Signs and Wonders

Fortune-Telling

The kung pao chicken was what kept me going back night after night. That and the hot and sour soup. Otherwise the Chinese restaurant had nothing going for it. You know those places where there’re loads of Chinese people ordering from a separate menu, and you gesture that you want what they’re having and suddenly you’re eating steamed dumplings and buns with mysterious, delicious fillings and side dishes of spicy, tender broccoli? This was not one of those places. In countless visits I never saw a single Chinese customer. In fact only Mr. Lu, who cooked the food, was Chinese. His wife, Stacy, who took the orders, was blond and hailed from Plano, Texas. Mr. Lu churned out egg rolls and fried rice and kung pao chicken at an amazing pace; you didn’t often see him, but you could hear him screaming at Stacy when she went back into the kitchen with the orders. It always sounded like he was outraged by what people had selected, but Stacy told me it was just because all the years of clattering pots and pans had damaged his hearing.

The place didn’t even have a name — neither on the door outside nor on the menu. It was just a Chinese restaurant across the street from my apartment. I started going there the week I moved in, having dropped out of college and come to the city to make my name, find fame and fortune, the whole nine yards. The very first time I had the kung pao chicken and the hot and sour soup, the next morning I got a call from a casting agent who wanted to audition me for a detergent commercial. I didn’t get the part but still decided the chicken was my lucky dish, so whenever I was feeling down, or tired, or in need of a boost, I’d go back. I felt that way a lot, so I was a regular.

During the day I was temping at a mortgage company, a job so tedious it caused me actual physical pain — backaches, headaches, stomachaches. The money was good, though, and I’d been temping there for so long they changed my status to perma-temp. I made fifty cents more an hour than the ordinary temps, and my boss gave me a plant to put in my cube. All day long I sat in there and proofread people’s mortgages, which were passed from bank to bank, back and forth, like chips in a poker game. For legal reasons I had to make sure that the stamps on the front of the mortgage matched these poker-game trails documented at the back. When I was done proofreading a big stack, I filed them in a cool, dark, windowless room we called the Cave. Sometimes I lay down in the Cave and took naps. I didn’t mean to slack off, but the idiocy of the work made sleep irresistible. Nobody ever seemed to notice, anyway, just like they didn’t when I was gone for two hours in the middle of the day on an audition. They were just as bored themselves, and at times it felt like we were all in a trance, dreaming this shared tedious dream.

After work I sometimes went to a class or an audition, or came home to check my messages to see if I’d been called back for anything, which I hardly ever was. Often, too tired to cook, I’d head across the street to the Chinese restaurant. A counter at one end served as a kind of bar, meaning Stacy would bring you a beer if you sat there long enough. When I was done eating I’d occasionally hang out there for a while. It never occurred to me that a young woman sitting alone at a bar could expect a certain amount of attention, that she could be sending out any kind of message to the world at large. I believed that a woman ought to be able to behave exactly like a man did, in any situation. This attitude often got me in trouble. I refused to flirt with male casting agents and directors; I wouldn’t wear makeup to auditions for roles where I was supposed to be the attractive ingénue. “In your heart you want to fail,” one of my actor friends told me once, a statement that, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was absolutely true.

It was following one such failed, nonflirtatious audition that I met Simon Robbie. Whether Robbie was his last name or whether he went by two first names was unclear. He was a guy my age who sidled up to me at the counter on a Wednesday night and introduced himself. He was wearing a dirty yellow T-shirt with the name of a Little League team on it, and corduroy pants that were sliding off his skinny hips — your standard hipster look. Also, he had sideburns.

“I’m Zoe,” I told him, which was a lie. I was into constructing false personae at this time. The world was my stage, was how I looked at it.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, then looked around the place. “What do you recommend to eat at this place? I’m looking for something new and different, some kind of culinary adventure.”

“I recommend you go eat somewhere else,” I said.

Simon Robbie looked offended. “Hey, I was just making conversation. No need to be a jerk.”

“I just meant the food here’s pretty standard,” I said. I decided that Zoe would be a kind girl from a small town, captain of the History Club in high school. She’d have a fondness for dressing up in period costumes at Halloween — Marie Antoinette, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Mao — and feel seriously disappointed if people didn’t recognize who she was. “It’s an egg-roll, chow-mein, fortune-cookies-bought-in-bulk kind of place.”

