Fiona and Jane(13)
She missed the days when her mother bathed with her, how her mother soaped the back of her neck and rubbed her shoulders. She recalled the feeling of her mother’s fingers massaging her scalp, the careful way her mother rinsed the shampoo from Ona’s hair, cupping a hand over her forehead to prevent water from dripping into her eyes. Ever since Ona started first grade, however, her mother said she was old enough now, she had to get used to washing on her own.
After, Ona wrapped a towel around herself and slipped from the bathroom to the bedroom. She changed into the pajamas her mother had laid out on the bed and climbed under the covers, while her mother took her turn to wash. She wanted to stay awake until her mother finished, to feel her mother’s body next to her in bed, to hear her mother’s voice whisper in her ear: Goodnight, my oyster pearl, my pirate’s treasure. Goodnight, my little daughter.
* * *
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The Father’s Day ballet recital was held in the auditorium of a nearby middle school, which was also its gymnasium. Appropriate for the occasion, the father of the Republic gazed benevolently over the audience: a large oil painting of Sun Yat-sen hung on one wall, facing opposite a basketball hoop that had been retracted to lie flat against the whitewashed cinder blocks. The girls had been practicing their routines for weeks, including a dress rehearsal the previous Saturday. Ona peered down into the audience from a gap in the curtains. Was her father already among them? Or would he slip into one of the few remaining chairs at the last minute?
After that Sunday afternoon out on the balcony more than a month earlier, her grandfather hadn’t mentioned his promise to invite Ona’s father again. She and her mother had continued their weekly visits, but the door to the room at the end of the hallway had remained shut thereafter, and her grandmother hadn’t raised the question of Ona transferring schools again.
Ona spied her mother in the second row, next to her grandparents. Her gaze passed over the men in the crowd once more. She’d never seen a single photo of her father; her mother had said that she got rid of them all, because they hurt her heart too much.
“Move over,” said Shulin from behind her. “I want a look.” Ona gave up her spot at the curtain. “Oh, there’s my baba!” Shulin giggled and turned around. “He said he’s nervous about his part onstage. We practiced it again this morning. Three times!”
Ona liked Mr. Wang very much. Whenever she skipped downstairs to play with Shulin, he always offered the girls something to eat, a sleeve of shrimp crackers, bright yellow egg tarts from the bakery across the street, black sesame cookies for dunking into a bowl of warm soy milk.
“My grandfather isn’t worried,” Ona said. “We practiced, too.”
“Grandfather?” said another girl, crowding the gap between the curtains. “It’s Father’s Day, not Grandparents’ Day.”
Shulin told her to be quiet. She said, “Grandfathers are fathers, too, stupid.”
The girl turned up her nose and stalked off.
Shulin took up her spot at the curtain again. Ona crowded next to her and peeked out, too. Almost every seat was filled now, a dozen or so rows of metal folding chairs set up across the gymnasium floor. The space buzzed with chatter underneath the ceiling fans swishing round and round overhead.
“Girls! Girls!” Miss Fang clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention backstage. “One minute to curtain. Dancers, take your places now, please.”
Shulin grabbed Ona’s hand and squeezed it. They ran to their spots next to each other on the stage marked by two pieces of blue electric tape, the distance between them measured by the span of Miss Fang’s hands touching, fingers spread. Shulin wore a plastered-on smile, her parted lips painted a pearlescent fuchsia. Miss Fang had come around backstage ten minutes earlier with a tube of lipstick in a slick gold case, applying the bright color to the girls’ mouths in decisive strokes. Ona had offered up her face readily. Some of the other girls’ mothers had darkened their daughters’ brows with black pencil, rouged their cheeks, washed their eyelids shades of blue; not Ona’s mother, who owned not a single lipstick or eye shadow palette, whose only beauty regimen was a swipe of Vaseline over her lips.
Ona struck her pose, one arm raised over her head and the other curved in front of her chest. She waited for the curtains to part, the music to crank on. The first number was a harvest dance; she listened for her cue, the sound of a rooster crowing.
Then: the ground beneath her feet moved. Ona glanced over at Shulin—the pink had smudged a bit at the corner of her smile—and in the next instant, Shulin crumpled to her knees, then fell forward flat on her face. A heavy globe light thudded onto the stage next to her, just beyond the reach of her outstretched fingers.
“Take cover! Earthquake! Earthquake!”
“Run for the doors!”
“The children!”
The adults in the auditorium cried out in panic, and some of them rushed the stage, crashing through the curtains. The bright lights all around Ona flickered once, twice, then went out completely, sending up shrieks. In the darkness she crouched down where she’d been standing on her mark and crawled on her hands and knees toward Shulin. She felt shoes and knees in her back as bodies stumbled and fell over her; panicked voices cried out the names of the girls in her dance class: Juju! Where are you? Xiao Ming? Mama is here! Where? Where?