Typical American (5 page)

"Not only do I know who you are, I know what you are," continued Pinkus.

This time Ralph moved to let someone by.

"Not only do I know you're a liar, I know you're a sneak. You keep hanging around my house, you'll get arrested, you hear me?"

"Wha?" Ralph started.

"I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but now I'm onto you, you hear me? No more of this I'm a poor immigrant. I talked to George Fitt. I'm telling you now, I've called the police. My daughter's wearing a whistle."

Ralph edged back.

"Do you hear me? This is America you're in now. If you want to lie, you want to sneak around, you should go back to China. Here in America, what we have is morals. Right and wrong. We don't sneak around."

Ralph stared.

"You hear me?"

Ralph tried to nod.

"We don't sneak around!" shouted Pinkus. "We have morals! You keep hanging around my daughter, I'll shoot you!"

Just then another person tried to sidle through. The person stepped forward; Pinkus stepped back; and Ralph, ducking around them, ran.

At home, he took a cleaver, turned it over and over in his hand. He sliced a sliver off one of his nails, touched the blade to the center of his palm and pressed enough to open a triangle of skin like a tent flap into himself. Out of this trickled blood, which

he watched meander to the edge of his hand. Then, tilting his wrist, he watched the blood cross back, no thicker, no more vibrant, than that of a chicken. He imagined a chicken in his hands, the practiced snap with which it became meat, a routine, a carcass to pluck to goose bumps; but first the blood must be let. He felt his neck for the vein he had slit countless times before. How easy to cross the line. One moment, one step, and a person was there, through the curtain to another world. How tempting. How amazing that the line wasn't crossed more often, if only out of curiosity. That curtain, it was like something someone made up. How could it be, in the real world, that a knife moved an inch in the wrong direction could — presto — transform everything?

He opened another triangle into his hand, next to the first. His hand, when he touched his pinky to his thumb, felt raw. The lines of blood crisscrossed.

Maybe he should wash his hands.

Was this his blood, all over?

He pressed his hand to his pillowcase. A red print, with no fingers — a mouth, evidence of a large kiss.

He was going to kill himself tomorrow, in front of Pinkus's house.

He woke up still holding the cleaver. Someone was knocking on his door.

"Phone call." Knock, knock. "Phone call."

Habit. Survival was such a habit with him that he put away his cleaver, moved down the block, this time to a building under siege by its owner's ex-wife. Sonya, her name was, her signature everywhere — broken windows, bashed doors. The moment the place was empty Sonya would break in again, sledgehammer a few walls, a floor.

But what did Ralph care? Once moved, he slept and slept, his days and nights marbled together as though so much vanilla batter, so much chocolate, cut into each other with a knife. He

had stopped going to work; as much as he hoped anything, he hoped Little Lou would come and find him. But Little Lou didn't come, didn't come, didn't come; and then Ralph didn't care anymore if he came or not. He lay waiting to see what happened. Anything could happen, this was America. He gave himself up to the country, and dreamt.

"Oh! Oh!"

He threw one of his shoes at the noise. A smile of lath opened amid powdery fallout. He lay back down, tried to sleep. Sugar. Pie. It was daytime.

And now that he was awake, he was hungry, he realized. His stomach burned. And his bladder — the old facts. He sat up slowly, blinked. Swallowed. Dust in his mouth. He tried to spit. He rubbed his face with his hands. What now? He walked his buttocks to the edge of the bed. A hand on each knee. He rocked himself up. Staggered a bit, crunching. Dark tracks trailed his bare feet.

Shoes.

He looked for his black shoes, found them plaster-dust white, tried to clean them off. The dust hung on, streaking. So what. In the bathroom mirror, he saw that his hair had been streaked white too. His clothes.

And outside, white. A conspiracy. White but warm, a day made for throwing off jackets. He trudged through the streets, hat and gloves on, studiously ignoring the broad blue sky, the winking sun.

He was not to be mocked.

