Beatrice
seems to think I’m Holly Golightly. I don’t know where
she could have gotten such an idea; I guess to any sheltered
Chinese girl who grew up in the sanitized suburbs of Marin County,
a 27-year-old half-breed cousin (Ma married white) living in
Manhattan by herself has got to seem glamorous. Never mind that I
seldom go to parties and always leave early when I do. Never mind
that I balance my checkbook and usually go Dutch on dates. And
never mind that I’m an office temp and that my apartment is
one room with the kind of particle board furniture even college
students turn down. At least the ones at Harvard, which Beatrice
was attending when she first came to visit me.
She came
for Thanksgiving her freshman year, since her folks said it was
too expensive for her to fly back home for just a couple of days.
This I found hard to believe. Aunt Rose was the type who wouldn’t
admit that anything was too expensive. Or, even if forced to admit
it, she’d go ahead and buy whatever-it-was anyway. Her
husband, Herman Yau, was a well-known architect and made big
bucks, but not big enough for her spending habits. Meanwhile my
mother, Rose’s older sister, whose husband washed dishes and
checked inventory in the restaurant they owned, had a saint’s
tolerance for her family members’ quirks. Why not let
Miranda run off to New York, alone, without a real job? Why
shouldn’t Rose buy a new car when she never drove the
two she already had? (One was always in the shop, she explained,
and the other was a stick shift; Rose hated driving stick.) In her
late middle age, nothing particularly shocked or perturbed Ma any
more, which made my “running off” to New York seem no
more daring than a haircut. And yet somehow I’d gained a
reputation with Beatrice as being bohemian, free-spirited, the
black sheep of the entire clan.
Part of that was because
of last Thanksgiving, I think. I wasn’t trying to be
subversive, really I wasn’t. I flew to California to visit
the Yaus that weekend; my mother was there too, preparing the
holiday feast (since Aunt Rose didn’t cook), and Beatrice
had been admiring Ma’s expert culinary skills. She herself
couldn’t even boil water, she told me with an abashed
giggle. So naturally I went out and bought her Easy Basics for
Good Cooking for Christmas, so that Beatrice could learn to
make spaghetti Bolognese and roast a chicken. I didn’t know
that my aunt had deliberately refused to teach Beatrice to cook,
refused to do any cooking herself, because she thought it was too
“low class.”
“Rose is not too happy you
give Beatrice the cookbook,” my mother informed me a month
later, quickly adding, “But you shouldn’t feel bad. It
was a nice thought.”
If Ma said “not too
happy,” it probably meant “furious.” “Why
is she upset with me for that? It’s just a tiny
little present. Beatrice can sell it back or give it away if she
wants. I thought she could use it, that’s all.”
I
could almost hear Ma’s patient shrug over the phone. Rose
had always been my mother’s favorite of her five sisters,
though I wasn’t sure why. Rose equally favored my mother,
but the reasons there were obvious: after she’d been working
in America for a number of years, Ma had saved enough to bring
Rose over from China and send her to college. My father always
said Rose should have been named Lily, as in lily of the field.
Out of all the Chao sisters, Rose alone got the fancy education,
married rich, did nothing; my mother meanwhile worked her ass off
night and day in the steamy confines of the restaurant. Perhaps
she liked to see one of her own in the lap of luxury, even if that
one scorned the very means of Ma’s own existence. Rose was
clearly proud of her inabilities in the kitchen. She wanted
Beatrice to be the same way.
What choice did Beatrice
have? She did everything her mother said. But she wasn’t
simply obedient; there was more to it. Beatrice and Rose together
were like sisters, like best friends; they giggled about guys and
clothes and movie stars. It gave me the creeps, frankly. It seemed
weird, unnatural—unhealthy, really—to be that way with
your mother. Mothers were for not talking to about all
those things, particularly guys, not that my mother would ever
scold or punish me for any perceived bad behavior with the
opposite sex, the way Beatrice’s did. But therein lay the
bigger problem, in my view: Rose was still most definitely the
mother, and as such their relationship would always be unequal.
They might titter about some boy at Harvard who was hopelessly
smitten with Beatrice, but if Rose picked up even the tiniest hint
that the boy might be making some inroads, she launched an
investigation: who was he, who were his parents, what did they do,
what did he aspire to do, was he the right type of person,
were they, was he in short good enough for BeatriceRose? He never
was.
In fact, I found out from Ma that the reason Rose
wanted Beatrice to stay with me over the holiday weekend was
because some boy at school had invited her to stay with him and
his family. The boy, needless to say, was not the right type, and
had to be discouraged. My mother and I never talked about my own
relationships, or about her problems with my father, but we got
plenty of vicarious mileage out of the saga of the Yau women,
since Beatrice told Rose everything, and Rose, either bragging or
complaining, told Ma. “So what’s so bad about this
one?” I asked. “He’s Chinese, right? And
a Harvard boy. His folks must be rich to afford that ten-digit
tuition. So what is it?”
