Typical American (2 page)

Did he confuse this phenomenon with love? Not yet. He stacked paper for Cammy. He taught her to say thank you in Chinese. "Shay shay!" she said now, whenever she saw him, whether she had reason to thank him or not. "Shay shay shay shay!" Ralph tried to get her to speak more correcdy. "Sh-yeh," he told her. "Sh-yeh, sh-yeh." He concentrated on getting his own pronunciation right, not wanting to pass on to her his Shanghainese hiss. So little of what he knew counted here; he

. 13

offered what he could on a kind of tray. "Isn't that what I said?" she asked. "Shay shay?" And before he'd had a chance to say yes or no, she was back to "Shay shay shay shay!" again, with such exuberance, Ralph didn't have the heart to do anything but nod. "Good!"

"You know, one of these days I'm going to study Chinese," said Cammy. "Chinese or French. Or else ballet, I've always loved ballet."

"Ah," said Ralph (this being the sort of thing he was beginning to understand he should say instead of "Wha?" when there was something he couldn't catch).

More favors, innocent enough — packages to the mailbox, expeditious disposal of a bumblebee. And, of course, help with her boss, Mr. Fitt.

Now Mr. Fitt was a grim man, an enforcer, with a small, sneering mouth; in another life he might have been a carnivorous fish. In this life, he carried a rolled-up newspaper in his thick hand like a bat he meant to use on someone. When Ralph wandered onto the scene, Mr. Fitt was tapping that bat on his thigh; his other hand was all five hairy fingers on Cammy's neat desk.

"But I w-was here. At one on th-the b-b-button." ITie sound of Cammy choked up made Ralph's throat catch. "Wasn't I, Ralph? Wasn't I?"

Ralph gave solemn testimony. Mr. Fitt straightened up, glaring. Cammy was all shay shays. "Tell me how to say it again," she said. "I know I don't say it right. I don't do anything right."

"No, no, you pronounce very good."

"No I don't. You say it again, the right way."

Ralph hesitated. "Shay shay."

"Shay shay." She lit up. "Shay shay! You mean, I am saying it right? Shay shay?"

Ralph nodded, beamed, situated his hat.

More and more now, he was beginning to know what was what. He was lonely still, but it was only a mist, a weather front that

passed through him when he was alone, a feeling of having turned too permeable. When he was working, he was fine. And having launched into his work, he did not go to the Foreign Student Affairs Office anymore, but rather to the stone-stepped library, where he studied and studied at the endless oak tables; or else to the kitchen at the end of the hall in his rooming house on 123rd Street. There, on the blackboard by the stove, he puzzled out problems with his classmates. Between equations, they marvelled that their tests would be scored to the whole point, instead of to five decimal places. Was it fair? Who knew? This was America. They forged on, mosdy speaking Mandarin, saving their English for impersonations of certain professors.

The kitchen was where Ralph spent his free time too, learning to cook. He could make three dishes now — boiled rice, egg rice, and fried eggs. Having thrown several successful shuijiao— making parties, his classmates were organizing a cooperative cooking program, and Ralph was practicing up, to be sure he'd be able to participate. Other developments: he'd discovered supper for a dollar at General Lee's, and also banana splits with extra nuts and marshmallow sauce (the specialty of the luncheonette down the street). Also, he'd bought a lamp for his room, from the secondhand store next to the grocery he used to go to. Already he had a history in America. Now he went to a new, cheaper grocery, even though the first grocer was friendlier than the second, and had been so nice as to count his change out slowly, one coin at a time.

From his doorway, the first grocer scowled at him.

The problem sets got harder.

His lamp turned out to have a short in it.

His problem sets started to come back red.

More red.

Who had ever thought the rice barrel could become an engineer?

New York lost its gleam. He drifted through its streets as if through an exhausted, dusty land, no detail of which had changed in a thousand years.

Then he remembered a form he was supposed to have handed in (some form, he had always been bad at that sort of thing) and, stopping into the Foreign Student Affairs Office, discovered Cammy arguing once again with Mr. Fitt. What a bully that man was! His whole long belly overhung Cammy's desk; he had his arms spread and bent, his fingers on her blotter. Cammy was holding her hands over her ears.

