by Vanessa Hua
Scarlett lifted her chin. Let them stew.
In the playground, a granny pushed a little girl in a swing. With thick round glasses and beaky nose, the old woman resembled an owl.
“Is this the best park for kids?” Daisy asked her. “How old is she?”
The granny didn’t answer. She might be hard of hearing, or maybe she only spoke Cantonese; its sharp tones—love songs that sounded like arguments—sliced through the air in this neighborhood.
“We’re new.” Scarlett asked where they might find a rental. The granny shrugged, said she didn’t know, and turned away. Her indifference stung. At the factories, girls from Scarlett’s province used to make room for her at their table in the canteen, even if she never went out shopping and strolling with them, even if she spent her meals studying, flipping through flash cards, and never joined their gossip. Even if they weren’t friends, they might have cousins in common, and as children, they had toiled and slept under the same big sky.
The granny pulled the little girl to her feet and started to lead her out of the park. The girl stomped her feet and refused, and when the granny tugged again, the girl thrashed and knocked over a toddler boy who started bawling. The granny ducked her head and dragged away the girl, now shrieking. Once she’d been an infant, like the baby inside Scarlett. All that work to keep her alive. How many baths, how many meals, how many diapers, how many fevers, how many tears—only to have your child grow up and flee into the world, with all its dangers and temptations that you’d tried for so long to keep out.
Daisy walked toward the women in sturdy shoes and sensible slacks dancing in unison under a trellis, their silk fans swishing like koi. They practiced the same steps over and over, as if preparing for a performance. Undeterred, she inched closer, causing the woman on the end to stumble to avoid swinging the fan at her. The leader—her hair dyed jet-black, cut into a severe bob—barked at her to get back in line and glared at Daisy.
Scarlett would try the knot of men in the corner in windbreakers, shiny slacks, cheap loafers with athletic socks, and bowl haircuts. Bumpkins. As she approached, a pockmarked man hissed with disgust and tossed aside his cards. He lit a cigarette and regarded Scarlett with suspicion. Apparently women weren’t welcome at this particular game, which gave off a seedy air, as if the men were clustered around pictures of naked centerfolds. As Daisy set off to buy a bottle of water, Scarlett watched the game, which had been popular at the electronics factory. She never played and had considered it a waste of time until she and Boss Yeung spent a rainy weekend at the beach. He taught her how to cheat: how to shuffle, to keep the top card for yourself, nudging it slightly aside. How to mark your cards with your fingernails with the barest crescent, the way she marked his back, scratching in wide, slow arcs.
“Is this how you win at cards?” she had asked.
“I want you to protect yourself. To know it when you see it.” Boss Yeung disdained gambling—slot machines and the horse track—but considered cards a game of skill.
She’d learned how, though she knew she’d never play cards with anyone except him, and in the end, she hadn’t caught the clues that would have revealed his intentions toward her.
Here, she quickly spotted a man cheating. His stubby finger nudged the top card, lightning fast, and he told joke after filthy joke to distract the other players. They were calling him Shrimp Boy, maybe because of his bulging eyes. She should walk away—weren’t these men getting what they deserved with their idle games? But she couldn’t stand Shrimp Boy’s smug grin. And if she helped another player, wouldn’t he help her in return? The next time, just before Shrimp Boy shuffled, she caught the eye of the pockmarked man. She cast her gaze at Shrimp Boy as he flicked the top card.
The pockmarked man scowled and challenged Shrimp Boy, and all at once the men were scuffling, a finger thumped against a chest, a shove against the shoulders, with the clumsy menace of bears forced on their hind legs. Scarlett backed away. With one arm, she shielded her belly and with the other, the roll of bills in her jacket. They could turn on her next, push her down and steal her money.
Then the men were laughing, backslapping, telling ten generations of the other’s ancestors to fuck off. Maybe they’d played cards so many times that occasional cheating livened up the game. But then she noticed the old man in the checkered cap she’d seen earlier. The others were calling him Sifu, master, a title of respect for his skills and experience. He settled the tempers of the two men, cajoling, joking, reminding them of the bites they’d snatched from each other’s bowls over the years.
