All That Matters

by Wayson Choy

  I straightened up.

  “Kiam, do you like her?”

  I played along, half whispering my words, using Meiying’s English name.

  “Well … I guess May’s lovely to look at.”

  “Yes. Very. Mother tells me—” her tongue made a quick swipe and her bottom lip suddenly shone like the skin of a wet apple “—that Meiying’s been going over to your place a lot. Does she?”

  I thought of the slim figure standing in our doorway, asking me if Stepmother was home; the slim figure stepping into our house as Stepmother greeted her. Meiying’s silk scarves would flutter as the door closed behind her. She was always polite, polite enough to ignore me standing in front of her. But Stepmother’s firm manner of welcoming Meiying, quickly taking her raincoat from my hand, told me that their meeting was none of my business. Meiying had a flawless face, a face that turned heads like Jack’s and mine. But she was like one of those beautiful Hindu girls at King Edward, the three who stood together during the sock dance at lunchtime because no boy dared to approach them. Surely they belonged to a more exotic world than the roped-off gym, with the Glenn Miller record playing crazily over the static-plagued sound system. Surely they would laugh at us for thinking we had any chance at all to take their bracelet-jangling hands and waltz away. And you could tell they didn’t feel they belonged there, either. Meiying seemed like one of those lonely, distant girls to me.

  “May’s out of my league.”

  Jenny’s eyebrows lifted: “And I’m not?”

  “I mean that she’s a little stuck up.” Pride and Prejudice dropped from her fingers; an open-mouthed smile flashed back at me. I slouched down in my chair, pushed off my other shoe, and shifted both feet against hers. Jenny smiled.

  “May doesn’t say more than ten words to me. She only comes over to talk with Stepmother.”

  “About what?” Jenny’s shoeless feet rested nicely on top of mine.

  “A mystery,” I said. “Whenever I’m home early, they always disappear up the stairs.” I smirked a bit too soon. “You aren’t jealous, are you?”

  She ignored the question. “Since Meiying’s been back with Mrs. Lim this summer, have you noticed anything different about her?”

  I knew Meiying attended schools in Victoria, where she stayed with her mother’s old opera ladies. For years, she came home to Mrs. Lim’s only during the summer holidays. Third Uncle once saw her at one of Victoria’s Chinatown fundraisers; she was giving a short speech in Mandarin and in formal Cantonese. He told Poh-Poh, “Lim Meiying is someone to admire, even from the back of a hall.”

  “Like opera star,” said Poh-Poh, reminding him that Meiying’s mother was Mabel Lim, the actress who drank too much and ran away to Toronto with Tommy Fong, a big-time gambler who didn’t want any tag-along children.

  “Why do you think Meiying decided to go to Britannia for her final year?”

  I shrugged.

  “What do she and your Stepmother talk about?”

  “Told you, don’t know.”

  Jenny tapped her fingers on the table. No one at the other tables was paying any attention to us. If they had looked up to see our bent heads and tangled fingers, they might have assumed we were a couple.

  “Have you ever run into her when she’s come downstairs?”

  “Once.” A cartoon flashbulb went off in my head. “I smelled Three Flowers on her.”

  Jenny knew that I was a sucker for perfume. On recent double-dates to the Jazz Hut, whenever we danced together, Jenny’s trace of Chanel had me leaning in and breathing deeply against the nape of her neck.

  “Three Flowers perfume?”

  I nodded.

  “Honestly, Kiam, you know the name of May’s perfume!”

  “Stepmother uses Three Flowers. I walk May to the door sometimes and—”

  Now she seemed caught between being playful and being serious with me. She hesitated. “Should I be telling you anything at all?”

  Before I could answer, a binder-sized sketchbook came sliding down the long table. With a drawing pencil tucked behind his ear, Jeff Eng watched with satisfaction as the large pages fluttered shut at Jenny’s elbow.

  “Tell Kiam everything, Jenny.”

