The Bathing Women

by Tie Ning

  She ducked into the bathroom with the raincoat. When she came out, she was “Cairo Night,” her plaits coiled on the back of her head and her beautiful, smooth shoulders exposed. She caught the black raincoat below her shoulders and above her breasts, showing off her sculpted collarbones. She clutched the clothes tightly at her chest to keep the raincoat from slipping down. Ah, “Cairo Night,” both Tiao and Youyou clapped for her. Just then she played a little trick, suddenly loosening her grip and letting the raincoat fall. She stood naked in front of her two friends. Perhaps she hadn’t really done it on purpose; or perhaps she wanted them to see that body of hers, so mature and worldly. How many secrets her body kept from them!

  Youyou screamed and Tiao laughed. Smiling, Fei calmly put her clothes back on. Next, she did their makeup for dinner. It was accomplished very simply: the only thing necessary was lipstick. She tore off and moistened a small strip of red paper, telling them to take the paper between their teeth and press down with their lips. The red of the paper was printed on their lips. Their faces immediately radiated seduction. They sat down to dine with red lips, putting on pretentious airs. “I’ll have the Ukraine red cabbage soup,” Tiao said to Youyou. And Youyou, wearing a tall homemade chef’s hat, waited on her attentively. Fei stuck out her little finger and made a special request for Tbilisi pickles. She pinched a cigarette, a real cigarette, between her fingers while she ordered. They ate, drank, and then wanted to hear a story. Their stomachs had been tended, now it was their minds’ turn. The storytelling was usually left up to Tiao.

  Tiao looked at Youyou, and then turned to Fei. Ah, what a perfect arrangement, with her in the middle savouring the gourmet food and admiring the lovely chef on her left and the beautiful girl on her right. She was the perfect storyteller. What else did she need? She started to tell a story she had read in Soviet Woman, the issue that had the “Little Basket” recipe.

  It was actually a very ordinary story. A girl named Genia is sulking and giving her fiancé, Mischa, a hard time on their outing. For the whole day, Mischa tries all sorts of things to cheer Genia up, but fails. One moment he’s making faces, the next he’s telling stories, and after that he’s singing songs—songs that Genia loves, but still she pouts. So, during their dinner at a small restaurant, Mischa flirts with a girl sitting at the next table, to make Genia jealous. That was all that happened in the story, according to Tiao. She thought the story was boring; she was interested only in the jealousy part. From the story, Tiao got the impression that emotion sometimes had to be indirect: a man loves a woman, but occasionally he has to make the woman he loves jealous by flirting with another woman. If she gets jealous, it proves that she loves and values him. A man has to use this roundabout way, approaching other women, to love the woman he loves. This way of testing the feeling, Mischa’s jealousy method, had a subtle attraction for Tiao. How troublesome and intricate the relationship between men and women could be! But what did jealousy feel like?

  It took time and energy to get jealous and to make people jealous. Jealousy, this bitter, delicate, sharp feeling, perhaps had something primitive about it, an antique foolishness; an emotion out of the Era of Steam. Jealousy would have no place in the nineties. There would be no time for anything, no time to laugh or cry, to win or lose at love, no time for heart-to-heart talks, no time to get jealous or to work up the courage to duel. The nineties were an era without rivalry in love. This was what Tiao would believe as an adult. If rivalry in love didn’t exist anymore, who could make you jealous?

  But right then, in the seventies, the girls with red-paper-dyed lips still discussed jealousy.

  “Would you get jealous, Youyou?”

  “Would you get jealous, Tiao?”

  “Would you get jealous, Fei?”

  Fei said, “I won’t get jealous, but I’ll make others jealous of me.”

  5

  Fei always seemed different from others, and she was different. When Tiao and Youyou talked about whether they would get jealous or not, Fei was thinking about making others jealous of her; when Tiao and Youyou sighed for lives like those in the movies, Fei told them, “I am a movie.”

  I am a movie.

  I am a movie. A grand statement that only the bold and lovely could make. Nothing seemed to frighten Fei. Was it true that any woman who’d found love could be as arrogant and spoiled as Fei?

