; it kept her spirit from leaking away. Then Moon Orchid went about the house turning off the lights like during air raids. The house became gloomy; no air, no light. This was very tricky, the darkness a wide way for going as well as coming back. Sometimes Brave Orchid would switch on the lights, calling her sister"s name all the while. Brave Orchid"s husband installed an air conditioner.
The children locked themselves up in their bedrooms, in the storeroom and bas.e.m.e.nt, where they turned on the lights. Their aunt would come knocking on the doors and say, "Are you all right in there?"
"Yes, Aunt, we"re all right."
"Beware," she"d warn. "Beware. Turn off your lights so you won"t be found. Turn off the lights before they come for us."
The children hung blankets over the cracks in the door-jambs; they stuffed clothes along the bottoms of doors. "Chinese people are very weird," they told one another.
Next Moon Orchid removed all the photographs, except for those of the grandmother and grandfather, from the shelves, dressers, and walls. She gathered up the family alb.u.ms. "Hide these," she whispered to Brave Orchid. "Hide these. When they find me, I don"t want them to trace the rest of the family. They use photographs to trace you." Brave Orchid wrapped the pictures and the alb.u.ms in flannel. "I"ll carry these far away where no one will find us," she said. When Moon Orchid wasn"t looking, she put them at the bottom of a storage box in the bas.e.m.e.nt. She piled old clothes and old shoes on top. "If they come for me," Moon Orchid said, "everyone will be safe."
"We"re all safe," said Brave Orchid.
The next odd thing Moon Orchid did was to cry whenever anyone left the house. She held on to them, pulled at their clothes, begged them not to go. The children and Brave Orchid"s husband had to sneak out. "Don"t let them go," pleaded Moon Orchid. "They will never come back."
"They will come back. Wait and see. I promise you. Watch for them. Don"t watch for Mexicans. This one will be home at 3:30. This one at 5:00. Remember who left now. You"ll see."
"We"ll never see that one again," Moon Orchid wept.
At 3:30 Brave Orchid would remind her, "See? It"s 3:30; sure enough, here he comes." ("You children come home right after school. Don"t you dare stop for a moment. No candy store. No comic book store. Do you hear?") But Moon Orchid did not remember. "Who is this?" she"d ask. "Are you going to stay with us? Don"t go out tonight. Don"t leave in the morning."
She whispered to Brave Orchid that the reason the family must not go out was that "they" would take us in airplanes and fly us to Washington, D.C., where they"d turn us into ashes. Then they"d drop the ashes in the wind, leaving no evidence.
Brave Orchid saw that all variety had gone from her sister. She was indeed mad. "The difference between mad people and sane people," Brave Orchid explained to the children, "is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over."
Every morning Moon Orchid stood by the front door whispering, whispering. "Don"t go. The planes. Ashes. Washington, D.C. Ashes." Then, when a child managed to leave, she said, "That"s the last time we"ll see him again. They"ll get him. They"ll turn him into ashes."
And so Brave Orchid gave up. She was housing a mad sister who cursed the mornings for her children, the one in Vietnam too. Their aunt was saying terrible things when they needed blessing. Perhaps Moon Orchid had already left this mad old body, and it was a ghost bad-mouthing her children. Brave Orchid finally called her niece, who put Moon Orchid in a California state mental asylum. Then Brave Orchid opened up the windows and let the air and light come into the house again. She moved back into the bedroom with her husband. The children took the blankets and sheets down from the doorjambs and came back into the living room.
Brave Orchid visited her sister twice. Moon Orchid was thinner each time, shrunken to bone. But, surprisingly, she was happy and had made up a new story. She pranced like a child. "Oh, Sister, I am so happy here. No one ever leaves. Isn"t that wonderful? We are all women here. Come. I want you to meet my daughters." She introduced Brave Orchid to each inmate in the ward-her daughters. She was especially proud of the pregnant ones. "My dear pregnant daughters." She touched the women on the head, straightened collars, tucked blankets. "How are you today, dear daughter?" "And, you know," she said to Brave Orchid, "we understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I understand them." Sure enough, the women smiled back at her and reached out to touch her as she went by. She had a new story, and yet she slipped entirely away, not waking up one morning.
Brave Orchid told her children they must help her keep their father from marrying another woman because she didn"t think she could take it any better than her sister had. If he brought another woman into the house, they were to gang up on her and play tricks on her, hit her, and trip her when she was carrying hot oil until she ran away. "I am almost seventy years old," said the father, "and haven"t taken a second wife, and don"t plan to now." Brave Orchid"s daughters decided fiercely that they would never let men be unfaithful to them. All her children made up their minds to major in science or mathematics.
A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe
What my brother actually said was, "I drove Mom and Second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt"s husband who"s got the other wife."
"Did she hit him? What did she say? What did he say?"
"Nothing much. Mom did all the talking."
"What did she say?"
"She said he"d better take them to lunch at least."
"Which wife did he sit next to? What did they eat?"
"I didn"t go. The other wife didn"t either. He motioned us not to tell."
"I would"ve told. If I was his wife, I would"ve told. I would"ve gone to lunch and kept my ears open."
"Ah, you know they don"t talk when they eat."
"What else did Mom say?"
"I don"t remember. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would come."
"There must"ve been more. Didn"t Aunt get in one nasty word? She must"ve said something."
"No, I don"t think she said anything. I don"t remember her saying one thing."
In fact, it wasn"t me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he"d told her. His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs. The hearer can carry it tucked away without it taking up much room. Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into b.u.t.tons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the n.o.bles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.
Maybe that"s why my mother cut my tongue. She pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum. Or maybe she snipped it with a pair of nail scissors. I don"t remember her doing it, only her telling me about it, but all during childhood I felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry-and then, when its mouth was wide open like a baby bird"s, cut. The Chinese say "a ready tongue is an evil."
I used to curl up my tongue in front of the mirror and tauten my frenum into a white line, itself as thin as a razor blade. I saw no scars in my mouth. I thought perhaps I had had two frena, and she had cut one. I made other children open their mouths so I could compare theirs to mine. I saw perfect pink membranes stretching into precise edges that looked easy enough to cut. Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other times I was terrified-the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue.
"Why did you do that to me, Mother?"
"I told you."
"Tell me again."
"I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You"ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You"ll be able to p.r.o.nounce anything. Your frenum looked too tight to do those things, so I cut it."
"But isn"t "a ready tongue an evil"?"
"Things are different in this ghost country."