“Where did she get the feet?”
“I think he’s helping her.”
“Who?”
“Geordie.”
“Why?”
“He hates me.”
I hang up.
When I was young my mother made cupcakes for my birthday and brought them to school. The teacher had us all write her thank-you notes in thick pencil on wide-lined paper. Dear Mrs. Harris, thank you for the delicious cupcakes. We enjoyed them very much. Sincerely, Geordie.
“Dear Mrs. Harris, Sincerely Geordie, what kind of letter is that to send a mother?” She still talks about how funny it was. When she telephones and I answer she says, “It’s Mrs. Harris, your mother.”
We are in bed. Susan is reading. I look over her shoulder, page 297 of In Cold Blood, a description of Perry Smith, one of the murderers. “He seems to have grown up without direction, without love.”
“I’m lonely,” I tell her.
“Read something,” she says, turning the page.
I go downstairs and fix a bowl of ice cream for Susan.
“I’m not your enemy,” I tell her when the ice cream is gone, when I have helped her finish it, when I am licking the bowl.
“I don’t know that,” she says, taking the bowl away from me and putting it on the floor. “You act like you’re on her side.”
“And what side is that?”
“The side of the dead, of things past.”
“Oh, please,” I say, and yet there is something in what Susan is saying; I am on the side of things lost, I am in the past, remembering. “You’re scaring me,” I say. “You’re turning into some weird minimalist monster from hell.”
“This is me,” Susan says. “This is my life. You’re intruding.”
“This is our family,” I say, horrified.
“I can’t be Chinese,” Susan tells me. “I’ve spent my whole life trying not to be Chinese.”
“Kate is half Chinese and she likes it,” I say, trying to make Susan feel better.
“I don’t like that half of Kate,” Susan says.
Something summons me from my sleep. I listen—on alert, heart racing. The extreme silence of night is blasting full volume. Moon pours into the room like a gigantic night light. Outside, the trees are still—it is haunting, romantic, deeply autumnal. Night.
And there it is, far away, catching me, a kind of bleating, a baleful wail.
I go down the hall, each step amplified, the quieter I try to go the louder I become.
I check Kate—she is fast asleep.
It becomes more of a moan—deep, inconsolable, hollow. There is no echo, each beatified bellow is here and then gone, evaporating into the night.
Downstairs, Mrs. Ha is crouched in the corner of the living room, like a new end table. She is next to the sofa, squatting, her hands at her ears, crying. She is naked.
“Mrs. Ha?”
She doesn’t answer.
Her cry, heartbreaking, definitive, filled with horror, with grief, with fear, comes from someplace far away, from somewhere long ago.
I touch her shoulder. “It’s Geordie. Is there something I can do? Are you all right?”
I step on the foot switch for the lamp; the halogen torch floods the room. Susan’s Corbusier chairs sit bolt upright—tight black leather boxes, a Prouve table from France lies flat, waiting, the modernist edge, dissonant, vibrating against the Tudor, the stone, the old casement windows, and Mrs. Ha, my Chinese mother-in-law, sobbing at my feet. I turn the light off.
“Mrs. Ha?” I lift her up, I put my hands under her arms and pull. She is compact like a panda, she is made of heavy metal. Her skin is at once papery thin and thick like hide. She clings to me, digging in.
I carry her back to her bed. She cries. I find her nightgown and slip it over her head. When she cries, her mouth drops open, her lips roll back, her chin tilts up and her teeth and jaws flash, like a horse’s head. It is as though someone has just told her the most horrible thing; her face contorts. Her expression is like an anthropological find—at eighty-nine she is a living skeleton.
I touch her hair.
“I want to go home,” she wails.
“You are home.”
“I want to go home,” she repeats.
I sit on the edge of her bed, I put my arms around her. “Maybe it was the soup, maybe the dinner didn’t agree with you.”
“No,” she says, “I always have the soup. It is not the soup that does not agree with me, it is me that does not agree with me.” She stops crying. “They are going to flood my home, I read it in the New York Times, they build the three gorges, the dam, and everything goes underwater.”
“I don’t know who they are,” I say.