Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [11]
What I did was torch Frankie’s precious home in Saratoga Springs. Flippant Frankie was right: there are only two categories of people, those with wants, and those with needs.
Baby Fong dropped out of the plump, drizzly sky one late-August afternoon in Saratoga Springs. What other reason besides a malevolent deity, or the supreme indifference of fate, could have compelled her to dump the semicomatose Aloysius in the care of smuggled-in, illiterate live-ins from Nanjing, ride the Amtrak to Troy, then rent a balloon from a Saratoga company called Bubbly in the Breeze, Inc.?
When I say “dropped,” I mean “dropped.” Baby’s balloon landed between a row of rose bushes and a bed of Japanese irises in the backyard Frankie’d just had professionally landscaped. He said, “Why couldn’t my mother have been another Imelda Marcos?” Why couldn’t she spike-heel up and down Madison Avenue, dropping platinum-colored plastic?
Frankie’s nickname for his mother was First Class Fong. Baby was a compulsive shopper with only one criterion. “You sure it real fine? You sure it genuine classy?” He’d caught her once in Singapore asking, “Is this your top price?” She could be on the Ginza or in Rome or in Toronto and she’d ask, “You sure this first-class stuff?” Why, oh why, Frankie grumbled, did he have to suffer for her obsessive need for “first-class” society? And why did she have to express it upstate by out-hosting Mary Lou Whitney?
I kept a file of First Class places, little crumbs of information from Frankie’s ranting. Hazelton Lanes, Via Veneto, Union Square. The factoid I didn’t have to file for keeps: Frankie s Debby.
Saratoga Springs in the racing season attracts blue bloods and grifters, touts and tarts, writers, Degas wannabes, balletomanes and a real dog pound of high-class mutts. Baby confused the classiest riffraff with the classiest elite. She planned pageants instead of parties: Mongolian contortionists and Chinatown acrobats entertaining titled guests in striped tents; Chinese “boat people” in chef’s hats wokking whole carp that they’d carried up from Chinatown on Amtrak wrapped in newspaper on their laps; Thai masseuses offering fussy cocktails from silver trays.
He didn’t show up for a week. He couriered me gifts, mostly the unimaginative kind, like flowers, boxed candies, perfume and lingerie. And one expensive one: a black silk Chinese-y dress with long side slits. So, he wanted me to be more Chinese. I’d be more Chinese than the Great Wall. Frankie liked to buy flowers more than I liked to receive them, and as for chocolate, you can’t sew it into the bottom of your suitcase. The dress I tried on. It looked okay on me. I had the mystery genes, the boyish hips and good legs. On Angie or cousin Nicole with their chunky bodies, the slits would’ve buckled out. They would’ve looked sluttish. Or, worse, pathetic.
The Saturday night of that dinner meeting with Baby, Frankie came over a half hour earlier than we’d arranged. I’d been ready and dressed for at least an hour: hair blow-dried wild, cheeks blush-brushed vampy, boyish body glamoured up in that Chinese sheath.
Before he could close the door behind him, I did a twirl and two-step to show off the whole getup.
“Nice,” he said.
“Nice?” He made it sound like I’d just won the Miss Congeniality Contest in the Saratoga County Beauty Pageant.
“Very nice?”
Third runner-up for Miss Nassau County. “Frankie …?” I went. “You want me to do something different with my hair? Don’t I look okay?”
“Very nice.”
“Jeesus, Frankie … nice? Like Merle What’s-Her-Face nice?”
He focused on my shoes. Retro platforms in chartreuse patent leather.