by Lee Martin
“Some are water, some are stone,” her mother told her when Miss Chang came back from Mongolia, her body bulky and hard with muscle, a slim, delicate girl no more. “You, Li, you shouldn’t wait for a husband. You should go to the university instead.”
By this time, the American president, Nixon, had come to China—Mao had opened his arms to the West—and now there were even Americans teaching English at the university. Miss Chang fell in love with one of them, a slim, gentle man named Don. No one could understand how she could love an American, but she did, and when Don promised to uphold China’s socialist principles, the government gave him permission to marry her. Then they managed to leave China, a feat that thrilled both of them, particularly Don, who boasted to friends in America that he had smuggled a China doll out of the country.
And now she is Lily, a name she has chosen for herself. Lily Chang because she has taken back her father’s name. Lily because she wants to think of herself as a water flower, pretty and delicate. Here in Nebraska, she sees the plains stretch out for miles to the distant horizon, looks up at the vast sky, open and blue above her, and believes all things are possible, even at her age, even now.
Since their divorce, Don has been eager to do whatever Miss Chang asks, even agreeing to allow her to attend the dance class he teaches with his new wife, Polly. Miss Chang knows he can’t forgive himself for taking her from her family and her country only to divorce her. “You should come after me with a butcher knife,” he said to her once. “I wouldn’t blame you.” She told him, “Life’s too short to drag around a bitter heart. What’s done is done.”
She lets him take care of odd jobs around her townhouse. He changes her furnace filters, mows her lawn, tends to her landscaping. Polly never complains. The joke among the three of them is, all it takes is a divorce to make a marriage work. “Why can’t people be kind to each other?” Polly says.
Miss Chang has never been able to dislike her, because before the divorce, the three of them were friends. Saturday nights, they would go to the Pla Mor Ballroom to listen to music, and sometimes Don and Polly danced. Miss Chang was always too shy, and besides, she liked to watch Don dance. His steps, precise and fluent, seemed to carry him back to some ancient form of himself—the patient, humble teacher she had fallen in love with in China. He had given her, his student, words and grammar, a language with which to speak her heart, but in America, his land, he became boastful and pedantic. “You don’t know what it’s like here,” he told her. “It’s a different world. Everyone’s out for himself. You’ll have to get an edge to you if you want to get along. I’ll teach you.”
He lectured her on customs and conduct. If a car cut in front of her on the street, she was to honk her horn and drive as close to the other car’s bumper as she could. “Make the asshole sweat,” Don told her. “He’ll think twice before he cuts someone off again.” When someone called on the telephone wanting money for this cause or that, she was to hang up. “We’ll pick our charities,” he said. “We won’t have them forced upon us.” And she wasn’t to pay any attention to express line limits in the supermarket. “Groceries are groceries. It’s all highway robbery. Who’s counting?”
It was his constant watch and guard that eventually drove them apart. “You won’t listen to me,” he told her. “Why won’t you listen?”
She wouldn’t listen because she found the vulgar behavior he prescribed unsavory. She could never imagine Polly doing any of the things Don suggested. Polly was too kind, too polite. “Milk and honey,” Don said once. “A real lady.”
With Miss Chang, it was a different story. With Miss Chang, it was always, “You’ve got to toughen up. You can’t let people run over you.” Don harped and harped at her. But on Saturdays, when they went with Polly to the Pla Mor Ballroom, he was a gentleman. He held doors open for Polly and Miss Chang, pulled out their chairs, stood each time one of them left the table. He became the charming guardian who had first won her.
Even now, under Polly’s spell, he is eager and quick to serve. When Miss Chang thinks of the three of them and the common affection they have been able to manage despite the divorce, she feels a spark kindle inside her, and she knows it is her heart, and she knows it fires with longing and with rage.
Wednesday nights, at the YMCA, it embarrasses Miss Chang to have to bow to the American women, to ask for their husbands. She understands what an intrusion she is, and deep down, though she knows it is mean-spirited of her, she imagines Don could see all this coming when he agreed to let her attend the class without a partner.
One night, he takes her by the hand and says, “Come on. Show me what you’ve learned.”
