End of East, The (14 page)

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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I tell my friends that I’m leaving and walk outside to hail a cab. As we approach my mother’s house, I ask the driver to let me out at the convenience store so I can buy cigarettes. I walk the rest of the way home.
The rain clouds have blown away and the streets are silent, the kind of silence that makes me walk faster. The cool breeze brushes my skin; I think of ghosts floating past me, trying to regain a sense of life by latching on to my body. I can see my
house from two blocks away—its dark windows, the shadows from the drooping branches of the Japanese maple beside the front door.
There’s nothing I can do. I always have to come back.
As I walk up, keys in hand, someone steps forward, emerging from the shadows smoothly, silently, like he’s floating. I stop moving and think, somehow, that if I remain motionless, he won’t see me and will disappear, melt back into the darkness. As he moves forward, I see the dull glow of his red hair, the ice of his pale skin. The bartender from Penny’s wedding.
“I had a feeling that you’d need some company tonight,” he says, holding out his hand to me.
It’s like seeing a vampire and knowing that he can enter your house only if you let him in. You know that, if you do, bad things will happen, blood will flow, and he will consume you. Yet something tempts you—death, rebirth, immortality, sex. Who really knows? The decision is harder than it seems.
I take his hand.
“Always there when I need you, even if I don’t know that I do.” I know he will hurt me, make me feel as if my body is splitting in two. He will challenge me, physically turn me inside out, and I will like it; the only thing I own is my body, and it will do whatever I say, even if it knows that the wisest decision is to do the opposite. I unlock the door and lead him to my bedroom; he’s a demon enclosed by my four white walls. His eyes burn, blue-hot.
Siu Sang has been at Woodward’s for two hours and cannot find what she wants.
Earlier that morning, she had complained to her husband that she needed money to go shopping, to buy new clothes for the coming winter. He handed her twenty dollars and gave her brief directions to the Woodward’s department store downtown.
She did not tell him that she did not want to go alone.
She walks by the snack counter and looks curiously at the menu posted up near the ceiling. She puzzles over the malts and hot dogs until a woman asks her if she would like anything. “We have some nice egg salad, dear, if you’re watching your weight.”
Confused and silent, Siu Sang hurries away.
She guesses that the women’s clothes are upstairs, but cannot find an elevator to take her there. She walks around the displays of garden spades and light bulbs, turning her head to look at a wrench or storm lantern whenever someone walks past.
An older woman stops. “Do you need help? You look lost.” Siu Sang only smiles tightly and shakes her head, unsure of what this woman has just said.
She tries to remember something from her lessons; every evening, after he finishes his accounting homework from night school, her husband helps her, taking her over the same words:
bus, tree, walk, store
, but her mind does not take it in. She has not gotten any farther than the alphabet, but she nods and pretends to understand when he asks. Now, only half-formed words tumble around in her head—even she knows they are nonsensical sounds.
She finds the washroom, sits on a toilet in a stall and stares at the white door in front of her. She feels abominably big, as if her ignorance has blown her up to ten times her normal size. Everyone must know how stupid she is, how she cannot even point or gesture to tell people what she wants. Pon Man once told her that he, too, had to learn the language and that the only way to do it was to just jump in. She had smiled sweetly and continued repeating the phrases he spoke to her.
“I am lost.”
“Where is the washroom, please?”
“I would like the chicken.”
I’m too slow
, she thinks,
like a dumb turtle.
The harsh light from the ceiling makes her hands look green, and she rubs her eyes, tears pricking the inside corners.
When she arrives home, her husband is studying his accounting textbook again. She walks closer to him and can smell the oil from the restaurant in his hair. She imagines she can even smell all the dishes he has cooked that day: Reuben on rye, eggs Benedict, chicken stew with biscuits. Her eyes swim as she looks at the rows of numbers in front of him, the pluses
and minuses that mean someone must know how much money there really is in the world. He looks up at her and smiles. “How was your shopping trip?”
Siu Sang pauses.
“Well, where are your new clothes?”
She breathes in. “There just wasn’t anything I liked.”
