The Natural Laws of Good Luck (8 page)

My husband thought me as clever as a person paddling a canoe with the wrong end of the paddle. He said I had accepted a job too difficult for too little money and was going at it in the most inefficient and unprofitable way. He communicated as much by asking, “Lady pay how much?” and “You work how much days?” He wasted no more words. We took turns refining the inside with a handheld gouge to avoid cracking the precious vessel. His slender-fingered hands, which had been smooth and elegant when he first came from China, were now as rough-knuckled as mine. He stuck with me until the urn enclosed a pleasing concavity.

Zhong-hua was surprised when I finished the crow on the lid, its round eyes wide open and sleek head tilted forward and down, as if already talking to the future inhabitant of the urn. This grueling task had let us both know that we were equally matched in endurance and skill and could work under pressure in harmonious collaboration. When I think of how many hours went into that job, I am glad that the ashes resting in it are those of a great patron of the arts who had bolstered the careers and morale of many poor artists.

I thanked Zhong-hua for coming to my rescue. He sat me down solemnly. “I am your husband, so I should do these things for you. If you say thank you, it is I not your husband.” I didn't get it right away, but from then on I bit my tongue before the phrase escaped again. I gradually learned that appreciation, remorse, and even joy were things one just had to feel in the air over time.

After the urn money paid some back bills, I pondered other ways we could make money together. One of my specialties is hand-built teapots with hand-carved handles. When Zhong-hua
saw them, he said at once, “No good.” He said they were too heavy and just “No good” in general. To elaborate, he pointed out that the Chinese had perfected the bowl and the teapot four thousand years ago, and these designs had since been working very well. Did I think I could improve upon them? I agreed that my pots were kind of clunky but argued for innovation and a combined vision. After many dummy teapots, we came up with some hybrid designs that I cast in porcelain and he painted. They incorporated my love of nature, making use of twisted roots for handles and spouts, and Zhong-hua's preference for delicacy and tradition, expressed through brush painting and calligraphy. I didn't know much about marketing but managed to sell some to the airport gift galleries in Detroit and Albany. The curators, both lovely ladies, were reverent toward artists and fair.

The grocery store was cutting back Zhong-hua's hours each week because his English was not progressing as the boss had hoped it would from attending summer school. My husband used a Chinese study technique that entailed silently copying words and phrases over and over. He memorized spelling but neither sound nor meaning. This discipline was repeated night after night into the wee hours. One morning I inspected the notebook. In his beautiful penmanship, he had written five pages of “I have an advantage with the doctor. I have an appointment over the slower runners.” He copied whole sections from a Toyota repair manual: “The symbol illuminates and chimes sound simultaneously when a fault has occurred in an important vehicle system.” Each chosen sentence was written four hundred times. It was hard to see how we were going to move forward at this rate.

I also worried that my husband was very isolated. Our social milieu was a bit thin for someone used to falling asleep to the music of his neighbors bickering and weeping on the other side of thin apartment walls and waking up to their cheery resurrection. He was comfortable in crowds, and I guessed the stillness of our country home stirred feelings of loss. When I suggested he might like to go to
the Chinese Community Center to talk with some other people in Mandarin, he said no, he'd already talked with many Chinese people in China. I fretted about making things just right for him even though I didn't know what just right should be. Whenever my heavy thinking got out of hand, my husband said I'd best do some heavy work so that at the end of the day, I would be too tired to think.

One chill day I woke to find my husband already out in the foggy drizzle tying up a gigantic flat rock about five feet by three feet and at least ten inches thick. What must have made a handsome door stone to the house or milk room years ago was about to be used to implement Zhong-hua's brand of geological existentialism. “If you have no thing to do, you can help,” he offered. “OK,” I said cheerfully. I was always up for doing things that had no apparent purpose and took tremendous effort. The two of us, with ropes, pry bars, wedges, and boards, strategized all day, prying up first one edge and then another, shoving the boards underneath as skids. Sometimes the stone slid half an inch and sometimes a whole foot. Sometimes it slid an inch back uphill, defying the laws of gravity. My husband kept saying “Just try.” I never asked why.

