The Bonesetter's Daughter 作者：谭恩美 （美国）

She knew her mother was sneaking looks at what she had written, because one day she asked Ruth, "Why you like this song Turn, Turn, Turn? Just cause someone else like?" Another time her mother sniffed and said, "Why smell like cigarette?" Ruth had just written about going to Haight-Ashbury with friends and meeting some hippies in the park who offered them a smoke. Ruth took some glee in her mothers thinking it was cigarettes they were smoking and not hashish. After that interrogation, she hid the diary in the bottom of her closet, between her mattresses, behind her dresser. But her mother always managed to find it, at least that was what Ruth figured, on the basis of what she was next forbidden to do: "No more go beach after school." "No more see this Lisa girl." "Why you so boy-crazy?" If she accused her mother of reading her diary, LuLing would become evasive, never admitting that she had done so, while also saying, "A daughter should have no secrets from a mother." Ruth did not want to censor her writing, so she started recording it in a combination of pig Latin, Spanish, and multisyllabic words that she knew her mother would not understand. "Aquatic amusements of the silica paniculate variety," was her reference to the beach at Lands End.

Sally, always the social one, made a loud entrance, shouting names and squealing as her husband and two boys followed. She was an aeronautical engineer, who traveled widely as an expert witness for law firms, plaintiff attorneys only. She inspected records and sites of airplane disasters, mostly small craft. Always a talker, she was perky and outgoing, not intimidated by anyone or any new adventure. Her husband, George, was a violinist with the San Francisco Symphony, quiet but happy to take the lead whenever Sally fed him a line. "George, tell them about the dog that ran onstage at Stern Grove and peed on the microphone and shorted out the entire sound system." Then George would repeat exactly what Sally had just said.

The next morning, Art left for Hawaii. The girls were at Miriams for the week, and though Ruth was accustomed to working alone during the day, she felt empty and anxious. Soon after she settled in at her desk, Gideon called to say that the Internet Spirituality author had fired her— fired, a first in her career. Although she had finished his book earlier than scheduled, he had not liked what she had written. "Im as pissed as you are," Gideon said. And Ruth knew she should be outraged, maybe even humiliated, but in fact, she was relieved. One less thing to think about. "Ill try to do damage control with the contract and HarperSan Francisco," Gideon went on, "but I may also need for you to document your time spent and outline why his complaints were not in keeping with reality. . . . Hello? Ruth, are you still there?"

"This my mother." LuLings voice sounded strangled. "See? I make copy for you." She pulled out a wax-paper sleeve with a duplicate of the photograph.

"I think Im going to throw up."

"He states his name, birthdate, and Social Security number. And then I beat him up until he tells me."

"Nothing," Ruth mumbled. "Im just a little tired, I guess."

LuLing snorted. "GaoLing not my sister!"

"Anyway, you already see this Ozzie show."

"So where are they going to sit? At another table?"

Later that afternoon, Ruth heard the sounds of the Pontiac pulling into the driveway. She peeked out the window. Lance, grim-faced, carried out some boxes, two suitcases, and a cat from the cottage. Then Dottie came out, dabbing her nose with a tissue. She and Lance never looked at each other. And then they were gone. An hour later, the Pontiac returned, but only Lance got out. What had Dottie told Lance? Why did Dottie have to move out? Would Lance now march up to their door and tell her mother what Ruth had done and demand that they move out that same day as well? Lance hated her, Ruth was sure of that. She had thought being pregnant was the worst thing that could have happened to her. But this was far worse.

Without more disagreement, Ruth made the last-minute changes: Called the restaurant to change the head count. Revised theseating plan. Ordered more dishes for two adults and two children who didnt like Chinese food all that much. She suspected that Fias and Dorys fussiness over unfamiliar food came from their mother.

"Ha! I knew you could laugh." He poked his finger under her armpit and tickled her. She squealed politely. He tickled her again, lower along her ribs, and she spasmed as a reflex. Then suddenly, his other hand reached for her other armpit and she groaned with laughter, helpless, too scared to tell him to stop. He twirled his fingers around her back, along her stomach. She balled herself up like a sow bug and fell to the rug below with terrible gasping giggles.

At the end of the day, Ruths mother went to her classroom to pick her up. Miss Sondegard took LuLing aside, and Ruth had to act as though she were not listening.

They treated her as though she were Helen Keller, a genius who didnt let injury keep her from showing how smart she was. Like Helen Keller, she simply had to work harder, and perhaps this was what made her smarter, the effort and others admiring that. Even at home, her mother would ask her, "What you think?" as if Ruth would know, just because she had to write the answers to her questions in sand.

"Lootie, what doctor say?" LuLings question startled Ruth. They were standing in front of the car. "He say I die soon?" she asked humorously.

"How I cannot show polite?"

She had a crush on Lance. She thought he was handsome, like a movie star with his neatly cropped hair, square jaw, and lanky, athletic body. And he was so easygoing, so friendly to her, which made her even more shy. She had to pretend to be fascinated by her book or the snails that slimed the elephant plants, until finally he noticed her and said, "Hey there, squirt, you can go blind reading too much." His father owned a couple of liquor stores, and Lance helped with the family business. He often left for work in the late morning and returned at three-thirty or four, then took off again at nine and came back late, long after Ruth had given up listening for the sound of his car.

Ruth hoped her mother would not continue to berate Nicky. She remembered when her mother would enumerate all the times she had spilled food or milk, asking aloud to unseen forces why Ruth could not learn to behave. Ruth looked at Nicky and imagined what she would have been like if she had had children. Perhaps she too would have reacted like her mother, unable to restrain the impulse to scold until the child acted beaten and contrite.

The Kamens were impeccable in their classy outfits and stood out amid the crowd of casually attired customers. Ruth wore an Indonesian batik-print top and crinkled skirt. It occurred to her that Miriam dressed like the Kamens, in designer-style clothing that had to be professionally pressed and dry-cleaned. Miriam loved Arts parents, and they adored her, whereas, Ruth felt, the Kamens had never warmed to her. Even though she had met Art after the divorce was nearly final, Marty and Arlene probably saw her as the interloper, the reason Miriam and Art did not reconcile. Ruth had sensed that the Kamens hoped she was only a brief interlude in Arts life. They never knew how to introduce her. "This is Arts, uh, Ruth," theyd say. They were nice to her, certainly. They had given her lovely birthday presents, a silk velvet scarf, Chanel No. 5, a lacquered tea tray, but nothing she might share with Art or pass on to his girls—or any future children, for that matter, since she was beyond the possibility of giving the Kamens additional grandchildren. Miriam, on the other hand, was now and forever the mother of the Kamens granddaughters, the keeper of heirlooms for Fia and Dory. Marty and Arlene already had given her the family sterling, china, and the mezuzah kissed by five generations of Kamens since the days they lived in the Ukraine.

"No." And tor emphasis, Ruth laughed. "Of course not.

"Whoa! Whoa!" he said, holding up his hands like someone being robbed. "What are you doing? Get a hold of yourself. . . . Would you just calm down, for chrissake!"

The girls picked up their plates. "I have homework," Fia said. "Night, Waipo."

This was amazing! Soon her mother was asking her opinion on all kinds of matters.

"Yes, you did, and I believed you." Dottie stomped off, cursing.

She tried to sound casual. "By any chance, have you seen my mother?"

During the lull before dessert, Ruth stood up and gave a brief speech. "As the years go on, I see how much family means. It reminds us of whats important. That connection to the past. The same jokes about being Young yet getting old. The traditions. The fact that we cant get rid of each other no matter how much we try. Were stuck through the ages, with the bonds cemented by sticky rice and tapioca pudding. Thank you all for being who you are." She left out individual tributes since she had nothing to say about Miriam and her party.

"Hey, are we in the white ghetto or what?" Wendy called out. She was sitting with her back to Ruth.

"I know how you feel," Dottie went on. "I really do."

"All right, and then he followed you, and then what? Did he have his clothes on?"

"Honey, no, no, no! You dont have to protect him. Really. Its not your fault or the babys. . . . Now listen, youre going to have to talk to the police—"

Dottie turned around and sneered. "You have no idea what sorry really is." Then she went inside and banged the door shut.

"If you dont go, what fun would that be? What would I do?"

At five-fifteen, Ruth called her mother to remind her she was coming. No answer. She was probably in the bathroom. Ruth waited five minutes, then called again. Still no answer. Did she have constipation? Had she fallen asleep? Ruth tidied her desk, put the phone on speaker, and hit automatic redial. After fifteen minutes of unanswered ringing, she had run through all the possibilities, until they culminated in the inevitable worst possible thing. Flames leaping from a pot left on the stove. LuLing dousing the flames with oil. Her sleeve catching fire. As Ruth drove to her mothers, she braced herself to see a crackling blaze eating the roof, her mother lying twisted in a blackened heap.

"So why do you ask?"

The next day, Ruth went to the easy chair, pulled back the cushion and cutting board, then reached her hand into the hollow to feel for the silk purse. She extracted the ring and looked at it, now a forbidden object. She felt as if she had swallowed it and it was caught in her throat. Maybe her mother had shown her the ring just to torture her. That was probably it. Her mother knew exactly how to make her miserable! Well, Ruth would not let her have the satisfaction. She would pretend she didnt care. She would force herself never to look at the ring again, to act as though it did not exist.

"Youre just a little girl," he panted. "You dont even have any titties yet. Why would I want to mess around with you? Shit, I bet you dont even have any tushy hairs—" And when both of his hands shot down to pull off her flowered panties, her voice broke free and blasted out as screeches. Over and over, she made a fierce, sharp sound that came from an unknown place. It was as though another person had burst out of her.

You must move, Ruth wrote. Now.

Ruth felt both thrilled and guilty over what she had heard. Dottie had sounded just like her mother, accusing and unreasonable. And Lance suffered as she did. The only difference was, he could talk back. He said exactly what Ruth wished she could tell her mother: Dont tell me what I think, cause you dont know!

The first person Ruth finally confessed her secret to was Wendy. She knew things, she always knew what to do. Ruth had to wait until she saw her at school, because there was no way she could talk about this on the party-line phone without having her mother or someone else overhear.

"Thats from the sidewalk!" Ruth protested.

Ruth wrote Yes right away. Her mother beamed. And then Ruth had an idea. She had always wanted a little dog. Now was the time to ask for one. She scratched in the sand: Doggie.

At that moment, she thought of the photos they had looked at during the Moon Festival dinner. Her mother had been around fifteen in the photo with Auntie Gal and Waipo. And there was another photo, the one of Precious Auntie, whom LuLing had mistakenly identified as her mother. A thought ran through her mind: The photo her mother kept in the Bible. She had also said that was her mother. Who was in that picture?

"Hey, squirt! Ive been waiting for you." Lance was on the porch, smoking a cigarette. "We need to talk." Ruth stood rooted to the sidewalk, unable to move. "I said we need to talk. Dont you think you owe me that? . . . Come here." He threw the burning cigarette onto the lawn.

Ruth knew that wasnt entirely true. She had seen a Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie. All it took was the right chemistry, which included love, and sometimes the wrong chemistry, which included booze and falling asleep. Ruth was not quite sure how everything occurred, but she was pretty certain those were the main things that activated a scientific change: it was similar to how Alka-Seltzer turned plain water into bubbly. Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. That wrong chemistry was why some women had babies born out of wedlock, babies that were illegitimate, one of the b-words.

"Description."

"Then she doesnt have to worry," Ruth said knowingly.

"Ewww! Take it away! Take it away!" Boomer screamed. Dory was hysterical with laughter. Art passed along the entire tables worth of jellyfish to Ruth, and Ruth felt her stomach begin to ache.

"So what do you think?" Lance said, nodding toward the television.

He shook his head in disbelief. "Am I imagining things, or werent you just laughing a moment ago? One second we re having fun, the next second youre acting like—well, I dont know, you tell me." He squinted hard at her. "You know, maybe you have a big problem. You start to get this funny idea in your head that people are doing something wrong to you, and before you can see whats true, you accuse them and go crazy and wreck everything. Is that what youre doing?"

Not again. Ruth took a deep breath. "Fu-Fus fine," she said this time.

"Look at us, so young," Auntie Gal sighed wistfully.

Ruth looked up and saw Wendy and Joe, gazing about the crowd. Behind them was Gideon, nattily dressed and perfectly groomed as usual, holding an expensive bouquet of tropical flowers. When Wendy turned and saw him, she smiled in mock delight, and he pretended to be just as enthusiastic. She had once called him "a star-fucker who practically gives himself neck strain looking past your shoulder for more important people to talk to." Gideon, in turn, had said that Wendy was "a vulgarian, who lacks the nuance to know why its not good manners to grace everybody with lurid details of ones menstrual problems at the dinner table." Ruth had thought about inviting one and not the other, but in a stupid moment of resolve, she decided they would just have to work it out between them, even if it gave her heartburn to watch.

"He peed."

"I wont lose it." Ruth slid the ring onto her middle finger. Too small for that one, but it did fit her ring finger.

"So where are they?"

Ruths eyes smarted with held-back tears.

Her mother frowned, then murmured in Mandarin. "Your father loved this old dress, and now I can never throw it away." She became misty-eyed. She sighed, then said in English: "You think you daddy miss me?"

"Ah, good girl," her mother murmured. "You sleep, feel better soon."

"Precious Auntie, thank you for helping my daughter. Forgive me that she speaks only English. It must be hard for you to communicate through her this way. But now I know that you can hear me. And you know what Im saying, that I wish I could take your bones to the Mouth of the Mountain, to the Monkeys Jaw. Ive never forgotten. As soon as I can go to China, I will finish my duty. Thank you for reminding me."

"You could hire someone to check on your mother a few times a week," Art suggested. "Like a housekeeper."

Ruth froze.

Day and night? And Ruth thought she was being diligent by having her mother over for dinner and trying to hire a part-time housekeeper. "Well, thanks anyway," she said.

"When I little-girl time, hold this Bible here." LuLing patted her chest. "Sleep time, think about my mother."

"Here, Ma," Ruth said, holding the jellyfish platter, "you start since youre the oldest girl."

The less Ruth said, the more her mother tried to guess what she might want. As she lay in the recliner, she heard LuLing talking to Auntie Gal on the phone.

Ruth burst into sobs. She doubled over and began crying hysterically. She had wished for this, caused this to happen. She cried until she had dry heaves and was faint from hyperventilating. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Auntie Gal had to take Ruth to Emergency too. A nurse tried to make her breathe into a paper bag, which Ruth slapped away, and after that someone gave her a shot. She became weightless, all worries lifted from her limbs and mind. A dark, warm blanket was placed over her body, then pulled over her head. In this nothingness, she could hear her mothers voice pronouncing to the doctors that her daughter was quiet at last because they were both dead.

Her mother still looked worried. "What part? Where good?"

"What?"

Now she steadied her hand and mind, conjuring the wisdom Precious Auntie might impart like the Wizard. O-Z, she wrote, and then started to write good slowly and in large letters: G-O-O. And before she could finish, LuLing exclaimed, "Goo! Goo means bone in Chinese. What about bone? This concern bone-doctor family?"

