But today, she was in the kitchen, ready for them. As they entered, she reached into her bag of supplies and threw the candy on the table dramatically. A rainbow of wrappers and foil sprayed across the scratched surface and bounced onto the floor. There was a moment of shock as the children registered what was happening. Then they erupted in cheers and applause. June kept her eyes down and turned red. It was a reaction she had often, and it grated on her grandmother. She wanted to yell at her, “Mo yung lui, you useless girl!” She stood there like she’d wet herself. She looked weak, this granddaughter of hers. Her blood. How could that be?
Poh Poh waited for the girl’s duplicity and the children’s greed to disgust her, but the next day, she found herself waiting for their clumsy footsteps to come through the front door. When she showed up with her bag, they cheered.
Every day this went on. Their simple happiness started a small, even glow inside her. She didn’t smile or speak, but it was there, a tiny light. During those afternoons, Poh Poh started picking up some English from them. They taught her the name of her favourite chocolate bar: Aero. The word sounded like arrow, a straight shooter, the brown boy, Nav, told her. She knew about those.
When they all talked at once, their babble sounded like chickens. She was happy not to understand them and their nonsense. The four of them were of different shades. It had amazed her when she first arrived that June had such a collection of friends. This country was as white as the January landscape until, she realized, you looked more closely. June’s best friend, Josie, was another Chinese girl from Hong Kong. Poh Poh wished June could be more like Josie. Josie always cleaned up the wrappers after their afternoon feasts of candy and thanked Poh Poh politely.
Darren was dark brown with hair that looked like a tangle of wire. He had a large laugh and beautiful cheeks. Nav, the brown boy with huge, gentle eyes, was her favourite. Nav had restraint, only accepting whatever Darren broke off his own bar to share, never grabbing, never noisy. She’d never seen a boy with such large eyes, large like a Japanese cartoon character, yet he kept them cast down, and he walked as if hesitating, trailing after the others, hanging on to their edges. She found herself noticing this child in a way she never noticed children. Something about him came to matter to her, made her feel like a cracked-open egg. Vulnerability in others annoyed her, but in this boy, it moved her where few things in her life did. The children were in Grade 8, but his body was still small, contained, not gangly like the rest of them. His face, his grace, they were delicate. He tilted his head like a bird to listen. He gazed at June’s heart-shaped earrings and pink socks with the same hunger the others had for the candy.
In him there was a secret of something both pleasurable and shameful. Poh Poh saw this.
In late fall, Poh Poh noticed that Nav’s hair had gotten longer. He had taken to wearing a blue baseball hat with a bird on it. When he took it off, it left his hair flatter and falling over his ears. He had developed a new gesture to flip it, even though it was still too short for flipping. Its shine was like a new table. She wanted to touch it, but she didn’t want her rough fingers to ruin its glassy surface. She thought back to her own hair when she was young, hair that had been known across the city. It fell like a bolt of silk down her back, never tangling even when the wind lifted it and swirled it around. When she was a girl, her mother wouldn’t allow her to cut it, telling her that she was lucky to be pretty.
One night in bed, shortly after getting married, her new husband had wrapped a finger around her hair and whispered that it was beautiful. In such a moment, her defences down, she had whispered back the contents of her raw heart: she hated it. She hated her hair. She wished she could shave it close to the scalp the way he did. Chu had been surprised, but he told her she should do what she wanted. She was an adult now and married. If he approved, no one could stop her. That was the moment when she knew she cared for Chu. He accepted her for who she was inside.
He was the one to do it, holding curtains of her hair in his hands as he cut, the strands falling around her. Afterward, he gathered the hair into a box and put it beneath their bed. Like Chu’s, her new hair was razor-cut at the sides and a little longer at the top, which she combed over with oil. People laughed and said she and Chu looked like brothers, and while Poh Poh was indifferent to their ridicule, Chu was caught off guard by the ugly attention.
