End of East, The (17 page)

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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The second baby arrives. Another girl.
Shew Lin wants to laugh, cackle loudly at the way fate is playing her daughter-in-law. When Pon Man arrives home from the hospital late on a foggy November night (the smell of apples and burning leaves in the air, a smell, Shew Lin often thinks, that is nothing like the mangoes and dust of the village), he seems afraid to mention the baby at all. Shew Lin carefully looks grim, nods slowly when he recounts the baby’s weight, the dimples already in her knuckles.
“Daisy,” Pon Man says, washing his hands at the kitchen sink. “Like the flower. You know, the white one with the petals and the yellow heart.”
Seid Quan nods, smiles uncertainly and congratulates his son with a handshake. Pon Man looks disappointed that he has already washed his hands.
When the baby and Siu Sang return home, Shew Lin’s heart secretly jumps at the pain of wanting to hold the little girl
all the time, of loving her so hard that her entire body shakes with it. But her broad face never changes from the same stony look she has always had, the one that falls away only when Siu Sang leaves the room. Still, she knows that a grandson will somehow fix things, give Seid Quan and Pon Man a miniature version of themselves (amalgamated, an unbreakable hybrid of him and him, a living example of how they could live together without the silence that bats down spoken words).
She must fear me
, she thinks as she watches Siu Sang leave the living room,
or the family will fall apart. Without fear, she will never do as I want.
She looks over at her husband and son, reading newspapers at opposite ends of the long, narrow room, facing each other yet almost totally obscured.
It wasn’t so long ago that she first stepped off the boat, saw the two of them together for the first time. She arrived, her loose dress hiding all the accumulated flesh of childbirth and old age she acquired in those lonely years. She was the family’s connection between the small village in China where she was born, and had once expected to die, and a port city in Canada where she knew no one except these two men, both, in different ways, products of her body.
She was unsure which old man standing on the dock was her husband. The other wives, all in their fifties and sixties, were standing behind her, murmuring their confusion. These men were thin, ghostly figures in the mist, no more tangible than the cloudy blue mountains in the distance.
A whole army of phantoms
, she thought as she scanned the crowd for something, anything that looked familiar. Perhaps a cough, a cologne, a thin hand raised in greeting. Anything.
Pon Man stepped forward, the only young man there, and held his hands out to his mother.
In her hurry to reach her son, she forgot to look for her husband. She held Pon Man’s face in her hands, making sure he was as flawless as he had been when he left her.
“So tall,” she said, “so handsome. Must be the cold Canadian air.”
It was only then that she saw Seid Quan, wearing a suit stiff with newness. His Adam’s apple poked out above his collar, and his face, finally in full colour, was crooked, wrong somehow, and old. This was not the face she remembered from his last visit home, the visit during which they conceived their son.
But then he reached out and touched her hand and she remembered. The surprising softness of a hand that knows almost nothing but hard work.
She walks back to the kitchen, intending to look into the garbage can to see if Siu Sang—who, since she returned from the hospital, has remained remarkably silent—has thrown out any food that could still be eaten.
I did not work so hard to keep my husband and son together just to have her come in and disturb it all,
she thinks
. I am the glue and spine of this house, and she will have to remember that.
On the kitchen counter is a small porcelain figurine, a tiny ballerina with one perfect foot pointed in the air. Shew Lin picks it up, stares at its white face and black arched eyebrows. She remembers seeing this in Siu Sang’s room, and now that silly girl has carelessly left it in the kitchen, probably after washing it in the sink.
Well, who knows what could happen to such fragile things in a house with children?
Shew Lin hurls it against the wall, watches the ballerina’s head split into two, her slippered feet splinter into jagged, sharp pieces. She turns around and walks out, leaving the mess for her daughter-in-law to find.
All day, every day, the house is silent. Sometimes, when the weather is bad, a draft whistles through the hall, front to back, carrying the sounds of outside in. When Shew Lin opens the door to collect the mail, she can hear the traffic two blocks away on Broadway, the shouts of the children at the school across the street, the hammering at the new house being built around the corner. When she shuts the door again, the only thing she hears is her own slippers on the parquet floor.
“I can see you are unhappy from your letters, daughter, even if you never really say so. When I was young, I had many fights with your father’s family. They did not hesitate to make me feel stupid.”
Shew Lin has steamed open a letter to her daughter-in-law from the girl’s mother. She has been looking for signs that Siu Sang has been complaining about her and the way she has been treating her.
She’s a crazy girl,
Shew Lin thinks,
crying like that
all the time
and then becoming silent,
like she is made of
stone.
She will pass on her insanity to my grandchildren.
But here is evidence.
“If you are having problems with your husband’s family, your husband should never know it. It is a terrible thing to choose between your parents and your wife.”
Shew Lin laughs.
Weak advice from one rich woman to another,
she thinks.
So then we are both keeping secrets
. She glues the envelope back together. She tiptoes outside again and places the letter back into the mailbox.
Ten minutes later, Siu Sang walks through the door, the letter in her hand. She pushes the double stroller into the hall and hurries into her bedroom, leaving both girls strapped down, still wearing their overcoats and woollen hats. Shew Lin watches as the babies begin to whimper, and then listens as Siu
Sang begins to cry for the first time in months, her weeping masked by the simultaneous cries of her daughters.
