Things You Should Know

THE CHINESE LESSON

I am walking, holding a small screen, watching the green dot move like the blip of a plane, the blink of a ship’s radar. Searching. I am on the lookout for submarines. I am an air traffic controller trying to keep everything at the right distance. I am lost.

A man steps out of the darkness onto the sidewalk. “Plane gone down?” he asks.

It is nearly night; the sky is still blue at the top, but it is dark down here.

“I was just walking the dog,” he says.

I nod. The dog is nowhere to be seen.

“You’re not from around here are you?”

“Not originally,” I say. “But we’re over on Maple now.”

“Tierney,” the man says. “John Tierney.”

“Harris,” I say. “Geordie Harris.”

“Welcome to the neighborhood. Welcome to town.”

He points to my screen; the dot seems to have stopped traveling.

“I was hoping to hell that was a toy — a remote control,” he says. “I was hoping to have some fun. Are you driving a car or floating a boat somewhere around here?”

“It’s a chip,” I say, cutting him off. “A global positioning screen. I’m looking for my mother-in-law.”

There is a scratching sound from inside a nearby privet, and the unmistakable scent of dog shit rises like smoke.

“Good boy,” Tierney says. “He doesn’t like to do his business in public. Can’t blame him — if they had me shitting outside, I’d hide in the bushes too.”

Tierney — I hear it like tyranny. Tyrant, teaser, taunting me about my tracking system, my lost mother-in-law.

“It’s not a game,” I say, looking down at the blinking green dot.

A yellow Lab pushes out of the bushes and Tierney clips the leash back onto his collar. “Let’s go, boy,” Tierney says, slapping the side of his leg. “Good luck,” he calls, pulling the dog down the road.

The cell phone clipped to my belt rings. “Who was that?” Susan asks. “Was that someone you know?”

‘It was a stranger, a total stranger, looking for a playmate.” I glance down at the screen. “She doesn’t seem to be moving now.”

“Is your antenna up?” Susan asks.

There is a pause. I hear her talking to Kate. “See Daddy. See Daddy across the street, wave to Daddy. Kate’s waving,” she tells me. I stare across the road at the black Volvo idling by the curb. With my free hand I wave back.

“That’s Daddy,” Susan says, handing Kate the phone.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” Kate asks. Her intonation, her annoyance, oddly accusatory for a three-year-old.

“I’m looking for Grandma.”

“Me too,” Kate giggles.

“Give the phone to Mommy.”

“I don’t think so,” Kate says.

“Bye, Kate.”

“What’s new?” Kate says — it’s her latest phrase.

“Bye-bye,” I say, hanging up on her.

I step off the sidewalk and dart between the houses, through the grass alley that separates one man’s yard from another’s. A sneak, a thief, a prowling trespasser, I pull my flashlight out of my jacket and flick it on. The narrow Ever-`Ready beam catches patios and planters and picnic tables by surprise. I am afraid to call out, to attract attention. Ahead of me there is a basketball court, a slide, a sandbox, and there she is, sailing through my beam like an apparition. Her black hair blowing, her hands smoothly clutching the chain-link ropes of the swing as though they were reins. I catch her in mid-flight. Legs swinging in and out. I hold the light on her — there and gone.

“I’m flying,” she says, sailing through the night.

I step in close so that she has to stop swinging. “Did you have a pleasant flight, Mrs. Ha?”

“It was nice.”

“Was there a movie?”

She eases herself off the swing and looks at me like I’m crazy. She looks down at the tracking device. “It’s no game,” Mrs. Ha says, putting her arm through mine. I lead her back through the woods. “What’s for dinner, Georgie?” she says. And I hear the invisible echo of Susan’s voice correcting — it’s not Georgie, it’s Geordie.

“What would you like, Mrs. Ha?”

In the distance, a fat man presses against a sliding glass door, looking out at us, his breath fogging the pane.

Susan is at the computer, drawing. She is making a map, a grid of the neighborhood. She is giving us something to go on in the future — coordinates.

She is an architect, everything is line, everything is order. Our house is G4. The blue light of the screen pours over her, pressing the flat planes of her face flatter still — illuminating. She hovers in an eerie blue glow.

“I called Ken,” I say.

