Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  My daughter laugh again. Here you go, she say.

  She say to John, Sophie must be growing.

  Growing like a weed, I say.

  Still Sophie take off her clothes, until one day I spank her. Not too hard, but she cry and cry, and when I tell her if she doesn’t put her clothes back on I’ll spank her again, she put her clothes back on. Then I tell her she is good girl, and give her some food to eat. The next day we go to the park and, like a nice Chinese girl, she does not take off her clothes.

  She stop taking off her clothes, I report. Finally!

  How did you do it? my daughter ask.

  After twenty-eight years experience with you, I guess I learn something, I say.

  It must have been a phase, John say, and his voice is suddenly like an expert.

  His voice is like an expert about everything these days, now that he carry a leather briefcase, and wear shiny shoes, and can go shopping for a new car. On the company, he say. The company will pay for it, but he will be able to drive it whenever he want.

  A free car, he say. How do you like that.

  It’s good to see you in the saddle again, my daughter say. Some of your family patterns are scary.

  At least I don’t drink, he say. He say, And I’m not the only one with scary family patterns.

  That’s for sure, say my daughter.

  Everyone is happy. Even I am happy, because there is more trouble with Sophie, but now I think I can help her Chinese side fight against her wild side. I teach her to eat food with fork or spoon or chopsticks, she cannot just grab into the middle of a bowl of noodles. I teach her not to play with garbage cans. Sometimes I spank her, but not too often, and not too hard.

  Still, there are problems. Sophie like to climb everything. If there is a railing, she is never next to it. Always she is on top of it. Also, Sophie like to hit the mommies of her friends. She learn this from her playground best friend, Sinbad, who is four. Sinbad wear army clothes every day and like to ambush his mommy. He is the one who dug a big hole under the play structure, a foxhole he call it, all by himself. Very hardworking. Now he wait in the foxhole with a shovel full of wet sand. When his mommy come, he throw it right at her.

  Oh, it’s all right, his mommy say. You can’t get rid of war games, it’s part of their imaginative play. All the boys go through it.

  Also, he like to kick his mommy, and one day he tell Sophie to kick his mommy too.

  I wish this story is not true.

  Kick her, kick her! Sinbad say.

  Sophie kick her. A little kick, as if she just so happened was swinging her little leg and didn’t realize that big mommy leg was in the way. Still I spank Sophie and make Sophie say sorry, and what does the mommy say?

  Really, it’s all right, she say. It didn’t hurt.

  After that, Sophie learn she can attack mommies in the playground, and some will say, Stop, but others will say, Oh, she didn’t mean it, especially if they realize Sophie will be punished.

  This is how, one day, bigger trouble come. The bigger trouble start when Sophie hide in the foxhole with that shovel full of sand. She wait, and when I come look for her, she throw it at me. All over my nice clean clothes.

  Did you ever see a Chinese girl act this way?

  Sophie! I say. Come out of there, say you’re sorry.

  But she does not come out. Instead, she laugh. Naaah, naah-na, naaa-naaa, she say.

  I am not exaggerate: millions of children in China, not one act like this.

  Sophie! I say. Now! Come out now!

  But she know she is in big trouble. She know if she come out, what will happen next. So she does not come out. I am sixty-eight, Chinese age almost seventy, how can I crawl under there to catch her? Impossible. So I yell, yell, yell, and what happen? Nothing. A Chinese mother would help, but American mothers, they look at you, they shake their head, they go home. And, of course, a Chinese child would give up, but not Sophie.

  I hate you! she yell. I hate you, Meanie!

  Meanie is my new name these days.

  Long time this goes on, long long time. The foxhole is deep, you cannot see too much, you don’t know where is the bottom. You cannot hear too much either. If she does not yell, you cannot even know she is still there or not. After a while, getting cold out, getting dark out. No one left in the playground, only us.

  Sophie, I say. How did you become stubborn like this? I am go home without you now.

