The Valley of Amazement. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ loved me, but I did not see any particular sign of that. I could not feel anything in my heart but the loss of her love. She had changed toward me, and I was certain that it had started the day when I threatened to betray her. Bit by bit, she was having nothing to do with me.

      Golden Dove found me crying one day in Boulevard. “Mother does not love me anymore.”

      “Nonsense. Your mother loves you a great deal. Why else does she let you go unpunished for all the naughty things you do? Just the other day, you broke a clock by moving its hands backward. You ruined a pair of her stockings by using it as a mouse for Carlotta to chase.”

      “That’s not love,” I said. “She didn’t get mad because she doesn’t care about those things. If she truly loved me, she would prove it.”

      “How?” Golden Dove asked. “What is there to prove?”

      I was thrown into mute confusion. I did not know what love was. All I knew was a gnawing need for her attention and assurances. I wanted to feel without worry that I was more important than anyone else in her life. When I thought about it further, I realized she had given more attention to the beauties than to me. She had spent more time with Golden Dove. She had risen before noon to have lunch with her friends, the bosomy opera singer, the traveling widow, and the French lady spy. She had devoted much more attention to her customers than to anybody else. What love had they received that she had not given me?

      That night I overheard a maid in the corridor telling another that she was worried sick because her three-year-old daughter had a high fever. The next night, she announced happily that her daughter had recovered. In the afternoon of the next day, the woman’s screams reverberated in the courtyard. A relative had come to say her child had died. She wailed, “How can that be? I held her this morning. I combed her hair.” In between her sobs, she described her daughter’s big eyes, the way she always turned her head to listen to her, how musical her laughter was. She babbled that she was saving money to buy her a jacket, that she had bought a turnip for a healthy soup. Later she moaned that she wanted to die to be with her daughter. Who else did she have to live for? I cried secretly as I listened to her grief. If I died, would Mother feel the same about me? I cried harder, knowing she would not.

      A week after Mother had tricked me, she came into the room where I was studying with my tutor. It was only eleven, an hour before she usually rose from bed. I gave her my sullen face. She asked if I would like to have lunch with her at the new French restaurant on Great Western Road. I was wary. I asked her who else would be there.

      ”Just the two of us,” she replied. “It’s your birthday.”

      I had forgotten. No one celebrated birthdays in the house. It was not a Chinese custom, and Mother had not made it hers. My birthday usually occurred near the Chinese New Year, and that was what we celebrated, with everyone. I tried to not be too excited, but a surge of joy went through me. I went to my room to put on a nice day dress, one that had not been snagged by Carlotta’s claws. I selected a blue coat and a hat of a similar color. I put on a grown-up pair of walking shoes of shiny leather that laced up to my ankles. I saw myself in the long oval mirror. I looked different, nervous, and worried. I was now eight, no longer the innocent little girl who trusted her feelings. I had once expected happiness and lately had received only disappointments, one after the other. I now expected disappointment and prayed to be proven wrong.

      When I went to Mother’s study, I found that Golden Dove and she were laying out the tasks for the day. She was walking back and forth in her wrapper, her hair unbound.

      “The old tax collector is coming tonight,” Mother was saying. “He promises that some extra attention may make him inattentive to my tax bill. We’ll see if the old dog fart is telling the truth this time.”

      “I’ll send a call chit to Crimson,” Golden Dove said, “the courtesan at the Hall of Verdant Peace. She’ll take any kind of business these days. I’ll advise her to wear dark colors, dark blue. Pink is unflattering on someone well past youth. She should know better. I’ll also tell the cook to make the fish you like, but not with the American flavors. I know he wants to please you, but it never comes out right, and we all suffer.”

      “Do you have the list for tonight’s guests?” Mother said. “I don’t want the importer from Smythe and Dixon to come anymore. None of his information has been reliable. He’s been sniffing around to get something for nothing. We’ll give his name to Cracked Egg so he does not get past the gate …”

      By the time she and Golden Dove finished, it was nearly one. She left me in the office and went to her room to change into a dress. I wandered around her office, and Carlotta followed me, rubbing against my legs wherever I stood. A round table was cluttered with knickknacks, the sorts of gifts some of her admirers gave her, not knowing she preferred money. Golden Dove sold the knickknacks she did not want. I picked up each object, and Carlotta jumped up and sniffed. An amber egg with a bug inside—that one would certainly go. An amethyst-and-jade bird—she might keep that. A glass display case of butterflies from different lands—she must hate that one. A painting of a green parrot—I liked it, but the only paintings Mother put on the walls were nude Greek gods and goddesses. I turned the pages of an illustrated book called The World of the Sea and saw illustrations of hideous creatures. I used a nearby magnifying glass to enlarge the titles of books in the bookcase: The Religions of India, Travels to Japan and China, China in Convulsion. I came across a red-covered book embossed with the black silhouette of a boy in uniform shooting a rifle. Under the Allied Flags: A Boxer Story. A note was stuck in the middle of the pages. It was written in the careful script of a schoolboy.

       My dear Miss Minturn,

       If ever you need an American lad who knows how to obey orders, will you consider using me as volunteer aide? I’d like to make myself as useful as you desire.

       Your faithful servant,

       Ned Peaver

      Had Mother accepted his offer to be her faithful servant? I read the page where the note had been inserted. It was about a soldier named Ned Peaver—aha!—during the Boxer Rebellion. After a quick glance at the page, I concluded Ned was a dull, prissy boy, who always followed orders. I had always disliked anything to do with the Boxer Rebellion. I was two years old in 1900 when the worst of the rebellion took place, and I believed I could have died in the violence. I had read a book about young men who swore themselves into the brotherhood of Boxers when millions of peasants in the middle of China were starving due to a flood one year, and a drought the next. When they heard rumors that foreigners were going to be given their land, they killed about two hundred white missionaries and their children. By one account, a brave little girl sang sweetly as her parents watched her being sent by the whack of a sword to heaven. Whenever I pictured it, I touched my soft throat and swallowed hard.

      I looked at the clock. Its newly repaired hands said it was now two o’clock. I had been waiting nearly three hours since she announced we would have lunch. All at once, my head and heart exploded. I ripped up Ned Peaver’s letter. I went to the table with my mother’s plunder and hurled the case of butterflies onto the floor. Carlotta ran off. I threw down the amethyst bird, the magnifying glass, the amber egg. I tore off the cover of The World of the Sea. Golden Dove ran in and looked at the mess, horrified. “Why do you hurt her?” she said mournfully. “Why is your temper so bad?”

      “It’s two o’clock. She said she was taking me to a restaurant for my birthday. Now she’s not coming. She didn’t remember. She always forgets I’m even here.” My eyes were blurry with tears. “She doesn’t love me. She loves all those men.”

      Golden СКАЧАТЬ