Across a Green Ocean (17 page)

“I don’t want . . .” her mother said, as if struggling to find the words, “I don’t want you to be like me.”

“I won’t be,” Emily said, thinking,
Oh, if only you knew how much I try not to be like you.

“What I want is for you and Michael to be happy, to have families of your own.”

“We will.”

“I don’t think so, if you leave Julian. And what for? Just because he wants children and you don’t.”

“How did you know that?”

“Julian told me at Christmas, when you and Michael stayed home and we went to church together. He told me he was afraid you would not change your mind. That this would be a problem for you two.”

Although she was a little disturbed that her husband had chosen to confide in her mother—as if her mother could do anything about it—Emily said, “Well, he was right.”

“Are you sure?” her mother asked. “Emily, are you sure you don’t want to have children?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I don’t know. How can Michael be sure that he’s gay?” It was a rhetorical question, but Emily regretted posing it when she saw the confused look on her mother’s face.

“But now you will be alone,” her mother persisted, “and so will Michael.”

“Actually, Michael has a boyfriend.” Emily figured she might as well come clean about everything she knew. “That’s how I found out Michael was gay. When I went over to his apartment Friday night, his boyfriend answered the door.”

“Michael and this boy live together? Is he the roommate?”

“What? There is no roommate.” Too late, Emily recalled the lie she had told her mother. “His boyfriend lives uptown. His name is David. He’s a lawyer.”

“A lawyer?” her mother echoed.

“Yes, but the point is that Michael has someone who cares about him. He’s going to be fine.”

“Do you think,” her mother said after a moment, “that maybe Michael is gay because I used to dress him in your clothes when he was a baby?”

“What? Mom, don’t be ridiculous. Of course that has nothing to do with it.”

“I just think,” her mother said, “that it is somehow my fault. That you don’t want children because of what happened to your doll.”

“What doll?”

Her mother hesitated. “The one that I broke.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Mom, did it ever occur to you that the way Michael and I turned out has nothing to do with the way we were raised? That we’re now adults and responsible for our own thoughts and feelings?”

“Maybe,” her mother replied, but she didn’t sound too convinced. Perhaps, Emily thought, her mother wanted to know that she had some measure of influence in her children’s lives, to keep them close to her.

“In any case, not wanting to have children has nothing to do with you or Dad. And really, it has nothing to do with Julian either. It has to do with me, and figuring out what it is I want. Can’t you see that?”

Her mother nodded slowly, although Emily could tell that she hadn’t changed her mind about what direction she felt her daughter’s life was heading in—straight down, as far as she was concerned. But it looked like she wasn’t going to argue with Emily about it anymore, at least for today. That was really all Emily could ask.

Just then, Emily heard the phone in her pocket beep. Taking it out, she saw that she’d missed a call. She glanced up to see her mother staring at her and could tell that her mother was dying to know who it was.

“It isn’t Julian.” The look on her mother’s face shifted a little. “It isn’t a secret boyfriend, either. There isn’t anyone else, in case you were wondering.”

“Oh.” Her mother almost looked disappointed.

“I have to leave in a little bit, okay, Mom?”

“Where are you going? Aren’t you going to stay here?”

“I can’t. You have your own life, I don’t want to get in the way. Like this morning, you didn’t go to church because I was here, right? You could have gone without me.”

“I didn’t want to leave you by yourself.”

“Then you could have woken me up and we could have gone together.”

“You were too tired.”

Emily felt like throwing up her hands. It was like arguing with a child; every excuse her mother was giving sounded like she was trying to hide something. Probably, judging by the snippet of conversation she had overheard that morning, that something had to do with Pastor Liu.

“Mom,” she said gently, “I think it’s good that you have a lot of friends from church. Even male friends. You do have male friends there, right?”

“Um, yes,” her mother said. “There’s Mr. Tsai, Mr. Chao . . .”

“If you wanted to be more than friends with one of them, I wouldn’t be opposed to it.”

A look of horror crossed her mother’s face. “Oh, no! They are married.”

“Well, if they weren’t married. You keep on saying that you’re afraid of Michael and me being alone. But it’s been a year, Mom. You don’t have to be alone, either.”