Ruth could hear her pulse pounding in her brain. Billy cleared his throat in an obvious bid to change the subject.

Ruth giggled.

"Its okay, honey," Sally told him. "Say youre sorry, and next time spin it more slowly."

They came bearing gifts. Auntie Gal brought a bottle of eau de toilette. Uncle Edmund gave Ruth a new toothbrush and matching plastic cup. Her cousins handed her coloring books, crayons, and a stuffed dog. LuLing had pushed the television set close to the La-Z-Boy, since Ruth had a hard time seeing without her glasses.

"Miriam! Stephen!" Ruth exclaimed with enthusiastic effort. She shook hands, and Miriam gave her a quick hug and waved to Art across the table. "Glad you could join us," Ruth said awkwardly, then turned to the boys. "Andy, Beauregard, how you doing?"

Only she realized in the next moment that this was not her mother but Auntie Gal. "Your mother is hurt," she said, and grabbed Ruth by the arm to steer her back out the door. "Hurry, hurry, we re going to the hospital now."

Ruth stared at her plate. Had he forgotten? She had told him she was not ready for another cat. She would feel disloyal to Fu-Fu. And when the time was right tor another pet, an animal she inevitably would wind up feeding and cleaning, she preferred that it be a different species, a little dog.

"Its really neat," Ruth answered in a small, serious voice, her eyes trained on the screen.

The week before Ruth wrote those fateful words, she and LuLing had been escalating in their torment of each other. They were two people caught in a sandstorm, blasted by pain and each blaming the other as the origin of the wind. The day before the fight culminated, Ruth had been smoking in her bedroom, leaning out the window. The door was closed, and as soon as she heard her mothers footsteps coming toward her room, she dropped the cigarette outside, flopped onto her bed, and pretended to read a book. As usual, LuLing opened the door without knocking. And when Ruth looked up with an innocent expression, LuLing shouted, "You smoking!"

"Open, dont ask."

"Best things take now," LuLing went on. "No need wait to I dead." She turned away before Ruth could either refuse or thank her. "Anyway, this not worth much." She was patting the back of her bun, trying to stuff pride back into her head. It was a gesture Ruth had seen many times. "If someone show-off give big," her mother would say, "this not really giving big." A lot of her admonitions had to do with not showing what you really meant about all sorts of things: hope, disappointment, and especially love. The less you showed, the more you meant.

She nodded quickly.

He looked at her sternly. It was as if he had X-ray eyes. "Yeah," he finally said. "I know." He was silent for a few seconds, and then added in a friendlier voice. "Boy, were you dumb. Babies and toilet seats, Jeez." Ruth kept her head down, but her eyes glanced up at him. He was smiling. "I hope you one day do a better job teaching your kids about the facts of life. Toilet seat! Pee? Pee-you!"

Just as she feared, when Ruth arrived she saw lights flickering in the upper level, shadows dancing. She rushed in. The front door was unlocked. "Mom? Mommy! Where are you?" The television was on, blasting Amor sin Límite at high volume. LuLing had never figured out how to use the remote control, even though Ruth had taped over all but the Power, Channel Up, and Channel Down buttons. She turned off the TV, and the sudden silence frightened her.

Ruth had picked Fountain Court because it was one of the few restaurants where her mother had not questioned the preparation of the dishes, the attitude of the waiters, or the cleanliness of the bowls. Originally Ruth had made reservations for two tables, seating for her side of the family and friends, as well as the two girls and Arts parents, who were visiting from New Jersey. Those she had not counted on were Arts ex-wife Miriam, her husband Stephen, and their two little boys, Andy and Beauregard. Miriam had called Art the week before with a request.

Ruth wondered how Dottie had been lucky enough to marry Lance. She wasnt even that pretty, though Ruths new friend at school, Wendy, said that Dottie was cute in a beach-bunny way. How could she say that? Dottie was tall and bony, and about as huggable as a fork. Plus, as her mother had pointed out, Dottie had big teeth. Her mother had demonstrated to Ruth by pulling her own lips back with her fingers so that her gums showed on the top and bottom. "Big teeth, show too much inside out, like monkey." Later Ruth stared in the bathroom mirror and admired her own small teeth.

"Now hold this." LuLing placed a brush in Ruths left hand. "Write your name." Her first attempts were clumsy, the R almost unrecognizable, the hump of the h veering off the paper like an out-of-control bicycle. She giggled.

The dinner began with a flurry of appetizers set on the lazy Susan, what LuLing called the "go-round." The adults oohed and aahed, the children cried, "Im starved!" The waiters set down what Ruth had ordered by phone: sweetly glazed phoenix-tail fish, vegetarian chicken made out of wrinkly tissues of tofu, and jellyfish, her mothers favorite, seasoned with sesame oil and sprinkled with diced green onions. "Tell me," Miriam said, "is that animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

Her mother, as it turned out, had suffered a broken shoulder, a cracked rib, and a concussion. When she was released from the hospital, Auntie Gal stayed a few more days to help cook and set up the house so LuLing could learn to bathe and dress herself easily. Ruth was always standing off to the side. "Can I help?" she periodically asked in a weak voice. And Auntie Gal had her make rice or wash the tub or put fresh sheets on her mothers bed.

She looked at the top page of this new stack in her hands, the large calligraphed character. She could hear her mother scolding her, "Should study harder." Yes, she should have. The large character was familiar, a curved bottom, three marks over it—heart! And the first sentence, it was like the beginning of the page she had at home. "These are the things I—" And then it was different. The next word was ying-gai, "should." Her mother used that a lot. The next, that was bu, another word her mother often said. And the one after that . . . she didnt know. "These are the things I should not—" Ruth guessed what the next word might be: "These are the things I should not tell." "These are the things I should not write." "These are the things I should not speak ." She went into her bedroom, to a shelf where her mother kept an English-Chinese dictionary. She looked up the characters for "tell," "write," "speak," but they did not match her mothers writing. She feverishly looked up more words, and ten minutes later, there it was:

But her mother had read it,had read and committed to heart what Ruth had written on the second-to-last page, the words that nearly killed them both.

During the movie, Ruth had a hard time paying attention to the television screen. She had to pretend to be comfortable. The three of them were sitting on a turquoise-and-yellow sofa that had the woven texture of twine and tinsel. It scratched the backs of Ruths bare legs. Besides that, Ruth kept noticing things that shocked her, like how Dottie and Lance put their feet up on the coffee table—without removing their shoes. If her mother saw that, shed have more to talk about than Dotties big teeth! Whats more, Lance and Dottie were both drinking a golden-colored booze and they werent even in a cocktail lounge. But what most bothered Ruth was the stupid way Dottie was acting, babyish, stroking her husbands left knee and thigh, while crooning things like, "Lancey-pants, could you turn up the volume a teensy-weensy smidge?"

Ruth turned and saw her mother scrutinizing her face.

"Its the chemistry that gets you pregnant. Love is one of the ingredients," Ruth declared as scientifically as possible.

What curse? Ruth now stared at the sand, half believing the dead womans face would appear in a pool of blood. What answer did her mother want? Did Yes mean the curse was gone? Or that it was still there? She put the chopstick in the sand, and not knowing what to write, she drew a line and another below that. She drew two more lines and made a square.

"Where are Fia and Dory?"

LuLing laughed. "Hah! So now you can talk back this way!"

"Dr. Huey said your heart is fine," Ruth added. She tried to figure a way to translate the diagnosis into a condition her mother would accept. "But he said you may be having another kind of problem—with a balance of elements in your body. And this can give you troubles . . . with your memory." She helped LuLing into the front seat and snapped her seat belt in place.

Her mother took Ruths television-watching as a sign that she had nothing better to do. And sometimes she would see this as a good opportunity for a talk. She would take down the sand tray from the top of the refrigerator and set it on the kitchen table. Ruths throat would grow tight. Not this again. But she knew that the more she resisted, the more her mother would want to know why.

"Im sorry," Ruth cried after her. "I said Im sorry." She was still not certain what she had done.

Ruth shrugged, though her arm was now aching.

Lance sat on the sofa, not as close as he had been that night. He took her books from her arms and she felt unprotected. Tears blurred her eyes, and she tried hard not to make any sounds as she cried.

Eventually, much to Ruths chagrin, he agreed with her logic.

"On the toilet seat. Then I went in and sat on it."

"I do know! I know what a real man is! . . . Danny . . . yeah, him, and he was good, Danny is a real man. But you! You gotta stick it up little girls who dont know any better."

More dishes arrived, each one stranger than the last, to judge by the expressions on the non-Chinese faces. Tofu with pickled greens. Sea cucumbers, Auntie Gals favorite. And glutinous rice cakes. Ruth had thought the kids would like those. She had thought wrong.

Ruths eyes flew open. In her imagination, the long-haired ghost was walking in circles.

Finally Ruth looked at the other gift. It was a pocket-sized book with black leather covers, a red ribbon for a place marker.

Ruth obliged. "Jail?"

"Why you laugh?" LuLing scolded. "I not kidding. And dont let dog in backyard. I know someone do this. Now cat dead!"

"Careful," LuLing warned when Sallys son reached for the pearls, "dont touch. Cost too much."

The following evening, after dinner, LuLing presented Ruth with a large tea tray filled with smooth wet sand gathered from the playground at school. "Here," she said, "you practice, use this." She held a chopstick in her left hand, then scratched the word "study" on the miniature beach. When she finished, she swept the sand clean and smooth with the long end of the chopstick. Ruth followed suit and found that it was easier to write this way, also fun. The sand-and-chopstick method did not require the delicate, light-handed technique of the brush. She could apply a force that steadied her. She wrote her name. Neat! It was like playing with the Etch-A-Sketch that her cousin Billy received last Christmas.

Ruth ignored this rite of first refusal and placed a heap of noodle-like strands of jellyfish on her mothers plate. LuLing immediately started to eat.

"Sweetie, Grand-Auntie was just surprised, thats all. Its only that youre so strong—like a baseball player."

Ruth had not considered this. Far away, she finally decided.

"Who want such thing? Toilet water!—peh!—like I big insult them."

Everyone now guffawed. LuLing had delivered the punch line to a joke! Of course, they were indeed sisters-in-law, married to a pair of brothers. What a relief! Her mother not only made sense, she was clever.

"Whats this?"

Her mother studied Ruths face, then concluded: "I die. doesnt matter. I not afraid. You know this."

Ruth blushed. "I dont know. . . ."

Ruth bit hard on the inside of her cheek.

"Mouth!" her mother cried, tracing over the square. "Thats the character for mouth!" She stared at Ruth. "You wrote that and you dont even know how to write Chinese! Did you feel Precious Auntie guiding your hand? What did it feel like? Tell me."

"Does it hurt?" her younger cousin, Sally, asked.

Though she could never show her mother those words, it felt good to write them. She was being truthful and neither good nor bad. She then tried to think of a place where her mother would never find her diary. She climbed onto the kitchen counter and stretched her arm way up and tossed the diary on top of the cabinet, so far out of reach that she too forgot about it over time.

While she and Ruth walked home from school, Wendy explained what the teacher had left out. Wendy knew things, because she hung out with her brothers pals and their girlfriends, the hard girls who wore makeup and stockings with nail polish dabbed over the runs. Wendy had a big blond bubble hairdo that she teased and sprayed during recess, while chewing gum she saved between classes in a wad of tinfoil. She was the first girl to wear white go-go boots, and before and after school she rolled up her skirt so that it was two inches above her knees. She had been in detention three times, once for coming to school late and twice for saying the other b-words, "bitch" and "boner," to the gym teacher. On the way home, she bragged to Ruth that she had let a boy kiss her during a basement make-out party. "He had just eaten a neopolitan ice cream sandwich and his breath tasted like barf, so I told him to kiss my neck but not to go below. Below the neck and youre a goner." She peeled open her collar and Ruth gasped, seeing what looked like a huge bruise.

Later, Ruth debated over throwing away her diary. She retrieved the dreaded book, still in the back of her underwear drawer. She turned the pages, reading here and there, weeping for herself. There was truth in what she had written, she believed, some of it, at least. There was a part of her in these pages that she did not want to forget. But when she arrived at the final entry, she was stricken with a sense that God, her mother, and Precious Auntie knew that she had committed near-murder. She carefully crossed out the last sentences, running her ballpoint pen over and over the words until everything was a blur of black ink. On the next page, the last page, she wrote: "Im sorry. Sometimes I just wish you would say youre sorry too."

"Hey there, girlie," he said. "Whats up?"

"Because of what he did to you, of course."

The door swung open. "Hey there, squirt," he said warmly, "come on in. We almost gave up on you. Hey, Dottie! Ruths here! While youre in the kitchen, get her a soda, will you. Here, Ruth, sit yourself down here on the sofa."

"What okay-okay? Then why she sick, no reason?"

She smiled at him and this time it came naturally. She tried to breathe through her clogged nose.

"Yeah," Dory jumped in. "Alice has the cutest Himalayan. Thats what we want."

"How does the bean curd dish taste?" LuLing asked one night.

"Wait a second. . . . He what?"

"Throw away? How I can throw away? This waste money!"

When Ruth learned what the request was, she balked.

Ruth ran toward her. "Where were you?" She appraised her mother for signs of damage.

"You have to tell Lance," Wendy said, then reached over and squeezed Ruths hand.

Art and the girls exchanged baffled looks. LuLing often issued what they considered non sequiturs, as free-floating as dust motes. But Ruth believed LuLings delusions were always rooted in a deeper reason. Clearly this instance had to do with word association: Himalayan kitten, Himalayan mountains. But why did LuLing believe she had driven there by car? It was Ruths job to untangle such puzzles. If she could find the source, she could help LuLing unclog the pathways in her brain and prevent more destructive debris from accumulating. With diligence, she could keep her from driving off a cliff in the Himalayas. And then it occurred to her: "My mother and I saw this really interesting documentary on Tibet last week," Ruth said. "They showed the road that leads to—"

"Why scare?" LuLing was ironing. The room had the smell of fried water.

"Dont say such bad-luck things!" Auntie Gal warned.

"I guess."

"There it is! Oops. Gone again!" He stubbed out his cigarette. "All right, are we friends again?" He stuck out his hand for her to shake. "Good. Itd be terrible if we couldnt be friends, since we live next to each other."

I want to die, she moaned to herself. Die, die, die. First she cried a lot in the bathroom, then sliced her wrist with a dinner knife. It left a row of plowed-up skin, no blood, and it hurt too much to cut any deeper. Later, in the backyard, she found a rusty tack in the dirt, poked her fingertip, and waited for blood poisoning to rise up her arm like liquid in a thermometer. That evening, still alive and miserable, she filled the tub and sat in it. As she sank under and was about to open her mouth wide, she remem bered the water was now dirty with nasty stuff from her feet, her bottom, and the place between her legs. Still determined, she got out of the tub, dried off, and filled the sink, then lowered her face until it touched the water. She opened her mouth. How easy it was, drowning. It didnt hurt at all. It was like drinking water, which, after a while, she realized was what she was doing. So she pushed her face lower into the water and opened her mouth again. She took a deep breath, welcoming death at last. Her whole body backfired in stinging protest. She began coughing in such a loud and hacking way that her mother rushed in without knocking and pounded her back, put her hand on her forehead, and murmured in Chinese that she was sick and should go to bed right away. Having her mother comfort her so lovingly only made Ruth feel worse.

