The Chinese Groove, page 19
“He’s not a missing person. He has a valid driver’s license. His lawyer told him he’s under no legal obligation to stay put. We have to wait until we hear from him,” Ted said.
“But where did he go?” Aviva said. “Why not tell us?” She looked at me. I looked at Ted. He shifted from foot to foot.
“I was hard on him,” Ted said uncomfortably. “He may have felt . . . unwanted.”
“Well, I think it’s perfectly childish of Henry to run off like this,” Aviva said.
“He didn’t do it for you,” I said. “He did it for himself.”
They looked appalled and then abashed. Ted rubbed a hand across his high forehead. The living room was dim in the evening light. I turned on a lamp and wished I hadn’t, for it made us more aware of Henry out there in the dark.
“Do you know where he went?” Aviva asked.
I shook my head. “He didn’t tell me a thing.”
Ted began pacing. “Where could he be? And for how long? A couple of days? A week?”
“His note sounds like he expects to be gone for a while,” Aviva said.
“Anyone know where his address book is?” Ted asked, looking around helplessly. “Maybe he went to see one of his old fishing buddies. I think there’s one in Irvine and one in San Diego. They moved after retirement to be close to their kids.”
“He has no friends left. He’s outlived them all,” Aviva said.
I fetched the address book, which was frayed and stained and full of crossings-out. Ted paged through it. “My mom kept up with a lot of people. Here’s Kate’s old address in Orange County. I remember that house. There were avocado trees in the backyard. Her dad grew winter melons.”
“That’s where he went,” I said.
Ted shook his head. “Her parents are passed. No one in the family lives there anymore.”
“No,” I said. “Not the house. He went to find Kate!”
Ted gaped. “Jesus, I bet he did.”
“At the kibbutz?” Aviva said. “That’s nuts.”
“It’s not a kibbutz,” Ted and I said in unison. We cracked up, more in relief than in mirth.
“It isn’t funny,” Aviva said. “I’m worried sick. He’s probably dead right now in a ditch.”
“I’m calling Kate,” Ted said.
She picked up on the first ring. “I was just about to call you,” she said, speakerphone amplifying her distress. Without any warning, Henry had rung the cowbell at Beit Hayeladim. His car had broken down a mile from the place, and he’d hitched a ride to the gate. At that very moment, he was eating soup in the dining room and debating with several residents the origins of the kibbutz movement. The discussion was just getting started.
“You better come get him,” Kate told Ted, “before he settles in for good.”
AVIVA VOLUNTEERED TO DRIVE south with Ted, saying they could use the time to talk about Ted and his father and how to get Henry home.
But Ted was ready for her, the brooder shooing away the intruder. He reminded her that she’d organized a special library program, which she was supposed to lead. “The kids will be disappointed if you’re not there.”
“How will you bring back Henry’s car? You can’t drive two cars at once. He shouldn’t drive himself.”
I spotted my chance and jumped, monkey-agile, to claim the shotgun seat. “I can drive Henry’s car back,” I volunteered. I didn’t tell Henry to scarper, but now that he had, his timing was perfect. I’d get to Southern California and visit Lisbet and Yu.
Ted agreed, and he called Kate to tell her that he and I would drive down in the morning. I hurried to write to Lisbet and Yu, saying I was coming to see them, with Ted as my Uber driver.
YU REPLIED FIRST. The baby had just been born! Deng will be here soon. He’s making the arrangements. Please come as soon as you can. I want you to meet my beautiful daughter. Lisbet’s message was equally happy. In a couple of days, she and her mother would be back in Malibu, and she couldn’t wait to see me. There were things she wanted to say.
The next morning, Aviva was awhirl, loading the crapmobile with an ice chest full of sandwiches and an armload of presents for Leo.
“Tell him I miss him,” she said. “I’ll come see him as soon as this mess is over. No, don’t say that. Don’t call it a mess, though it is. First Huntington, now Henry. And it all falls on Ted. What’s that? Is that for Leo?”
