The Love Wife (39 page)

The line outside was better than any advertisement, in fact we moved the register even closer to the door to make the line longer. That was my idea, just like the window into the kitchen so people could watch the cooking, and the free dumplings we gave to the first ten customers of the day. Of course we didn’t say why we were moving the register. We said we needed more room in back, for the kitchen, because of the increased volume. Which was true too.

Already people were talking about us. There was an article in the newspaper. Because so many people had tried to open businesses on
Main Street,
and so many had failed. If you walked down the street all you saw were half-empty stores, with too many shelves.

What was our secret? the reporter wanted to know.

LIZZY / 
Of course the answer was work. The answer to questions like that was always work.

BLONDIE / 
We returned to the center of our lives. Bailey settled into day care. Lizzy moved in with Russell, then—thankfully—moved back home when she realized he was eavesdropping on her phone calls.

— I wasn’t allowed to go out without his permission, she said. That was another thing. I swear, he was worse than you guys.

Meanwhile, Wendy made a new friend, Mya, who was smart, and sweet, and good at chess.

CARNEGIE / 
Suddenly all three kids had new modes of transportation. Lizzy, unfortunately, got her driver’s license; how we worried and worried, though not any more, as Blondie pointed out, than we had worried about Russell driving. At least Lizzy didn’t say anything, to our surprise, about the Jeep.

More happily, Wendy claimed Lizzy’s Rollerblades and learned to do tricks. And Bailey became so enamored of a hopalong ball that he stopped walking entirely, that he might hop everywhere like a kangaroo.

This precipitated a conference at day care.

BLONDIE / 
Carnegie got a new job—chief technology officer of an educational nonprofit dedicated to supporting teachers in rural areas. It was hardly cutting-edge, and who could get over how he had been treated at DMS?
In this family, we do not speak of DMS.
But he liked the people at his new job, and supported their mission, and found that in this outfit, he could take days off every so often. Even a week here and there.

CARNEGIE / 
I took up sailing. Thinking, as I tacked hither and thither in the sun, how healthy this was. How balanced. How sane.

But was it me?

BLONDIE / 
All fall and winter and spring our house seemed filled with our own music. There will be no nickel eating in this family. Of course we can get a new chess clock. A new way of defending against the Grunfeld, that’s terrific. There will be no licking Mom and Dad in this family. In this family, we do not tackle. In this family, the weekend curfew is eleven o’clock. Lollipops do not count as dinner in this family.

We had stopped looking for a sitter, not feeling that we needed one for more than an occasional Saturday night. And I was finding myself less depressed with less free time—in fact, happy—realizing, I suppose, that I needed to keep busy. This was hardly the deep revelation I had hoped for. But there it was.

In the meanwhile, I performed culinary experiments. One week was packet week—fish in parchment, chicken in foil, beef
en croute.
Next came a run of chutneys, followed by fun soups—tuber soup, pink soup, spider soup.

And celebration soup!—when Lizzy started seeing her old boyfriend Derek again.

WENDY / 
Derek the Normal.

CARNEGIE / 
How sweetly obsessed Bailey was with trains then, just like Lizzy, when she was little. Every day it was
Choo choo! Choo choo!
Then,
Crash!
—there was always plenty of crashing. And then,
Break train!
—meaning that he needed the breakdown train to come set things right. And of course the breakdown train did always come when he needed it.

Where did his sense of humor come from? He would call himself Juice and laugh; he gave his bears names like Butter. And when he discovered Blondie sleeping in one day, what did he say? But
Oink oink, Mama! Oink oink!

It did not mean anything exactly, this sort of thing. And yet it did make you feel as though you had sat on banks such as you wouldn’t want to have missed. That you’d seen rivers.

BLONDIE / 
Then came the first news of trouble.

WENDY / 
— You’re kidding, says Mom. You’re kidding.

She has this look like something just ran over her face, everything is flattened out, and her voice is funny too, quick and kind of skipping around. Hyper and then quiet. The quiet is like this big box you know has something in it.

