Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  I thought of Nate walking up to the house, that look on his face when he told me he couldn’t pay. He’d flicked his eyes away as he said it. A part of it was shame, but there was something else, too. Politeness. He was giving me a moment of privacy, a few seconds to take in the news that when the money ran out I wouldn’t have any more for a long while.

  Mr. Freese began explaining how easy it would be to negotiate a sale. He happened to know someone interested in the land, and he would handle the whole thing himself. I didn’t need to worry. He gave me numbers, so much per acre, the house, the barn, the machinery I’d come here hoping to sell alone. He added it all up and then flattened it into five digits. It sounded like a lot of money and also like not very much at all. “You want me to give up my home,” I said.

  Mr. Freese sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. He didn’t have much of a gut, but his pants were pulled up so his palms fitted neatly over the belt buckle. “I expect you’d like it here, if you wanted to settle in town. You have family in Edwardsville, don’t you?”

  I nodded absentmindedly. I was thinking about Nate again, how we’d been standing in the shade of the tree that Joe and his friends used as first base in their ball games. From above came that shuddering sound as the leaves moved in the wind. Bits of sunlight falling through the branches had scattered over the grass like coins.

  “Your family will help you,” Mr. Freese said.

  “Help me,” I repeated.

  “Help you get settled. Find a place to stay, find a job.”

  I’d been lagging behind the conversation, letting Mr. Freese drag the conversation in the direction he wanted to go. My eyes had drifted down to the desktop covered in papers, to the little wire racks with stacks of mail. Now I looked up. “I’ve already started looking for work.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  I thought quickly. “My sister owns a flower shop. I may start working there part-time.”

  “A shop here in town?” I told him the name of the place and he nodded, though he looked unconvinced. “So, then, you’ve already got a foot in the door.”

  I didn’t, of course. I thought of Lydie working in the Curtiss-Wright factory, how she’d told me she’d returned to it in her dreams. I pictured an assembly line, a long plane wing drifting slowly toward her like a ship. Nate would pay eventually, I was sure of that. It was a matter of having a steady source of income in the meantime. “Mr. Freese,” I said, sitting up a little straighter in my chair, “I thank you for your advice. If I were going to take it, I’m sure it would all go as smooth as you said. But since I’m not going to take it, I’d rather talk about something else. Selling that tractor—how about we talk about that?”

  He blinked at me for several seconds, a tight smile making his face look like a wrinkled grape. He took out another cigarette and lit it. Breathed in, then blew out the smoke and squinted through the cloud. “Sure,” he said. “Of course, it’s up to you.”

  As soon as I was out on the sidewalk, even while I was grinning, I felt the hairs on my arms stand on end. For the first time I saw just how completely the future was balancing on my back—I sensed it there, resting on the point right at the top of my spine. I’d told Mr. Freese that I trusted Nate Grisham. But now I saw that trust wasn’t going to be enough.

  I was too excited to get in my car right then, so I started walking quickly down the sidewalk, my purse clutched in one hand so it wouldn’t swing against my side. Where could I get a job? Where should I look? I passed a café, a deeds and titles office, a pharmacy. The door of the pharmacy was open, and remembering the money Rena had given me, I passed under the twisting fly strip and went inside.

  I was at the counter buying a bottle of aspirin when George walked in.

  “Hazel!” he said.

  I grinned at him in response, then turned to thank the pharmacist as he handed me my change. I tucked the money into my wallet, and when I looked up again, George was still standing before me. “What are you doing in town?”

  “Lydie made me go see a dentist,” he said slowly. The words sounded strange. He lifted a hand to his cheek and pressed on it. “They numbed me up.”

  “What’d you get done?”

  “Got a problem with one of my molars. I had it filled and then came over here with a prescription.” Reaching into the front pocket of his shirt, George pulled out a slip of paper. He squinted at it with suspicion. “Supposed to make it stop hurting.”

