The Joy Luck Club (23 page)

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Authors: Amy Tan

BOOK: The Joy Luck Club
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"Careful, it's not too sturdy," I say. The table is a poorly designed piece that Harold made in his student days. I've always wondered why he's so proud of it. The lines are clumsy. It doesn't bear any of the traits of "fluidity" that are so important to Harold these days.
"What use for?" asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. "You put something else on top, everything fall down.
Chunwang chihan
."
I leave my mother in her room and go back downstairs. Harold is opening the windows to let the night air in. He does this every evening.
"I'm cold," I say.
"What's that?"
"Could you close the windows, please."
He looks at me, sighs and smiles, pulls the windows shut, and then sits down cross-legged on the floor and flips open a magazine. I'm sitting on the sofa, seething, and I don't know why. It's not that Harold has done anything wrong. Harold is just Harold.
And before I even do it, I know I'm starting a fight that is bigger than I know how to handle. But I do it anyway. I go to the refrigerator and I cross out "ice cream" on Harold's side of the list.
"What's going on here?"
"I just don't think you should get credit for
your
ice cream anymore."
He shrugs his shoulders, amused. "Suits me."
"Why do you have to be so goddamn fair!" I shout.
Harold puts his magazine down, now wearing his openmouthed exasperated look. "What is this? Why don't you say what's really the matter?"
"I don't know…. I don't know. Everything…the way we account for everything. What we share. What we don't share. I'm so tired of it, adding things up, subtracting, making it come out even. I'm sick of it."
"You were the one who wanted the cat."
"What are you talking about?"
"All right. If you think I'm being unfair about the exterminators, we'll both pay for it."
"That's not the point!"
"Then tell me,
please
, what is the point?"
I start to cry, which I know Harold hates. It always makes him uncomfortable, angry. He thinks it's manipulative. But I can't help it, because I realize now that I don't know what the point of this argument is. Am I asking Harold to support me? Am I asking to pay less than half? Do I really think we should stop accounting for everything? Wouldn't we continue to tally things up in our head? Wouldn't Harold wind up paying more? And then wouldn't I feel worse, less than equal? Or maybe we shouldn't have gotten married in the first place. Maybe Harold is a bad man. Maybe I've made him this way.
None of it seems right. Nothing makes sense. I can admit to nothing and I am in complete despair.
"I just think we have to change things," I say when I think I can control my voice. Only the rest comes out like whining. "We need to think about what our marriage is really based on…not this balance sheet, who owes who what."
"Shit," Harold says. And then he sighs and leans back, as if he were thinking about this. Finally he says in what sounds like a hurt voice, "Well, I know our marriage is based on a lot more than a balance sheet. A lot more. And if you don't then I think you should think about what else you want, before you change things."
And now I don't know what to think. What am I saying? What's he saying? We sit in the room, not saying anything. The air feels muggy. I look out the window, and out in the distance is the valley beneath us, a sprinkling of thousands of lights shimmering in the summer fog. And then I hear the sound of glass shattering, upstairs, and a chair scrapes across a wood floor.
Harold starts to get up, but I say, "No, I'll go see."
The door is open, but the room is dark, so I call out, "Ma?"
I see it right away: the marble end table collapsed on top of its spindly black legs. Off to the side is the black vase, the smooth cylinder broken in half, the freesias strewn in a puddle of water.
And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can't see her face.
"Fallen down," she says simply. She doesn't apologize.
"It doesn't matter," I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen."
"Then why you don't stop it?" asks my mother.
And it's such a simple question.
Four Directions
Waverly Jong
I had taken my mother out to lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant in hopes of putting her in a good mood, but it was a disaster.
When we met at the Four Directions Restaurant, she eyed me with immediate disapproval. "
Ai-ya!
What's the matter with your hair?" she said in Chinese.
"What do you mean, 'What's the matter,' " I said. "I had it cut." Mr. Rory had styled my hair differently this time, an asymmetrical blunt-line fringe that was shorter on the left side. It was fashionable, yet not radically so.
"Looks chopped off," she said. "You must ask for your money back."
I sighed. "Let's just have a nice lunch together, okay?"
She wore her tight-lipped, pinched-nose look as she scanned the menu, muttering, "Not too many good things, this menu." Then she tapped the waiter's arm, wiped the length of her chopsticks with her finger, and sniffed: "This greasy thing, do you expect me to eat with it?" She made a show of washing out her rice bowl with hot tea, and then warned other restaurant patrons seated near us to do the same. She told the waiter to make sure the soup was very hot, and of course, it was by her tongue's expert estimate "not even
lukewarm
."
"You shouldn't get so upset," I said to my mother after she disputed a charge of two extra dollars because she had specified chrysanthemum tea, instead of the regular green tea. "Besides, unnecessary stress isn't good for your heart."
