Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  The silence bothers her. The girls must be huddled together in their attic room, giggling over her, anticipating her wake-up. or perhaps they are whispering while George nods on. Poppy sits up and steps out of bed.

  All her perceptions are askew—the floor is much too far, the door is too wide, and though she holds her head straight, she feels as if she walks leaning to the side. She pulls her damp nightgown over her head and replaces it with an old housedress. She pours a little water into the basin on her vanity and cleans her face with it, scrubs at her mouth, runs her wet finger along her teeth. Now there is sound: her hands sloshing water in the porcelain bowl, the brush of her hands against her face. Here is the sound of her bare feet across the floor, the way the wood eases to each step, and the sound of the door swinging on its hinges. In the hall, she is more careful with sound. She wants to launch upon the girls in the midst of their disrespect. She wants to hear them laughing at her.

  She takes each step with consideration. If she hurries, the stairs will creak. The stairway is dark, walls on both sides, lit by only the weak sun in the crack under the attic door and the light on the bottom steps that comes from the house. She pauses at the door. She holds her breath. All the heat from the house has welled up at this uppermost point and swells before the door. Behind it, the attic is quiet.

  She opens the door and steps into the musty gray room. She hunches to avoid the sloped ceiling and walks between the two rows of beds to the small diamond window. The roof peaks a little here and she rises on her tiptoes to peer out. The window is kept clean, spit-wiped. She looks down onto the river road, at the Southern Pacific warehouse on the other side, and at the river that runs under and around the warehouse. People bustle about, but she does not recognize any of them.

  The silence means she is alone. She lies down on one of the beds and looks at the ceiling. There is little between a sleeping body and the roof except heat. She is hot and hung over and alone. She tries to pretend she is a whitegirl, one of the blond-haired ones, real American-looking. She is young and has her whole life ahead of her. She has a boyfriend in Sac and a bit of income. It isn’t so bad. She could become an actress, or a dancer. But what she’d really like to do is work the counter at Woolworth’s, then settle down to have a family—lots of little towheaded babies.

  Is this what they think of, lying in bed at night in the attic of a brothel? of towheaded children in damp diapers? Poppy closes her eyes and concentrates a little more. She focuses on the body scent in the sheets and the pillow. This is Chloe’s bed. Poppy focuses a little harder. She tries to see past the spinning in her head.

  First, there is a coyote nuzzling fallen pears in the orchard. Poppy feels the wind ruffling its coat. It feels free—gentle enough to hold a pear in its iron jaws without bruising it, but strong enough to barrel through fences. on the other side of the fence is a road, and it walks along this road for miles, until a city comes into view. All its thoughts focus on leaving. Poppy covers her mouth to muffle a small burp. She’s not going deep enough—these are mere dreams, their residue left on Chloe’s pillow. She wants to know what Chloe desires, what she thinks in her conscious mind.

  Richard bucks on top of her and she squeezes her eyes shut and measures her breath. She keeps the fear down in her chest, reminds herself to keep from clenching her thighs. She smells the waxy pomade in his hair and the curls of heat and sweat that rise off his stomach with each thrust. Richard brings her arm up around his neck. His sleek shoulder and the ripple of muscle make her hand tingle. Chloe hates it! The realization startles Poppy’s eyes open. She’d been convinced it was a love affair, with some coyness on Chloe’s part. She turns her face into the pillow. Beneath the hate—neediness, dependence. After the sex, there will be money, and after the money, an apartment in the city, maybe a shopgirl job at a department store. There’ll be café dinners after work with the other girls, nights on the town. Rides to the top floors of hotels where she can look out on building after building that break the sky. There’ll be the drum of pounding jackhammers, men who speak different languages slamming bolts into metal structures, and bakeries whose scents are lost in the smell of fresh tar. If Poppy tries a little harder, she’s sure she’ll know Chloe’s future. She finds a strand of Chloe’s blond hair on the pillowcase.

