Face

by Aimee Liu

  Johnny picked up a flat rock from the wall and skimmed it out into space. It passed over the barbed-wire fence and disappeared into the darkness between the trees. Mosquitoes swarmed in its wake. And then came a deep rumbling echo, the sound a large animal would make if trapped at the bottom of a well.

  It grew louder, closer. There was a flash of white between the trees and Johnny yanked me to my feet.

  “It’s Glabber!”

  He turned and began to run, but I kept looking over my shoulder to see what we were running from. Would this monster really rise from the forest? Was he going to eat us or burn us or steal us away?

  The looking turned my feet to stone. Johnny had to practically drag me down the ridge, and because of his dragging, I never saw more than that single flash of Glabber’s light.

  Johnny yelled at me and his voice was strong, but all of a sudden those blue eyes were floating, and then his whole face was awash and I had this stab of worry that maybe he’d drown from the fear and effort of pulling me, and that worry set my feet to working again.

  We raced across my grandfather’s pasture to the skeleton of a hay shed that had been struck by lightning years before. We hid behind its widest rib and listened hard, our hearts beating as if Glabber’s ghost were right on us. Finally the echo faded, and all we could hear were the sough of tall grain and the distant mutter of Grampa’s tractor.

  “I told you"—Johnny was still catching his breath—"he doesn’t want anybody to mess with him.”

  “You don’t know that was Glabber. It could have been anything.”

  “I know. It was a warning… God, how stupid!” He kicked the base of the upright and a chunk of its blackened shell flew off.

  There was a glint in the dirt where the burned wood landed. I ran my fingers underneath and came up with a child’s gold locket. A fine chain and a tiny heart-shaped case, empty.

  This random find, like another mystical gift from the fairies, had a calming effect on Johnny. He polished the necklace with ash until it glistened. “Like a phoenix.” He fastened it around my neck and told the story of the mythical bird that set itself on fire only to rise from the ashes reborn. He took a scrap of shiny carbon and enclosed it in the heart. I felt the metal grow warm against my skin.

  “When you have your plane, where will you go?” I asked. “Where will you fly to?”

  He got that dreamy look again. “Places so different I can’t hardly imagine. Jungles and islands and deserts and mountains. Maybe even the moon or something. You hear about that astronaut Ed White walking out there in space? Yeah, I wouldn’t mind that.”

  “Think you’ll ever come to New York?”

  He scowled at the notion. “I seen pictures. There’s too many buildings, no good place to land.”

  “Helicopters can land on top of buildings.”

  “Helicopters don’t have wings.” As if that settled that.

  “How about China, then?”

  “What’s in China?”

  “My dad’s from there. But it’s communist now. Grampa calls them Pink Chinks. Says they kill white people. Mum says Grampa’s prejudiced. That’s why Dad never comes with us to the farm.”

  “Well,” Johnny said, warming to the challenge. “I could be like a peace ambassador, flying in to say hello and tell them about America.”

  “You could find some beautiful Chinese girl and marry her.”

  Johnny tipped his head back and squinted at me. “Your Dad’s Chinese, what’s that make you?”

  “Only a fourth, doesn’t count.”

  He shrugged. “Whoever I marry, she’s gotta be willing to fly.”

  I fingered the locket. “Well, before I get married, I’ll have to go far away, maybe all around the world.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s just logical, silly. I mean, with all the millions of boys in the world, you think I’d meet the perfect one right in my own neighborhood?”

  Johnny picked up a stick and drew a circle in the dirt.

  “Here you are in New York.” He made an X at one side of the circle. Then he made another X on the opposite side. “Here I am. I’ve flown to China. I’m living on rice and eating with chopsticks. Now you start your big trip and come around like this, and we run into each other along about here.”

  “That’d be fun.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Would you marry me then?”

  I was smiling. “You’ve got to have somebody who’ll fly.”

  “Oh, you’ll fly. You already have. From the Statue of Liberty, remember?”

