I propped myself up against the headboard, which was the back of the foldout sofa. My head was hurting. There wasn’t much light coming in, but it was about eight.
Tomorrow was Chinese New Year.
I slid out naked and staggered to the refrigerator. I found a bottle of Bud on its side under the crisper. I came back to the bed and sat on the edge. I picked at the cap with the tine on my belt buckle. I finally worked it off, but the bottle cap landed in Barbara’s hair.
She moaned, then brushed her ear. I took the cap away with my free hand.
“Robert, are you drinking?”
“Yeah, got a beer out of the fridge.”
“Argh, I was saving that for cooking.” After a few minutes, she asked, “Do you always drink in the morning?”
“Only when I’m up before noon.”
I took a few deep swigs.
“Hey, that was really nice last night,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I finished the bottle and put it on the coffee table.
“What are we doing? We’re crazy!”
“This is not the first time for either of us.”
“But this is the first time. For us!”
“Let’s celebrate with breakfast.”
“I’m so hungry.” She pushed half her face into the pillow. “And there’s nothing to eat here.”
“How about some pastries?”
“Yeah, let’s go to Martha’s!”
“Oh, whoa, no, not Martha’s!”
“It’s the best bakery in Chinatown!”
“It gets too crowded in there.”
“It’s crowded because it’s good and it’s on the way to the train.”
“That woman there gives me the evil eye, you know,
the one who looks like she shovels gravel?”
“It takes a tough woman to make a tender pastry. C’mon, let’s get moving!”
—
When we came in, the morning rush was already over and Lonnie was by herself behind the counter. Dori was sitting in a corner, smoking a cigarette and reading the Hong Kong newspaper. They both stared at us. I became very conscious of the fact that we looked disheveled, more than usual for me.
Three teenage degenerates hugged the walls in the corner. The one with the spiky hair smiled at me and picked his teeth.
“Looks like the cop finally saw some action last night,” he said out loud to his friends. I wanted to put a bullet in his head, but he wasn’t worth the paperwork I’d have to do after.
Dori smirked. Lonnie put on a very serious look.
“How are you today, Officer Chow?” she asked.
“I’m doing well, thank you.”
Lonnie gave me an expectant look.
“Oh, Barbara, this is Lonnie. Uh, she works here.”
Barbara smiled and said, “Hi.”
“More hot-dog buns today?” asked Lonnie.
“You eat those, Robert?” asked Barbara incredulously. “It’s kid food!”
“Sometimes I feel like a kid,” I said.
“Every day,” said Lonnie.
“That’s a lot of calories!”
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “I mean, I walk it all off.”
“I think I’m just going to have a plain bun and a hot coffee,” said Barbara.
“And you?” Lonnie asked me.
“Just an iced coffee.”
Lonnie turned and put the plain bun into a paper bag.
“Can you put that on a tray, Lonnie? We’re going to eat here.”
“Actually, Robert,” Barbara said, “I’m going to get that to go. I have to go back and do some work. But you stay with your friends here.”
“I, uh, sure. OK.”
She grabbed her stuff and left without even waving. I was dimly aware of getting my iced coffee from Lonnie. I leaned against the counter and drove a straw into the lid.
“Is she your girlfriend?” Lonnie asked.
“Oh no, no, no. She’s an old friend. We grew up together.”
Dori spoke up.
“That woman, she could do a lot better than a policeman. She doesn’t even want to be seen in public with you,
Officer Chow.”
“She just likes her privacy, like me.”
Lonnie cleared her throat.
“So, you don’t have a girlfriend?” she asked.
“I’m not really the type to have a girlfriend,” I said.
“Lonnie!” shouted Dori. “You have to clean off the counter!”
“It’s already clean.”
“Clean the part Officer Chow is on when he leaves. He probably got it greasy.”
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“Bye, Officer Chow,” Lonnie said.
If I had stayed, I might have left a bigger mess for Lonnie to clean up. I glanced at those punk kids but they were completely ignoring me.
—
Then, suddenly, it was my least favorite day in the world. Chinese New Year and its endless photo ops for me. The actual celebration goes on for two weeks in Chinatown, but on the legitimate first day, they hold the parade with the lion dances. 1976 was the year of the dragon — it was supposed to be a year of tumultuous change.
The Brow sent us off with his annual remark: “I don’t want to see you put in for holiday differential on this one. This is no American holiday.”
