Girl in Translation (24 page)

In my other life, I could feel the buzz of Matt’s presence whenever he was at the steamers, whenever he went to take a break. He seemed to walk around in a halo of light. It was as if every excruciating detail of his face, his hands, his clothing was imprinted upon my mind.

I once made the mistake of saying to him, “Your pants look different.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I don’t know, something about the way they fit,” I faltered, realizing I was getting onto unstable ground.

He looked at me strangely, then said, “Actually, if you have to know, it’s probably because I’m not wearing any underwear today.”

I laughed awkwardly, as if it were a joke and I were the sort of girl who could laugh casually at such things, but the truth was, I was secretly an expert on Matt’s ass and I’m quite sure he was telling the truth. I never did dare to ask the reason for the omission, although I imagine it was because he’d run out of clean underwear.

On the rare occasions when Park, Matt and I had some extra time, we would gather for a few precious moments outside. One day, when I came downstairs, I saw Park fixing the chain on Matt’s cargo bike while Matt watched.

Matt shrugged. “What can I say, I’ve got slippery hands.” Clumsy ones. He hastened to add, “My body has heavenly skills, though.”

These half-flirtatious remarks of Matt’s thrilled me, but they also made me even more uncomfortable around him than I already was. I pretended I hadn’t heard his comment about his body and bent over the wheel next to Park. Park had good hand skills, dexterous hands, and he refitted and tightened the chain in a very short time.

“Will you teach me how to do that sometime?” I asked Park.

As usual, Park didn’t meet my eyes, but he nodded. I smiled and patted his arm.

“If you two mechanics are finished,” Matt said, “can I have my bike back before the pizza place goes out of business? It’s hard enough for a bunch of Italians in Chinatown anyway.”

In many ways, I had an easier relationship with Park than with Matt. On the surface, Matt and I were friends and I lived for the moments when we could talk or laugh, no matter how briefly. My feelings were so intense that I associated being close to him with a tightness in my breathing. I was always careful to preserve the space between us, as if he were something forbidden, from which I needed to keep my distance. When he brushed against me, I would move my entire body away as if I’d been stung and what made it worse was that Matt seemed to enjoy touching me, often laying a hand on my back or arm. In a way, I think I was afraid that if the distance between us were bridged, I would be swept away from all I had worked for, everything that I was.

I was a fool. I should have grabbed him when I could have had him all to myself, snatched him up like a ripe mango at the market. But how was I to know that this was what love felt like?

One day, she was there, waiting for Matt outside the factory, and she was everything I was not. It was the flirtatious skirts and the perfect fingernails, the melting look in the eyes that said, “Save me.” It was the flick of her glossy black hair that tossed the scent of wildflowers into the wind. Ah, her hair was short but it only lengthened her graceful neck, swept forward to point at her perfect lips. Even now, I want to remember her as a feminine doll, manipulating him with her weakness, but the truth is that Vivian used to smile with genuine warmth whenever she saw me, even though other girls sneered at my cheap clothes. Let me be even more honest: when I say she was everything I was not, I mean that she possessed whatever virtues I may have had and more.

I made it my business to find out how they’d met. According to the gossip at the factory, her father was a tailor from Singapore, one of the best, and he owned a small shop, specializing in custom-made, expensive clothes, down the street from Matt’s apartment. Vivian helped out there and somehow, she’d been standing outside often enough when Matt passed by that they’d gotten to know each other. Of course, I suspected her of planting herself in his path on purpose, but who can blame her?

At the beginning, she was an inch or two taller than Matt. With the passage of time, she dwindled as he grew, until he stood over her with his new broad body and large hands, an arm slung protectively over her delicate shoulder. Matt was as kind to me as he’d ever been, but there was a new absentmindedness to him, as if a part of him was always with her. I would watch them walking away together, away from me, and ache with regret.

Curt broke his left leg skiing in January of tenth grade, when I had just turned sixteen. He had to have surgery before he could fly back and was stuck in Austria for several weeks. We’d hardly spoken after that incident with Tammy in eighth grade, when he’d defended me to Dr. Copeland, although we did continue to have some classes together. Curt had been much too busy being cool, as he began to fulfill his promise of becoming someone special. He made paintings and polished wooden sculptures that our Art department made a great deal of fuss over. Last year, he’d been featured in the Visual Arts Festival. And he was attractive, even I had to admit that, with a smoldering quality in the way he moved. I had seen even our Latin teacher blushing when she spoke to him.

One evening that winter, our phone at home rang. It was close to nine-thirty p.m. and I was sure it was Annette, but when I picked up, it turned out to be Curt. His voice was deep. I was so surprised he had called me that I didn’t even ask him how his leg was.

“Listen, Kimberly, I’m back in the U.S. but I’m not even allowed to get out of bed for another month. The truth is, I’m on the verge of flunking out anyway, and now that I can’t come to school at all for a while, I’m sunk unless you help me.”

“I didn’t think you were doing that badly.”

“My grades are borderline, but then I’ve had a few other scrapes as well. Remember the fire alarm someone pulled, right before Christmas break?”

“Was that you?” It had caused a huge commotion: the buildings evacuated, fire engines and squad cars on campus, all classes canceled, students and faculty standing shivering outside for hours.

“Yeah. They were ready to kick me out but my parents did their best. I had to write a letter of apology and swear to maintain a B minus average and be a good boy from now on. Which I’m trying to do, but now my neck’s on the line.”

I asked him the question that had been on my mind since the phone call had begun. “Why me? Anybody would be glad to help you.”

“Come on, Kimberly. No one’s smarter than you. I need serious help here. My folks are already threatening to send me to boarding school.”