  “That was just a dream.”

  “Same difference.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “No. Not for me. I can do lots of things in dreams I’ll never really do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like marry you.”

  Now I look back on those days with amazement, and a kind of dread. I remember the sensations, beautiful snapshots, but in the gaps between frames I sense the presence of something hideous. A demon crouching in the dark. Like Glabber.

  One night soon after I started flying I awoke convinced that my internal organs had been shoved into my mouth. The next day I compared mileage logs with my flying partners, women with more seniority than I would ever have, and tallied up their crashes, near misses, and unscheduled landings until I was finally persuaded that the odds were in my favor. Still, with each takeoff I’d clutch my seat, and around my two hundredth trip, a plane went down with three new hires working their first flight. Not long after that I had my near miss in Pensacola.

  The numbers would never have protected me. I was just killing time. I would not find what I was looking for in the sky, on the road, at the far end of the world. He was already long dead and gone.

  5

  When we lived in Chinatown, I would often play dolls on the window seat in my father’s workshop while he puttered. That was my mother’s word, and though I knew it was disrespectful, it also seemed an accurate description of how he spent his time. Puttering.

  He had piles of drawings on graph paper for gizmos he never would make. Piles more of trade journals and patent bulletins which he inspected daily for new or competing ideas. The shelves that lined the room were filled with models made of everything from Erector sets and Lincoln Logs to tungsten and stainless steel.

  “Toilet paper and Tupperware were ideas first,” he informed me one day when I was home sick and everyone else was gone. He stood back to inspect a scramble of wire hangers on his workbench. “Clocks and crossbows, too. Chinese invented those, you know.”

  “And toothbrushes and spaghetti and pancakes,” I said. Henry had told me that. The Chinese were geniuses, according to my brother, and that genius ran in our veins. I think Henry was the only one in the family who truly believed Dad one day would make us rich.

  “Toothbrushes. Spaghetti and pancakes.” My father stared at me. I nodded, smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

  I looked down the street toward the Six Companies building and saw Don and Julie Hsu kissing again. That was because they were ABCs— American-born Chinese. Mainlanders never kissed in public, and they thought it disgraceful if anyone did. But when it came to making families, that was something else. After Don and Julie were married, the old folks would be all over them to have babies, and if they were like most young couples—ABCs or not—they would soon comply. That would put a stop to the kissing, but the babies would keep coming. At least in that respect, my parents fit in: three kids, and I never saw them kiss.

  “Did you used to have Chinese friends?” I asked Dad. “When you still lived in China?”

  “Hmm?” He twisted a strand of wire around a corkscrew.

  “Did you play with neighborhood kids when you were little? Did you think you’d marry a Chinese lady and stay in China forever?”

  He stood up and began to fumble through a box of tools. No answer.

  “Daddy!”

  “Mm?”

&n
bsp; “Why don’t you ever tell us about China?”

  He stood motionless for a second or two, his face gone flat and vacant. “Nothing worth telling about,” he said, and resumed his fiddling.

  Across the street, a couple of older boys were squatting on the pavement, a square box top and two tiny bamboo cages between them. They flicked open the gates to the cages and shook the contents onto the cardboard. Two dark specks let out an unnatural screech. The boys watched, motionless at first, then more animated. The specks came together, one boy shoved the other. They stared at the box top, where one of the specks no longer moved.

  “Ah, shee-it!” The first boy raised his hand to his head as if to tear out his hair.

  Old Mr. Wen, who some of the neighborhood kids called the Hundred Year Old Man, came shuffling from his stoop down the block. He patted the irate boy’s shoulder. The boy reached into his pocket, handed his opponent a coin. Then Old Wen had the loser pick up his cage and follow him back to his building. A few minutes later they emerged from Wen’s doorway. When the boy lifted his cage, its new occupant let out a triumphal chirrup, and the boy grinned straight up at me.

