I nodded. “She’s not really your aunt,” I said/asked.
She smiled. “Not a lot of family resemblance, is there? No, I’m pretty sure…” She diagrammed in the air with her fingers. “Mr. Jenkins has a brother in Hong Kong who married a woman who works for my dad. So, through that, someone asked them to take me in. Maybe as study abroad or maybe as troubled girl who needs to pull herself together, who knows?” She rubbed her temples. “Aunt Soph. Poor thing. She’s gonna be absolutely shattered when I disappear. A bit of a cow, but she really really likes me. Not the first one, either. Must have a sign on my back that says: looking for clingy, controlling mother figures.”
“Someone crossed that out and wrote: looking to fuck rednecks.”
She smiled. “That explains a lot.”
I stirred the macaroni.
“These phone cards work?” Meili asked, inspecting the collage of long-expired cards.
“Uh, mostly no,” I said. “There might be some time left on the one with the stars.”
“You might could get me a phone card. Not s’posed to go out myself.”
“Sure. Manny gave me some cash.” I pulled it out of my pocket. It was a lot, and it was fifties. Who carries fifties?
“Fuckin hell, give me some of that,” Meili said, grabbing the wad. “God, I forgot. The floodgates open when it gets bad.” She was counting it.
“I need to get food, too,” I said. The patheticness of my food situation, already pretty obvious, would become embarrassingly clear if I didn’t shop right away.
“Sure. Let’s get a thousand boxes of macaroni and a pickup truck to drive it home.” She paused. “Or drive away.”
ELEVEN
Shopping when you have money is fun as hell. I bought orange juice, bananas, fancy cookies, a gallon of not-powdered milk, frozen ravioli, name-brand English muffins, eggs, and two cartons of Ben & Jerry’s. Two. I would have bought more, but that was all I could fit in my backpack.
I got three forty-dollar phone cards—I could use them if Meili didn’t—and a pack of her rolling tobacco. I chose the checkout line where this girl Carey was working, knowing she wouldn’t card me.
When I got back, Meili was on the phone, talking excitedly in Cantonese. She had a different energy, still badass but younger, less over it.
One sign she felt different: she stood up and kissed me on the cheek, cradling the phone in her shoulder and mussing my hair with her nonsmoking hand.
I was the sweet husband back from the grocery store, greeted by his charming wife who gossiped with a friend.
I put away the groceries and drank a glass of orange juice without watering it down the way my mom used to. Then I drank a second glass of undiluted juice. Things were changing in my world.
Meili yammered and wrote notes on the back of the takeout menus that hung by the phone. I was surprised the calling card lasted more than a few minutes, so I dropped the new ones on the table along with her tobacco. She made a silent “WOW” then grabbed my hand and held it to her cheek for a while. A long while. Long enough that I started stroking her hair with my other hand. I was in an awkward position, hunched over, but I didn’t care. She jumped up to write more Chinese characters on—was it intentional?—the Jade Garden takeout menu.
The house was so neat that I felt filthy. I hadn’t slept much or bathed since before the VFW. I got in the shower and rinsed a disconcerting amount of blood out of my hair. Mine? Ronny’s? Meili was still talking loudly, so I shaved and brushed my teeth. With a clean T-shirt and not-filthy jeans—hey, now I could hit the laundromat, too—I walked into the kitchen as Meili hung up.
She hugged me. She cried softly at first, then big, heaving sobs, smearing snot on my shirt.
I held her as tightly as I’ve ever held anything.
I felt that sob build up in my chest and rise to my eyeballs. Just one, then it passed.
Always one.
Her trembling slowed, then stopped. Meili wiped her face on my shirt, muttering a quiet, “Sorry, Bug.”
She put a pot of water on to boil. Somehow, she’d found tea (we had tea?) and the sugar packets I kept in the refrigerator so the mice couldn’t get them.
“You OK?” I asked. Stupid question.
