Lena is very different from the other three daughter characters. She had a rather strange childhood; her mother could barely speak English, her father understood very little Chinese, so they could never really communicate directly with one another or hold a conversation. As a result, their home was relatively quiet, and Lena's father always guessed at what her mother was saying, or he asked Lena to translate. Lena's mother was like a living ghost who never paid much attention to her daughter. She became even more ghostlike after her second son died at birth.
Lena is half Chinese and half Caucasian, and she says she gets her "Chinese eyes" from her mother, eyes that saw horrible things about to happen in even the happiest scenes. Her mother told her wild stories to prevent Lena from doing bad things, and as a result, Lena developed a vivid morbid imagination. As a child, she heard voices from next door (the Sorcis) screaming at each other and threatening to kill each other while she lay in bed trying to sleep. Every night, she heard sounds of fighting and, in her mind, saw the mother killing the girl. Lena imagined that Teresa Sorci lived the most terrible life possible. However, her opinion changed when Teresa used Lena's fire escape to climb back into her own room and trick her mother. Lena couldn't understand why Teresa would ever want to go back to such a terrible life, but she finally understood Teresa's real situation when she heard Teresa and Mrs. Sorci arguing again. Mrs. Sorci yelled, "You stupida girl. You almost gave me a heart attack," and Teresa yelled back, "I coulda been killed. I almost fell and broke my neck." Then they started to laugh and cry, "shouting with love." Lena could imagine them hugging and kissing and making up, sharing love that she had never known with her own mother. Lena feels ignored by her mother, who lies in bed or on the couch all day, and she longs to be seen and loved by her mother, as the little story at the end of Lena's first vignette, The Voice From the Wall, signifies.
When Lena gets older, she marries Harold Livotny, a partner at Livotny & Associates. Ever since they started dating, they always split the cost of everything. Whatever Lena buys, she pays for, whatever Harold buys, he pays for. They are extremely careful about who pays what, down to the very last cent. Lena feels that there is something seriously wrong with their marriage, and although she can�t put her finger on it, part of the problem is that Lena is sick of their checkbook-balancing lifestyle. Harold doesn�t know it, but Lena hates the idea of splitting the cost evenly, because love is about giving freely, not about determining who pays for what part of the cost. This misunderstanding is covered up by Lena�s willingness to go along with the status quo, and many other things in their lives are also concealed by false appearances. One big issue is equality between Lena and Harold. Both say that they�re each other�s equals, but in reality, Lena is treated as the inferior one. Harold earns seven times as much as Lena does and refuses to promote her. She comes up with the brilliant ideas that makes his firm so successful, yet he gets most of the credit. The balance sheet on the refrigerator is supposed to mean that Lena and Harold are equals, but it�s a false equality, an illusion. Like their house, which is really an old barn that was renovated to look like a grand house with fake paneling, their marriage has become one big illusion.
Their marriage, like the crooked table and the rest of the house, is falling apart, and although Lena sees the signs of deterioration, she does nothing about it. Why? One possible reason, although somewhat farfetched, is that as a child, she "knew" that she was going to marry Arnold, a mean, pimple-faced boy, because she left uneaten rice grains in her bowl. She was terrified at first, but after seeing a missionary film showing diseased people in Africa and India with large pits and fissures in their skin, Lena left more and more rice in her bowl and even refused to finish eating other kinds of food so that Arnold would be eaten away by huge pockmarks. She thought this was a clever way to prevent being married to this boy. Five years later, when she had all but forgotten about Arnold, she found out that he had died from complications from measles at age seventeen. Lena felt guilty and felt that this was her fault. She "knew" that she was destined to marry Arnold, so she did something about it, but tragedy resulted. Maybe she sees the signs of her doomed marriage and decides to do nothing about it because of what had happened in the past.