On the footpost, I walked by a seafood restaurant on Bowery whose big windows were crowded on the bottom with tanks of fish, crabs, prawns, and lobsters. The rest of the window showed off the crowded dining room and the all-you-can-eat buffet that was only open to people who could read the characters in the sign above it.
I saw a family sitting there, two parents and a daughter and her boyfriend. I knew he was the daughter’s fiancé because she was showing her parents the engagement ring on her finger while he sat back and sipped his water. I didn’t break my stride, and I only saw them all for two seconds, but it brought home how removed I was from regular life in Chinatown. I used to wish that they’d left us in the war longer so that I could have gone on fighting until I was dead.
Then this thing with Barbara had happened. Maybe there was something out there for me. Not today, though. Barbara was tied up with some relatives for the day, and I had to go see my mother, so we would miss each other today.
—
Ten thousand small firecrackers, each representing a year of prosperity, had been strung across Mott Street in front of the Greater China Association’s office. The president of the association and several other community businessmen stood together where the firecrackers dipped at their lowest point. I stood at the edge of the group. Whenever a press photographer wanted to shoot a picture, I was pulled into the frame. A dozen cops circling us kept the crowd at bay.
Although I had smiled for the pictures, I was irritable. Every time I heard firecrackers go off in the crowd, I looked around for someone to slap.
“Why so jumpy, Chow?” asked Peepshow, a cop who was off to my left. “You people live and breathe firecrackers, right?”
How the hell Peepshow had managed to keep his shield through the layoffs was beyond me. He was lazy and incompetent. He had a lower-ass rip in what was apparently his only pair of jeans. That’s how he got his nickname. No one ever told him to get it patched up. His real name was Geller. People forgot his first name.
I said, “Not only are fireworks illegal, but they’re dangerous.”
“To hell with that talk,” Peepshow said. “The Chinese have a religious and cultural right to bear them. What would Chinatown be like without firecrackers? We got to keep the visitors entertained.”
—
One of the honorees was a guy from the Chinatown American Legion, a decorated World War II vet. His hair was off-white and crisp like his khaki slacks. His shoes were in bad shape. He probably couldn’t see them over his bulging stomach.
When it was time for more pictures, I got up on the stage next to him and gave a plastic smile.
“Hey, Chow,” said the vet, “you were in Vietnam, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“How did you lose?”
I stared at him for a little bit.
“We were let down,” I said.
“You guys didn’t have it in you to fight. You were coddled too much when you were kids. Color TV. Rock music. Your generation doesn’t have any real men in it. You guys are a bunch of pussies.”
“I guess real men plump when you cook ’em,” I said, pointing to his gut.
“Oh, yeah, I’m an old man now, but I paid my dues. I was in France, Chow. I helped achieve our goals. Goals of the free world. You and your bullshit attitude remind me of the lousy soldiers who lost China.”
“You think you could have stopped communism in Vietnam?”
“Hell, yeah. We stopped Hitler, didn’t we?”
“Weren’t you fighting on the same side as communists against Hitler?”
“We just had the same enemy back then.”
“Weren’t you allied with communists, old man?”
We were both smiling as cameras flashed. We talked out the sides of our mouths.
“Hey, Chow, you shut your mouth.”
“Aren’t you a fucking commie, old man?”
“I’ll tan your goddamn hide for saying that.”
“I already have a tan. From Nam.”
When the pictures were over, I glared at him, then stepped away.
—
At 1300, the president of the association took a red plastic lighter from his shirt pocket, flicked it, and lit the firecrackers. We were quickly enveloped in clouds of sparks, sound, and smoke. Burnt firecracker paper settled dreamlike over the cheering crowd. It was tough to see for a few minutes, and I gagged on the smell of gunpowder.
I waved my arms around until I saw Peepshow again.
“Hey, everything’s cool, baby,” he said. “Just relax.” He gestured at the throngs of tourists breathing dim-sum breath.
I couldn’t take it easy because I knew trouble was going to start once the parade got underway. It was the first one since the death of Chiang Kai Shek, who was the head of the Kuomintang in Taiwan.
The KMT had lost the Chinese civil war to the communists and retreated to Taiwan. But the party still held power in Chinatown. It was no secret that the KMT poured cash into the Greater China Association and paid the salaries of its board. The association was an umbrella group for Chinatown’s many smaller family associations. Most business owners paid lip service to the KMT and bankrolled the parade to show what great communism-fighters they were.
The parade prominently featured the KMT flag, held in triumph, as if they had won the war. And if you weren’t there on the sidelines cheering and blowing kisses, you might be branded a pinko by the neo-McCarthyites in the community.
