by Aimee Liu
“You’re too tense. Relax.”
I tried to shake him off. “It’s all right. I’m not hungry.” But he moved behind me and extended my ring finger and thumb, clamping one chopstick in between, then loosened the top two fingers and slid the other stick gently between them and the tip of my thumb.
“I grew up in Chinatown.” I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, the bare width of air that separated our bodies. “I’ve been using chopsticks all my life.”
“I’ve watched how you use chopsticks.” He pressed my middle finger to create a pincer movement and lowered his voice. “Like a crab.”
His arm curled around mine, he guided my hand to the plate, then back with its pearl to my mouth. I tasted the salty smell of him and turned abruptly, dropping the shrimp ball. It rolled, leaving a warm brown trail down the front of my white shirt.
“You’re not concentrating.” He got down on his knees to fetch the runaway under the cabinet. An extremely disappointed cockroach scurried back into its crack. Tai retrieved his quarry but left a pinch for the kitchen guardian.
I fished among the pots in the sink and pulled out a soapy rag. The stain on my shirt grew larger instead of smaller for my efforts. The wet fabric clung to my breast. Finally, with as much finesse as I could muster, I tossed over my shoulder, “You said you had something to give me.”
He cleared his throat. I heard him stand, the rustle of feet and hands, crunch of paper.
“Recognize these?” He pulled from the bag a stack of framed photographs.
Sad eyes fastened in time.
Tai placed the stack in my hands and wrapped his fingers around mine. “Li gave them to me before he died and told me to find you. He wanted you to have them.”
In the weeks after Li Tsung Po named my intended husband, I watched Tommy Wah more closely. On the basketball courts he elbowed his opponents and swore as aggressively as a Brooklyn hood. In the arcade, he and Henry sang “Cool Jerk” and “Barefootin’” as duets so often and so loudly that the manager threatened to throw them out if they didn’t shut up. But while Henry did his best to corrupt him, Tommy’s face was still Chinese. He treated his parents with respect, worked in their store without pay. He attended Chinese school by his own choice, which was almost unheard-of for ABC boys.
“What are you doing hanging out with Li Po?” he demanded the one time he caught me watching him.
“We’re friends. Do you mind?”
He stood with his hands on hips, legs apart. We were exactly equal in height, but his confidence made him seem taller.
“Friends, huh? Well, you’re wasting your time.”
“What are you, jealous?”
He gave a short laugh. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I’m just looking out for you.”
“I think you’re afraid you’ll end up marrying me.”
“Me marry a huaiguo ren! No way.”
“You’re practically married to Henry, and he’s just as Anglo as I am.”
“Buddies aren’t brides. Different rules apply.”
“Fine by me.” I pulled up tall and looked him straight in the eye. “I already have a fiancé. He has blond hair and knows how to fly.”
13
I am standing above a moonscape, sky black with stars punched like holes over a valley of snow-swept hills and craters. I am standing on sheer, mirrored ice at the edge of a cliff with Johnny to one side, Marge Gramercy the other. Johnny squats, his thick hair lifting, white as the snow. Marge sits and dangles her legs like a child. She has been telling how she took this photograph with only moonlight by stopping all the way down, fast film, slow shutter. Her voice surrounds us in a blur of quiet, comforting detail. You can do anything you want, it insists, you are the living proof But as she talks I feel the ice slipping beneath my feet like a treadmill to the edge. I reach for Johnny, and he catches my elbow, pulling me forward and down toward the cliff. When I look up into the sharp, weathered wrinkles where his eyes should be, I find only gaping holes.
“If you died right now,” he asks, letting me fall, “how would your obituary read?”
Soon after Lao Li’s announcement of my betrothal to Tommy Wah, my grandmother sent a photograph of Johnny taken a few months after Henry shot him. He was pictured on the driver’s seat of Grampa’s tractor with Grampa standing on the platform behind, both of them grinning like maniacs. In the accompanying note, Gramma Lou said Johnny’s arm was good as new, Grampa was on his best behavior, and, she added in a brave P.S., they all missed me a great deal.