"She never complain," LuLing agreed.

"Worms!" Dory teased. "Try some."

"You know Miriam," Art said. "She doesnt accept no as an answer to anything. Besides, its the only chance my folks will have to see her before they leave for Carmel."

Ruth thought her mother had misheard Sally. "Bummed out" was not in LuLings vocabulary. LuLing and GaoLings mother had died in 1972. Ruth pointed to the photo. "See? Your mother is right there. And thats you."

"Yes, they do. They asked me twice." Ruth had left out the part about their inviting LuLing as well.

Ruth put on a jacket and strayed outside. She slid into the chair on the porch, opened her book, and waited. Ten minutes later, Dottie opened the back door of the cottage, climbed down the four steps, and strode across the yard. Her eyes were puffy like a toads, and when she smiled at Ruth, the upper half of her face looked tragic.

"No more."

"Ah! You see, I was right! I knew something was wrong. Mother always knows."

"How ya doin, kiddo?"

"Well, if you dont like it," Ruth once said, "why do you always tell them its just what you wanted?"

Hours later, as Ruth lay wide awake in bed, the muffled shouts and screams suddenly stopped. She listened for them to begin again, but all she detected were her mothers snores. She arose in the pitch dark and went into the bathroom. She climbed on the toilet seat and looked out the window across the yard. The cottage lights were burning. What was going on? And then she saw Lance walk out with a duffel bag and hurl it into the trunk of his car. A moment later, he spun the tires on the gravel and took off with a roar. What did that mean? Had he told Dottie he was going to marry Ruth?

Ruth was aghast. "He stayed in the living room, watching TV," she said in a tiny voice. "I was in the bathroom by myself."

"Come sit here," her mother said in Chinese.

Ruth put down the chopstick.

That night, Ruth tried to tell her mother what had happened. "Ma? Im scared."

"You let them go by themselves?"

Ruth held LuLings arm as they walked to the hospital parking garage. Her slack-skinned limb felt like the bony wing of a baby bird.

She nodded dumbly.

That made Ruth cry even harder. She shook her head. The cruel world and its impossibility swam in front of her. Lance didnt love her. If she told him, he would hate her, Dottie would hate her. They would kick her mother and her out of the bungalow. The school would send Ruth to juvenile hall. And her life would be over.

"You like this dress?" No, ugly. Ruth had never experienced such power with words.

"Ai-ya, sick?"

LuLing turned to Ruth. "Ask her to come every day." Ruth shook her head. She tried to slide off her chair. "Ask," LuLing insisted, and tapped the table in front of the tray. And then Ruth finally found her voice.

"A hickey, you dummy. Course they didnt show that in that crummy movie. Hickeys, hard-ons, home runs, it. Speaking of it, there was an older girl at this party puking her guts out in the bathroom. A tenth-grader. She thought she was preggers from this boy whos in juvenile hall."

He blew air out of his nose, disgusted. "Get out of here. Scram."

Ruth wiped at her teary face with her sweater sleeve. The worst was over. She started to go down the stairs.

"Well, thats why I need your help. Can she come visit you, maybe for the week? Its just that I have a lot of work this week and cant spend as much time—"

"Man oh man, I wish I had a cast," Billy said. He was the same age as Ruth. "Daddy, can I have one too?"

And each day, several times a day, Ruth wanted to tell her mother that she was sorry, that she was an evil girl, that everything was her fault. But to do so would be to acknowledge what her mother obviously wanted to pretend never existed, those words Ruth had written. For weeks, they walked on tiptoe, careful not to step on the broken pieces.

Fia kicked Dory. She made an X with her index fingers, the symbolic cross that keeps movie Draculas at bay. Dory kicked her back.

On her sixteenth birthday, Ruth came home from school and found her mother had bought some of her favorite foods: the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, both kinds, one with meat filling, one with sweet red-bean paste, as well as a Chinese sponge cake stuffed with strawberries and whipped cream. "Cannot cook you better things," LuLing said. Her right side was still supported in a sling, and she could not lift anything with that arm. It was hard enough for her to haul bags of groceries from the market with her left hand. Ruth saw these offerings as a gesture of forgiveness.

"It wont be the same."

She glanced at her watch. It was almost nine, an iffy time to telephone people who were not close friends. True, she and Miriam were bound by the closest of reasons, the girls and their father. But they treated each other with the politeness of strangers. She often ran into Miriam at dropoff and pick-up points for the girls, at school athletic events, and once shed seen her in the emergency room, where Ruth had taken Dory when she broke her ankle. She and Miriam made small talk about recent illnesses, bad weather, and traffic jams. If it werent for the circumstances, they might have enjoyed each others company. Miriam was clever, funny, and opinionated, and Ruth liked these qualities. But it bothered Ruth when Miriam made passing remarks about intimacies she had shared with Art when they were married: the funny time they had on a trip to Italy, a mole on his back that had to be checked for melanoma, his love of massage. For Arts birthday the year before, Miriam had given him a certificate for two sessions with her favorite massage therapist, a gift Ruth thought inappropriately personal. "Do you still get that mole checked every year?" Miriam asked Art on another occasion, and Ruth pretended not to hear, all the while imagining what they had been like together when they were younger and in love, and she still cared deeply enough to notice the slightest change in the size of a mole. She pictured them lazing about in a Tuscan villa with a bedroom window that overlooked rolling hills of orchards, giggling and naming moles on each others naked backs as if they were constellations. She could see it: the two of them massaging olive oil into their thighs with long-reaching strokes. Art once tried that on her, and Ruth figured he must have learned the maneuver from someone. Whenever he tried to massage her thighs, though, it made her tense. With massage, she just couldnt relax. She felt she was being tickled, pushed out of control, then felt claustrophobic, panicky enough to want to leap up and run.

"Let me see," Sally said.

It happened the year she turned eleven. Ruth and her mother had moved from Oakland to the flatlands of Berkeley, to a dark-shingled bungalow behind a butter-yellow cottage owned by a young couple in their twenties, Lance and Dottie Rogers. The bungalow had been a potting shed and garage that Lances parents remodeled into an illegal in-law unit during World War Two and rented to a series of brides whose husbands had departed for battle in the Pacific via the Alameda Naval Station.

"Yeah?" He patted her arm again, and this time she didnt jerk stupidly. He continued talking in a weary but reassuring voice. "Listen, Im not going to yell at you or nothing, okay? So just relax. Okay? Hey, I said Okay?"

"You know that part in the movie where everything is supposed to go from black-and-white to color?" Dottie said. "Well, on this set, it really does turn to color!"

"Forgot you were only eleven? Jeez!"

"You must encourage her to talk, Mrs. Young. I dont want this to turn into a problem."

Now, thirty-five years later, she was that eleven-year-old child again. She had chosen to live. Why? As she now kept walking, she felt comforted by the water, its constancy, its predictability. Each time it withdrew, it carried with it whatever had marked the shore. She recalled that when her younger self stood on this same beach for the first time, she had thought the sand looked like a gigantic writing surface. The slate was clean, inviting, open to possibilities. And at that moment of her life, she had a new determination, a fierce hope. She didnt have to make up the answers anymore. She could ask.

"On you?"

"Leave me alone!"

"Then when did he do it?"

At four, Agapi called to discuss final edits for Righting the Wronged Child. An hour later, they were still talking. Agapi was eager to start a new book, which she wanted to call either Past-Perfect Tension or The Embedded Self. Ruth kept staring at the clock. She was supposed to pick up her mother at six for dinner at Fountain Court. "Habit, neuromusculature, and the limbic system, thats the basis . . ." Agapi was saying. "From babyhood and our first sense of insecurity, we clench, grasp, flail. We embed the response but forget the cause, the past that was imperfect. . . . Ruth, my dear, you seem to be somewhere else. Should you ring me later when you feel more refreshed?"

Ruth held up her broken right arm in its cast.

"This is amazing," Billy said. "Hey, kids, guess who those two cute girls are?"

Ruth wound up staying the night at her mothers, sleeping in her old bedroom. The foghorns were louder in this section of the city. She remembered listening to them at night when she was a teenager. She would lie in bed, counting the blasts, matching them to the number of years it would be before she could move out. Five years, then four, then three. Now she was back.

Over the following days, Ruth anguished over whether her mother had told Auntie Gal what she had read in Ruths diary, why she had jumped out the window. She searched Auntie Gals face for signs that she knew. She analyzed every word she said. But Ruth could not detect any anger or disappointment or false pity in how Auntie Gal spoke. Her mother was just as puzzling. She acted not angry but sad and defeated. There was less of something—but what was that? Love? Worry? There was a dullness in her mothers eyes, as if she did not care what was in front of her. All was equal, all was unimportant. What did that mean? Why didnt she want to fight anymore? LuLing accepted the bowls of rice porridge Ruth brought her. She drank her tea. They spoke, but the words were about meaningless facts, nothing that could lead to disputes or misunderstanding.

Her mother gasped. She stared at the words and shook her head in disbelief. Oh well, Ruth thought, that was one wish she was not going to get. But then her mother began to whimper, "Doggie, doggie," in Chinese. She jumped up and her chest heaved. "Precious Auntie," LuLing cried, "youve come back. This is your Doggie. Do you forgive me?"

LuLing answered: "This because my mother just die."

Ruth imagined a distance as big as an ocean. She pictured the bay, the bridge, the long bus rides she had taken with her mother that made her fall asleep. San Francisco, she wrote at last.

LuLing frowned. "Why you say this?"

"Stay there," Ruth ordered her mother. "Ill be right back." She went to the patrol car and the officer rolled down his window. "Im sorry for all the trouble," she said. "Shes never done this before." And then she considered that maybe she had, but she just didnt know it. Maybe she did this every day, every night. Maybe she roamed the neighborhood in her underwear!

"I thought so too," her mother answered.

Nicky crossed his arms, and tears started to well up in his eyes.

Dottie laughed once, then sniffed. "I mean hes going to jail."

By nightfall, one corner of the living room was jammed with items Ruth had decided her mother would not miss: a rotary Princess phone, sewing patterns, piles of old utility bills, five frosted iced-tea glasses, a bunch of mismatched coffee mugs bearing slogans, a three-pod lamp missing one pod, the old rusted clam-shaped patio chair, a toaster with a frayed cord and curves like an old Buick fender, a kitchen clock with knife, fork, and spoon as hour, minute, and second hands, a knitting bag with its contents of half-finished purple, turquoise, and green slippers, medicines that had expired, and a spidery thatch of old hangers.

"Hold the brush straight up," her mother instructed, "not at a slant. Use a light touch, like this."

Ruth tried to imagine it. "Yep, its yours," Wendy would say to Lance. She pictured Lance looking like Rock Hudson when he learned Doris Day was going to have his baby. He would look stunned, but slowly he would begin to smile, then grin like a fool and race into the street, unmindful of traffic or people he bumped into, people who shouted back that he was nuts. And he would yell, "I am nuts, nuts about her!" Soon he was by her side, on his knees, telling her he loved her, had always loved her, and now wanted to marry her. As for Dottie, well, she would soon fall in love with the postman or someone. Everything would work out. Ruth sighed. It was possible.

"No—"

"Famous! Hnh! Everybody dont watch then no longer famous! Ozzie, Oz, Zorro, same thing."

"I dont know. Maybe." Then Ruth rushed home.

Ruth shook her head.

Dottie sighed, sat down on the porch, and dropped her chin onto her knees. "Hes gone," she said. "But hes going to pay, dont you worry."

"That man Lance, he was mean to me—"

"She has Alzheimers," Ruth jabbered. "Shes seventy-seven but has the mind of a child."

SEVEN

PRIVATE!!! IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOU ARE GUILTY OF TRESPASSING!!! YES! I DO MEAN YOU.!

"Maybe," Art replied.

A sob burst out of Ruths chest. She tried to say she was sorry, but she could make only mouselike sniffles.

Ruth was shaking but shrugged as nonchalantly as she could. "I really dont care."

"We can always squeeze in more chairs," Art countered. "Its just a dinner."

"Why I have daughter like you? Why I live? Why I dont die long time go?" LuLing was huffing and snorting. Ruth thought she looked like a mad dog. "You want I die?"

Later, over sobs of righteous indignation, she began to write in her diary, knowing full well her mother would read the words: "I hate her! Shes the worst mother a person could have. She doesnt love me. She doesnt listen to me. She doesnt understand anything about me. All she does is pick on me, get mad, and make me feel worse."

Ruth felt something touch her shoulder, and she jumped. "Ask her if she understood everything I just said," LuLing ordered. "Ask her if my luck has changed. Is the curse over? Are we safe? Write down her answer."

"I think thats a good idea. By the way, I think were going to hear about that other book project today, but frankly I dont think youll get it. You should have told them you had an emergency appendectomy or something." Ruth had failed to show up at an interview because her mother had called in a panic, thinking her alarm clock was the smoke detector going off.

The ceilings were low, the electricity often shorted out, and the back wall and one side abutted a fence on which alley cats howled at night. There was no ventilation, not even a fan over the two-burner gas stove, so that when LuLing cooked at night, they had to open the windows to let out what she called the "greasy smell." But the rent was cheap, and the place was in a neighborhood with a good intermediate school attended by the smart and competitive sons and daughters of university professors. That was why LuLing had moved there in the first place, she liked to remind Ruth, for her education.

"I think she wanted me to write O-Z. We can ask her now, if you dont believe me." Ruth went to the refrigerator, climbed the step-stool, and brought down the sand tray.

When she returned to school, Ruth found a big streamer of butcher paper hanging at the front of the classroom. "Welcome Back, Ruth!" it said. Miss Sondegard, the teacher, announced that every single boy and girl had helped make it. She led the classroom in clapping for Ruths bravery. Ruth smiled shyly. Her heart was about to burst. She had never been as proud and happy. She wished she had broken her arm a long time before.

After more questioning, Ruth deduced that the woman had not been coming since the day after she started. Ruth would never be able to find another person before she left for Hawaii. That was only two days from now. A vacation across the ocean was out of the question.

"Waipo," Dory interjected, "Ruth didnt add any salt. I watched. None."

"Then give it away."

"Not work. Not get up. Not return phone calls."

"Hey, squirt," Lance said, "whyncha come over and watch with us?"

Auntie Gal turned to LuLing and huffed with pretend annoyance. "Hey, why do you treat me so bad, hah?"

"Probably abducted."

Ruth shook her head. What was happening? She wanted to cry but didnt dare. She wasnt supposed to be able to make a sound.

"Still smoking." LuLing pointed toward the window and marched over. The cigarette had landed on the ledge below the window, announcing its whereabouts with a plume of smoke.

"We go shop dinner now or go later?" Later.

"Then youre happy?"

On the night of the Full Moon Festival, the Fountain Court restaurant was jammed with a line flowing out the door like a dragons tail. Art and Ruth squeezed through the crowd. "Excuse us. We have reservations."

