(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter (12 page)

“Sweetie, Grand-Auntie was just surprised, that’s all. It’s only that you’re so strong—like a baseball player.”

Ruth hoped her mother would not continue to berate Nicky. She remembered when her mother would enumerate all the times she had spilled food or milk, asking aloud to unseen forces why Ruth could not learn to behave. Ruth looked at Nicky and imagined what she would have been like if she had had children. Perhaps she too would have reacted like her mother, unable to restrain the impulse to scold until the child acted beaten and contrite.

More drinks were ordered. Ruth noticed Art was on his second glass of wine. He also seemed to be having an animated conversation with Miriam. Another round of dishes arrived, just in time to dissipate the tension. Eggplant sautéed with fresh basil leaves, a tender sable fish coated in a mantle of garlic chips, a Chinese version of polenta smothered in a spicy meat sauce, plump black mushrooms, a Lion’s Head clay pot of meatballs and rice vermicelli. Even the “foreigners,” LuLing reported, enjoyed the food. Above the noise, Auntie Gal leaned toward Ruth and said: “Your mother and I, we ate excellent dishes at Sun Hong Kong last week. But then we almost went to jail!” Auntie Gal liked to throw out zingers and wait for listeners to take the bait.

Ruth obliged. “Jail?”

“Oh, yes! Your mother got into a big fight with the waiter, said she already paid the bill.” Auntie Gal shook her head. “The waiter was right, it was not yet paid.” She patted Ruth’s hand. “Don’t worry! Later, when your mother was not looking, I paid. So you see, no jail, and here we are!” GaoLing took a few more bites of food, smacked her lips, then leaned toward Ruth again and whispered, “I gave your mother a big bag of ginseng root. This is good to cure confusion.” She nodded, and Ruth nodded in turn. “Sometimes your mother calls me at the train station to say she’s here, and I don’t even know she’s coming! Course, this is fine, I always welcome her. But at six in the morning? I’m not an early birdie!” She chuckled, and Ruth, her mind awhirl, gave out a hollow laugh.

What was wrong with her mother? Could depression cause confusion like this? The next week, when they had the follow-up visit with Dr. Huey, she would discuss it with him. If he ordered her mother to take antidepressants, maybe she would obey. Ruth knew she should visit her mother more often. LuLing often complained of loneliness, and she was obviously trying to fill a void by going to see GaoLing at odd hours.

During the lull before dessert, Ruth stood up and gave a brief speech. “As the years go on, I see how much family means. It reminds us of what’s important. That connection to the past. The same jokes about being Young yet getting old. The traditions. The fact that we can’t get rid of each other no matter how much we try. We’re stuck through the ages, with the bonds cemented by sticky rice and tapioca pudding. Thank you all for being who you are.” She left out individual tributes since she had nothing to say about Miriam and her party.

Ruth then passed out wrapped boxes of moon cakes and chocolate rabbits to the children. “Thank you!” they cried. “This is neat!” At last Ruth was somewhat becalmed. It was a good idea to host this dinner after all. In spite of the uneasy moments, reunions were important, a ritual to preserve what was left of the family. She did not want her cousins and her to drift apart, but she feared that once the older generation was gone, that would be the end of the family ties. They had to make the effort.

“More presents,” Ruth called out, and handed out packages. She had found a wonderful old photo of LuLing and Auntie Gal as girls, flanking their mother. She had a negative made of the original, then ordered eight-by-tens and had those framed. She wanted this to be a meaningful tribute to her family, a gift that would last forever. And indeed, the recipients gave appreciative sighs.

“This is amazing,” Billy said. “Hey, kids, guess who those two cute girls are?”

“Look at us, so young,” Auntie Gal sighed wistfully.

“Hey, Auntie Lu,” Sally teased. “You look kind of bummed-out in this picture.”

LuLing answered: “This because my mother just die.”

Ruth thought her mother had misheard Sally. “Bummed out” was not in LuLing’s vocabulary. LuLing and GaoLing’s mother had died in 1972. Ruth pointed to the photo. “See? Your mother is right there. And that’s you.”

LuLing shook her head. “That not my real mother.”

Ruth’s mind turned in loops, trying to translate what her mother meant. Auntie Gal gave Ruth a peculiar look, tightening her chin so as not to say anything. Others had quiet frowns of concern.