Polly is strolling around the gymnasium, weaving in and out through the couples, stopping to watch this one or that. Miss Chang admires her small feet, her narrow waist, the way she steps across the waxed floor when she and Don demonstrate a dance.
But now Miss Chang is dancing with Don. Her left hand is on his shoulder; her right palm, meeting his left, is held out into the air at their side. They are doing the waltz, and she has no trouble following Don’s step-close-step. But she is on guard, waiting for the moment when he will push against her left hand, the slightest pressure, and begin to promenade her backward. “Walk your lady across the floor, gents,” he said the first night of class. “Don’t bore her with the easy stuff. She deserves a chance to put on a show.”
Don is chewing gum, and Miss Chang can smell his sweet candy breath. His gray hair is parted neatly on the side, and the soft knit weave of his polo shirt is pleasant to touch. She is dancing with him, and she knows people are watching. He has chosen her, Lily Chang, and she is in step with him, in time with the music, and soon he will press her backward, and she won’t miss a beat. Her feet will glide back as his own come forward, and she won’t stumble or hesitate. She’ll escape the thick weight of herself, and even if, as her mother suggested all those years ago, she be stone, she will be, for a short time, a small stone, flat and smooth, skipping lightly across the surface of a pond.
But Don never presses against her hand. He keeps her moving in the simple one-two-three box, and soon she starts to feel the insult of it all. He doesn’t think her capable of anything beyond tracing that box over and over, and once she knows that, she feels a great rage and shame rise up in her.
“Good,” he says. “Good.”
Miss Chang has already begun to despise him. So smug he is, with his neatly combed hair and his fresh breath and his soft, soft shirt. She intentionally botches a step, and another, and another, until their dancing is chaos, all helter-skelter, and he, for the first time, looks clumsy and inept.
“All right,” he says, squeezing her hand to make her stop. “That’s enough.”
“Yes,” she tells him. “It’s quite enough. Thank you.” She sees Polly across the gymnasium, watching them, her hands on her hips as if to say, “What in the world was that?”
D-I-E
Miss Chang cuts the letters from newspaper headlines and glues them to a sheet of paper. The cliché—this stunt she’s picked up from some detective show on television—irritates her, but still she uses her old Underwood typewriter to address the envelope: “Mr. and Mrs. Donald Brawner, 811 South Waltz Road.” The irony of the address only deepens her anger. She imagines Don and Polly falling in love with the fortunate coincidence—two dancers living on Waltz Road—and for a moment she wishes she had someone, anyone, to whom she could announce, “It’s me. It’s Lily Chang. I’m the one sending this note.”
Miss Chang’s townhouse is in a new subdivision called Sherwood Forest, but there are few trees there, only the ornamental Bradford pears planted along the driveways and some Japanese maples in front yards. Don cares for her carpet juniper and her evergreen shrubs and the chrysanthemums that bloom yellow and red each fall. In China, Miss Chang’s father had been the director of a botanical garden, but when Mao’s revolution came, the Red Guard destroyed the greenhouses, torched azaleas and dwarf cedars and rhododendron
s because they were bourgeois. Here, behind her townhouse, there is only a large open space of lawn that stretches, without tree or hedge, from neighbor to neighbor. The lone exception is the house directly behind Miss Chang’s, the house of Miss Shabazz Shabazz, whose backyard is shaded by the only oak tree the developers must have spared and a white pine that carpets the ground with its fragrant needles. And there is a willow tree, its feathery branches sweeping down like the hair of the beautiful young girls who come to Miss Chang at the salon.
Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s daughter is also named Shabazz, but to avoid confusion she is known as Buzzy. Buzzy Shabazz is thirteen, and she has skin the color of caramel, a shade closer to Miss Chang’s own than to the deep ebony of Miss Shabazz Shabazz. The day Miss Chang went to their house to welcome them to the neighborhood, Miss Shabazz Shabazz explained how she had recently divorced her husband. “A white man,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you anything more.”
