The Natural Laws of Good Luck (25 page)

The juicy grasses reared upward, evidence of the distance between midnight and noon. The last of the three push mowers found by the curb had failed. For one whole summer, it had roared its way over woodchuck holes and chomped through sumac and burdock stumps as thick as my arm, but lately we had to start it manually by jiggling some wires around. The riding mower Zhong-hua had purchased at a garage sale for $100 no longer
worked. Zhong-hua bargained skillfully with the UPS man for another used riding mower, agreeing to pay $250. This was $50 less than the asking price, and then Zhong-hua pointed out that since we had no truck, the price would have to include delivery. The deal was not falling out as the seller had planned. He delivered the mower with a buddy, and they both sat down with Zhong-hua for a men's tea party, Chinese-style.

I gathered that this was my husband's way of making good relations should anything go wrong with the mower. It did. After one half of the lawn was shorn, the mower stopped. Zhong-hua said he would try to fix it first and, if he could not, would tell the UPS man that he had sold a lawn mower that was no good and must return the money. He said in China this was the way things were done. When he finally caught up with the UPS man, the man said no, it had been more than thirty days and he could not refund this money. Zhong-hua just shook his head. He could not understand this terrible American way of doing business.

The creases and whorls of Zhong-hua's fingers blackened with grease, and an array of parts lined up on newspapers spread over the kitchen table. It no longer seemed to be about repairing any particular lawn mower, nor about cropping the grass to match the neighbor's neatly mowed expanse; Zhong-hua seemed to have a commitment to the hidden workings, the blind power in the engine bowels, bound and blocked by some undiscovered malfunction. Time stretched out to accommodate these ritual repairs, which could theoretically ignite the world anew via spark plugs and gasoline. I'm not sure exactly when the grasses bent over from their own weight and Zhong-hua covered the mowers up with black plastic, saying he would fix them in the spring, stating “This not urgent things.”

While the lawn mowers waited for resurrection, Zhong-hua turned his attention to the brush paintings he was supposed to be completing to fulfill his commitment to the art center. The show was scheduled for late September; it was midsummer, and he still
had to figure out how to mount the fragile rice-paper paintings. Tradition called for several layers laminated with homemade wheat paste and borders of silk. We had spent all the grant money on picture frames, so we made a trip to the Salvation Army and bought a garish cartload of silk shirts. Zhong-hua took these shirts apart stitch by stitch, pressed them, and cut them into three-inch borders. Shirts that were not pure silk bubbled and wrinkled as they dried. Those had to be cut off the painting and the whole process started over. We jointly agreed, “Not perfect is OK. Perfect is not natural.”

“You do know that you are supposed to be painting scenes of Grafton, New York, right? I mean, the grant is a
community
grant. When I wrote the proposal, I said you would paint the nature of Grafton.”

“Maybe need go out one time look at Grafton Lake.”

By now there were a few hundred paintings. Besides the red flower campaign, there were ripe persimmons, ruby-crowned Mongolian cranes, crickets, crabs, shrimp, and numerous small birds, not many of them to be found in
The Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
and every one clutching the jointed limbs of bamboo. After several excursions down the road to Grafton Lake, a few attempted lake scenes appeared on the wall. The water was all faded blue, and the pine trees seemed to have been stuck into the shoreline from above, one by one. He kept at it. The hills around the lake steepened into “dragon's tooth” cliffs, and bamboo trees sprouted up between the pines. Chinese fishing boats appeared on the lake, and then the lake narrowed into a river in order to fit in between the dragon's teeth. There was one sprig of pond grass native to our own pond featured in one of the paintings. The stem arched gracefully and exploded into stars. Streamers of petioles trailed downward from the shooting stars. This grass specimen alone represented nature in upstate New York. A yellow bird, visiting from China, swayed on the curve below the starburst.

The painting project had absorbed most of my husband's sleepless nights and afternoons from February to September. We packed twenty of the best ones in cardboard and put them in the car the night before the art show. Zhong-hua wrinkled his brow and touched his chin. “I just think about: if all my paintings nobody buy—this maybe very funny.” We looked at each other and burst out laughing at this thoroughly unfunny thought.

