It was pretty pathetic to feel excited when Mom’s name flashed across my phone screen, but I’d come to learn that it was better to talk to someone than no one at all, even if it was my mildly insufferable mother spouting some inane church gossip. I let it ring for a few beats before I picked up.
“Chen ayi is coming to Boston tomorrow to catch her husband with his mistress,” my mother said. “I told her she could stay with you at your dorm.” Mom was chewing on something, her tone frantic and chipper as always. “You know, because she can’t use her husband’s Marriott points since he’ll find out.”
I was alone, as usual, but I still glanced out my fifth-story window to make sure no one was around. I’d been hearing about the mistress intermittently for the last two years. All the other wives quickly filed out the door after Bible study, but Chen ayi would linger in our kitchen while Mom made dinner. She would recount every suspicious phone call or the strange floral perfume clinging to her husband’s suit on a given week. After Dad died, she’d come on the weekends bearing family-sized tins of Ferrero Rocher chocolates from Costco. She would sink into our couch and seriously ask how we were doing with the whole death thing, before sighing dramatically and telling my mother that it was better to have a dead husband than one that cheated.
It must be a rich housewife thing, to have the leisure time to speculate about mistresses since her husband was gone all the time, criss-crossing the globe to a never-ending stream of clients who shat wads of money into his bank account. Her suspicions weren’t totally unfounded—she’d unearthed receipts to fancy midnight dinners for two in his bags before, and he was a little too touchy with all the other aunties whenever he bothered to show up to church. But what could Chen ayi do anyway? She didn’t have any marketable skills and her English was shit. If she lost her husband, she’d lose everything.
Maybe that’s why Mom put up with her, asking about the evidence, shaking her head at all the right moments, sending Chen ayi home with an extra piece of jianbing or a glass container of lurou. I don’t know if learning the intimate details of Chen ayi’s unhappy marriage gave Mom some sort of secret satisfaction. She never talked about it, but I’d catch her humming hymns while doing the dishes after Chen ayi left, like the Holy spirit within her was buoyed by possibilities of infidelity.
“Her husband will see alerts that his card is being used in Boston, so you’ll have to pay for her this weekend,” Mom said. “You can use the emergency credit card I gave you.”
“Is she going to pay us back?”
“Aiyah, Chen ayi has done so much for us over the years. How can you ask such a thing? This is a small way we can pay her back for all the help she has given us.”
God’s love was steadfast and never ending, but Mom’s kindness operated on a sliding scale. She kept mental tallies of all the church aunties who’d ever performed favors for us and ranked them by sacrificial effort. Chen ayi bussed me back and forth from youth group in her Porsche for an entire year after Dad died, so Mom probably added up all the gas money in her brain and deemed it monetarily equivalent for my imminent labor this weekend.
I picked at my cuticle, already scabbed with blood. Izzy, my roommate, was nice and all, but I didn’t know how she’d react to a middle-aged Taiwanese auntie camping out in our dorm. Whatever beginnings of rapport had fizzled when she suggested a decorating power hour during move-in day. Her wall was peppered with cross country medals from high school, Polaroids arranged in the shape of Michigan, a signed poster from a Strokes concert in Detroit. I flew in from California, so I didn’t have room to bring anything with me. Three months later, my side of the room was still mostly bare.
“I told Chen ayi all about how much you’re loving the Chinese church Lin ayi’s son went to when he was at MIT,” Mom said. “So you can take her too, on Sunday. She’s going to thank the pastor and your friend Jamie on my behalf for taking care of you.”
I ripped off a hangnail. Blood bubbled immediately to the surface, and I pressed hard, focusing on the sharp throb. Jamie did not exist, because I hadn’t gone to church for the last three months since college started. It’s not that I became a Richard Dawkins groupie or hated Jesus or anything grand like that; rituals just sounded too exhausting. Plus, it reminded me of one of the things Mom and Dad couldn’t see eye to eye on, even in death. I spent most of my Sunday mornings sleeping until twelve. Things felt lighter that way.
I planned on telling Mom the first week I skipped service, then the second week, then the fifth, but every time she asked me how church was going I found myself creating an increasingly complicated web of lies. Now Mom thought I was attending Bible study once a week off campus, asking the pastor critical questions after service, and spending all my time with Jamie, the made-up friend I met at the church carpool.