“Do you think we’ll go back to the farm this summer?” I asked Anna.
I was sitting at my desk, supposedly doing homework, but my attention kept getting lost in the tie-dyed swirls of fabric my sister had hung in the window. She lay on her bed, designing her nails in black and white polish. The Beatles were on the radio.
“Maybe you will, but I’m not.” Anna sat up, waving toes and fingers to dry them. “I’ve had enough of Mum’s duty trips to last me a lifetime. Let her drag you around and bitch to you what a bigoted asshole Grampa is. I know the rap already. Place bores the shit out of me, anyway.”
She strolled over and picked up Johnny’s picture. Her face brightened. “But then, I don’t have a lover boy there.”
I flushed as fast and hot as if she’d set fire beneath me. “Give me that!”
“Oo ooh.” She held it above my head and lip-synched to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“Give it!” I lunged, grabbing and tearing the photo in two. Grampa Henry remained intact, but Johnny was beheaded.
“You bitch!” I screamed as my mother walked in.
“Maibelle! What in God’s name…”
“Look what she did!” I was sobbing now.
“I did! I was just teasing. You tore the picture.” Anna returned to her bed and pretended to be engrossed in a Herman’s Hermits album. Anna loathed Herman’s Hermits.
My mother took a deep breath and assured me that she had some tape somewhere, but I must never again call my sister a bitch.
“Are we going back to Wisconsin this summer?”
“Well,” she said. “Actually, I thought we might make a tour of New England. Boston, Nantucket, see a little of Vermont. It’s about time Anna started looking at colleges, and we might even get your father to come along.”
“I’m not going to college,” Anna said. “I’m going to work at Andy Warhol’s Factory.”
“Over my dead body,” Mum said.
“What if I went to Wisconsin by myself?” I suggested. “You could put me on the train and Gramma Lou could pick me up in Milwaukee.”
“We’ll see.” My mother stared at Anna’s back. I could tell my summer was doomed.
The picture was still lying in pieces on the desk when my grandmother called the next day.
Anna picked up the phone. “Hi, Gramma Lou,” and a moment later her face turned white. “No. Nobody’s home except me and Maibelle.” She listened, nodded, sat on the floor. And refused to look at me.
At last Anna said, “No, I don’t think so. She’s standing right here, practically on top of me. Yeah, maybe you better… Here.” She got up to hand me the receiver, touched my shoulder. “Sit down, Maibee.”
I took the phone but didn’t sit down. I was too young to know that you are supposed to sit when being told bad news. So it was the touch on my shoulder, my sister’s sudden gentleness, that let me know I was in trouble. In that instant I thought—what? That Grampa Henry had pneumonia? Gramma was always saying he was going to catch pneumonia because he took such lousy care of himself. That they’d lost their crop and the bank was foreclosing on the farm? There was a lot of foreclosure talk in Wisconsin. Or maybe Gramma herself was sick?
No, I was just fighting to shut out the thought that Johnny had been shot again.
But it wasn’t that. It was much more obvious.
Johnny had gone flying.
Gramma was saying, “You know how he wanted to fly. But of course everybody assumed he mea
nt later, when he was grown, maybe he’d join the service and learn how to fly a real airplane. Who knew he had this crazy idea he could fly by himself?”
I knew.
I pictured him standing in the hayloft window, a warm breeze lifting his silvery bangs, sunlight making him squint so that his blue eyes looked almost black. His arms were skinny, and I could trace the bones of his rib cage beneath his white T-shirt. His baggy jeans weighed him down, pinned him to the darkness inside the barn as those arms, light as feathers, reached out into space.
“Johnny was a bird in a previous life and couldn’t bear to shed his wings.” That would be my sister’s conclusion years later, after the spiritual seed that was planted today had fully taken root. For the moment, she just stood there staring at the decapitated photograph.
“Where?” I said. “Where was he?”