Even from across the big room, Ruth could see that LuLing was beaming at her with motherly adoration. This gave Ruth heart pangs, made her both happy and sad to see her mother on this special day. Why wasnt their relationship always like this? How many more gatherings like this would they have?

When LuLing toddled off to the bathroom, Ruth went to the living room to speak to Art. "Shes getting worse."

Ruth thought about rubbing off the pee with toilet paper. But then she decided it was a sign, like a pledge of love. It was Lances pee, his germs, and leaving it on made her feel brave and romantic.

As Ruth walked along the beach, the surf circled her ankles and tugged. Go seaward, it suggested, where it is vast and free.

Ruth wanted to weep with relief.

And then Wendy turned around and fled. Ruth started to cry and when Wendy came back, she consoled Ruth, telling her she had a better plan. "Dont worry," she said. "Ill take care of it. Ill think of something." And she did. "Wait here," she said, smiling, and ran up to the back porch of the cottage. Ruth dashed into the bungalow. Five minutes later, the back door to the cottage flew open and Dottie raced down the porch steps. Through the window, Ruth saw Wendy wave to her before walking away quickly. Then came pounding on the door to the bungalow, and when Ruth answered, Dottie was there, grabbing her by both hands. She stared into her eyes with a stricken face and whispered hoarsely in her milk-and-metal voice, "Are you really—?"

"She left me, you know."

"Ring. Give back."

"Im not hurting you. I am not hurting you." He repeated this until she settled into whimpers and wheezes. And then there came just fast breathing in the space between them.

Ruth got up. Her legs were shaky. "Im going to go," she whispered. She could hardly walk to the door.

"Thats true."

"It may not be a problem, but well need to watch if this continues."

When she returned to her mother, LuLing complained right away: "Grocery store round the corner? I walk round and round, gone! Turn into bank. You dont believe, go see youself!"

"Since I may not be able to go back to China for a long time," LuLing continued, "I hope you will still forgive me. Please know that my life has been miserable ever since you left me. That is why I ask you to take my life, but to spare my daughter if the curse cannot be changed. I know her recent accident was a warning."

When Ruth was a teenager, her mother had once run off in the middle of an argument, declaring she was going to drown herself in the ocean. She had waded in to her thighs before her daughters screams and pleas had brought her back. And now Ruth wondered: If she had not begged her mother to return, would LuLing have let the ocean decide her fate?

"I like this stuff," Ruth said politely. "Its great."

Her mother had given her those other pages—what?—five or six years before. Had she written these at the same time? Did she know then that she was losing her memory? When did her mother intend to give her these pages, if ever? When she eventually gave her the ring to keep? When it was clear that Ruth was ready to pay attention? Ruth scanned the next few characters. But nothing except the one for "I" looked familiar, and there were ten thousand words that could follow "I." Now what?

Since the diagnosis three months before, LuLing had come to Art and Ruths for dinner almost every night. Tonight Ruth watched her mother take a bite of salmon. LuLing chewed slowly, then choked. "Too salty," she gasped, as if she had been given deer lick for the main course.

Ruth then passed out wrapped boxes of moon cakes and chocolate rabbits to the children. "Thank you!" they cried. "This is neat!" At last Ruth was somewhat becalmed. It was a good idea to host this dinner after all. In spite of the uneasy moments, reunions were important, a ritual to preserve what was left of the family. She did not want her cousins and her to drift apart, but she feared that once the older generation was gone, that would be the end of the family ties. They had to make the effort.

Ruth recalled the first day she had walked by herself along this stretch of beach. It had been nearly empty, and the sand in front of her had been clean, untrampled. She had escaped and reached this place. She had felt the waves, cold and shocking, grab at her ankles, wanting to pull her in. She remembered how she had cried with relief as the waves roared around her.

The next morning, Saturday, Ruth barely touched the rice porridge her mother had heated up. She waited anxiously for the Pontiac to return, but everything remained quiet. She slumped onto the sofa with her book. Her mother was putting dirty clothes, towels, and sheets into a bag draped over a cart. She counted out the quarters and dimes needed for the laundromat, then said to Ruth, "Lets go. Wash-clothes time."

And Ruth cried even harder, bursting with more feelings than she ever thought a heart could hold. Someone was angry for her. Someone knew what to do.

"Youll miss me dreadfully and tell me you were miserable."

"So now you know the real way babies are made, doncha?"

That afternoon, Wendy went home with Ruth. LuLing worked the afternoon shift at a nursery school and would not be home for another two hours. At four, while they were outside, they saw Lance stride to his car, whistling and jingling his keys. Wendy broke away from Ruth, and Ruth ran to the other side of the bungalow, where she could both hide and watch. She could hardly breathe. Wendy was walking toward Lance. "Hello?" she called to him.

Ruth sniffed and nodded.

"When you get back, well have some rum raisin ice cream." He named her favorite flavor. "Itll make you feel better."

For two days after the fall, Ruth was helpless; her mother had to feed, dress, and bathe her. LuLing would tell her what to do: "Open your mouth. Eat a little more. Put your arm in here. Try to keep your head still while I brush your hair." It was comforting to be a baby again, well loved, blameless.

Miriam opened wide her arms toward Marty and Arlene, and rushed to give them effusive hugs. She was wearing a maroon-and-olive outfit with a huge circular pleated collar. Her copper-colored hair was cut in a severe page boy. Ruth was reminded why the hairstyle was called that. Miriam looked like one of those pages in Renaissance paintings.

Didnt Mom ever realize, Ruth now mused, how her demands for no secrets drove me to hide even more from her? Yet maybe her mother did sense that. Maybe it made her hide certain truths from Ruth about herself. Things too bad to say. They could not trust each other. That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.

"Depress cause can not forgot! Look my sad life!"

"Hey, gimme a break. Im on the can!" he answered.

On good-weather days, Ruth would take her book to the dwarf-sized porch of the bungalow, and there shed sit with tucked legs on a bouncy patio chair with a clam-shaped back. Lance and Dottie would be in the yard, smoking cigarettes, pulling weeds out of the brick walkway or pruning the bougainvillea that covered one wall of their cottage like a bright quilt. Ruth would watch them surreptitiously, peering over the top of her book.

When Ruth returned to LuLings apartment, she began to throw away what her mother had saved: dirty napkins and plastic bags, restaurant packets of soy sauce and mustard and disposable chopsticks, used straws and expired coupons, wads of cotton from medicine bottles and the empty bottles themselves. She emptied the cupboards of cartons and jars with their labels still attached. There was enough rotten food from the fridge and freezer to fill four large garbage sacks.

"It was my fault too. I should have been more careful."

"Worse? How can she be worse?" GaoLing said. "I gave her ginseng, and she said she was taking it every day."

"Now try to write smaller." But the letters looked like blotches made by an ink-soaked fly twirling on its back. When it was finally time for bed, the practice session had consumed nearly twenty sheets of paper, both front and back. This was a sign of success as well as extravagance. LuLing never wasted anything. She gathered the used sheets, stacked them, and set them in a corner of the room. Ruth knew she would use them later, as practice sheets for her own calligraphy, as blotters for spills, as bundled-up hot pads for pans.

Art stood up. "I have some documents to look over for tomorrow. Better get started. Good night, LuLing."

Art came up to Ruth. "Hows it going?"

"What about stock market? I invest, you think I get lucky?" Lucky.

LuLing went to the refrigerator and brought out the cold beef patty. "Tomorrow what you want eat?"

"Jeez!" Dottie nodded bitterly. "Yeah, he always did like it in there. . . . So he took you to the bathroom—"

"I once drive to Himalaya, long ways by myself," LuLing bragged. "Himalaya very high up, close to moon."

When Fia and Dory finally showed up, Ruth did not feel she could chastise them in front of their mother or Arlene and Marty. They did a mass wave, "Hi, everybody," then gurgled, "Hi, Bubbie and Poppy," and threw their arms around their grandparents necks. The girls never voluntarily hugged LuLing.

"But he didnt mean to. He just forgot—"

Fia and Dory shrugged and gave each other knowing looks: Oh, this again. LuLings outbursts were becoming more frequent, more abrupt. Fortunately, they quickly abated, and the girls were not that affected by them. Nor did they become more sensitive to the problem, it seemed to Ruth. She had tried to explain several times to them that they shouldnt contradict anything LuLing said: "Waipo sounds illogical because she is. We cant change that. This is the disease talking, not her." But it was hard for them to remember, just as it was hard for Ruth not to react to her mothers threats to die. No matter how often she had heard them, they never ceased to grab her by the throat. And now the threat seemed very real—her mother was dying, first her brain, then her body.

"Yeah. You need more tea?"

"Okay, I guess."

"Precious Auntie," LuLing was already calling in Chinese, "are you there? What are you trying to say?"

"What makes you the goddamn expert, Id like to know!"

That night, as her mother cooked with the windows cracked open, loud voices punctured the air above the sound of spitting oil. Ruth pretended to read Jane Eyre. Her ears were straining to hear the words from outside, but the only thing she could make out was Dotties high-pitched shriek: "You filthy bastard!" Lances voice was a low rumble, like the revving of his Pontiac.

Ruth went into the kitchen and reached under the sink. "Im going to take out the garbage." Her mother gave her a raised eyebrow but kept cooking. As Ruth approached the cans by the side of the cottage, she slowed down to listen.

She plucked out the powder puff. Its edges were still nubby, but the center was worn smooth from its once-daily skimming over the curves of LuLings face. She threw the compact and powder puff in the trash bag. A moment later, she panicked, retrieved the compact and nearly cried. This was part of her mothers life! So what if she was being sentimental? She opened the compact again and saw her pained face in its mirror, then noticed the orange powder again. No, this wasnt being sentimental. It was morbid and disgusting. She stuffed the compact once more into the trash bag.

They returned the chopstick to Ruth. And Ruth wrote quickly and easily the answers to their questions: Does your arm hurt? A little. Can I touch your cast? Yes. Does Ricky love Betsy? Yes. Will I get a new bike for my birthday? Yes.

"Billy, stop teasing," Auntie Gal said. "Shes resting. She has too much pain to talk."

"I know what you did! Dont you play Mr. Innocent with me!" "Dont tell me what the fuck I did, cause you dont know!" This was followed by two door slams and the revving of the red Pontiac before it roared off. Ruths heart was racing along with it. Her mother shook her head and clucked her tongue, then muttered in Chinese, "Those foreigners are crazy."

Ruth checked her underwear a dozen times a day. By the fourth day after the movie, her period had not come. Now look whats happened, she cried to herself. She walked around the bungalow, staring blankly. She had ruined herself and there was no changing this. Love, pee, booze, she counted the ingredients on her fingers over and over. She remembered how brave she had felt, falling asleep without wiping off the pee.

Ruth was humiliated. Maybe he really had asked her only out of politeness. She bolted down the steps of the front porch. Now shed have to hide in the backyard for two hours so her mother would not know about her mistake or her lie.

There was another reason Ruth thought Dottie did not deserve Lance: She was bossy and talked too loud and fast. Sometimes her voice was milky, as if she needed to clear her throat. And when she yelled, it sounded like rusty metal. On warm evenings, when their back windows were open, Ruth listened as Lances and Dotties garbled voices drifted across the yard and into the bungalow. On quite a few occasions, when they argued, she could hear clearly what they were saying.

"Give me my smile."

"Why arent you talking?" Sally asked. "Did you break your mouth too?"

"Ah? " LuLing said. She immediately stood up and turned off the TV, and eagerly sat down at the kitchen table. Ruth smoothed the sand with the chopstick. She closed her eyes, then opened them, and began.

"No problem!" her mother reiterated.

"Whats that?"

She felt her limbs drain, felt unsure of herself, as if the diary contained an unalterable prediction of what would happen the rest of her life. Once again she was sixteen years old. She undid the clasp and read the words on the inside of the jacket, scrawled in two-inch block letters: STOP!!!

Then Ruth imagined it another way. Her mother reading the words, pounding her chest with one fist to shove her suffering back into the private area of her heart, biting her lips to keep from crying. Later, when Ruth came home, her mother would pretend not to see her. She would fix dinner, sit down, and chew silently. Ruth would not give in and ask if she could have some dinner too. She would eat cereal from the box at every meal, if thats what it took. They would act like this for days, her mother torturing Ruth with her silence, her absolute rejection. Ruth would stay strong by not feeling any pain, until nothing mattered anymore, unless, of course, it went the way it usually did, and Ruth broke down, cried, and said she was sorry.

When Ruth went back into the house, she was still shaking. She had not expected everything to be so crazy and ugly. Being careless could cause terrible trouble. You could be bad without even meaning to be.

"Ai-ya! What happen?" LuLing cried. "Robber?"

Francine rolled her eyes and nodded knowingly. "She went charging down the sidewalk about two or three hours ago. I noticed because she was wearing slippers and pajamas, and I said to myself, Wow, she looks really flipped out. . . . Like its none of my business, but you should take her to the doctor and get her medicated or something. I mean that in the good sense."

More drinks were ordered. Ruth noticed Art was on his second glass of wine. He also seemed to be having an animated conversation with Miriam. Another round of dishes arrived, just in time to dissipate the tension. Eggplant sautéed with fresh basil leaves, a tender sable fish coated in a mantle of garlic chips, a Chinese version of polenta smothered in a spicy meat sauce, plump black mushrooms, a Lions Head clay pot of meatballs and rice vermicelli. Even the "foreigners," LuLing reported, enjoyed the food. Above the noise, Auntie Gal leaned toward Ruth and said: "Your mother and I, we ate excellent dishes at Sun Hong Kong last week. But then we almost went to jail!" Auntie Gal liked to throw out zingers and wait for listeners to take the bait.

LuLing continued to give the immigrant good advice until she quit. Ruth started interviewing new prospects, and until someone was hired, she decided she should go to LuLings a few times a week to make sure the gas burners werent on and water wasnt flooding the apartment. "I was in the neighborhood to drop off some work for a client," she explained one day.

Ruth was so surprised she snorted in laughter. This was like the torment of being tickled. She couldnt stand it, but she could not stop her reflex to laugh out loud. Tears stung her eyes and she was glad for the darkness of the car.

Ruth laughed out loud when Wendy said that, but inside she was uncomfortable. Did most women ask men those kinds of questions? Had Miriam asked Art things like these? Did more of Arts past belong to Miriam than it did to her?

"Dont," Ruth managed to choke out. "You cant. I wont let you."

"Does she love him?"

She forced her lips to pull upward.

"The bathroom."

"The doctor said none of those things will help—"

"Okay I crazy!" LuLing sputtered. "Why you should believe me?" Her anger escalated like water in a teakettle—Ruth saw it, the rolling bubbles, the steam—and then LuLing erupted with the ultimate threat: "Maybe I die soon! Then everybody happy!"

Dottie stood up, her face twisted with horror. "Oh no, oh my God!" She grabbed Ruth by the shoulders and shook her. "Thats not how babies are made. Pee on the toilet seat. How could you be so stupid? He has to stick his cock in you. He squirts sperm, not piss. Do you realize what youve done? You accused an innocent man of raping you."