  “Has it been hurting awhile?” I asked. “Is it bad?”

  He shrugged. “Long enough.” The l came out like an n, and he grimaced.

  “Don’t let me stop you. You’re going to need that medicine.”

  He nodded but didn’t make any move to approach the counter. “Something happened?” he asked me suddenly. “You’ve got a smile like you won the pot.”

  “Not exactly that,” I said, thinking that I couldn’t tell him that defiance was boiling in my blood, and this joy was the vapor rising up out of it. Instead I explained that I’d just left the co-op and was thinking some things over. “Things about the future,” I added.

  George got a strange look on his face. “What about?” he asked, and I realized that Lydie must have talked to him about me. Either that or he knew just by looking that my situation these past months had been shaky, a sort of tryout for the future that hadn’t quite gone as hoped.

  “Listen,” I said, “have you eaten lunch yet, George?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then let’s go grab a bite,” I said, and then stopped and reconsidered. “A milkshake, how about. You go get your prescription filled, and I’ll wait.”

  I stepped outside and stood in the shade of the vestibule. My heart wasn’t pounding, but its beat felt sure and strong. A few minutes later, when George came out to join me, I almost took his hand to lead him down the sidewalk. “Is Bennie’s okay?” I asked, and we both started walking.

  Inside the diner, we sat side by side on stools at the counter. It wasn’t yet eleven, and most of the downtown lunch crowd hadn’t arrived, but there were a few office men sitting there, sleeves rolled up to their elbows, meatloaf sandwiches and tuna melts slowly getting cleared from their plates as they made conversation with one another and with Alice, Bennie’s wife, who was standing in her apron behind the counter. George and I ordered two milkshakes, and when they came I watched him try to use the straw and fail. Ice cream dribbled down his chin, and he had tears in his eyes that came before the laughter. “Oh, George,” I said, and I thought how I’d never kissed him and suddenly knew that I wanted to.

  We talked for a few minutes about this and that, about Gene starting junior high in September, about a loose gutter I needed to get fixed. Then I told him that Nate hadn’t been able to pay rent and Mr. Freese had tried to talk me into selling the farm. “But I’m not going to,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The relief on his face answered a question I hadn’t asked.

  One of the men a few stools down was telling Alice about his wife finding a garter snake in the backyard and going at it with a shovel. “She banged that thing to kingdom come,” he said, laughing, and Alice shook her head as she cut a hot sandwich in half with a big metal spatula. I could do this, I thought, stirring my milkshake with the straw. I could work in a place like this. George was eating his milkshake with a spoon, carefully tucking a bite into his mouth and then wiping his lips with a thumb to make sure he wasn’t drooling. Kiss me, I thought, and see if you can feel it.

  Thinking it wasn’t enough to make it happen. But the next day, when I was coming out from the henhouse with my basket of eggs, George drove up in his truck. He climbed down and said he’d been thinking about the gutter I’d mentioned, and it wouldn’t take him all of five minutes to fix it. He looked right at me and I looked right back at him, and I said, let me show you where it is. Only instead of me leading him around to the back, we went together into the house exactly as if it’d been planned. Debbie
and Joe were down at Rena’s, and the door hadn’t even closed before I set down the basket and turned to him and then we were kissing. The whole length of our bodies was pressed up against each other, and I didn’t say Why, or We shouldn’t, or Hold on. And neither of us was starting anything, because it had already begun.

  Juanlan

  8

  One day on her way home from tutoring Wei Ke, Juanlan comes upon a commotion just outside the east bus station. The station is the busiest in town, handling most of the buses to and from Chengdu, but it’s small and old, only a tiny waiting room whose floor is always littered with sunflower seeds and oily cellophane bags, the air heavy with exhaust. Right before the turn-in for the buses, a small crowd is gathered. When Juanlan stops her bike and gets off, a woman with knitting swaying from her busily moving needles says, “How do you think he ended up here?”

