Face

by Aimee Liu

  But the pictures that intrigued me the most were not of Chinese at all. They were a series of sepia portraits of a white woman and what I assumed was her family. She had sad eyes and hair as light and curly as mine. She wore long pleated dresses with lacy trim and waists tied with broad pale ribbons. I would never have guessed she was photographed in China if it weren’t for her chair, with that same inlaid wood and elephant carving, and the children standing beside her, the baby in her lap. Though dressed in starched white playsuits and gowns with ruffles and bows, these children had hair and eyes as black as those of the kids in Chinatown—the ones who really belonged there, that is, not “foreign devils” like me.

  When I asked who the lady was, Lao Li wouldn’t answer directly. Instead, he took me behind the counter and pulled up a couple of stools. He poured himself a bowl of tea and gave me a walnut cookie, then told about white witches who cast spells over China men.

  The witches stole the enchanted men’s babies for their kingdom in the sky. They raised the children as their own, teaching them wondrous magic. But when the babies were grown, the witches grew distrustful and hurled them back to earth. When the children knocked on their fathers’ doors they found that the China men had new babies and did not remember the old ones. The men saw them only as witches, and begged them to go away. And so the white witches’ stolen children were forced to remain forever between the earth and sky.

  “Is she one of the witches?” I searched the portrait above my head for signs of mystical powers.

  “Ah,” said the old man fluttering his palm. “This question you ask your father.”

  “My father? You know my father?”

  Mr. Li smiled.

  “But how do you know my father?”

  “Jade Maiden,” warned Lao Li, still smiling, “you ask too many questions.”

  That night I asked my parents if they knew Mr. Li, and as he’d implied, they did. Li Tsung Po was his full name. He’d operated a pawnshop in Shanghai before the communist takeover, and my mother said he had the best Oriental antiques in the city. My father, bluntly and without explanation, called him a thief and forbade me to see him again, but when I asked about the pictures, Dad was silent, then started to leave the room. He reached the doorway, turned, and said, “Witches cannot be photographed.”

  7

  In used bookstore on lower Broadway I bought twenty back issues of National Geographic with photographs by Marge Gramercy. I have them here by my bed, in the darkroom, scattered among this next batch of gadgets awaiting the camera’s eye. Not coffee-table reading or framable art, the magazines serve as a private warning system and reminder of what I hoped to accomplish by coming back.

  Marge Gramercy was no one I knew before stumbling across her obituary, but she has slowly, reliably turned into a role model, confidante, and friend. The longer I live in her home, the more deeply I imagine her. Through these photographs I see where she traveled, how she saw, what she thought and loved. By extension I can see the woman herself, as she kneels before the grieving windswept child in this portrait of the Andes. I picture silver hair braided long down her back, skin the color of a sandstorm. I admire her hand-dyed vests and khaki pants, combat boots, and wild tribal earrings given by native women in exchange for Polaroids of their children.

  Marge, I’m sure, had lovers at home and abroad and many invitations to marriage, but held out for the man who would not try to mold her, break her, or admire her too deeply, who would simply keep her company in love. When that man failed to materialize, she selected children in villages on all six continents and made it her life’s goal to support this global family. These are her children here—a weeping Himalayan shepherd, this grinning, Nubian wrestler in Adidas shorts and body painted white, this baby crisscrossed in the netting of a hammock aboard a Vietnamese fishing boat. Others crouch under broadleaf palms or laugh invisibly in the shadows of Marge’s distant peaks. Whether in grief or joy the children all have her eyes—clear, thrilled, hungry for life. But they are too trusting. She crushes this trust like a sweet, tender onion until it releases the vulnerability that makes her weep, and only when her tears are streaming does she record what she sees.

