Read Online Typical American by Gish Jen - Free Book Online Page B

amount for a pair of newlyweds, how enthusiastic they should feel about their new duties and responsibilities, where they fell in the spectrum of human attachments. Did they talk to each other more than average? Less? Did they kiss enough? Fight too much? What mattered? He wished he were in China, where if there turned out to be something wrong with the marriage he could always take a concubine. That was a better system, he thought, more sure. Although now that he was thinking about it, he wondered if he would even know if something were wrong. For this was the odd thing — all his life, he'd known he would get married, and yet he'd never stopped to consider what it would be like once he was. Marriage, as he'd thought of it, was the end of a story, much like a Ph.D., except that the marriage story was shorter, and less work. Not that life wouldn't take up again, but it'd be in other realms. At home, the husband would command, the wife obey. They would find harmony under their pillows the way that children, New Year's morning, found chestnuts.
    So he'd thought. But instead here he was, listening. Now she half turned, so that she faced away from him. He couldn't hear her at all. Had she stopped breathing? He sat up a little. A truck hitting a pothole, rumbling on. A distant radio, a soprano, very faint. He worked his pajama top out from under his back.
    Nothing. He stilled himself, lay himself out, patient as land;

    until finally, like a wandering rain, it came to him, not the sound he awaited, but something else, a recognition — that what he wanted more than anything was to secure her. He did not want her to float away into history, into the times, an upswelling of the masses. He wanted her to be permanent, an edifice whose piles touched the heart of the earth.
    Still nothing. He got out of bed and crossed the cold aisle to hers, shivering. How attached he was already — it was frightening how attached — just to her sound and presence, to her simple animal company. To her ways of doing things — the way she rolled up the washcloths, the way she dusted with a feather duster. What a privilege it was to know another person's habits! To know when she set her hair. To know that she hid things. He wished she wouldn't hide things. But even so; yes, already he was attached. He could not imagine how he was going to feel in twenty years. And how about fifty? How was he going to let her walk around on the street then? He was going to want to keep her in a satin-lined box.
    He fingered the hem of her pillowcase. The light in the room arced up to the ceiling, a half vault of stripes, below which he could almost make out the rise and fall of her body. Still he warmed his hands in his armpits; then gently picked up her head. It was heavy in his hands, and harder to grip than he'd expected — her hair. One of his thumbs slipped into the hol-iow of her ear. Yet he managed to turn her face back toward him. Ahh; her breathing again; better. She yawned, seemed to stir.
    Had he awakened her? He froze, hunched over, listening.
    Was she settling down?
    He would count to ten, then move, he decided. One, he started, two.
    But when eleven came he was still poised, waiting — holding his breath when she did, letting it go as she let hers.
    With morning, though, once more came day. Ralph asked if Helen had something to tell him; and when it turned out that

    there was nothing wrong (or nothing, at least, that she would admit), childish love turned into adolescent embarrassment turned into manly tyranny.
    "This way," Ralph demonstrated, inhaling, exhaling. "Even. Do you see? You should breathe this way"
    Helen mimicked him, timidly. "That one right?"
    "Right" pronounced Ralph. "Again"
    Helen did it again.
    "Again," he commanded. "Again."
    Helen thought a moment, then experimentally let her breath catch.
    "No," said Ralph. "That wasn't right."
    "Show me once more?" She tilted her head, and was pleased to see the pleasure with which Ralph