“I guess that means that everything is all right?” Addie said, looking from the woman to Mrs. Riddell, who was busying herself smoothing the blankets and tucking them up around Addie’s waist.
“There’s nothing to do but wait. Things are moving along.”
Addie pressed her lips together. It didn’t seem as if things were moving along. Already it felt like she had been in this state for days, weeks; it was difficult to remember not lying in this bed, waiting for the next twisting pain. How strange to think that the baby was there, really there, just a few hours from arriving in this room with its smell of lamp oil and clean sheets, that in a short time its cries would leak through the walls and reach everyone in the house—Owen, Li K’ang, Wei-p’eng—and perhaps their neighbors, too. She would be a mother then, and she would know what to do. She would know how to nurse and change him, how to quiet him when he screamed. She would have to know because there was no one to take lessons from but Julia Riddell, who might only remind her to do her duty without telling her what it was. But Addie’s fear was that she wouldn’t know. She wasn’t intuitive the way she imagined mothers needed to be; she hadn’t had an inkling that she would go into labor that morning. She’d started the day planning out what she would study with the tutor. Had he been told not to come? Had the word gone out? She opened her eyes to ask Julia and saw that the room had darkened and she was nowhere to be seen. The midwife was still seated in the chair by the window. She had knitting in her lap, but she was watching Addie, and she made a movement that let Addie know she was alert and had been monitoring her as she dozed.
“How long has it been?” Addie asked, and the woman tilted her head in the direction of the window and responded in Chinese. The sun was out of sight, slipped behind the rooftop. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed, and a moment later the door of the bedroom pushed open and Julia came in.
“How are you feeling?”
“I fell asleep. How long has it been?”
“Twenty minutes, perhaps.” Mrs. Riddell glanced around the room, at the shadows that had gathered. “The sun went behind the mountains, you know how it is.”
Addie put a hand to her mouth and chewed the tips of her fingers.
“Charles took more than a full day and night to come, and I went in and out of sleep the whole time.” She came over to the bed and held up a magazine. “The shipment came at last. Owen’s already gone through it.”
“He could come in and sit awhile.”
“I sent him over to dine at my house. It’s not good for a man in his situation to sit alone with nothing to do.” She ran a hand along the top of the dresser by the door. Everything was being handled, she seemed to say. There was nothing to do but go along. “Here’s October’s Godey’s, and you’ve got a whole stack of them waiting. Shall I read to you?”
Addie turned her eyes to the ceiling. It was plaster and seemed to glow like the moon. “I didn’t know the waiting would go on so long.”
Mrs. Riddell pulled a stool near to the bed. Opening the magazine, she said, “Would you like to hear about sleeves or learn a recipe for a quince jelly?”
The stars were fading into the predawn sky. Time had passed, and it felt like a moment and it felt like forever. The room was humid and still, the air close with the scent of sweat and blood. Addie’s eyes were fixed on the patch of sky visible through the window, but she didn’t see it; she was exhausted beyond the point of recognizing anything but the great yawning pain that opened up and up, swallowing her, drowning her whole. She was taking it on like a capsizing ship.
“You’re almost there,” Mrs. Riddell kept telling her. “Keep on, now, you’ve almost got it.” But Addie could hardly hear her. She was grasping at the edge of consciousness and could see it crumbling beneath her fingertips; she was falling. There had never been anything but this pain, and it was greater than anything that would ever come after.
Pillows. Smudges on the wall. The flickering of the lamp’s wick. The midwife’s face as she leaned between Addie’s legs, both arms extended as if in offering. Addie’s damp hair at the back of her neck. She pushed and pushed until she had nothing left, no knowledge but of struggle and pain, no breath, no thought, until finally, suddenly, a wail ripped the air. All other sounds stripped away, and the baby was placed in her arms, trembling and slick. Its eyes were open and dark as the sky. She looked into them and thought, Yes, I will love this thing. It opened its tiny mouth and bleated once, and Addie felt wash over her a wave that was pain and also the opposite of pain. Both at once, a brand-new feeling.
