Preparation for the Next Life (22 page)

The register girl began to text her sister.

Like, what kind of exercise? Oral exercise?

Gymnastic, Zou Lei said.

The register girl let out a piercing laugh at something she was reading on her phone.

16

T
HEIR
C
ANTONESE WAS HARD
to understand, it echoed off the tile. They had their backs to her. Her back was to the sink. Get the gwat, they said—she thought they said. It was like hearing someone talk through a prism. The dialect came in different versions, depending on whether they were from inland or the coast. Sunnie went around the corner. They were pulling boxes out from under the metal table legs. Sassoon’s hand went inside and came out with the organs from a chicken, sliding in her fingers. Take the jewels. I cook the jewels, they said, and peeled the membrane off. Take the silk, they said. No need to waste. Take the hand of Buddha. Give me the way. A hand with fat greased over it picked up a knife. She heard something getting cut in coins and thought they called it gwat but it was carrot. What are we doing? We make the hairy crab, wealth of the entire family. Way is very dull. Sunnie came back with bowls and set them on the table. The one is here to put the fat, the jewel, tendon, lotus, umbrella, jewel, fetus chicken. They pointed with the knife at Sunnie, you don’t count arithmetic. She said, I’ll get another one. Three more one! See? She don’t count arithmetic! Sunnie said okay and left again. One times three was three. She realized they meant a bowl. The women kept handling the meat. A monthly smell. I smell you having monthly tension, they said, wearing little bits of yellow gold, small eyes. They went into the dirty boxes on the floor and took out a radish, coined it with the knife. Gills stuck to the metal surface from the mushrooms they were cutting, mud clinging to a root. The lotus, when cut, resembled the cross-section of a pig’s sinuses. Dirt is on it still. Better make it neat or you embrace the Buddha’s feet. She used the cardboard as a dustpan for sweeping underfoot. Dirt clings to it like a country girl.

He say you mess his order up. The order come in stringy beef, chicken, pork, and oyster. Turkey separate. When order, whether the
combination plate, that’s a question. You can have the combination of the congee or the rice. If meat, you ask the sauce. The oyster only has the combination with the rice. If they want the chicken with oyster, you tell Rambo so he add it in the back. When she say order, she say the order first and the combination second. If it combine with noodle, she say beef and noodle. To save the time, she say only pork. She say a hundred time a day, don’t say again, everyone go crazy. Just one word, that’s it, everybody know. Simple! Congee another one. If they want the vermicelli, if they want the tendon, don’t keep the secret. You tell in back.

On her break, she did not exercise. There was no time anyway. She put her chopsticks in the shared tub and lifted out a wet nest of greens and dropped them on her rice and sucked them up into her mouth and kept sucking rice and chewing with her head down in the time allotted.

When deliveries came, she unloaded boxes with the Mexicans, and outside of work, she did double distance, sometimes running west in the evening towards Corona. Then she might get on the train and head back towards Skinner, getting a free transfer on the bus when she was tired. Her sneakers were falling apart, the soles completely flat. She looked in the window of a Footlocker.

A broad-shouldered black youth wearing the store uniform spoke to his friend and came outside to see if he could help her. He licked his lips and said, What you lookin for? She was standing hipshot in her jeans, reading prices. Can I be of service?

She got smile lines by her mouth. But she was calculating days until they paid her.

Yeah, I see you. Would you care to step into my office where it’s warmer?

Even then, with rent, she would be leaving herself with next to nothing.

Now, now, now—no need to go. I’m here to give you the service you desire.

Before letting her go, he insisted on shaking her hand, which he kissed, and she yanked her hand away, laughing. He called after her as she went down the block:

I see you! Think it over, ma!

In the morning, she ran farther out in the park, crossing a road after which the park continued on in the direction of the tall isolated buildings that she thought of as mountains. She came to a basketball court where Afghan men and boys were playing soccer in leather sandals in twenty-degree weather. The men had imam’s beards and the boys had loosely jointed running styles from birth defects, depleted uranium.