  What I admire most in this mythical woman is her ability to embrace her own sorrow. Her vision is absolute and as truthful as her children are trusting. She does not travel for escape or return to this small city box with regret. She accepts the empty pockets of her life. She knows her children will probably die with their eyes clouded over by betrayal or rage, and she endures the limitations of time and love and her own brittle body that prevent her from going back to them one last time. The world is full of inescapable horror, but Marge Gramercy knows how to wrap that horror in the splendor of an infant’s grin or the majesty of a snowcapped summit. She captures a whole doomed culture in a young girl’s upturned hands.

  I am not ashamed to talk to her photographs. I search them for guidance. And sometimes I imagine her answering me.

  Stop looking for endings, she warns. The ending is only the inevitable conclusion of something that started long ago. The sources of pain and treachery and madness are also the sources of freedom.

  I have called the offices of Life to see if I can order the back issues that contain my father’s photographs. They tell me those are collector’s copies, now worth up to one hundred dollars apiece. They can put me in touch with private search services, but their own archives are not for sale.

  How long, I ask Marge, is long ago?

  That she will not answer.

  Johnny wasn’t much of a writer, but he tried. Usually he sent postcards that he’d lifted from the donations box at church. On the back of glossy photographs of Mount Assumption under snow he’d scribble haphazard encouragements and news. “Went swiming in the ferry pond yestrday. Keep flying!” read one. “Hi, Chinese girl,” began another. “Been to that Stachue of Librty lately?” And the really important bulletin: “My dad says Glabber’s dead. Brain turner. So it’s safe to come back to the cuntry again. See ya soon, I hope.”

  The notes I wrote to him were more disappointing than his to me, though not for lack of thoughts or feelings. I wanted to tell him how much I missed him. I wanted to write about Chinatown and the Butterflies and Henry’s goof-up with Mrs. Dixie, but as soon as I got pencil in hand my mind turned to garbage, and I’d end up writing what I always (and for years afterward) wrote when I cared too much—or not enough; I called them nothing-notes.

  “School stinks, but my friend Mr. Li, the old Chinese man I told you about, he’s nice to me. Wish you were here.” Not exactly profound, or even informative, and to make matters worse, though I could spell better than Johnny, I still had the handwriting of a baby. The words came out looking even more stupid than they sounded.

  Every time I struggled with one of these letters I thought of deaf people trying to talk. Most deaf people, I believed, would keep trying. After three or four letters, I quit.

  Which meant that, when August came around again, we were six months out of touch. He was fourteen. I was twelve and sure that by now he had a girlfriend. He’d have outgrown his flying dream. He’d tell me his fairies were a joke on me and he’d lied about not liking Henry. Or maybe the Madisons had moved away and Gramma Lou hadn’t told me because she thought I’d feel bad.

  I mentally rehearsed the possible changes all the way to Wisconsin. Ten minutes after we arrived, Johnny found me on the back porch and called through the screen.

  “Come swimming?”

  He’d grown a good seven inches to my four. His hair was thicker and lighter than I recalled—near white—and his eyes, though still bright blue, had a shimmery, almost translucent quality.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Coming or not?”

  “You’re in some hurry.”

  “Got a new place to show you.”

  I grinned. “You found something new?”

  “Hey, it’s hotter ’n sheep shit out here. Come on.”

  I dug around in my b
aggage for a bathing suit, but when Johnny realized what I was doing, he let out a shaming hoot.

  “Swimming clothes are for city slickers. You’re back in the country, Maibee. Come on.”

  I’d never been skinny-dipping in my life, but as I contemplated Johnny’s proposal, my only objection was that my brother and sister—not to mention my parents and grandparents—would be scandalized.

  “Only if you’re dumb enough to tell them.” Johnny walked away.

  We followed the main road for about a mile, then turned across a stream and onto a path through dense oak forest, emerging on a slab of rock that dropped some thirty feet to a swirl of green water below.

  “Color’s just like your eyes.” Johnny frowned at my blushing. “Used to be a quarry about a hundred years ago.”

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me down the trail that zigzagged across the rock face. I tried not to look, because it made me queasy. Instead, I concentrated on the sensation of Johnny’s hand around mine. It was cooler, smoother, drier than anyone’s palm had a right to be on an overheated day like this.

