“Hey you!” the girl called. “Up there. Yo, Princess!”
In a tower, Baby thought. Like Cayenne said. Sounds were coming from the bedroom. The house seemed to tremble when Cayenne and Guy made love. Baby could hear her mother moaning, “Oh, Guy, je t’aime . . .” but she was faking. Baby could tell. Guy was no longer romantic. Baby wondered where they’d wind up next.
The street was silent, so she pulled back the curtain. The girl was still there, and now she moved her arm in a big, inviting arc.
“Come down here!” Her voice was thin behind the warped glass.
Baby shook her head.
“What’s your name?”
Baby didn’t answer.
“I’m Lulu,” the girl said. “You got any money?” She started to wheeze again. “I gotta get to the hospital . . .” She covered her mouth with her hand. Her shoulders shook.
Baby watched.
“Come on,” Lulu said. “Help me out, Princess! I’m fuckin’ dying down here . . .”
Just then Mrs. Wong peered over the back gate, brandishing a large pair of pruning shears. “You! You!” she yelled at the girl.
Lulu spat again and stared at the old lady. Baby held her breath. Mrs. Wong had a small brown paper bag, and now she waved it at the girl like she was signaling to her with a flag. She reached over the gate and thrust the bag into the girl’s hands. Lulu opened it and pulled out a round white bun. She turned it over and took a bite, and then another. Mrs. Wong gave a grunt and nodded, then she went back into her garden.
Baby let the curtain fall.
“Hey!” she heard Lulu call. “Thanks!” Then, like an afterthought, “Fuck you, Princess!”
“Hoi sam ma,” Baby whispered to her sloping ceiling, in the dark.
“Bébé is in need of a name,” Guy said.
“Baby will choose her own name when she’s ready,” Cayenne said. “That’s the deal, right, Baby?”
“What’s in a name?” asked Julien. He was Guy’s customer, a poet from San Francisco who had come up to buy pot. “Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?”
“Rose is pretty good,” Baby said. “I like Rose.”
Baby liked Julien. Cayenne did too. She thought he was TDH—tall, dark and handsome, plus he had brought lots of money. He was funny and imitated Guy’s accent. “I wan’ ze wheeeeelchair, man,” he said, pointing at a plastic freezer bag on the kitchen table and counting out the bills.
“Rose is a terrible name,” giggled Cayenne. She was in a mood tonight. There weren’t enough chairs so Baby was sharing hers. Now Cayenne pulled Baby’s head down into her lap and nuggied her scalp with a knuckle, acting playful. She did that sometimes when she wanted to impress a guy, to show she wasn’t just somebody’s mother.
“Cut it out,” Baby said. She stood up and went to stand behind Julien. Her hair was tousled. “I like Rose. Je m’appelle Rose.”
Cayenne sniffed. “Flowers’ names are so bourgeois.”
Guy lit a joint and handed it to Julien, who took a long toke. “Oh, yeah, man,” he said. “Iss ze fuckin’ wheeeeeelchair!”
“How come you need a wheelchair?” Baby asked, bumping her hip into the back of Julien’s chair. “Are you a cripple or something?”
Julien snorted, rocking forward as he exhaled. Cayenne laughed, too, high and tinkly.
“Oh, Baby, that’s priceless,” she said. “He’s talking about the pot, silly. It messes you up so bad you need a wheelchair. That’s all.”
Baby continued bumping her hip against Julien’s chair. “I know,” she said. “I just think it’s stupid.”
Julien caught his breath and looked at her. Tears from the smoke and laughter sparkled in his dark eyes. “She’s pouting,” he said admiringly. “She’s mad.”
“I am not. I just think it’s fucking dumb, is all.”
“Oooh,” Julien said. “Such language!”
“Yeah,” Cayenne warned. “Watch it.”
“Look at that lip,” Julien said. He flicked a red curl from Baby’s cheek and fingered her mouth. He pinched her bottom lip and tugged. His fingertips were hard and smelled like burnt tar.
