Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [201]
Jenny’s hand turned sideways and the mirror grew legs and took her eyes through the half-open door to the living room. In the corner of the living room by the curtained French windows, she saw two people: her mother and Jimmy.
Jimmy was holding a jug and pouring the water from it into a cup which he held in the other hand. Jenny knew all about Jimmy giving her mother Chinese herbal medicine (“Chinese bilge,” as her father called it). Her mother had been taking it for nearly twenty years to ease her pain. The price of this “Chinese bilge” climbed higher every year, and this caused increasingly bitter arguments between her parents. The older her father got, the cheaper he became; the older her mother got, the more she needed her medicine.
Jenny watched in the mirror as her mother drank the “bilge” and Jimmy gave her a towel to wipe her mouth with. But she did not take the towel. Instead, she gripped Jimmy’s sleeve. Jimmy pulled his arm back, but she hung on and finally he allowed her to wipe her mouth on his sleeve. Jenny could hardly believe her eyes.
Her mother had come to rely more and more on Jimmy as the years went by. He was her walking stick, the pillow she rested on, the handkerchief on which she dried her tears. Many of Jenny’s classmates lived in her street and they all knew that the Hendersons had a Chinese houseboy. Once Susie had said: “Someone saw that Chinaman scrubbing your mother’s back. Is it true?” Mary joined in the fun then. “I’ve heard that when Chinese people get their wages, they don’t put them in the bank, they stuff the money in the bottom of their shoes. Is your Jimmy like that?” Jenny flushed furiously at these stupid questions. Finally she spluttered some rude comment about Jimmy scrubbing Susie’s mother’s back—and did not speak to either of her friends for a week afterwards.
They did not ask Jenny any more questions about Jimmy after that, but even so, Jenny saw the suspicious looks they gave her. Their eyes were full of scorn, perhaps pity, as if they were saying to themselves: “Such a nice girl. What bad luck that she’s got a Chinese houseboy.” She tried to grow a thick skin and refused to let them needle her. But eventually her pride shrivelled under their relentless gaze.
In the end, it all got too much for her. One day, she was coming home from school when she met Jimmy walking to meet her along the pavement, as he usually did. She would not let him touch her school bag. She walked straight past him and up to her mother’s room. She stood in front of her mother, and hesitated a moment. It suddenly seemed as difficult to broach the subject as drilling a pinhole in an iron curtain.
She looked down at her toes, and stammered: “Mummy, do we really … really need Jimmy?”
Her mother made no attempt to probe at what lay behind the question. She simply took the words at face value. Holding Jenny’s hand she said, after a pause: “Yes, we do. Your father, I, and you too, we all need Jimmy.”
Jenny was annoyed at her mother’s casualness. She pushed away her hand. “It’s not us, it’s only you,” she said. Her mother was unperturbed. “If you don’t believe me,” she said placidly, “you go and ask your father. Who, apart from Jimmy, is willing to listen to his endlessly repeated jokes and laugh as if it was the first time he’d heard them?” Jenny felt deflated. She was quite well aware that her father depended on Jimmy as much as her mother did.
“Actually, you need Jimmy too,” said her mother.
“Of course, you were too young to remember, but it was Jimmy who bathed you and changed your nappy when you were a baby. When you had diphtheria, who was it that put you to sleep by resting you on his stomach? Do you think your breakfast would fly itself to the table if we didn’t have Jimmy? Would your skirt get washed and folded and put away? The dust on your desk doesn