From the beginning, there was this implicit bond between them. “Women of color,” Miss Shabazz Shabazz seemed to be saying. “Women warriors. We’ll look out for each other.” It pleased Miss Chang to think of herself and Miss Shabazz Shabazz united, but at the same time, she had no desire to poison herself with distrust. Of course, she knew there were people in the world who thought her dirty and vile. Sometimes, when new customers came to the shop and Miss Chang told them she was ready, they made up flimsy excuses—they had forgotten to put money in their parking meters, they had left their ovens on at home—and they would hurry away, never to return, and Miss Chang would know. She tried to let her anger wash over her like a wave rolling to a crest and then falling away.
But the first time she met Miss Shabazz Shabazz, she felt the woman’s rage seep into her. Miss Chang saw it in the glint of the heavy gold rings Miss Shabazz Shabazz wore, rings shaped like spear points, and in her high, sharp cheekbones, and the hair cut close to her skull and nubbed with patches of gray. “I gave my daughter my last name,” Miss Shabazz Shabazz told Miss Chang. “My African name, just as my father did for me. ‘That way,’ he told me, ‘no man will ever be able to take it from you.’”
This year, Buzzy Shabazz and her friends play a game called Marco Polo. It is a game Miss Chang has heard her customers talk about, a swimming pool game carried over now from summer to autumn, from water to dry land. Each evening after school, a large number of children gather in the open lawn behind Miss Chang’s, most of them, like Buzzy Shabazz, almost at an age when such games will be lost to them. There is a desperate urgency to their play, as if they know they are leaving childhood forever and must celebrate its wild, rollicking joy as often as they can.
The game, as far as Miss Chang can tell, is a frenetic, almost maniacal combination of blind man’s bluff and tag. One person wears a blindfold and runs about trying to tag someone else. The rule is this: the person who is “it” calls out “Marco,” the others must answer “Polo.” By repeating the call again and again and again, the person who is “it” tries to zero in on someone else. As soon as another person is tagged, that person becomes it, and the game goes on. It goes on and on until the light fades and Miss Chang can barely see the children, can only hear their feet thundering across the ground as they run and the incessant chant of “Marco,” “Polo,” until darkness finally takes the game from them, and in the sudden calm the call rattles around in Miss Chang’s head.
One night, she closes her eyes and tries to imagine the children, blind to any limits of range or motion, racing across the grass. When they run, they come dangerously close to houses.
Sometimes they lose their balance and fall. They frighten away the birds that come to feed at Miss Chang’s patio. She misses the birds, but she loves to watch the children run, especially Buzzy Shabazz, who is sleek and fast. When Miss Chang watches her, she thinks of the marvelous bodies of athletes she sees on television. While Buzzy and the other children run, their shouts disturbing the usual neighborhood calm, Miss Shabazz Shabazz strolls about her yard, off limits to the children because of its trees. She is regal and leonine, as if this wild abandon is somehow beneath her concern, and Miss Chang starts to resent her and her oak tree and her willow and her pine.
One night at dance class, a door slams shut, and Polly screams. “Not to worry,” Miss Chang says. “It’s just the wind.”
B-A-N-G-! Y-O-U-’-R-E D-E-A-D
Polly comes in each Friday for a wash-and-set. She has fine hair, thinning on the top, and Miss Chang has to use a mild shampoo and conditioner and a pick to gently fluff the hair when she is done. Still, when she has finished, she can see Polly’s white, white scalp shining through the airy puff of hair. Miss Chang imagines birds plucking away the strands one by one until Polly is bald.
Goldfinches, cardinals, chickadees, doves: these are the birds that used to come to Miss Chang’s patio. But now, instead of their songs, she hears the raucous shouts of the children—“Marco Polo”—as if they are searching for him, calling to him over the barren plains of Mongolia where Miss Chang used to watch herds of running-free horses race to drink from the rock wells she had dug, all for the good of the Party, all for Daddy Mao.
Sometimes in Nebraska, the wind’s howl unhinges her. The peasants in Mongolia believed a weasel could become a spirit and come into a person and make that person do crazy things. It must be the same with the wind, Miss Chang thinks, a wind like the one that swept Genghis Khan across Asia, a wind that makes her think she can do whatever she wants, can send note after note to Polly and Don, and no one will ever know.