  I tried to lift the window, but it jammed. A second later the pigeon that had caught the smile flew off the rail of the fire escape, and the boy turned back to his game.

  “One good idea is all,” Dad mumbled as he worked. “Good enough to stop her jabbering, anyway. Jesus! The great connoisseur—should have married goddamn Richard Avedon.” He looked at the wall. “One idea. That would get us out of here… maybe then she’d give up the rest.”

  “The rest of what?” The boy had long arms and a short neck. Like a spider. His cricket won this time.

  My father picked up a pencil and sharpened it. The shavings spiraled down to his wastebasket. I wanted to believe he’d confide in me, entrust me with secrets that no one else knew, but he acted as if he hadn’t heard, or maybe he didn’t want to confide in me, after all.

  I was trying to decide whether to repeat the question when he replied, “Your mother wants her brilliant, young artist back. She doesn’t realize he was the fool.”

  Mum, for her part, spent most days at the Foucault Gallery on East Sixty-third Street, two blocks from Central Park. It was identified only by a polished brass plaque, and customers had to make an appointment to be admitted. Inside, plush vanilla-malt carpeting absorbed noise so well that ordinary conversations were reduced to whispers. That was intentional, my mother said, so the art would speak louder than the people who came to view it.

  Those people had names like Vanderbilt and Amsterdam, but they couldn’t compete with the pictures, carpet or no carpet. There were paintings of dogs with the bodies of women, men with apples for heads, trees studded with babies erupting in flame, and clocks melting into the sea. Those filled the first floor. On the second were drawings and prints of those same unsettling images in pieces or variation, all personally selected by Mr. Foucault, the gallery’s owner, who spent most of his time and a small portion of his enormous wealth buying art in the same capitals of Europe that filled my mother’s dreams. Mum said he looked exactly like the screech owl at the Central Park Zoo. I couldn’t imagine a screech owl loose in a place like this, but my mother seemed right at home.

  I got to watch her in action on our Ladies’ Days. That’s what she called the occasional preschool days when I accompanied her to work because Dad was too busy to look after me.

  She’d make me climb into one of those precious Florence Eiseman outfits that made me feel about two—like the dress with rabbits eating cherries and the matching hat with an elastic band that cut underneath my chin. She’d say I looked adorable. I’d tell her I felt stupid and beg to wear my blue jeans, but I never stood a chance. As she put it, she wasn’t about to let her customers see a daughter of hers dressed like a little farm boy.

  Those customers didn’t stand much more of a chance with her than I did. As soon as they entered the gallery she could tell exactly how much they were worth and whether they’d part with a penny. She knew when to keep her distance and when to cozy a sale, could sense which newcomers had to be taught and which would keep her on her toes. She informed me of these talents on a regular basis, so although I was too little to know about business, I knew very well how proud Mum felt about her work.

  She was especially proud of the “special collection” she’d started on the third floor. This trove of photographs was her idea, her selection, and would become her great success. Even, as she often remarked, if it was bought with Foucault money.

  When I was five years old, what impressed me about the photographs was not that my mother had picked them, but how weird they were. She had work by Diane Arbus and Harry Callahan, W.Eugene Smith, Bill Brandt and Robert Frank, but only the strangest frames, in which people looked not quite human. As strange as the artwork downstairs, only more vivid and disturbing because they were real. Who could believe a liquid clock, but that photograph of a woman with two heads really made me wonder. Those days in the gallery I’d set up my spot in the back room on the third floor, and when I wasn’t coloring or playing paper dolls, I went through the drawers of prints, trying to decide if I liked them.

  Once I was old enough to handle art properly—clean hands on the edges only and no close breathing or sneezing—Mum encouraged this exploration. She’d tried to interest Anna and Henry in the gallery when they were very young, but both had rebelled against the hours of imposed quiet and the boredom of nothing but visual stimulation for entertainment, so the fact that I was never bored by art relieved and delighted my mother.

