The Buddha in the Attic (4 page)

SOMETIMES
the boss would approach us from behind while we were bending over his fields and whisper a few words into our ears. And even though we had no idea what he was saying we knew exactly what he meant. “Me no speak English,” we’d reply. Or, “So sorry, Boss, but no.” Sometimes we were approached by a well-dressed fellow countryman who appeared out of nowhere and offered to take us back with him to the big city.
If you come work for me I can pay you ten times what you earn in the fields
. Sometimes one of our husband’s unmarried worker friends approached us the moment our husband stepped away and tried to slip us a five-dollar bill. “Just let me put it in once,” he’d say to us. “I promise you I won’t even move it.” And every now and then we’d give in and say yes. “Meet me tomorrow night behind the lettuce shed at nine,” we’d tell him. Or, “For five dollars more I’ll do it.” Perhaps we were unhappy with our husband, who went out to play cards and drink every night and did not come home until late. Or perhaps we needed to send money to our family back home because their rice fields had once again been ruined by floods.
We have lost everything and are living on nothing but tree bark and boiled yams
. Even those of us who were not pretty were often offered gifts on the sly: a tortoiseshell hairpin, a bottle of perfume, a copy of
Modern Screen
magazine that had been stolen from the counter of a dime store in town. But if we accepted that gift without giving anything back in return we knew there would be a price to pay.
He sliced off the tip of her finger with his pruning knife
. And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man’s eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.

SOME OF US
worked as cooks in their labor camps, and some of us as dishwashers, and ruined our delicate hands. Others of us were brought out to their remote interior valleys to work as sharecroppers on their land. Perhaps our husband had rented twenty acres from a man named Caldwell, who owned thousands of acres in the heart of the southern San Joaquin Valley, and every year we paid Mr. Caldwell sixty percent of our yield. We lived in a dirt-floored shack beneath a willow tree in the middle of a wide, open field and slept on a mattress stuffed with straw. We relieved ourselves outside, in a hole in the ground. We drew our water up from a well. We spent our days planting and picking tomatoes from dawn until dusk and spoke to no one but our husband for weeks at a time. We had a cat to keep us company, and chase away the rats, and at night if we stood in the doorway and looked out toward the west we could see a faint, flickering light in the distance. That, our husband had told us, was where people were. And we knew we never should have left home. But no matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best of what we had. We cut out pictures of cakes from magazines and hung them on the walls. We sewed curtains out of bleached rice sacks. We made Buddhist altars out of overturned tomato crates that we covered with cloth, and every morning we left out a cup of hot tea for our ancestors. And at the end of the harvest season we walked ten miles into town and bought ourselves a small gift: a bottle of Coke, a new apron, a tube of lipstick, which we might one day have occasion to wear.
Perhaps I shall be invited to a concert
. Some years our crops were good and the prices were high and we made more money than we’d ever dreamed of.
Six hundred an acre
. Other years we lost everything to insects or mildew or a month of heavy rains, or the price of tomatoes fell so low that we had no choice but to auction off all our tools to pay off our debts, and we wondered why we were there. “I was a fool to follow you out into the country,” we said to our husband. Or, “You are wasting my youth.” But when he asked us if we would rather be working as a maid in the city, smiling and bowing and saying nothing but “Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am,” all day long, we had to admit that the answer was no.

THEY DID NOT
want us as neighbors in their valleys. They did not want us as friends. We lived in unsightly shacks and could not speak plain English. We cared only about money. Our farming methods were poor. We used too much water. We did not plow deeply enough. Our husbands worked us like slaves.
They import those girls from Japan as free labor
. We worked in the fields all day long without stopping for supper. We worked in the fields late at night by the light of our kerosene lamps. We never took a single day off.
A clock and a bed are two things a Japanese farmer never used in his life
. We were taking over their cauliflower industry. We had taken over their spinach industry. We had a monopoly on their strawberry industry and had cornered their market on beans. We were an unbeatable, unstoppable economic machine and if our progress was not checked the entire western United States would soon become the next Asiatic outpost and colony.

