End of East, The (20 page)

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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Years ago, when it was all over, when the house fell silent and my sisters had gone back to their everyday lives (back to their real homes, or back to work, where they could teeter in high heels and pretend that they were independent and business-like, hard as lacquered red nails), my mother wrapped
herself in layers—knitted vests, fleece sweatshirts, elastic-waisted sweatpants—and burrowed herself into the living-room sofa.
My body—twelve years old and so, so angry—pushed itself into uncomfortable new directions, and I slinked about the house with greasy hair and hunched shoulders. Through my stringy bangs, I peered at her (wet, pink eyes, tissue clamped in her left hand, the other resting on the bony shelf of her clavicles).
The only times she moved off her spot were for dinner and, sometimes, for bed. She cooked and we ate, sometimes leaving chunks of food in our bowls—our silent, hungry protest. Sometimes she cried, silent tears that rolled quickly down her cheeks and disappeared in the folds of her turtleneck. There were a lot of leftovers. I don’t know if she ever really slept.
I grew some more, my unnoticed body taking on a leaner, harder edge. Some nights I didn’t come home, and when I did, everything about me smelled like beer or pot or cigarettes or all three. Still she sat, nodded at my staggering self as if I were coming home from a Bible study. By then, I was used to it. By then, anything else would have been alarming.
I shake my head, stare at her face, wonder if that could truly be satisfaction over apple cake she is feeling.
“Are you feeling okay, Mom?” Somehow, this isn’t right. She sits there, flour smudged on the tip of her nose, head tilted to the side as if she is trying to see me in the right light.
“Oh, I’m just fine. How
are you
doing? You need to rest, you know, after what happened at the hospital.”
“All I’ve done today is rest.”
“Yes, but …” she folds her hands in her lap. “You haven’t been the same since you came back. What happened in Montreal?
I mean, you never seemed to like it there that much, but you seem sad now.”
“Sad?” I’m confused. The sweet cake fills my mouth, and my head swims. “How do you know I’m sad?”
“I just noticed. You’re not working or in school. You stay at home all the time.”
“But you never notice anything. I can’t remember the last time you asked me how I was doing.” I put my fork down, swallow the last crumb.
She picks a napkin up, folds it down the middle, pushing on the crease with the palm of her hand. “Well, you know. It’s hard sometimes, keeping track of what all you girls are doing. You see, we’re alone now, so I have more time for you.” She leans forward. “I don’t know why you were so sick, and maybe I don’t need to know, but I want you to tell me what is really going on with you.”
She’s trying,
I think.
How is this possible?
“You feel sorry for me,” I say quietly.
She blinks hard. “Yes, I do. I know what it’s like to be sad.”
“This is different.”
“No, it’s not. How? I moped around the house, didn’t talk to anyone—same as you. I’m trying to change things now, don’t you understand?”
I shake my head. She leans back again, holds her hands in front of her chest as if she is trying to prevent her body from cracking in two. “I want you to do something. I want you to stop looking at me like that. I want you to try, too. Will you at least think about what I’m saying?”
I push my chair away from the table. “Thanks for the cake, Mom.” I place my dish in the sink (quietly, for any noise would ruin the moment, and then we might be back where we started)
and walk briskly toward my room through the living room, drawing the heavy curtains on the way. I turn to look back and see the piano—spotless, smooth, unplayed. I can never walk past without seeing it. My eyes can’t skip over its solid, silent shape like they can with the silk flowers on the dining-room hutch or even, in the past, my mother sitting in the dark. Its noiselessness is not really noiseless at all. I step forward and run my hands over the dusty bench.
I can hear, still, the violent thumping of my hands playing scales. I sounded nothing at all like those children we saw in the news, the ones who won musical scholarships and the top awards at contests. Those girls (eleven years old, bespectacled, long, smooth braids) looked years younger than me, their imminent pubescence hidden by bibbed dresses and shiny Mary Janes.
I banged out my lessons, stormed my way through “Long, Long Ago.” I wanted to fling myself at the piano, break through its dark wood frame, ruin its innards. My sweatshirt sagged at the collar, and as I watched my hands on the keys, I could keep track of my hangnails, the ragged edges of my cuticles.
