Free The Love Wife by Gish Jen

window, which you realize is the other thing in her room, like her third piece of furniture. A big big window she has, so big it’s hard to open.
    — I guess, I say.
    — Because their parents made sure they knew, says Lizzy.
    — But the foster mothers ask for money, I say. Lily’s parents only know because her foster mother sewed a note into her clothes. Like over her heart, Lily said, in the very inside layer of all her clothes, it was just lucky her parents found it. Plus they could barely read the writing after it went through the wash.
    Lizzy stares at me a little. Sometimes I wonder if she would stare like that if she went back to her old hair, it’s like once she went blond nobody could stare at her anymore. Because they like so noticed her they had to try not to, and then she could stare at them.
    — You don’t get anything either, she says. I really, completely don’t belong to this family.
    — You do, I say.
    — I do not, she says.
    But she’s sprawled out more on her chair, and like staring a little less.
    — I’m like a visitor, like Lanlan, she says.
    — What about me? I say.
    — You can be whatever you want, she says. It’s a free country.
    — I like visitors, I say.
    — Good for you, says Lizzy.
    — I like Lanlan, I say.
    — Good for you, says Lizzy.
    — There is something about Lanlan that gets Mom and Dad to say the same thing the other one just said, I say.
    — Hmmm, she says, and then is kind of quiet, which is practically the nicest thing she’s ever said to me.

 
    4
    A Family Is Born

    CARNEGIE /  And again backward: to fifteen years ago, and the story of how Lizzy came to us.
    BLONDIE /  For this is how our family came together, Lizzy first. And is that not the start of the story?
    CARNEGIE /  I was a grad student back then, living in the Midwest, which I did not particularly like; and getting a master’s in double e, which I did not particularly like. It so happened too that I had signed up for an opera class in the church annex with the copper beech tree. Did I like it, particularly?
    My mother detested opera.
    And so yes, I did like it most particularly. Yes.
    I thought, what’s more, that there might be interesting women in that class, women who would prove, surprise, unlike my mother. And should one of them prove particularly interesting, I knew what I would do: invite her to an opera. The local conservatory was always mounting something, so to speak. I warmed its shiny schedule in my pocket.
    In the meantime, I passed and passed the smooth-barked beech tree. I looked up into that tree and thought about climbing it. But I was a man now; climbing the tree was like a question I did not have to answer. My life was full of new questions, questions so large I did not know what they were.
    They preoccupied me with their vagueness.
    BLONDIE /  I like to think of Carnegie in that phase of his life—passing that tree, considering his life. Considering the tree—how huge it was, and what a room it made under itself. So rich and venerable, and yet like a prison, he said. Its lowest boughs, big as trunks themselves, grazed the ground, which was resplendent with moss. Years later Carnegie was still talking about that moss, and the way the roots rose out of it like a day of reckoning.
    I didn’t know any other men who stood back that way. Carnegie had big hands—like my father’s, strong, but smoother and more delicate. He kept them in his pockets as though he was saving them. He might have been a surgeon, or a pianist.
    CARNEGIE /  My mother had considered me a sap on account of the things I did not do.
Forget about it!
was one of her maternal refrains because as a child I had refused to eat eggs, insisting they were baby chickens. As an adult I was bothered by raccoon traps.
    Then there was the matter of evictions. It was just Mama Wong’s luck to have her one child, her one son, her heir, turn out the type who was haunted by evictions. Several times I