As she walked up the steps to their apartment she unconsciously said a couple of Hail Marys. Once in the kitchen, she put down her purse and picked up the phone. She dialed her parents' house.
"Hey, Dad."
"Oh, hi. What are you doing calling? Are you at work?"
She explained that Michael had gone to Santa Barbara and that she had the day off.
"Oh," he said, "since you've got nothing to do, why don't you get a head start cleaning Yeh Yeh and Yun Yun's house today?"
She reluctantly agreed, hung up the phone and went to the bedroom to change her clothes.
Out on Thirty-Eighth Avenue, Lindsey approached the yellow stucco house. The exterior was covered in exhaust particles from the nearby traffic on Geary Boulevard, and large sections of peeling paint in the open-air stairwell barely clung to the walls, as if the soot were the only thing keeping the paint stuck to the building.
As she walked through the gate and up the stairs, she wondered what the place might look like inside. She hadn't been here since she was a kid, and didn't remember anything. By the look of the weeds and dead grass out front, it appeared that her grandparents had really let things go.
Her dad had given her the key the night of Yun Yun's party, and she turned it in the lock and entered. The place was completely dark, except for a bright, coin-sized spot of sunlight that shone through a hole in the heavy curtains.
"Hello?" she said, knowing that Yeh Yeh was most likely in Chinatown minding his grocery store but unsure if her grandmother was home. Waving her hand to clear the air, she immediately began to sputter and cough, choking on decades-old dust that mushroomed up from the hall carpet as she felt her way along the walls looking for a light switch.
Across the dark hall, a bedroom door was half-shut but she could hear a television. She figured Yun Yun was probably in there. Approaching, she knocked softly.
"
Wu
?" Lindsey slowly pushed open the door and saw her grandmother sitting in the bedside chair, fully clothed with her size-four stockinged feet resting on a plastic-sheathed ottoman. The rest of the room consisted of a bed with a floral bedspread tucked neatly around the mattress, and a vanity with a can of hairspray and a bottle of Jean Nate after-bath splash. A pair of miniature pink slippers sat by the bed.
"Hi, Yun Yun."
"Mm," her grandmother replied, half-hiccupping, half-grunting. She didn't ask Lindsey why she was there, and didn't seem to care anyway.
"Am I interrupting something?" Lindsey asked, and received an annoyed glance.
After a moment, Lindsey apparently hadn't observed the obvious and Yun Yun answered with a single word, "
Matlock
."
She saw Andy Griffith on the television and nodded. "Well, I'll get out of your way. I'm just going to clean up a little." As she turned to leave, her grandmother asked, "You gain more weight?"
Lindsey backed out of the room and shut the door behind her. Every time she talked to Yun Yun she felt like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. Her grandmother was Lucy Van Pelt, inevitably snatching the ball away at the last second, and Lindsey always seemed to fall flat on her back. Every time she was duped by Yun Yun's initial niceties, she knew she should have known better. Yun Yun would begin conversations with deceptively kind remarks like "Colorful sweater," or "Nice shoe," only to add a moment later, "look like Bozo clown," or "hunchback toe fall off yet?"
Feelings of insecurity were inevitable around Yun Yun. As Lindsey shuffled toward the front of the house, she wondered if she had, in fact, gained a few pounds.
Contrary to popular belief, not every Chinese grandmother was wise or kind. Some were downright ornery and didn't want you around. They didn't give you candy or say you were smart or that they loved you. Yun Yun was just this type.
A force of nature in the Owyang family, she was a gnarled and prickly thing, like an old rosebush growing out of a pile of rocks with branches entwined around a chain-link fence, having produced nary a blossom over the last thirty years. Yun Yun could prove her thorns were sharp, and often did, with caustic comments that stung worse than any pricked finger.
Lindsey feared her grandmother but was at the same time curious about the origins of her surliness. Somewhere in the soil beneath Yun Yun's rocky terrain, below that dry and tough exterior, was a tightly wrapped root ball. Lindsey wondered about that root ball. Down in the dirt, something had to keep it pulsing and alive. Lindsey wondered what Yun Yun's story was. She had read that trees required careful pruning to thrive, but how could she get close enough to cut a sprig and see what might develop? Most likely she'd be punctured by the sharpest of thorns.