  Jeff slumped into the chair beside me. Whenever he could excuse himself from his father’s garage, Jeff would end up in the third-floor museum finishing painstaking drawings for his portfolio. Even after he changed his clothes, he smelled of grease or gasoline, but the staff didn’t seem to mind. A few of the librarians even asked to keep some of his drawings.

  “Tell Kiam everything you know about Meiying,” Jeff repeated.

  “Mind your own beeswax,” Jenny said, looking down at her notes.

  Jeff took in my feigned attempt to keep going with Austen. “Can you stand reading her, Kiam?”

  “Have to,” I said. “One more year to go.”

  “When they finally let us Chinatown boys fight this war, I’m joining up to make some real money.”

  “First,” Jenny said, without looking up from her book, “come back alive.”

  “Yeah … and after that. I’ll take painting and illustration at Central Tech.”

  Jeff flicked his sketchbook open. Jenny took one look at the open page and shrank away. I almost turned away, too.

  Staring up at us was the unravelled head of an Egyptian mummy. On one whole page, Jeff had drawn the decayed features of the mummy as if it were alive and raging against its shrivelled condition. The sockets were so expertly drawn, so sombre and darkly toned, that their deep emptiness seemed to stare at us with ghostly eyes. The mummy’s rags, cut away from the parched face, lay squirming on the page.

  “Looks like a case of bad laundry,” I said.

  Jeff frowned. “A die-hard Chinaman like you would know about laundry.”

  Jenny kicked. Jeff let out a mock yelp.

  “Are you going to let your girl kick your best friend like that?”

  “You’re on your own, pal,” I said.

  “Hey, why not kick our local honky? Jack came here with me.” He looked around. “He must still be down in the stacks. My sister and Martha are there too.”

  “Let me see the drawing,” Jen said. “Seriously.”

  Jeff obliged.

  Flashing through my mind was a picture of Jack and me at the Rex when we were just kids, how we almost pissed in our pants screaming “Watch out! Watch out!” as Karloff shuffled down the castle hall.

  “Someday,” Jeff said, “all three of us are going to look like that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But we’ll have better laundry.”

  A swift kick.

  “You behave,” Jenny said. “We won’t be doing laundry or waiting on tables if we get an education.”

  “Or if we join up,” Jeff said. “The government has to give us some kind of recognition. We’ll be able to work in good jobs like everyone else. And whatever my father thinks, I’ll still be an artist.”

  Everything would be solved, I thought, laughing to myself.

  “I’m going to see if I can find Martha and Susan,” Jenny said. “The library closes in less than an hour.”

  She had heard Jeff go on about his hopes for the future too many times. I should have left with her and let Jeff bleed over his drawing, but it wasn’t the time to leave him alone. Jeff had already come to blows with his father for spending his father’s money on art supplies instead of on the mechanic’s tools he was supposed to have bought for himself.

  For what seemed forever, I stared down at that drawing of his, listened to him commenting on shading and cross-hatching and how tricky it was to create the shadows in the eye sockets just so. I couldn’t sit still any longer.

  “I’m going downstairs,” I said. “Can you guard all this stuff for us?”

  “Definitely. Oh, if you want to say hello to Jack, you should try the morgue. You know where it is, don’t you?”

  “Morgue?”

  Jeff smirked. “That’s what they call the room wher
e they keep the dead newspapers and magazines. It’s way in the back, behind the two tallest shelves. You go down this deep ramp. There’s a big double door. Can’t miss it.”

  I just wanted Jenny to walk home with me. And, if he was ready, for Jack to walk with us, too.

  I found myself standing in a space between the tall shelves, at the far end of an enormous and mostly deserted basement, standing on a steep ramp and looking down through the slightly opened double doors. Beyond some more shelves, lit by an overhanging lamp in a crisscross of light and shadow, I could see him leaning against her, his big back facing me.

