by Lisa Ko
Morning. The sun was straining through the curtains, and Leon was on the bed.
“Little Star,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I rubbed my eyes, the hotel room coming into focus. It was so quiet. How strange it was to wake up without you nearby. “What time is it?”
“First I won so much, you wouldn’t believe it. Five thousand dollars!”
“Five thousand?”
“I should’ve stopped then.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Okay. I should tell you. I used your money, too.”
“What money?”
“The three hundred and eighty in your wallet. I came back to the room, but you were asleep, and I was on a roll. ”
“That money’s supposed to go to the loan shark.”
“I got greedy. Thought for sure I’d win it back.”
My eyeballs felt like they were swimming in paste. “How could you do that?”
“I’m sorry. It was wrong of me.” He lay down and his face curled. “My shoulder.”
“You can’t do your shift tomorrow.”
“Who’s going to pay rent? The salon treats you like shit.”
“Then who told you to lose my money?” I threw a pillow against the wall and watched it slump onto the carpet. All the fingernails I clipped and sanded, the hours of gluing on rhinestones with tweezers and drawing palm trees and hearts until my wrists ached, to make that three hundred and eighty dollars.
“How could you think we could win money for free?” I said. “Nothing is free.”
WE SLEPT ON THE bus ride back to the city. We unpacked our bags. We went to work.
“Look,” Joey whispered to me from across the manicure table.
I saw one of the new girls spreading wax on another girl’s arms. She ripped it off. The second girl yelped.
Coco had quit. She simply didn’t show up for her shifts. When I finally got her on the phone, she said, “It’s good to do something else.”
Rocky was no longer in the office every day, and whenever I tried to talk to her, she would say she was in a rush, she was out the door, she had to make a phone call. Michelle, a cousin of Rocky’s, seemed to be taking over as manager. To replace Coco, Michelle hired four new girls, which meant our hours were capped. Like Rocky and Michelle, these new girls were Vietnamese Chinese, sullen-faced younger girls who arrived and left together in a van driven by a man with bronze highlights in his hair. The receptionist made no efforts to hide her distaste for them, not bothering to even address them by name.
“Hair removal,” Didi said. “Next they’re going to try Brazilians. Be glad you don’t have to rip off crotch hair.”
“For now,” Joey said.
Four nights after Atlantic City, I told Leon I heard of a good job that wasn’t in New York. “It’s the only Chinese restaurant in town and they want a waitress. Joey told me about it. That Hunanese girl at the salon. She’s from the same village as the restaurant owners. You know how rare it is to find a good waitressing job.”
Leon stood, naked and dripping, in the bathtub after his shower. “Okay.”
I gave him a towel. “So, let’s go.”
He dried his hair off. “Go where?”
The steam was soothing on my face. “Florida. Are you even listening to me?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“It’s a good job. Great money.”
He removed the towel. A drop of water fell onto his shoulder. “It was only a couple hundred dollars.”
“Three hundred eighty dollars of my money. Which you stole from me without my permission. No big deal to you, I guess.”
“Of course it’s a big deal to me. I screwed up. Said sorry. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to go to waijiu. We can make up that money fast.”
Beyond the cities was waijiu, the outside, America’s backwards villages. Everything that wasn’t New York. I bent closer to Leon and inhaled his soapy smell. “Florida has cities, it’s not all waijiu. Come on, you know that new manager is about to can my ass. I can make more in a month waitressing than I would in a year back home.”
“You’re just going to leave Deming? And me?”
I watched him step into his boxer shorts and thought of Qing, the boardwalk, the fat stars over the ocean. “Of course you’ll come. We can have a big house, all three of us. With a restaurant job, you eat for free. Joey said they might need men in the kitchen, too.”
“Yeah. Dishwashers.”
“Nothing wrong with dishwashing.”
“If it’s such a great job, why doesn’t this Joey go do it herself?”
He opened the bathroom door, releasing clouds of steam. On our bed, he stretched out and whispered. “It’s not safe. Look at that man in the Chinese papers. Robbed and killed delivering food. Lost his life for fifteen bucks.”
“Well, that wasn’t at a restaurant, and it’s always dangerous going into strangers’ homes.”
“Look at the one who was shot at the takeout spot. Through bulletproof plastic!”
“That won’t happen. Waitressing is safe.” I picked a pair of your pants off the floor. “Listen, I want to go. It’s time to try something different. Don’t you think?”
“I think it’s time for me to go to sleep. Forget about Florida, I’ll make the money back for you next month.”
“Leon.”
“If you want money so bad, find a rich guy with papers who doesn’t have to take care of his sister, too.”
“Stop it.”
It wasn’t about the money. I could do better than Hello Gorgeous. Leon could do better than the slaughterhouse. You needed to go to a school where you weren’t called Number Two Special.
I floated the idea to Didi. She socked me in the arm. “Waijiu? Are you crazy? You might as well take the subway to the moon.”
We were standing in the same damn alley, smoking cigarettes like we’d been doing for years, facing the same brick wall of the same building. Didi’s plan was to move to another salon downtown, and when her English got even better, get a job that didn’t involve painting nails. “I don’t understand why you won’t come with me to the other salon,” she said, addressing the bricks. “She wants to go to Florida but she won’t go to Thirteenth Street.”
