Beautiful as Yesterday Page 33

  “I miss you too,” she says, not feeling shy saying so in front of her friends.

  After putting down the phone, Mary eats more cookies. The living room is filled with the warm aroma of the taro cookies and the green tea they’re drinking, a smell that seems to be visible, like some kind of soothing color painted on the ceiling, the walls, the window trim and sills, all the furniture. Against the light-colored sofa, chairs and the creamy carpet, the mahogany coffee table, four cups of tea holding, stands out like a piece of art. Facing Mary are silk-framed Chinese paintings of the four seasons, hanging from the top of the wall almost touching the floor.

  Mary is warm and relaxed. She looks around at her friends with a feeling of contentment, of joy. Julia and Mingyi are teasing Yaya, saying that she has finally admitted she isn’t as modern about her relationship as she had claimed. Mary suddenly has a strange feeling that her mother hasn’t passed away at all but is making hometown-style snacks in the kitchen, just as Mary remembers her doing for the new year when she and her sister were little, back in China, so long ago and so far away.

  “Guo-Mei and Guo-Ying, come and taste what I’ve made for you!” her mother would say, holding out a plate of sesame balls.

  “Coming!” The two girls would run toward their mother cheerfully, hand in hand.

  After dinner, Mary and Bob sit on the sofa in the living room. Alex has gone to bed, exhausted from a few days’ crying and his day at the amusement park.

  “Did he have a good time?” Mary asks, feeling comfortable with her head against Bob’s shoulder. It’s so quiet now, just her and her husband. Knowing her friends are leaving her one by one, Mary is overcome by a longing to be closer to Bob, feeling blessed because she still has him.

  “He didn’t smile, but he seemed to like the rides.” Bob strokes the small of her back gently.

  “Are you okay taking care of him by yourself while I’m away?”

  “Of course, yes, and I’ll work from home for a week. Mary, are you sure you don’t want me to go to China with you? I can just get a ticket tomorrow.” Bob pauses. “I know I said it before many times, but really, I’m sorry that I’ve been spending so little time at home.”

  “It’s not easy for you. It’s not like you can slack off at work.” She turns to face her husband and runs her fingers through his hair, which has grown a little too long; there’s also a few days’ growth of beard on his chin. “You haven’t slept much these days,” she says.

  “Well, you haven’t, either,” he replies.

  “Now, you just got another promotion. It’s probably more work ahead.”

  “I talked with Shirat yesterday, and he said he’s quitting. He’s found a job in Bangalore, as an entry-level manager in a bank. He’s moving his whole family back to India. He said it’s not worth it to sacrifice his marriage and family life. I’ve been thinking too. I like the job, you know, but—”

  “Just take your time. Whatever decision you make, I’ll support you. Just don’t feel you have to stay with this job until the company goes IPO. We don’t need a big house, and if it’s necessary, we can even sell our current house and rent. We rented before and it wasn’t bad. And we have enough savings to last a while, don’t we? We’re probably better off than most Americans. If you wanted, you could even quit for a while and have some rest. I have a good salary too. Even if I lost my job, that’s still not the end of the world. We can always find jobs somewhere, you know, with our educations and work experiences. Julia’s husband just found a job in Phoenix, and they are moving there. We could move too, to somewhere cheaper so we won’t have such a mortgage burden. I know it’s a cliché, but money doesn’t buy happiness.” She rushes through her speech as if to assure Bob that he has nothing to worry about: meanwhile, she is pleasantly surprised how fluent her English was this time.

  “Thanks for saying that.” He cups her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing across her skin, staring at her with softness in his eyes, the kind of softness she had thought long lost in their marriage.

  “Do you love me?” she blurts out in a half daze, not sure why she asked.

  “Of course I do. I cannot image not having you in my life.” Bob bends to kiss her on the forehead, the cheeks, the nose, the area behind her ear, then her lips. “Do you love me?” he whispers.

