Tradition

by Jennifer Wang

            I thought about telling Robert to vacate the front passenger seat whenever we arrive at the airport to pick up Wendy, but although doing that would protect him from Wendy’s judgment, it would also mean he’d have to sit in the back with me. I’m not ready for that and for once, I want to be a little selfish. I also know that since Wendy has not seen him in the flesh yet, she’d want to observe him rather than let it be the other way around.

            Robert adjusts his polo collar for the last time, I’m sure, which is also what I said to myself the past five times. A week ago he’d asked me to pick between a mint green polo or one with thin black stripes against plain white. I told him to pass on the green, thinking that it brought out too much of the dark pink undertones of his easily sun-ripened skin, and no, don’t worry, the striped one did not make him look rotund. It’s another one of those fancy yet small words that Robert knows how to joke with, whereas my dad never had this kind of extended vocabulary. But my dad also never would’ve been caught dead wearing horizontal stripes, which is the real reason I counseled Robert the way I had. Robert would be Robert, and my dad was my dad.

            “Caroline, what did you say Wendy’s majoring in again? Sociology or psychology?” Robert turns to me, from the seat that was always my mom’s when my dad was alive and always insisted on driving. Robert’s side profile ends with a fleshy chin, like my mom’s. Sometimes now I believe that it’s true that couples grow to look alike, and that it’s not just a cute theory, although he and my mom have only been seeing each other since February.

            I don’t think Wendy’s going to appreciate being stuck in a car to meet him for the first time, but she can’t say I didn’t offer to introduce him beforehand. After all, for a while it was like she’d pretended that home didn’t exist. Her spring break was spent in NYC for an international relations student conference, and she was here for just a blip during the bookends of the summer, the rest of the time spent interning at a museum in Seattle. If it weren’t for the costs, I know she’d find something to do overseas, even further from Houston. But last month, she surprised my mom and me by asking us which day she should buy her plane tickets for winter break, when would one of us be free to pick her up? Since then I’ve been trying to figure out the right inroads into talking about Robert whenever she has time for a call. The first time I got as far as telling her his name and what he did, before she said she had to relocate from the common room she was cramming in. Another time I was about to suggest a group video call when suddenly she had to get back to researching sources for a midterm paper. You’d think I was the older sibling. Seriously, I could only resist calling her out on her immature bullshit because I didn’t want her to threaten canceling her tickets. If she really did, I knew mom wouldn’t say it was my fault, but I wasn’t going to give Wendy any excuse to do something to make me feel guilty. Not when I’ve done more than my fair share of helping take care of things at home.

            So far be it from me to know what exactly is going on in her head lately, let alone whether she’d stick with the major she declared, but I’ll try answering Robert on her behalf now anyway. She could say I was wrong later.

            “It’s neither. I think she chose history. Might minor in economics.”

            “She considerin’ the other way around at all?” Robert has lived in Houston his whole life, a through and through Texan, as he once described himself.

            “That you’ll have to ask her. She could still change her mind to anything else at this point.”

            “It’s good she’ll have somethin’ business-related though. Can’t afford not to these days.” Robert nods, chin bulging slightly. He sells insurance. You have to have a license apparently. It’s something I’ve learned because of him being around.

            I don’t know whether Wendy will hear the same thing from him. If she does, I know she’ll explain to him that economics and business majors are entirely different. I got a version of this lecture from her before. I also don’t know what she’ll hate more: what he’s saying or that he’s just as practical as our dad was.

            My mom straightens up in the driver’s seat, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “Wendy will do a business major?”

            I explain in our dialect of Chinese that Robert is mistaken. I can barely articulate what the liberal arts are in English though, so I just remind her that there’s no business major at Wendy’s college, and hey don’t forget, the exit for the airport is coming up!

            “I got it, I got it.” She does her best imitation of me from when I was learning to drive, sounding sure of myself before I backed up too far and broke the taillight covers of this very Honda we’re in. Wendy still gives me shit for it sometimes.

            I roll my eyes even though my mom can’t see. Robert chuckles. In fifteen minutes Wendy meets the guy who left mom a fifty-dollar tip on a hundred-dollar order at Sushi Rock. It had gotten her attention and given her a reason to smile, so from the start, I couldn’t totally hate him, even if I wanted to.