All these years later, Poh Poh still didn’t know whether he’d been a naive romantic or just stupid. But he panicked, demanded she grow it back. It was the only time he ever ordered her to do anything. She refused. He stopped talking to her. She frequented the barbershop every two weeks, cutting it back closer and closer to the scalp each time. A wound was growing in her husband, and even though she didn’t care anymore what he thought, as a nod of concession, she started wearing wigs. They were ugly, synthetic things. Wasp nests on her head, coarse, like a tight hat of hay. She didn’t care if she looked terrible. She amassed a collection—short, long, straight, curly, in all different colours. Her customers at the dried goods store grew used to her strange ways. As long as her dried scallops were good, they kept coming. She knew the wigs embarrassed Chu. She wanted them to embarrass Chu. The small, precious fondness that had glowed in her for him had been doused. If he’d truly cared for her, Poh Poh thought, he would have stood by her.
Their daughter was only eight years old when Chu died. She stopped wearing the wigs, pressed her teeth together and ran their shop alone. She haggled harder with the fishermen, made them lower their prices on salted fish and give her better quality. Everyone knew that she had grown hard, but they trusted her hardness and gave her their money. Gradually, her staff stopped calling her Mrs. Chu and referred to her as Dailo—big brother, big boss.
Her wigs became like friends, if she understood anything about friendship. She’d named the wigs after her hero: John, Johnny, Wayne, Spaghetti. Of all her things, she’d been sure to bring these with her from Hong Kong, and there they sat, lined up neatly on their Styrofoam heads on her dresser. She spoke to them from time to time, but mostly, she stroked them like cats.
From the moment Chu had cut off her hair, she had never wanted it again, but only wished she had it now, all that lost hair, in the box where Chu had regretfully laid it to rest. She would have liked to pin the hair to Nav’s head, so he could borrow from its former beauty and have something to flip over his shoulder.
Poh Poh began to recognize strains of herself in Nav. It was much more gradual than that, this approaching the mirror, the skimming glances at the reflection until it was understood that the expression in his face was so like her own that she kept hidden.
If he was anything like her, she knew his waters were deep and chill, whereas his friends dallied in warm shallows. His friends wouldn’t notice him out so far because they wouldn’t even know such secret recesses existed. In the deep, there were weedy silences and places to hide.
Poh Poh often caught him looking furtively in her direction. A hidden recognition passed between them, and they continued this way, stealing peeks at each other. Whenever their eyes met, they both looked quickly away. It didn’t seem like it was anything, but it was.
One day that winter, Poh Poh was taking a nap and missed the kids coming in. Not seeing her with her candy, they tramped up to her room to get her. They crept in and instantly began cooing over the wigs. They laughed while trying them on, making funny faces in front of the mirror as Poh Poh sat up in her bed. At first, she was angry, until she saw Nav standing by the door, giggling at the others. Poh Poh got up and took the longest one and walked to the door to give it to him—the one she’d named Ringo after John Wayne’s character in Stagecoach. He took Ringo and went into the bathroom down the hall and shut the door, unnoticed by the three still posing in front of the mirror. After the kids got their candy and grew bored playing with the wigs, they retreated downstairs to settle in front of the TV, and Nav finally came out. Poh Poh was still sitting on her bed, waiting for him. The wig was much too big on hi
m, and the strands hung all over his face. He looked at her directly for once through the tangle of hair. He pulled it off, gently setting Ringo back on the Styrofoam head and offered her a shy smile before joining the others downstairs.
That day changed their pattern. Often, on frigid afternoons that winter, too cold to play outside, the other kids flopped on the rug in front of the TV while Nav snuck upstairs and visited Poh Poh in her room. They said little, but with hand gestures and her limited English, they managed. She introduced him to the wigs, and in time, he came to greet them by name. “Hello, Rooster!” he’d call to the one she’d named after John Wayne’s character in True Grit. Or, “How are you doing today, Duke?” But Nav’s favourite was Mae West, a curly red bob that Poh Poh used to wear at the store for Chinese New Year. It listed precariously on his little head, but the lurid colour looked surprisingly good on him, and it made his huge eyes glisten as he turned this way and that in her mirror. Poh Poh would put a hand over her mouth to hide her smile.
