I told her about the afternoon when I was seven and my father had taken me to Serendipity, in the city. I’d gotten dressed up and had wanted to order a fruit tart because it looked delicate and grown up inside the glass case. My father pushed me to choose the hot fudge sundae, perhaps wanting something he knew would take me a long time to finish. He’d started up with his “ums” and “ahs” when I was just a few bites in, and as he kept talking I began shoveling larger and larger bites into my mouth, barely stopping to taste the ice cream or the chocolate sauce, feeling only the sticky film developing on my hand and the end of my spoon and around my mouth. I’d left the cherry in the bowl. When he finished talking, finally, and I finished eating, we both sat staring at it, so red it was almost obscene. He’d asked me then if I was going to eat it, as though it had been any other day and any other dessert, and I’d leaned over and thrown up beside the table. The vomit looked like some lunatic’s idea of happiness, just like my parents’ marriage.
He hadn’t told me about the secretary, but then he married his cliché and I figured it out.
“You must have stories,” I said after the moment of silence that followed. It wasn’t what I wanted to say.
“We have ham every Christmas,” Liz offered. “My mom always cut the end off before cooking it, and I could never figure out why. One year I finally asked and she didn’t know. She said it was how her mother had always done it. So I asked my grandmother at dinner, and it turns out she always cut it off because the only pan she had was too small to fit the whole ham. My mother was horrified.” We both laughed. “That’s what passes for scandal in my family—years and years of wasted ham.”
I wasn’t sure how to interpret this.
If not for the all-you-can-drink plum wine special the restaurant was running, I might’ve had the sense to remain quiet.
“My father got me into college,” I said. “His money. His connections. I was one of those girls. I squandered the opportunity, just like I squandered everything else he ever gave me, nearly flunked out. My shrink intervened on my behalf, thank God, and late assignments were accepted! Credits were awarded! The debutante was allowed to graduate.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
I should’ve known better. “Ha Ha, You’re a Failure” was not a dinnertime story. It was meant for the stage. My portrayal of the Dean of Arts and Sciences really couldn’t be beat. The role of my father was played by an angry voice on the phone: “What exactly am I paying for here, Sasha? What exactly are you doing?”
“It’s difficult to discern, father, what precisely I am doing, exactly, as I have been consuming mass quantities of Goldschläger, which you should be aware, has been very difficult to procure but is necessary as I feel the ratio of cinnamon to gold flakes perfectly mirrors my chemical composition at this time. And though the good Doctor Smith—whom you are so generously paying for and so thoughtfully calling every day and pumping for information about me despite my alleged doctor-patient privilege (which I suppose is waived when you’re not the one writing the checks)—prefers I don’t drink the stuff. But you see, father, I feel it is essential.”
I couldn’t say all this with a plate of gūlăo ròu between us. The restaurant smelled of oranges and chilies, and the air felt slightly greasy; the sizzle and pop of splattered oil in the kitchen was audible over the clacking of dishes and the low hum of conversation around us.
I shrugged in response to Liz’s question and stared down at our pork, the crispy edges of the meat, the pale orange sauce glistening provocatively. “Defense mechanism I guess.”
She didn’t ask what I was defending against. Maybe things would have been different if she had.
We went to that Chinese restaurant down the street from our apartment at least once a week. So maybe I could’ve staged my performance there. I might’ve just called our waitress in advance, the one who looked too young to have a job and who giggled whenever Liz ordered in English, as she did often, forgetting that I needed to speak for her. We will need the table in the corner, I might have said. The one next to the strange little stage where you keep the potted plant. Please seat the gentleman who is always grunting at his noodles in the back. I didn’t call, though, and didn’t deliver my stirring final monologue.
“You tell me a story,” I sighed.
Liz picked up a piece of pork between her chopsticks, circled it around the bottom of her plate, tracing a path through the viscous sauce, parting the green peppers. “Once upon a time, I moved to China and met a girl named Sasha.”
“I think I’ve heard this one before.”
