Lucy and Linh

by Alice Pung

  My problem this year was that I no longer had a group. I had lost you and Yvonne and Ivy. Even Tully had been worth tolerating. As much as I liked Katie, we weren’t really a group. We never did anything together outside of class or lunch break. We never called each other up in the evening. And our dynamic was that Katie talked and I listened.

  In my first week, Katie had asked me, “What do you do during school holidays?” but before giving me a chance to reply, she said, “I usually spend them on my cousin’s place near the countryside, in Mallah. They have seven acres and four cows and some sheep. It’s only a hobby farm, though, because my uncle owns a small business in town. It’s beautiful and real peaceful there. My cousin Dick and I ride horses. You should come up with me next school holidays!”

  Oh my God, Linh, this girl was straight out of a 1950s picture book! She had called her cousin “Dick” with no sense of irony whatsoever.

  I wondered what it would be like to be admired or desired by a boy, and thought about how lucky Amber was. I guess Gina was thinking the same thing, because she came up to us at recess. “Did you hear what Amber called me when the Growler sent me back to school to wash my face off?”

  “No,” Katie lied. “What did she call you, Gina?”

  Just as Gina was about to tell us what we already knew, she spotted something that made her jaw clamp like a clam. The Cabinet was approaching!

  If the rest of the school had not taken them so seriously, I would have laughed then, because they walked like a movie mean-girl gang, with heads held high and each with one hand (the right) in her blazer pocket. What was this, some kind of Western where they’d pull out their pistols and have a shoot-out?

  Gina bared her teeth in what she hoped was a smile.

  Brodie acknowledged Katie and me by giving us a small nod that barely tilted her chin. Then she turned to Gina. “Hey there, Regina. We hear you’ve been going around the school telling all and sundry that Amber has damaged your good name.”

  She actually used the words all and sundry, Linh.

  “Oh yeah?” demanded Gina, but her voice was fearful. “Who told you that?”

  “It doesn’t matter who told who what.” That was Chelsea—she was less articulate. “If you have a problem with any of us, you should have the guts to say it to our faces.”

  “Yeah,” said Amber. “I thought we were friends.”

  Gina looked stunned: she’d never so much as contemplated the possibility that the Cabinet would consider her a friend.

  “I’m hurt that you’ve been backstabbing me, Gina,” said Amber. “I thought that, as friends, we could joke around about stuff like that. I didn’t mean it! If anyone is the slut, it is obviously me.”

  Gina was even more flabbergasted.

  “Come on, who was the harlot who came back with the tacky pen?” Amber pulled it out and waved it around for emphasis.

  “Yeah,” Chelsea added. “Imagine all the tricks Amber had to turn to get her cheap, materialistic thrills.”

  “She has no shame,” added Brodie.

  Gina cracked a tentative smile. Then, seeing it was okay by the Cabinet, she started to laugh.

  Amber flung an arm around Gina’s shoulder. “Here, my fellow ho.” Then she did something that took Gina completely by surprise. “Have this.” She handed Gina her flashing pink pen.

  “Oh,” stammered Gina. “Oh…are you sure?”

  “Of course! Chicks before dicks!”

  After they left, Gina was in shock. “Oh my God, Amber just gave me this!” she said, as if Katie and I hadn’t just witnessed the whole thing. But I knew that Amber’s enthusiasm over her gift was all a show. She had only pretended to be proud of the thing to heighten its value before she off-loaded it. Gina had pen envy, and the Cabinet knew just how to fuel it.

  “I feel so bad,” confessed Gina. “I was a backstabbing bitch to her over some stupid joke.”

  “Yeah, that was real nice of them,” said Katie wistfully, and I looked at my friend, stunned.

  After school that day I got off the train at Sunray and headed for the indoor market. “Bring meat home, one pound of beef,” my mother had instructed me the night before. “Don’t pick the pieces that are brown, and don’t loiter.”