"Hey, no problem," the policeman said. "My mother-in-law did the same thing. Sundowning. The sun went down, she went wandering. We had to put alarm triggers on all the doors. That was one tough year, until we put her in a nursing home. My wife couldnt do it anymore—keeping an eye on her day and night."

LuLing was now sobbing. "Precious Auntie, oh Precious Auntie! I wish you never died! It was all my fault. If I could change fate, I would rather kill myself than suffer without you. . . ."

Ruths mind turned in loops, trying to translate what her mother meant. Auntie Gal gave Ruth a peculiar look, tightening her chin so as not to say anything. Others had quiet frowns of concern.

Her mother scowled, then said in Chinese: "This is because youre always bothering him. You think he wants to play with you—he doesnt! Why do you always make trouble? . . ."

Now that Ruth could no longer blame her mothers problems on the eccentricities of her personality, she saw the signs of dementia everywhere. They were so obvious. How could she not have noticed before? The time-shares and "free vacations" her mother ordered via junk mail. The accusations that Auntie Gal had stolen money from her. The way LuLing obsessed for days about a bus driver who accused her of not paying the fare. And there were new problems that caused Ruth to worry into the night. Her mother often forgot to lock the front door. She left food to defrost on the counter until it became rancid. She turned on the cold water and left it running for days, waiting for it to become hot. Some changes actually made life easier. For one thing, LuLing no longer said anything when Art poured himself another glass of wine, as he was doing tonight. "Why drink so much?" she used to ask. And Ruth had secretly wondered the same. She once mentioned to him that he might want to cut back before it became a habit. "You should take up juicing again." And he had calmly pointed out that she was acting like her mother. "A couple of glasses of wine at dinner is not a problem. Its a personal choice."

"She called him a creep."

"When?"

"And being neighbors, we gotta help each other, not go around accusing someone innocent of doing wrong. . . ."

Ruth looked up to see LuLing standing stock still at the end of the walkway. She was wearing a sweater over her pajamas.

After that, whenever Ruth was in the bathroom, she imagined Lance doing the same, the two of them trying to avoid the people who nagged them without end.

The second housekeeper lasted less than a week. On the days she didnt visit, Ruth felt uneasy, distracted. She was not sleeping well and had broken a molar grinding her teeth at night. She was too tired to cook and ordered pizza several times a week, giving up her resolve to set a low-fat example for Dory, and then having to endure LuLings remarks that the pepperoni was too salty. Recently Ruth had developed spasms across her shoulders that made it hard to sit at her desk and work at her computer. She didnt have enough ringers and toes to keep track of everything. When she found a Filipina who specialized in elder care, she felt a huge burden removed. "I love old people," the woman assured her. "Theyre not difficult if you take time to get to know them."

And what about LuLings other hiding spots? At the never used fireplace, Ruth lifted a basket containing photo albums. She pried at a loose brick, pulled it out, and—sure enough—it was still there, a twenty-dollar bill wrapped around four singles. Unbelievable! She felt giddy at finding this small treasure, a memento from her adolescent past. When they moved into this place, LuLing had put five twenty-dollar bills under the brick. Ruth would check every now and then, always noting that the bills lay in the same perfectly aligned wad. One day she put a piece of her hair on top of the money; she had seen this trick in a movie about a boy detective. Every time she looked after that, the hair was still there. When Ruth was fifteen, she began to borrow from the stash during times of her own emergencies—when she needed a dollar here and there for forbidden things: mascara, a movie ticket, and later, Marlboro cigarettes. At first she was always anxious until she could replace the bill. And when she did, she felt relieved and elated that she had not been caught. She rationalized that she deserved the money—for mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, being yelled at for no good reason. She replaced the missing twenties with tens, then fives, and eventually, just the singles wrapped with the one remaining twenty.

"No I wasnt!"

Ruth nodded. "She was pretty then." Ruth had seen other photos of LuLing and GaoLings mother—Waipo is what Ruth called her. In those, Waipo had a doughy face with wrinkles as deep as cracks and a mouth as severe, straight, and lipless as a sword slash. LuLing slipped the pretty picture into the Bible, then held one hand, palm up. "Now give back."

"There isnt room for four more people."

"But she was at your house until what? Two days ago? Three days ago?"

The last two blocks home, the truth of Wendys words bounced in Ruths head like pinballs. It made terrible sense, the part about the pee. That was why boys and girls had separate bathrooms. Thats why boys were supposed to lift the seat, but they didnt, just to be bad. And that was why her mother always told her never to sit on the toilet seat in someone elses bathroom. What her mother had said about germs was really a warning about sperms. Why couldnt her mother learn to speak English right?

"Happy Full Moon," Ruth said when her mother reached the table. She motioned for LuLing to sit next to her. Auntie Gal took the other chair next to Ruth, and then the rest of the family sat down. Ruth saw that Art was with Miriam at the other table, what was fast becoming the non-Chinese section.

"Its just up the street, and they said theyd be back in ten minutes."

Dory, who like LuLing often acted on impulse, blurted, "You just cant. I mean, youre crazy if you think—"

But she said nothing, of course. She stood by, her throat tightening, as LuLing went to her vinyl easy chair. She pulled up the bottom cushion. Underneath was a cutting board, and beneath that a flap, which she lifted. Into this shallow cavern, her mother placed the Bible and the ring in its purse. So thats where she also hid things!

She couldnt fault Art. He had always been honest about their relationship. From the beginning, he said he didnt want to marry again. "I dont want us to operate by assumptions," he had told her, cradling her in bed soon after they started to live together. "I want us to look at each other every morning and ask, Who is this amazing person Im so lucky to love?" At the time, she felt adored like a goddess. After the second year, he had spontaneously offered to give her a percentage ownership in the flat. Ruth had been touched by his generosity, his concern for her security. He knew how much she worried over the future. And the fact that they had not yet changed the deed? Well, that was more her fault than his. She was supposed to decide on the percentage interest she should have, then call the lawyer and set up the paperwork. But how could you express love as a percentage? She felt as she had when a college history professor of hers had told the students in the class to grade themselves. Ruth had given herself a B- and everyone else had taken an A.

Ruth pumped the brakes to make sure they would hold, then steered the car down the falling turns of the parking garage. Her mothers voice droned in rhythm with the engine: "Of course depress. When Precious Auntie die, all happiness leave my body. . . ."

She tried to cry no, stop, dont, but she was laughing too hard, unable to take a breath on her own, unable to control her arms or legs. Her skirt was tangled, but she couldnt pull it down. Her hands were like that of a marionette, twitching toward wherever he touched as she tried to keep his fingers away from her stomach, her breasts, her bottom. Tears poured out. He was pinching her nipples.

As Ruth drove her mother home after dinner, she marveled at the worries she had had at such an early age. But that was nothing compared with what most children had to go through these days. An unhappy mother? That was a piece of cake next to guns and gangs and sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention the things parents had to be concerned about: pedophiles on the Web, designer drugs like ecstasy, school shootings, anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation, the ozone layer, superbacteria. Ruth counted these automatically on her hand, and this reminded her she had one more task to do before the end of the day: call Miriam about letting the girls come to the reunion dinner.

"Not at all."

But as Ruth reached for the old towels, she found she could not get rid of them any more than her mother could. These were objects suffused with a life and a past. They had a history, a personality, a connection to other memories. This towel in her hands now, for instance, with its fuchsia flowers, she once thought it was beautiful. She used to wrap it around her wet hair and pretend she was a queen wearing a turban. She took it to the beach one day and her mother scolded her for using "best things" in stead of the green towel with frayed ends. By upbringing, Ruth could never be like Gideon, who bought thousands of dollars worth of Italian linens each year and tossed out last years collection as readily as last months Architectural Digest. Perhaps she was not as frugal as her mother, but she was aware of the possibility that she might regret the loss of something.

"No, this really my mother," LuLing insisted. "That one GaoLing mother." She held up the framed photo. In a daze, Ruth heard Sally asking Billy how the skiing was in Argentina the month before. Uncle Edmund was encouraging his grandson to try a black mushroom. Ruth kept asking herself, Whats happening? Whats happening?

Her mother fussed over her, taking her temperature, asking her what she had eaten, what her stools looked like. She made Ruth lie down on the sofa and placed a bucket nearby, in case she really did get sick. At last her mother departed for the laundromat; she would be gone for at least three hours. She always pushed the cart to a place twenty minutes away, because the washers there were a nickel cheaper than those at the closer places and the dryers didnt burn the clothes.

LuLing frowned, trying to recall.

Ruth sat still, unable to move. She wanted to go back to talking about food and clothes.

Ruth was frightened. "Why?"

An hour later, while LuLing was knitting and watching television, Ruth took down the sand tray by herself. "Precious Auntie wants to tell you something," she told her mother.

She continued the sirenlike wail, scuttling on her bottom away from him, pulling up her panties, pushing down her dress.

"Sorry. I was a little preoccupied. . . ."

Though she was no longer pregnant, Ruth felt no relief. Everything was still awful, maybe even worse. When her mother returned from the laundromat, Ruth was lying under the covers in bed, pretending to be asleep. She felt stupid and scared. Would she go to jail? And though she knew now that she was not pregnant, she wanted to die more than ever. But how? She pictured herself lying under the wheels of the Pontiac, Lance starting the car and taking off, crushing her without even knowing it. If she died like her father, he would meet her in heaven. Or would he too think she was bad?

"Sure he does. Or he will. Lots of times it happens that way. The guy finds out a baby is coming, and them boom—love, marriage, baby carriage."

During a commercial, Dottie untangled herself, stood up, and wobbled about tipsily like the scarecrow in the movie. "How about some pop-pop-pop popcorn, everybody?" And then with arms swinging widely, she took one step backward and loped out of the room, singing, "Ohhhh, were off to see the kitchen. . . ."

She felt her mother tapping her arm. "I have present for you too. Early birthday, give you now." She reached into her purse and pulled out a plain white box, tied with ribbon.

"Move?" her mother cried. "Ai-ya! Where we should move?"

Lance laughed. "Actually, I kicked her out. Yeah, in a way, you did me a favor. If it werent for you, I wouldnt have found out she was screwing around. Oh sure, I kind of suspected it for a while. But I told myself, Man, you got to have trust. And you know what, she didnt trust me. Can you believe it? Me? Let me tell you something, you cant have a marriage if you dont have trust. You know what I mean?" He looked at her.

The movie continued and Ruth watched the tadpole find the egg, which gobbled it up. A big-eyed frog began to grow. At the end of the movie, a nurse with a starched white cap handed a googly baby to a beautiful woman in a pink satin jacket, as her manly husband declared, "Its a miracle, the miracle of life."

FOUR

Ruth was quiet for a long time, trying to make her lips move right. Finally she said, in a cracked voice, "I trust you."

Her mother went on: "She my sister-in-law."

Ruth felt sick to her stomach. Her mother saw danger where there wasnt. And now that something was truly really awful, she was blind. If Ruth told her the actual truth, she would probably go crazy. Shed say she didnt want to live anymore. So what difference did it make? She was alone. No one could save her.

Ruth nodded, sensing this was important, that her mother was giving her a message about mothers. She tried to pay attention and not look at the ring on her finger. But she could not help imagining what the kids at school would say, how envious they would be.

Ruth didnt understand. Reluctantly she put the ring in LuLings hand and watched as she returned it to the silk purse.

Halfway through the dinner, Nicky, Sallys six-year-old, spun the go-round, perhaps thinking he could launch it like a Frisbee, and the spout of a teapot knocked over a water glass. LuLing yelped and jumped up. Water dripped from her lap. "Ai-ya! Why you do this? "

"Me, too," Dory said. "Bye, Waipo."

"Dad?" Fia asked. "Can we get a kitten?"

"More presents," Ruth called out, and handed out packages. She had found a wonderful old photo of LuLing and Auntie Gal as girls, flanking their mother. She had a negative made of the original, then ordered eight-by-tens and had those framed. She wanted this to be a meaningful tribute to her family, a gift that would last forever. And indeed, the recipients gave appreciative sighs.

Soon the pearls were making the rounds at the other table as well. Arts mother gave the necklace an especially critical eye, weighing it in her hand. "Just lovely" she said to LuLing, a bit too emphatically. Miriam simply observed, "Those beads are certainly large." Art gave the pearls a once-over and cleared his throat.

"Gone," LuLing said, looking satisfied.

But now it was night, and Ruth lay awake listening to the foghorns warning ships to stay clear of the shallows. The day before, when she picked up her mother for dinner, Ruth learned that the Filipina had quit.

"I dont want any money," Ruth protested.

"Thats an idea."

"Im afraid to leave her alone when we go to Hawaii."

"Does your mommy know?" Dottie asked.

"She said everything will be all right. Everything. All right? Youre not supposed to worry anymore." Her mother sobbed with relief.

"You go," Ruth told Art in the morning. They had already paid for the rental, and there was a no-refund policy.

After dinner, LuLing cleared the dining table and started to work. She laid out ink, brushes, and a roll of paper. With quick and perfect strokes, she wrote large Chinese characters: "Going Out of Business. Last few days! No offer refused!" She set the banner aside to dry, then cut a new length of paper.

"You think a lot of things are funny, dont you?" He twiddled his fingers up and down her ribs as if they were harp strings. "Yeah, I can see that now. Did you tell all your little girlfriends? Ha! Ha! I almost put that guy in jail."

"If I dont tell him, how else will he realize that he loves you?"

So that was why Lance had married her. But where was the baby?

"Does she look anything like that lady there?"

"She was almost killed! Scared me to death. Really! Im not exaggerating. She was nearly yanked from this life and on her way to the yellow springs. . . . I just about cracked my own teeth to see how much pain she was in. . . . No, no tears, she must have inherited the strength of her grandmother. Well, shes eating a little bit now. She cant talk, and I thought at first she bit off her tongue, but I think its only the fright. Come over to visit? Fine, fine, but tell your kids to be careful. I dont want her arm to fall off."

"Youre right," Ruth answered, trying to keep her mind on the road ahead. "Ill be more careful."

"Hon, Ive been meaning to talk to you about that. Not to imply that youre somehow at fault for what happened. But I am concerned that you havent been your usual self. You seem—"

"Ah, always for client. Work first, mother second."

"Hambugga? You say hambugga, then eat."

The living room smelled like booze and cigarettes. The curtains were closed and there were empty TV-dinner trays on the coffee table.

LuLing sniffed. "Hnh! Nothing wrong my memory! I member lots things, more than you. Where I live little-girl time, place we call Immortal Heart, look like heart, two river, one stream, both dry-out. . . ." She continued talking as Ruth went to the other side of the car, got in, and started the engine. "What he know? That doctor dont even use telescope listen my heart. Nobody listen my heart! You dont listen. GaoLing dont listen. You know my heart always hurting. I just dont complain. Am I complain?"

"Oh, very pretty!" GaoLing murmured, glancing at what Ruth held in her hand. "Let me see," and before Ruth could think, GaoLing snatched the box. Her lips grew tight. "Mmm," she said, examining the bauble. Had Auntie Gal seen this before? How many times had LuLing worn it to her house, bragging about its worth? And had GaoLing known all along that the necklace was fake, that Ruth, the good daughter, was also a fake?

