I’ve gotten through another weekend.  I’ve learned if I can get through another lonely Friday night, weekends can be momentous.  Thank God for sisters.  My sister came to my rescue Friday night and we did what we do best together-played slots (while listening to great music (Soul Tight Committee, http://www.soultight.com/schedule.html). Saturday we went to garage sales, my favorite store in North Saint Paul (http://lagarageandgallery.com/), and to satisfy our hunger we ate burgers at the oldest bar in Minnesota (http://www.neumannsbar.com/).  After shopping for groceries, we both went to our respective condos and took a nap! 

For me, Sunday is almost always a day of work.  Today I found it quite soulful to scrub floors, clean my ice box, vacuum and dust, wash clothes—all the things that help me relax and get ready for another work week.  But, as often is the case, by Sunday evening I remember that I am a writer.  And by Sunday evening I wonder why it takes so much stressful energy fighting off being alone, followed by a surge of activity, before I can actually sit down to write.

My friend, who I also consider my mentor, has given me assignments.  She told me to write stories. The stories have to be two pages, nothing longer.  Also, I was told not to revise, not until I have a dozen or more short stories. She gives me prompts.  The first assignment was to write a story that begins at the end.  The second  assignment was to write a story about a secret.  I have given myself two rules.  One, the stories have to be written in third person in hopes to move away from the personal (I am not worried about admonishments as to whether I have written fiction or nonfiction, my stories are drafts and who is to know, including me, if they are true or not). Two, the stories have to be about love.  I challenge you to also accept this assignment.

SECRETS

The secret belonged to her mother.  She, the youngest sibling, did not own it.  She, sixty years old/young, had no secrets.  Never had any secrets.  Her mother was dead.  She died still white as an angel’s frock.  Perhaps, unafraid at last.  Her mother had become what she said she was, White.    Even dead, she was White and she had told her children, no funeral.  No funeral, they assumed, because Mother didn’t want her relatives to mourn her, or damn her to hell.    Her children promised cremation; no confession of sins, no truth telling.  Dead or not, the color black was not allowed.

The residents of her mother’s nursing home celebrated each death with story.  Whether they knew or liked each other before death, whether they sat together at meals or played Scrabble together on Thursday afternoons fighting over the legitimacy of a word, whether they said hello to each other every day or never, whether the sat in their wheelchairs in the TV room watching “Days of Our Lives”– at the gathering to celebrate yet another passing, they never said anything ugly, not even about her mother.  They celebrated her mother’s passing with stories, some very funny.  Some, the daughters asked themselves, “could this me my mother they are talking about?”  It was important to conjure up goodness and humor after yet another resident was hurried off in an ambulance, not to return.  No one told her mother’s secret at the celebration, they probably didn’t know, though some might have guessed.   There were no stories linked to race or class.

The daughter she was weary.  How much time, and energy, and anger, and defiance, and information, and confrontation, and how many poems, and how many stories, how many lost friends, how many lost lovers, how much loneliness did it take for her to uncover and shed her mother’s lies.  What is the cost of truth?  Was her angst and sorrow and loneliness any more than what her mother endured by not telling the truth? 

Neither were right or wrong.  We do what we do because we have to.  We do it with compassion.  We do it for love.

The mother:  slot machines, romance novels, garage sales, peanut butter kisses, chastity, shame; prayer.

The daughter:  dark chocolates, poetry, slot machines, thrift stores, and romantic liaisons; eventually, no guilt and no shame; prayer.

She would not let her mother’s family disappear, though for years they were hidden in dark shadows.  She gave them life with her words, though she had much to imagine.  Her mother read her book Chinese Blackbird, and said in a whisper “we are proud.”  

Was she proud, or perhaps angry, perhaps sad, that the only way to keep her daughters’ from race riots and dark men was to prep them as exotic Asian girls, praying for them to marry the White Lieutenant; a safety net, what Bloody Mary demanded for Liat?  Her prayers were mighty strong.  Four daughters, eventually 13 ex-lieutenant husbands.   The youngest was  brave, “be gone” she said.  But often she wondered, “what if.” 

At sixty, the youngest daughter is weary and lonely.  Is martyrdom worth the isolation?  Are political allies true friends or lovers?  Why did she need to expose her mother’s secret?  Why did invisibility scourge her?  Did she know she had a secret of her own?

The daughter of the mother who passed for White wasn’t as Negro or Chinese as her birth certificate proclaimed.  Culturally, she was White.  Scandinavian neighborhood.  Norwegians and Swedes.  Lutheran Church.  Hot dish.  Dick and Jane. Wonder Bread.  White picket fences.

At sixty, she is restless.  She still wants the apple pie, the American Dream—this is her secret.  Perhaps being a grandmother she wants her world to be smaller, kinder, without labels, without definition.  No trying to save the world, no trying to control.  Just to survive each day; sometimes with joy.  With a heart full of love.

Loving her children and her grandchildren she knows:  that her mother’s secret, and her secret, are not so very different.

Sherry Quan Lee

August 16, 2010

Admittedly, minor revisions, Sunday, August 22, 2010