The Love Wife (10 page)

— Cutting-edge stuff, she would tell her sibs. — I’m working on the twenty-first century.

She would report to them about the future of technology.

— You wait and see, there will be computers in your shoe. There will be computers you can eat.

BLONDIE / 
No longer was I the baby, the afterthought, the least witty of the children. The child with the boring name—which my mother, even before I was born, had somehow thought appropriate. No more would everyone talk of how I had been the smallest at birth, a disaster at charades, in truth a touch shy.

Janie Runt of the Litter.

Janie Mommy’s Girl.

Janie They’re Picking on Me Again.

A listener, they called me. Agreeing on my strength with faint self-congratulation. How creative of them to have discovered a strong point!

A good listener.

Quite by accident I was making a most original marriage. My brothers and sisters approved. My father, too, approved heartily of everything about the match—even, apparently, Mama Wong.

CARNEGIE / 
How graciously he agreed with Mama Wong even when she announced that the Bailey family had
third-generation problem.

— In China, this happen all the time, she said. One generation made it, second generation do nothing, third generation lost everything.

I pointed out that Blondie and her siblings were fourth-generation on her mother’s side. Nor could you exactly call Doc Bailey
do nothing.
He was an upstanding and well-loved pediatrician who had seen many a low-income child for free and had, what’s more, single-handedly established a number of clinics in underserved areas.

But Doc Bailey laughed modestly and insisted that Mama Wong was right. There had been a falling-off. How could there not be? Not everyone could pull himself up by the bootstraps the way his father had, fresh off the boat from Ulster. Grandpa Bailey had been remarkable even in his projects and hobbies. He had left behind silver brooches he had smithed. Leather items he had tooled. The younger Baileys were proud to be his descendants. Who wouldn’t be?

Mama Wong left the get-together triumphant.

— You see! she chortled, banging her open hand on her pocketbook. — Even Doc Bailey admits. You see!

I adored the Baileys, though. It was true they cherished their own cleverness; Gregory in particular felt no need of facts to be knowing.
Russia expert turned armaments expert?
he would say.
I’ll tell you why, there was no money in Russia anymore.
Or:
Japanese potter sues American author? Elementary, my dear Watson, some lawyer put him up to it.

Still, they were more like than unlike the people I had gone to school with. People whose mothers did not carry fish bait in their handbags. People who were not strong-armed into managing rental buildings in the summer. People who were not summoned in the middle of midterms to come fix hot-water heaters. The Baileys made me feel as though I were still in college; as if life were full of electives, as if there would always be a cafeteria about which to complain. As if one’s categorical imperative was to find oneself via the right seminar.

Nowhere was this sense stronger than here, at the family summer place. This had in fact at one point been Mr. Buck’s sleep-over camp; but at another, a boys’ day school. Besides Mr. Buck’s own cabin, there was a library and a mess hall. The cabins all had blackboards; the Baileys were still finding compasses and ink bottles and pen nibs among the pine needles. What with Renata’s husband the mapmaker ably charting where each artifact was found, this activity constituted one of the island’s principal pleasures, surpassed only by the restoring of Mr. Buck’s original abode. For Mr. Buck had been a Michelangelo of home improvements. His many windows opened via homemade crank-and-bicycle-chain mechanisms. The bathroom featured a chute for baby diapers, as well as a self-setting timer on the shower. (The water shut off when the timer ran out.) Was he not a kind of genius? So the Baileys agreed.

But every proper genius has limits, as the Baileys liked to point out, and so too did Mr. Buck. Exhibit A being the foundations of his cabins, for there were no foundations to speak of. He had simply built the cabins on wooden ties, placed directly on the ground; the Baileys would have given anything to know why. Or what to do about it, now that the water table was rising. The plateau sank a few inches every year.

— Have them replaced, I said when the subject first came up in my presence. — Jack up the buildings and have some footings poured.

— We hereby name you Sir Buildings and Grounds, intoned Gregory immediately. — Our Own Home Repair Counsel, whom we do love as we love ourself.

BLONDIE / 
Our place had become something of a headache. It was so far north, no one could get there very often. And it was assessed at so little that major repairs just didn’t make sense. What’s more, a developer had recently bought up twenty acres directly across the water from us.