"You talk about killing yourself, so why dont you ever do it? I wish you would. Just do it, do it, do it! Go ahead, kill yourself! Precious Auntie wants you to, and so do I!"

Ruth nodded. "That mean curse gone?"

"But that was in PE!" Ruth wailed.

Ruth didnt know why she had said that. The words just popped out of her mouth. "Last night, remember?" She searched for an answer. "She had me write something that looked like a letter Z, and we didnt know what it meant?"

"Thats Waipo, isnt it?" Ruth said to Auntie Gal, struggling to stay nonchalant. When GaoLing nodded, Ruth said happily to her mother, "Well, if thats your sisters mother, she must be yours as well."

SIX

"Nonsense!" her mother said in Chinese. "I can see something is blocked inside and cant come out."

Ruth was tempted to speak, but she was afraid to break the spell. One word and all the good things in her life would vanish. She shook her head. LuLing encouraged her until the hamburgers rivulets of fat had congealed into ugly white pools. She put the patty in the fridge, then served Ruth a bowl of steaming rice porridge, which she said was better for her health anyway.

"Its The Wizard of Oz, not Ozzie and Harriet. And this ones a movie, its famous!"

Ruth wondered whether this was true. She thought about making a little sound so small no one would even hear. But if she did, then all the good things that were happening might disappear. They would decide she was fine, and everything would go back to normal. Her mother would start scolding her for being careless and disobedient.

Cleaning helped her feel that she was removing the clutter from her mothers mind. She opened more closets. She saw hand towels with holly motifs, a Christmas present that LuLing never used. She put them in a bag destined for Goodwill. There were also scratchy towels and bargain-sale sheets she remembered using as a child. The newer linens were still in the department-store gift boxes they had come in.

"Nah, you wont know for another ten years." He lit another cigarette. "You know, in ten years, youll look back and say, Boy, I sure was dumb about how babies are made!" He snorted, then cocked his head to get her reaction. "Arent you going to laugh? I think its kind of funny myself. Dont you?" He started to pat her arm and she flinched without intending to. "Hey, whats the matter? Uh-oh, dont tell me. . . . You dont trust me. What are you, like her? After what you did and what I certainly did not do, do you think I now deserve this kind of treatment from you?"

"In fact, why dont you start now, so she gets used to the food? Not that she isnt welcome to dinner here whenever she wants. . . . Listen, I really have to get some work done now. Are you going to take her home soon?"

"Where far?"

"She fell out the window. Why she was leaning out, I dont know. But she hit the cement. The downstairs lady called the ambulance. Her body is broken, and something is wrong with her head—I dont know what— but its very bad, the doctors say. I just hope theres no brain damage."

"I noticed." Art was shuffling papers.

"I dont feel so good."

Now whenever Ruth saw Lance, she breathed so hard and fast her lungs seized up and she nearly fainted from lack of air. She had a constant stomachache. Sometimes her stomach went into spasm and she stood over the toilet heaving, but nothing came out. When she ate, she imagined the food falling into the baby frogs mouth, and then her stomach felt like a gunky swamp and she had to run to the bathroom and make herself retch, hoping the frog would leap into the toilet and her troubles could be flushed away.

Ruth nodded and realized she was still gripping her toes. She relaxed. Soon this would be over. She saw that he had dark circles under his eyes, lines running from his nose to his jaw. Funny. He looked much older than she remembered, no longer as handsome. And then she realized it was because she was no longer in love with him. How strange. She had believed it was love, and it never was. Love was forever.

"Well, if you dont tell Lance, I will," Wendy said.

"Never work!"

"No," she said out loud. "I cant."

She noted with dismay that he had asked what she would do, had not said "we." Since the Full Moon Festival dinner, she had become more aware of the ways she and Art failed to be a family. She had tried to push this out of her mind, but it crept back, confirming to her that it was not an unnecessary worry. Why did she feel she didnt belong to anyone? Did she unconsciously choose to love people who kept their distance? Was she like her mother, destined to be unhappy?

She called Art in Kauai. There was no answer. She pictured him lying serenely on the beach, oblivious to all problems in the world. But how could he be on the beach? It was six in the morning there. Where was he? Hula dancing in someones bed? Another thing to worry about. She could call Wendy, but Wendy would simply commiserate by saying her own mother was doing far crazier things. How about Gideon? He was more concerned about clients and contracts. Ruth decided to call Auntie Gal.

She knew that what she was writing was risky. It felt like pure evil. And the descending mantle of guilt made her toss it off with even more bravado. What she wrote next was even worse, such terrible words, which later—too late—she had crossed out. Ruth now looked at them, the blacked-out lines, and she knew what they said, what her mother had read:

"Its awfully nice of you to include us," Miriam gushed to Ruth. "I hope it wasnt any trouble."

And so the rights continued, and felt to Ruth both strange and familiar. They argued with increasing vigor and assurance, crossing the temporary boundaries of the last month, defending the old terrain. They flung out more pain, knowing already they had survived the worst.

Ruth dropped the chopstick. The lady with bloody hair was trying to kill her! So it was true, that day at the playground, she almost died. She had thought so, and it was true.

The box was light. Ruth slipped off the ribbon, lifted the lid, and saw a gleam of gray. It was a necklace of irregularly shaped black pearls, each as large as a gumball. Was this a test? Or had her mother really forgotten that Ruth had given her this as a gift years before? LuLing grinned knowingly—Oh yes, daughter cannot believe her luck!

At the time, she was shocked that she could write such horrible feelings. She was shocked now to remember them. She had cried while writing the words, full of anger, fear, and a strange freedom of finally admitting so openly that she wanted to hurt her mother as much as her mother hurt her. And then she had hidden the diary in the back of her underwear drawer, an easy enough place to look. She had arranged the book just so, spine facing in, a pair of pink-flowered panties on top. That way Ruth would know for sure that her mother had been snooping in there.

Oh, no. Ruth knew what this was. Her mother sometimes talked about this Precious Auntie ghost who lived in the air, a lady who had not behaved and who wound up living at the End of the World. That was where all bad people went: a bottomless pit where no one would ever find them, and there they would be stuck, wandering with their hair hanging to their toes, wet and bloody.

"Its not another ghost."

"Eh, what wrong?"

"She was mean to me." He aimed a pout in the direction of LuLing, who was now busy dabbing at her lap with a napkin.

Someday? Ruths throat ached. She wanted to cry. "Whens forever?" But she knew what her mother meant—forever as in, "When I forever dead, then you dont need listen me anymore." Ruth was a mix of emotions, happy that her mother had given her such nice presents, because this meant she still loved her, yet filled with a new despair that the ring had been taken away so soon.

Arts parents were the first to arrive at the restaurant. "Arlene, Marty," Ruth greeted them. They exchanged polite two-cheek kisses. Arlene hugged her son, and Marty gave a light two-punch to his shoulder and then his jaw. "You knock me out," Art said, supplying their traditional father-son refrain.

Ruth went to the kitchen, carrying a bag of oranges, toilet paper, and other grocery essentials. While there, she checked for disasters and danger. The last time shed been there, she found that LuLing had tried to fry eggs with the shells still on. Ruth did a quick sweep of the dining room table and picked up more junk mail offers LuLing had filled out. "Ill mail these for you, Mom," she said. She then went into the bathroom to make sure the faucets werent running. Where were the towels? There was no shampoo, only a thin slice of cracked soap. How long had it been since her mother had bathed? She looked in the hamper. Nothing there. Was her mother wearing the same clothes every day?

"No right! All wrong!"

Ruth now reflected that in all the years gone by, she and her mother had never talked about what had happened. She put down the diary. Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time. She felt a curious sympathy for her younger self, as well as an embarrassed hindsight in how foolish and egocentric she had been. If she had had a child, it would have been a daughter who grew up to make her just as miserable as she had made her mother. That daughter would have been fifteen or sixteen right about now, shouting that she hated Ruth. She wondered whether her mother had ever told her own mother that she hated her.

"They went to check out a CD at Green Apple Annex."

"I didnt—" Ruth whispered.

"Im pissed!"

Her mothers voice startled her. "So how Fu-Fu do?"

"He doesnt love me."

"Im going to school now," Ruth would say.

"Sure, tell your mom to come over too," said Dottie.

"No-no!" LuLing said automatically. "You help youself."

"Who?" And then she heard him mutter, "God damn it."

Ruth raced back upstairs. With shaky fingers, she called a former client who was a captain in the police department. Minutes later, a Latino officer stood at the doorway. He was bulging with weapons and paraphernalia and his face was serious. Ruths panic notched up. She stepped outside.

At two minutes to seven, Ruth knocked on Lance and Dotties door. "Who is it?" Lance yelled.

LuLing shook her head. "That not my real mother."

With its small-paned windows and yellow shutters, the bungalow resembled a dollhouse. But Ruths initial delight soon turned into peevishness. The new home was so small she had no privacy. She and her mother shared a cramped, sunless bedroom that allowed for nothing more than twin beds and a dresser. The combined living room, eating area, and efficiency kitchen afforded no place to hide. Ruths only refuge was the bathroom, and perhaps for this reason she developed numerous stomach ailments that year. Her mother was usually in the same room as she was, doing her calligraphy, cooking, or knitting, activities that kept her hands busy but left her tongue all too free to interrupt Ruth when she was watching TV. "You hair getting too long. Hair cover your glasses like curtain, cant see. You think this good-looking, I telling you not good-looking! You tune off TV, I cut hair for you. . . . Eh, you hear me. Tune off TV. . . ."

And Ruth scratched back: B-U-R-G-R.

"I know youre scared, but what he did was wrong. Its called statutory rape, and he has to be punished for it. . . . Anyway, the police will probably ask you a lot of questions, and you just tell them the truth, what he did, where it happened. . . . Was it in the bedroom?"

The younger one, who was four, piped up: "Im called Boomer now."

Ruth lay down on the bed, the pages next to her. She looked at the photo of Precious Auntie and put that on her chest. Tomorrow she would call Art in Hawaii and see if he could recommend someone who could translate. That was One. She would retrieve the other pages from home. That was Two. She would call Auntie Gal and see what she knew. That was Three. And she would ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do. She would even move in with her mother, spend more time getting to know her. Art would not be too happy about that. He might take her moving out as a sign of problems. But someone had to take care of her mother. And she wanted to. She wanted to be here, as her mother told her about her life, taking her through all the detours of the past, explaining the multiple meanings of Chinese words, how to translate her heart. Her hands would always be full, and finally, she and her mother could both stop counting.

"I went down into the ravine. I looked and looked. Oh, I was crazy with grief. If only I had found you, I would have taken your bones to the cave and given you a proper burial."

"Well, do you or dont you?"

LuLing waved from across the table. Ruth had once asked the girls to give LuLing kisses. But she had stiffened in response to their pecks.

A few days after that, LuLing came into Ruths room, accusing her of having gone to the beach. When Ruth lied and said she had not, LuLing showed Ruth the sneakers she had left by the front door. She banged them together and a storm of sand rained down.

Ruth tried to act casual, walking speedily while clenching the tops of her thighs together. As she flew past the bedroom, she smelled stale cigarettes, saw an unmade bed, pillows, towels, and Jean Nate bath oil at the foot of the bed. Once in the bathroom, she pulled down her pants and sat, groaning with relief. Heres where Lance had just been, she thought, and she giggled. And then she saw the bathroom was a mess. She was embarrassed for Lance. The grout between the pink tiles on the floor was grungy gray. A bra and panties lay mashed on top of the hamper. And car magazines were sloppily shoved into a built-in wall rack across from the toilet. If her mother could see this!

When the lights came on, Wendy raised her hand and asked the teacher how the miracle got started in the first place, and the girls who knew the answer snorted and giggled. Ruth laughed as well. The teacher gave them a scolding look and said, "You have to get married first."

"Something is wrong," LuLing persisted. Ruth was amazed that her mother was so perceptive. Maybe there was nothing the matter with her after all.

She never told Art about the panic; she said only that with her, massage was a waste of time and money. And although she was curious about Arts sex life with Miriam and other women, she never asked what he had done in bed with his former lovers. And he did not ask about hers. It shocked her that Wendy badgered Joe to give her explicit details about his past escapades in beds and on beaches, as well as tell her his precise feelings when he first slept with her. "And he tells you whatever you ask?" Ruth said.

Her mother panted a few more times, then left the room. Ruth got up and slammed the door shut.

"Doctor!" GaoLing snorted. "I dont believe this diagnosis, Alzheimers. Your uncle said the same thing, and hes a dentist. Everybody gets old, everybody forgets. When youre old, theres too much to remember. I ask you, Why didnt anyone have this disease twenty, thirty years ago? The problem is, today kids have no time anymore to see parents. Your mommys lonely, thats all. She has no one to talk to in Chinese. Of course her mind is a little rusted. If you stop speaking, no oil for the squeaky wheel!"

"All right. For now, we dont need to tell her, not yet. First, let me think how we re going to take care of this. Okay? It wont be easy, but Ill figure out what to do, dont worry. Five years ago, the same thing happened to me."

She squirmed, her mind turning around and around. She saw terrible pictures. A brown hot dog squirting yellow mustard. She knew the words: penis, sperm, vagina. But how could she say them? Then the nasty picture would be there in front of both of them. "You know," she whimpered.

Ruth slowly stood up. Uh-oh. Her mother was back to her old ways.

Ruth stood, and thats when she noticed the dampness on her bottom. The toilet seat had been wet! Her mother had always warned her not to sit on other peoples toilets, even those at her friends homes. Men were supposed to lift the seat, but they never did. "Every man forget," her mother had said, "they dont care. Leave germ there, put on you."

She stayed home from school on Monday. LuLing became increasingly fearful that a ghost was trying to take her daughter away. Why else was Ruth still sick? LuLing rambled about bony teeth from a monkeys jaw. Precious Auntie would know, she kept saying. She knew about the curse. This was punishment for something the family had done a long time ago. She put the sand tray on a chair by Ruths twin bed, waiting. "Both us die," she asked, "or only me?"

Lances voice rose and broke like a crying boys: "You goddamn fucking whore!"

"Please let me know you are not mad at me," her mother went on. "Give me a sign. I have tried to tell you how sorry I am, but I dont know if youve heard. Can you hear me? When did you come to America?"

"You feel something else matter? . . . Another ghost here?"

Ruth stopped breathing. She ducked her head.

Ruth wondered what she had written. How could a square mean all that? Was there really a ghost in the room? What was in her hand and the chopstick? Why was her hand shaking?

"Oh. Oh, I know. . . . I die soon. . . . I right? You can say, I not afraid."

"But the doctor said sometimes you forget things because youre depressed."

"Its like part of me thinks everything about him is mine, his feelings, his fantasies. I know thats not right, but emotionally thats how I feel. His past is my past, it belongs to me. Shit, if I could find his childhood toy box Id want to look inside that and say, Mine. Id want to see what girlie magazines he hid under the mattress and pulled out to masturbate to."

"Okay."

"Damn it, Lance," she heard Dottie yell one night, "Im going to throw out your dinner if you dont come right now!"

