The Wondrous Woo Page 6

  “Oh, the bush,” I repeated, forcing a laugh. I didn’t think it was funny. Why would you call the woods “the bush”? The bush simply conjured up images for me of the neat hedges our Scarborough neighbours kept trimmed.

  I would have felt truly stupid if he hadn’t picked me up, dusted me off, and wrapped his arms around me from behind so we skated as one. We were from two different worlds; we should not have found one another or come together the way we did. But I believed, as we held tight to each others’ bodies and glided over the bumpy ice, that we were beating our own odds.

  My deepened sense of romance about us was furthered every time we had sex. It just got better and better the better I got at it. I couldn’t get enough of Jerry’s body on mine. I needed him to be with me. Needed him with his tongue thrust in my mouth and his hips tucked between my legs. I inhaled him deep into me. Only Jerry could have stopped me from getting more.

  “Aren’t you tired, girl? Shit. You are some kind of sex machine or something.” He would shake his head while I licked his chest. I would devour him if he would let me.

  I was convinced that this desire was changing me. Kathleen remarked on how bright my eyes were, like two beams of light shooting out of my head. I believed her. I felt like a feral animal, perpetually hungry. When we were not having sex, I was just waiting for the next time we would. I didn’t mind that once we were done, Jerry would pick himself up, get dressed, and go out to where his friends were watching TV or drinking beer. I believed he was putting up appearances, but, in bed, with me, was where he was most at home.

  Because the North Bay crew was so often around, it was as if I was dating the whole crowd of them. To spend time with Jerry, my life became his routine. Hockey Night in Canada at least twice a week, and then to a series of pubs they frequented to pass the time away. His friends were nice enough, but I didn’t always understand their conversations: people they knew in their hometowns, drinking games that they thought were funny, and sports mishaps from seasons gone by. What mattered the most was that I was with Jerry. Whoever happened to be there was just backdrop.

  I studied other girlfriends to see if I was doing it right. There was a way they looked at their boyfriends — an upward tilt of the head, a coy smile, a playing with the eyes, a giggle that I could never fully master. A touch on the arm meant, “remember you’re with me.” A touch on the leg said, “I want to be alone.” Clever one-liners were heavy with sexual innuendo. There were a million fine details that went along with being someone’s girl. While some maneuvers I was better at (the shy looking up, a Princess Diana move), other endeavours were less successful (my giggle sounded like a hyena’s).

  So I took care of Jerry. I cooked him macaroni and cheese. I went to his classes with him and helped him take notes and wrote his essays. I cleaned his two plaid shirts. Once, I overheard one of his friends say, “You have your own personal geisha girl, Jer.” They all laughed, thinking I couldn’t hear because I was in the kitchen fetching Jerry a beer. I heard fine, but I didn’t care. As long as Jerry wanted me, everything was wonderful.

  Jerry lived on campus, where he shared a room with another student from up north. But when he got too drunk to find his way back home, I would guide him lovingly to my place.

  On one beer-soaked night, Jerry disclosed to me that his father beat him. Not just when he was a kid, but even now, as an adult. And not just a wallop to the bum every so often, but episodes that involved whipping a belt against his back, crashing furniture over his head, and holding a broken bottle against his throat. Jerry’s dad was a drunk, a good-for-nothing wife-beater. His mother had long ago split, and had left Jerry and his little brother to their own survival devices. Jerry had done everything possible to get the marks to get into university. And the night he told me all of this, he sobbed into my lap, snot and tears soaking my acid-washed jeans. I stroked his hair and vowed silently that I would love him even more.

  After this, I finally began to open up with my own little stories about Scarborough. Like how it had been when we first bought our house and my family would sit on the curb, eating from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and gazing at the frame of our house as it was being built. We had imagined what each room would look like. Sophia and I had decided to paint ours pink, of course. Ma had wanted to plant a garden in the small backyard to grow tomatoes, beans, and roses. When we finally moved in, it was spring, and one day, men came in trucks and rolled out dozens of grass strips on the dirt. Sophia had marvelled at this and thought grass was carpet for the longest time.