Children yelped, exuberant. He ignored them. He ignored the icicles too, a whole row of glistening two- and three-footers dripping from a pipe. A boy accosted him. "Excuse me, mister? Do you have the time?" Not answering, Ralph shuffled aggressively on, stealing a look at the boy's surprised face — pink as a sweet cake. Ralph wished he'd been even ruder.

This was February. This was not spring. This spring was a false spring.

He thought. At the grocery he planned to buy what. Rice, but no place to cook it. Bread.

Rice, but no place to cook it.

From an open door, the smell of hot dogs.

Hot dogs! A step.

Ketchup. Another step. Relish. Pickle slices. Even the paper

boat began to seem appetizing, glistening in his mind with leftover condiment and grease. Then he was there, fumbling in his pockets for change. Everything, he told the man, yes. The first he gulped down; the second, savored. Sweet, salty, juicy, soft, warm. Squish of the frank. Tang of the sauerkraut. Bun — here juice-soaked, here toast-rough. His stomach gurgled. Twenty cents each, he couldn't afford it. Still he had another. Another.

His stomach started to heave.

Eighty cents! He swallowed manfully, and as the man behind the counter gave him an alarmed look — not here, please, not here — Ralph made his way into the street, his stomach contracting, relaxing, contracting.

Relaxing. For good?

A park. He cleared the wet snow from a bench with his forearm. The snow fell heavily, in a long pile like a sinking mountain range. And yet when he sat down, the bench was still wet. Wet wool. His under-thighs prickled. He took stock of his life. Three dollars and sixteen cents — more than he thought he had. He smoothed the bills out, lined the coins up on top of his thigh, in size order. On the other side of the balance — no job, no family, no visa.

A tall boy in a shrunk-up ivory sweater strolled by, hands in his pockets, singing. Then a girl teetered past in red heels and a red coat. For contrast the girl wore a large blue hat, fetching as a frying pan; Ralph watched as she took two steps, gazed up with rapture at the tree branches, then took another two steps. She twirled giddily, her handbag swooping. The handbag was red and gold, with a dainty gold-link chain. She held it by only two fingers. Was this temptation? If so, it was working. The bag swooped by again. How easy it would be to pluck it — quick! — out of the air. Instead Ralph pressed his fingers together and let the girl teeter on.

So. He'd passed the test. He felt momentarily pleased, like a man who, catching a chance glimpse of himself in a mirror, discovers a figure of some dignity. At the same time he wondered,

What test? Was he being tested? And who was doing the testing? And why him? That's what he really wanted to know. Why, of all people, him. From up the path, a black coat migrated his way, like an answer slow in coming. He squinted at it.

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter. Ralph was not religious in general, but in times of hardship, gods grew up, some to test and prod, others to look in on him. Interested in himself, he believed himself a subject of interest; so that when, after months and months of calling, Theresa finally found him slumped there on that park bench, Ralph believed himself not so much rescued as delivered.

"So lucky!" Theresa said later. After all, she couid've just as easily gone left instead of right, back around the pond instead of over the hill...

But what earthly luck could have produced this black coat, made it stop — could have made it talk Shanghainese, no less, could have turned it right before his eyes into a sister, his sister? Ralph was so astounded he couldn't talk, so astounded that in springing up to welcome her, he knocked her over, so that she fell to the sidewalk and sprained her ankle. Then he slipped too; and then they were both crying and not knowing what to do. Luck? How could it be only luck?

"Was miracle." This was Ralph's version of the story. "Miracle!" And even so many years later, anyone could still hear in his voice all that the word meant to him — rocks burst into blossom, the black rinsed from the night sky. Life itself unfurled. As he apparently, finally, deserved. How else could it be, that he should find himself lying in coin-spangled ice slosh, in America, embracing — of all people — his sister? Saved! Know-It-All in his arms! Impossible! So he would have thought; so anyone would have thought. But, heart burning, there he was just the same — hugging her, by Someone's ironic grace, as though to never let her go.

made her quit, sent her for dance lessons, strapped her to a stick-and-chalk contraption that was supposed to help her attend to her movements.