"This is very good jade, dont loose," her mother warned.

What else was in the bottom of the chair? Ruth reached in and pulled out a package wrapped in a brown grocery bag and tied with red Christmas ribbon. Inside was a stack of paper, all written on in Chinese. At the top of certain sheets was a large character done in stylish brushed-drawn calligraphy. She had seen this before. But where? When?

Ruths legs moved shakily forward. The top half of her was still running away. When she reached the top of the porch, she was numb. She looked up. "Im sorry," she squeaked. The quiver in her chin shook open her mouth, and sobs burbled out.

The next day, LuLing brought the tea tray to school and filled it with sand from the same part of the schoolyard where Ruth had broken her arm. Miss Sondegard agreed to let Ruth answer questions this way. And when Ruth raised her hand during an arithmetic drill and scrawled "7," all the other kids jumped out of their chairs to look. Soon they were clamoring that they too wanted to do sand-writing. At recess, Ruth was very popular. She heard them fussing over her. "Let me try!" "Me, me! She said I could!" "You gotta use your left hand, or its cheating!" "Ruth, you show Tommy how to do it. Hes so dumb."

In October, her mother asked her to give the rent check to the Rogerses. When Dottie opened the door, Ruth saw that she and Lance were busy unloading a huge box. Inside was a brand-new color television set, brought home in time to watch The Wizard of Oz, Dottie explained, which was going to air at seven oclock that night. Ruth had never seen a color TV before, except in a store window.

It was late, but Ruth felt even more energized, full of purpose. Glancing about the apartment, she counted on her fingers what repairs were needed to prevent accidents. The wall sockets needed to be brought up to code. The smoke detectors should be replaced. Get the water heater turned down so that her mother could not be scalded. Was the brown stain on the ceiling the result of a leak? She followed where the water might be dripping, and her discerning eye skidded to a stop on the floor near the couch. She rushed over and peeled back the rug, and stared at the floorboard. This was one of her mothers hiding places, where she hoarded valuables that might be needed in time of war or, as LuLing said, "disaster you cannot even imagine, they so bad." Ruth pressed on one end of the board, and lo and behold, like a seesaw, the other end lifted. Aha! The gold serpentine bracelet! She plucked it out and laughed giddily as if she had just picked the right door on a game show. Her mother had dragged her into Royal Jade House on Jackson Street and bought the bracelet for a hundred twenty dollars, telling Ruth it was twenty-four-carat gold and could be weighed on a scale and traded for full value in an emergency.

"We still have to talk. Turn around." His voice was not quite so gentle. Ruth saw he had opened the door. She stopped breathing. "Inside," he ordered. She bit her lip and slowly climbed back up, then glided past him. She heard the door close and saw the room go dim.

"Four-eleven, eighty-five pounds, black hair pulled into a bun, probably wearing pink or lilac pajamas and slippers . . ." Ruth was picturing LuLing as she said this: the puzzled look on her mothers face, her inert body lying in the street. Ruths voice started to wobble. "Oh God, shes so tiny and helpless. . . ."

FIVE

"All right, then. So settle down. Dont get all spooky on me."

"You think youre so hot! How many others have you screwed? . . . Youre nothing but a thirty-second wonder—yeah, wham, bam, thank you, maam!"

"I went by myself."

Ruths cousin Billy—now called Bill by others—showed up, trailed by his second wife, Dawn, and their combined four children, ages nine through seventeen. Ruth and Billy rocked in embrace. He thumped her back, as guys did with their buddies. He had been a skinny brat and a bully to Ruth in childhood, but those qualities had turned out to be leadership skills. Today he ran a biotech company and had grown chubby with success. "God, its good to see you," he said. Ruth immediately felt better about the dinner.

"Make her say hamburger before letting her eat a hamburger. Make her say cookie before she gets a cookie."

The only time her mother didnt bother her was when she was doing her homework or studying for a test. Her mother respected her studies. If she interrupted her, all Ruth had to do was say, "Shh! Im reading." And almost always, her mother fell quiet. Ruth read a lot.

"Now, now, dont worry anymore," her mother soothed. "Tomorrow you talk to Artie. Make him buy you a gift. He should pay a lot to show that he values you. He should buy you something like this." LuLing touched the necklace, which had been returned to Ruths hands.

That night LuLing took the teachers advice literally: she served hamburger, which she had never done. LuLing did not cook or eat beef of any kind. It disgusted her, reminded her of scarred flesh. Yet now, for her daughters sake, she put an unadorned patty in front of Ruth, who was thrilled to see her mother had actually made American food for once.

"No problem," LuLing assured her. "She no problem."

Ruth quietly tried to steer her mother back to coherence. "That was your nursemaid," she coaxed. "I guess youre saying she was like a mother to you."

"Its me. Ruth."

Before the class ended, the teacher passed out white elastic belts with clips, and boxes containing thick white pads. She explained that the girls were due to have their first periods soon, and they should not be surprised or frightened if they saw a red stain on their panties. The stain was a sign that they had become women, and it was also an assurance that they were "good girls." A lot of the girls tittered. Ruth thought the teacher was saying her period was due in the same way as homework, meaning it was due tomorrow, the day after, or next week.

When Billy tried to change the television channel, Uncle Edmund sternly ordered him to put it back to the program Ruth had been watching. She had never heard her uncle be strict with her cousins. Billy was a spoiled brat.

"Precious Auntie mad-it me?" her mother would say when Ruth had sat for several minutes without writing anything in the sand.

Her mother put the chopstick in Ruths hand. "Here, do this. Close your eyes, turn your face to heaven, and speak to her. Wait for her answer, then write it down. Hurry, close your eyes."

"Before me. He peed first, then I did."

A few days after the first housekeeper started, LuLing called to complain: "She think come to America everything so easy. She want take break, then tell me, Lady, I dont do move furniture, I dont do window, I dont do iron. I ask her, You think you dont lift finger become millionaire? No, America not this way!"

"I know, I know. Im not going to Hawaii, so I can catch up."

Ruth, who was watching television, noticed after a while that her mother was staring at her. "Why you not do study?" LuLing asked. She had made Ruth practice reading and writing since kindergarten, to help her be "one jump ahead."

"See!"

LuLing had objected to the idea of having anyone come to her house to help clean. Ruth had anticipated she would. Her mother hated spending money on anything she believed she could do herself, from hair coloring to roof repairs.

And then panic grabbed her. For now she remembered that three nights before she had sat on pee from the man she loved.

"What areyou talking about?"

"Hurt?" Ruth could not move. Her body felt airless, hollow and heavy at the same time. "What do you mean? How did she get hurt?"

"Really?" LuLing said. "That cat old. You lucky she not dead yet."

"Well, Precious Auntie thinks I should watch it."

Ruth sat with the chopstick poised for action. For a long time nothing happened. But that was because she was nervous she was about to trick her mother. What if there really was a ghost named Precious Auntie? Most of the time she thought the sand-writing was just a boring chore, that it was her duty to guess what her mother wanted to hear, then move quickly to end the session. Yet Ruth had also gone through times when she believed that a ghost was guiding her arm, telling her what to say. Sometimes she wrote things that turned out to be true, like tips for the stock market, which her mother started investing in to stretch the money she had saved over the years. Her mother would ask Precious Auntie to choose between two stocks, say IBM and U.S. Steel, and Ruth chose the shorter one to spell. No matter what she picked, LuLing profusely thanked Precious Auntie. One time, her mother asked where Precious Aunties body was lying so she could find it and bury it. That question had given Ruth the creeps, and she tried to steer the conversation to a close. The End, she wrote, and this made her mother jump out of her chair and cry, "Its true, then! GaoLing was telling the truth. Youre at the End of the World." Ruth had felt a cold breath blow down her neck.

"And call that service, Meals on Wheels. They might be able to deliver food while we re gone."

"Through the back, past the bedroom," Dottie said.

Wendy stopped walking. Her mouth hung open. Then she whispered: "Dont you know anything?" And she explained what Ruths mother, the lady in the movie, and the teacher had not talked about: that the ingredient came from a boys penis. And to ensure everything was now perfectly clear to Ruth, Wendy spelled it out: "The boy pees inside the girl."

"What you mean?"

"Some things too good use right now. Save for later, predate more."

Ruth now remembered the last place where she had hidden her diary. She had forgotten about it all these years. She went to the kitchen, hoisted herself onto the counter with less ease than she had at sixteen. Patting along the top of the cabinet, she soon found it: the heart-patterned diary, some of the hearts coated with pink nail polish to obliterate the names of various boys she had immortalized as crushes of the moment. She climbed down with the dusty relic, leaned against the counter, and rubbed the red-and-gold cover.

"How? Tell me."

Wendy waved both hands when she spotted Ruth, and then she and Joe eased their way through the restaurant. Gideon trailed a comfortable distance behind. "We found a parking space right in front!" Wendy boasted. She held up her lucky charm, a plastic angel with the face of a parking meter. "I tell you, works every time!" She had given one to Ruth, who had placed it on the dashboard but only received parking tickets. "Hi, sweetie," Gideon said in his usual low-key manner. "Youre looking radiant. Or is that sweat and nervousness?" Ruth, who had told him on the phone about Miriams crashing the party, kissed him on both cheeks and whispered where Arts ex was. He had already suggested he act as spy and report everything appalling that she said.

And now, thirty-one years afterward, in seeing the reminder of her small larceny, she was both the girl she once was and the observer of that younger version of herself. She remembered the unhappy girl who lived in her body, who was full of passion, rage, and sudden impulses. She used to wonder: Should she believe in God or be a nihilist? Be Buddhist or a beatnik? And whichever it should be, what was the lesson in her mothers being miserable all the time? Were there really ghosts? If not, did that mean her mother was really crazy? Was there really such a thing as luck? If not, why did Ruths cousins live in Saratoga? At times, she became resolute in wanting to be exactly the opposite of her mother. Rather than complain about the world, she wanted to do something constructive. She would join the Peace Corps and go into remote jungles. Another day, she chose to become a veterinarian and help injured animals. Still later, she thought about becoming a teacher to kids who were retarded. She wouldnt point out what was wrong, as her mother did with her, exclaiming that half her brain must be missing. She would treat them as living souls equal to everyone else.

She could smell the oil heating in the kitchen, hear the machine-gun spill of popcorn kernels into the pot. Lance swished the ice cubes in his glass and talked about the programs that he hoped were broadcasting in color: football, Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies. Ruth felt like she was on a date. She turned slightly toward him. Listen with a fascinated expression. Wendy had told her this was what a girl should do to make a boy feel manly and important. But what came after that? Lance was so close to her. All at once, he patted her knee, stood up, and announced, "I guess I better use the can before the show comes back on." What he said was embarrassingly intimate. She was still blushing when he came back a minute later. This time he sat down even closer than before. He could have scooted over to where Dottie had been, so why hadnt he? Was it on purpose? The movie resumed. Was Dottie coming back soon? Ruth hoped not. She imagined telling Wendy how nervous she felt: "I thought I was going to pee in my pants!" That was just an expression, but now that she had thought it. she really did have to pee. This was terrible. How could she ask Lance it she could use the bathroom? She couldnt just get up and wander the house. Should she be casual like him and just say she had to use the can? She gripped her muscles, trying to hold on. Finally, when Dottie came in with the bowl of popcorn, Ruth blurted, "I have to wash my hands first."

"This necklace been in my family long time," Ruth heard her mother say. Ruth stared at the beads, remembered when she first saw the necklace in a shop on Kauai. "Tahiti-style black pearls," the tag said, a twenty-dollar bit of glassy junk to wear against sweaty skin on a tropically bright day. She had gone to the island with Art, the two of them newly in love. Later, when she returned home, she realized she had forgotten her mothers birthday, had not even thought to telephone while she was sipping mai-tais on a sandy beach. She had boxed the twice-worn trinket, and by giving her mother something that had crossed the ocean, she hoped she would also give the impression she had been thinking of her. Her downfall lay in being honest when she insisted the necklace was "nothing much," because LuLing mistook this modesty to mean the gift was quite expensive and thus the bona fide article, proof of a daughters love. She wore it everywhere, and Ruth would feel the slap of guilt whenever she overheard her mother boast to her friends, "Look what my daughter Lootie buy me."

Ruth went to the vinyl chair, removed the cushion and the cutting board. Everything was still there: the small black Bible, the silk pouch, the apple-green-jade ring. She opened the Bible, and there it was, the wax-paper sleeve with the same photo her mother had shown her at the family reunion dinner. Precious Auntie, wearing the peculiar headdress and high-collared winter clothes. What did this mean? Was her mother demented thirty years before? Or was Precious Auntie really who her mother said she was? And if she was, did that mean her mother was not demented? Ruth stared at the photo again, searching the features of the woman. She couldnt tell.

Inside, the dining room roared with the conversations of a hundred happy people. Children used chopsticks to play percussion on teacups and water glasses. The waiter who led Ruth and Art to their tables had to shout above the clatter of plates being delivered and taken away. As Ruth followed, she inhaled the mingled fragrances of dozens of entrees. At least the food would be good tonight.

Her mother did not think she should go. "They just polite, dont really mean."

"Its for an immigrant training program," Ruth lied, "so they wont have to go on welfare. And we dont have to pay anything. Theyre doing it free so they can put work experience on their resume." LuLing readily accepted this reasoning. Ruth felt like a bad child. She would be caught. Or maybe she wouldnt, and that would be worse. Another reminder that the disease had impaired her mothers ability to know and see everything.

"Thats not true!" Ruth hated Wendy for telling her this, for laughing hysterically. She was relieved when they reached the block where she and Wendy went in opposite directions.

She ran to the back rooms, flung open closets, looked out the windows. Her throat tightened. "Mommy, where are you?" she whimpered. "Answer me." She ran down the front steps and knocked on the tenants door.

"Why you act so crazy?" her mother often asked. Of course, she could not tell her mother she was pregnant. Experience had taught her that her mother worried too much even when she had no reason to worry. If there was something really wrong, her mother would scream and pound her chest like a gorilla. She would do this in front of Lance and Dottie. She would dig out her eyes and yell for the ghosts to come take her away. And then she would really kill herself. This time for sure. She would make Ruth watch, to punish her even more.

Ruth held up the necklace. She saw how the dark pearls glistened, this gift that had risen from the bottom of the sea.

"Oh, yes! Your mother got into a big fight with the waiter, said she already paid the bill." Auntie Gal shook her head. "The waiter was right, it was not yet paid." She patted Ruths hand. "Dont worry! Later, when your mother was not looking, I paid. So you see, no jail, and here we are!" GaoLing took a few more bites of food, smacked her lips, then leaned toward Ruth again and whispered, "I gave your mother a big bag of ginseng root. This is good to cure confusion." She nodded, and Ruth nodded in turn. "Sometimes your mother calls me at the train station to say shes here, and I dont even know shes coming! Course, this is fine, I always welcome her. But at six in the morning? Im not an early birdie!" She chuckled, and Ruth, her mind awhirl, gave out a hollow laugh.

Ruth desperately nodded.

"Hey, where you going?"

The next results were better, but they had taken up a whole length of paper.

