Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (14 page)

Ralph lifts it out, presses a tiny bar on the side, and snaps it open.

Without a word he slides the screen and slips his chubby self through far enough to plant the compact on a tall crate, with the mirror angled toward the temple.

He returns, slides the screen back into place, bumps me, and says, “Jeez, give me some room. I'm on business. You're making me jittery. It is not a crime to look in a mirror. Why, a person can stand anywhere on earth all easy-breezy and spy just fine using strategic mirror placement. Using strategic mirror placement, one can catch the odd angle, peer around corners. Why don't you go distract the guard or something?” He looks through the crack. “Besides, she just walked out through a hidden door in the wall. You want me to ask somebody if she's really Lien Loo?” Ralph says, his voice softer now.

“No! I'll just stand here wondering why you aren't on a leash.” The ceiling lights buzz. My chest cracks down the middle. “God. It really could be her!” Suddenly I'm
running downstairs, across the main hall, and out the front doors onto the steps. I hear Ralph huffing behind me.

I wheel around. “What if she has been living behind that wall in the very same town as me for thirteen years? And all this time I worried she'd gone to hell!” Gone Mom turns into something small and hard. Forget her. I will
never
go in there again. Didn't she think she might run into me someday? Did she care? Does she care? No, she does not.

It is hours and an endless stomachache later—long after I have exhausted the Gone Mom possibilities and the fact that the hand is wooden, not stiff, dead enemy flesh—that I remember we have left Mother's precious, monogrammed, family-heirloom, ultrapolished compact on a crate in no-man's-land.

When I knock on Ralph's door to tell him, he waves me off. “I know. It's closed tomorrow. I'll have to wait till Tuesday. Can Mom survive that long without her face goop?” He rubs his cheeks, imitating her.

“It's not the goo, it's the
container
—her most prized possession of her whole life, and that includes
you
!”

*  *  *

On Tuesday Ralph comes into my room right before dinner looking all serious and smug except for one thing. He does not have Mother's compact.

“What happened?” I say.

“I sneaked in to get it. . . .”

“How?”

He points to his moccasins. “These. I employed Indian ways. And also these.” He holds up binoculars.

“But you didn't
find
it?”

“No wampum, but I bring news.” He gives me a careful look, says slowly, “The lady you thought was Gone Mom, isn't.”

The room absorbs this revelation. I lie back on the floor, eyes locked on the dead bugs in my ceiling light.

“I used my binoculars and I saw her point-blank. She isn't a Chinese person at all. And then she walked right past me in the hall and I asked her about the hand and she said it was a secret, part of the big grand-reopening event, so I got you one of these on my way out.” He hands me a fancy flyer with Chinese figures on the front.

Grand Reopening and Dedication

Chinese Temple

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Friday, March 9, 1951

6:00 p.m.

Lecture and reception

Chinese buffet and cocktails

“Mr. Howard, if you had the chance to learn something, you know, about your birth father, would you do it?”

“Nope.” He pops the
p
sound as we stand on the curb in front of school. It's windy and humid with an edge of spring.

I look up, shield my eyes from the sun. “Because?”

He turns to me, taps the side of his head. “I'm
good.
I've got him where I want him, squared away. If that man's soul got restless to seek me out one day, my advice to his soul would be: go chase your tail.”

“Yeah, but what if you had a chance to learn something new or see his face?”

“I put myself and everybody else through hell finally getting my feet on the ground.” He turns to me. “I can make a perfect Peking duck. I can spoil my wife, whack a baseball, play the flute, pick my way through a crapload of prejudice, and tickle my kids' funny bones. I'm glad he abandoned me. I never would have learned those life
essentials
from him. Let him be.” Mr. Howard waves a fist at his invisible father. “Bye-bye, ol' buddy.”

“But you yourself said things change, that life doesn't stay still.”

Mr. Howard nods. “Yep. Sounds good. Sounds right. But I admit I don't want him meeting my kids—their
grandfather
. Sheesh. But don't you believe I haven't
thought
of it a million times.” Mr. Howard pauses, gives me a puzzled look. “I'm more than a little curious why you're asking, Miss Firestone? Did you happen to run across my birth father?”

