The Natural Laws of Good Luck (24 page)

Later that day I saw the platypus on the grassy island he had made his own. I moved slowly toward him, like a walking bush, until I stood with my toes sinking into the soggy mud at the edge of the water. I saw the broad tail. I saw the brown, quivering haunches. I saw the little paw hands. I saw a face that tapered like a mouse's, a rodent face, a beaver face; our platypus had shape-shifted into a teenage beaver. I didn't think there would be enough for him to eat around our pond, especially since Zhong-hua's chainsaw massacre.

In a few weeks, the beaver had gone on his way. By late spring the water level had dropped to only a foot or so, and the bullheads died for lack of oxygen. By early summer the island was surrounded by greenish mud—the pond bed had become a smelly bog.

“We could rent an excavator, you know, one of those big machines that does this.” I clawed at the air with my hand.

“No need. We can ourselves do. Just slowly, slowly.”

“Ourselves?”

“Yes, no problem. Can. In my young times, when I was village schoolteacher, I did this work.”

“You dug out ponds by hand?”

“Yes. Wintertime. In the morning we four o'clock got up. We take off shoes and walk into cold water—one and one and one, like chain. Deep man fill bucket and pass to not-so-deep man. Not-so-deep man pass again—pass, pass, pass—then stand-in-mud man give stand-on-ground man take bucket. Stand-on-ground man give carry-to-field man take. Pond-bottom stuff very good for grow things. Four hours we stand in ice water, then stop. Eat some pounded corn cake and then go back work. We all switch. Stand-on-ground people stand in water. My legs very hurt. Blood pipes all broken. After that I never wear short pants again because legs very ugly blue. I not want another person watch my legs.”

My gaze rested on my husband's bare misshapen feet. The bones seemed to have taken an unnatural direction, as if to avoid an obstacle. My husband explained that deformed feet were common among his generation. Their families were so poor that the kids had to accept whatever shoes could be found or traded and wear them for three or four years or until the leather disintegrated. By then the toes had been rerouted. Zhong-hua had the unfortunate position of last in a series of five children—and the only boy. His mother bought or made the eldest daughter new clothes. The second, third, and fourth daughters and then Zhong-hua, in succession, inherited the hand-me-downs. He complained, not about the patched oversized clothes themselves but about the flower-patterned cloth. His mother was sometimes sympathetic enough to refashion the hand-me-downs so that the flowers were on the inside. The other boys could spot the flowers when he turned a somersault or climbed a tree and never missed the opportunity to taunt him.

We accumulated a lot of clothes from garage sales and the Salvation Army. I couldn't suppress a compulsion to corral what we didn't need into bags and donate them back. “Why do this?” Zhong-hua objected. “Just put somewhere—maybe sometime very useful.” The edge on his voice signified that this was more
than a suggestion. He thought I was insane. Zhong-hua's mother had never thrown away anything. She repaired holes in the blankets with the worn cotton of old dresses and made trousers for her only boy out of the sleeves of worn-out shirts. As he grew, she attached extensions, sometimes in a different color or with the brawl-instigating flowers. Chairman Mao died and the family's poverty gradually abated, but she would not be parted from the scraps of wool and cotton bulging out of the bags under the bed. I tried to regard the alarming plethora of shoes and continual influx from the garment industry from my husband's point of view, as abundance and insurance, not clutter.

Zhong-hua continued his watch at the edge of the big mud pie. There were still painted turtles as big as a man's hand and frogs with gold-rimmed eyes. There were Baltimore orioles, goldfinches, dragonflies, and praying mantises. Day after day, Zhong-hua shuffled in pajamas and slippers between the milk crate and the dank basement studio, where he filled rolls of rice paper with brush paintings. My favorite was of a row of craggy tree trunks blooming red against a snow-covered mountain ridge. High up and shrouded in mist was a tiny hut. I wanted to climb up there with a sleeping bag, and maybe some bacon and a coffeepot.

His favorites were of flowers. He was never satisfied and kept on painting roses and giant peonies over and over. He attacked the problem of the red flowers like a scientist faced with a quantum-layered mystery. Arranging the petals around the intense yellow center, he examined careless strokes and redoubled his efforts in the next flower. Sometimes the blossom was OK but the leaves “not natural,” or the butterfly was perfect above a “not pretty” branch. It seemed he had a contract with these flowers he meant to fulfill.

