The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [68]
Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face. She wished she could also hide her dappled hands. Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts.
“Do you want her to go back to China then?” Brave Orchid was asking.
“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. She may stay, but I do not want her in my house. She has to live with you or with her daughter, and I don’t want either of you coming here anymore.”
Suddenly his nurse was tapping on the glass. So quickly that they might have missed it, he gestured to the old women, holding a finger to his mouth for just a moment: he had never told his American wife that he had a wife in China, and they mustn’t tell her either.
“What’s happening?” she asked. “Do you need help? The appointments are piling up.”
“No. No,” he said. “This woman fainted in the street. I’ll be up soon.”
They spoke to each other in English.
The two old women did not call out to the young woman. Soon she left. “I’m leaving too now,” said the husband.
“Why didn’t you write to tell her once and for all you weren’t coming back and you weren’t sending for her?” Brave Orchid asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago.”
“The least you can do,” said Brave Orchid, “is invite us to lunch. Aren’t you inviting us to lunch? Don’t you owe us a lunch? At a good restaurant?” She would not let him off easily.
So he bought them lunch, and when Brave Orchid’s son came back to the car, he had to wait for them.
Moon Orchid was driven back to her daughter’s house, but though she lived in Los Angeles, she never saw her husband again. “Oh, well,” said Brave Orchid. “We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.” Brave Orchid and her son drove back north, Brave Orchid sitting in the back seat the whole way.
Several months went by with no letter from Moon Orchid. When she had lived in China and in Hong Kong, she had written every other week. At last Brave Orchid telephoned long distance to find out what was happening. “I can’t talk now,” Moon Orchid whispered. “They’re listening. Hang up quickly before they trace you.” Moon Orchid hung up on Brave Orchid before the minutes she had paid for expired.
That week a letter came from the niece saying that Moon Orchid had become afraid. Moon Orchid said that she had overheard Mexican ghosts plotting on her life. She had been creeping along the baseboards and peeping out windows. Then she had asked her daughter to help her find an apartment at the other end of Los Angeles, where she was now hiding. Her daughter visited her every day, but Moon Orchid kept telling her, “Don’t come see me because the Mexican ghosts will follow you to my new hiding place. They’re watching your house.”
Brave Orchid phoned her niece and told her to send her mother north immediately, where there were no Mexicans, she said. “This fear is an illness,” she told her niece. “I will cure her.” (“Long ago,” she explained to her children, “when the emperors had four wives, the wife who lost in battle was sent to the Northern Palace. Her feet would sink little prints into the snow.”)
Brave Orchid sat on a bench at the Greyhound station to wait for her sister. Her children had not come with her because the bus station was only a five-block walk from the house. Her brown paper shopping bag against her, she dozed under the fluorescent lights until her sister’s bus pulled into the terminal. Moon Orchid stood blinking on the stairs, hanging tightly to the railing for old people. Brave Orchid felt the tears break inside her chest for the old feet that stepped one at a time onto the cold Greyhound cement. Her sister’s skin hung loose, like a hollowed frog