The Foreigner - By Francie Lin Page 0,1

kind of system beneath her injunctions. We were not, for instance, allowed to wear shorts, jean jackets, baseball caps, or thin leather ties, nor were we allowed to stand on outdoor benches or decorative rocks, or the retaining walls of gardens in the park. Soda had to be sipped through a straw and could not be drunk while standing or walking. No girls. Certainly no boys. She had been obsessive about hygiene also, and well into our teens we had to submit to a full inspection of our nethers, back to front. On restless, unhappy nights I can still see the thinning part of her hair as I stand naked on the motel toilet lid, looking down at her probing my dickson clinically with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol.

Eight-twenty-five, eight-thirty. A small, mouse-haired Chinese woman with enormous glasses sat opposite me, finger-dipping into her change purse. She wore a shapeless gray skirt, and her pale, moon-shaped face was framed by thin, wistful plaits. About my age. A nice girl. An accountant, probably. Eight-thirty-five, eight-forty. I crossed my arms and tried to imagine taking her to the Metronome. Under dimmed lights, on the wide parquet, with the broad strokes of a waltz sweeping through the hall, perhaps I could love a woman like this. She didn't look coordinated, but she might be good at the cha-cha at least. Coins spilled from her pocketbook onto the floor; she got down awkwardly on all fours to retrieve them. Perhaps just a waltz then.

The tip of an umbrella planted itself near my foot.

"Hello, Mother."

She had come steaming up the concourse looking fierce, draped in an old blue silk dress and wielding her umbrella like a majorette's baton. I was touched to see that she had put on makeup for the occasion, although her mouth was like a hard little knot in her face, her eyebrows sketched on at an angle of permanent displeasure.

"Hair!" she said, pointing the umbrella at my head.

"I didn't have time to comb it."

She took a tiny brush from her purse.

"Mother!" I ducked, backing away. "Nobody is even looking at me."

"Doesn't matter." The brush hovered and jabbed. "Don't you want to look nice for yourself?"

"Mother - "

We regarded each other silently for a moment, with the old, familiar suspicion and appraisal, so deep and habitual that they were, for us, a kind of love. Up close, the makeup made her look rather hollow and aged. I was wearing the shoes she'd given me as a birthday present, an expensive pair of soft suede Ferragamos, and their rich, understated luster stood in sad distinction to her frayed silk and battered handbag. Defeated, I bent my head and allowed her to groom me with quick, fastidious little licks of the brush, a bit of spit wetting down the hairs.

"Was there a problem at the motel?"

"Police!" she said with relish. "Raid! That guy, that Room 210, he is parolee from the north. Oregon. They track him down, they come to take him away. You know I like fairness, so at first I say no way! Are you kidding? You cannot just take my customer away like that! But then I check my book." Her mouth crimped down in a little caret. "He have already paid up front for a week in cash. So take him, I say! Room 210. Here is the key. Not my affair." She gave a little moo of satisfaction and clicked her tongue, making a sound like faint applause.

The mousy woman had brightened when my mother appeared, sitting up straighter and adjusting her plastic frames attentively, and my mother now hailed her.

"Mei Hua! I am glad you could come." She held out her hand to the girl.

"Mother - "

"Just a friend, Emerson," she said casually, as she commandeered Mei Hua and steered her toward the restaurant. "I invite her at the last minute. What is a birthday without friends?"

"But I only made a reservation for two."

She gave me a restrained but significant look. My mother wanted me to get married. This desire had consumed her for so long that it had ceased to be meaningful and was nurtured now with franticness, like a tire spinning uselessly in the snow. Over the years, she had presented me, humiliatingly, to a range of women she found appropriate - all Chinese or Chinese-American, though with variants: tall, fat, myopic, depressed - who appraised me with gimlet hardness behind their demure, almondlike eyes; you could hear pension and interest calculations being totted up