by Lisa Ko
“Why, what’s tonight?”
“For dinner. I was thinking pork dumplings. You like steamed or fried? Steamed is easier, right? But Leon loves fried, of course. Which do you make for him?”
“Neither. I have to work late, but I usually bring home takeout for Deming, so you don’t have to worry about cooking him dinner.”
“There’s plenty of food. Plenty for your son.”
“Get Leon to cook. He’s doesn’t have to go to work until after dinner.”
“Cook? Leon?” Vivian laughed so hard she started to hiccup.
She expected that I would cook, even if I had to go to work, that women just loved spending their free time standing in a hot kitchen mincing meat and vegetables, spoiling grown men as if they were children. But I didn’t want to cause conflict. I wanted a sister. So Vivian and I cooked, after we finished our jobs.
She and Leon kept the apartment stocked with the soda you loved. One night, you and Michael sat on the couch with Leon, sucking down Cokes and seeing who could burp louder.
“That’s enough, Deming,” I said. “Stop it.”
“Oh, they’re boys,” Vivian said.
As if he was proving Vivian right, Leon chimed in with a belch of his own. You burped again, and Michael stifled a giggle.
“Deming! Stop that!”
“But Auntie Vivian says it’s fine.”
“Well, I’m your mama and you have to listen to me.”
You stuck your tongue out. A fizzy rage seeped through me like a poisonous gas. I was due back at the salon in the morning, it took almost an hour to get to Harlem on the bus and subway, and I’d already worked seven hours and stopped at the bodega to get food on my way home, where the owner, a nice man from South America, gave me discounts. There were dirty dishes in the sink, laundry to do, and you and Leon were burping while Vivian was trying not to laugh. You were all trying not to laugh at me. “I said, stop it! And you—” I pointed to Leon. “You’re no better than a child.”
Vivian and Leon exchanged a look. Mortified at how you refused to obey me, I ladled out the soup Vivian and I had made. You and Michael balanced your bowls on your laps. “Thank you,” Michael said, looking at Vivian and then at me, as if he was waiting for permission to eat. His eyes were large and watery, and I realized he was afraid of me.
DIDI AND I WERE in the alley behind Hello Gorgeous, splitting a cigarette on our break. A pigeon circled the trash cans.
“I’ve been leaving hints for Quan,” she said. “The other day, I showed him a picture of an engagement ring in a magazine.”
“What did he say?”
“He just nodded.” She shook her head. “Do you think I’m wasting my time?”
I didn’t mention that Leon had suggested marriage. “If he doesn’t want to marry you, then he’s a fool,” I told her. “You could find a better man, someone who will.”
Her face relaxed. “I know. And you could, too, Polly.”
I did know that, though I didn’t tell Didi how I daydreamed about men with money and papers. I’d hear our neighbor Tommie talking about visiting family in the Dominican Republic and wished I could travel like that. Living with Leon and Vivian, I found myself slipping back into a village accent, but envied how easily they could talk to one another, how Vivian bought Michael books and DVDs when she made even less than I did, and I worried I would never get better at English and you would grow up to be a meat cutter. There were other cities out there with other opportunities. Riding the bus downtown, I’d think: I could keep riding. I could never get off.
“Ignore Vivian,” Didi said. “Ignore Leon’s nonsense. Act like a woman who likes to eat dried squid out of the bag for dinner. The world’s not made of magic.”
“I like dried squid,” I said, passing the cigarette to Didi.
“All right, squid breath.”
“And I never said the world was made of magic.”
“It’s an expression.”
“I’ve never heard that expression before.”
Didi passed the cigarette back, green eye shadow glimmering. “That’s because I made it up. Don’t worry so much, okay? Either stay with Leon or move on.”
“You, too,” I told her. “Don’t worry so much.”
I linked my arm in Didi’s. It was good to have a friend.
VIVIAN WAS THE OLDEST of Leon’s three siblings. “She was the first to come to America,” Leon said, “then she married that cocksucker who ran off on her. Had another woman on the side. Now she needs us to help pay the rent. But inside she’s a soft woman, like you.”