“Kuomintang and the Chinese people for 10,000 years!” screamed a little girl with a megaphone at the front of the parade. Everybody cheered. She stomped on red firecracker paper shreds as she started her march. I shifted my weight and balanced my right hand at my hip.
A dissident group of merchants who were aligned with the communists had put up posters throughout Chinatown that by dawn had been ripped down by their rivals. A tourist walking by one of these posters wouldn’t notice anything different between it and the numerous other signs offering money-wiring services, get-rich schemes, and apartment listings. But anyone who ate rice and was even semi-literate would see:
ONE TRUE CHINA FOR THE CHINESE PEOPLE!
BURY THE CORRUPT CHIANG KAI SHEK!
BURY THE CORRUPT KMT!
RAISE OUR VOICES AT THE PARADE!
COMMITTEE OF UNITED CHINESE
The committee was mostly made up of mainland Chinese affiliated with old warlords who bore grudges against the KMT and had passed them on to their kids.
Resentment runs deep in Chinese people. Forgiveness is not a Chinese value. We pray for fortune, luck, a long and happy life, but never for the redemption of our enemies;
we want them to die a thousand deaths. Chiang Kai Shek killed communists every chance he got, especially unarmed ones. The communists threw KMT soldiers and their families into re-education camps when the war was over. It was stupid to forgive because forgiveness meant you hadn’t learned anything.
A few years ago, the U.N. had expelled the KMT-ruled Taiwan from its roster of permanent members, a move opposed by the U.S., which still recognized the KMT as the legitimate rulers of China. The U.S. had no diplomatic ties with so-called “Red China.” But Americans didn’t know that the color red has always symbolized China to all Chinese, whether they followed Chiang, or Mao, or
Dr. Seuss. Even the KMT flag is dominated by a red field. That red could represent all the blood of Chinese killed by other Chinese, whether at the collapse of every dynasty or in a gambling den.
When the elementary-school girls were done with their clumsy, mercifully short dance, Boy Scouts came stomping in. Instead of their traditional neckerchiefs, they were wearing the KMT flag. One kid with gold and silver arrow badges running down his chest played a bugle that jiggled a shaggy mane of yellow cords. He did a pretty good version of “Yankee Doodle,” and then he played the KMT anthem. The crowd cheered, and when he was done, he saluted. Tourist cameras went off. The bugle boy led the scouts marching forward to make room for the next performers.
I saw some commotion in the crowd — eight men with baseball caps pulled low over their faces jumped into the opening behind the scouts. They lined up and unrolled a huge banner as wide as the street that read:
BURY CHIANG KAI SHEK / BURY CORRUPT KMT!!!
A small part in English read:
U.S. RECOGNIZE CHINA
The immediate crowd reaction was a mass contest to see who could hold their breath the longest. This brash display at a KMT event was shocking to everyone whether you agreed or not.
The only sounds came from the tourists and the cops, who had no idea what was going on.
“They didn’t put a lot of thought into that banner, eh?” asked Peepshow, throwing an elbow into me.
Suddenly six men with their heads tied in red handkerchiefs charged out onto the street. Each held a deceptively thin bamboo pole that was strong enough to smash cinder blocks. The pole-bearers advanced on the men holding the banner. The Chinese people in the crowd took two steps back behind the tourists.
“Hey, it’s a kung-fu exhibition!” said Peepshow, crossing his arms. I grabbed his right elbow and yanked him forward with me.
“Listen, yo-yo! This fight is for real!” I yelled at him.
I don’t know who hit first. The guys with the bamboo poles were awkward, and their weapons were soon grabbed away. Baseball caps and handkerchiefs were yanked off. Pretty soon, you couldn’t tell who was from which side, and bamboo poles were spanking anyone within reach.
None of us were ready for a riot, least of all the merchants who had opened special sidewalk displays for the parade.
“Grab anyone with a pole!” I yelled at Peepshow. I wrestled down a man who must have been twice as old as me and yanked the pole out of his hands. I was reaching back for my handcuffs when I saw a periscope rise out of the chaos and zero in on my face.
“It’s a Chinese cop!” said the periscope. A hand reached out from the crowd and grabbed the bamboo pole on the ground that I had just taken away.
I twisted around and stepped on the hand. The man under me squirmed.
“Ouch!” said a female voice, and a woman tourist rolled forward onto the ground next to me. The periscope swung away, revealing a male tourist with a TV camera.