  The shelves surrounding them, standing at all angles, must have made them feel that no one could see them. Jack’s hand was under the familiar blouse. Jenny was squirming, kissing him, her hand rubbing the back of his head, and he was pushing hard, back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Jeff was still working intently on his drawing. I opened Pride and Prejudice and pretended to read. I would wait for her. I would wait. I wondered if she would walk up by herself. Or would they come back together? I would smile when she saw me, as if I had seen nothing. I would not say too much; I would not know too much.

  Jeff closed his sketchbook and started putting away his pencils.

  “Stop daydreaming, Kiam.”

  I looked up. Jenny was coming towards us.

  I gathered up my things.

  “We’ve got to go,” said Jenny and grabbed her books and my arm.

  As we stepped out of the building, the fresh air hit us. Jenny took a deep breath.

  “Let’s not talk,” she said.

  By the third week of September, the lingering warmth of summer was replaced by a layer of cold air that sank into the Lower Mainland and overnight silvered the city landscape. This was a record-breaking frost, arriving months before such conditions would have been expected. A sudden early snowfall had blanketed the highest peaks of the North Shore mountains, and people began to dress in their fall coats and jackets.

  The freak cold created inversions, so that fog and mists clung to the ground, and leaves, still green with summer, fell. On her high porch, two rickety staircases up, Mrs. Lim’s yellow roses dropped their petals and floated down to the street. Mrs. O’Connor’s garden began to fade. Leaves and petals swirled into tiny mounds against the curb and settled into the corners of our front porch. People were saying that the war must have changed the conditions in the upper atmosphere, the blast and heat of all those bombs altering the weather. No one could recall such an early cold.

  During that first day of frost, Poh-Poh stayed home with Sekky, who had been told once again he was not strong enough to start school. A new set of home-study readers and blank exercise books were sent over to our house, and Little Brother didn’t seem to mind too much. But the situation worried Father, who wondered aloud to Stepmother and me if the Old One was not having too much influence on Sekky.

  “Old ways,” said Father, “not Gold Mountain ways.”

  To add to his burden of concerns, Poh-Poh told Father that her time was near: the frost was the first of the signs that she had been expecting. It was time to complete her final windchime, the one she told Sekky she had longed to finish from the very beginning of their laneway adventures. She cautioned him that it would be the one that would be raised only after she had died.

  “Why?” Sekky had asked.

  “So my ghost can hear its music and come back to you.”

  Sekky later told me that this made perfect sense to him. And it made more sense when Poh-Poh whispered into his ear that this final, most glorious windchime was a Number One Secret, and that although he had been helping her with its construction all these months, helping her to slide the unwieldy parts under her bed, only she could finish it.

  Another sign appeared. A new janitor had lit the large furnace in the Chinese Presbyterian Church to warm up the building. In the middle of the night, hours after the man had gone home, the whole building burnt down.

  “How sad all beautiful windows lost,” big Mrs. Lim told Poh-Poh at the kitchen table while Sekky slurped up his morning bowl of jook. “How lucky church be empty.”

  Poh-Poh smiled at the news. Sekky smiled too.

  Right after Mrs. Lim left our house that morning, Sekky and Poh-Poh put on extra sweaters under their coats and went to scout the smoking site. They picked up fragments of half-faced men and angels, portions of raised hands in blessing, and eyes opened wide with bliss. Poh-Poh was ready to complete her work.

  I was in the locker room at school when six-foot Spencer Langley said he had spotted Sekky and Poh-Poh rummaging in the ruins, and he said in his show-off Latin that Grandmother was non compos mentis. I started sputtering some response when Jack rushed up from behind me, set to punch Spence out. I grabbed his shoulder and told him to lay off.

  “Just joking,” Spence said, backing off into the shower.

  “You okay?” Jack asked me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Thanks.” I grabbed my stuff, flashed my textbook at him, and walked away as if I were late for chemistry.

  When I sat down in the lab, my heart was still pounding. I had told myself not to remember. Jenny loved me, surely, as much as she could ever love someone like Jack. Everyone knew he could have a hundred or more girls. She must have known that he would betray her as easily as he betrayed all the girls he dated. Moira had been the fifth in a line.

