Girl in Translation (23 page)

The bike swung as he gained momentum. Then he really started to race.

“You sure you don’t want to hold on to me instead?” he asked. “It’d be safer.”

“I’m okay,” I breathed. I did desperately want to put my arms around him but I was already so aware of his body that shyness overwhelmed me at just the thought of it.

Gaps opened up for us in the solid wall of people on the street as they sprang back with fear when they saw us coming.

“You flying boy!” one woman yelled. A gangster, one of those kids that hung out on the streets, definitely not a compliment.

“You have the nose of a pig and slits for eyes too!” Matt called over his shoulder.

I was looking back at the woman apologetically when he swerved to avoid a delivery truck and we bumped onto the curb, pedestrians leaping out of our way; then we were in the street again. He seemed to slow down by the Chinese American Bank, and I wondered if his father worked there. Then I saw he was just looking at a pretty girl in tight jeans. I hated her at that moment, and him too. But seconds later we were past and out of Chinatown, and the traffic was less congested.

As we zoomed up the Bowery, I tossed my hair back and started to relax. After all of my dreams of traveling at high speed, this was the closest I’d come. Everything passed behind us, the wind streamed through our clothes and I wasn’t even cold, thrilled as I was at being close to Matt. The late-afternoon sun shone on my upturned face. Ahead of us, a pigeon spiraled upward between the concrete buildings, its wings extended as it headed for the sky.

He turned back to look at me. “You scared?”

“You trying to scare me?” I felt I was glowing, all of my happiness emanating for the world to see.

He grinned and turned back around. “Nah, you’re not going to hold on to me anyway. You have one big gall bladder.” He meant I was brave.

Finally, he slowed down by an alleyway. I knew we were still in Manhattan because we hadn’t crossed a bridge, but where we were exactly, I didn’t know. We stopped by one of the abandoned buildings, then Matt held the bike still while I climbed off. A homeless man and his shopping cart sat sprawled a few doorways away. Everything was boarded up, but from the upper floors, I could hear a baby wailing. Laundry fluttered from the fire escapes and the chatter of Spanish drifted in the wind. I was breathing shallowly, trying to avoid the stink of urine and car exhaust, but I wound up with their taste in my mouth instead. It looked like my neighborhood.

Then he went down a few steps to the doorway of an abandoned storefront. That sunken area served as a collection point for trash, and he had to kick away an empty can and a pile of what looked like toilet paper before he could get to the door. The glass window was completely covered by yellowing newspapers. I followed him down the stairs and stood next to him. When I peered more closely at the writing, I saw it was made up of Chinese characters.

He rapped out a drumbeat on the door, obviously some kind of code. The whole building looked so forsaken that I was still surprised when a tiny corner of newspaper was peeled back and a pair of eyes gleamed in the darkness.

“Wu, it’s your kid,” a man’s voice said.

The door was unlatched and we went in. I felt curiosity and anticipation but no fear, maybe because I was with Matt. The back of a man was disappearing down the murky hallway. The hallway was cramped and made even more so by the boxes piled high on either side, and in an alcove, a dark stairway led upward to nowhere. A bicycle tire, twisted and bent, leaned on top of a heap of magazines.

“From your last bike?” I murmured to Matt.

He gave a snort of laughter and we followed the man into a crowded room. It looked like it had once been a bar. The air was thick with smoke, and a group of Chinese men gathered around a card table piled high with cash. The bills were worn but lay on top of one another in neat stacks, except for the large mound in the middle of the table. The men had made sure that the room was entirely invisible to the outside world by boarding up every window, though tiny cracks of sunlight squeezed past the slits and caught the tarnished bronze of the barstools.

And in the yellow glow of the few dangling lightbulbs, Matt was watching me as if to ask if it was okay that he’d brought me there. By showing me his father in such a sordid place, he was letting down his face, which told me I was as close to him as anyone could be. I gave him a little nod. He seemed satisfied and turned away.

By this time, the men had seen me. “This isn’t a tourist stop,” one man said.

“She’s with me.” Matt had unfolded a chair in a corner behind the table. He let me sit down and stood next to me, shielding me from the rest of the room.

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.