  She nods hard, then tears come. Oh, you foolish woman, she chastises herself. Why are you crying? But more tears arrive. Bob dries those tears with more kisses. His warm breath and soft lips send chills down her spine. She stops sobbing and opens her mouth to meet his tongue. She closes her eyes dreamily, reveling in the feel of his strong arms, his familiar body scent, their tongues intertwined in a deep French kiss. A stir of desire arises within her, strong, irresistible, and she feels, to her embarrassment, her panties’ dampness against her. No, not right now, she says to herself, not today, yet she pushes her body against Bob’s greedily, wanting to touch him, and to be touched. As they take a break from kissing, they stare at each other with a sense of appreciation, of newly found love. Bob picks her up and carries her through the kitchen toward their bedroom, like he did on their wedding night.

  “Oh, Bob, but Alex…”

  “He’s sleeping,” Bob says with a mischievous smile.

  The phone is ringing; then the answering machine starts: it’s Ingrid.

  Mary turns her head to look at the phone.

  “Want to talk with her first?” Bob asks.

  “No,” she says, with a slight hesitation. “No, I’ll call her later.” This time, she’s firm. Strangely, for the first time in her life, she feels she’s happier than Ingrid: yes, her sister has made love with many men in her life, but she, Mary, is the one who is going to have wonderful sex with her husband.

  Circling her arms around Bob’s neck, Mary regrets that she hasn’t combed her hair properly, hasn’t put on something nicer than her jeans and a plain blouse. She doesn’t even remember what kind of underwear she put on this morning. Probably those white cotton ones that she had gotten from JCPenney’s recent sale, for $9.99 a set, bra and panties. It was Julia’s fault; she can never say no to sales and has to find someone to go shopping with her. Mary feels a gentle resentment toward her friend. And she must look ugly, with swollen eyes and tear marks on her face. She won’t allow Bob to turn on the ceiling light in the bedroom, she decides. And the shaded lamp on the nightstand will have to be on low. Then she thinks of her mother. Oh, well, her mother will forgive her. She didn’t plan it. She raises her head and places her lips by Bob’s ear. “Let’s close Alex’s door.”

  SIXTEEN

  June

  INGRID OPENS THE DOOR and turns on the light with Mary behind her: they have just returned from their mother’s funeral in the countryside. Their parents’ apartment, unoccupied for six months, is dusty, stifling, smelling of mildew. After putting away their suitcases, they open every window to air out the place, then begin to clean.

  “I can still hear suo na and gongs in my ears. The music was awfully loud,” Ingrid says, using a broom to sweep away the cobwebs in the corners. She hadn’t wanted to talk about the funeral, but the subject has somehow remained on the tip of her tongue. The funeral was so surreal, it seems to her that only through talking about it again and again with her sister can she make sense of the fact that her mother has indeed left them forever. “If you hadn’t stopped Uncle, he’d have hosted a three-day banquet. But even the one-day banquet was a lot of work. After everyone left, I filled five fifty-jin rice bags with empty liquor bottles and cigarette boxes.” Ingrid recalls several drunkards singing and making a fuss.

  “Luckily Yaya warned us about what a country funeral is like.” Mary washes a piece of cloth in a basin—she is cleaning the windows.

  “It looked less like a funeral, more like a chaotic stage performance.”

  “It was a sort of show, in a way.”

  Yes, it was a show, Ingrid thinks. When she and her sister were burning the paper sacrifices, she heard a young woman with a na
ked-buttocked little boy next to her commenting on the ritual. The woman said it was such a waste and how nice it would be if the money could have been used to buy a piglet, or a fruit tree, or send a kid to school. Ingrid had felt bad: it was not the money that upset her but her and her sister’s caving in to her uncle, to the old customs. Why couldn’t they mourn their mother’s death in their own way?

  Mary continues. “But what could we do about it? Uncle wouldn’t have listened to us anyway, neither would the villagers. Uncle said to me, ‘After the funeral you just go back to the U.S., but I have to live here. If the funeral wasn’t good, I’d become the laughingstock. How could I continue living here with that kind of shame?’”

  “We could have insisted. Don’t you think? Uncle just wanted to set an example for his children, so they’d have a funeral like this for him when he dies.”

