Face (31 page)

“Don’t they
know?”
Now I saw Johnny lying in the dark, like one of those strangled ducks, like the Chinatown chicken with silver-dollar eyes.
I felt sick.

Gramma was saying, “I’m just not sure, honey. No one knew it had happened till this morning…”

I threw the phone at Anna and raced to the bathroom, where I vomited until I lost consciousness.

It was late morning when I woke up. Dad was stroking my hair.

Anna had gone. To school, I guessed, and Henry, too. The room was quiet, except for the sound of running water. They’d washed
my face and put me into a nightgown, but I still smelled the sickness on me.

“I want to take a shower.”

Dad said, “Mum’s run a bath.”

“I don’t want a bath, I want a shower.” I needed to rinse off yesterday and send it down the drain. The last thing I wanted
was to lie in it.

“Mei Mei.”

Little Sister. He almost never called me that unless he was feeling very sentimental—and helpless.

“I
need
a shower.”

How could he possibly understand? Summer after summer we went away and he stayed in Chinatown. If he’d been with us last summer,
Johnny might still be alive. Dad would have stopped Henry and Grampa, for sure. And if he’d been there, I could have told
him about Johnny’s trying to fly. And he would have understood.

Dad reached for my hand. I punched him in the face.

My knuckles hit the bone in his jaw with a sickening crack, and the look on his face! Like a well collapsing. He grabbed me
around the
back and pulled me to his chest, held me there while I cried and he sat quiet as stone.

I heard the door open, my mother start to say something. Then she went away.

When I finally stopped crying, I could feel his hand smoothing my hair again. I didn’t want to look at him, and he didn’t
push me back so I had to. He rocked me like a baby and spoke over my head, half to me, half to himself. “People will tell
you you’ll be all right. It will pass. It will all work out for the best. And they’re right, all those things are true. But
you won’t ever be the same again. You don’t have to worry about that, Maibelle. You won’t ever be the same.”

My mother came and bundled me into my bath, filled the air with words as she soaped my back and lathered my hair. Did I want
to talk about what happened? She’d spoken to Gramma Lou last night, but there wasn’t any more news. Everybody was holding
up as well as they could. What else was there to do? A hot bath would make me feel better, and then I could have a warm cup
of cocoa. Maybe we’d go out to lunch later, just the three of us.

I hardly recognized this mother hen. When President Kennedy died, she fell to pieces, and she’d never even met
him.
For Johnny she couldn’t cry?

“Just leave me alone!”

She stood up without another word, put a clean towel within my reach, and left the room.

My father was right. What I feared most was that I’d be the same, that it would be as if Johnny never existed. That as I stopped
grieving I’d stop remembering how special a friend he was. I didn’t have enough friends to let them go like that.

Only Mr. Li now. And if Johnny could break his neck on a dream, how could I count on Lao Li?

I’d
never thought about Li’s age in terms of death. At first he seemed old and creepy, too strange to be my friend. Then his
oldness made him more interesting. Now it was a door, threatening to shut against me.

I came out to drink my mother’s cocoa but couldn’t think of anything to say to her, and everything she said annoyed me. At
last she decided
she might as well go to work, and I retreated to Dad’s workroom.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked him.

“Mm.” He stuck a wad of clay over the mouth of a milk bottle and began to mold it. “Not the kind you mean.” He pushed the
clay top flat with his thumb. “Not Halloween ghosts, or the ghosts in old Chinese stories. But people leave ghosts of themselves
in other people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your friend Johnny has left his ghost in you.” He swiveled in his chair to face me. “One day you’ll see him walk down the
street. He will be there in the mirror, you’ll feel him over your shoulder, and if you tell anyone else, they’ll say you’re
dreaming—and maybe you are, but it keeps him real. It makes him part of you. You need that to keep going.”

Something in his voice made me itchy. It was too earnest, uncharacteristically direct.

“How do you know all this? Do you have a ghost in you?”

“A few.”

“Are they good ones?”

“Good and bad.” He picked up a file and scored the edges of the clay. “Funny thing about ghosts—when they move inside, they
become much more complicated. They surprise you. Sometimes you find yourself laughing for no reason. Or you get so bloody
angry you could spit.”

