Face (30 page)

The company received this dazzling array with admiration bordering on reverence. Then, like children released from grace,
they let their chopsticks fly. When plates had been filled, most of the group returned to the other end of the loft. Only
Tai and I remained in the kitchen.

He poured a glass of water from the tap and watched me over the rim as he drained it. I set my plate on the counter and attempted
to pick up a shrimp ball, but it slipped from my chopsticks and into the sink. He put down his glass and reached for my hand.

“You’re too tense. Relax.”

I tried to shake him off. “It’s all right. I’m not hungry.” But he moved behind me and extended my ring finger and thumb,
clamping
one chopstick in between, then loosened the top two fingers and slid the other stick gently between them and the tip of my
thumb.

“I grew up in Chinatown.” I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, the bare width of air that separated our bodies.
“I’ve been using chopsticks all my life.”

“I’ve watched how you use chopsticks.” He pressed my middle finger to create a pincer movement and lowered his voice. “Like
a crab.”

His arm curled around mine, he guided my hand to the plate, then back with its pearl to my mouth. I tasted the salty smell
of him and turned abruptly, dropping the shrimp ball. It rolled, leaving a warm brown trail down the front of my white shirt.

“You’re not concentrating.” He got down on his knees to fetch the runaway under the cabinet. An extremely disappointed cockroach
scurried back into its crack. Tai retrieved his quarry but left a pinch for the kitchen guardian.

I fished among the pots in the sink and pulled out a soapy rag. The stain on my shirt grew larger instead of smaller for my
efforts. The wet fabric clung to my breast. Finally, with as much finesse as I could muster, I tossed over my shoulder, “You
said you had something to give me.”

He cleared his throat. I heard him stand, the rustle of feet and hands, crunch of paper.

“Recognize these?” He pulled from the bag a stack of framed photographs.

Sad eyes fastened in time.

Tai placed the stack in my hands and wrapped his fingers around mine. “Li gave them to me before he died and told me to find
you. He wanted you to have them.”

In the weeks after Li Tsung Po named my intended husband, I watched Tommy Wah more closely. On the basketball courts he elbowed
his opponents and swore as aggressively as a Brooklyn hood. In the arcade, he and Henry sang “Cool Jerk” and “Barefootin’”
as duets
so often and so loudly that the manager threatened to throw them out if they didn’t shut up. But while Henry did his best
to corrupt him, Tommy’s face was still Chinese. He treated his parents with respect, worked in their store without pay. He
attended Chinese school by his own choice, which was almost unheard-of for ABC boys.

“What are you doing hanging out with Li Po?” he demanded the one time he caught me watching him.

“We’re friends. Do you mind?”

He stood with his hands on hips, legs apart. We were exactly equal in height, but his confidence made him seem taller.

“Friends, huh? Well, you’re wasting your time.”

“What are you, jealous?”

He gave a short laugh. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I’m just looking out for you.”

“I think you’re afraid you’ll end up marrying me.”

“Me marry a
huaiguo ren!
No way.”

“You’re practically married to Henry, and he’s just as Anglo as I am.”

“Buddies aren’t brides. Different rules apply.”

“Fine by me.” I pulled up tall and looked him straight in the eye. “I already have a fiancé. He has blond hair and knows how
to fly.”

I
am standing above a moonscape, sky black with stars punched like holes over a valley of snow-swept hills and craters. I am
standing on sheer, mirrored ice at the edge of a cliff with Johnny to one side, Marge Gramercy the other. Johnny squats, his
thick hair lifting, white as the snow. Marge sits and dangles her legs like a child. She has been telling how she took this
photograph with only moonlight by stopping all the way down, fast film, slow shutter. Her voice surrounds us in a blur of
quiet, comforting detail. You can do anything you want, it insists, you are the living proof But as she talks I feel the ice
slipping beneath my feet like a treadmill to the edge. I reach for Johnny, and he catches my elbow, pulling me forward and
down toward the cliff. When I look up into the sharp, weathered wrinkles where his eyes should be, I find only gaping holes.

“If you died right now,” he asks, letting me fall, “how would
your
obituary read?”

Soon after Lao Li’s announcement of my betrothal to Tommy Wah, my grandmother sent a photograph of Johnny taken a few months
after
Henry shot him. He was pictured on the driver’s seat of Grampa’s tractor with Grampa standing on the platform behind, both
of them grinning like maniacs. In the accompanying note, Gramma Lou said Johnny’s arm was good as new, Grampa was on his best
behavior, and, she added in a brave P.S., they all missed me a great deal.

“Do you think we’ll go back to the farm this summer?” I asked Anna.

I was sitting at my desk, supposedly doing homework, but my attention kept getting lost in the tie-dyed swirls of fabric my
sister had hung in the window. She lay on her bed, designing her nails in black and white polish. The Beatles were on the
radio.

“Maybe you will, but I’m not.” Anna sat up, waving toes and fingers to dry them. “I’ve had enough of Mum’s duty trips to last
me a lifetime. Let her drag you around and bitch to you what a bigoted asshole Grampa is. I know the rap already. Place bores
the shit out of me, anyway.”