When she got paid, she bought an off-brand pair of sneakers in a 99-cent store. They tore her heels and she put tape in them to make them better.

When no one was around, she went beneath the steam table and took out a plastic shell and then, after looking around first, picked up a stainless steel cover and checked beneath it. There was nothing under it but water, and she let it go—it sounded like a symbol when it dropped—and wrung her burned hand. She grabbed a dipper and flipped up the next one with the handle. Steam flowed up. She heard someone coming and put it down and stood aside. The cook, Rambo, was coming out, bent over fast-walking as if trying to catch up with a tub he was carrying in front of himself, gripping it with rags. She backed out of his way. He heaved it down, flipped up a lid, and slammed it home. From where she had retreated to, she watched the heat coming off the rice. He took her dipper and flipped the covers up and caught them like a juggler of spinning plates in an oriental circus. She pretended to be organizing drinking cups. He squatted and dialed a flame up. She put the shell back and went and got her rag in the closet with the jackets and purses and the starch. They had shopping bags with their own greens in them sitting on the floor. Box thorn, Shanghai cabbage sprouts. Someone had come in with coffee. She went back out and saw the girl at the register eating a pastry—crumbs on a napkin, coffee rings on a napkin—you could smell the milk and sugar.

What you doing? Hiding back there?

She had wanted a piece of stringy beef.

When she went into the kitchen to wash dishes during the rush, Rambo saluted her.

Leaving work at night, she was cutting through the parking lot to Roosevelt Avenue. In the projects across the street, someone was running across her line of sight. She watched a figure in sweatpants vault over a railing and run up to a steel door and start bouncing her ass back and forth. The door banged open and others came out in ball caps, laughing and making noise. The girl jumped around and clapped and another girl jumped into it with her, clapped at exactly the same time—they slid sideways on cue, danced a couple steps in sync together—the whoop came to Zou Lei from across the avenue—and then they dropped right in step with everybody else, the group of kids passing under the streetlight and becoming a squad of shadows, just their energy moving out into the nighttime and the voice or two that carried back.

Then Zou Lei had a stroke of luck on the street, on Junction Boulevard. She found clothes out front of a thrift store, everything on the rack three dollars. She bought a pair of jeans at the Colombiana. The label, which she could not read, said Euphoria, but they were good as new and cut her way. She did three hundred squats one night at home and put them on and they fit her nice and tight.

Polo was speaking to Sassoon.

Everyone has their own characteristic. You look: One, two, three, four… One the style of Taiwan, one the style of Hong Kong, another one Japan. Polo paused for reflection. Another one Thailand, another one Singapore, another one Korea. More and more, on and on. The more modern style.

But we, we, what are we? You think.

Sassoon waited for him to tell her.

We provide the modern flavors, he said. The front line. That is our characteristic. You look: Sa-cha. Thick soup. Oyster. Everything is leaning to Hong Kong-Taiwan. This is the front line. Not just smell. Flavor. Also culture. The big plate. Why a big plate? Because this is modern. Look, someone is eating—he pays money, he is eating, but the plate is small! Just like twenty years ago! Just like village! I feel so poor! Why do I pay? I am unsatisfied. I want a big plate. The big
plate generates the atmosphere of freedom. The modern culture. Ah! Now I am so free, so magnanimous, so relaxed.

You understand this? He observed his listener, before going on.

You know sushi? Haha! He hooked his fingers towards his mouth. Sushi is advanced. This one—he pointed at another counter—provides sushi. You love to eat sushi? How do you know it? I am your senior and I just found out about it. I will invite you. You can taste it. What do you think? Hahaha.

You have to study the meaning. This meaning is very deep, this, this characteristic. If you understand this characteristic, you can advance, you can expand your market share. This is your capital. Otherwise no one will know you.

Little by little, you are learning. You must keep working. You will have your own business.

Too old, Sassoon said.

Maybe hair style? Maybe beauty? You will have your own business and be my competitor! He raised his pompadour and laughed hahaha.