“Angry at the ghosts?”

“At what they make you see in yourself. At the strings they pull.”

I liked the idea that Johnny might weasel his way into my head from time to time, but I was crying again.

My father sat next to me. When I buried my face in his shirt, I smelled the Kents in his breast pocket, his tobacco skin and
breath. Usually I hated these smells, but not today.

“I never got to say goodbye!”

“I know. That’s the hardest part.”

I nodded.

“If you’d been able to say goodbye,” Dad said, “you might have kept him alive.”

I shrugged.

“But there’s another possibility.”

I felt the solidity of Dad’s body, the drumming of his heart. He pushed me back to look into my face. The moonpuffs seemed
to intensify his concern. He cupped my cheeks in his hands.

“He might have taken you with him, Mei Mei. And that’s too high a price for goodbye.”

Suddenly I had to get away. My feelings ran from soothing to scalding like a temperamental shower. My father was doing his
best, and his best came close—much closer than Mum’s—but there were still too many hot spots where the slightest touch was
agony.

I left him with his clay bottle top and went out to walk.

April in New York. On the trees around the Criminal Courts Building tiny green parcels burst from dead, gray bark. Bright
sunshine threw crisp shadow branches across the pavement. Limbs reached and crossed, reached and crossed into a massive web
engulfing the long skinny line of my body. A plane crossed on approach to La Guardia, and its darkness gobbled mine.

I walked over to Baxter Street, past the shabbier nontourist stores that sold plastic shoes and polyester clothing. Past Mr.
Yang’s medicine store, with its huge gnarled ginseng root filling the front window. Henry said the hundreds of jars and boxes
inside held dried and pickled rhino’s horn, eel stomach, horse’s hoof, tails of lizards, dogs, and deer, tiger testicles,
and sea dragon. But there were no ancient miracle cures for Johnny anymore.

“Looking for lunch?”

I jumped as if I’d been whipped. Tommy Wah laughed and took a step backward. I began to cry.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I shook my head fiercely, but no words came and the tears refused to stop. He held out a handkerchief. A white pressed man’s
handkerchief of the kind old-fashioned bankers wear in their breast pockets. Too perfect to actually use. But my nose was
running now, beyond anything the back of my hand could manage.

Tommy started forward. He was frowning, and as he leaned toward
me the white cloth dangled at the end of his arm like a warning flag on an open tailgate.

I snatched it, spun, and ran away before he could say another word.

Without turning back I could see Tommy’s startled eyes, the sudden straightening of his body, the sneakers lifting and falling,
hitting the pavement faster, faster. Dodging bodies and cars, I skirted the Criminal Courts Building, headed west out of Chinatown,
then south and back. I’d traveled ten blocks before I turned to make sure I’d lost him. Then I stopped and blew my nose hard,
wiped my eyes.

The handkerchief was embroidered with the Wah name in Chinese characters surrounded by a circle of pale green rosettes. It
was crumpled now, soggy and disgusting. Though I knew I should wash and iron it, give it back, my mind started to whirl with
the complications—the possibilities for losing it in the Laundromat, the inevitable questions if my mother found it, the ridicule
from Henry and Anna if they caught me pressing it. Henry would know it was Tommy’s, and the cycle would start all over again.
Only this time it wouldn’t be worth the pain.

I balled the cloth in my fist, shoved it into an empty paper bag I found on top of a garbage can, buried the bag under a pile
of orange rinds. And walked slowly to Catherine Street.

I had never mentioned Johnny to Li, so I didn’t expect him to understand or sympathize. But he knew, instantly, that something
was wrong. He pursed his mouth, the sides turning down, lips thrust out in a grotesque air-kiss. He didn’t offer me a cookie
or start winding up for a story.

He stared at me for a minute or two, then said, “You have Chinese writing set.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Brush. Ink. Stone. You know—Chinese writing set. Bring that here. I will teach you write Chinese.”

It dawned on me that he was talking about the basket in our basement.

“How—?”