  She liked men, and she liked to make men like her. Fifteen-year-old Fei already had a steady boyfriend, an upper-class-man at her school nicknamed Captain Sneakers. The boy had several followers, all of whom shaved their heads and wore white sneakers and the same kind of clothing. They disrupted classes and gave the teachers trouble in school, and outside of school they ran riot, getting involved in gang fights. People called them the White Sneaker Gang.

  Captain Sneakers got to know Fei through a sort of abduction. One evening when Fei was on her way home, he and several of his gang members trailed her slowly on their bikes, and she couldn’t get away from them. She pretended to walk calmly, aware of being stalked by these older boys. It was threatening even though they rode their bikes very slowly. Their speed was a warning not to try to escape by running because her legs couldn’t outrun their wheels. So she dismissed the idea of running, and walked even more slowly instead. She glanced at Captain Sneakers out of the corner of her eye, his bald head and his strong body; she could hear his slightly nervous breathing. At school he was a figure of fear for everyone, and girls would lower their heads when they encountered him, as if he might immediately pounce. He had never pounced on any of them, and he actually liked Fei, sincerely. Fei walked slowly, not knowing what would happen but not really afraid; not knowing what would happen but eager for it, whatever it was. His nervous breathing puzzled her a little, her heart telling her that something should perhaps have happened already, but she didn’t know what. They were about to reach People’s Hospital. The streetlights were lit, but the darkness of the shadow-covered pavement seemed only to deepen. The gang members formed a half circle around her on the pavement with their bikes and he said, “Hey, get up behind me on my bike and let me take you somewhere.”

  His voice didn’t sound evil or threatening, so she lifted herself onto his bike. The gang spread out in a line across the street and rode crazily as if they were flying. He roared back to Fei on the seat behind him, “Hold on to my waist.” She reached her hands around and held on to his strong waist, feeling flashes of dizziness. It was the first time that she had held a man by the waist, a strange man, which made her seem brash and shameless, and she enjoyed the feeling. The crazy pedaling of the bicycle, the speed and the movement of the cyclist’s waist and legs, all gave her an unexpected joy, a pleasure she’d never known. What would she be doing if she weren’t doing this? She had been bored to death, already bored to death for so long.

  The boys rode their bicycles wildly until they got to a grey, bare residential building. The rest of the gang stopped outside, but Captain Sneakers locked his bike and brought Fei upstairs. He opened an apartment door with a key and locked it as soon as they entered, leaving the light off. Then he lunged toward her, grabbing her, forcing her back, step by step—back through a small hallway, past the bathroom and the kitchen, into a room that looked like a bedroom, and into the corner. Her heart beat loudly with a thud, thud, thud, and his breath puffed on her face, exciting her beyond words. She was finding it difficult to breathe, so she opened her mouth, hoping to ease her breathlessness with words. “What do you want to do?” she said.

  Suddenly he pressed against her hard with his body, grinding out the words through his teeth: “I want to fuck you. The first fucking time I saw you, I … you knew I wanted it for so long. Tell me, do you want it, too? Tell me you …” He sought out her mouth with his as he spoke, but she twisted and turned her head to avoid him. Even though those hot, naked obscenities of his dizzied her like blows to the head, she resolutely guarded her mouth. No man would ever kiss her mouth, as long as she lived.

  He reached
out trying to steady her head with his hands, growing more and more determined to kiss her, so she grabbed his wrists and put his hands on her breasts. He stopped trying for her mouth and began to tear at her blouse. Inexperienced with women, trembling, he ripped her blouse. Finally, he touched her warm, small, firm breasts and rubbed them, roughly, making her hiss with pain. Unable to wait any longer, he pulled her to the bed and pushed her down. As he was taking off his clothes, he said, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. This is my parents’ bed and they’re not home.” After taking off his own clothes, he fumbled in the dark for hers. He was surprised to find she was naked already. When he reached out to her, he touched her smooth, slightly trembling thighs. He didn’t despise her, then or later, for removing her clothes herself. On the contrary, he was grateful. He liked Fei’s directness and honesty, compared to those phony girls who half refused and half went along. Unfortunately, at the age of eighteen, he didn’t know how to show his appreciation.