  When I went behind a shrub to get out of my shorts and T-shirt, he laughed. But he turned his back when he dropped his pants, and he dove away from me to enter the water, giving me time to jump in unseen.

  Under the clear green surface, with the sun slicing long, angled swaths in the background, he looked like one of his marine fairies. He was swimming to show off, arms and legs wagging, hair a swirl of seaweed about his head. The color erased his tan and freckles, turned his body ghostly pale.

  Abruptly he crunched into a ball, hung suspended for a moment, then shot off, straight for the deepest water.

  I swam to the surface and waited, my sense of direction spinning. The walls of the quarry climbed in a bowl around the pool, the cloudless sky a flat lid on us. I wasn’t sure where to search for Johnny. And there was no knowing how deep this went.

  Finally the water burst about forty feet away. He popped straight up, waved his arm toward the opposite shore. And vanished once again.

  The swimming hole, I calculated, was at least a half mile long, surrounded on all sides by rock, and beyond by impenetrable thickets and woods. No one knew where we were, and if Johnny hurt himself or went into one of the narrow inlets along the edge of the pool, I would be alone. I was not a very good swimmer. I wasn’t really happy unless I could see bottom. Johnny knew this, if only he’d remember.

  I was starting up the ledge toward my clothes when a horsefly chased me in again. I dunked my head and swam back to deeper water.

  “Hey!”

  A white tennis ball came flying toward me, trailing a long cord. Johnny’s voice echoed up the quarry.

  “Grab hold!” He was standing on the opposite side of the swimming hole in water up to his waist.

  “Hold!” his voice echoed.

  “I want to go,” I yelled back.

  “Togo!”

  He shook his head, finger to lips. The ball bobbed in front of me. He was mouthing something, but I couldn’t read the words. Not that I liked that echo much, either.

  I clasped the ball between my hands, pushed off, and kicked as he pulled me across. When I felt the stone below me, I let go and swam the last few feet on my own. I didn’t climb past shoulder depth, though.

  He was standing ahead of me. Facing me. Naked.

  “We got to walk a ways.”

  Naked. Like the pictures in Mum’s gallery she insisted on calling nudes.

  “Walk?”

  I’d never seen a real boy naked. Not even Henry.

  “Place I want to show you.”

  “You mean…” I glanced around the quarry, anywhere else.

  “Nah, I known this swimming hole all my life. This is something special.”

  And what he was showing me right now wasn’t?

  “I won’t look.” He began to turn. Anyone else would be laughing at me, but not Johnny. Not now.

  “No. Wait.”

  I walked all the way to the top of the ledge. The water slid down me. Johnny stood, half-turned, motionless except for his eyes.

  I let his gaze roam my half-formed body. I took his in, too. The long stretch of his thigh, hard and pale as marble, the flat slab of his belly. Between them, a pale, soft tangle of hair, like the down I was just beginning to grow myself. Like a nest. I felt the fullness of my breasts as I gazed at his sex, a tightening between my legs. I raised my eyes and locked into his, and in that moment understood how it feels to be savored by a man.

  When I reached him, he curled his fingertips around mine and we walked through a wedge in the stone. We passed into a low stalactite-filled tunnel that raised my skin. My thigh brushed his in the darkness. We stopped as if connected by a raw, electric nerve, then started again, more slowly.

  At the end of the tunnel he made me cover my eyes and promise not to peek. It wouldn’t be as good, he said, if I looked too soon.

  The hard floor gave way to sand beneath my feet, and my skin eased back in the warmth that now replaced the tunnel’s damp chill. We walked about twenty paces. When we stopped, I was hot again. The sun turned the inside of my eyelids red, but the air was still, as if we were in a small, cramped room.

  I felt Johnny moving in front of me. Standing. Almost close enough to touch. Close enough that the surface of my body felt as if it were being pulled toward him, iron to a magnet, reigniting that nerve.

  “Open,” he said.