“Yeah, no, I just, I talked to my friend Jia for the first time in like a million years.” She sipped the last of the Lipton in her mug. “It was so good. It’s five a.m. or something there, but Jia never turns off her phone. Lit’rally since she got the phone, it’s been on, right? And I remembered her number, which is scary, and she picked up. I can’t believe it was that easy.”
“The phone card worked?”
“Yeah, I had her call me back, though, cause we had a lot to talk about.”
“You gave her my number?”
“Take it easy, Manny. Jia’s not about to fly over here and kill us, OK?”
Good. Was there someone who would do that?
Meili peeled the Jade Garden menu off the wall, and a fair amount of paint came off with the tape. “Ooh, sorry bout that. I’ll fix it up, I promise.”
“Ordering Chinese?”
She laughed. “Actually, big confession: I love American Chinese food.”
“Not tonight. I’m cooking.”
Meili opened the menu. “Manny’s always mortified. We’d go to Chinese restaurants here in the States, and when you’re Chinese, they give you a totally different menu, it’s in Chinese, has different food.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? I’m always like…” She raised a hand timidly, cringed. “’Scuse me, could I get the white-people menu, please? Cause I love that shit, some of it anyway. Manny covers his face, horrified. But he’s mainland, it’s different.”
“What’s mainland?”
“Mainland China. Totally different from Hong Kong. Huge divide, stereotypes, all that.”
“They don’t like Hong Kong?”
“More the other way. Hong Kongers think mainland people are crude, unsophisticated, that sort of thing.”
“What do mainland people think?”
“About us? Our stereotype would be: we’re snobs, and we’re not Chinese enough. Not real Chinese. We order from the white-people menu.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Real Chinese.”
“Wow, dunno. What does that even mean?”
I poured hot water in her mug.
“Cheers,” she said. She opened her new tobacco, pulled out the rolling papers. “I think if you’d asked me that a few years back, I’d have said: not really. I went to an international school, friends from all over the world. But in the States, especially here, I’m like: ‘Oh shit, I am so Chinese.’ A completely white town will do that, I s’pose.”
“It’s not completely white.”
“Oh, please. Yes, it is.” She rolled a cigarette and licked the paper. Smoking’s nasty, but that lick was always sexy. “Could you get the sugar? Cheers.”
“There’s people who aren’t white.”
“Where?”
“There’s a black teacher at UHS.”
“History teacher?”
“You know him?”
“No, but every time I say this town is white, he’s the one black person everyone mentions.”
“Well, yeah, there’s a lot of white people here.”
“Yeeup. Sherr awrr.” Her Southern accent. She lit her cigarette. “What about you?”
“What?” I looked in the fridge for a dinner plan. So many options.
“Are you a real American?”
“I don’t know. Not so much.”
“Oh, please. You’re completely fucking American. Like, insanely. Go anywhere else in the world and you’ll see.”
“I’ll see I’m ignorant?”
“Yes, that. But no, it’s freeing, actually. Such a big world.” She curled her legs onto the chair. “I’d be up at boarding school, tiny school with all the cliques and the talk. Then I’d
leave and, like, go to Thailand on holiday, and it was such a relief. All that shit at school, all the drama, it’s like: wait, no one cares. No one even knows it exists. It’s amazing. You should go, Jason. This town’s like boarding school. Too tight.”
“How did you do that?”
“What?”
“Go to Thailand.”
“It’s quite cheap, actually.”
I refilled the pot with water and put it back on the stove.
“But how did you know, like, where to go?” I said.
“Where to stay?”
“No, I mean, if you sent me to Thailand, I wouldn’t know, like, is this safe? Where should I go and not go?”
“Look at you! So cute, you’re scared of Thailand.”
“I’m not scared, I’m just saying, how do you know?”
“You’re totally frightened of Thailand, it’s completely endearing, especially from a man who punches people for sport.” She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette and balanced it on the ashtray. “Come here, cute boy. What are you doing?”
“Making ravioli.”