“Cut it out, fuckface,” Baby said. It hurt her to talk with him pinching her lip and her words came out funny. He held on.
“Hey, Mama,” Julien said to Cayenne. “You got yourself one bitchy little baby . . .”
“Julien,” Cayenne said. “Watch out for her, she—”
“Ow!” cried Julien, as Baby bit down on his finger. “Bloody hell!”
“—bites,” Cayenne concluded, as Baby thundered up the stairs.
Baby lay on her bed, toes still scraping the ceiling. Guy hadn’t gotten around to cutting off the legs. He’d meant to, but he kept forgetting. The sound of their voices from the kitchen dipped and swelled.
“I want more wine,” Cayenne cried. “We have to celebrate. Look!”
The alley was empty, but the wind was up. The pylons were creaking, and a seagull cawed as it flew overhead.
“It’s from that publishing place,” Cayenne said. “The one I sent my chapter to? They liked it!” Her words were like bubbles, rising in the broth of her laughter.
Baby’s heart started to pound.
“Listen.” There was a pause, then Baby heard her mother reading.
“ ‘Thank you for sending us your fascinating manuscript. Ships in the Night promises to be a real steamy bodice-ripper and we’re thrilled to be in a position to help you launch this promising new romance . . . ’ ”
Her mother’s breathless words bruised Baby’s heart. No, she whispered into the dark. Don’t tell them. Tell me!
Downstairs they were clinking their glasses. Guy wanted to see the letter. Cayenne was saying, “It must be all your positive energy, Julien.” Baby rolled onto her stomach and buried her face in the pillow. After a while she took off her pants and crawled under the covers. She tried listening just to the wind, but still she could hear their voices.
“Where’s the bathroom?” Julien asked.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” Cayenne said.
Baby heard their chair legs scrape. Guy said, “He don’t need you to help him piss.”
“Don’t be silly,” Cayenne said. “I have to check on Baby.”
Baby listened to their feet, climbing the stairs. She shut her eyes and slowed her breathing. Outside her bedroom door, their voices changed, soft and slurred and secret.
“In here,” Julien whispered.
“No! That’s Baby’s room . . .”
“Where, then?”
“Oh, Julien. Not now. I can’t . . .”
“Come on. Ships in the night, right?”
The floorboards creaked under the shifting weight of their bodies. Baby barely breathed at all. She could hear pushing sounds against the wall, and other sounds, too—puffs of air, or like a low throat humming.
“We’re writers,” Julien was murmuring. “Kindred souls . . .”
“Cayenne!” Guy called, and after all the hushing it made Baby’s heart leap.
“The bathroom’s over there,” Cayenne said loudly as she clattered down the stairs.
Baby breathed again and listened to the shuush of Julien peeing. In the kitchen, Guy and Cayenne were fighting. Baby got out of bed and crept toward the landing. She sat on the top step and hugged her bare knees.
“We were just talking,” Cayenne was saying. She was leaning against the kitchen table, holding the side of her head. “He’s a poet. We’re kindred souls.”
Guy was putting on his jacket. “Bien,” he said. He picked up a piece of paper from the table. It was Cayenne’s letter. He waved it in front of her face. “So now you need money for your book, you can go and suck his kindred dick, eh?”
“Give me that,” Cayenne said. She grabbed Guy’s arm but he laughed and held the letter out of her reach. Her breasts were heaving. “Don’t be so mean, mon amour,” she pleaded. “I’ll pay you back. It’s just until the novel starts to sell . . .”
Baby peered through the balustrades at her mother’s teary upturned face. The tears were real. She must still care, Baby thought. Things must still be romantic. She heard a noise behind her and remembered Julien in the bathroom. She crept back to her bedroom. Downstairs, she heard the back door slam. She knelt by the window, drawing aside the faded cloth and pressing her hot forehead to the cool glass. She watched Guy descend the rickety steps and walk out into the alley. After a moment Cayenne ran after him, catching up with him at the Dumpster. Baby chewed her thumbnail as she watched them go.