On her wedding night, Siu Sang slept in her husband’s arms, her body curved into his like a baby’s. He had touched her all over, stroked her body from head to toe. When everything had come together and it seemed as if they couldn’t have been any closer, her body stretched out as far as it could and then snapped back together, forcing her to open her eyes and look Pon Man in the face.
Every night for one week, he had held her like this. She found herself reaching for him long after they had fallen asleep, crying for him when he did not wake up as soon as she did. During the day, she wondered if this was shameful, if her mother or, worse, her mother-in-law, would condemn her as a woman with strange and unnatural tastes. But as nighttime crept through the windows and into the house, she ceased to care.
Let them think whatever they want
, she thought, breathless at her own daring.
I will do as my body says.
As soon as the second week began, Pon Man awoke at five o’clock, put on his cook’s uniform and left, taking the bus to English Bay to work breakfast and lunch at the Sylvia Hotel. Siu Sang watched him dress with one eye open, sleep still weighing down her body. When he came home, he opened up his accounting textbooks and studied until dinnertime. Siu Sang floated about, afraid of disturbing him but wanting to touch him all the same. After dinner, at exactly six thirty, he boarded
another bus to attend his classes at the college. Siu Sang stayed in her bedroom, reading her novel or rearranging her jewellery in its rosewood box. He arrived home at ten thirty, walked straight into the bathroom and climbed into bed at eleven. The first night, Siu Sang leaned into him, put her hand on his neck, but he was already asleep and rolled away from her, grunting.
Tonight, she watches him, his still-damp hair around his head like a shadow, but a living one. She puts a finger on his ear, feels his pulse even there. He snorts, and swats her hand away.
She turns finally and reaches for her nail polish, hidden in a drawer in the bedside table (Siu Sang is afraid her mother-in-law will pronounce this a silly extravagance and confiscate it, scolding her as she dumps the ruby red bottle in the garbage). She carefully paints her toes, reminding herself that she must wear covered slippers and socks all the next day so that Shew Lin doesn’t see. She blows on them, points her breath away from her husband so that he does not breathe in the heavy fumes.
Staring at her feet, she imagines how they would look in gold, open-toed pumps, the lacquered red peeking out like a surreptitious wink. She could wear a short black cocktail dress, perhaps with a draped, low back, and Pon Man might wear a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and hanging around his neck in a careless, rakish way. They would smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes, hers in a gold and green holder. They would dance, but only when the crooning singer onstage would personally ask them to, saying into his microphone, “Everybody, please give a warm round of applause for my favourite couple, Mr. and Mrs. Pon Man Chan.”
And the smoke would swirl around their heads, the breeze gently lifting Siu Sang’s perfect curls. Pon Man would laugh at
the crooner’s jokes and repeat the punch lines in a whisper close to her ear. As they rode home in their yellow and black taxi, Pon Man would kiss her on the mouth and slip his hand up her skirt.
Siu Sang falls asleep, her cotton nightgown bunched around her knees, her hands between her legs, holding herself as if she is afraid she might break.
She cowers in a corner of her bedroom, listening for the sounds of her mother-in-law approaching. She has been married for two months and has proven to be completely useless.
Shew Lin opens the door slowly and pokes her broad head around the frame. Siu Sang can feel her eyes scanning the room, resting, for a moment, on the very chair Siu Sang is hiding behind. Shew Lin shakes her head and mutters, “Useless girl.” She retreats into the hallway and slams the door. Siu Sang, her head covered by her hands, allows herself to cry.
She listens for the sounds of her mother-in-law in the kitchen, the sounds that mean she has returned to chopping and stirring, all those chores Siu Sang cannot do. She creeps out of her bedroom and crouches in a corner of the hallway where she can watch Shew Lin attacking a head of bok choy, unseen. The window in the kitchen is steamed over and, despite the fact that it is four o’clock in the afternoon, the house is surrounded by fog and is almost completely dark. There are several pots bubbling on the stove, and the entire house smells of pork and soup.
