Grace supposed she could allow herself to become alarmed at the way this day—Christmas Day—yawned open before her. She couldn’t run her usual Saturday morning errands to the bookstore, the farmer’s market, the drugstore. With an eight-week medical leave beginning right after the holiday season, she had no papers to grade or courses to prep. She wasn’t supposed to be looking forward to foot surgery. Her doctor had warned her that her bunions were severe and would involve not only cutting the bone but realigning ligaments and would be more painful and take longer to recover than most. “Don’t be such an optimist, Doc,” she had joked, only to be met with a tolerant squint. What was wrong with people? It was Gracie’s little secret that she liked or could handle almost everything about living alone, except that she missed having someone to complain to on a regular basis. You expected loneliness, even the occasional dark night of the soul. But what a luxury it would be to have someone waiting at home to whom one could say, “My doctor is such an ass.” Of course, that someone would have to be willing to listen. Her daughter Evie was due to arrive in on New Year’s Day to help her through recovery. Too bad she didn’t qualify.
This Christmas morning, Gracie could see all the way up to the snow-caps of the Sierras from her kitchen window. She breathed in deeply, imagining that she was inhaling the stark, clear air of those peaks deep into her lungs. A couple such breaths made you feel vibrant, almost light-headed. Eartha Kitten coiled herself into her favorite sagging spot in the faded canvas chair while Grace scanned the Fresno Bee opened before her on the counter and half listened to the television on low. Why not forced blooms? Martha Stewart suggested. The program encouraged viewers to adopt just one new LIVING idea in the New Year for a lasting sense of satisfaction at having cultivated even a small change. This from the new and improved Martha, although Grace was one of those who had always liked her. The quince-currant jam and five everyday-elegant napkin folding techniques (yikes) seemed like genuinely good ideas, if a tad fussy, to Grace, but the bulbs made sense like nothing had in days. Why not forced blooms, indeed, she thought and slowly ate her break-fast—freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and leftover fruited kuchen from her friend Eileen’s Christmas Eve get-together.
Eileen, her longtime colleague at the adult education building, had invited Gracie to the gathering at her place up in the foothills. Her family lived in one of the nicer new housing developments the contractors were throwing together up there. Eileen had insisted that Grace should spend the night and leave whenever she felt like it the next day. The invitation did have its appeal. The drive up to Coarsegold, just above the fog line, was a pretty one, and she could escape the gloom for a spell. Eileen couldn’t entertain often, living forty minutes from the valley floor, so it was only right that Grace try to put in a showing. After all, if she did not, Christmas Eve would consist of her getting into bed early with a hot cup of decaf cappuccino and a novel. On the other hand, Gracie did not look forward to making conversation with well-meaning strangers, even if some of them were otherwise alone on Christmas Eve like she was. This year was so different without the kids and grandkids. Christmas was for family. So at the last minute she decided to make the drive up to Eileen and Vic’s. “Yes, I do have family,” she practiced answering in her head as her Corolla negotiated the twists and turns of the mountain highway. “They’re with their dad this year. Busy. Couldn’t afford the plane tickets.” Which was close enough to the truth. The truth was that Gracie wasn’t sure which, if any, of her children was still speaking to her since she had threatened to sell the house and leave Navelencia once and for all. When she finally stood before the plum-studded wreath at Eileen’s front door, her sugar dusted gingerbread balls and a tin of Almond Rocha in hand, she peered through the window panes at a lighted tree and a crowd larger than she had anticipated. Gracie felt for a moment like the little match girl, born to be on the outside of things. She shook it off, put on a smile, and knocked.
To her surprise, she had felt surprisingly cozy with Eileen and her family and their circle of friends. There had been hot mulled wine, spiced nuts, all manner of sweets and pastries. A really nice spread was laid out in Eileen’s handmade crockery, simple, not trying to make a big statement. Vic played carols on the piano including “O Holy Night,” which always gave Grace goose bumps even in a roomful of people she didn’t know. One woman about her daughter Evie’s age had adorable twin toddler girls dressed in white knitted getups with red bows in their hair and little red tights. They shouted out “Rudolph” with appropriate glee, while Eileen’s daughter, who was at that wonderful, poised age of prepubescent girls, looked on approvingly. At one point, Grace felt very flushed and set down her glass mug of hot wine with the cinnamon stick in it. She felt moved to say, “What a perfect evening” to Eileen, but her tongue felt less than reliable. She’d let the moment pass but later remarked to Eileen about how pretty Amanda was becoming.
After the singing, she took the plaid wingback by the crackling fire, tucked a bright throw over her lap—her legs got a chill so easily—and decided she was staying put. There seemed to be so much good will in that house, and warmth, and, well, Christmas cheer, that instead of becoming the evening’s wallflower, Gracie found that people kept coming to her to chat, offering to warm her mug, bringing her things to eat. Now that she thought about it, she realized it was because they saw her as old. Grandmotherly. In need of solicitous attention. Grace straightened and took one last cold sip of coffee. Well, you are old, she told herself. Old for your age. Other women her age were out running marathons across glaciers and single jetting over the Serengeti, she knew. Even her own mother had crossed an ocean knowing she would probably never return home. The funny thing was if she went far enough back in her memory to the days when her body was young and strong, she could imagine having lived a life that led to flying airplanes in your sixties. That had not been the life she ended up living of course. But she liked to think she knew something of the adventurousness those women must have felt inside because, although it didn’t count for much, she had always felt some untapped part of her waiting in the wings. She didn’t feel like the old women other people saw, the woman who has already become everything she was destined to become.
Those twin girls must have thought she looked the part of grandmother because they spent a lot of time in her lap, alternating with Amanda or their mom. The girls had sensible, womanly names—Catherine and Francesca—not cutesy twin names and not abbreviated into Cate and Fran or, worse, Cathie and Frannie. The mom was one of those extremely together earth-mother types dressed in a loose ankle-length cotton dress with a pair of quilted doves appliquéd on the front. She was still nursing her daughters. They climbed onto her lap, confidently tugged at the doves on her chest which turned out to be a cloth panel that opened into discreet nursing slits, and nursed away. Very clever. Women with sense had designed such clothing.
Unfortunately, such women hadn’t seemed to be around when she had young ones. Back then, of course, the only women you ever saw nursing were in National Geographic. The mom and her daughters made a much more appealing picture, all in all, but Gracie knew she could never have endured being pawed like that—not well into the toddler years anyway—by those charming creatures acting so territorial about their mother’s body. There was something untamed about their splayed limbs, their hands milking each breast expertly, greedily. Gracie loved her own children with her whole being. But why did every generation have to figure out a new way to make motherhood an exercise in complete selflessness? Just when infant formula freed women to order their days with a bit more regularity and to sleep through the night, breastfeeding had come back into fashion. As soon as they came up with drugs to make labor go easier, women had started talking about natural childbirth. And now there was even the “stay at home mom” movement, with women fighting for the right to do the very thing that they had fought against twenty-five years earlier. Gracie had gone back to school to finish her degree when other moms were doing it, but she didn’t feel liberated. She felt she had better get ready to support herself in case one of Wayne’s affairs turned into something serious or in case she herself got so fed up with him that she finally kicked him out.
The young woman had taken the opposing wingback on the other side of the fireplace, head bowed over her suckling babes. But she kept looking up now and again as though she intended to carry on a conversation while trying to hold two squirming toddlers in her lap. When she ventured a full look in the woman’s direction, however, she saw that the squirming toddlers were now asleep.
“I’m Lina Murillo,” the woman said in a pointed, but quiet, way. “You must be Eileen’s friend Grace Teller.”
Grace found herself responding to the woman warmly. Lina reminded her of her own daughter, Evie, with the edges softened. And the more opportunity she had to observe her, the more convinced she became that the woman’s down to earth quality went deeper than her 100 percent cotton clothing and Birkenstocks. She asked Lina how she felt about having twins, knowing it was a subject that wouldn’t require too much conversational effort on her part. Lina had explained that all the books on twins stressed the importance of helping each child to achieve a separate identity, starting with their names and their clothing. She confessed that she couldn’t help herself on special occasions like this one, when she dressed them alike, “like little dolls,” she said a bit sheepishly, but in their daily life she worked hard to treat them as individuals. Catherina was the more assertive of the two, the one who had always weighed more and seemed to dominate her sister. Francesca was gentlehearted, the sensitive one.
And so on. Gracie remembered murmuring a question or comment now and again, but mostly, she recalled the feeling of just letting the woman’s soothing, low-toned voice wash over her as she sank, dreamy and warm, ever deeper into her chair while experiencing the uncommon sensation of not knowing where her skin ended and the chair began, and of feeling too utterly comfortable in any case to become alarmed. Finally, she began dozing off in short intervals. A couple of times she started awake and had to sneak her hand up to wipe a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth. Every time she woke, she heard Lina’s voice and wondered vaguely what mother had raised her.
Gracie now recalled other things she had learned about Lina, although she couldn’t remember at what point in the evening she learned them. The twins’ mother was from Schenectady and had gone to Vassar College and married her biology professor, one Hector Chou. After many happy years of marriage (widows always remembered their marriages as happy, Gracie had noticed), they had Catherina and Francesca. But soon after, her husband died of lymphoma. Lina found herself a job as a seed technician for an organic farming operation looking to get a foothold in the valley. She was new to the West and spending her first Christmas without her family or her husband’s family, just her and the girls and Daro, the man she had come with. Daro. Now she remembered. She had fallen into conversation with him at some later point in the evening. He was the one who had told her more about Lina when she had asked.
“Daro Tagura,” he had said to her when he pulled up a chair closer to the fire to shake her hand. He had that kind but ubiquitous smile, bordering on indiscriminate. He did seem sincerely kind and not merely polite. Gracie couldn’t help wondering, though, if he had only felt obliged to finally come to speak to her since she was the only other Asian in the room. To whom could she express such an opinion? She wouldn’t say this kind of thing to any of her neighbors or coworkers most of whom were White, in any case. Her sisters would look at her blankly: What do you mean you were the only Asian in the room? Her children would give her a pained half smile that meant their tolerance was being strained, which would then make her aware that they had been practicing their tolerance with her when she thought they were simply having a conversation. Evie, especially, would feel provoked by the comment, would probably even conclude that her mother was being racist. She knew how to throw words around, that girl—conk you over the head with them, even cut you now and then.
But this Daro person wasn’t just Asian, of course, he was Japanese. A Jap, people had called them during the war. Had her father been alive, he would have forbidden her to speak with Daro.
The son of Japanese immigrants, born and raised in the valley, Daro explained that his unusual name was owing to the fact that his parents had wanted him to have an American name—Dale—but spelled it phonetically for Japanese speakers—Daro. Gracie couldn’t help laughing and told him about her own father, the Korean immigrant who voted YES on every proposition that ever appeared on a ballot once he had become an American citizen because he believed he was saying “yes” to the American way.
Daro had an easy laugh, with small, good teeth and crinkly eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair brushed the top of his collar, longish but neatly styled. She had a nephew his age. Had he been part of the sixties? That wide smile indicated something she couldn’t quite read, it being just slightly too open. She could see how he would be friends with Lina. He wasn’t wearing Birkenstocks; in fact, he was wearing rather dusty field boots. He looked like a comfortable person. Comfortable in himself, in his dark green shirt and wide-wale corduroy trousers. He smelled good, too, and was clean-shaven. But he was just a little odd. For one thing, he had kept referring to Lina’s daughters as Click and Clack, after their mother had gone to the trouble of giving them such dignified names. For another, his only interaction with them involved sending them into hysterics of laughter, tickling and tumbling with them until something was going to get broken. Lina hadn’t seemed to mind. Eileen and Vic certainly didn’t mind. Even poised young Amanda wanted in on the action. Normally, Gracie would have had an opinion about all of the noise and roughhousing on this kind of occasion, which she would use up calories trying to keep to herself. But that night she lacked the energy to express an opinion about much of anything. Instead, she smiled to herself remembering when her own kids were little. Wayne would hoist them, squealing and delighted, inside a blanket over his shoulder. “Here’s my sack ‘o toys!” he’d roar. “My great, big sack ‘o toys!”
She watched Daro and Lina, trying to discern exactly what they were to one another. At first, she had thought they were married, Daro father to her brown, part-Asian-looking twins. Now she wondered if they were merely friends. He wasn’t attentive to her in more than what appeared a friendly way, and he never touched her, except to help her on with her coat when they were leaving. He did look a good fifteen or twenty years older than Lina, who must have been in her thirties but that didn’t mean anything. It hadn’t stopped Wayne. Now she found herself wondering why in the world she had thought about her father forbidding her to talk to Daro because he was Japanese. Gracie smiled to herself: a senior citizen and forbidden to talk to a man. He was part owner of a Japanese farming cooperative based near Sanger, never married.
“Lucky, I guess,” he laughed when she had asked boldly how he had managed to avoid marriage. It was very unusual, an Asian bachelor. Then she had cringed inside, realizing that, after all, he could be gay. Her children had taught her to think of this kind of possibility. It was a subject about which she felt more or less neutral, mostly because she preferred not to think about a subject people simply never used to talk about. What did occur to her was that she and Wayne had somehow raised children who were remarkably tolerant and open-minded about such things. She admired this quality in each of them quite apart from their opinions, themselves, with which she did often disagree.
Twice before the end of the evening, a log fell, sending sparks crackling from the hearth, starting her awake. Both times, someone sat sharing silently in that circle of dying firelight with her as she nodded off in earnest. Once, Eileen’s husband, Vic, made a big show of sweeping the ashes off her blanket and asking if she was all right. And once, Daro Tagura simply lifted his eyebrows at her in a kind but curious way, as though she had just uttered something slightly ridiculous in her sleep. Gracie couldn’t account for her behavior of the night before, falling asleep midconversation with people she hardly knew. Having to be woken by Eileen who handed her a towel and a packaged toothbrush and steered her in the direction of the guestroom. It was no wonder some people drank all the time, what blissful oblivion.
Gracie sat up straight and pulled her bathrobe a little tighter around her waist. She had woken just before dawn and literally sneaked out of the house, cold started her car, and drove back down the mountain highway without meeting a single vehicle until she hit town. How strange it had felt, lurking around before sunrise like a thief. Or a woman having an affair. Once home, she changed into her flannel nightgown and lay her head on her pillow, blinking, breathing, until she felt normal again. Hours later, she opened her eyes, sensing even before she drew the curtains, the brightness of the day.
Now she sat and looked at the fireplace, which housed a cold, gnarled log. There had always been a fire on Christmas morning. After Wayne was gone, Ben or Mitchell had seen to it. It was ironic how all of her kids had always been such sticklers for family traditions and now they weren’t even here. Christmas morning just wasn’t Christmas morning without a wood fire. You got up early, you made a crackling fire, you started the coffee and the sausage or orange juice, and you went in and opened presents. A huge and leisurely breakfast followed, always with hot biscuits or scones served with the gold-plated flatware and the Christmas napkins that Evie folded just so. Once, Gracie had skimped and bought regular vanilla ice cream rather than the coconut-covered Christmas “snowballs” everyone was used to but nobody actually liked. Such protests had ensued from grown people, people with minivans and weed whackers and insurance plans.
Gracie sighed. She might as well face it. Living alone was as hard as living with other people had ever been. You had to maintain a relationship with your solitude; you couldn’t just expect solitude to fend for itself. That was how you ended up babbling, with newspapers stacked to the tops of your cupboards all around your kitchen and people giving you wide berth as you made your way, a neighborhood legend, down the grocery aisle. Not Gracie, not as long as she could see the snowcaps from her kitchen window. She owned her old beige stucco and the three acres it sat on outright. Two thin junipers stood sentinel at the front drive, which let out close to a walled housing development under construction called Sierra Lakes Village on its own county road. That road, which gave her an address separate from the annexation, was the only reason Gracie still lived in her own place and not some clapboard condo across from a strip mall. She had enjoyed her status as last holdout in the neighborhood. For what it was worth, she had roots in this place. It wasn’t where she had come from. It certainly wasn’t what she had dreamt for herself. But this house and the postage stamp of land on which it sat in the little blip of a township called Navelencia had been Wayne’s dream, the star to which once upon a time she had hitched her wagon.
The five-acres of dead trees, brush, and the carcass of a chimney hearth had been part of Wayne’s inheritance from his father along with a check to purchase land and the two-story stucco they had built. They had been Gracie’s outright for years, since the divorce. Now all the developers were dying to get their hands on it so they could compete with Sierra Lakes Village. Only Isaac Garabedian, who owned the surrounding fig orchards, had land worth more. Some day Sierra Lakes Village clones would cover every last fig tree and grapevine and dusty fruit stand from here all the way up to Kings Canyon National Park. Gracie had always intended to be permanently horizontal before that happened here. But she had recently decided that a small, new, white condo with no dust, nor storage capacity to speak of and no history was exactly what she needed.
After a day spent on the back patio up to her arms in potting soil and surrounded by pots of various sizes, Gracie lifted a white teakettle from the stove just before it burst into song. She measured a scant teaspoonful of coffee crystals into a mug and sipped her coffee standing at her kitchen counter. Its clean gleam made her feel at peace. On most winter days in the valley, there wasn’t any point to having a view, as there was nothing much to look out at except rain or fog. It was a rare December day when the sun did burn through the fog, and this morning was one of them. When Gracie and Wayne had moved in thirty-some years ago, they had looked out onto neighboring fig orchards, where dark, gnarled branches pierced the tule fog like the arms of desperate beasts. Back when the children had been young, Gracie sometimes caught sight of them climbing into the limbs of those beasts or later spied a child’s bright scarf or winter cap left dangling behind. Muffled by the fog, their shouts and laughter, even back then, had sounded to her like the voices of memory.
