Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  “And now look at me,” Zhuo Ge says. “I’m the best-looking guy here.”

  “Shuai ge,” says Guo Jun, his voice raised high like a girl’s.

  In the laughter that follows, Director Wei leans close to Juanlan and says, “Here I was hoping that I was the handsomest man in the room.”

  Despite herself, she smiles.

  They call for the waitress to come refresh their tea, cigarettes are presented and passed around, and abruptly, the conversation breaks up into smaller groups. Juanlan and Director Wei are seated next to each other on the far side of the table, separate from the others. “I’m glad you came here tonight,” he says.

  She reaches for her glass of tea, needing something in her hands. “Why is that?”

  “Because you’re having fun. I haven’t seen you have fun before. I’ve only ever seen you doing your duty.” These last words he pronounces sharply, as if he has put something sour into his mouth.

  “Tutoring, you mean.”

  “You don’t enjoy it, even though you’re good. You don’t want to be a teacher?”

  “No.” She stirs the straw in her tea. It’s gone cold, and she doesn’t want to drink it anymore.

  “What do you want to do?”

  She thinks for a moment. “Work in a private company, I guess, as a translator.”

  “You’re not going to find many jobs like that in Heng’an.”

  “No.” She laughs harshly. “I won’t.”

  “Maybe in the future, our town will have companies working with overseas clients, but that’s still several years away. Too long for you to stay here, waiting.”

  She feels Director Wei’s eyes on her as she says, “I’m not planning to stay here long.”

  “Do you have connections anywhere?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I do, but that’s one of the benefits of being my age. Established, I mean. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  She glances quickly at Director Wei and then back at her glass. “He doesn’t live here.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Chongqing.”

  “Ah. And you’ll go live there, when you can.” He doesn’t seem to be asking a question.

  “If I could get a job in Chongqing, that would be convenient.”

  “‘Convenient’ is not a very strong word to use. If I were your boyfriend, I would feel upset by that word.”

  “What word would you prefer?”

  “If I were your boyfriend?” He is speaking quietly now; they are both speaking quietly. The others in the room are nearly shouting, telling some story about the other night. Director Wei lowers his voice even further, and leans toward Juanlan to be heard. “If I were your boyfriend,” he says, and taps his finger on her arm so lightly she almost doesn’t feel it, “I’d hope being together would be more than ‘convenient.’ I’d hope it would be . . . thrilling. Something that you demanded.”

  There is no time for her to respond before they are pulled back into the general discussion and the game is resumed. But she is breathing quickly, can feel the pulse in her neck. Earlier, when Director Wei walked into the room, the air shifted; she sensed it then without understanding what had changed. Now she knows.

  “Time for the accounting!” Zhuo Ge shouts at the end of the night, and they all tally up their money to see how they’ve done. It is as expected: Director Wei has won the most. Zhuo Ge is not far behind. Juanlan has lost more than any of the others, but it doesn’t matter, since the money wasn’t hers to start with. And in any case, it’s all for fun.

  She awakes early again the next morning, dresses, and slips on the plastic sandals at the side of her bed. In the living room, she takes the birdcage from its place on a table near the window and carries it through the kitchen, across the alley, and into the lobby. The coatrack is still standing by the door; yesterday, when she showed it to her father, he’d nodded and thanked her for thinking of him.

  The birdcage has an odd weight, uneven and shifting; Duo Duo might be moving back and forth on the rod inside. She sets it on the floor of the lobby while she opens the front door. Outside, yellow light sifts down like the mist from a cut orange. The air is damp and fresh. In her stomach is a fluttering feeling.

  She picks up the coatrack and sets it outside the door. Then she peels back the cover from the cage, and before she has even hung it, the bird begins singing.

  21

  One day the phone rings, and when she answers there is a pause and then a male voice, in English, saying, “Hello? Juanlan? Can I—is there someone—”

  The idea of his calling her, reaching her here, is somehow funny. So instead of responding in English, she says in clipped, rapid Mandarin, knowing he can’t understand, “This is the Three Springs Hotel. Would you like to make a reservation?”