“Emily, we are talking about
your
marriage,” her mother said firmly, and Emily knew that was the extent to what she was going to get out of her mother about what was or wasn’t happening at church. “Where are you going to stay?”

“In the city.”

“With friends?”

“Maybe.” Although as Emily said it, she had another, better idea. “I’ll call you after Michael comes back, Mom. Maybe the both of us can plan to come out and spend a weekend with you?” She paused, recalling the three of them together in this house last year, quiet and slow-moving, as if shell-shocked.

“Yes,” her mother said quietly. “I would like that.”

Since she had brought so little with her, Emily was able to get ready to leave quickly. Up in her room, she made the bed so neatly that you couldn’t tell someone had slept in it the night before, or that that morning it had been the site of whatever was the opposite of consummation. She picked up the keys, said good-bye to her mother, and pulled out of the driveway. Once on the road, she started to feel better and looked forward to getting back into the city. There were two people she needed to see before the day was over.

L
ing stood in the driveway, her hand raised to wave good-bye to Emily. She only lowered it when the car had vanished around a curve. A couple of hours ago she had been surprised to hear a car pull up to the house and to look out the window to see that it was the maroon Buick she had driven so many years ago. For a moment she thought that time had been turned back, and she would see her younger self emerge from the car, in a pantsuit and permed hair. But it had been her son-in-law, and Ling realized that Julian and Emily must have switched cars. Apparently, they had switched back before he had left.

Although she knew there was still a lot that Emily hadn’t told her, this was the most Ling had ever heard about her daughter’s marriage. They were not much for discussing things in the Tang family, Ling had come to realize. Maybe if she’d told Emily what her own marriage had been like, her daughter would be more forthcoming. But now there was no point; Emily seemed to have made up her mind about leaving Julian. Perhaps someday she would reveal more, but for now, Ling would just have to have faith that her children would solve their own issues.

For example, Michael and his issue, if you could call it that. After she had left Emily and Julian to talk upstairs, Ling had gone down to the living room, where she’d had to sit down on the sofa to absorb the fact that her son, her sensitive little boy, liked other boys. How could that be? Michael had never showed any inclination for fashion or interior design, and his room had always been the picture of slovenliness. Wasn’t that the opposite of what gay people were like? She had no idea, aside from what she saw on television. No family she knew had a gay son, or daughter, for that matter. There was that boy in church, Carl Cheung, whose voice soared higher than any of the sopranos; that was suspiciously feminine, wasn’t it? But who knew what that meant?

As she was pondering this, Julian appeared in the doorway. He looked even more disheveled than when he had arrived, his shirt untucked, his face grim.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tang,” he said. “I tried my best.”

Tried what?
she wanted to ask him, but sensed by the look on his face that she should pose this question to her daughter. Instead, she just nodded, and Julian left through the front door. She heard a car start and pull out of the driveway, and it was quiet. Then the pipes above her started to thrum as Emily turned on the water to take a shower. Ling wondered just what her daughter was trying to wash away from her life.

The stillness enveloped Ling again as soon as Emily’s car turned the street corner and she could no longer hear its familiar sputter. She had thought she’d gotten used to being by herself, but Emily’s unexpected visit was like a splotch of color on a black-and-white canvas. Afternoons were especially hard for Ling, and she had taken to watching talk shows on television, marveling in the ways that people managed to mess up their lives without half trying. Ling thought of how whenever her children visited after they had left home, it had seemed like part of herself was being wrenched away, no matter how much she convinced herself that they would come again. Han hadn’t seemed to feel like this, reminding her of how close both of them lived, a mere train or car ride away, and that she could go visit them if she wanted to. But Michael had never invited her to see his various lodgings—for a good reason, she now knew—and Emily’s house had always struck her as peculiar, filled with furniture that was old and worn down on purpose.

Then, in a time that should be one of crisis, near the anniversary of their father’s death, Emily had suddenly come to her, only to leave just as abruptly, and Michael had done the opposite by going away as far as he possibly could by himself. If he had to go to China, why not take along his poor old mother, who could certainly help him with the language and the customs, even though she herself had never been to the mainland. Maybe they could have all gone—herself, Emily, and Michael—as a sort of family vacation, although it would have been different without Han.

