The Natural Laws of Good Luck (10 page)

“OK, you're welcome.” The guy pulled the arm back. Zhong-hua waved and thanked him again.

Sometimes I think about the car grinding in slow motion off the washed-out gravel shoulder, totaling itself undramatically against the rotten tree stump. I think about us climbing out of the tilting wreckage, distraught but unhurt, and wonder whether we were pushed off the dirt road by the protective powers of the flying Cupid in order to be saved from some horrible highway fate.

One night at supper, Zhong-hua commented matter-of-factly that it was only because I yelled “Look out!” that he lost control of the car. I do believe in joint responsibility.

Deconstruction

M
Y HUSBAND
would attempt any task to avoid paying someone else a labor fee. Yet when he had a little money, it jumped out of his pocket. Once, after being paid cash for a Tai Chi class, he sat behind the wheel as if he had forgotten something.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. I just think this time have some money. How to make this money all gone?”

Moderation, a value highly regarded by Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars, was a quality my husband did not possess. He was extravagant in habits of food and exertion. The amount of meat he consumed after relocating a small mountain of gravel by wheelbarrow was astounding. Food was to eat; energy was to burn; and money, if we had any, was to buy more bags of cement.

Magnetized by his determination, I willingly cooperated in the most arduous undertakings. Some of these projects clearly saved us money, while others had more obscure inner benefit. My husband never worried about my small body tiring; he expected me to take care of myself. He said, “You want to do—do. You don't want to do—don't do. Every way is OK.” I was exhausted but didn't want to miss out after waiting all my life for intensity that matched my own. We made a sidewalk by sifting gravel through a screen and
dumping the pea-sized pebbles, together with sand, cement, and water, into the dirt trench we had dug. I thought we should mix it all smoothly in the wheelbarrow first, but Zhong-hua said, “No need.” Daylight dimmed to dusk, and dusk slid into twilight. The moon rose, and we worked on. In addition to “One time, eat all gone,” my husband's other motto was “One time, make all done.”

Our one-car garage made of aluminum hoops and covered with vinyl looked like a small airplane hangar. The dirt floor sloped downward toward the back so that the rain funneled in branching rivers beneath the car. He had an idea that we could take this car hangar apart and flatten it out into a two-car garage with a concrete floor. To be supportive, I said, “Good idea!”

First, the vinyl cover came off the garage. Then my husband told me to climb up on top of each arcing pole and jump up and down. There was a tree branch I could grab onto up there. He steadied the bottom end of one side while I jumped. When the pole had bent enough, he made a sign and I dropped to the ground. We flattened all the poles this way, with me jumping up and down between the spruce branches and my husband holding the bottom of the pole between his legs while smoking a cigarette. It worked. The garage was now wide enough for two cars; however, at three feet high, it was a bit too short to drive into.

We proceeded to frame up five-foot walls with old two-by-fours, which would theoretically give the too-short garage the boost it needed. I actually did know a thing or two about carpentry, but my knowledge was irrelevant to this particular entity. If a board was not long enough, he just spliced it to another two-by-four with a small scrap or a piece of metal, a method slightly better than connecting two boards end to end with Elmer's glue. These spliced two-by-fours wobbled and bent, as one would expect. He said, “No problem.”

“No problem?” I asked, trying not to sound frantic.

“No problem!” he said with confidence.

I suspended judgment because I wanted to believe. Finding the
pole structure much too heavy for us to lift up onto the wobbling five-foot wall, Zhong-hua sawed the poles that tied the whole structure together in half with a hacksaw. At least before, we had a one-car shelter. Now we had a lot of aluminum poles in pieces, three drunken walls careening in the wind, and a crumpled-up mass of vinyl and rope. I had a bad feeling. He squatted atop the wall, swaying companionably with the spliced-together frame structure. In his field studies of frame construction while goin' 'round, Zhong-hua had observed the overall geometric relationship of the pieces but not the connecting principles. Besides cement, he put much stock in metal. Joints could go anywhere as long as they incorporated a steel plate or an angle iron. A cigarette sticking out the side of his mouth, he held one half of the garage pole apparatus in place with one foot while I stood on the top rung of the ladder and nailed curved brackets over the horizontals to hold them against the wood frame. A stiff autumn wind snapped our clothing like sails, and I thought this must be very like working on a fishing boat in rough seas.