Ken is the one who had the chip put in. He is Susan’s brother. When Mrs. Ha was sedated for a colonoscopy, Ken had the chip implanted at the bottom of her neck, above her shoulder blades. The chip company specialist came and stood by while a plastic surgeon inserted it just under the skin. Before they let her go home, they tested it by wheeling her gurney all over the hospital while Ken sat in the waiting room tracking her on the small screen.

“Why?”

“I called him about her memory. I was wondering if we should increase her medication.”

Ken is a psychopharmacologist, a specialist in the containment of feeling. He used to be a stoner and now he is a shrink. He has no affect, no emotions.

“And?” she says.

“He asked if she seemed agitated.”

“She seems perfectly happy,” Susan says.

“I know,” I say, not telling Susan what I told Ken — Susan is the one who’s agitated.

“Does she know where she is?” Ken had asked. There had been a pause, a moment where I wondered if he was asking about Susan or his mother. “I’m not always sure,” I’d said, failing to differentiate.

“Well, what did he say?” Susan wants to know.

“He said we could try upping the dose — no harm in trying. He said it’s not unusual for old people to wander off at twilight, to forget where they are. He said there are all kinds of phenomena that no one really understands.”

“You haven’t ever called my brother before, have you?” Susan asks.

“I have not, no.”

Mrs. Ha has only been with us for three weeks. Before that, she was in her own apartment in California, slowly evaporating. It was a fall that brought her to the hospital, a phone call to Ken, a series of tests, the chip implant, and then Ken put her on a plane to us — with a pair of tracking devices packed in her suitcase. When she arrived I drove her around the neighborhood, I showed her where the stores were, the library, post office, and the train station. I don’t tell Susan that now I live in fear Mrs. Ha will find the station herself, that she’ll hop on a train — and the mother hunt will become an FBI investigation. We have only been here ourselves for five months, before that we were on 106th and Riverside, and most mornings when I wake up I still have no idea where I am.

“I don’t like coming home any more,” Susan says, turning to face me, the light from the computer an iMac aura around her head. “It scares me. I never know what to expect.” She pauses. “I can’t do it.”

“You can do it,” I say, plucking a fragment from my childhood, the memory of Shari Lewis telling Lamb Chop, “You can do anything.”

There is nothing Susan likes less than to fail. She will do anything not to fail; she will not try so as not to fail.

Susan is reading. She turns the pages of her book, neatly, tightly, they almost click as they flip. “Listen to this,” she says, quoting a passage from In Cold Blood. “‘Isn’t it wonderful, Kansas is so American.’”

When I told my family about Susan, they said, “She doesn’t sound Chinese.”

“An architect named Susan from Yale who grew up in LaJolla — that’s not Chinese,” my mother said.

“But she is Chinese,” I repeated.

And later when I told Susan the story she said angrily, “I’m not Chinese, I’m American.”

Susan is minimal, flat, like Kansas. She is physically nonexistent, a plank of wood, planed, smooth. There is nothing to curl around, nothing to hold on to. Her design signature is a thin ledge, floating on a wall, a small trough wide enough to want to rest something on, too narrow to hold anything.

I drape my arm over her, it lies across her body like dead weight. Her exhalations blow the little hairs on my arm like a warm wind.

“You’re squishing me,” she says, pushing my arm away. She turns the page — click.

“When she dies do they take the chip out?” Susan asks, hooking me with her leg, pulling me back.

“I assume they just deactivate it and you give them back the tracker — it’s leased.”

“Should we have one put in Kate?”

“Let’s see how it goes with your mother. No one knows if there are side effects, weird electromagnetic pulls toward outer space from being tracked, traced as you walk along the earth.”

“Where did you find her tonight?” she asks as we are falling asleep. We sleep like plywood, pressed together — two straight lines.

“On a swing. How can you be angry with an old woman on a swing?”

“She’s my mother.”

In the morning Mrs. Ha is in the front yard. She is playing a Jimi Hendrix tape she brought with her on our boom box: she is a tree, a rock, a cloud. She is shifting slowly between poses, holding them, and then morphing into the next.

“T’ai chi,” Susan says.

“I didn’t know people really did that.”

“They all do it,” Susan says, glaring at me. “Even I can do it.” She takes a couple of poses, the first like a vulture about to attack, her fingers suddenly talons, and then she is a dragon, hissing.

