What We Were Promised
Page 32
Sunny’s skin felt hot beneath her palms. She reached for the bottle of sunscreen standing at the foot of Boss Zhen’s chair and coated her shoulders, legs, face, neck, and feet. All greased up, she headed over to the steps of the pool and lowered herself into the chill, back first. The coldness was transformative. She ducked her head under at the final step and, when she resurfaced, pushed off the wall of the pool so that she was floating on her back. The water broke over her chest, not as frigid as it had felt before. Above, a thin layer of clouds moved across the sky. With both ears below the surface of the water, Sunny attuned herself to the pulse of the pool and the movements of those around her. And then Taitai drifted into view.
Sunny righted herself, sending water streaming from her hairline down into her eyes.
“Refreshing, right?” Taitai was leaning against the pool’s stone lip, watching her.
“Very.” Sunny swam over, and together they clung to the wall and faced the shallow end of the pool, where Karen was calling for Qiang to get in. He left his conversation with Wei and crouched at the edge of the platform that extended over the rim, fingers grazing its surface. A bright plastic ball floated by; he grabbed it, tested its air pressure beneath his fingers, then palmed it beneath the water. When he pulled away, the ball shot up into the air. It landed with a light bounce on Karen’s head and the two of them laughed.
“He’s good with her,” Sunny said after a moment.
Taitai glanced at her quickly and Sunny wondered if she could read it all in her face—if she could see that Sunny knew what had happened between the two of them the previous night. Was it her imagination or did Taitai’s eyes fill before she blinked and looked away?
“Are you married?” Taitai asked after a moment.
“No,” Sunny said. “I was.”
“That’s a shame,” Taitai replied. “Although maybe not. Marriage tends to make the years speed by. How old are you, thirty-something?”
“Almost thirty-five.”
“I can’t remember much of what’s happened to me between age thirty-five and now. Well, besides raising Karen.”
“That’s something,” Sunny said. “That’s a lot.”
Taitai raised her eyebrows as if to agree. Just then, Karen climbed out of the pool and headed toward them. Her legs glimmered and left a trail of water droplets along the concrete. As she leaned over the two of them, Sunny could feel the coolness of the girl’s body cutting through the heat, and the water flying off the ends of her hair.
“I’m getting hungry,” Taitai said, squinting up at her daughter. “I should have listened to Sunny and eaten something. Want to come to the club with me?”
“I was going to lie out,” Karen said. “Thirty more minutes.”
It pained Sunny to see the girl bake her body. Most Chinese did everything they could to stay out of the sun, but the Zhens were always trying to find ways to be in it.
“Fine,” Taitai said. “I’ll ask Daddy.”
But the men were deep in conversation again, and Taitai changed her mind.
“If they come looking for me, tell them I’m inside, all right?”
After Taitai left for the clubhouse and Karen went back to sunning herself, Sunny was alone in the deep end except for a few other ayis and their charges. She gestured hello to them as she made her way to the side of the pool hidden in the shadow of the acacia trees. At first, she’d been drawn there only by the promise of shade, but once she saw the metal frame of the skimmer grille, she knew what she was looking for. Sunny grazed up against the dark stone of the pool, unhooked the grille, and slid her hand inside. At first, all she felt was rectangular smoothness. But when she reached in a little farther, she felt a depression. Leaves, debris—this must be the filter basket. What else? Her fingers met something hard and pebbled. She rolled it between her fingers to make sure it was the shape and size she remembered. Then she pulled it out of the chute and examined it, holding it below the water.
It was just as Sunny remembered: lightly but intricately carved, like a child’s bracelet. She slipped it over her hand and dropped her arm to one side. The ivory beads, almost weightless in water, settled around the base of her thumb. It was so unlike any of the other jewelry Taitai wore that it must have seemed to Rose like a castoff from her collection. No wonder she had taken it, thinking it would go unmissed.
Sunny squinted up at Tower Eight and counted the floors, from the first all the way up to the twentieth. She imagined herself as she had looked that day, leaning over the balcony, tossing the bracelet into the water. How clever she’d thought she was being then, throwing it away as though everyone’s problems started and ended with the bracelet. The truth was more complicated than that. These objects of luxury they handled—how easy it was to fill them with meaning, to let them represent what you did or didn’t have. How difficult, in fact, to know what you wanted in the first place.
Acknowledgments
This novel began in the fiction workshop of the MFA Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received much support and guidance from the community there. My gratitude goes out to professors Danielle Evans, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Judith Claire Mitchell, who gave me a home in the Midwest. Thank you to my cohort-family, Piyali Bhattacharya, Hanna Halperin-Goldstein, Christian Holt, Will Kelly, Walter B. Thompson (honorary member), and especially Jackson Tobin, who read both the first draft and the last. I owe you all the beers and chicken chipotle wraps City Bar has to offer.
My agent, Rebecca Gradinger, shaped this story enormously by finding me when she did and asking just the right questions. I am lucky to have such a thorough, wise reader and strong advocate. Luckier still that she comes backed by a group of smart women: Melissa Chinchillo, Grainne Fox, and Veronica Goldstein at Fletcher & Company.
Thank you to Judy Clain for her unending enthusiasm and generosity toward this book. The entire team at Little, Brown—Alexandra Hoopes, Lena Little, Ashley Marudas, Craig Young, Sabrina Callahan, Reagan Arthur, Tracy Roe, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, and Lucy Kim—went above and beyond in making a new author feel welcome and delivering my novel into the world.
At NYU, I am indebted to Marcelle Clements and Emma Claire Sweeney for showing me what it means to take this work seriously. I also want to thank my grade school reading and writing teachers, Julie DiGiacomo, Susan Rothbard, and Frederica Glucksman. They saw in me an early love of language and held me accountable to it.
Several people were valuable resources when it came to researching this book. Thanks to Quan Chen for his knowledge of Suzhou and its surrounding villages in the 1980s; to my uncle, Lingyi Tan, for information on Chinese crime; and to Dylan-Lee Smith for his knowledge of the Expo grounds and the layout of the UK Pavilion. Any deviances from fact on these accounts are due to my own errors and imagination. To Eva: Thank you for the stories. You are an inspiration.
To everyone who has reached out to me in support of this book and every reader who has picked it up, your time and attention mean the world to me. Special thanks to my oldest friends and readers, who have been cheering me on for years: Alex and Susie Yang, Vinay Daryani, Ada Zhang, Maggie Chong, Christina Herbach, Angela Wu, Bena Cheung, Lilly Chen, Mengyi Luo, Annie Yoon, Jimmy Shi, Chloe Krug Benjamin, Joe Koplowitz, Ali Cuan, and Dizheng Du.
To Stephen Hogsten—for following me on this journey, for your love and infinite faith, I am humbled and deeply grateful. No one packs the contents of two apartments into a hatchback quite like you do.
This book has been a group effort by my tiny, fierce, and loving family, particularly the ones who raised me. My grandparents, Rennian Yang and Mingru Tan, taught me that the best kind of storyteller is a compassionate one. My parents, Lingshi and Lorna Tan, read multiple drafts of this novel and facilitated interviews in Chinese. More importantly, they showed me how to live adventurously, think independently, and love boundlessly. My voice is rooted in our home, wherever that home may be. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for proving that the safest path isn’t always the one worth traveling
. As immigrants twice over, you knew how to dream big. And then you taught me how to do it.
About the Author
Lucy Tan grew up in New Jersey and has spent much of her adult life in New York and Shanghai. She received her BA from New York University and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was awarded the August Derleth Prize. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Asia Literary Review and Ploughshares, where she was winner of the 2015 Emerging Writer’s Contest. This is her first novel.
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