One day, while Nav was preening in front of the mirror and Poh Poh was on the bed, clucking her approval, June came bounding up the stairs and into Poh Poh’s room. The boy’s eyes went wide as he quickly whipped Mae West off his head. It flew into the air and landed on the pillow. June took a running jump, landing beside her grandmother on the bed, and quickly donned Johnny Number One, a long grey number that Poh Poh had picked up at the Temple Street night market in Hong Kong on a whim because she’d felt like haggling. June, making pathetic sad faces, looked like a wailing mourner hired for a funeral. Then she picked up Mae West and handed it back to Nav, saying something in rapid English. He put it on slowly, unsure. June gave him a thumbs-up.
Poh Poh thought that maybe June wasn’t as selfish as she had thought.
June started following Poh Poh around. She’d sidle up beside her in the kitchen, asking her grandmother to teach her how to cut the greens, how to fry an egg, how to steam a fish. Endless questions. She never shut up. Sometimes Poh Poh answered her, and sometimes she told her to go away. June would laugh, knowing when Poh Poh had reached her limit, and run out before her grandmother could swat her with a dishtowel.
June began to visit Poh Poh in her room at night, and they would eat dry roasted peanuts, cracking them between their teeth and throwing the shells in a bowl while June launched into monologues about a boy named Bruce in her mashed-up language of Cantonese and English. Poh Poh half-listened and never commented, and June didn’t seem to notice. Poh Poh wondered if June would be the kind of woman who only lived for love or whether she would smarten up and live for herself. As of now, though, it wasn’t looking good.
Mei would walk back and forth in the hall, pretending to get fresh towels or look for a bar of soap. Don’t worry, Poh Poh wanted to shout out through the closed door. I am not corrupting your daughter. Mei told her how happy she was that Poh Poh was spending time with June.
Since the candy stash was being shared among so many, it would often run low, so June started going to buy the sweets with Poh Poh. She taught her grandmother how to walk on the slick sidewalks. “See how the ice hides?” June rubbed the tip of her boot against the snow and revealed the shiny ice beneath. “You think you are stepping on snow, and by the time you realize it’s ice, it’s too late.”
With an arm on June, Poh Poh learned to walk lightly, keeping even weight on both her legs and always brushing the snow with the toe of her boot to see if it was obscuring a patch of ice. June, on the other hand, revelled in the slippery walks and wore down the treads of her boots until they were smooth and perfect for taking a running start and sliding across the sheets of ice.
“Watch this, Poh Poh!” Away she would sail with her arms held wide, smooth as a ship leaving the harbour. Poh Poh was impressed that such elegance could come from such a wild thing.
Poh Poh told June about her store in Hong Kong and all the things she had sold there—the best grade shiitake mushrooms, tiny dried shrimps, flattened scallops, large oysters the size of her palm, and abalone that made soup sweet. Nothing like the crap they sold in the Chinatown downtown. She told her about her regular customers, like the cheap Mrs. Chow with her flashy jewellery and the too-tight cheongsams, who always tried to haggle her down past reason. Even thinking of her made Poh Poh’s face twitch. “Remember that, June. Only haggle if you don’t think it’s worth it. Know the worth! That’s the most important thing!”
“But how will I know?”
“First, you have to find out what quality is, June. You will know when you see it. Then, no one can ever cheat you! You have to know a thing’s worth.”
One afternoon in the spring when Poh Poh was expecting the children, she heard the slam of the door and June’s footsteps as she ran up the stairs. Instead of stopping to see Poh Poh, June dashed into her own bedroom and slammed the door. Poh Poh got up from the bed and went to see her. June was lying on her bed with her shoes still on and her head smashed into the pillow. Poh Poh poked at her back to see if the child was sick. “June-ah. June.”
June turned around. Her eyes were red from crying.
“What happened?” Poh Poh asked. The girl was crying hard now, fat tears rolling down her face. Poh Poh repeated the question, this time louder, slower. “What happened, June?”