When Susan and I met there was a gap between us, a neutral space. I saw it as an acknowledgment of the unbridgeable, not just male and female, but unfamiliar worlds — we couldn’t pretend to understand each other.

I look back out the window. Kate is there now, standing next to Mrs. Ha, doing her kung fu imitation chop-chops. Kate punches the air, she kicks. She has nothing on under her dress.

“Kate needs underpants,” I tell Susan, who runs, horrified, down the stairs, shooing the two of them into the backyard. For a moment the boom box is alone on the grass — Jimi Hendrix wailing “And the wind cries Mary,” at 8:28 A.M.

I see Sherika, the nanny, coming up the sidewalk. Sherika takes the train from Queens every morning. “I could never live here,” she told us the day we moved in. “I have to be around people.” Sherika is a single ebony stick almost six feet tall. She moves like a gazelle, like she is gliding toward the house. In Uganda, where she grew up, her family is part of the royal family — she may even be a princess.

I go downstairs and open the door for her. My top half is dressed in shirt and tie, my bottom half still pajamaed.

“How are you doing this morning?” she asks, her intonation so melodious, each word so evenly enunciated that just the sound of her voice is a comfort.

“I’m fine, and you?”

“Good. Very good,” she says. “Where are my ladies?”

“In the backyard, warming up.” I am still standing in the hall. “What does the name Sherika mean?” I’m thinking it’s something tribal, something mystical. I picture a tall bird with thin legs and an unusual sound.

“I have no idea,” she says. “It’s just what my auntie in Brooklyn calls me. My true name is Christine.” She smiles. “Today, I am going to take my ladies to the library and then maybe I’ll take my ladies out to lunch.”

I find my wallet on the table and hand Christine forty dollars. “Take them to lunch,” I say. “That would be nice.”

“Thank you,” she says, putting the money in her pocket.

Susan and I walk ourselves to the train, leaving the car for Sherika-Christine.

“Fall is here, clocks go back tomorrow, we can rake leaves this weekend,” I say as we head down the sidewalk. It is my fantasy to spend Saturday in the yard, raking. “We have to give it a year.”

“And then what — put her in a home?”

“I’m talking about the house — we have to give ourselves a year to get used to the house.” There is a pause, a giant black crow takes flight in front of us. “We need shades in the bedroom, the upstairs bathroom needs to be regrouted, it’s all starting to annoy me.”

“It can’t be perfect.”

“Why not?”

Sitting next to Susan on the train, I feel like I’m a foreigner, not just a person from another country but a person from another planet, a person without customs, ways of being, a person who has blank spots rather than bad habits. I am thinking about Susan, about what it means to be married to someone I know nothing about.

“It’s exhausting,” I say, “all this back and forth.”

“It’s eighteen minutes longer than coming down from 106th Street.”

“It feels farther.”

“It is farther,” she says, “but you’re moving faster.” She turns the page.

“Do you ever wonder what I’m thinking?”

“I know what you’re thinking, you confess every thought.”

“Not every thought.”

“Ninety-nine percent,” she says.

“Does that bother you?”

“No,” she says. “Everything is not so important, everything is not earth-shattering, despite what you think.”

I am silenced.

We arrive at Grand Central. Susan puts her book in her bag and is off the train. “Call me,” I say. Every morning when we separate there is a moment when I think I will never see her again. She disappears into the crowd, and I think that’s it, it’s over, that’s all there was.

Twenty minutes later, I call her at the office—“Just making sure you got there OK.”

“I’m here,” she says.

“I want something,” I confess.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “More. I want more of something.”

Connection, I am thinking. I want connection.

“You want something I don’t have,” she says.

I am at my desk, drifting, remembering the summer my parents divorced and my bar mitzvah was canceled due to lack of interest on all sides.

“I just can’t imagine doing it,” my mother said. “I can’t imagine doing anything with your father, can you? I think it would be very uncomfortable.”

My father gave me $5,000 to “make up the difference,” then asked, “Is that enough?” I spent my thirteenth birthday with him in a New York hotel room, eating ice-cream cake from 31 Flavors with a woman whose name my father couldn’t remember. “Tell my friend about school, tell my friend what you do for fun, tell my friend all about yourself,” he kept saying, and all I wanted to do was scream — What the fuck is your friend’s name?

