Everyday People Read online

  “Auntie, that’s not a good argument.”

  “My job doesn’t require me to argue well. If I could argue, I’d have become a lawyer, like your husband, no?”

  Chanel made a mirthless laughing sound. Despite her self-diagnosed depression, she seemed to enjoy talking with Auntie Mei more than most mothers, who talked to her about their babies and their breastfeeding but otherwise had little interest in her.

  Auntie Mei put Baby on the sofa next to Chanel, who was unwilling to make room. “Now, let’s look into this milk situation,” Auntie Mei said, rubbing her hands until they were warm before removing the heating pads. Chanel cried out in pain.

  “I haven’t even touched you.”

  Look at your eyes, Auntie Mei wanted to say. Not even a good plumber could fix such a leak.

  “I don’t want to nurse this thing anymore,” Chanel said.

  This thing? “He’s your son.”

  “His father’s too. Why can’t he be here to help?”

  “Men don’t make milk.”

  Chanel laughed, despite her tears. “No. The only thing they make is money.”

  “You’re lucky to have found one who makes money. Not all of them do, you know.”

  Chanel dried her eyes carefully with the inside of her pajama sleeve. “Auntie, are you married?”

  “Once,” Auntie Mei said.

  “What happened? Did you divorce him?”

  “He died,” Auntie Mei said. She had, every day of her marriage, wished that her husband would stop being part of her life, though not in so absolute a manner. Now, years later, she still felt responsible for his death, as though it had been she, and not a group of teenagers, who accosted him that night. Why didn’t you just let them take the money? Sometimes Auntie Mei scolded him when she tired of talking to herself. Thirty-five dollars for a life, three months short of fifty-two.

  “Was he much older than you?”

  “Older, yes, but not too old.”

  “My husband is twenty-eight years older than I am,” Chanel said. “I bet you didn’t guess that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Is it that I look old or that he looks young?”

  “You look like a good match.”

  “Still, he’ll probably die before me, right? Women live longer than men, and he’s had a head start.”

  So you, too, are eager to be freed. Let me tell you, it’s bad enough when a wish like that doesn’t come true, but if it ever does, that’s when you know that living is a most disappointing business: the world is not a bright place to start with, but a senseless wish granted senselessly makes it much dimmer. “Don’t speak nonsense,” Auntie Mei said.

  “I’m only stating the truth. How did your husband die? Was it a heart attack?”

  “You could say that,” Auntie Mei said, and before Chanel could ask more questions, Auntie Mei grabbed one of her erring breasts. Chanel gasped and then screamed. Auntie Mei did not let go until she’d given the breast a forceful massage. When she reached for the other breast, Chanel screamed louder but did not change her position—for fear of crushing Baby, perhaps.

  Afterward, Auntie Mei brought a warm towel. “Go,” Chanel said. “I don’t want you here anymore.”

  “But who’ll take care of you?”

  “I don’t need anyone to take care of me.” Chanel stood up and belted her robe.

  “And Baby?”

  “Bad luck for him.”

  Chanel walked to the staircase, her back defiantly rigid. Auntie Mei picked up Baby, his weight as insignificant as the emotions—sadness, anger, or dismay—that she should feel on his behalf. Rather, Auntie Mei was in awe of the young woman. That is how, Auntie Mei said to herself, a mother orphans a child.

  • • •

  Baby, six days old that day, was weaned from his mother’s breast. Auntie Mei was now the sole person to provide him with food and care and—this she did not want to admit even to herself—love. Chanel stayed in her bedroom and watched Chinese television dramas all afternoon. Once in a while she came downstairs for water and spoke to Auntie Mei as though the old woman and the infant were poor relations: there was the inconvenience of having them to stay, and yet there was relief that they did not have to be entertained.

  The dishwasher repairman returned in the evening. He reminded Auntie Mei that his name was Paul—as though she were so old that she could forget it in a day, she thought. Earlier, she had told him about the thieving egret, and he had promised to come back and fix the problem.