“I can’t help it. All my stories started when I moved here.”
I pretended to look annoyed. “Just try one.”
“I can tell you more about Bryan, I guess.”
“Ugh. Bryan. I’m so sick of Bryan. Can’t we do some kind of voodoo ceremony, light him on fire and move on?”
“You’re the one who asked for a story!”
“How about college other than Bryan. What else did you do?”
“Just normal college stuff. I went to class, sometimes skipped class, went to parties.”
“Did you have a best friend?”
“Not really. Freshman year I hung out with my roommate and the other girls on my floor, but then they all pledged. I was off campus so much, hanging out at Amherst with him. I didn’t make many close friends.”
We were silent for a moment. “Sorry,” Liz continued. “I know it all sounds terrible. It wasn’t, though. Just average.”
I smiled and nodded, as though this was all I wanted. I was trying to be encouraging.
Meanwhile, Love stared down at the cold pork and its congealing sauce, feeling slightly sickened, and sad for Liz and me: Two women who shyly bared our inadequacies, real or imagined, watching each other for the slightest flinch.
We held hands as we walked the three blocks back to our apartment building. It was a side street, a quiet one with not too many neon signs flashing. Liz looked up at the sky, and then stopped, began to laugh.
“What?” I asked.
She laughed again, then shook her head. “I was expecting to see stars,” she said. How stupid of her.
In the 10 months since Liz left Shanghai, I haven’t allowed myself to look for her online. But now that I’ve opened the box, have clasped the necklace around my own neck, all promises to myself have been broken. My laptop is packed in my carry-on; in a few clicks I am online, searching the internet for her constructed personas.
Liz Fabrio reveals nothing, but when I try Elizabeth, there she is.
She looks thinner, her cheekbones cutting angles that in all the nights I spent watching her sleeping face, I never saw. She’s bronzed and powdered, red-lipped and shimmer-eyed. Her dark brown eyes have been lined by a professional hand, and her hair sits in wavy piles atop her head, its caramel highlights reflecting the light. She is smiling for posterity, and with the knowledge that in this picture her flaws will be airbrushed away, as only a woman on her wedding day does.
Dusk on a Sunday makes Love want to weep. She compensates for the suffocating quiet with microwave popcorn. She has loud orgasms. Dusk gives way to night and Love feels better. Or Love compensates by making a family, filling her life with people who drown out the hush.
I’d heard all those noises in Heather—the salty crunch of popcorn and the cumming and the raucous future I believed we’d have. To my father’s ears, though, it must have sounded like a girl being murdered.
He’d burst into the room in a panic. Through the door she and I had forgotten to lock.
I heard all the noises again in Liz. Really I did. Such a thing is possible twice.
1.
Sam hovered near the wall of the Starbucks. Each week that Liz didn’t cancel he was surprised. It seemed so improbable that he’d found a language partner who also lacked an interest in exchanging language. Liz asked her questions about the subway and the produce in the grocery store she couldn’t identify, but she
was unmotivated to do the kind of intensive study required to speak Chinese. Sam assumed she wanted something else. He’d never thought of himself as a lucky person before, but maybe that was changing.
On the morning that Liz crept out of bed without waking me, Sam scanned the tables for a sign that someone might be leaving: a hand going for a coat, or pushing away an empty mug, a sigh and an uncrossing of legs. Several patrons, still clinging to their tables and the last sips of cold latte, had forecast the wrong signals and were now stuck with other customers standing uncomfortably close to their chairs, tapping their fingernails against their own mugs, talking too loudly. He and Liz didn’t stand a chance.
After launching in Taiwan just a few years earlier, and then Beijing, Starbucks spread to Shanghai and other parts of the mainland. The company learned that most Chinese preferred to come in the afternoon, sipping the sweeter drinks they favored over coffee as they lingered around the tables or couches. Sitting still conveys status in a city where time to be squandered is a luxury; there’s nothing to be gained from bustling out with a paper cup in your hand that would anyway be spilled in the first rush to board the subway or the groaning bus. The Shanghainese who go to Starbucks have the time to stay, smoke, talk loudly, and gesture wildly with sunglasses resting atop their heads and shopping bags at their feet.