Too old. I’m looking for a husband. A rich one. Let the husband work.

What will you do?

Bodyfit!

Bodyfit! What? The disco, aerobics… He smiled, raised his arms up, to the sides.

Lose my weight. I love to lose my weight, Sassoon said. She danced in her seat.

Ah, the boss said.

A boy from Cardozo spoke to Kay or Angela across the register. You scared about you image. There’s no girls here. Don’t be afraid. I protect you. I got to protect mines own image. Yeah, right. Yeah, right, he said. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. I told you first. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah. They let you touch the money. Let me touch the money? Don’t even think about it. KC. K-sahp-C laaaaaa! They the one who crazy. Mou aaaaaaah! Talk less. You boyfriend in the gang. So why you talking? I know you take it. Speak about the thing you understand. You take the money. Shut up already. You at the register all day… so
much temptation for girl like you. Let me get twenty. Let me get a hunnie. Lemme get a knot. Seriously, chill with that. I’m on camera. There are four camera on me all the time. X film. For real. XX film. Watch the porno of you. Mental illness. He must suspect you. This place does mad good. How much is mad good? Twenty dollar? Phat knots? Try like way more. You got stacks. Word? Bossie got mad dollars. He live in Jersey. What kind of car he drive? He push a Escalade. Escalade… The big black one. You likes the Escalade. Ahh yeah. She smirked and curled her tongue up over the front of her teeth. You on his shit. She hummed a little tune. Never know. No way. I could get behind the wheel. She put her fist up and steered, rocking her narrow body from side to side.

The men said, She is healthy.

The three of them were sitting at a table at the far end of the food court from the counter and they had a view of the women clearing trays in their orange hats and aprons.

You give her steak and she eats it, that kind of girl. Our Chinese girls are not like that. They have a modesty, that is their characteristic. When they show their flowers and branches it is different.

Miss, miss, don’t be angry. I sit on a chair, you sit on the ground. I eat watermelon, you eat meat.

It rhymed in their dialect from coal country. They had been discussing real estate, taxes, and how to beat a traffic ticket in American court.

She’d make a good bit of goods for Polo.

His blood isn’t red enough.

He’s a man of higher quality. He wouldn’t be interested, I’ll tell you.

If he did, you-know-who, the ghost-face one, would do away with herself.

He’s frightened of that leopard.

The former security man, whose name, Qing, meant Whisper in classical Chinese, told a story. There once was a labor organizer in our mine. He was connected to a clan, so we stayed clear of him. But he had a girlfriend we knew about, a fiancé. They weren’t married yet, you see. She was taken off the road, invited to a quiet place.
We offered her a seat. Told her to get comfortable. We had made a hot fire. We helped her off with her coat and her pants. It’s too warm for that, we told her. Be careful of your health. We don’t want you to catch a fever. In our village, we grow beans, the product our village is famous for, besides coal. Now we prepared a funnel. This will remind you of your lover, we told her. Your tears are tears of impatience. A kilo of beans was heated till they were smoking hot in a brazier. They were put inside her using a funnel.

One of the men, whose name meant Bell or Clapper, wanted to know if that was a true story.

I don’t know, said Qing. Is it?

That’s why we don’t have 9/11, the third one said.

We have had 9/11. A nation as big as ours, we’ve had more than one 9/11, but you don’t hear about it. But that’s why we are catching up to America. Because we don’t allow backward people to slow us down. Here they have blacks, everywhere the blacks—taking drugs, playing with guns. If an iron fist were used with them the way we do back home, America would be a much stronger opponent.

An open country.

Too open. The women are open. Buy them a soda pop and they open their legs.

Some of our Asian girls are getting like that too.

Society is changing gradually, as the quality of life increases, the material level increases. People have levels. You can’t confuse a low-quality person with a civilized person. If people are not confused, then society will not be confused. But some people confuse society, telling lies, that kind of thing, and it holds the country back.