It is true that I resemble my father, especially as I get older, except for my eyes, which Nai-nai said were my maternal grandfather’s. But what was striking in Daddy feels cumbersome in me: my height, my long solemn face and full mouth, my large hands and feet. The shoe salesman would ask my size and Ma would put in: “You can see, she has enormous ones.” She once told me there might be some Manchurian or even Hakka on my father’s side. Hakkas were misfits who had no home province, big-footed because they were nomads and did so much walking.
If I am my father’s child, then my sister is my mother’s. Born barely twelve months after me, she was named after Martha Washington, my mother’s favorite character from American history, which my parents were studying at the time to obtain their citizenship. Even as a girl my sister had an arresting face: diamond shaped, almond eyes set wide apart, a thin-lipped, stubborn mouth, Ma’s kitten chin. Typical Shanghai, my mother pointed out. Her nickname for my sister was “Mau-mau,” which means “little cat.” Marty’s official Chinese name is “Joyous Virtue” and indeed she was a sunny child, when she wasn’t having tantrums.
“But you, you have your father’s blood,” Ma told me. “So pessimistic, those peasants.”
And so I’d picture that melancholy running in our veins, like some rare blood disease.
When I was four and my sister three, Ma, who had been staying home with us, went back to teach summer school and Nai-nai moved in. It was my father who decreed that we should call my grandmother “Nai-nai,” which is the word for a father’s mother, instead of “Ha-bu,” which means mother’s mother. That way, Daddy said, she could stand for both grandmothers. Nai-nai in no way resembled the plump bespectacled grandmothers in our fairy-tale books. I remember exactly how she looked the first time we met—the cream-colored kid gloves, ivory hairpins, miniature feet in black embroidered slippers dangling daintily over the edge of the sofa. “Not bound,” she said when she caught me staring, “but still very nice.”
I used to imagine that in China, beauty did not have a sexual connotation. If a woman was beautiful, she was beautiful like a flower or a good horse. A man wanted to write poetry about her, not to have her. My grandmother was beautiful in that way, with her pristine clothes, her long hair wound into its pincushion bun every waking hour, not a strand out of place. Her face was a perfect oval, like a cameo, her pursed lips dark red, and she had a mole on her neck that embarrassed her, to the point where she usually wore high-collared blouses. When I was older, I’d watch her hobble down the sidewalk and wonder how such a delicately made woman had survived the birth of five children.
My grandmother liked to take walks. After lunch it was our habit to meander down to the rocky beach to feed the gulls or explore the woods across the street or my favorite: stroll two blocks over to the primary school Marty and I were still too young to attend. It was deserted for the summer and my grandmother would lift me and my sister up in turn so that we could peer through the windows. The bulletin boards and countertops were bare, the chairs upturned on top of the tables. “Next year,” Nai-nai promised me. The school was surrounded by pines, which threw cool shadows, and the ground below us was cushioned with fallen needles. My grandmother was wrong. By September we’d be in Connecticut and Nai-nai and the school in the pine grove would seem a thousand years away.
I remember all the days of that last summer in California as being sunny, every room in the bungalow filled with golden light, so that during nap time, even with the shades down, I could never sleep. I’d lie there making up plays with my stuffed animals while my sister snored her purring snore in the next bed.
I understand now that, like my father at Berkeley, I was happy.
9
Memory begins with an image.
I see my sister sitting on the front steps of our house on Woodside Avenue, waiting for her boyfriend Schuyler. She has on an old navy sweatshirt and a short denim skirt, one thigh—so slender I could die of jealousy—crossed over the other. A loafer dangles off her big toe, and her eyes are narrowed in that way that means she can barely contain her impatience. Her hair is parted on the side, the sweep of it following the sweep of her cheek.
She is thirteen, and just beginning to realize her power.
I’d left home by then.
Boarding school is my way out. By seventh grade, pamphlets have begun to arrive. Daddy has his heart set on Farmington, where Jackie Onassis went, but I fall in love with the quaint little school by the Sudbury River in Massachusetts. The day we visit, the autumn foliage is at full pitch and the shouts of girls on the hockey field float in through the open windows. We tour the fancy new performing arts center with its bubble dome, the white clapboard chapel that once was the centerpiece of a Vermont town (it was shipped down piece by piece and rebuilt by students), the dining hall with its French windows and pepper mills on each table. But what steals my heart is the art studio, with the skylight and balcony where you can go out and sketch on sunny days.
“That’s where I’m going,” I announce on the car ride back. In the rearview mirror I see my large face foreshortened with my hair whipping about in the draft from the open window.
“Get in first,” Daddy says.
“I’ll get in.” It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever been so sure of anything.
Before I know it, it’s August, the month before I leave, but no one is paying attention to me because they’re excited about the new house we just bought. It’s on Woodside Avenue, a much fancier neighborhood than Coram Drive, closer to Yale. The down payment came from the sale of some land that my parents bought in Monterey and kept all these years. Some big developers want to build a spa there. The move will take place in September, while I’m away.
There are open boxes all over the place and Ma’s frantically going through her lists. Marty has to remind her we need school clothes. Saturday afternoon we’re off to the mall in our gold Ford Fairlane, my sister in the front seat next to Ma, her bare forearm lying along the open window. I listen to them arguing about the radio.
“No wah-wah-wah music,” Ma says.
“It’s good stuff,” my sister snaps. Overnight she’s become sophisticated, spouting off the names of foreign sports cars and haute couture designers. She goes to the kinds of parties to which I’m not invited. One time she’s dropped off after midnight, drunk, and I have to sneak her into the bathroom to wash the puke out of her hair. She keeps giggling and I tell her to shut up, she’ll wake Ma and Daddy. “Oh, Sally, you’re so boring,” she hisses at me in a stage whisper. “Fucking afraid of your own shadow.”
Marty wins the music fight, and “Sugar Magnolia” floats back to me in snatches. “Isn’t this pretty?” she asks.
“No meaning,” says Ma.
She makes us start at Alexander’s. Marty groans. “There’s not a single item of clothing in here I’d be caught dead in,” she pronounces. “Not even a sock.” She looks at me for support.
“Not even underwear,” I say.
“Stop it,” my mother says sharply. “Sally, I’m surprised at you.”
We spin circular racks of skirts and sweaters that are all heavy on burgundy, navy, and forest green, like the banners of Ivy League schools. My mother automatically picks out the same things for Marty and me to try on, as if we were twins. She holds up two kilts in our respective sizes, both in the same burgundy and blue tartan.
Marty barely gives them a glance. “Geeky, Ma.” My mother hands me the one in my size and I take it because it seems like something a boarding-school girl would wear.