  “Juanlan?” His pronunciation of her name is terrible. He has always called her Jenny. “A girl—her name is Juanlan?”

  “How can I help you, please?” she asks in Mandarin.

  Another pause in which she can hear him breathing. “I’m sorry, wrong number,” he says, as if he is the one who has received the call, instead of the one who placed it.

  He calls back, and this time she replies in English. In the minute that passes before the phone rings, she has time to feel guilty for fooling him. When he hears her this time, Rob’s relieved laughter comes down the line. He tells her of calling before, baffling some poor girl with his foreign speech.

  “That was Lulu.” She doesn’t know where the lie comes from, but there it is.

  “I’m surprised she didn’t guess it was me. You said you don’t get any foreigners at the hotel.”

  “She knew—that’s why I answered this time.”

  A pause, which could mean he is thinking of Lulu, picturing her standing there beside Juanlan. She is suddenly sorry for him. Whether it is love or infatuation, there is no hope for it. “Yeah, well, here I am.” And he goes on to tell her that he’s coming back to Heng’an. In the weeks since he left, he’s traveled down through Yunnan to Kunming, then Dali, then Lijiang. He wanted to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge, but parts of it were closed, he said, because of recent landslides. Now he’s back in Chengdu.

  “You want to come here?” Juanlan glances around the lobby of the hotel. Dull reflections on the floor, the curtain hanging limply over the door to the alley. Du Xian hasn’t yet come to visit, hasn’t made any real plans to. Yet here is this foreigner coming twice in less than a month. “Why?”

  “Because I want to see all of you again,” he says simply. “I’ll be there tomorrow, and I’d like to take your family to dinner, if you’re free.”

  “It will be difficult for my parents to come.” She doesn’t explain about her father’s fall, that he is practically housebound for now. Rob has not met her father, and she realizes that she doesn’t want to present this version of him, slow-moving and slow-speaking, his words slightly garbled. She’d rather Rob didn’t meet her mother, either, though for different reasons. Her mother, she is sure, would be disapproving of him. “My parents don’t go out in the evening often. I will see whether Zhuo Ge and Lulu are available.”

  “Excellent,” he says, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Wah-buh! Hel-lo!” Lulu giggles and holds out her hand for Rob to shake. Her other hand is at her back, supporting it or straightening it, the way pregnant women do. In the past few weeks, her stomach seems to have grown by double. She still has more than two months to go, but she stands the way a woman nine months along would stand, and she is wearing the loose housedress that makes someone in her state look even bigger than she is.

  “Ni hao.” Rob raises her hand and pretends to kiss it. “How’s my Chinese?” he asks Juanlan.

  “Your pronunciation is better, but you do not speak the tones as you should.”

  “Well, I’m trying.” He winks at Lulu and asks Juanlan about Zhuo Ge.

  “He will join us later,” she explains.

  They enter the restaurant—a small pl
ain one Juanlan chose for its reasonable prices—and sit at a table near the wall. Rob picks up the laminated menu and hands it to Lulu. “You decide,” he says. He nods at Juanlan. “Both of you. Order whatever you want.”

  She explains to Lulu that Rob wants to pay for dinner, but that they should pay instead.

  “Why should we stop him,” Lulu asks, “if he wants to treat us?”

  “Because he’s a guest. Do you think if Zhuo Ge were here that he would allow him to pay?”

  Lulu shrugs. “Your brother isn’t here. And Rob is a man. Let him feel . . . manly.” She glances down at the menu and runs her finger down the first column. The dishes are nothing special, the same ones that can be found anywhere in town.

  The laoban comes to take their order and then disappears into the back. “I hope you ordered lobster,” Rob says. When Juanlan doesn’t understand, he explains that in the United States, lobster is expensive. Then he explains what it is because she doesn’t know the word. The explanation is difficult, and afterward she has to translate everything for Lulu, who lifts one hand and snaps it like a claw at Rob as she laughs.