“I told you I don’t want to.”
“Rocky’s never giving you that manager job. She’s stringing all of us along, even if we’ve been working for longer. They’re going to cut our hours down to nothing and keep these new girls on for cheap. Michelle’s taking over and Rocky will manage the Riverdale salon herself. If you don’t leave, they’ll make you leave.”
She was right, but it hurt to hear. A police car drove down the street, sirens wailing, and I was agitated and weary at the same time. “Don’t you get tired of being in New York?”
“Not really. Things are good now.”
This was true, at least for her. When Quan was going to Atlantic City regularly, sometimes I’d reassure myself: at least I’m not Didi. But since Quan had quit gambling, Didi had the money to go to English classes instead of fronting him rent, and now she was trying to convince him to have a baby. And you couldn’t try to sponsor me for a green card until you turned twenty-one, but after Didi got married, she’d applied for papers. Soon she would be legal and could work anywhere.
“You have a place with your man and your son, and you want to give it all up.”
“I just think this isn’t the best I can do. And they’ll come with me.”
“But you know what it’s like here. Anything can happen in Florida.” Didi looked at her cell phone. “We should go in before Michelle breathes her dragon breath on us.”
“Right, anything can happen. That’s the exciting part.”
“You’re angry about Leon and the money, but it’s nothing.”
“It’s not about the money. You and Quan should come, too.”
“Stay in New York. Get married, have a baby.”
I saw how much Didi would miss me if I left. I would mi
ss her, too, though I already missed her, the way we had been when we only had each other, believing that being the oldest residents at the boardinghouse was a thing to be proud of, when the ambiguity of our lives was terrifying and enthralling, when each new day was equal parts fear and opportunity. My solitary walks through Central Park, the streets so new I could still get lost easily. Riding the subway and watching the lights of the city rear up in front of me, wondering if this would be the closest I would get to love.
IT SNOWED, AGAIN, HEAPING inches of slush, and none of us could remember what it was like to be hot enough to need a fan. Leon cleared a path down the front steps of our building with his boots. “Florida sounds nice right now, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Will you stop with that? I told you, I’ll pay you back.”
“You don’t think I’m serious.”
“I have to go to work. I’ll see you later.”
“Can you say that you’ll consider it, think about it a little bit?”
“Okay, okay,” he said as he walked away.
I went upstairs and called the restaurant in Florida. I told the manager that I knew Joey and was interested in the job, answered questions about how long I’d been in America, said a few English phrases. The manager explained that the restaurant was in a small town called Star Hill, an hour outside of a city called Orlando. “Don’t wait too long,” she said. “We need a waitress soon.”
I said I’d call again, in a day or two, after I bought tickets for a bus from New York.
My Wednesday shift had been shortened, so later that day I was able to meet you when you got out of school. The building seemed like it was always under construction, metal scaffolding attached to its sides for as long as you’d gone there, and the few times I had been inside, I had been struck by the stale, mildewy marinade of sweat, glue, and floor cleaner. It wasn’t safe for children to go to school in a construction zone.
“I’m not going,” you said, when I told you about Florida.
“Deming, I’m your mother. You have to go with me.”
“You weren’t with me when I was in China.”
“Yi Gong was with you. I was working so I could save enough money to have you here. It’s different now.”
“Different how?”
“You’ll love Florida, too. You’ll have a big house and your own room.”
“I don’t want my own room. I want Michael there.”
“You’ve moved before. It wasn’t so hard, was it?”
You answered in English. “I’m not going! Leave me alone!”
I knew the proper words to respond, but didn’t say them, didn’t want to give you the power of making me switch languages, to talk only on your terms. A dense heat rose in my face and arms, like I was fighting against being shoved into a bag.
We were outside the bodega. I saw Mrs. Johnson from our building watching us. Your face was wrinkled and hurt, so I hugged you, hard, and you squeezed out of my arms and ran ahead of me, arms sticking out the wrist holes of your coat. Deming, I loved you so much. I made a note to buy you a new shirt. We wouldn’t need coats in Florida.
That night, I stayed up as you slept, waited for Leon to get home from work. You asserted yourself even while unconscious, flopping on your side, while Michael slept on his back with his arms and legs straight. I hadn’t been that much older when I had left home. It was good for a child to experience new things, learn how to be brave and independent. Like when you had fallen off a swing. It was scary, but I was proud of you for being strong. I wasn’t going to baby you. I wanted you to be smart, self-sufficient; to never be caught off guard.
When you were a baby, small enough to fit on top of a pillow, I couldn’t bear to be away from you, craved my skin against your skin. The city had seemed too harsh and loud for a child, and I wanted to protect you from the outside, ensure you’d be safe. I still did. I wanted to give you the chances I hadn’t taken for myself. Show you that you didn’t have to settle, stay put.
Streaks of light appeared in the sky. I drifted in and out of sleep and woke to Leon’s weight next to me. I curled into his shoulder, pressed myself against him, and he patted my back. “Go back to sleep. It’s late.”
