Chapter 2: Part One: Mai Announces Her Engagement

It is not possible to have a thorough understanding of my sister unless you observe many more examples than is possible without turning you away from the happy part of this story, for indeed there is a happy part, but similar to all of Tolstoy's unhappy families, the happy part is drowned by our family's unique and miserable details.

Replete in all these examples was an underlying pattern, irregular and even inconsistent at times, or perhaps constantly changing, so that it was near impossible to model my sister's behavior. But effectively helping her was based on understanding her behavior, and that could only be done if one could systematically characterize her behavior, motivation, and rationalizations. No different than anyone else, correct? Not exactly. It was always this "not exactly" that threw you. The difficulty in modeling Mai's behavior was exactly the difficult in helping her. It took a mind capable of observing, digesting, categorizing all her actions from the past, remembering them, and trying to adapt them to the future, when future actions would almost necessarily be inconsistent, or invariably unpredictable, in one small yet invariably significant direction. For the value of any scientific model is in its predictability, but even if you had the whole information set, that is, witnessed my sister’s life like St. Joseph did George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” thereby being able to in theory recreate a perfect model of my sister’s behavior, you would still have a model that only more likely than not predicted her actions. And that was on a clear, sunny day when you could see so far behind you that the future seemed almost nearer.

I was sitting in the family room up in my parents' house. I did not live there. It only seemed as if I did since I had recently spent so much time there in the past year. My mother had been ill and my father needed help so I flew home to help.

My parent's home sat on a corner lot. Red crimson, grayish bricks. Some siding on the back sides for cost efficiency. My mother had wanted a house fronting one of the man-made pondlets. I'm glad my father insisted on the corner lot because the ducks quacked a lot, and the duck droppings generously decorated the walkway round the pond. Those decorations found their way to the bottom of your shoes as you walked round the pond.

I slept in the family room because I could work on the computer at night and crash on the couch two feet away. That's how I usually worked those days, until exhaustion. It was at the end of my mother's long illness. The family room was on the second floor. My mother had always wanted a two-story house. We had been poor growing up so could afford only a one-story. By the time my parents could afford a two-story house, their four children had left. It was a very large, empty nest. My room faced east so the morning sun could heat my head at the foot of the couch almost as soon as I hit it.

Our old house was a model of disorganization. Something was always not quite right. Our house did not look like the Walton’s, or Little House on the Prairie. It was not neat. Our dish sponges smelled. There was always something on the table that should not be there. Something was always not put away in its place. Things spilled out if you opened shelves too abruptly, for all the clutter was delicately balanced so that only a pro in stashing untidy items could open a shelf door, add a say, binder or picture frame, and close it before the pile inside would come tumbling out. It was a skill that was learned from childhood and should not be attempted by non-professionals, even if on a closed circuit course.

It was a new development in the suburbs, the house my parents moved to after all their children left home. My parents moved to the fastest growing city in the region, if not the state, and one of the most noteworthy growing cities in the country. Unfortunately, with the fast development, came speedy building during which developers would shave corners a little too perfectly. Like most houses, my parents' house had a ten-year warranty, and in the eleventh year, virtually every house in the development started sinking. The lack of foundation sunk my parents' house so that the doors started not to close, cracks emanated from at least one corner of every room (usually the northeast). And the foyer had a nice crack running from the front door halfway to the carpeting, at the time I last noted. Each time I visited, it was harder to close the front door, the back door, until all the bedroom doors on the second floor could no longer completely shut unless you slammed it, as if in anger. That year of my sister's engagement, the bedroom doors were often completely closed. Simultaneously.

My mother decorated in light cream to keep the house open and airy. Thing is, we were not the neatest of families, and buttercream coffee shows stains vividly. The kitchen cupboards were done in maple pink. The counters were touched with similar pale pink. The cupboards were coated with hardened grease that somehow permeated from the stove to every cupboard door in the kitchen, above and below, nearest and farthest from the stove. On the cupboard doors nearest the stove, rusty orange grease drops permanently stuck mid-drip on the cupboard doors. That is what happens when you do not wipe cupboard doors once a year. But why should you, if you were brilliant like my parents, romantic, and had so many lofty ideas that stuffed your days so that even one day a year cleaning the cupboard doors would be taking away a valuable day of thought and ideal.