–

            Mom pulls the car up to the curb just past the dirty white loading zone-only paint. The airport staff member directing traffic throws us a dirty look but doesn’t act on it, and we end up not needing the space. Before she can ask me to give Wendy a call, Wendy’s already knocking on for us to open the trunk. Then her big suitcase lands with a thunk, then one car door is closed and another opens, and then she’s on the backseat next to me, her backpack a newly formed hill between us, the plane of her body from her shoulders to her hips completely squared off to my mom in the front seat. It’s as if Wendy is braced, even her pin-straight onyx hair, ready to take off again. What’s the rush? Mom clucks.

            Robert’s eyes reach across the space of the car and tether to Wendy’s, the leather underneath him whispering as he twists to aim his hand towards hers. He can’t wait anymore. Won’t. When dad died just before Wendy started her freshman year and I had to keep mom and me functioning, I’d asked myself, what would Wendy do? Now, what will Wendy do?

            “Hi Wendy, I’m—”

            “Robert. You were a frequent diner where my mom works. Good tips.”

            Our mom can make out the last part the clearest, laughing, though I know she thinks Wendy is being crass. “Ai-yah, Wendy!”

            Robert keeps his hand afloat, though his fingers slacken a little. After another second something to say seems to come to him, maybe not the thing he had originally planned to say, but he can’t just turn away from her now. “Pleasure to finally meet!”

            So Wendy was listening when I explained who he is and who he is to mom. Truly Wendy, collecting info and filing it away for the moment she’d get the most use out of it, to have the upper hand.  

            Finally fed up, the traffic personnel blows his whistle in our direction. Mom taps on the gas and Wendy goes, pumping Robert’s hand twice before settling into her seat. I see his sandy brows twitch up as he swivels to face forward again. Wendy is strong. Tennis was her sport throughout high school. Dad once told her she needed to work on her grip strength to up her game and prevent injuries, and he never needed to remind her again.

            Introductions somewhat over, we’ve merged onto the freeway, and mom finds another opening to speak. “Wendy, how was the flight?”

            Wendy responds in our dialect. Felt shorter this time, probably because I actually slept through most of it for once. I could sleep now, too. Sophomore year’s been tiring.

            Wendy, speak English, our mom says back. It sparks a memory of mine, where our parents demanded that we respond to them in our dialect or Mandarin instead. We were united then, Wendy and me, in trying to defy them with our English, the one power we had and that they needed and feared would one day sever us from them completely.

            “Why?” Wendy throws out.

            Maybe she’s still cranky from her plane nap. I stay quiet.

            Mom sighs, her hand forced even though Wendy did give in first. “So Robert can talk, too.”

            “Sorry, Robert. I didn’t say anything important just now.”

            “Oh May—your mom—doesn’t need to worry.” Robert winks as she flicks her gaze at him, and they smile at each other. In that instant, something in my heart twists, and I remember what it’s like to take wholeness for granted. “I know some things need to stay between moms and their girls. Right, Caroline?”

            “Hm? Yeah.” I try to catch Wendy’s stare to let her know whose side I’m on. This group of us in this car, we are not a family. We are getting along in a civil way, yes, but definitely not familial. If she can tell what I’m thinking, she doesn’t reassure me that she has.

            “Okay, I’ll speak in English whenever it makes sense,” Wendy says.

            Robert nods gamely. “At some point maybe we can trade phrases in Mandarin. Notice I said phrases, not sentences. I’m working up to those!”

            “You’re learning Mandarin?”

            Now is not when I want to catch Wendy’s stare. And it sounds like—as in, there’s no sound at all—mom is glad to focus on driving.

            “Well, I’ve just gotten on one of those apps. The ones that have the fun designs and characters and make you feel like you’ll actually remember how to say more than ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’”

            This earns a bark of a laugh from Wendy, and mom goes along with it, either just relieved that the car is no longer a pressure cooker or on the actual merit of the joke itself. But since she speaks with Robert so often now, it has me believing it’s the latter.

            Wendy again: “Why are you learning Mandarin?”

            “It was for work at first. I sell insurance, boring, but you know, Houston’s gotten more multicultural, and I want to be able to serve clients of different backgrounds. But of course I’m not foolin’ myself and anybody else at all yet.” Robert chances a glance at us in the backseat, feeling like this is going well. “Overall I just feel like it’s good for my brain and good for—”

            “Business?”

            “Building trust. At some point, maybe I can better understand who they are and what they need, you know, in terms of coverage and things, and they can understand how I can help.”