  “You’re sure the bird won’t be killed,” Auntie Mei said as she watched Paul rig some wires above the pond.

  “Try it yourself,” Paul said, flipping the battery switch.

  Auntie Mei placed her palm on the crisscrossed wires. “I feel nothing.”

  “Good. If you felt something, I’d be putting your life at risk. Then you could sue me.”

  “But how does it work?”

  “Let’s hope the egret is more sensitive than you are,” Paul said. “Call me if it doesn’t work. I won’t charge you again.”

  Auntie Mei felt doubtful, but her questioning silence did not stop him from admiring his own invention. Nothing, he said, is too difficult for a thinking man. When he put away his tools he lingered on, and she could see that there was no reason for him to hurry home. He had grown up in Vietnam, he told Auntie Mei, and had come to America thirty-seven years ago. He was widowed, with three grown children, and none of them had given him a grandchild, or the hope of one. His two sisters, both living in New York and both younger, had beaten him at becoming grandparents.

  The same old story: they all had to come from somewhere, and they all accumulated people along the way. Auntie Mei could see the unfolding of Paul’s life: he’d work his days away till he was too old to be useful, then his children would deposit him in a facility and visit on his birthday and on holidays. Auntie Mei, herself an untethered woman, felt superior to him. She raised Baby’s tiny fist as Paul was leaving. “Say bye-bye to Grandpa Paul.”

  Auntie Mei turned and looked up at the house. Chanel was leaning on the windowsill of her second-floor bedroom. “Is he going to electrocute the egret?” she called down.

  “He said it would only zap the bird. To teach it a lesson.”

  “You know what I hate about people? They like to say, ‘That will teach you a lesson.’ But what’s the point of a lesson? There’s no makeup exam when you fail something in life.”

  It was October, and the evening air from the bay had a chill to it. Auntie Mei had nothing to say except to warn Chanel not to catch a cold.

  “Who cares?”

  “Maybe your parents do.”

  Chanel made a dismissive noise.

  “Or your husband.”

  “Ha. He just e-mailed and told me he had to stay for another ten days,” Chanel said. “You know what I think he’s doing right now? Sleeping with a woman, or more than one.”

  Auntie Mei did not reply. It was her policy not to disparage an employer behind his back. But when she entered the house, Chanel was already in the living room. “I think you should know he’s not the kind of person you thought he was.”

  “I don’t think he’s any kind of person at all,” Auntie Mei said.

  “You never say a bad word about him,” Chanel said.

  Not a good word, either.

  “He had a wife and two children before.”

  You think a man, any man, would remain a bachelor until he meets you? Auntie Mei put the slip of paper with Paul’s number in her pocket.

  “Did that man leave you his number?” Chanel said. “Is he courting you?”

  “Him? Half of him, if not more, is already in the coffin.”

  “Men chase after women until the last moment,” Chanel said. “Auntie, don’t fall for him. No man is to be trusted.”

  Auntie Mei sighed. “If Baby’s Pa is not coming home, who’s going to shop for groceries?”

  • • •

  The man of the house p
ostponed his return; Chanel refused to have anything to do with Baby. Against her rules, Auntie Mei moved his crib into her bedroom; against her rules, too, she took on the responsibility of grocery shopping.

  “Do you suppose people will think we’re the grandparents of this baby?” Paul asked after inching the car into a tight spot between two SUVs.

  Could it be that he had agreed to drive and help with shopping for a reason other than the money Auntie Mei had promised him? “Nobody,” she said, handing a list to Paul, “will think anything. Baby and I will wait here in the car.”

  “You’re not coming in?”

  “He’s a brand-new baby. You think I would bring him into a store with a bunch of refrigerators?”

  “You should’ve left him home, then.”

  With whom? Auntie Mei worried that, had she left Baby home, he would be gone from the world when she returned, though this fear she would not share with Paul. She explained that Baby’s Ma suffered from postpartum depression and was in no shape to take care of him.

  “You should’ve just given me the shopping list,” Paul said.

