At my graduation, Marty showed up as the lone family representative, boyfriend in tow. She was wearing a very tight sheath splashed with purple cabbage roses and lipstick to match. “Egad,” she said, looking around the lawn, which was strewn with girls in airy white dresses. “You went to school in this place? What did they feed you—strawberries and cream?” She waved the old Instamatic at me. “Honey, they made me bring this, but you don’t really want a bunch of pictures of you and your virginal friends standing around looking goofy, do you?”
I told her I didn’t care.
“Let’s go find the champagne,” my sister said. She winked at the boyfriend. It was still Schuyler then, a hulking blond who maybe said five words the whole time he was there.
I never went home that summer but took the train straight into Boston, where I had a job at the chocolate chip cookie booth at Quincy Market. Ma called every couple of days to keep me posted. Daddy was home, Daddy was sitting up in the living room reading newspapers, Daddy had taken a walk around the block after breakfast, the doctor said that Daddy was well enough to teach the last session of summer school. When I got Marty on the phone she said that you couldn’t tell anything had happened to him at all, except that it took him a beat longer to answer when spoken to.
“Just as well,” I said.
Fran had invited me to her cousins’ house in Wellfleet for the last couple weeks in August, and I went to Providence from the Cape, taking the bus with my two suitcases, one filled with clothes, the other with art supplies. All the other kids had parents with station wagons or U-Hauls. I settled into my first semester at the Rhode Island School of Design, taking it seriously.
I hadn’t seen my father in over a year when, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, I got a message to call home.
At breakfast that morning, Ma had looked out the kitchen window and seen that the last rain had stripped the oaks in the front yard. “We have to get the boy to rake,” she said to my father. When he didn’t answer she turned to look at him. His jaw was slack, as if he were amazed at what she had said, but his eyes were pinched, focused on something behind her, beyond the window. He was dead by the time the ambulance pulled up in front of the emergency room entrance.
This is the official story, the one Ma told driving me home from the train station. I remember that she was wearing a rust-colored turtleneck sweater, a Christmas present from me, and a tweed skirt, lipstick on perfectly. She drove as smoothly as always, signaling in plenty of time before all her turns—thwack! and the clicking—and this somehow seemed to me the most astonishing thing of all.
But I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Ma was always businesslike about death. I’d come home for summer vacation my junior year of boarding school and Marty told me she’d flown to San Diego the day before to bury my grandmother. That was how I’d learned of Nai-nai’s death. I called California and begged Ma to let me come. “Not for kids,” Ma said. “You remember your Nai-nai like last time you saw her.”
The day after my father died, Marty was at the front door of our Woodside Avenue house, leaning up to hook her arm around my neck. It was the most affection she had shown me since we were kids.”Honey, I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered, and when we pulled apart I saw that she was holding a dustpan and brush. “I’m cleaning,” she said. “I guess that’s our job, you and me.”
That night Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard came over from the Holiday Inn with Chinese takeout. Marty and I spooned food into serving platters and the rice into bowls, while Ma sat at the head of the dining room table and spoke in exhausted tones to her sister and brother-in-law.
“This is time when it’s good to have daughters,” she said.
The morning of the funeral, as I was getting dressed, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Marty standing in the driveway, one foot up on the stone curb. At first I thought she was smoking a cigarette and then I realized that it was a joint. She lifted her chin steady after each toke, to hold the smoke in. For the first time since I’d heard Daddy was dead, I wanted to cry.
The service was held in the old Congregational church with its long light windows and plain furnishings that Marty and I had attended as kids. We went with Ma except at Christmas, when she’d drag Daddy along and he’d shift embarrassingly in the pew, not knowing when he was supposed to stand up or pray or open the hymnal, much less the words to any of the hymns. Daddy’s old friend Mr. Lin gave the eulogy in Chinese. Even though I couldn’t speak the language, I could tell that his accent was the same as my father’s. It was odd to hear the separate precise syllables of Mandarin in this stark white Christian chapel. Mr. Lin ended the speech in English: “Such a brilliant man, could have gone on to distinguished career in physics, he sacrifice to make good life in the United States for his daughters. We all miss him, eh?”
Sacrifice, I thought. Who exactly had sacrificed? Or been sacrificed?
Ma’s face was pale and perfectly composed over the white collar of her navy silk shirtdress. In the middle of the eulogy I happened to look over and saw a small glistening tear collect at the inside corner of one eye and begin to slide, oil-like down her cheek. She reached into her handbag and stopped it cold with a folded Kleenex. I don’t remember much else—mostly I was concentrating on not looking at the casket, because I thought I would throw up if I did.
At the house we served small glasses of sherry and fried sugared walnuts and hundred-year-old duck eggs that Aunty Mabel had sliced into quarters. “Everything from Sung Trading Company,” she whispered to me. “Remember to thank Aunty Lilah.”
All my parents’ friends were Aunty and Uncle, though Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard were the only blood. Ma stood resolutely straight as the guests came to pay their respects, leaning to kiss her and then me and Marty. My sister’s face looked ravaged, from grief or being stoned, I couldn’t tell which. Rosy-cheeked Mimi Sung was being helpful as usual, passing dishes and showing people where the bathrooms were. She had gotten quite busty, I noticed. And there was our old enemy Xiao Lu, in line with his mother and father. At nineteen, he towered over everyone else in the room. “Sorry” was all he said to us. His tone sounded preppy. Marty turned to roll her eyes at me. “What the fuck is he doing here?”
Toward the end Ma’s calm broke. She nudged my shoulder and said in an odd rushed way: “You’re in charge, you take care of everything,” and then she disappeared upstairs. Fortunately, people took this as a cue to leave, and finally Marty and I were alone in the kitchen loading the dishwasher.
“God, I’m glad that’s over,” I said.
My sister drew a deep breath. “Sa, listen, I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
“It didn’t happen the way Ma says.”
“What do you mean?”
My sister turned her swollen eyes toward me to make sure I understood the importance of what she was about to say. “They were having a fight.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“Me.”
I slammed the dishwasher door shut and pushed the buttons. The hum and gush filled the house and then settled into a steady rushing.
“It doesn’t matter, Mar. You didn’t kill him. You know how he was. He would have gotten overexcited somehow, over something, eventually.” But what I was thinking was: I gave him his first stroke, you gave him his last.
My sister nodded, slowly, and arranged herself on a stool by the stove, watching me wipe off the counters and kitchen table. Her eyes were half-closed, as if she were in a trance. Upstairs we heard the toilet flush. “Do you think we should check on her?”
“No. I think she’s all right.”