            Robert is a salesman, but Wendy is no easy sale. She’s leaning forward a bit, interested as a viper. In fact, I think his spiel has had the opposite effect versus how he thinks she’ll respond. “Why not learn Spanish first?”

            “I have a little bit of that under my belt already. I studied abroad in Spain in college, and I even worked at a Tex-Mex place my first two years. But I was just a waiter and didn’t pick up the culinary side so much, except the eating parts!”

            “Renaissance man.”

            “Oh, that’s being generous.”

            Wendy doesn’t deny it. “So mom, is Robert a good student?”

            “Very good! I help him, and he helps me with English, too!”

            “He helps you with English, too.”

            “Yes, that’s what I said,” our mom says, slightly piqued. I think she thinks Wendy was correcting her pronunciation. “It takes some work off Caroline, right?”

            I’ve been betrayed. In truth, I have gotten soft lately because Robert has done things like help negotiate a lower family plan phone bill for us three–not including him–when our rates got raised for no reason, and guide my mom through making her insurance claim when flooding from the last hurricane killed some of her car’s electronics. Whether his language abilities had grown his sales or not, he had been good for some of our personal business.

            So I say, finally facing Wendy, “Yeah, it is. It’s been nice having some help.”

            I don’t mean to, but it comes out harder than I intended. My family has never been not okay with occasional stretches of silence during long car rides, and one begins after my declaration. Robert checks something on his phone.

            I don’t want to hate her for it, but I can’t forget Wendy here during her last winter break, hidden in her room alternating between sobbing and sleeping, only to go back to college like her life depended on it and our grief, just as fresh as hers, was contagious. Now here we are, all working to help her feel like she fits in.

            Mom makes a belated announcement. “Ai-yah, talk, talk, talk. I forgot about eating. Caroline, give Wendy her fruit.”

            Wendy finally looks at me directly, and that’s when I notice the wispy tail-end of cursive text tattooed near her collarbone. She mouths, I’ll tell you later, almost like we’re conspiring again. I nod dumbly, frozen until she points between my shoes at the cut fruit our mom prepared. I peel back some of the pink saran wrap and hand the bowl to her. This much at least feels familiar.

            “We can go anywhere for dinner.” Robert says. “It’s your choice, Wendy. What hometown cuisine are you craving? My treat.”

            The rest of us know exactly where my mom is driving us to. It’s a kindness to pretend we don’t and let Robert ask. How else will he get to know us, the three now, not two? 

–

            In the bathroom at Hot Spot Hot Pot, Wendy interrogates me while I’m on the toilet. Worse, I can’t pretend I can’t hear her over the frothy, metallic pop music because the restaurant’s speakers only blast it in the dining areas.

            Immaturely, I let out a small fart I was holding in at the table. “You do realize you gave them more private time by following me here? But you’re choosing to get in the way of my private time instead. You might not wanna be here for this. That mala sauce is winding through me...”

            “You don’t scare me. I was there when you got your diapers changed. I probably changed your diaper once.” Wendy likes to exaggerate, like dad did.

            “Bullshit, Wen. You’re only three years older than me.”

            “Besides, you might as well get used to less ‘private time’ now. Just wait for college. Common bathrooms, they suck. I swear I was constipated for a few weeks because I was too self-conscious about pooping in other people’s earshot.”

            “Ew and I told you. I’m applying to Rice, and if I get in, I’ll stay at home. Save on room and board.”

            “Hm, wait. You have a point.”

            “I do?”

            “That way, Robert’s less likely to come over. Did you finish the application supplement? I can look it over after I catch up with some friends.”

            She doesn’t say anything about me needing to go for the full college experience.

            “Wen, are you hearing yourself? They’re not teenagers. And would you rather mom spend time at his place? Plus, I don’t think they do that.”

            “Caroline, are you hearing yourself? The rest of it call it sex.”

            I choose this moment to get the rest of my business done, loudly. Wendy scoffs but laughs when I have to flush twice. We’re still children.

            I come back out to wash my hands, continuing to talk at our reflections in the mirror. Where my face shares more of mom’s roundness, hers hasn’t lost the squarer edges of dad’s. Her other features favor his, too.

            “I really don’t think they do. Mom just likes having someone to talk to and go out to eat together sometimes. I’ve never even seen them hold hands or anything.”