CARNEGIE / 
An eighth of an acre each, his plots were going to be; his cockamamie plan was for, count ’em, one hundred sixty ‘quality residences.’ As if the market would support anything near that! We pictured tattered tarps, abandoned Dumpsters. Pits, rubble, wild dogs. Or worse, against our predictions, success: lane upon lane of cookie-cutter condos, in perky shades of aluminum cladding.

It was enough to make the Baileys think about selling. Not for the first time; a trailer park too was growing right smack at the base of their peninsula. But where else to buy? Downhill skiing had come to Maine, sending prices up. They could no longer begin to afford anything waterfront, other than where they had it. And hadn’t Independence Island been in the family forever?

BLONDIE / 
I wore Grandma Dotie’s dress. Neither of my sisters had worn it, but Gabriela had thought it blowsily marvelous enough that I had been moved to at least try it on. And then how could I not wear it? For it fit me perfectly—an old-fashioned, fairy-queen affair with a high neck, and long runs of covered buttons.

CARNEGIE / 
Not to say a bustle Peter called the apotheosis of the drape.

— No doubt it involves pulleys, he said.

Gregory said it put him in mind of various phenomena of the insect world, to wit, physogastric queen bees.

— Oh, be quiet, you bachelors, said Gabriela. Or I won’t marry either one of you!

They were chastened then, and admitted the dress to be fun, a spoof of a pouf. For both of them were a little in love with Gabriela, indeed asked her two or three times a day if she would marry one or the other of them, her choice.

To this she would reply: — Oh, go marry your mama in heaven.

Or else: — I thought I married you already.

Back then Gabriela was a sexpot redhead, always in a flurry, who secretly longed to be serious, as everyone knew.

— But I am not serious, I am not! she would moan, while all around her men assured her: — No, you are! You are!

— About what? Tell me! she would demand.

— About something.

— Something, she would snort. Something is nothing. But you wait and see. One day I will find my true self.

She smiled dreamily.

— I imagine it will be through massage.

BLONDIE / 
People said I was the spitting image of my mother.

CARNEGIE / 
Maybe that was why she began talking, endlessly, about what her mother would have worn to the wedding (blue). What her mother read (nonfiction). How her mother died (cancer). She talked about her mother’s painting restoration. How she had worked for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts at the end. How she had worked on a Turner. How this had involved many substances besides paint. How people had called her a genius.

— Is that so, I said.

I wondered how well I knew my fiancée.

Her lashes after the ceremony seemed longer than I had noticed; she felt like an alien in my arms. When I kissed her in the pavilion, her bustle forced me to support her waist in a new way. How beautifully her arched back fit my outspread hand; that was marvelous, I supposed, though did not those covered buttons dig into her back? I was glad, in any case, to see her hoist excited Lizzy up onto her hip, a familiar gesture, and to see Lizzy wrap her bare legs around Blondie’s waist.

Mama Wong and her friends had been the only party to arrive by car, i.e., her new air-conditioned Mercedes, complete with chauffeur, from which they had to be coaxed out.

— We can see through the windshield, said Mama Wong. Mosquitoes have plenty to eat already.

Once out, though, she softened. The brothers Bailey fanned her and brought her drinks. They told her jokes. They made her teach them Chinese. They complimented her on her hairdo, so very like a beachball.

But Doc Bailey, more importantly, agreed with her.

— One thing I tell you: that trailer park no good for property value, she said.

He nodded.

— And that is foundation rot down there. Foundation rot mean big trouble.

He nodded.

— You know what this place is? This place is so-called white elephant.

He nodded.

The result: she seemed almost touched when, late in the afternoon, Blondie changed out of her mother’s dress and into a red silk
qipao.
Also when Blondie knelt with me (this took some doing in that dress) and asked for her blessing. Never mind that this was a creative traditional touch straight out of
The Compleat Ethnic Wedding,
which Gabriela had given Blondie for a shower present. Mama Wong was moved.

