The Voice from the Wall
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Lena St. ClairWhen I was little, my mother told me my great-grandfather had sentenced a beggar to die in the worst possible way, and that later the dead man came bad killed my great-grandfather. Either that, or he died of influenza one week later.
I used to play out the beggars last moments over and ain in my head. In my mind, I saw the executiorip off the mans shirt and lead him into the open yard. "This traitor," read the executioner, "is senteo die the death of a thousand cuts." But before he could even raise the sharp sword to whittle his life away, they found the beggars mind had already broken into a thousand pieces. A few days later, my great-grandfather looked up from his books and saw this same man looking like a smashed vase hastily put back together. "As the sword was cutting me down," said the ghost, "I thought this was the worst I would ever have to endure. But I was wrong. The worst is oher side." And the dead man embraced my great-grandfather with the jagged pieces of his arm and pulled him through the wall, to show him what he meant.
I once asked my mother how he really died. She said, "In bed, very quickly, after being sick for only two days."
"No, no, I meaher man. How was he killed? Did they slice off his skin first? Did they use a cleaver to chop up his bones? Did he scream and feel all ohousand cuts?"
"Annh! Why do you Ameris have only these morbid thoughts in your mind?" cried my mother in ese. "That man has been dead for almost seventy years. What does it matter how he died?"
I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that happen to you, to know how you avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable. Because, even as a young child, I could sehe unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ohat chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark er of her mind. And still they found her. I watched, over the years, as they devoured her, piece by piece, until she disappeared and became a ghost.
As I remember it, the dark side of my mother sprang from the basement in our old house in Oakland. I was five and my mother tried to hide it from me. She barricaded the door with a wooden chair, secured it with a and two types of key locks. And it became so mysterious that I spent all my energies unraveling this door, until the day I was finally able to pry it open with my small fingers, only to immediately fall headlong into the dark chasm. And it was only after I stopped screaming—I had seen the blood of my nose on my mothers shoulder—only then did my mother tell me about the bad man who lived in the basement and why I should never open the dain. He had lived there for thousands of years, she said, and was so evil and hungry that had my mother not rescued me so quickly, this bad man would have planted five babies in me and theen us all in a six-course meal, tossing our bones on the dirty floor.
And after that I began to see terrible things. I saw these things with my ese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother. I saw devils dang feverishly beh a hole I had dug in the sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children. I saw a beetle wearing the face of a child, which I promptly squashed with the wheel of my tricycle. And when I became older, I could see things that Causasian girls at school did not. Monkey rings that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space. Tether balls that could splash a girls head all over the playground in front of laughing friends.
I didnt tell anyone about the things I saw, not even my mother. Most people didnt know I was half ese, maybe because my last name is St. Clair. When people first saw me, they thought I looked like my father, English-Irish, big-boned and delicate at the same time. But if they looked really close, if they khat they were there, they could see the ese parts. Instead of having cheeks like my fathers sharp-edged points, mine were smooth as beach pebbles. I didnt have his straw-yellow hair or his white ski my c looked too pale, like something that was once darker and had faded in the sun.
And my eyes, my mave me my eyes, no eyelids, as if they were carved on a jack-o-lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife. I used to push my eyes in on the sides to make them rounder. Or Id open them very wide until I could see the white parts. But when I walked around the house like that, my father asked me why I looked so scared.
I have a photo of my mother with this same scared look. My father said the picture was taken when Ma was first released from Angel Island Immigration Station. She stayed there for three weeks, until they could process her papers aermine whether she was a War Bride, a Displaced Person, a Student, or the wife of a ese-Ameri citizen. My father said they didnt have rules for dealing with the ese wife of a Caucasian citizen. Somehow, in the end, they declared her a Displaced Person, lost in a sea of immigration categories.
My mother alked about her life in a, but my father said he saved her from a terrible life there, some tragedy she could not speak about. My father proudly named her in her immigration papers: Betty St. Clair, crossing out her given name of Gu Ying-ying. And the down the wrong birthyear, 1916 instead of 1914. So, with the sweep of a pen, my mother lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger.