“Too old. Already
21.”
“Beatrice is almost 19!”
“Rose
say he drinks too much.”
“He’s 21!
That’s what guys do at that age. Besides, Rose thinks
two beers means too much.”
“Also, biggest
thing, he’s major in History. Rose say that means he have no
ambition. When he graduates, he doesn’t get a good job.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you say so. Heaven
forbid she should hook up with one of those liberal arts types.”
My major had been English. My father’s, near as I could
figure, had been something to do with city planning, public policy
andor social work. Rose thought we were both losers. I made a
mental note to buy my cousin The Norton Anthology of Poetry this
year.
Beatrice arrived late Wednesday night and left
Sunday afternoon. She looked so fresh-faced waving at me across
the train station I felt like sitting down and resting my weary
27-year-old bones. I suddenly realized I had no idea who she
really was or what to do with her for four days; I’d only
ever thought of her as the poor girl whose mother dominated her.
So we saw a Disney movie on Thursday and a show on Friday, went to
the museum Saturday and the park Sunday. Beatrice was polite and
undemanding; we made pleasant small talk and she thanked me for
everything, and at the end of four days I still had no real idea
what made my cousin tick.
Of course Beatrice talked to her
mother every night, detailing every single guy who made a
flirtatious comment to either of us (there were a few—the
Parisian in the park who offered to marry her on the spot, the
guard at the Met who took our picture then begged us to send him a
copy, countless whistlers and winkers and kiss-blowers, mostly for
her). Good heavens, I thought, Aunt Rose is going to get the idea
that all I did was take her darling daughter to singles bars. She
probably thinks I’m that desperate myself, anyway, pushing
30 and still unmarried. (“Grandchildren would be nice,”
was as much as my mother ever pressured me, always adding, “But
better you be sure he’s right for you.” Right
for her meant employed and well-mannered and one or two other
reasonable things—Ma did have standards after all, though a
far cry from Rose’s uncompromising list of future husband
requirements.)
I could also tell that Rose was lecturing
Beatrice not to think about that boy, the one who’d invited
her to meet his family. Beatrice would keep saying things like,
“Yes, I understand,” and “We’re just good
friends,” never losing her temper, never fibbing or hiding
anything, always maintaining that sweet sincerity that had so
magnetized the male population of Manhattan. I felt bad for the
poor nameless besotted lad up in Cambridge. Between Rose’s
iron will and Beatrice’s dimples, he didn’t stand a
chance of winning her away.
Afterward, I heard over and
over again from my mother how much Beatrice had enjoyed her visit.
“She loves New York! She have such a good time. She
say she wants to live there after she graduates.”
I
wasn’t quite sure what to say to that; I’d assumed
she’d had a tolerable four days the same way I’d had.
“Uh…is that OK with Rose?”
“Oh,
Rose likes New York, too.” She chuckled. “Why? Because
good shopping! Sacks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale, Tiffany. She like
to visit all the time. So she say it’s OK if her daughter
goes to live.”
“That’s big of her.”
What had occurred that had left such an impression on
Beatrice? I still can’t figure it out. If anything, I felt
that the weekend had been rather half-assed. The Disney movie, for
example—I couldn’t think of anything else to do, since
most things were closed that day even in Manhattan and the weather
was too raw to anything outdoorsy. Yes, Beatrice was 18 and not 8;
even if I couldn’t take her to bars, I probably could have
come up with something better than a cartoon at the Angelica. She
could do that anywhere.
And the show? I didn’t take
her off-off-Broadway like I probably should have, but instead we
went straight to the neon crassness of Times Square like any
couple of tourists and saw Art. Yes, at least it wasn’t
Cats, but still, a sure-fire crowd pleaser featuring
popular sitcom actors and a fun, non-challenging premise—I
could have tried to be more cutting-edge and original, but hadn’t
bothered. She enjoyed it, though it couldn’t have fired any
zeal for theater such that she’d want to move here, could
it?
There was the one night, Saturday I think, that we
went to dinner with my friends, Charles Tang and Norman Barrows.