  Her desire had been truly stirred by then. Seduced by his wild excitement, and without fear, her body welcomed his weight and the hardness that made her sweat with pain. She didn’t know what love was, and, in fact, she never loved Captain Sneakers. She just wanted him to handle her in this way, as if it made her more thoroughly degenerate, and meanwhile allowed her to raise her head more proudly.

  The whole school soon became aware of her relationship with Captain Sneakers, so she sat on his bike holding him around the waist more naturally. She asked him for cigarettes, Big Wheels, seventeen cents a pack. The girls in her class wouldn’t talk to her. They heard the rumour going around the other classes saying Fei was the human form of the fox spirit and had a big bushy tail hidden in her pants. They would go further. Then what about summer? Where would she hide her tail in summer? The one who spread the rumour responded that her tail could shrink as well as grow. In the summer she would simply shrink her tail and wrap it around her waist. So they got a malicious thrill out of following her to the toilet to spy on her, imagining they would see that tail hidden in her pants.

  The boys in her class didn’t talk to her, either. One of them, who lived in the same complex as Fei, would stick notes to the back of her chair with things like “bastard daughter” written on them. After she and Captain Sneakers started dating, she told him about these incidents, and Captain Sneakers beat the hell out of the boy, knocking out one of his front teeth. From then on, no one dared cross her. She wasn’t somebody to be crossed; she made girls jealous and boys afraid.

  She continued to tell her boyfriend to do this or that for her. One day, out of the blue, she got the idea of giving Tiao and Youyou a big surprise. So she told Captain Sneakers to have his gang break into the school’s canteen at night, and they did, sneaking out a bottle of bean oil, several jin of marinated beltfish, a small bag of flour, twenty eggs, and some spices, like Sichuan peppercorn and aniseed. Fei led their procession of bicycles over to Youyou’s house with the booty. Tiao and Youyou were so happy that they turned somersaults on the bed. They picked up the eggs one moment and sniffed at the Sichuan peppercorn and aniseed the next, and then they sifted the expensive enriched flour through their fingers and cradled the bean oil bottle, not wanting to put it down. In that era when eggs and oil were rationed, they were almost rich. They felt very rich. They felt like landowners, and even a landowner couldn’t have felt richer than they did.

  Grabbing a handful of the flour, Youyou announced that she was going to deep-fry the eggs and flour to make sa-qi-ma. Fei said, “You girls can make it and eat it. I won’t join you because he and I have other things to do.” She walked out as she spoke. Tiao and Youyou came out to see them off—Fei and Captain Sneakers—watching Fei wiggle her butt as she settled on his bike and put her arms around his waist. This couple, the beauty and the hero sitting together on the bike, attracted attention on the small road inside the residential complex. Back then, in all of Fuan, the entire province, or the capital and the whole of China, what girl had the nerve to sit on a boy’s bike in public and hold on to his waist? It seemed only Fei had the nerve. Only she could be so scandalous and so fearless.

  What boy doesn’t want to show off in front of the girl he loves? What girl doesn’t want her man to stand up for her and make her proud? But the word “love” didn’t apply to the relationship between Fei and Captain Sneakers. They never said the word “love.” The two bodies were attracted to each other by biological instinct, plus some youthful vanity and a hint of loneliness that couldn’t be expressed or relieved. Observed closely, they were not really like lovers; they were careless with each other, never caressing or flirting. Most of the time they acted more like buddies than lovers, always expecting to stand up for each other when there was trouble. Their lovemaking was monotonous, simple, and crude, even though they had enough time together. Fei never got any pleasure in bed, and Captain Sneakers never satisfied her—the question of satisfaction occurred to her only later. At the time she didn’t know that she could be happy and satisfied, just as she didn’t know what love was. She thought this was the way things went: she looked forward to it, and then just had to tolerate it. She was a model of toleration. All she needed to do was tighten up her lips and open her legs and then she could begin her tolerating.

