“Wildcats, of course. You play basketball?”
“No.”
“Too bad, you’re tall and slim. Like your aunt, but she’s also not sports-minded.”
I remembered our Willowridge rec therapy games, where the therapist would keep switching the rules. “Okay, now both teams go for the same basket!” “Men against women!” “No dribbling for the next five minutes!” This last call usually got a laugh. Lillith, for some reason, would always pass to me, underhanded, arms flailing, as if the ball were way too heavy for her. It got so I would expect it.
It was too sad to think about.
Mel and I had tried calling her a couple of times at State, leaving messages she’d never returned. We did find out that she’d been transferred from Medical to a regular ward.
The Wildcats were down by ten when Aunty Mabel came in with a tray holding a pitcher and three glasses. “Turn down TV,” she said to Uncle Richard. He obeyed, winking at me, and then began clearing a place on the coffee table by shoving aside a pile of magazines and newspapers, including, I noticed, an old Racing Form.
“So you were in the hospital.” Uncle Richard took a big sucking sip of his lemonade. “They call it a mental breakdown, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Your mother tells us you try and kill yourself.”
“Ding-ah!” my aunt said.
“You are Chinese, not Japanese. Japanese like hari-kari, honor, all that. Chinese have other way out of troubles. Chinese know it’s all luck. So they try to change luck.”
“Sally’s luck is changed,” Aunty Mabel said. “She comes to visit us.”
“That means our luck is changed. You come to cheer old man up.” Uncle Richard poked at Niu-niu, who didn’t budge. “See this cat? I’m like this cat now. Decrepit.”
“Come on,” I said.
“Good for nothing. They should mercy kill me.”
“See how he talks?” my aunt said to me.
“Every time I go to doctor, he gives me more medicine to take. Now it’s my heart. Like a rusty valve, Mr. Ding, he says. You get older, things start fall apart.”
“You smoke too much,” Aunty Mabel said.
Indeed, I’d noticed that on the ceiling over where my uncle was sitting was a distinct brown stain, spreading out from the middle like an aura.
When I offered to help with dinner my aunt shook her head and pointed through the glass doors at the back patio. The red-and-white-webbed lounge chairs that had been there when I was a child had been replaced by ones cushioned in lengths of squishy lime green tubing. “Xiuxi.”
The grass in the backyard was overgrown and weedy. From where I lay I could see that the grapefruit trees hadn’t been kept up, but here and there among the glossy dark leaves a patch of yellow showed through. A palmetto plant made a sagging fountain in the middle of the yard. There was even a full-fledged palm tree, a short one whose trunk was the shape and pattern of a pineapple. Honeysuckle draped from the eaves of the garage, entwined with a vine that shot out trumpet flowers the color of blood oranges. The flowers were so beautiful I knew they must be poisonous. And the air was brimming. It wasn’t just honeysuckle I smelled, there was something even more heady, a fragrant rush that was almost decadent.
The South pulled no punches when it came to decadence.
I fell asleep and dreamed I was five years old again and very sick. Pneumonia with complications. It was our first winter on Coram Drive. There were ghosts in the room, hiding in the pattern of the apple blossom wallpaper, in my clothes. I was staring at my favorite T-shirt folded on top of the bureau. It was red and blue stripes, with very thin black stripes between. Ma came in and I pointed to the shirt. “What?” she said. I pointed again. She picked it up and shook it and a ghost flew out and into the open door of the closet.
I opened my eyes and was back in Florida. In the yard to my right a sprinkler was going. What had awakened me was the sound of a car pulling into the gravel driveway. A middle-aged women in a pink top and mint green denim shorts carried grocery bags into the house. She gave a friendly nod as she passed. “We have such nice neighbors, this quiet old Oriental couple,” I imagined her telling people. “And now their sweet young niece has come down from Connecticut to keep them company.”
A heavy, slow breeze stirred against my pale chill northern skin, teasing the blood to the surface. I enjoyed the caress, not moving until my aunt called me for dinner.
She told me the smell was confederate jasmine. “Behind the garage, you see. All yellow.”
“Watch out for armadillo,” Uncle Richard added.
“Armadillo?”
“What do you think makes all those tunnels in the lawn? Big Mama Armadillo. Your aunt is out by the garage the other day and she sees one of the babies. Usually they don’t come out in daytime. She jumps and says, ‘Ai-yah!’ Armadillo jumps even higher than she does!”
As easygoing as my aunt and uncle were, conversation with them was exhausting. After dinner I excused myself as soon as was tactfully possible, and retreated back to the guest room. I took out Mel’s book and propped myself up in the twin bed farthest from the door, near the window, where I’d slept so many years ago. On the sill was a parade of little glass animals, starting with the rat. The signs of the Chinese zodiac. I picked up my year, the dog. It looked like some kind of spaniel. Strong and reliable. Last in line was pig, Marty’s year. Lazy but lucky.
I set the dog back in its place and let the book fall open to the page that had been read the most. It was Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
I knew it by heart. It was one of the poems Fran had recited to me over and over on the banks of the Sudbury River. I saw that Mel had marked the last two lines:
17
Next morning was overcast and cooler, the house perfectly silent as I checked my watch. I’d thrown my wedding ring into the East River, given the pear diamond back to Carey (it had been his grandmother’s), but this token of my marriage I kept because it was from Ma, the most expensive present I’d ever gotten from her. Six-thirty. I was still on hospital time. I got out of bed and, still wearing the T-shirt I’d slept in, pulled on my corduroys. In the kitchen, my aunt and uncle’s other cat, a little tiger, rubbed against my ankles and then shot through my legs when I slid open the glass doors to the patio.
I went out barefoot into the backyard and made my way through the tall grass, cold and heavy with dew, leaned against the back fence, and lit up a cigarette. That was a terrible habit I’d picked up in the hospital, smoking first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, but there was something divine about it too, the buzz so strong it was sick-making. I noticed the grapefruit lying scattered beneath the trees like bocce balls. They were rotting, riddled with insect holes. The grapefruit still in the trees didn’t look much better. The ones Ma had brought to me at the hospital were obviously not from this yard. For a moment I entertained the urge to paint them, and then I stubbed out my cigarette and put the butt in my pocket and began picking up the decaying fruit, making a heap in the corner by the fence.
If only it could always be early morning or night. It was the day that killed me.
I heard the shrill of the teakettle from the kitchen and when I went back inside Aunty Mabel was pouring hot water into mugs filled with leaves. On the stove something acrid-smelling simmered in a clay pot. In the cool morning light I could see how my aunt’s face was a reflection of my mother’s. But where high cheekbones made Ma regal, in my aunt they were exaggerated, giving her the melancholy air of a Modigliani. My aunt’s eyes were long and narrow, like those in Chinese fairytale books. Like mine.