  The man standing next to them says, “The bus, I guess.”

  At the center of the commotion, a red cap appears, and then an upturned face. It’s a foreigner, a white man with the strained smile and wide, blinking eyes she recognizes from other foreigners she’s seen on the streets of Chengdu. He bends down to root through a giant pack at his feet and comes up clutching a notebook with frayed edges. Holding it to his chest protectively, he speaks to the man standing directly in front of him. In barely recognizable Mandarin, he says, “Xiexie, buyao.” Thank you, I don’t want. “Xiexie, xiexie. Buyao, buyao, buyao.”

  “He’s odd-looking, isn’t he?” the woman with the knitting says.

  Under his cap, tufts of hair stick out, seemingly without color. Blond? Gray? His face is partly shaded by the bill of the cap, but Juanlan sees a high nose with a single deep line on either side. His skin is red in places from sunburn. He might be thirty-five, forty—Director Wei’s age or a little older. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he has thick, clumping sandals that are lashed to his feet with a series of black bands. “They always look odd,” she says to the woman.

  “You’ve met a lot of them?”

  “A few.” The foreigner is saying something in English now, but she can’t make it out. “You see them on the street sometimes in Chengdu.”

  “Do they all look as helpless as this one?”

  “Not all of them. Some live in the city and know their way around. I had one as a teacher at university.”

  The woman looks at her for a long moment, impressed. “You studied English at university? You must speak perfectly.”

  “No, I speak terrible English.” But this is how anyone would respond, and the woman doesn’t hear her. Instead, she asks which university she attended and then taps the shoulder of one of the men standing beside them. “This little sister studied English at Sichuan Normal. She can translate.”

  Juanlan is reluctantly pushed forward with her bike, the crowd parting, strangers peering expectantly. The foreigner, once they’re face-to-face, looks like a child standing on a train platform who sees someone waving from a window and isn’t sure if he’s supposed to wave back.

  Close up, he looks older. Forty-five, maybe even fifty. As old as her father, with small wrinkles that fan out from the corners of his eyes, though he’s squinting so narrowly she can’t see their color.

  “Go on,” says a man in the crowd. “See what he’s doing here. See if he needs help.”

  She nods and says, all right, she will. The foreigner notices them talking, and his eyes narrow further, as if he’s sure there’s a conspiracy mounting against him.

  “Welcome to our city of Heng’an.” Juanlan holds out her hand and waits for him to take it. “My name is Jenny.”

  He shifts the notebook to his other hand so he can shake hers. “You speak very good English, Jenny.”

  “No, it’s terrible.”

  He glances at the crowd, which has fallen silent for their exchange, and then looks back at her. “I’m looking for a hotel someone told me about. The Friend Hotel, I think?” He riffles through his notebook and then thrusts it out so she can look at a page where “Friendship International Hotel” is written in large Chinese characters.

  “This is not far away. You can take a pedicab.”

  “What about walking? Is it too far for that?”

  The top of the hotel is visible from here, but directions, she’s found, are difficult to explain in English, always more complicated than she thinks they will be. “Maybe you can walk. But your bag is very heavy.”

  He reaches down to grab one of the straps of his backpack, swinging it with effort onto his shoulders before securing a buckle at the waist and another over his chest. “Will you show me?”

  Juanlan leads him through the crowd as people ask where he’s going and exclaim at the backpack’s size. “Meimei,” cries the woman she was speaking with earlier, “come back and tell us what you find out!” Juanlan apologizes to the foreigner as they set off down the street, him with his backpack, her with her bike. “They are curious,” she explains. “Many have never met a foreigner before.”

  He shrugs; he is used to strangers’ curiosity, it seems. “I’m Rob,” he says. “Jenny, right? You know, you’re the fifth or sixth one of those I’ve met in China. What do they do: hand out a list of names and tell you to pick one?”

  “Some people choose. Others are assigned names by their teachers.”

  “What about you?”

