Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  He leaves her asleep on the couch and goes to the bathroom instead. Slips off shoes, peels away damp socks, undresses. Steps into the bathtub. There it is again. The white ring around the edge of the empty tub. Richard crouches, bare feet against cold porcelain, and rubs his fingers against the ring, and the residue that comes up reminds him of—what’s the word?—scouring powder. The kind that comes in a cardboard cylinder with a sieved metal top. The words come to him in english. Scouring powder. But it doesn’t have the chemical smell. It’s natural, oceanlike. It’s the smell of Ming Wai’s barely dented pillow in the morning, the smooth sheet where her body has lain. This is what comes off her body when she bathes? Not the scummy ring his own body leaves—gray, hair-flecked—but ice-white, softly grained like salt. He licks his fingertips and it tastes like his wife.

  It tastes like his wife. He can actually create this phrase. A sense detail not out of a long-term memory, but actual salt on his fingers. His wife: He is part of a pair, linked decidedly to a single woman. Poppy and Chloe are suddenly transitory figures. He dips his finger into the drain and removes a hoop of tangled hair. It has snagged on what lies hidden, deeper in the curves of the pipe, and brings up with it wet lint and sloughed body dirt. This is her hair, washed from her scalp. It hangs on his finger.

  He drops the hair onto the floor. He plugs the drain. He turns the faucets, mixing the hot and cold that flow from each. The water fills in the spaces between his toes, covers his feet, rises up his ankles, then his calves. He settles into it. He swirls the water where it meets, so that waves of cool and hot will not sweep past his skin. Steam begins to rise. The water touches the salt ring and he turns off the faucets. The water circles his neck. His knees bend into the air. The heat soaks into him like a fever coming through his arms and legs and chest. He coughs. Fever coming into his lungs through steam so thick it wets the inside of his mouth.

  He coughs again. Water splashes onto the floor. He tries to clear his throat, dislodge what clings and renders his breath ragged. He thinks of sickness as he’s known it: his father, his mother, a baby brother. There was the flu epidemic in 1919, and in one war after another, the sickness that spread out of the corpses that blocked the rivers. And then, in the stories: the obedient daughter who slices at her flesh for soup for a deathbed mother; a man who loses his life essence out of love for a ghost-woman. He coughs again.

  With his toe, he pulls on the chain that holds the stopper. There is a gurgle, then a suck as the water drains.

  17

  The Pigskin Suitcase (1924)

  UNDER THE BED was your suitcase. Made of battered paperboard covered in pig leather, it had lain under every bed you had slept in since your arrival in America. The clasps still opened with ease, you found, and the painted brass had barely flaked. Inside: an immigration visa of unadorned and buttoned-up black ink and, marked in a stranger’s scrawl, your name (Fong Man Gum), the date (April 28, 1918), the port of entry (Angel Island), and the name of the vessel (the Olympia); a plain gray stone that did not even gain a shine in water, picked up from the enclosed yard of the Angel Island barracks; a folded cutout of red paper that, unfolded, was the Double Happiness character, still scented with the idea of fireworks at a wedding banquet; a sepia-tinted photo, splitting from its paper back, of your family; a square of crisply folded newspaper, the whole article unreadable in folded form, so that the exposed sides revealed only these lines of the Immigration Act:

  A consular officer upon the application of any immigrant (as defined in section 3) may (under the conditions hereinafter prescribed and subject to the limitations prescribed in this Act or regulations made thereunder as to the number of immigration visas which may be issued by such officer) issue to such immigrant an immigrant visa which shall consist of one copy of the application provided for in section 7, visaed by such consular officer. Such visa shall specify (1) the nationality of term “alien” includes any individual not a native-born or naturalized citizen of the United States, but this definition shall not be held to include Indians of the United States not taxed, nor citizens of the islands under the jurisdiction of the United States; (c) The term “ineligible to citizenship,” when used in reference to any individual, includes an individual who is debarred from becoming a citizen of the United States under section 2169 of the Revised Statutes, or under section 14 of the act entitled “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese,” approved May 6, 1882.

  and a long braid of black hair that once hung down your back out of loyalty to the emperor and was shorn in 1911.

