China Dolls

by Lisa See

  In the top-hat number, I made a turn, zeroing in on Joe to use as my focal point, and spotted Ruby next to him. The way they stared at each other … The way their heads were tilted toward each other so intimately … I finally saw it: Ruby and Joe were a couple! My breath caught. I missed a step, stumbled slightly, and stopped dead in the middle of the number. Helen sashayed in front of me to cover my mistake. I began to count in my head—one, two, three, four—and my body, trained as it was, obeyed, but my heart was frozen.

  As soon as the routine ended, I ran offstage. A hand clamped down on my shoulder.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Charlie demanded.

  I bowed my head, praying that this wasn’t happening, that perhaps I’d fallen asleep and was having a guilty dream after what I’d hoped to say to Joe tonight.

  “It was my fault,” I heard Helen answer. “I’m so clumsy and careless. Grace tripped over my feet.”

  “Is this true?” Charlie asked.

  I refused to look up. I saw Charlie’s alligator loafers—the ones he always wore on Saturday nights—and my black satin shoes. In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed several pairs of shoes that matched my own, belonging to Helen and the other ponies.

  “I count on you, Grace,” Charlie chastised. “If you can’t do the job, then—”

  Helen pulled me away before he could finish. When we got to the dressing room, she said to the other girls, “We’ve got to help her. Hazel, be a doll, will you, and grab her corset? May, make sure those buckles are tight. Ida, what am I forgetting?”

  I was numb as they wrestled me out of one costume and pushed me into another.

  “Did you know?” I asked.

  “About what?” Helen may not have been the best dancer, but she sure could act innocent.

  “Ruby and Joe.”

  “Don’t imagine things,” Helen said, but her voice gave her away.

  The ponies were uncustomarily silent, soaking in the drama.

  Helen sighed. “I figured something might be going on with those two.”

  “Fiedee, fiedee, fiedee.”

  It was time for our next number. Helen balanced my hat on my head.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” I asked.

  “I hoped you’d never find out. I hoped even more I was wrong.” She led me through the door to the backstage area. “The truth is, I could be wrong. You could be wrong. They’ve met at the club before. You’ve seen them sit together before.”

  “But did you see how they looked at each other?”

  How long had I been making a fool of myself? From that night a year ago, when I introduced them outside Sally Rand’s?

  At the curtain, I closed my eyes, preparing myself to go onstage. The music for the finale started. I wanted so bad to bolt out of there.

  “Grace, you can’t lose your job,” Helen whispered behind me. “He’s just a boy. I take it back. He’s not a boy. If what we suspect is true, he’s a two-timer who led you on. Mama says a man like that is worse than a horse trying to pull two carts, meaning …”

  When we went out for the number, Ruby and Joe were gone.

  You know the expression “the show must go on”? Forget that! But I did my best to follow the music. When we came offstage, Charlie was right there, his face flushed with irritation.

  “Grace is sick,” Ida said before he could speak. “She needs to go home.”

  “Not possible,” Charlie said. “We have two more shows—”

  “You don’t want all of us to get sick, do you?” Ida asked.

  Helen put a hand on her stomach. “I’m queasy already.”

  Charlie sized up the situation, weighing the loss of two girls for the last two shows against the possibility that we all might get sick and he’d lose his entire line for a night or two, or that we were lying. Then he pursed his lips and waved us off with the back of his hand.

  The ponies brought me to the dressing room. As they changed into the gowns they wore between shows, Helen and I threw on our street clothes. Ruby has stolen Joe pounded in my head. Joe had hurt me, but that Ruby had deceived me was even worse. Anger began to replace my anguish.

  “Where do you want to go?” Helen asked when we reached the street. “Do you want to come to my house?”

  The invitation was a first. I smiled ruefully. I’d wanted to see the inside of Helen’s compound since forever.

  “Thanks for the offer, but let’s go to my apartment.”

  “What if Ruby and Joe are there?”

  “Good! I’ll tear her eyes out,” I said, repeating something I’d seen in a movie years ago.

