The Secrets of a Fire King Page 4

  Thus, he was pleased to see that more English textbooks appeared, and to find, one day, that most things in the house had been labeled with their English names in Ellie’s neat, blockish handwriting. The windows were open to the late spring breeze, and the paper labels fluttered softly. CUPBOARD, said one. STOVE, REFRIGERATOR, TABLE, CUP, SOFA, RADIO, SHELF. Jade Moon read them off proudly. Although Ellie was loud and aggressive, someone Jade Moon would have disdained in her own country, in America Miss Ellie was her only friend. It bothered Rob, sometimes, the way Ellie’s advice became law in their house. Use milk to remove ink stains, Jade Moon would declare, scrubbing at the shirt pockets where his pens had leaked. Vinegar and newspapers make the glass windows sparkle. It worried him that Ellie treated Jade Moon in a somewhat patronizing manner, as if what they shared was not a friendship at all, but a great gift Ellie was bestowing on her diligent and fortunate student. That was why Ellie made him think of missionaries he had seen, but because Jade Moon seemed happy, and because her English was improving, he said nothing.

  One day he came home from work to find Jade Moon pacing their small rooms with excitement. She had been invited to a mother-and-daughter dinner at the church. It was to be a potluck dinner, and Ellie had asked her to bring the dish they had learned that week: a tuna noodle casserole with a potato chip crust. Jade Moon had agreed to go, but she had a secret idea about what to fix. She would not tell him exactly what it was, but, laughing, said she wanted to drive into the city to find some fabric for a new dress, and then she wanted him to go to the lake and catch her a fresh rainbow trout.

  On the evening of the dinner Jade Moon came into the living room wearing a fitted dress of dark rose. It had a narrow waist and a skirt that flared from the hips like an upended tulip. She carried the baby, whose frilly dress was the color of cream and decorated with lace and ribbons that matched her own. In the kitchen the mysterious dish was covered with tinfoil. Rob had spent most of the previous weekend floating on the still-cold lake, seeking the fish, and on their trip into the city Jade Moon had disappeared into several different grocery stores and one tiny Asian market, coming out with her arms full of packages and a private smile on her face. She had worked all week on the new dresses, copying hers from a magazine she had bought. Now she turned shyly in the room, waiting for his approval. Rob was moved to stillness by the sight of her white arms and dark hair against the deep red material. He thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful, and he told her so.

  Before Ellie came, while Jade Moon was making a last-minute adjustment to her hem, Rob walked quietly into the kitchen and lifted the foil from the potluck dish. He saw at once that it was both splendid and completely wrong. Jade Moon had prepared a special fish. Turned on its side, the steamed trout was surrounded by vegetables cut into graceful shapes. Its one visible eye stared, and its tail was arched slightly, as if at any moment the fish might propel itself off the platter and into the green sea of the tablecloth. Rob stared back at the fish and wondered what he should do. Ellie was already knocking at the door. Perhaps, after all, the women would understand the importance of this gesture and be kind. So he nodded at Ellie, who was exclaiming over April’s dress, and said nothing when Jade Moon carried the platter proudly out the door.

  It was rare for Rob to be alone in the house, and he found himself restless, moving from one project to another, glancing constantly at his watch. He repaired a cupboard door, then put up new shelves in the bathroom. The familiar work calmed him, and he imagined the church ladies tasting the fish out of politeness, finding it good. He imagined them asking for the recipe, and Jade Moon giving it to them shyly, in slow but perfect English. The dinner lasted for over three hours, and the more time passed, the more convinced he became that things were going well.

  At last, just as he was putting his tools away, he heard a car door slam. He met Jade Moon on the porch. Ellie’s taillights were already disappearing over the hill. Jade Moon carried the platter balanced along one arm, and held the baby, who was sound asleep, in the other. She had stopped on the top step and turned to stare at the moon, which had risen as round and cold as a fish eye in the clear summer sky.

  “Where’s Ellie?” Rob asked, taking the baby. “Why didn’t she help you?” Jade Moon did not answer, but turned in her red dress and walked into the house. By the time he had followed her to the kitchen, the fish, completely intact, was displayed for him in the center of the table. Jade Moon’s face was expressionless, but nearly gray with embarrassment. He put the baby in the little reclining chair on the table. She was awake now, and wiggling happily, oblivious to her mother’s disappointment, even when Jade Moon dropped her face into her hands and began to weep.

  Little by little, he coaxed the story from her. He could imagine the women, of course, their small gasps, their looks of shock and then dismay as Jade Moon unveiled her fish. One woman had held her hand to her mouth and left the room. Even Ellie had been nonplussed. After a moment, the beautiful fish had been moved to the far end of the table. The rest of the evening had been equally humiliating. Whenever Jade Moon spoke in English, the others had laughed, or looked confused and walked away. Even when she repeated things twice, three times, they had not understood, and she had spent most of the evening listening to unintelligible chatter, while the women finished every dish and left her fish untouched.

  “They are just ignorant,” Rob said. He stood up and got a plate. The fish was soft, white, succulent, and he took a large portion. “Ignorant and foolish. If they had tasted it, they’d know what they were missing.” He ate one mouthful, slowly, then another. “It is delicious.”