“Oh, dear God.” I saw my grandmother breathing deep, wiping her forehead with her white handkerchief, shutting her eyes while she chose her words. I took some deluded hope from the image, as if by feeling enough hurt ourselves, we might be able to bring him back.
“He went up the silo, honey. He went out there in the middle of the night when everybody else was asleep. His mama keeps saying he was sleepwalking, and I don’t know, maybe she’s right. Least, it seems to make her feel better—like he didn’t know what was happening, didn’t really mean it. And, I guess, if he was asleep, there wasn’t much she could’ve done to stop it. What can you do to stop someone dreaming?”
I stopped him once. He scared me enough for that. But then he wowed me with his fairy tales, and instead of deciding he was crazy I fell under his spell. I didn’t understand that I was the only one who knew. I had no idea the danger he was in.
But I should have. Flying from the hayloft was just one clue. There was his fear of Glabber, too—that crazy fear, because he was a flying man who’d crashed. And his relief at Glabber’s death. Safe, he’d written. Safe for what? Safe to fly, maybe. And those imaginary men—
“Did he have anything with him when he jumped, Gramma?”
“With him?”
“You know, was he holding onto anything? Did he have anything in his pocket—”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, honey, I think he did—in his pocket. Some sort of feather, they said. A real pretty feather. Blue and green.”
“A kingfisher’s feather?”
“I think that was it. How did you know?”
“And did anybody talk to him after… before he…”
“No. No. See, Maibelle, his neck was broken. They think it happened right away.”
“Don’t they know?” Now I saw Johnny lying in the dark, like one of those strangled ducks, like the Chinatown chicken with silver-dollar eyes. I felt sick.
Gramma was saying, “I’m just not sure, honey. No one knew it had happened till this morning…”
I threw the phone at Anna and raced to the bathroom, where I vomited until I lost consciousness.
It was late morning when I woke up. Dad was stroking my hair.
Anna had gone. To school, I guessed, and Henry, too. The room was quiet, except for the sound of running water. They’d washed my face and put me into a nightgown, but I still smelled the sickness on me.
“I want to take a shower.”
Dad said, “Mum’s run a bath.”
“I don’t want a bath, I want a shower.” I needed to rinse off yesterday and send it down the drain. The last thing I wanted was to lie in it.
“Mei Mei.”
Little Sister. He almost never called me that unless he was feeling very sentimental—and helpless.
“I need a shower.”
How could he possibly understand? Summer after summer we went away and he stayed in Chinatown. If he’d been with us last summer, Johnny might still be alive. Dad would have stopped Henry and Grampa, for sure. And if he’d been there, I could have told him about Johnny’s trying to fly. And he would have understood.
Dad reached for my hand. I punched him in the face.
My knuckles hit the bone in his jaw with a sickening crack, and the look on his face! Like a well collapsing. He grabbed me around the back and pulled me to his chest, held me there while I cried and he sat quiet as stone.
I heard the door open, my mother start to say something. Then she went away.
When I finally stopped crying, I could feel his hand smoothing my hair again. I didn’t want to look at him, and he didn’t push me back so I had to. He rocked me like a baby and spoke over my head, half to me, half to himself. “People will tell you you’ll be all right. It will pass. It will all work out for the best. And they’re right, all those things are true. But you won’t ever be the same again. You don’t have to worry about that, Maibelle. You won’t ever be the same.”
My mother came and bundled me into my bath, filled the air with words as she soaped my back and lathered my hair. Did I want to talk about what happened? She’d spoken to Gramma Lou last night, but there wasn’t any more news. Everybody was holding up as well as they could. What else was there to do? A hot bath would make me feel better, and then I could have a warm cup of cocoa. Maybe we’d go out to lunch later, just the three of us.
I hardly recognized this mother hen. When President Kennedy died, she fell to pieces, and she’d never even met him. For Johnny she couldn’t cry?
“Just leave me alone!”
She stood up without another word, put a clean towel within my reach, and left the room.
