Amazon.com
The realities of mixed-heritage familes are explored in The Love Wife: those serio-comic moments that all families run into, but that are particularly difficult when its members are of completely different backgrounds. In this case, the non-American heritage is Chinese and the practitioner is an old hand. Gish Jen wrote Mona in the Promised Land, Who's Irish?, and Typical American, all rich and telling contributions to immigrant literature. The Love Wife combines humor, pathos, a big surprise at the end, and dead-on dialogue between children and parents to keep the reader engaged.
Carnegie Wong, only son of successful immigrant Mama Wong, much to his mother's horror, marries big, blonde, Caucasian Jane, known ever after, pejoratively, as Blondie. Carnegie has already adopted an Asian child of unknown origin--a factor in the story--when he meets Blondie and they adopt a Chinese girl. Lizzy and Wendy are eventually joined by a bio-baby boy, Bailey, who is "half-half" and disconcertingly blonde. The family is complete, Mama Wong dies, and along with her go all her prescriptive, preemptive, insulting remarks. Not quite. Her domineering hand reaches from the grave back to China and then to Carnegie and Blondie's home, delivering Lan, an erstwhile "cousin" Mama has bequeathed to her son and his family. She is supposed to be a nanny, but Blondie believes that she has been sent to be a "love-wife" or concubine.
The entire family dynamic is changed almost instantly. Lan, a model of passive-aggression, immediately ingratiates herself to the girls. Blondie, a model of forebearance as she is berated by her eldest daughter, misunderstood by her husband and detested by Lan, tries to befriend Lan; a lesser person would have driven her from the house. Lan is so obvious that she becomes a self-parody. Blondie quits her job to spend more time with her family; Carnegie loses his, and the family is headed for implosion.
This would have been quite enough plot to carry these characters into, and perhaps out of, heavy waters, but there are other complications; entrepreneurial thirst denied, racism in the 'burbs, a killing fire and bad choices abounding. It's a very full plate at the end, which is ambiguous enough to allow the reader to believe anything. --Valerie Ryan
From Publishers Weekly
A meddlesome Chinese-American mother bequeaths a Chinese nanny to her ambivalent son and his big blonde wife in this darkly comic fairy tale about cultural assimilation, biological destiny and domestic warfare. In her earlier novels (Typical American; etc.) and short stories, Jen established a sort of Asian Richter scale, registering the culture shock of new and not-so-new Chinese immigrants and their complicated, irrepressible families. Here she focuses on the racially mixed Wong family: Carnegie; his older wife, Janie (dubbed "Blondie" by Carnegie's hilariously awful mother); two adopted Asian daughters (the difficult teenager Lizzy and the hypersensitive Wendy); and a "bio" baby son who looks disturbingly non-Asian. When Carnegie's mother dies after a long bout with Alzheimer's, the Wongs are shocked to learn that she has arranged for an extended visit by a female relative from the Mainland, the unmarried, mysterious Lan. A year older than Blondie, whose "dewlap" and resemblance to an "Aeroflot" are beginning to alarm Carnegie, Lan seems quaint, "plainish" and self-effacing; soon her ambiguous status, passive-aggressiveness and blooming beauty threaten to destabilize the already rocky Wong marriage. Not only does she captivate Carnegie, who is dismayed and fascinated by his own rediscovered Chinese identity, she also preys on the Wong girls' insecurity as Blondie's nonbiological daughters. What threatens to turn into a standard evil-nanny plot takes on unexpected depth as Jen captures the not always likable Wong family with her trademark compassion, laser-like attention to detail and quirky wit. Though the shifting first-person narratives sometimes come off as awkwardly stagey (particularly Carnegie's, with comments like "I was entranced by the eternal return of villanelles—that deathless morph"), this novel has a robust, lived-in quality that makes you miss it when it's over. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–A vivid and likable family struggles with issues of adoption, aging, generational conflict, and clashing attempts at personal growth. The Wongs–composed of German-Scots-Irish-American mother Blondie, Chinese-American father Carnegie, adopted daughters Lizzie and Wendy, and birth son baby Bailey–live in suburban Boston, experiencing varying degrees of self-satisfaction and secret uncertainties. When Carnegie's strong-willed mother dies, she leaves a strange will that requires him to invite a formerly unknown Chinese relative into their home. Lan, a middle-aged woman from the provinces, readily wins the hearts of the daughters–both of Asian ancestry–and places herself quietly and adamantly at odds with Blondie, in spite of the latter's wishes for harmony in the home. Carnegie feels an attraction to Lan that he wants to keep at bay. Each of the characters helps tell the story, sometimes paragraph by paragraph and never on his or her own for more than a page or two, making this read like a wonderful overheard conversation among family members who truly love one another, in spite of individual quirks. Issues of race, racism, and interracial relationships are examined through the prism of such indisputable humanness that there isn't an ounce of didacticism to be found here. Both adopted teens and those who simply wish they'd wake up to discover that their parents aren't those embarrassing lumps in the next room will enjoy this riff on family while finding much to consider–and to smirk knowingly about.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Asian-American literature has, for whatever reason, been unable to evolve past what one might call the Cyrano's Nose phase. All too often writers are saddled with the anxiety of ethnic identity and feel compelled either to address it or be accused of bad faith.Whether the author or the literary market is to blame, Gish Jen's new novel, The Love Wife, falls into this trap. The characters are indistinctly drawn except for their self-absorbed awareness of racial identity, which they bear like monikers in a morality play.The story begins shortly after the death of Mama Wong, a harpy immigrant mother type so banal that her mantra is "Only in America!" She spent her youth making a fortune in Chinatown real-estate speculation and the latter part of her life bedeviling the marriage between her son, Carnegie, and his unsuitably older, unforgivably white wife, whom she has dubbed Blondie. Mama Wong ceaselessly tormented Carnegie and Blondie for robbing their three kids -- two adopted Asian girls, one biological baby boy -- of a Chinese identity.We learn that, back in the day, Mama Wong offered Carnegie "one million dollars cash" not to marry Blondie; when he refused, Mama Wong made the same offer to Blondie. The couple chose love above venality, only to accept blood money from Mama Wong at a later date anyway and then renege on their promise about how the money was to be used.After Mama's death, following a long battle with Alzheimer's, a mysterious missive from a relative in Hong Kong reveals that she has left a will, which comes with a bizarre stipulation: Carnegie's inheritance of his mother's millions is dependent upon his taking a "relative" from China into his home for "a few years," to serve as a live-in nanny to the children. This is Lan, a tackily attired, lissome fortysomething au pair from mainland China. Blondie fears that Mama Wong has, from the grave, sent Carnegie an unofficial second wife -- the "Love Wife" of the title -- who will subvert the children and make them Chinese and, by extension, no longer Blondie's.One of the things about this book that nags at the reader is the murky motivation behind the act that propels this story: Mama Wong's will was not witnessed or notarized, was written by someone not in full command of her wits, and was not legally binding. Yet Carnegie and Blondie feel compelled to follow its mandate, seemingly out of sheer perversity. Blondie is so lethargic in preventing what she knows will bring about the destruction of her family that she cannot win the reader's sympathy.Carnegie also sleepwalks through the novel. When describing Lan, he attributes the woman's youthful appearance to "that Asian predisposition toward subcutaneous fat." He ponders a spot on the bum of his half-Chinese, half-Caucasian baby and muses: "Was that not a Mongolian spot? A faint bluish bruise-ish indelible shadow, proof of some Asian connection." Wong describes Asians generally as having "a certain proclivity to skin sensitivities; for example, an inability to wear wool." Perhaps the author makes such statements ironically -- perhaps, for example, Carnegie's allergies are a metaphor for alienation. But she constructs the character too listlessly for the reader to make this determination one way or another. Carnegie's chief characteristic is cowardice, and not of a compelling variety. His occasional spurts of energy come from combating racial epithets, as when a skinhead calls him "chink boy" and Carnegie retorts (though only in his mind), "Let's see your tax return." We learn nothing from the character's thinking up nerdy, platitudinous comebacks and then keeping them to himself. Lan, meanwhile, would be largely unremarkable except for a mysterious past in which she was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and