  My building was quiet as we went upstairs. I put the key in the lock and opened the door. The lights were off, but I could hear something. I fortified myself, walked to the bedroom, and flipped on the light. Joe and Ruby were naked on top of the covers. He was pushing himself into her. All notions of tearing out eyeballs disappeared as my blood drained out of my head in a sickening whoosh. I averted my gaze and saw Helen. Her face was as pale as cream, and her lips were whiter still. I had to look worse. I mean, there we were—two virgins faced with something we’d only imagined. And what I’d imagined was not what was on the bed. I was stunned, destroyed, heartbroken. Joe reached for his shorts. Ruby slipped her arms into her kimono. I covered my eyes and began to weep.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruby’s pretty voice sang to me. “I’m so, so sorry. We never wanted you to find out this way.”

  Joe kept his eyes down and his mouth shut. He pulled on his pants and grabbed his shirt and socks from the clothes scattered on the floor. As soon as he had his belongings, he rushed past Helen and me and out the door. He’d played me for a sap, and he didn’t even have the courage to apologize. He didn’t have the conviction to stand by Ruby either. He’d made suckers of both of us. My humiliation was beyond anything I could have imagined. For the first time, I fully understood what it meant to lose face.

  “Well,” I said at last, “this stinks.”

  “Grace—”

  Hearing Ruby say my name hit me like an electric shock.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” she went on. “We realize you don’t know much about sex. Joe and I have always tried to be careful. You usually don’t come home until much later.”

  “You mean this isn’t the first time?”

  “We waited a long time before I let anything happen, so we’ve only been together for a few months. We were just celebrating the first-year anniversary of when we met. I’ll always be grateful to you for introducing us.”

  Helen grabbed my arm to hold me steady.

  “But I love him,” I mumbled.

  “We knew you were sweet on him. That’s why we waited,” Ruby said sympathetically. “But you kept following him around all the time.”

  I needed to get out of there.

  “Joe was worried about you,” Ruby confided in a gentle but straightforward voice. “We both were. You’re so nice, but you didn’t even graduate from high school. You’re not in the same world as we are. You can’t play at the same level.” She paused. “Oh, honey, you’re out of your league. It’s time you learned that.”

  Here’s how I heard what she said: I was some dumb rube from the sticks, while she was gorgeous and half-naked all the time.

  “Do you love him?” I asked.

  “Don’t be such a kid,” she answered like she was trying to be helpful and teach me what was what. “You work in a nightclub. I work in a nudie show. You need to grow up.”

  When I recoiled, Ruby finally had the decency to glance away.

  “We’re like the Three Musketeers, remember?” For the first time, I heard a hint of anxiety in her voice. “We promised we’d never let a man come between us, and I meant it.”

  “How could I have ever liked you?” I asked.

  “We thought, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,” she continued, going back to sounding like a know-it-all big sister. “We hoped you’d get over Joe and develop a crush on someone else. Maybe ge
t back together with Monroe, or meet another boy your own age.”

  I was only two years younger than Ruby! I fought the urge to smack her.

  “We wanted you to be happy,” she went on. “We wanted you to come to a place—on your own—that you would be able to look back at your silly little crush as just that. We kept the secret precisely so this wouldn’t happen.”

  “What about me?” Helen suddenly asked. “What’s your excuse for not telling me?”

  “You’re not even supposed to walk through Chinatown by yourself,” Ruby answered. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear that I was making love with a boy. But really, neither of you should make a big deal about this. Joe and I have been playing around. So what? It’s not that serious.”

  Her excuses made me angrier. She’d lied to Helen and me. Her reasons seemed to be based on our being too innocent to accept the truth. I so hated her in that moment.

  I turned to Helen. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We should talk about this some more,” Ruby appealed to me. “Please, you need to understand—”

  “There’s nothing to talk about!” I screamed from a place inside me that I hadn’t known existed. “I love Joe, and now you’ve ruined everything!”

  “For heaven’s sake, Grace. He’s a man. A man doesn’t want puppy love.”

  I thought I’d been humiliated. Now I was HUMILIATED.