But Dory interrupted her to say to LuLing, "You cant drive to the Himalayas from here."

"Hey, Auntie Lu," Sally teased. "You look kind of bummed-out in this picture."

So there they sat, two dozen bottles, two dozen insults, some from GaoLing, some from GaoLings daughter, who were unmindful that LuLing rose each morning, saw these gifts, and began the day feeling the world was against her. Out of curiosity, Ruth opened a box and twisted the cap of the bottle inside. Stinky! Her mother was right. Then again, what was the shelf life of scented water? It was not as though toilet water aged like wine. Ruth started to put the boxes into the Goodwill bag, then caught herself. Resolute but still feeling wasteful, she put them into the bag destined for the dump. And what about this face powder? She opened a compact case of a gold-tone metal with fleur-de-lys markings. It had to be at least thirty years old. The powder inside was an oxidized orange, the cheek accent of ventriloquists dummies. Whatever it was looked like it could cause cancer—or Alzheimers. Everything in the world, no matter how apparently benign, was potentially dangerous, bulging with toxins that could escape and infect you when you least expected it. Her mother had taught her that.

"Yeah," Billy said. "Did the fall make you stupid or something?"

"I think shes a bit tired, which is natural for the first day back. But Im a little concerned that shes so quiet. She didnt say a word all day, not even ouch."

"Then be polite, but throw it away later if it bothers you so much."

To Ruth, this particular gathering was not "just a dinner." It was their Chinese thanksgiving, the reunion that she was hosting for the first time. She had given much thought to setting it up, what it should mean, what family meant, not just blood relatives but also those who were united by the past and would remain together over the years, people she was grateful to have in her life. She wanted to thank all the celebrants for their contribution to her feeling of family. Miriam would be a reminder that the past was not always good and the future was uncertain. But to say all this would sound petty to Art, and Fia and Dory would think she was being mean.

"Those people huli-hudu" her mother muttered. She set the steaming food on the table. "Crazy, argue over nothing." And then she closed the windows.

Another night, as Ruth and her mother sat at the kitchen table with the sand tray between them, Dotties husky voice rang out:

She wore a high-collared jacket and a strange headdress that looked as if it were made of ivory. Her beauty was ethereal. She had wide tilted eyes, with a direct and immodest stare. Her arched eyebrows suggested a questioning mind, her full lips a sensuality that was indecent for the times. The picture obviously had been taken before the accident that burned her face and twisted it into a constant expression of horror. As Ruth peered more closely at the photo, the womans expression seemed even more oddly disturbing, as if she could see into the future and knew it was cursed. This was the crazy woman who had cared for her mother since birth, who had smothered LuLing with fears and superstitious notions. LuLing had told her that when she was fourteen, this nursemaid killed herself in a gruesome way that was "too bad to say." Whatever means the nursemaid used, she also made LuLing believe it was her fault. Precious Auntie was the reason her mother was convinced she could never be happy, why she always had to expect the worst, fretting until she found it.

LuLing acted alternately cheerful and cranky, unchanged by what had just transpired in the doctors office. Ruth, however, sensed that her mother was growling hollow, that soon she would be as light as driftwood. Dementia. Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring. Ruth now imagined icy plaques forming on her mothers brain, drawing out moisture. Dr. Huey had said the MRI showed shrinkage in certain parts of the brain that were consistent with Alzheimers. He also said the disease had probably started "years ago." Ruth had been too stunned to ask any questions at the time, but she now wondered what the doctor meant by "years ago." Twenty? Thirty? Forty? Maybe there was a reason her mother had been so difficult when Ruth was growing up, why she had talked about curses and ghosts and threats to kill herself. Dementia was her mothers redemption, and God would forgive them both for having hurt each other all these years.

And so by luck all fell into place. The Wizard of Oz, Precious Auntie was apparently saying, was also about a bone doctor, and she would be happy for Ruth to see this.

"Its that wife of Arts," Ruth finally whispered in her American-accented Mandarin. "I wish Art had not let her come."

The officer walked up to the two of them. "Happy ending," he said, then turned toward his patrol car.

Now Ruth found herself on the sofa alone with Lance. She stared ahead at the television, her heart thumping. She heard Dottie humming, the sound of cabinets being opened and shut.

"Someday I give you forever."

"You holding backward," her mother said, and flipped it so the back was the front but facing the wrong way. She turned the pages for Ruth, left to right. Everything was in Chinese. "Chinese Bible," her mother said. She opened it to a page with another place marker, a sepia-toned photograph of a young Chinese woman.

She gave vent to these feelings by writing them down in a diary that Auntie Gal had given her for Christmas. She had just finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank in sophomore English class, and like all the other girls, she was imbued with a sense that she too was different, an innocent on a path to tragedy that would make her posthumously admired. The diary would be proof of her existence, that she mattered, and more important, that someone somewhere would one day understand her, even if it was not in her lifetime. There was a tremendous comfort in believing her miseries werent for naught. In her diary, she could be as truthful as she wanted to be. The truth, of course, had to be supported by facts. So her first entry included a list of the top ten songs on the radio hit list, as well as a note that a boy named Michael Papp had a boner when he was dancing with Wendy. That was what Wendy had said, and at the time Ruth thought boner referred to a puffed-up ego.

Ruth hesitated. She did not know San Francisco that well, except for Chinatown and a few other places, Golden Gate Park, the Fun House at Lands End. And that was how it came to her, an inspiration that moved quickly into her hand: Lands End.

After Auntie Gal left with her mother, Ruth walked a few blocks to the beach, to Lands End. She needed to hear the pummeling waves, their constancy and loudness drowning out her own pounding heart.

A few days later, Ruth saw a movie in gym class that showed how eggs floated in a female body, traveling along primordial paths, before falling out in a stream of blood. The movie was old and had been spliced in many places. A lady who looked like a nurse talked about the beginning of spring, and in the middle of describing the emergence of beautiful buds she disappeared with a clack, then reappeared in another room describing buds moving inside a branch. While she was explaining about the womb as a nest, her voice turned into a flapping-bird sound and she disappeared into the cloud-white screen. When the lights came on, all the girls squinted in embarrassment, for now they were thinking about eggs moving inside them. The teacher had to call in a slouching, slack-mouthed boy from the audiovisual department; this made Wendy and several other girls squeal that they wanted to curl up and die. After the boy spliced the reel back together, the movie took up again, to show a tadpole called a sperm traveling through a heart-shaped womb while a bus driver voice called out the destinations: "vagina," "cervix," "uterus." The girls shrieked and covered their eyes, until the boy swaggered out of the room, acting proud, as if he had seen them all naked.

"Hey, hey," Lance said. He looked nervously down the street. "Come on, you dont have to do that. I wanted to talk so we could have an understanding. I just dont want this to ever happen again. Okay?"

Ruth started bawling, and Dottie put her arm around her shoulders, soothing her, then squeezing her so hard Ruth thought her bones would pop out of their sockets. It hurt but also felt good. "That bastard, that dirty, filthy bastard," Dottie kept saying through gritted teeth. Ruth was shocked to hear the b-word, but even more so to realize that Dottie was angry—not with her, but with Lance!

Just as she had so long before, Ruth now stooped and picked up a broken shell. She scratched in the sand: Help. And she watched as the waves carried her plea to another world.

The next day, Ruth had dawdled before coming home from school. She walked along the beach. She stopped at a drugstore and looked at makeup. She called Wendy from a phone booth. By the time she returned home, her mother would have read the words. She expected a huge fight, no dinner, just shouting, more threats, more rants about how Ruth wanted her dead so she could live with Auntie Gal. LuLing would wait for Ruth to admit that she wrote those hateful words.

"No," Ruth wrote, "all O.K."

"Thats not funny." Her mother used to say it was bad luck even to speak words like that. On cue. LuLing entered, her petite frame contrasting with GaoLings sturdier one. A few seconds later, Uncle Edmund came in. Ruth sometimes wondered whether this was how her father would have looked—tall, stoop-shouldered, with a crown of thick white hair and a large, relaxed swing to his arms and legs. Uncle Edmund was given to telling jokes badly, consoling scared children, and dispensing stock market tips. LuLing often said the two brothers werent similar at all, that Ruths father had been much more handsome, smarter, and very honest. His only fault was that he was too trusting, also maybe absent-minded when he was concentrating too hard, just like Ruth. LuLing often recounted the circumstances in which he died as a warning to Ruth when she was not paying attention to her mother. "You daddy see green light, he trust that car stop. Poom! Run over, drag him one block, two block, never stop." She said he died because of a curse, the same one that made Ruth break her arm. And because the subject of the curse often came up when LuLing was displeased with Ruth, as a child Ruth thought the curse and her fathers death were related to her. She had recurrent nightmares of mutilating people in a brakeless car. She always tested and retested her brakes before heading out in the car.

"Watch it! Spy talk!" Dory called from the other table.

"No! No! I dont want to!"

And then it came to her. The other pages, the ones buried in her bottom right-hand desk drawer. "Truth," she recalled the top of that first page read. "These are the things I know are true." What did the next sentences say? The names of the dead, the secrets they took with them. What secrets? She sensed her mothers life was at stake and the answer was in her hands, had been there all along.

Ruth wanted to cry out, "No! You cant do that! Its my birthday present."

"You like?" LuLing said proudly, switching back to the public language of English. "This real things, you know."

And Ruth etched: Salty, She had never said anything bad about her mothers cooking before, but that was what her mother always said to criticize her own food.

Ruth went into LuLings bedroom. On the dresser were bottles of toilet water, about two dozen, still in their cellophane-bound boxes. "Stinky water," her mother called it. Ruth had tried to explain to her that toilet water was not the same as water from a toilet. But LuLing said that how something sounded was what counted, and she believed these gifts from GaoLing and her family were meant to insult her.

What was wrong with her mother? Could depression cause confusion like this? The next week, when they had the follow-up visit with Dr. Huey, she would discuss it with him. If he ordered her mother to take antidepressants, maybe she would obey. Ruth knew she should visit her mother more often. LuLing often complained of loneliness, and she was obviously trying to fill a void by going to see GaoLing at odd hours.

"Yes, but she says she has to go back now. And she said I need to rest." "She forgive me? She—"

"Last year, report card, you get one Satisfactory, not even Good. Should be everything Excellent. Tonight better study more."

"Im an American," Ruth shouted. "I have a right to privacy, to pursue my own happiness, not yours!"

"Sit down." Lance gestured toward the scratchy couch. "Want a soda?" She shook her head. The only light came from the TV, which was tuned to an old movie. Ruth was glad for the noise. And then she saw a commercial, a man selling cars. In his hand was a fake saber. "Weve slashed our prices—so come on down to Rudys Chevrolet and ask to see the slasher!"

LuLing was fishing for something in her wallet. She pulled out a tiny photo, then handed it to Ruth. "There," she said in Chinese. "This one right here, shes my mother." A chill ran over Ruths scalp. It was a photograph of her mothers nursemaid, Bao Bomu, Precious Auntie.

She heard her mother speak again in polite Chinese: "Precious Auntie, I did not mean what I said before you died. And after you died, I tried to find your body."

During lunch, girls vied with one another to present her with imaginary trinkets and serve as her maiden-in-waiting. She was invited to step into the "secret castle," a rock-bordered area near a tree at the edge of the sandbox. Only the most popular girls could be princesses. The princesses now took turns drawing on Ruths cast. One of them gingerly asked, "Is it still broken?" Ruth nodded, and another girl whispered loudly: "Lets bring her magic potions." The princesses scampered off in search of bottle caps, broken glass, and fairy-sized clover.

"Its not that."

"What are you going to do?"

"Wah! Now you can talk again." Her mother had switched to English. "Precious Auntie cure you?"

Since childhood, Ruth had thought about death every day, sometimes many times a day. She thought everyone must secretly do the same, but no one talked openly about it except her mother. She had pondered in her young mind what death entailed. Did people disappear? Become invisible? Why did dead people become stronger, meaner, sadder? Thats what her mother seemed to think. When Ruth was older, she tried to imagine the precise moment when she could no longer breathe or talk or see, when she would have no feelings, not even fear that she was dead. Or perhaps she would have plenty of tear, as well as worry, anger, and regrets, just like the ghosts her mother talked to. Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown. And that contained all sorts of bad possibilities. It was that unknown which made her decide that no matter how terrible and unsolvable her life seemed, she would never willingly kill herself. Although she remembered a time when she had tried.

"No time buy gift," her mother mumbled. "But I find some things, maybe you still like." She pointed to the coffee table. Ruth slowly walked over and picked up a lumpy package that was clumsily wrapped in tissue paper and tape, no ribbon. Inside she found a black book and a tiny purse of red silk, fastened with a miniature frog clasp. And within the purse was a ring Ruth had always coveted, with a thin gold band and two oval pieces of apple-green jade. It had been a gift from Ruths father, who had received it from his mother to give to his future bride. Her mother never wore it. GaoLing had once hinted that the ring should belong to her, so it could be passed along to her son, who was also the only grandson. Forever after, LuLing brought up the ring in the context of that greedy remark of her sisters.

On Tuesday, Ruth could not stand her mothers fussing over her any longer. She said she was well enough to go to school. Before opening the door, she looked out the window, then down the driveway. Oh no, the Pontiac was still there. She was trembling so hard she feared her bones might break. After taking a deep breath, she darted out the door, scooted down the side of the driveway farther from the cottage, then edged past the Pontiac. She turned left, even though school was to the right.

"Wow, wow, wow." Ruth stared at the ring in her palm.

LuLing retrieved the chopstick and tried to put it in Ruths hand. But Ruth balled her fist. She pushed the sand tray away. Her mother pushed it back and kept babbling nonsense: "Im so happy youve finally found me. Ive been waiting for so many years. Now we can talk to each other. Every day you can guide me. Every day you can tell me how to conduct my life in the way I should."

"These are the things I should not forget."

And then Ruth had no more time to imagine any other versions of what might happen. She was home. She steeled herself. Thinking about it was just as bad as going through with it. Just get it over with, she told herself. She walked up the stairs to the door, and as soon as she opened it, her mother ran to her and said in a voice choked with worry, "Finally youre home!"

"Youre not going anywhere until you promise youre not going to spread any more of your goddamn lies. You got that straight!" He walked toward her. "You better not say I did something to you when I didnt. Cause if you do, Im going to get really mad and do something thatll make you sorrier than hell, you hear?"

"You have lunch money?"

"Whats that?" Ruth heard Boomer ask at the other table. He scowled at the jiggling mound of jellyfish as it swung by on the lazy Susan.

Ruth squeezed her eyes shut. She saw the lady with hair to her toes.

"No need to ask. Im already offering. Ill come get her in one hour. I need to do some shopping there anyway."

In the morning, Ruth opened the cupboards to look for cereal. She found dirty paper napkins folded and stacked. Hundreds. She opened the fridge. It was packed with plastic bags of black and greenish mush, cartons of half-eaten food, orange peels, cantaloupe rinds, frozen goods long defrosted. In the freezer were a carton of eggs, a pair of shoes, the alarm clock, and what appeared to have been bean sprouts. Ruth felt sick. This had happened in just one week?