Last Night at the Telegraph Club

by Malinda Lo

  “I don’t know. I don’t think my father wants to move so far from the hospital.”

  Shirley didn’t respond. She seemed pensive, her earlier excitement extinguished, and Lily wondered what she was thinking. They hadn’t talked—really talked—in so long; she was a little afraid that she no longer knew how to talk to Shirley. Avenue after avenue went by; they were at Thirtieth, and Thirty-Fifth, and soon they would have to get out and walk the rest of the way.

  “I don’t think my parents will ever move out of Chinatown,” Shirley said at last. “They can’t.” There was a tension in her voice, as if she were holding something back.

  “Sure they could. Maybe they don’t want to.”

  “What are they going to do? Open a restaurant out here?” Shirley was dismissive.

  “They could still keep the Pearl open, and just live out here.”

  “No. It’s too expensive. They can’t afford it.” Shirley looked at Lily. “Your parents could though. Why don’t they?”

  Lily was taken aback. Shirley’s tone was almost accusatory. “I don’t know.”

  “They could get out of Chinatown. I don’t know why they don’t.” Shirley turned to look out the window, but from the expression on her face, Lily knew her friend wasn’t enjoying the view at all.

  * * *

  —

  Point Lobos Avenue descended in a dramatic curve from Forty-Eighth Avenue all the way to Cliff House, perched on the edge of the land, before it swept south toward the long stretch of Ocean Beach. Fog still shrouded the Pacific, but it was a Saturday, and cars already lined Point Lobos as Lily and Shirley trooped down the sidewalk into the wind, toward Sutro’s. The building rose up like a cinema just before Cliff House, with the word sutro’s standing in giant letters over the angled front overhang. Beneath it two windows flanked a row of glass doors, and over one of the windows a placard declared: if you haven’t seen sutro’s . . . you haven’t seen san francisco.

  “It’s too foggy to see the Seal Rocks,” Lily said. They walked past the Sutro’s entrance to peer over the waist-high wall at the ocean, which crashed rhythmically against the jagged rocks along the shore.

  “The fog will clear out,” Shirley said, but she sounded doubtful.

  Down below, the glass-covered pavilions of the old Sutro Baths were visible through the mist like a faded photograph. A gust of wind nearly ripped off Shirley’s scarf, and she set down her lunch bag to tighten the scarf beneath her neck.

  Ahead of them Cliff House was lit up through the fog, and Lily saw a family of four climb out of their Buick and head into the restaurant, the mother clutching her scarf over her hair just as Shirley was. As the doors closed behind them, the wind snuck up beneath Lily’s skirt, whirling it around her legs and causing her to shiver.

  “Oh, let’s go inside. This is awful,” Lily said, as the wind whipped her hair into her eyes.

  “I kind of like it out here,” Shirley said, but she relented at the look on Lily’s face.

  Inside Sutro’s, they climbed the central stairway to the gallery overlooking the ice-skating rink. Signs posted all around the perimeter advertised the many attractions awaiting them: dolls of the world and victorian art and see ito now! In the gallery, children were banging at the Goalee game, causing it to ring and ring and ring, and others ran back and forth, freed from their parents temporarily as they sought out the other coin-fed games. Several tables were covered by gaily striped awnings as if they were outside, but the daylight coming through the glass atrium roof was weak and gray. Down in the ice rink, the lights were on as if it were nighttime.

  “Let’s get some hot chocolate,” Lily said. “I’m so cold still.” She bought two paper cups of hot chocolate from a cart, and then she and Shirley found a bench overlooking the ice-skaters and sat down.

  Carnival music played throughout the vaulted building, and Lily watched the skaters below attempting to move in time to the music. Only a few were actually good: a girl in a fluttering skirt that swirled out as she spun; a boy who leaped up and then landed, arms flung out for balance. Lily was surprised that more people didn’t crash into each other. She had never skated herself and imagined she would be terrible at it.

  “Don’t you ever wish you could be like them?” Shirley asked, turning her cup of hot chocolate around in her hands.

  “Like who? The skaters?”