in which she witnessed the murder of her father. The whole family is arbitrarily drawn to the sagacity with which this experience supposedly endows the colorless Lan. She serves as a blank canvas onto which the Wongs project their needs and fears: the children's need for a connection to their origins, Carnegie's need for a tie to his deceased mother, and Blondie's need to articulate the foreignness that she cannot trust in her own husband. Lan is the unmoved mover.Jen is a skillful prose stylist, in this book experimenting with a tricky narrative device that shifts between different points of view, with each of the characters telling the story in the first person. This works well in some cases, particularly when characters need to reveal shameful motivations, as when Blondie confesses, "I loved it more than I would have said that my genes were not swallowed up by Carnegie's." Such powerfully honest remarks reveal the chinks (no pun intended) in her marriage: Blondie is plagued by the fear, real or imagined, that after all is said and done, this interracial pairing inevitably comes down to a tug-of-war over which race the baby resembles.The shifting point of view, however, is occasionally frustrating to the reader, who can only glimpse into the lives of the characters. When they behave rashly, as when one decides to leave home, it almost seems as though the character has decided to escape from the book.Jen is an unassailably talented writer, but her strong prose only brings the underdeveloped state of her characters into even sharper focus. She reaches top form, oddly enough, when writing about Caucasians. Perhaps they allow Jen to feel at home in her novelist's skin, to exercise her right to comment on universal truths. Otherwise she appears trapped within self-imposed strictures, within an almost pessimistic view of how ethnic characters should be allowed to behave, and her ethnic people, by their nature, are allowed to reveal only microcosmic axioms.Reviewed by Y. Euny Hong Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Jen’s third novel (Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land) draws a wide range of opinions, from the glowing to the bitter. One common thread is appreciation for Jen’s prose, although it plays like a safety valve in the negative reviews, as if the writers had to find something to like. The multiple first-person narrators provide perspective and richness, as does Jen’s bighearted insight into the cultural divide. Yet, even the positive reviews struggle to reconcile the first two thirds of the book with the plot twists at the end. Jen’s move towards more serious subject matter provokes reviewers to tag The Love Wife as a more mature work. The question remains whether maturing is all it’s cracked up to be. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Jen--a writer of great comedic skills, candor, and imagination, who specializes in cultural collisions--portrays a hugely entertainingly American family in her third novel, a vibrant work notable for its unusual and arresting dialogue-saturated style. Not only do characters address each other, they also appeal to an unidentified third party, as though they're in group therapy or starring in a documentary. Mama Wong is the novel's ruling spirit. After fleeing China because she was too "spicy" a girl to get along with the Communists, she finds success in the U.S., only to see her son, Carnegie, engaged to an Anglo. She offers Carnegie, and his fiancee, called Blondie, a million dollars to call off the wedding, but they met on the day that Carnegie impulsively decided to adopt an abandoned Asian baby girl and feel destined to be together. The Wongs travel to China to adopt a second daughter, then Blondie has a son. Then Lan, a smart and alluring relative of Mama Wong's, arrives from China, allegedly as a nanny, although Blondie suspects more dire motives. This is a recipe for a situation comedy, or a soap opera, but instead it unfolds as a probing and hilarious inquiry into complex questions of nurture and nature, bloodlines and love. From Lan's scorn for the ease of American life to the girls' preference for Lan over their mother to the strains on Carnegie and Blondie's marriage, Jen, as keenly attuned to the incongruous as to the profound, orchestrates predicaments rich in irony and revelation to create a smart, piquant, and far-reaching tragicomedy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“What a truly satisfying read The Love Wife is. As I got to know the Wongs–a family like more and more American families–I loved each one of them. Hearing their multi-lingual voices and participating in their delights and sadnesses, their fun and troubles, I felt my own understanding and kindness grow. A wonderful book.”
