The Natural Laws of Good Luck (23 page)

“What's wrong? This is big-head fish.”

“Yes.” Zhong-hua could not hide his disgust. His black eyes became shining slits of lightning.

“What's the problem?”

“Where is head?”

“Well it had a head. It's somewhere.”

“This big-head fish not have head. Not have skin. Skin very important, very good for healthy. Head very special.”

“Zhong-hua, look, just eat this. Tuesday, I will be the first one to Dong Shi and get the biggest catfish for you.” That Tuesday the Colombian fellow grabbed a big stud catfish from the tank and swiftly clobbered it on the head with the cleaver. I brought it home, and Zhong-hua boiled it with scallions, ginger, and pepper.

Snake meat would be best, Zhong-hua said thoughtfully. Since the snake lives underground and eats many strange creatures such as stinging insects and frogs with poisonous glands, snake meat provides antidotes to harmful substances and helps bring up the hemoglobin in the blood. Chinese doctors consider snake a “hot” food because it induces a sweating cure. Too much snake causes nosebleeds. I said I couldn't buy any, and Zhong-hua said he was too weak to go snake hunting. Next he went on a peach binge for a week, not long in comparison to the legendary immortals in ancient China, who subsisted for several decades on peaches alone. Even ordinary mortal beings have reportedly attained immortality through regularly eating peach resin.

By this time, anything he ate soon appeared in slightly altered form in the ostomy bag. After the ordeal in the hospital, the sight of yellowish brown sludge oozing into the bag gave us a lot of satisfaction. The doctors had recommended bland foods to prevent another obstruction, things like yogurt, Jell-O, and tapioca pudding. Zhong-hua did not consider these things food and was not about to start eating them. Instead, he ate pickled bamboo shoots and big-head fish. I told him I thought it was a bad idea to eat wood, but he said, “Wood no problem.”

The next morning I was awakened by my husband's groans. His
face was beaded with sweat. The bamboo shoots had evidently piled up in his small intestine because there were no shredded bamboo shoots in the bag. I drove him to the emergency room. In agony with an intestinal blockage, my husband lay on a stretcher covered with a thin hospital blanket, shivering. I was in my T-shirt, freezing cold as well. I commented conversationally that microbes didn't grow as rapidly in cold climates, and maybe that's why they kept it cold in the curtained cubicle. My husband moaned. The aide wheeled him away for tests and back again.

For a long time I sat in the semidarkness. At one point I yawned, and I felt my jaw joint pop. My mouth was stuck open. Wide open. I told my husband, “Uh, uh, uh, uh,” and walked to the nurses' station, trying to remain dignified and unobtrusive. I told the nurse, “Uh, uh, uh, uh.” She looked at me. “Did you break your jaw?” I shook my head and went back to Zhong-hua's room.

The doctor was in there. “Uh, uh, uh, uh,” I said. He stared at me. “OK, I don't have much experience with this, but let me try something.” He put on latex gloves and stuck his big hands in my mouth, pushing down hard on my lower jaw. My knees bent, but my mouth was still stuck open. “Well, we may have to operate. Better get an X-ray. When it rains it pours, eh?”

Zhong-hua's moans were the sort that called for the universe to witness, not the sort for soliciting sympathy from other people. My ridiculous predicament couldn't even provide comic relief because Zhong-hua was in too much pain. “Are you OK?” he said. “Uh, uh,” I said. Tears started down my cheeks. Every time the nurse or technician came in, there I was standing in the middle of the room with my mouth wide open. I sat down and started to massage my jaw with my fingertips. Just as the doctor returned and told me he'd ordered an X-ray of my jaw and would have to start a chart for me, I heard a pop and my mouth closed on its own.

Grateful that my own sideshow was over, I turned my attentions back to my husband. “Please, doctor, he needs some medication for
pain.” Zhong-hua spent one night in the emergency room and left with admonitions not to eat pickled bamboo ever again.

Zhong-hua's reconnective surgery was only a few weeks away. Da Jie said she was too busy to come this time. My husband was unhappy. He said, “You know, if I go to surgery in China, whole family go to hospital.” I could just see the poor nurses trying to monitor the smuggled influx of Chinese cuisine and remove Zhong-hua's father, stepmother, three sisters and their husbands, six uncles, and five aunts from the hospital room every night.