“Wow, busy.”
Sam looked over, surprised. “I didn’t see you come in.”
“How could you? It’s a mob scene in here. Should we go somewhere else?”
“Maybe we walk?” He was nervous to choose another place. There was a tea house nearby that would be empty, but they’d be on display, the waitress hovering, indiscreetly listening to their conversation if she understood English, speculating loudly in Chinese if she didn’t. Is that his girlfriend? she’d ask. How much is he paying her? And then laugh. Liz would ask what she said and he would lie. Ignore the xiăojie, he’d tell her. The waitress. But the word also means prostitute.
No, they couldn’t go to a tea house. Walking they were exposed to the same kind of scrutiny, but at least if they kept moving he wouldn’t have to hear it.
“What are the coffee shops in America like?” Sam guided them west out of the mall, away from the tangled intersection of Hongqiao, Huashan, and Hengshan Roads, which would be filled with people heading to the shopping mall, the subway station, the movie theater complex around the corner.
“Not so different,” she answered slowly.
Sam pictured cavernous spaces, the tables separated by wide aisles, where customers sat reading newspapers, ignoring everyone else. This was all of America as he imagined it: quiet, with enough space: to drink coffee with anyone, or walk down the street holding hands with whomever you wanted. “They must be different.” He didn’t know where they were going; he just wanted not to have to walk with his elbows up, deflecting the crowds. Turning off the main thoroughfare, they walked past tall apartment buildings and more than one real estate agent’s office.
“Well, they don’t come around with free samples.” She paused. “And there aren’t so many Chinese people in them.”
He said nothing, waiting for her description to conform to his hope for what was possible. She was incapable of telling that kind of story, though.
“Not that there is anything wrong with Chinese people,” she rushed.
Finally, he laughed. “There are just so many of us!”
Liz laughed too. “Well, yes, I guess, but that’s not what I meant. It’s just strange to live somewhere where the vast majority of people are the same race. In New York everyone looks different. No one stands out.”
“You grew up in New York?”
“I moved after college. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. Do you know Massachusetts? Boston? I lived sort of near Boston.”
“I know about Harvard,” he answered. “And the Red Sox.”
She laughed. “That’s pretty much it.”
“Everyone looks different there, too?”
“No,” she paused, “they’re all white.”
“You’re used to fitting in.” It wasn’t a question.
Liz shrugged. “Sometimes fitting in means disappearing.”
What Sam wouldn’t give. It had nothing to do with race, he wanted to explain. But he didn’t know how. He would’ve argued with Dorian’s point that Shanghainese were insiders while the lăowài were always outside. Or at least he would’ve pointed out that being born in Shanghai—being able to blend in on the sidewalk—did not mean he was free. He pictured himself in a coffee shop with Liz, either in New York where he wouldn’t stand out, or in her hometown where he would, but for reasons he could live with.
It took me a long time to realize Sam and I were looking for Liz to save us from the lives we didn’t want to live.
They continued walking in silence: awkward for a language exchange. The street they were on was quiet too, mainly residential. Above their heads, laundry hung on ropes strung between the trees and power lines.
They had to step off the sidewalk to avoid a group of older men blocking their path with rickety chairs and an overturned milk crate set between them like a coffee table.
“Why do they do that?”
“What?” Sam had navigated around the group without seeing them.
“Just sit out on the sidewalk like that.”
He shrugged. “Their apartments are very small.” Inside, they’d have no view of the street. They’d have missed, for example, the young Chinese man walking beside a lăowài, a woman. He and Liz would be fodder for the rest of the day. “They like to see what’s going on.” He barely contained the disgust in his voice. Neither the groups of men in their public living rooms nor the waitresses in the tea lounges were really Sam’s problem though. To disappear from their view—as he did when he was out with his friends, as he would if he were walking with a Chinese woman—was relatively easy.
