The Joy Luck Club (27 page)

“Too busy for mother?”

“I have an appointment . . . with my psychiatrist.”

She was quiet for a while. “Why do you not speak up for yourself?” she finally said in her pained voice. “Why can you not talk to your husband?”

“Ma,” I said, feeling drained. “Please. Don't tell me to save my marriage anymore. It's hard enough as it is.”

“I am not telling you to save your marriage,” she protested. “I only say you should speak up.”

When I hung up, the phone rang again. It was my psychiatrist's receptionist. I had missed my appointment that morning, as well as two days ago. Did I want to reschedule? I said I would look at my schedule and call back.

And five minutes later the phone rang again.

“Where've you been?” It was Ted.

I began to shake. “Out,” I said.

“I've been trying to reach you for the last three days. I even called the phone company to check the line.”

And I knew he had done that, not out of any concern for me, but because when he wants something, he gets impatient and irrational about people who make him wait.

“You know it's been two weeks,” he said with obvious irritation.

“Two weeks?”

“You haven't cashed the check or returned the papers. I wanted to be nice about this, Rose. I can get someone to officially serve the papers, you know.”

“You can?”

And then without missing a beat, he proceeded to say what he really wanted, which was more despicable than all the terrible things I had imagined.

He wanted the papers returned, signed. He wanted the house. He wanted the whole thing to be over as soon as possible. Because he wanted to get married again, to someone else.

Before I could stop myself, I gasped. “You mean you
were
doing monkey business with someone else?” I was so humiliated I almost started to cry.

And then for the first time in months, after being in limbo all that time, everything stopped. All the questions: gone. There were no choices. I had an empty feeling—and I felt free, wild. From high inside my head I could hear someone laughing.

“What's so funny?” said Ted angrily.

“Sorry,” I said. “It's just that . . .” and I was trying hard to stifle my giggles, but one of them escaped through my nose with a snort, which made me laugh more. And then Ted's silence made me laugh even harder.

I was still gasping when I tried to begin again in a more even voice: “Listen, Ted, sorry . . . I think the best thing is for you to come over after work.” I didn't know why I said that, but I felt right saying it.

“There's nothing to talk about, Rose.”

“I know,” I said in a voice so calm it surprised even me. “I just want to show you something. And don't worry, you'll get your papers. Believe me.”

I had no plan. I didn't know what I would say to him later. I knew only that I wanted Ted to see me one more time before the divorce.

 

What I ended up showing him was the garden. By the time he arrived, the late-afternoon summer fog had already blown in. I had the divorce papers in the pocket of my windbreaker. Ted was shivering in his sports jacket as he surveyed the damage to the garden.

“What a mess,” I heard him mutter to himself, trying to shake his pant leg loose of a blackberry vine that had meandered onto the walkway. And I knew he was calculating how long it would take to get the place back into order.

“I like it this way,” I said, patting the tops of overgrown carrots, their orange heads pushing through the earth as if about to be born. And then I saw the weeds: Some had sprouted in and out of the cracks in the patio. Others had anchored on the side of the house. And even more had found refuge under loose shingles and were on their way to climbing up to the roof. No way to pull them out once they've buried themselves in the masonry; you'd end up pulling the whole building down.

Ted was picking up plums from the ground and tossing them over the fence into the neighbor's yard. “Where are the papers?” he finally said.

I handed them to him and he stuffed them in the inside pocket of his jacket. He faced me and I saw his eyes, the look I had once mistaken for kindness and protection. “You don't have to move out right away,” he said. “I know you'll want at least a month to find a place.”

“I've already found a place,” I said quickly, because right then I knew where I was going to live. His eyebrows raised in surprise and he smiled—for the briefest moment—until I said, “Here.”

“What's that?” he said sharply. His eyebrows were still up, but now there was no smile.

“I said I'm staying here,” I announced again.

“Who says?” He folded his arms across his chest, squinted his eyes, examining my face as if he knew it would crack at any moment. That expression of his used to terrify me into stammers.

Now I felt nothing, no fear, no anger. “I say I'm staying, and my lawyer will too, once we serve you the papers,” I said.

Ted pulled out the divorce papers and stared at them. His x's were still there, the blanks were still blank. “What do you think you're doing? Exactly what?” he said.

And the answer, the one that was important above everything else, ran through my body and fell from my lips: “You can't just pull me out of your life and throw me away.”

I saw what I wanted: his eyes, confused, then scared. He was
hulihudu.
The power of my words was that strong.

 

That night I dreamt I was wandering through the garden. The trees and bushes were covered with mist. And then I spotted Old Mr. Chou and my mother off in the distance, their busy movements swirling the fog around them. They were bending over one of the planter boxes.

“There she is!” cried my mother. Old Mr. Chou smiled at me and waved. I walked up to my mother and saw that she was hovering over something, as if she were tending a baby.

“See,” she said, beaming. “I have just planted them this morning, some for you, some for me.”

And below the
heimongmong,
all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.

Five months ago, after a crab dinner celebrating Chinese New Year, my mother gave me my “life's importance,” a jade pendant on a gold chain. The pendant was not a piece of jewelry I would have chosen for myself. It was almost the size of my little finger, a mottled green and white color, intricately carved. To me, the whole effect looked wrong: too large, too green, too garishly ornate. I stuffed the necklace in my lacquer box and forgot about it.

But these days, I think about my life's importance. I wonder what it means, because my mother died three months ago, six days before my thirty-sixth birthday. And she's the only person I could have asked, to tell me about life's importance, to help me understand my grief.