  Across the aisle, seats were filling up. Mr. Ainsley put on his lab coat and started to take supplies from the storage cabinet.

  I tried to focus, but my mind would not rest: Jack was just a guy who might never settle down, who could never be faithful. He and Jenny had acted impulsively. Nothing had been planned between them. And if I believed that nothing had really changed between Jenny and me, if I remained steady and didn’t rock the boat, it would be the last time they would be alone together like that. What had happened would never happen again. I was the one who loved Jenny and would always be faithful. She knew that.

  “Mr. Chen?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “We’re waiting for you to open your textbook …”

  I told myself, when I calmed down, when I remembered how much Jack also meant to me, that I could still think of him as my best friend. He thought he was coming to my defence with Spence. I should drop over to his house, catch up on his news, and thank him. I opened my book.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get over to Jack’s that evening. Instead, Jenny came by to warn me that a couple had come to her store to buy some film. They’d asked her if she knew about this old Chinese lady and the little boy. What time might the two show up at the ruins?

  Just the night before, Father and Stepmother had asked me to speak to Sekky. When they’d left for work, I’d shaken my young brother awake.

  “Father told me to tell you to stay home and do your school work. Too dangerous out at the church. Don’t go there any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Poh-Poh or you could slip and fall. The frost makes everything icy.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Grandmama says she got everything she needed. I even found a piece of an angel’s wing for her.”

  I heard sighing. It was me.

  “Don’t do that,” Sekky said.

  “Do what?”

  “Sound like Father.”

  I did not protest. How could I not sound like Father? I was more Gold Mountain than Old China. Father appreciated that I, First Son, would do my duty to teach my siblings what was true and what mattered.

  “Don’t worry so much about Sekky and the Old One,” Jenny said. “When you think too much, you get so quiet. You scare me. Stop it.”

  “What’s wrong with thinking?”

  “Gets you nowhere.”

  A light kiss landed on my forehead as if I were as simple as my little brother.

  I pulled Jenny against me, felt how real she was, the smell and colour of her hair, the way her one leg moved between mine, the laughter in her
eyes, and the way she was smiling, the way my hand cushioned the back of her head and our foreheads bumped, her lips leaned towards my own, and her eyes reflected the lamplight, and all this realness made me want to hold her forever, exactly as I was, entangled and lost, silent and hard. Back and forth.

  The fall winds were harsh, and winter was coming. Father and Stepmother were worried that the Old One might leave the house for more treks through alleyways and ruins and endanger both her life and Sek-Lung’s. Father decided it was time to speak up.

  After the three youngest ones were in bed, Stepmother and I watched as Poh-Poh sat silently in her rocking chair while Father carefully explained the untenable situation to her.

  After a long pause, she said, “Yes, yes, I stay home. I wait for the last sign.”

  “Which sign?” I asked her as patiently as I could.

  “A sign that my friend the magician has come back for me.”

  “But—”

  “I have everything now,” the Old One said, gently cutting me off. “I have three grandsons. Good family. Plenty food. I rest and wait. I have long life already.”

  I saw Father take out his handkerchief. Stepmother took Poh-Poh’s arm, and they went upstairs.

  Father said to me, “First Son, the Old One is going to leave us very soon.” He stayed as calm as he could manage, and waited for my questions.

  I had none. Jenny and I had spoken about Poh-Poh’s leaving, about her death. I found myself resisting the thought.

  “Everyone dies, Kiam,” Jenny had said to me when I spoke of Poh-Poh’s shaking hands and slowed steps. “Everything ends.”

  “It can’t be that simple,” I said, though I felt she was right. “Things never are that simple.”

  “The other day,” Father said, “the Old One asked me how you and Jenny are doing. She say Jenny so much like herself.”

  “We’re okay,” I said.

  “I know she like you, Kiam-Kim.” For emphasis, Father tapped his glasses with his forefinger. “Her mother tell Poh-Poh Jenny think about you all night and all day. Just you.”

  A lie, I thought, and the painful truth of that assessment made me flinch. My silence gave me away.