BLONDIE / 
The takeout business was a success. But when it was time to move into a bigger space, they found that there was only one landlord in town. And that landlord was set on a certain rent not only for a new space, but for their old space. He maneuvered and argued—I knew this man, he collected fire insurance on a building every other year. So in the end they moved into the new space—they had no choice. But really it was too expensive for them.

CARNEGIE / 
Did not people still swear by their dumplings, though? Which they offered in four scrumptious flavors, including All-American.( We didn’t dare ask what that meant; it came, they said, with special sauce.)

As for their landlord laments, what else was new? That landlord was a greedy bastard, everybody knew it. In fact some people said he was one reason the town was depressed, that he destroyed every business this way. The mayor himself, that great man, encouraged Lan and Jeb to stay.

LAN / 
The mayor himself had lunch with us and told us how he didn’t want us forced into another town. He said what the landlord was doing wasn’t right, and that a store like ours brought all kinds of foot traffic into town. It was stimulating for the economy. It was good for everyone.

And so we promised him we’d stay. We shook hands with the mayor and had our picture taken with him. We told him that for the good of the town, we’d stay.

CARNEGIE / 
To bring down their labor costs, they replaced some of their help with Chinese immigrants like themselves—one legal and one not—whom they found through a community bulletin board on the Internet. As for how to explain this change:

Friends of the family, we have an obligation,
they said.

We are very sorry, but you understand.

Mr. Su has these friends.

Most people called him Mr. Su. For example, the employees, at least until they were fired. Then they called him ‘that asshole Su.’

Those Chinese stick together, the only people they trust are their friends.

Jeb tried to suggest that there was a skills issue also, that the new help had more experience cooking authentic Chinese food. (Of course, here he glossed over the All-American dumpling.) Not long after that, though, it came out that the new help were not even friends, as they had been presented.

These guys do nothing but lie! I’m telling you.

Lan finally came clean and admitted the new help was just cheaper, but to no avail.

They pay these people nothing.

LAN / 
Finally we fired our immmigrants and replaced them with local help, at far higher rates. But even so the help believed themselves underpaid.

What the hell can we do? We could be replaced by immigrants anytime.

BLONDIE / 
We tried to tell Lan and Jeb to ignore what people said. It was just envy and resentment, we said.

CARNEGIE / 
— Red-eye disease, we said. You’ll be all right in the end. You have the support of the mayor.

And was not the mayor a great guy? O’Reilly, his name was, an Irishman, he knew how things could be. How long ago was it really that being Irish meant fighting with somebody over something all the time?

— People were having you left and right, he said.

LAN / 
Shu da chao feng
—
the tallest tree catches all the wind.

BLONDIE / 
The PR problem grew when the help started filling some bags fuller than others. In theory, they used scoops, and all the portions were the same. But in practice, there was variation. People started comparing what was in their bags, and the blacks in town—all six of them—claimed that they were routinely shorted.

Then there were claims that the shop used peanut oil in everything. Three children in town had peanut allergies; their parents always asked before ordering whether such-and-such dish had been made with peanut oil. And Lan was always careful to ask the cooks. But the cooks were perhaps not always honest in their answers—or perhaps they were. The fact that a child got sent to the hospital and that the mother blamed the shop was perhaps not even fair.

Still the rumor flew that Lan’s Chinese food had almost killed a child.

LAN / 
There was another rumor too—that in the interview we’d given to the newspaper we’d said that the reason we’d succeeded was not that we worked hard but that we worked harder than anyone else. Now there were people in the bar down the street asking,
What’s the matter, don’t you work?
To which their friends answered,
No sir, I do not. I mean, not as hard as some, that’s why you see me in the very same fashion garments I’ve been wearing for ten years.

Of course, Jiabao and I never hung out at the bar ourselves, being too busy. That was a source of joking too. Our
prep chef
told us what people said.

What are you doing here, you lout? Loafing around again.

If you worked harder, you wouldn’t be living in a double-wide.

If you worked harder, you wouldn’t be hanging around here.

