Physical work doesn’t keep you from thinking! In fact sometimes it stimulates it. My aunt and uncle were as good as could be, but I was still in my life, I still had to return to New York City. As I struggled with the clackety mower I calculated my savings: I could survive for about a month and a half on what I had and then I’d have to find a steady income One possibility was freelance from my old boss, if she still trusted me. My last assignments had been delivered late and barely acceptable. I’d told her I was going to Connecticut to live with my mother for a while, and then with all the mess, going into the hospital and all, I had completely lost touch.
It was hard to believe now, but at the agency I’d handled all the biggest projects. I was known to be great under pressure. Crank up the Vivaldi, order out pizza, and I could work through the night, meet the toughest deadline with panache. Where I worked, the darker the circles under your eyes the more promising your career. Sally Wang-Acheson, senior art director. So chic, that hyphenated name, and so chic was I my long hair done up in all sorts of intricately casual styles—I had finally begun to accept my looks for what they were not beautiful but something else—with all those flowing tropical-colored outfits, dangly bronze and silver earrings Carey had given me every birthday and Christmas. A woman with style. A woman on her way up.
And then—catastrophe. A foot over on the other side, and it had affected me permanently, down to my brain cells. After degenerating to idiocy, I had to learn to be smart again, an adult in this world. How was it possible? Since I’d been sick I had taken to wearing the kind of asexual outfits I’d favored at boarding school—T-shirts, corduroys, sneakers. No makeup, no particular hairstyle. My reflection in the mirror was disturbing to me, the face thinner, childish, with a stripped expression I remembered from working with the mentally handicapped. Pure shock that you had to be out in the world at all.
I was almost done when I heard the car pull in. My aunt stood on the patio shading her eyes with her hands.
“Next year we spray the trees again.”
“Aunty Mabel, there’s some kind of other fruit out here. Little orange things on bushes.”
“Calamondin. Too sour to eat. You can make marmalade from.”
Unexpected treasures in your own backyard. I thought of the patch of lily of the valley behind the swing set on Coram Drive. Fortunately the bad boys missed it in their rampage. Once in a while Ma would pick a handful to keep in a glass in the kitchen. “This is what I have in my wedding corsage,” she told Marty and me, although she didn’t know the name in English. We didn’t know that they were so rare that it was actually against the law in Connecticut to pick them.
“Sal-lee, you come in now,” Aunty Mabel said. “After lunch we go shopping.”
In Montgomery Ward I selected the most conservative bathing suit I could find—a red one-piece with white polka dots and low-cut leg holes. I changed into and out of it as fast as possible, stopping long enough only to check that it was serviceable. Department store lighting was so cruel. “Let’s see!” my aunt called from the other side of the curtain and I said, “It’s fine, it’s fine.”
On the way to the cash register Aunty Mabel stopped at a rack full of tropical flowered sundresses, her coral nails fluttering over the hangers. “Sal-lee! Ni kan! This style become you very much.”
To please her, I tried one on. It had a full skirt—not my taste—with purple hibiscus on a green and white background that vaguely resembled leaves. But the bodice was cut in a sophisticated way, as snugly as an evening gown, with a graceful scoop neck and deep armholes. I wished the bones of my chest didn’t show, but they always had, as long as I could remember. This time I gave in to my aunt and stepped outside to model.
“Huh,” she said, drawing her eyebrows together in a delicate frown. I was barefoot and my ankles were raw from the sandspurs I’d picked up from working in the yard, but I could see that what she was looking at was the inside of my left arm where the tiger stripes overlapped delicately but distinctly from wrist to elbow.
“It’s gorgeous,” Aunty Mabel said, finally deciding she wasn’t going to ask. “I buy for you.”
For dinner my second night in Florida we had jiao zi. My aunt rolled out the dough and pressed circles into it with the rim of a teacup to make the wrappers. I spooned the pork and cabbage filling in and pinched the dumplings shut. Thanks to Nai-nai I’d perfected my technique at making them dainty, evenly scalloped at the edges. My sister’s had too much filling and spilled out the sides. You could always tell which ones were whose when they came out of the pot.
“I’m not eating any of Marty’s,” I’d announce.
“Mine are better, they have more meat,” my sister would shoot back.
“No fight,” my father would say in his high-pitched starting-to-be-mad voice. But I noticed that Daddy ate more of mine than my sister’s.
Aunty Mabel asked how Marty was.
“She has an apartment in New York now.”
“How does she support herself?”
My sister lived off men, but I didn’t think my aunt needed to know this.
“When she’s in the city she works as a clown at South Street Seaport. Now she’s up in Vermont with a college friend of hers.”
“So she moves to the country?”
“No, no, this is just temporary. She still wants to be an actress in New York.”
“Actress.” Aunty Mabel sighed. “Your sister, she’s always so active.” She slid a pile of dough circles across the table to me. “And you! When you were little, you send us such beautiful cards. All kinds of animals, horses, dogs, cats. I still keep. You remember? And your ma-ma told us you won so many prizes in high school, for painting pictures.”
“She told you?”
“Of course she told us. I think this is a very difficult school you attend, lots of talented girls.”
“That’s what it was like.”
“So much talent, though, doesn’t help find a husband.”
“I did find a husband, Aunty Mabel.”
“You found wai guo ren. Maybe it’s better you find Chinese.”
“You mean like Xiao Lu?”
My aunt considered. “Those New York Chinese too small and pale. Maybe Hawaiian, or some big, strong California one. You ever think about moving out to California? We still have relatives there, you know.”
“Your ba-ba so handsome.” In the living room after dinner, my aunt and I were looking through old photograph albums. I remembered that she had once been interested in my father. We had come to a photograph of my parents just before they got married. They were leaning against the railing of a ship, hand in hand, hair blowing every which way, eyes only for each other. Daddy’s face was angled a little away from the camera, smiling and shadowed. Even in that casual pose, you could see the intensity in the twist of his neck. Ma, dimpled in a big-shouldered dress, looked fragile beside him.
“Bau-yu and Pau-yu,” my aunt said. “Similar and not similar.”
We had the same picture in an album at home; I knew the story that went with it. After the ship photographer snapped their photo, they’d set out on a cruise around San Francisco Bay. Although it wasn’t particularly rough, in ten minutes my father had completely ruined his fancy seersucker jacket. “I never saw anyone so sick in my life,” Ma told us. “I had to take it to the cleaners three times.” Back on land, Daddy told her how he’d suffered on his voyage from China. He’d lost eighteen pounds on the way.
I studied the face in the photo, noticed how the young man’s side-parted hair fell in a way that reminded me of Marty’s. Daredevilish.
Then came my parents’ wedding. What touched me most was Aunty Mabel standing alone, her big, good-natured face framed by a bad perm, wearing a light-colored dress with petal sleeves and a straight skirt too tight around the hips. When she smiled her eyes disappeared into half-moons and you could see her crooked top teeth. Ma said that Aunty Mabel did better than anyone expected. She moved to New York and six months later started dating Uncle Richard, who was an accountant at Grumman, where she worked as a secretary.