I gave Zhong-hua our last fifty dollars to buy moon cakes, sweet Chinese pastries filled with either red bean or lotus root paste, for the opening in downtown Troy. The art center's main gallery was featuring bumper art. There were all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles embellished with roses and skulls and crossbones parked in the atrium. An entire wall displayed artistically lacquered car bumpers. The gravelly voices of motorcycle bums played over loudspeakers, interspersed with engine revving. In a small side gallery hung Zhong-hua's red flowers and scenes of the four seasons. We smiled and stood by the paintings.

Paroda came with two friends from work, and Sweet Sweet brought a camera. Two of my clients arrived in their Sunday best and toured the show as if they were at a White House reception. One murmured over and over, “I love art. I love art,” and the other, “Oh, wow! Oh, wow!” An enormous man I'd often seen wandering the streets appeared and washed down a dozen moon cakes with jasmine tea. Then he sat in a chair, pulled out a sketch pad as if he were visiting his aunt Betty, and commenced sketching the face of my client who sat opposite him. She seemed to have forgotten for the moment that she had an anxiety disorder and that relaxing was not in her repertoire. My husband had the effect of causing certain people who came in contact with him to forget who they had been before they met him. He discomfited others into clinging tenaciously to their identity, but no one in this crowd. My in-laws Da Ge and Da Jie burst in and commenced to systematically critique each painting as a judicial duo, moving clockwise: “This one no good. Oh, good, good. This one
not too bad. No good. No good. No good. Too expensive; cannot sell like this. Need cheaply sell.”

We were packing up the leftover moon cakes when a bearded young man with a video camera arrived out of nowhere and thrust a microphone in front of my husband. “Sir, would you mind telling me, what is art?”

Zhong-hua did not hesitate. He centered his weight and puffed out his chest, hands behind his back, speaking loudly and distinctly. “Art is something the artist do to help you know how is possible to feel or to think—how is possible to be.” Everyone in the room turned toward him and froze. “Art need to have this thing that let you feel
how
another thing feel and
how
another thing think. Yeah. Art let you know—this energy is from
world
. Art need let people feel energy of the artist go through these world things. If cannot feel, this not art. If art not do this, then not art: this painting, this poem, just paper, like junk—not art.”

Nobody bought a painting, and after the show it started to rain.

Cultural Navigation

T
HE GROUND FROZE
, and the rains looked for pathways in, filling the cellar like a cistern. The foundation became a mossy indoor waterfall that did not submit to a “concrete solution.” The walls of the house started squeaking, an unmistakable chorus of creature babies, but we didn't know what kind. At night the sound of chewing kept us awake, and in the morning there were rat-sized holes in the Sheetrock ceiling of the bedroom and living room. I plugged the holes with Brillo pads, reasoning that rats would not enjoy chewing steel wool.

Zhong-hua sat in the basement painting red flowers while conducting a study of rat behavior. We had two species, roof rats and Norway rats. They were so dainty-footed that they entered the Havahart trap, helped themselves to dog food nuggets, and exited without tripping the door. Zhong-hua resolved to shoot them with an air gun, but he said that they stared fearlessly down the barrel of the gun, tilting their heads first one way then the other, and he couldn't take aim. He identified individual rats as exceptionally smart. We resorted to rat poison.

Rats had never dropped through holes in the ceiling when Socrates was alive. Deer now nosed for apples in the moonlight on top of his grave. Only a few feet away, Zhong-hua and a bobcat surprised each other inside the garden fence. The bobcat lunged,
butting its head against the wire fence again and again, until, by chance, it found an opening and bolted.

Without Socrates, Loki, our other dog, spent more and more time under the honeysuckle bush. There was a cool depression under there, made by Socrates turning around and around and landing heavily on his side. Loki was so good-natured that even though he sorely missed Socrates, he wagged his tail and looked hopeful.

