The Chinese Groove, page 21
“Does she look yellow to you?” he said. Awkward! A bad American joke. “No, really,” he said. “Ask Yu for me. Does her coloring look different now compared to when she was born? How about her eyes. Do the whites of her eyes look yellow?”
I told her what he was asking. Yu, alarmed, looked anxiously over her baby. She told me that her eyes did look a little yellow, and maybe her stomach too.
“May I touch her?” Ted asked, and again, Yu nodded. He pressed gently on the baby’s forehead.
“That doesn’t look right!” Yu cried. “Her skin looks very yellow!” Ted told her not to worry. He put the baby’s shirt back on, bundled her snugly into her blanket, and laid her in Yu’s arms.
“She’ll be okay,” Ted reassured her. “Has she seen a doctor?”
“There was a lady here; she said she was a doctor,” Yu said.
“What day was that?”
Yu couldn’t remember. “Maybe the first day? Maybe the second. They gave me some medicine that made me forget.”
“She might have jaundice,” Ted said. “That can show up a couple of days after a baby is born. We need to get her to a doctor.” We didn’t know jaundice; Ted had to explain. The old bitch reappeared and insisted that there had been regular doctor visits. All the mothers were healthy; all the babies had been examined, I translated for Ted.
“What doctor? When? Can we call the doctor now? Have you got a name for this doctor, a number?”
“Get out of here!” the woman yelled. She screeched at Yu, “Tell them to leave! They’re making trouble. He’s upsetting the mothers. We’re going to get complaints!”
“No translation necessary,” Ted said drily. He took Yu to a quiet corner. “Would you like to come with us? We’ll go find a doctor.”
Eyes wide, Yu gripped his arm and nodded.
“Get your things. You’re not coming back to this place.”
This time, it was Ted who blocked the old bitches. Yu put the baby into my arms and ran for her suitcase. I stood like a statue, afraid I was holding her wrong.
“Relax, breathe. She won’t break,” Ted said.
Ten minutes later, we were on our way to the hospital, Yu murmuring to her baby in the back seat of the car. Ted was triumphant.
“You’re not going back there,” he repeated. “God, that place was awful. Call Aviva,” he said to me.
“Shelley!” Aviva answered the phone. “What have you done with Crouder?”
I handed the phone to Ted.
“Eli had jaundice when he was born, right? Can you tell me everything you remember?”
“Will you hold her for a while?” Yu asked me. “I’m very, very tired.”
I crawled into the back seat. Yu fell asleep in an instant. The baby looked up at me with the yellow eyes of a cat. Next to a real live baby, Crouder was a walk in the park.
24.
Waking Up
TED WAS THE HERO OF THE HOUR. HE TOOK US straightaway to USC Medical Center. The doctors there assured Yu that the baby would be fine after they treated her for jaundice. Yu thanked Ted over and over, and Ted, embarrassed, said that anyone would have done the same. To me, he muttered, “I’ve never done anything like that before. I don’t know who that was.”
Yu stayed overnight at the hospital with the baby while I tried to reach Deng. He hadn’t replied to Yu’s messages or mine. Perhaps he was en route to L.A., but after Henry’s folly and Lisbet’s flight, my worry for Yu was climbing. When I finally got a message from him, it was as bad as I feared. He wasn’t coming for Yu or the baby. Yu’s father had made trouble for him all over town by accusing Deng of corrupting Yu and ruining the family name. Not only that, he demanded of Deng’s important contacts that they stop doing business with Deng, and he complained directly to Deng’s mother and the aunties, who threatened to cut Deng off if what Yu’s father said was true. Yu is lying, Deng wrote. I bet you a thousand yuan that I’m not the father. I saw her with that asswipe Tao more than once. Let some rich American have her. She’s not my problem.
Deng didn’t have the guts to tell Yu himself. He left that job to me.