“Never mind, never mind. You go home, get that writing set. I have present for you.”

I let his instructions stop my thinking, erase my fears. I followed them swiftly, but when I returned, a wall of black clouds
had blocked the sun, and a cold wind churned up from the river.

“Good,” Lao Li said. “Rain is bad for customers, good for lessons.” He had cleared his desk as if he expected to devote the
whole afternoon to instruction.

“You sit here.” He arranged a plump silk pillow in his chair to boost me to working height and settled himself on a stool
by my side. Then he took the basket of writing tools and slid open the top.

“Your papa has shown you how to use?” he asked.

“No.”

“He never write Chinese?”

“No.”

Lao Li wagged his head as he fingered the basket’s contents. The movement of his hands was so full of respect that I was embarrassed
by the memory of Anna and me dueling with the brushes. He took each one in turn, rolled the wooden handle between his thumb
and forefinger, spit on the fingers of his other hand and used the spittle to smooth the bristles down to a perfect point.
There were four brushes in all, each the length of my forearm but ranging in width from fat to skinny.

“Like people.” Lao Li arranged them on the desk. He pointed to the biggest brush. “This one very rich. He eat too much, move
slow, but very, very elegant.” He pointed to the skinny brush. “He never have enough to eat, always work too much. He run
fast, crazy. Both speak same words, make same pictures, but talk very different.”

“So which do I use?”

He looked me up and down as if he’d never seen me before, then picked up a midsize brush.

“Not too fast, not too slow. Not too big, not too little.” He smiled.

I picked up one of the ink sticks and rolled it between my fingers the way he’d rolled the brushes. A black chrysanthemum
spread its petals beneath a black bird in flight, beneath a seal stamped gold. The carved edges resisted the pressure of my
skin. But one end of the stick had been worn smooth, cutting off the top of the seal, replacing gold with air.

Lao Li placed a small lacquer cup on the desk, filled it with water from a jug by his side, then reached into the basket for
the oval brass box that contained the inkstone. In one half a tiny pond of slate, in the other a dirty field of silk down.
He took the brush and dabbed it in the water, painted the stone and took the ink, skated it, gold down, around the pond. His
whole arm traced the circle one way, once, twice, three times, then the other, once, twice, three times. I watched the slate
push into the gold, the sky below the flying bird shrink as a wash of black mud thickened across the surface of the pond.

Mr. Li’s fingertips were clean. He placed the ink stick back in the basket and reached into his top drawer.

“Your present,” he said. “Please. Open.”

A calligraphy primer. Page after page of sheer, almost transparent paper sectioned into squares, each square filled with the
dotted outline of a basic character, with arrows to direct the brush. Paint by arrow, except there were no colors and the
picture was not a picture but a word.

“First number.” Lao Li pointed at page one (back page), square one (right column), and in it the dotted outline of a single
horizontal line. “
Yi.
One. Very easy.”

He took the brush and placed it upright in my hand. Automatically I repositioned it as I would a pencil. He held the stem
up and gripped my hand, forcing the fingers into position along the wood.

“Brush must always point to heaven,” he said. “If not, how can gods help you?”

He guided my arm to dip the brush in water, rolled it against the silk to taper the bristles, then slid them through the ink.

“You write number one,” he said. “Like this.” And in the air he moved his arm in a conductor’s downbeat followed by a slight
lift and sideways sweep, finishing up at the level where he’d started. “Now you do.”

I held the brush the way he showed me and drew a line across the square. The ink squirted over the borders, making a large
blob.

“Hmm.” Lao Li gave me a look, adjusted the brush in my hand again, and drew a line in the air flat above the desk. “Here is
paper.
Now, like this—” and, grabbing me at the elbow, he pushed my arm through the motion he himself had just shaped.

“Like dancing,” he said. “You dance in air, your feet make Chinese writing.”

“You have to be a ghost to dance in air.”

“Okay,” he said. “Be ghost.”

There were four more squares in the column with the outline of number one. I tried again.

The ink still went over the borders, but it was more of a smudge than a squirt.

“Better.” Lao Li repositioned the brush and moved my arm above the next square. “Again.”