The way you work, pretty soon they’ll be needing you down in Mexico.

Of course, Jiabao thought it was true, that some of the townspeople were lazy.
San tian diao yu, liang tian shai wang,
he said—Fish for three days, take two days to dry the nets. The way they worked, he said, they could be Chinese government officials.

CARNEGIE / 
Then there was the house.

16

Sue’s Beach

CARNEGIE / 
Last backtrack—to just after Bailey was born.

Recall: I went up to the house alone, taking the day off, to see what manner of intruder was setting off our alarm.

That long, long drive.

Those rude, lewd beach bums.

Then turning on the cabin lights: only to discover empty cans, dirty plates, sippy cups. Unpopped popcorn. Someone having expected a microwave, it seemed, not realizing that the Baileys were die-hard Luddites who popped their popcorn in long-handled baskets over a campfire. Also I found diapers, wipes. Toys.

The woman had set up camp in the library building next door—the coolest of the outbuildings in the summer, thanks to the willows. I had never been met with someone so magnificently unkempt. A mountainous woman with felted hair, she did not stand when I came in, but only opened her eyes and glared glazedly at me as if to impress upon me my rudeness. I might as well have walked in on a séance. The corners of her mouth drew down in annoyance; she so pointedly closed her eyes again that they seemed to recede, as if hauled in, under her jutting brow. Her speckled bosom heaved and fell.

— Hello? I said. Hello?

She did not respond. Instead response came—startlingly—from a baby, emerging from under its mother’s wraps as if in a school play about Mother Hubbard.

I was not an infallible judge of children’s ages, but I guessed the baby (on closer inspection, a her) to be around eighteen months old or so. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt with a ruffled edge, and a heavy diaper. In her condition of hair and shelf-like brow she resembled her mother, but she could not have been less mountain-like. On the contrary, she toddled and tumbled, rolled and plunked, nonstop.

— Hello, I said.

She scurried back into her mother’s skirt.

Probably I should have had them both summarily removed for trespassing. Instead I impulsively invited the woman to dinner in the main house. It was dinnertime, and how were they going to cook, if I was using the kitchen? So I offered.

— Thank you, said the woman, rousing herself.

Her eyes—an unsettlingly clear blue, now that she’d woken up—seemed to scan me for hidden intentions. She was like a child herself in that she did not hesitate to look and look and look if she liked.

— We would be happy to dine with you, she concluded.

Grandly, astoundingly, she rose.

— Did you mean just now? she asked, once she was fully risen. — Or did you mean later?

She took a step; it was like watching an Egyptian temple being wheeled off an opera set. She was lighter in motion than I would have expected; her feet, improbably small. Her child too seemed somehow out of scale beside her, like a miniature child.

— Just now, I answered, mentally reviewing the contents of a cooler I’d brought.

— Very well then, she said.

And so we proceeded, the three of us, to the main house.

She was, as Blondie could have told me, Mr. Buck’s great-granddaughter. Her name was Sue. Her daughter was Ashley.

— And who are you? she asked.

I explained as I cleared the big table and set the food out.

— I remember your wedding, said Sue. You had a little girl.

— Yes, I said. Like yours.

— This is my girl, she said then. Don’t get any ideas.

— Oh, no, I said, setting out some stuffed grape leaves in a pickle dish. — Of course she’s yours.

Ashley sat on her mother’s lap. From across the table, I could see all the better now how overgrown and broken her small nails were, and how beyond detangler her hair. Her eyes too—a beautiful blue, like her mother’s—were crusted in the corners, her lips and cheeks chapped. Her arms and neck and face were bumpy with bug bites and scabs; she scratched so constantly that my skin itched in sympathy.

We ate. Sue’s pace was not abnormal, only the placid way she kept at it, eating and eating and eating. Ashley was less restrained; she stuffed things in her mouth, cramming and cramming.

How many times we had had to coax our girls to eat! Singing to them as they ate, reading to them. Cutting the sandwiches into bird shapes and heart shapes, cooling off too-hot foods in the freezer.

