Since childhood, Ruth had thought about death every day, sometimes many times a day. She thought everyone must secretly do the same, but no one talked openly about it except her mother. She had pondered in her young mind what death entailed. Did people disappear? Become invisible? Why did dead people become stronger, meaner, sadder? That's what her mother seemed to think. When Ruth was older, she tried to imagine the precise moment when she could no longer breathe or talk or see, when she would have no feelings, not even fear that she was dead. Or perhaps she would have plenty of tear, as well as worry, anger, and regrets, just like the ghosts her mother talked to. Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown. And that contained all sorts of bad possibilities. It was that unknown which made her decide that no matter how terrible and unsolvable her life seemed, she would never willingly kill herself. Although she remembered a time when she had tried.
It happened the year she turned eleven. Ruth and her mother had moved from Oakland to the flatlands of Berkeley, to a dark-shingled bungalow behind a butter-yellow cottage owned by a young couple in their twenties, Lance and Dottie Rogers. The bungalow had been a potting shed and garage that Lance's parents remodeled into an illegal in-law unit during World War Two and rented to a series of brides whose husbands had departed for battle in the Pacific via the Alameda Naval Station.
The ceilings were low, the electricity often shorted out, and the back wall and one side abutted a fence on which alley cats howled at night. There was no ventilation, not even a fan over the two-burner gas stove, so that when LuLing cooked at night, they had to open the windows to let out what she called the "greasy smell." But the rent was cheap, and the place was in a neighborhood with a good intermediate school attended by the smart and competitive sons and daughters of university professors. That was why LuLing had moved there in the first place, she liked to remind Ruth, for her education.
With its small-paned windows and yellow shutters, the bungalow resembled a dollhouse. But Ruth's initial delight soon turned into peevishness. The new home was so small she had no privacy. She and her mother shared a cramped, sunless bedroom that allowed for nothing more than twin beds and a dresser. The combined living room, eating area, and efficiency kitchen afforded no place to hide. Ruth's only refuge was the bathroom, and perhaps for this reason she developed numerous stomach ailments that year. Her mother was usually in the same room as she was, doing her calligraphy, cooking, or knitting, activities that kept her hands busy but left her tongue all too free to interrupt Ruth when she was watching TV. "You hair getting too long. Hair cover your glasses like curtain, can't see. You think this good-looking, I telling you not good-looking! You tune off TV, I cut hair for you… Eh, you hear me. Tune off TV…"
Her mother took Ruth's television-watching as a sign that she had nothing better to do. And sometimes she would see this as a good opportunity for a talk. She would take down the sand tray from the top of the refrigerator and set it on the kitchen table. Ruth's throat would grow tight. Not this again. But she knew that the more she resisted, the more her mother would want to know why.
"Precious Auntie mad-it me?" her mother would say when Ruth had sat for several minutes without writing anything in the sand.
"It's not that."
"You feel something else matter?… Another ghost here?"
"It's not another ghost."
"Oh. Oh, I know… I die soon… I right? You can say, I not afraid."
The only time her mother didn't bother her was when she was doing her homework or studying for a test. Her mother respected her studies. If she interrupted her, all Ruth had to do was say, "Shh! I'm reading." And almost always, her mother fell quiet. Ruth read a lot.
On good-weather days, Ruth would take her book to the dwarf-sized porch of the bungalow, and there she'd sit with tucked legs on a bouncy patio chair with a clam-shaped back. Lance and Dottie would be in the yard, smoking cigarettes, pulling weeds out of the brick walkway or pruning the bougainvillea that covered one wall of their cottage like a bright quilt. Ruth would watch them surreptitiously, peering over the top of her book.
She had a crush on Lance. She thought he was handsome, like a movie star with his neatly cropped hair, square jaw, and lanky, athletic body. And he was so easygoing, so friendly to her, which made her even more shy. She had to pretend to be fascinated by her book or the snails that slimed the elephant plants, until finally he noticed her and said, "Hey there, squirt, you can go blind reading too much." His father owned a couple of liquor stores, and Lance helped with the family business. He often left for work in the late morning and returned at three-thirty or four, then took off again at nine and came back late, long after Ruth had given up listening for the sound of his car.
Ruth wondered how Dottie had been lucky enough to marry Lance. She wasn't even that pretty, though Ruth's new friend at school, Wendy, said that Dottie was cute in a beach-bunny way. How could she say that? Dottie was tall and bony, and about as huggable as a fork. Plus, as her mother had pointed out, Dottie had big teeth. Her mother had demonstrated to Ruth by pulling her own lips back with her fingers so that her gums showed on the top and bottom. "Big teeth, show too much inside out, like monkey." Later Ruth stared in the bathroom mirror and admired her own small teeth.
There was another reason Ruth thought Dottie did not deserve Lance: She was bossy and talked too loud and fast. Sometimes her voice was milky, as if she needed to clear her throat. And when she yelled, it sounded like rusty metal. On warm evenings, when their back windows were open, Ruth listened as Lance's and Dottie's garbled voices drifted across the yard and into the bungalow. On quite a few occasions, when they argued, she could hear clearly what they were saying.
"Damn it, Lance," she heard Dottie yell one night, "I'm going to throw out your dinner if you don't come right now!"
"Hey, gimme a break. I'm on the can!" he answered.
After that, whenever Ruth was in the bathroom, she imagined Lance doing the same, the two of them trying to avoid the people who nagged them without end.
Another night, as Ruth and her mother sat at the kitchen table with the sand tray between them, Dottie's husky voice rang out:
"I know what you did! Don't you play Mr. Innocent with me!" "Don't tell me what the fuck I did, 'cause you don't know!" This was followed by two door slams and the revving of the red Pontiac before it roared off. Ruth's heart was racing along with it. Her mother shook her head and clucked her tongue, then muttered in Chinese, "Those foreigners are crazy."
Ruth felt both thrilled and guilty over what she had heard. Dottie had sounded just like her mother, accusing and unreasonable. And Lance suffered as she did. The only difference was, he could talk back. He said exactly what Ruth wished she could tell her mother: Don't tell me what I think, 'cause you don't know!
In October, her mother asked her to give the rent check to the Rogerses. When Dottie opened the door, Ruth saw that she and Lance were busy unloading a huge box. Inside was a brand-new color television set, brought home in time to watch The Wizard of Oz, Dottie explained, which was going to air at seven o'clock that night. Ruth had never seen a color TV before, except in a store window.
"You know that part in the movie where everything is supposed to go from black-and-white to color?" Dottie said. "Well, on this set, it really does turn to color!"
"Hey, squirt," Lance said, "why'ncha come over and watch with us?"
Ruth blushed. "I don't know…"
"Sure, tell your mom to come over too," said Dottie.