The Joy Luck Club

list. My mother must remember the incident on the fire escape landing, where she found me, shivering and exhausted, sitting next to that container of regurgitated ice cream. I could never stand the stuff after that. And then I am startled once again to realize that Harold has never noticed that I don't eat any of the ice cream he brings home every Friday evening.

'Why you do this?'

My mother has a wounded sound in her voice, as if I had put the list up to hurt her. I think how to explain this, recalling the words Harold and I have used with each other in the past: 'So we can eliminate false dependencies…be equals…love without obligation…' But these are words she could never understand.

So instead I tell my mother this: 'I don't really know. It's something we started before we got married. And for some reason we never stopped.'

When Harold returns from the store, he starts the charcoal. I unload the groceries, marinate the steaks, cook the rice, and set the table. My mother sits on a stool at the granite counter, drinking from a mug of coffee I've poured for her. Every few minutes she wipes the bottom of the mug with a tissue she keeps stuffed in her sweater sleeve.

During dinner, Harold keeps the conversation going. He talks about the plans for the house: the skylights, expanding the deck, planting flower beds of tulips and crocuses, clearing the poison oak, adding another wing, building a Japanese-style tile bathroom. And then he clears the table and starts stacking the plates in the dishwasher.

'Who's ready for dessert?' he asks, reaching into the freezer.

'I'm full,' I say.

' Lena cannot eat ice cream,' says my mother.

'So it seems. She's always on a diet.'

'No, she never eat it. She doesn't like.'

And now Harold smiles and looks at me puzzled, expecting me to translate what my mother has said.

'It's true,' I say evenly. 'I've hated ice cream almost all my life.'

Harold looks at me, as if I, too, were speaking Chinese and he could not understand.

'I guess I assumed you were just trying to lose weight… Oh well.'

'She become so thin now you cannot see her,' says my mother. 'She like a ghost, disappear.'

'That's right! Christ, that's great,' exclaims Harold, laughing, relieved in thinking my mother is graciously trying to rescue him.

After dinner, I put clean towels on the bed in the guest room. My mother is sitting on the bed. The room has Harold's minimalist look to it: the twin bed with plain white sheets and white blanket, polished wood floors, a bleached oakwood chair, and nothing on the slanted gray walls.

The only decoration is an odd-looking piece right next to the bed: an end table made out of a slab of unevenly cut marble and thin crisscrosses of black lacquer wood for the legs. My mother puts her handbag on the table and the cylindrical black vase on top starts to wobble. The freesias in the vase quiver.

'Careful, it's not too sturdy,' I say. The table is a poorly designed piece that Harold made in his student days. I've always wondered why he's so proud of it. The lines are clumsy. It doesn't bear any of the traits of 'fluidity' that are so important to Harold these days.

'What use for?' asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. 'You put something else on top, everything fall down. Chunwang chihan.'

I leave my mother in her room and go back downstairs. Harold is opening the windows to let the night air in. He does this every evening.

'I'm cold,' I say.

'What's that?'

'Could you close the windows, please.'

He looks at me, sighs and smiles, pulls the windows shut, and then sits down cross-legged on the floor and flips open a magazine. I'm sitting on the sofa, seething, and I don't know why. It's not that Harold has done anything wrong. Harold is just Harold.

And before I even do it, I know I'm starting a fight that is bigger than I know how to handle. But I do it anyway. I go to the refrigerator and I cross out 'ice cream' on Harold's side of the list.

'What's going on here?'

'I just don't think you should get credit for your ice cream anymore.'

He shrugs his shoulders, amused. 'Suits me.'

'Why do you have to be so goddamn fair!' I shout.

Harold puts his magazine down, now wearing his openmouthed exasperated look. 'What is this? Why don't you say what's really the matter?'

'I don't know… I don't know. Everything…the way we account for everything. What we share. What we don't share. I'm so tired of it, adding things up, subtracting, making it come out even. I'm sick of it.'

'You were the one who wanted the cat.'

'What are you talking about?'

'All right. If you think I'm being unfair about the exterminators, we'll both pay for it.'

'That's not the point!'

'Then tell me, please, what is the point?'

I start to cry, which I know Harold hates. It always makes him uncomfortable, angry. He thinks it's manipulative. But I can't help it, because I realize now that I don't know what the point of this argument is. Am I asking Harold to support me? Am I asking to pay less than half? Do I really think we should stop accounting for everything? Wouldn't we continue to tally things up in our head? Wouldn't Harold wind up paying more? And then wouldn't I feel worse, less than equal? Or maybe we shouldn't have gotten married in the first place. Maybe Harold is a bad man. Maybe I've made him this way.

None of it seems right. Nothing makes sense. I can admit to nothing and I am in complete despair.

'I just think we have to change things,' I say when I think I can control my voice. Only the rest comes out like whining. 'We need to think about what our marriage is really based on…not this balance sheet, who owes who what.'

'Shit,' Harold says. And then he sighs and leans back, as if he were thinking about this. Finally he says in what sounds like a hurt voice, 'Well, I know our marriage is based on a lot more than a balance sheet. A lot more. And if you don't then I think you should think about what else you want, before you change things.'

And now I don't know what to think. What am I saying? What's he saying? We sit in the room, not saying anything. The air feels muggy. I look out the window, and out in the distance is the valley beneath us, a sprinkling of thousands of lights shimmering in the summer fog. And then I hear the sound of glass shattering, upstairs, and a chair scrapes across a wood floor.

Harold starts to get up, but I say, 'No, I'll go see.'

The door is open, but the room is dark, so I call out, 'Ma?'

I see it right away: the marble end table collapsed on top of its spindly black legs. Off to the side is the black vase, the smooth cylinder broken in half, the freesias strewn in a puddle of water.

And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can't see her face.

'Fallen down,' she says simply. She doesn't apologize.