“I’m not a soft woman.” Then I wondered if Leon had asked me to move in with him only to help Vivian with the rent.
“Yes, you are.” He rubbed the knobs at the top of my spine. “Your boobs are soft. Your ass.” I grabbed his waist and he pushed me onto the bed, kissing my neck, my earlobes, my shoulders.
He bought me gifts, an itchy yellow sweater covered in yarn balls that resembled pimples, a stuffed unicorn, a plastic kitten to hang from the antenna of my cell phone. When he presented them to me the hopeful look on his face reminded me of you, gifting me pictures you’d drawn at school, lopsided scratches in jiggly colors. I kissed and thanked him. Leon bought gifts for you, too, a softball, a big leather mitt for catching. The three of us walked to the park on a summer Saturday, and I watched him throw you the ball. When you missed, he was encouraging. “Good try!” Then he’d toss it again. When you caught it the two of you would leap up and down, like you had won an Olympic medal. Leon let you high-five him again and again.
“Come play, Mama,” you shouted.
“Polly, join us,” Leon said.
I got up and watched, my son and my man, your comfort with one another, your laughter. All that I had once wanted, this big life, my exciting life, seeing the places in Liling’s old textbook, the promises I had made to myself when I called the lady with the mustache, were in danger of drying up. Or had they been a young girl’s fantasies? I walked with Qing and Xuan outside the factory. I stepped into the Atlantic Ocean and decided to have a baby. Maybe it wasn’t about moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.
Leon tossed the ball. You caught it and lobbed it back. How did I get here? A flock of birds flapped over the trees, but the sun was shining so hard, it hurt to see.
SECOND GRADE TURNED INTO third grade, third grade into fourth, and your English grew from timid to fluent, you and Michael learning how to keep secrets from Vivian and me. At P.S. 33, the kids were Cambodian, Mexican, Filipino, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Vietnamese, Guyanese, Dominican, Haitian, Ecuadorian. They were all from other places, or at least their parents were.
Michael was skinny on the bottom but wider up top, shaped like a bobble-headed toy, with an array of similarly undersized friends who also became your friends, Hung and Sopheap and Elroy. The year you were in fourth grade, you and Michael talked about something called Power Rangers as if they were actual people in the neighborhood.
“Who is this Timmy? A kid from school?”
You and Michael writhed on the couch, slapping your thighs, clapping your hands. “Tommy, not Timmy! He’s not a kid. He’s the Black Dino Ranger.”
“Black . . . die?”
“What?” Vivian said. “Who’s dying?”
You and Michael shrieked. “Dino, not die! Dino, dino, dino!”
When I watched you and Michael play catch in the park, I was proud because you could throw the ball harder, faster. Still, while you were stronger and more fearless, Michael was the A-student, and you were bad at school, like I’d been—I could memorize lyrics to pop songs and figure out the precise mix of colors to make a certain shade, but never the multiplication table—and neither Leon nor Vivian were scholars, which made Michael’s grades a fluke, random enough it might as well be you who was the good student, you the one who said things like “when I go to college.” I knew it was unfair to compare you two when Michael had never lived anywhere except New York, but when he chose
to read a library book as you sat in front of the television—and yes, I was likely right there next to you—watching a rerun of a rerun you’d already seen four times, claiming to have lost your homework yet again, I felt exposed for my own lack of interest in books, unless they were the books on art and painting Coco brought to the salon; those I liked to read. You’d been slow to learn English. Your sweat had a cabbage-y odor that I was convinced was Haifeng’s genetic bequest. You always took the biggest piece of candy, gorging yourself before others took a bite, banged chicken wings on your plate and pretended you were playing the drums. Chunky and padded from the food you ate, your shirts rode up around your waist, and you teetered on fat, outgrowing new pants overnight. As if I had money to buy new clothes all the time! I worried it was my fault when you acted impolite or selfish, that it reflected a deficiency in myself.
Hana had left Hello Gorgeous to run a dry cleaning business with her husband and brother, but I remembered how her two children were going to high schools in the city, ones they had to pass a test to get into.
“You’re too hard on him,” Leon said. “He’s not doing so bad.”