“Gotcha,” Simon Robbie said. “Hey, did you already eat? I was thinking maybe I’d eat here at the bar with you? Would that be okay?”

“I see no problem with that,” I-as-Zoe said, and gave him a friendly smile. I saw Stacy coming out of the kitchen and waved her over. She looked pleased. She thought that a twenty-year-old woman who ate by herself in a Chinese restaurant three or four times a week was in dire need of friends. Simon Robbie ordered three appetizers — scallion pies, wonton soup, egg rolls — and no main course.

“Nothing else?” Stacy said.

“Not for now,” Simon Robbie told her. “I like to keep my options open,” he said to me, and winked.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

While eating he asked me about myself, sometimes gesturing with his left hand as if to say, “More details!” while he shoveled in mouthfuls with his right. The food was greasy and a ring of oil soon appeared around his mouth, wide and shiny, like a clown’s lipstick. I told him all about Zoe’s childhood on a farm, how her father had to give up the land his family had worked for generations and moved them to a small, grimy town where he worked in a factory, assembling cell phones. I said he hated this so much that the sight of a person talking on a cell phone drove him into a blind rage and one day, when Zoe was sixteen, she came home with a cell phone of her own and he threw her out of the house and ever since then she’d been on her own.

“That’s intense,” Simon Robbie said.

“Yeah.”

“So what do you do now?”

For some reason this was the only thing I didn’t want to lie about. “I’m an actress,” I said.

“Wow, cool, excellent,” he said through a mouthful of egg roll. “What do you act?”

“I do theater mostly,” I said. “Sometimes commercials, for the money. You know how it is.”

Simon Robbie chewed and swallowed. “No, I meant what kind of people,” he said. “Show me.”

I’m acting right now, I almost said, but didn’t. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I told him.

“Oh, okay, I totally understand,” he said. “I’m in insurance myself, and when people ask me questions about it outside of work, I’m like, dude, no more, call me at the office. You know what I mean?”

“You’re in insurance?”

“I sell life-insurance policies door-to-door,” he said.

I couldn’t believe I’d met someone whose job sounded worse than mine. It made me warm to him. “How do you like it?” I asked.

He finished chewing an egg roll, wiped his mouth, and shrugged. “Life is long,” he said, “and this is just one phase.”

I toasted this philosophy with my beer. Stacy came by and asked if we wanted anything else to drink. Simon Robbie ordered tea, and I said I’d have the same. The place was emptying out, Mr. Lu’s angry cries from the back coming less often now. With the tea Stacy brought some cookies, and I cracked mine open and read the fortune. You will never win the lottery, it said. I showed it to him.

“Then why do they print those numbers on the other side?” he said.

I shook my head. The fortune had put me in a bad mood. We sat for a couple of minutes in silence, Simon Robbie opening his fortune—Be kind to everyone you meet, his said, which wasn’t even a fortune in my opinion, given that it said nothing of the future — and ate our cookies. I drank some weak, bitter tea. “Well, I guess I’m off,” I finally said, and waved to Stacy for the check.

“Wait a minute,” Simon Robbie said. “I need to ask you a favor.”

“I’m not much for favors.”

“Please?” he said. “It’s important, and I’ll buy you dinner. I’ll buy you dinner tonight and for the next week.”

“That’s a lot of egg rolls.”

“It doesn’t have to be here,” he said, nearly pleading.

“Okay, what is it?” I asked.

“It’s my mother. She’s always after me about a girlfriend, every time I see her. If you could just come over with me, even for ten minutes, pretend that we’re on a date, it would shut her up for a least a few weeks. Please?”

“You want me to pretend I’m your girlfriend?” I said. I’d forgotten that I was Zoe, and my tone was incredulous and unkind.

He nodded. Stacy put down the check and he counted out the cash, then looked at me with puppy-dog eyes.

“I only live five minutes away,” he said.