“What the hell are you doing!” the man tourist demanded to know.
“Don’t touch that pole!” I yelled at the woman tourist.
“I just wanted to see what it was made of,” she moaned.
“I’m going to report you!” threatened the man tourist. He swung his camera lens back at me. “I got your badge number and everything.”
“Keep that shit out of my face!” I yelled at him. I heaved against the camera and felt him fall back. The man under me managed to scoot out and slipped into a sea of legs somewhere to the south. “Motherfucker!” I yelled to God.
“I can’t believe you talk like that!” yelled the tourist woman. She was cradling her hand like it was a sick hamster.
“Go fuck yourself!” I told her.
—
We managed to get six men into custody with no reports of serious injuries in the crowd. We weren’t sure who we had, and even though a few thousand Chinese had seen what had happened, no eyewitnesses would come into the house.
We gave the men warnings for disturbing the peace. They all seemed to know English.
“Can you believe it, those guys pushing for Red China?” asked Peepshow. He’d managed to get a bruise on his jaw. “Right when the Viet Cong are running all over. Those Red China protesters are right down there with Jane Fonda. They keep up at it, people will think they’re gooks.”
“People already think they’re gooks,” I said.
—
I went home, took a shower with a bar of sandalwood soap, and cut myself shaving. In the mirror, I saw that I had bruises in the shape of fingers around my neck. I didn’t remember getting them, and they didn’t hurt, so I ignored them. I got into plain clothes and went back out. The streets were flooded with tourists going in and out of the restaurants and shops. I headed for Columbus Park.
The rundown park was jammed with groups of Chinese people talking loudly while eating rice cakes, leading
some to choke on too-big bites. Grandmothers spitting into their hands and wiping children’s faces. Old men standing together, each adding another sentence to an imagined story about this guy they all used to know. Teenaged boys and girls slapping handballs around on the courts. Someone had a soccer ball, but with no field or goalposts in the park, the kids took turns trying to bounce it on their knees. Everyone was dressed in red or wearing something red.
A little boy sucking on a dry plum stared at me and I buttoned the second button to my red flannel shirt. When he spat the seed out, it would slip into the cracks in the asphalt, where there were hundreds of other seeds that had been spat out by his father and uncles.
I found the midget sipping sweetened soy milk from a plastic bottle. He nodded and said, “Officer Chow,” without taking the straw out of his mouth. He was wearing a red cardigan over a t-shirt that had turned pink from being washed with the sweater. He was idly playing a game of Chinese chess against a little boy dressed in a suit with a red tie.
“I didn’t see you at the parade,” I told him.
“I don’t have to go to the parade,” said the midget.
“Aren’t you proud of your culture?”
The midget took the straw out of his mouth.
“I’m very proud of the Chinese people,” he said. “We invented soy milk, right? What a wonderful drink. Anyway, if you’re talking about things like the lion dance, I don’t support that. You know where that originated from?”
“There’s that old fable about that guy who wanted to show how brave he was by playing ball with the lions.”
“Yeah, there’s that. But the whole ritual of dressing up dancers as lions and going around to businesses to collect red envelopes was just a big bribery scheme cooked up by government officials in ancient times. You give enough money to the lion, you buy some ‘good luck.’ Sound familiar?”
“That was a long time ago. It’s not like that now.”
“Well, they use more than lions now.”
“If it were a crime, we’d have detectives on the case.”
“I heard about the dustup at the parade today,” said the midget. His soy milk bottomed out and he tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder into a trash can. “Fighting amongst ourselves is in our culture. Think about China’s history. How many little countries were defeated and consolidated and broken up again over how many thousands of years?”
“A lot.”
“Yes, a lot. Think of all the regional beliefs and traditions that each of those countries had, even before the Mongols and the Manchus colonized us. Everyone who’s Chinese is really many different ancestries, with the blood of a hundred different nations that are now gone.”
To the little boy in the suit, he said, “Take that piece back. That’s a bad move. Very bad move.” The boy sadly dragged his cannon back and bit his lip.
The midget went on. “All the Chinese people feel this internal struggle. That’s why Chinese leaders are so terrible.”
“Both the KMT and the communists are lousy,” I said. “But you know, if Sun Yat Sen hadn’t died suddenly, China would be farther along than Japan is now.”
The midget blinked. “Sun, he would have ruined China if he had lived.”
I was shocked that the midget dismissed Sun so easily. Both the KMT and the communists looked up to Sun. He was the one who’d kicked out the colonizing Manchus in 1911. Tragically, he had died before seeing his reforms put into practice. If you ate with chopsticks, you loved the man.
