Typical American by Gish Jen Read Free Book Online

twirled giddily, her handbag swooping. The handbag was red and gold, with a dainty gold-link chain. She held it by only two fingers. Was this temptation? If so, it was working. The bag swooped by again. How easy it would be to pluck it — quick! — out of the air. Instead Ralph pressed his fingers together and let the girl teeter on.
    So. He'd passed the test. He felt momentarily pleased, like a man who, catching a chance glimpse of himself in a mirror, discovers a figure of some dignity. At the same time he wondered,

    What test? Was he being tested? And who was doing the testing? And why him? That's what he really wanted to know. Why, of all people, him. From up the path, a black coat migrated his way, like an answer slow in coming. He squinted at it.
    That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter. Ralph was not religious in general, but in times of hardship, gods grew up, some to test and prod, others to look in on him. Interested in himself, he believed himself a subject of interest; so that when, after months and months of calling, Theresa finally found him slumped there on that park bench, Ralph believed himself not so much rescued as delivered.
    "So lucky!" Theresa said later. After all, she couid've just as easily gone left instead of right, back around the pond instead of over the hill...
    But what earthly luck could have produced this black coat, made it stop — could have made it talk Shanghainese, no less, could have turned it right before his eyes into a sister, his sister? Ralph was so astounded he couldn't talk, so astounded that in springing up to welcome her, he knocked her over, so that she fell to the sidewalk and sprained her ankle. Then he slipped too; and then they were both crying and not knowing what to do. Luck? How could it be only luck?
    "Was miracle." This was Ralph's version of the story. "Miracle!" And even so many years later, anyone could still hear in his voice all that the word meant to him — rocks burst into blossom, the black rinsed from the night sky. Life itself unfurled. As he apparently, finally, deserved. How else could it be, that he should find himself lying in coin-spangled ice slosh, in America, embracing — of all people — his sister? Saved! Know-It-All in his arms! Impossible! So he would have thought; so anyone would have thought. But, heart burning, there he was just the same — hugging her, by Someone's ironic grace, as though to never let her go.

    made her quit, sent her for dance lessons, strapped her to a stick-and-chalk contraption that was supposed to help her attend to her movements.
    But Theresa would not care, being almost glad to be all wrong in some sphere. When Ralph laughed at her, she laughed with him. Wasn't she a misfit too! By day they shook their heads together, brother and sister, tears in their eyes. Only in the soft of the night, quiet, her pet cat in her lap, did she wish to be someone else. Like their younger sister, say, whose blessing was the blessing of blessings — to be who she was supposed to be, so in tune with her time and place that though she gave without calculation to others, she was invariably repaid sever-alfold. Her falling in love was typical. She helped a certain harelipped schoolmate with her homework, wrote her a part in the school play; and in return was introduced to that schoolmate's brother, a man gentle, handsome, and intelligent past imagining.
    Not to say rich, which pleased their mother; and though it displeased their father that his wife talked of such things, it seemed that Theresa's sister and her beau were going to be allowed to marry. No one had actually said so; but neither was anyone matchmaking, and her lover's letters were permitted to arrive. Theresa tried to hint — she wouldn't mind if her sister married first.
    No one would hear her. Her sister spent hours in the pavilion by the carp