When they got older, her children mumbled rather than shouted and slipped off beyond the reach of her voice, the fog a convenient blanket within which to experiment in that orchard with all of the things that promised to ruin them and nearly did ruin them for a time. They would return to the kitchen, furtive, cigarette smoke clinging to their jackets, harboring their separate and pointed miseries. Sometimes, Grace would look up from the cutting board where she stood preparing the same evening meal she had prepared ten years earlier and have the sensation that the past two decades had been nothing but a flash of light. Poof. There they were, all grown. A long string of drizzly, foggy days did that to you, wore at the edges of your sense of self until you felt gray, unarticulated. Once she retired, of course, it would either get worse or she would be so good at being alone she wouldn’t give it another thought.
That pork cutlet with a little bit of applesauce, a half hour or so of television, and a shower, and it would be time for bed. In the manner of that prayer she had taught in Sunday school, Gracie would slip between her sheets, weary, content, and undishonored. She had missed her children this holiday, even ached for them. But her decision to sell the house felt as right as ever, even if her children did not see it this way. They had a right to feel so strongly against it that they stayed away for Christmas. They could stay away next Christmas if that was what they needed to do. It didn’t change a thing. Gracie was not being stubborn in the least. And if she stirred in the middle of the night, her heart pounding, her face heavy with the pillow’s warmth, the fear would be only the most ordinary of fears: a tree branch tapping against the pane in a brisk night wind, the floor heater ticking on or off again, Eartha Kitten aggravating some tomcat from her perch in the windowsill. Or some other noise, difficult to place, but not persistent enough, or alarming enough, to coax her from her sleep.
Sometimes, recalling the summer day when she had first appeared at the fruit stand, Daro Tagura couldn’t believe he had let a woman like Lina go. She had stepped out of her white Jeep, and even before he noticed that she was pretty, he noticed she was a woman with a very strong back. Two tiny heads nodded toward one another from their car seats inside the Jeep, forming an arch. The woman harnessed herself with a complicated-looking cloth carrier featuring front and back pouches, ducked inside, and extracted a chubby sweaty female in a denim hat topped by a fake sunflower. After inserting the child’s sausage legs into the carrier’s leg holes, she somehow twisted the thing around so that the first baby was at her back while she hoisted another infant in an identical drooping sunflower hat, its legs dangling, onto her front and facing forward. Most amazingly of all, both infants had woken without a peep blinking and serene as though it would take more than roadside dust and valley heat to get them going.
The woman crunched across the gravel in a faded sundress and sandals, came up into the shade and just stood with her hands on her hips. Calm as a pastured animal, she stood there sniffing, letting her eyes adjust to the change in light. Her face shone with sweat, and all three of them appeared flushed, but clear-eyed, neither flustered nor tired. Her hair, long and a rich shade of brown, was twisted up off her neck with one of those hair claws. Daro wondered if he should have helped her with those babies instead of watching her from his perch in front of the fan, his book open on his lap, his glass of iced tea sweating atop the particle board over two sawhorses that served as the counter. When the woman turned to the nectarines, the quiet, alert backside baby reached toward the bright smells and colors with no success. The front side child looked delighted, agog.
“Do you grow this fruit?” the woman asked him. Her bangs were almost perfectly tidy and straight, the color of wet bark, and her lips were full and slightly waxy-looking, as though she’d slathered on Chapstick. Part Latina, or Polynesian, he wondered? The backside baby grabbed a plum as her mother bent to pick up a bag of oranges. She sucked, patient and earnest, unable to pierce the taut skin.
“I’m a Tagura, but the Tagura Orchards is my uncle’s. I’m filling in today.”
“It’s nice. I’ve always heard this part of California is the place for fruit.”
“The world’s produce basket, they say. I’ve sold fruit here every summer since I was about their age.” He nodded at the girls. “Where’re you all from?”
Lina squinted when the squished plum slid down her back. He liked the way she simply reached her arm up and behind, fished for the plum, pulled it out, and tossed it in the wastebasket at the side of the counter. “Add that one to our total,” she said. She didn’t shave her underarms, but on her it looked good, natural. “Originally? From a decaying industrial city in upstate New York.”
“I took geography,” he said.
“Schenectady. But now you have to spell it.”
He did. And then he said, looking at the girls, “Don’t tell me—Click and Clack?”
Tiny hands with purple-stained fingers encircled her neck. “Close enough. Meet Catherine and her baby sister by two minutes, Francesca.”
“Ah, I get it. No identity crisis for your girls—nice distinct names.”
She smiled at him in a way that let him know he had said the right thing. “And mine’s Lina Murillo.”
“Daro,” he replied and wiped his hand off on a counter rag to reach it out to her. “Daro Tagura. You coming up or going down?” he asked. She looked at him, clear-eyed as ever, and blinked. “The mountain,” he added.
She laughed and shook her head. “Do you know that I was just about to tell you my life story? I thought you were asking if I was coming up or going down in life.”
“And?”
“Down the mountain. I’m learning pottery and firing from a friend up in Coarsegold.” She paused a beat. “So I guess that means up in life. Doing something for your soul again should count for that, don’t you think?”
Daro noted the “again.” He wanted to tell her she didn’t seem like someone who had experienced many lapses in the soul-nurturing department. Instead, he asked, “Anyone along for the ride with you three?”
“Down this mountain, no. In life, well, not anymore.”
He looked at her kindly, carefully. “Won’t be for long, I’m sure.”
He had invited them home to see the orchards and let the girls run around and play. It meant she would meet everyone, and he didn’t know how to tell her that no one would think a thing of it since they were used to his bringing women home, even women with kids. Plenty of women had spent the night in his little place back of the main house. He wouldn’t tell her that. He was just helping a transplanted New Yorker adjust to life in the valley, someone who could stand making a new friend or two.
For the rest of the summer, they were just friends, Catherine and Francesca playing the biggest part in their relationship. They took to him naturally; children always did. The trick was to treat kids like dogs, letting them sniff you first, not getting into their space until they invited you in.
Sleeping together was no accident. It ended up being, literally, just sleep, all of them, girls included and even a cat or two, on the floor of Lina’s second-story apartment. He and Lina had been drinking wine to celebrate her landing a position as a part-time cook at a natural foods lunch place in Fresno, a job that provided a cushion in case the soft money on the organic growing cooperative ran out. She had brought home whole wheat pasta primavera in Chinese food containers—no Styrofoam—paid the babysitter, nursed each of the girls, and then started in on the food like she wasn’t going to eat again for a week. Daro suddenly wanted to braid her hair, a single plait down her back, thick and loose, that he could undo later. She asked him where he had learned to do that.
“I did my own, for years and years.” He could feel her smile, although her face was not to him. “You know, a Chinaman’s queue.”
“I do know. My husband wore one too. I go by Murillo again, my maiden name.” She turned her face slightly to him. “I was Lina Murillo-Chou. The girls are.” He braided, the heft and smoothness of her hair a sensation containing the possibility of arousal. The dark wave of it caused a tickling across his groin. He tugged a handful of it, pulling her face toward his. He maintained vigilance with himself, even though it was something of a waste. Later, when he wanted it, he’d embarrass himself, there’d be nothing.
“You’re not Chinese though. Was it solidarity? Yellow power?”
Daro chuckled at phrases he hadn’t heard in a while. “That was before your time.”
“Hector was a full professor when I met him.”
“Uh-oh. An older man?”
“Not as a rule,” she smiled. “So don’t get your hopes up. But fill me in on your sordid sixties past.”
“There isn’t one to speak of. I was in high school when Vietnam ended, more troublemaker than radical. I got swept up in the times, I suppose. There were the years when acting White was all that mattered. Then came the years when not being White was all that mattered.”
“And now?”
He shrugged. “We had our say. Change takes, you know, time.” He wondered what caused Lina’s lack of reply but not enough to get into further discussion about any of it. So he added, “I wore the queue because I thought it looked good. Women loved it.”
Her head tilted up with a playful smile. The feel of her hair in his hands caused a ready stir that he couldn’t help feeling a little proud of. “So, they stopped loving it?” When he didn’t answer right away, she tried, contritely, “Or just time for a change?”
“I cut it off for a woman I loved. She left. I never grew it back.”
Lina nodded. “Hector lost his from the lymphoma of course.”
He tilted her head back gently, as if to kiss her, but laid a palm against her cheek, cupped part of her chin. “I am sorry. You’re young for so much loss.”
The girls were whiny and clingy that night—all sorts of teeth were coming in—and he offered to take them out in the double stroller until the sun went down so Lina could have an hour or so to herself. By the time he returned, she was asleep on the sofa and the girls were out cold. Leaving didn’t feel quite right, although Daro realized it wasn’t up to him to decide to stay. The right thing to do would be to leave this family in peace. Carefully, he lifted the girls from the stroller, kissed the top of each sleep-damp, fragrant head and set them in their respective bean bag chairs, whereupon they rolled toward each other in the middle and en-twined their bare legs, settling in for some serious sleep. He couldn’t resist pretending to himself this was his wife with her arm flung across her face, chest rising and falling soundlessly, that these were his own daughters. His couch, his television. It wasn’t that he wanted a wife; he’d have managed that by now if he’d wanted it bad enough. But Lina had that womanly quality of making you want to take care of her, independent as she was. He knew her enough now to know it would have appalled her to hear this said of her. She thought of herself as the last woman to inspire either protectiveness or possessiveness in a man. And, in fact, it was her very resourcefulness and self-reliance—worn with a kind of urgency due to her being a single mother of twins, he supposed—that drew him in. You had to be careful; women knew what was going on even when they appeared not to. Half the time, you eventually realized that what you thought was pursuit was nothing more than your unwitting fulfillment of a well-laid plan. But when it was genuine, there was nothing more attractive than a woman who had neither her guard up nor her line cast, probably just because it was so rare.
He couldn’t help himself. He switched on the evening news so low that he could hear the hum of the set better than he could hear the football scores. Just for a little while, he wanted the blue glow to fall on somebody’s face besides his own, to fall on the faces of people he loved, people who needed him.
The curtain of the conscious world had just let fall when Lina sat up, bringing him back from sleep. She was a clean waker, no fuzzy edges. She suggested that they each take a child, put her in her crib, and then go in and lie down in her bedroom. Her sheets were a well-washed bright yellow-and-white striped pattern that made his mouth almost water from the faint suggestion of lemon. She slipped out of everything but her panties and loose-fitting lavender T-shirt, somehow getting the bra off her shoulders with the shirt still on. What did that effort at modesty suggest? Or was it modesty? He found it sexier than her simply taking the shirt off. He got undressed as well, got in, and she turned her back to him. Then she scooted backward. He had always loved these wordless transactions between bodies. His arm fit so neatly into the curve of her hip, the top of his knee snug against the back of her own. Not all women fit like that. He grew hard with the sensation of that old newness, of age-old motions with an unfamiliar body, the intimacy always surprisingly sudden to him as he breathed in a new scent, cupped a new belly, kissed a new neck. She pressed back against him, willing, wanting. But he whispered, “Sleep, in the morning,” because he knew sleep was what she needed but also because, lovely as she was to him, he probably wouldn’t stay hard having had so much wine and it being so late. Erections lasted a little longer in the morning. He hoped to wake with one.
When Daro woke again, he was alone in Lina’s bed. Blue dark, faintest morning seeped through the half-drawn curtains. He felt around for his glasses and then lifted his head to look around for a clock. He let his head fall back to the pillow. Pointless, disjointed dreams had disturbed his rest, the familiar beginnings of depression. He lay and watched for where it would pool inside him. Neck? Lower back? Shoulders? Groin? But he found that he couldn’t attend to his awareness while lying in a woman’s yellow sheets, a woman that he hadn’t made love to when she had asked him to and whose whereabouts were not even, at the moment, clear to him. And, of course, all of these thoughts annoyed him further. He tried to gauge the silence of the household, whether it was weighted with sleep (had she gone in to check on the girls and decided to sleep in their room?) or felt empty (had she—they—gone somewhere?).
He sat up. He lacked information, a feeling he didn’t like at all. Draped across the foot of the bed was her white bathrobe. Out for a morning jog? There must be some sort of note then. Suddenly aware of the beating in his chest, he pulled the chain on the bedside lamp but nothing happened. Either it was a three-way switch or she hadn’t bothered to fix or replace the bulb. Where was the wall switch then? He groped along the wall where it was reasonable to expect to find a light switch and then gave up, fumbling around amid piles of laundry that hadn’t been there before. He had to urinate but didn’t want to wander around half dressed in case a female came out. What he wanted very much right now was just to find his goddamned jeans and get them on. He sat down in a stuffed chair, on them he realized, much relieved. There. He sat back down in order to think about what was next. He was getting too old for this.
Where exactly Lina and her daughters were right now was Lina’s business, he decided. To a younger man or a man more smitten—she was beguiling, truly, but his heart wasn’t in it—this little mystery would be worth solving. Daro just wanted the smell of his own sheets, the weight of a presidential biography teetering on the rise and fall of his belly, Ranger snoring at the foot of the bed, chin on tail.
He stood and stepped his way to the hallway, where he finally found a functional light switch. The door to what he recalled was the girls’ room stood ajar, the only light coming in from where he stood. He peeked in long enough to discern three slumbering heads. So much for Lina’s thing for older men, Daro thought wryly. He felt for his keys and wallet, stuck his Giants cap on his head, and stepped out into the near-pink dawn. Her next-door neighbor had left his sprinkler on; the water in his patch of lawn was pooled and rising. Lina’s front door had a knob lock, but he felt bad that he wouldn’t be able to deadbolt it or chain it for her. Should he go back in and wake her, bother with explanations and goodbyes, thereby risking enhancing the drama of a situation he wanted to de-emphasize, if not forget? He half-turned, but no. That was probably the reason he was alone at his age. He lacked that extra something that husbands and fathers had or were supposed to have. This lack wasn’t noticeable. To most people, he was a great guy. Hell, he was a great guy. In fact, Daro couldn’t remember the last time his conscience had stepped into his path, fingers twitching and ready to draw.
Of course, that night had been his only chance to sleep with Lina. He hadn’t been able to admit that at the moment, but his refusal stood like a curtain between them that he was unable to sweep aside, and before he knew it, they had become pals. If he wanted to know whether there was any possibility of ever upgrading (re-upgrading?) to the status of lovers, he could always ask her. But there it was again, that bit of stubbornness he’d somehow acquired that didn’t want to take the trouble.
Just as he had expected, the morning he rose from her yellow sheets and went home, he sat in his green recliner and watched his mood lower itself link by link into a bleakness that engulfed him for days. After two days of take-out pizza and TNT accompanied by lite beer, a can of cling peaches, then deviled ham spread, and then canned water chestnuts, it was back to the shrink he’d seen on and off for a decade, who gave him the same lecture about just staying on the pills. This time she gave him a dose that kicked him in the ass, and the next thing he knew, his uncle was cosigning on a string of new condos that were being built near Reedley on land that wasn’t exactly cheap but that his uncle wanted in the family before it became worth even more in the future. The first units sold so fast he was able to purchase a nearby development on his own, this time in Navelencia. He didn’t miss the fruit business in the least. Didn’t mind no longer being just one of many Taguras in his uncle’s employ. Once the old man had decided that he could buy into development just as easily as he could resist it, Daro’s life suddenly had new, if somewhat artificial, purpose. He moved out of the little place behind his uncle’s and into his own spanking new condo on a man-made lake in an upscale section of north Fresno. He showed up at wine and cheese fundraisers for children’s diseases and art festivals, where deeply tanned women with frosted hair and bedecked with clunky turquoise jewelry dragged him around the pavilion introducing him to their friends.
There was just the small problem of sometimes finding himself home alone, his head more or less reeling from what had become of his life. Days like these, he resigned himself to performing useless but occupying tasks. Armor Alled the dashboard of the truck, watered the lone philodendron from Lina in the snug little bay window off the breakfast nook, picked up dog chow, a rubber door mat, and a pound of salmon on sale at the Costco. When he returned lugging the twenty-pound sack over his shoulder, the pool guy behind the gated fence glanced his way. Daro called out a friendly hello but got no response. His fingers itched to dead-head the tiny rosebushes or to water the shrubs that someone else took care of. New house smell was unnerving. He’d just read an article they’d included in his sack at the health food store: new houses were chock full of toxins. Carpets, fresh paint, poly-laminate floors, synthetic upholstery, varnish—all gave off outgases—and the door and windows on the new models were often so snug and well-insulated that it was poisonous just to hang out at home. So he did very little of it. The place had long been as bare as the surface of the moon, save for an unyielding new futon, a rustic-look TV hutch in knobby pine, and his old leather recliner from home, the kind of furniture piece that, Lina assured him, most women found offensive. Daro had argued that the chair was in perfectly good condition and that it would probably only be a few more years before avocado came back into style as an acceptable designer color. Besides, it was the only thing in the house that didn’t smell like it was fresh from a factory warehouse. “Avocado will never come back as a color,” Lina assured him. “Guacamole will be its next incarnation.”
Lina, good woman, had decided to remain his friend throughout the changes of the past months. He and Francesca and Catherine had a movie night once a week, while Lina got out for the evening, sometimes with a date. In exchange, she brought meals from the restaurant or cooked for him once or twice a week. She brought him items she had found at estate sales—cross-stitched kitchen curtains of Dutch children playing leapfrog, milk glass pieces, funky old hand tools or cameras as decoration. She had even found some posters from old packing crates—an old Sunkist label of a fresh-cheeked brown-haired beauty, the Unrivalled label with mighty Atlas wielding an orange, and the Golden Globe label with the brightly colored hummingbirds. She had them framed with boldly contrasting matting and hung them in the dining alcove. She was so good at coming and going, her ponytail flipping behind as she rushed out to work, or clicking off in heels and a short, swishy skirt with a man on her arm that it took Daro by surprise when “pals” was suddenly supposed to be over. He thought it might have something to do with the girls starting a half day twice a week at the Boulevard Children’s Center. For the hands-on mom that Lina was, this was a very big deal, for Lina more than the girls of course. She was getting to that age of waning possibility when it came to having more babies, whether or not she actually wanted more babies being a different issue altogether. How women could leap from a trivial change like starting daycare to wanting to get married and have babies was among the least charming (and most enduring) of their mysteries.