  Was this the inexpressible mystery that people referred to? She would have preferred to put on clothes instead and hang around the street with him, where she could at least collect stares, envious, disapproving, or puzzled. She could, at least, let people know that there was a tough-looking man to protect her. She badly needed to be protected by a tough-looking man, whom she could boss around and manipulate and who liked the way she arched her eyebrows and widened her eyes angrily with her hands on her hips. The dull days started to have some flavour because of the way they were together, which seemed to be closely connected to sex and also seemed to have nothing to do with sex.

  Both loafed around. Fei often stayed out at night, sometimes sleeping with him, sometimes asking to sleep over at Youyou’s. One night, Tiao, Youyou, and she had dinner at Youyou’s house, and Tiao was vividly telling a Shakespeare story called “Emilia.” From an old comic book that she read recently, the breathtaking and soul-stirring story concerned a mistress who fell out of favour. Captain Sneakers came and asked Fei to leave with him, and Fei didn’t want to, so he reached over and gave her a slap that jarred the warm, peaceful atmosphere and their tender hearts.

  Tiao said angrily, “Why did you hit her?”

  Captain Sneakers grabbed Fei’s waist and said to Tiao as they were leaving, “You know fucking nothing!”

  Tiao and Youyou stared after them as they left Youyou’s home. They were thinking that maybe it was true they knew “fucking nothing,” because Fei didn’t seem to resent Captain Sneakers’s slap. The slap reminded Tiao of the first time she and Fei met. That was the day she got a similar gift from Fei in the alley, in honour of their new acquaintance.

  Fei and Captain Sneakers continued this way until he graduated from high school and was sent down to the countryside for peasant’s reeducation. Then Fei met a dancer from the Fuan Song and Dance Troupe. The dancer had been invited to their school to teach dance—the Propaganda Team of Mao Zedong’s Thoughts was rehearsing a Tibetan dance, Song of the Washing Girls. Fei was not a member of the Propaganda Team of Mao Zedong’s Thoughts. She wouldn’t have qualified because of her corrupt lifestyle, and she didn’t like singing and dancing, either. But as long as she was around school, she attracted attention. She caught the dancer’s eye, and he caught hers, too. His handsome face won the girls’ hearts and his easygoing manner attracted the boys, as well. But Fei believed that he noticed her alone, that Fei was the only one he wanted to get to know personally. That was what she imagined.

  6

  “Listen, you’re in really great physical condition, why don’t you join the Propaganda Team of Mao Zedong’s Thoughts? I think you’d be the perfect lead dancer for Song of the Washing Girls. I’ve been watching you closely.” The dance
r stopped Fei at school and told her this one day.

  He had finally spoken to her, which made her feel proud. Her guess had proved correct; by now she’d had some experience of men. She smiled at him and said, “My name is Tang Fei.”

  “I know your name is Tang Fei,” he responded.

  “That’s right,” she said. “A lot of people talk behind my back at school.”

  He seemed not to want their conversation to go in that direction; he was more interested in talking about things related to his profession. “Have you done any dancing?” he asked. She told him she hadn’t. She’d never danced. She didn’t like dancing and didn’t plan to dance in the future. Confident in the power of her beauty, Fei deliberately put distance between herself and dance. She didn’t need to attract this dancer by pretending she liked dancing, nor did she have to get close to him by saying that she had danced. She was right in front of him, the possessor of a wonderful body without ever needing to dance. But what a goddess she’d have become if she’d received some training. A goddess, really, Fei thought childishly.

  He continued, “One of your parents must have been an artist. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have emerged as such—such a beauty. Beauty, do you understand?” She was clearly disturbed at his mention of her parents, but his compliments pleased her, particularly his use of the word “emerged,” which made her heart skip a beat. In her mind “emerged” formed an absolutely beautiful image, like a fresh, early sun rushing up out of the morning rays, a downy new chick pushing out of its egg, meeting the world innocently for the first time, or a lotus flower standing above the filthy mud, distinguished and free. And the images—touching and suggestive—was Fei truly worthy of them? She looked at the dancer and said nothing for some moments. She didn’t want to respond to his comment about her parents, nor did she want to discuss the idea of beauty.