The door to her bedroom opened, sucking the wind in from the alley through the crack, and the thin curtains billowed. The fabric caught the light from the streetlamp, so that what Julien saw, as he stood in the doorway, was a half-clothed Baby, enveloped in a lucent field of yellow and cornflowers. Her hair was tousled, and flaming tendrils blew across her forehead. She was kneeling on her little bed in her underpants as though in prayer. In a garret. She stared at him, then slowly she held out her hand. It was too much to ask, of a poet, to resist.
“Don’t be scared,” Julien said, approaching the bed.
“Do you have any money?” Baby demanded.
Cayenne lay on Baby’s bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Canada is a backwater, Baby,” she said. “We’re getting stale here, don’t you think? It’s time we went back home. I was thinking maybe San Francisco. That’s a real city. We can live in one of those cute Victorians and I can finish my novel. Julien said it’s a fine community for writers. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Outside in the alley, the streetlamps had just come on. Baby pressed her lips to the cold glass. “I hate San Francisco,” she said.
“How do you know?” Cayenne said. “You’ve never been there.” She was wearing a peasant blouse with a lace-up front, wrapping the laces around her fingers so that the tips turned white. “Why are you doing this?” she said. Her voice tightened, rising into a whine. “Why are you ruining everything?”
Baby didn’t answer. Down below, a chicken truck from Hung Lung Enterprises rattled through the alley past the streetlamp, sending a hooker stumbling into the spill of the light. Stacked high with empty chicken cages, the truck left a wake of feathers, floating in the air.
Cayenne sighed and sat up. She looked out the window. “That’s the same girl,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
The hooker looked like Lulu, milky-eyed and confused. Glancing up toward the light, she caught sight of a wafting feather. Then another, falling, like snow. “Whooo whoooo,” she laughed like a loon, then she doubled over and started to cough. Baby recognized the cough. She wanted to knock on the pane. Maybe they could have been friends, but now it was too late. Dazed, Lulu spun, a demented ballerina in a snow dome, reaching out to catch the feathers as they drifted down. Baby let the curtain drop.
“You just want Julien to fuck you.”
Cayenne pinched her arm, hard. “Listen,” she said. “It’s not what you think. Julien and I have a special relationship. We’re from the same tribe.” Then she put her arms around Baby and gave her a big hug. “Trust me, hon. You’ll change your mind when we get to San Francisco, I promise.”
When we get to San Francisco, Baby thought, pulling away and rubbing her arm. The words stuck in her head. “When we get to San Francisco, I’m changing my name to Lulu.”
“Lulu?” Cayenne said. “God, that’s awful!”
“L’s are sensual. You said so.”
“Whatever.” Cayenne shrugged, then her eyes got dreamy. “Anyway, I’m thinking of changing the whole story. It’s all going to take place in Canada, see? In the Pacific Northwest. The heroine’s this poor Indian girl, and the villain’s a French fur trapper, and maybe there’s a Chinese drug dealer . . .”
Baby looked back out the window. Lulu was still there, spinning and coughing. Baby could hear Mrs. Wong next door, yelling something to the landlord in Cantonese. She glanced at Cayenne, then she tapped on the pane of glass. When Lulu looked up, she waved.
Cayenne didn’t seem to notice. She was stretched out on the bed again, staring at the lowering ceiling. “I can still call it Ships in the Night,” she was saying. She pulled out her letter, folded many times, from her bosom. She sighed. “Did I read you what they wrote? It’s going to be a real steamy bodice-ripper, Baby . . .”
Baby climbed over her mother’s legs. She took a thin wad of bills from her underwear drawer and stuffed it into her jeans pocket. She paused at the doorway.
“Hoi sam ma?” she asked, giving her mother another chance.
Cayenne still didn’t get it.
“Tao-che,” Baby said, and then she bolted.