Lindsey had also read that indoor plants used their leaves to purify the air, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. Yun Yun, who often sat as still as a houseplant, transformed things as well, but in the opposite way. She actually sucked air
out
of the room. She could take happy feelings and holiday good cheer and with one scowl or cutting look, fill a room with dread.
And Lindsey wasn't the only one who felt this way. Her brother, Kevin, had often complained that their grandmother despised him. Just as Yun Yun had often told Lindsey that listening to music was a waste of time, she also had scolded
Kevin, saying that playing basketball would cause an early onset of osteoporosis and "too thin blood." To drive her point home, she always ended with the comment, "And you, already so short. No longer growing. Short man for life."
Lindsey walked to the window in the living room and parted the thick wool curtains with her hands, setting off an avalanche of powdery dust that rained all over her arms, shoulders, and head. Covered in gray dustbunnies, she looked like she was wearing a shag carpet.
Jeez
, she thought,
it's like Mount Saint Helen erupted in here
.
From the looks of things, neither Auntie Geraldine or Uncle Elmore had been coming around to clean the place like they were supposed to. Lindsey went into the kitchen to find a wet rag, but was so overcome by the mess that she forgot what she was looking for. Every square inch of linoleum and tile was splattered with multiple layers of every kind of food and beverage imaginable, as if a hundred cans of soup, spaghetti sauce, and various condiments had exploded in 1998 and been left to dry. It looked like Chef Boyardee had broken into the place and tagged the walls and floor with Franco-American graffiti.
Violent splashes of spilled coffee accented the floor and drips of brownish gravy made stripes on the lower cupboards, ending in dried blotches and pools that were then smeared with footprints. She wondered how two old people could make such a mess.
She stumbled around looking for cleaning supplies, puffs of dust following her like she was Pigpen from the Peanuts gang. In the broom closet she found unopened rolls of gift wrap from the fifties, boxes of swirly patterned Dixie cups, and unused packages of luncheon napkins in chartreuse, avocado, and other vintage colors unseen since 1969. She could just imagine Yun Yun reasoning, "Still good! No need throw out."
Under the sink she found some ancient sponges. They were bundled in their original packaging with the price tag still stamped on the cellophane. Fifteen cents for five sponges. When had they bought these, during the Cold War? She stacked the dirty dishes and let them soak in the sink while she investigated the rest of the house.
The dining room was entirely dedicated to trash. She found grocery bags filled with various items: scraps of miscellaneous string, sugar packets from restaurants, and saved twisty ties from a thousand loaves of bread. She found sacks filled with crumpled paper bags in various sizes, and within one of those bags, inexplicably, a single plastic cup. Or a sock. She sifted through boxes of dirty rubber bands and piles of expired newspaper coupons so old they had turned yellow. Walking through a maze of stacked magazines and expired telephone books, she headed toward the mantel, where she saw a statue of Buddha resembling Baboo the Genie wearing balloony, CP Shades culottes. Dusting off his rotund belly, she then made her way down the hall to the other bedroom.
From what Lindsey could see, Yun Yun was Felix Unger to Yeh Yeh's Oscar Madison. Her room had been neat as a pin, but Yeh Yeh's room was another story. Lindsey opened the Levolor blinds and looked around. She saw a sad, twin-sized cot in the corner and a scuffed-up dresser. After noting these two pieces of furniture, there was nothing left to do but stand back and stare at the staggering mountain of junk that took up half the room.
She had often wondered what type of person bought all the novelties at checkout counters and gadgets advertised on late-night television. Now she knew. Yeh Yeh apparently bought them all. Stacked from the ceiling to the floor she saw ten-piece baking sets, flame-resistant oven mitts, lights that turned on at the clap of a hand, leather-repair kits, and the Whis-pertron 2000 for eavesdropping on conversations up to fifteen feet away. As she gazed at the tower of boxes, it occurred to her how dangerous it might be if Yeh Yeh's teetering tower of bargain merchandise ever toppled onto his bed at night. She could just imagine the headline: CHINESE MAN FLATTENED IN
BIZARRE CHIA PET ACCIDENT.
