Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  “You better get yourself down to Stix, then. Don’t you think that’s the best place for them to go, boys?”

  They were married, all three of them, and that made it easier to fall into conversation. Wendell talked the most; Dopey followed along and chimed in now and then; the third man lifted his chin whenever he was called upon to agree with something that either of the other two said. He had the air of a man who knows he’s good-looking and doesn’t have to do much to win approval.

  Lydie and I were the audience. When asked a question, we got no more than a sentence or two in before Wendell took up the baton and off he ran. Neither of his friends got more than two words in, either.

  The conversation went on that way for a while. Lydie finished her cigarette and took another when Wendell offered it. I’d polished off my second drink and needed something to do with my hands, so I picked up the cigarette he’d given me earlier and held it out to be lit.

  “This isn’t your brand,” he said as he struck a match, protecting the flame with a cupped hand and extending it toward me. Lydie cocked her head at his tone, which suggested a certain confidence between him and me that left her out of the conversation. She turned away on her stool to talk to Dopey; his name was George, it had turned out.

  “You’re right,” I said to Wendell, “I never smoke Marlboros.”

  “What do you like? What kind?”

  “None of them, much.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You all grow your own tobacco out there?” Lydie and I had told him we were neighbors, and then it had come out that we owned land and that land was farmed. We didn’t tell him it was Lydie’s husband who did it all. Somehow, Wendell seemed to think we were like those landowners you read about in old novels of the South, the two of us sitting beneath giant trees on a green lawn, batting silk fans about our faces and drinking iced tea. “You roll your own cigarettes,” he went on teasingly, “just the way you want them, or what?”

  I looked at the cigarette in my hand, pinched between my thumb and forefinger, the way George would hold it. I had a vision of him squinting out at the flat horizon a long way off over the honey-gold acres. There was no imagining him into the dandified clothes of a southern gentleman; it was muddy work pants and a worn shirt, the edges frayed and yellow patches under the arms. Then the image clicked over, and it was Karol standing there, shoulders sloped at a steeper angle toward the ground. He’d had a way of holding himself that looked like he was tipping forward a little, about to set off at a determined walk, even when he was standing perfectly still. I thought of him lifting the cigarette to his lips, taking a long pull of smoke into the lungs, and I did the same now. “To tell you the truth,” I said, the smoke swirling around in my head, “I haven’t smoked a cigarette since I was a girl.”

  “I guess it’s a city habit. My mother, you should see her, she gets her next one started before she’s ever finished with the first. Sit with her an hour, and the ashtray’s filled up like a planter.” Wendell shook his head. “But she’s particular about her cigarettes, won’t smoke anything but Chesterfields. You try to offer her a Marlboro, and the look on her face could freeze your blood.”

  I pictured her tall, one of those big-boned women who’ve learned that it’s better to stand up straight than try to slouch and look smaller, and so is always looking down from a high perch at nearly everything around her. She is the type of woman who’ll hold her cigarette down by her hip when she isn’t pulling in smoke, the type of smoker who never coughs. And the haze around her seems to come from her very self, as if she has molten lava moving through her veins rather than blood.

  Wendell tipped his chin back. “You and your friend don’t look like you spend too many afternoons like this.”

  “Like this, how?”

  “Having a drink, chatting up strangers.”

  “Seems to me that you’re the ones chatting us up.”

  “All in the way you see it, I guess.” He grinned, a sly grin that said, Now we’re getting somewhere. When he wasn’t smiling, he had a glint in his eye like polished steel. The grin turned it into a twinkle; it made him look boyish and daring. He kept looking at me as he took a drink from his glass. It was half full of whiskey, and suddenly I wanted to drink something like that, smooth and burning, a sort of wonderful punishment.

  “Why don’t you buy me a drink,” I said. “Whatever you’ve got.”

  He grinned again, but let it linger past its natural end, and the twinkle in his eye turned into a blue spark that flashed bright and cold, and then was gone. “What I’ve got here is an Old Forester, and it’s a double.” He gestured to the bartender to order two more.