I agreed to give him my notes from the classes we shared, couriered daily by his little brother. They were copied and I got them back the next day. I saw other kids delivering notes to his brother too, probably for his classes in math and science. Once in a while, Curt phoned me with questions about any of his subjects. I don’t know if he ever tried calling earlier in the evening, but the calls I received came quite late at night, as if he’d been waiting for me to be home. He never asked me what I’d been doing earlier in the day, which I appreciated. Even though I was a few years ahead of him in science and math, I remembered the material and could explain the topics he was doing.

Although he could have, he didn’t keep me private. When he finally returned to school on crutches, there was a rush to sign his cast, but he saved the most central spot for me. He openly sat next to me whenever he could, and in a way, I was brought into his sacred circle. I don’t know if he did this mainly out of good manners or genuine appreciation. The end result was that I became accepted by the popular group, though still not liked. I had a kind of power that made other girls want to be seen with me but they were careful around me, tentative and distant. Nothing like Annette, who, amused by my sudden rise in status, remained my one true friend.

With my pseudo-popularity, there seemed to come a new awareness of me by the boys at school. Not every guy, of course. There were plenty who thought I was beneath their notice, but there were also always a handful who seemed to like being with me. I felt strangely relaxed with them. Now that Matt was gone from my life as a romantic interest, it was as if he had been the single repository of all my shyness, and with other boys, I was liberated.

The popular girls at school eyed the cheap factory samples I wore, and any warmth they showed me was far from genuine, but every weekend, after we got home from the factory, the phone would ring and it would be a boy. I would lean against the yellowing wall and twirl the long knotted cord around my fingers as we spoke-twirl, untwirl, twirl-and when I finally disentangled the cord from my hands and hung up the phone, it would ring again and it would be another boy. This drove Ma crazy, especially if they phoned late in the evening. Talking to a boy on the phone was bad enough but doing it in the dark really crossed the line.

Ma’s standard way of answering the phone became “Kimberly not home” and then hanging up. She spent her time pacing around me, calling loudly, “Dinnertime! Dinnertime!” which was pretty much the only other word she had learned in English. Ma was particularly anxious because she couldn’t understand what the boys and I were talking about, but she needn’t have worried. The calls were all about inconsequential things like homework, motorcycles, mean teachers.

I didn’t consider myself pretty at all. With time, I had grown too long-limbed and skinny for Chinese tastes, and despite Annette’s best efforts, the intricacies of makeup and clothing remained incomprehensible to me. I was not beautiful and I was not funny, nor was I a good buddy or a particularly good listener. I was none of the things that girls think they need to be for boys to love them. Mostly, I stayed on the call with my eyes closed, listening to the thrum of the phone line underneath our words. I knew what these boys really wanted-freedom. Freedom from their parents, from their own unsurprising selves, from the heavy weight of the expectations that had been placed upon them. I knew because it was what I wanted too. Boys weren’t my enemy, they were co-conspirators in a mission to flee. My secret was acceptance.

At school during my free periods, I spent a lot of time taking walks hand in hand with boys. We would walk and we would make out. This was exactly what Ma had warned me not to do with boys, which only made it more fun. I was forced to be responsible in so many other ways that I was glad to have the freedom over my own body. I could only go so far-there’s only so much you can do in fifty minutes on school property-but the boys didn’t seem to mind much.

“I don’t know how you stay so detached,” said Annette. “Don’t you ever fall in love?”

The fact was, I didn’t worry about these boys the way other girls did. The details of whether a particular boy called or not, of an invitation to a dance or a party or a movie, didn’t matter to me. Despite my own strange access to the popular crowd, I didn’t care if a boy was popular or not, a good athlete or not. Of course, I did have a slight preference for a smart boy, sometimes a handsome boy, but I could also be won over by a certain shy way of smiling or even the shape of their hands. The boys at Harrison Prep were merely a dream to me: delightful and delicious but evanescent. The blistering reality was the deafening thunder of sewing machines at the factory, the fierce sting of cold against my skin in our unheated apartment. And Matt. Despite Vivian, Matt was real too.

Even though Curt was now back at school, we still met once a week for me to tutor him in whatever he needed. The subject was usually math, at which he was atrocious. The school scholarship program counted this as working time for me, so I was initially glad to do it. As Curt emerged from the immediate danger of failing out, however, he reverted to his old ways. Sometimes he came to our sessions with a joint in his hand. And stoned or not, he never missed an opportunity to flirt with me. I didn’t take him seriously because I’d seen him doing the same with other girls. I understood he was just practicing.

There was quite a bit of swooning over his eyes, which were a startling dark blue with a glimpse of white in their depths, but I found them to be too empty to be intriguing. He was not interested in math or most of his other subjects at all, and was hardly ever prepared when we met, which annoyed me. A few times, he was late or didn’t come at all. I learned that when he was working on a piece of sculpture, he forgot about the time. Curt had taken over a corner of the enormous room used for Shop and he had a pile of wood pieces there that he worked on endlessly.

Finally I asked him, “Why do you bother coming, Curt?”

He raised his eyebrows flirtatiously. “Don’t you know?”

“Maybe another tutor would be better for you. Someone stricter.” I hated feeling like I was wasting my time.

Now he looked alarmed. “No. I like you. Sometimes I even understand stuff after you talk about it.”

“It should not be sometimes, it should be all the time. You don’t listen very well.”

“Yes, I do. And for me, sometimes is really good.”

“All you do is flirt with me. I would like it more if you just do your homework.”

“Sorry about that. It’s kind of a habit. And you have such great legs.”

I glared at him and he immediately added, “Oops, did it again. I’ll try, okay?”