I knew Mom was lonely after I left her, especially since I could’ve gone to school twenty minutes from our house. She brightened whenever I told her fabricated stories about church. Better for her to think that at least one of us wasn’t derailed by grief. But maybe it was time to confess that I was actually a friendless loser.
Outside, the rain fell steadily. Puddles of oil shone in greasy rainbows on the sidewalk below my dorm window. During the first month of college I got sick three different times, unaccustomed to the changing of seasons and relentless storms. I insisted I was doing just fine over the phone, but I couldn’t disguise my nasally voice from Mom. Two days later, there was a huge box waiting for me in the mailroom. Small delicate parcels of Chinese medicine, oranges from our backyard in bubble wrap, vitamin C pills, two jars of citron tea concentrate, a blanket we didn’t have space for in my suitcase. There was no note, but I found a crushed receipt with Mom’s hasty signature wedged between the cardboard folds. It had cost ninety-two dollars for overnight shipping.
“Lili? You can take Chen ayi, right? You know I’m praying for you.” She started humming Be Thou My Vision.
“Yes. Of course,” I croaked. I would figure out my excuse later.
***
Chen ayi stumbled out of an Uber at 2 A.M. in a lurid yellow parka, her dyed hair plastered to her forehead in oily streaks, dragging a Louis Vuitton luggage set in the rain. She stood in line behind the drunk herds of freshmen so I could check her in.
“This dorm is very old looking,” she remarked, clutching the handle of her suitcase tightly and looking around furtively, as if one of the inebriated frat boys would steal her matching holdall. “And so many white people here. You know, the last time I was in Boston was when my husband graduated from Harvard Business School?”
Chen ayi reminded me that her husband graduated from Harvard Business School every other time we saw each other.
“Maybe if you study very hard, it’s not too late for you to transfer in,” she said as we crammed into the elevator with a group of pimpled boys. They were holding open bottles of Smirnoff Ice inside brown bags. The sticky sweetness of alcohol swam in the humid air.
“I’m happy where I am, ayi,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
It was dark and empty inside my room, the shadows elongated by the street lights streaking from the window.
“You’re like, sexiling me, except it’s like, aunt-exile?” said Izzy, after I explained that Chen ayi was staying with us over the weekend. “It’s really nice of you to do this for your family. Don’t worry, I was actually planning on going home for the weekend anyway. But I’m a little uncomfortable with someone sleeping in my bed, just so you know.”
“You can take my bed,” I told Chen ayi. I padded over to my closet and pulled out the small sleeping bag Mom insisted I pack for church retreats and spread it on the narrow strip of carpet. “I’ll just be here.”
“You are so kind, giving up the bed, Lili.” She shrugged out of her parka and left it on the floor in a wet yellow lump. “Philip needs to be more like you.”
Chen ayi named Philip after the prince. He had already totaled the white BMW he got for his sixteenth birthday present. “Not at all.” I forced a smile. “This is the least I can do.”
In the morning Chen ayi wanted to visit Harvard.
“It’s where I want Philip to go in the future. We’ll see MIT if there’s time,” she said. Her husband’s illicit reservation was at 4 P.M.
I never really knew how to hold a conversation with Chen ayi, but it didn’t really matter, because all she did was talk. On the subway ride she told me about Philip’s perfect SAT scores, the fat instructor of her new Zumba class, how all the wives clogged the bathroom at the annual church luncheon a few weeks ago because the catered pasta was not made with dairy free cheese, as advertised.
“My husband got his MBA at Harvard,” she said as we turned into campus. “He’d fly me out to visit him back then, even though he had no money. Have you been here before?”
“A few times, yes.”
“Well, I can give you the proper tour.” She grabbed my hand, scraping my knuckles with the large ring on her index finger. A piece of my dead skin clung to the corner of the stone like a white flag.
I had toured Harvard once during my senior year, back when I’d finally committed to going to school in Boston. It was our first flight since Dad died.
“Vacation,” Mom said, holding my hand as we rode the subway. I let her. We stood in line to rub the feet of John Harvard and trailed behind a throng of middle aged Chinese women with permed hair and hot pink sun visors, straining to understand the tour guide through his thick Beijing accent.
