The Foremost Good Fortune (30 page)

I try not to stare too hard at the senator when she answers. I feel none of the remove I’ve had earlier this week. This conversation is too surreal to stay removed from. The senator. Right here.

Tyler’s voice begins to rise. He’s getting emotional and heated, which means he’s breaking one of the cardinal rules of talking policy with a senator at a dark and dirty duck dive in an old corner of Beijing. “Why should we fear them? What have they done to us that would make us distrustful?”

I look over at Lily, and her eyes are wide. She’s staring at her husband.
I try to change the subject by saying to anyone who will listen, “Did you know that Lily’s second novel was featured in
People
magazine?”

“Oh really?” Margaret says. “That’s fantastic.”

Lily looks over like she wants to strangle me. She hates this kind of attention. I can tell she’s really mad. But I was only trying to take the attention off Tyler. That’s when Tony asks the waiter for the duck carcasses to be brought to the kitchen and chopped up with a cleaver. “There is a Chinese tradition,” he says to everyone, “of sautéing the bones with garlic.”

In minutes the waiter hurries back with a heaping mess of cooked duck bones. The plate makes its way around the table and we all try a bite, cracking the small bones in our teeth.

“This is disgusting,” I say. What a gross idea—cutting up the carcasses and eating them. Everyone is laughing now. In this China moment, everyone is inside the conversation. I laugh so hard that my eyes fill with tears. I haven’t thought about cancer for hours.

When Saturday comes again, Lao Wu drives us back to the airport. Up until the moment we say our final good-bye, I keep thinking Lily will find some way for them all to stay. They’ve liked China so much—every single one of them. Our lives will be quiet in the apartment when they’re gone. Lily hugs me and thanks me again. “It’s been one of those life-changing trips,” she says. “And I hadn’t expected it. Wasn’t looking for it. I want to come back to this place. To this amazing country.” Then she adds one more thing, and it’s what I hold on to after she’s left.

“Sus.” She speaks slowly, standing on the curb of the departures terminal. “I’ve been waiting to say this all week.” She pauses. “I know you’re struggling. Reaching. I know you are thinking. All the time still thinking about your disease, and I’m not sure you can think your way out of cancer.” I nod at her; I know she’s saying something important. Something I can’t quite find my way to yet. “Maybe this is the time to let go and just be,” she goes on. “Maybe it’s not the time to think.”

The United Nations
of Second Graders

It’s difficult to figure out how to celebrate birthdays in this city. But on November 27, we reinvent the birthday party wheel. Thorne is turning eight. We can’t have all the kids to the apartment. They won’t fit. Who could have predicted that by this time Thorne would have so many friends in China? Or that he would join the swim team and the soccer team and love them both? Or that he would tell me that he thinks he’d like to stay in China until he’s a teenager?

Who could have known we’d have this good kind of birthday problem on our hands? So what we do this year is invite seventeen boys and one girl (Molly) to a soccer game at the school gym. It’s the United Nations of second graders: Korea, Taiwan, China, England, Bahrain, Cameroon, the United States, Denmark, and Germany are all represented. They play for an hour while Tony runs around with a whistle on his neck, refereeing.

When the games are over, we break for lunch at the Noodle Loft around the corner from the school. Tony blows the referee’s whistle to stop and start the herd of eight-year-olds as they run down the block. Eighteen kids at the Noodle Loft gets a little crazy. I pass out a box of metal magic rings I picked up at a kiosk under the pedestrian tunnel last Friday. The kids play with the rings for about two minutes and then begin drinking Sprite through their noses.

Thorne’s friend Simon’s birthday is also today. Simon’s father e-mailed me four days ago and asked if Simon could have his birthday party with us. I told him to join in, but maybe we could keep the numbers below twenty. Because what on earth do you do in Beijing with twenty eight-year-olds?

Tony had asked Simon’s parents to take care of the food at the restaurant while we manned the soccer at the gym. “Just order the noodles,” I’d said to them as they left. “The kids love noodles.”