Yu wept bitterly. Ted and I took turns toting the baby. We brought the two of them to Palmdale, the baby, still froggy but looking more pinkish than yellow, riding in her own swanky chair purchased by Ted. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot of the faded green motel and felt the heat rising from the scorching tops of the cars, Ted announced, “We’re not spending another night here. Let’s get our stuff and go.” He went to call Aviva and came striding back, smiling. He told Yu: “You’re coming home with us.”
The drive home took a lot longer with a newborn baby on board. At a rest stop, Ted told me that he and Aviva had instantly agreed there was no way he was going to leave Yu and her baby. “They’ll stay with us until she figures out what comes next. Is there any way your cousin is going to do the right thing?”
“Um, I don’t know.” Although he’d boasted about how he wanted a family of daughters as beautiful as Yu, I’d never seen Deng within ten meters of a baby.
“Doesn’t he love this woman?” Ted asked.
He had promised her he did. Yu certainly believed it.
“If he loves her, he won’t leave her stranded,” Ted said.
Lisbet. Lisbet.
HENRY’S HOUSE WAS SEALED tight, as though it knew he wasn’t coming home. The whole place was stale and dusty. Henry had sent me a single message: Start clearing out. I want it done in 30 days. I dumped my backpack and collapsed on the mango bed. Sleep overtook me before I could undress. In the morning, I shed my clothes, climbed under the covers, and fell back into a stupor. Without Lisbet, I had no reason to get out of bed. I told myself that there must be some explanation, but deep down I knew it was over. Twice she’d left me stranded. Only in a fairy tale would a fool hope for a third chance with a princess who refused to be loved.
When I awoke, I dragged myself to the kitchen and ate instant noodles, which I microwaved in the cup. Then I went back to bed, where I watched videos on my phone until I fell asleep. The next day, I walked to a corner market to buy a frozen pizza. The pizza tasted of salt and cardboard, same as the noodles. I crawled back into bed. I didn’t care that I was missing class. I heard a knock on the front door and ignored it. Like any tender shoot that struggled to grow in canyon country, I’d been left parched and wanting. Sleep was my only respite.
Eventually, Eddie and Paloma came to roust me, worried because I hadn’t answered their texts or even told them if I was back. Paloma had called Aviva, who’d said she’d seen lights on but that I hadn’t answered her knock.
“Phew, it smells bad in here,” Eddie said, walking into the house.
I dropped into Diana’s chair, fatigued right through to my bones.
“You look awful,” Eddie said. “Are you sick?”
“Did something happen with Lisbet?” Paloma asked.
I nodded dumbly. When I didn’t say more, Paloma signaled to Eddie, and they moved quietly through the house, opening doors and windows. I heard Eddie go down the stairs to the garbage cans in the alley and Paloma washing the dishes. A few minutes later, they returned.
“She knew I was coming,” I told them. “And she left before I got there.”
“Damn,” Eddie said. “I knew it.”
Paloma shushed him. “Come on,” she said, taking me by the arm. “You’re sleeping at Eddie’s tonight.”
I went with them obediently, too tired to object. Eddie gave me his bed and slept on the couch. When morning arrived, I rolled over and went back to sleep. Through my dreamless drift, I heard the faint sounds of Eddie and his roommates coming and going, and the robot vacuum and the rev of a car engine, but nothing pulled me from the bed. I wasn’t thinking anymore of Lisbet or worrying about Henry or wondering how Yu and the baby were doing. I was in a sunken state, dragged to the bottom by an undertow of sleep.
The sun rose again. Warm sunlight streamed through Eddie’s window. I felt a hand on my shoulder and struggled to open my eyes.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” Paloma said, “but we have work to do.”
She made me shower and get dressed and eat a bite of breakfast and join them in the living room. We had design decisions to make, she said, starting with the look and feel of the app’s landing page. Eddie had updates on market sizing. We worked all morning, the two of them happily arguing about Eddie’s list of beta testers and Paloma’s estimation of our MVP, the Minimum Viable Product that would get us the feedback we needed. Listening to them spar with their unshakeable confidence in themselves and each other, I felt better than I had in days.
“I’m starving,” Eddie announced. “Shelley, how about you?”