We unrolled the rice paper on the floor, starting in the kitchen and running through the middle of the house to the bedroom. Which flower was good? He wanted to know. I didn't tell him that while he was still in China, I had dug up all the peonies in front of
the house and given them to my friend because I hated peonies. They had neglected to take one sickly bush next to the barn door, where Zhong-hua discovered it and promptly transplanted it to the front of the house. We stared into the center of these flowers and peered between the petals. We examined the leaves and the veins in the leaves. Zhong-hua shook his head in disgust: “No good. Not natural. Terrible!” He had a few mountain landscapes, a few birds, some koi fish, roses, and three hundred feet of variations on the peony.

One morning while Zhong-hua slept, I gathered the rice paper rolls under my arm and grabbed my camera. I marched out beyond the garden to the open field. New grass was just pushing up from last year's thatch. I unrolled the fragile paper. It made a lively road that undulated over the contours of the land, a flowery Chinese highway narrowing into the distance. I snapped a roll of pictures. The same day I wrote a proposal to the art center asking for a grant for Zhong-hua to paint Chinese brush paintings of Grafton, New York. When everything was ready, I showed Zhong-hua. He tempered his single nod of agreement with the lament: “I make red flower not natural.”

Since the surgeries, I had taken a job as a mental health worker for a supported housing agency and was also still working as a mask maker. When Zhong-hua's vigor did not return, I pondered our situation and decided that my pact with life now required that more education be added to raw willingness to sustain our threesome. I took out a loan and enrolled in a master's degree program at Bennington College in Vermont, reading and writing in the dark hours of morning before leaving the house for work. Zhong-hua dreamed one night that a geyser of hot mineral water had founted from our mud-pie pond bed. In the dream he built a bathhouse around the fountain, and droves of people came to soak their aching bones. He mused, “If this happens, I just need to know how to build this bathhouse. Cement maybe good.” If only the pond would fill up again, maybe our luck would improve.

I was not certain that I would be a competent mental health case manager. As it turned out, I did understand the anxiety, depression, and paranoia of my clients from my own experience. It's not easy to feel at home in the world. I wanted to be useful to them, even if only to unveil the mysteries of unclogging a Hoover vacuum cleaner. I met my first client, Arthur, in my office, and he immediately began pacing the floor insisting that someone had been stealing his mail again.

“People tell me it's all in my head. Like they think I'm making it up. How does that help me?”

“Have you considered moving?”

“Jeez, why would I move if it's all in my head?”

“It's in your head, and it's not in your head,” I offered.

“Yeah, I know. Thank you! Why can't people understand that?”

We talked for a while more, and I discovered that Arthur loved art. He said he wanted to learn to draw people so that he could paint Saint Francis. I suggested taking a class, but he said no, he would get too confused. When I asked him to tell me the most important thing I could do for him as his case manager, he said, “Slow down. Everybody talks so fast they may as well be speaking Chinese. Jeez. I'd probably sit there for ten weeks and still not be able to paint Saint Francis.”

Window-shopping for paint was as close as we got to Saint Francis that day. Driving home, we looked down the long hill that slopes toward the river; the valley below opened up into a panorama of weeping willows, church steeples, and chimney pots under moody tailed clouds tinged purple, pink, and scarlet. Arthur said suddenly, “Look at those clouds! Look at all the colors in there! Look at that gray! Oh, man, isn't that something? We have so much to be grateful for on this planet! So much I can't believe it. Jeez.” I learned from Arthur how to ride on clouds. Spending my days with him and other people of high quality was my good fortune.

I had never worked in an office before. Zhong-hua sent me off with bags of long Chinese cucumbers to distribute among the other people there. This cucumber diplomacy was quite effective. People walked up and down the halls happily chomping on foot-long cucumbers throughout August. Everyone raved about them. People whose grinning faces I did not recognize would stop me and say, “So, what other vegetables do you have?”

We had to attend weekly floor meetings that managers declared a “safe space” for expressing any concerns we had. Every week a few people timidly inquired when we might be getting an increase in mileage reimbursement since ours was ten cents below the federal standard and we case managers had to drive up to two hundred miles per week while fronting gas money until our next paycheck. I pointed out that if the cost of gas was eating into an already small paycheck in such a way that an employee could not meet the cost of living each month, then that employee would be forced to look elsewhere. My boss, young enough to be my daughter, later stormed into my office with eyes flashing. She said I had disrespected the administration by giving them an ultimatum. I thought I had only clearly articulated an equation everyone had been openly complaining about.

