Zhou Xiaojing
Buffalo, New York
1996
NOTES
1. Toni Morrison, Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1994), 155.
2. Hermione Lee, ed., The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women (London: Phoenix, 1995), x.
ONLY TWO DAYS since Mother left. The freedom seemed forever. More room for running. More time for staying awake, games, play. Was she glad? Was she sad? There was never time for thinking although the day was long, longer as the afternoon drew on and on towards meal time, longest in darkness when the odours of soy, pork, ginger, garlic and sweet cooked rice lingered on and on in the empty rooms downstairs, like a vague ache in her crotch, a burn in her chest, sensations that followed her to the bedroom to lie down beside her in the brown faded dark of the bottom half of the iron double-bunk bed that had been so fashionable only a few years ago.
Mother would be gone three days next morning.
Chai tightened the uniform belt and thought of Suleng. Suleng’s mother was a washerwoman, but in her hand Suleng had a piece of white bread spread thick with margarine and sprinkled with sugar. Suleng wasn’t in her A class. Suleng was a B class girl, but her uniform was starched and ironed, the creases sharp and straight, the folds thick like her slice of bread and the yellow margarine spread with a fat knife. The starch made Suleng’s royal blue cotton uniform gleam, like the fat sugar crystals glistening on the margarine on top of the bread.
She had watched Suleng eat that slice of bread as they walked across the bridge to school a few weeks ago, when she had first moved to Grandfather’s house. Even then Chai had been hungry. Mother had given her two marie-piah and some boiled water. Brown, crisp, flat, dry, round, pricked, sugary, crackling, each half the size of a palm—you could buy ten marie-piah for five cents. She watched Suleng eat her slice of thick, soft, oily bread. She walked beside her and began talking, watching as Suleng put the last wedge in her greasy mouth.
Now Chai waited for Suleng in the middle hall of Suleng’s house, and watched as Suleng’s mother spread the margarine on the bread. The margarine tub was huge, almost as large as those square tins of fancy English biscuits Mother bought when they had money and lived in the bank that Father managed. Now she didn’t even have those two marie-piah for breakfast.
Perhaps she hoped Suleng would not be able to finish her bread and would give her the leftover. Perhaps she hoped the washerwoman would offer her a slice. At every house, from every open and half-opened door, she smelled the fresh yeasty dough of white bread, the clean tang of sugar crystals. The morning was full of food, and she was hungry.
By the next week she had stopped walking with Suleng. She could walk faster, easier, without Suleng who strolled lazily munching her bread. Swiftly she passed the half-opened doors from where warm scents of toast and coconut cakes wafted towards her thin chest. She did not care to pause to breathe the full aromas of black coffee, that clear scent of pandan-scented coconut-boiled rice that made her stomach lurch. The houses were rich, concealed behind gold-leafed, carved doors and windows, like her grandfather’s house had been, even in her memory, which seemed now so short, so immediate of quick movement and sunshine.
This was freedom. To walk at a fast trot to school, to think ahead to the day, the play, the books, the next day, the play, the books. Not to think of where she was but how she must go. Quickly she crossed the little bridge, breathed the sulphuric smell of putrid riverine sediment. This is not it, she thought. The angsana trees were heavy with yellow blossoms. Their tiny petals littered a stretch of the park, the morning air was acid sharp with their efflorescence and decay. Yellow pollen like gold dust dotted the ground. To the right the Straits of Malacca was always blue or grey, colours as steadfast as her heart as she walked rapidly to school. I am steadfast, she thought, exhilarated. I am myself, no one is me, I am alone. She forgot she was hungry, walking between the weight of the blossoming angsana and the empty blue space of the morning sky and the Malacca Straits.
So quickly she had forgotten about Mother. Poor Mother who cried that morning in Auntie’s house after she had pulled her in as she was passing by on her way to school and had given her a glass of Ovaltine and a slice of bread and marmalade. Very good marmalade, from Sheffield, England. It had strips of bitter peel and was shining clear orange, just the way she liked marmalade. But that was only one morning. Mother wasn’t at the window of Auntie’s house the next day nor the next, nor the next, and so on. Mother had gone some place, gone away. Now she walked quickly past Auntie’s house with its closed gold-leafed, carved windows and doors and tried not to think about the marmalade.
Sister Finnigan was a tall scarecrow. Her eyes were bright blue, little shifting chips of precious star sapphire behind the steel-rimmed glasses. Mother had taken her to many jewellery stores. She had sat in front of the long glassed-in counters and stared at the coloured stones, watery aquamarine, flushed pigeon rubies from Burma, the bland green jade best for carved peaches and Buddhas, and dense yellow tourmaline from Brazil. It was the colourless stones that cost the most: clear as nothing else in the world. No blue, no grey, no yellow, the hardest stone in the world, Mr Koh, the man behind the glass counters with his abacus and little magnifying glass, had told her. No-colour, clear as clear, like looking through water and seeing no bottom, no sky, no eyes looking back, the impossible clear that is still not nothing, that has been chipped and chipped till the planes tilt like crazy mirrors refracting each other and their cross-reflections catch dizzy fire, and what you saw then was this blaze, this spark that sprang up at you and pulled you in. But it was just a stone, a stone with no colour. Now Mother had been gone for weeks she was becoming like that stone, she was becoming no-mother, a memory clear as clear, and Chai knew she was forgetting her, as if Mother had no reflection in the bottom of her memory or in the sky above. Sister Finnigan’s blue star-sapphire eyes snapped and pulsed, although not as blue and steadfast as her own heart.
She sat on the floor by the classroom door and sewed a row of back-stitches, hemming handkerchiefs. She had to unpick the first row.
“You’re taking too much cloth in the stitch,” Sister Finnigan said, turning the handkerchief over to show the way the stitches bunched up on the seamless side. “Pick only a thread,” she said, her long white fingers pushing the needle smoothly through the cotton, sliding through a thread of the weave, “and don’t pull tight.” She turned the cloth over to show where the stitch had closed the seam, not even a faint shadow of the thread showing. “Invisible, it must be invisible,” she said.
Try as she would, Chai could not do it. The handkerchief was for her father. Invisible, she thought, pick only a thread, leave smooth. But the needle was huge and clumsy and wouldn’t obey her. It broke off the thread of the weave and left cloth scars. Her anxious fingers printed smudges of pencil grey lead and grime. After Mother left, she didn’t take a bath everyday, sometimes it was three days before she felt grubby enough to strip and pour buckets of well water over herself. There was no soap and Father rinsed their clothes and dried them on Saturdays and Sundays. Sister Finnigan fixed her chipped blue eyes on her crumpled uniform, the socks she slipped lower each day into the canvas shoes so as to hide the spreading grey heels. So she sat right by the doorway, as far as she could from Sister Finnigan’s stinky black robes as Sister perched on her desk showing the eager girls how to turn daisy petals, knot bachelor