Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (21 page)

Neither spoke for a moment, and when Mr. Chang asked if Meilan needed another cup of tea, she knew that her time was running out. “Do you still play music?” she asked, eagerly grabbing the first topic that occurred to her.

“
The one who understands the music has ridden the wings of the crane to heaven,”
he said.

She thought of telling him how she had listened to the music coming from his unit years ago, through open windows in the summer evenings, behind piled coal outside his unit on winter nights. But a love story told forty years too late could only be a joke. Instead, she asked him about the strange instrument she had never seen. She might as well solve one mystery if this turned out to be her only chance to talk with him.

He looked at her as if surprised by her memory, and without a word withdrew from the living room. A moment later, he came back with a round-bellied instrument. He plucked the strings and shook his head at its off-key tuning. “My father-in-law brought it from America but neither he nor my wife knew how to play it,” he said. “It’s a banjo.”

“Where did you learn to play it, then?”

“I figured it out myself. It was not that hard. My wife used to boast to her friends that I was the only banjo player in Beijing.”

“Was that true?” Meilan asked, watching him smile dreamily, remembering an old joke, perhaps, between husband and wife.

“I’ve not met another one in my life.”

“Am I not a lucky one to meet the only banjo player in this city, Uncle Fatty?”

Mr. Chang nodded, trying to recover some old tunes. Meilan stood up and swung slowly to the music. In the soft twilight her face looked beautiful in a strange way that reminded him of his wife, but the woman, with her blind cheerfulness and loud voice, would not feel in his music what his wife had once felt. Perhaps this was what his wife had wanted for him, a woman who understood little, an antidote to death and loneliness.

“I have a great idea,” Meilan said when the music stopped. It had taken forty years for him to play the banjo for her once, and neither of them had forty more years to waste. “We should move into one unit and sell the other.”

Why? he asked, aware that he had not appeared as shocked or offended as he should have. If he told the story of the train ride to the woman in front of him, would she laugh at him? Or perhaps she would tell an equally unseemly story, a joke that would crack them up like a pair of shameless oldsters at the Twilight Club.

“Garden Road is hot now, and we’ll make good money.”

“What should we say we are if the police come to check our household register cards?”

“Neighbors, roommates, coinhabitants,” Meilan said. “How much space does one need at our age?”

Indeed, he thought. In the semidarkness he plucked the strings again. Sooner or later one of them would have to stand up and turn on the lamp, but for now he would like to think of himself as happily occupied, playing an old song on an older banjo.

Sweeping Past

THEY HAD BECOME
sworn sisters in Ailin’s backyard fifty years earlier, Ailin being the oldest of the three and the one to come up with the idea. They were twelve going on thirteen, their bodies just beginning to fill the gray Mao jackets handed down from their mothers. By then sworn sisterhood, like many other traditions, had been labeled as a noxious feudal legacy, and they had to bribe a neighbor’s daughter to take Ailin’s younger siblings to the marketplace for sugar canes so that the three girls could be free of prying eyes—it would take the little ones a sweet long time to chew from one end of the sugar canes to the other. Mei had stolen some yam liquor from her father’s cabinet, and they each took a sip of the strong liquid before pouring it on the ground.
“Let the heaven and the earth be the witnesses of the beginning of the rest of our lives,”
Ailin read a pledge she had adapted from old novels in which men and women chose their sworn brotherhood and sisterhood beyond the bond of blood, and Mei and Lan repeated after her that they, sworn sisters from now on, would stick through thick and thin till the day they were to leave the earthly world together.

Later they went to the only photographer in town to have a picture taken. They were in their best outfits: moon white blouses with bows of the same color tied on the ends of their braids, pants with soft-colored floral prints. The photographer, a bachelor in his late thirties, watched the three girls giggle with excitement as he adjusted the lamps, and was moved by something in the girls’ faces that was beyond their understanding. In the final prints, he wrote, with a fine-brush pen, a line from an ancient poem:
As innocent as new blossoms, unaware of the time sweeping past like a river
. Embarrassed yet unable to bring themselves to confront the photographer, the girls pretended that they did not notice the annotation to their sworn sisterhood.

Nine years later, the photographer, with his German-made cameras as evidence for his being a capitalist spy, was the first one in town to be beaten to death by the young Red Guards. By then Mei and Lan were both expecting their first babies, and Ailin, pressured by the other two’s achievements, rushed into marriage with a man whom she had barely known and would take years to fall in love with. He was not the first man the matchmaker had introduced to her, nor was his family the one best able to afford good betrothal gifts, but it was like the old saying:
The one to show up at the right time beats the earlier risers
.

