Homesick (13 page)

I was keeping track. “Do they each have a bathroom?”

“No, they share. And they're not even here now. School is over for us and they're staying with my father in his apartment until we sail.” She sighed. “We're having a hard time with David. He doesn't want to go to America.”

“Does he have to? Can't he stay with your father?”

Andrea shook her head. “Both my mother and father think that would be bad for him. He'd just keep brooding and hoping. Maybe when he gets to a new country, he'll forget the adoption business.”

I was interested in David Hull's troubles and I could see that Andrea wanted to talk about them, but right now I was more interested in the bathroom situation.

“You know,” I said, “I'm kind of in a hurry.”

“Sorry.” Andrea took me into another bedroom. “We'll share my bedroom.” She pointed to a door on the right. “My bathroom is there.” Then she pointed to a door on the left. “That's yours there.”

“My private bathroom?”

“Of course. I told you, didn't I?”

Well, that's all I wanted to know. I went in and shut the door. Right away, as if I'd been touched with a magic wand, I felt like a queen. I'd never dreamed that a bathroom could make so much difference in a person's life. Not only was it private, it was elegant. The basin and pot and tub were pale blue. The toilet paper too. (I'd always supposed all that stuff had to be white.) In one corner of the room was a dressing table with a blue-and-white-striped skirt flounced around it. I sat down on a chair in front of the table, picked up a comb, and ran it through my hair. I had never combed my hair sitting down before. Then I opened the door of the medicine cabinet and found little jars and tubes of face cream lined up inside. And a bottle of shampoo. And a big box of bath salts. I wondered if it would be all right for me to try out the bath salts. I flushed the toilet so Andrea would think I'd really had to go, then I went into the bedroom and asked about the bath salts.

“Sure you can use it. Help yourself to anything. I put it there just for you.”

I was overwhelmed. “Do you always use bath salts?”

“And how!” Andrea was lying on the floor, just the way she used to, exercising her thighs.

“How come you say ‘and how' so much?”

“It's the latest. They say it in the States all the time.”

“Maybe when we get there, they'll be saying something different,” I pointed out.

Andrea got up. “I can change. Want to see me do the split?” She took off her stockings so she wouldn't get a run and then glided to the floor as if her legs had been built to go in opposite directions.

She jumped up. “Now the back bend.” Slowly she went over, all the way until the tips of her fingers touched the floor. Then a little more until her hands were down flat.

“I'm going on the stage,” she announced.

She amazed me. She knew just how to get ready for life while all I seemed to do was to wait for life to happen.

That night I took a long, luxurious bath in deep, lilac-scented water. Afterward I sat down at the dressing table and on one side of my face I rubbed night cream that said “For oily skin.” On the other side I rubbed cream that said “For dry skin.” I'd never noticed what kind of skin I had so I figured this would be a good test. Andrea called to me from the bedroom.

“Did you brush your hair?”

“Now
? Why should I brush it now?”

“To keep it in good condition, you should brush fifty strokes every night.”

So I brushed. By the time I'd finished my beauty work, it seemed a shame just to go to bed but that was obviously all there was to do. I put on my flannel pajamas and Andrea put on her flowered nightgown and we lay in the dark and talked and talked.

The next day after my mother and Mrs. Hull had gone shopping, Andrea turned on the Victrola. I should learn about popular music, she said. So I listened to “Five Feet Two, Eyes of Blue” and “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya huh?” I didn't much care for the “Eyes of Blue” song, but I agreed that “Gimme a Little Kiss” had a nice snappy tune. Still, the song I liked best was “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream.”

“You would,” Andrea said.

“What do you mean—‘I would'?”

“Well, it's not sophisticated or romantic. Your trouble is that you think America is just feeding your grandmother's chickens. There's a lot more to America than that.”

I supposed she was right. Still, I felt silly snapping my fingers and singing “Five Feet Two” the way Andrea did.

“Just remember,” Andrea went on, “when you start school in the States next fall, you'll be in eighth grade. Nobody in the eighth grade is going to be singing ‘Swa nee River.”'

She scared me.

“You don't still curtsy, I hope?”

“No.”

“Well, thank goodness for that.”