  I try to use a stick, chase her out of there, and once or twice I hit her, but still she does not come out. So finally I leave. I go outside the gate.

  Bye-bye! I say. I’m go home now.

  But still she does not come out and does not come out. Now it is dinnertime, the sky is black. I think I should maybe go get help, but how can I leave a little girl by herself in the playground? A bad man could come. A rat could come. I go back in to see what is happen to Sophie. What if she have a shovel and is making a tunnel to escape?

  Sophie! I say.

  No answer.

  Sophie!

  I don’t know if she is alive. I don’t know if she is fall asleep down there. If she is crying, I cannot hear her.

  So I take the stick and poke.

  Sophie! I say. I promise I no hit you. If you come out, I give you a lollipop.

  No answer. By now I worried. What to do, what to do, what to do? I poke some more, even harder, so that I am poking and poking when my daughter and John suddenly appear.

  What are you doing? What is going on? say my daughter.

  Put down that stick! say my daughter.

  You are crazy! say my daughter.

  John wiggle under the structure, into the foxhole, to rescue Sophie.

  She fell asleep, say John the expert. She’s okay. That is one big hole.

  Now Sophie is crying and crying.

  Sophia, my daughter say, hugging her. Are you okay, peanut? Are you okay?

  She’s just scared, say John.

  Are you okay? I say too. I don’t know what happen, I say.

  She’s okay, say John. He is not like my daughter, full of questions. He is full of answers until we get home and can see by the lamplight.

  Will you look at her? he yell then. What the hell happened?

  Bruises all over her brown skin, and a swollen-up eye.

  You are crazy! say my daughter. Look at what you did! You are crazy!

  I try very hard, I say.

  How could you use a stick? I told you to use your words!

  She is hard to handle, I say.

  She’s three years old! You cannot use a stick! say my daughter.

  She is not like any Chinese girl I ever saw, I say.

  I brush some sand off my clothes. Sophie’s clothes are dirty too, but at least she has her clothes on.

  Has she done this before? ask my daughter. Has she hit you before?

  She hits me all the time, Sophie say, eating ice cream.

  Your family, say John.

  Believe me, say my daughter.

  A daughter I have, a beautiful daughter. I took care of her when she could not hold her head up. I took care of her before she could argue with me, when she was a little girl with two pigtails, one of them always crooked. I took care of her when we have to escape from China, I took care of her when suddenly we live in a country with cars everywhere, if you are not careful your little girl get run over. When my husband die, I promise him I will keep the family together, even though it was just two of us, hardly a family at all.

  But now my daughter take me around to look at apartments. After all, I can cook, I can clean, there’s no reason I cannot live by myself, all I need is a telephone. Of course, she is sorry. Sometimes she cry, I am the one to say everything will be okay. She say she have no choice, she doesn’t want to end up divorced. I say divorce is terrible, I don’t know who invented this terrible idea. Instead of live with a telephone, though, surprise, I come to live with Bess. Imagine that. Bess make an offer and, sure enough, where she come from, people mean for
you to move in when they say things like that. A crazy idea, go to live with someone else’s family, but she like to have some female company, not like my daughter, who does not believe in company. These days when my daughter visit, she does not bring Sophie. Bess say we should give Nattie time, we will see Sophie again soon. But seems like my daughter have more presentation than ever before, every time she come she have to leave.

  I have a family to support, she say, and her voice is heavy, as if soaking wet. I have a young daughter and a depressed husband and no one to turn to.

  When she say no one to turn to, she mean me.

  These days my beautiful daughter is so tired she can just sit there in a chair and fall asleep. John lost his job again, already, but still they rather hire a baby-sitter than ask me to help, even they can’t afford it. Of course, the new baby-sitter is much younger, can run around. I don’t know if Sophie these days is wild or not wild. She call me Meanie, but she like to kiss me too, sometimes. I remember that every time I see a child on TV. Sophie like to grab my hair, a fistful in each hand, and then kiss me smack on the nose. I never see any other child kiss that way.