  Between customers and phone calls she would introduce me to her newest pieces. “You see, darling, now he’s playing with light and color à la Monet?” The photograph looked to me like a picture of a Bowery bum stretched out on a park bench at dawn. “And yet it also has that social relevance. A strong Lautrec influence. Mm, really quite painterly. The shadow contrast with the warm colors and tones. Worth at least three hundred, since he’s printing a limited run. He’s young, but give him another ten years and I’m willing to bet he’ll be one of the country’s top twenty.”

  Then she’d heave a sigh. A meaningful look.

  “Your father was at this stage when I met him. He was going to be the next Steichen.”

  It happened dozens of times. Just like that. And it always took me by surprise.

  My mother arrived at my apartment two weeks to the day after Anna’s visit. Miffed that I hadn’t formally invited her, she gave me what she considered due time, then took the initiative. Naturally she was horrified.

  “You can’t really expect to do any decent work all cramped in like this. I wish you’d let me call Scott and see if he knows of any lofts— you could still live here if you insist, but maybe you could share work space…”

  Her mouth opened and shut, a bright gash of lipstick. The muscles in her neck stood out. She was still holding her briefcase, a well-worn Italian calfskin tote that my father had given her before I was born. I pointed.

  “You’ve got something to show me?”

  “I thought you might like to see what all the fuss is about. Since you won’t come to the gallery, I’ve brought it to you.”

  “A house call.”

  “You could say that.”

  All the fuss, as I’d read in The New Yorker, New York, and the Times, was Mum’s second ground-floor photo show, by a young black artist named Delong Dupriest. “Cultural Allegories,” Artforum dubbed his work.

  Mum opened the binder to a reprint showing a fat white butcher surrounded by sides of dark, glistening beef. Laid in transparency over this image was a Ku Klux Klan Dragon presiding at the lynching of six black men. The work was in black and white. Of course.

  “This piece is six feet square. I sold it on the first day, can you imagine? Twelve thousand dollars. Gerard was fit to be tied. I sold out my first one-man, too, you know. Scott’s show?”

  “Smashing.” I closed the book without looking further.

&
nbsp; “Smashing.” She narrowed her eyes at me the way she used to when I said I felt too sick for school. “Well, then. Let’s see what you’ve been up to!”

  She did not mean my eight-by-ten product shots of the grinders, scrapers, holders, and splicers that she was conspicuously ignoring.

  “I don’t have anything ready.”

  “Oh, please. You can show me.”

  “I’ve been too busy with the job to print.”

  She stared at the empty mantelpiece for a moment as if she could see something hanging or leaning there that I could not. Then she put away the binder and stood up brusquely, grabbed my hair and lifted it this way and that.

  “You’d be happier if you got all this stuff off your shoulders. Lighter, bouncier, less time-consuming.” She pulled just this side of too tight.

  For the first time I noticed the precise flecks of yellow and green that give her gray eyes their fire.

  “You’re twenty-eight years old, Maibelle. This is your time, your chance. If you don’t pull yourself together in the next couple of years, you’re going to lose it all.” She yanked tighter, hurting my scalp. “Just like your father did.”

  “You despise Dad, don’t you?”

  “Maibelle!” She released my hair.

  The sensation was what I imagine a dandelion might feel when its white fluff blows away. I rose from my seat. She had come uninvited. She’d insulted me and twisted the knife in my father’s back as she had my whole life, over and over.

  “You can’t make us all blame him for disappointing you.”

  She sat rigid on Marge Gramercy’s sofa and clenched both fists until the skin pulled white across her knuckles. She glowered at my equipment across the room, then stood up quickly, haphazardly, banging her knee on the trunk I used for a coffee table. It must have hurt, but she ignored the pain, collected her purse and hat. I was astonished to see shelves of tears in her eyes when she looked at me again.

  “You don’t know what’s it’s like to be married to a stranger for thirty years.”