  She won’t marry, as she is attracted only to men who are guaranteed to leave. She won’t ever have children. Her mother will die before she can see her again and her brother will forget her. Poppy pushes sickness back in her throat, convinces herself she doesn’t smell like gin. Her father has gone mad with guilt and he dies a wanderer who lives off the kind hand of the city. She will learn loneliness by growing old in an apartment without mementos, where her life is lived through a glowing blue screen that flickers to her the outside world. The violence of the gangsters spreads west, until even children have guns. The diamond window magnifies the light, which has risen to noon brilliance. Poppy begins to cry, miserable, dizzy, ready to vomit. The house is so quiet. She needs sounds to break with the afternoon light, so that she knows that it really is Chloe’s lonely future she sees and not her own.

  24

  TWO GIRLS WALK down Main Street on another bright day. The air is heavy and wet, like a room after the wash has just been done, when the steam clouds the window that gives a glimpse of the lawn. People are sweaty and noisy, squinting and calling for rain. The boats horn down the river. The girl with the uneven red-brown hair is looking for her father, but she makes an adventure of it. She dawdles, stops to look at the lone rose rising up between two buildings toward sunlight, reads the window ads, ponders what kind of person she will be if she buys this brand of cigarettes or that.

  Coming the other way is the blonde with the timid eyes. She carries ice cream in a paper bag. Her steps are direct. one can tell she’s the girl who never outgrew her baby fat, who has elegant tapered fingers, but a paunch-stomach. She catches sight of the brown-haired girl looking in the store window, and she pauses. She is almost home; it would be silly to cross the street.

  The brown-haired girl turns from the window. She is looking for her father. He is not at this end; he may be at the other. She gazes down the street, and over the shoulders and in between the spaces of passersby who move in and out of the light slanting between the balconies that cover the sidewalk, she sees the blonde, frozen, clutching a paper bag. She looks at the store window, and across the street, then starts walking again. She must find her father. She smiles. The crowd may jostle her, she may be nudged to the side, and the collision with the blonde will be unavoidable.

  The two girls on Main Street are walking toward one another.

  They pass, brush, cloth across skin, sleeve of one against the arm of the other. Waves and salt-foam billow out between. It’s the illicit that attracts them—nighttime meetings, looks sneaked in the street, swimming beyond the trees—and this is the zenith moment: the barely-there touch on a busy street at high noon.

  25

  BEFORE CHLOE CAN see Sofia, there is the church. A small lantern glows on the floor. The two women sit on either side, the inconstant light sending up haggish shadows. They nest in humped blankets. Chloe brushes flakes of windowsill paint from her fingers and pushes through the front door.

  The boat-women are startled. They say nothing as she approaches.

  With a sweep of her hand she asks if she can sit. She was sure they spoke only Chinese, but one says: Sit.

  Chloe introduces herself. Go on telling your stories. I just want to listen.

  We want to know about you. The younger one speaks. She has the face of an angel dancing atop a face-powder box. Tit for tat.

  A story about me? Chloe asks. For a year at Madam See’s, people have shown only mild interest in each other. It is enough they are there; no one wants to know why. Beatrice has a boyfriend; Lisel has a daughter; Julia has no one; but that is all. Thrown together, with no desire to forge something more intimate.

  Tit for tat.

  And I go first?<
br />
  The older one nods. She could stir at a cauldron with that face. Thirty-five or so, with a broke-beak nose.

  I’m seventeen. Chloe pulls a blanket up over her shoulders. This happened when I was fourteen. My daddy was kind of crazy from the war, so he didn’t come home too much. And my mama worked late at the tomato cannery, so I had to put my brother David to bed. He was little, just nine, so he slept well, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I used to stare out the bedroom window and watch the people passing by. our house fell on the path to a speakeasy and you never saw so many drunks in your life. This night, a moaning brought my eye to the road. A woman had fallen in the mud. She kept trying to push herself up, cursing goddamn. Then she stopped. I was reluctant to go out there, but I was afraid she’d suffocate in the mud. I put on my coat and went out. The mud sucked at my shoes, nearly pulled them off.