That was our plan—simple bowls of noodles. It is a
noodle
place, after all. But then platters of duck start arriving. “It is Simon’s favorite,” his mother explains to me. It’s a tricky thing to serve whole roasted duck to hungry eight-year-old boys. There’s a lot of food preparation. Too much. Tony and I get busy cutting and distributing meat and thin pancakes and plum sauce. Thorne’s friend Ali comes to the party late and with no warning and brings Rashid, his eleven-year-old brother. I smile at Rashid and recall that he is the boy who taught Aidan and Thorne the concept of “getting sexy.” What a gift. I tell Rashid to grab a seat too (he has a sweet face) and this bothers Thorne. He says, “The party is getting out of control and Rashid is too old to be here.” This is how I learn it’s a delicate thing to introduce a fifth grader into a second-grade scene.

We seem to recover, and I make a point of never looking Thorne in the eye again during the party, because each time I do, he makes a mad face at me. There are things about mothering I’ll never understand. It’s the weight of it—the subterranean pull between my children and me. How can I set Thorne off with a look, when I’m the one who dreamed this party up and invited all these kids? I stay away on my own side of the room, handing out duck to Gustav and Mads and Eric. Each time I sneak a look over at Thorne he’s playing with Jiho and making farting sounds with his hand under his armpit while he eats his noodles.

After the party Lao Wu announces that he’s taking the boys to a live animal market to buy Thorne a turtle. How can we say no to such a nice offer? He parks the van in a crowded street not far from his own apartment. Then he tells us he keeps two turtles at home, and that we will like having turtles. They’ll grow, he says in Mandarin and spreads his hands in the air.
Hen Da
.

Lao Wu takes Thorne’s and Aidan’s hands, crosses the street, and strides into the crowded outdoor shopping center. Luckily, this is not the live reptile market I’ve heard about where snakes are for sale. It’s a market for tropical fish in glass tanks and hundreds upon hundreds of
turtles. How will Thorne ever choose one? Tony and I walk behind the boys, and we circle the entire market twice. I’m not sure what we’re looking for—what characteristics mark a good turtle from the rest of the lot. This place is dark and smelly and surreal—dozens of men and women sit inside their tiny stalls arguing the case for their own turtles.
How can you tell the difference?
I want to ask. The turtles all seem to be stoically swimming for their lives in giant, scummy glass aquariums.

Lao Wu looks like he’s enjoying himself. He doesn’t let go of the boys’ hands, but he pauses from time to time in front of certain stalls and gazes up at the stacked tanks. Then he points out a yellow-bellied turtle and then later one tinged a darker shade of green. Thorne finally decides on a member of a hardy-looking troupe of lime-colored, palm-sized turtles. Lao Wu asks the vendor how much. Then he scoffs at the price and the two men go back and forth negotiating the sale of this one little guy who’s running in air now, suspended by his shell in Thorne’s small hand. Of course Aidan wants a turtle now too, and how can we deny him when the price is much better if you buy more?

When we get home, the turtles will not give any of us the time of day. I can tell that they don’t like us. Every time we put them down on the wooden floor they scramble frantically. And who wouldn’t? It dawns on me that we’ve got new responsibilities here. We’ve got two turtles we have to keep alive until we exit China, when hopefully we can give them away. Thorne puts them in their glass bowl near the sink in the living room and they instantly shrink into their shells.

“Tony,” I call out. “I’m glad we finally found a use for the wet bar!” Then Thorne sprinkles brown food pellets into the water and watches each turtle poke his neck out of his shell to swallow. Aidan wants a naming ceremony, and I tell him to think on it and we’ll vote at dinner. Then Tony comes out of the bedroom smiling. He likes the turtles. We have pets now in China. Some of us are feeling more and more at home here.

