A Long Stay in a Distant Land Read online

  He wanted to believe what Julie had suggested. He wanted to believe a man could leave family behind and find fulfillment somewhere else. He needed to because as much as he loved his family, they occasionally frightened him, particularly his mother, whose affection and need for affection manifested itself as a body-crushing weight, and he would rather remember her fondly from a distance than grow to resent her up close.

  He sat up and watched Julie sleep, the gentle heave of her chest, and he felt light. He felt not like the awkward American foreigner she occasionally teased him of being. He felt right at home.

  Louis picked up the red envelope. He wondered how much money his mother used to send Uncle Bo. Had it always been the same amount? Two twenties? A fifty? A hundred? Or a single dollar to deemphasize the money and emphasize the good health and blessings suggested by the gold characters printed on the envelope? How much had Uncle Bo's affection and respect cost? How much had his mother been willing to part with?

  Louis didn't know because the envelope was empty, the money long since spent. It was fine. He didn't need to know. His mother would have wanted her gift put to use. That would have made her happy.

  One Thousand Cigars

  (1945)

  When Melvin arrived home from the war, his face felt like sandpaper. It was gaunt and Esther touched the new hollows in his cheeks with shock and a sense of discovery.

  He put down his green canvas bag, which jingled with shell casings, and hugged her. "I missed you," he said.

  "Then you shouldn't have gone."

  He hugged Dr. and Mrs. Lum, his brother, Phil, and his aunt, uncle, and cousins. They took him home and he slept for nearly two days straight. When he woke, he was quiet and Dr. and Mrs. Lum coddled him as if he was a newborn.

  At dinner, they picked meat and vegetables for him, placing the food in his rice bowl until he said, "Stop it." He spoke with a new voice of authority, which was a very tired and hoarse voice.

  After dinner, he'd say, "I'm taking a bath," and Dr. and Mrs. Lum would stop what they were doing and ask, "You need any help?"

  They checked on him before he went to sleep, asking whether he needed a glass of water or more blankets. Sometimes, they'd touch his shoulder and say, "Sleep well," which wouldn't have annoyed Esther as much if she wasn't already lying next to him while they tucked him in.

  She figured Melvin needed to live in his own head for a while, and decided to give him a week. She let him sit by himself in their bedroom or the living room. She didn't approach him for sex or conversation.

  At week's end she asked, "Did you fulfill your duty to your country?"

  He shrugged.

  "You want to tell me what you saw in France?" she asked.

  "No."

  "Anything you want to talk about?" she asked.

  "No."

  "Are you going to be able to adjust to life here?"

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "Before you left, when I asked you a question, you responded with more than one word."

  He kissed her on the cheek and said, "Good night." Then he turned out the lights.

  She'd been sharing this three-bedroom apartment with his parents and brother in San Francisco's Chinatown since she married him. Space was expensive and the Lums didn't have much money. Dr. Lum, who'd been a doctor of either literature or medicine in Canton, had worked at a cigar factory and then a meat cannery after the cigar factory closed. He had one tweed suit he wore on weekends to show he was more than just a factory worker, which to Esther meant he was a man capable of wearing a tweed suit on weekends.

  Mrs. Lum taught English in the local public school and Esther served as her assistant, earning a salary that wasn't enough to afford a new home. Esther's current home, this three-bedroom apartment shared by five adults, was too small. Her bedroom was just large enough to hold her bed. Her closet held her clothes, and Melvin's were folded and placed underneath the bed. The lack of space, underscored by Melvin's return, chafed her.

  She lay awake that night next to her husband, who also lay awake, neither of them talking, and she remembered what her father used to tell her: "Don't forget you're worth one thousand cigars."

  It was a bedtime story he'd told her as a child, and one which had brought comfort in its remembrance.

  When she was born, all of Chinatown took notice because ninety percent of the population were men, eight percent were female prostitutes, and only two percent were unspoiled girls like herself.