On Memorial Day weekend, my mother married her “friend,” Howard, and took off on an eight-week second honeymoon, and I was sent to my father’s new townhouse condo in Philadelphia.

There was a small room for me, made out of what had been a walk-in closet. My father was taking cooking lessons, learning a thousand and one things to do with a wok. On different days, different women would come for dinner. “I’m living the good life,” my father would tell me. “I’m getting all I want.” I would eat dinner with my father and his date and then excuse myself and hide in my closet.

I spent my summer at the pool, living entirely in the water, with goggles, with fins. I fell in love with the bottom of the pool, a silky sky-blue, a slippery second skin. I spent days walking up and down, trying to figure the exact point where I could still have my feet on the ground and my head above water.

“It’s vinyl,” I heard the lifeguard tell someone.

The extreme stillness of the sky, the hot, oxygenless air, the water strong like bleach, was blinding, sterile, intoxicating, perfect.

The only other person who came to the pool regularly was a girl who had just been in the nuthouse for not eating. Deformedly thin, she would slather herself with lotion and lie out and bake. She was only allowed to swim one hour a day, and at noon her mother would carry out a tray and she had to eat everything on it—“or else I’m taking you back,” her mother would say.

“Don’t stand over me. Don’t treat me like a baby.”

“Don’t act like a baby.”

And then the mother would look at me. “Would you like half a sandwich?”

I’d nod and she’d give me half a sandwich, which I’d eat still standing in the water, goggles on, feet touching the bottom.

“See,” the mother would say. “He eats. And not only does he eat, he doesn’t make crumbs.”

“He’s in the water,” the girl would say.

In the evening I would crawl into my cave and read postcards from my mother—Venice is everything I thought it would be, France is stunning, London theater is so much better than Broadway. Thinking of you, hoping you’re having a fantastic summer. I am imagining you swimming across America. Love Mom.

“We’re still your parents, we’re just not together,” became the new refrain.

Later, when I started to date, when I would go to girls’ houses and their mothers and fathers would ask, “What do your parents do?” I’d say, “They’re divorced,” as though it were a full-time job. They’d look at me, instantly dismissive, as though I too was doomed to divorce, as though domestic instability was genetically passed down.

And then, later still, there were families I fell in love with. I remember sitting at the Segals’ dining room table, happily slurping chicken soup, looking up at Cindy Segal, who stood above me, bread basket in hand, glaring at me in disgust. “You’re just another one of them,” she said, dropping the bread, unceremoniously dumping me. Too stunned to swallow, I felt soup dribble down my chin.

“Don’t go,” Mrs. Segal said, as Cindy slammed upstairs to her room. After that, the Segals would sometimes call me. “Cindy’s not going to be here,” they’d say, “come visit.” I went a couple of times and then Cindy joined a cult and never spoke to any of us again.

My mother used to say, marry someone familiar, marry someone you have something in common with. The flatness of Susan, the hollow, the absence of some unnameable something — was familiar. The sensation that she was on the outside, waiting to be invited in, was something we had in common.

Never did Susan ask for an accounting of my past, never did she pull back and say—“You’re not going to hurt me, are you? You don’t have any weird diseases, do you? You’re not married, right?”

Susan looked at me once, squarely, evenly, and said, “Nice tie,” and that was it.

In the morning, after our first night together, she rearranged my furniture. Everything immediately looked better.

It is late in the afternoon; I have spent the day lost in thought. There are contracts spread across my desk waiting for my review. Outside, it is getting dark. I leave and instinctively walk uptown. All day I have been thinking about the house, about Mrs. Ha, and now I am heading toward our old apartment as though it were all a dream. I am walking, looking forward to seeing the grocer on the corner, to riding up in the elevator with Willy, the elevator man, to smelling the neighbors’ dinner cooking. I am thinking that once these things happen, I will feel better, returned to myself. I go three blocks before I catch myself and realize that I am moving in the wrong direction. I belong in Larchmont — Larchmont like Loch Ness. I hurry toward the station. Stepping onto the train, I have the feeling I am leaving something behind. I check my messages — Susan has left word, something about a client, something about something falling, something about it all being her fault, something about staying late. “I don’t know when,” she says, and then we are in a tunnel and the signal is lost.