When I quit, I simply stopped. I said nothing. My mother said nothing. The piano stood between us, its cover growing a fine layer of undisturbed dust. I didn’t touch it, and my mother didn’t ask me to. I waited and waited for her to say something, until the waiting became the past. The piano itself disappeared under mismatched doilies, china figurines and Christmas cards from relatives in Oakland, Toronto, Perth.
All those things that belong nowhere else are now marooned on the piano. There is no escaping that I disappoint her, that the piano remains so that she can remind me of my failure. Although, perhaps, it reminds her of something too.
I head to my bedroom, knowing that, underneath it all, it’s still just a piano.
When I wake up on sunny mornings, the first things I see are the mountains. They’re painfully sharp in the morning light, reassuringly real and yet unreal at the same time. I want to reach out my hand and touch them, yet I know if I did, all I would get is air. My love for them is no less for this.
The ocean is different. It exists separately and does not enter into the daily workings of my life, except for the western breeze that blows across the city, that moves my curtains from left to right. It is not so much mysterious as all-knowing and silent. There is a lot it could say if it chose. A silent partner in this landscape I was born to.
I’ve driven through Vancouver with my mother, my sisters and, in the past, my father; so many things happen as we drive, watching the streets go by, the quality of the light changing as we travel from east to west, or east again on our way home. It is really the East Side that is Vancouver for me—the netless basketball hoops stranded in their concrete courts, the stained stucco on the sides of squat apartment buildings, the spitcrossed sidewalks that seem to lead everywhere you’d ever want to go until you realize that they can only end in ocean or mountain or trees. The smell of the city comes in through the windows, and it’s easy to forget the purpose of the drive, the lives we’ve left at home, the ugly days when it rains and we have to take the bus.
At home, the portraits on the wall are of the departed, and I can’t walk to the kitchen without seeing old images of my father, my grandfather and my grandmother. All in a three-quarter portrait pose, all smiling, all without a body.
They hang there, three in a row, suspended on the dark wood panelling, fading a little more every year. But it seems my mother has come to life lately—bustling, grasping my wrist when I need it, even before I ask. Surely, this is life, even in the presence of the past.
I walk this city every day, sidestep the garbage, hold my breath through the alleys. But even in the dirtiest of places, where the sidewalk is covered with gum and the hum of traffic and city noise is so loud that you can’t even hear your own footsteps, you can always look north and see the mountains. And there’s always a breeze, faintly salt-scented, that touches your face as you turn to look west.
Pon Man shakes off the shreds of his dream (in which his mother follows him through his daily life like a shadow, disappearing when he turns his head, reappearing in his peripheral vision) and sits up, aware that he is alone in bed. Down the hall, he hears a low keening, the kind of sound he imagines lambs being led to the slaughter might make. He swings his feet over the side of the bed and into his slippers. He wonders if one of the girls is sick and Siu Sang has gone to help her.
He knocks on the bathroom door, listens at the crack in the door frame. He can see the light spilling out into the hall from the gap by the floor.
“Hello? Is anyone in there?”
And then another low cry—choking, wet, wordless. Pon Man reaches for the knob and turns.
Siu Sang lies on the linoleum floor, her pyjamas around her knees. There is blood coursing thickly from between her
legs; there is blood on the floor, blood on the walls, blood all over the toilet and spattered on the mirror. She cries, her mouth an open hole amidst all the blood so that it seems to be streaming from her face as well.
Pon Man breathes through his mouth, knowing that, otherwise, he will gag.
He wraps her in three towels and carries her through the house to the car outside. Wendy opens her bedroom door and peers out at him. “I’m taking your mother to the hospital,” he whispers. “You’ll have to clean the bathroom.” He wonders if he should warn her about the blood, but decides there’s no time. He leaves quietly, as if he is absorbed by the night.
As they drive through the streets (empty and black and wet—not even a cat), Siu Sang begins to talk, her words a damp babble at first. But then she repeats herself, her voice slowly forming each syllable as if she can remember only the individual sounds and words themselves have lost their meaning.
“It’s a curse. She laid a curse on me.”
Pon Man does not dare take his eyes off the road. He squirms. “Who? Who are you talking about?”
“This is my punishment for hating her, for birthing only girls. I knew I was sick as soon as Sammy came out. I could feel the blood pooling inside.”
“Who put a curse on you?”
Siu Sang reaches up from the back seat, where she is lying, and grabs his shoulder. Later, he will see the thick red handprint on his jacket, like the devil’s mark. “Your mother, of course. Now that she’s dead, she has nothing better to do than torture me.”