  18

  THE BARBER’S HAND is shaking. He is overworked, and the pain stretches from wrist to elbow. His assistant, lovesick, has quit, and the scraggly-haired men crowd the chair, lean against the window ledges, and spill out the door. They must be trimmed by churchtime Sunday. There are fights in the street and in the fields over empty boasting and triumphant claims. This one has stolen a kiss from the younger woman, he says; another saw one changing clothes through the blue church windows. The barber works his razor carefully over a man’s jaw, wipes the blade on a rag, catches himself in the mirror. His age shows in his neck, loose and mottled. His hair is mussed and ragged too, but who cuts the barber’s hair? When will it be his chance to court these women? He was in love with a girl in his hometown. He hardly knew her, and over twenty years have passed, but he holds on to the love so he can say he has someone too. The blade scrapes along hard stubble and lather. Would it sound the same dragged down a woman’s leg? He wipes it down again and tosses it into the basin. No more. The man in the chair is half shaved, waiting for the next pull of metal against his skin, but the barber is gone.

  19

  HOWAR TAKES CORLISSA by surprise. She goes to him at his desk in the corner of the living room, looks with displeasure at the mess fanning across it—the loose paper, pens, roll of stamps unfurling—and asks if he is ready to go.

  He asks where they are going and when she reminds him that it is the Fourth of July, that they have never missed the fireworks, he caps his pen and gives a long look at his desk. He asks if it is obvious that he can’t go. She’ll have to drive by herself and Corlissa gives a huffing sigh because Howar knows that she fears driving the road at night. everything is pitch-black, and the only indication of the river, the only warning to keep on the levee, is the moon shining off the water. The one time she drove the levee road at night, she crept slowly, shuddering at every bump.

  You know I can’t drive that road at night, she says. She tries to see what is written across all those papers, but can catch only a word or two; nothing illicit revealed. Suddenly Howar rises from his chair; it swivels and rolls backward; he presses himself against her. She’s backed to the wall. She turns her face away and whispers, What are you doing? He has his mouth to her ear, his fingers in her hair. She’s angry, but she giggles, Howar, stop it! He kisses her lobe. She tries to wiggle away. She looks out the window at the two women sitting beneath a tree, digging away at a fruit. A pomegranate. Their mouths and fingertips are red.

  They might see us, she whispers. But outside it is much brighter than the shadowed living room and all they will see in the window is themselves. She pushes against his hips with her palms and says, I don’t know what’s the matter with you.

  Your hair smells different, he says. She’s self-conscious, blushes, says it’s the permanent. He nods, reaches hands back to feel for the chair, and sits down. He rocks in his chair and repeats, I can’t go.

  She’s still light-headed from his sudden closeness, then distance. She nods her head, yes, yes, yes, but the questions are waiting—not at the tip of her tongue, but farther back, where there is only the wonder but not the language. The whole world is different. For days now, she has given second glances to everyone. Her daughter, her husband, the people in town. She feels like her grandmother, who once reached the point when the world was far too different than what she’d known. She couldn’t negotiate the new rules, etiquette, language, politic
s. After spewing curses and spittle at Corlissa as explanation, it had been as simple as willing herself to stop breathing. Howar has turned back to his desk, but Corlissa still leans to the wall, mesmerized. The women outside the window cast the pomegranate rind to the grass. They are always there, in the corner of her eye, just past the window, just through a doorway. Sparks are lighting in her mind, feeling like the jolts of static electricity she gets when touching a doorknob. Howar is as unhappy as she is. His eruption of passion was antagonistic, the kiss given when one really wants to bite. Small epiphanies are erupting that she will forget as soon as she is back in the banality of day-to-day. She welcomes all the knowledge, still leaning against the wall, breathing, thinking, ignored by her husband, for once enjoying life, until her mind darkens again and she goes to pack for the fireworks.

