Across a Green Ocean. Wendy Lee
The truth, Ling realized, was that Emily knew as little about Michael’s personal life as she did. She had always wanted her children to grow up close, as she had with her own sisters, but was afraid that the six-year interval between her two children forever doomed them to older sibling–younger sibling rivalry or worse, indifference. She just wanted them to be happy, that was all. And for them to be happy, they had to have families, spouses, children. These things were what had made Ling happy, although, as her own children were growing up, she had never considered the question of whether she was happy or not.
Jerry Katz had gone back into his house, and the sunlight had traveled clear across the lawn now. Due to how it reached halfway up the fence, Ling figured it was around seven o’clock and finally the right time to try calling Michael. It was late enough so that he would have left work, but early enough so that he wouldn’t have gone out yet. Calling her children could be such an ordeal. Emily didn’t want Ling to call her cell phone since she also used it for work, but if Ling called Emily’s home number, she almost always reached her husband, Julian, instead. She didn’t mind making small talk with her son-in-law. In fact, she enjoyed discussing with him the improvements he was making to the house, or, more recently, what late-season vegetables were growing in the backyard (unlike the teenage Emily, Julian appeared to be an adept gardener). At first she had thought it strange that he always was at home, but now she had come to accept it as just another aspect of her daughter’s marriage she didn’t understand.
Julian had a profession. He was a documentary filmmaker who, as far as Ling could tell, worked sporadically on other people’s projects and occasionally on his own. So far he had made a ten-minute piece about a bunch of trust-fund artists who scorned their parents’ support, that had been in a minor festival. It was, Ling suspected, based on his own life, except that Julian did use his family’s money; that was the only way he and Emily could afford their house in Westchester. Ling had been so excited when Emily had announced just before her thirtieth birthday that they were buying their own place, although she was slightly disappointed that it was so far away from her—about equidistant from the city, but in the wrong direction. It would be very inconvenient for Ling to help out with the baby she was certain Emily would shortly announce she and Julian were expecting. But two years had passed, Han had passed away, and still no sign of a grandchild.
Julian wasn’t a bad son-in-law, Ling acknowledged. In fact, she quite liked him. Yes, he had once brought her white roses, not knowing that white was the color of mourning in most Asian cultures, but that was forgivable. He and Emily looked good together as a couple, and would provide her with adorable mixed-race grandchildren. But Ling was afraid that Emily gave too much to everyone but those closest to her and that one day her husband would ask her for something she was not able to provide.
Now, Michael was just as hard to reach but for a different reason. He only had a cell phone, which Ling supposed was the trend among young people nowadays, but it caused more problems than if he had a landline. Strange how the more convenient technology made it to talk to people, the more difficult it was to find them. Ling had been trying to reach Michael for the past week; since Monday. She wanted his advice on what it meant when you went to a restaurant with a man and he paid, when you had long conversations with him and he listened intently, when at the end of your outings together, he gazed into your eyes and said he looked forward to seeing you again soon. In short, she wanted to know about dating.
Ling didn’t know how much of an expert Michael was on this subject. Of course, in high school he had been oddly close to the Bradley girl, and once he had brought home a girl from college who wore a bowler hat. But certainly he was a better option for a confidante than Emily, and not only because Emily was so loyal to her father’s memory. Ling was afraid that Emily might start asking uncomfortable questions, or worse, think that her mother’s real motivation for calling was to ask when she and Julian were planning to have a baby. Children could be so selfish, thinking the world revolved around them.
Every day this past week, when Ling had dialed Michael’s number, the message had gone to voice mail. She supposed he must be terribly busy, or else he would have called her back by now. Cut him some slack, Emily had said, and Ling had spent the past few days cutting it, whatever slack was. But now she picked up the kitchen phone and pressed the buttons, willing a human to pick up on the other end. We’re sorry, the mailbox is full, answered a voice that could never have belonged to a real person. The messages couldn’t all be from her, as she’d just called once a day. And besides, she had not actually left messages. She never liked hearing the sound of her own voice being played back, with its accented English even after almost thirty-five years of living in this country. The one good thing about cell phones, she supposed, was that she didn’t have to leave a message for someone to know she had called.
She hung up and sat for a while in the kitchen, her fingertips cold. It was not unusual for Michael to let his phone go to voice mail or to not call her back for a few days, but for his mailbox to be full? This must mean other people were trying to reach him without success, that he wasn’t calling anybody back. To make sure she had heard right, she called again, and once more received the same, disembodied message. As if on their own, her fingers punched in the number again and again, until she forced herself to stop. She sat there clutching the receiver, as though it was the only thing grounding her.
The last time she had felt this way was almost a year ago, when the hospital had called to tell her that her husband had had a heart attack.
Han’s death had occurred quite suddenly at work. He had been a laboratory technician at a pharmaceuticals company in Trenton. Ling did not know exactly what he did—whenever he had tried to explain it, her mind felt overstuffed, like when she was first learning English—but she knew he cared enough about it to the point that he rarely took a day off. She remembered noticing the strain of his back through his shirts, worn thin from too much washing. He had been fifty-seven years old.
By the time Ling had gotten to the hospital, he was already gone. It was heart failure, the doctors had said. She hadn’t believed them at first. Wasn’t heart failure caused by too much weight, too much food, too much drink, too much of everything? Her husband was as slim as the day she had set eyes on him, and he never touched alcohol or smoked a cigarette. He was the kind of person who got up at dawn to take a brisk walk around the block, and he went to bed at ten thirty every night, without a minute or two’s deviation. She wanted to tell the doctors this, as proof that there had been some mistake, but for some reason her English came out all twisted, and they were more interested in whether she needed to be sedated.
When Ling called Emily’s cell phone to tell her what had happened, she added that she and Michael shouldn’t hurry to the hospital. Don’t you want us to be with you as soon as possible? Emily had asked. There was no point, Ling had said, since it was too late to say good-bye to their father, surprising even herself with her calmness. When Emily did arrive, Ling thought that her daughter looked like she was working too hard. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and her shoulder-length hair badly needed a trim. It also didn’t help that she had inherited her father’s dusky complexion, his wide-set eyes and generous mouth. Ling knew her daughter had more important things to worry about than her appearance, but surely a little makeup wouldn’t hurt. However, she knew if she mentioned this, Emily would respond tartly that she shouldn’t think all lawyers looked like those on television.
Michael, however, took after his mother—tall and thin and pale, with delicate features and long, sensitive hands and feet. When he was young—perhaps because she knew there would be no more children after him—Ling treated him like a piece of porcelain. She picked him up whenever he cried, chose the best bits from her own plate to feed him, took care to leave on a night-light in his room. This irked Han, who thought she babied him, and he insisted that his son should grow up tough, as he had. How tough, Ling didn’t know, although she was aware that life in 1960s Beijing must have been difficult.
At the hospital Michael sat with her quietly, holding her hand, while Emily flew about interrogating doctors, browbeating nurses, commandeering cups of coffee that no one wanted to drink. In that way she was her father’s daughter, capable and methodical, even to the point of lacking an imagination, Ling sometimes thought. But Ling could not be more grateful for her daughter’s help. Emily