Charles was 30 and a lawyer; I’d temped at his firm once
last year and we hit it off. Norman was 47 and worked at
Starbucks; he and Charles had been living together for four years,
and I had figured Beatrice would pick up on this last fact without
me having to spell it out—and that a multiethnic
May-December gay couple couldn’t possibly be a shocking
thing to her, no matter how sheltered she might be. Whether it was
shocking or not, I’ll never know, because I could tell she
had no idea. Roommates, I could see her assuming. She seemed shyly
taken with youthful-looking Charles, as though I’d brought
along a nice Chinese boy for her to possibly hook up with. Never
mind that he used to be a heroin addict back in his playboy years
before he met Norman, before he became clean and sober and
born-again Republican. I couldn’t wait for him to start
talking about the twelve-step. Beatrice might think it was some
kind of dance. Oh boy, I thought, wait till Aunt Rose hears about
this one.
But Charles didn’t tell any of his stories
about shooting up in the changing room at Brooks’ Brothers.
Turned out he and Norman had gone to the same movie we had, and so
we mostly talked about that. “The animation was fantastic,
but that musical score? Just a few too many sweeping violins for
my taste.” “Yes, but only think of the absolutely
unlimited opportunities to peddle film-related merchandise!”
The conversation eventually moved to films in general, and every
so often I thought Norman, who used to hang out with theater types
and had lots of delicious gossip about them, was surely about to
say something ribald or suggestive about a particular actor, but
his double entendres that evening were mild, barely discernable
even to me and certainly over Beatrice’s haloed head.
So
it couldn’t have been that. What, then? Ordering greasy lo
mein at midnight? The block-long line for bagels and coffee at
H&H? The fact that my apartment featured a sleeping loft in
the living room and a bathtub in the kitchen? But those were such
frivolous things. Beatrice might have been young, but she’d
already traveled the world with her parents and had a bit more
sophistication than the average teen. Perhaps ultimately it had
very little to do with me and the things we’d done; it was
simply being under the care of someone so unlike her mother that
she could finally cut the cord, or at least nick it a little. A
wicked idea began forming in the back of my brain: I would corrupt
my sweet young cousin. I would drag her away from the chains of
respectability, away from the arranged marriage her mother would
no doubt foist upon her, away from her mother in general. The two
of us would rent a place together in the East Village, or the
meat-packing district, or Williamsburg; Beatrice would start
shopping at Goodwill, devouring dollar paperbacks from The Strand,
jamming to the sitar at cab driver-crammed Indian restaurants.
She’d transfer to NYU and major in women’s studies;
I’d teach her to cook Senegalese food, to quote from Howl.
We’d pierce body parts, date drummers. Even my mother would
start to be mildly concerned (“She doesn’t take any of
the drugs, does she? Rose would be so upset”).
I
fully intended to put this plan in action, starting the very first
weekend after Beatrice left. Norman had told me about a party in
Chelsea, hosted by some set designers, that promised lots of
potential for meeting the kinds of people Beatrice and I would
surely be hanging out with. It was there, however, that I met Buck
Brenner. Very soon thereafter I found myself not going to another
such event ever again. It seems that night I’d found that
one person with whom to stay home every Friday night not
regretting it. No doubt none of Aunt Rose’s criteria would
have been met by him: an Irish-American freelance writer, the
product of blue collar parents and lifelong public schooling, who
made jambalaya our second date and drank at least two beers while
we ate it. Perhaps the very fact that he’d fail every Rose
requirement only added to his appeal.
Of course, in the
early stages it wasn’t without typical New York complexity.
His apartment was uptown west in the 90s, mine was downtown east
in the teens, just about as inconvenient as possible, so we spent
the better part of our non-working hours on busses and subways to
one or the other’s place. Even more frustrating, his job
required traveling, while mine meant odd hours and lots of
overtime. Whenever we could finally meet, we fairly tore into each
other, it always felt like it had been so long.
I hadn’t
spoken to or about Beatrice in many months, so when she suddenly
called, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, asking if she could once
again stay with me, I became frantic. I liked my cousin, and I
still liked to toy with the idea of liberating her, but Buck and I
had so few chances at consecutive moments together; this
Thanksgiving would have been the first four-day stretch ever. I
thought quickly: Beatrice may have admired my devil-may-care
lifestyle, such as it seemed to be, but I didn’t think she’d
be quite so enamored of the harsh reality—dishes furry with
week-old mold stacked in the sink, for example, because I was so
sporadically home. They had maid service at Harvard. I’d let
things get especially bad lately because I’d been planning
on spending the long weekend at Buck’s having nonstop sex.
Actually, it would be more like four times, max, but the point is
that couldn’t happen with Beatrice around.
“Um,
I’ve been super busy, Beatrice. The place is a sty. I’m
not kidding, it’s disgusting. And it’s been so
incredibly busy at work,” which was true, “that I
haven’t had time to clean,” which wasn’t, given
that my apartment was so small it wouldn’t have taken more
than a couple of hours. Then I felt guilty; she was family, after
all, and it shamed me to think of my mother, so tolerant and
understanding of us all. “Look,” I said magnanimously,
“If you are absolutely stranded up there all by yourself and
you’ve got nowhere else to go, you can stay here.”
