“Unless that little girl finds a bone marrow match, most likely from another biracial person…” the nurse’s voice trails off but her meaning is obvious even to a third floor neophyte like me. “It’s really too bad that most of the volunteers on the bone marrow registry are Caucasian. Autologous transplants are just not as effective.” With one hand on the door, the nurse says, “Now, let’s see if Lillian can sweet-talk her into taking a couple of bites.”
I stare at Mrs. Fujimoro’s large belly as the nurse’s information sinks in. The real reason for Mrs. Fujimoro’s pregnancy is a last-ditch effort to save her daughter. An awful niggling thought sneaks into my head; under no circumstances can I imagine Mama willingly gaining thirty pounds for me.
Lillian peeks her head out of the room and says, “Amanda would really love a picture of herself as a snowboard girl.”
“Really?” I ask, surprised.
“Yeah, who knew? It must be all the ESPN my dad’s been watching. Come on in.”
Reluctantly, I follow Lillian inside Amanda’s room where Mrs. Fujimoro is awkwardly easing herself into a sitting position, patting her hair back into place self-consciously when she spies me. Looking away to give her some semblance of privacy, I focus on Amanda, who’s grinning at me from her bed, bouncing up and down, unmindful of her IV.
No sooner do I park myself in one of the chairs beside her bed than Amanda begins to art direct me. “Pigtails!” she demands.
“Amanda,” reprimands Lillian.
So much for shyness with strangers. Oddly, I feel pleased and smile back at Amanda.
“With pom-poms.” Amanda looks at me so steadily, there is no question that she might be bald now, but in no time, she’ll be sporting short, stubby, and pom-pommed pigtails.
“All the cool snowboard girls are rocking helmets with speakers in them,” I tell her. “So what’s on your helmet?”
“A hummingbird. Red and green,” she says decisively. “And I want a red snowsuit. Not pink. And goggles. Definitely goggles.”
“How old are you?” I ask, laughing as I begin to draw her on top of a mountain.
“Big enough to snowboard,” says Amanda.
Mrs. Fujimoro smiles tremulously at her. “Maybe next year.”
The nurse’s words—
unless that little girl finds a match
—hang in my head, dark clouds portending a storm. I press down hard on my journal, as if the heavy lines will make my image come true: Amanda, a fearless grom with luscious pigtails, the picture of health and serious attitude, soaring sky-high over Bold Mountain.
When I hand the finished page to her, I say, “Now what are you going to eat?”
“Everything,” Amanda breathes and holds the manga in her chubby little hands like it’s the ultimate pass to Paradise, one I’d give to her for free if I could.
As Amanda wanes between bites number three and number four, I ask her, “Do you want to see me as a snowboard girl?”
She nods eagerly.
“Another bite then,” negotiates Lillian, smiling her thanks to me.
As Lillian shovels another spoonful into Amanda’s mouth, I open my manga-journal to Shiraz.
“That doesn’t look like you,” says Amanda, frowning.
“What do you mean?” I flatten the page with my palm, but as I do, I study my manga alter ego under the bars of my fingers, and suddenly see Shiraz with absolute clarity. She’s a stick figure in a parka. A stick figure with an ample chest, if I have to be totally honest. Boobs on a board, that’s how I’ve drawn Shiraz. Suddenly I remember how once, after I had moaned to Age about how fat I was, he said, “You’re compact, Syrah. You’re the prototype for the perfect snowboarding body.”
“You’re right,” I tell Amanda softly. “That doesn’t look like me at all.”
Later, near the main
entry of the Children’s Hospital, Lillian points at the statue of a mother elephant, her trunk wrapped protectively around her baby. “Guess what Amanda’s favorite part is.”
I tap the mother’s trunk, which ends in a pale pink heart. “This?”
“Nope, their toes.”
“Are you kidding?” I have to laugh, because both mother and child have red toenails, as if they made a pit stop at Spa Safari for a pedicure before hoofing it over to the hospital. “Your sister is something else.”
“I know.”
“You know,
you
should write about your Groundhog Day party, what it means to make a difference. That’d make a great column.”
“Nah, I’d be a one-sentence story: girl with sick sister throws party. Big whoopee.”
