Normally, she avoided Chinatown. With each block, faces half-similar to hers joined the flow of the street. Old women, her mother’s height and size, wearing clothes her mother would have given to the Salvation Army, stood hawking fruit and wigs on stands. The frazzled plastic hairs tangled in the wind. The fruit sellers called out to her in Chinese, Cantonese, or Fujianese—she couldn’t tell which—offering her fruit. Yuki looked to the ground. Did they know they’d gotten her face wrong or did they think she was merely one of the new, ungrateful generation? The old ladies wore mis-sized nylon jackets. Thick purple make-up crowned their eyes but their lips were chapped.
Yuki’s green-kimonoed grandmother had walked with tiny steps. Her chopsticks made no sound as they picked the last grain of rice from the bowl. Her calligraphy flowed like silk. Or so Yuki had been told. She preferred these loud street-hawkers. She took a picture, but they waved her off, cursing and swatting the air. To pacify them, she bought a fistful of cherries. They were sour and sweet and tasted like spring, although winter was approaching. She spat the stones in the gutter.
The playground was busy, and the children shouted in multilingual joy. Their petite hands beat out rhythms, their claps muffled by thick woollen mittens. It was only autumn, but the air tasted of ice. Yuki remembered her first year at the church school, clapping out the beat on her knees, because she had no one else’s hands to clap. She tightened her grip on the camera strap. She wondered what would happen if she got pregnant. Would the baby look like Lou? Would he sing to it or scream?
She’d have to be careful. The playground was watched over by a row of mothers who had identical glossy perms. There were no white girls in all the world with hair so perfectly curled.
Behind the bars, a girl with a hand-knitted panda was humming the Rocky and Bullwinkle theme. The panda’s head lolled attentively to one side. She took more photographs than she needed, still uncertain of the camera’s alchemy.
She walked home past neon lights, dusty, turned off, waiting for the night to light up and spell out OPEN and BAR. Other signs were in Chinese. Chinese characters were similar enough to Japanese that she could guess their meanings. Guess, but never know. She could parse GOLD, LUCKY, BEAUTIFUL—store after grubby store dreaming the same things.
Lou was already there when she got home. She plunked the camera on the table, and started a pot of tea.
“Why couldn’t I have been Chinese?” Her knuckles were wind-gnawed. She flexed her fingers.
“Why couldn’t I have been six feet?” Lou put his feet up on the table.
“I think I’ve forgotten all my Japanese.”
“So say something to me.”
“Konnichiwa.”
“Even I know what that means.”
“You see.”
She hadn’t exactly forgotten all her Japanese, but she had no memory of hearing it shouted across open spaces, or filling a street. It had been crammed into that over-polished apartment.
“Make enough for me.” Lou gestured to the pot. She’d started him drinking jasmine tea. Sometimes, she thought it was the only way she’d rubbed off on him. He believed sushi was a con, in which the fish got more expensive every time it was cut in half, and he’d still rather read a book than go to a gallery. “The photos’ll be good.”
“How do you know?”
“Because, you’re good, kid.” It sounded more like a dismissal than a compliment.
“How do you know?” Now she really did feel like a kid.
“Fine. The photos will be terrible.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not going to make a difference what I think. They’ll be good. Or they won’t.”
He clapped his hand hard on to her shoulder, and she started each nerve shivering to life. But then his fingers rubbed a circle and another. Stretching and calming her. She leaned into his grip. Strange how the same hands could help and hurt.
After Lou went to sleep, she called Edison and told him. He said, “You are good.”
“Am I disturbing you? I guess you should probably be asleep.”
“I’m at my drafting table. Right now I’m drawing every step in three hundred flights of stairs. I needed a break.”
“But if my boyfriend doesn’t even know if it will be good.”
“Yuki, Lou is. Lou, well.” Edison’s breath crackled down the phone. “Lou is not an artist. And he’s not exactly, well, sensitive.”
