The Fortunes, page 2
“They call us ‘soiled doves’ here.” Not Tanka then, by her accent, which was the same as Ng’s, but at least her profession was familiar.
“Half the laundries are brothels,” Ng explained cheerily. “Good business! There’s a dozen fellows to every woman in the state.” Ling thought of the ship he’d arrived on, packed so tightly with men they shared their bunks—three tiers, eighteen inches between—in shifts. He’d heard one sailor joke, Add some oil and they’d be sardines. And yet his abiding memory of his passage was of loneliness, despite (or perhaps because of) the cramped quarters, shunned as he was by many of the other sojourners for being Tanka. In San Francisco, though, surrounded by ghosts, he’d felt the disembarking crowd of Chinese draw tight together, himself among them, Han and Tanka, Cantonese, Hakka and Hoklo all as one.
Little Sister slept past noon, but when she emerged on Ling’s first day, Ng set her to teaching him the “eight-pound living”—ironing—which she consented to, grumpily.
“You?” Ling asked, surprised.
“Who you think had your job first?” she snapped, winding her hair into a tight bun and securing it with a chopstick.
“Then why not just get another girl?”
“Girls are expensive. You’re cheap!” The mannish jaw that clenched gave her face a sullen cast, unhinged into a wide, wanton grin when she laughed.
“Very funny.”
Her face closed, and she went back to lining up the flatirons on the stove, hefting them one at a time to spit on their shiny surfaces until the saliva skittered on the hot metal and she was ready to apply it to the shirt stretched out across the board before her.
“You see?”
He nodded.
She pressed the iron back and forth firmly, shoving the wrinkles along like waves until they fell off the edge of the board.
“See, lah?”
He nodded again.
She took a dainty sip from the bamboo beaker at her side and blew a fine spray of water onto the cloth before her, the iron sweeping over it with a little sigh of steam.
“I thought we were supposed to clean them,” Ling joked, but she ignored him, directed another jet of water at a stubborn crease. He caught a pink flicker of tongue between her teeth.
She moved forcefully but gracefully in her loose clothes, with a slight swinging rhythm that carried from her wrist to her hips and down to her dainty feet. She had rolled back her wide sleeve and he could see the sinews in her forearm—as taut as a man’s—rolling under the skin. When he looked up she was staring at him, and the next time she spat with greater vehemence. She made the work look easy, handling the hot irons so nimbly that they seemed to glide over the clothes, her body behind them swaying and fluid.
He would never have imagined that someone could iron lewdly, and yet he couldn’t help as he watched her thinking how else she used those hips, those forearm muscles, that mouth.
“Your turn,” she said, clanking her iron back on the stove.
The irons were heavier and hotter than he’d thought watching her—he cried out when he grazed his knuckles on a plate, stuffed them in his mouth to suck; she held out a rag for him to bind around his hand—and within minutes he was sweating, the drops dripping down his nose onto the linen, where he erased them with the hot iron, embarrassed to seem weaker than her. She had taken up a needle and thread.
“Too slow!” she scolded, without seeming to look up from her stitching. “Keep moving or the shirt will scorch.”
He felt his cheeks burning, heated with the work and the shame of it. Women’s work; but surely that should make it beneath him, not beyond him. When he paused to take a gulp of water, she shook her head. “You’re supposed to spit.” But when he tried the water just dribbled down his chin, or erupted from his mouth, not as a spray but as if he’d thrown up.
Wiping his chin, he thought he caught a smile on her face, but a moment later it was gone, like a wrinkle pressed away, her face smoothly indifferent.
“Here!”
She bit off the thread she was sewing, took the iron from him, and set to work again, drawing in a mouthful of water and expelling it with a little puff.
“How do you do that?”
“What? This?” And this time she hit him squarely between the eyes.
“Ai-ya!” He wiped his face on his sleeve. When he was done he found her standing on tiptoes before him, mouth open for him to study her tongue, her lips. He examined how she pursed them, the lithe curl of her tongue between them, and rehearsed the same motion tentatively inside his own mouth, all the time aware of her warm breath on his face, moist and honeyed like steam off tea.
