The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [67]
“You want a husband, don’t you?” said Brave Orchid. “If you don’t claim him now, you’ll never have a husband. Stop crying,” she ordered. “Do you want him to see you with your eyes and nose swollen when that young so-called wife wears lipstick and nail polish like a movie star?”
Moon Orchid managed to sit upright, but she seemed stiff and frozen.
“You’re just tired from the ride. Put some blood into your cheeks,” Brave Orchid said, and pinched her sister’s withered face. She held her sister’s elbow and slapped the inside of her arm. If she had had time, she would have hit until the black and red dots broke out on the skin; that was the tiredness coming out. As she hit, she kept an eye on the rearview mirror. She saw her son come running, his uncle after him with a black bag in his hand. “Faster. Faster,” her son was saying. He opened the car door. “Here she is,” he said to his uncle. “I’ll see you later.” And he ran on down the street.
The two old ladies saw a man, authoritative in his dark western suit, start to fill the front of the car. He had black hair and no wrinkles. He looked and smelled like an American. Suddenly the two women remembered that in China families married young boys to older girls, who baby-sat their husbands their whole lives. Either that or, in this ghost country, a man could somehow keep his youth.
“Where’s the accident?” he said in Chinese. “What is this? You don’t have a broken leg.”
Neither woman spoke. Brave Orchid held her words back. She would not let herself interfere with this meeting after long absence.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” These women had such awful faces. “What is it, Grandmothers?”
“Grandmother?” Brave Orchid shouted. “This is your wife. I am your sister-in-law.”
Moon Orchid started to whimper. Her husband looked at her. And recognized her. “You,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
But all she did was open and shut her mouth without any words coming out.
“Why are you here?” he asked, eyes wide. Moon Orchid covered her face with one hand and motioned no with the other.
Brave Orchid could not keep silent. Obviously he was not glad to see his wife. “I sent for her,” she burst out. “I got her name on the Red Cross list, and I sent her the plane ticket. I wrote her every day and gave her the heart to come. I told her how welcome she would be, how her family would welcome her, how her husband would welcome her. I did what you, the husband, had time to do in these last thirty years.”
He looked directly at Moon Orchid the way the savages looked, looking for lies. “What do you want?” he asked. She shrank from his stare; it silenced her crying.
“You weren’t supposed to come here,” he said, the front seat a barrier against the two women over whom a spell of old age had been cast. “It’s a mistake for you to be here. You can’t belong. You don’t have the hardness for this country. I have a new life.”
“What about me?” whispered Moon Orchid.
“Good,” thought Brave Orchid. “Well said. Said with no guile.”
“I have a new wife,” said the man.
“She’s only your second wife,” said Brave Orchid. “This is your real wife.”
“In this country a man may have just one wife.”
“So you’ll get rid of that creature in your office?” asked Brave Orchid.
He looked at Moon Orchid. Again the rude American eyes. “You go live with your daughter. I’ll mail you the money I’ve always sent you. I could get arrested if the Americans knew about you. I’m living like an American.” He talked like a child born here.
“How could you ruin her old age?” said Brave Orchid.
“She has had food. She has had servants. Her daughter went to college. There wasn’t anything she thought of that she couldn’t buy. I have been a good husband.”
“You made her live like a widow.”
“That’s not true. Obviously the villagers haven’t stoned her. She’s not wearing mourning. The family didn’t send her away to work. Look at her. She’d never fit into an American household. I have important