As I gazed out the window, it started to snow.
Maybe my mother has learned to ski, I thought. Far-fetched but not impossible. A near seventy-year-old woman skiing, peacefully and idyllically, with just the sounds of her blades cutting white powder underfoot, and casually checking her ringing phone on the downhill, then putting the phone back in her coat and skiing on. But then this serene image turned scary. What if she fell and fractured her knee? She didn’t have health insurance here, nor did she know the hospital system. I would need to find her a good surgeon and then convince this surgeon to let me scrub in. But because I wouldn’t be able to shut my mouth while I watched, I would constantly be questioning the good surgeon and his technique until he eventually asked me to leave. With all due respect, and we appreciate you being here for your mom, but please get out of my OR.
On January 27, two days into the year of the rat, she finally picked up.
Yes? What is it? she asked. She seemed agitated and announced that their monthlong trip had come to an end, and she was trying to pack. But where were her reading glasses, passport, green card, and plastic box of pills? They were set to leave in a few hours, and no one was helping her—why wasn’t anyone helping her?
I asked if she had learned to ski.
Ski? She’d hardly left the lodge.
Was the lodge fun?
Why would sitting all day in a lodge with Tami be fun? Why would being watched by her hawk of a daughter-in-law and followed from place to place like prey be fun?
I sensed that my mother needed to vent and that I could be that for her, a blank wall against which she could throw things, as I’d seen in some movies when, to talk about something stressful, two people will play that game of aggressively hitting a tiny, hard ball indoors, side by side, with fuzzy sweatbands around their heads. I could be that game for my mother. I could be squash.
How’s the scenery?
Predictable.
And the food? The hot chocolate?
Nanny makes it better.
Anything else?
What would you do in this hypothetical situation? she asked. Say hypothetically her February flight from JFK to Shanghai had been canceled because the American airline that she’d booked with had enacted a temporary China ban; pilots and flight staff were refusing to fly to that country until the Wuhan situation had been managed. She was upset about the cancellation, but Fang saw this as a chance for her to stay longer with them, maybe even through the summer months, when they could all go glamping.
She asked if I knew what that was.
I did not.
Glamorous camping. Notwithstanding how absurd that sounded, she couldn’t stay here until then, she needed to get back. She had her own summer plans. Reunions with college friends, a trip to Wuxi, to Tai Lake, planned with her sisters.
Fang brought you into it, she said. He told me to ask you whether there was any real danger to this virus or if it was the media again, scaring everyone about China. The reasoning behind the China ban had been safety precautions, and with ten thousand cases there now, two hundred deaths, she could recognize the hazard as well. But she too suspected bias. If the U.S. had this many cases or more, would they expect other countries’ airlines to ban them, or would they demand to keep on traveling? Just as my brother did, she believed that if there was ever a chance to ostracize China, America would take it.
Stay, Fang had urged.
But for how long?
We’ll see.
Those words had angered my mother, as had his tone—could she sense some glee in it, in finally being able to tell this old lady what to do? She felt boxed in and exasperated in the quaint mountain cottage where mother and son were having their fight.
I said the virus was real and my professional opinion she could relay back to Fang, hypothetically.
Of course it’s fucking real, said my mother, shouted my mother. I wasn’t born yesterday.
* * *
—
ON JANUARY 28, A large piece of card stock was stuffed into every mailbox in our building, and a pile of them was stacked neatly outside on a newspaper box. The NYC Tenant helpline: Are you a tenant who needs help? Are you being harassed by your landlord? Do you have questions about your lease? Call 311 for more information.
The very same day, my mother texted me from Eagle County Regional Airport, thirty-seven miles outside of Vail, that they were waiting to fly back to JFK, where a car would be waiting to drive them back to Greenwich. So much waiting, she wrote. Then: See you at the bash.
I’d completely forgotten.
(No, I hadn’t.)
But I thought I’d completely forgotten that I was expected in Connecticut this weekend for their Chinese New Year bash. I tried to forget Fang’s ultimatum again, but it was impossible to fake-forget twice. I had nothing else to do, nothing else on my mind, and when I looked at my calendar for February, it was totally blank.
* * *
—
THE BRAND OF SPARKLING water that I bought in bulk was LaCroix. But on January 30, when I went to the store to stock up, they didn’t have the tangerine flavor or my other flavor of choice, pamplemousse, no orange, passion fruit, hibiscus, nothing except coconut, the flavor I liked least so was never going to buy.
Been a hiccup in the supply chain, explained the manager. And restocking could take up to a month. He suggested I try another brand, maybe Poland Spring.
I said for the sake of my family, I only bought from the French. My brother preferred L’Occitane amenities bags. My sister-in-law was in love with Celine. And once in Paris, they could both eat an inordinate amount of boeuf bourguignon.
The manager said he didn’t know how to break it to me but felt that someone had to since it was a common confusion and he could sympathize.
Break what to me?
LaCroix isn’t French, it comes from La Crosse, Wisconsin, and a brewery that used to make lagers.
Lagers?
Yeah, lagers.
But that’s not even remotely French.
They’re German, said the manager. Bavarian.
Can’t be.
Afraid so.
Sans cans, I walked back to my building in a daze. The doorman was not at his desk either, and there was no sign of where he had gone or when he would be back. I had to let myself into the building with a key and push the elevator buttons myself.
Upstairs, I found my apartment transformed. A new dining table had been brought in, rectangular and long, with rows of appetizers, crackers, nuts, marinated olives, various-colored dips laid out down its spine, and more cubed cheese than I’d ever seen. This not-mine table ran from the edge of the kitchen to the other side of the living room, right up next to Suede Chair. People I didn’t know were meandering around this table, picking at food. A nightmare? I closed my eyes and rubbed them. When I opened them again, the scene hadn’t changed.
Joan! some elegantly dressed woman shouted from the bay window where she was drawing the blinds. We were going to surprise you but weren’t sure when you would be back. Not everything is prepared yet and not everyone is here.
What’s going on? I asked. Who are you?
Mark’s idea, actually, said the man beside her, in a sweater vest and khakis, cradling a handful of nuts. Been planning it for days, told us all to keep it secret. The man pointed to my tallest book stalagmite and said I had some good ones in there, some of his faves. But he would be interested in my thoughts on them, and why I’d chosen to include certain titles over others, whenever I had a free minute to chat.
For the first time in a while, Mark was nowhere to be found.
My door opened, and in came the same weight and height couple from the elevator where they had been discussing apartment 9B and cultural moments. They handed me a bottle of wine and patted my shoulder. Nice to see you again, they said in unison, keep up the good work.
I took the bottle of wine and asked, What good work? But they had already moseyed on.