“Great! Thanks! See you in three days!”
I
was still holding the receiver to my ear when it started its
deafening “hang up the phone right now, you idiot”
beeping. I’d created a monster. Beatrice actually looked
forward to sleeping on my slab of a sofabed, waking to a symphony
of garbage trucks and car alarms and dodging airborne roaches in
the shower. Why couldn’t she lie to her mother this time and
stay with her latest beau? Or hell, she had a lot of girl friends,
why couldn’t she just stay with one of them? (No good; Rose
was always suspicious that boys would be involved somehow. I guess
since she considered me an old maid, she figured that wouldn’t
happen in New York, despite the reports Beatrice had given last
year.)
In desperation, I called my mother. This was a last
resort because it meant admitting to her that I was pretty serious
about Buck (and remember what I said about mothers and secrets?).
She took the news calmly, though I knew she was silently letting
out a long, slow sigh of relief (some of Rose’s “old
maid” comments must have gotten to her), and I knew that as
much as she tried not to pressure me, hints about wedding rings
and grandchildren would begin and end every conversation from now
on. It was worth it, though, because she promised to do something
about Beatrice. “That girl really is spoiled,” she
said, probably the harshest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say
about Beatrice. “Just like her mother.” (I’ve
heard plenty said about Rose; my father can’t stand her
either.) “She think she can just come over whenever she
want. You don’t be worried, Miranda; I will talk to Rose.”
She did, though I have no idea what she said, whether she
finally pulled rank as older sister and simply told Rose that
Beatrice had to find somewhere else to go, or whether she tried a
sneakier tactic, suggesting that Miranda’s rich, successful
boyfriend might propose marriage this weekend and so it was best
that they were alone. However she did it, Beatrice ended up
staying with a friend in the suburbs of Boston, too far from the
city for it to be easily accessible to a couple of unsupervised
college girls. Rose was appeased; Buck and I got to be, too. Six
times, as it turned out.
I still felt a little glum about
what had happened, though. Because of my own selfish desires, I
failed the revolution to free Beatrice. I’d chosen sex over
sisterhood, and Beatrice was doomed to remain shackled forever.
Well, maybe that was a slight exaggeration of my own influence.
After all, one more Thanksgiving couldn’t possibly have
steered her off the course of bourgeois snobbery toward taking a
walk on the somewhat-wild side. Besides, had I really been
considering doing it for her, or for me? My New York life was so
unlike the way I’d thought it would be, the way Beatrice
must have seen it. That was OK, though; I may not have had the
fast lane, but at least I had something that was mine. Everything
Beatrice had, she turned over to Rose.
Then I found out
that the real reason Beatrice had wanted to stay with me in New
York this time was because there was yet another boy, one
whose family lived in Queens. The two of them weren’t quite
serious enough yet for her to be invited to stay over with his
family, but they still could have met a few times in the city.
“His family—Rose was so angry she found out!—they
own a restaurant chain,” Ma told me. “Southwest food.
Fajitas, nachos, that kind. Chinese people, they make money any
way. Plenty of money, that family, but of course Rose
cannot accept them.” Was that actually a hint of sarcasm in
Ma’s voice? “She forbids Beatrice to even speak to
him.”
“Then why was Rose going to let her stay
with me?”
“Rose didn’t know about
him.”
Stunned silence. “You mean—Beatrice
lied to her?”
“First time. Can you
believe it? Beatrice didn’t say anything about the boy. And
she say you invited her to New York.”
“But
I did—sort of. I mean, she wasn’t exactly lying. She
asked if she could come over and then I invited her.
Actually, she was quite clever about it,” I said admiringly.
Baby-faced Beatrice was taking on a life of her own—go
figure.
“Oh, so that’s how you do it!” Ma
exclaimed, feigning great shock. “That’s how you girls
lie to your poor mothers. Shameful!” We laughed—rather
like sisters sharing a joke. “You tell Buck I say hi. Maybe
you two visit soon. Maybe…maybe you have some news for
us.”
“Yeah, sure, Ma.”
I still
don’t know what’s going to happen to Beatrice, whether
she’ll turn into a copy of her mother or go off in her own
way entirely. I have a feeling it’ll be the latter, and I’m
almost positive that’s a good thing. I do feel bad, though,
that I’d unwittingly kept her from a tryst with her
boyfriend, possibly even gotten her in trouble over it with her
mother. To make up for it, I think I’ll buy my cousin a book
on auto repair this Christmas. Rose is going to flip.