Chapter One: Chinese Eyes
From the novel, Cooking Lessons
By Tena Russ

Summer, 2005

This morning I woke up thinking I was back in Paradise, Wisconsin in my third-floor bedroom. Then I remembered that I’ll be there soon. The funeral is tomorrow. I’m returning home for the first time in ten years, riding back with Esmé, my sister of a different mother. Still in shock, I’ve asked her to drive since I don’t trust myself behind the wheel. Besides, I want her with me in case the road home gets too bumpy. Last night at dinner she asked what I wished would happen. I answered, for the dead to be resurrected.

I stayed up well into the night rereading my old diary, the one I wrote the summer I turned eighteen. My memory is intact but my heart is not. I would gladly banish certain memories but that would be denying their truth. Truth is the key to freedom. Esmé bears witness to the fact that in my family truth was a curved surface. Mom once remarked that I had elevated the lie to an art form. How ironic that she should trump me.

Outside my bedroom window, departure day is overcast. Lake Michigan laps at the shore like a cat at a bowl of cream, a very different view from the endless cornfields of my childhood. Ruffled waves tease the shoreline and then, as if in exile, retreat to other borders. In Belmont harbor, sailboats ready for open water struggle against their moorings. It’s all about leaving.

*

Where is home?

I was born in Hong Kong on July 4, 1975 at 9:20 PM to a nineteen-year old woman named J. Wong. My birth certificate listed her occupation as “musician.” Since my father’s name was missing, I was assumed to be illegitimate or, euphemistically put, a love child. In my dictionary illegitimate was defined as “one born out of wedlock, not sanctioned, with no hereditary rights.” To me, it was a synonym for being demagnetized from true north and set adrift.

I had Chinese eyes, the legacy of unknown ancestors.

At the age of two weeks, in a private adoption, St. Catherine’s placed me with an American couple, Clyde and Gloria Pettersen, who lived in Paradise, Wisconsin. In Paradise, I was the only Asian except for the ancient Korean dry cleaner. Mr. Kim and I were anomalies. I looked up the word the year we studied the Apollo 13 Mission, the one that nearly ran out of air before the astronauts returned from outer space. Houston, we have a problem. We have an anomaly. Paradise, we have an anomaly named Daisy. To tell the truth, I really loved the sound of the word. Had I been a romance writer I might have named my heroine Anomaly Smythe.

As a child, I disliked the name my adoptive parents had given me. Daisies were the most ordinary flower in the world, a weed that grew anywhere. People named their dogs Daisy. “Come Daisy. Sit Daisy. Oopsy-daisy, off the sofa, girl.” If I had to be named for a flower why couldn’t it have been Violet or Rose, or better yet, Lily? Mom said daisies reminded her of freshness and purity, qualities an ideal daughter should possess. It was hard to pinpoint where I failed, exactly, but I learned to recognize her disapproval early on. That I wasn’t her flesh and blood hadn’t mattered so much when I was a life-sized doll to dress up and show off. Who wouldn’t love a black-eyed waif in pink ruffles? Then, she’d been warm and protective when monsters and bogeymen hid under the bed and lurked in the closet. She’d tell me my sheet was an angel’s wing that would protect me while I slept. If the sheet came off during the night, I’d scream in panic and she’d stumble down the hall to tuck me in again, murmuring, it’s okay, hush now, and I’d be asleep before she left the room.

Then the twins came along. The story went that when she couldn’t conceive, she adopted me and then got a two-for-one surprise that made her lap -- formerly my province -- suddenly full of boy babies. Ever since, Frank and Lowell were two moons orbiting her. I wasn’t sure if it was because they were male or because they came from her body as I had not, but after their arrival she was no longer my safe harbor. She was No Man’s Land.

I remember being about eight, sitting between her knees at her dressing table as she braided my hair for Sunday school. In front of us, on a slender stand, was the antique mirror that had been a gift from her deceased father, Poppy.