Pon Man is afraid to speak. He hopes she will forget these words in her pain (he wonders if she is perhaps right, but
then shakes his head, burying
curse and torture and mother
beneath the unordered clutter in his brain) and that he will be free to drive the rest of the way in silence. At the next red light, he turns to look at her. She is asleep. He is so thankful he could cry.
Later, as he sits in the waiting room while doctors remove Siu Sang’s uterus, he relives, over and over again, the sight of his wife lying, her eyes wide open, in her own blood. He could smell the fear in the air—his or hers, he doesn’t know—the sickening combination of flesh and blood and terror. He rubs his face with the heels of his hands.
As if,
he thinks,
there hasn’t been enough sickness already.
Shew Lin’s funeral was only two weeks ago. That afternoon, the warm air smelled like berries and mulch to him as he rubbed his hands, red and sore from the casket handles. The funeral went well—lots of people, a touching service. He arranged everything himself, not knowing exactly what his mother would have wanted because, like many superstitious old ladies, she refused to talk about her death. So, as he made his way from funeral home to cemetery, he could only guess, imagine her voice in his head one last time, saying
yes
to this or
no
to that. As Shew Lin was the first to say, only her boy could know her so well.
When Pon Man walks into the recovery room to see his wife, she lies with her face to the wall, her back stiff and perfectly straight so that he knows she isn’t sleeping. Her whole body blames him, makes him feel like a foolish little boy whose selfishness has ruined everything. He can hear her thinking,
Your children did this to me. It is your mother who wishes me to suffer
. He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes and steps away from her, walks into the hall, where, under the
fluorescent lights, his skin looks not quite there, in the process of disappearing.
When Pon Man brings her home, she doesn’t speak. The girls creep about the house silently, their eyes moving from left to right as if they are looking for hidden dangers that might leap out of dusty corners. Seid Quan carefully moves in the last of his things from his apartment in Chinatown, making sure not to bump the walls with his boxes, afraid, perhaps, that the vibrations will travel through the drywall and into Siu Sang’s bedroom.
Pon Man brings her hot water with lemon, ties on her apron so that he can cook the meals (meat pies and pork chops and casseroles made with canned cream of mushroom soup). He is silent as well, for if she begins to speak again in response to him, there is no telling what she might say. “I have children to think of,” Pon Man says to himself. “And if her madness comes back, I don’t want them to know.”
He lets himself wonder what she must be thinking. Does she want to hold Sammy? Does being a mother make her crazy? What does she want—really, really want? The answer could not possibly be as simple as a genuine pearl necklace or a fig tree for the backyard. He searches his brain for the things she loves and can come up with nothing, not even the taste of watermelon on a hot day, or that movie where the girl is discovered and becomes a Hollywood star.
Picking up things that he knows she has touched, he wanders through the house, hoping that one of these objects will tell him that essential thing about his wife he needs to know. He touches them all: the feather duster, a white leather glove, the case she keeps her glasses in. Pon Man stares at each one, turns
it over as if something might be hidden on the underside. Nothing. He even finds his old sketchbook, the last pages filled with drawings of Siu Sang, but these say more about him as a young, impatient artist than they do about her.
He rummages through the old boxes in the garage, hears the mice skittering away and climbing the insides of the walls. He plunges his hands into her forgotten things, pushes aside the red silk pillows her mother insisted she bring to Canada. He is sure that he will know what he is looking for when he finds it.
Pon Man lifts the lid of Siu Sang’s trunk, the one she brought with her from Hong Kong when she first arrived. In a pocket in the lining, he finds an old book, a romance novel with a picture of a young, open-faced girl on the cover. He wipes it off with his sleeve and lets out a tense breath.
“So this is it,” he whispers. The pictured girl is poised, ready for misfortune but knowing that the real happiness, the romantic ending, is a sure thing. He realizes it is the promise of the perfect life that Siu Sang lives for—a life of martinis and glamour and perfectly behaved, beautiful children. The kind of life this fictional girl on the cover of a book fully expects.
He thinks of Siu Sang’s middle-aged body: the unmistakable scars of motherhood and age, the thin snakes of stretch marks on her stomach and thighs and breasts. Even when she is naked, he can almost see the rose-coloured cardigan she wears every chilly day floating like a ghost above her damp skin, the cork-soled slippers on her feet and the tissue tucked into her sleeve.