  “I had another name, but I didn’t like it.”

  He asks what it was and she tells him, June. This was the name chosen by the Australian teacher she had during her third year at Sichuan Normal. The teacher had seemed young, younger even than some of the students, spoke quickly and unintelligibly, wore shorts that showed lumpy expanses of thigh.

  “June,” says Rob, giving the name a flat sound it doesn’t have in a Chinese person’s mouth. There’s a certain laziness to the lips speaking English that Juanlan hasn’t figured out. Rob moves his head from side to side. “That’s not so bad. Why’d you want to change it?”

  “In Chinese, this is a boy’s name.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, thinking. “When I was a kid, people called me Bobby, but now I go by Rob. So I guess I’ve changed my name, too.”

  “Why did you want to change it?”

  “For one, Bobby sounds like a little kid. But also, when I went away to college, I didn’t feel like the same person anymore. I guess I wanted a new name to go along with my new life.”

  She’d felt something similar in her English class. Choosing a different name, she’d tried to conjure up a different existence to go with it. Airport corridors with gleaming floors. Giant planes. A passport full of stamps. Sunglasses pushed up the bridge of her nose, chin tilted down, she would be Jenny in Paris and New York and Seoul. She would grow bored with the ocean seen from ten thousand meters.

  Juanlan asks where he’s from. America, he tells her, which is what she suspected. He has the bearing of one who unconsciously uses up too much space, the expression of one accustomed to looking out over long distances.

  They cut over onto a street that runs alongside the river, and she tries to concentrate on what he is saying. Something about a book he’s writing. A book about China. “Oh, you’re an author!” she exclaims. Well, no, he’s not an author, not exactly. It’s a travel guide, and he’s one of the contributors. He travels, he says, and then writes about what he finds.

  “It must be difficult because you speak little Chinese.”

  “‘Little’—ha! I’d say none. But most people who buy our guides don’t speak the language, either. What they need is someone who’s in their shoes to try it out first.”

  It occurs to her that his method would not work very well without people like her stepping in to help, but she doesn’t say this aloud. “And you came to Heng’an for this reason?”

  “We’re always looking for new places, little towns and hidden gems. I spent a few weeks up north and went down the coast to Shanghai, but I’ve gotta say, the southwest of China is my favorite part. But it’s hard to know wher
e to go. A guy I met in Chengdu was from near here and he said there’s lots of little old villages around. It’s on the ancient tea route, and all that. I thought I’d come check it out.” He looks out at the river. Often there is just a narrow channel running down the middle and flat gray stones on either side, but now the water is high and fills its banks. “What’s the name of it?” he asks, gesturing.

  “It is called Duoyu Jiang.”

  He echoes the words, badly. “Hold on a sec,” he says, and stops to flip open his notebook. “Dwo yoo jang,” he writes, and Juanlan has the urge to laugh. How helpless he is. She is reminded of a child trying to form his characters.

  They walk on, passing a man on a flatbed tricycle stacked with coal cylinders, who stares at them and then frowns as he pushes against the slight incline. She wants to explain that things are not what they appear: she is not a young giggling woman hoping this foreigner will marry her and take her abroad. She’s seen such couples on the streets of Chengdu. The women are rarely beautiful, but in their bright clothes they look like delicate exotic birds hopping alongside the men, who are balding or gray-haired, with thick legs and broad bellies that push at the buttons of their sweated-through shirts.

  She points out the hotel up ahead. As they approach, Rob tucks his thumbs in the straps of his backpack. “This place looks fancy,” he says, and doesn’t appear pleased.

  The hotel has two stone lions on either side of the glass doors. Inside, a pretty girl stands behind the front desk, her hair pulled back, her face ready to stretch into a smile the moment it is required. The lobby’s floor is so shiny that even from the sidewalk it looks like the surface of a pond in sunlight. “It is not very expensive,” Juanlan says, and then adds, “for you.”