The Queen of Tears (29 page)

“Yes.”

“The truck matches him.”

“Yes, it’s a big truck. Come, we will take you back to town.”

She’d been on the bus for over an hour to come to Waianae and have an unpleasant half-an-hour conversation with her daughter. The thought angered her. “No, I will catch the bus.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“OK.”

The fact that her daughter didn’t argue more with her concerning a ride back to Honolulu angered her more. She quickly waved to Won Ju and began walking to the bus stop. She would have to fix this. Everyone else was just too lazy to do it. She took her bus schedule out of her purse and looked at how she was going to get from Waianae to Kailua. It looked as if she was going to have to go all the way back to Honolulu and transfer there. She was looking at about three hours of travel. The combination of the sun beating down on her and her thoughts of travel reminded her of the long walk she’d taken when she was fourteen. There was hope then. What was there now? She did not know. There was the prospect of death. There were accounts to be closed. Her dream was much different now than it had been then. As a child, she dreamed of imaginary things, a palace, a prince, and a paradise. But now, knowing that the world was not ideal, but very real, she simply dreamed of eternal sleep with a clear conscience. She dreamed of dying, knowing that her family was OK. She did not think of it as a very ambitious dream, which was why she was so puzzled at the fact that it was so difficult to achieve. She sat down at the brown-painted, shoddy gazebo bus stop next to a mother trying to control her three screaming children. She tried to enjoy the shade. Cars whizzed past in the two lanes, traveling in opposite directions. The speed of the cars scared her. All one had to do was turn a steering wheel forty-five degrees, and disaster. Life was so precarious. A simple gesture, a split-second decision could end it all. The slight jerk of a wheel, and it could be over. A silver knife, no matter how sharp, could not protect one from that. How did she manage to survive for so long?

An old Nissan sedan pulled up to the bus stop. It was Darian. “C’mon, Mother, let’s go to Kailua. I’ll take you.”

Soong raised her voice over the yelling children playing tag, running in circles around the bus stop. “I’ll catch the bus.”

Darian shook her head. “Stop trying to be a martyr, Mother, and get in this car.”

“I need to call Chung Yun.”

“I have a cellular phone. We can call him.”

Soong stood up and entered the car. As Darian pulled away and dialed the number of the restaurant, Soong sat quietly thinking about what her daughter had just said. Was she trying to be a martyr? Darian sped toward the freeway. “Guess what, Mother, I’m happy.”

Soong smiled for the sake of her daughter. It will not last, she thought. Everything human is temporary.

-2-

Donny didn’t see any light. There was no moment of redemption for him, no enlightenment; he didn’t see God, there was no epiphany. He didn’t look at his life, constructively reflect upon the error of his ways, or decide to put his foot down and make a change for the better. He didn’t accidentally stumble upon an eight-fold path, nor did he run into a twelve-step program. He didn’t let bygones be bygones. He wasn’t trying to right wrongs. He wasn’t turning the other cheek. He wasn’t trying to start over again. He wasn’t settling old debts, nor was he preparing for Judgment Day, whether that entailed a possibility of eternity in hell, returning to earth as a cockroach or the fungus that causes ringworm, or simply decomposing six feet under. Donny was simply doing what he knew hundreds of millions of other people did every day. He was working. Even though his sisters looked at him as if he were turning staffs into snakes, he was just working. It was just work. He didn’t seem to have anything better to do.

He was forty years old, single, and childless. He’d received the divorce papers a week before in the mail. He didn’t feel horrible about it, but he sensed an acute melancholy, a sort of emptiness that befuddled him because he didn’t really feel like he’d lost anything. It was a curious pain, a nagging muscle ache, like one that originates in the state of slumber. He’d slept wrong, but work seemed to help. Work for him was like stretching a sore muscle.

There were a couple of things that he did realize, though. When he’d found out what really happened to his sister years ago in Las Vegas from Kenny, it had made him sad. He didn’t want to talk about it with her or his mother, which surprised him. He also found it funny that, after the years of halfheartedly searching for the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, the idea of becoming wealthy didn’t even really appeal to him anymore. So Donny didn’t see any light; instead it seemed to him that he gave up. He submitted, like he supposed most people did when they reached adulthood. He laughed at this. He just became legal at forty. But this resignation, this dying of vague dreams wasn’t a sad thing to him. It comforted him. He didn’t feel like he had to chase anymore, even if his twenty-year chase had been done in a low-impact jog, or sometimes in a wheelchair pushed by his mother, where what he was chasing was never in sight.

