North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  “Are you having fun?” I asked Mom, careful when I crawled in beside her not to jostle her few purchases: the three bundles of raw silk, all in muted beiges. A few brocade frogs, like the ones used for clasping traditional Chinese clothes. And four small gold tassels.

  She nodded, her eyes glowing. “I just can’t believe I’m here. Susannah would have been so proud.”

  I kept quiet, afraid to make a noise for fear of scaring off this unexpected conversation. Mom rarely mentioned her big sister.

  “You know, I was supposed to come here with her, oh, about twelve years ago,” she said, dreamily. She pleated the soft green sheet that draped over her stomach. I didn’t have to ask what stopped her: three letters, begins with D, rhymes with “cad.” “We’re following the itinerary almost exactly, too — a couple of days in Shanghai, then Beijing, then Xi’an, then back home.” Her lips pursed unconsciously at that unintended reminder: home.

  I didn’t want to think about home any more than she did. So I asked, “What did you buy yesterday?”

  “Oh, some things for your bedroom. You know how I’ve wanted to redo your room for the longest time. I thought I could make you curtains with this,” she said, fingering the silk. “It’ll go with everything.”

  Beige was no color I would have picked out for myself, not when there were verdant greens like the ones on Merc’s bed. A flash of irritation tugged at me. Why had she wasted her money? I was going to college, damn it. I wouldn’t be in that room much longer.

  “Mom,” I said mildly, “you should keep this for yourself, especially if you like it.”

  “I’m having a few things made.”

  “Not much. One skirt.” Norah had regaled us at dinner with the story of their expedition to the fabric market, how Mom couldn’t believe that stall after stall sold materials and buttons and zippers. “All of, what, seven dollars?”

  “Five. I don’t need anything more,” she said simply.

  She meant, she didn’t deserve anything more.

  My stomach growled. We had eaten an early dinner with Jacob and Norah, Merc too busy to join us at five. Before I could stop her, Mom heaved out of bed and bent down to her luggage, withdrawing an unopened bag of trail mix.

  “Here, honey,” she said, tearing the bag open for me. She looked sadly at the plastic bag, and I knew she was wishing she could pour the contents into a hand-painted ceramic bowl. Food, she always contended, tasted better beautifully presented.

  Immediately, I felt guilty for being so irritated with her. Her first thought was always about me, my comfort, my pleasure. “Do you want some?”

  Automatically, Mom reached for the bag, but as her fingers dipped inside, she withdrew them, empty-handed. “Actually, I’m not really hungry.”

  I must have looked surprised. God knew, I was. But Mom shrugged. “The tailor told me I was too fat.”

  “Mom!” I forgot to modulate my voice, I was that outraged. Mom shushed me, casting a wary glance at the door as though she expected Dad, the joy police, to barge in. But there was only Merc outside in the living room, sleeping. No, probably working. We hadn’t seen him come in last night. The image of the tailor laughing at Mom, making fun of her, got to me. I knew I should have stayed with Mom yesterday. My voice I could quiet, but my words refused to remain silent: “That’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me yesterday? Why didn’t you call me? I would have come.”

  But then Mom did the oddest thing; she laughed. “You know, she was just telling me the truth. I am too fat.”

  Mom, you are not. The denial was so ready on my lips, but I swallowed the false words when I saw the relaxed expression on Mom’s face. She had closed her eyes, a little smile playing on her lips like she was remembering something fondly.

  I demanded, “So what did Norah do? Did she say anything?”

  “Oh, she said quite a lot. Until I stopped her.” Mom turned her head toward me, eyes still closed, like a stuporous cat basking in the sun. “You know what, though? I appreciate the candor in this country.”

  We were quiet then. I wrote in my journal, catching up where I had left off last night, too tired to write. I probably should have stopped sooner yesterday; over the course of a page, my handwriting had gone from perfectly architected letters to illegible scrawl. Mom sighed contentedly beside me, and I thought she might have fallen back asleep until my stomach gurgled especially loudly.

  “Go ahead and eat, honey,” she said.