"Nothing is wrong with my heart," she huffed as she kept a disparaging eye on the waiter.
And she was right. Despite all the tension she places on herself—and others—the doctors have proclaimed that my mother, at age sixty-nine, has the blood pressure of a sixteen-year-old and the strength of a horse. And that's what she is. A Horse, born in 1918, destined to be obstinate and frank to the point of tactlessness. She and I make a bad combination, because I'm a Rabbit, born in 1951, supposedly sensitive, with tendencies toward being thin-skinned and skittery at the first sign of criticism.
After our miserable lunch, I gave up the idea that there would ever be a good time to tell her the news: that Rich Schields and I were getting married.
"Why are you so nervous?" my friend Marlene Ferber had asked over the phone the other night. "It's not as if Rich is the scum of the earth. He's a tax attorney like you, for Chrissake. How can she criticize that?"
"You don't know my mother," I said. "She never thinks anybody is good enough for anything."
"So elope with the guy," said Marlene.
"That's what I did with Marvin." Marvin was my first husband, my high school sweetheart.
"So there you go," said Marlene.
"So when my mother found out, she threw her shoe at us," I said. "And that was just for openers."
My mother had never met Rich. In fact, every time I brought up his name—when I said, for instance, that Rich and I had gone to the symphony, that Rich had taken my four-year-old daughter, Shoshana, to the zoo—my mother found a way to change the subject.
"Did I tell you," I said as we waited for the lunch bill at Four Directions, "what a great time Shoshana had with Rich at the Exploratorium? He—"
"Oh," interrupted my mother, "I didn't tell you. Your father, doctors say maybe need exploratory surgery. But no, now they say everything normal, just too much constipated." I gave up. And then we did the usual routine.
I paid for the bill, with a ten and three ones. My mother pulled back the dollar bills and counted out exact change, thirteen cents, and put that on the tray instead, explaining firmly: "No tip!" She tossed her head back with a triumphant smile. And while my mother used the restroom, I slipped the waiter a five-dollar bill. He nodded to me with deep understanding. While she was gone, I devised another plan.
"
Choszle!
"—Stinks to death in there!—muttered my mother when she returned. She nudged me with a little travel package of Kleenex. She did not trust other people's toilet paper. "Do you need to use?"
I shook my head. "But before I drop you off, let's stop at my place real quick. There's something I want to show you."
My mother had not been to my apartment in months. When I was first married, she used to drop by unannounced, until one day I suggested she should call ahead of time. Ever since then, she has refused to come unless I issue an official invitation.
And so I watched her, seeing her reaction to the changes in my apartment—from the pristine habitat I maintained after the divorce, when all of a sudden I had too much time to keep my life in order—to this present chaos, a home full of life and love. The hallway floor was littered with Shoshana's toys, all bright plastic things with scattered parts. There was a set of Rich's barbells in the living room, two dirty snifters on the coffee table, the disemboweled remains of a phone that Shoshana and Rich took apart the other day to see where the voices came from.
"It's back here," I said. We kept walking, all the way to the back bedroom. The bed was unmade, dresser drawers were hanging out with socks and ties spilling over. My mother stepped over running shoes, more of Shoshana's toys, Rich's black loafers, my scarves, a stack of white shirts just back from the cleaner's.
Her look was one of painful denial, reminding me of a time long ago when she took my brothers and me down to a clinic to get our polio booster shots. As the needle went into my brother's arm and he screamed, my mother looked at me with agony written all over her face and assured me, "Next one doesn't hurt."
But now, how could my mother
not
notice that we were living together, that this was serious and would not go away even if she didn't talk about it? She had to say something.
I went to the closet and then came back with a mink jacket that Rich had given me for Christmas. It was the most extravagant gift I had ever received.
I put the jacket on. "It's sort of a silly present," I said nervously. "It's hardly ever cold enough in San Francisco to wear mink. But it seems to be a fad, what people are buying their wives and girlfriends these days."
My mother was quiet. She was looking toward my open closet, bulging with racks of shoes, ties, my dresses, and Rich's suits. She ran her fingers over the mink.
"This is not so good," she said at last. "It is just leftover strips. And the fur is too short, no long hairs."
"How can you criticize a gift!" I protested. I was deeply wounded. "He gave me this from his heart."
"That is why I worry," she said.
And looking at the coat in the mirror, I couldn't fend off the strength of her will anymore, her ability to make me see black where there was once white, white where there was once black. The coat looked shabby, an imitation of romance.
"Aren't you going to say anything else?" I asked softly.
"What I should say?"
"About the apartment? About
this
?" I gestured to all the signs of Rich lying about.
She looked around the room, toward the hall, and finally she said, "You have career. You are busy. You want to live like mess what I can say?"
My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself permanently in my memory. I still remember the first time I felt it.

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