  The suitors began lining up outside her apartment the day her parents brought her home. Scores of men. Men of all ages, sizes, and shapes. Some had beards. Some didn't. Some had moles on their faces. Some had perfect complexions. All were desperate for the female companionship withheld from them by immigration laws.

  "She can't even walk yet," her father told them, but they begged and pleaded for her hand in marriage, if not now, then fifteen years from now.

  "They were trying to place reservations," her father used to say proudly. "Or they were coming on behalf of their sons. They offered me money. A lifetime cut of their salaries. They offered clothes. They offered to pay part of my rent each month."

  Among the suitors was Dr. Lum, who rolled cigars at a factory and brought one for her father each night after work. Tied around the cigars were red ribbons her father slid off and hung over her crib.

  Months passed and the accumulated ribbons formed a red spherical star that captured the light of the room's lamp.

  "The smell of the leaves was so strong," her father would say, "it'd stay on my fingers for days."

  This was true. She remembered Dr. Lum's hands, the stench of the leaves, and the yellow-brown stains they'd left on his fingernails and palms.

  Sometimes when she was wearing a dress she thought beautiful and the sun lit her face and revealed her clear skin, she believed the story. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror and saw only a pale, scrawny girl, she didn't believe any of it.

  There were suitors by the time puberty struck, but they weren't lining up around the block. A dozen fathers came on behalf of their sons. A dozen suitors. A dozen. Not the one hundred and twenty her father had sworn by. And one of the dozen was Dr. Lum, a thin man who sometimes brought barbecued pork buns for her and her mother. "He'd given me a thousand cigars by the time I promised to marry you to his son," her father often said.

  Her husband would have been Phil, the firstborn, but he'd said he didn't have time for a wife. Dr. Lum had often complained about him, saying he loved alcohol and other pungent chemicals more than girls. "Alcohol is for drinking," Dr. Lum told Esther's father. "My boy uses it to make things explode."

  Dr. Lum had wiry arms and loose flapping skin under his neck, and Esther wondered if he'd even been capable of rolling one thousand cigars. One thousand was probably her father's euphemism for one hundred, which was probably an exaggeration often.

  Her father watched her wedding with the nervous excitement usually reserved for a high-stakes game of mah-jongg. During the banquet, he slapped her on the back and laughed cheerfully like she'd just produced the winning ivory tile from the crack in her ass.

  After Melvin returned from the war, and faced with the vacant expression he offered whenever she asked a question, Esther often remembered her father's lie, the fairy tale he had passed off as history. Instead of stirring the imagination of all the men in Chinatown, she'd really just stirred the interest of Dr. Lum, who wanted wives for his sons and who'd probably given her father no more than five cigars.

  How else to explain the situation she was in, lying next to a man who wouldn't talk or smile, a man with Popeye tattooed on his arm, a man who if unable to communicate normally with people because of something that'd happened in the war, had no one to blame but himself because everyone he knew and loved had told him not to go?

  As she lay awake that night, Esther imagined herself, Melvin, and their yet unborn children spending weekends together in their own single house. A thousand square feet with a full-sized ki
tchen and three bedrooms. She wanted a new home away from the Lums and Hsiehs.

  "War's over," she whispered. "Enough moping. You're getting a job—we'll each take two if we have to. We're moving out. Southern California's warm all year round."

  Melvin didn't object. In fact, he didn't say anything. His eyes were shut and he continued sleeping, his breathing so soft she had to strain to hear it.

  He mumbled something, then turned to sleep on his side, his back to her.

  She took that as a yes and leaned her head into the gap between his shoulder blades. The indentation felt like a small cave for her face, and she was comforted by its steady warmth as she drifted into sleep.

  Tripping an Benadryl with Ah-Mah

  (2002)

  Sonny woke to find himself alone. He usually dreamed about Mirla, the two of them lying on the couch. She'd lie on top of him and he'd cradle her in his arms. In this last dream he'd found Louis in the kitchen with a basket of fried chicken. The boy had held up a greasy drumstick and said, "This, Dad, is a leg!" He began eating, periodically stopping to wave the drumstick at him. "Hitting people will not make you feel better. Slapping Arnold Mannion didn't help, did it?"

