The Chinese Groove, page 9
“You know, he kept you from me,” Henry said. “He didn’t tell me you were here. I had to keep asking: ‘Who’s that young man hanging about in the yard?’ ‘Oh, that’s a friend.’ ‘A friend?’ ‘Well, a visitor.’ Finally, I asked her. ‘Well, that’s Shelley,’ she said. ‘One of the Chinese relatives.’ So then I figured it out. Why the big secret? ‘Oh, no secret, but he’s a student, you see. Far too busy to take time from his studies.’ I kept on asking. ‘Let me meet the boy!’ He refused. He said I’d take advantage. It was very insulting. My son has a word that he should apply to himself. What do you call it? Paternalistic.”
I knew the meaning all right. How’s your pater? Miss Chips used to ask me. And, Pater was a linguist. He was mad for the right word. Miss Chips, her pater, and I had that in common. Nothing gives pleasure as much as choosing the right word.
Henry was still complaining. “‘Don’t be paternalistic. It’s my life. Let me make my own decisions.’ He never listens to good advice. No one’s allowed to be paternalistic to him, especially his father.”
“Is it true?” Aviva said, returning to the kitchen. “Is Shelley moving in with you?”
“What choice do I have?” Henry grumped, like a midlevel boss who’s ordinarily mild but growls when the big boss is watching. “At least someone in the family is willing to help.”
Aviva narrowed her eyes at me. “Well, aren’t you a clever thing.” Then she relaxed. “I think it’s brilliant. A brilliant solution. You can help each other.” And give me a break, she was thinking. But I still had Ted to appease.
“I feel bad that I caused hard feelings. Please tell Ted that my lessons won’t suffer. I’m number one in my class.”
That was true.
“And since Father asked me to look after Henry, I can now fulfill my promise.”
That wasn’t.
“Oh, sweetie,” Aviva said. “This isn’t about you.” She looked at me intently. “Don’t you understand? This has nothing to do with you. I already told you. It all goes back to the same thing.”
“What do you mean that your father asked you to look after Henry?” Ted asked, reappearing. He’d been eavesdropping from the hallway, one of my signature moves.
“Well . . .” I made a moue of embarrassment. Miss Chips had taught us moue. A useful expression between scoff and grimace. It was part of our unit on What the French Have a Word For That’s Better Than in English. It was a long lesson, to Miss Chips’s disgust.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t say, for Father’s sake.”
“We’re all family here,” Aviva said. Curiosity had wedged her mouth ajar. “Families should talk. How else can we support one another? Openness is good.” Her eyes looked unnaturally bright while Ted’s had darkened.
I shuffled my feet, fiddled my fingers. “It was Father’s biggest dream that I should come to San Francisco, but the trip cost a lot. Father had to borrow the money. He asked all the relatives. No one wanted to help. Finally, one auntie gave Father a generous loan. She’s Henry’s cousin twice removed, so Father is very grateful to Henry’s branch of the family. He instructed me to help look after Henry.”
There was no auntie who made such a loan; Father’s boss was the sole soft touch. But Ted had no way to fact-check my story, which is every sponger’s bluff.
“You didn’t mention your aunt before,” Ted said suspiciously. “You said the money came from your father’s boss at the bus depot.”
“Some of it did. The rest came from Auntie. I was waiting to mention it until I could thank Ye Ye—Henry—in person.” I cast a demure expression, the fault being mine, not Ted’s.
Ted frowned and was silent. I held my breath. Either way, I was moving into the saltbox, but it’d be a lot easier if Ted didn’t object.
The moment stretched longer. “It’s Chinese custom to look after our elders,” I said.
“I know that,” Ted said crossly. He looked at Aviva. She emphatically nodded her head. As I said, we made a good team, Aviva and me.
“I think we both can see that Shelley could use a little help right now,” Aviva said. “This works well for everybody.”
“Okay,” Ted said. He rounded on his father. “But you need to pay Shelley a decent wage. Not just room and board. Think of what it costs to live in this city.”
“Of course!” Henry said. “I was going to offer. You didn’t give me a chance.”