  As they eat, he tells them about his travels through Yunnan, how beautiful Dali and Lijiang were, how the air was clear and the mountains rose in the distance, covered in snow. He explains about the Naxi people who live in Lijiang, how they have an ancient system of writing that’s—he stops, searching for a way to describe it. Like the Egyptians, he says at last, and then introduces a new word: hieroglyphics. Juanlan calls the laoban over and asks for a piece of paper and a pencil, and she makes him write it down as she translates for Lulu.

  “Who cares about Lijiang?” her sister-in-law says. “I want to know what it’s like where he comes from. Ask him.”

  So she plays interpreter again as Rob explains that he lives in Minneapolis, in the north part of the country, but he travels so much of the time that he’s hardly there. He was married for a while but isn’t any longer. “After the divorce, I rented a room at the top of this house in a neighborhood where all the people speak Spanish. This little tiny room with slanting ceilings. I’m banging my head all the time there—” He slaps one hand against the side of his skull, just above one ear. Lulu bursts out laughing, and laughs so hard that he suddenly looks sheepish.

  “I had this office job, great benefits, all of that. But I don’t miss it at all. This job lets me see the world. I feel really free,” he says, taking a bite of chicken. Because he’s no longer married? Lulu asks, and he doesn’t laugh as Juanlan expects him to. Instead, he sets down his chopsticks and thinks for a moment. Yes, but it isn’t because the marriage was terrible. It was the routine that ground him down. “In my old life, I woke up every morning knowing exactly how long I would spend eating breakfast, and I’d get in my car at the exact same time, and I’d sit in traffic on my way into the city. Then in the evening, I’d come home, and my wife and I had nothing to say to each other.”

  “Does he have children?” Lulu asks. Her eyes narrow suspiciously; this is a secret he’s been keeping.

  No, Rob says, he never had any children. His second wife had kids from her first marriage, but they were older. He squints at Lulu. “About your age, I guess.” Then he turns to Juanlan with an embarrassed look.

  She would like to ask more. She wants to know how you can have two lives, an old one and a new one that you live back to back. It is, she thinks, a very foreign idea—the kind of thing only a foreigner can do. It seems that he is done talking about his ex-wife, his stepchildren, this family that no longer exists, and the conversation moves on to other topics. At some point, she gets up to go visit the bathroom and asks if Lulu needs to go, too, but her sister-in-law waves her away.

  There is no bathroom in the restaurant. The laoban gives Juanlan a key and says she can use one in an alley down the block. Stepping out into the street, she senses a difference in the angle of light; the sun is poised slightly above an apartment building down the street, like a fat bird perched on top of the roof. She squints at it—the sun low enough and orange enough that she can look right at it without going blind—and is instantly struck, for some reason, with sorrow. She thinks of her father, his feebleness. No. That’s not it. Something else: a slipping away. This day that is ending. It will soon be gone forever, and then another day will begin and end, and another. She will get older during a series of days exactly like this one, days in which she does nothing significant.

  She finds the gate that the laoban described and uses the key to open it. The bathroom is filthy, a trench toilet with a pile of used toilet paper on the ground. She squats to pee quickly, breathing through her mouth the whole time.

  When she gets back to the restaurant, Rob and Lulu are seated on the same side of the table. His hand is on her stomach, and he has a starry look on his face. When he glances up he looks so guilty that Juanlan wants to laugh. Then his face relaxes and he says, “Have you felt this thing? That baby’s got a kick . . .”

  “Yes,” Juanlan replies. “I have felt it.” She settles herself into the chair left vacant by his move to the other side of the table.

  “The miracle of life,” he says, shuffling an empty teacup between his hands, as beside him Lulu smiles serenely like a pet cat.

  After dinner, they walk down to the bridge. The river has crested and gone down again, but it is still much higher than usual, still covering the dancing square and Jiangnan Lu. Coins of light bounce off its surface as if the citizens of Heng’an, standing on the bridge above, have tossed down all their pocket change in exchange for wishes.

  They stroll until it’s time to meet up with Zhuo Ge. He is waiting for them at the row of barbecue stands along the river. He greets Rob warmly, says “Hel-lo” in English, and then laughs at himself. They are getting ready to sit down at one of the low tables outside when Lulu declares that she doesn’t want to stay. They have just eaten dinner, she says. She does not want to eat again. “I need to use the bathroom. The baby is pressing on my bladder.” Her face is pale, her hair pasted to her temples with sweat.