  The satellite TV has so many channels, more channels than I can count, including a Chinese channel from the Mainland and a Chinese channel from Taiwan, but most of the time I watch bloopers with Bess. Also, I watch the bird feeder—so many, many kinds of birds come. The Shea sons hang around all the time, asking when will I go home, but Bess tell them, Get lost.

  She’s a permanent resident, say Bess. She isn’t going anywhere.

  Then she wink at me, and switch the channel with the remote control.

  Of course, I shouldn’t say Irish this, Irish that, especially now I am become honorary Irish myself, according to Bess. Me! Who’s Irish? I say, and she laugh. All the same, if I could mention one thing about some of the Irish, not all of them of course, I like to mention this: Their talk just stick. I don’t know how Bess Shea learn to use her words, but sometimes I hear what she say a long time later. Permanent resident. Not going anywhere. Over and over I hear it, the voice of Bess.

  WAXING THE THING

  Ginu Kamani

  When I first came to Bombay to work in a beauty salon, I didn’t understand anything. They told me to wax, so I waxed: legs, arms, underarms, stomachs, foreheads, fingers, toes. It’s like a game for me. I cover the skin of the ladies with hot wax, then quickly-quickly take it all off with a cloth, almost before they notice that it’s there. It reminds me of my village school, where I used to draw on the wall with chalk, then quickly wipe it off before the teacher found out. For me it’s all very strange, what goes on with these rich-rich city ladies, but I mind my own business. I’m just a simple village girl. Everything about the city is strange to me, so what’s one thing more?

  There I was, minding my own business, when one day this Mrs. Yusuf, whose legs I was waxing in the private room, asked me if I would come to her house to wax her thing. I was so stupid, I asked her to her face, “What is this thing?”

  Born in Bombay, India, in 1962, GINU KAMANI moved with her family to the United States in 1976. She is the author of Junglee Girl, a collection of short stories, and coauthor of the play The Cure along with Joel B. Tan. A writing fellow with the Sundance Institute, and an instructor of creative writing in the Mills College M.F.A. program, she is currently working on a series of novellas, as well as a book of essays on taboo-breaking filmmakers. Her interests in mentoring new writers include work in the high school classroom through a California Arts Council grant, and a sexual storytelling workshop with members of HIV/AIDS care groups in India. Also a filmmaker, she currently has two video documentaries in postproduction.

  Now she was already lying there with her sari pulled up to her stomach, and her legs bent at the knees, and I was trying not to look at her big white panties that she was shamelessly showing me through her wide-open legs, when suddenly she stuck one finger inside of her panties and pulled the material down and showed me all her hair there. I felt so ashamed! All this time, I didn’t know that the ladies wax down there.

  This Mrs. Yusuf said, very sweetly, that only young girls like me are pure enough in the heart to wax it down there. Naturally she wanted me to go to her house to do this delicate job. In a salon, anyone can walk into the private room, even when the curtain is pulled. Some of the other waxing girls told me that they don’t do such type of work. Why shouldn’t I? If they want to pay me better than at the salon, and on top of that, pay for my taxi here and there, then what do I care?

  So I did the work for Mrs. Yusuf, and she told her friends, and before I knew it I had more work waxing things than arms and legs and all. All the ladies like me better because I’m not married. They tell me that marriage will make me rough, like a man, and then I won’t be able to do the delicate job.

  All our Indians, you know, are so rough and hairy. The shameless Indian men are always scratching themselves between the legs because of the Bombay heat, but the ladies don’t have to, because their skin down there is cool and clean. And definitely the smell is also a little less.

  I never knew how many kinds of smells could come out of these city ladies’ things! Even though they wash night and day and remove every single hair from their bodies, I tell you, some of them smell down there like an armpit. I tell them to put a little baby powder, or maybe even some eau de cologne on the day that I’m coming, otherwise I have to breathe through my mouth so the smell won’t drive me crazy. I never used to notice such smells before, but day in and day out putting wax between their legs, I can’t help it, my nose has become very nosey.