  Her dress had gotten hitched up. She had mud all over her wool stockings. She looked like a beast. I was afraid to touch her. I couldn’t see her face, so I touched her neck. Her skin was cold, but I could feel some heat deep beneath. I pushed her shoulder. She turned and her mouth was marked up with vomit. I wanted to cry, because that was my mama.

  My mama, who never talked much, save to say do the wash or wipe down the table or boys’ll bring you trouble or shhhh sleep baby. I just kept calling her until she roused. I had to pull her skirt down. I said all the nonsense things she said to my brother when he woke from night terrors until she got up and I walked her through that nasty mud and to bed.

  The women say nothing. Now your story? Chloe asks, embarrassed by their silence. Maybe people don’t have drunk mothers in China.

  No wonder you’re a whore, says witch-face. Just look at your mother.

  Chloe surprises herself. Is that the story she would tell them if she was brave enough to burst into the church and demand their confidence? She flicks one pebble toward Sofia’s window, but Sofia comes through the kitchen door.

  Pear orchard? Chloe asks. Her anxiety over her story fades under giddiness. She didn’t need the pebble; Sofia was waiting.

  EGRETS FLUTTER UP and down from the treetops with the sound of rippled canvas. They flash wary eyes at the two girls sitting at the trunk of a fruit-bare tree. Chloe brushes her palm against Sofia’s ragged hair and tells her she likes it short. Sofia pushes smoke through her teeth. It fans out messy.

  What’d you do on the Fourth?

  Saw a movie. Chloe almost tells her about seeing David, but Sofia would pry more.

  Was it good?

  It was okay. It was too hot to do anything else.

  I’m sorry about Tuesday. Spilling all your wine and acting that way.

  Chloe laughs. This quick forgiveness is a flaw. But Sofia is not Alfred, or any of them. It’s too much to think about on such a clear night. Chloe says, Play with my hair? She puts her head in Sofia’s lap. She squints off, trying to see past the trees into the darkness beyond. She wonders if the birds will fly away at the hint of a coyote. Will they be warned?

  What are they like? Chloe asks.

  Who?

  Those women. What do they do? There’s talk around town, but it’s hard to tell who’s seen them and who’s making it up.

  Chloe wants to know if they traveled across the sea on that tiny boat, eating fish they pulled from the ocean with their bare hands. And she wants to know what they do now, in the church, or in the living room, in the heat behind closed curtains.

  Sofia snorts. They’re very boring. Mama and Baba are always helping people, giving them a place to stay. Sai Fung and So Wai aren’t any different.

  But Chloe still thinks of the boat and escape by water. She tucks some hair behind her ear. Sofia pulls it out again and runs her fingers along the strands. I want to tell you something, Chloe says. When I got to Madam See’s, they didn’t make me work right away. I mean not in that way. First I had to stay in this small room. Downstairs. It had a small window and the men who couldn’t pay a lot, you know, could pay a little and I’d open the curtain and they could look at me.

  They paid just to look? The smoke has stopped.

  Not exactly. I’d do whatever they wanted me to, but they couldn’t touch me.

  Has my father ever come in?

  I don’t know.

  You’ve never seen him?

  I’ve never seen him. But Chloe can’t be sure. All of the men of town have passed through Madam See’s door—the pious and the unsaved.

  I feel sorry for you, Chloe.

  Chloe sits up and pulls away from Sofia’s fingertips. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m going to leave soon. It’s a plan that emerges suddenly, against Sofia’s sympathy. Her pity is far removed from the reality of Chloe’s life within those red walls. To Sofia it must be all abstract notions, and Chloe can’t convey the breath and the stickiness and the eyes that you can’t (must not must not) open, because seeing is the only sense you can stop. You know Lisel? She’s over fifty—she has kids and everything. She’s going to be there until she dies. Chloe spits the words.

  Where will you go?

  I don’t know. Sacramento. Wherever I can, with whatever money I have.

