All That Work and Still No Boys

For Sale By Owner

56 For Sale By Owner A sign has appeared in our front yard, For Sale By Owner, white letters on stiff red cardboard, tacked to a wooden pole and hammered into the grass by my father. He has written our telephone number into the blank space on the bottom of the sign, and the whole appearance of it—the wobbly sign, the careful black numbers, the clear plastic sheeting stapled by my mother so autumn rains won’t run the ink—has a whiff of shame about it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of though. I don’t know why I feel embarrassed. We’re going to California. My father has got a promotion. Our ticket up and out—that’s what my parents say behind closed doors. I like the place we live in, a small town out the Philadelphia F o r S a l e B y O w n e r 5 7 Main Line. It’s the early sixties, something is stirring, but our little neighborhood hasn’t been touched. From the road, we look no different from all the other families around us. Our house is red brick with black shutters. The driveway runs straight, with a basketball hoop for my older brother and me. Yew bushes line the path to our front door. We have a red metal flag to raise and lower on our mailbox. I’m ten; my name is Charley. My family is Chinese—there’s no way around that—but we’ve been welcome here all the same. I have a pack of friends; they’re all envious. They want to be going to California. It seems a joke, that we’re moving to Los Angeles . To palm trees and Hollywood and Disneyland. They punch me for that, roll me in the dirt. We scrabble for handholds, trip the ones just getting to their feet. When we come up for air, we laugh at Wally Mitchell, who has weeds in his red hair that make him look like a farmer. Farmer Mitchell, we start to call him. It makes him mad, so we link arms and chant that at him all the way down the block. It’s his turn today, but tomorrow it will be somebody else’s. The gang keeps track; nobody is the victim for long. I belong here, I know it, and my parents are wrong to think that we’re better than this. Once, only once, did something bad happen. It wasn’t scary, only unpleasant. It might have been one of my gang who did it, or one of my brother’s friends—he’s sixteen. We had a little statue that came with the house; he stood at the end of our driveway. A riding jockey, with a red cap and striped pants, lifting a lantern in his curled hand. It was hard to tell if he was a boy or a man. My father didn’t like it, said it wasn’t meant for an ordinary neighborhood , a cramped little house like ours, but my mother wouldn’t let him remove it. I’ll give him a coat of paint then, said my father, and he painted the hands, the grinning face, the feet bright white, with a brand-new can of paint he bought at the hardware store. And the very next day, someone painted slanty eyes across the whitened face of our happy jockey. Okay, said my mother, her own eyes narrowed. Take it to the junkyard. She hurried back into the house. It was only a joke, my brother and I protested. We found it funny, because our friends thought it so, but our father’s silence as he loaded the little statue into the trunk of the Pontiac shut 58 F o r S a l e B y O w n e r down our explanations. It was our parents who couldn’t see the humor. We knew nobody meant us any harm. In fact, it’s their fault. They go out of their way to be different . My mother, especially, makes it a point. She sends my father to the city—sometimes Philadelphia, sometimes New York—to Chinatown to buy ingredients. She cooks for two days—eggrolls, wontons, mein noodles—Peter and I eat as fast as we can sneak it. Then she and my father put up the green card table and the red one and invite everybody in. My father pours the...