They had had a great morning at the Floating World festival downtown. Catherina and Francesca had done the traditional Oban dance holding their mom’s and Daro’s hands. Then they had sat together under a canopy hung with streamers where the sunshine jutted in at bright angles, scooping udon noodles off little plastic plates with little plastic forks as children sang in bright costumes on a set of risers. The way she held him lightly at the elbow or leaned into his side told Daro that Lina had been pretending he was her spouse. Since he was either related to or an acquaintance of most of the people there, what people saw was generally referred to as “Daro’s latest.” He really didn’t mind when she did this—it had happened before, even when she announced she was serious about whoever she was dating.
Blame it on springtime igniting thoughts of romance, but it didn’t stop when they got back to his place, including her ordering him around once or twice about dishes or stuff on the floor—in his own home—and in a tone of voice that reminded him why he lived alone. But he didn’t hold that against her, precisely because she didn’t live with him and wasn’t his wife. So it wasn’t resentment he felt when she started kissing his neck as they sat behind the girls on the couch, watching their previously taped PBS special. And she could get him hard—thoughts of her had done so plenty of times in the past months—so it wasn’t that either. He ended up having to fake concern that the girls would see them going at it. Later, in the dark, with music playing and candles lit (he shouldn’t have let her go to that length, he admitted), there was no good excuse. He was a cad at best for leading her on that night. His only explanation, not good enough for a woman, was that he had had so little of being chased in his life. The sex encounters he had enjoyed (as opposed to the far fewer enduring romantic relationships) were, with one or two notable exceptions that gave him a taste of what he was missing, almost always with women who wanted to be pursued, especially if they were cheating on a husband or boyfriend, and then it was pretty much required. So he enjoyed Lina’s ardent purposefulness, the more so because she was so appealing and such a good friend. And he didn’t know what he felt when he made her stop, whether he was being high-minded or coy or what.
“I’m sorry for myself more than anything,” he told her. “You’re so lovely. I guess I didn’t know wild oats were something a guy could run low on. God knows I used up my share. But I just don’t have the energy for the whole package. The girls are great, you’re great. I just—God, where were you twenty years ago?”
“At about your knee. But I’m sure you must have had plenty of 1970 versions of me—without kids—to choose from.”
“Ah, life before AIDS.”
“I’m licking some wounds here. Aren’t you supposed to say something comforting or at least face-saving?”
He gave her the half hug that signaled “just friends.” “I’m sorry. I’m trying to be light. I’m trying not to lose a great pal.” He peered under the wall of her hair. More words were not the solution, at least not any that were going to come from his mouth. But that was what she seemed to need right now. “You’re half my age, dear,” he tried. “Don’t underestimate that things look different from this edge of life, especially when it comes to your energy reserves. In a couple of years, I’ve got free coffee for life at McDonald’s. I qualify for discounts at National Parks. I need someone more my speed.”
Lina squeezed her eyes shut. “Jesus. I think that hurts worse than any of this. In general, you do want someone, just not me.”
He waited that one out, the observation being one worth considering. She took the cartons of pasta out of the brown paper bag. “You want lunch then? I’m not hungry.” Then she shook herself, as if trying to stave off tears. “I feel like I’ll do something undignified.” She didn’t appear to be faking those tears. Daro looked at the floor as she pulled her jacket back on, her shoulder bag up, got her keys in hand. “I’ll call you when I feel ready to be just friends. But, um, don’t hold your breath.” She hid her face in his neck for the longest moment she could. What class, not even using real tears as a weapon. His high-mindedness felt cheap. The scent of her alone made him want to snap his idealism in two over his knee and pull Lina by the hand to the bedroom. He didn’t understand what kept him from it, what gave him the strength aside from the desire not to repeat a pattern. Wasn’t he just putting himself first, like he always had, to try to hold himself above his wanting her? That’s a good one, his conscience answered. You almost had me with that one.
It was a wild, clanging, utterly alarming pain like sirens going off inside her feet until the meds kicked in. Really, Grace hadn’t expected anything like it. The meds caused a heaviness that made her feel slightly unhinged, but the trade-off was a delicious surrender to the moment that usually meant sleep or something close enough to it to count. Vaguely, she wondered if Evie was giving her more than the recommended dosage. She found she cared less to stop thoughts like these when they wafted by, un-bidden. Often, her grandson Adam was in the room playing quietly at the foot of the bed, singing along with a muted but brightly colored picture on the television screen or making sound effects for his toys. Several times a day she had the intention of lifting her head to observe him. She was curious about him; he had turned into a little boy. She dreamed about him on and off, saw him stepping from the thick fog of Garabedian’s orchard into the backyard clearing, pausing to consider the out-of-place chimney hearth, the rusted but still-sturdy swing set and sandbox that had been there since his own mother was his age. A strange, knowing sense flooded her when he came into sight. She already knew the small cups of his shoulders, the tender curls of his ears, the half smile at his lips. What was he doing there, and where was Evie? She felt so blanketed by dope, so heavy, so thirstily drinking up this time to do nothing but be a body trying to ward off the pain that she couldn’t muster the energy to say something. And in a way she liked it, Adam nearby. His needs were obviously being met somehow—weren’t they? By someone. He demanded nothing of her, although sometimes he would creep close, lean down, and press his nose up against hers. He wasn’t above sticking his finger in her ear and, once, up her nostril. This is what they will do to me when I am dead, thought Gracie with a muffled concern. Sometimes he turned into Mitchell as a boy, who had always been good at occupying himself at that age too. She would open her eyes and realize her heart ached from free-floating memory and regret.
Her leg became a train track one afternoon. As the cars Evel-Knievelled from her knees to her feet she awoke, screaming out loud. That was the way it was with the medication; the pain was just suddenly, alarmingly there. Adam stood wide-eyed for a moment and then bounded out of the room calling for his mother, who rushed down the long hallway and into the room, cloaked with the smell of cigarettes and the outside chill.
“I was going to check on you as soon as I had finished that cigarette,” Evie said contritely.
Adam blinked at his grandmother. “I’m sorry I vroomed on your leg.” Once his apology was accepted, he intended to make the most of her awake time. “Why did they have to cut your feet?” he asked, with more curiosity than sympathy for this old woman he didn’t know well.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t have shoes that fit right. It made my feet grow funny. The doctor made my feet better though. So don’t worry. It only hurts right now.”
“You gonna walk another day, Grandma?”
“Yes I am, Adam.”
“But not today?”
“Not today.”
He turned back to his dragons. “My grandpa will walk today.” The dragon alighted on her stomach. “They didn’t have to cut his feet.” Self-pity suddenly whooshed in as though she had sent out engraved invitations. “No, Adam. You’re right. No one ever cut his feet.”
He seemed to consider this thoughtfully. Then he asked, “Did they bind the feet of the Chinese ladies?”
Gracie shot her daughter a look. Evie merely poked her pen behind her ear, drained the last of her can of Pepsi, and shut her books with a thud. “Remember when you called and asked me to come take care of you? We had joked on the phone about your having your feet bound, you know, with bandages? Adam wanted to know what that was, so I told him.”
“Told him what, Evie? Does a six-year-old really need all the details?”
“He didn’t get all the details, Mother,” Evie shot back. “He got the facts. Come on, guy. Daddy’s gonna meet us downtown.” It was plain that Gracie could get her daughter from zero to sixty in less time than ever.
“I wanna stay with Grandma.”
“Well, you can’t. Grandma needs to rest now.”
“If you make me go, I will be really sad.”
“You be however you want, just get your jacket on. And where are your shoes?”
“Can I take Rhince?”
Evie sighed and gathered the dragon parts scattered over her bed. “Here.”
“Do you need help with that sash?” Gracie asked out loud.
“What, Mom?”
Gracie shook herself. “Nothing.” She’d been dreaming Evie was trying on dresses to wear to a school dance. Once, she had tried to tie a Korean-style bow with the sash at her waist. Evie promptly undid the tie and refashioned it back into a regular bow.
Evie paused, Gracie was sure, as a way of wrestling her irritation under wraps. “Can we bring you back anything, Mother?”
There was a SmartMeal with marinara sauce in the freezer. She shook her head no. “But I’ll take that frozen pasta dinner when you get back.” There it was again, Evie’s summoning of her patience. But never mind. She had to ask for what she needed, and Evie had agreed to do this. She wasn’t asking for spa treatment. She just wanted to goddamned well eat some dinner like anybody else.
“Mom, can I have meatballs?” Adam asked, obviously prompted by the idea of spaghetti.
Evie did not say yes or no to anybody. Imagine being so uptight or upset or whatever she was that you couldn’t answer a simple question. “We’ll be back by 7:00,” was all she said. And goodbye. In a moment, she heard Adam running back down the hallway toward the room. He burst in on the shut door, dragging the furry pinto throw from the living room. He draped it awkwardly over her, tugging it up to her chin. Gracie pretended to be sleeping. Then he pulled something from his coat and tucked it in on the pillow beside her head. Gracie opened one eye after he left with his mom. “Night, Rhince,” she said.
Before she returned to work, Grace had found time to venture into the garage, sorting through the kids’ boxes of stuff from previous eras of their lives. There were Mitchell’s books that had never made it to Ontario, where he was living with his Taiwanese wife who was teaching English to immigrant children and writing textbooks about it in Mandarin. Mitchell, himself, did not earn money. He conjured it. He stayed at home and (Gracie hoped) looked after her granddaughter, but she was pretty certain that most of the day he sat in front of a computer screen and moved his wife’s money from one place to another, watched the financial figures go up and down, and experienced various emotions due to the rising and falling of those figures that never registered on his face but that Gracie was sure were having an effect on his vital organs in some irreversible way. There was Ben’s motorcycle parked at a jaunty angle in the far corner of the garage and looking like an overgrown Schwinn lacking the red and white tassels dangling from the handlebars. Leftover from Ben’s hippie carpenter phase were various boxes of saws, tools and parts and a planer hulking at the opposite end of the garage from the motorcycle. He had finally come back for his yellow Karmann Ghia that had sat out at the side of the house since he’d returned home at twenty-five, broke, his band split up (Rachel and the Elders they had called themselves), and the young woman vocalist he had thought he was going to marry had gotten engaged to a cop. He got in that car again at the age of twenty-six and drove it all the way to New Mexico to herd sheep with some back-to-the-landers. That had been a year ago. He had called and written since he left, but Gracie hadn’t seen him since.
Benjamin was Gracie’s dear, her baby. It wasn’t that she loved him more than Mitchell and Evie, it was simply that Ben was the only one of her children Gracie would have chosen for a friend in a different life. Ben liked people. People liked Ben. Gracie would never have expected she would have the pleasure of knowing someone who had this much charisma, although she had admired people like this from afar. If you measured love by its intensity, however, it was her daughter who had commanded the most of it. Ben had been such a relief after her second child, the girl, the one she was going to dress up in little handmade outfits, the one who would just naturally want to be well-mannered, and tidy, compliant, easy. When Evie had left, she hadn’t looked back. The things Gracie kept relating to Evie were things her daughter didn’t even remember. The tortured entries in a diary from junior high school complaining bitterly at the betrayal of a girl who had promised to be her best friend. The letters beginning “Dear Mom and Dad,” apologizing profusely for receiving a less-than-perfect grade on her report card, then launching into blame of her and Wayne for not helping, for not seeing the problem, and then ending with self-castigation for all of her faults and a promise to try harder than ever. It was as though she had been born with the volume turned way up inside her head, had always lived more intensely than other people and, Gracie thought, unnecessarily so. Dear God, not every situation required such emotional fervor, not unless you wanted to die young.
At least the house was clean. A clean house was a pleasure something like a dentist must feel, thought Grace, after the teeth are flossed and polished, the gums a gleaming bumpy pink. With the proper attitude, January could be a decent month after all, Gracie decided, which is how she found herself on her back trying to imitate the yoga pose on the video when Evie walked into the rec room.
“Just look at it this way, Mom, be glad I’m not a meth freak or strung out in detox.”
From upside down and backward between her spread legs, it was clear to Grace her form looked nothing like Solomon Yin’s. But yoga took the ache out of her lower back after all those weeks of bed rest. And no one knew it, but she was missing the false peace of her medication; yoga seemed to help with that too. She sat back up and looked hard at Evie. Her daughter’s jaw had a familiar set to it. Gracie breathed—navel to nose, navel to nose—Solomon would say from his perch on some Hawaiian beachscape. “You have something to tell me, don’t you? Which I am not going to like.” She hit the remote.
“To ask you.”
“You need detox?”
Evie squinted in puzzlement. “Okay, let’s start over. I’ve been accepted into law school, and—I’m going, Mom.”
Gracie picked herself up off the floor to give her daughter a hug and to buy herself some time.
“Great,” Evie said. “You’re not even happy for me.”
Gracie kissed the hair over Evie’s ear. “Of course I am. When? Where?” Her mind searched the possibilities about what Evie could want—money? A car?
“Mom, they gave me this huge scholarship at the University of Iowa. Practically a full ride.”
Gracie squeezed Evie tighter and smiled so big her chin pressed into her shoulder. “Is that great or what? Did you tell your Dad? He’ll be thrilled.” She waited for the asking part, the bad news. “And?” Gracie finally asked.
Evie stepped away from her and went to the window looking into the backyard. People only did that in movies, crossed the room before delivering a line. Little Miss Perry Mason. “Lance doesn’t want me to take Adam out of state,” she explained. “But there’s no way I’m letting him live with Lance.”
Gracie got it, but she wasn’t letting on. Besides, the answer was no. Let her ask, but the answer was—had to be—no no no no no. “Isn’t four years of the Midwest enough for any Californian? There’s so many good law schools here. And what about your son?”
Evie sighed, ready for this. “I don’t have to pay for this school, Muther.” She paused a beat. “He’ll be fine. Here with you. We can keep Lance’s visitation just like it is. He’s already agreed to it.”
Gracie plopped down on the couch. “He’s staying here? He’s the Iowan.”
“He just got into the union, remember?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. I am sixty-four years old, Evelyn. Not to mention crippled.”
“And doing yoga.”
“Don’t.”
“With the best of them.”
“I’m serious. I’m happy for you, but I’m not one of those grandparents. You know, doting.”
“You make it sound like a dirty word. You’ve known Adam—what—a fraction of his life? I brought him back here and you didn’t even recognize him.”
“I was medicated, for God’s sake.”
“Well, now’s your chance to catch up for lost time.”
“You’re doing me the favor?”
“You know, Mom, there are some grandparents who would see it exactly that way.”
“But not Lance’s folks, I take it?”
“His mother’s already raising his brother’s kids, three of them. Messed up family.”
“Oh, well good thing we’re perfect,” said Grace. “I don’t know, Evie. It’s like you expect me to take care of your son. Like my agreeing to this is the only thing standing between you and your plans.”
Evie must have practiced not reacting, Grace decided. All she said was, “Lance would take him every single weekend.” And then added, “Please just try it for one semester? A trial basis.”
“I don’t owe you this, Evie.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“You’ll say anything right now.”
“I want what I want, Mom. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But this is a good thing. And you can help. I need your help.” She came to her and draped her arms around her neck from behind in a bad imitation of an affectionate daughter. “You’ll love him,” she whispered.
“I put your father through law school and look where that got me.”
“I can’t divorce you, Mom. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
Gracie sighed. It was true she didn’t know her grandson well. She could regard it as an investment in his future. “One semester,” Grace said. “And you’ll pay me child support, both of you.”
Her daughter kissed her on each cheek. “Just watch, Mom. You won’t regret doing this for Adam, for us.”
“I’d better not.”
“By the way, you should probably know—Lance calls him Chink.”
“My God, Evie.”
“He means it affectionately.”
“Evelyn, what the hell is wrong with you? I don’t need to give you a history lesson.”
“Mom mom mom, calm down. He does it ironically.”
“How is that possible? Lance is not capable of irony.”
“Very funny. Look, just think of it as a reclaiming of the word.”
“Like nigger?” Gracie shot back. “See, I made you wince.”
She was awoken by a low whirring from afar that could have passed for World War II fighter planes. She sat up a little in bed, parting the curtains and looking out past the fig orchards under a cold, clear moon. The stars in a clear winter sky always seemed to contribute to its icy silence. Frost. So late? It was March. Besides, when she’d gone to bed only a few hours earlier, she could hardly see the tops of the trees in the orchards for the fog. The moonlight revealed Adam’s sleeping form. He was on his back, legs splayed out over the comforter leaving him completely uncovered but thankfully in his footed polar bear sleeper. He slept like it was good, hard work, flush cheeked and slightly sweaty, and hovering around him the irresistible, hushed, animal aura of a slumbering innocent. She thought of all the faces that would gaze upon his sleeping form in his lifetime. A child of his, perhaps, wondering whether she dared try to wake him. A wife, reading beside him or perhaps wiping the tears from her cheeks as she pondered how to tell him the thing she could not tell him. Surely Gracie underestimated his parents Evelyn and Lance. In the early days, when it was just Evie alone, she must have gazed upon her infant, filled with amazement, gratitude, love. And once his father had come round to the idea that he had a son, he, too, must have watched his sleeping baby with that tender arch in the neck of a young parent learning the depths of love.
The smoke from the smudge pots began to lift above the orchards, almost hanging in the air despite the wind machines. She hoped her neighbor Isaac had a chance tonight. She put her hand on the window-pane, cold almost aching in her pressed palm. He was going to lose some oranges tonight, even running those wind machines. Poor Isaac.
