This Old Man Read online

  “Your mother’s so cute. Doesn’t your father know she speaks English?”

  “Of course he knows, but he doesn’t know. That way everyone is happy. He speaks English also. They both went to Galileo High School.”

  “I was listening to you talk Chinese, and the only thing I could make out clearly through your father’s clenched teeth was ‘Bak le, bak le.’ What did your father mean? I was sure he was talking about me.”

  Wing looked embarrassed as he replied, “Bak le, bak le means so white, so white.”

  “I see.”

  Hackey had parents, almost like a normal person. His father died when Hackey was about twenty, and left Mrs. Barnes all alone. She got to be a little too much for Hackey, but I got along with her just fine. She was from Iowa, transplanted to northern California, where she never quite fit in. It seemed like she ought to be on a farm, fixing biscuits and gravy for breakfast for the field hands. Anyway, I only bring it up because Mrs. Barnes taught me everything I know about proper manners. For instance, when someone has you over, you turn around before the month’s out and have him to your place. That’s the end of that, neat and shut, unless you get to be good friends, and then nobody counts who goes to whose house how many times.

  So, since Wing had introduced me to his parents, it was time for me to reciprocate. I couldn’t exactly take Wing home to meet Mom and Dad, and in fact my mother never came around to Anza House, for security reasons. But the least I could do was have him over, if I could only explain to him about living in this group-house setup.

  Elizabeth made it easy. She planned an open house for us, to take place one Sunday afternoon. Wing was at the top of my list of guests, followed by Mr. Saxe, who didn’t count because he was on two other girls’ lists, and who else was there? Not my mother. Certainly not Hackey. I would have invited Mrs. Barnes, though. She would have liked the lace tablecloth in the dining room, and the pink punch and homemade cookies. I wrote her an invitation anyway, and kept the stamped envelope under my pillow for a week, until it was too wrinkled and sweaty to mail, even if she hadn’t been dead.

  Then I wrote an invitation to Old Man.

  Dear Mr. Kwang,

  It would be my pleasure to have you at our open house on Sunday afternoon, from 2:00 to 5:00. Your grandson Wing will be here also. We’re baking Chinese almond cookies with you in mind, so I hope you can make it.

  Sincerely yours,

  Greta

  (The one outside the door)

  I knew very well that Old Man couldn’t come, so I treated myself to this delicious fantasy:

  Old Man is being borne on a sedan chair by four Chinese wearing coolie hats. His hands are tucked into their opposite sleeves, the sleeves of a plum brocade gown with a hundred buttons down the right side. He sits erect and still, never leaning against the satin pillow provided for him in the sedan. He has a thin gray beard and, in perfect balance, a black braid, a queue, lies down the back of his gown. He looks like the Emperor of China being carried up Twenty-third Avenue. Now he’s rounding the corner at Anza and Twenty-third. People line the streets to watch the procession, whispering reverently to one another, “The Emperor is going to Anza House. He’s a guest of the Janssen girl.” The bearers bring him up the stairs to our house. Pammy throws the door open. All the girls drop to their knees and kow-tow. But I don’t. I stand proudly at the door and wait for him to greet me. He smiles then and shows me a toothless mouth as pink as cotton candy. I hand him an almond cookie and a cup of tea.

  I filed Old Man’s invitation with Mrs. Barnes’s—down the incinerator chute.

  “You’re on my list,” I told Mr. Saxe.

  “And you can count on me.”

  “Will you be bringing Mrs. Saxe?”

  “Not this time,” he said evasively. I felt pretty sure he’d never bring her. I couldn’t figure out whether he was hiding us from her, or her from us. “Greta, I see by my calendar that it’s nearly April. You need a summer job. You’re sixteen so there’s no problem with a work permit. You’ll need money as well as something to occupy you during the long summer months. Besides that, Elizabeth will go nuts if you girls don’t get jobs.”

  By a job I assumed he meant respectable work. I could have had the other kind a year before, courtesy of Hackey Barnes.

  “So you’ve got to start pounding the pavement after school. Get a head start on all the other kids.”

  “Could we talk about Old Man?”