“Please, I couldn’t. I just had, like, nine cups of tea. Come on.” She took me by the arm and led me to the living room. “Ooh, you’re all clean and fresh, aren’t you?” She lay on the couch and pulled me on top of her. “Now, I’ve decided something.”
“What?”
“I’ve decided you like me a lot.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you’re really into me.”
“Good to know.”
“You’re basically obsessed.”
“Obsessed?”
“Yeah, I’m a goddess. Rainbows out my arsehole, diamonds for nipples.” She squeezed her tiny boobs like she was shooting them at me. “Champagne pouring out of my nipple diamonds.”
I laughed, and she kept shooting champagne.
“It’s time.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For a proper snog.”
God, I hoped that was slang for sex.
She kissed me and kept her eyes open. She moved her lips back and forth across my mouth, watching me the whole time. I managed to get the first taste of her tongue when the phone rang.
“Oh, shit, gotta get that,” she said, pushing up from the couch.
“Leave it,” I said. Losing touch with her body was painful.
“It could be Jia. Or somebody else.”
“Well, it’s my phone, I should answer it.”
She pulled the cord as far as she could, and I reached over the back of the couch.
“Hello?” I said.
A female voice spoke what sounded like Cantonese.
“Hold on.” I passed the phone to Meili.
Goddammit.
I knew the phone call would end, though. I knew she’d come back, and I’d taste her mouth again.
I didn’t know how unlike sex with other people it would be. Sex with Meili involved a lot of position changing (including standing) and, more than anything, talking. Sex with other girls was always an eyes-closed, we’re-not-really-here tussle. Meili looked at me a lot and talked about stuff. And tried stuff. “Put your hand right here and press.” “What if I put my leg up here? Like that?” “Oooh, that’s fuckin great, a bit gentler, ’K?”
We tried stuff on the floor, on the kitchen counter, in a chair. She especially enjoyed doing several things at once: mouth here, hand there, and what if you sucked my toes? (That actually happened.)
Another thing that was different: she came a lot. Other girls came once, or maybe just made a convincing display. I could never tell, and I never asked. Meili came thunderously, heavily, moaning and trembling, many times. And talked about it. I came twice, once in a condom and once a different way. (My mom got pregnant at nineteen, so piles of condoms appeared in my room during middle school.) Meili came repeatedly before and after. Never at the same time, though not for lack of trying.
During a pause on the couch (were we done?), I had my head on her chest. Her naked chest. Casually hanging out with a girl’s naked body was a first. Before Meili, a naked girl meant: quick, have as much sex as you can before the opportunity passes.
I played with the shark tooth on her leather necklace, fake biting her with it.
“Plump Bambi,” she said.
“Is what?”
“Where I got that. Fat Deer Key, this amazing island off Florida. Went there when I was little, absolutely magical. I couldn’t believe it was named Fat Deer Key. I’m picturing, like, this huge, overweight Bambi. It was the most spectacular place. I swear to god I’m going back. We should go. Your mum’s in Florida, yeah?”
“North Florida. Pretty far from the Keys, I think.”
“You’ll love it, Bug. Nothing like here, I’ll tell you that.”
You’ll love it. Fat Deer Key. I’m going back. We should go. Later, I would argue about this in my head. Was she telling me something?
She squeezed my ass. “God, you’re so pale. Look at you.”
“Um, thanks?”
“It’s like you’re anemic or something. Get this boy some steak, I think he might pass out. Which reminds me, I’m famished, and I’m dying for a fag,” she said, popping up from the couch like it was nothing. “That was good fun, though, eh?” So we were done.
“That was amazing.”
She put on my T-shirt and smoked at the kitchen table. Very sexy. I opened the fridge and admired our food supply again.
“God, know what I just remembered? FunHole. My first day was today,” she said. “Sorry, Big Don. Guess that bit about motivated, hardworking employees wasn’t so accurate. I thought of it when we were on the arm of the sofa, you were doing that bit with your fingers.” She watched me cook. “You’re a bit shy, aren’t you?”
“Is that a joke about how I’m naked and making ravioli?”