She watched Adam’s sleeping form nearly upside down to her. She hoped he would be outrageously handsome, that those blond locks and blue slanted eyes would be considered exotic and cool by all the girls. In truth, he was what they used to call a throwback, like a black Irish, someone whose features reveal an almost all but forgotten racial past. Now with that still-round face of childhood, the tiniest pudge under his chin, and the half smile at his lips, he really did look like a sleeping Buddha. Buddha with hair. Blond-haired blue-eyed Buddha child. Forget it, thought Gracie. He’s too hard to wake and too heavy to lift. I’m not bringing him back to his own bed. Suddenly, the fear descended sharply upon her that she was going to have this child with her forever. As though concurring with her thought, the child turned, snorted in his sleep, and brought his arm smack against her side.
Too soon, it was morning. He sat up, yawned, and then confirming Gracie was awake by shoving his nose into her face. Once he had her attention, he turned to the collection of small toys he had gathered about him the night before. He asked her what catnip was.
“Oh, well it’s a small plant that cats like to eat. It makes them feel really good.”
“No, a cat nap. A catnap.”
“I see, yes. That’s a short nap.” She saw Eartha Kitten at her feet. “Cats like to sleep, and they’re good at taking short naps as well as long ones. We could have one right now, if you want.”
“No, thanks,” he told her. “I just woke up.”
She was still getting used to the daily-ness of living with a small child again. He would have chores, just like her other grandkids did when they were visiting and just like all her own kids had from a very young age. And she would be going back to work soon, so it would be time to find a good daycare.
“Adam, you may set the table now.” The child seemed absorbed in his play, but something told Gracie he was faking it. “Adam,” she tried again. Still nothing. She gritted her teeth. “Chink!” He looked up at her, a wooden puzzle piece in each hand. God, thought Gracie. This is sick.
“My dad and mom call me Chink,” Adam announced. Gracie couldn’t hear the word without her gut turning.
“Yes, I know that, child. But I will not.”
“Why not? It’s one of my names.”
“Adam is your name. Adam Bidden. I want you to prefer to be called that.” She liked that her grandson never simply burst into reaction before considering his words, unlike his mother. He was calculating something, arriving at some sort of conclusion. “You don’t like my name because that’s what they call me.”
“What do you mean they? Your mommy is my little girl.” She dumped vegetable peels into the trash and scraped the remainder off the cutting board with a knife. “I love her as much as you do, you know.” She watched her grandson consider his image in the black glass of the oven door. It was hard to say whether he was, like most children, simply fascinated with his reflection or whether he was contemplating the origin of the term his father used with him in his physical features. The child did not, thank god, seem to get it yet.
“Do you know what it means, Adam, the word ‘Chink?’”
He shrugged.
“Do we shrug at our grandmothers? A shrug is not an answer, child.” Still, she hesitated about going into definitions, as there was no way to explain why, if it was such a bad word, his parents sometimes called him by it. “Adam, you call me Halmoni, right?”
“Hall-money?” He seemed to consider the word in its three syllables, a new word when you said it more carefully like that.
“Which means grandmother, did you know that?”
“In your language?”
“In my mother and father’s language, Korean. Halmoni is what your mom used to call her own grandmother, my mother, you see how that works?”
Adam seemed to start tuning her out, suddenly very interested in his writing things and in securing a piece of paper from the tray she had set out for him on the low counter.
“So I was thinking, Adam. Adam? I was thinking we might give you a Korean name to be called, in case you really don’t want me to call you Adam anymore. What do you think?”
He was writing out the letters he had heard, having never considered the word as a word before. H-O-M.
“I want to tell you something,” he said. “I am six years old.”
If she waited until she had his complete attention, she might never speak. “You know, the Korean word for grandson is a pretty good word. It’s Son-ja. How about we call you Son-ja?”
He made a face but kept writing. When he finished, he held the paper up to her. HOMINY it read, with letters getting larger as they marched across the page. He seemed pleased that he had made her laugh. “That’s just how it sounds, yes. I am your hominy.”
“Okay, I’ll be Adam,” he consented.
“No Son-ja, then?”
He slid a glance from one end of the room to the other. “That’s gonna be my other secret name,” he decided.
“And how many secret names do you have?”
“Two. The one you call me that only you and me know, and the one I call myself that only I know.”
She nodded sagely. “Except even I don’t know that one yet,” he said.
The more she thought about how to explain herself to the child, the more indignant she became about the situation. It was unconscionable that she would be put in this position because of the ignorance of his father. Grace decided this warranted her breaking her agreement to Evie not to contact Lance for any reason between scheduled visits unless absolutely necessary. Well, this was absolutely necessary. She would put a stop to anyone’s referring to her grandson with this derogatory term.
That Lance Bidden would call his son by this name was only fitting given the young man’s general uncouthness and ignorance. Her own daughter had no such excuse. That “reappropriation” remark was so Evie. Nothing was ever just what it was. There was always an explanation that she couldn’t be expected to understand. No, as Grace saw it, her daughter who spouted feminism and pierced and tattooed herself in places her clothing only partially hid, went along with “Chink” because she had gone along with whatever Lance did or wanted. Oh, she understood the trade-off. That a woman would submit so entirely to a male had something to do with what she was getting in return. It wasn’t necessarily pretty on the outside, but it met some of her deepest needs. Evie would be shocked and downright angry with Grace if she dared to reveal that she understood her daughter as well as that.
If you went for the rugged type, she supposed Lance was a decent specimen, a skinnier version of the lumberjack on the paper towels, only shiftier looking, as though the lumberjack had to do something demeaning like sell drugs to supplement his income from appearing on paper towel packages. His hands were perpetually dirty, calloused, bandaged from some wound or another. He wore layers of things, like a bum. A dead sweatshirt over a tired turtleneck over the filthiest Carhartt she had ever seen. It looked as though he had been dragged through a mechanic’s garage and then behind a dirt bike. To be fair, she had seen him cleaned up a few times, and she always had the same reaction: now there’s what soap and water can do for a person. Then she was able at least to understand what Evie might have seen in him once upon a time. Fridays Lance came to get Adam right from work, always in a stocking cap and thick and dirty sherpa-lined mud boots. Despite his overall appearance, the one thing he apologized for was his hair, about which he must be vain, judging from the lovingly framed high school graduation portrait Evie kept of the young man with shining golden hair parted down the middle and falling down past his shoulders. He wore a hard hat all day, which made his now considerably browner and shorter haircut poke out around the ears, while the top was matted.
Evie had always had to have a bad boy. They weren’t very nice to her, but then, she wasn’t very nice to them either. Nice didn’t seem to enter into the picture, but if it didn’t, then for God’s sake why drag things out with each other? Lance didn’t strike Grace as being the tender sort. She could imagine that Evie longed for tenderness—who didn’t?—but, to hell with it. A mother couldn’t get far in being critical of her children; all paths seemed to lead back to her: Unable to achieve intimacy. Lacking access to her emotional side. All those jargony descriptions, all of them, were the fault of her child-rearing. She had never heard a single complaint from Evie’s lips about Wayne. Wayne, who brought the female clients he was screwing home as dinner guests out of some twisted sense of guilt about what he was doing.
It was with something of a drunkard’s remorse that Gracie watched Daro Tagura make his way up her walk in his blazer, blue jeans, and casual tie. His briefcase was a worn leather schoolboy’s satchel. It had been months, but the man’s first impression of her came only after she had sipped one too many cups of mulled wine in front of the fire. Her heart pulsed blood to her face, although she wasn’t yet sure whether it was embarrassment about Christmas Eve, anxiety about having taken this step with a developer thereby ushering in huge changes to her small, quiet life, or something else.
She let him ring the bell and watched through the peep hole as Daro appeared to rummage through his satchel for something. Adam leaped to the front door and yanked it open, revealing a man bearing a cellophane-wrapped basket of a few pretty pears and nectarines.
Gracie more or less blocked the doorway. “I didn’t do anything to deserve this, so you must be trying to get on my good side.”
He laughed heartily. He had a movie star’s smile, which you couldn’t tell until he did smile. Gracie couldn’t believe his response was genuine good humor, even though this was the beginning of a business transaction. Grace didn’t finesse things with people; she was too old for that. Life was okay, sometimes downright pleasant, but rarely was it worth charm’s exertion.
“This?” Daro replied, releasing the basket into Adam’s grip. “Don’t worry. If I needed on your good side, it’d be a much bigger basket.”
“Well thank you. This is my grandson Adam Bidden. We’re working on waiting our turn. And gentlemen shake hands when they are introduced to others.” Daro raised his eyebrows at her like he had on Christmas Eve. Gracie blushed. “Listen to me. I sound like a kindergarten teacher.”
“That’s your grandson?” Daro asked. “He’s so . . . blonde.”
“Well, his father calls him ‘Chink,’ and his mother allows it.”
Daro looked at Grace. “What the hell’s wrong with them?” Gracie couldn’t help a smile. “That’s a refreshing response. You mean you don’t automatically blame me?”
“I don’t know you well enough yet.” Daro grinned. “Perhaps we’ll get to that.” He gamely played along as Adam grabbed his hands and began walking up the stranger’s legs. “Look at me, being walked all over by a six-year-old.”
Gracie sighed. “I’m a bit out of practice, although I’ve been through this three times. Plus, kids are different now. Or this one is anyway.” They looked at Adam as each tried to figure out the next thing to say.
“Do you only see the blonde?” she asked him. “Look at him.”
“He’s a gorgeous child.”
“I mean the eyes. They’re as blue as can be. But you can see why anyway.”
“Why they call him Chink?”
She squinted. “Ugh, don’t keep saying the word.”
Daro laughed. “You and your daughter don’t get along, I take it?”
“That’s none of your business,” Gracie told him and rose to bring her mug to the counter. “And yes, he is a gorgeous child.”
“I’d apologize for the lived-in look of the place and the grime of country living, but I won’t since it’s not my house you’re after.” She showed him the acreage, its border ending where Garabedian’s old figs began. “This used to all be oranges, I hear,” she told him. “No offense, but how many condos can displace agricultural land before you reach a point of no return?”
“Not to dodge your question, but I was raised not far from here. There was a hotel where the Santa Fe came through. Maybe that old chimney in your yard was the very heart of it, once upon a time. There was even a postal office. It was quite the orange boom, which lasted until a wipe-out drought about the time of the First World War.”
“My in-laws founded this town—the Tellers—but they were all cleared out of here by the end of the war. Their investment was about profit, and temporary. Your family built its fortune off of produce. How could you develop it now for such a . . . finite purpose?”
“Finite, eh? You’re going easy on me. But I thought that’s why you asked me out here.”
At the Christmas party, she had opened her eyes and there he was. Now she had made him appear before her, had summoned him on this piece of business she was still unsure about. He did not take bait; he did not respond to provocation. She wondered what it would be like to be interested in a man again, if she had the energy to learn a whole new set of rules. And for what?
“My own dad lived somewhere in this valley for a time,” Gracie told him. “He was a fruit picker, I believe, and a cook. None of us knew much about that period of his life. What I’d like is to see where he was born.”
“I could never live in Japan; I have no interest in going back.”
“Going back?”
“I was actually born in Yokohama. My father married a picture bride and had to travel back home to meet her. There were delays, and they ended up staying for a couple of years before being allowed to return.”
“Restrictions, right?”
“Every time they turned around. The Japanese American Citizens League finally got my parents back into the country, arguing that my father had farming techniques that were indispensable for peaches and cherries. He built up what you might call a small fruit empire and then, of course, came the war. I was born after the camps, and it was so strange because it was like there was no way to get a sense of what my family history was like before Manzanar. No one would talk about it. When I was a kid—I had a sick sense of humor—I’d go around with a flashlight I used as a fake mike and ask my mom and dad and my auntie and uncles and anyone who hadn’t just tuned me out questions that I’d thought up, things I really did want the answer to even though I got very few answers. ‘Where did they put you when you had a baby? Did they have a prom for the high school graduates?’ On my wall at home, I have this exit form, this questionnaire that they gave out, one per family. Very few of my family’s things survived from the camp, but this was one of them in a folder of paperwork, along with a copy of the deed to Dad’s home and land signed over to a buddy of his who had promised to take care of things until they got out. That was one thing, my father did have friends in the area. I’d go around asking the questions from this exit form just to keep things lively, not expecting any real answers. Questions like ‘Where do you plan to reside?’ and ‘How will you support yourself and your family?’ that were beyond ridiculous since they had lost their homes and incomes to the people who were asking the questions.
“One day my father told me to get the strap from the nail on the wall. It hung right in the kitchen next to the wall clock and the copper molding pans. Understand he had never—no one had ever—used it on me. They’d never had to; I had a healthy respect for warnings. But he took that belt in his hand, doubled it up, snapped it tight, and smacked me but good. Just once. Once in my whole life. Then he lit the questionnaire with a match from the matchbook he always kept in his shirt pocket and threw it in the kitchen sink. It flared up, charred the porcelain, and turned to ashes. I think I understood even then that history tells us about the significance of events, but it isn’t very good about consequences. Leave that to the shrinks, right?”
Daro shrugged. “Who doesn’t, eventually? I went off to college. A lot of us got very active in the Asian version of La Raza and all that. But, I don’t know what it was with me. I didn’t have the character, the staying power, I dunno. My friends said it was because I was too comfortable being part of the owning classes and didn’t really want change.”
Gracie waited for more. The sixties hadn’t happened to her and they had changed everything and this man was speaking to her from the other side of history. “Owning classes,” Daro shook his head. “A few Japanese growing peaches out of the dry dirt.” She liked that he seemed to be working things through. He wasn’t young; he could live with that about himself.
When the grass became damp, she called to Adam. She was wearing sandals for the first time since her surgery. Her scars were pink and fading, and she sported a toe ring, one of several sent from Evie in a little satin pull-string bag. Adam took the opportunity to admire her toe ring, which reminded him of her former bunions. He told Daro all about the surgery, opining that he believed bunions had to do with food and with his halmoni’s improper hygiene. He reminded Daro of the story of the little girl who refused to take a bath and eventually spouted radishes in her hair. His halmoni had sprouted onions in her feet—that explained the bulges—and they, the “bunions,” had to be cut out. He further explained to Daro that he didn’t see why he had to brush his teeth every day if his own halmoni didn’t keep herself clean.
“That’d be between you and your halmoni,” replied Daro. Always game, he added, “But wouldn’t they be funions? You know, foot onions?”
“No,” Adam insisted, “they were not fun at all.” He rolled his eyes, incredulous that it wasn’t perfectly sensible to these two, “Bumpy onions is bunions, get it?”
“Now that you promise to make me rich, the least I can do is invite you to stay for dinner. I hadn’t been expecting company, but we can manage.” Now, hearing the two of them laughing together at the table (she never would have invited Daro without Adam there as buffer and distraction) made Gracie feel like she was playing house. Like a single mother must feel when a man she likes is getting along with the other part of the package, the crucial part. She thought of Evie, whether she was dating anyone new out there in grad school, hoping she wouldn’t hook up with another Iowan, for God’s sake. It hurt to think of Evie and Lance—what a mistake they had been.
She found herself wondering whether she should have “dressed for dinner,” as it were. Changed out of those filthy comfort waistband slacks she wore around the house and into that darted skirt that accentuated the fact that she still actually had a waist. Good Lord, not for enchilada casserole. That was the crazy part. That she might seek to do something that would enhance her appearance in this man’s presence meant—what? Desirable men of any age did not, as a rule, inspire much of anything in her. She encountered any number of good-looking younger men in her classrooms at the Adult Ed building, but they didn’t inspire butterflies and certainly not romantic fantasies. Perhaps that was her problem. Why shouldn’t they, after all?
According to Daro, she didn’t stand to make nearly so much as her neighbors, given something called easement junctures and water table parcel codes involving the nearby Copper Pond, but in his professional opinion, she’d make enough to be comfortable. “I’d like to do this again,” Daro added.
“Do you get a lot of free meals this way?”
Adam crawled onto a chair, then the counter, so that he could maneuver his way onto Daro’s back. “Eartha Kitten has a worm in her heart,” Adam said. “Can you fix it?”
“That only happens to dogs, Adam, and then only some of them. Now please climb down from our guest.” She wanted this man gone. And Adam in bed. She wanted to be alone, to get familiar with the enticing possibility that Daro Tagura presented in her life. As soon as Adam was out for the night, she was going to go into the bathroom, take off her clothes and examine her reflection in the cruel light of the full-length mirror. Then, when she had determined there was absolutely no reason why a man like Daro should be interested in her romantically—sexual-ly—she would shower, crawl into a thick and cozy nightgown, and peruse bulb catalogs in the light of her bedside reading lamp, a cup of hot tea steaming on the table beside her.
The long, strange trip of aging wasn’t what she had expected. For one thing, she hadn’t realized at the age of forty, even back when forty meant forty, that forty wasn’t old. Physically, she’d still been a spring chicken. She’d never done much to maintain her health, never jogged or swum a mile in her life, but she’d never really abused it either. There had been that diet-for-a-small-planet phase with her last pregnancy (Ben) when she fixed tabouleh and tahini before anyone had heard of the stuff and blended herself tiger’s milk shakes made with flaxseed and brewer’s yeast. Being Asian, she’d had the tofu thing down long before it had become good for you, and she had enjoyed serving elaborate pan-Asian style dinners to friends where she prepared Korean dishes and tried out passable forms of sushi and stir-fry because it worked as a dinner party theme and everyone expected her to be good at it. She was good at it. And at teaching Sunday school and home-sewn mother-daughter dresses and passing out homemade cupcakes in the kids’ classrooms. She’d been good at all of it. When she thinks back to when her kids were growing, her family was intact, and at least from certain angles, she and Wayne appeared to have one of the better marriages around, she wants to step back into the picture and tap that old Grace on the shoulder and just make her freeze-frame everything. This is the good part, she wants to tell that younger Grace. The part you’re flying through.
you there?
