by Malinda Lo
“Hold the weight of the ball with your left. Right, like that. Now bend your knees and lean forward—but not too much! You’re going to lead off with your right foot. Just walk toward the lane—keep your eyes straight ahead. Swing your right arm back—you see how they’re doing it down there? Right, swing your arm and just let go—no, you don’t need to throw it!”
Lily had tossed the ball heavily at the front of the lane. It smacked the polished wood with a wince-inducing crack, and then spun into the gutter.
“I told you I’m not good at sports,” Lily said ruefully. “Maybe I should have just stayed with Miss Weiland’s group.”
Over to their left, Miss Weiland was teaching several beginners, but Kath had convinced her she could teach Lily on her own. The rest of the G.A.A. girls were split up among half a dozen lanes throughout the Loop Bowl. The group of mixed couples and a party of four men beside them were the only non-G.A.A. patrons that afternoon.
“I should have showed you first,” Kath said. “Watch me this time. It’s all about timing. That’s what Miss Weiland says. You have to swing your arm in time with the way you walk. See?”
Lily watched Kath pick up a ball and hold it in front of her stomach. Then she started walking toward the lane, leading with her right leg as she swung the ball back with her right arm. She took four steps and slid her left foot along the polished wooden floor, extending her right leg behind her as if she were curtsying to the bowling alley, and let go of the ball. It rolled down the oiled wood and struck down half of the pins.
“That’s great!” Lily exclaimed.
“It would’ve been better if I got them all. But I’ll go again. Maybe I can get a spare.”
Lily took a seat at the back of their lane to watch Kath try again. There was a pleasing rhythm to the way Kath moved, a smoothness to the arc her arm followed before she released the ball. When she slid on the fourth step, dropping low to the ground, her skirt rose up and exposed the hollows behind her knees. The sight was unexpectedly intimate, and Lily averted her eyes. The men who were bowling nearby seemed to smoke and talk more than they actually bowled, and Lily saw a couple of them eye the G.A.A. girls and grin at each other.
There was a crashing sound as Kath’s ball struck the last of the pins, and she let out a triumphant whoop before returning to Lily. “You see, it’s about momentum,” Kath said. “You don’t have to throw it down the lane. The momentum will carry it. You want to go again?”
Lily was acutely aware of the men in the next lane, and she drew Kath down on the bench beside her and whispered, “I think they’re watching.”
“Who?”
Lily turned her back on the men and said quietly, “Those men behind me. When you bowl, your skirt goes up.”
Kath looked startled. She glanced over at their classmates, watching as they slid toward the lane and extended their legs back. Each time a girl bowled, her skirt rose up, exposing a flash of knee or thigh, and with those men watching, the ordinary motion of their bodies somehow became indecent—as if the girls were showing off their limbs to onlookers.
Kath looked down at her hands, her cheeks turning a faint pink. “Don’t pay any attention to them,” she said, but she didn’t suggest picking up their bowling game again.
The girls from the G.A.A. down at the far end hadn’t noticed they had an audience. They were still getting their lesson from Miss Weiland, who was instructing them on the proper way to walk toward the lane. “The footwork is unhurried—you don’t need to run at the lane,” Lily heard her say. Her voice carried clearly in a break between the echoing, musical sounds of bowling balls crashing into pins. She watched Miss Weiland take her stance and begin her approach to the lane, her arm swinging back and releasing the ball, her right leg extending backward in that bowling lane curtsy. Miss Weiland was wearing trim-fitting khaki pants rather than a skirt, and Lily wondered if Miss Weiland had done that on purpose.
“Now, you see, you swing the ball back like a pendulum and simply let it go,” Miss Weiland was saying.
Miss Weiland’s bowling ball spun down the right side of the lane and then hooked toward the center, rolling right into the space between the center pin and the one to its right. The crack of collision echoed as the pins tumbled over. Lily could imagine it illustrated in a cartoon with the jagged-edged star of an explosion, and she immediately thought of rockets. “It’s all physics,” she said suddenly.