  “Don’t be so hard on Uncle, and don’t think we can change him. He has rarely traveled outside his village. If you were him, you’d probably have thought the same way. ‘Face is bigger than the sky.’ It’s all about maintaining face.”

  “I don’t think Ma would have liked such a funeral.”

  “We don’t know. Maybe she would. Ma once told me that she always burned paper money for Ba on his birthdays and the holidays. People of her age like to observe the old customs.” Mary speaks slowly and calmly, wiping the window.

  Ingrid glances at Mary, thinking that her sister is more accommodating than she is, though she doesn’t necessarily share Mary’s views. Or is she so Americanized, as Julia claimed, that she no longer understands the old rituals in China? Has she somehow abandoned her roots?

  Without Windex, or a squeegee, or stain and spot remover, cleaning the windows is painstaking, but Mary doesn’t seem to mind. To remove tough stains, she uses her fingertips and fingernails. “Whenever I came home,” she says, “the windows were always very clean. I hope Ma had hired a helper to do the job. I don’t know why I never asked her.” Her voice conveys barely concealed grief, suggesting that she is convinced their mother actually did all the cleaning herself.

  Throughout the funeral, Mary had worked with their uncle on the arrangements. While their uncle treated Ingrid like a girl, an outsider, ignoring what she said, he listened to Mary’s suggestions. Without Mary, Ingrid has come to realize, the funeral would have become a farce—their uncle had even considered hiring professional mourners, not an uncommon practice in the village. Of course, Mary was the older daughter, but something in her—perhaps her calmness or her understanding expression—made their uncle and the other villagers take her more seriously than they did Ingrid.

  After the funeral, they stayed a few more days. Every evening after dinner they walked for half an hour to visit their parents’ grave, located in the middle of a hill, surrounded by wild azalea, with several thick-branched pine trees nearby. Their uncle had told them that their father had hired a feng shui master to pick this location during one of his trips to the village. This surprised Mary and Ingrid; they wouldn’t have guessed that their Communist father, who had criticized feudal traditions so vehemently when he was alive, would have done something like this. But the grave site is indeed a nice place, especially in the evening, when the daytime noises have abated, replaced by insects chirping and tree leaves rustling in the breeze.

  They sat down together on a rock near the grave, overlooking the square fields and several adobe houses. In the dark, in the silence, they talked about their father, their mother, their memories of them, both good and bad. They had never been so frank with each other. Despite their reservations about their mother’s funeral, they felt relieved that their parents were buried together in their father’s hometown, remembering what their father liked to say when he was alive: that fallen leaves return to their roots.

  Ingrid now sits on the floor to take a break. She scans the room. “After all these years, the furniture remains the same, even its arrangement. The TV is the same brand, in the same spot. Ba’s wicker chair is where it used to be. It’s like déjà vu, like stepping into an old dream. I can almost see Ba opening the door and going out for a walk in his warden’s uniform after dinner and Ma doing dishes in the kitchen, her head bowed.”

  “Wasn’t Ba very thin? His lozenge-shaped face and bony hands. When I was leaving China, he traveled to Beijing to send me off at the airport. After handing me the luggage, he said in a flat tone, ‘Take care of yourself and don’t worry about us.’ Then he said good-bye and left, not looking back once. He didn’t like to show his emotions, you know, being a typical Chinese father. I used to think him cold and strict.” Mary looks absorbed in her narration. “I knew little about Ba at that time. Now, I think that he didn’t leave the airport after saying good-bye to me but waited in the lobby to see the plane take off through the window. He probably even cried in the men’s room if no one else was there.”

  “That was like Ba. I sometimes wished that he’d hugged us and praised us like an American father does. I’m sure he was very proud of us, especially you—you were always a top student—but he never told us anything.”

  “We weren’t very nice to Ba. Maybe he thought we despised him.”

  Ingrid is silent, remembering again how she treated her father outside her dorm room in Beijing. Then she says, “I just thought of something. Do you know that Ba had several big scars on his right leg? One ran from the knee almost to the ankle. That was why he wore long pants year round. No matter how hot it was, he never wore shorts or rolled up his pants.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I saw them when Ba was washing his feet in the sink. I was in high school then. As soon as he saw me, he rolled down his pants legs. Those scars were deep and ugly. I asked him how he’d gotten them, and he said that he fell from a tree when he was a teenager. I believed him at the time; I just didn’t think much about it, I suppose. Oh, Mary, did Ma tell you a lot of things from the past?”