She wondered what Han would think about his son being gay, and Ling was secretly glad he wasn’t around to know. Han had always been hard on Michael for the slightest things—for leaving his bike on the lawn, or getting poor grades in math, or spending too much time next door with the Bradley girl. Then, when Michael was a teenager, this attitude intensified, until Ling thought it might be something more than just regular fatherly disapproval and teenage sullenness. After he left home, Michael rarely came back to visit, and his reasons seemed less like Emily’s—that she was too busy—and more that he couldn’t stand to be around his mother and father. Maybe it had something to do with his sexual orientation. Ling had to admit to herself that she secretly welcomed this explanation, as it had less to do with her own shortcomings as a mother. But still, she should have seen it, she should have found a way to help her son. Because she knew that his father would not have. She knew that above all, Han wouldn’t have been able to hide his disappointment that his son was not who he had wanted him to be.

 

When Ling learned she was going to have a second child, she knew that it would be a boy. She craved meat—steaks so rare that they dripped blood—and the baby sat low and round above her pelvis. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her little girl, who was already more serious than a six-year-old had any right to be. Emily held hands with her mother when they walked down the street, helped her wash the dishes at night, announced she wanted to go to bed early so that the next school day would come faster. There was nothing Ling enjoyed more than combing tangles out of her daughter’s long hair and tying the sashes of her dresses.

After Han came home from work each night, Ling would watch as her daughter immediately stopped what she was doing to run to her father. Emily craved his approval so desperately, as if she knew that she would soon be displaced by her brother. Ling knew how much having a boy meant to Han. It would be a validation of his passage to America, of the days he had spent working as a dishwasher, of his decision to move to a suburb where not many families looked like theirs. It would help with the fact that no matter how tidy he kept his lawn, waved to the neighbors, and subscribed to the right local paper so that it was delivered in the center of their doormat every morning, he would never quite be viewed with the same easygoing acceptance as, say, their neighbor Mr. Bradley, whom everyone knew was a closet alcoholic.

Indeed, after Michael was born, her husband showed a tenderness unfamiliar to Ling, even in the early days of their marriage and when Emily was born. He came home from work early to be present for the baby’s evening feeding, allowed him to fall asleep in the crook of his arm. He insisted that Ling follow the Chinese traditions of not washing her hair or going outside for the month after she had given birth, in order to rebuild her strength. He bought a black-skinned chicken to make soup, since it was considered to be more nutritious, and red-dyed eggs to symbolize good luck when the baby turned a month old. Ling had renounced these kinds of superstitions when she had joined the church, but she went along with them for her husband’s sake.

Michael turned out to be a difficult baby. He had colic, when he’d cry so long and hard that it sounded like he was choking on his own discomfort. Ling tried everything, feeding him, holding a heating pad to his back, walking circles around the room. They took him to the doctor, who only said that Michael would grow out of it. Until then, the entire family had to endure sleepless nights, and Ling felt at times that her child’s sobbing would kill her.

Then there was the time Michael cried so hard that he stopped breathing. When that happened, Ling could literally feel his dead weight in her arms. She shook him, and his head flopped as if the string that had been holding it up had been cut. For a moment she felt as if her own heart had stopped. Then she screamed for Han to call an ambulance.

Until then she and Han had done their best to make their house look just like any other on the block. Han fixed loose shingles on the roof and mowed the lawn regularly; Ling tended flower beds and refrained from cooking anything that might result in strange smells wafting out the kitchen window and over fences. But after that night, it was apparent that something was not right with the Tangs. First, there had been that ambulance roaring down the street in the early morning, waking up everyone on the block. And then there was the day about a month later, when a strange car parked outside their house. From it emerged a no-nonsense-looking woman with a briefcase.

Ling went to answer the doorbell.

“Hello, Mrs. Tang?” the woman said, offering a large, capable hand. “My name is Gretchen Davis. May I come in?”

She went on to say something about herself that Ling couldn’t quite understand but allowed the woman to pass through, wondering if she was selling something, like the rouged ladies who tried to get into the living room to set up their cases of makeup, or the ones who wore no makeup at all but carried pamphlets about how to achieve eternal life.