Juanlan
4
She has a live wire inside her, a little burning blue coil. Usually, she can hide it, tamp it down, so that it feels only like the smoldering coals of impatience. But it’s always there, and it’s not anger and it’s not passion—though if she could only have her body crushed by another, that might do the trick—but both these feelings at once, and others besides. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, had all the Confucian books burned and several hundred scholars buried alive. She feels like one of those books. Or like one of those scholars.
It takes six hours to get back to Heng’an. People say that after the expressway is completed, it will take less than two, but for now that expressway is churned-up earth, flattened in places and crawling with big yellow LiuGong machines. The wet earth opening like a wound. A vision of the future: China’s backward southwest catching up to the north, the east.
The last time Juanlan returned to Chengdu after the New Year, her seatmate leaned over her, his elbow digging into the bag of fruit and candy on her lap. “My coworker’s cousin had his house torn down to make way for the expressway,” he said, pointing. “It was very near here.”
When she looked out the window, expecting to see the remnants of a bulldozed house, there were only orange flags marking the place where the expressway would eventually be. “Where did he and his family go?”
“Oh, they were lucky.” The man sat back and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “The government paid them, and now they live in Chengdu.”
This man did not live in Chengdu. He was there on business and seemed disappointed that Juanlan lived in the city and probably knew it better than him. She was only a student and didn’t have the money to go to the McDonald’s or to go shopping on Chunxi Lu, but she knew the bus lines and bus stations; the going rate for pedicabs around Wuhou Si; the warren of shops in Yanshikou, an entire row devoted to shoes, another to tape players.
Her seatmate this trip is an old woman who got on outside Shuangliu, hauling on three giant sacks of carrots, one at a time. Two are now stacked in the aisle and the other is crammed beneath their feet. Juanlan’s own bags, which hold everything from her four years at the university, are stowed away in the undercarriage. If only they were beneath her feet, where she could touch them and know they were real. Nothing about this trip feels fully concrete. A few hours ago, she was buying a steaming mantou from the vendor outside the campus gates, gazing up through the leaves of the French plane trees at the white sky beyond. From somewhere over the line of shops had come the clanging from a high-rise construction site. Those trees, the strike of metal against metal, the white erasure of smog: nostalgia is a matter of specific combinations. That particular combination was real but already tainted; her friends were back in the dorms, packing, and it had been two nights since Du Xian kissed her good-bye.
The bus bounces along the narrow rutted roads. They pass house after house with corn drying out front on the concrete patio and a tied-up dog at the end of its leash, barking. The woman asks if Juanlan is going home for the summer. She squints and then laughs. “You look like a student.”
Juanlan tells her she lives in Chengdu, a lie only by timing. She doesn’t mention that she was a student at Sichuan Normal, that she graduated on Saturday, that none of her family was there. “My father’s not well,” she says, and this, at least, is no lie. “He had a stroke.”
“And you’re go
ing home to help care for him?”
She hesitates. “Yes.”
“He can’t be old.” The woman moves her tongue over her teeth, judging Juanlan’s age.
“No, he’s forty-eight.”
She shakes her head. “I’m lucky, more than seventy years old and as you can see, I’m still healthy. But you never know: tomorrow I might not wake up at all.” She smiles as if the thought brings her some joy and then calls out to the driver to let her off. “I wish your father good health,” she says as the bus rolls to a stop. When Juanlan looks back, she sees the woman standing in the sun with the sacks of carrots at her feet, gazing down the road with one hand shading her eyes.
The bus pulls into the station in Heng’an in the late afternoon. Through the window, Juanlan spots Zhuo Ge standing with a few men dressed in uniform, who must be from his danwei. He is round-faced and smiling, waving a cigarette around as he speaks, and when Juanlan steps down from the bus carrying only her purse, he walks over with his arms held wide, asking why did she give all her stuff away? Has she finally decided to become a nun? He cups his hands to make an alms bowl and accidentally drops his cigarette on the ground. Stamping it out, he says, “If a nun comes looking for a smoke, that one’s still got a few centimeters left on it.”