In the old days, when I gave the slightest indication that I would be taking a walk, Loki would launch himself off the porch and remain airborne for at least ten feet. Now he didn't even stand up. The vet prescribed some pills and said the dog should bounce back soon—but he didn't. His beautiful head was as sleek and perfect as a harbor seal's, except for the long, troublesome ears, which had always been prone to fungal infection. He no longer barked at deer or chased the cat. Zhong-hua helped me bathe him and carry him inside, where the flies could not bother him.

One day when I came home from work, Loki was thrashing back and forth in delirium. I opened the door, and he staggered out across the grass to the apple tree, where he tried to burrow his head into the ground. I raced to my neighbor's back door and begged him to shoot my dog. Dave was a huge man who intimidated even local toughs on motorbikes. His aim was swift and precise. When I lifted Loki, he was very light and soft, like a stuffed animal, even though he had been fifty pounds a minute before.

The dogs were dead, and the wilderness was closing in. The toaster toasted only one side of the bread. The ignition key would turn but could not start the car's engine. I had an accelerated vision of the reclamation of the house by wind and rain until only a few half-buried stones in a depression in the earth marked our having lived at all.

I wished we could go somewhere slightly removed, a one-dimensional waiting room between the processional order and connecting wires of daily life and a disassembled realm where
schedules and toasters have no use. I smiled to think of us wandering stress-free there with our life folded up in our pockets, paper milk crates and a paper pond, like the immortal Chang Kuo-lao, who kept a paper mule in his breast pocket. When he wished to ride, he sprinkled the paper with purifying water to make it flesh again. He always rode backward, facing the mule's tail. If we were immortals, we could disappear for a while, return when we felt up to it, and never add to our suffering by taking ourselves too seriously.

Zhong-hua stacked up the framed paintings between sheaves of Chinese newspapers and turned his attention back to how things work. Our two vehicles had a combined mileage of 360,000. We had already paid a few hundred dollars to Chuck, the auto repairman, to fix the ignition problem in my car. Zhong-hua explained to him that it was a simple situation of two metal pieces missing each other in the blindness of the inner chamber. Chuck said no, it was definitely the starter switch. He replaced the switch; still nothing. Then he ordered a whole new lockset, but that didn't cure it. Finally, Zhong-hua took it all apart himself, stared at the parts on the kitchen table, realigned the two points of metal that needed to touch when the key was turned, and reassembled everything. It worked.

Then Chuck fixed the head gasket, but when he finished, something was still not right. Chuck said he had fixed it perfectly and nothing was wrong. Zhong-hua sat thinking on it for a few weeks and figured out the problem. He told Chuck, “Coolant not going through. Engine very hot.”

Chuck shook his head and shot me a look that said, “Get your deranged Chinese husband off my back and give me my money.” The malfunctioning part was a twelve-dollar internal thermostat that Chuck had not checked before replacing the seven hundred—dollar head gasket.

After that Zhong-hua ordered needed car parts himself directly from the dealer: “I want to order an elevator for my car. Yes, elevator. One elevator.”

“Al-ter-na-tor!” I shouted from upstairs.

“Oh, sorry, sorry! I want one alternator.”

My husband's outward focus did not extend beyond the minutiae of metallic mysteries, but at least this concentration was saving us money.

I was trying to help my husband do something I did not know how to do myself—find the right niche, enough space to unfold the paper donkey that could run with the burden of his life as if it were a wren on its rump. Around that time, Zhong-hua discovered that expression “I have no idea” and used it liberally—to my annoyance—as if having no idea were a legitimate excuse for inaction. Perhaps it was the best excuse. I went to my job, and every night when I came home, he was watching Muhammad Ali on the Boxing Channel. If I had been the one lounging at home all day, I would feel guilty, and if questioned on my day's activities, I would say I had dusted, cleaned the bathroom, carried in wood, and, “Oh, lots of stuff.” Even though I could see that Zhong-hua had done some chores, when I asked what he had done all day, he said with gusto, “Nothing!”

I kept on prodding: “You have to make connections. The art center sponsored you to teach that free class, and people loved it. Maybe they would pay you to teach again. You should talk to the ladies. Cultivate good relations. My God, I can't do everything.”