(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter (3 page)

“Ruth!” Art said in a warning tone. “The girls are going to be late.”

“I’m really sorry, Wendy. I have to take the girls to ice-skating school—”

Wendy interrupted. “Mommy married her personal trainer! That’s what she called to tell me. He’s thirty-eight, she’s sixty-four. Can you believe it?”

“Oh… Wow.” Ruth was stunned. She pictured Mrs. Scott with a groom in a bow tie and gym shorts, the two of them reciting vows on a treadmill. Was Wendy upset? She wanted to say the right thing. What, though? About five years before, her own mother had had a boyfriend of sorts, but he had been eighty. Ruth had hoped T.C. would marry LuLing and keep her occupied. Instead T.C. had died of a heart attack.

“Listen, Wendy, I know this is important, so can I call you back after I drop off the girls? “

Once she had hung up. Ruth reminded herself of the tasks she needed to do today. Ten things, and she tapped first her thumb. One, take the girls to skating school. Two, pick up Art’s suits at the dry cleaner’s. Three, buy groceries for dinner. Four, pick up the girls from the rink and drop them off at their friend’s house on Jackson Street. Five and Six, phone calls to that arrogant client, Ted, then Agapi Agnos, whom she actually liked. Seven, finish the outline for a chapter of Agapi Agnos’s book. Eight, call her agent, Gideon, whom Wendy disliked. And Nine—what the hell was Nine? She knew what Ten was, the last task of the day. She had to call Miriam, Art’s ex-wife, to ask if she would let them have the girls the weekend of the Full Moon Festival dinner, the annual reunion of the Youngs, which she was hosting this year.

So what was Nine? She always organized her day by the number of digits on her hands. Each day was either a five or a ten. She wasn’t rigid about it: add-ons were accommodated on the toes of her feet, room for ten unexpected tasks. Nine, Nine… She could make calling Wendy number One and bump everything back. But she knew that call should be a toe, an extra, an Eleven. What was Nine? Nine was usually something important, a significant number, what her mother termed the number of fullness, a number that also stood for
Do not forget, or risk losing all.
Did Nine have something to do with her mother? There was always
something
to worry about with her mother. That was not anything she had to remember in particular. It was a state of mind.

LuLing was the one who had taught her to count fingers as a memory device. With this method, LuLing never forgot a thing, especially lies, betrayals, and all the bad deeds Ruth had done since she was born. Ruth could still picture her mother counting in the Chinese style, pointing first to her baby finger and bending each finger down toward her palm, a motion that Ruth took to mean that all other possibilities and escape routes were closed. Ruth kept her own fingers open and splayed, American style. What was Nine? She put on a pair of sturdy sandals.

Art appeared at the doorway. “Sweetie? Don’t forget to call the plumber about the hot-water tank.”

The plumber was
not
going to be number Nine, Ruth told herself, absolutely not. “Sorry, honey, but could you call? I’ve got a pretty full day.”

“I have meetings, and three appeals coming up.” Art worked as a linguistics consultant, this year on cases involving deaf prisoners who had been arrested and tried without access to interpreters.

It’s your house, Ruth was tempted to say. But she forced herself to sound reasonable, unassailable, like Art. “Can’t you call from your office in between meetings?”

“Then I have to phone you and figure out when you’ll be here for the plumber.”

“I don’t know
exactly
when I’ll be home. And you know those guys. They say they’re coming at one, they show up at five. Just because I work at home doesn’t mean I don’t have a real job. I’ve got a really crazy day. For one thing, I have to…” And she started to list her tasks.

Art slumped his shoulders and sighed. “Why do you have to make everything so
difficult?
I just thought
if
it were possible,
if
you had time— Aw, forget it.” He turned away.

“Okay, okay, I’ll take care of it. But if you get out of your meetings early, can you come home?”

“Sure thing.” Art gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Hey, thanks. I wouldn’t have asked if I weren’t completely swamped.” He kissed her again. “Love you.”

She didn’t answer, and after he left, she grabbed her coat and keys, then saw the girls standing at the end of the hallway, staring critically at her. She wiggled her big toe. Twelve, hot water.