So when his mother had called him that afternoon, from Waianae of all places, saying that she and Darian were going to cover the evening shift, and that she had something important to tell him, he wasn’t anxious or irritated. In fact, when Soong and Darian walked through the door while he was re-stocking napkins and straws behind the counter, he was surprised to see them. He’d momentarily forgotten that they were even coming.

Soong slouched into one of the chairs and hunched over the table. It was the first time Donny remembered seeing his mother hunched over. It looked especially awkward because she wasn’t tall enough to lean completely over the table. It was like a seventy-degree lean. Darian walked behind the counter and whispered to Donny that their mother wanted to talk to him. The clicking of her black platform shoes faded as she walked to the kitchen. Donny shrugged and went to sit across from his mother. He wanted to make it quick, just in case a customer came in soon.

“Mother.”

Soong sighed. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“Quickly would be good. A customer could come in any minute.”

Soong rubbed her eyes. “Crystal is pregnant.”

“And?” The fact that he was neither shocked nor really interested surprised him.

Soong sat up. “You don’t care?”

“I don’t think I do.” Not caring felt liberating, but he supposed he should act like he cared a little for his mother’s sake, so he added, “How do you know this, anyway?”

“Brandon.”

Donny smiled. “Wow.” Then he began to laugh loudly. He found it very funny. Did ludicrous things like this happen outside of the imagination? Donny supposed that anything was possible.

Soong stood up and yelled. From her training as a stage actress, her voice could reach ear-piercing volumes. “This is not funny! This is not funny!”

Donny began laughing even harder. It developed into an uncontrollable laughter, and tears soon followed. Every time he tried to respond, he was cut off by a burst of howling laughter. “Your sister is crushed!”

He stopped, wiped his eyes, and frowned. “Yes, this must be hard on her.”

Soong sat back down. Her weariness disappeared. She sat straight up. “Do you suppose she will keep the baby? Won Ju said that Brandon thinks she will.”

“Yes, she will probably keep it. Crystal didn’t think she could have children.”

Soong sighed. “Do you know where I can find her?”

“What are you planning to do? What are you going to do, try to buy the baby from her or something? What could you possibly do? Let it go, Mother. Just let go. It’s Crystal’s baby.”

“It’s family. It’s my great-grandson.”

“The embryo is family? What could you possibly want with this child? You could just forget about it.” Donny was listening to himself, and for the first time, he felt like the sane one in the family.

A man walked in with two children. The children were at that touch-everything, motor-mouth age, where it seemed like they had to have the metabolism of hummingbirds to keep up that sort of energy.

Darian immediately emerged from the back. She smiled as she took the family’s order. As Donny turned back to his mother, it just occurred to him that she hadn’t stopped talking since the threesome walked in. He understood that. When you speak a foreign language, a conversation is private by default. “I’m sorry, Mother, what were you saying?”

“You never listen.”

“Customers just walked in.” He paused to check his voice, resisting the urge to yell. “So why can’t you just let it go?”

“I don’t think Brandon can.”

“He’s a child. What, is he going to raise this child? Is he going to marry Crystal? Drop out of school to support his new family? Crystal wouldn’t even marry him.”

Soong bit her lip. “She married you.”

“Yes, she did. And look how that turned out. You are insane. Look at yourself. Crisis management. You are always trying to solve problems instead of trying to prevent them. And you are always trying to solve problems, not where they lay, but just everything around them. You’re…you’re…like a bad doctor or something. The heart is bad, so you check for cancers in the arms, legs, and head. And you amputate anything suspect.”

“I try!”

The two children in the restaurant immediately became quiet. They stared at Soong. Donny shook his head. “Just because you blame me, you hate me, I try,” Soong said.

“This is the first time we’re having a conversation about this.”

“I try.”

“Why is it the first time? What are you going to do? Try to find Crystal, try to fix this? Is it not Brandon that’s broken, not Crystal? What about Won Ju?”

