The Kitchen God's Wife Read online

  I pretended to be equally busy, perusing the help-wanted section. Three months ago, I took a position as a speech and language clinician with the local school district. And while I was basically happy with the job, I secretly worried that I had missed a better opportunity. My mother had put those thoughts in my head. Right after I announced I had been chosen over two other candidates for the same position, she said, “Two? Only two people wanted that job?”

  And now Phil looked up from his computer, concerned. And I knew what he was thinking, about my “medical condition,” as we called it, the multiple sclerosis, which thus far had left me not debilitated but easily fatigued. “It’ll be a stressful weekend,” he said. “Besides, I thought you couldn’t stand your cousin Bao-bao. Not to mention the fact that Mary will be there. God, what a dingbat.”

  “Um.”

  “So can’t you get out of it?”

  “Um-nh.”

  He sighed. And that was the end of the discussion. Over the years that we’ve been married, we’ve learned to sidestep the subject of my family, my duty. It was once the biggest source of our arguments. When we were first married, Phil used to say that I was driven by blind devotion to fear and guilt. I would counter that he was selfish, that the things one had to do in life sometimes had nothing to do with what was fun or convenient. And then he would say the only reason we had to go was that I had been manipulated into thinking I had no choice, and that I was doing the same thing to him. And then our first baby, Tessa, came along, and a year later my illness was diagnosed. The shape of our arguments changed. We no longer fought self-righteously over philosophical differences concerning individual choice, perhaps because Phil developed a sense of duty toward the baby, as well as to me, or at least to my medical condition. So the whole issue of individual choice became tricky, a burden to keep up, until it fell away, along with smoking cigarettes, eating veal, and wearing ivory.

  These days, we tend to argue about smaller, more specific issues—for example, my giving in to Tessa’s demands to watch another half-hour of television, and not our different attitudes toward discipline as a whole. And in the end, we almost always agree— perhaps too readily, because we already know the outcome of most disagreements.

  It’s a smoother life, as easy as we can make it. Although it bothers me from time to time. In fact, sometimes I wish we could go back to the old days when Phil would argue and I would defend my position and convince at least myself that I was right. Whereas nowadays—today, for instance—I’m not really sure why I still give in to my family obligations. While I would never admit this to Phil, I’ve come to resent the duty. I’m not looking forward to seeing the Kwongs, especially Mary. And whenever I’m with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

  So maybe it was guilt toward Phil or anger toward myself that made me do this: I waited until the next day to tell Phil we’d have to stay overnight—to attend Grand Auntie Du’s funeral as well.

  For the dreaded weekend, Phil and I had decided to come into the city early to get settled and perhaps take the girls to the zoo. The day before, we had had a polite argument with my mother over where we would stay.

  “That’s very kind of you, Winnie,” Phil reasoned with my mother over the phone. “But we’ve already made reservations at a hotel.” I listened on the other line, glad that I had suggested he call and make the excuses.

  “What hotel?” my mother asked.

  “The TraveLodge,” Phil lied. We were actually booked at the Hyatt.

  “Ai, too much money!” my mother concluded. “Why waste money that way? You can stay at my house, plenty of rooms.”

  And Phil had declined gracefully. “No, no, really. It’s too much trouble. Really.”

  “Trouble for who?” my mother said.

  So now Phil is getting the girls settled in the room that once belonged to my younger brother. This is where they always stay whenever Phil and I go away for a medical convention. Actually, sometimes we just say it’s a medical convention, and then we go back home and do all the household chores we aren’t able to finish when the children are around.

  Phil has decided that Tessa, who is eight, will sleep on the twin bed, and three-year-old Cleo will get the hideaway cot.

  “It’s my turn for the bed,” says Cleo. “Ha-bu said.”

  “But Cleo,” reasons Tessa, “you like the cot.”

  “Ha-bu!” Cleo calls for my mother to rescue her. “Ha-bu!”