  I’m not so nosey that I ask them questions or anything, but these ladies tell me anyway about why they like to be waxed down there. These thin-thin ladies like Mrs. Nariman and Mrs. Dastur say that it makes them feel clean, because there’s no hair for anything to get stuck to down there. Then the gray-hair ladies like Mrs. Patel and Mrs. Loelka say it makes them feel like innocent little girls again, and they even talk with giggly high voices. But worst of all are the lazy fat ones like Mrs. Singh and Mrs. Vaswani, who tell me it’s so much better than getting a massage, giving so much more energy to the body, keeping the blood going all day and all night.

  Mostly I don’t listen to what they say, but one lady, Mrs. D’Souza, told me a very sad story. She said that she was married so many years and her husband never liked to do the man’s work in her and so they had no children. Finally she got angry and asked him what was wrong with him and he said that it was all her fault, that the hair on her thing was so rough that it poked like pins right into his skin so he couldn’t come near her. Poor man! Since then this lady makes me wax her thing every week, even when I can’t find one single hair. The whole time, she lies there saying prayers to Mother Mary. At least these days someone like Mrs. D’Souza can wax. In olden days what must have happened to these poor ladies?

  My mother in the village still lives like in olden times. I tried to explain to her that I do waxing to make money, but she just can’t understand. She stays in the house all day, covered from head to toe in her cotton sari, so how will she understand? These city ladies are not like that. They understand everything, or how else would they all get rich-rich husbands?

  My poor mother—it’s so shameful—doesn’t even wear panties. And she sits with her legs wide open. All the old women are like that. They’re so shameless, they don’t even want to wear anything down there. Without panties, how can a modern girl control her monthly mess? When my mother was young and she got her monthly bleeding, she just sat in one corner and spread this mud between her legs until it mixed with the blood and became hard, a lid made of clay to close her upside-down, bleeding “pot.” When she stood up, the hard clay cut into her skin like a knife. For five days she was like that, sitting in one corner with a pile of mud, playing with herself like a mad girl. After the five days, when she tried to break the mud, the hair from down there would be stuck in it and she would pull the hair right off. How she would scream! My god
, you would think it was the end of the world. Why such a big fuss over a few hairs? That’s the difference, I tell my mother, between her and the big ladies. If she knew what was good for her, she would have pulled all the hair out.

  The ladies definitely want all their hair out. They make me check again and again for even one single hair that I missed. It’s not so easy, you know, unless I shine a torch on it, and anyway, who says I want to look down there? In the beauty salon they told us, if you’re plucking a lady’s eyebrows, don’t look into her eyes; if you’re threading her upper lip, don’t look into her mouth; so if I’m waxing the thing I don’t look inside there!

  Of course it’s my job to get all the hair out, but I can’t help it, sometimes the hair just won’t come out. I try once or twice, but these fussy ladies are never satisfied. For half an hour I have to feel around bit by bit for any leftover hair, and then even if I find it, how can I wax just one hair? So I have to try to pull it out with my fingers, but even that is impossible because by then the skin has become all sensitive and slippery and sliding.

  That Mrs. Yusuf, my god, the way she shouts! “I can feel it, I can feel one hair, not there, other side, in the front, no, no, feel properly, grab the skin with one hand and pull with the other, try again, just wipe your fingers if they’re sliding, don’t think you can rush away without finishing your job,” and on and on. What to do? I don’t like digging around in there because I know it’s where babies and all come from. But I don’t grumble because the fussy ladies always give a good tip. Thank god they are not all like that or I would have to spend the whole day waxing and cleaning the thing of just one of them!

  Not that they are in any hurry. They can just lie there all day, I tell you. At least I don’t have to work at night, because the ladies only like me to wax during the day. I have to finish before the husband comes home, because the man doesn’t like his wife to be locked in a room with some outsider.