I had been in New York for ten years and often reminisced about those early months on Rutgers Street, a time so desultory I would wake up in my sleeping bag each morning startled by where I was and what I had done. Back then, the passing of each day had felt inconsolable, as if there would be no end to the uncertainty—the baby, the job, the debt—but I revisited that first year in New York more than any other time in my history, loved to flip it around, marveling at my youth, how scary and exciting it had been, how so much had changed since then. Even the time I took you to the factory seemed safe enough to remember, though I always backed off when I pictured what things would have been like if I hadn’t returned to the bench where I had left you.
There was this one Sunday, about a year before we were separated again, that we rode the subway to a point you picked out on the map. It had been a long time since we had done this. We ended up downtown, at the tip of Manhattan, walking on a winding pathway that overlooked the water. I missed it, the water.
“We used to come to this park when you were a baby.”
“I don’t remember,” you said.
You were looking more like me, the same eyes and mouth and nose, the broad shoulders and bony legs, though when I saw your face in profile, I’d see how much you could also resemble Haifeng with the point of your chin and your bushy eyebrows. Then you would turn another way and look like me again.
We sat on a bench and put our feet up on the railing. The water sparkled. I pointed into the distance, to a large boat moving away from the city.
“I have a new nickname at school,” you said. “Number Two Special.”
“What does that mean?” I felt self-conscious, like when I took you and Michael to that carnival and you made fun of me when I mistook the English word octopus, the name of a ride that spun you around in circles, for lion.
“It’s a joke. You know, from a Chinese takeout menu? That’s how they order the dishes. Number one special, number two special. Get it?”
I watched the boat until it became a white speck, fading into the skyline. “You don’t work in a takeout restaurant.”
“Yeah, but I’m Chinese.”
“You better tell them not to call you that.”
“It’s a joke, Mama.”
I TOOK OUT ANOTHER loan to cover fees for nail art training. Intricate designs became my specialty. I could draw palm trees, diamonds, and checkerboard patterns, even a recognizable depiction of a person’s face on a thumbnail, though I didn’t know why people wanted that. On a good week, I made more in tips alone than I had earned working at the factory. Rocky called me a customer favorite, and everyone said I had a steady hand, an eye for the best color combinations.
I was gratified when I heard Rocky’s laugh, several soft puffs out her nostrils, but when her voice was strained, her face worried, I pushed myself to learn more new designs and act extra nice to the customers, not only for tips, but because I recalled the story of the woman who had gone on to manage her own salon. Once, I overheard Rocky saying to a friend in her office: “I bet Polly could run this place as well as I could.” Didi said Rocky had been talking on the phone about taking out loans and speculated she might be opening another salon. A new salon would need a new manager, and if Rocky hired me to be one, she might also sponsor me for a green card.
The nail techs gossiped about Rocky when she was out. “She lives in a mansion on Long Island,” said Joey. “Her husband runs an import-export business for fruit.”
“Her husband doesn’t work. He stays home and takes care of the house and cleans,” Didi said. “He takes care of their son and drives her around, too. Haven’t you seen him pick her up from work?”
“I heard she married him because they were in love, but he was illegal and about to get busted by Immigration,” Coco said. “They were going to throw him in one of those immigration jails.”
“What immigration jail? I thought her husband was Chinese mafia,” I said.
Joey snickered. “Mafia would explain a lot about her personality.”
On a slow Tuesday morning, I sat on one of the pedicure chairs and flipped through a magazine.
“You’re here until two, right?” Rocky stood in front of me holding a ring of car keys, eyeliner on her right eye, but not her left. “I have to run home for a minute because I forgot something. Come with me?”
It turned out Rocky didn’t live on Long Island, but in northeastern Queens, which was almost in Long Island. The drive took half an hour, over highways and bridges, and she talked about her bad ankles and high blood pressure. “Getting older is a bitch, Polly, you know that?”
“You’re not old,” I said. She was probably ten years older than me, in her forties.
“You’re so good to me. But seriously. High blood pressure! I’m going to have to give up coffee, red meat, fried foods, you name it. Take pills. And I’m forgetting things right and left. I have these forms I was supposed to bring in today and I left them at home. I even wrote myself a note to remember.”