  Phil and I are staying in my old room, still crammed with its old-fashioned furniture. I haven’t stayed here since I’ve been married. Except for the fact that everything is a bit too clean, the room looks the same as when I was a teenager: the double bed with its heavy legs and frame, the dressing table with the round mirror and inlay of ash, oak, burl, and mother-of-pearl. It’s funny how I used to hate that table. Now it actually looks quite nice, art deco. I wonder if my mother would let me have it.

  I notice that she has placed my old Chinese slippers under the bed, the ones with a hole at each of the big toes; nothing ever thrown away, in case it’s needed again twenty years later. And Tessa and Cleo must have been rummaging around in the closet, scavenging through boxes of old toys and junk. Scattered near the slippers are doll clothes, a rhinestone tiara, and a pink plastic jewelry case with the words “My Secret Treasures” on top. They have even rehung the ridiculous Hollywood-style star on the door, the one I made in the sixth grade, spelling out my name, P-E-A-R-L, in pop-beads.

  “Gosh,” Phil says in a goofy voice. “This sure beats the hell out of staying at the TraveLodge.” I slap his thigh. He pats the mismatched set of guest towels lying on the bed. The towels were a Christmas gift from the Kwongs right after our family moved from Chinatown to the Richmond district, which meant they had to be thirty years old.

  And now Tessa and Cleo race into our room, clamoring that they’re ready to go to the zoo. Phil is going to take them, while I go to Ding Ho Flower Shop to help out. My mother didn’t exactly ask me to help, but she did say in a terse voice that Auntie Helen was leaving the shop early to get ready for the big dinner—in spite of the fact there was so much to do at the shop and Grand Auntie’s funeral service was the very next day. And then she reminded me that Grand Auntie was always very proud of me—in our family “proud” is as close as we get to saying “love.” And she suggested that maybe I should come by early to pick out a nice wreath.

  “I should be back at five-thirty,” I tell Phil.

  “I wanna see African elephants,” says Tessa, plopping down on our bed. And then she counts on her fingers: “And koala bears and a spiny anteater and a humpback whale.” I have always wondered where she picked up this trait of listing things—from Phil? from me? from the television?

  “Say ‘Please,’ ” Phil reminds her, “and I don’t think they have whales at the zoo.”

  I turn to Cleo. I sometimes worry she will become too passive in the shadow of her confident big sister. “And what do you want to see?” I ask her gently. She looks at her feet, searching for an answer.

  “Dingbats,” she finally says.

  As I turn down Ross Alley, everything around me immediately becomes muted in tone. It is no longer the glaring afternoon sun and noisy Chinatown sidewalks filled with people doing their Saturday grocery shopping. The alley sounds are softer, quickly absorbed, and the light is hazy, almost greenish in cast.

  On the right-hand side of the street is the same old barbershop, run by Al Fook, who I notice still uses electric clippers to shear his customers’ sideburns. Across the street are the same trade and family associations, including a place that will send ancestor memorials back to China for a fee. And farther down the street is the shopfront of a fortune-teller. A hand-written sign taped to the window claims to have “the best lucky numbers, the best fortune advice,” but the sign taped to the door says: “Out of Business.”

  As I walk past the door, a yellow pull-shade rustles. And suddenly a little girl appears, her
hands pressed to the glass. She stares at me with a somber expression. I wave, but she does not wave back. She looks at me as if I don’t belong here, which is how I feel.

  And now I’m at Sam Fook Trading Company, a few doors down from the flower shop. It contains shelves full of good-luck charms and porcelain and wooden statues of lucky gods, hundreds of them. I’ve called this place the Shop of the Gods ever since I can remember. It also sells the kind of stuff people get for Buddhist funerals—spirit money, paper jewelry, incense, and the like.

  “Hey, Pearl!” It’s Mr. Hong, the owner, waving me to come in. When I first met him, I thought his name was Sam Fook, like the shop. I found out later that sam fook means “triple blessing” in old Cantonese, and according to my mother—or rather, her Hong Kong customers—sam fook sounds like a joke, like saying “the Three Stooges.”

