The Opposite of Fate. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ for two small children without any means of support. My grandmother’s young son would take clothes to a pawnshop so the family could have a little money. “Can you imagine?” my mother would say to me, as she told her story. She would repeat this question often, making me work harder to imagine it.

      Later, she enacted a day when her first husband returned home roaring with anger so he could make a big show in front of his friends. It happens afresh in her memory’s eye: He pulls out a pistol and makes her kowtow to him. “What are you looking at?” he bellows to the friends, who stand by the door, their mouths dropped open. They kowtow too. She is looking up at him, at the wild waving of the gun, getting ready to duck in case he shoots. But then “that bad man” begins to laugh. It’s a joke, he made us do this as a joke.

      In another memory, she is holding a baby in her arms, her first son. He has just died of dysentery, because her husband refused to interrupt his mah jong game with the doctor. I said to her as gently as I could, “What did you feel when the baby died? You must have been in so much pain.”

      She looked up blankly. “No pain, only numb. I said, ‘Good for you, little one, you escaped. Good for you.’”

      One time, several hours into one of her stories, she stopped talking and looked at me as if she had just woken from a dream. “Maybe you don’t want this part on TV,” she said. I was amazed to realize she was cognizant of the camera. “This part concerning sex …” The camera kept rolling, and she lowered her head to say conspiratorially, “He want sex, I go to bathroom, pretend use my chamber pot. Oooh, oooh, so sick, bad diarrhea. That night, no sex. So many nights, I pretend I go to my chamber pot.” She was laughing when she told me this. The camera caught it all.

      The more I heard, the more I wanted to know. I could not believe I had once taken no interest in these stories she tried to tell me for years. Now I wanted to go back to the past. I wanted to be there with her, to be her witness, to agree with her, “Your life was terrible.” It was not too late to comfort her.

      In 1991, I presented her with my second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife, a story based on her life, one she had asked that I write. She began to read the first page, then said with consternation, “Helen? I never knew Helen in China.” I reminded her that this was not that Helen, this was fiction and the characters were made up. “Ah, yes, yes,” she said, then resumed reading, before soon stopping again. “I never live in pink house in San Francisco.”

      Months later, I asked whether she had finished reading the book. “No time,” she said. Even later, her excuse was this: “Why I need finish? That’s my story. I already know the ending.”

      I saw more things that she could not finish: Half-knit sweaters. Bills she opened but had not paid. Food she had defrosted but had not cooked. Her apartment was becoming untidy, not just cluttered in the way it had always been, but dirty. She forgot to lock her door and the security elevator. She forgot how to go in reverse and dented her car backing out of her garage. She later bashed it again, running into the back of a truck. And even stranger, she didn’t seem very concerned that her car was full of dings.

      I also noticed that my once fastidious mother was looking disheveled. She wore the same clothes every day, a purple sweater, a pair of black stretch pants. She was not bathing. Her hair was dirty and it smelled. One day when I suggested she wash her hair before we went to a dressy event, she commented that the shower knobs were broken.

      I went to the bathroom to check. They were fine. It occurred to me that she did not know how to adjust them. As someone who goes on book tours and stays in a different hotel every night, I know how disconcerting it is to figure out how the water works without getting either scalded or doused with cold water. I turned on the water, adjusted the temperature, and ran a bath for my mother. Then I noticed that she was missing soap, shampoo, toothpaste. Why had she not bothered to buy these things? I made a mental note to do some shopping for her.

      Sometime later, our family was gathered around the dining table for a Thanksgiving different from the disastrous one of a few years before. We were with my husband’s family. The conversation touched on sports, the weather, politics, and then eventually on O. J. Simpson’s acquittal. My mother had a comment to make there. “Oh, that man kill his wife,” she said with great authority. “I there. I see it.”

      “You mean you saw it on television,” I corrected.

      “No!” my mother insisted. “I there. He hide in bush, jump out, cut the knife on that girl’s throat. So much blood, you cannot believe so much. Awful.”

      My mother’s English often left seeming gaps in logic. I frequently served as her interpreter, even in childhood, when I wrote my own letters to the principal, excusing my absence from school. I now attempted to clarify for the others what she meant: “Oh, you saw a documentary on what the lawyers said happened.”

      “Maybe you see documentary,” my mother replied. “I see everything. I there.”

      “What do you mean?” I said. Lou put his hand on my arm. Those around us had grown quiet, sipping wine or chewing turkey in embarrassment. But I couldn’t stop. I had to know what was going on. Did my mother think she had astrally projected herself?

      She was oblivious of everyone’s discomfort. “I hide in bush too.”

      “You saw him get in his car and go home?”

      My mother nodded. “I follow.”

      “How? How did you get to Los Angeles?”

      I couldn’t shake her illogic. “I don’t remember. Must be I drive.”

      “And you were in his bedroom when he cleaned up?”

      She nodded confidently.

      “You watched him get undressed?” I challenged, desperate to make her realize how crazy her line of thinking was.

      “Oh, no!” she answered quickly. “I turn my eyes away.”

      That was the moment I could no longer deny to myself that something was terribly wrong. She was certainly at an age when Alzheimer’s could be a possibility. On the way home, Lou and I agreed we needed to take her to the doctor.

      To get her there would require subterfuge. I told her we were going for a checkup.

      “I already checkup this year,” she said.

      “We need another one,” I said, and then I took the plunge: “I think we should check out this problem with your memory.”

      “What problem?” my mother said.

      “Well, sometimes you forget things … It could be due to depression.”

      And my mother shot back: “Nothing wrong my memory. Depress ’cause can not forget.” Then she started to recount the tragedies of losing her mother, my brother, my father. She was right. Nothing was wrong with her memory.

      “Well, let’s just go to the doctor to check your blood pressure. Last time it was high. You don’t want to have a stroke, do you?”

      A week later, we were in her internist’s office. He asked her a few questions. “How old are you?”

      “Oh, I already almost eighty-one.”

      The doctor glanced at my mother’s chart. “She might mean СКАЧАТЬ