A Girl Named Faithful Plum (21 page)

“You can take me piggyback,” Zhongmei said. “Please.”

“I can’t carry you all the way to the town center,” Zhongling pleaded. But she knew already that she had lost this battle. Zhongling loved to make other people happy. If it had been Zhongqin who was home that day, there would have been no ice stick for Zhongmei, but Zhongling didn’t have the heart to disappoint her sick little sister, especially not on her birthday.

“Please,” Zhongmei said yet again.

“Oh, all right.”

As Zhongling carried Zhongmei all the way from their lane to the ice-stick stand in the center of town, it started to rain, and the girls had no umbrella.

“We have to go back,” Zhongling said.

“After we get my ice stick,” Zhongmei said firmly, tightening her grip around Zhongling’s neck.

“Be reasonable,” Zhongling pleaded. “We’re going to get soaked.”

They were already getting soaked. The rain was coming down in slanting sheets, blown by a cold wind.

“Who cares!” Zhongmei shouted. “It’s fun to get wet!”

“Oh, all right,” muttered Zhongling, and she trudged on.

It rained even harder on the way back, Zhongmei clinging
to her sister with one hand, holding the treasured ice stick with the other, trying to lick it fast before it got washed away. There was no shelter. It was a long walk. The rain pelted Zhongmei’s hair and cheeks; it stung her eyes. Zhongling splashed through muddy puddles that formed on the earthen lane that ran to their house. By the time they got home, both girls were not only drenched, their hair matted, their shoes soaked, but Zhongmei was shivering with cold, though she kept eating her ice stick through blue lips and chattering teeth, or at least as much of it as she’d been able to save from the rain.

Zhongling helped her sister into dry clothes. She put her on the
kang
and covered her with padded blankets, muttering, “Stupid” to herself.

“Who’s stupid?” Zhongmei asked weakly.

“We’re both stupid,” Zhongling said. “You’re stupid for making such a big deal out of an ice stick and I’m stupider for taking you out of the house on a day like today. Now you’re really going to be sick.”

And sure enough, when the girls’ parents got home, Zhongmei had such a high fever they decided to take her to the town’s medical clinic, where a doctor was on duty. Zhongmei’s father took her there on a bicycle cart, Zhongmei bouncing uncomfortably on the cart’s bed while her mother sat alongside her, keeping her from falling off. At least it had stopped raining.

When Zhongmei was settled onto a bed in the hospital, her mother discovered that she was still holding the telltale sliver of wood left over from the ice stick she’d forced Zhongling to get for her clutched to her chest.

“Where did this come from?” her mother asked.

Zhongmei just shrugged and closed her eyes, pretending to sleep. Of all the Li children, Zhongling was the one most often in trouble with their parents, and their mother wasn’t averse to administering a good spanking from time to time. Zhongmei wanted to save Zhongling from punishment. As it turned out, Zhongling didn’t get spanked, but only because her mother stayed up all night with Zhongmei in the hospital mopping her brow, trying to get her fever to go down. But when Zhongmei got home from the hospital a couple of days later, she apologized to her older sister, admitted that she had been selfish, and promised never to do anything like that again.

“Have one,” Xiaolan urged her now in Tiananmen. She spoke in a whisper. She thought that maybe the girl who didn’t know what it means to go on television didn’t know what an ice stick was. “They’re really good,” she assured her.

“I know they’re good,” Zhongmei said, whispering back, “but I don’t have any money.” Zhongmei’s parents had given her the few yuan, Chinese dollars, left over from the purchase of the train ticket, and it had to last all year. She could use it for essential things, like toothpaste and toilet paper, which the students had to provide for themselves at the Beijing Dance Academy, and that was all. There was no fund for frivolous things like ice sticks.

“Jinhua is paying for all of us,” Xiaolan whispered.

“I mean, I won’t have any money to pay when my turn comes up,” Zhongmei whispered back.

“Oh,” murmured Xiaolan. “Well, that’s all right. When it’s your turn, I’ll pay for you.”

“I couldn’t let you do that,” Zhongmei replied.

“They’re only five fen,” Jinhua said mockingly. She had overheard. Five fen was even less than a single American penny. Zhongmei could have bought ice sticks for her entire class of boys and girls for about twenty cents, but for the family that could only eat an egg once a year, twenty cents wasn’t a small amount. “Five,” said Jinhua, and she spread the fingers of her right hand.

“You mean you’re so poor in Bao … quan … ling … that you can’t buy ice sticks?” said Jinhua incredulously.

“They have them once a year,” another girl said.

“During the winter,” said another. “In the summer they don’t have ice up there.”

“They have them for New Year’s,” a third girl put in.

“Thanks anyway,” said Zhongmei. “I really don’t want one.”

“The farm girl is too poor to buy ice sticks!” Jinhua jeered, and the other girls, except for Xiaolan, laughed.

Zhongmei said to herself there and then that she would never again accompany her classmates on a Sunday excursion to Tiananmen, and she never did.

T
he days got shorter and colder as fall tumbled toward winter. After a couple of weeks, a letter from Zhongqin arrived for Zhongmei. She tore it open and read.

The letter cheered Zhongmei up, but it also made her long for her family and her home. She dreamed of the brick house where she lived, simple and narrow but filled with the mischievous clamor of her sisters and brothers and with the smells of the soups and dishes Da-jie cooked in their little kitchen. Zhongmei used to help with the fire, which had to be lit under the stove. She would get it going with twigs, toss in a brick made out of coal, and then watch, her face enveloped in the heat, as it began to glow. The big wok would be placed on the stove, and before long it would be steaming with something fragrant. It was all so different from the fluorescent-lit cafeteria where she ate at school.

She remembered that at this time of year she would wake to a thick frost covering the wheat fields and glittering in the morning sun. She missed the
kang
that she slept on along with her brothers and sisters. At home, even when it was bitterly cold outside, the fire under the
kang
made the whole house warm and toasty, until the fire went out and everybody would wake up, covered in their heavy quilts, with the tea left over from the night before frozen in its porcelain cups. Her dormitory room in Beijing was always cold, despite the clanking, water-stained radiator under the window that was supposed to heat it.

Zhongmei missed so many things. She missed singing in front of the microphone at noon. She missed the low-slung cinder-block schoolhouse where she had learned to read and write and where no teacher bore even the slightest resemblance to the hateful Teacher Zhu, where everybody was kind
and generous and full of compliments. In Baoquanling, everybody knew her and everybody liked her, and that’s what she missed most of all. At night, when she thought of all those things that she missed, Zhongmei wept, muffling her tears in her pillow so that none of the other girls would hear.

One raw, wet day in the late fall, Zhongmei was not sent to her corner in fundamentals of ballet but stayed at her place at the far end of the line at the barre, happy to be included. The class began. The girls faced the barre and held it with both hands. The accompanist began tinkling out a tune on the upright piano. “As always,” Teacher Zhu said, “chin up, shoulders down,
pi-gu
over your heels, stomach in, OK, and plié.” Zhongmei followed directions, occasionally checking her position in the mirror on the wall opposite the barre.

“Zhongmei!” she suddenly heard Teacher Zhu calling her name. “Your
pi-gu
is sticking out so far it looks like you’re looking for a place to sit down. Do you want to sit down?”

“No,” Zhongmei said, not feeling too bad despite the muffled snickering of the other girls because this was the sort of ribbing that everybody got from Teacher Zhu. Teacher Zhu carried a small stick, a bit like a riding crop, that she used to slap in her open hand as she surveyed the class, so that the girls’ exercises had a kind of accompaniment to them, the
slap, slap, slap
of the stick in her palm. But she also used it to slap the body parts of any dancer that were out of position, and she now employed it stingingly on Zhongmei’s behind. But Zhongmei still felt happy. At least Teacher Zhu was paying attention to her, treating her the same way she treated the others.

“Well, draw it in, then, keep it over your heels, not sagging behind like a sack of rice, because if you want to sit down you can go to your spot in the corner and sit there.”

The class continued, with Teacher Zhu urging the girls to keep their positions but to do it gracefully, not stiffly. Near the end of the class she went through some stretching exercises. The girls all lifted their right legs, pulled them toward their faces, and held them there, clutching the barre with their left hands.

“Up, up, up,” Teacher Zhu said, and she walked down the row of girls, stinging the bottoms of their upraised feet with her stick and repeating, “Up, up, up. Get those legs higher and keep them there.”

“Now,” Teacher Zhu said, “left leg on pointe!” The girls lifted themselves on their left toes while their right legs remained over their heads, a maneuver that caused about half of them to let go of the raised leg, so that they had to bend over awkwardly to retrieve it.

“You girls who let go, sit down,” cried Teacher Zhu. Zhongmei was among the six who were still standing. She was doing well, standing on pointe, gripping her right ankle in her right hand and pulling it straight up.

“You and you,” Teacher Zhu said, tapping two of the girls on the shoulder with her stick. “You’re leaning way back in order to keep your leg up. Sit down.”

Four girls were left, Zhongmei among them, but the raised leg of one of them was steadily losing altitude, and Teacher Zhu told her to sit down too. Now it was Zhongmei, Jinhua,
and Xiaolan, the only ones left standing.
“Bu tsuo”
—not bad—Teacher Zhu said. “Keep the leg and body straight, stay on pointe, that’s it. Now, let go of the barre with your left hand.”

Let go? Impossible, thought Zhongmei, but Teacher Zhu was shouting, “Let go! Let go! Let go!” as she walked along the barre ready to apply her stick to any left hand still gripping it.

Zhongmei let go. She held her position for a second and then had to grab ahold again to stop from falling, whereupon she felt the snap of Teacher Zhu’s stick on her hand. She let go again, and this time, over she went right onto the floor. At first she felt humiliated, but then she saw that Jinhua and Xiaolan were on the floor too. Not a single girl had managed the whole exercise, but Zhongmei had been in the final group. She had done better than nine of the other girls and just as well as the other two. Surely Teacher Zhu would see that and allow her to take the class the next day, and the day after that.

“OK, back to the barre,” Teacher Zhu said. “Final movement. Face the barre,
ding zi bu
”—basic position—“and plié.” She watched as the girls followed her instructions. “Some of you are looking as stiff and awkward as elephants trying to dance,” she said. “You’re not holding your heads up gracefully like peacocks but stiffly like roosters crowing in the morning.”

“Zhongmei!” she said suddenly.

“Yes, Teacher Zhu?”