I wondered if he cruised the Chinese restaurants in this neighborhood each night, the pizza joints, the Greek diners, looking for a girl who seemed willing to impersonate a girlfriend, if he knew I’d made up Zoe and her cell phone traumas and could tell I was practiced in the immorality of lying. I wondered if he’d give me cash, or if I’d actually have to eat dinner with him every night. Would it be nice to have someone to eat dinner with, or horrible? I had no idea. I was staring at his yellow Little League T-shirt, seeing how it was smudged and smeared with enigmatic stains, and it suddenly occurred to me that he might not be a hipster at all, that it might be a T-shirt from his own long-ago team. It was the saddest thought I’d had all day.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We walked for a few minutes in silence, past a skateboard park and a theater where a movie was just letting out. Simon Robbie sauntered along with his hands in his pockets, pushing his cords even farther down his hips, his mouth pursed as he whistled some kind of tune. I almost reached into my bag for my cigarettes, but then realized Zoe wasn’t the kind of girl who smoked. It was important to stay in character no matter what events might unfold. After a few blocks he took my elbow, very gentlemanly, and tugged me down a side street packed tight with little run-down houses. There were no streetlights and the place was dark and deserted. At another time of my life, I might have been scared. But Simon Robbie didn’t look very strong; his arms were stringy and thin. I figured I could take him if I had to.

“Here we are,” he said, guiding me up the steps of a white house. In the front windows sat three or four cats, their yellow and green eyes blinking out into the night. When he opened the door I was greeted by an overwhelming smell of detergents and ammonia and room fresheners. It was like being hit over the head with a bowl of potpourri.

“Mom?” he called as we walked in, and the cats turned to look at us, crouching down in defensive positions. The living room, as you might expect, was exceptionally clean, with a couch and a television and a round rug made of rags, and everything except the rug was glistening. On the coffee table, magazines were stacked in neat, geometric rows.

A woman came in, smiling. She was younger than I’d expected, with short, neat brown hair and friendly brown eyes. I’d been picturing some kind of dragon lady, and I let out a relieved breath. Simon Robbie was still holding me by my elbow, as if I were a pet he’d led home on a leash. I stepped away and clasped my arms behind my back.

“Mom, I want you to meet Zoe,” he said.

“Hey there,” his mother said, still smiling. “Great to meet you. Have a seat. Would you like a drink, maybe some lemonade, or a glass of wine? Sit down, please, let’s get comfortable.”

I glanced at Simon Robbie, who looked like he was about to break into a sweat. I couldn’t figure out what about this woman was so terrible. I sat down across from the mother, and he sat down next to me. We were on a kind of love seat, and she was in a recliner. The cats relaxed and resumed their vigilant stares at the outer dark.

“Zoe,” his mother said, “that’s such a beautiful name.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I was named for a character in a children’s book.”

“Really? Which one?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My mother chose the name, but she died when I was young, and my father didn’t know which book it was.”

“And you never tried to find out? A good library—”

“Of course I’ve tried,” I said, cutting her off. “But no luck.” I leaned back in my seat, pleased with how things were going so far.

“You’d think that if you cared enough you wouldn’t let the issue drop,” the woman said. “About your dead mother, that is.”

I looked at Simon Robbie. I was starting to get a sense of what he was grappling with. But I had an advantage: Zoe’s mother wasn’t real. “Maybe so,” I said, smiling wistfully at the carpet, as if long-held grief was welling up inside me.

Simon Robbie put his hand on my elbow again, maybe to comfort me, or possibly himself. Sitting next to me on the couch he exuded a faint, clammy smell of nerves mixed with the residual odor of scallion pie.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some lemonade?” his mother said, and the pressure on my elbow intensified.

“Sure, why not?” I said. It was the wrong answer. The lemonade was made from a mix, using all the wrong proportions. It was thick and sludgy with particles and so sweet that one sip made my teeth call out in protest. The woman across from me smiled as I set the glass down on a coaster. I was starting to think that this was some kind of demonic ritual practiced by the two of them, that she was a sorceress who demanded her son bring home victims for her to torment. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t know how to make lemonade.

“Delicious,” I told her.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, and crossed her legs. One of the cats came over and jumped up in her lap. She didn’t pet it or anything, just let it settle itself on her thighs.

“Zoe’s an actress, Mom,” Simon Robbie said.

“How wonderful! What do you act?”

“Funny, that’s exactly what he asked,” I said, gesturing at him companionably.

“Well, it’s a logical question, isn’t it?”

I was going to explain my confusion, but decided to let it drop. “Mostly commercials,” I said.