As I wavered fearfully on the ladder, bracing my head against a trembling tree branch for stability, I noticed that my husband was completely relaxed, standing up on the undulating skeleton lighting another cigarette, as if the wind itself were his safety harness. Clouds billowed behind him, gathering speed toward the distant ocean. He was a rakish novice, not as expert as a Baltimore oriole suspending a nest of grass from a forked branch or a beaver slapping mud on sticks, but still worthy of nature's tribe, where ingenuity is the highest value. We managed to get both halves of the garage raised up, one at time, and secured to the sculpture-in-motion that the garage had become.

My friend's husband Mike, a professional carpenter, stopped over to check on our progress. I heard him mutter to himself “Sweet Jesus.” He took me aside and said soberly, “You know, when you put the roof on that contraption, the whole thing is going to take off like a giant kite. And the weight of the snow is going to be
a problem now that you've widened the arc out.” But by this time I was beginning to think, “Maybe OK.” I thanked him politely for his warning. The structure stiffened up considerably when we nailed old sheet metal roofing to make walls, and even more when we tightened the laces binding the vinyl over the curved roof poles. By the time my husband had mixed eighty bags of cement one by one with sand and water, encasing the entire bottom edge of the three walls in concrete, we were ready for a hurricane.

As a finishing touch, Zhong-hua installed a motion-sensor light he had purchased at a garage sale. He fed the wires through a crack in the foundation of the house. I held a flashlight while he expertly spliced the wires into the main line outside the fuse box. After that, the light went on every time a deer passed within fifty feet, a skunk ambled by, or Socrates wandered into the garage to check out the garbage.

I had been queasy when our perfectly good one-car shelter was reduced to a scrap pile of wood, metal, and fiber, and I was elated when all this resurrected, as promised, into a two-car garage. We didn't have two cars. We had a seventeen-year-old Nissan truck with a mystery muffler. When I drove down the road and unrolled the window, the glass slid down inside the door, never to emerge again. Winter arrived, and the old truck was cold. Then the toilet backed up. The bathtub wouldn't drain. I asked my neighbor where the septic tank was because he had been born in our bedroom seventy years ago. “Oh, there isn't one,” he said. “Me and Pa just used to get in that hole back there once a year and shovel the stuff out.”

Snow drifted down. We dug a chest-deep trench and started looking for the six-inch iron pipe that, legend had it, ran underground from the house. Tree roots and boulders thwarted our pick and shovel; I lowered myself down into the muck, grunting and panting to loosen the stones. They made a huge sucking sound on the way out. I heaved one onto the bank, emitting an inhuman sound from my abdomen. “Good,” my husband said.

I felt my strength giving out as my mind took in the enormity of the task. He thought I was much stronger than I really was. My knuckles were raw, and my nose was running. Strands of hair blew across my face and stuck there. Sewer sludge piled up in mounds and hardened in the cold, like chocolate cupcakes sprinkled with snow. I wanted to pronounce our efforts futile, sordid, impossible, but my husband never entertained these kinds of self-hexing thoughts. He just kept going and said, “No problem,” “Just try,” and “Maybe OK.” After a few days, we found the end of the iron pipe about six feet down and began ramming the impacted sludge with an iron rod. “One, two, three, ugh!
Yi, er, san
, ugh!” There was a magical moment when we heard a faint rumble. The water gushed through into the trench, and I cheered in joyous relief.

It was still snowing when my husband returned with the Nissan truck. Loaded with bricks, the truck bed swayed alarmingly from side to side as he bounced into the yard over the frozen bumps. He had found a demolition site by the side of the road in the city, where he coveted the heaps of old bricks. The work crew helped him load the truck. I remembered the teeming cities of China, and how the earth regurgitated ancient walls as workers dug foundations for new buildings. Those bricks from the past were neatly stacked, awaiting a present to surround. It appeared to be a continual process everywhere in China, this turning over of the earth that rearranged centuries of time.

