Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok

  I had seen so much money on the table in front of me that when I breathed in I thought I could smell its acidic odor underneath the blue cloud of smoke.

  “Here, have something to drink, kids,” the man behind the bar said, and he slid two open beers toward us.

  Matt took them and gave me one. I’d never had alcohol before. I took a swig. The taste was bitter and made my eyes water, but I managed not to show my distaste. After my initial swallow, I sipped only a little from the bottle. Matt drank as if he did it all the time.

  The men returned to their game. They had glasses of liquor in their hands and more cards were thrown onto the table. Matt went up to the man sitting in front of us and tapped his shoulder. So this had to be Matt’s father. His father turned but seemed annoyed at being interrupted in his game. Then Matt handed him a thin envelope from inside his jacket. To my surprise, his father opened it, gave a satisfied nod and immediately added the contents to his pile of money on the table: it was more cash. Then he dismissed Matt by pushing him away with the back of his hand. There had been no greeting, no thank you.

  Matt’s shoulders were hunched when he returned to me. He didn’t meet my eyes. I stood up and gave his arm a squeeze. Then, to cover up this impulsive gesture, I pulled him down into my recently vacated chair.

  I said, “You sit down. I want to see better.”

  From this vantage point, I could observe the cards they were laying on the table. My head began to whirl from the alcohol and the smoke, but I was fascinated by the Chinese game they were playing, unlike any I had seen in the West. When I stared long enough, it seemed to me I could begin to make out a pattern to the cards.

  After some time, the phone rang and the barman said, “Ah-Wu, it’s for you.”

  Matt’s father stood up and the barman tossed him the phone, attached to the wall with a long black cord. He paced back and forth as he spoke and I could see his face well for the first time. It was clear where Matt had gotten his looks. His father was handsome, the heavy eyebrows adding a touch of demonic charm to features that would otherwise be too fine for a man. And there was a reckless air to him, a carelessness in the way he swung his arms, as if he could break everything in the room and wouldn’t care. His suit had once been expensive, I could see that, and he had bothered to shine his shoes. I wondered what Matt had learned from a man like this. It couldn’t have been anything good.

  “Louisa,” he said, “I’m running late. Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be there real soon. No, don’t worry, no gambling.” He gave his friends a wink as he said it.

  At my questioning look, Matt said with a kind of defiance, “His girlfriend. He lives with her.”

  I saw then that the money Matt had given his father hadn’t come from his mother. It must have been from Matt’s salary, probably what he made from his delivery job, the one he was cutting school for. I understood. I too would have done anything to protect Ma, and forgiven her any sin. Perhaps my feelings showed in my eyes because Matt quickly looked away again, as if he couldn’t bear to see my pity.

  When Matt’s father walked back to his seat, where the other men were waiting for him, he seemed to see me for the first time. He turned and waved his cards in front of my face. “What would you play, huh, girlie? Ladies’ luck.”

  The noisy chatter at the table ground to a halt. “Ladies’ luck.”

  “Pa, leave her out of this,” Matt said, standing up.

  “It’s all right,” I said to him. I knew luck had nothing to do with it. I would have chosen statistical probabilities over luck any day. Without hesitation, I pointed to the queen of spades and the seven of diamonds.

  “Really,” said Matt’s father thoughtfully. “Strange, strange. But maybe . . . if . . .”

  He withdrew those two cards slowly from his hand and threw them on the table. There was a sudden roar from the others and a few of them glared at me. When the upheaval was over, Matt’s father scooped up the rest of the money on the table.

  He was grinning from ear to ear, revealing a tooth capped with gold. He took a sip of his drink and came over to us again. He reached out and clumsily patted me on the head, as if I were a dog.

  “This,” he said, “this is a great girl. This is a girl deserving of old Wu’s son.”

  Even though this comment had come from a drunken gambler, I felt like it was a benediction of sorts. Matt seemed proud, but he also shifted his weight from leg to leg, as if he didn’t know if we should make a run for it or not before the other men began.

  And indeed, the chorus started immediately. “Come sit with us,” they said. “We want to do some winning too.”

  “No, she stays with me.” Matt was still only fifteen then, but he stood up in front of me and faced the whole group of gamblers. I was close enough that I could feel him tremble slightly. For the first time, I began to feel afraid, and then someone started to laugh.

  “Okay, but bring her again. We can always use some luck.”

  Matt never took me there again, but I think it was because I had seen what he’d wanted me to see. He had shown me his shameful secret, and I had accepted it. It seemed a kind of turning point for us, a promise of trust and openness, and maybe even love.

  This was before the girl started showing up.

  TEN

  By tenth grade, I was one of the best students, despite my continued disadvantage in English. Unlike the other kids, I hid my test scores immediately and never spoke about them.

  Annette was my source of information. She told me on the phone one evening, “You would not believe the things they say about you. I heard Julia Williams telling this other girl that you never sleep and you never study.”

  It was true that I didn’t manage to sleep much, but I couldn’t imagine how Julia Williams, a girl with tight golden ringlets, could possibly know that. My only opportunities to do homework at the factory were snatched during the brief breaks and on the subway, and we usually arrived at home after nine o’clock. By the time I got my homework done, I was so exhausted that I dropped straight onto my mattress and went to sleep.