“Better a great one-sentence life than a boring book-length journal. At least, for me,” I tell her as we walk outside past the purple hippo crouched in front of the fountain shaped like a watering hole. It’s already dark. I check my watch, surprised that it’s eight. After drawing Amanda and then visiting Derek, a couple of other kids wanted manga-portraits, too. So did a few siblings. And two nurses.
In silence we walk to the parking garage, and I finally ask the question that’s been bugging me since I met Amanda. “How come you don’t talk about your sister? I had no idea she was sick.”
It could be that Lillian is ignoring me, she’s walking fast enough to outdistance my question. But her first “oh” after my question had sounded more surprised that someone would ask, than offended. Not until we’re safe inside the minivan does Lillian answer, “Probably for the same reason that you never talk about your dad. You never mention him or your airplane or your gazillion cars. There aren’t that many people who don’t get all freaked out that my little sister may be dying.”
Who would have known that it would be Lillian Fujimoro, the star of Viewridge, who would understand me so perfectly? “Yeah” is all I say.
It must be all I need to say, because as Lillian drives out of the garage and we approach the traffic light that changes from red to green, she asks, “How does pizza sound? Pagliacci makes a mean pepperoni.”
I sink all the way back in my seat happily and tell her, “Pepperoni sounds perfect.”
A
fter dinner, when Lillian
pulls down the driveway to my house, I’m in such a food coma, I can barely move. What’s weird is that I don’t feel (too) guilty about my two slices of pizza, and I haven’t calculated how much time I’ll need to spend on the treadmill tomorrow morning to ward off the ill effects of cheese, pepperoni, and grease on my belly pooch. After seeing Amanda and that anorexic girl at my school and my Shiraz alter ego, Lillian has it right. It’s just so stupid to obsess about weight and calories when my body is perfectly healthy, even my knee.
“Okay,” says Lillian, turning her head to me.
“Okay, what?” I ask.
“Okay, here’s the deal. Since you did your manga on me, I get to do a feature on you.”
“But I’m not doing anything.…” My voice trails off as an inkling of an idea starts to form. Amanda, snowboarding, charity benefit, bone marrow transplants. But the sight of Baba’s BMW haphazardly parked in front of the house instead of inside the garage stops my brainstorming. It’s not yet ten, way too early for them to return home from their Valentine’s dinner.
Instead of a “Syrah, where were you after school?” or a “Syrah, how dare you leave an event early,” when I walk inside the house, I hear a keening wail, so pained, my instant thought is that Baba has died. God, did he have a heart attack? Immediately, I rush, mouth dry and heart pounding, toward the anguished sound, coming from my parents’ wing. The crying turns into a single-note shriek. I stop in the hallway, scared now that an intruder has breeched our state-of-the-art security system and attacked my parents on their way in. No wonder Baba’s car was parked so carelessly. My heart thuds as another ragged cry tears through the house. Why hadn’t my parents taken that retired FBI agent’s advice and employed a couple of bodyguards to roam the grounds, twenty-four seven?
I’m fumbling with my cell phone, ready to dial 911, when I hear Mama wailing over and over, first in Cantonese, then in her British English made unrefined in its raggedness, “My Mama is dead, Mama is dead.”
I don’t understand and hasten to my parents’ bedroom, where the crying is coming from. My grandmother, Weipou, has already passed away, dead when I turned seven. I have a vague recollection of standing in front of her coffin, too scared to look in, so I closed my eyes. The lit incense in my hand made me want to gag, its smell so pungent, but I kowtowed three times the way my Hong Kong cousins did, while needing to go to the bathroom desperately. Mama tch-ed at me and made me wait so long that I wet my pants. “Shameful,” I overheard a guest muttering, and I wanted to drown in the tiny pool under my billowing white dress.
Then, on the day Weipou’s coffin was carried to the cemetery, her friends grumbled that for as few tears that were shed by the family, we should have hired professional mourners to rip their hair out and weep the way they did in olden days, as a sign of respect.
Whoever this unknown Mama is needs no professional mourners, not the way my mother is crying inconsolably. Before tonight, I’ve never heard her so much as sniffle.
Baba murmurs something so softly that I don’t catch the words, only his soothing tones.
Mama, sounding broken, asks, “How could she have died three days ago and I didn’t know? No one told me.”