We went into the kitchen and made turkey sandwiches on good black bread, and I found that I was hungry. I ate one and then another and then I was ready to return to Henry’s house.
OCTOBER HAD ARRIVED, AND the brilliant sunshine held the fog at bay. Sitting at the kitchen table, I made a list. I would start with the easy stuff—closets and drawers that hadn’t been opened in years; Henry’s books, plenty outdated; the medicine cabinet full of pills, unguents, and syrups with expiry dates from the previous century—and move on to the garage. The bedrooms and kitchen would come last. I felt good at the prospect of clearing out decades of disuse. Houses, like people, needed to be refreshed, and though I hoped he would return sooner rather than later, I had a begrudging admiration for Henry’s breakaway. I had thought that transformation was a right held exclusively by the young. It never occurred to me that old people sometimes changed too.
I went to see Professor Luo, who upbraided me for missing class. I explained that my benefactor, Mr. Cheng, had urgently needed my attention, but I was back now and very sorry and eager to make up the work. It wasn’t the first time Professor Luo heard a plea from an international student. Some of my classmates were homesick, some were out of money, some broke on the wheel of homework drills and tests. In my case, it helped that I paid my tuition bills on time and in full, courtesy of Henry. Professor Luo gruffly gave me another chance.
Afterward, I went to see Yu and the baby. As soon as I stepped inside, Aviva dragged me to the kitchen. I tried to take up my old listening post in the doorway, but she made me sit down with her and Ted at the table. I was part of their story now, invisible no longer. She said that Yu and the baby were out for a walk in this beautiful weather. What had taken me so long to come over? Aviva had been waiting. She wanted my full report on Beit Hayeladim.
“What’s it like? It’s not a cult, right?” Aviva said.
I had to ask for a definition. Ted tried to explain. “Satanic,” I wrote in my little black notebook, pentagramming it for later study.
“It was very nice. Lots of kids. Families. People were friendly,” I said.
“How did Leo seem? Happy?”
“He’s talking more,” I said. “He likes his school and his friends.”
“I should’ve gone with you,” Aviva said to Ted. “I could’ve checked the place out. I probably could’ve gotten Henry to come home.”
Ted ignored the speculation; he’d likely heard it a hundred times since coming home empty-Henried.
“Kate already told us that Leo made the adjustment more easily than expected,” he said. “She and Orit are thrilled. She keeps telling me not to apologize for sticking her with my father. He’s wildly popular, she says. They all want to sit with him at dinner.” Ted snorted. “Kate says they’re one big extended family.”
“Not a family,” said Aviva. “A tribe.”
With that, I ventured to ask the question that had set the black fish in my tummy madly swimming ever since I’d learned that Leo slept every night away from his mothers, in the Children’s House. “The other kids at Beit Hayeladim. Do they want Leo with them? Since he’s halfway Chinese and not all the way Jewish?” I asked.
“Who knows,” Aviva said, “since you didn’t let me come with you.”
“I trust Kate,” Ted said. “She wouldn’t be living there if she and Leo weren’t welcome.”
“I hope you’re right,” Aviva said. “Maybe the place is exactly as advertised. Wouldn’t that be great? We should all be so lucky.”
My tummy fish finned to a drifting quiet. I was relieved to hear Ted’s reassurance. Almost all whom I’d met in Peach Blossom Land had treated me with MVP, Minimum Viable Politeness, but there had been instances—a comment here, a shove of the elbow there, an unguarded, hostile look—when the fact of my foreignness threatened somebody else.
“Besides,” Aviva added, “Orit is Jewish, and she’s his biological mother, which means that Leo is a Jew.” She explained about bloodlines and such.
“So it doesn’t matter that he’s Chinese, as long as he’s Jewish?”
Aviva sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“Race and faith aren’t equivalent, although sometimes we talk about them as if they are,” Ted said. “Then there’s the whole question of economic class.”
