The Natural Laws of Good Luck (31 page)

“Yeah, we should stick together with them. I send twenty dollars of my check every month.”

“Me, too. For twenty years now.”

“I've always wanted to learn from them how to live in harmony with nature.”

The ocean was too far away, and I wasn't sure if the Indians would welcome us, but I said I would ask. Arthur said he wanted to see
the giant windmill on the top of Jiminy Peak. This was within the can-do range, so off we went. I couldn't find where to park, and Arthur said if it were him, he would have known that first, even before he left the house—he would have asked where the parking lot was and made sure so there would be no confusion. We parked and then couldn't find the ticket booth. Arthur said he knew this would happen—that we wouldn't be able to find the parking lot or the ticket booth. When we found it, it was closed: no windmill tours because a group of important wind researchers was visiting. In the end, we hijacked the convoy of scientists, Zhong-hua—style, and rode up through the clouds with them in the eight-person chairlift. We hiked a muddy trail until the huge
whoosh, whoosh
of the propellers quickened our pulse. Like long, slender seabird wings, they cut the mist, shook the leafy heads of fall trees, and made waves in low grasses. It rained the whole time on the red and gold mountain and on us. Arthur hated confusion, dirt, walking, and being wet and cold—but not that day. He had the time of his life, and so did I.

“The world does a person good sometimes,” he said.

“Yes, it does.”

My husband was not quite sleeping at night, sometimes not quite breathing until I shook him into a great, surprised inhale. It was as if we were on a bridge that swayed endlessly between two points, in the present tense but without presence. Despite this dubious thought, I made the saving gesture and touched my husband where he lay beside me snoring. He gripped my knee, like a vise. Awake, he was there with me—just the other side of skin—of course he was, and together we made a softness that let me abandon all hexing thoughts.

When not tending to things at home, my husband ventured out as a wandering satellite in service to failing engines. I was working in Troy when he called to say his car battery had died just across the river and he needed a jump. As I came over the bridge, I spotted my husband shoveling snow in front of a house, supervised by a round wooly woman in a babushka. I assumed he was just being chivalrous,
but I was wrong. He had knocked on the door and asked to use the phone. First the woman said they had no phone, but when Zhong-hua offered to chip the ice from the steps, she agreed to allow him one call if he would also clear the walkway.

My husband told me the story backward as we drove to buy a new battery. I learned that before making the phone call, he had tried to get the car fixed at the auto repair shop down the street where he had an appointment. But the car kept stalling on the way and he was a half hour late. The owner told him gruffly to come back in four hours.

“Can I please wait here?”

“No, you can't wait here. And move your car.”

“I cannot start my car, sir.”

“I have a tow truck. It will cost you one hundred dollars—cash.”

“No need, sir. I have Triple A.”

“We do not deal with Triple A here. You use our truck for one hundred, or I can sell you a battery for one hundred.”

“Sir, I don't have one hundred cash. Can you please give me a jump and let me move my car?”

“You move your fuckin' car right now or I'm calling the police.” The other workers looked on and said nothing. One young man whom Zhong-hua recognized from our small town looked at his shoes.

Zhong-hua answered very softly, very politely. “Sir, I is your customer. You need very nice to me.”

“The hell I do! Get out of here, now.” The man shook his fist in Zhong-hua's face.

My husband used an even softer and more polite tone of voice. “If you want to help me, I don't want your help. If you want to give me one hundred dollars, I don't want. Call the police, please, sir.” That was when Zhong-hua walked down the street to knock on a stranger's door.

My husband's anger rarely manifested as affect but as a disturbing intensity that looked like a chunk of pyrite feels—condensed.
His skin changed color, as the earth's surface changes when a massive bank of clouds rolls in. This took place behind stoic features and a matter-of-fact tone as he related the story. The more contained his response, the more I felt compelled to emote.

“Zhong-hua, that guy cannot treat you like that. I want to go over there and talk to him tomorrow.”

“No. No need. This man you don't need talk to. This kind of person in the world few. That's all.”

