Joan Is Okay(19)

If either Fang or I couldn’t go to school—rare, but sometimes happened from seasonal flu—I was in charge of writing our sick notes for our mother to sign. But since she didn’t like the sight of her own cursive, I was tasked with forging her signature as well.

I hated all of my tasks of course—the standard juvenile complaint of why me? and why did some parents clear entire forests for their children but not mine?—though with time, what I hated more was seeing my parents get bullied, for no real reason except the obvious.

Big words aside, the language of medicine has its own shorthand and lingo. Yes, the training could flatten you but it also let you into an exclusive club.

None of the jargon mattered to patients.

Give it to me simply, they and their families would request. Are you talking about the head or the heart?

I’m talking about the heart.



* * *



—

JUST THE OTHER DAY, while my mind was on my brother, mother, and the upcoming Harvest Bash, I watched a peacock cross the road. It didn’t heed walk signs and all cars had to stop or go around. For a second I thought this peacock had, out of protest, escaped Connecticut and Fang’s imminent petting zoo. A few blocks behind the bird was a small team of people dressed in tan custodial clothes. Had any of us seen Harry? they asked calmly, Harry being the peacock that had just run out of St. John the Divine. Everyone had seen Harry, so we all pointed frantically in the same direction to help.

When I called my brother to un-RSVP from their party, he was kind of mad-sounding, kind of livid, since they had already given their final numbers to the caterers. In both Chinese and English, the phrase is the same, “to take someone to school,” “to school them in x, y, and z.”

You overwork yourself, said Fang, and let yourself be bulldozed. Why are you always covering for other people but I never hear anyone covering for you? No one should be working that much. Health is wealth and time is money.

My brother could speak only in catchphrases, or only in clichés.

Had you started a private practice here, like I’d suggested, none of this would be an issue. Doctors hire other doctors under them and essentially become managers. Managing people is a skill. In time, you won’t even need to practice, you just collect the fees.

With regard to leaving the hospital and starting a practice, my position has never changed. Oranges didn’t abandon groves to start new ones of their own, only to manage other oranges and to never become juice. But my brother fought wars of attrition and thrived against resistance, so if only to move the lecture along, I simply told him that he was right.

In addition to Fang, I was talking more to my mother since she was calling me more to chat, and before we got started, I would confirm that she was in fact, calling me to chat.

You’re a very literal person, she would say. You were not always this way. You were not a very literal child.

Here’s an idea, she said, calling in the middle of the day, like yesterday and like tomorrow, to tell me something either Tami or Fang had said earlier that day.

Your brother thinks it would be better for morale if we all lived close by, within a five-mile radius.

Your sister-in-law suggested a ten-mile radius. What did you think about that?

Me? I said. What did she think about that since in either scenario, she would have to stay.

Oh, I’m not staying, she said. That’s a ridiculous idea. Her ticket was booked for February and that’s when she would leave. But she was just relaying these pieces of information to me. Do with them what you will.

The next time she called, they had gotten her a nanny. The they being my brother and sister-in-law, and without asking or consulting her. The nanny, a Chinese woman in her forties who reminded my mother of herself, when she was that age, doing a similar kind of work. After declaring that decade for her, the last spent in America, to be a mix of confusion and unhappiness, my mother said, What could a woman in her forties know, no offense to you or Tami. Moreover, she did not need a nanny.

Aide, I said.

All Nanny does is follow me around. I see her check the stove after I’ve used it. I see her tightening the knobs to make sure that I’ve shut off the gas. She brings me blankets before I can even ask for one. She would sit with me in the bathroom if she could. Continually boils me hot water.

It’s attentive, I said.

It’s a complete waste of water and electricity, she said.

I tried to change the topic. Had my mother finally seen the entire house?

She had. Every room had been viewed and sat in from every seated position, every window looked out of, and now she was bored.

They won’t let me drive, my mother said, after what she deemed another incredibly boring day. They being Fang and Tami of course but also the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, whom she had just finished a contentious phone call with because she had wanted to hash this situation out, once and for all, with a knowledgeable professional who would listen to her, but the professional had not. He had been as dismissive as everyone else.

They won’t let you drive, Mom, because your American license expired and you never got a Chinese one. If you really want a license, we’ll have to sign you up for classes and then have you retake the test.

She didn’t want to retake the test, especially not one that she had already passed.

That was over thirty years ago, I said. Over thirty years ago, you passed a test.