“You can’t say that about Sun,” I said. “He was the one who got China back on its feet.”
“He was so vague about everything,” said the midget. “No wonder both the KMT and the communists love him so much. If he had lived and headed the country, he would have been expected to be as ruthless as the old emperors, like Mao and Chiang are now — otherwise people wouldn’t admire him. Sun loved Chinese people so much, he couldn’t stand the thought of mistreating anyone. That’s what killed him.”
Life under the Manchus had been hard on China. The men had to wear their hair in queues to show loyalty to the Manchus and pay taxes to a Manchu emperor. Chinese weren’t allowed to rise up to the highest military or government ranks, which were held by Manchus or Europeans. It had been almost 300 years of institutionalized discrimination against the Chinese. I wondered if the Manchus had allowed the Chinese cops to get investigative assignments.
“Okay,” I told the midget. “You think Chinese people make lousy leaders and we all hate each other, then how come we all live together in Chinatown? Why do you come to Chinatown?”
The midget shrugged.
“I’m only in it for the soy milk,” he said.
I shook my head and checked my watch.
“I gotta go see my mother,” I said.
“Have fun in Brooklyn,” the midget said with a wry smile.
“Happy New Year!”
“Whoopee.”
—
Down the street, I bought a fresh green bamboo twig from a sidewalk salesman. It was cultivated in a nursery where it had been slowly twisted over a few months so it would grow into the shape of an undone wire coat hanger. More twists made it more lucky.
I stopped at Martha’s Bakery. Lonnie and Dori both looked frazzled. To save time, boxes had already been packed with rice cakes and stacked up. I picked one up and threw my money at Dori.
“Happy New Year!” I told her. She glared at me, but held her tongue. It was bad luck to say anything mean-spirited on New Year’s, since that day would set the tone for the rest of the year. In Dori’s case, I couldn’t see how it mattered. She was going to have a lousy year whether she talked badly about me or not. Still, we all followed traditions we didn’t believe in. Like being a diligent son.
Lonnie gave me a searching look.
“Happy New Year, Lonnie!”
“You, too, officer!” she said, already looking away.
The Brooklyn-bound platform of the N train was packed with tourists heading for home. There were some Chinese, but almost none of them would be riding out as far as me to just past Bay Ridge.
I got on the train and leaned against the doors when they closed. I thought about how my mother wanted nothing to do with Chinatown anymore and lived in a neighborhood where she was the only one who knew how to fiddle around with a wok. When I got out of the train, I walked down to her block, which looked like a suburban Little Italy. I was sure I was carrying the only rice cake for miles.
“Stupid, low-class Chinese culture,” she said. I had just seated myself down on her couch, which was swathed in a multi-colored crochet cover with three God’s eyes. Seeing me always reminded her of how she came to this country and ended up living and working with people she considered beneath her social status back in China. Understandably, she was always in a bad mood at first.
“I saw the little girls parading on television today. They use such cheap material, and they didn’t dance in time with the drum. Then they had that fight. So disrespectful. Made me lose face,” she said, swiping her cheek with a finger.
She leaned forward into me. “Hey Robert, what’s this?” she asked, tapping at the nick in my chin. I was glad my shirt was covering up the bruises from this afternoon.
“Oh that? That’s from a bullet, Mom.”
“Shut up! It’s from shaving!”
“If you know it’s from shaving, then why did you ask me?”
“I just want to talk to you. You don’t want your mother to talk to you? Maybe I need to get a ticket from you to say that you write to me.” A whistle went off in the kitchen and she left to get the tea.
She owned this apartment, a one bedroom in an old brownstone on the ground floor. My mother did really well.
A lot of women of her generation had to work as seamstresses. But my mother’s family had been one of the richer ones, and she already spoke enough English when she came over. She managed to get a job working for Americans in midtown, sorting and punching 80-column cards for the computers. Now she supervised the department.
The women who worked in the sweatshops weren’t so lucky. When they got older, they slipped up more and got canned from the garment factory. They found themselves making dumplings for a penny each. Or giving foot massages on the sidewalk. Or worse.
“This tea comes from the middle of China. Not the cheap Hong Kong garbage,” said my mother. She walked back into the living room with a lacquer tray. The teapot and two cups had a crack glaze finish that looked like lizard skin. A raised seal stuck out on each of the three pieces, the character for longevity, which looks like an old man bent over with cane. She also brought out a rice cake sliced into eighths on a small dish.
