Lesson 5 How Long Does It Take to Say I'm Getting Married?
I had taken my mother out to lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant in the hope of putting her in a good mood, but it was a disaster.
When we met at the Four Directions Restaurant, she eyed me with immediate disapproval. “Ai-ya! What's the matter with your hair?” she said in Chinese.
“What do you mean, ‘What's the matter,'” I said. “I had it cut.” Mr. Rory had styled my hair differently this time, an asymmetrical blunt-line fringe that was shorter on the left side. It was fashionable, yet not radically so. “Looks chopped off,” she said. “You must ask for your money back.” I sighed. “Let's just have a nice lunch together, okay?”
She wore her tight-lipped, pinched-nose look as she scanned the menu, muttering, “Not too many good things, this menu.” Then she tapped the waiter's arm, wiped the length of her chopsticks with her finger, and sniffed: “This greasy thing, do you expect me to eat with it?” She made a show of washing out her rice bowl with hot tea, and then warned other restaurant
patrons seated near us to do the same. She told the waiter to make sure the soup was very hot, and, of course, it was by her tongue's expert estimate “not even lukewarm”.
“You shouldn't get so upset,” I said to my mother after she disputed a charge of two extra dollars because she had specified chrysanthemum tea instead of the regular green tea. “Besides, unnecessary stress isn't good for your heart.”
“Nothing is wrong with my heart,” she huffed as she kept a disparaging eye on the waiter.
And she was right. Despite all the tension she places on herself — and others — the doctors have proclaimed that my mother, at age sixty-nine, has the
blood pressure of a sixteen-year-old and the strength of a horse.
After our miserable lunch, I gave up the idea that there would ever be a good time to tell her the news: that Rich Schields and I were getting married. My mother had never met Rich. In fact, every time I brought up his name — when I said, for instance, that Rich and I had gone to the symphony, that Rich had
taken my four-year-old daughter, Shoshana, to the zoo — my mother found a way to change the subject.
“Did I tell you,” I said as .we waited for the lunch bill., “what a great time Shoshana had with Rich? He —“
“Oh,” interrupted my mother, .“ I didn't tell you. Your father, doctors say maybe need surgery. But no, now they say everything normal.” I gave up. And then we did the usual routine.
I paid for the bill, with a ten and three ones. My mother pulled back the dollar bills and counted out exact change, thirteen cents, and put that on the tray instead, explaining firmly: “No tip!” She tossed her head back with a triumphant smile. And while my mother used the restroom, I slipped the waiter a five-dollar bill. He nodded to me with deep understanding. While she was gone, I devised another plan. When she returned, I said, “But before I drop you off, let's stop at my place real quick. There's something I want to show you.” My mother had not been to my apartment in months. When I was first married, she used to drop by unannounced, until one day I suggested she should call ahead of time. Ever since then, she has refused to come unless I issue an official invitation.
And so I watched her, seeing her reaction to the changes in my apartment — from the pristine habitat I maintained after the divorce, when all of a sudden I had too much time to keep my life in order to this present chaos, a home full of life and love. The hallway floor was littered with Shoshana's toys, all bright plastic things with scattered parts. There was a set of Rich's barbells in the
living room, two dirty snifters on the coffee table, the disemboweled remains of a phone that Shoshana and Rich had taken apart the other day to see where the voices came from.
“It's back here,” I said. We kept walking, all the way to the back bedroom. The
bed was unmade, dresser drawers were hanging out with socks and ties spilling over. My mother stepped over running shoes, more of Shoshana's toys, Rich's black loafers, my scarves, a stack of white shirts just back from the cleaner's. Her look was one of painful denial, reminding me of a time long ago when she took my brothers and me down to a clinic to get our polio booster shots. As the needle went into my brother's arm and he screamed, my mother looked at me with agony written all over her face and assured me, “Next one doesn't hurt.” But now, how could my mother not notice that we were living together, that this was serious and would not go away even if she didn't talk about it? She had to say something.
I went to the closet and then came back with a mink jacket that Rich had given me for Christmas. It was the most extravant gift I had ever received. I put the jacket on. “It's sort of a silly present, “ I said nervously. “It's hardly ever cold enough in San Francisco to wear mink. But it seems to be a fad, what people are buying their wives and girlfriends these days.”
My mother was quiet. She was looking toward my open closet, bulging with racks of shoes, ties, my dresses, and Rich's suits. She ran her fingers over the mink.
“This is not so good,” she said at last. “It is just leftover strips. And the fur is too short, no long hairs.”