  What if you ran off with the money without delivering the groceries? she thought, though it was unfair of her. There were men she knew she could trust, including, even, her dead husband.

  On the drive back, Paul asked if the egret had returned. She hadn’t noticed, Auntie Mei replied. She wondered if she would have an opportunity to see the bird be taught its lesson: she had only twenty-two days left. Twenty-two days, and then the next family would pluck her out of here, egret or no egret. Auntie Mei turned to look at Baby, who was asleep in the car seat. “What will become of you then?” she said.

  “Me?” Paul asked.

  “Not you. Baby.”

  “Why do you worry? He’ll have a good life. Better than mine. Better than yours, for sure.”

  “You don’t know my life to say that,” Auntie Mei said.

  “I can imagine. You should find someone. This is not a good life for you, going from one house to another and never settling down.”

  “What’s wrong with that? I don’t pay rent. I don’t have to buy my own food.”

  “What’s the point of making money if you don’t spend it?” Paul said. “I’m at least saving money for my future grandchildren.”

  “What I do with my money,” Auntie Mei said, “is none of your business. Now, please pay attention to the road.”

  Paul, chastened into a rare silence, drove on, the slowest car on the freeway. Perhaps he’d meant well, but there were plenty of well-meaning men, and she was one of those women who made such men suffer. If Paul wanted to hear stories, she could tell him one or two and spare him any hope of winning her affection. But where would she start? With the man she had married without any intention of loving and had wished into an early grave, or with the father she had not met because her mother had made his absolute absence a condition of her birth? Or perhaps she should start with her grandmother, who vanished from her own daughter’s crib side one day, only to show up twenty-five years later when her husband was dying from a wasting illness. The disappearance would have made sense had Auntie Mei’s grandfather been a villain, but he had been a kind man, and had raised his daughter alone, clinging to the hope that his wife, having left without a word, would return.

  Auntie Mei’s grandmother had not gone far: all those years, she had stayed in the same village, living with another man, hiding in his attic during the day, sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night for a change of air. Nobody was able to understand why she had not gone on hiding until after her husband’s death. She explained that it was her wifely duty to see her husband off properly.

  Auntie Mei’s mother, newly married and with a prospering business as a seamstress, was said to have accepted one parent’s return and the other’s death with equanimity, but the next year, pregnant with her first and only child, she made her husband leave by threatening to drink a bottle of DDT.

  Auntie Mei had been raised by two mythic women. The villagers shunned the two women, but they welcomed the girl as one of them. Behind closed doors, they told her about her grandfather and her father, and in their eyes she saw their fearful disapproval of her elders: her pale-skinned grandmother, unused to daylight after years of darkness, carried on her nocturnal habits, cooking and knitting for her daughter and granddaughter in the middle of the night; her mother, eating barely enough, slowly starved herself to death, yet she never tired of watching, with an unblinking intensity, her daughter eat.

  Auntie Mei had not thought of leaving home until the two women died, her mother first, and then her grandmother. They had been sheltered from worldly reproach by their peculiarities when alive; in death, they took with them their habitat and left nothing to anchor Auntie Mei. A marriage offer, arranged by the distant cousin of a man in Queens, New York, had been accepted without hesitation: in a new country, her grandmother and her mother would cease to be legendary. Auntie Mei had not told her husband about them; he would not have been interested, in any case—silly good man, wanting only a hardworking woman to share a solid life. Auntie Mei turned to look at Paul. Perhaps he was not so different from her husband, her father, her grandfather, or even the man her grandmother had lived with for years but never returned to after the death of Auntie Mei’s grandfather: ordinary happiness, uncomplicated by the women in their lives, was their due.

  “You think, by any chance, you’ll be free tomorrow afternoon?” Paul asked when he’d parked the car in front of Chanel’s house.

  “I work all day, as you know.”

  “You could bring Baby, like you did today.”

  “To where?”

  Paul said that there was this man who played chess every Sunday afternoon at East-West Plaza Park. Paul wanted to take a walk with Auntie Mei and Baby nearby.