“You know, Dad always wanted his kid to go to Harvard,” Mom said. We were lying side by side on the small hotel bed, empty cups of Shin Ramen on the nightstand. “He used to say it a lot when we were in Taiwan. That when we moved to America, he’d send his kid to Harvard one day. He said all sorts of things back then. But this is close enough, don’t you think?” She squeezed my hand. The room smelled like soup.
Dad had been gone for a year by then. That was right around the time Mom started recounting broken details about his past without warning, like how he belted Teresa Teng songs in the same key at karaoke, or how he blew all his bartending tips on vet appointments for stray dogs when he was in college. I always assumed Dad was boring, but now I saw his weary resignation. Some people reached their full potential in America, and others were whittled down to pale shadows from everything they had accumulated along the way.
“My husband used to take me to the library a lot,” Chen ayi said. Whatever ghosts lingering in my consciousness dissipated as we crossed the main lawn. “He studied so hard, you know? That’s why he’s so successful now.”
She suddenly stopped and shoved her hand in front of my face. Two gigantic rings rested on her fingers, a square emerald and a ruby edged with white diamonds. They dragged the wrinkled folds of her skin toward her knuckles.
“Back when he proposed, he could only do it with this little ring.” She pointed at her engagement ring, which I’d missed in the shadow of the emerald. The diamond was the size of a fruit fly. “Because he asked me to marry him before we came to America, before he made all his money. This kind of ring you look at and think, these are poor people! That’s why he got me these other rings after he started his own business.”
“It’s very impressive,” I offered. She ignored me and started walking again.
“And after my husband sold his first business, he wanted to leave his mark here, at Harvard library.”
The library loomed before us, all white columns and clean brick. A few students were eating sandwiches and reading books on the steps.
“My husband donated a whole table here, right after we moved out of your neighborhood. Our family name in big letters. He wanted all the students who study at his table to have good luck and become rich. Maybe you can sit at his table and pray that you can transfer in,” Chen ayi suggested. “I will pray with you.”
“I’m pretty sure you have to be a student to get in the library,” I said. “Why don’t we check out the gift shop instead? You could buy Philip a sweatshirt or something.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Chen ayi. “We donated a table. He is such a famous businessman now, they will know who he is.” She marched up the steps authoritatively. A few students stared at us curiously from their books as we walked past. I tried not to make eye contact.
Everything in the library was sterile white marble. Three turnstiles lined the entrance. A freckled boy in a salmon Vineyard Vines pullover pushed past us and tapped his ID card on the pad.
“Are you a student?” An old white woman sat at the front desk, eyeing me closely from behind her thick bifocals. She wore a soft white sweater and pearl earrings.
“Um, no, I’m not,” I said. “We were just looking at the inside—”
“My husband, he is a benefactor here,” Chen ayi cut in. She pronounced benefactor like bee-nefactor.
“Sweetie, you and your mom can’t come in. You’re not affiliated with the university,” said the old white lady. She pushed a stack of files to the corner of her desk and crossed her arms. “Only current students can swipe in guests.”
“Got it,” I mumbled. “Don’t worry, we were just leaving.” I tugged Chen ayi’s sleeve to steer her away from the entrance, but she pushed me away.
“Excuse me, my husband, he went here,” Chen ayi said. Her broken English bounced off the white walls. Some of the students milling beyond the entrance at the stairs were whispering and looking at us. I backed slowly towards the exit.
Mom’s English used to embarrass Dad. I’m sure she saw the way he shrank away from her in public, but it never kept her from getting things done. Once, she wanted to treat him to his favorite dinner one last time. We didn’t actually know if Alexander’s Steakhouse was his favorite, just that it was the most expensive meal any of us had ever eaten, and we only got to try it because his old boss treated us before Dad was laid off a few months later. Dad warned us about coming off as greedy or deprived, so we all cut up our tiny pieces of fifty dollar dry-aged steak into even tinier slices. But Mom didn’t remember what Alexander’s Steakhouse was called, just that it was two words and contained “house,” so we ended up at Texas Roadhouse that night. Dad tried to act happy and pleased, but every grin mostly looked like the grimace of someone who wanted to die, probably because his latest round of chemo filled him with more poison that couldn't kill whatever was inside of him. Every time he opened his mouth in a half-hearted attempt to smile I saw the bulbous white sores lining his yellowed teeth. I guess that’s why I agreed when Mom told me to ride the mechanical bull in the center of the restaurant. I flailed on the legless plastic bull for four revolutions, each time thrown onto the greasy floor, until our white waitress asked me to get off because the saddle was reserved for birthday guests. When I looked up Dad was bowing, his glassy gaze fixed upon the oil stained linoleum, apologizing.