            The hand dryer is broken. Before I can wipe my hands on my shirt, Wendy ducks into the stall I just came out of and wraps some toilet paper around her hand for me. I glimpse the text below her collarbone again, visible since she shed her hoodie once we came into the bathroom. During dinner, she kept it zipped up, despite the heat rising up out of our boiling hot pot cooker and from the ten or so other tables in the restaurant.

            I ask: “When are you going to show her the tat? When were you going to tell me?”

            “Can you please not call it that?”

            “What, a tat?”

            “Oo. Taa-too.”

            Wendy brushes her finger over the length of it. The words my daughter, in a thin, tidy, black script. It’s not one of those generic, wispy calligraphy fonts, yet known to me in another way.

            “That’s dad’s handwriting,” Wendy confirms. “When I was here at the start of summer, I flipped through one of his old agenda books. He wrote down all our mobile numbers and our relationships to him in the contacts section upfront. I was planning to show you when we got home.”

            She shrugs her hoodie back on and zips it. “I got it done during fall break after I turned in my last midterm paper. Planned it so I had some time to heal, since nothing else was going on.”

            Mom had been willing to pay for her ticket home, even though the break was only a week long.

            “You went with someone?” I don’t know what kind of answer I was hoping for. That she got drunk at a party and left with a group of friends to get tattoos because why not, it’s what college kids do? That no, she didn’t brave it alone, because her roommate’s a local and took her to the same spot they got a tat back in high school, that their parents still don’t know about?

            “No.”

            “Why?”

            “I didn’t need anyone there to hold my hand. It didn’t hurt that much. It’s a more sensitive spot to get tattooed, but the artist did it for plenty of other people.”

            Before, I wanted to ask if she’ll take me when I get mine because I want one, too. Instead I just want to shake her. She makes me ask for everything.

            “Did it hurt at all?” I ask.

            “Uh, yeah. Fricking pin pricks over and over, you know. I had soreness and itching for the rest of the week.”

            “Good.”

–

            Caroline, what did you say to Wendy? It’s her first night back. You two, fighting already. My mom says, a smile breaking through despite her best efforts. It is some normalcy for her and therefore reassuring.

            I continue on past her towards our kitchen for some water. “It’s okay, mom. Wendy knows that’s part of coming home.”

            With her asleep now, my mom finally asks, “She like Robert?”

            Earlier when we got home from dinner, Wendy bitched at me for having recycled her old issues of The Economist that had piled up. She hissed that hadn’t I basically agreed with Robert that majoring in econ and minoring in history instead was a better bet? Why would I get rid of her Economist’s then? I hadn’t said anything at all during that part of the dinner discussion.

            “Maybe. It’s too early to say. As long as you’re happy, mom.”

            I told Wendy that whether I agreed with Robert or not didn’t matter. Hell, maybe he’d be out of our lives by spring break, so was that what she wanted?

            She went silent. I never had a sport the way she did, quitting tennis when I could no longer keep up with her level of the game, but I could return a serve if I needed to.

–

            In the morning as I’m still in bed, half in the world of another memory, Wendy asks mom for permission to take the Honda to visit her old high school friends. The garage door rumbles open and closed. Just as soon as Wendy came back, mom decides to let her fly again, whether she’s seen the tattoo or not. It’s not my secret to tell. Wendy knew I wouldn’t. She never has to ask me for discretion.

            I’m unsure if what I saw in my mind before I opened my eyes was a memory or a wish, or both. I’m an unreliable witness to my own grief. Someone in an online forum said that focusing on making good memories was one way to get through it. From the moment we drove away from the hospital, I’ve made enough wishes in the past year and a half that some of them became memories, so I have to remind myself to separate them from time to time.

            Some memories: my sister came home for winter break. Hurricane season is over for another year. I got my SAT done with on my second try, while Wendy had been a one-shot wonder. The hospital staff said that hospital-acquired infections can happen, and that my dad was undergoing immunosuppressive therapy, and that they were so sorry, so sorry, so sorry. As was I when I lunged at them, nurses, doctors–they were all fair game. I screamed in the hospital chaplain’s face. He was assigned to placate us, or more specifically, me and my sister, since what English words broke through our mom’s wails were unintelligible. I was plenty intelligible. I made it clear that I was going to continue causing a scene. I told them the best way to calm me down was to make themselves scarce. I told them to call security on me, go ahead, go ahead, but I guess they didn’t because my dad had just died or because Wendy had wrenched the chair from my grasp before I could hurl it. I did not realize I had picked it up. I know this to be true because she had to scrape my hands with her fingernails for me to see it, put it back down. Later, I printed the head doctor’s official headshot, pressed it onto the couch, pressed my thumbs on his eyes as far as I could, leaned in and pressed until my fingers curled into claws and the paper cratered beneath my full weight. Then I know I balled up the headshot as compactly as I could, kneading, kneading, even chewing it until it could be stuffed into this small divot on our front lawn that I kept putting off filling in with mulch. Since I was already outside, I retrieved the mail and then I changed into my work clothes.