  “Oh, Greta,” he sighed, “you don’t understand the importance of finding—”

  “His voice is so weak that it worries me. It’s like a bird that’s fallen from the nest. I can’t understand what Old Man says, of course, and Wing hardly ever translates afterward. In fact, the two of them don’t talk all that much themselves.”

  “Greta, let’s discuss the job situation.”

  “Once Wing told Old Man that I was there, outside his door. It seemed to make him very nervous, Wing said. I guess he was afraid I’d see him in his nightgown. Big deal.”

  “The hour is flying by, and we’ve got to confront the issue of summer employment.”

  “He asked Wing if I was Chinese, and Wing said I was. That eased Old Man a little.”

  “If you don’t find a job, Greta, you’ll have too much time on your hands, and no spending money.”

  “He hardly eats anything anymore. Wing brought him black seaweed gelatin in syrup, which used to be Old Man’s favorite dessert, but he wouldn’t touch it.”

  “Greta!”

  “Are you trying to tell me our time is up?”

  Mr. Saxe groaned, as if I were an incorrigible child. I was about to apologize for wasting his time. But what was I there for? In fact, what was I there for?

  4

  For those who are interested, here are highlights of the Open House.

  Sylvia’s father went overboard and sent enough flowers to make us look like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Darlene is allergic to flowers, so all but the most modest centerpiece of daisies and blue cornflowers were banished to Elizabeth’s bedroom. Darlene sneezed through lunch anyway, whipping her face with her silver hoop earrings.

  Jo didn’t look bad. She tamed her ringlets into a circle at the top of her head, held together by a yellow ribbon. Jo, as she told us at least twice a day, was a disciple of Mother Nature, and despite Mother N’s TV image in margarine commercials, the woman normally ran around stark naked. How could Jo do less? But Elizabeth insisted that she be decent for the Open House, so Jo wore a yellow tent dress that covered everything. It was obvious though, especially when a cold breeze hit her, that she hadn’t gotten so carried away as to wear underwear. Still, we were grateful for whatever she could do.

  Not one of us was what you’d call uptown, in the fashion department. Pammy’s jumper was about five inches shorter in the front than in the back, and she’d begun to fold her hands over the shelf of her belly, like the other “pre-mothers” we saw in the clinic waiting room. I don’t mind telling you, some of those women could have played double solitaire on the tables of their bellies. But Pammy wasn’t that huge. She was only at what Jo called the “pleasantly grotesque stage.”

  Darlene said she’d stay upstairs during the Open House. Elizabeth tried to talk her out of that, but Darlene was immovable. We took cookies and punch up to her, and noticed her peeking over the railing once or twice, but since no one on her guest list showed up, she was probably better off upstairs.

  Jo carried the punch bowl into the dining room, while Elizabeth followed with a rag to mop up the slosh. Finally, the first guests arrived, Sylvia’s parents. Sylvia ran into her father’s arms, and all three of them together looked like the kind of airport reunion where the brother from Albania meets his American family for the first time in fifty-six years.

  Sylvia’s parents fussed over her: straightened her blouse, wiped a fleck off her shoulder, and brushed her hair back off her face, for the good of her skin, her mother said. They told her she looked simply lovely, glow
ing, and wondered if she’d been using her Purpose Soap faithfully, morning and night. “You aren’t wearing your watch,” her father observed. “Has your brand new diamond watch already broken?” “We’ve missed talking to you,” her mother said, craning her neck to look into the entrance hall. “Oh, there’s the phone. I was beginning to wonder if it had been taken out.” “Where are the flowers?” her father asked.

  I watched Sylvia shrink and shrivel into her clothes. Elizabeth came into the parlor then and herded Sylvia’s parents right into the dining room. “Come see how Sylvia’s folded the napkins. Don’t they look like rose petals?” Her mother said she had no idea Sylvia possessed such a talent.

  The doorbell kept ringing, as more and more of our people came. There were two women and a man from Elizabeth’s social work classes. They smiled a lot and seemed to be making mental notes. Maybe they were comparing our house with other social work placements. Next came members of the Board of Directors, who patted our heads like we were their grandchildren. They were followed by Jo’s father, who looked terribly uneasy in a splashy plaid sport coat and jeans.