Yuki thought of his fingers drawing figures of eight on her sore back.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“I’m sure, but if you ever—”
A door slammed as Lou went to take a piss. Yuki lowered her voice. “Got to go.”
“Keep taking pictures,” Edison said and hung up.
The Upper East Side schoolgirls wore boaters and neat maid-tied braids. But coming home at the end of the day, they were as frayed and excitable as little girls anywhere. The Puerto Rican girls had their ears pierced, and she caught the glimpse of gold between the curls. Little girls played jump rope hopscotch in Harlem, a game that involved skipping while having to hit your foot in just the right square. The Irish girls, in their Sunday dresses, concealed silver jacks in their fists.
When he saw her photographs all laid out on the table, Lou said, “It’s lucky you’re cute or people might think you were one of the white slavers.” He pinched her cheek.
“Ow. Stop it.” She batted him away. “How can I be a white slaver? I’m not white.”
“No. It was just what my mom used to say—the white slavers would come take us away if we were bad.”
The last photograph would require cooperation. There could be no hiding on the other side of the street, no leaning on fence posts. It required a little girl.
“Do any of your friends have kids?” she asked Lou.
“Usually around the time they have kids, they stop being my friends.”
“Do you ever think you might?” She stacked her photographs carefully, making sure the edges aligned. She wondered how their child would look. The only Japanese-white couple they knew was John and Yoko, from the magazines. Would it be a redhead? It would be short—that was certain. She hoped it would have his slanting smile and strong hands.
“My dad wasn’t great. I’m not sure I’d be.”
“Oh.” She bit the inside of her lip. “Well, hey, I’m not planning on being a mom any time soon.”
“I’m giving up,” she said to Edison. They sat on the wooden benches in the great hall of the Metropolitan Museum. “The series doesn’t work without her.”
“Well, I mean, I can find her.” She gestured to a little princess in a puff-sleeved dress holding the hand of a woman who was probably her grandmother. “Like her.” She was an all-American moppet—a blond, blue-eyed kid who would win beauty pageants if she wasn’t too wholesome to enter. “And no girl like that has parents who are going to let me take a picture of her holding a photograph of an atrocity.”
She had saved the issue from last year. She looked at it so often, she had it memorized. All the children are running down the bare road. Their feet are shadowless. The children are screaming, their eyes shut into dots. Most wear white button-down shirts, puzzlingly formal for a war, but running straight down the center line of the street, there she is—naked. Her skin shows every wrinkle of bone beneath. Her little pubis sticks out. And behind her come soldiers and the napalm haze. The soldiers’ faces are hidden by their helmets. Yuki wondered if the boy from the bar was one of them. Unlikely. Still, he was probably somewhere, maple syrup hair shaved off, melting little girls.
“Who cares about the body bags? That’s all anyone talks about. The body bags of our kids coming home. But what about those kids? They don’t even have parents left to scrape their bones off the road.”
“Shh.” Edison grabbed her hands. His palms were cool. He stroked them. “This is why you’re doing this show.”
Their neighbor on the bench, an old man in a newsboy cap, unwrapped a chicken salad sandwich. H
e looked around furtively, but none of the guards noticed him in the crowded hall. “I should’ve realized sooner that I wouldn’t be able to do it. It doesn’t work without that shot.”
“How many people in this museum gave up?”
“Most of them. Probably. Isn’t that what growing up is? Giving up?” She tried to make the words sound hopeful in her mouth, as if giving up might in fact be a good thing disguised as bad—like braces or a measles shot. Perhaps she could be happy, just a visitor.
“No, I don’t mean this lot.” Edison waved at the crowd. “I mean the people whose work is on the walls.”
She hunched deeper into her coat. Who did she think she was to compare herself to someone who hung in the Met? She could make a pile of dirt perhaps. But, this was too much. Though it was probably the only thing that would make her father ever forgive her. She bit her lip. And anyway, she couldn’t figure out how to Give Up. What would that look like? Who would she be? At least as a failed artist she was an artist.