In this picture you see why my mother looks displaced. She is clutg a large clam-shaped bag, as though someone might steal this from her as well if she is less watchful. She has on an ankle-length ese dress with modest vents at the side. And on top she is wearing a Westernized suit jacket, awkwardly stylish on my mothers small body, with its padded shoulders, wide lapels, and oversize cloth buttons. This was my mothers wedding dress, a gift from my father. In this outfit she looks as if she were her ing from noing to someplace. Her is bent down and you see the precise part in her hair, a white line drawn from above her left brow thehe black horizon of her head.
And even though her head is bowed, humble i, her eyes are staring up past the camera, wide open.
"Why does she look scared?" I asked my father.
And my father explained: It was only because he said "Cheese," and my mother was struggling to keep her eyes open until the flash went off, ten seds later.
My mother often looked this way, waiting for something to happen, wearing this scared look. Only later she lost the struggle to keep her eyes open.
"Dont look at her," said my mother as we walked through atown in Oakland. She had grabbed my hand and pulled me close to her body. And of course I looked. I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a building. She was old and young at the same time, with dull eyes as though she had not slept for many years. And her feet and her hands—the tips were as black as if she had dipped them in India ink. But I khey were rotted.
"What did she do to herself?" I whispered to my mother.
"She met a bad man," said my mother. "She had a baby she didnt want."
And I khat was not true. I knew my mother made up anything to waro help me avoid some unknown danger. My mother saw danger ihing, even in other ese people. Where we lived and shopped, everyone spoke tonese lish. My mother was from Wushi, near Shanghai. So she spoke Mandarin and a little bit of English. My father, who spoke only a few ed ese expressions, insisted my mother learn English. So with him, she spoke in moods aures, looks and silences, and sometimes a bination of English punctuated by hesitations and ese frustration: "Shwo buchulai"—Words ot e out. So my father would put words in her mouth.
"I think Mom is trying to say shes tired," he would whisper when my mother became moody.
"I think shes sayihe best darn family in the try!" hed exclaim when she had cooked a wonderfully fragrant meal.
But with me, when we were alone, my mother would speak in ese, saying things my father could not possibly imagine. I could uand the words perfectly, but not the meanings. Ohought led to another without e.
"You must not walk in any dire but to school and bae," warned my mother when she decided I was old enough to walk by myself.
"Why?" I asked.
"You t uand these things," she said.
"Why not?"
"Because I havent put it in your mi."
"Why not?"
"Aii-ya! Such questions! Because it is too terrible to sider. A man grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby. Then youll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in a garbage , then what be done? Youll go to jail, die there."
I khis was not a true answer. But I also made up lies to prevent bad things from happening iure. I often lied when I had to translate for her, the endless forms, instrus, notices from school, telephone calls. "Shemma yisz?"—What meaning?—she asked me when a man at a grocery store yelled at her for opening up jars to smell the insides. I was so embarrassed I told her that ese people were not allowed to shop there. When the school sent a notie about a polio va<var>..</var>ation, I told her the time and place, and added that all students were now required to use metal lunch boxes, sihey had discovered old paper bags carry polio germs.
"Were moving up in the world," my father proudly ann<bdo>99lｉb?</bdo>ouhis being the occasion of his promotion to sales supervisor of a clothing manufacturer. "Your mother is thrilled."
And we did move up, across the bay to San Francisd up a hill in North Beach, to an Italian neighborhood, where the sidewalk was so steep I had to lean into the slant to get home from school each day. I was ten and I was hopeful that we might be able to leave all the old fears behind in Oakland.
The apartment building was three stories high, tartments per floor. It had a renovated fa鏰de, a ret layer of white stucco topped with ected rows of metal fire-escape ladders. But i was old. The front door with its narroanes opened into a musty lobby that smelled of everybodys life mixed together. Everybody meant the names on the front door o their little buzzers: Anderson, Giordino, Hayman, Ricci, Sorci, and our . Clair. We lived on the middle floor, stuck between cooking smells that floated up a sounds that drifted down. My bedroom faced the street, and at night, in the dark, I could see in my mind another life. Cars struggling to climb the steep, fog-shrouded hill, gunning their deep engines and spinning their wheels. Loud, happy people, laughing, puffing, gasping: "Are we almost there?" A beagle scrambling to his feet to start his yipping yowl, answered a few seds later by fire truck sirens and an angry woman hissing, "Sammy! Bad dog! Hush now!" And with all this soothing predictability, I would soon fall asleep.