I’m here. Thank you very much for the toe rings and the pretty little bag they came in. It’s great to look down my legs to my neatly aligned, normal-looking feet and see my even (and now decorated!) little toes.
I’ve got a night class in a bit. what did you mean about adam’s asking questions you shouldn’t answer?
Mostly he asks me when you’ll be coming back. Big surprise. And if you’re going to be here for his birthday.
like I would miss his birthday. damn that lance. okay, what else?
Things like: are we White people? And how long are people supposed to stay married before they get their divorce? This is your job, Ev! I want to be Halmoni, not . . . this.
when you tell him the answers, could you tell me? you there?
Who’s responsible for throwing this party, Evelyn?
uh-oh, i’m getting evelyned. me, of course. and lance. and his new girlfriend, if she wants to help, i guess.
So you know.
shit. i guess i do now.
I’m sorry.
You there?
going to class. more tomorrow. nite.
“When is it my turn on the computer?” Adam announced from the floor where he was erecting a tower from a package of windmill cookies he had commandeered.
“As soon as your penmanship improves.”
“But I’m six.”
“Some six-year-olds have already taken their college entrance exams.”
His cookie tower collapsed; almond slivers slid across the linoleum. “Miss Lina is a Black person,” said Adam. Declaratives were his mode of asking questions lately. Grace started a Word file titled Adam ??? right then and there and typed in the comment about Lina and an earlier declaration about where babies come from (Adam’s reply: a place called The Farm—?).
“Not black, honey. You might say brown.”
“What color are we?”
“Ask your mom, honey.”
“You always say that,” Adam replied.
The first morning Grace brought Adam to his new daycare, Lina Murillo, the woman from Eileen’s Christmas party, was busy duct-taping huge squares of contact paper, sticky side up, to the linoleum. Adam leapt right onto a square and began laying down and picking up his hand with satisfying thwacks. “Sensory integration,” Lina had smiled. Another day when Grace came to pick him up, they were tossing rolls of toilet paper around the room and letting them unravel across the furniture and from the light fixtures, all of them in such a frenzy of joy that Grace stood there two minutes before Adam even noticed her. Then there was beach day, when Lina laid out a huge tarp and let the kids splash in their bright swimsuits and scuba gear in a wading pool on the floor. Really, Lina was almost too much fun. The child would never put up with normal life and responsibilities if he spent the day “fingerpainting,” up to his arms in whipped cream and mini marshmallows or making solar energy s’mores atop squares of foil on the front sidewalk. And it gave her a pang to think of poor Adam’s faraway tort-reform-on-the-prairie mother who was missing all of this.
To her credit, Evelyn had been fiercely maternal in Adam’s early years, even a bit holier-than-thou, which of course wasn’t hard for Evie. Grace had not particularly wanted to know it, but she heard from her all the same about her biweekly massages from a male massage therapist and how she did guided meditations in which she communicated with her baby in the womb or danced naked to African world beat as she rubbed herself up with shea butter and conditioned her nipples for breastfeeding with purified lanolin. She had a midwife and a doula, the latter of which Gracie had never even heard of, and further revealed that the only reason she wasn’t having her baby in the water right in the middle of her own living room was because her student health insurance plan wouldn’t cover it. And that was just the pregnancy. After the baby was born, she wore him everywhere, including into the shower, to class, and on campus protest marches for better student health insurance coverage. And, of course, to bed, where she nursed him “on command” until he was three, which she reported was on the early side when you compared it to weaning age in many cultures. Grace never knew what to say to such statements from Evelyn; they did not seem to invite either inquiry or agreement.
It was probably best that at that early stage of the game Lance was driving drunk and smoking drugs and whatever else he was up to, enough trouble to land him in jail and then into a halfway house, where Evie visited him once a month, baby in tow, and where classes with titles such as “Getting Real” and “Rid Yourself of Stinkin’ Thinkin’” somehow took. The next thing she knew the three of them were a family. They headed back to California and took up residence at Otter’s Cove trailer park on the Kings River, where Lance went to work fixing restaurant coffeemakers and other indirect heat-sourced appliances, and Evie got on as shipping and accounts receivable manager at an orthopedic supply warehouse out near the airport. No one ever says, “When I grow up I want to be a shipping and accounts receivable manager at an orthopedic supply warehouse”—and so much for that degree in biomedical ethics and the three expensive months spent in acupressure school—but at least they were both steadily employed.
Of course it wasn’t enough for Evie, who got itchy for a change about the time other people were just settling in. Grace sincerely hoped that her pursuit of a law degree was about trying to make something of herself for real this time. She had started and abandoned three different undergraduate degrees. Had gone away for a semester abroad and wasn’t seen again for a year and a half. Had slept with enough men to populate a small army. Dear God let it be time for her to get herself figured out, instead of dragging her would-be husband and son through the part that most people had gotten out of their system in their twenties.
On Friday when Adam was waiting for Lance to arrive, he announced, “My dad is married to a different lady now.”
“I didn’t know your dad had ever been married, Adam.”
“She’s a pistol worker. I forgot her name. I don’t like it.”
“Do you mean a postal worker?”
He shrugged.
“Why do you say they are married, sweetheart? Did they get married?”
“Because she sleeps where my mom used to sleep. She has yellow hair like me and Dad. Do you know her?”
Gracie and Daro looked at one another.
Some weeks Adam ran to Lance and leaped up into his arms. Other weeks he gave an almost world-weary “hi, Dad” as though he could hardly be troubled with the formality. Lance was cleaned up and brought in a nice outdoor smell with him. “Don’t you look handsome,” Grace offered.
And in a rare good mood, to boot. “Well, thanks, Grace.” He rubbed his chin and nodded at Daro. “Evening.”
“Lance, meet Daro Tagura.” The men shook hands, and then Daro discreetly busied himself with retying an action figure dangling on a shoestring from Adam’s backpack.
“I have an aunt who married someone by the name of Tagura,” Lance offered conversationally. “I never met her. She moved to Japan with him.”
Daro sat up straight trying to work the kinks out of his back from bending over Adam’s toy. “She probably had to back then. They might even have been chased out of town.”
“No kidding?”
“I think there were laws against intermarriage right up til probably about the time you and Adam’s mother were born.”
“Jeez, I thought that was all back in the Dark Ages.”
Daro was starting to formulate a thought that would get them much too deep into this conversation, so Gracie interrupted, “Adam said something about a pistol worker?”
Lance’s good-natured demeanor collapsed into a frown.
“I mean I assume he meant postal worker, but I just thought I’d check whether firearms might be involved, that’s all.” Gracie peered out the window at the darkened car. Yellow hair. The three of them would look like a family together at the pizza place. “Did you want to invite her in?”
“Maybe Sunday. And it’s not serious, Grace. You don’t need to bring it up.”
“You mean with Evie? It’s been brought up.”
Lance rubbed his face in exasperation and took a half step involuntarily toward the door. “Here we go.” He started snatching together Adam’s things. “Let’s go, Chink. Tell your grandma and Mr. Tagura goodbye.” At the door, Adam saw the woman in the car and shouted the name he’d said he couldn’t recall earlier, running out to her with his shoelaces flapping.
Lance paused, his hand on the doorknob. “Let’s get one thing straight, Grace. It’s me that’s waiting for Evie, not the other way around.” He stuck a thumb at his chest. “I’m the one that got left behind. In the meantime, I don’t think I owe anyone an explanation about my personal life.”
“Would you just remember that I can watch Adam, you know, any time?”
Lance put his hands up. “Grace, we both know that kid’s got a hell of an imagination.”
Grace paused and looked at Daro before she began, deciding whether to let him witness this little scene or save it for later. “I’m cooler than Evie probably makes me out to be, Lance, but I’m not that cool.”
“Say goodbye, son.”
“And please no cable in his room, Lance,” she called.
Daro put his arm lightly around Gracie’s shoulder. Then he shut the door behind Lance and walked her to the kitchen table, where he sat her down and dug his fingers into her shoulder muscles, working them with just the right touch—not so hard as to feel intrusive, not so tentative as to make her wonder why he had bothered. She let escape an involuntary sigh. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to become confessional. “Sometimes I just want to go home.”
His fingers stayed busy. “Where’s home?”
“This isn’t where I’m from, you know. I want to be with my people.”
“Your people, eh? I think I’ve rubbed off on you already.”
“Sometimes I think that was the whole problem, leaving my family, leaving the city. I felt like I could never go back, once I left. Even though they are my own flesh and blood. You’d think I was crossing an ocean, marrying my White husband and moving out here.” The massage brought tears to her eyes. “Is it possible to feel displaced for forty years?”
“You’re talking to the son of internment camp victims.”
“Koreans have a word for the feeling—han. Maybe it’s how I was meant to feel.”
“Fatalist,” Daro accused her. “Why not just take a trip to South Korea, where it really started?”
“My sisters went ten years ago. They took my mother. Everybody she had not seen for sixty years—imagine—who was still alive was so happy to see her. But do you know what they wanted? American things. For her to send American things, and money, and to take their kids with her.”
“She didn’t think she was ever going back, right?”
“To where? The DMZ?” Gracie shot him a look. “Sorry, I’m not up on Asian American decorum here. What’s proper between historical enemies?”
Daro laughed. “We’re all the same color to White folks. Where were you during the sixties and seventies, woman?”
“Raising my children.”
“So were lots of folks, Grace. We were yellow and proud, our race—La Raza as the Latinos say—was what mattered. We weren’t going to let divisive U.S. policies create our national identities. It turns out that inability to distinguish us from one another is our strength. Strength in numbers.”
“Which is where I wouldn’t have fit in.”
“Because?”
“Because I married a White man.”
“You think that makes you unique? Lots of us married White folks.”
“Us? You said you never married.”
Daro smiled. “I mean the race. You and me might not be any example, but lots of those marriages lasted.”
“It sure felt unique back in my day. But we were happy; we thought we were creating a new society.”
He nodded to the photo of Adam on the fridge. “You were.”
She smiled. “You make me feel like I can breathe.” The truth was that his touch felt sure and healing, and she feared she would begin to weep. He stroked her on the sides of the arms and then began to massage her head, working methodically around her hairline, at the base of her skull, behind her ears, at her temples. She felt at once electric and serene, and sighed again, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Let’s just take it step by step, shall we?”
Gracie’s breath caught. “I meant Adam, raising my grandson for who knows how long.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were still on the subject of Adam.”
She had to laugh. “You can’t mean you think I’m—interested in you?”
“I can’t speak for you. I guess I was hoping something along those lines. Forgive me if I’ve picked up on something that isn’t there.”
“Daro, I’m sure I’m closer to your mother’s age than your own.”
He shrugged. “My mother’s cool.”
“Wouldn’t you be getting the raw end of the deal? You could have anyone—Lina, Evie, for that matter.”
Another hearty laugh but no comment.
“You have. Lina, I mean. Right?”
“Lina’s a pal now. A great pal but just that.”
“Well, it’s absurd to move from a beautiful young woman like that to . . . How can you expect me to take you seriously? You don’t know a thing about women my age. I could introduce you to my daughter however. She’s attractive, if a tad prickly.” Daro merely sucked his lips together in an amused expression. “I see you’ve been trained,” Grace continued. “You know when it’s better to keep your mouth shut. But really, everyone you know will ask why you chose, you know, the vanilla.”
He laughed out loud. “The RC cola?”
“The four-door sedan. The creamed corn. The sensible shoes.”
“Just think how you’ll make out. Asian men are the new sex symbol.”
“Even if that were true, what’s in it for you?”
Daro kept his smile but said nothing.
“Don’t tell me—pursuit is its own reward, quite apart from the object.”
“On the contrary, it tires me. What I’d really like, Grace, is not to have to work so hard, at pursuit, I mean. So that there’s energy for other things, you know?”
“So, ‘I’m attracted to you but don’t tax me?’ I’m supposed to make this easy for you?”
“How about, ‘I’m attracted to you,’ period? It already is easy.”
“Uh-oh, you’re using lines on me. And don’t pour me more wine. Your strategies do nothing but amuse me.” She let out an almost guttural breath when he found a spot in her right shoulder blade and worked it expertly.
“Liar,” he mused. She breathed out again. Her hands went limp in her lap. “Fine,” Grace managed to utter. “But I don’t know the rules here.”
“I have a feeling they’ll kick in. Watch,” he said and kissed her.
In class the next day, Grace tried to determine which of her studly looking male students might be a candidate for a sexual fantasy, but there were so many to choose from if you were just going on appearance that the effort seemed beside the point. At lunch, she asked her friend Eileen if she ever fantasized about any of her male students. “Are you kidding me? My students are potters. Talk about good with their hands.” Eileen sounded disconcertingly knowledgeable on that score. And when she picked up Adam that evening, she told Lina flat out that Daro was interested in her because she figured the incredulous look on Lina’s face would bring her to her senses. It came out wrong, however, and Gracie ended up making Daro sound like the kook for expressing interest in her.
“My God, Grace,” Lina had replied. “You are so hard on him—and on yourself. Why does he have to be a perfect human being in order to like you no matter your age?”
“That’s your generation talking, dear. I know nothing about sleeping around, and I don’t see why I should be enticed into something risky and, well, uncharacteristic unless it really is worth it. Besides, you’re hardly one to speak on his behalf—right?”
Lina smiled sadly. “That hurts some, Grace. He’s the one who jilted me, in case he didn’t share that with you.”
“God, he’s an idiot,” Grace told her. And she meant it. Nevertheless, the next evening she found herself peering in through the plate glass at the dining room wall with three attractive framed orange crate labels, one of them of the pretty brown-haired Sunkist girl. Above the sink, an embroidered ruffle valance hung. She couldn’t make out the cross-stitched decorative figures in red and blue. From a distance, they looked almost like the copulating figures of East Indian mythology. She squinted. Kama sutra curtains? Surely not.
An hour later, Grace eyed her empty wine glass and cleared her throat. Daro sat up straight and looked at the wall. “Um, the nibbling on your ear thing is kind of my specialty.”
Gracie winced at the casual allusion to Daro’s lifetime of lovers—that sort of loose comment made him seem even more unsuitable as her lover. That he didn’t have the sensitivity to see that now was only another point against him.
“Daro, look, I can’t . . . some people aren’t . . .”
“Bullshit, Grace. That’s bullshit. Some people have accepted less. That doesn’t mean their substitutes are working.”
“Well, Daro, I hate to disappoint you, but I suspect I may qualify as one of those people. You don’t know me that well, you know.”
“As an empty shell? Did you aspire to that or did it just come naturally?”
“Look, Daro, I’m not your project. You don’t have to save me from my sexual wasteland, which is what I’ll admit it is. I manage just fine, thank you.”
“I don’t want a project, Grace, I want to get laid!”
“That was a joke, right? See, there you go again. You just don’t get that I don’t think that’s funny. I’m too old to find that funny, I just would never use that phrase. Daro, I wear polyester striped things that went out of fashion so long ago they’re back in fashion. I own a pair of shoes from the McCarthy era, for God’s sake. That is why we cannot do this.”
“Hang on to those shoes, girl, they could be worth money.”
“I like to watch those pathetic British comedies on PBS. In bed. Bill Moyers is my standard for a stimulating evening. I scruff around in terrycloth house slippers, Daro. You don’t want to watch me eat a chicken wing.”
“Hey, now that’s going too far. Don’t you try to out-Asian me. The whole thing disappears, right?”
“There’s not just an age difference. I was an adult when Kennedy was assassinated.”
“Kennedy was assassinated?”
“I wear white cotton underwear, Daro, because I prefer it. Don’t underestimate the turnoff that will be.”
He ignored her use of the future tense, but noted it, she could tell.
They looked at one another. “This is all just foreplay to you, isn’t it?” she said.
“I’ll disappoint you.”
“Grace, have some self-respect.”
“See? Already I have.”
“Look, what sort of kinkiness did you have in mind? All I want to do is make love to you. We don’t even have to do that right away. Or we could just, I dunno, touch, relax together. It doesn’t have to lead anywhere in particular—welcome to sex in middle age.”
“I have scars . . .”
“That’s scraping the bottom of the excuse bucket, now.”
She did feel ridiculously girlish, her elbows locked at her waist. Surely there was a more grown-up way to do this.
“Look, this isn’t exactly the summer of love. Why me? Why now? No man has even cast a glance my way for fifteen years.”
“I don’t know about the last fifteen years, but I’m damned sure they’re looking now, all the way from those sexy little toes of yours to the top of your head. Be with me, Grace. I’m not twenty-seven. This is not a conquest.”
Oddly enough, she thought about Wayne a lot more now. What Wayne had needed, what she had been unable to give him, was affection—kisses in public, squeezes of the hand, smiling glances across the room at a dinner party. She might have given these things to some other husband, but Wayne needed it too badly from her. She was raising his children and keeping his house; must she also demonstrate to him that he was loved? Then again, she knew that she had a touch deficit. She had started from too far back in life, with a mother whose touch she couldn’t remember in the least. The grown-up result, in shorthand, was frigid, for most people, certainly in Wayne’s view. But there was a history behind frigid, and while frigid was not Wayne’s fault, a lover with more patience to go along with that desire to experiment, that itch to scratch that was just this side of kinky (that he finally, and to Gracie’s relief, dammit, began to satisfy with magazines—not your average Playboy or Penthouse but raunchier stuff—jugs, cum, oui). Tenderness now and then he could muster, but it never seemed to grow into skill. And then, of course, came that fateful year, long before the marriage died, when it became too late to be the kind of woman he needed, when she only recognized any second chances she had been handed as such when it was too late to avail herself of them. Grace would have stayed with Wayne happy or not, satisfied or not, because her people simply did not get divorced. That’s what putting up with his affairs had been about, and there’d been no awards for that, no credit in the I’ve-been-persecuted-so-be-nice-to-me department from any of her family members, immediate or extended. Just a flat-lipped grimace from her mother as though it had just been a matter of time before this happened because she had married the hajukin, the White man.