  Zhuo Ge frowns. “We can find a toilet around here.” He glances up and down the darkened block. After a moment, his face brightens. “Deng Liyan lives nearby, just up the street. You can use the bathroom there. Maybe he and his wife will want to join us.”

  Lulu shakes her head. “I don’t want to use some stranger’s bathroom.”

  “You’ve met Liyan. Remember—”

  “I don’t want to stay and watch you eat. I don’t want to sit around with some people I don’t even know. And these stools are awful to sit on, anyway. I’m pregnant, remember?”

  Zhuo Ge glances at Juanlan. “What do you think, Mei? Am I being unreasonable? She has to go to the bathroom, and I offered her a place to do it. Now she’s making a fuss because she doesn’t want to invite some friends to join us.” He reaches into his pants pocket, producing a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Shaking one from the pack, he pinches it between two fingers and uses it to gesture at Lulu, punctuating each word: “She. Can. Not. Be. Satisfied.” Then he puts the cigarette between his lips and lights it. His hands free, he sweeps them away from his body, ridding himself of the whole thing.

  Lulu jerks her head, as if she’s been hit. “I’m going home. Wah-buh,” she calls to Rob. He’s moved over to the barbecue to survey the offerings, sticks of various foods piled high on a plastic shelving unit behind the smoking grill. “I’m leaving.” Then, to Juanlan: “Tell him, please.” She moves away from them, back in the direction from which they came.

  Zhuo Ge twirls a finger by his head. “She’s crazy right now.” He glances at Rob, who wears an expression that he’s trying to disguise as ignorance. But it’s clear that there’s been an argument. Zhuo Ge says, “You should sit down and order some food. I’m going to go see if Liyan wants to come join us. He’ll get a kick out of eating barbecue with a foreigner.” And with that, he heads in the opposite direction of Lulu, up the street toward his friend’s flat.

  “Looks l
ike we’ve been abandoned,” Rob says with an uncomfortable laugh.

  “I’m sorry. My family loses face acting this way.”

  He shrugs. “I guess marriage is pretty much the same everywhere.”

  It’s embarrassing, and she wants to explain. But what should she say? “Lulu,” she begins, and Rob cocks his head. “She is not very happy. For many months, she has not been happy.”

  “Depressed, you mean?” He explains the term, and she agrees that it sounds like the right word. He rubs his cheek in a gesture of deep thought. “Maybe she’s just tired. I mean, she is pretty pregnant.”

  “That may be one reason for her bad temper,” Juanlan concedes. She is not convinced, but Rob seems eager not to continue the conversation. He’s provided an answer and is satisfied with it.

  When Zhuo Ge reappears, he has his arm around a skinny man who looks like a teenager. “My friend Deng Liyan!” he proclaims as they come up to the table. “Deng Liyan, this is my sister and her foreign friend, Wah-buh. Wah-buh?” He screws up his face and makes his voice like a cartoon character. “Eng-guh-luh-shuh?”

  They eat and drink, the argument with Lulu forgotten.

  The night is fine: the smell of meat in the air, smoke swirling up through the trees, the thumbprint of a moon somewhere overhead. Perhaps Juanlan is wrong: it’s not Lulu’s company in particular that Rob likes but simply being around those who include him. She joins the three men in a toast, then another, and another, and the warm beer strikes the back of her throat like a bell.

  The next day they take a taxi fifteen minutes outside of town to a nongjiale, an old country house that has been converted for the purpose of entertaining those who don’t live in the country. This one’s main attraction is a swimming pool, and Director Wei and Teacher Cao have invited them for the afternoon. “Someone’s always treating me here!” Rob had remarked when Zhuo Ge told them of the plan over barbecue. Juanlan didn’t explain that this is because he is a prize to be shared, that this excursion is part of an ongoing negotiation of favors. “Bring a swimsuit,” she said, and he promised he would.