“Oh, I love commercials!” she said. “Some of them are so clever these days. They tell a whole story in under thirty seconds. They have this wonderful”—here she snapped her fingers, looking for a word, and the cat jumped down and rubbed itself against my legs—“economy.”

“That’s true, I guess,” I said.

“Show me one.”

“What’s that?”

She gestured at me, commandingly, like a queen. “Act one out. Please?”

I glanced at Simon Robbie but he was staring at the ground. Then I reminded myself that I was still Zoe, not me, though by this stage the lines were getting blurred. I thought about my last callback, for a car dealership. They went with a taller woman in the end, my agent said; I looked too small next to the trucks.

Standing up in that clean, heavily scented room. I motioned at the love seat behind me as if it were a gleaming 4 x 4. “Come on down to the lot at Ed’s Car and Truck!” I said loudly, smiling to show as many teeth as I possibly could. “We’re practically giving away our inventory of quality preowned vehicles, with no money down and delayed interest payments for up to a year! These deals won’t last, so visit us now! At Ed’s, we’re not just your dealer, we’re your friends!”

At this point in the script, the rest of the dealership was supposed to crowd around me, although, as my agent said, they were all men and having them crowd around a young actress as she smiled by the pickup looked like the beginning of some porno movie. But I didn’t say anything about this, just stood there, still smiling and a little out of breath. Then I sat down.

“I don’t really feel it,” his mother said.

“Mom,” Simon Robbie said reproachfully.

“What? I just call them like I see them. Would you buy a car from that girl?”

“Don’t listen to her, Zoe,” he said. “That was great. Is that commercial still on?”

“Uh, no. Although I wasn’t actually pretending to be a salesperson,” I said to his mother. A high-pitched pleading tone surfaced in my voice, the same as it did whenever my agent called with bad news. “I was just advertising their Labor Day sale.”

“Those guys at Ed’s are sharks,” she said. “Don’t you feel bad working with sharks like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice still squeaky.

“I always go to Millingham Honda. They’ve done right by me.”

I stood up again. “I think I’d better be going.”

“You didn’t finish your lemonade,” the mother said.

“That’s okay.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“It’s delicious,” I said. “I’m just, uh, full, or whatever the equivalent of that for drinking is.”

“Hah!” the mother said, then looked at her son. “I can tell she’s lying. She doesn’t like lemonade. Probably goes for the hard stuff. Watch out for this one, babe. She’ll lead you down the garden path.”

“It was very nice to meet you,” I said softly, inching toward the door.

“You aren’t even really his girlfriend, are you?” she said. “You don’t have love in your eyes when you look his way.”

“I do love him!” I whispered desperately from the doorway, all conviction gone. “I love him very much!”

“You don’t even know what love is,” his mother said.

Red-faced, hands in pockets, Simon Robbie walked me outside. We ambled together down the block, until we were out of sight of those staring cats. As soon as we hit the street I’d started to cry, but Simon Robbie didn’t notice at first.

When he did, he nodded his head glumly. “She got to you too,” he said.

“She’s right, isn’t she? You wouldn’t buy a car from me either.”

“That’s the worst part. She only tells the truth. The things that other people think but never say.”

“She’s like a witch.”

“She’s my mother,” he said.

I wiped my nose with my sleeve. If we kept talking about it, I was going to be blubbering like a baby. “You don’t have to buy me dinner this week,” I said. “Okay?”

He just shrugged. I guessed he was used to getting the brush-off after these home visits. “Sorry about my mom, Zoe,” he said. “She does that to everybody.”

I left him at the corner, his yellow T-shirt glowing faintly on the dark street, and started back to my apartment. The whole world was colored in hues of truth. I saw the Chinese restaurant clearly as I passed by: a small, grimy place that wasn’t worth returning to night after night, that didn’t offer any refuge, or even serve decent food. I saw myself reflected in its windows, a girl who was all alone and scared of it, who’d deceived herself into thinking that lying and acting were the same thing. The next day, when I woke up, I talked myself out of this state and got back to the business of living. But ever since then, I’ve looked back on the night I met the truth-teller as the one moment of perfect clarity I ever achieved — a moment when I realized I had no idea what I was doing or who I thought I was. And often I ask myself: who was she, Simon Robbie’s mother? Where did she get her power to speak the merciless truth? And if I ever meet her again, will I still be found wanting?