Bad Bad Girl, page 22
My mother, in contrast, definitely didn’t want to know. “Too much to say!” she said over and over. She did not want me asking why I couldn’t wear pants or miniskirts or use tampons, or why I couldn’t ask the doctor how much contact lenses cost now that I was babysitting and could maybe make enough money to pay for them. Everything was no. I was not allowed to wear eyeliner. I was not allowed to wear lip gloss. I was not allowed to wear blue jeans. I was not allowed to go on sleepovers.
“But why, Ma?”
“Forget about why!”
I wished my father would come home. Sometimes I would think I heard the garage door slam, and then even if I was asleep, I would wake and think, He’s home! But it was always something else, never him.
* * *
—
Some of my new friends had charge accounts in the stores in Scarsdale Village. If they liked something, they just charged it to their parents.
“Like, I liked this sweater,” my friend Annie Dreyfus explained. “Because it was really soft, and I like soft stuff, so I bought it.” Then she asked me what I liked, and when I said I didn’t know, she said, “What do you mean you don’t know? How can you not know?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
All I had ever noticed about a sweater was whether it was on regular sale or final sale. But also, in my family, we were not allowed to say we liked or didn’t like something, especially me, and especially at supper. Since we ate Chinese-style, serving ourselves from bowls of food in the middle of the table, we could generally avoid food we didn’t like by not helping ourselves to any. But one day, my mother gave me a big helping of stir-fried chicken livers and, when I made a face, shoved the whole dish in front of me.
“You eat,” she said.
“Ma,” I said. I could see she really had it out for me, though, and so I ate some.
“Eat the rest,” she said.
“Ma.”
“You finish.”
“Ma.”
“Whole thing.”
“I thought you’re always telling us not to stuff ourselves.”
She hated it when I used something she herself had said against her.
“Eat,” she said.
Reuben started to stand up from the table. She glared at him. He sat back down.
“Eat,” she told me again.
And as no one was allowed to leave the table until I had eaten the rest of the dish, I ate while they watched. The livers were rubbery and cold. It was like eating a dish of erasers.
“In this house, no American ‘I don’t eat this, I don’t eat that’!” my mother said at the end. “Chinese people eat everything! You hear me?”
“Faintly,” I said.
And so it was that even after eating all those chicken livers, I got hit anyway while everyone else skedaddled.
You didn’t listen, that’s why, she says now.
By “listen,” you mean “obey,” I say. You mean I didn’t obey.
You were the most disobedient child there ever was.
The most difficult to control, you mean.
That’s right. The most difficult to control.
With my father back home, the school year was not as bad as the summer. Scarsdale might have been terrible for baseball, but it did have school-sponsored ski trips, which Reuben loved and my father supported enthusiastically. Whenever a parent had to pick Reuben and his friends up in the middle of the night, my father always volunteered. And when the rest of us kids all wanted to learn to ski, too, he lined us up on the bench at the ski area and, kneeling at our feet and going down the line, helped us with our lace-up boots, one after another. He would tinker with any bindings that needed adjusting, using a bag of tools he brought from home, and then he would park himself in the lodge with a cup of tea and a pile of student papers. He was the only one in the ski lodge wearing a wool overcoat, but he didn’t mind. He would sit grading papers by the window with his leather briefcase beside him and watch us come down. Sometimes he would take a break and stand at the bottom of the hill. “That’s Lisa!” he would say, pointing. “That’s Sean!” “That’s Shane!” And as we braked in front of him, spraying up snow, he would clap and say, “Very good! Very good!”
Meanwhile, besides skiing, Scarsdale for me also meant learning to protest. Protesting wasn’t the only thing I did with my new best friend, Allison; we designed plasma-powered space suits and wrote poems in color, too. (If the sound of a word and the shape of the poem mattered, after all, why not the color of a poem?) Allison also introduced me to classical guitar: I had made enough money babysitting to buy myself a record player, and had spent many hours listening to the Beatles and Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkel. But Andrés Segovia! John Williams! Fernando Sor! These were musicians I never would have discovered on my own. Neither would I have discovered fantasy and science fiction writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and, my favorite, Ray Bradbury.
But we had started protesting back in sixth grade when we made posters to help save the Bronx River Parkway—should it not, we asked, be allowed to “keep its bumps and curves”?—and now that we were in seventh grade, we marched around the cafeteria with signs demanding that girls be allowed to take shop. We weren’t the only ones protesting. It was 1967, after all. Civil rights! Vietnam! The whole country was protesting. It’s true we weren’t exactly resisting the draft or making sure all Americans could vote. But still—how come girls had to sew and cook while the boys got to use hammers and saws to make big things? Why did we not have a choice? Allison and I did not spark any kind of mass movement. We were, however, eventually granted permission to use the shop ourselves, after school.
Did I even really want to make something? With all those boys around? The first time I followed Allison into the shop, I was so nervous I tripped.