We stand there, me knowing I've swirled up the dust inside him. “Sorry, Mr. Howard.”

“No. That man did me a favor letting me figure my own self out.” Mr. Howard looks off and says slowly, “On the other side, think what
his
life has been like. Leaving your baby boy must feel raw right up to the day you pass. Maybe especially on that day.”

Misty is how I would describe Mr. Howard's face. He doesn't try to hide it. Seems he has bruises under his eyes. I wonder, if I have the chance to see Gone Mom and I don't take it, if I'll regret it every day until I pass.

Cars and buses slide by us. I am already late for first hour. “Okay,” Mr. Howard says, “why
are
you asking? You got something?”

And from my mouth spills the legend of my box, my stupid museum-lady mistake, the slipper, the dragon pearl, the photos, and the teeny chance that Gone Mom might be at the celebration at the art museum. I am shaking by the end.

Mr. Howard throws up his hands. “Oh, is
that
all?” He raises his eyebrows, whistles, and says, “Well, fear ends when you do what you fear.” He looks off, thinking. “I'll be there stirring the bird's nest soup. Elliot's coming. The mayor's coming too and museum bigwigs, archaeologists, Chinese art types.” He looks at me—eyes wide. “I can get you a ticket.”

Lantern light washes the museum entrance in Chinese red. Wind chimes chatter. A huge, bug-eyed dragon coiled over the doors warns—enter at your own risk. I have a ticket and six pictures in my purse and fear shredding my stomach. I need the “do what you fear” flame in me. It's not.

I review my plan: sit in a chair in the back row, locate the exit, bolt if I see someone I know, do not get in a picture, do not leave my purse under the chair, stay incognito, and watch the clock. I have until at least ten to get home. Dad is being honored by the chamber of commerce for his real estate developments and innovations in Kansas City. My parents left the house in a twit, all bow-tied and
girdled
with not one question to me or to Ralphie about our plans for tonight.

I will also avoid Auntie Chow and her jade-shattering voice—HA! LILY FIRESTONE! WHY YOU HERE?

I am searching for my birth mother, Gone Mom.

Fur coats sweep up the steps, their owners all dolled up and in high spirits. I stand in a stone column's thick shadow, shivering.

Limousines slide around the circular drive. Their shiny black sides swim along the icy water of the lighted reflecting pool. Valets swing car doors open. Passengers slip out. Clustered momentarily, they exclaim over the huge, billowing dragon and the spills of knotted red silk streamers, then waltz inside.

Hours ago in social studies we learned of the USS
Essex 
's ability to handle atom-bomb-carrying planes and how “in civil-defense news, cities gird for attack as war crimes soar and truce talks stall.” I walked out of class tasting jellied gasoline napalm, a mushroom clouding my mind, scared for our civilized world, wondering if war is “just” or just organized violence.

I walk inside, hand over my ticket, and head straight to the restroom, astounded that so many have come to celebrate the artwork of the enemy. I pick at a threadbare place in the fainting couch upholstery, wondering what Gone Mom and I will do if we meet. I will show her my pictures—the proof that I am her daughter—and then what? Exchange hugs? Tears? Telephone numbers? Or not. Surely lots of girls like me have fainted here before going upstairs to meet their birth mothers.

I creep out of the bathroom, stop at the drinking fountain without swallowing a sip, and go upstairs.

I skirt the Main Chinese Gallery, which is filled with people, not crates. No remnant of my ripped petticoat, either, just glowing gorgeousness everywhere—polished wood, a floor-to-ceiling green-and-gold-tiled walkthrough, and towering open-cut screens that divide the ceiling light into snowflakes dusting us all. Flashbulbs bounce off display cases full of jade and porcelain. I hop around a photographer and spot Mr. Howard in his chef's hat. He raises a wooden spoon in greeting, shakes his head slightly as if to say he won't tell the Chows I'm here.

A gong sounds and everybody finds a seat in the Buddhist temple. I head down a row of folding chairs to the back corner. I have dropped my program somewhere, but I am not about to get up now. I put my purse on the floor, wrap my feet around the chair legs, and try to swallow my heart, which is lodged in my throat.