Zhong-hua retreated to small-engine repair. He had a battalion of chainsaws ready to go, including three he had found on garbage day and the one Earnie the local chainsaw expert had performed last rites on and offered to dispose of for free. Zhong-hua took the engine out of one of the two curbside riding mowers and put it in the UPS guy's mower. All it needed was a tiny metal ring somewhere. He had shopped around unsuccessfully for this metal part. Then I came home from work, and he was washing peppers in a suit and tie. “Did you have a job interview?” I asked.

“No. Need buy lawn mower part.”

“You wore your suit to buy a part?”

“Right.” He was chopping the peppers, and the knife sounded like rapid fire on the board.

“Why?”

“So nobody will get hurts.” Six different parts departments had rebuffed him in his usual blue jeans and Tai Chi sweatshirt. He decided to try changing clothes to see if he could get someone to listen to him long enough to find out what part he needed. The formal attire had the desired effect, but he felt disillusioned. He had thought that in America people were treated equally no matter who they were.

Lying in bed at night, Zhong-hua and I both agreed that we could cheat ourselves of happiness by a failure to be contented. The metal ring incident was the first time my husband had ever hinted that he felt like punching somebody. If Zhong-hua had ever felt bitterness, he had never shown it to me. Lately, I sensed he was choking on it.

Da Jie had grown increasingly distant. She avoided her brother. He had always been in the habit of visiting her on Friday evening. “Eat something,” she would say, waving from the couch. “I have to go out. I need to play mah-jongg tonight.” She still called if the leaves needed raking, the vacuum cleaner broke, or the garage door opener didn't work. “I need you to quickly come,” she said. He went. When Zhong-hua first arrived from China, his sister had been zealous with advice, as family tradition mandated. She was the oldest sibling; he was the youngest. She had loaned him the money to buy his first used car and was chastising when it met its end—that is to say, when it met the end of another car.

That was before my husband got sick, and though she was glad to help for a while, she expected him to quickly recover and get a job. Every time he came to see her, she thought he was looking for a handout. The part of the family still in China depended on her for money whenever illness struck, and she alone supported her weakening father and his second wife. Zhong-hua said it didn't matter what she thought; she was his only relative in America, and he needed to try to have a good relationship. He was always thinking how to reciprocate past favors. Every summer since his surgery, my husband had a bountiful harvest of Chinese cucumbers. His sister loved these crunchy treats, so he bagged up half a bushel and drove over to her house.

This time, when he arrived with the cucumbers, there were cars in the driveway, but no one answered the door. Zhong-hua knocked and knocked and at last sat down on the stoop. After two hours, he heard voices in the house. Again, he knocked and called out, but no one came. Anger welled up in him. This would be unthinkable in China. He was the only brother. The world was truly upside-down if they could disrespect him like this.

At our niece's engagement party, she had trouble unstopping the wine bottle, and bits of cork floated in Zhong-hua's glass. What did this mean? Was he dirt? Was he nobody important? He was her only maternal uncle! My husband had stalwartly endured slights
from many a shopkeeper, policeman, bureaucrat, and stranger on the street. He always shrugged it off, saying there were few of this kind of rude people in the world. But this he could not shrug off.

He came home strangely animated, nervous, almost electrified. He poured a glass of Chinese wine, the 125 proof that was generally reserved for holidays and for me on a bad day. It didn't take long before he was very jovial and very bold. He called his sister, and soon I heard a dramatic monologue in Chinese that was to continue on and off for the next eight hours. He role-played in a mocking voice, cussed, and delivered a speech that stung with sarcasm.

If his sister hung up, he called back. When his nerve flagged, he opened another beer, which we had in the house only because Paroda had recently graduated from the university and had a yard party. His melodic voice rose and fell melodramatically. “Oh, so this is how it is, I see! Good! Excellent, Sister, excellent! Your daughter serves her uncle dirty wine. I very much love dirty wine. How did you know? How clever of you! You must tell me where to get some of this special dirty wine! Did you already forget in China I was the top manager and people respected me?”

Finally, I hid the phone, and Zhong-hua's head swayed for a while before falling forward onto the table into a puddle of vomit. I fetched a bowl of soapy water and a cloth, unceremoniously lifted his head with one hand, and swiped the front of his face and the table with the other. I wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and went to bed. We never mentioned that night again. In a few weeks, it was time for Zhong Qiu Jie, “Midautumn Festival,” an important Chinese family gathering. We sat at his sister's table and ate hot-pot vegetables and moon cakes with everyone else as if nothing had happened.