  When she did not answer him, he put his fork down and took her hand.

  “Jade Moon,” he said. “Remember the time I tried to compliment your mother’s house, and instead I told her she had a lovely toilet?” He waited for her to smile at this old joke between them, but she did not. “Don’t you remember? Everyone was shocked, and I was terribly embarrassed, but I didn’t give up. You must make mistakes in order to learn.”

  Jade Moon’s face was set. “English is an ugly language,” she said, speaking to her hands. “It sounds like dogs barking. I don’t want to know this language.”

  He looked at her profile, her narrow face and generous lips, and remembered how much she hated to do things unless she excelled at them. Once she had ripped out an entire piece of embroidery because of a tiny flaw she had discovered in the first stitch. He put his silverware down and spoke to her sternly.

  “Jade Moon,” he said. “You must learn. This is your country now. What if there is an emergency and you need to use the telephone? What if something happened to me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, glancing up, and he saw the worry move like clouds across her face. Then she composed herself and grew stubborn. “I will learn emergency phrases,” she said. “But that is all.”

  He felt his patience ebb. If she would not learn, then she would be dependent on him all her life.

  “You are nothing but a lazy woman,” he said. “Lazy, lazy, lazy.” He spoke the last word emphatically, aware of the great insult it would be to her, amazed, even as he spoke, at the depth of his own cruelty.

  Her face changed and grew still, closed to him. On the table the baby kicked and cooed. Jade Moon picked her up, wiped her tears away with the back of her wrist, and turned away, leaving the ruined fish in the middle of the table.

  That night Rob did not sleep well, and in the morning Jade Moon avoided him until he left for work. On his way out the door he paused, disturbed by both the silence and by some other, subtle change he couldn’t name. Then it came to him. He looked around again, from cupboard to stove to table to chair.

  All the small white cards had disappeared.

  SPRING WAS TWO YEARS OLD when her brother was born, and by then the argument about language, about names, had become a tender, misshapen knot in the living flesh of their marriage. When Jade Moon held the new baby on her shoulder and said she would call him Mou
ntain, the air was tense with years of accumulated arguments. Jade Moon, stubborn, talked on. She herself had traveled too much in her life, as her name foretold. She wanted her son to stay in one place, as solid and steady as a rock cliff against the sea. She would give him the name to ensure him strength. She said all this defiantly. Rob sighed, eyeing their small son. When the nurse took him off to fill in the paperwork he tapped his pencil against the wooden desk, looking out the office window over the parking lot. He wrote down his father’s name, Michael James.

  Three weeks before their last child was born, just a year later, Jade Moon announced that if it was a girl, she would name the child Sea.

  “Why Sea?” Rob asked, looking up from his newspaper. The two older children were asleep, and Jade Moon sat at the desk, slight even in this last month of her pregnancy, writing a letter to her parents. The translucent paper rustled softly beneath her pen. Though he spoke fluently, Rob had never read her language well, and the characters seemed both ominous and full of mystery. Was that how it felt to Jade Moon, he wondered, walking in the town or buying groceries? He tried sometimes to imagine how his language, divorced from meaning, might sound. Was it melodious, like French or Spanish? Was it the harsh singing of Chinese? Did it really resemble the sound of barking dogs? Sometimes he tried to listen to only the sounds of English, but for him sound was meaning, impossible to separate.

  “Sea,” she said, “for two reasons. First, because it is a sea that both separates and connects my family and myself. And second, because I am Jade Moon, and the moon controls the movement of the sea. I do not want my daughter to travel as far as I have in this life. Besides,” she added, “it is a beautiful name, both in your language and in mine.”

  “When they go to school,” he argued, “they’ll need American names. Why not call her Maria? It’s from Latin. It’s an ordinary name, but it means sea.”

  “Maria,” she spoke the words, blurring the r in a way that reminded him of a day, long ago, when he had tried to teach her the sound—raspberry, rhubarb—in the field behind the house. Now, as then, it sounded awkward in her mouth, and some of the old anger flared up within him. It was a difficult sound, true enough, but she had been in America now for nearly four years.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Maria. Ma-ree-ah. That’s her name.”

  “You call her Maria, then,” she said, turning back to her letter. Her long hair was tied in elastic and made a black line down her back. “But I will call her Sea.”

  “Why are you so stubborn about this?” he asked, throwing down his newspaper. But she did not answer him. She kept her eyes fixed on the letter, her fingers shaping the complex, mysterious characters of a language he could not fully understand.

  ONCE THE CHILDREN were born the years passed quickly, one following another in smooth succession, although Rob never lost the sense that he was leading a double life. Like the branches of a young tree, it seemed the parts of his life grew less and less connected with the passing of time. His days forked off into the community where he told jokes, swapped stories, argued, and worked in his own language. Pulling into his driveway in the evenings, he had to make a conscious effort to switch from one world, one language, to another. It was like stepping into the past, he sometimes thought, or walking with a single step from one country to another. He put his toolbox in the shed and stepped through the door with his pockets full of sawdust. There he found his family gathered around the table, folding animals out of paper, or singing songs while Jade Moon sliced narrow rings of spring onion, or working diligently at the complicated characters of her alphabet. The children were hers from birth until they went to school, and if their world was an isolated one, Jade Moon saw to it that it was full of learning, full of joy.