Daisy returned with a bottle of water. The pockmarked man gave her an oily smile, eying her ballooning breasts and the curve of her belly, irrefutable signs of her fertility and her lack of innocence. “Did you find us a place to stay?” Daisy asked.
“I have just the place for you.” The pockmarked man laughed and elbowed Shrimp Boy. He spoke in Cantonese, which Daisy didn’t understand, but his crude tone couldn’t have been clearer. Daisy reddened.
“The only company you keep is with your hands,” Scarlett shot back in Cantonese, one of the insults she’d picked up at the factory. Shrimp Boy roared. Though she should have held her tongue, she’d been bullied for too long. The next time the pockmarked man saw them, he’d know not to harass them, not to catcall or follow them.
“He uses his right hand during the week,” Shrimp Boy said. “Left hand for special occasions. Calls it ‘going to the disco.’ ”
“Whores,” muttered the pockmarked man.
Daisy kicked over the cardboard box serving as their table and playing cards fluttered into the air. Aiya! Scarlett hooked her arm into Daisy’s. The men gaped but did not fight back against the crazy pregnant women who might spew afterbirth in retaliation.
“Women get like this,” the pockmarked man said, “just before the baby comes.”
“Your mother’s still like that.” Shrimp Boy grinned, and with that, the men returned to insulting each other.
Scarlett dragged Daisy toward the elevator to the parking garage, fuming at herself. That girl was a lit match to Scarlett’s spilled gasoline. Daisy’s temper must have caused her parents so much grief. At the edge of the park, they passed a dozen women sitting cross-legged on mats, wearing sun hats big as flying saucers. Their heads bowed, their hands clasped in meditation, beneath a portrait of the Celestial Goddess printed on a vinyl banner. She resembled Imelda Marcos turned into an interstellar ambassador, with flowing purple robes and a diadem twinkling on her forehead like a third eye.
Boss Yeung’s wife also devoted herself to the Celestial Goddess, meditating five hours a day, abstaining from meat, dairy, garlic, and onions, and contributing to her master’s charities: vegan restaurants, a line of cubic zirconium jewelry, and a satellite television network. Believers claimed they’d been cured of cancer, been reunited with loved ones, and come into enough money to pay off their debts. Mrs. Yeung must have prayed for a son. But if the goddess had intervened, she had a sense of humor—getting Scarlett pregnant instead.
Who knows, his wife might even join protests like this one, along with her regular attendance at retreats hosted by the goddess. “Stay or go, she’s not really there,” he’d once said of his wife. Gone, even when he was in the same room with her. Had he loved her until he lost her to another plane of consciousness, or was it until she failed to produce an heir? Had she always been softheaded, or did she only seek out the assurances Boss Yeung no longer offered her?
A woman with a vampire’s aversion to the sun—in a giant visor that obscured most of her face, flowing pants and tunic, and long white gloves to prevent her skin darkening like a peasant’s—was handing out flyers to passersby. Scarlett turned away. “I wish you safety and happiness,” the woman said. “Do you know you will need to do one thing if you would like to have a safe and happy future?”
Scarlett didn’t answer. When they fi
nally reached the entrance to the garage, she jabbed the scuffed down button. She wasn’t leaving, but she didn’t know where else to go. Berkeley wasn’t far, Daisy said. She’d checked the map, and they could walk around campus to find the father of her child.
“I’m not driving,” Scarlett said sourly. She passed her hand over her face, the smell dusty and metallic, the smell of discomfort and disorder.
“We can sit down, get something to eat, and then we can go.”
“I’m not going. You can.”
The elevator chimed and the doors opened. They didn’t get in. It was obvious that Daisy didn’t want to part ways yet, not with the clouds gathering in the early evening and the winds starting to whip up, not on the first night in a strange city. Scarlett regretted her threat. She did and she didn’t want to be alone.
