Part 19 (1/2)
We'll take you in.
Hattie claps. Of course, In the deepest part / Of her soul and heart / she does / does want to laugh! But she does not. Instead, she asks, Do you believe in Satan? And when Sophy says yes, Hattie asks what he looks like.
”He's like a k'maoch,” says Sophy.
”So there are ghosts in both Christianity and Buddhism?”
”It's all, like, the same thing.” Sophy makes a face Hattie's never seen before-two commas and, between them, a sea change, Lee would say.
Hattie is careful.
”So you're liking going up to the center?” she asks.
”I'm trying to drag my mom to, like, an ice cream social,” answers Sophy. ”They have a guy who plays the accordion-I know she'd just love it. This guy playing and everyone, like, laughing and joking.”
”Like your sisters have come back. Or like life in Cambodia, before Pol Pot.”
”I guess.” Sophy retunes one of her strings, turning the peg, listening, turning it some more. She tucks a stray hair behind her ear as if to help her hear better.
”A warm place,” says Hattie. ”With people you can turn to.”
”Yeah. Except people don't even care who your family is or anything.” Sophy runs a thumb down the strings, listening as each one sounds. ”It's hard to explain.”
”I think I understand-we had all that face stuff in China, too,” says Hattie. ”Everyone focused on who your family was. The church was a lot more welcoming.”
”They are!” Sophy stills the strings with a flat hand. ”You're right! A lot more! Like they gave me this pamphlet that says 'Where friends become family' and it really is true. It really is like that.”
”And doesn't that make a difference if your own family isn't doing so hot,” says Hattie.
Sophy scrutinizes her nails, which are short on one hand and long on the other. ”I just wish they'd kill each other already,” she says.
”Is your dad still hitting Sarun with the newspaper?”
”You asked me the same exact thing before. In those exact same words.”
”Did I?” Hattie gone batty! Though didn't Sophy just say something she'd said before, too? ”Just checking, Sophy.”
”Checking up on us.”
Checking in on you, Hattie would have said. But, well, never mind. With teacherly patience, she says, ”Does it bother you?”
Sophy considers, strumming. ”I probably shouldn't say that anyway.”
”No,” says Hattie. ”You shouldn't.”
”So why didn't you say so?”
”Would you have wanted me to?”
”I don't know. I guess. If you're going to think things. Yeah, I would.”
”Well, all right then. Next time, I will. I won't hold back.” Should she be promising this? Too late. ”Next time I'll say, 'Don't say that, Sophy! That's terrible!' ”
Sophy laughs so hard she has to cover her mouth. ”Where's Annie?” she asks. ”Aren't we going to have cookies?”
Yet more e-mails about money, and then this one: Dear Aunt Hattie, I don't know how to write this, but my son Alexander has died. It is a terrible story. He was, as you know, fifteen, and friends with his cousin, a year older. Of course that cousin had been having problems, as we all knew. But he'd been living in Australia. We did not see him so often, anyway. We knew he would not come back from Australia even for his father's funeral. But we did not know he was so-called paranoid schizophrenic until he came to a family reunion and beat my son to death. But that is what happened. While they were playing horseshoes, apparently they had some fight Hattie reads this e-mail again.
Can this really be because of the graves?
She begins to write, I cannot begin to say what sorrow, but then stops. What can she say, really? That will help. What can she say that will help?
You'll but lie and bleed awhile....
No.
At the end of the e-mail Hattie wants to say, For all of the horror of this, I just do not believe that moving my parents' graves will make a difference, but does not. What use can it be, parrying belief with belief? And what can the grieving hear anyhow? What with the sound of their own hearts so loud.
Hattie understands.
Still: How many more of these appeals can she read? Da gun-she sets up a file, so that when the next e-mail comes, she can simply click on it and drag it over. Then she gets out her inkstone and brushes. Though how heavy the inkstone today! And does it not seem that she is going to be working on the knots between her bamboo segments forever? Like the character for heart, xn, only without the dots, she thinks; but somehow they hook back wrong and seem to connect nothing.
She goes for a swim.
Hattie had majored in biology in college. After graduation, though, she had gotten a job teaching Chinese at a private school, where she probably would have stayed except that one hot Fourth of July, Dr. Hatch asked her how she liked it. And when she said that she liked some things but had maybe had enough of pattern drills, he said she should go back into science.
”Science?”
”You know. The systematic interrogation of the natural world.” He speared some figs on the grill; his bald head shone.
By then Hattie was no longer avoiding Carter, but when he drove up the driveway, she did still take note.
”I hadn't thought of it,” she told Dr. Hatch-noticing, as she spoke, that Carter had gotten himself a new VW convertible just like his old one, only blue. He had the top down and his radio on-bluegra.s.s-and got out of the car alone.
”Well, perhaps you should think about it,” said Dr. Hatch. ”You were good at it.”
”Was I?”
”You can't really be surprised to hear this.”
”Oh, no, Dr. Hatch. I am. I am.” A hot dog rolled off her paper plate; Dr. Hatch eyed her as she rescued it, gra.s.s clippings and all.
”You like to shake things, I've noticed,” he went on. ”Give things a shake and see what's what.”
”Do I?” And was he giving things a shake himself? He did like to get things going, she knew. ”I don't know that I shake anything on purpose. But there's a lot I don't know about the world. So maybe that's, I don't know.” She hesitated. ”A disturbance.”
Carter winked at her as he entered the yard but then went to stand as far away from her as possible-a game they used to play. But was it a game now? She tried to focus on her conversation with Dr. Hatch.
”... though there's more to your avowed ignorance, isn't there? he was saying. ”Than simple ignorance. You're interested in reality. The ding an sich, as they say. The noumenon.” (This was Dr. Hatch as Renaissance man.) ”In knowing where it lies, what it is-never mind that it always lies just beyond us, somehow. That we are like blind men groping an elephant. Even the nature of the blindness interests you. The limits of our senses, of our processing apparatus. Am I right?”