“What’s wrong with Hong Kong, Mom?”
“Nothing wrong with Hong Kong! Did I say something’s wrong with Hong Kong?”
“You called it ‘garbage.’ This isn’t the way to start the new year, talking badly about Chinese people.”
“When are you going to learn?” asked my mother, taking sips of her tea. She slipped a piece of rice cake into her mouth. “Don’t worry about ‘Chinese people.’ Just worry about yourself. You think people in Chinatown care about you? They all just want to make enough money to get out
of there.”
“How did you learn to hate Chinese people so much?”
“You think I hate Chinese people? Chinese people hate me! You know how they treated me! After your father died, everybody turned their backs on me. I’m buying groceries in the street, the store owners don’t even look at me until I give them money.”
“But you still have Chinese friends. What about Auntie Two Big Girls and Auntie One Girl and Boy? You hate them?” I never knew the names of my mother’s friends; as I was growing up, and even today, we just referred to them by their children.
“They are my friends. I know them. But most Chinese people are simple and unsophisticated.”
“Now you’re being racist against yourself, Mom.”
“Robert, don’t you hate working in Chinatown? Chinese people don’t love you and you don’t love them right back.”
“You know, you sound like Dad going off on the communists. How can you hate people who look like you?” I bit off a rubbery chunk of rice cake and it instantly glued my mouth shut. I took a sip of tea to help break it up.
“Don’t talk about the communists,” she said, running out of steam. “You’ve never been to China, how can you talk about the communists?”
“I read the newspaper, I know about the political situation. The communists defeated the KMT so easily, they obviously had the support of the Chinese people.”
My mother sighed and sipped more tea.
“The Americans are celebrating the 200th birthday of their country this year.”
“It’s our country, too. We’re American citizens, Mom.”
“You’re American. I’m only American on paper. You know my English isn’t that good. Anyway, China’s history is more than 20 times longer than 200 years. You have no idea how old our history is. You think the communists are going to last? Even if the KMT had won, they wouldn’t be doing better. Nothing lasts. Worry about yourself. That’s history’s lesson.”
I thought about the reports coming out of some parts of China. The Cultural Revolution had destroyed the country in ways the Japanese could only have wished to do. Employees had killed their bosses, students had beaten their teachers, and cats had chased dogs up trees. The movement now seemed to be losing steam, according to reports in the Hong Kong and Taiwan papers, but you never knew for sure.
“What do you think happened to all the money that Dad sent back to China?” I asked. “It wasn’t too much but we really could have used that money a few years ago.”
“All of it was confiscated by the communists,” sighed my mother. “Along with your dad’s brother. The entire family was labeled ‘class enemies’ because of all the money your father had been sending them. But that’s not the worst part.”
“What could be worse than losing your money?”
“Well,” said my mother, leaning back and speaking very slowly. “I never told you this before. Because your father was sending money back to China, he was under investigation for being a communist.”
“Who was investigating him?”
“The FBI, but really, the old guard Chinatown organizations, the ones who loved the KMT. They were compiling information on everyone who was sending money back to China. They wanted to get them all deported. They didn’t want anyone sending money to the communists.”
I was stunned by this revelation.
“He hated the communists! How could he be accused of being a communist?”
“When your father fell off the roof, some people said that it wasn’t an accident,” said my mother. Her voice had all the emotions squeezed out of it. “They said that it was a guilty man committing suicide.”
“Motherfuckers,” I said. “Who were they?”
“I don’t know.”
“What were their names?”
“Nobody knows. They only sent us anonymous notes in the mail.”
“You never told the police?”
“What am I going to tell them? Huh? If I came into the police station, they would tell me to do their laundry.
I didn’t dare go there. Huh!”
“They wouldn’t do that!”
“Tell me they wouldn’t!”
I put my hands on my knees.
“We should really talk about good things, Mom.”
She nodded.
“How is your job going?” I asked.
“Can’t complain.”
After a minute or two, we had the TV on.
—
I called up Barbara not too long after I got home. It was a few minutes after 0100. I didn’t know if she’d be there.
“Yeah?”
“You answer the phone like a guy, Barbara.”
“I can do everything a guy can do. Even more.”
“Yeah, I know, I remember. Hey, what are you doing now?”
“Recovering from the worst Chinese New Year ever at my aunt’s.”
“I gotta bottle of Seagram’s. Wanna help me read the label upside-down?”
“You have to come over here. My bra’s already off.”