My mother was not happy with the apartment, but I didhat at first. When we moved in, she busied herself with gettiled, arranging the furniture, unpag dishes, hanging pictures on the wall. It took her about one week. And soon after that, when she and I were walking to the bus stop, she met a man who threw her off balance.
He was a red-faced ese man, wobbling down the sidewalk as if he were lost. His runny eyes saw us and he quickly stood up straight and threw out his arms, shouting, "I found you! Suzie Wong, girl of my dreams! Hah!" And with his arms and mouth wide opearted rushing toward us. My mother dropped my hand and covered her body with her arms as if she were naked, uo do anything else. In that moment as she let go, I started to scream, seeing this dangerous man lunging closer. I was still screaming after two laughing men grabbed this man and, shaking him, said, "Joe, stop it, for Chrissake. Youre sg that poor little girl and her maid."
The rest of the day—while riding on the bus, walking in and out of stores, shopping for our dinner—my mother trembled. She clutched my hand so tightly it hurt. And once whe go of my hand to take her wallet out of her purse at the cash register, I started to slip away to look at the dy. She grabbed my hand back so fast I k that instant how sorry she was that she had not protected me better.
As soon as we got home from grocery shopping, she began to put the s aables away. And then, as if something were not quite right, she removed the s from one shelf and switched them with the s on another. she walked briskly into the living room and moved a large round mirror from the wall fag the front door to a wall by the sofa.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
She whispered something in ese about "things not being balanced," and I thought she meant how things looked, not how things felt. And thearted to move the larger pieces: the sofa, chairs, end tables, a ese scroll of goldfish.
"Whats going on here?" asked my father when he came home from work.
"Shes making it look better," I said.
And the day, when I came home from school, I saw she had again rearranged everything. Everything was in a different place. I could see that some terrible danger lay ahead.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked her, afraid she would give me a true answer.
But she whispered some ese nonsense instead: "When something goes against your nature, you are not in balahis house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill. So you ever get ahead. You are always rolling backward."
And thearted pointing to the walls and doors of the apartment. "See how narrow this doorway is, like a hat has been strangled. And the kit faces this toilet room, so all your worth is flushed away."
"But what does it mean? Whats going to happen if its not balanced?" I asked my mother.
My father explai to me later. "Your mother is just practig her ing instincts," he said. "All met it. Youll see when youre older."
I wondered why my father never worried. Was he blind? Why did my mother and I see something more?
And then a few days later, I found out that my father had been right all along. I came home from school, walked into my bedroom, and saw it. My mother had rearranged my room. My bed was no longer by the window but against a wall. And where my bed once was—now there stood a used crib. So the secret danger was a ballooning stomach, the soury mothers imbalance. My mother was going to have a baby.
"See," said my father as we both looked at the crib. "ing instincts. Heres the . And heres where the baby goes." He was so pleased with this imaginary baby in the crib. He didnt see what I later saw. My man to bump into things, into table edges as if she fot her stomach tained a baby, as if she were headed for trouble instead. She did not speak of the joys of having a new baby; she talked about a heaviness around her, about things being out of balanot in harmony with one another. So I worried about that baby, that it was stuewhere between my mothers stomad this crib in my room.
With my bed against the wall, the nighttime life of my imagination ged. Instead of street sounds, I began to hear voices ing from the wall, from the apartme door. The front-door buzzer said a family called the Sorcis lived there.
That first night I heard the muffled sound of someone shouting. A woman? A girl? I flattened my ear against the wall and heard a womans angry voice, then ahe higher voice of a girl shouting back. And now, the voices turoward me, like fire sirens turning onto our street, and I could hear the accusations fading in and out:Who am I to say!…Why do you keep buggihe out and stay out!…rather die rather be dead!…Why doncha then!
Then I heard scraping sounds, slamming, pushing and shouts and then whack! whack! whack! Someone was killing. Someone was being killed. Screams and shouts, a mother had a sword high above a girls head and was starting to slice her life away, first a braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the point of her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothi, no sounds.
I lay back against my pillow, my heart pounding at what I had just witnessed with my ears and my imagination. A girl had just been killed. I hadnt been able to stop myself from listening. I wasnt able to stop what happehe horror of it all.