“Now you.” She dropped back onto her heels with a little thud.
He worked on until his arm and back ached, but with concentration, by the time the pile was done he was able to direct a spurt of water in the approximate direction he intended. He looked over at her, but she was lying back among the dry clothes, eyes shut, asleep he thought, though when he flopped down beside her she leapt up at once.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“I’m finished.”
“Finished?” She pointed to the clothes all around them. “There’s no finished.”
He unwound the strip of cloth from his hand, clawed from gripping the iron, and massaged his fingers. “But I’m tired.” His palm smelled sourly of metal.
In answer she pointed to the ceiling, where among the rough beams he saw a metal hook gleaming dully.
“That’s for when you’re tired.” It took him a moment to understand; he’d been studying the faint spray of freckles across her cheeks. He’d heard of scholars tying their queues to such hooks, so that if they fell asleep over their books they’d be jerked awake. Uncle Ng must have heard the same story.
“Aren’t you going to help?” he asked.
“You need the practice. Besides,” she said, closing her eyes again, “I earn my keep.”
He had thought they were becoming friends, but when Ng returned and asked about his progress she gave a scathing report of him—lazy and weak, a shirker. He felt betrayed, leapt to his own defense. “See,” the old man cried. “He’s a good boy.” And then he struck her across the face. “You teach him better.” Ling took a step back, but the girl stood fast, one cheek white, the freckles stark as a constellation, the other flushed red, freckles vanished as if struck off by the blow, until Ng dismissed her. “Go do your work.”
She entertained each evening in a narrow lean-to adjoining the laundry, a door with a shutter in it—closed if she was engaged, open for viewing if she was available—leading to the alley alongside. Ling slipped out back late that night after Ng had headed off to his regular appointment at a gambling den and approached it, his mouth dry. He meant to apologize for getting her in trouble. The wicket was open, a smoldering square of lamplight in the gloom. After a glance up and down the alley he crept forward and peered in. She was sitting on the side of her bed in a white shift—silk, from the ivory glow of it, and so finely embroidered he knew she must have “borrowed” it from a customer. The walls around her had been papered at some point with old newspapers for insulation, the indecipherable headlines surrounding her. She was still sewing, making alterations and repairs to cleaned clothes during the lull between customers, hunching low over the work—her hair untied, swinging forward like a dark curtain around her face to meet the swoop of her needle—as if to make it out in the greasy light. He could see the ridges of her backbone through the thin cover of the gown, and then she cried out softly and put her finger to her mouth. In doing so she glanced over at the shutter, her face accusatory as if he’d made her do it, and he fled.
He hadn’t known her for a moment. She had painted her face, a dainty red bow in the center of her wide mouth making her lips seem pursed in anger. He wondered, fleetingly, if it resembled his mother’s face.
He wandered the streets, trembling, his skin tight and feverish, for what seemed like hours, meeting nothing but male faces until he persuaded himself she couldn’t have recognized him. When he returned the moon had risen like a button in the sky and the shutter in her door was closed.
Ling’s own “room” was a splintery corner screened by hanging laundry. He’d lain awake, watching the clothes sway back and forth in the breeze until they rocked him to sleep, and even when he woke in the dingy morning light he thought he was still dreaming. From his pallet he could see a pair of bound feet and calves beneath the drifting hems and tails. He watched her—for it was her—move around, start a fire, set a kettle to boil (its stiff iron spout reminding him of his erection), and fill one of the laundry tubs until steam billowed from it. He figured she was preparing for the first load of wash until she dropped her shift—he saw it crumple around her clenched feet before she kicked it into the laundry pile—and stepped into the water. It must have been very hot, because she lowered herself slowly—dimpled thighs, flaring buttocks (Look away, he thought, but he couldn’t), slim back and bony shoulders speckled with moles—until her round face came into view, shiny with sweat and tight with pain. He held his breath in secret sympathy. She set about herself roughly then, with a washcloth, shoving it first between her legs and over her breasts as if they belonged to someone else, pummeling her body as if—already he couldn’t think of it any other way—it were a load of laundry. He wanted to go to her suddenly, to stay her hand, take the cloth from her and use it more gently.