In contrast, Ashley. And how strange the woman and child looked, both eating at once, one above the other, in a bilevel arrangement.

I obligingly put out all the food I had brought. Food from the cooler—fish, shrimp, chicken. Lentil salad, orzo salad, tofu salad. Pad thai. Carrots. Kale. I had not wanted to bring so much food; but what if the situation took a few days to straighten out? So had asked Blondie. There was a greasy spoon in town, but it was anti–heart-healthy. Hence: broccoli soup. Tomato soup. Carrot soup. Salsa. Yogurt. And from my grocery bags, bagels. Crackers. Bread. Veggie chips. Tortilla chips. Rice cakes. Nuts. Fruit. Though I had brought beer, I left that in the bag.

Outside the window, the lake shone and shone, innocence itself. Every so often the surface stippled, then calmed. Tied up to the dock—a surprise—the bicycle ferry bobbed gently. It was missing, interestingly, its handlebars.

Sue and I talked. About the weather, the motorboats, the harbormaster, the town. But also about the house, which Sue believed belonged to her.

— Don’t go getting ideas, she said.

I assured her I would not.

— My family owned this island before the Baileys, she told me. My family owned this island before it became a school. My great-grandfather built this cabin. He built all these cabins. We gave the island to the school. Not to the Baileys, to the school.

— The school sold it to the Baileys, I said. Or not even to the Baileys, right? To my wife’s grandparents, who passed it on to my wife’s mother, who married a Bailey.

— Now you are living here.

— Just visiting, I said.

— You may, she said. So long as you don’t go getting ideas.

I passed her some veggie chips.

Across the way, the setting sun bisected the hills—the top half bright with sun, the bottom dark with shadow.

—  We are going to take it back, she said.

— How very interesting, I said.

She lowered her protuberant brow.

— Not that I’m getting ideas, I said.

— Don’t be fresh, she said.

Ashley, finally full, wriggled off her mommy’s lap. Hovering by the edge of the table, she picked up a bagel and looked at me through the hole. I waved, then picked up a bagel too, and squinted through it. She smiled and threw her monocle on the floor, where upon I threw mine on the floor, like the monkeys in
Caps for Sale
—a book I hoped someone would someday read to her. She giggled.

— You’re getting ideas, said Sue.

— And here I’m not even a Bailey, I said.

— I can see that, she said. Don’t be obvious.

— I don’t know if it’s so obvious, I said. I could be a Bailey. I mean, someone who looked like me could.

— Don’t go getting ideas, she said.

The sun began to go down; the lake turned orange-pink. Rummaging for some candles, I asked Sue how long she had been living in the library.

— Forever, she said, pointing out the drawer with the matches.

And how long was she planning on staying?

— Forever, she said. This is our home.

— Not to be fresh, I said. But I believe the Baileys think this their home.

— They may think what they like, she said.

— Of course, I said.

That seemed the most acceptable thing I had said so far.

— This isn’t a great place for a child, I said, lighting a candle.
— Where do you live when you don’t live in the library?

— Elsewhere, she said. Don’t be stupid.

— Of course, I said.

I tried to ascertain whether she had a job, or health insurance, or a partner. Zero for three.

— Does Ashley have a doctor? I asked.

— Everything would be fine, said Sue suddenly, if we could stay here.

— Of course, I said.

— May I smoke?

— Of course, I said again, though the Baileys hated smoke and did not allow smoking indoors.

Sue produced a pack of Marlboros. Ashley and I were eating apples, crunching loudly at each other.

— I’ll make you a deal, I said. You can work as our caretaker if you bring your child into the clinic in town. I’ll arrange everything.

— Then we can stay here, she said.

— You should be seeing someone too, I said. Are there social workers up here?

— Don’t be ridiculous, she said.

Ashley cuddled in her lap, sleepy; I produced a bowl for an ashtray, half afraid Sue was going to drop burning ash on her child’s face. I offered her and Ashley beds in the main cabin too, but she said I was welcome to use them.

— I just had a baby myself, I said as she left. — That is, my wife did. Just have a baby. His name is Ellison Bailey Wong.