She strolled over and picked up Johnny’s picture. Her face brightened. “But then, I don’t have a lover boy there.”

I flushed as fast and hot as if she’d set fire beneath me. “Give me that!”

“Oo ooh.” She held it above my head and lip-synched to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

“Give it!” I lunged, grabbing and tearing the photo in two. Grampa Henry remained intact, but Johnny was beheaded.

“You bitch!” I screamed as my mother walked in.

“Maibelle! What in God’s name…”

“Look what she did!” I was sobbing now.

“
I
did! I was just teasing. You tore the picture.” Anna returned to her bed and pretended to be engrossed in a Herman’s Hermits
album. Anna loathed Herman’s Hermits.

My mother took a deep breath and assured me that she had some tape somewhere, but I must never again call my sister a bitch.

“Are
we
going back to Wisconsin this summer?”

“Well,” she said. “Actually, I thought we might make a tour of New England. Boston, Nantucket, see a little of Vermont. It’s
about time Anna started looking at colleges, and we might even get your father to come along.”

“I’m not going to college,” Anna said. “I’m going to work at Andy Warhol’s Factory.”

“Over my dead body,” Mum said.

“What if I went to Wisconsin by myself?” I suggested. “You could put me on the train and Gramma Lou could pick me up in Milwaukee.”

“We’ll see.” My mother stared at Anna’s back. I could tell my summer was doomed.

The picture was still lying in pieces on the desk when my grandmother called the next day.

Anna picked up the phone. “Hi, Gramma Lou,” and a moment later her face turned white. “No. Nobody’s home except me and Maibelle.”
She listened, nodded, sat on the floor. And refused to look at me.

At last Anna said, “No, I don’t think so. She’s standing right here, practically on top of me. Yeah, maybe you better… Here.”
She got up to hand me the receiver, touched my shoulder. “Sit down, Maibee.”

I took the phone but didn’t sit down. I was too young to know that you are supposed to sit when being told bad news. So it
was the touch on my shoulder, my sister’s sudden gentleness, that let me know I was in trouble. In that instant I thought—what?
That Grampa Henry had pneumonia? Gramma was always saying he was going to catch pneumonia because he took such lousy care
of himself. That they’d lost their crop and the bank was foreclosing on the farm? There was a lot of foreclosure talk in Wisconsin.
Or maybe Gramma herself was sick?

No, I was just fighting to shut out the thought that Johnny had been shot again.

But it wasn’t that. It was much more obvious.

Johnny had gone flying.

Gramma was saying, “You know how he wanted to fly. But of course everybody assumed he meant later, when he was grown, maybe
he’d join the service and learn how to fly a real airplane. Who knew he had this crazy idea he could fly by
himself?”

I knew.

I pictured him standing in the hayloft window, a warm breeze lifting
his silvery bangs, sunlight making him squint so that his blue eyes looked almost black. His arms were skinny, and I could
trace the bones of his rib cage beneath his white T-shirt. His baggy jeans weighed him down, pinned him to the darkness inside
the barn as those arms, light as feathers, reached out into space.

“Johnny was a bird in a previous life and couldn’t bear to shed his wings.” That would be my sister’s conclusion years later,
after the spiritual seed that was planted today had fully taken root. For the moment, she just stood there staring at the
decapitated photograph.

“Where?” I said. “Where was he?”

“Oh, dear God.” I saw my grandmother breathing deep, wiping her forehead with her white handkerchief, shutting her eyes while
she chose her words. I took some deluded hope from the image, as if by feeling enough hurt ourselves, we might be able to
bring him back.

“He went up the silo, honey. He went out there in the middle of the night when everybody else was asleep. His mama keeps saying
he was sleepwalking, and I don’t know, maybe she’s right. Least, it seems to make her feel better—like he didn’t know what
was happening, didn’t really mean it. And, I guess, if he was asleep, there wasn’t much she could’ve done to stop it. What
can you do to stop someone dreaming?”

I stopped him once. He scared me enough for that. But then he wowed me with his fairy tales, and instead of deciding he was
crazy I fell under his spell. I didn’t understand that I was the only one who knew. I had no idea the danger he was in.

But I should have. Flying from the hayloft was just one clue. There was his fear of Glabber, too—that crazy fear, because
he was a flying man who’d crashed. And his relief at Glabber’s death. Safe, he’d written. Safe for what? Safe to fly, maybe.
And those imaginary men—

“Did he have anything with him when he jumped, Gramma?”

“With him?”

“You know, was he holding onto anything? Did he have anything in his pocket—”

“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, honey, I think he did—in his pocket. Some sort of feather, they said. A real pretty feather.
Blue and green.”

“A kingfisher’s feather?”

“I think that was it. How did you know?”

“And did anybody talk to him after… before he…”

“No. No. See, Maibelle, his neck was broken. They think it happened right away.”