She took a moment to play with the novelties that required human interaction. Dropping a coin into his desktop toilet-shaped bank, she listened as it made an authentic flushing noise. She pushed a button to make the Big Mouth Billy Bass sing "Don't Worry, Be Happy." After pressing the paws of several kung fu gerbils that began to twirl their tiny nunchuks, she triggered the motion sensor on a plastic Frankenstein head that played a rendition of "Who Can It Be Now?" by Men at Work.
On the floor by the window were various piles of junk mail. Sifting through some envelopes, she noticed that some were postmarked as far back as the seventies and eighties. Kneeling down, she picked up a stack and found little reminders scrawled here and there. Written in dull, soft pencil were notes such as, "milk and toilet paper," or "Tuesday senior special at Chick-n-Coop."
It was then that she noticed the yellow Post-it notes stuck all around the room—on the doorknobs, the metal cot legs, and on the windowsill. One read, "hide in ditch," another, "drop and roll," and by the closet, "duck and cover." Each upper-right corner was marked with a corresponding disaster— "tornado."
"earthquake," or "stray bomb." Yeh Yeh was obviously prepared for any worst-case scenario. Lindsey was somewhat comforted to know that her grandpa would be ready should a rogue cyclone ever tear through Chinatown.
Back in the kitchen she threw out trash and wiped down the countertops. Here and there she found more Post-its that Yeh
Yeh had stashed. Cleaning the toaster, she found directions on how to escape during a flash flood. Inside an unwashed coffee mug in the cupboard, she discovered how to cure a snakebite.
She flicked on a lamp in the living room and took a closer look around. The space was divided into a tidy section and a sloppy one. There may as well have been a line painted down the room to delineate the "his" and "hers" sections. By the fireplace was a single, orange-upholstered chair and a tiny area rug. That must have been where Yun Yun sat and picked her teeth. Five feet from the chair was a smallish television set with a bouquet of plastic violets sitting on top. That was all.
The other half of the room was much like Yeh Yeh's bedroom. She stared at the hill of trash and yet another tower of stacked boxes against the wall. She found unopened miniature screwdriver kits, teeny wrenches, and itsy-bitsy fondue forks that read, souvenir of Niagara falls. Since everything was still perfectly encased in the original packaging, she deduced that neither Yun Yun nor Yeh Yeh actually used any of these things, but were well prepared for a fabulous party that they'd probably never give.
After making a bologna sandwich and a cup of hot tea for Yun Yun, Lindsey swept, mopped, and scoured. As she worked, she became more and more curious about her grandparents. Their house was generic and spoke of a very boring life. She wondered about their marriage and, lightheaded from the Tilex and Comet fumes, started to think that hidden somewhere in the place must be a clue to some sick and twisted secret life they had, either together or individually. Lindsey had always had an overactive imagination, and now that she was hungry, tired, and high from Windex, a really bizarre idea popped into her head.
Porn. It was disturbing to think of parents watching dirty movies, but to go a step further, and to think of grandparents getting smutty was downright sick. Nonetheless, once the possibility, albeit far-fetched, popped into her brain, she couldn't stop thinking about it. The idea
of
Yun Yun or Yeh Yeh having a secret stash of nudie mags was so disgusting that her mind had to go there. Half-jokingly, with each closet and drawer she organized, she searched for a cache of whack material hidden amongst the domestic rubble. They simply
had
to have more of a life than Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes forms and U.S. commemorative coins. As Lindsey cleaned, she secretly looked for
Penthouse
or
Jugg
magazines but found only periodicals titled
Caring for Houseplants, Pet Canaries
, and
Terrier Fancy
. In the bathroom, what she thought might be a couple of dildos turned out to be underwater flashlights.
Several hours later, organizing the last of the bathroom drawers, in a box full of electric razors and unopened shaving cream canisters, she found a black, rectangular box. It was buried deep underneath some vintage Gillette replacement blades and samples of talcum powder, and she almost missed it. It was a videotape in an unmarked sleeve.
She read the typed label:
"You've taken your first step to fulfilling your needs. You may be embarrassed, but we guarantee you will be completely satisfied after you watch…"
Aha! This was it! She'd found something nasty in her grandparents' house! She ran to the living room and popped the tape into the decrepit VCR. Its innards sluggish, the machine hissed and whined. Turning on the television, after some static, Lindsey watched as words appeared onscreen: