The Travellers and Other Stories (2 page)

We have been talking about Hwang and Moon, this morning, Ellen and I.

We have both noticed them lately, arguing in the shop. Moon looking sullen and rebellious and not sitting down at the table in the corner next to her grandmother where she is supposed to do her homework. Hwang pointing a curled finger at her books and making himself look even uglier than usual with all this shouting at Moon. Looking as if he is telling his daughter that he hasn't crammed his soul into his threadbare khaki shirt, his crumbling leather belt, so that she can grow up to become a dry cleaner. One terrible scene I witnessed ended with Hwang throwing the bowl of boiled sweets up into the air, along with a whole pile of pink tickets snatched up off the spike on the counter. The sweets bounced across the floor and out across the sidewalk into the gutter, the tickets floated about in the steamy shop like butterflies and even the old woman looked up for a moment from her work in the corner to see what was going on. Then Moon ran off in tears through the curtain in the back, up into the tiny apartment above.

Ellen and I discuss Hwang's ambitions for his daughter, and end up agreeing that with her grave, exquisite face, her raven-wing hair, she looks so much like a fairy-tale princess that ambition and hard work may not matter for her, because
someone
is surely bound to come along one day, and whisk her away from the chemical smells and the drone of her grandmother's sewing machine and the damp kiss and sigh of her father's steam press.

Ellen is my friend.

She has been my friend ever since the day Francis and I arrived here five years ago, ever since the spring afternoon she came across the street from her house to ours, bearing a tray of iced-tea and three white saucers of Pepperidge Farm cheddar cheese Goldfish, one saucer for each of us. She has lived all her life in the neighbourhood, grew up here and lived here with her husband Norm until he died of cancer nine years ago. The day after we moved in, she came back over and took my arm and walked me around our little area here, where I have come to feel so much at home: the small but adequate A&P; the two good hairdressers; our dentist, Dr. Sandusky. The Barnes & Noble bookstore with its coffee shop, where I have coffee with Ellen every Tuesday morning, where I am having coffee with her at this very moment. The Ann Sather café where Francis and I go for a pancake breakfast on Saturdays. There is the Swedish butcher; a chiropodist; a medium-sized Walgreens; four small but thriving theatres the three of us attend whenever there is something showing which appeals. The hospital and medical centre are only four blocks from our house. There is Hwang too of course, less than three minutes' walk away, and the branch library where I attend a book group every third Wednesday in the month and Ellen comes across to cook Francis his supper and keep him company.

Francis has promised me we will never have to move again; we've moved so much over the years with First Boston, and I have found that as I've grown older, settling into a new place is something I do increasingly badly. I did it worse in Cleveland than in Atlanta, worse in Atlanta than in Philadelphia and everywhere worse since the children left.

It has been different here. I have found I have everything I want; all my needs seem to be looked after in this half square mile with all its now familiar places. I have Francis, and I have Ellen, and I have always felt that there is nothing else here I could possibly ask for.

Much of my conversation with Ellen revolves, inevitably, around the neighbourhood. Speculation about whether the new extension to the Ann Sather café will be ready by the end of the summer. How much longer it takes to find what you want in the A&P since they changed everything around. I tell Ellen which book has been chosen for the next meeting of my Wednesday library group and from time to time I try to persuade her to come along with me, at which she laughs and throws up her hands so her silver bangles slip and clatter along her arms, and says, ‘What! And have Francis starve?'

We wonder about the funny smell from the roadworks at the intersection of Clark and Lincoln where they have dug up part of the sidewalk in front of the dental surgery, about how the new young man with the red hair at the Swedish butcher's might have lost his thumb; and at some point on these Tuesday mornings, sooner or later, we end up talking about Hwang or his old mother or Moon.

The other week I said to Ellen that Hwang reminded me, with his baggy wool pants and his ruthless lack of mercy, of a ninja. A ninja about to pounce.

Ellen hooted at this, threw up her hands. Her silver bangles clanked. ‘A
ninja
! Hardly, Sal! Ninjas are
Japanese.
You can't think Hwang is
Japanese
!'

Ellen was almost choking with laughter, fanning her hand in front of her mouth so her bangles started clanking again.

‘Korean.
He's from
Korea.
All the dry cleaners here are Korean now.'

She said that when her mother was a girl here they were all Jewish owned; now it's the Koreans; one day, she said, it will be another lot.

Ellen was a schoolteacher once and very occasionally she can still sound a little like one; she can sound ever so slightly lecturing.

‘No,' she repeated, still chuckling, ‘
not
Japanese.'

I shrugged. ‘I know that, Ellen.'

For a moment we were silent, Ellen took a bite out of whatever kind of cookie she was having that day, a sip of coffee.

‘He still makes me think of a ninja,' I said.

In fact, I had always thought Hwang was from China. Or rather, I'd never really thought much about exactly where he was from. I'd wondered why he is the way he is, so bitter and angry and haughty. I'd wondered if there was a Mrs. Hwang, if perhaps she had been too frightened to come here with him and start a new life in America, if she might still be over there somewhere, if Hwang was still trying to send for her. I'd wondered, also, if he had perhaps once occupied some position of rank, if that accounted for his brutal disdain, his bullying rudeness, the impression he gives of so much swallowed pride. Of bitterness, maybe, at the way life has betrayed him, or been so hard.

Perhaps his difficulties with Moon are getting him down. I don't know.

What is certain is that over the years that I've known him he has grown angrier, more frightening, meaner to his ticket-less patrons. Where once he would eventually shuffle off, with a lot of bad-tempered mumbling, to search through all the hanging clothes for the items in question, these days he will not budge. He just stands there behind the counter, shaking his head and looking mean; obdurate as a stone.

I have always liked Barnes & Noble for coffee. The green paint and brown wood are soothing, the plush carpet is soft underfoot, there is an atmosphere of quiet repose, and the cakes are good. Today I am having a tall latte and a slice of cherry crumb cake, Ellen a lemon cookie and a decaf espresso.

She is wearing a fawn linen pantsuit and a cream cotton blouse cut square across her collarbones. A print scarf around her throat—she doesn't like her throat, she says no one our age should go out with her throat uncovered. She looks wellgroomed, rested, at peace. She looks exactly like herself.

It is six days since I came back from the library and found one of Ellen's silver bangles in our bed and I can think of no sensible way to proceed. I am frightened of speaking, of saying a single word, either to Ellen, or to Francis. I'm certain that if I put anything of what I feel into words, I will poison the air we breathe and none of us will ever recover. I have become increasingly certain over the past week that the best thing to do is to say nothing, to let things run their course. To stay quiet until whatever is going on has come to a close; to hope for some kind of invisible mend.

When we are almost ready to leave, Ellen says she won't be a second, she just needs to go to the bathroom. I watch her get up, thread her way between the little round tables. At the first bookcase she turns, points back at her chair, mouths, Watch my purse a second?

Ellen's Cole Haan purse, boxy and black with two tall handles, is sitting upright on her chair. The shiny leather is cool to the touch. The zipper makes almost no sound. There is very little inside. House-keys. A hairbrush. Chase Manhattan checkbook in a navy blue plastic case, a single lipstick, her maroon wallet. I fan my thumb across the checkbook stubs looking for I don't know what. The lipstick is nearly finished, its scent powdery and delicious, the scent of Ellen herself. In her wallet she has forty-five dollars and some loose change. A receipt from the One-Hour Photo on Clark Avenue, a pink dry-cleaning ticket.

There is one last mouthful of cherry crumb cake left on my plate. I pick it up with my fingertips, put it in my mouth. Then I eat the dry-cleaning ticket.

It is, I know, a small, stupid thing to do.

I know also that I might just as well have crushed it in my palm and dropped it into the metallic trash can over by the cakes, or just slipped it into my jacket pocket—it's very unlikely Ellen would ever have found it in either place. But sitting here now, thinking of Ellen's silver bangle, the shock of it against my foot, eating the ticket seems the only available thing to do. It is almost impossible to chew, it skates between my upper and lower teeth like the squeaky scraps of articulating paper Dr. Sandusky has me bite on when he's checking a crown or a new filling. In the end I munch it into a ball and with one painful swallow it's gone and all that's left in my mouth is the sharp, inky taste of Hwang's bitter scrawl. A picture in my mind of Ellen, rooting hopelessly through her purse. Hwang behind the counter, arms folded. His pugnacious fury, his proud, frigid grandeur. Fixing her with his ninja's glare.

WAKING THE PRINCESS

SHE WAS THE
widow of the Customs House clerk and she had never liked me. I was only after one thing, she said, and I could forget about that because I repulsed her. I
disgusted
her. She loathed the sight of me and as long as I lived, she told me, I would
never ever
find the key to her heart.

I had tried to kiss her once outside her front door—a terrible, greedy, darting, desperate sort of lunge I have always regretted—and after that she took to shouting at me through the window when I came to call.

‘Lizard!' she shouted. ‘Toad!'

Her name was Elizabeth and she lived with her children in one of the tiny dark houses which lined the narrow streets behind the Customs House in our town at that time. Every day she appeared at her door in the same dingy, high-necked gown, her brown hair scraped back and pinned behind, a drawn look to her face. But she was tall and strong and big-boned and to me she resembled the gorgeous painted figureheads on the ships that came up the river and lay anchored outside the warehouses on the quay. I thought about her all the time.

I had brought her presents—a paper flower from the fair at Appleby, a tea canister with a design of roses on it from Atkinson's on China Street, a pair of combs for her hair—but she left everything on the doorstep for the beggars to steal. I sent her letters and poems but she screwed them up in her fist and tossed them out into the sewers; when I called she closed the door in my face and shouted at me through the window and I was left to loiter in the street outside her house with nothing to do but wait and watch for a glimpse of her.

Which was how I began to observe the way she lived.

The front door was almost always open and I could see the dead clerk's shabby black coat, still hanging on its hook in the passageway. I could see her ragged children running in and out all day long. Elizabeth herself seemed to do nothing but tend the fire and clean the floor. In the early mornings, she was there crouched in the crooked doorway, a donkey-stone in her hand, whitening the edge of the step. The rest of the time I could see her through the open door, trudging around with a bucket of water, a handful of brushes and a heap of rags. Half her life, she seemed to spend on the floor, trying to scrub it clean—all the time with her dirty children charging in from the street, down the dismal passageway beyond the front door, mud and sewer-slop dropping off the flaking soles of their boots and mingling with the blown soot from the fire and sinking into the furrowed boards and lumpy flagstones of the floor. She'd yell at them then to look at the stinking grime they'd brought in on their shoes from the filthy street and how they were trampling it into the floor.

Once a month she bought clean sand from the old man who hauled it into town from the shore on his cart. Then she'd be on her knees again, scouring her pock-marked flags and greasy, blackened floorboards with the sand and a bucket of steaming water. As far as I could tell, she owned just one carpet, a small woven thing like a tab-rug only heavy. This she would heave out into the street every Monday morning on her back, like a stevedore, then beat it against the stone wall of the house. Vast puffs of black dust drifted up into the air, getting smaller and gradually paler until she seemed to be satisfied, and then she'd drag the carpet back into the mean, dark little room at the front of the house she called
the parlour.
She only seemed to rest for a few hours a week, on Sunday morning, when she'd stand at her bedroom window wrapped up in a blanket. There she would shake out her drab, solitary dress and beat it like her old carpet until it was as clean as it ever would be, and then she'd put it on again and go to church.

I decided I wouldn't bother any more with the tea canisters, the paper flowers, the combs for her hair, the poetry. I would give her something she would value above anything. I would give her something that would change her life.

I visited shops and markets and fairs. I looked in newspapers and catalogues and scrounged enough money to travel the country. I went to Manchester and Edinburgh and to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace but found nothing anywhere that came close to what I had in mind.

I decided I would make what I wanted myself. Something different. Something new.