The elevator doors closed. Turning away, Daisy winced at the sight of the granny still sitting in the wheelchair. She had fallen asleep. Daisy walked over and tucked the lap blanket around the granny, and when she stirred, Daisy patted her withered hand.
Scarlett and Daisy turned at the sound of footsteps—the Sifu, who introduced himself as Old Wu. “You’re related to Granny Wang?”
“No more than you,” Scarlett said.
“You were kind to help her.” He’d seen them earlier, he said, wheeling Granny Wang into the shade. Old Wu explained that even after her stroke, she’d had days when she could still get by with her cane, days where she remembered your name. Bad days, too, where she slept most of the time and couldn’t make her legs go. The neighbors took turns wheeling her into Portsmouth Square, for the sunshine, for the sound of the children and their laughter to heal her. If her daughter found out, she’d force Granny Wang to leave Chinatown and move to a distant suburb where you had to drive from place to place, where the shops didn’t stock dried shrimp and bitter melon, where your grandchildren chose their devices over you, and there were few Chinese—a fate worse than death. It was worth lying to your flesh and blood to maintain your independence.
Old Wu seemed to take this sort of proprietary interest in his fellow residents, whether they’d been here a day or a decade. He cocked his head at Scarlett, smiling, and she could have wept, the tumult of the last twenty-four hours catching up to her. Boss Yeung no longer loved her; maybe he never had. She swayed, weak in the knees, and had to steady herself on the railing.
“Do you need a seat?” He reached for a cardboard box.
“I’ve been sitting all day.” The jumbled pile of boxes teetered in the breeze. “I doubt anything is sturdy enough to hold me up.”
He smiled again, and she felt emboldened to ask where they might stay the night. Evergreen Gardens, he answered quickly, where a room had opened up down the hall from him. A reasonable price, with a landlord who didn’t ask much of you, if you didn’t ask much of him. Their first night in Chinatown, they curled like shrimp, back-to-back, with borrowed extra pillows propped between their legs. The cotton sheets were scratchy, spotted with faded stains and reeking of mothballs, and the mattress on the floor was mushy as a toadstool. She and Daisy kept tumbling into the hollow down the center, arms brushing backs, feet grazing legs. “Sorry.” “Didn’t mean to—”
As the transgressions multiplied, they stopped apologizing. Scarlett’s skin crawled. Before getting pregnant, she’d slept on her back, her arms and legs spread like a starfish, in the same position until morning. Boss Yeung complained, but it had never driven him out of bed. At Perfume Bay, she’d grown accustomed to sleeping on her own again, in the soothing hush of the suburbs after nightfall.
Here the walls were thin enough to hear a fart next door, here shouts and laughter floated up from the street. She squirmed. She’d gone soft, weakened by age, by pregnancy. She used to take pride in her ability to nap in any position, in any condition, on a bus, in the canteen, leaning against a wall for a few minutes. She rubbed her fist in the small of her back, trying to ease the ache. Old Wu had lent her a jar of Tiger Balm, the menthol and camphor cure for every ailment from a cold to an amputation.
She and Daisy washed up under a dribbling shower, but had to change back into their Perfume Bay tracksuits, musty with sweat and smoky from dinner. With a roomy waistband and matted velour, the tracksuits were slovenly and yet infantile, designed for those who couldn’t be trusted with zippers or buttons. Scarlett wanted to toss it, torch it, but she was too practical for such a dramatic gesture. She had to make the money last; she couldn’t count on finding Daisy’s boyfriend. She had to sell the van, at a bargain price to any buyer willing to overlook the missing papers, lost front license plate, and cracked windshield. She wasn’t yet sure if mothers could deliver for free, or if they might get charged for medical supplies, the bedpan, the pads, whatever she and Daisy might need during their stay at the hospital. Tomorrow, Scarlett would start asking about where to give birth. The ultrasound technician had sounded so sure that hospitals couldn’t turn you away, but what if she’d been wrong?
She’d parked in a dim corner of the garage, which seemed secure—an attendant until midnight, sturdy gates, and security cameras—but all of a sudden she pictured thieves prying off tires, breaking the window, and rifling through the glove compartment. Police cruising through the garage, shining a flashlight onto each license plate, in search of the stolen van.