One night Grace wore some lingerie she’d picked out, lacy, not racy. The dragons Daro would have had to slay to be what she wanted when Grace was feeling that vulnerable were too much for the most valiant of men. He kissed her on each cheek and went home.
“Just hold me—that was a mixed message given my choice of under-wear,” she told him on the phone a half hour later. “I’m a grown-up, really I am. Have I ruined my chance?”
“Grace,” he said. “Who put me in charge?” He hung up the phone. To Grace, he felt endless, like if she decided to trust that body, that voice, those lips and hands, there’d be no end to the fall.
Later, they had more time to talk it out. “I think you’re just hiding behind your modesty because you don’t think it’s okay to be an out-and-out coquette.”
“A coquette? I’ve never heard anyone actually use that word. And on me! Imagine! But I am modest.”
“You are a grown woman in nothing but a pair of panties that do no justice to the sweet curve of your hips, making choices. Just be naked, Grace. Enjoy the way the tips of your nipples pucker, inviting my lips.”
“I feel like I’m in bed with a sex therapist.”
“Don’t knock it. Sex is therapy.”
“Oh, God. You’re going to make me groan, but not from pleasure.” He kept at it. “Okay, with pleasure.”
His hands spread and wandered where she let them. “Feel free to participate,” he managed to say without making it come off like an insult. How self-evident was his comment. And kind. Simply permitting someone to give her sensation or pleasure was no longer participation enough, and she had not been updated on this news.
She cupped his head in her hands and thought how disembodied a person’s head felt in that position. His coarse black-white hair, the warmth of his lips. He was round muscled but taut, his back narrowed to slim hips and a bit of a paunch. He had the thick, squat legs she expected to see, but they were perfectly in proportion with his body, and smooth, so smooth. She felt an old pain in the fleshy part behind her knee that started to ache again. Such an old sensation it made her laugh. It was a quirky little body tick but as reliable as her little sewing machine; it meant she was aroused. Then a wild, bleating thought came to mind. By God, she was going to be reminded of what all the fuss was about. As though he’d heard and understood, he whispered into the underside of her breast, the crook of her elbow, her armpit. “Use me, Grace. Use me up.”
Grace pulled the bedsheet over her scar, a motion Daro gently countered. He placed a palm over it. She exhaled.
“You’re so soft here on your belly,” he observed on one of their afternoons. “There’s a lot of give.”
“That’s because I’m short one uterus, Daro.”
His hand lifted almost involuntarily. “I get it. When did you have that done?”
“It’s okay to say the word.”
“Your hysterectomy. It doesn’t bother me, Grace.”
“Tell me something that makes you vulnerable,” she asked another day. “I’m tired of being the only one.”
“Once upon a time I got into a hot tub with two beautiful, willing women. I couldn’t achieve an erection. Every man’s dream, right? I sat there feeling like, I dunno, feeling like my parents’ son.”
“They were White women?”
“In that time of my life, they always were.”
“I can’t believe you told me that. You call this tit for tat?”
“I’m trying to impress you with my willingness to be vulnerable. It’s all part of your seduction.”
“I can’t keep up with this banter, especially when you distract me with . . . sensation.”
“Don’t. The last thing on earth you want to have is an ironic orgasm.”
“I disagree. I’ll take any kind you’ve got.”
“See how my bicep looks against your breasts? We look like the cover of one of those novels. Watch how my hand covers the flesh of your inner thigh. Oh, that’s warm. That’s nice.”
“You’re beautiful,” said Grace.
“You are beautiful. Say it.”
“Don’t. Don’t touch me like that.”
“Why is that not for you? And this? And this? As much as it is any woman’s right?”
She inhaled his scent in the sheets, in the room, in the crook of his elbow or cap of his shoulder. Outside, children screamed and shouted on the playground of the nearby schoolyard. A ball thwopped against the wall, repeatedly. She saw that image of Adam again, stepping from the dark of the orchard, looking solemn, puzzled, and she squinted until a bright light flashed at the edges of her sight.
“Show me with your hand what you like,” he said. They were like a ship pushed out into quiet waters. Fog shrouded the shore. Then there was no shore.
For God’s sake, thought Gracie. Why, if I’m going to get something so outlandishly beyond what I could hope to expect—why can’t I get what I really want? She stood at the counter mincing garlic, julienning carrots, just the sort of task that allowed her thoughts to flit. What would that be, at your age, some part of her countered. Winning the lottery? Honey, this is the lottery. She kissed the back of her hand and shook her head. What the hell was happening? It’s like you’re sleeping with one of your students. That was Evie-speak, only she would use a different verb. Gracie did not intend for Evie to find out about her and Daro, but if she did that’s how Evie would describe it.
“Teach me about you,” he had said. Your body, your mind. What kind of movie was that? This was not happening. Such a simple question, but a question she had never once been asked, certainly not in bed. “If you don’t know,” he had said, “let me explore. But talk to me. I can stop. I can start again. Let me know.” Unbelievable.
Adam had his set of cardboard bricks out, building a wall around himself and leaving little peepholes here and there. He watched her at the counter through a peephole and told her knock-knock jokes. Grace was so used to Adam’s being close by that when he went out the sliding glass door to pick dandelions, she expected he’d be right back in to decorate his castle.
Something even better than the fact of being desired had occurred to Grace, and it felt delicious to contemplate: she felt desirable to him. What pleasure to think that the trouble she took with her bath, with her hair, with her scent, meant something beyond self-care or the social obligation to maintain one’s physical dignity through hygiene. She was getting ready to spend an evening with a man, and every trouble she took might contribute to his pleasure. Had she ever felt that? Being in his hands made it difficult to maintain her sense of reasonableness, her sense of the Gracie she knew at all. How beyond the rules pleasure could transport you! That’s how she felt—that she was living a lifted, higher version of her own life. Because she did feel like herself, but a self to whom such things did not happen. And she wanted to tell Daro all about it, this jumble of things that did not make sense, because he would listen, which was a huge part of his sexiness, or at least pretend to listen as his head moved beneath her hands. How indulgent it would be to talk and talk to him, but she could not talk, her attention being so distracted by new sensations, not all of which she was sure she liked, and many of which sometimes whipped up a storm of resistance inside her that eventually gave way. Trust of him was like being in a bright white room, her soul laid so clean and bare by him that it nearly squeaked.
She smiled to herself. She finally understood that other advantage of doing daily Kegel exercises that the pamphlets in the doctor’s office talked about. The truth was that she had enjoyed herself in bed years ago, far more than Wayne had ever given her credit for. When she let Wayne do the things he asked her to do, she did them, and she often did enjoy them. But afterward Wayne wouldn’t speak to her, sometimes for days. He’d shut off like a faucet and not even look at her over the heads of their children across the dinner table. But then the next thing she knew, he was leaving crumpled Weinstocks charge slips in his dresser caddy and asking her if she’d ever considered having an “open marriage.”
“Adam,” Gracie called, a little irritated that he’d left open the patio door. She’d spied his blond head bobbing up and down as he darted around the lawn picking the flowers. When she called his name again and got no response, she wiped her hands on a towel and went to the door. The swing on the playset lifted gently in the early evening breeze. She padded out in her terrycloth slippers around the side of the house. “Adam.” Still life with cranes and bulldozers was the scene across the gravel road, where development had approached the foundation-laying stage of the new side of Sierra Lakes Village North. Like any little boy, Adam loved watching the builders at work. She pictured him slipping into the seat of a Bobcat and trying to work the controls. Nothing in the area was blocked off, which was certainly irresponsible of them, if not illegal. Fortunately, there was lots of mud and mucky pits from recent rains. Adam disliked getting muddy. She hurried across the front lawn back around the other side of the house. Calling Adam’s given name didn’t seem to be working. She peered down the lanes of Garabedian’s orchard, her feet sinking a little in the soil and slowing her steps. “Son-ja!” she called. She hurried back into the house, checking his brick castle, his bedroom. He wasn’t merely hiding because he made a big show of where he was when he did that. “Son-ja!” She was going to smack his little bottom when she found him. She made another trip around the house, this time crossing the road and calling into the construction site, then back over into the orchard. It was like a magical word now, the thing she had to say to make this not be real: “Chink!” She was a step away from panic, cops, search parties. How had this happened? Weeks ago she was a woman living her small, quiet life. “Chink!” Once she found him, that was absolutely it, she decided. She was too old for this. Then she heard sirens. She raced into the house to call Daro. Her breathing was stuck high in her throat. She placed a hand there to calm herself. There was no need to call Lance or Evie. Or the police. This was not going to be any sort of crisis. He was lost, that was all. He had wandered off, lost in his thoughts and looked up and discovered he didn’t quite recognize the way back. Daro was on his way. The child was somewhere. The child was somewhere.
And then there he stood quietly at the orchard’s edge, where a moment ago he had not been. At the sight of him, Gracie sank onto a patio chair and clamped her hand over her mouth. Adam ran to her and climbed into her lap. “I cannot do this,” she said into his hair, her tears hot and unstoppable and genuine. “I’m sorry, child. I have tried, and I simply cannot.”
“I’m sorry, Halmoni. Please don’t be mad. Please don’t tell my mom or she won’t come back home. Please, Halmoni.”
“I don’t owe her this. I don’t. Did you hear those sirens? I thought they were for you. I thought something happened to you. Where have you been?”
Daro arrived and stepped out onto the back patio.
“I’m one of those people who shakes children now,” Gracie told him.
“You look pretty shaken yourself.”
“I found these things from Somebody’s Grandpa,” Adam said, showing Daro and Gracie his yellow plastic bucket. Inside were a pair of wirerim spectacles that looked like they could be antique, a used green plastic spoon, a wilted spiral pocket-sized notebook with all the pages torn out save a few damp sheets with lists of ratios in a column, and a lidless can of orange spray paint.
“What do you mean ‘Somebody’s Grandpa’?”
“He died a long time ago. He is a very sad man.”
“Were you in the orchard, Adam?” Daro asked. “Your grandma doesn’t ever want you to go out there by yourself. “Did you see anyone out there, buddy?”
Adam looked at Daro straight on and nodded his head.
“Who did you see?”
“I’m shaking my head yes because yes I was in the orchard. Please don’t be mad at me, you guys.” The child was not going to give a straight answer, and it occurred to Grace that she might not be ready to hear it in any case. She went and lay down with a cool cloth on her forehead while Daro took over for a while.
That night Adam asked, “Halmoni, does every boy get to be a grandpa someday?”
“Boys cannot be grandpas, Son-ja. Some men are. The ones with children who have children.”
“But not the dead ones.”
The next morning two police officers knocked on the door. The body of a young man had been found on the north side of Isaac’s orchard, cause of death as yet to be determined. Isaac had reported he had seen a white Lincoln with suicide doors full of kids going past several times around 1:00 a.m. Had they seen anyone?
“Adam, honey, why didn’t you tell us there was a man out there?”
“I did tell you. I said Somebody’s Grandpa was out there, but he didn’t talk to me.”
“Did you see somebody or not, honey?”
Adam nodded.
“Was he an old man, Adam? Or a young man? Did he look like Some-body’s Grandpa to you? How old is a grandpa, Adam?”
“All right, that’s enough. Please try not to overwhelm him. And we should get a lawyer.” Gracie looked at Daro.
“You said boys become grandpas and girls become grandmothers. Well, this was a boy.”
“Kind of a man.”
The officers looked at one another. “All right, you will need to retain counsel on the boy’s behalf. And we’ll need to finish this down at the station. Are you the legal guardian?”
“I’m his grandmother. He’s visiting; his father lives in Fresno. But what are you suggesting? A six-year-old boy could not be mixed up in this. You only want to ask him some questions, right? He doesn’t know anything.”
“That’s right, ma’am. His parents should be notified, and they have the right to remain with him throughout the questioning.” Why had he called the man Somebody’s Grandpa if he was too young to be anyone’s grandpa? Why were the items he found under the trees seemingly more important to him than the actual body? The investigators had a right to those questions; she just didn’t have the answers. Adam certainly didn’t.
His name was Bin Pham. He was twenty-two years old, a Laotian born in the United States. Worked at Jiffy Lube part-time while caring for grandparents. The parents worked eighty hours a week each. A good-looking young man, high school wrestling champion and homecoming king. Had a girlfriend who attended Reedley High, Cassandra Harcomb. Had been interested in street racing until his love of music won out, then became a bass player in a hip-hop band that had begun getting gigs in the area. Had gotten into a fight with some members of a country-and-western band that played at the same location in Reedley, a renovated building people called the Chatterbox. The members of the country-and-western band resented the young man’s dating an ex-girlfriend of the lead singer. The girlfriend, Cassie Harcomb, had not been injured. There had been talk of roughing him up somehow, but evidence pointed to suicide. The investigation continued. If it got classified as a homicide investigation, it would be months before they were through with Adam.
i never asked a dime from you for college, you know. i’m not saying you owe me, but i do feel like this is the least you can do so that i can get through grad school. Don’t you want me to have a better life? Don’t you at least want your own grandson to have a better life? This is my chance, Mom. It’s not that much longer.
Tell Adam I got the giraffe picture he sent and both math tests (way to go, babe!) will phone Tuesday but not before. Am out of town at a conference.
The top of Adam’s head, his scalp, always smelled slightly sour when Lance dropped him off on Sunday evenings. Either he wasn’t bathing the child, or he’d worn a sweaty cap all weekend. Grace was more than ready to be annoyed with Lance, but he lingered in her kitchen and helped himself to a plate of frosted lemon bars.
“Let me ask you something, Grace. Did anyone ever tell you to ask for more?”
“Once.”
“Who was that?”
“A sister.”
“One of those aunties Evie talks about?”
“No, it was a different sister. She died before I was born.” Grace loved watching Lance trying to digest information that took him a beat or two more than most people. “Grace, you’re spookin’ me.”
“I’m perfectly serious. I dream about her maybe once or twice a year, and she tells me exactly that—that I should ask for all that is my right.”
Lance appeared to think this over. “We should all have somebody reminding us of that.”
“Some people feel pretty entitled already, don’t you think?”
Lance studied her face to see if this was an accusation. She hadn’t actually meant it as such, but if the shoe fit.
“I lost a big brother. Desert Storm.”
“I’m sorry,” said Grace, although she felt an ever-ready irritation with him for being so persistently self-referential. “What was his name?”
“Jack. Jacky Bidden.”
“Tell me something he liked to do.”
“He liked to hunt. He would feed his dog, Circe, chocolate bars, which is supposed to kill dogs, but not Circe. He wasn’t trying to kill her or anything. She liked them.”
Gracie gave him a napkin and poured him a glass of milk.
“I’d wanted him gone so badly, you know? We used to fistfight in the backyard. Tough fights, like sometimes it felt like he wanted me dead. And then he was gone.” For a moment, he seemed lost in recollections he had no intention of sharing with his sort of mother-in-law. “My family’s been military from way back. My dad’s been in and out of a vet’s hospital since Vietnam. It’s all a big mistake.” He shook his head but didn’t offer more. Instead he asked, “So what this sister tells you—do you listen? I mean does it ever occur to you to ask for more, Grace?”
Gracie smiled, partly because Lance had just foiled her theory about him and partly because she realized even a week ago her answer would have been very different. The old answer was the one she gave, however, as she wasn’t about to jinx the good, new things in her life by letting Lance in on anything, even obliquely. “When you’re older, you stop yearning quite so much for things. You don’t have the energy.”
Lance shrugged. “I bet I stopped long before you ever did.”
“Hey now,” Grace offered charitably. The two of them shared custody, after all. “I don’t know you very well, but I’m sure you have a lot going for you—youth, strength, a good job, a beautiful son.” When her list petered out, Lance stole a glance at her to make sure no more was coming. Clearly, he was unused to simple bucking up; it almost made Gracie sorry there really wasn’t more to say.
In the heat of the first days of June, they rode their bicycles out to Copper Pond. “Halmoni, why do you have brown bumps all over you?” Her neck and upper chest and shoulders were covered with skin tags.
“I wish I knew.” She looked down at herself and shook her head. “They don’t hurt.”
He touched them with his fingertips like he was doing a gentle dotto-dot. “Do you want to hear the inside of the world?” he asked her. “It’s green and quiet, but only sort of quiet. Like something is going vruuuuuuuum.”
She laughed and floated on her back as Adam did. She heard the green, felt the quiet, the murky stillness. “I wish I could go there,” he called out so that she would be able to hear him with her ears submerged. Gracie quickly righted herself, her toes grabbing the silty bottom. Adam did the same, then paddled to her and attached himself to her side, in the crook of her hip, where her body responded with an ache of memory, so many small bodies on that hip in past years. He moved to her front, embraced her with arms and legs wrapping her torso, eel-skin slick against her bathing suit and glistening, his neck and dripping hair fragrant with pond scum and heat on skin and strawberry scented shampoo. “I would miss you very much. Don’t go there,” she said into his neck.
“Is that where the sad man went?”
“I don’t think that’s where the sad man went.”
Adam paused to consider her slant answer. Then he said, a child mimicking some adult’s certainty, “Heaven is not a place, you know.”
