Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
cue aged Mary Ellen twenty years, so that now she looked her age. I
also felt Wendy shouldn’t go. The junta had put her name on a spe­
cial list of visitors. If she ever stepped foot in Burma, they’d lop it off.
Wendy admired Phil as her mentor so much she slept with him, in
fact, enough times for them to qualify as lovers. Hard bodies, she de­
cided, were not that important anymore. He was smart and articu­
late, and that was a form of seduction. She liked it that Phil worried
she didn’t care enough for him—which was the opposite of how
things were with Wyatt. Actually, she noticed that Phil could even be
somewhat clingy. He asked little test questions, like, “I was thinking
about your tush today. Were you thinking about mine?” Sometimes
he came across as desperate. She wished he were as confident in bed
as he was with the press.
Every now and then, when she did think of Wyatt, which was
“hardly ever,” she told herself she was “so totally over him.” He was
a brief infatuation, and she convinced herself it was a hypomanic
side effect induced by a change in her medication. Wyatt was a loser,
and not very smart. Plus he had no idea what responsibility to others
was. He didn’t ever think about having a real job or having a goal in
life beyond mooching off people so he could take off on his next ad­
venture. He would never do anything to distinguish himself, just as
he hadn’t when they were stuck in No Name Place. There was noth­
ing much to him, she concluded several times a day when he sprang
to mind, besides his cute butt and a certain jackhammer talent of the
pelvis.
W YATT DID indeed return to Mayville, which held another parade
and a grand banquet in his honor. For weeks, he was invited to one
luncheon after another. His high school held a victory dance in the
auditorium, and there he ran into a woman who laughingly said,
“Don’cha know it’s me?” It was the ditzy woman with heavy black
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