We moved the massive piece of granite from somewhat near the house down the bank to the pond's edge, where it platformed into the pond like the dock to a dream. Darkness fell, and the drizzle turned to downpour. In the end we were both covered with mud, his pants were wet to the thigh, and my knuckles dripped blood. I looked back up the hill, where the stone had ripped up the grass as it lurched and slid, and remarked that, actually, the stone would be more useful at the top of the hill as the step to the kitchen door. Zhong-hua said, “Good idea. You want, you do.”

Following Zhong-hua's theory of how best to convert worry to aching muscle mass, I decided that it would be best for us to find outdoor work together. Our bodies were not young enough to do heavy labor every day and feel happy about it, but in our situation our bodies were the best resource available to us. We scraped and painted decks, pruned trees, pulled weeds, and shoveled gravel.
Although hauling manure in a wheelbarrow and digging up daylilies was not easy, the hourly pay was good with two people working.

Zhong-hua wore his headphones and listened to English 900 tapes, the ones with monotone voices having a conversation in English devoid of emotion and almost devoid of meaning. “Bob, were you kidding yesterday, because if you were kidding yesterday, then I am leaving next Tuesday afternoon.” “Don't leave, Steve. Please don't leave. I was not kidding yesterday afternoon. I will not kid you tomorrow, Steve. I will not kid you next week.” Zhong-hua's face grew slack in the shade of his straw hat. His features thickened, and his personality vanished. It was as if he'd summoned some ancestral farmhand to take his place while he listened in on Bob and Steve. The farmhand was an opaque shadow in human form and had a lot more stamina than I did. Zhong-hua spoke once and slapped me on the back in order to prod me into completing the fifth hour. “One more hour. One day, one hundred dollars, is OK. Tonight body very tired, very pain, don't need think anything. Just sleep is OK. Don't need think about terrible things.”

Driving and Drinking

I
N CHINA
, my husband had never driven a car. He was sure he could learn in two hours. He owned a big motorcycle in China. How different could it be? First of all, he had a general irreverence for rules. The centerline had no significance to him. The lanes held no association to restricted sideways movement. Pulling out of a side road onto the main route, oncoming car in view, a hastened version of his motto “Maybe OK. Try!” was put into action, often shortened to “Try!” My teeth clenched, and I felt as if I were swallowing my tongue as the other car roared up on our rear bumper, horn blasting in alarm. Country drivers in big-wheeled pickup trucks sped up and skinned past us, shouting obscenities and flinging the finger. I instructed Zhong-hua that the person on the main road had right-of-way and that a red light meant STOP until the light changed to green.

“I don't think so.”

“What do you mean, you don't think so? Red means don't go. You have to wait; that's the law.”

“In China, who can go, just go. Is OK. Big road, small road, left turn, right turn—this doesn't matter. Just watch, see, look at. OK—go. Not OK—not go. Also, people drive on any side of the road. Which side open, which side drive.”

“What if another car is coming the other way, for God's sake?”

“No problem. Just not hit other car—is OK.”

“Watch out! That guy is passing you on the right because you're in the fast lane. You should be in the slow lane. Stay in your lane! Stay in your lane!”

“Another driver say, ‘Asshole.' What is
asshole
?”

“It means he's mad. Get over, get over! Holy shit!”

I was gasping and holding on to the ceiling. My feet were braced against the dash. My husband sighed and said I “must be” ride in the backseat because I was making him nervous and this was “very danger.” He pulled over on the shoulder, and I got out, took a few deep breaths, and repositioned myself rigidly in the far right side of the backseat, mostly pressing my mouth closed but still involuntarily yelping “Stay in your lane! Signal! Signal! I showed you these words in the dictionary a hundred times! Do you know what a lane is?”

I wasn't in the habit of drinking alcohol, but for several weeks, as soon as we returned home alive from a driving excursion, I sedated myself with Chinese wine, the kind that numbs your mouth like Novocain for a full hour. Zhong-hua must have scared himself, too. He pointed out that our license plate number contained four
4
s. This was a very bad thing.
Si
, the word for the number
4
, sounds similar and is written identically to the word
si
, meaning death. We had to quickly change this, even though it meant paying extra. He dedicated an evening to playing with number combinations, finally arriving at one that seemed auspicious and contained no
4
s.