–Maxine Hong Kingston
“I’ve been reading and marveling . . . Her characters are so alive that one can hardly call them ‘characters.’ Blondie, Mama Wong, Carnegie, Lizzy, Wendy, and, oh, Lan! I didn’t want to part from them: here is a novel so insightful, so satisfying, that it ought never to have ended. The interlude in China, the ingenuity of the narration, the tenderness, the all-observing comedy, the darker elements, the perfect-pitch dialogue, the domestic exactitude, the surprises! Having lived for a time (too brief a time) with Gish’s people as with one’s own family, one comes to love them.”
–Cynthia Ozick
“It’s hard to find a novel that seems, at once, so funny and so touching that one really is dumbstruck with admiration. The Love Wife, with its fragmented narrative, its feast of voices, summons a strange new American reality and declares it pure. I read the book in three sittings, and plan to start it all over again soon, hating to leave this world, these characters, this vision.”
–Jay Parini
“A vibrant work…A probing & hilarious inquiry into complex questions of nurture and nature, bloodlines and love.”
--Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Psychologically and politically astute…Jen’s eye for the complexities of American life is shrewd, her characters utterly believable.”
--Kirkus
“Poignant, funny, and powerful…A truly intimate portrayal of a typical American family’s year of tribulation, confusion, love, and self discovery.”
--Dale Raben, Library Journal
Jen’s humor and sharp writing are delightful...A tale about family love and commitment in an era of political correctness.”
—Bernadette Murphy, The Los Angeles Times
The Love Wife probes that profound human need to be part of a family and to have your own place within it...Jen has created characters of complexity and truth.”
“Vibrant, multilayered...wise and compassionate, The Love Wife unflinchingly probes the ties that bind–and separate–people, races and nations.”
--People Magazine
"A big story...big-hearted...A story about families and identity and race and the American Dream, a story about how one generation deals with the expectations and the hopes of an earlier generation, a story about how sons and daughters make choices that define themselves against their parents...[Gish Jen's] most ambitious and emotionally ample work yet."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
From the Inside Flap
From the highly praised author of Mona in the Promised Land and Who’s Irish?–a generous, funny, explosive novel about the new “half-half” American family.
Here is Carnegie Wong, second-generation Chinese American warm heart and funny guy. Here is his WASP wife, the delicious “za-za-vavoomy” Blondie. Here are their two adopted Asian daughters, and their half-half bio son. And here is Mama Wong, Carnegie’s no-holds-barred mother, who, eternally opposed to his marriage, has arranged from her grave for a mainland Chinese relation to come look after the kids. Is this woman, as Carnegie claims, a nanny? Or is she, as Blondie fears, something else?
What happens as Carnegie and Blondie try to incorporate the ambiguous new arrival into their already complicated lives is touchingly, brilliantly, intricately told.
Powerfully evoking the contemporary American family in all its fragility and strength, Gish Jen has given us her most exuberant and accomplished novel.
About the Author
Gish Jen is the author of two previous novels and a book of stories. Her honors include the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Gish Jen’s Who’s Irish? and Mona in the Promised Land are available in Vintage paperback.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
BLONDIE / The day Lan came, you could still say whose family this was--Carnegie's and mine.
We had three children. Two beautiful Asian girls--or should I say Asian American--Wendy, age nine, and Lizzy, age fifteen, both adopted; and one bio boy, Bailey, age thirteen months. Carnegie's ancestry being Chinese, and mine European, Bailey was half half, as they say--or is there another term by now? With less mismatch in it--'half half' having always spoken to me more of socks than of our surprise child, come to warm the lap of our middle years.