  I also tentatively told Jerry about Ma’s nerves, and how one day, shortly after we had moved into the house in Scarborough, Ma began to hallucinate. The first episode had come after an incident at the Woolco cafeteria when I was ten. It was $1.44 day and we had been on a back-to-school shopping mission. After selecting new socks, underwear, sweaters, and the infinitely important Laurentian pencil crayons in the requisite twenty-four colours, we had stood in line at the lunch counter as a special treat. I had been entranced with the rice pudding, a congealed paste of yellowing white in a glass dessert dish, topped with three wiggling raisins and covered in Saran Wrap. Darwin had been all about the french fries, and Sophia had chosen the hot chicken sandwich drowned in brown gravy, all highly coveted foods we never got to eat at home. We had slid our trays along the stainless steel counter and ordered from the ladies in hairnets.

  After Sophia got her stringy chicken, sandwiched by white bread with a pile of brown steaming goop on top, we heard the shouts from one of the tables. “Go back to where you came from,” the kids had sniggered.

  We had snapped to attention, our backs like steel rods.

  Ma had whispered to us in Cantonese, “Don’t look. Just ignore.”

  But we couldn’t help it. We had to look. I snuck a peek while Sophia turned fully around to face them. There they sat, three white boys, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, nursing milkshakes and blowing the pink and brown goop at each other with straws. They had laughed and pointed at Sophia. My face had flushed with heat and I had begun to shake. Darwin had looked up at Ma. Then Sophia, with all the might in her seven-year-old body, had shouted back at them, “Shut up, you bloody asshole. Bloody, bloody, hell assholes,” she screamed. It was every curse word she had ever learned in her young life, thrown together like a salad.

  Not a second had gone by when Ma reached up and slapped Sophia across the face with such force that she wavered before falling, dragging her lunch down with her to the ground. She sat on the floor, clawing at the gravy burning her face and arms, chicken pieces and soggy bread all over her clothes. The teenagers had collapsed into heaving laughter that reached into my body and made me feel sick.

  Sophia had then stood up, letting the food fall from her, and in a low voice that was cold and steady, she turned to Ma and said, “I hate you.”

  I had kept my eyes straight ahead, looking past the counter to the server’s face. The server had a scoop of mashed potatoes in her hand, a plate in the other. She froze the moment Ma had slapped Sophia. The old woman’s eyes had filled with horror. I had wanted to shout, “This is all wrong! It’s the boys, the boys are to blame!”

  The cashier had rushed over with a wet cloth and proceeded to clean up Sophia, clucking quiety, “Tsk, tsk. You poor dear.” Another staff person appeared, and the teenagers were asked to leave. I had heard about things like this happening, but my eyes remained locked on the server’s face. Finally, the server turned her eyes on me and startled, as if she had seen a ghost. I was not sure what my face looked like in that moment, but I guessed it must have been horrible.

  That night, Ma met what came to be known as “the hands.” At first, she told Ba that a pair of hands was following her. The pair became a hundred, then a thousand, then countless, all lurking in the shadows. They would make obscene gestures, slap at her, and pull her hair. Ma had become terrified, staying in bed with the blankets pulled over he
r head to escape them. She kept asking to go home, over and over, getting louder and more frightened. We heard her through the bedroom door.

  Later, Ba had asked us what had happened at the mall that day, but we just shrugged our shoulders and avoided each other’s eyes. We were too scared and confused to know what to tell him. Maybe it had even been our fault.

  After that, no one could predict when the shadows would strike. It was random. Things could be okay for months and months, to a point where no one even worried about it anymore, and then, furtively, like animals coming out to prey at night, the hands would return. I told Jerry that this was what had troubled me most since Ba died. No one knew when the hands would come back to claim Ma. I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t want to have to. I wanted Ba to do it.

  I had never told this to anyone, but I told Jerry. There was a part of me that knew it would be impossible for him to understand, but I wanted him to, so badly.