  Shirley nodded. “They just go out there and—look! That one fell over. Oh, he’s getting up. He’s terrible. I think he just wants to hold on to his girlfriend.”

  They watched for a while longer in silence. The hot chocolate was powdery and not quite mixed together. Lily tried to swirl hers around in her cup, but it didn’t make much of a difference.

  “I mean, don’t you ever wish you weren’t Chinese.” Shirley spoke in a low voice, as if she were afraid to say it. “You wouldn’t have to live in Chinatown, and you could do anything you wanted. You could go ice-skating anytime.”

  Lily looked at her friend; she had a slight scowl on her face as she watched the skaters. “We could go ice-skating if you want,” Lily said.

  Shirley took a sip of her hot chocolate. “No. I don’t want to. That’s not what I mean. It’s just . . . ice-skating is so silly. Why would anyone do it?”

  “For fun?”

  “Exactly. For fun.”

  Shirley sounded bitter, which was unlike her. “Is something bothering you?” Lily asked. “Did something happen?”

  Shirley shrugged, as if she were trying to slough off the black mood that had fallen over her. “No, nothing. I just get tired of the . . . the smallness of Chinatown, you know? Everybody knows everybody, and they’re always poking their noses where they don’t belong, and you can’t do anything just for fun.”

  Lily wasn’t sure how to respond. She took the last few sips of her hot chocolate. It was too sweet now, and sugar coated her tongue like sand. Shirley was right; Lily felt those constraints too. And yet she also felt protective of Chinatown. She didn’t want anyone to disparage it—not even Shirley. When they were children, Chinatown had seemed wonderfully free to Lily: a neighborhood full of friends, with shopkeepers who would give her candied fruit and lumps of rock sugar. Of course everyone knew each other; it was like a densely packed little village, and her father was the well-respected village doctor. It was safe. Outside Chinatown was a different story. Everybody knew the boundaries. You stayed between California and Broadway, went no farther west than Stockton, and no farther east than Portsmouth Square. It wasn’t until junior high, when she had to walk through North Beach to go to school, that Lily became comfortable with leaving Chinatown. Even then, she heard stories about Italian boys who beat up Chinese kids who made the mistake of wandering off Columbus Avenue.

  “I want to go to New York,” Shirley said abruptly. “Or Paris. Maybe London—or Honolulu! One of my cousins lives there. Anywhere but here. Don’t you want to go somewhere?” She looked at Lily then, challengingly, and Lily suddenly wondered if Shirley somehow knew about the Telegraph Club.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Lily bent to set her empty cup on the floor at her feet, which allowed her to look away.

  “You do. You want to go to space.” Shirley gave a half laugh, unable to hide the trace of condescension in her tone.

  Lily bristled. “Why did you want to me to come out with you today? Did you just want to pick on me?”

  “Pick on you!” Shirley humphed and finished her hot chocolate, swallowing her own grainy dregs with a grimace. “I just wanted to get away for a few hours, that’s all. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been a lousy friend, I know it. I’m sorry. Forgive me?”

  The sudden turnabout took Lily aback. She wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her.

  “Come on, let’s go walk around. There’s a whole museum in here, isn’t there? Let’s go.” Shirley got up and reached for Lily’s reluctant arm to drag her to her fee
t. “Come on. Be my friend today, okay? I need a friend.”

  Beneath Shirley’s joking tone was something urgent, even a little desperate. Lily saw her friend’s eyes gleam for an instant as if she were forcing back tears. Abruptly she dropped Lily’s arm, picked up Lily’s empty cup, and went to toss it along with her own into the trash can nearby. When she returned she had a contrite expression on her face, and Lily had to give in because she had known Shirley her entire life, and this was the first time Shirley had asked for her forgiveness.

  27

  Sutro’s Museum was full of what some people would call junk: a lineup of horse-drawn buggies straight out of the Old West; a collection of Egyptian mummies in their ancient carved coffins; dioramas of ghost towns that would come to mechanized life with the drop of a few pennies. In one room there was a life-size mannequin of a Japanese woman called Mrs. Ito. She looked subhuman, crouching on the ground with one half-bared arm pointing to the side, her head balding and faintly apelike.