Our family was, in any case, an improvisation. The new American family, our neighbor Mitchell once proclaimed, tottering drunk up our deck stairs. But for Carnegie and me, it was simply something we made. Something we chose.
His mother, Mama Wong, thought this unnatural.
The trouble with you people is not enough periods, she liked to say. You can say I think like Chinese, but I tell you. A child should grow up, say this is my mother, period. This is my father, period. Otherwise that family look like not real.
Always good about assigning blame, she blamed the family on me.
I know Blondie. Everything a nut do, she do too. She is not even a real nut, like her friend Gabriela. She is only try-to-be-nut.
To which my friend Gabriela would say: Janie. Your name is Janie, I can't believe you let Mama Wong call you Blondie all these years. And Carnegie too! That is like the definition of low self-esteem.
I tried to tell her that it was my choice--that I liked nicknames. I tried to tell her that she could think of Blondie as my married name, as if I'd changed my first name instead of my last. For that was the way I was--or thought I was, before Lan came. An open person. A flexible person. Had I not been voted Most Sympathetic to Others in high school?
CARNEGIE / Our very own Blondie had, in her day, held the Kleenex for the homecoming queen.
But, whatever. Gabriela minded the Blondie bit far more than she minded being called, herself, a nut. She being the first to admit that she had gone back to the earth two or three times, maybe more. Also that she had spent years finding herself without much progress.
BLONDIE / At least you have your family, Gabriela used to say, thumbing through the personals. She circled possibles in pink; her red hair looped out the back of her baseball cap.
At least I had my family.
I was forty-five when Gabriela last said that; Carnegie was thirty-nine. It was 1999. We lived in a nice town with good schools, outside of Boston--a town within easy driving distance, as we liked to say, of both city and ocean.
At least I had my family.
Every happy family has its innocence. I suppose, looking back, this was ours.
Back then, our bird feeder was the most popular in town. In the snow we could have a hundred birds or more. But squirrels came too sometimes, more and more squirrels as the years went on. I fixed a tin pie plate to the top of the pole from which the feeder hung; I greased the pole itself. Yet still the hungry birds huddled in the bushes, some days--too many days--twittering. Clumps of snow pitched themselves from the branches as the birds refined their positions. In contrast, the squirrels leapt at the feeder from the trees, often from two or three directions at once. They gyrated midair--hurtling, twisting, flailing--only to plummet, midflight, to the ground. It was only every so often that one would make it to the seed, tail twitching; but then how the feeder would shudder and swing! Seed flying in black sheets onto the white snow.
--Squirrels will triumph, said Carnegie, observing this. It's only natural.
But the seeds, surprisingly, sprouted in the spring--and wasn't that natural too? I had assumed the seeds sterile. They ought to have been sterile. One day I noticed in the grass, though, a rosetta of sunflower seedlings--each topped with a little leaf bow tie--which were almost immediately no longer seedlings; which were daily, miraculously, larger and larger--until there they loomed, modestly huge-headed, fantastic with a rightness I wanted to call beauty.
It was these that I saw, when I sat up in bed, the early fall day that Lan came to us. Our house was an old house, with enormously wide floorboards and, between them, correspondingly wide cracks. I toed one of these, and felt, for all our housekeeping, graininess. The children thumped hollering down the stairs; Carnegie called for reinforcements, meaning me. Still, for a half second more I enjoyed my flowers. In one way, they were all wrong--a sudden haphazard clump in the middle of the yard. And yet how I drank them in, through the window screen, and the sunlit fog--that awkward glory. So crowded; disorderly; addled. They looked as if they'd dropped their contact lenses, every one of them, and all at the same time. These were the homely, brown-faced kind of sunflowers--some twelve feet tall, single-stalked, scraggly-leaved. Their huge heads knocked into one another. How strange they were--that bird feeder still nestled among their knees, like something they might trip on. And yet how authentic, somehow. How blissfully undeterred; full of the triumph of having become, from the seed of themselves, themselves.
Would this Lan--her name was Lan, meaning 'orchid'--like them?
