At the Heart of the Universe (7 page)

It is much smaller than they recall, like returning to your hometown as a grown-up. Someone is occupying the room, but they aren't there. A mahjong game lies orphaned on a low table. But it is much the same as it was—two single beds, a tiny refrigerator, large chrome thermoses of boiled water. They go into the small bathroom.

“We gave you your first bath here,” Clio says, “right there in the sink. It was the first time you made a sound—you wailed! In the orphanage, you never made a single sound.”

“Why not?”

“We don't know—you were all bundled up, and peaceful. It's a mystery.”

Katie wonders at that, that she didn't make a sound.
Why not? Was I scared? Weird not to know why.
She looks at her mom, who is inspecting the bathroom as if it has some secret passage in it.
A mystery?
Like when
Tara and Kissy were asking each other, “What time were you born?” And they each said what time they were born and then they asked me and I said the truth, “I don't know,” and they gave me a weird look and I had to say something else so I said, “I'm a child of mystery,” and I felt outsidered.

“You were so stuffed up,” Pep is saying, “you couldn't sleep. So we all got naked and turned on the hot water and stayed in here till the steam cleared you out.”

“I fit in that sink? It's weird not to remember—I mean except what you told me.”

“We tried everything to get you to sleep,” Clio says, “and nothing worked, and finally we looked over—we didn't have a crib, they just gave us a baby carriage, one of those massive old-fashioned ones with big wheels?—and we saw, up over the side, you had one hand held up straight in the air, and you were asleep.”

“Like I was saluting or something?”

“Or maybe surrendering,” Pep says.

“Yeah, I remember—I mean you told me. Maybe I was trying to get out of the baby carriage and sleep with you guys? You told me there were two babies in every crib in the orphanage, so maybe I was scared being alone?”

“Think so?” Clio asks.

“I'm
really
hungry. Can we like eat?”

Pep and Clio look at each other and smile. To her, and now to them too, it's just a room. Worse, someone else's room. They leave easily, not wanting any more of the other room, the magical room, to disappear. The restaurant they remembered is still there, but the cuisine has gone downhill. Picking at the chicken with vegetables, Katie happens upon a head—complete with beak. In disgust she pronounces the food the worst on the trip—a lot worse than the food back home in Columbia at Chinese Restaurant or even at the new one, Shalom Hunan.



Outside on the street, they are accosted by several beggars. One, a shriveled old man with a cane, blocks their way and pecks at Katie with his free hand, screeching at her as if she understands. Two weeks of beggars in the new China have put Pep on edge—you never saw a beggar in China ten years ago, it was safer than America. He puts one arm around Katie, the other around Clio, and starts for the cab, parked up the street.

The old man suddenly sidesteps, blocking their way. Another beggar approaches. Pep starts to get anxious. Thinking quickly, he points to a spot behind the old man, and as the man turns to look, Pep leads Katie and Clio quickly to safety.

They get into the cab, and rocket on off, away.

Katie is embarrassed.
Did he have to trick him like that?

Clio and Katie clutch each other as the cab careens along in crazy lane changes and close calls.

Across the street from the slick and sparkly thirty-story Grand Sun Hotel, there is a new banner:

HELP TURN CHANGSHA INTO CLEAN MODERN CIVILIZED CITY.

7

An hour later, they are lying in their terrific beds. The air-conditioning hums softly. Katie is in bed with Clio, Pep in the next bed by himself—the usual arrangement on the trip. Katie finishes a chapter of
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
. Pep turns out the lights. Clio rubs Katie's back and waits to see if she'll start to talk. In the dark at the end of the day, Katie often gets chatty. But not tonight.

Clio has been disappointed by how little time she's had alone with Katie. Katie's friend Heather Ho McGinnity from New York City came along on the first part of the trip, and the two of them were inseparable. Sitting together on the bus, running around the tourist sites, sitting together at restaurants and every night watching TV in the hotel—it's been a glorious two-week playdate. For the whole past year, Clio has felt Katie spiraling out, less and less interested in spending time with her, preferring to be with her friends—or Mary. Sleepovers are all the rage. Spook Rock Country Day School is a hidden world, a kind of British-Visigothic fortress from which parents are mostly forbidden—except from the first-rate Development Office. The teachers are fuzzy but not warm. At home Katie has killer homework, and then dives into her computer, or the TV—
and we let her
.

The tight, close “I can tell you anything” bond that they shared for years has frayed. They used to talk about everything—
everything
! Katie would open up completely, and with the most heart-wrenching innocence, as if it were natural not to have any separation between them. Clio had never had conversations like that with anyone before. And now, is it ending?
What if she and I can never talk that way again?

Clio had hoped that the trip would break the pattern, that it would be a chance for her to spend time with Katie—it's been anything but. Even when Clio's been alone with Pep, her mind has been on her daughter—she knows he senses her divided attention. She hopes that these few days alone with Katie and Pep in Changsha will be a real chance for all of them.

“I'm sorry, Katie,” she says now. “It wasn't the greatest birthday in the world. We'll do better tomorrow. After the orphanage, you get to do anything you want.”

“Okay, Mom. Thanks.” She pauses. “You know, coming here to China, I thought it would be like a quest, like the Greeks this year in school, like Ulysses on his adventures, or in our class play when Orpheus goes like looking for Eurydice down in Hades? Where the hero goes on a journey and discovers things? I mean discovers what's
really
happening, not what he
thinks
is happening or
wants
to happen or whatever? So I've been trying to act like that, trying to kinda journey-like and discover what's
really
happening, I mean as much as I can?”