“No, while we were having sex, sometimes I’d say something, and I’d think: oh god, he’s absolutely mortified, I should shut up and get on with it.”
“Well…” I didn’t know where to start. “That was different from other girls. I’m not used to all that … communication.”
“American girls, like, lie there unconscious or something?”
“Not unconscious, but … definitely there’s less, um, talking and … less trying different things.” It was even hard for me to talk about what was hard about it.
“God, maybe it’s a cultural thing. Can’t imagine just lying there, hoping for the best.”
I laughed. “When you say it like that, it does seem like a bad idea.”
“I remember one bloke, he kept telling me to stop looking at him, and I was like, ‘Where should I look?’ He said, ‘Close your eyes.’ I thought, ‘What a terrible idea. Everything we’re doing is dead sexy, why wouldn’t I look?’”
“American guy?”
“One was American. The other three guys in the orgy were Russian.” She sensed the tension in my question. “Yes, Bug. I have had sex with other people, OK? Shocking.”
“I know. Me too. I was just wondering if it’s an American—”
“You had sex with another girl? Who? Swear to god, I’ll kill her.”
God, I loved that about Meili. She could laugh at me for being jealous one second—How absurd! We’re adults, we have bodies, get over it—and then immediately swerve and be over the top jealous of me. And she meant both of them. Or neither. It made things OK, made them honest. Things that had always felt self-serious and tragic didn’t with Meili. She was too quick, too comfortable with the contradictions.
I stirred the ravioli and splashed a bit of boiling water onto my bare belly. “Ow!”
“Don’t burn your cock off,” Meili said. “It’s a quite lovely cock. I know you blokes are always wondering if you’re, like, massive enough, and rest assured, you’re brilliant down there.” I couldn’t look at her. “Are you blushing? That’s too cute, Bug. Are you totally embarrassed by me?”
“It’s just, this is not a conversation I’m used to
having.”
“What conversation?”
“The one where the girl reviews my cock. I don’t talk to girls about sex. Not in that way.”
“How d’you make it better then? I’m not saying it needs to get better—it was quite fantastic—but, like, how d’you know if it’s going OK?”
“I think most people, or most people I know, don’t make it better. They just do it how they do it.”
“Their loss. And my cock review is five stars.” She held out five fingers. “Three on the shaft and one on each little testicle.” She drew my cock in the air with her hand. “Not little. Sorry, can’t ever use the word ‘little’ when you’re near a man’s crotch. One on each of your massive balls.” She spread her arms wide, looking up at my blimp-size nuts. “But really, it’s ridiculous, you blokes, all you’re ever on about is sex, but the minute a girl talks about it, it’s like, ‘Oh god! Don’t speak of it!’ Explain that.”
“Can’t. Sorry. But you’re right, it’s uncomfortable.”
“Have you got any alcohol? Smoking after sex is unbelievably good, but it’d be even better with a little drinky, wouldn’t it?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Your mum’s a drinker, right? Must be a little stashed away someplace.”
“That’s not how alcoholics work. They drink it all. Hit the liquor store every day, drink till it’s gone.” No amount of stockpiled alcohol could survive the twin assault of my mom and Al, so my house was always dry. Other kids would steal a bottle from their parents’ liquor cabinet, and I would always think: What’s a liquor cabinet?
“Really? What about Sundays? Liquor store’s closed on Sundays, I think.”
“Sunday, you go to the bar.” I knew the whole system.
“Wow, didn’t know that. Bit sad, isn’t it? We should call your mum.”
“We?”
“Yeah, I’ll be like…” She took the phone off the wall. “Hello, Mrs. Firebug, how you doing? I’m sitting in your kitchen watching your son cook pasta with his cock out. What’s that? Oh, yes, it’s a lovely cock, five stars.”
I covered my ears. “Aaah…”
“What? OK, I’ll tell him. Your mum says she’s sorry for being such a drunk. And you should go out and get a nice bottle of wine for me. Her treat.”
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