When I peer inside their bedroom, I see them sitting on the edge of their bed, their backs to me, Baba holding Mama, rocking her as if she were one of the Evergreen Fund’s beneficiaries, a homeless child he’s sworn to protect and cherish. Both are so attuned to her grief that neither notices me.
Feeling every bit the outsider, I draw back. Reality is, I’m uncomfortable viewing this breakdown in the understood Cheng code of conduct: always be in control, dispassionate, analytical.
So I leave them and climb the stairs to my bedroom with my arms around myself. I want to call Age, but know I can’t. Something tells me that Grace would talk, if only I called, but I don’t want her to know how vulnerable Mama is now. And it’s too late to phone Bao-mu.
So I lie down on my bed and try to remember. My few disjointed memories of Weipou are concentrated into a couple of sharp images that smolder with unease. Like how Mama put Weipou in the best room of our old house, but my grandmother’s miss-nothing eyes narrowed accusingly, as if Mama was showing off how much we-who-deserved-so-much-less had. How she covered her ears whenever I spoke in Cantonese, as if I were an out-of-tune piano. How she commanded Mama to forbid Bao-mu from speaking Mandarin with me, since it was obviously ruining my speech. And I remember shopping with Mama before our yearly trips to visit Weipou, filling up suitcases with cigarettes, lotions—anything that would be expensive to purchase in Hong Kong. Once we got to her mother’s house, Mama would lay out these gifts like peace offerings or a tribute that Weipou inspected and deemed never good enough.
T
he next morning, Mama’s
overstuffed luggage is lined up by the front door, like the two obese suitcases can’t wait to clear out of our Nonfat Farm. Personally, I can’t either. I am swarming with so many questions, I go hunting for Mama and answers, armed with my decision that I’m attending the mystery mother’s funeral with her.
The first place Mama hits as soon as she wakes up is her workout room. But she’s not running, running, running as if wife number three were on a treadmill behind her. There’s no trace of Mama in her office or in Baba’s pavilion, where the only sign of life is the stock ticker scrolling on his computer screen. Outside, the courtyards are damp, the sky a soggy gray backdrop that makes the evergreen trees appear even greener. And that’s how I figure out where Mama has gone.
Wrapping my arms around myself, I pick my way through the worms squiggling along the cobbled path. After what seems like an inordinately long time, I pass the public reception hall to finally reach Mama’s greenhouse. The glass door is always kept partially open in the winter so that her beloved bonsai get enough fresh air to prevent a blight of mold, but are protected from cold death. Through that cracked open door, I see Mama, her back to me, as she bends over to tend her stunted trees.
“Good morning, Syrah,” Mama says without turning around when I enter. “How was your Valentine’s Day?” The way she’s talking, she could be the perky star of a cereal commercial, not the woman whose late night weeping I can still hear, it was that raw.
Just like the first Chinese
penjing
gardeners must have done and Japanese bonsai ones later copied, Mama coils a copper wire around a tree, training its branch to bend as if it’s been windblown by nature. She skips over my non-answer and asks, “All set for school?”
Wind rattles the greenhouse, but Mama doesn’t notice. I shiver. If Bao-mu were here, she’d say it was the ghost of the woman Mama was mourning last night. In my haste to know who this woman is, I clumsily ask, “Is everything okay?”
“Of course.” Mama snips off the extra length of wire, not noticing that it drops, unneeded and discarded, by her feet. Calmly, Mama clips another long length of wire and begins painstakingly to cinch the copper corset around a different branch. It’s all I can do to stop myself from flinging in front of the besieged, belittled tree, like I’m the charter member of the Bonsai Liberation Front.
“Mrs. Fujimoro mentioned that you were working with her daughter on some project at the hospital,” says Mama, sounding as surprised as I was that she is so involved in the Evergreen Fund.
Our knowledge of each other is as limited as these bonsai, cut back before they can sprout overlarge. What I know of Mama—and my whole family—is the idealized version that she presents to the world. No different from me, my public persona pruned of all the messy bits in my history.
“Did you finish?” Mama asks, all the while her busy hands bend the branch gently down.
At first I think that Mama is asking whether I’ve finished pruning myself to perfection. I haven’t. But then I recognize her diversionary tactic for what it is: a Mama-made obstacle course of conversational distractions. Swallowing hard, I commit to my own route, no matter how unpredictable and frightening it is. Softly, I say, “I’m going with you.”