  There was a pause on the line and I could hear the low rumbling of static. “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “The way you are in class. And like that last history test—I know you hardly studied for it. I mean, the day before the test, you hadn’t even read the chapters yet.”

  I stared down at my hands. “I don’t know. It’s like being born with an extra head or something.”

  But in a way, now that my English was fairly fluent, I didn’t find my academic achievements to be so remarkable. I simply did what the teachers assigned as best I could and regurgitated what I had learned on the tests. Sometimes I had to do all the preparation at the last moment because I had no choice, but I always got it done. School was my only ticket out and just being in this privileged school wasn’t enough; I still needed to win a full scholarship to a prestigious college, and to excel there enough to get a good job.

  In tenth grade, I enrolled in AP classes, even though they were generally for juniors and seniors. Later, at the end of the year, I would receive the top score, a 5, on all of my exams. For this kind of thing, the other Harrison kids looked at me with mingled respect and jealousy, but not with what I longed for, which was friendship. Despite Annette’s presence, I was lonely. I wanted to be a part of things, but I didn’t know how.

  My skin was now clear and Ma had finally let me grow my hair out. I was a perfect size six and I could take samples from the factory, which made my attire less noticeably inadequate. But my obligations to Ma and the factory didn’t allow room for social ambitions. And even if they had, I was perceived as—or I really was—too serious. I never went to parties or dances.

  On the rare occasions when I was invited somewhere, I made excuses without even trying to ask Ma for permission. I kept a deliberate distance from the other girls because I knew it would inevitably lead to an invitation to their house, and I wouldn’t be able to go. I already
snuck off once in a while to see Annette; I couldn’t fit anyone else in.

  And at least I had Annette, who understood and accepted the things I couldn’t do, even if she had no idea of the true details of my life. She often came to the library when I was working there and had become a great admirer of Mr. Jamali. In private, she’d go on and on to me about how incredibly wise and beautiful he was. Annette’s likes were always intense. Her crushes were fleeting and left no real imprint upon her heart. She’d even had an interest in Curt, who had broken up with Sheryl over the summer. For a period of about two weeks, Annette had raved about how artistic he was, how creative and free. Sometime in the last year, he had stopped wearing his neat designer clothes and now went around in worn cotton trousers and old T-shirts underneath his blue blazer. But a few months after the crush began, she found him boring because too many other girls liked him too. All of this happened without any actual interaction with Curt himself, of course. For Annette, a crush was an activity more than a feeling, and she liked it best when I pretended to like the same boy she did so we could talk about him together, much the way other kids shared a passion for a hobby like baseball.

  I didn’t mind. I enjoyed pretending to have more of a normal life when I talked to Annette. It allowed me the luxury of imagining I was richer and better off than I actually was. It was also too hard to tell someone how we lived when there was so little chance of change. We had long ago given up the idea that Aunt Paula would do anything to improve our situation. We were still paying off our debt to her, which left little money to spare. We could barely afford the things I needed to buy, like new shoes when I grew out of my old ones. Our only hope was when the building would actually be condemned and she would have to move us out.

  In my other life, I could feel the buzz of Matt’s presence whenever he was at the steamers, whenever he went to take a break. He seemed to walk around in a halo of light. It was as if every excruciating detail of his face, his hands, his clothing was imprinted upon my mind.

  I once made the mistake of saying to him, “Your pants look different.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, something about the way they fit,” I faltered, realizing I was getting onto unstable ground.

  He looked at me strangely, then said, “Actually, if you have to know, it’s probably because I’m not wearing any underwear today.”

  I laughed awkwardly, as if it were a joke and I were the sort of girl who could laugh casually at such things, but the truth was, I was secretly an expert on Matt’s ass and I’m quite sure he was telling the truth. I never did dare to ask the reason for the omission, although I imagine it was because he’d run out of clean underwear.

  On the rare occasions when Park, Matt and I had some extra time, we would gather for a few precious moments outside. One day, when I came downstairs, I saw Park fixing the chain on Matt’s cargo bike while Matt watched.

  Matt shrugged. “What can I say, I’ve got slippery hands.” Clumsy ones. He hastened to add, “My body has heavenly skills, though.”

  These half-flirtatious remarks of Matt’s thrilled me, but they also made me even more uncomfortable around him than I already was. I pretended I hadn’t heard his comment about his body and bent over the wheel next to Park. Park had good hand skills, dexterous hands, and he refitted and tightened the chain in a very short time.

  “Will you teach me how to do that sometime?” I asked Park.

  As usual, Park didn’t meet my eyes, but he nodded. I smiled and patted his arm.

  “If you two mechanics are finished,” Matt said, “can I have my bike back before the pizza place goes out of business? It’s hard enough for a bunch of Italians in Chinatown anyway.”