But Theresa would not care, being almost glad to be all wrong in some sphere. When Ralph laughed at her, she laughed with him. Wasn't she a misfit too! By day they shook their heads together, brother and sister, tears in their eyes. Only in the soft of the night, quiet, her pet cat in her lap, did she wish to be someone else. Like their younger sister, say, whose blessing was the blessing of blessings — to be who she was supposed to be, so in tune with her time and place that though she gave without calculation to others, she was invariably repaid sever-alfold. Her falling in love was typical. She helped a certain harelipped schoolmate with her homework, wrote her a part in the school play; and in return was introduced to that schoolmate's brother, a man gentle, handsome, and intelligent past imagining.

Not to say rich, which pleased their mother; and though it displeased their father that his wife talked of such things, it seemed that Theresa's sister and her beau were going to be allowed to marry. No one had actually said so; but neither was anyone matchmaking, and her lover's letters were permitted to arrive. Theresa tried to hint — she wouldn't mind if her sister married first.

No one would hear her. Her sister spent hours in the pavilion by the carp pond, composing replies. Her sister read poetry, searching out lines to quote. She admired her beau's handwriting. His absence bloomed in her until she grew absent herself, pre-ternaturally agreeable.

Finally the news came that Theresa was engaged, to a Shanghai banker's son. There was only one hitch — her fiance had asked to see her.

"Since when do boys come look?" fretted their mother.

Their father dropped his observation like a bomb. "Modern type."

But in the city, as the go-between pointed out, things were changing. She pressed delicately. Of course he would like what he saw.

"Of course " their mother agreed. Still, in later negotiations, she tried to arrange things such that the young man might glimpse Theresa as she drove by in a car.

The go-between apologized, explained.

Their mother compromised. The young man could watch Theresa walk past a window.

Then, her final position. The young man could station himself by a certain park gate as Theresa strolled down a path some hundred feet away, carrying a parasol.

"Aparasol?"

To protect her complexion from the sun. Their mother held firm; and as it would be unreasonable to expect a girl to take risks with her complexion, the matter was setded, except that Theresa refused to walk anywhere.

"Meimei," their mother reminded her — Younger Sister.

They were standing in the shadowy arcade that encircled the cobblestone courtyard. Theresa hesitated, looked to her father, who nodded his head a little as he withdrew to his study. By this he meant, she knew, that she too should retreat to what study she could find.

Discipline. At sixty, said Confucius, J was no longer argumentative. Of course, she was only twenty-six. But still duty called to her, a voice like her own. Meimei — Younger Sister.

"Anyway" she said, "no parasol"

By the night before the walk, though, she had worked past that bit of pride too. Her outfit included not only her sister's shell-pink parasol, but also a new pair of silk shoes, a size too small, the idea being not so much to make her feet more acceptable — her fiance would be too far away to tell — but to help her maintain a more ladylike step. Such indignities! She struggled to submit to them, only to be seduced. A modern type. Not the type to go along with his parents' designs.

Did that make him her type?

She placed her new shoes by her bed.

The path had been chosen so as to ensure that there would be nothing small in the picture — no flowers, no low walls, nothing for scale. Someone had proposed something about her sister accompanying her on blocks, but that scheme was quickly dismissed as too complicated. And so, as she started down the path, she was alone. This was August. The heat wound itself around her, stickily intimate. No danger of bounding. Theresa moved carefully, slowly — one step, one step — sweating. Thinking, as she walked, of the way penguins cooled themselves, sliding on their stomachs in the snow when a thaw was too much for them. Biology — another thing her mother wished Theresa hadn't learned at the convent school. She saw herself as if in a textbook. Instinct. The female of the species performs her mating dance. This specimen carries her parasol on her left, toward the gate and her fiance, though the sun inflames her right.

Her right shoulder burned.

And yet so, paradoxically, did her left, her fiance's gaze boring through her thin silk shade like a second solar power. How hot she was, caught in these cross beams! She was under fiery observation. The female of the species performs her mating dance. And how her feet were swelling. One step, one step. She could feel the ground radiating up through her finespun cloth soles.

Her instep rose.

A modern type.