Ralph's heart rumbled like a Peking Opera drum; it was the crescendo before — crash of the cymbals! — a hero appeared.

"Think of your parents," urged Old Chao. His shirt pocket stretched with its load of mechanical pencils. "Think of your father. If he hears what you're doing, it will kill him."

Ralph mooned harder, with oedipal glee.

Now he had had some experience pitching woo before. For instance, during the War, after the pipelines were blown up, he and his classmates had ferried water up to the girls' dorm, each leaving his bucket at the door of a particular resident. The particular residents had fluttered gratifyingly in response. But this was America he was in now, which meant who-knew-what. Research: as his classmates grappled on with Finite Element Analysis of Structures, Ralph began watching Americans and, his English having improved, even talking to Americans — who, he was surprised to discover, actually liked to sit back, and scratch their sandy chins, and tell him what they thought a young Chinaman should know. This was how he learned that the ceilings in the White House were ready to fall down, as well as other things. That he ought never put a bumper sticker on a new car. That when dames had dandruff, it was often just flakes from their hairspray.

The last of these wisdoms came from an old man in the luncheonette.

"Dames?" chewed Ralph.

"Holy Jesus," said the man, going on to explain not only what a dame was, but other basics. What was wrong with politics (dames); what was wrong with the Yankees (dames); and what was wrong with America.

"Dames?" said Ralph.

"Dough," said the man. He gripped his sandwich so hard, its contents bulged. "That's all anyone understands in this country. Dough, dough, dough."

"Dames too?"

"Dames got it the worst. You know what dames understand?"

"Dough."

"Diamonds. Pearls. Big fat fur coats."

"Presents?"

"You got it." He nodded so emphatically, his sandwich laid a pickle chip. "Big fat presents."

On the way home, Ralph bought a scarf. The next week it was a jar of cold cream. Presents paved roads in China too; this was a type of construction he knew. Pins, belts, booties. A hat, a pot holder, a can opener. She would understand; that was how he felt in the stores.

In person, though, he was just so much ardor next door, a boy whispering his heart through a solid garden wall. "Oo-oo-ooo," Cammy crooned, upon being presented with a box. "Shay shay!" But then she never wore any of the pins or anything else. Sometimes he wondered if she returned all of his presents for cash, the way she had with a radio she'd been given at a school picnic. He tried making little pen marks here and there on things he gave her, as tracers, but then couldn't bring himself to check for them in the stores. Instead he stood in front of her empty desk in the evening, after everyone had gone home, and touched her things — her typewriter, her scissors, her pencil cup, her blotter — as if trying to coax them into yielding up what somewhere in their atoms they had to know. Did she love him?

That year was the year of the big blizzard, twenty-eight inches. The sidewalks turned to tunnels; cars were lost for the season. It seemed the drifts would never melt.

But magically, one day, they had; and there then were Ralph and Cammy, going out for coffee every so often. The atmosphere had indeed warmed. If Ralph had not yet won her, at least he'd won her confidence. Now, over doughnuts, she told him how she'd leave her job, except that she'd sworn to Mr. Fitt's boss that she'd stay.

"The dean," she sighed. "He's put me down for another raise. I don't know." She batted her lashes as though bothered by something in the air. "Do you think that's wrong?"

Reassurance. It was all she'd ever wanted, though they did

talk too about houses and cars, and about how she'd always dreamed of going to Paris for her honeymoon.

"Hmm," mulled Ralph. "That's far."

Then one afternoon in the spring, they were out, by chance, at dusk. They went to the same luncheonette they always had, but this time its front glowed gold; and when they emerged a little later, it turned out that they'd been talking longer than they'd realized, so that it was — who would have thought it? — already night. The clamorous street had turned private, a blue path such as should rightly lead to a hidden knoll, and so on. They headed for the park by the river, hushing their voices. The tree leaves rustled obligingly.

"Of course you will happy," he told her.

"I'm not happy."

"You know " He hesitated, but courage fought its way to

him. "You know, you are like star in sky." He gestured awkwardly, hat in hand.

"I'm not a star."

"You are like bird," he went on.

"Bird?"

