“Mmmhmm.”
“I ever tell you about my cousin in Shanghai, she got a divorce?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“In China this is unheard of. Her mother and father disown her. When they see her in the street, they look right through her. Like ghost.”
“What is the point of this story, Ma?”
“No point. Just conversation.”
Lally rapped on the side door and I went over to let her in. “Hey, sweetie!” she brayed, giving me a hug. “Boy, you look like you’ve been somewhere. Bonnie, did ya see how dark she is? Looks like a Malaysian, almost. Here, this is for you. To celebrate your birthday, but more importantly, your total and final recovery!” Never one to mince words, was Lally. I snuck a glance at Ma, saw that her mouth was set in a mean line. The gift was a pewter heart on a chain bracelet. “I got one for your sister too.” Lally, like my uncle, had always wished for daughters.
“Thanks, Lally. It’s beautiful.”
“Go set the table, Sally,” Ma said. “We eat in the dining room tonight.”
When we were all sitting down Lally said to me: “Now, I want to hear all about you. How are things in that big bad city?”
“Sally lost her job,” Ma said. “She quit, and she can’t get it back.”
“I’m freelancing,” I said.
“Just another word for unemployed.”
“Freelancing seems to be the thing these days,” Lally said. “God, this salad dressing’s divine, Bonnie, you’ll have to give me the recipe.” She started going on and on about some neighbor of ours who had a son who was a poet in New York and doing legal proofreading nights to pay the rent. She asked my sister, “And how did you say you made your living, dear?”
Marty yawned.
“She’s a clown,” I said. “She dresses up in a polka-dot suit and juggles at the South Street Seaport.”
“You have to start somewhere.” My mother smoothed her apron and smiled at Lally. “Now, how about dessert?”
After Lally left and Marty and I had loaded the dishwasher my sister retreated upstairs and I went into the living room and watched a couple of sitcoms. When I came into the kitchen for something to drink my mother was sitting at the table correcting papers. Flick, flick, flick. Marty and I used to imitate her on our already corrected school compositions and then hold them up shrieking: “I got a hundred!” It was one of the few things we did that could make Daddy look up from his newspapers.
I was leaning into the refrigerator and jumped at the sound of my mother’s voice.
“I call Valeric and she says you’re doing fine.”
“She said fine?”
“She said progress.”
“That’s a little different, Ma.”
“Maybe you don’t need her anymore.”
My mother’s stare was level, telling me nothing.
“I think it’s too soon to quit,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.
“When do you think you’re going to get better?”
This was what she used to say when I was a little girl, home from school with the mumps or the measles. In the first hours of an illness, my mother was tender and magnanimous, running out to indulge every whim: a special brand of orange soda, a stuffed animal, another box of crayons. But then I’d wake up one morning to her standing over me: “You’ve been sick for two days. When do you think you can go back to school?”
I could think of several answers to Ma’s question: Therapy is a process, not an instant cure; someone who’s just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital needs to be followed up; or even the desperate, I’ll pay for it myself if I have to. They all sounded weak, unconvincing.
“It will probably take a little while. I’ll let you know.”
This was the wrong answer—I could tell from the look on her face.
“I don’t say anything when you’re in the hospital. I do all what Valeric says I should do, I even go to family therapy. But there’s no result!”
“What do you mean, no result? What did you expect?”
“You still don’t have decent job, you still see doctor all the time.”
“Ma, it’s only been a month!”
“I know all you do in Florida, your Aunty Mabel tells me. What kind of boy! Boy from the hospital!”
“Just leave Mel out of it.”
“You’re not so sick, you can fool around with this boy. You just feel sorry for yourself, I can tell. You think ‘Poor, poor Sally’ and you imagine everything that’s happen to you, what I do to spoil your childhood, terrible things about your daddy.”
“You didn’t spoil my childhood.”
“You’re so selfish, I’m embarrassed to speak about you to my friends. They all the time talk about their children, this one gets married, this one goes to law school, and what am I suppose to say? I have a crazy daughter? I spend so much money and she is crazier than before?”
I’d never understood the expression “to see red,” but now a faint crimson bar appeared in the middle of my line of vision, so that I could only see the periphery of the scene, and not the focus, which was my mother sitting in the midst of her papers.
“You are a horrible person,” I said. “You are not even a human being.”
I turned and walked out of the kitchen. Behind me I heard her shouting, “We do everything for you, we send you to the best boarding school in America,” and it was as if Daddy were speaking. I found that I could tune it out easily—there seemed to be a switch in my brain designed specifically for this purpose.
I went up to my room and into my day pack I stuffed the following items: the carved wooden horse, my summer correspondence with Fran, the snapshot of Marty and me on the swing set on Coram Drive. Also a postcard from Lillith I found on my bureau—a photograph of a giant hot fudge sundae with a message I couldn’t quite make out, something about feast or famine. From Ma’s bedroom I called a taxi to take me to the train station and then I went down to the living room to wait.
My mother came to stand in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going back to New York.”
“Too late to take the train.”
I didn’t answer.
“I can drive you to the station, if you want.”
I picked up a copy of Newsweek from the coffee table and opened it.
The next time I looked up she had disappeared.
I studied the room, as if seeing it for the first time: the wooden laughing Buddha seated cross-legged on his cushion on the stereo cabinet, the tapestry of the Great Wall over the sofa, the set of three porcelain stools with their elaborate raised red and green curlicue designs like script on a birthday cake; there had once been four, but Marty had broken one pretending to be a circus elephant. If I could have taken anything with me, it would have been the painting in the foyer. It was of a boy on the back of a water buffalo. The boy was so insouciant—he was playing a flute and looking off into the distance. I remembered the painting was a gift from Mr. Lin, and now it occurred to me that it was probably his work.
Across from where I was sitting was a low table displaying my mother’s collection of framed photographs. My and Carey’s wedding portrait, once in the position of honor, had been removed. There were my parents and Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard all dressed up in a nightclub somewhere in Florida. A sepia picture of Nai-nai from her singing days, a perfect fullblown orchid in her sleek hair, her mouth a dark bow. Marty leaning against the front door of our house in Monterey—the photo was black and white, but I remembered the dress, a pale yellow, with navy stripes across the bodice. Marty as the Virgin Mary in the eighth-grade play, draped in blue and gold. Marty’s head shot when her hair was longer, in a bob. In none of these pictures was my sister smiling, but there was something seductively relaxed about her look, the confidence of someone who was thinking at the moment her image was being recorded: yes, yes, I am beautiful, and I deserve to be adored, I deserve everything the world is able to give me, and more.