The big hole abruptly sealed itself shut four days before surgery. The doctors had to poke the piece of small intestine resembling a rosebud back into his body and sew up the hole it had been poking through. They had to open up the folded lower end of the small intestine so it could take over the function of the missing rectum. This was a wonderful thing because it meant Zhong-hua could say good-bye to the ostomy bag.

Zhong-hua became paranoid again as soon as we arrived at the hospital. He feared to have me leave the room and the light bothered him, so I resigned myself to staying there. The orange vinyl chairs on that ward were not at all suitable for pushing together for a bed. As I sat there, a childhood memory animated the dim room: One Christmas when I was a little girl of seven, my big sisters blindfolded me and carried me downstairs. They set me down and put a key in my hands. Off came the blindfold, and there was a plywood chest with a hinged lid and a silver padlock. The tag on it said, “Make-It Box—Love, Dad.” Inside were paper, metal foil, oil pastels, and charcoal. I felt that I had to make something perfect with these beautiful art supplies, and because of that I preferred trudging up the muddy creek bed behind the house collecting junk: frying pans, plastic doll heads, sardine cans, and rubber wagon wheels. I brought the day's harvest home and made “sculpture” out of it.

As I settled for the duration in the slippery chair and Zhong-hua slept, the memories of my creek art brought back to mind Chinese tales about the Creator's first attempts to make people: these
first beings walked around with noses where their toes should be, ears all over their heads like shells, or one leg shorter than the other. Things could go very wrong before they went right. North American trickster tales drifted into my mind, where they combined and recombined like cloud formations: The fog bank moved, and four shreds of mist stretched downward like legs and became Silver Fox running. A dark cloud quickened and rolled over and over to become Raven flying. Raven stuck his beak into his belly button and pulled out dirt. Fox spit on the dirt and rolled it with his paw. Raven poked a hole in the ball, and they both crawled in. After a while Raven complained, “I am tired of smelling your tail.” Fox said, “And I am tired of your stick legs scratching me.” Fox stretched and Raven flapped his wings until the dirt ball crumbled and they stood on the mound of earth.

“Hey, where are we?” Raven asked.

“I don't know,” Fox replied, “but since we are here now, let's make something.”

“Let's sleep first.”

They slept a few days, and in his dream the lice in his fur taught Fox the words to a song and Fox taught Raven. The song was like a crank in the buckets of their brains stirring up good ideas. A creator had only to sink into sleep or depression, burp, sneeze, scratch off flakes of dead skin, fart, or feel diffuse longing for unheard-of things to come into being. These tales, even in the hacksawed form in which my mind had stored them, gave me the comfort and chiding I needed. I had kept the key to the make-it box in a baking powder tin. Sitting in the pit of Zhong-hua's beleaguering silence, my stomach growled.

The Peaches of Immortality

I
T BECAME APPARENT THAT ZHONG-HUA
wasn't thinking about anything but food and what it could do for him. When we got home from the surgery that reconnected his small intestine to his handcrafted rectum, the quest for big-head fish was abandoned for pig and chicken feet. Both had a gelatinous, strengthening toe protein—or so Zhong-hua claimed. As fast as the men at the Chinese grocery could stack the packages of feet in the cooler, I snatched them out. I could never sufficiently scrape the thick, fatty pigskin to remove all the elegant golden hairs. Zhong-hua nudged me aside with his diminished mass and leaned against the kitchen sink to scrape the hairs himself. The chicken feet also had all but invisible hairs that had to be properly pinched out. Next the kettle full of claws and toenails must be brought to a boil and the gray scum lifted off the bubbling surface with a sieved spoon. The first water was thrown away and the process repeated. I could not eat pig feet or chicken feet, nor do I remember what I did eat during that time.

At Christmas, Paroda, who had started college, brought over a ham she had won at the restaurant where she worked. All the kids were home for Christmas Eve: Eula, Mavis, Athan, Paroda, and Sweet Sweet. Zhong-hua made multiple Chinese dishes for the holiday dinner, all traditional except for the smoked ham: smoked
ham with caramelized onions, smoked ham with ginger and peppers, smoked ham with celery, and smoked ham with tree ears. I cannot recommend any Chinese dish made with ham.