“If we were both working at the restaurant, we’d go to sleep together every night, wake up together every morning.”
“Mm,” he said.
“Don’t you want to go with me?”
“I can’t leave my sister. She’s my family.”
“Vivian and Michael can come with us.”
“She doesn’t want to leave New York.”
“How do you know? Maybe she does and you don’t know it.”
“She called me today. Thought I was leaving without telling her. I didn’t know what she was talking about.”
“I don’t either.”
“You told Deming we were moving to Florida. I didn’t agree to that. And he told Michael, of course, and Michael got scared and told Vivian, and she called me. She was so upset.”
“I didn’t tell Deming we were moving.”
He pressed his finger to my lips. “Be quiet. You’ll wake the boys.”
I pushed his hand away. “You be quiet.”
“You want to take your son away from here, but what about what he wants?”
“Deming is a child, he doesn’t get to decide.”
Leon snorted. “A mother is supposed to sacrifice for her son, not the other way around.”
“You better take that back.” This man I had slept next to for years, this man I was supposed to marry—he’d never known me. “Take that back right now.”
A mother was supposed to lay down and die for her children, and Leon got to be called Yi Ba because he watched TV with you several afternoons a week. If he bought you a cheap toy, Vivian would crow, “How thoughtful!” and when he took you to the park the neighbors complimented him for being such a good daddy. But no one called me a good mama when I did those things. And now Leon was blaming me for wanting a better life?
I smacked the bed, hard, with the edge of my hand. “You think I don’t love my son? Go fuck yourself.”
You grunted in your sleep. Leon pulled me up and led me out of the bedroom.
We sat at the kitchen table in the dark and whispered as Vivian slept on the couch.
“You’ve never liked her, have you,” he said.
“Vivian? Of course I do. She’s my sister.”
“You wanted her to accept you without question.”
“Is that so wrong?”
Leon looked as if he was coming to realize an unpleasant truth.
“I was the new one,” I said. “You have each other.”
We were so close I could feel his breath on my face, warm and sour. He couldn’t meet my eyes, even in the dark. “You’re not a nice person sometimes.”
“I’m nice to you. I’m nice to Deming and Michael and Vivian, too.”
“You only want to go to Florida for yourself. Not for Deming or me. It’s always all about you.”
“No, you’ve got it all wrong.”
Across the room, Vivian snored, and in the bedroom you continued to dream steadily, perhaps of Power Rangers, or maybe that was last year’s fad. From behind the curtains the sun struggled to rise, and I said I wouldn’t go. We would stay in New York with him and Vivian. I would forget about Florida. But Leon’s warmth did not return, and it was as if his opinion of me had already altered beyond repair.
SO MANY TIMES IN the years after, I would revisit this night: plot a different path, see myself with Leon at the kitchen table, and the next day, instead of going to work, I would stay home and pick you up from school, take you out for donuts and tea. Didi would get her papers, and eventually, so would I.
But that didn’t happen. What I did was go to work. Thursdays brought a steady stream of customers to Hello Gorgeous, refreshing their manicures for the upcoming weekend, chipped polish wiped away and replaced with new coats. Some women debated over what color to choose, like it was as important a
decision as picking a name for a child, while others came in already knowing the name of the shade they wanted, the same red their friend had, the same bronze an actress wore in a magazine picture. Brittle tips were shaped into triangles, feet that smelled like spoiled milk soaked, buffed, and scrubbed. Calluses, tough and hardened like mean nuggets of tree bark, were sanded down, dead skin scraped away.
After two mani-pedis and one pedicure, my next customer only wanted a mani. She chose a purple polish and held her hands out, primed for service. She was chewing gum, her mouth moving beneath a coat of brown lipstick.
Base coat, first coat. I dared my customer to look at me. Her bare nails were thin and yellow, a sign of too many manicures. I finished her right pinkie and twisted the bottle shut, glad I hadn’t been roped into waxing mustaches like the other girls. I switched on the hand dryer and motioned to the customer. “Wait to dry, okay, then we’ll do the second coat,” I said in English.
I checked my cell phone, which Michelle frowned upon. I yawned; I’d barely slept. In the morning, Leon had sought a truce. “I’ll think about Florida,” he said. “It’s a good opportunity for our family. If we have another child, we’ll have space for him.” Startled, I agreed. “We can talk more tonight,” Leon said. But when I embraced him, he didn’t hug me back. He kept his arms at his sides and presented his cheek for my kiss, not his lips.
The new girl at the next station was struggling to keep her brush steady. “It’s easier if you do it fast, or else the polish gets sticky,” I said. “Flick the brush, one-two-three, don’t give yourself time to think.”
The girl scowled. Her ponytail hung like a mouse tail against the back of her shirt. She bent closer to her customer, her body rigid, too nervous to do good work. Her customer tapped her feet.
I began my customer’s second coat. One of the new girls was smearing hot wax onto a woman’s upper lip. The new girls chattered to one another in Vietnamese and to the customers in limited English, and the speakers in the front of the salon played a radio station with American songs while Michelle watched Korean movies on a TV in the back office. I could hear operatic crying and swelling string music.