If he wasn’t already en route, Boss Yeung soon would come after them. He’d have the help of his friend Uncle Lo, a man of vast resources, to hunt them down. And wouldn’t Daisy’s frantic parents search for their runaway daughter?
The baby kicked, her head down, in ready position, impatient to squeeze herself into the world. Daisy flipped her pillow, in search of a cool spot, and her hair whipped into Scarlett’s mouth. Scarlett gagged. She couldn’t stand the proximity with a near-stranger, not now, not night after night until their delivery. She sat up. Enough! Daisy tugged on the sheet and Scarlett tugged back so hard that the teenager was left exposed.
She expected Daisy to snap at her. Scarlett wanted to fight, to shout, to vent all that roiled within her, steam howling out of a teakettle.
Instead, Daisy clutched her pillow. “I’ve never shared a bed.” She stroked the edge of the pillow as she would a lover’s arm. She and her boyfriend probably never had a chance to spend the night together, spooning. Daisy didn’t realize that you might share the same bed, but dream different dreams. A man who held you in his arms might at that very instant be plotting how to part you from your child.
Scarlett had known none of that when she’d started her weekend driving lessons with Boss Yeung. They traveled in an hour what once would have taken a week to walk, days by donkey cart. She studied maps—taking in the highways from Harbin to Hong Kong, Shanghai to Kunming—that crossed China like lines on a crone’s palm. She’d never felt more self-contained, self-sufficient than in the car with him on the weekends, stopping and going as they pleased, the climate, music, direction, and speed at their fingertips.
A couple of weeks later, they became lovers on a visit to a local tourist attraction, century-old towering brick homes. For decades, men from this county had been going abroad to find work. Only the luckiest had returned with gold heavy in their pockets, and with it they commissioned the domed roofs and terraces they’d seen abroad.
Boss Yeung had noted the intricate pattern on the tile floor, red and black eight-pointed stars. “Imported. From Italy.” He had an eye for quality and refinement, and he’d judged her valuable, too.
They were alone on the top floor. As she ran her fingers along slits in the walls, he came up from behind. “To take aim on the enemy below,” he said, his arm brushing against her. She exhaled, and leaned back slightly toward him. The air thickening between them, they clutched each other in the sticky heat. They left for the nearest love motel, one they’d passed a few kilometers away. Their room had been tricked out in purple velvet, with a karaoke system bristling with a
s many knobs as a starship. Parched with desire, she drank deeply of all his textures: his soft lips, his prickly stubble, and the smoothness at the back of his neck, where his years hadn’t yet reached.
He never acknowledged their age gap and neither did she: the silver hairs in his crotch, the creak in his neck, the menus he squinted at before handing to her to read, her ease in squatting down to retrieve something he’d dropped. He’d lived out his youth, settled, and started his business before she’d been born. The years that had shaped him most were years she would never know. The age difference had been part of the attraction: she made him feel young, and he made her feel young, too. As old as she felt, he was older, and for a time, she found him wiser.
She failed the written test for her license three times. Everyone said the questions were confusing and that you had to bribe the examiner to pass.
She didn’t need a license, Boss Yeung had said.
“What if there’s an emergency?” she’d asked. “What if—what if something happens and you can’t drive?”
He had grimaced. He didn’t like contemplating any future that debilitated him. The next day, he had presented her with a recording he’d made of the exam, reading aloud questions and the answers. She listened through her headphones every day, while she slept, his voice becoming dear to her.
She never wanted to hear that voice again. She threw the rumpled sheet back over Daisy and herself, but their feet poked out of the tangle. The teenager tottered up—now what?—and yanked the sheet off the bed. Before Scarlett could protest, Daisy snapped the sheet up and let it float down, a calming sight in the half-light from the street. The heat of their bodies dissipated and when the sheet settled upon her, Scarlett felt tidy and smooth.
“My mother used to make the bed over me,” Daisy said.