Rocky’s house was at the end of a block of similar-looking houses, with two stories and a front yard and an attached garage. The outside was brown brick, with a dark red roof, a low gate separating the yard from the sidewalk. It wasn’t a mansion; the new houses in Minjiang were far bigger. But it was a real nice house. I followed her into an entranceway with a full-length mirror on the wall and into a living room with a nice leather couch and two tall windows. There was an electronic keyboard in the corner with paper piled on top, and a school picture of Rocky’s teenage son, whose smile exposed a mouth full of plastic braces.
“You want water?” She gave me a plastic bottle of Poland Spring from a cardboard box. “Take a seat on the couch. I have to run upstairs to find this form.”
I sat, but as soon as I heard her walking on the floor above me, I got up. Down a short hallway was the kitchen, which had a dishwasher and a microwave, boxes of cereal and bags of chips on a round table. The sink was full of dishes, and the counter stained with dried sauce and crumbs. On the other side of the kitchen was a small room. I heard voices, the sound of a motor revving.
It was the television. I leaned closer to the open door and saw a man in a reclining chair, dressed in striped pajama pants, slippers, and a baggy white undershirt. One hand gripped the remote control, the other rooted inside a bag of Cheetos. He crunched in a mechanical motion and sighed, content.
Rocky’s husband was home in the middle of the day, eating Cheetos and watching action movies in his pajamas. He didn’t look like the owner of an import-export business, or even a househusband who cooked and cleaned.
“What does your husband do again?” I asked Rocky on the drive back to the salon.
“Oh, he’s in between jobs right now, so he spends too much time at home. Let me tell you, I’m glad I have this salon. Speaking of which, I wanted to talk to you. Where yo
u live, in the Bronx, are there a lot of nail places?”
“A few,” I said. “Smaller places. I’ve never been to any of them.”
“Are they nice?”
“They aren’t trying to be spas.”
“Is your neighborhood near Van Cortlandt Park? Riverdale?”
“No, those are north of where I live.”
“I’m going there later today.” Rocky turned onto the highway. “There’s a space for lease in Riverdale and I think there’s a market in the Bronx, especially in those higher-end neighborhoods. Lots of people with money who don’t mind paying for a clean nail space.”
We got to the bridge entrance and Rocky slowed down at the toll. The E-ZPass sensor clicked to green. I took a breath and counted from one to ten. “If you do open another salon,” I said, “and you are looking for a manager, I would be good at it.” I tried to catch a glimpse of Rocky’s profile without looking directly at her, and thought I saw her nod.
She looked over her shoulder as she changed lanes. “Yes, I’ll let you know, of course.”
I took you and Leon out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant, the room cheery with red and yellow streamers, and told you it was too premature to say for sure, but there was a good chance I might get promoted to become the manager of my own salon. A man fed a dollar into the jukebox and a raucous chorus of trumpets kicked up. You kicked your legs under the table and I didn’t tell you to stop.
LATER THAT SUMMER, DIDI and Quan got married. Quan had proposed after winning big one night in Atlantic City, kneeling on the carpet of the casino hotel and presenting a diamond ring. I stood with them before the judge at City Hall, sat next to Leon at a restaurant table, clapping as the newlyweds posed for photos. Didi applied extra coats of fuchsia lipstick. Quan’s spiky hair fell over his eyebrows.
One of the other women at our table said I should inquire how much the meal cost in case I wanted to have my wedding here, too. I didn’t. Didi was marrying a man who gambled his paycheck away. Sure, she loved him, but even Leon agreed she was getting the shit end of the deal.
Meanwhile Leon’s back was giving him trouble. At work, his pay remained the same, though he’d been there longer than most of the other men. “You’ve got to ask for a raise,” I said, but there was always another excuse. His boss was in a bad mood. His boss quit and he got a new one. That boss was out that day. Then he was in pain and couldn’t get out of bed, so he missed three days of work, not to mention pay. Vivian and I kept telling him to see a doctor before his back got worse, but he refused, said we were overreacting, he was fine with ice packs and Tylenol.