“Any of the foreign supermarkets’ll probably have them,” I say. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop propped on a pillow on my legs. I don’t really look up. She’s always asking questions like this, and I admit I tune them out a lot of the time.
“Really? Because I went to… what’s the name of that French one? Carrefour? And they had peanut butter, but it was chunky and I need smooth. And I didn’t see any chocolate chips at all.”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. “You could always buy chocolate bars and hit them with a hammer.”
“I guess I could.”
Now I do glance away from my screen. There’s my mom, her streaked, bleached hair rising in a halo of static, wearing a Sunrise T-shirt (I’VE FOUND MR. RIGHT AND HE’S PERFECT! ISAIAH 62:5) and sweats, solid through the middle like a pound cake, the bramble-rose tattoo above her elbow sagging a bit, which is what happens to a tat inked twenty-five years ago.
“Aren’t you cold?” I ask, because even with the radiators on I’m wearing a sweatshirt.
She snorts. “Not right now. I’ve got my own heat.” She mimes fanning herself. “Hot flashes.”
Like I needed to know.
“The thing is, I want to make my special chocolate chip cookies for Andy,” she continues, cheeks flushing.
And that’s when I know I’ve got to get out of Beijing: That nice Mr. Zhou next door has become Andy.
Given my mom’s track record with men, no good can come of this.
“Maybe try Walmart,” I mutter, and turn back to my laptop.
I LOVE MY MOM.
Seriously, I really do. She did the best she could do with raising me, which maybe wasn’t always very good, but she comes through when it counts, like after I got blown up in the Sandbox, for example, leaving my leg busted in too many places to count and the rest of me not much better.
It’s just that a month now, living in my apartment in Beijing? That wasn’t what I had in mind when she said she wanted to come and visit me.
“Just to see how you’re doing,” she’d said, “since you don’t have time to come home.”
This of course was a lie on my part. I didn’t want to come home. Long story.
After a couple of weeks, where I did my best to show her the tourist sites-the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the Silk Market for fake Prada, and the world’s largest IKEA store-she showed no sign of going anywhere, other than to the guest room in my apartment by the Gulou subway station, which used to be my office. I finally asked, “So, Mom, when’s your flight home again?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s really up to you.”
“What about work?”
“Well…” She hesitated. As I recall, she twisted her hands together. “The job didn’t really work out.”
IT’S NOT HER FAULT, I tell myself now. She worked hard for years. It’s not her fault that the US economy is in the toilet, that she’s fifty-one years old and no one wants to hire her for anything. Not her fault that Refinancing Roulette didn’t pay off. The condo was a shithole anyway. Sometimes it’s even sort of cool having her here, like when she makes tacos, cooking being an activity at which I suck.
But I seriously need some away time from her right now.
“Don’t talk to me about Jesus,” I said about three days after she got here, Jesus being one of the things that we used to have in common, but that pretty much got blown up along with the rest of my life, in Iraq. Mostly she’s been pretty good about it, but every once in a while Jesus slips out.
For example: “You know, that nice Mr. Zhou next door belongs to a church. And I think it’s Christian, more or less. They worship Jesus anyway. He invited me to attend their service. Would you like…?”
“No thanks.”
Like I’m going to go to some weird-ass Chinese underground house church, featuring Brother Jesus Christ of the Righteous Thundering Fist, or what have you.
Like I’d set foot inside Sunrise, for that matter.
Sunrise is the church that my mom and me used to go to in Arizona. It’s a big church, in this fake-adobe complex that always reminded me of an Indian casino. But I still used to believe in it all. Take comfort in Reverend Jim’s air-conditioned sermons. Snap my WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? rubber bracelet against my wrist when I needed an invisible helping hand.
When people talk about how your faith gets tested, they always say that trials make your faith stronger. What they don’t say is that sometimes faith just dissolves like desert sand between your fingers.
“Do you feel like going to Walmart?” my mom asks. “You know, you could use a few things for your kitchen. You don’t have a single spatula.”
It’s fucking cold outside, and so far the lack of a spatula does not seem to have negatively affected my life. “Sure,” I say anyway. “Just let me finish some emails.”
I should get out of the house, I tell myself. Two P.M. and I’ve done nothing today but sit on my ass, surf the Net, drink coffee, and eat spicy peanuts and shrimp chips.
It’s right about then I hear the underwater gurgle signaling that a contact of mine has signed onto Skype. I don’t bother to look who it is. I do have a couple of emails to answer: a request from a San Francisco gallery for a couple of Lao Zhang’s paintings to exhibit for a show titled A Remix of Progress: The Disjunction of the Status Quo; somebody named Vicky Huang representing some Chinese guy I’ve never heard of, Sidney Cao, claiming he’s a big art collector who wants to arrange “a private viewing” of Lao Zhang’s work, and Lucy Wu wanting to know if I can make her opening in Shanghai on March 12. I guess I should do something productive today. That is, other than buying a spatula.
I decide to answer Lucy first. Sure, I’ll go to her opening. She usually has good wine, and maybe she can explain to me what “the disjunction of the status quo” means.
Besides, Shanghai would be getting out of Beijing, right?
That’s when the Skype phone rings.
I switch windows. It’s my buddy Dog Turner calling.
“Hey, Baby Doc!”
“Hey, Dog. Hang on a sec. Lemme put on my headset.”
Dog twitches on the screen while I untangle my iPhone earbuds.
“Lookin’ good, Ellie,” he says.
“You, too.”
He doesn’t, really, but what am I supposed to say? Even with the low-res camera on his computer, I can see the indentation in his skull where the RPG hit. If he sat farther back from the camera, I’d see the arm that wasn’t there, but frankly, I’d rather not. I think about that too much, and my own arm starts to hurt, and my leg, which pretty much hurts all the time, although I’m getting better at ignoring it. Thanks in part to the fresh supply of Percocet my mom brought me. When I asked her about it, she just giggled and said, “Well, I still have friends.”
In the aquarium light of the computer screen, I see Dog twitching in his chair. Spasms cross his face like sudden ripples on a still pond.
“What’s up, man?” I ask. “How’s the family?”
“Mostly good.” His mouth twists.
“Mostly?”
“Kids are good. Wife… I make her crazy.” He grins lopsidedly. “You?”
“Fine,” I say.
I know something’s up with him. We’re buddies and all, we keep each other posted, but it’s not like we talk all the time. It’s hard for him to talk, for one. The TBI, the traumatic brain injury, really fucked him up. Plus, there’s the whole thing where we messed around back in Iraq, and even though it didn’t really mean anything, I still feel a little weird talking to him too much when he has a wife and a couple of kids. It’s almost worse since he got hurt in Af-Pak, because I wish I felt comfortable talking to his wife. Like, if the situation were different, I could say, “Hey, Natalie, what can I do to help?”