Pangs of Love

B agel, Jamie, and I spend the afternoon playing tennis while my mother watches us from the car. The others take a drive around the "countryside." We eat dinner late. Jamie barbecues chicken. My mother chops her duck into rectangular chunks. We drink three bottles of chardonnay. Afterward, we're in the kitchen, slicing pies, making coffee, putting away leftovers, wash- ing dishes.

I hear my mother calling for Bagel. We find each other in the busy kitchen, and he asks me to see what she wants.

She's in the master bedroom standing in front of the TV set. It's turned on; the screen's filled with pink and blue snow.

"What are you doing?" I say. "This is Saturday. There's no Johnny Carson."

"You think I don't know," she says. "Saturday night has to have wrestling."

I flip through the stations with the remote control. For as long as I can remember, my mother has been a wrestling fan. It's good pitted against evil; the clean-shaven, self- effacing, play-by-the-rules good guy versus the strutting, loudmouthed, eye-gouger. No language skills required here. A dialogue of dropkicks, forearm smashes, and body slams. It's a big fake but my mother believes. And for a long time, as a kid, our family gathered in front of the set Saturday nights, drinking sodas and cracking red pistachio nuts, true believers all.

In one of my strongest memories, a man from ringside wearing a pea coat and knit cap, with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, leapt into the ring where the champ, a vicious long-haired blond, was taking a post-victory strut on his victim's chest. The fans in the arena, my mother beside me, were voicing their indignation when this mys- tery man, who looked as if he had walked in off the streets, caught the champ unawares, lifted him onto his shoulder, and applied a backbreaker, soon recognized as his signature hold. What joy, what gratitude, what relief we all felt! Justice restored! Later in the program, the ringside an- nouncer interviewed our hero. He was an Italian sailor, he said, in heavily accented English, a recent immigrant to U.S. shores.

It was myth in action. The American Dream in all its muscle-bound splendor played out before our faithful eyes. My mother and I sit at the edge of the king-size bed. On the screen, a match is about to begin between a doe- faced boy named Bubby Arnold and the Samurai Warrior. The All-American Boy meets the Yellow Peril. The out- come is obvious to everyone except my mother. She yells encouragement to Bubby, "Kill him, kill the little Jap boy!" as he bounds across the ring, all grit and-determi- nation, but promptly collapses to the mat whenhe runs into the Samurai Warrior's lethal, upraised foot I shake my head. By then my thoughts are full of Kyoto and Mandy's Ito. My Musk 838/Lot No. igr443754I-3e, tes- tament to our love, and my tenuous hold on- Mandy are crumbling, going the way of Bubby Arnold under the Samurai Warrior's assault. I ache for Bubby,thepoor schnook. I can't bear to watch. But my mother hasn't given up. She screams for her man to step on his opponent's bare toes, to yank on his goatee. But that isn't in the script. He isn't paid to be resourceful, no Yankee ingenuity.here. No one, not my mother and her frantic heart, can change the illusion.

At the commercial break my mother says, "The Japanese are so cruel. He almost killed that poor boy." She goes on that way, recounting the mugging, and I tell her not to take it so seriously. "It's all a fake," I say. "He's not really hurt."

"I have eyes," she says. "I know what I just saw."

I'm surprised by the sudden heat in her voice, by the wound beneath the words. The fights matter: in them, she believes her heart's desire, her words of encouragement have currency. What she wants counts. But the truth is she doesn't believe what she has seen. The good guy should win. Somewhere in that mind of hers she carries hope for the impossible. Bubby Arnold triumphant, Mandy back in our lives again. I look at her, a woman against the odds. What a life of disappointment!

I won't let her down as Bubby Arnold has. She needs to hear the truth: there is no Santa; the Communists aren't leaving China. Her beloved Amanda is gone for good. "I have to tell you somthing." I take a deep breath and say, "Amanda," and as anticipated, she's startled, expec- tant, hanging on my next word.

I regret I ever started. That hope is flickering in her irises, and it's poison to my enterprise. But I have no recourse but to get on with it; as my mother likes to say at such a juncture, "You wet your hair, you might as well cut it."

I know what I want to say in English. My mind's stuffed full with the words. I pull one sentence at a time from the elegant little speech I've devised over the months for just this occasion, and try to piece together a word-for-word translation into Chinese. Yielding nonsense. I abandon this approach and opt for the shorter path, the one of reduction, simplicity, lowest common denominator. "Ah-mahn-da, what? Talk if you have talk." There's music in her voice I haven't heard in years.

"I like Amanda," I say.

My mother nods. On the TV, wrestlers being inter- viewed snarl into the camera and holler threats that seem directed not so much at future opponents, but at the view- ers themselves.

"She doesn't like me," I say.

"Crazy boy. Like? What is this "like"? I lived all those years with your father -- who worried about who liked which one? Tomorrow, you call her back here."

Samurai Warrior's grinning face fills the screen. In the background his manager carries on about the mysteries of the Orient, tea ceremonies, karate, brown rice, and his client's Banzai Death Grip.

"Look it, look it. He's so brutal, that one is," my mother says. She touches my cheek, her hand warm but leathery. I can't remember this happening before. "You say you like her, so call her back."

"What's wrong with your ears? I said she doesn't like me. She likes him." I point at the TV.

"Crazy boy. What are you saying?" She dismisses me, her fingers pushing off my cheek, as if they have springs.

"Amanda likes a Japanese."

"That one." she says, meaning the wrestler.

I pound my fists against my thighs. "No, not him." I stand up and pace the carpet between my mother and the TV set. "Amanda," I begin, "Amanda..." And each time I say her name and hesitate, my mother sucks in breath and inflates with new hope. I stop pacing. She looks up at me from her seat at the edge of the bed. I touch her cheeks with both hands. I don't know where the gesture comes from, movies or TV, but it has nothing to do with what went on in our household. I am on strange ground. In my palms her face is a glass bowl, open and cool. "Amanda likes you. She doesn't like me. She likes a Japanese boy in California. I can call her, but she's not coming back."

My mother pulls away, not just from my hands, but receding, a filament inside her dimming. "Ah-mahn-da makes a delicious dumpling," she says in a small, distant voice. "She rolls the skins so delicately."