  The whiskey came, and I took a searing drink of it. It brought me back to when I was young and loved nothing more than to go out dancing, and someone would bring along a flask to pass around. No one ever asked what it was, or cared, and though I could tell that what I was drinking now was better than that moonshine had been, it was similar enough to give me the same thrill, the same feeling that I was right up close to the line of abandon, if only I cared to step over it. I took another sip and said to Wendell, “You’re particular in your choice of liquor.”

  “I’m particular in my choice of all sorts of things,” he responded, but with a lift at the corner of his mouth that said he knew I’d expected him to say it. We were fast getting to that place of speaking on different levels at once. I took another drink and looked coolly around the bar. Big-Eared George had finally taken a seat next to Lydie, and the man he and Wendell had come in with was drawn into their circle at last. He was telling a story, and Lydie and Big-Eared George both had their faces tipped up at him like children looking to their father. Her cheeks were flushed, and she had the sort of loose smile that comes on with a few drinks and stays until a few drinks more. It’s a smile that looks fluttering somehow, stretching and then contracting as a flag flaps with the wind.

  I had never seen this smile on Lydie’s face before. She was having fun; she was happy. And it wasn’t the happiness of a mother or a wife, whose happiness is like the cold spot in a lake: something you might swim through and not quite notice. It was the kind of happiness you feel often when you’re young, and rarely after you’re grown, a feeling that takes over the whole body, that makes you want to kiss your own hand.

  I wanted that feeling. What I had instead was sharp-edged and dangerous. I could do a mean thing, I thought, or a reckless one. The flirtation between Wendell and me didn’t have to go anywhere, but I wanted it to. I wanted to put someone at risk, me or him, it didn’t matter. I finished my drink and tapped the rim with my finger, and as the bartender took a clean glass from the rack and began fixing me another, I leaned toward Wendell and asked if he wanted to know a secret.

  “Boy, do I ever.”

  Well, who has ever said no to that question?

  Later, when Lydie was sick—sick in more visible ways, sick enough that she wasn’t getting out of bed much anymore—she would ask me sometimes if I remembered that afternoon at the bar. I couldn’t tell what she was up to. That day, with her talking to Big-Eared George and the other man, whose name I never did catch, and me talking to Wendell a few feet away, could she have heard what I said? I’d been drinking, and I might have spoken louder than I intended. It was possible, but I didn’t think so. By the time I got around to telling Wendell that I was sleeping with Lydie’s husband, once it got to the actual moment of revelation, a kind of sober clarity settled over me. It was as if we were all eggs in a box, each of us set down in exactly the right place, so that the mold fit over us just as it should. In other words, I’d waited a long time to let my secret fly, and when the opportunity came, I took it.

  Had Lydie heard? I couldn’t recall any particular clue. What I remembered was a plank of light from the front window that fell over the floor and went halfway up the legs of the nameless man. Lydie, seated on her stool, had only her feet dipped into the amber glow. The afternoon was turning to evening, and soon we would stumble b
ack to the hotel in the violet dusk, with the streetlights winking on at the moment we turned the corner and left Lafayette Square behind. But that hadn’t happened yet, and for now it seemed that this afternoon would go on forever. We’d both left our true selves behind, in the hospital or at the hotel, or maybe back over the river in Illinois, and the different women we were pretending to be existed in some other world, outside of time, like in one of those science fiction novels Debbie started reading a few years later.

  I was watching Lydie and the two men, and somehow I was able to view her as if she were a stranger: a middle-aged woman with a slack middle and brown arms, laughing a little too loud. She might have been someone who came to a bar like this every afternoon to see where the evening would take her. There was a kind of nervous hilarity about her mouth, which was opened wide enough to show that the inside of her lips was a different color than the outside; her lipstick had worn away. This was the same Lydie who’d told a rambling tale of taking a drive and leaving her baby all alone for an afternoon. She’d told it because she felt guilty, I figured, but we’d never got to that part.