  “I told him he should change the name,” my mother had said. “Luckier that way. But he says he has too much business already.”

  “Hey, Pearl,” Mr. Hong says when I walk in the door, “I got some things for your mother here, for the funeral tomorrow. You take it to her, okay?”

  “Okay.” He hands me a soft bundle.

  I guess this means Grand Auntie’s funeral will be Buddhist. Although she attended the First Chinese Baptist Church for a number of years, both she and my mother stopped going right after my father died. In any case, I don’t think Grand Auntie ever gave up her other beliefs, which weren’t exactly Buddhist, just all the superstitious rituals concerning attracting good luck and avoiding bad. On those occasions when I did go up to her apartment, I used to play with her altar, a miniature red temple containing a framed picture of a Chinese god. In front of that was an imitation-brass urn filled with burnt incense sticks, and on the side were offerings of oranges, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and an airline mini-bottle of Johnnie Walker Red whiskey. It was like a Chinese version of a Christmas crèche.

  And now I come to the flower shop itself. It is the bottom floor of a three-story brick building. The shop is about the size of a one-car garage and looks both sad and familiar. The front has a chipped red-bordered door covered with rusted burglarproof mesh. A plate-glass window says “Ding Ho Flower Shop” in English and Chinese. But it’s easy to miss, because the place sits back slightly and always looks dark and closed, as it does today.

  So the location my mother and Auntie Helen picked isn’t exactly bustling. Yet they seem to have done all right. In a way, it’s remarkable. After all these years, they’ve done almost nothing to keep up with the times or make the place more attractive. I open the door and bells jangle. I’m instantly engulfed in the pungent smell of gardenias, a scent I’ve always associated with funeral par-lors. The place is dimly lit, with only one fluorescent tube hanging over the cash register—and that’s where my mother is, standing on a small footstool so she can see out over the counter, with dime-store reading glasses perched on her nose.

  She is talking on the telephone in rapid Chinese and waves impatiently for me to come in and wait. Her hair is pulled straight back into a bun, not a strand ever out of place. The bun today has been made to look thicker with the addition of a false swatch of hair, a “horse’s tail,” she calls it, for wearing only on important occasions.

  Actually, now I can tell—by the shrillness of her pitch and the predominance of negative “vuh-vuh-vuh” sounds—that she’s arguing in Shanghainese, and not just plain Mandarin. This is serious. Most likely it’s with a neighborhood supplier, to judge from the way she’s punching in numbers on a portable calculator, then reading aloud the printed results in harsh tones, as if they were penal codes. She pushes the “No Sale” button on the cash register, and when the drawer pops forward, she pulls out a folded receipt, snaps it open with a jerk of her wrist, then reads numbers from that as well.

  “Vuh! Vuh! Vuh!” she insists.

  The cash register is used to store only odds and ends, or what my mother calls “ends and odds and evens.” The register is broken. When my mother and Auntie Helen first bought the store and its fixtures, they found out soon enough that anytime the sales transaction added up to anything with a 9 in it, the whole register froze up. But they decided to keep the cash register anyway, “for stick- ’em-up,” is how my mother explained it to me. If they were ever robbed, which has yet to happen, the robber would get only four dollars and a pile of pennies, all the money that is kept in the till. The real money is stashed underneath the counter, in a teapot with a spout that’s been twice broken and glued back on. And the kettle sits on a hot plate that’s missing a plug. I guess the idea is that no one would ever rob the store for a cup of cold tea.

  I once told my mother and Auntie Helen that a robber would never believe that the shop had only four dollars to its name. I thought they should put at least twenty in the cash register to make the ruse seem more plausible. But my mother thought twenty dollars was too much to give a robber. And Auntie Helen said she would “worry sick” about losing that much money—so what good would the trick be then?

  At the time, I considered giving them the twenty dollars myself to prove my point. But then I thought, What’s the point? And as I look around the shop now, I realize maybe they were right. Who would ever consider robbing this place for more than getaway bus fare? No, this place is burglarproof just the way it is.