“Are you guys lost?” said Andy Bezos.
“Shut your trap, Bozo, or I’ll shut it for you,” said Jeff Green.
Mr. Gorman calmly showed us what to do. He wore a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt and a pencil behind his ear.
“First rule here is PUT IT BACK,” he said. “Got that? We got a lot of tools here, and you can use any of them. But after you use it, you have to PUT IT BACK.”
“I thought the first rule in this shop was SAFETY FIRST,” said Andy.
“That’s for you boys,” said Mr. Gorman. “These young ladies already know that. Girls are way ahead of you on pretty much everything; try to hold on to that. Then when they ask you if you learned anything in shop, you can tell them.”
“You mean we didn’t just learn to PUT IT BACK?”
“What’s a genius like you doing in seventh grade, eh?” said Mr. Gorman. “Yes. If you pay attention, you can leave this class having learned two things, unlike the thirty or forty these young ladies are going to take away, you watch.”
Then he turned to us. “What’s this?” he said.
“A hammer,” said Allison.
“And this?”
I could barely get out the words. “A screwdriver.”
“Brilliant,” said Mr. Gorman. “What are they for?”
“They’re for putting back,” we said.
“Best students I’ll ever have,” said Mr. Gorman. “Beats me why girls can’t take shop. A-plus.”
We came back again, and then showed up and showed up, until we had managed to pick out hunks of wood, situate them in vise clamps, and hollow them out with a gouge. Then we sanded and sanded until our hunks had become bowls we could take home. We put them on our shelves like trophies.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, my mother received another letter from Auntie Ping:
Our relatives just came back from Hong Kong with some things to report. Do you know the phrase “struggled against”? These days in China it is used a lot thanks to something called the Cultural Revolution. Maybe you have heard about it. Society is now divided into red families and black families. The Nine Black Categories—the bad guys—are landlords, traitors, spies, counterrevolutionaries, capitalist roaders, intellectuals, and some other people. I forget them all, but you get the idea. People like your family and ours are particularly targeted because we represent the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. As for what happens when you are struggled against, you don’t want to know. These students called Red Guards will stop at nothing. Thousands of teachers have been killed by their own students. You would not believe how many drownings and knifings and beheadings there have been.
I am sorry to give this report. I only write because your family is probably afraid to tell you themselves—too dangerous. It is terrible they did not get out of China. My relatives are planning to travel to Hong Kong again next year and might hear more then. I’ll let you know.
Having briefly responded to Constant Y. C. Tse at the Hong Kong plastics factory, my mother was also now barraged by letters from her family. They said almost nothing about what was happening, however, but only things like:
How is your health? I hear you have arthritis. Is the cold weather difficult? It is always important with arthritis to keep warm.
And:
Your children are so hardworking, like you and Brother Chao-pe. They will certainly be successful.
And:
Are the boys naughty? Their cousins here are all very naughty.
And:
You should take ginseng and also white fungus. Do you know how to prepare it?
Apparently aware that she did not want to be pestered with requests for money, they refrained from asking. There was only one reference to their circumstances, in a letter from my grandmother:
We are all fine. The Red Guards have come through our apartment five times now, but they did such an excellent job cleaning out our jewelry and paintings and books—everything feudal—that all there is to do now is praise the thoroughness of the Red Guards who visited before.
They always bring me out of the apartment into the open air when they come. I do not go out often, since my balance is not so steady, but they will work together to carry me downstairs to the courtyard. As for the things they say, I cannot always understand them because of my hearing. Still, I manage to learn some lessons I will not forget.
We have received no news from your younger sister but trust that if she were no longer able to work, we would be notified.
Of course, I feel very bad, my mother says now.
And yet still you refused to write back to your mother, I say. You wrote to your sisters and brothers, but not one line to your mother.
She is quiet.
Did you know what was happening? I ask. Did you know that the Red Guards were rampaging through the country, beating, torturing, humiliating, and killing people? They even went after pets, calling them “symbols of bourgeois decadence.” Thousands of cats were killed, and so many Pekinese dogs, the breed almost went extinct.
Poor Bao-bao and Zhen-zhen.
Yes. Your poor dogs were probably killed.
She is quiet once more.
They repeatedly dragged your mother into the courtyard, as she told you. They put a dunce cap on her, and cursed and harangued her, and spit on her.
I didn’t know the details.
But did you have an idea what was happening?
An idea.
Then aren’t you sorry today that through it all, you held on to your anger and refused to write to her? When it might have been some small comfort? Aren’t you a little sorry?
She is silent.
* * *
—
School-sponsored skiing might be okay, but was I allowed to visit my friend Annie Dreyfus on Shelter Island for the weekend? No.
“Why?” I said. And, “Please, Ma, please? Gillian Cantor is going, and Lori Kahn, and Annie invited me to come, too.”
“You are becoming a social butterfly,” she said. “Tell them I say you are stay home, period.”