“Today’s your day off?” Juanlan asks. “You’re not in uniform.”
“Someone had to come. Ba wanted to, but Ma wouldn’t let him.”
“How is he?”
“Better than before. He’s been working the desk a few hours in the mornings.” Zhuo Ge steps forward to take the bags from under the bus and nods to the men he was standing with before. They come over to help and a few minutes later, the police car pulls out into the stream of bikes and motorbikes, pedicabs and people walking. “Hey, Shifu,” Zhuo Ge says, leaning forward between the seats. “Take us to the Three Springs Hotel, okay?”
The officers laugh. “Sure thing,” says the one at the wheel.
“Not a bad way to get home, is it?” her brother asks.
“No,” she says, “it isn’t.” Any way is as good as another.
It’s been over two months since her father’s stroke. That day, she came back to her dorm after a morning class and the niangniang at the front desk gave her a message that read: “Father ill. Call mother at hospital.” Juanlan had to go up to her room to get her calling card. She ran up the stairs and then back down again, squeezing past girls carrying books or laundry tubs, almost pushing them down. She was panting when she went to the phone, and the niangniang clicked her tongue. She was knitting a tiny sweater, and the needles kept flying as Juanlan dialed. An operator picked up, and then a nurse and finally her mother, who said Ba had been acting funny that morning. Then suddenly he was garbling words and couldn’t smile when she told him to. Her mother sounded tired and put-upon. Juanlan asked if she should try to take a bus back to Heng’an. “Let’s wait and see,” her mother said.
She didn’t end up going home. When she talked to her brother, he told her that Ba’s left side was a little loose and he was more tired than usual. And quiet, but he had always been quiet; it wasn’t from his father that Zhuo Ge learned to tell a joke. “And what about the hotel?” she asked. Zhuo Ge had found a girl to clean in the mornings for a few days, he said, and Lulu was covering the front desk whenever their mother went to the hospital.
They were getting by. But it was becoming more difficult for Lulu, and when she had the baby she would no longer be able to help at all. And they couldn’t afford to keep paying the girl to clean. The hotel is small. It makes just enough money to stay in business with Juanlan’s parents splitting the work between them. Even with Ba home from the hospital now, they’ve been in a difficult position. But jobs are proving hard to come by, so Juanlan is available. Everyone says it: 1998 has been a bad year for graduates, too many people and not enough jobs. Most of her friends have already gotten employment; they’re going to be teachers, and therefore placed by the government. But she doesn’t want to teach. She’d thought she would take her chances in the free market. Tough luck there are so few openings, but maybe it’s for the best.
“You’ll come home for a little while,” her mother said, “and then we’ll see.”
When they get to the hotel, the two policemen help them unload her bags and then say good-bye. Her parents are waiting in the lobby, seated in chairs on either side of a table like guests. Her mother stands and helps her husband to his feet. He smiles, and the smile is a little off, as if he’s followed directions for how to do it and hasn’t quite mastered them. Still, it is recognizably a smile. “You look good, Ba,” Juanlan says and steps forward into his stiff hug.
“I’m lucky,” he says, pulling away. “But we missed your graduation. I am sorry, Lan’er.” He blinks, and it’s not quite in sync, the left eye and the right eye not moving in the same way. She wasn’t here before to witness the frozen face or the dangling arm, but she is here now to see the slightly crooked smile, the way of leaning a bit to one side. Different, and yet also how her father was before the stroke, too. He’s long had the bearing of someone who hides a limp: a deliberate deflection of attention combined with purposeful movement. When she pictures her father, it’s always with his hands clasped behind him, standing somewhere close to a wall.
“Come on,” her mother says. “Let’s go over, and I’ll start dinner while you and Ba rest. Zhuo’er, you’re going home to get Xiao Lu?”