  “Aw, baby. People are just shit, ya know.” He shook his head with his arms around me. “There’re just some shitty, shitty people in the world.”

  I nodded. Jerry was sweet, but I knew he really didn’t get what happened in Woolco or my family.

  I didn’t think any outsider could understand if he didn’t know my family, but it was not like I could sit and chat with Ba about our stories. But I realized I needed to tell the stories, even just to remind myself of who I was.

  Chapter 11 ~

  They did not recognize her as a princess. For her own protection from the Emperor’s enemies who wanted to overthrow him, Qian had to don the clothes of a pauper and walk among the common people. Her mother, the Empress, would not allow her to fight with her father’s army, thinking her only child needed to live to continue the royal lineage. To the villagers, she was just the lowly daughter of the pig farmer, smeared in dirt and manure. She longed for her blow-dryer. She longed for her Chanel N°5. Instead, she shovelled pig shit and tolerated her own stench.

  ONE JANUARY NIGHT of that first school year, in the middle of Hockey Night in Canada, a commercial previewed an upcoming feature news story on CBC: “Two geniuses. One family. An Immigrant Success Story!” Then came a shot of Darwin in his little tuxedo as he stood with a violin on a lit stage, a full orchestra behind him. The next shot was of Sophia standing on a chair in front of a large blackboard in a lecture hall, scribbling a series of symbols and numbers while a hundred people in the audience sat on the edge of their seats, riveted. “Watch CBC news at eleven.” Still too absorbed in the hockey game, the North Bay boys didn’t even notice the commercial.

  I spent the rest of third period in a sweat, debating whether I should tell them or not. The New York Rangers and the Toronto Maple Leafs bashed it out on the ice while I bashed it out in my head. On the one hand, I was really proud of Sophia and Darwin. On the other hand, I would have to explain The Gifts, and they would probably wonder why I wasn’t special. For the first time in my life, I had been feeling like I actually was special. I was special just for fitting in so seamlessly in this new world. I didn’t want to tip the balance.

  The Rangers won. The boys sat dejected, and their Leafs jerseys looked just as deflated as the boys slumped over their beers. The predictable post-game chatter came on, but with a 7-0 loss, there really wasn’t much to talk about. When first the commercials, then the familiar CBC signal came on, the North Bay boys started moving around, getting restless for the next activity. Watching the news wasn’t usually on the agenda after games. But then. The story began:

  “One family. Two child prodigies. Less than a year ago, life changed forever for the Woo children when they discovered their extraordinary talents, which took them from Scarborough, Ontario, to the concert and lecture halls of the world.”

  First came a shot of Darwin with the violin under his chin. His vigorous playing of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons rocked his small body back and forth. He had gotten new glasses, I noticed. They were round tortoiseshell frames and made him look like a child playing grown-up.

  “Holy shit. Look at that kid.” Dave pointed at the screen.

  Then came a close-up of Darwin’s round face. His hair was still too heavy for him, like a black lid on his head, and he smiled widely for the camera. He was wearing the tuxedo, the one that a tailor had custom-made for him for his first concert performance. The interviewer asked him what music meant to him. Dar shrugged and said in his high voice, “It’s a living.” The North Bay boys howled with laughter. When asked if there was anything else he wanted to say, he waved frantically at the camera and yelled, “Hi, Miramar!” Then the North Bays boys stopped laughing and stared at me.

  Next was a shot of Sophia lecturing a group of undergrads. She was wearing one of her signature off-the-shoulder sweatshirts. Sophia was always proud of her ability to cut up these sweatshirts so they hung just right. It looked like she had gotten a perm and her luxurious hair now hung in ringlets all over. “Hey, is that chick cross-eyed?” one of the boys laughed. “Shut up,” Jerry snapped.

  Then came the narrator again: “Sophia Woo, at the tender age of fifteen, is a part-time lecturer at McGill University. She completed her doctorate in a mere four months, astounding the mathematical world with her genius.”

