Harvard Love

Charles Lowe

My wife’s mom hangs laundry on a line stretching across the loose border between our kitchen and living room. She’s lived with us in Massachusetts for nine months since our kid was born. Ever since she arrived, our kitchen has had a funny smell: a mix of boiled milk, stinky tofu, and pork and scallion dumplings.

The last two are Dad’s favorites. He likes to munch on the rice-flour wrappers and the tofu dipped in a hot sauce while watching Harvard Love. It’s a soap opera where three Koreans speaking fluent Chinese solve crimes committed in Cambridge by intellectuals long on degrees but short on intelligence—which brings me to the mouse.

For the last two weeks, a mouse has been preying on the pork and scallion dumplings. Dad’s confident the mouse is a foreigner. It eats only the dumplings and refuses the stinky tofu just like his son-in-law who can’t stand its gooey coat. “Most Americans prefer hamburger, like your President who likes his meat covered with heaps of ketchup and golden onions. But some foreigners,” Li translates, “prefer fried dumplings with pork and scallions, a favorite of Tianjiners along with stinky tofu.”

“Dad has two conditions,” Li explains.

“For what?”

“To kill the mouse of course. You want to be a son.”

“Why else would I call him Dad,” a decision which, by the way, wasn’t easy. My own dad had died only several months ago. Anyways, here’s Li’s theory. If I call her father Dad enough, he’ll forget I’m a foreigner.

Dad’s hatred of foreigners began at the time of the Japanese occupation, a distaste that went so deep he risked his family and his life to steal a used Schwinn from a Japanese lieutenant. Dad was anxious to tell that story and had Li translate it before he’d let her unpack his brown case. The point of Dad’s visit was to help take care of the kid, but so far he hadn’t done much except chew on dumplings and stinky tofu sparkling with red sauce while watching Harvard Love when he wasn’t pouring over copies of The World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper we ordered for him from New York.

“What’s my first?” I ask.

“Your condition,” Li stops to slice the pork into tissue-thin shards. Her fingers are thin and operate with the precision of a professional typist. “Dad will supervise the mouse’s capture.”

“What’s the second?”

“You must gombei.”

Gombei means down the hatch, and to demonstrate its meaning, Dad takes out the Maotai he’s proud to have smuggled through customs. The golden liquor is stored behind a gold label in a can, which looks like it contains motor oil.

The first shot goes down easily enough. The second, though, burns a hole in my stomach. Dad keeps pouring. By the fourth, I forget the stinky tofu smells like milk left out too long and believe I have always loved its taste. Li says everyone in her district thinks stinky tofu has the smell and taste of an overly affectionate dog. By the sixth, the warmth of the dog or the stink of the tofu has given me the courage to follow Dad behind a crinkled-up steel garage door while leaning my neck forward so that my shadow dissolves into his wide arms and bulky shoulders. By the seventh, I am blind and believe no one can guard a used Schwinn whose metal frame shivers in the absence of moonlight. By the ninth, I wheel the bicycle across a flat iron bridge. The city lights are off. It’s curfew. There’s a clear view of a Japanese brigade. I’m hungry, watching the foreigners dine on stinky tofu while drowning their sorrows in Maotai. The golden liquor enables its consumer to face a foreign ghost. By the eleventh, I am taking apart the bicycle so that the Japanese cannot find it—a task which brings me to the carpet.

Every room in our federally subsidized apartment has a carpet except our kitchen. The threads by the twelfth have become a map marking out a city from splotches of flour with a rancid odor. Dad is a sloppy eater and has decorated our gray carpet with specks of pork and scallions and with a patch of stinky tofu. By the thirteenth, I am drawn to the tofu, which has the aroma of rancid milk. When I close my eyes, Mom spoons out a red bean cereal, which is as warm as stinky tofu—stirring me awake.

Dad is by our Volkswagen. It’s parked near the dumpster. He’s tapping his foot. I can see all of that through our picture window and the used furniture as well, which a neighbor has piled next to the metal lip of the dumpster. I drive Dad the fifteen minutes to the Aubuchon’s next to the Stop & Shop where Li has told me to buy the Kraft Velveeta Cheese. But I select instead the Havarti flavored with peppercorn, as it is the type of cheese I would prefer if I were a mouse. It has a milk-white coating and clean, aromatic scent. The clerk speaks in a voice that sounds like it contains dry wood chips while explaining our two options. The first is wood spray, which has a pine smell and is guaranteed to eradicate the mice and other foreign pests. “The nicely scented oil is only slightly carcinogenic,” the clerk smiles.

I thank him for the insight and select the Victor Mouse Trap. “Be careful,” the clerk uses his index finger to identify the silver bar surrounding the large red V whose point disappears behind a gold bar engaged in the lock position. “It’s caught more than a finger,” he adds.

“I’ve been a Ph.D. student for nine years,” I tell him, “and am trained to be careful.”

“I have a degree in philosophy,” the clerk answers while affectionately touching my elbow.

Dad smiles, agreeing with my slightly less carcinogenic choice or because he believes his new son doesn’t need all his fingers. Either way, Dad reviews letter by letter the directions on the V for Victor trap, which are in English, Spanish, and Rumanian, but not in Chinese.

Here is the most important step:

Choose the right bait.

Afterwards, vigilantly (the italics, again, from Victor) remove the small staple that locks the gold bar to the wooden base.