“Look, I think one of my professors from last year might be able to help. He’s pretty radical and I’ve seen him with his wife and kids.”
She got her last shot. The kid wasn’t blond, but she had ringlets, and round marshmallowy cheeks.
The diner’s manager told her she could hang them wherever she wished. “Long as you don’t disturb the clientele,” he said.
She unwrapped the frames on an open table. She’d imagined the pictures in a long line; all leading to that last girl, holding the folded newspaper in front of her mouth. The sharp headline and her sharp lashes were in focus, the edges of the image bleeding to dark abstraction. Even in the diner’s halogens, Yuki loved that image. She could do this.
The walls were scattered with chalkboards and signed photographs of celebrities, but between where the leatherette booth chairs met the walls there was plain paint. Nine booths, three on the left, three on the right and three on the back wall. She dipped into the first empty space. She had to crawl and slide, bending over the linoleum countertop, but she aligned her picture nail and hammered. The sound could barely be heard over the clanking from the kitchen. It took an hour to hang the first eight. The last booth was occupied by an old man who seemed determined to make his hash and eggs last until his deathbed. But, finally, he asked for a doggy bag and Yuki darted in.
She stood back. She’d hit her thumb with the nail so many times that she could feel the bruise spreading its roots beneath her skin. The photographs looked like nothing. Maybe a scrambled scrapbook. The old man’s booth held the fourth shot. The panda bear hung center frame wearing a thread-worn smirk. It was cute, that was all. There was no flow.
She ordered a coffee, black. People came in and out. Yuki turned her placard over and over. There had been no place to hang it. She had hand-lettered
HARMLESS LIKE YOU
on to ten white index cards and indicated the number of each. She doubted Lou remembered saying it, but the words had tingled in her mind: Harmless Little Girls Like You. It seemed like a curse. She’d thought she could break it with the show, but apparently not.
The clientele ignored her photographs. But the photographs looked out at her. From every wall the little girls stared. All but the child on the photographed newspaper. It was under this photograph Yuki had chosen to sit. The camera’s focus was not on the paper. It focused on the bright teeth of the girl holding the paper. The newspaper girl’s running body was a blur. It was a smudge of pain. Yuki wondered how she had thought she could do anything for this girl. Yuki’s problems were so much smaller, and yet she could barely muster the strength to drag them around this fine city.
At five o’clock, Edison came through the glass door and dropped himself and his suitcase on the other side of the booth.
“A slice of cherry pie, à la mode, with whipped cream, and strawberry drizzle. Do you have strawberry drizzle?”
When the pie arrived, he said, “I’ve been admiring these interesting photographs.” Yuki aimed a kick at his leg and missed. They were skinny targets.
After the smirking waitress turned away, Yuki asked. “Is this even food?”
“Of course it’s food. What does it look like? Art? Eat.” His whole body tilted toward her, in his effort to press happiness onto her. “It’s your first exhibition. We need to celebrate.”
“I’m nauseous.”
“Let me buy one,” he said. “I want to hang it above my desk.”
“They’re not for that,” she said. Though that’s what they looked like, cute pictures of kids, to hang above your desk. “They’re supposed to make you think, not decorate your office.”
“Maybe I want to think while I’m at my office.”
He was trying so hard that it hurt. He must have co-workers, other people he could befriend. Why did he persist? Lou hadn’t hit her in two months—that would change if he saw Edison leaning across the Formica table staring at her with big, brown eyes.
“It’ll inspire me. One day, I’m going to make my own buildings. Not offices, but schools, playgrounds, homes. Spaces for people to feel real things in. Big things.”
She couldn’t think of a corridor or kitchenette that had ever made her feel better. Then again, the diner was making her feel worse. It was like twenty forks were pressing their eighty tines into her veins. Edison said, “Let me take you somewhere else. You’ve been here all day.”
There seemed to be a fatter question squeezed into his words, the buttons holding it in straining.