He pushes the book back into its pocket and lifts the trunk back onto its shelf. Standing beside the station wagon, he
squints at the cobwebs in the corners, the window slicked over in layers of grease and dust. He listens for the sounds of life behind the door to his house, but hears nothing, not even the breathing of his family. From in here, he could pretend there was no one home at all.
Wendy stands in the middle of the room, a damp dishcloth in her hand. Pon Man can see the tears starting behind her eyes, although her face remains still, the muscles held tight beneath her skin. He wants to run to her, pick her up and carry her and her sisters away—somewhere far, through the Rocky Mountains, out, perhaps, to the open prairie, where Siu Sang would never think to look. Wendy blinks, and one tear rolls down her cheek and off the point of her long chin.
Siu Sang is systematically running her finger over every dish her daughters have just washed. If her finger is covered in soap, food or grease, she throws the dish through the air to smash against the pantry door.
Her eyes
, Pon Man thinks.
I cannot hide them from the children
. The other four girls are huddled in a bunch in the hall. Sammy crouches behind Jackie’s legs, her chubby hands clutching the thick blue denim.
“What is the point of having daughters if they cannot even wash a plate?” Siu Sang speaks in a low growl. “I teach them and teach them and still, here they are staring at me like there are no brains in their heads. Tell me, Wendy,” she turns to her oldest daughter, “do you have a brain? Do your sisters?”
Wendy doesn’t move. Her voice comes out in a croak. “I think we all do.”
“You think, do you? Isn’t that funny?” She holds a ceramic soup spoon in her hands, examines it thoughtfully, then tosses it toward the back door.
Pon Man looks around him, his mouth opening and closing, soundless. He wants to speak, he wants to run, but he stands instead, his silent mouth gaping, his feet glued to the carpet.
What kind of father am I? What kind of husband?
He feels a shadow behind him, a faint breathing on the back of his neck. He turns and sees Seid Quan. “I thought I would see what all the commotion is about,” he says softly.
Siu Sang spins, sees Seid Quan watching her. “You. I’m so tired of looking after you and cooking your disgusting meals. I feel nothing but pity for you, you sad, musty old man.”
Pon Man steps forward, grabs Siu Sang by the wrist. “That is enough. Do you see how you’re scaring the children?”
She laughs. “They’re not scared. Look at them. Not a brain between the five of them. How could they be scared?”
Pon Man sees that his father is hustling the girls downstairs into the basement. “We’ll leave you if you keep this up. You have to stop.”
Siu Sang stands still. “What do you mean, leave me?”
“I mean that I will take the girls and move away.”
“You would really leave me?”
“If you don’t stop this nonsense.”
Siu Sang pulls a paper towel off the roll, dabs at her eyes. “You don’t know how hard it is, how hard I work to cook three meals a day for all these mouths. The girls don’t appreciate me. You don’t appreciate me. It’s just as well, I suppose. You can find another wife who won’t complain.”
Through the window, Pon Man’s flowers sway in the breeze.
How nice it would be to sleep among the blooms, feel the dew gather on my body as I sleep
. He feels the guilt inflate his chest, push on his liver and lungs.
I’m not perfect either
. He puts his arms around her waist.
“I won’t leave. It’ll be all right. It will all be forgotten tomorrow.”
Siu Sang collapses into his arms, cries out to him. “I’m so tired. So tired.”
He leads her to the bedroom, where he tucks her in. She looks up at him one more time. “Do you know how it is? It will kill me.”
He pushes her hair off her forehead. “Yes, I know. We’ll all do better. I promise.”
Pon Man opens the door to their bedroom; all five of his daughters stand in the hallway, waiting for a sign. “Get in here,” he whispers, holding the door open.
Siu Sang does not look at the girls, speak or even grunt as Pon Man orders them into a line at the foot of the bed. He steps back and clears his throat.
Wendy goes first. “Mom, I’m sorry.”
Daisy: “I’m sorry.”
Jackie: “I’m sorry too.”
Penny: “Sorry, Mom.”
And then Sammy, squirming under Pon Man’s tight grip. “I’m sorry too, Mom.”
Pon Man marches them out again and sits, alone, in the living room, staring at the rubber plant in the corner. He can hear his daughters loudly whispering in the kitchen, talking about their mother’s insanity.

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