“That’s Waipo, isn’t it?” Ruth said to Auntie Gal, struggling to stay nonchalant. When GaoLing nodded, Ruth said happily to her mother, “Well, if that’s your sister’s mother, she must be yours as well.”

LuLing snorted. “GaoLing
not
my sister!”

Ruth could hear her pulse pounding in her brain. Billy cleared his throat in an obvious bid to change the subject.

Her mother went on: “She my sister-in-
law
.”

Everyone now guffawed. LuLing had delivered the punch line to a joke! Of course, they were indeed sisters-in-law, married to a pair of brothers. What a relief! Her mother not only made sense, she was clever.

Auntie Gal turned to LuLing and huffed with pretend annoyance. “Hey, why do you treat me so bad, hah?”

LuLing was fishing for something in her wallet. She pulled out a tiny photo, then handed it to Ruth. “There,” she said in Chinese. “This one right here, she’s my mother.” A chill ran over Ruth’s scalp. It was a photograph of her mother’s nursemaid, Bao Bomu, Precious Auntie.

She wore a high-collared jacket and a strange headdress that looked as if it were made of ivory. Her beauty was ethereal. She had wide tilted eyes, with a direct and immodest stare. Her arched eyebrows suggested a questioning mind, her full lips a sensuality that was indecent for the times. The picture obviously had been taken before the accident that burned her face and twisted it into a constant expression of horror. As Ruth peered more closely at the photo, the woman’s expression seemed even more oddly disturbing, as if she could see into the future and knew it was cursed. This was the crazy woman who had cared for her mother since birth, who had smothered LuLing with fears and superstitious notions. LuLing had told her that when she was fourteen, this nursemaid killed herself in a gruesome way that was “too bad to say.” Whatever means the nursemaid used, she also made LuLing believe it was her fault. Precious Auntie was the reason her mother was convinced she could never be happy, why she always had to expect the worst, fretting until she found it.

Ruth quietly tried to steer her mother back to coherence. “That was your nursemaid,” she coaxed. “I guess you’re saying she was
like
a mother to you.”

“No,
this
really my mother,” LuLing insisted. “That one GaoLing mother.” She held up the framed photo. In a daze, Ruth heard Sally asking Billy how the skiing was in Argentina the month before. Uncle Edmund was encouraging his grandson to try a black mushroom. Ruth kept asking herself, What’s happening? What’s happening?

She felt her mother tapping her arm. “I have present for you too. Early birthday, give you now.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a plain white box, tied with ribbon.

“What’s this?”

“Open, don’t ask.”

The box was light. Ruth slipped off the ribbon, lifted the lid, and saw a gleam of gray. It was a necklace of irregularly shaped black pearls, each as large as a gumball. Was this a test? Or had her mother really forgotten that Ruth had given her this as a gift years before? LuLing grinned knowingly—Oh yes, daughter cannot believe her luck!

“Best things take now,” LuLing went on. “No need wait to I dead.” She turned away before Ruth could either refuse or thank her. “Anyway, this not worth much.” She was patting the back of her bun, trying to stuff pride back into her head. It was a gesture Ruth had seen many times. “If someone show-off give big,” her mother would say, “this not really giving big.” A lot of her admonitions had to do with
not
showing what you really meant about all sorts of things: hope, disappointment, and especially love. The less you showed, the more you meant.

“This necklace been in my family long time,” Ruth heard her mother say. Ruth stared at the beads, remembered when she first saw the necklace in a shop on Kauai. “Tahiti-style black pearls,” the tag said, a twenty-dollar bit of glassy junk to wear against sweaty skin on a tropically bright day. She had gone to the island with Art, the two of them newly in love. Later, when she returned home, she realized she had forgotten her mother’s birthday, had not even thought to telephone while she was sipping mai-tais on a sandy beach. She had boxed the twice-worn trinket, and by giving her mother something that had crossed the ocean, she hoped she would also give the impression she had been thinking of her. Her downfall lay in being honest when she insisted the necklace was “nothing much,” because LuLing mistook this modesty to mean the gift was quite expensive and thus the bona fide article, proof of a daughter’s love. She wore it everywhere, and Ruth would feel the slap of guilt whenever she overheard her mother boast to her friends, “Look what my daughter Lootie buy me.”