When they were drying off on the comforter she had thrown over the spiky grass, Gracie lay on her back, blinking and at peace. Which adult, she wondered—Evelyn? Lina? Lance? A warm breeze smoothed itself over them. Even though she was helping it to happen, it would be too bad when the condos spread as far as Copper Pond. From his pocket, Adam pulled a spyglass and a tarnished tube of lipstick with a stub of antique red. Lately, his bed had become littered with objects: a pearl-handled comb, a pocket mirror. He brought them home from his visits to the bunkhouses where Grace had consented to let him roam because there was nothing out that direction but fields, foothills, mountains, and sky. Grace often wondered why no local history buff had considered the site a historic treasure; she figured the items might be worth something someday. The funny thing was, her kids had used to play out there all the time and they never came home with this stuff. One day, Adam had even come home and started writing imitations of ideographs on a piece of paper and primitive-looking sketches that looked like cave drawings—a tiger with jagged bones, a large-winged raptor, a man urinating onto the top of a mountain.
At school, she thinks she sees Bin Pham in the halls. He might have been her student, might have brushed past her in the halls. At night she dreams of his face, one that could have been any of the hundreds she has seen in Adult Ed. Although she has probably never seen Bin Pham alive and certainly not dead, in her dream she sees him in detail. It is a blue-gray face, lips blanched, cheeks bloated, the eyes puffy slits with reddened, somewhat chafed-looking eyelids and faint eyebrows. He wears an expression of mild amusement, as though someone had cracked a decent joke but not a knee-slapper. She wakes from the dream, often thirsty, although that is partly due to the season, and feels compelled to go in and check on Adam. Adam had decided that he wanted to go solely by the name “Chink,” which Grace still refused to call him. But when she checked in on him at night, she smoothed the hair from his forehead, pulled the sheet back up to his chin, and said the name because he wanted her to, just once, not ironically, not with appropriation in mind, not bitterly, just once, whispered with a kiss, because it was how he was known.
“I don’t get it,” Daro says. “The kid was an American success story—son of immigrants who can’t read or write English becomes an athletic star off to college with a wrestling scholarship, fucking prom king, blond cheerleader girlfriend, plays in a band. What went wrong? Was he really still an outsider after all that just because he’s Asian? Will this country never get over itself? Will we never be assimilated?”
“But who do you mean by we, Daro? What do I have in common with people from a country I’ve never been to who came here eighty or ninety years after my own father? I mean, I sympathize with them, but not more or less than I sympathize with families from Bosnia or Sierra Leone.”
“Chink,” Daro called her.
“The day no one can call you that, or me, or Adam is the day I keep my mouth shut.”
“Look at how many White kids commit suicide.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“And how many Asian kids don’t.”
“You mean that maybe it’s actually a sign of his assimilation that he killed himself?”
“It’s bleak, I know.”
“Except for that pesky little detail of the hate crime, you’ve almost got a point.”
“Technically not a hate crime though, right? Because it originated in a romantic feud.”
“That’s bullshit, Grace. There wouldn’t have been a feud if Bin Pham had been White.”
“Over Cassandra Harcomb? I’ve seen pictures of her. She could inspire a feud or two among men of any color. Not everything is about race, Daro.”
“Don’t be White, Grace.”
“That word is sure easy to throw around.”
“The Man can’t stand to see the beautiful ones go to men of color.”
“The Man? Don’t provoke me, Daro. I’m not young enough to be thrown into worrying about what gorgeous blondes lurk in your own past, even though I think you’d like me to be.” She looked at him carefully. “You’re fuming, I can see that. Look, even if everything did come down to race, a person can’t live like that.”
“Maybe you can’t. I don’t see that I ever had a choice.”
“Oh, please.”
“Now you’re going to pull the generation gap on me again, aren’t you?”
“My, I’ve become predictable. But in any case, it’s true. How did we survive all of last century? Not by maximizing the race issue, but by proceeding in spite of it, Daro. And don’t look at me like that. I married Wayne because I loved him. Think what it cost me in terms of my own family. After the sixties, that may seem quaint.”
She couldn’t tell whether he’d been softened or defeated. He started putting his things back into his overnight bag. “Just like that? Can’t we have a conversation anymore, Daro?”
“You know what’s sadder than anything? That race would come between us. And don’t give me that crap about Japs and Koreans. We’re yellow, Grace. Yellow. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you.”
They were miles out. No shore. She was going to let him drift out of sight. At least she knew where to find him; according to Lina, he’d be at home sinking into his green leather recliner.
Once a year, Wayne would explode. Objects, sometimes even small animals or people, would go flying. In a jaw-clenched red-faced fury, he would unleash a year’s worth of foiled tolerance, unappreciated attempts at placation, well-timed walks around the block, guilt riddled into a sense of persecution, and the usual frustrated ambition, desire, and longing of a domesticated, socially harnessed, middle-aged family man. Scared the hell out of everyone, including Wayne himself Grace felt sure. But she had to admit, it cleared the air. She wouldn’t go so far as to say she preferred it to Daro’s disappearance, but she understood a whole lot better where she stood.
She gave him what she was forever telling Adam to give her—space—but quickly discovered that a body gets used to pleasure just as easily as it gets used to its denial. “Masturbation” was such a drawn-out and heavily enunciated word there was no wonder you felt guilt for doing it. Guys had their terms for it, but equivalent terms for women did not exist, so far as she knew; she would have to ask Eileen. Then along came Our Bodies, Ourselves, by that bra-burning women’s collective, to liberate women from cold steel foot stirrups and speculums at the gynecologist’s office and encourage them to dance naked before mirrors. Grace found that she was just a shade too old (and too uptight) for things like self-examination with speculums and hand mirrors or menstrual dripping. In a way, she was sorry she had missed that boat because that door in her remained at least slightly ajar. But mostly she was content to watch with one eye squinted as women did away with every last shred of mystery they possessed. Then Grace recalled that the book had indeed given a better name for masturbation—self-pleasuring, they called it, and much to her astonishment, Grace was finding it to be a useful, workable term.
“Don’t tell me,” Lina said when she came in with the twins to fetch Adam for a playdate. “Daro?”
“Does it show that easily?” Francesca and Catherina encircled Grace’s waist with hugs.
“I admit Lance had said he was starting to wonder about you. He didn’t want to ask you directly.”
“Oh, well, I’m all right.”
“Is that why your African violets are crispy?”
For some reason, she cannot bring herself to venture back out there. She herself had never actually done what each of her children and now her grandson had done—walk in the orchards in the fog, after dark. She had walked through them a few times but only in the daytime to get through to Garabedian’s on some neighborly errand.
A cloak of stillness, of soaking quiet. Fig trees had to be really the ugliest trees on Earth, so dark and craggy in this season. She slid her back against a tree to scratch her back, then slid all the way down the bark until her bottom hit the exposed roots. These trees were so old; Garabedian had got all the fruit off them he could possibly be expected to get. Time to raze these terrific creatures for some nice, tidy Cape Cods featuring their little balconies and grill style windows in pastels of blue and peach. He’d make such a bundle; his kids and grandkids would be set for life, she supposed.
But then, she thought morbidly, where would people go to kill themselves? Where would teenagers go to have sex? Where would you go if you wanted to sit at the base of a scarred, fruitless tree and worry that your lover had just picked a fight with you in order to get out of a relationship that wasn’t what he’d hoped it would be (never mind what you hoped it might be) and have a good cry and be left utterly alone?
you there? there’s a tornado watch here in johnson county. kind of a thrill.
Evie! Take cover! Better sign out NOW.
it’s only a watch, mother. Warnings are when you want to start thinking about heading to the basement.
Even so, let’s keep this short. Should your computer even be on during a storm? Let me just say this—I think you should come home as soon as you can. i thought you said the investigation wasn’t a big deal. adam won’t talk about it. that bugs me.
This isn’t about Adam, not directly. And there’s nothing more going on with the investigation. We’ve told them everything we know. I just think a month is too long to wait right now. too long for what???? what the hell is going on?
Call it a Lance watch, with possibility of upgrading to a Lance warning.
he started drinking again? got busted for something?
Nothing like that, at least not that I know of. Evie, this is the only warning you’re going to get from me. If you ever thought you and Lance could make it work, better come now. you’re killing me, Mom. why won’t tell me WHAT?
Because I think you know WHAT. Come home.
Gracie had gotten to where she recognized Officer Svoboda’s knock. Randall Svoboda, who just missed being handsome, compensated by being very nice. Or maybe he was just nice. But, still, he was not a man she wanted to see daily, and she told him as much when she opened the door. It was a Saturday.
“Hey, buddy. I like those jammies,” he said, lifting his hand to Adam.
“They’re not jammies. It’s my jamos. That’s Korean for pj’s.”
“Adam, don’t talk back to grown-ups for one thing. For another thing, it’s time to brush your teeth. Scoot.” Grace smiled at Officer Svoboda. “You’d think my grandson was a suspect, you’re here so often.”
“No, ma’am. But we do have a lead I thought you should know about. We think there may have been someone else out there that day. Your grandson may have been approached by an individual, possibly the ‘Somebody’s Grandpa,’ he referred to.”
“No. That’s not it,” Adam insisted. Gracie and the officer turned to look at Adam.
“Did you see somebody out there, or not, buddy?”
“Not the boy.”
“Not the boy? Was there someone there with you?”
“No,” he replied. “I didn’t touch him.”
Officer Svoboda looked at Grace. “Now, I don’t mean anything by this, but he’s a little . . . he’s very. Is this maybe a little bit unusual behavior for him?”
“Personally, I think it’s because he doesn’t watch much television.”
“One thing’s clear, ma’am. The boy’s statements are not consistent or credible.”
“You mean he’s lying?”
Adam went to his notepad and wrote: IM TRYING TO TRIK THE GOATSGHOSTS. He brought it to Officer Svoboda. “Ghosts can’t read,” he whispered.
The officer looked at Grace helplessly. “Adam is learning about Chinese culture from his daycare lady. They’re very multiculturally oriented, as you can see. Tell him what you’ve been learning, Adam.”
“When the ghosts try to take Chinese babies away, the mothers will lie or hide them or put them in disguideds—”
“Disguises,” Grace interrupted.
“Disguises so that they can’t take the babies away.”
Gracie smiled and shrugged at the officer. “It’s a Jewish-owned day-care run by a Latina. Go figure.”
She could tell he was wondering what kind of daycare would talk about ghosts and snatching babies away from their homes. You had to know Lina. “Look, Officer—Randy? May I call you that? Let’s say we find out that the investigation is ruled a suicide, then you can shut down this case, can’t you?”
“No ruling has been filed, ma’am.”
“Hey, Randy. Randy, can I tell you something?” Adam tugged on the officer’s striped pant leg.
“His name is Officer Svoboda to you, young man.”
“Guess what, Randy? My halmoni has these scissors that are really old like about a thousand years and they’re still sharp.”
Officer Svoboda raised his eyebrows at Grace. “It’s true they’re still sharp. My father was a barber. Now, Office Svoboda, I will certainly encourage Adam to cooperate to the fullest extent. But if suicide is the determination, let’s have that be the end of Adam’s involvement, all right? The boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he has done nothing wrong.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, the exact finding has yet to be determined.”
“Hey, Randy,” Adam tugged again. “What do you get when you cross a cat with a flashlight?”
Officer Svoboda was already out the door. Gracie smiled apologetically at her grandson.
That night, Adam woke Gracie by jostling her shoulder until she opened her eyes.
“Some people die and some people just go on and on,” he said into the dark. She patted the side of the bed and he crawled in beside her. “No, I’m sorry honey but it doesn’t work that way. Everybody dies.”
“He’s at home. He has some things he needs to take care of.”
“But you and me. And my mom. And my dad. And Mr. Daro, and Miss Lina. We will go on and on, won’t we?”
“I suppose as long as somebody remembers you, yes, you do go on and on. But everybody dies. Only don’t worry because that isn’t going to happen today.”
“It happened to Bin Pham. He wasn’t too old. He wasn’t even as old as you.”
“You’re right, Son-ja, it did happen to Bin Pham. Sometimes it happens when it isn’t really supposed to.”
“But why?”
“To be very honest, Son-ja, because sometimes people want it to. But you know what? For one, you are just too little to understand more than that. For another, it is your mom and dad’s job to talk to you about this, so I will let them talk to you when they see you. And for another, most of the time it doesn’t happen too soon. Most people get a pretty long time. I’ve had a long time.”
“Didn’t Bin Pham want a long time too?”
“Yes, he probably did. But he was confused. And if he had known he was going to be Somebody’s Grandpa one day, he might have made sure he stuck around.” Saying this, she missed her friend Daro. And somehow, in missing him, she felt suddenly flooded with a rush of unfamiliar feeling. Gratitude.
mom: adam told me all about “gitte” the blonde. what the hell kind of a name is that? i think she’s out of the picture, or so I gather from adam. but should i be worried about this Lina person? am arriving Sunday at 4 p.m. flight #1762 from SF. lance is picking me up and bringing adam and dropping us off at your place. we leave for disneyland early monday a.m. big favor: do you think you could still send that $100 to help out with the plane fare? i didn’t know if you thought you could still swing that. teaching assistants did not get the raise they were expecting, and i’m trying to stay away from any more student loans see you this weekend. love, me.
“Hello, Adam. My name is Cassandra. May I come in?”
The boy stepped aside and watched the young woman as she entered. “Are you going to have a baby?” he asked.
Gracie took the young woman’s hand. “I apologize, my dear. He comes from a long line of people who are very direct.”
Cassie looked at him wonderingly. “As a matter of fact, I am going to have a baby girl. Do I show already?” Gracie intercepted the slightly untoward question by offering the girl a glass of juice or tea. She couldn’t possibly know the sex of a fetus that hadn’t even begun to show. Lord, these babies having babies. Adam had not taken his eyes off her. “Are you the Sunkist girl?”
She laughed. “Who’s that? Is that from LA Live?” Adam looked rather helplessly to his grandmother. How could she not know, especially when she looked so much like her?
“He’s paying you a compliment, honestly,” Gracie explained. “Do you know the girl on the red raisin box? A long time ago there was an orange maiden a lot like her, only she didn’t wear a bonnet. I think her hair was tied in a blue bow.”
“You could come to my birthday party after we get back from Disneyland.”
“Disneyland? How exciting.” He was charming, standing near her so ready to be of service, setting the glass of tea down before her with a deference she didn’t know he was capable of. But this young woman had come with a purpose, and she looked rather eagerly out the patio doors toward the orchard.
“Would you mind if I went out there? Just for a little ways. I just want to I guess sort of say goodbye.”
“They aren’t my orchards, but believe me, people go through there all the time.”
“Can I go, Halmoni?”
“That’s up to Cassandra.” She took the boy’s still chubby hand.
“I’ll ask you both to stay within shouting distance. And please don’t let go of him.”
She was very young indeed. Her hair was pleasingly unfussy brown curls pulled back loosely with a silver clip. Those fresh cheeks didn’t look like they had so recently suffered a loss. For a moment before they disappeared from view, Gracie’s heart leapt into a tiny flurry. When the girl had called to ask if she might visit, Gracie had been so anxious to do something about the awful situation that she urged her to come over as soon as possible. Now she saw that she was letting her grandson disappear—again—holding the hand of a perfect stranger.
She set down her coffee and newspaper and went out into the orchard a ways herself. They had been truthful; they weren’t far at all. When they came into view many yards ahead, Gracie stopped and watched them. They appeared not to be aware of her presence, but stood quietly holding hands, very patient and very still, looking up into the branches of a tree. From where she stood, Grace couldn’t see what had captured their attention, but dear God they looked like such children, both of them. They began to walk, still hand in hand, down the orchard row making very slow time and pausing to examine things on the ground now and then. The last gesture Grace could make out was of Cassandra jutting her elbows to the side and bracing herself at the hips with her hands, that classic pregnant mother’s pose to relieve the aching back. She wasn’t pregnant enough; she must have been practicing. She wasn’t even beyond the risk of mis-carriage. They were getting out so far that Grace felt nearly compelled to shout at them to head back. But something in her told her to trust them, to allow the girl this time.
There had been a moment in the lives of each of her children when she looked at them and realized they were separate from her, there before her but gone forever from the chalk circle she had drawn around them in her mind. Each had stepped across that line at different ages, on different occasions. For Ben, it had happened at summer camp when he had lost his glasses on the very first day and endured the week able to see next to nothing. He had been furious with her even though he knew it was not her fault. And after that week, he still loved her—loved her more than ever in some ways—but the self of his own making had begun. Mitchell, her first, had been the longest holdout. He’d lived at home and attended the state university, studying Mandarin at the kitchen table rather than socializing with friends. For years, Grace thought he would never meet a girl, but he did, a student of his from Taiwan whom he assisted in the foreign language lab. And then there was Evie, whose separation from her was complete before she was out of her crib, if not the womb. And it’s too bad she wasn’t here to see this, thought Grace—this moment when her son was walking away from all of them hand in hand with his Sunkist girl down a lane of Valencias a breath or a sigh from bursting into bloom.
The moon was a wink above the white-blossomed blur of the orange groves flying past, filling the rushing air with the citrusy scent of the blossoms. Lance killed the headlights as they rode through the night, navigating by slicing a dark line through the luminous, fragrant groves. She threw her head back and a swirl of implacable stars washed around inside her skull. Her hair whipped her cheeks. He tucked his free hand neatly between her thighs, steered with the other. She turned to check on Adam asleep in the back seat.
“His favorite ride was the most boring ride of all,” Evie said to Grace and Daro the next morning. “I don’t remember the name of it; he called it the People Mover. You know that ride where you sit in those cars on that conveyor belt, and on the outside is that telescope that makes the people going in look like they’re getting smaller and smaller? And you learn all about microscopic life, and in the end, you come out big again. That’s what he wanted. Big, small, big. Over and over. Unbelievable.”