            Some wishes: my sister will go on a cruise with us during Christmas. Robert will not come. He will ask us about our girls’ trip later. Wendy and I will tolerate my mom’s request that we color coordinate our dresses for the designated formal nights and pictures the cruise company will charge too much for. We will ask the ship’s dining room staff to not take away the fourth place setting. No really, it won’t get in our way. On the last day of the cruise, watching the sunset from a high deck on the ship, we will cry as a family for the first time since the funeral, all together, no more hiding from each other. It will be beautiful and cathartic and all our wounds will close.

            When I posted in an online forum, seeking validation that I wasn’t insane, which was probably insane in and of itself, someone had guessed from my username that I was Chinese, and perhaps in the spirit of having an open-minded conversation over the internet, they wanted to know if there were mourning traditions or practices from “my culture.” I think they wanted me to say something special and serious. I told them that we wore black, people sent flowers, and a big meal served as the wake. We put up my dad’s portrait at home but no, we don’t have a full-blown ancestor altar, and no, we aren’t Shinto, as this person had tried guessing. But beyond that? No, I guess I don’t know many Chinese things, actually. Is there a Chinese way to grieve?

            I did throw them a bone. I told them the meal was at a restaurant in Chinatown. Going there might be the most consistent thing we do, and that’s close enough to a tradition.

–

            Wendy comes back home just after I finish eating leftovers for dinner.

            I ask her, “Did you eat already? You didn’t reply to my text.”

            “I had a big, late lunch. And then we had ice cream so we passed out at the house.” She sheds her jacket and backpack. With a thicker coat on, she’d look like she was still back on campus. “Oh shit.”

            She dashes back out the door and then returns with a small tub of something in a plastic bag. The label looks familiar, but like it’s from another decade.

            “Is that…”

            “Yes. TCBY froyo.”

            “I thought all their stores were closed a long time ago.”

            “The one closest to our house is a Starbucks now. But there’s still at least this one in Houston.”

            Wendy sets the tub on the table and opens it. Before she gets back up, aiming for the kitchen, I point at my recently emptied dinner plate. “Don’t get me a spoon. I can’t eat this right now. Won’t mix well.”

            “Come on. It’s not like I haven’t heard you go number two before.”

            “Now I really don’t want it.”

            But I don’t immediately get up to go wash my dishes and put things away. I stay in my seat and wonder which flavor it is. I shouldn’t care. “Why go all the way into Houston just for TCBY?”

            “I just thought about it, and I missed it, I realized.”

            “Dad would take us there.”

            Wendy sits too and grabs the tub. “He would switch between who got to pick the flavor and who got to pick the topping. When I whined about your topping pick, he’d say to me, ‘Who’s supposed to be the older sister, you or Caroline?’”

            “It always made you more angry than anything else.”

            She doesn’t deny it. “Come on. Have a bite.”

            The tub is filled to the brim, and the frozen yogurt waits untouched, milky and inviting. I can’t help it–I press my thumb dead center on top and watch the little oval of melt grow outward.

            “Yeah, I’m definitely the older sister.” Wendy grins.

            I know that the itching and swelling and burning parts of her tattoo healing process are done, but I bring my yogurt-coated thumb to her tattoo. Push into it. As if I can transfer the words onto my skin, into me.

            “This is basically what I did all fall break. Ice for days.”

            I bring my thumb back. “It’s perfect, like he really wrote it. How did they do that?”

            “They print a tracing and follow it.”

            “Still.”

            “So you like it?”

            “Of course.”

            “Yay.” Then, “I miss him, Care.”

            “Wendy.”

            I catch her head as she dips toward the table, and I shift my chair closer to her. We lean against each other, my hold on her mirroring hers on me.