  Now I told Wendell a shortened version of my own tale of sin, and I didn’t leave out the best parts, or the worst parts, either. When I was done, he said, “I take it you didn’t bring that gal over the river just to break the news. Seems like a waste of a trip, if you did.” He took a sip of his drink. “And a pretty long car ride back home.”

  I was silent, thinking of the hospital: the doctors and nurses, the rattling carts in the hallways, the squeaky shoes on linoleum.

  “So, Hazel, what are you doing here?”

  I blinked at the invitation in his voice and then turned my face to the door. It had opened to release a few patrons out into the dusk. “That’s another story.”

  He laughed once, sharply. “I’d bet a thousand bucks it’s not.”

  I’ve made some mistakes in my time, but at least I can say this: I’ve told nobody’s secrets but my own. If Lydie didn’t want people to know she was sick, I wasn’t going to be the one to let it slip. I told Wendell that it was exactly as we said before: my friend and I had come to St. Louis to buy ourselves some pretty clothes, to have a few drinks, to have a good time.

  “Those last two I’d say you’ve done pretty well.” He nodded at Lydie, who had laid her head on Big-Eared George’s shoulder, and looked close to falling off her stool. “But let me give you a word of warning about those good times.”

  “What’s that?”

  He tapped two fingers on the side of his glass. “They aren’t hard to come by”—we both drained the last of our drinks—“but, Hazel, they sure are damn hard to keep.”

  Two days later, George came walking up to the house. I saw him from the living room window and went outside to meet him on the lawn. Lydie and I had got back the evening before. She was sore and groggy from the procedure she’d had done, and though I’d offered to help her into the house, she’d waved me away. They’d taken a little piece of her breast, and they were going to sample it to find out if it was cancer. All the hilarity of the day before was gone. It had been gone by the time we got back to our hotel.

  George had thunder in his footsteps, and his face was pinched and red. I’d never seen him this way before. “I thought it was you that was sick,” he said without any other word of greeting. “That story about insurance didn’t make sense at all. I thought you were sick, and Lydie was taking you to a doctor.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You left, and I spent all day worried. I was worried about you.” He almost spat out the word. “Then you get back last night, and she comes in all bandaged up. I don’t see it till we’re getting into bed. ‘What’s that,’ I say, and she tells me it’s nothing.” He had his hands in his pockets, and I suspected he might ball his hands into fists if they weren’t contained that way. He shot a glance behind me at the house. Debbie was inside, watching television. Joe had gone down the road to George and Lydie’s place a little while before. I figured the windows were empty, reflecting nothing but sunlight and shadows. “I thought you were sick, and it made me crazy,” George said now, his voice suddenly drained of emotion. “Now I figure it’s Lydie, and I don’t know what to think.”

  I didn’t speak for a moment. I’d made a promise I wasn’t going to say anything about it to George or to anyone. “You better talk to her,” I said at last.

  “What did I just tell you?” He took his hands out of his pockets and removed his hat, smoothed his hair down, put the hat back on his head.

  “George,” I said in a quiet, firm voice, “this isn’t my business.”

  “The hell it’s not. You’re the one that drove her over there.”

  “She asked me to.”

  He was silent for a minute, or longer. Once, he craned his neck around at the far-off bark of a dog. When he turned back again, his face looked as if all the muscles it contained had collapsed, all the strain gone out of them at once. A slug of snot was creeping from his nose, and he leaned over and blew it onto the ground. For a moment I thought he was crying, and then I wasn’t so sure. When he stood up straight, he said, “She had an aunt that died of it. Her grandmom, too.”

  “Then you know more than me,” I said.

  “I don’t know a thing.”

  He waited to see if I’d respond, and when I didn’t, he tipped his cap in farewell and turned and walked away. It had been more than a week since we’d been together. I watched him go, thinking: feet, hips, shoulders, head. He was all of his parts moving off down the lane. He was a body taking itself away from me for good.