  I hesitated, trying to quiet the noise of my heart before taking the next step, but it was no use.

  The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Johnny’s face looking up. I followed his gaze and discovered that we were standing inside a natural dome. The rock looked as if it had been scooped out with a spoon. The sand floor was as flat and soft as a mattress with darkness licking the edges. But the darkness seemed very far away because from high up, through an opening to the sky, rained a blazing light that enclosed us in one perfect circle.

  Johnny lay at my feet and crooked an arm behind his head. He smiled up at me.

  “Know how this place makes me feel?” he asked.

  I sat beside him and hugged my knees.

  “Makes me feel like we’re inside God.”

  Next morning, after the women were gone, Grampa embarked on this summer’s project—teaching Henry to shoot. I would have been somewhere else, too, except Johnny had to finish his chores first. I was batting a croquet ball around the side lawn, waiting for him, when the gunslingers went by.

  Henry and Grampa positioned themselves atop the stile that spanned the wide stone wall between the farm’s lawn and pasture. Henry propped both elbows on the railing to stabilize his aim, and Grampa adjusted his fingers, made sure he had a tight grip on the butt, and cautioned him about the gun’s kick. Then they scanned the middle distance for telltale shapes or movements.

  “There, boy, see him?” Grampa pointed.

  Henry moved the revolver slightly and cocked the trigger.

  “What is it?”

  “Woodchuck,” said Grampa. “They got a burrow somewhere in this pasture, damn near destroyed your grandmother’s vegetable garden.”

  I edged closer for a look. The muscles in Henry’s arms were tight. Grampa’s face was twitching. At the far side of the pasture sat a fat, friendly-looking creature with dark brown fur and round eyes. He had his paws up, begging.

  “What the hell you waiting for—”

  Kaboom!

  Nothing could have prepared me for the havoc caused by that one little bullet. The explosion lifted me right off my feet. Low, deeply masculine, the throbbing bored to the bone and stayed there, drumming, for many seconds after the shot was fired.

  The weapon’s recoil knocked Henry backward so hard he would have dropped the gun if Grampa hadn’t grabbed his hand. At first I thought Henry had been hurt, but then the two of them jumped from the stile and tore off across the field, Grampa hooting as if Henry’d scored a touchdown.

  The side of the woodchuck’s
head was blown off, a mash now of blood and brains and jumped-up dirt. What was left of the animal lay on its back, snout and paws raised skyward, the remaining eye turned black, in the background Mount Assumption.

  All the same raw material, but rearranged forever.

  “See what I did, Maibee? First shot a direct hit!”

  Henry’s black eyes flashed. He reached with one hand and pushed his hair out of his eyes, a gesture he’d picked up from his Chinatown cronies. He had exactly the same look on his face I’d seen in the boys who won at craps in the street below our balcony.

  “Now, don’t go getting all high-and-mighty,” said Grampa. “Beginner’s luck don’t count for much.”

  That only fueled Henry’s determination to repeat his success. He galloped back to the stile. Grampa motioned for me to move away, but I needed no encouragement. I turned and ran inside the house, wishing fervently for my brother to fail.

  I went up to the attic and kneeled in the gable window overlooking the main road. I thought I’d be able to see Johnny coming. Then I’d run down to meet him and we’d go back to our secret place. We’d go skinny-dipping and, afterward, he’d show me how to kiss again and insist it wasn’t just practice.

  Yesterday I’d tried to tell him we weren’t old enough, but he said he was two years older and he was. Old enough to love me, that is. I asked how he was so sure about something as grown-up as that.

  “You’re the only other person I’ve ever met,” he said, “who knows fairy stories are true.”

  Kaboom!

  This blast shook the pane so hard I was sure the glass would shatter. I raced to the opposite window and was pleased to see my brother shaking his head. He was positioning himself for a third shot when Grampa gave a shout and the two of them were suddenly off, away from where the woodchuck had fallen, away to the other side of the pasture, the ridge by Glabber’s woods.