Barren winter trees allowed our retired neighbors, Dave and Flippy, to better keep a watchful eye on the chain of events at our place, which they greatly enjoyed. Often Dave would telephone after observing us struggling to accomplish some impossible task: “Hey, it's Dave. I wasn't doing anything today and wondered if you want me to bring my tractor up. I can pull that car out of the ditch easy, if you want me to. I mean if you don't want me to, I won't. But no sense you two hurting yourselves.” We were very grateful for Dave and the tractor.

They waved each time Zhong-hua drove past to practice driving with me in the backseat. They probably thought this was another Chinese custom, along with setting the garden mulch on fire with a couple of plastic detergent bottles, shooting mourning doves, and chain-smoking while overseeing the wife mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow. Zhong-hua rolled down the window, veering inadvertently toward them, and bellowed, “Hi, hi, hi, how are you?” The rural American custom of waving to everyone whether you know them or not was very alien to Zhong-hua, but he made up for his discomfort by trying extrahard to conform.

Once out on Route 2, we lurched along, first twenty miles under speed, then twenty miles over speed, swerving from side to side as I squawked over and over, “Stay in your lane! Stay in your lane!” At stoplights we looked straight ahead to avoid the glowering faces of other drivers. After a few weeks, their furious looks sobered Zhong-hua to the point that his most common transgression on the road became going too slow in an effort to be extracareful.

We had returned home late at night from Da Jie's house through blackness blossoming spring snowflakes. We pulled up close to the kitchen door. I was so appreciative when Zhong-hua said he would put the car in the garage. All that driving practice was worth it to have help late at night in the cold. He reappeared a few minutes later and just stood in the doorway. “Sorry!” He started quaking in silent laughter, looking down at the floor and shaking his head.

“Sorry?”

“Yessss! Very, very sorry.” He started laughing again. “You see!” He pulled me after him into the snow to the garage, which was made of aluminum hoops covered with vinyl. I looked in at where the car should be, but there was nothing there. I lifted my eyes, and there were the still-lit taillights of the car, going west through a gaping hole in the other end of the garage. I ran around the outside of the garage and beheld the front three-fourths of the car hanging out in midair over the stone embankment. The Triple-A tow truck came and pulled the car back into the garage, no questions asked.
The car was not harmed, and we managed to sew the vinyl back together with giant sutures of heavy black thread. I held the pieces edge to edge while Zhong-hua sewed. The next time it happened, a week later, the same Triple-A driver came to the door. “I know what to do, ma'am,” he said.

The day arrived in May to take the road test. The testing officer had a crew cut, thick eyebrows, and no waist. She rested a clipboard on her stomach to reference the rules. She didn't crack a smile. I sat in my backseat station. My husband was so nervous that he never exceeded ten miles per hour and stopped dead at every intersection, Stop sign or no Stop sign. He proceeded to the middle of the intersection and stopped again, dead. Brakes squealed behind us. The woman became red-faced and perspiring. “You almost got us killed! Have you ever driven before? You are a horrible driver! Horrible!”

This first failed test was very disappointing, and my husband was determined not to flunk the second test three weeks later. He remarked with some disgust that America was, apparently, not that different from China, in that people judged you according to outward attire. Accordingly, before leaving the house, he gelled his hair, put on the suit jacket, by now two sizes too large, and fastened Cupid to the lapel.

A young man greeted us curtly, clutching his clipboard as if to rein in his natural friendliness. Zhong-hua went to work. They were hardly out of the parking lot before he started inquiring about the young man's love life and offering advice. In the midst of his parallel-parking attempt and with one tire still up on the curb, he offered a 25 percent discount at the natural foods store and explained that he could not learn certain things at his advanced age of forty-four but needed the license in order to support the family. After Zhong-hua failed to signal a lane change and made an incomplete stop, the young man stammered weakly, “Yeah, OK, cool,” to Zhong-hua's offer of free Tai Chi lessons and a bushel of Chinese cucumbers with some hot peppers thrown in once they were ripe.