  20

  THE THEATER IS cool.

  Chloe wants to be in the dark where the heavy red drapes pull back to reveal a screen, and the springs press up through the red plush seats. every shift elicits a squeak. The talkies have made their way to Sacramento, but the Walnut Grove theater hasn’t yet been renovated for sound. Chloe comes to sink into her chair and watch the flicker of black and white across the screen. She’s not sure who the characters are, what they are doing, if they’re in love. She can’t get lost in the fiction of it.

  Sofia has gone to Sacramento for the night with her family and the boat-women. And when Chloe heard the shuffling of Madam See in her closet and the heaviness of a bottle removed, she knew that she was free for the night. Some of the other girls have gone out with their boyfriends, and one is visiting home. They have all left to George the task of grabbing at Madam See’s wrists when the numbness of the alcohol fades, when she starts to cry out before her head tips into sleep. No one has stayed to mop the floor of her vomit, or receive the lash of her drunken tongue.

  Chloe brings her feet up to rest on the back of the chair in front of her. She leans her head back and the cold metal of the chair’s frame presses into the bend of her neck. Home for her is not so far away. San Francisco too is not so far away, and she knows where Alfred stays. He left her, in New York and without heat, for a brass-and-white apartment in San Francisco and a woman named Dixie. Both of them, stinking of money. They were living—and she had too!—the promised moneyed life that the people in Locke only dreamed of. Maybe couldn’t even dream of.

  She knows how words move down the streets and up and down the alleys until the town is suffused with gossip, but she wonders how they travel along the river. Do they dip into every waterway, every slough and creek and island? Have they flowed so far that her mother knows that Chloe is so close, just a few towns over, and living in a brothel built for Chinese men?

  A shaft of light breaks down the center aisle as the door in the back opens. Two whispering boys clop down the aisle and take seats a few rows ahead, on the other side of the theater. When the glare of the sudden light-blindness fades and Chloe’s eyes have readjusted to the dark, she glances at the latecomers. They are teenagers, gangly, but still to grow. She wonders what brings them into a theater on the Fourth of July when everyone else is out having a family picnic and waiting for the fireworks to start. There is the rustle of waxed paper removed from a bundle of candy. More whispers, which resonate in the nearly empty theater. A couple turns toward them and the man says, How ’bout you keep it down? The boys laugh.

  The hair feathering the nape of one boy’s neck is familiar. So are the shape of his head and the slouch of his shoulders. even in light that rises and falls, she recognizes the gold-touched hair and the curve of his ears. He was ten when she left, at school on the afternoon that she hefted her bag and set out to hitch for a ride on the highway. He’d be twelve now, nearly thirteen?

  She dares herself to whisper his name, David, and loses the sound in the crackle of the paper and the shudder of the film feeding through the projector. The phonograph plays low and sticks into a groove. The melody repeats.

  She puts her feet on the floor and sits up straight. She leans forward and utters his name like a length of smoke.

  David.

  David.

  David, David, David.

  He pauses and looks at his friend. He says something, his friend says something, and both turn back. She quickly looks at the screen. When she dares to glance again, they are watching the movie.

  Her heart pounds. What message will she send back to her mother? What will she tell, and what won’t she tell? What will she tell for his ears only, some secret he can hold as a bond between the two of them? The figures on the screen are completely lost to her.

  The screen shakes a little when the thundering outside begins. The music is consumed by each crack of the fireworks. The man takes his arm off his girlfriend’s shoulders and turns back, squinting up toward the projector. Chloe feels the pound in the pulse of her neck. The boys look around in gleeful surprise. Her brother removes a peppermint stick from his mouth and says something to the other boy. They stand up.

  They are leaving; each beat and burst takes them one step closer to the door. They pause before Chloe.