— Of course, she said.

— He’s so beautiful, I said. You should see how beautiful.

She threw her cigarette butt onto the ground outside the door when she left. The ground in that spot was perennially damp, as she maybe knew; condensation collected under the shingles in that corner. Still, when she turned the corner, I stomped on the butt to put it out.

BLONDIE / 
Carnegie did call the department of social services, and the local clinic, and the police when he got back. But by that time Sue and her child had left.

Carnegie began using the alarm again.

No one was breaking in anymore.

CARNEGIE / 
Now it was almost summer. Having survived the trial by white of winter, and the trial by brown of mud season, Lan and Jeb were now enduring the trial by blackflies and Sue; for Sue was back. By their account, she was more solidly of this world than when I made her surreal acquaintance. Her hair was cut, and her clothes clean, and she seemed largely awake. Still, they were more afraid of her than they were of the bear family that regularly outwitted even their most ingenious garbage enclosures.

— The bears are not crazy, they said. Sue is crazy.

LAN / 
One day when we were sleeping
Sue
walked right into the house. That was how we first realized there even was such a person. That was how we first realized that she was living in the library, right next door to us.
Jian guai bu guai,
Jiabao told me—Do not be afraid of the strange. Still, I was scared.

CARNEGIE / 
We told Lan and Jeb not to kick her out. We told them that Sue was harmless, that she had a daughter. That if anything they might try to establish a relationship with Sue, so we could get her and Ashley some help. Lan said all right, but in a few days called again and said that there was no daughter.

— The daughter might come back, we told her. Keep an eye out. Sue is harmless.

LAN / 
After that we locked the door, but sometimes she came and stood outside the window. Of course we slept with the windows closed. Still we could hear her saying,
This is my home. This is my home.
We drew the curtains, but still could see her silhouette. And through those old windows, we could hear her. A man had come, she said. A man had brought her heavenly food, and told her to take care of this island.
You are its caretaker,
he told her.
To you is given the care of all its buildings and all its plants, for as long as you walk on its ground.
Or so she claimed. Sometimes she claimed too,
My family owned this island. My family owned this island before it became a school. My family built the buildings that sit on this land. My family gave the island to the school. No one ever thought the school would sell it. To a family that did not even come! Who gave it away to foreigners! Where did they go getting such ideas?
She said her great-grandfather had come to her in a dream.
Check the contract,
he said.
The contract says we give this island to the school, a place for children to learn. If it is no longer a school, we take it back.

Now she chanted outside our window.

— We take it back,
she said.
Check the contract. We take it back.

— What contract?
Jiabao said one night. He pulled aside the curtains and opened the window. I tried to stop him, but could not.
 
He said: 
— If there is a contract you should Xerox a copy for everyone to see.

She did not seem surprised that he had opened the window and was talking to her. She just looked at him and said:
 — You are not even a Bailey.

— The Baileys sent us here,
said Jiabao.
This is their house and we are their guests. We plan to buy this house from them one day.

— Don’t go getting ideas,
she said.

CARNEGIE / 
That was news to me. Jeb and Lan thinking to buy the house? But when I asked Blondie, she said she had indeed said they might. That she would talk it over with her father, yes. Seeing as she didn’t feel we could just up and sell it, even if it did belong to us.

— Most certainly not, I said.

LAN / 
After a while we weren’t so afraid. We felt sorry for
Sue
, especially when we found out her child had been taken away by the government. But why didn’t she find a way to help herself? Like Jiabao and me.
Have you never heard of bootstraps?
Jiabao asked her. We told her if she worked hard, she could have her child back. If she worked hard, she and her child could have a house, and food, and new clothes. Jiabao said she was mentally ill, but I thought she was lazy. I told her how Jiabao and I had winterized the main house with our own two hands. I explained to her how warm we were after we put the
insulation
in. We told her that any night she felt cold, she was welcome to stay with us. Because even in early summer, it could still be quite cold at night. Sometimes we saw frost on the ferns in the morning.