Back when I was a sophomore in college, I spent a summer in Hong Kong, studying Mandarin. A summer was not a long time. Still, I did learn, a little, about how the Chinese in general prized the cultured. The cultivated.
These sunflowers, meanwhile, were anything but.
Of course, Mainlanders were different than Hong Kongers. The younger generations were different than the older. The less educated were different than the more. Daoists were different. Lan herself could be different.
In this family, we do not generalize, my mother would say. In this family, we keep an open mind.
Still, in my heart of hearts, I wished that this Lan would never come to behold them at all. I wished not to have to explain their beauty.
Now I believed, please understand, in openness. In the importance of cultural exchange, especially what with globalization and whatnot. My family had always hosted exchange students. And whatever the circumstances under which this Lan came, she was, after all, a relative of Carnegie's. Family.
Yet if I could add a word to our language, it would be a word for the peace a grown woman feels on the days--the rare days--when she needs to consider no view but her own.
WENDY / Dad has the windshield wipers on but like no one can see on account of the fog. How can the plane even land, says Lizzy, but Dad says there are special instruments, no one has to be able to see anything.
--It's like jumping, he says, can't we land on the floor with our eyes closed?
--A plane doesn't have feet like ours, says Lizzy. That's reassuring but not true.
--Oh really, says Dad. And where did you learn that?
--Some things you know yourself if you're smart enough to realize it, she says.
--What's reassuring? I say.
--Oh, use your brain, says Lizzy.
--Ah-ah-ah-choo! says Bailey.
Baby Bailey is so little he still has this mirror in front of him in the car. Now he sneezes at the baby in the mirror again--ah-ah-ah-chooo!--and laughs and laughs, loving himself so much that he drools. Dad says he's like Narcissus making his own pool, but then doesn't tell us what that means. In the fullness of time you will get my jokes, he says. In the fullness of time.
--Maybe it will lift, Mom says, let's hope for the best.
--Maybe it will lift, says Lizzy, imitating her. Let's hope...
--Elizabeth Bailey Wong, says Dad. Stop now.
He twists his head clear around like an owl, practically, so we can see how his neck skin always wrinkles in a kind of spiral when he does that. Dad's parents were Chinese Chinese, like from China, so he has the same kind of skin as me and Lizzy, soft smooth like a hill of snow nobody's walked on, only kind of tea-colored in the summer, and creased like in a couple of places, it makes you realize that every time he turns around he does the exact same thing. Over and over. But he keeps on doing it anyway, just like Lizzy keeps on being Lizzy, if she didn't we'd probably all float up to the ceiling with happiness and bang our heads.
--Maybe it will lift, says Lizzy one more time, in her imitation-Mom voice, and then says, in her regular voice:--When I grow up will I also spout inanities out of nowhere?
No answer.
--And what if we don't like her? says Lizzy. Can we send her back to China?
--Can we send her back to China, sighs Mom.
Lizzy is wearing a nose ring and earrings, and henna tattoos in the shape of snakes. Thank god the tattoos at least wash off and that short short blond hair will grow out too, Mom says, but of course not in front of Lizzy, because she completely knows what Lizzy will say back. Namely, Why shouldn't I bleach my hair, it's no different than you highlighting yours, and besides why shouldn't I be blond when my mother is blond?
So instead Mom just says things like how she doesn't like that phrase, sending people back to China. Because people say that even to people who speak perfect English and have been here a long time, she says, and how are you going to like it if people say that to you?
--They aren't going to say that to me, says Lizzy.
--We hope, says Mom.
She doesn't twist around like Dad to talk to us, she just looks in the mirror on the back side of the car visor. Mom is like the complete opposite of Dad. Dad is muscle-y. If you threw him in the ocean he would sink plunk to the bottom, while Mom would bob right up, Dad calls her za-za vavoomy. And she's like colorful. We can see her in the mirror, those blue blue eyes and that blond blond hair and those pink pink lips. It's the complete farm girl look, Lizzy says, that being where her family is from originally, on her mom's side anyway, a farm in Wisconsin where people were real and not phony. Of course, she herself grew up in Connecticut. Still who would've thought she'd end up in a place where people actually buy those black designer diaper bags? That's what she wants to know sometimes, I guess she always figured she'd kind of drift back to the farm someday.
