Sai Ying Pun, 11:32AM – Showers.
Entry 97
A father and son board the elevator. The son, about 7, presses the button, floor 23. Two floors from the top. I wonder what’s on the 25th floor, the boy says. A secret office? I smile, reminded of the age when I believe so many things are hiding in plain sight, just a button, lever, or password away.
Around that time, I have an obsession with fountains and ponds. The kind you can buy at home improvement stores and install yourself, with electric pumps. The fountains look like wedding cakes topped with what look like pinecones or pineapples. The larger the fountain, the more tiers for the water to splash down. The ponds are just a black tarp covering a hole dug in the ground. But you can line the tarp with stones from your garden, so it looks like a real pond. You can put lilies and plants in, even fish. If you have raccoons in your neighborhood then you have to put a grate down at night so they don’t eat the fish.
In my post-war housing boom neighborhood, the front yards are closed off and raised several feet up from the sidewalk, some fenced or hedged in, so that hiding in plain sight is an active form of existence.
My mom and I walk through our neighborhood together. Sometimes to school, other times just so she can comment on the houses. I learn that smooth finish stucco is expensive. Brick is dangerous in an earthquake. Clapboard siding means termites. Ice plant and ivy mean rats. My mom wants to be a good mother. She wants to show me that she knows what a nice home is and that she is striving for that, even if it means nit-picking at perfectly fine homes lived in by ordinary people we’ve never seen.
As she critiques, I focus on the fountains and ponds. I learn that you can usually tell if there are any behind a hedge or a fence by the presence of gravel. Gravel may have been used to fill in a pond hole or the periphery of a fountain. People usually buy too much gravel when they get a fountain or a pond and so they spread the extra around the rest of the garden.
If you see gravel from under a fence, then you should stop and listen for the play of water. When I hear it, my mom lifts me up to see over the fence, which she can see over just fine, because these fences are just, what my mom calls, “for decoration,” as are other things like most of the exposed eaves in our neighborhood. And, she says, they are ugly. She would never have a fence.
Sometimes I don’t hear the play of water, but I am so sure that there is a fountain, I beg my mom to knock and ask. (Honestly, I would never do this for my child, but she does). I stand at the edge of the driveway looking bashful while my mom laughs and says something like, my son and I were just admiring your house and, for some reason, he thinks you might have a fountain. They both laugh at the absurdity of this. And then the person says, sort of amazed, something like, you know what? We do! But it’s in the back. Or, that’s so funny we used to, but the pump broke and now it’s in the garage. And that would be that.
Inside the elevator it smells like incense because it is Ghost Festival. And the father tells the boy if there were really a secret office on the 25th floor then there probably wouldn’t be a button for it. Too obvious. But, he says, we can go check.