On the morning of the wedding, while her two sworn sisters helped Ailin make up her face, she remembered, to her surprise, where the long and gentle fingers of the photographer had touched her chin when he had adjusted the angle of her face years ago. If she closed her eyes she could almost feel the momentary coolness when she was shielded from the bright light of the lamps, big and small, by his raised arms. Remember what the photographer wrote on our picture, Ailin asked, and then said how true it was that time swept past when they were the least prepared. Mei and Lan, both glowing in their new motherhood, laughed at Ailin for being a sentimentalist. Wait until this very night to discover what you haven’t known about life, said Mei, always the most outspoken one, without lowering her voice; Lan blushed but then agreed with a coy smile, and for a moment Ailin was intimidated by a looming void of which her two sworn sisters seemed unaware.

THE PICTURE WAS
buried with a few pieces of her maiden clothes in a trunk that had been rarely opened in her married life, and when it was uncovered again, it was not by Ailin but by Ying, Ailin’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter on her summer holiday from Lisbon. Who were these girls? Ying asked her grandmother as she put aside the picture and tried on a blouse from the trunk. The moon white silk fabric had taken on a dull yellow hue, just like the faded picture from fifty years ago, but she seemed to be impressed by herself in the old-fashioned blouse. She parted her hair, dyed reddish yellow, in the middle and braided it, but the hair was unruly from her perm, and after a few trials she let go and focused on a tortoiseshell comb missing a few teeth.

They had been best friends, she and the other two girls, Ailin said, but did not explain the ritual of sworn sisterhood for fear of being laughed at, which happened sometimes when she talked about the past with her granddaughter. Ying picked up the picture again and studied it. Sweet, she said, as one would speak of a puppy.

If her granddaughter was home for stories Ailin would tell her stories, but she knew that even though the girl acted nonchalant when her childhood friends admired the pictures she brought home, in which she posed in an exotic city with stately buildings, grand statues, and blue harbors with white boats, Ying already had too many stories of her own to shoulder. Five years earlier, after the death of Ailin’s husband, her only son had decided to emigrate to Portugal, and Ailin, knowing that her opinion was the last thing sought from her, had given him the money he had requested without voicing any doubt. Ailin had thought of suggesting that they could leave their only daughter for her to raise, but Ying had been the one most eager to leave for a foreign life.

She was a good helper in the restaurant, Ailin’s son soon called to report, and became even more useful when she picked up Portuguese and learned to deal with the paperwork and officials for her parents. Every summer she came back to Ailin’s home for two weeks of vacation, an award for her contribution to the prospering restaurant, but apart from quietly showing off her new life to friends and neighbors, Ying was also in charge of purchasing handmade tablecloths and napkins, decorated with the embroidery the province had been known for in the past thousand years and still cheap if one knew which village to go to.

Life was good, and the business had never been better, Ying reported every summer, with fewer details each year, and Ailin learned not to ask for more than what was provided. If the girl wanted to tell stories, Ailin was all ears, but Ying was at an age where the line between the real and the imagined was blurred, and the tales she thought impressive invariably bored Ailin, though she was careful not to show it.

TOWARD THE END
of Ying’s stay the girl brought home a poster-sized print of Ailin’s picture with her sworn sisters. The store had Photoshopped it for better effect, Ying explained. The three girls in the sepia-toned print smiled dreamily, as if a shared mystery had cast a mist that separated them from the rest of the world. What was this for? Ailin asked, and the girl replied that the picture was to be part of the new decorations for a section of the restaurant divided from the main floor. There were other pictures she had gathered, too, Ying said, old photos she had sought from her friends’ parents, and the store would have them ready in a day or two.

Ailin looked at the picture. She was sitting on a stone bench, her knees drawn to her body and clasped in both hands, as directed by the photographer. Look slightly upward as if being summoned, he had told her, though by whom he had not said. Mei and Lan stood behind her, each placing a hand on her shoulders and pointing the other hand to where all three were expected to look. All of it had been staged, and the painting of bamboo trees and waterfall on the background curtain, already faded fifty years ago, was recognizable perhaps only to Ailin’s eyes now. Still, the long-forgotten details came back with the enlarged images: The coiled ends of her braids, slightly burned even though it was hard to see in the picture, were the result of impatient curling with a pair of hot tongs; the jasmine blossoms in their top button holes were from Mei’s neighbor, a boy their age with a shy smile who liked to offer Mei the blooming flowers from his mother’s garden, but before any fruitful connection could be made from all the fragrant presents, the boy had to move away when his widowed mother remarried into another province; Lan, the prettiest of the three, had to be begged once and again by the photographer not to turn her face away, though if looking closely, one could detect the shying away of her face from the lens, and the photographer had skillfully caught her eyes just before she had averted them.