I-’-V-E G-O-T Y-O-U-R N-U-M-B-E-R
One night, after dance class, Miss Chang walks into the ladies’ room at the YMCA and finds Polly standing at the sink, sobbing. The delicate wings of her shoulder blades flutter.
“Please excuse,” Miss Chang says, and turns to leave.
Polly grabs her by the hand. “Stay with me,” she says. “Stay just a while. I don’t want to go home.”
“Something is wrong?” Miss Chang says. “Something at your house?”
“There are people in the world,” Polly says. “Horrid people. We’ve been getting threatening notes in the mail.”
Miss Chang feels, in the tight grip of Polly’s hand, her tremendous fear, and she wants to tell her there is no need to be afraid; the notes have been a hoax. But of course she can’t admit her guilt, and, too, Polly’s confidence flatters her. Out of all the people she might have told, she’s chosen her, Lily Chang.
“It’s probably nothing,” Miss Chang says. “Probably just some crank. Some cuckoo bird. Who would want to hurt you?”
“It’s Don,” says Polly. “He’s the one they’re after. He said this would happen, and now it has.”
Toward the end of summer, Polly says, Don received a call from a man named Eddie Ball, the same Eddie Ball who had been a key figure a few years before in the trial of a Lincoln woman who had hired a hit man to kill her husband. Eddie Ball, the prosecutors contended, had been the one to put the woman in touch with the killer. Eddie Ball, everyone said—though the trial had never proved it—had mob connections.
“He wanted someone to write his story,” Polly says, “and someone at the university had suggested Don. Well, you can imagine Don’s reaction. ‘I won’t do that,’ he told Eddie Ball. ‘Not for a lowlife like you.’ You know how Don is. And Eddie Ball said to him, ‘You should be careful what you say to a man. You should be able to live with whatever happens now. I’ve got your number. I know where you live.’”
“Those notes,” Miss Chang says. “Have you told the police?”
Polly nods. “They drive by our house a couple of times each night. They’ve told us to be careful. That’s about it. Lily, I’m scared. I think it’s true about Eddie Ball. I think he knows people.”
Miss Chang knows practically no one besides Polly and Don. She has acquaintances, neighbors mostly like Miss Shabazz Shabazz, and there are the other hair stylists at the Mane Attraction, and her customers, but no one she wo
uld really call a friend. Other than Wednesdays, when she goes to the YMCA for her dance class, she spends her evenings alone. She watches Buzzy Shabazz and her friends race across her lawn; then she turns on her television to catch Club Dance. Before she started sending Don and Polly the notes, her quiet life pleased her with its plainness and its modesty. Still, when she saw the flit and bob of a goldfinch in flight, its bright yellow could stun her, and when she watched the women dancing on television, their steps could make her heart ache for love. And now she has become a thug, a shady character like this Eddie Ball. Suddenly, it saddens her to think of all the people in the world and the ways they can find to hurt one another when all along what they want—what everyone must surely want—is to feel that they are safe and cared for, a part of some circle larger than any shape they could manage on their own.
In the middle of summer, not long after she had welcomed Miss Shabazz Shabazz to the neighborhood, a policeman came to Miss Chang’s door. Someone, he explained, had stolen a birdbath from Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s yard. And someone had dug up a crepe myrtle and had thrown it onto Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s porch. Had Miss Chang heard anything, the policeman wanted to know. Had she noticed anything suspicious? No, nothing, Miss Chang told him. “Well,” the policeman said, “your neighbor is plenty hot about this. She’s afraid it’s because she’s black. I wouldn’t want to be in her way if she got started.”
After that, Miss Chang stayed away from Miss Shabazz Shabazz. She wanted no part of trouble. If someone had stolen the birdbath and dug up the crepe myrtle because they didn’t like the idea of blacks living in the neighborhood, how easy it would be for them to feel the same way about Miss Chang, especially if they saw her keeping company with Miss Shabazz Shabazz.
One evening, Don comes to put in Miss Chang’s storm windows. “So,” he says to her, “Polly told you about Eddie Ball.”
“Yes,” Miss Chang says, “she told me.”