I am going home. I imagine arriving at the house and having Sherika tell me Mrs. Ha is gone again. I picture changing into hunting clothes, a red-and-black wool jacket, an orange vest, a special hat, and going in search of her, carrying some kind of wooden whistle I have carved myself — a mother-in-law call. I imagine Mrs. Ha hearing the rolling rattle of my call Mrs. Haa…Mrs. Haaa Haa…Mrs. Ha Ha Ha…Mrs. Haaaaaahhhh—it ends in an upswing. She is roused from her dream state, her head tilts toward the sound of my whistle, and she is summoned home as mystically as she was called away.

I phone Sherika and ask — can she stay late, can she keep an extra eye on Mrs. Ha. I take a taxi from the train — there is the odd suburban phenomenon of the shared cab, strangers piling in, stuffing themselves into the back of the sedan, briefcases held on laps like shields, and then each calls out his address and we are off on a madcap ride, the driver tearing down the streets, whipping around corners, depositing us at our doorsteps for seven dollars a head.

Home. The sky is five minutes from dark, the floodlights are already on in the backyard. Kate and Mrs. Ha are down in the dirt, squatting, elbows resting on thighs, buttocks dropped down, positioned as if about to shit.

“Mrs. Ha, what are you doing?”

“I am thinking, Georgie. And I am resting.”

There is something frightening about it — Kate imitating Mrs. Ha, grotesque in her gestures, rubber-limbed like a circus clown, contorting herself for attention, more alive than I will ever be. Her freedom, her full expression terrifying me — I am torn between interrupting and simply watching her be.

“We are planting a garden,” Sherika says, straightening up, extending to her full six feet. “After lunch I took them to the nursery. We are putting in bulbs for spring.”

“Tulips,” Kate says.

Sherika drops sixty-nine cents of change into my hand and somehow I feel guilty, like I should have left her a hundred dollars or my credit card.

“What a good idea,” I say.

“We are just finishing up. Come on, ladies, let’s go inside and wash our hands.”

I follow them into the kitchen. They wash their hands and then look at me, as though I should have something in mind, a plan for what happens next.

“Let’s go for a ride,” I say, unable to bear the anxiety of staying home. Not knowing where else to go, I drive them to the supermarket. Sherika takes Mrs. Ha and I have Kate and we go up and down the aisles, filling the cart.

“Are you the apple of your daddy’s eye?” A clerk in the produce section pulls Kate’s hair and then looks at me. “There’s lots of these Chinese babies now, nobody wants them so they give them away. My wife’s sister adopted one — otherwise they drown ’em like kittens. You don’t want to be drowned, do you, sweetheart,” he says, looking at Kate again.

“She’s not adopted. She’s mine.”

“Oh sorry,” the guy says, flustered as though he’d said something even more insulting than what he actually said. “I’m really sorry.” He backs away.

Sorry about what? I look at Kate. Her head is too big. Her skin is an odd jaundicy yellow and now she’s playing some weird game with the cantaloupes, banging them against the floor. It occurs to me that the guy thought there was something wrong with her.

“Did you find everything you were looking for?” Sherika asks as we’re wheeling up the frozen foods toward the checkout.

“I’m finished.”

In a strip mall across the street, I notice an Asian grocery store. When the light changes, I pull in.

“Ah,” Sherika says, “look at that.”

It is small, dingy, and a little otherworldly. There are wire racks for shelves, and things floating in tubs filled with melting ice — none of it incredibly clean. Mrs. Ha scurries around collecting tins of spices, bottles of vinegar. She seems happy, like she has recovered herself, she is chatting with the man behind the counter.

She shows me fresh vegetables: water chestnuts, shanghai cabbage, “Bau dau gok,” she says, — “snake bean.” Lotus leaves, brown slab sugar, and now she is in the freezer case, handing me a bag that says FROZEN FISH BALLS. She hands me others with writing in Chinese. “Fatt choy?” she asks the man behind the counter, and he points toward it.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Black moss,” she says.

“What is it really?” I ask.

She shrugs.

I want Mrs. Ha to feel comfortable. If pressed seaweed is to her what mashed potatoes are to me, I want her to have ten packages. Why not? I start picking things off the shelf and offering them to her.