VI
Hall of
Preserving
Harmony

Homing Pigeon

In early December my mother comes to Beijing for three weeks, and every day is like a small celebration. Every day is like a holiday. We don’t get much family all this way around the hemisphere. “She’s here!” both boys say when they get off the bus and spy her standing there.
She’s here!
I say to myself. She’s tired, too, but what better time could there be to play a full round of Monopoly than after you’ve just flown thirteen hours up and over the North Pole? We go back to the apartment. She will sleep in Thorne’s room—he’ll sleep on Aidan’s top bunk again.

Thorne lays the board down on the rug in the den. He asks Nona to dole out the money. She doesn’t remember that each player gets six of the twenty-dollar bills, not five, until Thorne reminds her. Aidan wants to be the thimble and grabs it first. Thorne chooses the dog. I will be the iron, and my mother is the car.

Things move quickly. I land on Baltic Avenue—it’s cheap and I buy it immediately. Aidan seems to have caught on to my strategy. He gets ahold of two railroads within the first ten minutes: Reading and Pennsylvania. Thorne runs into trouble. He lands on the 10 Percent Luxury Tax and has to pay two hundred dollars to the kitty. The boys are getting used to having a grandmother again. They take turns in her lap. She gives them all her attention and they bask. The apartment feels like more fun now that my mother is here. She’s come all this way for us, and maybe she’ll take some of this mothering load from me. Because I can carry it, but with a little help from her I might be able to put the worst of the cancer behind me.

There is this sadness that’s still following me. I don’t know where it came from. I wasn’t expecting it, and it won’t let me go. What I know
is that people and things that used to make me happy, sometimes now make me weep. It’s as if I’m still trying to understand the cancer. I don’t know yet that my sadness is right on schedule. I don’t know yet that there even is a schedule.

It’s Aidan’s turn when I hear a small thud outside the big double window. I don’t look up from the board. Aidan rolls double fives and tries to decide whether to buy California Avenue. Thorne thinks he should—it’s a great property, he says. My mother mentions casually that a bird has just banged into the window.

“Oh,” I say and hand Aidan two hundred dollars for passing Go. “A bird?”

“Yes.” My mother stands up. It takes her a moment longer than I remember to straighten out her long body. She is a tall woman—almost six feet—and wears her gray hair cut in a line along her jaw. She has smooth, young-looking skin. “A bird most definitely flew into your window.”

The boys and I rise slowly now too, and then the four of us climb over the couch on our knees to have a look. We lean into the window and crane our necks to see the concrete shelf down below. That’s where the homing pigeon stands. He’s downy white with a long, black-tipped tail and wing feathers that look soft and clean. The only thing that moves on him is his oddly curved head. The head bobs and turns entirely around so that his body faces forward but his head is staring straight at us. It’s a bit creepy. The bird’s head is covered in white feathers too, though they’re shorter than his wing feathers and give the effect of an old, balding man.

“A BIRD!” Aidan yells nervously. “THERE IS A BIRD!”

“He’s so big!” Thorne screams. “How did he get so big?”

My mother laughs. “It’s beautiful,” I decide. “And enormous.” Like a city pigeon from downtown Boston, where I lived for many years, but on some kind of growth hormones. It’s also stunned because of the crash. Perhaps more problematic is that it’s all alone. The little I know about Chinese homing pigeons is that the flock is where it’s at. The birds are not supposed to go solo when they’re out with their posse. The flock flies as one.

Aidan takes another long look at the big, white bird and then he unhinges. There is no way to explain why Aidan cries, really, except
that the sight of the bird with its round bobbing head and avuncular beady eyes scares him. “Wow,” I have time to say before Aidan’s screams drown out my voice. “Wow. What a pigeon.”

I will admit there is something scary about the bird—maybe it’s the size. Maybe it’s how unannounced its visit is. We’ve been preparing all week for my mother. Adrenaline is high. We’ve already got the transatlantic visitor we’ve been hoping for. And now this strange bird? Aidan’s shrieking is the kind a small child makes when he’s lost control. “Aidan,” I say in a singsong voice and take him in my arms. “Aidan. Aidan. Aidan. That bird is not going to hurt you. The bird is not going to come in this house.”