“What?” Kath said, puzzled.
“The bowling ball hitting the pins—it’s Newton’s third law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s how rockets work.”
“I think you’ve lost me.”
“Sorry. Do you want me to explain?”
“Sure.”
Lily reached for her book bag and pulled out a notebook, and began to draw a diagram with a rocket and a stick figure of a human being. Kath, sitting beside her, leaned over to watch as she drew. “How do you know all this?” Kath asked.
“I’ve read about it,” Lily said, trying to ignore the brush of Kath’s knee against her leg. “And my aunt Judy has explained some of it to me.”
“I’d love to go on a rocket.”
“People can’t go on rockets. It’s too dangerous.”
“Isn’t that why it would be fun?”
Kath was close enough that Lily could feel the warmth from her body. “Not—not for me. I get sick when the cable car goes downhill too fast.”
“I’d definitely go.” Kath leaned back, her shoulder grazing Lily’s. “Can you imagine how exciting it would be to go to the moon or to Mars?”
“Arthur C. Clarke says it would take about two hundred and fifty days to reach Mars. As long as a rocket can reach escape velocity, it doesn’t take much more energy to keep flying all the way to Mars.”
“How long would it take to get to the moon?”
“Five days or less. If we left tomorrow, we could be there by Tuesday! But we don’t have the ability yet to launch a rocket that can escape Earth’s gravity. And it’s very dangerous.” Lily tapped her pencil against her notebook, her equations forgotten. “We’d have to shield the crew—if there was a crew—from radiation. It would be much safer to send automatic instruments.” She gestured excitedly with her pencil and said, “Robots!”
The pencil nearly stabbed Kath in the leg. “Careful,” Kath said, laughing, and reached for Lily’s hand.
“Sorry,” Lily said, blushing.
Kath eased the pencil from Lily’s fingers and set it down on the bench. “Let’s say you invent a rocket that can do it—”
“It’s a fuel problem,” Lily said.
“Right, fuel. Let’s say we get that right, and we can get people onto this rocket. What do you think it would be like to go to the moon?”
“Hmm.” Lily still felt the ghost of Kath’s hand on hers. She tried to focus. “Well, we’d need to develop space suits too. Arthur C. Clarke said they might look like suits of armor—wouldn’t that be funny?”
“Why suits of armor?”
“Because of the pressure. There’s no pressure on the moon, so the suit would probably have to be rigid.”
“So we’d be wearing suits of armor on the moon? Like King Arthur and his knights? I guess if you meet some aliens, then you’d be prepared.” Kath reached for the pencil and brandished it as if it were a sword. “En garde, aliens!”
Lily burst into laughter, and her notebook slid off her lap onto the floor. Kath picked it up to use as a shield, standing to strike a heroic pose. Lily covered her mouth, still laughing, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the group of men again. She had almost forgotten about them. Now they seemed somewhat pathetic; they were middle-aged and balding, dressed in ugly plaid shirts. There was a desperation to the way they were eyeing the girls. Whatever danger she had sensed from their attention had turned to pity, and with a burst of inspiration she stood up
and went to the ball rack.
“You see, I’ll show you—it’s physics,” she joked to Kath. There was a certain pleasure in knowing that Kath was watching her, that Kath would keep her eyes trained on Lily’s body as she released the bowling ball to spin down the lane—inexpertly, to be sure—and when the ball struck only one of the pins on the left side, she shrugged. “I’m not good, but it’s still conservation of momentum. The moment the ball strikes the pins is exactly like the moment a rocket launches from the ground—it’s an explosion.”
Kath came to pick up her bowling ball. “I think you’ve lost me with your analogy, but I don’t think I need to know how it works. You’re the one who’s going to build the rockets, right?”
Lily smiled. “Right.”
She stepped back to give Kath room to bowl, and also to block the men’s view.
