Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Chow was talking long distance to the widow’s daughter in Texas. Earlier the widow had told the daughter that the Chows were threatening again to leave. She apologized for her mother’s latest spell of wildness. “Humor her,” the daughter said. “She must’ve had another one of her little strokes.”

Later Mrs. Chow told her husband she wanted to leave the widow. “My fingers,” she said, snapping off the rubber gloves the magazine ads claimed would guarantee her beautiful hands into the next century. “I wasn’t made for such work.”

As a girl her parents had sent her to a Christian school for training in Western-style art. The authorities agreed she was talented. As expected she excelled there. Her portrait of the king was chosen to hang in the school cafeteria. When the colonial Minister of Education on a tour of the school saw her painting he requested a sitting with the gifted young artist.

A date was set. The rumors said a successful sitting would bring her the ultimate fame: a trip to London to paint the royal family. But a month before the great day she refused to do the minister’s portrait. She gave no reason why; in fact, she stopped talking. The school administration was embarrassed, and her parents were furious. It was a great scandal; a mere child from a country at the edge of revolution but medieval in its affection for authority had snubbed the mighty British colonizers. She was sent home. Her parents first appealed to family pride, then they scolded and threatened her. She hid from them in a wardrobe, where her mother found her holding her fingers over lighted matches.

The great day came and went, no more momentous than the hundreds that preceded it. That night her father apologized to the world for raising such a child. With a bamboo cane he struck her outstretched hand — heaven help her if she let it fall one inch — and as her bones were young and still pliant, they didn’t fracture or break, thus multiplying the blows she had to endure.

“Who’d want you now?” her mother said. Her parents sent her to live with a servant family. She could return home when she was invited. On those rare occasions she refused to go. Many years passed before she met Chow, who had come to the estate seeking work. They were married on the condition he take her far away. He left for America, promising to send for her when he had saved enough money for her passage. She returned to Hong Kong and worked as a secretary. Later she studied at the university.

Now as she talked about leaving the widow, it wasn’t the chores or the old woman that she gave as the reason, though in the past she had complained the widow was a nuisance, an infantile brat born of an unwelcomed union. This time she said she had a project in mind, a great canvas of a yet undetermined subject. But that would come. Her imagination would return, she said, once she was away from that house.

It was the morning of a late spring day. A silvery light filtered through the wall of eucalyptus and warmed the dew on the widow’s roof, striking the plums and acacia, irises and lilies, in such a way that, blended with the heavy air and the noise of a thousand birds, one sensed the universe wasn’t so vast, so cold, or so angry, and even Mrs. Chow suspected that it was a loving thing.

Mrs. Chow had finished her morning chores. She was in the bathroom rinsing the smell of bacon from her hands. She couldn’t wash deep enough, however, to rid her fingertips of perfumes from the widow’s lotions and creams, which, over the course of months, had seeped indelibly into the whorls. But today her failure was less maddening. Today she was confident the odors would eventually fade. She could afford to be patient. They were going to interview for an apartment of their very own.

“Is that new?” Chow asked, pointing to the blouse his wife had on. He adjusted his necktie against the starched collar of a white short-sleeved shirt, which billowed out from baggy, pin-striped slacks. His hair was slicked back with fragrant pomade.

“I think it’s the daughter’s,” said Mrs. Chow. “She won’t miss it.” Mrs. Chow smoothed the silk undershirt against her stomach. She guessed the shirt was as old as she was; the daughter probably had worn it in her teens. Narrow at the hips and the bust, it fit Mrs. Chow nicely. Such a slight figure, she believed, wasn’t fit for labor.

Chow saw no reason to leave the estate. He had found his wife what he thought was the ideal home, certainly not as grand as her parents’ place, but one she’d feel comfortable in. Why move, he argued, when there were no approaching armies, no floods, no one telling them to go? Mrs. Chow understood. It was just that he was very Chinese, and very peasant. Sometimes she would tease him. If the early Chinese sojourners who came to America were all Chows, she would say, the railroad wouldn’t have been constructed, and Ohio would be all we know of California.

The Chows were riding in the widow’s green Buick. As they approached the apartment building Mrs. Chow reapplied lipstick to her mouth.

It was a modern two-story stucco building, painted pink, surrounded by asphalt, with aluminum windows and a flat roof that met the sky like an engineer’s level. Because their friends lived in the apartment in question the Chows were already familiar with its layout. They went to the manager’s house at the rear of the property. Here the grounds were also asphalt. Very contemporary, no greenery anywhere. The closest things to trees were the clothesline’s posts and crossbars.

The manager’s house was a tiny replica of the main building. Chow knocked on the screen door. A radio was on and the smell of baking rushed past the wire mesh. A cat came to the door, followed by a girl. “I’m Velvet,” she said. “This is High Noon.” She gave the cat’s orange tail a tug. “She did this to me,” said Velvet, throwing a wicked look at the room behind her. She picked at her hair, ragged as tossed salad; someone apparently had cut it while the girl was in motion. She had gray, almost colorless eyes, which, taken with her hair, gave her the appearance of agitated smoke.

A large woman emerged from the back room carrying a basket of laundry. She wasn’t fat, but large in the way horses are large. Her face was round and pink, with fierce little eyes and hair the color of olive oil and dripping wet. Her arms were thick and white, like soft tusks of ivory.

“It’s the people from China,” Velvet said.

The big woman nodded. “Open her up,” she told the girl. “It’s okay.”

The front room was a mess, cluttered with evidence of frantic living. This was, perhaps, entropy in its final stages. The Chows sat on the couch. From all around her Mrs. Chow sensed a slow creep: the low ceiling seemed to be sinking, cat hairs clung to clothing, a fine spray from the fish tank moistened her bare arm.

No one said anything. It was as if they were sitting in a hospital waiting room. The girl watched the Chows. The large woman stared at a green radio at her elbow broadcasting news about the war. Every so often she looked suspiciously up at the Chows. “You know me,” she said abruptly. “I’m Remora Cass.”

On her left, suspended in a swing, was the biggest, ugliest baby Mrs. Chow had ever seen. It was dozing, arms dangling, great melon head flung so far back that it appeared to be all nostrils and chins. “A pig-boy,” Mrs. Chow said in Chinese. Velvet jabbed two fingers into the baby’s rubbery cheeks. Then she sprang back from the swing and executed a feral dance, all elbows and knees. She seemed incapable of holding her body still.

She caught Mrs. Chow’s eye. “This is Ed,” she said. “He has no hair.”

Mrs. Chow nodded.

“Quit,” said Remora Cass, swatting at the girl as if she were a fly. Then the big woman looked Mrs. Chow in the eyes and said, “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. There’s not a baby in the state bigger than Ed; eight pounds, twelve ounces at birth and he doubled that inside a month.” She stopped, bringing her palms heavily down on her knees, and shook her wet head. “You don’t understand me, do you?”