The pink maple kitchen matched the Hunter Douglass shades over the fireplace in the living room, which also showed dust amazingly well. The pinks cut the monotony of mono- to duochromatic ivory buttercream throughout the house. To this day, I am not sure if the double shades have been cleaned. They certainly have not been raised or lowered. The Hunter Douglas shades were made of two sheer fabrics that diffused a pale pink light in the living room. It was my parents' only homage to conspicuous consumption, as the altar was above the fireplace. The rest of the windows that were too high for my Dad to reach with a stepstool still had the temporary paper blinds collecting their eleventh year of dust. Actually, they looked pretty good for their paperiness, for anything less than high-end shades would have looked worse than nothing. And that is why some of the ceiling windows in the living room were left untreated. Either way, my mother achieved her desired light and airy look of openness, with a dense spattering of stains between the coffee table and the couch, and also on the carpet edging the kitchen. And a medium density of stains on the kitchen counter facing the living room interrupted the façade of cleanliness my mother attempted. As did the stains in the front room by the front door opposite the dining room. This room, the official den, held the piano we banged on in childhood with the metronome transported from our old house as well (probably sitting on top during transport so that we would be able to find it in the new house).

The walls were left white save the upper story bathroom adjoining my family room to the next room, which were wallpapered in lustrous blurry beige-brown pattern. These took on dye stains that appeared during the process of marrying sis. Across the second-floor walkway were two more bedrooms, one my father used as a work space, and one my dad slept in when he fell asleep watching television. On one side, the walkway overlooked the living room with a good glimpse of the kitchen. On the other side, where the stairs led up, the walkway overlooked the front door, with a fair glimpse into the dining room on the west and the official den, which along with our piano from youth, held another computer desk facing the front window, on which my father spent far too much time, the way I spent far too much on the computer upstairs in my room.

The master bedroom on the first floor did not have a television, for it kept my mother's sewing machine. She was a master designer and tailor. The curtains were all mom-made. They did not have the uniform crisp quality of department store drapes yet when we replaced a few with store-bought, I realized the mix and design of the fabrics my mother chose was something that heavier textiles could not achieve.

The back lawn was busily coaxed to a thriving garden of hard to find herbs, some of which I am totally in the dark regarding their arrival and habitation in this country, that my parents enjoyed regularly. My father built a tin room for the patio that was a bit too high and shanty-town for the homeowner's association. The front yard at the time housed a fish pondlet that froze every other winter unless covered with a tarp. Trees with rare fruits spotted the lawn, although most of them never bore fruit the first summer, only the second and perhaps every other henceforth. A shallow bower framed the red-black brick front entrance. Vines grew on a trellis my father built to frame the entrance as well as the front window, to offer shade from the summer sun when he was surfing the net on the computer desk in the den. My mother grew flowers, of which her prized roses were so coveted, some neighbors asked for a few. We said sure, how many? They said a dozen.

It was in the family room, my makeshift bedroom, where I was working when my sister came in to talk to me. I slept on the ivory couch; the cushions would never stay in place and would slide off onto the floor while I was sleeping. The mini two-seater couch sat at a right angle to the big couch-bed, its back to the center of three windows facing mostly south and a bit east, which meant that the curtains on the center window had to be shorter than the curtains than on the side windows, no furniture being placed next to those windows. The mini couch I used to throw my clothes, the clean clothes on the right cushion, the worn clothes that could still be worn again on the left. For years, the mini couch was covered with a bright red and black striped Mexican blanket, with a few slivers of white and green. The colors were garishly unappetizing but it stayed because I do not have a nesting instinct. Of late, a course ivory throw with soft fringe blended the mini couch into the carpet.

It was the end of Mai's trip home and she was leaving the next day. My mother had fallen ill in February; it was now November and Mai had come to help take care of our father. My oldest sister, Thuy, who was a physician and lived on the East Coast same town as Mai, did not as yet have time to visit my mother. Busy with the kids.

Mai had been in town for over a week and she was exhausted. From day one. It was difficult for her to do the things an invalid needs even with my father and me helping. Remember when you were young and very ill and your mother would bring you chicken soup, and it might have been too hot and you weakly said, "it's too hot, mom," your mom would blow on each spoonful until it was just exactly right even if one spoonful required four blows and the next spoonful required six, a mother always knows how much--not too hot, not too cold--that, dear friends, is quintessential motherhood.

Well, motherhood is composed of a million to some N-th power of details that only a mother would know and notice about her children for their comfort and happiness. For elderly parents who need care, it's not much different except children have no parental instinct for their own parents. Well, some do and most don't and a few fall in varying degrees in between, most toward the shove them off to a nursing home and visit when they aren't so busy with the kids.