Place a hunk of cheese or peanut butter inside the curl at the end of the bait pedal. Set the trap at the most opportune location, which I do, inserting the wooden slab at the edge of the laminated kitchen counter where a cluster of unnatural food is kept, including a nearly closed packet of Lays and a half-eaten yodel. Afterwards, I leave Dad to the close of Harvard Love where a law student with immaculate hair scrolls out in always-elegiac pictographs that manage to bring a smile to his grandfather who holds the silk-papered notes, which would otherwise vanish in the milk-white fog overhanging a tinted high rise in Seoul.

I press my knees against the linoleum tile. Here’s my plan:

Disappear.

If the mouse sees a foreigner, he won’t digest the piece of Havarti cheese with a delicious scent, which I am still inhaling when I awake. Dad wipes away the Havarti from the steel rod while Li places her slippers above my forehead while asking for the reason why her bookworm husband employs our best cheese to bait a foreign mouse. She stalks out of our kitchen, as I’m about to explain my theory.

Mom starts spooning the red bean cereal, its odor and warmth stirring me awake. A few weeks later, Li recommends trying Cornucopia. After the Havarti encounter, the suggestion surprises me. I remember she’s horrified by the price of toothpaste at the natural foods store; nevertheless, Li does find attractive an ad in The Valley Advocate beneath the green paste, promising to free our natural sanctuary of pests and other family members. Dad becomes very excited after hearing the translation but insists we men go it alone.

Dad doesn’t sleep that night. Li tells me he hasn’t been this excited since the Great Leap Forward when he beat the roof of their apartment house with a broom so as to prevent the pigeons from resting on a polluted gutter. Dad buckles me into a seat with a leathery look, and we drive into a slow-moving jam on Rte. 9. I watch the bicycles sail across a flat bridge while Dad reads The World Journal, which is run by some Nationalists. Dad likes to heap curses on its editorial page, which Li calls his version of stinky tofu.

When we get to the natural food store, my first question is, where’s the trap?

“We don’t sell instruments of physical or psychological abuse,” says one of the sales specialists, my question inspiring the others to flee to a backroom.

“There are non-intrusive ways,” she adds, “to catch a mouse. You can purchase a cage and afterwards, return it to the wild.”

“Northampton has wilderness?”

The sales specialist ignores my question. “You can also buy peppermint oil.”

She holds a bottle snug enough to fit into my palm. “It’s only sixty bucks. Mice generally dislike the odor. Besides, it makes a sparkling addition to your kitchen.”

“Do you have something more economic?”

“Onions.”

“Do they have to be organic?” I’m thinking Stop & Shop.

“No, but you might have to leave them out a few days. They rot easily.”

“Is there something in between?”

“We sell cocoa. Just mix it with plaster of Paris. Put the mix where you found the droppings.”

“What will happen?”

“The mouse will go off into a field and drop dead. It’s more humane.”

I put down the ten bucks for a packet of organic cocoa, and drop over a hundred on a cage as well. Dad and I become involved in another slow-moving jam. Dad’s reading the headlines and grumbling, his breath clotting up the side window. I watch several bicyclists enter the parking lot in front of a porn shop, then race across a flat bridge over the Connecticut River, the moon evaporating the mix of ash and dust kicked up from a construction project that has begun near the turn off to Aubuchon’s.

When we return to our federally subsidized sanctuary, I am feeling remotely optimistic a cage with a packet of organic cocoa has all the necessary dimensions to cure our family of foreign influence. Dad does also. Of course, I can’t be certain. We do speak separate languages. But he does bring over a can of Maotai, which I assume means he shares a similarly bright view of my prospects as a mouse catcher.

So despite our difference over stinky tofu, the two of us crouch on the cold tile in case the foreigner remains shy, although by now he’s probably at least as comfortable in our federally subsidized apartment as I am. Dad’s leathery hands become draped on my shoulders. We hear at two a neighbor dumping garbage into the large green dumpster. The trash makes a funny sound that causes Dad to smile.

He starts snoring. His breath’s like a home without walls, just containing the off kilter sound of pipes. It’s funny then because I don’t feel alone but instead feel my familiar dad taking my new dad’s place, bending down—believing if the foreign mouse can sees us, it will be reticent to partake of organic cocoa.

That’s ridiculous of course. He died, as I explained a little earlier, a few days after my daughter was born. One day, my father’s making salesman jokes, the next, a tube’s leaking drops of painkiller which stick to his tongue, the respite nurses having a reasoned discussion over whether he’d stopped breathing at two or four in the afternoon. It ended up at 3:15, and I sat beside him, watching him grow cold for three hours. The morticians were held up in traffic, and when I made them unzip the bag, his lips had grown white, and I still couldn’t talk with him.

A neighbor closes the metal lid of a dumpster, which stirs me awake. A few years before, my father explained he never faced the Japanese in combat. He was a radioman and had landed on an airbase near Tokyo a few months after the bomb was dropped, and the Japanese were friendly. He also talked about an old couple that lived near a live volcano and fed him sweet tea.

I push his arm away and get up to swat my face with cold water, assuming if I stay awake, the trap has a better chance. When I return downstairs, Dad is snoring louder, and I wonder how anyone sleeps. Li comes down at five and pours me some Maotai. I wave her off, but she holds it in front of me like it’s medicine, and I drink some—only a shot—and begin to feel dizzy when the cage door snaps shut.

© 2019 Charles Lowe

====

Charles Lowe’s fiction has appeared in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Fiction International, Guernica, J Journal, and in the anthology Friend. Follow. Text. #storiesFromLivingOnline. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is Associate Professor of English at United International College in Zhuhai, China, where he lives with his wife and daughter.