Siu Sang knows exactly what Shew Lin is thinking (for even though she cannot learn English or stir-fry chicken, she understands daydreams like no one else). She watches Shew Lin look out the window at the vegetable garden in the back; Siu Sang knows she is thinking about what she will do with
the surplus zucchini and beans she will pick this week. Siu Sang sees Shew Lin’s flying knife slow down slightly, and she can hear her mother-in-law thinking about this tall house and how full it will be with grandchildren running through the halls and down the stairs. The chopping stops altogether, and Shew Lin smiles.
Thinking about her first grandson,
Siu Sang thinks.
How typical.
Siu Sang stands up and walks into the kitchen, knowing that this is where Shew Lin wants her to be. She sits down at the kitchen table, her eyes red and her nose swollen. She picks at some pastries, dropping the crumbs all over the vinyl tablecloth, and does not look up.
Shew Lin chops viciously, each drop of the knife like the cracking of bones. Siu Sang winces every time the knife hits the wooden board, imagining that it is her fingers her mother-in-law is cutting off, one by one.
“This house is mine.”
Siu Sang turns her head. “Did you say something, Mother?”
Shew Lin looks surprised. “No, nothing. You must be hearing things.”
She grabs a head of garlic and smashes it, sending cloves into every corner.
Pon Man buttons up his new grey suit, looks at himself in the mirror on the closet door. Siu Sang can see her own face behind him, watery in the warped glass.
“What do you think? Good enough for tomorrow?”
She nods, sits down on the bed. “I think it looks very professional. Just what a young accountant would wear.”
He laughs. “I hope so. This suit cost more than all my other clothes combined.”
“But you’ll be making so much more now. I didn’t like to think of you working so hard for so little at the hotel.”
He begins to unbutton his jacket. “I didn’t like to think of it either. But I just couldn’t work for my father anymore. I’m sure you understand how it is. I couldn’t be an individual then, you know?”
Siu Sang does not know and does not understand (why would anyone want to stand out in real life when that only means others will notice you and see you for all the wrong things you are or could be), but she nods, thinking that an accountant’s wife should be smart and understanding, the kind of wife who can swap chicken recipes with other wives.
“I’ll be home much more now, think of that. No more night school, no more getting up at five just so I can fry eggs and pancakes for fat tourists. Our evenings will be ours, just you and me, I promise.” He sits down beside her, naked but for his shorts.
When he touches her again for the first time in three months, she responds to him so quickly that she makes him laugh, his lean body pulsating against hers. She throws her arms around him, wants their bodies to touch all over so that she will disappear into him, so that they can be a new creature together.
After it is over, Siu Sang drifts in and out of sleep, her feet tangled in the sheets and with his. He pushes his head up against hers and whispers, “We should have a baby soon. My mother keeps talking about it. A baby will make us as happy as it will make her.”
Siu Sang opens her eyes and stares at her husband, his flushed cheeks, the blackness of his eyes. She wonders if the decision to have a baby has already been made without her, if
her husband and his mother have determined that now is the time. She has always known, of course, that she must have a baby eventually, but she never supposed that it would have to be so soon.
How stupid of me,
she thinks.
He makes love to me once we have enough money to support a child. Of course
. Her body feels as if it is shrinking.
“Of course, a baby.”
He looks at her, his eyes travelling over her hair, her eyes, her mouth. “I love you,” he says.
This is the first time he has said this, and Siu Sang is unbelieving at first.
How could he say he loves me?
she thinks. But then, she sees that he must mean it, for he is smiling at her as if she were the only thing in this entire world that he would go to war for.
“I love you too,” she says and immediately buries her head in the pillow.
He falls asleep long before she does, but she does not mind, only watches the thickening dark through the window, the fall of nighttime rain.
Late in her first pregnancy, Siu Sang perches on the edge of her bed, staring at her reflection in the mirror. For the last few weeks, she has been seeing nothing but flesh. She is overwhelmed by the very solidity of her body, the hunger that seems to chew a hole right through her, the earthy textures of the fat and muscle underneath her skin. She cannot think of anything but her growing self—it doesn’t matter where she is or what she is doing, all she sees are the layers of fat encasing her fingers, her neck, her knees. If she was ever pretty, she can no longer see it—she cannot even imagine it. Yet she eats and eats, even as tears of disgust pool inside her
eyes. Siu Sang never lets those tears fall, for she can never tell who might be watching.

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