“And you should repay this aunt the money she loaned to Shelley’s father. Shelley’s airfare should be part of the package.”
“Let’s not go overboard. One thing at a time,” Henry said.
Whew! I didn’t want Henry to go looking for a fictional beneficent auntie.
“I’m going to check on you,” Ted warned Henry. “God knows you’ve got the money.” Funny how Ted no longer objected to my working on a student visa, now that I was taking care of his father.
“You can empty that basin outside,” Aviva said. “There’s a storm drain next to the curb.” She took me outside and showed me.
“Good job,” she said. “You got them talking again. In my family, we talk about everything. We don’t stay bottled up. We end up screaming at each other, but at least it clears the air. Those two keep a barrier up between them as high as the walls in this house. Well, if a person isn’t willing to share his feelings, he never finds out what the other person thinks.”
I felt sorry for Aviva, unschooled in the Chinese groove. Ted and Henry knew exactly what the other was thinking, even if we didn’t. They had their private history, father to son to father, but whatever their grievances, I’d managed to slip between them.
“Here,” Aviva said, handing me a bottle of cleanser. “Give it a good scrub. And throw that knife in the garbage. There’s no way I’m ever going to use it again. Are you done yet? Can you take him home already?”
I went back inside to bring Henry home.
“You’re making a mistake,” Ted said to me. “Nothing you do for him will ever make him happy.”
But I was jubilant. I had a place to live and soon I’d have money. In my imagination, Lisbet shimmered. With the promise of a full stomach every day and a warm bed every night, my worries were quickly fading. After all, how much trouble could one old man be?
9.
Henry’s House
I FELT AT HOME IN HENRY’S HOUSE THE MINUTE I GOT there, a common occurrence for spongers worldwide. You walk in the door and instantly recognize your old life lurking in the shadowy corners: in my case, cracked tiles, dim lighting, the smell—so familiar!—of malehood. I’d have to work hard to scrub the loneliness out of the place.
“Okay, okay,” Henry said, clutching. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” With him pulling on the handrail and me shoving him palm to bum, we’d gotten him up the outdoor stairs and through the front door. He shuffled into the living room and dropped into the larger of a pair of worn armchairs, first pushing aside a book. Coffee table, end table, pillowed couch were covered in printed matter. I’d never seen so many books, journals, magazines, and papers outside of the library at Honghe U., where Lisbet used to study. Scores more books, bricked with knowledge, bulged from crowded shelves. The drapes were open in the picture window, and more books were stacked beneath the sill. I was in an aerie for the erudite, a room of words and wisdom. Exactly what I needed to ignite my poet flame.
“We made it,” Henry said gleefully. “Good job engineering our escape. She was ready to call the nursing home to come and haul me away. Ha! We showed them. Did you see the look on Ted’s face? If you want to call me Ye Ye, you go right ahead. Come on now. Grab that footrest. Move it closer.” He pointed at a kind of high footstool with a pillowtop of its own—an ottoman, I later learned it was called, though I’m not sure why; it was too ugly to have been designed by the beauty-loving Turks—which I pushed this way and that until it was right where he wanted it; then he heaved his legs up, wallowed his rump, and settled.
“My daughter-in-law wastes a lot of effort trying to get my son and me to talk,” he said. “She ought to know by now that we don’t have anything to say to each other. She used to insist on dinner once a week until we put an end to it. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, I’m watching the markets. Thursdays, too. Every business day is important. Friday evenings, I’m ready to relax. I could do with a little company on Fridays. Not Fridays, he says, they’re too tired after working all week. Could you call what he does ‘work’? She works, not as hard as she used to. She started out as a teacher, that was good. Then she became a librarian, still important, but easier, you know, sitting at a desk stamping books. Teaching’s the harder job. I taught high school students for forty years. I got an award, twice. But they’re tired, he says. They’re always tired. You’d think he was the old one, not me. How about Saturday night, I said, or Sunday dinner? No, not the weekends. That’s when they see their friends. So Monday nights it was, sheer torture. She’d cook a big casserole full of chickpeas and lentils or something she’d stewed all day and send me home with the leftovers. I’m not complaining. It was nice of her to invite me. But she thinks I’m over here moldering, that I haven’t got a life of my own. I do, they just can’t see it. Old people in America, they turn invisible to the rest. Not like in China.”