“How much does it cost to make this?” Ailin asked as she fingered the fabric of the print.

Ying gave Ailin a number that took her aback, and Ailin commented that despite the amount of money spent, the picture looked even older than it was.

“That’s the effect I need.”

“Did you talk to your parents before making this?”

“Why should I?” Ying said. “They’ll love it if I tell them that this is what the guests have been asking for. Besides, they say the restaurant will be mine someday, so why can’t I make the decision now?”

Ailin thought about lecturing her granddaughter on filial respect, but Ying would only roll her eyes and laugh at her outdated and useless wisdom. “I don’t see why anyone wants to look at some girls from ages ago while eating at your restaurant.”

“All three of you look very young and innocent. Very Chinese.”

“We certainly didn’t take the picture to entertain some foreign devils,” Ailin said dolefully.

“But you don’t mind, do you?” Ying said. “And your friends—will you not tell them about this? I don’t want them to come to me and ask to be paid.”

The girl was too young to worry about such things, Ailin thought, saddened by the fact that her granddaughter had less space and time to dream than Ailin herself had once had at this age. She would not let the secret out to her friends, Ailin replied, but Ying looked doubtful.

“But you may forget,” she said. “I know what it’s like with old people. You make a promise one day and the next day the promise means nothing because you have all this time on your hands and you need to tell them every bit of news.”

“I’ll never see them again.”

“Are they dead?”

They did not live in town, though neither had moved very far away. The distances could be covered easily by a two-hour bus ride, but Ailin had not sent word to Mei and Lan about her husband’s funeral. It had occurred to Ailin before that similar losses might have been kept from her as well, though she had always believed that in the case of a death among the three, the news would find its way to the other two. On what ground to be so blindly confident? she pondered now, and Ying, studying Ailin with a detached sympathy, asked again if her friends had died on her. They were probably still in good health, Ailin replied; only they no longer talked. But why? Ying pressed. Circumstances, Ailin said, and added that fifty years was a long time to keep up.

Ying seemed dissatisfied with the answer. “You don’t stop being a friend because of circumstances,” she said. She herself stayed close to a couple of friends through Internet phone calls, birthday cards, and days spent together on her holidays. Every summer she gave the friends presents she bought with money she earned, clothes and shoes said to be in fashion in Europe.

Life was crowded with many small worries that could replace a friendship with indifference—meals to be prepared, diapers to be changed and washed, critical in-laws and bosses to appease, illness and exhaustion to recover from—and beyond that there was what the photographer had called the sweeping past of time, but Ying was right that one did not discard the sworn sisterhood due to some minor changes in circumstances. “Something happened to us a while ago,” Ailin said finally. “I told a very bad joke, and neither of them wanted to be my friend anymore.”

“A triangle can be unforgiving and unstable for friendship,” Ying said. “What kind of joke was it?”

“They both had their first babies before I had your father—a boy and a girl, so I suggested that they arrange a marriage between the kids,” Ailin said. “It was meant to be a joke.”

“And of course one of the families took it more seriously than the other. It was a silly joke, if you ask me, but it was sillier to stop being friends because of the joke. So don’t blame yourself, Nana,” Ying said. Ailin had never seen her granddaughter act brusquely protective, but perhaps it was what was required of her when she had to speak for herself as well as for her parents.
“There would’ve been no trouble in the world if not for the stupid people who make stupid mistakes,”
Ying added.

Only it had not been proposed as a joke, nor had it been received as one. The two babies were born a day apart, both as beautiful as their mothers. There would be more children coming to the three families, but the first two were special. Their mothers were sworn sisters, and what could be a better destination than a marriage, so that the two children would continue loving each other beyond playmates, beyond brother and sister? It made sense when a marriage was semiofficially arranged for the two babies; it made Mei and Lan happier that Ailin had been the one to propose it—they worried about her feeling left out, she could see, and with more enthusiasm than either mother she prepared a lavish meal for the small ceremony. None of the three husbands attended the ceremony, treating it with dismissive amusement, as a harmless feminine fantasy. The three men got along all right, but they would not have chosen to be friends if not for their wives; none of them had been told about the sworn sisterhood.