  When Sonny woke he realized he'd only slept an hour and a half. He usually slept no more than three or four a night. He needed a seven-hour sleep, which he hadn't had in a long time. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was Ah-Mah whispering, thinking he was already out, "What do you know about romance?"

  The TV and halogen lamp were off. He distinguished objects in the room by differing shades of dark. He got up and walked slowly to avoid bumping his knee into the coffee table and ramming his shoulder into the corner of the TV, which he sometimes did late at night, groggy from insomnia and wandering the house.

  He went to Louis's room and opened the door a crack. He heard his mother's steady breathing inside. He went back to the sofa in the living room. It was two in the morning.

  When he was fifteen, he'd imagined pleasant problems he and Mirla would have after they were married:

  He turns pro and they move to Europe, where he wins mostly flat stages in the Vuelta a Espana, the Giro d'ltalia, and the Tour de France. (He cannot feature himself winning the whole of any one of these races. Out of respect for legendary Tour winners like Eddy Merckx and Fausto Coppi, he cannot grant himself their accomplishments even in a fantasy.)

  Upon returning to Orange County, he becomes the Register's local sports hero. By this time, the French have dubbed him Le Wheel-Man and whenever he visits Paris, they hound him in the streets and shout, "Le Wheel-Man! Le Wheel-Man!"

  The Register runs articles on his training regimen and dietary habits. He writes an advice column in the sports section called "Ask the Wheel-Man," in which he responds to husbands who get grief from their wives for riding too much, and kids who aspire to ride as well as him.

  Under his column is a black-and-white photo of him posing in just cycling shorts, his chest smooth and his abs sharply defined. He receives love letters and marriage proposals from lots of women, which upsets Mirla. She says, "People only refer to me as the wife of the incredibly handsome and talented Wheel-Man."

  He tells her, "Without you, my trophies would be mean­ingless," and brushes his hand across her cheek while looking over her shoulder at his three-feet-tall trophies.

  She smiles, runs her hand across his abs, and says, "I never realized how hard and sculpted your body really is."

  "I'm sorry my successes upset you," he says.

  "I understand now. Thanks for clearing things up for me."

  After they were married, they had problems that weren't pleasant:

  She comes home from church. It's the afternoon. He's on the sofa watching TV. His god-given right. "Why don't you come with me next Sunday?" she asks. "No, thanks." "Don't you want to be in Heaven?" "No such thing." "How can you not believe in God?" "Doesn't exist." "Fool."

  They don't talk for the rest of the day and he's angry she called him a fool. He watches TV, unable to pay attention to what's on, Mirla's words crackling like loud static against his skull—CometoHeavenCometoHeavenCometoHeavenCometoHeaven-CometoHeavenCometoHeavenCometoHeavenCometoHeaven-CometoHeavenCometoHeavenCometoHeavenCometoHeaven-CometoHeavenCometoHeavenCometoHeavenDon'tgotoHell- Don'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHell- Don'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHell- Don'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHell- Don'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHellDon'tgotoHell- Don'tgo . . .

  He watches Wheel of Fortune and realizes he can't even answer something like "S_NGAP E, Place" until the contestant buys another vowel. He thinks, Who is this woman telling me I have to believe in Jesus and potlucks? What happened to Mirla?

  He went to the kitchen. He wanted to call Louis, but didn't want to disturb his vacation. He opened the drawers. A meat tenderizer was a useful tool. For tenderizing meat. He ran his fingers over the sharp protrusions, then put it down. He handled the silverware. Checked the plates and glasses. Opened more drawers.

  "What are you doing?" Ah-Mah asked. She had light feet.

  He turned to face her.

  "You don't have any canned food," she said.

  He noticed he was holding a can opener in his right hand. He put it down on the counter next to the sink. "I'm going to see Hersey Collins."

  "To do what?"

  "I don't know. I need to see him. He and I need to talk."