“Oh, very pretty!” GaoLing murmured, glancing at what Ruth held in her hand. “Let me see,” and before Ruth could think, GaoLing snatched the box. Her lips grew tight. “Mmm,” she said, examining the bauble. Had Auntie Gal seen this before? How many times had LuLing worn it to her house, bragging about its worth? And had GaoLing known all along that the necklace was fake, that Ruth, the good daughter, was also a fake?

“Let me see,” Sally said.

“Careful,” LuLing warned when Sally’s son reached for the pearls, “don’t touch. Cost too much.”

Soon the pearls were making the rounds at the other table as well. Art’s mother gave the necklace an especially critical eye, weighing it in her hand. “Just
lovely”
she said to LuLing, a bit too emphatically. Miriam simply observed, “Those beads are certainly large.” Art gave the pearls a once-over and cleared his throat.

“Eh, what wrong?”

Ruth turned and saw her mother scrutinizing her face.

“Nothing,” Ruth mumbled. “I’m just a little tired, I guess.”

“Nonsense!” her mother said in Chinese. “I can see something is blocked inside and can’t come out.”

“Watch it! Spy talk!” Dory called from the other table.

“Something is wrong,” LuLing persisted. Ruth was amazed that her mother was so perceptive. Maybe there was nothing the matter with her after all.

“It’s that wife of Art’s,” Ruth finally whispered in her American-accented Mandarin. “I wish Art had not let her come.”

“Ah! You see, I was right! I knew something was wrong. Mother always knows.”

Ruth bit hard on the inside of her cheek.

“Now, now, don’t worry anymore,” her mother soothed. “Tomorrow you talk to Artie. Make him buy you a gift. He should pay a lot to show that he values you. He should buy you something like this.” LuLing touched the necklace, which had been returned to Ruth’s hands.

Ruth’s eyes smarted with held-back tears.

“You like?” LuLing said proudly, switching back to the public language of English. “This real things, you know.”

Ruth held up the necklace. She saw how the dark pearls glistened, this gift that had risen from the bottom of the sea.

FIVE

Ruth held LuLing’s arm as they walked to the hospital parking garage. Her slack-skinned limb felt like the bony wing of a baby bird.

LuLing acted alternately cheerful and cranky, unchanged by what had just transpired in the doctor’s office. Ruth, however, sensed that her mother was growling hollow, that soon she would be as light as driftwood.
Dementia.
Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring. Ruth now imagined icy plaques forming on her mother’s brain, drawing out moisture. Dr. Huey had said the MRI showed shrinkage in certain parts of the brain that were consistent with Alzheimer’s. He also said the disease had probably started “years ago.” Ruth had been too stunned to ask any questions at the time, but she now wondered what the doctor meant by “years ago.” Twenty? Thirty? Forty? Maybe there was a reason her mother had been so difficult when Ruth was growing up, why she had talked about curses and ghosts and threats to kill herself. Dementia was her mother’s redemption, and God would forgive them both for having hurt each other all these years.

“Lootie, what doctor say?” LuLing’s question startled Ruth. They were standing in front of the car. “He say I die soon?” she asked humorously.

“No.” And tor emphasis, Ruth laughed. “Of course not.”

Her mother studied Ruth’s face, then concluded: “I die. doesn’t matter. I not afraid. You know this.”

“Dr. Huey said your heart is fine,” Ruth added. She tried to figure a way to translate the diagnosis into a condition her mother would accept. “But he said you may be having another kind of problem—with a balance of elements in your body. And this can give you troubles … with your memory.” She helped LuLing into the front seat and snapped her seat belt in place.

LuLing sniffed. “Hnh! Nothing wrong my memory! I ‘member lots things, more than you. Where I live little-girl time, place we call Immortal Heart, look like heart, two river, one stream, both dry-out… .” She continued talking as Ruth went to the other side of the car, got in, and started the engine. “What he know? That doctor don’t even use telescope listen my heart. Nobody listen my heart! You don’t listen. GaoLing don’t listen. You know my heart always hurting. I just don’t complain. Am I complain?”

“No—”

“See!”

“But the doctor said sometimes you forget things because you’re depressed.”

“Depress ‘cause can
not
forgot! Look my sad life!”

Ruth pumped the brakes to make sure they would hold, then steered the car down the falling turns of the parking garage. Her mother’s voice droned in rhythm with the engine: “Of course depress. When Precious Auntie die, all happiness leave my body… .”