Gretchen Davis walked into the Tangs’ living room, looking around in a manner that indicated more than idle curiosity. “I suppose your husband must be at work,” she said to Ling. “Where are your children?”

Ling explained that Emily was at a friend’s house for the afternoon, and that Michael was upstairs, napping.

“How is your daughter doing in school?” was the next question.

“She is doing okay,” Ling replied. “Not the best in the class. She needs to work harder.”

This was not true. Mrs. Mayer had told Ling at a parent-teacher conference that Emily was the brightest student she’d had in years, although she was concerned about the way Emily peered at the chalkboard and thought she might need glasses. But Ling did not want to say this to Gretchen Davis. She felt that it would be safer to be modest and pretend her child was ordinary, if not downright delinquent like the Bradley boy next door.

Judging by her visitor’s raised eyebrows, Ling didn’t think that her intentions had come across clearly enough. She noticed that the woman began to scribble some notes on a pad that she had extracted from her briefcase.

“Mrs. Tang, when does your daughter get up in the morning? What does she eat for breakfast?”

Ling replied eight o’clock and rice porridge. Sensing that her mothering skills were being evaluated, she wondered if she should have changed that last answer to something more appropriate and American-sounding—eggs, for example. Gretchen asked for permission to go into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator door and exposed the unruly heads of bok choy and napa cabbage. Gretchen glanced into the cupboards at the dishes Ling had bought to set up house with. She didn’t run a finger along the counter to check for grime, but she might as well have.

Now Gretchen wanted to see their bedrooms. Ling tried to imagine the rooms through a stranger’s eyes. Emily’s room with its four-poster bed and white quilted coverlet was tidy. As far as Ling could tell, there were no unwholesome books or dangerous toys sticking out anywhere. In the other bedroom, Michael was awake and lying quietly in his crib. Ling picked him up and unwillingly handed him over to Gretchen, who examined his reflexes and unbuttoned his onesie to check his body.

“How did he get this?” she asked Ling, pointing to a bruise on his thigh, where the joint of his plump little leg met his body.

Ling stammered that maybe she had held him a bit too roughly when she tried to pin his diaper. Or perhaps she had been holding him when she turned and accidentally bumped into the edge of a door. She had no idea. Finally, Gretchen Davis made her way to the front door, handed Ling a business card, and said she would be in touch. Ling locked the door after her, feeling that she had just taken a test in which she had gotten every answer wrong.

That night in the kitchen, after Emily and Michael had been put to bed, Ling handed Han the card, which said
Social Services
on it. Maybe it was something routine, she suggested in a hesitant voice. Maybe they were doing this to all the families with school-age children in the area, and it just happened to be the Tangs’ turn. Han said in a low, terrible voice, how could she not realize that Gretchen Davis thought that Michael had had to go to the hospital because the Tangs were abusing their children? How could she have let that woman into the house? Had the neighbors seen anything? Didn’t she know what a huge shame this was to the family?

He stopped, veins bulging from his forehead as if they were strings to be plucked. He didn’t say it, but Ling knew that he also blamed her for being the one who was holding Michael when he had stopped breathing. For being a bad mother. But wasn’t it Han’s fault, she said aloud, for leaving her alone with the children all the time? Why couldn’t he admit that he was wrong to have left New York City, to have married her, to have come to America in the first place?

Please,
Han said,
keep your voice down,
even though she was speaking in Mandarin Chinese and Emily probably wouldn’t be able to understand.
I am tired of keeping my voice down,
Ling said, and went upstairs. She didn’t care if Emily had heard. Actually, she hoped she had, so that someday when she had a husband of her own, she would know what to do when you were pushed so hard against the door that you couldn’t just lean against it, you had to open it and go out into the dark night.

The next morning, Ling came downstairs at eight o’clock to find Emily already seated at the kitchen table. Ling asked her if she had slept all right, and Emily nodded with no indication of having heard her parents’ fight the night before. While she fed Michael, Ling made a phone call to Mrs. Bradley next door. She said that she had to go to the city at the last minute, and would Mrs. Bradley be able to look after the children for a few hours? Mrs. Bradley hesitated, and in the background Ling could hear the Bradley boy acting up. Ling had never asked her neighbor anything like this before, but finally Mrs. Bradley agreed.