  Auntie Mei laughed. “Why, so he’ll get distracted and lose the game?”

  “I want him to think I’ve done better than him.”

  Better how? With a borrowed lady friend pushing a borrowed grandson in a stroller? “Who is he?”

  “Nobody important. I haven’t talked to him for twentyseven years.”

  He couldn’t even lie well. “And you still think he’d fall for your trick?”

  “I know him.”

  Auntie Mei wondered if knowing someone—a friend, an enemy—was like never letting that person out of one’s sight. Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else’s thought. In that sense, her grandmother and her mother had been fortunate: no one could claim to have known them, not even Auntie Mei. When she was younger, she had seen no point in understanding them, as she had been told they were beyond apprehension. After their deaths, they had become abstract. Not knowing them, Auntie Mei, too, had the good fortune of not wanting to know anyone who came after: her husband; her coworkers at various Chinese restaurants during her yearlong migration from New York to San Francisco; the babies and the mothers she took care of, who had become only recorded names in her notebook. “I’d say let it go,” Auntie Mei told Paul. “What kind of grudge is worthy of twenty-seven years?”

  Paul sighed. “If I tell you the story, you’ll understand.”

  “Please,” Auntie Mei said. “Don’t tell me any story.”

  • • •

  From the second-floor landing, Chanel watched Paul put the groceries in the refrigerator and Auntie Mei warm up a bottle of formula. Only after he’d left did Chanel call down to ask how their date had gone. Auntie Mei held Baby in the rocking chair; the joy of watching him eat was enough compensation for his mother’s being a nuisance.

  Chanel came downstairs and sat on the sofa. “I saw you pull up. You stayed in the car for a long time,” she said. “I didn’t know an old man could be so romantic.”

  Auntie Mei thought of taking Baby into her bedroom, but this was not her house, and she knew that Chanel, in a mood to talk, would follow her. When Auntie Mei remained quiet, Chanel said that her husband had called ear
lier, and she had told him that his son had gone out to witness a couple carry on a sunset affair.

  You should walk out right this minute, Auntie Mei said to herself, but her body settled into the rhythm of the rocking chair, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Are you angry, Auntie?”

  “What did your husband say?”

  “He was upset, of course, and I told him that’s what he gets for not coming home.”

  What’s stopping you from leaving? Auntie Mei asked herself. You want to believe you’re staying for Baby, don’t you?

  “You should be happy for me that he’s upset,” Chanel said. “Or at least happy for Baby, no?”

  I’m happy that, like everyone else, you’ll all become the past soon.

  “Why are you so quiet, Auntie? I’m sorry I’m such a pain, but I don’t have a friend here, and you’ve been nice to me. Would you please take care of me and Baby?”

  “You’re paying me,” Auntie Mei said. “So of course I’ll take care of you.”

  “Will you be able to stay on after this month?” Chanel asked. “I’ll pay double.”

  “I don’t work as a regular nanny.”

  “But what would we do without you, Auntie?”

  Don’t let this young woman’s sweet voice deceive you, Auntie Mei warned herself. You’re not irreplaceable—not for her, not for Baby, not for anyone. Still, Auntie Mei fancied for a moment that she could watch Baby grow—a few months, a year, two years. “When is Baby’s Pa coming home?”

  “He’ll come home when he comes.”

  Auntie Mei cleaned Baby’s face with the corner of a towel.

  “I know what you’re thinking—that I didn’t choose the right man. Do you want to know how I came to marry someone so old and irresponsible?”

  “I don’t, as a matter of fact.”

  • • •

  All the same, they told Auntie Mei stories, not heeding her protests. The man who played chess every Sunday afternoon came from the same village as Paul’s wife, and had long ago been pointed out to him by her as a potentially better husband. Perhaps she had said it only once, out of an impulse to sting Paul, or perhaps she had tormented him for years with her approval of a former suitor. Paul did not say, and Auntie Mei did not ask. Instead, he measured his career against the man’s: Paul had become a real professional; the man had stayed a laborer.