  Lily and Shirley approached her dubiously. She had been carved out of wood and painted, and Lily wondered if she had been based on a real woman, and if so, what woman would have consented to have this mockery made of her.

  Several Caucasian children were peering at the statue while their mothers stood behind them talking to each other. One of the little boys pointed at Shirley and Lily and announced, “Mommy, they’re like Mrs. Ito!”

  One mother had the grace to look embarrassed, but another said, “How wonderful! Excuse me, girls, are you Japanese? Would you talk to my boys?”

  Lily froze.

  Shirley grabbed her hand to pull her away, calling over her shoulder in a false accent, “No speak Engrish, sorry!”

  Once they were outside the room they fled, running through the Dolls of the World display—Lily was sure there were some terrible Chinese dolls there—and back up to the gallery overlooking the skating rink as if they were being chased. The running made the whole thing funny rather than awful, and when they reached the Marine Deck, where a long line of windows overlooked the ocean, Shirley said snidely, “鬼佬,”* and Lily laughed, even though it wasn’t really funny.

  Telescopes were mounted every few feet in front of the windows to enable visitors to zoom in on the Seal Rocks out in the ocean. The marine layer had finally lifted, and the rocks were now visible offshore. Shirley went to one of the telescopes and peered through, then glanced over her shoulder at Lily. “Come look—you can see the seals.”

  Lily put her eye to the viewer and squinted, twisting the scope until the rocks came into focus. She saw a few seals lying on the rocks, their glossy brown bodies displayed on the steep-sided island. One of them raised its head, and Lily saw its catlike whiskers as it swung around before diving sleekly back into the water. Beyond the Seal Rocks, the Pacific stretched out wide and gray, flecked with whitecaps, until it disappeared into the cloudy horizon. It felt as if they had come to the edge of the world—or at least as far from Chinatown as possible without leaving San Francisco—and those lounging seals were entirely unconcerned with petty human dramas.

  A family came clattering loudly onto the Marine Deck, and Lily glimpsed the boys out of the corner of her eye. She thought they might be the same ones from the Mrs. Ito display. Beside her, Shirley was slinging her lunch bag over her shoulder and buttoning up her coat. “I’m hungry. Do you want to go eat lunch?”

  “All right.” Lily stepped away from the telescope and the two of them left the Marine Deck, purposely ignoring the family. Lily felt their eyes on her back all the way to the exit.

  * * *

  —

  They decided to take their lunch up to Sutro Heights Park, which overlooked the ocean. Lily bought two bottles of Coke from a vendor on the way. At the top of Point Lobos Avenue, the main gate to the park was flanked by two giant stone lions; inside, the road was lined with palm trees that waved their fronds in the wind.

  Though Lily saw a few people wandering down the paths, the park was mostly deserted. She glimpsed the remains of concrete statues half-hidden in the shrubs. There was a fallen deer, its antlers broken, and the curve of a stone woman’s breasts, one plump arm extended. She and Shirley walked all the way to the old parapet that circled the site of Adolf Sutro’s Victorian mansion and found a bench facing the chain-link fence at the edge, right above Cliff House. A few tourists were taking photographs, but they weren’t prepared for the chilly day, and after they left, shivering, Lily and Shirley had the view of the ocean to themselves.

  Lily opened their Cokes while Shirley opened the takeout box. Lily selected one of the chue yuk paau and took a bite. The steamed bread was a pleasingly light contrast to the salty, savory minced pork filling.

  “I don’t know why you’d want to be Caucasian,” Lily said. “You’d have to eat American food all the time.”

  “They can eat this food,” Shirley said as she picked up a bun for herself. “We sell it to them!”

  “You don’t sell them these—they only eat the ch’a shiu* ones. Normally they eat—what do they eat?—creamed corn or something? Or tuna casserole!”

  Shirley hid her mouth behind her hand while she laughed. “Meat loaf!”

  “Liverwurst sandwiches!” Lily made a face.

  “Chicken à la king! What is that, anyway?”

  “Some kind of chicken dish, with a cream sauce? I think I ate it at the school cafeteria once.”