Only after she had dashed scoops of water over herself from a bamboo dipper did she allow herself a moment to lean her head back on the edge of the tub, silken ribbons of lank hair dripping on the boards. The tightness around her eyes and mouth eased, like creases loosened by steam, and he saw how young she was. When she rose from the water, glistening like silver, he found himself looking away at last, even before she wrapped herself in towels, helped herself to a bowl of rice porridge, and retreated to her room.
He lay back and stared at the shivering spangles of light reflected off the slough onto the sheets around him.
He’d seen women naked before, of course. He used to spy on the girls with their men at the brothel, but he never imagined himself with any of them. They’d mothered him when he was small, bossed him when he was older, stirred no desire in him (though he missed being surrounded by women in this bachelor city). He watched them in an effort to picture his mother and father together. The men rarely had a face, though. It was just the back of their heads he saw, their hair light brown or blond or tinged with red, tied off in the short, tarred ponytail of a sailor.
He ladled porridge for himself and ate it staring at the new stack of coins set next to the ashy stems of incense on the faded red shelf they used as a shrine. Little Sister had left a kettle on the fire, and when the steam began gushing from its spout he set about filling the first of the morning’s laundry tubs, grating soap into it. He soaked and scrubbed and rinsed and wrung half a dozen more loads under Uncle Ng’s cloudy eyes (the old man had stumbled in shortly after Little Sister had retired and swept the offering of coins into his hand) before his boss loaded him with string-and-brown-paper parcels of clean laundry and beckoned him—“Come, boy”—to follow him out into the city on his delivery route.
Ling had been thrilled at first by the bright bustle of the streets—the hollow thunder of boots on boardwalks, the shivery jangle of harness, or spurs, or coin, and over them all, momentarily seeming to silence every other sound, the steam whistles of the paddle wheelers announcing a fresh surge of disembarking passengers through the streets like a foaming tide. Everything seemed to shine under the high white sun. He craned his neck to squint up at the three-story buildings, marveled at the plate glass, the names of stores and businesses emblazoned in gold as if on the very air, alongside his own gape-mouthed reflection. But most of all he stared at the white ghosts striding or riding by: “So many it’s like Yu Lan,” as someone had said when they’d arrived in San Francisco, meaning the Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell swung open for hungry spirits to walk abroad. Ever since he’d learned his father’s race, Ling had found himself shy around foreigners and yet drawn to them in the streets or in Big Uncle’s opium den, staring at them as if he might guess at what his father looked like, what he might have inherited from him. For years he’d studied his nose in the mirror, wondering if it would grow big as a devil’s, but it had remained small and flat, to his relief; it was at best a dubious distinction to be Eurasian. Only in the hinges of his eyes, where the lids folded, he fancied he saw a crease of his heritage. He felt the same fascination now, except at home he’d been invisible, one face in the crowd; here he felt as if he were subject to stares himself, the ghosts meeting his gaze and scowling, until Uncle Ng cuffed him and told him to keep his eyes to himself.
Ling had concentrated on the packages clutched to his chest—Ng had a baying pole slung over his shoulders with more parcels dangling from it—cradling the laundered clothes from the filth of the city, the glossy clods of horse manure, the dust lacing the warm air. If he had owned such linens, he thought, he would never have worn them. But he had trudged back to the laundry more circumspectly at the end of the day, staggering under the pole himself now, malodorous sacks of dirty washing hooked on notches at either end, swaying heavily with each step.