  Juanlan

  25

  An affair, then. They meet once a week, sometimes twice, in a tiny rented room above a noodle shop near the bus station. The noodle shop is owned by one of Director Wei’s friends, a cheerful half-Tibetan man named Qiang Ba. This friend is married, but his wife and two children live in a village up in Aba Zhou. There is no female presence in the shop, save a slightly faded photograph of a woman standing in grasslands covered in white and blue wildflowers. She looks full Tibetan—her cheeks stained a deep red, silver dangling from her ears, and a string of heavy beads hanging down over her T-shirt—and without ever asking, Juanlan knows this is Qiang Ba’s wife, and that he loves her deeply. She looks at the image every time she comes in; it is stuck to the wall without any frame or protection, and a fine layer of grease makes it seem as if it is part of the plaster behind it. The woman might be a deity of some kind, perhaps Guanyin herself, the goddess of mercy, and her mercy extends to the little room above, and to everything that goes on there without any questions asked. Qiang Ba himself has a mistress, Juanlan knows. Director Wei informed her of this fact one day when she made a comment about how his friend must miss his wife, living far away and only going home at the New Year. Director Wei had seemed annoyed by her observation, perhaps even jealous. “He’s got a second woman here,” he told her, digging a cigarette out of its case and lighting it with a match. “Just some shopgirl at the Hualian Supermarket.”

  “Do they use this room, too?” She’d glanced around at the bare walls. The room is clean and undecorated. The only color comes from the bedspread, which has a pattern of giant red roses splashed across a yellow background.

  “Of course not. I pay rent on this place. Qiang Ba has nothing to do with it.”

  But of course he does. The first time Juanlan showed up—following the directions that Director Wei had told her over the phone the day before—Qiang Ba gave her a friendly grin and begged her to have a seat, looking all around for the best spot, even though the whole place was empty. The best spot was a seat that allowed an easy view of the black-and-white television set on a cabinet in the corner. It was tuned to the CCTV version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the volume was off, but Juanlan watched as Qiang Ba fixed her a bowl of noodles. She’d never seen noodles like these before, little flat bits of dough that he pinched off with his fingers and dropped into the pot at a rapid pace. The br
oth had onions in it, and thin slices of potato, too. Juanlan felt she was far away from Heng’an.

  She was grateful that he didn’t ask any questions or make remarks about why she was there. He sat with her through the end of the episode, then showed her the staircase, accessible from a tiny room filled with rolls of toilet paper and empty boxes. “Next time, you can just go on up,” he said. “No need to ask first.”

  The rented room has two separate entrances, the one through the shop and another from the alley, which means she and Director Wei never have to be seen entering or leaving together. It is the perfect place for an affair, very discreet. Of course she is not the first woman to do this.

  The fact doesn’t bother her much. What is between them is new, whether or not there have been others. I am a mistress, Juanlan thinks, standing before the mirror over the sink in the tiny bathroom. A second woman. She turns to the side and considers herself from that angle. Then there is a sound from the other room, Director Wei turning a key in the deadbolt, and she narrows her eyes at her own reflection and goes out to greet him.

  Soon after the start of the affair, Teacher Cao leaves to take Wei Ke up to Chengdu for school. There is a farewell dinner, to which Juanlan is invited, but she feigns being sick to avoid the event: her precedence over the other woman is better enjoyed from a distance. And, too, she would rather not sit at a table with her lover’s family, to hear the wife thank her for attentions to her son. The tutoring has helped, a little: Wei Ke is not quite so terrible at English as he was before, though he hates it as much as ever. During the final few days, Juanlan made him write and then recite a two-page essay on any topic related to the English-speaking world, and he wrote about how the spread of English-language instruction around the globe was a sign of modern imperialism. It was a sophisticated topic, if handled simply. Juanlan taught him words like dominant and colonialism. He was unable to pronounce most of them; nevertheless, she was proud of his progress.