Ruth started the car and pumped the brakes to make sure they worked. As she drove Fia and Dory to the skating rink, she was still mulling over what Nine might be. She ran through the alphabet, in case any of those letters might trigger a memory. Nothing. What had she dreamed the night before, when she finally fell asleep? A bedroom window, a dark shape in the bay. The curtains, she now recalled, had turned out to be sheer and she was naked. She had looked up and saw the neighbors in nearby apartments grinning. They had been watching her most private moments, her most private
parts.
Then a radio began to blare.
Whonk! Whonk! Whonk!
“This has been a test of the American Broadcasting System’s early-warning signal for disaster preparedness.” And another voice came on, her mother’s: “No, no, this is not test! This real!” And the dark shape in the bay rose and became a tidal wave.

Maybe number Nine was related to the plumber after all: tidal wave, broken water heater. The puzzle was solved. But what about the sheer curtains? What did that mean? The worry billowed up again.

“You know that new girl Darien likes?” she heard Fia say to her sister. “She has the best hair. I could just kill her.”

“Don’t say ‘kill’!” Dory intoned. “Remember what they told us in assembly last year? Use that word, go to jail.”

Both girls were in the backseat. Ruth had suggested that one of them sit up front with her, so she wouldn’t feel like a chauffeur. But Dory had replied, “It’s easier to open just one door.” Ruth had said nothing in response. She often suspected the girls were testing her, to see if they could get a rise out of her. When they were younger, they had loved her, Ruth was sure of it. She had felt that with a ticklish pleasure in her heart. They used to argue over who could hold her hand or sit next to her. They had cuddled against her when scared, as they had often pretended to be, squeaking like helpless kittens. Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls.

Dory was thirteen and chunky, larger than her fifteen-year-old sister. They wore their long chestnut hair alike, pulled into ponytails high on their heads so that they cascaded like fountain spray. All their friends wore their hair in an identical style, Ruth had noticed. When she was their age, she had wanted to grow her hair long the way the other girls did, but her mother made her cut it short. “Long hair look like suicide maiden,” Lu-Ling had said. And Ruth knew she was referring to the nursemaid who had killed herself when her mother was a girl. Ruth had had nightmares about that, the ghost with long hair, dripping blood, crying for revenge.

Ruth pulled up to the unloading zone at the rink. The girls scrambled out of the car and swung their satchels onto their backs. “See ya!” they shouted.

Suddenly Ruth noticed what Fia was wearing—low-slung jeans and a cropped shirt that bared a good six inches of belly. She must have had her jacket zipped up when they had left home. Ruth lowered the car window and called out: “Fia, sweetie, come here a second… . Am I wrong, or did your shirt shrink drastically in the last ten minutes?”

Fia turned around slowly and rolled her eyes upward.

Dory grinned. “I told you she would.”

Ruth stared at Fia’s navel. “Does your mother
know
you’re wearing that?”

Fia dropped her mouth in mock shock, her reaction to most things. “Uh, she
bought
it for me, okay?”

“Well, I don’t think your dad would approve. I want you to keep your jacket on, even when you’re skating. And Dory, you tell me if she doesn’t.”

“I’m not telling on nobody!”

Fia turned and walked away.

“Fia? Fia! Come back here. You promise me now, or I’m going to take you home to change clothes.”

Fia stopped but didn’t turn around. “All right,” she grumbled. As she yanked up the jacket zipper, she said to Dory, loud enough for Ruth to hear: “Dad’s right. She loves to make everything
sooo difficult.”

The remark both humiliated and rankled her. Why had Art said that, and especially in front of the girls? He knew how much that would hurt her. A former boyfriend had once told her she made life more complicated than it was, and after they broke up, she was so horrified that his accusations might be true that she made it a point to be reasonable, to present facts, not complaints. Art knew that and had even assured her the boyfriend was a jerk. Yet he still sometimes teased that she was like a dog that circles and bites its own tail, not recognizing she was only making herself miserable.