Escaping from his family was the real magic trick. Communal property was a pair of his pants draped over his own chair in the corner of his own small bedroom; his mother went through his pockets. The aunties heard about his promotion before his workday had ended. And they all knew a perfect Chinese girl for him. All those perfect girls he didn’t want.
They crossed the street. The day was crisp but sunny, and the park they walked into was filled with people: clusters of teenagers, a handful of young couples, and the elderly, alone or in pairs.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Sam asked, keeping his eyes on the sidewalk.
Liz wasn’t sure what to say. She thought about my hands leaving prints in her skin, as though she were made of clay. She thought of her own lips, bitten and bruised.
“I had a boyfriend, before I moved here. But we broke up.”
She paused, waiting for Sam to ask what happened.
But he wasn’t interested in Liz’s past. “And now?”
She shook her head. “I have…well, it sounds crazy to say. Or crazy for me anyway,” she laughed nervously. “I guess you could say I have a girlfriend.”
She kept her eyes on Sam, waiting for a dropped jaw or a smirk, a searching glance that he’d try to hide. But he kept his face forward, either because he wasn’t surprised or he was too polite to show it.
“Oh,” was all he said, and then after a moment of silence, “I’m happy for you.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m happy too.” She didn’t stop to wonder if that was true. But she wanted it to be.
She didn’t really have a girlfriend—not technically anyway. Not yet. But Liz was impatient and unconcerned with technicalities. Just like Sam, she’d been looking for an escape from her old life; in my bed she thought she found it.
2.
I’d woken that morning with the taste of Liz still on my tongue but found only a long brown hair on the pillowcase where her head was supposed to be.
My hopes rose like a balloon: that she was in the kitchen making tea, wearing my t-shirt and nothing else, still smelling like our sex and w
aiting to kiss me good morning.
My t-shirt was on floor, though, and the kitchen was empty. My hopes were inhaled helium—making me sound ridiculous. I crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up over my head. Smelling Liz on my pillow I started to cry.
My tears were dry by the time I heard the front door open and close. I didn’t get out of bed. She would tell me, I was sure, that last night had been a mistake. She would tell me she was moving.
I wasn’t prepared for her to come into my room. She didn’t knock, and I don’t know if she knew I was home.
“Sasha?” she said as she sat down on the edge of the bed, beside the unmoving lump that was me. I didn’t answer. I didn’t really think I could hide from her, but I also wasn’t ready to face her.
My silence made no difference. She pulled the covers back slowly. My cheeks were tear stained, eyes puffy, but I tried to project a sense of calm. “Are you going to leave?”
Prior to coming to Shanghai, Liz wasn’t a person who pursued what she wanted. Bryan had been in her sophomore English class. They’d sat next to each other, and a few weeks into the term he’d asked her to study for a test with him. Then invited her to a school dance. Then kissed her. Their relationship followed a typical path. Bryan picked her up and Liz got in the car. Bryan made requests and Liz acquiesced. Bryan got into a top college and Liz went to the state school nearby. Bryan pledged a frat and Liz bought formal dresses to wear to his parties. Bryan got a job in New York and Liz found an apartment in Brooklyn. As long as Bryan kept asking, Liz kept saying yes. You didn’t say no to a boy like Bryan.
But I wasn’t a boy like Bryan.
“What? No,” she said. “No. No, I’m not leaving. No.” With me, no was always easier for her than yes. She continued to repeat it as she reached out to touch my cheek, as she leaned down to kiss me. I pulled her into bed, unbuttoning her jeans as I did, tugging them down awkwardly and then rolling her onto her back. I knelt over her, self-conscious for a moment as I fumbled with the denim around her ankles, and then her pants were off. Using the neck of her shirt I hoisted her to sitting again, then lifted it up over her head. It’s back was damp with sweat and I wondered if she’d hurried home.
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