(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter Read online

  And so by luck all fell into place. The Wizard of Oz, Precious Auntie was apparently saying, was also about a bone doctor, and she would be happy for Ruth to see this.

  At two minutes to seven, Ruth knocked on Lance and Dottie’s door. “Who is it?” Lance yelled.

  “It’s me. Ruth.”

  “Who?” And then she heard him mutter, “God damn it.”

  Ruth was humiliated. Maybe he really had asked her only out of politeness. She bolted down the steps of the front porch. Now she’d have to hide in the backyard for two hours so her mother would not know about her mistake or her lie.

  The door swung open. “Hey there, squirt,” he said warmly, “come on in. We almost gave up on you. Hey, Dottie! Ruth’s here! While you’re in the kitchen, get her a soda, will you. Here, Ruth, sit yourself down here on the sofa.”

  During the movie, Ruth had a hard time paying attention to the television screen. She had to pretend to be comfortable. The three of them were sitting on a turquoise-and-yellow sofa that had the woven texture of twine and tinsel. It scratched the backs of Ruth’s bare legs. Besides that, Ruth kept noticing things that shocked her, like how Dottie and Lance put their feet up on the coffee table—without removing their shoes. If her mother saw that, she’d have more to talk about than Dottie’s big teeth! What’s more, Lance and Dottie were both drinking a golden-colored booze and they weren’t even in a cocktail lounge. But what most bothered Ruth was the stupid way Dottie was acting, babyish, stroking her husband’s left knee and thigh, while crooning things like, “Lancey-pants, could you turn up the volume a teensy-weensy smidge?”

  During a commercial, Dottie untangled herself, stood up, and wobbled about tipsily like the scarecrow in the movie. “How about some pop-pop-pop popcorn, everybody?” And then with arms swinging widely, she took one step backward and loped out of the room, singing, “Ohhhh, we’re off to see the kitchen… .”

  Now Ruth found herself on the sofa alone with Lance. She stared ahead at the television, her heart thumping. She heard Dottie humming, the sound of cabinets being opened and shut.

  “So what do you think?” Lance said, nodding toward the television.

  “It’s really neat,” Ruth answered in a small, serious voice, her eyes trained on the screen.

  She could smell the oil heating in the kitchen, hear the machine-gun spill of popcorn kernels into the pot. Lance swished the ice cubes in his glass and talked about the programs that he hoped were broadcasting in color: football, Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies. Ruth felt like she was on a date. She turned slightly toward him. Listen with a fascinated expression. Wendy had told her this was what a girl should do to make a boy feel manly and important. But what came after that? Lance was so close to her. All at once, he patted her knee, stood up, and announced, “I guess I better use the can before the show comes back on.” What he said was embarrassingly intimate. She was still blushing when he came back a minute later. This time he sat down even closer than before. He could have scooted over to where Dottie had been, so why hadn’t he? Was it on purpose? The movie resumed. Was Dottie coming back soon? Ruth hoped not. She imagined telling Wendy how nervous she felt: “I thought I was going to pee in my pants!” That was just an expression, but now that she had thought it. she really did have to pee. This was terrible. How could she ask Lance it she could use the bathroom? She couldn’t just get up and wander the house. Should she be casual like him and just say she had to use the can? She gripped her muscles, trying to hold on. Finally, when Dottie came in with the bowl of popcorn, Ruth blurted, “I have to wash my hands first.”

  “Through the back, past the bedroom,” Dottie said.

  Ruth tried to act casual, walking speedily while clenching the tops of her thighs together. As she flew past the bedroom, she smelled stale cigarettes, saw an unmade bed, pillows, towels, and Jean Nate bath oil at the foot of the bed. Once in the bathroom, she pulled down her pants and sat, groaning with relief. Here’s where Lance had just been, she thought, and she giggled. And then she saw the bathroom was a mess. She was embarrassed for Lance. The grout between the pink tiles on the floor was grungy gray. A bra and panties lay mashed on top of the hamper. And car magazines were sloppily shoved into a built-in wall rack across from the toilet. If her mother could see this!