Had he been to China lately?
“My wife looked into it. We were planning to go. Didn’t make it before she died.” His gaze on me sharpened. He was wondering how much I knew. I told him I was sorry about his wife and his grandson, and his shoulders relaxed now that it’d been said.
“Who wants to go anyway? From what I hear, the traffic’s awful. If I want to see tall buildings, I can look at the TV.”
“The relatives would be happy to host you in Gejiu.” The excitement that would bring! They’d vie for the honor; they’d pull out all the stops.
“Not interested,” he said. “Now listen. I don’t like to be worried after. You’ll learn that about me. I don’t like to be waited on hand and foot. My daughter-in-law has an excess of need to be somebody’s mother, but like I said, it’s a waste. In my own house, I can do what I want. Go look in the freezer. I put some soup in there last week. Split pea from Safeway. Warm that up and make us a couple of ham sandwiches and pour me a bourbon. Two fingers, lots of ice. Bring it all out here and set up a couple of TV tables. You can help me to bed after.”
Maybe every fellow who lives alone has a yammerer inside him waiting to burst out. A yammerer and a martinet, eager to give orders. He said the liquor cabinet was in the kitchen, furthermost top on the right. The key was on a silver ring tied to a red cord hanging from a hook on the back of the door to the cupboard under the kitchen sink or if I couldn’t find it there, I should look in the shoebox where he kept loose items that, last he remembered, he’d placed on the closet shelf. The liquor cabinet was tricky; the door had to be jiggled, and if that didn’t work, I should straighten a paper clip to unjam the lock. He’d had the lock installed to keep repairmen out. “Plenty of those guys like a shot while they’re plumbing.”
I knew enough to check the cabinet door before I went hunting for the key. If Henry was anything like Father, he wouldn’t have bothered to lock it after his last imbibe. Even misers like to get to their bottle in a hurry. Sure enough, the door of the cabinet was hanging wide open.
“I found the key,” I said as I delivered his drink. “It was right where you said.”
“You and I are going to get along great.”
Five minutes later, he was snoring.
THE PEA SOUP STUCK to the spoon and smelled like dirty socks, so I glopped it into the garbage and made a Chinese soup with ingredients I found in the cupboards and fridge. While the soup simmered and Henry slept, and after a quick snack of half a box of Ritz—Family Size! the box proclaimed but then there’d have to be a family that wanted to cracker together—I examined the books on his shelves. Cookbooks in two rows bristled with slips of paper. The rest was history and biography and dense encyclopedias of people and cultures long dead. On top of a round table beside the couch was a congestion of framed photographs, like figures trapped in a crowd. The best was a black-and-white picture of Henry and Diana standing next to a wedding cake, she in a long white gown with a pearly sheen, he in a slim dark suit. She had an oval face and eyes like Ted’s, small and serious. Henry’s suit gave him an air of sophistication that his countenance belied—he was looking with awe at Diana like an astonished chappie who couldn’t believe his fine luck. In another silver frame, Ted and Aviva posed on the steps of the big domed building I recognized as city hall. Aviva was clutching a bouquet and squinting into the sun, and Ted looked startled—What am I doing here? Kate was in the picture, beaming. The city supervisor friend of Ted’s, Huntington, clowned behind him, a tall green bottle balanced on the palm of his hand. From the palm of his other hand rose a tower of red plastic cups. He was ready to pour the groom a drink if only Ted would let him.
All the other photos were of Diana—with an elderly couple, probably her parents; with a group of lady friends; with a boy in the park, at the beach, at the zoo. Eli. I wiped the dust with my sleeve and saw, stuck between the table and the edge of the couch, a picture that had fallen. It was the same photo I’d seen in Eli’s bedroom: Eli and Diana, standing in front of a store window under a big red sign with white letters that read HONG’S FINE FOOD MARKET. Eli looked like Aviva, with a rounded face and curly hair, though he had Ted’s grave expression. I couldn’t make out if he possessed the telltale earlobe rivet, trademark Zheng, marker of our measure, but I was glad for Ted that his son had been a serious sort of lad. It meant that people knew they were related.