  At Vinh and Robina’s Meats, Tully’s mother greeted me as I walked in the store. “Wah, look at you, so smart in your uniform!”

  At school I may have looked like a try-hard, superpolished version of everyone else in my immaculate uniform, but in this neighborhood I stood out like a beacon, a sign to small business owners and factory workers that the next generation would belong to a different class. This was an outfit not made for messing up, or for hacking away at cow carcasses, or for hiding in back rooms threading needles. This outfit was made for a seated life, a life of air-conditioning, long lunches and weekends away in semi-rural cottages.

  “How are you finding the work at the school?” asked Tully’s mother.

  “Okay, Mrs. Cho,” I answered. “There’s a lot more of it than at Christ Our Savior.”

  “Of course there is!” she exclaimed. “Those good schools always give you more work. It’s how they get students used to working hard at university. Afterward, when they all become professionals, they have good work habits and get promoted sooner.”

  Tully’s mother didn’t just talk to you; she lectured. She also had a pretty warped idea of how the world worked.

  “So what subjects did you pick this year?”

  I listed them, one by one. Mrs. Cho’s eyes widened when I finished. “No advanced math?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m no good at it, Mrs. Cho.”

  “But how are you going to get into university without taking an advanced subject?”

  I didn’t dare tell her that I also intended to drop most of my science subjects when I got to Year Eleven next year, Linh. She would have had a heart attack and collapsed on her tray of duck livers. Instead, I smiled, because within our community a smile often seemed to be the right answer to anything if you were a girl. “I don’t want to be a doctor or anything like that.”

  “What do you think you will do, then? Law?”

  “No,” I confessed. “I’d like to get into teaching.”

  “Wah! What a waste, with you being so smart. Aiyoh, such a waste. So much smarter than Tully!”

  I didn’t take the bait. “Not sure about that.”

  “Ah, that Tully!” Mrs. Cho sighed. “Uncle says she’s lazy and, well, you know, that kind of ding-dong way she has—so helpless and impractical. We despair. What will she ever make of herself? She’s not as stable or as hardworking as you are.”

  Even though I didn’t really like Tully, it seemed unfair that her own mother would talk about her like this.

  “Ay, ay,” she said, waving me closer. “I know why Tully did not get into the school. Her English is not as good as yours. I remember now, you won the Year Eight poetry competition! Yes! You!”

  I smiled again, although by now my jaw was beginning to feel sore.

  “Maybe you can come over and give Tully some lessons in English, huh?” she asked. I said yes to be polite, knowing that the last thing Tully needed was tutoring from me.

  Mrs. Cho handed me the bloodied block of steak in a plastic bag with a knot tied at the top. “Well, pass on our regards to your mum and dad. They must be very proud of you.”

  “Yes, I will. Thanks, Mrs. Cho.”

  —

  There was a letter from the school in our mailbox when I arrived home.

  Dear Mr. Lam,

  It appears that your daughter is not participating in Laurinda’s extracurricular physical education program. We stress the importance of physical education for the overall health of every student, and for the beneficial effects of teamwork.

  Lucy has been signed up for netball but has not attended any games this term. Please ensure that she…

  I dropped the letter in the kitchen bin and went to the garage, whe
re I found the Lamb in his cardboard box. He listlessly banged his rattle and one-eyed terry-cloth duck together.

  “Yo, Lamb,” I said, picking him up. “What have you been up to today?”

  His nose was running, so I tore a sheet from a roll of toilet paper Mum had left nearby and wiped his face. A streak of blue stained his cheek. That was strange, I thought; I hadn’t seen markers in his box today. Then I looked at the wad in my hands and realized that the tissue was also daubed blue. I looked back at the Lamb, and wiped his nose again. His snot was the same blue that a Toilet Duck cube would turn the water after you flushed.

  “Ma!” I yelled. “Ma, come and have a look at this!”

  “Coming, coming. No need to yell the house down.” My mother came back into the garage with Lamb’s bottle and set it down next to her overlocker. “What is it?”