  “Tell us, Sophia, when did you first realize you were a genius?” the interviewer asked. They were sitting in an office, Sophia’s office, I assumed. Behind her stood a large blackboard covered in different coloured chalk markings — Sophia’s formulas.

  “Since as early as I can remember I knew I was special. I just didn’t know in what way until the math hit me,” Sophia smiled demurely. She looked beautiful.

  “Hit you? Is that how you would best describe it?”

  “Sure, it wasn’t there one day, and then suddenly it just happened. Numbers and symbols started floating around right here.” She touched her forehead. “They had to come out. It was like a Tetris game, ya know? All the numbers had a place and they just fit.”

  The narrator talked a bit about Scarborough and flashed scenes of strip malls and of our old high school. “From this suburban neighbourhood came the wondrous talents of these two extraordinary children.” The scene switched to Ma. “What do you think of your kids?” Ma stood on a stage in front of a piano. Darwin sat next to her on the bench.

  “My children … they work hard,” Ma said. “I am proud.” This made my eyes well. And me, Ma? I wondered. Are you proud of me, too?

  “Do you worry about them? I mean, peaking so young?”

  “Peking? No, no, we from Hong Kong. Not Peking,” Ma smiled, shaking her head. I knew exactly what my mother was thinking: Gweilos think we’re all from Beijing.

  The narrator concluded: “There you have it. An immigrant success. A wholly Canadian story.”

  The scene closed with another shot of Darwin playing the piano on the same stage. This time the narrator said it was Joseph Haydn.

  “Whoa! Miramar! Was that your family?” Dave asked. Kathleen was sitting on the edge of her seat, her eyes wide. Uh-oh, I thought. More psychoanalyzing was going to come out of this.

  “Yep,” I shrugged, trying to look casual. They all started talking at once.

  “Wait. One at a time. I can’t hear all of you.” I held my hands in front of my face.

  I thought I would have to field questions, but they mainly had comments. The general consensus was that it was “really cool.”

  “Now I get why you’re so smart. It’s in the genes,” Kathleen said warmly. They all agreed, calling me a brainer. I laughed with them. I couldn’t believe that they thought I was special enough just as I was. I didn’t elaborate on the circumstance of The Gifts. I didn’t know how to explain that, and I sensed the CBC producer didn’t either since Ba had not come up.

  Jerry swung his arm around me. This should have relaxed me, but instead, a panic grew. They were just being nice, I thought, and were really wondering what was wron
g with me. The North Bay boys told me they thought Sophia was really hot, and that Darwin was a real hoot. They even said Ma spoke excellent English. I stuffed down my insecurities. I should have just been proud of my family. I should have just said, “Thank you.” There were a million “shoulds” in the world, or in my world anyway, but they didn’t add up to squat. I was still the same boring Miramar Woo from Scarborough. Some things were no different.

  Chapter 12 ~

  Wen was drunk with love. She absent-mindedly mopped the floors, leaving streaks of dirty water across the stones. She burned the rice and received a slap across the face from the mistress. Her eyes were fevered, and her head was hollowed. She paid no attention to anything else but the thought of how to keep her lover from leaving her. Her friend Pat’s words reverberated – love really was a battlefield.

  ALL THAT WINTER, Kathleen took to knitting. On some nights, when Jerry didn’t call, I would sit with her in the living room while she taught me. We made long scarves that fell down our laps, snaked across our legs, and swam all over the floor around us. Kathleen said she hated to finish the scarves because they were just so pretty. She chose her colours and yarns carefully — lilacs matched with purples and blues and greens. Mine were all solid colours since I didn’t yet know how to change yarn. The one I was working on was already too long, but I decided I would not finish it until I heard from Jerry. It had been a full three days.

  Kathleen took these opportunities to talk about her ex-boyfriend whom she referred to as “The Love of My Life,” “The Only Man I Really Loved,” or “William Dexter Michael Rowan.”

  “We were meant for each other, you know. The moment I laid eyes on William Dexter Michael Rowan, I knew he was my soulmate. You know about that, right?” She looked over at me for confirmation. I nodded, but didn’t take my eyes off my needles.