“Too cold out there without sweater.”
“I’m fine, really.”
I could hear my uncle coughing in the bathroom. He’d lost his basketball bet last night.
Aunty Mabel set two mugs on the table. “Who would think Pau-yu be the first to go,” she said as we sat there sipping. “I always think it’s your uncle.”
“Daddy was older.”
“Your Uncle Richard, six different doctors he has, for all his disease. Lucky we still have insurance and disability from his job.” My aunt got up to turn off the burner under the earthenware pot.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Special Chinese medicine for his heart. We have a friend sends it from Queens.”
I remembered the potion I’d taken the year I was eight, which I’d believed to be dried blood. I never did find out what it actually was.
After breakfast my aunt drove my uncle to the cardiologist and I sat out on the patio in the sun, which had finally come out, until I felt too much like a bum. I decided to gather the rest of the grapefruit, filling two giant trash bags. Insects had begun to hum in the jungly grass. Savannah was the word that came to mind as I stood there surveying the yard for any strays I’d missed.
The next task I set for myself was to clip the grass with hedge trimmers, wearing an old sun hat I found in the garage hanging beside the tools. When I was done I went in for lemonade and the last half of the Sally Jessy Raphael show—bulimic boys, not as entertaining as you’d think, or maybe I was finally losing my taste for talk shows. By then it was around eleven-thirty and my aunt and uncle still hadn’t returned, so I went out to the garage again and got out their old rusty rotary mower, which kept jamming on me. The ground was even more hummocky than it looked. I kept a hopeful lookout for armadillos, never having seen one before, but all I came across were lots of fat flying bugs and a tortoise, which I carefully picked up and put by the back fence, behind the grapefruit trees. The pastel lady from next door was hanging out her wash and waved to me.
Physical work doesn’t keep you from thinking! In fact sometimes it stimulates it. My aunt and uncle were as good as could be, but I was still in my life, I still had to return to New York City. As I struggled with the clackety mower I calculated my savings: I could survive for about a month and a half on what I had and then I’d have to find a steady income One possibility was freelance from my old boss, if she still trusted me. My last assignments had been delivered late and barely acceptable. I’d told her I was going to Connecticut to live with my mother for a while, and then with all the mess, going into the hospital and all, I had completely lost touch.
It was hard to believe now, but at the agency I’d handled all the biggest projects. I was known to be great under pressure. Crank up the Vivaldi, order out pizza, and I could work through the night, meet the toughest deadline with panache. Where I worked, the darker the circles under your eyes the more promising your career. Sally Wang-Acheson, senior art director. So chic, that hyphenated name, and so chic was I my long hair done up in all sorts of intricately casual styles—I had finally begun to accept my looks for what they were not beautiful but something else—with all those flowing tropical-colored outfits, dangly bronze and silver earrings Carey had given me every birthday and Christmas. A woman with style. A woman on her way up.
And then—catastrophe. A foot over on the other side, and it had affected me permanently, down to my brain cells. After degenerating to idiocy, I had to learn to be smart again, an adult in this world. How was it possible? Since I’d been sick I had taken to wearing the kind of asexual outfits I’d favored at boarding school—T-shirts, corduroys, sneakers. No makeup, no particular hairstyle. My reflection in the mirror was disturbing to me, the face thinner, childish, with a stripped expression I remembered from working with the mentally handicapped. Pure shock that you had to be out in the world at all.
I was almost done when I heard the car pull in. My aunt stood on the patio shading her eyes with her hands.
“Next year we spray the trees again.”
“Aunty Mabel, there’s some kind of other fruit out here. Little orange things on bushes.”
“Calamondin. Too sour to eat. You can make marmalade from.”
Unexpected treasures in your own backyard. I thought of the patch of lily of the valley behind the swing set on Coram Drive. Fortunately the bad boys missed it in their rampage. Once in a while Ma would pick a handful to keep in a glass in the kitchen. “This is what I have in my wedding corsage,” she told Marty and me, although she didn’t know the name in English. We didn’t know that they were so rare that it was actually against the law in Connecticut to pick them.
“Sal-lee, you come in now,” Aunty Mabel said. “After lunch we go shopping.”
In Montgomery Ward I selected the most conservative bathing suit I could find—a red one-piece with white polka dots and low-cut leg holes. I changed into and out of it as fast as possible, stopping long enough only to check that it was serviceable. Department store lighting was so cruel. “Let’s see!” my aunt called from the other side of the curtain and I said, “It’s fine, it’s fine.”
On the way to the cash register Aunty Mabel stopped at a rack full of tropical flowered sundresses, her coral nails fluttering over the hangers. “Sal-lee! Ni kan! This style become you very much.”
To please her, I tried one on. It had a full skirt—not my taste—with purple hibiscus on a green and white background that vaguely resembled leaves. But the bodice was cut in a sophisticated way, as snugly as an evening gown, with a graceful scoop neck and deep armholes. I wished the bones of my chest didn’t show, but they always had, as long as I could remember. This time I gave in to my aunt and stepped outside to model.
“Huh,” she said, drawing her eyebrows together in a delicate frown. I was barefoot and my ankles were raw from the sandspurs I’d picked up from working in the yard, but I could see that what she was looking at was the inside of my left arm where the tiger stripes overlapped delicately but distinctly from wrist to elbow.
“It’s gorgeous,” Aunty Mabel said, finally deciding she wasn’t going to ask. “I buy for you.”
For dinner my second night in Florida we had jiao zi. My aunt rolled out the dough and pressed circles into it with the rim of a teacup to make the wrappers. I spooned the pork and cabbage filling in and pinched the dumplings shut. Thanks to Nai-nai I’d perfected my technique at making them dainty, evenly scalloped at the edges. My sister’s had too much filling and spilled out the sides. You could always tell which ones were whose when they came out of the pot.
“I’m not eating any of Marty’s,” I’d announce.
“Mine are better, they have more meat,” my sister would shoot back.
“No fight,” my father would say in his high-pitched starting-to-be-mad voice. But I noticed that Daddy ate more of mine than my sister’s.
Aunty Mabel asked how Marty was.
“She has an apartment in New York now.”
“How does she support herself?”
My sister lived off men, but I didn’t think my aunt needed to know this.
“When she’s in the city she works as a clown at South Street Seaport. Now she’s up in Vermont with a college friend of hers.”
“So she moves to the country?”
“No, no, this is just temporary. She still wants to be an actress in New York.”
“Actress.” Aunty Mabel sighed. “Your sister, she’s always so active.” She slid a pile of dough circles across the table to me. “And you! When you were little, you send us such beautiful cards. All kinds of animals, horses, dogs, cats. I still keep. You remember? And your ma-ma told us you won so many prizes in high school, for painting pictures.”