But the night, the girl came back to life with more screams, more beating, her life once more in peril. And so it tinued, night after night, a voice pressing against my wall tellihat this was the worst possible thing that could happen: the terror of not knowing when it would ever stop.
Sometimes I heard this loud family across the hallway that separated our tartment doors. Their apartment was by the stairs going up to the third floor. Ours was by the stairs going down to the lobby.
"You break ys sliding down that banister, Im gonna break your neck," a woman shouted. Her warnings were followed by the sounds of feet stomping oairs. "And dont fet to pick up Pops suits!"
I kheir terrible life so intimately that I was startled by the immediacy of seeing her in person for the first time. I ulling the front door shut while balang an armload of books. And when I turned around, I saw her ing toward me just a few feet away and I shrieked and dropped everything. She snickered and I knew who she was, this tall girl whom I guessed to be about twelve, two years older than I was. Then she bolted dowairs and I quickly gathered up my books and followed her, careful to walk oher side of the street.
She didnt seem like a girl who had been killed a huimes. I saw no traces of blood-stained clothes; she wore a crisp white blouse, a blue cardigaer, and a blue-greeed skirt. In fact, as I watched her, she seemed quite happy, her two brown braids boung jauntily in rhythm to her walk. And then, as if she khat I was thinking about her, she turned her head. She gave me a scowl and quickly ducked down a side street and walked out of my sight.
Every time I saw her after that, I would pretend to look down, busy rearranging my books or the buttons on my sweater, guilty that I knew everything about her.
My parents friends Auntie Su and Uncle ing picked me up at school one day and took me to the hospital to see my mother. I khis was serious because everything they said was unnecessary but spoken with solemn importance.
"It is now four oclock," said Uncle ing, looking at his watch.
"The bus is never on time," said Auntie Su.
When I visited my mother in the hospital, she seemed half asleep, tossing bad forth. And then her eyes popped open, staring at the ceiling.
"My fault, my fault. I khis before it happened," she babbled. "I did nothing to prevent it."
"Betty darling, Betty darling," said my father frantically. But my mother kept shouting these accusations to herself. She grabbed my hand and I realized her whole body was shaking. And then she looked at me, in a strange way, as if she were begging me for her life, as if I could pardon her. She was mumbling in ese.
"Lena, whats she saying?" cried my father. For once, he had no words to put in my mothers mouth.
And for once, I had no ready answer. It struck me that the worst possible thing had happehat what she had been fearing had e true. They were no longer warnings. And so I listened.
"When the baby was ready to be born," she murmured, "I could already hear him screaming inside my womb. His little fingers, they were ging to stay inside. But the he doctor, they said to push him out, make him e. And when his head popped out, the nurses cried, His eyes are wide open! He sees everything! Then his body slipped out and he lay oable, steaming with life.
"When I looked at him, I saw right away. His tiny legs, his small arms, his thin neck, and then a large head so terrible I could not stop looking at it. This babys eyes were open and his head—it en too! I could see all the way back, to where his thoughts were supposed to be, and there was nothing there. No brain, the doctor shouted! His head is just ay eggshell!
"And then this baby, maybe he heard us, his large head seemed to fill with hot air and rise up from the table. The head turo one side, then to the other. It looked right through me. I knew he could see everything inside me. How I had given no thought to killing my other son! How I had given no thought to having this baby!"
I could not tell my father what she had said. He was so sad already with this empty crib in his mind. How could I tell him she was crazy?
So this is what I translated for him: "She says we must all think very hard about having another baby. She says she hopes this baby is very happy oher side. And she thinks we should leave now and go have dinner."
After the baby died, my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one. I never knew when it would happen, so I became nervous all the time, waiting.
Sometimes she would start to make dinner, but would stop halfway, the water running full steam in the sink, her knife poised in the air over half-chopped vegetables, silent, tears flowing. And sometimes wed be eating and we would have to stop and put our forks down because she had dropped her fato her hands and was saying. "Mei gwansyi"—It doesnt matter. My father would just sit there, trying to figure out what it was that didnt matter this much. And I would leave the table, knowing it would happen again, always a ime.
My father seemed to fall apart in a different way. He tried to make things better. But it was as if he were running to catch things before they fell, only he would fall before he could catything.