MANY NIGHTS
, we waited for them. Sometimes they drove by our farm shacks and sprayed our windows with buckshot, or set our chicken coops on fire. Sometimes they dynamited our packing sheds. Sometimes they burned down our fields just as they were beginning to ripen and we lost our entire earnings for that year. And even though we found footsteps in the dirt the following morning, and many scattered matchsticks, when we called the sheriff to come out and take a look he told us there were no clues worth following. And after that our husbands were never the same.
Why even bother?
At night we slept with our shoes on, and hatchets beside our beds, while our husbands sat by the windows until dawn. Sometimes we were startled awake by a sound but it was nothing—somewhere in the world, perhaps, a peach had just dropped from a tree—and sometimes we slept straight through the night and in the morning when we woke we found our husbands slumped over and snoring in their chairs and we tried to wake them gently, for their rifles were still resting on their laps. Sometimes our husbands bought themselves guard dogs, which they named Dick or Harry or Spot, and they grew more attached to those dogs than they ever did to us, and we wondered if we had made a mistake, coming to such a violent and unwelcoming land.
Is there any tribe more savage than the Americans?

ONE OF US
blamed them for everything and wished that they were dead. One of us blamed them for everything and wished that she were dead. Others of us learned to live without thinking of them at all. We threw ourselves into our work and became obsessed with the thought of pulling one more weed. We put away our mirrors. We stopped combing our hair. We forgot about makeup.
Whenever I powder my nose it just looks like frost on a mountain
. We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed.
I fear my soul has died
. We stopped writing home to our mothers. We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting. We simply worked, that was all. We gulped down our meals three times a day without saying a word to our husbands so we could hurry back out into the fields.
“One minute sooner to pull one more weed.” I could not get this thought out of my mind
. We spread our legs for them every evening but were so exhausted we often fell asleep before they were done. We washed their clothes for them once a week in tubs of boiling hot water. We cooked for them. We cleaned for them. We helped them chop wood. But it was not we who were cooking and cleaning and chopping, it was somebody else. And often our husbands did not even notice we’d disappeared.

SOME OF US
moved out of the countryside and into their suburbs and got to know them well. We lived in the servants’ quarters of the big houses in Atherton and Berkeley, above Telegraph, up high in the hills. Or we worked for a man like Dr. Giordano, who was a prominent thoracic surgeon on Alameda’s gold coast. And while our husband mowed Dr. Giordano’s lawn and pruned Dr. Giordano’s shrubs and raked Dr. Giordano’s leaves, we stayed inside with Mrs. Giordano, who had wavy brown hair and a kind manner and asked us to please call her Rose, and we polished Rose’s silver and we swept Rose’s floors and we tended to Rose’s three young children, Richard, Jim, and Theo, whom we sang to sleep every night in a language not their own.
Nemure, nemure
. And it was not at all what we had expected.
I have come to care for those boys as though they were my own
. But it was Dr. Giordano’s elderly mother, Lucia, whom we came to care for the most. Lucia was even lonelier than we were, and almost as short, and once she overcame her fear of us she never left our side. She followed us from one room to the next as we dusted and mopped and not once did she ever stop talking.
Molto bene. Perfetto! Basta cosi
. And for many years after her death her memories of the old country would continue to linger with us as though they were our own: the mozzarella, the
pomodori
, the Lago di Como, the piazza in the center of town where she went shopping with her sisters every day.
Italia, Italia, how I long to see it one last time
.

IT WAS THEIR WOMEN
who taught us the things we most needed to know. How to light a stove. How to make a bed. How to answer a door. How to shake a hand. How to operate a faucet, which many of us had never seen in our lives. How to dial a telephone. How to sound cheerful on a telephone even when you were angry or sad. How to fry an egg. How to peel a potato. How to set a table. How to prepare a five-course dinner in six hours for a party of twelve. How to light a cigarette. How to blow a smoke ring. How to curl your hair so it looked just like Mary Pickford’s. How to wash a lipstick stain out of your husband’s favorite white shirt even when that lipstick stain was not yours. How to raise up your skirt on the street to reveal just the right amount of ankle.
You must aim to tantalize, not tease
. How to talk to a husband. How to argue with a husband. How to deceive a husband. How to keep a husband from wandering too far from your side.
Don’
t
ask him where he’s been or what time he’ll be coming home and make sure he is happy in bed
.