  In many ways, I had an easier relationship with Park than with Matt. On the surface, Matt and I were friends and I lived for the moments when we could talk or laugh, no matter how briefly. My feelings were so intense that I associated being close to him with a tightness in my breathing. I was always careful to preserve the space between us, as if he were something forbidden, from which I needed to keep my distance. When he brushed against me, I would move my entire body away as if I’d been stung and what made it worse was that Matt seemed to enjoy touching me, often laying a hand on my back or arm. In a way, I think I was afraid that if the distance between us were bridged, I would be swept away from all I had worked for, everything that I was.

  I was a fool. I should have grabbed him when I could have had him all to myself, snatched him up like a ripe mango at the market. But how was I to know that this was what love felt like?

  One day, she was there, waiting for Matt outside the factory, and she was everything I was not. It was the flirtatious skirts and the perfect fingernails, the melting look in the eyes that said, “Save me.” It was the flick of her glossy black hair that tossed the scent of wildflowers into the wind. Ah, her hair was short but it only lengthened her graceful neck, swept forward to point at her perfect lips. Even now, I want to remember her as a feminine doll, manipulating him with her weakness, but the truth is that Vivian used to smile with genuine warmth whenever she saw me, even though other girls sneered at my cheap clothes. Let me be even more honest: when I say she was everything I was not, I mean that she possessed whatever virtues I may have had and more.

  I made it my business to find out how they’d met. According to the gossip at the factory, her father was a tailor from Singapore, one of the best, and he owned a small shop, specializing in custom-made, expensive clothes, down the street from Matt’s apartment. Vivian helped out there and somehow, she’d been standing outside often enough when Matt passed by that they’d gotten to know each other. Of course, I suspected her of planting herself in his path on purpose, but who can blame her?

  At the beginning, she was an inch or two taller than Matt. With the passage of time, she dwindled as he grew, until he stood over her with his new broad body and large hands, an arm slung protectively over her delicate shoulder. Matt was as kind to me as he’d ever been, but there was a new absentmindedness to him, as if a part of him was always with her. I would watch them walking away together, away from me, and ache with regret.

  Curt broke his left leg skiing in January of tenth grade, when I had just turned sixteen. He had to have surgery before he could fly back and was stuck in Austria for several weeks. We’d hardly spoken after that incident with Tammy in eighth grade, when he’d defended me to Dr. Copeland, although we did continue to have some classes together. Curt had been much too busy being cool, as he began to fulfill his promise of becoming someone special. He made paintings and polished wooden sculptures that our Art department made a great deal of fuss over. Last year, he’d been featured in the Visual Arts Festival. And he was attractive, even I had to admit that, with a smoldering quality in the way he moved. I had seen even our Latin teacher blushing when she spoke to him.

  One evening that winter, our phone at home rang. It was close to nine-thirty p.m. and I was sure it was Annette, but when I picked up, it turned out to be Curt. His voice was deep. I was so surprised he had called me that I didn’t even ask him how his leg was.

  “Listen, Kimberly, I’m back in the U.S. but I’m not even allowed to get out of bed for another month. The truth is, I’m on the verge of flunking out anyway, and now that I can’t come to school at all for a while, I’m sunk unless you help me.”

  “I didn’t think you were doing that badly.”

  “My grades are borderline, but then I’ve had a few other scrapes as well. Remember the fire alarm someone pulled, right before Christmas break?”

  “Was that you?” It had caused a huge commotion: the buildings evacuated, fire engines and squad cars on campus, all classes canceled, students and faculty standing shivering outside for hours.

  “Yeah. They were ready to kick me out but my parents did their best. I had to write a letter of apology and swear to maintain a B minus average and be a good boy from now on. Which I’m trying to do, but now my
neck’s on the line.”

  I asked him the question that had been on my mind since the phone call had begun. “Why me? Anybody would be glad to help you.”

  “Come on, Kimberly. No one’s smarter than you. I need serious help here. My folks are already threatening to send me to boarding school.”

  I agreed to give him my notes from the classes we shared, couriered daily by his little brother. They were copied and I got them back the next day. I saw other kids delivering notes to his brother too, probably for his classes in math and science. Once in a while, Curt phoned me with questions about any of his subjects. I don’t know if he ever tried calling earlier in the evening, but the calls I received came quite late at night, as if he’d been waiting for me to be home. He never asked me what I’d been doing earlier in the day, which I appreciated. Even though I was a few years ahead of him in science and math, I remembered the material and could explain the topics he was doing.

  Although he could have, he didn’t keep me private. When he finally returned to school on crutches, there was a rush to sign his cast, but he saved the most central spot for me. He openly sat next to me whenever he could, and in a way, I was brought into his sacred circle. I don’t know if he did this mainly out of good manners or genuine appreciation. The end result was that I became accepted by the popular group, though still not liked. I had a kind of power that made other girls want to be seen with me but they were careful around me, tentative and distant. Nothing like Annette, who, amused by my sudden rise in status, remained my one true friend.

  With my pseudo-popularity, there seemed to come a new awareness of me by the boys at school. Not every guy, of course. There were plenty who thought I was beneath their notice, but there were also always a handful who seemed to like being with me. I felt strangely relaxed with them. Now that Matt was gone from my life as a romantic interest, it was as if he had been the single repository of all my shyness, and with other boys, I was liberated.