  Mr. Saxe arrived, wearing too many shades of blue. “Well, how are my girls?” he asked, as if we were his junior varsity volleyball team. He sampled a lot of cookies and kept glancing at his watch.

  People left, and others came. I thought Wing had forgotten, when finally he was at the door. He was stuffed into his suit. The collar was too tight on his shirt, which looked like last year’s fit. After the brisk walk from the bus stop, his cheeks were apple red. “Boy, there are a lot of people here,” he said.

  “More than we expected. But we have enough cookies.”

  “Are your parents here?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “I’ve never been in a place like this before. Where does everyone sleep?”

  I motioned upstairs. “There aren’t as many of us living here as there are in your own family.”

  “Oh, well.” He rubbed his hands together and looked more uncomfortable than Jo’s father. I gave him a plate heaped with cookies and a plastic cup of pink punch. He systematically worked his way through the mound of cookies. I chewed a Mexican wedding cookie to death, licking powdered sugar from around my lips, so I wouldn’t have to talk.

  The moment I dreaded was upon us. Mr. Saxe came over. “You must be Wing,” he said.

  Wing seemed surprised, but I didn’t give him a chance to respond. “Wing, this is—” Then I wasn’t sure how to introduce Mr. Saxe. In Wing’s world, people didn’t have social workers. “This is sort of an older friend of mine. His name is Saxe.”

  Wing balanced his punch cup on top of his cookies to shake hands. “How do you do, Saxe?” I couldn’t help but laugh, even while I was praying that Mr. Saxe wouldn’t go into his Grand Inquisitor routine.

  I dragged Wing off to the kitchen, where Elizabeth was trying to unmold a giant ice ring studded with strawberries and lime slices.

  “Wing!” she cried, licking her fingers to warm them. “How nice to meet you. How’s your grandfather?”

  “He’s okay, thank you.”

  Elizabeth tossed the ice ring from hand to hand. “This thing is cold. Will you two excuse me so I can plop it into the punch bowl?”

  Then we were alone for a few awkward minutes. I hadn’t realized what a difference it would make not to have Old Man’s basket there between us. “If you’d like to go, it’s all right with me. I have to help clean up pretty soon, anyway.”

  “It’s almost time for Old Man’s dinner.” Wing put his plate down on the counter, too eagerly, I thought, and backed toward the door. “Thank you for inviting me, Greta.”

  “Please come back,” I called to him as he started down the front stairs. It was the polite thing to say, for this polite Sunday Open House, and then Mrs. Barnes’s voice came to me, and I heard myself mimicking her: “Don’t be a stranger, hear?”

  Once Wing and Mr. Saxe were gone, I relaxed a lot more and had a good look at Randy, Pammy’s boyfriend. Mind you, he was no Mr. America. He was a skinny sixteen-year-old kid with a skin problem and a knack for fixing things like hair dryers and hand mixers. He spent most of the Open House tinkering with the circuits behind our TV. Every so often Pammy coaxed him out with some cookies, and then he seemed overwhelmed by her ripening, unsure where he could touch her. He kept a belly’s width between them at all times and treated her like she was a parishioner, and he was the village priest.

  Considering everything—that is, it wasn’t one of those freak accidents you read about in Ann Landers, where the girl sits on the boy’s lap, and lo and behold, nine months later there’s a baby—considering everything, Randy and Pammy seemed very innocent. I kept looking at Randy popping chocolate chip cookies, shoveling the crumbs into his mouth with the back of his hand, and all I could think was that the guy must have taken a vow of celibacy after Pammy turned up pregnant. That would explain why he ate so much and broke out so much.

  Enough of the Open House. I’d rather talk about Pammy. She had the thinnest, paper-white skin I ever saw. It was so white that it was almost blue, like skim milk. Besides that, she was allergic to make-up, so she just wore pale pink lip gloss. Her tiny fingers with perfect half moon nails and the limp black bangs that hung over her eyes made her look like a storybook doll, only pregnant.