  “Once they had creamed spinach, do you remember? It was this slimy dark stuff swimming in milk.” Shirley made a sound of disgust.

  “Why do they always put their vegetables in cream?”

  “Well, I do like ice cream.”

  “That’s not the same.” Lily took the last bite of her chue yuk paau and wished she had some ginger ice cream to finish things off. “Do you want to split that other baau?”

  “Sure. Don’t forget there’s also faat ko.”

  “Oh, yum.” Lily reached into the box and broke off a spongey piece of sweet steamed cake.

  “I wish I’d brought some taan t’aat,”* Shirley said.

  “Mmm. Or tau sha paau.”*

  “You like those. They’re not my favorite. I like the lin yung paau.”*

  Lily took another sip of her soda, the sweet bubbles fizzing on her tongue. She was full and content, and when the wind wasn’t blowing, it was almost pleasant here. She watched the changeable gray of the ocean as it swelled and sank; the white lacelike foam that swirled on top like cream; the pummeling waves that crashed against the iron-colored rocks. It was constantly changing, yet always the same.

  Shirley passed her a fortune cookie, and she cracked it open to pull out the white slip of paper. She popped a piece of the cookie into her mouth, chewed, and then read the fortune aloud: “‘Perseverance brings good fortune.’”

  Shirley opened hers and read: “‘To know when you have enough is to be rich. Lao Tzu.’”

  Lily crunched on the rest of her cookie and thought about the two messages. “They contradict each other. Don’t they? Mine says to keep going, and yours says to know when to stop. Or maybe they work together?”

  “They’re just for tourists. They don’t make sense.” Shirley let her fortune go, and they watched the small piece of paper flutter into the air. It was caught by a wind current that lifted it over the chain-link fence before shooting it down toward the Pacific.

  Impulsively, Lily got up to toss her fortune over the fence after Shirley’s, as if the vast ocean were a wishing well. She leaned against the cold metal railing to watch the slip of paper twirl on a long draft down toward Cliff House until it vanished from view, too small to see. Something was under construction near the south end of the building. Trucks and winches had been left there, along with giant bales of thick wire. A Caucasian boy, perhaps five years old, was standing outside the construction zone, holding on to the hand of his mother, who was holding on to her hat
.

  “Lily.”

  She turned around. “What?”

  “I’m going to enter the Miss Chinatown contest.” The wind plucked at the edge of Shirley’s scarf and tugged it loose from her hair, and she reached up to tuck it back in place. She seemed very calm, as if she hadn’t announced an extraordinary thing.

  Lily came back to the bench and sat down. “Why? This morning you said you wanted to get away from Chinatown. This is . . . the opposite.”

  Shirley dropped her eyes to her lap, where she had balanced the takeout box. “I didn’t mean it—what I said this morning. Not really.”

  “Only partly.”

  Shirley closed the box and set it on the bench beside herself. “I just hate the Chinatown gossip, that’s all. And I decided that if they’re going to gossip, why not give them something to talk about?”

  Lily studied her friend; Shirley crossed her arms defensively and wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “What gossip?” Lily asked.

  “What does it matter?” Shirley said defiantly.

  At that moment the wind knocked the empty fortune cookie bag onto the ground and blew it across the pavement toward the fence. Shirley jumped up and ran after it just as the takeout box skittered toward the edge of the bench. Lily grabbed it before it tumbled onto the ground. Shirley returned a moment later with the crumpled paper sack, then opened her cloth bag so they could stuff the garbage inside.

  The act of chasing down their trash had dissipated some of Shirley’s tension; now she seemed looser limbed, or at least, resigned. “Anyway,” she said, “George Choy came by the Eastern Pearl the other day to ask my father to sponsor the beauty pageant, and he said I should enter—Mr. Choy did—and I thought, why not? I’m just as pretty as last year’s winner, and they never get enough girls to enter, and it would be good for business. If I enter, the Eastern Pearl will get plenty of advertising at the New Year festival.”

  A few years ago, the contest had been moved from the Fourth of July to Chinese New Year, and it had gotten bigger every year. The winner was expected to lead the New Year parade.