  Ruth stood, and that’s when she noticed the dampness on her bottom. The toilet seat had been wet! Her mother had always warned her not to sit on other people’s toilets, even those at her friends’ homes. Men were supposed to lift the seat, but they never did. “Every man forget,” her mother had said, “they don’t care. Leave germ there, put on you.”

  Ruth thought about rubbing off the pee with toilet paper. But then she decided it was a sign, like a pledge of love. It was Lance’s pee, his germs, and leaving it on made her feel brave and romantic.

  A few days later, Ruth saw a movie in gym class that showed how eggs floated in a female body, traveling along primordial paths, before falling out in a stream of blood. The movie was old and had been spliced in many places. A lady who looked like a nurse talked about the beginning of spring, and in the middle of describing the emergence of beautiful buds she disappeared with a clack, then reappeared in another room describing buds moving inside a branch. While she was explaining about the womb as a nest, her voice turned into a flapping-bird sound and she disappeared into the cloud-white screen. When the lights came on, all the girls squinted in embarrassment, for now they were thinking about eggs moving inside them. The teacher had to call in a slouching, slack-mouthed boy from the audiovisual department; this made Wendy and several other girls squeal that they wanted to curl up and die. After the boy spliced the reel back together, the movie took up again, to show a tadpole called a sperm traveling through a heart-shaped womb while a bus driver voice called out the destinations: “vagina,” “cervix,” “uterus.” The girls shrieked and covered their eyes, until the boy swaggered out of the room, acting proud, as if he had seen them all naked.

  The movie continued and Ruth watched the tadpole find the egg, which gobbled it up. A big-eyed frog began to grow. At the end of the movie, a nurse with a starched white cap handed a googly baby to a beautiful woman in a pink satin jacket, as her manly husband declared, “It’s a miracle, the miracle of life.”

  When the lights came on, Wendy raised her hand and asked the teacher how the miracle got started in the first place, and the girls who knew the answer snorted and giggled. Ruth laughed as well. The teacher gave them a scolding look and said, “You have to get married first.”

  Ruth knew that wasn’t entirely true. She had seen a Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie. All it took was the right chemistry, which included love, and sometimes the wrong chemistry, which included booze and falling asleep. Ruth was not quite sure how everything occurred, but she was pretty certain those were the main things that activated a scientific change: it was similar to how Alka-Seltzer turned plain water into bubbly. Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. That wrong chemistry was why some women had babies born out of wedlock, babies that were illegitimate, one of the b-words.

  Before the class ended, the teacher passed out white elastic belts with clips, and boxes containing thick white pads. She explained that the girls were due to have their first periods soon, and they should not be surprised or frightened if they saw a red stain on their panties. The stain was a sign that they had become women, and it was also an assurance that they were “good girls.” A lot of the girls tittered. Ruth thought the teacher was saying her period was due in the same way as homework, meaning it was due tomorrow, the day after, or next week.

  While she and Ruth walked home from school, Wendy explained what the teacher had left out. Wendy knew things, because she hung out with her brother’s pals and their girlfriends, the hard girls who wore makeup and stockings with nail polish dabbed over the runs. Wendy had a big blond bubble hairdo that she teased and sprayed during recess, while chewing gum she saved between classes in a wad of tinfoil. She was the first girl to wear white go-go boots,
and before and after school she rolled up her skirt so that it was two inches above her knees. She had been in detention three times, once for coming to school late and twice for saying the other b-words, “bitch” and “boner,” to the gym teacher. On the way home, she bragged to Ruth that she had let a boy kiss her during a basement make-out party. “He had just eaten a neopolitan ice cream sandwich and his breath tasted like barf, so I told him to kiss my neck but not to go below. Below the neck and you’re a goner.” She peeled open her collar and Ruth gasped, seeing what looked like a huge bruise.

  “What’s that?”

  “A hickey, you dummy. Course they didn’t show that in that crummy movie. Hickeys, hard-ons, home runs, it. Speaking of it, there was an older girl at this party puking her guts out in the bathroom. A tenth-grader. She thought she was preggers from this boy who’s in juvenile hall.”