18
Kath came to Lily’s locker first thing on Monday morning, her eyes bright with excitement. “I have it,” she said, and Lily felt her stomach drop. All around them students were putting their jackets away, gathering their books and pencils, heading off to class. The bell would ring at any moment, and there was no time to talk about it now. “I’ll show you after school,” Kath promised.
All day the minutes crawled past. In Senior Goals, with Kath in the next row, time seemed to slow even further because they couldn’t speak about it. She noticed Shirley, who had barely spoken a word to her since the dance, eyeing her suspiciously. She tried to suppress any trace of her impatience, but she couldn’t stop her knee from bouncing beneath her desk.
By the time the day came to an end, Lily was exhausted from waiting and from keeping quiet, while Kath seemed filled with nervous energy. As soon as the last bell rang, they left school together, taking Chestnut Street up Russian Hill. At the bottom of the steps they paused to make sure they were quite alone, and Kath removed a small card from her book bag.
“I didn’t think you’d have it yet,” Lily said, almost afraid to look.
“Jean got it from a friend in the Western Addition. We went and saw him together on Saturday.”
“How much did it cost? Do I owe you money?”
“No, don’t worry. He owed Jean a favor. Here you go.”
It was a little bigger than a business card, with white lettering on a dark background. The words operator’s license california were printed across the top, along with the expiration date and a number. The name on the card was not Lily’s; it read may lee wong. In a box on the lower right was a fingerprint, and a signature was scrawled across the bottom. It looked startlingly genuine.
“I told them you were Chinese,” Kath explained. “They thought that was a good name. Is it all right?”
Lily held the card gingerly, as if it might burn her. “Whose fingerprint is that? Who signed it?”
“It’s my fingerprint,” Kath said. “And the guy who made the card signed it. Doesn’t it look real?”
Kath seemed oblivious to the possible consequences of carrying this card, but seeing the declaration above the signature (“I hereby certify that the person described hereon has been granted the privilege of operating motor vehicles”) made Lily feel queasy. She hadn’t imagined it would look so authentic, and now she was certain this would doom her if the authorities discovered it in her possession. She wondered if false immigration papers could be obtained as easily.
“Is something wrong?” Kath asked. She seemed worried. “You look like—is the name wrong?”
Lily didn’t want to be a spoilsport. She shook her head. “It’s a little like calling me Jane Smith, but it’s all right.”
Kath frowned. “Are you sure? We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
A pang went through Lily. “I want to, I just—where’s yours? Can I see it?”
Kath pulled hers out and showed it to Lily.
“‘Elizabeth Flaherty,’” Lily read. “You don’t look like an Elizabeth.”
Kath laughed, and so did Lily, and then her nervousness began to be overtaken by excitement. “Do you really think this will work?” she asked, looking at Kath.
Those two red spots began to bloom on Kath’s face again, just beneath her cheekbones. “Only one way to find out,” she said. “When do you want to go?”
* * *
—
The newspaper clipping with the photo of Tommy Andrews was beginning to soften at the edges. Lily carefully removed it from The Exploration of Space and unfolded it against the book, taking care not to smudge the newsprint. She and Kath had decided to go to the Telegraph Club on Friday night, but the idea that she could see Tommy for real still felt like science fiction.
She angled the Telegraph Club ad to better catch the light from her bedside lamp. The picture was so familiar she didn’t need to look at it to remember what Tommy looked like, but she still liked to look, to feel the way it tugged at something deep within her. A spark of recognition, or a glow of hope.
She lay back against her pillows, setting the clipping down beside her on her bed. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine Tommy Andrews singing to the women in the audience—to her—but her imagination seemed to balk tonight, as if it refused to show her this fantasy anymore because she was about to see the real thing. By the end of this week, she would be there.
When she opened her eyes, the ceiling was a shadowy dark yellow in the lamplight. The flat was quiet. Everyone had gone to bed, but she wasn’t sleepy. She picked up The Exploration of Space and opened it at random to the chapter on the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, and Mars. She had read it before, but now she read it again, hoping that it might put her to sleep.