I was bringing with us The Encyclopedia of Animals, Leo’s favorite book. Under “A,” for “American,” the buffalo stood. O give me a home. I’d marked the page for Leo.
“How sweet,” Aviva said. “Let’s send him a picture of Crouder. Have you got one?”
Why would I need a picture when I had the real live dog?
“Bring him over then. In the yard, not the house. I’ll take a picture and print it. He can hang it on his wall.”
Wished I could. Crouder was sleeping.
“For Pete’s sake,” Aviva said. “Get him up! This is for Leo!”
I didn’t know who this Pete was, but I didn’t have Crouder. I went back to the saltbox and ate a plate of spareribs and a bowl of juicy grapes. When Ted texted that he was ready to go, I returned to the saltbox stretch and reported, “Crouder’s gone out.”
“Gone out? Where would he go?”
“He’s probably next door. He likes to go visiting in the neighborhood,” I said.
“But we’re next door,” Aviva said.
“Ready? Let’s go.” Ted kissed Aviva. “We won’t be long. Two, three days at the most. I’ll call you from the motel in Palmdale.”
“But what about the dog?” Aviva called as we pulled out of the driveway.
I shouted back, “He won’t be any trouble!” We hit the road, The Ted and Shelley Show.
MY EARLIER TRIP TO L.A. had been on the bus at night. Now I had a view of California rolling by. We crossed the Bay Bridge—full of Chinese steel, Ted remarked; a countryman had to blush—and saw the old bridge running right beside. It was being taken down piece by piece after an earthquake damaged it years ago. Its long deck was suspended over the water, ending abruptly in midair. I thought of our lao jia coming apart in pieces, first with Leo’s departure and now with Henry’s. Could we put back together the old family home?
“There are a hundred thousand more people living in San Francisco now than there were ten years ago,” Ted said. “No wonder there’s so much traffic.”
“Is that a lot, a hundred thousand?” Yunnan Province, feathered nest where little Gejiu bird perched, had forty-seven million.
Ted laughed. “It is for us. Cities need new blood. Though it’s hard to keep up with the changes.”
“Would you really sell the house?”
“Aviva and I almost sold it, years ago, after Eli was killed. She wanted to move back to Ohio. Her brother lives there, and she wanted to be near her nieces. Her brother found us a house, way more affordable than here, but I couldn’t bring myself to go.”
“Are you still angry with Henry?”
Ted sighed. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t leave him there with Kate.”
A full hour had passed since I’d eaten breakfast, and the ice chest was calling. I reached back and rooted among its riches, blessings on Auntie Aviva. Ted sipped at his coffee. Driving had unlocked in him a maybe sort of mood.
“Maybe we should’ve gone to Ohio. Maybe that would’ve made things easier. After.”
“Father and I moved after Mother died. It didn’t help. We still missed her. When she was alive, Father used to tell terrific stories, but when she died, he stopped. A year went by and then another. I kept waiting for him to start again. But he never told another story.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“Seven.”
“Old enough to remember her. You can hold on to that.”
I told him how Father, Mother, and I would walk in the park with Father singing to Mother, and how, at the close of the day, he would make up a story for her about the people we’d seen strolling. “The stories were for Mother. He liked to make her laugh.”
“I’m sorry,” Ted said. “If there’d been a way for him to make things better for you, he would’ve tried.”
“Same as Henry,” I suggested. We stared out at the road.
BRAVELY THE CRAPMOBILE CLIMBED the Altamont Pass. The sky was bright blue, and I cheered as we ascended. Along the ridge, white wind turbines hailed us in friendly greeting.
“We’ve still got to get over the Grapevine,” Ted warned, but he looked pleased as we crested. We drove down into the Central Valley and the landscape opened. Power lines outside the window rose and fell like an undulating ridge of distant mountains. Cars and trucks barreled beside us, everyone traveling way over the speed limit because that was the rule of the road, S.F. to L.A., northern to southern, the I-5 corridor, not for the faint-hearted, Ted declared. He seemed lighter, looser. His problems hadn’t disappeared, but the rush of the highway relaxed him the way that bike-riding did. He’d brought a pile of old CDs and, to my amazement, he belted along with Bruce, Boz, and the Beach Boys, musical artists of the ancien régime.