"Bird. You know ... in sky."

She looked at him as though she'd never heard of a thing higher than ceilings.

"You know," he said. "Up."

"Those are cliches." She started to sniffle.

"Cree?"

"You're just like the other guys. You are." Now she was crying. "You think you're different, but you're exactly the same! A peapod! You are! No one listens! No one cares a-a-bout m-m-me-eee..."

What had happened? He didn't even know.

Still she was crying.

"Cold?" he asked finally; and when she didn't answer, he stretched his free arm around her, gingerly. Was this how women cried, their whole bodies trembling? He folded her toward him

carefully, half expecting her to object. She dropped her wet face to his shoulder. Her breasts against his chest were nothing like earthworks at all.

America!

Crushing his hat between his knees, he gently kissed the top of her sweet-smelling head.

With morning, though, came day.

"Second form from the right," said Cammy, her face closed. "By Tuesday." It was as if she'd filed herself away. "If you have a question, Mr. Fitt would be happy to answer you."

He went back to buying her presents. Things would change, he thought, they had to. But they didn't; so that when Cammy left suddenly, in June, Ralph was stuck with a veritable stockpile to bury away in the darkness of his black trunk. Her last day, Cammy softened enough to tell him how Mr. Fitt had fired her in open defiance of the dean.

"Our plans," she lamented.

Plans?

Honeymoon. Paris. Snails. The dean had a house and car, and had had a wife, until the papers finally came through. With

nobody except Mr. Fitt suspecting anything What a hard

time he had given her! Over what — a few long lunches.

Ralph picked a pencil out of her pencil cup. He pressed it to her desktop. The lead broke off neady, leaving a kind of headless cone, a wooden volcano. He did another.

Cammy went back to ignoring him. Until Mr. Fitt strode out of his office; and then, though she didn't actually say anything, she did give Ralph a crooked smile, which Ralph took to mean she might have cared for him. He ought to have bought her diamonds, he thought later. Not that he had the money to buy her diamonds, but still he thought it anyway. He ought to have bought her a fat fur coat. He ought to have bought her a car.

"Forget her" said his friends. "If you have to give her a car, she doesn't love you."

This made a certain amount of sense, even to Ralph. Yet he moped and moped — not eating, not talking, indulging his misery as though it were a child. His was a low-key style, the sort certain people can sustain indefinitely.

And so, no doubt, he would have, had not the Communists liberated Manchuria in the fall.

*3

was dropping— -whoosh — but still: the Communists would not, could not, cross the Yangzi River. That much remained clear.

Until the spring, improbable as ever, brought among its pretty new fashions, the greatest shock yet.

Come home! In the last letter Ralph was ever to receive from his parents, his father had written, Your mother asks that you please listen this one time. But Ralph could not obey. He wrote back, The U.S. won't let us leave; they're afraid we'll use our training to help the Communists. People are being taken off the boats in Hawaii...

It was a letter many students were writing, in outrage. The Americans, with their law and order, with their traffic lights everywhere — how could the Americans of all people do this? Later the students would guess that the Nationalists had put them up to it. At the time, though, they did not guess, they railed. It was illegal, completely illegal! Not to say wrong. Ralph was as mad as anyone, if only because the anger drew him together; his doubts, on the other hand, dispersed him. Would he have gone back if he could have? He wished he knew that he would have risked his life for his family and country — that he loved them the right way. Instead, he only hoped. He hoped that the Communists would prove unable to hold the country. How could they, when the United States wouldn't so much as recognize them?

He refused to be made an American citizen. He thumbed his nose at the relief act meant to help him, as though to claim his home was China was to make China indeed his home. And wasn't it still? Even if his place in it was fading like a picture hung too long in a barbershop — even if he didn't know where his family was anymore? Or was it exactly because he didn't know where his family was? For certainly he felt more attached to them for their having turned abstract — missing them more than he had liked them, the missing being simpler. Though not

that simple, not when a family disappeared the way his had, vanishing as if into a crowd, or into a clutch of wilderness, or into some kidnapper's hidden cove. Suddenly no more letters. Who knew why, who knew what had happened? Their story was an open manhole he could do nothing to close.