Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

When she heard the widow’s wheelchair she tossed the copy of Life down on the couch, afraid she might be found out. The year was 1952.

Outside the kitchen, Chow was lathering the windows. He worked a soft brush in a circular motion. Inside, the widow was accusing Mrs. Chow of stealing her cookies. The widow had a handful of them clutched to her chest and brought one down hard against the table. She was counting. Chow waved, but Mrs. Chow only shook her head. He soaped up the last pane and disappeared.

Standing accused, Mrs. Chow wondered if this was what it was like when her parents faced the liberators who had come to reclaim her family’s property in the name of the People. She imagined her mother’s response to them: What people? All of my servants are clothed and decently fed.

The widow swept the cookies off the table as if they were a canasta trick won. She started counting again. Mrs. Chow and the widow had played out this scene many times before. As on other occasions, she didn’t give the old woman the satisfaction of a plea, guilty or otherwise.

Mrs. Chow ignored the widow’s busy blue hands. She fixed her gaze on the woman’s milky eyes instead. Sight resided at the peripheries. Mornings, before she prepared the tub, emptied the pisspot, or fried the breakfast meat, Mrs. Chow cradled the widow’s oily scalp and applied the yellow drops that preserved what vision was left in the cold, heaven-directed eyes.

“Is she watching?” said the widow. She tilted her big gray head sideways; a few degrees in any direction Mrs. Chow became a blur. In happier days Mrs. Chow might have positioned herself just right or left of center, neatly within a line of sight.

Mrs. Chow was thirty-five years old. After a decade-long separation from her husband she finally had entered the United States in 1950 under the joint auspices of the War Brides and Refugee Relief acts. She would agree she was a bride, but not a refugee, even though the Red Army had confiscated her home and turned it into a technical school. During the trouble she was away, safely studying in Hong Kong. Her parents, with all their wealth, could’ve easily escaped, but they were confident a few well-placed bribes among the Red hooligans would put an end to the foolishness. Mrs. Chow assumed her parents now were dead. She had seen pictures in Life of minor landlords tried and executed for lesser crimes against the People.

The widow’s fondness for calling Mrs. Chow a thief began soon after the old woman broke her hip. At first Mrs. Chow blamed the widow’s madness on pain displacement. She had read in a textbook that a malady in one part of the body could show up as a pain in another locale — sick kidneys, for instance, might surface as a mouthful of sore gums. The bad hip had weakened the widow’s brain function. Mrs. Chow wanted to believe the crazy spells weren’t the widow’s fault, just as a baby soiling its diapers can’t be blamed. But even a mother grows weary of changing them.

“I live with a thief under my roof,” the widow said to the kitchen. “I could yell at her, but why waste my breath?”

When the widow was released from the hospital she returned to the house with a live-in nurse. Soon afterward her daughter paid a visit, and the widow told her she didn’t want the nurse around anymore. “She can do me,” the widow said, pointing in Mrs. Chow’s direction. “She won’t cost a cent. Besides, I don’t like being touched that way by a person who knows what she’s touching,” she said of the nurse.

Nobody knew, but Mrs. Chow spoke a passable though highly accented English she had learned in British schools. Her teachers in Hong Kong always said that if she had the language when she came to the States she’d be treated better than other immigrants. Chow couldn’t have agreed more. Once she arrived he started to teach her everything he knew in English. But that amounted to very little, considering he had been here for more than ten years. And what he had mastered came out crudely and strangely twisted. His phrases, built from a vocabulary of deference and accommodation, irritated Mrs. Chow for the way they resembled the obsequious blabber of her servants back home.

The Chows had been hired ostensibly to drive the widow to her canasta club, to clean the house, to do the shopping, and, since the bad hip, to oversee her personal hygiene. In return they lived rent-free upstairs in the children’s rooms, three bedrooms and a large bath. Plenty of space, it would seem, except the widow wouldn’t allow them to remove any of the toys and things from her children’s cluttered rooms.

On weekends and Tuesday afternoons Chow borrowed the widow’s tools and gardened for spending money. Friday nights, after they dropped the widow off at the canasta club, the Chows dined at Ming’s and then went to the amusement park at the beach boardwalk. First and last, they got in line to ride the Milky Way. On the day the immigration authorities finally let Mrs. Chow go, before she even saw her new home, Chow took his bride to the boardwalk. He wanted to impress her with her new country. All that machinery, brainwork, and labor done for the sake of fun. He never tried the roller coaster before she arrived; he saved it for her. After that very first time he realized he was much happier with his feet on the ground. But not Mrs. Chow: Oh, this speed, this thrust at the sky, this UP! Oh, this raging, clattering, pushy country! So big! And since that first ride she looked forward to Friday nights and the wind whipping through her hair, stinging her eyes, blowing away the top layers of dailiness. On the longest, most dangerous descent her dry mouth would open to a silent O and she would thrust up her arms, as if she could fly away.

Some nights as the Chows waited in line, a gang of toughs out on a strut, trussed in denim and combs, would stop and visit: MacArthur, they said, will drain the Pacific; the H-bomb will wipe Korea clean of the Commies; the Chows were to blame for Pearl Harbor; the Chows, they claimed, were Red Chinese spies. On occasion, overextending his skimpy English, Chow mounted a defense: he had served in the U.S. Army; his citizenship was blessed by the Department of War; he was a member of the American Legion. The toughs would laugh at the way he talked. Mrs. Chow cringed at his habit of addressing them as “sirs.”

“Get out, get out,” the widow hissed. She brought her fist down on the table. Cookies broke, fell to the floor.

“Yes, Missus,” said Mrs. Chow, thinking how she’d have to clean up the mess.

The widow, whose great-great-great-grandfather had been a central figure within the faction advocating Washington’s coronation, was eighty-six years old. Each day Mrs. Chow dispensed medications that kept her alive. At times, though, Mrs. Chow wondered if the widow would notice if she were handed an extra blue pill or one less red.

Mrs. Chow filled an enamel-coated washbasin with warm water from the tap. “What’s she doing?” said the widow. “Stealing my water now, is she?” Since Mrs. Chow first came into her service, the widow, with the exception of her hip, had avoided serious illness. But how she had aged: her ears were enlarged; the opalescence in her eyes had spread; her hands worked as if they were chipped from glass. Some nights, awake in their twin-size bed, Mrs. Chow would imagine old age as green liquid that seeped into a person’s cells, where it coagulated and, with time, crumbled, caving in the cheeks and the breasts it had once supported. In the dark she fretted that fluids from the widow’s old body had taken refuge in her youthful cells. On such nights she reached for Chow, touched him through the cool top sheet, and was comforted by the fit of her fingers in the shallows between his ribs.

Mrs. Chow knelt at the foot of the wheelchair and set the washbasin on the floor. The widow laughed. “Where did my little thief go?” She laughed again, her eyes closing, her head dropping to her shoulder. “Now she’s after my water. Better see if the tap’s still there.” Mrs. Chow abruptly swung aside the wheelchair’s footrests and slipped off the widow’s matted cloth slippers and dunked her puffy blue feet into the water. It was the widow’s nap time, and before she could be put to bed, her physician prescribed a warm foot bath to stimulate circulation; otherwise, in her sleep, her blood might settle comfortably in her toes.