My father was right. What I feared most was that I’d be the same, that it would be as if Johnny never existed. That as I stopped grieving I’d stop remembering how special a friend he was. I didn’t have enough friends to let them go like that.
Only Mr. Li now. And if Johnny could break his neck on a dream, how could I count on Lao Li?
I’d never thought about Li’s age in terms of death. At first he seemed old and creepy, too strange to be my friend. Then his oldness made him more interesting. Now it was a door, threatening to shut against me.
I came out to drink my mother’s cocoa but couldn’t think of anything to say to her, and everything she said annoyed me. At last she decided she might as well go to work, and I retreated to Dad’s workroom.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked him.
“Mm.” He stuck a wad of clay over the mouth of a milk bottle and began to mold it. “Not the kind you mean.” He pushed the clay top flat with his thumb. “Not Halloween ghosts, or the ghosts in old Chinese stories. But people leave ghosts of themselves in other people.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your friend Johnny has left his ghost in you.” He swiveled in his chair to face me. “One day you’ll see him walk down the street. He will be there in the mirror, you’ll feel him over your shoulder, and if you tell anyone else, they’ll say you’re dreaming—and maybe you are, but it keeps him real. It makes him part of you. You need that to keep going.”
Something in his voice made me itchy. It was too earnest, uncharacteristically direct.
“How do you know all this? Do you have a ghost in you?”
“A few.”
“Are they good ones?”
“Good and bad.” He picked up a file and scored the edges of the clay. “Funny thing about ghosts—when they move inside, they become much more complicated. They surprise you. Sometimes you find yourself laughing for no reason. Or you get so bloody angry you could spit.”
“Angry at the ghosts?”
“At what they make you see in yourself. At the strings they pull.”
I liked the idea that Johnny might weasel his way into my head from time to time, but I was crying again.
My father sat next to me. When I buried my face in his shirt, I smelled the Kents in his breast pocket, his tobacco skin and breath. Usually I hated these smells, but not today.
“I never got to say goodbye!”
“I know. That’s the hardest part.”
I nodded.
“If you’d b
een able to say goodbye,” Dad said, “you might have kept him alive.”
I shrugged.
“But there’s another possibility.”
I felt the solidity of Dad’s body, the drumming of his heart. He pushed me back to look into my face. The moonpuffs seemed to intensify his concern. He cupped my cheeks in his hands.
“He might have taken you with him, Mei Mei. And that’s too high a price for goodbye.”
Suddenly I had to get away. My feelings ran from soothing to scalding like a temperamental shower. My father was doing his best, and his best came close—much closer than Mum’s—but there were still too many hot spots where the slightest touch was agony.
I left him with his clay bottle top and went out to walk.
April in New York. On the trees around the Criminal Courts Building tiny green parcels burst from dead, gray bark. Bright sunshine threw crisp shadow branches across the pavement. Limbs reached and crossed, reached and crossed into a massive web engulfing the long skinny line of my body. A plane crossed on approach to La Guardia, and its darkness gobbled mine.
I walked over to Baxter Street, past the shabbier nontourist stores that sold plastic shoes and polyester clothing. Past Mr. Yang’s medicine store, with its huge gnarled ginseng root filling the front window. Henry said the hundreds of jars and boxes inside held dried and pickled rhino’s horn, eel stomach, horse’s hoof, tails of lizards, dogs, and deer, tiger testicles, and sea dragon. But there were no ancient miracle cures for Johnny anymore.
“Looking for lunch?”
I jumped as if I’d been whipped. Tommy Wah laughed and took a step backward. I began to cry.
“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I shook my head fiercely, but no words came and the tears refused to stop. He held out a handkerchief. A white pressed man’s handkerchief of the kind old-fashioned bankers wear in their breast pockets. Too perfect to actually use. But my nose was running now, beyond anything the back of my hand could manage.
Tommy started forward. He was frowning, and as he leaned toward me the white cloth dangled at the end of his arm like a warning flag on an open tailgate.