The rest of our drive passed quickly. I told Ted about the app that Eddie, Paloma, and I were building, and he said that it had as good a chance as any other. He asked me about Lisbet—how we had met and whether Father minded that she wasn’t Chinese; in theory, no, though I’d never taken her to meet him. I told him how I’d promised her three splendid poems.
“Like in a fairy tale,” he said. “Aviva says that in fairy tales and legends, three is a powerful number.”
“Three, not eight?”
“Like the hero has three tasks to perform to win the princess, or the boy traveling through the forest meets three helpful strangers.”
I’d met helpful strangers, like Cook, Ron, and Mr. Lee, and I’d heard Aviva talk about princesses though hers were always Jewish.
“I wrote a second poem for Lisbet last night.” I touched my pocket to make sure it was there. Well past midnight, I’d sat at Diana’s desk staring at Lisbet’s picture, but it wasn’t until I’d gone to bed and relived as best I could by myself our afternoon at Zuma Beach that results had finally come.
“That sounds serious,” Ted smiled.
“She likes them short and sweet.”
“Let’s hear it then,” he said.
In the middle of the night
I lay awake and addressed the sun.
Please, come back and warm me
Like a mango sweetens my mouth.
“I take it you’ve slept with this girl,” Ted said.
Was that what the poem said? “Should I change it?” I asked.
“She’s going to love it,” he assured me.
Later, he told me his own story. From the moment he’d met her, he’d felt the same way about Kate. They’d both gone to a meeting at the college newspaper’s office the first week of freshman year at U.C. Santa Cruz. She was standing off to the side, and he noticed how quiet she was, although it wasn’t shyness. She raised a hand to ask a question and her voice was as clear as a bell. When she looked at him and smiled, he felt charged with hope. He was a reticent guy, he said, who didn’t like to be prodded. Kate’s serenity made him want to act. It was always that way with Kate. She found the best in you. You knew you could trust her with who you really were.
They were friends for several months, then boyfriend and girlfriend. He spent holidays at her home in Orange County; she spent weekends with him at Henry and Diana’s. When his mom asked where he and Kate planned to live over the summer, he realized he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. They found summer work in Sacramento. He got a city beat job as a cub reporter; she was hired by a capitol news service headed up by a veteran woman journalist whom the legislators feared and courted.
By the time they were moving into their sublet in downtown Sacramento, they’d lost their way as a couple. “We were miserable, and we didn’t know why. Kate’s boss set her straight. In a manner of speaking.” She drew Kate into a love affair of three short weeks, then discarded her. It was long enough for Kate to know she didn’t belong with Ted. It took them a year to sort through it. “It made us the best of friends, the suffering. Which, at that age, is monumental.”
“She told me what Henry did. How he went to see her father.”
“Yeah. He surprised me. I knew my mother would understand but not my father.”
I thought of my father, source of no surprise. His days were filled with the monotony of labor, his nights with weeping and drinking. He was never going to change. Mother’s loud gasp had been our last surprise.
“I miss Henry,” I blurted. “I want him to come home.”
“I told Kate to expect us tomorrow. He better not make me beg.”
PALMDALE WAS DRY AND hot. I felt the scorch of the blacktop through the soles of my trainers in the motel parking lot. We went for a burger and a beer at a sports bar in a nearby mall. Ted wolfed his down, famished. He was spent from the drive and wrapped in his own thoughts. The fleeting fun of our journey had vanished. I texted Lisbet, but she didn’t answer. We drove back to the motel, and Ted went to the room to call Aviva. I wasn’t tired yet, so I took a last warm soda out of the ice chest and sat in a plastic chair on the deck of the motel swimming pool, which was hardly bigger than a barrel. I thought of Leo asleep in his new bed at Beit Hayeladim and Henry on the lam and Lisbet flying to meet me. In a few short hours, I’d visit Leo and Henry and then, at last, Lisbet.