  Hey, don’t you want to see the fireworks? David says with a grin.

  Two years older than he was, with shadows of the adult face he will have. His face looks darker, his jaw sharper.

  She smiles. I want to see the rest of the movie.

  The man calls out, You aren’t the only ones in here! Chloe glances at him and smiles back at David.

  David’s friend is walking again toward the door. David starts to shake his head, as if to say, Crazy girl, giving up fireworks for romance in black and white. But he stops and squints at her. They look at each other, then his glance passes through—the moment of recognition slides by.

  Suit yourself, he says. He resumes sucking on the candy and follows after his friend.

  Chloe does not turn to watch them leave. She wants the blood to subside, the geyser-flood from heart to face, the geyser-rush in her ears and the tingle in her fingers. Home seems closer. Her past is real again. The blood from her birth has drained through her mother’s bedsheets into this same soil. Whatever she was looking for among high-rises and neon lights was not home.

  The fireworks reach a frenzy—it must be the finale. The picture jumps with the layered explosions. Then the whine of the phonograph fills the theater once again and spins out the last of its song. The screen flickers to black.

  21

  The Split Water Blues (1926)

  THERE HE WAS, beneath Chloe’s window, whispering as loud as a shout.

  Chloe! Chloe!

  Chloe scrambled over to the window. oh, Jesus, Chloe, he said in a high whisper. Come out and walk with me?

  Chloe glanced back at her brother sleeping and her mother dead gone in the corner of the room. Her father, thank goodness, was still on his shift and the dog stayed curled up—so lazy it wouldn’t stir if a rat nibbled on its tail.

  All right, she said. Shut up, I’ll be out.

  She grabbed her daddy’s big plaid shirt, the red woolly one that she wore like a jacket because these nights got chilly with the Delta breeze. outside, Barrett stomped his feet in the cold.

  Sorry to bother you, Chloe. I just, you know, wanted to talk to you.

  She giggled. He really was drunk; it was all over him in the iron smell of his sweat.

  Come on.

  They made an arc, clearing the houses and the small speakeasy still erupting with sound.

  You want to go back there? he asked. He nodded toward the tule reeds that formed a barrier to the water. A small trail led to the edge. It’s dark, he said, but look. There’s a half-moon.

  I’d rather walk around here.

  Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I just, you know, wanted to talk. every time he made this admission he tugged at a tuft of his strawberry hair.

  If you’re not careful, Chloe giggled, you’ll pull it out.

  What? oh, yeah. I just, you know . . . Well, you know.
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  They walked silently, the tapping of their feet on the dirt louder than anything except the flap of bat wings.

  They carry rabies, Barrett said. So, you think you want to stay here when you get older? I mean, me, I got all these things I want to do.

  They found themselves in the middle of someone’s tomato patch. A few ripe ones had fallen onto the dirt and split, sweet with rot.

  Barrett continued to ask questions and answer them with his own hopes and thoughts, ending each with—I’m babbling. I don’t know what I want to say. I just wanted to see you, Chloe.

  Yeah, Chloe said, because she was only fifteen and didn’t know yet what to say to men who cried for you from the depths of their drunkenness.

  The chill seeped through her dad’s jacket. I’d better get back before my daddy gets home.

  Sure, sure. It’s cold and I’m babbling. Well, good night.

  Good night, Barrett.

  Two days later he was cool to her. She figured it must have been because he remembered coming to her window stinking of whiskey in a jar and whispering for her to come out. She smiled at him to let him know she didn’t care. She said his name at the end of hello, so he wouldn’t feel embarrassed.

  That night he was at her window again. Again she slipped out in her daddy’s coat.

  HE TOOK HER on the path through the wild licorice to a clearing where a flame-scarred brick foundation remained. A home in ruins. Blistered red paint still visible on the water pump. Some falling-over pieces of wood. Set off at the far edge of the clearing stood an outhouse, perfectly intact. Chloe sat on what was left of one of the house’s walls.