  “Does she love him?”

  “She called him a creep.”

  “Then she doesn’t have to worry,” Ruth said knowingly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the chemistry that gets you pregnant. Love is one of the ingredients,” Ruth declared as scientifically as possible.

  Wendy stopped walking. Her mouth hung open. Then she whispered: “Don’t you know anything?” And she explained what Ruth’s mother, the lady in the movie, and the teacher had not talked about: that the ingredient came from a boy’s penis. And to ensure everything was now perfectly clear to Ruth, Wendy spelled it out: “The boy pees inside the girl.”

  “That’s not true!” Ruth hated Wendy for telling her this, for laughing hysterically. She was relieved when they reached the block where she and Wendy went in opposite directions.

  The last two blocks home, the truth of Wendy’s words bounced in Ruth’s head like pinballs. It made terrible sense, the part about the pee. That was why boys and girls had separate bathrooms. That’s why boys were supposed to lift the seat, but they didn’t, just to be bad. And that was why her mother always told her never to sit on the toilet seat in someone else’s bathroom. What her mother had said about germs was really a warning about sperms. Why couldn’t her mother learn to speak English right?

  And then panic grabbed her. For now she remembered that three nights before she had sat on pee from the man she loved.

  Ruth checked her underwear a dozen times a day. By the fourth day after the movie, her period had not come. Now look what’s happened, she cried to herself. She walked around the bungalow, staring blankly. She had ruined herself and there was no changing this. Love, pee, booze, she counted the ingredients on her fingers over and over. She remembered how brave she had felt, falling asleep without wiping off the pee.

  “Why you act so crazy?” her mother often asked. Of course, she could not tell her mother she was pregnant. Experience had taught her that her mother worried too much even when she had no reason to worry. If there was something really wrong, her mother would scream and pound her chest like a gorilla. She would do this in front of Lance and Dottie. She would dig out her eyes and yell for the ghosts to come take her away. And then she would really kill herself. This time for sure. She would make Ruth watch, to punish her even more.

  Now whenever Ruth saw Lance, she breathed so hard and fast her lungs seized up and she nearly fainted from lack of air. She had a constant stomachache. Sometimes her stomach went into spasm and she stood over the toilet heaving, but nothing came out. When she ate, she imagined the food falling into the baby frog’s mouth, and then her stomach felt like a gunky swamp and she had to run to the bathroom and make herself retch, hoping the frog would leap into the toilet and her troubles could be flushed away.

  I want to die, she moaned to herself. Die, die, die. First she cried a lot in the bathroom, then sliced her wrist with a dinner knife. It left a row of plowed-up skin, no blood, and it hurt too much to cut any deeper. Later, in the backyard, she found a rusty tack in the dirt, poked her fingertip, and waited for blood poisoning to rise up her arm like liquid in a thermometer. That evening, still alive and miserable, she filled the tub and sat in it. As she sank under and was about to open her mouth wide, she remembered the water was now dirty with nasty stuff from her feet, her bottom, and the place between her legs. Still determined, she got out of the tub, dried off, and filled the sink, then lowered her face until it touched the water. She opened her mouth. How easy it was, drowning. It didn’t hurt at all. It was like drinking water, which, after a while, she realized was what she was doing. So she pushed her face lower into the water and opened her mouth again. She took a deep breath, welcoming death at last. Her whole body backfired in stinging protest. She began coughing in such a loud and hacking way that her mother rushed in without knocking and pounded her back, put her hand on her forehead, and murmured in Chinese that she was sick and should go to bed right away. Having her mother comfort her so lovingly only made Ruth feel worse.

  The first person Ruth finally confessed her secret to was Wendy. She knew things, she always knew what to do. Ruth had to wait until she saw her at school, because there was no way she could talk about this on the party-line phone without having her mother or someone else overhear.

  “You have to tell Lance,” Wendy said, then reached over and squeezed Ruth’s hand.

  That made Ruth cry even harder. She shook her head. The cruel world and its impossibility swam in front of her. Lance didn’t love her. If she told him, he would hate her, Dottie would hate her. They would kick her mother and her out of the bungalow. The school would send Ruth to juvenile hall. And her life would be over.