“Don’t touch it,” she said. “If you break a mirror you’ll have seven years of bad luck.”

When she spoke, her breath was as sweet as an apple. Using a rat-tail comb, she parted my hair into two perfect hemispheres. Then, with the comb between her teeth, she wove my hair over and under until she’d made a braid like a black asparagus tip. I watched her face in the mirror, the shape of her eyes, the tilt of her head. When her fingers brushed against my neck, my stomach warmed with pleasure.

“Okay, you’re done,” she said, pushing me from her lap. She brought the mirror close to her face and gazed into it. There is no one more beautiful than this mother. When I reached to hug her, my arm must have bumped the mirror. Suddenly jagged pieces of glass littered the floor. In them were reflections of her face, hideous with rage.

“Look what you’ve done!” she cried. “What did I do to deserve such a clumsy girl?”

With a bursting heart, I fled to Dad.

“It’s okay, Daisy-doodle,” he said, hugging me. “You didn’t mean to.”

At thirteen, I was a portrait by an artist done during a period of uncertainty. An aspiring femme fatale, I decided to test out my budding femininity on Dad by pretending to be a model. I put on my faded Calvins and a favorite purple t-shirt to perform my over-the-top runway strut for him. He applauded and whistled as if Cindy Crawford were working the room. Mom, standing in the doorway with a dishtowel slung over her shoulder, said, “Don’t you have something better to do?”

I understood that to mean: “He’s mine.” And he was. She was Queen; I was princess, lower case.

When she could no longer deny the fact that I needed a bra, she took me to Jostin’s Intimate Apparel where we were shown into a claustrophobic fitting room with peach-colored walls and a three-way mirror. In my Carter’s cotton underpants I resembled Popeye’s girlfriend, Olive Oyl, all knees and elbows and feet the size of gondolas. Mom presided from a gilded chair, her good handbag at her slender feet. I could smell her perfume, a ladylike blend of lilac and orange blossom called Femme. A universe resided in that scent.

Her usual saleslady, Miss Moran in sensible shoes, brought in some training bras, which were supposed to coax embryonic breasts into growth.

“She’s at that awkward stage, you know,” Mom said, straightening her spine.

Miss Moran, measuring me with a tape, noted, “Thirty four. She might be ready for an A. Try this one, dear.”

I put my arms through the straps and she hooked the back as if I weren’t capable of doing it myself. In the mirror, I marveled at my surprisingly adequate chest. The bra was plain and the color of an Ace bandage, but it did make me look more like a girl.

“I had to wear a bra when I was ten,” Mom said. Bragger, I thought.

Miss Moran flashed her tweed-toothed smile. “You have a lovely figure, Mrs. Pettersen.”

The corners of Mom’s mouth lifted. “I entered a talent contest once.”

“I’m not surprised,” replied Miss Moran. “How’d you do?”

Mom’s eyes flickered. “I had to withdraw. My parents didn’t approve.”

Miss Moran was studying me. “Your daughter reminds me of Audrey Hepburn.”

Before the old Paradise movie theater was torn down, Esmé and I saw a rerun of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We sat in the dark on worn plush seats, gobbling Jujubes and black licorice, swooning as Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard kissed in the rain. Audrey was everything right in the world, and all I wanted to be: graceful and gorgeous. To be mentioned in the same breath with my idol! I decided that Miss Moran wasn’t so stupid after all, and was sorry to have nicknamed her Miss Moron.

“Audrey Hepburn?” said Mom. “Really, I don’t see that at all.”

I tried hard to be her ideal daughter, to make her proud, but her approval of me seemed in inverse proportion to my efforts. By the time I was a high school senior I was editor of the school newspaper, a member of the Honor Society, and a reading buddy at the elementary school. Little kids smiled at me. People called me friend. Dogs licked my hand. I didn’t do heavy drugs and I didn’t hang out with bad boys. Yet she obsessed that I would end up damaged goods; after all, I was the second-hand smoke of that big-time sinner, my mother. If Mom couldn’t re-map my heredity at least she could exert her steely influence over my environment. Therefore, my childhood was accompanied by a long list of thou-shalt-nots. The decree to treat my body as a temple evidently sunk in for at eighteen, I was the last living virgin in the free world. No man had been granted a visitor’s pass to my body, let alone worshipped at its sacred altar.