I spot the hidden door in the wall by the stage, just a rectangle of molding with a keyhole. I have imagined Gone Mom coming through that door and stepping up onstage a thousand times. Will she look out and recognize me instantly? Will I run to her or turn away? Will we look alike? Or will we gaze up at the dragon pearl—our starting point or ending point—together?

One whole wall is a painting of Buddha. The platform
at the front has a tall red curtain on wheels. There's a slide projector, a podium, a table with the wooden body parts hidden under a tasseled red cloth, a vase of chrysanthemums, candles, scrolls with rows of calligraphy, a bowl of sand, and an old Chinese fellow playing a skinny, high-pitched instrument. His strumming calms everyone's voices. The man in front of me whispers—
zither
—to the lady he's with. She wears a heavy armor of Chanel N
^o
5 perfume. Mother's favorite. Ralph swears that if our mother ever once perspired, she'd sweat Chanel.

Somebody tests the microphone and dims the lights. The overflow crowd settles down in the Main Chinese Gallery. Blood rushes from my hands and feet. I straighten my face and look ahead.

Mayor Taylor welcomes everybody, thanks a million people, and says, “A well-publicized stranger has come to town, and I don't mean our special guest speaker.”
Ha-ha-ha.
“I am referring to the treasure behind this curtain.”
Ooh . . . aah . . .

The director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum speaks next. He will introduce the guest speaker. He has white hair and a crimson necktie. I scan the audience. There are lots of Chinese people—distinguished-looking scholar types and couples, the men in tuxedos, the women in slim silk dresses. None are carrying bayonets. None of them are Gone Mom. They are black-haired and elegant. I am unelegant in
my swing skirt and blue cardigan. In their beaded purses I imagine silver combs and cigarette holders. My purse contains Chiclets, my compact, a comb, Tangee, and six grainy photo graphs.

“We've waited fifteen years for this evening . . . Dr. Benton molded our Chinese collection . . . a mecca of Oriental antiquities right here in the Midwest . . . painstaking . . . searching and piecing together . . . fakes and halos . . . sixth sense . . .” We learn that the featured speaker's credentials and talents are too vast to be contained in one institution. He and his colleagues will stay in Kansas City for several weeks.

Now the crowd laughs. The museum director has said something funny, but I don't care what. It feels like nothing is happening
outside
of me tonight.

The audience stands, so I do too. Dr. Michael Benton walks onstage to huge applause and begins his remarks. His American face and Chinese coat and pants are an odd mix. “
Jin wan xie xie ni men lai. Wo hen rong xing he ni men zai yi qi.
Thank you so very much for coming this evening. I am so honored to be with you.” He's the expert, the head of the archaeological team, the one everybody but me is waiting to see. He thanks the museum for sponsoring the work of his team in China.

He explains he has
come home
to tell a Chinese fairy tale. He lights incense sticks, pokes them into the sand, and steps back with his hands folded. We watch the smoke rise.
“Smoke carries our deepest desires and gratitude to the ancestors,” he says.

Sandalwood curls to the back of the room, mixes with the Chanel N
^o
5. Gone Mom combined with Mother. Tears spring down my face. No warning. No stopping them. I turn toward the wall, use my sleeve for Kleenex. Why didn't I bring some? Why didn't I
think
?

The expert shows slides of artworks in our museum—sculptures of pharaohs and martyrs, busts of Roman emperors, statues of Hercules, Shiva, Buddha, stained-glass images of Mary and Jesus, the beaded throne of an African king.

“An art museum is the perfect place to experience diversity. No wars allowed in here. Rulers and kings, gods and goddesses, mummies, and saints live peacefully under one roof!” He smiles, extends his arms in a wide circle to include the audience, Buddha, the guardian lions, and dragons all around.

The audience claps and cheers.

“And it is in this spirit that we gather tonight to dedicate our Chinese Buddhist temple and to celebrate an object of unparalleled merit, an object that exemplifies heavenly peace and compassion for all. But let us first hear the tale of its discovery.”

His voice fades. I check my watch. I try to figure out which of the lumps under the red cloth is my wooden
hand, which is the head. “Our team's search began here in Shanxi.” The expert points to a slide of China.
Shanxi.
His next picture is tethered camels and a bonfire and rubble.