  “How did you let this happen to you?” I asked her while we practiced her exercises on the living-room floor one afternoon. It amazed me how she could tense one leg and let the other one go limp, then switch. When I was tense, it was head to toe. When I was relaxed, it was inside and out, but that wasn’t too often. Here was Pammy mastering control over her muscles to get her through labor and delivery. And Hackey thought chopsticks were awesome?

  “Me and Randy,” she said, counting ten beats with nods of her head, “didn’t think we’d get in trouble just once. He’s real sorry.” She sat up, with the bottoms of her feet together, and slammed her knees flat against the floor: five times, rest, five more times.

  “What does that do?” I asked. I tried it, but couldn’t do it without pulling groin muscles that I didn’t know girls came with.

  “It strengthens the pelvic floor.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “His parents are real nice to me. They’re gonna take the baby. When me and Randy get married some day, we can have him back. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know anything about these things.”

  “I worry about what if he doesn’t want to live with us after we’re married.” Now she was on her hands and knees, doing something called the pelvic rock.

  “You might not ever marry Randy.”

  Pammy stopped rocking and sat back on her feet. “Not marry him?”

  “Sure. Maybe you’ll meet somebody else when you’re twenty-five. Maybe some guy from Argentina or Cleveland, you never know.”

  She gave it a thought, then shook her head. “We’re just right for each other, in the whole world,” Pammy said, “and that’s that.” Now she lay on her back with the huge mound of her belly pointing up and around the living room. “Just not for a coupla years, that’s all.”

  The fate of the baby was out of her hands. Pammy had no parents that I knew of. She’d lived in a foster home for six years, but when she turned up pregnant at fifteen, her foster parents had sent her back. They couldn’t cope with her “condition,” they said. She would be welcome back after the baby was gone.

  Randy’s parents, both teachers, took it all very well. They were already repainting the furniture Randy had outgrown not so long ago.

  “If you knew Mr. and Mrs. Stemmons, you’d know it’s the best thing for the baby,” Pammy said. “Until we’re ready for him.”

  Darlene, the allergic one, came in and slammed the front door. She flew by us and up the stairs, without a word. Well, she was never very talkative at the best of times, but we knew something was wrong. By dinner the word was out: Darlene’s social worker was arranging for her to go to a foster home the day a
fter Easter. We didn’t take the news well. Darlene was the first limb to be cut from the tree, at least since I’d come to Anza House. Not that we liked her much; is a tree crazy about all its limbs? Still, it hurts to have one chopped off.

  Easter dinner was a glum affair. Jo and Sylvia had gone home for the holiday, and it was just Elizabeth, Pammy, Darlene, and me around the big dining-room table. Elizabeth asked for a blessing, and I said, “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat,” but nobody felt much like eating. Darlene made tracks of mashed potatoes around her plate and didn’t say much, while Elizabeth tried too hard to tickle us. Finally Pammy brought the subject up.

  “The thing is,” she said sadly, glancing from one of us to another, “Darlene won’t be here when the baby comes.”

  “You think I care about that?” Darlene said, struggling with her tears.

  “Of course you do,” cooed Elizabeth. “Now, everybody have a piece of my cheesecake. I’m practically famous for my cheesecake all over San Francisco.” Darlene shook her head no, and Pammy said it wasn’t good for the baby, and besides she was getting weighed in on Monday, so I volunteered to eat for two, three, any number, just so Elizabeth wouldn’t get that sunken disappointment in her eyes.

  There was a holiday dinner once, on Thanksgiving, not Easter, when I felt Hackey’s mother’s eyes searching me just that way …

  It’s pumpkin chiffon pie, and I can’t believe how light and fluffy it is, like sweet creamy tan clouds. Mrs. Barnes settles back in her chair with warm satisfaction, until her eyes fall on Hackey.

  “Do you like the pie, Son?”

  “Yeah, it’s great.”

  “Is it as good as you remember from when you were a boy?”

  “About the same.”

  My mother nudges Hackey into more enthusiastic raves. They are almost like husband and wife at this point, so she is free to nag him.