My mother was not able to eat much and her meals consisted mainly of liquids. She liked her water a certain way. First, tap water filtered through Brita, then boiled through a coffee maker that never was used for coffee, only water, the coffee taste never went away. Then when the filtered then boiled water was cooled, it was poured into a pitcher or bottle, ready for my mother. Since my mother was not eating much, she would ask for a drink now and again. When she was cold, she would ask for a blanket, and when she was hot thirty minutes later, she would ask for the blanket to be taken off. This was a lot of trouble for Mai, even with my father and me helping her, and after a day of this (I had picked her up at the airport around midnight the day before last), Mai said she was tired. She was impressed that I could have helped care for our mother for several weeks, and I mentioned our father had been doing this for nine months now. He had lost almost twenty pounds.

It wasn't that it was hard, said Mai, only that getting up and getting down when she was all settled with the laptop on the couch was you know, kind of a lot of trouble to get up and interrupt what she was doing. It's a vicious cycle. If you're not active, you gain weight and your body feels sluggish. When you gain weight, you feel even more sluggish. No one in my immediate family was fat, or even overweight, yet after a few decades in cornucopia America, some of us were not as trim as the gaunt figure of an Asian immigrant that comes to mind. Which meant that getting up to get my mother some water was a hassle for some.

During Mai's visit, she helped me bring my mother to the doctor. My father was so relieved to get a break, for he and I both had to take my mother to the doctor before Mai came home, so now he got a break. It was difficult for my mother to get out of bed and walk. You had to help her up slowly, let her adjust to sitting, then when she was ready, help her stand up, wait until she was steady on her feet, and walk. Someone had to hold her up while she leaned her weight against them. There was a bag of meds, a sweater, water, munchies in case my mother needed something waiting in the doctor's office since she could barely swallow five hundred calories a day. So if my mother said she wanted a bite, literally one bite, I made sure a bite of food was available so she would not feel faint. An ice pack in case my mother had a hotflash, not the menopausal kind but the waves of heat that would burn her up so that she could not sleep and the bed underneath her burned so that she could get no rest.

Anyway, it was the first time that Mai had been involved in getting my mother out of bed to the doctor's, since that was the only place she was going these days. This particular doctor's office was less than ten minutes' drive away. It took well more than that to move my mother from the bed to the car and load up the three small bags for her. When we parked in the lot, I shouldered one tote, my purse, and my mother's sweater and was helping her out of the car. Mai was in the back; she was in charge of two bags and asked, "do we need to bring in the thermos? It's heavy." My mother looked hurt. I glared at my sister; she knew the look and shouldered the great weight of the two bags, which weighed en toto five pounds. As we approached the front entrance of the medical building, which was fifty feet away and would take us another couple of minutes to reach, I called out to my sister who was ahead inside the entrance, "Mai, hold open the door for us," as I guided my mother the last few feet to the office building. We shuffled, moving like time-lapse photography. I had so much time in between steps my mind wandered to a video of two starfish that was captured using time-lapse technology. They were battling each other for something I forget what, a female starfish? Territorial combat? I do not think it was over a scallop. But each starfish's arm took a day or more or half to lash out at its enemy, and I thought if it took that long, could one starfish, seeing its opponent begin a punch that would take twenty-eight hours to execute, stop its own punch midway, change directions, duck and throw a sucker punch, or once begun, a starfish attack was delivered without possibility of change? I wondered if the thinking process took long as well.

"Mai, open the door." My mother and I reached the entrance and Mai had wondered off somewhere she had gotten tired of holding the door open.

So it was that Mai's trip home to help our mother ended tomorrow. She had spent most of her time on the phone with her boyfriend when she was not working. She had talked so much that she used my phone since I had unlimited minutes. We knew not to interrupt when she was talking to her boyfriend, my dad and I. Mai was now sitting on the floor by the desk where I was working on the computer. I listened while I worked.

"Well, Anh, I wanted you to be the first to know, since you've always helped me, ever since we were little. And you helped me, you know, taught me how to fix myself up and dress a little nicer and showed me how to put on makeup, and it you know, boosted my confidence, and that was how Steve first noticed me, he said that I was nice looking and had an air of, you know, kind of assurance that made him notice me. So, I wanted you to be the first to know that Steve and I have been talking about getting married, and he's coming home with me Christmas to meet the family and announce our engagement then." My sister was so happy I listened to her chirp for another few hours, minimized the window that I was working on and looked at engagement rings while she was telling me all about Steve and their plans.

Later, when Mai was fast asleep, I picked up my work again, staying up late to finish it. I had to get up early to take her to the airport. She dozed on the way there.