  “Do you think Merc will mind though? Me eating in his bed?” I whispered like I was doing something wrong. The concept of breakfast in bed was unheard of at home; Dad would have lectured us about all the millions of germs a single bite of food invited into bed.

  “Oh, who cares?” Mom said blithely, still not opening her eyes. “They’re just crumbs. No big deal.”

  So I took one peanut, popped it into my mouth, chewed. Mom nodded, satisfied that she had fulfilled her maternal duty of keeping me well fed.

  “So, honey,” she said, only now opening her eyes, “what . . .” Her voice trailed off. I could feel Mom wanting to say more, her silence so pregnant with thoughts she was unable to express.

  “What, Mom?”

  “Oh, noth —” She stopped abruptly and sighed. Then, “Just be fair to him.”

  I flushed guiltily, knowing instantly what she was getting at. In a rush, she continued, “Be fair to Jacob. And Erik.” She sidled an uncertain look at me, afraid she had overstepped her bounds. “Jacob’s already been abandoned once, and now his dad’s left. . . . Just be fair. Okay?”

  “Mom, I am,” I said, shaking my head adamantly as if I wasn’t doing anything wrong. “We’re just friends.”

  “Are you so sure about that?”

  No, I wasn’t. But I couldn’t admit to Mom any more than I could admit to myself in my journal that in the most screwed-up way, it was beginning to feel like I was cheating on Jacob whenever I thought about Erik. Not the other way around.

  That morning, we were supposed to catch a ride with Merc to Jinmao Tower, eat breakfast with him, and then reconnoiter with Jacob and Norah in their hotel lobby to go to the Shanghai Museum together. What happened instead was this: Merc received an emergency call at six in the morning (apparently, business happened round the clock in Shanghai), decided he didn’t have time to eat breakfast with us after all. So to save money, Mom and I hitched a ride with him to work, where we planned to forage a cheap pastry of some kind. But then in the lobby, Mom said, “Let’s call the Fremonts, see if they want to join us.”

  So I called. Mom looked relieved when Norah agreed to find a café with us as though a foray by ourselves would have been doomed to failure.

  By seven thirty, we were done with our coffee and buns filled with barbecued pork. Norah checked her watch, asked, “What time does the museum open again?”

  “Nine,” I answered. I chose to ignore Jacob’s snort as I bussed our table of the cups and plates. Yes, I was the walking, talking itinerary.

  “What should we do now?” asked Mom. I noticed she had left a bite of her Chinese pastry on her plate.

  “Let’s head over anyway. We can poke around a park,” said Jacob, playing with a packet of sugar. He glanced at me, grinned wickedly. What was he up to now?

  I couldn’t wait to find out.

  As early as we were, the park Jacob picked for us to visit was already bustling with activity. We walked past a man who was doing some kind of calisthenics on a bench, balanced on his head, legs splayed open in a feat of astonishing male flexibility.

  “Hey, can you do that?” I teased Jacob.

  He grimaced. “Ouch.”

  We left our mothers before a group of old men and women practicing tai chi, their graceful, balletic movements belying their age. Dressed in loose tops and roomy pants, they followed the same routine like a choreographed dance. There was no instructor, no one calling out the ancient moves. How many times had they practiced this? A lump formed in my throat, their fluid motions were so beautiful. Jacob h
ad already started up the path, and I was about to follow him when, without any embarrassment, Norah started miming their slow swinging of an arm, the meeting of the hands in the middle.

  “Wait,” I called to him softly.

  Jacob turned back around, groaned. “Oh God, Mom. Just wait, she’ll have your mom out there in a second.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Mom stood uncomfortably beside Norah, the two of them adjacent to the group. I didn’t want to leave her, an outsider when all the other kids had been chosen for a team, when the game had already started without her. But Norah beckoned her silently. Slowly, slowly, Mom raised an arm. She stood there, immobilized, while the others flowed to the next position.

  Oh Mom.

  And then, Mom kicked out a foot, slow, graceful. She swooped low, a diving swan.

  “She looks good,” said Jacob, surprised.