“Not tonight,” Zhuo Ge says. “She had a headache when I left. She said to tell you she’s sorry she couldn’t make it.” This last to Juanlan, who shrugs acceptance. Her sister-in-law’s absence is no matter to her.
“She’ll come tomorrow, though. Lan’er, you know your uncle is giving us a dinner.”
“No,” Juanlan answers.
“Of course; you think he wouldn’t want to welcome his goddaughter home? The college graduate.” She lifts her chin quickly, a gesture of pride. Then she places on the desk a sign instructing honored guests to please ring the bell and, drawing aside the curtain that screens the exit into the alley, leads the way through to the living quarters on the other side.
Over dinner, they talk about the new expressway, to be completed within the year. Juanlan says, “I didn’t see any pavement yet; they’re still clearing the path.”
“They’ll get it done, no problem.” Zhuo Ge takes a piece of fried pork. “Laying asphalt is the easy part. They had to plan it out first, and then you have to figure out the displacements, compensations, and all that. By now, it’s just a matter of execution.”
“There’s a lot to execute,” Juanlan says doubtfully.
“Wasn’t Chengdu to Chongqing a lot more complicated? All those tunnels, and they got it done. You need faith, Mei. I’m a traffic cop”—he puts a finger on his nose—“I know what I’m talking about. Pass the ribs.”
Their mother pushes the plate toward Juanlan after Zhuo Ge has taken his fill. “It’s just a shame the highway wasn’t there while you were at school. Think how much easier it would have been to come home. You wouldn’t have had to wait for summer break or the New Year. You could go and come back the same day, if you needed to. If there were an emergency, for example, like with your father.”
Juanlan feels compelled to tell him she’d wanted to come home before. Messages might have been lost, or confused. He might have wondered, while he lay in the hospital bed, why she wasn’t there. “Ma told me not to come,” she explains.
Her father nods. “That was right.” Slowly, he resumes eating.
“Of course it was right. You think I would have let you stay in Chengdu if your Ba was at death’s door? Look at him. He’s strong.” Her mother thumps a hand on her own thigh for emphasis, then glances at her husband and son for validation. “He’s already gone back to working. Maybe too soon, that’s what the doctors say, but you just try to stop him. In the mornings, he’s out at the front desk before I can get him breakfast. You’ll see.”
And so she does. The next day, J
uanlan’s mother comes into her room early and flips on the light. “Get up, you’ve been sleeping too long. Ba went out to the desk a half hour ago.” Her mother stands in the doorway looking around the tiny room, giving a critical glance at the bag still open from last night’s search for pajamas and toothbrush.
“I’ll tidy up today,” she says, yawning. “I was too tired last night.”
“No different than before. Messy, messy.”
As a teenager, Juanlan tried to be neat, but she would leave her school things out on the bed: books and notebooks and worksheets sliding over each other. When she was studying for the gaokao, she’d often gone to sleep with the corner of a textbook jabbing her ribs, papers bunching up beneath her hip. More than once, she’d awoken to find marks on her skin from a pen that had come uncapped during the night.
“You stayed up late reading. I saw the light under your door when I went to sleep.” Her mother plucks a book from beside the bed, a translation of Pride and Prejudice. She laughs when she reads the title aloud. “Is it a good book?”
Juanlan shrugs. “We read it in my British literature class last autumn; I wanted to try it again in Chinese. It’s a romance.”
“Oh, romance,” her mother says, pursing her lips in a kiss, and then laughs at herself as she leaves the room.
Juanlan puts on yesterday’s clothes, folds up her pajamas, makes the bed. The picture on the cover of the book is of a woman and man, half turned away from each other. She barely understood anything when she read it in English, but the characters had struck her as exotic, their world as lovely and delicate as lace. Rereading in Chinese, it is all too familiar. The people are small; they live in a small place; they take, it seems, only the smallest of risks.
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