“Oy,” I said, unable to keep up. There were too many identities to label and sort, a hallmark of San Francisco, although I was not unfamiliar with the roll call of roles that each of us performs. After all, in Gejiu I was son to the father, father to the father, insider, outsider, countryman, and stranger. The details differed but the whole was universal: myriad multiplicity was a fact of modern life.
CROUDER WAS ANOTHER STORY. From him, I expected a sign. A paw print on the back stoop, a bark in the middle of the night. An overturned water bowl—I freshened it daily—or a pile of fertilizer. I got bupkus. Aviva posted lost-dog fliers around the area, but Crouder was still out there, exploring. It pissed me off that he should treat me so cavalierly. Who had fed him, cleaned the fur around his puckered arsehole, gathered his turds like crop? Some friend he was. Had he never heard of loyalty? Of nobility, of devotion? I assured Aviva I had no idea what had happened to the little mite, a technically accurate statement. Maybe he was snuggling with the bison and coyotes. The least he could do was check in.
“They’ve all abandoned me,” I said to Eddie and Paloma. “Lisbet. Henry. Even Crouder.”
Eddie was glad that I could mention Lisbet’s name half in jest. “Everyone gets dumped. You’ll get over it,” he said.
“That’s not particularly helpful,” Paloma said without looking up from her laptop. Between her course load and our start-up, she was working nonstop.
“Freshman year, I was totally in love with a girl named Alyssa. She broke up with me right before she left for Burning Man with some other guy,” Eddie said.
“Again, not helpful,” Paloma said, the click-clack of her keyboard like the sound of a passing train. She was a genius at crushing code.
“But then I met Paloma, the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Eddie said.
“So far,” Paloma said, still tapping. “I know your mother loves me.”
“I love you,” Eddie said. Paloma smiled. TinRoad was bringing them closer together, a beautiful by-product of our on-demand platform with its on-trend flow.
“You’re not going to meet your next girlfriend by moping every night,” Eddie said. “Paloma has a lot of friends.” I shook my head. “At least look,” Eddie said, holding up Paloma’s phone.
“Don’t be a dick,” Paloma said. “Shelley’s not interested in dating right now.”
“If he was, he wouldn’t have gotten his heart stomped,” Eddie said.
Paloma patted my shoulder. “You’ll meet someone new. You’re open to people. You don’t have a cynical bone in your body. That’s why you got stomped, of course. Anybody could have told you she was going to bolt. It’s her emmo, right? She can’t handle commitment, so she runs? It scared her to be in love with you. It meant she was responsible for somebody else’s heart.”
“MO,” Eddie said, seeing my confusion. “Modus operandi. The usual way she does shit.”
“I guess so. She told me she’s not good at sticking by people, but I thought she was talking about her mother.”
“It’s all about her mother. That’s really who she was running away from,” Paloma said.
“But she promised!” I said. A last gasp of the injured. The moment the words puffed into the air, I heard how feeble I sounded.
“So now you know,” Paloma said. She stood and went back to her laptop, sympathy session over. In her own sturdy way, Paloma woke me up.
25.
Yu’s Warning
OVER AT THE SALTBOX STRETCH, YU AND THE BABY were thriving. The baby was rounder and sturdier and talking, so to speak, through her little tea-spout mouth. At every diaper change, her fat legs kicked in freedom. The jaundice was gone, and she was sleeping well at night. Yu was stronger too. After three weeks, she’d gained a few pounds—sing kugel’s praises—and the fullness suited her. Her smooth face luminesced. The earlier stress had made it hard to get Baby to take the breast, she said, but now they had the hang of it. I hastily dropped to a knee and fiddled with my shoelace to stave off the details. Yu laughed at me and told me how grateful she was to my uncle and auntie. They had opened their home to her. They loved giving Baby her bottle. Their friends had given her loads of baby equipment and money for clothing and diapers.
“Have you chosen a name for her yet?”
Yu sighed. “I keep changing my mind. Nothing seems suitable. I wish I could ask my mother.” She ran a fingertip along a wisp of Baby’s hair. She’d written and called and pleaded with her parents, but they refused to answer. Deng had downright disappeared.