I went home and hid in the bed, utterly confused. Zhong-hua found me and began vigorously slapping my body up and down with the cupped Qigong hand. “Nothing! Nothing! This just life. Boss always this way. Eat! Eat! You don't worry. Tomorrow tell your boss you is wrong and you is very sorry and you never will do again. Bring her some fresh cucumbers. You know, Ellen, Chairman Mao one time say Zhou Enlai no good. He say, Zhou maybe people's enemy because he have his own idea. Zhou Enlai go down on his knees and beg Chairman Mao to kill him right away: ‘You is right; I is wrong. Cut off my head.' Chairman Mao very surprised and laughing. He say, ‘No, no, no. Get up, Zhou! Of course I will not cut off your head. You can stay here and help me.' Nobody write down this kind of China history. This just somebody talking. Real
China history nobody know because all people standing next to Mao never can talk, not even after Mao dead. This is government rule. One thing you need to know: you is employee; boss is boss.”

I couldn't bring myself to tell my boss that I was wrong. I thought we could both be somehow wrong and somehow right. I left the cucumbers on her desk. Our mileage allotment was soon increased by eight cents a mile, but after that I never opened my mouth at meetings again. My husband needed health insurance.

Zhong-hua maintained his appetite for feet. He put on pounds and walked farther and farther from the house. He even started going to the convenience store or stopping here and there at a garage sale, still wearing slippers and pajama bottoms. Uncut, his hair grew long according to the bizarre currents of multiple cowlicks. The hair next to his ears grew forward horizontally. A shock of hair slanted skyward from his forehead, and another escaped at a stiff angle off the swirl at the back of his head. I offered to trim his hair, but he said, “No need.” He seemed oblivious to his appearance. Then a letter arrived from the art center, congratulating Zhong-hua on the award of a painting grant. When it was Zhong-hua's turn to give an acceptance speech, he said simply, “Everyone knows that in my home, Grafton, live many beautiful animals, fly many beautiful birds, grow many beautiful trees and flowers. Thank you!” During the wine and cheese reception after the awards ceremony, a smartly dressed woman approached Zhong-hua and thrust out her business card. “I write a newspaper column,” she said. “You really must call me when the show goes up. I can't wait to write a review.” The art critic's phone number disappeared somewhere between Troy and home.

My husband navigated a dreamy convalescent plateau of enervation. He was living underground like the blacksnake tunneling beneath the rocky banks manufacturing antidotes to poisonous toads and venomous insects. He disappeared into the moist and populous summer nights, where the throng of tree frogs and the Milky Way enveloped him. At midnight, when I couldn't find
him at the basement table or in the bathroom, I pressed my face to the sliding glass door in the kitchen and made out his moonlit form squatting down with a trowel, digging out dandelions. Our lawn lumped and tumbled to a wilderness of field and woods and consisted of mostly dandelions anyway. I let him be.

Another night, missing Zhong-hua at 3:00 AM, I found the door open and heard the relaxed, measured treading of deer over the packed-dirt driveway as they headed for the pond to drink. I glimpsed the pale possum sauntering along the uneven contour of the crumbling stone wall. Nothing minded Zhong-hua standing there, his body rising and sinking on his breath, his fingers tracing trails through the night air. Inhaling, he raised his arms; exhaling, he stroked the air downward. One story claims that a Taoist priest of the thirteenth-century Yuan dynasty learned this circular art in a dream, a practice described as “taking water to the mountain peaks and fire to the bottom of the ocean,” causing that which is below to rise and that which is high to descend in a constant flow of yin and yang essences. Feminine essence is
yin
and male essence
yang
. My husband had lately been distressed that the first surgery had irreversibly damaged the nerve that releases the sperm. The thwarted sperm was forced backward into the bladder. Zhong-hua was very sad. The Taoists called the sperm “excellent water” or the “yin of the yin.” Some qi masters knew how to change this special fluid to breath and move it up to replenish the brain, thus “taking water to the mountain peaks.” Zhong-hua was afraid that with backward sperm, health would elude him. The doctors in Boston said nothing could be done.