  “They should learn to speak English,” he said one night when the children were in bed. “Even if you won’t, the children must.”

  She put down her embroidery and looked up at him.

  “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “When I was a young girl my parents had a friend who went to Hong Kong for business. While they were there they had a baby girl, and since they were rich, they hired a local girl to care for this baby during the days. Two years passed, then three, and though the baby was happy and healthy, still it did not speak. They grew worried, and even consulted a doctor. Then one day they were taking a walk, and they stopped in a shop for some food. The baby was babbling. They thought it was just baby talk until suddenly the store owner, an old Chinese woman who also spoke a little of their language, looked up smiling. ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘Baby speaks Chinese!’”

  Rob started to laugh, but saw at once that it was the wrong reaction.

  “No,” Jade Moon said. “How do you think that mother felt, missing her own baby’s first words? How do you think she felt, not being able to speak with her own child? These are my children too,” she said. “Not just yours and not just America’s. I want to be able to tell them about my life.”

  THEY WERE HER CHILDREN until they went to school, but in the end Jade Moon lost each one to America. Rob grew to dread the early days of school, the way his children came home, one after another, at first in tears and later drawn into themselves, isolated and bewildered by the unfamiliar language. Yet it amazed Rob, too, how quickly they learned, with an aptitude that surpassed even his own. Within weeks they were chattering, imperfectly but fluently, to the other children. He tried to help by speaking English with them in the car, or while Jade Moon was outside hanging the wash or gardening. When they got older, he looked over their homework for mistakes. They were all bright, and their intelligence helped them overcome the thoughtless cruelty of other children. In the end they caught up and even surpassed their friends. April was editor of the newspaper in her senior year. Michael played the clarinet and drew intricate pictures that won awards. Maria ran for class treasurer, and won. They survived the hard years; they grew up. Like him, they had their secret lives outside the house, their lives of the telephone, of prom parties and clubs. He saw them roll their eyes behind Jade Moon’s back when she refused to speak English, and he said nothing. He felt this complicity was the least he could offer, because he knew that sometimes still they were hurt. He could tell it from the tense, inward silences that enveloped them now and then. They didn’t offer to share the sources of this pain, and for this he was, at first, grateful. He told himself that they took after him, that they preferred to work things out for themselves, in privacy and silence. It was only later when, one by one, the children left home for large cities and contained, controlled, anonymous lives, distant lives, that he wondered at the depth of pain they might have suffered, that he wished to go back, to touch the tense shoulder, to understand.

  FIVE YEARS AFTER Maria graduated from college, Rob fell from a ladder at work and hurt his back. Lying on the ground, the wind knocked from his lungs, pain like nails in his spine, he understood that his construction days were over. Once he had finished physical therapy, the company gave him a desk job. He sat in the windowless office, pushing papers and answering the phone, and thought about the time, forty years before, when he had worked on the radio ship, his future spread out before him like the sea. Eventually they offered him early retirement, and he took it. He packed up his few remaining tools and removed himself from one-half of his life. As he parked his truck that final day, and carried his toolbox for the last time into the shed, he looked up to see Jade Moon standing in the kitchen window, preparing his dinner, humming. He paused for a moment in the driveway. The song was a light and haunting one, an old song from her own country. Jade Moon’s voice wavered, and the August heat shimmered around the house. He felt an urgency then, a sudden panic, as if the house and his life within it were part of a mirage. It seemed that this time the attempt to leap from one life to another would plunge him from a terrible height. His fear was so sudden, and so great, that he actually turned to retrace his steps to town. Then a tug of pain in his back stopped him. After a few moments he grew calmer and wa
s able to move forward, bridging the distance with a few steps, his feet on solid ground after all.

  At first the days were difficult, long and restless, and he relieved himself by focusing on projects around the house, working late into the long summer nights. Then his back went out and he was forced to lie still in bed while Jade Moon moved quietly through the house. He observed her as she stepped from one room to another, surprised by her energy, her quiet grace, the traces of youth she had carried with her into middle age. There had been moments, even as a young man just married, when Rob would look at Jade Moon and see what she would be like old. She might be doing anything—reaching to a high shelf for a can, pouring water in a vase, stirring soup. For an instant he would see it—age in her narrow calves, bony as an old woman’s, age in the careful grace of her gestures, age in the stiff curve of her fingers around a spoon. In an instant it was always gone, lost to the completion of her actions, to the resurfacing of her youthful self.

  Now, alone again in the solitude of their home, he discovered an opposite phenomenon: beneath the surface of wrinkles and slow movements, Jade Moon had retained elements of her youth. Her hair stayed dark and her shoulders were still smooth and firm. Sometimes, as she stepped from the bath in a towel, her white shoulders broken by the black water of her hair, he was moved with a sense of collapsing time. She would laugh if he went to her then.