But like here she is.
--We hope, says Mom. But even if they don't, in our family we don't talk about sending people back to China. Because some of the people who get told that aren't from China to begin with.
--Some of them are from New Jersey, says Dad.
--Some of them aren't even of Chinese origin, says Mom.
--You mean some of them are who-knows-what, says Lizzy. Right? Japanese, or Vietnamese.
--Right.
--Or mixed-up soup du jour, like me. Right?
--Right.
--You're too sensitive, says Lizzy.
Mom flips the visor back up, making that little light next to the mirror blink out. Which was the maybe brightest thing I've seen all day, I realize, that's how gray it is out.
--And how is it that the honky in the family gets to explain this? Mom asks the air.
Dad puts the windshield wipers on high even though it isn't really raining.
--You are a superior being married to a quasi-Neanderthal who has yet to internalize the mores of the middle class, that's how, he says, turning to her. And when she doesn't turn back, he puts his eyebrows up and down, he has these big thick eyebrows like caterpillars. Then he says, quiet like:--I do beg your patience.
His cell phone rings, this week the tune is 'America the Beautiful,' which he says is for the benefit of Lizzy and me, he wants to make sure we know more than 'Afunga Alafia.' Not that he has anything against Swahili, Swahili is very nice, he says, a language spoken by many.
--Sounds great, he says now, into the phone, in his work voice. Just make sure the visuals are in order and that new one...exactly.
Bailey starts crying, so Lizzy plugs him up with a passy.
--Anyway, she's from a little town someplace between Shanghai and Beijing, Mom says. Which are cities in China.
--You told us that already, says Lizzy.
But Mom keeps going over the whole thing anyway like it's what to do in case of a fire or something.
--She's very nice and she's our relative, says Mom. She'll be here for a couple of years, helping with you guys, and we are all going to like her.
--That's reassuring but not necessarily true, says Lizzy.
--No one can say anything around here, says Dad.
--That's not true either, says Lizzy.
--So what is true? I say. If you're so smart.
LIZZY / --Parents are liars, I said. When they're worried they reassure you and they steal your Halloween candy if you're not careful.
--Nobody stole your Halloween candy, said Dad. If you're talking about last year.
--I was careful, I said.
WENDY / --Some was missing from mine, I say.
I look at the black back of Dad's head. Then at the blond back of Mom's.
--I don't even like Reese's peanut butter cups, says Dad.
--Oh, for heaven's sake, Carnegie, says Mom.
--Nor do I care for Kit Kats, he says.
--Honestly! says Mom. You are my fourth child.
--So sue me, sue me, what can you do me, sings Dad. I...a-a-ate...them.
His cell phone rings again. We can hear the words in our heads. Ohh beau-ti-ful for spacious...
--Will you put that thing on vibrate, says Mom. And when Dad doesn't answer:--Honey, please. Taking phone calls night and day is just not going to help. If there are going to be layoffs, there are going to be layoffs.
--Thank you for that consoling insight, says Dad. It will bring me almost as much solace on a sleepless night as knowing the Great Greenspan saw this coming.
His phone rings again. Ohh beau-ti-ful for...
--And may I just point out that I turned mine off even though I have that board meeting tomorrow, says Mom.
--Nobler than springtime, are you, sings Dad then. Sweeter than Kit Kats, are you...
But he shuts his phone off and hands it to Mom. She puts it in the glove compartment, closing it up with kind of a bang because it doesn't work that great. Of course it falls back open again anyway, so she hits it again, only more gently, which works. There's that click. Then she looks over her shoulder and says:--Your dad is a joker.
Home