  “His snot is blue!”

  “Let me see.”

  I showed her the tissue, and as she took it from me I noticed that her fingertips were the same blue. After examining the tissue, she looked at the pile of denim jeans by her sewing machine. “Oh, crap,” she sighed. “He’s breathing it all in.”

  She was right: the Lamb had been inhaling the floating blue-dyed dust motes whenever my mother shook out a pair of jeans or trimmed their edges in preparation for the overlocker. I imagined the branches on the tiny trees of his lungs overhanging with blue threads. Enough time and breathing, I imagined, and each organ would be encased in a little knitted blue pouch.

  “Aiyoh,” my mother sighed. “We need to find a better place for him to sit during the day.” Then she added, needlessly, “Don’t tell your father.”

  She took the Lamb back in her arms. “Poor little Lamby.” She handed him to me. “Take him to the kitchen and sit him down in his high chair while you do your homework. Give him his bottle too.”

  Later, when my mother came out for a coffee break and saw the crumpled letter in the bin, she pulled it out. “Why did you throw this away? What does it say?”

  “It’s nothing, Mum. The school just wants us to play sports on Saturdays.”

  “Then go if you want.”

  “Nah.”

  “Aha! You can even take the Lamb with you. Then he won’t have to stay with me in the garage.”

  My mum didn’t understand some things, Linh, like the way you couldn’t have a baby on a hockey field or netball court. To her, sport was play, and if I wanted to play with some of the girls in my class, then the Lamb could come too, and the ones who were off the court could look after him. She had no idea that we would have to go to Alberdine Park on Saturday mornings and stay there for four or five hours. There was even a compulsory sports uniform, which consisted of twelve different items, all bearing the college crest: two polo tops and two swim caps (one for school events and one for house events), a bathing suit, a water-resistant jacket, microfiber track pants, leggings, athletic shorts, a netball skirt, a cap and socks, plus a sports bag.

  My mother had no idea how seriously Laurinda took its play.

  Mrs. Leslie, my remedial English teacher, was the most attractive older lady I had ever seen. She was skinny in a way that women my mother’s age in Stanley weren’t, and the warm lines around her eyes made her even more lovely. All her blouses were silky and pastel, and all her cardigans were the color of small woodland animals. She came in two times a week, just for me. The two of us sat in the corner of the library when everyone else was in normal English class.

  I felt very lucky indeed.

  She was also Amber’s mother.

  We were studying a book called The Great Gatsby, which was about a rich man in a pink suit who had huge parties in his house on a long island shaped like an egg. I thought that he was possibly gay, with his fashion sense, and that his love for that rich, cotton-candy Daisy was fake, because all she did was play tennis and complain about the heat. Who Gatsby really wanted to be with was Tom, which is why he killed Tom’s mistress. There was a line in it that said Gatsby would never look at another man’s wife, which supported my theory.

  I was really looking forward to sharing my insight with Mrs. Leslie. I never spoke up in normal English class, but I thought that we’d have deep and meaningful talks since she was the head of the book club. But no, in the first lesson she gave me an essay structure to learn (introduction, body and conclusion). She had also come armed with vocabulary lists based on the book.

  She told me she liked how I expressed things so concisely and asked if I had read Lord of the Flies.

  “No, but I might know him.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I know the leading distributor of jeans zippers in Australia,” I joked, but she didn’t find it funny. I guessed it wasn’t the time to tell her your joke, Linh, about how Hamlet was the son of Piglet.

  So I sat there miserably as Mrs. Leslie tested me on words I didn’t know, like extemporize and supercilious.

  Then she read passages out to me and asked me to explain what they meant. I had no idea why she was testing my comprehension as if I were ten years old, so at first I replied with stuff like, “This passage shows that the story is set in New York, which is a rich and cultured part of America.”

