“Listen, we’re getting off the topic,” the MH said. He was practically shouting. “Obviously there’s a lot to be worked out here. Let’s go back to Sally’s original statement about her abuse memories.”
“She knew about it.” I pointed at Marty. “Your precious Mau-mau was in the same room and never said a word.”
My mother clammed up, making her mouth into a line. I knew, if the MH didn’t, that this was absolute. I’d seen her do it too many times in childhood. It scared me worse than anything, than her yelling, than Daddy yelling, even.
“I don’t think incest is the point,” my sister said. “We’re never going to agree on it, so why bother talking about it?”
I wondered if she and my mother had discussed strategy. It seemed possible.
Afterward I walked them to the front door. As soon as the MH was out of earshot, Ma gripped my upper arm so hard I almost screamed. “Your father is dead,” she hissed. “He is an ancestor. You must have respect for your ancestors.”
“She’s been in this place for too long,” Marty said. “I told you, Ma, it’s all these crazy people, they’re a bad influence.” She turned to me making big eyes and I felt like saying, I’m not one of your gullible white boyfriends, this act doesn’t work on me. “Honey, there’s no use brooding about the past. You just have to pick up and go on. Lots of people have breakdowns. It makes them stronger. Like a bone that’s been healed.”
“Your sister’s right.” Ma let go of me and smoothed her hair back with one hand. “And now the insurance is running out. You think about that, Sally. You discuss that with your smart psychiatrist.”
“You know I’m not staying in here,” I said. “You know I’m going to St. Pete.”
“I could call and tell them not let you come,” Ma said.
From the front door I watched the two of them proceed down the flagstones. I could tell they were arguing about where they had parked the car.
I’d just been moved up to Status Four, which meant I could go anywhere on the grounds by myself. It was only eight-thirty, plenty of time for a walk before lights out. I went upstairs to my room and grabbed a jacket. On the way out the door I remembered Nai-nai’s hairpin. I found it in my bag and slipped it into my inside pocket.
The lake was absolutely still. It was a mild, clear night. I lay down on one of the benches and looked across the water to where the willows poured down in Gothic arches. They were white, ghostly, in the light from the parking lot. Around me the shapes of the buildings lay cozy and familiar: the A-frame dining room that had so disoriented me the first night, the gym, the barrackslike adolescent unit, all those Colonial houses, including the admitting ward.
I took the hairpin out and laid it against my cheek. It was much colder than the air, colder than anything alive.
I was ready to leave.
In eighth grade, I had finally announced to my mother that I didn’t want to take piano lessons anymore.
She gave me a lecture on how important it was to have a music background.
“You don’t have one,” I said. “Nai-nai didn’t make you sing.”
Ma told me I was selfish.
“You never get a husband, Sally. You don’t know how to give in. You don’t know how to love like a wife has to love.”
I guess she’d know.
There were so many tragedies. At Willowridge, after a while you got numb. The amazing thing was that anyone survived at all.
The parking lot lights went off.
The dark is kind; why should I be afraid of it? I made out the Big Dipper, easy, over the trees, and then the North Star. Part of Orion stuck up over the horizon—he was a winter constellation, and on his way out. My favorite star was the cold blue brilliant light of Vega, but I couldn’t find her, it probably wasn’t the right season. And then I saw, upside-down from how I usually did, that bold glittering W, an M now, smack in the middle of the Milky Way. Queen Cassiopeia, brighter than anyone else, and the most abstract.
I got down off the bench and lay on my back on the wet grass and wept.
Part Two
8
My mother grew up the youngest of five daughters in a wealthy Shanghai family. My grandfather was a scholar who had studied in Paris, and by the time my mother was twelve she could speak English and French as well as Mandarin, and of course the soft, slithery local dialect. Shanghainese is elegant and musical, a feminine tongue—it is to Mandarin as Portuguese is to Spanish.
Before Communism, my mother watched her three oldest sisters get married off one by one to boys of good birth, carefully chosen by my grandparents. The year my mother turned fifteen the revolution began, and like so many of the aristocracy, the family packed up and went abroad. The Mas moved to San Diego to live with my grandmother’s cousin Su-yi. My grandfather had died in a tuberculosis epidemic, so it was only my grandmother and her two youngest daughters, Ming-yu and Bau-yu—Clear Jade and Precious Jade. They were forced to leave most of the household goods in storage. I think Nai-nai must have known that she would never see them again, for she brought all her favorite mementos with her. “So much junk,” my mother would say, rolling her eyes, when she told the story to Marty and me.
I can picture Nai-nai, tiny even in high heels and the 1940s-style navy cinched-waist suit her Shanghai tailor had copied from French Vogue, hair swept into a bun with ivory pins making an X at her nape, gold hoops in her ears. In her youth, she’d been a well-known lieder singer, traveling to Paris and Vienna on tour, so this new port didn’t faze her. I can see her standing on the dock in San Francisco watching anxiously as they unloaded the luggage-heavy brown trunks with the family character, Ma, painted in white. Although my grandmother’s English was heavily accented, she was a mezzo-soprano after all, and she shrieked at the men as they trundled the trunks down the gangplank. “Attention! You pay attention!” The Chinese Princess, the crew had dubbed her, which mortified my mother. She and her sister stood huddled together, arms linked, as the dockworkers stared at them and joked, using words my mother didn’t recognize but knew were dirty.
Their first year in America, Ming-yu, my Aunty Mabel, was sent east to college. My mother had to adjust to American high school by herself. Her spoken English was not up to her reading ability, and since spoken Chinese has no genders, she, he, and it were interchangeable to her. One day, from a stall in the girls’ bathroom, she heard a classmate mocking: “Mis-tah Bee-vah, she def-in-i-lih my fa-vor-ih tea-cha.”
“They are stupid,” she raged to Nai-nai. “I read Pride and Prejudice when I was thirteen, and they cannot spell.”
My grandmother frowned at her youngest daughter. “Eh, Bau-yu, you may be intelligent, but you don’t comb your hair properly. It’s no wonder you don’t make friends.”
Nai-nai stayed in the guest bedroom, but my mother had to share a room with the cousin’s daughter, who was attending secretarial school and silly beyond belief. The daughter had dropped her Chinese name for an American one—Grace—and her Shanghainese was so bad that my mother was forced to converse with her in English. “She has twenty kinds of nail polish on the dresser,” my mother wrote, half in scorn, half in envy, to Aunty Mabel. As ridiculous as Grace was, however, it was she who thought to take my mother shopping for plaid dirndls and shirts with Peter Pan collars so that she could blend in better.
Su-yi, my grandmother’s cousin, was from a different branch of the Shanghai family, one that was not as illustrious as Nai-nai’s. She was nervous having her overseas relatives staying and was always cooking, creating feasts of eight courses or more for weekday dinners. She always took care to include at least two seafood dishes, my grandmother’s favorite.