  She did. And as she spun slowly, her arms winding, I remembered when I was a little girl, Mom would turn on music to clean the house before Dad came home. I loved the way she had twirled me, admired the way her hips swiveled effortlessly one way and then another.

  “She used to dance,” I said and wondered when she had stopped. And why.

  “She is again,” Jacob said.

  I could have stayed there all morning, forgotten the museum, just to watch Mom. But she noticed me there a ways up the path, stopped, and tucked her hair behind her ear self-consciously.

  I knew Mom wouldn’t continue while I stood there. The last thing I wanted was for my presence to rob her of this moment. “Let’s go,” I told Jacob, swallowing hard. Quickly, I yanked around, hurried along the path, not daring to look back.

  Jacob caught up to me and said softly, “It’s not you. Sometimes you can be more yourself with people you hardly know.”

  “But I want her to be herself with me,” I whispered.

  “It takes two.” He held out his hand, not to hold mine, but to give me his GPS.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We,” he corrected. “We are going geocaching.”

  I held the device away from me as though it were a poisonous snake and grimaced. Even though I had tried geocaching on my own, I couldn’t make sense of the coordinates, somehow ending up north when I meant to go east. I admitted reluctantly, “You know I can’t read these things.”

  “It’s easy once you get the hang of it.” Standing behind me, Jacob wrapped his hand around mine so that both of us held the device. If we could geocache all day like this, then sign me up. I could feel the heat of his body against mine. God, how easy it would be to lean back into him, forget the stupid cache. I wanted his arms around me, and I had to close my eyes against the strumming of my body.

  One problem: Jacob didn’t seem to notice me at all. He nudged me forward as though I were a marionette. “Watch the northern coordinates.” According to the GPS, the last few digits on the latitudinal coordinates were growing smaller. “So if north and south run this way” — he pointed — “which way do we go?”

  “This is a math problem,” I accused him.

  “You’re good at math. Which way?”

  I took a tentative step forward, then another, and this time, he slid his warm hand in my free one that wasn’t holding the GPS. We continued hiking through another patch of grass, stepping over flower beds and squeezing through shrubs. So absorbed in feeling his hand in mine, wondering exactly what he thought about me, I completely forgot why we were foraging through a park until Jacob pulled his hand away. He reached for the GPS and said, “Bingo.”

  I blinked at him.

  “We’ve reached the exact southern coordinates,” he explained, and gave me back the GPS. Forget the device, I wanted his hand. “Now the eastern coordinates. Which way?”

  “You’re testing me again.”

  “No, proving to you that you’re less directionally challenged than you think. So which way?”

  Sighing, I turned to my right, walked a few steps. The last digits of the longitudinal coordinates increased, instead of decreased. So I backtracked, went the opposite direction, holding the GPS out like a divining rod.

  “Okay, try not to look so obvious,” he remarked from behind.

  I spun around. “Hello? Let the driver drive, please.”

  We tromped across the grass, straying from the paved path. We passed countless flower beds, scarred park benches, old men playing chess. We circled around a lotus pond, all platter-sized leaves, no blooms. It was too early in the season for flowers. And through all of that, I kept thinking about why Jacob had held my hand . . . and why he wasn’t holding it now.

  “Okay, cruise director, we must be getting pretty close,” said Jacob, ambling along so close to my side now that our arms brushed against each other. I have to admit, I was navigating by instinct as well as by GPS device. Before us was a tiny enclave made up of a park bench positioned some ways from a statue. The site looked promising, so I stopped, checked the coordinates. Astonished, I said, “I think we’re here.”

  “You think or you know?”

  “We’re here.” I held up the GPS. “Look for yourself.”

  He didn’t. He had already dropped to his knees, scouring around the bronze statue when a man in jeans and a goatee walked past, eyed us suspiciously before moving on. He cast another accusatory look over his shoulder before dialing a number in his cell phone.

  “So do you think he’s calling the police?” Jacob asked me.

  “Hurry, find that stupid cache!”

  Jacob laughed. “Most people would abandon this about now.”