That had been only mildly humiliating, though, compared to the gauntlet of ghost boys he and Ng had had to run. They capered alongside, holding their noses or making monkey noises, pelting the two Chinese with horse apples from the roadway. Most of all they enjoyed darting close to tug on Ling’s queue—Ng, he noticed too late, had tucked his in his collar—sometimes so hard that Ling found himself toppling. A Yankee yank, they called it, never mind their Irish accents. It was as if they were mocking his foolish notions of kinship. He wanted to fight back—Ng had a laundry bat tucked in his belt like a truncheon—or at least shout back, but Ng hissed at him to be quiet, to keep his head down and put the end of his queue in his pocket, and he had to content himself with swinging his carry pole in wary circles to ward them off.
“Don’t let them provoke you,” Ng advised, waving a hand before his face. “They’re only flies.”
Which makes us dung, Ling thought, getting a whiff of his burden.
4.
And so this was his life. Washing in the mornings, deliveries every afternoon while the clothes dried, ironing at night. And always, always thinking of Little Sister, especially evenings when Ng set him to watch the shop. He’d shown him the cleaver he kept under the counter in case of trouble, a confidence that had made Ling swell with importance, though Little Sister herself had only sneered. “You in charge? Wa!” She fingered the chopstick holding up her hair. “I can look out for myself.” Many of her clients saw so few women that they were shy and mannerly with her. Besides, she reminded him, she peddled opium in addition to her other services, which settled the more boisterous among them, though he had seen her in her bath scrubbing at bruises as if they were stains. Still, Ng’s behest made Ling feel protective of her, obliged him to listen to the noises from her crib—fleshy smacks, low chuckles, and a panting giggle that must have been hers—hefting the cleaver, as if hoping for a scream, an excuse to burst in. He never heard her laugh like that during the day, and he couldn’t help but imagine those muffled, complicit sniggers directed at him. He pressed his hands to his ears, the blade of the cleaver cool at his temple. Every night of his childhood he’d nodded off to the slap of skin, indistinguishable from the lap of water against the hull of the flower boat, but he couldn’t sleep now until her work was done and she slipped out of her room to urinate softly—“So-dah!”—into the latest tub of stained clothes they were soaking (an idle defiance, since all their laundry water came from the slough that served as sewer for half the town).
The glimpse of her bathing, repeated most mornings, made him feel he knew something of her, something secret—he still watched, though he looked away whenever she gave Ng her earnings, handing them over brusquely as if she were paying for something—and it made him tender toward her, even as she continued to be surly with him, surlier, if anything, in response to his efforts at friendship. Ng didn’t allow her out—not safe for females on the streets, he claimed—and Ling figured she envied him his freedom. Not that she could have gone far on her bound feet. He tried to bring her small gifts, mooncakes or the sour plums she favored, and citrus, which he plucked from the trees. Oranges she placed on the little kitchen shrine, but lemons she especially prized (only later did he grasp that she used slices of them as a contraceptive; he could never eat lemon chicken again). In the evening, bent into the steam of a mutton broth, their faces flushed, or gnawing on fried chicken feet, he told her stories of the operas he saw and dreamed of taking her to, until she roused herself reluctantly and went in to her work.
He ironed at night, when it was cooler—she’d deemed him tolerably skilled after a few days, and he’d straightened with pride until he realized there’d be no more call for her instruction—working until the ache in his shoulders seeped into his soles. But when he still couldn’t sleep he sat up sometimes trying to fashion a kite by candlelight from the brown paper they wrapped the clean laundry in. It tore too easily, or his hands, so accustomed now to the heavy iron, were too clumsy for the delicate work. But then he hit on the idea of fitting a light frame inside an unclaimed shirt, starched for stiffness.
Little Sister watched him launch it one morning from the plank jetty behind the laundry, snorting at his efforts. But when he finally got it aloft, the breeze off the slough catching it, he was pleased to see her head tilt up to the light, her long pale neck exposed.
“Ah, the Chinese flag,” she mocked, but when he teased the line to make the kite dip, a perilous maneuver, and it almost plunged to the water, he heard her cry out. He arrested the swoop with a sharp tug and was rewarded by her relieved laugh.
