Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

While they arranged the food on separate platters — this was an informal dinner and so would be served as a buffet — Fan asked if she lived in the house all the time. It was an odd question to pose, but something about Mala seemed hidden to Fan, and she couldn’t help but ask. Mala told her that she lived here at the house twenty days in a row and on the twenty-first she spent the day and night away. The next morning she returned for another twenty before going away for a full day again. That was the schedule for the last seventeen years.

Where do you go?

Outside.

To the open counties?

Mala nodded. She was carefully layering the fruit and berries on the cheesecake and did not stop until she was finished.

You’re going to ask where I stay.

Yes, Fan said.

I will tell you. It’s nothing not to tell. I stay with my family. With my husband and my children.

They must miss you.

We’re accustomed to the schedule.

And apparently, Mala went on to describe, to the money, too. She had no need of any funds when she was working, and what she was paid went very far in the counties, enough that her daughters and her son could attend a tutoring center four days a week and her husband could have a dependable car to drive them there. Naturally, he didn’t have his own job, as he had to take care of and safeguard the children and the house. He was a good man. There was a rough period of adjustment but they made it through. Only once was the house not cleaned and vacuumed and the meals prepared for her day at home, when he was already drunk when she arrived in the morning and asked what happened, and he shouted, You’re not the king! She did not argue with him and went about picking up the toys on the floor and gathering the laundry and washing the dishes when he knelt before her at the kitchen sink and with tears in his eyes begged her for forgiveness. He was so lonely it made him crazy. She told him he was a man and should act that way, and that as long as he was faithful in his heart nothing else mattered. After that he was fine. And her children were fine, too, although she worried that they spent too much time on the handscreens she’d bought them last Lunar New Year, rather than studying. But the truth was where would that studying lead them, especially her son? Because of her work, her daughters, now sixteen and thirteen, would at least have sizable dowries they could offer to suitor families. But her son was eleven years old and disliked his tutors and shirked his studies, and she had little hope he’d do well enough on any tests to have a chance at one of the few corporation jobs. What would he have to do? Could he sell enough of something to make a living in the counties or else with mixed fortune marry someone like her?

They made up a fresh tray of drinks and brought it to the gallery, and Mala then gave Fan a quick tour of the rest of the house. They started from the kitchen and went upstairs to where Fan and Quig and Loreen were staying and then to the other guest bedrooms, which were also richly decorated and outfitted, but they didn’t venture inside the rooms at the other end of the house, as they were the master suites, one for Mister Leo and another for Miss Cathy. On the main level there was a vid room and gym room full of exercise machines and there was Mister Leo’s huge office full of screens that connected him to his mining operations all over the world, plus the commodity exchanges where the metals and rare earths were traded. There was a glass sunroom where Mister Leo and sometimes Miss Cathy had breakfast, which looked out onto the swimming pool and gardens and the rest of the spacious if not immense property. In the finished basement there was a wine room and a massage and sauna room and a very small pool that was meant for swimming when it was too cold outside, a continuous current flowing from one end. Perhaps Mister Leo would even let her use it. They toured the three-car garage, which seemed just as scrubbed as the kitchen and did not smell of fuel or oil, the vehicles sparkling under the bright lighting.

Finally Mala showed Fan her own suite next to the kitchen and laundry room, which, in fact, was quite nice, if downright spartan in decoration and furnishings when compared with the rest of the house, a bedroom and sitting area with a desk and a full bathroom, all finished in standard white paint and tile. There was nothing on the walls in the way of decoration except a few printed photographs of Mala’s family above her bed. Her husband was Caucasian and her children were exceptionally attractive in the way mixed offspring often are, enough so that it was hard to see how they were derived from their very ordinary-looking parents. There was a viewer on her desk and Fan checked with Mala before tapping the screen. It lighted up with more pictures of her kids, separately and together, and then of her husband standing in front of their house, a tidy-looking cottage painted yellow with white shutters and a dark asphalt roof. His expression was cheerful enough but not quite fixed of feeling, his gaze tentative and faraway. There were many other shots, most of them, Fan could see, obviously taken on her free-day, everyone dutifully assembling in various family combinations at whatever locale they’d decided to visit, a mini-golf or bowling center or an outdoor eatery at a lakeside beach, with Mala pressed in close among her loved ones but maybe with too much hopeful lean. Or maybe not.

There was a thumbnail of an unfamiliar girl, and when Mala excused herself to use the toilet, Fan tried to bring it up. But a passcode was required and Fan was not going to bother but then idly keyed in 2-0-2-0, the days Mala worked. Nothing. Then she tried 2-1-2-1, and amazingly, this brought it up.

It was a girl, Asian, too, around eleven or twelve years of age. But the difference now was that the pictures were taken here at the house, out back in the gardens, or in the kitchen, or downstairs by the little pool. None had Mala in them, just the girl. There were albums of other girls, too, seven in all, again in and about the house and property, each captured solo. They were smiling and not, engaging the camera and not, the backgrounds showing every season and various times of day, nothing common about the portraits except that the girls were all around the same age and of some kind of Asian blood. She noticed something funny about one picture, not the girl so much as the shrubs behind her, which were tiny. She could hear a toilet flush and the faucet running, and she touched one last image and it was of the same girl and Mala, the picture clearly snapped by Mala herself as she extended her hand. They were happy, even giddy, like a joyous mother and daughter, but what Fan was startled by most was how young Mala was, the image clearly many years old.

When she came out, there was an unmistakable tension in the air and Mala looked straight at the viewer, which Fan had just shut down. Mala asked if she liked the pictures. Fan said she did. If she liked, she could look at them again after dinner, but it was time to get back to the kitchen and clear a few things before the meal. Of course, she could rejoin the others. Fan said she would keep helping, which she did, taking the platters out to the buffet table so that Mala could clean up the island. Fan then loaded the dishwasher with the cooking utensils and heavy mixing bowls, Mala commenting on how capable she was for such a little girl.

And very strong. How old are you?

Fan had the strange urge to tell her the truth but in the last moment caught herself and said, What do you think? and that she should guess. Mala took Fan’s hands in hers and gazed into her face, squeezing her palms with enough increasing force that Fan began to wish she’d just said some age to the woman. She was going to shout out. But then Mala let go, for the lady of the house, Miss Cathy, appeared in the kitchen. Immediately Mala retrieved a carafe of water from the refrigerator and poured out a small glass for her, which Miss Cathy drank down with some pills she had in her hand. Her eyes were sleepy and bloodshot. She had not yet seemed to have noticed Fan. She was wearing a striped-print caftan and was tall and full figured, and you could see that she was once probably a very beautiful and commanding woman, with her fine cheekbones and regal, straight nose; but she was definitely only half a figure now, and sickly looking, her reddish hair going uncolored for some time, as the roots were prominently gray; her forehead was broken out in the center with a rash of tiny pimples, the skin of her hands and forearms papery-dry and flaking.