“Lou said he’d pick me up after work.” They’d take the subway home together.
Edison left alone. He walked quickly, his shoulders folded inward. She watched him cross the street and turn into another slim shadow. He looked dejected. The hunch of his body seemed far sadder than when he told her his Canadian girl had gotten tired of waiting. She supposed she should be flattered. She could tell from the way he looked at her that he liked her. He looked at her the way she used to look at clothes, as if the right dress could solve all her problems. She could’ve told him that never worked. She was tired, tired of keeping herself cheerful, of distracting Lou from his low last-beer-in-the-fridge moods, tired of picking up the phone, of saying, “Hold, please.” She was too tired to address whatever it was that Edison was wishing for. She just hoped he’d keep it in.
Lou was late. It was eleven ten. He spent five minutes staring at the menu, before ordering fried eggs. He didn’t look at the pictures. He swiped the runny yolk off the plate with his fingers, sucking them one by one.
“Skipped lunch,” he said.
“Oh.”
“They think just because we don’t work by the hour, our hours are free.”
“Oh.”
Lou called the waitress over and ordered more toast: rye and butter, no spread. Lou had a pimple close to his hairline. She lived with a pimply almost-forty-year-old, but she could forgive the black plague if he would just look up at the photographs unprompted. She couldn’t tell if more coffee would soothe or inflame her headache. She lifted the empty mug to her mouth, clicking it with her teeth. It could be a sort of Morse code. Click, click, clickclickclick, click, clickclick: I hate my life. Clickclick click clickCLACK: if you eat any more toast that hairy belly will snap your cheap pants. Click: somebody just look at a photo. Her teeth hurt. Her gums hurt. The insides of her bones felt cold, as if she had some sort of inner draught.
The waitress called out last orders from the dinner menu. They were switching to the limited late-night list. Lou reached into his pocket for his wallet. It was black leather, torn at the corner and taped up with brown packing tape. He pulled out a five; even the bill looked old. Some long-ago person had doodled a red heart in the corner. Yuki wondered if they were in love or just had restless hands. On the table, the note curled in on itself defensively.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“Bit cold, but at least they didn’t overcook the yolks.”
“Of my photographs.” He’d seen them before, lined up
in the apartment. He’d helped her pick between the girl walking her kitten down the street, blue bow at its neck, and the girl who’d fallen off the swing set, wood chips spiking her hair. But it was different here in public. A show, like a country, was supposed to be greater than its parts. As if by coming together with the public it could make something grand and visionary.
“They’re great.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody’s looked at them all day.”
“Well, what do you expect? It’s a diner.”
Silence. And finally he looked up, and she followed his eyes around the room. He concentrated for a minute, his eyes narrowing, considering. She crossed her feet anxiously under the table. Then he belched. He didn’t even cover his mouth, and she saw where dark crumbs had stuck between his crack-lined teeth.
“Bakayaroā,” she spat. She had forgotten the word until it came unbidden. The word her father used to describe the boss’s son, the American dealers, the drunken men who pushed past them on the street. It came out low and gravelly and momentarily satisfying. Who needed Morse code when she had her own secret language?
“What?”
“Nothing.” There was no point to a secret language if there was no one to share it with. “So you just told me to do this to humiliate myself? You think it’s easy being ignored?”
“They’re just some shitty pictures. Who cares?”
Before Lou, she hadn’t known how to fight. She’d retreat, apologize, leave, hide in her room, or at least behind her hair. Now, she borrowed his vicious cadences.
“Oh, maybe I should xerox your poems then, pass them around the office. Maybe get some laughs. They’re just some shitty poems after all.”
“I was thinking we could put your photos in the next issue of Emily. But, you know what, I think they’re too easy.”
“Easy.” She said it low and quiet.
“Yeah, easy. We all know the war kills little girls. Big news. And you’re not really doing anything with form are you? Easy. Anyway, I’m going to take a piss.”
Harmless Like You Page 16