“Poh Poh,” she started. Her voice was hoarse and she gulped for air. “I don’t know what happened. Nav came to school with his sister’s sunglasses on. They were red and the lenses were shaped like hearts. Some of the kids said he looked like a girl.” She stuttered on her words, searching for the Cantonese ones, falling back on the English ones. She paused to take a breath, but Poh Poh felt fury rising in her throat and shook her as if to get a faulty toy to keep working.
“At first, he laughed too, so I laughed. It was funny, and we were just playing, but then more kids came and started calling him a girl. Then they said ‘fag.’ They said Nav was a fag. They were in a circle and kept saying it. ‘Fag. Fag. Fag!’” June was sobbing now. Poh Poh didn’t know this word, but by the way June repeated it, she understood the violence in that short word.
“Then they started kicking him. There were too many of them. Older kids we didn’t even know. I didn’t know what to do. Darren and Josie yelled at them to go away, but they called them names too. They pushed Darren and Josie out of the way and started punching Nav until he fell down. I saw blood. I don’t know whose it was.”
A cold sweat broke out over Poh Poh’s skin.
“Finally, Nav got up and ran. The kids laughed and stood around a minute, then left. I didn’t know what to do.”
The sight of her granddaughter weeping on the bed, impotence streaming down her blotchy face, filled her with rage. How did she ever get such a weak grandchild? So stupid and self-absorbed. Poh Poh wanted to hit her, stop the horror that flowed out of her. She raised her hand to June, but then she saw the look in June’s eyes as she raised her arms to shield herself. The child had never been hit, but she knew enough to cower.
Poh Poh saw something else too. It was the same confusion that had been in Mei’s eyes all those years ago when Poh Poh couldn’t hold back her anger and slapped her. June had never had to feel that, and her grandmother could see her young mind working hard to understand. Must one body strike against another to create fire? To what end did the world need to burn?
Poh Poh grabbed June, held her tightly and was surprised to feel her own face wet. Later, Poh Poh asked herself what she had been crying for. For a child battered by other children in the history of a world of beat-up children? Yes, that was what it was. It was enough reason.
The next morning, before the sun rose, Poh Poh softly rapped at June’s bedroom door. “Wake up. We have something to do today before school starts.” She didn’t wait for questions, and June didn’t ask any. Poh Poh waited outside while her granddaughter dressed.
They started down the street as the first rays of sun lit the sky, casting the street in an apricot glow. Birds were greeting each other from their hiding place
s. The world was otherwise still, not yet full of voices and cars. Poh Poh looked around. It was beautiful, peaceful like Mei had said. June took her hand while Poh Poh carried a white plastic bag in her other.
Down the street, they arrived at a tidy brick bungalow. Instead of going up the front walk, June tiptoed through the matted grass to the side of the house. Poh Poh followed. June stopped at the second window and crooked her finger for Poh Poh to come forward and look. There, in his bed beneath the window, was Naveen, cocooned in his blanket.
“Nav, Nav,” June whispered, and lightly tapped on the window with her knuckle. She did it again a few more times until he turned and looked up at them.
“It’s us, me and Poh Poh. We have something for you.” She smiled.
Poh Poh admired June’s smile. It was lovely, very pretty. It had her heart in it.
Nav crawled out of his bed and came to greet them at the window. Poh Poh was not prepared for what she saw when his face turned toward them. The light from the sunrise fell on him like a veil, revealing the purple bruises around both of his eyes. His nose was swollen into a bulb. Dried blood was crusted around his lips. He opened the window with some difficulty. Poh Poh handed June the bag to give to Nav. She knew June had already guessed what was in it.
“Here.” June pushed the bag over the windowsill.
Nav took the bag and put one hand into it. He smiled, recognizing the feel of the object with his fingers. He slowly pulled it out, and Mae West, in all her coppery beauty, lay in his hand like a promise.
Rain
The year that began with Rainey McPhee deciding whether she would live or die, Rainey’s mom moved them to Scarborough, which may or may not have had anything to do with Rainey’s decision or its outcome.
That Time I Loved You Page 12