Thinking about the make-it box, my father's gift, finally gave me an idea. It wasn't the brilliant entrepreneurial inspiration I was waiting for, but it was something. I bought some rolls of rice paper and bottles of black and red calligraphy ink and a box of Chinese watercolors. I knew Zhong-hua had carried a collection of his father's brushes with him from China. Soon Zhong-hua had set up a table in the basement studio, where he sat for hours painting. Each roll of paper was sixty feet. By March he had filled six rolls with flowers, mountains, birds, and fish. I bought boxes of ceramic tiles wholesale, and he painted those with glaze, to be fired with the teapots. I watched him and then tried my hand. He had much more control than I did, but my birds were livelier, as I pointed out. I asked him, “How can you paint all these flowers and birds and never look at the real ones?”

“Chinese way and American way different. Chinese artist hold painting inside heart. Just need take out. American artist need same time look at tree, same time paint tree. Try to find tree, how to feel.”

“Well, I think some Chinese painters never go outside.”

“Hmm, maybe you right. Chinese painter should be sometime go out look.”

Before the snow melted that spring, Zhong-hua was outside in his faded pajama pants and black jacket sitting on the upside-down milk crate at the edge of the pond. To his amazement, a school of three-inch goldfish appeared, survivors of the big freeze. He had brought them home from Pet World before the first surgery in August. He sat there smoking Old Golds and saw the kingfisher ride down a swift angle from a high branch, hit the water, and fly up with a wriggling goldfish. He saw the blue heron stand patiently in the mud on one leg, then stretch its long neck to nab a bullhead from the shallows. He saw the twelve-foot blacksnake wrapping
itself around the branches of a fallen birch tree that had crashed into the water. Zhong-hua called to me to come see when the female snake, two feet shorter and slightly more slender, joined the male for a horizontal mating dance among the white branches stretched over the water.

At dinner Zhong-hua imitated this handsome snake's technique for baiting the bullfrogs by poking just his head up into sight and wagging it back and forth, back and forth, for as long as it took for one to take the bait and leap into its fanged maw. This choreographed cleverness elicited my husband's esteem. Zhong-hua marveled at the spectacle of the huge frog waving good-bye from the snake's unhinged jaws, his hind legs already swallowed and his oversized head gazing up—clouds traveling unconcerned across the blue sky in each eye. Four hours later, the fingers disappeared at last, and Zhong-hua stood up and stretched in the red afternoon light.

“You watch,” Zhong-hua called early the next morning, sitting on his crate. I had draped a rug over the porch railing and was finding satisfaction in the disgusting amount of dirt that fell out as I beat it with a stick. He always used
watch, look
, and
see
interchangeably despite my unsuccessful attempts to explain the differences in duration and intent. In Chinese one word covers the bases. I looked. He gestured toward the small, grassy island in the middle of the pond. A small, furry animal was nibbling grass held in its paws. The air was laden with mist, and I couldn't clearly make out—did it have a tail? What was that thing on its face?

“Have flat tail, have beak” declared Zhong-hua.

“A beak?”

“Yes, have,” he said.

I peered into the mist again. “A platypus? I don't think platypuses live in North America, do they?” This was amazing. We had the only platypus in North America. Maybe it had escaped from a zoo or arrived as a stowaway in Nova Scotia and swum up the St. Lawrence Seaway. Over the next few days, we tried to get a better
look, but the platypus kept turning its back for private nibbling or plopping into the water beak first.

Tarin, a friend from Vermont, stayed overnight during this platypus period. She and I stood on the porch the next morning in sweaters and mittens. A west wind pushed the steam rising off the pond until it merged with the peachy sunlight seeping up between the eastern trees. We gazed into the sparkling meld of fire and water. “We have a platypus in there,” I told Tarin. Being a wise woman, she didn't answer right away.

“It has a flat, broad tail and a beak,” I continued. “Zhong-hua said he's sure he saw it. I think I saw it. I definitely saw the tail.”

“That's certainly unusual. I wonder how it got here.”

“Me, too!” My overtired mind welcomed this inexplicable visitation from Australia. My critical faculties were completely out of order, and our pond provided a mystical oasis where marvelous things could happen. Tarin was not inclined to compel reason.