"Shes just tired," he explaio me when we were eating di the Gold Spike, just the two of us, because my mother was lying like a statue on her bed. I knew he was thinking about her because he had this worried face, st<dfn></dfn>aring at his dinner plate as if it were filled with worms instead of spaghetti.
At home, my mother looked at everything around her with empty eyes. My father would e home from work, patting my head, saying, "Hows my big girl," but always looking past me, toward my mother. I had such fears inside, not in my head but in my stomach. I could no longer see what was so scary, but I could feel it. I could feel every little movement in our silent house. And at night, I could feel the crashing loud fights oher side of my bedroom wall, this girl beien to death. In bed, with the bla edge lying ay neck, I used to wonder which was worse, our side or theirs? And after thinking about this for a while, after feeling sorry for myself, it forted me somewhat to think that this girl door had a more unhappy life.
But one night after dinner our doorbell rang. This was curious, because usually people rang the buzzer downstairs first.
"Lena, could you see who it is?" called my father from the kit. He was doing the dishes. My mother was lying in bed. My mother was now always "resting" and it was as if she had died and bee a living ghost.
I opehe door cautiously, then swung it wide open with surprise. It was the girl from door. I stared at her with undisguised amazement. She was smiling back at me, and she looked ruffled, as if she had fallen out of bed with her clothes on.
"Who is it?" called my father.
"Its door!" I shouted to my father. "Its…"
"Teresa," she offered quickly.
"Its Teresa!" I yelled bay father.
"Invite her in," my father said at almost the same moment that Teresa squeezed past me and into our apartment. Without being invited, she started walking toward my bedroom. I closed the front door and followed her two brown braids that were boung like whips beating the back of a horse.
She walked right over to my window and began to open it. "What are you doing?" I cried. She sat on the window ledge, looked out oreet. And then she looked at me and started to giggle. I sat down on my bed watg her, waiting for her to stop, feeling the cold air blow in from the dark opening.
"Whats so funny?" I finally said. It occurred to me that perhaps she was laughing at me, at my life. Maybe she had listehrough the wall and heard nothing, the stagnant silence of our unhappy house.
"Why are you laughing?" I demanded.
"My mother kicked me out,&q<tt>99ｌｉｂ?t>uot; she finally said. She talked with a swagger, seeming to be proud of this fact. And then she snickered a little and said, "We had this fight and she pushed me out the door and locked it. So now she thinks Im going to wait outside the door until Im sorry enough to apologize. But Im not going to."
"Then what are you going to do?" I asked breathlessly, certain that her mother would kill her food this time.
"Im going to use your fire escape to climb bato my bedroom," she whispered back. "And shes going to wait. And whes worried, shell open the front door. Only I wohere! Ill be in my bedroom, in bed." She giggled again.
"Wont she be mad when she finds you?"
"Nah, shell just be glad Im not dead or something. Oh, shell pretend to be mad, sort of. We do this kind of stuff all the time." And then she slipped through my window and soundlessly made her way bae.
I stared at the open window for a long time, w about her. How could she go back? Didnt she see how terrible her life was? Didnt she reize it would op?
I lay down on my bed waiting to hear the screams and shouts. And late at night I was still awake when I heard the loud voiext door. Mrs. Sorci was shouting and g, You stupida girl. You almost gave me a heart attack. And Teresa was yelling back, I coulda been killed. I almost fell and broke my neck. And then I heard them laughing and g, g and laughing, shouting with love.
I was stunned. I could almost see them hugging and kissing one another. I was g for joy with them, because I had been wrong.
And in my memory I still feel the hope that beat ihat night. I g to this hope, day after day, night after night, year after year. I would watch my mother lying in her bed, babbling to herself as she sat on the sofa. A I khat this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop. I still saw bad things in my mind, but now I found ways to ge them. I still heard Mrs. Sord Teresa having terrible fights, but I saw something else.
I saw a girl plaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable. I saw the mother lying in bed in her long flowing robes. Then the girl pulled out a sharp sword and told her mother, "Then you must die the death of a thousand cuts. It is the only way to save you."
The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced bad forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.
The girl said, "Do you see now?"
The mother nodded: "Now I have perfederstanding. I have already experiehe worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing."
And the daughter said, "Now you must e back, to the other side. Then you see why you were wrong."
And the girl grabbed her mothers hand and pulled her through the wall.
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