  The shop has the same dull gray concrete floor of twenty-five years ago, now polished shiny with wear. The counter is covered with the same contact paper, green-and-white bamboo lattice on the sides and wood grain on the top. Even the phone my mother is using is the same old black model with a rotary dial and a fabric cord that doesn’t coil or stretch. And over the years, the lime-colored walls have become faded and splotched, then cracked from the ’89 earthquake. So now the place has the look of spidery decay and leaf mold.

  “Hau, hau,” I now hear my mother saying. She seems to have reached some sort of agreement with the supplier. Finally she bangs the phone down. Although we have not seen each other since Christmas, almost a month ago, we do none of the casual hugs and kisses Phil and I exchange when we see his parents and friends. Instead, my mother walks out from around the counter, muttering, “Can you imagine? That man is cheating me! Tried to charge me for extra-rush delivery.” She points to a box containing supplies of wire, clear cellophane, and sheets of green wax paper. “This is not my fault he forgot to come last week.”

  “How much extra?” I ask.

  “Three dollars!” she exclaims. I never cease to be amazed by the amount of emotional turmoil my mother will go through for a few dollars.

  “Why don’t you just forget it? It’s only three dollars—”

  “I’m not concerned about money!” she fumes. “He’s cheating me. This is not right. Last month, he tried to add another kind of extra charge too.” I can tell she’s about to launch into a blow-by-blow of last month’s fight, when two well-dressed women with blond hair peer through the door.

  “Are you open? Do any of you speak English?” one of them says in a Texas drawl.

  My mother’s face instantly cheers, and she nods, waving them in. “Come, come,” she calls.

  “Oh, we don’t want to bother y’all,” one of the ladies says. “If you might could just tell us where the fortune cookie factory is?”

  Before I can answer, my mother tightens her face, shakes her head, and says, “Don’t understand. Don’t speak English.”

  “Why did you say that?” I ask when the two ladies retreat back into the alley. “I didn’t know you hated tourists that much.”

  “Not tourists,” she says. “That woman with the cookie factory, once she was mean to me. Why should I send her any good business?”

  “How’s business here?” I say, trying to steer the conversation away from what will surely become a tirade about the cookie woman down the street.

  “Awful!” she says, and points to her inventory around the shop. “So busy—busy myself to death with this much business. You look, only this morning I had to
make all these myself.”

  And I look. There are no modern arrangements of bent twigs or baskets of exotica with Latinate-drooping names. My mother opens the glass door to a refrigerator unit that once housed bottles of soda pop and beer.

  “You see?” she says, and shows me a shelf with boutonnieres and corsages made out of carnations, neatly lined in rows according to color: white, pink, and red. No doubt we’ll have to wear some of these tonight.

  “And this,” she continues. The second shelf is chock-full of milk-glass vases, each containing only a single rosebud, a fern frond, and a meager sprinkling of baby’s breath. This is the type of floral arrangement you give to hospital patients who go in for exploratory surgery, when you don’t know yet whether the person will be there for very long. My father received a lot of those when he first went into the hospital and later right before he died. “Very popular,” my mother says.

  “This, too, I had to make,” she says, and points to the bottom shelf, which holds half a dozen small table sprays. “Some for tonight. Some for a retirement dinner,” my mother explains, and perhaps because I don’t look sufficiently impressed, she adds, “For assistant manager at Wells Fargo.”

  She walks me around to view her handiwork in other parts of the shop. Lining the walls are large funeral wreaths, propped on easels. “Ah?” my mother says, waiting for my opinion. I’ve always found wreaths hideously sad, like decorative lifesavers thrown out too late.

  “Very pretty,” I say.

  And now she steers me toward her real pride and joy. At the front of the shop, the only place that gets filtered daylight for a few hours a day, are her “long-lasting bargains,” as she calls them—philodendrons, rubber plants, chicken-feet bushes, and miniature tangerine trees. These are festooned with red banners, congratulating this business or that for its new store opening.