  “Have you been to New York, Lucy?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t make generalizations like that. Not all of New York is wealthy or cultured. Think about the valley of ashes.”

  Eventually I started to cotton on to what Mrs. Leslie wanted. My answers became more detailed, and not all about plot. I learned to judge the characters as I’d judge real people. Nick secretly admires Gatsby, but due to his class and circumstances, and also to him being related to Daisy, he can’t openly admit it. To do so would be to admit that he hangs around shady people and condones their dodge, I would write in my essays. Or: The green light is supposed to be a metaphor for Gatsby’s hope, because it is far away and flashes and blinks, to emphasize that hope is often elusive. But no one ever speaks about Gatsby’s envy, which the green could also symbolize.

  I had no idea why, but this last comment really did it for Mrs. Leslie. Her brown eyes lit up. “You are really engaging with the text and learning the skill of analysis,” she praised. “What do you mean by Gatsby’s envy?”

  I thought of all the people I knew in Stanley who looked at the houses along Ambient Estates with the same metal-rimmed, wide-eyed Eckleburg yearning as those living in the valley of ashes. I thought of how hard we tried—you, me, Yvonne, Ivy—to look sophisticated with our imitation perfumes and gold buttons and makeup, when true Laurindans never wore such stuff, and how the plainness of their clothes did not conceal the fact that their tops were made of angora and their shoes of calfskin. I’d been at the school for only a few weeks when I realized that we were the ones standing on the shore in our pink suits, suddenly tacky, suddenly left so far behind, and that—unlike Gatsby—most of us could not afford a boat to take us across to the other side. The only way to get there was to do it individually, sink or swim, and of course very few swimmers made it.

  “Gatsby wants the status they have, but he can’t get it no matter how rich he becomes, because his wealth is shady…I mean, ill gotten.”

  “Spot on, Lucy!” cheered Mrs. Leslie.

  Then she asked me how I was settling into the school.

  “Good,” I said. “Katie has been a good friend to me.”

  “Katie,” Mrs. Leslie said slowly. “Is that Katherine Gladrock?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  Then she chuckled. “Sweet girl. But awfully dull.”

  —

  For my first history essay for Ms. Vanderwerp, I received thirteen out of twenty. Thirteen out of twenty! A bare pass. She had also written a note: A good effort, but your argumentative skills need improving. Please come and see me. And she got my name wrong again. I don’t know how difficult it is to forget “Lucy,” but somehow she did.

  Ms. Vanderwerp’s office was a small, cramped corner thing, bigger than a broom
closet but only just. It smelled of Pine-Sol, and on an overhead shelf she had three cartons of wipes and two boxes of tissues.

  “Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “I can see that this is the first history essay you’ve written. It was a good attempt. But you didn’t sustain a consistent argument about what could have caused World War I.”

  “My argument is that many things happened to cause the war, and no one thing made it happen.”

  Ms. Vanderwerp looked at me for a while, then told me that my conclusion was satisfactory but that I had to structure my argument to reflect it. She allowed me to resubmit because it was my first essay. When she returned it with a sixteen out of twenty—a mark that would have made Tully weep inconsolably—I felt like I’d got the hang of things.

  So for my next two assignments, I followed the same formula. Many things in history happened to cause X, Y or Z. There was no decisive moment.

  “Lucy, your writing skills are vastly improved,” Ms. Vanderwerp told me, “but the questions are asking you to choose a side and argue for it.”

  “But why do I have to choose a side? There are so many sides to a historical event, as you’ve taught us.”

  “Yes, Lucy. But the nature of the task is to write argumentatively. So you have to choose a side, acknowledge the other side and then defeat its arguments. Am I making sense to you?”

  She was making sense, but I wasn’t sure whether I should be forming opinions about grave historical events in six hundred words or less. What did an argument I made about who started World War I have to do with anything? I didn’t even get to decide what we’d eat for dinner, or when I could go out, or who I could sit next to in class. Who cared what a fifteen-year-old thought?