“How can you criticize a gift!” I protested. I was deeply wounded. “He gave me this from his heart.” “That is why I worry,” she said.
And looking at the coat in the mirror, I couldn't fend off the strength of her will anymore, her ability to make me see black where there was once white, white where there was once black. The coat looked shabby, an imitation of romance. “Aren't you going to say anything else?” I asked softly. “What should I say?”
“About the apartment? About this?” I gestured to all the signs of Rich lying about.
She looked around the room, toward the hail, and finally she said., “You have career. You are busy. You want to live like mess, what can I say?”
After much thought, I came up with a brilliant plan. I concocted way for Rich to
meet my mother and Win her over. In fact, I arranged it so my mother would want to cook a meal especially for him. I had some help from Auntie Suyuan. Auntie Su was my mother's friend from way back. They were very close, which meant they were ceaselessly tormenting each other with boasts and secrets. And I gave Auntie Su a secret to boast about.
After walking through North Beach one Sunday, I suggested to Rich that we stop by for a surprise visit to my Auntie Su and Uncle Canning. They lived on Leavenworth, just a few blocks west of my mother's apartment. It was late afternoon, just in time to catch Auntie Su preparing Sunday dinner. “Stay! Stay!” she insisted.
“No, no. It's just that we were walking by,” I said.
“Already cooked enough for you. See? One soup, four dishes. You don't eat it, only have to throw it away. Wasted!”
How could we refuse? Three days later, Auntie Suyua had a thank- you letter from Rich and me. “Rich said it was the best Chinese food he has ever tasted,” I wrote.
And the next day, my mother called me, to invite me to a belated birthday dinner for my father. My brother Vincent was bringing his girlfriend, Lisa Lum. I could bring a friend, too.
I knew she would do this, because cooking was how my mother expressed her love, her pride, her power, her proof that she knew more than Auntie Su. “Just be sure to tell her later that her cooking was the best you evr tasted, that it was far better than Auntie Su's,” I told Rich. “Believ1e me.”
The night of the dinner, I sat in the kitchen watching her cook, waiting for the right moment to tell her about our marriage plans, that we had decided to get married nextJuly, about seven months away. She was chop ping eggplant into wedges, chattering at the same time about Auntie Suyuan: “She can only cook looking at a recipe. My instructions are in my fingers. I know what secret ingredients to put in just by using my nose!” and she was slicing with such a ferocity, seemingly inattentive to
her sharp cleaver, that I was afraid her fingertips would become one of the ingredients of the red-cooked eggplant and shredded pork dish.
I was hoping she would say something about Rich first. I had seen her
expression when she opened the door, her forced smile as she scrutinized him from head to toe, checking her appraisal of him against that already given to her by Auntie Suyuan. I tried to anticipate what criticisms she would have. Rich was not only not Chinese, he was a few years younger than I was. And unfortunately, he looked much younger with his curly red hair, smooth pale skin, and the splash of orange freckles across his nose. He was a bit on the short side, compactly built. In his dark business suits, he looked nice but easily forgettable, like somebody's nephew at a funeral. Which was why I didn't
notice him the first year we worked together at the firm. But my mother noticed everything.
“So what do you think of Rich?” I finally asked, holding my breath. She tossed the eggplant in the hot oil and it made a loud, angry hissing sound. “So many spots on his face,” she said.
I could feel the pinpricks on my back. “They're freckles Freckles are good luck, you know,” I said a bit too heatedly in trying to raise my voice above the din of the kitchen. “Oh?” she said innocent ly.
“Yes, the more spots the better. Everybody knows that.”
She considered this a moment and then smiled and spoke in Chinese:“Maybe this is true. When you were young, you got the chicken pox. So many spots, you had to stay home for ten days. So lucky, you thought.”
I couldn't save Rich in the kitchen. And I couldn't save him later at the dinner table.
He had brought a bottle of French wine, something he did not know my parents could not appreciate. My parents did not even own wineglasses. And then' he also made the mistake of drinking not one but two full glasses, while everybody else had a half-inch “just ‘for taste”.
When I offered Rich a fork, he insisted on using the slippery ivory chopsticks. He held them splayed like the knock-kneed legs of an ostrich while picking up a large chunk of sauce-coated eggplant. Halfway between his plate and his open mouth, the chunk fell on his crisp white shirt and then slid into his crotch. It took several minutes to get Shoshana to stop shrieking with laughter. And then he had helped himself to big portions of the shrimp and snow peas, not realizing he should have taken only a polite spoonful until everybody had
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