Ted came outside. His bleak expression told me that the hopeful thoughts to which I’d been clinging were about to be uprooted. “I talked to Kate. Henry refuses to see me.”
“He has to! You’ve come all this way.”
“Kate said she’d try to persuade him. I’m to call her in an hour.”
Beyond the city limits, the mountains loomed. The moon looked huge and red. We left the pool and walked away from the motel lights so we could view the sky while we waited. Ted said we were looking at a total lunar eclipse on the night of a supermoon. I felt that we, like the moon, were passing within Earth’s shadow. I hadn’t come to Peach Blossom Land for this. I had meant to leave sadness behind.
“If you could talk to your father right now, what would you say to him?” Ted asked.
I had no answer. It was my turn to be silent. Ted excused himself to make the call. He came back and quietly said, “Henry won’t see me. He’ll only talk to you.”
The sky wheeled. The fat moon darkened.
22.
Runaway
BEIT HAYELADIM WAS THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES FROM Palmdale in a town called Agua Dulce in northern Los Angeles County. Ted and I made our plan. I would collect Henry, bring him to Palmdale, and go to Lisbet in the afternoon. Tomorrow, Ted and I would pick up Henry’s car at the repair shop, and I would visit Yu as promised. I hoped to surprise Yu by bringing Lisbet with me. The day after that, Ted and I would caravan back to San Francisco, me driving Henry in his car. I asked Ted to come along to Beit Hayeladim; maybe Henry would change his mind and want to see him. Drop me at the mall, Ted said. I know when I’m not wanted.
Outside, it was already getting hot. I rolled down the car window and let the dry wind blow as I dipped and climbed through sharply rising hills left parched and brown by summer. The spare land cheered me—there wasn’t a fishing pond in sight. Henry would be glad to come home.
I called Lisbet and left her another message. An older, narrower road, the Sierra Highway, took me through canyon country. I was only an hour from Malibu and its long blue wash of sea, and as I drove, I daydreamed of finding some nice little hamlet where Lisbet and I could settle, not with her mother or my ye ye or uncle or auntie but all by ourselves.
The day grew hotter. Ranches appeared, their golden hillsides stamped with the silhouettes of grazing horses. The paved road ended, and I continued on a packed-dirt track according to Kate’s instructions. I pulled up to a wooden ranch gate and got out to ring the cowbell. Kate appeared and opened the gate. She waved me down a driveway to a parking area, where I saw several cars and a pickup truck beside a long, low building. We greeted each other. Orit was away for the day, Kate said, and Leo was in school; I could visit with him later. We should look for Henry first.
We found him staking plants in the garden. He stood and shook my hand in formal greeting, and I felt like I was meeting him for the first time. Kate left us to talk in private.
He walked me back to the long building, which was the dining hall, and we settled into wicker chairs on the porch.
“How are you?” Henry said. His eyes were bright with mischief. His face was browner than before, and he wore a straw hat like Farmer John in Leo’s picture book. I recognized the khakis, but the denim shirt was new.
“You forgot your ginger chews.” I handed him a bag.
“Don’t need them anymore.” He patted his stomach. “Kosher cooking. It’s done wonders for my digestion.”
Surely my cooking was better.
“You’ve stressed everyone out,” I said.
He looked regretful. “I needed to get away. It’s been a long time since I took a vacation. It’s beautiful country here.”
“Ted isn’t angry anymore,” I said. “You can come home and then things will return to normal.”
He looked thoughtful and a little sad. “Ted gave me a lot to think about when he said he was leaving. Maybe it is time for a change. We can’t find common ground. We used to do things together when Diana and Eli were with us. They were the bridge between us. Their deaths changed all that.” He peered at me. “It’s no use beating the family drum. Sometimes families break apart. You know it as well as I do.”
It pained me to think he was right. “My exams are coming up. How will I pass if you’re not home to coach me?”
He stretched out his legs. A fellow walking by called Henry’s name with a smile, and Henry waved back. “You have the basics. All you have to do is practice. You don’t need me for that.”
He sounded so calm that I felt like I was talking to a stranger. “What should I tell Ted?” I asked.