  “Well, if you don’t tell Lance, I will,” Wendy said.

  “Don’t,” Ruth managed to choke out. “You can’t. I won’t let you.”

  “If I don’t tell him, how else will he realize that he loves you?”

  “He doesn’t love me.”

  “Sure he does. Or he will. Lots of times it happens that way. The guy finds out a baby is coming, and them boom—love, marriage, baby carriage.”

  Ruth tried to imagine it. “Yep, it’s yours,” Wendy would say to Lance. She pictured Lance looking like Rock Hudson when he learned Doris Day was going to have his baby. He would look stunned, but slowly he would begin to smile, then grin like a fool and race into the street, unmindful of traffic or people he bumped into, people who shouted back that he was nuts. And he would yell, “I am nuts, nuts about her!” Soon he was by her side, on his knees, telling her he loved her, had always loved her, and now wanted to marry her. As for Dottie, well, she would soon fall in love with the postman or someone. Everything would work out. Ruth sighed. It was possible.

  That afternoon, Wendy went home with Ruth. LuLing worked the afternoon shift at a nursery school and would not be home for another two hours. At four, while they were outside, they saw Lance stride to his car, whistling and jingling his keys. Wendy broke away from Ruth, and Ruth ran to the other side of the bungalow, where she could both hide and watch. She could hardly breathe. Wendy was walking toward Lance. “Hello?” she called to him.

  “Hey there, girlie,” he said. “What’s up?”

  And then Wendy turned around and fled. Ruth started to cry and when Wendy came back, she consoled Ruth, telling her she had a better plan. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll think of something.” And she did. “Wait here,” she said, smiling, and ran up to the back porch of the cottage. Ruth dashed into the bungalow. Five minutes later, the back door to the cottage flew open and Dottie raced down the porch steps. Through the window, Ruth saw Wendy wave to her before walking away quickly. Then came pounding on the door to the bungalow, and when Ruth answered, Dottie was there, grabbing her by both hands. She stared into her eyes with a stricken face and whispered hoarsely in her milk-and-metal voice, “Are you really—?”

  Ruth started bawling, and Dottie put her arm around her shoulders, soothing her, then squeezing her so hard Ruth thought her bones would pop out of their sockets. It hurt but also felt good. “That bastard, that dirty,
filthy bastard,” Dottie kept saying through gritted teeth. Ruth was shocked to hear the b-word, but even more so to realize that Dottie was angry—not with her, but with Lance!

  “Does your mommy know?” Dottie asked.

  Ruth shook her head.

  “All right. For now, we don’t need to tell her, not yet. First, let me think how we ‘re going to take care of this. Okay? It won’t be easy, but I’ll figure out what to do, don’t worry. Five years ago, the same thing happened to me.”

  So that was why Lance had married her. But where was the baby?

  “I know how you feel,” Dottie went on. “I really do.”

  And Ruth cried even harder, bursting with more feelings than she ever thought a heart could hold. Someone was angry for her. Someone knew what to do.

  That night, as her mother cooked with the windows cracked open, loud voices punctured the air above the sound of spitting oil. Ruth pretended to read Jane Eyre. Her ears were straining to hear the words from outside, but the only thing she could make out was Dottie’s high-pitched shriek: “You filthy bastard!” Lance’s voice was a low rumble, like the revving of his Pontiac.

  Ruth went into the kitchen and reached under the sink. “I’m going to take out the garbage.” Her mother gave her a raised eyebrow but kept cooking. As Ruth approached the cans by the side of the cottage, she slowed down to listen.

  “You think you’re so hot! How many others have you screwed? . . . You’re nothing but a thirty-second wonder—yeah, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!”

  “What makes you the goddamn expert, I’d like to know!”

  “I do know! I know what a real man is! . . . Danny… yeah, him, and he was good, Danny is a real man. But you! You gotta stick it up little girls who don’t know any better.”

  Lance’s voice rose and broke like a crying boy’s: “You goddamn fucking whore!”