Pangs of Love

D eborah is a bean pole. As a joke, my mother calls her "Mah-ti," water chestnut, the squat, bulbous tuber that tapers to a point like a mini dunce cap. She has hips that flare like the fins of an old Cadillac, but no rump to speak of. She wears glasses with a rhinestone frame -- she's had the same ones since the eighth grade; this is not a stab at style here -- and photosensitive lenses that have the annoying quality of never being dark enough or clear enough; she's always in a haze. On the rare occasions she's visited me at my mother's, she's come dressed in a most unladylike fashion: penny loafers or running shoes, chinos, and shirts bought in a boys' department. Today is no exception. I stop the rental car, a big Chevy four-door, at Park and Thirty-third. She grabs the front-passenger-side handle and stands there expecting my mother to climb into the backseat like a dog. I hit the power window switches. "You can sit in front when we stop to pee," I say.

Deborah slams the door behind her. She leans forward in her seat. "How are you, Mrs. Pang?" I've heard her speak more warmly to the bald mice she tends at Sloan Kettering. That's where we met. At the lab we had had a small-scale scare, a baby version of the Red Dye No. 3 controversy a few years back, that forced Kyoto to send me, his right-hand slave, across town to have the stuff tested in Deborah's mice.

"Goot," my mother says. "How you?"

Deborah doesn't answer. Won't waste her breath on someone who can't take the conversation the next step. Mrs. Pang, the linguistic dead-end street. Barbarian, I think. But a savage in bed she is, even without Musk 838/ Lot No. igI4437594I-3e. Early on, my mother caught us in the sack -- her sack, in fact -- bony Deborah, with breasts like thimbles, on all fours. At that moment, as my mother's eyes burned holes through our nakedness, I meant to say, "What are you looking at?" full of indignation, but it came out a meek, "What do you see?" Fine, Deborah, I think, trash my mother; you're not a keeper anyway, as the fishermen say. She's the rebound among rebounds; only somehow she's stuck. If I had the words I'd straighten my mother out, allay her fears. What is she so fond of saying? "Are you planning to marry Mah-ti?" To which I tell her, emphatically, no. "So why," she says back, "you always hugging that scrawny thing?"

The trouble between Deborah and my mother runs deeper than the fact that my mother's seen the glare of Deborah's glassy bare rump. There are things I can do to soften their feelings toward each other. I might buy Deborah a pair of high-heel shoes, or register her at Hunter for Cantonese classes, or rent videos of the Frugal Gourmet cooking Chinese; I might ask my mother to stop calling Deborah Mah-ti and teach her, with patient repetition, the difficult syllables of Deborah's given name. But Deborah wants me to move out of my mother's place, says I'm a mama's boy, calls me that even as we make love; and my mother's still sad about the loss of Mandy, her surrogate Chinese daughter-in-law. My mother is subtle about this: "Mah-ti has no smell," she says, "like paper." That is to say, she misses Mandy, who made a point of showering herself with the perfumes I brought home from the lab whenever she visited my mother. There's no clean dealing with either of them.

When we pass the gas tanks along the Expressway, my mother tells me this is the very route Bagel always takes to his house. She says this with a measure of pride; I can tell what's going on in her head: I'm driving the same road my brother has driven, and to my mother's way of think- ing that's not only a remarkable coincidence but a confirmation of the common thread between us, our genes, our good blood -- ah, her boys, her talented womb! So why bother telling her the Expressway is the only reasonable route out to Bagel's?

Her last time out, she says, she drove with Bagel and his friend "Ah-Jay-mee" in the latter's two-seater, with Bagel folded into the rear storage area, best suited for umbrellas and tennis rackets. Then she wistfully adds that Bagel's former apartment mate Dennis had a car that had an entire backseat, but that luxury is "washed up" since he moved out.

After a while Deborah taps me on the shoulder. "What's she saying? She's talking about me, right? I heard her say my name."

"She said Dennis."

"Dennis-ah cah bik," my mother tells Deborah, spreading her hand to show size.

"Tell her this is a 'bik' pain in the you-know-what," Deborah says in a huff "Tell her I'm tired of your secrecy, of being gossiped about in front of my face."

I say, "Slow down, okayP We're discussing my brother. "

"What's Mah-ti saying?" my mother asks.

"She's saying her parents have a big car. She wants to take you on a drive someday."

My mother turns to Deborah and says, "Goot!"

There's not much traffic eastbound on a Saturday, not at this hour. Deborah's listening to her Walkman; I take the tinny scrape scrape scrape of the headphone's overflow as a token of peace. My mother stares out the windshield. Her eyes look glazed, uncomprehending. She seems out of place in a car, near machines, a woman from another culture, of another time, at ease with needle and thread, around pigs and horses. When I think of my mother's seventy-five-year-old body hurtling forward at eighty miles an hour, I think of our country's first astronaut, a monkey strapped into the Mercury capsule, all wires and restraints and electricity, shot screaming into outer space.

With Deborah occupied, I figure it's safe to talk. A chance to humanize the speed, the way pharmaceutical companies sweeten their chemicals with Cherry i2/Lot No. x362-4d so a new mother will eyedropper the stuff into her baby's mouth.

We speak at the same time.

"Ah-Vee-ah," she says my Chinese name in a whisper, "why is it that Ba-ko has no girlfriends? You have too many. You should marry. Look at Ah-yo. See how content he is?"

Poor Ray! If she only knew half of his troubles.

"Why is Ba-ko so stubborn?" she asks. "I tell you something, when I offer to take him to Hong Kong to find a bride, you know what he says? He says he's already married to his cat. Ah-Vee-ah," she says, touching my hand, "he upsets me so, I wouldn't even mind if he dated your Mah-ti."

I laugh a little; she shows her gold mischievously. "Tell me," she says (we're confidants now), "what do you make of your youngest brother?"

I shrug my shoulders. "I don't know," I say, turning palms up. "Ask him. "

"I'm talking to you now."

"Talk to Bagel. "

"Fo-gellit!" she says.