WE LOVED THEM
. We hated them. We wanted to
be
them. How tall they were, how lovely, how fair. Their long, graceful limbs. Their bright white teeth. Their pale, luminous skin, which disguised all seven blemishes of the face. Their odd but endearing ways, which never ceased to amuse—their love of A.1. sauce and high, pointy-toed shoes, their funny, turned-out walk, their tendency to gather in each other’s parlors in large, noisy groups and stand around talking, all at once, for hours. Why, we wondered, did it never occur to them to sit down? They seemed so at home in the world. So at ease. They had a confidence that we lacked. And much better hair.
So many colors
. And we regretted that we could not be more like them.

LATE AT NIGHT
, in our narrow, windowless rooms in the backs of their large, stately houses, we imitated them. “Now you be the master and I’ll be the missus,” we said to our husbands. “No,
you
be the master and
I’ll
be the missus,” they sometimes replied. We tried to imagine how they did it. What they said. Who was on top. Who was on the bottom. Did he cry out? Did she? Did they wake up in the morning with their limbs intertwined? Other times we lay quietly in the darkness and told each other about our days.
I beat the rugs. I boiled the sheets. I dug up the devil grass with my farmer’s knife from the south side of the lawn
. And when we were finished we pulled up the covers and closed our eyes and dreamed of better times to come. A pretty white house of our own on a long, shady street with a garden that was always in bloom. A bathtub that filled up with hot water in mere minutes. A servant who brought us breakfast every morning on a round silver tray and swept all the rooms by hand. A chambermaid. A laundress. A Chinese butler in a long white coat who appeared the moment we rang a bell and called out, “Charlie, please bring me my tea!”

THEY GAVE US
new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl. They marveled at our tiny figures and our long, shiny black hair. They praised us for our hardworking ways.
That girl never stops until she gets the job done
. They bragged about us to their neighbors. They bragged about us to their friends. They claimed to like us much more than they did any of the others.
No better class of help can be found
. When they were unhappy and had no one to talk to they told us their deep, darkest secrets.
Everything I told him was a lie
. When their husbands went away on business they asked us to sleep with them in their bedrooms in case they got lonely. When they called out for us in the middle of the night we went to them and lay with them until morning. “Hush, hush,” we said to them. And, “Please don’t cry.” When they fell in love with a man who was not their husband we kept an eye on their children while they went out to meet that man in the middle of the day. “Do I look all right?” they asked us. And, “Is my skirt too tight?” We brushed off invisible specks of lint from their blouses, retied scarves, adjusted stray locks of hair so they hung just so. We plucked out their grays without comment. “You look beautiful,” we said to them, and then we sent them on their way. And when their husbands came home in the evening at the usual hour we pretended not to know a thing.

ONE OF THEM
lived alone in a run-down mansion on top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill and had not been outside in twelve years. One of them was a countess from Dresden who had never lifted up anything heavier than a fork. One of them had fled from the Bolsheviks in Russia and every night she dreamed she was back in her father’s house in Odessa.
We lost it all
. One of them had used only Negroes before us. One of them had had bad luck with the Chinese.
You have to keep an eye on them all the time
. One of them made us get down on our hands and knees every time we scrubbed her floor instead of using a mop. One of them grabbed a rag and tried to help us but only ended up getting in our way. One of them served us elaborate lunches on fine china plates and insisted that we sit down with her at the table, even though we were anxious to get on with our work. One of them never changed out of her nightgown until noon. Several of them suffered from headaches. Many of them were sad. Most drank. One of them took us downtown to the City of Paris department store every Friday afternoon and told us to pick out a new item of clothing.
Whatever you like
. One of them gave us a dictionary and a pair of white silk gloves and enrolled us in our first class in English.
My driver will be waiting for you downstairs
. Others tried to teach us themselves.
This is a bucket. This is a mop. This is a broom
. One of them could never remember our name. One of them greeted us warmly every morning in the kitchen but whenever she passed us outside on the street she had no idea who we were. One of them barely said a word to us in the thirteen years that we worked for her but when she died she left us a fortune.