Shew Lin thrusts her hands into the stroller and strokes the girls’ cheeks, wondering how long the babies will have to stay in the hall like this (for she cannot take them out, bound as she is by her own rules of fear and control), if Pon Man will have to arrive before they are taken out of their seats. Shew Lin sits on the floor in front of them, lets them pull on her worn, brown hands.
In her head, she retreats into the continuous thought that runs like a loop through all of her waking hours.
Grandsongrandsongrandson.
I should have kept my mouth shut,
she thinks
. It’s only when you finally get what you want that you realize it’s no good.
Even when she is not in the room, Siu Sang creeps into her thoughts, a cleaning hurricane that displaces all of the other things in Shew Lin’s head.
She’s useful now, but does that mean that I am not?
Siu Sang has suddenly turned into the daughter-in-law that Shew Lin had always wanted.
Siu Sang wakes up at six o’clock, has the children clothed and fed by seven thirty, and begins cleaning at eight. Mondays, it’s the living room and hall. Tuesdays, the kitchen, bathrooms and closets. If she finishes before the week is over, she starts all over again, scrubbing invisible dirt, batting away invisible dust.
“Don’t you think you should rest? It hasn’t been long since Daisy was born.” Shew Lin approaches her carefully one morning, measuring her words so that she sounds firm, distrustful.
“Rest? Dust comes into the house whether I rest or not.” And she walks off, the toilet brush tucked into the waistband of her checked apron.
Later, Shew Lin checks on the children. The older one rips paper into strips. The baby sucks her thumb and stares out the window, big eyes following the cars that drive past, the birds that swoop down from the power lines. Shew Lin only rarely touches them, does not even play with them and usually only peeks into their room before she sneaks off to her worn brown brocade chair, the only dusty thing left in the house.
In the evenings, she has taken to listening outside her son and Siu Sang’s bedroom door. Tonight, she puts her ear to the keyhole and, when she’s sure no one is watching, down to the crack by the floor. But it’s as if Siu Sang knows when Shew Lin is crouching just outside, and not a sound escapes, not the scraping of a chair against the floor, not even the regular breathing of two people asleep.
Closed tight,
she thinks,
room and mind
. For so long, she was used to the sounds of her daughter-in-law weeping—the wounded animal, the rawness of a throat being torn into shreds by overuse. As Shew Lin listens to the quiet, she can feel the house slipping away from her, the family spinning counter-clockwise in a fury of dirt and suds and rags. She pulls her head back from the closed door and sits on the floor, her thick legs poking stiffly out the bottom of her wool skirt.
When I came here
, she thinks, rubbing the sore joints in her knees,
I didn’t know what kind of family I would have. After all those years of dreaming about finally living with my husband, there I was.
At first, shortly after her arrival, it was a little dance. They were carefully treating each other like mutual guests in a hotel, moving out of each other’s way in the hall. He knocked when she was in their bedroom, and they slept with a thin sliver of space between them.
Their memories of each other hung in the air like a dividing curtain. They had expected certain things and were afraid to see if those things could really be.
One night, Seid Quan walked to the closed door of his bedroom and heard his wife undressing for bed—the swish of her dress as it fell to the floor, the slap of her bare feet on the wood floor. He walked in silently.
Naked, she was clearly an older woman. Flesh sat on her hips softly, in layers. Her breasts were flat, and the bones on her shoulders and neck stuck out, sharp like knives. She looked at him and her eyes flickered—once for embarrassment, twice for longing.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s cold out in the hall.”
That night, he touched her, his own body like a wire hanger, all angles, long and thin. She wanted to laugh at the way they looked, she the dumpling, he the celery stalk. But nights were short, and they had already waited long enough.
Hours later, Seid Quan’s face was buried in the back of Shew Lin’s neck, his arm around her waist. The curtains of the window above their bed swayed in the draft. He ran his hand down her shoulder, her arm, felt the rough spot on her elbow.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, as she brushed the iron-grey hair out of her eyes.
She could feel the struggle, the words forming in his throat and creeping up to his mouth, but he could not speak, could only push his face deeper into her body as if he were hiding and wished to cover himself in her skin.
“Do you remember the little house in the village? The garden with the winter melon?” His head nodded against her shoulder, and he inhaled, as if ready to speak.
“I know,” she whispered. “You don’t have to tell me.”
The cold of the hardwood floor seeps through her layers of skirt and stockings, interrupting the flow of memory. She remembers that she is supposed to be eavesdropping, not daydreaming, and soon sees that Seid Quan has snuck up behind her and stands motionless, his hands clasped behind his back. She sighs.
“No, I didn’t fall,” she says, holding up her hands so he can pull her to a standing position. “Don’t worry.” She pats him on the arm. “Why don’t we have some tea?”
The third girl. She is underweight and hairy, and has been jaundiced since Siu Sang delivered her. Shew Lin knows there is nothing to save this baby from the disappointment. Siu Sang returns from the hospital with her lips pressed even harder together and new lines around the corners from the effort of not smiling. It is not until the baby has been at home for one week that Pon Man decides on a name.

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