  "Calm down," she said. "Take a deep breath."

  "I'm calm. I have to go."

  "Give me five minutes."

  "What for?" he asked.

  "Sit on the couch with me for five minutes."

  He went back to the couch. Ah-Mah brought two glasses of water and a hundred-tablet bottle of Benadryl Allergy. "When I'm feeling emotional," she said, "I take some and I feel better in half an hour."

  "I don't think Uncle Phil wanted his formula to control our moods," Sonny said.

  "Take a couple with me."

  "The effect only lasts a couple hours," he said. "After it wears off I feel more awake than before."

  She handed him two tablets. "Two each."

  "One's enough to knock me out," he said.

  "We take the same dosage."

  "One for me is the same as two for you," he said. "You have better tolerance."

  "Fine." She took back one of his tablets.

  "You first," he said. She popped the pills in her mouth and he put his index and middle fingers against her throat as she swallowed. Ah-Mah was a crafty woman and he respected her for that. "Stick out your tongue," he said. "Say ahhh."

  She stuck out her tongue, raised it, lowered it, swung it left and swung it right. He was certain she'd ingested the pills.

  "Your turn," she said.

  He put the pill in his mouth. He had never told Ah-Mah about his surgery. When he was twenty-eight, he'd had all four of his impacted wisdom teeth removed. The extraction was performed by a stocky Romanian who kept wiping sweat from his forehead and blood from his scalpel, proclaiming, "This does not hurt! This is not even the beginning of pain!" as he sliced, drilled, and braced his knee against the side of Sonny's chair to yank, grunt, and pull.

  The procedure had left four holes in the back of his mouth. Food often got stuck in these crevices of gum tissue, shards of apples, and peanuts that lingered hours after brushing.

  He maneuvered the pill into his left bottom hole as he swung his tongue to reveal the upper right side of his mouth, then hid it in the right bottom hole while she scanned the upper left side. When she asked to check the bottom of his mouth, he guided the pill up into the spaces behind his molars.

  She made him repeat several times. How far they'd come, from a time when she used to confiscate his candy to a time when she was trying to force-feed medication to sedate him. This was his mother at her most affectionate.

  "Slower," she said. "Let me see all the way in. What are you hiding?"

  "That's enough," he said. "You saw everything." He closed his mouth and
moved the pill under his tongue.

  He turned on the TV, waiting for a bit of time to pass before getting rid of the pill. If he rushed to the bathroom now, she'd know he was up to something. If he waited too long it'd melt in his mouth.

  "I used to fantasize about winning stages in all three major bicycle races," he said.

  "So?"

  "It's hard to stay in peak form year-round, even for a superbly gifted athlete, which I was not."

  "Okay." She studied his face.

  "I was very arrogant," he said.

  On the TV was an infomercial for an exercise machine. The spokeswoman, a thin but muscular blonde in red Lycra, spoke about the advantages offered by the contraption's series of adjustable levers, steel cords, and knobs while a big man rippling with muscles and wearing just shorts and sneakers performed leg curls, flexing his oversized quads and calves in the process.

  "That piece of crap won't do a damn thing," Sonny said. "What a waste of money. All you need is a bike and a warm, clear day."

  "Look at those muscles."

  "They're just for show," Sonny said. "Too big. Not practical."

  They continued watching the man, who was named Brad. After finishing his leg reps, he began pulling down on an overhanging bar attached to a set of weights.

  "Look at Brad work those lats," the spokeswoman said.

  "Nice lats," Ah-Mah said.

  "What do you know about lats?" Sonny asked his mother as the spokeswoman talked about calories burned and time saved.

  About ten minutes had passed. Sonny stood up.

  "Where you going?" she asked.

  "To take a piss," he said.

  "You sure you need to go?"

  "How can I calm down if you're constantly suspecting me?" he asked.

  "I'm not suspecting you. I just don't think you need to take a piss."

  "You're not helping me calm down."

  "Fine. Be quick."

  He locked the bathroom door behind him and spit the pill into the toilet bowl while pissing.