I now wear that pendant every day. I think the carvings mean something, because shapes and details, which I never seem to notice until after they're pointed out to me, always mean something to Chinese people. I know I could ask Auntie Lindo, Auntie An-mei, or other Chinese friends, but I also know they would tell me a meaning that is different from what my mother intended. What if they tell me this curving line branching into three oval shapes is a pomegranate and that my mother was wishing me fertility and posterity? What if my mother really meant the carvings were a branch of pears to give me purity and honesty? Or ten-thousand-year droplets from the magic mountain, giving me my life's direction and a thousand years of fame and immortality?

And because I think about this all the time, I always notice other people wearing these same jade pendants—not the flat rectangular medallions or the round white ones with holes in the middle but ones like mine, a two-inch oblong of bright apple green. It's as though we were all sworn to the same secret covenant, so secret we don't even know what we belong to. Last weekend, for example, I saw a bartender wearing one. As I fingered mine, I asked him, “Where'd you get yours?”

“My mother gave it to me,” he said.

I asked him why, which is a nosy question that only one Chinese person can ask another; in a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family.

“She gave it to me after I got divorced. I guess my mother's telling me I'm still worth something.”

And I knew by the wonder in his voice that he had no idea what the pendant really meant.

 

At last year's Chinese New Year dinner, my mother had cooked eleven crabs, one crab for each person, plus an extra. She and I had bought them on Stockton Street in Chinatown. We had walked down the steep hill from my parents' flat, which was actually the first floor of a six-unit building they owned on Leavenworth near California. Their place was only six blocks from where I worked as a copywriter for a small ad agency, so two or three times a week I would drop by after work. My mother always had enough food to insist that I stay for dinner.

That year, Chinese New Year fell on a Thursday, so I got off work early to help my mother shop. My mother was seventy-one, but she still walked briskly along, her small body straight and purposeful, carrying a colorful flowery plastic bag. I dragged the metal shopping cart behind.

Every time I went with her to Chinatown, she pointed out other Chinese women her age. “Hong Kong ladies,” she said, eyeing two finely dressed women in long, dark mink coats and perfect black hairdos. “Cantonese, village people,” she whispered as we passed women in knitted caps, bent over in layers of padded tops and men's vests. And my mother—wearing lightblue polyester pants, a red sweater, and a child's green down jacket—she didn't look like anybody else. She had come here in 1949, at the end of a long journey that started in Kweilin in 1944; she had gone north to Chungking, where she met my father, and then they went southeast to Shanghai and fled farther south to Hong Kong, where the boat departed for San Francisco. My mother came from many different directions.

And now she was huffing complaints in rhythm to her walk downhill. “Even you don't want them, you stuck,” she said. She was fuming again about the tenants who lived on the second floor. Two years ago, she had tried to evict them on the pretext that relatives from China were coming to live there. But the couple saw through her ruse to get around rent control. They said they wouldn't budge until she produced the relatives. And after that I had to listen to her recount every new injustice this couple inflicted on her.

My mother said the gray-haired man put too many bags in the garbage cans: “Cost me extra.”

And the woman, a very elegant artist type with blond hair, had supposedly painted the apartment in terrible red and green colors. “Awful,” moaned my mother. “And they take bath, two three times every day. Running the water, running, running, running, never stop!”

“Last week,” she said, growing angrier at each step, “the
waigoren
accuse me.” She referred to all Caucasians as
waigoren,
foreigners. “They say I put poison in a fish, kill that cat.”

“What cat?” I asked, even though I knew exactly which one she was talking about. I had seen that cat many times. It was a big one-eared tom with gray stripes who had learned to jump on the outside sill of my mother's kitchen window. My mother would stand on her tiptoes and bang the kitchen window to scare the cat away. And the cat would stand his ground, hissing back in response to her shouts.

“That cat always raising his tail to put a stink on my door,” complained my mother.

I once saw her chase him from her stairwell with a pot of boiling water. I was tempted to ask if she really had put poison in a fish, but I had learned never to take sides against my mother.

“So what happened to that cat?” I asked.

“That cat gone! Disappear!” She threw her hands in the air and smiled, looking pleased for a moment before the scowl came back. “And that man, he raise his hand like this, show me his ugly fist and call me worst Fukien landlady. I not from Fukien. Hunh! He know nothing!” she said, satisfied she had put him in his place.

On Stockton Street, we wandered from one fish store to another, looking for the liveliest crabs.

“Don't get a dead one,” warned my mother in Chinese. “Even a beggar won't eat a dead one.”

I poked the crabs with a pencil to see how feisty they were. If a crab grabbed on, I lifted it out and into a plastic sack. I lifted one crab this way, only to find one of its legs had been clamped onto by another crab. In the brief tug-of-war, my crab lost a limb.

“Put it back,” whispered my mother. “A missing leg is a bad sign on Chinese New Year.”

But a man in a white smock came up to us. He started talking loudly to my mother in Cantonese, and my mother, who spoke Cantonese so poorly it sounded just like her Mandarin, was talking loudly back, pointing to the crab and its missing leg. And after more sharp words, that crab and its leg were put into our sack.

“Doesn't matter,” said my mother. “This number eleven, extra one.”

Back home, my mother unwrapped the crabs from their newspaper liners and then dumped them into a sinkful of cold water. She brought out her old wooden board and cleaver, then chopped the ginger and scallions, and poured soy sauce and sesame oil into a shallow dish. The kitchen smelled of wet newspapers and Chinese fragrances.

Then, one by one, she grabbed the crabs by their back, hoisted them out of the sink and shook them dry and awake. The crabs flexed their legs in midair between sink and stove. She stacked the crabs in a multileveled steamer that sat over two burners on the stove, put a lid on top, and lit the burners. I couldn't bear to watch so I went into the dining room.