Mom’s name was Gloria, perfect for a woman who could have been a beauty queen. Picture a woman with a gentle sweep of forehead, a small, straight nose, an unimpeachable mouth. Her body, while small enough to pass for a middle-grader, was not childlike. Her huge hazel eyes reminded you of a lioness. What stopped you dead in your tracks was her hair. It was the color of ginger ale, a shade that sells peroxide by the gallon. Hers was real. Her only flaw was that she was flawless.

I should mention her diary, that it was a way I came to know her heart, a little. One afternoon, I was searching the kitchen hutch for Gran’s old recipe book when I came across the notebook tucked behind some old file folders. The obscure placement didn’t seem accidental. Even without opening it, I guessed what is was. The urge to know what she’d written about me itched like a scab.

Esmé and I liked to take those magazine quizzes that asked such questions as, “What would you do if your friend was cheating with another friend’s steady?” or “Would you lie on a test if you knew you wouldn’t get caught?” or… fill in the moral dilemma. The answers seemed blatantly obvious to us, especially when they didn’t concern a situation we actually faced. Women of integrity, we would always choose the high moral road. Esmé would probably try to talk me out of reading the diary, giving me wise and noble advice I didn’t want to hear, like “Integrity is sacrificed at your own hand.”

Sometimes that hand must scratch an itch. In the diary, I read of Mom’s enigmatic and often bizarre inner world, and about some odd family triangles, but I still wasn’t sure who she really was.

For reasons of her extraordinary good looks and others, Gloria Pettersen was a different species than I. She was born to first-generation immigrants, one of the many German families who came to central Wisconsin to raise corn and dairy cattle. Her parents, Johann “Poppy” Lehman and his wife, Annamay, were hard working, law-abiding, God-fearing people. From her fundamentalist father she learned a deep antipathy toward sinners, a category that included anyone who committed the slightest indiscretion, which meant that I was the living, breathing result of someone’s sin.

A devout churchgoer, Mom was the primary soloist in the choir. She sang like an angel, everyone said. A mezzo-soprano with perfect pitch, she had the kind of voice that made you teary when she sang “America the Beautiful.” She could do popular songs too, torchy stuff that made Dad melt, like “Love Me Tender” and “Ev’ry Time We Say Good-Bye.” A born actress, she got rave reviews for her roles in the local productions of the Mikado and Pirates of Penzance. In my opinion, her most notable performance was as Town Beauty.

I have wondered how her life might have been different if she had been born ugly, or worse -- to her way of thinking -- nondescript. Unlike the rest of us mere mortals, she’d never had to worry when she would grow into her lips or if she would ever have a boyfriend. She was born with Presence, a quality that casts a long shadow over a daughter. In her company, males of all ages would stand taller. Dad’s friends loved to tell her silly little stories and jokes just to make her laugh. She’d listen to their flatteries and then flit away, a butterfly sated on honeysuckle. Later, gossiping on the phone with her best friend, Hattie Johnson, she’d refer to her admirers as ninnies. She was blonde to the bone.

The disadvantage of being born with great beauty is that it has no place to go. Each morning is a step away from the original perfect design, a gift one must surely forfeit with regret. At forty, while she wasn’t exactly Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, it must have been unpleasant to realize that her status as goddess might have a time frame, and limits. I wouldn’t have cared if she looked like E. T. if she had loved me.

The central fact of my life was that I was nobody’s all-time favorite person. I would never be loved unequivocally and passionately. If only I were like a black hole in space with enough power concentrated in my vortex, I could suck someone into my gravitational pull forever! In reality, I was the human equivalent of the planet Pluto.