I went into the dining room to pour myself a glass of sherry. Back at the kitchen table, I said, “I thought Roger was sweet.” Roger was Schuyler’s replacement, a Yale rugby player, who had shown up for the reception. I could tell he saw my sister as some delicate Asian flower. On my way upstairs to get more hand towels for the downstairs bathroom, I’d brushed past the two of them sitting on the landing. He was kissing the top of her hair and murmuring, “Baby, baby.” In my entire life no one had ever called me baby.
“Yeah, he is sweet,” Marty agreed absently, her voice trailing off and getting lost in the racket of the dishwasher.
The Formica of the table was a tan and cream design that resembled birch bark. Rubbed into the pattern I saw a faint soy sauce stain I had missed.
“To die in your own kitchen,” I said.
“He died in the ambulance.”
“But he was probably completely out of it by then.”
Marty stuck her hand out and I passed her the glass. She took a swallow and then said in a muffled voice, “This is what people drink at funerals, this wussy stuff. No, I saw him, there, before they carried him out.” She pointed to the floor below the kitchen table, across from where I was sitting, where Daddy always sat. “His face was a mess, he was drooling and everything. But he was looking at me. He knew what was happening all right. Ma was the one who called 911. She woke me up and said: ‘Come down and stay with your father.’”
My sister looked up and repeated: “ ‘Stay with your father.’ “ Her mouth twitched and I thought she was going to cry.
I pictured the chair with its back to the floor and then, like an echo, my father lying beside it, half under the table. His long body fallen like a crooked tree. I could imagine his upturned face as my sister described it, all pulled down on one side, far worse than the first stroke, the gray skin quivering where it had been stretched. One eye staring straight up, embedded in a nest of wrinkles, and black with terror.
After a moment, Marty said dreamily, “Sa, do you think you’ll ever get married?”
“Maybe,” I said.
My sister tipped her head back so that I could see the clean line of her jaw and her throat convulsing as she swallowed the last of the sherry. She set the glass down on the stove with a little click. “Well, I’m never. I don’t see why I can’t just live with people.”
“Ma would love that.”
“Ma doesn’t care as much as you think.”
The dishwasher hiccuped and eased into the dry cycle. Now we could hear a car climbing the hill outside before making the turn down our long street, and then upstairs a slow, sighing creak as our mother turned over in her bed, alone. I was exhausted, but at the same time ready to stay up all night with my sister. I thought that if we sat there long enough, Daddy would be completely erased from the room.
Ma was ominously quiet as we walked side by side down the hallway to the foyer. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Lillith and her uncle. He was much younger than I’d expected—thin fair hair slicked back from a high forehead not unlike Lillith’s, wearing a white-and-purple-striped shirt and a green Hermes tie. Fastidious. Certainly not someone you’d think would stick tubes up someone’s anus or play with their shit. Lillith had her hands pressed to either side of her face and was mouthing something up at him.
My mother opened her purse and took out her car keys. “I forgot to tell you. Carey called.”
“Did you tell him where I was?”
“What do you want, everyone to know you’re in a place like this?”
“He was my husband, Ma. He can know.” When she didn’t answer I said, “Come on. Aren’t there psychiatric hospitals in China?”
She muttered something I didn’t catch.
“What?”
“I don’t like these rules. Why can’t I call my own daughter?”
“Next time, Ma. I’ll see you next time, at family therapy.”
“Your sister is coming home.”
“When?”
“I tell her soon. It’s too hard for old lady all alone.”
“Oh, come on, Ma. You’re not old.” But as I said it I saw her paleness, paler than the powder that covered it. When had she started wearing powder?
An MH was standing in the foyer, seeing the families out. She smiled at my mother. “Hello, Mrs. Wang. I’m glad to see you made it tonight.”
“That girl has good skin without foundation,” Ma said to me.
The front of our unit had a sliding glass door that was controlled electronically from the nurses’ station. As it whooshed open for my mother the smell of wet earth and trees came gusting in, and for the first time in months I remembered what it felt like to be well.
5
Remembering.
That was how they judged you in the loony bin, by how much you remembered and how well you related it. My group was getting frustrated. You would have thought I was betraying them in some way. I’d given them every single detail and they wanted more.
“Sally, you’re not a reporter. This is your life.”
“You can tell us. You may fall apart, but you won’t die.”
I knew what they were after: rage.
They pointed to my tiger stripes: this is what happens if you don’t scream, beat on a pillow.
“When are you going to confront your mother?”
“When are you going to confront your sister?”
Valeric was more patient than my group, taking down all the pieces I could conjure up without immediately wanting to fit them together. Her scribbling was especially prolific, I’d noticed, when it came to my dreams. But what, exactly, was the point? What was the use of calling up the past when you were drowning, how was it going to save you? Take Rachel—she was better off than any of us, because she’d figured out the time when her life was perfect and moved back there. Why should she have had to hold something in her mind like her boyfriend’s brains splashing all over a tree trunk if she couldn’t bear it?
And Lillith. She’d developed her memory into an art. How many times had she told the story of her uncle, with how many variations? She took out all this drama and wore it like a shawl, flinging it about her for everyone to gasp about. She never failed to weep at certain points in the telling, as if she were reading the sad part of a book over and over. But I couldn’t see that her remembering had helped her any. She was either crazy and unreachable or obsessed with the past. Either way she was trapped.
Valerie said you remember in order to understand. I wished it were that easy. I wished I could step back from my life, as if it were a painting in progress, study it from different angles, in different lights, so I could figure out where to put the next brush stroke.
In OT I tried my hand at the potter’s wheel, making bowls, which I flattened down afterward. I loved the feeling of the cold slippery mass disintegrating beneath the pressure of my palms.
“Masochist,” said Mel. He was sitting at a table behind me rubbing a copper sheet over a mold.
“Destruction is the flip side of creation.”
“Right,” he said, smirking.
On Easter Sunday he’d introduced us to his ex-girlfriend Bethie, a slight blonde in a ratty rabbit coat who couldn’t take her eyes off him. She was partly responsible for his being in here. They’d been arguing in the car when a cop pulled them over. In a classic case of displaced anger Mel had punched the policeman in the jaw.
Lillith came by carrying a tray of sculptures for the kiln. They were miniatures of food: a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, a hot dog in a bun, an ice cream sundae with an out-sized maraschino cherry tilting off the top.
“Want a bite?” she asked us.
“I’ll wait till they’re baked,” I said.
“Dibs on the sundae.” Mel reached over and poked the cherry, making a dent.
“STOP IT.” Lillith snatched the tray away. She was acting anorexic, making food instead of eating it. As she marched toward the kiln, it struck me that she had the bearing of a mad queen, all bones and misplaced energy. Her hair, which she was wearing in twin skinny braids plastered around her head, even sort of looked like a crown. Although it wasn’t a particularly cold day she was covered in layers—two turtlenecks, a button-down shirt, and a sweatshirt—at least that’s what I could see—which somehow managed to accentuate, rather than hide, her skeletal form.