Throughout the fall and into winter, Zhong-hua continued to inquire into successive jobs with no callbacks. Anxiety, that monkey on my back, returned. Adding to the atmosphere of unease was the actual atmosphere: the winter that seemed never to come, other than a few wet flurries of snow. It was warm, way too warm
for December. The wood in the furnace smoldered. Overhead, the geese flew the wrong way. When my husband reached for me at night, I could only feebly pat his shoulder. In my heart I made mad love, but my body was exhausted and my spirit flagging.

The pep talk I was in the habit of giving my husband—“You don't need to start from zero”—was sounding tinny. The myriad selves we had been were dragging us down, and I considered that maybe it was time to start
cong ling
, “from zero,” to let fall the edifice of who we thought we were and what we were supposed to be doing.

The grown-up children came for Christmas to join Zhong-hua, Sweet Sweet, and me. It was a Christmas tailored to our pocketbooks. Eula had assigned each of us one other person to give a gift to. This was a new tradition, and Paroda said it would have worked if she had been in charge. As it was, the task befuddled Eula, and she assigned three people to Zhong-hua and nobody to Paroda, the only one who cared about gifts in the first place.

Zhong-hua's Christmas Eve feast was a four-year-old tradition, which now included mashed potatoes and excluded ham. It centered around the mountain of finely sliced cucumbers garnished with toasted sesame paste, garlic, vinegar, and soy sauce. In addition to the array of Chinese dishes made with tofu, pork, and chicken, I prepared a roast. Mavis wanted to bring back another tradition I had started when the children were very small: the lantern walk. Zhong-hua rounded up the bright red Chinese liquor boxes to make instant lanterns. We punched a pattern of holes with an awl and tied string for handles. Each box had a votive candle inside, sheltered from the wind. Zhong-hua carried the one Chinese translucent paper lantern.

Our lanterns bobbed along in the dark like fallen constellations, while Zhong-hua's cast a golden aura bright enough to light the path. He swung it in big circles over his head as we straggled merrily to the woods. This was our version of what my parents had done with a great band of rowdy friends, who marauded the neighborhood singing Christmas carols and then returned to someone's
house to share food. Never having had a great band of friends or close neighbors, I had formed my own troupe, back when the kids would still do whatever I said. None of us could sing, so we traipsed through the back fields clutching milk-carton lanterns while Eula beat a big drum and shouted orders.

We had a fine Christmas together. I was relieved that none of the children asked me to make my famous goulash, the dense mixture of hamburger, elbow noodles, and Velveeta cheese they had grown up on and held dear in their adult memories as a delicacy. They each grew up to improvise their own version of goulash, and it warmed me to think that mediocre magic could be improved by the magician's offspring. Mavis left her candle in the middle of the stream that crossed the path, and we laughed and jostled our way home, pausing once to look back at the wee light in its watery darkness.

After Christmas, Zhong-hua had his long-awaited chance at a real job. It was only for a month, but he could make some money doing something in which he was expert, Tai Chi. The job was for the month of January at Williams College, and he had seventeen students signed up. Zhong-hua wanted to do this job “very perfect.” I promised to come in halfway through the course to lead class discussions and read the students' assigned papers. The first day, he went alone, because I had to work. This was a fresh start. If he could teach Chen-style Tai Chi to “Have Stomach John,” then surely he could teach bright, athletic college students.

Trouble started with the first homework assignment: memorize the English names of the seventy-four forms of Chen-style Tai Chi. These included Walking Obliquely, Looking for a Needle on the Sea Bottom, Buddha's Warrior Pounds the Mortar, Sparrow Dashes Earth Dragon. No, the students protested, this list was unreasonable, absurd, impossible. “Also,” they e-mailed impertinently, “this course is a lot more work than the other Winter Study courses. We have to come to class too many hours and then practice at night, too.” One miserable boy wrote: “I regret to inform you that I am forced to drop out of Tai Chi because of the overwhelming
extreme difficulty of the material and the terrible frustration and discouraging lack of progress that I feel upon leaving class.”