— Okay, she said. She was seated in a baronial chair dug up in a flea market; the pillow behind her shone gold, with a deep braided fringe that could have come from a Gilbert and Sullivan admiral’s uniform. — You are married now. Nothing anybody can do.

— Thank you, said Blondie, her hands clasped as if in prayer.

— Don’t say anything, said Mama Wong. Let Carnegie say. Bride not supposed to talk too much.

My neck began to itch.

— Thank you, I said.

— And next time don’t put white flower in your hair, she said. Chinese people consider that very bad luck, white is the color people wear when parents die.

— Do you at least like the dress? I asked.

— She found a good dressmaker, said Mama Wong. She is not easy to fit, I can see.

Blondie’s eyes welled up, threatening her mascara; I thought I heard her dress rip as she stood. We turned toward the assembly.

How everyone clapped! The tear, happily, turned out to be minor. A septic-tank scare turned out to be just that, a scare. Neighbors from the trailer park came and ate cake; one man was heard to yell,
You leave our women alone!
but was quickly hushed by others. Anyway, I did and didn’t hear him, having developed a mystery case of hives. This, happily, responded to an antihistamine in the medicine cabinet, though the expiration date on the box had long since passed.

Our local blue heron perched at the end of the dock—staring, with pencil-point attention, toward the moving water.

Meanwhile, every guest with a son or a cousin or a niece who had married in an unorthodox way proudly got out pictures of their new family members, and sometimes of the products of the union. They showed these to my mother. I held my breath, but Mama Wong generously oohed and aahed even over the mulatto babies, agreeing that they were unutterably precious and beautiful. The new face of America.

— You see what kind luck that baby bring you, she told one parent.

The parent beamed.

To another couple, she said: — Don’t worry. Carnegie and Blondie’s babies going to look even funnier than that.

How people laughed!

BLONDIE / 
How people danced! Even Mama Wong and her friends danced, their faces red—with one another, and with my family, and with other people too. The dancing spilled out of the tent, onto the lawn.

Outside the circle of our gathering, quiet gathered. The air cooled; the ground cooled. The mountains seemed to be assuming their rightful power as their shadows deepened; the drape of the willows was silhouetted by the sun. Still everyone bounced and swirled, magically unbothered by mosquitoes. But Mama Wong asked the time, and finally we pushed off in an old wooden rowboat—our ever-faithful Daedalus—with Lizzy in the stern, on the bench. She was bundled up in her bunny PJ’s and asleep, amid many blankets.

A shower of clattering rice. Then, to the music of our oarlocks, we bid everyone good-bye and headed to a campsite across the way—the first place I had ever spent a night alone. The music resumed, but receded. We could see the crowd begin to thin. Loons crooned. There was a distant echo, and there were bats over the water—hundreds of bats. Every now and then one passed so close we thought we could feel, not so much its wing, as a push of air. My own thoughts then were flying too, circling. I wanted to give voice to one of them, but how to settle long enough on one, and not another, to speak? I hovered near Lizzy, trying to make sure she didn’t get bitten; I had read once that a child could get bitten by a bat without anyone noticing. I crossed her bunny ears over her face, to protect her.

CARNEGIE / 
— Your mother seemed so happy, said my wife—my wife!—after a while.

— That red dress appears to have done the trick, I agreed.

— It’s so tight I can hardly breathe. I shouldn’t have eaten any cake. I was fine until I ate the cake.

Blondie was still wearing the Chinese dress. She had intended to change into a third outfit, as per Chinese tradition, for her leavetaking. But that involved spaghetti straps, which at the last minute she had thought too much for my mother and her friends.

— She’s so crazy about you now, she’s hoping you’ll go into business with her, I said; trying out the idea in a joking manner.

Blondie laughed so loud she seemed to be startling the early stars out of the just-dark sky. 

— I thought there would be some strings on that million dollars, she said.

Million dollars?

It seemed that after I had left Mama Wong, the night of the rehearsal dinner, she had summoned Blondie to her room. Blondie had responded to the summons, accepted a juice from the mini-bar, then sat as directed in the armchair. Mama Wong had offered her the million dollars not to get married; Blondie had accepted. Whereupon Mama Wong gave Blondie permission to marry me after all.