She made me feel so behind the times that when my mother came home and handed me a package of silk stockings, I went right upstairs and put them on, rolling the tops over round garters, the way Andrea did. Then I stretched out my legs to give them the once-over. They didn't look like my legs but I decided they weren't too bad. Still, I kept wondering: How on earth was I going to roller-skate in silk stockings?

The next day when my mother and Mrs. Hull came home from shopping, my mother seemed more light-hearted than she'd been for ages. “Well,” she said, “I have a surprise.”

She pulled off her hat and her hair was bobbed. I felt sick to my stomach. Andrea told her how stylish she looked, but I knew that she had ruined herself. She didn't look like my mother at all. I knew that my father would feel exactly the way I did. “What will Dad say?”

“Oh, he'll be mad at first,” she said gaily, “but he'll get used to it.”

When my father got mad, it was not a laughing matter. When his chin went hard, he was really trying to hold down the lid on a private volcano, but sometimes the lid blew. Sky-high.

“Don't you like it, Jean?” My mother was pirouet ting around me.

“Well, you're pretty, no matter what you do.” After all, she couldn't stick her hair back on, could she? When I looked at her, I'd just try to skip over her hair.

I had plenty of other things to think about. Mr. Hull was taking all the children to the moving pictures the next afternoon. Andrea was sorry that John Gilbert wasn't playing because she was in love with him, but this was next best, she said. Not a love movie, a scary one.
The Phantom of the Opera
with Lon Chaney. She said that a boy in the Shanghai American School had been so scared, he'd wet his pants. I could see that Andrea thought this movie was a real challenge, a test of how grown-up you were. I pretended to be excited too but secretly I was worried because I didn't know if I could pass the test. To make sure, I'd just close my eyes, I decided, if I felt any danger.

The way my mother and Mrs. Hull were tearing around—packing, shopping, sewing—you wouldn't have thought either one of them would have bothered to ask what we were going to see. But Mrs. Hull did, just as we were leaving. Andrea tried to get over the moment by shrugging and saying a loud good-bye, but David told.

“The
Phantom of the
Opera,”
he said.

Mrs. Hull grabbed Andrea's arm. “You are doing no such thing,” she announced. She looked at Mr. Hull as if he'd taken leave of his senses. “You can't take children to that.
Rin-Tin-Tin
is playing across the street. Either the children go to that or they stay home.”

“That's for babies!” Andrea cried. “Daddy promised us Lon Chaney.”

But Mrs. Hull didn't care what Mr. Hull had promised and he didn't argue. After we'd left, Andrea tried to talk him into going to Lon Chaney anyway. “After all,” she scoffed, “it's just a movie. How could a movie hurt anyone?”

But Mr. Hull took us to
Rin-Tin-Tin.
Secretly, of course, I was glad, because I knew I could keep my eyes open the whole time.

Actually, we should have gone to the movies the next day, the twentieth, and taken my mother to distract her. It was the day my father was due to arrive, and from the time she got up, my mother was beside herself. She would start a job, look at the clock, forget what she'd been doing, and go to another job. Every time the telephone rang, she jumped. Every time there was a knock at the door, she ran to it. It was never my father. In the evening she called up the boat company. No, they said, the boat from Hankow had not come in and they'd had no word.

The following day my mother paced. Every few hours she'd call up the boat company but there was still no news. I kept thinking of the pingpingpings on our boat; I kept worrying that my father didn't know how to fall down fast enough.

Andrea and I stayed downstairs late that night but at eleven o‘clock, just as we were about to give up, there was a bang on the front door. My mother got there first.

And yes, it was my father, triumphant, laughing, happy, brimming with news of Narrow Squeaks. The boat, it seemed, had run aground in that shallow channel of the river that boats were always wary of. It had taken all this time to get clear. He told about the riots in Hankow and was reporting on what had happened to different friends when all at once I noticed that the line of my mother's mouth had gone tight and thin. My father had been here over half an hour, talking steadily about his news, and he hadn't even noticed her hair. After all, my mother had never had her hair cut in her life and of course she expected my father to be startled or shocked. But not even to notice! I was afraid that at any minute my mother might blow her own volcano, and I didn't want to be around, so I kissed them good night and went to bed.

