A. Homes: Things You Should Know

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

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

“But she is Chinese,” I repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Should we have one put in Kate?”

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

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

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

“She’s my mother.”

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

“T’ai chi,” Susan says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m fine, and you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And then what — put her in a home?”

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

“It can’t be perfect.”

“Why not?”

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

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

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

“It feels farther.”

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

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

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

“Not every thought.”

“Ninety-nine percent,” she says.

“Does that bother you?”

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

I am silenced.

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

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

“I’m here,” she says.

“I want something,” I confess.

“What do you want?”

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

Connection, I am thinking. I want connection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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