She shakes her head and continues shopping.

The man behind the counter says something and she laughs; I am sure it is about me. I hear something about three Georges, about water, and then a lot of clucking from Mrs. Ha. He talks quickly, flipping back and forth from Chinese to broken English. She answers — her speech, suddenly rhythmic, her accent shifting into the pure diphthong, the oo long, an ancient incantation.

The man takes a small beautiful box out from a shelf below the counter. Mrs. Ha makes a soft cooing sound before he opens it. “Bird’s nest,” he says. “Very good quality.”

“What is bird’s nest?”

The man blows spit bubbles at me. He drools intentionally and then sucks his saliva back in. “The spit of a swift,” he says, flapping his arms.

Mrs. Ha checks her pockets for money, finds nothing, and looks at me as if to ask, Can we get it?

“Sure, why not?”

“I have never had so much home in a long time,” she says.

“Come again soon,” the man says, as we are leaving. “Play bingo.”

I carry two shopping bags out to the car, imagining Mrs. Ha is going to start dating this man — I picture tracking twin positioning chips, two dots, one on top of the other. I make a mental note to ask Susan — is Mrs. Ha allowed to date?

In the car on the way home Mrs. Ha asks, “Do you like Sony? Mr. Sony make the tape recorder and Mr. Nixon make friends with the Chinese. Then Mr. Nixon erase and now Mr. Sony die, I read in your New York Times.” She laughs. “Stupid old men.”

Kate is on the floor in front of the television. Mrs. Ha is in the kitchen making soup. Sherika takes the car to the train station; she will drop it off and go home to Queens, Susan will pick it up and come home to us.

“What’s that smell?” Susan says when she comes in the door.

“Your mother is making soup.”

“It’s so weirdly familiar, I thought I was hallucinating.”

“Everything OK?” I am looking at her, trying to tell if she is lying, if there’s more to the story or not.

“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s fine. He got hysterical, a little piece of the wall came down — it wasn’t my fault. I was so upset. I thought I had done something wrong.”

I don’t tell Susan that I was worried she might not come back. I don’t tell her that I took everyone to the supermarket because the idea of staying alone in the house with the three of them inexplicably terrified me.

“Dinner is ready,” Mrs. Ha says.

“It looks delicious.” I stare into my bowl. There are white things and black things floating in the soup — nothing recognizable. I am starving. I assume it is mushrooms.

“Hot,” Kate says, her face over the bowl, blowing steam like a dragon.

Susan stares speechless at her bowl.

The broth is rich, succulent. I slurp. It is skin, skin and bones, small bones, soft, like little fingers, melting in the mouth.

I look at Susan. “Feet?” I ask in Latin. Susan nods.

I don’t want to say anything more. I don’t want to throw Kate off — she is eating, not noticing. And Mrs. Ha is clearly enjoying herself.

“Georgie took me shopping,” Mrs. Ha says.

“I had a late lunch.” Susan carries her bowl into the kitchen.

Later, I overhear her on the phone with her brother, whispering. “She tried to poison me, she made chicken-feet soup.”

I pick up the extension in the kitchen and hope neither of them notices the click.

“Where did she get the feet?”

“I think he’s helping her.”

“Who?”

“Geordie.”

“Why?”

“He hates me.”

I hang up.

When I was young my mother made cupcakes for my birthday and brought them to school. The teacher had us all write her thank-you notes in thick pencil on wide-lined paper. Dear Mrs. Harris, thank you for the delicious cupcakes. We enjoyed them very much. Sincerely, Geordie.

“Dear Mrs. Harris, Sincerely Geordie, what kind of letter is that to send a mother?” She still talks about how funny it was. When she telephones and I answer she says, “It’s Mrs. Harris, your mother.”

We are in bed. Susan is reading. I look over her shoulder, page 297 of In Cold Blood, a description of Perry Smith, one of the murderers. “He seems to have grown up without direction, without love.”

“I’m lonely,” I tell her.

“Read something,” she says, turning the page.

I go downstairs and fix a bowl of ice cream for Susan.

“I’m not your enemy,” I tell her when the ice cream is gone, when I have helped her finish it, when I am licking the bowl.

“I don’t know that,” she says, taking the bowl away from me and putting it on the floor. “You act like you’re on her side.”