  “I’m not most people.”

  When Jacob started shaking the shrubs, I snickered and called out, “Okay, try not to look so obvious, will you?”

  All the caches I had found with Jacob were hidden in sneaky, clever places: tucked inside a log, welded to a bolt, lodged inside a fake electrical box nailed to a tree. So I stood there, in a wedge of sunlight, and got my bearings, studying the surroundings. Jacob had moved to the bench, now peering underneath it, behind it. And then I saw it — or saw what looked like the ideal hiding spot for a crafty geocacher. The cache wasn’t on the bench, but behind it. I hurried to the conspicuous clump of dead leaves under the spiky shrubs, used my shoe to brush away the debris, and there it was: a small metal green box.

  “Found it!” I cried, proud of myself. But the treasure I most cherished was Jacob’s answering grin.

  Something must happen to women’s plumbing when they reach a certain age, because both mothers needed to use a bathroom when we returned to collect them. This, after they’d just visited the facilities at breakfast. And no, they couldn’t wait for the museum to open in just fifteen minutes. Luckily, Jacob remembered seeing a bathroom while we were geocaching. I could have located it by its odor alone. The reek was even worse inside: no toilet, just two holes. In the ground. With nary a sheet of toilet paper in sight.

  “You know, the toilet in the Venice train station is even worse,” said Norah conversationally as she dropped her pants.

  On so many levels this was wrong. First, forget the toilets-around-the-world retrospective. This facility was bad enough; I didn’t want to imagine worse. And second, I really didn’t need to see Jacob’s mother or my own — oh God, she was sliding down her elasticized pants, too — doing their business. Me, I needed to pee now, too, but was afraid to use the holes. This was not a good traveler moment. Or even a good tourist one. I had become the epitome of stupid American visitor, the one I vowed not to be, the one who was squeamish and judgmental of local customs.

  “I don’t suppose you have any tissue left?” Mom asked Norah.

  “No, I used it all yesterday.”

  “Oh.” Both women stared at each other, stumped. Then, Mom: “My legs are shaking; I don’t think I can hold this position for much longer.” They started cackling. Then came the snorts when Norah bounced a couple of times, to dry off, I suppose.

  And me, the girl who thought she had prepared for every co
ntingency, was caught without my Kleenex. I had left it in my backpack when I changed to the more chic messenger bag.

  I knew who had a cache of napkins. So I told the moms to wait a moment, which elicited some groaning. Why they had already squatted and used the toilet without fully sussing out the situation, I don’t know. Quickly, I flew out, breathing in big gulps of fresh air. Jacob was waiting outside.

  “What’s with all the laughing?” he asked.

  I shook my head, grudgingly asking him, “Could I have a napkin? Better make that three.”

  He grinned, removed a handful from his pocket. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  “Trust me, I never thought I would,” I said, and all but sprinted back to the bathroom.

  Let’s just say there’s a reason why Chinese women have such svelte figures. It takes awesome thigh muscles to squat.

  When I came out of the bathroom, I squirted half my antibacterial cleanser into my palm, rubbed vigorously. And then I pushed the tiny bottle on Mom and Norah, who were standing next to Jacob, watching an old man holding a calligraphy brush three feet long. He dipped the brush in a bucket of water, and with one hand behind his back like a fencer, he began writing on the pavement, his movements every bit as graceful as the tai chi practitioners, deft, assured, meditative.

  I approached the man slowly, not wanting to interrupt his flow, glad that the mothers had quieted, too, as if they knew whatever this man was doing was special. I don’t think the calligrapher would have noticed me anyway, so lost in that moment. Not lost, I corrected myself. Found. I had never seen a person more present than this man, writing that vertical drop of characters over and over.

  “What’s he writing?” Mom whispered to Norah, trying but failing to be quiet.

  Norah stepped closer to the words, the watery characters already fading, deciphering them in silence. I was drawn to those words myself, traversing the length of the sidewalk. But I wanted those dancing characters to remain a mystery, draw what meaning I wanted from those unknown glyphs before they vanished like poems recited into the wind.