Ruth thought of a book she had helped write a few years before,
The Physics of Human Nature.
The author had recast the principles of physics into basic homilies to remind people of self-defeating behavioral patterns. “The Law of Relative Gravity”: Lighten up. A problem is only as heavy as you let it be. “The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The Centrifugal Force of Arguments”: The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

At the time, Ruth thought the analogies and advice were simplistic. You couldn’t reduce real life into one-liners. People were more complex than that. She certainly was, wasn’t she? Or was she too
complicated?
Complex, complicated, what was the difference? Art, on the other hand, was the soul of understanding. Her friends often said as much: “You are
so
lucky.” She had been proud when she first heard that, believing she had chosen well in love. Lately she had considered whether they might have meant he was to be admired for putting up with
her.
But then Wendy reminded her, “You were the one who called Art a fucking saint.” Ruth wouldn’t have put it that way, but she knew the sentiment must have been true. She remembered that before she ever loved Art, she had admired him—his calm, the stability of his emotions. Did she still? Had he changed, or was it she? She drove toward the dry cleaner’s, mulling over these questions.

She had met Art nearly ten years before, at an evening yoga class she had attended with Wendy. The class was her first attempt in years to exercise. Ruth was naturally thin and didn’t have an incentive at first to join a health club. “A thousand bucks a year,” she had marveled, “to jump on a machine that makes you run like a hamster in a wheel?” Her preferred form of exercise, she told Wendy, was stress. “Clench muscles, hold for twelve hours, release for a count of five, then clench again.” Wendy, on the other hand, had put on thirty-five pounds since her days as a high school gymnast and was eager to get back into shape. “Let’s at least take the free fitness test,” she said. “No obligation to join.”

Ruth secretly gloated when she scored better than Wendy in sit-ups. Wendy cheered aloud at besting Ruth in push-ups. Ruth’s body-fat ratio was a healthy twenty-four percent. Wendy’s was thirty-seven. “It’s the enduring genetics of my Chinese peasant stock,” Ruth kindly offered. But then Ruth scored in the “very poor” range for flexibility. “Wow,” Wendy remarked. “According to this chart, that’s about one point above rigor mortis.”

“Look here, they have yoga,” Wendy later said as they perused the schedule of classes at the club. “I hear yoga can change your life. Plus they have night classes.” She nudged Ruth. “It might help you get over Paul.”

In the locker room that first night, they overheard two women talking. “The guy next to me asked if I’d like to go with him to that midnight class, Togaless Yoga. You know, he says, the
nude
one.”

“Nude?
What a scumbag! . . . Was he at least good-looking?”

“Not bad. But can you imagine facing the naked butts of twenty people doing Downward-Facing Dog?” The two women walked out of the locker room. Ruth turned to Wendy. “Who the hell would do nude yoga?”

“Me,” Wendy said. “And don’t look at me like that, Miss Shock-and-Dismay. At least it wouldn’t be boring.”

“Nude, with total strangers?”

“No, with my CPA, my dentist, my boss. Who do you think?”

In the crowded workout room, thirty disciples, most of them women, were staking out their turf, then adjusting mats as stragglers came in. When a man rolled out his mat next to Ruth’s, she avoided looking at him, in case he was the scumbag. She glanced around. Most of the women had pedicured nails, precision-applied nail polish. Ruth’s feet were broad, and her naked toes looked like the piggies from the children’s rhyme. Even the man next to her had better-looking feet, smooth skin, perfectly tapered toes. And then she caught herself—she shouldn’t have nice thoughts about the feet of a potential pervert.

The class started with what sounded like a cult incantation, followed by poses that seemed to be saluting a heathen god.
“Urdhva Muka Svanasana! Adho Muka Svanasana!”
Everyone except Ruth and Wendy knew the routines. Ruth followed along as if she were playing Simon Says. Every now and then the yoga teacher, a ropy-muscled woman, walked by and casually bent, tilted, or lifted a part of Ruth’s body. I probably look like a torture victim, Ruth thought, or one of those freaks my mother saw in China, boneless beggar boys who twisted themselves up for the amusement of others. By this time she was perspiring heavily and had observed enough about the man next to her to be able to describe him to the police, if necessary. “The nude yoga rapist was five-eleven, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. He had dark hair, large brown eyes and thick eyebrows, a neatly cropped beard and mustache. His fingernails were clean, perfectly trimmed.”