“Won Ju needs help. Will you not help your sister?”

The customers hurried outside with their food. “Why didn’t either of you tell me about what happened in Las Vegas?”

Soong seemed unsurprised by the question. She shrugged. “How could you not know? A mugging. You must be stupid. You saw her at the hospital.”

“I was a teenager, of course I was stupid. And nobody talked to me.”

“You were a child.”

“Yes, I was. So was Won Ju. And you were a mother who left her children. And I am not saying this now because I want to hurt you. But Brandon is a child, too. So I guess you will not talk to him either.”

“Are you going to tell me where she is?”

Donny stood up. “She’s working at the club again.”

He walked to the kitchen to grab a cigarette. He also felt the sudden need to chop cabbage.

Darian was smiling and handed Donny a cigarette. He lit it, sat down on a stool, and leaned against the enormous stainless-steel refrigerator. The coolness of the door felt good. “Aren’t we a scandalous family,” Darian said in English.

His younger sister had been in an unbearably perpetual good mood ever since she’d started up with Kaipo. They were such a strange couple to Donny, more so physically than anything else. It looked disturbingly like pedophilia when they went off together. “When are you going back to California?” Donny asked as he took a long drag from his cigarette.

“Don’t take this out on me. Besides, I think I’ll stay here, get married, have a couple of kids. I’ll get nuclear.”

“Won’t that be ‘problematic’ with Kaipo?”

“See, you’re stereotyping him. Racist. Won Ju sees the light. He’s been great to her and Brandon, the little spoiled shit. Jeez, do you see how Won Ju, Kenny, and Mom give him everything, and he acts all sullen and unhappy? You ever notice that before?”

Spoiled. She was one to talk. “Maybe certain stereotypes have some validity to them, like the ex-con one. Don’t most of them go back to jail?”

“He’s a changed man.”

“Are you taking credit?”

“I sure am. He’s even reading
Moby Dick
now.”

Donny put out his cigarette and began packing his things. Wallet, house keys and car keys to his just-purchased, used nineteen-eighty-three Honda Civic, cigarettes, lighter, accounting book for the restaurant. The BMW days were over for him. He looked once more at Darian. Soong walked to the back. They looked amazingly alike. Donny walked away in wonderment that he was the only sane one in the family. He felt prophetic. Bad things were going to happen, and no one could see it but him. Donny saw no light, instead he saw that darkness was coming.

-3-

In China, they mutilated feet. In the West, they made corsets. In Africa, they made lip plates and neck rings. In the Middle East, they covered it all in black robes in hundred-degree heat. And in America, they made saline and razor blades. All to accentuate the feminine features that men found attractive. Feet, waist, lips, neck, breasts, hair, or the lack thereof, everything. Most of it also seemed to make women immobile. These thoughts immediately popped into Soong’s mind at her arrival to Club Mirage.

The dancers did not dance. Most simply changed imaginary sexual positions. The ones with the saline-charged chests seemed to be drawing the most attention. The others leaned on fluorescent-lit plexiglass poles filled with water bubbles. They either smoked cigarettes or tried to get the attention of men sitting in booths, men who stared at their beer-bottle labels. All were in various stages of undress. About a third of them were completely naked, and this embarrassed Soong. She didn’t know who she was embarrassed for, the young girls or herself. Loud rock-and-roll music blared. One of the girls leaning against one of the poles put out her cigarette, and halfheartedly moved her feet to the percussions.

It occurred to Soong that perhaps every woman should come to a place like this before they get married. The men were of all sorts; old, young, of all ethnicities. The ones at the stages ogled round breasts and shaved crotches. Some of them looked like hunched-over stamp collectors. Others slapped each other on the back, musing about what a good time they were having. There were a few who were trying to look into a naked girl’s eyes, Soong supposed to try to show them they had decency and consideration, which, of course, they didn’t. She again focused on the bubble-filled poles. The owners probably spent a huge amount of money installing them, probably because they thought it was classy. Soong demanded that someone had to be embarrassed. Whether a naked girl, a male pervert, or proprietor, someone should shout, “I can’t believe this place exists, and I no longer want to be a part of it!” She was tempted to yell it herself.