  Sofia brings up one knee and picks at a scab. I’ll miss you.

  Foreign words to Chloe, who has never been told this: I will miss you.

  Sofia still concentrates on the crust on her knee. I’d go with you, Chloe. I’ll leave with you.

  Before Chloe answers, the sound of Sofia’s name echoes through the trees. The startled egrets stretch their wings and lift up like incandescent sheets being shaken dry.

  It’s Mama, says Sofia.

  SOFIA RUNS UP from the direction of the orchard.

  Where have you been? That’s trespassing, Corlissa hisses.

  I didn’t hop the fence. A little whine in her protest.

  Corlissa leans forward and sniffs as her daughter speaks. Sofia shrugs her face away.

  You smell like cigarettes.

  I was chewing on a piece of grass.

  Corlissa almost laughs. She breathes hard to keep from slapping her. Get upstairs and brush your teeth. Sofia clears her throat. She looks her straight in the eye, then drops her head and runs inside.

  Corlissa remains on the lawn, arms folded against the cold, searching out the shape of the orchard fence. She would like to say, Wait until your father hears about this, but Howar is away, looking for the women’s families and papers, and when he returns, she knows the urgency of the event will have been lost. She thinks of straps and switches and the red welts her own mother left on the backs of her thighs. She had always deserved it. Sofia deserves it. She centers her anger until she feels she can direct it into a swinging arm, a hand clutching her husband’s belt. She thought that once Sofia was a teenager, spanking would be undignified, that the girl could be reasoned with. But the look straight in the eye, the repeated warnings, the threats! Sofia is a completely unreasonable creature, who seems to know only through her skin.

  Something flashes at the orchard fence. A boy? Had Sofia gone off with a boy? She takes a few steps closer, to the edge of the church lawn where the grass meets the gravel. The figure moves toward Main Street. Corlissa crosses the road and walks up between the two houses that face the church. She’ll take the alley route, cut the person off.

  She stoops under the lit windows of her neighbors. She’s ashamed to have not known earlier, all along, that it has been this. A prank letter received last week, tossed in among peelings and other trash, warned her of this. Anonymously written, misspelled words. With cruelty, the letter had mentioned a girl and Corlissa was confused. Unfathomable and impossible. She lingers in the alley to wait for the boy to pass. Her heart beats fast. She is sweating. Her hair has loosened from its bun and is hot and heavy on her neck.

  She waits, but no boy passes. She peeks out to Main. The only person there, now turning toward the brothel, is a whitegirl, one of the prostitutes. Corlissa steps onto the road and walks back down toward the orchard. To the left, the levee road is
empty, and on the right, the orchard fence is bare. The boy has disappeared. A fear pushes up and Corlissa pushes it down, a constant play between her thumping heart and her rising hope. Maybe it wasn’t a boy. The thought turns for a second. No. Where did he go?

  26

  TUFFY LEAMON’S SPEAKEASY has run dry. The crops are rotting in the fields. Revelry is the only thing men want. one Sunday, Howar gives a sermon that quotes the Song of Songs. The men, turning back to their Bibles, find revelation in learning newfound words:

  Thy cheeks are comely with ornaments, thy neck with strings of jewels. We will make thee plaits of gold with studs of silver.

  The next day, all the jewelry to be found or bought in town has been left on Howar and Corlissa’s doorstep. Howar’s new congregation is testing him; he tacks a sign to the door:

  EXODUS 20:15:

  The eighth Commandment: Thou shall not steal.

  He intends it to be stern in its brevity. The few wives in town show up to claim their missing pieces. They pick out their belongings from the glittering baubles laid out on the dining room table.

  Another week, another batch of jewelry. Howar posts a new note:

  EPHESIANS 4:28: Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.

  The wives return again for their jewelry. At home, the rubies and rhinestones and dark yellow gold are locked inside of a box locked inside another box and hidden under the sink, or on the top shelf of the closet, behind the hatbox. But even the women know it is futile against the desperation of lovesick men.