“Good, honey. Daddy and I feel that way about this trip too.”

“Thanks. But the bad news is, is that... well, coming here to China and seeing everything like the people and how different they look and how poor they are and all?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Mom, I can't
believe
I came from here, from China. Like I'm Chinese, but I'm really more Chinese
American
? Like I'm Chinese, but not Chinese? People look at us and they're wondering why these two Americans are with this Chinese girl? At the police station, it was like the policemen were thinking you kidnapped me or something! It's all pretty weird. So all the time I feel weird here, people coming up to me talking to me and expecting me to speak Chinese? Before I got here I thought Chinese was like in the back of my brain and it would just come out when I'm here but it hasn't?”

“It's hard, honey,” Clio says. “But I know exactly what you mean. We're all feeling that, aren't we, Dad? Strange, and trying to put it all together to make sense?”

“We sure are,” Pep says.

“We're glad that you're really trying to understand it.”

“You are?”

“Yes. We're all on the same quest, together.”

“Right,” Pep says, “and we're learning a lot, and we'll go home a lot better for it. Just like Orpheus and Eurydice.”

“Da-ad—Orpheus
lost
Eurydice!
She rotted forever in Hell
!”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Katie is silent for a few moments. “I'm... I don't know, I'm trying to think like if I'd grown up in China I'd be
different
—shorter and smaller and browner?”

“Really?”

“Un hunh.”

“You think you'd be a lot different?”

“Yeah, this isn't like home.”

“That's why we came,” Clio says. “To try to understand all this, together.”

“Cool. G'night.”

“Goodnight, hon. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

“G'night, Kate-zer,” Pep says. “Love you.”

Silence. Finally, Katie says, “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“You shouldn't treat beggars so rough-like?”

“You mean like outside the hotel?”

“Yeah and like the waiters too?”

“Waiters
too
? What waiters?”

“All the waiters if you don't get what you want right away like if they don't know what a Sprite is, you yell at them?”

“You think?”

“Most definitely. Mom and me don't like it.”

Hearing the “Mom and me,” Pep feels a rush of shame, and then irritation. For the past several years, he's felt the two of them bond together, at odds with him. They're mother/daughter, of course, but still. Sometimes he feels his position in the family has fallen to a niche somewhere below Cinnamon the dog and above Dave the lovebird. Lying in bed now, he feels cast out, alone. Like the loneliness he increasingly feels at home when the two of them are out at a horse show or gymnastics or art or music or shopping or Mary's Farm and he's left rattling around the big, empty house throwing the ball to Cinnamon or playing his trombone—with only the dog listening.

Clio has her circle of friends, mostly moms. Then there is Carter, her best friend from Wellesley, and her partner Sue, who lived in her building in New York and who moved up to Columbia and started Oblique Antique, where Clio sometimes works. It was while Clio was visiting Carter that she and Pep first met. Last year Clio invited him to join her and Carter in taking meditation lessons from Tulku, the cash-poor Tibetan janitor at Katie's school. He tried, but at his age neither his body nor his mind could bend that way. Clio thinks he doesn't like Carter—not true. It's more complicated than that. He's amazed at how easily women can connect—even on this trip the fourteen women—hetero, gay, single, whatever—all of them got along like quote sisters. And what does he have? Golf pals and poker buddies and Rotarians, a lot of 'em Columbians he's known since kindergarten, and if they ask, “How are you?”, well, you could be dying of cancer but you say, “Fine,” or “Pretty good,” and that's that. Meanwhile Clio makes her daily rounds of “cancer calls” to her stricken friends. She seems to think he's uneasy with lesbians and even homophobic. She doesn't know that deep down it isn't resentment at all, but envy. His envy of their closeness, and his having no way of getting there. The closeness he and she had before the infertility crap, before Katie.

Suddenly chilled, he shivers. He knows that if he could just admit to his loneliness, Clio might respond, but he can't seem to.
Why the hell not?

He feels terrible, almost like crying. What is it that Clio said last month, about Katie being so “authentic” all the time?—“She's got a genius for the real. It's like living with a Zen master, twenty-four hours a day.” Once, after Katie painted a red horse galloping on the original oil painting of Pep's great-great-grandfather, Gifford Macy—he had been cleaning it, had left it lying on his desk—he said through clenched teeth: “Please, Katie, don't do that again.” She looked at him and said, “You said that without love in your voice.” Startled, with difficulty he swallowed his pride and said, “Okay. You're right. I did.” She paused and said, “You said
that
without love in your voice too!”

The girl has a light beam for anything cruel or phony—she'll call you on it with such innocence, you melt. And she even had it the first time they saw her, when she was brought out into the bright October sunlight and handed to them and he opened like a flower, felt a blast of love from his toes to his head and he started to say, “What a little muffin,” but the “muffin” part got lost in the choking tears of joy, the love he had never felt before, and when he looked into her eyes they held his gaze, dark eyes so electric!—and he fell in love with the peacefulness of the three of them, the birth of this finally family he'd yearned for, sitting together in the concrete courtyard with old iron play gyms and bamboo seats that kept the toddlers imprisoned, and the bright flash of a rainbow of baby clothes hanging on a line, flapping in the wind of south China in the glorious fall, and all of it blurred like a rushed photo because he was weeping.

Now he counts to ten to calm himself.

“Okay, Kate-zer. With the beautiful nice beggars and the waiters? I'll try.”