Gracie sighed at the energy her daughter put into her reactions to things and then let it go. It had been a good weekend. Daro had called to say he was glad to have the excuse of house-buying paperwork for her to fill out because he wanted to come over and hold her in his arms the entire night. Now the kitchen streamed with sunlight, and Daro had something that smelled delicious baking in the oven. She didn’t want to jeopardize their peace by venturing too close to the subject of their last argument. Still, it was an irony she would love to share with him—an article about a hate crime at the university, this time a Caucasian boy who had been downtown at the bars with an Asian girl, and they got taunted by a drunken crowd of young men. Underneath that article was an announcement about the upcoming Taidom festival, also at the university. What a country, as Lance Bidden was fond of saying. No, she wouldn’t mention it until they were back on surer footing. She wasn’t sure how long that would take, since she wasn’t going to use sex to expedite their reconciliation. There’d been too much of that with Wayne—sex that was like poking a jellyfish to gauge its response, sex that was like changing the dressing on a wound, sex that was business as usual when really you were seething inside. Leave that to married folks.
When she had lived alone not so very long ago, Grace liked, on windy days, to leave the windows open. Muscular coastal gusts galloped across the valley a few times a year, relocating her lawn furniture to wild angles and lifting her wind chimes to a clanging horizontal fury. She loved to open the casements for a swift cross draft that sucked doors shut in empty rooms and jostled her ferns. It was as though spirits—tidy ones, nowadays—were going about their daily lives, slipping down the hallway to let the cat out, tucking into the bedroom to put away the folded socks. A loose screen door at the side of the house added to the drama as it lifted open and then slammed shut against the jamb. It was probably best that she had people in her life now who would not abide this practice. When Daro spent the night, he leapt straight up from bed at the slam of a door (which caused Gracie a lift of the eyebrows about his past), groaned awake, and went to shut windows, muttering about fixing the goddam doors. Adam, for his part, stirred in his sleep and, if awoken, would crawl into bed with Grace and Daro. So it wasn’t the same sort of fun. When Grace brought this habit into the light of day and really examined it, she had to admit it was the edge of looney, a disconcerting habit to develop at this stage of the game, and Lord only knew where it might lead.
She had even gone as far as checking out the continental wind currents in the newspaper to figure out what was blowing in from where, an Alberta clipper from the Northwest Passage or an Asian wind current from the Pacific. Was this the air that, yesterday, someone had breathed in Bangor, and, a week before that, Bangkok? Someone’s sighs, someone’s germs swooping across her front lawn. Topsoil and dandruff and pheromones coursing in from the trees. The wing dust of alpine moths, the cumulus syllables of a prayer, the skins of balloons alighting, drifting, eddying, settling in.
She wasn’t a traveler, save for, years ago, an obligatory trip to Europe with Wayne as part of a last-ditch effort to save her marriage. This was her pathetic substitute—to let the world course through her doors and windows depositing its invisible traces through her curtains and onto her couch and carpet and plate glass coffee table. Someone’s past, and someone else’s future pausing here, leavened now with the sweet-mouthed yawns of a child, the laughter of an aging man whose age would never catch up with hers, and the ever-present barely discernible sighs of a woman for whom adventure and travel and even delight had been a mostly interior journey whom no one, probably not even God, found remarkable. At least it wasn’t an ill wind she set forth. At least that was something.
“How come we’ve done so little of this, you and I?” Grace asked her daughter in the postbirthday lull out in the backyard. She wanted to reach across and tuck under a stray curl of Evie’s auburn hair. She wanted to tell her she had never looked more beautiful to her, with the evening sun igniting the color in her hair and cheeks.
“Because, Mother,” Evie started, and then paused. “Look at how that tree bends in the wind. Just bends.” She looked straight at Grace. “You’re flawed, Mother,” she said. “So don’t take this as any sort of huge pardon for my childhood. But—I’ve never known how to bend. Is that your fault? Or was I born that way, or what?”
Gracie had to smile at love’s distance from clarity. “When you were little we’d eat at a Chinese restaurant and you’d empty the sugar shaker into your little cup of tea. I’d be mortified.”
“If you weren’t supposed to do it, there wouldn’t have been a sugar shaker there in the first place, right?”
“You see?”
She pulled out a cigarette and lighter but then put them away.
“Easy for me to look back and judge, isn’t it, now that I’m settled and old?”
“And having the time of your life in bed?”
Gracie’s squint was her normal response to Evie’s frankness, she couldn’t help it. But she grabbed Evie’s hand to make up for the gesture, squeezed, and nodded yes.
Evie told her, looking across the lawn strewn with birthday party detritus. “I still wish we could convince you to keep this place. You don’t want to mess with a condo owner’s association, do you? All those bylaws and busybodies and fumbling for the pool key.”
“I haven’t decided anything for sure. Please remember, though, it’s not up to you or your brothers.”
Evie sat down in the rusted glider; Grace sat down next to her. “Adam was no accident,” Evie told her. “I don’t know if you realized that.”
“You chose to be a single mother, Evelyn?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I chose Adam. Lance and I had tried for a baby once, back when I was even dumber than I am now. And I did get pregnant—for thirteen weeks.” She put her hand on her mother’s arm. “I’d been about to tell you. So close, at which point I lost the baby. And then I just couldn’t, for all sorts of reasons. I remember the day, playing Frisbee golf with a bunch of friends out at the greenway. One of those perfect spring days in Iowa, and I’d felt great. Lance was getting more and more into the idea that he was going to be—had chosen to be—a father. But I went home that night and started getting cramps and throwing up. I lost it that night. He didn’t want to try again—he was sinking for other reasons, for his own reasons, and we split up not long after that. But of course we saw each other eventually like we did after the first five split-ups. And I knew it was the worst timing ever for us, but I found out I was pregnant that summer, which is why I didn’t make the trip home that year to visit. And the funny thing is that I had nothing against abortion—it wasn’t that. I was alone, but I knew somehow I really was ready. Maybe not ready in all the ways that would have made me a responsible, secure mother, but in enough of them to make me sure I could do it. I haven’t screwed him up, yet, I don’t think.”
He’s only seven would have been Grace’s first response; barring that, she didn’t know what to say. Evie added, “Law school is for Adam as much as it is for me, you believe that much, don’t you?”
Grace just nodded and breathed. How did someone as safe as she was end up with a daughter so reckless with her life? They watched Lina and Daro and Lance step out onto the deck and begin gathering up small mountains of bows and wrapping paper. One mountain came alive and it turned out to be Catherine or Francesca, no one ever knew for certain except their mom. Someone had let Adam loose with his Super Blaster, which he was now filling with water from the hose. “Very few women as gorgeous as Lina are not models,” Evie observed. “Do we stand a chance with these men?”
The garage door banged shut in the breeze, then lifted open again, creakingly. Gracie looked at her daughter. “You’re no slouch in that department, but I’m sure you know that.”
Evie choked out a sigh. “Where did you get that idea? I didn’t know that. I don’t know that, Mother. It would have been so easy for you to say it just once in my life.”
Gracie grabbed her daughter’s chin. “Stop it. Stop it. You’re a beauty. I thought you knew.”
Evie wiped her nose with the back of her hand, sighed again.
“Did you tell your Dad and Arlene about Daro when you visited?”
Evie nodded carefully. “Don’t be mad, please? They were tickled pink for you.”
“Ha! I’ll just bet they were.”
“Okay, so we’re still working on the bitterness.”
“Okay, so yeah we are.”
Adam and the twins had become bored with trees and each other for targets and started in on grown-ups with the Super Blasters. Grown-ups in motion, or those protesting the loudest, were getting hit early and often. “We went to see Aunt Elin, too, up in Calgary. She put Lance to work fixing things, so he felt right at home. And she made Adam promise to be her pen pal. Man, I want to live like that someday. All alone in the high chaparral with my books and peace and quiet.” Gracie looked at her doubtfully. “I said one day, Mother. Also, it helps when you’ve made your fortune.”
“Does she still wear that god-awful red hat when she’s writing her books?”
“You’ve gotta admit it works for her. I think she earned the life she’s got.”
“Who does she meet up there?”
“Ranch hands. Gardeners.”
“Men?”
“Shit-boy howdy.”
“Good for her.” Grace put her hand on Evie’s arm as Super Blasters found their way into the hands of grown-ups headed their way.
“Elin gave me a notebook of Grandmother’s she kept the year she died. She’d started writing letters that she never sent. Some of them are to Dad when he was a kid. Stuff you don’t even know.”
“Stuff I don’t need to know. How old was she when she died?”
“Ninety-something, same as Halmoni, which is great news for me.” Gracie shrugged. “And me. I suppose. What’s Elin’s next book then?”
“Another one on angels. Angels and children, this time. The working title is something like What Your Young Child Would Like You to Know.”
“Duck!” Gracie shouted, just in time to see a blast of water hit her daughter straight in the backside.
The pilot said the sun was shining up high where they were going and then wouldn’t it be something to see. But right now, it reminded him of winter in Iowa, like the sky was about to cave in from the whiteness. It wasn’t his mom’s fault she was back in Iowa now. She was taking care of business, his dad explained. In Iowa, everything was puffy white with black or brown edges, like an old photograph. The puffy parts were snow, and they were everywhere. His mom had a patio chair on the little patio place that hung outside her tall apartment building, and the chair was very puffy, and the arms on the chair were very puffy. But if you sat down on it, you wouldn’t feel soft, you would feel wet and cold and then you would get in trouble from your mom if you didn’t have clean underpants and socks to change into right away. Even when the weather was nice, Adam wasn’t allowed to sit out there because the balcony was still icy and it didn’t pass the “six feet” rule.
“What’s the matter with you?” his halmoni chided. He knew she meant that after getting a bag of goodies from the airline and getting his picture taken in the cockpit with the pilot and having apple juice brought to him by more than one airline hostess, there had better not be anything the matter.
“I feel sad about your mom.”
“My mother? What in the world for?”
Her face was like a moon in the photograph on Halmoni’s piano, round and white and shiny with some feeling he didn’t have the name for. His halmoni says she was painted in next to her husband later on. A painted lady, he had asked? No! she’d shouted back, like she did sometimes. The great-grandfather part was the first picture, and then when Changmi, that was her name, came to this country to be with him they painted her in. That was what he was sad about; they had had to paint her in.
Halmoni laughed and took his hand. “But why is that a sad thing, Adam?”
“Because she had to wait all that time to be put next to him.”
“Yes, she did have to wait a long time. About thirteen years.”
He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to wait for something that was even longer than your whole lifetime.
As he drifted off to sleep between Halmoni and Daro, he thought about the man they called Bin Pham. That morning, he had been finding lots of stuff—a no-good balloon with white gravy in it (he knew to leave that alone), the side of a box of Frosted Flakes, a wet book that had lots of words melted together by the dripping, and a pair of glasses. The man he had seen was not just a man; he was a sad man. Maybe he could not stand to look at himself, so he took his glasses off that were bent like a giant paperclip. Adam knew the man could not talk to him. But Adam could talk to the sad man. “Somebody’s Grandpa,” he called him, in case that was a name the young man might know. “I’m sorry for you.” He did not think he was dead or not dead. He only thought he should get away so that he could explain there was someone out there. He knew this was the right thing to do, but he had felt a little bit bad about it. The sad man really looked like what he wanted was to be left alone.
The customs official was a pretty redhead in crisp teal shirtsleeves. “Good morning. Does the child have a passport?”
“We were told we wouldn’t need one as long as we had his birth certificate.”
The agent took the document and examined it, making quick marks and circles on a card. “You are tourists. This is your first trip to ROK. Your return date is August 17th, correct? Every member of your party has the same return date, correct?” Gracie and Daro nodded. Adam had an arm wound round Daro’s leg while studying the woman behind them in the line who seemed to be talking to no one until you noticed the headset and slip-on microphone on her jacket. Even with her hands free, she seemed busy, attempting to arrange a scarf with one hand while pulling a strapped-together luggage series on wheels.
“Your relationship to the child?”
“I am his grandmother.” The agent’s eyes slid to Daro. “I’m just a friend of the family.”
“I see. And the parents are where? Deceased?” Gracie had forgotten how much of one’s personal business became the business of the state when you began crossing oceans. It wasn’t just the stuff in your suitcase or on your person they wanted to know about. “No, they are not deceased,” Grace retorted, “they are at home. This is nothing but a pleasure trip with my companion and my grandson.”
“I understand, ma’am. My job is to ask you a few questions, and your patience is certainly appreciated.” The agent from the next booth, an attractive Black woman, glanced over at them, seemed to note something about them that Gracie couldn’t read.
“Now, then,” the agent continued. “Do you have a letter from the child’s parents giving you permission to have him travel with you?” She wore lipstick that matched the stripes in her neck scarf in an unbecoming shade of frosted rust.
“A letter? No, I don’t have any letter. I had no idea I’d need something like that. We’re just going on vacation, for goodness sake.”
Daro put his hand on Gracie’s shoulder and spoke to the agent. “What happens if we don’t have a letter? Is this going to be a problem?”
They could see the agent sizing up the situation. What did she see? An Asian man and an Asian woman taking a gorgeous towheaded boy to South Korea with them. Did she see the Asian in him? “He is my biological grandson, in case you were wondering.” Gracie offered. Daro squinted and scratched his temple.
The agent looked at Gracie with implacable officialness. “Halmoni,” Adam said, tugging on her arm. “Halmoni, look.” A swarm of reporters whooshed after some sort of celebrity, darting around a corner with cameras on shoulders, all of them attached to one another with cords and microphones. Other cameras followed on a go cart; Gracie realized that the swarm was part of a movie and the reporters were only actors. That explained the Christmas decorations hung in late August. Gracie had seen Hope Lange once in the days when she was older but still much more famous. She had been waiting in line just like everybody else at the train station of all places, getting her bags checked. She had looked Grace right in the eyes with a sort of neutral goodwill and then quickly looked away. For the rest of the day, Grace felt in good spirits. Even Hope Lange took trains. Even Hope Lange, beautiful as she was, aged.
“We’ll need the full names and address of the parents, with phone contact.”
A moment later, Gracie stood gasping at the price of duty-free L’Eau du Temps, Daro and Adam both now tugging on her arm.
The guide announced they were approaching Chejudo, what Koreans liked to call the Island of Wind, Rocks, and Women because of the famous deep-sea diving women with incredible lung capacity, and the rocky wild wind and shore. It was a favorite destination of Korean honeymooners and vacationers. The guide repeated herself in Korean. Then she launched into history and details that became background noise for a few moments as Gracie watched the shore. Inland, the clumped tropical growth seemed to give off an almost minty scent, something fresh that competed with the smell of the sea.
Grace knew little about her father’s past. She had never even met her own grandparents. But she did know that one hundred years ago, Sin Tae Song had boarded a ship to leave this place forever. She wondered about the person he was in that limbo, that traveling self that was neither the person you had been nor the person you were about to become. She thought about both the willing and unwilling traversal of distances that had made her life—and Adam’s life—possible. The journey of the famous woman traveler Isabella Bird Bishop, who had passed through her mother’s village with her nimble but dignified step. Of her father, crowded with hundreds of dreamers on board the Gaelic. Of her mother, her still hopeful heart lifted toward adventure. And of other journeys, as well. From the edge of the bed to the middle, where someone beside you sleeps with light and even breath. From the fog shrouded orchard to the clearing back of the house.
Adam looked far out over the water. Grace had a finger hooked around his back belt loop. When he thought no one was looking, he pulled a small item from his jacket pocket, kept his fist enclosed over it, and dropped it over the ferry’s edge. Shiny metal, possibly ornate was all Gracie had time to discern. “What was that you just threw in, Adam?”
He shrugged. “One of my treasures. I found it.”
“But why? I thought that was precious to you.”
“It is precious to me. That’s why I wanted Captain Hamel to have it.” The guide had told of a Hendrik Hamel, a Dutch sailor who had shipwrecked on this island in 1683 with forty surviving crew members. Aside from an escape by thirteen of the men that got them thirteen miles from shore, none of the crew ever returned home.
“But he died over three hundred years ago!”
“So? You say he was buried at sea.”
Gracie can picture the sailor, that accidental immigrant, soaked and clinging to his piece of ship, his hair and shirt stiff with the salt of the sea. From the rocky beach, obscured by trees, a young woman watches, squatting behind a rock on powerful legs. She is smiling because she can see that, despite the pinkness of his skin and his red-gold beard, he is handsome. That makes his fate more interesting. What this handsome sailor does not know is that it is the custom of the Korean king to capture and retain foreigners forever. Korea is not called the hermit kingdom for nothing.
Perhaps the native girl will get a chance to see the expression on his face when the man learns he has entered a land neither hostile nor friendly to him but simply neutral. He and his men will be fed and provided for. At first they will be the objects of curiosity and amusement, but eventually, interest in them will subside. Perhaps they will father children. Perhaps some will adopt the country as their own, becoming quite at home among its customs and people. Perhaps some will accept their fate with a bitter heart. But, in any case, they will always be watched and, at the same time, invisible. Isn’t that a kind of glory, to be so important for the rest of your days? And, anyway, it wouldn’t be so bad. She will lay fish and fruit and cakes before them at their first welcome. They will not exchange a single word. Her smile, however, will mesmerize him, telling them everything they need to know: You will die here. But today you live. Eat.
A pocket mirror fitted inside a mother-of-pearl frame bobs in the ship’s wake. Sometimes it is mirror side down, reflecting the quick-silver glint of a school of fish. Sometimes it floats, mirror side skyward, a rectangle of gray or blue, crisscrossed now and again by the image of a sea bird or an airplane passing overhead or the cheeks of a cloud. One day it may wash to shore, lodged between the slick stones of Kaesang Beach. Or it may sink for no known reason to the ocean floor, caught between the jaws of some scuttling bottom creature. Or one day it may be taken up into the clutch of a young diver practicing the arts of her foremothers. She will be a modern girl, one not yet dreamed into being. She will be familiar with her own reflection, and the image of her face will cause her to smile an ancient smile. This, too, could happen. Or has happened. Or all of these things. Or none.