I never did find out what went on between them but the next morning everything seemed to be all right. I was the last one down for breakfast and right away I noticed how happy everyone was.

“The day after the day after tomorrow,” Andrea announced.

Suddenly I felt as if a genie had clapped his hands and poof! my “ifs” had vanished. We all seemed to agree that nothing was going to stop us now. So we should celebrate, I thought. We should do something. We shouldn't just sit here eating oatmeal.

My father must have had the same feeling because all at once he slapped the table, tipped his chair back, and began singing “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag and Smile, Smile, Smile.” I looked at Andrea to see if she was turning up her nose at such an old-fashioned song, but no, she was grinning and singing along with everyone else.

I never knew grown-ups to stay excited for so long and I wondered when the spell would break. I knew, of course, that once we got on the ship, it would be hard for Andrea and David and Edward to say good-bye to their father, but no one was coming to say good-bye to me so I figured I could go on being happy indefinitely.

On the twenty-sixth, just before we went on the ship, my father sent my grandmother a cablegram: SAILING TODAY. I wanted him to add “Hooray,” but every word cost money, he said, and besides she'd recognize the hooray even if it wasn't there. Certainly on board the President Taft the hooray feeling was all over the place. On deck the ship's band was playing “California, Here I Come,” and people were dancing and singing and laughing. A steward was handing out rolls of paper streamers for passengers to throw over the railing as the ship sailed.

Although my mother, father, and I had spoken to Mr. Hull when he'd first come on board with the boys, we'd left him to visit alone with his children. I tried not to look in their direction so I wouldn't spoil my hooray feeling, but when the whistle blew for visitors to leave, I went to Andrea and stood beside her. Together we threw our streamers as the ship began to pull away from the dock. Everyone threw. Roll after roll until the distance from the ship to the dock was aflutter with paper ribbons—red, yellow, blue, green. Flimsy things, they looked as if they didn't want to let Shanghai go, but of course as the ship moved farther away, they broke, fell into the water, or simply hung bedraggled over the ship's side. Andrea leaned over the railing, waving to her father as long as she could see him. Then suddenly she turned and ran—to her cabin, I supposed.

My mother, father, and Mrs. Hull went into the lounge for tea. Edward went exploring, and I walked to the back of the ship with David trailing behind me. It seemed to me that once we were completely out of sight of land, I would really feel homeward bound. But as I looked at the Shanghai skyline and at the busy waterfront, I had the strange feeling that I wasn't moving away at all. Instead the land was slowly moving away and leaving me. Not just Shanghai but China itself. It was as if I could see the whole country at once: all the jogging rickshas, the pagodas, the squeaking wells, the chestnut vendors, the water buffaloes, the bluebells, the gray-coated soldiers, the bare-bottomed little boys. And of course the muddy Yangtse with my own junk looking at me with its wide eyes. I could even smell China, and it was the smell of food cooking, of steam rising from so many rice bowls it hung in a mist over the land. But it was slipping away. No matter how hard I squinted, it was fading from sight. I glanced at David, woebegone as always, but I knew he wasn't sad at leaving Mr. Hull or at leaving China. He was just feeling sorry for himself in the same old way.

Suddenly I was mad. “You make me sick, David Hull,” I said. “Cry-babying over something in the past that you can't know a thing about. Don't you know your real past is right there? Yours and mine both.” I pointed at China. “It's been under our noses the whole time and we've hardly noticed.”

I didn't want to talk to David Hull, so I went down to the cabin to open Lin Nai-Nai's present. That would make me feel better, I thought. I took the red package out of my suitcase and tore off the tissue paper. Inside was a folded square of cloth that was obviously a piece of Lin Nai-Nai's embroidery. As I unfolded it, I drew in my breath. This was no iron-on pattern. This was Lin Nai-Nai's own design: a picture of a mountain, a thin black line climbing up to a scallop of clouds. In the center of the picture was a pool with bluebells and tiger lilies growing all around it. I started to cry—not just a flurry of sniffles but such huge sobs I had to throw myself on my bunk and bury my head in my pillow.