Centuries of June (27 page)

She could not take his meaning, only that he had delivered it to the correct address as printed on the brown paper surface. “Thank you,” she said. “Wait right here, and I’ll find a penny for your troubles.”

When she returned to the door, the boy was gone.

With great care, she opened the packet. Wrapped in red tissue paper were a few personal things she instantly recognized as her husband’s. A silver pocket watch engraved “Virginia, Nevada” from his trip there. A tortoiseshell comb that Flo had given him on his thirtieth birthday. A straight razor with an ivory handle. A leather billfold, which she opened and found inside forty-nine dollars and a carte de visite with a photograph of the family, probably from before the silver disaster, and on the reverse, the family name and address of the octagon house. Stashed in the secret compartment was a yellowed clipping from an ancient newspaper, a brief story about the robbery of a red lacquer box filled with cash, owned by a well-to-do Chinatown importer named Li, a longtime resident of the city who had first worked the California gold fields back in the glory days.

A letter accompanied these tattered effects:

Please forgive me English
.

I am returning these few things of my tenant, Mr. James Worth, who left this world peacefully some months past. He was an ideal man and never caused any trouble. Although he seemed hale and hearty during our long acquaintance, he must have been otherwise suffering, for no one could enjoy his bed and sleep more than our Mr. Worth. I do not know if he is survived by any family, but in good conscience, I send these few remainings to the last no address
.

Ah Sum

B
eneath the English signature, the author had printed a character in Chinese, but this meant nothing more to her than the final inscrutable sign of her incomprehensible man.

T
he spotlight snapped off, the houselights were raised instantly, and the shower curtain was drawn back a final time. The other women in the room gasped one by one as the golden jewelry melted from their necks and arms and evaporated from their ears and hair. All of the silver stock certificates in the bathtub began to curl and form little spheres, and as they rose, they changed into soap bubbles, exploding as they touched any surface, until the tub was clean and empty.

T
wo young sisters, maybe ages six and three, screamed in the front yard as their parents blew soap bubbles into the summer air. Catching the falling light, the bubbles spun and danced, and with each new bunch blossoming from the wands, the girls chased after the floaters, following dizzying patterns, to capture with claps or open hands the ephemeral and shout with delight at each surprising pop. When the sun had nearly set, the fireflies began to appear, blinking their small lights on the lawn and in the boxwood and fragrant rosebush. The little sisters shadowed these insects, running after the slow erratic flights with outstretched arms to lure one to their fingers or clamp down on one struggling along a blade of grass. Their squeals upon capturing each bug sounded like ecstatic sirens, and they brought every prisoner to their waiting parents to show them the green glow in the cave of their tiny fists, and then, with a shake, released each into the June sky. From across the street, I had watched this comedy unfold, spying on the young family while I pretended to listen to one of the guests at our cookout drone on about marinades. My girlfriend, Sita,
was trapped on the other end of the deck by two men from the architectural firm. They wooed her with a story about kayaking down the Potomac River. I longed for her to come join me on the chaise longue and watch the girls chase fireflies. But as the stars appeared in the night, the parents rose and called their daughters inside. My coworker began to explicate aromatic rubs and the Zen of the Maillard Reaction. Sita seemed enthralled by the pair of office goofs. The moment passed, as it always does.

F
ingers long and thin and stained with ink and nicotine flashed before my eyes. The old man was fanning his hand before me to see if I was awake or had fallen into some trance. The bubbles that lately had filled the air had disappeared, though the crowd of people in the bathroom was still real as ever. Four of the women stood at the cardinal points of the room’s compass, and Flo slouched, disconsolate, on the edge of the tub. She seemed to be speaking of me when she eulogized the late Mr. Worth.

“I can forgive anything but laziness in a man. Show me a man without ambition, and I’ll show you a living corpse. Sure, he had his ups and downs, what else is life? But to give up like that, to crawl into bed and never try, well, it’s a form of cowardice, isn’t it? I’d take a crooked man, a liar, a brute, a fake, a cheat over the lazy man. Give up on yourself, okay, but give up on the rest of your responsibilities?”

Dolly leaned forward and stuck the jut of her jaw into the cradle of her hand. “So, whatever happened to her?”

“Lived for years in that house and was well known around the city as that old lady with the red box, which she carried everywhere she went. Perished, like so many, in the great quake of aught-six, and when they found her, buried in the rubble of the octagon house, she still had that lacquer box clutched in her hands, had to pry it off her. Funny
thing, when they opened it, all they found was an old comb, a silver pocket watch, and a rusty straight razor. Not a cent. She’d put it all in the bank and a few stocks and made do off the interest. Left a small fortune to the Chinese American Benevolent Society.”

The last bit of her story made me remorseful for the hardship and loneliness she had to endure those final decades, and at the same time, I was pleased to learn that she had held on to both the box and the money. And as an architect, I was further delighted to learn that the eight-sided house withstood nearly sixty years of earthquakes, not to mention the hole in the wall. They certainly don’t make them like they used to. Almost by instinct, I began sketching in my imagination the plans for a modern octagon house of two stories and an attic, and thus engaged, I slipped away into the comfort of my mind. Perhaps it was the example of the man so desperate for nothing more than a bed, but an enormous fatigue settled into my bones, and I may have fallen asleep, for the next thing I remember was the sound of the old man’s fingersnapping next to my ear.

“Wake up, Sonny. The night is young, and so are we.” The five women chuckled at his remark. “You were just about to relate how the dancing dames of the Old West were assaulting you with hugs and kisses.”