“And what side is that?”

“The side of the dead, of things past.”

“Oh, please,” I say, and yet there is something in what Susan is saying; I am on the side of things lost, I am in the past, remembering. “You’re scaring me,” I say. “You’re turning into some weird minimalist monster from hell.”

“This is me,” Susan says. “This is my life. You’re intruding.”

“This is our family,” I say, horrified.

“I can’t be Chinese,” Susan tells me. “I’ve spent my whole life trying not to be Chinese.”

“Kate is half Chinese and she likes it,” I say, trying to make Susan feel better.

“I don’t like that half of Kate,” Susan says.

Something summons me from my sleep. I listen — on alert, heart racing. The extreme silence of night is blasting full volume. Moon pours into the room like a gigantic night light. Outside, the trees are still — it is haunting, romantic, deeply autumnal. Night.

And there it is, far away, catching me, a kind of bleating, a baleful wail.

I go down the hall, each step amplified, the quieter I try to go the louder I become.

I check Kate — she is fast asleep.

It becomes more of a moan — deep, inconsolable, hollow. There is no echo, each beatified bellow is here and then gone, evaporating into the night.

Downstairs, Mrs. Ha is crouched in the corner of the living room, like a new end table. She is next to the sofa, squatting, her hands at her ears, crying. She is naked.

“Mrs. Ha?”

She doesn’t answer.

Her cry, heartbreaking, definitive, filled with horror, with grief, with fear, comes from someplace far away, from somewhere long ago.

I touch her shoulder. “It’s Geordie. Is there something I can do? Are you all right?”

I step on the foot switch for the lamp; the halogen torch floods the room. Susan’s Corbusier chairs sit bolt upright — tight black leather boxes, a Prouve table from France lies flat, waiting, the modernist edge, dissonant, vibrating against the Tudor, the stone, the old casement windows, and Mrs. Ha, my Chinese mother-in-law, sobbing at my feet. I turn the light off.

“Mrs. Ha?” I lift her up, I put my hands under her arms and pull. She is compact like a panda, she is made of heavy metal. Her skin is at once papery thin and thick like hide. She clings to me, digging in.

I carry her back to her bed. She cries. I find her nightgown and slip it over her head. When she cries, her mouth drops open, her lips roll back, her chin tilts up and her teeth and jaws flash, like a horse’s head. It is as though someone has just told her the most horrible thing; her face contorts. Her expression is like an anthropological find — at eighty-nine she is a living skeleton.

I touch her hair.

“I want to go home,” she wails.

“You are home.”

“I want to go home,” she repeats.

I sit on the edge of her bed, I put my arms around her. “Maybe it was the soup, maybe the dinner didn’t agree with you.”

“No,” she says, “I always have the soup. It is not the soup that does not agree with me, it is me that does not agree with me.” She stops crying. “They are going to flood my home, I read it in the New York Times, they build the three gorges, the dam, and everything goes underwater.”

“I don’t know who they are,” I say.

“You are who they are,” she says. I don’t know what she is talking about.

Mrs. Ha reaches to scratch her back, between her shoulder blades. “There is something there,” she says. “I just can’t reach it.”

I imagine the little green blip on the tracking device, wobbling. “It’s OK. Everything is all right now.”

“You have no idea,” she tells me as she is drifting off. “I am an old woman but I am not stupid.”

And when she is asleep, I go back to bed. I am drenched in sweat. Susan turns toward me. “Everything all right?”

“Mrs. Ha was crying.”

“Don’t call her Mrs. Ha.”

I take off my shirt, thinking I must smell like Mrs. Ha. I smell like Mrs. Ha and sweat and fear. “What would you like me to call her — Ma Ha?”

“She has a name,” Susan says angrily. “Call her Lillian.”

I cannot sleep. I am thinking we have to take Mrs. Ha home. I am imagining a family trip reuniting Mrs. Ha with her country, Susan with her roots, Kate with her ancestry. I am thinking that I need to know more. I once read a story in a travel magazine about a man who went on a bike ride in China. I pictured a long open road, a rural landscape. In the story the man falls off his bike, breaks his hip, and lies on the side of the road until he realizes no help is going to come, and then he fashions his broken bike into a cane, raises himself up, and hobbles back to town.