The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [70]
The children locked themselves up in their bedrooms, in the storeroom and basement, where they turned on the lights. Their aunt would come knocking on the doors and say, “Are you all right in there?”
“Yes, Aunt, we’re all right.”
“Beware,” she’d warn. “Beware. Turn off your lights so you won’t be found. Turn off the lights before they come for us.”
The children hung blankets over the cracks in the door-jambs; they stuffed clothes along the bottoms of doors. “Chinese people are very weird,” they told one another.
Next Moon Orchid removed all the photographs, except for those of the grandmother and grandfather, from the shelves, dressers, and walls. She gathered up the family albums. “Hide these,” she whispered to Brave Orchid. “Hide these. When they find me, I don’t want them to trace the rest of the family. They use photographs to trace you.” Brave Orchid wrapped the pictures and the albums in flannel. “I’ll carry these far away where no one will find us,” she said. When Moon Orchid wasn’t looking, she put them at the bottom of a storage box in the basement. She piled old clothes and old shoes on top. “If they come for me,” Moon Orchid said, “everyone will be safe.”
“We’re all safe,” said Brave Orchid.
The next odd thing Moon Orchid did was to cry whenever anyone left the house. She held on to them, pulled at their clothes, begged them not to go. The children and Brave Orchid’s husband had to sneak out. “Don’t let them go,” pleaded Moon Orchid. “They will never come back.”
“They will come back. Wait and see. I promise you. Watch for them. Don’t watch for Mexicans. This one will be home at 3:30. This one at 5:00. Remember who left now. You’ll see.”
“We’ll never see that one again,” Moon Orchid wept.
At 3:30 Brave Orchid would remind her, “See? It’s 3:30; sure enough, here he comes.” (“You children come home right after school. Don’t you dare stop for a moment. No candy store. No comic book store. Do you hear?”)
But Moon Orchid did not remember. “Who is this?” she’d ask. “Are you going to stay with us? Don’t go out tonight. Don’t leave in the morning.”
She whispered to Brave Orchid that the reason the family must not go out was that “they” would take us in airplanes and fly us to Washington, D.C., where they’d turn us into ashes. Then they’d drop the ashes in the wind, leaving no evidence.
Brave Orchid saw that all variety had gone from her sister. She was indeed mad. “The difference between mad people and sane people,” Brave Orchid explained to the children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.”
Every morning Moon Orchid stood by the front door whispering, whispering. “Don’t go. The planes. Ashes. Washington, D.C. Ashes.” Then, when a child managed to leave, she said, “That’s the last time we’ll see him again. They’ll get him. They’ll turn him into ashes.”
And so Brave Orchid gave up. She was housing a mad sister who cursed the mornings for her children, the one in Vietnam too. Their aunt was saying terrible things when they needed blessing. Perhaps Moon Orchid had already left this mad old body, and it was a ghost bad-mouthing her children. Brave Orchid finally called her niece, who put Moon Orchid in a California state mental asylum. Then Brave Orchid opened up the windows and let the air and light come into the house again. She moved back into the bedroom with her husband. The children took the blankets and sheets down from the doorjambs and came back into the living room.
Brave Orchid visited her sister twice. Moon Orchid was thinner each time, shrunken to bone. But, surprisingly, she was happy and had made up a new story. She pranced like a child. “Oh, Sister, I am so happy here. No one ever leaves. Isn’t that wonderful? We are all women here. Come.