  Perhaps Ruby sensed she’d gone too far. “Try to forgive me—”

  “Forgive you? I never want to see you again!”

  With that, I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed.

  “Don’t go.” Her eyes welled with tears. I’d never seen her cry before, but my usual compassion had been shredded to nothing.

  I opened my dresser drawers and stuffed my purse with brassieres, panties, and the envelope with Mom’s emergency money. I packed my newly bought frocks, the dance shoes and practice clothes I’d brought with me from Plain City, and the evening gown that had taken six months to pay off, but I left the trinkets Joe had given me rattling in the bottom of my drawer.

  Ruby kept apologizing. Helen waited quietly. I snapped the suitcase shut and picked it up. Ruby flew to the door to block me from leaving.

  “Move aside, or I’ll move you.” I sounded just like my father.

  The steel in my voice was such that Ruby edged out of the way. Helen took my arm. Her grip was stable and reassuring as we walked through the streets, but I was a whimpering mess. When we reached the Fong compound, Helen led me through a door, up some stairs, and along a hallway. Her room was neat, fairly empty, and not all that different from my room at home: a bed, a side table with a lamp, a dresser, and a mirror. I collapsed on the bed. Helen gave me a handkerchief. I cried, and Helen kept up a commentary—which didn’t cheer me any.

  “First she said it was their anniversary,” Helen stewed. “Then she said they’d been doing it for a while. Then she said it wasn’t a big deal. Then she practically said she didn’t even care for him. If all that wasn’t enough, she then tried to make it sound like Joe was forced into babysitting you. Did she change her story because she thought that’s what you wanted to hear?”

  I blubbered some more.

  Helen disappeared, then shortly returned with a pot of jasmine tea and a plate of cold barbecued-pork dumplings.

  “I can’t stay here.” My voice caught—like I was being suffocated.

  “Sure you can. We have plenty of room.”

  I shook my head. “I mean I can’t stay in San Francisco.”

  “Just a minute! You have a job. You have friends. You have me. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

  But running away was how I knew to protect myself.

  “Hollywood,” I murmured. “I’m going to Hollywood. I should have gone there in the first place, because life is in movies, movies are life, and movies are greater than life.”

  “You don’t make a decision just like that!”

  “I do,” I said as a hard protective shell came down over me. “If I didn’t, I’d still be in Plain City.”

  I stood. Done here.

  “At least sleep on it,” Helen pleaded.

  But nothing she said—and, boy, did she try—changed my mind, forcing her pleas to become more desperate. “The day we first met you promised we’d stick together.”

  Around four in the morning she finally accepted defeat. “All right then,” she said. “Wait here.”

  Once I was alone, my fidgety desire to run was even stronger. It was all I could do not to sneak out of Helen’s room and the compound by myself. I closed my eyes and saw Ruby and Joe naked. His thing. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. Across the room on a little table was a framed photograph, fruit on a blue cloisonné dish, and a couple of candles. Grateful for a momentary distraction, I went to get a better look at the photo. It was Helen and a Chinese man, probably one of her brothers with the presidential names—Washington, Jefferson, or …

  Helen returned with Monroe. He didn’t show surprise that I was there, and he didn’t ask any questions. In his mind, I’d probably come to the end I deserved, what with my lo fan thinking. It took only a few minutes to drive to the bus station, where Helen revved up her campaign again: “There will be consequences if you run away.”

  I held her hand in mine. “Thank you, Helen, for helping me … again. You’ve been a good friend, but I’ve made my decision.”

  “And your decision does not include me.”

  I boarded the first bus heading south. I had lived the last sixteen months with joy in my heart, but now my mind ran from the memory of seeing Joe and Ruby in bed together. I’d lived as though I would never cry again, but now I couldn’t stop crying. I hoped to find refuge in sleep, but I was unable to close my eyes for fear of what I might see. All those times I thought Ruby had been out with boys from the Gayway, she’d been with Joe. And she hadn’t bothered to tell me because she’d decided I’d “get over him” on my own? The bus driver stopped for gas, and I went to the restroom. I stared at myself in the mirror and saw a pale ghost. My red lacquered nails seemed morbidly alive against my dead skin.