SEPARATION ANXIETY
from AMERICAN SON
Brian Ascalon Roley
I
Today Tomas has to deliver a dog to a celebrity in Brentwood Park. I have not been to a celebrity’s house before, and this morning I woke early and waited for him to get up so I could help. He walks into the kitchen and fixes a bowl of cereal without saying a word. Though yesterday he told me I could come, he does not normally take me on these trips, and I wonder if I should ask him again to make sure. But he looks too touchy to be bothered. Finally he finishes eating. There is still sleep in his face as we go out back and as he swings the wire door off the cage. I reach in and retrieve Johan, the best of the pups, who pants with an energy that comes from being young, though he is large already and fully trained. Tomas goes in and grabs Buster—Johan’s mother—and drags her onto the grass. She stays close by him, making anxious circles.
Cut it out, Buster, he says, looking down on her. What you so worked up about?
She must sense we’re gonna sell her son.
No shit.
BRIAN ASCALON ROLEY, born in 1966, is a biracial Filipino American who grew up in a household of Filipino immigrants to Los Angeles. His first novel, American Son, is the first part of a trilogy in progress. It was published to much acclaim and was considered by the Los Angeles Times to be one of the best books of 2001. He is currently at work on a new novel, as well as a nonfiction book on the relationship between ethnicity and religion.
No shit, I say. If it’s so no shit then why’d you ask her why she’s so excited.
I’m just making talk with her, Junior.
He turns away to rub her under her chin reassuringly, pressing his cheek down against the back of her neck. She whimpers and rubs her side against him like a cat, then sits down on her haunches again.
Are you gonna sell Buster, too? I say.
What do you think?
No.
Without a word for me, he rubs her fur to shake off bits of dirt and dried-up leaves. Then why’d you bring her out? I say.
He pats Buster’s side seriously and lets his hand rest there. It’s the last time she’ll get to see her son. I want her to see him to the last.
We take the dogs through the house—Johan for the last time—and it seems to me a shame that our mother is not home to see him off. They seem to sense something is wrong, and they quicken their pant. Johan breaks free and scrapes across the kitchen linoleum towards the far end where, when he was a pup and allowed to live inside, we used to put out his dog dish. He sniffs in the corner, confused, and even shoves his nose up against the wall at the memory of where he used to push the dish against it.
Tomas hollers. Johan looks up, ears perked, and comes dutifully back.
In the meantime, Buster has wandered into and out of our mother’s room, where she still sleeps, as if today might be the last time she would smell it.
Tomas lets the dogs into the car first, and they climb in back. Their fear—if they ever had any—has transformed into excitement, and as they peer out at me their breath fogs the windows. Their noses leave moist dots on the glass. Tomas gets inside. As I reach for my door he leans over and locks it.
The handle does not move. What you doing? Open the door.
You aren’t coming.
Don’t be stupid, I say. Let me in.
You deaf?
I try the handle harder again, though it will not budge. The dogs have their claws clambering against the glass, watching me. Tomas looks forward, inserting the key and revving the engine.
He pretends to be warming up the car, though he is waiting for me to plead.
Come on, Tomas, I finally say. Let me come with you.
He turns to me and rolls the window down a crack.
Why should I?
I want to see this celebrity’s house.
He looks me up and down and shakes his head.
One look at you and they’ll think these dogs were raised by a bunch of wimps.
I look aside and do not answer him, pretending to stare off at the neighbor’s cactus plant. Nails scraping against the glass sound like keys clicking.
The door snaps open.
When I turn to him, he throws some of his clothes and junk off the seat onto the floor.
All right, you don’t have to cry, he says. Come on in.
I do not move. I’m not crying, I say.
I’m not going to ask you again, he says. So you can come along and look at the house or stay behind.
Without a word I get in and we pull out and the car humps over the lump in the asphalt, a great warp above a tree root, and the dogs fall against my seat back and I can hear their eager panting.
We pass beneath the 405 overpass, entering its shadows, and above us I can see patches of sky between the bellies of the freeways that appear blindingly bright and blue, and the sun flickers over the dogs’ faces until we come out into the daylight again. The dogs watch the sun, then the wetbacks who stand in golden shafts amid the shadows waiting to get picked up for work, short little men who smoke cigarettes and talk in groups.
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