“Sorry,” I said to the old woman. She was tapping the desk with her fountain pen. “We just wanted to um, come inside and take a peek. We’re going.”
The door opened behind us. A short Asian girl walked in, her purple Jansport slung low on her shoulder. She glanced at us, then quickly averted her eyes and made her way to the furthest turnstile. I watched in horror as Chen ayi stalked over and grabbed the edge of her backpack.
“You can let us into the library, right?” she demanded in Chinese. “My husband, he went here.”
The girl staggered backwards, stunned.
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to stop manhandling our students,” the old woman snapped.
“I haven’t been here in over twenty years, and I just want to show her something,” Chen ayi continued, pointing at me. “My husband is very important here—hiyah, Lili, that hurts!”
Chen ayi yelped as I wrestled her grip from the girl’s backpack. In a daze I noticed I’d left long red welts on her wrists.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I said, nodding towards the girl, the old woman, then at Chen ayi in a disjointed circle. I couldn’t bear to meet their gazes. The marble floors swam in lazy white waves. “We’re leaving. We’re leaving.”
Someone was coughing in the distance.
“I don’t speak Chinese, and I don’t know who your husband is,” said the girl, loud enough for the old woman to hear. Then she jerked her backpack from my grasp and walked stiffly through the turnstile. I didn’t realize that I had been clinging onto the black strap.
“Ma’am, if you don’t remove yourself from Harvard property within the next few minutes, I will have no choice but to call security,” the old woman said.
“We’re very sorry.” Bowing my head, I took Chen ayi’s hand and led her out the door. She was quiet.
After the library debacle Chen ayi stopped talking. She looked so meek and forlorn, gently shifting her body so she wouldn't thwack passerby with her huge Louis Vuitton bag. I couldn’t be mad at her. At lunch I bought her a ham sandwich, and it was only then that she dispiritedly muttered about how the bread was staler than the you tiao from church, shaking her head and sighing loudly before lapsing into silence again. We walked around the edges of campus, passing by two different European tour groups, before settling into a bench beneath a large tree. The midday sun was finally sinking into a bed of dark clouds.
“I’ve always known,” Chen ayi said. A pair of British tourists posed beneath an ivy-covered building. “That he was cheating, you know? For the last two years.”
I thought about mentioning that I could hear her from my room whenever she came over, but Chen ayi would probably tell Mom.
“Sometimes, really late at night, he sneaks out of bed and shuts himself in the bathroom,” she continued. “I can’t hear what exactly he’s saying, but he’ll be talking to someone on the phone. Whenever he’s not away on business, he does this nearly every other night.”
“Have you ever asked him about it?”
“Hiyah, of course not! Then I’d lose my advantage. Let me teach you the first basic rule of marriage, Lili. Always keep the upper hand, then attack, see? Did God not sneak attack us with Jesus’ sacrifice? That’s what I’m doing. I am attacking now.”
I didn’t know what to make of that comparison, so I nodded.
“Do you think I am stupid, Lili?”
I glanced at her, startled. “Of course not—”“Because I think my husband thinks I am. But I’m not stupid. I see it. Two weeks ago, he comes back all dry and tan, even though he told me he was on business in New York. I went and checked his account. You know what he did? The credit card charges were in the Bahamas. I went through his things after and found a gold bracelet. Then I found this dinner reservation in his email. He’s been flying some whore out to all these places.”
We considered this in silence.
A year ago, when the summer months were slicked with sweat and Dad’s fresh absence, Chen ayi paid me two hundred dollars to water her garden for three weeks while she was vacationing in Southeast Asia with her friends from Zumba. After the first week I completely forgot about my obligations until the day before her return. I bought fast-acting fertilizer from Home Depot and sped to her house, only to find a crew of gardeners milling through the yard, humming in unison while wrapping small plastic bags around her peaches and trimming errant leaves from the bushes. Chen ayi drove to our house the next day and handed me a stack of twenties. “You know Lili, you must have some magic touch,” she gushed. “So bad you are leaving us for college next year. My figs have never tasted so sweet and juicy. Here, I brought a bag. Give it to your mom.” After she left I counted the bills, wondering how rich you had to be to forget that you’d hired multiple people to care for such a small plot of land.
