Had she downplayed the problems over the past six months? Or had Art simply not been paying attention? She was frustrated by how little they seemed to know each other.
"I think it would be easier if you hired help to take care of you and the girls," Ruth said.
Art sighed.
"I'm sorry. It's just that the housekeepers I get for my mother keep quitting, and I can't get Auntie Gal or anyone else to take care of her except for an occasional day here and there. Auntie Gal said that the one week she spent with her was worse than running after her grandkids when they were babies. But at least she finally believes the diagnosis is real and that ginseng tea isn't a cure-all."
"Are you sure something else isn't going on?" he asked, following Ruth into the Cubbyhole.
"What do you mean?" She took down diskettes and notebooks from the shelves.
"Us. You and me. Do we need to talk about something more than just your mother's mind falling apart?"
"Why do you say that?"
"You seem-I don't know-distant, maybe even a little angry."
"I'm tense. Last week I saw how she really is, and it frightened me. She's a danger to herself. She's far worse than I thought. And I realize the disease is further along than I first thought. She's probably had it six or seven years already. I don't know why I never noticed-"
"So your going to live there has nothing to do with us?"
"No," Ruth said firmly. And then in a softer voice, "I don't know." And after a long silence, she added, "I remember you asked me once what I was going to do about my mother. And it struck me. Yes, what am / going to do? I felt it was all up to me. I've tried to handle it the best I can, and this is it. Maybe my moving out does have to do with us, but now, if there's anything wrong with us, it's secondary to what's wrong with my mom. That's all I can handle right now."
Art looked uncertain. "Well, when you feel you're ready to talk…" He drifted off, so miserable, it seemed to Ruth, she was almost tempted to assure him that nothing was really wrong.
LuLing was also suspicious as to why Ruth needed to live with her.
"Someone asked me to write a children's book, with illustrations of animals," Ruth said. She was now accustomed to telling lies without feeling guilty. "I was hoping you'd do the drawings, and if you did, it would be easier if we worked together here, less noisy that way."
"How many animal? What kind?" LuLing was as excited as a child going to the zoo.
"Anything we want. You get to decide what to draw, Chinese style."
"All right." Her mother looked pleased at the prospect of being vital to her daughter's success. Ruth sighed, relieved yet sad. Why hadn't she ever asked her mother to make drawings before? She should have done it when her mother's hand and mind were still steady. It broke her heart to see her mother trying so hard, being so conscientious, so determined to be valuable. Making her mother happy would have been easy all along. LuLing simply wanted to be essential, as a mother should be.
Each day, she went to her desk and spent fifteen minutes grinding her inkstick. Luckily, many of the drawings she did were of subjects she had drawn many times for scroll paintings-fish, horse, cat, monkey, duck- and she executed them and the characters from a neuromotor memory of the strokes. The results were shaky yet recognizable renditions of what she once had done perfectly. But the moment LuLing attempted the unfamiliar, her hand flailed in synchrony with her confusion, and Ruth became as distressed as her mother, though she tried not to show it. Every time LuLing finished a drawing, Ruth praised it, took it away, then suggested a new animal to draw.
"Hippo?" LuLing puzzled over the word. "How you say in Chinese?"
"Never mind," Ruth said. "How about an elephant? Do an elephant, you know, the one with a long nose and big ears."
But LuLing was still frowning. "Why you give up? Something hard maybe worth more than easy. Hippo, what look like? Horn right here?" She tapped the top of her head.
"That's a rhinoceros. That's good too. Do a rhinoceros, then."
"Not hippo?"
"Don't worry about it."
"I not worry! You worry! I see this. Look your face. You not hiding from me. I know. I your mother! Okay-okay, you don't worry hippo anymore. I worry for you. Later I remember, then tell you, you be happy. Okay now? Don't cry anymore."
Her mother was good at being quiet when Ruth was working. "Study hard," she would whisper. But if Ruth was watching television, LuLing, as she always had, figured she was not doing anything important. Her mother then gabbed about GaoLing, rehashing her sister's greatest insults to her over the years. "She want me to go love-boat cruise to Hawaii. I ask her, Where I have this kind money? My Social Security only seven hundred fifty dollar. She tell me, You too cheap! I tell her, This not cheap, this poor. I not rich widow. Hnh! She forget she once want marry my husband. Tell me when he die, lucky she choose other brother…"
Sometimes Ruth listened with interest, trying to determine how much of the story LuLing changed in each retelling, feeling reassured when she repeated the same story. But other times Ruth was simply irritated by having to listen, and this irritation made her feel strangely satisfied, as if everything was the same, nothing was wrong.
"That girl downstair eat popcorn almost every night! Burn it, fire alarm go off. She don't know, I can smell! Stink! Popcorn all she eat! No wonder skinny. Then she tell me, this not work right, that not right. Always complaining, threat me 'lawsuit in-jury, code vio-la-tion'…"
At night, as Ruth lay in her old bed, she felt she had come back to her adolescence in the guise of an adult. She was the same person and yet she was not. Or perhaps she was two versions of herself, Ruth1969 and Ruth1999, one more innocent and the other more perceptive, one needier, the other more self-sufficient, both of them fearful. She was her mother's child, and mother to the child her mother had become. So many combinations, like Chinese names and characters, the same elements, seemingly simple, reconfigured in different ways. This was the bed from her childhood, and still within were those youthful moments before dreams, when she ached and wondered alone: What's going to happen? And just as in childhood, she listened to her breathing and was frightened by the idea that her mother's might one day stop. When she was conscious of it, each inhalation was an effort. Expiration was simply a release. Ruth was afraid to let go.
Several times a week, LuLing and Ruth would talk to ghosts. Ruth pulled out the old sand tray stored on top of the refrigerator and offered to write to Precious Auntie. Her mother reacted politely, the way people do when offered a box of chocolates: "Oh!… Well, maybe just little." LuLing wanted to know if the children's book was going to make Ruth famous. Ruth had Precious Auntie say that LuLing would be.
LuLing also asked for updates on the stock market. "Dow Jones go up or down?" she asked one day.
Ruth drew an upward arrow.
"Sell Intel, buy Intel?"
Ruth knew her mother watched the stock market mostly just for fun. She had not found any letters, junk mail or otherwise, from brokerage firms. Buy on sale, she decided to write.
LuLing nodded. "Oh, wait till down. Precious Auntie very smart."
One night, as Ruth held the chopstick in her hand, ready to divine more answers, she heard LuLing say: "Why you and Artie argue?"
"We're not arguing."
"Then why you not live together? This because me? My fault?"
"Of course not." Ruth said this a bit too loudly.
"I think maybe so." She gave Ruth her all-knowing look. "Long time 'go, you first meet him, I tell you, Why you live together first? You do this, he never marry you. You remember? Oh, now you thinking, Ah, Mother right. Live together, now I just leftover, easy throw away. Don't be embarrass. You be honest."