Transparency Read Free Page B

tossed it onto the sofa. “So, who are your friends here?”
    “Oh yes, let me introduce you to my neighbors.”The mahjong ladies half stood out of their seats, smiling at Agnes, but it
     was obvious they wanted to return to their game.
    “Don’t let me disturb you,”Agnes told them. “Is my father here?”
    “He’s taking a nap,”Lily said, seating herself at the table.
    The living room was brightly lit compared with the dimness of the hallway. It seemed like its own island in space as the afternoon
     waned and the windows darkened. The mahjong ladies chattered, flinging their tiles to the middle of the table. They were older
     than Lily, in their seventies at least, their hands plowed with wrinkles, with bright green circles of jade hanging from their
     wrists. Their fingers, too, were weighed down by gaudy rings, the stones as shiny as candy, purple and turquoise and vermilion.
     “He ate oatmeal every day,”a woman with badly drawn eyebrows was saying.
    “I heard he took poison,”another said, picking up a tile. She had thick, sour lips and wore red horn-rimmed glasses. “Didn’t
     he lose everything?”
    “No, it was a heart attack. His wife found him still sitting on the toilet! In the middle of reading a newspaper.”
    “He was too cheap to pay for his own funeral,”the third one said. She had a sagging, magisterial face, her thick white hair
     pulled back into a bun. “In his will, he donated his body to science.”
    The one with the false eyebrows knocked down all of her tiles. “Hula!” she declared.
    There were startled cries. “I wasn’t even close!”
    “Did anyone have three sticks?”
    Agnes smiled as she poured herself a cup of tea from the counter. These ladies were real witches, talking about people’s ends
     with such morbid assurance—how could Lily stand their company? Perhaps she liked the attention, for she seemed to be the silent
     center of the group, the one the ladies exclaimed over and petted. Lily glanced toward Agnes from time to time, smiling at
     her. She seemed impatient for Agnes to leave.
    “Well,”Agnes said, after she had finished her tea, “he won’t mind too much if I wake him.”She walked across the room and opened
     the bedroom door, even though she sensed this was precisely what Lily did not want her to do.
    Her father sat at his desk reading a newspaper, his bifocals slipping down his nose. A single lamp illuminated his down-turned
     head, and it seemed from his silence that he had been exiled here. His manner changed the moment he saw her. His face broke
     into an exuberant smile as he stood up from his chair.
    “So what are you doing here? Come to pay me a visit?”
    Agnes closed the door behind her. “I’ve brought you a duck,”she said. “And to wish you a happy new year.”
    “A duck? Did you go to the Golden Palace?”
    “I did.”
    “That’s the best place to go. They have better ducks than anywhere else. Number one ducks!” he said. “So plump! And with crispy
     skin.”
    Agnes looked at her father. “And how are you these days?”
    “I’m fine!” he declared. “I’m good! Just look at me.”He straightened his argyle sweater over his shirt and tie, then preened
     in front of the mirror, turning his head to one side and then the other.
    “You don’t play mahjong with the ladies,”she said, looking around the room. The furniture was mismatched—things that she had
     given him which she no longer had any use for. A chair from an old dining room table set. A desk with buttercup yellow legs.
     A massive dresser with gothic iron handles. It bothered Agnes to see her daughter’s stickers still on one of the drawers.
    “You know me. I’m not good at these sorts of games. I’m a scholar, I read things ... like this newspaper,”he said, waving
     it in the air. “Besides, they want to talk freely without me hanging about.”
    “What’s that doing in here?” Agnes asked. “Is that where she makes you sleep?” In the corner,