  “No,” Mary replies hastily. “The past is the past. What’s the point of keeping on thinking about it?”

  Ingrid ignores her sister’s comment. “Have you seen the photo of Aunt and Ma taken in 1947? Aunt looks extremely cute. She has a high forehead, her short hair permed into small curls. She is smiling mischievously. Ma looks nice too. She wears a fur-collared coat, her head high, like a proud princess. Our grandparents must have been quite well off before the Liberation, or at least they had money for a while. There’s also a photo of Ma and Ba, taken one month after my birth. Though they’re wearing decent clothes—the type of clothes everyone wore at that time, you know—they look like skeletons. Especially Ma. Her cheeks are hollow, and her lips are ashen. When Ma was in the U.S., I asked her if she had a problem giving birth to me. She said the labor was easy and she looked sallow in the picture because of lack of nutrition. Mary, do you remember the time when Ma was pregnant with me?”

  Mary avoids Ingrid’s inquiring eyes. She squats to rinse the cloth in the basin again. “I was only five or six. How could I remember? I think Ma was telling you the truth, that she didn’t get enough nutrition.” Mary looks up at Ingrid and says cheerfully, “But look at you! You weren’t affected. You’re pretty tall for a Chinese woman.”

  Ingrid catches Mary’s momentary hesitance, so she asks again, “Ma really didn’t tell you anything?”

  “No. Nothing at all.” Mary smiles. “Don’t sound so skeptical. If Ma had told me anything, you bet that I wouldn’t have hidden it from you. We’re sisters.”

  Mary takes the basin to the kitchen. A moment later, she hollers. “I’m cleaning the stove now. Don’t come in. There are cockroaches here. Those big ones. You probably haven’t seen one for years.”

  Ingrid walks in anyway. “Don’t forget when we were little you were the one who was afraid of cockroaches. When you found one in your room, you sent me to kill it.”

  “That’s true.” Mary chuckles. “Okay, you can clean the cabinet.”

  Ingrid is going to ask more questions about the time their mo
ther was pregnant with her, but Mary says first, “Who is the guy who called you yesterday? Matthew something?”

  “Matthew Stein. Just a friend.”

  “Only a friend?”

  “Yes.” Ingrid gives Mary a discouraging look.

  “Okay. I got it,” Mary says in a half-serious, half-joking way. “In our next lives, let’s switch; you’ll be the older sister and I’ll be the younger one. Then you’ll know how I feel.”

  Ingrid laughs. She takes a wet towel Mary hands to her and begins to clean the cabinet. “I only got one call, while you got many. Mingyi, Yaya, Julia, your church friends. Your phone kept ringing. Bob called you at least five times, right? He and Alex must have been missing you a lot.”

  “Rather than missing me, they’re probably missing their chef, janitor, and gardener,” Mary jokes. “Believe it or not, Bob cooks every day. Now he doesn’t have time to play computer games or watch sports on TV. Alex said that his dad is a good cook and he played with him and told him stories every night.”

  “How is Bob?”

  “He’s doing all right. Though many small companies are going bankrupt, his just got funding from a venture capitalist, and it can last at least another year. They’re actually hiring. His ex-boss at Santa Clara University contacted him a few days ago and said that he’d love to take him back. Bob is considering it right now. He was just promoted to director. He has to work much harder at a start-up and the job isn’t secure, but it’s more challenging and he gets paid more. In Silicon Valley, having a mortgage is a big financial burden.” Mary lowers her voice. “It was I who asked him to join a start-up, but now I want him to go back to the university, to get some rest. If the housing market crashed, we could always move to a smaller house or sell our house and rent.”

  “How about your own job?”

  “I don’t think about it. If I were laid off, I’d probably get a pretty good severance package, and I could also apply for unemployment benefits.” Simulating a cheerful voice, Mary adds, “Capitalist countries aren’t always bad.”