  I DON’T KNOW what I expected. Movie stars greeting me on the sidewalk when I got off the bus in downtown Los Angeles? Chauffeur-driven Packards and Auburns tooling along palm-lined boulevards? Mansions with sprawling lawns? Diamonds in the pavement? Glamour everywhere? What I saw as I took a local bus west along Sunset Boulevard looked drab—little bungalows with peeling paint, geraniums wilting in the sun, and regular working stiffs plodding along the sidewalks. After moving into a furnished room on Ivar in Hollywood, I taped my envelope with my mom’s fifty dollars under a drawer, with a promise to myself not to spend my money frivolously as I had in San Francisco. I was nineteen years old now and determined to make myself into a star: reward for my heartbreak.

  I went to Paramount Studios first. The gate looked just like it did in the movies.

  “I’d like to go to your casting department, please,” I told the guard.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m sorry, miss. I can’t let you in.”

  I went to other studios—Warner Bros., RKO Pictures, Twentieth Century–Fox, and more—but I couldn’t get past those guard gates either.

  I needed a new strategy. With the listings of theatrical agents torn out of the yellow pages in hand, I started with the As and went to the office of a man named Abel Aaron.

  “Aaron isn’t my real last name,” the balding man said as he waved me into his private office. “But it guarantees that young aspirants like you will visit me first. Now, please, sit on the couch.”

  I wasn’t that dumb, but as I worked my way down the list—visiting the Bronstein Agency, Carrell Talent, and Discover New Faces—I heard that request more times than I could count. My response was always the same—“No, thank you”—so of course I didn’t get representation. My refusal to have sex wasn’t the only reason I didn’t make progress. I loo
ked up casting calls in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, but the white girl always got the job. I went to Chinatown, but it didn’t have a single nightclub. My sorrow deepened. I was on my own now without a soul to help me. I had to toughen up—grow up, as Ruby had put it. I slept in very little clothing, trying to discipline myself to take whatever cold might come my way. I walked miles to save the nickel bus fare. And if Ruby or Joe entered my thoughts, I’d distract myself by stretching or doing a barre routine by holding the back of my chair in my room. I gave myself pep talks. I’d bounced back from adversity before. I’d do it again. But life isn’t that simple or easy.

  The worse things got, the more I thought about my mom and dad, and why I could never give up and return to them in Plain City. My waking hours in Los Angeles started and ended the same way: with good and bad memories of them. I’d often asked my mom how and why we’d ended up in Plain City. Her story was always the same, and it had to do with my birth. Mom and Dad had been living in San Francisco. They’d been doing pretty well, well enough to own one of the first closed Model Ts—used, of course. One weekend they drove north to Sebastopol to pick apples. “I went into labor,” Mom liked to recount. “The contractions were far apart so I wasn’t frightened. We started driving back to San Francisco. By the time we reached San Rafael, I had to get to a hospital. We went, but they turned us away. They said they didn’t service Chinese.”

  What kinds of people would turn away a woman in labor? The kinds of people I now met every day in Los Angeles.

  “You were born by the side of the road,” she’d go on. “That’s why your feet move all the time. We looked at you, our precious little girl, and your father said, ‘Why would she walk when she can dance across the room?’ He saw your special talent. He decided we should go where people weren’t used to hating Chinese.”

  So we’d piled in the car and headed east. The car broke down in Plain City. Dad dropped it at the Ford dealership on Main Street and went looking for a hotel, but there wasn’t one. (Because Plain City was just a place to pass through.) Reverend Reynolds at the Methodist church took us in. Dad eventually rented a two-story building on Chillicothe—the only other major thoroughfare in town. We lived upstairs; Dad opened the laundry downstairs. He was a dreamer, so he sunk a ton of money into a neon sign that blazed MR. LEE’S LAUNDRY gaudy and bright into my room all night. Dreamers are born to be disappointed. My dad was, certainly, and in this single regard I now understood him in a way I never had before.