A sort of yellow fog occluded my vision, and when I awoke fully and shook the exhaustion from my eyes, there before me in Beckett’s lap sat the child, now older by some months. He looked closer to two than to one year old, and when he smiled, eight teeth appeared in his bright red mouth.

“So that we may have no further interruptions to your saga,” Beckett said, “perhaps it would be wise to find some nourishment for this young bucko. Would you have any Melba toast in the larder? Or they seem to favor dry breakfast cereal in the shape of life preservers. Circles of bananas. Cold Spaghetti-os. Any morsel, really, small
enough to be picked up by tiny fingers but soft enough to avoid choking if swallowed whole.” He whispered an aside. “They feel independent at this age if they feed themselves, matteradam if they make an unholy mess. Would you have some tidbit about the place?”

I informed him that a search of the pantry would be necessary.

Beckett addressed the toddler directly. “What do you say, young man, some num-yum-num in order?”

“Soightenly,” the baby said.

I bowed to his wishes and backed out of the bathroom.

Grateful for the silence and emptiness of the hallway, I paused with my hand on the doorknob and considered my predicament. Although this had long been my home, it felt like a strange land in which strange things had been happening all night, ever since I found myself naked and bleeding on the floor. No, before that, strange things from the moment I arrived home to discover the seven bicycles splayed across the front yard. Or perhaps even earlier? I tried to remember the last normal thing to have happened, retracing my steps past that homecoming, but memory failed me. All I could truly recall was waking in the middle of the night and finding my way to the bathroom.

The doorknob jiggled in my hand, so I let go and hurried downstairs to look for some food for the baby. At the bottom landing, I glanced to the right and saw that everything had changed in the living room. The white walls had been painted sea green and the decor had morphed from my rather traditional Stickley to a sleek fusion of styles, the lines vaguely art deco but the furnishing a mixture of Japanese-Italian-Southwestern-Zen ethos, favoring a kind of modern simplicity. It all looked like some interior decorator’s misguided vision of the future. Instead of the old television, there stood a panel thin as glass, but flexible to the touch. Worst of all, my books were missing. There was not a volume to be seen, not even
The Poetics of Space
. It looked like a wasteland.

More formal and austere than before, the dining room bore only the faintest traces of my design, and the kitchen appeared to have been dropped directly from the spaceship of an anal-retentive species of aliens. Gone were the rustic cabinets, the bread on the counter, the booze collecting dust, and the cookie jar molded into the shape of a mermaid that my brother had acquired on some Caribbean vacation. Stainless-steel cabinets and appliances in brushed nickel gave the room cleanliness and order, but the immediate effect was mitigated by the sensation of having wandered into a morgue. What lurked behind those closed metal drawers? It all looked sterile and dangerous. I opened the cupboard in the area where the cereal had once been stored, but the freakish designer who had made over the outside of the room had carefully catalogued and labeled the foodstuffs into clear plastic containers. The cheese crackers were filed beneath the challah and above the chutney. Alphabetized. Talk about measuring one’s life out in coffee spoons (between the cocoa and the corn chips). Imagining the baby might be thirsty after his snack, I fished around in the gigantic fridge and poured a half glass of skim milk. I also remembered that the cat was about the house somewhere, and I left a saucer of water on the floor. Not wanting to wake anyone, I softly called for Harpo, here kitty, kitty, but no meow echoed back. Cats are notoriously independent and cannot always be bribed, like dogs, with food. I shut off the lights and made my way through the strange rooms to the upstairs landing.

The urge to peek in on them was too strong, so I softly elbowed open the door to my bedroom, just a skosh, enough to see the three bodies remaining on the bed. Two of the women groaned slightly at the disturbance and tangled themselves together in a knot, and the third had not moved all night, if indeed the night can be said to have passed at all, but she remained still, her face to the wall, and her hand resting on the swell of her hip. For a moment, I watched the rise and fall of her breathing, and not wishing to disturb her sleep, I left the room as
quietly as I had arrived. The floorboards groaned at my tread, and the bathroom door flew open suddenly, flooding the space with light.

“There you are,” the old man said, pulling me by the wrist into the cramped room. “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting for ages.”

They had been up to their usual shenanigans in my absence. Someone had found a lipstick and rouge, and they had painted their faces. And each woman had a new hairstyle: Marie in a medusa of dreadlocks, Alice in a Veronica Lake wave that dipped over one eye, Dolly in twin braided pigtails of prodigious length, and Jane and Flo, tall and small, in matching pageboys. Powder caked their faces, and they looked altogether artificial. Beckett’s eyes had been shadowed with kohl, making his stare starker still, and even the baby had rosy cheeks. Perhaps the little one smelled or saw the cereal through the plastic or heard a typical rattle, for he implored me by clenching and unclenching his miniature hand to give over the loot.

I pulled off the lid and offered the container, and he reached in up to his wrist and came away with little Oaty-Ohs sticking to his skin and spilling from his grasp. The tot seemed more concerned with what he had lost than with what was still in hand, and he struck me in the moment as somewhat emblematic of the human condition, not to read too much into basic greed and regret. He shoved the lot in his mouth and happily chewed and chewed. Alice took the cup of milk and set it on the sink counter, and then reached for her broom and pulled out a single strand of straw and blew on one end, forcing a hole the length of it to make a suitable tube through which the child might easily drink. The crowd in the bathroom saluted her ingenuity, and everyone watched as if they had never before seen a child take a sip. His first assay was too forceful and the boy gasped and spewed out the milk, but he soon learned his lesson, and general applause was proffered. Fondness and pride buoyed our hearts. I wondered what raising a child with Sita might be like.