Clarke spent several pages on the mysteries of Venus, which seemed to exasperate him. The planet was completely covered by clouds that obscured all traces of the surface. He theorized it was unlikely that Venus supported intelligent life, but he gamely speculated that if they existed, Venusians would have no knowledge of the stars until they developed machines that could fly above the clouds. Mars, on the other hand, was largely naked to the observer, and maps had even been drawn of the surface. The book included a map of Mars, which seemed to Lily almost as fantastical as a map to Alice’s Wonderland. This Mars was labeled with names for places no human had ever visited: Elysium, Eden, Amazonia. There was also a color illustration of an automatic rocket that could travel to Mars. It had a spherical body mounted on several small rockets, and metallic arms that extended a satellite dish for communication as it hovered over the red planet.
There was a stage between wakefulness and sleep when she seemed to be able to direct her unconscious mind; the problem was, she could never be sure when that stage began or ended. As she drifted off to sleep, she saw the insectlike rocket crawling over the surface of Mars, which wasn’t red as it should be, but was covered with swirling clouds like those over Venus. She knew she could direct the rocket closer to its destination—she had built it herself—but somehow she could never cause it to accelerate fast enough. The destination remained a silvery blur.
—1942
Joseph joins the U.S. Army and becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen.
—1943
The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed.
Grace and her family attend the parades in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to San Francisco.
—1944
The “Suicide Squad” is formalized as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operating under the army.
—1945
World War II ends.
Joseph is discharged from the U.S. Army.
—Nov. 16, 1945
JOSEPH takes Grace to the Forbidden City nightclub.
—1946
Franklin Chen-yeh Hu (胡振業) is born.
—1947
Judy Hu arrives in San Francisco to begin graduate school at the University of California–Berkeley.
JOSEPH
Nine Years
Earlier
Organizing a night on the town was much more work than Joseph Hu imagined. By the time the children were settled with the Lums (Eddie had the misfortune to bump his knee on the edge of a packing crate, which led to tears and then a tantrum), and he and Grace had changed into their evening wear (he in his old but freshly pressed gray flannel suit; she in a navy-blue dress that he couldn’t remember if he’d seen before), they were running late for their reservation. He called a taxi, which Grace protested because of the cost, but he did it anyway. She was wearing new shoes, and he could tell they were already pinching her feet. The taxi driver took the hills too swiftly, causing Grace to lurch toward him on the back seat, and the pink silk flowers she had pinned to her hair smashed into his face. She had to re-pin the flowers blindly as the car sped down Powell Street.
It was not an auspicious beginning to the night, and he was certain that Grace was noting all these little errors in her mental ledger, as if toting up harbingers of bad luck. It was one of her most Chinese traits, something that surprised him when he first discovered it, not expecting to find such Old World superstition in an American girl.
When they arrived at the Forbidden City, the nightclub’s red neon sign cast a devilish glow over the scalloped awning advertising the “All-Chinese Floor Show.” Joseph helped his wife out of the taxi and she gave him a pained smile, as if she was trying to brush off the unfortunate beginning to their night.
Inside, they stopped at the hat check first, where a young Chinese woman dressed in a red-and-gold cheongsam took their coats and his hat. Then they passed through a circular archway decorated with sinuous dragons on a sky-blue background and entered the front bar, where the ceiling was painted with fluffy white clouds and patrons were ordering drinks from the Chinese bartender. Joseph went to the maître d’, who checked their reservation and handed them off to a waiter, who took them through another archway (it was decorated with matching dragons) to a white cloth-covered table on the edge of the rectangular dance floor. The experience was like a ritual or a ceremony, Joseph thought, amused, and now that they’d gone through three doorways (four if you counted the taxi door) and circumnavigated the ceremonial performance space, they sat down at their table for two and opened their menus to make a freighted choice: American Deluxe dinner or Special Chinese?