On the way home, he was stopped by a policeman who, after following him for some distance observing the swaying of the truck bed, concluded that he was drunk. He satisfied the officer that he had not been drinking and completed the mission. Before dark we had mixed more concrete, dug a deep hole with a pickax, and constructed a septic tank. It was like a brick troll house in the side of the hill topped with a slab of stone for a roof. That night I lay in bed with a sharp pain in my left shoulder, Band-Aids on three fingers, and an Ace bandage around my knee. But I was beginning to think I had married a genius.

Marriage Is Sacred

W
HILE STILL IN CHINA
, my husband confessed that it took him many hours over three or four days to write a one-page letter to me in English. I finally told him to write in Chinese and I would find someone to help me read it. I could not decipher the five pages of Chinese characters that arrived, except for “I,” “you,” “see same moon,” “together.” I took the letter to my friend who translated from the tissuey pages of rice paper. I still remember one part:

In my imagination I see your slim figure buffeted by icy gusts of wind, and I want to cross the street and stand next to you. I long to shield you from the cold. But I am across the world, not across the street. We must both be patient. I will come, and I will be with you forever. In the meantime, remember to put on your heavy coat. The greatest wealth is health. We are not so young, after all. Please trust me. Marriage is a sacred thing
.

Here in America, my husband never used such words; it was as if precious things could be endangered by being named. His deep appreciation was expressed spontaneously under cover of darkness, preferably interrupting my sleep. It was sufficient. Yet sometimes I felt abstractly disgruntled and took the opportunity to get peevish about the lack of clichéd romance. I found reasons to indulge in feelings of deprivation—one sore point being the lack of dancing opportunities, another the lack of a symbolic wedding
ring. I looked at other women's smooth, pretty hands with diamond rings on them, and I wanted one.

I am an artist, and my hands are rough, red, and arthritic; they wouldn't look good even if you covered them in rubies and emeralds and glued long designer fingernails on them. I can't wear a ring for ten minutes without getting it clogged with clay, papiermâché, concrete, or bread dough. But for a while I became obsessed with the idea that I had no glittery ring to let everyone know. Know what? That I was not trying to pick them up; that I was married, for God's sake; that my husband thought my hands were good enough for an expensive ring? I tried not to examine this list too carefully.

In China, I had a soft gold wedding ring that bent and fell off every time I caught it on my hair or the buttons on Zhong-hua's shirt cuffs. Upon arriving in America, Zhong-hua had given me a stoic, geometric nickel-colored ring. Its squareness hurt my fingers, so I often took it off and placed it to the side if I needed to work with my hands. One day I thought I heard it on its way up the vacuum pipe while I was cleaning the windowsill. I cut open the bag and dumped everything out, but couldn't find it. Even though I was the careless one, I brought the subject up as if someone else had wronged me and should make it right. I was annoying even myself, but my husband took it in silent amusement. I could hear him thinking, “This woman is very interesting. I give her two rings, and she throws them away like garbage. Now she wants another one.” I couldn't rid myself of this irritating craving for something people considered sacred to marriage, even though whenever I owned one, it proved nothing but a nuisance. My neighbor Flippy had lost the ring Dave gave her fifty years ago. She had been hanging out laundry, and it disappeared in the long grass. She said she didn't miss it one bit. “They say diamonds are a girl's best friend, but they're not mine. I have no use for 'em.”

What exactly makes a thing sacred? At our house, it seemed
that all the things I thought I held sacred meant nothing to my husband. When he took over the kitchen, my favorite cup disappeared; I found it in the shed behind the house with some coffee cans full of hinges and screws. Before he came, I had spent days preparing the house, intending to make a clean, airy sacred space, and the first item my husband added to this space had been the vitamin rack shoe tree. This metal high-rise quickly overflowed with gagging garage sale shoes with their tongues hanging at all angles. Next came a black metal shield with two gold British knights, an eagle on the center medallion, and two lethal-looking daggers crossed behind. A loud neon wall clock, twelve crystal punch cups, and glass end tables resting on gold chrome bullhorns took their places when I wasn't home and gave me a shock, as I've always had a visceral aversion to shiny, bright, or ticking things. I kept looking away and then back to see if maybe they were not as ugly as I thought.