“But why, Mom? Why?” And brimming with protest spirit, I packed my things in a pillowcase, then snuck out the next morning and walked over to Gillian’s house, where Annie’s mother picked us up. She said she could have picked me up at my house, but I told her this worked better because I had just slept over at Gillian’s anyway.
Annie’s mother raised an eyebrow but kept driving.
I’d never been on a car ferry before and was sorry the ride was so short—even the drive that came afterward seemed too short, what with all the beautiful rambling roses lining the way. It was that much sooner that we were on Annie’s dock, though, dangling our bare feet in the water. Annie said it was her favorite thing, and I could see why. The water was so cold and splashy, and the bay so bright and wide open. Little fish nibbled at our toes, which I thought tickled but which made Lori shriek, “They’re biting us!” until Annie convinced her they were taking off our dead skin. Then just when Lori relaxed, what should appear under the dock but a huge snapping turtle!
“I’ll save us!” Annie said. She hoisted a blue-and-yellow sail up the mast of a Sunfish and helped us squish together with our feet in the cockpit. Then we set sail into the light. The water was so twinkly, and the clouds so wispy they didn’t look real. And the sun pressed on our backs as if encouraging us to bend down and trail our hands in the water, so we did—even Lori, who wasn’t going to but changed her mind when she saw that nothing was biting us—while Annie steered us around using the wind, just like in Treasure Island. She was wearing her mother’s sunglasses and a visor, which made her look even more expert.
“It’s easy,” she said, explaining about upwind and downwind and coming about, all of which made sense but still somehow so confused me that she said she could see she would have to show me on a piece of paper later, especially since the wind was picking up. We bumped fast across the water, waving at the other people out on boats except when they were Mafia.
“Are they really Mafia? Are you sure?” I said.
Annie was sure. “What else do you think they do with their money?” She pulled her mother’s sunglasses down her nose so she could look over them at me.
Gillian agreed. “They have to put it someplace. So they put it in houses and boats.”
“I thought they put it in a bank,” I said.
That made them laugh. “The Mafia don’t use banks,” they said. “They do their business in cash. So they have too much cash and have to buy things with it.”
“Plus, they want to diversify, just like us,” said Annie.
I had no idea what she was talking about but didn’t want to ask any more questions because I had already asked too many. And so I just tried to duck when I was supposed to and not get hit by what Annie said was called the boom exactly because it could—boom!—smack you in the head.
Later on, Annie’s mother was mad that we’d gone out without life jackets, especially when she realized I couldn’t swim. Her frosted-pink lips stretched grimly from ear to ear.
“You ladies are lucky you didn’t capsize,” she said.
But it had never occurred to Annie that I might not be able to swim, just as it had never occurred to me that the boat could tip over. I did want to learn to swim now, though, especially when we all went swimming and Annie’s mother ran to find me an inflatable ring.
“You look like a ballerina!” Annie said, twirling around on her toes.
I did not feel like a ballerina. But when I got a sunburn—my first sunburn ever, complete with a white bow on my back from my bikini top—I felt like one of the gang again because everyone was sunburnt and we all had white bows. Annie got out the Solarcaine so we could spray each other, shrieking at the cold. Then we had pineapple pizza and ice cream with Marshmallow Fluff and fudge sauce on the beach, and I came home so happy, why should my mother hit me?
But she said I was disobedient and wild and had no consideration for others.
“How could you sneak out? Make everyone worry sick!”
“If you were so worried, why didn’t you call the police?” I said.
“Because we knew where you went. We knew you went with Annie even after we told you no!”
“Then why were you worried sick?”
“Bad bad girl,” she said, hitting me. “If you lie and sneak out like that again, we will disown you!”
“I wish you would,” I said, making her hit me even more. “I wish you would.” And, “Why should I listen to you?”
“You think you know everything!”
“I know a lot more than you,” I said. Because what did she know about Sunfish and coming about and where the Mafia put their money, much less pineapple pizza? “You don’t want me to have fun because you don’t have any fun, and you don’t want me to have friends because you don’t have any friends.”
“You can go to hell!” my mother said then—surprising me, as she did sometimes, with her new vocabulary.
* * *
—
That was not the end of the hitting. In fact, it went on all week, until finally I took all the money I had—almost ten dollars—out of my small gray metal lockbox. I bundled it up in a pillowcase with my mini-Pietà, and then I left again.
I walked to the next town over, taking the path through the woods, by the stream and the skunk cabbage. Hartsdale was a commercial area, with a train station; I thought I could take the train to Yonkers and Mrs. Cunningham’s house. That was wrong. There was no train to anywhere near our old neighborhood. There was a bus, though. I took that down Central Park Avenue and got off by the Adventurers Inn. Then I walked from there back to our old house. It was uphill forever, but I kept walking until finally I reached Jennifer Lane and Spring Road.