“This is delicious,” Henry said, after he’d slurped his soup. A string of cabbage hung from his chin; I handed him a napkin and told him I’d been cooking all my life including a recent professional stint.
“My wife was a wonderful cook,” Henry said. “She collected recipes like other people collect paintings. She would get them printed and hand them out at the store. She was a very intelligent woman. Perceptive. She took Ted to the library, got him his own card. ‘Watch the other kids around him. They look to see what he’s doing, then they do it too.’ He was three when she said that. I got excited. Maybe he was special. ‘Of course he’s special. He’s your son. I’m not saying he’s a genius. Don’t be thinking that. But his little mind is whirring.’” He rocked forward in his chair. “She could read him like a book. I thought he might become a lawyer or a teacher, like me, but she said no. ‘He observes,’ she said. ‘He stands outside the fray.’” He pushed his bowl aside. “Too bad he gave up before he really got going.”
“What was your subject? History?” It was an obvious guess. There was scope on those bookshelves, also an air of doom.
“American history. My most popular class was a senior seminar on the Spanish-American War. Teddy Roosevelt. You’ve heard of him?” he asked.
I hadn’t. Miss Chips had said there were too many instances of U.S. foreign interventions to give us a comprehensive list.
Henry grumbled, “You’ve got some learning to do before the citizenship exam. Luckily, I can teach you.” Citizenship exam! He was singing my song, laying out my future. Practically pelting me with petals from lovely Peach Blossom Land.
“I’ll tell you about Teddy Roosevelt someday. He was one of our greatest presidents, a man of extraordinary talent. Now they call him a racist, but the times were different then. Ted’s named after him. It didn’t do him any good.”
HE’D LEFT HIS CAP at Ted and Aviva’s house; he asked me to go back and fetch it because he was planning to visit the casting ponds and he had to have that cap. I helped him to bed and went next door.
“Oh, Shelley!” Aviva cried for the second time that day. “Is it working out okay? I’m breathing again, knowing that you’re there.” She turned to Kate and Orit, who were sitting with Ted at the table cracking walnuts into a wooden bowl. “Shelley has swooped in like a fairy prince to totally save us. He’s going to look after Henry.”
They loved the idea. “Communal living makes so much sense,” Orit said. “The whole community cares for the young and the old.”
“Oh, God, let’s not hear about the kibbutz again,” Aviva said. “It’s unnatural, all those people trying to live in one place.”
“I want to hear,” Kate loyally said. “You loved growing up there.” She brushed walnut shell from her hands and offered me the bowl.
“My childhood was idyllic,” Orit said. “Some of my friends from the kibbutz have started a collective on ranch land in L.A. It has shared spaces and private quarters and a big kitchen garden. There’s a school on the property for the kids. They’re creating something amazing. We’re going to visit for Passover. Kate and I might move there.”
“You can’t do that!” Aviva said. “Think of the failed experiments of communes in the sixties. You’ve got to have your own home. Ted, tell them.”
“I’d hate for you to move,” Ted said to Kate.
“We haven’t decided yet,” Kate said.
“In any case, you’re not taking Leo,” Aviva said. She looked around. “Is he still watching that awful TV show?”
Orit tiptoed to the doorway and peered into the living room. “He’s asleep,” she reported.
“Speaking of unhealthy living,” Aviva said to me, “please help Henry clean out the junk. I can’t get him to throw anything away. The place is a firetrap.”
“Save some of the books for me,” Ted said.
“No, Ted!” Aviva looked horrified; the others laughed. “You’re as bad as your father.”
“I’m the same,” Kate said. “I asked the landlord if he’d rent us an extra storage locker. He said no.”
“The landlord wants us out,” Orit said. “He doesn’t like that I organized the other tenants.”
“We didn’t sneak around,” Kate said. “We’ve been very open with him.”