In the distance, the British tour guide gestured enthusiastically at a building. Thick crowds of students strolled across the grass. Chen ayi stared at them while twirling the rings on her fingers, her sagging flesh twisting with each revolution. How long had I considered her merely a receptacle for her husband’s easy wealth?
“I don’t expect you to have anything to say.” She blinked several times, then forced a thin-lipped smile at me. “Tell me, how is church going for you? Your mom talks about it all the time. She is so proud you are such a faithful girl, making so many good friends.”
Mom was always searching for assurance that the thousands of miles I put between us was not an act of betrayal but some mythic leap of faith. In many ways it was, but to whom, I didn’t know. What was the difference between running away and growing up? “I haven’t been going,” I said. “And I don’t have any friends, either. So we won’t actually be going tomorrow. Sorry.”
Chen ayi turned toward me on the bench, opening and closing her mouth like a fish. Then she smacked my knee with her bag. “That’s why you don’t have friends,” she said. “At church, they are forced to be nice, or else they get in trouble with Jesus.”
I asked her to please not tell Mom.
“Let us pray together,” she said, grabbing my hand. I looked at our interlocked fingers and wondered what to say. I knew Dad stopped hoping a long time ago, back when he was ten and his boyish cries to an unknown god weren’t substantial enough to save his little brother from drowning in a starved gorge, then again two decades later, when he and Mom took their ten day old baby off life support. I was only five at the time but I crawled out of bed to Mom’s low sobs in the kitchen, piecing together the shape of our loss from their disembodied voices. It was Dad’s idea to keep the gender of the baby and the location of its burial from me. I guess he thought that I couldn’t grieve what I didn’t know. Mom and Dad stopped sharing a language for grief after that, but she learned to craft one for herself. Dad never complained about the women gathered in our living room on Tuesdays, searching for traces of heaven with their foreheads pressed to the ground and begging for extensions of dreams that never arrived. He quieted whenever Mom prayed for him throughout the two years of his sickness, letting her hope at first that death would leave him, then hope that he would take longer to die. Maybe prayer was just learning to be less greedy with our desires. I don’t know when I stopped praying, but I imagine that I eventually ran out of them in my weariness.
“I don’t know how,” I told Chen ayi. “Not anymore. Do you?”
I thought she was nodding, but she merely tilted her head to the sky and held it there. She didn’t say anything for so long that I thought she’d ignored my question, but then she spoke slowly. “Prayer isn’t about what you know.”
***
By the time we emerged from the Uber, it was raining again. The waitress eyed our soaked bodies warily, but Chen ayi splayed her Louis Vuitton bag on the front desk, glaring back with such ferocity that the waitress collected two menus and led us to a candle-lit table near the bathrooms. As soon as she walked away Chen ayi burst up from her chair and dove into an empty booth on the other side of the room. She waved her hand urgently at me.
There weren’t any other Asian people in the restaurant, so it was easy to spot her husband. From our vantage point we had a clear view of his small round table, a glass of sweaty water in front of his hunched figure. He kept pushing up his sleeve and checking his Rolex while tapping his foot on the ground. Watching him made me feel claustrophobic. Folds of wrinkled fat sank into the collar of his shirt as he shifted in his seat. He’d lost more hair and gained weight since the last time I saw him.
“Stop shaking your leg,” Chen ayi hissed. She was glaring so intently at her husband I was surprised that he didn’t turn around.
Chen ayi’s husband peered out the window. He checked his phone, then quickly swiped past the grainy photo of Philip on his lock screen to answer a text message.
“I want to leave,” Chen ayi said suddenly.
“I thought you wanted answers.”
“There’s no use,” she muttered, looking at her husband, then back outside at the lingering rain. She started shuffling out of our booth. “Nothing will change, anyway.” I yanked her back into her seat just as the waitress returned, a tall middle-aged man following behind her. The man handed his tennis bag to the waitress, who accepted it with a neat bow. Despite being underdressed in a pair of Nike shorts, he carried himself with the easy confidence of someone who had never lost something he was unable to reclaim.
“Ah-liang!” Chen ayi’s husband cried, hurrying out of his seat and wrapping his stubby arms around the tall man. “It’s really so good to see you. Please, sit.”
The tall man stepped neatly out of the hug and patted her husband’s hand. “Likewise, Isaac.”
I could make out faint snippets of their conversation—idle chatter about Harvard, something about wives and sons. Chen ayi scooted to the edge of the booth, her head craned towards their table. Her husband reached over to give the tall man a friendly nudge on the shoulder but mostly succeeded in nearly tipping over his glass of water.
So there was no mistress after all, not at this dinner, at least. Chen ayi still looked tense, grimacing at the tall man like she recognized him.
“Who is that?” I whispered.
“Old classmate from Harvard MBA,” said Chen ayi, frowning. ““I remember this man. He was my husband’s competition.”
A waiter lowered two steaming plates of pasta and a bowl of escargot onto the table. Chen ayi’s husband began ladling the shells onto their plates while talking animatedly. The tall man seemed to be studying a painting on the wall. Then he sighed abruptly, taking his napkin off his lap and setting it on the lacquer table.
“I know where this is going,” he said, loud enough for us to hear.
Chen ayi’s husband grabbed the tall man’s hand. The sleeve of his suit caught in the green escargot sauce. His voice shook, reverberating. “Ah-Liang. I know you are a good man. I promise, this time will be different. I’ve got a new investment—”
“Isaac.” The tall man tugged his hand free and wiped it on his shorts. “I appreciated your proposal last month and the vacation, but my answer is the same. Please, stop calling. I can’t be pulling favors for you anymore.” Then he smiled at Chen ayi’s husband, his eyes so full of pity and patronizing kindness that I had to look away.
Chen ayi’s husband muttered something about his wife and kids. He rubbed his soiled sleeve on the white tablecloth.
“They can get to work too.” The tall man signaled for the check. His plate of pasta and the greasy escargot left untouched on the table. “Don’t worry, I’ll cover this bill.” I could see the gold teeth implants in the corners of his mouth.
Chen ayi’s husband sat there for a long time, the food before him long expelled of its steam, sad and oiled clumps beneath the fading light. He’d taken out a little notebook, scribbling with one hand while he punched at his phone with another. That small, nervous grin still frozen on his face. I wondered who he was pretending for.
It reminded me of the way Dad would smile at me towards the end. Always refusing to look me in the eye. Like when he thought I wouldn’t know what hospice care meant. “They think I’m getting better, so I get to come home,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the steering wheel, smiling at the empty street stretched in front of us, his face glowing red beneath the stoplight. The muscles of his hairless eyebrows moving in the darkness. “We’ll get to spend more time together. That’ll be nice, don’t you think?” A month later, when Mom and I were on our hands and knees cleaning his shit from the carpet, he could no longer speak. He watched us from the bed, his mouth opening and closing, tears mingling with the spit running from the corners of his lips. Mom never said anything. Just stroked his cheek gently with a handkerchief. Afterwards we prayed in the same position, our noses touching the ground that still reeked of vinegar and feces and all the things we tried to cover but never fully went away.
Chen ayi sat facing me, not looking at her husband for some time, staring out the window of the booth. The rain fell unrelentingly, drowning the soft jazz and whatever other sounds that existed in between hope and humiliation. She was fiddling with her rings. The stones shone dully beneath the quiet light. Slowly she slid off the giant ruby and emerald and dropped them into her purse. Her bony fingers looked naked, weightless. Then she picked up her things and walked over to her husband.
“The noodles are getting cold.” She took the tall man’s seat and picked up his unused fork.
Her husband’s eyes widened in recognition. Small rivers of tears leaked and trailed through the wrinkled deltas of his face. He bowed his head. Chen ayi placed her small hand over his. They ate like this for some time.
Outside the rain washed me gently like a kinder baptism. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, bewildered and comforted by everything I did not know.
Hairol Ma is a Taiwanese-American writer from California. Her writing has received support from Kundiman, Tin House, and Kearny Street Workshop. She is at work on her first novel.
